Mark Schmitt

"The Defection Card"

One of the contributions that weblogs can make is by drawing out the truly outrageous aspects of those comments, quotes or events that seem to pass benignly through the studied neutrality of the daily press. And no one does that more consistently, while never overdoing it, than Josh Marshall, whether it is calling Trent Lott out on his Dixiecrat nostalgia or catching the absurdity of the "flypaper" theory of Iraq. (Draw all the terrorists there and then we've got 'em!)

He brings exactly the right tone to Howard Dean's comments about what would happen if he is not the Democratic nominee:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 28, 2003 - January 03, 2004 Archives

From the New York Times story on Dean's demand to DNC chair Terry McAuliffe that he tell the other candidates to stop attacking him: Dean says his supporters "'are certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician.' Though Dr. Dean has repeatedly said he would back whichever Democrat wins the nomination, he said Sunday that support was 'not transferable anymore' and that endorsements, including his own, 'don't guarantee anything.'"

I don't care if Dean says he'll endorse whoever wins. He's playing the defection card. And that crosses the line....The price of admission to the Democratic primary race is a pledge of committed support to whomever wins the nomination, period. (The sense of entitlement to other Democrats' support comes after you win the nomination, not before.) If Dean can't sign on that dotted-line, he has no business asking for the party's nomination.

Absolutely correct. This attitude, as much as the electability question, is the basis of my wariness about Dean. And it is surprising, frankly. Dean of all people should know how dangerous the left-wing's tyranny of small differences can be: He almost lost his last race for Governor of Vermont because of it. In 2000, Anthony Pollina ran for governor on the Progressive Party, charging that Dean was just too close to being the kind of conventional politician he now disdains. Pollina won 10% of the vote, Dean just barely 50%. Up until the day of the election, there was a real worry that Pollina's vote would hold Dean under 50%, in which case, under Vermont law, the legislature would have decided the election, and there was also reason to think that the legislature might have gone Republican. In the event, Dean squeaked by with just over 50%, the Republican conceded gracefully, and the legislature remained narrowly Democratic. (Here's a CNN story on how this race looked just before the election.) But, having come through that scare, shouldn't Dean know just how dangerous this kind of threat can be?

It is certainly true that a prolonged battle for the nomination, loaded with bitterness and vicious attacks, that extends well into the spring will be hurtful to the eventual nominee. The Kennedy-Carter battle in 1980 is the classic example. There is a point at which the party establishment, such as it is, needs to say, enough, and perhaps tell a candidate who still has a mathematical possibility of winning the nomination that it's time to join the team. But that point is sometime in March or April. It is most certainly not in December of the year before the election, when not one vote has been cast and not one delegate has been chosen.

The way a party finds its strongest nominee is through campaigns, voting, and a vigorous contest of ideas. Such a contest need not be destructive, and often leaves the eventual candidate stronger. So far, everything that the other candidates have said about Dean, even Lieberman's charge that his economic policies would lead to "the Dean Depression" are entirely within the bounds of normal, healthy political back-and-forth. There has been nothing comparable to Gore's use in 1988 of Willie Horton, which did allow George H.W. Bush to use the same loaded imagery with impunity against Michael Dukakis.

We don't choose a party's nominee on the basis of money, standing in the polls, or Meet-up attendance. If we did, we would have all had to coalesce around John Kerry a year ago. If you believe in "people power," you have to let the people actually vote before you can act as if you've actually accomplished anything.

Two Interesting Quotes About Dean

I want to comment very briefly on two provocative quotes from yesterday's Washington Post story, As Pre-Primary Season Closes, Questions Cling to Dean's Gains (washingtonpost.com)

First,

"Our primary voters are dialed into electability like I've never seen before, and it is the argument against Dean," said a strategist working for another candidate. "But what the other candidates lack is a piece of evidence they can lay on the table to say, this is why I get the electability card over Dean. If somebody could come up with that, that could make a big difference in this race."

This is a very important point. I suspect that Dean can't win the election, but it will be hard to prove. And as he becomes better known, his national numbers are likely to move up, while his rivals like Clark, because they are still obscure, are likely to do no better in head-to-head matchups. And yet, that doesn't show that Dean is electable, or that he's not electable. Was Dukakis electable when he had a 13-point lead over George H.W. Bush? On the other hand, there was plenty of evidence that suggested Al Gore was unlectable in 2000 -- he never beat Bush in early polls, despite being better known -- and yet, he won the popular vote by a sizable margin.

It also affirms the point that, while Clark has found some focus for his campaign by talking about electability, it is far from sufficient as the basis for a campaign.

The other fascinating quote is from a political strategist I've worked with, both in the Senate and on the Bradley campaign, and respect a great deal, Anita Dunn:

"Dean faces one significant challenge, to go to the next level of his candidacy," said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser in Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign. "He has not yet achieved the level of admission to what I call that small circle of people in the United States that voters perceive as qualified to be president. That is an enormous hurdle. . . . He has, at every stage of his campaign, when he has faced a hurdle, found a way to move to that next level, but they get steeper."

That makes sense to me, but it's probably infuriating to the Dean camp. First, because the person making the statement is not easily dismissed as a hostile member of the Clinton establishment. But second, who decides when or how you've been admitted to that circle? Just out of curiosity, who right now might be said to be in that circle of people voters perceive as qualified to be president?

Gore, certainly. All he did was receive more votes than any candidate for President except Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Lieberman, probably, just by virtue of having been on a national ticket.

Gephardt, probably. He's run before, he's a national figure.

Kerry? Who knows. I don't need to bash the poor guy again.

Clark? Probably not yet, but I think he has a strong case for admission to the circle.

Hilary Clinton? Absolutely. You live in the White House for eight years, you're qualified. You have the same last name as a president, you're qualified. (See Bush, George W.)

It's also interesting to think about who might have lost the presidency because they never gained admission to the circle of the perceived-as-qualified. Dukakis? Probably. But Mondale was certainly perceived as qualified, and he lost just as badly.

And it's not at all clear how one gains admission to that circle, in a single cycle. How did Clinton do it? Was it his own doing, or the embrace of the Washington establishment?

Just like "electablity," I think this is a purely subjective judgment, one that may seem obvious after the fact, but is hard to prove right now. But subjective judgments are sometimes all we've got.

Again, Blaming "Government," Not Bush

A number of bloggers, starting with Josh Marshall, have noted and ridiculed this passage from David Brooks's New York Times column Saturday:

Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.

It's offensive on many levels, but also a good example of what I've been talking about in my last couple of posts: the administration's bizarre ability to turn their own specific policy failures into general indictments of government, which in turn actually supports their political agenda that rests on an aggressive rejection of government.

I think I actually said something nice about David Brooks here once, and he always looked pretty good in the company of most of the Weekly Standard writers, except Chris Caldwell. But I take it all back. Since I wrote that nice thing, Brooks has managed to, in the course of grudgingly supporting gay marriage come out in opposition to dating ("Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide"), has retailed the stupidest stereotypes of New Yorkers, has been a mouthpiece for the flimsiest White House spin about "the ownership society," and now this.

Is Bad Government Good Politics?

At the end of my last post, about whether Bush's domestic initiatives can be compared to Nixon's, I made the point that the sloppiness, complexity, and general fraudulence of both the Medicare drug bill and No Child Left Behind would lead to backlashes, but that the backlash was likely to help the Republicans, because it would further stir up anti-government feelings, and reinforce the sense that government can't do anything right. The blogger Angry Bear commented here that this was "just screwy enough to be scary." I didn't really deal with the question of whether I think it's a deliberate strategy, or just the accidental outcome when people who don't particularly like government programs and listen only to K Street lobbyists try to craft liberal social programs.

Given a choice between a conspiracy theory and a screw-up as an explanation, I usually vote for screw-up. But in this case, I'm willing to speculate that there's something deliberate about it. At the very least, someone in the White House is thinking about it in just these cynical terms. To understand why, you have to go back to those one-hit wonders, the "lucky duckies."

The lucky duckies had their fifteen minutes in a Wall Street journal editorial on November 20, 2002, with the title, "The Non-Taxpaying Class." The Journal argued that "thanks to a growing number of absolutely legal escape hatches," too many people paid little or no federal income tax. "Who are these lucky duckies?" the Journal asked. Not, as you might imagine, Conrad Black or the corporate clients of tax-shelter promoter KPMG, but the working poor and middle class, about 16 million who file income tax returns without tax liability.

The editorial was a window into a way of thinking that usually does not dare speak its name.

What if Bush is a Nixonian Liberal?

For a long time, I've argued that there wasn't much profit to talking about Bush as a conservative, right-wing, or extremist President. Sure, he betrayed his promise to "change the tone" in Washington. But conservative isn't a word loaded with bad connotations, unlike "liberal," and more importantly, it concedes too much: Bush is not conservative in the least, certainly not in the Burkean sense in which conservative means respecting a pre-existing order and our duty to future generations, or even in the vulgar sense of merely favoring a smaller government.

Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard, who's probably the smartest conservative writer around, and certainly the one with the broadest cultural range, makes a similar point in the Financial Times (requires regi$tration, so I'll quote at length)

Caldwell quotes Howard Dean calling Bush "the most radical president we've ever had," and CNN analyst William Schneider calling him, "the most right-wing president ever." Caldwell comments, "Crowd-pleaser though it may be, there is no credible basis for this charge. Correct or not, one can assemble a logical argument that Bush is a bad president. Or that he is slow-witted or uninspiring or smug. But not that he is radical. It is a dubious proposition, in fact, that he is governing from 'the right' at all."

Before going on, let's point out that there's a difference between conservative/right-wing and radical. The term radical was never even associated with conservatism until the late '60s, and referred to groups like the John Birch Society, which were as dedicated to the destruction of the existing order as the radical left-wing groups of the time like the Weather Underground. But in the sense that "radical" means a change down to the very roots of society, it may be more suited to Bush than conservative. It is exactly right to call the underlying vision of his tax policy, which is a system that taxes exclusively income from labor, and exempts income from investment, "the most radical idea since socialism," to quote John Edwards.

But in most other cases, and particularly when it comes to government spending, the administration and Congress are not operating from any deep principles of government, just seeing what they can get away with to benefit their friends and contributors, and figuring out how to win an election so they can keep doing it. On social issues such as gay marriage, abortion-related questions, and affirmative action, the noisy grinding of the gears as they calculate just how to hit the spot where they won't alienate either their base or swing voters makes it obvious that the question of what the President actually believes is a story to be crafted later, by speechwriters.

Caldwell also argues that the administration is neither conservative nor consistently hardline on foreign policy, but that's a tough question and I don't want to take it on right now. I suspect historians will struggle for years over the meaning of the "Bush Doctrine," and even whether it is a doctrine at all or just an occasional pose.

Caldwell argues that to compare Bush either to his father or to Ronald Reagan

"is to seek the wrong model for Mr. Bush's modus operandi. The current president of the U.S. follows Richard Nixon ... in his embrace of path-of-least-resistance politics. It is to Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political plenipotentiary, who entered Republican politics in the late 1960s, that we owe the recrudescence of the Nixon style: throwing opponents off-balance by allying with liberal constituencies, passing reasonable facsimiles of socialist legislation and avoiding all actions that fit into Democratic speechwriters' stereotypes -- a tactic that makes opponents look like woolgathering fabricators at campaign time."

Now, I hate to hear the word "socialist" used to refer to any aspect of the social safety net almost as much as I hate words like "fascist" used to describe conservatives, so I'll just ignore that bit of innuendo. Otherwise, Caldwell has a reasonable description of the Bush strategy: Just as Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and oversaw the quiet expansion of Social Security by cost-indexing of benefits and the creation of Supplemental Security Income for the disabled, among other things, Bush expanded Washington's control power in education through No Child Left Behind and, in the Medicare bill, created the biggest new entitlement since Medicare itself.

If this is correct, it adds an important dimension to the debate over "Bush-hating." It's now beyond dispute that Nixon's presidency was close to the high-water mark for American liberalism in domestic policy, and very much an extension of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations that preceded it. It was only in the Nixon administration, after all, that the U.S. came within a hair's breadth of an actual welfare state, in the form of a guaranteed income crafted largely by Daniel Patrick Moynihan But, as David Greenberg shows in his fine recent book, Nixon's Shadow, it took the hindsight and discipline of historians to recognize this. Most liberals let their well-founded Nixon-hatred blind them to the complexity of his agenda. Greenberg has a great quote from a young Bob Kuttner, later editor of The American Prospect, writing in the Village Voice in 1973,"My God, he's dismembering the Great Society before the Texan's boots are cold." Had liberals understood just how Nixon's initiatives would compare to everything that would follow in the next thirty years, they might have thought about him a little differently, although his ethics and his expansion of the Vietnam War are not small matters.

But there are significant differences between Nixon's liberalism and Bush's domestic initiatives. For one thing, the Nixon-era initiatives were pretty sound and responsible, with the exception of wage and price controls. No one doubts the efficacy of the EPA or the idea that disabled people should be protected from becoming destitute. In many ways, they were sounder than the cutting edge of the Great Society, particularly the Office of Economic Opportunity, whose doctrine of "Maximum Feasible Participation" by poor people in designing local social programs was an invitation to political problems, especially because the local groups that could organize that participation were not yet established. (An amusing footnote to this is that the man Nixon brought in to gut the OEO was a young Illinois congressman, Donald Rumsfeld, who in turn hired a recent PhD on an American Political Science Association fellowship named Dick Cheney. And their receptionist was a well-bred, well-connected recent graduate from New Jersey named Christie Todd.)

Bush's domestic initiatives, on the other hand, are as disgraceful to liberals as to conservatives. The Medicare bill may be the biggest new entitlement in generations, but it is more of an entitlement to insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and employers than to the beneficiaries. As Caldwell puts it, "even the basic plan is indecipherable...The president is right to call this a new kind of entitlement: It is the first entitlement that you have to hire an accountant to take advantage of." It is impossible to see how this scam will form the basis for a better-structured entitlement in the future. The same is true of No Child Left Behind.

Caldwell argues that "Mr. Bush has built his re-election around policies that will help him personally in the next election but harm his party thereafter. Republicans will not long wish to defend the education bill. Nor will they be able to fund the Medicare benefit fully, as voters will surely demand. The political risk is that the drug benefit will allow Mr. Dean, should he become the Democratic nominee, to re-establish himself as a centrist."

I wish that were true. I do think that the backlash against the Medicare bill is not long in coming, and No Child Left Behind is already one of the most locally unpopular federal initiatives in a long time. But as I've written before, it's not easy for Democrats to find centrist language that shows how they would do things differently, that goes beyond the liberalism of "more." As it is, I suspect the backlash against this crappy, lazy, irresponsible legislation will not be a call to improve it, but simply another backlash against government. "Look at this Medicare mess," seniors will say: "government can't do anything right!" And when Americans are pissed off at government, who do they call? Republicans.

It will take a very subtle politician to change this dynamic, in which Bush gets credit in the short-term for expanding social spending, and the Republicans retain the advantage in the long term because of the hostility to government its will create. (I'll take up the question of whether this is deliberate in another post.) Until they craft an alternative vision, Democrats are much better off establishing the "logical argument that Bush is a bad president" than granting him the totally undeserved credit for being a conservative one.

Fundraising Letters that Work

I happened to see a Bush '04 fundraising e-mail today, from Ken Mehlman, with the heading "Foreign liberal cash used to defeat President Bush!" Most of it is just further innuendo about the Drudge-generated phony scandal around the website, Canadians for Clark..

But there is also one priceless line in the e-mail:

Wesley Clark, who was in Europe when Saddam Hussein was captured, criticized the President this week...

Wow, what was Mr. Clark doing in Europe, when he's supposed to be an American? Probably judging a Gruyere-tasting contest, or studying up on Swedish land-use planning...

You wouldn't really know that he was helping bring another evil dictator to justice, would you?

Updated:Here's the complete e-mail, for those interested

A Little More on Coase, Dean, Everett Ehrlich and Politics and Technology

via Mickey Kaus, who is quite obsessed with Everett Ehrlich's essay on technology and politics that I discussed at unnecessary length a day ago, pointed me to another long comment on Ehrlich by a law professor who seems to know what he's talking about: Ronald Coase Does Not Explain Howard Dean: Political Parties and the Transaction Cost Economics of Voting.

Professor Bainbridge takes a completely different approach to this, but basically arrives at the same conclusion I did: that Ehrlich is incorrect to predict that Internet-based organizing efforts will become third parties or take the place of the major parties. His argument is that the heuristic functions of political parties, which is to say, their value in helping people figure out who to vote for, is not replaced by the Internet. And Bainbridge confirms my understanding, based on reading one essay by Ronald Coase and one about him, that Coase was more concerned with when and why people organize their economic activity in particular forms such as firms, than with the size of firms.

As Kaus has argued, there are many other functions of political parties, or activities that take place within parties, that really can be dramatically changed by reducing transaction costs. The best example is Dean's fundraising. The Internet doesn't just make traditional fundraising easier; it completely transforms it. So, under the classic Democratic model, there is a set of people already identified as "donors," divided into major and minor donors, and a set of people identified as "fundraisers." Raising money involves deploying the fundraisers, and also the candidate, appropriately to get the largest contribution out of each identified donor, ideally in a single shot. The cost of asking for money from people who are not pre-identified as donors is too high, as is the cost of going back after each donor for multiple contributions.

But with the Internet, the cost of the "ask" goes down considerably. And the cost of asking for a repeat contribution is almost zero. In addition, some contributions come in spontaneously, which almost never happens in regular politics. This is transformative, because it allows a candidate or party to approach people who have never given, and it allows them to ask for a very small contribution at first, and then go back and back again (which is what Dean does when they "bring out the bat" on the website) until an individual either maxes ($2,000), or reaches the maximum that he or she is able to give. In other words, what had been a command-and-control system now becomes a system of constant bargaining to find the exact amount people are willing to give. This is also what I meant in the earlier post about "transactional" politics: fundraising does not ask for a single commitment of loyalty, but builds it up out of many smaller transactions, which may not be financial.

It's likely to be much more lucrative because, just in simple economic terms, it picks up a lot of dollars that would otherwise be left on the table, from potential donors who are never asked, or from people who are asked for too little or too much. But more importantly, it changes the very nature of the campaign. Instead of depending on the ridiculously narrow class of political donors, who are very different from voters, a candidate (or party) can appeal to a far broader group, largely the same people he would want to have vote for him. And it gives him some ideological freedom as well as freedom with time, because the candidate himself does not have to raise every dime. (This is one reason I think many politicians hate Dean: a guy like Gephardt spends a year at least going from one rich person's living room to another's law firm conference room to another's private club, sucking up to every one of them -- almost every politician finds this activity hateful -- and at the end of the day, all he's got is $13 million, where a guy like Dean at least appears to just sit back and $25 million rolls in! (Not that Dean didn't do plenty of the same hat-in-hand stuff, but he sure makes it look easy.))

The same logic that controlled fundraising for years governed parties' approach to voting. There is a group of people who are pre-identified as voters. Most of them are 1s or 5s -- that is we know who they're going to vote for. And then there's the smaller number of 2s, 4s (leaning for or against), and the oh-so-valuable 3s. The entire political effort of the Clinton-era party went into identifying and switching those swing voters, and all the analysis of pollsters like Mark Penn (which I mentioned over the weekend in this post) were about identifying those swing voters, soccer moms or office-park dads, who might make up just two or three percent of the population in a particular key state. This also had an effect on the way Clinton governed after 1994, with micro-issues that appealed to swing voters rather than larger visions. But going after someone who was not a reliable voter at the time just didn't seem worth the cost, given that most wouldn't vote anyway, and because a new voter is only half as valuable as switching an existing voter. (That is, he doesn't take a vote away from your opponent.)

The big question for next year is whether technology can change the transaction costs of trying to draw out new voters. If so, it will completely transform politics, as candidates will simultaneously go deeper into their bases and also try to reach new populations. Both the Republicans, with their "72-Hour Plan" for voter turnout, which was very successful in Georgia in 2002, and independent groups supportive of Democrats, through voter contact projects such as America Coming Together will use technology, such as constantly updated voter files on Palm Pilots, to reduce the cost of approaching new voters. If successful, this will have an even more transformative effect on politics than changing the fundraising.

So, Bainbridge is right and Ehrlich wrong that reducing transaction costs will lead to the creation of new political parties. But transaction costs can hugely change the way existing parties do business, the way candidates like Dean and Clark operate in their efforts to take control of an existing party, and ultimately on the way citizens are encouraged to participate. Ehrlich would have had a stronger and less confusing argument if he had not brought in the issue of third parties or virtual parties at all.

Incidentally, Bainbridge makes the point that the Internet can't substitute for the heuristic functions of parties, in that voters will never bother to use a comparative website to find the candidate they favor. This is absolutely correct. I spent a few years trying to help build up projects that would serve exactly the purpose Bainbridge talks about, which is helping people figure out who to vote for in obscure races. Unfortunately, the non-partisan voter information systems like The Democracy Network never really took off. Neither candidates nor voters participated in great numbers. Politics on the internet took a very different turn, though, as campaigns made better use of it, ultimately leading to Dean's achievement. Sometime I'd like to write more about that whole experience.

Yikes, I didn't mean to write yet another long post on this topic!

Dean's Penguin, or Technology and the Nature of Political Interaction

(note: This is a long post, and somewhat heavy. But it does contain the nicest things I've ever said about Howard Dean.)

A lot of good comments have been provoked by Everett Ehrlich's remarkable Washington Post Outlook article on the transformation of politics by technology. My reaction was that the essay is brilliant, and helped clarify my own thinking about the question (you can be the judge of that below), but that like other attempts to understand the Dean campaign and technology, it both overstates and understates the magnitude of the transformation.

The overstatement is in the usual fetishizing of technology itself: it's not blogs and meet-ups that made Dean's success so far; it's that it's a campaign for which those are appropriate technologies and the campaign was unafraid to use them, and even embrace the loss of centralized control they imply. All of the Democratic campaigns think they're using technology, and they all have blogs and they all do online fundraising. To some degree, it's like the illusion that cost people so much money in the aftermath of the dot-com boom: just because some enterprise uses the internet doesn't make it a technology company or mean that it's transforming the way business is done. (e.g., pets.com was still a low-margin retailer selling 25-pound bags of animal feed.)

But the sense in which Ehrlich doesn't quite go far enough is that he puts the new politics into traditional categories: Dean, he asserts, is really a third-party candidate looking to capture "the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value." In the near-future, he argues, third parties, or "virtual parties," will be easier and cheaper to create on the fly, leading to an eventual third-party president.

"Brainwashed"

My choice for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, should a Dean-Clark or Clark-Dean combination not work out, seems to be the first one to figure out just how to cover his ass on having voted for the war: Point out that he and his colleagues were systematically lied to. Why is it so hard for others to point out that they were given specific false information that influenced their votes? Is it the specter of Michigan Governor George Romney admitting in 1968 that he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the Vietnam War?

(thanks to The Daily Kos)

Local News

Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.

Nelson said claim made during classified briefing

By John McCarthy
FLORIDA TODAY

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
...
Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

There should be nothing controversial about this claim, since Bush said just about the same thing publicly. For the most part, I think that Senators don't really have the option to disbelieve specific factual statements given them by the administration, so there should be no reason to be afraid of admitting that one voted on the basis of false statements.

Unfortunately, the "unmanned aerial vehicles" claim is one that was so stupid and implausible that you have to doubt the intelligence of anyone who fell for it, even if knowledgable administration officials did pitch it with a straight face and no one challenged it. I don't know anything about this field, but it should be obvious that, since the earth is round, you couldn't control a drone from Iraq, or even from a boat in the mid-Atlantic, over the horizon without help from a network of satellites, which isn't something the Iraqis had at their disposal.

But it's apparently very hard to look an administration official in the eye and say, that's ridiculous.

Did Anyone Really Believe We Would Never Find Saddam Hussein?

Apparently the conventional wisdom is that the capture of Saddam Hussein all but sews up Bush's reelection (The Democrats: Candidates Celebrate First and Worry Second)

Without getting into all the nitty-gritty about public attitudes about the war, whether the resistance will or will not subside, or the rhythms of political reaction to events, it seems to me a basic logical point is missing here: In order for an event to significantly alter one's prediction of the outcome of an election 11 months away, the event has to be one that is unexpected. Or, at least, there would have to have been a reasonably good chance that it would not happen. In other words, to assert that Bush's reelection is now very likely, whereas before the capture you thought he might have been vulnerable, implies that when you believed he was vulnerable, you must have been assuming that Saddam would remain elusive for another year.

Yet that was not a plausible assumption. The U.S. was going to catch or kill Saddam Hussein. Unlike the area of Pakistan or Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden (or, "Osama bin Forgotten," as Senator Graham called him) is presumed to be hiding, the U.S. controls every inch of Iraqi territory, and there is no country or nearby planet self-destructive enough to let Saddam in. And apparently the brilliant plastic surgeons and molecular biologists that you see on Alias, who for a million dollars could have transformed Saddam into Jennifer Garner's roommate weren't able to get past the U.S. checkpoints.

So there's drama and I suppose some relief in his capture, but not really new information that should change anyone's prediction about the course of politics over the next year. Predictions are not just a straight line from the present. Anyone making predictions has to have taken into account events that are likely to occur. The same goes for jumps in gross domestic product and declines in the unemployment rate. They will happen, and Bush is no less vulnerable after they happen than before.

While we're at it, here's a couple more likely events: Ronald Reagan will die, and there will be a week of mourning. (In which I'll join a little, because he was a whole lot better president than this one.) And Dick Cheney will be moved off the ticket in favor of maybe Senator Frist. I'm discounting those events already.

And one more thing about the press coverage of this event: Doesn't it seem at this point that CNN should not use the word "defiant" in describing Saddam's insistence that he had no weapons of mass destruction?