So, How's the Tea Party Taking the News?

A few days back, Andrew Sullivan wrote that Mitt Romney losing the election would force the Tea Party and the rest of the conservative base to reconsider its positions and rhetoric:

My own view is that the only way to rehinge an unhinged party is for it to lose badly. And because Romney put Ryan on the ticket, and endorsed the entire Tea Party shebang, it will be hard for the wingnuts to blame defeat on running a moderate.

In response, I  had written that channeling the spirits of the Tea Party faithful is not one of Sullivan's many gifts.

Sullivan is insightful about many things, but he utterly misunderstands the Tea Party and the Republican Party's primary electorate. Should Mitt Romney lose the election, as it seems reasonably likely that he will, the Tea Party movement and the larger set of Republican partisans who populate its primary electorate will, I suspect, draw precisely the opposite lesson from the election.

So, Romney has lost.

How is the Tea party taking the news?

It's still early, but  it looks like I will turn out (sadly) to be right about this one. This morning, the website Tea Party Network News, ran a statement headlined "Tea Party Vows 'No Retreat': Promise to search out candidates with clear conservative records; no more Dole-McCain-Romney nominees." It opens:

Leaders of the Tea Party News Network (TPNN) and TheTeaParty.net offered an unflinching assessment of Election Day results. Todd Cefaratti, editor of the Tea Party News Network said, “We’re disappointed in Governor Romney’s loss. But this goes to the heart of what we have been saying all along. Bob Dole didn’t win. John McCain didn’t win. And now Mitt Romney hasn’t won. The lesson the GOP and Americans need to learn is that weak-kneed Republicans do not get elected. Conservatives do.” 

“The Tea Party has not yet begun to fight. It’s time for a wholesale reassessment of the D.C. establishment politicians and party grandees who have no commitment or courage to reduce the size of government. We now have another four years ahead of us with Barack Obama leading the charge against liberty,” TPNN News Director Scottie Hughes said. “There were some bright spots tonight from Ted Cruz to Jeff Flake, to a decisive win in the U.S. House where Tea Partiers have a mandate to stand against Obama’s big government second-term agenda. ”

“I eagerly await the day the GOP establishment figures out that the ‘safe’ candidates are not getting the job done,” stated Hughes. “The GOP needs to adhere to stricter ideological purity and put forth candidates that represent a significant difference in viewpoint from the Democrats that are creating devastating policies for Americans. The Republican Party has been shoving ‘their’ candidate down the throats of conservatives for years, and it’s not working. It’s time for them to wake up.”

At Tea Party Nation, Judson Phillips writes:

There are some lessons to be learned from this disaster.  The first lesson is, no more moderate Republican candidates.  Mitt Romney now joins the long list of moderate Republicans who line up right next to General George Custer.   Romney lost.  McCain lost, George W. Bush barely won and set the stage for Obama.   Bob Dole lost.  The only reason George H.W. Bush won a single term was because he was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President.  When he ran on his own as a moderate, he gave us Bill Clinton.

We conservatives have to say this time; we will not support a moderate again.  Our desire to remove Barack Obama and the Party of Treason was so strong that we jumped on board the Romney train.  The Republican establishment correctly assumed that if it could get Romney nominated, we would have no choice but to fall in line.

It happened this time.  It will not happen again.

Daniel Horowitz writes on the front page of RedState.com:

We ran with Dole in 1996, and we lost; we ran with McCain in 2008, and we lost; we ran with Romney, and we lost.  Romney took the issue of Obamacare off the table and barely attacked Obama directly for much of anything.  There was no potent conservative philosophy that was offered to provide voters with a sharp distinction between the parties.  The Republican convention was a pathetic Oprah show and the entire campaign was basically an advocacy of Obama’s policies, albeit with less enthusiasm.  And let’s not blame the loss on Paul Ryan and Medicare reform; he outperformed Bush and McCain with seniors.

This line of thinking spills over into the Conservative semi-establishment. Writing at National Review Online, Grover Norquist faults Romney's lack of commitment to tax cuts and entitlement reform:

The Republican House was reelected after not just touching but fondling the “third rail of American politics.” It is clear that if you are specific about your reforms they cannot as easily be misrepresented to voters. The Republicans in the House all voted for Ryan. They lashed themselves to the mast and thrived. Romney hinted he was sort of in that general vicinity.

These examples are a nonrandom sample of the some of the Tea Party's first responses to the election. I don't know how representative they of of the Tea Party as a whole or the larger core of the conservative movement more generally. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this line of thinking becomes the movement's conventional wisdom and motivates its leaders' strategic decisions between now and 2016.

Andrew Sullivan Utterly Misunderstands the Tea Party: The Conservative Response to a Romney Loss

In a blog post critiquing David Frum's endorsement of Mitt Romney, Andrew Sullivan drops this:

My own view is that the only way to rehinge an unhinged party is for it to lose badly. And because Romney put Ryan on the ticket, and endorsed the entire Tea Party shebang, it will be hard for the wingnuts to blame defeat on running a moderate.

Sullivan is insightful about many things, but he utterly misunderstands the Tea Party and the Republican Party's primary electorate. Should Mitt Romney lose the election, as it seems reasonably likely that he will, the Tea Party movement and the larger set of Republican partisans who populate its primary electorate will, I suspect, draw precisely the opposite lesson from the election.

The conservative movement, including the Tea Party, will conclude that Romney's loss was a result of his failure to forcefully articulate a clear and consistent conservative vision. Had Romney been a true Reagan conservative, it will reason, he could have easily driven Barack Obama from office in the midst of a slow and uncertain economic recovery in the same way that the Great Reagan himself defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Instead, they will reason that the Republican Party lost a winnable election because the country club establishment pushed the great moderate from Massachusetts on them. As a result, they will say that RomneyCare took ObamaCare off the table as an issue, that Romney put too much distance between himself and Paul Ryan's original budget roadmap (and corrupted Paul Ryan in the process), that he failed hit the president on Benghazi, and that he was soft on abortion. In short, the movement will blame Romney's defeat on every way he diverged from its ideal rather than any way in which he embraced it.

I expect neither the leadership of the conservative movement nor its adherents in the mass public to find any reason to moderate their political ambitions or rhetoric as a result of a Romney defeat. Instead, I expect the most committed parts of the conservative movement, including the Tea Party, to double down on their prior beliefs. Among other things, if Mitt Romney loses next Tuesday, I expect that the next presidential nominee of the Republican Party will be much more like Rick Santorum than Jeb Bush. Likewise, Mike Lees and Richard Mourdocks will continue to seriously and successfully Bob Bennetts and Dick Lugers in conventions and primaries for seats in Congress and state legislatures across the country. And, the general trend of asymmetrical partisan polarization will continue.

EmpowerU and Texas A&M University System Analytics: One (but Only One) Step in the Righ Direction

The Texas Tribune reports that the Texas A&M University System is set to officially launch a new public accountability website on Monday called EmpowerU. The heart of the website is another website reporting "Analytics" for each system campus. The analytics website reports a variety of aggregate data on enrollment, student degree progress, completion rates, and finances for the various Texas A&M System institutions.

Having a centralized web portal for these data is a great improvement. While data on the system's workload and performance have been nominally public for some time, they have been hard to find online and available only from disparate entities within the system or from the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board. Putting the information in one spot is a huge boost for transparency and accountability, and the system should be commended.

Having said all of that, the analytics website looks and acts incredibly clunky. It doesn't so much report data as offer some pre-packed statistics reported in poorly formatted charts and clunky graphics. Here's an example. The following is a screen clipping from the reported generated for requesting data on the "Most Recent Fall" from the "Enrollment" tab.

The data breakouts are arbitrary (Why is ethnicity reported in a bar chart in the top left corner using one color scheme while gender is reported in a pie chart in the bottom right corner with another? Why does the ethnicity bar chart need a color scheme at all?). The space is poorly formatted (You must scroll down in the "Ethnicity" box to see internalization student enrollment, for example.) and much of it is wasted (e.g. the huge white spaces around the Texas map and space used by the redundant Texas A&M System logo in the top left corner of the data field). The bar charts in the lower half of the screen showing enrollment by campus puts enrollment on the main campus at College Station with enrollment at other system campuses on different scales. The campus labels are unhelpful (nine begin with the acronym "TAMU." They could simple be labeled "College Station, Prairie View, Health Science Center, International, Commerce, etc.) There is a lot of useless chart junk, like the boxes around the various figures. Options for manipulating the graphs are confusing. The whole thing is confusing, difficult to use, and, frankly, ugly.

These are more than just aesthetic objections. The presentation of the data make them hard to understand and contextualize. An citizen, parent, or legislator who wanted to compare the size and diversity of the various system campuses might easily be misled or distracted by this display of information.

Additionally, the underlying data themselves are not available to be downloaded. This makes it difficult for others' to independently assess the system's performance, which is the reason for making the data public in the first place. In this respect, the analytics website compares unfavorably with other government websites used to disseminate public information.

For example, the federal Office of Management and Budget's website includes a wealth of reports and analysis along with an array of historical data available to be downloaded as MS Excel spreadsheets, which can be read by a variety of free and open source software packages in addition to many commercial programs. Those interested in the federal budget need not take the OMB's word about anything. The raw data used in their reports are available for anyone else to analyze on their own. The TAMU System's analytics data are free and online, but the data themselves should be available in a convenient, widely used electronic format, also.

EmpowerU is a step in the right direction, but a serious effort to promote transparency and accountability should make a more significant effort to present data in useful and understandable ways and also make the relevant data easily available without the filter of the system's "analytics."