Monthly Archives: July 2012

Beating the Drum On Bain

Kevin Drum, who writes for the left-leaning Mother Jones, had a testy response to the edited version of my comments published in the American Prospect today. Normally I don’t pay much attention to partisan blogs, but Drum’s post has so many inaccuracies that it presents a real teaching moment. Even Drum might learn something. (Ok, I’m joking there.)

First, in Drum’s defense, he’s responding to the edited version of the comments I sent to Jamelle Bouie late last night that were published today in Bouie’s blog post at the American Prospect. As I noted in my earlier post today, readers of Bouie’s article may come away with a slightly misleading impression of what I said to him in those comments. That appears to be the case with Drum – he is responding to the excerpts Bouie published, and not my full post here. Still, it is worth quoting him in full if for no other reason to illustrate how partisan pundits think. After quoting my excerpt in Bouie’s piece, Drum explodes (in an article titled “Today’s Adventures in Pseudo Profundity”!): “Why do people say stuff like this? Of course the electorate is highly polarized. Of course 70% of voters have already made up their minds. So what? Campaign ads aren’t aimed at these people. They’re aimed at the small segment of the population that’s persuadable, just like every advertisement for every product in history. That’s not even Political Science 101. It’s more like junior high school level stuff.

Please, let’s all stop spouting this nonsense as if it were something profound. It’s not. All mass advertising is mostly wasted because the vast majority of the audience has no interest in the product for one reason or another. But some of the audience does. That’s the target. The fact that the target is far, far less than 100% of the viewers is news to no one.”

Let’s start with the most obvious error, and go from there. First, despite Drum’s assertion, it is NOT obvious that the electorate is highly polarized. In fact, all the evidence suggests just the opposite – the electorate is not highly polarized at all. I’ve covered the data on this before, so I trust I need not go into it again. The idea that Americans are deeply divided, of course, is a recurring meme from partisan bloggers, so Drum’s mistake puts him in good company. But it’s a mistake nonetheless. The truth is that most Americans do not share Drum’s extreme partisan leanings – or that of those occupying the extreme right wing either.

Second, Drum would have us believe that the 30% or so of voters yet to make up their minds are “persuadable” via, presumably, campaign ads such as the ones the Obama campaign are running about Bain. (Note that contrary to Drum’s impression, my comments to Bouie re: the 70% referred to the impact of Bain as an issue, broadly defined, not to a specific campaign ad, but never mind.) Alas, there’s not much evidence that this is true either. While a small proportion of voters may be genuinely undecided, most of the remaining 30% lean in one partisan direction or the other and that lean will likely determine how they vote – and how they react to the Bain controversy (if they bother to pay attention to it this early in the campaign). And for those who are truly persuadable, it’s almost certainly the case that the state of the economy, as captured in broad-gauged measures such as unemployment and GDP growth, will be more influential than the debate over Mitt’s tenure at Bain.

Third, Drum overstates the impact of any single campaign advertisement. The reality is that the impact of campaign ads is rather short-lived, and that in the high-information environment characteristic of presidential campaigns, when voters will be saturated with advertisements from both sides, no single advertisement is likely to carry the day. The impact of the Bain controversy will almost certainly be drowned out by the barrage of events and related campaign advertising to come.

My point here is not to disparage Drum’s partisan leanings. He clearly thinks electing Mitt would be bad for the country, and he could be right. But that’s no excuse for exaggerating the likely influence of the Bain controversy, or for simply misstating some pretty fundamental political facts. Let me be clear. I’m sympathetic to Drum’s plight – the guy he wants to win is facing stiff headwinds in the form of a stubbornly weak economy. Given this weak fundamental, it’s clear that Drum wants – desperately wants – to believe that the Bain controversy is going to be a turning point in this campaign. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Alas, the historical evidence suggests this isn’t likely to be the case no matter how much Drum and his fellow partisans cite each other as evidence that the Bain controversy is, in fact, a turning point. It just isn’t.

Sorry, Kevin. Bain’s not going to swing this election to Obama. But let’s focus on the positive: you are ready for junior high!

The Bain of Mitt’s Campaign?

If you are an active follower of twitter feeds, political blogs and the Sunday talk shows, you could be excused for thinking the presidential election, for all intents and purposes, ended this weekend, with revelations regarding Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. According to the pundits, the disclosure that Romney’s name remained on Bain documents for several years after he allegedly cut all ties with the company in 1999 to run the U.S. Olympic hosting effort has apparently boxed Mitt in, politically speaking. He’s either lying when he says he severed all ties with Bain in 1999, in which case he is culpable for what Bain did in later years, including contributing to the outsourcing of U.S. jobs, or he misrepresented his true status in legal filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and was a figurehead to boot. In either case, it is not good news for the Mittster. To top it off, the Obama campaign immediately launched the following ad, which various pundits have described as the “most devastating ad” of the campaign season.

[youtube /watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ud3mMj0AZZk]

If the pundits are to be believed, then, the cumulative effect of this weekend’s feeding frenzy is that Mitt has been Swiftboated, but without the falsehoods, as Atlantic columnist and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallow puts it. The Bain disclosures have effectively turned Romney’s purported strengths – his business acumen – into his Achilles Heel, just as the Swiftboat ads turned Kerry’s war service into a liability.

Fallows is right: the Bain disclosures are likely to have the same impact on this race as did the Swiftboat ads in 2004. That is to say – they will have almost no impact at all. This is the point I made to Jamelle Bouille in his piece today for the left-leaning American Prospect. I want to amplify my remarks to Jamelle, in part to clarify one of his statements which some might read as reflecting my thinking. In the American Prospect piece, Jamelle writes: “The important thing to remember is the electorate is highly polarized, and most voters have already made their choice. Dickinson explains, ‘Keep in mind that 70 percent or so of voters have already made up their mind regarding who they will support, and most people, including independents, aren’t paying much attention to this story anyway.’”

Note that I do NOT believe the electorate is highly polarized, at least not in an ideological sense. In a race in which voters have but two choices, of course, they are going to appear to be polarized. But, to paraphrase Morris Fiorina’s observation in his very useful book Culture Wars?, we should not mistake a closely divided electorate for a deeply divided one. Most Americans situate themselves somewhere closer to the center-right of the ideological spectrum, and have for some time.

My larger point, however, is that there’s no reason to believe that the Bain disclosures are going to change the retrospective nature of this election which will largely be a referendum on the incumbent President. That is, for most voters whose mind is not made up, the key issue come November will be how they evaluate President Obama’s handling of the economy. This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, one that – this week’s media firestorm notwithstanding – will dwarf debate over Romney’s did-he or didn’t-he still run Bain question? Put another way, our forecast models won’t be much more accurate by including a variable that measures public reaction to the Bain controversy. In contrast, a change in GDP quarterly growth of 1% or more is likely to be very consequential.

Part of the reason pundits overstate Bain’s significance is that they operate in a media echo chamber in which the impact of a very small number of highly partisan voices is amplified by the rise of social networks. Media pundits convince themselves that because they think something is important – and it must be because all the Twitter feeds are discussing it – the general public must think it is important as well. Alas, almost four months before the election, most people are not as infatuated with this inside baseball talk as the pundits might think. As I wrote to Jamelle, “This is one of these classic media echo stories where the combination of twitter feeds, Sunday talk shows, and partisan blogs all convince each other that they have just witnessed a game changing moment, without bothering to realize that they are all referencing each other. By definition, this makes it a news event – but not one that matters very much in the long run. This may have a short-term impact on polls, but at this point polls are best interpreted as people responding in terms of who is getting the best of the news coverage – not in terms of who they are likely to vote for. In the end, the election will still turn on the fundamentals that always drive election outcomes – and the biggest one will be the state of the economy.”

But what about that “devastating” ad? Hasn’t Romney been Swiftboated? Again, in the retelling, the Swiftboat ads have morphed into a game-changing event that cost Kerry almost certain election (just as the Willie Horton ad undercut Michael Dukakis’ chances in 1988!) The reality is that Kerry actually outperformed our forecast models, doing better in the 2004 election than most political scientists predicted based on the fundamentals alone. (Try this thought experiment. Did you see the Swiftboat ad? If so, did it make you change your vote? I didn’t think so.) A look at national polls during the time the Swift Boat ads ran, moreover, suggests that the ads – by themselves – had minimal effect on Kerry’s national support. (It is possible that they were more influential in key swing states, but I don’t have polling data to address this issue.) More generally, we don’t find much support indicating that campaign ads have long-lasting persuasive effects, particularly in a high-information campaign in which both candidates are going to saturate the air waves with hundreds of campaign messages. The singing Romney ad, thankfully, won’t be the last thing we see on this topic from either side.

The bottom line is that how most voters respond to the Bain controversy will be determined by their pre-existing partisan attachments and ideological predispositions. It isn’t likely to have nearly the persuasive impact that pundits fervently wish it will. Now, in a very close election – and all indications are that this election will be close – pundits can point to almost any event, issue, campaign ad or other fact as THE deciding influence on the outcome. If Romney loses by half a percentage point come November, political wags will undoubtedly cite this weekend and Bain as the point at which it all unraveled. Even then, however, I would argue that when it comes to explaining the final vote, the marginal impact of the voters’ perceptions regarding the economy will be much bigger than attitudes toward Bain.

Does Bain matter at all, then? I think Bouille comes closer to the truth when he writes, “The attack on Bain Capital—and in particular, the perception that Romney is hiding something—could serve to cement negative perceptions of the candidate [Italics added]. It’s not that voters will necessarily understand the substance of the Bain Capital attacks, but they will begin to perceive Romney as an unscrupulous banker who evades responsibility and abuses the rules—a picture that reminds voters of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and fits well with the rhetoric used by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.” In short, if voters’ are looking for a reason to vote their predisposition to support Obama and oppose Romney, Bain provides plenty of fodder. But it’s not going to persuade very many Romney supporters to change their vote and back the President. And it’s not likely to be the major reason why undecided voters rally to one candidate or the other. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to the pundits this weekend.

I’m Living the High Life (On The Lite Side)

Look, I admit it. After a hard day of blogging, I like to take out the pool chair, turn on the transistor to catch Joe and Dave describing the Red Sox game, and pop the tab on a refreshing Miller Lite. Sure, my choice of beverage might offend some of my colleagues, with their fancy degrees and their pinky-raised Chablis-sipping ways. But I’m all right with that. And do you know why?

Because Miller Lite tastes great.

And it’s less filling.

And nothing makes an intellectually-weighty tome like The Obamas go down easier on a hot summer day.

Miller Lite. The drink of non-partisan presidency scholars living in Vermont (when the weather is hot).

(P.S. If you are an Anheuser- Busch company representative, and you are looking for a low-cost way to advertise your product, I can’t think of a better way to spread your brand name than by sponsoring a non-partisan political blog. Just a thought.)

What Kantor’s The Obamas Really Reveals About The Obama Presidency

For my summer reading, I’m about half-way through Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, her best-selling inside look at Michelle and Barack’s life in the White House. (Full disclosure: I was asked to review the book for a political science journal, or I never would have looked at it. And by summer reading, I mean a book I can read while floating in the pool drinking Miller Lite.) Some of you might recall that when the book was first published this past January, critics – including the First Lady – jumped on Kantor for, among other alleged vices, characterizing Michelle Obama as “an angry black woman” (the First Lady’s words – not Kantor’s) who repeatedly clashed with the President’s senior West Wing aides. (Note that the First Lady apparently did not read the book.) Others claimed that The Obamas was filled with factual errors but, for the most part, these turned out not to be errors at all. It is true that the book suffers from the flaws one often finds when journalists write about politics: it focuses on personalities as the primary explanation for political outcomes, tends to overdramatize and to find significance in often random events, and purports to reveal the thought processes of the First Lady and the President despite the fact that Kantor never interviewed either for the book.

But when Kantor sticks to doing what journalists do best – reporting rather than interpreting – the book is actually quite good. In particular, it reinforces a couple of points that long-time readers have heard me make before. The first is that presidential campaigns do little to prepare a president to govern, and in many respects they may make governing more difficult. In this vein, Kantor recounts a meeting between Obama and a group of law professors and civil libertarians early in Obama’s first year as president, when it was becoming clear that he had overestimated the ease with which he could close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Kantor writes, “He had made that promise before administration officials read the classified files on the detainees….” and goes on to note that many of the detainees were greater security threats than he realized. Ultimately, of course, Obama came to the same conclusion that Bush had: there was no other place to put most of the detainees, and so Guantanamo remains open as the least worst option available for holding suspected terrorists.

As I’ve noted many times, it should not be news that Obama’s anti-terrorist policies hew closely to Bush’s – they are dealing with the same set of problems under the same set of political incentives. It was no surprise to me, therefore, that “on a host of related matters such as releasing photos depicting detainee abuse, the administration seemed to be echoing Bush’s policies or adopting them with slight revisions (Kantor, p. 106.)” Not surprisingly, Obama’s policies did not sit well with his strongest supporters on the Left. (For that matter, they didn’t always sit well with critics on the Right, such as Dick Cheney, either.) In a classic acknowledgement of what it means to be president, Obama told the group: “When I was a senator running for office, I talked very firmly about what I thought was right based on the information I had. Now I’m the President of all the people, and the decisions I make have to be from that perspective based on the information I now have (Kantor, pp. 106-07.)” To drive that point home, Obama told those in the meeting that he was considering an indefinite detention policy, “allowing authorities to hold certain suspects without charges.” This was a far different policy than what candidate Obama had espoused, and not surprisingly those in the White House meeting were outraged. But despite that outrage, Obama has not only built on the Bush-era precedents in the War on Terror – he has sometimes gone beyond them as with his use of drone strikes.

The second revealing vignette occurs during the Gulf oil spill, which dragged on for months while the Obama administration waited with everyone else for BP engineers to plug the leak. Under pressure to show that he was doing something, Obama finally relented and gave a prime-time address from the Oval Office to describe the steps that were being taken to plug the leak. The setting of the speech was intended to demonstrate that Obama took the spill seriously, but as his aides conceded, the speech was “a wasted bullet”; “Oval Office addresses were supposed to make presidents look powerful, but the truth about the spill was that there was ultimately a limited amount Obama can do.”

These glimpses into the limits of presidential power are far more revealing about the Obama presidency, I think, than are the more highly publicized aspects of Kantor’s book, such as the segments dealing with Michelle’s fashion choices, her unwillingness to campaign during the 2010 midterms, the “secret” Halloween Party, or Obama’s alleged “women” problem within this White House staff. What Kantor’s intimate glimpse shows, once again, is that our expectations for what presidents can hope to accomplish far outstrips the capacity of the office to deliver. The presidency, simply put, is not very powerful. Even in those areas, like foreign policy, where we assume presidents wield the most power, they in fact find their choices deeply constrained by operating in a system of shared powers, but also by the unyielding pressure to do whatever it takes to protect the nation from attack. It may be that Candidate Obama was perhaps more naive about and thus less prepared for this reality than were many previous presidents. But he was not the only one who failed to anticipate just how limited his powers would be. All the evidence suggests that his strongest supporters overestimated the power of the presidency as well – and that many continue to do so. The question remains whether Obama will pay a price come November 2012 for their continued naiveté.

Women On The Highest Court: We’ve Come A Long Way

Amy Davidson’s recent New Yorker piece characterizing Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the real “hero” of Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold Obamacare got me thinking about the relatively brief history of the role of women on the Supreme Court and how we now take their presence for granted. Davidson argues that for all the attention Chief Justice Roberts received for his Solomon-like decision, it was Ginsburg who, by the force of her dissent, may have persuaded Roberts to turn against his own natural ideological inclination and think instead about what impact overturning Obamacare might have on the Court’s influence. As Davidson concludes, “There was talk, after the decision, that Roberts had ‘saved’ the President and ‘rescued’ the court’s liberals, and one can reckon it that way. Again, at this point we don’t know what decided his vote. But must we assume that Roberts was the one who came to the aid of judicial damsels in distress and their trusty squire, Stephen Breyer? Or did he find himself eyeball to eyeball with the senior woman on the court, and blink? Maybe Ginsburg is the one who saved Roberts.”

Ginsburg was joined in her dissent to Roberts’ reading of the interstate commerce clause by the other two women on the Court Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotamayor, although Kagan joined with the conservatives and Stephen Breyer in striking down the Medicaid expansion portion of Obamacare. These three women frequently vote together as part of the liberal voting bloc, but as Davidson notes, Ginsburg “is the leader of the liberal wing” – although it is likely that she won’t be leading it much longer.

Nominated by President Bill Clinton, Ginsburg joined the Court in 1993, becoming only the second woman to serve, after Sandra Day O’Connor (and the first Jewish female justice.) At age 79, however, Ginsburg is in poor health and will likely step down sometime during the next presidential term. If she does, it will be interesting to see whether there is political pressure to replace her with another woman. If so, it will be a sign of just how far views toward women serving on the Court have evolved.

For many years, of course, O’Connor – who was nominated to the Court by Ronald Reagan in 1981 – was the sole female Justice until Ginsburg joined her. However, another Republican president, Richard Nixon, came close to nominating a women a decade before Reagan did. In 1971, Nixon, who had already appointed two Supreme Court justices, Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, had the opportunity to appoint two more due to the resignations of Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan. As political scientist Kevin J. McMahon tells the story in his well-researched book Nixon’s Court, Nixon seriously considered filling one of the Court vacancies with a woman. He did so, McMahon makes clear, despite privately disparaging their fit for public service. Nonetheless, Nixon – looking ahead to the 1972 election – thought it made sense politically. As he told an aide, “Hell, I’m against it myself, but it’s got to be done.” Nixon reasoned that it would not cost him votes, and it might gain him support, particularly among women. However, McMahon notes that Nixon’s desire to appoint a woman was virulently opposed by a surprising source: Chief Justice Warren Burger. Indeed, Burger threatened to resign if Nixon placed a woman on the Court, but Nixon was undeterred, going so far as to release a list of six potential nominees that included two women, one of whom – Judge Mildred Loree Lillie of the California Court of Appeals in Los Angeles – was at the top of his list for one of the vacancies. In addition to being a Democrat and a conservative, McMahon notes that Lillie had two additional selling points: she was Catholic and she was married to another Catholic who was also Italian. Both qualities were potentially valuable electorally at a time when Nixon was working hard to attract the support of lower-income ethnic voters that had traditionally supported Democrats. Unfortunately, as McMahon documents, when Lillie’s name was released, there was an outpouring of opposition that focused primarily on what critics considered her mediocre legal record. (However, the New York Times did compliment Lillie on her “bathing suit figure.” McMahon finds no word on how the men under consideration looked in their swim trunks.) Ultimately, and partly as a reaction to his two previous failed nominations, Nixon opted instead to take the safe route and appoint William Rehnquist to the Court. (He did joke that it would help if Rehnquist opted for a sex change.)

It would be left to Reagan to break the gender barrier by appointing O’Connor, thus fulfilling one of his campaign promises. Despite criticisms from Republicans and conservatives that she was insufficiently conservative, O’Connor was confirmed by the Senate by a 99-0 vote.

Here she is being sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger.

What do you think he is thinking?

From persona non grata to “hero” of the Court. We’ve come a long way in 40 years.