Heartache With Hard Work

23 – Blonde Redhead

A friend asks:

“Is this NY23 thing a big deal? Perhaps more importantly, do we want it to be (I can’t tell whether I want the Republicans to implode after a long season of infighting or return to the middle so that elections can be about more reasonable things again, assuming they ever were)?”

These are fair questions. I think the best take I’ve seen so far is from Jonathan Bernstein here and here. The takeaway is that the race does matter, sort of. And the dynamics of it are almost certainly bad for Republicans, but they’re not necessarily that great for Democrats either. This race has clarified something that was already pretty obvious: ‘mainstream’ Republicans are simply not welcome in modern conservatism.

That will certainly make it harder to recruit the sort of moderate candidates who might be necessary to take back a lot of the more vulnerable seats that the Blue team won in 06 and 08.

At the same time, Hoffman has a pretty good chance of winning this thing – despite being a Glenn Beck-ite, which can’t be very comforting for Democrats. Sure, NY-23 is a traditionally Republican seat, but Obama won it and it “shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada.” Running against a fringe candidate should have made this a solid chance for a pickup.

Of course, while every seat matters, a swing of two votes in the House right now is pretty irrelevant. The real question is what effect this has on 2010 and 2012. And there it’s all about the gamble. If there is a major sea change in attitude and the Republicans can manage a ton of pick-ups despite running candidates like Hoffman it could spell serious damage for Obama, the Democrats in general, and the idea of a sustainable new progressive majority.

On the other hand, if those gains fail to materialize, we could end up with an increasingly apocalyptic minority that spirals down the drain for another few cycles before they get things back together.

My take: Hoffman could very well win, though in a race with so many crazy twists and turns prediction is probably futile. In the longer term, I think the gamble isn’t going to pay off. Districts that can support candidates like Hoffman already have them – they’re the 40% of districts the Democrats haven’t been able to pick off in two landslide elections. Unless there’s some major external problem (scandal, crisis, or most likely a dragging economy that shows no noticeable improvements for the next 12 months), the GOP has a much better shot of putting a dent in the Democratic ruling majority by running RINOs (and then having to put up with their occasional apostasies).

But Jeebus save us all if this pays off. We could seriously end up with the same kind of united, categorical opposition from a party with enough power to literally shut down the government for a few years.

And either way, I think we’re in trouble for awhile re: the goal of having elections be reasonable. Regardless of who wins, it’s going to be close, and that’s going to be enough to make this a template for a lot of other elections driven by Sarah Palin endorsements, breathless coverage, and total ridiculousness.

Frank Luntz, GOP strategist, says the following:

The Democratic Party controls a 77 seat majority in the House and almost 20 seats in the Senate, along with the White House. If they cannot get a bill passed with such overwhelming control of Washington, it says there’s something wrong with the legislation. Rather than forcing a bill through with only limited support, they should keep working until they can get a bill that represents the opinions of most Americans.

Now, it goes without saying that his statements have to be read with an eye on the clear political goals. What he says isn’t meant to analyze; it’s an attempt to persuade. But there’s still a limit (or should be). In this case, it’s the idea that people who might be on the fence here are going to be persuaded by the argument that the legislation must be bad if they can’t get it done despite those majorities. Now, let’s think about this for a second.

First, the idea that they “cannot get a bill passed.” It’s a little early for that isn’t it? After all, the entire point of his memo is to convince people not to pass a bill. Will he admit that it WAS popular after all if it does happen? Also remember that the GOP has consistently complained about the speed with which this legislation has moved through the process. “Just slow things down a little bit so we can consider more.” Whatever you think about that request, it’s a little hard to take it seriously when it runs concurrently with arguments which suggest that the test for whether a bill is acceptable is if it passes quickly.

Then there’s the way that huge Democratic majorities are treated as unrelated to the rest of the question. The tone clearly suggests that Democrats were just randomly gifted with big majorities. Never mind that a lot of those people won contested elections where health care was a pretty big campaign issue. Usually it’s not a very compelling argument for your position that 60% of the races went against it.

What does Occam’s Razor tell us? What we’ve got is a health care bill which has strong support from well over 50% of elected officials and (most likely) the public. Which is more likely: that there’s somethign wrong with the legislation or that there’s something wrong the legislative process?

Really, this is a jumping-off place for some broader thoughts I’ve been having recently. I’ve been reading a lot in the past couple weeks about variations in democracy: in particular, the differences that come with a majoritarian, parliamentary system compared to the Madisonian republic that we’ve got going on here in the US. There’s a lot to be said for a system of checks and balances but situations like this do not put it in a very good light.

Even if you support checks and balances, there’s a pretty strong argument against the multitude of veto points that we’ve set up. Perhaps some are essential, and maybe we dig the idea of bicameralism in general. But it does seem like we’ve got to a bit of an extreme here. Five committees, each of which have to pass a bill. Two houses of Congress which then have to pass a combined bill. And then those bills have to get blended. And then each house has to pass the blended bill. And the whole time, if it ever looks (even for a short period) like you don’t have a clear path to your preposterous 60 vote majority needed to beat that filibuster the whole thing teeters on the brink of political oblivion.

Maybe it made sense to make it this hard for Congress to pass things back in the days of the Federalist Papers when our main fear was legislative tyranny or things moving too quickly and getting out of hand. But our institutions have only gotten more sludge-filled even while society has sped up about 700 million percent.

It’s time for a change. The question mark in the title signifies my general confusion about how far we want to take things. The filibuster (in its current form at least) has got to go. But how much further should it go? Do we want to risk tyrannies of the majority? Sure, majoritarianism sounds good to me now when health care and global warming are on the line, but how will I feel when Jeb Bush is in office?

These are tough questions and I don’t have a firm answer. But in part II we’ll see if there’s a compelling case for majoritarianism as fundamentally progressive, even accounting for these problems.

Change – Lightning Seeds

Health care is dead because of the town halls. No wait, it’s totally revitalized because of Obama’s big speech. And in fact, it’s basically inevitable because Olympia Snowe voted for it out of committee. And look, not only is health care inevitable, but the public option is going to pass because Harry Reid grew a backbone. Or, it turns out, it’s dead because Lieberman and Nelson and Landrieu and company are against it.

My general feeling about all this is there’s a lot of fuss about the swings because we all love a news cycle, but that the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. All year I’ve assumed that health care had a strong chance of passing, but that what actually made it to Obama’s desk would be a lot weaker than the folks on the blue team would have wanted. In short, I haven’t varied too much in my best guess that odds were probably 2:1 in favor of passage, but that a public option was extremely unlikely (unless in one of its most diluted variations) and that subsidies were not going to be as high as they really needed to be.

That’s what I thought in January, in May, in August. And it’s more or less what I think now.

Perhaps the biggest real change has been the revived potential for the public option. This, I think, was genuine news. The underlying dynamics started to shift over the summer with a massive liberal pushback on this issue and the willingness of the House and Senate leadership to really work for it.

That said, I still don’t think things have tilted THAT much. It’s not that I really think any of these ‘moderates’ would be willing to take responsibility for filibustering a health care bill because it contains a generally popular program that will reduce costs and – in the worst case scenario – will simply fail to displace a meaningful portion of the private insurance market. When push finally comes to shove and there’s an actual bill that needs to pass, these folks are probably going to vote for it regardless of disagreements at the margins.

The reason why I still don’t expect a strong public option is that even if we can be reasonably sure Evan Bayh is not going to derail the single most important piece of progressive legislation since LBJ over something so trivial, we can’t be sure. And more importantly, the White House and Democratic leadership can’t be sure. They all want a public option, of course, but they simply want a bill more.

What could be very interesting is the deals that take place assuming the stronger opt-out version does actually end up in the bill. How long will the supporters fight for it? How hard? Are they willing to play chicken on this? As things drag on, are they going to keep together the votes needed to shoot down GOP amendments as they pile up and up and up?

My guess is no. At some point, the leadership is going to loosen the reins, tell the wavering members that it’s okay to kill the opt-out. And the best case scenario will be that all of the fighting on this will have shifted opinion about where the ‘center’ is on this question sufficiently that the other side will take a trigger option that isn’t totally pointless (i.e. – that has meaningful targets).

Recent twists and turns might have changed things a bit, but I’d still wager that health care reform will pass before 2010, and that whatever variation on the public option that it includes will be so watered down as to be (relatively) meaningless.

Until things change again in a few hours.

Idiot Son – Loud Family

More health care posting coming tomorrow (hopefully). But for right now, a few thoughts on Joe Lieberman (#@%$#&%, CT):

At this point it is clear that he is a massive tool and I completely take back all the things I ever said about making nice with him. I get a fair number of predictions right – and tend to consider myself a fairly astute judge of political stuff – but good lord did I get this one wrong. My theory was that he would want to win another term in 2012, would see the value of tacking back left, and would deliver a solid vote on domestic issues (which were going to be the things most in need of filibuster-busting). It turns out that he apparently is only interested in lashing out like a petulant, spoiled child.

Now, I don’t take his posturing on this all that seriously, and I don’t think it spells doom for health care reform writ large or even necessarily this variation on the public option. But Jesus H. Christ he is ridiculous. That someone who can demonstrate such utter lack of character or empathy can exercise such influence over the political process is only a sign of how broken our system is.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that this guy was one Supreme Court pang of conscience away from the Vice Presidency

Alan Grayson was briefly a hero in the progresso-sphere, as a sort of liberal counterpart to Michelle Bachmann. Except, as people loved pointing out, while he was uncivil he was actually (more or less) stating things how they actually were. People loved him for that, and that was all well and fine. But there was always danger in trying to set up a liberal equivalent to Michelle Bachmann…namely that he would quickly steer into bomb-throwing for the sheer sake of it. Which may very well be what’s happening.

All of which only solidifies my belief that the truly progresssive response to lunatics like Bachmann and Glenn Beck and the like is reasoned discourse. We can’t out-shout them, and the more we try the more we’re adopting a form of rhetorical engagement which plays into their hands.

There’s the old Clinton line: “if one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other’s trying to get you to think…you better vote for the person who wants you to think.”

Well, he’s right. All other things equal, the more that people think the more we win. Which isn’t to say there’s no rational argument for a conservative position, obviously. It’s just to say that on balance conservativism is an attitude of disengagement. Vitriol, screaming, and general nuttiness aren’t intrinsically conservative, but the type of communicative process they embody certainly trends that way.

The Odds – Saybia (from Eyes on the Highway)

I don’t even care about basketball, but I can’t help but point out the breakdown in logic in this recent post by Matt Yglesias. Taking issue with Bill Simmons’ prediction that the Trailblazers will go 41-41 he says:

To merely go 54-28 again would require the team to regress somewhat. To win 41 games would involve a regression as big as the step forward that would be require to win 75 games and become the greatest team of all time.

Yikes.

What is missing in this analysis is a recognition of the importance of ‘regressing to the mean.’ Put simply, on balance any performance is substantially more likely to revert to the mean performance of the pool from which it is drawn than it is to go further toward the extreme.

In this case, the pool is professional NBA teams and the mean is (obviously) .500. All else being equal, we’d assume that any team who wins more than 41 games is going to do worse in the next year, and vice versa. And the further away from the mean, the harder it will be sustain their performance. And it will be particularly difficult to improve.

Like I said, I don’t care about basketball, but the principle is pretty important for a lot of areas. It’s the general idea which helps us remember that exceptional economic performances are…well…exceptional, and thus unlikely to be sustained or improved upon. It’s what reminds us that if we gamble and win, it was still a gamble. And if we try again, the odds are much closer to 50% than they are to 100%.

In short, it’s a principle which we very easily lose track, meaning that we end up making extremely important decisions based on a false sense of security derived from a relatively small sample size. Forgetting to regress to the mean, and failing to gather a significant enough amount of data to minimize the effect this causes, is a deadly combination: whether it’s for sports predictions or the global economy.

Looking through the archives, it seems like I never got around to posting about Ravens and Chimes a couple years back when they had a very nice little indie-pop record called Reichenbach Falls, in particular the jaunty and emphatic “General Lafayette! You Are Not Alone.” Oh well. Consider this a much belated recommendation.

But in blog-world two years is a lifetime, so obviously the only reason I bring this up now is that the band is back with another perfect little slice of quirky and melodic guitar pop.

Hearts of Palm – Ravens and Chimes

I’m sure this reference isn’t going to help many people, but I can’t help but hear them as a slightly more sunny variation on Hefner.

“Hearts of Palm” is scheduled for release on their as-yet-untitled second album. Given that it doesn’t even have a name yet, I’m guessing mid-2010 before we’ll actually be hearing anything. But in the meantime, enjoy this one and maybe pick up their debut.

Let’s play a game of “I totally was going to say it when I had time, but someone already got around to it, and said it better anyways.” In this case, it’s Daniel at Crooked Timber, on the Super-Freakonomics climate denialist bust-up that happened this week:

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

Yep, that’s about the size of it. For me, the big story here isn’t that the new Freakonomics book has a bunch of stuff in it that wasn’t particularly well researched and is there more for shock value than strong evidence. I’ve been reading the Freakonomics blog for a while now and the mixture of smug economic rational choice contortionism and smarmy contrarian dodginess is pretty common there. It’s worth putting up with because about one in four posts are actually pretty fascinating, but that’s precisely the stuff that was least likely to go into the new book.

No, the real story is the way it demonstrates the general ridiculousness which is contrarianism these days.

It’s a little rich to act like you’re telling truth to power and bucking trends when the crux of your argument is that we should just go on doing exactly what major economic movers and shakers want. And then there’s the Slate thing where you act like you’re a rebel because you brazenly accuse both sides of every single issue of being misleading. The subtext, of course, is that since the truth is always at the precise midpoint between any two positions, we should probably just keep on doing what we’re doing.

I’m exaggerating of course, but it does sometimes seem like there are only two types of argument that are allowed to appear on a public stage these days: 1) deliberate exaggeration of things that most people already wish were true in order to confirm what we expect, but in such a radical, cool way that it seems edgy. 2) a ‘pox on both houses’ style that suggests the impossibility of making actual firm judgments about important issues.

(I don’t even want to get into the recent Slate article suggesting that Creed is actually a good band. I have a friend who declared them the kings of suck-core back when they were big in the 90s and nothing since then has changed my opinion one iota. I’m far more willing to listen to the “Sarah Palin punched Putin’s big head when he rose over Alaska and thus is qualified to have her own personal nuclear arsenal” theory than an apology for Creed.)

Anyways, what is truly aggravating about all this is the way that those who make purely political arguments (made in a particular way in clear-eyed awareness of the way that subtext and connotations will help them sell, sell, sell) immediately fall back into this sense of victimhood – where the true villain is the ‘tone’ of arguments.

I’m not saying tone doesn’t matter. When you have people arguing in good faith, there are few things more damaging to legitimate debate than the intrusion of an antagonistic and angry tone. But when you have people attempting to manipulate other people to make a buck…

[End rambling]

While I’m on the subject of argument though (and given the 40th anniversary of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), how about a nice video for a palate cleanser:

Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum both talk about a recent poll on the question of mandated insurance. In the poll, 56% said they support requiring people to get health insurance, and 41% were against it. But…if you tell the opposers that low-income families will get subsidies to help them pay, then a third of them switch.

Klein says “In other words, a solid majority supports the individual mandate. And a third of the opponents become supporters if they learn that there will be subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance.”

However, I think that’s a misleading way of characterizing it. Or, if misleading is a bit too strong, it’s at least incomplete. Because what’s left out of that analysis is a deeper effect, which Drum points to, namely that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.”

He wonders about this in a general sense: whether work has been done to quantify just how big of a swing is usual in these sorts of circumstances.

But I think it also reminds us that you can’t uncritically add the original 56% and one-third of 41% to get 70% support for mandates. Because we don’t know how many of the supporters could be just as easily convinced to change their mind. Perhaps if they knew subsidies were being offered, they’d stop supporting it. They like the idea of forcing everyone to participate but don’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to support it. That’s not a completely insane position to have.

The point being that it’s very easy to take these sort of polling numbers and extrapolate a general sense of where the society is at. But ultimately, the numbers are so fluid and unstable that it’s really hard to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Even the idea that 97% of people are remotely close to having a formed opinion on this question is laughable.

That doesn’t mean polls like this are useless. They definitely help to clarify a general sense of attitudes and give us a window into what sorts of arguments might be useful. But we really should strive to remind ourselves that they are at best rough indicators and certainly are not dispositive.