Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 87

Illiberal Feminism Strikes Again

This is a truly clarifying argument:

The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups. Debating abortion as if it’s a topic to be mulled over and hypothesised on ignores the fact that this is not an abstract, academic issue. It may seem harmless for men like Stanley and O’Neil to debate how and if abortion hurts them; it’s clearly harder for people to see that their words and views might hurt women.

Access to abortion impacts the lives of women, trans and non-binary people every day, and the threat pro-life groups pose to our bodily autonomy is real, not rhetorical. If you don’t believe me, visit any abortion clinic and witness the sustained aggressions of pro-life pickets. In organizing against this event, I did not stifle free speech. As a student, I asserted that it would make me feel threatened in my own university; as a woman, I objected to men telling me what I should be allowed to do with my own body.

The context for this is the inability of a group called Oxford Students For Life to find a place on campus for a debate on abortion between two men. They were planning an event in Christ Church’s Junior Common Room, a typical place for a small-scale discussion. The group has had similar debates including women in the past. The pro-choice side was represented. But men, it seems, are not allowed to debate abortion at all, according to a fem-left group at my alma mater. Because: men. Even pro-choice men. In a country where pro-choicers greatly outnumber pro-lifers, and where the right to an abortion is deeply rooted in law. And their contempt for even the idea of free debate is palpable:

This Tuesday Oxford Students for Life are putting on a super cute debate with two cis guys on whether people with uteruses deserve to have any choice over their own bodies. We don’t think this is okay so (assuming the event is still going ahead) we thought we should go and say hi! … We are still hoping this gets shut down by the college (Christ Church).

The college canceled the debate in part due to concerns about “physical security” of the students – the danger that the college would be mobbed by protestors, making a debate impossible – and their “mental security” as well. What on earth does “mental security” mean? This apparently:

Mental security here refers to students’ emotional well-being, avoiding unnecessary distress, particularly for any residents who may have had an abortion. With a 300 person protest expected, the event could not have been self-contained and it would have been impossible for those in the closest staircases (at a minimum) to avoid being made acutely aware of the event.

Let me put this simply enough: Once free speech is made contingent on no one’s feelings being hurt, we no longer have free speech. Once that applies even within a university – the one space in our culture where free speech should be absolute – we have left liberalism behind on the march toward progressivism. That’s why the logic of “hate crimes” is so pernicious; that’s why the language of “micro-aggressions” leads to a public sphere in which some individuals, simply because of their gender or sexual orientation, are deemed unworthy of being allowed to debate. And those of us who speak out against this are damned in the same way: our integrity as human beings impugned, our characters wantonly besmirched, our views dismissed, and our arguments made to look as if they are mere prejudices.

Any movement that seeks to win this way is not a movement I want to be a part of. And feminism is too vital a cause and too integral part of our discourse to be hijacked in this fashion.

What To Think Of Bill Cosby? Ctd

The latest damning evidence in the Cosby saga is this post-interview AP footage:

Amanda Hess blames the culture of entertainment journalism for allowing the allegations to go under the radar for so long, pointing to that AP interview as a prime example:

Entertainment journalists require access to rich, famous people, and rich, famous people require favorable press. How news organizations and celebrities negotiate that exchange depends on their relative status in the marketplace. When Cosby granted the AP interview at the beginning of the month, he believed that he was powerful enough to demand positive coverage, and ultimately, it appears the AP agreed.

But just ten days after the piece aired, Cosby’s stock had dropped considerably: In that time, Netflix, NBC, and TV Land had all cut ties, meaning that he had fewer friends, less influence, and very little leverage. As the power differential shifted, the AP’s complicity with Cosby in producing the art-related video and scuttling the rest began to pose a reputational risk to the news organization. (The AP notes in the new video that it decided to publish the additional footage in the new context of the “backdrop” of his shuttered business deals.) So: The AP rolled the tape of its interview touching on the rape allegations, and also included the tense off-the-cuff conversation that followed. The postscript contained the interview’s juiciest bits, but it also served as a sly explanation for why the AP failed to release the video earlier: The implication is that Cosby and his people intimidated the AP into silence.

But the video shows that the Associated Press reporter was not eager to approach the topic in the first place, and unwilling to justify his line of questioning when Cosby challenged him.

Bill Wyman also holds the media accountable:

The odd thing about Cosby’s downfall is that nothing had changed in the last decade; there was no suggestion that any of the events described by his new accusers had happened since the first allegations and an accompanying civil case, which was settled. The initial lack of followup by influential outlets created a sort of reverse pack mentality—a reinforcing silence. No one mentioned it, because no one else had.

This was helped along by the feel-good nature of much arts writing: If the point of the story is to promote a comedy appearance, or a new book or other product, a digression into allegations of drugging and sexual assault was buzzkill.

Others reflect on how one should approach Cosby’s work now that he’s widely seen as a rapist. Despite being “100 percent in favor of NBC yanking his sitcom,” Pilot Veruet laments TV Land’s removal of the show that made Cosby famous:

The Cosby Show may have been about a family that happened to be black, rather than about a black family, but that doesn’t negate the huge strides the show made. Most importantly, it doesn’t negate the fact that for many people, myself included, this was one of the first times I was seeing myself — my family, my skin, my hair — represented on television in a way that actually made me feel good. …

Aside from the show’s legacy, TV Land’s decision brings up a whole slew of questions that are impossible to answer: What are the rules when it comes to public erasure of a prominent figure and his work? What makes Cosby different from Roman Polanski or Woody Allen — two filmmakers who continue to work and get their films distributed, and whose movies still regularly air on television (I can’t imagine them ever getting yanked) — or any other terrible person who has also contributed something of value to society? Is it the sheer number and volume of victims, or something else at work here? And what does this mean for everyone else who worked, for so many years, on The Cosby Show and will now fail to get their share of the residuals? Will all of Cosby’s past work eventually see the same fate?

The thing that strikes me the most about TV Land’s choice is that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with righteousness or respect for the victims; it appears to be a panicked business decision, a preemptive strike to ensure the network doesn’t receive any of the backlash that Netflix and NBC were getting prior to pulling their respective Cosby projects.

Todd VanDerWeff’s take:

Separating art from the artist — or condemning art made by terrible people — is never a zero sum game. You can find Cosby’s alleged actions so appalling that you can’t watch his show at all. You can also find his alleged actions appalling, yet find they don’t impact your ability to watch anything he’s ever done — or even appreciate his stand-up.

If you fit into that latter category, don’t worry that you’re tossing piles of cash his way if you fire up a favorite Cosby Show episode on Hulu. But if you find Cosby to be a monster and want to monetarily punish him somehow, you don’t really have a lot of recourse, unless you were planning to see him perform live soon and now won’t. Cosby’s considerable fortune — the one that made it possible for him to settle allegations against him out of court, the one that made it necessary to try him in the court of public opinion — was made long, long ago, and there’s little to be done about it now.

And Tim Teeman sums up much of the response over the question, “How could the guy who played Cliff Huxtable do this?”

Bill Cosby, it seems, can only be seen in two registers: sainted family man of a much-loved sitcom, or fallen, tarnished villain. There is no middle ground. There is no understanding that on The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby was playing a role, and playing it so well that America happily conflated character and actor. The conflation was so total that now America apparently feels cheated, or tricked somehow, that this person is not the character he played.

But Cosby never was, and it is not his failing that America took him to their hearts as so (indeed, ironically, that confidence trick was solely down to his acting brilliance). Cosby’s alleged crimes are horrific, but America’s infantile deification of celebrity, its crazy melding of the fictional and the real, underpins Cosby’s present position in the public stocks, as much as his alleged crimes.

Another Day, Another Mass Shooting

Student says books in his backpack saved his life during FSU shooting: http://t.co/hOEt56UePr pic.twitter.com/t1al9BcXhy

— ABC News (@ABC) November 21, 2014

Myron May, the man who shot and wounded three people at the Florida State University library yesterday morning before police killed him, was mentally disturbed:

May’s Facebook page shows he posted mostly Bible verses and links to conspiracy theories about the government reading people’s minds. Records show May was licensed to practice law in Texas and New Mexico. According to a Las Cruces, New Mexico, police report last month, May was a subject of a harassment complaint after a former girlfriend called to report he came to her home uninvited and claimed police were bugging his house and car. Danielle Nixon told police May recently developed “a severe mental disorder.” “Myron began to ramble and handed her a piece to a car and asked her to keep it because this was a camera that police had put in his vehicle,” the report said. The report also said May recently quit his job and was on medication.

In the wake of this latest tragedy, Beth Elderkin wants to talk about how almost all such “active shooters” are male:

[T]here’s no way to deny that almost all active shooters of the past decade have been men. Even Paul Elam, founder of men’s-rights site A Voice For Men, called the FBI’s statistics “reasonable” in an interview with the Daily Dot. But does that mean masculinity is, or should be, part of the conversation? According to researchers, the answer is yes. An increasing number of sociologists, including [Michael] Rocque, who authored a study on school shootings in 2011, say gender should be treated as a key component in how we address active shootings and other violent acts. And we’re not just talking about mass shootings; FBI statistics show that in 2012, more than 80 percent of arrests for violent crimes were men.

Update from a reader:

So can we acknowledge now that male brains work differently from female ones? Obviously I don’t mean that it’s always for the better! But then couldn’t these differences also partially explain the lack of gender parity in certain professional fields? Testosterone is powerful stuff.

Tyler Lopez, meanwhile, blasts the NRA’s position on these incidents and how to stop them:

The gun lobby acknowledges the problem of mass-shooting incidents in the United States. Its solution calls for arming more people who could potentially stop a shooter and for rapid-response training focused on minimizing casualties. This is part of an increasingly pervasive, insidious gun culture that accepts mass shootings as inevitable. But by this logic, the first victims—friends, loved ones, children—are expendable. The first victims of a mass shooting are a mangled human sacrifice on the altar of Second Amendment rights.

Until a shooter pulls the trigger to begin his slaughter, he is merely a guy with a gun. The gun lobby insists that the government should allow people to carry firearms into all public places. (Gun advocates continued to push for expanded open-carry legislation the morning after the Tallahassee shooting.) After all, who are we to judge a man simply because he is proudly displaying a gun by his side? In this world, the first victim is merely an alarm for others to respond.

A Democrat Finally Steps Up, Ctd

Joe Klein welcomes Jim Webb’s presidential run:

He will be a refreshing presence on the campaign trail. He doesn’t talk like a politician. He can be blunt and combative. He has taken strong populist economic stands and was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. In fact, Webb goes in strong whenever he takes a stand. He’ll certainly be fun to watch during debates (he was a boxer at Annapolis).

You’d have to call him a longshot, of course. But I suspect he’ll be one of those long shots who have the power to shape a campaign with new ideas and sharp arguments. He will certainly cause Clinton some populist agita, should she run.

David Freedlander downplays Webb’s chances:

It has all the trappings of a campaign as vanity project, the type of presidential exploration designed not to excite convention delegates but to boost a candidate’s name ID before cable-TV bookers.

Webb, after all, would come into a Democratic primary with considerable baggage—never mind that he would likely be squaring off against Hillary Clinton, the most overwhelming favorite in an open Democratic primary in history. There is the fact that Webb used to be a Republican, a point he proudly points to in the video when he mentions his service in the Reagan administration. Or the fact that Webb, who decided not to run again after only one term in elective office, doesn’t seem to have the stomach for the degradations of politics. And the fact that Webb’s base of support lies among working-class whites, who are a diminishing constituency in a party made up more and more of liberals, minorities, and the professional classes.

Jonathan Bernstein opines that Webb “isn’t so much a serious candidate for a presidential nomination as he is an interesting person who has chosen to enter the contest”:

In that, he reminds me of Bill Bradley in 2000 or perhaps Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Interesting people can be excellent (or so-so) senators, but they never get close to presidential nominations. For that, the requirement is almost insane ambition.

Nevertheless, on the surface Webb looks like a viable candidate (he fits my criteria of having convention qualifications and fitting in the mainstream of his party on policy). He also appears to be well-regarded by many in the national press corps. So even if he polls badly six months from now and has little in the way of the organization that real candidates need, it will probably be easier for Clinton to accept at least a couple of debates with him than to freeze him out.

Jennifer Rubin talks up Webb’s run:

If nothing else, Webb can show how empty Clinton’s message may be. He can turn her insistence on inevitability into a portrait of entitlement, which in fact it is. And if he starts getting attention, it might stir other Democrats to get in and steal some of the limelight.

Noah Millman hopes Webb will force Clinton to debate foreign policy. But he fears Webb will get tripped up by the culture war:

Webb’s campaign is going to be severely under-funded, and Webb himself is going to start out of the gate a terrible campaigner, so it may be that Clinton will simply ignore him and we won’t get any debate at all. But if she wants to make him instantly irrelevant, the last thing she’d do is engage him. Rather, all she – or, rather, her surrogates – need to do is to position him as a culture war conservative, someone who is at best iffy and at worst outright hostile on women’s equality, gay rights, affirmative action, immigration, and so on down the line. Once that becomes the story, that will likely be the only story – the only one that matters, anyway. And then, either he sinks without a trace or, if he gets a little bit of traction, it’ll be another story about how culturally conservative working class whites who rejected Obama are rejecting Clinton as well. Which, in turn, will further facilitate their consolidation as a GOP voting bloc – precisely the opposite of what Webb intends to achieve. …

Webb is never going to be the great progressive hope – and that’s fine. Indeed, it’s better than fine. It’s better for Clinton to be challenged on foreign and economic policy by a Jim Webb than a Bernie Sanders. People who aren’t the usual suspects might just listen. But he needs to avoid being defined by the cultural signals he gives off.

The Dish Mug Is Here!

[Re-posted from yesterday]

A reader recently wrote:

I haven’t bought a t-shirt because that’s not so much my thing. I eagerly await a coffee mug though. A mug with a beagle on it would make my mornings brighter.

We looked and labored over a dozen different mug options and chose what we think is the perfect one:

This navy-colored coffee mug is very high quality, holds a generous 15oz, and, during our caffeine-addled test phase, it proved very durable. So the sturdy mug should last a long time in any Dishhead’s kitchen or office (and yes, it’s microwave and dishwasher safe – we tested that too). As a serious coffee-addict, I love it.

The Dish mug can be yours for $15 plus shipping and handling. Just click here and follow the simple prompts to order yours today. We only have a limited number of mugs for sale, so get yours before someone else does. And send us a photo when it arrives; you might see it on the blog.

Update from a reader:

Hubby has been told that it better be going in my stocking this year. Thank you!

Another:

Love them – will give as gifts! Hope you have the web address on there so friends who don’t know you will check out the Dish.

Obama’s Immigration Speech: Blog Reax

The speech in full (transcript here):

Chris Cillizza thought the speech “fit more neatly into the Obama of the 2008 campaign and the first term of his presidency — heavy on inspiration and imagery, relatively light on details and depth”:

It’s the sort of address Obama is both best at and most comfortable giving. The idea of what makes America America — particularly in the face of the unique challenges that the 21st century poses for the country on the domestic and international fronts — is something he has quite clearly spent significant time thinking about. The 2008 edition Obama we saw tonight is also, not coincidentally, the version most beloved by the base of the Democratic party. And, in truth, that’s who the speech was really aimed at. The politics of immigration are such that there were no words Obama could (or would be willing to) utter that would drastically reshape the coming fight over the issue.

Beinart argues that Obama “decided once again to trigger the hatred of defenders of the status quo because, I suspect, he knows American history well enough to know that real moral progress doesn’t happen any other way”:

Yes, Obama is a pragmatist. Yes, he is professorial. Yes, he wants to be liked by his ideological opponents and by the powers that be. But he also knows that were he in his twenties today—a young man of color with a foreign parent and a foreign-sounding name—he might be among those activists challenging the vicious injustice of America’s immigration system. When Obama talked about “the courage of students who, except for the circumstances of their birth, are as American as Malia or Sasha; students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in a country they love,” he wasn’t only comparing them to his daughters. He was comparing them to himself.

For progressives, this was always the real promise of Barack Obama. It was the promise that a black man with a Muslim name who had worked in Chicago’s ghettos—a man who had tasted what it means to a stranger in America—would bring that memory with him when he entered the White House. It’s a promise he fulfilled tonight.

Ramesh Ponnuru feels that, in Obama’s speech, the “policy and the rhetoric are at war with each other”:

I imagine that most left-wingers will rally behind the president’s immigration policy, especially since it appears to be a minority position. But some of them will be complaining that the president didn’t go far enough. And we should take a moment to appreciate that they have a point. The moralizing language Obama used, which essentially cast attempts to enforce the immigration laws as acts of indecency, are hard to square with the limits that he set.

JPod makes a version of the same argument:

Simply put, the president offers no explanation for why he is ordering these changes only for 5 million of the nearly 12 million illegals in the United States. Everything he said in his speech about the value of immigrants, and the need to show kindness to the stranger, ought in theory to apply to any illegal but a criminal. But Obama has limited its reach to people who have been here for several years and have children who are American citizens. This means either his arguments are disingenuous, or he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions, or he’s calibrating his responses to satisfy a political constituency without causing a wholesale eruption inside the country. Or all three.

Jonah Goldberg is on the same page:

This is the way this president and his fans always sell his policies. They mock, ridicule, snark, smirk, wink and guffaw at any notion he’s a radical or an ideologue when the action he wants to take is under debate. It’s just a modest This, a pragmatic That, an incremental The Other Thing. But, once it’s a fait accompli, it’s a Big F’ing Deal — to borrow a phrase from the Vice President. Right now, what Obama wants to do is par far for the course for every president Why, it would be weird if he didn’t give 5 million people amnesty. But I have no doubt that in the minutes, days, or, at the most, weeks to come I will be getting emails from the DNC telling me this a bold, historic, revolutionary piece of legislation executive action.

Dara Lind wonders how many undocumented immigrants will actually take advantage of the new policy:

In order for the program to be effective when it officially launches (which is expected to be in spring of 2015), people are going to have to apply. And that could be tricky. After all, these are people who’ve been living in the shadows for years — and have learned that any interaction with government officials could lead to their deportation.

The good news is that the administration, and community groups, have done something of a test run on the new program — via the DACA program in 2012. The push to get unauthorized immigrants to apply for DACA has created an existing infrastructure that can now be built on for the new, expanded relief programs. But in order to build on that, they’re going to need more money and more lawyers. And the government agency running the program, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, doesn’t have much money to spend on outreach.

Claire Groden expects that “Obama’s deportation order will affect fewer people than you’ve heard”:

[E]ven among those who will apply, not all will receive protection. Undocumented parents of legal residents and citizens will have to pass the same kind of background checks as those applying for visas, [the Migration Policy Institute’s Marc] Rosenblum said. People who will qualify under the expanded umbrella of DACA can’t have any felonies or significant misdemeanors on their track record. Protection is far from automatic: undocumented people will have to not only fit the eligibility requirements, but prove it.

Byron York views the speech as baldly political:

Obama’s action is not about winning broad support now. It’s a long-term effort to increase the number of Hispanic voters, who chose Obama over Mitt Romney by 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012. If that support can be cast in cement, and the number of Hispanic voters increased even beyond current demographic trends — well, that would be very good news for the future health of the Obama coalition.

Jamelle Bouie is unsure “how much the Democrats gain” from the executive order itself:

At most, the president’s immigration order might strengthen the short-term bonds among Latinos, Asians, and the Democratic Party. More significant, I think, is the Republican reaction. If the GOP reacts to the immigration order with unhinged hysteria and anti-immigrant animus … it could further estrange itself from these groups. And that, more than anything, could shift the long-term shape of our politics.

Ed Morrissey is puzzled by the “rather large gap between his speech tonight and the actual action Obama promises to take”:

Section 2 is titled in bold font, You Cannot Apply For Several Months. The start of the program is nebulously given as “early 2015,” which could mean anything from January 2 to, say, June 29th. Why not start now if Obama is so tired of waiting? One has to wonder whether this is a bluff of sorts, intended to scare House Republicans into passing the Senate bill in the waning days of the lame-duck session. If Obama’s willing to wait “several months” to take action, why not just wait and at least attempt negotiation with incoming Republican leadership?

Ambinder expects that “immigration politics will become nastier in the near-term”:

You think you’ve heard the last of talk radio hosts bloviating about Ebola-carrying migrants sneaking across the southern border? It’s about to get much worse, and much more toxic. By singling out certain classes of undocumented immigrants, Obama puts a bullseye on the backs of those who do not qualify for documented status. Add the idea that the president is acting like a dictator and — kaboom: the act of granting amnesty becomes even more associated with one political party.

And Suderman fears that real immigration reform just got harder:

Unprecedented, unpopular, large-scale, unilateral policy changes are nearly certain to produce a backlash—against the president, against his party, and against the ideas at the heart of the policy change itself.

To me, this is the most significant risk of Obama’s plan—that it will create a backlash, not only amongst congressional Republicans, but within the public at large, a backlash that makes it more difficult to achieve a stable, legal, and politically viable system of expanded and simplified immigration, one that is not dependent on a sympathetic executive or enforcement discretion, but that is codified in law and agreed upon by enough of the country’s residents and legislators.

Live-Blogging Obama’s Immigration Speech

Thanks to POTUS for taking action on immigration in the face of inaction. Now let’s turn to permanent bipartisan reform. #ImmigrationAction

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 21, 2014

Well, I should confess something up-front. I found the president’s peroration deeply moving as an immigrant myself who has experienced a little of the fear and insecurity that being in some way on the wrong side of the immigration services can incur. The paradox of living somewhere and building a life and knowing that it can all be suddenly swept away; the thought of being separated from those you love – for ever; the stresses within families and marriages that such a shadowy existence can create. We need a full-throated defense of immigration in these cramped and narrow times, and the president was more than eloquent on that tonight – and made his case with a calm assurance and intensity. I’m gladdened by it – and I can only begin to appreciate how his words will have felt to millions of others.

Did he make the case that a mass deferral of deportations was the only option for him? Not so effectively. His strongest point was simply the phrase: “pass a bill.” Saying he is doing this as a temporary measure, that it will be superseded as soon as a law reaches his desk, gives him a stronger position than some suppose. There is more than one actor in our system. The president and the Senate have done their part; the House has resolutely refused to do its – by failing even to take a vote on the matter. Why, many will ask, can’t the Congress come up with a compromise that would forestall and over-rule this maneuver? What prevents the Republicans from acting in return to forestall this?

At the same time, he did not press the Reagan and Bush precedents. And his description of the current mess as a de facto amnesty was not as effective as he might have hoped. His early backing of even more spending on the border, his initial citing of the need for the undocumented to “get right with the law” by coming out of the shadows to pay back taxes, among other responsibilities, was a way to disarm conservative critics. It almost certainly won’t. But it remains a fact that the speech – in classic Obama style – blended conservative stringency with liberal empathy in equal parts.

Objectively, this is surely the moderate middle. Obama’s position on immigration – as on healthcare – has always been that. It’s utterly in line with his predecessor and with the Reagan era when many conservatives were eager for maximal immigration. His political isolation now is a function, first and foremost, of unrelenting Republican opposition and obstructionism. From time to time, then, it is more than good to see him openly challenge the box others want to put him in, to reassert that he has long been the reasonable figure on many of these debates, and to remind us that we have a president whose substantive proposals should, in any sane polity, be the basis for a way forward, for a compromise.

They are not, of course. And this act of presidential doggedness, after so long a wait, may well inflame the divisions further. I still have doubts about the wisdom of this strategy. But I see why this president refuses to give in, to cast his future to fate, to disappoint again a constituency he has pledged to in the past, and why he is re-stating his right as president to be a prime actor rather than a passive observer in the last two years of his term. That’s who many of us voted for. And we do not believe that the election of a Republican Senate in 2014 makes his presidency moot. Au contraire.

The branches are designed to clash and to jostle over public policy. And the Congress has one thing it can do now that it has for so long refused to do. It can act. And it should. The sooner the better.

Why Is Obamacare Unpopular?

Bill Gardner reviews research on the question:

Jon Krosnick, Wendy Gross, and colleagues at Stanford and Kaiser ran large surveys to measure public understanding of the ACA and how it was associated with approval of the law. They found that accurate knowledge about what’s in the bill varied with party identification: Democrats understood the most and liked the law the most, independents less, and Republicans understood still less and liked the law the least. However, attitudes were not just tribal. Within each party, the more accurate your knowledge of the law, the more you liked it.

Krosnick and colleagues found that most people favor most of the elements of the ACA, but not everyone recognized that these elements were all in the plan. Many people also have false beliefs about the plan. For example, only 42% of Americans correctly understood that the law does not provide free treatment for illegal aliens. Only 21% of Americans approve of this imaginary feature of the plan.

This suggests that if the public understood the ACA perfectly, support for the law would be higher. Based on their model for how knowledge about the ACA is associated with approval for the law, Krosnick and colleagues project that in the unlikely case in which the public had perfect understanding of the law,

the proportion of Americans who favor the bill might increase from the current level of 32% to 70%.

Keep in mind, however, that Krosnick’s survey can’t show us that change in knowledge would cause change in approval. Perhaps causality runs the other way and it is approval of the law that drives people to seek information about what is in it.

But all of this is a huge indictment of the president’s and the Democrats’ approach to talking about the law. In my view, they should have been using every single opportunity to explain what the law actually does, compared with the system it replaced. Yes, there has been a mountain of propaganda against it. But that doesn’t excuse political malpractice in defending it. This is the Democrats’ most significant piece of domestic legislation in decades. And yet they cannot manage to make the case for it. That tells you so much about why that party remains such a shit-show, rescued temporarily by this president, but still wallowing in its own dysfunction, inability to communicate and pusillanimity.

How Seriously Should We Take Christie?

Compared to most other GOP presidential contenders, Christie isn’t well liked by Republicans:

Despite such numbers, Mark Leibovich sees the logic of a Christie run:

There is a theory in presidential politics that electorates will gravitate to the candidate who represents the biggest departure from the incumbent, especially if they have grown weary of that incumbent. “That’s the argument people make to me about why I should run,” Christie told me during one of our conversations. “They’re like: ‘No one could be more the opposite of Barack Obama from a personality standpoint than you. Therefore, you’re perfect.’ ” Yet one of the more compelling aspects of a Christie candidacy would be his ability to start an overdue fight within his own party.

In 2012, Mitt Romney never took on the G.O.P.’s far right, which has more than its own fair share of bullies. He was content to run right in the primaries, tout his “severe conservative” stripes and hope it would not end up costing him with swing voters in the general election. (It did.) In a brief period of reckoning after the 2012 election, Republican leaders spoke of their need to expand their shrinking base and appeal to Hispanics, African-Americans, women and younger voters rather than bow to unrelenting hard-liners. Christie could be the candidate with the best shot of pulling this off. “Christie’s strength is that people think he is being straight with them,” said Tom Kean, a former New Jersey governor and one of Christie’s political mentors. “If he kowtows to anyone, and people stop believing that he’s saying what he means, he’s going to kill the brand.”

Kean told me that Christie “is the best politician I’ve seen since Bill Clinton.” [Haley] Barbour said he “has a strong starting place in 2016.” But for all of the noise he has made, there is a difference between being an operative and being a national politician. Christie’s positions on immigration reform, foreign policy and certain social issues remain very much a black hole, not to mention an object of great suspicion, on the right. Running in a Republican presidential-primary campaign would be considerably harder than showering cash on his fellow governors and being dubbed by the media as a “winner” of this cycle. On some level, Christie might be just the latest intriguing moderate for the small media-obsessed wing of the Republican Party that gave us Presidents Giuliani and Huntsman.

Face Of The Day

Ben Guefrache Fatma of Tunisia, a contestant of the Miss World Muslimah 2014, during a practice session before the final round at Prambanan temple in Yogyakarta, Indonesia on November 20, 2014. Around 25 finalists take a part in the 4th Muslim World contest. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.