Hijacking a Comment to Create an Open Thread [9.14.14]
Stealing this from Geezer in the Sunday Daily Delawhere thread:
I’ll treat this as the open thread so I can post this link to Thomas Frank’s piece from Salon, which is the best thing I’ve read so far this morning.
John Manifold responds Geezer’s post of the Frank article with this:
Thomas Frank : Ezra Klein
Rousseau : Voltaire
Frank’s article *is* quite good — certainly Washington D.C. has no shortage of various kids of expertise. Some they listen to, and some they don’t, but if you want to stay on the inside, you are more productive when you are saying what people what to hear. Even more, in a place like D.C., your expertise in certain fields really isn’t especially important as long as you are in the correct ideological tribe. Witness the massive hiring of Reagent University grads for the DOJ with Buscho was in office. Not even trying to hire the Best and the Brightest (who can be their own screwups outside of their natural habitat), just fellow travelers. DCs problem (and yes, I do think that this is worse on the right) is that is has no idea how to evaluate or value expertise outside of an ideological prism.
That said, Ezra Klein’s article was not about expertise in DC, it was about what data driven journalism is adding to the conversation. He is specifically talking about those journalists who are trying to figure out why and how old systems and frameworks are re-arranging. These journalists are mining data to try to answer these questions, and not relying on the way that political journalists tell their stories. They don’t need to air both sides, because the data reveals its own story. The data may or may not reveal something useful, but it does have something to say about how politics works now. Interestingly, Thomas ends his piece with this observation:
But the Democrats chase nobly on after grand Washington bargains and sign more free-trade deals and make endless compromises with Wall Street—and then can’t figure out why such achievements don’t win them the adoration of the people in the hard-bitten countryside.
And Klein uses this to talk bout the usefulness of data-driven journalism:
But over the last decade, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee became an unreliable narrator. So did pretty much everyone else working in American politics. If you spent 2008 and 2009 talking to (then) Sen. Max Baucus you would have believed that health reform would be a bipartisan bill. You would have believed that because he believed that. And he believed that because he had been close friends with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Chuck Grassley, for years. They would work this out.
They didn’t. I remember interviewing then-Sen. Kent Conrad, the then-chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and a member of Baucus’s failed “Gang of Six.” I asked him why the Gang hadn’t come to a compromise. I’ll never forget his response. “I honestly don’t know,” he replied. And he really didn’t.
The old rules that let Grand Bargains come together and work are falling apart and the numbers guys are trying to suss out why. They may not get to an answer and what they are doing may not mean much in the long run, but speaking for myself, this is WAY more interesting that the He Say She Say journalism that is pretty much information free.
There are parts of the article which are good, but others which are just mind-bogglingly dumb. Mr Frank noted the servile attraction to the “experts,” and David Halberstam’s book, but I recall one passage from hat book, where Mr Halberstam quoted Sam Rayburn (I think it was Mr Rayburn!) saying that all of these new academic geniuses were just fine, but he wished that one of them had at least run for sheriff once before.
But here’s where he veers off into the weeds:
That ignores the huge statistic that, despite losing the overall vote by a significant margin, Mitt Romney carried the white vote. Naturally, the left want to claim that, why, that’s just racism, but what it really is is a difference between the cultural and economic values of rural, suburban and urban voters. Black Americans are so heavily concentrated in large urban areas that they pack their votes in tightly as well, but, overall, Democrats carry fewer congressional districts. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 228 congressional districts, compared to 207 by President Obama. You can yell “Gerrymandering!” all that you want, but with the heavily black populations in so many inner cities, you’ll never be able to (legally) draw districts which would not have a slight Republican skew.
Looked at another way, in 2004 John Kerry carried twenty congressional districts by larger margins that the best district for President Bush.
I look at Kentucky as a state which tells you something interesting. Kentucky is a poor state, and the Democrats control both the state House of Representatives and the gubernatorial mansion; only the state Senate is controlled by the GOP. But I grew up in Kentucky, and I know the people there: they are conservative, rural Democrats, and the only Democrats who carry their votes in presidential elections are those who have run as conservative Southern Democrats: since 1956, Kentucky has been carried by the Democratic candidate in only 1964 (the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater), 1976 (supposedly conservative Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter) and Bill Clinton’s two wins in 1992 and 1996.
This is the kind of thing that I find useful and illuminating about what Klein and those like him are doing:
Policymaking has a liberal bias
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/09/since-beginning-time-republicans-yearned-massively-expand-medicaid
I hope the Scott Lemieux isn’t supposed to convince anyone that Thomas Frank is wrong. I realize that corporate lawyers who want to think of themselves as progressive need the DLC Democrats to be right, but the rest of us have no such conflicts.
Maybe if the Democrats appealed to the resentments of the rube class, they could win
JM,
Anyone naming their blog after a Zevon song is, well, Genius.
http://youtu.be/WK1NSXbh6IY
Ed Kilgore also weighs in on Frank’s article:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119479/democratic-candidates-need-talk-obamacare-voters
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/have-republicans-finally-gone-too-far-in-kansas.html