meditations

The Permanent Republican Majority

As Dr. Phil might ask Karl Rove, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

Here’s a nice graphic (via Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium) showing just how deep a hole the Bush years have dug for the Republicans. (Rove should have it tattooed on his forehead.) On NPR the other day it was pointed out that Obama won eight of the ten most populous states, but that doesn’t really capture the magnitude. Obama won thirteen of the top fifteen, and seventeen of the top twenty-two (with Missouri still being too close to call).

It’s always dangerous to extrapolate from one election to another, but take the map below and flip Arizona (#16 in size and McCain’s home state which would have gone blue otherwise) and possibly Texas (#2 and with a rapidly growing Latino population) and the Democrats start to have the kind of “electoral lock” that the Republicans enjoyed for forty years.

Is this good for the country? Somehow I doubt it. For better or ill we have an unusual two-dominant-party political system that seems to function best when the parties are roughly competitive. Then again, after the rancor of 2000 and 2004 there’s something to be said for the peace of a landslide. I’m going to enjoy it for a bit.

The Turnout Advantage

Before the election, in my often contrarian way, I pointed out that high turnout on election day likely favored McCain not Obama. While politicos will be crunching the numbers for months there are several reasons to think I was right. From Chuck Todd at MSNBC’s First Read

McCain’s underperformance: Channeling John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times, we also looked at the state-by-state vote totals. And we found that Obama’s wins in many battlegrounds weren’t solely a result of Obama increasing Kerry’s totals from 2004; they were also because McCain’s performance was DOWN from Bush’s in 2004. (See our “Unbuilding 2008” section for the stats here.) In short, we saw a one-sided rise in turnout. Had McCain's turnout increased at the same rate as Obama's in many of the battleground states, we would have topped 140 million, which was the argument some in the McCain campaign were making. They needed a HUGE turnout -- and they didn’t get it.

One particularly good example Todd left out is Ohio, where Obama essentially matched the vote total Kerry got in 2004 while McCain significantly underperformed Bush and the state flipped. Bush’s ‘04 campaign in Ohio will likely be studied by political science types for a long time (and not just because of the ongoing conspiracy theory that Bush and/or Rove and/or Diebold stole it). Rove leveraged 13 anti-Gay marriage initiatives to turn out 4 million more Christian Conservatives than voted in 2000, and nowhere more effectively than in Southeast Ohio. Again, it will take a while before all the dust settles on the numbers — a quick web search will show you people are still arguing over Ohio in ‘04 — but overall it does seem like Evangelical Christians disaffection was a key variable. Imagine how bad it would have been without Palin.

And Missouri is yet to be determined

The chart below (via Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com) gives one good measure of the strength of Obama’s win. Take away any state where his margin was less than 5% and... he still wins (and with Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to spare.

And his EV landslide may yet get bigger. Turns out my home state of Missouri has tightened up a bit with McCain now leading by less than 5000 votes. The odds are still long for Obama — and I would hope no one is losing sleep over this — as the major source of ballots yet to be counted are 7000 provisional ones (which will largely come from Obama leaning areas). Still, I would love to see Obama at 376 EVs and have my home state go for him, preferably by one vote.

A Memento

A few weeks ago we had a 100th birthday party for our house, and the next door neighbors — wonderful people — gave us a bottle of champagne. Jodi and I decided to save it for "something special" and nothing seemed more appropriate than last Tuesday night.

It would be easy to go on for pages and pages about how much Obama's election means to us, but for now it can be boiled down to three key points:

1. Is this an amazing country or what?
2. Please please don't be another Jimmy Carter!
3. That being said, ANYONE will be an improvement over the last 8 years.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy

Today, one way or another, the country turns in a new direction after eight badly wasted years. Bush’s belief (a la Harry Truman) that he’ll be vindicated by history may give him comfort, but the passage of time will show it’s about as realistic as his 2000 campaign promises to be a “uniter” who would pursue a “humble” foreign policy.

At the same time, I doubt he’ll go down as the worst president ever. Awful yes, but worst no. Once you start using a superlative history sets some pretty tough benchmarks and I think the descendants of Buchanan and Franklin Pierce would take exception (a group that includes Bush himself via Barbara Bush nee Pierce).

Sifting through the debris

There's been a lot of discussion, both in the mainstream media and in the  regular set of blogs I read, about the direction of the Democratic party the next few years. I'm still deep into ennui after the election --- and will elaborate on that point shortly --- so not terribly interested. But next week  I'm invited to a meeting advertised as a grass roots reorganization of the party, an attempt by concerned people to counter the idiotic policies proferred by our current "leadership."  I've never been a registered democrat, and never will be, but I plan to attend and hope to offer a few words of solace to these disgruntled Ohioans. I'll start by reading the first paragraph from a recent posting by Charlie Cook

As Democrats prepare to select a new party chairman next month, they should think not only about what went wrong in 2004 but about what went right. After all, a party that carried 19 states in four consecutive elections (with a total of 248 electoral votes, just 22 short of the 270 needed to win) is not fundamentally broken, it just needs some work. But for 118,599 votes out of the 5.6 million cast in Ohio and 119 million votes cast nationwide, a different half of America would be despondent today and another group of people would be headed to Washington to celebrate the presidential inauguration.

Of course... for Democrats the lessons to be learned are usually small. Unfortunately the last 25+ years shows even small changes are almost impossible to implement.

Post Election Thoughts

So I'm pretty down... made worse by the euphoria over Kerry's early (and seemingly sweeping) lead in the leaked exit polls. It is, of course, just an election, but right a move to Canada, or France, maybe even French Canada(!) seems enticing.

Just a few morsels for thought:

1. Kerry did extremely well in this election. He got more votes for president than anyone ever had before, breaking Reagan's heretofore unapproachable record from the '84 landslide. It's just that Bush did even better. He really did find Rove's 4 million evangelicals who sat out the last election and turned them out.

(As an aside, this is almost certainly why the exit polls almost uniformly favored Kerry. The polls are weighted based on a voter turnout model --- largely based on the Y2K turnout pattern --- and the model was wrong.)

I haven't done more than read quick summaries of the subindices on the exit polls, but Bush won largely because of first time voters who said "cultural values" were their #1 reason for supporting him. These voters were heavily concentrated in states --- like my new home state of Ohio --- with Gay Marriage initiatives on the ballot.

I'll hazard three (unprovable) guesses here: (a) if you had told the Kerry team on November first how many votes they were going to get they would have been pretty confident it was a winning number. (b) If the exit polls had asked the first time culturally conservative voters if the debates had affected their vote they would have resoundingly said no (i.e., it wasn't a question of whom they would support, it was weather they would turn out) And (c) this election was probably decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Court and their gay marriage ruling.

So any sense of "failure" on the part of the Democrats is mis-placed. They set their targets, met or exceeded them, and pulled higher raw numbers and a higher percent than any candidate they've fielded in 28 years. It's just the Republicans were a little bit better this time.

2. That being said, one really has to question whether the Democrats can be considered a nationally competitive party any more. They've largely disappeared in wide swaths of the country, and probably have less of an elective presence south of the Mason-Dixon line than the Whigs had in 1856 (I'll have to check this). Because of the disproportionate way the Senate is allocated, they're sentenced to minority status there for the foreseeable future. Because of gerrymandering and the powers of incumbency, the house is probably even farther out of reach. At the presidential level they're competitive --- for all the gnashing of teeth, it should be remembered that with a couple hundred thousand more votes in Ohio or Florida (just a couple tenths of a percent of the ballots cast) and we'd be talking about President Kerry --- but you have to question the longevity of a party that starts by ceding two of the three elective chambers of government.

Over and above the demographic disadvantages, I would argue the dems remain in need of a strong identity. This year they did well (just not well enough) by being the anti-Bush party, which is fine when you've got such a divisive administration to run against, but how does that carry over to '08 and beyond? For 20 years I've told my mother (a fairly senior Democratic politician) that her party was the political equivalent of the Balkans, a bunch of contentious interest groups with little to tie them together except occasionally joining for a common purpose.

3. The nation is now even more polarized than in 2000. The red states are redder, the blue bluer. There were 22 states in 2000 where the presidential vote was within 5%, there were only 11 this time. Moreover, there is a 25+ year trend of increased polarization at the local level (the number of competitive counties in the country has dropped to a third of what it was in '76) and while we'll have to wait for all the counts to come in, I'd be stunned if they didn't show a continuation.

It would be nice to think Bush will govern in a more centrist fashion (as several political columnists are predicting) but it seems unlikely. If he didn't do so after the close election of 2000, and then didn't do so after 9/11, it's hard to imagine it happening after a more decisive victory. As Bush himself would say, with him you know where he stands and what you get. Moreover, the millions of new evangelical voters are only going to pull the Republicans farther to the right, the "double edge" of needing to keep your base intact. Of course, time will tell the tale here, but I'm not optimistic.

The National Unity Ticket

Here's how crazy rumors get started, with simple deductive reasoning from a conveniently chosen set of facts. In no special order:

1. Abu Ghraib and circumventing the Geneva Conventions will become a major scandal for the administration. As Fred Kaplan says, "The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away."
   
2. Kerry's campaign has, thus far, not capitalized well on Bush's seemingly endless string of bad news. A lot of people think Kerry needs to make a dynamic vice-presidential choice to jump-start his campaign.
   
3. The dynamic names most frequently floated, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, are both almost certainly not real possibilities. McCain is too much the maverick, and realistically far too conservative. And Clinton, although her image has softened in recent years, remains a divisive figure who would do little to help the democrats reach out to the center. Not to mention that she has her own plans for the presidency.
   
4. At 75% approval, Colin Powell remains one of the most respected men in America. He's a moderate Republican, a rags-to-riches war hero, and our first black secretary of state.
   
5. Powell is not going to let his sterling reputation, his place in history, get dragged through the mud with an administration which has so ill-treated him for 3.5 years. His criticisms of the White House have become sharper, more common, and are no longer issued through proxies.

And you can see where this is going right? A Kerry-Powell ticket of national unity. Sure it's unlikely, but it makes a lot more sense than a Kerry-McCain ticket, with Powell, the archetypical "good soldier" far more suited to the second slot than maverick McCain. And if Powell wants to cement his place in history (and distance himself from Bush's disastrous stewardship of the country ) there would be no better way than becoming the first black Vice President (and wouldn't knifing all those neocons in the back feel great?)

How about it John? Make the call!

The Bush is like Carter Meme

Here's something I'd like to see on Final Jeopardy next year:

Answer: Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush

Question: Who are the only US Presidents to serve a full term and not appoint a Supreme Court justice?

I've been surprised this hasn't been picked up in the mainstream media. I'm not much of a Supreme Court watcher, and so don't know all the nuances of when retirements are traditionally announced, but it's the middle of May, and the window of opportunity is closing. The supremes hear oral arguments until June 3rd, and then spend (I think) 2-3 weeks issuing rulings. Seems unlikely that a retirement announcement would come out before mid-July. Between vetting candidates, hearings, and the upcoming election, it's going to be pretty hard to get someone appointed before next January, meaning that if Bush loses he's going to have to hustle or be forever joined to Jimmy Carter.

But that assumes there will be a retirement. The real story here is that there haven't been any in Bush's term thus far, and probably won't be until after the election. When Bush came into office there was widespread speculation he might get to appoint three or four justices in just his first term, including a chief justice. Rehnquist is now 80 years old and has a bad back. John Paul Stevens is 84, Sandra Day O'Connor is 74 and has spoken of retirement for years (and of her desire to have her replacement named by a Republican). Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 71 and had to have her sigmoid colon removed and extensive chemotherapy because of colon cancer. All of them have had good reasons for retirement for several years now, yet none has budged. Why?

No doubt each justice has his or her own story but I would guess there are also some common reasons. Two come immediately to mind:

• Nearing the end of their careers, they have a sense of their place in history. Having rendered the controversial decision which put Bush in office, they might have a desire to wait for him to achieve a clear cut electoral victory before letting him choose their successor. This argument might particularly apply to Rehnquist, who has seemed sensitive about the decision and even wrote a book on the somewhat similar Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876.
  
• Might it be they are waiting (hoping?) for a more moderate president? Stevens and Ginsburg would almost certainly like to leave the decision up to a Democrat (Ginsburg would probably have to be carried out in a body bag before she'd give Bush the option) and O'Connor, while an active Republican, is clearly a moderate. In fact, it's a measure of how far right the Republicans have moved that even Rehnquist, once regarded as very conservative, is now well to the left of the administration. Bush has repeatedly said that Scalia and Thomas are his two favorite justices, but by all accounts they are so far right as to be isolated on the court. Would any of the four like to see Scalia as Chief Justice and an arch conservative as the court's first Hispanic member?

Again, I'm not an avid court watcher, just an interested bystander. So far I've seen nothing on this in the media (and with the situation in Iraq, lots of things are getting sqeezed off the front page) but I suspect there's a good story in there. Maybe Dahlia Lithwick or another good legal reporter will pick it up.

Next week I learn there is no Santa

Tom Friedman has finally seen the light on George Bush. I'll happily welcome any additional anti-Bush votes into the camp, particularly one with a wide audience (see: Stern, Howard) but have to ask what took him so friggin long?

This will probably get me in trouble, but I've never been much of a Friedman fan. I first became aware of him in the run up to the first Gulf War through his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. But it's so self-absorbed, episodic, and disorganized as to be virtually unreadable. It conveys almost nothing of the Arab mind, little of their culture, and pales in comparison to the sublime (but oddly lesser known) The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage by David Lamb.

A couple times a week Friedman kicks out a column crammed with almost random details, trite phrases, and strained metaphors. Logic, critical reasoning, and over-arching thought are nowhere to be found. Even those who try to praise Friedman can't get around his deficiencies, e.g. the key grafs from this David Plotz piece in Slate a couple years ago:

He's not much of a stylist. He endlessly repeats favorite themes: How many "open letters from blah to blah" can one columnist write? No philosophical foundation girds his work.

...

But this does not mean his writing lacks power. Friedman's skill is that he speaks in the voice of Madison Avenue. He's effective not because he sounds like a historian, but because he sounds like an advertisement. Friedman has no ideas that can't be expressed in a catchphrase. His work is salted with slogans and phrases in capital letters. They are gimmicky, too simple, and extremely useful.

The best description of Friedman's work might be what someone once said of Bob Woodward's, "It's pointillism without the point." I suspect this is why it's taken so long for Friedman to grasp the obvious. Despite his extensive knowledge of the Middle East and unmatched contacts in the region (and, reportedly, in the administration) he's always been too focused on the small details to ask himself simple questions like "what kind of men are leading us?" and "where are we going?"

Nonetheless, I'm glad to hear you've come around Tom. Welcome aboard! Now please do two things for me:

1. Since you like to endlessly repeat favorite themes, hammer away at the "Bush must go" line in your column between now and November.
   
2. If possible, register in your home state of Minnesota. It's a swing state and your vote is more valuable there.

UPDATE: Okay, I see that Kevin Drum has tackled the same subject this morning, and admits that in 2002 he was fooled by the administration in the same way that Friedman claims. I must just be a lot more cynical than Kevin, but under the circumstances I'll be more gracious about Friedman's epiphany. However, the comments about his writing style stand as is.