"Just fix it"

Alyssa Milano, via Twitter:

Hey, Republicans AND Democrats. Liberals, moderates AND conservatives. All of you. Stop the bullshit and just fix it.

Here's why we can't "just fix it." There are different ways of fixing it. You could raise taxes. You could cut spending. If you want to raise taxes, you could do it on upper income Americans, or on lower income Americans, or some combination. If you want to cut spending, you could cut the military, social programs, or some combination. There is no one way to fix it. And it turns out that people who want to fix things a certain way tend to group together in parties and elect people to Congress who agree with them. So Congress is filled with people who feel very strongly about doing things a certain way, and others feel very strongly about doing it another way, and their careers depend on them making good on their commitments to the people who elected them. That makes it very hard to quickly reach an agreement. This is the essence of democratic representation. Dictators could fix things much more quickly, but there's no guarantee they'd do it better. Most likely, they'd do it worse.

I don't mean to pick on Alyssa Milano -- she's from my home town, after all -- but she's uttering a commonly held sentiment that needs, in my opinion, to be addressed.

A link and a nod

• Has this whole debt crisis been a huge sting operation to get Obama to commit an impeachable offense?
• All you need to know about the debt ceiling crisis in one magazine cover.
• Alex Pareene: "If everyone who takes Thomas Friedman seriously did start their own third party, we at least would no longer have to worry about anyone who takes Thomas Friedman seriously getting elected to public office."
• Decisions made under tight deadlines are not always of the highest quality. Go figure.
• Sean Theriault says that Congress is doing exactly what it was elected to do.
• Holy crap: "The economy actually shrank at a 8.9 percent annual rate the fourth quarter of 2008 and 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009." However, economic growth turned positive the moment the stimulus kicked in, notes Brad Plumer.
• The trillion dollar platinum coin could solve all of our problems.
• Turns out we've all been playing Monopoly wrong.
• An informative and catchy rap about political parties.
• Looking for a recent thriller? "Source Code" > "Unknown"

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.

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.

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.

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.