Matt Zeitlin

I’ll be liveblogging it with the North by Northwestern politics crew here.

Friend of the blog Jamelle Bouie disagrees with this denunciation of Bill Clinton from the left:

- In reading this post from Bruce Reed the other day offering advice to Obama and the Democrats, while trumpeting Bill Clinton’s political adjustments after the 1994 election, this thought kept occurring to me — has there ever been a less consequential two-term president in the history of the United States than Bill Clinton?  Seriously, what did he accomplish in his eight years?  A balanced budget.  That’s something.  There was prosperity on his watch — but how much of that was ephemeral and how much of it was Clinton’s doing?  It seems to me that the neo-liberal policies that he embraced were not all that different from those of Reagan and Bush II — oh they were the free market with a human face of sorts, but by and large he helped foster the bubble economy.

One thing that hasn’t happened yet — but should — is that liberals who are noting that Republican obstructionism and the 60 vote Senate are the primary causes of a frustrating first year for Obama should become much more sympathetic to Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton was in much worse shape than Obama to pass any progressive legislation. He was elected with well under 50% of the popular vote and from 1994 to 2000 had to face Republican majorities in Congress. That he was able to do anything worthwhile — and balancing the budget was worthwhile — is remarkable. Now, there is room to complain about his priorities in office and whether NAFTA and welfare reform were really key components of any type of progressive or liberal agenda, but it seems impossible to say that the only reason that the Clinton administration didn’t produce the progressive results one might have wanted had much to do with Clinton himself.

Everyone should read Ben McGrath’s sympathetic, yet quite damning piece on the Tea Party Movement in the New Yorker. There’s all sorts of great stuff in there — from interviews of the nutty and sensible people involved in a true grassroots movement to some good historical analysis of where the Tea Party fits in with other populist movements in American history — but I wanted to focus on this bit, Republican representative Geoff Davis’ denunciation of cap-and-trade:

Geoff Davis, brought up the proposed cap-and-trade legislation favored by Democrats, and called it an “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.”

Of course, this is a pretty clear misrepresentation of how any carbon pricing scheme would work. While it is certainly true that cap-and-trade would mean higher costs for those whom carbon consumption makes a bigger portion of their income — the middle class who has to commute a lot, the rural poor — this overall picture of how liberal programs work is almost strikingly inaccurate. Putting aside that cap-and-trade wouldn’t pay for “social programs in the large coastal states,” this overall picture of how taxing and spending works in the U.S. obscures the fact that the states with the highest per capita incomes are generally  liberal and so end up transferring a lot of that money to the poorer states, which are generally more conservative.

In lots of Tea Party/right-wing populist rhetoric you see this overwhelming concern with money being transferred from those who are upright Americans who deserve it to un-American leeches who use their powerful, liberal representatives to make these heists legitimate. I think this goes to show that the ideas and passions of the Tea Party are really just those that have animated the modern conservative movement for as long as its existed and that, pace Yglesias, people are much less likely to support redistribution to strangers when they themselves are suffering economically.

So it seems like Bernanke renomination might be in trouble. The ire that lawmakers seem to have for Bernanke is, of course, hypocritical. Basically, everyone agreed that banks needed to be shoveled money lest the economy melt down, but no one wanted to take responsibility for it. So, the Fed, which had both the tools to do this and the necessary political insulation, shoveled tons of money to banks and now Bernanke is taking heat for it. And while this is unfair and silly, it makes sense.

What’s depressing about this situation is that there is a case to be made against Bernanke’s nomination and it seems like no one (in the Senate) is making it. Bernanke is not just the technical wizard in charge of value-neutral central banking policy, he’s probably the most important economic policy maker in the country. And, he has the policy preferences of, not surprisingly, the moderate-to-conservative Republican that he is. Which means that he’s quite concerned about inflation and has rejected expansionary, unemployment-lowering policies which he can implement because of inflation concerns.

Instead, both supporters and opponents of Bernanke seem to be mired in the past. The best positive case for Bernanke is that he did a good job when shit hit the fan. Which is true, but sort of irrelevant. The question is whether or not he should continue to be Fed chairman, not whether he should get a merit badge for his actions during the crisis. On the other hand, the idea that Bernanke should be punished for lack of regulatory action seems kind of silly. Following Megan McArdle, it seems unlikely that anyone would have done anything that useful in the time that Bernanke was Fed chairman. Also, it was hardly like the type of people who would be Fed chairman instead of Bernanke were super prescient on this issue.

But we’re stuck in a weird situation. Because Obama decided to renominate Bernanke, Chris Dodd is probably right that sinking the nomination now would be  ”the worst signal to the markets right now.” But if people just thought that the Fed chairmanship was another political/policymaking job that requires a certain level of expertise and that presidents get to appoint Fed chairmans whose political outlook is similar to ours, no one would have freaked out if Obama had just nominated Larry Summers or Janet Yellen. It’s not like they don’t have the technical chops for the job and it’s not like a slightly looser policy will turn back the clock to the late 1970s. But because we don’t seem to think of the Fed chairmanship this way, we’re stuck in the decidedly suboptimal situation where we have a less-than-ideal Fed Chairman pursuing less-than-ideal policies but it also being the case that it would be worse for everyone to not have him in the job.

Paul Krugman thinks that Obama, like Reagan in the beginning of his first term, should blame the weak economy on his predecessor:

Finally, about that narrative: It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

Maybe this is good advice, maybe it isn’t, but it’s worth noting the main differences between the two scenarios. Basically, because Reagan and Paul Volcker were directly responsible for the recession, Reagan had to blame Carter.  Although Bush was much more responsible for the current recession than Obama, Obama has pursued policies that have been purely expansionary in intent and still hasn’t gotten any political credit for doing so.  This situation, oddly enough, constrains him because it looks like he is deflecting criticism from his supposedly ineffective economic policies. Reagan, on the other hand, had no choice but to furiously distract people from the fact that he, along with Paul Volcker, was deliberately engineering a recession.

So, no matter what happens with health care, there is going to be a lot of talk among pundits and Democrats about “pivoting” to jobs. But I don’t really see how much of anything that will actually reduce unemployment can get through Congress before the midterm elections. The problem is that unlike voter or pundit concern with the deficit, voter concern with unemployment will respond to actual conditions. You can’t just make a big show of caring about jobs and then get points for caring about jobs. Instead, unemployment has to actually go down. So what type of policies could do that?

Well, the problem with any policy that Democrats are likely to propose is that they’ll spend money. Things like aid to states or a second stimulus will be criticized by the very pundits, centrists and moderate Democrats who are suggesting a pivot to job creation because all these policies would increase the deficit. The other big policy idea — a bit of inflation from the Federal Reserve — is not going to happen because Obama has insisted on keeping a conservative Republican in the most important economic policy job in the country. And, if Obama managed to get Bernanke out for such blatantly policy-based reasons, investors would actually freak out and that would probably be bad.

And it’s not like these concerns are purely hypothetical. You see, at the very beginning of his term, only a year ago, Obama exclusively focused on the economy. He passed a giant stimulus that even the AEI says reduced unemployment. But because the stimulus reduced unemployment from super-duper-god-awful to just god-awful, Obama isn’t getting much credit for it. And, as Yglesias points out, the payroll tax cuts in the stimulus were designed to be maximally effective, but that meant that they were designed to be as hard to notice as possible. Instead of getting a special check that everyone knows is  special stimulus spending unlikely to effect their lifetime income, people instead got a bit less of their paycheck withheld.

So, what are the Democrats to do? If they really want to pivot to jobs, they have to meaningfully reduce unemployment. But there doesn’t seem to be any great, feasible ways to do that. So maybe they should think on actually delivering something that’s been in the works for months and has 59 votes in the senate. Perhaps health care?

Because of liberal House Democrats ambivalence and outright opposition from labor unions, the Senate health care bill looks dead. So, are there any other options? Ezra Klein has this idea:

Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.

I mean, this would obviously be better than nothing, but it’s not really “reform” in the sense that anyone wants reform. I imagine the most popular part of health care reform, as envisioned in the House and Senate bills, are the insurance industry regulations. Just about everyone supports these. But since a lot of people, intentionally or unintentionally, don’t understand health care policy, we have the weird phenomena where people support the insurance regulations so that coverage can’t be denied because of preexisting conditions but don’t support the mandate and subsidies that have to accompany those reforms. And it’s exactly those two things which have made the health care bill “expensive” and scary and has driven its unpopularity.

Nate Silver has a post with graphs and data showing that “those states which have tended to take more liberal policies toward gay marriage have tended also to have larger declines in their divorce rates” and “Overall, the states which had enacted a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage as of 1/1/08 saw their divorce rates rise by 0.9 percent over the five-year interval. States which had not adopted a constitutional ban, on the other hand, experienced an 8.0 percent decline, on average, in their divorce rates.” Basically, there’s a pretty strong association between the strength of marriage as an institution as measured by the change in divorce rates over the past five years and the level of official sanction for gay unions.

So, does this mean, as Ezra Klein says, that gay marriage opponents “rely on some ridiculous arguments”? While I agree that most arguments against gay marriage — including that it weakens marriage as an institution — are quite bad, I don’t think Klein, Silver and other people attributing a ton of meaning to these statistics have quite the right take.

I think, pace Ross Douthat, that the reason we see socially conservative policies — from gay marriage bans to abstinence only sex-ed policies — in states where the social structures that they are trying to conserve are faltering is because people see that marriage and what not are falling apart and are looking for some sort of policy response to it. Throw in a dislike or aversion or lack of consideration for gays and you have strong support for gay marriage bans as social policy. But I don’t think it’s quite right to see this association as indicative of social conservative futility or silliness.

Also, when comparing divorce rates in richer, more educated states like Massachusetts to poorer, less-educated states like Kansas, it seems like one should also look at overall marriage rates. If there’s an expectation that everyone get married or if there isn’t less delaying marriage because of educational or professional attainment and achievement, then you’re probably more likely to see divorces as people get married who probably aren’t right for that marriage or for marriage at all.

If you’ve been following the wonky blogosphere recently, you’ll know that there’s a debate that started as a dispute between Jon Chait and Jim Manzi over some statistics Manzi used in his National Affairs essay to show that European social democracy underperformed the American economic model. Chait pointed out that his statistics didn’t actually show that, that they instead showed that per-capita GDP growth was similar and that much of the US’s gain in share of global income was due to population growth. Best I can tell, Chait is right.

Tyler Cowen, however, chimed in to say many things about comparing the US and Europe and I want to focus on this last point he makes:

Countries have to start from where they’re at.  If you’re constructing policy advice, you can either build on what a country is really good at or you can try to revise the internal culture of the country.  If you’re going to do the latter, come out and say so.  Most of my policy recommendations are based on the former approach, namely strengthening what (the better-functioning) countries already are good at.  I’m not suggesting that countries never change, but getting such changes right by deliberate policy interventions is very hard to do.  I wish to stress this point applies to the pro-U.S. as much as the pro-Europe side.

I’d like everyone to have a sign, which they would hold up when appropriate: “My policies seek to revise the internal culture of my country.”  That’s OK, but you’re raising the bar for your own ideas and don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

This point is a good one, and people should be cautious about country-to-country comparisons when there is little chance that a given country can full-hog adopt the other country’s policies or economic system. But I’m a little suspicious of “culture” being a catch-all reason for why America can not adopt a more egalitarian social and economic structure. Or, I wish we’d talk about more institutions.

It doesn’t seem like too big of a stretch to say that if America had a more majoritarian legislative system, we’d already have universal health care of some sort, and may have had it since the Truman administration. And when we talk about social democracy in Europe, health care is a big part of it. So would we be a social democracy? But what about our resilient individualistic culture?

Now, one can say that our change-adverse institutions are an outcome of our unique political culture; but the existence of a senate comes from the late 18th century when the idea of public welfare or anything like social spending was quite foreign to our political culture. And it’s not like European social democracies flowed naturally from their “culture.” Atul Gawande made the excellent point that many European universal health care systems were adopted in a piece-meal way due to historical circumstance. Once again, that the British government ending up taking responsibility for much of the country’s well-being because of the Blitz and then, by the end of the war, had the fundamentals of the N.H.S. already in place has very little to do with culture and more with Britain’s location vis-a-vis the rest of Europe.

It’s probably naive to think that the U.S. will ever spend more than 4.5% of GDP on job retraining, wage subsidies, unemployment benefits and early retirement like Denmark does, but it hardly seems like seeking to “to revise the internal culture of my country” by arguing for a health care bill that has passed the senate and marginal moves towards higher taxes on rich people and more redistribution and social insurance spending knowing that I’d like to see those moves go farther than might be politically plausible at a given time. One could even say I want a marginal revolution.

There’s a similar tendency in both sports and political commentary to think that the best response to any organizational failure is to fire someone quite prominent, if for nothing else than sending a message that failure is bad. So, when the Eagles lose to the Cowboys by 20 in the first round of the playoffs, the best response is to…not start Donavan McNabb next year?

It’s true that McNabb didn’t play great against the Cowboys, but the reason the Eagles lost is because their defense played horribly and, to a lesser extent, their nonexistent running game. Over the season and over his career McNabb has consistently put up better-than-average stats, made the Pro Bowl five times and, this past season, put up impressive members.  Simply because Eagles fans are frustrated with their team’s inability to win a Super Bowl doesn’t mean that replacing the most prominent player of their team will change their performance for the better.

Moshe Halbertal, in his review of Amartya Sen’s new book in the The New Republic, deploys a very common argument to show the flaws in utilitarianism, one that is supposed to show that utilitarianism can not or does not incorporate our strong intuitions about bodily integrity:

In order to highlight this problematic feature of utilitarianism, let us once again alter the circumstances, and therefore the distributive stakes, of our parable. Let us assume that Clara needs a liver transplant and Anne a heart transplant to survive. From a strict utilitarian perspective, as a matter of principle, there is a justification for removing Bob’s heart and liver. (Assume for the sake of argument that Anne’s heart or Clara’s liver cannot be used for transplants.) But such a violation of Bob’s rights to the integrity of his body seems intuitively wrong.

Now, Halbertal is already being a little fishy here by saying that there is a “justification” for removing Bob’s heart and liver, instead of saying that it is morally mandatory to do so, but let’s take the strong version of the so-called utilitarian argument here: a utilitarian says that one must remove Bob’s heart and liver in order to save Clara and Anne. But this argument totally screws with what we very strongly believe about bodily integrity, so what is one to think? It’s actually quite simple, one can be a utilitarian and still say that Bob shouldn’t be killed and his organs removed for the sake.

Here’s how it works. Instead of just asking, in one case, whether it’s OK to kill Bob so that Anne and Clara can live, we should ask what would happen if people thought that, if every time they went to a hospital, there was a chance that they could be killed so that sicker people could get their organs. If people thought that, or if hospitals had policies allowing such a practice, no healthy people would go to the hospital, and everyone would be worse off. And even if you think that rule-utilitarianism isn’t a viable alternative to act-utilitarianism or that one reduces to the other; in the case of medical ethics, people actually formulate rules for action instead of a free-floating calculations of what would maximize the benefit for some arbitrary number of people in specific time and place.

Now, it could still very well be the case that utilitarianism doesn’t allow for Bob’s death and that it has problems with bodily integrity or the distinctions between persons, but this case, which shows up often in introductions to moral theory, doesn’t really pose those hard problems in a compelling way.

It’s safe to say that the conservative movement has confused normative ideas about what policies should be implemented or not implemented. But of course I would say that; I’m a liberal. But it’s also noteworthy how the conservative movement has seriously confused positive ideas about pretty basic policy issues. There is, of course, the widespread belief among movement conservative types (and politicians) that reductions in marginal income tax rates will increase revenue. This, obviously, is not true and doesn’t have a scintilla of empirical evidence to support and not even any good argument for why this could be true when income tax rates are the lowest they have ever been.

But another argument that conservatives seem to take for granted is that, despite our abnormal-for-the-industrialized-world inequality, we have more intergenerational mobility, that the economic and social status for a given person is less influenced by their parents economic and social status than it is in other countries. Marco Rubio, profiled in today’s New York Times Magazine, believes this wholeheartedly:

He jackhammers his message about America’s exceptional status in the world. “This is the only society in history where your future is not determined by where you were born,” he said. “I believe that the United States of America is the greatest society in the history of humanity.”

This, intuitively, seems unlikely; if the income distribution is more spread out, it would seem harder to advance along it. But even when you just measure gross income gains, Marco Rubio, “The First Senator From the Tea Party?” is pretty wrong. Here are just a smorgaboard of papers and reports that all conclude that the US has less intergenerational income mobility than comparable countries. And, most damningly for hardcore economic conservatives, Scandinavian social democracies have higher levels of intergenerational income mobility.

Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has a paper which says that “Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children,the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated.” And, “estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth.”

Or, from Markus Jantti of Abo Akademi University:

The United States, Italy, and France all have high persistence, at 0.45, 0.44, and 0.42, respectively, which with a 12-fold income advantage in the parental generation would translate to roughly three times higher incomes among the children of the richest fifth compared to those of the poorest. Denmark has the lowest persistence at 0.12, and most other countries are quite close to 0.25. These numbers translate to 1.35 and 1.86 times higher incomes among the richest fifth offspring, holding constant the parental income advantage

In summary, “Intergenerational income persistence in the United States is quite high compared to other countries, and that persistence.”

Now, conservatives could argue that all this talk of mobility doesn’t matter and that it’s aggregate growth that’s important. But when there is so much inequality, this type of argument isn’t likely to find much purchase in the electorate. And, even more damningly, there is a ton of research that suggests the best way to increase intergenerational mobility, especially among the very poor, is intensive, expensive investments in early childhood education and health care. Of course, the only conservative education policy is to make it easier to fire teachers, privatize as much as possible and just hope shit works out. Which I guess explains why they hold such contrary-to-reality views about intergenerational mobility.

Dylan Matthews, after using my university library-fu to get his hands on Jonathan Franzen’s Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream” defending a certain type of realist ficiton that he practices, had some not-so-nice things to say about the novel’s place in the 21st century. He says that the novel is “no longer, technologically speaking, necessary.”

I say this as a committed lover of literary fiction: Dylan is, in a way, right. Certainly, for certain types of narratives, movies and TV do things that novels don’t. If you want to best tell a story in a gripping, thriller-type way, cinema gives you many tools that novels don’t. And if you want all the production values and visuals of movies, but tell a big, sprawling, multiple-plot story, television allows you to do that. Novels also take up much more time than movies and TV, for the telling of a single story, and demand all your attention. So, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that a form that was perfected in the mid-to-late 19th century is no longer relevant in a world where people have a lot else to do with their time.

But there is one thing that a novel can do that only the absolute best movies and TV shows can do: depict the interior life of human beings. Now, some movies can do this, but it’s really, really hard to do unless you take the risk of using voiceovers or have incredibly talented actors working with a genius director. Of course, this is hardly a new argument. Virigina Woolf in Modern Fiction was basically saying the same thing. Now, it may be that the interior lives of bourgeois types isn’t the most enlightening, interesting or important topic in the world. But it’s certainly something that a novel can deal with in a unique, inimitable way.

Of all the revelations that have come out in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book, Harry Reid’s poorly worded support of Barack Obama has probably got the most attention:

[Harry Reid's] encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.  Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

Now, this is a impolitic, ugly and certainly not attuned to our current sensibilities about the  way to talk about a black politician. But it’s hard to see what exaclty isn’t true. The idea that Obama had both an ability to talk to multiple audiences in their own dialect or voice and that this ability was an asset for him was hardly controversial. Here’s what Zadie Smith had to say in a lecture that was published in the New York Review of Books entitled “Speaking in Tongues”:

It gives me a strange sensation to turn from Shaw’s melancholy Pygmalion story to another, infinitely more hopeful version, written by the new president of the United States of America. Of course, his ear isn’t half bad either. In Dreams from My Father, the new president displays an enviable facility for dialogue, and puts it to good use, animating a cast every bit as various as the one James Baldwin—an obvious influence—conjured for his own many-voiced novel Another Country. Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: “I believe that’s the Milky Way.” This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president; we’re so unused to it.

And, from the right, here’s Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal:

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama’s broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama’s genius to understand this.

Basically, anytime someone mentioned that Barack Obama could speak well to different audiences, especially audiences of different races, they were basically echoing Reid. Anytime someone tried to explain why Obama was more likely to get the Democratic nomination that Jesse Jackson by mentioning Obama’s wider appeal, they were agreeing with Reid.

Now, the light skin point reads much worse than the rest of Reid’s bit’ but I think this is, again, something most people would admit. America was always more likely to elect a lighter-skinned and probably biracial black man than a black man (or woman) of unambiguously and complete African-American heritage.

That Reid described Obama’s only-occasional way of speech as a “negro dialect” can probably be attributed to Reid’s old age than to any underlying bigotry.

Anyway, nothing in this excerpt is comparable to saying that America would be better off had a single issue segregationist presidential candidate won the 1948 presidential election.