I wrote a not particularly well-commented upon, non-rec-list diary entitled "Charlie Cook: Not the Genius You Think He Is" which I published on March 10th and which I assumed at vanished completely down the memory hole by the next day. So, I was rather surprised when I noticed for the first time today that on March 11th Charlie Cook himself responded to my diary in comments!
A word of advice to Mr. Cook: celebrity attention is like some sort of sweet, intoxicating elixir to unknown blogger/diarists like yours truly. So, in the future you might do better to ignore me.
Having said that, I appreciate the detailed and thoughtful, if feisty, tenor of Mr. Cooks rebuttal given the gratuitously insulting nature of the title of my diary and some of the commentary it contained.
And for those of you asking yourselves the obvious question, I'll save you some time -- Charlie Cook is uid:60258. Who knew he was an old school kossack?
Following are his comments reproduced in full:
Cook Comment 1:
Cook responds (0+ / 0-)
It would be interesting to see you compare what others were saying in say March of 2006. Both the 1994 and 2006 waves simply didn't develop until mid-to-late summer, and I was the first to call the House turning Democratic in the first week of August of 2006. (http://www.cookpolitical.com/node/2345
Did you compare what others were saying at precisely the same time you cherry picked my quotes?
Time is running out for Republicans. Unless something dramatic happens before Election Day, Democrats will take control of the House. And the chances that they'll seize the Senate are rising toward 50-50.
The electoral hurricane bearing down on the GOP looks likely to be a Category 4 or 5, strong enough to destroy at least one of the party's majorities. The political climate feels much as it did before previous elections that produced sizable upheavals, such as in 1994, when Democrats lost 52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of both chambers.
(http://www.cookpolitical.com/node/2345
Or take a look at any of my columns from September or October of 2006. We were consistantly on the money.
I sure wasn't reading that from any of you guys back in the summer of 2006. That wave simply didn't exist in March 2006, just as the anti-Democratic wave didn't exist in March of 1994.
Perhaps some of you should take a look at veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg's recent New Republic piece ("Disaster Relief: How to avoid a repeat of 1994," warning Democrats of what's ahead and what they might do to avoid another 1994. You might recall that Stan was President Clinton's pollster in 1994 and knows a wave when he sees one.
http://www.tnr.com/...
You might also want to go look at the memo that Greenberg and James Carville wrote for Democracy Corps warning Democrats about the political climate.
http://www.democracycorps.com/...
I am not going to get into a back and forth you guys, because frankly I think it is a waste of time, you guys just hate to hear that your team is in trouble. I am very familiar with this, having quite a few conservatives upset with me in 2006.
But if you listened carefully to what the professionals, the people that do this for a living on the Democratic side, folks who have been through a couple of wave elections, in other words, watched this stuff for a lot longer than many of you had, with more data and a better vantage point, you may see that I am not on another planet.
So go ahead and cherry pick early writings, and have your fun. Shoot at the messenger all you want. I hope it makes you feel better.
by Charlie Cook on Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 05:42:12 PM PST
Cook Comment 2:
And a couple of other things (0+ / 0-)
These registered voter polls are very nice, but when you start looking at voter intensity and enthusiasm, who really is going to turn out in a midterm election and some of you guys may reach different conclusions. Keep in mind that Democrats currently hold 59% of the House seats. That requires a faily healthy Democratic lead in the national popular vote in November to hold at those levels, in a midterm elections that skew heavily older, a weak spot for Democrats these days.
Take a look at Stan Greenberg's Democracy Corps/Third Way February 20-24 poll, among Likely Voters. On the Generic Congressional ballot test, Republicans are getting 47%, Democrats 44%. Note that is likely voters. What do you think the losses would be in a House where 59% of the seats are currently held by Democrats?
Take a look at last week's Daily Kos/R2k poll on likelihood of voting. Among Republicans, 24% said that they would definitely vote, 25% said they would vote (total 49%) compared with just 19% of Democrats who said they would definitely vote, 20% said they would vote (total 39%).
http://dailykos.com/...
Last week 43% of Republicans polled by Gallup said they were enthusiastic about voting, compared to 27% of Democrats. http://www.gallup.com/...
These are the kinds of data points that people who have done this for a living look at. This Democratic majority was built in 2006 and expanded in 2008 in elections in which Democratic voters were enthusiastic, Republicans lethargic and independent voters swinging in favor of Democrats. Today the data is pretty convincing that the opposite is the case. Does that sound like the kind of environment that would help Democrats hold the 53 seats that were in GOP hands four years ago, the 48 that are in McCain 2008 districts and the 47 that are in districts won by both McCain 2008 and Bush 2004?
by Charlie Cook on Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 07:16:37 PM PST
A few points in rebuttal:
First, I basically don't disagree with anything Mr. Cook says in his comments. There are a lot of bad omens out there for Democrats and I don't dispute at all Cook's assessment of the present condition of the electorate.
What I do dispute, however, is the assertions that Mr. Cook has made in other forums that the present situation means that the Democrats losing the House in November is all but inevitable and that the inevitability of those losses is directly attributable to miscalculations by the President.
In particular, this February 18th interview with National Journal:
NJ: If Obama has a communications problem as you suggest, then what should he do to reach out to the American people? Should he try to appear more populist?
Cook: I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it's just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush's decision to go into Iraq. While Bush went, "We're going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11," and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.
This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn't big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn't want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.
And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn't worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn't a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.
And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we've seen in modern political history.
NJ: What do Democrats have to do to correct this?
Cook: I've spent the last couple of days talking to some of the brightest Democrats in the party that are not in the White House. And it's very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don't lose the House. It's very hard. Are the seats there right this second? No. But we're on a trajectory on the House turning over....
There are nine months, certainly things could happen, but the odds of unemployment being below 9 percent are minimal by the time of this election. We're probably going to have a year of basically, more or less, 10 percent unemployment, which hasn't happened since the Great Depression. I mean, in fact, in an even-numbered year there's only been one month of double-digit unemployment in the post-War era. One month. And now we're going to have probably about a year.
With respect to Mr. Cook's claim that Obama's pushing of Healthcare reform was a "miscalculation," I couldn't disagree more. Moving forward on healthcare reform was a core campaign promise and has been a key plank in the Democratic platform for decades. The President was absolutely correct to move forward on that agenda.
I think Matt Yglesias addressed this issue quite eloquently yesterday:
If reform passes and is signed into law, then immediately Barack Obama’s position in history is secured. When people look back from 2060 on the creation of the American welfare state, they’ll say that FDR, LBJ, and BHO were its main architects, with Roosevelt enshrining the principle of universal social insurance into law and Obama completing the initial promise of the New Deal. Members of congress who helped him do that will have a place in history. Nobody’s going to be very interested in a story like "Mike Ross served a bunch of years in Congress and people were impressed with his ability to win a relatively conservative district; he didn’t achieve very much and one day he wasn’t in Congress anymore."
Which is just to say that nobody lasts in office forever, no congressional majority lasts forever, and no party controls the White House forever. But the measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.
I agree with Cook's point in the excerpted NJ interview that the economy could have used a bigger stimulus, but I am not aware of any evidence that Obama could have obtained a bigger stimulus if he'd only abandoned healthcare reform. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was enacted with a great deal of haste, but not because Obama and the Democrats were in a big hurry to move on to healthcare reform. It was enacted hastily because there wasn't any time to lose!
Here's Paul Krugman at the beginning of January 2009:
All of this leaves me concerned about the prospects for the Obama plan. I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized. And Mr. Obama is right: We really do need swift, bold action.
Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy — well, you can see where this is going.
So this is our moment of truth. Will we in fact do what’s necessary to prevent Great Depression II?
UPDATE: [I accidentally published this diary before I'd completed it; so, here's the thrilling conclusion of "Charlie Cook Responds."]
I look around me and I see a bad economy but not Great Depression II, so I think maybe the Recovery act combined with TARP and Fed action may actually have worked.
What I thoroughly disagree with from Mr. Cook's NJ interview is this characterization of the stimulus bill:
Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package...
That's just not true. The Recovery Act was an absolute model of clean legislation. There was no "pork and junk and pet projects". The bill was basically 100% made up of the following four areas: providing relief for those who'd been hurt the most by the weak economy through extension of unemployment benefits, COBRA and nutrition programs; picking up the slack for State spending to prevent lay-offs of State government employees, infrastructure investment and tax cuts. I actually think Charlie Cook is generally a pretty fair, down-the-middle commentator but on this point he's just repeating false Republican talking points.
Finally, I think Charlie Cook is a pretty good political analyst, but I don't think he's particularly good at predicting election outcomes way in advance. If, come September and October, this is the tune the Mr. Cook is still whistling, maybe I'll push the panic button.
But for right now, I look at Charlie Cook's analysis and I think: yeah, we have a big fight on our hands, but I think it's a fight we can win. I think that passing healthcare legislation will help us win this fight. And I'm glad we've got President Obama at the helm.
These first 14 months of the Obama presidency have been incredibly trying for the American people and for our elected Democratic representatives but I think that if we all pitch in we can ride this storm out. And if we can survive this first election without losing either the House or Senate, I think the payoff will be huge.
So my advice is analysis like Charlie Cook's to motivate you to get out there and fight, but don't allow it to discourage you at all. The Republicans are a completely discredited brand. The only way they can beat us is if we give up. The only things we have to fear are discouragement and apathy.