Brendan Nyhan

But during the press conference and a later appearance on “Inside Politics,” in which he said that DeLay and Gingrich “contributed to the environment” in which corporate malfeasance has occurred, Gephardt offered little evidence to back up his assertions, saying to the press corps that “we are going to lay this out in detail for you” at some unspecified later date. He did say that Congress has “done things to affirmatively unwind regulations that should not have been unwound,” but his evidence was a vague list of those regulations — accounting, tax, corporate governance — and of blocked legislation. If Republicans stymied reforms that would have prevented recent scandals or supported reforms that caused them, Gephardt should say so specifically and offer clear supporting evidence.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., also offered lots of rhetoric and not much substance. In his press conference Friday, he criticized the “laissez-faire attitude” of the Bush administration, saying that it “helped create the kind of environment that exists today, an environment that … all that is required is self-policing.” He also said the Republicans in Congress “dismantled the regulatory environment that we had and in large measure created this sense of laissez-faire, of just total unwillingness on the part of enforcement or regulatory agencies to play a role. And I think that is the price we’re now paying for the difficulties that we’ve experienced.” According to the New York Times, he also pontificated about Republicans creating “a deregulatory, permissive atmosphere”: “It’s as if the line between right and wrong, legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable, was so little enforced that it became blurred.” Again, if there are specifics to be offered, Daschle should offer them. Isn’t the SEC responsible for most enforcement of securities law? Wasn’t it part of the Clinton administration until January 2001?

These accusations are being refined into overheated jargon — here’s the Associated Press yesterday on controversy over Bush’s sales of stock in Harken Energy Corp., which resulted in an SEC investigation: “Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri called the 1989 transactions by Harken and Bush ‘very Enron-esque’ and said they were symbolic of how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose former employer Halliburton is also now under SEC investigation, had helped create a business climate ripe for accounting fraud.”

But few people even knew of the Harken case until this week. Had WorldCom executives researched the president’s business history and decided to take their inspiration from him? This argument by analogy is a cheap attempt to pin the blame on Bush. His past actions aren’t proof that his administration encouraged or allowed illegal accounting since he took office.

“Crossfire” co-host Paul Begala, however, was undeterred from setting up Bush’s Harken experience as part of a trend leading up to the recent scandals.

On Friday’s “Crossfire,” Republican consultant Ed Rogers made an obvious point, saying that “these bogus accounting practices … didn’t start on Inauguration Day, January 21st,” to which Begala replied, “No, Bush was doing it when he was in business, Ed.”

Note the logical flaws and unanswered questions in those arguments. How does a “climate” actually cause corporate executives to engage in wrongdoing? Aren’t changes in specific incentives — such as threats of prosecution, pressures to increase profits, and opportunities for personal gain from stock options — obviously more relevant than a “climate,” an “atmosphere,” or the alleged example of Bush? If Bush largely carried over the same policies that were in place under Clinton, how did this “climate” suddenly arise?

In response to all this, a number of Republicans have fought back by reversing the Democratic claims and suggesting that the “climate” of malfeasance was created by Clinton, blaming the former president for creating a “tone” of dishonesty that somehow led to fraudulent accounting, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz and Joshua Micah Marshall have noted.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh, unsurprisingly, has again led the way. According to Kurtz, on Wednesday he said, “Who taught us how to get around laws? A, Ronald Reagan. B, Bill Clinton. Who taught us how to have his way with words and women? Who taught us, my friends, how to lie under oath and get away with it? Who taught us that oral sex isn’t sex, and now kids across the country in grade school try it out?” Limbaugh also pointed to the Whitewater scandal, saying that “the president of the United States got away with all kinds of things and inspired others to try [it] themselves.”

Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes pushed a similar argument on CNN’s “Moneyline” about “the tone of the ’90s,” which “started right at the top, at the White House, where the attitude was anything goes. If you get caught, spin your way out of it.” Republican strategist Rogers also claimed on Friday’s “Crossfire” that this corporate fraud “didn’t start when Bush was elected or when Bush was sworn in. It started during the Clinton bubble years, where we were all taught from the top down the truth is relative.” And the National Review’s Kate O’Beirne added her two cents on CNN’s “Capital Gang” Saturday, saying “that high ethical standards in high places was not exactly a feature of the ’90s, and that Bill Clinton — which is what the Republicans will be saying, of course — showed his own lack of respect for, for honesty.”

Finally, writing in the Sunday Times of London, Andrew Sullivan jumped into the fray: “In some ways, [these scandals] were deeply consonant with Bill Clinton’s cultural ethos. When the president of the United States acted as if the only ethical criterion that mattered was what he could get away with, it’s not entirely surprising that this attitude seeped outward into the general zeitgeist. I’m not saying Clinton was responsible for this corporate corruption — just that his administration was responsible for policing it and for setting the moral tone of the country.”

These attempts to link corporate dishonesty to Clinton are a variant of an evolving tactic of blaming him for dishonesty of all types, particularly by framing it under the aegis of “Clintonization.” On the August 24, 2001, “Hannity & Colmes,” Sean Hannity blamed Clinton in this way for Gary Condit’s apparent dishonesty in the Chandra Levy case. On August 31, 2001, Limbaugh even brought up 14-year-old Danny Almonte, who lied about his age in order to lead his team to a Little League World Series championship.

Many Democrats now believe corporate responsibility will be the issue that gives their party an edge in the 2002 congressional elections. Republicans fear they could be right. And so both sides are pushing these vague but powerful arguments about the other side’s creating a “tone” or “environment” that somehow encouraged corporate malfeasance. But don’t expect this gamesmanship to truly explain the roots of the recent accounting scandals or to provide solutions to the problems that caused them.

This argument is absurd on a number of levels. First, in terms of the specific claims about Provenge, CMS hasn’t denied coverage and experts say it’s unlikely they will do so at the end of the year-long process (see also Media Matters). The entire claim is based on speculation.

More important, even if CMS had already decided to deny coverage, it would not justify Palin’s statement. Here is the relevant passage again:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin’s language suggests that a “death panel” would determine whether individual patients receive care based on their “level of productivity in society.” This was — and remains — false. Denying coverage at a system level for specific treatments or drugs is not equivalent to “decid[ing], based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether [Palin's parents and baby with Down Syndrome] are worthy of health care” (see also Cato’s Michael Tanner). Those who try to redefine “death panels” in this way are attempting to move the goalposts in the debate. It’s the equivalent of pointing to buried Iraqi chemical shells from the 1980s as evidence for the Bush administration’s claims about WMD.

Finally, defining “death panels” as rationing of any sort is totally nonsensical. By that standard, there are government and private “death panels” throughout the healthcare system already. It’s true that Obama’s proposal is likely to increase rationing, but so would every other proposal to control the unsustainable trajectory of future healthcare spending. Under Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan, for instance, CBO projects that “[b]eneficiaries would… be likely to purchase less comprehensive health plans or plans more heavily managed than traditional Medicare” (my emphasis). Unfortunately, hysteria over “death panels” is preventing a necessary debate over which approach would be most effective and fair.

I think most sophisticated Obama supporters and administration officials would agree with each of these statements, but few besides Matthew Yglesias seem to understand their combined implications. The economy drives American politics, and it’s stuck in a ditch. Absent a macroeconomic miracle, the Fed is Democrats’ best hope for getting the recovery moving, and their only direct leverage is Obama’s appointment power. So why does no one care that Peter Diamond’s Fed nomination was blocked yesterday? As bizarre as it sounds, there is no bigger issue in American politics right now in terms of the potential effects on future electoral outcomes.

This originally appeared at Brendan Nyhan’s blog

As Jamison Foser points out at Media Matters, Barnes published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that repeatedly suggests the key to Obama’s re-election is cutting spending:

If Mr. Obama wants to avert a fiscal crisis and win re-election in 2012, he needs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be removed from her powerful post. A GOP takeover may be the only way…

Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn’t have done it if Republicans hadn’t won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996…

Mr. Obama’s re-election to a second term is heavily dependent on his ability to deal effectively with the fiscal mess.

The suggestion that Clinton had “an easy re-election” due to spending restraint is implausible. Here’s a plot of changes in non-defense discretionary spending (Barnes’s preferred metric) for recent first-term presidents (see methodological notes below for details):

The relationship between spending restraint and vote share is entirely driven by Reagan’s 1984 landslide (an outlier on both dimensions). When it is excluded, there is no relationship between the variables.

By contrast, the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote share is extremely strong and robust to the exclusion of any single president. Here, for example, is the same set of presidents with their vote share plotted against the Douglas Hibbs measure of weighted per-capita growth in disposable personal income (drawn from his Bread and Peace model):

As I’ve previously noted, Clinton’s move toward the center (which included an emphasis on deficit reduction) may have helped somewhat to boost his margin above what we would have otherwise expected, but the driving force in 1996 (as in every election) was the state of the economy.

Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Reagan being re-elected based on his record of spending restraint if the economy was in the tank. The fiscal year 1982 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending substantially, but it wasn’t enough to protect Reagan during the recession of 1981-1982, which pushed Reagan’s approval numbers down to 35% by January 1983. Once the economy bounced back, however, approval rebounded in time for him to crush Mondale in 1984.

Barnes may wish that presidents were re-elected based on spending restraint, but that’s just not the world we live in. Obama’s fortunes will rise or fall depending on the state of the economy.

[Methodological notes: Spending levels are drawn from the historical tables for the FY2010 budget and are in constant dollars (Table 8.2). I compare spending in the fiscal year beginning before the president takes office (e.g. fiscal year 1969 for Nixon) to the fiscal year that ends just before the president is up for re-election (e.g. fiscal year 1972 for Nixon). I start with fiscal year 1974 for Ford (since he took office in August of that year) and end with fiscal year 1976 (excluding the transition quarter in 1976).]

Things have changed, however. In a column for Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg flags a new NBC/WSJ poll suggesting that the Democratic brand has lost most of its advantage relative to the GOP.

Unfortunately for Democrats, their own brand has fallen like a rock.

In April, almost a year ago, the Hart/McInturff poll found 45 percent of Americans with a positive view of the Democratic Party and 34 percent with a negative view. In the most recent Hart/McInturff survey, the Democratic Party’s positives have sunk to 37 percent and its negatives have risen to 43 percent. Yes, those numbers are slightly better than the GOP’s (31 percent positive/43 percent negative), but not enough to help Democrats in the fall.

Here’s how the net positive numbers (pecent positive minus percent negative) for Democrats and Republicans have changed over the course of Obama’s presidency:

Perceptions of the GOP have only improved a bit, but the negative press and opposition party criticism faced by Democrats have apparently taken their toll. Since my original post in October, the difference in net positive numbers between the parties has closed from 27 points to 6 — a decline that coincides with the most intense stage of the health care reform debate.

As a result of this change, the difference between the major party brands no longer appears to be unusual for this stage in the midterm election cycle (polls in the chart were the closest available):

I interpret this shift as reflecting the underlying fundamentals of the election cycle, which favors the GOP (a Republican takeover of the House is a realistic possibility). The question now is whether the Republicans will continue to gain ground. In 1994, the GOP opened up a major lead in perceptions of the party relative to Democrats between June and October:

I still don’t expect a 1994-style landslide in November, but it seems clear that the Democratic brand advantage that might have helped prevent such an outcome has evaporated.

Will reporters let the president continue this strategy in the second half of his term, especially when it comes to war with Iraq? The evidence isn’t reassuring.

So far, Bush has been protected by his reputation for honesty, the media’s distaste for complex policy issues and — since Sept. 11 — his status as a wartime president. As a result, the administration has gotten a pass when it has used deceptive, even dishonest arguments to sell key pieces of its agenda, most notably the tax cut and Bush’s plan to create private Social Security accounts. And even when serious questions about its arguments have been raised, the White House has dissembled wildly rather than admit mistakes or mendacity.

Take Bush’s false claim to have publicly listed three exceptions during the campaign under which budget deficits would be acceptable. As revenues declined last year and deficits appeared imminent, the president claimed the following to try to protect himself from criticism: “As I said in Chicago during the campaign, when asked about should the government ever deficit spend, I said only under these circumstances should government deficit spend: if there is a national emergency, if there is a recession, or if there’s a war.”

Bush repeated this at least 11 separate times (and told his “trifecta” joke based on it even more often). Yet there is no record of Bush ever saying what he claims during the campaign in Chicago or anywhere else, as Jonathan Chait first reported in the New Republic. After much investigation, it was discovered that Vice President Al Gore listed the exceptions during the campaign, not Bush. A Bush advisor did indicate at the time that he also supported them, but the White House has not produced any evidence to substantiate Bush’s Chicago story despite numerous requests from the press. The administration’s only substantive response was to direct a Washington Post reporter to two GOP primary debates and a post-election appearance by Bush, none of which support the claim.

Then, in July, the Office of Management and Budget issued a press release that severely underestimated the percentage decline in the 10-year federal budget surplus caused by the Bush tax cut (apparently an inadvertent error). Rather than admit its mistake publicly, OMB deleted the error and posted an altered version of the release (Adobe PDF file) on its Web site with no indication that it had been changed. After my initial report on this was picked up by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, OMB was finally forced to add a disclosure to the release.

Now, with matters far more grave at stake in the debate over Iraq, the administration has been no less brazen in its dishonesty. At a Sept. 7 appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush said, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”

An IAEA report in 1998 (around the time that inspectors were “finally denied access”) did say Iraq was six to 24 months away from developing a weapon before the Gulf War in 1991, but its efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium were largely crippled by the war and subsequent inspection regime. It appears Bush was referring to that estimate to underscore the point that Iraq has already come close to developing nuclear weapons and will try to do so again.

However, he should have been clearer about when that capacity was discovered. By tying the pre-Gulf War estimate to when inspectors were “finally denied access,” Bush appears to imply that IAEA’s conclusion that Iraq was “six months away from developing a weapon” dated from 1998, rather than 1991. The IAEA summary of the report he is referring to in fact stated that as of 1998 it “has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material.”

Rather than clarifying the point appropriately, Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan claimed the president was referring to an IAEA report published in 1991 (the organization says it did not issue such a report that year) and pointed a Washington Times reporter to two newspaper stories that do not corroborate Bush’s claim.

The White House shifted gears several weeks later, telling a Washington Post reporter that Bush was “imprecise” and that his statement was based on U.S. intelligence. Then, just two days after that story was published, press secretary Ari Fleischer tried a third approach, claiming that “it was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months.”

But the IISS report Fleischer finally settled on as the president’s source was actually released on Sept. 9, 2002, two days after Bush’s original statement and years after inspectors were “finally denied access.” And if the president was briefed about the report in advance, he would have been told that it does not mention any such six-month estimate. An IISS summary does state that Iraq “could … assemble nuclear weapons within months if fissile material from foreign sources were obtained,” but this conditional assessment of the situation today was certainly not the basis for Bush’s claims in his press conference with Blair.

Nonetheless, Fleischer attacked the Post with righteous indignation. “The source may be different, but the underlying fact remains the same, despite the story’s declaration of the president’s argument, once again, as ‘dubious, if not wrong,’” he wrote. “It is The Post’s reporting that is dubious, if not wrong.”

This dissembling is a betrayal of Bush’s promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House. With so much at stake domestically and abroad, it’s time to hold the president and his administration to a higher standard of truth.