Matthew Yglesias has an important piece in the Washington Post that explains why politics are so horrible right now. He answers why people are so fearful and angry:
This hostility is not about the midterms; it is a consequence of the economic downturn, every bit as much as foreclosures and layoffs. When personal incomes stop growing, people become less broad-minded, and suspicion of foreigners and other ethnic groups grows. We have seen this time and again, in this country and in others.
Fear, in essence, begets fear. The loss of a job, or the worry that one might be lost, raises anxiety. This often plays out as increased suspicion of people who look different or come from different places. While times of robust growth and shared prosperity inspire feelings of interconnectedness and mutual gain, in times of worry, the picture quickly reverses. Views of the world turn zero-sum: If he wins, what do I lose? Any kind of change looks like decline — the end of a “way of life.”
And here’s his prescription:
The lesson is simple: The current controversies are ultimately byproducts of our economic morass. To really dispel the atmosphere of suspicion, what’s needed are ideas about how to boost the economy to bring unemployment down and earnings up. Finding policies that do all this will not be easy, but it is the only way to turn the national mood around.
Yglesias focuses on the xenophobia that’s been on display this year, but you can see exactly the same pattern when it comes to environmental policy. People are unwilling to confront or even acknowledge the long term consequences of global warming when they face potential deprivation in the short term.
This has been the great lesson of my adult life. Things never have to get worse before they can get better. Disasters can sometimes bring out the best in people for short periods of time, but sustained hardship always pushes people down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Here’s Ezra Klein on framing:
One of my rules in politics is that whichever side is resorting to framing devices is losing.
I find I buy into this much more than I buy into the idea that proper framing is the key to political success. (Sorry, George Lakoff.)
University of Delaware economics professor Laurence Seidman has a proposal that’s too sensible to ever be adopted for fixing the federal budget. Here’s his description of the problem:
The worst federal budget policy is the one we’re now following: ignoring the looming large future deficits while refusing to enact temporary fiscal stimulus to combat the recession. As long as Congress and the president refuse to tackle the large looming future deficits, financial markets and the public will rightly stay nervous.
He suggests three things, the first is a “normal unemployment balanced budget rule” for Congress. It would require the annual federal budget to be balanced if the unemployment rate is 6%. The second is a set of changes to entitlement programs that would avert their future budget-busting growth. And the third is a set of stimulus programs pegged to the unemployment rate:
At the same time, Congress should enact a set of temporary tax cuts and expenditures to stimulate the economy. This legislation must contain a phase-down schedule so that these temporary measures are phased out as the unemployment rate, which is currently over 9 percent, falls below 9 percent, then 8 percent, then 7 percent, and are completely terminated when the unemployment rate falls to 6 percent. Note that these temporary measures would have no effect on NUBAR, because they would be completely terminated when the unemployment rate falls to 6 percent.
It’s the kind of idea that would work if we had two parties that were interested in restoring economic growth and fixing our future budget problems. Instead we have one party that wants the economy to stay broken for political reasons, and another party that prioritizes avoiding perceived political risk over actually fixing problems.
This sentence from Dan Froomkin pretty much says it all when it comes to President Obama’s speech on the oil spill:
How unmoored from reality are Obama and his top advisers to think that some pretty words with so little substance could accomplish so much?
The words weren’t even that pretty.
My deeper fear is that President Obama’s limited reach still exceeds the nation’s feeble grasp. Is there a great untapped willingness to take on the challenge of climate change or even moving to cleaner fuels for other, less politically toxic reasons? I don’t see it.
Christopher Beam illustrates the point I was trying to make about political journalism and political science the other day with humor:
A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.
Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.
He goes on. Funny, and accurate.
The world of sports is in the latter stages of a revolution of data-driven analysis. The ultimate question in sports analysis is, what determines whether a team wins or loses? Traditionally, most people believed that the determining factors were those that sports journalists liked to write about and that coaches felt like they could control.
Back in the day, everyone talked about leadership, and chemistry, and clutch hitting, and all sorts of other human factors that were unquantifiable. The numbers show that the truth is more boring than that — once you learn how to properly measure player performance, statistics show that teams with better players usually win. When teams underperform or outperform their statistical predictions, more often than not it’s due to luck.
A classic example of received wisdom from the institutions of sport is that great teams win most close games. What data analysis teaches us is that performance in close games is essentially random, and that great teams don’t play in as many close games — they tend to beat inferior teams badly. That’s what makes them great.
The new insights that quantitative analysis has brought to sports are applicable to many fields, including politics. That is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Nate Silver, once known to baseball fans as creator of the PECOTA system for forecasting the performance of baseball players, has become famous as a political analyst, specializing in breaking down polling data and using it to make predictions.
The adjustment to a more data-driven approach to analyzing sports has been tough on sports journalists, because increasingly they are being forced to acknowledge that their impressionistic analysis of sports may be entertaining, but isn’t very informative. Political journalists are just starting to face the same challenge to their positions of authority. As political scientists have improved their data-driven analysis, it has become increasingly clear that most of the things that political writers (and indeed, politicians) think are are important, really aren’t.
This was all a very long segue into a link to an article about the tension between political scientists and political journalists in the Columbia Journalism Review, Embrace the Wonk. Here’s the crux:
That perspective differs from the standard journalistic point of view in emphasizing structural, rather than personality-based, explanations for political outcomes. The rise of partisan polarization in Congress is often explained, in the press, as a consequence of a decline in civility. But there are reasons for it—such as the increasing ideological coherence of the two parties, and procedural changes that create new incentives to band together—that have nothing to do with manners. Or consider the president. In press accounts, he comes across as alternately a tragic or a heroic figure, his stock fluctuating almost daily depending on his ability to “connect” with voters. But political-science research, while not questioning that a president’s effectiveness matters, suggests that the occupant of the Oval Office is, in many ways, a prisoner of circumstance. His approval ratings—and re-election prospects—rise and fall with the economy. His agenda lives or dies on Capitol Hill. And his ability to move Congress, or the public, with a good speech or a savvy messaging strategy is, while not nonexistent, sharply constrained.
The important take away for people who are consumers of political news is that press coverage of politics on a day to day basis is at best useless and at worst pernicious. What really matters is that there is a blowout spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and that it probably won’t be fixed until August. The degree to which President Obama seems to be upset about it doesn’t matter. What really matters is that the unemployment rate is right around 10%. What doesn’t matter is that Congress is holding votes on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rather than doing things that create the appearance that they’re working on the economy.
I try to pay attention to what our actual problems are and the degree to which we’re making progress in solving them. It turns out that not only is this what’s important in our day to day lives, but it’s what’s important politically as well.
From a New York Times article on a federal appeals court decision denying detainees access to US courts:
The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.
The court has ruled that as long as the government detains prisoners in Afghanistan rather than the US, they are not entitled to the same process as they would be if they were detained somewhere else, regardless of where they were captured. That’s quite a loophole.
In the meantime, Britain’s new government is confronting its complicity in torture and looking to roll back surveillance powers and other impingements on civil liberties. I’m envious and more disappointed than ever in the Obama administration.
The basic philosophy at the center of the tea party movement, explained:
The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.
Yes, I had to look up what a Jacobin is.
Congressman David Obey, the current Chairman of the House Appropriations committee, is retiring after 42 years of service. He doesn’t pull any punches in his statement:
In the last months, two colleagues, Charlie Wilson and Jack Murtha, have died. Both were 76. For me, that is only four years away. At the end of this term I will have served in the House longer than all but 18 of the 10,637 men and women who have ever served there. The wear and tear is beginning to take its toll. Given that fact, I have to ask myself how I want to spend the time I have left. Frankly, I do not know what I will do next. All I do know is that there has to be more to life than explaining the ridiculous, accountability destroying rules of the Senate to confused, angry, and frustrated constituents.
I absolutely believe that, after the economy returns to a decent level of growth, we must attack our long-term budget deficit. But, perhaps I expect too much because, in addition to an attack on the federal budget deficit, I also want to see an equal determination to attack the family security deficit, the family income deficit, and the opportunity deficit which also plague the American people.
I am, frankly, weary of having to beg on a daily basis that both parties recognize that we do no favor for the country if we neglect to make the long-term investments in education, science, health, and energy that are necessary to modernize our economy and decline to raise the revenue needed to pay for those crucial investments. I do not want to be in a position as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee of producing and defending lowest common denominator legislation that is inadequate to that task and, given the mood of the country, that is what I would have to do if I stayed.
Seems like he’s feeling liberated.
I’m not too happy with the state of Arizona, but I can’t express myself any better than New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse did today, in her op-ed piece Breathing While Undocumented. Arizona has passed a law that any idiot can see is inhumane and unenforceable.
Political activists tend to ignore basic issues of enforcement when they propose laws. During the late stages of the health care debate, Senate Republican introduced an amendment that bans the government paying for erectile dysfunction drugs for registered sex offenders. Not to go too far afield, but the idea was that the Democrats would have to embarrass themselves by voting against the amendment for procedural reasons, thus handing Republicans a minor victory.
But what interested me was that while this amendment might have seemed like a good idea, it had huge enforcement issues. Suddenly it turns doctors or health insurance companies into law enforcement agencies — whose responsibility does it become to ask patients whether they’re a sex offender? Do people have to indicate that they’re a sex offender when they enroll in a health insurance plan?
Now that this bill in Arizona has gone into effect, every policeman has immigration enforcement added to their existing list of duties. Not only does it increase their workloads, but it also makes it less likely that immigrants will work with the police for any reason, undocumented or otherwise. If anything, this bill will make life better for criminals in immigrant communities because those communities will be further alienated from the police.
So on top of the reasons of principle that make this bill an awful idea, but it’s likely to be an utter failure for practical reasons as well.
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