Obamacare also rises

I published some work recently (along with the ACA-Effects Posse of Nyhan, Sides, McGhee, and Greene) suggesting that voting for health reform was very costly for House Democrats in 2010, causing them to run 5-6 points worse in the November elections and quite possibly costing them control of the chamber. Well, there's a flipside to this, it turns out. The New York Times reports that two conservative House Democrats -- Reps. Jason Altmire and Tim Holden of Pennsylvania -- lost their primaries earlier this week largely because of their opposition to health reform. So they might well have lost their seats to Republicans in November 2010 had they supported the bill. Instead, they lost their seats to other Democrats because they voted against it. Sucks to be them.

Alert readers, please be on the lookout for other Democrats who opposed ACA and are now facing primary challenges as a result.

Remembering Paul Sandoval

Colorado Democrats lost a major figure the other day. Paul Sandoval, a one-time Colorado state senator, became a powerful but informal leader of Denver Democrats over the course of his life.

I had a chance to speak with him in 2005, and it was a great interview. It was one of the first confirmatory pieces of evidence I'd collected suggesting that the Informal Party Organization model I used to describe California politics transported well to other states. Here was a guy who made his living running a tamale shop but managed to become highly influential in city and state politics through his control of the resources needed to win primary elections. As one story has it, Sandoval sat in the back of his La Casita restaurant with the Salazar brothers in the 1990s and determined which one of them would run for which office and when, charting out a career that ultimately led to Ken in the U.S. Senate while his brother John served in the U.S. House.

It's hard to know just what sort of title to give such a man. Yes, he was a restauranteur and a former state senator, but his power, his energy, and his legacy were devoted to building and managing a Democratic coalition in Denver and Colorado politics, even though that doesn't appear on a business card. I suppose "godfather" or "boss" are appropriate, if perhaps unnecessarily pejorative. I'll stick with "leader" for now.

Colorado Democrats back legalized marijuana

So a majority of delegates at last week's Colorado Democratic Convention and Assembly voted to express support for Amendment 64, the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act," which will be on the November ballot. Big news, right? A state party endorsing the legalization of marijuana?

Well, not exactly. First of all, according to the party's rules, only the state central committee can officially endorse an initiative; delegates can just indicate their support. Second, consider who was a delegate to the convention. These were largely people who were elected at their county conventions and who had been originally selected at the precinct caucuses in early March. And the Democratic precinct caucuses contained very few contested races -- only one presidential candidate, no gubernatorial or senatorial races, etc. So these were really the die-hard Democrats who bothered to show up. Chances are, they're not very representative of state Democratic voters as a whole or of state Democratic officeholders.

Now, just by indicating their support for the initiative, they may put some pressure on Democratic candidates to do the same, just to avoid alienating the die-hard activists. But at least so far, prominent Democrats haven't been scrambling to endorse the thing.

The McGovernites

What's it like to take over a major political party? You can get a great sense of it by watching "One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern." I recently showed parts of it to students in my parties class and we all found it fascinating. In particular, the coverage of the 1972 primaries and the chaotic convention that year are great and revealing. The film also does a nice job explaining the McGovern-Fraser reforms and how they affected subsequent elections.

You get a great sense of the party establishment being set back on its heels as this anti-war insurgent candidate from the middle of nowhere seems to be taking the nomination from them with a ragtag army of freaks. There's a beautiful moment where McGovern defeats Hubert Humphrey in California, which was then under winner-take-all rules (despite the reforms of the previous year). Humphrey and his party backers then try to have California's delegates retroactively allocated proportionally, involving the McGovern campaign in a distracting five-week litigation battle. Seeing McGovern defend WTA while the insiders argue for proportionality is quite delightful.

Now, the film isn't all great. It's got a pretty heavy-handed lefty agenda, suggesting that President McGovern could have rescued us from the deceit of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Lewinsky, WMDs, etc. The interviewees are kind of an all-star Hollywood liberal elite cast -- Warren Beatty, Gloria Steinem, Gore Vidal, Dick Gregory, etc. (I suppose they deserve some credit for getting Ron Kovic instead of Tom Cruise playing Ron Kovic. Then again, Kovic was probably the easier get.) And it goes off into some paranoid areas, implying that the assassination attempt on George Wallace was tied to Watergate.

But there's some rich stuff in there that really makes it worthwhile. They don't really draw the connection, but I couldn't help comparing these events with those of the Goldwater insurgency just eight years earlier. In both cases, a group of young idealists manage to take over the party and fundamentally change how the party was perceived and what it stood for, nominating a candidate who they truly believed in, rather than one they settled for. In both cases, their summer of elation ended up with historic routs for their party. That's a pretty rough awakening for the most energetic activists in both parties.

Now McGovern vs. Goldwater? That would have been fun.

The party, deciding: Virginia edition

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have failed to qualify for Virginia's Republican presidential primary. Gingrich has responded typically with bombast and inappropriate historical metaphors. But rather than criticizing the campaigns as incompetent or Virginia's rules as bizarre, we might note what this means for our understanding of party nominations.

One of the things that party insiders provide for their preferred candidates, in addition to money and endorsements, is expertise. That covers a wide range of things, including people who know how to read polls and put together ads and basically run a campaign on a national scale. But it also includes people who understand the arcane rules of nomination contests in the 50 states. Those rules can get weird. For Virginia, a candidate needs 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 from each of the state's 11 congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats vote for delegates, rather than candidates, and Hillary Clinton had some problems there in 2008 when her campaign failed to find a full slate of loyal delegates prior to the primary. Caucuses bring their own level of weirdness that primaries lack. Texas has both a primary and a caucus.

The point is that someone with insider backing within the party doesn't usually make mistakes along these lines. They're provided with people who can avoid these snafus. That doesn't mean that outsider candidates can't achieve this level of expertise -- notably, Ron Paul made the Virginia ballot -- but it's a lot harder when you don't have the backing of party elites. This is one of the ways that party insiders pick winners.

Update: Important point from Josh Putnam: This is the first time that the Virginia GOP has bothered to validate signatures. They now do so as a result of an independent candidacy for the state legislature in 2011. Again, a well-backed presidential campaign would know these details, but this is an important wrinkle.

Caddell and Schoen crack me up

If you want to read some first-rate hackery, be sure to check out Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen's op/ed in today's Wall Street Journal. No, it shouldn't surprise anyone that these allegedly Democratic pollsters don't have Obama's best interests at heart, but beyond that, the op/ed reveals deep and profound misunderstandings about partisanship.

The basic premise of the piece is absurd: Obama is so unpopular that he can't win next year, and even if he somehow won, he'd have to run such a negative campaign to do so that he couldn't govern in a second term. Therefore, he should decline his party's nomination and let Hillary Clinton run in his place.

Okay, granted, Obama may need to run a very negative campaign, just as he did in 2008! And he still managed to govern because, you know, he had a Democratic Congress for his first two years in office. Caddell and Schoen are convinced that we've had gridlock recently, though, because of Obama's strident tone:

We warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be "guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it." The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline.

There are quite a few people who would disagree with the notion that Obama has been intransigent in his recent dealings with Republicans. (Remember the debt ceiling negotiations? Who was being intransigent then?) But beyond that, did it ever occur to Caddell and Schoen that this might have more to do with just the president's tone? That there might be sincere and enormous policy differences between the parties?

Wait, here's another good one:

If President Obama were to withdraw, he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate.

Yes, conceding defeat is a great way to extract concessions.

But the piece gets even better when they start talking up Hillary:

Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.

Ah, yes, nothing like Hillary Clinton to rise above partisan politics. I'm sure the Republicans wouldn't start opposing her vehemently once she were the nominee. It's not like her name was ever synonymous with every evil thing conservatives attribute to liberals.

I know it's been a few years, but do Caddell and Schoen remember that these were exactly the reasons many people supported Obama over Clinton in the primaries? He was supposed to be the one more likely to "step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington." How's that worked out so far? Oh, and remember when Bush ran as the uniter, not the divider? How'd that go?

Folks, it's not that these politicians are lying -- I'm sure they'd sincerely like to reach out to people across party lines. But partisanship is bigger that one politician, and it's certainly not a function of tone. There are massive, historic forces compelling the parties apart from each other. Hillary Clinton would be just as polarizing a president as Obama, if not more so.

Nonetheless, I'm sure her path to the White House next year would be an easy one after Obama's decision not to run. Just ask presidents Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey.

Update: More goodies from Matt Glassman. His conclusion:

I’ll just leave you with a funny thought an old college buddy emailed me, writing “the only upside to Gingrich winning the nomination and then taking on HRC for the presidency would be that Kurt Cobain would probably come out of hiding with like 5 full albums worth of great new material.” Amen to that.

Ecological inference and vampires

Via Sullivan, here's a map by Goodreads in which they map out reviews of the book "Twilight" by state. Bluer states have more negative reviews of the book; redder states have more positive reviews: 

The mysteries presented are twofold:

1. Why does this map seem to mirror voting patterns so sharply? That is, why do Republicans like "Twilight" while Democrats hate it? 
2. Why has Utah generated such a disproportionately high number of reviews?

The second one is easy: the author, Stephenie Meyer, is Mormon, and a graduate of BYU. I can only assume that there's been a disproportionate share of buzz about her in Salt Lake City. Still, it's curious that Utah departs from the partisan trend; she has so many readers, but most of them dislike the book. 

The first one is trickier. What can account for Republicans liking the book so much more than Democrats do, other than, as Erik Loomis says, "Republicans having horrendous taste in literature"?

Actually, we don't know that. This is a classic case of ecological inference fallacy. It is certainly possible that Republicans like the book more than Democrats do, but the map can be deceiving. The people in these states who vote in presidential elections may not be the ones who register opinions on Goodreads. Indeed, a goodly number of "Twilight" readers are probably under 18. 

The only way we can really test the partisan connection is to examine individual level data, and Goodreads (regrettably) does not collect data on party ID. Still, there might be a way to infer party ID from Goodreads profiles, perhaps by looking for hints of political preferences in the "about me" section. If Gary King or some other enterprising individual would like to work on this, have at it.

Third party chutzpah

Remember Americans Elect? That group that plans to run as a third-party ticket and is currently seeking placement on all fifty state ballots? According to Dan Froomkin, they are now refusing to disclose the identity of their donors. That, of course, is illegal for a political party. But now they're claiming that they're not really a party:

Kahlil Byrd, the group's CEO, said it is operating "completely within the bounds" of the law. He noted that unlike a traditional political group,"Americans Elect has no candidate and has no issue."

Um, yeah, but according to their own website, they're planning a nominating convention for next June to, you know, pick a candidate and a platform:

Americans Elect is creating the first nonpartisan presidential nomination in U.S. history.

• YOU DECIDE THE ISSUES.
• YOU CHOOSE THE CANDIDATES.
• YOU NOMINATE THE PRESIDENT.

 So why would they want to hide the identity of their donors? Froomkin continues:

As for the donors, [Byrd] said, the reason they want to remain secret is to avoid political payback. "This is a very tough political environment," he said. "Retribution is real."

Huh? Personally, I think donating to the organization is a waste of one's money, but I wasn't planning to kneecap anyone for doing it. Just who is planning some sort of "retribution"?

(h/t Kevin Collins)

Party before government

It looks like some enterprising individuals are trying to construct parties in Libya:

As Libya's new leaders work on setting the country right and eliminating the last holdouts of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists, budding politicians are looking forward to the planned elections.

"Our party is being formed," said Abdel Dayem al-Gharabli, a lawyer from Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, after lengthy talks in a cafe with a group of friends. 

To be called the National Democratic Encounter, it aims to be broad-based, supporting the rule of law and respect for liberties, he said.

The really interesting thing here, of course, is that there's not yet a government for the parties to influence, a legislature to which to recruit members, or elections in which to participate. There's a provisional government, and there will likely be a constitutional convention next year, followed a year later by some sort of legislative and presidential elections. Parties are forming now with an eye to influencing the process of creating a government.

This is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the argument advanced in The Party Decides that America's constitutional Founders were essentially a party. They built a government that would protect and advance their interests, and deliberately made that government very hard to change (the amendment procedure is a very high wall, and the separation of powers structure is filled with veto points making it difficult to pass sweeping laws). Importantly, they organized and planned to control a government prior to that government's existence.

In Libya, it is not entirely clear on what basis these parties are being formed. They certainly have their roots in geography and ethnicity, but some sorts of ideological claims may be built on top of those.

(h/t Marc Herman)

Time out of power and ideological extremism

John Sides has the keys to 538 and has posted a nice piece suggesting that Republicans are more likely than not to nominate an ideological extremist for president. This analysis draws heavily on Cohen et al's The Party Decides and includes one of my favorite all time scatterplots:

The basic lesson above is that the longer a party has not controlled the White House, the more moderate a candidate it tends to nominate. The logic here is pretty intuitive. Just one term out of power, a party might see the most recent election as a fluke, the product of a bad candidate or bad times. "The White House is rightfully ours," they might think, "so there's no need to soften our stances. Just put up a less flawed candidate in a less crazy year and we're back in." Of course, that doesn't always work, so with each subsequent term out of power, they get hungrier for the White House and are willing to compromise more and more of their agenda to get it. At the extreme (five terms out of power), they're willing to nominate someone like Eisenhower, whose policy views and even party registration were a complete enigma until the summer of the convention. "Who cares what he stands for? He might win!"

There's evidence of this same trend in other countries and at the state level. Just think of the California Republican Party's backing of Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall despite his being well to the left of most of the party regulars.

Anyway, if you're a betting person, the above history tends to point to a Perry candidacy rather than a Romney one.

Once more, Mr. Friedman

Oh, why do I bother?

As for America, we’ve thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation). It’s put us in a deep hole, and the only way to dig out now is a new, hybrid politics that mixes spending cuts, tax increases, tax reform and investments in infrastructure, education, research and production. But that mix is not the agenda of either party. Either our two parties find a way to collaborate in the center around this new hybrid politics, or a third party is going to emerge — or we’re stuck and the pain will just get worse.

Two quick points: First, we're not in a deep hole because we live in a post-industrial society. We're in a deep hole because of a massive recession combined with a decade of tax cuts, wars, and un-financed expansions of Medicare. Spending increases plus declining revenues equals big hole. It's really not rocket science.

Second, yeah, it's too bad that we can't get one of our parties to champion an agenda of spending cuts, tax increases, and investment in infrastructure and education. Oh, wait, that's exactly what the Democrats have been pushing. But yeah, hybrids, the kids all love the hybrids.

Journalistic trends both awesome and terrible

If you care about campaign journalism, I've got good news and bad news for you.

Let's start with the bad news. That would be Kathleen Parker's latest column about Rick Perry. Excerpt:

The same things that drove liberals mad about George W. will repeat themselves with Perry. It’s that certitude mixed with bravado. It is also, dare I say, their certain brand of manliness. Weathered, creased and comfortable in jeans, they convey a regular guyness that everyday Americans relate to. Take it or leave it, it happens to be true.

Regular guy,
comfortable in jeans.

Please just kill me. I can handle the stuff about candidate personality and pop psychology, I can handle the outlandish claims about fundraising and advertisements tipping elections, but I feel like if I have to go through another whole election cycle filled with this sort of gender-stereotyping, regular-guyness, Americans-can-relate-to-him-because-he-jogs-with-a-gun-and-never-rethinks-anything, my-schoolgirl-crushes-correlate-with-American-voting-behavior-at-1.0 kind of crap, I'm just going to snap. Quick reminder, Ms. Parker: W. lost the popular vote to an egghead in 2000, barely beat another egghead in 2004 despite being a very manly commander-in-chief during a war, and left office with an approval rating in the 20s. Even if Americans can relate to such "regular guyness" -- a dubious proposition -- there's about zero evidence that matters politically.

Luckily, there is a decidedly good development in campaign journalism pulling me back from the abyss. A few weeks back, political scientist Hans Noel challenged journalists to try covering the party aspect of nominations rather than the candidates themselves. Mark Blumenthal has decided to do exactly that, conducting a survey of party elites (or what he calls the "power outsiders") in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The survey questions are pretty limited so far, but this approach has the potential to yield some very useful information about how the party picks its nominee -- a lot more useful than information about Michele Bachmann confusing Elvis' birthday with the anniversary of his death, entertaining though that may be.

For some other encouraging coverage along these lines, check out this piece by Jay Cost and Nate Silver's recent post that features this awesome Venn diagram:

Kudos to Cost, Silver, and Blumenthal, and to Hans for saving the universe.

Obama and Post-partisanship

Sean Smith makes some interesting points in this Politico piece. His argument is that many of those on the left now criticizing Obama for not being partisan enough were among those praising him in 2004 and 2008 for his post-partisan style. (Remember, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America.") They convince themselves, Smith argues, that Obama is too worried about his poll position or his reelection prospects to fully take on the Republicans, that he's feigning bipartisanship. But, says, Smith,

It’s never been an act. It’s who he is. After seven years of exposure to him, you would think more people would accept that.

A few points here. One, Obama was backed in 2008 by everyone to the right of Dennis Kucinich and to the left of Colin Powell, nearly all of them believing that Obama stood for what they believed in. Someone in that coalition just had to end up disappointed.

Second, this article reveals an important point about partisanship: everyone hates it until they think their side is losing, and then they want more of it. That is, "I want an end to the bickering and I want politicians to set aside petty grievances and do what's right, but they damn well better fight for the things I believe in and not sell out to people I perceive as wrong or evil."

I disagree with Smith that next year's election will help settle this internal debate. If Obama loses, many on the right will say it was because he was too far to the left, and many on the left will say it's because he gave too much to the right. That is, he was both too partisan and not partisan enough. If he wins, that will be either evidence of the genius of his post-partisan style or of his tenacious defense of liberal values. It's all relative.

Essential party readings I

I'm going to try to start a new feature on this blog. Any time I find a key passage that helps us understand political parties, I'll run it under "Essential Party Readings." The first comes from Jon Stewart in his book America, p. 108:

Each party has a platform, a prix fixe menu of beliefs making up its worldview. The candidate can choose one of the two platforms, but remember - no substitutions. For example, do you support universal health care? Then you must also want a ban on assaults weapons. Pro-limited government? Congratulations, you are also anti-abortion. Luckily, all human opinion falls neatly into one of the two clearly defined camps. Thus, the two-party system elegantly reflects the bichromatic rainbow that is American political thought.

The third party fantasy

If you're not content with the way this country is being governed, one of the best ways to change it is to get involved with one of the existing parties and work to nominate and elect candidates at all levels of government who will fight for the things you care about. Odds are, one of the parties will want much of what you want. Pining for an independent, third-party dictator is not only a waste of your time, but if you somehow got what you wanted, you'd quickly find it wasn't what you wanted at all.

So argue Hans Noel and I in today's Los Angeles Times.

A view to a downgrade

I woke up early this morning to the sound of screams, which I'm now pretty sure were my own. I don't know exactly what kind of effect the S&P downgrade will have on the U.S. or world economy; Dylan Matthews says it could be trivial, as it was with Japan's recent downgrade. But symbolically, it's horrible. It's a (technically) neutral observer saying "We know you have debts, and we know you have the money to pay them, but we don't think you'll do it." And it's hard to counter that assessment given recent political events.

Ezra Klein has a good take this morning. He notes S&P's chutzpah -- they told us just a few years ago that all those financial products from a few years ago that turned out to be complete junk deserved an AAA rating, which contributed to the massive meltdown of 2008. Oh, and thanks to that meltdown, government revenues have dropped and outlays have increased, which is a large part of the reason our debt has spiked. But that aside, they're not wrong to question America as a solid investment. As Ezra says, quoting the S&P statement,

“The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges,” they explained in the statement accompanying Friday’s decision. After Republicans in Congress spent three months weighing whether or not to default on our debt and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that paying our bills would never again be a foregone conclusion, can anyone really argue with that? After every Republican presidential candidate save Jon Huntsman either remained silent on, or flatly opposed, the deal to raise the debt ceiling, can anyone really say that U.S. debt is completely riskless? That there’s no chance of a political miscalculation, and if there is such a chance, that they can perfectly predict the outcome of the ensuing chaos?

I'd like to think that such a sobering assessment from an ostensibly neutral observer would turn this into a cooperative game, that it would force members of Congress to reconsider some of their previously held beliefs. It won't. Republicans read this as evidence that the cuts in last week's debt ceiling deal weren't deep enough. Democrats read it as evidence that Republican recalcitrance on taxes is killing the country.

What might be more realistic to hope for would be a reassessment of how the U.S. structures its political institutions. For example, perhaps we should just do away with the debt ceiling, an unnecessary vote that just invites hostage-taking. More generally, perhaps we should do away with counter-majoritarian rules (like the filibuster) and just let the majority party govern as it wishes. If Democrats want to increase services and taxes to pay for them, let them, and let the voters decide if they should remain in power or not. If Republicans want to return us to 1920s levels of services and taxation, let them, and let the voters judge.

I recognize that such an ideal can never be quite achieved in a system where executives and legislators are elected separately, which allows for divided government. But moving toward this ideal would likely be better than our current situation, in which one party's top priority is to protect government services and the other's top priority is to not pay for those services and both have the power to see their top priorities enacted simultaneously.

Elites, not deciding

Nick Confessore, in today's NYT:

Two and a half years after Mr. Bush left the White House, the formidable network of Republican donors he assembled has largely melted away. Fewer than one in five of Mr. Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers, the elite corps of “bundlers” who helped Mr. Bush smash fund-raising records in his two runs for the White House and remain the gold standard of Republican fund-raising, have contributed to any of the current Republican candidates, according to a New York Times analysis.

This is a solid piece of analysis; kudos to Confessore for doing the legwork here. Like Hans Noel says, there's no one definitive piece of information that tells us how "the party insiders" are leaning, but early high-level donors, particularly those who participated actively in previous campaigns, are a decent indicator, and so far they're suggesting that elites in the GOP are having a hard time settling on a favorite for the nomination.

There are a few possible interpretations of this. It may be that the political world has changed since 2000 and you really don't need the party's elites in your corner to win the nomination anymore, as long as they're not actively opposed to you. Perhaps Internet fundraising has given candidates the ability to collect sufficient sums that they're no longer dependent on key elites for support. 

It's also possible that the same basic rules that have existed since 1980 are still in play (read The Party Decides for details), but GOP elites just can't pick a favorite, as happened in 2008. They may like Romney as a general election candidate but worry about his ideological flexibility and the difficulty a Mormon would have in winning over some conservative voters. They may like Pawlenty but have been unimpressed with his campaigning skills thus far (Shades of Fred Thompson four years ago). They may like Perry but are worried that he'll be easily caricatured as an extremist. And perhaps in their hearts they like Bachmann but in their heads they think she's nuts.

Additionally, the Tea Party movement may have made all this elite coordination a lot more challenging -- it's hard to know whether Tea Partiers would accept someone like Romney and, if they didn't, whether they could or would actually derail a presidential nomination if the rest of the party was behind him.

It's possible that some of these elites will come off the fence if Perry officially jumps in (although see here). Or perhaps they're just doing what some elite Democratic donors did in 2008 -- just sitting back and waiting for the early primaries to provide some information as to how well these folks campaign, deal with setbacks, and connect with voters.

Modern Republicans and the invented crisis

Jeanne Cummings and Mark Niquette wrote a decent piece for Bloomberg recently suggesting that the ultimate cause of the current debt ceiling crisis is the rapid rise in party loyalty in recent years. This is only partially right. Hyper-partisanship is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for this crisis.

To be sure, polarization has occurred among both parties, and both parties' Congressional leaders are willing to play serious hardball to get what they want. But only one party chose to impeach a president for lying about fellatio. Only one party proposed shutting down the government to force a president to agree with its agenda. And today, that same party has chosen to use the pretty routine task of raising the debt limit to pay for past commitments as a weapon to constrain future spending. This is simply how the modern Republican Party operates when Democrats control the White House: they invent crises. I do not say this to score partisan points -- it is simply an observation of recent political history.

Why do they choose such high-profile showdowns, especially given the outcomes of previous showdowns? After all, while the Clinton impeachment embarrassed the White House and possibly affected the 2000 election, it failed to remove Clinton from office, portrayed the GOP as extreme, and cost Speaker Gingrich his job. Similarly, the government shutdown of the mid-1990s is, among Republican officeholders, widely believed to have been a huge miscalculation that damaged their party's reputation and strengthened President Clinton's hand.

But the Republicans do not pursue such tactics to become loved. For one thing, you don't need to be loved to win an election, just hated slightly less than the other guy. For another, the GOP approach to governing is a logical consequence of how they whip up their activist base in order to win elections. If you tell people that the president is an illegitimate, immoral monster or that government spending is a mortal sin enough times, eventually you have to deliver on it or your base sees you as a fraud.

Turning "Republicans and Democrats into Americans"

Brendan Nyhan flagged this recent article by former Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-OK) in the Atlantic. The article's title, "How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans," is really obnoxious, suggesting that Republicans and Democrats are not already sufficiently American when they advocate for the things they care about. But I have no idea if Edwards actually came up with the title, and the rest of the post is pretty thoughtful, so I'm going to try to give it its due.

The piece has a clear insidery perspective; Edwards was clearly bothered by partisan divisiveness during his time in Congress and doesn't like what he's seen in the two decades since. While I am a longstanding defender of parties and partisanship, I am sympathetic to concerns raised by members of Congress about such divisiveness. No one likes divisiveness in the workplace. Members of Congress -- most of them, anyway -- put in long hours trying to advance issues they and their constituents feel are important, and it can't be fun to see people opposing you just because of the "D" or "R" that appears next to your name on the ballot or to have people questioning your motives all the time. So while I believe that parties are very useful for voters and for legislators, I certainly understand why an experienced congressman (particularly one who saw a pretty substantial rise in partisanship during his tenure) would want some sort of reform.

That said, I believe the reforms Edwards is pushing are pretty misguided. Here are his six reforms and some brief responses to them:

• Blanket primaries - I've addressed this issue before. I don't think it helps anyone if Democrats can pick Republican nominees and vice versa or if the general election is between two candidates of the same party. But even if you like this idea, there's very little evidence to suggest that it makes much of a difference. Washington state has had a blanket primary for a while now but maintains a pretty polarized state legislature. The legislators California elected during its earlier experiment with the blanket primary were no more moderate than in other years. Maybe it will make a modest difference, but I wouldn't bet good money on it.
• Nonpartisan redistricting - There's no real evidence that this makes a difference, either. State legislatures in nonpartisan redistricting states are no less polarized than those where the majority party in the legislature draws up the districts. Polarization has definitely been occurring over the past few decades, but the fact that both states and counties -- which have fixed borders -- are polarizing just as rapidly suggests that redistricting hasn't had much to do with that.
• The remainder of Edwards' reforms are quite insidery and would really only affect members of Congress and their immediate staffs. They including allowing more open rules in the House, increasing the power of the ranking minority member on each committee, filling committee vacancies by lottery, and professionalizing committee staff. I don't have terribly strong feelings about these, but I would note that the first two, which basically enhance the power of the minority party, would serve to make the House somewhat more like the Senate. If I were a minority member in the House, I'd be all over that, but is the Senate really a model of efficiency or collegiality right now?

In sum, Edwards' reforms would likely have little effect on partisanship, and any effects they have would be felt almost exclusively by members of the House of Representatives. That doesn't make them bad ideas so much as ineffectual ones. 

What does make them bad ideas is that they seek to undermine political parties, the greatest tool we've ever devised for representation in a democracy. The parties, which Edwards dismisses as "private clubs," consist of people who are volunteering their time, labor, and money to advance issues and candidates they care about to improve the country in some way, at least from their perspective. All that activity, aggregated into two large national parties, creates a great deal of constraint on members of Congress, who understandably chafe under that yoke. But it's that yoke that creates accountability and ensures that the government behaves in a way that is at least somewhat consistent with what the American people demanded in the most recent election.

The Internet will not save you

While I'm dumping all over Tom Friedman, I should probably mention another facet of Americans Elect that strikes me as problematic. Basically, what this organization is purporting to do is to create an on-line political convention. As Friedman explains:

First, anyone interested in becoming a delegate goes to the Americans Elect Web site and registers. As part of that process, you will be asked to fill in a questionnaire about your political priorities: education, foreign policy, the economy, etc. This enables Americans Elect to put you in contact with others who share your views so you can discuss them and organize together. Then you will be invited to draft a candidate or support one who has already been drafted and to contribute to the list of questions that anyone running on the Americans Elect platform will have to answer on the site.

Using the Internet to facilitate political dialogue and organization is hardly objectionable, but it's also hardly novel. This is exactly what people at NRO, Daily Kos, and other sites have been doing for years. If you're interested in politics and you have Internet access, chances are there's already a place for you out there. And if there isn't, the startup costs are extremely low. So it's not clear to me just what Americans Elect is bringing to the table.

This whole endeavor seems rather enamored of the idea that American Elect can change American politics by harnessing the power of the Internet. Or as the organization promises, "We’re using the Internet to give every single voter... the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012." Look, I love the Internet as much as anyone, but its transformative power in politics has been way overstated. Political activists use the Internet to fundraise, to contact voters, to spread information, and to debate issues. News flash: we were doing all those things before the Internet was invented. We may do those things differently -- sometimes more easily, sometimes more effectively, but not always -- but it's still the same basic tasks of politics. (Apple somewhat ironically drives this point home in a recent iPad ad.)

The Obama campaign really did make brilliant use of on-line social media in 2008, and just maybe it turned out some votes using these methods that would not have otherwise turned out. But does anyone think that McCain would have won if no one had ever invented the Internet?

The idea that a website is somehow going to reshape our national political system is kind of a joke. The idea that a website will be the great democratizer of American politics really flies in the face of everything we know about who participates in politics and who is on-line. If you think it's going to "give every single voter... the power to nominate a presidential ticket," just think about what percentage of voters are likely to participate in an on-line party convention next June to nominate a bipartisan ticket.