Posted 11:51 AM by Robert

The New Conventional Wisdom

Is it just me, or is the new Conventional Wisdom that John Kerry was Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose, as expressed in this rather belated rant by feckless Marty Peretz:

For what the electorate did on Nov. 2 was essentially (or maybe just merely) turn down John Kerry, a candidate who until very late in the Democratic primaries was almost no one's choice as the nominee, the party's last option because it could rally around no one else. What a pathetic vessel in which to have placed liberalism's hopes! A senator for two decades who had stood for nothing, really nothing.

If Mr. Peretz is ever able to bring his blood pressure under control, perhaps he will want to ponder these questions in a quiet, softly lit room - preferably one with a calming water feature:

1. Why is Senator Kerry a worthy object of such scorn when he outperformed by several percentage points the share of the popular vote he was predicted to take by virtually every serious economic model - including the Fair model Presidential Vote Equation - which predicted that Mr. Bush would take 57.48% of the popular vote.

2. Why isn't the more appropriate object of his scorn those involved in this election cycle's Democratic Congressional effort? Models such as the Fair model Presidential Vote Equation are based on the historic observation that incumbent Presidents are very rarely unseated when the economy is in the state it has been, but it is also true that no such incumbent has been reelected with an increase in his party's representation in both houses of Congress since 1936. Senator Kerry - who outperformed his expectations - can't be held accountable for Democratic Congressional losses on such a historic scale. Further, as RealClearPolitics cogently points out, it is hard to find a Republican mandate in Mr. Bush's 3% lead - but it's not too hard to find a Republican mandate in that historic two-house Republican Congressional surge. Shouldn't Mr. Peretz reserve a bigger portion of his venom for Tom Daschle and, especially, Nancy Pelosi - especially since something could, in principle, be done about Ms. Pelosi, who still "leads" House Democrats?

3. Why there weren't better Democratic contenders? The natural sources of presidential contenders are state governorships and, much less reliably, Congress. But most Democratic contenders this time were drawn from the Senate - with Senator Clinton poised to repeat this mistake next time out. Why? Senators have a terrible track record of achieving the Presidency. Kerry. Mondale. Dole. Humphrey. Goldwater. Kennedy was only nominally a Senator - and he too probably would have lost without the graveyard vote. Johnson? Please - he ran against Goldwater, a Senator, only one of them could lose (Johnson redeemed the curse of the Senator-Candidate in his own way with a disastrous presidency).

Why are Democratic governors such a shallow pool these days? For example, by all historical rights Gray Davis should have enjoyed all of Ronald Reagan's advantages as the re-elected governor of the largest state. After his recall, the only thing keeping his Republican replacement from being a serious presidential contender is the "native born citizen" clause of the Constitution - and lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante, the Republican's only Democratic challenger in the recall, was and is a clown. Does Mr. Peretz care to venture an opinion as to why the California Democratic party is such a mess at the governorship level - apparently along with every other Democrat-led state?

4. Why didn't Mr. Peretz vent himself more in this fashion during the primaries when it might have actually had some effect? Mr. Peretz points out accurately that John Kerry's Senate and post-Vietnam record made it clear long before the primary season that he could not be elected President. So when it became apparent to all that the Howard Dean was a disaster, why did Mr. Peretz not find another better Democrat and launch a movement to draft him or her? Were there none? Why did no other influential Democrat do that?

5. What happened at the DNC? Doesn't Mr. McAuliffe and the people who put him in office deserve a share of Mr. Peretz's venom?

6. How long will it be before the Democrats decide that the real problem was in the primary schedule, convention date and rules, and other minor procedural matters - as they have after every disaster since 1968 - and again start spending way too much time and energy running down those dead ends?

Posted 8:18 AM by Robert

The Senate's Time-honored, 200-year-old Tradition

One needs an especially strong stomach and unflappably low blood pressure to listen to United States Senators discuss the "traditions" of their chamber. The bon mots of New York Senator Charles Schumer on a proposal to limit the use of filibusters against federal judicial nominees provide a particularly septic example:

"To implement it would make the last Congress look like a bipartisan tea party," Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, said. "For the sake of country and some degree of comity, I would hope and pray that the majority leader would not take away the Senate's time-honored, 200-year-old tradition."

The "200-year-old tradition" of requiring a three-fifth majority (sixty Senators) cloture vote to end debate in the Senate to which Senator Schumer refers dates back only to 1975, when the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60) of the 100-member Senate. But the rule allowing termination of debate upon a two-thirds cloture vote itself only dates back to 1919. Before 1919 the Senate permitted unlimited debate. Senator Schumer is perhaps referring to that tradition?

Who knew that Senator Schumer revered filibuster stunts as he now says he does? It is well known that filibusters were particularly useful to southern senators blocking civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. The record for the longest individual speech goes to South Carolina's J. Strom Thurmond who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The filibuster-powered obstructionism of segregationist Senators was cited as an important symptom that the democratically elected branches of the federal government could not by themselves deal with the civil rights crisis of the mid-20th Century - and therefore as justification for the liberal judicial activism. Senator Schumer is a big fan of that flavor of judicial activism. Is he trying to preserve one of its historical justifications or is he just being sentimental? It's so hard to remember those long-dead days when New York and its representatives once preened themselves as progressive!

Senate debate serves exactly one legitimate purpose: Presentation to the Senate of potentially persuasive information and argument pertaining to a matter before the chamber. Once all relevant information has been presented and all material arguments made, further debate serves no legitimate function. It is therefore particularly illegitimate for "debate" to go on against the will of the Senate majority once every Senator has made up his or her mind on the matter debated.

But then there's Chuck Schumer's reverence for the Senate's time-honored, 200-year-old tradition.

Posted 7:38 AM by Robert

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

The great Democratic self-flagellation proceeds apace. But like many a jilted suitor, the Democrats seem to be looking in all the wrong places for love, the cause of their losses and the solution to their problems - and determined to repeat their mistakes.

The Democrats simply should not be focusing so much on their loss of the presidential election. Once the economy recovered in earnest, it was always a very long shot for John Kerry to win. In fact, Kerry-Edwards did better than most economic models predicted - he should not be ashamed of his vote count (some aspects of his broader campaign "performance" is another matter).

But perhaps the most peculiar and potentially fatal effect of the Democrats' over-emphasis on the presidency is the resulting romanticization of the Clintons. Yes, Bill Clinton unseated an incumbent President. But Mr. Clinton mostly surfed into office on the back of an economic wave - a recession that had receded a little too late to benefit George H.W. Bush. In 1996 the by-then-burgeoning economy allowed Mr. Clinton to overcome the many flaws in his first administration.

This part of the Clinton "legacy" will at some time be repeated. In the future, both Republican and Democratic administrations will again fall victim to the uncontrollable business cycle. And in the future, otherwise unsuccessful incumbents (like Bill Clinton) of both parties will be returned to office because an uncontrollable business cycle just happens to bouy the incumbent up. But presidential business-cycle surfing had nothing to do with Mr. Clinton (indeed, his 1993 tax increase risked a double dip recession) and the Democrats need not look to Mr. Clinton to replicate the most critical aspects of "his" 1992 and 1996 successes. Even the 1992 business cycle wave that washed Mr. Clinton into office would probably not have been enough if Ross Perot hadn't declared his bizarre 1992 jihad against the incumbent. As they seek wisdom in their Clintonian apocrypha, are the Democrats going to try to replicate or institutionalize that aspect of Mr. Clinton's 1992 campaign? Perhaps John Corzine - whose function is mostly to persuade near-billionaire Democrats to run for Senate seats - might branch out a bit with a effort to persuade eccentric billionaire Republicans to run against incumbent Republican presidents?

While the waves of the business cycle will eventually carry Democrats back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as flotsam if nothing else, the same cannot be said of the Capitol. That's why the election of several new Republican Senators and the ejection of key Democratic Congressional incumbents in a period of prosperity, including the defenestration of what should have been a secure Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle, should be much more troubling to the Democrats than what happened to John Kerry. The Democrats should be trying harder to figure how to fix what's been going wrong for them in the Congress.

With respect to Congress the Clintons are especially dangerous people to romanticize. They have almost always been poisonous to Congressional Democrats. Mr. Clinton's 1992 coat tails were negative - Democrats then lost seats in the House. The 1994 Congressional elections, which awarded both House and Senate control to the Republicans, were vastly more disastrous for the Democrats than those of 2004. Yes, there was a bit of regrouping in the late 1990's - but that was mostly attributable to Republican missteps, not to Mr. Clinton. The 2000 election was a return to the Clinton norm, with Al Gore deprived of what should have been an easy "third term" - and the Senate slipping back to Democratic control only after Republican Jim Jeffords defected.

So why the focus on the presidency - and therefore the focus on Mr. Clinton as "the last big Democratic winner" and on Hillary Clinton as potentially "the next big Democratic winner?" The Clintons since 1992 are more responsible than anyone else for putting the Democrats in their current disastrous Congressional position. The Democrats' top imperative should be to make sure that nobody like the Clintons ever gets close to Democratic positions of power again. Instead, the Democrats and their media apologists seem determined to make the same mistakes all over again - just like so many hasty, jilted lovers do on the rebound.

Posted 10:51 PM by Robert

Not A Fully Satisfactory Metric

This election was characterized by an unusual number of controversies regarding public opinion polls. The point at which the polls may be least significant is the very end of the campaign when the final polls are taken. Yes, there is some speculation that final polls may affect turnout a bit, but that surely is a very minor effect. Further, by the final days preceding the election the campaign has been run, the candidates and their supporters have advanced their arguments, deployed their strategies and tactics and marshaled their positions and forces - all informed by public opinion polls taken much earlier in the campaign. Even beyond that, the early dynamics and psychology of a campaign are largely determined by reports on polling results. Those factors can seriously affect voting patterns in primaries in which strategic voting can be very significant. In contrast, the final polls are mostly curiosities, surrogates for the real thing soon to come - but not influencing that real thing much.

So it strikes me as a very odd thing indeed to measure which pollster was "most accurate" on the basis of whether the pollster's final poll "called" the election. But that's what Real Clear Politics is doing. And they are very smart guys. But consider, for example, Zogby's bizarre, outlying polling reports the week before the New Hampshire primary, which he pulled into line with the other polls in his "final" poll. Was Zogby "accurate" in new Hampshire? I don't think so, but the RCP metric says he was accurate ... and Zogby has used this trick on other occasions.

Posted 9:39 PM by Robert

La Peste

The Washington Post reports:

"We have to treat the disease, not the symptom," [James] Carville said. "The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and we're not doing that."

Uh ... Mr. Carville ... the purpose of a political party is supposed to be advancing and preserving certain moral principles chosen by its members. It is true that in a democracy winning elections is sometimes an important subsidiary component of party purpose. But many perfectly good political parties in this country know perfectly well that they will almost certainly never win an election. That doesn't deprive the Libertarians, Communists, Greens or Natural Law Parties, for example, of their purposes. Indeed, some of the most important political parties have existed and now exist in political systems in which there are no elections.

Having too many people in the Democratic Party - especially its higher levels - thinking that "the purpose of a political party is to win elections" is the disease. Indeed, the Democratic Party has become an example of a party that for too long has been able to win elections without having a purpose. Its "disease" is characterized by its ongoing dominance by technocratic functionaries without moral center and those having principles shared by an isolated minority.

The disease has long gestated. Mr. Carville is most associated with Bill Clinton, who once told Tony Blair that Mr. Clinton expected to be remembered mostly as someone who won elections. The shocked, newly-minted Prime Minister remarked that he (Blair) certainly hoped he would be remembered for something more substantial than merely winning elections. And now - thanks to his stalwart position in the international theater - he will be. That's one of the nice consequences of not contracting Mr. Carville's "disease."

Of course, Mr. Clinton may be mostly remembered for his sexual scandals and impeachment. But, then, irony is cheap in politics.

UPDATE: La Peste Carville progresses, inducing delusional fever:

"We can deny this crap, but I'm out of the denial. I'm about reality here," Mr. Carville told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "We are an opposition party, and as of right now, not a particularly effective one. You can't deny reality here."

He said the party is desperately in need of a compelling narrative to tell voters, rather than the "litany of issues" the party stands for now.

He said Mr. Bush and Republicans presented just such a story: "These guys had a narrative — we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it," he said. "I think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is."

So in the newly found "reality" of James Carville, George Bush was re-elected and both houses of Congress became substantially more Republican because the Republicans supposedly told the American people "we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it." That was what he thinks the Republicans' "compelling narrative" was that the Democrats have to match.

That's very interesting. Oddly, I have no recollection of Mr. Bush ever saying anything whatsoever about "homos in Hollywood" during the campaign. Perhaps it was one of those unusual "compelling narratives" that dare not speak its name? And while there was quite a bit of effort expended by the President's people to convince voters that Iraq was a critical component of the war on terrorism, the concern (at least as I heard it) was that the persistence of terrorist states and states that sponsor and foster terrorism (regardless of whether there was a direct connection to 9-11, the narrow focus of the Democratic alternative) has to be dealt with over there of we'll inevitably have to deal with the consequences right here in the USA. If Mr. Carville has found "reality," it must be of the alternate variety,because there doesn't seem to be much overlap between his reality and mine.

But there is one point we do have in common: I also think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is. In fact, Arnold Schwarzenegger is exactly such a person. His "compelling narrative" has something to do with self reliance, low taxes and things like that - in other words a narrative that also has little in common with Mr. Carville's alternate reality.

Too bad about that "native born American" clause. Mr. Schwarzenegger will just have to make do with Sacramento.

Posted 1:22 PM by Robert

Another Day In The Life Of Terry McAuliffe II

The insanity continues:

"This party is stronger than it's ever been. We're in the best financial shape. We now have, unlike four years ago, millions and millions of new supporters of this party. We're debt-free for the first time ever, and we're beginning to build towards 2008" -- Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, after last Tuesday's elections.

Quote from OpinionJournal's e-mail service, Political Diary.

Mr. McAuliffe may be - at some subtle, nuanced level - a highly intelligent and talented being. At more obvious levels, the same is certainly true of Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Flipper and Dracula. None of those beings is an appropriate choice to be a national party chair - although Flipper and Dracula may edge out Ms. Brazile and Mr. Ickes, respectively, in that running.

It's close, though. Really, really close.

UPDATE: CBS News says that Mr. McAuliffe's "term is ending" - and that Howard Dean may want his job.

Against competition like Howard Dean candidates such as Flipper and Dracula are clearly way in the lead!

Posted 9:45 AM by Robert

News. Supply. Demand.

The New York Times ponders the growth and profitability of Fox News in a curious article that spends much space on the consequences of Fox becoming the largest cable news network:

Fox News clobbered the other cable news networks, its 8.1 million viewers more than tripling its own election night prime-time performance in 2000. NBC, ABC and CBS, on the other hand, lost millions of viewers this year, according to Nielsen Media Research. And Fox News actually came closer to CBS in the ratings than CNN did to Fox News. .... [T]he network's success could undercut the very raison d'être of Fox News: that it exists as an alternative to what its executives and some of its on-air talent call, disdainfully and often, the media establishment. Fox News has now become popular enough - with an audience whose conservative political leanings track those of the voters who re-elected President Bush - to lay claim to its own place in the establishment.

Someone might want to point out to the Times that when the reference is disdainful, the term of choice is the liberal media establishment. But who's picking?

Perhaps the most bizarre omission in the Times article is its complete failure to consider the consequences of supply and demand in its analysis of why Fox News keeps getting bigger and more profitable and the outlets comprising the liberal media establishment - including the New York Times - have become "mature" cyclical businesses whose profits tick up when advertising spending goes up generally, but mostly have profits that are at best stagnant or decline steadily in the long run.

Here's something to ponder: NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, PBS and CNN all serve their news with pretty much the same political mix (calling that mix a "slant" or a "bias" or the consequence of "unbiased policies" does not change the economic fact that the mix, whatever it is called, is pretty much the same). That's a lot of suppliers to align themselves with the views of the roughly 50% of the nation who voted for for Kerry-Edwards. On the other hand, the Times completely misses the economic consequences of one of its own observations regarding Fox:

What seems less open to debate is that the audience for Fox News mirrors the majority that re-elected the president. In June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that the percentage of Fox News viewers who identify themselves as Republican was 41 percent, compared to 29 percent who identified themselves as Democrats, and that 52 percent of Fox viewers identified themselves as conservative. (CNN, by contrast, was found to be more popular with Democratic viewers.) Mr. Ailes said he regarded the study as "a totally fraudulent survey done by a bunch of liberals."

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said, "It's a classic case of shoot the messenger." Mr. Kohut said his organization's financing came from a nonpartisan source, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the survey results had been replicated in other studies. He added that Fox News's commentators had had no problem quoting approvingly from an earlier study by his organization - one that suggested that the news media was increasingly liberal.

The Times reporter seems completely distracted by the "Is-Fox-conservative?" side show. The main economic point here - entirely missed by the Times - is that Fox is the only major television supplier to align itself with the views of the roughly 50% of the nation who voted for Mr. Bush.

Political slant is obviously not the only factor used by news consumers to choose their media. Now that the election is over, Fox's advantage and distinctiveness may fade somewhat. Or Fox's advantage and distinctiveness may not fade, since the liberal media establishment insists on flavoring all sorts of stories with what the "Bush base" would view as political bias.

Media audiences are not wholly distinct even during politically charged events like elections. Many people flip at least briefly among news channel to follow special events - and thereby create their own "balanced" portfolio of news. (One might compare this behavior to that of investors who create their own portfolios of stocks rather than purchase stock in a single "balanced" conglomerate.) But even those "media flippers" have lots of choices for their "left-of-center" litings - but Fox is the only choice on television for the "right" view. The Man Without Qualities, for example, found Wolf Blitzer's energetic and increasingly delusional attempts to present the election results as "up for grabs" and "too close to call" long after Mr. Bush had clearly carried Ohio to be hilariously entertaining compared to the obviously correct "it's over - Bush won Ohio and reelection" message Fox was putting out. Similarly, science fiction movies that defy the laws of physics can sometimes be much more entertaining and hilarious than a science documentary explaining those same laws. Part of the entertaining hilarity is that after a few martinis the science fiction movies can for moments on end actually seem to make more sense than the documentaries - until you actually think about it - just like Wolf!

The bottom line is that to the extent political slant is a factor in viewers' choice of media outlet, Fox has a huge advantage simply because it is the only television news outlet serving its 50% of the nation while the outlets comprising the television liberal media establishment are many and for the most part virtually interchangeable. Unless the television liberal media establishment actually remakes itself into the television media establishment (say, for example, CBS fires Rather, hires Hannity), that advantage will continue and Fox will likely continue to grow and make ever more money while its competitors continue to shrivel. If that transformation continues to be delayed or denied, one can look forward to lots of consolidation in the television liberal media establishment. The attempted merger of ABC News and CNN was one early attempt, an attempt that essentially recognized how fungible these two outlets really are. That merger crashed on big corporate ego rocks at Disney and Time Warner - but the economics justifying the merger have only gotten more imperative.

All of which begins to sound a lot like the current discussions about how the Democratic Party will have to remake itself into something broader if it wants to survive.

MORE: Reports concerning the workings of CBS News bear an increasing resemblance to the disconnected associations one might read in, say, Zippy the Pinhead comics:

Pre-election, the feeling in some quarters at CBS was that if Kerry triumphed, fallout from the investigation [of the Rathergate fake-document ANG story] would be relatively minimal. The controversial piece’s producer, Mary Mapes, would likely be suspended or fired, but a long list of others up the chain of command—from 60 Minutes II executive producer Josh Howard, to Rather and all the way up to news division President Andrew Heyward—would escape more or less unscathed. But now, faced with four more years of President Bush, executives at CBS parent Viacom could take a harder line on the executives involved.

So CBS News is now to be seen discharging senior people who would have been retained but for President Bush's re-election? The liberal media establishment will react with fury to that report. It's pretty clear that this story was probably leaked by the very people at CBS News who are threatened - exactly to stir up that fury and resistance to their discharge. Whether those people stay or go at this point, it's another disaster for CBS News.

And a few more bucks for Fox.