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Is Obama Too Thoughtful?

Monday, February 15th, 2010
Mike Signer


Mike Signer is a PPI senior fellow and chair of PPI’s E3 Initiative.

by Mike Signer

The following is an excerpt from Mike Signer’s column published this weekend in the Daily Beast:

“[W]e need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” That’s what Sarah Palin told Tea Partiers in Nashville last weekend, triggering uproarious cheers. A few weeks earlier, she had dismissed Obama’s State of the Union as “quite a bit of lecturing, not leading.” Meanwhile, John McCain just borrowed the “lecturer” line to attack Obama in the Financial Times.

Palin and her partners seem intent on turning one of Obama’s strengths—his thoughtfulness—into a liability. Such broadsides threaten to dominate political and policy debates not just in November’s mid-term elections, but the 2012 presidential election as well. The administration should take note and pivot quickly. The fact is that voters often need a bolder narrative, one whose plot turns on actions and victories, not just the calls to civil discourse and contemplation that have come to mark Obama’s presidency.

The intellectual has always held a hallowed, fraught place in American politics. In Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, set in the 1950s, Bellow’s slightly ridiculous poet-hero Von Humboldt Fleisher showers praise on Adlai Stevenson, the “great souled” intellectual Democratic nominee for a president whose “chief of staff would know Thucydides.” “Intellectuals are coming up in this country,” Humboldt says. “Democracy is finally about to begin creating a civilization in the USA.”

The mirage of a “great-souled man” who can help “create a civilization in the USA” still promises water in the desert, particularly to progressives. It played a significant role in Obama’s stunningly inspiring 2008 campaign. But this vision also rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Since our nation’s beginning, many Americans have viewed overt intellectuals with suspicion and disdain, as memorably documented by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 volume, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

We all know that Obama was a law professor. He deeply believes the lawyer’s idea that a thesis, brought into conflict with antithesis, will result in synthesis: truth. As president, Obama has demonstrated unheralded courage in his repeated attempts to use politics to help lead toward truth, rather than just a win. You might call this the “philosophical model” of the presidency, and it dominated his State of the Union address.

One example was a passage meant to make people reflect on their own responsibility to counter pessimism with a sort of voluntary optimism. Obama said, “As one woman wrote me, ‘We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.’ … It is because of this spirit—this great decency and great strength—that I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight. . . . And tonight, I’d like to talk about how together, we can deliver on that promise.” Note that he says, “I’d like to talk about.” It’s as if Obama is inviting us to reason together. This is what Palin attacks as a “lecture.”

Read the full column at the Daily Beast.

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State of the Union: The Philosophical President

Friday, January 29th, 2010
Mike Signer


Mike Signer is a PPI senior fellow and chair of PPI’s E3 Initiative.

by Mike Signer

“There was quite a bit of lecturing, not leading.”

This is what Sarah Palin said about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. Yes, I laughed, too — but it’s worth listening to Palin’s response (if not taking it too seriously). I found the president’s speech serious to the point of contemplative. We all know that Obama was a law professor. He deeply believes that thesis, brought into conflict with antithesis, will result in synthesis — truth.

One of Obama’s greatest unheralded risks is his repeated attempt to use politics to help lead toward truth, rather than just a win. You might call this the “philosophical model” of the presidency. Whether or not using the presidency not just to educate but to help collectively drive toward greater understanding works for people when more material needs are on their minds is a critical question for Obama. It’s a new experiment, one that is unfolding as we speak.

In several conversations I’ve had since the speech, the topic of Obama’s silences has come up. Often you could hear a pin drop, as the president introduced big themes, complicated them, let a heavy idea drop on the shoulders of his audience. He delivered some lines literally to make people ponder, rather than rise from our chairs cheering.

Here’s one example — a leading passage meant to make people reflect on their own responsibility to counter pessimism with a sort of voluntary optimism:

As one woman wrote me, “We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.” . . . It is because of this spirit – this great decency and great strength – that I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it’s time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength.

And tonight, I’d like to talk about how together, we can deliver on that promise.

Note that he says, “I’d like to talk about…” It’s as if Obama is inviting us to reason together. This is what Palin heard as a “lecture.”

Then there was the passage where he slowly, methodically, almost quietly mocked the “noise” that surrounds politics today:

But remember this – I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone. Democracy in a nation of three hundred million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.

Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation.

But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight.

Here, he linked “doing big things and making big changes” with an opposition to “noisy and messy and complicated.” He quietly suggested those who are “noisy and messy and complicated” are not on the right path; reason, paired up with policy ambitions, will instead lead the way.

The only problem is it hasn’t worked out that way so far. Obama’s greatest rhetorical successes have also been his most reflective — e.g. the campaign’s “race speech” about Jeremiah Wright, or Obama’s Oslo speech reconciling the Nobel Peace Prize with his deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But both of these speeches were also retrospective — about events in the past, rather than policies in the future. The question is whether this approach can sustain the presidency itself, especially against the Republicans’ scorched-earth tactics. Can Hegelian dialectic be the rule, rather than the exception?

The answer, I suppose, will lie in the eating of the pudding. If the president’s injunction to be more thoughtful about our problems and more capacious in our understanding ends up eliciting more participation in solutions, then he’s right. If, on the other hand, during all those long silences last night, Republican operatives were only scheming about how to kill every single one of his proposals — and they do it — then it will have been an exhibit of a beautiful mind.

That’s what Palin was after with her attack on Obama’s “lecture.” After all, inanity has never been inconsistent with extremists’ strategy; indeed, in dark times, it is sometimes their best playbook.

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State of the Union: Obama Still Missing a Master Narrative

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

President Obama’s first State of the Union address was a surprisingly prosaic affair for a man of his oratorical gifts. It was practical, concrete, and workmanlike, long on common sense and short on inspiration.

Still, the speech probably advanced several of Obama’s key goals, and it gave the country a chance to see how well he stands up to political adversity. By turns humorous, passionate and resolute, Obama gave the impression of a more seasoned leader who has not been knocked off stride by recent reverses, and who is rededicating himself to changing the way Washington works.

On the positive side, Obama conveyed empathy with working Americans who have lost jobs, houses and retirement savings, and reassured them that he will put jobs and economic recovery first in 2010. He identified with their anger over government’s rescue of the financial sector – “we all hated the bank bailout” — and reeled off a list of small-bore initiatives to boost small businesses and help middle-class families pay for childcare, retirement and college.

Although his major reforms — health care, financial regulation, the climate and energy bill – seem stalled, the President vowed to stay the course. In fact, he deftly parried conservative depictions of these as big government or archliberal initiatives, defining them instead as integral to the mission he was elected to accomplish: changing Washington’s dysfunctional political culture.

Crucially, Obama sought to resurrect his image as an outsider and insurgent bent of tackling America’s polarized and broken politics. He spoke of the “deficit of trust” in government and vowed to reduce the power of lobbyists and special interests, though was uncharacteristically vague on how he’d do that.

The president also seems to have recognized that, to win back disaffected independents, he will have to confront the forces of inertia in his own party as well as his political opponents. He issued a pointed challenge to liberals not to resist his efforts to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government, endorsed a deficit-reduction commission and threatened to veto profligate spending measures. And he bluntly called out Republicans for their blind obstructionism, adding that their ability to block legislation carries with it the responsibility to help solve the nation’s problems.

The most disappointing part of Obama’s address was on international affairs, a subject he finally turned to about an hour into his speech. The president duly noted that he is waging the fight against al Qaeda aggressively and sending more troops to Afghanistan. But he had little to say about the nature of the struggle that America is waging, at great sacrifice, against Islamist extremism. He seemed more passionate in affirming his pledge to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq, but said little about what they have achieved there, or whether our country has any interest in what happens there after we leave.

All in all, the president seemed to treat consequential matters of war, terrorism and foreign relations generally as an afterthought. This may suit the public’s present mood, but it didn’t reveal much about how this president connects America’s purposes abroad to what he wants to achieve at home.

And this underscores what was perhaps most striking about the speech. There was very little by way of an overarching vision or governing philosophy to link together the president’s many initiatives and commitments. There was no striking image like Reagan’s “shining city on the hill,” or thematic scaffolding like Bill Clinton’s “opportunity, responsibility and community” to invest Obama’s tenure with a deeper logic than serial problem-solving. Yes, Obama in his peroration repeatedly invoked “American values,” in an almost generic way. What’s still missing after a year in office is the master narrative of the Obama presidency, a story that is less about him and more about the next stage in America’s democratic experiment.

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On Budget, Obama Must Walk a Fine Line

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

As President Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union Address tonight, he is being tugged in conflicting directions. His dilemma is simple, and familiar: independent voters want different things than liberals.

Independents and moderate Democrats worry about big government and deficits. Liberals want more government spending and regulation, and they think fiscal discipline is the death of progressive reform.

These tensions were on display yesterday as the Senate squelched a bipartisan proposal, endorsed by President Obama, to set up a special commission to tackle the nation’s growing fiscal crisis. Offered as an amendment to legislation increasing the debt ceiling, the proposal by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Ranking Member Judd Gregg (R-NH) attracted a bipartisan majority of 53 votes. But under the Senate’s tyranny of the supermajority, it needed 60 to pass.

To the independents who have been defecting from Obama’s winning 2008 coalition, it looked like yet another victory for the status quo in Washington. The defeat sets up a confrontation with Senate moderates, who have threatened to vote against raising the debt ceiling unless Congress empowers a commission to rein in the nation’s runaway deficits and debt. It may also prompt President Obama to revive his idea for setting up the commission under executive order. House Blue Dogs yesterday endorsed a commission as part of their plan for fiscal reform.

On the other side of the fiscal divide, many liberals have recoiled from Obama’s call for a three-year “freeze” on non-security discretionary spending, seeing it as a cave-in to budget hawks that will crimp progressive ambitions and possibly forestall economic recovery. Since the bill envisions only modest cuts in spending ($250 billion over the next decade) — none of which go into effect until 2011 when it won’t hinder the recovery — such fears seem overwrought. And Obama cushioned the blow by unveiling a new package of middle-class tax cuts.

Nonetheless, the president has a fine line to walk tonight. He must convince the country that he is taking decisive action to control government spending and deficits. And he must convince his party that big progressive reforms can advance within a framework that restores long-term fiscal stability.

Even as the commission went down, the Congressional Budget Office yesterday released new budget forecasts that underscore why Congress must begin laying the groundwork for a return to fiscal discipline in Washington. CBO projects this year’s deficit at $1.3 trillion. At 9.2 percent of GDP, that is slightly less than last year’s whopping 9.9 percent shortfall, which was the biggest in U.S. peacetime history. But while these short-term deficits are enormous, the more fundamental problem is the nation’s cascading national debt. CBO sees the debt nearly tripling from $5.9 trillion to $15 billion by the end of the decade, or from 53 to 67 percent of GDP, and that estimate is based on very conservative assumptions.

America piled up a similar load of debt after World War II, but at least we owed the money to ourselves. Unchecked, today’s borrowing binge means more dependence on Chinese and other foreign lenders to keep our economy afloat, more tax dollars siphoned off to service our debts, and a growing squeeze on public investment as automatic spending on the elderly crowds out everything else.

Given the magnitude of the problem, Obama’s proposed freeze is exceedingly modest. What’s more, it’s a flexible freeze, not an indiscriminate swipe of the budgetary ax. Congress can boost vital public investments – say in technological innovation and clean energy, as long as it is willing to pass offsetting program cuts. As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, the proposal would basically restore the budget “caps” that effectively restrained spending during the Clinton years.

The deficit commission is a bigger deal because it aims at the core of America’s long-term fiscal challenge: the automatic and unsustainable growth of spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Society Security. Congress, polarized along lines of party and ideology, and intimidated by pressure groups, has repeatedly shown itself incapable of slowing entitlement cost growth. Hence the Conrad-Gregg proposal for a bipartisan commission to develop a package of tax and spending changes, and present them to Congress for an up or down vote.

The president tonight should challenge both anti-tax conservatives and pro-spending liberals to get serious about entitlement reform. And he should use the occasion to spell out for skeptical independents why health care reform is indispensible to controlling public spending. Coupled with a strong message on jobs, a forceful presidential commitment to restoring fiscal discipline in Washington will boost economic confidence and help to bring independents back into the progressive fold.

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To Fix Our Country, We Need to Fix Our Politics First

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

It’s the start of a brand new decade, but declinism hangs heavy in the air. And that, says writer Jim Fallows, is a good thing.

Having returned from three years in China, Fallows finds America in a funk. Bled by war and terrorism, beset by a lingering financial crisis and stubbornly high unemployment, facing stagnant wages and growing inequality, saddled with obsolete infrastructure and massive public debt, the United States today seems far removed from the confident “hyperpower” of a decade ago. Among the global commentariat, the “post-American world” is the cliché du jour.

But Fallows comes to challenge, not embrace, this glum narrative. In a lengthy Atlantic essay, he notes that premonitions of American decline have recurred frequently in U.S. history – and have just as often been proved wrong. He admits to having contributed himself to the “Rising Sun” hype in the 1980s, when many observers worried that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. thanks to its superior production techniques and state-guided economic strategies.

Instead, Japan sank into a long period of stagnation. But if the “jeremiad tradition” is a poor predictor of the future, says Fallows, it has the salutary effect of spurring Americans to rise to new challenges and prove the doomsayers wrong.

He attributes American resilience and adaptiveness to our inventive, entrepreneurial culture, a welcoming immigration policy and first-rate system of higher education. What’s holding us back, however, is a hopelessly dysfunctional political system that has lost the capacity to deal effectively with big national problems.

“This is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke,” he says. So far, so persuasive. But Fallows’ congenital optimism seems to fail him when the discussion turns to solutions. He’s no doubt realistic in dismissing great structural transformations, like a Constitutional convention to reorder our governing system, a parliamentary system or new rules that favor third parties. But concluding that “our only sane choice is to muddle through” under present arrangements ignores political reforms that are both powerful and attainable.

We could, for example, launch a frontal attack on Washington’s transactional culture and diminish the power of special interests by changing the way we finance Congressional elections. And rather than accept the inevitability of “rotten boroughs,” we could counter the worst abuses of gerrymandering by insisting that political districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions charged with increasing rather than decreasing the number of competitive seats. We could also think seriously about addressing the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, something that has sparked a great deal of commentary from progressives of late.

Such reforms would make it easier to overcome obstacles to the substantive changes that progressives favor, from affordable health coverage for all, to big investments in modern infrastructure and a new, low-carbon energy system. And where policy changes often expose philosophical cleavages and well as clashing interests within the Democratic coalition, fixing our broken political system is a cause that has the potential to unite all progressives.

Fallows has highlighted the right problem. But progressives should give high priority to fixing our broken politics as the prerequisite for renewing America.

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The Clinton Boom Was Real — Then Bush Happened

Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Most progressives were happy to say goodbye to the “aughts,” as dismal a decade as America has endured since the snake-bitten 1970s. But they may be surprised to learn that the U.S. economy’s poor performance on George W. Bush’s watch was actually Bill Clinton’s fault.

So says Michael Lind, who rang in a new year with a retrospective blast on Salon this week against the “New Democrat” policies of the 1990s.

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.

Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and of course, the grand finale – the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (PPI comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

Breaking Down the New Economy

Specifically, Lind takes issue with New Democrats’ claims that the IT revolution helped to spur more robust productivity growth. This is not a terribly controversial point among economists. For example, a 2003 review of over 50 scholarly studies (PDF) by Jason Dedrick, Vijay Guraxani and Kenneth L. Kraemer (cited in Rob Atkinson’s 2007 report “Digital Prosperity“) reached this conclusion: “At both the firm and the country level, greater investment in IT is associated with greater productivity growth.”

It’s true that economist Michael Mandel, a PPI friend and prominent advocate of innovation-centered growth, has argued that U.S. productivity gains after 1998 were overstated. But the fact remains that labor productivity, which grew at an average of only 1.46 percent per year between 1973 and 1995, grew to nearly three percent annually afterwards. That spurt helped to produce the prosperity of the second half of the 1990s, a period which saw incomes grow in a “picket fence” pattern, meaning that all segments of the population saw roughly equal advances. For those years, at least, relative wage inequality narrowed.

Yet rather than give Clinton credit for economic results in the years when his policies actually were in force, Lind invokes the poor performance of the 2000s to condemn the policies of the 1990s. George W. Bush, arguably the worst economic manager since Herbert Hoover, is oddly absent from this revisionist fable.

And what about all the money gushing into the United States during the ‘90s from foreign investors? In Lind’s telling, New Democrats naively assumed that money was chasing higher returns, when in reality foreign lenders were trying to drive up the dollar’s value to make their country’s goods more competitive. Currency manipulation, especially by China, is obviously a problem today. But in the 1990s, the U.S. was not only innovating furiously, it was also growing faster than Europe and Japan, making it a natural magnet for foreign investment.

Finally, Lind challenges the notion that skills gaps are related to wage inequality. There are reams of economic studies showing strong positive returns to educational attainment.  (For an excellent discussion, see chapter eight in Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.) He is probably right that skills disparities alone don’t account for the growth in income inequality over the last several decades, but it seems perverse to argue that Clinton and his allies, as well as President Obama, are mistaken in wanting to see more Americans attend college.

Blaming the New Dems for GOP Sins

As a quick perusal of our website will confirm, PPI in the latter part of the 1990s published a raft of reports that a) documented the rise in relative inequality and b) proposed an array of innovative policies aimed at “expanding the winners’ circle” to include more working Americans. And perhaps Lind has forgotten that Clinton, in his first budget, raised taxes on the wealthy to restore progressivity and thus reduce after-tax inequality. He also got Congress to pass a massive expansion of the “work bonus” (earned income tax credit) for low-wage workers.

The causes of inequality are a subject of lively dispute among economists, but Lind is not hobbled by doubts. The reasons, he asserts, are to be found in the decline of unions, an eroding minimum wage, and unskilled immigrants. Yet by his own account, inequality really took off in the 1970s, when unions were relatively strong. (Plus, it’s strange to blame Democratic policies for growing inequality since 1980, since Democrats controlled the White House for only eight of those 28 years). Moreover, it should be obvious that falling union membership is the consequence, not the cause, of a massive shift in the U.S. employment base from manufacturing to services.

Because it affects only a small proportion of workers (including lots of kids working at part-time jobs), the minimum wage is a slender reed on which to hang the revival of good, middle-class wages in America. And there’s scant evidence to support Lind’s claim that immigration, legal or otherwise, has exerted significant downward pressure on native workers’ wages. The tide of unskilled immigration does have an impact on workers who don’t graduate from high school, but not a very large one.

The problem with Lind’s attempted deconstruction of the “New Economy” narrative is that it ignores a whole herd of elephants in the room, namely big structural changes in what U.S. firms do and how work is organized. Consider this description by Rob Shapiro, a key architect of the Clinton economic policies:

For the first time ever, U.S. businesses have been investing more in the development and use of ideas and other intangible assets than in physical assets of property, plant and equipment. Moreover, most of the value the economy now produces comes from those intangible assets. In 1984, the book value of the 150 largest U.S. companies—what their physical assets would bring on the open market—accounted for 75 percent of their stock market value; by 2005, it was equal to just 36 percent of the their market capitalization. The idea-based economy has gone from metaphor to reality.

We are left at last with the question of motive. Why is Lind so intent on rewriting the history of the most successful Democratic president in our lifetime, and raising doubts about the economic competence of the first majority-vote winning Democrat – Barack Obama — in the White House since LBJ?

Some progressives find it hard to forgive Bill Clinton for forcing them to acknowledge past mistakes. But failing to recognize your own successes may be even worse.

This item is cross-posted on Salon.

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Obama One Year On

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

PPI President Will Marshall joined a panel to discuss and assess President Obama’s performance on national security and domestic policy issues at the end of his first year in office.

The event was hosted by the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program and The American Interest.

Essays written by the panelist are featured in the current edition of The American Interest.

This event will run from 12:15pm – 1:45pm EST and will be featured on CSPAN later this week.

Panelist
Walter Russell Mead
Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
Council on Foreign Relations

Richard Perle
Resident Fellow
American Enterprise Institute

G. John Ikenberry (via conference call)
Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University

Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program
New America Foundation
Publisher, The Washington Note

Will Marshall
President
Progressive Policy Institute

Stephen Krasner (via conference call)
Former Director of Policy Planning, US State Department
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University

Ronald Steel
Professor Emeritus of International Affairs
University of Southern California

stage-setting remarks
Adam Garfinkle
Editor
The American Interest

moderator
Steve Coll
President
New America Foundation
Staff Writer, New Yorker

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Where’s the Center? More on Polarization and the Parties

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Here at P-Fix, the ever-energetic Scott Winship has pivoted from a debate with me and others about the advisability of limiting or killing off the Senate filibuster into an extended and scholarly discussion of the origins and nature of partisan polarization. He’s mainly doing battle with the 2005 book “Off-Center” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have no particular dog in that fight, other than to observe that Hacker and Pierson did usefully draw attention to the perils involved in allowing either party to unilaterally move “the center.”

But while I am not competent to joust with Scott on the proper exegesis of Poole-Rosenthal “scores,” I do find a couple of the assumptions he makes quite troubling.

The first is his understandable but still misleading reliance on self-identification of “liberals, moderates, and conservatives” (or some variation involving intensity) for defining the ideological character of the American electorate. Yes, polls of self-identification on this scale do show a very stable “center-right country” in which conservatives typically outnumber liberals three-to-two or even more. This is how Scott arrives at his fundamental argument that polarized elected officials don’t adequately represent the people who elected them, and also how he somehow concludes that the notable shift of Republican opinion to the right in recent years has made the system more, not less representative (that’s his major refutation of the Hacker-Pierson contention that the GOP has dragged the political center to the right).

Self-identification measurements are always iffy, as is made most evident by the vast gap between the number of voters who call themselves “independents” and the number who actually behave in an independent manner. But the hoary liberal-moderate-conservative scale is particularly influenced by the unpopularity of the “liberal” term, even among many voters who are “liberal” by the normal standards. This is what conservatives have bought with so many years and so many billions of dollars invested in the demonization of “liberalism,” compounded by the very different meanings the term has denoted here and abroad.

The distortion involved in using this term is made evident by many, many surveys that show millions of “non-liberal” voters agreeing with liberal values and policy goals, and by a few efforts to use a different typology. In the latter category, John Halpin and Karl Agne published a study earlier this year that found a significantly different spectrum of ideological self-identification simply by adding two other options — “progressive” and “libertarian” — to the usual three choices. The electorate broke down as 16% progressive, 15% liberal, 29% moderate, 34% conservative, and 2% libertarian — a much more equal distribution than the ancient three-to-two-or-higher advantage for the right.

It’s worth noting as well that the “center-right nation” meme has the perverse effect of holding Democrats to a higher standard of “bipartisanship” than Republicans, since “liberals” obviously have to move further to reach the actual political center than “conservatives.” And indeed, that’s pretty much what Scott suggests.

The second problematic feature of Scott’s analysis is that his data is (unavoidably, since you use what you can get) crucially out of date when it comes to profiling Republicans ideologically. Pre-2006 analyses of Republican elected official ideology may well be useful for a historical debate, but since this whole discussion began with the current partisan gridlock in Congress, the sharp movement of the GOP to the right following its defeat in the last two election cycles is more than a little relevant. To put it simply, the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, at least in Congress, largely died after 2006 and 2008, partly because many moderates were defeated, and partly because party leaders and activists alike made a collective decision to blame both defeats on insufficient GOP conservatism. Few if any Republican “thinkers” are arguing for greater moderation or bipartisanship; more common are safaris to bag the increasingly rare species of the RINO. And most obviously, as Barack Obama seeks to implement the campaign platform (if not, as in health care, something to the right of his platform) he won on, Republicans in Congress are united against him while Democratic moderate dissenters are sometimes so thick you can’t stir them with a stick. This is not the picture Scott paints from his data of a political system where both parties have equally eschewed “the center.”

Getting back to the original discussion, Scott suggested that reforms to open up primary elections to independents might be a more fruitful approach to ending gridlock than restoring something like majority rule in the Senate. Though I favor open (or at least more open) primaries as a general proposition, the idea that this would have an immediate impact on polarization isn’t terribly compelling. It’s a subject that is complicated by definitions: some states with “closed” primaries allow very late changes in party registration, even on Election Day, which certainly gives independents every opportunity to participate. “Open” primaries range from the “jungle” primaries of Louisiana and Washington, to those in states with no party registration to begin with, to those who allow registered independents to vote in either party’s primary. But if you are looking in this direction for a cure-all, consider that the two most ideological senators, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are both from open primary states. (Meanwhile, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Olympia Snowe are products of closed primary states.) And remember, too, that registered “independents” are not always “centrists.”

In the immediate future, there are only two apparent routes to ending gridlock. One would be curbing the filibuster, either through intrapartisan pressure among Democrats to support cloture votes as a matter of course, or a change in the Senate rules. The other would be the revival of interest among Republicans in governing, either because they win elections and are forced to do so, or they lose so badly that today’s rightward stampede is reversed.

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Conservative Crocodile Tears About “Corporatism”

Monday, December 21st, 2009
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

TNR published a piece I did the other day examining the ideological underpinnings of the left/center split in the Democratic Party over the propriety of a universal health care system based on regulated and subsidized private health insurers. I suggested there was a burgeoning, if questionably workable, tactical alliance between “social-democratic” progressives and some conservatives to derail much of the Obama overall agenda. Then I made this observation:

[O]n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

This statement has drawn considerable comment from people on both the Right and Left, mainly objecting to the argument that Obama’s critics can’t all be right.

Conservative theoretician Reihan Salam, writing for National Review, first argued that there’s not much substantive difference between the “New Democrat” deployment of private-sector entities in public initiatives and that favored by the privatizers of the Right. But then he pirouetted to make common cause with Obama’s critics on the Left:

It is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn’t that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit    health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a “corporate takeover of the public sector.”

Salam’s friend Ross Douthat of The New York Times added an “amen” to this argument:

The point is that the more intertwined industry and government become, the harder it is to discern who’s “taking over” whom — and the less it matters, because the taxpayer is taking it on the chin either way.

But do conservatives really oppose this intertwining of industry and government? Rhetorically, yes, operationally — not so much.

Consider the default-drive Republican approach to health care reform, such as it is. It typically begins with federal preemption of state medical malpractice laws and health insurance regulation, the latter intended to produce a national market for private insurance (while also, not coincidentally, eliminating existing state provisions designed to prevent discriminatory practices). But the centerpiece is invariably large federal tax credits, accompanied by killing off the current tax deduction for employer-provided coverage, all designed to massively subsidize the purchase of private health insurance by individuals (with or without, depending on the proposal, any sort of group purchases for high-risk individuals). Another conservative pet rock is federal support for Health Savings Accounts, which encourage healthy people to pay cash for most medical services, perhaps supplemented by (very profitable) private catastrophic insurance policies. And most conservatives, when they aren’t “Medagoguing” Democratic proposals to rein in Medicare costs, favor “voucherizing” Medicare benefits—another gigantic subsidy for private health insurers.

Now some conservatives will privately tell you that all these subsidy-and-deregulation schemes are just an interim “solution” towards that great gettin’ up morning when tax rates can be massively lowered, all the tax credits, vouchers and other subsidies can be eliminated, and the government gets out of the health insurance business entirely. But don’t expect to see that on any campaign manifestos in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Republicans generally support huge government subsidies to corporations without any public-spirited regulatory concessions in return.

Do anti-“corporatist” progressives really think they can make common cause with conservatives, beyond deep-sixing Obama’s agenda in the short term? Well, sorta kinda. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who rejected my “incompatibility” argument about left and right critics of “corporatism” as strongly as did Salam, is smart and honest enough to acknowledge there’s no real common ground with conventional conservatives or Republican pols. He instead offers a vision of an “outsider” coalition that includes anti-corporatist progressives and Tea Party types. This is, of course, the age-old “populist” dream (most famously articulated by Tom Frank inWhat’s the Matter With Kansas?) of a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party that attracts millions of current GOP voters (or nonvoters) who don’t share the economic interests of the Republican Party or the conservative movement but have seen little difference between the two parties.

All I can say is: Good luck with that, Glenn. Short of a complete and immediate revolution within one or both parties, complete with blood purges and electoral chaos, it’s hard to see any vehicle for a left-right “populist” alliance other than a Lou Dobbs presidential run. Barring that unlikely convergence, wrecking Obama’s “corporate” agenda would produce little more on the horizon than a return to the kind of governance we enjoyed during the Bush years, or maybe a bit worse given the current savage trajectory of the GOP.

Part of my intention in the original essay was to suggest that pro-Obama Democrats take seriously the views of intra-party rebels on health care and other issues, instead of insulting them as impractical and childish or obsessed with meaningless totems like the “public option” (which in the anti-corporatist context isn’t meaningless at all). But said rebels really do need to think through where they are going, and where they would take Democrats and the progressive coalition.

Meanwhile, conservatives need to be far less pious about their alleged objections to “corporatism.” Cheap rhetoric aside, their own agenda (when it’s not just preserving the status quo) is largely corporatism with any clear and enforceable public purpose cast aside whenever possible.

This item is cross-posted at The New Republic.

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Has Political Polarization Been One-Sided? Part Two

Friday, December 18th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

To read the first part of this post, click here.

Defining the Center

Let’s examine Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center.” When they compare activists to independents, changes in the distance from independents may be due to growing extremism among activists. However, the distance may grow without activists changing their views at all if independents change their views. So saying Republican activists drifted further away from the center than Democratic activists may misstate what occurred; independents may simply have drifted toward Democratic activists over time without activists drifting anywhere. It’s also possible that Republican activists have grown more extreme, which has pushed independents closer to Democratic activists’ (unchanged) views.

Furthermore, secular changes in ideology over time can move people from the independent category into Democratic and Republican camps and vice versa, making it difficult to say whether the changes identified indicate that activists (or independents) are changing their views, or that it’s just flows into or out of the parties that is changing. If one of the parties looks more or less extreme, it could simply be that people who would have called themselves independent in the past are now identifying with one of the parties, making the leftover independents look somewhat more extreme in the opposite direction.

Rather than compare activists to independents, why not simply measure how far they are from the midpoint of the ideology scale? When one does so, one obtains the graph below.

Trends in Activist Ideology (ideology midpoint)

By this measure, which avoids all of the problems with using independents as a reference point, the change in extremism among Democratic activists looks exactly the same as the trend for Republican activists. Once again, Republican activists look more extreme in any year, and this time (not shown) this remains the case when one looks at the unsmoothed data points.

A Better Way to Measure Ideology

There is also a problem with Hacker and Pierson’s measure of ideology. If we want to know whether party activists have become ideologically more extreme over time, we should use as pure a measure of ideology as possible. The measure Hacker and Pierson use, however, conflates ideology with tolerance and empathy because it is based on questions asking how warm or cold one feels toward liberals and conservatives. It could be that Democratic activists are simply more tolerant of their opponents than Republican activists rather than being more centrist. One can feel warmly toward a group without identifying oneself with it.

A better measure of changing ideology among party activists would be to look directly at changes in self-identified ideology. The NES asks respondents to place themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Here, then, is a final chart showing trends for activists in each party, with ideology measured as the distance of activists from “4” – the midpoint of the seven-point scale. The actual data points are connected and the smoothed trends are shown as black dashed lines. It should be noted that this chart is based on even smaller sample sizes than Hacker and Pierson’s, so I show the margin of error for the data points as dashed vertical lines. I also omit off-year elections to make the chart less noisy.

Trends in Activist Ideology (self-ID)
This chart confirms that Republican activists more often than not have been more extreme than Democratic activists, though the two groups were statistically tied in 1972, 1976, 1992, and 2004. There is a clear trend toward greater extremism among Republican activists. Among Democratic activists, there was little consistency between 1972 and 1998, but they appear to have moved to the center in 2000 and 2002 before jumping up to the level of Republican extremism in 2004.

Finally, there is the claim by Hacker and Pierson that Democratic activists are more centrist than other Democrats. In my results, this was not true in 2004 whether one used the thermometer index or the self-identified seven-point ideology measure and was not true in 2002 unless one used the seven-point measure (which Hacker and Pierson did not). Regardless, none of the differences between the two groups – in my results or theirs – are statistically significant due to the small sample sizes.

In sum, Republican activists have generally been at least as extreme as Democratic activists and often more so, though not in 2004, which makes the Republican pattern seem less worrisome. Furthermore, while in 2002 it looked like Republican extremism had increased and Democrats had become more moderate, by 2004 Democrats had completely caught up to Republicans. Republican and Democratic activists were equally far from the center in 1972 and in 2004, so the shift was of the same magnitude for both. And there’s no reliable evidence that Democratic activists are more moderate than other Democrats.

The Bush administration and the Republican Congress may have used various tactics in order to pass an agenda that lacked strong support. But they were not “off center” if that phrase is taken to mean that their agenda was outside the bounds of what the public supported. Or more specifically, where Republicans succeeded, their agenda was not out of bounds. Hacker and Pierson downplayed the extent to which Republicans had to reach out to the center in what they did or did not favor. Education spending, for instance, increased more under Bush than under Clinton, in a nod to “compassionate conservatism.” Furthermore, where Republicans truly moved off center, they failed, as with Social Security privatization. And of course, 2006 and 2008 happened.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Will Liberals Really Kill Health Reform?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

The never-ending story of health care reform took another turn for the weird this week.

It began with liberals working themselves into a lather over Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threat to scuttle reform unless the Medicare buy-in was dropped. Now Howard Dean, liberal paladin and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is campaigning openly to kill a Democratic president’s top domestic priority. Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s sole self-avowed social democrat, warns the White House that he is not a certain vote for health reform, though it’s unlikely that he would cast a vote with the Republicans to filibuster it either.

Liberals believe, perhaps with some justification, that Sen. Lieberman has forced changes in the bill simply to spite them. But it has to be said that Lieberman, at least, makes no pretense of being a party loyalist. He crossed the political Rubicon by appearing at the Republican National Convention in 2008 to endorse his friend John McCain. His decision to caucus with the Democrats is a marriage of convenience, so charges of infidelity seem beside the point.

No good purpose is served by the left’s fixation on Lieberman as a kind of progressive Judas. It’s creepily reminiscent of the orchestrated venom directed against the fictional turncoat “Goldstein” in George Orwell’s 1984.

What prompted Dean’s scream on health reform was the decision by Senate leaders, backed by the White House, to drop both the public option and the Medicare buy-in in pursuit of the 60 votes needed for passage. In a characteristically self-righteous outburst in today’s Washington Post, Dean helpfully accused his fellow Democrats of selling out to the health insurance industry.

The rifts among Democrats, coupled with monolithic Republican opposition to the Senate bill, have fed growing public doubts about health reform. According to a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, more Americans oppose the legislation than favor it (44-41 percent). Other surveys show that voters are worried that they’ll actually wind up paying more for health care after reform.

The President’s Principles

Now, liberals are understandably angry that Senate filibuster rules effectively give a handful of moderates inordinate power to block progressive measures backed by a majority of Senate Democrats. That’s triggered an important debate – featured here on P-Fix over whether it’s time for progressives to change those rules to either circumscribe or abolish the filibuster.

But it’s also true that liberals should not have expected that the Senate bill include a public option or the provision allowing people as young as 55 to buy health coverage from Medicare. The Senate Finance Committee bill did not include them and Obama promised neither during the campaign. In fact, the president has explicitly ruled out a single-payer approach, instead echoing PPI’s call for a distinctly American approach to universal health care, a public-private hybrid based on the principle of “shared responsibility.”

Many single-payer advocates, however, apparently view the president’s stance as purely tactical; surely, deep down, he’s with them. They see the public option and the buy-in as incremental steps toward a “Medicare for all” approach that ultimately will displace private health insurance.

Obama, however, has been admirably consistent about his top-line goals: expand coverage through public subsidies and mandates; prevent insurance companies from denying coverage or dropping people who get sick; drive medicine toward higher quality and lower costs; and do it all in a way that adds nothing to the deficit. The Senate bill, though riddled with imperfections and compromises, does an acceptable job of advancing those goals and moving the process forward to the final stage: a conference to reconcile House and Senate versions of reform.

So liberals have a choice. They can torpedo a bill backed by a Democratic president and nearly all Senate Democrats, a bill that would cover 30 million uninsured Americans, discipline health insurance companies, and begin the challenging task of containing health care cost growth, in favor of alternatives that stand no chance at all of passage. Or they can pocket the undoubted progressive gains embedded in the House and Senate bills, help their party pass landmark legislation, and keep working to build support in the country for their vision of health reform. Congress meets every year and there will be ample opportunities to refine whatever emerges from today’s legislative scrum.

Despite the public infighting and fratricidal rending of garments, congressional Democrats are only one vote away from an historic victory on health care reform. So progressives should stop obsessing over Joe Lieberman, turn off Howard Dean, and help Barack Obama bring home the prize.

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Has Political Polarization Really Been One-Sided?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

OK, to review the debate so far: I wrote a post suggesting progressives might want to think twice before jettisoning the filibuster. Ed thought twice and said, yup, still want to get rid of it. Ezra did the same. I wrote another post saying, oh well whatever nevermind and tried to shift the subject to polarization being the real problem. I said I’d follow up about whether increasing polarization has been a one-sided affair. Crickets chirped. All hell broke loose on the health care reform front. And here we are.

So….one-sided polarization….Ever since Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center, all good progressives know that the growing political polarization has been one-sided, with Republicans pulling public policy “off center” through various nefarious means. Right?

Well….yes and no. Hacker and Pierson argued that, as of 2005, Republican activists and legislators had grown more conservative, but Democratic activists and legislators had not grown more liberal (and had even moved to the right themselves in some regards). Along with this shift, Republicans had developed effective strategies to move public policy further rightward than the typical voter preferred.

Since the rightward shift of Republicans occurred during a period in which Hacker and Pierson showed the distribution of self-identified ideology had not changed, the implication was that the electorate was being deprived of the more progressive policies that it desired. But a closer look at their data and analyses shows that while the increase in polarization among legislators has occurred disproportionately among Republicans, the evidence hints that this is because it proceeded from a Nixon-era Democratic Congress that was well to the left of the electorate.

Rather than refuting the idea that policy reflects the preferences of voters in the middle (the “median voter theorem”), as Hacker and Pierson claimed, the evidence actually bolsters this view. Correcting their claims is important if progressives are to govern effectively. Republicans did not simply pull public policy to the right of where Americans preferred, and now that Democrats are back in control of Congress, progressives should not assume that the median voter is leftier than she really is.

Why Off Center Is Off

To argue their case, Hacker and Pierson turned to scores created by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that put members of Congress past and present on a common scale measuring ideological position. Hacker and Pierson report that the polarization of Congress between the early 1970s and the early 2000s was almost entirely due to growing extremism among Republicans. Democratic legislators had not moved nearly as far from the center. Because of the increasing conservatism of Republicans, Congress was, in the early 2000s, far to the right of the median voter, who had not grown more conservative over time. But Hacker and Pierson’s account is flawed.

Consider the Senate.* Poole and Rosenthal’s scores, using every vote by every member of every Congress through the 108th Congress (which ran from 2003 to 2004), indicate that the “center” as of 2003-04 was typified by northeastern Republicans such as Lincoln Chafee, then-Independent Jim Jeffords, and William Cohen; Arlen Specter (now, of course, a Democrat); and by red-state Democrats such as Ben Nelson and John Breaux. In 1971-72, the median senator had a score of -0.056, equivalent to Ben Nelson’s score in 2003-04. By 2003-04, the median senator had a score of 0.061, equivalent to Arlen Specter in 2003-04.

This small change in the median of the Senate as a whole only hints at the fact that, as Hacker and Pierson claim, Republican senators did move farther ideologically than Democratic senators. The evidence that Hacker and Pierson presented describes how the median in one year compared with then-recent senators’ scores. In the early 1970s, according to Hacker and Pierson, the median Republican senator lay “significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain of Arizona—around where conservative Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia stood” [where the references to McCain and Miller are to their 2003-04 scores, italics in the original]. The median Republican senator’s score then “doubled” by the early 2000s so that it sat “just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum.”

These descriptions do not quite reflect what the Poole-Rosenthal scores show. The median Republican senator’s score in 1971-72 was equidistant between McCain in 2003-04 and Miller in 2003-04, not closer to Miller, and it was just as close to McCain as the median Republican senator’s score in 2003-04 was to Santorum.

This claim also raises a technical issue. The Poole-Rosenthal scores are not ratio scales with a meaningful zero point. The distance between 0.2 and 0.4 is supposed to be the same as that between 1.2 and 1.4, but 1.2 is not “six times as conservative” as 0.2, because a score of 0 does not indicate the complete absence of conservatism. The zero point is completely arbitrary. The doubling from 0.2 to 0.4 would become an increase of just 50 percent if we added 0.2 to all of the scores (from 0.4 to 0.6). We cannot know whether Republican senators grew twice as conservative between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. Indeed, the phrase “twice as conservative” has no obvious meaning.

More to the point, Hacker and Pierson’s interpretation of these results is an even bigger problem. Rather than the Republican Party drifting ever rightward (the whole time increasingly “off center”), if the Democratic Party was “off center” in the early 1970s, then the movement among Republicans could be interpreted as a restoration of an equilibrium reflecting voter preferences. This is exactly what appears to have happened.

First of all, the medians for the 2003-04 Senate were 0.379 and -0.381 for Republicans and Democrats – essentially identical. That means that after this great rightward shift by Republicans, the parties were equally “extreme” by historical standards. Furthermore, the median Democratic senator in 1971-72 wasn’t much less extreme than the median senator from either party in 2003-04.

Second, at least in terms of self-identification, the ideological distribution of Americans was unchanged over this period, with roughly twice as many people calling themselves conservative as calling themselves liberal.**

Taking these facts together – a rightward shift by Republican legislators, an end state where Democrats and Republicans are equally “extreme”, and an ideological distribution among voters that was static over the period (and right-leaning) – the conclusion that best fits is that the Democratic Congress of 1971-72 was off center rather than the Republican Congress of 2003-04. The median Republican became more extreme over time, but that was because Congress became more representative of the electorate, not less. The story on the House side is much the same, except that the median Republican was a bit more “extreme” than the median Democrat by 2003-04 (although no more extreme than the median Democrat was in 1971-72).

Comparing the Activists

Hacker and Pierson also argue that Republican activists grew more extreme while Democratic activists became less so (becoming even less extreme than Democrats in general), but these claims are also problematic. Hacker and Pierson began by defining an activist as someone who self-identifies as a Democrat or a Republican and who participated in three out of five election-related activities asked about in the American National Election Studies. They measured ideology using a combination of two “thermometer” items – one of which asks respondents how warm or cold they feel toward liberals and one inquiring about conservatives. These scales range from 0 (cold) to 97 (hot). (The scale ends at 97 rather than 100 because in some years, the NES used codes 98 and 99 as missing value codes.) The liberal score is subtracted from 97 (so that high numbers then signify cold feelings) and then added to the conservative score. This number is divided by two, 0.5 is added to it, and the decimal is dropped. The resulting measure ranges from 0 (extremely warm toward liberals and extremely cold toward conservatives) to 97 (extremely cold toward liberals and extremely warm toward conservatives).

To determine how far activists drift from the center, they compared the activist scores on this index to the scores for independent voters. The distance from independents is expressed in percentage terms (e.g., 10 percent more conservative or liberal). Hacker and Pierson plotted the average distance from independents for Republican and Democratic activists and then “smoothed” the trends by imposing curves to describe them. The result is a graph that I replicated, more or less:

Trends in Activist Ideology (smoothed)

The graph shows that Republican activists were more extreme than Democratic activists to begin with, that they became more conservative over time, and that after becoming more liberal, Democratic activists tacked back toward the center. The first important thing to note about this graph is how much the nice, smooth lines depend on fitting the data points to a quadratic equation. The original data – without the smoothing – looks much messier:

Trends in Activist Ideology (not smoothed)

The upward trend among Republican activists is still readily apparent, but the trend for Democratic activists no longer points toward moderation. The bouncing around is partly due to different turnout patterns in off-year elections, but also a result of statistical noise, as the sample sizes for each group are less than 70 – and as low as 18 – in each year. Furthermore, Republican and Democratic activists are statistically the same distance from the center for much of the period between 1968 and 1992. To illustrate further how deceptive the smoothed trend lines can be, look what happens to them when 2004 data – which was not available when Hacker and Pierson created the graph – is added:

Trends in Activist Ideology (+ 04)

The Republican line hardly changes, but now Democratic activists appear to grow steadily more liberal. It still appears as though Republican activists drifted from the center more than Democratic activists did, and Republican activists look more extreme in all years.

OK, take a breather. Tomorrow I’ll wrap up with some revealing evidence about how Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center” affects these analyses of political activists.

To read the second part of this post, click here.

——————————————

* Following their recent book, Polarized America (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, 2006), I use scores on Poole and Rosenthal’s first DW-NOMINATE dimension (for details, see http://polarizedamerica.com/ and http://www.voteview.com). Hacker and Pierson report using “d nominate” scores, but these are only constructed through the 99th Congress, so I am inclined to believe that they too used the first DW-NOMINATE dimension scores.

** Hacker and Pierson (2004), page 38. Hacker and Pierson cite ANES data. According to Gallup data showing self-identified ideology, the breakdown among Americans as a whole in 2004 was roughly 20 percent liberal, 40 percent moderate, and 40 percent conservative (Wave 2 of the June Poll, Question D10). In 1972, it was 25 percent, 34 percent, and 37 percent (Poll 851, Question 14).

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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