Category Archives: Commentary

Sunday Shorts: Hillary’s Money, Midterm Turnout and Illegal Immigration

It’s Sunday, and that means time for some short takes on trending stories:

In this earlier post I argued, tongue only partly in cheek, that Hillary Clinton may not be rich enough to be a great president. As I pointed out, our greatest presidents as rated by historians are, beginning with George Washington, often extraordinarily wealthy. Indeed, wealth seems to be a predictor of greatness! Despite this, I noted a spate of media stories of late suggesting that Hillary’s wealth may somehow prove to be a stumbling block for the presidency. Not surprisingly, given this narrative, Republican Party operatives have established a website designed to make Clinton’s wealth a campaign issue.

That Republicans are using Clinton’s wealth against her does not surprise Democratic pundit Paul Waldman. However, that the media seem to embrace the same logic does surprise him. As he writes in this Washington Post opinion piece, “But what may be even more remarkable is that so many in the press go right along with this stupidity… There’s a hidden assumption in some of this coverage that candidates should be nothing more than advocates for their class. If you’re rich, then you can’t sincerely care about the well-being of people who aren’t, and anything other than advocacy on behalf of other rich people is odd, even suspect.” The irony here, of course, is that Waldman’s Democratic colleagues used precisely this logic to attack Mitt Romney’s candidacy during the 2012 campaign.

Meanwhile, in an otherwise illuminating discussion of the reasons why midterm election turnout is typically much lower than that for a presidential election campaign, Pew Research Center author Drew DeSilver posted this graph based on research by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist:

As you can see, turnout out for congressional midterm elections was actually higher than for presidential elections during the period 1789-1824, which runs contrary to the norm for most of our nation’s history.  What explains this apparent anomaly?  DeSilver’s answer: “History break: As McDonald’s chart shows, in the early decades of the republic, midterm elections typically drew more voters than presidential contests. Back then, most states only gave voting rights to property owners, and Congress — not the presidency — tended to be the federal government’s main power center and focus of electoral campaigns.” What DeSilver’s explanation does not say, however, is that for the first several presidential elections, many states did not choose electors through the popular vote. In 1792, for example, George Washington won reelection, but only 6 of the 15 states chose electors based on some form of popular input.  It is no wonder, then, that turnout for congressional elections was higher – many people simply did not have the opportunity to vote for the president (or, more properly, for the electors who chose the president). Indeed, it was only after most states began using the popular vote as a means of choosing electors, along with a decline in property-based voting requirements, that popular participation in presidential elections began increasing. That increase in participation provided presidents, beginning with Andrew Jackson in 1828, with an independent base of power and rescued the office from a dangerous dependency on Congress.

Peter Rothschild brought the following Security Weekly article on immigration by Scott Stewart to my attention. You might think, given the extraordinary media attention to the immigration issue, most recently in reaction to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to post the National Guard at his state’s border with Mexico, that we are facing a record influx of illegal immigrants. Think again. Stewart writes, “Lost in all the media hype over this ‘border crisis’ is the fact that in 2013 overall immigration was down significantly from historical levels. According to U.S. Border Patrol apprehension statistics, there were only 420,789 apprehensions in 2013 compared to 1,160,395 in 2004. In fact, from fiscal 1976 to 2010, apprehensions never dropped below 500,000. During that same period, the Border Patrol averaged 1,083,495 apprehensions per year compared to just 420,789 last year.”

Of course, as Stewart acknowledges, apprehensions may not be the best indicator of the rate of illegal border crossings. Still, the data seems to belie the media narrative that the country is enduring an illegal immigration crisis. But it is easy to lose sight of this with the media focus on the apparent increase in undocumented children crossing the border. That story has far greater media legs than does one focusing on the fact that “the Border Patrol will apprehend and process hundreds of thousands fewer people this year than it did each fiscal year from 1976 until 2010.”

Finally, we are scheduled to begin occasional “simulposting” with the Christian Science Monitor sometime this coming week. If past experience is any clue (see the comments to this post on the debt ceiling crisis!), the more visible platform is likely to mean more comments from readers who often have strongly-held views. That’s fine – I always enjoy the comments from readers from both sides of the political aisle and try to respond to all of them. I also exercise a very light touch on the censor button – as long as the comments are civil, I don’t care how passionate the language or what political views are expressed, although it is worth reminding everyone that my response to a comment doesn’t necessarily imply agreement (or disagreement) with that comment.  This is a non-partisan blog – it says so right in the title! I learn a lot from readers, and my hope is that we can continue this dialogue in the months to come.

Have a great Sunday!

No, the Presidency Has NOT Become More Difficult

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote an interesting column two days ago under the headline “It’s Virtually Impossible to be a Successful Modern President.” Cillizza begins his piece like this: “Being president is the most powerful job in the world. At which you will almost certainly fail.”

Both those statements are wrong, of course. As I and other presidency scholars have written repeatedly, the presidency is not a very powerful office and it is certainly not the most powerful job in the world.  Indeed, even among elected chief executives in modern democracies, the presidency is one of the weaker offices. The primary reason, of course, is because the Framers wanted it that way, as indicated by their decision to embed the presidency within a constitutional system of shared powers. That’s why presidents cannot dismiss Congress, call for new elections, or even count on the support of a legislative majority to pass legislation – all expectations that many prime ministers in other nations possess. And, with the ratification of the 22nd amendment, presidents lucky enough to win reelection serve most of their second term as defacto lame ducks. As Brendan Nyhan notes in his column today, however, this weakness has not stopped individuals from exaggerating the president’s potential degree of control over events.

But what of Cillizza’s second claim? In part, both Cillizza and Ronald Brownstein, whose article here provides some of the evidence on which Cillizza bases his claim, rest much of their case about presidential weakness on the belief that America is an increasingly divided nation. As I’ve argued elsewhere,  however, the evidence that Americans are polarizing along ideological lines is weak – most of what analysts claim to be a growing ideological divide is more accurately described as party sorting. In short, there’s not much support for the claim that modern presidents are dealing with a more ideologically polarized public.

The more empirically valid charge is that modern presidents must deal with a very polarized Congress – the most partisan  polarized Congress since the 19th century. Both Cillizza and Brownstein argue that it is very difficult for presidents to get legislation passed through a Congress that is so deeply polarized along partisan lines. But the link between partisan polarization and legislative productivity is more complex than this simple narrative would have one believe. Nelson Polsby, in his classic work How Congress Evolves, describes how a cross-partisan conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans stymied the passage of liberal legislation from 1937 until the mid-1960’s. More generally, building on Polsby’s observation, studies show that too little polarization in Congress is as counterproductive to legislative productivity as is too much. This is because under conditions of limited partisan polarization, we often see great divisions within parties (see Polsby’s description of the Democrats during the era of the conservative coalition), and little difference across them – exactly the conditions that James MacGregor Burns complained about in his classic study of American political gridlock in the early 1960’s.  Evidence shows that legislative productivity under these conditions of weak polarization is as limited as under the deep polarization in Congress presidents confront today.

Moreover, there is other evidence one can cite that undercuts the premise of Cillizza’s and Brownstein’s argument. For instance, we might think that if the presidency was so much more difficult, presidents would find it harder to win reelection. However, our three most recent presidents – Clinton, G. W. Bush and Obama – all successfully won reelection. In contrast, three of their four immediate predecessors: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and G. W. Bush, did not. Moreover, Lyndon Johnson did not pursue a second full term in 1968 because of political opposition and declining support, and Nixon resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment, making Ronald Reagan the only one of those six previous presidents to serve two full terms. No wonder scholars complained of a “tethered” presidency at the start of Reagan’s first term!

Finally, consider the severity of the issues facing recent presidents. Yes, 9-11 ushered in the Age of Terrorism, and all the difficulty that entails for presidents’ efforts to fulfill their commander-in-chief functions. But the consequences of making a mistake in the fight against terrorism, while enormous, are arguably not any greater – and probably less significant – than what the post-World War II presidents confronted during the height of the Cold War. It is for this reason that Neustadt, in the final edition of his classic work which was issued as the Cold War came to a close, cautions against looking back on those years with rose-colored glasses. He writes, “From the multicentered, interdependent world now coming into being, environmentally endangered as it is, Presidents [and pundits!] may look back on the Cold War as an era of stability, authority and glamour. They may yearn for the simplicity they see in retrospect, and also for the solace. Too bad.” Although acknowledging that governing in this new age has its own set of difficulties, Neustadt reminds us that there are compensations for outliving the Cold War: “[T]he personal responsibility attached to nuclear weapons should become less burdensome for Presidents themselves, while contemplation of their mere humanity becomes less haunting for the rest of us. To me that seems a fair exchange.”

To me too. Yes, the presidency is difficult. But there’s little evidence that it is harder today than in previous presidencies during the post-World War II modern era.  Indeed, one might argue that the job has become slightly easier, although I doubt that is any solace to Barack Obama.

P.S. This post attracted its fair share of readers, so I’ll follow up with some additional discussion focused on recent evaluations by pundits of Obama’s presidency.  If you are interested in getting notifications of new presidential power posts, I post notices on twitter at: https://twitter.com/MattDickinson44

Or contact me at dickinso@middlebury.edu and I’ll put you on the anonymous distribution list.

UPDATE: Jonathan Bernstein weights in on the issue here: http://bv.ms/1xbKij5

Will Open Primaries Reduce Polarization?

The New York Times printed this op ed by New York Senator Chuck Schumer yesterday, in which Schumer made the familiar claim that to reduce partisan polarization, we should open up party primaries to all voters, regardless of partisan affiliation. In particular, he cites with approval adopting a version of the “top-two primary system” in which “all voters, regardless of party registration, can vote and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, then enter a runoff.” That’s the system adopted in 2010 in California, in time for this summer’s nominating process there.

Schumer’s impulse is understandable – in theory, by opening primaries, you allow independents and more moderate voters to participate in the nominating process, thus increasing the odds that more moderate candidates will be nominated to run in the general election. In contrast, under closed primaries dominated by party purists, logic suggests the tendency is to nominate the more ideologically extreme candidate, leaving moderate voters to choose from two extreme candidates in the general election. As Schumer puts it, “The partisan primary system, which favors more ideologically pure candidates, has contributed to the election of more extreme officeholders and increased political polarization. It has become a menace to governing.”

While well intentioned, however, the problem with Schumer’s proposal is that there is little evidence suggesting open primaries will reduce polarization. Consider recent results in California. As former Middlebury College student Jaime Fuller noted in this Washington Post piece, the early evidence from the California experiment with the top two system are not encouraging for Schumer’s argument. She writes, “If you look at last month’s results, however, there aren’t many congressional races you can point to where moderates made the final round — even in those seven races where two members of the same party made the runoff.”

More generally political scientists have not found much evidence that tinkering with the primary voting rules has much impact on the level of polarization in legislatures (see here and here and  here). There seems to be three reasons why open primaries don’t seem, by themselves, to produce more moderate candidates. First, it remains the case that more extreme voters tend to participate in greater proportions even in open primaries. As I’ve noted many times before, political activism and more extreme views go hand-in-hand. Second, as Seth Masket points out, party activists, who tend to be more ideologically extreme, still control a variety of means, including endorsements, money and campaign expertise, which they can use to help their favored candidates get a leg up in the selection process. Third, it appears that in the California top-two election process, voters were not always able to distinguish the more ideologically moderate candidate running under a party label.

This does not mean the California experiment is a failure – it has only been in place for one and half election cycles, and it may yet produce a more moderate candidate field as voters, and candidates adjust to the new system. But for now, contrary to Schumer’s claim, open primaries do not seem to be the remedy, by themselves, to the hyper-partisanship afflicting our political system.

Schumer also cites a second factor that he believes has increased polarization: gerrymandering – the drawing of House district lines in ways that that enhance the reelection prospects of certain candidates. Again, however, the empirical evidence, which I’ve discussed previously, does not support Schumer’s claim.

If open primaries and “neutrally”-drawn districts are not going to reduce polarization, then what will? For reforms to work, they need to increase the participation of the more moderate voters in the nominating process. This Bipartisan Policy Study contains a number of recommendations for doing so. Among the electoral reforms, it suggests a common national primary day for all congressional nominating races and easing registration requirements and strengthening outreach to make it more likely that the less politically engaged will vote in primaries. Eliminating caucuses as a means of nominating candidates would also help. Even here, however, without additional institutional reforms, it is unclear just how much these incremental changes will reduce the level of partisan polarization in Congress. But without additional reforms like these,  open primaries aren’t likely to do the trick, contrary to what Schumer might believe.

UPDATE 7.23.14: Jonathan Bernstein takes on the Schumer proposal in this Bloomberg column and comes to the same conclusion: open primaries will not reduce polarization.

 

 

The Malaysian Shootdown: What Would Reagan Have Done?

Last Thursday’s apparently deliberate shoot down of a Malaysian civilian airliner by Ukrainian separatists using Russian weaponry inevitably brought back memories of the Soviet’s shooting down of Korean Airlines 007 in August, 1983. And, not surprisingly, conservative and liberal pundits have drawn different lessons from President Reagan’s response to that earlier tragedy. Conservatives have cited with approval the national address Reagan made in which he condemned the attack as a moral outrage, and have openly wondered why President Obama has not made a similar speech to a national audience. Liberals, in contrast, have focused on Reagan’s initial reluctance to leave his California ranch when first notified of the KAL shootdown, a decision that attracted a fair share of media criticism at the time. Ultimately, Reagan did come back to Washington to give a nationwide address.

Both perspectives, I think, miss the important lesson from Reagan’s handling of the KAL007 incident.  Before developing that point, however, it’s worth listening to Reagan’s speech.

It appears that President Obama will shortly provide his own brief statement regarding the Malaysian Airlines tragedy. I’ll be on with comments and some context regarding the KAL007 comparison shortly after.

11:30 a.m. President Obama has just completed his brief statement re: the Malaysian airline shootdown.  His primary message was to push Russian leader Vladimir Putin to cooperate in the investigation of the Malaysian jetliner tragedy. Beyond that, however, he offered very little in the way of concrete steps, although it is likely additional punitive options, such as stronger sanctions, are being debated.  In short, the statement was vintage President Obama – cautious, pragmatic, devoid of rhetorical excesses and designed to buy time while keeping public pressure on Putin.  As such it almost surely will be condemned by conservative pundits as more talk, with little action.  It bears remembering, however, that Reagan received similar pushback from conservatives for not acting more strongly in the aftermath of the KAL007 shootdown in 1983.  That incident occurred during a period of heightened tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union – tension that had been exacerbated in part by Reagan’s previous words.  In June, 1982, Reagan gave a speech to British members of Parliament, in which he proclaimed that the “Soviet Union…runs against the tide of human history.”  The following March, in a speech to evangelicals, he famously called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.”  Also that month he unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars”, against the backdrop of a rapid increase in U.S. defense spending.  In October, after the KAL007 incident, Reagan sent troops into the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow the Cuban-backed government there.  The next month West Germany agreed to accept U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles, prompting the Soviets to walk out of arms control talks in Geneva.

In retrospect, the KAL007 shootdown marked the low point of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Reagan presidency. By the end of 1983, even Reagan was acknowledging the necessity to dial back the harsh rhetoric, in order not to further inflame an already tense situation.  That deescalation was helped when Soviet leader Yuri Andropov died in February, 1984, and was replaced with Konstantin Chernenko.  Although Chernenko lived for little more than a year after assuming power, he recognized that the Soviets were in no position to win an arms race with the U.S. and, shortly after Reagan’s reelection in 1984, the Soviets agreed to restart arms negotiations without preconditions.  Chernenko’s softening position laid the foundation for his successor’s Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost at home and more conciliatory, albeit still contentious, relations with Reagan and the U.S.

At this time, of course, it is impossible to tell whether the Malaysian shootdown represents a turning point in U.S.-Russian relations, and if so, whether that means a resumption of a Cold War-like standoff or a realization from both sides that it is time to step back from the brink and engage in more constructive diplomacy.  And that uncertainty is exactly my point. There is a tendency for pundits, with the benefit of hindsight, to simplify their read of history in ways that accord with their own ideological preferences.  Whether liberal or conservative, however, the “lessons” pundits derive often overstate the degree to which presidents felt free to act at the time these incidents are occurring.  While Reagan’s nationwide address did evoke a moral clarity, and on a more visible platform, that perhaps was a bit less evident in Obama’s just-concluded statement, Reagan’s actual response to the KAL007 shootdown stopped short of actions that might escalate an already tense situation. In part, this reflected Reagan’s uncertainty over Andropov’s motives, or even the circumstances behind the shootdown.  It also reflected the limited range of possible responses available to Reagan, many of which had the potential to exacerbate an already tense situation.

When we get beyond the pundits’ take on the KAL007 shootdown, it appears that Reagan’s response then isn’t much different than Obama’s reaction to the Malaysian jetliner incident, at least to this point.  And it is a reminder that the powers of the presidency seem much more limited, and the repercussions of acting rashly much more consequential, when you are sitting in the Oval Office than when you are critiquing the president’s actions from afar.  This is not to say that history will judge Obama’s foreign policy, taken as a whole, as better, or worse than Reagan’s.  But in contrast to what pundits are currently suggesting, that comparison is not likely to turn on Reagan and Obama’s respective handling of these two tragic shootdowns which, so far, seem remarkably similar.

The President Is Dead. Long Live the President.

It’s Saturday – time for another trip to the presidential archives.  To understand the significance of today’s archival document, you need first to look at the document’s date: November 23, 1963. It is, of course, the day after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The memorandum from Kermit Gordon, the Bureau of the Budget director, to the new President is a reminder that even as the nation struggled to cope with this enormous tragedy, the wheels of government continued to turn despite the suddenness of the transition in power. (The BoB is the forerunner of today’s Office of Management and Budget). In the memo, Gordon tries to accomplish two objectives. First, he assures Johnson of his, and the BoB’s fealty to the new administration. In the very first section, Gordon describes the BoB’s central mission as follows, “The BoB is a staff agency to the President which, by tradition and in fact, has no constituency other than the Presidency and no obligations which complicate its allegiance to the President.” I think Gordon’s interchanging the words President and Presidency is significant – it shows his understanding that the BoB is in service to the Presidency as an institution as much as it is to the President as an individual politician. (Elsewhere Andy Rudalevige and I have written about the BoB’s commitment to protecting the interests of the presidency as an institution.

Gordon then moves to the topic of immediate interest: putting together the 1965 budget. He writes, “Despite the fact that the time is late, I know that you will want to make this budget your budget” (underscore in the original memo) before laying out the schedule of key dates in the budget process. Here’s the document, which came from Gordon’s file contained at the JFK Library.

 nov23, 1963

The document is an extraordinary testament to the ability of officials at the highest levels of government to continue to carry out their basic responsibilities, such as putting together the annual budget. But at the same time, these officials recognized that there was a new President, who had his own priorities. Shortly after this memo was drafted, Gordon sent in this memorandum offering his resignation. The letter begins, “Believing that a new President should have and exercise the widest freedom in the selection of the members of his official family….” and ends with Gordon’s offer to resign.

gordon resignation

Johnson did not accept the resignation and Gordon stayed on through 1965, helping LBJ craft his Great Society budgets. After his resignation Gordon became the President of the Brookings Institution where he used the think tank as a platform for both defending LBJ’s Great Society but also as a means for criticizing the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Johnson would effectively capitalize on the need for continuity by citing JFK’s legacy as a reason to push through his Great Society program – but also to continue, and escalate, the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

[youtube.com/watch?v=WKVhodv9zpE]

The President is dead. Long Live the President.