longwalkdownlyndale: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Conservativism's Information Disadvatage

Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic pointed out yesterday a troubling trend with many of the news organs of modern conservatism, namely they often get basic facts and predictions wrong, which in turn does their readers a great disservice:

Americans who get their news from anti-Hagel conservatives discovered Tuesday that much of the analysis they've long been fed on this subject left them as misinformed about the likely course of events as they were about Mitt Romney's prospects for victory during Election 2012. Of course, a single nomination battle isn't nearly so consequential as a presidential election. This is nevertheless another reminder for the rank-and-file on the right: Demand better from the journalists whose work you patronize, or remain at an information disadvantage relative to consumers of a "mainstream media" that is regularly outperforming conservative journalists.

Friedersdorf has recorded a rather impressive list of conservative writers who get paid to keep their readers informed doing the exact opposite over the past few months. One that stands out is the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin who as early as 2010 was responding to suggestions about Hagel as a Secretary of Defense with statements like "Maybe this is a trial balloon. If it's more than that, it will go over like a lead one." And as recently as February 11th with statements like:

When a Democratic insider and top adviser to President Obama like Stephanie Cutter laughs on the Sunday shows at the prospect of defending Chuck Hagel, you know things are not going well. She essentially said that the disastrous hearing doesn't matter.

The point here is not that Rubin is a sorry excuse for a journalist and the Washington Post should be embarrassed to keep her on the pay roll, although she is and they should be, it's that this sort of coverage makes the jobs of conservative readers who are trying to stay informed about politics that much harder. To make matter worse, when the events that other journalist have been predicting do in fact come to past, conservatives who depend on people like Rubin to stay informed must be left dumbstruck and politics becomes even more impenetrable. Why on earth did some guy who hates Israel and wants Iran to get the Bomb get confirmed by the Senate? The obvious answer is that Hagel doesn't have those views and since he has no personal scandals he's likely to get confirmed, like every other Secretary of Defense, but you'd never learn that from reading Rubin. I'd wager that this is in no small part a reason for conservatives to be more prone to a lot of conspiracy theories out there. If the economy is not improving according to Rush, even though it is according to CNN or The New York Times, the idea that people in the Government invented monthly job report numbers makes much more sense.

Ironically its conservatives themselves that should be the most outraged by things like this as in the long run it only makes their attempts to get politicians they like elected and policies they like enacted that much harder.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Towards a Unifed Theory of BipartisanThink

Matt Yglesias has been working with Jonathan Chait to help explain the Washington phenomena he has dubbed "BipartianThink" which is an important part of how so many Beltway pundits operate:

A certain strand of Beltway political thought has a problem with the budget deficit. By definition the failure of the parties to agree to a balanced deficit reduction package is equally the fault of both Democrats and Republicans. That's a core element of BipartisanThink. At the same time, deficit hawks actively want to get politicians to agree with their prescriptions. So the risk always exists that the hawks will get what they want and someone will agree with them. That's what's happened with Barack Obama and most of the Democratic congressional leadership. At that point, a paradox occurs since again, by definition both parties are equally to blame.

This is a crucial part of explaining why our media can seem so dysfunctional when it comes to explaining political problems in Washington. Pundits and editorial boards start from the conclusion that both parties are equally to blame for the sequester and work backwards to try and shape their description of the political world they try to cover. So you begin with the idea that both parties are too blame and look for evidence that supports that, while discarding evidence that might contradict it. As Jonathan Chait recently pointed out a lot of pundits found themselves in a jam because recent political events surrounding the sequester where not following the one true path of BipartisanThink:

On the one hand, they fervently believe that the country’s most vital priority is to pass a plan to reduce the deficit through a mix of cuts to retirement programs and reduced tax deductions. On the other hand, they believe with equal fervor that the two parties are equally to blame for the country’s problems in general, and the failure to pass such a plan in particular. Their problem is that one party agrees with them completely, and the other rejects them. This creates a paradox between the two mental tentpoles of BipartisanThink. The solution is to simply wish away the facts, thus bringing them into line with reality.

David Brook's responded to this paradox by just cold making things up, which he apologized for yesterday, but few pundits are so open about their failings and even less would respond by changing their mind about who is at fault. If you want to understand the Beltway media, you have to understand BipartisanThink.

On the one hand, they fervently believe that the country’s most vital priority is to pass a plan to reduce the deficit through a mix of cuts to retirement programs and reduced tax deductions. On the other hand, they believe with equal fervor that the two parties are equally to blame for the country’s problems in general, and the failure to pass such a plan in particular.

Their problem is that one party agrees with them completely, and the other rejects them. This creates a paradox between the two mental tentpoles of BipartisanThink. The solution is to simply wish away the facts, thus bringing them into line with reality.

- See more at: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/david-brooks-obama-plan-birther.html#sthash.XRnn2N51.dpuf

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Trouble with Moralizing History

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great piece about violence and housing in Chicago at his blog as well as a follow up. They are both quite good and you should read them, but they did highlight one of the more problematic things with this type of moralized history, that is Coates' attempt to ascribe his own moral framework onto the realities of the past. Now of course we should be willing to make moral judgements of the past, Mary I was religious fanatic and bad person, but by ascribing our contemporary views and values we can obscure the realities of that period and in a way confuse history and make learning from it even more difficult.

Coates' posts are about the history of segregation in Chicago, especially during the middle of the 20th century, and how communal violence (what he calls terrorism) was used to do things like enforce de facto segregation. He's quite right that the illegal or extra-legal tools of riots, housing covenants and actions of trade groups like professional realtors associations did succeed in creating a city more segregated that many in the south. Coates ascribes the reasons for this as simply "white supremacy." Right off the bat this is problematic, because of Coates intellectual background in African American Studies he is ascribing a very particular view of race that isn't very helpful for understanding race in that period. Ironically this same problem bedeviled Martin Luther King when he led a large scale protest movement in Chicago in the mid-60's. As Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor pointed out in their great biography of then Mayor Richard J. Daley American Pharaoh, "And to [SCLC] southerners used to a region where almost everyone fell into the simple category of "black" and "white," Chicago was a confusing array of Irish, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, and other ethnic groups." Coates is falling into the same trap, by ignoring the very real divisions between groups in Chicago that didn't fall into the simplistic categories of "black" and "white" he's missing a lot of what's really going on. Just like saying that the recent mini-riot in South high school was "racial" misses just how complicated human identity can be and isn't very helpful.

In addition, Coates simplistic portrait of "whites" oppressing "blacks" ignores the very important internal conflicts that went on inside these communities at the same time violence was being used to enforce housing lines. As Cohen and Taylor point out:

Another thing the SCLC was unprepared for when it arrived in Chicago was the opposition it would face from significant parts of the black community. "Chicago was the first city that we ever went to as members of the SCLC staff where black ministers and black politicians told us to go back where we came from," says Dorothy Tillman, then a young SCLC staff member from Alabama...Some Chicago blacks professed to be as offended as Daley that outsiders were coming and telling them what to do. "Dr. King can move into Alabama and say, 'This is it,'" said the Reverend W. H. Nichols, a West Side minister, "but here in Chicago each man stands on his own two feet." To some on the SCLC staff, the black opposition seemed to be rooted in years of oppression by whites...But the truth was, much of the opposition came not because Chicago black were powerless, but because they had more power than blacks in the rural South. Daley, who needed black votes in a way that southern politicians did not, had handed out elected offices, patronage jobs, and money in the black community, and had singled out a few Dawsons and Metcalfes to represent blacks on a citywide level. These black leaders, and their armies of patronage workers, had a personal state in the status quo, in a way no blacks in Selma or Birmingham did.

These historical realities, that some black Chicago leaders supported the status quo not because they had to, but because it was in their own personal interests to do so, is a crucial part of the story Coates is trying to tell. But it has been completely dropped from his telling of history, the same way many conservative versions of this period in history paints a strange picture in which no one was really opposed to civil rights or that the real story of racism begins with Tawana Brawley.

Finally, by ascribing the realities of race in mid 20th Century Chicago to "white supremacy" and economics Coates has missed the crucial reality that the policy of desegregating housing represented far more than just a threat to whites racism. It represented the end of the City's entire political structure as it was then constructed, which included 40,000 patronage jobs, 14 members of Congress and perhaps 1,000,000 votes on election day. Again Cohen and Taylor:

Daley's opposition to King was also rooted in simple politics. King's prescription for Chicago would have freed blacks to move out of the ghetto and into white neighborhoods. If King succeeded in integrating Chicago, it would change the demographic layout of the city to the detriment of the machine. Blacks would move out of the traditional black wards, where ward committeemen and precinct captains had for years been turning them out consistently for the machine's candidates. And when blacks moued in, whites would flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs, cutting into another important part of the machine base. Just as troubling, the civil rights movement challenged the machine's careful racial balancing act. The machine held on to black votes by giving the black community patronage jobs rather than civil rights, and it held on to the white vote by assuring the Bungalow Belt that it would not be integrated. If integration became a real possibility, the machine would be challenged from the left in black wards, by independent candidates promising to fight hard for integration. And in the white wards, white backlash candidates would run to the machine's right, promising to be more outspoken in opposition to open housing.

Asking white politicians like Daley to accept integration was asking them to accept the end of their political power-a power that could pick governors and presidential nominees-and that was simply not the way of the machine. Perhaps they should have supported desegregation and accepted the end of their political power and life's work for moral reasons, but the fact that they refused to and instead fought against integration for so long should surprise no one.

Friday, February 22, 2013

The Hackdom of Ted Cruz

The New Yorker had a great piece by Jane Mayer about how Ted Cruz, the freshmen GOP Senator from Texas, has declined from once the hope of the conservative movement to a pathetic hack who infuriates members of his own caucus and acts like Joe McCarthy. Mayer points out that some of Cruz's rhetoric makes Rush Limbaugh look reasonable by saying thing like, “[President Obama] would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” because:

There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.

Mayer called up Reagan's former solicitor general Charles Fried whose now a faculty member at Harvard who quickly points out that its just not true, the are several Republicans on the faculty and no "Communists overthrowing the United States government." That's text book McCarthyism right there.

This raises the why someone who is supposedly a smart person would resort to these kinds of tactics. Jonathan Bernstein at A Plain Blog About Politics speculates it's all about the incentives in the modern GOP. That is, this type of over the top rhetoric will get you on Fox News and other conservative outlets which will raise your profile which is crucial for all sorts of elaborate money making schemes. I completely agree but I do think another factor might be in play. Saying inflammatory things on TV is really easy compared to say, crafting legislation that will work well and will get out of committee and get through the 60 vote Senate and get through the House and can have any difference between the bills ironed out in conference committee and not get vetoed by the President. That process, called the legislative process, is a lot harder than yelling, because yelling and calling people names is easy. So is Ted trying to pump up his profile and/or get a seat on the Koch brothers gravy train? Probably. But it's also possible that this man is just a lazy lout who would rather rest of the laurels of calling the President a communist than try and be a good Senator.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Take that Socialism!

Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog had a good summery about where we stand on the much vaunted health insurance exchanges being set up under Obamacare. Basically the Feds will run 26 of the nations 51 exchanges and will partner with another seven other states to set up their exchanges jointly. The remaining 17 states and DC will run their own. As she points out, this is overwhelmingly due to Republican Governors refusing to set up their own exchanges. Ironically this GOP attempt to limit the horror of Kenyan socialism is actually giving liberal policy wonks a bit of a victory:

Remember, House Democrats originally wanted one national health exchange, where everyone in all 50 states could purchase coverage. That idea was nixed in the Senate bill, which aimed to give states a larger role in setting up the Affordable Care Act.

In a way, all these states turning over their exchanges to the federal government brings Obamacare a little closer to the more liberal House bill, which had the federal government running one big marketplace. It allows the White House to have more control over setting up its signature legislative accomplishment. It also creates some economies of scale, as HHS can develop one template exchange that all 26 states it handles will use.

Kliff also points out that if the GOP Governors really wanted to damage Obamacare, and thus make it more unpopular, they could have decided to make their own exchanges and then done a horrible job implementing them. Not a very noble tactic to be sure, but it strikes me as probably the most effective one available. At the very least if people like Rick Perry decided to set up exchanges, they could have worked to make them as Spartan as possible. By bravely trying to stand in the hospital door people like Scott Walker are in a way helping the President's agenda.

Don't like that comparison? I'd argue that the comparison to George Wallace helps explain a lot about this kind of decision. Take Wallace's language from 50 years ago out of context and it sounds like something a Bobby Jindal could say at a press conference tomorrow, "I stand here today as governor of this sovereign state, and refuse to willingly submit to illegal usurpation of power by the central government." And just take a look at the handy map from the Kaiser Family Foundation, every state of the Old Confederacy except Arkansas is refusing to set up a state based exchange. As Rick Perlstein likes to point out, their's nothing new under the wingnut sun.

Monday, February 18, 2013

More on the Policy Gap

Political Scientist Jonathan Bernstein made a great point on the Washington Post's Plumline Blog in response to something Ramesh Ponnaru wrote in the New York Times. Ponnaru argued that the GOP should stop focusing on rekindling the glories of the 1980's and instead focus on economic and tax policies that make sense for today. Bernstein argues, in my view correctly, that the problem is even worse than that:

The problem with Republicans today on public policy isn’t that they’re stuck in the 1980s; it’s that they’ve given up entirely. More often than not, what passes for Republican “policy” is just symbolic, not substantive.

And you can see this all the time right now. Bernstein points out the major gaps; the missing replace side of "repeal and replace Obamacare," the fact that John McCain can't even explain what the "coverup" of Benghazi even is and the 20 year obsession with passing a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment to name a few.

Increasingly "conservative" policy proposals are coming from liberals who bring up their ideas in occasional "here's what the GOP should be doing" type pieces. In response to Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage, Matt Yglesias pointed out that the sensible path would be for the GOP to oppose the increase and purpose their own substitute policies. Alas, as Yglesias points out, that's just not going to happen:

So something else they could do is take up one of several alternative policies that economists tend to like better. They could embrace a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. They could embrace a Guaranteed Basic Income. They could target their assistance at families with a bigger refundable child tax credit. But they're not going to do any of those things either. Nor are they going to say that the real solution is expansionary monetary policy to create tight labor markets and the chance for workers to obtain higher market wages without government intervention. They're just going to offer nothing, until at some point Democrats have enough seats to pass the minimum wage hike or a handful of Republicans defect and join them.

Exactly. Yglesias goes on to point out that this is because the GOP is opposed in principle to policies with the goals like raising the minimum wage because they are oppose in principle to the idea of the government regulating "market outcomes" with things like minimum wage bills. As he puts it:

This isn't because there are no conservative thinkers with better ideas than a minimum wage hike, but because none of those ideas will be embraced in practice by Republican politicians or deployed by the conservative movement in any way other than as a smokescreen.

Which I would say is true. But as Bernstein pointed out, the problem is even worse than that. Even if a Marco Rubio wanted to find policies to promote instead of a minimum wage hike there aren't even any out there for him to go to in think tanks or with other GOP allied party actors. Making the problem even worse than we think it is.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Rubio's Policy Gap and An Update

A lot of the commentary about Marco Rubio's response to Obama's State of the Union is focusing on some of the goofier stuff, like the water break, the "I Dream of Jeannie" looking set or the sad fact that he didn't just blurt out what he obviously really wanted to. What struck me was how little substance the speech actually had. Andrew Sullivan saw it as a "pathetic, exhausted, vapid response" and while I'd agree that it was all of those things it struck me as being more than just another lame speech. If it was anything it was another illustration of the "policy gap" that has developed between the two parties.

Matt Ygleisas has a great list of the numerous different and specific policy proposals Obama outlined in the State of the Union last night that includes links to all sorts of progressive/Democratic allied groups and experts about how to move forward. Compare that to Rubio's talk where he said things like, "And because tuition costs have grown so fast, we need to change the way we pay for higher education. I believe in federal financial aid." That's all well and good but what does he propose to do specifically? More pell grants? More community colleges? Since Rubio didn't elaborate other than to tell us what he "believes in" your guess is as good as mine. The same thread was apparent in Eric Cantor's much lauded speech a few weeks ago where he proposed fixing our budget deficit by zeroing out the $11 million dollars in grants the National Science Foundation gives to the study of political science. And who can forget the mother of all policy black holes: Republicans have been vowing to "repeal and replace" Obamacare for the last two plus years, and while they've voted to repeal it over 30 times in the House no bill to replace it has been introduced or even discussed in either chamber of Congress.

A fashionable criticism of Obama over the past four years has been he needs to stop "campaigning" and "start governing." The idea here is that Obama's big rallies and speeches he does for issues from time to time are not effective and he needs to spend more time in Washington or something. While I think this kind of criticism is a bit silly, public speeches are a part of a presidents job, I have realized that a similar concept does apply to the modern GOP. Over the past 20 years Republicans have increasingly replaced the language and reality of policy with boilerplate campaign rhetoric. You saw this a lot last night with Rubio. The economic section of the speech was largely confined to: "And more government isn’t going to inspire new ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs. It’s going to create uncertainty." Later Rubio criticizes the upcoming sequester cuts as being "devastating." So government isn't the answer, but cutting it is devastating, but what we want is smaller government. This sort of incoherence isn't a flaw in Marco Rubio, its a flaw in a political party that no longer attempts to understand or explain complex policy issues and instead has built its rhetoric and discussion of policy around gimmicks and the use of buzzwords.

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In other news, I have a lot more free time on my hands these days as the project I was working on ended on Friday. So, I'll be updating this blog a lot more, maybe even as much as once a day. Anyway thanks again for reading and check back soon!

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The State of the Union

Matt Yglesias had a great post earlier today in response to a David Brooks column where Brooks calls for Obama to abandon the never ending fight over how much to tax the rich and instead use the State of the Union tonight to roll out a variety of policy proposals David Brooks likes:

If the president were to propose an agenda for the future, he’d double spending on the National Institutes of Health. He’d approve the Keystone XL pipeline. He’d cut corporate tax rates while adding a progressive consumption tax. He’d take money from Social Security and build Harlem Children’s Zone-type projects across the nation. He’d means test Medicare and use the money to revive state universities and pay down debt.

Matt pointed out that while he agrees with these policies, following Brooks' advice wouldn't be very helpful:

The problem with that idea is that the president can't cut corporate tax rates while adding a progressive consumption tax. All he can do is propose cutting corporate tax rates while adding a progressive consumption tax...The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did (among other things) cut Medicare spending in order to (among other things) improve health care services for children. Republicans lambasted it, but it passed anyway since Democrats had majorities in Congress. Today, a proposal to go farther down that road would go nowhere due to the existence of persistent partisan disagreement.

Exactly. Probably one of the biggest misconceptions with how a lot of reporters and commentators approach covering American politics is about the basic structure of our system of government itself. The Presidency is the most widely covered aspect of journalism about politics, but by design it simply isn't very powerful. This is difficult for a lot of people to understand because of they way our media covers the Presidency and the way we are taught from an early age to view the President as a sort of national father who plays a role in dealing with all the problems of the day. But if you step back and look at the powers of the office in the specific instead of grand themes about intangible concepts like "leadership" you see a pretty limited office. A President can not spend money or write laws, they can only veto and sign a budget or law Congress sends to the White House. A President has very few ways to punish a member of Congress of their own party, let alone a member of the opposition. Indeed, a President can't even get a bill submitted to Congress without some member agreeing to walk it up on the floor and put it in the hopper.

Furthermore the other branches of Government have powerful tools to fight back against any attempt by the White House to bypass Congress, the Courts or the Federal Bureaucracies. A president who offends Congress can find themselves under investigation and their nominees blocked. The Supreme Court has been a thorn in the side of Presidents with expansive designs of executive authority since the days of Andrew Jackson and even beyond. When I was in college one of my Sociology professors told our class a great story of how Federal Bureaucrats could work to fight back against people the White House would send to radically change their Department or slash their budgets. For her PHD she interviewed a lot of very high level people in one of the Departments in Washington (i think it was one of the boring ones likes Agriculture or Interior) and they told her a great trick. When new Administrations would come to town they'd often try and discipline theses departments by sending in a new cabinet level or sub-cabinet level person, like a Deputy Undersecretary, with the orders to kick ass and take names if what the White House wanted wasn't implemented. It was suppose to go a lot like this. The folks in the Department would fight back by waiting until the White House's person had to go and testify before Congress. Since they had been in Washington a lot longer than the typical Cabinet Secretary they would brief the Secretary very well but leave our crucial details that they knew Senators would ask about, but that the Secretary wouldn't, as they had never testified before Congress before. The result would be the Secretary would look foolish in front of all of Washington, weakening their position inside the Administration and illustrating just how important good relations with their staff is. The end result of this trick was a dialing back of kick ass and take names and the end of attempts to radically change everything in the Department. In short, the anonymous bureaucrats beat the President of the United States.

Does this mean the Presidency "doesn't matter?" Of course not. A President is very important, but that importance doesn't translate into unfettered power. And so the State of the Union tonight matters, it will tell us about Obama's priorities and positions, but giving a speech won't transcend the important structural factors in Washington today, like the fact we have divided government and the dysfunctional state of the GOP.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

About Those Drones

Drones and targeted killings are back in the news these days and Dave Weigel at Slate made a great point today that..." one reason why drone warfare and targeted killing don't really get discussed in Washington unless there's a memo leak or a protest: There's bipartisan consensus to whistle awkwardly and let the system continue." I think this can't be stressed enough, legal and moral questions aside our targeted killing policies remain remarkably popular among Americans of a variety of political stripes and overwhelmingly popular among our elected officials. None other than John Boehner referred to a statement with this response to questions about the targeted killing of American citizens: "When an individual has joined al-Qaida — the organization responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans — and actively plots future attacks against U.S. citizens, soldiers, and interests around the world, the U.S. government has both the authority and the obligation to defend the country against that threat." That might be a dubious legal rational, but it's a great one in the court of public opinion and given the way the national security apparatus and presidency has evolved since the end of World War II, that's what matters. You might not like these policies but I don't see them going away anytime soon.

Any campaign trying to change these policies must be rooted in these political realities or it won't get far. Politics is hard work and if you want to enact change you have to go beyond calling for Obama to be impeached or saying you consider something unconstitutional, that won't change anything.