Finally, a good film about the presidency

I saw "Lincoln" the other night. This is a very good and very rich film -- it contains a great deal of detail, both in the script and on the screen -- and I'd like to see it again soon to look for things I missed the first time around. Much has already been written on the film (I'm particularly enjoying Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Susan Schulten's perspectives, and David Brooks makes some interesting observations), but I wanted to mention a particular point: this is probably the best film on the American presidency ever made.

The premise of the film is that Lincoln has an agenda item (the thirteenth amendment) he wants to push through Congress. He's recently been reelected -- after very publicly supporting emancipation -- and believes he has a mandate to see this agenda through. But he faces numerous obstacles. First, a Confederate peace envoy is offering to cease hostilities if slavery can be retained in some form; news of this will likely erode support for the proposed amendment. Second, his party, while maintaining large majorities in Congress, doesn't command two-thirds of the House, and members of the minority Democrats must be won over if the amendment is to pass. Third, his party is hardly united on the amendment; conservatives think it goes to far, radicals think it doesn't go far enough, and none of them like him forcing this on a lame duck Congress. Fourth, Lincoln's own views on slavery and the war have evolved over his first term, and many in Congress and in his own cabinet distrust him as a result.

These struggles are the essence of the American presidency. And the film nicely portrays both the powers and the limitations of the president. It makes the point that should be so obvious but is so rarely portrayed in political films: the president has no direct power over Congress. He is not a member of it, he cannot author bills, he cannot force Congress to consider a bill, and he cannot (despite what the creators of "The Contender" would have you think) demand a roll call vote. The president runs and is elected on an agenda but is largely dependent on Congress to see it through. The film also notes that the president can't dictate to his party: Preston Blair, one of the founders of the Republican Party, makes far more demands on Lincoln than the other way around, and Lincoln basically begs Thaddeus Stevens and the Radicals for their support. And in terms of the president's legal powers, Lincoln himself is shown wrestling with whether his Emancipation Proclamation was actually constitutional or whether it would have any authority in peacetime. He well knew that he was exploring uncharted and potentially dangerous areas of the law and was unclear about his power to do so.

But the president does have other powers, notably the power to make patronage appointments and control the military. He can influence media coverage but can't control it. And while we do see a few examples of the president attempting to personally persuade some members of Congress, it's not clear how effective that is, and this isn't remotely treated as his most important power. (A lesser film would likely have shown the president using his bully pulpit powers, but that would have been both ahistorical and stupid here.)

I'm open to suggestions here, but I have a hard time coming up with another film about the presidency that gets at these core issues of executive limitations and powers. "The Contender" was a joke in this regard. "All the President's Men" is great but is basically about the media. "The American President" is pretty much a romantic comedy. It does show the president struggling with pushing bills through Congress, but largely resorts to magical bully pulpit powers in the end. "Dave" is lighthearted comedy. "Seven Days in May" addresses some of these issues but almost completely ignores Congress. The one film that handles these issues seriously, I think, is "Advise and Consent," which chronicles a president's difficult nomination of a new secretary of state, although much of that film's focus is on the blackmailing of a particular senator rather than on the president, who disappears for much of the film. "West Wing" actually addresses a number of these issues in a serious way, although scattered across many different television episodes.

So I plan to use "Lincoln" in my film class, and I'm grateful for a film that finally deals with the executive branch in all its glory and shortcomings.

[Cross-posted from Mischiefs of Faction]

Vampires and politicians

A student recently interviewed me for a paper she was writing about the similarities and differences between vampires and politicians. I kind of enjoyed doing the interview, so with the student's permission, I am reposting it here.

How do you think immortality would influence a vampire’s political platform or view on issues?

This would have to have a huge effect, since immortality makes irrelevant so many of the major policy issues we deal with, from health care to Social Security to war. Even if a vampire were sympathetic to mortals' concerns over these issues, it would be hard for him to convince many people that he shares their interests.

The vampire is described as different, similar to humans but stronger, prettier, and paler than humans. These differences make him different and stand apart. Do you think looks factor into our decision for president?

Looks aren't completely irrelevant to politics, but they're likely very overrated. We've had overweight presidents (Taft, Clinton), ugly presidents (Lyndon Johnson), slight presidents (Coolidge), etc. The chances that a vampire candidate were so much more attractive than his human opponent as to affect the vote strike me as pretty remote. The paleness probably wouldn't help -- it may have hurt Richard Nixon when he ran against a tanned JFK in 1960.

The top traits that a young voting demographic associated with vampires and politicians was power-hungry, narcissistic, and selfish – what do you think that tells us about our trust and belief of our political candidates?

It's hard to know from your question -- people may apply these traits to many people in positions of authority, including CEOs, athletes, celebrities, etc. But more generally, I think it's important to distinguish between how a politician would use power and how a vampire would. If we elect a politician to advance a set of issues we care about, his/her desire for power probably helps to achieve these goals. The more he/she advances that agenda, the more powerful he/she becomes, the better able he/she is to advance the agenda further. It's hard to see how a vampire's power helps anyone other than the vampire.

Is the vampire a Democrat or Republican? Why?

Republicans describe Democrats as sucking the life out of capitalism. Democrats describe Republicans as sucking the life from the working class. So either could probably be said to have some vampire-like qualities. However, given that vampires tend to be older, paler, and wealthier than most mortals, I would tend to think that he's a Republican.

Would you vote Cullen/Dracula 2012?

I haven't seen or read any of the "Twilight" series, so I couldn't adequately comment on Cullen's candidacy. Also, the issue of immortality makes the vice presidency somehow less important than it already is. Finally, there are a lot of Dracula depictions out there. If we're talking about Gary Oldman's Dracula, there's a lot I like about him, but I'd really need to see his birth certificate before I could consider voting for him.

Lack of enthusiasm for Obama demonstrated by enthusiasm for Obama

Here's another entry for the "Problems Obama Doesn't Actually Have" file. An article in today's Denver Post tries to make the case that young voters' enthusiasm for Obama isn't quite what it was four years ago:

When then-junior Sen. Barack Obama came to the University of Denver in 2008, the Democratic presidential hopeful was greeted by long lines and a crowd full of youthful enthusiasm. And while his return to the state for tonight's appearance at the University of Colorado at Boulder more than four years later has produced similarly long waits for tickets, the other response — enthusiasm — is lurching along.

That's the first paragraph. Let that sink in for a second. The one piece of hard evidence we have so far that would allow us to measure student enthusiasm -- long lines to obtain tickets -- suggests just as much enthusiasm as existed four years ago. So where's the evidence that there's less enthusiasm?

Maybe the evidence lies in the quotes? The article includes quotes from four CU students. The first is unapologetically pro-Obama. The second describes Boulder as pro-Obama. The third, an officer in the campus Republican group, is vaguely critical of Obama, and the fourth is somewhat lukewarm toward Obama. This is the basis for a conclusion that enthusiasm is waning? (The other quotes are from a political consultant and a political scientist seeking to explain the enthusiasm gap for which there is no evidence.)

Oh, the article also cites a study showing that fewer than half of younger voters are "absolutely certain" about whom they will vote for in November, but that doesn't really tell us anything about enthusiasm or expected voter turnout.

So, to review: the quantitative evidence suggests that there's just as much enthusiasm for Obama as there was four years ago, and the qualitative evidence is mixed. I'd love to know how the author or the headline writer reached their conclusions.

Now, this isn't to say that enthusiasm for Obama isn't down since 2008 -- it may very well be, although this article certainly hasn't provided the evidence to support that conclusion. But to the extent we're seeing fewer Obama stickers on backpacks and laptops this year than we did in 2008, we might note an important contextual difference: the lack of a primary opponent. I had several students take leave four years ago to volunteer in Democratic contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. The fact that they're not doing so this year has less to do with an enthusiasm gap than the lack of Democratic contests in those states. My guess is that enthusiasm will be running plenty high on both sides come September.

Health care reform and the bully pulpit

Scott Lemieux has a nice review up of George Edwards' new book On Deaf Ears, which it sounds like I'll need to read/assign soon. It's about the basic ineffectiveness of presidential speeches in changing congressional minds, something our pundit class seems to have a hard time wrapping its head around. I particularly like the discussion of Bill Clinton's experience with health care reform.

The particularly striking example, which Edwards spends a lot of time on, is Clinton and health care. Clinton, in short, did everything that armchair critics of Obama assure us would have produced a better bill than the ACA. The administration crafted a plan itself rather than waiting for Congress to act, and using extensively tested strategies made a conscious decision to “go public” and try to indirectly pressure members of Congress to support its bill by making it more popular. Of course, this approach couldn’t have worked out any less well; presidential communication didn’t make Clinton’s proposals any more popular, and Democrats in Congress who had been largely cut out of the loop didn’t have Clinton’s back.... Granted, Clinton’s health care strategy might (or might not) have worked better if he had Obama’s margin in the Senate to work with. But 1)Obama had very good reasons for not wanting to emulate that approach. and 2)there’s than no reason to think it would have produced a better result and 3)there was a very real risk it would have ended up in health care reform failing entirely yet again.

Sandra Fluke and Martin Luther King

Anyone else noticing some similarities between the recent Rush Limbaugh attack on Sandra Fluke and the arrest of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1960? Okay, they're far from perfect analogues -- Fluke was insulted, not jailed, and she wasn't a movement leader or household name until Limbaugh made her one. But there are still some interesting parallels.

In October of 1960, King was arrested as part of a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. John Kennedy, just a few days before the presidential election, made a highly publicized phone call of support to Coretta Scott King, and Robert Kennedy intervened as an attorney to have King freed on bond. Nixon, who had enjoyed a cordial relationship with King, made no public gestures of support at this time, apparently believing it would be inappropriate for him to do so as vice president. These events notably occurred at a time when the African American vote was far less uniformly Democratic than it is today. JFK was making a play for a competitive voting bloc, potentially risking the support of southern whites.

This year, we once again see the presidential candidates seeking the best way to respond to a high-salience political event that could affect the votes of a powerful voting bloc. And the responses are telling. Obama has responded by calling Fluke directly (and publicizing the call). Romney's response has been much more measured, saying simply, "It's not the language I would have used." It's hard to say what Romney really should have said, but given that Limbaugh's own half-hearted apology today went further than Romney did, my guess is that few people will be impressed with Romney's courageous stance.

Now, it should be noted that JFK's stance in 1960 was somewhat gutsier than Obama's today; JFK risked alienating his white southern supporters, without whom Democrats of that time just couldn't win the White House. Conversely, women today (particularly pro-choice women) reliably vote more Democratic than men. Obama hasn't alienated anyone who was likely to vote for him. It's all win for him. But Romney faced a situation similar to that of Nixon and similarly whiffed.

I'll be curious to see if we see this reflected in the polls.

Trading it in for a bucket of warm spit

Bill Keller's Sunday NYT op/ed suggesting that Obama drop Joe Biden from the ticket and replace him with Hillary Clinton strikes me as rather silly. While not as mean-spirited as the Caddell/Schoen please-wreck-your-party memo, I can't imagine what purpose such a suggestion serves. I can understand that some people, particularly Hillary supporters from the 2008 days, would like to see her name in the top slot on the party's ballot and may want a chance to vote for her for national office. But beyond that, I think this idea suffers from two important errors:

• Error 1: Hillary Clinton would help the Democrats retain the presidency. I see no evidence that she brings any voters to the Democratic side who aren't already there. Yes, I know her approval ratings are currently higher than President Obama's, but that's basically because she isn't the president and isn't receiving blame for economic difficulties. Remember, Obama has basically polled ahead of where economic conditions would predict him to be. Also remember: she's a deeply polarizing figure! She may not look that way now, but put her on the executive ticket and see what happens. Besides, everyone already knows she's a prominent member of the Obama administration. Why changing her job title would bring in additional voters escapes me.

• Error 2: The Vice Presidency is a promotion above Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton has been the United States' public face abroad during a period of extraordinary international changes. My impression is that she's managed this position rather well, projecting U.S. interests and priorities without appearing overtly pushy or imperialistic. It's a serious job and she's handling it in a serious way. Conversely, what would she be doing as Vice President beyond sitting around waiting for a close vote in the Senate or President Obama's death? When was the last time you read about Joe Biden when it wasn't about him making a gaffe? I have no doubt Biden has been important behind the scenes in dealing with colleagues on Capitol Hill, and Clinton could do the same thing, but this role is very much out of the limelight and it's not obvious just how effective she could be there, particularly if Republicans retain control of at least one chamber. 

The Hillary challenge: How is this story still alive?

I thought we were done with speculation that Hillary Clinton would challenge Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but then a version of this Bogdan Kipling op/ed showed up in Sunday's Denver Post. His main argument for a Hillary challenge seems to be that Obama sucks:

Contrary to mainstream opinion, Obama is a mediocre politician.

Go on.

Were it not so, surely he would have known instinctively that people get wise to polished repetitive, but empty speeches — and know the difference between bread and butter now and pie in the sky later.

I'm guessing he knows that, but continue.

Joblessness and fear of watching retirement savings vanish weigh heavier on the nation’s collective mind than long-range climate change and health care reform. The president’s touted political instincts should have told him all that. But, as James Carville once noted so cogently, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

But while Obama talked jobs and initiated a jobs bill in Congress on his sixth day in office, almost all of his mind and determination remained focused on health care — his overriding priority.

Kipling is engaging in a number of classic pundit fallacies here:

1. Mind-reading: Regardless of Obama's public speeches and actions, his "mind and determination remained focused on health care." 
2. The Green Lantern theory: If Obama were sufficiently determined, the economy would be better by now and his reelection prospects would be stronger.
3. The Executive Branch Has One Employee theory: It is impossible for an administration to be working on improving the economy while also working on health care reform.

It's all rather silly and ignores some basic truths: the state of the economy will largely determine Obama's reelection prospects (something Obama assuredly knows); we've recently experienced a collapse of the financial sector, which tends to freeze up lending and investment for many years; it's hard to see how Obama's actions could have made for a much stronger economy at this point (except for a larger stimulus, and you tell me how he gets that through Congress without resorting to the Green Lantern theory).

And then there's the other big point: the forces currently making Obama's path to inauguration day 2013 a difficult one would be doing the same thing to Hillary Clinton were she the nominee.

"Is this as good as it gets?"

Chris Matthews:

In the above interview, Chris Matthews mourns the lack of a narrative in Obama's bid for a second term:

There is no Peace Corps... There is no Moon program.... What are we trying to do in this administration?... What's he going to do in a second term? More of this? Is this it? Is this as good as it gets?

He goes on to whine that Obama doesn't invite him to late night parties and doesn't call members of Congress often enough, and that there's too much e-mail communication or something, and then there's those darned kids running the White House....

Look, Matthews is obviously under no obligation to be one of Obama's foot soldiers, but I find this idea that Obama can't win without a compelling "narrative" really annoying. Obama could promise a mission to Mars or a cure for cancer or a new season of "The Wire," and I doubt it would make a lick of different for his reelection prospects. Those would be fairly vague, if inspirational, promises about the future, when voters tend to be highly attuned to what is going on now and what has happened recently. Specifically, they will retain him in office if they are sufficiently satisfied with improvements in economic conditions, and if they're not, they won't, regardless of what he promises.

As for Matthews' dismissive "more of this" comment, I'd imagine quite a few people would be happy with that, if "this" includes health care reform, preventing a depression, financial reform, student loan reform, killing Osama, toppling Kaddafy, etc. That's a solid record to run on. I'm sorry if Matthews doesn't think it's as exciting as a Moon landing. It's just, you know, governing.

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.

East End boys and Westen's pearls

Drew Westen is once again filling valuable column inches in the New York Times with cheap pop-psychological claims about parties and politicians. John Sides goes in for the quick kill, and Jon Bernstein helps mop up. I'm a bit late to the show, but I saw another claim in Westen's piece that really begged to be addressed.

Westen:

Democrats... are too likely to view intellect as both necessary (which it is) and sufficient (which it is not) for high office. They have repeatedly presented the American people with candidates — Hubert H. Humphrey, Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — with more than enough gray matter to be the world’s chief executive but not enough of the other skills that matter to the American people. [...]

The ability to “read” the emotions of the electorate and to speak to those emotions in a compelling way do more for both electoral success and legislative success than I.Q. Similarly important is the ability to articulate a vision and a set of values, which is a far better predictor of voting behavior than positions on “the issues.”

This is something Republicans understand far better than Democrats, and something Ronald Reagan mastered.

This is classic post hoc reasoning that doesn't even belong in an undergraduate essay in an intro-level class, no less on the Sunday op/ed pages. The reasoning goes: Mondale ran, Mondale lost, therefore Mondale was lacking some important qualities [insert whatever qualities you like in people]. One major factor that is being ignored here, of course, is the economy. Mondale ran against a popular incumbent during an enormous economic boom. Are we to believe that Bill Clinton would have defeated Reagan in 1984?

Another point: Did Nixon "read the emotions of the electorate" in 1968? Did he "articulate a vision and a set of values"? Or did he just happen to run in a year when the incumbent party's candidate was suffering from his association with a slowing economy and a deeply unpopular war?

Yet another point: Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000! No, that certainly doesn't make him president, but nor does it demonstrate that the voters rejected him due to his purported inabilities to read emotions or articulate visions.

Still another point: Yes, Ronald Reagan possessed some excellent public speaking skills, but that didn't help him when the economy was floundering during his first term. His approval ratings dropped into the 30s in 1983. Maybe in all the economic turmoil, he briefly forgot how to read emotions and articulate visions.

Beautiful dialogues

I want to highlight two recent dialogues that have been fascinating and quite enlightening for people interested in politics. The first is Ezra Klein's dialogue with Matt Miller. Miller recently wrote an article urging a third party candidacy for the presidency (an idea Hans Noel and I have picked on before), and Klein responded with this piece. Their current dialogue is far-reaching, but generally focuses on the idea of speeches versus institutions; Miller believes that an inspiring speech from a candidate untied to the current party system could change the way things are done, and Klein believes that Miller's approach totally misunderstands and misrepresents how American politics actually works. A highlight from Klein:

People in this country have different roles in the political process. And you and I have a particular one. And our particular one is to inform people, to try to explain to people how things are working and how they’re not working, and to give them a realistic idea of why. I talk to business leaders, too, and I talk to a lot of people in American politics. I talk to a lot of politicians. I talk to pundits. I talk to cable news people. I talk to all of them. And I almost never meet the structural pessimist, actually. All I meet, as far as I can tell, are people who think we just need more “leadership.” We need a president willing to stand up and fight. We need a leader who will finally take advantage of the moment and push this country forward. We need somebody willing to make the tough choices. And I find it borderline irresponsible.

Klein also mentions the dangers of a center-left presidential candidate for those who care about liberal policy goals.

Let’s say that Barack Obama runs against Rick Perry and against Matt Miller’s candidate. Do you think there is no risk in a world where Matt Miller’s candidate gets 22 percent of the vote, a remarkable showing, and throws the election to Rick Perry? You don’t think that is a risk at all?

Hans Noel has been mentioning this possibility a lot recently, and it deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Anyway, loyal readers of this blog will know that I'm partial to Klein's arguments, but it's a really informative dialogue, and if you have relatives who sound more like Miller (as I do), you'll want to learn this stuff before Thanksgiving.

Okay, dialogue number two: John Sides' discussion with.. well... himself, in preparation for a panel last night with some serious political elites on the topic of whether American politics is broken. Sides addresses the most important question: what do we mean by "broken"? Political observers love to claim that the system is broken, but they rarely explain what they mean, and the meaning has important consequences:

Q: What does “broken politics” mean?

A: People tend to mean one of two things. First, the political process is broken. Complaints about process involve different things—incivility, hyper-partisanship, gridlock, and so on. This is a complaint about means to ends. Second, they mean that the political system is unable to reach certain ends, which means people’s preferred policies. So politics is broken when the government can’t pass certain pieces of legislation, for example.

Q: Why does this distinction matter?

A: For two reasons. First, I think complaints about broken politics tend to involve the latter more than the former. Even when people complain about process, their complaints typically arise because their policy goals have been stymied. Complaints about gridlock usually don’t mean that people want just any policy to pass; they want their preferred policy to pass. Second, the two meanings of “broken politics” can imply very different solutions. If your concern is incivility or partisanship, then your solution is more consensual forms of decision-making. If your concern is policy, then you may not necessarily need to care about process. The easiest way to enact landmark legislation is often (mostly?) to get large partisan majorities and leverage their power, even at the risk of incivility or hyper-partisanship.

I give the Enik Gold Seal to both pieces. Please read.

Talking us into a recession

Yoni Appelbaum, writing in the Atlantic, argues that William Jennings Bryan single-handedly created a double-dip recession for the United States when he delivered his Cross of Gold speech in 1896:

Bryan's speech is well remembered. Its consequences are not. Wall Street panicked. For ten days after Bryan's nomination, capital fled across the Atlantic, halted only by the formation of an extraordinary consortium. Even in the months leading up to the convention, the likely ascendancy of silverite forces had spooked businessmen and investors. After Bryan's improbable triumph, the bottom fell out of the economy. The uncertain climate of the spring of 1896 gave way to a prolonged slump. Interest rates rose, investments fell, stock and bond issues dried up, building permits slumped, and new orders for capital goods failed to materialize. Industrial and commercial activity declined across the board.

I can't claim to be any sort of an expert on the Gilded Age economy. I'm sure Appelbaum pursues this line of research in greater detail elsewhere, and I really don't have data to counter him here. But given how little power presidential speeches actually have, I'm skeptical of his argument. Were investors really so skittish and naive as to believe that the claims of a presidential nominee were soon to become law? Even if Bryan were to somehow win (McKinley beat him 51-47), would he be able to get this agenda through Congress? (Republicans held a 246-104 majority in the House at the time Bryan delivered his speech.)

I suppose this is possible. I mean, if Rick Perry were nominated next year and gave a speech at his convention promising to move the U.S. to a monetary system based solely on tungsten, yeah, some folks might panic a bit. But my guess would be that the relationship between Bryan's 1896 address and American economic problems was one of correlation rather than causation.

Update: Matt Glassman notes that Bryan's nomination itself (more so than the speech), was something of a surprise, as few observers expected the silver advocates to secure two-thirds of the convention vote. So perhaps Wall Street did panic when they saw one of America's two major parties being taken over by a faction they perceived as manifestly irresponsible. Still, I'd love to see some hard evidence. I guess I need to read Appelbaum's book.

How quickly we forget

A busy schedule and a tight budget unfortunately kept me from attending last weekend's Clinton '92 campaign reunion in Little Rock. I have no idea if the Washington Post's coverage of the event is representative of what really went on there, but I really hope not:

The class of ’92 cast its reunion as a tacit — and sometimes not so tacit — rebuke of the current president and his un-Clintonian aversion to the political fray. Some erstwhile Clinton aides wore “I Miss Bill” T-shirts and “It’s Still About the [Expletive] Economy, Stupid” buttons. Others privately regretted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s acceptance of the secretary of state post — the theory being that she would be better positioned to replace Obama if she had stayed in the Senate.

I'm pleased to see President Clinton himself in the article dismissing the Obama comparisons as off-base. But really, do these folks remember what that first term was like? I remember showing up to work when Clinton's approval ratings were in the 30s, lower than Obama's have ever been. And yeah, there was a lot of soul searching -- Were we doing it right? Why wasn't his message getting through? Did we misread the voters in 1992? Was he doomed to be a one-termer? But I don't remember any of us saying that the country would have been better if we'd backed Harkin or Tsongas or Brown.

I would agree that Clinton had more of a love for the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics than Obama does, but exactly what did he have to show for it by this point in his first term? Yes, Clinton's first budget passed, including a tax hike on upper income earners, but he lost on the stimulus that year. Health reform was in ruins. Don't-ask-don't-tell was a compromise that no one liked. His only other big legislative wins were NAFTA and the crime bill, both of which were staunchly opposed by sizable chunks of liberal congressional Democrats. Contrast that with Obama's record on health reform, student loan reform, financial sector reform, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the end of DADT... it's really quite impressive, and not something liberals should be dismissing. Sure, liberals have plenty of reasons to be upset with Obama's concessions to Republicans on budgetary matters, but does no one remember Clinton's concessions? His triangulations after the 1994 election? His hiring of Dick Morris?

This is not to disparage Clinton's accomplishments as president. There were many, and I am proud of the very small role I played in them. But the fierce partisan fighter some folks seem to recall is largely fictitious, and to the extent it was real, just how great was it? Winning the news cycle is not the same as enacting an agenda.

Trends that are not actually occurring, Obama donor edition

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Confessore has a piece up claiming that Obama's small donors, who were such a major part of his support in 2008, are not showing up for him during this election cycle. The thrust of the piece is qualitative, involving interviews with some of Obama's 2008 donors who are now disappointed with him and haven't given him any money yet. But behind these assertions is a quantitative claim: Obama is not commanding the same level of support he was four years ago. As Confessore says:

Through June 30, the close of the most recent campaign reporting period, more than 552,000 people had contributed to Mr. Obama’s re-election effort, according to campaign officials. Half of them were new donors, and nearly all of them gave contributions of less than $250.

But those figures obscured another statistic: a vast majority of Mr. Obama’s past donors, who number close to four million, have not yet given him any money at all [emphasis added].

Okay, there's a big and very obvious problem with this comparison. The half-million people who have donated to Obama's 2012 campaign so far (that is, through June of 2011) are being compared with those who donated through the entirety of the 2008 campaign season. The bulk of donors don't get involved until much closer to the primaries and general election. The appropriate comparison point would be those who donated through June of 2007. According to the FEC, there were just over 77,000 donations to Obama in the first half of 2007, roughly a third of which were under $250.

So, just to review, Obama has received more than seven times as many donations at this point in the 2012 cycle than he did by this point in the 2008 cycle. What's more, the share of his donations coming from small (under $250) contributions is now greater than it was four years ago.

Now, of course, there are plenty of reasons why these two elections cycles don't make for a great comparison. Obama is the president now, and he was only a modestly-famous freshman senator four years ago. Conversely, he was going into a hotly contested primary back then and appears to be unopposed for the nomination today. That said, there is no quantitative basis for Confessore's assertions.

That's not to say that there are no 2008 Obama supporters who are disappointed with his presidency -- I'm sure there are plenty! And I haven't collected the data that would tell us the extent to which those supporters are contributing today. But to say that the half-million who have given to Obama this year compare unfavorably to the 4 million who gave to him previously is really grossly misleading.

Do good politicians need help?

This post by Gladstone at Cracked is a bit old, but contains some important notions about presidential popularity that deserve to be addressed. Gladstone is discussing the website "WTF Has Obama Done So Far," a tongue-in-cheek project designed to demonstrate that Obama's presidency has, in fact, been marked by a great deal of accomplishments of which liberals should be proud. One would hardly expect such a website to have an enormous impact on elections or public discourse, but Gladstone actually takes it as evidence of Obama's failure as a politician:

A true presidential politician articulates a vision for America, wins over the public support and then gets the Congress to follow him because everyone wants to be on the winning team. And by that standard, Barack Obama has not met his objectives. How do you know? Because after two years in office, he needs the liberal devout to engage in an Internet campaign to explain what he's even done. [...]

[T]wo years into Reagan's term no one had to be told what he did. It didn't even matter if it were true. Americans would tell you Reagan cut inflation, made us stronger abroad and restored our national pride. Furious, the liberal intellectuals would then take to the media to explain why Reagan's seeming accomplishments were a smoke screen. Why he had taken credit where none was due. And point out all the unforgivable things he hadn't done or did in secret. Meanwhile, the right would merely smirk at those brainiac, detail-orientated liberals, while mumbling things like, "There you go, again," because they knew they'd already won.

Gladstone is funny and compelling, but also profoundly wrong about a few key items here. First of all, the obvious one: Reagan was deeply unpopular two years into his first term! In January of 1983, Reagan had approval ratings in the mid-30s, well below Obama's lowest point thus far. That doesn't make him a bad politician or a poor communicator; it's just a reminder that presidents are, to a great extent, victims of circumstance. The economy was in the middle of a full-blown recession, and that takes a toll on even charismatic politicians like Reagan.

Second, how did Reagan manage to win reelection in 1984? It's simple: the economy recovered. If "no one had to be told what [Reagan] did," that's because everyone could experience economic recovery in their own lives. More people were finding work, employed people were making more money than they were the previous year, their buying power wasn't being wiped out by high inflation, etc.

Third, even if people didn't have to be told what Reagan did, they were told anyway. No, there were no sarcastic websites in 1984, but there were plenty of conservative operatives at work getting that message out. They could largely be found in places like the White House, the Republican National Committee, the Reagan/Bush reelection campaign, and more than a few newspaper editorial desks, and they spent a great deal of time, money, and energy telling Americans that their lives were better because Reagan was in charge. In other words, they were doing exactly what liberal activists are trying to do for Obama today.

If most Democrats can't recite a laundry list of Obama's accomplishments, well that's just because very few voters can do that about any president, not because Obama's a bad politician. And if economic growth actually ramps up in the next year, Gladstone will be amazed at how good a politician Obama suddenly appears to be.

Presidential attention

Kevin Drum (via Bernstein) takes apart Bruce Bartlett's claim that Obama should have stayed single-mindedly focused on the economy even after the stimulus passed. Drum's main objection is that the argument doesn't make much sense:

What does it mean to "single-mindedly" keep his attention on the economy? I just don't understand how that translates into concrete action. I think Obama got briefed plenty to understand the trajectory of the economy (you really don't need eight hours a day to figure that out) and I have a hard time thinking that it's a good use of presidential time to insert himself into the details of the appropriation process. I also doubt that Obama really had much influence over Ben Bernanke.

Yeah, I'm with Drum here. One virtue of having a large administrative branch is that the "president," broadly speaking, can focus on many things at once. Just because the president is making a speech on health care doesn't mean that his economic advisors aren't focused full time on monitoring the economy and reporting to him regularly about its health and recommending policies. Furthermore, the president giving speeches constantly on the economy doesn't make the economy any healthier.

In a similar vein, I want to highlight an otherwise excellent NPR piece on the road to 9/11. This report details both the education of Mohammed Atta and the frustrations experienced by White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke in the months and years preceding the attack. The piece suggests that the White House possibly could have killed Bin Laden in 1999, but it was "distracted" by the Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment proceedings.

I seriously doubt that the NSC and the CIA spent their briefings with the president discussing Monica Lewinsky in 1999. Clinton may well have been reluctant to order cruise missile attacks on Bin Laden based on spotty intelligence, but only because this was before 9/11 -- few Americans had any idea who Bin Laden was or what kind of threat he posed, and any inadvertent deaths resulting from bad intelligence or collateral damage would have rightly created political problems for Clinton. (The American public, and American policymakers, are substantially less risk averse today about such matters.)

In other words, the problem wasn't presidential "attention."


Update: Matt Glassman follows up on this topic by suggesting that Obama talking about health care would have been like Lincoln going around the country talking about the Homestead Act. Both were longstanding priorities of the parties, of course, but it seems distracting and possibly foolish to spend time talking about them when the nation was clearly focused on the economy/the Civil War. As Glassman says, "It does matter, when the economy is this bad, that people don’t think he’s focusing his energy on other things."

I suppose it's bad for Obama if voters think he's unconcerned about the economy, but really, when did he stop talking about the economy? You could find evidence of him discussing jobs and economic security, even in the context of health reform, throughout his presidency. If Americans think he's not concerned about the economy, this likely has more to do with the actual behavior of the economy than with any analysis of presidential time management. If the economy were humming along, people would largely be content with Obama's attention to it, regardless of how much he actually discussed it.

And while I don't consider myself an expert on Lincoln's presidency, my impression is that voters evaluated Lincoln based on the substance of the war rather than any perception of his attention span. That is, his reelection looked to be in doubt in 1863 largely because the war wasn't going well, but he won in large part because Sherman took Atlanta in the summer of 1864, tipping the war in the Union's favor. Lincoln's rhetoric, impressive though it was, probably did little to sway voters at the time it was uttered.

Thought for the day

If Kaddafi's ouster leads to plummeting oil prices, and that leads to an improved American economy, Obama will owe his election to a group of Muslim militants, which is what the right has been alleging for years anyway.

You think the Bush tax cuts are temporary? A play in one act

Scene: Third presidential debate, October 2012. In the most recent tracking polls, Obama leads the Republican nominee by only two points.

GOP nominee: "Mr. President, are you going to raise the American people's taxes this December? Or can you promise all of us right now that you will extend the Bush tax cuts?"
Obama: "Homina homina homina..."

Well, what do you think he says?

Election 2012: Time to sweat the small stuff

John Sides looks at recent economic growth numbers and polling trends and concludes that "Barack Obama is on the cusp of becoming the underdog in the 2012 election." He's right, although I'll offer a few caveats. First of all, polling done more than a year before an election just doesn't have much predictive value, so I wouldn't place a whole lot of stock in that right now. Second, while the economic growth figures look really bad, Obama will, for the most part, be evaluated on the economic growth that occurs between now and the fall of 2012. That is, Obama will be held responsible for an economy that doesn't yet exist.

What will that economy look like? Well, the forecasts for growth aren't that great, and most of the forecasts we've had over the past few years have turned out to be too optimistic. And the outcome of the debt ceiling crisis will likely be at best neutral for economic growth and quite possibly negative.

All this means that the economy will probably not slip back into a recession in the next year, but economic growth will be anemic. That is, the economy may be slightly better than the one that Jimmy Carter faced during his reelection effort, but not by a whole lot. We could be looking at 1 or 2 percent annual growth.

What does this mean for Obama? Let's look at a scatterplot, shall we?

The horizontal axis above measures growth in real disposable income from the 3rd quarter of the year prior to the election to the 3rd quarter of the election year. (We're currently in the 3rd quarter of the year prior to an election.) For example, real disposable income grew by 1.8 percent prior to the 2004 election, in which George W. Bush received the narrowest reelection margin for a president in U.S. history. So it's possible for an incumbent to win during a time of mediocre economic growth, but the odds aren't great. Incumbents win 2/3rds of the time when they stand for reelection, but in the data shown above, of the six elections where RDI growth was below 2 percent, the incumbent party only won two of those. The record is 2-2 when a sitting president is up for reelection under those circumstances.

Loyal readers of this blog will note that I'm generally unimpressed with the ability of campaigns or candidate personality traits to affect election outcomes. It's not that they have no effect, just that that effect is usually paltry compared to the effects of the economy and wars. But if the economy leads us to predict a 50-50 shot for Obama next year, then smaller effects become all the more important. The ability of Obama's reelection campaign to communicate with potential voters like it did in 2008 could be pivotal, as could the identity of the Republican nominee.

Brinksmanship and the debt ceiling

One point I wouldn't mind hearing more of from the media in their coverage of debt ceiling negotiations: It is very, very hard to know who is "winning" and who is "losing" at any given point during a negotiation. In fact, those terms really aren't very meaningful until we know what the final agreement is. For example, I've heard some Democrats complain that Obama is getting rolled or that he's not "winning the argument," but it's really not clear what that means. If 60% of the American people primarily blamed Bush for the size of the debt, would that mean that Democrats had won the argument? 70% 100% And whatever that percentage is, does it have any bearing on the outcome of the negotiations?

Similarly, I'm pretty sure that John Boehner didn't want to reveal or exacerbate splits between business leaders and Tea Party activists within the GOP when he decided to go the brinksmanship route on the debt ceiling increase. But there's a tendency to treat that as a loss for Republicans, even though we have no idea whether it will impact the final agreement.

"Go ahead, blow it back to God."

Most of what we have right now are nothing more than tea leaves, offering small bits of insight as to just how serious each side is and whether or not it has the votes to get what it wants. My personal impression of Boehner is that he's kind of like Indiana Jones pointing a bazooka at the Ark of the Covenant; he's serious, and he really doesn't want the other people to control the Ark, but he's not actually willing to blow it up. But Eric Cantor just might be, and even if he's not, he just might have enough people in the GOP caucus who don't see a downside to blowing it up and can't tell when their leaders are bluffing. That's a precarious situation for negotiations. But again, these are just impressions.

The key point here is that no one knows who is winning or losing this thing. Horse race descriptions, while useful in campaigns, just really don't apply here.