Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Alan Rudolph, 70.

Travel day yesterday, so I hardly saw any good stuff, but there are these:

1. Andrew Sprung, as usual, listens to Obama better than most of us.

2.  Keith Bentele and Erin O’Brien track black voting and restrictions on voting.

3. And really, no more (blogging) Dan Drezner?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question, plus a bit more. What's the general consensus of neutral experts going to be by, oh, the end of March on how the ACA is working? Series of disasters? Surprisingly successful, given the fiasco in October? Too soon to know? Or something else?

And what of Barack Obama's job in implementing the law. Presumably he'll still be knocked for October, but among liberals, will it look not so bad in retrospect? Sign of all that is wrong with his presidency? Demonstration that he makes at least his share of mistakes, but is good at recovering from them? Or something else?

Gun Control Didn't Ruin Obama's Second Term

Alex Seitz-Wald test-drives what could easily become a new liberal fantasy:

The Connecticut massacre set in motion a cascade of events that led the White House to burn through its only real window to accomplish its goals. The month before the shooting, Obama had won a convincing reelection and a modest popular mandate. One major liberal wish-list entry, immigration reform, seemed not only within reach but almost inevitable.

Instead, not only in this story did Obama's gun control initiative sink immigration reform, but it derailed, at least so far, his entire second term.

C'mon. Let's see...this argument depends on a bunch of stuff: To begin with: that there's such a thing as a mandate (and that Obama had one on immigration), and that "The first few months of any president's term, closest to their electoral win and furthest from the next congressional midterm, are usually the most fruitful." The latter holds for first terms, but as far as I know there's no similar evidence on second terms, and certainly not second terms which also yield continued divided government.

For that matter, the list of reelections with continued divided government is a short one -- in the last hundred years, only 1956, 1972, 1984, and 1996 fit that category before 2012, and of those 1972 wasn't much of a test. I don't think it supports Seitz-Wald's point, either. Just looking at wikipedia...the 99th Congress didn't pass any major bills until December 1985, but passed several, including tax reform, in 1986. Tax reform is as good a comp as any. Reagan sent up his proposal in May 1985; Ways and Means marked up a bill in September through December, 1985 and it passed the House in the same month; Senate Finance finished their markup in May, 1986; the Senate passed it at the end of June; and then after a formal conference in July and August, both chambers passed the bill in September, 1986.

Ike's 85th Congress did pass three major laws in 1955, but several more in 1956. As for Clinton, not too much happened in the 105th (although unlike in Ike's case, the second Congress of Clinton's second term was more productive.

What I think all this says is: the "almost inevitable" was an illusion. Presidents re-elected with continued divided government don't have a Hundred Days, and they basically don't pass partisan initiatives.

Or, to put it another way: whether immigration reform passed was always going to be about what mainstream House conservatives wanted, and they really don't care very much whether Barack Obama's approval rating is at its honeymoon peak of around 51%, or if it's fallen to around 48% (post-gun bill), 46% (after the Senate passed immigration), or 41% (now). Now, if Obama was at 70% that might scare a few moderates, but that wasn't going to happen in winter and spring 2013.

Obama's second term legislative agenda was derailed on election night 2012 when Republicans retained the House. After that, it's just been a question of where to find a few productive compromises that work for both parties.

More broadly, it's just not true that Congress, or even one chamber of Congress, can only do one thing at a time. Even when the bills are going to go through the same committees, it's actually perfectly possible for two or more bills to advance through the process together. Sure, small delays are possible if two bills reach the exact same stage at the exact same time, but usually that's not the case. The more likely explanation for the delay in the immigration bill -- just as with the ACA in 2009 -- is that it takes time for Congress to work its way through complex, contentious bills.

Pass it along: gun safety probably had no effect at all on the rest of Barack Obama's second term.

Sunday Question for Liberals

What lessons from the Barack Obama presidency -- positive or negative -- are you keeping in mind when choosing a presidential candidate for 2016?

Catch of the Day

To Scott Lemieux for (once again) shooting down liberal fantasies that the only thing preventing Congress from passing single-payer health care insurance in 2009-2010 was a failure of will from the president.

It's an excellent job, and sadly necessary, over and over again.

One key point that Lemieux doesn't mention this time: in one sense, this really isn't about 2009 at all. It's about 2007 and 2008, when the three leading Democratic presidential candidates converged on essentially the same plan (with Obama famously omitting the individual mandate). That says a lot. It says that none of those three candidates believed that adopting single-payer would have given them a serious edge in a closely contested nomination fight -- and that no other candidate was able to leap to the top tier by embracing single-payer. In other words, it tells us that in the world of 2007-2008, at least, the ACA was mainstream within the actual Democratic Party as it was, and single-payer was a fringe position in the actual Democratic Party as it was. Maybe lots and lots of Democrats preferred single-payer in some sense, but virtually none of them, either elites or electorates, did anything about it. And that's what counts.

What this also means is that ACA vs. single-payer had virtually nothing to do with Barack Obama himself. And so Obama-centric explanations for it are clearly, 100%, wrong.

I'd further argue, although here it's not quite as clear, that there was very little about the way that Obama fought for the ACA that had much to do with Obama himself. Yes, a Hillary Clinton WH would have looked a little different from the Obama WH...but not all that very different. Yes, presidents themselves do make key decisions, and not their staff or their party. But not only are they often severely constrained by their party (and by Congress, and by lots of other things), but they're also highly influenced by the incentives of the job, and those are the same whether we're talking Obama, Clinton, or George W. Bush.

In short, there's an excellent chance that both the good and bad outcomes on health care reform would have wound up more or less the same whether the winner of the 2008 Democratic nomination was Obama, or Hillary, or a hypothetically unscandaled John Edwards, or for that matter John Kerry or Al Gore.

Meanwhile: nice catch!

Sunday Question for Liberals

What's the underreported Obama Administration success? What's the underreported Obama Administration failure?

Electoral Effects of the...Oh, C'mon, People, Really?

Sometimes, I think it helps to be a solid 1500 miles away from Washington. Or maybe it helps to have read a little history. Or maybe I'm just an old guy.

Anyway: we're at a point at which even Jonathan Chait, writing against panic, says that "the current sense of dread enveloping the Democratic Party has a very real basis. President Obama’s poll numbers are plunging to unprecedented depths."

Yes, it's all massively overstated.

Plunging? His approval (and some associated numbers) have definitely dropped. I suppose "plunge" is subjective, but HuffPollster's estimate, set for "less smoothing" and therefore (over?) sensitive to recent polls, is that he's lost maybe 2.5 percentage points over the last five or so weeks. He's been losing ground all year including, mostly likely, during the shutdown. Depending on what adjustments one does, that might have accelerated after the shutdown, or maybe not. It doesn't sound like a "plunge" to me. 

Obama's popularity is probably at the low point of his presidency (again, depending on the adjustments, he's either a bit below or a bit above his previous low. But it's not any kind of unusually low low point (he's nowhere near Truman, Carter, Nixon, W.), there's no particular reason to expect the slump to continue, and myths aside no reason to believe he won't recover if the news turns better. Granted, it's hard to know what to expect from healthcare.gov, but it's not as if it's getting worse over time. I'm not saying his numbers will go up. Just that it's more or less equally likely as further drops. 

(Actually...if I had to guess, I'd say a run of either stability or improvement is probably more likely, at least if the next budget deadlines come and go quietly. Gallup's economic confidence index has been steadily recovering from its shutdown/debt limit plunge -- yes, that one was a real plunge -- and Jamelle Bouie is right that the economy is a very big part of presidential approval, although I think he somewhat understates the ability of other events to matter).

As for electoral effects? I wrote an item dismissing direct electoral effects of the shutdown against Republicans back last month; that post pretty much works now, in reverse for effects against Democrats. I should say: it's far easier for sentiment against the president to translate into midterm electoral losses than it is for feelings against the out-party. So if Obama is unpopular in November 2014, it will hurt Democrats. But today's frenzy about the ACA is going to be mostly forgotten by then, one way or another, just as the shutdown seems forgotten today. That's probably even true, believe it or not, if the program totally collapses, although I don't think that's going to happen.

Anyway, Obama's approval ratings have in fact fallen from the mid-40s to the low-40s, and over the course of the year from around 50 to the low 40s. It's obviously not good news for him, but it seems a lot less dramatic than a lot of the chatter this week would have it be. 

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Richard Hell, 64.

Still shut down, but we still need good stuff, don't we?

1. Interesting: Brad DeLong rapidly losing confidence in Barack Obama. I'm okay with the Summers trial balloon, and with not fighting after it was shot down; I'm not so okay with the two month delay part of it.

2. Yeah, Russia isn't exactly running the world; Dan Drezner is right about that.

3. I suppose I have to link to Jimmy Kimmel on this one.

4. And the Jews -- Pew has lots of numbers.

Professional Reputation: Obama and Syria

Okay, with the main point about Syria and the presidency out of the way, time to turn to stuff like this:

If he loses the vote on Syria, the Republicans will be emboldened to challenge him on fiscal issues, immigration and on his nominee to be chairman of the Federal Reserve...If Obama wins, his position on those issues, along with immigration, will be strengthened just as he also is starting enrollment for his health-care law.

That's Michael Tacket reporting at Bloomberg, but you can find lots of similar examples.

It's totally the wrong way of thinking about presidential reputation.

As regular readers know, I'm a great believer in Richard Neustadt's portrait of presidential influence. And so I do tend to believe that a president's professional reputation matters -- in fact, I probably ascribe more to that concept than most current presidential scholars do.

However.

First of all, to the extent that reputation matters, it matters within the context of everything else going on. Most obviously, partisanship. As Brian Beutler puts it: "Syria won’t derail Obama’s second term — Republicans will" (see also Matt Yglesias).

Second...professional reputation isn't a question of "political capital" (whatever that is); it's, in Neustadt's words:

The men he would persuade must be convinced in their own minds that he has skill and will enough to use his advantages. Their judgement of him is a factor in his influence with them...A President's effect on them is heightened or diminished by their thoughts about his probable reaction to their doing.

What does it mean to lose an important vote in Congress? It depends! It depends on the context; it depends on the president's actions; it depends on how it happens; it depends on how everyone perceives it.

What will Washingtonians (to use Neustadt's old-fashioned but very useful term for the people who must deal with the president, directly and indirectly) take away from the Syria vote?

Surely the most likely answer is: not very much.

After all, to begin with we're dealing with a fifth-year president, so the question is what adjustments will be made in their view of him. And why would their views change? Obama has, for better or worse, never been a president who was noted for punishing those who opposed him. He's surely never been a president who could be counted on to deliver Republican votes. He's not really a president who could be counted on to deliver Democratic unity, across the board...yes, Democrats did supply needed tough votes on some policies, but not on others. No one in Washington could possibly believe that Obama has the ability to massively change public opinion with a single speech or an extended campaign (that no president can do that is perhaps better understood now than it used to be, but at any rate no one has thought that of Obama since, at best, January 2010).

That's not to say that Obama's professional reputation was terrible going into this fight; it's just to say that the particular limitations that would be on display if he loses are exactly the limitations everyone already believes he has. Whether one believes those limitations are personal to him or part of the general conditions of the current presidency.

Moreover, if we take professional reputation as more nuanced than just "winner" or "loser," then it's hard to see how the particular qualities on display here matter very much to upcoming fights. For example, on the budget and debt limit, the basic reputation question that Republicans will need to ask is whether Obama is likely to cave quickly when faced with a shutdown (or potential default). It's hard to say that anything in this fight -- especially the part of it having to do with working for Congressional votes -- is really parallel to anything in that one.

So to put it all together: what matters are changes to presidential reputation from a particular episode, and then what matters are the particular, specific, changes to reputation, and how they are relevant to future battles, in Congress or elsewhere. I'm open to arguments that it can matter some...I do believe, as I said at the top, that a president's professional reputation can make a difference. But we certainly should not pretend that presidential reputation is the only or even the leading thing that matters, or that one episode can completely rewrite years of examples.

Point One on Obama's Presidency and Syria

There are a bunch of things out there that I suspect I'm going to write about with respect to Barack Obama, presidential power, presidential reputation, and Syria...I'll start with what might seem the most obvious, but a point that isn't being made much and should be.

The preface: There are multiple balls in the air. There's the effects of winning vs. losing a Congressional vote. There's the effects of forcing a Congressional vote, which Obama did, as opposed to not forcing it, which is what everyone expect. But then there's also the effects of actually carrying out the policy (that is, a military intervention) or not. And that last one has all sorts of possibilities, right? The scale and scope of the intervention could be various different sizes and durations, and could go well or badly; some of that is within the control of the White House, and some isn't.

Of all of those, there's one permutation that absolutely, no question about it, would destroy the rest of Barack Obama's presidency is: a disastrous war. Ask Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush. Or Harry Truman. Unending, seemingly pointless wars are the one sure way to ruin a presidency.

Now, I'm not saying that's in the cards; in fact, I don't think it is. I'm just saying: that's the kind of thing that really does matter a lot to presidencies. And if you do believe that the administration is going down a path that winds up there, or a path that has a high risk of winding up there, then you should be very worried about the health of this presidency.

If not? None of the other permutations here are anywhere close to that kind of threat to the Obama presidency. Presidents lose key votes which are then mostly forgotten all the time. They pursue policies which poll badly, but are then mostly forgotten, all the time. There are important things to say about all of that, because "mostly" isn't completely. But the first thing to get right when considering the effects of Syria policy on the rest of the Obama presidency is that the scale of a Vietnam or an Iraq (or a Korea, for that matter) overwhelms everything else we might talk about.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Which is more important to you in your evaluation of Barack Obama's presidency: the resolution of the war in Iraq; the resolution of the war in Afghanistan; the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere; the intervention in Libya; or the resolution of the situation in Syria?

(Note: yes, these are not the only foreign policy/national security events of the Obama presidency; I'm just thinking about these, but feel free of course to discuss whatever is of interest to you).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jim Brady, 73.

1. Andrew Sprung on Obama's speech. And yes -- I noted the lack of GBA, too. Maybe Fallows got to him!

2. Jamelle Bouie on Obama's speech.

3. And Laura Sjoberg on networking at APSA. Good advice, as far as I can tell, although I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'll toss in my two cents: keep in mind that if someone (an important scholar, a senior colleague, someone you took a class from in grad school) ignores you or otherwise doesn't seem to treat you as well as you hoped, it may well be that person's poor social skills, not anything at all about what he or she thinks of you.

Failing Trial Balloon 101?

I have to say: if Barack Obama really does wind up nominating Larry Summers for Fed Chair, it's got to be some sort of record-breaking performance for Worst Use of Trial Balloons.

We've been hearing about the possibility for months. As far as I can tell, the reactions -- I think from both parties and all ideologies, issue positions, and experience with the potential nominees -- fall into basically three baskets:

1. Larry Summers is the World's Greatest Monster. Having him at the Fed would be an abomination (includes subgroup: Bob Rubin is the World's Greatest Monster, and Summers is disqualified by having had anything to do with him).

2. There are a handful of good, qualified, people, of whom Summers is one...but there's no reason at all to select him over Janet Yellen, who overall is the better candidate (plus a small subset of who have a different candidate)

3. Brad DeLong, who thinks that there are a handful of good, qualified, people, and who would give Summers a very small edge over the rest of the field.

OK; maybe I missed someone else in camp 3. And as DeLong points out, those are only the people, mostly outside of the administration, who will speak out publicly. But that's why you do a trial balloon! If you only want to know what your current economic team thinks, you don't need to go public to find out.

In other words, the administration put up a series of trial balloons, which were shot down, blown up, popped, deflated, or whatever else you do to balloons to make them dead, dead, dead, and gone away forever. And yet it appears that they're still going full speed ahead.

Very strange. If you want Summers, regardless of what anyone thinks, why go through all this? Just do a (relatively short, please) rollout. Or, if you do care what people think...listen to them!

Keeping this thing going for weeks and weeks for no good reason just makes it look like the White House doesn't know what it's doing. It's not the end of the world, but it's surely not a plus, either.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

What's the worst foreign policy/national security mistake that Barack Obama has made? By "worst" I mean the one with the most important consequences, so I'd also like to know what you think it has major effects.

(And technically: I'm asking for the worst mistake by the US government, or at least the presidency/exec branch, during the Obama presidency. It's always difficult to know, especially in this realm, which are presidential decisions and which are not. But the shorthand is okay most of the time).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to KRS-One, 48.

Good stuff:

1. Hey, academics: you'll want to read "How Not To Publicize Your Research" from Seth Masket.

2. Amy Fried:

Maine is the whitest state in the country (96.9% white) and Vermont is the second most white (96.7% white). Obama won both, convincingly. Twice. In 2012, Obama won 56.3% of the vote in Maine and 66.6% in Vermont. In 2008, Obama won 57.7% of the vote in Maine and 67.5% in Vermont.

And how did LePage do in Maine in 2010? Not anywhere near Obama’s total — just 38%.

3. And I'll lump the baseball ones together: Joe Sheehan on Dempster/Rodriguez, and Scott Lemieux on A Rod.

The Fun of Nixon/Obama Comparisons

George Will trots out the lame argument today that Barack Obama is a far more serious crook than Richard Nixon ever was. Jonathan Chait does a takedown, and it's fine, but I get the sense that he's not really into it...perhaps because Will puts so little effort into his own column.

I mean, really.

Will's big case is that the Obama Administration has selectively implemented the ACA. This is picking up steam among conservatives...but Will (as Chait notes) doesn't really argue it; he merely asserts it. Truth is, it's at about the level of "he has czars!" All presidents, all executive branch agencies, need to interpret laws while they implement them. Have some agencies during the Obama presidency crossed over the line between "interpret" and "rewrite"? Probably! It's a very fuzzy line at best. Implementation really does pose challenges; virtually all laws, no matter how well written, wind up colliding with reality in unexpected ways, and that creates tough calls for regulators and administrators. However, just as with the first term "czars!" talking point, what we're getting here is the implication that no interpretation is ever needed or justified. That's just not so.

At any rate. Obama's administration delayed implementation of some ACA provisions for a year; Nixon illegally refused to spend Congressionally appropriated money, which got him slapped down by the courts and eventually overridden by an angry Congress.

Obama's administration conducted an undeclared war in Libya; Nixon's administration conducted an undeclared and secret war in Cambodia. OK, not secret to the Cambodians.

Obama's administration hounded whistleblowers and prosecuted them to the full extent of the law. Nixon's broke into a whistleblower's psychiatrist's office to (attempt to) get dirt on him, and wound up all told doing so much that the case against him was thrown out in court because of administration malfeasance.

Obama's IRS...well, Chait covers this. Unless new information suddenly emerges, Nixon is the champ here, too, and it isn't close.

Obama's NSA did a wide range of things which were probably legal, but still in the view of many constituted abuses; Nixon wiretapped government officials and reporters. And we're still pre-Church, so the FBI and the CIA are up to all sorts of things. This one is probably the least clear...my bet is that when all the evidence is in the 1969-1974 abuses will top the Obama-era abuses, but it could easily wind up being a judgement call.

And then there's the accusations, backed by at least fairly strong evidence, that Nixon spiked peace talks before he took office; I can't think of anything analogous with Obama.

Am I forgetting anything? Oh, year: Watergate. Haven't mentioned that one, yet. Well, Watergate per se; some of this stuff wound up being folded into it, but nothing about about breaking into the DNC, or for that matter about ordering the Brookings firebombing, or having an operative trail Ted Kennedy, or campaign dirty tricks, etc.

Anyway, the fun of this is that whatever the accusation against Obama, it's pretty easy to come up with something similar that Nixon actually did, but worse.

I should note: that doesn't imply that Obama hasn't done anything wrong! Just that "worse than Nixon" is the wrong place to go.

Elsewhere: Senate Deal, more

Lots of stuff to pass along, including one on the Senate deal still holding on today's ATF vote. One quick addition to that: it's worth remembering that the Senate deal is important, and that the potential instability in the tag-team approach is important, because Republicans are still filibustering everything. So it still takes 60 to defeat all these filibusters; all that's happened is that some Republicans are willing to help the Democrats defeat those filibusters in order to avoid a nuclear confrontation. But the filibusters are still going on.

Here's the other recent ones, beginning with my weekend column from Salon, which is about why presidents should continue going public even if it doesn't do what people think it can do.

Is the bully pulpit dead?

The conservative (led) boycott of (some) health insurance

In defense of context-included policy coverage

Will Obama finally move ahead of W?

Ignore the Obamacare spin war!

Oy, Kraushaar

Granted, I haven't watched the president's speech today. But that's OK; apparently, Josh Kraushaar hasn't watched anything else the president did from about March 2009 until today.

Seriously: I think this could be the single stupidest thing I've heard anyone try to peddle yet about Barack Obama's economic record:

Instead of taking up health care reform in the wake of the Great Recession, the president could have spent his time addressing Americans’ economic insecurity by promoting programs for those finding themselves out of work, struggling to find new jobs, and looking to get back on their feet...

Imagine if Obama began his presidency pitching an economic opportunity platform focused on, say, expanding job retraining programs, extending the payroll tax cut, and streamlining the tax code.

My emphasis, because...Oh my God. That's right: Josh Kraushaar is complaining that Barack Obama ignored the economy from March 2009 until, apparently today -- and all would have been well if only he had supported extending the payroll tax cut. Extending the payroll tax cut. Extending the payroll tax cut!!!

(No, he's not talking about the beginning of the second term; later in that paragraph, he talks about how he had the votes in Congress back then to do whatever he wanted. Which also wasn't true, by the way, even in 2009-2010).

For the record: the payroll tax cut was passed in 2010 and extended in 2012 through the end of that year. It expired at the end of 2012 -- basically, at the end of Obama's first term. That is, the payroll tax cut was passed and once extended during the period in which Obama was supposedly ignoring the economy; it was only available to extend  at the end of 2012 because it was passed when he supposedly was ignoring the economy.

There's no hint in Kraushaar's column about the Jobs Act that Obama proposed in September 2011. Nothing about the economic plan he pushed in fall 2010, either. Nothing about Dodd-Frank. Nothing even about the proposals Obama made in his State of the Union this year, most of which he's still repeating (and House Republicans are still ignoring). For that matter, nothing about Obama's deficit-cutting over the last couple of years. Some of that may have been bad policy; much of it never happened because he didn't have the votes in Congress. But all of it was done in an attempt to get the economy moving.

Not to mention that there's a very screwy giving-speeches-and-passing-things focus here. What Obama did for the economy in 2009-2010 was mainly implementing the stimulus passed in early 2009. That's really not ignoring the economy.

By all means, criticize the specific choices Obama and Hill Democrats made. Was the stimulus too small? Too big? Badly constructed, or badly implemented? Was Dodd-Frank the wrong path? Should there have been a different course on housing? Was Bernanke at the Fed a mistake? Did Obama err in pivoting, to the extent he did, to austerity? All of those are fair game. The idea that the administration ignored the economy in after spring 2009, however, just won't fly.

Oh, and you know what? Ask a hundred economists, and I bet 99 of them say that "streamlining the tax code" is very small potatoes indeed for the economy compared with fixing health care.

I like some of Kraushaar's stuff, but this has to be the single worst column (not counting partisan talking points) I've read in a long time.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Louise Fletcher, 79. So, so, wonderful on DS9. One of the very best TV villains, and of course she was one of the very best movie villains, too.

A new week, and more good stuff:

1. An interview with the Monkey Cagers.

2. Sarah Binder on the Senate showdown.

3. Remember lazy mendacity? That was, during the campaign, the idea that Republicans were not even bothering to pretend that their claims were true; apparently they cared far more about the initial headline and getting a story out there than they did about the effects on their reputations when it turned out that the story was untrue -- to the extent that I noted a couple of times when they themselves linked to an obvious debunking. At any rate: we're seeing it in Obamacare "rate shock" stories, as Jonathan Cohn describes.

4. TNC on Obama's comments on Friday.

5. And Andrew Sprung on Obama.

Catch of the Day

To Christian Beckner at Foreign Policy who notes that, with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announcing that she's leaving, that there are now -- ready? -- 15 key slots at that department that will be vacant.

Let's see...I think I'll do this one bullet point style.

* It's fairly likely that there are other similar cases at other departments and agencies. Hey, reporters! There are stories out there about this stuff.

* Some of this really is a filibuster story. Some of it is about the impossible vetting standards that have built up over time. Senate reform is only a part of the solution, here.

* And some of it is almost certainly Barack Obama's fault. Indifference to governing? Failure to understand the importance of personnel? Don't know. I do know that every failure to appoint someone to fill a vacancy is a wasted opportunity.

* Yes, it's still the case that nominations, both judicial and executive branch, are Obama's biggest unforced errors of his presidency.

* Democrats haven't receive nearly the bashing they deserve over the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Terrible idea to begin with, and as far as I can see it's had even worse consequences than I expected. 

* And that's not to mention the awful name. 

* Nevertheless, there's nothing to be done about the department as a whole at this point. It would just create more pointless set-up costs.

* Did I mention the awful name yet? 

I think that'll do it for now. Also: nice catch!