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April 1, 2004   

Etc.


Why is Noam Scheiber writing &c.;? Click here to find out.



04.01.04

MY FINAL WORD ON BROOKS--I PROMISE!: Nick Confessore and Matt Yglesias over at Tapped were apparently not so satisfied with my defense of David Brooks. As someone who is admittedly ambivalent about Brooks himself, I find a lot to concede in their posts--some of it I think I actually did concede in my piece. But I have a few thoughts in response nonetheless.

First, Nick argues that, even if you concede that Brooks is right at the broadest level--i.e., that there are some stark cultural differences between the kinds of people you find a lot of in Blue states (or regions or counties) and the kinds of people you find a lot of in Red states--this observation is "so true as to be useless." (Nick also accuses me of being "too fair to Brooks." But as I'm not quite sure what that means, I think I'll take a pass on it.) I agree that Brooks's is not an especially novel thought. But, given that fact, it's amazing how often the point--or at least its implications--is overlooked. For example, many people believed that Howard Dean might be able to overcome Southerners' predispositions against a culturally liberal northerner by simply appealing to them on the level of economics. People in the South need health care and good schools and jobs just as much as the rest of us, Dean would say, and it sounded reasonable enough at the time. What this analysis obviously missed is that cultural predispositions run pretty deep--some times so deep that they swamp otherwise impeccable political logic. And what a good Brooks piece does, I think, is demonstrate--pretty vividly, but, yes, occasionally pretty sloppily--why these cultural forces aren't nearly as surmountable as they sometimes appear.

Matt, for his part, says Brooks papers over the fact that affluent, culturally liberal, suburbanites are only one part of the Democrats' coalition; African Americans and the working poor also tend to vote heavily Democratic, and many of these people have more important things to worry about than where their next latte is coming from. I couldn't agree more (on both points). But, by the same token, fire-breathing evangelicals are also part of the Republican coalition, and Brooks doesn't spend a whole lot of time talking about them either (though he clearly does talk about religion). If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because these neglected groups are the safest part of each party's coalition--that is, the base. Conversely, the reason I imagine Brooks devotes most of his attention to the vast middle--affluent suburbanites versus slightly less affluent exurbanites, for example--is that this is where he sees the real action, politically. And there's some truth to that claim. While African Americans and the working poor are voting basically the same way today as they voted in 1980 or 1988, affluent suburbanites once voted Republican but are increasingly voting Democratic.

In any case, these are all worthy topics for discussion. And a good piece about Brooks would have gotten into them. My biggest problem with the Issenberg piece wasn't that it took a critical view of Brooks, but that it was pretty superficial, consisting by and large of the kinds of cheap shots you could take at anyone, whether or not they were any good at what they did.

(A final point: Nick in his post refers to me as "his friend," which is often times just a polite way of saying "this idiot who I'm about to skewer." But in this case Nick and Matt and I do all happen to like and respect one another, at least as far as I know, so please understand that there's no bad blood here.)

posted 2:58 p.m.

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03.31.04

MORE HACKERY FROM THE BUSH TREASURY DEPARTMENT: This Wall Street Journal story, while not quite as alarming as its first paragraph suggests, is still pretty alarming. Here's that first graph:
The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry's tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site. A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns.
Later on the piece explains that this kind of thing, though it's not supposed to happen, went on in the first Bush administration, and that the Clinton administration used its Treasury department to calculate the cost of Bob Dole's and George W. Bush's tax cut proposals. (Though it didn't share them with the Clinton or Gore campaigns.) Still, the Bush Treasury's use of overtly political language on its website--e.g., Kerry's proposal would represent a tax increase of as much as $477 billion on "hardworking individuals and married couples"--strikes me as pretty tacky.

Also, the rationale provided by Bush's former assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, Pam Olson, strikes me as utterly absurd. Here's how the Journal sums it up:

But Pamela Olson, who stepped down as the Bush Treasury's top tax official last month, countered that the Treasury should do even more analyses. "The obligation at the Treasury Department is to advance the president's legislative agenda," which includes making the individual income-tax cuts permanent, she said. "Something that goes in the opposite direction" -- as Mr. Kerry's proposal would -- "would be inconsistent with the president's legislative agenda," she said.
What? According to the "advance the president's legislative agenda" criterion, isn't pretty much anything that helps Bush get re-elected okay, since failing to get re-elected would be the biggest possible blow his agenda could suffer? Surely Olson doesn't mean it's okay for Treasury to do anything that helps the president get re-elected. ... How 'bout political ads with testimonials from career civil servants? Dispatching teams of IRS agents to audit Kerry campaign staffers? Sending Treasury tax lawyers to heckle Kerry at campaign rallies?

posted 8:40 p.m.

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THE STAGGERING DISHONESTY OF THE ANTI-GAY-MARRIAGE CROWD: Now for a discussion that brings together two of my favorite issues: Social Security and gay marriage. Yesterday's New York Times featured an article about the Congressional debate over the gay-marriage amendment. The article included the following paragraph:
Ms. Musgrave and others say they take offense at the very suggestion that they are discriminatory. Backers of the proposal say those fighting it prefer to talk about bigotry rather than some of the practical consequences of widespread gay marriage, like the drain on retirement systems if large numbers of same-sex spouses were suddenly to qualify for survivor benefits.
The idea of a run on Social Security survivor benefits being an unforeseen consequence of gay marriage struck me as so absurd I decided to do a little checking around. Now that I've done so, it strikes me as even more absurd. First, about 1.2 million people identified themselves as part of a gay or lesbian couple in the latest census. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is approximately the number of gays and lesbians who would get married if gay marriage suddenly became legal and available across the country. (I think that's pretty high, since being part of a couple doesn't necessarily mean you want to get married. But, on the other hand, I imagine that the number of gay couples has increased since the census data were collected almost four years ago.)

Anyway, a quick check of the Social Security Administration web site reveals that the number of people who receive survivor benefits in a typical month is about 7 million. As there are about 120 million married people in the country, let's assume that a country of 120 million married people produces about 7 million kids and widows/widowers who receive survivor benefits--or, put differently, that the number of people who receive survivor benefits is about 6 percent of the number of married people. (I realize this isn't a perfect assumption: The number of married people that produced those 7 million survivors was probably somewhat different from 120 million. But I think these numbers provide a reasonable estimate.) Assuming the same relationship applies to the gay population, then 1.2 million married gay people should produce about 70,000 people who will claim survivor benefits. Which means that, for the foreseeable future, we're probably not talking about more than 100,000 additional people earning survivor benefits, out of a total of 7 million currently earning survivor benefits, if gay marriage is legalized. That's an increase of less than 1.5 percent--in dollar terms, less than $1 billion out of the $60 billion or so we pay out in survivor benefits each year. This, of course, is peanuts compared with an annual federal budget of $2.4 trillion and annual Social Security disbursements of nearly $500 billion.

(BRIEF ASIDE: It's conceivable that in 20 or 30 years there will be many more than 1.2 million married gay people. But, then again, there will probably be many more heterosexual recipients of survivor benefits, given the aging of the baby boomers, so the overall percentage of survivor beneficiaries resulting from gay marriage could actual fall dramatically. In any case, even if you believe that there will be, say, three times as many new survivor beneficiaries as a result of gay marriage as I'm assuming, we're still talking about less than a 5 percent increase in the overall volume of people receiving survivor benefits, assuming no increase in the population of heterosexual beneficiaries.)

But wait, there's more. As Brookings Social Security experts Henry Aaron and Peter Orszag point out, the way survivor benefits work is that survivors get either their own Social Security benefits or the their own benefits plus the difference between their benefits and the benefits their deceased spouse would have received--whichever number turns out to be higher. Which means that, in a couple with two income-earners in which both partners earn about the same amount of money, the survivor benefits are worth almost nothing. (This doesn't take kids into account, whose survivor benefits are calculated differently.) And it turns out that gay couples are much more likely than the average heterosexual couple to have a.) two income-earners, and b.) two income-earners who make roughly the same amount. That means that, in many cases, the survivor benefit for gay people would be zero or close to zero--bringing our earlier estimate down substantially.

All of that said, there's probably an even more important point here: Given that gay workers are paying into a system that promises everyone else survivor benefits, why shouldn't they, as a matter of equity, receive these benefits, too? This, after all, has nothing to do with how you feel about gay marriage. It's a basic question of rights: Some people are paying into a system that promises benefits they're not getting.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what on earth is the anti-gay-marriage crowd doing making arguments about practical consequences anyway? I thought the whole point of their opposition was that they couldn't tolerate gay marriage on principle--i.e., that they think gay marriage would undermine the whole institution of marriage. Do the people who hold survivor benefits up as an argument against gay marriage mean to suggest that they'd be in favor of legalizing gay marriage if it would save the Social Security system a little money?

posted 6:27 p.m.

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03.30.04

BOB WOODWARD'S SECRET PLAN TO SAVE THE COUNTRY: For years Bob Woodward has looked to the journalistic community like a professional shill--buying incredible access to top officials with the implicit promise of hagiographic treatment in his prose. But it turns out that Woodward was a step ahead of us all along--executing a long-planned strategy of maximizing his influence over American politics, at which point he would cash in his chits for the sake of the republic. What I have in mind here is Woodward's forthcoming book on the war on terror, which will apparently be highly critical of George W. Bush at a time when Bush can least afford it. Here's how Lloyd Grove sums it up today:
I hear that "Plan of Attack," supersleuth Bob Woodward's still-secret study of President Bush's war on terrorism, will be very bad for the Bush reelection campaign - which is still reeling from gun-toting former terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration figures in "Against All Enemies."

Woodward's book, to be released next month, will receive not only a multipart series in The Washington Post, but also the Mike Wallace treatment on "60 Minutes" April 18 - when I am absolutely confident that the common corporate ownership of CBS and Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will be mentioned.
Wow. Maybe all those Commanders and Maestros and Bush-at-Wars were worth it after all...

posted 8:58 p.m.

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03.29.04

INTERPRETING THE POST-DICK CLARKE POLL NUMBERS: Yesterday on "This Week," George Stephanopoulos cited a recent Newsweek poll on the issue of 9/11 responsibility and noted the following:
In the headlines, a Newsweek poll out this morning shows that the 9/11 debate has made more Americans question how President Bush has handled the war on terrorism. It shows that his approval rating for the war on terror and homeland security has dropped from 65 percent to 57 percent. The president's overall approval rating has held steady at 49.

Most Americans also say, however, that the charges leveled by the president's chief accuser, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, have not affected how they think about President Bush. Fewer than one in five Americans have a less-favorable view of Bush because of Clarke's accusations. And half of those polled say they think that Mr. Clarke has personal and political motivations [emphasis added].
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't one in five a pretty significant number--particularly at a time when most polls show Kerry and Bush in a statistical tie? I guess it's possible that most of these one-in-five were Democrats who already had unfavorable views of Bush, and that Clarke simply made their views even less favorable. On the other hand, if you're already a Bush-hating Democrat, it seems unlikely that your views of the president could get a whole lot worse. Isn't it more likely that the people who said Clarke's accusations changed their opinion of Bush were people who didn't already have their minds made up about him? And since this group can't possibly account for more than 20 percent of the electorate, then it's likely that the opinion of just about everybody who's opinion it was possible to change actually did change thanks to Clarke's allegations.

UPDATE: I should probably deal with an additional wrinkle from the Newsweek poll before I get any angry e-mails: In addition to the specific Clarke-related numbers, the poll also reports that Bush's overall approval rating stayed flat, at 49 percent. This raises the question of why, if I'm right that undecided voters are the ones whose opinions of Bush have been changed by Clarke, these sentiments aren't showing up in Bush's approval rating.

It's a good question. My response is to point you to another result from the poll: The president's approval rating on terrorism and homeland security has fallen from 70 percent to 57 percent since Newsweek's last poll two months ago. My hunch--and I'm sure someone out there has looked at the evidence closely enough to know if I'm right (this means you, Ruy!)--is that dips in politicians' overall approval ratings tend to lag dips in support on specific issues.

posted 6:41 p.m.

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03.25.04

THE REAL POLITICAL FALLOUT FROM DICK CLARKE'S BOOK: Ron Brownstein makes a reasonably compelling case for why Kerry isn't likely to get quite as much mileage out of the revelations disclosed in Richard Clarke's book and this week's 9/11 commission hearings as you might expect:
But most Republicans remain cautiously optimistic that this week's events won't significantly erode public approval of Bush's handling of the terrorist threat. They base their view largely on the belief that that confidence is rooted in real-world events--the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, above all, the absence of additional attacks inside the United States since that searing day in 2001.

Some independent analysts agree that those critical of Bush's terrorism tactics face the same problem the president does on the economy: Voters' actual experiences, rather than arguments from either side, are most likely to shape their attitudes.

"People aren't going to judge Bush on the basis of what the commission says; they are going to judge him on the basis of performance," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling organization.
All true. But doesn't this logic go out the window if there's a terrorist attack in the United States between now and the election? (And, believe me, this is the last thing I want to happen--particularly as a resident of DC with family in the New York area.) Whereas the conventional wisdom up to this point more or less held that another attack would aide Bush's reelection (though that CW took a bit of a hit after the attacks in Spain), wouldn't the practical effect of the Clarke book and the 9/11 commission hearings be to make Bush extremely vulnerable politically in that scenario? It would very quickly connect the current abstract criticism to first-hand experience ...

posted 3:43 p.m.

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WHO ARE THE AD WIZARDS ...: One other thought about the 9/11 commission: There seems to be a pretty large disparity between the savviness of the Democratic members, like Tim Roemer, Bob Kerrey, Jamie Gorelick, and Richard Ben-Veniste--who've aggressivley deposed former Bush (and, to their credit, Clinton) administration officials--and the Republican members, like former governor of Illinois James Thompson, who seem more inclined toward hackery.

To wit, this exchange between Thompson and Clarke at yesterday's hearing, as the Post reported it:

Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.

Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student.

"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."

With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency--"the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?"--Clarke tutored the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who had far exceeded his allotted time, frowned contemptuously. "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this," he said. During a second round of questioning, Thompson returned to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality."

"I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke snapped.

Thompson had to wait for Sept. 11, 2001, victims' relatives in the gallery to stop applauding before he pleaded ignorance of the ways of Washington. "I'm from the Midwest, so I think I'll leave it there," he said. Moments later, Thompson left the hearing room and did not return.
My hunch is that the administration didn't expect the public hearings to generate this kind of attention when they went about selecting the Republican members of the commission. They probably figured that, with a few notable exceptions (like the commission's head, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean), their ideal commission-member was someone relatively pliable and unlikely to get very worked up over administration foot-dragging and obfuscation. Whether or not they could feign competence or objectivity in a public setting was not a major concern. In retrospect, it looks line one of those good bets that just didn't pan out...

WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, Republican commission member Fred Fielding was also pretty inspired yesterday, when he essentially accused Clarke of perjuring himself before congress. Here's the Post's account:

Fred F. Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke, though the back of his neck and head were a burning red, replied coolly: "I wasn't asked, sir."
Oops.

posted 1:58 p.m.

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REPUBLICANS ACCUSE THE ADMINISTRATION OF A COVERUP: This paragraph from today's Post, about yesterday's congressional testimony from Richard Foster, the Medicare actuary who estimated--accurately, as it turns out--that the Bush Medicare "reform" plan would cost almost $150 billion more than its $400 billion price tag, nicely summarizes the situation:
Foster's acknowledgement of those threats touched off a partisan furor. It was on full display as he testified for three hours before the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the main authors of the Medicare bill that narrowly passed Congress in November. Democrats accused the administration of a coverup; Republicans said the actuary followed the law by deferring to his boss to decide how much internal administration information about the legislation Congress deserved.
In other words, Democrats accuse the administration of a coverup; Republicans accuse Foster's boss of a coverup. Other than the details of who actually did the covering up (which, to be sure, is not a trivial matter), it doesn't sound like we're that far apart here.

posted 10:43 a.m.

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APPARENTLY NOT AN IRONIC COMMENT: From today's Washington Post:
Rice, who has refused to testify publicly before the commission, met with reporters late yesterday and said that Clarke has sharply changed his view of the administration's war on terrorism. "This story has so many twists and turns now that I think he needs to get this story straight," Rice said.


posted 10:01 a.m.

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DICK CLARKE 2, WHITE HOUSE 0: I have no doubt that this apology from Richard Clarke yesterday before the 9/11 commission was sincere. But it also happened to be a brilliant public relations move:
[P]erhaps the day's most dramatic moment came at the start of Clarke's testimony, when he issued an apology that prompted sobs and cheers from the front rows of the packed hearing room, which were filled with relatives of victims of the terrorist attacks.

"To the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you," he said. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
As Ryan Lizza and Fred Kaplan have pointed out, the Bush administration may finally have met its match, political street-fighter-wise.

posted 09:53 a.m.

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