There’s no substitute for being right all the time about everything

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There’s no substitute for being right all the time about everything

By Matthew Yglesias

13 - 16 minutes

Back in my primitive college days, students would sometimes argue about politics and current affairs on the Kirkland House email list serve.

When the United States invaded Iraq, I made the argument — which I regret both because it was totally wrong and also because several students told me at the time that it persuaded them — that the progressive hothouse environment of the Harvard campus was leading people to dramatically underrate George W. Bush’s odds of success. At the end of the day, I said, Bush had access to all kinds of intelligence and military professionals. And while he obviously might shade the truth or engage in misleading rhetoric (as all politicians do), it fundamentally made no sense for him to allege that Iraq had an advanced WMD program unless he had a very high degree of confidence that they did, in fact, have an advanced WMD program. The opposite would, after all, result in a huge political embarrassment with obvious blowback.

More broadly, I argued that the whole idea that we lacked sufficient planning for the postwar was dubious.

Might Bush do bad things like reward his wealthy supporters with unjustified tax cuts or go easy on polluters in ways that damaged long-term public health but wouldn’t be immediately visible? Of course. Would he push anti-gay policies I found personally repugnant? Of course, he’s a Republican. But the idea that he would start a war on a false pretext and then bungle the execution didn’t make sense — he would suffer the consequences of doing that. So if you wanted to say you’re against the war because you’re a pacifist or some kind of dogmatist about UN authorization that’s fine, but don’t kid yourself about how this is going to go in practice.

I was, of course, totally wrong.

And yet, flubbing Iraq was costly for Bush, who was riding high in public opinion when the march to war started. Initiating the invasion was controversial and contributed to the erosion of his approval rating, which suffered from the WMD embarrassment but more fundamentally from the poor course of the war. By the end of his term in office, he was toxically unpopular and personally discredited. His entire faction ended up losing control of the GOP, with his once high-flying brother humiliated in the 2016 primary and now his nephew George P. Bush drummed out of public life by the Trumpers. People sometimes say that Bush has been “rehabilitated” by liberals, but he really hasn’t — he was an awful president. What has happened is that Bush has repeatedly reminded us that his stylistic approach to politics — pious, patriotic, optimistic, respectful — remains appealing. He and his family lost out not because the Bush politics or the messaging failed, but because Bush failed so badly as president.

This is also true of his counterpart across the pond. Tony Blair was the last prime minister to deliver stability and prosperity to Britain, and he did it while halving child poverty. But his faction of the Labour Party discredited themselves over Iraq. Hillary Clinton backed the Iraq War because she thought that doing so would serve her presidential ambitions. Like me, she figured that it would probably end up looking pretty good. John Kerry did the same.

But by the summer of 2004, Gallup polls showed most Americans thought sending troops had been a mistake.

Public opinion of the war recovered and was very narrowly above water by October 2004, but it did so during the context of a presidential campaign between two candidates who both supported the war. Had Kerry said in October 2002, “I think this is a bad idea and it’s going to turn out Iraq maybe doesn’t have the WMD program and the occupation is going to be a disaster so I don’t think we should do this,” I think he’d have done better in 2004.

But Clinton definitely would have done better. It’s easy to forget today how close she came to beating Barack Obama in the 2008 primary, but it was a razor-thin race despite the fact that Iraq was by then badly underwater with the national electorate and even more profoundly so with Democrats.

It was Obama who, on October 2, 2002, gave what was in retrospect a pitch-perfect speech. Obama went out of his way to clarify that he was not a pacifist, anti-patriot, or anti-nationalist. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said. “What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Obama is really good at speeches, in part because he’s a charismatic guy with oratorical skills. But also, I think, because he’s a writer. “Dreams From My Father,” is a real book, not a presidential campaign book, and it’s good. Once he hit the big time, he worked with speechwriters and ghostwriters like any other politician. But he has the capacity to write well 100 percent on his own, which means that the writers who work with him have an authentic authorial voice they can work with. It’s a unique and powerful asset that I think guarantees that if Obama had wanted to deliver a pro-war speech, it would have been a great pro-war speech. My pro-war emails to the Kirkland listserv were pretty well crafted. But the foundation of Obama’s ascent isn’t just or even primarily that he’s a top-notch writer and orator — it’s that he displayed correct judgment that was vindicated over time on a crucial issue at a time when a very large share of politically ambitious Democrats made the wrong choice.

Obama is the most successful politician of our era, even though he ultimately wasn’t the liberal Reagan or a neo-FDR.

And that’s because as good as he was, he wasn’t perfect. In particular, he and his team repeatedly misjudged the size of the output gap and the economy’s potential to add jobs and workers. This misjudgment impacted the design and implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, but also the design of the Affordable Care Act and the negotiating priorities with Republicans during the debt ceiling standoff and fiscal cliff episodes around the middle of their term. It was also reflected in Federal Reserve Board of Governors appointments and Fed policy, culminating in Janet Yellen’s premature proclamation that the economy was close to full employment by late 2015.

These missteps depressed Obama’s popularity for most of his term in office, contributed to Democrats’ bad midterm results in 2010 and 2014, and were a drag on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which growth is modestly more robust, leading Democrats to hold a few more Senate seats (the Pennsylvania race they lost in 2010 and the Colorado race they lost in 2014 especially) for a narrow House majority in 2013-2014 that puts Clinton over the top in 2016. If that had happened, comprehensive immigration reform would have happened, Clinton would have flipped control of the Supreme Court to Democrats, and I think Obama really would’ve been seen as a Reagan-level figure.

Donald Trump seems like a very irresponsible person. He’s had multiple wives, is constantly breaking the law, says ill-considered things constantly, and is frequently revealed in interviews to be alarmingly uninformed about major subjects.

I have no idea why he improperly took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and then refused to accede to perfectly legitimate requests for their return. It’s possible he was covering up something nefarious, but it’s also 100 percent plausible that it’s a mixture of carelessness and orneriness that just had him breaking the law for no good reason. He’s a sloppy, irresponsible person.

And as president, he conducted a classic “irresponsible” policy mix.

    He wanted to deliver a huge tax cut to rich business owners, and to make it politically palatable, he wanted to tack on a middle-class tax cut.

    At the same time, he wanted a large increase in military spending, and the way to secure that was to reach a deal with Democrats that would also increase domestic non-military spending.

    Due to population aging, the cost of Social Security went up during his term. So did the cost of Medicare. So did the cost of Medicaid.

    On top of that highly expansionary fiscal policy, he implemented all kinds of anti-growth trade policies while slashing legal immigration.

This mix in some sense “should” have led to stagflation. Trump did hugely expansionary demand-side policies combined with some significant anti-growth measures on the supply side, and he did it at a time when the conventional wisdom was that the economy was already near full employment.

Now because I sometimes get things right, what I said at the time was that Trump was right and the conventional wisdom was wrong, and a big dose of fiscal stimulus would end up being beneficial. Now I have no idea if Trump came to this conclusion by studying the policy details or just through dumb luck, but the fact is that he was right. And this is a really important part of understanding the Trump presidency. If you followed the news in micro-detail during the Trump years, you’d get an overwhelming sense of floundering and inept leadership. But if you zoom way, way out, the story of Trump’s first three years is that he reversed the pivot to deficit reduction and the country benefitted.

On Covid-19, he didn’t do as well. People sometimes retro-cast him as a wide moderate, but the fact is he kept saying insane things like the virus will vanish in the springtime and refused to model even low-cost interventions like wearing quality masks at a time (pre-Delta, pre-vaccines) when they were very useful. If he’d been able to get his shit together and articulate skepticism about mandatory closures without devolving into nonsense and wishful thinking, he’d have gotten re-elected. And on core policy questions like the CARES Act, he displayed much better judgment than many of the maniacs he’s recruited into his movement.

And I think this is fundamentally the most underrated thing about Trump.

Political journalists kind of hate engaging with the substance of public policy — they want to talk about style and messaging. So if Trump does well, people must like his style. If Biden’s poll numbers are down, it must be that his message isn’t landing. But I think the evidence is pretty clear that Trump was and is freakishly unpopular relative to the fundamentals precisely because his style is so bad. What kept him aloft was economic policies that worked out well. If he was able to manifest the character and deportment of George W. Bush, he’d do way better. And if Obama’s macroeconomic policies had matched the circumstances as well as Trump’s, he’d have been a titanic figure.

Both here in this newsletter and on Twitter, I’m constantly speculating about counterfactuals because I think they are a good antidote to the human tendency to over-attribute things.

But if Trump had stood fast for free market orthodoxy and refused to do the CARES Act, the economy would have collapsed and he’d have gotten wrecked in the 2020 election. If Obama had generated a super-rapid “Morning in America”-velocity recovery, he’d have been reelected resoundingly rather than narrowly, down-ballot Democrats would have done better, more progressive policies would have passed, and he’d be a titanic figure rather than a merely impressive one.

Biden’s team took office determined to avoid making some of the mistakes that Obama made, and they succeeded.

Unfortunately, they made whole new mistakes of their own. I’ve never seen anyone really nail down the reporting on this, but I’ve always wondered to what extent Team Biden just tossed out the American Rescue Plan as an opening bid assuming that Joe Manchin and other moderates would bargain it down a lot. My notes from the briefing call I was on when they first laid the proposal out say “OPENING BID.”

But whether they thought you can never do too much stimulus (because inflation expectations are so well anchored, any inflationary surge will pass quickly) or that you can never ask for too much stimulus (because Congress will inevitably slice it down), there was an error in judgment here. That’s hardly unprecedented; every administration makes errors in judgment. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t even that big a mistake — probably less bad than the error Obama made in the opposite direction. But it was pretty serious, it’s had genuinely negative consequences for people’s lives, and there’s a political price to be paid for it.

And to be clear, while I would have made a slightly smaller mistake if I’d been in charge (I always thought the state/local aid was too much and too likely to backfire politically by helping Republican governors), I would have made a broadly similar error in judgment. It’s more fun to second-guess people’s messaging choices because making real-time policy choices with uncertain information is difficult.

If it were easy, you wouldn’t see incumbents repeatedly making mistakes and becoming unpopular. So “make correct judgments about everything, all the time” is, on one level, not great advice. On the other hand, with all the huge sums of money spent on political advocacy, I do think that rigorous, accurate policy analysis is a very underfunded subfield. Judging situations correctly and making policies that work is the best thing anyone can do.