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.

That's no moon... it's a pumpkin

My first attempt at a Death Star Jack-o-Lantern.

Getting money out of politics

A friend posted a Facebook link this morning to a group called Get Money Out, which wants to, quite simply, get all private money out of political campaigns. Now, I would normally quickly dismiss such a group, but this seems like a good opportunity to discuss campaign finance reform and some of the arguments used in its favor.

Campaign finance reform strikes me as a solution in constant search for a problem. It's actually quite hard to identify specific and egregious incidents of bribery that would have been prevented by removing private funding from campaigns. Yes, there are occasional abuses -- Rod Blagojevich selling an Illinois senate seat, Tom DeLay shaking down lobbying firms in exchange for access, Duke Cunningham offering contracts to a military contractor in exchange for a yacht -- but these are exceedingly rare and, more importantly, the abusers were caught and convicted under existing laws. But these are not the problems reformers tend to highlight. Rather, they voice a more general concern that everything "bad" in American politics stems from the private financing of campaigns. Note the opening statement on Get Money Out's website:

Bailouts. War. Unemployment. Our government is bought, and we’re angry.

The insinuation is that if our campaigns were publicly financed, there'd have been no bailouts or war, and that unemployment would be lower. This is pretty ridiculous on its face (who exactly is lobbying for high unemployment, and who in Congress or the White House is keeping unemployment high to satisfy donors?), and one could easily point to countries with publicly-financed campaigns that have nonetheless found themselves with persistent high unemployment and prolonged wars in recent years. Nonetheless, the reformers persist in their quest.

One might ask, what's the harm? That is, maybe driving private money out of elections wouldn't exactly create Heaven on Earth, but maybe it would make politics a bit cleaner and make our officeholders more representative of our needs. Why not try it?

I'm actually working on a book on this very topic right now, but here's the quick answer: campaign finance reform, to a very large extent, simply hasn't worked. That is, every time a government tries to enact a specific contribution or spending limit to reduce the amount of money in elections (FECA, BCRA, you name it), innovative donors and candidates figure out ways around it. You want to give more than the limit to a group of candidates? Fine, just donate to a 527 or some sort of independent expenditure committee that can spend unlimited amounts on behalf of a candidate. Colorado's Four Millionaires showed how this can be done. This is part of the reason that, despite decades of campaign finance reform, the amount spent in campaigns continues to rise, much faster than inflation.

What's more, all this regulation has a price. If you want to know who contributed to the campaign of a president or a senator or a state legislator, it's not as easy to figure it out as it used to be. All these webs of committees that have cropped up to get around campaign finance limits end up obscuring the path of the money. Some of the money comes from individual donors, who can be identified in FEC records, but lots of it comes from groups who only have minimal disclosure requirements, and the donors to those groups may be other groups of people bundled together. Who's backing a candidate? It's almost impossible to tell nowadays.

The end result is that these reforms designed to reduce the role of money in campaigns not only don't end up reducing the role of money in campaigns, but they actually reduce accountability and transparency.

Update: I had missed Matt Yglesias' take on this same topic last month (h/t Andrew Long). He notes that banning all contributions to campaigns tends to make it difficult for anyone to run for office, and wonders just what problem this solves. He also cites Dylan Rattigan's specific proposed constitutional amendment:

No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office [emphasis added].

Beyond the problems noted above, it seems odd to write a rule into the U.S. Constitution proscribing behavior by people who are not Americans. I'd think it would make somewhat more sense if the candidate, rather than the prospective donor, were the subject of the rule.

Reconstituted nuggets

• The economy's problem is lack of demand, not "regulatory uncertainty."
• Susan Schulten explains how the Union got demolished at the Battle of Ball's Bluff for want of a map.
• Frances Lee wrote a nice review of Greg Koger's book on the filibuster.
• Great Jon Stewart coverage of Pat Robertson's claims that GOP presidential candidates's rhetoric is sounding too extreme.
• Interesting screed about Michael Moore. Personally, I'm not a big Moore fan -- I think he's a bully and his films are a mess, but he does highlight some important events (Bush reading "My Pet Goat," the city of Flint dying, etc.) that the media tend to overlook.
• Jonathan Bernstein smacks around Newt Gingrich a bit. I'll give Gingrich a bit more credit than Bernstein does for recruiting quality candidates in 1994, but beyond that, our assessments align.
• Pretty fascinating 1994 exchange between Herman Cain and Bill Clinton about small businesses and health care reform. Both come off well.
• Some excellent back-to-school drinks. I'm a fan of the goldfish corpse reviver.
• The new Peter Gabriel is really good, but I don't get his fascination with Ane Brun, who basically ruins "Don't Give Up."

Different approaches to reporting the news

Screen capture provided by Chris Zorn. Click to enlarge.

Some like it cold

Nate Silver examined the turnout at various Occupy Wall Street rallies during this past Saturday. He notes a couple of reasons why more people might turn out in one city than in another, including racial politics, organizational technology, and city political structures. Here's another idea: temperature. Does cold weather keep people indoors?

To answer this question, I used Silver's rally turnout estimates (Excel file) for the 36 largest rallies and divided them by each city's 2010 population to get a per capita estimate. Then I collected high temperature data for each city on that date. Here's the result:

Quite the opposite from expected: the protesters like cold weather! Of course, the coldest weather for any of these cities that day was in the 50s -- this graph might look quite different if the protests were held a month from now. (In general, I'd advise starting massive outdoor social movements in the spring rather than the fall.)

Also, there's a big heteroskedasticity problem in the data, and there just aren't many cases above 85 degrees. But dammit, I collected that data, and I was going to put the scatterplot up no matter what it said.

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.