Rebranding? No. But Get Ready to Govern

Paul Waldman has a nice post today about GOP "rebranding." He's quite right: ideological shifts, real or perceived, do far less to explain electoral results than basic economic performance and other "retrospective voting" things.

In particular: I think it's very likely that a Democrat would have won in 1992 even if there had been no DLC. And I think that at best Democrats have a very narrow national advantage based on perceived Republican extremism, almost certainly smaller than the presidential vote margin in 2008 and 2012.

However, as I've said before: that doesn't mean that party reform isn't necessary. If it's really true that Republicans have become "post-policy" -- both indifferent to public policy choices in many cases, and incapable (or at least severely challenged) in devising complex policy -- then their ability to govern will be compromised. Indeed, in my view, that's a large part of what went wrong during the George W. Bush years. To begin with, Republicans nominated a president ill-suited for the policy demands of the job without apparently seeing the dangers in that; once he was in office, a Republican Congress too often abdicated its own policy role missed opportunities to nudge the party back on course when policy disasters were looming.

To put it bluntly, I think Democratic success in 1992 and 2008, and Republican success in 1980, was basically an accident -- but Republican failure in 2008, and perhaps Democratic failure in 1980, was no accident at all.

(1980 is tricky. That Carter was a failure of a president was no accident, as Nelson W. Polsby argued in Consequences of Party Reform. But I'd say it's very much open for argument whether the process which produced Carter's nomination was a consequence of a broken Democratic Party or, perhaps, just a fluke of history. Regardless: I see no reason to believe that Walter Mondale in 1984 or Mike Dukakis in 1988 (or Gerald Ford in 1980 or perhaps Bob Dole in 1996) couldn't have governed successfully).

And I think it would have been very difficult for a Republican elected in 2008 or 2012 to govern successfully.

So, I do think that Republicans desperately need to reform. But not in order to win.

Explaining John McCain

Jonathan Chait considers John McCain's career, on the occasion of McCain's recent Tea Party bashing and immigration bipartisanship, and concludes that it's all about national security:

The basic way to understand McCain is that neoconservative foreign policy is his ideological core. Everything else about his ideology can shift radically depending on his ambitions, circumstances, and whom he’s most angry with at any given moment. He favored immigration reform under George W. Bush, abandoned it to refashion himself as a “build the dang fence” border hawk, and, in the wake of last November, embraced it again...

But the foreign policy hawkishness has remained constant. 

Perhaps. I personally subscribe to the other theory: it's a combination of electoral incentives and personal vendettas.

What we need is for a neocon to pick a fight with McCain (to see if he'll go dovish as a reaction) or for some electoral situation in which hawks are at a disadvantage. I don't think either of those has ever happened in his career, or at least I don't think he's perceived belligerence in foreign affairs to be an electoral negative.

What both theories have in common is the idea that McCain is largely indifferent about policy at least of outside of national security and foreign affairs. Well, indifferent isn't quite right...McCain can be quite passionate about all sorts of issues while he's engaged in them; it just doesn't seem to be based on any kind of consistent ideology, or even a consistent view on the specific issue.

I am wondering how McCain's push for reconciliation with Vietnam counts here. I'd argue that it cuts against Chait's theory and in favor for everything being either electoral or, in this case, personal. I'd also argue that his relatively moderate position on the Chuck Hagel nomination fits my theory better; McCain opposed the first cloture vote and final confirmation, but he provided the key vote for cloture in the second cloture vote. Perhaps because he was more annoyed with Ted Cruz than he was loyal to the neocons. But neither of these is anywhere near conclusive.

Anyone else have examples that can help resolve this one?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Greg Briley, 48. One of my Blue Sox heroes, long ago. Sometimes, that 24 year old season is the peak.

Sorry for the slow start today, but there's still time for the good stuff:

1. Richard Arenberg on the Senate floor skirmishes.

2. Fred Kaplan on Obama's national security speech.

3. And Brad DeLong on, well, the economy.

Sri Srinivasan Confirmed

Sri Srinivasan was confirmed unanimously this afternoon, 97-0,  for a position on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. He was originally nominated on June 11, 2012 for a position vacant since November 1, 2008.

So there's one obvious point, and one huge question.

The point: yes, it's absolutely ridiculous that a unanimous pick took eleven months. The only somewhat reasonable part of the delay was in the run-up to the 2012 election; it's traditional for the out-party to drag their feet to prevent confirmations just before an election, even though Republicans in this case push that to (and beyond) reasonable limits. But there was a lame duck session; they could have taken care of unopposed nominations then. Or in February, March, or April.

The question: having given up on Srinivasan, will Republicans now blockade the remaining three vacancies on the DC Circuit Court, perhaps on the bogus pretext that those judges aren't actually needed? If so, that's something that's almost certainly worth going nuclear over. It's certainly possible, however, that they're only going to target those they consider "extremists" -- and that those will be a small minority of all nominees. Surely that's what Mitch McConnell and the Republicans would claim as the July showdown over obstruction gets closer. But as of now, we don't really know the answer.

And for that, yes, it would help if there actually were nominees for those three vacancies.

Dept. of Missing the Point (Kinsley ed.)

A wonderful example of the myopia of the deficit scolds...

The background is that Michael Kinsley wrote a particularly bad column last week about "austerity," a key point of which was based on factually incorrect memories of what went wrong in the 1970s; as you can imagine, this earned him plenty of corrections and dismissals from people who used access to accurate economic and government policy statistics. 

Kinsley was quite taken aback by this, apparently, and wrote a follow up to defend himself. Dan Drezner has already pointed out that Kinsley is still relying on the same inaccurate memories that got his first column into trouble, but I actually found a different part of Kinsley II more interesting, in which he thinks he's caught Paul Krugman in a contradiction.

Kinsley writes:

Paul Krugman takes credit for good economic news whenever it happens. On Krugman’s blog site (“The Conscience of a Liberal”) last week were two bits of prose side-by-side. One was an ad for his latest book, End This Depression Now! “How bad have things gotten?” the ad asks rhetorically.” How did we get stuck in what now can only be called a depression?” Right next door is Krugman’s gloat about the recent pretty-good economic news. “So where are the celebrations,” he asks, “now that the debt issue looks, if not solved, at least greatly mitigated?” Greatly mitigated? By what? Certainly not by anyone taking Paul Krugman’s advice. He has been, in his own self-estimate, a lone, ignored voice for reason crying out in an unreasoning universe.

What's the problem? The linked post by Krugman isn't a gloat about good economic news! It is, to be sure a gloat; it's a gloat about deficits...Krugman goes so far as to call lower deficits "progress," although as I read it he's really just saying that lower deficits should be counted as progress from the point of view of the deficit scolds.

What's happening here is that Kinsley is projecting onto Krugman a classic deficit scold mistake; Kinsley is conflating the federal budget deficit with the economy. Krugman isn't doing that; it's purely Kinsley's invention.

It gets, however, to exactly why Kinsley was buried under a large pile of abuse after his first column. Well, in part; the other part, as Krugman notes elsewhere, is "the existence now of a policy blogosphere...which makes bluffing harder." Say something factually inaccurate these days, and you're going to get slammed; it seems that some pundits who preceded that development find it hard to get used to it.

But the other part is conflating the federal budget deficit and the economy is really a pretty big deal. It might even explain, by the way, Kinsley's faulty memories of the 1970s; if bad economic times are synonymous with large budget deficits, then there "must" have been deficits back then. It's less of a argument about deficits causing bad times than a tautology about deficits meaning bad times.

And the problem is that outside the myopia of deficit scolds, there are real policy choices about fiscal policy. Which are extremely difficult to make well when a large part of the political culture is trapped inside, well, deficit nonsense.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Laurel Holloman, 42.

Right to the good stuff:

1. Seth Masket has a quick note on quality challengers.

2. Jonathan Chait on Josh Barro...and on climate, the DC Circuit, and filibusters.

3. Sarah Kliff on the fluoridation wars, before Portland clobbered a fluoride vote.

4. And Kevin Collins tweets something very sensible: "Presidential elections are the least common type of contest, so be wary of general conclusions about US electoral politics drawn from them."

No, Don't Wait Two Months For Public Opinion Effects

Is it worth a post over a headline? I suppose so...that's what people read, after all.

Michael Catalini writes over at National Journal today goes over the public opinion reaction to Watergate, Iran/Contra, and Lewinsky. His accounting of Iran/Contra and Lewinsky are fine, but he's a bit tripped up on Watergate. I wouldn't bother, but the headline and subhead are awful:

Wait About Two Months, Then Check the President's Approval Rating

Reagan and Nixon saw their approval ratings drop two months after Iran-Contra and Watergate. Clinton was a different story.

Actually, I wrote about this just yesterday, and it's totally wrong. The actual story on Iran/Contra was that Reagan's approval rating collapsed in the very next Gallup poll -- but it was taken several weeks after Iran/Contra broke, back in the days when Gallup polling was far less frequent. So Catalini gets that right in the body of the story, but the headline writer somehow turned that into two months -- for all we know from the Gallup number, it was instant, but at any rate it's only one month.

As for Watergate, Catalini writes:

The break-in at the Watergate occurred in June 1972, five months before Nixon rode to a landslide reelection, but the scandal did not damage his approval ratings until after two aides were convicted of conspiracy in January 1973. Between January and August, his approval rating dropped from 67 percent to 31 percent after the resignation of his top staffers, attorney general and deputy attorney general. 

However, what is important here is that the cover-up was largely effective up until early March 1973. That's why there was no effect on public opinion! People didn't actually know what "Watergate" was about yet. Specifically, things start unraveling in public with Pat Gray's Judiciary Committee hearings, which began on February 28 and continued well into March. There are plenty of news stories throughout the earlier months, including some pretty important revelations, but it's still a marginal story until then.

The point of all this is that we shouldn't expect some sort of delayed reaction to the current scandalmania.

Assuming, that is, that the basic facts stay more or less the same. But don't expect continued publicity about the same facts to change public opinion in any dramatic way, and don't expect people to mull it over for a few weeks and then decide they no longer approve of the job Barack Obama is doing. That's not what happened in those other cases, and it's not likely to happen with this one.