QUESTIONS I DO NOT KNOW THE ANSWER TO

A. Since the current primary system has been in place, has any presidential incumbent running for re-election who did not have a serious primary rival lost a general election?

B. Since the current primary system has been in place, has any presidential incumbent with a serious primary rival won a general election?

Now, the "current primary system" was not, I believe, in place when Eisenhower ran for re-election in 1956, but even if it was, Eisenhower was unchallenged in the primaries and won.

The next incumbent to run was Johnson in 1964. I do not believe that he had any serious internal opposition and won re-election. Is that belief correct?

Nixon in 1972: Did Schmidt run against him in the GOP primaries or did he simply bolt to run third party? Would he count as a serious intraparty challenge? I really don't know.

Ford in 1976: Reagan ran against him in the primaries, he lost the general election.

Carter in 1980: Edward Kennedy ran against him in the primaries, he lost the general election.

Reagan in 1984: Did not have any serious internal opposition that I know about, won handily.

Bush 1992: Buchanan won New Hampshire and would thus qualify as a serious challenger. Bush lost the general election.

Clinton in 1996: No primary challenger, won.

So the questions then become:
(A) Do weak incumbents simply draw primary challengers and thus a primary challenger is indicative of a problem?
(B) Do primary challengers make the candidate appear even weak and therefore have a detrimentally negative effect on the president's odds for re-election.

Democratic Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey considered running against Clinton in 1996. For whatever reason, he chose not to. In the run-up to the election, Clinton's re-elect numbers were not all that great. In fact, I believe a "generic Republican" ran about even with him. Nonetheless, when Bob Dole won the nomination, Clinton's re-election seemed imminent. Would a Kerrey challenge have changed that perception? Or did Kerrey simply know that since the economy was doing well, Clinton would thus be strong because that was the issue he'd run on in 1992? In other words, was Kerrey's decision not to run based on a percieved lack of weakness (A) or was Clinton's sailing through to re-election a product of coming out of the primaries with a party unified behind him (B)?

What did Bush's numbers look like when Buchanan filed to run against him?

Anyone have any thoughts or answers?

INS AND OUTS OF POWER

Jane Galt has a great post about the parties in and out of power. The crux of it is Jane's Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

She also goes on to explain her belief that Clinton's impeachment was done right: Clinton should have been impeached, but should not have been removed from office. While I don't precisely agree with her and believe that Clinton should indeed have been removed from office, her explanation of the entire situation is stellar:

I am the only person I've ever met who actually thinks we got about the right result in the impeachment. We impeached the guy, to say "No, you can't just commit perjury", but we didn't remove him from office over a minor civil suit. (Although Democrats who are planning on deluging me with elegant arguments about how he shouldn't have had to answer those questions -- I agree with you, except for one little thing, which is that he signed, with great fanfare, the law that made it so he had to answer those questions. As far as I'm concerned, therefore, he's the only guy in America who should have had to answer such questions under oath.)

But I could see how you wanted him impeached, and I could also see the argument for not impeaching him. It was a judgement call.

Except that a substantial portion of the Republican Party seemed, long before, to have lost all judgement. They were insane on the subject of Clinton. It wasn't enough that they disagreed with him politically; nothing would do but that he be the AntiChrist. They flooded the airwaves and newsprint with vituperative rants about the veriest trivialities of his administration. They raged impotently at the people in America -- THE FOOLS! -- who couldn't see that Clinton was the AntiChrist, even though it was as plain as the nose on your face. Every tiny shred of news about Clinton, no matter how innocuous, was waved about as evidence of his perfidy. I recall listening to some radio commenter go on and on about some Rose Garden ceremony for some law that was, as laws go, blandly heartwarming though ultimately useless, rather than, say, totally antithetical to basic concepts of liberty. The radio host used this law, which was so boring that I can't remember its topic except that it had something to do with kids and learning, as proof of Clinton's inherent evilness. How dare he cavort with children in the Rose Garden when, as we have already seen, he's EEEEVVVVVIIIIILLLL.

This was my conflict during the entire process. I was a Clinton defender and later apologist for most of his presidency. In fact, my very first column for the Daily Cougar outlined why I viewed impeachment as a mistake. In my generally tempered style, I fell short of explaining what I really thought: Republicans were insane.

And even though I now agree that there were grounds for Clinton to be impeached and removed from office, I still believe that they were. Not those that thought that lying under oath was an impeachable offense, of course, because I'm one of them. However, that's just the charge that they caught him one. Republicans had been aiming to get him removed since the 1996 election for whatever it was they could find. An investigation of a land deal became an investigation of marital indescretions resulted in impeachment on a crime that had not yet been committed when the investigations began. I don't say this because I think it lets Clinton off the hook because I obviously don't believe it does. Instead, I want to look at how irrational it all was and how they innoculated Clinton to the point that the public rallied behind a confessed adulturer, liar, and perjuror.

Bill Clinton was accused of everything from murder to treason. The former charge is thoroughly discredited and the latter is specious at best, but the point is when you accuse a man of being the Satan incarnate, discovering that he is an adulturer, liar, and perjuror just doesn't seem so bad. They had spent so much time trying to charge so much against the man that by the time actual wrongdoing was discovered, the people were sick of it.

On political grounds, Republican criticisms of Clinton's politics were equally inept. I remember a classic political cartoon that explained it all in a nutshell:
Panel 1:
Republican: Bill Clinton is liberal, liberal, liberal!
Arrow to Panel 2
Panel 2:
Democrat: Isn't it great to have a president that stands up for what he believes in?
Arrow to Panel 3
Panel 3
Republican: Stands up for what he believes in? Bill Clinton has never stood up for anything in his life!
Arrow to Panel 4
Panel 4
Democrat: Doesn't that just go to show how nice it is having a president that is so open to compromise.
Arrow to Panel 5
Panel 5
Republican: Compromise? Bill Clinton is taking credit for all our ideas!
Arrow to Panel 6
Panel 6
Democrat: How wonderful it must be for you that Bill Clinton supports Republican initiatives.
Arrow to Panel 1

The Republicans tried to attack President Clinton on every front at once to the point that the attacks were mutually exclusive. I don't know if it was irreconcilable hatred of the man or a desperate attempt to see what will stick.

Whatever the case, the parallels with Democratic criticisms of President Bush. Whereas Republicans vascilated between Bill Clinton having no principle and being a liberal hatchetman, Democrats do so between the notion that Bush is this machiavellian prince and that he's a moron (or smirking money or empty hat). Bush may well be defeated in 2004, but it will be despite, not because of, the Democratic's undisciplined, unfocused opposition to him.

In the post-Watergate era, only two elected presidents have not been re-elected: Jimmy Carter and George H. Bush. In both cases the economy weighed very heavily in their defeats. More than that, the opposition was able to make the case that the problem was the man in the White House and that replacing him would amount to change. More than even that, the case against them was very focused on their job performance. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that neither were hated by the opposing party nearly as much as Reagan and Clinton were. To put a finer point on it, Carter and Bush were difficult men to hate on a personal level so they were able to approach the situation with more level-headedness. Or maybe they were difficult to hate because they were inept.

Either way, at the present time Bush is more reminiscent of Clinton and Reagan. The Democrats lack a unified theory. Is Bush a conservative firebrand out of touch? Is he a machiavellian prince without any principle other than politics (note: you are running against Bush, so don't say "well Rove is this way and Bush is that way and together they unite to form the Axis of Republican Evil!")? Is he inept and his incompetence is to blame for percieved failures in Iraq and on the economy?

Lieberman presently strikes me as the only candidate who has a chance primarily because he's the only one who has picked an answer (ineptitude) and run with it. Unfortunately for him, his answers on foreign policy are largely incompatible with the Democratic primary electorate, so he will not win the nomination. Edwards is the only candidate that has to potential to have a chance because he hasn't closed any doors yet so he could make a case that he would be better than Bush on both foreign and domestic policy. Given his lack of experience, it's an uphill climb, but his lack of exprience also serves to explain why he hasn't developed a comprehensive plan, as opposed to John Kerry, where every new thing he says that contradicts something he's previously said serves as yet another example that he is a victim of a Gorean identity crisis and given that just about everything he has said this point has been already contradictory of something else, I just don't think there's much hope.

Bob Graham also could win, but by all indications he has appeared to have lost his mind, so I'm not sure what to say about him. Gephardt is running on the economy. He didn't get the memo.

Of course, the above analysis is in large part dependent that Iraq is not in the middle of a civil war that we're involved in and we're not in the middle of the Second Great Depression. If that's the case, everyone who isn't named Sharpton, Braun, or Kucinich could concievably win.

But praying for rain is not a political strategy.

So to wrap this post around, the point is that unbridled hatred only serves to insulate the party that's in power. The "insanity" of Republicans prior to impeachment innoculated Clinton when wrong-doing was demonstrated. Similarly, the current "insanity" of Democrats is innoculating Bush for 2004.

THE INFINITE TOLL-WAY

A couple brief stories:

1.
My mother was once on a plane with James A. Baker, who was serving as Secretary of Treasury at the time. He was approached by someone who had an idea for easier taxation. The man said that everyone should have to pay for things with what today are called debit cards (but were not as prevalent at the time) and a portion of each purchase should just go straight to the government. Baker was polite (one suspects that he got ideas on taxation from strangers often) and explain, "Yes, that would make it simpler to collect taxes and a lot simpler to raise them."

2.
A left-of-center friend and I were getting gas on our way out of town for a road trip. Gas prices were abnormally high at the time and there was an ongoing debate as Republicans were pushing for them to be lowered. My friend saw a sticker on the pump that explained that fifty-three cents of every gallon was going to pay for local, state, and federal taxes. "Why do they do that?" he complained, "it's like they want to blame the government for the high gas prices."

I responded that if the government was responsible for fifty-three cents on the gallon, it's more than fair to say so. It's like when stores don't include sales taxes on their prices.

Turns out he also had a problem with that.


Charles Kuffner links to a report on taxes in passing that caught my interest. It explains the good and bad ways that states tax:

Of course, the burden a tax system must carry varies from state to state. There is no such thing as a perfect structure, no template that all, or even most, of the states could use. One of the glories of the American system of governance is that states are free to offer different degrees of service to their citizens. The main commonality is that they must raise whatever revenue they need to meet their chosen level of service. Raising money to meet irresponsible spending doesn’t make for a good tax system. But utilizing well-balanced streams of revenue and avoiding unsupportable tax cuts are critical, regardless of whether a state wants to have a Cadillac government or a Chevy.

Fair enough. I am generally in favor of balanced budgets, so tax cuts that create massive deficits are undesirable to me (though much more desirable than spending that creates deficits, which is why Democratic criticisms of Bush ring hollow to me, but that's an aside).

The question is what makes a taxism more or less fair than another? After all, a balanced budget is balanced whether the revenues are generated via sales, income, corporate, or property taxes. There's always the question of who is getting taxed. Income taxes are usually favored by liberals and sales taxes favored by conservatives since the former can be aimed at the wealthy and the latter are less likely to be targetted. There is also the question of what the taxing promotes and penalizes, conservatives arguing that the progressive income tax penalizes work, many arguing that property taxes discourage home ownership, and so on. But the report doesn't really explore these issues.

It's primary concern is making taxation as psychologically untaxing (pun intended) as possible.

States with unbalanced tax systems are particularly ripe for misinformation and misconception. In Texas, sales and property taxes are high because there is no income tax. Even though Texas ranks near the bottom in tax burden — per capita or otherwise — its citizens “think of themselves as overtaxed,” reports Judith Stallmann, a professor at the University of Missouri.

This kind of veracity vertigo wouldn’t be such a bad thing if complaining about high taxes were like complaining about the weather. But politicians who want to stay in office regularly disregard their better instincts and follow their citizens on a path to misbegotten policies. Tennessee’s tax structure, with its over-reliance on high sales taxes, is, for instance, famously dysfunctional and inadequate to state needs. Well-informed observers have long argued in favor of adding a state income tax to the mix. “Many in the legislature believed the income tax was the right approach to funding government,” says Bill Fox, a nationally known tax expert and professor at the University of Tennessee. “But the percentage who was willing to vote for it was different.”

Damn those voters! Always complaining about taxes! Except their complaints get in the way of bigger government!

I'm being hyperbolic, but I get a whole lot of that in Texas. Over and over again I'm told how low our state taxes are compared to other states and how if we're really going to be able to pay our bills, we're going to have to incorporate a state income taxes. Whether or not we should have a state income tax is, of course, open to debate. But I don't want to sign on to more taxes and more government in Texas because taxes are higher elsewhere. If the current taxes are "inadequate," as they presently are, they we either need to pare down state government to the point that they are adequate or raise current rates to meet our needs. How we raise rates is statistically insignificant as long as the money actually comes in.

That last part is important as in recent history states (including Texas) have pursued quick-fixes in the forms of state lotteries that have promised more revenue than they've brought in. But the article states as clear as day that income taxes are just as susceptable to the ebb and flow of the economy as are sales taxes and so on. So really it's not so much pushing for a state income tax.

What it is pushing for, though, is diversified taxation. In other words, a little taxes everywhere (income, sales, corporate, and property) so that people are less inclined to notice or be deeply psychologically scarred for life by the government taking its chomp out of our wallets. Hyperbolic again, but you get the point. What they're getting at is a desire to make taxes easier and less noticeable.

That's where I just can't agree. I want taxes to be noticeable. I hate counting out pennies because of sales taxes, but that reminds me that $8.25 of every $10 goes towards the government. When Pasadena raised their sales taxes from .075 to .0825, I didn't notice some macroeconomic manner of mildly increasing prices, I noticed that something $20 costed a buck and a half more. Black and white. Cut and dried. As it happens the people of Pasadena voted for the tax increase and that's perfectly fine. I'm sure they're happy with it. The buck-fifty isn't the point. The point was that taxes went up and people were made immediately aware of it.

Truth be told, I might not mind a state income tax if it were institution in place of, instead of in addition to, the current structure. Like the federal income tax, it wouldn't be hard to determine exactly how much bite of the apple the government is taking. It'll make voters think twice before that next tax hike. As someone who is generally anti-tax, I consider that a good thing. That's why I don't consider psychologically painful taxes to be such a bad thing: they keep us from getting to economically painful tax rates.

On a last note, there is one area on which I do agree with the report.

the golden rule of tax equity: collect the lowest possible rates on the widest possible base of taxpayers.

I call this the "divide and conquer" strategy. Tax hotels because theoretically (but not actually) those are paid for by out of towners (and some of those in-town hotel guests would just assume no one know that they... ahem... frequent hotels). Tax cigarettes cause smokers are a minority and you can add a moral dimension to it. Tax every concievable vice, and we'll all end up paying in the end, but we'll all have our barrels pointed at different taxes and they'll be much more difficult to fight.

The article calls that form of taxation the most "fair." While I maintain that the difference in fairness is marginal, I would call that taxation the most likely to be passed and the least likely to be reversed, so Ima ginnit.