I like presidential inaugurations. I like the symbolism of transferring power in a republic. I like the assembly of the entire government in one place. I like that they take place at the Capitol, subtly and whiggishly marking the legislature — and not the President — as the fundamental governmental entity. I like the flags and the bunting. And call me a sucker and a sentimentalist, I even like the speeches.

And so a pop quiz. Name the presidential inaugural address from which each of the following word clouds were formed. It’s not easy, but I think all four can be gotten with a little bit of thought. If you have trouble getting them at first glance, make sure you examine the smaller words; they hold a lot of clues. Answers and discussion tomorrow. (Click on the clouds to enlarge them.)

Cloud #1:

Cloud #2:

Cloud #3:

Cloud #4:

There are a million people writing great things on the Internet today about last night. I’m going to tell a story:

I was sitting in a bar in Boston — I think it was the Beacon Hill Pub —  a year or two after I got out of college, maybe 2001. It was a late afternoon in August, and I was with a bunch of buddies, just hanging out.  The bar was almost empty, and everyone there was watching the Red Sox game. It was a pretty standard mostly-empty-bar baseball crowd.  Two patrons in particular, however, stuck out. The first was a man who must have been about 60. He was sitting alone at the end of the bar, wearing a red sweatshirt, and quietly muttering “fuck the Yankees” over and over again while he drank his beer. (Note: the Red Sox were not playing the Yankees on the TV).

Given his age, I made up a back story in my head for him: he was probably 6 years old when Pesky held the ball in the ’46 Series and 8 when they dumped the 1-game playoff to the Indians, and then spent the rest of his youth watching the Yankees win a dozen pennants and a pile of World Series. It was that kind of formative baseball experience that would produce this kind of 60-year-old. And my own experience agreed: my first vivid memory of the baseball playoffs was the ’86 Series, when I was 8. I’m sitting with my dad watching game 6 — we’re yankees fans, so obviously we’re rooting for the Mets — and when Stanley throws the wild pitch, my father — who up to this moment had been dead quiet —  just starts laughing hysterically. And then I do to. And then Buckner and now we’re both roaring again, uncontrollably. And then Strawberry hits that towering cheery-on-top-of-the-sundae homer in the 8th inning of game 7 and we both start laughing again. And to this day, whenever something goes wrong for the Red Sox, I start laughing. So I understand how these things happen.

The other guy of note in the bar, my friends and I actually talked to him. Another Red Sox fan, huge Boston accent. He had a childhood baseball story too. Turns out he was 7 years old during the ’75 Series. And it also turns out that he never really got over it. It was all he wanted to talk about. He quizzed us on the Reds’ starting lineup (we got everyone but Cesar Geronimo), he recounted in detail his living room reaction to the Armbrister/Fisk non-interference call in game 3, he told us about Tiant’s complete game in game 4. And then he started to talk about game 6. After a short monologue he says, “You guys know who hit the big home run in that game, right?” And one of us says, “yeah, Carlton Fisk.” And he then instantly answered with a firm “No! That’s what everyone says. But the answer is Bernie Carbo! His homer in the 8th was the important one. That’s when I knew the Sox were going to win the game, and the Series!” And then we sat in silence for a few seconds. Finally, one of my buddies says, “Yeah? So what happened in game 7?” And the guy looks straight at us and says, “That’s what I’m still trying to figure out.” And then he walked away.

Somewhere in Boston, there’s a kid who’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what the hell happened last night.

Five other quick thoughts, hopefully not duplicating anything you’ve read already today:

3) The Sox collapse is like a microcosm of all their great tragedies. The month-long nature of it makes it  a lot like ’78. So does Dan Johnson’s Dent-ish homer. Crawford’s non-catch in left field is reminiscent of Pesky/Stanley/Buckner. The two easy outs in the 9th were very ’86 Game 6ish.  Longoria’s homer was very Boone-ish ’03.  Add in that the Yankees were involved — by losing — and that just sends it into the stratosphere.

1) Dan Johnson is like Bucky Dent crossed with Bernie Carbo. No way that homer happened. I mean, Johnson makes Dent look like a triple-crown contender. “That little shit hit a god damn 300 foot pop-fly.” That’s Tip O’neil, in his autobiography, talking about Dent’s homer. He might as well have been talking about Johnson.  But I bet, like Carbo, he ends up taking a back seat in our memories in the coming years. Longoria’s game-winner is going to be the iconic clip.

2) Last night wasn’t possible ten years ago. The fan experience is just different now. I had all three game available to me on my TV, which itself probably wouldn’t have been possible in the 90’s. But Twitter took those games through the roof. Maybe there have been Twitter sports moments before, but last night was the first time I felt like I was watching the games with dozens of other people, despite sitting alone on my couch. I remember watching game 5 of the 2004 ALCS (the 14-inning marathon at Fenway) alone in my apartment, in the dark, barely blinking. A totally different feeling (no doubt, in part,  because I was rooting for the Yankees), and an amazing one in its own right. But had Twitter existed then, I’m pretty sure it would have made it even better (worse).

4) Baseball drama is more rare, but much more satisfying, than any other sports drama. As plenty of people have said over the years, it’s partly because of the lack of clock. You get these great closeups of the pitcher reading the signs, the batter digging in, the runner leading off first. But you never know exactly when the action is going to start. And then the pitch is way outside and the tension is released and starts building again. But I also think it’s because of the one-on-one confrontations. Yes, it’s a team game, but the success and failure is individual. And I think that makes us relate to it differently. It’s more personal.

5) There’s no cosmic justice for baseball. How else could Tampa make that comeback last night with less than 30k fans coming out to the park? That’s just embarrassing.

As for me, I tweeted the follwoing about 45 minutes before it all ended:  Whether the Sox blow this tonight or tomorrow or at Daddy stadium in the ALCS, it’s going to be wonderful history to watch. Which it was. And, yes, I stayed true to form: after Papelbon gave up the tying run I started involuntarily giggling. And then when Crawford dropped the ball, I started uncontrollably laughing. This being the 21st century, I followed that up with a tweet 15 seconds later: hahahahahaha.

Former CBO and OMB director Peter Orzag had an article in the New Republic on Monday that made two claims: first, that political polarization in America is causing legislative gridlock that is reducing the capacity for even basic government functions; and second, that the solution to this problem is to shift some decision-making away from the legislature and toward institutional actors that are more insulated from the small-d democratic will of the voters.

Not surprisingly, there’s been a tidal wave of criticism. Michael Poterma thinks Orzag is just whining. Andrew Gelman calls him an elitist. Drudge is running the headline “Former Obama budget director: ‘we need less democracy’ to ‘counter gridlock’…”. DIA says his solutions are “useless” because they can’t be implemented. David Dayen says it’d be bad if they were.  Ditto from Paul Krugman. The comments at Hot Air are unbelievable. And so on and so forth. I have no intention of defending Orzag here: he indeed comes off in the article as a smug elitist who thinks he could solve everything if it just weren’t for the pesky voters.

Still, I thought Ezra Klein succinctly made the most important point: Orzag’s implicit premise — that democracy causes polarization and, in turn, gridlock  — is wrong. Instead, the causes of gridlock are institutional, either baked into the Constitutional cake (separation of powers between political actors elected by different constituencies on different time-lines; multiple veto points; supermajority hurdles) or arrived at through the development of institutional rules (committee system; filibuster; etc.). In effect, it’s the anti-majoritarian character of the institutions that is causing the gridlock; a majoritarian parliamentary system (in effect, a sovereign House) could in theory be incredibly democratic, incredibly polarized, and experience almost no gridlock. Ezra also made an important second point: many of Orzag’s ideas aren’t even anti-democratic in any sense. For instance, tying UI and the payroll tax to the unemployment rate may or may not be good public policy, but it’s a policy decision that is produced by the regular democratic process and has no effect on said process.

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of the animosity toward the Orzag article is rooted in an impulse that I think is fundamentally wrong: the idea that more democracy always equals good, and that less democracy always equals bad. A lot of people tend to apply this sort of democracy=good  frame by default when evaluating institutional designs, and I think it’s a mistake.

Eight rambling points, none really about Orzag or his article:

1. Democracy is the least-worst form of government ever devised. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I’m one of those anti-democracy cynics you often run into in casual policy debates. Such people, if you press them, will usually reveal themselves as elitists who are more or less disdainful of the wisdom of pretty much everyone else. Their trick is to force you to compare democracy as practiced against some normative ideal, without ever themselves proposing a real-world alternative. The truth is that Churchill was right. No real-world alternative even comes close. Democracy gives government leaders the most incentive to act in a way least-harmful to the people. That’s far from perfect, but it’s as good as you’ll get. Unless you still believe in benevolent monarchs and philosopher kings.

Cranky partisans and Euro-philes will also sometimes argue that American democracy is inferior to parliamentary democracy, but that’s mostly because they haven’t lived under it and seen it in action, which creates the same ideal vs. as-practiced false construct. The varieties of western democracy each have their benefits and drawbacks, but I have never seen evidence that any single system is inherently better than any other, at least not in any qualitative way. Might America be better off under a parliamentary system? Perhaps, but I doubt it would substantially alter a meta-evaluation of the quality or desirability of American democracy. It would still be pretty good, and people would still routinely complain about it.

2. Democracy isn’t best in every circumstance. This is the heart of the problem. Because democracy is, at the systemic level, by far the best available governing arrangement, people tend to assume it’s the best arrangement in all situations. But there are specific situations in which non-democratic systems enjoy advantages over democracies. Two examples are commonly given: first, war-making stamina. Dictatorships can continue to fight long after democracies would have surrendered due to negative public opinion. Would a democratic Russia have survived the German assault on the Eastern front? Would the western allies have been able to weather that level of casualties? I doubt it. (Of course, I’d rather have democratic control over the decision to go to war, as monarchs/dictators have a penchant for starting silly and unncessary wars.)

The second set of examples is far more important: democracies are not good at long-term planning, because the short-term electoral calendar gets in the way. Dictators can overcome J-curves when instituting things like market reforms precisely because they aren’t accountable to voters in the short-term. And so there are situations in which a democracy may want to mimic a less-accountable form of government, for the purpose of passing J-curve type policies. Therefore, legislators seeking to make good public policy have an incentive to devise institutions that are less democratically accountable, so that the long-term interests of the people can be met without electoral backlash against the short-term negative consequences followed by policy reversal of the long-term plan.

3. There’s an important distinction between democracy and majoritarianism. This is expanding on Ezra’s point. You can have a system of government that is very democratic and at the same time non-majoritiarian (consider a direct democracy with a supermajority requirement), and you can also have the opposite (consider a sovereign majoritarian parliamentary republic in which all MPs were elected indirectly by local legislatures, which themselves were elected by a very narrow franchise). So they are distinct concepts. One addresses the proximity of the citizen population to the decisions; the other addresses the amount of agreement required among that citizen population.

People tend to confuse these things when they attack arrangements or ideas that they consider anti-democratic. The filibuster isn’t really anti-democratic, it’s just anti-majoritarian. Ditto with unanimous jury requirements. Same thing with the veto power. On the other hand, a repeal of the 17th amendment woudn’t really be anti-majoritarian, but it would definitely be anti-democratic. Once you separate the two ideas, I’m pretty sure that most people have a bigger problem with non-majoritarian systems than they do with mildly non-democratic systems. (Although, in general, I believe most people are situational majoritarians. For example, many people hate the filibuster and deride it with every argument under the sun about things like “the will of the people” when it blocks policies they like. When it helps them, they are mum. Such people also tend to not complain about the veto power, which is probably more anti-majoritarian than the filibuster.)

4. Broadly speaking, America has become more democratic during the last 200 years. In 1789, America was something of a democracy, and almost certainly the most democratic nation in the world. But a contemporary nation with an America-circa-1789 democracy wouldn’t seem particularly democratic. Voting was limited in many states to white men who met property and other qualifications; only one-half of one branch of the federal government was chosen through popular election; and many of the liberal rights that we consider necessary ingredients of a functioning modern democracy, such as a free press or the right to a jury trial, were not constitutionally guaranteed at either the federal or state level.

Over time, the trappings of mass-democracy developed. Civil liberties were amended into the constitution in the 1790’s. Universal white male suffrage was more or less achieved by 1832. Mass political parties arose. Popular voting for the electoral college were adopted everywhere by 1868. The franchise was guaranteed to non-whites and to women by the early 20th century. Ditto for the direct election of Senator. In short, 18th century concerns about the sustainability of a mass democracy were proven to be unnecessary worries, and many were unraveled over the first 100 or so years of the nation.

5. The contemporary United States is one of the most democratic nations on earth. Most people don’t realize it, but from a comparative perspective, America is one of the most election-intensive nations. Americans spend more time voting than pretty much any other citizenry.  As Anthony King has described, American politicians are perhaps the most vulnerable in the western world: they face re-election more often, they are helped less by their parties, and  they must do more self-fundraising. The consequence is that American politicians tend to be hyper-sensitive to their constituents, given their comparative electoral connection. And this has policy consequences, especially when trying to solve problems that have long-term benefits but incur short-term costs.

Again, this doesn’t address the anti-majoritarian concern; that’s still there. But the U.S. is a very democratic system, perhaps to a fault. After all, this is one of the most common complaints in DC: that the elected officials spend too much time thinking about campaigns and elections, and not enough time thinking about policy. The two-year cycle is often described as too short for the modern age, forcing Members to start fundraising earlier in the cycle, leaving little time for actual governance. Which leads a lot of people to the logical conclusion that the terms of Members of the House should be extended by Constitutional amendment, perhaps to 3 years. But note that this is a clear anti-democratic move. If you think it’s a good idea, then you (indirectly) agree with the thrust of Orzag’s piece. But my sense is that many people who think congressional terms should be extended would be fierce critics of his article.

6. There’s a difference between “less democratic” and “not democratic.” This is important. The pre-17th amendment Senate was democratic, it was just less directly democratic than the post-17th amendment Senate. It’s similar to the difference between a direct democracy and a republic. No matter how many independent commissions Congress sets up, it’s still Congress setting them up and it’s still always possible for Congress to dismantle them. Yes, there’s the “ratcheting up” problem of the presidential veto and giving power to the executive branch, but the general principle still holds: if somewhat more than the majority of Americans have a burning desire to dismantle the Fed and for monetary policy to be handled in Congress, it will eventually happen. You can say a lot of things about Congress, but you can’t say they aren’t responsive to the burning desires of their constituents.

It seems silly to me to say that an entity making decisions X lengths down the chain from the voters is somehow not democratic and yet an entity X-1 lengths away from the voters is perfectly democratic. We’re dealing in degrees here, not cutpoints. I don’t think of cabinet secretaries as non-democratic decision makers; but, in effect, that would be the consequence of a logic that asserts any entity Congress devises and grants decision-making authority to  is so far removed from the voters that it can’t be considered democratic.

7. There are specific democratic reforms which have proven mediocre at best. In general, the direct democracy reforms of progressive-era westerners have not achieved the ends that were expected. The ballot initiative process is one such reform that leaps instantly to mind. Especially in California, it doesn’t seem to function as one’s normative desires might hope. Same thing with the recall provisions in various states; they don’t seem to do anything but keep people focused on electoral politics rather than policy politics. I also think the shift toward primaries in presidential nominating has been a mixed-result. There are definitely people who disagree, but I don’t see any evidence they have made the outcomes or the process better. But I think, overall, the consequential reduction in party power and rise of individual candidate power has had something of a negative effect on presidential-party relations and presidential-congressional relations.

There’s a related issue here, as well, and that’s transparency. In theory, transparency of decision-making in government is completely unrelated to democracy. You can have highly democratic non-transparent systems, and quite transparent non-democratic systems. But in practice, they tend to go hand in hand, and people who prefer more democracy (or more majoritarianism) tend to prefer more transparency. My sense is that the increase in transparency in the past generation or so has, at best, produced mixed results . In the House, two notable examples are the move toward recorded votes in the committee of the whole and the opening up to the public of committee markups. The intended effect of both of these reforms — to expose the policy process and make legislators accountable — is certainly noble, but I don’t think the objective has been met. For example, one unintended consequence of the open mark-up is that most of the real debate over the bill has been moved into the backrooms, prior to the markup. This makes sense: especially when the fight is intra-party, Members have all sorts of incentives not to air their grievances with each other in public. So the markups themselves are often dog and pony shows, and the real deals are now even further from public view than before.

8. There are specific anti-democratic reforms that have proven useful. Five years ago, I don’t think it would have been the least bit controversial when Orzag said in his article that an independent central bank was an excellent anti-democratic policy device. And I still don’t think there’s any doubt that it is. As Romney said the other night when the GOP candidates were piling on Bernake and the Fed, what’s the alternative? Should Congress Be Setting Monetary Policy? I think that’s exactly right, and it goes to the crux of the democracy argument: are there decisions that should be made in a setting more removed than Congress from electoral politics? And I think the answer is yes. Some of the critics of Orzag have made the point that entities like the Fed have not done particularly well in their technocratic decision-making as of late. But I think this again is a false comparison against a normative ideal: is there any evidence that Congress would have made better monetary policy decisions than the Fed over the last two years?

Orzag also uses the BRAC base closure example, and I think that (along with the Fed) partially refutes DIA, whose premise is that Congress could never set up such institutions correctly, because the will that is allegedly lacking (to solve the problem) will also be lacking to produce the insulated institution. But BRAC and the Fed were both produced by congressional legislation, and in the case of BRAC, Members came to actually like how it operated, because even when their base got closed, it wasn’t because they lost the politics (and were therefore ‘weak’ or could be blamed), but they still got to vote against it to boot!

/soapbox.

None of this is intended to be a defense of Orzag. As I said above, I think his article is silly, because he’s proposing a solution to a premise that I think is demonstrably false. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to remember that democratic decision making comes in many flavors, and that removing difficult policy decisions from direct democratic accountability isn’t fundamentally an elitist usurpation of the will of the people. It’s just a different arrangement of the institutional furniture in complex structure that is utterly democratic in the meta-sense.

Update (9/28 3:05pm): Jon Bernstein offers some insightful thoughts in response to the above, which I pretty much completely agree with.  Here’s a snippet:

Independent commissions are useful only in cases in which politicians agree on what should be done but do not want the credit for doing it. It’s possible that these commissions are under-utilized by Congress right now, but mostly for relatively small and technical things. You’re not going to get a Grand Bargain out of a commission unless leading politicians from both sides secretly want a Grand Bargain on similar terms in the first place, and that’s not the case right now.

That strikes me as both correct and important. Go read the whole thing.

According to news reports, Senator Blunt is considering running for a party leadership position in the Senate, in the wake of Senator Alexander’s announcement that he will be stepping down as Republican Conference Chair in January. This got me thinking about congressional history. Senator Blunt, you see, served in the leadership in the House prior to his election to the Senate.

And thus a question: how many times has someone served in both the House leadership and the Senate leadership?

In order to make the analysis easier, we’ll limit it to top leadership posts in both chambers (Speaker, Majority/Minority Leader, and Majority/Minority Whip), and we’ll restrict ourselves to the 20th century, when the non-Speaker leadership positions became more formalized.

We can break the question into two parts. First: how many Members who served in a top House leadership position have gone on to serve in the Senate (or vice-versa)?

Theoretically, we shouldn’t expect too many. While it’s true that many (if not most) Representatives would jump at a good opportunity to join the Senate, it’s also the case that doing so resets all of your seniority and accumulated power. Therefore, we should expect that, all else equal, Members of the House with significant power and/or seniority should be less likely to seek a Senate seat.

According to my quick run of the data, 341 people have served in both the House and Senate since 1900. Of those 341, only six had served in the top leadership posts in the House at some point during their career:

• Oscar Underwood (D-AL), who served as Whip and Majority/Minority Leader;
• James Watson (R-IN), who served as Whip;
• Frederick Gillett (R-MA), who served as Speaker;
• John Sparkman (D-AL), who served as Whip;
• Trent Lott (R-MS), who served as Whip; and
• Roy Blunt (R-MO), who served as Whip and (interim) Majority Leader

Underwood, Sparkman, and Lott were elected to the Senate while serving in the House leadership. Watson, Gillett, and Blunt had previously served, but were not currently top leaders at the time of their Senate election.

Second question: did any of these men go on to serve in the Senate leadership? Yes.

Lott, as many people undoubtedly remember, was Majority Leader; Underwood and Watson were also Majority Leader. Gillett only served one term in the Senate. Sparkman, as it turns out, is the only one of them who had a long Senate career, but never served in the leadership. And Blunt, evidently, is seeking to start a climb up the leadership.

So 3 of 5 served in the Senate leadership, and Blunt may very well someday make it 4 of 6.

This probably says something about the ambition track.  That 2/3 of the House leaders who went on to the Senate either served in leadership or look like they will seek service in the leadership probably indicates that such a preference is not only constrained by the institutional context and contingent events during ones career, but also by the personal characteristics and preferences Members bring to Congress. It’s unlikely that the institutional context in which these men arrived in the Senate just happen to once again make the leadership path an obvious choice; far more likely is that these men were natural leaders, and sought the jobs independent of context.

Following Matt Yglesias, Jon Bernstein offers his advice on the most efficient way to donate to campaigns:

So there’s no mathematical equation for exactly how to spend your money, but Yglesias is certainly right: it’s hard to see presidential re-election as a good use of money, no matter how important the president is (and remember: as much as I’ll talk about presidential weakness around here, I’ve also always pointed out that the president is the single most important single elected official). My guess is that for most partisans, the best choices are open Congressional (House and Senate) primaries in party-friendly seats with retiring Members, and close Senate general elections. But then again I should mention that I tend to have a strong and probably unjustifiable bias towards national politics; it may be that state legislative races and local races are really the best bets for many people.

I think this is pretty much on the button, but I’d add a few things:

1) Presidential election candidates fundraise more or less like elite university annual funds. That is, they rely on the big donors for the actual money raising, and on the small donors to up their “participation” level. That’s why if you are planning to give $25 to your college, you might as well just give $5, or even $1. All they want you for is so that they can increase their “X% of alumni gave this year!” blurb, and the corresponding U.S. News and World Report statistic. Presidential general election campaigns are a bit different, in that they have a hard cap on the high-end donations, but it’s the same principle. If you are planning on giving less than $100, your main purpose to them it that they can report a wider donor base.

2) I would lean toward Bernstein’s half-nod for local races. Maybe this is just my sentimental libertarian heart, but I firmly believe that the preponderance of important government decisions made by your elected officials each year are concentrated at the local or state level. If you have kids, I’m positive this is true: unless there is a depression or conscription, the school board, local government, and state government decisions over the public schools will be the most important for you and your family.

But the kicker is that (a) no one pays attention to these elections; (b) they are funded on shoestrings, especially school board elections in the northeast, where pretty much each high school has its own board; and consequently (c) a very small amount of money/time/energy can swing a school board race. Even donating the maximum in every possible avenue at the presidential level will not give you the same bang for your buck as $1000 dumped into a school board race. Obviously, the President has a lot more power than any local official. But your odds of influencing a national election with even $10k aren’t much greater than influencing it with your one vote. So send it local.

3) There are a lot of important corollaries here. First, dollars to doughnuts says you are spending an amount of time disproportionate to its relative importance on national politics. My sense is that this is an middle and upper-middle class problem. Ever work a job that put you in a breakroom with a bunch of working-class guys? Those guys are ridiculously knowledgeable about local issues, and my sense is that it’s because they intuitively recognize its direct importance, and they don’t have the luxury of not paying attention to the most important issues for them, even if national politics is far more sexy.

Second, if you want to get involved with politics as a candidate, run for school board. Period. There’s simply no better way to make an actual difference in politics, and the impact to BS ratio is far better than anything you can find at any higher level of government. Not only are school boards making decisions over extremely important things, but they are also quasi-executive bodies masquerading as legislatures, so you not only get to deal with making policy, but also with implementing it and carrying it out.

I’m starting to once again hear about the “anti-incumbent attitude” of voters, and the effect this will have in 2012. As I wrote back in Spring 2010, I think too many people confuse anti-incumbency with ideological landslide. But I was just fiddling (for other reasons) with some election data, and saw something mildly interesting.

I think it’s important to differentiate the two ideas — anti-incumbency and partisan landslide — as collapsing them reduces our ability to describe elections. For example, there may have an anti-incumbent attitude in the 2010 election, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that it electorally manifested itself.  Yes, the proportion of incumbents who returned to the House (78.2%) was the second lowest  since 1948, but of the 90 seats that were vacated by an incumbent, 66 were former Democratic seats won by Republicans, while only 3 were former Republican seats won by Democrats (21 retiree seats were won by the occupying party). If very few incumbents of the winning party lose re-election, it hard to call it an anti-incumbency situation, per se. It’s just a garden-variety ass-whippin’, in the form of a  partisan/ideological landslide.

And so while I certainly can see the anti-incumbent attitude in the current polling data, I’m not inclined to put too much stock into it having a large electoral effect. Yes, approval ratings of both congressional parties are at historical lows, such that we are definitely in uncharted waters, but I think the safe assumption, following the historical evidence, is that anti-incumbency only really manifests itself when you have bi-partisan support for truly unwanted policy (like the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854***) or bi-partisan blame for corruption (like 1992). Anything else, and it’s more likely that the aggregate electorate is just going to punish one party or another (like 1890 or 1930 or 1994).

What would evidence for actual anti-incumbency look like, differentiated from ideological drift? Well, one scenario that would be  a low incumbency retention rate paired with a low partisan seat swing. Imagine if every incumbent in the House lost, but the net partisan seat gain was zero. That’s probably good evidence. I say probably because it’s not airtight — voters of both parties could have become more radical and remove their incumbents for ideological reasons, for example.

Anyway, here’s a simple plot of incumbent return rate vs. absolute partisan seat swing, 1952-2010:



The trend line, not surprisingly, provides a pretty strong correlation between incumbency return % and absolute seat swing — aggregate incumbent defeats tend to reflect partisan or ideological drift . But check out the outlier. That’s 1992, when only 75% of Members returned to Congress, but the total seat swing was only 11 seats. Again, this isn’t air-tight evidence of anti-incumbency; it’s possible that many otherwise-electable Members retired and were replaced by partisan comrades. But a lot of what we know about 1992 says otherwise: the House banking and post office scandals were symbols of an institution in decline, many of the Member retirements were to preempt losses, and both parties suffered double-digit defeats in seats they were trying to defend.

________________

***For the unfamiliar, 1854 bears a second look, because that’s a true anti-incumbency result: going into the election, the partisan breakdown in the House was approximately 150 Dems and 75 Whigs. When Congress reconvened after the election, the breakdown was 84 Democrats,  60 Whigs, 62 American Party (“know-nothings”), and 46 Republicans. I can’t see how that will ever be topped — the majority party loses almost half its seats, the minority party loses a fifth of its seats, and they all go to a minor party that previously held no seats and a new party that didn’t exist a year earlier!

It’s no secret that the Internet has radically transformed the practice of legislative politics on Capitol Hill. Information is everywhere, and moves like lightning. Staffers are no longer chained to their desks and their hard-line telephones. And, perhaps most importantly, the relay of information from the Hill to the rest of the country (and vice-versa) has been reduced, time-wise, to basically zero. As soon as it happens here, it’s known everywhere. And not only is the information relay faster after something happens, but the outside, non-Hill world feels closer to the policy-making process before anything happens. And that has consequences.

Despite this, people sometimes underestimate the magnitude of the change. To which I respond with this graph (click on to see full size if you are on the main page), which plots incoming mail to the House of Representatives since 2002, as a function of delivery medium. The top line (blue) is incoming emails, the bottom line (black) incoming postal mail.

A few notes: first, the uptick in emails in 2007 that defies the otherwise steady ascent is probably due to several spam attacks that got by the House filtering system. Second, good email data is not available prior to 1998, but any estimate would put it significantly lower than the numbers for 1998. Finally, incoming postal mail does not include mail sent to Member district offices, just mail sent to Capitol Hill.

A quick plug for Ben Morris and his Skeptical Sports Analysis blog. Ben’s an old poker buddy of mine from Yale and he recently won the 2011 ESPN Stat Geek Smackdown.  One look at his blog will convince you that he’s not only a killer sports statistician, but he’s also an engaging and humorous writer. And he’s about to lay down the full-court geekery tomorrow with a live blog of the entire NFL day. Should be awesome.

That’s the question being asked over at The Monkey Cage. I don’t have any hard data, but my anecdotal memory says:

1) In general, not very often.

2) The losses comes in a bunch of flavors: pulling a doomed bill prior to a vote (ex: Boehner debt bill, July 2011), losing a final passage vote (ex. TARP attempt #1, September 2008), and losing a vote on a rule (crime bill, August 1994). The leadership pulls bills that are going to lose more often than they actually lose a vote. My sense is that rules votes fail less often than final passage votes, but they are both rare events.

3) The most recent final passage loss I can remember is TARP attempt #1, September ’08. Three years ago next week.

4) I can’t remember a rule going down during that time period.

5) My intuition is — and again this is anecdotal — that the majority leadership lost more often a generation ago, in part because the parties weren’t as ideologically homogeneous, in part because the leadership had less control over the backbenchers, and in part because the leadership was generally more inclined to let bills (like appropriations bills) come out of committee and onto the floor relatively un-vetted and under open-rules.

If you have insight or hard data, I’m all ears.

Continue reading →

By a vote of 190-230, the House yesterday failed to pass the continuing resolution (CR) that would temporarily fund the government while FY2012 appropriations are completed. Forty-eight conservative Republicans voted against the bill, largely arguing that it did not cut enough spending; all but 6 Democrats also voted against it, largely because it forces emergency spending for recent natural disasters to be offset with spending cuts.

Bills do not fail on the floor of the House very often. [UPDATE: See this post for more info.] This is because the  majority leadership has almost total agenda control. They choose what is brought to the floor, they have a majority on the floor, and a majority can pass a bill. Even in cases when a measure gets to the floor and the leadership realizes there is not majority support for it, they don’t have to lose a vote: they can pull the bill and not have to take the vote. So what happened yesterday?  Either the leadership thought they had the votes, and was blindsided by defections either left or right or both (probable), or they were playing a strategic game of chicken with either the Senate or the House Dems (unlikely but plausible).

So what now? Three points:

1) A shutdown just became more likely. Or, more accurately, our current information reveals that the probability of a shutdown is higher than previously thought.  The last two major issues in the house (the FY11 long-term CR and the Budget Control Act) were passed by the center holding together against the wings of each party. It’s not clear now that such a center exists. The Democrats and conservative Republicans have both signaled a position, and buying up votes on the left or right may lose as many votes on the other side as it gains.

2) In the meantime, the House leadership has a strategic choice to make today. The Rules committee met last night to pass a same-day waiver, so the wheels are in motion to bring a new bill to the floor today. The leadership can bring back a more conservative bill and pass it on a party-line vote. Or they can dump the offsets and try to win back the centrist Democratic votes. If they do the former, it lays down a marker and escalates the strategic game of chicken against the Senate. But it doesn’t really get us closer to a deal, and portends a long week. If the do the latter, they run the risk of an all-out conservative revolt. My intuition is that the latter is the plausible endgame here. But this isn’t the end. Expect a more conservative bill today.

3) How will the Senate respond? Majority Leader Reid has indicated that any offset bill is a dead-letter in the Senate, but it’s not obvious he has the votes to hold that together in the face of a shutdown. If a non-offset bill can’t sustain itself in the Senate, then one endgame seems pretty simple: buy up any liberal filibuster, pass an off-set compromise based on the House-failed bill, and roll both wings in the House by putting it back on the floor there, where I think it would pass in a second go-round. But if Reid can demonstrate that no offset bill can sustain itself in the Senate, the brinkmanship could really escalate, especially because the opposition of the House Dems will solidify.

Jonathan Bernstein, who has been predicting CR shutdown crisis while many of us (including me) thought the BCA would prevent it, gets a lot of credit right now. Continue reading →

Simple question: how credible is Obama’s recent veto threat, and what effect does it have in the context of veto bargaining?

Three points:

1) In general, I don’t think a veto threat is very credible for the President this Congress. The Senate is controlled by the Democrats, and thus any legislation coming out of Congress automatically has something of a Democratic stamp-of-approval on it. There’s just no way around this. Everyone is now attuned to the idea that 41 Senators can stop legislation. So if 60 Senators sign-on, the perception is that you have a bipartisan deal, and it’s hard to imagine the President actually vetoing any legislation that is described that way. And if he can’t veto it, then the veto threats are empty, and veto bargaining should be theoretically worthless. It’s just cheap talk.

For this exact reason, it seemed highly unlikely to me that Obama would carry out his various veto threats earlier this year against either a long-term CR or a debt-ceiling deal, since either would-be law coming out of Congress was more or less required to have the support of at least a dozen Senate Democrats. Perhaps Obama could have aimed his veto threat at just such conservative Democrats, in hopes that they won’t cave in to GOP pressure to pass a rather conservative package. But it doesn’t really seem likely.  The 12th most conservative Democrat is someone like Hagan or Begich or Benet. Are their ideal points really that far from Obama’s?

As such, I think this illustrates one reason Obama has it harder than Clinton did post-1995. Since the GOP held both the House and Senate then, Clinton had a much stronger bargaining position, and the veto threats were much more real. Any legislation coming out of Congress was inherently Republican legislation, and that made it easy for Clinton to threaten, and follow-through, with vetoes. And that meant that veto bargaining held some real promise.

As a more general historical matter, we’re in a relatively unprecedented divided government situation. As it happens, I think there have only been three instances since world war 2 in which one party has controlled the Senate and the other party has controlled the House: the 107th Congress after Jeffords switched parties (2001-2002); the first three Congresses of the Reagan presidency (97th-99th Congresses, 1981-1986); and the famous “do-nothing” 80th Congress (1947-1948). Bush didn’t veto anything in the 107th. Reagan vetoes a lot, 59 bills in those six years. Truman vetoes dozens upon dozens of bills in the 80th, but given the conservative coalition, it probably was closer to a typical divided-government situation than a cross-chamber split.

Further exploration of these situation might be useful. Charles Cameron’s book on veto bargaining suggests that divided government should increase the instances of inter-branch bargaining and veto threats, as the ideal points of the President and Congress drift apart from each other. But this tells us little about the current situation, in which one chamber of Congress may have an ideal point theoretically close to the President.

2) That said, the legislation arising from the Joint Select Committee provides a special situation. The expedited procedures included in the Budget Control Act regarding legislation produced by the so-called supercommittee create a majoritarian set of rules for Senate consideration. The motion to proceed to the legislation is not debatable; the measure is privileged for disposition; time limitations are placed on consideration; and a majoritarian up/down vote occurs after the time limits expire. In this situation, a conservative package might very well draw the necessary four Democratic/Indy votes. It’s not hard to imagine a package unliked by Obama that  Nelson, McCaskill, Lieberman, and Webb all support. In this case, Obama’s ideal point my well be far enough away from the Senate median voter’s ideal point that a veto threat might be credible, and thus veto bargaining effective. In effect, Obama would be saying to the GOP and the four most conservative Democrats: don’t bother. This may or may not dissuade them — position taking matters — but it would certainly force them back to the drawing board post-veto, which might force them back to the drawing board prior to any position taking opportunities.

I think this is an under-appreciated effect of the Budget Control Act — it makes the President more relevant politically. And this is precisely because it opens up the possibility of a very conservative bill coming out of Congress, without any real possibility of a very liberal bill coming out of Congress. That doesn’t mean it helps the President achieve his ideal point; quite to the contrary, it moves the median bill coming out of Congress to the right. But that very fact means that the President might plausibly veto the result, and thus he has room to play politics with the bill in a way that he otherwise would not. In effect, under the rules of the Budget Control Act, the politics of the deficit look a lot more like Clinton vs. the GOP than they otherwise would. And that, I think, helps the President politically if not on policy.

3) Another possibility is that Congress could unify in an “irresponsible position”; that might provoke a veto. Imagine a scenario in which Congress decides that both the supercommittee cuts and the sequestrations are completely unpalatable, or a situation in which the supercommittee comes up with basically nothing. In either case, it might be tempting for Congress to write legislation that more or less overrides the Budget Control Act, blocking the sequestration of the defense funds and entitlement cuts and perhaps comes up with minimal window-dressing cuts as a show piece. Assuming such action could get through the House, this would be an ideal candidate for a veto, since it would plausibly allow the president to take the “responsible” position against a recalcitrant Congress, forcing them to either accept the sequestration cuts or actually come up with a more substantial alternative-plan.

What do people out there think? Do Obama’s veto threats mean anything, or are they just cheap talk? Is the supercommittee legislation fundamentally different? Continue reading →

I was browsing through President Obama’s plan for economic growth and deficit reduction this morning, and a few things came to mind. First, credit to the White House for putting this document out. I’m not an economist, so I can’t really judge it on the merits (there are not-unexpected rave reviews from mainline dems, some grousing from liberals and conservative dems, and critical opinions for conservatives, but that doesn’t really help understand it), but I’m delighted that the document itself exists. I think the refusal of President Obama to commit, in writing, to a white house health care bill in 2009 was both a policy problem and a political misstep. Same thing with a debt-ceiling plan back a few months ago. And I think having to put yourself on the record in writing forces political actors to choose what they really want to say, instead of using vague allusions to lots of policies. Many smart people were surprised about what was, and was not, in the proposal. It leaves out a lot of the big-ticket items previously discussed. But that’s kind of my point. Now it’s real.

And look, I’m no fan of presidential domestic power — I’m about as close to as Whig as you can get in the modern age.  But that ship has sailed, and it has repeatedly infuriated both his friends and adversaries that the President won’t seem to present things beyond general principles. So good for him on this one.

One thing in particular in the plan caught my attention — a proposal to kill some tax breaks for the coal industry:

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Eliminate preferences for the coal industry. The Administration proposes repealing the following tax preferences available for coal activities beginning in 2013: 1) expensing of exploration and development costs; 2) percentage depletion for hard mineral fossil fuels; 3) capital gains treatment for royalties; and 4) the ability to claim the domestic manufacturing deduction against income derived from the production of coal and other hard mineral fossil fuels. This would reduce the deficit by $2 billion over 10 years.

—–

Did anyone else immediately think of Bobby Byrd when they read this? Because my immediate reaction was wow, I bet this would never have even been put into the plan 3 years ago. (Note again, that I have no opinion on the provision itself, I’m just assuming it’s bad for the coal industry). Byrd was not only a vociferous defender of all things West Virginia, including the coal industry, but also positioned in the Senate — as the chair of the Appropriations Committee — in a way that made his priorities on such things more or less absolute vetoes. Prior to his voluntary stepping aside as Approps chair in 2009 (which may very well have come with the price tag of no cap-and-trade bill in the Senate), liberals would regularly muse that movement on global warming was fundamentally tied to his retirement. And they were only half-joking. Now that’s a powerful Senator. And I can see the debate at the White House over something like this too. Well, it’s only $2 billion dollars…no way that Byrd even looks at this…we can find the money somewhere else.

But being reminded of Byrd also made me think more broadly about his affect on congressional politics. When I wrote about him shortly after his death 15 months ago, I lamented that he left the Senate via death rather than retirement, because I thought his farewell address would have been an important moment in American history. I still believe that, but I also think that the Senate could have very much benefited from a health Bobby Byrd over the ensuing 15 months. I have no doubt that he would have given several important speeches in the wake of the 2010 election, the debt-crisis, and in regard to the super-committee and current politics. And he would have spared no quarter; Byrd was not a man shy to criticize a president of his own party if he thought said president was impeding on the Congress or otherwise not doing his job.  Anyone who ever saw Byrd give a speech — the one I remember best was an opening statement on an Approps markup in 2007 or 2008, when he spent five minutes blasting then-president Bush on the proper role of the executive and the congress in the budget process, a pack room held rapt on his every word — knows that words and rhetoric can matter, even if only very rarely. Continue reading →

Greetings from Austin, Texas! Blogging will be spotty over the next few days, as I’m down south coordinating a project that I’m undertaking with some folks at the University of Texas.

After my flight landed mid-day today, I had some time to kill, and I managed to get over to the state capitol for a look around. Touring legislatures is something I’m quite fond of, and I came away quite impressed with the Texas Capitol Building. The architecture of the place is interesting, the grounds are charming, and the people were very friendly. The Rotunda is understated but well done, with portraits of all the past state governors on four levels, each level with a balcony looking down. The floor of the Rotunda features a large Texas star in a circle, with five smaller circles orbiting around it, each with the symbol of the other five nations Texas has been a part of (France, Spain, Mexico, CSA, USA). The House and Senate chambers are impressive, with wonderful paintings of Texas history on the walls and large fraternity-like composites of the Members from each elected legislature, all the way back to Texas independence, a quite stunning touch. The legislative reference library was also well done, and obviously a treat for someone who works at CRS. One thing that sticks out is that the lone star symbol of Texas is seemingly everywhere — on the walls, on the floors, on the backs of chairs, on the door hinges. A little much, but very Texas.  Overall, I’d compare the Capitol favorably with the one state capitol I know very well (Albany) and the six others that I have solid recollections of (Richmond, Hartford, Harrisburg, Annapolis, Providence, and Boston).

The nicest thing about the capitol, however, was something that made me feel sad, or at least very nostalgic: there was minimal security, and our ability to wander around, open doors, and check things out was almost unlimited. The legislature is out of session, and both chambers were wide open, with virtually complete public access except for the actual Members’ desks. We walked around the floor of the House and Senate, circumnavigated the galleries, opened doors to unlabeled rooms, and generally just wandered about. The first few times we went into new places, we checked and made sure we were allowed in when we saw someone working. But later on we didn’t even bother: not only were we allowed everywhere, but in a couple of instances, staff or security offered us facts or comments about what we were looking out.

This stands in stark contrast, of course, to what has happened on Capitol Hill in DC. Security is now perhaps the overriding concern at the Capitol, and it makes both tourist and staff access to the Capitol much, much more difficult. No tourists can simply wander around the Capitol building, and even tour-led access is much more restrictive than even five years ago, prior to the opening of the CVC. Even more to the point, the wonderful lawns around the Capitiol, which are still public access as far as I know, are now designed to implicitly discourage their use as picnic spots: there are few benches, and the new architecture of the CVC, complete with small restraining-like walls, makes them seem more like something you look at than something you sit on. It’s almost unimaginable to think about the Capitol in the 1970’s, when anyone could drive their car onto the East front, park, and go wander around inside.

This is not to say any of this is without good reason; obviously, there are qualitative differences between the U.S. Capitol Building and the Texas Capitol Building, first and foremost being that international plots against state capitol buildings are not only few and far between, but also less serious by an order of magnitude even if (god forbid) they were to occur. Plus the visitor traffic to the Hill is several magnitudes greater than the traffic in Austin; crowd control alone would be a nightmare if open-access to the Capitol were allowed again. And, lest we forget,  it’s not the worst thing to stay on the side of caution in such instances.

And yet there’s an overriding sense when you walk around the Capitol that it has, in some ways, become a fortress. Some Members hate that idea, that the “people’s legislature” has constructed walls between, well, the people and the legislature, and many have fought to keep it as accessible as possible while still being consistent with the security needs. But it’s an uphill fight. The frustrating part for me, as someone who is on the Hill everyday, is how easily the high-security environment becomes completely normal. Despite the massive presence of security on the Hill, you don’t really realize how tight it actually is until you visit a place like the Texas Capitol, with people wandering around and picnicking on the lawn. It shocked me when I saw that staff who work at the Austin Capitol do not need to go through a metal detector to gain access to the building. And then it made me sad that I was shocked by it.

Again, I’m not saying we should scale back Capitol security. I’m in no position to judge. The feeling I have is more one of Burkean regret, that something has changed, and it is something that we will never recapture, because the world is a different place. Truth be told, Hill security was probably in need of an upgrade fifteen years ago; even if it is a bit overdone currently,  prior to the tragic shooting of Capitol Police Officers Chestnut and Gibson in 1998, followed by the would-have-been 9/11 attack on the building, there might have been too little security at the Capitol. And the thought of returning to the wide-open free-for-all of the 1970s and prior is silly, just as it would be silly to take the fence down at the White House and allow people to once again roam the lawn.

Still, it was such a wonderful feeling to walk unimpeded around the Texas Capitol today, observing the institutions of democracy at our own pace, in our own way, that it made me long for the ability of people to do the same in Washington. We stood in the Texas House chamber and pondered the ideals and shortcomings of a republic, the debates and representatives who shaped a state and and a nation, and the future of such institutions, both state and federal. And I like to think it had an effect on me, in a way that no guided-tour of the Capitol Visitor Center ever could. That this experience was once available in Washington, and no longer is, is cause for reflection and, yes, sadness. It may be a necessary loss, but it is a loss nonetheless.

Reading Homestyle with my Congress class right now. On pg. 17, a classic quote about congressional campaigns:

“Seventy-Five percent of all the money we spend in a campaign is wasted. But we don’t know which 75%.”

This quote will ring true to anyone who’s ever worked on a campaign. A friend of mine who has worked hundreds of campaigns actually thinks it drastically underestimates the wasted money.”Switch the 7 for a 9,” he says. “That rings more true.”

I recall one local campaign I worked on in New Haven, we had this real Carville-wannabee as campaign director. On election day, he was in such a frenzy that after we finished calling all the registered partisans to remind them to vote, he started yelling at us to call all of the people not registered to either party. I said to him, “we have no evidence that the independents are breaking in our favor; in fact, we have a lot of reasons to believe they are breaking against us. If we are correct that they are breaking for us, calling them might marginally increase the probability of an already-likely victory. If we are wrong, calling them might significantly increase the probability of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” He just stared at me for about 5 seconds. Then he barked quite loudly, “Trust me. Just call them.” And then he walked away.

It didn’t matter. We got creamed in that election, almost 2 to 1. But that only proved that the independents had broken against us, and that I probably got someone to vote who otherwise wouldn’t have…for the other guy!

Wasted money indeed. The crazy truth is that the vast majority of campaigns employ a kitchen-sink strategy of spending money any way that it could plausibly be effective, without any hard evidence that such methods have any effect, and certainly no idea of the magnitude of the effect. Just like that kooky campaign director in New Haven having us call indys, occasionally you can’t even be certain that the strategy is not having a negative effect. And there’s a horrible feedback loop: winning campaigns are seen to be models of good strategy, and losing campaigns are seen as models of bad strategy. Marginal effects? Good luck raising that issue.

I bring this up because Sasha Issenberg has written a new book, The Victory Lab, which details how Rick Perry brought on a host of political scientists to do randomized field experiments with his campaign for governor in ’06.

This is interesting in itself; double interesting to me because the political scientists who more or less started this movement (and presumably worked with Perry) were Yale political science faculty, Don Green and Alan Gerber, when I was in graduate school. Their methods aren’t complicated: they simply run controlled field experiments using random assignment, in order to understand what campaign techniques work, and more importantly, how cost-efficient different campaign strategies are. One of their first major pieces compared mailings, phone calls, and door-to-door personal contact, randomized in a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drive in New Haven. After random assignment of citizens to the treatment groups (including a control group), they apply the treatments and then after the election check the effect on voter turnout, using public records. Instrumental variable regression can be run using the intent-to-treat, and a cost-per-vote can be precisely calculated. In the case of this experiment, door-to-door blew away phone calls and mailers, despite being on the surface far more expensive.

It’s a cool sub-field in behavioral American politics, and certainly one with significant real-world implications. And the extensions are endless; one of the coolest pieces I’ve read studied how social pressure affected GOTV — a treatment group was sent a mailer indicating that whether or not they voted would be revealed to their neighbors. (It significantly increased turnout). One drawback to the line of research is that it’s quite expensive; without start-up cash or a serious hook-up from a campaign, it’s not the kind of research you can just decide you want to do. But that’s one thing that makes the connection with Perry so interesting. If he’s the GOP nominee and allows continued experiments to be run during his national campaign, it could be a massive wellspring of research across a sample and a stakes that has never been subject to these methods before. Very exciting.

Still, there are limits. As another buddy of mine says, all of this research may someday make it possible for campaigns to only waste 2/3 of all the money they collect.

There are two distinct ideas floating around the chattering class right now that I think are related. The first is a criticism of the Obama administration — articulated here by Bruce Bartlett — which argues that they made a major mistake by turning to health care after the stimulus passed, instead of staying laser focused on helping the economy.

The second is something that I heard over-and-over again in panels at the American Political Science Association convention three weeks ago, and continue to hear from liberals (and Andrew Sullivan) around DC: Obama is simply not getting credit for all the helpful policies (ARRA, Dodd-Frank, Cash for Clunkers, drawdown in Iraq, killing Bin Laden, ending DADT) enacted since 2009.

As a substantive matter, the Bartlett thesis is refuted by Kevin Drum here, and by Seth Masket here (and, in part, by Jonathan Bernstein here). And I think their points are fundamentally correct: the President, almost regardless of situation, is never “laser focused” on anything. There’s a massive executive branch of workers, policymakers, and advisers who can and do keep the President up to speed on everything. Even in the midst of the health care debate, the President wasn’t even close to single-minded in focus on that; on any (and probably every) given day, the President is focused on a dozen different things, and most of the time the top of that list is national security and international affairs.

Still, I think this rebuttal misses the mark. This isn’t about substantive Presidential attention, it’s about messaging and perception. During the summer of ’09, the President appeared to be single-minded in his focus, and that focus was on health care. It doesn’t matter that this was far from the case; any low or moderate-information voter was going to assume that the President was spending his time on health care, not national security or the economy.

Nor do I think that Bartlett or other critics see this is a substantive progressive-policy mistake.  After all, the President got both the stimulus bill and the health care bill. It’s not like there’s an easy counterfactual in which he gets more policy generation by staying on the economy. (Best case scenario: Dems hold Congress and we’re fighting out health care right now, no?). Rather, the critique is a political-electoral one. It’s point is that Obama might have been able to save his own hide in 2012 if he had been giving a jobs address to Congress in September 2009 instead of a health care address. It doesn’t matter what he’s actually spending his time doing. But it does matter, when the economy is this bad, that people don’t think he’s focusing his energy on other things.

The analogy I’ve been using as of late is Lincoln in the winter of 1863-1864. The Republicans  had passed the Homestead Act in May of 1862. This was not small potatoes; it was one of the longest-standing policy goals of the Republican Party (albeit the party had only been around for 8 years), and had been continually stymied in Congress. The Act was intended by design to deluge the west with free soil settlers, aid in the downfall of slavery, and help conquer the continent. As a national policy, it was probably second only to anti-slavery as a constitutive component of the GOP, especially prior to the war.  Still, it would have been nothing short of insane for Lincoln to make the Homestead Act his focus, as a PR or messaging maneuver. The war was only possible thing to be publicly focused on. That doesn’t mean you don’t ever talk about other things; life and politics and government must go on even in the face of civil war. But it does mean that when you have to choose, you go up to Gettysburg and give an address rather than trumpet your new western land policy.

And this applies double to re-election concerns, which brings us back to the liberals, APSA attendees, and Andrew Sullivan. No matter how awesome Cash for Clunkers or Dodd-Frank or DADT repeal was, all those things are the Homestead Act as far as Obama 2012 is concerned. Political scientists should know better than this; it’s been generations of research that link presidential re-election very tightly to some measure of economic fundamentals, with everything else trailing way behind. To decide that Obama should be re-elected (or receiving better public standing) simply because he passed his own little Homestead Acts is non-sense. And it’s double non-sense because it’s the administration itself which is proclaiming that we are still in the midst of devastating crisis. Now I’m not saying we aren’t; I’m just saying that if you spend 2.5 years telling everyone it’s the modern economic equivalent of the civil war, don’t expect the modern equivalent of the Homestead Act to save you. (Note that I’m not making an argument here against the stimulus or other Obama economic policies; as I’ve written before, trying to explain marginal effects to voters is a nightmare of massive proportions).

Nor do I think the GOP gets off easy here, either. Watching the last two primary debates has been surreal. Somehow, the GOP equivalent of the Homestead Act — reforming social security — has become the central feature of the debates, encased in a general critique of the White House for, evidently, mismanaging the civil war. It’s strikingly off-key, in much the same way Bartlett sees Obama. Perhaps the GOP is resting on the idea that they can win the election without much of a jobs/economic plan of their own, or at least the individuals can get through the primary in that manner. If we push the 1864 analogy further, I don’t know if this makes them War Democrats or Copperheads. But, unlike McClellan and his (misguided) laser-focus on the war, it surely doesn’t make them seem presidential. Continue reading →

I’ve come to a rather striking (at least given my past thinking on the matter) conclusion over the past few months: Oh Hell is the greatest card game ever invented. By far. And by that I mean “it’s the most fun game that you will want to regularly play and will be able to regularly play.” Let me explain.

I like to play card games. I’m not talking about poker. (I like that, too, but as they say, Bridge is a card game you can gamble on; poker is a gambling game you play with cards.) I’m talking about real card games: Bridge, Whist, Pitch, Rummy, All Fours, Hearts, Spades, Catch the Ten, and so forth. But I constantly run into a very frustrating situation: I don’t know a lot of other people who like card games as much as I do, and even when I do find myself in a situation with the right people, a lot of game simply “don’t work” for one reason or another: people don’t know how to play, don’t like certain games, etc. As it turns out, most card games do not have the right ingredients to be spontaneously played when the moment strikes a group of people.

So what are the ingredients of a great card game? I would venture that there are four (or five).

1a) Meaningfully complex strategy. This is by far the most important ingredient to any card game. Any decent card game has to provide positive feedback for skillful play; making better decisions than the other players should usually result in victory. I say usually because all card games have an element of luck; the best games are ones in which the the time horizon for long-term skill to overtake short-term luck is short enough to allow better players to win over the course of a game, but also so that weaker players receive a negative feedback for poor strategy. So, ceteris parabis, the more strategic decision points, the better. In any case, at a bare minimum, there has so be some strategic choice involved in the game. Otherwise, no matter how you dress it up, you’re just playing War or Klondike solitaire. Good for passing the time, but not much else. Or maybe you’re just playing Speed or Spit, which are fun but not really strategy games.

1b) Unstable strategy. Closely related to strategy complexity is what I call strategy instability. A game with a stable strategy is one in which you can devise your strategy either prior to the cards even being dealt, or right after they are initially dealt, without worrying too much about having to adjust them during the course of the game in response to your opponents actions. This is partially the downfall of a game like full-books Go Fish or Palace: you get your hand, you watch what cards your opponents plays, but you really don’t need to react strategically to all that much. On the other end of the spectrum, games like Bridge and Whist require not only careful attention to what your opponent is doing, but a rethinking of your strategy based on what they are doing.

2) Rule simplicity. This is the death knell of so many card games, and particularly ones that satisfy the conditions of strategy complexity and instability. If a game can’t be taught to new players in 10 minutes or less, you’re not going to play it that often. This is, far and away, the downfall of Bridge. I spent the better part of two hours a few weeks ago teaching some smart and relatively card-savvy people how to play Bridge, and we still never got around to playing a real game that first night. Just awful. Same with Wisconsin Skat. I’m pretty sure that would be one of the most popular three-person card games in the world, if it didn’t take half the night to teach it to someone.

3) Scalable participants. Nothing is worse than wanting to play one of the great partnership games (Bridge, Bid Whist, Partnership Spades, or even Gabes(!)) and having either just 3 people or, even worse, 5 people. The games that scale are much, much better. Mostly because you have a lot more opportunities to play them.

4) Little down-time. This is the downfall of Pitch, which otherwise would be an amazing game. Way to often, you are barely participating, because you got dealt a junk hand, had no plausible chance of bidding, and during the play you’re cards are so bad that you’re nothing more than an automaton tossing junk into each trick. In effect, all of the strategic complexity disappears, because your hand is so bad that it requires no strategy to play it. A surprising number of games are like this, and it’s a major problem. Bridge suffers from the same problem with the dummy; you can end up sitting out hand after hand if your partner keeps winning bids.

5) Tricks and trumps. When you cut to the chase, there are really only two strategic card games: Rummy and Whist. Almost everything else is just a variation on one of those two. After 30 years of playing card games, I’ve still never found a Rummy variation that can compete with any of the top Whist variations. Perhaps this is more of an opinion or personal preference, but the element of tricks and trumps simply dominates on the level of strategic complexity.

So this is where Oh Hell comes to the rescue. If you know how to play any game that uses tricks and trump, I can teach you how to play in less than two minutes: X rounds, in the first round each player gets 3 cards, second 4, and so forth, up to the maximum the number of players can accommodate , an then back down. In each round, after the deal, a card from the deck is flipped for trump. After that, starting left of the dealer, players make a single bid on exactly how many tricks they will win. The dealer cannot bid a number of tricks such that total bids equal total tricks. After the bids, left of the dealer leads and players must follow suit if they can. Trick winner leads next trick. After all tricks played, players who made exactly their bid score (10+bid) or (5 + round #) if they bid zero tricks, everyone else scores zero. Most points at the end of all rounds win.

The beauty of the game is that it satisfies all conditions for a great card game. Obviously, it’s a tricks and trumps game. And you can play with any number of players 3 to 7 (or more if you modify the number of rounds). But the real beauty is that there’s zero down-time. Since each person’s objective is to correctly evaluate the exact number of tricks they can take and then execute that evaluation, the absolute strength/weakness of your hand is of utterly no consequence to the playing of the hand. It is pure genius, because it completely wipes out the boredom of getting bad hands over and over again, as well as the complaints that people are getting “dealt bad cards.” Bad situations can still arise strategically, but there’s no such thing as a bad hand out of the gate.

And, of course, the strategy. Good lord, the strategy. I’ve never met another game that plays and feels like a cross between bride and poker, but this one does. In one sense, you have to plan your tricks out, like Bridge, before the hand starts playing out. But inevitably, the actions of the other players will affect which cards in your hand are the winners and losers, and thus which cards you need to win with and which cards you need to dump. And thus it is often the case that you end up pitching an Ace away on other-led suits, only to later win tricks with trash cards. Like Bridge, you often spend a lot of time pondering how you are going to lose control and then gain it back. But like poker, there a lot of room for bluff-like moves, especially ducking tricks. It’s the most strategically-dynamic card game I’ve ever played.  Even the bidding requires some interesting thinking and tactics, especially in the early/late rounds, when you hold very few cards in your hand.

Oh Hell also has more “eureka” moments than any other card game. It’s the kind of game that makes you feel brilliant, and makes you marvel at other people’s brilliance. In the end, it’s one of the few games that leaves everyone at the table smiling.

There has been some recent rumbling — added to today by Chuck Todd — that a credible centrist 3rd party candidate for the Presidency might emerge next Spring. And by the way people are talking, they don’t mean “John Anderson credible,” and they don’t mean “Ross Perot credible.” They mean the real deal: Teddy-Roosevelt-Bull Moose-1912-win-more-electoral-votes-than-one-of-the-major-parties credible. Someone who would have the background to not only qualify in voters’ minds as a legitimate candidate, but also actually be a threat to win the Presidency.

Of course, the mere possibility of this  is predicated on the following three conditions holding true: first, President Obama remaining relatively vulnerable (probably because the economy continues to stagnate or get worse) due to unpopularity among self-described independents; second, the Republican nomination process producing a candidate far enough to the right that a significant number of said independents might still prefer Obama to the Republican nominee, ex ante; and finally, the existence of a plausibly-electable candidate that would have the desire and resources to become a  major player from the center.

In this post, I’d like to consider some of the  institutional constraints that might influence whether or not a credible centrist third party candidacy develop, and put some historical context on the issue. Seven points:

1) How conservative a nominee would the GOP have to nominate to provide the space necessary for a centrist 3rd candidate? Contrary to Chuck Todd, I think probably more conservative than either Perry or Romney. There’s not a lot of evidence right now that Perry is conservative enough or enmeshed enough in the Tea Party to generate the space needed for a centrist challenge. If you take a look at this ideological map of the current candidates, a few things stand out. First, there’s not that much room right now between Perry and Romney, despite all the talk about Romney appealing the moderates and Perry appealing to orthodox conservatives. What is happening is that — as a Downsian model might predict — two ideologically similar candidates are appealing to different portions of the party. So contrary to some conventional wisdom, it’s not obvious that, in a general election, Romney would ideologically appealing to centrists and Perry unpalatable to them.  Furthermore, it’s not clear that Perry would make a bad general election candidate, once the field is cleared and he can safely tack toward the center.

Bachmann, I think, is a different story. Not only is she somewhat more conservative (based on the Poole/Rosenthal method from the linked map), but she is fundamentally and irrevocably associated with the Tea Party, which would be a major selling point of a centrist 3rd party candidate. So I think the chances of a 3rd party candidate were much higher prior to Perry’s entry into the race, when Bachmann had a much greater chance of winning the nomination. If Romney wins the nomination, there will be no 3rd centrist challenge, period. And while I wouldn’t rule out a credible 3rd party challenge in an Obama-Perry race, I think the chances are pretty low, barring some contingent event that dramatically changes the calculus.

2) The nomination system and campaign laws are going to severely limit where the challenge would come from. The campaign finance laws enacted in the early 1970s make it more difficult, on balance, to enter the race late. Fundraising needs to begin early, and so does campaign organization. Consider 1968: Senator Kennedy joined the race on March 16, after McCarthy’s excellent showing against LBJ in the New Hampshire primary. It’s hard to imagine that a 3rd party challenger could start from scratch that late in the current environment. Money cannot be raised fast enough at the current maximum donation levels. Campaigns have also become, in real dollars, more expensive. And such a candidate would be without the help of a major party to organize and support the campaign (unlike Kennedy, had he won the nomination). Which means any centrist challenger would likely need to have one of the following two attributes: enormous private wealth (i.e. Perot 1992), or an existing campaign infrastructure from having already been in the campaign for the GOP nomination (i.e. Anderson 1980).

3) Are there plausibly centrist candidates that have the desire/resources/ideology to do this? The two most-talked about plausible centrists are Huntsman and Romney. Both are already raising money for the primary, and both have significant personal wealth that they could plausible draw upon. Huntsman is an honest-to-god GOP moderate, and Romney wouldn’t have a lot of trouble fitting that bill either, once he was unshackled from the need to court GOP primary votes.   Bloomberg is often mentioned, and he’s got the personal wealth and plausibly the ideology, but probably not the desire. Others who are not currently in the race can probably be written off: Christie is not an un-wealthly person by any means, but has nowhere near money to fund a campaign. Ditto with Daniels, who probably is too conservative, anyway. I presume McCain is too old, too exhausted, and now too tied to the party orthodoxy  to make a go of it. And, just for kicks, remember that the Governator is constitutionally ineligible.

4) Would someone like Romney or Huntsman be willing to fracture the party by putting up a candidacy? I don’t see why not. Huntsman has already worked in the Obama administrations, so his partisan allegiance can’t be total. Romney certainly has a long family history with the party, but his personal allegiance to it is unknown. Circumstantially, you can imagine he has the necessary prerequisites to jump ship. He’s a business-first conservative and a member of religious minority in a party that is increasingly drifting toward the social conservatives and becoming more enthused with a religious base that is at least partially skeptical of Mormonism. It wouldn’t be hard to write the speech he would give upon leaving the party.

5) Where would a Vice Presidential candidate come from?A lot of the talk you hear centers around the idea of a unity ticket — someone like Huntsman or Romney pairing themselves with a conservative Democrat who’s not particularly attached to the party, for the purposes of transcending partisan affiliation completely. Someone like Senator Webb.  While that’s plausible, I think it would just as likely that the pick would come from the right half of the middle. Romney might very will go with Huntsman. Another possibility would be to grab someone more conservative, but still wonkish and plausibly a cross-the-aisle kind of guy. Like Portman. But the bottom line is that it could be anyone; unlike the top of the ticket, existing money or infrastructure resources would be a plus, but not a prerequisite.

6) Could a Romney-Huntsman or Romney-Webb ticket win? I think it’s plausible. The strategic voting possibilities would be fascinating, since virtually every voter would list Romney-Webb as at least their second choice. Remember, there was no opinion polling in 1912 or 1860. Voters had little ability to coordinate. In a serious three-way race in 2012, voters in states where their candidate was obviously going to come in 3rd would have strong incentives to switch their vote to Romeny-Webb, since it would clearly be better for them than allowing the opposite-party candidate from winning. If nothing else, it would be fascinating to observe.

7) Would such a candidacy result in a durable 3rd party? Doubtful. The iron logic of the majority-vote single district system is that it inevitably leads to a two-party structure. Even more so, a third party would not be fielding lower-level candidates, and perhaps not even see itself a creating something durable. A Romney-Huntsman ticket might actually be claiming that it was the “true” Republican party. In any event, don’t expect such a challenge to have a lasting effect — as with Roosevelt, it would be an attempt to shift an existing party onto a different track, not create something new for long-term competition. Continue reading →

One thing that’s pretty hard to find on the internet is a good guide to the jargon of Capitol Hill. I don’t mean formal terminology related to floor procedure, that can be found in quite a few places. I mean the language that staffers use. Like any profession, the Hill is chock-full of wonderful phrases and sayings. But unlike a lot of other professions, politics tends garner a lot of interest from non-practitioners. Last year, PS published an article with a bunch of jargon (subscription required), but it was kind of short. So I thought I’d post some here. This is just a first edition off the top of my head. As you’ll see, many of these are appropriations-process related, probably because that’s what I have on my brain right now. I’ll do another round in a future post. Enjoy. And feel free to add on in the comments.

Update: There is now a more updated version of this post, available here.

UC: unanimous consent, or unanimous consent agreement. Perhaps the most important phrase in the Senate. If no one objects, the time-consuming process for moving anything on the Senate floor can be reduced to mere seconds. Usage: We need to line everyone up on this, if we can’t get a UC then it’s not going to move.

Run the traps: The process of vetting an idea by making sure all key players sign-off on it. Usage: I think this language will work, but you need to run the traps on it. Start by calling Ben in the Speaker’s office.

Member-level:  In bill or report language negotiations, an issue that can’t be handled by staff and will require Member-to-Member communication. Usage: Q: Can you delete the language on the park issue? A: No. That’s going to have to be a Member-level decision.

Mark: The version of a bill used by a committee when the committee formally acts to amend legislation. Usage: Have you seen the mark for the Defense bill yet?

Rattle the cage: To surprise a hearing witness with unexpected or unwanted questions. Usage: When the secretary comes down here next week, I think the chairman is going to rattle the cage a little.

Embargo: A ban on the disclosure of information of any sort until a certain time. Usage: Here’s the report language for the bill. There’s an embargo on it until 3pm tomorrow.

D’s/R’s: Democrats and Republicans. Usage: If we put that on the floor this week, the D’s are going to be might upset.

Scores: When a provision in a bill costs money, but especially when the provision does not appropriate money, it scores. The Congressional Budget Office evaluates the cost of all bills that come out of committee, and appropriations bills are subject to caps on their budget authority and outlays. So it’s not good when something scores. Usage: I don’t think we can include those riders. They’re both going to score, and we don’t have room under the cap.

Book(s): Short for briefing book(s). The large binders that staff put together for Members and themselves prior to committee and other events, filled with things like statement texts, markup notes, bill language, data, etc. Usage: We’ve got to get moving on this draft. It’s already 9pm and we haven’t even started putting the books together.

Go down: Send bill or report language to GPO for overnight printing. Usage: I’m hoping we can finish this afternoon and go down tonight. That way we can read a bit tomorrow.

Sit and read/ turn pages: Collectively walking through a bill (especially an appropriations bill) out loud with multiple people, to check new drafts against old ones and confirm that language is exactly correct. A slow process. Usage: I’d like to turn pages on Thursday, so adjust your schedule accordingly.

Optics: how a bill or report language or policy will look from a constituent point of view. Usage: I agree with you, John, but the optics of this thing are terrible.

Drop: to introduce a bill. Usage: We need that language ASAP, because we want to drop this bill tomorrow.

Take a haircut: have your appropriation cut by some percentage. Usage: I know you have a lot of needs, but in this climate everyone is going to have to take a haircut.

Plus up: An appropriations increase, especially in contrast. Usage: the overall bill is flat but we gave a plus up to agency XYZ.

Four corners discussion: staff conference that includes majority and minority staff of both House and Senate. Usage: Let’s try to put together a four corners discussion for Tuesday. See if they’ll come over here.

CR: continuing resolution. If all 12 appropriations bills are not signed into law by October 1, the government will have at least a partial shutdown, unless a continuing resolution is passed to temporarily fund things until the regular bills can be passed. Usage: The CR expires on November 3rd. Do you think they’ll have it all done by then, or do you think there will be another CR?

IQ: the most popular correspondence management system on the Hill. Used by Member offices to track and respond to constituent communications. Usage: Our new staff assistant is terrible. Five weeks and he can’t figure out IQ.

SA/LC/LA/LD: Four common positions in a Member office: Staff Assistant, Legislative Correspondent, Legislative Assistant, and Legislative Director. The basic chain of command beneath the chief of staff. Usage: We need to hire two new LAs this month and it looks like our LD might be leaving.

Clerk: lead staffer on a committee or subcommittee, particularly on Appropriations. Largely interchangeable with Staff Director. Calls the roll for committee votes. Usage: I think that’s right, but you better check with the Clerk.

CRS/CBO/GPO/GAO/LOC/AOC: Some of the legislative branch agencies. Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, Government Printing Office, Government Accountability Office, Library of Congress, Architect of the Capitol. Usage: I can’t believe the roof is leaking again. Get the AOC down here stat.

Give away: to have no floor votes on a day when there were initially going to be votes. Thus, Members are free to return to their districts early, and the Hill quiets down. Usage: I heard they are going to give away Friday this week.

The smell of jet fuel: an allusion to the impatience that sets in when Members are imminently leaving town for the weekend. Such situations can be used to quickly get through mark ups or floor action that might have otherwise taken time. Usage: It’s great we’re going last today. The smell of jet fuel is in the air, so there’s little chance we’ll face many hostile amendments.

Cats and dogs: Small details in a bill. Usage: we’ve pretty much ironed out all the outstanding issues. Just a few cats and dogs left, but nothing major.

CODEL/STAFDEL: Acronym for congressional delegation and staff delegation, the groups that might go on an official trip overseas. Usage: Did we get the money for the CODEL to South Africa yet? No, but I hear its coming.

Hotline: any number of uses related to moving a bill through the Senate by unanimous consent. Formally the decentralized phone system used to clear bills with all Members prior to bringing them to the floor. As a verb, the practice of moving bills in this manner. Usage: When are they going to do the land use bill? They’re going to try to hotline it tomorrow afternoon.

Ramseyers: refers to the Ramseyer’s Rule, which requires committee reports for House bills to include a section that describes how the proposed legislation would alter current law. Usage: I’m so glad we can farm out the Ramseyers to legislative counsel, those are a pain to write.

Side-by-side: A document that places the text of two similar bills (perhaps a House version and a Senate version) next to each, line by line. Allows easier comparison of the exact language difference between the bills. Usage: We’re almost ready for the staff-level conference negotiations, but we need to finish the side-by-side.

Markup notes: a document produced by committee staff for Members to use as a companion to a bill at markup. Most common in appropriations bills. Usage: If you’re having trouble understanding section 5, refer to the markup notes, which have more details.

HR/SR: House recedes or Senate recedes. Notation used in conference negotiations to indicate one chamber or the other giving in on bill language that differs between the chamber-passed versions. Usage: On page 12, section 3, 4, and 5 are all HR’s.

Suspension: Any bill going through the House of Representatives under suspension of the rules, which can move a bill quickly, but requires a 2/3 vote. Usually used with non-controversial legislation. Usage: How many suspensions are we doing today? Continue reading →

There’s been a pretty strong reaction by some bloggers on the Internet today (see here and here) because  state legislators in Pennsylvania are considering legislation to change Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes from winner-take-all to a congressional district system: one electoral college vote for each district won, plus two votes for winning the state at-large (this conforms to the Constitutional structure — total representatives + Senators — of the state EC vote distribution). The partisan implications are obvious; whichever presidential candidate was likely to win the state under the at-large system will come out a loser, as at least some proportion of the congressional districts will give their vote to the other candidate. This is likely to hurt the Democrats, as they have won Pennsylvania in recent elections and, at any rate, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes (back then 21) are part of the math of most plausible Obama maps.

I’m not going to rehash all of the usual arguments about the value of the winner-take-all vs. CD system or the consequences of changing from one system to another nation-wide. You can read about them in this decent political science piece if you like. I will, however, make three  points that I have not seen mentioned:

1) The winner-take-all direct vote system used in almost all states is the product of two strong historical forces. The Constitution is very clear that each state may choose its electors in any way the state legislature directs. This includes the winner-take-all direct votes system, the congressional district direct vote system, a division by proportional statewide vote, a vote of the state legislature, a hand-picking by the governor, a caucus system, a vote by state legislative districts, or anything else you can dream up. It’s not even out of the realm of possibility that the system could contradict other portions of the Constitution. If a state chose to let only people over 40 participate in a direct vote system, it’s not at all clear to me that the federal courts would intervene (it might very well be struck down in state court). The Constitution clearly leaves the decision up to the state legislature.

So why then do all but Nebraska and Maine use the winner-take-all direct vote system? For two reasons. First, the spread of universal suffrage and mass democracy in the early 19th century put pressure on the states to shift the vote from the legislature (which all states had been using as the selection methods in the first two elections) to the people. This trend accelerated in the 1820’s, and by 1828 only Delaware and South Carolina were still picking electors in the state legislature. (South Carolina did not switch to direct vote until after returning from secession).  Second, using a winner-take-all system maximizes the leverage of the state. Candidates need not pay much attention to a state in which the best they can do is win, for example, 6 of 10 electoral votes and the worst they can do is win 4 of 10 electoral votes. In effect, such a state has reduced its electoral votes to 2, and becomes proportionally less important, which in theory means candidates will be less likely to bend policy promises toward the state’s electorate, and definitely means local and state politicians will have fewer chances to appear on stage with the national candidates. Thus individual states, jealous of their political clout within the federal system, had strong incentives to make the electoral votes winner-take-all.

2) I suspect we will see (a few) more congressional district systems in the future. Once upon a time, individual states were less diverse. That is, the interests of the people of the state were narrower and more uniform. This is a lot less true now than it was 100 or 150 years ago. In fact, the sorting of the political parties by ideology has accelerated the trend such that conservatives in state X are much more like conservatives in state Y than they are like liberals in state X. Consequently, it’s not obvious that partisans in any state still have reason to maximize the state leverage in the federal system by using a winner-take-all electoral college system. In effect, national partisan concerns are now far more dominant than state or local concerns, partisan or otherwise. While 150 years ago, the national parties were loose confederations of state parties that had disparate underlying constituencies and policy goals, almost the exact opposite is true now: the state parties are, using the broadest brush, administrative units of a functionally nationalized party system. This overstates the case a bit, I know, but the logic still holds: the national parties have no interest in winner-take-all systems in states they won’t win, and without independent and diverse state parties to constrain things, it is likely that we’ll see more tinkering with electoral college systems in the future.

3) That said, I don’t expect Pennsylvania to change it’s system. Nor do I see a lot of states going to a congressional district system in the near future. While the overarching conditions for maintaining the winner-take-all system are crumbling, the necessary political context to trigger a conversion to a congressional district system is rare. The only time a legislature would theoretically consider a shift would be when either:

(A) they honestly think a congressional district system is better on the merits; or

(B) when they see political advantage in doing so.

Or both. But the problem is that choice A is unrealistic; institutional change in political systems is rarely driven by normative concerns, instead usually occurring as the byproduct of decisions that maximize political interests. But the conditions that make choice B hold are not common: you need a situation in which the state population is likely to vote for candidate A, but the entire state government is controlled by the party of candidate B, and the party of candidate B believes they will not be badly punished by the voters for supporting such a change.

Right now, the second condition holds in Pennsylvania: the GOP controls the state government. The working  assumption is that the first condition also holds — that President Obama is likely to win Pennsylvania. That, however, is not a slam dunk in 2012; the GOP could easily end up costing itself electoral votes by shifting to a congressional district system (although, it should be noted, if President Obama cannot win Pennsylvania, it is unlikely to be the difference in the election). And the third condition is the most dubious: in a world where President Obama wins Pennsylvania in 2012, I think it highly probable that at least some proportion of GOP state legislators (and perhaps some Pennsylvania GOP House Members) will pay an electoral price for supporting a change to the system. Which could make some legislators gun-shy about supporting the change. Therefore, I think it highly unlikely that such a change occurs this cycle.

This is not to say that such changes are not possible. But my guess is that the factors mentioned above will attenuate most impulses to change the systems. Continue reading →

What an odd debate last night. It was surely not Lincoln-Douglas 1858. And yet I think it revealed more about the candidates and the shape of the field than any information we had to date. I thought the format was tiresome. The use of live voters asking questions from remote locations seems like a complete waste of time and money; in essence, it’s either a gimmick to make the debate look like a 18th century New England town hall meeting, or a pure ratings play because viewers must love themselves some minor connection to the event (look, those questions are being asked by someone in Virginia! I live near there!). In either case, it doesn’t produce better (or even more populist) questions. It just creates a forced and obvious fake replication of some sort of community. Allowing questions via Twitter is an interesting concept, but suffers from much the same problem: there are some great follow-up questions running on the ticker via twitter, but those don’t get asked. Wolf Blitzer struck me as a weak moderator, but one thing he did well was to let the candidates have some back and forth; there were a few moments where two candidates (notably Romney and Perry) seemed to be almost having a conversation. I don’t know what that’s worth, but it certainly made for some lively television.

Anyway, on to the debate. There’s a certain conventional wisdom going on right now in the blogsphere/DC chattering class about the meta-implications of these debates. It goes something like this:

Romney is winning among people who are thinking strategically about the 2012 general election and is consistently showing himself to be the most appealing candidate to the median American voter. He’s sensible, intelligent, and presidential. However, these debates are not about winning the general election, they are about positioning yourself to win the Republican primary. In that sense, Perry is destroying Romney. Conservative voters looking to make an emotional attachment to a candidate are almost certainly choosing Perry, and whenever Romney attacks Perry’s right wing orthodoxy, it backfires regardless of how effective the attack is.

I think this CW needs to be tweaked a little bit. For one, not many people are watching these debates. In one way, that’s good for Perry: even if he has a bad night, his poll numbers will remain relatively stable. On the other hand, if few people are watching the debate, then the people who are watching are going to be skewed drastically toward the chattering class. In that case, things might just be coming full-circle and favoring Romney. If you believe in the invisible primary — the idea that the money-and-influence elites still have a huge say in the nominating process despite the early 70’s reforms that brought in all the direct primaries — then Romney’s strategy seems not only clear, but also working: convince all the elites that Perry is a loose-cannon who may blunder a slam-dunk election, and that everyone with money or influence must immediately back Romney and arm him in order to sink Perry before the primary voters make a huge mistake.

That seems to be what Romney is doing. And I think it’s working.

Now, take the latter sentence with a grain of salt. Who really knows, right? Almost by definition, if you are reading this, you aren’t in position to judge either (a) how the average Republican primary voter thinks; or (b) the degree to which the money and influence establishment can push voters away from Perry. But I don’t think there’s any question that this is Romney’s strategy at this point. He’s passing up most opportunities in these debates to prove how conservative he is, and that was once his main goal. Instead, he’s now positioning himself as a sturdy, classic conservative stuck in a lifeboat with half a dozen people who, while maybe more conservative than him, are definitely missing a few nuts and bolts of common sense.

Five points:

1) My predictions from yesterday were pretty far off. It was actually Romney who came out swinging in the attack on Perry and Bachmann who went more subtle. I don’t remember the jobs bill getting a “show of hands” moment, so my prediction there can’t really be judged. And Ron and Herman were off the chain, but not really more than usual. Herman Cain’s references to the Chilean model of social insurance might be brilliant policy, but someone has to tell him that’s it’s a political dead-end to tell voters were going to copy how some other country they’ve never really heard of does something. Double dead-end if you’re trying to win GOP primary voters.

2) This is undoubtedly a two-man race between Romney and Perry. Barring the entry of someone not yet in, that is. And probably even then.  Which raises the secondary question: what are the other people running for? It’s become clear to me that Bachmann is running to be Perry’s Vice President. (Not that I think she will get it). Same with Santorum. Huntsman is running for a serious cabinent post in the Romney administration. Ron Paul is running to swing the debate, particularly over troop withdrawal and issues of empire. Gingrich appears to be running either to try to hold the party together philosophically — he’s incredibly focused on unifying the people on stage, even to the detriment of his own differentiation — or to pump his private-sector businesses.  I have no idea what Cain is angling for, but unlike some people, I don’t think he’s a bad voice to have on stage.

3) Perry got battered bad a few times last night. He still hasn’t found the pitch-perfect response on Social Security. You’d think they’d have more staffers working on that right now. And he can’t seem to get the vaccine mandate off his back. He needs a more forceful response to that question, or he is going to continue to get hammered by Bachmann/Santorum. Right now his line is “I always err on the side of life” and “there was an opt-out.” But the former is obviously a joke — his death penalty policies prove that — and the latter is not explained well. Here, I’ll write him a 30-second response that I think works better:

I 100% agree that parents should have total authority over their children’s health care  — and that’s why our policy in Texas allowed anyone who did not want the vaccine to opt-out. But I will not let fear-mongering and half-truths cloud reality here: the health of our kids is my top priority, this vaccine saves lives, and I think it is 100% appropriate for a state government to promote the health of its citizens  in the manner my administration did. This is no different than wearing a seat belt: we can debate whether people should be required to wear their  seat belts, but it’s ridiculous to debate whether wearing one is a good idea.

4) I thought Perry made one potentially huge sound-bite style error. At one point, he said that he was “offended” if someone thinks “he can be bought” for five thousands dollars, because that’s chump change compared to his “$30 million dollars” he raised in the campaign. I totally understand what he was trying to say — that he’s not going to bend his policies for some drop in the bucket financial addition to his campaign — but it came out sounding like he was saying “it takes a lot more than a measly $5k to buy off this politician!” He also had this weird hesitation as he was saying it, as if he was thinking to himself “oh, shit” as it was coming out of his mouth. And while I would not be surprised  if someone down the road makes an ad or otherwise uses the sound-byte against him, the bigger takeaway is that, once again, Perry has shown he can stick his foot in his mouth in unscripted moments. In the current campaign environment, that’s another plus for Romney in the invisible primary.

5) There are some new populist bogeymen. Or, I should say, some old populist bogeyman. The federal reserve is now under direct attack. Free silver ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s really no better populist conspiracy than a central bank, and American history is rife with this line of thinking. Almost no one — I mean, almost no one in the chattering class let alone the median voter — has a firm understanding of central bank politics. Which means not only does it appear to be an utterly non-transparent, non-democratic, shady institution, but also that no one can defend it, even among people who know it’s vital. Romney had the best response to all this pap last night — he asked the rhetorical question, “What’s the alternative? Do you want Congress setting the interest rates and controlling the money supply?” — but I’m 99.44% sure that went right over the heads of any plausible audience. Except for the invisible primary targets. Which, again, is why I think he’s slowly winning. Continue reading →