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Lessons Learned in 2006

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

The interpretation of election results is complicated, often self-serving, and a necessary predicate to future political success. The Democrats may fall prey to the illusion that winning control of Congress represents a sweeping mandate and repudiation of Republicans. Though dramatic, the loss of seats in both the House and Senate in the sixth year of an administration, particularly during war time, is quite consistent with past administrations. Republicans should not take too much solace in this observation, but Democrats ought not to be fooled either.

The assertion of an unequivocal Democratic mandate would have been more plausible if Democrats had run on a specific platform or if party leaders like the current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had played a prominent role in the fall campaign. Movements need a face, and the leading faces of the Democratic Party were hidden lest other Democrats be tainted with the Liberalism of their leaders.

Democrats essentially ran on an anti-Bush and anti-corruption platform. Indeed ten of the Republican seats lost in House were the direct result of specific local scandals.

Anti-Bush sentiment essentially reduces to an anti-Iraq policy position. Given the close vote counts in many districts, it is safe to conclude that if there were less dissatisfaction with Iraq, Republicans would have held onto Congressional power. In a very real sense, Democrats actually captured the public mood on Iraq, a non-specific angst. There is no conspicuous consensus on the Democratic policy for Iraq. Similarly, the public itself is deeply skeptical about Iraq. While the Left wing of the Democratic Party does not much want to succeed in Iraq as to leave, the public is justly frustrated with progress in Iraq and desperately seeks clear evidence of progress. The public would be patient with slow advances, but not with the lack of visible improvement. If there was a message in the 2006 mid-term elections it was to succeed in Iraq. Drift is unacceptable.

However, even the public’s position seemed confused. Senator Lieberman, a Democratic (running as an independent after loosing the Democratic Party primary) Iraq war supporter convincingly trounced truculently anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont in liberal Connecticut. By contrast, anti-war Republican Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island narrowly lost his re-election bid. In the former case the public responded to a person of principle and in the latter case it rejected irresoluteness.

Further, Democrats would be wise to realize that they can maintain power so long as they appear to take a centrist approach. In exit polls, 21 percent of the people identified themselves as liberals, 32 percent as conservatives, and 47 percent as moderates. The US is still a center-right country and the Democrats are a Left-center party. At least social conservatism is further evidenced by the fact most of the anti-gay marriage referendums passed.

This poses a problem for Democratic leaders. Party activists are far larger more Liberal than the electorate and want to see some quick legislative return on their investment in the Democratic Party. However, if the Party moves too noticeably to the Left or appears to be cheering for failure in Iraq, it might find its return to Congressional power short lived.


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Suicide Bomber and Halloween

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

Halloween has never been known as a time for thoughtful activity, but activities at a couple of big-name university campuses this year were occasions for interesting contrasts.

At Johns Hopkins University, the Sigma Chi fraternity sent out an e-mail invitation to a “Halloween in the Hood” Party. At the very least, the invitation was puerile and tasteless and at worst it was a repugnant example of lingering racism on campus. The e-mail referred to dominantly African-American Baltimore as an “HIV pit” There were further requests to wear “bling-bling,” vernacular for expensive and perhaps ostentatious jewelry associated with the hip-hop community. WBAL radio reported there was a least one person at the fraternity party dressed as a slave.

The university community responded quickly, suspending fraternity activities. Though the university should be careful not to step on First Amendment rights no matter ignoble the speech, condemnation of the e-mail and the party is necessary and appropriate. The student responsible has since apologized and claimed the initiation was “satirical” and not intentionally offensive Nonetheless, it is reasonable to ask how a student who claims he is not a racist and is obviously intelligent enough to attend a prestigious university could be so insensitive as to not realize the hurtful effect his e-mail could have.

At the other end of the spectrum is the University of Pennsylvania, the President of the University, Amy Gutmann, hosted a Halloween Party at her home. At the party, a student came dressed a suicide bomber. While Gutmann certainly cannot be held responsible for every poor judgment made by a university student, she had no problem standing for a smiling pose with the student. One could make the reasonable assumption that she would not have posed with someone dressed in a Klan robes, in a Nazi uniform, or a white student dressed in blackface — at least one hopes not. The logical conclusion is that suicide bombers, who blow themselves up to kill deliberately as many civilians as possible, have not yet become politically unacceptable on at least one major university campus. Could not Dr. Gutmann see how divisive her actions could be? Gutmann is not an inexperienced student, she is supposed to represent the adult supervision on campus

Perhaps even more disappointing is that the University of Pennsylvania has not united as in the case of Johns Hopkins to condemn such offensive behavior. The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student paper at the University of Pennsylvania, ran an op-ed suggesting that those upset by the student in suicide bomber costume posing with the University president just did not have a sense of humor. It is reasonable to ask how the student who wrote the piece and the student who dressed as a suicide bomber (both obviously intelligent enough to attend a prestigious university) and the president of a major university could all be so insensitive as to not realize the hurtful effect of trivializing the suicide bomber.

Later Dr. Gutmann explained that the “costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take more pictures with him as he requested.” Next time we hope that Dr. Gutmann will be a little more sensitive and escort similarly clad students from her home.

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Kerry’s Foot Firmly in Mouth

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

The words that people say are seldom considered outside of the context of the speaker who utters them. Speaking at Pasadena City College in California, Senator John Kerry and the former Democratic nominee for President said, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Was Kerry saying that the American military is composed of the least educated among us or suggesting that President Bush’s lack of education is the reason he decided to go into Iraq? The plain meaning of the words suggests he was criticizing American troops, but it could have been awkward phraseology.

Part of Kerry’s problem is that he has a long history of saying pejorative things about American troops. During Vietnam he claimed that American troops had committed war crimes and that such crimes were wide spread. In 2005, Kerry charged American troops with “terrorizing kids and children” in Iraq. Moreover, the notion that American GIs come from those who do not do well in school arose during the Vietnam era when college students received draft deferments and others were conscripted. More than a few young men used college as a means of avoiding military service. Of course, this state of affairs has not existed since the decades-old all-volunteer army began. Perhaps Kerry’s mind set in firmed stuck in the 1960s.

Of course, Kerry could have, as he said, been making a bad joke about Bush’s intelligence and the fact that we are in Iraq. Jokes should not have to be explained, but no one ever claimed that Kerry has a talent for comedy. Ironically, Bush’s grades at Yale were at least as good as Kerry’s, but Kerry’s certainly judges himself Bush’s intellectual superior. Certainly, this conviction is what makes Kerry’s loss to Bush in the 2004 presidential election so frustrating to Kerry.

If Kerry is as smart as he believes he would not be making these clumsy statements. Nonetheless, he did manage to worm himself into a world of trouble during his Presidential bid with clumsy or perhaps revealing statements. With regard to a bill to support American troops in Iraq, he told an audience “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

Without looking into his soul, it is not possible to know for certain if Kerry was criticizing the troops or making a joke about Bush. However, it can be said with high confidence that he was probably trying to pander to his audience. That is his real problem.

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Microcredit and Megacredit

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

Unlike some other Nobel Peace Prize winners, the winner for 2006, Muhammad Yunus, began the work for which he won the prize with his own money. In 1976, while an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh, he loaned local craftsmen $27 to help finance their businesses. This small generous gesture started a large and ultimately successful experiment in “microcredit.” Many small enterprises in poor countries fail because of the lack of capitalization. Conventional banks are reluctant to make such small loans, considering the poor to be bad credit risks. Part of Yunus’s genius was the use of credit groups where impoverished people would help each other in meeting their payments, in effect all members of the credit group act as guarantors of the loans to the credit group. In addition, Yunus focused most of the loans on women, who appeared generally more responsible in using the loans for the general benefit of the family.

Yunus’s success in Bangladesh is remarkable especially in contrast to typical foreign aid. Large-scale loans to impoverished countries generally are squandered in ubiquitous corruption. The inherent problem is that the aid gets filtered by governments, that if they were effective in the first place, there would be less need for foreign aid. Microcredit schemes represent an innovative way to bring the benefits of capitalism to the poor themselves. Credit and borrowing are a necessary component to growth. Yunus earned a Nobel Peace Prize for providing an effective modality for providing credit to the poor.

Both microcredit and “megacredit” made news in the same week. On the megacredit front, we learned that the annual US budget deficit continues its rapid descent as federal tax receipts grow even faster than government spending. The federal budget deficit for this year fell to $248 billion. Microcredit and megacredit are linked by the fact that liquidity and growth depend upon borrowing, whether for a handful of dollars or billions of dollars. Indeed, just as the use of credit is necessary for individuals to create wealth, it good for the US government to maintain a reasonable level of debt. There are two key factors that many on the Left and the Right do not often remember in assessing public debt:

  • A nominal budget deficit or surplus value must be normalized for inflation. When inflation is high enough, nominal budget deficits could even represent real surpluses. Even with a real budget deficit, if US growth is robust, the federal debt load can be decreasing.
  • A modest debt lubricates the economy and is a necessary requirement for growth.

Consider the current the deficit of $248 billion relative to the total US federal debt of $8.5 trillion. The inflation rate for 2006 is about 3.5%. This means that a nominal deficit of $298 billion would increase the total debt by 3.5%. Hence, for such a deficit there would be no “real” increase in the debt, or zero real deficit if the nominal deficit were $298 billion. Given the imprecision in computing the inflation rate, it might be too much to claim we are now running a real surplus with a $248 billion deficit, but we are certainly within measurement error of it. The only reason to reduce the deficits further is if we believe the debt load is too high.

The current debt load (the debt-to-gross-national-product ratio) for the United States is about 65%, and should optimally be somewhere between 40% and 80%. Beyond these extremes, economic growth is inhibited. For example, in the 1970s, the debt-to-GDP ratio was lower than 40% and we experienced stagnant growth and high unemployment. Indeed, in the late 1970s, inflation was so high we were really running budget surpluses with nominal deficits and suffered under the twin problems of “stagflation.”

It would seem that we are now running something close to the optimum yearly federal deficit with the optimum debt load. We should consider further significant reductions in debt carefully. Though we might wish to decrease the federal debt load in anticipation of increase liabilities as baby boomers begin to consume social security and medical benefits, reducing deficits too quickly could ultimately lead to economic stagnation.

Posted in Economics, Social Commentary | No Comments »

Linda Greenhouse’s Honesty

Sunday, October 8th, 2006

The credibility of reporters depends on the conviction of readers that they are consuming reporting untainted by any political or personal bias. However, in many ways, such objectivity is not possible. An honest and diligent reporter will report facts as best as he or she can determine them. However, by definition reporters can only include a subset of facts, facts they consider important to the story. In addition, there are many possible stories to report upon. Reporters can only devote finite resources to those stories they consider most relevant. It is in the selection of stories to cover and facts to include that bias can seep in. This is not to disparage reporters, but to point out that they like all others synthesize facts into a story in a way informed by both their political and social outlook. Indeed, the most conscientious of reporters will bring the most of themselves into their reporting. At best, we can hope that reporters are conscious of the biases they may bring to story and use that to bring the broadest possible perspective to a story.

Daniel Okrent, the public editor of the New York Times, by contrast, argues that, “It’s been a basic tenet of journalism … that the reporter’s ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous view.” However, if we believe that all people bring their world views to their reporting, no matter how conscientious, then obscuring a reporter’s ideology is to perpetuate the fiction that anyone can be entirely objective. If a reporter’s ideology is known and conceded, it allows readers to apply this knowledge in the assessment of a story and to decide how much weight to grant the story.

When Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court beat writer for the New York Times, was being honored at Harvard University, she spoke honestly. She worried that the government has “turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world — [such as] the U.S. Congress.” Greenhouse’s honesty is a virtue but perhaps she should have known better than to be so conspicuously candid. While writing about the abortion decisions of the US Supreme Court in 1989, she was participating in pro-choice political rallies and subsequently admonished by the NY Times editors to avoid such political activism

One can agree or disagree with Greenhouse’s political perspective. However, her outspokenness is a service to her readers. We can weigh her coverage given her known views. This is far more truthful than if Greenhouse effectively hid her views. It is better to be clear and open about the perspective Greenhouse brings to her coverage than to mislead her readers with the illusion that she is or even could be completely objective.

Posted in Law, Politics, Social Commentary | No Comments »

“Shoot Me First”

Sunday, October 8th, 2006

We all need heroes. We do not need them to worship or to adore. We need them to provide examples and models we can aspire to, even if we ourselves never quite meet these aspirations.

Sports heroes, when not juiced with performance enhancing chemicals, provide examples of excellence that are the outgrowth of commitment and training.  Other heroes provide examples in different, more indirect ways. Most heroes are quite inconspicuous, like the father who works long hours to provide food and clothing for his family or the single mother who works a job all day and cares for her children at night. There are heroes like nurses who stay late to grasp the hand of a frightened patient alone in a hospital room. There are heroes like firemen who risk their lives to save people they do no know. There are military heroes, which we hear too little of, like Marine Capt. Joshua L. Glover who was awarded the Silver Star after taking the full brunt of a grenade to save his buddies.

In a week when we get to experience the worst of behavior, like former Republican Representative Mark Foley who sent explicit and unseemly electronic messages to Congressional pages and we are made to endure the ensuing political finger-pointing, we are also afforded a story of true heroism.

In Nickel Mines, PA an unbalanced milk truck driver, Charles C. Roberts, motivated by unclear internal demons, killed five young girls in an Amish school house. It is a story of violence in schools that has too often been repeated. However, there was an interesting and different aspect to this story.

When it was all to clear that Roberts was going to gun down the children. One of the older children in the school, 13-year-old Marian Fisher, asked “Shoot me first,” in order buy time for the younger children. The sacrifice was in the end not sufficient, but Fisher displayed a self-composure and bravery under stress that few could ever match. In the process, she demonstrated a power of faith and self sacrifice many should aspire to. Few will find themselves in similar situations and fewer still would respond similarly.

Heroism can also be found in the quiet reaction of the Amish community to the killings. There was not only dignity in the private grieving over the loss of the children, but true forgiveness and reconciliation between the families of the victims and the killer. This reconciliation will cauterize the civic wound inflicted by the killings and prevent anger over these killings from spilling over into new violence.

The cynical in us will see a world populated with too many Charles Roberts, while the heroic in all of us will aspire to a world more commonly occupied by the Marian Fishers.

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When Are Aggressive Interogation Techniques Justified?

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

While interviewed on Fox News Sunday by anchor Chris Wallace, former President Bill Clinton grew defensive about criticism of his efforts to apprehend or kill Osama Bin Laden before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. He crowed about his aggressive pursuit of bin Laden saying,

“What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”

So we have a president of the United States not only admitting, but boasting, that he exercised arbitrary executive authority to direct the killing of a foreign national. Although clearly bin Laden was pursuing a war against the United States, Congress had declared no such war. As chief executive, Clinton was exercising his Constitutional authority as commander-in-chief, to protect citizens and interests of the United States. Clinton’s admission of the desire and order to assassinate bin Laden is interesting given that the Church Committee’s investigation of intelligence excesses in 1975 concluded that assassination was “incompatible with American principle, international order, and morality.” Of course, there is an exception in times of war, but at the time that Clinton was attempting to kill bin Laden, there was no state of war. The United States was planning to kill bin Laden because we believed he posed a threat and that it would be easier to kill than append him.

President Ford’s executive order 12,333 provided that “[n]o person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Of course, this presidential order could have been superseded by Clinton. Nonetheless, in the Fox interview, Clinton admits he was aggressively and deliberately violating that executive order. There has been little objection by Democrats on the Left about this now common conclusion that assassinations ordered by the US president can be appropriate.

In retrospect, few would now question the legality of such a potential killing, and many fewer still would question its desirability. Perhaps such an assassination or series of assassinations of Islamic radicals would have prevented the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on September 11. Of course, it is ironic that had such an assassination(s) occurred, there would have been two possible outcomes: either the attacks of 9/11 would or would not have happened. If they had happened, the far-Left would have claimed that the attacks constituted a response to hostile US efforts to kill Islamic leaders. If the attacks of 9/11 had never happened, we would have never known what had been prevented. The assassinations could have still been criticized as yet another example of American international lawlessness. Indeed, anti-Clinton Conservatives would have likely criticized such actions as well.

The morality of a bin Laden assassination, despite any legal issues, rests on the principle that the innocent should be protected with the minimum violence possible. In the case of bin Laden, the application of such deadly force seems justified. We should capture him if we can, and kill him if we must. Can this same principle be applied to the use of torture or aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture?  We seem to have collectively agreed that an assassination that would prevent a terrorist attack is not only morally justified, but morally required. What about aggressive interrogation techniques?

If a president is confronted with high-level terrorists and must use aggressive interrogation techniques to save innocent American lives, to what extent is it morally justifiable? One the one hand, if we are too cavalier with the use of aggressive interrogation techniques we run the risk of unnecessary cruelty and its  morally deadening effect on those who act on our behalf. On the other hand, if we are too punctilious we trade moral posturing for the protection of innocent life.

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Protesting Too Much

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

In the intermediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the country rallied together realizing that fighting amongst ourselves would be counterproductive. Even before any investigations to determine the history of what had happened in the lead up to the attacks, it could have easily been foreseen that in the perspective of hindsight there would have been many opportunities to have thwarted the attacks. President George W. Bush’s Administration had eight short months to anticipate an attack. The Administration of President Bill Clinton had eight years. There must have been many mistakes made by both administrations.

It is likely that given a pre-9/11 perspective, if the administrations of Clinton and Bush had been reversed in sequence, 9/11 would not have been averted. The Clinton Administration considered the threat of terrorism a criminal enforcement problem, not an international conflict. It is not clear that Bush would have thought differently before 9/11.

Up until now, in the interest of comity, neither president had dissipated national unity by focusing on a blame game. President Clinton broke this tacit arrangement this Sunday in an angry interview on Fox News Sunday. “They had eight months to try [to get Bin Laden]. They did not try. I tried, ” he boasted.

A dispassionate examination of the 9/11-Commission Report or Richard Clarke’s book cited by Clinton in the interview does not support the picture painted by Clinton of a directed president doing everything in his power to get Bin Laden.

It is unclear if Bill Clinton was posing faux anger in the interview to energize Democrats in anticipation of the mid-term election. William Kristol of the Weekly Standard lays out a possible Clinton strategy for such an outburst. Chris Wallace, who conducted the interview, reports that Clinton walked away angry and chewed out subordinates suggestive of authentic anger. Perhaps, Clinton was still smarting from the docu-drama The Path to 9/11 that painted the Clinton Administration in a negative light.

As usual Clinton played a little fast and loose with the truth, but not any more than we have come to expect from Clinton spin. There was no “comprehensive anti-terror strategy” bequeathed to the Bush Administration as he asserted. Richard Clarke, Clinton’s source of all wisdom, claimed that, “There was no plan on al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration…[a] plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.” In fact in 2001, Clarke said, the Bush Administration “changed the [Clinton] strategy from one of rollback [of] al Qaeda over five years to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.”

Clinton may get angry from many causes, but it is true that when he is caught red-handed, a la the Monica Lewinsky affair, he has a tendency to get livid and self righteous. Perhaps it is my Conservative ear but I heard a little of the finger-wagging “I never sex with that woman” as he leaned over and harangued at Wallace, “What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him [Osama bin Laden]…”

It is common to be most stung by criticism when it hits close to home. Perhaps Clinton feels a little guilty that not enough was done to pursue Osama Bin Laden during his administration. The case can be made that it would have been difficult for anyone to do more, though there is always room for critical self-examination. However, in his congenitally narcissistic manner Clinton believes this is a question about him and his legacy. It is more important for the country to eschew self-blame and focus moral liability on terrorists, but Clinton insists on polishing his own reputation. It is ironic that Clinton’s outburst in desperate service of his legacy will continue to cement the vision of Clinton as an unserious person.

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Religious Bullies

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

It is no coincidence that Rosie O’Donnell is not afraid to conflate “radical” Christians with Islamic terrorists on television. It is no accident that that Madonna is willing to mount a crucifix to entertain us. The calculation of consequences is not difficult. Some Christians will be offended, but all they will do is complain. Other people will praise O’Donnell’s and Madonna’s faux courage, while the controversy will increase their marketability.

Pope Benedict XVI learned that the calculation changes when one even indirectly criticizes Islam. On September 12, he delivered a papal address at the University of Regensburg on the relationship between faith and reason. The essence of the talk was the observation that Christianity and the Greek tradition of logic had reached a synthesis. Faith and reason are not exclusive, but complimentary.

One consequence of this accommodation is the recognition — not always, but generally, respected by Christians — that faith can only be spread by moral witness and persuasion built on reason. Pope Benedict argued that reason and openness are the only foundation upon which there can be honest dialogue between faiths.

In passing, the Pope cited a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor who said, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find thing only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Pope did not argue that this was the essence of Islam or that it was his view of Islam. Indeed, he cited the part of the Koran, (Surah 2) “There is no compulsion in religion.”

Even if upset about the negative portrayal of Islam by someone dead over six-hundred years, Muslims faithful to a more modern interpretation of Islam, one that had reached an understanding between faith and religion, would have understood the intellectual and exploratory nature of the Pope’s remarks. Even after the Pope expressed regret about the misinterpretation of his remarks, a large number of Muslims appeared eager to remain offended and threaten the Pope. There is more than a little irony in the observation that when Islam is indirectly criticized for unreasonably resorting to violence, some Islamist threatened the Pope, burn churches, and slay a nun.

As Charles Krauthammer argued, “the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout ‘God is great’ as they slit the throats of infidels — such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 — and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.

There is an important if not quantifiable portion of modern Islam, maybe just the loudest and most conspicuous, which is not only intolerant, but does not even have a fully developed theology or understanding of religious toleration. What remains is the theology of the religious bully. The distinction between that part of Islam that has embraced religious tolerance and that part that has not is relatively easy to recognize. The element that embraces tolerance does not react violently when criticized and refrains from suggesting that Christians are swine and Jews are apes.

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Presidential Approval and Gasoline Prices

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

The ubiquity of computers and data available on-line have made it possible for statistically savvy non-politicians to engage in numerical political science. Recently, “Professor Pollkatz” has drawn well-deserved attention to the relationship between Bush’s presidential approval rating and gasoline prices. As gasoline prices rise, President Bush’s job approval rating decreases. As the prices fall, Bush’s approval rises. Of course, the mere fact that there is a correlation between the two does not prove a casual link. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose that gasoline prices affect the popular perception of how the economy is fairing and consequently the approval of the president. If gasoline prices are high, people are reminded weekly at the gas pump.

This relationship takes on contemporary importance since gasoline prices are currently falling. If the relationship holds, Bush’s approval should rise and perhaps affect the prospects for Republicans in the mid-term elections about a month-and-half away. Indeed, as prices have declined there does appear to be a modest improvement in presidential approval over the last week.

To make the gas-price-presidential-approval relationship clear, Pollkatz plots a composite presidential approval index as a function of time on the same graph as the scaled reciprocal gasoline price. As the gasoline price goes up, his index goes down. This allows the presidential approval and Pollkatz’s price index to track each other on similar numerical axes. The observation that the two quantities track is quite clear, but Pollkatz does not provide (or I could not find) the actual correlation statistics at his site.

To perform my own statistical analysis, I pulled down Pollkatz’s composite approval data which he based on a combination of a number of publicly available polls. I also retrieved semi-monthly prices for regular-grade unleaded gas from the Department of Energy. Rather than plotting both presidential approval and gasoline prices as a function of time, the graph below shows a scatter plot of presidential approval as a function of gasoline price.

Gasoline vs Presidential Approval

This way of displaying the data re-enforces some intuitive notions. First, there is general relationship between gasoline prices and presidential approval. Second, there appears to be two regimes of importance. When gasoline prices are greater than about $1.75 per gallon, presidential approval is strongly correlated to gasoline prices. Once gasoline prices fall below $1.75 per gallon, gas prices become less of a concern and are less associated with presidential approval ratings.

When considering all the data for the Bush presidency, the square of the correlation coefficient relating gasoline price and presidential approval is 0.54. This implies that about 54% of the variations in presidential approval can be linearly related to the price of gasoline. However, in the next graph, we only include gasoline prices larger than $1.75 per gallon. For these higher prices, the correlation coefficient is significantly larger, about 0.76. Thus, 76% of the presidential approval can be explained by gasoline prices.

Presidential Approval v. Gasoline Prices for Prices Greater Than $1.75/gallon

What does it imply for our current situation? If we believe the linear relationship, for every 10 cent decrease in the price of gasoline, Bush’s approval percentage will increase by 1.2%. Since August 12, 2006, the price of gas has fallen nearly 50 cents. We could expect roughly a 6% improvement in presidential approval, roughly consistent Rasmussen’s daily tracking data. If gasoline prices decrease to near $2.00 per gallon, Bush’s approval could cross the 50% point, close to what it was when elected to second term.

It is unclear how much gasoline prices will drop in the near future or even if they will turn around and increase. It is also unclear whether any improvement in Bush’s approval rating will measurably improve prospects for Congressional Republicans. It is clear that from the perspective of an incumbent, falling gasoline prices are preferable to rising gasoline prices.

Posted in Economics, Law | No Comments »

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