Why did President Bush not do very well in Congress this year? Was it because he was politically inept? Was it because he offended members of his own party? Was it because they were afraid that sticking with him would kill any chance of reelection?

All of these are possibly correct. But I think that there is a more efficient answer -- and that is that the President, in dealing with Congress, simply bit off more than he could chew. He thought that there were consensus positions for reforming certain issues, but there were none. He misread the number of people willing to agree to any kind of tax cut extension, Social Security reform, immigration reform, or Patriot Act extension.

His fundamental mistake, I think, was that he failed to appreciate the nature of Congress. Congress is not the sort of body that passes lots of big pieces of reform legislation by small margins. Its structure is such that you usually have to find a very large consensus within the institution itself -- and this is very often hard to come by. At certain points in time and with certain types of issues, it is downright impossible.

This is the point that Stanford's Keith Krehbiel makes in his book Pivotal Politics. This is one of the few books I have read that tries to explain congressional activity in the broader context of the presidency. Krehbiel argues that the structure of Congress is very important. It creates roadblocks to getting what you want out of the institution. Think of all the different structural "pivots" in Congress:

1. Any bill must find a majority in both houses.

2. Any bill must, if it is opposed by the President, find a majority of 2/3rds.

3. Any bill must find a majority of 3/5ths in the Senate.

 

These structures explain, according to Krehbiel, why gridlock is the status quo in Congress and why, when it is broken, it is usually broken by large majorities. Think of it this way. Suppose you have a status quo policy that a bare majority of Congress wants to change to an alternative policy. Is this enough? No way. There are still two more "pivots". If a 2/5th minority of the Senate prefers the status quo to the majority's proposal, it will filibuster. If the President prefers the status quo to the majority's proposal, he will veto; his veto will be successful unless 2/3rds of Congress prefers the alternative to the status quo.

But, one might respond, what about political parties? Is it not easier to get big changes when the President and Congress are of the same party? According to this theory, not necessarily. This theory presumes that members of Congress and the President vote according to their own interests. If they prefer one position over another, they vote for their most preferred position. The party does not have the power to induce them to vote against their interests. From what we know about congressional parties, this is a very reasonable assumption. They are weak compared to European parties. Our legislative parties usually work by controlling what goes on the agenda, not by controlling members of Congress. Party leaders know that they can really do nothing to stop "mavericks".

As a practical matter, then, we will only see Congress and the President act to reform a situation when a very large majority prefers the policy proposal to the status quo.

This also explains why Bush had trouble this year. He tried to reform certain policies where there does not seem to be a large enough consensus on any given reform proposal. In other words, it was not just a matter of Bush refusing to give the other side what they want. It was a matter of impossibility: it was impossible to find any alternative to the status quo -- on Social Security, taxes, immigration, etc -- that Bush, any majority of the House, and any 3/5ths of the Senate would find acceptable. For instance, what would have happened if Bush had compromised with his Democratic opponents so much on immigration that they would have agreed with his proposal? His Republican supporters would have turned into his opponents!

Ultimately, it is impossible to reform certain issues at certain times in American history. Sometimes the size of the majority willing to go along with any given reform is too small.

So, maybe Bush's legislative mistake this year was not that he is stubborn and refuses to modify his positions. Maybe it was not that he did not sweet talk Congress enough. Maybe the mistake came last January when his White House decided what they were going to push for. They chose too many wrong things -- things that Congress could not possibly have agreed upon. In other words, Bush failed in Congress for the same reason he failed with the public -- he presumed that his election meant something more than it did. He misread his mandate. His election did not mean, for the public, that certain issues were settled. It did not mean, for the Congress, that a consensus position of sufficient size had emerged within the body. It only meant that he could keep his job for another four years.

Posted by Jay Cost at 08:38 AM | Email Author | Permalink

The conventional wisdom about the 109th Congress, now at the end of its first session, has largely emphasized Republican division and a derailed agenda. This is an interesting theory -- and there are two ways one could look at it. On the one hand, one could examine start-of-session expectations and then examine end-of-session assessments of how Congress has met those expectations -- placing it in the context of the congressional soap opera. This is the usual method of assessing congressional performance.

There is, however, another way to evaluate congressional performance. One could compare this session with the average legislative output of other congressional sessions to see how the 109th thus far compares to congressional history. I have seen no attempts at this latter method. This is surely valuable, as it gets beyond the influence of start-of-year expectations, which are almost always unrealistic.

David Mayhew's Divided We Govern serves as a good starting point for this second line of analysis. Mayhew, examining end-of-year session write-ups in The New York Times and The Washington Post (in addition to miscellaneous supplementary material, and what he calls "retrospective judgments" written by experts at a future date) from 1946 to 1990, finds that, on average, when the same party controls the presidency and Congress, Congress produces 12.8 "major" acts per two-session Congress. That would work out to 6.4 acts per session under unified government. This gives us some perspective: if we find about six to seven major pieces of legislation, we can tentatively conclude that this session was average.

Actually, we might expect a little bit less than six to seven. As I mentioned, Mayhew uses newspaper write-ups as a "first sweep" to see what contemporary observers thought were important. He then examines retrospective judgments -- comments by policy experts who evaluated certain pieces of legislation -- to see if the journalists missed anything.

So, how does the first session of the 109th stack up? Fairly well, as it turns out. Looking at the The New York Times' assessment of what Congress did, there seem to be six major pieces of legislation Congress has passed. Quoting Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

ENERGY -- The first comprehensive energy bill in years sets rules to increase the reliability of electrical supplies, encourage construction of nuclear power plants and finance research into alternative energy sources.

CENTRAL AMERICA FREE TRADE -- Most trade barriers between the United States and six small Central American countries are removed.

HIGHWAY SAFETY -- More stringent safety measures are instituted, including the first performance standards intended to reduce rollovers. States can now receive additional federal money if they enact laws allowing the police to pull over drivers for not wearing a seat belt.

BANKRUPTCY OVERHAUL -- The first major overhaul of bankruptcy laws in 27 years disqualifies many families from erasing their debts and getting a ''fresh start.'' Significant new costs are imposed on those seeking bankruptcy protection, and lenders and businesses get new legal tools for recovering debts.

CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS -- The ability of people to file class-action lawsuits against companies is sharply limited, and many such cases will now be transferred to federal courts from state ones.

TORTURE -- Cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody is banned in a bill sponsored by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and a former prisoner of war, that was originally opposed by the White House.

This is just a rough estimate -- as Mayhew has sources other than the NY Times write-up on one session of a given Congress (and the write-ups in the period he studied were more elaborate than the 2005 write-up I found). This does not amount to a repetition of Mayhew's method, by any stretch of the imagination. For instance, I had to estimate that several of the pieces of legislation mentioned by Stolberg, e.g. $3.9 billion to prepare for bird flu, would not find their way into the kind of write-ups Mayhew found, and therefore would not count as an "important" piece of legislation. But it seems, as rough as this data is, that this session has not been unproductive. The average session produces six to seven pieces of important legislation, and this session seems to have produced six.

Unfortunately, this method does not evaluate the extent to which the President led Congress. Obviously, Bush did not get everything he wanted -- notably Social Security reform and an extension of the Patriot Act. Further, the torture law was something he had to compromise upon. So, it seems fair to say that Bush's presence was not felt as strongly as it could have been in this session (though it is difficult to judge how Bush stacks up against other presidents who enjoyed a Congress of the same party).

However, this should not detract from the fact that the 109th is, thus far, on par with previous Congresses. So, when pundits are discussing how unproductive this legislative session has been, they are not really doing so with much historical perspective. For a Congress that is controlled by the same party as the President, this session seems to have been normal.

Posted by Jay Cost at 06:41 AM | Email Author | Permalink

It is very rare that an article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics finds its way into the mainstream media. But an article in its recent edition, by Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, entitled "A Measure of Media Bias," did just that last week.

Most of the reports I read were based upon the press releases that announced the article's publication. Much of the details of the article, which is 46 pages in length, went largely unnoticed. Having just finished reading this piece, I thought I might comment upon it.

The authors theorize that the mainstream press is (a) more leftist than the average member of Congress and (b) more leftist than the average American voter. This is an argument that many have made in the past, but rarely has it been done systematically, i.e. with some kind of objective measure of bias. The authors of this article develop such a measure.

What they do, in essence, is compare the frequency with which members of Congress reference think tanks in House or Senate speeches to the frequency with which 20 news sources reference think tanks in their news reports. The theory behind this test is that a conservative member of Congress will probably mention the same think tanks that a conservative media outlet will mention - and a liberal member of Congress will probably mention the same think tanks that a liberal media outlet will mention. If you have an objective measure of liberal/conservative among members of Congress (and Groseclose and Milyo use each members' Americans for Democratic Action voting score - a standard measurement in academic work), you can then develop a measure of liberal/conservative for media outlets.

In their words:

As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, and suppose that the New York Times cited the first think tank twice as often as the second. Our method asks: what is the estimated ADA score of a member of Congress who exhibits the same frequency (2:1) in his or her speeches? This is the score that our method would assign the New York Times.

As has been reported, they found that most think tanks are more liberal than the average member of Congress from the same period.

What has gone relatively under-reported are two interesting findings. First, the results of Groseclose and Milyo tend to go against the arguments made by people like Eric Alterman and Neal Gabler that the media has a corporate, and therefore conservative or pro-business, bias. One result that they find, for instance, is that News Night with Aaron Brown and Time magazine have different ADA scores, with the former being about 9 "points" more conservative than the latter. Yet, both are owned by Time-Warner. This does not amount to a strong refutation of the theory of "conservative bias" but nevertheless the result is problematic for those who advocate that idea.

Another point that has gone under-reported is that almost all media outlets are more liberal than the average Republican member of Congress and more conservative than the average liberal member of Congress. The media outlets that are measured would, if they were members of Congress, be mostly Democratic - but also mostly conservatively Democratic. So, it is important not to overstate the scale of bias they find. The direction of the bias is left, but the strength of the bias is not overwhelming.

One argument that Groseclose and Milyo make that I think is overstated is the argument that we now know that the media is more leftist than the average American voter. They make this argument by inferring what the average voter's ADA score is. They estimate the average member of Congress's ADA score -- weighting it to account for factors like gerrymandering, population variance among senatorial constituencies, and the absence of congressional representation for Washington DC -- and use this estimate as a proxy for the average American's ideological position on the ADA scale. The problem with this is that I think it gives too much credit to the average voter. The consensus among political scientists is that only about 30% of the American electorate is ideological in the sense that the ADA would rate members of Congress. Thus, comparing the ideology of the electorate to the ideology of the media is, by and large, like comparing apples to oranges. The public is largely, as Donald Kinder once put it, "innocent of ideology." Unfortunately, this article lacks a discussion of this compelling literature - and so their argument in this regard is not very persuasive. Furthermore, even if we assume that the public is ideological, we cannot assume that they vote for members of Congress based upon ideology. We know for a fact that they do not. Accordingly, it is difficult to infer the average voter's ideology based upon the average member's ideology.

A final point is worth mentioning. This article does not prove that the media is biased toward the left. It produces a result that is consistent with that theory. That is an important distinction. The fact that this article is in the Journal of Quarterly Economics indicates that the article is methodologically valid (i.e. all of their statistics are good) and theoretically plausible and honest (i.e. they are not putting forth some insane theory or some insignificant way of testing the theory).

But that does not necessarily mean that it is theoretically perfect. The objectivity of this measure of bias is, as mentioned earlier, legislative voting. But consider how this measure is "filtered" in the study. One moves from congressional vote choices, to the ADA's assessment of what constitutes liberal and conservative vote choices, to the ADA's assignment of liberal/conservative scores, to speeches by members where think tanks are referenced, to references in the media to think tanks, to ADA scores for the media, to a comparison between media and congressional scores. This is not a very parsimonious measure in that it takes many different steps across institutions (Congress, ADA, media) and across actions (vote casting, speechifying, news reporting). It might be possible to construct a more parsimonious indicator of media bias that is just as objective - and such an indicator might provide a different result.

(One such possible improvement might be an independent indicator of whether a think tank is liberal/conservative. Their theory assumes that liberals prefer to cite liberal think tanks. That is how they conclude that media outlets are liberal when they see them referencing the same think tanks. But they do not test that assumption. One would need an independent measure of think tank ideology, which they do not provide, to see whether liberals in fact use liberal think tanks, and vice-versa. Maybe they do not.)

It is also not necessarily the case that, simply because the media is biased in this domain (i.e. its use of think tanks in its reports), it is necessarily biased in all domains. For instance, the media might have a tendency to use pro-leftist think tanks, but it might show a conservative bias in its selection of news stories. Maybe, in other words, its bias is compartmentalized - in some instances it is leftist, in others it is rightist. This article is only directly measuring a type of bias. The fact that objective indicators of bias are difficult to develop, and so rarely done, means that we simply cannot say with certainty whether the media is generally biased.

In other words, the results they find are consistent with a general bias, but they do not "prove" that there is such a thing. It is very possible that these results could eventually be explained by an alternative theory that does not conceive of the media as being generally biased. That would first require the development of another objective indicator of media bias.

Posted by Jay Cost at 07:07 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Like many people, I read Newsweek's mid-December, high-octane burn of Bush with more than a bit of wonder, and not a good "Christmasy" kind. Halfway through the article, encountering what must have been the twenty gigillionth unnamed source, I thought to myself, "This is what happens when a President plugs all the leaks. The stories don't stop -- they just become a reflection of the journalist's preconceived notions."

This Newsweek piece was the latest in an ongoing series of attempts to psychoanalyze this President. Here is Newsweek's take on the essence of the Dubya:

Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history, at least since the late-stage Richard Nixon. It's not that he is a socially awkward loner or a paranoid. He can charm and joke like the frat president he was. Still, beneath a hail-fellow manner, Bush has a defensive edge, a don't-tread-on-me prickliness.

OK -- fair enough. Quite plausible. I have seen people in my life who are like that. Next, important question -- putting aside the sexiness of your conclusion, what is your evidence?

They respond:

It shows in Bush's humor. When Reagan told a joke, it almost never was about someone in the room. Reagan's jokes may have been scatological or politically incorrect, but they were inclusive, intended to make everyone join in the laughter. Often, Bush's joking is personal-it is aimed at you. The teasing can be flattering (the president gave me a nickname!), but it is intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Seriously? The way Bush jokes is the window into his soul? That is all you have?

But really, in the course of reading the article, you cannot help conclude that is pretty much all they have. It boils down to five cent psychoanalysis that would have made Peanut's Lucy proud: he's in a bubble, he will not listen to criticism, he is stubborn. Why? Here is, at least by my reading, the evidence they provide:

1. He has angered some congressmen. Now that is compelling, is it not? Who could envision members of Congress having the kind of self-conceit that they could get angry by being "slighted"? They are so humble, after all.

2. His jokes make the press corps twitchy and mildly offended. But, am I to really believe that the offended elements of the press can take any joke without being offended? Am I to believe that they are not full of themselves and the utter, deadly seriousness of their sacred, patriotic project to protect democracy, liberty and the First Amendment by reporting (cue dramatic music) the Truth? Did you see how Rather reacted to the National Guard fiasco?

3. All of these unnamed sources say something that the authors can interpret as being consistent with their theory.

4. He just will not admit that we are losing that damned war in Iraq.

Am I supposed to be compelled by this data set?

The Newsweek story is, at this point, no longer inducing chatter. But it gets to a broader trend in the media -- one that today's Washington Times piece by Bill Sammon tosses cold water upon. Consider again the metaphor that Newsweek chose to describe Bush -- a bubble. If you are in a bubble, nothing gets into you. But, importantly, nothing gets out as well. Throughout the Newsweek piece, you see the authors justify again and again the anonymity of their sources. A typical line reads, "A White House aide, who like virtually all White House officials (in this story and in general) refused to be identified for fear of antagonizing the president, says..." In other words, the fact that Bush does not show his hand is a piece of data that can be used to psychoanalyze him. He lets nobody leak because he likes a "tight circle of trust" that is inviolable. Accordingly, nothing gets through that circle, and nothing gets out. The "no leaking" is proof of that.

So to these four pieces of pseudo-evidence, we must add a fifth:

5. He and his associates will not share themselves to the press corps' satisfaction.

To use this as evidence is, however, to engage in a logically faulty program. The fact that this White House is very effective at preventing its officials from talking to the press is not a piece of data that one can use to psychoanalyze the President. It is, rather, a sign that this President cannot, currently, be psychoanalyzed. We have no data to do so. We really have little-to-nothing in terms of reliable information about how the man thinks. Why? Because he runs a tight ship. He does not suffer leakers. No leakers mean no inside scoops that are worth anything. It means that you get four junky pieces of data -- a few pissed off members of Congress, offended pressies, anonymous and vaguely agreeing sources, and a war "nobody" thinks we are winning -- to make an argument about the essence of a man. You do not salvage the value of this data, and you certainly do not strengthen your conclusion, by adding, "He won't tell us anything!"

There is a synonymous term for "arguments based on no quality data". It is: idle speculation.

This is why Sammon's piece is so compelling. It is not that Sammon demonstrates to letter certainty that the Newsweek account is incorrect. He largely relies upon unnamed sources as well. It is, rather, that, since this White House is so tight-lipped, you can get fundamentally competing accounts of Bush as a person from two reputable news sources in the course of 14 days. It shows that the whole project of psychoanalyzing Bush is illegitimate. (N.B. what makes the Sammon piece better journalism is that Sammon does not jump from the fact that Cheney is still close to Bush to any conclusions about Bush's psychological state).

The bottom line is the following. The desire to psychoanalyze a president is very strong among almost all serious observers of the White House. But a psychoanalytic conclusion must follow from a data set that has some empirical value. As the quality of that data set diminishes, so does the power of the conclusion. What is more, the conclusion will begin to look more and more like one's preconceived notion, as there is less and less data to test those initial impressions. That is exactly what I think happens in these "Bush's Mind" pieces. Bush has given us so little data that those who wish to figure him out are left rephrasing how they felt about him before they started researching, and bringing forth utterly absurd pieces of "evidence" to make their conclusions seem like something more than their initial impressions.

This is why, if I am asked what I think about Bush's mind, I will demur. I lack enough data to make a conclusion worth your while.

After all, who wants to read idle speculation?

Posted by Jay Cost at 02:41 PM | Email Author | Permalink

I've been sitting back most of the week enjoying Jay's commentary on politics and intelligent design, but I wanted to toss out some quick links, observations, etc. Here goes:

-- Key graphs from Bill Sammon's article on the relationship between Dubya & Cheney:

 Mr. Bush often lunches in private with Mr. Cheney, who has no compunction about disagreeing with his boss. The president welcomes such dissent, although he does not always follow it.
    For example, Mr. Cheney was thought to be less than enthusiastic about the president's nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court earlier this year. Miss Miers withdrew her nomination after Republicans complained that she was not demonstrably conservative enough for the bench.
    Secondly, throughout 2005, Mr. Cheney appeared more interested in democratizing Iraq than in reforming Social Security, an issue that the president spent much of the year promoting. After failing to persuade Congress to enact the reform, Mr. Bush belatedly returned to aggressively defending his Iraq policy. 

Lesson: Always follow Cheney's advice.

--Michael J. Totten writes about his recent travels to Libya.

--A reader email on the NSA spying kerfuffle:

Let's win the war on terror. If that means suspending a few rights - fine.  Actually, more rights have been lost to the Environmental Protection Agency than to the Patriot Act or any other legislation meant to keep us safe.  For example, and this is only a partial list: I can no longer fish where I want, burn leaves when necessary, drive where I want, water where I want, smoke where I want, dispose of cuttings where I want, swim where I want, have access to inexpensive fuel, make our wine where we want, press our olives where we want, and frankly do quite a few other things because our rights to do so have been subjugated to a few fanatics. 

Liberals have been trying to spin this Rasmussen poll (64% approving of the NSA intercepting telephone calls between terrorist suspects overseas and people in the United States) as bad news for President Bush (see here and here for two examples) but I just don't see it. If Democrats believe they can reframe this debate as anything more nuanced than "Bush is doing his best to battle the bad guys and Democrats are once again being soft on national security" then I think they're spitting in the wind.

--Jake Tapper reports on an interesting case of white voter disenfranchisement in Mississippi.

--Despite being sick and on vacation, McIntyre was on Hugh's radio show last night talking about 2006. 

-- How much of ANWR are we talking about opening up for drilling? I'm Not Emeril puts things in perspective.  

Posted by Tom Bevan at 09:31 AM | Email Author | Permalink

It is very difficult to make any interesting arguments about what will happen in 2008 this far out. It is impossible, for instance, to say (a) which candidates on either side will run, (b) which candidates will receive the nominations or (c) which candidate will win the general election.

It is easy, at this point, to get a sense of who is thinking about running and who is not. But that also makes it relatively uninteresting -- a quick peek at whom C-SPAN is covering on its "Road to the White House" will tell you everything you want to know.

There are a few valuable points that we can make with a higher degree of confidence. For instance, we can confidently identify a few who stand no chance at acquiring the nomination of either party. I tend to view the Republican primary as being fairly wide open, even for McCain and Giuliani (New Hampshire provides a nice x-factor for these two). The Democratic Party, however, is definitely not wide open, insofar as some of the known presidential aspirants/ponderers are aspiring/pondering in vain.

There are three potential candidates whom I think it is safe to say stand no chance. All three of these have shown, to varying degrees, an interest in running. These three are: Al Gore, John Kerry and John Edwards. None of these fellows will nab a nomination -- POTUS or V-POTUS.

There are two reasons I think this is the case:

1. As known losers, they have a real strategic disadvantage. First and foremost, they do not know how to win general elections. Second. primary opponents know what to expect from them. Thus, in a crowded field, it is likely that these three guys will manage to work their respective ways to the bottom of the barrel.

2. As known losers, it will be difficult for them to attract primary voters. The Democrats want to win in 2008; and so, in a crowded field, primary voters will move away from these three guys. They wanted a win in 2004 and picked Kerry because, for some reason I have still not quite fathomed, they thought he would beat Bush. They forced Kerry to pick Edwards because, again for some inscrutable reason, they thought he would help beat Bush. Democrats will not make the same mistake twice with these two (and, for that matter, neither can claim that he is electable) -- and Gore is risky for the same reason. Gore is perhaps more risky, as he now has a track record of making extreme utterances.

None of this is to imply that former candidates cannot become future candidates, as with Adlai Stevenson, or successful future candidates, as with Richard Nixon. I am not trying to postulate some general law of presidential dynamics. But, in a crowded field, the known loser is not the smart money.

Posted by Jay Cost at 05:33 PM | Email Author | Permalink

The AP had an interesting story this morning about Charles Schumer, DSCC Chairman, and his plan to take back the Senate next year. Usually, stories like this are built around one small bit of information, but this story actually provides two interesting insights.

(1) Currently, the DSCC has a $22 million more cash on hand than the RSCC.

(2) Schumer plans to sponsor major challenges in 7 Republican-held Senate seats. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, and Arizona

Taken together, these points indicate, I think, the frustration that 2006 will bring for ambitious Democrats. On the one hand, their financial advantage is nothing to sneeze about. It is a sign that their party's base is more amped up than the Republican base, and/or their political elites are doing a better job of acquiring dollars. It seems to me that with an incumbent President who is still loved by the financial backers of the Republican Party, the Democrats will not have a financial edge next year; however, it also seems likely that the two parties will be at financial parity (which, I hasten to add, is good news for Democrats).

On the other hand, consider again the set of states in play and the Democratic margin for error. Four of these seven states are states that Bush won by 5% of the vote or more in the last two elections. Furthermore, six of these seven are currently held by incumbent Republicans. In a pro-incumbent, largely realigned electoral environment, that is a less-than-ideal electoral situation to find oneself, especially for a Democratic Party that, as we discussed earlier in the month, does not have the capacity to nationalize 2006. The GOP had a much better environment in 2004 when it had open Democratic seats in five Republican states.

In addition to this, consider the very small margin of error for Democrats. They will have to take SIX of these seven to assume control of the Senate (remember that Cheney is the tie-breaker). And, not to mention, I think it is quite unreasonable to talk about AZ being in play. That means the Democrats will have to go six for six -- and still hold off the GOP in both Minnesota and Maryland. It also seems likely that at least one or two or three of these six will turn out to be non-contests (at this point, it is too early to say which will be which, but it seems unlikely that the Democrats will have an opportunity in anything more than four to five states).

It is still early in the year, too early to make any initial predictions about seats. Candidates are still being recruited, electoral strategies are still being fleshed out, primary opposition is still indeterminate, financial contacts are still being made. At this point, we still have to talk in the aggregate -- and the aggregate is such that it looks now as though the Democrats will pick up a few seats, but not enough for control. The Democrats have certain advantages at the moment -- money, anti-Bush sentiment in the country -- but these seem to be insufficient for recapturing the Senate.

Schumer's comment -- "If the stars align right we could actually take back the Senate." -- sums the situation up perfectly. Recapturing the Senate is a little bit more than a technical possibility, but the Democrats will need some supernatural assistance to make it happen.

Posted by Jay Cost at 01:02 PM | Email Author | Permalink

The talk among many in the punditocracy of late has been that Bush is, in some way, "finished". What people mean by this is usually unclear, but the general gist is that Bush has lost the capacity to persuade Congress and the public, and that this ability is not coming back.

That is an interesting idea. Minimally, its value is that it touches upon the idea of informal presidential power. Bush still has all the same formal powers that the Constitution grants to him, but he has lost some kind of power that exists "between the lines". There is, however, a lack of theoretical clarity in this discussion -- for the key (often unaddressed) question is the following: has he lost these powers in a way that they cannot be reacquired?

On the one hand, Bush might simply be in a bit of a slump. Presidents find themselves in slumps all the time. The public is increasingly in disagreement with Bush, and Congress has responded to this disagreement by disagreeing in turn. But, if it is just a slump, Bush can turn it around. On the other hand, Bush might be "finished" in that his reputation is no longer such that he can lead the nation or the Congress the way he used to -- he has lost something he cannot reacquire. Presidents have experienced both types of power nadirs.

Perhaps recounting an anecdote will help amplify the question. Harvard's Richard Neustadt, one of the first to address the issue, tells the following story in his seminal Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents:

Early in 1958 a technician from the Bureau of the Budget testified before a subcommittee of the House on the provisions of a pending bill within his field of expertise. As he concluded, he remarked for emphasis what he recommended was essential to "the program of the President." Whereupon everybody laughed. The hilarity was general and leaped party lines; to a man, committee members found the reference very funny. This incident occurred only fifteen months after Eisenhower's smashing re-election victory. Yet it is perfectly indicative, so far as can be judged from the outside, of an impression pervading all corners of the Capitol (and most places downtown), as a result of what seemed to happen at the White House in the months between.

In other words, Eisenhower was not taken seriously. Why? He let develop a reputation of being out of control. Thus, members of Congress found it funny for an administration man to imply that the President wanted something specific, as if Ike had an opinion on the matter.

Neustadt goes on to assert that President Eisenhower was not viewed as being in control of the White House agenda because he allowed the public and the Capitol to develop that impression. He was not mindful of his reputation. And, as Neustadt argues, reputation is almost everything in the modern presidency. The presidency is so powerful because the President has the ability to persuade people in the Washington community to do what they would not otherwise do, and (closely related) has the ability to convince the American public to think in ways they would not otherwise think. He can persuade -- and persuasion is first and foremost about reputation.

So when we say that Bush is down, we really mean that Bush's reputation today is such that he is not really convincing many in either Congress or America. When we ask if Bush is finished, we are asking whether he can rehabilitate his reputation. So, is Bush finished? Ultimately, it depends upon Bush. As Neustadt argues, "A President can change his reputation. This is the essence of his opportunity."

I personally think that Bush's standing will improve over the next few months -- providing that he keeps moving in the direction that he has been in the last few weeks. Since roughly Thanksgiving (maybe a bit earlier), we have seen Bush actively working to counteract the negative aspects of his reputation. He has been working against the impression that developed this year that he is out-of-touch and stubbornly insistent on old policies, even at the expense of his congressional allies or the public good.

Bush and his advisors are thus following Neustadt. How does a president change his reputation? The scholar answers:

His general reputation will be shaped by signs of pattern in the things he says and does. These are the words and actions he has chosen, day by day. His choices are the means by which he does what he can do to build his reputation as he wants it. Decisions are his building blocks. He has no others in his hands.

The President has the power to make and remake his own destiny. Bush seems to be doing just that, and doing it correctly by focusing on the weak spots. His reputation, similarly, suffered by his own hand. He did not protect it -- and so his opponents were able to recharacterize him; indeed, he aided them in that regard. Why did Bush's reputation go from being steady in times of trouble to being stubborn and unyielding? George W. Bush let it happen.

So is Bush out? You will have to ask Dubya. There is no logic that the calendar dictates -- Bush will not necessarily be finished at a certain date (even Ike made a comeback in 1959). If Bush makes his choices carefully and prudently, he will reemerge. Above all, he must be mindful of his reputation, recognizing that the entire set of his informal powers -- that which separates the modern president from a mere clerk who executes the laws enacted by Congress -- are dependent upon it.

The bottom line is not just that Bush should not be underestimated because he can always come back. It is also that the modern presidency should not be underestimated -- it almost always offers an opportunity to the man who occupies it to come back.

Posted by Jay Cost at 07:11 AM | Email Author | Permalink

In my last entry, I made a preliminary statement about what science is and why ID does not qualify. This is not the end of the story. There is a third party who is just as unscientific as the ID theorist. This person uses scientific evolution as the cornerstone of a naturalistic philosophy known as scientism or evolutionism. This is the position that what science discovers is all there is. The "evolutionist" argues, in varying degrees of sophistication or explicitness, that evolutionary theory tells us something "deep" about life's origins.

Stephen Jay Gould is a good example. In 1994, Gould wrote,

History includes too much chaos...Humans arose...as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway...

There is a subtle transition that Gould undertakes in the quotation above - from the science of randomness to the metaphysics of indetermination. Chaos is a concept that implies, as Gould rightly notes, that certain phenomena, like the weather, are unpredictable at a certain level of precision because of small initial variations. It is related to "random" -- there is "random error" in your scientific theory when there are observations your theory fails to predict.

What Gould concludes however, goes beyond chaos. Chaos is not "replay the same event and you can yield a different result." It is, "replay a seemingly same event and you can yield a different result." The former position is indeterminism, which is what Gould implies at the end of the passage, and more explicitly in the following:

The pedestal (on which human hubris rests) is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush (H. sapiens) would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.

The force of this moral argument is predicated upon the misuse of the word "replant." To say that something is chaotic or random is not to say that the same cause will yield a different result, but that we cannot recreate the causes with a sufficient level of precision to recreate the result. This is far different than saying that a perfect repetition of the experiment would yield a different result - which is what Gould must imply if he wishes to assert that we are not meant to be or that progress is an illusion. In other words, Gould is advocating a position of indeterminism and not chaos or randomness. Indeterminism is objective -- things literally could have gone in any direction. Chaos and randomness are subjective -- we cannot get things to go in a certain direction.

Indeterminism on this scale cannot be arrived at scientifically. Hypothesize, with Gould, that resetting the evolutionary clock will yield an entirely different result. That is an intuitively plausible hypothesis - especially since we know from quantum physics that indeterminism exists on the sub-atomic level. How might this hypothesis be tested? One could do what physicists do to study electron indetermination when they run a series of electrons through a test, holding all variables constant, to see how they vary in their motion. A possible test of Gould's indetermination hypothesis would be to repeat evolution on Earth, holding perfectly constant all variables, and see how (if at all) life develops differently.

That is an experiment that we cannot perform. Accordingly, we have no way to test the validity of Gould's hypothesis. That Gould held it nevertheless indicates that the grounds of his acceptance were non-scientific - and therefore he was, in the course of deploying this argument, acting as a philosopher and not a scientist.

Gould's transition from science to metaphysics is quite subtle and it is easy to appreciate how this would inspire strong feelings in those who disagree with his metaphysical conclusions. He uses scientific packaging to make an argument about the meaning of human life. I appreciate the desire to make science “matter” to humanity. However, science cannot be made to "matter" in the way that Gould wishes. This is because science does not have the capacity to answer the big questions. Science is the process of making descriptive and causal inferences - identifying the existence of that which is not initially known or identifying the cause of that which initially seems uncaused. Scientists do this by manipulating variables that can be brought under our control. If we cannot possibly control a variable, and control of that variable is necessary for testing a theory, we cannot test that theory. Thus, the most important moral and ontological questions - what should I do, why are we here, where are we going, is there a God, is there life after death - cannot be answered scientifically. We cannot control the variables to test our answers.

In conclusion, it is important to make the following clear. One can disagree with evolutionary biology's argument about the origin of life being "random," but one cannot claim that this randomness in any way contradicts Judeo-Christianity's religious narrative about life's origins. Random does not mean uncaused. It means unpredictable. When evolutionary biologists say that life is random, they mean the cause of life has never been known to cause life any other time. In other words, life is unique and it is not the product of a general, pro-life “law” in the universe, as gravity is. An apple falling from a tree is not random, but life developing from non-life is. This does not mean that the former is caused and the latter not caused. All it means it that the cause of the former is a general law that causes apples to fall all the time, while the cause of the latter is not general and therefore life's development is unique. That is all random means to the scientist.

Posted by Jay Cost at 06:35 PM | Email Author | Permalink

James Q. Wilson had a very good column yesterday in The Wall Street Journal about Intelligent Design. Wilson is one of the most influential and important political scientists of the 20th century. From studies of political parties, to the bureaucracy, to urban politics, to the sociology of crime, Wilson is a giant among those who try to understand politics scientifically.

This is why his critique of Intelligent Design was so devastating - the man knows what science is about. He argues that ID is not science because it is not subject to empirical testing. Writes Wilson,

God may well exist, and He may well help people overcome problems or even (if we believe certain athletes) determine the outcome of a game. But that theory cannot be tested. There is no way anyone has found that we can prove empirically that God exists or that His action has affected some human life. If such a test could be found, the scientist who executed it would overnight become a hero.

This is a point that cannot be understated. Intelligent design may be a correct theory, just as Hegelianism may be a correct theory. However, neither is scientific because neither is testable (i.e. falsifiable). Wilson here advocates the position that falsification is what separates science from non-science.

Unfortunately, Wilson actually gives ID too much credit. If you look closely at his essay, you will see that he later implies that ID is falsifiable and that it has been falsified:

But if an intelligent designer had created the human eye, He (or She) made some big mistakes. The eye has a blind spot in the middle that reduces the eye's capacity to see. Other creatures, more dependent on sharp eyesight than are we, do not have this blind spot. Some people are colorblind and others must start wearing glasses when they are small children. All of these variations and shortcomings are consistent with evolution. None is consistent with the view that the eye was designed by an intelligent being.

The key word in this passage is “consistent”. Wilson implies that there is empirical evidence that is inconsistent with ID. However, to say that there is inconsistent evidence is to presume that ID makes predictions about the world that can be compared with the data to determine consistency. In other words, it is to say that ID is falsifiable and therefore scientific. Accordingly, Wilson here is arguing that ID is scientific and false.

I think that Wilson's initial claim of unfalsifiability is much stronger. I do not think it is possible to find empirical evidence that is inconsistent with ID. The reason for this gets to the heart of ID itself. In broad outline, the theory asserts that life is too complicated to have occurred “randomly” (a word that is often abused by people in this debate, but that is another story) and that therefore it unfolded according to a designer's intention.

The only way this could be falsifiable, and therefore scientific, is if it makes specific claims about the designers' intentions. These claims, further, must not be dependent upon the evidence used to test those claims. In other words, to be scientific, it must first make predictions about what specifically we should see in the world and then see whether those predictions come true. But it does not. ID argues that we know the design intention only from the observed design product. It makes no attempts to theorize what the will of the designer is beyond, “What you see is what you get!” Thus, there is no imaginable state of the world that goes against ID.

Wilson, however, implies that ID has an independent idea about what is in “God's” design plan - the principle of efficiency. Consider again Wilson's discussion of the human eye and why it is evidence that is inconsistent with ID. The reason that he sees it as being inconsistent with ID is that he is presuming that ID holds that the designer values efficiency and that we can expect the design product to be efficient. But ID does not claim that efficiency is part of the designer's scheme. ID theorists are quasi-Protestant in their outlook, arguing that the designer's will is inscrutable, except when inferred from the design product.

Thus, an ID theorist is “immune” from the point that Wilson makes. In actuality, ID “predicts” that creation is efficient when the design schematic says it is efficient and it is inefficient when the design schematic says it is inefficient, but it says nothing about the design schematic independent of what it observes in the world. Bill Preston has 20/20 vision: all part of God's plan! Ted Logan is blind as a bat: all part of God's plan! It is a theory that cannot possibly be shown to be wrong by empirical evidence.

So ID is not science. Does this mean that science, in any way, implies the non-existence of God? No. Does this mean that belief in God is irrational and that we should all be "free thinkers"? No. Does this mean that it is impossible to arbitrate between various theories of the existence/non-existence of God and come to some reasonable conclusions? No. Does this mean that we cannot say that humanity is meant to exist? No.

In other words, rationality outside of science is quite possible, and has been around for a long time. How do you think humanity invented science in the first place? We surely did not do it scientifically. Science as we know it is the product of millennia of philosophical debate -- from Aristotle to Lakatos. Science depends upon philosophy, which itself is unfalsifiable and unscientific.

The debate about ID has been blown way out of proportion because of the social status that science has acquired in 21st century Western society. For better or for worse, deserved or undeserved, science is a very powerful concept. It is quite coercive. If somebody tells you that you are not being scientific, you will probably take that as a criticism. You should not necessarily, though. The fact of the matter is that, despite the message of our culture about the authority of science, it is not the end-all-be-all of rational thought. Science is a very limited form of inquiry that produces results that are, from a certain perspective and with certain assumptions, reliable. But they also do not tell us all of the things we need, or want, to know about life. Man cannot live by science alone.

Neither, for that matter, can science. Do you have a snarky friend who thinks that science is the only legitimate type of inquiry? Tell him to prove that one scientifically!

Posted by Jay Cost at 07:12 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Jeanne Pirro, the ersatz challenger of Hillary Clinton, is now officially the erstwhile challenger of Hillary Clinton. She will not challenge the junior senator from New York next year. She has decided to run for Attorney General of New York instead.

The Pirro “campaign” was not much of anything at all. It was rocky from the start - she actually lost a page of her announcement speech and stood silent for half a minute. After George Pataki endorsed her, many Republicans in the state must have been scratching their heads, doing their best impersonation of Michael Bluth…“Her?”

So Pirro is gone and nobody who stands a chance is in sight. I have been skeptical of Hillary's presidential potential for a very long time. She must, however, be credited as an adept freshman senator who has cleared the way for an easy victory next year. The fact that Hillary will face a second- or even third-rate challenger is no coincidence, and a testament not just to her political acumen but also to the uphill battle Republicans face in New York.

In other words, it is important not to make too much of this. Clinton is, after all, a good ideological fit with the Empire State. Many politicians could do what she has done. It is not so much that she has demonstrated that she is an above-average politician and more that she has demonstrated she is not a below-average politician. I still see very little evidence on Hillary's part of any political excellence that does not boil down to the ring on her left hand's ring finger. What, for instance, is the difference between Hillary's presumptive victory next year and Barbara Boxer's landslide win last year? A Democrat is doing very well in a Democratic state. Surprised?

Analysts who say that Hillary's reelection will be a boost to her 2008 ambitions are incorrect. Easy victory next year is a necessary condition for her 2008 bid - but it is nowhere near a sufficient condition. It is like having your supporters follow you around New Hampshire with campaign signs. It does not help you get any votes, but if you did not have those people around you, it would cause you to lose votes, as people would wonder, “Well, if he is such a good candidate, where are his supporters?” Hillary's chances would be severely diminished by anything less than 55% next year - but anything over 55% will not enhance them very much.

Posted by Jay Cost at 05:56 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Today, most in America who follow these sorts of things would claim that Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. By that, people tend to mean that she is somehow "in the lead" and therefore, if things remain linear, will be the Democratic nominee.

The trouble with this logic is that the Democratic nomination process is hardly ever linear. Those who are in the lead early are almost never in the lead late. Usually, the nominee is some fella whom nobody saw coming. Consider the years where there is no incumbent, either president or vice-president, seeking the nomination: 1972, 1976, 1984, 1992, 2004.

The first year that the Democrats relied upon the primary system in large measure was 1972. That year, George McGovern pulled off a spectacular comeback victory against Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. Despite the fact that Nixon was much more afraid of these candidates, they both did poorly among Democratic primary voters.

Jimmy Carter in 1976 was an even bigger darkhorse going into the primary system. Carter was really the first candidate to take advantage of the new, primary-dominated landscape, and thus beat "insider" candidates like Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, Henry Jackson and Morris Udall.

In 1992, of course, Bill Clinton was a major underdog -- first behind Mario Cuomo and then (when Cuomo decided not to run) Paul Tsongas. For the first few months of the campaign season, people knew Clinton -- if they knew him at all -- as the scandal-ridden candidate. Somehow, Clinton managed to turn a second place finish in New Hampshire into a victory. The rest is history.

2004 is the most telling example of Democratic non-linearity (they were downright parabolic!). Early on, John Kerry was considered the frontrunner. Then, in the fall of 2003, rank and file Democrats rallied behind Howard Dean. John Kerry's candidacy was declared DOA. But, the same Democrats -- true to form -- abandoned their new frontrunner and rallied behind the old one!

The only exception in this story is 1984. That year, Walter Mondale, who was considered all along the front-runner, did indeed obtain the nomination over Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson. Usually, though, Democratic primary voters seem to take a special pleasure in defying the experts and nominating a darkhorse. One might even go so far as to say that being in first in the lead up to the Democratic primary is a severe handicap.

Thus, if you want to correctly predict who will win the Democratic primary -- pick an unlikely candidate and then keep it to yourself, lest your Democratic primary voting friends catch wind that the new conventional wisdom is for that person!

On the other side, the Republicans are as certain as the tides in their nominations of front-runners. Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush -- all front-runners. Whoever gets in the lead in the GOP nominating process will have history on his side. Maybe that is why Mitt Romney and Bill Frist are retiring from their current jobs so early.

Posted by Jay Cost at 01:01 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Jay Cost has graciously accepted an invite to guest blog in this space for the next week.  For those who aren't aware, Jay is a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago and one of the most astute young political analysts around. He ran the widely acclaimed Horserace Blog in 2004 and recently authored a great three-part series for us looking ahead at Election 2006 (Part One, Two, Three). We're honored to have him.

I'll be lurking in the shadows this week and may pop in from time to time, but for the most part, it's going to be Jay's show. So without further ado...

Posted by Tom Bevan at 08:01 AM | Email Author | Permalink

First off, let me say how privileged and honored I am to have been invited to guest blog here at RealClearPolitics for the final week of 2005. Few political websites rise to the level of indispensable as this site does, so for John and Tom to think of me for this is very flattering indeed.

Since it is the end of the year, it seems fitting to try to assess how various political agents fared in 2005. The most obvious place to start is George W. Bush, who - let us face it - had an awful year. It was certainly the worst of his presidency. The pressing question: why was this the case?

I think that this year was as bad as it was for Bush because he fundamentally misread his electoral mandate. The Bush Administration was convinced last January that, in the words of Washington Times columnist Helle Dale, “The American people endorsed Mr. Bush's foreign policy in the 2004 election and gave him a mandate for leadership.” The administration also claimed for itself a mandate on domestic policy. Said Bush last January (as quoted in The Washington Post at the time), "I campaigned on this issue of Social Security, and the need to strengthen it and reform it…This is part of fulfilling a campaign pledge."

The Democrats, on the other hand, had a different view of the matter. Even after the stinging defeat they suffered last year, they were emboldened to block each and every one of Bush's major initiatives. More than this, they felt they could continue to debate the major questions from the 2004 campaign, most notably the Iraq question. They bet that Bush's election did not represent a decision on the part of the public that they were willing to bite on his “ownership society”, or any other Bush proposal, foreign or domestic.

The Democrats were correct. And we all saw what happened as a consequence. What was Bush's mistake? Simply stated, he misread his mandate.

It is a common mistake that presidents make. Even the great presidents misread their mandates. FDR, for instance, incorrectly guessed that the public had demonstrated in 1936 that they were willing to support his plan to redesign our governmental institutions for the sake of his domestic programs. He, of course, was wrong. This was the first time this type of mistake has been made in the modern presidency - and it is one that has been repeated time and time again.

Presidents misread their mandates all the time. They assume that their electoral victory implies some kind of empowerment to do anything more than take the oath of office and see where things go from there. But, in reality, it implies little more than this. The reason for this is that, as political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once famously said, the American people collectively have a vocabulary of just two words: "yes" and "no." And the question that was put before that public in 2004 was “Do you want George W. Bush to continue to serve as President?” The answer was a monosyllabic response: yes. It was not, “Yes because we like his Iraq policy” or, “Yes because we want to have an ownership society.” The American public, taken as a whole, lacks the ability to make such a sophisticated statement.

In the case of Bush, his electoral constituency did not have a uniform set of reasons for voting for him. Some voted for him to support the troops, some liked his domestic agenda, some liked his personality, some loathed John Kerry, and some even pulled the wrong lever. And there was no single bloc of Bush voters that voted for him because of any given issue that was large enough to induce the Democrats to honor Bush's demands for reform on that issue. Take Social Security. How could the Democrats so boldly thwart Bush's Social Security reform agenda, despite the fact that he was elected with 51% of the vote? The reason is that only a small portion of that 51% (a) knew that Bush wanted to reform Social Security, (b) knew with any detail what Bush's idea to reform Social Security was, and (c) agreed with Bush that his idea of Social Security reform was a good one.

Simply stated, all presidents who enjoy success with Congress do not enjoy that success by virtue of their electoral mandate. They enjoy it rather because of their proper reading of Congress and its relationship with the public. They know what to ask for, when to ask for it, whom in Congress to ask, how to ask, etc. Successful presidents do not rely on any mandate to get their proposals through our legislature. For proof of this, just look at how successful Bush was in his first term - two wars fought, major domestic reforms of almost all major domestic issues, and 49% of the vote.

Most presidents enjoy no substantive policy mandate moving forward, i.e. no consensus among the public about what the president should do. This means that they have to claw and scratch for every inch they can get from Congress without recourse to reminding that body what the public “said” several months before. However, they usually enjoy the luxury of having previous issues that they have settled remaining settled. Most presidents, when they take that second oath of office, do not need to worry about the issues in between oaths being revisited. Bush was not so lucky. His electoral victory in November, 2004 did not even signal that the public was necessarily ready to accept what Bush had already done.

This was the White House's key misreading of their mandate. They came to believe that the Iraq policy was largely settled with the November election. But, again, the only thing that was settled in November was Bush over Kerry, not Bush's Iraq policy over Kerry's Iraq “policy”. Perhaps the fact that we need quotation marks to discuss Kerry's pseudo-position on Iraq is why the public never coalesced around an opinion on the matter -- there was no clearly identifiable policy choice last year. The choice was rather between Bush's status quo and Kerry's hollow rhetoric. Perhaps it is because the Bush Administration was able to characterize the foreign policy questions of last year as boiling down to capacity, i.e. Kerry's total lack thereof, that resulted in Iraq policy remaining unsettled. For whatever reason, the public had not solidified behind a pro-Bush opinion on Iraq after the November election.

If you examine the tactical maneuvers of the Bush Administration in the first few months of this year, you can see very clearly that Bush and his advisors were of the opinion that the Iraq issue was essentially settled; the public was concerned about the casualties, but, so the White House thought, largely felt that Bush was on the right track. They took Bush's reelection as proof of this. And thus, the Administration decided to move forward with Bush's slate of domestic reforms.

Democrats, however, correctly saw that Bush did not have a solid majority of the public on his side either on Iraq or on his domestic reform agenda - and therefore they could thwart his domestic reform proposals while continuing to question the wisdom of the Iraq policy. As the White House did not respond to these criticisms for months, they began to take hold within the mind of the public. Thanks to the fact that for months Bush was talking about Social Security and the Democrats were talking about Iraq, public opinion slowly began to move from Bush: the lack of a mandate for Bush's Iraq policy, indeed the lack of any majority opinion in the public on the Iraq question, transformed into a majority opposing Bush.

This was Bush's major tactical error in 2005. Unfortunately for Bush, this error was compounded by events that negatively affected public perception of the Administration - Katrina, Libby-Rove, Miers. Some of these were within his control. Some of these were not. But they added up to Bush being seriously off his game by October.

As it stands, and to the White House's credit, the Administration seems to have bounced back. They seem to have recognized that Iraq is not a closed issue, that they must continue to address it if they wish to have the kind of public support they need to force Congress to act. Unfortunately for Bush, he only began to return to form at the end of the legislative session, thus ensuring that his influence over legislative output this year was minimal. Perhaps we can see this most clearly in the problems that the Administration has faced in getting the Patriot Act renewed.

This year was most definitely a wasted year for the Bush Administration. They made a major tactical error early in the year, and did not realize their mistake until the summer had come and gone.

This just goes to show that presidents should not be too hasty in reading a mandate into electoral returns. The American public is a hodgepodge of interests, values and preferences - and it is only rarely that this hodgepodge manages to coalesce behind an issue and a president at the same time. Smart presidents recognize that the mandate a president enjoys is the mandate to assume all of the formal and informal powers that a president enjoys - so that he can finagle what he can from Washington. That is the mandate of an incumbent president - a mandate to continue to be president. It is rarely, if ever, a mandate to do a certain thing. This is why, in the age of the modern presidency, the campaign never actually ends - the president must continuously coax, coerce and convince both Congress and the public to see things his way. He can never assume that any issue, large or small, is settled. The Administration forgot that in 2005. This is why it was such a rough year for the 43rd President.

Posted by Jay Cost at 07:35 AM | Email Author | Permalink