Three Cheers for Dysfunction?

It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the president “won” on the fiscal cliff (if you can call half his original revenue request a win) because doing nothing – Congress’s preferred response to any crisis – would have led to automatic tax increases as the lower Bush rates expired. By contrast, Obama “lost” on the sequester because leverage had shifted to the GOP; the default was spending cuts, not tax increases, and what Republican doesn’t love a spending cut? Obama severely overestimated the GOP’s desire to protect the Pentagon and just as radically underestimated its single-minded pursuit of smaller government. (The sequester didn’t touch entitlements, and thus did little to solve the debt “crisis,” but as Paul Krugman constantly reminds us, Republicans today don’t care about deficits. They care about lower taxes.) If you accept this version of history, Obama is in a bad position. The GOP has him over a barrel; inaction on the sequester gave conservatives their spending cuts, and they have little incentive to negotiate a deal on entitlements with a president unwilling to solve the problem solely through further cuts. Many Democrats feel that he should have pushed for more revenue prior to the fiscal cliff, even at the risk of letting tax rates go up on the middle class. “Thinking they’d have a second bite of the apple was a real mistake,” former CBO director Robert D. Reischauer told the New York Times. (The Times also notes, however, that other Democrats like Nancy Pelosi weren’t helping the administration’s bargaining stance by floating proposals to raise even less revenue by limiting tax increases to income over $1 million.)

At Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore points to a possible silver lining in the president’s miscalculation. According to an article by David Kamin in the magazine’s March-April issue, inaction may once again save us. Just as doing nothing to forestall the fiscal cliff would have led to a massive influx in revenue that even the president acknowledged would hurt the economy, doing nothing to index tax brackets for inflation will also lead to greater revenues. Staying the course on the Affordable Care Act will do the same. Kilgore summarizes:

[T]here are two other ways in which revenues may well automatically increase in coming years if “nothing happens” to break the current partisan gridlock in D.C. One is the natural “bracket creep” that will be exacerbated if income equality continues to grow. The other is Obamacare’s tax on “Cadillac” health care plans, which will gradually act to reduce the tax subsidy on employer-based health insurance. Combine these two ingredients of current law and slowly simmer them over time, and you’ve got some serious deficit reduction.

He also quotes directly from Kamin’s piece, which is worth reading in full:

Taken together, this “automatic” revenue growth would reduce the long-term deficit, as projected by the CBO, by roughly one-third over the next seventy-five years. Again, that’s with no congressional action whatsoever. Moreover, it’s based on what’s probably too pessimistic a scenario that, among other things, assumes no ramp-down in the wars abroad, a return to higher historical levels of both defense and nondefense annual appropriations, and a partial repeal of Obamacare’s controls on health spending.

Of course, the downside here is that, as desirable as new revenues may be, achieving them in this manner relies on the continuing dysfunction of Congress – which isn’t exactly a plus for the country as a whole. The extent to which policy has been driven over the past year by politicians’ sheer refusal to act – to cast courageous votes that might earn them a primary challenge, to choose compromise over ideology – is amazing. Even the sequester – $1.2 trillion in cuts designed to be so repulsive to both sides that the “supercommittee” would be forced to come to an agreement – wasn’t enough to cure the Republican allergy to tax increases or convince the president to replace his “balanced” offer with a complete cave.

While it’s nice that Washington Monthly can find a bright side to the gridlock, and to know that the next time Congress can’t get it’s act together, the default path will favor Democrats and not Republicans, it’s also profoundly depressing. Just as the sequester-related cancellation of White House tours has taught groups of disappointed schoolchildren more about the realities of government — that it’s less the paragon of democracy envisioned by the Founders and more an institution led by very human, frequently bickering adults — than they ever would have learned in a stroll through the East Room, the sequester has taught the left something important about the merits of even small, dubiously secured achievements. Conservatives have openly rooted for gridlock for years out of the belief that the government which governs least governs best. To many Republican thinkers, more bills being passed by Congress simply means more regulations and greater federal power. Dysfunction throws a wrench in the gears of the leviathan state that they would rather see grind to a halt in the first place. Democrats, who generally favor a more activist government, are the ones who benefit from a functioning Congress able to pass bills and fund programs. For liberals, there is something almost distasteful in looking for a silver lining in the brokenness of our political system; we tend to see government as good, and thus want it to work well. Kamin’s insight suggests that perhaps that distaste can be overcome. We too can learn to love gridlock. Less certain, however, is whether we should.

A Difference Without a Distinction?

Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore has been a persistent critic of the mainstream media narrative that posits a split in the Republican Party between the Tea Party set and reformers like Marco Rubio, who is at least willing to consider a deal on immigration, and Bobby Jindal, who admonished GOP’ers to “stop being the stupid party.” Today, with the announcement that libertarian isolationist Rand Paul will deliver the Tea Party’s response to the State of the Union address, setting up a potential conflict with the official Republican response given by Marco Rubio, Kilgore writes:

And before you can say “phony war,” the MSM is setting this up as reflecting the yawning gap between the Rubio/Rove “establishment” and the True Conservative tribes—once again showing how no matter what happens to and within the GOP, its “center” keeps getting pulled to the Right.

I don’t know what if anything Rubio or Paul will say on international issues; if so they will probably be offering a stark choice between immediate and ultimate war with much of the rest of the world. But on domestic issues, you’ll need a crow-bar to pry them apart.

He links to a post on a CNN blog that informs us “The dueling GOP speeches come at a time when a very public rift is developing between the Republican establishment and conservative activists over the direction of the party.” And the Washington Post hypes the dissension as well, observing that the Tea Party’s counter-programming hasn’t been received well in the past, with Michele Bachmann’s 2011 address leaving Republican insiders “annoyedthat CNN agreed to air her remarks in their entirety because they were concerned that showing Bachmann’s speech alongside the official GOP response from Rep. Paul Ryan would make the party look conflicted.”

I take Kilgore’s point: from an outside perspective, the policy differences between the right and the far-right are minimal. Even Republicans like Jindal who are heralded by outfits like Politico and the Times for presenting a fresh face for the party are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives at heart. Eliminating Louisiana’s income tax, handing out vouchers to schools that preach creationism, block-granting Medicaid — these are not positions that differ greatly from those held by the so-called kooks of the party, the Todd Akins and Ted Cruzes. When the Post encourages Democrats to “give Eric Cantor a chance,” it downplays the fact that Cantor’s much-ballyhooed “Making Life Work” speech offered zero new ideas — smaller government! private enterprise! — about improving the life of the average voter. Kilgore is understandably angry that the mainstream media treats the GOP’s efforts to rebrand itself as a rethinking, when the real consensus among Republicans is that, while their message may have failed in 2012, their ideology is beyond reproach. He would, I’m sure, like to see the Times and the Post paint Republicans as the radicals they are.

But that’s not going to happen. And where I think Kilgore errs is in presuming that the “very public rift” is unimportant. Rand Paul himself thinks there’s a split, telling Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine that the party’s libertarian wing, which wants to cut spending but also curtail foreign adventures and legalize marijuana, doesn’t fit well with the establishment. After John Boehner stripped a handful of House members their committee positions in what was widely viewed as retaliation for voting against the party line, rumors circulated that a Paul-inspired band of representatives might try to topple the Speaker in a coup. Rep. Justin Amash, described by the Doherty as “the most prominent House “Paulite,” reportedly “relishes how his libertarianism marks him as a rebel in his own party.”

Beyond the libertarian-conservative divide, Republicans are also up in arms about just how far to the right to push the party. In the last week, a bitter feud has erupted between Tea Party stalwarts like the Club for Growth Karl Rove, whose newly founded Conservative Victory Project aims to boost electable conservatives (read: not Todd Akin) in Republican primaries. Despite a vow that the group will “wherever possible try to find consensus among groups on the right,” talk-radio hosts and old media pundits alike believe that its mission to “support the most conservative candidate who can win — as we put it, institutionalizing the Buckley rule” is simply code for running wishy-washy, Constitution-hating RINOs.

Rove has been roundly denounced by the conservative blogosphere, with reliable right-wingers like Citizens United’s David Bossie writing that “The Civil War Has Begun” and Rove’s spokesperson dramatically labeling activist Brent Bozell a “hater” in an interview. The response? A letter signed by Bossie and over 20 conservative groups reading, “You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. Let it start here.” At the reactionary American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord fumes that “Rove’s project is seen here as nothing less than renewing the long ago battle over GOP principles between the moderate Ford/Bush Establishment GOP and Ronald Reagan.” This sounds like quite a gap — perhaps not a “yawning” one, but a gap nevertheless.

Whether or not there is a real divide in the GOP, conservatives sure think there is. They interpret Rove’s efforts to win elections as injecting dangerous moderation into their party, a threat they take with deadly seriousness. This is the significance that I think Kilgore misses: As long as Republicans believe there is a split, as long as they squabble among themselves, the real work of positioning the party for 2014 and beyond will be hampered. Internecine warfare takes a toll on a movement, and candidates going to battle in GOP primaries to out-conservative each other will only leave fewer resources available to fight the Democrat in the general election. When the director of the Senate Conservatives Fund is recasting the Rove’s Victory Project as “The Conservative Defeat Project” and writing that it “is yet another example of the Republican establishment’s hostility toward its conservative base,” you know there’s at least the perception of a real break.

So the left can continue to lament the hair-width differences between the reformers and the, uh, “patriots,” as the Tea Partiers might call themselves. But they shouldn’t pretend the split isn’t real simply because it is based more on ego (of which Karl Rove has plenty) and power grabs than an actual opening of the conservative mind. Sure, abortion will still be compared to the Holocaust and poor people will still be state-coddled moochers. Those aren’t stripes the GOP is ever going to change, softened rhetoric or no. But as long as Republicans are hitting each other, their punches against Democrats will have less oomph. A party “in disarray,” as a melodramatic, narrative-crafting outfit like Politico might say, will have difficulty presenting a united front. To the extent that the backlash against Rove goads state-level Republicans into nominating even more rigidly ideological candidates — see Iowa’s Steve King, whom Rove deputy Steven Law singled out as having a “Todd Akin problem” — Democrats may also benefit from being able to run against controversy-provoking opponents who present ripe targets for attack ads. King runs behind the more moderate Tom Latham in statewide polls, but the Tea Party, outraged at Rove’s slight, is firmly behind King. Iowa Democrats must be fervently hoping the GOP keeps believing it’s at war with itself, because King would surely be an easier candidate to defeat than Latham.

Rand Paul won’t say anything substantially different from Marco Rubio on Tuesday. But conservatives will think he is, and that’s what counts.

Fire Your Media Planner

I understand that the process of buying online advertising is not as simple as dialing up BuzzFeed or the Huffington Post and asking for a rate card. As far as I can gather, advertisers go through middlemen, utilizing third-party vendors that distribute ads over a range of sites. Call it buying in bulk. But even if an advertiser is more specific in its request than just “high traffic sites” or “entertainment media,” it might be wise to narrow the field a little further than “political websites.” Precise targeting is obviously possible; National Review is lousy with ads for books by its contributors, like Mark Steyn’s “After America.” (Two guesses which Muslim socialist will be ushering in the apocalypse.) Left-wing magazine Mother Jones features an interactive spot from Change.org that cycles through petitions about abortion rights and saving the wolves. Newsmax, a sort of poor man’s Fox News, caters to its low-information voters by spotlighting links like “A 30-second daily trick that SHRINKS your belly” and “Eat this and the fat pours out of you!” (See this hilarious Baffler article about the marriage of convenience between conservative websites and snake oil salesmen like gold-bullion scammers and fake Viagra peddlers.)

You get what you pay for, though, and low-budget outfits unwilling to pay for specificity end up paying in another way: wasted ad dollars. Case in point:

Note the dramatic call to “Stop the Islamist Witch Hunt against Rep. Bachmann” from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative foundation that runs illustrious programs like “Jihad Watch” and generally spreads Islamophobic, shariah-law-is-nigh vitriol. It’s an ad that would fit right in at National Review, but what is it doing on the home page of the liberal Washington Monthly, a magazine that splashes photos of a smiling President Obama on its cover beneath the headline “Barack the Builder”? Much has been written about the “digital divide” between Republicans and Democrats; last November’s failure of the Romney campaign’s “ORCA” get-out-the-vote technology was only the latest evidence that the GOP is outmatched in Internet know-how. But now it seems conservative groups in general could use a primer on online advertising. If the Obama campaign can use its massive e-mail list to send alerts about legitimate-rape craziness to 25-year-old female Facebookers in Iowa and Amazon.com can serve a Travelocity ad to someone who just searched for suitcases and bug spray, the media-savvy world of folks like Eric Erickson and Matt Drudge can surely learn to pick better platforms for its ads.

Newsmax: Targeting done right, if crazily.

The mismatch is not as bad as the recurrent print-media gaffe of running inappropriate ads alongside serious articles, like the recent gun show promotion that a Connecticut paper paired with a story on the Newtown shooting. It is, however, perhaps an even bigger waste of money. (Hey, even gun owners need their morning news.) The only clicks the Bachmann ad is likely to garner are from bemused liberals cackling in amazement. The Washington Monthly is a pretty low-profile publication, and its readers are ideologically homogeneous. It doesn’t attract the conservative trolls who lurk at places like The Nation and Mother Jones solely to post inflammatory remarks in the comments threads. (Grammatically challenged sample from The Nation: “The USS Progressive will start taking on water and slowly sink and the free riders will abandon ship and the progressive movement will again find itself as the permanent minority they have always been and will be.”)

For the record, this is what Ed Kilgore, the Monthly’s prolific blogger-in-residence, and his predecessor, Steve Benen, have to say about the woman (a.k.a. “the unhinged Minnesotan” or “that uber-wingnut congresswoman”) the Freedom Center wants us to support:

Even as the Republican Party leaps off a right-wing cliff, Bachmann stands out for her unique brand of madness.

Bachmann’s principal problem is that she combines the worst of two important traits: she’s strikingly ignorant about public policy and she’s paranoid to the point of delusion.

The problem isn’t that she’s a liar. The problem is Bachmann combines two very serious flaws: she’s mad as a hatter and conspicuously unintelligent.

Bachmann’s ignorance knows no bounds. The enduring question about Republicans’ unhinged rhetoric is whether the speaker is lying or crazy. With Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), it’s especially challenging, but I tend to go with the latter — she strikes me as entirely sincere and stark raving mad. Her accusations are truly idiotic, but I don’t doubt that Bachmann actually believes them.

To top it off, under the headline “Bachmann: Too Crazy for the GOP?” Kilgore knocks both the congresswoman and the anti-Muslim rhetoric that organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center employ:

Bachmann has been “out there” for years, making outrageous statements almost daily and embodying a brand of Christian Nationalism that is never more than a few steps away from hate-group ravings.

Are you feeling the love yet?

Apparently, the media buyer for over-the-top right-wing outfits is working overtime, because the latest ad to pop up on the Monthly’s website is an even worse fit:

Click the link and you’re taken to the website of the Public Advocate of the United States, an obscure group which “lobbies to fight the radical agenda of the Homosexual Lobby.” It calls for signatures on a “Protect Our Children’s Innocence Petition” that warns of a wave of mandated homosexual indoctrination in our public schools: “This bill is the brainchild of radical liberals who want to force their political view-points on to our children and to eradicate the values you and I cherish.” (Is the English language really so difficult? Beware “legislation working it’s way through the United States Congress.”)

Yeah, that’s going to get a lot of buy-in from WaMo readers.

And the icing on the cake? Three minutes ago, as I scrolled through the search results for “Michele Bachmann” on the magazine’s website, this graced my screen:

Sign up today? Toss in an AdBlock plug-in for Firefox and you’ve got yourself a deal.

Information Just Wants to Be Free

“The Information Sage” (Washington Monthly)

An illustrative but data-empty graphic that Edward Tufte would hate (Stephen Savage/theatlantic.com)

Every month has a sponsor these days. If it’s February, it must be American Heart Month; if the calendar says April, you can pick between the serious (Child Abuse Prevention Month) and the, uh, less serious (Straw Hat Month). As for May, well, all signs point to Innovation Month. Or does “Genius Month” have a better ring to it? Either way, various magazines have dedicated their warm-weather issues to all kinds of intelligence. The New Yorker’s May 16 piece on Pixar (sorry, it’s behind the paywall) was as much a highlight of author Anthony Lane’s writing skills as it was a profile of the movie studio’s Ph.D-laden animators. The Atlantic, under the banner of “The Culture Issue,” published Paul Simon’s songwriting drafts alongside a short story constructed of crossword clues. The most interesting feature, however, arguably belongs to The Washington Monthly, a left-leaning magazine for the D.C. area whose May/June issue introduces us to graphic design guru Edward Tufte.

Tufte is less interested in designing a nice cover for Company X’s quarterly report than in life’s fundamental Big Questions, which he believes can be answered with the “forever knowledge” of raw data and billions of information points. Such data can only be harnessed, however, if it is made lucid and understandable. Because forever knowledge is best embodied in graphics and charts that present maximum data with minimal complexity, graphic design is intrinsic to solving cosmic, what-does-it-mean-to-be-human problems. Tufte, who would likely agree whole-heartedly with the Google-esque axiom that “information just wants to be free,” is convinced that the only way to “free” information from the impenetrable clutches of Power Point is to create charts and maps that let it shine. For this reason, Tufte says, “I purposely don’t write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation.”

“It’s not about making the complex simple,” Richard Grefe, the executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, is quoted as saying. “It’s about making the complex clear.”

Tufte hardly fits the stereotype of a commercial graphic designer — Yaffa finds him neither hunched over a computer nor obsessed with tweaking the colors of a corporate logo. Instead, he travels the country like a Dale Carnegie speaker, giving a course called “Presenting Data and Information” in Hilton ballrooms and conference centers. This is not as boring as it sounds. The centerpiece of his presentation is a 19th century map of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Italy. It is simultaneous a geographical map, a timeline of the campaign, and a bar graph showing the decimation of the French army as it was winnowed by temperature, disease and Russian soldiers. A thick tan stripe representing Napoleon’s army marches eastward across the map; when it nears Moscow and suddenly doubles back on itself, the wide swath turned to an enervated black pencil line, France has started its retreat. Yaffa describes Tufte’s narration:

“‘This,’ he said, ‘is War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy.’ Tufte pointed to the far left of the map, where the tan and black lines intersect. ‘And it is there,’ he said, ‘at the beginning and at the end of the campaign, where we have a small but poignant example of the first grand principle of analytical design’: above all else show comparisons.”

Yaffa concludes with the sober observation that “only one in forty-two soldiers survives the doomed campaign.”

When not on the lecture circuit, Tufte moonlights as a designer for the federal government. The unlikely marriage of stripped-down data maven and hidebound government bureaucracy began when Tufte was drafted by the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board to create a user-friendly and visually comprehensive interface for Recovery.gov, the site that tracks stimulus dollars as they flow across the country. Tufte is a natural proponent for releasing as much information as possible. Knowledge, as the cliche goes, is power: “”if you display information the right way, anybody can be analyst. Anyone can be an investigator.”

“So far,” Yaffa writes,  “Tufte’s most visible contribution to Recovery.gov is a map that he designed, which shows the rollout of 101,236 stimulus projects between February 2009 and December 2010 as a proliferating series of white lights overlaid on top of a nighttime map of the U.S.” Other maps available on the website compare unemployment rates to recovery funding; others let you see completed recovery projects by money awarded, contracts signed, et cetera. Tufte pushes his bosses at the  Transparency Board to do more with more data, more quickly. He is not used to the sclerotic pace of government bureaucracy. “Tufte drives cars,” says Earl Devaney, who heads the Board, “and most people in Washington drive tanks.”

Tufte rails against visual illiteracy — of which he gives Power Point as the prime example. He put together a 28-page condemnation of the program. Yaffa reports that, according to Tufte, “the low information density of PowerPoint is ‘approaching dementia.'” The designer notes that the charts and graphics used in PowerPoint average twelve numbers apiece, “which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda.” This has real world implications: Data and information that could have revealed the problems with the space shuttle Columbia are reduced to primary-colored pie charts. The pros and cons of military action are boiled down into a few bullet points and a line graph showing cost-benefit analysis. Decisions are made almost in a vacuum, because the crucial information is either absent or obscured.

nytimes.com

[Yaffa also name-checks Thomas X. Hammes, the retired Marine colonel whose 2009 anti-PowerPoint essay in Armed Forces Journal garnered widespread media coverage, including this article in The New York Times that calls out the ridiculously baroque slide at left]

In a 2007 book, Tufte pioneered an alternative to confusing, hard-to-interpret charts. He calls them sparklines, “numerically dense, word-size graphics that show variation over time.” A little line graph of the peaks and valleys of two months of the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes up less space than “Dow Jones Industrial Average.” This makes such graphics practical, useful and simple enough for the average reader to grasp, as useful for the financial pages as for the sports section. Microsoft has tried to patent sparklines as a feature for its Excel spreadsheet program. Tufte responded characteristically, not with a law suit but with a bemused shrug of acceptance. Information, he seems to know, just wants to be free.