Explainin' Palin: All of The Above?

It's by sheer coincidence that we'd happened to have a Sarah Palin item running earlier this afternoon at the time she announced that she was leaving Alaska's governorship. I've been on a plane for the past six hours (the flight that I was supposed to take last night got cancelled). Fortunately, it was JetBlue, so I was able to watch a lot of TV.

There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:

1. She's simply burned out;
2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping";
3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc.

The point I'd add is that I don't think these three things are mutually exclusive. In her press conference today, Palin didn't seem sure of much of anything except that she'll no longer be governor. She may have felt like being governor of Alaska had become a waste of her time when she can go about the country being a celebrity instead; she might have concerns for what the national media spotlight has done to her family; she might be worried that she's made too many enemies in the state and that sooner or later one of these mini-scandals will blow up into a bigger one ... AND she may be crazy and narcissistic enough to think this will actually help her chances for 2012.

It won't, of course. Politicians have survived and been re-elected after being stigmatized as liars, hypocrites, and flip-floppers -- but can someone who may forever be branded as a "quitter" become Commander in Chief? There's almost no way. I can't think of someone who has done something comparable to what Palin did today running for national office, let alone winning it. In her critics' imaginations, she's gone from being Dan Quayle to some permutation of Thomas Eagleton.

And today will make her critics more numerous. One gets the sense that the Republican establishment was already starting to have concerns about Palin's electability -- see particularly Charles Krauthammer's recent comments. If Palin really is still in the running for 2012, today's actions may turn those concerns into action items -- like trying to build an "inevitability" narrative around Mitt Romney, or perhaps recruiting another populist conservative into the race to split Palin's vote and ensure that she can't win on some sort of plurality basis. I happen to think that these electability concerns are wise ones, and in the long run Palin may have done the GOP a big favor. In the short run, though, it's going to be a long weekend for them in more ways than one.
___
* A fourth theory, I guess, is that she's running for Senate, but that doesn't make any sense at all. Why would she need to leave office to do that? And could she really beat Lisa Murkowski? My guess is that, after today, Palin would not only lose the primary to Murkowski but might do so by an embarrassing margin.

There's More...

Contract Post

Why (Some) Liberals Hate Sarah Palin

Hot Air's Allahpundit:

Jim Geraghty [theorizes] why it is that the left despises [Palin] so. He’s certainly got part of the answer — happy, successful pro-life conservative women are a grievous offense to leftist feminism — but I think he misses the element of sheer contempt they have for her intellect. To the left, I think, she embodies a sort of comfort with ignorance that they think characterizes most/all conservatives. Why they’ve come to see her that way is complicated (part of it’s probably educational pedigree, part of it’s her affinity for rural pastimes like hunting, part of it’s the Katie Couric interview and the canned answers she gave at the debate with Biden), but I think it’s a mistake to assume that their antipathy is rooted in nothing but fear and defensiveness. That’s not true of the right vis-a-vis The One, after all. Is it?

Emphasis mine. And I 100 percent agree with the bolded statement. It's much simpler than other versions of this theory, relying less on creepy psychosexual dynamics, and ultimately I think more prescient. And the nice thing about it is that it sort of cuts both ways. If liberals are right that Palin really is ignorant, and moreover, completely comfortable with that ignorance, and moreover still, thought she ought to be Vice President of the United States, they have perhaps ample reason to dislike her. On the other hand, if they dismiss Palin because she looks pretty or talks funny or doesn't read the same newspapers they do, that goes to their being snobs.

But I think there is an even simpler version of this argument: George W. Bush.

Palin is the most Bushlike of all the Republicans who have emerged as contenders for the national ticket: the smirkiness, the smugness, the regional accent (although Palin's, I assume, is not feigned), the malapropisms, the contempt for media (both the people who cover it and their mediums), the express deference to religious faith, the occasionally undeniably likable moments of joviality and regular guy/gal-ness, the tendency toward self-dealing, the bulldog/barracuda mentality, the comfort in one's own skin (Palin was crippled when she lost hers late in the campaign), the (apparent) preference for isolation in [Wasilla, Crawford], and last but not least, the no-holds-barred, no-apologies conservatism.

And sure, some of this is complicated by the fact that Palin is a woman, and a very attractive woman. Would Palin be resented to the same degree by (some) liberals if she looked like Susan Boyle? Well ... maybe not. But would she have been picked for the national ticket? Well ... maybe not. But this has less to do with Palin herself and more to do with the manner in which she was elevated to the national stage. Liberals believe very deeply in the idea that life ought to be meritocratic. Palin didn't seem to have earned it, especially in comparison to John McCain and Barack Obama and even Joe Biden who had such compelling life stories. To a lot of people (not exclusively liberals; Kay Bailey Hutchison's contempt for Palin was obvious), it felt like another case of the pretty girl getting the promotion. If Palin wins the nomination on her own in 2012, this case will fade, and in turn so should some of the resentment.

There's More...

Contract Post

This Post Brought to You by Poker

I'll be boarding a plane in the next few minutes headed to Las Vegas, where I'll be for the next several days to conduct some research (yes, really!) for my book and to play in the World Series of Poker.

I haven't played cards for 18 months or so, should you probably be happy if I happen to appear at your table. Nevertheless, for a period of about two and a half years starting in 2004, when the poker craze was at its peak and it was easy to find poor opponents, I was playing quite a bit and relied on poker as a secondary source of income, without which I probably would not have been able to quit my consulting job.

Most of my play was online, which is certainly much duller than playing in person, but has the advantage of allowing you to play many more hands per hour: you don't have to wait for the dealer to physically shuffle the cards, or the players to handle their chips. And if you like, you can play on multiple tables at once -- this is not as impossible as it sounds since you should be folding most of your hands anyway, although there were days when I felt like a meth-addled air traffic controller. Since poker is a volume business -- even winning players earn a very small amount of money on a per-hand basis -- this was essential to many player's ability to earn a living from the game.

All of that changed in September, 2006 when the outgoing Republican Congress passed the conference report to the SAFE Port Act, a perfectly admirable port security bill to which the Congress added a rider called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 or UIGEA. The UIGEA did not make online gambling illegal (although its legality was and remains somewhat ambiguous), but instead sought to prohibit people from depositing money into online casinos, all of which are based offshore. Without money, of course, there can't be any game, and -- further frightened by some aggressive enforcement actions by the Department of Justice -- many leading poker sites such as PartyPoker shuttered their doors to Americans.

Other sites, discovering that the UIGEA was a sloppily-written piece of law, developed workarounds and remain open to Americans to this day. But the games weren't the same. The competitive ecology of poker is very fragile: winning players usually earn almost all of their profits from the presence of one or two suckers at the table. Once those suckers ran out of money (as suckers are wont to do), and found it was simply too cumbersome to get any additional funds in, a lot of the winners became the suckers -- including me. So I got most of my profits out while it was still safe to do so, and lost most of the rest.

In the long run, this turned out to be a good thing: poker, as they say, is a hard way to make an easy living, and trying to moonlight as a poker player while running a sports business was physically and mentally exhausting. I'm having much more fun now than I was back then, and get go to bed feeling like maybe, just maybe, I've contributed something insightful to the world that will make people's lives better.

But following the debate over the UIGEA was one of the primary motivators that got me into politics. It took a "dirty trick" -- attaching it to an unrelated conference report that couldn't possibly be voted down -- to get the UIGEA to become law, although then again, this was undertaken partly in response to another "dirty trick", which was the process of anonymous holds that was preventing the bill from coming to a floor vote in the Senate (where it would probably have passed on its own merits). I found the whole process of watching the sausage getting made alarming -- but also utterly fascinating. Without poker -- and without that bill -- there probably wouldn't have been any FiveThirtyEight.

The UIGEA, intended as a way to bolster their family values credentials, didn't turn out so well for the Republicans. The bill's principal sponsor in the House, a very moderate Iowa Republican named Jim Leach, lost his seat after 30 years to an unknown political science professor, a Democrat named Dave Loebsack. I was one of thousands of poker players who gave money to Loebsack -- he was the first political candidate I'd ever donated to -- and considering that he won by only 6,000 votes in a race that wasn't even on many observer's radar screens, it may have been those extra funds that put him into the Congress. Meanwhile, the primary driver of the bill in the Senate, the then-majority leader Bill Frist, retired and has barely been heard from since, his Presidential aspirations dashed by the landslide losses that Republicans took all over the country that year.

There are now efforts being led mostly by Barney Frank and Ron Paul -- politics makes for strange bedfellows -- to either overturn the UIGEA or to explicitly legalize online poker, which would allow American casinos to take money from American taxpayers, with Uncle Sam getting a share of their earnings. I am not terribly optimistic about the prospects for passage of any of these bills -- gambling is opposed by many paternalist Democrats as well as most Republicans -- but as the government is forced to rely on increasingly "creative" mechanisms to collect revenues and pay down the debt, they may gain some traction.

In the meantime, you'll have to wish me luck, and I'll try to spare you guys the bad beat stories.

There's More...

Contract Post

Destroying the Planet, Part II

Over the weekend, we provided a graphic illustration of how much of the planet you could eliminate for a "budget" of 5 percent of global GDP. But what if, instead of having 5 percent to work with, you instead had 23.4 percent, or about 14.3 trillion dollars, which was the United States' share of world GDP in 2008 as according to the International Monetary Fund?

It turns out that you could wipe out 5.3 billion people for this amount: all of Africa except Libya, all of South America except Venezuela, Mexico and the Rest of Central America, China, Southeast Asia (except Taiwan and Hong Kong), the Indian Subcontinent, all of Central Asia, most of Eastern Europe, and quite a few tiny Pacific Islands.



Note that a few countries, like Cuba and Somalia, survive here merely because the IMF does not publish data on them, but they're generally impoverished and it probably would not be too much trouble to rid yourself of those ones too.

There's More...

Contract Post

Cup O' Jolt, Or, How Americans are Tightening Those Belts

Many Americans are in dire economic straits: they lost their jobs, their homes have been foreclosed, their health care bills are skyrocketing, and creditors are hassling them. But even many of those Americans for whom none of the above apply are tightening their belts, as I discussed in a post earlier this week based on a recent Harris poll on how Americans are managing their assets.

Starbucks Store Closures, 2008

















Now comes Harris with the release of other results from this survey, pertaining to consumption patterns. Not surprisingly, people are cutting back on, if not foregoing altogether, many non-essential items. What sorts of non-essentials?

In their write-up, Harris reports that Americans say they cut back or altered their consumer behaviors during the past six months in the following ways:

*Three in five adults (62%) say they are purchasing more generic brands while another 14% are considering it. Just under half (47%) of Americans are brownbagging lunch instead of purchasing it with 8% considering it;

*Slightly over one-third (36%) are going to the hairdresser or barber less often, while one-third (33%) are switching to refillable water bottles instead of purchasing bottles of water;

*People are also cancelling one or more magazine subscriptions (29% done, 7% considered) and cancelling a newspaper subscription (15% done, 9% considered); and,

*One in five Americans have cut down on dry cleaning (20%) and stopped purchasing coffee in the morning (19%) while 14% have begun carpooling or taking mass transit.

These findings conform with news that, beginning last year and depicted geographically above, Starbucks has been forced to close hundreds of stores; generic brand sales have jumped dramatically; and drycleaning sales have dropped off, as depicted in terms of regional sales declines, below. (Courtesy of AmericanDrycleaner.com.)


Obviously, these changes in consumer behavior ramify across the economy, costing jobs in these sectors, worsening the recession and exacerbating the financial woes of, say, Americans who worked as baristas or wholesalers of drycleaning plastic wrap. But the downturn seems to be providing a different and arguably long overdue jolt for Americans, as they begin to reassess how and on what they spend their disposable income now that they have less of it to dispose.

There's More...

Contract Post

Is Mike Huckabee the New Jesse Jackson?

Michael Barone has a fascinating insight that, dare I say, I'd never really contemplated before.

Huckabee or a candidate with a similar profile can corner the votes of evangelical and born-again Christians and, starting with Iowa, can round up a significant number of delegates. It is conceivable that such a candidate, with the help of Republicans’ winner-take-all delegate allocation rules and if he continues to face multiple opponents, could accumulate enough delegates to win the nomination. But otherwise he is in the position of Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic contests, able to run a significant second or third thanks to strong support from one of the party’s core constituencies but unable to run first.

Does this analogy hold water? I've always tended to think of Huckabee, who has more populist views on economics than most other Republicans, as a candidate who had a fair amount of crossover appeal. But Huckabee may be crossing over too far -- appealing to independents and some conservative Democrats, but not necessarily the non-evangelical part of the Republican primary electorate.

Here is how the major Republican candidates split the vote last year before Mitt Romney dropped out of the race after Super Tuesday:



Evangelicals make up a larger share of the Republican primary electorate -- about 40 percent, than black voters do of the Democratic primary electorate -- about 20 percent. But Huckabee was nowhere near as dominant among evangelicals as candidates like Jackson and Barack Obama have been among blacks He won the evangelical vote in about half the states that voted through Super Tuesday; almost all of those wins were in the South. But John McCain and Mitt Romney won the evangelical vote in other states, and Huckabee wound up with only about 37 percent of the evangelical vote overall (weighting for the approximate number of evangelicals in each state). As Barone suggests, a Republican candidate could potentially win the nomination if he absolutely ran the table among evangelicals, even if he had little support elsewhere. But Huckabee didn't do that in 2008, and with Sarah Palin a probable entrant in the primary next time around, the going isn't likely to be much easier in 2012.

Meanwhile, Huckabee won only 8 percent of non-evangelical voters, which is getting into Ron Paul territory. Could Huckabee make inroads with this group instead? He'll probably have a larger media profile in 2012 than he did last year, which could help to make up for what might be chronic deficiencies in fundraising and establishment support. But this is likely to be a tricky road to navigate: the Republicans, so far, seem more inclined to play up their fiscal conservatism than their social conservatism, and Huckabee is swimming in somewhat the opposite direction.

Some months ago, I had a smart Republican strategist tell me that he thought that Huckabee might skip 2012 to focus on 2016 instead. Since that time, 2012 has started to look a bit more winnable for the Republicans. But it nevertheless might be tough for Huckabee to squeeze out enough votes with Palin competing on his right and Romney and some Charlie Crist alternative on his left (if he's smart, Romney will run somewhat to the left, especially if Palin enters, endeavoring to pick up big delegate prizes in some winner-take-all states like California).

Huckabee is not like Jackson in this way: there are circumstances where one can at least imagine him being his party's nominee, which was probably never the case for Jackson. But I'm not sure if those circumstances are shaping up all that well for him in 2012. Moreover, I suspect any Republican candidate who runs and loses for the second time in 2012 (this would include Palin, since she was on John McCain's ticket, as well as Romney and Huckabee) will be severely damaged going forward and will risk being tarred with perennial candidate label so often applied to folks like John Edwards (as well as to Jackson himself). So it might be indeed be smart for Huckabee to go into political hibernation in 2012 and hope that Romney and Palin have managed to eliminate themselves, or one another, once's he's woken up.

There's More...

Contract Post

Obama Has a Health Care Plan?

CNN asked a stupid question and got a stupid result:

From everything you have heard or read so far, do you favor or oppose Barack Obama's plan to reform health care?

51% Favor, 45% Oppose

OK, so in fact there's nothing stupid about the question at all. The public's response, likewise, is perfectly reasonable given the information they were provided.

But a better question might be: what exactly is Barack Obama's health care plan? Does he have one?

And if so, what's included in it? Is it the plan Obama advanced on the campaign trail, which had a public option but lacked an individual mandate? Is it the one making its way through the Senate Finance Committee, which has an individual mandate but lacks a public option? Is it the House's version, which has both?

And how is the plan going to be paid for -- something the campaign version of Obama's plan was largely silent on? Is there going to be a tax on health care benefits -- an economically sound but undoubtedly unpopular idea that Obama explicitly campaigned against? Booze and cigarette taxes? A rollback of the Bush tax cuts? A value-added tax?

CNN's article makes a big deal of the "public option" component of Obama's "plan". The article seems to imply that it's the public option that accounts for its tepid numbers, when in fact, the public option is the one component that seems to be somewhat unambiguously popular.

The more pressing issue, though, may be that the lack of detail and public-facing leadership from the Administration on health care. You'd think that if you took two fairly popular things -- health care reform and Obama -- and combined them together, you'd wind up with a more popular thing. Instead, we have a situation where the Obama "plan" is less popular than the idea of health care reform in general and less popular than Obama in general. Obama's approval ratings on health care, indeed, lag about 10 points behind his overall numbers, according to an average of three recent polls:



The conservative spin on this is Obama's personality is preferred to his liberal politics. That might be true, but it's not clear that conservatives are the only problem Obama has on health care. Quinnipiac actually tracks presidential approval by political philosophy (liberal, moderate, conservative). Although Obama is underperforming on health care among all groups, the differences are larger among moderates and liberals than they are among conservatives:



That's not to suggest that Obama should throw caution to the wind and push for single payer. But he needs to begin pushing for something, and something fairly specific.

There's More...

Contract Post

Welcome to the Club, Al

Yesterday, Al Franken joined the most exclusive club in America. No, not the Senate, nor even the 60-member-strong and theoretically filibuster-proof Democratic majority caucus within the Senate, but the even smaller club celebrities who have won major public office. (The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has a pretty good roundup of celebrity politicians here.)

In 1990, political scientist David Canon published a book entitled Actors, Athletes and Astronauts, in which he examined--and, with the benefit now of almost two decades of hindsight, apparently presaged--the era of the celebrity politician. Actually, the book is more broadly about political amateurs, defined as those who win high office despite a lack of appointed or elected experience prior to their election. Canon talks about how most political amateurs in the general sense end up becoming lamb-to-the-slaughter losers in no-win races, but how, thanks to their special celebrity status actors, athletes and astronauts are more competitive and can thus more easily break out from the pack of amateurs and win.

Although Franken was always very involved in politics as an activist and donor, he surely qualifies as an amateur under this definition. And his comedic style certainly qualifies as amateurish; I mean, c'mon, the man once did a bit wearing bunny ears and a diaper!** Franken has appeared in some feature films, including the leading role in his Saturday Night Live-created character Stuart Smalley; but he's mostly a television actor and comedian. (My favorite Franken role was as the other half of a baggage-handling duo, along his early-career but long since forgotten comedic partner Tom Davis, in Trading Places.)

What I have long found ironic is that Republicans tend to bemoan the influence of Hollywood in politics when, in fact, they have had more than their share of actors-turned-politicians, including former Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy (pictured above, middle, in case you had forgotten about the Love Boat's "Gopher"), former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and, most notably, President Ronald Reagan, who you may recognize as the other politician pictured above.

Frankly, I'm wary of celebrity-politicians, whatever their occupational background or ideological leanings. Reagan's aura covered up for a lack of substance and, late in his presidential tenure, even a declining coherence. Grandy worked hard, but was otherwise not particularly distinguished House member. John Glenn was a solid senator from Ohio and JC Watts was a key fixture in the Republican House and on the national scene, though it's hard to disentangle how much of Watts' wattage stemmed from the fact that he was both a celebrity former football player and almost equally rare elected species, namely a black Republican. Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning has--how to put this?--slowed down a bit late in his career. And Thompson never could make up his careerist mind, jumping from the political world to acting to senator, and then back to acting and then back again into politics for his ill-fated 2008 presidential bid; supposedly Thompson is lazy, but maybe he's just torn between the two versions of celebrity. Meanwhile, I really don't think it serves the people of California to have Arnold Schwarzenegger as their governor, nor would Warren Beatty or Rob Reiner be much better successors to the Terminator. For my money, the best example of the celebrity-turned-politician is the late Jack Kemp. Whatever you think of his ideas, he studied the issues closely and took governing seriously.

I realize that in the era of reality TV, where non-professionals can become television celebrities, maybe celebrities who are political amateurs are just as entitled as anyone to serve in elected office. But I'd much rather have a person who worked her way up through the state legislature and the House run and win a Senate seat, than Al Franken. Oh, and the use of the feminine pronoun in that last sentence was not random: You'll note that when we talk about celebrity politicians we are almost invariably talking about men.

**CORRECTION: At the time of the posting, I simply did not know that this photo was a doctored fake created by the Ohio Republican Party. Given many of the outrageous characters Franken has played over the years, it's not unreasonable to conclude he had. (We're not talking Thurgood Marshall here, folks.) In any event, apologies to readers and to Sen. Franken.

There's More...

Contract Post

Who Voted for the Climate Bill? (And Why?)

In many ways, the debate over curbing carbon emissions is more interesting than the debate over health care. The latter is more or less a straightforward discussion about economics -- how much to subsidize health care for lower-income taxpayers at the direct or indirect expense of an increased tax burden on higher-income taxpayers, and to what extent private-sector insurers, warts and all, can be expected to deliver more efficient solutions than public-sector ones.

The debate over cap-and-trade, on the other hand, is a genuine moral dilemma, pitting the interests of present-day Americans against those of future generations both here and abroad. I have absolutely no sympathy for those who voted against the climate bill because they don't believe in global warming; I do have some sympathy for those who weren't willing to sacrifice jobs in carbon-intensive industries in their districts now to possibly save a village of Bangladeshi children who will be born 40 years hence. That is not meant to sound sarcastic; it is naive to pretend that there wouldn't be losers from a bill that sought to increase the cost of carbon and it is naive to assume that a member of a legislative body who is subject to re-election every two years might not err on the side of his present-day constituents. Although the bill barely got through the House, in some ways it is amazing that it did in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years.

In any event, it would be useful to see how the 434 sitting members of the House (one seat in California remains vacant) tried to navigate the waters. As I did for health care, I built a logistic regression model that attempted to predict the likelihood of a particular congressman voting for the cap-and-trade bill as the result of a variety of factors. After much trial and error, the factors that look to be most significant are as follows -- factors are listed roughly in declining order of significance:

Ideology. The overall liberal-conservative bent of a Representative, as determined by DW-NOMINATE scores, which run from -1 for very liberal to +1 for very conservative. In this instance, I use the "common space" version of DW-NOMINATE scores, which are slightly less robust overall but place Representatives and Senators on a level playing field, which will come in handy later when we try and predict (as we will in a subsequent post) how the Senate will vote on the bill. Scores are as of the 110th Congress; for freshman Congressmen, they are extrapolated from Progressive Punch scores.

District Partisan Lean. The PVI (Partisan Voting Index) in a district was a highly significant variable; Congressman in Democratic-leaning districts were more likely to vote for Waxman-Market and those in Republican ones more likely to vote against it, all else being equal.

Lobbying Money. As in the case of health care, funds raised from certain types of PACs are a significant predictor of a representative's vote, although the money in this case cuts both ways. Whereas receiving contributions from coal industry PACs decreased the likelihood of a vote for Waxman-Markey, contributions from nuclear and alternative energy providers significantly increased it. I also looked at contributions from oil and gas industry PACs, public utility PACs, and agribusiness PACs, but these had no statistically significant effects. All data is taken from the Center for Responsive Politics and covers the 2004 cycle forward; contributions are divided by the number of cycles a Representative has participated in as a Congressman or as a candidate.

Carbon Emissions. I use county-by-county data on the amount of carbon emissions per capita in a particular area, as determined by Project Vulcan. This requires us to map the county data onto congressional districts by dividing the population of a county evenly among all congressional districts that occupy a part of its geography. Estimates are in metric tons of carbon consumed annually per capita. The carbony-ist district is the At-Large one in Wyoming, which produces 36.3 metric tons of carbon per capita; the least carbon-intensive are the 10th and 11th Congressional Districts of New York, which are both located in Brooklyn and are responsible for 1.1 metric tons of carbon per capita.

Poverty Rate. Although the Waxman-Markey bill contains provisions to refund a portion of increased energy costs to lower-income consumers, it was nevertheless more likely to receive support in districts where the poverty rate is low. Alternate measures of economic welfare like per-capita income work almost as well in the model and could serve as reasonable substitutes for the poverty rate.

Employment in Carbon-Intensive Industries. Lastly, the fraction of a district's jobs that are in manufacturing, mining or agriculture was a good predictor of voting on Waxman-Markey (although this variable was significant only at the 90 percent level and not at the 95 percent level).

*-*

Overall, this set of variables is pretty useful and explains about three-quarters (R-squared = .74) of a particular Congressman's vote on the climate bill. The model predicted 401 of 431 votes correctly.

The congressmen deemed most likely to vote in favor of cap-and-trade are as follows:



These are liberal Democrats in liberal areas with relatively low carbon output. All on this list did indeed vote for Waxman-Markey. Waxman and Markey themselves, incidentally, ranked as the 11th and 15th most likely Congressman to vote for the bill, respectively. All on this list did indeed vote for the bill.

The congressmen deemed least likely to vote for Waxman-Markey are these:



There's Ron Paul! Few surprises here either; these are some very economically conservative Republicans in districts that tend to consume a lot of carbon. Cynthia Lummis was given only about a 1-in-4.5 million chance of voting for the bill -- she didn't. Neither did any of the other Congressmen on this list, although Jeff Flake of Arizona missed the vote.

Where were the surprises then? These are the Congressmen the model thinks were most likely to vote for Waxman-Markey but in fact didn't:



The first three names on this list -- Pete Stark, Dennis Kucinch, and Peter DeFazio, apparently all cast nay votes on the bill because they they thought it was too conservative. One imagines that they might have voted for the bill nevertheless if their votes were necessary to secure passage -- but as it actually went down, they didn't. Not listed here is Alcee Hastings of Florida, who was given a 99.8%+ likelihood of voting for the bill but did not cast a vote either way.

Next, here are the least likely yes votes.



Note of these yea votes were truly all that unlikely, the closest thing to an exception being John McHugh from upstate New York, who is generally fairly conservative and represents a somewhat poor district.

So what are the general takeaways here?

-- People on the whole were pretty rational in trying to balance "selfish" traits (their own ideology; lobbying influences) against "unselfish" ones (the economic and political characteristics of their districts).
-- Nevertheless, the playing field is fairly broad, as there are quite a few representatives for whom these traits balance out in ambiguous ways. Some 95 representatives -- about 20 percent of the House -- were deemed to have between a 10 percent and a 90 percent chance of voting for the bill and can reasonably be described as swing votes.
-- Cap-and-trade differs from health care in that there are particular private sector groups that would appear to benefit from its passage: nuclear power and renewable energy providers. Although the nuclear energy lobby is small, and the alternative energy industry lobby is very small, they nevertheless appear to have had some influence; nuclear is a big, untold part of this story. On the other hand, the effects of the agricultural lobby appear to have been mostly neutralized, perhaps because of concessions made in the bill to farm-state Democrats.
-- This bill faces long, but not impossible, odds in the Senate -- we will cover that in more detail tomorrow.

There's More...

Contract Post

Obama, Sotomayor and Affirmative Action

Yesterday's long-awaited Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano is unsurprisingly being injected immediately by conservatives into their case for rejecting the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Court. The obvious reason is that the Court, by a 5-4 margin, reversed a Second Circuit decision in the same case in which Sotomayor participated.

But anti-Sotomayor forces are also avidly using the decision to heighten the racial overtones of the confirmation fight. The idea is to link her "repudiation" by the Supremes to claims that she is race-and-ethnicity obsessed, while exploiting long-simmering public resentment against some forms of affirmative action, particularly in the kind of employment cases at issue in Ricci. In other words, they hope Ricci can blow the confirmation fight wide open.

Is there any basis for that hope in public opinion? Not as much as Sotomayor and Obama critics seem to think.

Exhibit A in the case for Ricci being a huge problem for Sotomayor is a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released just yesterday that recited the basic facts of the Ricci case and asked respondents to play judge:

In a case currently before the Supreme Court, a city decided to use a test to determine which firefighters should receive promotions. No black firefighters scored high enough on the test to earn a promotion, so the city decided not to offer promotions to the white firefighters who got the highest scores on the test. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view:

65% Those white firefighters were victims of discrimination and should get the promotions based on the test results
31% Because no black firefighters got high scores, the city should use a new test to make sure that blacks were not victims of discrimination

This question, of course, does not get into the details of the statutory and constitutional issues being tested in Ricci, much less the role of Sotomayor's Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which was not, unlike the Supreme Court, in a position to make new interpretations of law. This is a critical point already being raised by Sotomayor's supporters, most notably Linda Greenhouse in today's New York Times. Even Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Ricci steered clear of any argument that Sotomayor's court misinterpreted the law as it stood prior to yesterday.

While Americans should not be expected to pay attention to such institutional nuances, this issue of precedents does complicate the other prong of the anti-Sotomayor argument: that she is a "judicial activist" who wants to make "policy" from the bench.

More generally, the question in assessing the impact of Ricci on the confirmation fight is whether public hostility to affirmative action is on the upswing, perhaps (as some conservatives have been arguing for a while) because President Obama's own election shows it's no longer necessary.

The most immediate evidence is a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey which posed a question that's been asked since 1991:

Now let me read you two brief statements on affirmative action programs, and ask which one comes closer to your own point of view. Statement A: Affirmative action programs are still needed to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, and are a good idea as long as there are no rigid quotas. OR, Statement B: Affirmative action programs have gone too far in favoring minorities, and should be ended because they unfairly discriminate against whites.

Respondents preferred Statement A to Statement B by a 63%-28% margin, a higher level of support for affirmative action than in January 2003 (59%), March 2000 (54%), September 1995 (50%) or March 1991 (61%).

Wording on such polls is important, of course, and the qualifier in Statement A above ruling out "rigid quotas" is important. As recent polling from Quinnipiac shows, questions on affirmative action that do not include a rejection of "rigid quotas" and that also introduce the idea of "preferences" produce a different reaction:

Do you think affirmative action programs that give preferences to blacks and other minorities in hiring, promotions and college admissions should be continued, or do you think these affirmative action programs should be abolished?

This formulation elicited 55% support for abolishing such programs, and 36% for continuing them.

There's nothing new about that, and nothing new about the wildly varying findings on affirmative action depending on the precise wording. (The NAACP site has a useful compendium of examples of how the wording of poll questions on affirmative action affects the outcome.)

This is why smart politicians have generally taken a position on affirmative action that endorses the concept while avoiding extreme applications and tough cases. It's no accident that a national debate on the subject in the 1990s that was threatening to create a major conservative wedge issue was tamped down significantly by President Bill Clinton's famous "mend it, don't end it" speech of 1995. Sure enough, a TIME/CNN poll conducted shortly after Clinton's speech found 65% of Americans saying affirmative action programs should be "mended," and just 24% saying they should be "ended."

Barack Obama has worked hard to occupy that same safe territory on affirmative action. He's gone out of his way to suggest that "preferences" should no longer be granted automatically on the basis of race, but he's also strongly opposed state ballot initiatives that would outlaw affirmative action measures entirely. There's no particular reason to believe that doesn't remain the political "sweet spot" on the subject.

The claim that Obama's own election dooms affirmative action isn't well supported in public opinion. The same Quinnipiac survey that's being cited as showing that Americans don't like racial preferences also showed that 80% denied Obama's election made any difference to their views on affirmative action, and of the 18% saying it did, nearly half (8%) said it made it more likely that they'd support affirmative action.

The bottom line is that Ricci shouldn't be a big factor in the Sotomayor confirmation fight so long as she insists that she was applying well-established precedents in the interpretation of a statute enacted by Congress--i.e., she was far from exerting any sort of "judicial activism" or racial-ethnic point of view, and was just doing her job. President Obama can and should defend her on this point, and both should benefit from his superior positioning on the issue, and the reluctance (political if not ethical) of at least some potential Sotomayor critics to directly attack the first African-American president and the first Latina Justice on baldly racial grounds.

There's More...

Contract Post