Hilary Rosen Dustup & New National Poll

Manufacturing Controversy

It is clear from the events of the last few days that America has finally solved all its problems.  At least that's what I'm tempted to think given all the conversation by the chattering class about what Hilary Rosen said a couple nights ago.  Mitt Romney has stated on several occasions that his wife Ann helps him to understand the issues that are important to women.  Hilary Rosen attempted to cast doubt on Ms. Romney's ability to understand the economic concerns of working class women by saying that Ann Romney 'never worked a day in her life.'  It was clearly a poor choice of words by Ms. Rosen that have been spun by the press and the GOP to make it sound as though Rosen was denigrating Ms. Romney for being a stay at home mom.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  Ms. Rosen was just sticking to the Democratic Party line that will be a large part of the fall general election campaign argument that the Romney's are part of the 1% and as such cannot identify with the struggles of the 99%.  It wasn't an attack on stay at home moms or Ann Romney.  But since all of our problems have been solved, the political elites have to manufacture controversy somewhere or we just might tune them out.  Perhaps we should do that anyway?

New Fox News Poll

A new national poll was released on Friday showing Mitt Romney with a 2 percentage point lead over President Barack Obama.  As a result I've updated the chart posted earlier this week.

Away They Go!

Now that Rick Santorum has officially suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination the media is sure to turn its attention to the 'horse race' between President Obama and Mitt Romney.  While I certainly question the usefulness of polls conducted 7 or more months prior to election day, I also recognize that previous political science research indicates most voters have already decided for whom they will vote in November.  For voters who have made their decision, the issues no longer matter on a daily basis, thus why should the media cover them if their reporting is for the bulk of their audience?  In some ways it would be similar to a caller of a horse race announcing the past performances of the entrants in a race after the bettors have made their wagers and the horses have left the starting gate.  If the media are just providing an update on the status of the race to voters who have already made up their minds, the horse race coverage may make sense as Andrew Gelman argues.    To be sure, though, there are a small percentage of voters who will make up their minds later in the campaign, as the classic book The American Voter reported in 1960 (and has been confirmed by American National Election Studies every two years since).

All that is to say that the polls the media are reporting today won't tell us much about who will ultimately be elected president in November.  Polling conducted after Labor Day will give us a much better picture.  The polls do, however, provide us with a pretty good idea of the floor and ceiling of support for each of the party nominees.  Since 1932, the largest margin of victory for a presidential candidate was 24.3% (FDR's landslide reelection in 1936), while two others enjoyed victories by at least 20 percentage points (LBJ in 1964-22.6%; Richard Nixon in 1972-23.2%).  Most presidential elections are relatively close with margins of 5-8 percentage points.  This year is likely to be no different.  Having said that, today will be the first of an ongoing series of posts that will be updated whenever a new national poll by a reputable polling organization is released.  I will include results from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Pew, USA, and CNN (and each of their respective partners).

So, in the classic style of my favorite race caller the great Trevor Denman, 'away they go.'

Free Speech? Not in Little Havana!

By now everybody has heard about Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen's remarks about how much he loves Fidel Castro.  You've probably also heard that he has now been suspended for five games as a result, even after apologizing and saying his comments were taken out of context.  You probably haven't heard many conservatives or liberals rushing to Guillen's defense, though I'm sure you've heard many from both sides criticizing Mr. Guillen.  Reactions from fans outside the Marlins new ballpark in Little Havana included the following:

"We don't need a guy like that teaching our children that kind of behavior. I won't allow my children, grandchildren, to watch the games if he stays."

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/10/2739843/miami-marlins-ozzie-guillen-in.html#storylink=cpy

“I don’t think we should forget the words he has already said,” Sandigo said. “This country is a country of convictions and values. We’re here for a cause.”

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't one of those values freedom of speech?  Even when we don't like what the person has to say.  It seems strange to me that we can be a country that insists spending money is a protected form of speech, that corporations are people, too, but the manager of a baseball team gets crucified for expressing what was on his mind.  I won't pretend to know what many Cuban-Americans have experienced at the hands of the Castro regime, either in person or through family members.  I don't deny that Castro is an evil man who has caused pain for millions of people.  I'm also pretty sure that people who disagreed with his regime were silenced.    Perhaps that makes Little Havana not all that much different from the real Havana.

Free speech?  Not in Little Havana.

The Two Wars

It seems like America has always been at war.  For many kids growing up today all they have ever known is war.  The mass media, left and right, and our political chattering class has been talking a lot about war in recent weeks.  In fact, each side seems to have their own favorite war.  Of course, I'm talking about the twin wars on religion and women.  The only problem is that the two wars are a fiction of the imagination concocted wholly by the political elites.

First, the war on religion.  Republicans like to claim that President Obama and his administration have embarked on a 'war on religion.'  As evidence, they point to the recent requirement by the Department of Health & Human Services requiring ALL employers to provide birth control if they provide insurance to their employees.  Even though the directive specifically exempts religious institutions engaged in religious activities Republicans see a war on religion.  They are, of course, wrong.  It is not a 'war' in any sense of the word, merely a requirement that all organizations, whether religious or not, who are engaged in non-religious activities (i.e., commerce) abide by the same rules.  This requirement upholds the constitutional separation between church and state prohibiting Congress from either establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  There is nothing inherently religious about participating in the business world that should give religious entities an exception, thus allowing them a competitive advantage over secular entities.  The requirement neither inhibits nor promotes the advancement of religion, which squares with what the Supreme Court ruled in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971).

Second, the so-called 'war on women' concocted by those on the political left is another example of political fiction.  Pundits and politicians from Candy Crowley to Nancy Pelosi have claimed that the GOP is engaged in a war on women by opposing the above regulation.  Then they proceed to invoke polls that show the war on women is harming Republicans.  Yet another figment of the political elites imagination.  It is a war that doesn't exist, just like the war on religion is a figment concocted somewhere in the bowels of the GOP.  Sure, some of the policies advocated by Republicans in recent months might shore up Democratic support among women but that really is nothing new.  It is simply a solidification of the gender gap that has been present for a very long time.  President Obama won the female vote by 13 percentage points over John McCain in 2008, up 10 points from John Kerry's result in 2004, but similar to Al Gore's margin over George W. Bush in 2000.

In the end, there is neither a war on religion nor a war on women going on.  No, the true war being waged by the politicians and the talking heads is on the intelligence of the American People.  We deserve better but we won't get it until we demand accountability from the press, from the politicians, and, ultimately, begin to think for ourselves and question the garbage being fed to us by the elites.

Intellectual Honesty? Dead!

When did intellectually honest conversation die?  Was it ever alive?  Or has American politics always been steeped in spin, talking points, and demagoguery?  I don't have a really good answer to this question but I can say that the current state of the political conversation in America is pitiful.  I've long thought the major media outlets (Fox, ABC, CBS, and the rest) were intellectually lazy.  No wonder average Americans have tuned out the political class and tuned in to Big Brother, Survivor, The Bachelor, and the Hunger Games.

Case in point, while watching Morning Joe this morning, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) was asked about Mitt Romney's 'woman problem.'  She launched into a dialogue about how women are just like everybody else, concerned with rising gas prices and the debt, as if either of those were President Obama's fault.  Then she criticized the president over the price of gas and complained about how he has reduced drilling on federal lands and blocked the XL pipeline, neither of which has any relation to oil prices!  Oil is a market traded commodity whose price fluctuates based on world demand, not US demand.  Additionally, overall production in the U.S. is 8% higher than when President Obama took office...and it has had NO effect on oil prices.  If the XL project were to go forward it would be years before any oil began flowing from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  Even then, the refineries would turn it into diesel and export it to Europe, which would not reduce prices in the U.S. at all.  All the drilling in the world isn't going to lower the price of oil as long as a cartel controls much of the supply and speculators can bid up the price to reap windfall profits.  President Bush wasn't responsible for high gas prices in 2008 and Barack Obama isn't responsible for them in 2012.

And her point about the debt?  Ridiculous.  The much touted Paul Ryan budget does nothing to eliminate the $16 trillion in debt we have.  Sure, it balances the budget in 28 years, assuming everything works perfectly for the next 28 years, which it won't.  But it also more than doubles the debt accrued during that span.  Of course, Republicans will keep insisting on more tax cuts for their wealthy benefactors, which will only exacerbate the debt problem further.  The president hasn't proposed a serious budget that will lead to fiscal sanity either.  We should all be honest about that.  But we won't be.

Intellectual honesty?  Nah, it's dead and buried in America.

Paul Ryan vs. Barack Obama

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), Chair of the House Budget Committee, released his budget proposal for FY 2013 during the past week.  The plan immediately drew criticism from Democrats for targeting programs such as military pensions, food stamps, and Medicare with major cuts of as much as 33% while proposing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, particularly those who derive all or most of their income from capital gains.  Under the Ryan plan, individuals like Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney would have virtually no tax burden while the poor and middle class would experience higher tax bills.  Couple that with more restrictive programs for the poor and vulnerable and it amounts to what Newt Gingrich ominously referred to a year ago as 'right-wing social engineering.'

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's FY 2013 budget request has been all but ignored by the Republican House, largely because it contains higher taxes on individuals making over $250,000 a year...the people who can actually afford to pay a bit more.

Neither the president's budget nor Paul Ryan's budget does much to address the nation's most serious problems, including long term structural deficits totaling in the tens of trillions of dollars.  The Ryan budget proposes to balance the budget by 2040, a whopping 28 years, by which time the debt of the United States will have more than doubled.  Add to that the fact that Congress is incredibly poor at actually sticking to a budget and that future Congresses rarely abide by what their predecessors have done and the likelihood of the Ryan plan actually accomplishing its goal is slim, if not nil.

But what the Ryan proposal does is give the Republicans a line of argument for the fall campaign that at least they have put together a proposal.  Whether it had any chance of adoption is irrelevant.  Of course, that's another problem Congress has...it has no incentive to work with members of the opposite party to work out real solutions to real problems.  So the rhetoric will go on and on and on.

Republicans will argue that President Obama 'added' more to the federal debt in 4 years than President Bush did in 8 years.  That depends on how one calculates debt and deficit.  I argue that in order to properly calculate a president's effect on the debt and deficit one must examine the revenue increases/decreases, expenditure increases/decreases, and deficit projections contained in their (and their immediate predecessor's) budget proposal.  Let's see where that leads us.

In FY 2001, the final budget under President Clinton and the Republican Congress, called for total federal spending of less than $1.9 trillion and achieved a surplus of $128 billion.  Over the next ten years, a surplus of more than $5 trillion was projected.  If realized, the United States would have been essentially debt free by FY 2011.  However, the economy slipped into recession and Congress passed a 'stimulus' package in the form of tax rebates during 2001.  Coupled with increased spending in the first Bush budget (5% increase from $1.9 trillion to $2 trillion) and a reduction in revenues of $138 billion (due to tax cuts and weaker economic activity) produced a deficit of $157 billion for FY 2002.  Spending would continue to grow at a faster clip under President Bush than it did under President Clinton for the remainder of his two terms.  The final Bush budget was $3.1 trillion for FY 2009, a full 55% higher than his first budget proposal in FY 2002.  It contained a deficit of $1.4 trillion, largely due to a massive decline in revenues that reduced total receipts back to near the level of FY 2000, approximately $2.1 trillion.  That's a net increase in the deficit of more than $3.5 trillion since FY 2001.  Add the lost surplus of $5 trillion and it amounts to an actual increase of some $8.5 trillion in debt...more than $1 trillion per year!

That, of course, is when the figures most beneficial to President Bush are used...that is total revenues less outlays PLUS any surplus generated by the Social Security and Medicare programs.  These programs ran a surplus of $1.34 trillion during the Bush years.  This means the actual Bush effect on the debt was closer to $7 trillion since the off-budget surplus was surely a part of the projected $5 trillion surplus from FY 2001-2010.  Review the actual budget figures here.

What about the Obama years?  What portion of the record budget deficits should rightly be attributed to his administration?  First, we need to know what the OMB projections were for FY 2009-2016 were when he took office.  Fortunately, we have such projections!  If none of President Obama's policies had been adopted OMB projected total deficits around $8 trillion.  That's right, with NO new spending the deficits would STILL have been averaging $1 trillion per year, largely due to the policies put in place during the Bush years (multiple unpaid for tax cuts, prescription drug benefits for Medicare, and the ongoing costs of two wars) plus the aging of the American population.

So what has been the effect of President Obama's policies on the debt and deficit?  To be charitable, we'll include all of the $800 billion stimulus package passed in 2009 even though it was part of FY 2009.  We'll also subtract that from Bush's deficit total leaving him with a legacy of $6.3 trillion over 8 years.  According to OMB figures the deficit for FY 2010 was $1.3 trillion, FY 2011 $1.64 trillion, FY 2012 $1.1 trillion (estimate), FY 2013 $767 billion (estimate), FY 2014 $644 billion (estimate), FY 2015 $604 billion (estimate), and FY 2016 $648 billion (estimate).  Assuming President Obama is reelected (not a certainty), the debt is estimated to have increased by $7.5 trillion by 2016.  This estimate includes allowing ALL the Bush and Obama tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012.  If any of them are reauthorized, which they almost certainly will be, the cumulative deficits over the next four fiscal years will rise another $1.4 trillion.

What do the numbers actually show?  Primarily that 'massive spending increase' under President Obama that conservatives keep screaming about never happened.  Also, that the massive debt increases due to President Obama's policies also are a figment of their imagination.  To be sure, the debt is a problem as are structural deficits.  But that's the kicker...the deficits are structural, not endogenous to a single president except where that president advocates and agrees to policies that directly add to or subtract from the deficit/debt.  The only true increase in federal spending under President Obama in the first four years has been the stimulus package in 2009, which stabilized the economy and provided an opportunity for it to begin growing once again.  The primary culprit has not been increased spending but rather decreased revenues.  Revenue in 2000 was just over $2 trillion.  By the end of 2011 it had only reached $2.17 trillion in spite of inflation, an increase over 10 years of less than 10%.  From 1980 to 1990 revenue doubled from $500 billion to $1 trillion, from 1990 to 2000 it doubled again from $1 trillion to $2 trillion (and we had 4 consecutive budget surpluses).  Had revenues simply continued on that pace the country would be debt free.  Instead, because of terrible choices over the past decade, America is left with unsustainable deficits and debt.  We shouldn't pin the blame on President Bush or President Obama because doing so is just partisan politics.  Rather, we need to pin the blame on those who ought to know better, our elected representatives in Congress.  Ultimately, we are responsible since we keep sending the same clowns back to Washington even though they have proven themselves incapable of governing responsibly.  Shame on us.

The Affordable Care Act and the SCOTUS

Let me start with a caveat: I'm not an expert on the Supreme Court, though I have taught Constitutional Law and Judicial Process courses for undergraduates.  Having said that, I think I know enough about the Court and its behavior to make two relatively non-controversial statements.  

• Oral arguments before the Court rarely, if ever, determine the outcome of a case and;
• Anyone who thinks they 'know' how the Supreme Court will decide this case is guessing.

The Supreme Court has many options available to it in deciding the outcome of the lawsuit by the 26 states hoping to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (hereafter, ACA), derisively referred to by Republicans as Obamacare.  The March 27th arguments were devoted to two primary questions:

• Does Congress have the right to mandate the purchase of a product and;
• Is the penalty for failure to comply properly considered a 'tax'?

On the first question, the arguments were all over the map and I think the Solicitor General did a horrible job of articulating and defending the government's position.  That does not mean the government's argument is weak, however.  The justices seemed open to the argument that there might be situations under which the government could compel the purchase of products on the market, though they wanted to know what kind of limitation exists on Congressional power to do so.  The Solicitor General utterly failed to provide an answer to this question while stammering about how the mandate isn't about creating economic activity or spurring demand.  This may or may not hurt the government's case as the justices are certainly smart enough to figure out on their own what kind of limiting principle might exist, although it was bizarre when a couple of the conservative justices started comparing an individual's lack of purchase of health insurance to the choice not to consume broccoli.  There are fundamental differences between the two and the Solicitor General did a poor job of explaining them.  

The key, I think, is whether or not the justices are convinced that the health insurance market and the health care market are either one and the same or so intricately intertwined as to be virtually inseparable. If  a legitimate separation can be made then the mandate must fall.  If it is impossible to separate the two, then the mandate will stand.  The question then becomes one of 'why do people purchase (or not purchase) health insurance'?  If the answer is to protect themselves from catastrophic ruin in the event of unforeseen illness, the mandate must fall.  The government has no power to force individuals to protect their financial futures.  But, if the answer is that people purchase health insurance in order to receive (and pay for) health care treatment, the mandate has a good chance to survive.  That's because the primary method of payment for health services in the United States is health insurance.  The health care market is unlike any other market in the United States because even individuals who do not purchase health insurance are entitled to be treated in emergency rooms.  If they don't pay for the treatment, the rest of us do through higher premiums, higher deductibles, and higher fees for service.  The same is not true about the grocery market. Hungry people cannot walk into a grocery store and demand free broccoli.  Plus, my refusal to purchase broccoli doesn't make the price of broccoli higher for you.  If anything, it makes the price lower because of a lack of demand.  

At this stage I think there are four certain votes to uphold the mandate.  Those will come from Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  There are also two almost certain votes to invalidate the mandate.  Those will come from Justices Thomas and Alito.  I think Justice Scalia will vote to strike it down but he could vote to uphold the mandate if he concludes that it was both necessary and proper for Congress to accomplish it's goal in the ACA.  He seemed convinced that it was necessary but skeptical about whether it was proper.  The unknowns are Justice Kennedy, who at times seemed opposed and at other times sympathetic, and Chief Justice Roberts.  If I were to venture a guess I'd say Roberts is opposed to the mandate but open to upholding it if Kennedy can find some kind of limiting principle to Congress' power.  Lyle Denniston on SCOTUSblog has an excellent take on this in his recap of the oral arguments.  

The normal order of voting in conference by the justices has the chief vote first followed by the associates in order of seniority.  Roberts is likely to abstain while waiting to see what Kennedy does because if Kennedy votes to uphold the mandate and Roberts votes to strike it down Justice Kennedy will get to assign the opinion.  Chief Justice Roberts would probably prefer to be in the majority on this case so he can assign the opinion (or write it himself) in such a way as to make the most narrow ruling possible.  In this case, he might even be able to bring Justices Alito and Scalia with him.  

Of course, as I said at the beginning, oral arguments are usually irrelevant to the outcome of most Supreme Court cases.  The justices have made up their minds long before the lawyers open their mouths.  Much of what happens during the oral argument amounts to the justices playing devil's advocate.  As Segal and Spaeth have contended for almost twenty years, Supreme Court decisions are largely a product of the justices ideological attitudes.  Except, of course, when they're not.  

New Santorum Ad

Ok, wow.  Someone on Rick Santorum's presidential campaign team has lost all his marbles.  The latest ad put forward by team Santorum goes where few have gone before.  Is this as bad as LBJ's 'Daisy Girl' ad in 1964?  Read Paul Waldman's comments here.



This ad plays to all the right wing paranoia and nonsense the conspiracy freaks have been propagating for the last 3 years.  Rationed healthcare, empty storefronts, the end of freedom of religion, and on and on and on.  Nonsense.  All of it.  I expect this kind of schtick from Rush Limbaugh or the folks at Fox 'News' but not from a man who wants to be president.  Then again, this is the same man who said God told him to run, told people that the Dutch euthanized senior citizens against their will (and has refused to recant when the Dutch called him on his lie), called the president a snob and a socialist, and believes birth control is an excuse for promiscuity.

Just one more reason America cannot allow Rick Santorum anywhere near the Oval Office.

The Dysfunctional GOP

I remember the days when most, if not all, of the crazy people identified with the Democratic Party.  From environmental terrorists to Hollywood celebrities saying any silly thing that entered their minds, the Democrats had a virtual lock on wing nuts.  Rarely, however, did those people offer themselves up as candidates for president.  The balance of crazy power has definitely migrated over to the Republican Party today.  What's more, the crazies actually run for president and are considered viable candidates by many Republican voters.  The question is when and where did this start?  Some have suggested it began with the vice-presidential nomination of Sarah Palin in 2008.  Perhaps, but I think Palin was more a case of someone being unprepared for the rigor of national politics than the John McCain choosing a crazy person as his running mate.  I do think, however, that Palin's presence on the GOP ticket made it more acceptable for ignorant people to seek the presidency.  That explains the candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain.  Fortunately, GOP voters and the Republican establishment rejected both of them.  As they did with the male version of Palin, Texas Governor Rick Perry.   Voters are currently rejecting the GOP's crazy uncle, Ron Paul.

Yet, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, both serial liars and both less qualified to be president than Republicans believe Barack Obama was/is, are considered viable candidates by many GOP voters outside the party's inner circle.  Each has the establishment sweating out the 'what if Mitt Romney fails to secure the nomination' scenarios.  Rick Santorum tours the country telling fibs about the Dutch and how they euthanize senior citizens against their will, claiming that birth control is an excuse to engage in promiscuous behavior, and now lecturing Puerto Ricans on the need to make English the island's official language to 'comply with federal law' in order to pursue statehood.  Of course, there is no such federal law except for the one Santorum would like to pass.  His exact statement was,

“Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law,” Santorum said. “And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.”

Can a candidate for the most powerful job in the world be this ignorant?  Or is this a slip of the tongue that will cause more headaches for conservatives as they try to woo the hispanic population, which will soon be a plurality of the U.S. population?

The good news, if you can call it that, is that some conservatives are now coming around to the fact that  their party has a 'crazy' problem.  Ann Coulter recently admitted the 'con man and charlatan' problem is bigger in the GOP than in the Democratic Party.  As she points out in the video below, when Democrats have crazy people who run for president and lose they don't get shows on MSNBC but Republicans reward crazy people with high paying TV gigs.




This may be the first time in history I agree with Ann Coulter about anything.

Frontloading HQ: On the State of the Republican Nomination Race, Post-AL/MS

Frontloading HQ: On the State of the Republican Nomination Race, Post-AL/MS