Haggadah!

Better late than never.  Here's my 2010 quickie haggadah (PDF), now with more kiddie activities and lots of copyrighted material used without permission.  Enjoy!

Federal mandates

Is the new health care act really the first time in history the federal government has mandated that Americans purchase a commercial product?

George Washington would disagree.  He did sign the Militia Act of 1792, after all:

I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.... [E]very citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder.

(h/t Phil Gussin)

Primaries and Partisanship

John Sides has a few posts recently (here and here) in which he cites research by Eric McGhee at the Public Policy Institute of California on the effect of primary systems on the partisanship of elected officials. (Disclosure: Eric and I are working on a conference paper together on this topic.)  His findings suggest that the effect of moving from a closed to an open primary is surprisingly modest.  He further notes that during California's brief experiment with the blanket primary, politicians were no less polarized and the budget was still passed late.

Here's another way to look at this issue.  In the graph below, I've plotted Jerry Wright's data on legislative partisanship in each of the state legislatures during the 1999-2000 session along the vertical axis.  The horizontal axis is the type of primary the state was using at the time, going from most to least restrictive.

Now, notably, the states at the far right (Louisiana with its jungle or top-two primary and Nebraska with its nonpartisan elections) are among the least polarized legislatures.  However, the regression line is nonetheless flat.  We'd expect polarization to decrease as primaries become more open to independents -- they don't.  Indeed, many of the states employing the blanket primary at the time prove relatively partisan.  And Wisconsin and Ohio, which then employed open primaries, have among the most polarized legislatures in the country.  Of course, this is a pretty simple bivariate look at this problem, but one would expect to see more of an effect than this.

So what will happen if California adopts Proposition 14, the top-two primary, this spring?  Well, I suppose that depends on just how representative we think Louisiana is.  Does the Cajun State have a relatively moderate legislature because of its primary system, because of its unusual political culture, or because of other odd institutional rules in place there?  Given that it's hard to separate those out, and given that other evidence about primaries and partisanship suggests little relationship between the two, I doubt the initiative would have anything close to the impact its backers suggest.

I'm wondering if anyone has recent data on Washington's state legislature, the members of whom have been elected through a top-two primary since 2006.  Since Washington has been among the more polarized legislatures in recent years, it will be interesting to see if the chamber has been de-polarizing.

Interpreting the Bush hand-wipe

This video of George W. Bush shaking hands with a Haitian and then wiping his hands on Bill Clinton's shirt is making the rounds today:



How do we interpret this act?  It actually reminded me of this moment in 2000, when Bush cleaned his eyeglasses on the sweater of one of David Letterman's employees.  One might interpret it as a sign that Bush is a kick-down type of guy who believes everyone is his servant and is abusive to subordinates.  But that's inconsistent with everything else we know about him.  Regardless of what you think about his presidency, by pretty much all accounts, he seems to be a pretty good boss.  He listens -- even defers -- to his advisors, comes up with chummy nicknames for people, etc.  Very few of his employees have left to talk trash about him personally.

So what kind of a person wipes his hands on Bill Clinton's shirt?  This just goes to my running theory that presidents are necessarily weird people.  The levels of ambition and ego necessary to tolerate the things that need to be tolerated to obtain and hold that job are way off the scale and tend to manifest themselves in some weird way on personality.  With Kennedy and Clinton, it involved infidelity.  With Nixon, it involved near-psychotic paranoia.  With Bush, it's using other people's clothing for towels.  Weird, but there are worse sins.

Pelosi's feat

Seth Hill put together this nice chart showing just how difficult a task Speaker Pelosi faced in keeping the coalition in support of health reform together.  The solid line shows the ideological distance between the House party medians.  The dotted lines mark the distance between the 5th and 95th percentile members of each party in terms of ideology.

What we see, unsurprisingly, is that the distance between the two parties was relatively low from the 80th congress through the 95th (1947-1979), but the two parties have moved further apart from each other since then to historic highs.  At the same time the parties were closer together, they were more divided internally, but they have become more ideologically cohesive since then.

Interestingly, while polarization between the parties is high today, the parties still don't seem nearly as internally coherent as they were at the turn of the 20th century.  So given the state of polarization, there was no reason for Pelosi to expect any Republican support on health care or any other major piece of legislation.  But she also had to hold together a pretty diverse coalition, ranging from Rep. Barbara Lee of California (the most liberal House member) to Rep. Joe Donnelly of Indiana (the most conservative aye vote).  Not an easy task.

Obama's failed bipartisanship?

Peter Beinart in the NYT:

Let’s face it, he’s failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president, the one who can use rationality and calm debate to bridge our traditional divides.... It turns out he’s our third highly polarizing president in a row.

That's so weird.  It's almost like presidents have no power whatsoever to affect partisanship.

It's not that we've had three polarizing presidents in a row.  It's that we live in polarized times.  Sheesh.

On the value of street protest

Markos Moulitsas, on Twitter:

#HCR passage will prove, once again, that street protests are pretty ineffective. It was time for Cons to learn that lesson

I'm not sure they were totally ineffective here.  No, the protests didn't stop health reform from passing, but they did slow it down for a while, and they reinforced total GOP opposition (although that might have happened anyway).

The inevitable comparison is to the civil rights movement.  We often credit protests for helping that movement succeed.  Why can't other groups do that today?

Well, for one thing, most protests we see just don't look like the civil rights movement.  Think of the 1963 march on Washington, which took place on a work day and involved hundreds of thousands of well dressed people all carrying professionally made signs showing just a handful of pre-approved messages.  Think of the Selma march or the lunch counter sit-ins, which involved substantial physical risk for participants.

Today's protests, whether it's tea partiers gathered in opposition to taxation or something or anti-war types opposing the invasion of Iraq, don't have nearly that level of discipline or physical risk.  There's no reason for an observer to admire anything that these protesters are doing.  They're simply getting together and speaking because something is going on that they don't like and they don't want to keep silent about it.  That's certainly fine and understandable, but it's hard to see how that changes minds.