Electoral College Bashing, 2012 Edition

It is fashionable in election years to lament the undemocratic nature of the electoral college.  The latest installment is a nice column in The Dartmouth this morning.  There are two problems that are cited -- that less populous states are overrepresented and that the preferences of people who live in states in which they are in a small minority are irrelevant.  For example, the column notes that Wyoming has 0.18% of the population but 0.56% of the electoral votes.  Continuing with Wyoming, it will always vote Republican, so the preferences of anyone living there don't count at the margin.

It is true that if we elected the President through popular vote, then everyone's vote would count the same.  What is missed in these discussions is that only the first problem -- overrepresentation of less populous states -- is distinctively American.  It applies to both the electoral college and the way the majority party in the Senate is selected.  The second problem is present everywhere that there are representatives elected from districts.  For example, the majority party in the House is chosen every two years by electing our representatives by Congressional district.  I live in Vermont -- everyone who represents me in the House and Senate will be a member of the Democratic Party, regardless of my preferences.  In the attention paid to the question of who will be the next Speaker of the House, no one is considering my vote in Vermont but everyone is looking across the Connecticut River to New Hampshire, where the race in the 2nd district is very close.  These issues also arise in parliamentary systems in which the Prime Minister is chosen by the legislature (though it is important to note that this typically happens with smaller districts than our states and parliamentary systems often have more than two parties and a ruling coalition of those parties).

It is also true that if we elected the President through popular vote, then in a close election nationally, the chaos from Florida in 2000 might spread to many more places.  It is a shame that our voting technology and support are so bad that they constrain the type of election reform we can have.

Is This Journalism? I Say No

The title of the post refers to this article by Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor, "Huge Tax Increase Looms at Year-End 'Fiscal Cliff.'"  The purpose of the article seems to be to report on the findings of a study released yesterday by the Tax Policy Center, "Toppling Off the Fiscal Cliff: Whose Taxes Rise and How Much?"  The study is worth your time.  The article is not.

I am wondering whether it is standard practice in schools of journalism to encourage this style of writing (emphasis added):

Taxpayers across the income spectrum will get slammed with increases totaling more than $500 billion — a more than 20 percent increase — with nine out of 10 households being affected by the expiration of tax cuts enacted under both President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush.

[...]

Monday's study, by the independent Tax Policy Center, deals with the immediate increases set to slap taxpayers in January under the existing framework of the tax code.

[...]

Few are talking of renewing Obama's payroll tax cut, even though that would mean a healthy tax increase for many working people. Working families with modest incomes would be hit hard as the child tax credit would shrink from a maximum of $1,000 per child to $500.

The world is complicated enough without reporters using violent language to describe non-violent events.  Running deficits in perpetuity is not a civil right.  The simple facts of the matter are that for over a decade, policy makers have been able to agree only on ways to lower tax revenues through the income and payroll tax systems, not on how to raise them.  They chose to do so by enacting temporary measures.  The failure of the anything-but-super committee to accomplish its objectives has brought this poor style of policy making to defense expenditures as well.   Many of these measures would not have passed if they had been described as permanent from the beginning.  In eight years of blogging, I have never defended this last decade of fiscal policy.

So what is looming is simply a reversion back to an older tax code.  We should let that reversion happen, as dictated by prior legislation.  Starting from that new baseline, we can ask the question of what productive uses of deficit spending we might have available.  The answer is the same now as it was nearly five years ago.

What Makes a Swing State Swing?

The internet is abuzz today with reactions to the "secret" video of the "closed door" Romney fundraiser "leaked" to Mother Jones.  You can hear excerpts, with accompanying biased commentary by "journalist" David Corn, here.

Romney is distinguishing two types of Obama voters from 2008 -- those whom he has little chance of flipping and those -- a much smaller group -- who might be willing to vote for him if he allows them a way to still claim that their vote for Obama was not a mistake in 2008 but would be in 2012.  His triage seems callous, but it doesn't strike me as any worse than the President's rhetoric regarding people he doesn't expect to vote for him.

We have this notion that what needs to happen in the general election is for the candidates to move toward the political center to pick up the marginal voters.  That's a strategy, but it doesn't seem like it is the only viable strategy.  A candidate might instead choose to focus his energies on getting his base to turn out in higher numbers than his opponent's base, particularly in states that are closely contested.  The role of the swing voter is overrated.  What matters is total votes in swing states.

Some Pre-Election Pessimism

From yours truly, in this term's Rockefeller Center newsletter.  Key quote:

The propensity toward gridlock is a risk in any system with direct election of the President.  However, in the United States, this propensity is exacerbated by the low regard and low expectations we have for the Congress.  We seldom reward legislators with a promotion to the White House.  In the postwar period, for example, only John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have been elected President directly from the Senate.  Quite the contrary, the American public tends to reward governors who make a bid for the White House, particularly when they run as Washington outsiders.  The elections of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were all based to varying degrees on this strategy.  

Enjoy?

Campaign Contribution or Bribe?

This article by Robert Barnes in the Washington Post is well worth your time in a season when campaign finance will once again become an issue of contention.  I have long been disappointed that the Supreme Court is so willing to treat money in politics as if it were speech.  Some money is speech.  The rest is a bribe.  We would have a much better democracy if we could find a way to remove the latter without seriously compromising the former.

The focus of the article is a recent case in Alabama, which the Supreme Court chose not to hear.  The key piece of information is that judges in the lower courts are pleading for more clarity.

Federal law makes it a crime to corruptly solicit or accept money with the intent of being rewarded or influenced in official actions, and prosecutors have said campaign contributions can be part of such a scheme.

The Supreme Court’s guidance on the issue is thin. In 1991, it ruled that a campaign contribution could be a bribe if prosecutors proved a quid pro quo — that the contribution was “made in return for an explicit promise or undertaking by the official to perform or not to perform an official act.”

In a subsequent case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the quid pro quo need not be expressly stated. But lower courts have differed, since then, on exactly what standards apply.

Read the whole thing.

Mapping Out the Electoral College

Chris Cillizza takes a careful look at Mitt Romney's "narrow path" to a possible victory in November.  I thought the conclusion was interesting:

Given the narrowness of his electoral map window, the key for Romney this fall is to win in places that Bush, McCain and other Republican nominees over the past two decades have struggled to make inroads. No Republican has carried Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Michigan (16) or Wisconsin (10) in any of the past five elections, for example.

Picking up one of those states would be evidence that the Republican Party can remain a national party.  My how things can change in eight years ... remember this?

The Senate Contest in 2012

Paul Kane's article in The Washington Post today sums up the 2012 election pretty well -- unless one party gains a large majority in the Senate, then the gridlock in Washington won't end regardless of who wins the White House.  According to the article, the Democrats have 23 Senate seats to defend, compared to just 10 for the Republicans, during this cycle.  There will be a close battle for the majority, but it likely won't yield a large majority either way.

Given that likelihood, it would be interesting to have the major presidential candidates asked specifically about how they would appeal to a divided Senate.  For some earlier musings on whether there will be more or less gridlock with Romney rather than Obama in the White House, see this post from January.

The Economy in the 2012 Election

I made a presentation to the Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley on Saturday morning, "The Economy in the 2012 Elections."  In addition to many of the themes I have blogged in recent years, I made the point that the recent dip of the Initial Unemployment Insurance claims below 400,000, if it is sustained, signals the beginning of a robust job market expansion.  I also suggested that the failure of policy makers to recognize how important investment is to the beginnings and ends of business cycles is one of the reasons why we have been stuck in a lackluster economy for longer than we needed to be.  The slides are included below. Samwick DCUV 20120204

The Case for Obama

With Jon Huntsman now out of the presidential campaign, chances are very high that I vote for President Obama in November.  Even though I don't think a President Romney would implement policies too far from the political center (see this post for my reasons), the Republicans have done little to merit more influence in national government.  I thought Huntsman was the only interesting Republican candidate.  I was disappointed in his campaign but hope to see him in the 2016 race if the opportunity arises.

Via Ezra Klein this morning, I see that Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful column laying out the case for President Obama's re-election.  It discusses policies but it also discusses tactics:

And what have we seen? A recurring pattern. To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.

This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.

I recommend the whole thing.  For my own views on President Obama's re-election chances, see this post from August 2011.  I am less sympathetic to the "long view" that Sullivan is using to tie together Obama's actions in his first term, but that's the thing about long views -- it takes time to prove them right or wrong.

On My Mind Today -- Paul Tsongas

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, and in preparing my introduction of David Walker today, I was thinking back to 1992 when Paul Tsongas won the Democratic contest while campaigning on fiscal issues.  Here's a particularly relevant passage from his Call to Economic Arms:

This is where democracies rely upon the courage of their elected leaders.  The normal political instinct is to always engage in happy talk.  It is courage which allows a politician to take a people beyond that.  It takes toughness to lead a people toward their preservation no matter how disquieting the journey may be.  For avoidance of unpleasant reality is simply a part of human nature.

I do not think we have an economic problem here.  We have a leadership problem here.  Sadly, I do not see tomorrow's primary as a meaningful step toward resolving that leadership problem.  In his talk, Walker mentioned two interesting organizations that might offer some hope: www.nolabels.org and www.americanselect.org.

UPDATE: Here's an article on Walker's lecture in The Dartmouth.

If You Want To Advance the Centrist Democratic Agenda ...

... then you might hope that Romney wins the election in November.  Here's my thinking on this crazy notion.

We know what Washington looks like if Obama is President but the Democrats don't have the House and don't have 60 votes in the Senate.  Republicans dig in.  The Democratic agenda doesn't move forward.  It's gridlock.  If Obama is re-elected but the Congress doesn't shift strongly Democratic, we can expect more of the same. That's just the way it is with Republicans on Capitol Hill these days.  We can speculate as to whether House Republicans would feel more or less empowered opposing a re-elected Obama.  Maybe less right after the election, but growing over time as Obama becomes more of a lame duck President.  And history doesn't favor an improvement for the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections if they control the White House.

But now consider what happens if it is President Romney.  We can presume that if there was enough sentiment to make that happen, the Republicans will not have lost ground in Congress.  So what is Romney's record in the organizations that he has run?  It has been pointed out many times that he does not seem to be driven by ideological principles.  It is less often emphasized what he is driven by.  He is results oriented.  He tries to turn things around and add value.  It was true at Bain.  It was true in the 2002 Winter Olympics.  And, most instructively, it was true of his time as Governor of Massachusetts. 

So how would a President Romney get things done?  He wouldn't make the mistake of trying to transcend politics.  He would play politics to the hilt.  Unencumbered by restrictive ideological principles, he would work very hard to get 60 votes in the Senate while retaining a majority in the House, so that he could take credit for the results while he's in office. The need to get those 60 votes in the Senate is what allows the centrist part of the Democratic agenda to move forward.

I believe that the way to understand the Romney campaign is simply to acknowledge that his ambition is to be the guy in charge who gets things done on the grandest scale possible.  That means being President.  Nothing he has to say or do in the process of getting elected will substantially affect what he does when he gets there.  And that would be good news for centrist Democrats, even if it would be a bitter pill to swallow.

Quick Reactions to the Iowa Caucus

The results from Iowa with over 90 percent of precincts reporting show Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in a dead heat with 25 percent of the vote each, with Ron Paul third with 21 percent of the vote. 

This is not a surprise.  The Republican party has three factions: religious conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians.  Each faction is represented by one of these three candidates (in the order listed above).  What shifted over the past few months was which candidate would represent the religious conservatives.  It turned out to be Santorum, rather than Bachmann or Perry.

The Iowa caucus is not supposed to determine the nominee.  It is primarily the media circus surrounding it that makes it appear to be more consequential than it is.  Ezra Klein had a good post on this a day ago.  Iowa matters beyond the delegates it awards because it provides information that is useful to others who are deciding which candidate to support -- and because an abysmal showing might convince a marginal candidate to drop out of the race.  That might be Bachmann here.  Huntsman ignored Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, and Perry might as well hold on until South Carolina.