QOTD: Political Science vs. Mythmaking, the Case of de Gaulle

One of the few persistent myths about de Gaulle that Hazareesingh leaves unexplored is how he managed to acquire his reputation as a grand strategist among today’s historians and policy-makers. “I believe that sooner or later the United States will have to develop some operational concept of the national interest. And when that happens, we will have to be, whether we like it or not, students of de Gaulle,” remarked Henry Kissinger in a breathless 1990 tribute. But any close inspection of de Gaulle’s policies reveals an implacably pragmatic politician who was as much constrained by domestic pressures as any leader of the period. De Gaulle never hesitated to delay his grand plans for Europe in order to satisfy more local concerns, as when he held the EEC hostage to the whims of French farmers. (De Gaulle threatened to leave the Common Market unless it included the massive subsidies he thought were necessary for the modernization of French agriculture.) That the political scientist Andrew Moravcsik was roundly dismissed by scholars across the spectrum for showing this more mundane side of de Gaulle is indicative of the reverence he still commands.

Source. This was a debate that I didn't know had existed. I'm on Moravcsik's side, of course, and am pleased to (therefore) find myself on the opposite side of Kissinger once again. Here is much much more, although note that the state of art in this debate seems to be captured by this earlier piece and this more recent one.

On Obama, Race, and Political Survival

Ta-Nahisi Coates has been (rightly) given a lot of praise for his thoughtful essay on how race relations has affected Obama's presidency and the current political environment. He does a good job of highlighting some key political science research demonstrating that Obama's race cost him a non-negligible number of votes in 2008 -- roughly 3-5% of the popular vote overall -- and that race has shaped his presidency in powerful, if subtle, ways.

Most of the attention both in the article and surrounding it has focused on the broader American culture, histories of black political participation, and the reasons why Obama has largely declined to discuss race at all during his presidency. I find that interesting, but I find it interesting less as an endpoint of discussion and more as the setting for a bigger topic: politicians' quest for political survival. Coates plays around with this a bit in the essay, and ends up critical of Obama for not directly taking on difficult issues regarding race in America. But in the interview above, Coates admits that while this makes him angry it is almost surely the correct decision. That is, if Coates' argument about current race dynamics in American politics is true, then Obama could not gain or maintain power by emphasizing race. Coates concludes -- literally -- by saying that Obama's supporters in the African American community (and elsewhere) understand this, so they are willing to overlook or at least forgive his inaction on issues they care about.

In ending the essay there Coates missed an opportunity to have a broader discussion about the politics of reform and change. Because this issue is not limited to Obama, nor to race. It affects all politics, and all politicians. Coates' mission in writing the article was to comment on race in American politics as it relates specifically to Obama, and he did a good job in that, but thinking more broadly can help us identify similar dynamics elsewhere. It can also prevent us from making conclusions like this one, the only part of the essay in which Coates deals directly with foreign policy:

The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

Italics added. This may indeed be true, but it doesn't have to be true to explain Obama's behavior. It is well established that Republicans "own" foreign policy as an issue; that is, voters tend to believe that Republicans manage foreign affairs better than Democrats. This was true before Obama, and it will likely be true after Obama. The question is whether they'd trust a black Democratic president less than a white Democratic president. This is a different question than any Coates asks, and he can't answer it. (Note that Obama is up 12 points over Romney on foreign policy.)

And even if it is true, we don't know how this would motivate Obama toward more aggressive behavior. After all, if Obama wanted to be seen as "getting tough on terrorism" there are more public ways of doing that than sending flying robots over remote parts of Yemen to take out individuals that Americans have never heard of.

What we do know is that, whatever his race, Obama has an incentive to consolidate power. We know that he has done very little to roll back the expanse of executive power conceived during the Bush administration, and has continued that expansion in at least some areas. We know -- as Coates says in the interview -- that Obama's first motivation is to win elections. Unless he first does that nothing else is possible. There are many bones to pick with selectorate theory, but at its core it's pretty hard to deny that the logic of political survival is sound at its core. So if we were hoping to explain why Obama has chosen to expand the drone program, continue assassinations of questionable legality, renege on his campaign promise to close military prisons, further derail the Doha round, and violate Pakistan's sovereignty in pursuit of bin Laden -- all policies that would have been likely under a McCain presidency, much less that of another Democrat such as Hillary Clinton -- Occam's Razor would dictate that we rely less on race dynamics than Coates suggests, even if that is precisely where we should look to explain Obama's actions in other policy areas.

In other words, the fact that Obama is a black president in a country with a complicated past (and present) of racial politics might go some distance in explaining why Obama say less about race than any other Democratic president since 1960. But to make that explanation cohere we can't just leave it at that and then complain, as Coates does, that "a total submission to [prejudiced voters] is a disservice to the country". What matters is that Obama wants to keep power, and he'll do what he needs to do to keep it. Service to the country, which means nothing at all when stripped of its normative assumptions especially in this context, is not Obama's concern.*

What does this mean? It means that while Obama may be different from every other American president in one respect, he is exactly the same as his predecessors in another. It is the latter fact that best explains his presidency, including his approach to racial politics, and not the former.

*And if "service to the country" could mean anything with any substance, "total submission" to the voters -- whether prejudiced or not -- seems like the most likely candidate to me.

Poking Macroeconomists with a Stick

In one small part of a longer discussion Scott Sumner says something interesting:

Macroeconomics is the study of policy failure. Once an issue goes away the field loses interest.

Leave aside for now whether or not that is strictly true, or whether it was inadvertent. When I read the first of those sentences I immediately thought "then why not study why the policies fail, dammit!" After a bit of reflection I've realized that macroeconomists think that's what they're doing. They have models, to which they are wedded ideologically and/or reputationally, which are internally coherent but externally invalid.* When they try to explain why they are invalid they claim that policymakers aren't doing what the models tell them they should do. That's what Sumner means by "policy failure". And they explain why policymakers aren't doing what the models tell them they should do by either demonizing them, calling them ignorant, or claiming that they are members of cults believing in confidence fairies, bond vigilantes, the hive mind of the Borg, or some discredited or otherwise objectionable ideology.

The assumption here is that policymakers are, or should be, utilitarian Philosopher Kings whose goal is to maximize output and employment while minimizing inflation. But maybe, just maybe, that assumption is false. If we get rid of it then we don't have to appeal to superstition or metaethics to explain the behavior of policymakers. Instead we can treat policymakers as being interested in gaining or retaining office, and that the best way to do that is not necessarily to bring unemployment down to its natural rate as quickly as possible.

In other words, we can treat macroeconomic outcomes not as "policy success" or "policy failure", but as things that benefit some groups of people and harm others. From the viewpoint of a policymaker a policy success is one in which the policymaker retains office, and a policy failure is one in which she does not. To remain in office she must appease some number of people (what we often call a "minimum winning coalition") and that's all. In advanced democracies that coalition is largely comprised of relatively affluent people who own some type of equity whose value is more sensitive to inflation than whether the marginal unemployed worker gets her job back. So when policymakers set policy to win over that person it isn't a "failure"... it's the whole purpose.

This is what Steve Waldman was driving at in his "choosing depressions" posts. This is the dynamic that I blog about in almost every post. This is what I was writing about in a prior post, "The Problem with Macroeconomics Is the Macroeconomists". If the world doesn't work the way that macroeconomists think it should, then maybe that's because macroeconomists don't understand how the world works.

That doesn't mean that macroeconomists, or anyone else, can't have their own preferences. Krugman's blog and associated book is titled Conscience of a Liberal, not Explaining How the World Works. But that's quite a different thing from saying that "macroeconomics is the study of policy failure". To acknowledge that different groups have different preferences over outcomes is to acknowledge that the definition of "policy failure" is a not a constant but a variable, and macroeconomics has nothing to say about that.

That's why we need political economists.

*Of course they will all protest that their pet model is not externally invalid, only everyone else's is. However no macro models have performed very well in this crisis. No macro models can explain the global nature of this crisis, why countries with similar characteristics have had vastly divergent outcomes, etc. The best argument that most macroeconomists can put forward in support of their preferred model isn't "it worked" but "it hasn't been sufficiently tried".

On IR Professionalization, Grad School, and What I Think I've Been Doing for the Past Four Years

Dan Nexon has written a lengthy diatribe opposing what he calls the "over-professionalization" of IR, particularly as it involves graduate student instruction. Over-professionalization seems to reduce to, basically, extensive training in neopositivist approaches (mostly but not only quantitative) to the study of international relations, with less space for idiosyncratic approaches. Nexon believes this has led to, and is leading to, an impoverishment of IR theory. It's well worth reading, as is Erik Voeten's critique, and comments on both posts.

No one has responded to Nexon from my perspective -- a grad student about to go onto the job market -- and I've been thinking a decent amount about these issues lately, so I'm going to chime in. Before I get into more specific discussion, let me note that it's been very interesting to watch the ways in which my approach to grad school has evolved over the past four years, and the ways in which my fellow grad students have taken different approaches to their time in grad school. For me, having an academic career is only valuable if I can do it more or less my way. I'm not a "careerist" in that sense... if what it takes for me to get a job at a good school is to do a bunch of work that I don't enjoy or find interesting, then I don't want a job at a good school. I'd much rather have a place at a lesser school or in a non-academic setting. Therefore, I'm somewhat risk-acceptant regarding both my professionalization (evidence: my willingness to pick blog fights with tenured faculty) and my research program (which carries a nonzero chance of being an abject failure). Some of my fellow graduate students don't seem to feel the same way, and they make their choices accordingly. There's nothing at all wrong with that, it's just not the approach I'm comfortable taking.

At this point I have almost no idea what the values of "the discipline" at large are, and I'm somewhat skeptical that there is any such thing.* It seems to depend very much on which departments we're talking about, and even then it's somewhat contingent upon the balance of recent hires/turnover within departments. Same with the journals. While different journals (naturally) tend to publish different types of work, it's not clear whether that is because authors are submitting strategically, editors are dedicated to advancing their preferred research paradigms, both, or neither. There are so many journals that any discussion of them as doing any one thing -- or privileging any one type of work -- seems like painting with much too wide a brush. Nevertheless, on to Nexon's claims.

Perhaps ironically, I think the phenomenon that Nexon is trying to describe (to the extent that it exists at all) is best understood using language taken from formal bargaining theory. That is, in an environment where competition for any decent academic job is fierce -- much less a so-called "top tier" job -- there is no possible way that grad students will not be "over-professionalized". Grad students will always be incentivized to game the job market as best as they can, and their advisors and departments are incentivized to help them do it. The job market rewards graduate students that can strongly signal an ability to maintain a productive research agenda into the indefinite future. Even if the efficient outcome is for a less professionalized discipline (if e.g. it leads to more interesting theorizing), and Nexon does little to establish the case that it is (more below), those who defect and become more professionalized are more likely to get jobs because they will be the ones who can better signal their quality to hiring departments. In politics it is often said that you can't enact the policy without being elected, and you can't have a long career doing interesting research in IR without first getting hired somewhere. Getting a job is therefore the first goal of every student, advisor, and department. There is no other measure of success, nor can there be.

From where I sit, as a grad student there appear to be only so many ways you can signal your value to hiring committees that receive tons of applications for each job -- particularly if you're coming from a department outside of the top 10. One way is to demonstrate mastery over difficult material and/or techniques for inquiry that will be useful in conducting research over a long career. Another is by having work published -- indicating that you actually can do research -- and in progress -- indicating that you don't have only one decent idea -- and by getting well-regarded scholars to write strong letters on your behalf. For the first, taking an extra methods course adds to the "toolkit" in ways that taking an extra class out of your major field does not. Or hell, even within your major field, if it's on a topic that isn't directly relevant to your dissertation. Sure, the substantive class will expose you to new ideas, but nothing's stopping you from reading those books on your own. The value added of discussing the substantive work in seminars with other grad students who only had time to skim the reading is almost surely less than the time spent learning a new method. Having more training in more methods gives you a greater ability to ask a wider range of questions and a greater ability to answer them. We're always being told to not let method determine research question, but if you only know one method you have no other option. Moreover, without some methodological chops it is difficult to conduct research that is publishable (the second signal) or that is interesting enough to excite jaded faculty that are writing letters for you (the third). In short, it's important for graduate students in political science to be able to do political science. Methods training is a prerequisite for that.

Unlike Nexon, I don't see this as a very bad thing.** I've taken more methods classes in my graduate education than substantive classes. I don't regret that. I've come to believe that the majority of coursework in a graduate education in most disciplines should be learning methods of inquiry. Theory-development should be a smaller percentage of classes and (most importantly) come from time spent working with your advisor and dissertation committee. While there are strategic reasons for this -- signaling to hiring committees, etc. -- there are also good practical reasons for it. The time I spent on my first few substantive classes was little more than wasted; I had no way to evaluate the quality of the work. I had no ability to question whether the theoretical and empirical assumptions the authors were making were valid. I did not even have the ability to locate what assumptions were being made, and why it was important to know what those are. Those questions, which are central to any study in political science (or should be, anyway), can only be answered once one has some sense of how theory is constructed, how models perform, how data is collected and analyzed, and why every choice made by the analyst is important. Coming into grad school I didn't have that ability despite having being fairly comfortable with basic statistics (what Nexon lumps into GLR -- "general linear reality") and models as an undergraduate economics major. (In my opinion it's still a weakness for me, and for nearly everyone I come across in academia.)

The fact remains: students at architecture schools are not asked to design a skyscraper on the first day. Someone taking their first saxophone lesson is not encouraged to abandon traditional chord structures in favor of free improvisation. Nor would it be productive for most graduate students to be "thinking outside the box" during their early years in graduate school. At that point I didn't even know where the box was. I couldn't possible have been any less professional, and so I was incapable of producing anything of theoretical or substantive value. I don't think a single one of my grad student colleagues was any different.

More importantly, I don't think that learning a bunch of methods closed off avenues of research for me; on the contrary, it opened them up! Learning that not every real-world variable has a Gaussian distribution, that assumptions regarding the data-generating process are very important, that (yes) not every process in the world is linear, that bias can come in all shapes and sizes (regardless of what method one uses, and I don't just mean quant here)... this is important knowledge to possess! I could not acquire it without "professionalizing" myself.

So with the caveat that he has much more experience and knowledge than me, I don't think I can agree with Nexon's core argument: that professionalization of graduate students has led to a lack of interesting theorizing. I believe a decent amount of professionalization is a prerequisite for understanding how good theories are constructed and how they may be evaluated. I do think that there is not all that much interesting theory being produced in IR currently, but I think that's because it's really hard to come up with original theory. Not just in IR... theoretical development moves slowly in all sciences. Most of the work is in pushing at the edges of existing theory in more-or-less straightforward empirical ways.*** It takes something approaching genius to develop original theories and let's face it... most graduate students (and professors, practitioners, and lay-people) just don't possess the necessary quality whether they've been professionalized or not.

If there is one thing that I wish I had spent more time on in my graduate classes it would be taking the philosophy of science more seriously. I suspect, from other things he's written, that Nexon would agree. Other than the first-semester scope and methods class -- which came too soon to be of much use, and doesn't seem to be conducted super-rigorously almost anywhere -- attention paid to the philosophy of science has been spotty, sporadic, and mostly ad hoc. This is, I believe, a problem with social science more generally and not just graduate instruction at the top 20 (or so) IR grad programs. But such a focus would almost necessarily have to lead to more professionalization rather than less.

*When we discuss what "IR" wants in terms of hiring decisions, it seems relevant to note that hiring decisions are generally made by departments as a whole and not just the IR people. I'm sure that in many cases faculty from other disciplines will defer to IR people when making IR hires, but I imagine that there's quite a lot of variation there.

**I'm not sure he does either. He seems to be saying different things at different times. I think what he'd like to say is that a strong methods training would be a very good thing if it didn't lead to the sort of professionalization that he doesn't like. But he doesn't quite say that, and I can't tell if it's really true.

***On a somewhat related point, tangential to my post as well as Nexon's: if I was more familiar with the literature I think I'd like to write a post arguing that political "science" must mean something specific. Political practice is different from political science, and I think there are a lot of uses in keeping the distinction between normative and positive theory intact. The falsifiability criterion seems to me to be as good as any. I think there are good reasons for arguing that certain types of theory is not political "science" without diminishing its utility for people who are interested in politics, theories about the world, etc. The word "science", if it is to have any meaning, must distinguish between styles of inquiry based on their approach, their methodology. I'm not sure where that line falls, but it must exist.

Sometimes Voters Matter

UT-Austin professor of government Sean Theriault makes an important point about the debt ceiling miasma: this is happening because of political audiences, i.e. voters:

In 2005, I published a book called "The Power of the People." In it, I made the simple argument that, contrary to the opinion of a growing number of political pundits, members of Congress are still -- as they have always been -- responsive to their constituents. ...

The general election brought us race after race in which these tea party candidates were running against moderate Democrats, the so-called "Blue Dogs." Some of these Blue Dogs fought against Obama's health care plan. Others fought against cap-and-trade environmental legislation. In fighting these plans, the Blue Dogs frequently made them more moderate.

It didn't matter how hard they fought these plans or that they voted against them because, in November, their constituents voted them out of office. Why? Simply for being Democrats. And because of those decisions in November, the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives now has 60 members -- 60 automatic votes against any type of compromise to preserve the full faith and credit of the United States.

The problem with our deficit crisis today is that the message the voters sent -- and that the winning candidates heard -- was "never compromise, never surrender." We may need such a mentality on the battlefield, but we cannot have such a mentality in politics. Politics, after all, is the art of compromise.

During the Krugman/Crooked Timber fiasco a few months back I tried to make the case that the voters really do play a role in the way politicians act. It's not just elites in the media or business that influence legislators. On this issue all of those groups are on the same side. The Very Serious People universally want a deal done. The rentier class is not interested in a debt default or downgrade, and don't particularly care how it's avoided. And yet here we are. Why? The best explanation has to be that the representatives care about political survival, and their constituents want them to hold the line. For the Republicans, especially those in districts vulnerable to Tea Party mobilization, this means tying a deal to deficit reduction that includes no new tax revenues. And Boehner couldn't unite his own party behind any moderate version of that. McConnell's attempted punt, which would put all of the political heat on Obama, similarly failed. McCain is now calling conservatives in his own party "foolish", "deceiving", and "bizarro". But the Tea Party isn't interested interested in the merely feasible. For the Democrats, it means opposing entitlement reform and especially a balanced budget amendment. This is why Obama went on national television practically begging voters to contact their congresspeople, and then spammed the internet with literally dozens of Tweets passing on the handles of representatives to his millions of followers.

There are a lot of political issues where politics is conducted mainly behind closed doors. The video below describing the experience of Dodd-Frank is one of them. Highly-technical policies are especially prone to "quiet politics". But high-profile political issues like the debt ceiling/deficit battle are anything but quiet, and voters find it fairly easy to take sides. That doesn't mean that voters are perfectly informed -- it seems many have broken the debate down to a more spending/less spending false choice -- but they don't have to be to put a lot of pressure on their representatives.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Dodd-Frank Update
www.thedailyshow.com
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Shout It From The Rooftops

Phil Arena says that we need to take political economy seriously (bold added):

What does concern me, though, is the cult of democracy worship that pervades IR (and much of political science, though IR scholars seem to be the worst about this). And this has come to rest heavily, in recent years, on the claim that democratic leaders have an incentive to provide public goods while leaders of other regimes do not. Unfortunately, the evidence that this is the case comes almost entirely from statistical analysis of data that is non-randomly missing and pertains to goods that are not public goods (see this paper for more details). The difference is important if you want to make claims about democracy working for everyone, not just the winners of the political process. There's good evidence that it does not (see here, or of course, virtually all of the public choice literature, which I truly wish more IR people would read -- a great primer for which can be found here).

Amen. Even true public goods have to be paid for by somebody; politics is about who pays for them, and who enjoys them. But the bigger point is that what many think of as public goods (e.g. roads, schools, health care) are definitionally not. It seems like many people confuse public goods with egalitarianism, but they are not at all the same. Many in IPE make the same mistake.

My impression that comparative politics may have some of the same democracy-worship proclivities as IR, for the same (misguided) reasons. Selectorate theory is, after all, a comparative theory before it's an IR theory. This type of question doesn't seem to be high on the American politics research agenda either.

All politics is about distribution. Whatever it's other faults, at least Acemoglu and Robinson get that part right.

Politics Is (Usually) Not a Coordination Game

Matthew Yglesias sees a bipartisan rationale for overhauling the American political system:

In Canada, their health care system is more equitable and it spends less taxpayer cash per patient. Traditionally, conservatives don’t point to Canada’s health care system as a conservative victory but they do point to Canada’s low taxes which are in part a consequence of its efficient single-payer health care system. So is that a conservative win or a liberal one? Well, it’s both. The main upshot of many features of the US political system that I don’t like is to enhance the influence of interest groups and decrease the influence of ideologues and technocrats. This is basically by design and reflects 18th century state of the art thinking about the dangers of liberal governance being trampled by demagogues. Insofar as the balance we’re currently striking is inappropriate to the conditions of the 21st century United States that’s bad for the right and the left.

This assumes, of course, that politicians are primarily motivated by ideology, and therefore mutually-beneficial common ground is easy to find. Unfortunately for Yglesias, if that were true it would (most likely) have already happened, and he'd have nothing to complain about. His complaint that interest groups are able to successfully lobby policymakers indicates that his assumptions are probably wrong.

But even if the assumptions weren't wrong, his conclusion still would be. Yglesias cites the Canadian health care system as an example of positive-sum policy: both liberals and conservatives can be happy about the outcome. But is that so? Low taxes are not contingent on an efficient single-payer system. After all, taxes could be lower still without any public health care system at all, as I imagine was the case before Canada's universal health care system went into effect. Conversely, the health care system could be even more egalitarian if taxes were higher or more progressive. Any tilt in policy in one direction or the other is generally zero-sum*.

Moreover, even if efficiency gains were created by a new policy, the surplus still has to be distributed somehow. That distribution is by definition zero-sum.

The point is that it's not enough to simply point to some policy outcome and claim it is positive-sum. That judgment must be made relative to some baseline scenario.

*This can get a little bit complicated, but an exception to this rule could occur when there are scale returns at that particular policy margin. But partisans are unlikely to value those scale effects in the same way; e.g. conservatives probably don't want a more efficient public health care sector if the result is a crowding-out of private health providers. Liberals probably don't want a more egalitarian system that leaves all consumers subject to a private monopoly. Etc.

Political Incentives and the Israel/Palestine Situation

Matthew Yglesias asks a question about the American government's willingness to pressure Israel into ceasing settlements in Palestinian territory:

Unfortunately for us, we’re not in one of those periods of time when Israel has a government that’s probably actually not that sympathetic to the settlers but faces domestic political difficulties in cracking down on them. If that were the case, then strong words from the United States might be enough to force change in Israeli policy. But the current government is a coalition between the right and the far-right, and gives every indication of being extremely committed to settlement expansion. This, naturally, raises the question of what American policymakers are prepared to actually do about the fact that the world’s largest recipient of American aid seems to have so little interest in our perspective on crucial regional issues.

"Our perspective" is in fact a reference to Yglesias' perspective, which happens to be roughly in line with Obama's perspective. But it is not necessarily the perspective of the public at large, who tend to side with the Israeli government come hell or high-water. Politicians want to stay in office, and the best way to do that is to get the public on your side. In this case, that means taking a hard-line approach against the Palestinians:

[T]he thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Now, I don't entirely agree with the 'Israel Lobby' argument advanced by Mearsheimer and Walt, but the broader point is impossible to deny: the broad public sides with Israel over the Palestinians for a variety of reasons. This is evident in both political parties and in every national election. Indeed, last week 76 U.S. Senators sent a letter to Obama urging him to "support Israel" without conditions but to demand a host of concessions from Palestine before affirming its right to a state. (Interestingly, the Jerusalem Post article linked above omits the senators' affirmation of the Palestinians' right to a state if they achieve certain pre-conditions; this AFP story keeps the relevant passage in. The letter itself is here [pdf].) This is actually a very different line than the one Obama is taking -- a much harder line towards Palestine -- which shows that even a very popular president will have difficulty galvanizing Congressional support for any policy that is even remotely critical of Israel.

The lesson is that legislators respond to incentives just like anyone else, and the incentives are all aligned in such a way as to practically guarantee universal support for Israel in the Congress, because that is what the electorate wishes to see. So the Congressional movement that Yglesias wishes to see is very unlikely to actually happen.