Kausfiles' Festival of Bad Punditry

Cake, taken: I've said dumb things about elections, but I don't think I've ever said anything quite as dumb as Glenn Greenwald's argument, on Morning Joe, that

if you look at who actually lost in this election, it wasn't the liberals who lost. The progressive caucus was reelected by a rate of 95 percent. The people who bore the brunt of the electoral bloodbath were the Blue Dogs. Fifty percent of the Blue Dogs [lost] ...

As if "progressive" candidates would have gotten 51 percent of the vote—as opposed to, say, 31 percent—in the relatively conservative districts Blue Dogs tend to get elected from ... P.S.: Greenwald tries to weasel out of his argument here ... A fan abandons him here, citing his "logic problem." ...  P.P.S.: Greenwald argues that loudmouthed progressive Rep. Alan Grayson's losing race isn't a good example of the perils of going too far left—and it's apparently true that Grayson's district is relatively conservative and likely to be inhospitable to any Dem. But Grayson "underperformed" even when the makeup of the district is taken into account ... 12:55 a.m.

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What does he know about triangulation? Dick Morris argues that a "triangulation" strategy—moving to the apparent center by pushing off against both the congressional Dems and GOPs—won't work for Obama because "[t]oday's issues are different ... and don't lend themselves to common ground":

Obama's programs have been so far-reaching and fundamental that any compromise would leave the nation far to the left of where it's always been and wants to be. When he took office, government (federal, state and local combined) controlled 35 percent of the US economy—15th among the two-dozen advanced countries. Now, it controls 44.7 percent, ranking us 7th, ahead of Germany and Britain. So where's the compromise—leave government in control of, say, 40 percent?

Why isn't the answer "yes"? ... I mean, you could imagine Obama agreeing to (a) quickly get the government out of the auto-company-owning business, say, in exchange for (b) preserving his health-care experiment. I'm not claiming this compromise is likely. Just that it's not in any sense difficult to craft. This isn't an "on-or-off" issue, at least the way Morris presents it ... P.S.: The same goes for the health-care "mandate." It's been watered down pretty far, which suggests that it's not an on-off issue either. There are a spectrum of things we might mean by "mandatory"—there's go-to-jail mandatory (at one end) and garnish-your-wages mandatory and we-won't-let-you-check-videos-out-of-the-library-unless-you-have-insurance mandatory and (at the other end) get-a-stern-letter-but-nothing-else mandatory ... 12:50 a.m.

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Hanged for a sheep: Here's a very strange midterm analysis from the otherwise estimable Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. First, Lizza argues that the Republican wave was "indiscriminate ... At least in House races, there was almost nothing a Democratic member in a vulnerable district could do to avoid defeat." Then he presents, in the form of a graph, evidence that there was indeed something House Dems could do: the more they opposed the Obama agenda on health care, the stimulus, and cap and trade, the better they did given the makeup of their district. But Lizza bizarrely concludes that this shows Obama should have loaded up his agenda even more, with "more stimulus and a comprehensive energy bill" instead of taking his "foot off the pedal."

Huh? Lizza's logic seems to be that as long as the president was going to lose effective control of Congress, he might as well have gotten as much through as he could before he lost it. But that's a conclusion we could have reached from the simple fact that it was lost. What Lizza's new evidence adds is the suggestion that maybe Obama could have prevented the loss of the House—and lived to legislate another day—by pushing less of an agenda, or less of a "bold and controversial" one. Why isn't that the most obvious "takeaway"? ... P.S: Lizza's commenters rise as one to make these very points ... 12:48 a.m.

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