Brian Schatz

The most important thing about the transition from Daniel Inouye to Brian Schatz is that it matches the general transition from the 112th to 113th Senates: the outgoing Democrats had hardly any liberal energy remaining, while the incoming Democrats appear to have quite a bit. There is one exception, finally, with John Kerry leaving, but other than that, the outgoing Democrats either had little apparent initiative remaining of any kind (Kohl, Bingaman) or the bulk of their energy was spent on conservative or centrist priorities (Holy Joe, Conrad).

So much for substantive analysis; what about demographics?

Obviously, the big one here is age. Schatz is 40; the switch knocks an extremely impressive 48 years off of the total age of the Senate. That's right, this one transition alone lowers the average age of the Senate by about half a year. Recall that DeMint -> Scott was another 14 years, so the postelection developments have really made a difference, at least pending the Kerry replacement.

What else? Schatz is Jewish, meaning that the new Senate will only decrease by one Red Sea Pedestrian, instead of what was expected to be a decrease of two. The biggest hit, instead, will be Methodists, with four 112th Senate Methodists gone from the 113th and only one new one. The new Senate will add three Roman Catholics, and one new Mormon, as well as the Senate's first Buddhist. On the other hand, in addition to Methodists, the Senate is losing one Eastern Orthodox and Unitarian Universalist. Again, that could still change depending on what happens in Massachusetts.

As far as education, neither of the post-election Senators went to an ivy, although we do get a non-Ivy elite liberal arts (Schatz, Pomona). So Ivies account for just 2 of 14 new Senator undergrads (plus one other Harvard Law; Ted Cruz is Princeton/Harvard Law, so a total of three have some Ivy education. Not counting Elizabeth Warren, an Ivy educator).

Following the Fiscal Cliff Negotiations

Just a few points:

1. What gets reported from the negotiators is usually part of the negotiations. That is, reporters hear what the negotiators want them to hear. And you can't even assume which way it's slanted (if at all); one of the players may believe it's in his interest to stress how reasonable he's being, or how tough he's being. Doesn't mean it's really true.

2. That might include deliberate trial balloons -- but they usually aren't labeled trial balloons!

3. Advocates on both sides have will generally have a strong incentive to push for more -- to denounce the weakness of the politicians on their side, and emphasize both the cleverness and the outrageousness of those on the other side.

4. The exception to that is that advocates do have an incentive to temper their complaints about being sold out on less-essential items in order to be able to make a better stink if a higher priority is in danger. But even there, the incentives may be murky enough that they don't do it.

5. What's more, advocates may be misinformed or misunderstand the negotiating positions. That is, advocates may not realize that their side will eventually have to give up something of value (if that's the case) and instead of steering their representatives towards the least-objectionable area, they may be equally offended by any potential concession. This may be get even worse because advocates from once side may be entirely clueless about the structure of preferences and intensity on the other side (in other words, advocates on one side may believe that giving up X will buy the same reward as giving up Y, but that can be way off).

6. Even worse: advocates may be misinformed about the underlying substance. In negotiations such as these, there's just so much at play that even relatively well-informed observers may not realize potential trade-offs involved. And not everyone making noise is a relatively well-informed observer. Read things such as Jonathan Cohn's excellent post yesterday with that in mind.

7. Part of the job of the politicians in these things is to teach outside advocates about those things the advocates could be wrong about, but negotiating situation and underlying substance. But at the same time, the politicians could be wrong about any of it, too.

8. Oh, and one more thing: neither outside advocates nor the politicians involved in the talks are necessarily monolithic. There's no official "liberal" position on Social Security or "conservative" position on taxes -- but there are plenty of people who want their position to be the liberal or conservative position on an issue, and will act as if it is.

There's nothing wrong with any of this: politicians and advocates are doing exactly what they should be doing. Well, except for the misinformed part of it, I suppose.

It's just that anyone trying to make sense of what's going on should keep all of it in mind, and attempt to interpret what they read and hear with all of it in mind.

Old-ish Senate Update

No, the Senate isn't suddenly getting young -- but it's certainly backing off the record levels it was at a few years ago.

The latest updates? Jim DeMint is 61; he'll be replaced by Tim Scott, who is 47.

Daniel Inouye died at 88. He wrote to Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie before his death asking that Colleen Hanabusa, who is finishing up her first term in the House, get the appointment to succeed him; whoever Abercrombie appoints will hold the seat through 2014. Abercrombie will be limited, however, to a list that the Hawaii Democratic Party supplies. Hanabusa is 61. Worth noting? Blue Dog Hawaii pol Ed case is 60; Hawaii's newest Member of Congress, or I suppose Member-Elect, is Tulsi Gabbard, who was born in April 1981. I don't know enough about Hawaii politics to know who the other potential candidates are.

And while it's not certain until it's certain, everyone has John Kerry replacing Hillary Clinton at State. Kerry is 69. No way at all of knowing who gets either the temporary appointment or who wins the subsequent special election (or if Massachusetts changes their succession law again, for that matter). There is talk of Ed Markey, 66, running; most of the other possibilities would be younger, but I'll save a list of candidates until we know more. Of course, a short-term appointment could well be older. But, you know, probably not a lot older.

From the perspective of Senate aging, Scott is very solid, and Hanabusa would be a real missed opportunity, especially after Mazie Hirona took the other seat -- yes, if Hanabusa is appointed, Hawaii would have two baby Senators, ages 61 and 65. And given the Aloha State's electoral history, they would probably both be there as long as they wanted and stayed alive. Massachusetts? We'll see.

Even in the most pessimistic scenario, we're still talking about shaving almost 40 years off of the total Senate age, which is not bad at all. But I'd like to see a 100 year reduction from just these three seats. That would be a real dent in the aging of the Senate. Hey, Hawaii Democrats and Governor Abercrombie! Step up for a younger Senate!

Lobbying and Member Incentives

Matt Yglesias saw "Lincoln" and got interested in patronage and the incentives it provided to, in this case, exiting lawmakers in a lame duck session.

It will surprise none of the regular readers here that I'm a fan of patronage, I'm sure. But Yglesias asks a good question: given the existence of extremely lucrative lobbying opportunities, can modern-day legislators be bought off influenced by the jobs which presidents can control?

It's an excellent question. One answer is that political parties do probably have at least some influence on the influence-peddlers. Suppose Barack Obama really wants Evan Bayh's vote on something during the lame duck session of the last Congress, and he knows that Bayh's chief interest is to wrap up the session as quickly as possible so that he can start cashing in. Obama and the Democrats can't dictate to anyone in the private section who they should hire. But anyone who wants Bayh because of his excellent relationships with the Democrats might think twice if Democrats made it clear that he had no excellent relationship with them. Surely, we know that House Republicans in the 1990s with their "K Street project" pressured lobbyists to hire Republicans; I don't know whether they extended that pressure to which Republicans to hire, but they certainly might have.

Another answer is -- wait, Dick Armey is getting $8M to quit FreedomWorks?!? That is: there appear to be excellent financial opportunities within the party network, at least on the Republican side. Granted, I don't know how much influence George W. Bush may have had while president on self-styled outsider groups such as FreedomWorks and Club for Growth, but it's certainly possible that the answer could at least be "some."

But the third answer is: good point. I don't really worry very much about quid pro quo corruption, but I do worry a lot about perverse incentives, and it sure seems iffy that Members of Congress who leave their jobs can get a large payout, and presumably for a lot less and much more comfortable work.

Still, there doesn't seem to be a stampede for the exits, so perhaps, for whatever reasons, it's not actually all that big an incentive after all. And the last few years notwithstanding, lame duck sessions are actually a much less significant deal than they were back in the 19th century, so the particular problem here might not be that big a deal.

I do have to say that I'm not sure I ever recall seeing a good academic article about post-Congressional careers over time (might be one I'm forgetting), and what if any effect it may have had on Congress. I will note (and perhaps cite irrelevantly) that the 19th century House was the pre-institutionalized House, and that Members back then often left for a promotion to local positions. If anyone knows of any study that sheds more light on these issues, I'd love to hear about it.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Martha Plimpton, 42

And straight to a bit of good stuff:

1. Where are the statewide black politicians? Jamelle Bouie is looking for them.

2. Team Obama's use of social networks and other fancy stuff, by Seth Masket.

3. Doug Mataconis on whether the GOP actually gets anything out of Fox News, Rush, and the rest of it (answer: probably not).

4. Ross Douthat on where Republicans should retreat. Interesting. There's an analogy available here in the way that Democrats retreated on the death penalty and on gun control, without many of their politicians actually changing their positions. Could that be a model for how Republicans retreat on marriage?

5. Patterns in voting: white women. By Lynn Sanders, Carah Ong, and Adam Hughes.

Education and the New Senate

I'm not sure I have a major point to make about this, but given that all our recent presidents and most of the losing nominees seem to have either Harvard or Yale on their resumes, and given the much-remarked dominance of the Supreme Court by a few elite law schools, I decided to take a quick look at the incoming class of Senators to see where they were educated.

And: nope, they aren't all from Ivy League schools.

There's only twelve of them -- nine lawyers -- so why don't I just list all their schools:

Half went to state schools: two to Missouri, and one each to the Universities of Hawaii, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Houston.

Two went to flagship religious-affiliated schools: BYU and Notre Dame.

Two to Ivies: one Princeton, one Dartmouth.

And two to small liberal arts colleges, Smith and Williams.

As far as law schools, we did get two from Harvard Law; the rest went to U Conn, Georgetown, Lewis and Clark, Wisconsin, Virginia, Washington and Lee, and Rutgers. That's not a bad group of schools, to be sure, but it's also not all Harvard and Yale.

Again, this is mostly sharing the data, not really making a point. Of course, it's not perfectly representative of the nation; to begin with, all twelve are college grads, and nine are lawyers. Nor are their undergraduate experiences even representative of all college graduates: it's certainly weighted on the elite side. Less so than the Supreme Court? Sure. Beyond that, I don't really have any additional comment. Just find this stuff interesting, so maybe others will too.

Filibuster Thoughts: Coalitions

In my post last week, I said that I'd like to increase incentives for cross-party incentives. An anonymous commenter quite sensibly asked: "Why?" It's worth a response.

Basically, I'm for strong parties -- but at the same time parties where are relatively non-ideological and non-hierarchical. In other words, I think that democracy is best served when parties cooperate and internally compete to make policy. At their best, American parties have done a pretty good job of that.

Part of that involves real intraparty differences. Our parties are stronger, in my view, if they can accommodate those differences while still working together.

The system as a whole, however, is stronger if individual politicians can be policy entrepreneurs as well, and not just within the party. Indeed: democracy is stronger, in my view, when the losing party isn't entirely locked out of policy-making. After all, in single member districts, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and, oh, Jeff Flake and Ted Cruz, are just as much winners as are John Boehner and Harry Reid -- and Barack Obama. Granted, we don't expect minority parties to win on the sorts of issues which really divide the parties. But on other issues? Sure. Why not?

Parties should matter, yes.. Making party caucuses all-powerful just squanders the strength of single-member districts, of having Members of Congress who really know the various different places and constituencies out  there. Now, in a small nation, perhaps that's not as important. But in a continental nation of over 300 million, it seems very likely to me that the problems of Phoenix are not the problems of Great Falls or the problems of Pittsburgh or the problems of Long Island. And having Members of Congress who really know and care about the various interests and issues that they represent, and can actually have the capacity to do something about it, seems extremely democratic to me.

So that's one reason to encourage incentives for cross-party coalitions. A second is that, given the Constitutional system, we're apt to have divided government fairly often, which pretty much means we have to have compromise between the parties to make any progress. Under those circumstances, it's probably a good idea to have people around who practice at it.

There's more, but that's a start, at least.

Biden's Career Path

Dave Weigel makes an interesting aside in the midst of a preview of Joe Biden's debate style which I enthusiastically recommend. He says that after the 1988 presidential campaign fiasco, "Biden quit the race and followed the pattern of senators who’d had their dreams crushed in front of national TV audiences. He focused on the work."

That's exactly the kind of claim that goes right to that part of my brain that spent the better part of the 1980s and 1990s reading and rereading Bill James. Is there such a pattern? How common is it?

Well, the problem is that it's a little hard to do this one, at least for a quick blog post. But I'll take a shot. And guess what? The generalization holds a whole lot better than I would have expected.

1972: Ed Muskie returned to the Senate, and was Budget Committee Chair for a long stretch, and then briefly Secretary of State. I get the sense that his biggest legislative accomplishments were before his presidential campaign, but as far as I know his reputation as a serious Senator was basically the same before and after. Tom Eagleton had an excellent reputation as a serious Senator in the mid-1980s. George McGovern had eight more years in the Senate; I don't think he was particularly productive, but I think it's probably true that he "focused on the work."

1976: Does anyone really fit? Some Senators lost in the race for the Democratic nomination, but none really came all that close to winning. Bob Dole become one of the most successful Senators of his era. Scoop Jackson ran in 1972 and 1976, and died a Senator in 1983.

1980: Ted Kennedy certainly counts as perhaps the greatest example of someone who had originally sought the presidency but, after (repeated) humiliations on the national stage, wound up focusing on becoming an excellent Senator. Howard Baker and Bob Dole fit, too.

1984: Gary Hart is the counterexample, although the humiliation part doesn't come until his 1988 run. But he had already left the Senate, choosing not to run in 1986. I'm guessing that John Glenn was a more serious Senator after 1984 than before.

1988: Beyond Biden, there's Al Gore. You know about him.

1992: No one really humiliated. Bob Kerrey was re-elected once and then retired; Tom Harkin is still in the Senate.

1996: Bob Dole, of course, resigned from the Senate during his run. Phil Gramm, like Kerrey, was re-elected once and then retired. The others were Lugar and Specter.

2000: Again, no real dream-crushing. John McCain you know about.

2004: John Kerry has probably been a better Senator since then, right? Joe Lieberman continued as before, except even more sanctimonious. Re-elected once, then retired. John Edwards was on the Gary Hart path, except that his term was up in '04.

2008: Well, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, again, you know about. There was also Chris Dodd, who had a very busy two years in the Senate and then retired. If you want to count Evan Bayh, who got out very early in the cycle -- he's a clear counterexample.

(Note: I didn't include everyone, especially those with very brief campaigns, in an effort to keep this reasonably short.)

During the entire modern era, there are only a couple of Senators who ran for president without continuing on in the Senate long enough to get re-elected -- excluding, of course, those such as Clinton who were snatched out of there. Quite a few of them, including several whose presidential runs were embarrassments, wound up taking their work in the Senate more seriously than they previously had.  I would have thought that there were other examples similar to Gary Hart, who found the Senate too small after being on the big stage, or similar to Evan Bayh, who seems to decided that if he couldn't be president he'd just give up on politics. Or even Edwards, who was up for re-election and chose to go presidency-or-bust, something he shared with Fred Harris in 1972, but that's about it. Overall, it turns out that those are the exceptions; what Biden did in 1988 really does seem to be the more normal approach.

Q Day 8: Ethics Question

Okay, last one. Thanks for all the questions, and sorry I couldn't get to them all -- I just went through and answered a bunch in comments on the original post. But I'll end with a morbid one about political ethics, from Matt Glassman:

If a major party POTUS nominee discovered that he had serious but probably treatable cancer in October, would you want him to tell the American people before the election (potentially altering the outcome), or wait until after he/she won to disclose it?

Hmm...that's a good one, and I'm fighting the urge to say "depends." I mean, how "probable" is probably treatable? How debilitating is the expected treatment? Is this the kind of illness where revealing it would almost certainly cost votes, or is the kind of thing that people mostly accept as no big deal? And I suppose another very practical one: how confident can the candidate be that it won't leak if it's not disclosed?

The interests to balance here, I suppose, are the responsibility to the electorate and the responsibility to the party. Both are real and serious, and yup, they seem to be in conflict here.

And...I'm going to use one of the outs I mentioned. Because calculating the proper response to the responsibility to the party has to include not only the risk to election of disclosing but also the risk to election of not disclosing and then being discovered, I think I'll say that the responsibility to party and supporters won't outweigh the responsibility to the electorate. So you disclose...at least up the last few days before the election, at which point you can also make the (dubious?) argument that revealing such a thing in the last few days may be as likely to give the candidate an unfair advantage as it is to produce an unfair disadvantage.

Q Day 7: Politician Skills

An anonymous commenter asks:

You talk a lot about how being a good President is largely about being a good politician. One of the reasons you think Carter was a poor president, I take it, is that he viewed himself as above politics and did not take seriously, once in office, the job of leading his party and fighting partisan battles.

That said, my question is this: Did Obama's debate performance on Wednesday change your opinion on him? Joe Klein said something like, it's hard to imagine this Obama (i.e., the debate version) even being able to communicate effectively to do his job.

I wanted to respond to this one not just because it gives me an always-welcome chance to bash Jimmy Carter, but to talk a bit about the skills politicians need.

In particular, we tend to overemphasize those things which are easiest to see, of which public speaking style is probably #1. The press is particularly guilty of this, which is natural; after all, they're in the business of communicating, and it's natural to believe that it's important. And sure, it's important.

But it's only one political skill. It's probably not as important as, say, bargaining abilities. Probably not as important as, for want of a better name for it, political instincts -- recognizing the interests and incentives of other political actors. It's probably not as important as understanding political processes, whether it's budgeting or how nominations work or how agencies run.

The Carter anecdote that goes with this is that the "malaise" speech didn't actually hurt him; it was his actions in the aftermath of the speech which (further) alienated everyone in Washington, which in turn alienated voters.

Pro-Pivot

NPR has a story up today about the horrors of candidates who duck questions in debates. Apparently there's a guy who is dedicated to eradicating this scourge:

Todd Rogers, a behavioral psychologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, got interested in looking at pivots, or dodges, or whatever you want to call them, after watching the 2004 Bush/Kerry debate I quoted earlier.

To him, the dodging on both sides of that debate was enraging, and he couldn't understand why others didn't feel the same.

Well, I don't feel the same, so I'll try to explain.

Rogers and others worried about this -- and in my experience, most people are on his side, not mine -- in my view have a fundamentally wrong view of what debates are all about. It's basically a goo goo idea of debates...voters should come into the debates open-minded, the candidates should speak (rationally, honestly) about "the issues" in order to give voters a good rational basis for making vote choices based on those answers.

I think that's about 75% fantasy. Voters don't watch the general election debates with an open mind; virtually everyone who watches has already decided, or is leaning so strongly that we can probably speak of them as having decided but not realized it yet. Most undecided voters, at any rate, don't have strong views on most issues, so they're not going to choose based on carefully comparing the candidates' positions to their own, anyway. That doesn't mean that debates are worthless; I'll have a post later today  on why I think debates are valuable anyway. But the implicit model here of what debates should be is mostly based on fiction.

(What isn't fiction? I like questions about public policy rather than clown questions about campaign events or gaffes or other nonsense. Also, I'm pro-honesty, at least within reason; I don't think candidates should outright lie about things, and I favor attempts to discourage that sort of thing).

At any rate: because I don't expect debates to offer a thoughtful discussion of The Issues which will allow voters to make rational choices based on the candidates' positions, which are revealed only thanks to clever questions by moderators, I have no problems with a candidate who ducks a question he or she doesn't want to answer. For the most part, I think what's valuable about the debates has to do with the candidates talking about whatever it is they want to talk about; indeed, I think what's valuable about the campaign is having the candidates talk about what they want to talk about. Yes, I'd like to nudge them a bit towards public policy and away from, oh, whether the other candidate was really a Soviet operative (an actual debate topic in 1992), and so I'd like decent questions. But beyond that -- hey, it's a skill to answer the question you want rather than the question you're asked; it's a skill to avoid talking about what you don't want to talk about without overly insulting your audience. It's fine if politicians demonstrate that skill during the debates.

Catch of the Day

Today's goes to Dave Hopkins, who read today's Politico story in which Mitt Romney's personal flaws are alleged to be the source of his current campaign woes, and tweeted out:

Paging @jbplainblog: anon. Romney-ites admit he's a bad politician but say he'd be a really successful pres. Unlikely!

Political skills are equally important to succeeding in office as they are to successfully gaining office.

Yes, exactly. Now, in fact, I think Romney's political skills are, at the moment, underrated; no one accidentally winds up as a major-party nominee for president, certainly not in an era in which parties have re-asserted control over nominations (I'd be willing to go with Jimmy Carter and perhaps George McGovern as accidental nominees). But that points to the real point here: there's more to being a good politician than simply being able to come up with the right folksy metaphor all the time.

Note, for example, that the "$10,000 bet" that Politico makes much of didn't actually seem to hurt him very much in his quest for the nomination. But something did help him: his apparent ability to assure party actors that he was an acceptable candidate.

(There's also the question about whether Romney's current problems have anything to do with his electioneering skills or with the campaign at all; remember that he's down by about four points in current polling, which isn't very far from where "fundamentals" models would put him, depending on which model you look at).

Granted: there's George W. Bush. While I don't think his general election candidacies were anything special, his nomination victory in 2000 was a truly impressive political accomplishment. Bush did successfully sell himself to key party leaders -- most notably, the other Republican governors of the time -- as a good presidential candidate and presumably someone who could be a president who would not damage Republican interests. That turned out to be dead wrong, and the skill Bush appeared to show in doing so turned out to predict little of how he would behave in office. Still, I think the point generally holds: good political skills are useful both in campaigning and governing, and glaring weaknesses revealed in one most likely reveal defects in the other. What I'd probably say is that if we break political abilities down into specific skills, we would wind up with a broad overlap between those used in electioneering and those used in governing. Not identical, and some would show up in both lists but would be more central for one than the other, but nevertheless overlapping.

Also: nice catch!

The Real Me

I have a post up at PP this afternoon that I sort of liked about how the presidency is a job for politicians. Meanwhile, I the hook I used for it was a Romney adviser poor-mouthing him as a poor politician, which as I said was really just a way of spinning away his poor favorability numbers.

I went another way in the PP post, but another way to think about this is that, yes, favorability numbers should be thought of as a function of political skills and not some innate likability. To put it another way: likeability is generally not separate from other skills a politician might have. Oh, sure; there may be someone somewhere who would have terrific bargaining abilities and overall political sense but just repel so many voters that he or she would be unable to be elected. But that certainly can’t be the case for presidential nominees, who cannot make it that far without making themselves at least somewhat appealing to voters.

And the key there is “making themselves.” Political images aren’t something inherent in politicians; they are products created by candidacies and by the interaction of those politicians with the rest of the political world. Remember: everything you see, from one-on-one interviews to convention speeches to, yes, debate performances, is almost always thoroughly rehearsed and prepared. Nor are those performances received in isolation. Barack Obama was more charming – perceived as more charming – in 2008 than in 2010, not because he changed but because the political context changed. One reason why nominees look great at their conventions, as Romney will undoubtedly look great tomorrow night, is because they are by definition winners, and winners always look better than losers.

In that same vein, I have no problem with anyone who wants to watch the candidates -- or their spouses -- to get some idea of the persona that they'll be displaying in public should they win. But don't be fooled: what they show shouldn't in any sense be thought of as who they "really" are. Nor should you trust reporters to get at it. Every politician, and certainly every one of them who reaches that level, learns to put on a public face for the cameras -- and, yes, for those quieter interviews and "candid" moments, as well. Which is fine; of course they do that. It's part of the job. Just don't mistake it for something other than what it is.

(And it's not just what they're trying to do. We have lots and lots of examples of times when reporters apparently just got it wrong, perhaps because they tend to fall pretty easily for politicians -- or celebrities, or ballplayers -- who put real effort into working them. Kirby Puckett, anyone?).

Q Day 8: The Ultimate Constitutional Hardball?

OK, this is going to have to be the last one. I'll try to double back to the original post and answer some of the rest in comments if I get a chance this weekend. I feel like the great bloggers of old -- this is, if I'm counting right, my 14th blog post of the day, plus I wrote a column and I'm working on a second draft of a magazine article. And I still have a scheduled baseball post to do later (fortunately, no Watergate post tonight I don't think..I know there's one coming up, but I think it's tomorrow). All in all, a fun way to spend the anniversary. Thanks for all the terrific questions, and sorry I didn't get to all of them. I'll do it again before too long, I'm sure.

So, Greg asks a great question:

Why isn't there more state-level gerrymandering? That is, when there's unified partisan control of the federal government, why don't parties use that to admit more states to bolster their advantage in the Senate? If New York City (or even each borough) seceded from the state, there'd be two strongly Democratic states instead of one. Texas could split off several chunks to create more Republican states.

Two answers. First is: there are all kinds of institutional crosscurrents involved that make it harder than it might seem. Politicians aren't only party actors; they also have their own personal self-interest, which often conflicts with a party interest...for example, a New York Democratic Senator from upstate might worry that she would put her seat in jeopardy without the NYC vote, and prefer two safe NY seats instead of two extremely safe NYC seats plus two lean-Dem other seats. At the same time, some of her constituents may have strong interests in keeping the status quo in New York state government. The bottom line is "what's good for the party?" is often not the most important question politicians and other party actors ask. I'll point out, too, that it would surely have been filibuster bait any time in the last thirty years at least, and maybe even before that, and there haven't been too many occasions to test it in that case.

Second answer? I don't know! It's a complete mystery to me why Democrats in 1993 didn't try to make the District into a state, and even more of a mystery why Democrats in 2009 didn't do it. I've heard several suggested answers (basically they come down to what I think is an absolutely wrong belief that anyone in Nebraska or Missouri would care in an election two or four years later, although it's certainly plausible that the Benator or whoever actually believed it, even though it wouldn't have been true).

Celebrated Summer

Dan Drezner and Dan Larison have been going back and forth and back about Mitt Romney's announced plan to take a prestige-building foreign trip this summer. Both of them agree on a few things: Romney has been an embarrassing hack on foreign affairs so far; foreign policy isn't apt to be a plus for Republicans this year, presumably whatever Romney does; and anyway, the election won't turn on foreign policy and national security. It's a good discussion.

I'll add a couple of things. It's not likely that Romney's trip will have any effect at all on what foreign policy specialists think about him. For that, he would need to actually outline policies that impress them -- which is unlikely, since there's a very small overlap of foreign policy ideas that conservative orthodoxy would allow and what's generally popular, and my guess is that whatever fits into that very small corner is some sort of mindless demagoguery that would leave policy specialists not pleased at all. However, it certainly could impress nonspecialist reporters and pundits -- at least enough to keep them from talking about foreign policy as an important weakness of the challenger. If it does that, it's a reasonable use of time.

Which gets to the second point: opportunity costs. What he gives up for a foreign trip are some campaign appearances. But we're talking late July here; I think it's highly unlikely that a couple dozen campaign appearances several months have any effect at all. Sure, if he has nothing better to do, he might as well campaign in front of voters; it's not as if there's apt to be much harm in it, and so why not? But if there's anything actually worthwhile to do with his time, losing stump minutes isn't a reason to avoid it.

The only significant reason I can really think of that a foreign trip could be a campaign error would be the possibility of an effect on the candidate's health and stamina going forward. Don't forget, we're talking about a 65 year old candidate, and even much younger politicians have had minor health difficulties keeping up with the demands of the campaign trail (I'm thinking of Nixon in 1960, who had an ill-timed cold or flu or something like that, and Clinton in 1992, who repeatedly lost his voice). I assume Romney will travel in much more luxurious conditions than Nixon did in 1960, but still, it's a factor to consider.

Other than that, however, I'd say it's a reasonable choice.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to James Callis, 41. I'm not a huge fan of Baltar as a character, and I wouldn't put Callis on my list of top performances on BSG...but then again that's an awful high bar. We just finished (re)watching the series this weekend with the eldest daughter, who absolutely loved it...I found that the series held up extremely well the second time around (although watching the first miniseries episodes was sort of a brutal experience, just realizing what we were signing our daughter up for -- so many of the characters are so undamaged, or at least so undamaged compared with what's to come). At any rate, I was pretty much okay with the final episode the first time around, and this time I was even more positive. The one thing that I did feel about the series overall this time was that there were a fair number of times where I thought the actors saved some pretty cheesy writing.

Okay, I should get to the good stuff:

1. I'm not quite on board exactly for all of the history he lays out (but then again I'm very much in the minority on interpreting Madison), but David S. Bernstein has a wonderful, wonderful essay on democracy and politicians. High recommend.

2. Hans Noel on the ideological party.

3. Scott Lemieux on the bully pulpit.

4. And Sarah Kliff on the evolution of the spelling bee.

The Boomers Done It?

Regarding my discovery that the Senate is getting older in part because incoming recent Senators have become a lot older, which as I said earlier I had found but couldn't explain, my brother has a theory: it's the baby boomers.

Could be! I'll note, however, that over the last three cycles (that is, elected in 2006, 2008, and 2010) there have actually been four pre-boomers, four new Senators born during WWII. OK, Dan Coats is a new but not a first-time Senator, but still. And that might not be it. David Dewhurst was born in August 1945 -- after the war ended, but I think the demographers call 1946 the beginning of the boom. And Angus King? Born before D-Day (March 1944). Chris Shays is a lot less likely than either of them to make it to the Senate, but he was born in October 1945.

At least all of them were born after Pearl Harbor. Tommy Thompson, who I suppose is technically the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in Wisconsin, was not. OK, I don't think he's going to get the nomination...I mean, I really, really, don't think he's going to get the nomination...but I like the idea of Thompson losing to Tammy Baldwin and then going back in time to November 1941 and explaining it to everyone.

By the way: that's a realistic if slim chance that five pre-boomers could enter the Senate in 2013 (you could add Bob Kerrey -- 1943 -- but it's hard to believe that Kerrey, Shays, and Thompson could all get elected). If I'm counting correctly, the maximum number of post-boomers who could make it is only four. Yikes!

Also by the way: the demographers say 1965, but I think that's ridiculous; in my view, there's no way that those of us born after JFK died should be considered baby boomers. The idea that we share a cultural world with Sally Draper just doesn't work.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Nicholas Brendon, 41.

The good stuff:

1. Nice post by Jordan Ragusa on Americans Elect.

2. Bill Clinton is responsible for "38 percent of all presidential mentions of the word." What word? Stupid. Yup, stupid. Great research from Eric Ostermeier. My guess is that Clinton has to be also responsible for 90% or so of the presidential uses of the phrase "brain-dead," too.

3. Michael Tesler on race and opinions of the president's dog. Really.

4. Jamelle Bouie makes the case for Mitt Romney to go positive.

5. And Jodi Cantor on empty governors' mansions.

Vicious TV Attacks on 1960s Politicians

So those who don't watch Mad Men woke this morning to find that a TV show had taken a shot at Mitt Romney's dad. Let's get into it!

First: the character who calls Michigan Governor George Romney a "clown" is an operative for New York City Mayor John Lindsay, and for that matter not one who we in the audience are supposed to be, as far as I can tell, particularly fond of.* At the time, both Romney and Lindsay were positioning for the 1968 Republican nomination, on the hope that the Goldwater debacle of 1964 would make a liberal Republican the choice -- and, as Garry Wills tells it, on the assumption that Kennedy-like "charisma" was needed against LBJ (see also  here for more Wills quotes on G. Romney; and here for Brad DeLong on Nixon Agonisties).

Dave Weigel says:

This episode of Mad Men was set in 1966, when George Romney was about to be re-elected governor. He was one of the best-known critics of the GOP's conservative wing; he trashed Barry Goldwater for his Civil Rights Act vote, and would say in speeches that "state's rights" was a weasely term that excused racism. A liberal New York Republican would like Romney.

 Would Francis feel otherwise because Romney threatened his client's national ambitions? Maybe, but the "clown" line still sounds out of place. The myth of Romney's foolishness really got going when he gave an interview in 1967 about his shifting position on the Vietnam War. He said, mea culpa, that he'd had "the greatest brainwashing" from generals and the diplomatic core.

See also Ezra Klein, who says that "In 1966, George Romney was an incredibly admirable politician."

Two things. One is that Wills has Robert McNamara helping Romney to get his political career going (remember, they were both auto industry executives), but later believing that the problem with Romney was "no brains." Unfortunately, Wills doesn't tell us where he got that from, or more to the point when he got it from, and I couldn't find it after a quick search (and remember -- it was McNamara's DOD and generals that Romney was criticizing). My impression is that (as Wills basically says) George Romney was always vulnerable to getting a "no brains" reputation, and that one reason the "brainwashed" gaffe hurt him was that it was taken to confirm something that political insiders already believed.

The second and more important thing is that it's certainly very possible that a politician could hold positions on matters of public policy which one agrees with, and which may even be courageous in a way, but still be widely viewed as a moron; indeed, it's possible that such a politician might actually be a moron. There's a natural tendency to attribute smarts to those who agree with us on issues, and moreover to assume that the side politicians take on pressing issues of the day tell us something about those politicians. But neither of these is a safe assumption. It's true that many choices politicians make come from their beliefs about the world; it's also true that choices politicians make are just responses to the incentives they are faced with. Granted, one might believe that a politician is admirable even when (and again, not saying it's true in this case) she's a moron and her positions are just what her pollster told her to take, but I probably wouldn't agree.

As for George Romney...I really don't know whether his reputation among insiders was already formed in 1966, pre-brainwashing. But I suspect so.Nor do I have any idea at all whether the reputation was deserved. I am certain, however, that admirable positions on public policy give us surprisingly little hint about the intellectual firepower of politicians.



*100 years from now, Lindsay will be even more forgotten than he is now -- but will achieve immortality as Gotham Mayor Linseed on the Adam West Batman show. Hey, you take what you can get in politics.

Titles

Did you see that the airport in Little Rock is being named after Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Putting aside the obvious jokes (which I made on twitter yesterday, but it fell flat, which is why I feel compelled to mention it again here) about why Arkansas is naming something after a New York politician -- perhaps this is a good excuse to push an idea that American politicians should, as Emily Yoffe argued in a terrific post earlier this week, act like Americans and stop using their titles after they leave office. See Paul Waldman's follow-up, too. Hey, even Walt Disney knew this one: the theater on Main Street shows "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln," after all. In a democracy, Mr. or Ms. is a good enough title for anyone.

Back in the 1990s, I used to think that Bill Clinton was the right guy to start the trend. If he insisted on being Mr. Clinton now, I think there's a good chance it would catch on. But he didn't. Perhaps impeachment made him a bit more title-insecure than he would have been otherwise; perhaps it just never occurred to him.

Why Clinton? Well, it would presumably take a populist president to think of doing it...I wouldn't expect Ronald Reagan, for example, to have considered it. Nor would I expect it of anyone whose legitimacy as president was under fire: so not Nixon, or Ford, or Carter, or George W. Bush (and here's one case where it surely matters that Obama is the first black president; it would be entirely inappropriate to ask him to give up the title in the future while the other members of the ex-presidents club are using it).

Well, I hope he reads Slate (or the Prospect...well, I hope he reads Plain Blog, too, for that matter) and starts thinking about it. Surely by now impeachment is long past and his reputation as a legitimate president is safe and secure. After all, he's got an airport named after him! Maybe he could even get his buddy George H.W. Bush, surely secure in his reputation and with his own airport in Houston, to go along with it.

Yoffe is right: it's downright unAmerican to give people titles once they're done with their jobs. But she and I and you believing that isn't going to do any good. You know what we need? A Cincinnatus-of-the-titles, to take the lead and return to being a nice, citizenly Mr.

What about it, Mr. Preside...er, Mr. Clinton?