Brendan Nyhan

Twitter roundup

From my Twitter feed:
-Bob Somerby thrashes the dishonest paraphrases of Rachel Maddow
-Alan Abramowitz predicts Democrats will lose 37 seats in the House, citing the standard midterm backlash and the number of seats Democrats have to defend as the main factors
-Bernie Sanders attempts to win over climate skeptics with friendly comparison to Nazi deniers
-Rush Limbaugh's race-baiting of Obama is getting more explicit
-Credit to John McCain for this takedown of J.D. Hayworth's birther past

More context on the use of reconciliation

Updating my previous posts on past uses of reconciliation, a New York Times article this morning by Jackie Calmes has what appears to be the most complete breakdown of the two parties' use of reconciliation (updating Joshua Tucker's previous estimate).

Though there's no shortage of hypocrisy on this issue, the punchline is that most previous bills passed under reconciliation during periods in which Republicans controlled the Senate (emphasis added):

Sixteen of the 22 “reconciliation bills” that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the “R” and “A” in Cobra stand for “reconciliation act”).

For additional context, see this NPR story by Julie Rovner documenting how most recent changes to the health care system have been passed using reconciliation:

[H]ealth care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. "In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process," says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

...[O]ver the past three decades, the number of major health financing measures that were NOT passed via budget reconciliation can be counted on one hand. And one of those — the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act — was repealed the following year after a backlash by seniors who were asked to underwrite the measure themselves. So using the process to try to pass a health overhaul bill might not be easy. But it won't be unprecedented.

And here's a sidebar with a timeline:

For 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:

1982 — TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs

1986 — COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care

1987 — OBRA '87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program

1989 — OBRA '89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care

1990 — OBRA '90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid

1993 — OBRA '93: created federal vaccine funding for all children

1996 — Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare

1997 — BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens' health program called CHIP

2005 — DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid

Update 2/25 9:36 PM: Politifact has slightly different numbers:

On Nov. 14, 2008, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put out a report on reconciliation bills between 1981 and 2009. There have been 22 of them, including three that were vetoed by President Bill Clinton. It's been used for health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, start-up of the state Children's Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform.

While some have tallied the Republican vs. Democratic report card on reconciliation based on the president in power at the time, we think it makes more sense to look at the party in power in Congress when the reconciliation procedure was initiated.

By our count, eight of the reconciliation bills were initiated by a Democratic-controlled Congress. The rest, 14, were done by a Republican-controlled Congress.

...Still, we think looking at all 22 reconciliation bills casts too wide a net. Many reconciliation bills were not even all that controversial, and enjoyed wide bipartisan support. But other ones have clearly involved policy decisions that otherwise would likely have failed. Only eight involved votes where the winning side had less than the supermajority threshold of 60 votes. One could argue those were the times when Congress got around the need for the standard 60 votes. But even among that smaller group, six of the eight came courtesy of a Republican-controlled Congress.

Gaffney again Muslim-baits Obama

Via TPM, conservative apparatchik Frank Gaffney is promoting bizarre suggestions that President Obama's missile defense policies are actually an attempt to submit the United States to Sharia law:

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo. (For a comparison, the previous logo is below.)

...Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.

...Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team. Readers are encouraged to offer examples of their own to info@securefreedom.org.

Here are the previous and new MDA logos:

In a sane world, Gaffney and Logan would be cast out of polite society for their attempts to capitalize on the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Instead, the meme was promoted throughout the conservative press, including the Washington Times, Fox News, FoxNews.com, and the Drudge Report.

Gaffney has previously claimed that Obama's apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was "code" telling "our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them" and suggested that Obama is secretly a Muslim. More generally, Gaffney's efforts are part of a long history of smears against Obama's loyalty and false claims about Obama's religion. As laughable as "Logo-gate" may be, the underlying strategy is deeply disturbing.

(I've added Gaffney's statement to my timeline of smears against Obama's loyalty.)

Update 2/27 9:07 PM: Gaffney has retracted much of his post (via Media Matters):

In a post here Wednesday, under the headline “Can This Possibly Be True?,” I called attention to a “new” logo being used by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on the grounds that it bore a disconcerting resemblance to an amalgamation of the Obama campaign’s logo and the symbols of Islam, the crescent and a single star. It turns out the answer is “no,” it isn’t true that the MDA’s logo is exactly new or, apparently, that it reflects an Obama-directed redesign.

We have since learned that the logo has been used at the MDA website since at least October 2009. Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the agency continues to use its older shield-like logo for online and other purposes. The contract for a complete rebranding for MDA was let in 2007, during the Bush administration, although much of the work appears to have been done in 2008 in follow-on contracts during the presidential campaign in which the Obama logo was much in evidence.

It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

For these reasons, I am content to have the question posed in the last post be answered in the negative, and I regret any confusion caused by my suggesting otherwise.

Reviewing the uses of reconciliation 1980-2008

Given the increasing likelihood that Congressional Democrats will try to use reconciliation to pass health care reform, it seems worthwhile to repost this table from a an April TNR article by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein showing that "[m]any of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy":

Budget Reconciliation Bills Signed Into Law, 1980-2008

Bill	Major Purposes	Change in Revenue	Change in Outlays	Net Effect on Deficit
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980	First use of reconciliation process.	$29.2 billion	-$50.38 billion	-$79.58 billion; 1981-1985
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981	Made significant cuts to discretionary programs, including welfare and food stamps.		-$130 billion	-$130 billion; 1981-1984
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1982	Reauthorized and made changes to food stamp program. Made changes to federal employee pay formula and to the farm support program.		-$13.3 billion	-$13.3 billion; 1983-1985
Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA)	Rescinded some provisions of the previous year's Kemp-Roth tax cuts.	$98.3 billion	-$17.5 billion	-$115.8 billion; 1983-1985
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1983	Made changes to federal employee pay and retirement formulas.		-$8.2 billion	-$8.2 billion; 1984-1987
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985	Mandated an insurance program giving some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after leaving employment (COBRA) and amended the Internal Revenue Code to deny income tax deductions to employers for contributions to a group health plan unless such plan meets certain continuing coverage requirements.	$9 billion	-$15.9 billion	-$24.9 billion; 1986-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986	Ordered the sale of Conrail. Made minor changes to Medicare hospital provisions.	$10.5 billion	-$6.5 billion	-$17.0 billion; 1987-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987	Created federal standards for nursing homes under Medicare and expanded Medicaid eligibility	$23.2 billion	-$16.4 billion	-$39.6 billion; 1988-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989	Made approximately $10 billion in spending cuts	$15.4 billion	-$23.77 billion	-$39.2 billion; 1990-1992
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990	Established Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) rules for the first time and implemented a range of tax increases	$137 billion	-$184 billion	-$236 billion; 1991-1995
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993	Created two new personal income tax rates and a new tax rate for corporations. The cap on Medicare taxes was repealed, and gas taxes were raised. The taxable portion of Social Security benefits was increased. The phase-out of the personal exemption and limit on itemized deductions were permanently extended, and the earned income tax credit was expanded.	$250.1 billion	-$254.7 billion	-$504.8 billion; 1994-1998
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)	Clinton's welfare reform bill	$1.9 billion	-$52.2 billion	-$54.1 billion; 1997-2002
Balanced Budget Act of 1997	Contained first portion of Clinton's plan to balance the federal budget by FY 2002. Created the Children's Health Insurance Program. Made changes to Medicare hospital payment policy.	$8.6 billion	-$118.6 billion	-$127.2 billion; 1998-2002
Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997	Clinton's tax cut package	-$88.9 billion	$11.5 billion	$100.4 billion; 1997-2002
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001	First Bush 43 tax cuts	-$512 billion	$40 billion	$552 billion; 2001-2006
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003	Second Bush 43 tax cuts	-$314 billion	$29.5 billion	$342.9 billion; 2003-2008
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005	Reduced Medicare and Medicaid spending, changed student loan formulas, and reauthorized the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.	N/A	-$39 billion	-$39 billion; 2006-2010
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005	Extended several of the earlier Bush tax cuts, including the reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends and the alternative minimum tax (AMT) tax reduction.	-$70.0 billion	N/A	$70.0 billion; 2006-2010
College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007	$20 billion student aid reform package. Included grant increases, loan rate reductions, and created public service loan forgiveness program.	N/A	-$752 million	-$752 million; 2007-2012

(This post was inspired by a Brian Montopoli post at CBSNews.com linking to my original post on Mann and Ornstein's article.)

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):

-More evidence for the social construction of the "Al Gore sighed too much" narrative after the first debate in 2000
-Time to revise my priors downward on Democrats losing control of the House -- the current state of the generic ballot is gruesome:

-Ben Smith catches Rep. Darrel Issa's casual slur of Obama as having a "foreign ideological vision"
-More misguided "Obama's problem is his staff" hype
-Via Ben Smith, the correction of the month: "[New Yorker editor David Remnick] said the book would not be a 'pumped up' version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a 'pimped out' version of the article."
-Jay Rosen on the insanity of the New York Times being agnostic about claims of "impending tyranny" in the US
-Mark Blumenthal's column on myths about political independents includes a fantastic chart disaggregating Obama's approval ratings:

Lincoln Chafee falls for third party fantasy

Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent, commemorated the impending retirement of fellow Senate legacy admission Evan Bayh with an op-ed reviving the fantasy of a centrist third party:

So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that a third party could be a viable contender for the White House in 2012, my first thought was that he was focused on a future as an independent — and the exciting new avenues for public service it offers.

In 2001, John Zogby, the pollster, told our Republican caucus, “There is a burgeoning centrist third party waiting to be formed.” Either party could make a strategic decision to capture the center, he said, or both could wait for a third party to fill the vacuum.

Barack Obama stood in as a kind of third-party candidate in 2008, with an attractive message of hope, change and a post-partisan approach. He captured that popular, centrist energy for the Democrats.

So far, I’m sorry to say, he’s proving my assertion that Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all...

With our hopes for a post-partisan era still unmet, I say to Senator Bayh: Welcome to the club of independents who are looking for a better way to serve. Before long, we centrists may even come together to define the third party that Mr. Zogby foresaw in 2001.

It has happened before. In 1856, my former party ran a credible presidential campaign just two years after its founding. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House under that new Republican banner. If my friend Evan Bayh can walk away from the United States Senate and not look back, more power to him. But my guess is, he has a modern-day reprise of the Lincoln victory in mind.

What Chafee doesn't understand -- just like Mickey Kaus, Ron Brownstein, Unity '08, Hotsoup.com, James Fallows, Andrew Sullivan, Sanford Levinson, Dick Morris, Bob Shrum, and many others -- is that it's virtually impossible for a third-party candidate to win the presidency. Here's what I wrote back in 2005:

To even become a viable contender as a third-party candidate, you have to spend tens of millions of dollars to get on the ballot in most or all states, plus you need to compete in the ad wars and develop your own grassroots infrastructure from scratch. The party candidates can just plug into an established infrastructure that qualifies them for ballots, ensures them millions of loyal voters, and turns them out on Election Day. As a result, the relentless winnowing of Duverger's Law means they are almost surely going to be one of the two top candidates. It's certainly possible for a third-party candidate to become one of the top two, but it hasn't happened since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (and he was an ex-president), and a third-party candidate hasn't won since Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

And even if a third party candidate did well enough to prevent both major party candidates from winning a majority of Electoral College votes, the race would almost certainly be decided in favor of one of the two major party candidates by state delegations in the House of Representatives.

Also, the comparison to Lincoln and the Republicans is specious. The reason that there was an opening for a third party in the pre-civil war period is that slavery was a highly salient issue that cut across the axis of partisan conflict and internally divided the major parties. No comparable issue exists today.

Hyping the gerrymandering/polarization link

Retiring Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, retired Virgina Republican Tom Davis, and the center-right newsweekly The Economist (via Yglesias) have all recently cited gerrymandering of House districts as a major cause of partisanship and dysfunction in Washington. It's DC conventional wisdom at this point.

In reality, however, the evidence for the claim is weak. As I've pointed out before, the Senate has polarized almost as much as the House in recent years even though state boundaries cannot be gerrymandered. In addition, the most sophisticated political science study on the issue "find[s] very little evidence for such a link." Don't believe the hype.

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Prison sexual abuse is one of the great scandals of our time
-Mitt Romney praises Dick Cheney's "indefatigable defense of truth" in CPAC speech -- no comment necessary
-George Will writes that Sarah Palin is "not going to be president" and won't be the GOP nominee "unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states"
-George Packer savages the empty tactical analysis that pervades political journalism -- a must-read
-TNR's Jon Chait destroys the feckless and vapid Harold Ford
-USA Today engages in false balance, pairing pro-vaccine editorial with defense of discredited Lancet article on MMR/autism link
-Apocalypse now: Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for believing in "objective reality"

The Drudge-hyped CNN "shock poll"

Matt Drudge is currently blaring this headline about a new CNN poll (PDF):

CNN SHOCK POLL: MAJORITY SAY OBAMA DOESN'T DESERVE 2ND TERM

Actually, the poll isn't especially shocking. As The Hill points out, "52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn't deserve reelection in 2012" -- a number that is almost identical to the proportion who disapprove of the job he's doing (50%).

For context, a Fox News poll in August 2001 asked the following question about George W. Bush:

Considering how President (George W.) Bush has performed so far, do you think he deserves to be reelected or would the country probably be better off with someone else as president?

The results? 36% said Bush deserved to be reelected, 42% said the country would be better off with someone else, and 22% said it depends or weren't sure. These numbers are actually worse than Obama's relative to the 55% approval/32% disapproval numbers the Fox poll showed for Bush.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Bayh's misleading paen to Senates past

In a New York Times interview about his decision not to run for re-election, Evan Bayh wistfully reminisced about the bipartisanship of his father's era in the Senate:

Mr. Bayh said he was startled at how much the Senate had changed since he arrived in 1998, and even more since his father, Birch Bayh, served in the Senate, from 1963 to 1981.

“This is colored by having observed the Senate in my father’s day,” Mr. Bayh said. “It wasn’t perfect; they had politics back then, too. But there was much more friendship across the aisles, and there was a greater willingness to put politics aside for the welfare of the country. I just don’t see that now.”

Left unmentioned was the fact that the bipartisanship of the period was largely an artifact of the South's long history of racial apartheid and one-party rule. Good times!

(For the record, I think it's incredibly pompous for Bayh to tout his own "willingness to put politics aside for the welfare of the country," a Broderesque statement that falsely equates bipartisanship with on behalf of the greater good. You could just as easily argue that Bayh himself should have put his electoral concerns aside on issues like the estate tax for the welfare of the country. What he fails to acknowledge is that most people in Congress presumably believe that what they are doing is in the best interests of the country. The problem is that people disagree about how to advance those interests.)

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-CJR's Greg Marx joins the call for reporters to acknowledge role of economy in political outcomes
-GWU's John Sides illustrates how trust in government is closely linked to the state of the economy
-The bad economy/low trust combination is again bringing forward various naïve reform proposals like these -- shades of "electronic town halls" circa 1992
-How Borders can make a social scientist cry
-Bayh's timing may help Dems by letting party choose most centrist candidate -- Ellsworth and Hill are some of the most conservative House Democrats (although obviously Democrats' odds of retaining the seat fall dramatically with Bayh's departure)
-The Bayh-for-president rumors, including speculation about a primary challenge to Obama, make no sense -- in what world does he win Democratic primaries? The base loathes him.
-Every time I start to feel bad for Dan Quayle, he says something like this

Geraldo Rivera joins anti-dissent caucus

Geoffrey Dickens at Newsbusters catches Fox News host Geraldo Rivera accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" and "encouraging another attack" by criticizing President Obama's foreign policy.

During an interview Sunday with conservative pundit Ann Coulter, Rivera said the following (MP3 audio):

But don't you think when the former Vice President says America is weaker than it has been that you are giving aid and comfort to the enemy, that you are encouraging another attack?

Rivera joins an emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left that includes Salon's Joan Walsh, Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan (here and here), and New York Times columnist Frank Rich. I've started a timeline of these attacks here.

GOP double standard on hiring and firing

In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein points out that GOP obstruction of the confirmation process is making it more difficult for President Obama to fire his appointees because they can't be easily replaced.

It's worth noting the irony of this result. In the past, Republicans have argued against labor market regulations that would reduce firms' flexibility to fire their workers, arguing that businesses won't hire new employees if they aren't free to reduce their workforce as needed. We're now witnessing the same dynamic in reverse. Obama can't fire underperforming appointees -- the ones Republicans would seemingly most wish to see removed -- because GOP obstructionism limits his inability to hire new ones. It's a bizarre and counterproductive outcome.

The Obama tax cut misperception

Via Steve Benen, Stephanie Condon at CBSNews.com highlights a widespread misperception about changes in taxes under President Obama:

Of all the very information that came out of the recent CBS News/New York Times poll, one question stuck out, that of taxes.

Here's the poll question: "In general, do you think the Obama Administration has increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans or have they kept taxes the same for most Americans?"

The answer:
• 24 percent of respondents said they INCREASED taxes.
• 53 percent said they kept taxes the same
• And 12 percent said taxes were decreased.

Of people who support the grassroots, "Tea Party" movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

Condon offers two possible explanations:

If so many tax cuts were passed, why have so few Americans actually noticed them?

Possibility 1 – the tax cuts were expansive, but small.

While the majority of the tax cuts, passed last February, affected 95 percent of working families, when they took affect by April of 2009, the monetary value was not too large -- most families saw about $70 more in take home pay every month. Individual workers saw about $13 more a week.

Any tax relief is still relief, but many Americans may not have felt that the tax cuts had much impact.

Possibility 2 – the talk of raising taxes in the future clouded the landscape.

In his 2011 budget, the president has already made it clear that his administration wants to end the Bush–era tax cuts for wealthier families, set to expire next year. So it could be that people see that move as a tax hike already.

Both explanations are plausible, but the divergence between Tea Party supporters and other Americans suggest that the influence of these factors varies depending on people's underlying views of Obama -- a finding is consistent with previous evidence showing widespread divergence in partisan perceptions of the deficit, inflation, etc.

Update 2/15 9:42 PM: Along similar lines, see this Boston Globe article on misperceptions about rising crime, which also have a partisan component:

The year 2009 was a grim one for many Americans, but there was one pleasant surprise amid all the drear: Citizens, though ground down and nerve-racked by the recession, still somehow resisted the urge to rob and kill one another, and they resisted in impressive numbers. Across the country, FBI data show that crime last year fell to lows unseen since the 1960s - part of a long trend that has seen crime fall steeply in the United States since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, however, another change has taken place: a steady rise in the percentage of Americans who believe crime is getting worse. The vast majority of Americans - nearly three-quarters of the population - thought crime got worse in the United States in 2009, according to Gallup’s annual crime attitudes poll. That, too, is part of a running trend. As crime rates have dropped for the past decade, the public belief in worsening crime has steadily grown. The more lawful the country gets, the more lawless we imagine it to be...

The increasingly divisive partisanship of the past two decades may also play a role. Political scientists have found again and again that when the other party has the White House, hard-core partisans will invariably think the country is doing worse than it is. According to Gallup data, in 2004, for example, with a Republican in the White House, 67 percent of Democrats believed crime was up, to the Republicans’ 39 percent. Once Barack Obama was elected, however, the percentage of Republicans who believed crime was rising jumped from 63 to 79, while Democrats stubbornly held at 72. “People are extraordinarily partisan in the way they answer questions about the national scene,” says Gallup’s Saad. And the more partisan the country becomes, the stronger this effect is likely to be.

The Democratic success counterfactual

Matthew Yglesias imagines a counterfactual in which the Democrats enjoyed more legislative success during Obama's first year in office:

If congress had committed itself to expeditiously enacting administration proposals on stimulus, on health care, on climate, and on financial regulatory reform the economy would be in better shape, Obama would be more popular, and congressional Democrats would be more popular.

Boosting the economy via a larger stimulus would likely have improved Obama's standing, and thereby the Democrats', but I'm skeptical that passing the other measures would have increased their approval ratings. It seems more likely that a series of liberal legislative victories would accelerate the expected shift in public opinion toward a preference for smaller government, and thereby reduce the popularity of Obama and the Democrats in the short to medium term.

Hypocrisy alert on Brennan smears

Talking Points Memo's Eric Kleefeld catches Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) reversing his position on smears designed to silence critics of the government's foreign policy.

During the Bush years, Lieberman repeatedly suggested that criticism of the President and his foreign policy aided Al Qaeda and endangered the country. However, after Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan smeared Republican critics of the President as "serv[ing] the goals of al-Qaeda," Lieberman said the following on MSNBC:

You can have a difference of opinion about how the Christmas-Day Bomber should have been treated without turning it into a political debate or suggesting that anybody who doesn't agree with the way the administration handled the Christmas-Day Bomber is somehow giving aid and comfort to al-Qaeda.

However, one could raise similar questions about TPM itself, which has raised no objections about Brennan's language despite criticizing previous attacks on dissent under President Bush (see, for instance, this Josh Marshall post back in 2003). It's sad how few people and organizations have a consistent perspective on this issue.

Update 2/12 11:25 AM: While I was drafting this post, Josh Marshall posted a tortured parsing of the difference between the words of Brennan and previous Republicans:

A lot of people are saying that John Brennan went too far by saying that "politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda." Given the past administration's habit of arguing that dissent or questioning of counter-terrorism policies played into the hands of the terrorists, the words may have been ill-chosen. But it is simply wrong to equate the two things. Indeed, it's the kind of distinction, regrettably, the daily press is seldom able to grasp, putting simple, structural equations above the substance of what is actually being said.

If you look at what Brennan actually said it was that sowing panic, telling people that the terrorists are far more powerful than they are and that our institutions are incapable of defending us against them just makes them seem more frightening than they are. That seems qualitatively different than trying to forbid any question of just how great the threat is or the means we're using to counter it. In both cases, in and out of power, the Republicans are about the political mobilization of fear.

Contrast that with the conclusion to Kleefeld's article:

We've contacted Lieberman's office for comment on how these situations might be different. They have not gotten back to us at this time.

More substantively, it's worth noting again that Brennan has made this point twice. Neither case is fully consistent with Marshall's parsing.

First, consider what Brennan said in July:

“A lot of the knuckleheads I’ve been listening to out there on the network shows don’t know what they’re talking about,” he told me after the Christmas Day attempt. Some Republicans, including Cheney, were blatantly mischaracterizing the record, he fumed. “When they say the administration’s not at war with Al Qaeda, that is just complete hogwash.” It was the angriest I had heard him during months of conversations. “What they’re doing is just playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort, which is to get us to battle among ourselves instead of focusing on them,” he said. [emphasis added]

The point Brennan is making is that any political controversy sparked by GOP criticism (i.e. "get[ting] us to battle among ourselves") necessarily detracts from the anti-Al Qaeda effort. Regardless of the substance of the dispute over the Christmas Day attack, his statement is a direct attack on dissent.

In the second case, while there was again a substantive dispute over anti-terrorism policy of the sort that Marshall notes, the reach of Brennan's statement about "[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering" is much broader:

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America's counterterrorism professionals and America's system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd. [emphasis added]

Indeed, as I've argued, Brennan's words closely track those of John Ashcroft in his infamous testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee -- just switch the allegation from fear-mongering about the Al Qaeda threat to fear-mongering about the threat to civil liberties:

BRENNAN: Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.

ASHCROFT: To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

In short, Marshall's claims contradict Kleefeld's article and are unpersuasive on their own merits.

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Via Matthew Yglesias, Mark Schmitt has a nice take on how Harold Ford's campaign is the latest independent/third party fantasy (see also my previous posts on the subject)
-My friend and former grad student colleague Kevin Morrison is featured in a Slate article on game theory and healthcare reform
-Emory's Alan Abramowitz argues that Congressional popularity doesn't matter in elections
-Princeton's Sam Wang on the limits of fMRI studies of political opinion formation (the "new phrenology")
-Shame on Oprah for giving a talk show to professional vaccine misinformer Jenny McCarthy
-Is there anything more idiotic than making up stories about why politics caused the stock market to do X?
-Best FOIA request ever -- all files on UFOs, Roswell, flying saucers, Area 51 or the X-Files in John Podesta's files from the Clinton White House

White House stands by Brennan's smear of GOP

Senator Kit Bond of Missouri has called for the resignation of Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan after the publication of a USA Today op-ed in which Brennan smeared Republican critics of the President as "serv[ing] the goals of al-Qaeda." It was the second time he had made such a claim -- back in January, Brennan said that Republicans critics of the administration were "playing into Al Qaeda's strategic effort."

The White House responded to the call for Brennan's resignation by issuing a statement yesterday calling Bond "pathetic":

Through his pathetic attack on a counter-terrorism professional like John Brennan who has spent his lifetime protecting this country under multiple Administrations, Senator Bond sinks to new depths in his efforts to put politics over our national security.

In other words, the White House is not only standing by Brennan, but doubling down on his tactics (by claiming Bond is "put[ting] politics over our national security"). I hold no brief for Bond, who has engaged in equally disreputable smears of Obama, but I'm still waiting for the Democrats who were offended by the Bush administration's tactics to speak up against Brennan and his boss.

Wisconsin Public Radio interview

It looks like I'll be talking about President Obama's approval rating on Wisconsin Public Radio's "At Issue with Ben Merens" today from 5:07-6:00 PM EST. You can listen live here on WPR's Ideas Network.

Update 2/11 4:40 PM: Never mind -- it's off.

Blaming staff for structural problems

Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010:

During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama's approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has made poor strategic choices or that the President isn't "connecting" with the American public. Hundreds of hours will be spent constructing elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.

Within two weeks, the narratives about Obama not "connecting" arrived thanks to Scott Brown's victory in the special election for the open Senate seat in Massachusetts.

It's now been about a month since I wrote the original post. After tiring of the "not connecting" narrative, the press has now moved on to blaming Obama's advisors for his political problems. Congressional Democrats have quickly gotten on board, implausibly blaming Rahm Emanuel for not targeting more conservative Senate Republicans on health care.

Obama's staff certainly has made mistakes, but I doubt they are the principal cause of the administration's problems. As I've pointed out before, good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look like idiots. In other words, staff performance is largely a reflection of the political fundamentals (in particular, the economy), not the cause of a president's success or failure.

Unfortunately for Obama's staff, they're under siege from all sides. The political press needs a dramatic narrative in which the President's problems are the result of failed political tactics; Democrats need a scapegoat; and Republicans want a scalp (particularly Emanuel's). If the year doesn't go well for Obama, it's likely that someone will be thrown overboard.

PS I predict Mickey Kaus is ahead of the curve on phase three, which will be to blame Obama himself for poor strategic choices.

Update 2/12 9:14 AM: See also Peggy Noonan's column today, which points in a similar direction as Kaus (i.e. blaming Obama himself).

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Norquist denies admiration of Lenin's tactics

Via Tom Lee, I see that American for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist denied endorsing Lenin's tactics during an exchange with historian Rick Pearlstein on Diane Rehm's NPR show today (starts at 48:17 in the Real Audio or Windows Media clips):

PEARLSTEIN: Of course Grover Norquist wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. It's his life's work.

NORQUIST: No, I don't. Don't tell me my position, sir. I've written a book on the subject.

PEARLSTEIN: You said that you're a Leninist and these things are thirty-year projects. These things are on the record.

NORQUIST: We're not name-calling and I'm a Leninist? Hey, wait a minute, grow up. I'm not a Leninist. I'm an American, thank you. I fought Leninists all my life. And we crushed the Soviet Union, thank you.

PEARLSTEIN: Have you ever said you had Lenin as a hero?

NORQUIST: No.

PEARLSTEIN: He's lying.

I'm not sure if Norquist ever specifically described Lenin as a hero, but as I pointed out back in 2005, he reportedly had a portrait of Lenin in his house and frequently quoted Lenin's saying "Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses."

Similarly, when describing his movement-building plans to the New Yorker, Norquist used language referencing a Communist-style revolution:

[Norquist] talked about how to build a broad coalition. "If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters," he said. "But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that's a much bigger section of the population." To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles over a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote "guns," in the second he wrote "taxes," in the third he wrote "faith." There was a small area where the circles intersected. "With that group, you can take over the country, starting with the airports and the radio stations," he said. "But with all of the three circles that's sixty percent of the population, and you can win politically."

What's interesting is that Norquist has previously endorsed the comparison. In 2001, a Washington Times column by the Heritage Foundation's Alvin Felzenberg stated that "Norquist took it as a compliment when Mr. [E.J.] Dionne called him the 'Lenin' of the right":

Their celebratory writings about the advance of 20th century liberalism from Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Johnson are just as ideologically laden as the utterings of Mr. Norquist and his compatriots. Conservative columnists have yet, though, to depict them - or those who put FDR on the dime and JFK on the half-dollar - as liberalism's "Lenins." (Mr. Norquist took it as a compliment when Mr. Dionne called him the "Lenin" of the right.)

Update 2/10 10:30 AM: Per the comments below, let me make clear that the point of this post is that Norquist frequently referenced Lenin's tactics, not that he himself is a Communist (obviously not). Similarly, the New Yorker quote above about "airports and radio stations" was provided as an example of a reference to Communist-style tactics. Again, he wasn't proposing a Communist revolution. I have updated the language of the post and the title to try to make these points more clear.

Brennan again smears GOP dissent

John Brennan, President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is making a habit of smearing GOP critics of the president's security decisions.

In a USA Today op-ed today, Brennan writes that "[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda":

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America's counterterrorism professionals and America's system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.

Back in January, Brennan engaged in a similar attack, accusing Republicans who criticized the administration of "playing into Al Qaeda's strategic effort."

Brennan's rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the attacks on dissent that Republicans frequently engaged in during the Bush years, particularly John Ashcroft's infamous testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, is the Obama administration giving in to the same temptation?

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Sarah Palin's hand notes are the new Rorschach blot of American politics
-My advice? Next time, Palin should write the notes on her shoes like Mike Seaver on Growing Pains
-Inside Edition (!) corrects its misleading reporting on Desiree Jennings case -- mainstream media take note!
-The bizarre asymmetry of presidential powers
-Conspiracy-minded pundits suggest the government is investigating Toyota to help US automakers
-You know "That's how we roll" is no longer cool when David Axelrod is using it on This Week

Obama's phony health care summit

Understatement of the year on Obama's proposed health care summit:

[I]t remains unclear whether a single discussion can begin to bridge the political and substantive policy divide with Republicans, who view their united front against the Democratic bills as a key to their political recovery.

I understand the supposed rationale for the summit is to "engage Congressional Republicans in policy negotiations, share the burden of governing and put more scrutiny on Republican initiatives," as the Times puts it, but let's be clear -- the meeting is an obviously phony PR stunt. The Democrats are locked into the Senate bill plus whatever changes they have to make in a separate reconciliation bill to appease House Democrats. On background, an administration official said "This is not starting over... We are coming with our plan [a merged version of the House and Senate bills]." On the GOP side, the invited Republicans are surely going to use the meeting to promote their own health care agenda, not to try to improve a bill they nearly unanimously oppose. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even said "we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."

In short, Obama is raising expectations for genuine bipartisanship, but it's not going to happen -- the odds of important policy changes coming out of the meeting are virtually nil. If House Democrats then go ahead and pass the Senate bill plus a reconciliation package on a party-line vote, the press will again surely note the contrast between Obama's rhetoric and the realities of legislating in a highly partisan Congress. Is this stunt really worth a delay of more than two weeks?

Update 2/8 9:15 PM: Greg Sargent reports that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is just as dismissive of the exercise as McConnell:

[U]nless the President and Speaker Pelosi are willing to scrap their government take over and hit the reset button, there’s not much to talk about.

Republicans believe the status quo is unacceptable, but so is any health reform package that spends money we don't have or raises taxes on small businesses and working families in a recession.

Death panel myth will not die

Among the right-wing faithful, at least, the myth of the so-called "death panel" persists:

When Andrew Breitbart, the founder of BigGovernment.com, introduced Ms. Palin [to the National Tea Party Convention] by describing her as “the first person to tell us about the death panel,” the crowd cheered.

Kit Bond smears Obama on terror

During a conference call with conservative bloggers yesterday, Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) accused the Obama administration of conducting "a terrorist protection policy" and engaging in a "jihad to close Guantanamo" (MP3 audio):

[0:21] Let me begin by saying that yesterday's hearing with the leaders of the intelligence community shows how this Administration think it's more important to protect the legal rights of terrorists than to protect Americans from terror...

[0:48] What we need in this country is an administration that has a terror-fighting policy, not a terrorist protection policy...

[10:18] They're on this jihad to close Guantanamo, which is a good campaign promise and is designed to keep ACLU, Media Matters, and the extreme left wing, where Obama still has support in the Democratic Party, happy, but it makes our country less safe...

Bond is the latest in a long line of conservatives who have suggested that President Obama is disloyal using language that draws upon the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Sadly, his comments are unlikely to draw any further notice -- it's apparently no longer considered newsworthy to report that senators are smearing the president's loyalty to this country.

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Jon Chait shreds the Luntz memo on financial reform as a classic example of conservative postmodernism.
-New economic research on the difficulty of estimating teacher effects on student achievement (PDF).
-More evidence of the insanity of CA public finance under Prop. 13 (PDF).
-Important Boston Globe investigation of Scott Brown's coat (also repeats the Naomi Wolf myth) -- call the Pulitzers!
-Shame -- former Rep. J.D. Hayworth joins birther caucus.
-Hatch says using reconciliation for health care would be abuse of power, but it has frequently been used for social policy.

New left-wing smears of conservatives

Liberals and Democrats are increasingly adopting the popular post-9/11 tactic of comparing their political opponents to terrorists and murderous regimes. The latest examples come from SEIU president Andy Stern, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

First, via CNSNews.com, Stern referred to Democratic senators who aren't supportive of labor's policy priorities as "terrorists":

Stern criticized Senators Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, who have stalled legislative action with their objections.

“There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we are supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met,” Stern said.

Similarly, Matthews joined Josh Marshall and Frank Rich in comparing Republicans to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia:

What's going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going on in that party, where they're going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, if you're not far right, you're not right enough.

Finally, Kos engaged in a similar smear in which he likened Republicans to the Taliban, a comparison that is apparently going to be the subject of an entire book:

As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world.

The Taliban comparison was coined by former NAACP president Julian Bond in 2001 and quickly came into wide usage, including Senator Tim Johnson, Marshall, Lewis Lapham, Matthews, and Kos. The release of the Kos book will only make things worse.

Obama's misguided spending freeze

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his advisers have repeatedly claimed that they don't listen to DC's conventional wisdom. But Obama's decision to propose a freeze of discretionary non-security spending suggests that the White House misunderstands the problem in the same way as most of the rest of Washington.

The problem, as I've argued, is that Obama's political fortunes are closely tied to the economy -- a variable over which he has relatively little control. With his first midterm election approaching and the economy in terrible shape, an anti-presidential backlash was a virtual certainty. Obama's approach to health care or the economy may have exacerbated this backlash -- the public tends to move in the opposite direction from public policy (though usually after some lag) -- but it's highly unlikely that Obama's policies or communication strategies were the primary cause of his declining approval ratings.

The decision to respond to this problem with a partial spending freeze is both bad politics and bad economics. From an economic perspective, Obama faces a serious risk of a long period of slow growth or even a double-dip recession. He has no politically feasible jobs agenda; his proposed tax credit is tiny relative to the scale of the problem. Imposing additional limits at government spending will only make the problem worse.

From a political perspective, Obama's gesture will have very little effect. The idea seems to be that it will appeal to independents and Republicans who are concerned about the deficit. However, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will not support Obama no matter what he does. They may say they are concerned about the deficit or government spending, but if those concerns are addressed they are likely to find other reasons to oppose the administration. (In addition, their perceptions are likely to be biased.) Deficits might hurt Obama on the margin, but in most cases I tend to think that they're a convenient reason to cite for opposing a president you wouldn't like anyway.

Just to underscore the magnitude of the political and economic problem Obama faces, the White House budget, which was released today, projects "8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 unemployment percent by the end of 2012." While unemployment isn't as good a predictor of election outcomes as income growth, these figures underscores the difficult path to re-election that Obama currently faces. He can still win in 2012 -- seasonally adjusted unemployment in December 1983 was 8.3% and Reagan went on to beat Mondale in a landslide -- but he needs significant growth to do it (regression line excludes the outliers of 1952 and 1968):

Given the historical record, the downside risk of suboptimal economic policy vastly outweighs the symbolic appeal of spending freezes and other short-term deficit measures. Unfortunately for Obama, this is one issue where his administration appears to buy into the conventional wisdom.

Update 2/2 1:30 PM: Matthew Yglesias makes the point more eloquently in a post linking to this one:

Roughly speaking, people got it into their heads over the years that “deficits” are “bad” (which is usually true, but also pretty simplistic) and then the economic situation became very bad, so people have decided that large deficits must be the problem. This is a misunderstanding. An application of a crude, sorta-correct rule of thumb to an unusual situation. It also involves people confusing cause and effect. Steep economic downturns cause large deficits, which is bad. But the deficit is the symptom rather than the cause. Meanwhile, as Brendan Nyhan observes the Obama administration seems eager to pile bad political science on top of the mass public’s bad economics. People are upset, and they say they want a smaller deficit. So Obama’s proposing to give it to them, and seems to have no intention of doing anything about its own forecast of a years-long bleak economic situation.

In political terms, though, the actual performance of the economy in 2012 is going to be much more important to Obama’s re-election than the budget deficit. In particular, by directing its policymaking more at the things that the public thinks are the cause of economic problems rather than the things that economists think are the cause of economic problems, the administration is making is running a huge risk of GOP takeover of the House in 2010. What’s more, they’ve left themselves with almost no margin of error for their own re-election. And for double-irony, the very members of congress who are most endangered by poor short-term economic performance are the ones who are doing the most to urge the administration to adopt a fiscal retrenchment agenda. The faith in vox populi that this reflects (”the public will reward me for doing what they said they wanted me to do, even if it turns out not to work at all”) is sort of touching, but really lacks any basis in the evidence. It’s fascinating to me how few professional political operatives or reporters seem interested in systematic studies of US politics.

See also:
-Seth Masket on pundits misunderstanding Obama's problems
-John Sides on the overemphasis on process as the problem in the health care debate
-Jon Chait on Peter Wehner ridiculing "structural factors" as the primary reason for Obama's decline

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]