90s Party

I'm glad that Ezra got so much discussion going with this observation:

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that tries to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

I thought it was kind of nifty how Ezra supported the left-wing critique of Obama's positions in a way that mostly didn't feel very left-wing at all -- just neutral and historical. I was excited to see that Nate Silver had a post on it, but I kind of choked on this:

I’m a big fan of Mr. Klein’s work, but I don’t find his thesis persuasive in this case. Instead, I’d suggest that the evidence points toward a considerably less exciting conclusion. Rather than being an early 1990s moderate Republican, Mr. Obama is a prototypical, early 2010s Democrat.

And here we miss the point by taking things too literally. I think Nate's argument would've been complete with some kind of mathematical evidence to show that it's the early 2010s, so obviously Obama can't be an early 1990s moderate Republican. In any event, it's no surprise that Obama and current Democrats line up so closely. These two things aren't independent variables. Obama's the leader of the Democratic Party and he sets its agenda. I don't know how you use data like Nate's to evaluate agenda-setting choices, when each of several choices would leave a large number of Congressional Democrats with no real option but following along.

I like Nate's chart, though. Maybe I've seen data using this technique before where you assume that incumbents have constant ideological positions and use that to help you determine whether new legislators are moving a party left or right, but this is the first time it's been explained to me. And here's what you get:
Three lines, and it tells you a lot. Unrelated to the current discussion, I like how it supports the Civil Rights Act theory of why bipartisanship died. Basically, you go from having 3 groups -- segregationist Dixiecrats, pro-labor Northern Democrats, and pro-business Republicans -- to the current 2 groups that fit better in ideologically coherent parties. The Dixiecrats form the core of the new Republican Party and the more moderate Republicans become Democrats. On this chart, the closest things get is in the mid-1960s when the Civil Rights Act passes, and the parties separate from there.

It's The Future And We Can Help People Know Stuff

I remember Ezra and others complaining, back during the effort to pass health care reform, that the news focused too much on process stories about whether the bill would pass the next legislative hurdle, when lots of people still didn't know what the legislation was actually doing. That this would happen was understandable -- process stories change and you have something new to report every day, while the basic structure of the legislation was roughly constant. Even if the really important thing to tell people is old news, it doesn't get covered as much as the shiny new news of the day.

This kind of problem should be easier to solve in the internet era, when you can just put together some kind of infographic explaining the legislation (sort of like the one Nick made, which has been the most-linked thing ever on our blog) and put a small link to it in every story on the legislation. Back when there were just newspapers, I can see why people didn't want to take up precious space with the same story over and over again. But now it's the future and we shouldn't have this problem.

The Birther Wedge

More attention to the question of whether Obama was born in the United States probably helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. This is an issue where you've got controversy within the Republican Party, but everybody else knows what's going on, and elite media opinion is firmly on the right side. So Republican politicians have a choice: either reject the conspiracy theory, alienating some of their primary voters, or treat it as credible and look crazy to everyone else.

The effect of Obama's request for a birth certificate is to raise the salience of the issue nice and early in the Republican primary. I don't think it'll put any dent in the number of Birthers. The people who remain unconvinced right now are deep enough in a conspiracy theory (as Nick notes below in linking to my earlier post -- one they may accept for reasons that have little to do with evidence) that there's no way evidence is going to pull them out.

Understanding Birtherism, Maybe A Little

Today is a good day to re-read Neil on the emotional roots of birtherism.

Nomination Ruminations

I'm starting to think that I counted Mitt Romney out a bit too quickly. Not because of anything about him, but just because the field is so thin. I'll stick to my old claim that the nomination was Jim DeMint's for the taking, because he has the most Tea Party cred without being a gaffe-a-day freak show. But he's apparently not running, and neither are Haley Barbour or Rick Perry or John Thune. I still think that Romney's going to lose to somebody more crazy than him, but there are fewer potential Romney-beaters out there than I thought.

Amanda Marcotte's case for Tim Pawlenty -- that he's the candidate nobody in the GOP strongly objects to -- seems right to me. That's especially valuable in the late stages of the campaign where there are fewer options and broad acceptability matters, so I'll put him at number 1 for now.