Baseballot has been relatively quiet this month, but never fear, it's not from a lack of writing. I've had a few pieces published by other outlets that are also worth highlighting here:
In Grantland last week, I shared my musings and recap of the Congressional Baseball Game. In case you missed it, the Democrats won big (22–0) despite some good Republican smack talk before the game. I was able to visit with the players in their clubhouses and on the field and got some good color for the game.
On The Atlas Project blog, Karyn Bruggeman and I preview the Massachusetts Senate special election. Our conclusion? Anyone holding onto the notion that Gabriel Gómez can win is kidding themselves. We dig deeper into the data than just looking at polls to prove it. (This follows on the heels of my Massachusetts Senate primary preview in The Atlantic back in April.)
Please click through and enjoy! I'll get back to posting in this space soon.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
LBJ for President in 2016!—But Which One?
Technically, on the calendar 2016 is still three years away. But the campaign for the next president of the United States? Based on the last few cycles, that's likely to be up and running by June 2015—in other words, less than 24 months from today.
When Hillary Clinton inevitably declines to run (more on that in a later post), Democrats will scramble to find a favorite candidate. Since ideology will be (almost) irrelevant, they'll turn to other criteria to choose. Charisma will be important, of course; it's how President Obama was elected. But if every president is a reaction to the previous president, Democrats will look at their outgoing candidate and seek to improve upon him. And if there has been one complaint from the left about President Obama, it's that he has failed in schmoozing and wheeling and dealing with Congress. In other words, he has a great agenda, but he hasn't been effective at pushing it through.
The 2016 primary field will probably feature two candidates for whom effective legislative wrangling is a specialty: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. To an electorate of liberals frustrated at the lack of progress on the national stage, these two will be able to say they passed a smorgasbord of liberal dream bills in their respective states. As president, they'll succeed where Obama failed, the narrative will go: they're Obama 2.0, the right ideas now upgraded with the legislative savvy to get them passed.
The similarities between Cuomo and O'Malley are striking—and impressive. Both passed extremely strict gun-control laws, proving adept at turning the post-Newtown mood into results. They've both also legalized gay marriage in their states despite historical opposition. And each has a long list of lower-profile, but equally substantive, other accomplishments.
But 2016 primary voters will be interested in their differences, not their similarities. Which of these two second comings of the Master of the Senate will make a better president? I'm certainly not going to pretend to know the answer to that, but voters might decide one of them is closer to their personal tastes once we pick apart their personal styles of governing.
The son of a former governor, Andrew Cuomo knew what he was getting into when he was elected in 2010; East Coast bias notwithstanding, the New York legislature has an unparalleled reputation for ruthlessness and gridlock. To break through it, Cuomo's preferred style has proven to be brute force. His willingness to wade in and get himself dirty with sausage-making residue paid immediate dividends: his first legislative session, in 2011, was one of the most productive in New York history. The highlight of that session was the vote to legalize gay marriage in New York—a proposition that had failed just two years earlier under largely similar political conditions. As we stand today, Albany has now passed a budget on time for three years in a row—all three years of Cuomo's governorship—for the first time since 1984.
Cuomo accomplished all this with a mastery of backroom deal-brokering. His philosophy is one of consultation and making legislative partners feel invested because they have been a part of the process from the beginning. To aid in this, Cuomo has the old politicians' touch at building relationships—one-on-one meetings, birthday and anniversary wishes, and tons and tons of phone calls. On gay marriage, one senator switched his vote to "yes" after he said Cuomo called him so often that he was sick of hearing from the governor. Indeed, when the going gets tough, Cuomo isn't afraid to hound legislators until he gets what he wants.
And, of course, those legislators are much more likely to listen if the governor hounding them is a strong executive: a Democrat in a Democratic state with the power of the people behind him. Cuomo has proven politically competent at not only maintaining a high approval rating—it's been in the 60s for years now, and the lowest it's ever been measured at is 55%—but also wielding his popularity as political capital. To help grease the wheels for gay marriage, he orchestrated grassroots campaigns in the home districts of the state senators he was trying to sway. His campaign operation succeeded at mobilizing pro-marriage-equality voters to the point where they too were flooding their legislators with calls, letters, and email. He cultivated favors from legislators by campaigning for them, but he also reportedly threatened to personally campaign in the hometowns of anyone who voted against his tax-reform bill.
Indeed, Cuomo has a knack for knowing when to balance the carrot with the stick. His popularity helps him convince fencesitters that his policies are popular too and that they would do well to get on board with them. Even Republicans beg for scraps at his table, thanks to Cuomo's unprecedented (for a Democrat) popularity in reddish Upstate New York. But his popularity also serves as a subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) threat. Not only are endangered incumbents motivated to earn his endorsement, but they're also actively afraid of not getting it. His popularity is an insurance policy against Democrats falling out of line, and, to Republicans, it sends a clear signal that they would be unwise to attack him or his policies too directly. Cuomo's got the best combination a politician could ask for: loved by the people, feared by his colleagues.
Another talent of Cuomo's has been the ability to get results fast. According to one political strategist, his MO is to "announce victory, stand with the partners in a room—and then they work out the details later." Nowhere was Cuomo's efficiency at governing on better display than when New York became the first state to pass gun-control legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Using a common emergency procedure known as "message of necessity," Cuomo was able to push the bill to the floor and get it passed without any hearings, testimony, etc., on only the second day of the legislative session. In the State Senate, the bill passed 43–18. Twelve Republicans were among the ayes, allegedly because Cuomo threatened to annul the power-sharing agreement that had given the GOP control of the divided State Senate.
But there is a dark side to these methods by Cuomo. The same arm-twisting that gets results also can leave legislators and colleagues sore. For instance, some conservatives believe that Cuomo's gun-control law is unconstitutional because he used the emergency "message of necessity" procedure in a non-emergency. Despite campaigning on a promise of transparency in government, Cuomo has also presided over one of the most secretive administrations in New York history. It's the flip side of his ability to get things done quickly; he tends to run silent on issues for a while and then emerge with a finished product that's already halfway to being passed. (This is almost the exact opposite of President Obama, who releases proposals far in advance and then gives the public a front-row seat to a protracted negotiation process with congressional Republicans. It's this excruciating sausage-making that has given rise to his reputation as a poor finisher. When Cuomo defends his methods, it's almost a slap to Obama's: "Normally when we release bill language before an agreement, the probability of that bill passing is very, very low...in my experience [it] polarizes the parties.") He's also not eager for the public to glimpse the process even after the fact; his office has been accused of editing and removing public records from Cuomo's tenure as state attorney general. If Cuomo runs for president, the adjective "Nixonian" will almost certainly come up, and while Cuomo's backroom tactics do seem to be the most effective way to get things done, one wonders if they'll trip him up as president.
The longer Cuomo's stay in Albany has stretched on, the more feathers he has appeared to ruffle. He has a poor relationship with arguably the most important politician in his state, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he recently made headlines for disparaging the possible next mayor, Anthony Weiner. If true, his worst misstep may be working behind the scenes to oust longtime Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver—one of Albany's most powerful politicians. (Needless to say, if a governor tries to engineer a coup against a leader within his own party and fails, he can kiss his legislative agenda goodbye.) And it takes a special kind of confidence—some would say arrogance—to publicly suggest a major overhaul to the way the state legislature is set up. For all his successes, Cuomo doesn't seem—to the naked eye anyway—to be very diplomatic about his professional relationships. As a governor, you might be able to get away with living on the edge like that, but will it fly under the harsher spotlight and higher stakes of the national stage?
For Democratic primary voters, there's also another angle to consider. Cuomo has excelled at getting liberal bills through a divided legislature, yes—but he has also excelled at getting surprisingly conservative policies passed in a very blue state. Among his seemingly impossible accomplishments: he has almost disappeared the New York state deficit (from $10 billion to under $1 billion today) by cutting spending and cutting taxes, and he got a public-employee union to cave and accept a package of wage and benefit cuts just five weeks after rejecting it. Both of these speak to extraordinary negotiating skill, but Democrats could be forgiven for wondering what good that power is if it's used for "evil." If Cuomo does run for president, in a Democratic primary he will doubtlessly pledge to push exclusively for progressive priorities, but he'll face questions over a past that has proven he is emphatically not a party man. In many Democrats' eyes, his biggest sin was praising and even endorsing the 2012 candidacies of two Republican state senators who had been helpful to him—despite Democrats having a very real shot at seizing control of the New York Senate. This has already earned him the enmity of many activists on the left as well as the bitterness of New York Democrats who did not enjoy his support.
But ideology isn't the focus of this compare-and-contrast piece; methods are. And it's entirely possible that Cuomo's moderate streak doesn't represent his true feelings, but rather just his acknowledgment of political reality. Another of Cuomo's secrets to passing a too-liberal-to-be-true agenda is his willingness to horse-trade. Cuomo got his minimum-wage increase in exchange for a tax cut. He got pension reform in exchange for a Republican-friendly redistricting map. And New Yorkers wouldn't have gay marriage today if Cuomo hadn't promised to give electoral cover to Republicans who supported it. The specifics of the final gay-marriage bill were also the result of some intense haggling between Cuomo and the specific Republican legislators he targeted for conversion—that's why it actually includes a religious exemption. This may be none too pleasing to Democratic primary voters, but it shows an uncanny ability to compromise and extract concessions from across the aisle. Clearly, this is something Washington desperately needs right now. Liberals may want to face the possibility that the only way meaningful progressive legislation can pass in DC is the way it passed in Albany: by making a deal with the devil.
Clearly Andrew Cuomo is a complicated and controversial figure; national Democrats can be forgiven for viewing him "with a combination of grudging admiration and cautious suspicion," as one put it. He possesses all the seminal skills of a virtuoso politician and has parlayed them into being one of the best governors in the country. He is driven solely by a desire to get results and make a difference—and will do it by any means necessary. He's pragmatic to the point where he is just as satisfied pushing conservative solutions as liberal ones. He's prone to making enemies and is not afraid to fight below the belt. And if governing opaquely is the only way to get stuff done, then so be it.
But despite what some would call a slightly authoritarian method and style, Cuomo has faced remarkably little backlash. His popularity remains through the roof, suggesting it might just be the medicine voters want or need. Certainly, President Cuomo wouldn't shrink at trying every trick in the book to coax action out of the US Congress. There can be no one more qualified to get the wheels of government moving again despite a hostile environment. And, crucially, he has mastered the art of manipulating a legislature controlled by the opposite party.
That's not something Martin O'Malley can say in Maryland, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. Yet O'Malley has been able to rattle off a list of legislative accomplishments just as long as, and even more liberal than, Cuomo's. O'Malley's approach has been much more like a courtship; first elected governor in 2006, O'Malley made incremental progress in his state for several years, building up relationships and credibility. His most productive legislative session was his seventh—the most recent one, here in 2013. In addition to passing gun control, the 90-day session this winter increased the gas tax, repealed the death penalty, legalized medical marijuana, expanded early voting, instituted same-day voter registration, closed a corporate campaign-finance loophole, gave illegal immigrants driver's licenses, and incentivized the use of renewable energy. No, it's not Liberal Nirvana. It's just Maryland.
Unlike in New York, however, all these initiatives were not noteworthy for how quickly they passed, but rather for how leisurely the path to them was. While these bills all passed during one extraordinary legislative session, in another way they were all seven years in the making. That's reflective of O'Malley's willingness—in contrast to Cuomo—to let the legislative procedure play out. Most of the bills above went through extensive debate and public commenting—and were stronger for it. True, a few bills, such as medical marijuana, were watered down; the State Senate also chose to accept the House of Delegates's minor changes to the gun-control legislation so as not to risk the bill's overall passage. And, just like in New York, the deciding votes on gay marriage were obtained by including a religious exemption. However, O'Malley was able to keep the changes from being so great that progressives would cry foul. As a result, not only did these measures all pass, but most of them did so comfortably and with little controversy. Medical marijuana passed the State Senate 42–4; the voting-reform bill passed it 38–9. By taking the time to listen and respect the process, O'Malley actually decreased the acrimony in government that so many bemoan these days—while still successfully enacting some very progressive laws.
In fact, moving deliberately was a crucial part of O'Malley's strategy on at least one bill, the death penalty. The longer that the issue was in the political spotlight, the more opponents were led to doubt their position on it. O'Malley and his supporters unleashed a slow and steady education campaign that emphasized the lack of evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent as well as the risks of executing an innocent person. Where Cuomo buffaloes legislators to get what he wants, O'Malley is content to wear them down—with equally good results.
It's probably unsurprising, then, that O'Malley has stronger, more trusting relationships with legislators than Cuomo is reputed to have. House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch and Senate President Mike Miller (both Democrats) have both proven helpful allies to the governor, whose charisma has endeared him to many in Annapolis. Comparing O'Malley to Cuomo, "Martin is more instantly likeable," according to former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. This fits with his style of persuasion, which is much less adversarial and more positive. O'Malley seems to believe that the most effective vote-whippers are friendly faces, such as he is to most Democrats. This also showed in how he recruited specific other friendly faces, such as the archbishop of Baltimore and the president of the NAACP, to persuade Catholic and black legislators on his death-penalty repeal. Legislators want to help O'Malley too, though. During the 2012 election, the governor built up a lot of political capital by campaigning unusually actively for a handful of liberal ballot measures, including same-sex marriage legalization and the DREAM Act. They all passed, affirming the connection between the governor and popular progressive policies.
As already alluded to, however, the big problem with praising O'Malley's nice-guy methods is that the deck was already stacked in his favor; after all, having Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the assembly isn't exactly a challenging environment for a Democratic governor. In addition, 2010 was actually a good year for Democrats in Maryland, unlike in the rest of the country; most of what O'Malley has been able to accomplish only happened after these new, friendly Democratic legislators entered office, not during the previous four years of O'Malley's governorship. His tactics may very well be too gentle to work in an environment as nasty and polarized as the US Congress.
Still, O'Malley has undeniably made the mechanisms of government budge where they weren't budging before. The gas tax, for instance, hadn't been increased in Maryland since 1992. On the death penalty, O'Malley secured the votes of veteran legislators who had voted against repeal during a previous attempt in 2009. Even gay marriage failed initially in 2011 (which, take note, is after 2010) before passing in 2012. The difference was O'Malley going beyond just giving a bill his blessing to actually attaching his name to it as a sponsor. This reportedly made the difference on gay marriage and other Round Twos by lending them the media attention that follows the governor as well as the time and efforts of the lobbyists on his staff. There may also be a benefit to drawing an issue out over many years, just as there is a benefit to drawing an issue out over many weeks: legislators have time to reflect on their votes and consider the reactions of colleagues and constituents to them. Of course, this slow way of doing business can be far from ideal when you're trying to get important policies passed, and it's the same gear-grinding that many have criticized Washington, DC, for. If O'Malley is elected president, will he face the same impatience that Barack Obama has?
A final point on the Maryland governor: O'Malley has proven effectual without being wildly popular like Cuomo. After winning reelection with 56% of the vote in 2010, he has dropped to a lukewarm approval/disapproval of 49/41. Clearly, O'Malley lacks Cuomo's magic touch with the public that has kept the latter's approval rating in the stratosphere even after passing a controversial agenda. (It is also amazing, and perhaps telling, that O'Malley has done so much national publicity, appearances on morning shows, etc., and yet he is far less widely known than Cuomo, who purposefully avoids national attention.) However, he is popular with the Democratic legislators with whom he campaigned side-by-side in 2010 (when O'Malley's reelection campaign probably helped contribute to the Democratic wave in Maryland). Overall, O'Malley is much more of a party man than Cuomo is, working well with his majorities but subject to being seen by the public as a partisan figure. For 2016 voters, this can be either a plus (he's a loyal Democrat, whereas Cuomo can be seen as wavering) or a minus (he's only equipped to succeed in blue states).
Martin O'Malley can be best described as a happy warrior. When he has a priority, he obviously leans hard to make it a reality, but he's not abrasive or molesting. He has made Maryland's government among the most liberal in the union through old-fashioned deliberate, respectful legislating. He believes in positive reenforcement and the power of a smile. Above all, perhaps, he's a hard worker, unafraid to put his legacy on the line to give good policy a better shot.
But he's also been accused of being too soft. He really has only one weapon in his arsenal—friendly persuasion—and we don't know how well he'd do if that didn't work. His résumé, while impressive, has one big hole: he has no experience working with Republicans. There seems to be little doubt that O'Malley would be an excellent president if Democrats control the House and Senate during his term, but how likely is that? Democratic primary voters will be getting something of an unknown commodity if they nominate him to spar with a divided Congress.
An unknown commodity is what President Obama was at the beginning of his term—and he has seen mixed success in bending Congress to his will. To a left wing that has felt those failures most acutely, you can bet that Andrew Cuomo and Martin O'Malley will talk up their track records as governor—quite possibly raising them above a field with less impressive CVs. But if they really are the two frontrunners in 2016, whom should you vote for?
O'Malley is the liberal you can have faith in; Cuomo is the one with the experience in divided and rough-and-tumble legislatures like Albany and the US Congress. You can have no fear that Cuomo will push his bills through by hook or by crook; you can rest easy knowing O'Malley will go about his job in a way you can be proud of.
But if you choose Cuomo, be aware that he's taken conservative turns before and could be an alienating figure in DC. And if you choose O'Malley, recognize that you're rather idealistically sending a nice guy to tame a not-so-nice city.
If 2016 does shape up to be a cagematch between Cuomo and O'Malley, Democratic voters will be deciding some age-old questions. Is it better to be feared or loved? Do nice guys really finish last? And, ultimately, do you believe civility and respect can still prevail in the US Congress, or is it time to play some hardball? Your answers to these questions do nothing less than reveal your preference for president in 2016.
When Hillary Clinton inevitably declines to run (more on that in a later post), Democrats will scramble to find a favorite candidate. Since ideology will be (almost) irrelevant, they'll turn to other criteria to choose. Charisma will be important, of course; it's how President Obama was elected. But if every president is a reaction to the previous president, Democrats will look at their outgoing candidate and seek to improve upon him. And if there has been one complaint from the left about President Obama, it's that he has failed in schmoozing and wheeling and dealing with Congress. In other words, he has a great agenda, but he hasn't been effective at pushing it through.
The 2016 primary field will probably feature two candidates for whom effective legislative wrangling is a specialty: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. To an electorate of liberals frustrated at the lack of progress on the national stage, these two will be able to say they passed a smorgasbord of liberal dream bills in their respective states. As president, they'll succeed where Obama failed, the narrative will go: they're Obama 2.0, the right ideas now upgraded with the legislative savvy to get them passed.
The similarities between Cuomo and O'Malley are striking—and impressive. Both passed extremely strict gun-control laws, proving adept at turning the post-Newtown mood into results. They've both also legalized gay marriage in their states despite historical opposition. And each has a long list of lower-profile, but equally substantive, other accomplishments.
But 2016 primary voters will be interested in their differences, not their similarities. Which of these two second comings of the Master of the Senate will make a better president? I'm certainly not going to pretend to know the answer to that, but voters might decide one of them is closer to their personal tastes once we pick apart their personal styles of governing.
The son of a former governor, Andrew Cuomo knew what he was getting into when he was elected in 2010; East Coast bias notwithstanding, the New York legislature has an unparalleled reputation for ruthlessness and gridlock. To break through it, Cuomo's preferred style has proven to be brute force. His willingness to wade in and get himself dirty with sausage-making residue paid immediate dividends: his first legislative session, in 2011, was one of the most productive in New York history. The highlight of that session was the vote to legalize gay marriage in New York—a proposition that had failed just two years earlier under largely similar political conditions. As we stand today, Albany has now passed a budget on time for three years in a row—all three years of Cuomo's governorship—for the first time since 1984.
Cuomo accomplished all this with a mastery of backroom deal-brokering. His philosophy is one of consultation and making legislative partners feel invested because they have been a part of the process from the beginning. To aid in this, Cuomo has the old politicians' touch at building relationships—one-on-one meetings, birthday and anniversary wishes, and tons and tons of phone calls. On gay marriage, one senator switched his vote to "yes" after he said Cuomo called him so often that he was sick of hearing from the governor. Indeed, when the going gets tough, Cuomo isn't afraid to hound legislators until he gets what he wants.
And, of course, those legislators are much more likely to listen if the governor hounding them is a strong executive: a Democrat in a Democratic state with the power of the people behind him. Cuomo has proven politically competent at not only maintaining a high approval rating—it's been in the 60s for years now, and the lowest it's ever been measured at is 55%—but also wielding his popularity as political capital. To help grease the wheels for gay marriage, he orchestrated grassroots campaigns in the home districts of the state senators he was trying to sway. His campaign operation succeeded at mobilizing pro-marriage-equality voters to the point where they too were flooding their legislators with calls, letters, and email. He cultivated favors from legislators by campaigning for them, but he also reportedly threatened to personally campaign in the hometowns of anyone who voted against his tax-reform bill.
Indeed, Cuomo has a knack for knowing when to balance the carrot with the stick. His popularity helps him convince fencesitters that his policies are popular too and that they would do well to get on board with them. Even Republicans beg for scraps at his table, thanks to Cuomo's unprecedented (for a Democrat) popularity in reddish Upstate New York. But his popularity also serves as a subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) threat. Not only are endangered incumbents motivated to earn his endorsement, but they're also actively afraid of not getting it. His popularity is an insurance policy against Democrats falling out of line, and, to Republicans, it sends a clear signal that they would be unwise to attack him or his policies too directly. Cuomo's got the best combination a politician could ask for: loved by the people, feared by his colleagues.
Another talent of Cuomo's has been the ability to get results fast. According to one political strategist, his MO is to "announce victory, stand with the partners in a room—and then they work out the details later." Nowhere was Cuomo's efficiency at governing on better display than when New York became the first state to pass gun-control legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Using a common emergency procedure known as "message of necessity," Cuomo was able to push the bill to the floor and get it passed without any hearings, testimony, etc., on only the second day of the legislative session. In the State Senate, the bill passed 43–18. Twelve Republicans were among the ayes, allegedly because Cuomo threatened to annul the power-sharing agreement that had given the GOP control of the divided State Senate.
But there is a dark side to these methods by Cuomo. The same arm-twisting that gets results also can leave legislators and colleagues sore. For instance, some conservatives believe that Cuomo's gun-control law is unconstitutional because he used the emergency "message of necessity" procedure in a non-emergency. Despite campaigning on a promise of transparency in government, Cuomo has also presided over one of the most secretive administrations in New York history. It's the flip side of his ability to get things done quickly; he tends to run silent on issues for a while and then emerge with a finished product that's already halfway to being passed. (This is almost the exact opposite of President Obama, who releases proposals far in advance and then gives the public a front-row seat to a protracted negotiation process with congressional Republicans. It's this excruciating sausage-making that has given rise to his reputation as a poor finisher. When Cuomo defends his methods, it's almost a slap to Obama's: "Normally when we release bill language before an agreement, the probability of that bill passing is very, very low...in my experience [it] polarizes the parties.") He's also not eager for the public to glimpse the process even after the fact; his office has been accused of editing and removing public records from Cuomo's tenure as state attorney general. If Cuomo runs for president, the adjective "Nixonian" will almost certainly come up, and while Cuomo's backroom tactics do seem to be the most effective way to get things done, one wonders if they'll trip him up as president.
The longer Cuomo's stay in Albany has stretched on, the more feathers he has appeared to ruffle. He has a poor relationship with arguably the most important politician in his state, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he recently made headlines for disparaging the possible next mayor, Anthony Weiner. If true, his worst misstep may be working behind the scenes to oust longtime Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver—one of Albany's most powerful politicians. (Needless to say, if a governor tries to engineer a coup against a leader within his own party and fails, he can kiss his legislative agenda goodbye.) And it takes a special kind of confidence—some would say arrogance—to publicly suggest a major overhaul to the way the state legislature is set up. For all his successes, Cuomo doesn't seem—to the naked eye anyway—to be very diplomatic about his professional relationships. As a governor, you might be able to get away with living on the edge like that, but will it fly under the harsher spotlight and higher stakes of the national stage?
For Democratic primary voters, there's also another angle to consider. Cuomo has excelled at getting liberal bills through a divided legislature, yes—but he has also excelled at getting surprisingly conservative policies passed in a very blue state. Among his seemingly impossible accomplishments: he has almost disappeared the New York state deficit (from $10 billion to under $1 billion today) by cutting spending and cutting taxes, and he got a public-employee union to cave and accept a package of wage and benefit cuts just five weeks after rejecting it. Both of these speak to extraordinary negotiating skill, but Democrats could be forgiven for wondering what good that power is if it's used for "evil." If Cuomo does run for president, in a Democratic primary he will doubtlessly pledge to push exclusively for progressive priorities, but he'll face questions over a past that has proven he is emphatically not a party man. In many Democrats' eyes, his biggest sin was praising and even endorsing the 2012 candidacies of two Republican state senators who had been helpful to him—despite Democrats having a very real shot at seizing control of the New York Senate. This has already earned him the enmity of many activists on the left as well as the bitterness of New York Democrats who did not enjoy his support.
But ideology isn't the focus of this compare-and-contrast piece; methods are. And it's entirely possible that Cuomo's moderate streak doesn't represent his true feelings, but rather just his acknowledgment of political reality. Another of Cuomo's secrets to passing a too-liberal-to-be-true agenda is his willingness to horse-trade. Cuomo got his minimum-wage increase in exchange for a tax cut. He got pension reform in exchange for a Republican-friendly redistricting map. And New Yorkers wouldn't have gay marriage today if Cuomo hadn't promised to give electoral cover to Republicans who supported it. The specifics of the final gay-marriage bill were also the result of some intense haggling between Cuomo and the specific Republican legislators he targeted for conversion—that's why it actually includes a religious exemption. This may be none too pleasing to Democratic primary voters, but it shows an uncanny ability to compromise and extract concessions from across the aisle. Clearly, this is something Washington desperately needs right now. Liberals may want to face the possibility that the only way meaningful progressive legislation can pass in DC is the way it passed in Albany: by making a deal with the devil.
Clearly Andrew Cuomo is a complicated and controversial figure; national Democrats can be forgiven for viewing him "with a combination of grudging admiration and cautious suspicion," as one put it. He possesses all the seminal skills of a virtuoso politician and has parlayed them into being one of the best governors in the country. He is driven solely by a desire to get results and make a difference—and will do it by any means necessary. He's pragmatic to the point where he is just as satisfied pushing conservative solutions as liberal ones. He's prone to making enemies and is not afraid to fight below the belt. And if governing opaquely is the only way to get stuff done, then so be it.
But despite what some would call a slightly authoritarian method and style, Cuomo has faced remarkably little backlash. His popularity remains through the roof, suggesting it might just be the medicine voters want or need. Certainly, President Cuomo wouldn't shrink at trying every trick in the book to coax action out of the US Congress. There can be no one more qualified to get the wheels of government moving again despite a hostile environment. And, crucially, he has mastered the art of manipulating a legislature controlled by the opposite party.
That's not something Martin O'Malley can say in Maryland, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. Yet O'Malley has been able to rattle off a list of legislative accomplishments just as long as, and even more liberal than, Cuomo's. O'Malley's approach has been much more like a courtship; first elected governor in 2006, O'Malley made incremental progress in his state for several years, building up relationships and credibility. His most productive legislative session was his seventh—the most recent one, here in 2013. In addition to passing gun control, the 90-day session this winter increased the gas tax, repealed the death penalty, legalized medical marijuana, expanded early voting, instituted same-day voter registration, closed a corporate campaign-finance loophole, gave illegal immigrants driver's licenses, and incentivized the use of renewable energy. No, it's not Liberal Nirvana. It's just Maryland.
Unlike in New York, however, all these initiatives were not noteworthy for how quickly they passed, but rather for how leisurely the path to them was. While these bills all passed during one extraordinary legislative session, in another way they were all seven years in the making. That's reflective of O'Malley's willingness—in contrast to Cuomo—to let the legislative procedure play out. Most of the bills above went through extensive debate and public commenting—and were stronger for it. True, a few bills, such as medical marijuana, were watered down; the State Senate also chose to accept the House of Delegates's minor changes to the gun-control legislation so as not to risk the bill's overall passage. And, just like in New York, the deciding votes on gay marriage were obtained by including a religious exemption. However, O'Malley was able to keep the changes from being so great that progressives would cry foul. As a result, not only did these measures all pass, but most of them did so comfortably and with little controversy. Medical marijuana passed the State Senate 42–4; the voting-reform bill passed it 38–9. By taking the time to listen and respect the process, O'Malley actually decreased the acrimony in government that so many bemoan these days—while still successfully enacting some very progressive laws.
In fact, moving deliberately was a crucial part of O'Malley's strategy on at least one bill, the death penalty. The longer that the issue was in the political spotlight, the more opponents were led to doubt their position on it. O'Malley and his supporters unleashed a slow and steady education campaign that emphasized the lack of evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent as well as the risks of executing an innocent person. Where Cuomo buffaloes legislators to get what he wants, O'Malley is content to wear them down—with equally good results.
It's probably unsurprising, then, that O'Malley has stronger, more trusting relationships with legislators than Cuomo is reputed to have. House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch and Senate President Mike Miller (both Democrats) have both proven helpful allies to the governor, whose charisma has endeared him to many in Annapolis. Comparing O'Malley to Cuomo, "Martin is more instantly likeable," according to former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. This fits with his style of persuasion, which is much less adversarial and more positive. O'Malley seems to believe that the most effective vote-whippers are friendly faces, such as he is to most Democrats. This also showed in how he recruited specific other friendly faces, such as the archbishop of Baltimore and the president of the NAACP, to persuade Catholic and black legislators on his death-penalty repeal. Legislators want to help O'Malley too, though. During the 2012 election, the governor built up a lot of political capital by campaigning unusually actively for a handful of liberal ballot measures, including same-sex marriage legalization and the DREAM Act. They all passed, affirming the connection between the governor and popular progressive policies.
As already alluded to, however, the big problem with praising O'Malley's nice-guy methods is that the deck was already stacked in his favor; after all, having Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the assembly isn't exactly a challenging environment for a Democratic governor. In addition, 2010 was actually a good year for Democrats in Maryland, unlike in the rest of the country; most of what O'Malley has been able to accomplish only happened after these new, friendly Democratic legislators entered office, not during the previous four years of O'Malley's governorship. His tactics may very well be too gentle to work in an environment as nasty and polarized as the US Congress.
Still, O'Malley has undeniably made the mechanisms of government budge where they weren't budging before. The gas tax, for instance, hadn't been increased in Maryland since 1992. On the death penalty, O'Malley secured the votes of veteran legislators who had voted against repeal during a previous attempt in 2009. Even gay marriage failed initially in 2011 (which, take note, is after 2010) before passing in 2012. The difference was O'Malley going beyond just giving a bill his blessing to actually attaching his name to it as a sponsor. This reportedly made the difference on gay marriage and other Round Twos by lending them the media attention that follows the governor as well as the time and efforts of the lobbyists on his staff. There may also be a benefit to drawing an issue out over many years, just as there is a benefit to drawing an issue out over many weeks: legislators have time to reflect on their votes and consider the reactions of colleagues and constituents to them. Of course, this slow way of doing business can be far from ideal when you're trying to get important policies passed, and it's the same gear-grinding that many have criticized Washington, DC, for. If O'Malley is elected president, will he face the same impatience that Barack Obama has?
A final point on the Maryland governor: O'Malley has proven effectual without being wildly popular like Cuomo. After winning reelection with 56% of the vote in 2010, he has dropped to a lukewarm approval/disapproval of 49/41. Clearly, O'Malley lacks Cuomo's magic touch with the public that has kept the latter's approval rating in the stratosphere even after passing a controversial agenda. (It is also amazing, and perhaps telling, that O'Malley has done so much national publicity, appearances on morning shows, etc., and yet he is far less widely known than Cuomo, who purposefully avoids national attention.) However, he is popular with the Democratic legislators with whom he campaigned side-by-side in 2010 (when O'Malley's reelection campaign probably helped contribute to the Democratic wave in Maryland). Overall, O'Malley is much more of a party man than Cuomo is, working well with his majorities but subject to being seen by the public as a partisan figure. For 2016 voters, this can be either a plus (he's a loyal Democrat, whereas Cuomo can be seen as wavering) or a minus (he's only equipped to succeed in blue states).
Martin O'Malley can be best described as a happy warrior. When he has a priority, he obviously leans hard to make it a reality, but he's not abrasive or molesting. He has made Maryland's government among the most liberal in the union through old-fashioned deliberate, respectful legislating. He believes in positive reenforcement and the power of a smile. Above all, perhaps, he's a hard worker, unafraid to put his legacy on the line to give good policy a better shot.
But he's also been accused of being too soft. He really has only one weapon in his arsenal—friendly persuasion—and we don't know how well he'd do if that didn't work. His résumé, while impressive, has one big hole: he has no experience working with Republicans. There seems to be little doubt that O'Malley would be an excellent president if Democrats control the House and Senate during his term, but how likely is that? Democratic primary voters will be getting something of an unknown commodity if they nominate him to spar with a divided Congress.
An unknown commodity is what President Obama was at the beginning of his term—and he has seen mixed success in bending Congress to his will. To a left wing that has felt those failures most acutely, you can bet that Andrew Cuomo and Martin O'Malley will talk up their track records as governor—quite possibly raising them above a field with less impressive CVs. But if they really are the two frontrunners in 2016, whom should you vote for?
O'Malley is the liberal you can have faith in; Cuomo is the one with the experience in divided and rough-and-tumble legislatures like Albany and the US Congress. You can have no fear that Cuomo will push his bills through by hook or by crook; you can rest easy knowing O'Malley will go about his job in a way you can be proud of.
But if you choose Cuomo, be aware that he's taken conservative turns before and could be an alienating figure in DC. And if you choose O'Malley, recognize that you're rather idealistically sending a nice guy to tame a not-so-nice city.
If 2016 does shape up to be a cagematch between Cuomo and O'Malley, Democratic voters will be deciding some age-old questions. Is it better to be feared or loved? Do nice guys really finish last? And, ultimately, do you believe civility and respect can still prevail in the US Congress, or is it time to play some hardball? Your answers to these questions do nothing less than reveal your preference for president in 2016.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Leading Los Angeles
Ever met the president? Your US senator? Your congressman? Didn't think so.
What about your mayor or local officials? That's a lot more likely, and that's reassuring. Most of the policy that affects you in your day-to-day life is probably made on the state or municipal level. I've long advocated for a predominantly "local-out" view of politics, and I'd argue that mayoral elections are more important than most others, even on the federal level—possibly second only to the presidential.
If I'm right, we have an extremely important election coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, May 21, when the second-biggest city in the US will choose its first new mayor in eight years. Los Angeles actually had its initial mayoral election on March 5, but like many cities' elections, the race is thrown to a runoff if no candidate reaches 50%. Tuesday will be that runoff, pitting the top two candidates against one another for the big prize. The winner will have some large—and larger-than-life—shoes to fill, as the term-limited, outgoing mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is a popular showman and potential candidate for higher office.
Although Los Angeles municipal elections are technically nonpartisan, both qualifying candidates ally themselves with the Democratic Party. Forty-two-year-old Eric Garcetti has served on the LA City Council since 2001 and as president of the council since 2006. The son of a former DA, he is an impressive mishmash of local ethnicities, including being both Mexican-American and Jewish.
Voters' alternative is Wendy Greuel, who has worn many hats in municipal government: city councilor, mayoral aide, and, currently, city controller (meaning she has won a citywide election before). She also has some serious connections—to Bill Clinton, in whose administration she worked, and to Hollywood, having worked as a studio executive at Dreamworks. She has the endorsements of both Clinton and Steven Spielberg. Greuel is white but would break barriers in other ways: she'd be Tinseltown's first female mayor.
In an environment where the two candidates agree on almost all the actual issues, the "issues" the race has been fought over have been rather superficial. Mainly, the campaign has been about who is supposedly in the pocket of which special interest—and, with the amount of independent spending the election has seen, this has resonated with voters. (I highly recommend this excellent graphic from the Los Angeles Times to see exactly which interest groups are spending for whom.) The knock against Garcetti has been that he is a little too close for comfort with big business—but by far the biggest shadow in the race has been cast by unions, who have spent overwhelmingly for Greuel. They have accounted for almost $6 million of the $7.7 million that has been raised by pro-Greuel super PACs. (In contrast, pro-Garcetti outside groups have raised only $2.7 million.) While this has led to a very effective line of attack against Greuel—that she has been bought by union interests—the outside spending has also kept her mayoral chances afloat. Although Garcetti's ($8.1 million) and Greuel's ($7.1 million) campaign committees have raised roughly comparable sums, Greuel's campaign has virtually run out of money here in the final stretch.
Other controversies have flowed out from these union connections. Greuel's union allies have taken fire for distributing flyers and circulating sound trucks in Hispanic neighborhoods that claim Greuel supports a $15 minimum wage. In reality, that wage proposal would only apply to hotel workers, but that was allegedly unclear the way the unions phrased it—perhaps, opponents claim, purposefully trying to mislead LA's Hispanic poor. However, it's not clear if this tactic has backfired on Greuel.
A final manufactured "issue" that is unlikely to make a difference is the still-extant division between Obama Democrats and Hillary Clinton Democrats. Mirroring an internal dynamic that has played itself out in other Democratic primaries, Garcetti supported the president early in the 2008 primaries, while Greuel was behind Clinton. Garcetti has trumpeted his friendship with Obama all campaign long, but with no endorsement and with Greuel obviously now an Obama supporter as well, too much has changed in five years to make that predictive in any way.
So who has come out on top of all this? In the March 5 primary that winnowed the field, Garcetti received 33.1% of the vote, 29.0% went to Greuel, and other, eliminated candidates amassed the remaining 37.9%. Since then, Garcetti has averaged a similar overall lead in polling, although for a period of about two weeks, the candidates were essentially tied (and may still be, depending on how you view a USC Price/LA Times poll released last Friday):
The narrative of the race—which, as we all know, can diverge from the data—has generally been that of a Garcetti campaign on cruise control while Greuel has stumbled. In late March, her bid was seen in chaos when four prominent members of her team left the campaign. More generally, Greuel is seen as the candidate of more dispassionate, moderate voters, while Garcetti is the "Obama-esque candidate" of young activists and Hispanics.
There's a lot more ambiguity when you actually get into it, however. A SurveyUSA poll found that all age groups were split right down the middle in their support. That poll also found that white and Hispanic voters tend to back Garcetti, with African-Americans and Asians behind Greuel—except another poll found that Garcetti's core groups were Asians and Latinos, while Greuel held leads with whites and blacks. That poll, in turn, found a strong gender gap in favor of Greuel—but the most recent poll found Garcetti ahead with the fairer sex. And finally, all three polls showed that it's actually Garcetti, by a comfortable margin, who is the preferred candidate of Angeleno Republicans.
How much do each of these groups matter in assembling a winning coalition, and where are they all concentrated? Let's take a tour of the city to get acquainted with its demographic layout. According to the American Community Survey, the City of Los Angeles is 48.1% Hispanic or Latino, 28.9% white, 11.4% Asian, and 9.6% black or African-American. As the home of almost four million people, Los Angeles has among the most complex political geography you can have in only 469 square miles, so we'll keep our characterizations on the simple side. (For intricate detail on each of LA's diverse neighborhoods, check out the Los Angeles Times's great "Mapping LA" project.)
Look at a map of the Los Angeles area and it's almost never clear what's actually within the City of Los Angeles. Often treated like their own cities, "suburbs" like Hollywood and Pacific Palisades are actually neighborhoods within the LA city limits. Meanwhile, places like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and a couple others that appear to be in the heart of Los Angeles are actually their own cities—enclaves completely surrounded by the main city. For greatest ease, let's start in Central LA, which is almost certainly where the big letters reading "LOS ANGELES" are on your aforementioned map. Slightly inland, Central LA is extremely diverse, both ethnically and socioeconomically, but it is also solidly blue. Comfortable members of the creative class make their homes in Hollywood Hills and Silver Lake (home of Eric Garcetti), voting Democrat in keeping with their artsiness; moneyed residents of Fairfax and Hancock Park vote Republican in keeping with their wealth. However, a vast majority of this district's vote is in the areas where poverty reigns without prejudice: between the skyscrapers of Downtown (a sizable black community), below the calligraphied signs of Koreatown (a pocket of Asian immigrants), and amid the smell of ethnic food in Westlake (home of many Latinos, who also make up pluralities in most of Central LA's other neighborhoods). Even glamorous Hollywood is home to a mostly poor population (though it is whiter than its aforementioned eastern neighbors). Like the rest of America's urban poor, these people are reliable Democratic votes. Furthermore, since many of them are Latino and are represented by him on the city council, they probably favor Garcetti—at least they did in March. However, this is one area where Greuel and her union supporters are hoping to make inroads; they are airing negative ads against Garcetti aimed at Latinos, and these poor neighborhoods are the ones where the minimum-wage promises—real or not—could change some minds.
West of Central LA, extending all the way to the Pacific, is what's known as the Westside. In a way, the Westside is an extension of Hancock Park or Silver Lake in its political tastes: well-educated, middle- and upper-class voters who tend to vote for Democrats. Intellectual Westwood, where UCLA is, is in this area; so is Venice Beach, which retains its hippie vibe. The Westside is also home to fiscally conservative but socially liberal voters in affluent communities like Pacific Palisades (usually tips Democrat) and Westchester (usually tips Republican). Garcetti, seen as a pro-business Democrat, is a great fit for this area. Look for him to build upon his already-respectable showing here in the primary.
East of Central LA, on the other hand, is the correspondingly named Eastside, along with Northeast LA to, um, the northeast. Uncorrespondingly, these areas are almost completely Latino—and thus all voted strongly for Garcetti in March. However, the area isn't entirely monolithic. Within this strip of land, from Eagle Rock in the north to Boyle Heights in the south, incomes tend to drop as you go south. This means the Eastside generally might be fertile ground for Greuel to steal away some Garcetti base votes as she's trying to do in Central LA. However, well-off Latinos in Northeast LA probably are lost causes for her—they can relate so strongly to Garcetti.
To the south is the historically African-American district of South Los Angeles. Much of what's left of LA's black population still resides here, especially in western neighborhoods like Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw and Hyde Park, but overall this is another heavily Hispanic area. More relevantly, it is among the most dangerous, poorest, least educated urban areas in the nation—famous to the rest of us as South Central LA (home of the Watts district). Another Democratic stronghold, it's unclear which Democrat it will favor on Tuesday; in March, it sided decisively with its city councilor, Jan Perry, who finished fourth overall. Perry endorsed Garcetti after losing, and certainly it makes sense that the Hispanic vote here will go to him. However, polls agree that African-Americans are in Greuel's corner this time around, and blacks in this area have shown a reluctance to vote for Hispanic candidates in past mayoral elections. South LA should be competitive, and Greuel's people will certainly be looking at their margins here on election night—as should you.
From South LA, a thin strip of land that is still the City of Los Angeles slithers south past Torrance and Compton, all the way to the ocean, where it widens and becomes the Harbor district. This near-exclave is home to the middle class of all races, and it is also more politically diverse than the neighborhoods we've covered so far. For instance, the plurality-Hispanic Wilmington neighborhood is mostly Democratic, but the seaside San Pedro actually boasts a respectable Republican population. This area will probably be a wash; perhaps a slight Garcetti advantage won't matter because the vote share here is the lowest of the six regions we're touring today.
Thus far, it's seemed like most neighborhoods have been all Garcetti, all the time—and that's certainly a testament to his frontrunner status. However, I've saved the biggest region for last. The San Fernando Valley sprawls massively to the north of the Westside and northwest of Central LA; depending on turnout, it probably holds from 40% to 50% of the Los Angeles vote share. The Valley is the suburban purgatory that everyone pictures when they think of LA. With so many people, it also features quite a few political opinions, although on the whole it's the most conservative/moderate area in the city. Like most of suburbia, it is also solidly middle class, although you can certainly find both extremes here too. Garcetti did just OK in the Valley, running strongest in the chain of middle-class Hispanic communities on its east edge (e.g., Pacoima, Sun Valley, North Hollywood, as well as more westerly Reseda) that are the Valley's most consistent sources of Democratic votes. Then, on the Valley's western edge, you'll find LA's well-hidden Republican voters. Rich neighborhoods like Woodland Hills and Porter Ranch were where Republican Kevin James got his 16.3% of the vote in the March election; now those votes are up for grabs. Maybe, as the polls indicate, they'll switch allegiances to Garcetti—but maybe they'll also look to their neighbors for inspiration and go Greuel. Wendy's support was widespread across San Fernando, basically picking up any votes that didn't go James west of the 405 and any votes that didn't go Garcetti east of the 405. She won most of the precincts in the Valley in March and did particularly well near her home in Studio City. She should win them again tomorrow, but, in what is clearly a pretty politically balanced region, by how much? Like in South LA, she'll need to win convincingly here to make up for deficits elsewhere in the city.
So can Wendy Greuel convert enough inner-city votes? Who wins the conservative floaters, especially in the Valley? How decisive will the black vote be? The way you see each of these questions resolving says a lot about how you think the results will shake out tomorrow night.
Personally, I buy into a picture painted by the most recent USC Price/LA Times poll. That survey, which had Garcetti up by seven points, showed that Greuel was weak—even losing to Garcetti—on her supposed home turf in the Valley. The poll's sponsors postulated that Greuel's associations with unions were undermining her support among this relatively conservative bloc—certainly plausible, given how the campaign narrative has harped on those connections. It is certainly true that Greuel has no clear path to victory without the Valley, her most natural source of votes and one of two areas where turnout is likely to be higher. (To make matters worse, the other, the Westside, is solid Garcetti territory.) Fortunately for Greuel, I do see her clinching the black vote, which should make election night more competitive. But I don't think it will be enough for her to get more than 45% of the total vote.
To be clear, though, this election remains a tossup. In a sentence, the result hinges on whether that USC Price/LA Times poll is correct or instead an outlier from a trend that theretofore had the race tied. We'll find out tomorrow night—hopefully.
What about your mayor or local officials? That's a lot more likely, and that's reassuring. Most of the policy that affects you in your day-to-day life is probably made on the state or municipal level. I've long advocated for a predominantly "local-out" view of politics, and I'd argue that mayoral elections are more important than most others, even on the federal level—possibly second only to the presidential.
If I'm right, we have an extremely important election coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, May 21, when the second-biggest city in the US will choose its first new mayor in eight years. Los Angeles actually had its initial mayoral election on March 5, but like many cities' elections, the race is thrown to a runoff if no candidate reaches 50%. Tuesday will be that runoff, pitting the top two candidates against one another for the big prize. The winner will have some large—and larger-than-life—shoes to fill, as the term-limited, outgoing mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is a popular showman and potential candidate for higher office.
Although Los Angeles municipal elections are technically nonpartisan, both qualifying candidates ally themselves with the Democratic Party. Forty-two-year-old Eric Garcetti has served on the LA City Council since 2001 and as president of the council since 2006. The son of a former DA, he is an impressive mishmash of local ethnicities, including being both Mexican-American and Jewish.
Voters' alternative is Wendy Greuel, who has worn many hats in municipal government: city councilor, mayoral aide, and, currently, city controller (meaning she has won a citywide election before). She also has some serious connections—to Bill Clinton, in whose administration she worked, and to Hollywood, having worked as a studio executive at Dreamworks. She has the endorsements of both Clinton and Steven Spielberg. Greuel is white but would break barriers in other ways: she'd be Tinseltown's first female mayor.
In an environment where the two candidates agree on almost all the actual issues, the "issues" the race has been fought over have been rather superficial. Mainly, the campaign has been about who is supposedly in the pocket of which special interest—and, with the amount of independent spending the election has seen, this has resonated with voters. (I highly recommend this excellent graphic from the Los Angeles Times to see exactly which interest groups are spending for whom.) The knock against Garcetti has been that he is a little too close for comfort with big business—but by far the biggest shadow in the race has been cast by unions, who have spent overwhelmingly for Greuel. They have accounted for almost $6 million of the $7.7 million that has been raised by pro-Greuel super PACs. (In contrast, pro-Garcetti outside groups have raised only $2.7 million.) While this has led to a very effective line of attack against Greuel—that she has been bought by union interests—the outside spending has also kept her mayoral chances afloat. Although Garcetti's ($8.1 million) and Greuel's ($7.1 million) campaign committees have raised roughly comparable sums, Greuel's campaign has virtually run out of money here in the final stretch.
Other controversies have flowed out from these union connections. Greuel's union allies have taken fire for distributing flyers and circulating sound trucks in Hispanic neighborhoods that claim Greuel supports a $15 minimum wage. In reality, that wage proposal would only apply to hotel workers, but that was allegedly unclear the way the unions phrased it—perhaps, opponents claim, purposefully trying to mislead LA's Hispanic poor. However, it's not clear if this tactic has backfired on Greuel.
A final manufactured "issue" that is unlikely to make a difference is the still-extant division between Obama Democrats and Hillary Clinton Democrats. Mirroring an internal dynamic that has played itself out in other Democratic primaries, Garcetti supported the president early in the 2008 primaries, while Greuel was behind Clinton. Garcetti has trumpeted his friendship with Obama all campaign long, but with no endorsement and with Greuel obviously now an Obama supporter as well, too much has changed in five years to make that predictive in any way.
So who has come out on top of all this? In the March 5 primary that winnowed the field, Garcetti received 33.1% of the vote, 29.0% went to Greuel, and other, eliminated candidates amassed the remaining 37.9%. Since then, Garcetti has averaged a similar overall lead in polling, although for a period of about two weeks, the candidates were essentially tied (and may still be, depending on how you view a USC Price/LA Times poll released last Friday):
The narrative of the race—which, as we all know, can diverge from the data—has generally been that of a Garcetti campaign on cruise control while Greuel has stumbled. In late March, her bid was seen in chaos when four prominent members of her team left the campaign. More generally, Greuel is seen as the candidate of more dispassionate, moderate voters, while Garcetti is the "Obama-esque candidate" of young activists and Hispanics.
There's a lot more ambiguity when you actually get into it, however. A SurveyUSA poll found that all age groups were split right down the middle in their support. That poll also found that white and Hispanic voters tend to back Garcetti, with African-Americans and Asians behind Greuel—except another poll found that Garcetti's core groups were Asians and Latinos, while Greuel held leads with whites and blacks. That poll, in turn, found a strong gender gap in favor of Greuel—but the most recent poll found Garcetti ahead with the fairer sex. And finally, all three polls showed that it's actually Garcetti, by a comfortable margin, who is the preferred candidate of Angeleno Republicans.
How much do each of these groups matter in assembling a winning coalition, and where are they all concentrated? Let's take a tour of the city to get acquainted with its demographic layout. According to the American Community Survey, the City of Los Angeles is 48.1% Hispanic or Latino, 28.9% white, 11.4% Asian, and 9.6% black or African-American. As the home of almost four million people, Los Angeles has among the most complex political geography you can have in only 469 square miles, so we'll keep our characterizations on the simple side. (For intricate detail on each of LA's diverse neighborhoods, check out the Los Angeles Times's great "Mapping LA" project.)
Look at a map of the Los Angeles area and it's almost never clear what's actually within the City of Los Angeles. Often treated like their own cities, "suburbs" like Hollywood and Pacific Palisades are actually neighborhoods within the LA city limits. Meanwhile, places like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and a couple others that appear to be in the heart of Los Angeles are actually their own cities—enclaves completely surrounded by the main city. For greatest ease, let's start in Central LA, which is almost certainly where the big letters reading "LOS ANGELES" are on your aforementioned map. Slightly inland, Central LA is extremely diverse, both ethnically and socioeconomically, but it is also solidly blue. Comfortable members of the creative class make their homes in Hollywood Hills and Silver Lake (home of Eric Garcetti), voting Democrat in keeping with their artsiness; moneyed residents of Fairfax and Hancock Park vote Republican in keeping with their wealth. However, a vast majority of this district's vote is in the areas where poverty reigns without prejudice: between the skyscrapers of Downtown (a sizable black community), below the calligraphied signs of Koreatown (a pocket of Asian immigrants), and amid the smell of ethnic food in Westlake (home of many Latinos, who also make up pluralities in most of Central LA's other neighborhoods). Even glamorous Hollywood is home to a mostly poor population (though it is whiter than its aforementioned eastern neighbors). Like the rest of America's urban poor, these people are reliable Democratic votes. Furthermore, since many of them are Latino and are represented by him on the city council, they probably favor Garcetti—at least they did in March. However, this is one area where Greuel and her union supporters are hoping to make inroads; they are airing negative ads against Garcetti aimed at Latinos, and these poor neighborhoods are the ones where the minimum-wage promises—real or not—could change some minds.
West of Central LA, extending all the way to the Pacific, is what's known as the Westside. In a way, the Westside is an extension of Hancock Park or Silver Lake in its political tastes: well-educated, middle- and upper-class voters who tend to vote for Democrats. Intellectual Westwood, where UCLA is, is in this area; so is Venice Beach, which retains its hippie vibe. The Westside is also home to fiscally conservative but socially liberal voters in affluent communities like Pacific Palisades (usually tips Democrat) and Westchester (usually tips Republican). Garcetti, seen as a pro-business Democrat, is a great fit for this area. Look for him to build upon his already-respectable showing here in the primary.
East of Central LA, on the other hand, is the correspondingly named Eastside, along with Northeast LA to, um, the northeast. Uncorrespondingly, these areas are almost completely Latino—and thus all voted strongly for Garcetti in March. However, the area isn't entirely monolithic. Within this strip of land, from Eagle Rock in the north to Boyle Heights in the south, incomes tend to drop as you go south. This means the Eastside generally might be fertile ground for Greuel to steal away some Garcetti base votes as she's trying to do in Central LA. However, well-off Latinos in Northeast LA probably are lost causes for her—they can relate so strongly to Garcetti.
To the south is the historically African-American district of South Los Angeles. Much of what's left of LA's black population still resides here, especially in western neighborhoods like Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw and Hyde Park, but overall this is another heavily Hispanic area. More relevantly, it is among the most dangerous, poorest, least educated urban areas in the nation—famous to the rest of us as South Central LA (home of the Watts district). Another Democratic stronghold, it's unclear which Democrat it will favor on Tuesday; in March, it sided decisively with its city councilor, Jan Perry, who finished fourth overall. Perry endorsed Garcetti after losing, and certainly it makes sense that the Hispanic vote here will go to him. However, polls agree that African-Americans are in Greuel's corner this time around, and blacks in this area have shown a reluctance to vote for Hispanic candidates in past mayoral elections. South LA should be competitive, and Greuel's people will certainly be looking at their margins here on election night—as should you.
From South LA, a thin strip of land that is still the City of Los Angeles slithers south past Torrance and Compton, all the way to the ocean, where it widens and becomes the Harbor district. This near-exclave is home to the middle class of all races, and it is also more politically diverse than the neighborhoods we've covered so far. For instance, the plurality-Hispanic Wilmington neighborhood is mostly Democratic, but the seaside San Pedro actually boasts a respectable Republican population. This area will probably be a wash; perhaps a slight Garcetti advantage won't matter because the vote share here is the lowest of the six regions we're touring today.
Thus far, it's seemed like most neighborhoods have been all Garcetti, all the time—and that's certainly a testament to his frontrunner status. However, I've saved the biggest region for last. The San Fernando Valley sprawls massively to the north of the Westside and northwest of Central LA; depending on turnout, it probably holds from 40% to 50% of the Los Angeles vote share. The Valley is the suburban purgatory that everyone pictures when they think of LA. With so many people, it also features quite a few political opinions, although on the whole it's the most conservative/moderate area in the city. Like most of suburbia, it is also solidly middle class, although you can certainly find both extremes here too. Garcetti did just OK in the Valley, running strongest in the chain of middle-class Hispanic communities on its east edge (e.g., Pacoima, Sun Valley, North Hollywood, as well as more westerly Reseda) that are the Valley's most consistent sources of Democratic votes. Then, on the Valley's western edge, you'll find LA's well-hidden Republican voters. Rich neighborhoods like Woodland Hills and Porter Ranch were where Republican Kevin James got his 16.3% of the vote in the March election; now those votes are up for grabs. Maybe, as the polls indicate, they'll switch allegiances to Garcetti—but maybe they'll also look to their neighbors for inspiration and go Greuel. Wendy's support was widespread across San Fernando, basically picking up any votes that didn't go James west of the 405 and any votes that didn't go Garcetti east of the 405. She won most of the precincts in the Valley in March and did particularly well near her home in Studio City. She should win them again tomorrow, but, in what is clearly a pretty politically balanced region, by how much? Like in South LA, she'll need to win convincingly here to make up for deficits elsewhere in the city.
So can Wendy Greuel convert enough inner-city votes? Who wins the conservative floaters, especially in the Valley? How decisive will the black vote be? The way you see each of these questions resolving says a lot about how you think the results will shake out tomorrow night.
Personally, I buy into a picture painted by the most recent USC Price/LA Times poll. That survey, which had Garcetti up by seven points, showed that Greuel was weak—even losing to Garcetti—on her supposed home turf in the Valley. The poll's sponsors postulated that Greuel's associations with unions were undermining her support among this relatively conservative bloc—certainly plausible, given how the campaign narrative has harped on those connections. It is certainly true that Greuel has no clear path to victory without the Valley, her most natural source of votes and one of two areas where turnout is likely to be higher. (To make matters worse, the other, the Westside, is solid Garcetti territory.) Fortunately for Greuel, I do see her clinching the black vote, which should make election night more competitive. But I don't think it will be enough for her to get more than 45% of the total vote.
To be clear, though, this election remains a tossup. In a sentence, the result hinges on whether that USC Price/LA Times poll is correct or instead an outlier from a trend that theretofore had the race tied. We'll find out tomorrow night—hopefully.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Sorry, Slugger: Pitching Really Does Win Championships
Grantland's Rany Jazayerli ignited a mini-debate on Twitter the other day. The topic: whether good pitching is better to have than a good offense. Jazayerli straightforwardly argued that, in a balanced game like baseball, the two are equally important. If you give up zero runs, true, you can't lose; but you also can't win if you can't score a run.
He's right, technically; a team with an extraordinary offense and exactly average pitching would have the same playoff odds as a team with an average offense but pitching exactly as good as the other team's offense. But the challenge lies in how awkwardly phrased that truism is—how do you compare the quality of an offense to the quality of a pitching staff? It's pretty apples to oranges.
Runs provide a nice common frame of reference by which to measure both hitting and pitching prowess. However, it is not a common scale. In terms of value to a team, runs allowed and runs scored are close, but they are not equal. These days at least, teams at the top of the league in runs allowed do actually win more ballgames than the ones leading MLB in runs scored.
Here are a couple scattergrams for you. The first plots runs scored per game (i.e., offensive strength) against winning percentage for all teams in the Wild Card era. (That's every team from 1995 through 2012—a robust sample size of 534 different data points.) The second plots runs allowed per game (i.e., strength of pitching and defense) against the same.
While neither relationship is particularly strong, the runs allowed graph has a higher R-squared—meaning pitching is (slightly) more closely correlated with winning than hitting is.
Let's dive into the specific data points for a closer look. One way to look at them is simply by threshold: how good must your pitching be to guarantee a winning season? Your offense?
Every team that has allowed fewer than 3.77 runs per game has had a winning record in the past 18 seasons; 17 teams fit that criterion. Going out further, only one of the 48 stingiest teams (RA/G of 3.98 or lower) finished under .500—and that was the 2011 Padres, whose numbers were obviously skewed by pitcher-friendly Petco Park. It really isn't until the runs-allowed-per-game number hits 4.20 or so that we start seeing losing teams with any regularity—about the 81st percentile.
Compare these numbers to the era's best offenses. The losing team with the most runs scored was the 2000 Astros, who scored 5.79 runs per game. That was the 17th punchiest lineup, which nicely mirrors the best 17 pitching teams. But the losing teams start coming pretty regularly after that, at the 23rd-best offense, 31st-best offense, 34th-best offense, 40th-best offense, and 46th-best offense. The floodgates open for low-quality teams below the 87th percentile (about 5.35 runs scored per game).
This shows that offense has historically been shakier ground on which to build a successful team. The opposite is also true; teams with terrible pitching are bad more often than teams with terrible hitting. Twenty-two of the 23 teams that allowed the most runs per game were losers; two of the four that scored the least were actually winners (the 2003 Dodgers and the 2011 Giants).
But we should also look beyond whether a team wins to how convincingly it does so. In the graphs above, the runs-allowed regression line has a steeper slope, which means that a shift in runs allowed per game has a more drastic effect on wins than a shift in runs scored. We can also compare the average and median winning percentages of the teams with the most runs scored/allowed, the next most, the next next most, etc.:
In most cases, teams' fates were more closely tied up with the pitching; the best teams at run prevention performed better than the best teams at run creation, and, to a lesser extent, the worst-pitching teams also averaged the worst records. Specifically, your excellence held up longer as you move away from the top of the leaderboard if the leaderboard you're on is fewest runs allowed. All this reflects a simple reality of the past couple decades in MLB: there have been more teams with beastly offenses that still lost than teams with filthy pitching that still lost.
What accounts for this slight, but unmistakeable, discrepancy? Excellent hitting should be just as valuable as excellent pitching. My theory is that it still is—but excellent hitting is a lot harder to get than excellent pitching. Obviously, there is a level of offensive prowess that would dwarf any issues on the mound, but that level is up at 1,000 runs scored per season and above. That just doesn't happen very often. Especially in this ERA-friendly era, extraordinary pitching is much more common than extraordinary run-scoring.
Indeed, a lot of those teams with the lowest RA/G—all of them over .500—are from the past couple of years. In contrast, a team from the Obama presidency doesn't crack the list of top offensive teams until slot number 26—below the magic line above which only winning teams dwell.
So, especially in this new dead-ball era, what we're really comparing is excellent pitching and merely great offenses. (The #1 offense in the league in 2013 may be relatively excellent, but on the absolute scale a better adjective is just "good.") It shouldn't be too controversial to anyone that the quality of the pitching overmatches the quality of the hitting in this case.
Indeed, I don't think I'm arguing something as baldly opposed to common sense and baseball truism as it would at first appear. I'm merely saying that the spectrum on which we measure pitching from lousy to average to excellent has a slightly different scale than the one for hitting. And, of course, there's a major disclaimer for any general managers reading this piece: the best baseball teams—and the safest route to MLB success—are a combination of both good hitting and good pitching. But if you have to choose, it turns out an old baseball saying is true after all, in an unexpected way: "Good pitching beats good hitting every time."
He's right, technically; a team with an extraordinary offense and exactly average pitching would have the same playoff odds as a team with an average offense but pitching exactly as good as the other team's offense. But the challenge lies in how awkwardly phrased that truism is—how do you compare the quality of an offense to the quality of a pitching staff? It's pretty apples to oranges.
Runs provide a nice common frame of reference by which to measure both hitting and pitching prowess. However, it is not a common scale. In terms of value to a team, runs allowed and runs scored are close, but they are not equal. These days at least, teams at the top of the league in runs allowed do actually win more ballgames than the ones leading MLB in runs scored.
Here are a couple scattergrams for you. The first plots runs scored per game (i.e., offensive strength) against winning percentage for all teams in the Wild Card era. (That's every team from 1995 through 2012—a robust sample size of 534 different data points.) The second plots runs allowed per game (i.e., strength of pitching and defense) against the same.
While neither relationship is particularly strong, the runs allowed graph has a higher R-squared—meaning pitching is (slightly) more closely correlated with winning than hitting is.
Let's dive into the specific data points for a closer look. One way to look at them is simply by threshold: how good must your pitching be to guarantee a winning season? Your offense?
Every team that has allowed fewer than 3.77 runs per game has had a winning record in the past 18 seasons; 17 teams fit that criterion. Going out further, only one of the 48 stingiest teams (RA/G of 3.98 or lower) finished under .500—and that was the 2011 Padres, whose numbers were obviously skewed by pitcher-friendly Petco Park. It really isn't until the runs-allowed-per-game number hits 4.20 or so that we start seeing losing teams with any regularity—about the 81st percentile.
Compare these numbers to the era's best offenses. The losing team with the most runs scored was the 2000 Astros, who scored 5.79 runs per game. That was the 17th punchiest lineup, which nicely mirrors the best 17 pitching teams. But the losing teams start coming pretty regularly after that, at the 23rd-best offense, 31st-best offense, 34th-best offense, 40th-best offense, and 46th-best offense. The floodgates open for low-quality teams below the 87th percentile (about 5.35 runs scored per game).
This shows that offense has historically been shakier ground on which to build a successful team. The opposite is also true; teams with terrible pitching are bad more often than teams with terrible hitting. Twenty-two of the 23 teams that allowed the most runs per game were losers; two of the four that scored the least were actually winners (the 2003 Dodgers and the 2011 Giants).
But we should also look beyond whether a team wins to how convincingly it does so. In the graphs above, the runs-allowed regression line has a steeper slope, which means that a shift in runs allowed per game has a more drastic effect on wins than a shift in runs scored. We can also compare the average and median winning percentages of the teams with the most runs scored/allowed, the next most, the next next most, etc.:
| Percentile | Mean Winning Percentage (RS/G) | Mean Winning Percentage (RA/G) | Median Winning Percentage (RS/G) | Median Winning Percentage (RA/G) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 95th–100th | .574 | .574 | .580 | .568 |
| 90th–95th | .559 | .572 | .556 | .574 |
| 85th–90th | .536 | .569 | .534 | .574 |
| 80th–85th | .533 | .556 | .531 | .562 |
| 75th–80th | .530 | .536 | .540 | .542 |
| 20th–25th | .470 | .456 | .458 | .451 |
| 15th–20th | .453 | .450 | .451 | .435 |
| 10th–15th | .444 | .432 | .420 | .424 |
| 5th–10th | .455 | .448 | .457 | .451 |
| 0th–5th | .414 | .420 | .414 | .423 |
In most cases, teams' fates were more closely tied up with the pitching; the best teams at run prevention performed better than the best teams at run creation, and, to a lesser extent, the worst-pitching teams also averaged the worst records. Specifically, your excellence held up longer as you move away from the top of the leaderboard if the leaderboard you're on is fewest runs allowed. All this reflects a simple reality of the past couple decades in MLB: there have been more teams with beastly offenses that still lost than teams with filthy pitching that still lost.
What accounts for this slight, but unmistakeable, discrepancy? Excellent hitting should be just as valuable as excellent pitching. My theory is that it still is—but excellent hitting is a lot harder to get than excellent pitching. Obviously, there is a level of offensive prowess that would dwarf any issues on the mound, but that level is up at 1,000 runs scored per season and above. That just doesn't happen very often. Especially in this ERA-friendly era, extraordinary pitching is much more common than extraordinary run-scoring.
Indeed, a lot of those teams with the lowest RA/G—all of them over .500—are from the past couple of years. In contrast, a team from the Obama presidency doesn't crack the list of top offensive teams until slot number 26—below the magic line above which only winning teams dwell.
So, especially in this new dead-ball era, what we're really comparing is excellent pitching and merely great offenses. (The #1 offense in the league in 2013 may be relatively excellent, but on the absolute scale a better adjective is just "good.") It shouldn't be too controversial to anyone that the quality of the pitching overmatches the quality of the hitting in this case.
Indeed, I don't think I'm arguing something as baldly opposed to common sense and baseball truism as it would at first appear. I'm merely saying that the spectrum on which we measure pitching from lousy to average to excellent has a slightly different scale than the one for hitting. And, of course, there's a major disclaimer for any general managers reading this piece: the best baseball teams—and the safest route to MLB success—are a combination of both good hitting and good pitching. But if you have to choose, it turns out an old baseball saying is true after all, in an unexpected way: "Good pitching beats good hitting every time."
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Sentence-Diagramming the Second Amendment
The political drama over guns may not be over yet. This week, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced his intention to re-introduce his failed compromise bill expanding background checks for gun purchases. President Obama certainly doesn't sound ready to give up on the issue either, and ordinary Americans seem angry enough to lash back at senators who voted to kill the only gun-control legislation that seemed realistic in the wake of the Newtown shooting.
Although many will argue that it was the electoral coercion of the NRA, several senators who voted "no" cited the Second Amendment as the reason why. This is a common tactic—pro-gun advocates throwing constitutional rights into every debate about guns—even when it isn't terribly relevant. That's a problem, in my view; we should all try to adhere to the Constitution, but it's hard to do that when the actual meaning of the Bill of Rights is diluted. Second Amendment advocates actually hurt their own cause by citing it too often. To determine if an assault-weapons ban or universal background checks really are a threat to our Second Amendment rights, we must first understand the content and language of the Second Amendment.
For public information, here is what the Second Amendment actually says:
Well, first off, don't worry so much about all the commas. Commas were used a lot more freely—and haphazardly—in colonial times than they are today. Different copies of the Constitution, transcribed by different printers, have different numbers of commas. Back then, it was simply a punctuation mark inserted to give speakers (remember, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were read from public places across the colonies) cues on where to pause and take a breath. Apparently it was even the British legal tradition at the time to disregard commas when interpreting statues—they were considered annotations more than parts of the text.
Now that we have codified grammatical rules to an extent that was unimaginable—even impossible—in the 18th century, we have also abandoned the once-common practice of inserting commas between subjects and their predicates. That accounts for the two Second Amendment commas that look weirdest to the modern eye: the first ("Militia, being") and the third ("Arms, shall"). Take those out, and you're left with two clear clauses regardless of what you do with the second, middle comma.
The second half ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed") is the money phrase and the independent clause of the amendment—in other words, it's the main idea. This seems great for gun advocates—except it's not the only idea. We also have to figure out what to do with the dependent, participial clause that begins the sentence: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State."
Those who have studied Latin will recognize this immediately as an ablative absolute clause. Under this Latin device, an entire string of words before the main idea of a sentence would be put in the ablative case, which is used to express means or accompaniment (i.e., it's used after the word "with"). Here's an example:
If you were to translate the Second Amendment into Latin and then back into English, the best translation would read something like, "Since a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That establishes a much clearer causal link for the right to bear arms with the necessity of a "well-regulated militia." This gives rise to the liberal interpretation of the amendment.
However, since the Bill of Rights is, in fact, not written in Latin, the true meaning is open for debate. Progressive legal scholars like Jeffrey Toobin observe that, for much of American history, the right to bear arms was only understood in the context of protecting state militias. Only in the late 1970s, Toobin argues, when the Republican Party was making its hard turn to the right, did the NRA campaign successfully to alter the national perception of the amendment to cover individual citizens' gun rights. To Toobin, that makes the individual-rights interpretation wrong. However, it can also be convincingly argued that the organized-militia-only interpretation flew in the face of the actual, original intent by the Framers. Colonial-era writing samples suggest that the phrase "bear arms" was a deliberate choice and specifically refers, then as now, to individual possession of weapons, not the military use of them.
What is clear is that the relationship between the first clause and the second clause is the key to understanding the amendment's meaning: does the dependent clause qualify or restrict the independent one or not? On one hand, the first half could be a specific and exclusive raison d'être for the entire main clause, in the full spirit of the ablative absolute, as if the Bill of Rights had been written in Latin itself. Or the first clause could just be irrelevant fluff, a throwaway statement that may be tangentially true but does not affect the amendment's main point; it might as well not even be there. The middle ground is that the first clause is neither meaningless nor decisive; it provides a context, and perhaps an explanation, for the main thrust of the amendment, but it doesn't take anything away from the core meaning.
So are background checks unconstitutional? You can argue that they do take away certain citizens' rights to bear arms, or that they obstruct law-abiding citizens' rights even if they do get their guns in the end. But background checks also fit perfectly with the idea of a "well-regulated" gun-toting population, should you accept the liberal or the moderate interpretation of the Second Amendment. Anything short of denying the relevance of the first clause, and you acknowledge that the Constitution believes regulation of guns is important. (Ironically, conservatives who deny that are thus also denying any similarities between the Second Amendment's structure and the ablative absolute of Latin—many conservatives' favorite language.) However, many of the senators who claimed that they believed background checks violated the Second Amendment were moderates, even Democrats—not conservative ideologues.
If you believe in the hard-right interpretation of the Second Amendment, that's fine. But I don't think these swing-vote senators on the background-checks bill do. Given their overall philosophies and temperaments, a much more nuanced view of Second Amendment law seems likely. Maybe they too, like the rest of us, need a grammatical lesson and a refresher on what the Constitution actually says.
Although many will argue that it was the electoral coercion of the NRA, several senators who voted "no" cited the Second Amendment as the reason why. This is a common tactic—pro-gun advocates throwing constitutional rights into every debate about guns—even when it isn't terribly relevant. That's a problem, in my view; we should all try to adhere to the Constitution, but it's hard to do that when the actual meaning of the Bill of Rights is diluted. Second Amendment advocates actually hurt their own cause by citing it too often. To determine if an assault-weapons ban or universal background checks really are a threat to our Second Amendment rights, we must first understand the content and language of the Second Amendment.
For public information, here is what the Second Amendment actually says:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."Intelligent people can have intelligent disagreements about how to interpret this sentence, especially since it is a particularly confusing piece of the law of the land. There are too many nouns and not enough verbs, for one thing; for another, what's up with all the commas?
Well, first off, don't worry so much about all the commas. Commas were used a lot more freely—and haphazardly—in colonial times than they are today. Different copies of the Constitution, transcribed by different printers, have different numbers of commas. Back then, it was simply a punctuation mark inserted to give speakers (remember, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were read from public places across the colonies) cues on where to pause and take a breath. Apparently it was even the British legal tradition at the time to disregard commas when interpreting statues—they were considered annotations more than parts of the text.
Now that we have codified grammatical rules to an extent that was unimaginable—even impossible—in the 18th century, we have also abandoned the once-common practice of inserting commas between subjects and their predicates. That accounts for the two Second Amendment commas that look weirdest to the modern eye: the first ("Militia, being") and the third ("Arms, shall"). Take those out, and you're left with two clear clauses regardless of what you do with the second, middle comma.
The second half ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed") is the money phrase and the independent clause of the amendment—in other words, it's the main idea. This seems great for gun advocates—except it's not the only idea. We also have to figure out what to do with the dependent, participial clause that begins the sentence: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State."
Those who have studied Latin will recognize this immediately as an ablative absolute clause. Under this Latin device, an entire string of words before the main idea of a sentence would be put in the ablative case, which is used to express means or accompaniment (i.e., it's used after the word "with"). Here's an example:
Omnibus paratis, familia discessit ad urbem.It's a construction we still use in English sometimes, as the non-awkwardness of the translation suggests. However, in Latin, the ablative absolute is used for a special reason: to express purpose. Therefore, a less literal, but more colloquial, translation would be, "Since everything was ready, the family departed for the city."
With everything prepared, the family departed for the city.
If you were to translate the Second Amendment into Latin and then back into English, the best translation would read something like, "Since a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That establishes a much clearer causal link for the right to bear arms with the necessity of a "well-regulated militia." This gives rise to the liberal interpretation of the amendment.
However, since the Bill of Rights is, in fact, not written in Latin, the true meaning is open for debate. Progressive legal scholars like Jeffrey Toobin observe that, for much of American history, the right to bear arms was only understood in the context of protecting state militias. Only in the late 1970s, Toobin argues, when the Republican Party was making its hard turn to the right, did the NRA campaign successfully to alter the national perception of the amendment to cover individual citizens' gun rights. To Toobin, that makes the individual-rights interpretation wrong. However, it can also be convincingly argued that the organized-militia-only interpretation flew in the face of the actual, original intent by the Framers. Colonial-era writing samples suggest that the phrase "bear arms" was a deliberate choice and specifically refers, then as now, to individual possession of weapons, not the military use of them.
What is clear is that the relationship between the first clause and the second clause is the key to understanding the amendment's meaning: does the dependent clause qualify or restrict the independent one or not? On one hand, the first half could be a specific and exclusive raison d'être for the entire main clause, in the full spirit of the ablative absolute, as if the Bill of Rights had been written in Latin itself. Or the first clause could just be irrelevant fluff, a throwaway statement that may be tangentially true but does not affect the amendment's main point; it might as well not even be there. The middle ground is that the first clause is neither meaningless nor decisive; it provides a context, and perhaps an explanation, for the main thrust of the amendment, but it doesn't take anything away from the core meaning.
So are background checks unconstitutional? You can argue that they do take away certain citizens' rights to bear arms, or that they obstruct law-abiding citizens' rights even if they do get their guns in the end. But background checks also fit perfectly with the idea of a "well-regulated" gun-toting population, should you accept the liberal or the moderate interpretation of the Second Amendment. Anything short of denying the relevance of the first clause, and you acknowledge that the Constitution believes regulation of guns is important. (Ironically, conservatives who deny that are thus also denying any similarities between the Second Amendment's structure and the ablative absolute of Latin—many conservatives' favorite language.) However, many of the senators who claimed that they believed background checks violated the Second Amendment were moderates, even Democrats—not conservative ideologues.
If you believe in the hard-right interpretation of the Second Amendment, that's fine. But I don't think these swing-vote senators on the background-checks bill do. Given their overall philosophies and temperaments, a much more nuanced view of Second Amendment law seems likely. Maybe they too, like the rest of us, need a grammatical lesson and a refresher on what the Constitution actually says.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Where the Polls Stand in Massachusetts
Doing some research this week, I noticed that the usual suspects—FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, etc.—weren't aggregating polls for the upcoming special Senate election in Massachusetts. Doing the research myself wasn't hard (there have been only a handful of polls), but I also don't want anyone else to duplicate the work. Therefore, without further ado...
Here are the results of all polls I could find of the Democratic primary for the special election for John Kerry's Senate seat, to be held on Tuesday, April 30:
Here are the results of all polls I could find of the Democratic primary for the special election for John Kerry's Senate seat, to be held on Tuesday, April 30:
| Poll | Dates | Markey | Lynch | Undecided |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPP | 1/29–1/30 | 52% | 19% | 29% |
| MassInc/WBUR | 2/11–2/13 | 38% | 31% | 26% |
| PPP/LCV | 2/13–2/14 | 43% | 28% | 29% |
| Garin-Hart-Yang/LCV | 2/26–2/27 | 42% | 28% | 30% |
| UML/Boston Herald | 3/2–3/5 | 50% | 20.5% | 23% |
| MassInc/WBUR | 3/19–3/21 | 35% | 24% | 41% |
| PPP/LCV | 3/26–3/27 | 49% | 32% | 19% |
| WNE/MassLive | 4/11–4/18 | 44% | 34% | 21% |
| Lynch for Senate | 4/20–4/21 | 44.5% | 38.9% | 16.5% |
| PPP/LCV | 4/23–4/25 | 50% | 36% | 14% |
Thursday, April 18, 2013
History Shows It's Game Over for Sanford and Weiner
Political comebacks have been in vogue lately. First Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor who was the laughingstock of the nation after an extramarital affair in 2009, won the recent Republican primary in the special election for the South Carolina First District. Then, in last week's New York Times Magazine, erstwhile congressman and sexter Anthony Weiner revealed his interest in the New York City mayoralty.
There seems to be a consensus that, not only are Sanford's and Weiner's comebacks possible, but also that they wouldn't be unusual. This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, if you look at the history of politicians attempting to come back from scandal, Weiner faces extremely long odds, and Sanford is extremely lucky to have gotten as far as he has.
We at Baseballot dipped into the archives and identified 82 federal and statewide elected officials over the past 20 years who have faced scandal—sex or otherwise—while in office. Only 10 can be said to have definitively survived the charges leveled at them. Four more (Bill Clinton, Kathy Augustine, Scott DesJarlais, and John Swallow) remain inconclusive. That means 68 of the 82 (83%) at some point fell from power as a result of their sins—whether via resignation (38), removal (5), retirement (14), or repudiation by the voters (11). This is the population we're really interested in, as it includes Weiner and Sanford.
Out of those 68, 66 never held elected office again. That's an abysmal 97% attrition rate. The two success stories include only one who successfully returned to his previous position: Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed in 2003 following a politically popular decision to defy a court order to remove the Ten Commandments from public property. (The second, former Michigan congresswoman Barbara-Rose Collins, managed to win a couple local elections to the Detroit City Council.)
This doesn't even include people who weren't holding office at the time of their scandal, such as former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who it's safe to say would've been run out of town on a rail if he were still a senator. The 66, however, do include Newt Gingrich, who has arguably made a comeback by doing as well as he did in the 2012 GOP primaries, as well as Sanford and Weiner themselves, whose fates are yet to be determined. It also includes 58 disgraced ex-pols who never even attempted comebacks, although this fact in and of itself is instructive, in my opinion. Still, peel away these quibbles, and politicians who left office in disgrace still have a poor .286 batting average (2 out of 7) when they try to come back from obscurity and regain public office.
My findings conspicuously clash with a prominent recent study that found that most scandal-plagued politicians actually pull through just fine. Political scientist Scott Basinger compiled a database of 237 naughty congressmen and found that, while they have a lower political survival rate than their unblemished colleagues, they still returned to Congress more often than not. Specifically, 73% of embattled congressmen stuck it out and contested another general election (versus 91% in the control group); 81% of those went on to win, making for a total survival rate of 60%.
Without Basinger's full data set, I can't say for certain why his findings are so divergent from mine. I'd probably point to three key differences in our methodology. First, I looked at all federal and statewide elected officials, while Basinger limited himself to US congressmen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Basinger went all the way back to 1973, while I stopped at 1993. I tend to believe that more recent data are more reliable—even cases from 20 years ago are of limited value in the age of social media, if you ask me—but Basinger's doubly large sample size could certainly account for our disagreement.
Third, while I don't know how Basinger conducted his research, mine consisted mainly of a heck of a lot of Googling. I'm almost certain that I missed out on a few scandals, especially going back to the 1990s when the archives of the World Wide Web grow thin. Still, because of the nature of internet research, I'm fairly confident that I documented all of the most high-profile scandals of the past 20 years. Basinger, in contrast, doubtlessly included even the most obscure misconduct in his database. Again, while more data points are usually good, in this case it might be more instructive to look solely at the high-profile cases. They are the ones most closely relatable to Sanford and Weiner, and they predictably prove more damaging to politicians' public personas. It's probably not helpful to skew our predictions for two notorious adulterers with politicians who coasted to reelection after abusing the franking privilege, for instance.
Indeed, I completely trust Basinger's methodology and his findings, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that 60% of overall offenders tough it out and go on to live completely normal and healthy political lives. Indeed, a decent slice of my dataset did that very thing. I'm even willing to admit that my dataset is flawed in that it probably undercounts the number of politicians who defied calls to resign and weathered the storm (again, it's easier to find internet archives of big news events like "SENATOR X RESIGNS"). My research may very well be inconclusive about this cadre.
But it doesn't matter, because we're talking about politicians who didn't survive—who, like Weiner and Sanford, fell to the deepest depths of shame and ignominy—and then climbed back to a position of prominence, power, and popularity. About them, there can be little doubt that full-blown comebacks from rock bottom do not happen. Basinger does not address this specific type of case in his study, leaving my data—66 out of 68, remember—as our only guide.
The reason that the media's examples of political comebacks—meant to convince us that Sanford and Weiner really can do it—actually bear no resemblance or relationship to Sanford's and Weiner's utter implosions is that there almost literally are no political phoenix stories. All of the most famous "comeback" stories—Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Wilbur Mills, David Vitter—are of politicians who never resigned in the first place. They recognized that their best strategy was to deny, defer, or deflect guilt as quickly as possible and move on. By the time they faced the voters again, their transgressions were either forgotten or overshadowed.
But for those who admit fault—or, perhaps more accurately, admit that they ought to be punished for it by resigning or otherwise leaving office—the path to public forgiveness is much less clear. If you're a scandalized politician, at least you still have your office and a platform from which to build yourself back up (including the significant electoral advantage of incumbency). Step down, and you're nothing but a broken man. Leaving office in disgrace has been a black mark from which there has almost never been any coming back. The media and 24-hour news networks may love comeback stories, but there's little evidence the public does.
We've taken our time to come back around to the bottom line for Weiner and Sanford, so here it is: they're probably finished, even if they don't know it yet. For Weiner, going from disrepute to the extremely powerful position of New York City mayor in the space of two years is just too big of a jump. Even the one ex-representative who returned to local government did so to city council, and she endured an ethics investigation, not Weiner's sensationalist sex scandal and its attendant national humiliation. A comeback by Weiner would be unprecedented in modern American politics.
Sanford, while still an unlikely candidate, may have slightly better odds. For one thing, he has already won one election—the GOP primary—which is half the hurdle. For another, he holds a key advantage over Weiner: he never resigned. Despite the equal amount of ridicule and embarrassment he faced with his "Appalachian Trail" saga, Sanford actually served out the remaining two years of his term as governor and was effective at fading out of the spotlight rather than going out with a bang. However, polls indicate Sanford is still badly underperforming a generic Republican, and, after this week's revelations of further family troubles resulted in his abandonment by the NRCC, the former governor is now looking decidedly like an underdog. All in all, I would be surprised to see him buck history here.
There seems to be a consensus that, not only are Sanford's and Weiner's comebacks possible, but also that they wouldn't be unusual. This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, if you look at the history of politicians attempting to come back from scandal, Weiner faces extremely long odds, and Sanford is extremely lucky to have gotten as far as he has.
We at Baseballot dipped into the archives and identified 82 federal and statewide elected officials over the past 20 years who have faced scandal—sex or otherwise—while in office. Only 10 can be said to have definitively survived the charges leveled at them. Four more (Bill Clinton, Kathy Augustine, Scott DesJarlais, and John Swallow) remain inconclusive. That means 68 of the 82 (83%) at some point fell from power as a result of their sins—whether via resignation (38), removal (5), retirement (14), or repudiation by the voters (11). This is the population we're really interested in, as it includes Weiner and Sanford.
Out of those 68, 66 never held elected office again. That's an abysmal 97% attrition rate. The two success stories include only one who successfully returned to his previous position: Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed in 2003 following a politically popular decision to defy a court order to remove the Ten Commandments from public property. (The second, former Michigan congresswoman Barbara-Rose Collins, managed to win a couple local elections to the Detroit City Council.)
This doesn't even include people who weren't holding office at the time of their scandal, such as former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who it's safe to say would've been run out of town on a rail if he were still a senator. The 66, however, do include Newt Gingrich, who has arguably made a comeback by doing as well as he did in the 2012 GOP primaries, as well as Sanford and Weiner themselves, whose fates are yet to be determined. It also includes 58 disgraced ex-pols who never even attempted comebacks, although this fact in and of itself is instructive, in my opinion. Still, peel away these quibbles, and politicians who left office in disgrace still have a poor .286 batting average (2 out of 7) when they try to come back from obscurity and regain public office.
My findings conspicuously clash with a prominent recent study that found that most scandal-plagued politicians actually pull through just fine. Political scientist Scott Basinger compiled a database of 237 naughty congressmen and found that, while they have a lower political survival rate than their unblemished colleagues, they still returned to Congress more often than not. Specifically, 73% of embattled congressmen stuck it out and contested another general election (versus 91% in the control group); 81% of those went on to win, making for a total survival rate of 60%.
Without Basinger's full data set, I can't say for certain why his findings are so divergent from mine. I'd probably point to three key differences in our methodology. First, I looked at all federal and statewide elected officials, while Basinger limited himself to US congressmen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Basinger went all the way back to 1973, while I stopped at 1993. I tend to believe that more recent data are more reliable—even cases from 20 years ago are of limited value in the age of social media, if you ask me—but Basinger's doubly large sample size could certainly account for our disagreement.
Third, while I don't know how Basinger conducted his research, mine consisted mainly of a heck of a lot of Googling. I'm almost certain that I missed out on a few scandals, especially going back to the 1990s when the archives of the World Wide Web grow thin. Still, because of the nature of internet research, I'm fairly confident that I documented all of the most high-profile scandals of the past 20 years. Basinger, in contrast, doubtlessly included even the most obscure misconduct in his database. Again, while more data points are usually good, in this case it might be more instructive to look solely at the high-profile cases. They are the ones most closely relatable to Sanford and Weiner, and they predictably prove more damaging to politicians' public personas. It's probably not helpful to skew our predictions for two notorious adulterers with politicians who coasted to reelection after abusing the franking privilege, for instance.
Indeed, I completely trust Basinger's methodology and his findings, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that 60% of overall offenders tough it out and go on to live completely normal and healthy political lives. Indeed, a decent slice of my dataset did that very thing. I'm even willing to admit that my dataset is flawed in that it probably undercounts the number of politicians who defied calls to resign and weathered the storm (again, it's easier to find internet archives of big news events like "SENATOR X RESIGNS"). My research may very well be inconclusive about this cadre.
But it doesn't matter, because we're talking about politicians who didn't survive—who, like Weiner and Sanford, fell to the deepest depths of shame and ignominy—and then climbed back to a position of prominence, power, and popularity. About them, there can be little doubt that full-blown comebacks from rock bottom do not happen. Basinger does not address this specific type of case in his study, leaving my data—66 out of 68, remember—as our only guide.
The reason that the media's examples of political comebacks—meant to convince us that Sanford and Weiner really can do it—actually bear no resemblance or relationship to Sanford's and Weiner's utter implosions is that there almost literally are no political phoenix stories. All of the most famous "comeback" stories—Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Wilbur Mills, David Vitter—are of politicians who never resigned in the first place. They recognized that their best strategy was to deny, defer, or deflect guilt as quickly as possible and move on. By the time they faced the voters again, their transgressions were either forgotten or overshadowed.
But for those who admit fault—or, perhaps more accurately, admit that they ought to be punished for it by resigning or otherwise leaving office—the path to public forgiveness is much less clear. If you're a scandalized politician, at least you still have your office and a platform from which to build yourself back up (including the significant electoral advantage of incumbency). Step down, and you're nothing but a broken man. Leaving office in disgrace has been a black mark from which there has almost never been any coming back. The media and 24-hour news networks may love comeback stories, but there's little evidence the public does.
We've taken our time to come back around to the bottom line for Weiner and Sanford, so here it is: they're probably finished, even if they don't know it yet. For Weiner, going from disrepute to the extremely powerful position of New York City mayor in the space of two years is just too big of a jump. Even the one ex-representative who returned to local government did so to city council, and she endured an ethics investigation, not Weiner's sensationalist sex scandal and its attendant national humiliation. A comeback by Weiner would be unprecedented in modern American politics.
Sanford, while still an unlikely candidate, may have slightly better odds. For one thing, he has already won one election—the GOP primary—which is half the hurdle. For another, he holds a key advantage over Weiner: he never resigned. Despite the equal amount of ridicule and embarrassment he faced with his "Appalachian Trail" saga, Sanford actually served out the remaining two years of his term as governor and was effective at fading out of the spotlight rather than going out with a bang. However, polls indicate Sanford is still badly underperforming a generic Republican, and, after this week's revelations of further family troubles resulted in his abandonment by the NRCC, the former governor is now looking decidedly like an underdog. All in all, I would be surprised to see him buck history here.
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