Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Dean’s Gaffes

Devastating catalog of Howard Dean's most recent gaffes in today's LA Times. You know a Democratic candidate has a serious case of foot-in-mouth when even the LA Times feels obliged to cover the story. Any other candidate long since would have self-destructed. Maybe the rumors about Dean being made of teflon really are true.

Can the Democrats Win Without the South?

In claiming that the Democratic nominee can win without winning at least some southern states, the The Daily Kos notes and tries to rebut a TNR argument that the red states are getting redder:

Sure, many Red States (mainly in the South) are getting redder, but many Blue States are as well. With Nader mostly out of the picture, we're talking a lot bluer. That means the battle for the presidency will not be fought in Alabama or California, Georgia or New Jersey, or Kentucky or New York. It will be fought in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and a couple more states. We may very well see $500 million or more spent by both sides on just a dozen states.

Fair enough. What Kos overlooks, however, is the concomitant Electoral College trend. Maybe the blue states are getting bluer, just as the red states are getting redder. If so, however, the key statistic is the net gain of 7 electoral college votes by the red states as a result of the post-2000 reallocation. This gain gives Bush room to lose at least one of the smaller battleground states and still win the Electoral College.

Complexity of legislation

Calpundit Kevin Drum rebuts a conspiracy theory explanation for complex leislation:

[L]egislation has been getting increasingly complex for a long time, and it seems to be a bipartisan failing. In fact, one of my political science professors, Morris Fiorina, wrote a book a few decades ago theorizing that there was a cycle that went like this:

• Congress passes complex legislation.
• Constituents get confused and irate.
• Constituents call their local congress critter.
• Congressional staff gets on the horn with offending agency and clears up the problem.
• Grateful constituents reelect congressman.
• Repeat as necessary.

In other words, whether consciously or not, congressmen like complex legislation because it gives them a chance to help out their constituents. This book was written 30 years ago, and I don't know if Fiorina himself still supports this theory, but I've always thought it was pretty clever.

I keep fairly close track of the public choice literature and my sense is that this is still a widely accepted exlanation for statutory complexity. (Poliblogger Steven Taylor apparently agrees, as does Outside the Beltway.) Yet, it is not the only explanation. Statutory complexity has at least two additional sources besides those Kevin et al. identified. One follows from transaction costs. Any longrange planner faces the problem of uncertainty. As the time horizon with which onedeals extends towards the indefinite future and the number of variables one must accounts for increases, one must anticipate an ever-growing number of contingencies. Attempting to deal with multiple contingencies ex ante necessarily results in complexity. You need a lot of detail to deal with all sorts of "if this happens, then do that" commands. Congress could (and often does) deal with complexity by leaving the problem of future contingencies to the courts and regulatory agencies to be addressed ex post. Yet, Congress may not wish to give up control to those other bodies. A Congress controlled by Democrats, for example, may not want to give regulatory gap-filling powers to a Republican administration. Hence, you're going to get many cases in which Congress will try to fill as many gaps as possible in the regulatory scheme ex ante, which leads to complexity. A second source of complexity arises where there are multiple interest groups involved in the legislative process. One way of looking at legislation is to think of Congress as a referee between competing interest groups. In the legislative process, the interest groups eventually strike a bargain. Congress then ratifies that bargain and gives it teeth by passing a statute. Sometimes striking a bargain among multiple interest groups, especially in an area where there are many variables for which to account, requires a highly complex contract. Bottom line? Sometimes complexity in statutes exists solely for the sake of complexity. But sometimes it has a real - and arguably even legitmate - purpose.

Lieberman on Dean’s Temperment

After Howard Dean started whining about how everybody was picking on him, Joe Lieberman told the LA Times:

"I've got news for Howard Dean: The primaries are a warm-up compared to what George Bush and Karl Rove have waiting for the Democratic nominee," Lieberman said. "If Howard Dean can't stand the heat in the Democratic kitchen, he's going to melt in a minute once the Republicans start going after him."

Yep. It's hard to see how somebody as thin-skinned as Dean seems to be can survive the rough-and-tumble of a national campaign.

Dealing with lawyer “jokes”

Scheherazade's run into something I see a lot:

I notice at gatherings like the book group party and at a big family gathering of relatives people make lawyer jokes -- not the "two lawyers walk into a bar" kind but the "watch out, A.J., you don't want to say that around her, she's a lawyer" kind of comments and I don't really know what to make of them. Do people do this with other professions?

By way of reply I'll offer an anecdote from my days at Illinois. We were at dinner with a bunch of townies we knew through church. A couple of them were doctors who started in on me about lawyers. I took it for a while, but finally turned the tables by asking a couple of questions about the HMO for which they worked (a particularly large but infamously unpleasant one to deal with). This got the crowd going on HMOs, which is about as close as I've ever come to Churchillian repartee. I feel a little guilty about not turning the other cheeck, but only a little.

Slicing and dicing the electorate

Calpundit Kevin Drum tweaks Ronald Brownstein, who wrote the LA Times story on the gender gap discussed below, for not slicing the electorate more thinly:

How about Southern white males vs. everyone else, Ron? (Besides, we all know that the real action is in the urban/rural divide anyway, right?)

He has a point, of course. There are countless ways of slicing and dicing the electorate. One of my favorites is the newly popular pollster fad for NASCAR dads (although it seems being a NASCAR mom is pretty important too):

The approval rating for Bush is 61 percent among men who like NASCAR, 55 among those who don't, according to the Pew Research Center For The People & The Press. The gap is even greater among women - Bush has a 58 percent rating among NASCAR women and only 47 percent among non-racing fans. The error margins for these different samples range from 3.5 to 6 percent.

If attitudes towards NASCAR are a useful proxy for the South versus rest of the country/rural versus urban distinctions Kevin wants to draw, it strikes me as noteworthy that Bush commands a majority even among men who don't like NASCAR. Anyway, I thought the "real action" was church attendance:

People who attend church regularly are twice as likely to vote Republican than those who don’t, according to a new survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. ...

"It’s the most powerful predictor of party ID and partisan voting intention," said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Anyhow, here's hoping Kevin feels better soon and is back at his post blogging away.

The gender gap

The media usually spins the gender gap as being driven by female voters' preference for Democrats. In fact, however, much of the polling data I've seen suggests that the female vote is fairly closely divided between the two parties. A major article in today's LA Times (of all places) confirms what I've suspected for a long time; namely, that the gender gap is driven mainly by a preference for the GOP among white males:

In the modern political era, Democrats never expect to carry white men, who reliably tilt Republican. But the emerging threat to Democrats in 2004 is that Bush will win white men so decisively that the party can't overcome his advantage with other voter groups that lean in their direction, such as minorities and college-educated white women. ...

Recent polls underscore the challenge for Democrats with white men. In an ABC/Washington Post survey released last week, white men preferred Bush over an unnamed Democrat in 2004 by 62% to 29%, a head-turning 33-point margin; by contrast, white women gave Bush just a 10-point lead. ...

[Some] Democrats worry that if Dean's liberal positions on social issues, such as civil unions for gays, and his emphatic opposition to the war in Iraq allow Republicans to typecast him as a Northeastern cultural elitist, "he could get wiped out among [white men] not by a 24-point margin like Gore, but by a 30- or 35-point margin...."

Fake editorial comments

Will Baude's going to put it to a vote:

Unlearned Hand writes:

I only have one wish this Christmas and that is that you never ever use an [editor] aside again. Please? ...

The tic is most famously used by Mickey Kaus, but apparently it makes some people cringe. I've always found it one of the most useful ways to mock myself .... But I'm in no particular mood to make my readers cringe, after all. So out of pure curiosity, I'd like to know whether you hate the "ed." persona.

I use the fake editorial comments for much the same purpose, plus sarcasm. Since this blog is not a democracy, I'm not going to put the issue to a vote here. But if you want to vote in Baude's poll, go here.