Still going...
The scorecard that most political analysts will probably post after today's big Senate showdown is one for two. Republicans -- with the help of Dick Cheney, who rushed back from the Middle East to cast the tie-breaking vote -- managed to squeeze through their big budget package, complete with around $40 billion in spending cuts focused mostly on the least advantaged. However, when they tried, in their second audacious move, to cram ANWR oil drilling into a must-pass defense appropriations bill, they were narrowly rebuffed by a successful filibuster.
The normal give and take of politics, right? Win one, lose one?
Wrong.
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Dec 21, 2005 -- 04:58:51 PM EST
Editors' Choice
Published: December 18, 2005
Recently reviewed books of particular interest.
Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy
By JACOB S. HACKER AND PAUL PIERSON.
How the right has gamed the system and outsmarted political checks and balances.
WashingtonPost.com
Books: 'Off Center'
"The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy"
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson were online Friday, Dec. 16, at noon ET to discuss their book, "Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy." "Off Center" examines the success of the Republican party in gaining and maintaining power and influence within the government, despite objections by some Democrats and moderates that they are more conservative than most Americans. The authors argue that their policies are too far to the right of majority American opinion, and that this hurts the system of checks and balances to the detriment of democracy.
Read the transcript here.
Oops!
Brian Kalt of Michigan State University recently alerted us to an error in the numbers that we cited from Hendrik Hertzberg's New Yorker piece. Hertzberg asserts that the 44 Democrats in the Senate represent 30 million more people than the 55 Republicans. Well, it turns out they "only" represent around 3.2 million more. We just ran the numbers, and got 144.76 million for the Republicans and 148.02 million for the Democrats. This is still striking, because Republicans after all have 11 more seats. But it's far, far from what Hertzberg reports. We went through a rigorous fact-checking process for our book, and the New Yorker is famously fastidious. The New York Times also fact-checked our recent piece that reprinted the numbers, though presumably its fact-checkers trusted the New Yorker (wrongly, it turns out).
We deeply regret the error, and we're grateful to Brian's friendly number-crunching for catching it.
Thursday, 15 December 2005, 4:20PM
Bai-ism
I haven't read Off Center yet, but these posts by Yglesias and Chait pretty much cover the weird world of Matt Bai.
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WHO WILL REVIEW THE REVIEWERS?:
There is a strong conventional wisdom running through political punditry which holds that the system does what the people want. If one political party is winning, then it must be because they reflect majority opinion, and/or the other party is just screwing up.
Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written a book called Off-Center that powerfully challenges this conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson show that public opinion has not moved rightward over the last two decades, and that the Republican Party has had to go to extraordinary lengths to hide its unpopular domestic agenda from the public.
It's an extremely provocative and well-argued book. Unfortunately for them, The New York Times assigned Matt Bai to review it . Bai, the Times Magazine's lead political reporter, tends to undergird his arguments with either sweeping generalizations or narrow anecdotes, rather than the rigorous sort of data that Hacker and Pierson prefer. Moreover, he's deeply committed to the conventional view of American politics. Bai is primarily interested in the Democratic Party: He writes shockingly little about the Republicans, who after all do control the entire government. Given the topic and the reviewer, the outcome was as inevitable as if Communist Party chief Earl Browder had been tapped to review Animal Farm.
--Jonathan Chait
posted 4:33 p.m., 12 December 2005
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TAPPED
Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
NUMBERS MATTER.
Matt Bai's underwhelming review of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Off Center is, as others have noted, bad, but it's bad in a very common way. Bai took the thesis -- that Republicans win elections through manipulation and obfuscation -- decided he disagreed with it, and then wrote a review focusing on how awfully wrong the argument was. It's clear from his piece that he didn't seriously consider any of the empirical evidence the book marshaled en route to its conclusion, evidence which, really, was the point of publishing Off Center as a book rather than as an article for, say, The American Prospect. If Bai didn't want to wade into the data, he shouldn't have taken the assignment.
--Ezra Klein
Read the whole post here...
Posted at 03:02 PM
Scott Lemiuex on Blogger.com: " A Pox on Bai"
As always, I was intensely irritated by Matt Bai's review of Pierson and Hacker's fine new book. While such events as the failure of Bush's social security initiative do indeed raise serious questions about the limitations of the thesis, and there are certainly other things one can quibble with, Bai for the most part takes the "shape of the world: views differ" approach he virtually always does. Rather than rebutting their voluminous data about shifts in the Republican caucus that do not reflect shifts in public opinion, he basically declares that since it doesn't blame both parties equally it must ipso facto be wrong.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Continue reading here... |
What Next?
Ruy cheerfully asks for marching orders. We're reluctant to say much about this, since (Matt Bai notwithstanding) our central subject matter is the small-d democratic issue of declining accountability and responsiveness, not what the big-D Democrats should do. We're also the first to admit that the structural, large-picture perspective we're presenting doesn't necessarily translate easily into a discussion of tactics appropriate to a particular moment. Still, we think our analysis carries at least three strategic implications, one negative and two positive.
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Dec 09, 2005 -- 05:18:24 PM EST
The "Other Matt" Weighs In
Since it is both interesting in its own right and connects to where the converation here is leading, we thought we'd take this opportunity to comment briefly on Matt Bai's review of Off Center, scheduled to appear in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review. Since most people won't get a chance to read it until Sunday, we thought we'd give you the short version: He's not so crazy about the book.
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Dec 09, 2005 -- 03:12:01 PM EST
Do We Want a Fair Fight?
In response to the Off Center take on the Bush tax cuts, which I certainly agree with and I think was probably the strongest section of the book, I thought I'd toss off an observation that's a bit outside the scope of the work. What I have in mind is the extent to which the salad days of liberalism, roughly the middle of the twentieth century, were fueled by a policy dynamic that, like the Bush tax cuts, was pretty highly non-transparent -- so-called "bracket creep." The way this worked was that before the Reagan administration, the income tax brackets weren't pegged to inflation. As a result, there was, in effect, a small annual tax increase automatically built into the tax code.
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Dec 09, 2005 -- 12:08:57 PM EST
The Best Laid Plans...
Matt uses the "starve the beast" example to raise an excellent challenge: Aren't we falling into the common trap of giving politicians too much credit for planning things that emerged more haphazardly? Of seeing some sort of long-term vision where what's really going on is short-term maneuvering and improvisation, and rationalization after the fact?
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Dec 09, 2005 -- 01:40:45 AM EST
We Await Our Marching Orders
OK, now we're getting somewhere!
Jacob and Paul admit that the presidency has been incredibly important to the GOP's ability to move the country off center. And they further admit that the wheels could start coming off the GOP machine right now if self-fulfilling expectations about its potency subside significantly. Indeed, if these expectations start heading south, the nature of the GOP machine is such that a "tipping point" may be reached and we could see "a fairly rapid collapse of the current model of GOP rule".
C'mon, tipping point!
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Dec 08, 2005 -- 06:52:27 PM EST
What About the White House?
Matt skillfully presses the point that off-center politics require control of both Congress and the White House. We don't completely agree.
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Dec 08, 2005 -- 06:51:13 PM EST
Cracking Up, Or Running Aground?
Mark said some smart things in response to my previous post, but I think he kind of bounced away from my main point. Yes, liberals' feats of policy wonkery won't deliver us to the electoral promised land. The issue, though, is what this conservative machine is supposed to accomplish. Whatever we may think of the Democrats' prospects in 2006, Republican political power isn't likely to increase very much from the level achieved in early 2005. And the result of that has been what is, at the end of the day, a very modest rollback of the rate of growth of the basic FDR-LBJ welfare state. And I don't think conservatives have a plan for turning this dynamic around.
David Brooks, who I think still ought to count as liberals' favorite conservative writer, more-or-less concedes as much in today's column.
Dec 08, 2005 -- 12:01:48 PM EST
Excerpt: Off-Center
More than ever, American politics is being driven from the top. And because the increasingly coordinated efforts of these elites are so central to off-center governance, it makes sense to start at the top of the top: the New Power Brokers in American politics. The New Power Brokers--men like Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, and Karl Rove--are colorful figures. But this is not just a story about interesting personalities. Who rises to power and how power is exercised are ultimately grounded in political institutions and processes. At root, the growing sway of the New Power Brokers reflects the transformed American political landscape...--and in particular, the growing power of the conservative GOP base. The base stokes the ideological intensity of today's Republican Party. The New Power Brokers direct this fervor toward remaking American public policy.
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Dec 08, 2005 -- 11:24:14 AM EST
The Tipping Point?
Is the GOP machine cracking up? The signs of big trouble are certainly there: plummeting poll numbers, Bush's second-term agenda in tatters (with Social Security privatization the big victim, as Greg and Ruy rightly argue), scandals that are distracting or dragging down their leaders (and which seem to proliferate daily), struggles to produce a budget and to sustain their tax-cut agenda (as Matt usefully points out), and a Democratic opposition that has honed its own political knives (as Ruy notes). Although the wellsprings of unity within the GOP remain deep, internal discord and jockeying for position are clearly beginning to surface. In short, it's natural to ask whether the remarkable GOP experiment with off-center politics is finally coming to a close.
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Dec 08, 2005 -- 07:01:19 AM EST
Agreements, Disagreements and a Modest Suggestion
I'm trying to figure out where those of us involved in this discussion agree and where we may disagree.
Here's where I think we agree:
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Off Center is a great book and everyone should buy it.
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The basic thesis of the book is correct. One reason the GOP has been able to govern way to the right of public opinion-and get away with it-is because they have, in an aggressive disciplined way, changed the rules of the political game.
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When the good guys get back in power, they should seek to reform the system so that such abuses of democracy are much less possible in the future. And the Schmittian amendment: be ye not like them when ye take over. Many old (and now-broken) rules of the game had to do with relations of trust between and among players of the game. Once in power, the good guys should seek to rebuild those relations in some form, rather than use the GOP's own rules to crush them like they crushed the Democrats when they had the upper hand.
Here's where we may disagree:
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 09:20:29 PM EST
End of Story?
I'm not officially one of the designated reviewers of Off Center, but since I had already read the book without being assigned to, maybe I can get some extra credit from Josh by chiming in with a question for the authors: might the defeat of Social Security privatization end up proving to be the end of your tale? That debacle for the administration took place after the book went to press, though you presciently anticipated that the push to privatize would likely fail given the forces lined up against it. But the way the defeat played out, and the inability of Republicans to even remotely regain their footing since, raises the possibility that the machine you described so insightfully may already be an artifact that will never work quite as effectively again.
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 05:03:11 PM EST
Will The Beast Starve?
As Mark observes, one thing that happens in times of political upheaval is that it becomes hard to know what the rules of the game are. One way you see that, I think, have been the left's rather desultory efforts to understand the curious nature of the "conservatism" to which the country has been subjected over the past several years. On some level, it's obvious what's going on -- tax cuts, even when not super-popular, at least go down smooth. Spending cuts do not. So we've seen a lot of the former, and little of the latter. But what to make of this?
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 12:56:32 PM EST
"We're Smarter"
Matt raises a good point: We do tend to ascribe too much conspiracy to practices that are equally well explained as sloppy improvisation. I was on a panel Monday with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation where the question of the "Starve the Beast" strategy came up, and he said that while that might have been someone's theory, it wasn't his and wasn't anything he ever heard about. It might have been a theory Grover Norquist had, it has some roots in public choice theory, but much like "The Constitution in Exile," chances are that conservatives weren't sitting around planning the step-by-step weight-loss program.
I'm reluctant, though, to base a theory on the idea that "Conservatives aren't all that bright." (The hilarious political novel that I once drafted half a chapter of was going to have the title, "We're Smarter," and largely be about what happens to people with that attitude.)
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 04:48:07 PM EST
Miss America, Inc.
Mark's great post offers the analogy to Miss America candidates to capture how strong supporters of a conservative agenda manage to appear independent or moderate to their constituents.
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 04:27:15 PM EST
How Do We Know the Rules?
Thanks Jacob, Paul, Matt and Ruy for getting this conversation about Off-Center started while I pondered my move. Like Matt, I've already offered my two snaps up for the book - it's very good and very important. Everyone interested in politics or understanding the state that we are in should read it. Holidays are coming up, think of that high school senior on your list with a vague interest in politics.
One common reaction on finishing the book is to ask, "Why was it so hard for Democrats, the press, political scientists, etc. to figure out that this is what was going on?" Jacob and Paul's analysis is so right, it so thoroughly explains much of the five years of Bush and the ten years since Gingrich, that it's almost embarrassing that it should be so fresh and provocative. And yet it is.
The deeper question that Off-Center raises, then, is something like, "How do we know what the rules of the game are?"
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 08:25:56 AM EST
A Theory of Everything
Ruy nicely notes that we're not selling A Theory of Everything. In fact, in our many discussions of Off Center we've developed a special aversion to comments that look at the big changes occurring in American politics and say, "it's easy to explain. It's all because of X", where X is any one of twenty or so possible culprits.
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Dec 07, 2005 -- 07:21:50 AM EST
A Couple of Observations
I suppose it would be more exciting if I violently disagreed with what Jacob and Paul have to say. Alas, I can't, for I largely agree with it.
But let me make a few observations that might further the discussion.
1. The puzzle Jacob and Paul address is: how can the Republicans get away with pushing so many unpopular policies? How come they not only get them passed, but don't seem to be punished for them?
One answer to this puzzle might be that it's not really a puzzle. The policies the GOP pushes really are popular, since the public has moved to the right. Jacob and Paul show this is false and go on to describe a number of ways in which the GOP has changed or manipulated the rules of the political game so that they can both pass unpopular policies and escape the consequences of their unpopularity.
Their basic argument seems sound to me and, at minimum, has to be part of the explanation for recent GOP success in pursuing their agenda. But is it the whole explanation?
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Dec 06, 2005 -- 05:44:02 PM EST
Heisenbergian Punditry
That's a pretty convincing riposte from Jacob and Paul, and offering a counterargument is further complicated by the fact that I need to get on a train pretty soon. But since Ruy and Mark seem to have vanished, I guess I owe it to the world to keep this controversy burning. I agree, mostly, with the idea that people usually underestimate the importance of congress vis-a-vis the presidency (see George Tsebelis' Veto Players for an interesting argument in favor of the Off Center view that uses the entirely different methodology of abstract game theory models) but I think the overall Off Center thesis really requires unified government to make sense.
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Dec 06, 2005 -- 02:58:19 PM EST
What Matt Said...
We're in agreement on Matt's basic point. It is impossible to understand recent American politics without recognizing the profound impact of 9/11. Clearly, the changed national security climate boosted Republicans, especially by widening the electoral "margin of error" for GOP politicians. Yet the aftermath of 9/11 primarily intensified trends that were already far advanced -- trends that need to be understood on their own terms.
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Dec 06, 2005 -- 01:29:11 AM EST
What If They Gave A War...
First off, many thanks to Jacob and Paul for bringing discussion of their important and timely book to our virtual community. I wrote a review of Off Center for the November American Prospect, and as you'll see there, the book is highly recommended. I should also confess to a minor conflict of interest in that my younger brother Nicholas is currently enrolled in one of professor Hacker's classes at Yale.
There's a lot to be said about this book, but I suppose I should just start where my review ending -- the question of national security, or at least the politics of national security. Off Center argues persuasively that 9/11 didn't "change everything," politically speaking, and that the structural trends they document were under way in the early months of the Bush administration and even before he took office. That notwithstanding, it doesn't seem plausible to me that you can really understand the politics of the past several years without dealing with the huge increase in the salience of national security issues.
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Dec 05, 2005 -- 12:19:32 PM EST
OFF CENTER...
We're grateful for the opportunity to write for this great forum. TPMCafe has become an important, lively, and classy venue for the exchange of ideas, and it's a real privilege to get a chance to outline, extend and debate some of the ideas from Off Center here.
Continue Reading Here...
Dec 05, 2005 -- 09:15:31 AM EST
New York Times Magazine November 20, 2005
The Center No Longer Holds
By JACOB S. HACKER and PAUL PIERSON
The struggle for supremacy in American politics is usually seen as a closely fought battle for the middle ground. The two parties compete to win over the unassuming but pivotal figure that political scientists call the "median voter" - the swing voter in the ideological center, who plays the decisive role come Election Day. The theory of the median voter is inspired by the analogy of two stores competing for customers: if consumers are evenly scattered in a region, the stores' best strategy is to locate right next to each other; otherwise, they take an unnecessary risk of losing potential customers. Political parties, too, should seek the center. Like a pendulum, politics swings back to the middle when governance strays too far to the extremes.
Since the late 90's, however, the pendulum has appeared to be stuck. Despite losing the popular vote in 2000 and facing one of the most closely divided electorates in United States history, George W. Bush has governed largely to please his base, allied with a G.O.P. majority committed to goals that were demonstrably out of line with middle-of-the-road voters' views on many issues. In recent decades, Republican politicians and activists have moved considerably to the right. The median Republican senator of the early 70's, for example, was significantly to the left of the current G.O.P. maverick John McCain. Today, however, the typical Senate Republican is situated just shy of the ultraconservative Senator Rick Santorum. Meanwhile, the median voter remains in roughly the same ideological location. Yet the G.O.P. has still managed to win elections and pursue many of its key aims without dislodging the pendulum from its rightward position.
These realities suggest that the recent Democratic gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey do not necessarily presage a reversal of partisan fortunes. For all their current vulnerabilities, Republicans still enjoy a number of formidable advantages, grounded in a favorable electoral map and the character of contemporary majority rule. What's more, while many Democrats are crowing about Bush's free fall, most of these Republican advantages rest in Congress, not the White House. And unfortunately for Democrats, even a significant shift in public opinion toward the Democrats may do little to loosen the G.O.P. Congressional majority's grip on power.
This is not because Republicans enjoy an overwhelming edge. Far from it. To capture Congress in next year's midterm elections, Democrats need to pick up 6 seats in the Senate and 16 in the House - a modest swing by postwar standards, especially in the sixth year of a presidency, when the president's party often loses ground. Yet the veteran election-watcher Charles Cook recently placed the odds of Republicans losing even one chamber in 2006 at just 1 in 5. Understanding why a party that's so battered can still be so favored reveals a great deal about how the G.O.P. has insulated itself from the traditional swings of the political pendulum.
To begin with, Republicans enjoy a lead right out of the starting blocks thanks to the geographic structure of American elections. In the Senate, Republicans have a tremendous built-in edge because small states, which lean Republican, are so overrepresented. As a result, Democrats can win a majority of votes nationwide and still not gain control. In the last three Senate elections, as the political journalist Hendrik Hertzberg has pointed out, Democrats have actually received 2.4 million more votes than Republicans, yet the G.O.P. has won 11 more seats. The Senate's 55 Republicans represent 131 million people (assuming each senator represents half a state's population); its 44 Democrats represent 161 million.
Surprisingly, the electoral battlefield is also quite tilted in the House. Congressional districts are roughly equal in population. But Republicans are helped by the fact that Democratic voters are more tightly packed together. In 2004, for example, Bush won 50.7 percent of the popular vote. But because he typically lost by large margins in Democratic districts and won by smaller margins in Republican districts, he came out ahead in nearly 59 percent of the nation's Congressional districts. By the same token, the Republicans could retain control of the House next year even if the majority of voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, the G.O.P. has padded its lead by aggressively redrawing the Congressional map. Between 2000 and 2004, redistricting created roughly a dozen new Republican-leaning districts nationwide.
Not only do Republicans get more seats per vote; almost all the seats they hold are also very safe. The last two elections have seen the fewest incumbents defeated by challengers in all of American history - four in 2002 and five in 2004. In 2004, the average margin of victory for House incumbents was 40 percentage points. Incumbency advantage is often blamed on gerrymandering. But a bigger cause is money. Between 1974 and 2002, the amount spent by successful House challengers rose from $100,000 (in 2002 dollars) to $1.5 million. And money isn't equally distributed between the parties. Over the last decade, Republicans have cultivated close ties to deep-pocketed donors and special-interest groups. They have also developed a highly institutionalized system of intercandidate giving, in which party members and their PAC's donate to other Republicans to keep the majority in power. Republicans didn't invent these strategies, but they have raised them to a new level of effectiveness.
Democrats constantly lament their financial disadvantage - and in an era in which money speaks louder than ever (and is more unequally distributed), their worries are understandable. But money is just one Republican weapon among many. Over the last decade, Republicans have rewritten the rules of Washington. From control of the agenda to the design of policies to the use of legislative procedure, they have used their ideological unity and the growing powers of the majority to simultaneously pursue conservative aims and avoid electoral fallout. You might call these measures "backlash insurance," because they protect Republicans against political outcry for doing things that aren't all that popular with a majority of Americans.
Of course, politicians have always tried to maximize credit and avoid blame. But the modern G.O.P. has centralized political control, allowing it to dominate the national agenda and dictate legislation in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Congressional committee chairmen are now appointed largely on the basis of their fealty to the Republican leadership and their ability to raise funds for G.O.P. candidates. When bills go to a conference committee to iron out differences between the House and Senate, they are rewritten to please conservatives and then thrown back to the floors of the House and Senate, where they can't be amended. Interest groups are told that loyalty to the G.O.P. is the price of access. One lobbyist reportedly complained: "I always thought my job is to look out for my clients. Suddenly, I'm working for the Republican Party."
The result is a coordinated political apparatus skilled at designing and presenting even unpopular policies so that they don't set off alarm bells. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the many rounds of tax cuts since 2001. Polls showed that voters didn't want tax cuts to increase the deficit or threaten popular programs. They also believed that any tax cuts should focus on the middle class. Republicans could have revamped their cuts to respond to these concerns. Instead, they provided modest goodies for the middle class right away, but buried fiscal time bombs and big tax breaks for the wealthy in the legislation's later years.
The Republicans have also proved adept at pursuing an aggressive agenda while protecting vulnerable seats against retaliation from the median voter. Consider a G.O.P. tactic that has come to be called "catch and release." After the leadership has assured itself that a controversial bill will pass, moderate Republicans are released to cast highly publicized votes of "conscience." This is one reason why so many big bills end up magically squeaking through with no votes to spare.
The beauty of the Republican network is that it is stronger than the sum of its parts. The conservative power broker Grover Norquist - the head of the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform - recently said that if he were run over by a bus, someone else would take his place. Many thought G.O.P. cohesion would collapse when Newt Gingrich fell from grace. It didn't, and all signs are that it will also survive the loss of the House's latest strongman, Tom DeLay.
All this calls into question the ubiquitous complaints that the Democrats' ineptitude is what mainly accounts for G.O.P. dominance. Democrats are right to be rethinking their strategies. But what they face isn't the old game of give-and-take. Instead, it's a game that Rick Santorum explained candidly in 2003: "This idea that somehow or other. . .everybody has a seat at the table all the time, it's just not the way this place operates. The majority means something. It means that you win." One reason why Democrats aren't gaining public ground as rapidly as Republicans are losing it is that they are virtually shut out of high-profile public discussions. Republicans have used their unified majority to maintain almost total control of the Congressional agenda. A recent exception proves the rule: after I. Lewis Libby Jr.'s indictment, the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, invoked a parliamentary rule to seize the Senate agenda for a discussion of prewar intelligence - but only for two hours. Given how rarely the Democrats find themselves in a prominent role on the national stage, it's little surprise that Republicans routinely trounce Democrats when it comes to the perception that they have "strong leaders."
In fact, even disunity within the Republican Party is often more theatrical than real. Witness the much-hyped revolt of the "budget hawks." The fight sounds dramatic - until you realize that the hawks are happily supporting new tax cuts that will drive up the deficit even as they demand cuts in spending. They are able to do this because Republicans have broken with usual budget practice and created two budget bills: one for tax cuts and one for spending. Thus, they can tout a "deficit reduction package" (their spending bill) even as their full agenda promises to increase future deficits through new tax cuts. And, of course, no Republican is even mentioning the big tax cuts for the well-off that were passed in the last few years. (In January of next year, one set of cuts passed in 2001 will start to take effect. When fully implemented, these cuts will have a 10-year price tag of nearly $150 billion, 97 percent of which will go to families making more than $200,000 a year.)
If the G.O.P.'s troubles continue to mount, staged disunity could give way to the real thing. But that will require a perceived political threat so serious that moderates genuinely break with their party. So far, this hasn't happened. After all, Republicans have plenty of experience waiting out political storms. When the government shutdowns and impeachment battle of the 1990's proved intensely unpopular, the Republican leadership took its foot off the gas, allowed moderates a little room and waited for the public outcry to die down. But when the storms passed, it was back to the same old project: building a permanent conservative majority.
The conventional view of American politics gives politicians who arouse the wrath of the median voter only two options: tack back to the middle or start clearing out their desks. But thanks to the G.O.P.'s energetic efforts to rewrite the rules of American politics, Republicans are acting today as if they have a third choice: break out the backlash insurance and keep the pendulum jammed right.
November 22, 2005 11:25 AM
Sam Rosenfeld , on the American Prospect's blog, "TAPPED," offers a partial dissent ...
OFF CENTER FOREVER? In The New York Times Magazine, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson take a stab at applying the analytical argument of their new book Off Center to the recent period of Republican woe. I'm glad to see them try....But the chance for a congressional chamber to actually change hands is greater now than it was [in the late 1990s], and such a takeover could help set in motion some fundamental changes to the dynamics of sustained power that Off Center takes as its subject.
Read the post at "TAPPED."
November 21 , 2005 1:01 PM
George Packer, in this week's New Yorker, on Democratic strategy..."As a new book, “Off Center,” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, points out, Republicans never won the war of ideas—Americans remain almost implacably centrist—but they created a powerful political machine that is tactically shrewder and far richer than that of the Democrats..."
Read the whole essay at NewYorker.com
Oct 24, 2005, 9:45
George Packer, in this week's New Yorker, on Democratic strategy..."As a new book, “Off Center,” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, points out, Republicans never won the war of ideas—Americans remain almost implacably centrist—but they created a powerful political machine that is tactically shrewder and far richer than that of the Democrats..."
Read the whole essay at NewYorker.com
Oct 24, 2005, 9:45
Eric Alterman , in this week's Nation, on the problem with the GOP: "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy demonstrates just how badly Americans are served by media that accept the fundamental frame put forth by far-right Republicans..."
Read the whole essay at TheNation.com
Oct 24, 2005, 9:45
Featured on Eric Alterman's Book Club. From Alterman's intro: " Have I ever said anything like this before? Off Center is the most important book on contemporary American politics to be published in more than a decade (since Thomas and Mary Edsall’s Chain Reaction actually.) If somehow, Tim Russert, David Brooks, Joe Klein, the smart boys at “The Note,” etc., and the rest of the MSM could be forced to read it and address the power of its evidence, American politics would be transformed overnight. Read it."
Read the excerpt and post at "Altercation."
October 20, 2005 11:25
Waiting for the Pendulum to Swing...We want to first thank Kevin for giving us access to this terrific forum. We emerge with some good new ideas, a great deal of helpful feedback, and a huge amount of new respect (and we already had a lot) for the efforts of serious bloggers.
The two objections Kevin raised—the GOP never moved that far right, and anyway, things are swinging back—are helpful challenges. We responded to the first yesterday (and got a lot of help from those who commented on Kevin’s post). Just to repeat one key point: Simply listing the labels of the GOP’s big domestic initiatives hugely distorts the true content of their activities. Indeed, as we emphasize in the book, this distortion is a crucial component of the GOP’s larger attempt to cloak immoderate policies in moderate garb.
Kevin’s second objection is of even greater interest at the moment. Aren’t the Republicans cracking up? Isn’t the pendulum swinging back?
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 14, 2005, 3:57 PM
Is there a puzzle? Kevin raises some important issues in his last, agreeably skeptical post. And, ironically—given that he’s the political commentator and we’re the political scientists—he mounts a spirited and thoughtful defense of the traditional political science view: namely, that pushing politics and policy off center for any length of time inevitably creates gridlock and backlash, pulling politics, like a pendulum, back to the middle.
We were trained to be partial to this view, and we still find aspects of it appealing, even as we dispute its accuracy as an account of present politics....Still, the conventional view can veer much too quickly from healthy skepticism into unhealthy complacency.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 13, 2005, 4:26 PM
The Road Back, Part II...We wrote Off Center to try and understand not just why the GOP has risen to power, but also why a very conservative elite has been able to advance its radical agenda while so effectively evading political accountability....We won’t hide that our own politics are progressive. Yet our book is aimed at small “d” democrats rather than capital “D” Democrats. Wanting a government that, at least in broad terms, responds to the concerns and aspirations of the vast middle of the American electorate is simply not a partisan position.
But the book is partisan in one clear sense. We think the severe erosion of accountability in American politics is closely associated with Republican rule. An emphatic defeat for today’s governing party is a prerequisite for healing American democracy.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 13, 2005, 8:59 AM
The Road Back...The 2006 elections are shaping up as a potential watershed. We know, every election feels that way nowadays, but this time it’s true—really.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 12, 2005, 9:50 AM
A Surprising Fact ...As we were going back to the National Election Studies data to clarify the "mystery graph," we came across a simple table that cannot help but surprise those who have watched American politics shift steadily to the hard right.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 11, 2005, 1:05 PM
Back to the Center?.... Kevin asks :
How long do you think this can last before the center finally pulls back? Or has American politics changed so fundamentally that it will stay off center forever unless Democrats adopt tactics similar to Republicans'?
In other words, what's your best guess: do Democrats need to fight fire with fire? Or will the center eventually hold if Democrats figure out a more effective way of appealing to moderate voters?
There are actually two distinct, but obviously linked, questions here. (1) How much is it going to take to push things back towards the center? And (2) what strategies give Democrats the best chance of succeeding? Since these are both BIG questions, and since we want to spark conversation on both of them, we take up the first one in this post. We plan to tackle the second one tomorrow.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 11, 2005, 11:10 AM
The Mystery Graph.... We have put up a short post on TPMCafe explaining how we produced the figure on p. 27 of Off Center (the figure is reproduced by Kevin here ) which shows that Republican activists -- always farther from independent voters on a liberal-conservative scale than Democratic activists -- have moved even farther away in recent years, while Democratic activists have moved back toward independent voters.
A few quick additional clarifications in response to queries we have received:
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 11, 2005, 09:22 AM
What about 9/11? Having read the comments thus far -- and let us say right away that this is a very, very sharp crowd -- we've decided that three issues require immediate elaboration: the role of 9/11, our definition of the center, and the prospects for a big reversal in the near future. In this post, we want to respond to David Bailey's useful reminder that "[w]hatever other tools the GOP have had on their side to push an extreme agenda in an evenly-divided government, let's not forget 9/11."
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 10, 2005, 1:08 PM
Why is American Politics Off Center? We are very grateful to Kevin for offering this chance to discuss the current state of American politics. It's gratifying that astute political analysts like Kevin, Chris Hayes, Henry Farrell, Mark Schmitt, Mathew Yglesias, and Paul Krugman (who has a column discussing our book in today's Times) find our book of value. And we look forward to a lively discussion with all of you over the coming week.
Read the whole post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 10, 2005,
10:10 AM
OFF CENTER.... What's the better campaign strategy: appealing to the center in order to win moderate votes or appealing to extremism in order to mobilize your base? In Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer an intriguing take on this ancient question, and I've invited them to guest blog here this week and chat about it with us.
Read Kevin Drum's entire post at washingtonmonthly.com
Oct 10, 2005
The Mystery Solved
This may be too self-referential even for the blogosphere. But Mathew Yglesias has rightly complained that we -- i.e., my co-author Paul Pierson and I -- do not explain the exact provenance of a figure on p. 27 of our new book, Off Center. The figure, which Kevin Drum has kindly posted on his blog, shows that Republican activists -- always farther from independent voters on a liberal-conservative scale than Democratic activists -- have moved even farther away in recent years, while Democratic activists have moved back toward independent voters. Faced with the cries of bewilderment, we can only say that we wish we hadn't decided to cut back the long caption that previously followed the figure (on the grounds that it would freak out non-specialists). But we are happy to now have the chance to sort out the confusion.
Read the whole post at TPMCafe
Oct 10, 2005 -- 09:00:10 PM EST
Kevin Drum Thinks William Galston and Elaine Kamarck Should Be Sent
Our Book, Too
Kevin Drum writes on his wonderful Washington Monthly blog:
William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have written a new report that
urges Democrats to move to the center if they ever want to become a
majority party again....
But it turns out that's not the whole story, because in Off
Center Hacker and Pierson also provide a ton of evidence that,
congressional results notwithstanding, Americans haven't become
any more conservative over the past three decades. 
Nor has the activist base of the Democratic party become more liberal.
Rather, it's the activist base of the Republican party that's
gotten more extreme. The chart on the right, my favorite from the book,
shows the startling story: compared to independent voters, Republican
activists have gotten far more extreme since 1980, while over the same
period the Democratic base has actually become more moderate...
And yet, Republicans keep on winning anyway. But why? How is it that a
party can continue to drift farther and farther from the center of
American politics — the Holy Grail of most political strategists —
and yet continue to be successful? Why is the center no longer holding?
Read
the whole post at Washington Monthly.com
Oct 07, 2005 -- 3:00:15 PM EST
Tax-Cut Shell Games and Katrina
A half-page chart
on today’s Times op-ed page unintentionally shows just how effective
the Republicans have been in hoodwinking otherwise sensible journalists
and policy experts.
Read
the whole post at TPMCafe
Oct 07, 2005 -- 10:47:36 AM EST
Mark Schmitt Thinks the Council on Foreign Relations Should Be Sent
Our Book
Mark Schmitt writes on his excellent blog:
Much in the [Council on Foreign Relations] report might have been
true in the late 1990s, when that "pox on both your houses"
approach made a little more sense. But it's simply not the nature of the
problem today, which is a radical discontinuity from the rules and
assumptions of the past....One reason that the Republicans have been able
to so completely rewrite the rules of partisan control is that what's
happened is so radical, so sweeping, that most longtime Washington
observers just can't see how much their basic assumptions about how the
game works have changed.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write in their fabulous new book, Off-Center:
The Republican Revolution & The Erosion of American Democracy,
"the problem is not just polarization. It is unequal
polarization -- unequal between Democrats and Republicans, unequal in its
effects on the governing aims of liberals and conservatives, and unequal
in in its effects on American society."...
And maybe we can arrange to have a copy of Off-Center sent to
each of the members of the Advisory Committee.
Read
the whole post at TPMCafe
October 6, 2005 -- 4:30:12 PM EST
Our First Review
Henry Farrell of George Washington University has a thoughtful review
up on the blog, "Crooked Timber." Here is a teaser:
"Political scientists don’t often write books that take sides in
political arguments, and when they do, they usually don’t do any better
at it than common or garden pundits. It’s hard to combine the attention
to detail and to careful argument that academics are supposed to have
with a passionate concern for the results of the fight. OFF CENTER pulls
off both. On the one hand, it is very clearly the work of people who have
thought carefully and hard about how politics works. There’s a depth of
analysis here that’s completely absent from the common or garden
partisan bestseller-wannabe. But on the other, it doesn’t pull its
punches. Hacker and Pierson have no compunctions in arguing that the
current Republican hegemony is dangerous, and needs to be rolled
back."
Read the
whole review at "Crooked Timber:
October 5, 2005 -- 10:38:19 AM EST
Who's Running the Show?
We are fans of James Thurber (the political scientist at American University, not the late, great New Yorker writer and cartoonist). But, as we said here yesterday, and in today's Washington
Post, we disagree with his assessment that "Tom DeLay was like Tito in Yugoslavia. He ruled with fear and also resources to reward people. Now without DeLay, the House will be balkanized."
DeLay certainly ruled with fear and resources. But the GOP caucus is more like the politburo than the internally fractured Yugoslav state. And it's going to take a lot more than losing DeLay for true balkanization to set in.
Read the entire thread at TPMCafe
Sep 30, 2005 -- 10:28:19 AM EST
Without Further DeLay?
There will be a lot of speculation today about the meaning of David Dreier's very short-lived promotion. Blunt's triumph will be taken as many things: a sign of his very DeLay-like advanced planning and quick footwork in lining up support within the GOP caucus; an indication that DeLay is done, not just on vacation; and, not least, evidence of the mounting frustration of many of the most conservative members of the caucus, particularly around issues of spending.
It may well be all these things, but it is mostly just business as usual.
Read the entire thread at TPMCafe
Sep 29, 2005 -- 09:40:27 AM EST
