If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that while I have my problems with Vox, I also admire what they do. Some people there, like Max Fisher, are awesome. But even at its core of where it shows off its upper-middle class biases, it still provides reasonably good coverage. So when I see them make a clear conceptual mistake, it disturbs me because I know it is so much worse at The New York Times, much less Fox News. In this case, I’m talking about its debate coverage.

Dylan Matthews wrote one of their typical genre articles of debate coverage, 3 Winners and 2 Losers From Saturday Night’s Republican Debate. These are always interesting, even if I consider them wrong. The three winners were: Jeb Bush, the Democrats, and the moderators; the two losers were: Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. He felt that Rubio lost because he was just okay and he needed to shine. The Democrats won because, “The longer, the bloodier, and the sillier this campaign season is, the better it is for the eventual Democratic nominee.” And the moderators won because they did a reasonably good job.

Debate Coverage: Not Like Music Criticism

Matthews’ argument for Trump being a loser and Bush being s winner, however, are based on the same questionable analysis: the theater audience was clearly with Bush. Think about this from different perspective. You are a classical music critic and you are supposed to review Yoyo No Mas, the great tenor who hasn’t performed in over a decade. He’s performing in his hometown. And everyone loves his performance. But you are a professional and you know Yoyo No Mas has lost it: his rhythm is erratic and he’s flat when he hits high notes. Do you write a glowing review because the clearly biased audience ate it up? I don’t think so.

But that’s what Matthews did. And he isn’t alone. That seems to be the consensus of the debate coverage: Bush did well because, oh, how the audience cheered him and Trump did poorly because he got booed — a lot. Most of the rest of the media firmament may be unaware of the situation. They may actually think that the audience is indicative of South Carolina voters. But the truth is that Trump was right when he said, “That’s Jeb’s special interests and lobbyists talking.” And Matthews knows this! He wrote, ” Apparently only 600 of the 1,600 tickets to the event were given to the candidates, and the state and national party controlled most of the rest.” He added to this, “The result was an enthusiastically pro-Jeb crowd.”

Let’s Repeat the False Narrative!

Now I get this. If I were the Republican Party establishment, I’d do it too. It certainly must have looked to many viewers at home that Jeb Bush had a feisty debate. But why should the media play along? Isn’t it the job of the media to report that Jeb’s new more aggressive stance against Trump is mostly just a matter of stage lighting and make-up? Jeb Bush was only a winner if the debate coverage ignores this fact.

From my vantage point, Jeb Bush was better than he has been. But it’s just as easy to make the same argument about him that Matthews made about Rubio. And to me, every time the audience booed Trump, it made me think how pathetic the Republican establishment is. I suspect that this is even more true of Trump supporters. And it makes Jeb Bush look like exactly the weak guy that Donald Trump has portrayed him as: someone who needs his powerful family and establishment connections to win the race.

What the media need to understand is that they affect the game. A lot more people will see debate coverage than the actual debate. If Jeb Bush really was a winner for those who watched the debate, proclaiming him so only pushes a very fake reality that the Republican Party establishment has created.

Update (15 February 2016 11:07 am)

Check this out, Poll: Rubio Won Republican Debate. The placement from the CBS News overnight poll was this: Rubio, Trump, Kasich, and then Cruz. The Drudge Report readers’ poll had this placement: Trump, Cruz, and then Rubio. Notice anyone who’s missing for these polls? That’s right: Jeb Bush. And according to Dylan Matthews, he was the only Republican in the “win” category.

I hadn’t meant to watch last night’s GOP debate. But it was amazing. I couldn’t turn away. The thing was, it didn’t seem like a debate. It was more like kids throwing mud at each other. But I find this more interesting than the substantive debates that the Democrats have. Now that may be because I already know where the candidates stand on most issues. So I see the debates as being artificial. Republican debates are more like fist fights. And this one was the top of the them all.

But it got me wondering: why do Democrats talk about actual policy whereas we see no such thing at any GOP debate? Part of it surely is that Republicans don’t really have much to offer in terms of policy that they can talk about. If they get into the details of their economic policy, it will be clear that all they care about is giving tax cuts to the rich and allowing companies to send more jobs overseas even while polluting more here at home. They aren’t going to talk about that in a debate.

It’s even worse on foreign policy. Pretty much every Republican has this to say about the subject, “Obama has made us weak! I will make us strong!” But if you burrow down into what their actual policies are, they are the same things that Obama is doing. So what they are really saying is, “I will do exactly what Obama is doing, but I will really mean it!” Once you realize this, you can’t watch a GOP debate without finding it amusing — and horrifying. Kind of like watching Dead Alive.

Why the GOP Debate Was Contentless

There is a more fundamental issue at hand, though. The Republicans have moved about as far to the right as they possibly could. This is why it is interesting that people consider Donald Trump too far out. While it might be true that he is too far out, he is not too far to the right. He never would have caught on if he had gone in that direction because only the billionaire class is interested in that kind of a candidate. There is no doubt to me that Trump is by far the most reasonable candidate in the Republican primary.

So when you get these people together who really don’t disagree on anything they can really talk about publicly, they have nothing to do but sling mud at each other. And it was quite a scene. Mostly, it was just allegations about how the others weren’t the True Conservative™. It was, not surprisingly, like Monty Python:

This is a natural problem in a two party system when one party decides to move distinctly toward the other. And that’s what the Democratic Leadership Council was able to do to the Democratic Party. Now I’ve always thought that fundamentally, those people weren’t interested in the Democrats winning elections, but really just wanted a socially liberal Republican Party. But even if you grant that their real concern was making the Democrats competitive, they won the battles and lost the war.

To start with, winning elections means nothing if it goes along with the entire political environment moving in the opposite direction. And that’s what’s happened. It wasn’t Reagan that moved the entire country to the right; it was Bill Clinton. He was the one who managed to greatly constrain the Overton Window. And as a result of this, the Republicans had two options. They could have jumped over the Democrats and become a complete populist party (and this is more or less what Trump is doing). Or they could move way off to the right. And that’s what they’ve done.

It is funny that every four years, we hear what a “deep bench” the Republicans have. And then they all get out there and there isn’t a deep bench. It’s just a bench of a bunch of guys who all play the same position. There is nothing different about them other than that they have different styles. Last night at the GOP debate, we saw a free-for-all. There was nothing to discuss. There aren’t different conservative policy positions. There is just one and the only question is which one of the candidates will enforce it most rigidly.

Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a resort in Texas this morning. I assume it was a heart attack. He was 79 and he never looked particularly healthy to me. It’s obviously a personal tragedy for those who knew and loved him. I’m not one of them. To me, he was just a really powerful man who did great damage to our country. Not that he was always wrong, but his ideology affected his rulings in a more grand way than most recent judges. And the last several years he wasn’t making a lot of sense — on or off the bench.

My concern is his replacement. Because other than raising Scalia from the dead and nominating that zombie to the Supreme Court, I don’t see the Republican controlled Senate allowing Obama to appoint anyone at all. And you know Obama: he’s never been one to nominate liberals to the Court. As I’ve noted many times, the Court used to have 5 conservatives, 3 moderates, and 1 liberal. Now it has only 4 conservatives. The Republicans will try to stop any replacement, hoping that they control the White House starting next year.

Think about the history here. Obama got to replace two liberalish justices with two moderate ones. And even that was treated by the Republicans as though he were staging a violent coup. The idea that Obama will get to replace a conservative firebrand like Scalia will be seen as totally unacceptable. And so they will try to avoid doing anything at all.

Republican’s Dangerous Moment Regarding Scalia

But here’s the interesting thing: this is a very dangerous game for them. If they allow Obama to put another moderate on the bench, they might be lucky. If Clinton is the next president, she will almost certainly have a majority in the Senate. And if necessary, the Democrats will be able to abolish the filibuster altogether, and allow Clinton to put the first truly liberal judge on the bench since her husband was in office. Do they really want to take that chance?

Well, the answer is clear: yes. They will definitely take that chance, because the Republicans are the “all or nothing” party. I look back with great glee to when, after winning re-election, Obama told Boehner, “You should have taken the deal I offered you back then.” That was the deal where Boehner claimed to get 98% of what he wanted and still turned it down. But this does make it all the more important that the Democrats win the presidency this year.

Think about this: with another moderate on the bench, the Court could hear another case that would allow it to reverse Citizens United. We would back away from the coming reverse on Roe v Wade. Scalia’s death could hearken much better times for millions of people in the United States. On the other hand, what is the worse case scenario? The Republicans don’t allow Obama appoint a new judge, and we get someone just as bad as Scalia. So this is a very hopeful day for liberals and a terrible day for conservatives.

Michael Hiltzik brought my attention to something interesting, The Conservative Case Against Expanding Social Security? It Was Based on a Math Error. In December, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that cheered conservatives. It stated that people on Social Security would end up making a lot more than was thought in retirement compared to the what they made at the end of their careers. Here’s Hiltzik, “To take just one example, the CBO reported in December that for the average retiree born in the 1940s, Social Security benefits would replace a healthy 60% of average late-career earnings. The new figure is only 43%.”

I probably didn’t notice the release of the original report because the Social Security argument that we get from conservatives is disingenuous. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, they will find a reason as to why it proves that we must cut benefits. Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot wrote Social Security: The Phony Crisis over 16 years ago. But it could have been written today. The arguments they counter have not changed at all. So it is not at all surprising that conservatives took the fact that seniors would be “living it up” with a full 60% of their incomes while they were working.

The truth is that they might as well make the same argument using the 43% number. Hiltzik noted, “Personal finance experts generally say that it takes 70% of one’s working income to maintain a lifestyle in retirement.” And that tidbit comes from conservative Andrew Biggs, who was making the argument that 60% was excessively generous. So it really doesn’t matter: conservatives think what conservatives think; damn the facts!

But the really interesting thing is that Biggs wrote three articles on this subject recently. Two he has retracted because they were based on the CBO error. But one, he is not retracting because it didn’t use the CBO data. You see, Biggs has his own calculation that show that the CBO’s first estimate actually was the right one. That’s because there will literally never be any evidence that suggests that we are being stingy to our elderly population, because the conservative belief is that we shouldn’t do anything for seniors. They should just have really great investments like I’m sure Andrew Biggs has.

Social Security Attacks Get Worse As Need Increases

As the decades have passed, the conservative idea that people can plan for their own retirement has gotten worse and worse. And the reason for that is mostly because we’ve allowed businesses to do just what they want. So wages have stagnated. And benefits, in as much as people have them, have transferred from pensions to defined contribution plans, which have been a complete failure. Yet as workers’ other options erode, these conservatives want to destroy the fallback: Social Security.

Most people understand racism. When people are segregated, it is easy to vilify or discount “those people.” But it isn’t as well understood when it comes to economics. Those who write about economics are pretty far removed from the lives of the poor. We see this all the time with people like David Brooks who thinks that if the poor would just act more like the middle class their economic fortunes would improve. Sorry, but that ain’t the case and the only kind of people who make that case are people who start at the conclusion.

What’s more, the middle class is not doing very well in case this fact somehow slipped by. But it’s all part of the larger system: taking from the poor and giving to the rich. When people talk about means testing Social Security (as Biggs does), they don’t care about the money it would save the program, because it wouldn’t save much. They are just trying to head off an actually helpful solution like increasing the payroll tax cap. So again: the assault on Social Security benefits is, as always, just a fight to keep the taxes of the rich low.

Update (12 February 2016 8:14 am)

Dean Baker noted that this is not the first time that the CBO just happened to make mistakes that helped conservatives, Strike Three for the Congressional Budget Office? Social Security Retirement Income Projections.