A couple days ago I opined that defenses of the electoral college seem to be driven by two factors: A partisan Republican desire not to retroactively delegitimize George W. Bush's 2000 election, and a general attachment to the status quo. The latter, specifically, takes the form of defending the electoral college by imagining negative scenarios that could result from a popular vote system, rather than attempting to actually weigh the pros and cons of competing systems.

The very next day after I wrote that, Commentary's Jonathan Tobin offered a perfect specimen of the form -- so perfect readers may almost suspect that I pseudonymously wrote Tobin's item in order to make my analysis look good. (If I were to attempt a trick like that, I'd pick a different first name.) Tobin makes two arguments for the electoral college. The first is that the desire to change the system is motivated by Democratic partisans embittered over the 2000 election:

It’s a little late to help Al Gore, but the loyal Democrats of Massachusetts are still trying to reverse the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. ...

While the Electoral College has always had its critics, grousing over the arcane system devised by the Founders was never loud enough to reach the point where an alternative might be seriously considered — at least not until the hanging chads of Florida in 2000. The razor-thin outcome of that state’s voting embittered Democrats, many of whom cling to the fiction that the 2000 election was “stolen.”

Riiiight. It's Democrats, not Republicans, whose views about the electoral college are motivated by the partisan lens of 2000. That must by why the House overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment in 1970 to abolish the electoral college, with the backing of Richard Nixon and bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress only to fall short in a filibuster. They were bitter about the 2000 election in advance. It can't be because people intuitively believe the candidate who gets the most votes should win.

Tobin argues, "we should remember that the real reason this “reform” is being championed by some legislators is the fact that the Democrats were the losers in 2000." It's a classic exercise in projection.

Tobin's second argument is the hoary but flimsy claim that electing a president by popular vote would cause the neglect of most parts of the country:

Critics of the current system point out that the realities of Electoral College mathematics push presidential candidates to concentrate their energies on states whose votes are up for grabs while they ignore those that are safely in the pockets of either party. But its abolition will more or less render all small states and non-urban areas no-go zones for the candidates. An election in which only the national popular vote counts might limit the campaigns to the two coasts and a few big cities in between them, with most of the country being truly relegated to the status of “flyover” territory.

Under the current system, presidential candidates lavish attention on about a quarter of the country and ignore the rest. Tobin argues that this is better than having a national vote, which would ignore everything but the coasts and a few big cities. But why would this be true? Sure, under a popular vote system, candidates would start devoting attention to the dreaded large cities in blue states that currently get ignored. (New York City, Los Angeles, etc.) They would also probably spend time in large cities in large red states (like Houston, Atlanta and Nashville) that currently get ignored.

Tobin suggests they would skip small states. Why? Sure, candidates would visit a lot of large cities. But which sounds like a better campaign strategy -- spending all your time campaigning on the coasts and a few big cities, or splitting your time between there and other locales where a more rare visit will pack a larger punch? We don't have to guess about this. We have a popular vote arrangement for governor in every state in the union. Statewide candidates in, say, New York do not spend all their time campaigning in New York City. They tour upstate so extensively they're practically on a first name basis with every cow. Do countries that lack an electoral college -- i.e. everybody else -- complain that candidates spend all their time in a few big cities? I'm have never heard such a complaint produced.

Remember that the electoral college was created for reasons that no longer apply at all -- interposing independent electors between the voters and the election result, and giving political weight to slave states -- that no longer apply at all. Justifications like Tobin's are not an actual attempt to think through the benefits and liabilities of the electoral college versus an alternative. Even if you decided the most important quality of an electoral system was to force candidates to spend time in small states -- and this is not a common goal of electoral systems -- the electoral college is not what you'd come up with. (It forces candidates to visit Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania over and over again.) And so the justifications are almost invariably an exercise in reasoning backwards, beginning with the premise that the electoral college is superior, then trying to devise some way in which that is true.

There's an old line, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Why do I mention it right now? Oh, no reason:

Conservative talk radio host Michael Reagan, eldest son of former president Ronald Reagan, is selling @Reagan.com e-mail addresses on his website with an appeal to conservatives to stop giving their money to companies he casts as tied to liberalism.

Writes Reagan: "People who believe in true Reagan Conservative Values are unwittingly supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda! What do I mean? Well, every time you use your email from companies like Google, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple and others, you are helping the liberals. These companies are, and will continue, to be huge supporters financially and with technology of those that are hurting our country."

"Is that where you want your money to go? I didn't so I changed things," he continues. "I came up with the very first conservative email service provider. You now can put your name next to the name of the Greatest Conservative of all, my father Ronald Reagan." ...

@Reagan.com e-mail addresses cost $34.95 per year (through tomorrow, after which prices go up). Reagan says those who purchase the e-mail addresses will also get a DVD of his father's famous 1987 "Tear Down This Wall" speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

Well, he is the Greatest Conservative of all.

Last week, USA Today published a story about all the "ordinary folks" who might get hit with the estate tax.

A $1 million exemption would affect a lot of families that are well out of Steinbrenner's league. "You take a home, an IRA or 401(k) retirement account, some other savings and you get to $1 million pretty easily," says Richard Behrendt, senior estate planner for Robert W. Baird and a former IRS attorney.

Families who live in areas with high property values are particularly vulnerable, says Clint Stretch, tax principal for Deloitte Tax who lives outside Washington, D.C. "People in my neighborhood bought a house for $32,000 in the '60s, and now it's worth $1 million," he says. "If they've got anything else, they would be paying an estate tax."

It's silly to pretend that people "get to $1 million pretty easily." In 2003, the last time the threshold was set at $1 million, only 1.24% of estates were eligible - the 98th percentile of all American families. Last year, under the new threshold of $3.5 million, that number went down to 0.3%. To help put this in perspective, the height of the top 0.3% of American males is 6'7", or the median height of an NBA player. Only 1.8% of those estates fall under the category of "farms or small businesses." Should the threshold revert next year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that only 44,000 estates will pay any estate tax.

Not only that, but, in Stretch's example, if you have "anything else," your heirs would only pay tax on the anything else. That is, a $1.1 million estate would be taxes as $100,000 -- even assuming zero estate planning, which is unrealistic. Indeed, fewer than half of estates that file estate tax returns actually pay estate taxes.

Finally, an amusing coincidence at the end: 

As repeal of the estate tax loomed at the end of 2009, wealthy families had an incentive to keep ailing parents or grandparents alive until Jan. 1. This year, in what sounds like an episode of Law & Order, heirs stand to benefit if wealthy benefactors die before midnight on Dec. 31.

Not only does it sound like a Law & Order episode, it was a Law & Order episode.

Unlike some other liberals, I have no problem with the deficit commission to reduce the unsustainably large long-term deficit. I do have a problem with the fact that the Democratic co-chairman of the commission, Erskine Bowles, proposes that the commission's plan hold federal spending at 21% of GDP. As Matt Miller notes, government spending averaged 22% of GDP during the Reagan administration. The aging population and explosion of health care costs that have followed mean a long-term level of 21% would mean slashing other functions of government.

A 21% goal means that the commission would not be producing a compromise between the Democratic and Republican preferences. It would be a wholesale adoption of the conservative plan, as CBPP points out:

The Committee on the Fiscal Future of the United States, a joint effort of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration, recently developed four budget paths or scenarios to illustrate the range of available policy choices for federal spending and revenues.One was a low-spending path that eschewed revenue increases and accomplished nearly all of its deficit reduction by cutting programs. At the other end of the spectrum was a path that accomplished most of its deficit reduction by raising taxes. Between these two paths, the committee outlined two intermediate scenarios. (See Figure 3.) Committee co-chair Rudolph Penner has described both the low-spending and high-spending paths as “extreme,” explaining that “At one extreme, the committee asked what spending cuts would be necessary to stabilize the debt-GDP target at 60 percent if the total tax burden was maintained at its historical level between 18 and 19 percent of GDP.” 

Under the committee’s extreme low path that secured almost all of its deficit reduction through budget cuts, federal spending would be about 21 percent of GDP.

Again, I'm very open to some middle-ground compromise to reduce the deficit. It's going to require liberals to accept some spending cuts we don't want, because liberals don't have the political clout to enact tax levels to pay for them. A deal tilted almost entirely toward the conservative vision is a total non-starter.

Interesting observation from First Read:

We said it at the time: As the GM bailout goes, so goes the Obama presidency. It was the bailout everyone in America could understand, and it wasn’t popular. In our June 2009 NBC/WSJ poll, the American automaker had an awful 18%-47% fav/unfav. A year later, however, the Obama administration believes it has a good story to tell. And today, the president is going to tell that story. Later this morning, he heads to Michigan, where he will tour a Chrysler and then a GM plant. After that, he’ll make remarks about the auto industry at 1:40 pm ET. There are real signs that the American auto industry has a pulse. What's helped besides the government’s intervention? Well, the Toyota debacle for one thing. But GM has also embarked on quite the image campaign. And in our May 2010 NBC/WSJ poll, guess what GM’s fav/unfav was? 37%-27% Quite the turnaround.

It's also worth considering that this isn't purely a national issue. The people who care about GM and the domestic auto industry are overwhelmingly the same people who identify with it and believe it can and should be saved.

Following up on the new poll showing strong approval for the Affordable Care Act, a Republican points out to Ben Smith that old people, who vote at the heaviest rates, still oppose it:

A GOP source, seeing my earlier post about the increasing popularity of health care reform, digs deeper into the new polling and pulls a nugget that will bode poorly for Dems this fall: Forty-six percent of seniors hold an unfavorable view of the new law, and 38 percent hold a favorable one.

Further, when asked whether the bill will make seniors in general better off or worse off, the numbers are even worse: 23 percent vs. 48 percent.

This has been true for a while:

Conservatives have made a concerted effort to portray public opposition to health care reform as an ideological rejection of liberalism and government. The truth is that people who don't have government health insurance support the Affordable Care Act. The only opposition comes from people who already benefit from single-payer health care. They're not opposed to government health care -- they're worried that providing health insurance to others will come at their expense.

Robert Kagan, the sanest of the neocons, argues that conservative attacks on the START treaty are unpersuasive:

The proposed cuts in nuclear arsenals are modest. The START I agreement cut deployed strategic nuclear weapons on both sides roughly 50 percent, from between 10,000 and 12,000 down to 6,000. The never-ratified (but generally abided-by) START II Treaty cut forces by another 50 percent, down to between 3,000 and 3,500. The 2002 Moscow Treaty made further deep cuts, bringing each side down to between 1,700 and 2,200. And New START? It would bring the number on both sides down to 1,550...

The three previous arms control treaties, all negotiated by Republican presidents, and two of which were ratified with full Republican Party support, cut deployed nuclear weapons from near 12,000 down to around 2,000 -- about 80 percent. If anyone deserves credit, or blame, for moving the United States in the direction of zero, the two Bushes deserve a lot more than President Obama.

If you want an example of the anti-treaty demagoguery Kagan is (gently) rebutting, check out Mitt Romney.

-- Richard Posner is not a fan of the Post's "Top Secret America" series.

-- A thorough debunking of Stanley Kurtz's case that Barack Obama is a socialist.

-- Ezra Klein interviews Paul Ryan, Alan Blinder, and Mark Zandi.

-- For Rick Perry, "worst uninsured rate" equals "best healthcare in the country."

Democrats have been sending around a new Kaiser poll showing that 50% of Americans approve of the Affordable Care Act, while only 35% disapprove. The poll has gotten a lot of liberal play today, but a little caution is in order. Kaiser has always drawn more favorable numbers than other polls. The polling average still shows more Americans disapprove of the new law than approve: 

Now, it's true that disapproval isn't very high -- the pollster.com average puts the approval gap at less than four percentage points, which means the country is basically split on the health care law. The fact that polls produce such wildly divergent results shows that health acre reform has become a low-salience issue. (You don't usually get wildly divergent poll results on questions that people have well-formed views on.) The Republican base thinks it's the Death of Freedom, but public opposition was largely related to the ugly, drawn-out Congressional debate. Now that the debate is over, most Americans are tuning the issue out.

The upshot here is that the triumphal conservative narrative that Obama's health care reform is wildly unpopular and undid his presidency is almost certainly wrong. (And letting reform die on the one yard line would have been an epic political disaster.) But it's just not accurate to pick out one poll to suggest that health care reform is actually popular.

J.D. Foster, the Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy at the Heritage Foundation, explains why conservatives should oppose tax hikes even while deploring deficits. Let me quote and respond to it, not because it's remarkable but because it's an utterly unremarkable statement of conservative fiscal dogma:

Even under normal circumstances, at just over 18 percent the federal tax burden is already too high. Opponents of even higher taxes need to keep this in mind, just as they need to remember that the excessive budget deficit for 2010 and in the following years is not the result of a shortfall in revenue but is due entirely to an attempt by Obama and friends to increase the size of government substantially and permanently. Whereas federal spending as a share of our economy is typically just above 20 percent, under Obama’s budget it hits 25.1 percent, according to his own numbers, and stays around 23 percent for the balance of the decade.

Foster begins by asserting that federal revenue at 18% of GDP is "too high." Isn't it a little bizarre that we should set an arbitrary figure for how high revenue should be? Revenue, in the long run, should be equal to spending. And federal spending ranged between 20 and 23% of GDP during the entire reign of Ronaldus Magnus:

But Foster is perfectly the view of the conservative movement that tax revenue levels do not need to bear any relationship to actual spending.

Foster's next point:

Those who fight tax increases are not weak or hypocritical about the budget deficit. The deficit is dangerously high and must come down, or else we risk a fiscal crisis, as a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report makes clear. But there is a higher priority than reducing budget deficits caused by excessive spending, and that is to protect taxpayers from the insatiable appetite of the federal goliath. Lower taxes would allow individuals to keep more of their own property. It’s their money, not the government’s money on loan or bequest.

Here we have argument #2: Taxes "belong to the people." It's a matter of abstract philosophical right, one which frees conservatives from having to consider any relation between revenues and government spending. On to #3:

Lower taxes generally mean a stronger economy. The favorite tax hikes of the big-government brigade, like higher taxes on capital income and higher tax rates on small business, are precisely those that would do great harm to the economy now and in the long run.

Some economists believe that lower taxes on capital increase growth. But those models are based on replacing the lost revenue from low taxes on capital with other revenue sources, or by reducing expenditures. There's no justification for reducing taxes on capital and financing it by deficit spending. Moreover, the most recent evidence hardly suggests that Bush-era tax rates are more conducive to growth than Clinton-era tax rates:

Finally, argument #4:

Lower taxes also mean that, deprived of sustenance, the federal goliath must go on a diet. Spending will have to come back toward historical levels to avert the crisis of which the CBO warns. This would be a victory for the economy, for workers, and for individual liberty.

Does lower revenue force spending to come down? The evidence suggests just the opposite.

Imagine a man who has to lose weight. Either he needs to eat fewer calories or burn more of them. Conservatives are arguing that he should exercise less, because this will force him to eat less food. Foster writes, "Lower taxes are evidently what the American people want, which is especially galling to the tax-increase crowd." And it's true -- Americans want to keep their spending and tax cuts too. Diets that promise to let you spend all day on the sofa and still eat lots of delicious food are also popular.

Arnold Schwarzenegger now reviled in California even more than the hated Gray Davis:

The new survey by Public Policy Polling (D) gives Arnold an approval rating of only 19%, with a whopping 71% disapproval. By contrast, Gray Davis's personal favorable rating is a much healthier (but still awful) 32%, with an unfavorable rating of 44%. Respondents were asked: "Who would you rather have as Governor now, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gray Davis?" The answer turned out to be Davis 44%, Schwarzenegger 38%.

I suppose you could try to explain this by constructing some elaborate theory about how Schwarzenegger has bungled the politics or veered too far from the center. Or you could conclude that economic crises make incumbents unpopular.

Say this for the president: He knows how to charm the ladies.

Obama’s sit down on “The View” this morning seemed to go about as smoothly as one could hope. POTUS stayed cool, confident, and charming as he answered questions ranging from “Why don’t we get out of Afghanistan?” to “Where is your message machine to combat the right’s?” to “Were you invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding?” (No. He was not.) His one clear moment of not knowing how to respond was when Joy Behar asked if Mel Gibson needed rage therapy. But refusing to wade into that mess can only redound to the president’s benefit.

In keeping with his audience, Obama played up the family stuff. He talked a lot about the adorableness of Malia and Sasha—even getting a bit feisty when asked if boys had yet entered the pictures—and brought up Michelle in a couple of humorous asides.

One overstep in this area: When explaining why he had agreed to sit down with the five yammering co-hosts, he told the group: “I was trying to find a show that Michelle actually watched.” Then he made some remark about how his wife just flips the channel on “all those news shows.”

How cute. The little woman doesn’t like hard news. Gag me.

More broadly, Obama achieved an important strategic goal by stressing again and again (and again) his focus on and efforts to shore up the economy. Asked by Barbara Walters to play The Rose and the Thorn (some game he apparently plays nightly with his family , in which they name the best and worst moments of the day), Obama started out by discussing the pain and suffering of Americans in these tough economic times. When Elisabeth Hasselback inquired if he was frustrated that, after all the hopefulness of his election, the country still remains deeply divided, he again mentioned the depth of the economic crisis and the controversial steps that had been necessary to address the problem.