Keeping the Republic Blog

All Foley, All the Time -- 10/8/06

Most of the news in the last week has been consumed with the latest developments concerning former congressman Mark Foley’s inappropriate and possibly criminal behavior toward the high school-aged congressional pages who come to DC each year to work in Congress, and debates about how much Republican leaders of Congress knew about his behavior and when they knew it. 

The coverage of the scandal has been a classic case of a media “feeding frenzy” (see KTR, p. 663) and rather than giving a minute by minute report of events as they have unfolded, I have delayed posting about this until we could see something of what the political fallout would be.

The short answer seems to be that, unlike the Abramoff scandal which involved fairly complex financial and lobbying improprieties, the Foley scandal resonates with the public.  Sex scandals make for good gossip and the question of whether the House Republicans violated the public trust in failing to care for kids in their custody is one that strikes at the heart of the family values that the Republicans base much of their electoral appeal on.  Since there are already issues of Republican competency in this election, this scandal has what news people call “legs”  -- it won’t go away quickly.

Today’s Washington Post has a good piece (Michael Grunwald and Chris Cillizza, Foley Consuming GOP as Elections Draw Near, 10/8/06) on what this scandal means politically for the Republicans, especially on the chances that it will disillusion the party’s value-concerned base and keep them home on election day.  

The Foley scandal has hindered Republican efforts to control the agenda in the days leading up to the election and the war news (casualties in Iraq are at a two year high ) will make that difficult even when the scandal begins to recede. That events are taking a measurable toll on Republicans is apparent as the first wave of post-Foley polls come in (See for example, Marcus Mabry, A Political Limbo, Newsweek, 10/7/06.) 

More Katrina -- 8/30/06

Lots of coverage of the President’s commemorative trip to New Orleans; most discusses the political aspects I noted yesterday.  But check out a couple of pieces in this morning’s Washington Post on the cleanup/reconstruction effort (the first thread I talked about in the previous post.) 

One article (Spencer Hsu, First the Flood, Now the Fight) does a nice job of showing the bureaucratic haggling and problems within FEMA that have slowed down much of the recovery effort.  Based on what you have read (or will read) in Chapter 9 of KTR, would you expect this to be an area where government can get the job done?

Another piece (Dean Starkman, The Legal Storm in Katrina’s Wake) documents the troubles that residents are having navigating the insurance industry, and the difficulty they face getting their claims met.  What’s interesting is that these pieces point to problems that are devastating to gulf residents and presumably have been all year long, but have not been receiving much national attention until the impending anniversary shown some light on them.  Would more national attention from the media help these problems get solved? 

If politics is about who gets what and how they get it – why would you say the gulf residents aren’t getting more help, resources, and attention?

Fuel Prices and Press Secretaries -- 4/26/06

In the face of record high gas prices and blockbuster profits for the oil industry, but record low opinion ratings (he just hit 32% in one recent poll), President Bush announced yesterday several steps the administration would take to lower oil prices. (Jim VandeHei and Steven Mufson, Bush Calls for Probe of Rising Gas Prices, WaPo, 4/26/06.) These include temporarily stopping additions to the nation’s oil reserves and considering easing Environmental Protection Agency regulations to promote clean fuel. You can read about his plan in any major paper today. See the LA Times, however, for a concise explanation of Why Gas Prices Won’t Go Down (Elizabeth Douglass, April 26, 2006). Basically, the problem keeping prices high isn’t about low supply -- we have plenty of oil right now -- it is about concerns for the future, with an uncertain situation in the Middle East and a growing demand in India and China. As the article points out, the world’s energy crisis isn’t going to be solved by short-term remedies –- the best solutions are medium and long term. As we suggest in the What’s at Stake in Chapter 17 of KTR, such solutions are politically controversial in the United States and reveal deep seated ideological differences. USA Today does a nice job of detailing the efforts of past presidents to deal with the same issue. (Bush, Predecessors, Look for Response to Rising Oil Prices, 4/26/06.)

Also in the news this morning is the acceptance by Fox News commentator Tony Snow (a former speech writer for Bush’s father) of the White House Press Secretary job being vacated by Scott McClellan. (Jim Rutenberg, Fox Commentator to Join White House, Officials Say, NYT, 4/26/06.) Given Fox’s positive coverage of the Bush administration, this appointment has given rise to a variety of late night TV jokes about whether Snow will get back pay for his previous support for the president, but as libertarian blogger Andrew Sullivan points out, Snow has also been critical of Bush for expanding the size of the government and the budget. McClellan was kept on a pretty tight leash of White House officials but Snow has reportedly bargained for a voice in policy discussions as a part of his new job. It will be interesting to see whether that will free him to do more than repeat the canned statements of his predecessor. See KTR, p. 657, for a definition of the revolving door (a phenomenon Snow illustrates nicely) and pp. 668-669, for a discussion of news management in the Bush administration. Is Snow’s journalism background a help or a hindrance to him in his new job? Are there ethical issues involved?

Immigration and Presidential Leaking – 4/10/06

Cartoons, Hunting and U.S. Port Security -- 2/22/06

Sorry for the long time between posts. We were traveling and then dealing with a very sick dog.

While a number of events have taken place in the last two weeks, the three that have gotten the most air time by far are the worldwide protests about the Danish printing of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, the Cheney hunting accident and, most recently, the hullabaloo over the transfer of the control of six American ports from a British owned company to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

The Danish cartoon story is a complex one, and it doesn’t really have to do with American domestic politics so I won’t cover it in any depth. It’s a good way to understand the concept of political culture we discuss in Chapter 2, however, (especially the clash between procedural societies in the west and more substantive cultures in the Arab world) and it illuminates some of what’s at stake in the melting pot versus crazy salad controversy. It also may help us think about a few issues that arise in Chapter 5 on civil liberties. One is freedom of religion. We see in the chapter (pp. 165-172) how Americans have struggled to find a balance between allowing religious freedom, but not permitting the state to establish or endorse a religion. A variation of that conundrum arises in the Danish cartoon case. Does religious freedom, with the toleration and respect that that implies, require all people to observe the strongly held religious norms and proscriptions of each religion? Another issue is freedom of the press. Does the fact that the press can print what it likes mean there are no limits on what it should print? This may not be a constitutional question, but an ethical one, that is, it raises issues not of what is legal, but of what is right. This ties into a third civil liberties issue that the Danish cartoon story raises – what is the role of self censorship in a democratic world? Revisit the discussion of free speech on campus (pp. 180-181) and ask yourself if there are any parallels between the political correctness issues raised there and the issues being debated with respect to the Danish cartoons.

About Cheney, I want to say only this. What is interesting to me from a political scientist’s perspective is the way the story developed “legs” and refused to go away despite the Vice President’s best efforts to make it do so. Lots of important stories fizzle for lack of public and media interest, and lots of trivial ones stick around forever. How come? The best analyses of this I have seen argue that it is not because what happened was of such earth-shaking importance (except, of course, to the people involved) but rather that it fit so well with the views many people already held about the Vice President, what political scientist Larry Sabato, who has studied the anatomy of such scandals, calls playing into the “subtext.” People already thought that Cheney was secretive and that he set his own rules, so his behavior over the hunting accident only reinforced that. Other than to weaken his own popularity ratings, however, there is probably minimal fallout from what Sabato calls the “feeding frenzy.”

Finally, this morning all the papers are abuzz with Bush’s declaration that he would veto any congressional legislation to halt the deal his administration has made to turn over control of 6 U.S. ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. (David E. Sanger and Eric Lipton, NYT Bush Would Veto Any Bill Halting Dubai Port Deal, 2/22/06.)

Not only Democrats but many Republicans including House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist are calling on Bush to stop the deal since they fear it will endanger U.S. security to have our ports out of our control. Bush, who has not yet vetoed a bill (KTR, pp. 334-335) says he will veto one interfering with this deal and argues that Congress and the American people should trust him.

An editorial in the Washington Post (Port Security Humbug, 2/22/06) takes Bush’s side here, pointing out that the ports are already managed by a foreign-owned company (in Great Britain), that the UAE are allies, and that port security is currently and will continue to be controlled by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Nonetheless, Bush is getting clobbered by liberals and conservatives alike on this one, and in that sense he is probably reaping what he has sown. Since 9/11 he has emphasized that national security should take precedence over even such essentials to the American system as civil liberties and checks and balances. His detractors are simply using the same issue frame (a term borrowed from the media chapter, KTR p. 659) that the administration has polished over the years. He has yet to make a convincing case to the public that the port control issue does not present a case of “business as usual” trumping security concerns.

A Summary of the Week's News 1-27-06

No big news items this week on the domestic front, but lots of little ones. I've been saving them for a single post and, since today's news coverage obliging has some good catch up pieces, this post will be kind of long. You can savor it over the weekend.

Mostly the domestic news of the week has been focused on three issues: the Alito confirmation, the White House's offensive on the NSA spying issue, and the leaks and hints about the content of the President's State of the Union Address coming up on Tuesday.

Alito

As far as the Alito hearings go, it looks like the White House has the votes to confirm. No Republicans have defected so far and at least three Democrats will vote to confirm. Other Democrats oppose his confirmation either on the grounds that they think he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which says that a woman's decision to have an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy is an exercise of the right to privacy, or because they believe that he will rule in a way to give too much power to the president (see the post on signing statements, below.)

Thursday Senator John Kerry announced that he would attempt to filibuster the vote on Alito and said he had the support of Senator Ted Kennedy. As we explain in KTR (pp. 306-308) a filibuster allows a minority of senators to halt activity on the Senate floor, but it can be stopped by a vote of cloture (which takes 60 votes.) The White House says it has those votes, and it probably does. In 2005 Republicans threatened to eliminate the use of the filibuster for judicial confirmations(a strategy they called the nuclear option) but a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement to preserve the legislative maneuver in exchange for an agreement not to support a filibuster unless there were extraordinary circumstances (KTR, p. 308.) It is unlikely that Kerry and Kennedy would seriously jeopardize the filibuster's fate here, but if they know they will lose the cloture vote they can take a stand without risking the nuclear option. The tactic is still controversial among Democrats right now. Though it pleases the Democratic base, many in the party fear that it will distract from issues where they feel the Republicans are really vulnerable. (Charles Babbington, Democrats Split Over Filibuster on Alito, WaPo, 1/27/06.) Senator Frist plans to schedule a vote to end debate on Monday and a vote to confirm Alito on Tuesday, a nice send-off for the President's State of the Union speech that night (see KTR, p. 334.)

NSA Eavesdropping

One issue the Democrats want to keep on the public's agenda is the NSA's domestic spying operation. The Bush administration has launched an offensive to frame the surveillance as necessary to keep Americans safe -- fanning out to TV talk shows and making public speeches (Bush even gave one at the NSA) arguing that only Americans having conversations with Al Qaeda members were eavesdropped on. They don't call it spying or eavesdropping they call it a "terrorist surveillance program," and they say they can't discuss it much because to do so would help the enemy. Critics of the eavesdropping dispute that and argue that the issue here is not safety, since Bush could have conducted the surveillance legally had he chosen to get search warrants, but rather the unchecked power of the executive. Nothing is new on this legally since I posted below; what has changed is the Bush administration's decision to take the case to the public in black and white terms. The political fight here is for how the issue is to be understood: If Bush succeeds in making it about security, the public is likely to support him; if his critics can make it about civil liberties and an executive power grab, they are less likely to do so. The latest New York Times poll shows this in graphic terms; 53% of respondents support eavesdropping to reduce the threat of terrorism, but only 46 % support it if terrorism is removed from the question. (Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps, NYT, 1/27/06.) See the KTR public opinion chapter for a discussion of how important question wording can be in polling (pp. 465-466) and the media chapter for a discussion of framing (pp. 659-660) and news management (pp. 666-669.)

SOTU

Finally, there is increasing coverage of the issues that Bush is likely to air in his State of the Union address. One issue that he seems sure to talk about is health care. While details of his proposal have not been revealed yet, from various leaks it seems clear that he will try to do something similar to what he attempted with Social Security last year -- focus on revamping the program to transfer more responsibility to individuals. (Peter Gosselin, Health Plan to Revive Debate, LAT, 1/23/06.) In this case, that will mean tax cuts to individuals to cover their own health care costs -- perhaps a beefing up of the medical savings account program where Americans carry health insurance only for catastrophic care, and pay for their other medical expenses out of tax-exempt savings accounts. The idea here, long endorsed by conservatives, is that if people have to pay for their care out of their own pockets (as opposed to having it covered by insurance) they will make more financially savvy decisions and be a lot less likely to seek unnecessary treatment, causing health care costs to decline. Eventually, if the health care system moved in this direction, employers would not offer health insurance packages to employees as they do now, and the entire face of health care provision in the country could change. As with Social Security, however, this could be a hard sell to the American people, many of whom are unwilling to face risk with only their own resources. A NYT piece about how the banks (who would have a central role in these savings accounts) are positioning themselves to take advantage of them does a pretty good job of explaining what's involved. (Eric Dash, Savings Accounts for Health Costs Attract Wall St.)

Other News Worth Noting

Bush held a press conference Thursday. (For a semi-humorous take on the conference, read Dana Milbank, Trying to Maintain Control of the State, in a State of Confusion, WaPo, 1/27/06.) Although as Milbank points out, his discussion was largely devoted to defending executive prerogative, he also fielded questions about the Hamas victory in the Palestinian legislative elections (complicated story, but briefly, Hamas is a terrorist organization, sworn to eliminate Israel; Bush supports democracy in the Mideast in Iraq and elsewhere, hoping that peaceful parties will win, but democracy is not an easy force to control as the Palestinian elections make clear) and the suppression of pictures taken with him and Jack Abramoff (he says the pictures are irrelevant; they seem to have been purged from existing records so they can't be used for "political purposes" but it's not clear who has done the purging). John Dickerson in Slate points out that they aren't irrelevant, they actually help Bush by distracting the press from questions about Abramoff's real influence in the WH. (Dickerson, All the President's Dodges, Slate, 1/16/06.)

The LAT releases new approval ratings for Bush -- 43%, the lowest Bush has received in their poll. This poll also echoes the NYT finding that people support the wiretapping if done to protect us from terrorists. (Ron Brownstein, Bush's Ratings Sink, but Trust Remains, 1/27/06.) See KTR, pp. 342-349; 364-367, to understand how important a president's public approval is to his ability to get things done.