Category Archives: More

Super Tuesday Preview: He’s Back! (I Think)

Jon Bernstein, who produces thoughtful political analysis at his PlainBlog website, and I are usually in agreement, but Jon takes issue with a number of recent posts I’ve made about the nomination campaign. Rather than waste your time defending my points – you’ve already read what I have to say – I suggest that you take a glance at Jon’s post. If he objects to something, it’s usually for good reason.   Perhaps confirming Jon’s criticisms, I should also note that Politico, the online politics website, in excerpting my piece yesterday on why the results in Georgia are more important than Ohio’s, describes me as a “Presidency Scholar” – in quotation marks (as in “alleged”)!

By now, most of you understand that I sometimes play the role of a provocateur, especially when I think conventional wisdom needs some pushback. Of course, it’s often with tongue firmly in cheek.  But don’t let a bit of humor distract you from my underlying point. It is in that role of provocateur that I write these words:

He’s back.

Newt Gingrich, I mean.  While pundits have been focusing on the Santorum-Romney faceoff, particularly in Ohio, Newt – if polling can be believed – has quietly pulled himself into contention in Tennessee and, possibly in Oklahoma as well.  He may even steal a delegate or two in Ohio, to go with a likely huge delegate haul in Georgia, the biggest ticket of them all tomorrow.  The bottom line?  It is possible that he will bring home more delegates than Santorum when all the Super Tuesday voting concludes.  This despite a media narrative that has, again, all but written the Newtster off.

Just so there’s no confusion here – Romney is poised to bring home a plurality – perhaps even a majority – of the 400-plus delegates at stake tomorrow. He will easily win Vermont (only he and Ron Paul are even advertising here) and Massachusetts. Only he and Paul are on the ballot in Virginia.  I suspect he’ll clean up in the Idaho caucuses, with their strong Mormon component.  I’ve got no clue what will happen in the North Dakota caucus, or in Alaska. (There was a Ron Paul sighting there I think). But in the four major contested states – Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, Newt will give Mitt a run for his money.

I talked yesterday about Georgia.  The latest CNN poll there has Newt at 47% – within shouting distance of 50%.  That suggests he may reach 50% in at least some of the 14 congressional districts, meaning he takes all three delegates in each district in which he wins a majority, thus shutting the other two out.  At the same time, polls indicate Santorum has dipped below the 20% threshold required to qualify for any of 31 at-large delegates.  Remember, this is where Newt benefits from the 21 bonus delegates Georgia has earned – they are allocated statewide.

In Tennessee, meanwhile, two recent polls have Newt within 1-4% of the lead.  Just five days ago he was .polling at about 20% – now he’s pushing 30%, if the polls are to be believed. Remember, Tennessee has a very strong evangelical base comprising roughly 60% of likely Republican voters – a group Mitt has not done well with. So although Romney is polling about even with Santorum there, his support may be soft.  And if Santorum begins slipping, as he has done in Ohio and Georgia, Newt may be poised to sneak in a second victory tomorrow.  It’s still a longshot, particularly since Rick may have banked a lead based on early voting, but less of one than it appeared to be even five days ago.  But even if Newt finishes second, or a close third, he will pick up some of the 28 at-large state delegates and, possibly, a handful of the 27 congressional district delegates. In sort, I expect that he and Rick will probably run pretty even in the Tennessee delegate race with Santorum having perhaps a slight advantage.

Then there’s Oklahoma, with its 40 delegates (25 at large and 15 allocated by congressional districts).  The key here is to break the 15% threshold in order to qualify for either statewide or district-based delegates.  The last poll that I’ve seen was from four days ago, and had Santorum up with 37%, followed by Romney at 26% and Gingrich at 22%. I have no idea if the Newt surge that is happening in Tennessee and Georgia is also taking place here.  But even if these figures don’t change, Newt will pick up some delegates here too although probably not as many as Santorum or Romney.

That leaves Ohio, the second largest delegate haul of the day. Here we have plenty of polling and it consistently places Newt a distant third.  Although the media focus has been on the Romney-Santorum duel, there is some evidence that Gingrich may have gained a couple of percentage points here in the last four days. It’s still a longshot but if he reaches 20% he qualifies for some of the 15 at-large delegates here, although it seems unlikely he’s going to win any district- level delegates.  So Ohio will go a long way to offset Newt’s delegate advantage in Georgia. Keep in mind, however, that Santorum didn’t file a full slate of Ohio delegates, so he is going to fall below what his popular vote suggests he should get.

Of course, the situation is quite fluid, polling data is uncertain and anyone who says they know what the final delegate totals will be is lying.  But I think based on my back of the envelope calculation that Newt could actually beat Rick in the delegate haul tomorrow.  Assuming Newt does, what is the significance, if any?  At the risk of provoking my colleagues again, I think it means that Newt goes on.  At the very least, it means Newt receives a burst of positive media coverage, possibly an infusion of cash and added motivation to stay in the race, which moves onto terrain presumably more favorable to him a week later with primaries in Alabama and Mississippi with a combined 90 delegates at stake. That won’t change my belief that Mitt remains the odds-on favorite to win this.  But what I believe doesn’t matter – it’s what the candidates think that does. A week ago some thought Super Tuesday would end Newt’s candidacy.  Now it may actually prolong it.

More tomorrow.

On President’s Day We Salute the Guardian of the Presidency

As I have done every President’s Day since I began this blog in the late 1950’s, I post my traditional column commemorating the late, great Richard E. Neustadt.  Until his death in 2003 at the age of 84, Neustadt was the nation’s foremost presidency scholar.  In his almost six decades of public service and in academia, Neustadt advised presidents of both parties and their aides, and distilled these experiences in the form of several influential books on presidential leadership and decisionmaking.  Perhaps his biggest influence, however, came from the scores of students (including Al Gore) he mentored at Columbia and Harvard, many of whom went on to careers in public service.  Others (like me!) opted for academia where they schooled subsequent generations of students in Neustadt’s teachings, (and sometimes wrote blogs on the side.)

Interestingly, Neustadt came to academia through a circuitous route that, unfortunately, is rarely used today. After a brief stint in FDR’s Office of Price Administration, followed by a tour in the military, he returned to government as a mid-level career bureaucrat in President Harry Truman’s Bureau of the Budget (BoB) in 1946, gradually working his way up the ranks until he was brought into Truman’s White House in 1950 as a junior level political aide.  While working in the BoB, Neustadt took time to complete his doctoral dissertation at Harvard (working from Washington), which analyzed the development of the president’s legislative program.  When Truman decided not to run for reelection in 1952, Neustadt faced a career crossroads. With the doctorate in hand, he decided to try his hand at academia.

When he began working his way through the presidency literature to prepare to teach, however, he was struck by just how little these scholarly works had in common with his own experiences under Truman.  They described the presidency in terms of its formal powers, as laid out in the Constitution and subsequent statute.  To Neustadt, these formal powers – while not inconsequential – told only part of the story.  To fully understand what made presidents more or less effective, one had to dig deeper to uncover the sources of the president’s power. With this motivation, he set down to write Presidential Power, which was first published in 1960 and went on to become the best selling scholarly study of the presidency ever written. Now in its 4th edition, it continues to be assigned in college classrooms around the world (the Portuguese language edition came out four years ago). Neustadt’s argument in Presidential Power is distinctive and I certainly can’t do justice to it here.  But his essential point is that because presidents share power with other actors in the American political system, they can rarely get things done through command or unilateral action. Instead, they need to persuade others that what the President wants done is what they should want done as well, but for their own political and personal interests.  At the most fundamental level that means presidents must bargain. The most effective presidents, then, are those who understand the sources of their bargaining power, and take steps to nurture those sources.  It is a simple point, but one that is often overlooked by presidents and their strongest supporters who in the heady days after election often overestimate just how much power a president has.

At its core, Presidential Power is a handbook for presidents (and their advisers). It teaches them how to gain, nurture and exercise power. Others have picked up on his themes, but none have distilled the essence of presidential leadership quite so well. The reason why Neustadt’s book retains its power, I have come increasingly to believe, is because Neustadt was, at heart, a government bureaucrat more than an academic.  Beyond the subject matter,  what makes his analysis so fascinating and compelling are the illustrations he brings to bear, many drawn from his own personal experiences as an adviser to presidents. Interestingly, the book might have languished on bookstore shelves if not for a fortuitous event: after his election to the presidency in 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked Neustadt to write transition memos to help prepare him for office. More importantly for the sale of Neustadt’s book, however, the president-elect was photographed on an airport tarmac with a copy of Presidential Power clearly visible in his jacket pocket.  Believe me, nothing boosts the sale of a book on the presidency more than a picture of the President reading that book!  (Which reminds me: if you need lessons about leading during an economic depression, President Obama, I’d recommend this book. Don’t forget to get photographed while reading it!)

Neustadt was subsequently asked to join Kennedy’s White House staff but – with two growing children whom had already endured his absences in his previous White House stint under Truman  – he opted instead to stay in academia.  He went on to help establish Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote several more award-winning books, and continued to advise formally or informally every president through Clinton.  After the death of Bert, his first wife, he married Shirley Williams, one of the founders of Britain’s Social Democrats Party (and now a Baroness in the House of Lords), which provided still another perspective on executive politics.  He also continued churning out graduate students (I was the last doctoral student whose dissertation committee Neustadt chaired at Harvard.). When I went back to Harvard in 1993 as an assistant professor, my education continued; I lured Neustadt out of retirement to co-teach a graduate seminar on the presidency – an experience that deepened my understanding of the office and taught me to appreciate good scotch.  It was the last course Neustadt taught in Harvard’s Government Department, but he remained active in public life even after retiring from teaching.  One of his last advising roles involved traveling to Brazil to advise that country’s newly-elected president Lula da Silva. In my last conversation with him, a few weeks before his death, he was his usual generous self, providing me equal parts career advice, scotch and a mini-lesson on the history of presidential war powers and their relevance to the Bush presidency.

And so sometime today take time to hoist a glass of your favorite beverage in honor of Richard E. Neustadt, our own Guardian of the Presidency. If you are interested in learning more about him, there’s a wonderful (really!)  book available on Amazon.com edited by Neustadt’s daughter and that blogger guy from Middlebury College (see here). It contains contributions from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Al Gore, Ernie May, Graham Allison, Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harrison Wellford, Harvey Fineberg, Jonathan Alter, Chuck Jones, Eric Redman, Beth Neustadt and yours truly.

Here’s to you,  Dick!

 

What Do “We, The People” Really Believe About the Contraceptive Debate?

Judging by a quick scan of this morning’s political talks shows, the controversy regarding religious-based exemptions from requirements to pay for contraceptives remains a hot topic.  Much of the talk by the various pundits centered on whether the Republican candidates’ stance against forcing religious-based organizations like hospitals to pay for contraception will cost them the votes of women and independents.   Critics of the Republican candidates’ stance, citing multiple polls, argue that Rick Santorum and others running for the Republican nomination who oppose the Obama administration policy are out of touch with mainstream public opinion which overwhelmingly favors requiring private insurance plans to cover birth control.  That view is captured in Margie Omero’s scathing rebuke in this HuffingtonPost column of the Republican position.  Citing this recent New York Times poll, Omero points out that the only group that opposes the Obama regulations is Republican men.  Among Republican women, and among all independents and Democrats, however, substantial pluralities support the requirement.

Her conclusion? “If Republicans think it is politically advantageous to mock women, shut them out of the political process, and deny access to care that 99 percent of them use, then they are in even worse shape headed into November than we thought.”

Omero and others who criticize Republican candidates’ position on this issue certainly can cite polling data that seems to support their claims.  Here, for example, is the Times survey question and responses on which Omero based her HuffingtonPost column and accompanying graph (she was also able to get the crosstabs for this question):

75. And what about for religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university – do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that their health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees?

Support Oppose DK/NA
61% 31% 8%

By almost 2-1, then, those with an opinion favor requiring religious-based organizations to cover the full cost of birth control.   With polling data like this, the Republicans candidates seem to be on the losing side of this issue.

But are they?  Consider the following results from this Pew poll out in the field at about the same time as the Times survey:

Q.67 Should religiously-affiliated institutions that object to the use of contraceptives be given an exemption from this rule, or should they be required to cover contraceptives like other employers?

Total Respondents Including Those Who Have Heard Nothing About This Issue Only Those Who Have Heard “A Lot” or “A Little” About the Issue  
30% 48% Should Be Given An Exemption
27% 44% Should Be Required to Cover
2% 3% Other
3% 5% Don’t Know/Refused to Answer
38%   Heard Nothing/Don’t Know/Refuse

To begin, a plurality of those surveyed haven’t even heard of the issues.  Of those who have, according to Pew, slim pluralities support granting the religious exemption.  Probing further, Pew finds support for religious exemptions much higher among Republicans, with independents about evenly split on the issue.  Only Democrats strongly oppose religious exemptions.

Not surprisingly, views are more strongly polarized among the more partisan members of each party who have heard more about this issue; moderates and independents are much less likely than strong partisans to be familiar with the debate. Interestingly, younger respondents are also much less likely to have heard about the controversy.   As with the Times‘ poll, Pew does find a gender-based difference in the responses.

Based on the Pew survey, then – and in contrast to Omero’s assertion – it makes perfect political sense for Republican candidates trying to appeal to Republican voters during the nominating process to take a strong stand against the Obama policy.  And, if the Pew results are to be believed,this stance may even prove less costly during the general election than Omero and other critics suggest, particularly since – as the NY Times poll indicates – most voters are more concerned with economic than social issues.  By the time November rolls around it’s not likely that this issue will even matter to most voters.  In the short run, however, it is a likely winner for Republican candidates to oppose the contraception mandate.

Of course, this still doesn’t explain the seeming discrepancy between the Times and the Pew survey results.  Why do they present such different snapshots of public opinion on this issue?  The answer, I think, lies in the way the two polling outfits couch their questions.  To begin, the Times prefaces its question regarding whether one supports religious exemptions with this survey question:

74. Do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients?

Support Oppose Don’t Know/No Answer
66% 26% 8%

Note in this  first question on the issue, there’s no mention of religious-based exemptions.  This serves the purpose of priming a respondent when they decide how to answer the next question that introduces the religious exemption; having already stated an opinion regarding where they stand on the basic issue, I suspect it makes many respondents less likely to want to appear to reverse themselves when almost the identical question is asked next.  The Pew survey, in contrast, does not prime respondents in this manner.

Note also that the surveys use slightly different question wording.  The Times gives specific examples of religious-based organizations: hospitals and universities.  Pew refers only to religious institutions, without providing examples.  Most people don’t think of hospitals and universities as primarily religious institutions which may make survey respondents more likely to support requirements that these institutions pay for birth control. Note as well that Pew focuses on exemptions for religious organizations, while the Times’ question centers on compliance with federal regulations – a slightly different emphasis.

My point here is not to indicate a preference for one survey question wording as opposed to the other.  Nor is it to tell you what the public really thinks.  It is instead to remind you that what pundits often cite as evidence of what “the public” is thinking is frequently determined by surveys whose responses are very sensitive to issues of question wording.   This is particularly true of surveys addressing deeply divisive issues and which use words that often have deep-rooted symbolic and often emotionally-charged meanings. Given this, one should be skeptical of any argument that draws on only one poll to divine what “the public” believes when it comes to highly divisive issues.  Instead, one should consult multiple polls that may use slightly different question wording to fully understand the often shifting, inconclusive and not always well-informed views of “We, the People”.

Of Pundits, Pimples, Presidents and Policies: The Real Lessons of the Contraception Debate

In his memoir Present at the Creation, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote: “One fact is clear to anyone with experience in government: the springs of policy bubble up, they do not trickle down.” I was reminded of Acheson’s comment when reading the pundits’ often misleading analyses of the contraception controversy that President Obama found himself enmeshed in this past week.  As most of you know, the President initially embraced an administrative rule issued by the Health and Human Services (HHS) department that required employers – including religious-back organizations such as charities, hospitals, and schools – to offer health insurance that fully covered contraception, even if the use of contraception ran contrary to church doctrine.  Obama did so only after listening to extended debate among his own advisers regarding whether to accept or modify the HHS rule.  In the end he sided with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and domestic advisers Valerie Jarrett and Melody Barnes in backing the rule, against the opposition of Vice President Joe Biden and chief of staff Bill Daley and others who sought to broaden the religious exemptions.  (Barnes and Daley have since left the administration).

With hindsight, it was the wrong decision, one that was opposed not just by religious organizations, but by many Democrats serving in Congress as well by left-leaning pundits who are normally the President’s strongest supporters. The subsequent political furor not only overshadowed the President’s effort to focus public attention on the strengthening economy; it also threatened his health care mandate and, potentially, his reelection.   To his credit, the President quickly realized his mistake and pushed his advisers to craft a fallback compromise under which insurance companies, rather than the religious-affiliated institutions, would handle and pay for contraceptive coverage. While this compromise has not entirely quelled the political fires, it does place the administration on stronger political footing.

How did the President find himself in this predicament?  Some, like blogger Andrew Sullivan, are arguing that Obama’s fallback was a clever “bait and switch” maneuver designed to trap the Republican Right into overreaching by appearing to oppose a women’s right to contraception.  Indeed Sullivan says this type of policy retreat is one of the hallmarks of Obama’s presidency: “I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.”

Sullivan is correct on one point: this was an elaborate trap all right. But it was one set by Obama’s own HHS-led advisers, and at the President’s expense. In suggesting Obama was pulling the policy strings all along, Sullivan falls prey to a common conceit: that presidents are in charge of the executive branch and the policies it produces are the ones he actively solicits.  Alas, as Acheson – a veteran of more than two decades working in the executive branch – understood, the policy process rarely allows the president to engage in the type of “deep game” that Sullivan fantasizes this president has mastered. Instead, the process is more often one in which the president comes in at the tail end, and is forced to choose from a limited menu of options that often carry high risks no matter what he decides. But decide he must – albeit with incomplete information and based on the advice of senior officials who have their own interests at stake in the outcome.  So it was with the contraceptive debacle.

In this case, Sebelius and HHS had first issued a preliminary rule laying out the initial contraceptive insurance policy last August. When an executive branch issues a potential rule or regulation, it is posted in the Federal Register for a comment period.   During this period interested parties can weigh in on the merits of the interim rule.  By most news accounts, Obama’s advisers were deeply divided regarding whether to go ahead with the new regulation. Ultimately Sebelius and her allies won out, but only after pushing the deadline for the rule to go into affect (at least as it affected religious organizations) to after the 2012 presidential election.   When that decision was publicly embraced by the White House, the political firestorm ensued, necessitating Obama’s hasty retreat to the current fallback position.

The President’s tactical retreat will almost certainly not end the controversy, as both sides struggle to reframe the debate in ways that appeal to their political base; for Republicans, this is a question of maintaining a separation of church and state. For Democrats, it is a matter of women’s right to have access to affordable contraception.  Polls indicate, not surprisingly, that the public is divided on the issue, and along predictable lines, although the extent of the division depends in part on how the polling question is worded.  I don’t pretend to know how the debate will play out, but as long as it remains in the public eye, it detracts from other issues on which the President would likely prefer to focus.

For my purposes here, however, the politics of the matter is less important than how the media pundits have sought to portray the debate.  This is not the first time that Obama’s supporters have discerned a deeper purpose in his political maneuvering; many of you will recall that the President was supposedly engaged in a similar chess match with checkers-playing Republicans during the debt default debate, when he was apparently setting the Republicans up for his master stroke: invoking the 14th amendment.  This was nonsense, of course – a point I made at the time more than once. But, judging by Sullivan’s comments, that outcome has not stopped some of his supporters from imputing greater power to the President than he actually possesses; from their besotted perspective, every presidential pimple becomes a beauty mark, and every stumble is a feint designed to mislead a dimwitted opponent.   Alas, sometimes a pimple is an eyesore, and a stumble nothing more. Pretending otherwise, and thus raising expectations regarding what Obama can hope to accomplish to unreasonable heights, does him no favors.  Expectations are hard enough to manage without attributing powers of foresight to the President that he does not possess.

There is a second lesson in the contraceptive debate, one I’ve cited in previous posts. It is this: Presidents are no more in charge of the rulemaking process, or of the executive branch more generally, than they are of legislating in Congress.  Contrary to the claims of some of my colleagues that presidents have a vast reservoir of “unilateral” powers, when it comes to rulemaking and many other administrative procedures with significant policy consequences, presidents often find themselves forced to bargain even within their “own” executive branch – and with their own political appointees.  The reason, of course, is that by virtue of their own constitutional and statutory obligations, a President’s executive branch appointees rarely see policy, and the related rules and regulations, from the President’s vantage point.  More than three years into his presidency, it is a lesson Obama seems not yet to have learned.

Looking Back to Nevada, Ahead to Tomorrow, and Why the Patriots Lost

In a process that lasted longer than the Super Bowl pregame festivities, the Nevada Republican Party finally concluded vote counting and and posted the final caucus results.   As expected, Romney gained a slight boost, to 50%, when the final Clark County results were totaled,  but this changed nothing substantively except to bring his vote total exactly in line with my pre-caucus predictions.  Gingrich remains second with 21% to Paul 19%, and Santorum finishes dead last at 10%. The end of vote counting also meant that the final turnout figures were established, and they were even worse than expected, with only 32,930 caucus participants, far less than the 44,000 from four years ago.  Once again, Romney victory was tainted by underwhelming turnout.

Interestingly, despite his last place finish, Rick Santorum is enjoying something of a comeback in the estimation of some pundits by virtue of expectations that he will do well tomorrow in Missouri’s non-binding primary, and in Colorado’s and Minnesota’s caucuses.  A  PublicPolicyPolling (PPP) poll has Santorum neck-and-neck with Romney in Minnesota, and only 8% behind Romney in Colorado.  In Missouri, at least one poll Santorum in the lead.  (Keep in mind, however, that Gingrich is not on the ballot there.)   Santorum is hoping that a strong performance in all three contests will vault him ahead of Gingrich into the “not-Mitt” alternative slot.

It’s possible, I suppose, but I’m not yet persuaded that Rick is the new Newt.  He will likely best Newt in both caucuses tomorrow,  but I don’t think the margins will be large enough to suggest that the end is near for Newt, who is banking on remaining in the race until SuperTuesday, when he expects to do well across the southern tier of states.

Of greater interest to me is the fate of Ron Paul’s campaign.  He was banking on rolling up delegates in the caucus states, but he had a lackluster showing in Nevada, and so far he is not polling well in either Colorado or Minnesota.  He may finish a distant second to Mitt in Maine, which concludes its caucus voting next Saturday. Unlike with Gingrich, there’s no obvious place where Paul is going to threaten to win outright, at least in the immediate future.

I’ll be on tomorrow with a preview of the caucus races.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this incisive analysis by Giselle Bunchden regarding why the Patriots lost yesterday:

“You (have) to catch the ball when you’re supposed to catch the ball,” she snapped back, according to CBS New York. “My husband cannot (bleeping) throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can’t believe they dropped the ball so many times.”

There’s really nothing to add to that.

ADDENDUM: Apparently the full post did not show for some time tonight – my apologies.  I blame the wonders of the internets.