Well, somebody had to do it. And they did it. Sasha Issenberg has a story in Philadelphia Magazine about David Brooks’ proclivity for sweeping cultural generalizations that aren’t supported by facts. For example, in his influential Atlantic Monthly magazine article about Red and Blue America, where Brooks visited Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a presumed exemplar of Red America, he claimed:
On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu –steak au jus, “slippery beef pot pie”, or whatever — I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s. I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and “seafood delight” trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.
Turns out it’s pretty easy to spend $20 on dinner in Franklin County, including at the Red Lobster.
In the same article, Brooks remarks that:
In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.
Turns out that QVC’s audience, according to their vice president of merchandising, skews Blue, not Red.
In another influential article, this one in The Weekly Standard, on “Patio Man” who lives in fast-growing “Sprinkler Cities” mostly in the South and West, Brooks said that the women of Sprinkler Cities were “trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady”.
Turns out that Spa Lady’s franchises are all in New Jersey.
There are many other examples in the article that show Brooks frequently overstates how well the real world fits his cultural models. This is important because Brooks’ status as a sociological and political analyst is heavily based on his presumed ability to capture the real America through his acute cultural observations. If those observations are merely charming anecdotes that are bit fanciful to begin with and cannot be generalized into larger socio-political categories, his analysis loses a great deal of its power. And that, in turn, undermines what Issenberg terms “the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy”. Take that away–people are not best understood by where they shop and what they buy–and Brooks would have to make his political case the old-fashioned way: with reference to hard facts, documented trends, survey data and all the rest of the boring stuff other analysts (like myself) have to rely on.
And, as I’ve suggested in other writings, when Brooks does have to makes his case in these more straightforwardly political ways, his analysis frequently has serious problems. See, for example, this post on his analysis of “Bush Democrats” or this article, where I discuss his analysis of exurban political trends.
In other words, if you take away his cultural generalizations, his political analysis has to stand on its own merits and can be distinctly underwhelming.
Of course, Brooks’ defense of his approach–which we get in the Issenberg article–is that he really doesn’t mean his cultural-political assertions as factual assertions. They are not meant to be taken literally and are more in the nature of jokes or satire.
That’s fine, but then he needs to ease up on the sweeping cultural-political generalizations he tends to make and the very high explanatory power he tends to assign them in explaining contemporary politics. Or else he shouldn’t be suprised when people take what appear to be claims about the real world and put them to the test.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

The latest state and national polls suggest that the Richard Clarke’s revelations about the Bush administration’s mishandling of the war on terror and their obsession with invading Iraq at the expense of prosecuting that war are damaging Bush and his re-election effort. And they have certainly stopped the pro-Bush momentum detectable in horse race questions in the second and third weeks of March.
A just-released Newsweek poll has Bush’s approval rating on handling terrorism and homeland security down to 57 percent, a sharp decline from 70 percent two months ago. It is also significant that this rating is down in the 50’s–Bush’s ratings on terrorism, homeland security and related issues have been steadily in the 60’s or above in this and other public polls for a very long time.
Bush’s approval rating on Iraq is now 44 percent, with 50 percent disapproval (up from 39 percent disapproval at the end of last year). And a plurality of voters (42 percent) say they’ll be less likely to vote for Bush because of his handling of postwar Iraq, rather than more likely (34 percent).
Bush’s overall approval rating in the poll is 49 percent and his ratings on specific domestic issues are uniformly worse. His approval rating on education is 47 percent and his rating on tax policies is only 43 percent (49 percent disapprove). Worse than that, 54 percent and 58 percent, respectively, disapprove of his handling of the economy and of Medicare.
And check this out: his approval rating on handling “jobs and foreign competition” is a stunningly dismal 28 percent, with 60 percent disapproval (!).
Currently, Kerry leads Bush by one point (48-47) in this poll, slightly up from a tie one week ago. And Bush’s re-elect number has declined slightly, from 46 percent to 45 percent.
Other national polls also suggest Bush’s slippage in presidential trial heats. The Rasmussen Reports national tracking poll found a 47-43 Bush advantage over Kerry on March 19 turning into a 48-44 Kerry advantage over Bush by March 25 (though note that Kerry’s lead in that poll has declined in the last couple of days). And the latest Fox News poll, conducted March 23-24 has the Bush-Kerry race tied up 44-44. Since the Fox News polls tend to be notoriously pro-Bush (Bush typically fares about 5 points better in Fox polls than in Gallup polls), that suggests a more reliable poll like Gallup would have showed a significant Kerry lead on those survey dates. Note also that this Fox poll has Kerry-Edwards 5 points ahead of Bush-Cheney (48-43), a race they had dead-even in early March.
Turning to state polls, there is also some positive news for Kerry. The Hotline‘s round-up of state polls finds Kerry leading in states with 229 EVs and Bush leading in states with 101 EVs, for a 128 EV lead for Kerry. Notable recent results include a 10 point lead for Kerry in Iowa (51-41), a 3 point lead for Kerry in Minnesota (47-44) and a 3 point lead for Kerry in Wisconsin (46-43, even with Nader included, so Kerry’s “true” lead is probably larger).
And here’s a big one: The University of Cincinnati’s Ohio Poll has Kerry ahead 46-44 in Ohio, even with Nader included in the matchup. Kerry’s ahead by 13 points among independents, 16 points among moderates and by 34 points among young voters. Other data from the poll show that Bush has negative favorability ratings among all these groups: 33 percent favorable/52 percent unfavorable among independents; 46/51 among moderates; and 30/62 among young voters. Note also that Ohio Polls earlier this year had Bush’s approval rating on the economy at 40 percent, with 58 percent disapproval and also found that the economy was far and away the most important issue for Ohio voters.
Other interesting red state news: Bush is up by 7 points in Missouri (49-42), but is only tied with Kerry in West Virginia (46-46), even with Nader in the race. And here’s a very intriguing one: Bush is only leading Kerry by 4 points in Colorado, even in a poll conducted by a Republican pollster (McLaughlin & Associates) and even with Nader included!
A fella can dream, can’t he?

Especially since they seem to go so closely intertwined in voters’ minds. In the latest Democracy Corps poll, the top three economic problems rated “very serious” by voters were rising health care costs (53 percent), employers cutting back contributions for employees’ health insurance and pensions (38 percent) and job losses to China and India (37 percent).
And in another question asking voters which two of a list of seven economic problems qualified as “major long-term” problems, the top two were “jobs being outsourced overseas” (selected by 43 percent of voters) and “health care costs rising every year” (selected by 35 percent).
But that would be wrong. Sure these two issues are both (a) highly salient and (b) areas of clear Democratic advantage. Beating Bush, however, will require a more wide-ranging approach that takes a few more risks.
Start with Iraq and the national security issue. As I mentioned the other day, Bush currently leads Kerry on who could handle the situation in Iraq better (53-37). And he leads Kerry by even more on handling terrorism and homeland security (56-35). It’s probably not stretching things too much to say that if Kerry can cut these margins in half, he’ll win the election.
The raw material for cutting those margins is certainly there. The Democracy Corps poll shows about half the public saying Bush doesn’t have good plans for Iraq, that he has a go-it-alone policy that creates a lot of uncertainty in the world, that America’s security depends on building strong ties with other nations, that Bush misled the country about reasons about reasons to go to war in Iraq and that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost of US lives and dollars. And this survey was conducted before this weeks intense wave of bad publicity for the administration from the testimony and public statements of Richard Clarke.
A great time to push on the Iraq mess and the president’s credibility, right? But, as Matthew Yglesias reports on Tapped today:
Last night I saw Terry McAuliffe speaking to a Democratic Party MeetUp at Lucky Bar here in Washington. He was, as one would expect, highly critical of George W. Bush’s leadership. He managed, however, not to mention the war on terror at all in the course of his presentation, focusing instead on jobs, health care, and education. This was a bad strategy when it was first unveiled for the 2002 midterms; it’s been a bad strategy ever since, and it’s an absolutely awful strategy for this week.
The kind of approach exemplified by McAuliffe’s talk has got to go. But let me commend him for at least mentioning education. That issue’s part of what I call the “E3” issue set (education, the environment and energy) that needs to get a more prominent role in the campaign.
Take education. Bush is hugely vulnerable on this issue because of the many problems with the No Child Left Behind Act and the general sense that education is getting shortchanged in the current fiscal environment. And this is an important issue to voters (if not quite as important as the economy and health care).
But in the recent Newsweek poll, Kerry only has a 3 point lead over Bush on who can best handle the issue. That should be larger.
As for the environment and energy, these are issues with lower salience, but are also issues where Bush is generally perceived as doing a lousy job. Bush’s terrible ratings on the environment have been documented in poll after poll and now Gallup has released some data showing the public’s view of his performance on the energy issue is also bleak.
According to these data, Bush’s rating on energy was highest right after he was elected, in March, 2001, when 58 percent said he was doing a good job on this issue. From then on, it declined steadily every time Gallup took a reading, falling to 54 percent in April of that year, then to 46 percent in March, 2002 (one area where his post-9/11 approval spike apparently never kicked in), then to 39 percent in March, 2003 and finally to 34 percent this month.
So there’s a great deal of opportunity on the E3 issues, if Democrats care to take it. And a strong program in these areas–building a 21st century P-14 school system (preschool through 2 years of college), energy independence and safeguarding the environment–would go a long way toward giving Kerry’s domestic approach the optimistic, forward-looking character it needs. That would help reach the swing voters Kerry needs to win, as well as mobilize the young voters that are already moving in his direction (see yesterday’s post).

Zogby’s new poll has Kerry up, 48-46 over Bush. The poll also has Bush’s job rating down to 46 percent, a decline of 5 points from Zogby’s mid-February reading. And Bush’s re-elect number, consistent with the Newsweek poll I have been discussing, is mired at 45 percent. Again, this underscores the extent to which recent gains by Bush, such as they are, do not reflect any real change in the public’s evaluation of the job he’s doing and whether he deserves to be re-elected.

It’s interesting to note that, even with Bush’s relatively strong recent performance in horse race questions, and even with Nader thrown into the mix, Bush’s soft spots are still readily apparent in the recent Newsweek poll. The Polling Report has the demographic breaks here on this matchup.
The top line on the matchup is that, while Kerry-Bush is a dead heat in the same poll, with Nader thrown in, Bush has a 2 point lead (45-43), with Nader drawing 5. But Kerry still leads among young voters by 48-38, with Nader drawing 7, among senior voters by 18 and among independents by 8 (with Nader drawing 12!). Though the data aren’t provided, it’s reasonable to assume that Kerry’s lead over Bush is larger among all these groups with Nader not included in the matchup.

Here’s a couple of interesting results from the Newsweek poll I discussed yesterday. Only 30 percent say the US military action in Iraq has decreased the risk that large numbers of Americans will be killed or injured in a future terrorist attack. That compares to 63 percent who say either the risk has increased (36 percent) or hasn’t changed at all (27 percent).
Yet the same poll finds Bush favored over Kerry (53 percent to 38 percent) on handling the situation in Iraq.
Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

On Wednesday, The New York Times officially caught up with DR in an article headlined “Seems Like the Last Word on Medicare Wasn’t“. As the article points out: “When President Bush signed into law the biggest expansion of Medicare in 38 years last December, the moment was widely considered one of unalloyed triumph for the Republicans.”
But it ain’t so unalloyed any more. Even John Rother, policy director of the AARP, which supported the Medicare bill, has to admit:
When we measure public opinion, what really stands out right now is that essentially the Democratic charge has taken hold, and people do see the bill as very favorable to the pharmaceutical companies and to insurers. I think they’re much less clear about whether the bill helps them personally or not.
He’s got that right! According to the new CBS News/New York Times poll, by more than 4:1 (34 percent to 8 percent), Americans believe that the policies of the Bush administration have increased, rather than decreased, the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly (another 27 percent say there’s been no effect). And among seniors, the intended benefiaries of the legislation, it’s even more lop-sided–by more than 5:1 (43 percent to 8 percent), they say Bush’s policies have increased, not decreased, their drug costs.
Not exactly what the GOP had in mind. At this point, they’re reduced to asserting that the truth about the bill eventually come out or (even more laughable) the availability of drug discount cards this summer will really turn things around.
AARP’s Rother allows that could happen “but it’s hard to predict”. Actually, I don’t think it’s hard to predict: it won’t.
Of course, the administration’s problems on this front are being seriously exacerbated by the emerging scandal about suppression of cost estimates for the bill. Richard Foster, the analyst whose estimates were suppressed, now says he believes the White House directly organized and encouraged the effort to keep his estimates out of the legislative process.
They’ll deny it, of course. But every little bit hurts. And it illustrates a problem with the conventional wisdom about “Bush’s good week”. This judgement is apparently based on: (1) Kerry’s less-than-stellar performance beating back various rhetorical salvos from the Bush campaign in the past week; and (2) the horse race result in the CBS News poll cited above, which shows Bush with a small lead over Kerry.
But the other side of this is that, outside of these rhetorical exchages, nothing good has happened in the real world that puts Bush in any stronger position than he was. Quite the contrary. Instead we have: the terror bombing in Spain, that shows terrorism is alive and well; the bloody attacks in Iraq; Iraq coalition partners bailing out left and right; the Medicare scandal; and CBS News and other polls showing no change in voters’ gloomy perceptions about the direction of the country, the state of the economy and the situation in Iraq.
So don’t let the CW fool you. Bush is still in a lot of hot water. Time for the Kerry campaign to come right back at ’em.

He just doesn’t have much else to run on. The latest Gallup poll finds economic optimism plummeting, with only 44 percent saying the economy is getting better, down from 53 percent in mid-February, which was down from 66 percent in early January.
This isn’t what’s supposed to be happening when the economy is growing at a decent rate. But it is. The typical voter just doesn’t like where this economy is going and how this recovery has proceeded. That’s why a recent front-page article in The Wall Street Journal was headlined “Improving Economic Signals May No Longer Deliver Votes“. The GDP growth rate doesn’t do much good with voters if good jobs seem to be disappearing, benefits are being cut and wages are stagnating.
As the WSJ article puts it:
[B]asic changes in the way the economy works have created a new political equation this year, loosening the old links between prosperity and a president’s popularity.
And the article presents anecdotal evidence that this changed equation is reflected in the anti-Bush leanings of swing voters in West Virginia, Pennsylvanian and Ohio. As 2000 Bush voter and self-described conservative Chuck Svokas of Weirton, WV puts it, Bush “doesn’t look like he has a grasp of what needs to be done for the American economy”. He says he’ll vote for Kerry this year.
That’s an anecdote, but the latest CBS News/New York Times poll has hard data on the deep economic hole Bush is in with voters. His approval rating on the economy is at 38 percent, with 54 percent disapproval. That’s his second straight sub-40 economic rating in this poll. Only 28 percent say the economy is getting better (note that this question includes a “staying the same” option and is therefore not directly comparable to the Gallup rating). Only 14 percent believe that Bush administration policies have increased the number of jobs in the US. Only one-fifth say the nation’s economy is better today than when Bush took office and the same low number say their family is financially better off today than it was when he took office.
People also say they are uneasy (57 percent) rather than confident (39 percent) in Bush’s ability to make the right decisions about the economy. In addition, just 39 percent say that if Bush is re-elected he is likely to increase the number of jobs and just 30 percent think the economy will get better if he gets re-elected.
Not exactly a vote of confidence. No wonder Bush’s current campaign slogan is “I’m a war leader”. Saying he’s a leader on the economy wouldn’t even pass the laugh test.

The March 10 Wall Street Journal had a story headlined “Bush’s Gambit for Votes of Hispanics Fizzles“. Of course, that’s not exactly a scoop, since I’ve been making the same point for a very long time, backed up by copious amounts of data. But I guess it’s nice to see the mainstream press catching on. The fact of the matter is that the strongest part of the GOP’s argument about Hispanics is that they need to make progress among this voter group. Evidence of actual progress among Hispanics has been conspicuously lacking.
The failure of the GOP’s Hispanic strategy is underscored by a just-released Democracy Corps poll of Hispanic likely voters that includes oversamples in three southwestern states (NM, AZ and NV) and among non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida. (You can read the poll here and the analysis memo here.)
In the poll, just 33 percent of Hispanics think the country is going in the right direction and 52 percent say it is off on the wrong track. And they give Bush an approval rating of only 46 percent.
The Democrats retain a huge lead of almost 40 points (65-26) on party ID. This includes a larger lead in the southwest (45 points) and a substantially smaller, but still significant one among non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida (12 points).
In terms of the presidential contest, Kerry beats Bush among Hispanics by 23 points (57-34), which includes a whopping margin of 33 points in the southwest and 7 points among non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida.
As the analysis memo points out, it is unlikely that Bush will get many more votes than he pulls in pre-election polls. Almost all Hispanic undecided voters are likely to break toward the Democrats based on past Hispanic voting patterns, undecided voters’ heavily Democratic party ID and the general tendency of undecided voters to break toward the challenger.
In short, the GOP Hispanic strategy is in a shambles. Their clever strategy of targeting Hispanic voters has run into a fairly major problem. The current Republican party (aka the white people’s party) just doesn’t have a lot to offer an overwhelmingly working class, immigrant-based, minority population like Hispanics. “We’re socially conservative, too” or “Some of us speak Spanish” just doesn’t cut it with a group whose real-life needs call for more government action, not less.

Yesterday, I reported on the latest NCB News/Wall Street Journal poll which, along with other recent data, highlights key role that economic anxiety is likely to play in this November’s election. Today’s Washington Post has a front page article on how the Bush economic team keeps making mistake after mistake in responding to voters’ economic concerns.
Advantage Democrats. But what is to be done to turn this advantage into the maximum number of Democratic votes? That’s where things start to get tricky.
Start with the idea that there is something very odd indeed about the current pattern of job loss and failure to create new jobs. Charlie Cook expressed it well in his March 9 column:
For almost a year, I have been on a tirade about the political importance of the jobs issue in this election, even before I saw an eye-popping August report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on the subject. The New York Fed study showed that during the twin economic downturns of the mid-1970s, 49 percent of the job losses were cyclical — or temporary job losses — such as letting a shift go at the plant. Meanwhile, 51 percent of the job losses were structural, permanent job losses. The study went on to show that during the next downturn — in 1981 and 1982 — the percentages were exactly the same, 49 percent were cyclical, 51 percent were structural. The 1991-92 downturn was somewhat different, with only 43 percent of the job losses cyclical, and 57 percent structural.
What about this downturn? A measly 21 percent of the job losses are cyclical ones, while a whopping 79 percent are structural, permanent job losses. Why is this bad? It’s bad because we know that it always takes longer to create a brand new job than it takes to call a shift back at the plant.
In December, the CEO of a California-based high tech firm told me that “there is no amount of overtime that we will not pay, there is no level of temporary services that we will not use, there is no level of outsourcing or offshoring that we will not do, in order to prevent us from having to hire one new, permanent worker in the U.S.” As I travel around the country, meeting with business leaders, I hear similar, though less succinct thoughts in almost every sector and every part of the country. U.S. wages, health care, and other benefit costs have gotten so high — and the press by investors for high stock prices is so great — that the premium is on wringing every last bit of work out of as few employees as possible, to do anything but incur the costs of adding permanent employees.
If this description is roughly accurate, then this dynamic is going to be hard to counter by getting a bit tougher on trade, cracking down on “Benedict Arnold” corporations or providing a tax credit for manufacturers. Instead, it appears to call for a more direct role for the government in fostering job creation through direct spending (likely to be more effective in the short term) and socializing costs like health care and pensions that put US firms at a competitive disadvantage (likely to be more effective in the long run). Kerry does have some ideas along these lines–for example, his state tax relief and education fund, his energy independence plan and his plan to socialize and control some health care costs–but, perhaps because they don’t lend themselves as easily to applause lines in speeches, we hear less about them.
That may have to change. A Democratic approach to job creation, in the end, has to sound like it would work. And my guess is that American voters will applaud the lines about Benedict Arnold corporations, unfair trade and the evils of outsourcing, but won’t find them convincing as a way to create jobs. They will be looking for a more serious program that gets to the root of the current jobs crisis and the Democratic campaign has to be ready to give it to them.