Helpful teaching links

If you're teaching about the presidency, you'll love these. First is the Washington Post's POTUS Tracker. It displays the president's daily schedule in convenient graphical form, so you can see how much attention he devotes to which issues and which members of his administration. Biggest surprise: Malia and Sasha get more face time than Rahm or Pelosi. I guess sometimes family comes first.

I also wanted to recommend Seth Hill's graph of American military fatalities. Biggest surprises: the lethality of the Korean War and the weirdly symmetrical curve of Vietnam fatalities.

Do the parties do things differently?

I've got not one, but two co-authored papers I'm presenting at the upcoming conference of the American Political Science Association on the subject of differences between the two parties. I don't think this topic gets enough airing in political science. We generally treat the parties as equals -- Democrats in the majority act pretty much the same way Republicans in the majority act. There's a lot of truth to this, and it's a welcome corrective to the popular press on the subject which treats the Democrats as spineless and the Republicans as evil, or something like that. But there actually are some important differences.

Jo Freeman spelled some of these differences out nicely in a 1986 PSQ piece. To wit:

The Democratic party is pluralistic and polycentric. It has multiple power centers that compete for membership support in order to make demands on, as well as determine, the leaders. The Republicans have a unitary party in which great deference is paid to the leadership, activists are expected to be “good soldiers,” and competing loyalties are frowned upon.

We found some recent evidence backing this up. In a paper I did with Richard Skinner and David Dulio, we examined the personnel files of the 100 largest 527 organizations to discover where else all those employees have worked. The links between all these organizations chart out different patterns across the two parties. The Republican network appears more hierarchical than the Democratic one.

Michael Heaney, Joanne Miller, Dara Strolovitch, and I found something similar in our study of delegates to last summer's presidential nominating conventions. We asked all the delegates to name the interest groups they belonged to. Democrats were much more likely to belong to an interest group. They also belonged to a much wider range of interest groups. Check out this graph, which shows how many delegates reported belonging to the top 11 interest groups in each party:

A bunch of Republicans belonged to just one group (the National Federation of Republican Women, as it turns out), with memberships dropping off quickly after that. Democrats are all over the place. Below is the networky depiction. The red groups are those which claimed membership solely by Republican delegates. The blue ones held only Democratic delegates. There are a few "bipartisan" groups, but their memberships are pretty one-sided. The key thing, though, is that the Republicans appear much more hierarchical; the Democrats have a much more horizontal structure of competing interest groups.

Update: Link fixed.

Why are seniors opposing health reform?

I've seen this mentioned in numerous places. It looks like the older you are, the less likely you are to favor some sort of health reform. Note Andrew Gelman's nice graph:

The usual interpretation is that it has something to do with interests. Seniors already have government-funded health care and they are distrustful of the idea of extending it to others, thinking it will happen at their expense. But I think there's a much simpler answer: older people are more conservative than younger people:

Sure, partisanship has something to do with interest, but it's far from the whole story. And I'm more likely to believe that people favor or oppose a bill because of their partisan predispositions than because of the policy substance of the legislation.

Update: Ah, it appears Ezra Klein and I park our cars in the same garage:

Seniors are also the most conservative segment of the population and are getting more so. They constitute not only the sole age group that Obama lost in last year's election, but also the sole age group in which his results were worse than those of John Kerry in 2004. And both Obama and Kerry underperformed Al Gore's 2000 results.

"The Roosevelt seniors are being replaced by the Reagan seniors," says Paul Begala, who helped run Clinton's 1992 campaign. A May poll by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time in 20 years, the GOP is now an older party than the Democrats.

[...]

But taken as a whole, the attitudes seniors express on health care are arguably the greatest vote of confidence anyone has offered reform. Seniors live in America's version of Canada. They have single-payer health care. And they love it. They love it so much that they've got the chairman of the RNC swearing to protect it.

2009-40=?

Memo to Tom Hayden: People are more likely to believe the scientific claims in your article if you don't make colossal mathematical errors in the opening paragraphs.

I sat in the White House Cabinet room as the president and his advisers formulated their official plan to garner half of America's energy from solar and conservation by 2020. At the table were union officials pleased at a White House report that showed an enormous number of jobs would be created for welders, plumbers, sheet metal workers, electrical engineers, carpenters and architects.

That meeting took place 40 years ago.

The president was Jimmy Carter. His 1978 Council on Environmental Quality had concluded that "it is now possible to speak realistically of the United States becoming a solar society."

Great description

Will Wilkinson (via Matt Yglesias):

Men are either unlovable whining sad sacks or misogynist assholes who cite a cartoon version of Darwinism to justify treating a woman as little more than an upgrade from Jergens and a sock.

Follow the link for context, but I just loved the phrasing.

Romanoff v. Bennet?

Whoa! Is Andrew Romanoff serious about this, or is he just floating a trial balloon?

This would be a hard one to call. Bennet seemed a lot weaker a few months ago. He's still not terribly well known, but among Democrats who pay attention to state politics (i.e.: the ones who will be voting in the primary), he's managed to thread the needle, maintaining a relatively moderate voting record while signaling somewhat leftish tendencies (public option) to the activists. He's also managed to get a lot of the Democrats' major donors to back him.

That said, it's my impression that there are a lot of active Dems who feel that Bennet hasn't been there in the trenches with them over the years, while Romanoff has. And a lot of those folks still think Gov. Ritter screwed Romanoff when he didn't appoint him to the Senate. I'm guessing that a sizable chunk of the folks who have donated to Bennet would switch over to Romanoff if he signaled that he's serious about this.

It's an interesting choice by Romanoff. My guess is that Ritter is actually more vulnerable next year than Bennet is. But going after Ritter actually would split the party, while there just aren't that many loyal Bennet people out there, at least not yet.

Teddy

Today, for the first time in my life, there is no Edward M. Kennedy in the United States Senate. Others have eulogized him today far better than I can, but I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts.

The first time I saw Sen. Kennedy in person was in the fall of 1988 at an Oakland church, where he was speaking on behalf of Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign. He was an enjoyable and energetic speaker, but my main memory of the event is a seemingly deranged man moving aside a velvet rope and making a run for Kennedy on the dais. He was quickly grabbed by security and taken outside, and Kennedy laughed it off. But it scared the hell out of me. I remember thinking just how dangerous it was to be a politician, and one named Kennedy in particular.

The last time I saw him was one year ago today, when he gave his passionate address in support of Barack Obama on the opening day of the Democratic National Convention. Here's a picture I took:

A final note: a distant cousin of mine just unearthed a letter that Kennedy sent to my grandparents, who apparently had donated to Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign. I'm posting it below. Note that it includes a personal signature. I tried searching for the donation but couldn't find any record of it, suggesting that my grandparents gave less than $200 to the campaign. That such a modest donation would have earned a personal signature is a real testament to Kennedy's style.