I get nervous when I read sentences like this

from Greg Sargent:

But there is no realistic scenario under which Democrats agree to serious entitlement cuts without new revenues, so until this position changes, we’re very likely going to remain stuck in extended sequestration.

It seems to me that progressive watchers of the budget wars like Sargent and Brian Beutler tend to underestimate Obama's capacity to move the goalposts on itself. Remember his alleged retort to Boehner's opening offer late last year to raise about $800 billion in new revenue over ten years via (unspecified) loophole closures: "I get that for free"?  He didn't. And as Sargent's post implies, he won't any time time soon. Relatedly, remember Obama's not-quite-hard line about the Bush tax cuts -- that they would not be extended for households earning over $250k? They were (up to $450k).

Unemployment and the incumbent president: look at the last 16 months

Binyamin Appelbaum recently warned in the New York Times:

No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent. 

In response, political scientist Seth Masket plotted out presidential elections since 1948 and concluded, "the unemployment rate does not predict presidential elections at all." Carlisle Rainey dug deeper into the data and found that there does seem to be some relationship when incumbent presidents are up for re-election. Analyzing a massive series of data subsets, Rainey concludes more broadly, "the data are consistent with both very small and moderately large effects."  Nate Silver, similarly, dives deep and comes up agnostic, concluding that the unemployment rate does reflect (if not drive) the incumbent's fortunes,but that the relationship between the unemployment rate and electoral fortunes is too entwined with a host of other factors to map out with any confidence.

Silver also looks at the direction unemployment moves over an incumbent's term. Here I think he is getting warm. But as he looks over the whole four years, he finds little correlation.

I have for some time been (nervously) tracking Obama's political fortunes against Reagan's, since it's often pointed out that both inherited a vicious recession; at Obama's low moments I've taken some comfort in the fact that Reagan's approval rating reached a nadir of 35% in January 1983, shortly after the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8%.  The impression I've soaked up is that the unemployment rate really matters in the 16-odd months before a president stands for re-election, when the electorate starts to tune in and measure him against the opposing party's candidates.  For Reagan, I've noted, a decisive turn came in July 1983, when the unemployment rate dipped to 9.4% from 10.1% the prior month. From there he had the wind at his back to October 1984, when the rate was 7.4%. Hence Reagan's landslide.  He asked us to stay the course, and the course started running downhill run when it counted.

Re: Gabrielle Giffords and Political Courage

If I may put one-plus-one together here: Seth Masket pays tribute to the political courage of Gabrielle Giffords:

She represents a district that McCain won in 2008 and surely was aware that Republicans would be devoting considerable funds to defeating her. Nonetheless, she voted for TARP, cap and trade, the stimulus, and health care reform, and she still managed to retain her seat last year. That certainly merits some sort of mention.

Whoa. It sure does. More than those of us who don't study political science for a living (as Masket does) might recognize.  In the aftermath of the last election, political scientists Brendan Nyhan, Eric McGhee and John Sides took a dive into the data and found that what hurt individual House Democrats most was votes on precisely those four bills:

We counted the number of these measures supported by each Democratic incumbent and then estimated the effect of this support on their election conditional on the partisanship of the member’s district (controlling for other factors). The simple answer: these roll call votes mattered. A lot. A Democratic incumbent in the average district represented by Democratic incumbents actually lost about two-thirds of a percentage point for every yes vote. Democrats in the least Democratic districts, such as Chet Edwards of Texas or Gene Taylor of Mississippi, lost about 4 percent for every yes vote.

Politics and principle, cont.

Seth Masket, parsing my critique of Jonathan Bernstein's approach to political ethics, seems to have missed (or discounted) a couple of key modifiers (emphasis added):

Sprung...questioned why we should accept crass political calculation by our elected officials:

Where Bernstein (judging from his blog's Comments section) does disturb many readers -- me included -- is in his suggestion that it is politicians' right, indeed their duty, to be guided entirely by such calculations [of political advantage]. He argues, in effect, that the law of political survival is a necessary, natural, sufficient and therefore desirable prime mover of politicians' words and actions.

I don't want to speak for Jon here (I'm sure he'll have a good post along these lines up shortly), but my response to this is as follows: I don't celebrate this system. But to complain that politicians will be guided by political calculation is like complaining that businesspeople will be guided by profit maximization or that athletes are too obsessed with winning. It's not a character flaw; it's their line of work. Indeed, hoping for politicians who are untethered from political calculations is not only naïve, but sometimes quite dangerous

The bone I picked with Bernstein was not that he illuminates the how and why of political combat. I'm delighted that he does; that's why I read him.  My question was simply whether we should assume, as I think Bernstein at least sometimes does, that the struggle for political advantage has no bottom -- and that it never conflicts with the struggle to craft good policy.