I've written extensively in A Blue View about how the GOP has been reduced to a rigidly conservative, ideologically pure rump of its former self (eg: here, here, here and here). The flip side of this contraction is that the Dems have expanded their ideological basis to encompass many of the liberal/moderate Republicans turned off by the GOP's far right bent (eg: conservative Blue Dog Dems).
A recent post at TNR got me thinking Obama's statistical challenge:
In a post on the Calif budget crisis where being one GOP vote short is moving the state toward a cliff, Josh Patashnik applied a very intriguing political analysis using, of all things, statistics:
A basic assumption underlying [the California legislatures'] supermajority requirement is that the distribution of political views along an ideological spectrum resembles a bell curve, with plenty of votes in the center. The idea is that you can gain a good deal of stability--preventing policy from shifting wildly back and forth when majority control of the legislature changes--without completely depriving the majority of the power to govern. If you have a normal distribution, the process is simple: you figure out how many votes you need from the minority party, make whatever compromises you need to get them, and your legislation gets passed. The more votes the majority party has, the fewer votes it needs from the minority, and the less it has to give up.
But the distribution of political views in the California legislature isn't normal at all; it's bimodal, with lots of liberal Democrats, lots of conservative Republicans, and almost no centrists. In this situation, a supermajority requirement is a disaster. Unless the majority party gets to the magic number of seats it needs to legislate, it doesn't really matter how many seats it wins, because there aren't any members of the minority party to negotiate with--you have to go all the way to the other end of the political spectrum to find the votes you need. The result is gridlock, and, much like the San Andreas Fault, the stress simply builds until it's no longer sustainable and one side or the other gives in. It's a horrible model for legislating.
Josh's point about bell curves (or normal distributions for the statistically inclined) got me thinking about Obama's problems with the Republicans in Congress. As I said in the intro, the flip side of the GOP's contraction is the Democratic party's expansion to encompass many of the liberal to moderate Republicans turned off by the GOP's far right ideology.
Plotting out these distributions would give you the graph above: a wide range of views--from liberal to conservative--within the Democratic party and a very narrow range of views--from very conservative to nut case conservative--within the GOP. And there wouldn't be much overlap between the two.
So the bimodel distribution Josh referred to in the California legislature also applies to the US Congress. Even more troubling from the perspective of someone looking for progressive legislation to come out of this Congress, is the fact that the Senate also routinely requires a supermajority (to prevent filibusters). Updating Josh's point:
Unless the Democrats have the 60 seats needed to prevent a filibuster, the few, reachable members of the ideologically narrowed Republican party will have outsized power during negotiations--Obama will have to go far from the center of Democratic views to prevent gridlock.
So the unfortuneate changes Collins, Snow & Spector were able to force on the Stimulus bill, their ability to move the bill from the center of Democratic beliefs to the peripheral tail is, I fear, not going to be the exception. It's going to be the rule.