Matt Yglesias

Celtics-Bulls

Holy crap, what I game! I was planning to go the Kills show tonight, but triple-OT wound up making that infeasible.

This has been an incredible series.

Marriage Equality Opinion Feedback Loop

Thinking about the seemingly rapid advances the once-toxic cause of marriage equality is making in public opinion polls illustrates, I think, the fact that not only do politicians take cues from public opinion, but the public takes cues from politicians.

In this particular case, it’s been clear for a few years now that the trend in public opinion was ineradicably moving in the direction of equality. That’s encouraged a lot of the more far-sighted political elites to start moving in a more gay-friendly position. You see this especially among conservatives where for the past few years supporting civil unions or full marriage equality has been the method of choice for demonstrating reasonableness. And I think that elites shifting to more gay-friendly positions has a substantial impact on the large number of Americans who I think are basically fair-minded but who, being of a certain age, just found the idea of same-sex marriage initially too shocking to contemplate.

Meanwhile, as more and more jurisdictions have permitted marriage or civil unions, the sky keeps not falling. And all that only further accelerates the trend.

Swedish Finance Minister Slams Geithner Plan

Via Noam Scheiber, Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg doesn’t think much of the Geithner plan for the banking sector:

While the U.S. has funneled tens of billions of dollars to embattled banks such as Citigroup, Sweden temporarily took over two banks late last year and then sold them back to private investors at a roughly 50% profit three months later, says Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg.

U.S. officials should confront the financial industry’s political power and seize temporary ownership of troubled banks, Borg says. Otherwise, error-prone bankers will be bailed out at taxpayer expense.

“We can’t let them get away with the fact that they’ve been reckless,” Borg told a group of economists while attending the recent International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings here.

This isn’t a painless or cost-free solution, but it still looks to me to be the right one. I’ve come to appreciate over the past several months that there are legitimate issues of complexity, logistics, and legal authority that separate our situation from Sweden’s. But it seems to me that these are issues the administration should be working on, not just issues the administration should be raising as reasons not to act.

It’s worth noting that Borg is not one of those Swedish socialists you’ve heard about. He’s the finance minister in a center-right government and he’s been spearheading their charge for tax cuts and rollbacks in the welfare state. “This is not about the market economy,” he says. “We don’t believe in the state running the banking sector.” It’s just that he recognizes that there is no real “market” solution to a banking crisis, there are just different forms of government intervention available.

What Happens When CRE Goes Bust?

The McClatchy story about the looming financing crisis in the commercial real estate market is very interesting. At the same time, the accompanying chart seems to indicate that the financial consequences, as such, of CRE-related losses will be less severe than the consequences of the collapse in the residential housing market. Not because the situation is necessarily better, but just because the scale of the loans involved is smaller.

But here’s my question. What happens to the tenants when you have CRE foreclosure? I read this:

The reality is already on display. On April 16, the nation’s second largest mall developer, General Growth Properties, filed for bankruptcy protection. The Chicago-based company owns more than 200 malls across the U.S., and was unable to renegotiate its debts as they came due.

Six days later, a 40-story office tower on New York’s Avenue of the Americas was seized by its creditor, a Canadian-owned pension fund. The tower’s owner, Macklowe Properties, couldn’t meet loan terms.

Presumably, vacancies at the General Growth malls and the office building on Sixth Avenue were part of the issue in the owners’ inability to pay their debts. But at the same time, it’s presumably not the case that all 200+ General Growth malls are uniformly empty. Same with the office building in Manhattan. So what happens to you if you’re running a store or a restaurant or a company and the owner of the office building or mall you lease from goes bankrupt?

Smearing Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein is a brilliant progressive lawyer whose views on regulation are, if anything, somewhat more conservative than those of most Democrats. He’s friendly to cost-benefit analysis, and a proponent of the idea that public policy should try to “nudge” people as an alternative to more heavy-handed intervention. Barack Obama has nominated him to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where that’s what he’ll be working on.

Naturally, elements on the right have embarked on a dishonest smear campaign. Julian Sanchez has the details.

Public Health Taxes Poll Pretty Well

I’m an enthusiastic proponent of the idea of public health taxes—raising additional revenue at the margin not by taxing people’s work, but by taxing consumption of public health hazards like sweeteners and booze. And here’s Ezra Klein discovering that such taxes are possibly more popular than he’d imagined. He cites this slide from an NPR/Kaiser poll:

I think part of the reason this gets a relatively good result is that it’s framed in the context of revenue. We’re not talking about taxing soda, we’re talking about providing for health care. But that will cost money. And the money has to come from somewhere. And taxing public health hazards sounds like a reasonable place to get it. I’ve said before that I think this is the right way to think about it. Taxing soda in order to make people skinnier sounds totalitarian and it’s not obvious to people whether or not the health benefits would even be large. But taxing soda in order to pay for health care sounds like a relatively benign way of raising taxes—at the margin, it will do more to promote health than to depress economic activity.

This kind of thing is important, because I think as we move toward raising the volume of revenue that we’ll be needing over the next 10-15 years it’s crucial to think hard about the efficiency of the tax code. That means cracking down on deductions and loopholes and pigouvian consumption taxes, not just higher rates.

As it happens, though, I don’t think paying attention to this kind of polling is that significant. For one thing, as Kevin Drum emphasizes, opinion on unfamiliar issues is extremely malleable. But more important, I just don’t think public opinion on issues is all that important a driver in politics—just look at the fate of mortgage cramdowns or what have you. The important point is that if you’re going to have a more generous welfare state and an aging population and continued advances in medical science you’re going to need more money, and you’re going to need to get it in a way that’s consistent with economic growth. Voters really don’t like recessions. Taxes on public health hazards meet that standard, so they should be appealing.

Health Reform and Epidemic Disease

The CDC’s “Swine Flu and You” page offers the following under the heading of “what should I do if I get sick”:

If you live in areas where swine influenza cases have been identified and become ill with influenza-like symptoms, including fever, body aches, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, or vomiting or diarrhea, you may want to contact their health care provider, particularly if you are worried about your symptoms. Your health care provider will determine whether influenza testing or treatment is needed.

Of course as Igor Volsky points out:

But for the millions of Americans who can’t afford to purchase health insurance, a visit to a “health care provider” is an expensive proposition. We know that the 45.7 million Americans without insurance are less likely to visit a doctor and receive needed care, but the the economic crisis, the erosion of employer-based benefits and the skyrocketing costs of health insurance are now causing an increasing number of insured Americans to avoid their “health care provider.” According to the latest Kaiser Poll, 60 percent of Americans say that “they or a member of their household have delayed or skipped health care in the past year” and many are “substituting home remedies or over the counter drugs for doctors visits.”

Obviously, it’s not as if epidemics wouldn’t take place if we had comprehensive health care reform. But people being unable to go see their doctor for economic reasons doesn’t help; nor does the lack of sick days faced by many workers.

More broadly, the epidemic serves a reminder that the health care system is in many ways a public function. Free markets work very well for ordinary consumption goods, but Tamiflu is not an ordinary consumption good. It’s important to be able to direct the health care delivery system’s resources toward public purposes and not have the resources allocated purely by market demand.

Swine Flu and Industrial Agriculture

There’s been a great uptick in interest over the past couple of years in the environmental and ethical problems with the ways animals are conventionally raised in modern industrial agriculture settings. That, combined with the rise of swine flu, has naturally led to interest in the issue of whether or not the emergence and spread of the H1N1 virus is linked to pig Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in some damning way. Grist is hosting an interesting debate on the subject, with Tom Philpott making the case for links and Merritt Clifton pushing back and saying the evidence really isn’t in.

I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the general issue of animal-to-human flu strain “jumps” is that it is related to agriculture, but not necessarily to the CAFO question. The reason these transmission cases typical involve chickens (”avian flu”) or pigs (”swine flu”) is that these are the animals most commonly raised by man. And chicken and pig viruses are subject to animal-to-human transmission in part because it’s common for people and their animals to be living in extremely close quarters in the developed world. It’s true that strict adherence to humane treatment of free range animals would mitigate that risk. But the locus of the problem is less the state-of-the-art developed world CAFOs than it is developing world agricultural practices.

That’s in general. Of course in general these things also usually happen in Asia, where those practices are widespread. Since this particular flu arose in Mexico, where conditions are different, it’s not unreasonable to think that the circumstances of origin are different.

Racism is a Bigger Problem than Anti-Racism

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an important post here that I think could probably use an “amen” from a white person. It’s absurd how totally disproportionate the volume of public concern is about black people “playing the race card” or about “political correctness” stifling someone or other to the volume of public concern about actual racism.

Just yesterday we had Byron York saying that black people’s opinion shouldn’t count when tallying up how popular someone is and, on a sillier note, this bizarre CNN segment on Obama’s “swagga”. Now we’ve still come a long way from when the local sheriff’s deputy would put a mask on during his off-shift on burn your house down for trying to register to vote. But this stuff is no good. And it’d be nice if some of the conservatives who like to rant and rave about how put upon white people are these days would take notice of this kind of BS on CNN or within their own ranks when it comes to things like York’s column.

Do We Need to Crack Down on Restauranteurs?

I think that Dave Alpert’s suggested changes to DC’s regulatory efforts to ensure the existence of non-restaurant retail opportunities would be an improvement over the status quo. Still, I would reject the whole premise that regulation is needed in this sphere. Here’s the rationale:

Adams Morgan. Photo by randomduck.
Fostering a diverse range of retail in a neighborhood commercial area is a difficult balancing act. DC has tried several techniques for managing this balance, including limiting the frontage devoted to restaurants, limiting liquor licenses, and offering bonuses to new development that contains certain uses.

Restaurants, especially those allowed to serve alcohol, can afford higher rents than neighborhood-serving businesses, like grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies and dry cleaners. As bars and restaurants become successful, an area draws more foot traffic, attracting more of those businesses. Landlords can charge higher rent, which pushes out the local businesses. This is basically an economic game theory problem: the most natural equilibrium states are a mostly-vacant corridor on the one hand, and nothing but bars on the other.

What’s going unasked here is the question of why the restaurants, especially those with liquor licenses, can afford to pay higher rents? The reason, of course, is that they register higher operating profits. But why do they register higher operating profits? Well, I would submit that they’re so profitable precisely because of the regulations aimed at limiting their quantity.

If you made it easier to open a restaurant, and easier to get a liquor license, then many people would look at the high operating profits currently being earned and open more bars and restaurants. The increased competition, citywide, would reduce bar and restaurant profits and eventually bring the system into equilibrium. But right now the preferred marginal use of a currently vacant structure is as a bar or restaurant precisely because there are so many regulatory barriers to opening new ones. Given not only the hard limits, but also the uncertainty involved in securing regulatory approval, people hesitate to attempt to start up new bars and restaurants even though if you can get a new one off the ground in the right neighborhoods in DC you’re certain to earn profits. That leads to structural undersupply of restaurants, oversupply of vacant buildings, and a persistent culture of mediocrity.

The problem, when people envision a neighborhood becoming “a new Adams-Morgan,” is that they’re envisioning a very limited deregulation. The high levels of regulation prevailing throughout the city means that if you make a single three-block stretch of some street somewhere friendly to new bars and restaurants then you really will get a ton of new bars and restaurants crowding everything out. But it’s a fairly large city. If there were less regulation across the board then the new bars and restaurants would be spread throughout the city and no particular neighborhood would see a drastic increase.

The Chrysler Deal

Looks like Chrysler will wind up in a pre-packaged bankruptcy before becoming a firm jointly owned by Fiat, the United Auto Workers, the United States of America, and Canada. The point of passing through bankruptcy courts is (a) to force a handful of holdout bondholders (mostly hedge funds, it seems) to take a haircut and (b) to be able to put the hammer to Chrysler dealers.

Another element of this is that Chrysler’s financial arm will not be bailed out. Instead, GMAC—GM’s financing arm, now restructured as an independent bank holding company—will take over.

Given the status quo as of two weeks ago, I think this is a good resolution. But I still wish that back in late November when this issue first come up that we’d moved directly to the government putting up money to do debtor-in-possession financing and but the company through the bankruptcy courts. Fiat could have bought Chrysler’s productive assets in a bankruptcy process, and instead of spending billions keeping Chrysler operating for a few additional months more funds could have been made available for direct relief. I suppose that, politically, it may have been necessary to go through the motions of showing that it wasn’t possible to get all the concessions needed short of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, how much precedent is there for state-owned enterprises to be jointly owned by two different countries?

Someone Needs to Talk to Congress About the Banks

According to Hendrick Hertzberg’s writeup of a recent New Deal 2.0 event, some of the critics of the administration’s approach to the banks are shifting to an interpretation of what’s happening that’s closer to what the administration’s friends are saying:

Stiglitz said he has the impression that while the Administration’s policymakers are familiar with the approach he and Solow advocate and have discussed it among themselves, it hasn’t been given the kind of in-depth consideration that has been extended to the solutions preferred by the big banks. “When push comes to shove,” Solow said, “politics wins over economics every time. It’s the unanswerable objection: ‘You can’t get it through Congress.’”

I totally get this. What I’m not sure I do get is why, if the administration’s had the ability to convince a large swathe of outside analysts that congressional politics are making a highly sub-optimal response necessary, we’re not seeing more signs of an effort to persuade congress that this is a problem.

Getting Apologies for the Economic Crisis

Felix Salmon says he wishes Larry Summers would apologize for some economic policy mistakes of the 1990s, and that he’s got a longer list of hoped-for apologizers:

Of course, Summers isn’t the only person who should be apologizing: I very much look forward to reading or watching something similar from Bob Rubin, who managed to compound his errors at Treasury with further massive blunders at Citigroup. And the list goes on. Greenspan would be nice, but he’s already admitted being wrong on some fronts, and has at least engaged substantively with his critics on most others. Ken Lewis and Stan O’Neal and Sandy Weill and Dick Fuld, of course. Phil Gramm, absolutely. But let’s start with Summers, since he’s the one name on the list who’s still actively involved in making incredibly important decisions which affect the future of the country. And if he can’t admit to making mistakes, how can he learn from them?

I’m not hugely optimistic that any of this will happen, but I think part of the same rationalist paradigm that got us into some economic trouble is to underrate the extent to which this kind of thing is important even though it doesn’t come with any tangible penalties. Indeed, if you look at the extent to which political leaders who’ve implicitly admitted error on Iraq (think Hillary Clinton) are loathe to outright say that they messed up and their mistakes had consequences, you can see that it’s very psychologically difficult for people to come to terms with admissions of culpability.

But the emotion of shame and the fear of humiliation are important psychological drivers. And I think that’s particularly true when you’re talking about very wealthy people and powerful people who are basically beyond the point of benefiting in any incredibly tangible from further career success. That’s why I’m glad to see Ken Lewis getting pushed out even if it doesn’t “make a difference” and do hope that social, cultural, political, and media pressure will continue to build on the wise men and business titans who were running the show over the past 15 years to accept some culpability. Among other things, it’s important to get across the point that human agency is involved in these problems.

Has Obstruction Failed?

Mark Schmitt says the key thing about Barack Obama’s first hundred days is the success he’s had in framing the terms of debate:

How successfully has Obama set the terms of debate so far? The first thing to notice is that he has completely marginalized the Republican right, and his bipartisan outreach has a lot to do with it. Those of us who welcomed Obama’s bipartisan and consensus-building tone were often criticized on the grounds that Republicans would unite in lockstep opposition to any Democratic president, and so, we were lectured, one had to fight them with equal force. Having witnessed the lockstep opposition to President Bill Clinton at close hand in 1993, I was hardly naive about the Republican strategy of massive resistance. The question was whether it would work. In 1993, Republicans got continuous positive feedback for their opposition — gaining in the polls, bringing Clinton’s popularity down, and effectively blocking, not just modifying, most of Clinton’s initiatives except for those in the giant budget-reconciliation bill. They could see the potential Republican majority right around the corner.

This time, though, the Republicans have little to show for their opposition and with nowhere else to turn, seem to be aligning themselves not only with the crazier elements of their own coalition but with a desperate last-gasp defense of the most unpopular — not to mention illegal and immoral — aspects of the previous administration. Such a result is extraordinarily helpful to the magnanimous president — it removes any ambiguity, tells him exactly where he stands, and gives him the moral high ground in moving forward with a mainly Democratic coalition. And the few Republicans who for personal reasons or for reasons of constituency do want to cooperate with the president will find themselves cut off from their party, and as they find it harder to keep a foot in each camp, they will have to move more completely and decisively, just as Sen. Arlen Specter did by switching parties.

I largely agree with this, but in many ways it still strikes me as far too optimistic. To take just one example, climate change. The administration and the congressional leadership have ruled out the use of the reconciliation process to pass their energy/climate agenda. Since it’s completely inconceivable that you could get 60 votes in the Senate for the sort of cap-and-trade proposal that Barack Obama outlined during the campaign, this means they’ve preemptively surrendered on an agenda that they ran and won on during the course of a two-year presidential campaign. And that campaign-season plan, though excellent, fell somewhat short of what scientists say is necessary to prevent a potentially irreversible catastrophe. As I wrote in my hundred days roundup that’s a very significant failure.

On health reform, it seems certain that a bill will pass and be signed into law that’s called “Obama’s health care bill.” But it remains very unclear to me and to everyone how much the bill will actually do to tackle either the social injustice or the fiscal instability of our current health care system. Meanwhile, on the banking sector the debate about the administration’s policies is essentially between people who think they’re screwing up because they’re corrupt (Simon Johnson, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman) and those who think they’re doing close to their best when faced with objective political constraints (Felix Salmon, Brad DeLong).

But those political constraints don’t just appear magically out of the sky. They have something to do with the continuing atmosphere of partisan gridlock on the Hill. So you can say that congressional obstruction has succeeded in derailing Obama’s efforts on the most important short-term issue that congress has jurisdiction over, and also derailing his efforts on the most important long-term issue that he’s facing. That’s pretty impressive for a small and unpopular minority!

The hard right’s political strategy, in other words, may be pretty unsuited for short-term electoral victory—I think they’re in very bad shape for 2010 and 2012—but it’s surprisingly effective on policy terms.

Volcker Says Not to Worry About Inflation (For Now)

These remarks from Paul Volcker mostly seem a bit too cryptic for me to comment on in a reasonable way. But I take it that Volcker has credibility as an inflation-fighter, so I hope people will listen when he says this shouldn’t be the worry for now:

“The inflation problem, which should be a real threat for the future, is not right on the doorstep,” he said. “But two or three years from now that may be the critical problem, how that’s handled. Because, given what the Federal Reserve has been doing, it’s going to be harder to retrace their steps, so to speak, than it ordinarily would be.”

What I see this as is mostly reason to be worried about a prolonged recession. At the moment, the Fed is engaged in massive expansion to get the economy growing again. That’s smart. But if it works, then we really will need to start worrying about inflation. But efforts to curtail inflation could mean that even when we do return to growth, it’s sluggish growth carried out in the face of monetary contraction.

Biden and Airplanes

I guess I’ll just say that I’m a bit surprised it’s taken Joe Biden this long to say something dumb. The Vice President has a lot of virtues, but I would suggest not using him as a surrogate in circumstances where you need to walk a very fine line between expressing concern and not sparking panic.

Win By Losing?

Via Ed Kilgore, Ed Rogers from the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations makes the point that it’s basically never good to lose a Senator:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I do think it’s always worth considering an alternative. I think it’s very possible that Democrats could “gain so much power” that they implement at least some of their “crazy plans” and that the people, rather than revolting, will just turn their attention to other issues. For example, many Americans feels anxiety about their health insurance status. And the majority of these people vote for Democrats. But if Democrats deliver a health care reform plan that assuages those fears, those voters may start voting more on their hatred of abortion or love of torture and bring Republicans back into power.

You can think of Dwight Eisenhower succeeding as a politician not despite the New Deal, but in large part because the New Deal’s successes eventually built a country that no longer had a strong desire for progressive economic policy. Or how today’s tax cut jihad has trouble attracting votes in part because marginal tax rates are much lower than where they were before Reagan cut them—the issue just doesn’t matter as much to people as it used to.

Normal Flu

If I were to say that this year 30,000 Americans would die from the flu, you’d probably think I was offering an alarmist take on the current swine flu outbreak. In fact, I would be offering an extremely optimistic take on influenza in 2009. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the country sees about 36,000 flu-related deaths in a normal year and around 200,000 hospitalizations. It’s standard for between five and twenty percent of the population to contract the flu in any given year.

Given all that, not only do we face the risk of an unusually bad pandemic of “swine flu” we also face a risk of panic. Apparently, very high levels of flu-related hospitalizations and deaths are actually pretty normal. But the media doesn’t normally cover them as national news stories. The heightened awareness of swine flu risks, however, means that anything flu-related is going to get dramatically inflated attention.

David Leonhardt’s Obama Interview

I don’t think there’s anything earth-shattering in this interview, but it is worth reading if only to take a moment to savor the fact that we have a president who can speak intelligently about a range of policy issues. I also think it’s near that David Leonhardt and the NYT have inserted some HTML “footnotes” into the interview to give some of the facts and specific context that tend to slip out of view when people are talking.

The one thing I would really take issue with here is that I think Obama is unduly optimistic about the idea that we can keep the financial industry basically as is, but regulate it “better.” The pre-crash state of regulation had a lot to do with the political clout and prestige of the institutions in question. If you keep the same institutions in place, I worry that they’ll swiftly recapture the regulators.

Spelling Reform

To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling. A point that’s well-illustrated by this video:

And all this is to say nothing of the fact that the same word is often spelled differently (”colour” vs “color”) depending on which country you’re in. This all makes it more difficult for immigrants to English-speaking countries to become literate and, in general, it’s an extra disadvantage for children whose family background puts them at a relative disadvantage. And as English has increasingly become the international language, it’s particularly problematic for the world to be operating with one of the languages in which it’s hardest to communicate.

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to organize some kind of totalitarian effort to force everyone to adopt a new, more logical spelling system. But spelling conventions have changed over the years, and other languages are easier to spell in part because there’s more deliberate effort by leading institutions to play a custodial role and implement periodic reforms. Something similar for English could be very useful.

Come See Me Speak

I’m going to be speaking tomorrow at a Campus Progress event. Come see me!

100 Days of Change? Evaluating Obama’s First 100 Days:

Thursday, April 30, 2009 6:30 P.M. – 7:30 P.M. Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor, Washington, DC 20009. Join us as we examine the first 100 days of the new administration. The panel will feature Matthew Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Amanda Carpenter, Reporter and Blogger for The Washington Times, Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters, and Khalil Thompson, Southern Regional Deputy Political Director for the Obama Campaign. Refreshments will be served. Click here to RSVP for the Panel Discussion.

My in-person insights are twice as good as the ones I blog.

Barry Eichengreen Says We Need More Empirical Economics

I highly recommend this Barry Eichengreen article on the failures of the economics profession in the pre-crisis years. I think it’s an excellent explication of what went wrong intellectually and an okay rough sketch of why it went wrong. His solution is a turn to a more empirically driven research program:

The late twentieth century was the heyday of deductive economics. Talented and facile theorists set the intellectual agenda. Their very facility enabled them to build models with virtually any implication, which meant that policy makers could pick and choose at their convenience. Theory turned out to be too malleable, in other words, to provide reliable guidance for policy.

In contrast, the twenty-first century will be the age of inductive economics, when empiricists hold sway and advice is grounded in concrete observation of markets and their inhabitants. Work in economics, including the abstract model building in which theorists engage, will be guided more powerfully by this real-world observation. It is about time.

I think that looked at realistically, three different strands—political, economic, and intellectual—are inextricably tied together in a mutually reenforcing way. It’s naive to think you just change what economics departments do and you get different policy outcomes. But it’s also wrong to see the intellectual trends as irrelevant.

Mods vs Cons in GOP Extends Beyond Culture Wars

Olympia Snowe’s op-ed on how the increasingly narrow and dogmatic conservatism of the Republican Party drove Arlen Specter from the fold is worth a read. But I think it’s noteworthy that she seems more interested in a rote recitation of the plight of socially moderate northeastern Republicans than she is in actually looking at the particulars of Specter’s situation. It’s true that Specter was nominally pro-choice. But for the past 15 years, he’s assembled a voting record that’s pretty orthodox. He led the charge on behalf of Clarence Thomas, he worked mightily for all of Bush’s judicial appointments, and he still says he’s eager to filibuster Dawn Johnson.

Indeed, what’s notable about the Toomey-Specter grudge match is that it’s not primarily about cultural issues, it’s primarily about Specter’s alleged deviations on economic policy.

More broadly in the intellectual arena, the orthodox conservative position has started to include controversial—and, frankly, false—claims about which things are problems. To be a conservative in good standing, for example, you’re supposed to join with Alan Reynolds in denying that inequality is increasing. You’re supposed to join with George Will and David Boaz in denying that climate change is happening. Basically, if you say that there are any problems in the United States other than high taxes, you’re out of the tent. That, much more so than the continued prominence of conservative social issues, constitutes a radical narrowing of the definition of “conservatism” from where it was 25-30 years ago.

York: Obama is “Actually” Not So Popular, Because Some People Who Like Him Are Black

Byron York has identified an important problem in our system of measuring public opinion, just the sort of thing that inspired the noble Framers of our constitution to wisely implement the three fifths compromise:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Dave Weigel observes that all Democratic politicians are always much more popular among blacks than among whites, so it’s not clear why York would spin this as a unique attribute of Obama’s. But more to the point, what is York talking about here? How does the fact that much of Obama’s support come from African-Americans mean that he’s not “actually” popular?

Richard Burr Losing in Possible Matchup Against Roy Cooper

Thus far, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) doesn’t have an announced opponent in 2010, but one possible candidate would be North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. And even if Cooper doesn’t throw his hat in the ring, this is not the polling an incumbent likes to see:

In a recent poll of nearly one thousand voters across the state, Attorney General Cooper, a Democrat, leads Burr by four points in a hypothetical Senate race. NewsChannel3 asked Cooper if he will run for Burr’s Senate seat. “No, I have not made a decision on that. I want to serve the people of North Carolina and just need to determine the best way to do that.”

Given that Obama carried North Carolina, and that Burr doesn’t seem very popular, I find it surprising that Burr doesn’t seem to be trying harder to find a high-profile issue on which he can buck his party and partner with the president. Certainly, blanket opposition is a novel strategy under the circumstances.