Presidential Persuasion: Not Usually A Thing

I'm liking Ezra Klein's piece in the New Yorker on how presidential rhetoric only convinces the president's party, and anti-convinces the other party. From the way Ezra describes the academic debates in political science, it looks like the people who focused on the power of presidential speechmaking were paying undue attention to factors whose salience was amplified by heavy media coverage. The debate has turned towards a focus on less-salient but more important facts about partisan incentives.

While agreeing with the general drift of the research, I wonder how it addresses the time between 9/11 and the onset of the Iraq War. A large minority of House Democrats and half the Democrats in the Senate supported Bush's Iraq War. I don't think it's straightforwardly that Bush persuaded them, but his administration was very happy to promote a way of understanding the conflict that led to major Democratic support for his disastrous proposal. Perhaps part of the problem is that partisan forces in our system were dulled by the rally-round-the-flag effect of 9/11, with Bush having the highest Gallup rating ever for a sitting President. And part of it may be that House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt was hoping to advance his Presidential campaign by supporting what he thought would be a popular war, so he co-authored the Iraq War resolution with Joe Lieberman rather than following the partisan incentives to oppose Bush.

I haven't done much Nancy Pelosi blogging lately, so let me share this anecdote from the article:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, recalls discussing the Social Security privatization plan with a sympathetic Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. He says that the representative told him, “You wouldn’t get everything you want and I wouldn’t get everything I want, but we could solve the problem. But I can’t do it because my leadership won’t let me.” Rove says, “It was less about Social Security than it was about George W. Bush.”

Without the work of the Democratic leadership, which Pelosi took over just before Bush started pushing Social Security privatization, these "sympathetic Democrats" and their sympathy for the devil would've sent American retirement security to hell. That's where they sent Iraq when Gephardt was House Democratic leader. Our political system is a two-party system, and Pelositheism is a Manichean faith. I'm a believer.

Draghi And The Banks

Simon Thorpe notes that Mario Draghi is printing money and lending it to banks instead of directly lending it to Greece. This is supposed to stabilize Greece by having the banks buy their debt, and that seems to be happening. He asks, "So, can somebody explain to me why all of these central banks throw this freshly minted money at commercial banks, rather than lending the money to governments and allowing them to use the money to pay off national debt?"

The answer I'd offer is that this is the only politically feasible option, since direct loans to Greece are considered unacceptable in Germany and Northern Europe. If your cover story to the Germans is that you're just loaning money to banks, however, you can sneak some aid to Greece by them. I don't want to disagree too strongly with his suggestion that the ECB wants to line the pockets of commercial bankers by letting them be middlemen, but this is still a reasonable way to do things given the generally dysfunctional politics of the Eurozone. And this is why I'm quite happy with Mario Draghi -- even if he has to make tactical concessions to the pathological German obsession with inflation and to the prejudices dividing Northern and Southern Europe, he doesn't allow them to utterly dominate European central banking.

In the Romney v Santorum Counterfactual, Romney Still (Probably) Wins

While it's not an exact science, Nate Silver tries to estimate what would have happened if Newt Gingrich had simply not run for President at all. The answer seems to be that his support would be split between and Santorum and Paul, with Santorum getting the lion's share, but that Santorum would still be far, far behind Romney. In this scenario, Romney's delegate lead would be due entirely to taking 100% of the delegates in Florida, Virginia, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Idaho.

To believe that Santorum could have won the nomination had Newt simply not entered the race, you have to believe that his win in South Carolina would have propelled him into competition with Florida; that Romney's avalanche of negative ads would have been less effective against Santorum, who has higher favorables among Republicans than Gingrich; and that he would have been able to hold Romney to below 50% in Arizona. And even then, Santorum would still trail Romney in delegates.

While the map favors Santorum over the next week—Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri aren't exactly friendly territory for Romney—we're getting much closer to the end.

Cato And The Kochs

The Koch brothers are trying to take over the Cato institute, and Cato is fighting back to try to preserve its independence.

I hope Cato survives, because there are good people doing good work there on issues I agree with, and I want them to keep their jobs. I've read articles by Chris Preble and Justin Logan off and on over the years, and they're consistently making sensible points against various foolish military activities. Here's Preble's book calling for a smaller military, and Logan's paper from 2006 against attacking Iran. The pro-peace side of Cato is small but real, and I wish the best to those people.

I mostly agree with Julian Sanchez' recent post that there's nothing interestingly ironic about libertarians being annoyed that big money is buying out their think tank. It's about as ironic as somebody who believes that you've got to stop for red lights being annoyed because they got stopped by a red light. Which is to say, not very ironic at all. Cato people are unhappy about what's happening, but they don't ever begrudge anybody in their situation the right to be unhappy. They just think the government shouldn't get involved in stopping rich people, and they're not asking it to. (Julian's excellent work against excessive intellectual property regulations is one of many reasons why I'm hoping Cato remains a hospitable environment for him.)

But there's another side to the ledger. Cato has a somewhat independent reputation -- it's not Heritage or Americans for Prosperity. And there are people at Cato who don't really deserve to be under that kind of banner. You get a pretty solid example in Randal O'Toole, who is willing to abandon libertarian views on transportation policy issues when it'll annoy left-wing urbanists. That guy belongs in some kind of hack tank where everybody will know he's not a principled libertarian. There were times when it might've made sense for Cato to pick up Nat Hentoff, but shortly after he supported the Iraq War and decided not to vote for Obama on anti-abortion grounds?

And yes, that brings us to abortion, an issue on which Cato has been incredibly disappointing. This ought to be the ultimate libertarian issue. Can the government force an unwilling woman not to remove an organism from her abdominal cavity for nine months until its incredibly painful emergence? Look, this is the stuff of science fiction dystopias. And as Thomson has famously argued, on strict libertarian assumptions it doesn't matter even if the fetus is a full person. If you can't be required to pay for someone else's health care, you certainly can't be required to carry them around inside your body and nourish them with your internal fluids. But searching the Cato archives for abortion mostly turns up horrific failures to appreciate the magnitude of the issue. If David Boaz ever thinks to himself during this crisis, "Why didn't the left support us more?" part of the answer is "because you went around making ridiculous comparisons between public arts funding and the government forcing someone to go through with a pregnancy." That's the sort of thing that makes it really hard to get emotionally involved in being on Cato's side.

I talked up the good foreign policy people at Cato a while ago. It's worth mentioning that at the most important moments in the last decade, things weren't entirely that way. Brink Lindsey was making the case for the Iraq War in October 2002 in exactly the way that a Bush Republican would. I think they've gotten better on this -- the foreign policy people there seem more strongly antiwar now -- here's Malou Innocent doing good. But the past wasn't a good time.

And here's Cato promoting climate change denialism. This doesn't have to be the libertarian position, as the carbon you put into the atmosphere could be conceived as damaging others' property. But instead of making that point, they'd rather confuse people about the science.

So let me do this like Abraham. I think there are

probably 10 people on Cato's 50-strong

"experts" list who are devoting some substantial amount of professional effort to promoting libertarian views on the large range of issues where I and my left-wing allies would agree with a principled libertarian position. I count Logan, Preble, Innocent, and Sanchez so far. And I know they have some people who oppose the War on Drugs. And for their sakes, may Cato be saved! But really, given the other stuff going there, it's the sort of thing where you have to beg the Old Testament God pretty hard.

The Easy Virtue

The pushback against Rush Limbaugh is going strong, with lots of advertisers and some radio stations dropping him. And that makes me very happy.

I've come to regard promiscuity as a positively virtuous trait, at least when people are taking care to practice safe sex. Character traits that contribute to the pleasure of others are generally regarded as virtuous, and promiscuity is a trait of that kind. As far as I know, this is holds in an especially strong way for female promiscuity, as a promiscuous woman may dramatically improve the lives of many lonely men. Sex has diminishing marginal utility, so if you're spreading it around to more people, you're probably generating a better distribution than if you're having it all with one person. (If women find it easier to attract short-term sex partners, a promiscuous man isn't likely to help lonely women quite as much, since they're likely to already have what they need.) Like being generous to the poor or courageous in dangerous situations, this isn't the sort of virtue that everybody has to include in their lives, but those who exhibit it should be admired.

There's an argument to be made that women who want the large array of publicly funded medical services to include birth control shouldn't be seen as promiscuous. Sounds right to me, and I'll let others talk about that if they want. I want to make the further and more fundamental point that an interest in having safe promiscuous sex with lots of men is a thing we ought to find admirable in a woman. Other behaviors with the tendency to improve others' lives are admired, and this ought to be no exception.

It's especially satisfying when villains meet their unexpected downfall in attempting to do something particularly dastardly. Rush was trying to make people ashamed of doing admirable and socially beneficial things. We probably won't see him get driven off the air entirely for this, but if it were to happen, it'd be sweet justice.