Brendan Nyhan

Diana Mutz on "in-your-face" TV debate

Via Henry Farrell, the lead article in the new American Political Science Review is Diana C. Mutz, “Effects of “In-Your-Face” Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition" (PDF):

Abstract: How do Americans acquire the impression that their political foes have some understandable basis for their views, and thus represent a legitimate opposition? How do they come to believe that reasonable people may disagree on any given political controversy? Given that few people talk regularly to those of opposing perspectives, some theorize that mass media, and television in particular, serve as an important source of exposure to the rationales for oppositional views. A series of experimental studies suggests that television does, indeed, have the capacity to encourage greater awareness of oppositional perspectives. However, common characteristics of televised political discourse—–incivility and close-up camera perspectives—–cause audiences to view oppositional perspectives as less legitimate than they would have otherwise. I discuss the broader implications of these findings for assessments of the impact of television on the political process, and for the perspective that televised political discourse provides on oppositional political views.

In her experiments, Mutz filmed actors debating from two perspectives -- close-up and medium distance -- and also varied interruptions and agitation, while keeping the script and debaters constant. This design allows her to show convincingly that incivility and close-up imagery, which are the defining characteristics of cable talk shows, increase subjects' perceptions that the other side's views are illegitimate. It's a clever study that provides scientific confirmation of an important fear about the political consequences of shout TV. Highly recommended.

NYT busts Giuliani on bogus stats

The New York Times has an impressively critical article on Rudy Giuliani's misleading use of statistics in today's edition. Here's how it begins:

In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views.

Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record.

For instance, another major American city claims to have reduced crime every year since 1994: Chicago. New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980. And Mr. Giuliani’s own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure; an aide said Mr. Giuliani had meant to say that he had proposed a 7 percent reduction in per capita spending during his time as mayor.

Where was this kind of coverage when President Bush misused statistics to sell his tax and budget plans starting during campaign 2000? (see All the President's Spin for more) Remember, back in October 2002, Dana Milbank's similar piece about President Bush's dissembling in the Washington Post drew an extremely harsh reaction. The rest of the press, needless to say, did not follow his lead.

Here are a few possible explanations:

(a) Rudy's bluster invites more critical coverage -- he seems like more of a dissembler than the supposedly straight-talking Bush;
(b) Bush's statistics were carefully parsed to be half-true, making them harder to debunk within the framework of supposedly "objective" journalism (this is the argument we make in ATPS), while Rudy's are often just wrong;
(c) Reporters are becoming more skeptical about the use of statistics of the Bush administration;
(d) The political environment is pushing reporters toward more critical coverage of Republicans;
(e) All of the above.

What do you think?

How did Saletan miss Rushton's background?

Will Saletan tries to clean up the mess over his ill-conceived Slate series on race and intelligence, which was shredded here, here, here, and here (among others):

Last week, I wrote about the possibility of genetic IQ differences among races. I wanted to discuss whether egalitarianism could survive if this scenario, raised last month by James Watson, turned out to be true. I thought it was important to lay out the scenario's plausibility. In doing so, I short-circuited the conversation. Most of the reaction to what I wrote has been over whether the genetic hypothesis is true, with me as an expert witness.

I don't want this role. I'm not an expert. I think it's misleading to dismiss the scenario, as some officials have done in response to Watson. But my attempts to characterize the evidence beyond that, even with caveats such as "partial," "preliminary," and "prima facie," have backfired. I outlined the evidence primarily to illustrate the limits of the genetic hypothesis. If it turns out to be true, it will be in a less threatening form than you might imagine. As to whether it's true, you'll have to judge the evidence for yourself. Every responsible scholar I know says we should wait many years before drawing conclusions.

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

In general, I'm baffled that Saletan thought he was qualified to arbitrate a scientific debate as complex as the one over race and intelligence. But his ignorance about Rushton is even more disconcerting. He didn't even have basic biographical information about the supposed experts whose work he was drawing on, so what was he doing when he was reporting the story? Who was he talking to?

Update 12/1 1:31 PM: More from CMU's Cosma Shalizi:

In my first post about this, I said that there were two possible interpretations of Saletan's actions: that he didn't know that the ideas he was spreading were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to advance an agenda. Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable wasn't just a joke. Sadly, this partial mea culpa supports the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in "shorter William Saletan" form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked! — to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, logically, he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning — as Brad DeLong says, this seems like a trained incapacity.

But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on "peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue". There are two problems here.

One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton's papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan's main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I'd say that the most likely explanation of Saletan's writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just how he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.

Matt Yglesias also chimes in:

Saletan was busy trying to have his cake and eat it, too, and when confronted with Rushton's rhetoric suddenly finds himself choking on it. But of course the research "proving" blacks' genetic inferiority to whites is shot through with racism; what else would the race-science paradigm possibly be infused with? Somehow, Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn't notice what side he'd landed on.

The Sierra Club's holiday survival guide

The New York Times notes an amusingly wacky Sierra Club website with tips on winning arguments about environmentalism over the holidays:

Are you likely to be the lone environmentalist at the dinner table sometime soon? Win arguments and influence people with this handy guide. You'll find ready responses to the predictable dinner table arguments that'll be directed at you, the nearest environmentalist. Who knows, you might even make a few converts!

• Spar a few rounds with grumpy Uncle Burt, whose personal virtues do not include conservation.

• Educate the sweet but confused Aunt Mim about the facts of global warming.

• Help wonkish Cousin Mervin get his priorities straight.

• And face off with the ever-feisty Sis who thinks you're a lousy, no-good sell-out.

McCain: The Myth of a Maverick arrives

In the mail: McCain: The Myth of a Maverick by Matt Welch. More when I read it...

Mitt takes the GOP backward

At Polysigh, Phil Klinkner notes the historical discrepancies between Mitt Romney's alleged statement about Muslims in his cabinet and the history of the GOP:

Mitt Romney is in a bit of hot water over his comments that he would be unlikely to appoint a Muslim to a cabinet post. He is reported to have said:

Based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a Cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.

Muslims currently make up anywhere from 0.5 to 2.2 percent of the population of the U.S.

In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower appointed Ezra Taft Benson as his secretary of agriculture, making the first Mormon cabinet secretary. At the time, there were approximately 1.2 million Mormons in the U.S., or approximately 0.75 percent of a total population of 160 million.

In 1969 Richard Nixon appointed George Romney, Mitt's father as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development. At that time, there were 2.8 million Mormons, approximately 1.4 percent of the population of the time.

Does Romney believe that these appointments were not "justified" because Mormons were too small a percentage of the U.S. population? Exactly what percentage of the population do you need in order to claim a position in the Romney cabinet?

Somerby: Media biased against Democrats

The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby has suggested that the entire press corps now has a partisan bias against Democrats:

What has changed since 1960? At one point in his iconic first book [The Making of the President 1960], [Theodore] White painted a truly remarkable picture. He described the way the mainstream press corps was flying around the country, mocking and laughing at one of the candidates—and bonding with the other candidate, the one who was pandering to them. And wouldn’t you know it? Forty years later, during Campaign 2000, a string of major profiles painted a very similar picture! As White had done forty years before, they described the way the mainstream press corps was flying around the country, mocking and laughing at one of the candidates—and bonding with the other candidate, the one who was pandering to them. But uh-oh! In White’s account, the press corps was bonding with Candidate Kennedy—and mocking and laughing at Candidate Nixon. By the time of Campaign 2000, though, the press corps was bonding with Candidate Bush—and mocking and laughing at Candidate Gore.

In short, the press corps’s conduct was exactly the same—but the press corps’ party allegiance had changed!

Somerby previously made the same charge against Tim Russert. In both cases, it's simplistic and unconvincing. Here's what I said about his Russert accusations -- I think the same logic applies here:

I actually agree with Somerby that Russert tends to be more aggressive in his questioning of Democrats. (Anyone remember his interview of Howard Dean during the last presidential campaign?) The problem, however, is that we can't know Russert's motives. More importantly, it is strange to assume that the ex-Democratic operative wants to embarrass Democrats for partisan reasons.

There's a simpler explanation that seems more persuasive. Like most journalists, Russert is far more sensitive to the approval of his peers than to the opinion of the general public (they're a lot like academics). So how do you win acclaim for being a tough journalist? First, you grill your subjects on alleged inconsistencies and constantly try to throw them off message (his signature style). But you must also fend off any suggestion of liberal bias, a charge that could be especially potent for Russert given his history as a Democratic operative. As a result, it makes perfect sense for him to go overboard in grilling Democrats and to treat Republicans less harshly. There's no reason to think it has anything to do with partisan animus.

The next CSI effect?

I have to admit I'm both fascinated and repulsed by the upcoming Fox show "The Moment of Truth," which asks participants awkward personal questions while they are hooked up to a lie detector:

After ordering the pilot, Mr. Darnell made some changes. He increased the prize money and made the questions “more aggressive.”

“There’s no, ‘Is your favorite color blue?’” he said. “Some people are freaked out by that. They get to question three and they’re like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

He also added a button where the contestant’s friends and family sit that they can use once during the game to “rescue” the player from a difficult question. Except, Mr. Darnell said, the friends and family never seem to use the button for its intended purpose. When one contestant was asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he lost 20 pounds—which is considered a relatively easy query—her husband lunged for the button.

“What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves,” Mr. Darnell said. “Or they don’t use it [because they really want to hear the answer].”

But as even TV Week points out, the evidence supporting the accuracy of polygraphs is dubious (see also here). The problem is that the show will likely increase perceptions that polygraphs are reliable, further increasing their use and perceptions of their validity in criminal trials. We already saw this happen with the so-called "CSI effect" in which jurors expect definitive scientific evidence from crime scenes and may be more skeptical about cases in which that evidence is lacking. Let's hope it doesn't happen again.

(On the other hand, it would be fantastic if someone could go on the show, beat the lie detector, and take Fox's money. That example alone would do more to kill the polygraph than any article pointing out the lack of scientific evidence.)

John Edwards: "Who cares?"

Via the Hillary '08 Fact Hub blog, here is John Edwards dismissing concerns last week about the constitutionality of his questionable proposal to strip health insurance from members of Congress if they don't create universal coverage (see here and here):

[CNN'S WOLF] BLITZER: You’ve also suggested that if the Congress doesn’t pass universal health care, you would, as president, take away health care insurance, health care privileges for members of Congress, to which the Clinton campaign issued a statement saying: ”Senator Edwards is proposing unconstitutional gimmickry to pass universal health care.” Would this be constitutional or unconstitutional simply to strip members of Congress of their health care given the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches?

EDWARDS: Well, first of all, when I talk about shaking up Washington and making this place actually work for the American people, it is an interesting thing to watch that the people who are inside Washington, including Senator Clinton and her campaign, they circle the wagons and start protecting Washington politicians.

Who cares? I mean, what this is — the answer to the question is, yes, the president of the United States has enormous power. He has the veto power over the budget. The president of the United States has the bully pulpit to make this proposal to America and to the Congress and to go around America — by the way, every Democrat would vote for universal health care. So it would not be an issue for Democrats. But if you go across this country and say, “Your Congressman or your Congresswoman is for their own health care and their family’s health care but they’re not for health care for you” — the whole point of this is to shake the place up.

And it’s fascinating to watch how quickly Washington insiders, including the Clinton campaign, rally the forces and circle the wagons to protect politicians instead of talking about what we can do together to bring universal health care to the country. I will be the first to tell you, I’m going in there to shake the place up and make it work for America.

Did Edwards really say "Who cares?" about the constitutionality of his proposal? I don't know what his inflection sounded like in the video, but it certainly looks bad in print. As far as substance, his answer makes no sense. Even if his proposal were to be found to be constitutional, Congress would have to pass it into law. The president's veto power is irrelevant.

Al Gore's twin?

I have nothing to say about Al Gore's awkward White House visit except that he is really looking like Chris Cooper these days...

The relative cost of presidential phone time

Over at TNR's The Plank, Josh Patashnik notes that Mitt Romney is offering a "holiday package" for a $250 contribution that includes a "downloadable phone message of Mitt answering your voicemail using your name."

Patashnik then asks "Can you imagine what kind of great holiday gift package Dennis Kucinich or Fred Thompson could put together??"

In fact, Kucinich has apparently been quite available by phone for free for some time (by contrast, the Mitt message is only available if your name is on the master list). Back in June, my friend Ben Fritz reported on an email a Hollywood character actress sent to her friends and acquaintances that included this offer:

Dennis has asked me to give him phone numbers of my pals, so that he can make a personal call to you, in order to hear your concerns, and answer your questions. Forty years in politics, and being in touch with his feminine side, gives Dennis a distinct advantage to truly change direction in our beloved country...

If you are interested in participating in the 2008 elections, and wish to talk with Dennis personally, please send me one of your phone numbers, and I will pass it on to him.

Anyone want to see if they can get him on the phone? I bet an inquisitive caller could do it in less than 24 hours...

Splitting the difference on Clinton/Obama

Bumper sticker sighted in western North Carolina: "Clinton 2008 Obama 2016"

Strange bedfellows: Rudy and Obama

While I was out of town for Thanksgiving, I was amused to see Rudy Giuliani trying to form a coalition of convenience with Barack Obama:

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Tuesday told high school students that when he was their age he was hardly a model student, experimenting with illegal drugs and drinking alcohol.

...During a campaign stop in Chicago, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was asked if he thought Obama's comments to the students were appropriate.

"I respect his honesty," Giuliani said.

"One of the things that we need from our people that are running for office is not this pretense of perfection," said Giuliani, who has faced questions about his own personal life marked by three marriages and estrangement from his two children. He said of the candidates, "we're all human beings."

"If we haven't made mistakes, don't vote for us," Giuliani said.

Someone's trying desperately to inoculate himself against the inevitable attacks on his personal life and character. (If you missed the message, Giuliani's first two ads both include him admitting he's not perfect.)

Ironically, with Giuliani looking weak in early primary states, he could use some help from Hillary too. If she won in Iowa, it would strengthen his argument that he's the candidate best-positioned to beat her in the general election.

The fine print on new Zogby poll

Drudge is touting a new Zogby poll showing Hillary trailing top Republicans, but the Reuters article admits in the last paragraph that it's based on an unusual sample:

The poll of 9,355 people had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point. The interactive poll surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls.

Absent further details, it's not clear why we would believe this to be a useful finding. Zogby's summary and defense of its approach is here, but let's just say that the jury is still out. Here's some past coverage in which a political scientist expresses skepticism:

When reached by phone last week, Cliff Zukin, a political science professor and polling expert at Rutgers University, suggests that journalists should generally be wary of any Zogby interactive poll.

“The Zogby stuff, on scientific grounds, is quite questionable,” says Zukin. “Online, Internet, opt-in polling, where people volunteer to be respondents, doesn’t really have a basis in scientific validity. There are two kinds of samples in the world. There are probability samples, and there are non-probability samples.”

The Zogby interactive polls, says Zukin, clearly fall into the latter camp. “With probability samples, when everybody has a known chance of being selected, you can make pretty valid inferences about the population from which it is drawn,” says Zukin. “You can’t do that at all with self-selected surveys. That’s a problem.”

Another problem with Internet-based polling, says Zukin, is that, in general, Web and email-based surveys tend to overvalue the opinions of young people. A group that is notoriously lousy at showing up to actually vote.

“Internet coverage is now about two-thirds of the population,” says Zukin. “But it’s really age-skewed and, to a lesser extent, education-skewed, in the wrong way for voters. It’s younger people who are online. It’s older people who are not online. It’s older people who vote. And younger people who don’t.”

“It’s certainly not the gold standard,” says Zukin.

In short, without further confirmation from more traditional polling, don't take the Drudge headline too seriously.

Update 11/27 10:01 AM: The University of Wisconsin's Charles Franklin has a detailed post showing that the Zogby results are way out of whack with more traditional estimates:

The hugely surprising result is that the Zogby poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton losing to all four top Republicans in head-to-head trial heats. What makes that surprising is that Clinton LEADS all four of those Republicans in the trend estimates based on all other polling by between 3.8 and 11.6 points.

...What is immediately clear is that the Zogby Clinton numbers are well below the estimated trend for Clinton in each of the four comparisons. Clinton is consistently 8-10 points below her trend estimate based on other polling.

Meanwhile, Hillary's Fact Hub blog points out that a more traditional Gallup poll was also released yesterday and it found results more in line with previous findings:

A new Gallup Poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton with a slim but not statistically significant advantage over both former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain in head-to-head matchups for the 2008 general election for president. Clinton has much more substantial leads over former Sen. Fred Thompson and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Sen. Barack Obama also has significant leads over Thompson and Romney, but essentially ties with Giuliani and McCain.

...The results for Obama matched up against the Republican candidates are largely similar to those for Clinton. He has substantial leads over both Thompson and Romney, and is highly competitive with McCain and Giuliani. Though Clinton's margins of support over McCain (six points) and Giuliani (five points) are larger than Obama's margins of support against the same candidates (three points and zero points, respectively), the differences are not large enough to be considered meaningful from a statistical perspective.

Update 11/28 11:18 PM: Via Kos, an analysis of Zogby Interactive's track record provides further corroboration of my suspicions:

I looked at five pollsters that were among the most prolific: Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, Zogby (which releases separate telephone and online polls) and Washington, D.C.-based Mason-Dixon. For all but the latter, I used the numbers posted on the organizations' own Web sites. For Mason-Dixon, which keeps some of its poll data behind a subscriber wall, I used Pollster.com to find polls from the two weeks before the election. I checked the results against vote counts as of this Tuesday.

...In the Senate races, the average error on the margin of victory was tightly bunched for all the phone polls. Rasmussen (25 races) and Mason-Dixon (15) each were off by an average of fewer than four points on the margin. Zogby's phone polls (10) and SurveyUSA (18) each missed by slightly more than four points. Just four of the 68 phone polls missed by 10 points or more, with the widest miss at 18 points.

But the performance of Zogby Interactive, the unit that conducts surveys online, demonstrates the dubious value of judging polls only by whether they pick winners correctly. As Zogby noted in a press release, its online polls identified 18 of 19 Senate winners correctly. But its predictions missed by an average of 8.6 percentage points in those polls -- at least twice the average miss of four other polling operations I examined. Zogby predicted a nine-point win for Democrat Herb Kohl in Wisconsin; he won by 37 points. Democrat Maria Cantwell was expected to win by four points in Washington; she won by 17. (Zogby cooperated with WSJ.com on an online polling project that tracked some Senate and gubernatorial races.)

The picture was similar in the gubernatorial races (where Zogby polled only online, not by phone). Mason-Dixon's average error was under 3.4 points in 14 races. Rasmussen missed by an average of 3.8 points in 30 races; SurveyUSA was off by 4.4 points, on average, in 18 races. But Zogby's online poll missed by an average of 8.3 points, erring on six races by more than 15 points.

Santa's got a taser

For those of you who thought tacky Christmas marketing had hit rock bottom, think again (via Drudge/Wired):

With the TASER® C2, you can have police proven, effective protection that is convenient to carry and easy to use. Over 270,000 law enforcement professionals have come to rely on TASER devices to protect life.

Discover the new TASER C2.

Thompson's latest supply-side claim

According to the New York Times, Fred Thompson has repeated the false claim that tax cuts increase revenue:

An analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which looked into the kind of plan Mr. Thompson proposed, found that the federal government would stand to lose at least $2.5 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

But Mr. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, said in an interview yesterday on “Fox News Sunday” that such studies “always overestimate the losses to the government” and that tax cuts would spur the economy, leading eventually to greater revenues.

Thompson made a similar claim back in April. And he's not the only one -- Giuliani (here and here), Mitt Romney, and John McCain are all on the supply-side bandwagon. Who cares that even Bush administration economists think it's nonsense?

The overvote footnote on Bush v. Gore

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund makes a claim about the 2000 election that is only partially true:

Democratic partisans still argue that the 2000 presidential contest was decided by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, even though media recounts of Florida ballots showed that the outcome would not have been changed if Bush v. Gore had gone the other way.

While it's true that the outcome would probably not have changed if all the undervotes had been counted, the judge supervising the recount said he might have counted the overvotes as well, a decision that would have tipped the outcome to Gore.

Clinton touts her electability?

Hillary Clinton, who has apparently unprecedented negative ratings for a first time presidential candidate, is now claiming that only she can win in November:

Central to the new Clinton push will be the argument that only she can beat the eventual Republican nominee, a claim Obama is also seeking to make to voters here.

Advisers said her message will be: "You can't have change if you don't win." Her rivals, meanwhile, are moving aggressively to capitalize on Clinton's weaknesses in Iowa -- and, they hope, block her path to the nomination.

Up is down! Maybe she should be campaigning for a job in the Bush administration...

Thanksgiving break

The family and I are headed to the mountains of western North Carolina for Thanksgiving so blogging will probably be nonexistent until next week...

Obama needs issues

Writing on TPM, Reed Hundt notes how Barack Obama's campaign lacks actual issues:

Obama’s campaign has a good offensive position on the all-important “change” issue. But the campaign has apparently been reluctant to articulate in detail how Clinton does not stand for “change” in policy terms... Obama’s campaign this fall has plainly been willing to go on the offense. But to my eyes, they have not yet selected the battleground of policy difference where they will fight their last and perhaps winning fight.

Of course, policy debates in and of themselves are not definitive in campaigns. However, policy distinctions are the language of good offensive campaigns

Josh Marshall agrees:

What's the premise of Obama's campaign? I hear less triangulating, more principle (which basically means the same thing), change, etc. But those are slogans. To make these work politically I think Obama would have to say, Clinton is the cautious Democratic politics of the past. It was good in its day. And I respect all that Sen. Clinton has accomplished for our party. But I'm about something different and that's why X, Y and Z. Perhaps it's something dramatic on climate change. But that's not the point. I'm not running his campaign. But I think you need policy specifics that demonstrate the point.

So Obama says we Democrats know X, Y and Z is necessary. And I'm going to propose and commit to passing legislation in my first two years in office. And you can see I'm different because watch, Hillary won't follow me.

As it is, at the beginning of the last debate when they both made their basic pitch for their candidacy, it was Hillary's poll-tested platitudes and then Obama criticizing Hillary's establishmentarian platitudes with platitudes about change and other platitudes about avoiding platitudes.

Marshall then elaborated:

Many have made the argument about what I think Marc Schmit has called the Dems policy literalism. And it's a point I agree with. Strongly. But saying shared values doesn't make it so. And it's very easy to get led astray by a lot of jargon and nonsense. I probably should have been more clear. The point is not to beat Hillary on the issues. But if Obama's angle is to show he's more principled, less likely to sway in the political winds and so forth, he needs to ILLUSTRATE IT and not just assert it.

In other words, Democrats need to be convinced why they should cast aside their default choice, and Obama has failed to provide substantive issue-based reasons for doing so. Unlike Hundt, I'm also much less sanguine about new policy differences magically appearing that Obama could use. I don't know that they exist.

Update 11/19 12:57 PM: One more elaboration from Marshall gets to the heart of the matter (my bold):

My disappointment with Obama's campaign to date is that it's really, ironically, been pretty old politics to me. And I mean that in this sense. Going back several cycles, you've often had some version of the Gore v. Bradley campaign in 2000. One candidate who's the establishment party figure and another who talks about new stuff and change and principle and generally whets the appetites of the party's cerebral types but then never quite delivers with anything specific and gets crushed by the well-oiled campaign of the establishment candidate. I've seen different versions of this in Mondale/Hart, Clinton/Tsongas, Gore/Bradley. And the same result every time.

The reason it seemed like it might be different this time is that Obama was raising the kind of money that would allow him to match Hillary dollar for dollar in ads, foot soldiers and infrastructure. But so far I haven't seen a case made for Obama over Hillary behind the fact that it'd be cooler to have him as president than her -- a point I concede, but one I doubt is sufficient to get him the nomination.

And the truth is that however we got to this point, he needs to take the initiative and change the dynamic of the race. Or else the conclusion we're headed toward looks pretty clear.

Rove: Everything Hillary does is calculated

In a Newsweek column, Karl Rove tries to advance the Al Gore-esque narrative that everything Hillary does is calculated:

And against a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh, being seen as someone who says what he believes in a direct way will help.

Of course, Rove has no idea why Hillary laughed the way she did or used a Southern accent -- he's just pretending he can read her mind. As a result, I'm breaking out my swami graphic, which may become a regular feature in the next year.

Also, contra Sean Wilentz, Rove doesn't sound scared of Hillary:

The conventional wisdom now is that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. In reality, she's eminently beatable. Her contentious history evokes unpleasant memories. She lacks her husband's political gifts and rejects much of the centrism he championed. The health-care fiasco showed her style and ideology. All of which helps explain why, for a front runner in an open race for the presidency, she has the highest negatives in history.

Rove's last claim is a little strange, however. We haven't had a truly open race for the presidency (no incumbents or VPs) since 1952, so the claim is true almost by definition. A more relevant question is whether a non-incumbent/non-VP has ever had negatives this high so early in the race. My suspicion is that the answer is no.

The GOP is not scared of Hillary

In an interview with Newsweek.com, Sean Wilentz makes the case for Hillary Clinton. I'm sympathetic to his criticism of Barack Obama's anti-political tendencies, but his response to a question about Hillary's electability is weak:

You know who makes that argument more than anybody else? Republicans. This is a favorite Republican argument. They say, "We want to run against Hillary. She's the polarizing candidate and we're going to take advantage of that. She's going to rile up our base, et cetera, et cetera." Whenever Republicans tell us who they want us to nominate, we should nominate her. They're scared of her. Who else is going to build a coalition?

Saying Republicans are "scared of her" is such a silly claim. Every campaign says it is being attacked because the other side is scared -- John McCain's campaign manager just claimed "CNN is scared that John McCain will beat Hillary Clinton" -- and there's usually no way to resolve the question. More importantly, the evidence suggests that the GOP shouldn't be scared of Hillary. So why would we think otherwise?

The motive dodge

Writing on National Review, Mark Hemingway attempts to dismiss criticism of Ronald Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, MS by saying "Reagan isn't a racist":

Krugman's mentioned the Reagan/Nashoba incident four previous times over the last two years; Bob Herbert has mentioned it eight previous times going back to 1997. Enough already. Nobody believes Reagan is a bigot.

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of emails pointing out that of course people believe Reagan was a bigot. Let me clarify what I meant — nobody who has seriously examined the man and his political career believes that Reagan is a bigot.

But as Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias point out, that isn't actually what critics are alleging. Here's Krugman:

That is, of course, not the question. Reagan’s personal attitude is of no consequence. The question is whether he deliberately appealed to bigots, as a political tactic. And he did.

I would add that we can't know Reagan's true personal attitudes. But we can evaluate his record on the issue of race. And as I wrote (see here and here), Reagan did exploit the issue of race during his political career, though the speech in Mississippi has been exaggerated.

The issue recurs in today's New York Times op-ed by Lou Cannon defending Reagan, which focuses entirely on his personal views except for this parenthetical:

(Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

Yglesias correctly objects, though his post includes an unfortunate Hitler analogy (see here and here for our debate about them):

Reagan was a politician. His political views are what matters. And during the crucial civil rights fights of the mid-1960s, Reagan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the forces of white supremacy. How important Reagan's background as an anti-civil rights activist was to his 1980 election win seems debatable — I've previously noted that it wasn't a close election and the objective facts about the late 1970s would have made it extremely difficult for Carter to win re-election under any circumstances — but Reagan's record is his record, and his views about political issues are personal views, whether or not some of his best friends were black.

I've been struck by the use of this tactic since one of my first columns for Spinsanity on John Ashcroft's Attorney General nomination. Ashcroft's defenders won it by shifting the focus of the debate from his inflammatory public statements about race to his (unprovable) feelings about race by claiming his critics were calling him a racist:

This rhetorical trick left Ashcroft's opponents reeling. By most accounts, Ashcroft is a decent person who does not personally hate people on the basis of race - and no one can definitively prove otherwise (hence President Bush: "This is a good man; he's got a good heart"). But this does not mean that Ashcroft should be exempt from criticism for capitalizing on racial animus and being indifferent to civil rights in his political career...

In the end, Ashcroft's supporters created a standard that is effectively insurmountable, precluding race-related criticism of the more ambiguous political appeals, statements and positions that constitute the vast majority of American politics...

Sound familiar? In the end, the motive dodge is deeply undemocratic; it prevents us from judging public figures on their public actions. Debates about candidate's personal motives and beliefs are inherently futile.

Update 11/19 9:05 AM: Krugman addresses this point in his column today:

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

One more point: what, exactly, is the reasoning behind the Hemingway defense? Does he actually think that one must be a racist to exploit the issue of race? The logic of the response makes no sense to me.

Update 11/19 12:40 PM: Time's Jay Carney agrees that Reagan's personal views are irrelevant.

Obama: Still not about issues

Despite his obvious discomfort with going negative, Barack Obama has been slowly edging toward the "Hillary is too polarizing" pitch that Andrew Sullivan and I have advocated. The problem, however, is that his core message is still about process rather than issues -- and process candidates do not usually win primaries.

During last night's debate, for instance, Obama went after Hillary early on this point and she struck back with an issue critique that was much more effective (transcript, video):

SEN. OBAMA: Well, first of all, I’m really happy to be here in Nevada and I appreciate this opportunity.

Senator Clinton, I think, is a capable politician, and I think that she has run a terrific campaign. But what the American people are looking for right now is straight answers to tough questions. And that is not what we’ve seen out of Senator Clinton on a host of issues, on the issue of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

We saw in the last debate that it took not just that debate but two more weeks before we could get a clear answer in terms of where her position was. The same is true on Social Security. We have serious disagreements about how we’re going to make sure that Social Security is there for the people who need it.

And what I’m absolutely convinced of is that right now, we need a different kind of politics. Everywhere I go, all throughout Nevada, people are struggling with health care. People are working harder for less. They are having a tougher time saving, tougher time retiring. And part of the reason is because they don’t feel that Washington is listening to them.

And what I want to do in this campaign is make certain that we are breaking out of the gridlock and partisanship and the standard practices of Washington and actually start listening to the American people to get things done.

MR. BLITZER: All right. Senator Clinton, do you want to respond?

SEN. CLINTON: Well, I hear what Senator Obama is saying, and he talks a lot about stepping up and taking responsibility and taking strong positions. But when it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that. His plan would leave 15 million Americans out. That’s about the population of Nevada, Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire.

I have a universal health care plan that covers everyone. I’ve been fighting this battle against the special interest for more than 15 years, and I am proud to fight this battle. You know, we can have a different politic, but let’s not forget here that the people who we’re against are not going to be giving up without a fight. The Republicans are not going to vacate the White House voluntarily. We have some big issues ahead of us, and we need someone who is tested and ready to lead. I think that’s what my candidacy offers. (Cheers, applause.)

While Obama mentions a few issues in passing, his message is "I will create a different kind of politics," while Hillary's is "I am a leader who will fight for issues you care about like universal health care." Obama is going to lose that fight every time, particularly among downscale voters who aren't interested in process.

(Image from the New York Times)

David Brooks loves adjectives

Obscure historical justifications notwithstanding, the the table of adjectives about the candidates that David Brooks put together is utterly pointless. Couldn't they just run a slug that says "David Brooks didn't have a good column idea" and publish an actual article instead?

Don't trust Media Research Center

One thing I learned while working on Spinsanity is never to trust the Media Research Center, which continually puts out work based on quote-doctoring, taking things out of context, etc. (see here and here).

As a result, I wasn't surprised when Greg Sargent of TPM caught the supposed watchdogs of liberal media bias in the act:

Brent Bozell and Tim Graham are both top officials with a conservative media watchdog group called the "Media Research Center," an outfit that's devoted to ferreting out the fifth column liberal bias that has infected our media and is busily working to destroy our country from within.

Bozell and Graham have now co-authored an article for National Review calling on the media to stop lauding Hillary. One thing they hold up as proof of the media's liberal conspiracy to promote Hillary is this:

When it comes to Hillary Clinton, the national media have flagrantly abandoned their duty as a supposedly independent, dispassionate press. They have shamelessly served as cheerleaders for Mrs. Clinton from the moment she emerged on the national scene in 1992, with Time’s Margaret Carlson describing her as “an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

Wow -- did Margaret Carlson really describe Hillary in such gushing and cringe-worthy terms?

Well, no, as it turns out. No, she didn't.

The original article Carlson wrote is still online. Here's what she actually said:

Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She gets up before dawn, even on weekends, and before her first cup of coffee discusses educational reform. She then hops into her fuel-efficient car with her perfectly behaved daughter for a day of good works.

Fortunately, Hillary Clinton, the latest wife to be challenged to fit perfectly into the ill-defined role of political spouse, is more interesting than that.

As you can see, Carlson was actually mocking Hillary supporters for presenting her in such glowing terms. But Bozell and Graham cheerfully told National Review's readers that Carlson herself had presented her in these terms. Even more amusingly, they held this up as proof of the media's liberal bias.

Sargent then discovered that the chopped-up quote is a centerpiece of a book written by the duo, one of whom (Graham) actually defends the quote by saying the rest of the article is nice to Hillary. Unbelievable.

A unified theory of Russert

There's a strange fight going on in the progressive blogosphere over the behavior of Tim Russert.

Matthew Yglesias offered an essentially non-partisan critique of Russert's "gotcha" style that was endorsed by Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein.

The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby, who previously suggested that Russert had a partisan animus, then declared "It’s time to give up on Kevin and Matt and all the Good Boys of the Village suburbs." The reason? They failed to detect what Somerby considered to be Russert's disproportionately harsh treatment of Democrats, which he suggested was the result of partisan bias. (He made this suggestion again today.)

I actually agree with Somerby that Russert tends to be more aggressive in his questioning of Democrats. (Anyone remember his interview of Howard Dean during the last presidential campaign?) The problem, however, is that we can't know Russert's motives. More importantly, it is strange to assume that the ex-Democratic operative is wants to embarrass Democrats for partisan reasons.

There's a simpler explanation that seems more persuasive. Like most journalists, Russert is far more sensitive to the approval of his peers than to the opinion of the general public (they're a lot like academics). So how do you win acclaim for being a tough journalist? First, you grill your subjects on alleged inconsistencies and constantly try to throw them off message (his signature style). But you must also fend off any suggestion of liberal bias, a charge that could be especially potent for Russert given his history as a Democratic operative. As a result, it makes perfect sense for him to go overboard in grilling Democrats and to treat Republicans less harshly. There's no reason to think it has anything to do with partisan animus.

Update 11/15 10:20 AM: Yglesias wrote a new post last night clarifying his views:

[T]hough I don't really want to speculate as to Russert's motives, I think the impact of his methods is pretty unambiguously bad for Democrats. It's not a "partisan issue" in the sense that one could, in principle, be both a member of the Republican Party and also be a politician whose career would benefit from participating in a serious discussion of important issues, but in practice the whole ludicrous enterprise is a boon to the Party of Flim-Flam.

Obama's "process" email

A question: When you're being criticized for running a campaign about process, should you be sending out emails less than two months before Iowa with the subject "Change the process"? (PDF)

The NYT falls for the base rate fallacy

Why are journalists so bad with numbers?

Reader Joel Wiles passed on this example from a New York Times article on the aging of Japan's prison population:

Between 2000 and 2006, while the total population of Japanese 60 and over rose by 17 percent, inmates of the same age group swelled by 87 percent. In the country’s 74 prisons, the proportion of older inmates rose to 12.3 percent in 2006 from 9.3 percent in 2000, while the share of those in their 20s declined and in other age groups remained flat.

While the main reason behind the explosion in graying lawbreakers is the rapid aging of Japan’s population, the rates have far outpaced the increase of older people in the general population.

Between 2000 and 2006, while the total population of Japanese 60 and over rose by 17 percent, inmates of the same age group swelled by 87 percent. In the country’s 74 prisons, the proportion of older inmates rose to 12.3 percent in 2006 from 9.3 percent in 2000, while the share of those in their 20s declined and in other age groups remained flat.

Japan’s rates are much higher than those in the West. America’s prisons — where those 55 years and over are categorized as elderly — are also graying. But such prisoners accounted for only 4.6 percent of the total prison population in the United States in 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The phrase "Japan's rates are much higher than those in the West" falsely suggests that more elderly people are in prison in Japan than the US. However, while a higher percentage of prisoners in Japan are elderly, the proportion of the population that is both elderly and incarcerated is much greater in the US due to our dramatically higher incarceration rate (PDF). This is a classic example of what is known as the "base-rate fallacy." Can we get a statistical ombudsman or something?

A bizarre Bush defense from Peter Berkowitz

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers this paragraph as part of his argument for why it is wrong to hate President Bush:

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach--especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats--but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

Note how shallow these substantive points are. First, Berkowitz writes that "the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal," but fails to explain that it has endorsed the use of several techniques that are commonly viewed as torture. Then he congratulates the White House for complying with Supreme Court decisions, which I didn't realize was an action worthy of praise. Things must be worse than I thought if this is the best defense a conservative law professor can muster.

Cohen brings back third party hype

I was just thinking how nice it was that the persistent and unrealistic third party hype had finally died down, but then I read Richard Cohen and got annoyed all over again. Yes, he eventually allows that it is unlikely Bloomberg could win the presidency, but the whole column is still absurd:

The equilibrium of ineptitude -- fools at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue -- is not lost on the American people. They award Congress even lower approval ratings than they do the president, about 20 percent in the case of the Hill, about 30 percent in the case of George W. Bush. What they think of the crop of presidential candidates is not yet clear, but I, for one, pick up the paper in the morning and read that the economy is sinking, that oil could top $100 a barrel and that a pandemic of house foreclosures is sweeping our nation of sweet cul-de-sacs -- and the people who want to be president have precious little to say about any of these issues.

Enter Mike Bloomberg. He is the mayor of New York, endowed with near-universal support in his city and about $13 billion in the bank. Intimations of his presidential ambitions are getting stronger. He cooperated with a Newsweek cover story that, whether he intended it or not, left the clear impression that he can hardly be restrained from running. More to the point, his associates and friends do not, as you might expect, caution me against believing that a presidential run is under consideration. On the contrary, they fairly drool like Pavlov's famous mutts when the words "White House" are mentioned.

How such a feat can be accomplished -- how the electoral college can be won and how an independent can govern with a Congress composed of Democrats and Republicans -- is not the issue for the moment. Instead, what animates and energizes the hope of a Bloomberg candidacy is the utter failure of the current political establishment to deal with, not to mention solve, the immense problems facing us.

Michael Dukakis ran for the presidency partially on a platform of competence. The American people took one look at him in a battle tank and concluded that someone else should be commander in chief. Yet things may be different for a different Mike from, of all places, Massachusetts (Bloomberg grew up in Medford).

A glance at the sky shows more than winter's coming -- maybe a recession, too. All sorts of things are going wrong and some of them, like the crisis on Wall Street, cannot even be gauged. Just who will be stuck owning worthless paper based on worthless mortgages secured by nearly worthless houses is still unknown. Not even the financial institutions -- Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, etc. -- knew what was happening or know, will you believe, what is now happening. Bad times -- probably very bad times -- are coming.

So competence will have a certain charm. (And Bloomberg is not short on actual charm, either.) These circumstances, not to mention an ability -- if not a determination -- to spend maybe $1 billion on a campaign, could radically change American politics. The chances of this happening are not great, I know, but Ross Perot did get 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 (nary a vote in the electoral college, though) and he was perceived as a bit weird and totally unsuited for the presidency. Bloomberg is a different story altogether.

Will Mayor Mike run? He might. Can he win? I still doubt it. But my doubts are nothing compared with my chagrin when I read an op-ed by Karl Rove with which I keep nodding in agreement. It takes a pretty broken system for Rove to be right. Maybe it will take a Bloomberg billion to fix it.

Unfortunately for the Cohens and Broders of the world, "competence" -- which is code for their brand of establishment centrism -- is not an issue that will overthrow the two-party system.

Stephen Moore insults our intelligence

Supply-sider Stephen Moore, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, again suggests that tax cuts increase revenue:

The quality of this discourse rarely rises above the level of trash talk. Nevertheless, some arguments are repeated with such regularity that they need to be addressed. One is that supply-siders dishonestly claim that tax rate cuts increase tax revenues. Now, we can argue forever whether tax revenues would have been higher or lower without the Bush 2003 tax cuts. But one stubborn fact remains: Tax receipts are up, not down, by $745 billion in four years since the 2003 tax cuts.

It's one thing for the supply-side critics to have predicted four years ago that the Bush tax cuts would increase the budget deficit. But Mr. Surowiecki tells us, today, that "myriad studies" find that the Bush tax cuts "led to bigger budget deficits."

Bigger deficits? After the second Bush tax cut of 2003, the budget deficit tumbled to $163 billion in FY 2007 from $401 billion in FY 2003.

The point is obviously disingenuous. The consensus among economists, including those who work for the Bush administration, is that tax cuts decrease revenue all else equal. The fact that revenue has increased and deficits have declined over time proves nothing. Revenue would have increased more and the deficit would have declined more had the tax cuts not been in effect.

(For more on Stephen Moore, see my posts on him and our writing about him at Spinsanity.)

Update 11/14 10:09 AM: Donald Luskin makes a similar claim in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

When [rich people stop working in response to tax increases], Mr. Rangel will get a lesson in supply-side economics he'll never forget. Some say that the Laffer Curve is wrong, and that tax cuts don't result in higher tax revenues. But when America's most productive workers stop working -- even a little bit -- in reaction to the incentive effects of the "mother of all tax reform plans," they'll see that the Laffer Curve was right after all, and that it can cut both ways. Involuntary tax hikes result in voluntarily lower tax revenues.

Edwards: Unrealistic and unconstitutional

Via Christina Bellantoni, John Edwards has released an ad in Iowa that makes the misleading claim that he can take away health care from members of Congress:

The Clinton campaign's Fact Hub blog has posted a response citing my post on Edwards's proposal as well as one by Matthew Yglesias:

Sen. Edwards has a new TV advertisement about health care where he proposes the following law:

When I’m president, I’m going to say to members of Congress and members of my administration including my cabinet, I’m glad that you have health care coverage and your family has health care coverage. But if you don’t pass universal health care by July 2009, in six months, I’m going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.

The problem is, Sen. Edwards doesn't have the power to take health care away from Congress unilaterally—he'd have to propose a law. (Sen. Edwards himself has acknowledged this point.) And a law that takes away health coverage from Congress in July 2009 is unconstitutional according to the 27th Amendment:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Thus, since the law would change compensation for Congress before the next Congressional election (2010), it would violate the 27th amendment. The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias and All The President's Spin author Brendan Nyhan agree.

I love how I'm cited as if I'm some sort of constitutional law expert. But I'm pretty confident I'm right that the law would be invalidated. And even if I'm wrong, do you think Congress will vote to drop its own health care?

More on Krugman vs. Brooks

Various liberal bloggers (here, here, and here) are concluding that Paul Krugman was right in his debate with David Brooks over the meaning of Ronald Reagan's 1980 speech in Philadelphia, MS. The key point, according to Kevin Drum, is this:

Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance.

If this is true it wraps up this argument on pretty much every level, both substantive and semantic. Anybody care to weigh in on this? Is it true that Reagan had never (or virtually never) used the phrase "states's rights" before this speech?

I'd agree that this, if confirmed, would be relevant evidence. I found articles predating the speech in which Reagan indicated support for a federalist approach to economic and land use policy (see below the fold) -- two issues with no clear racial implications. However, he is not quoted using the loaded phrase "states' rights" in either article.

Taking a step back, I want to be clear what my original post on this subject was arguing. I am not saying that Reagan's use of the phrase "state's rights" in Philadelphia, MS wasn't an appeal to racist sentiment. As I wrote, Reagan frequently appealed to race in ugly ways. My point was that the circumstances of the speech have frequently been oversimplified. For instance, take the way Paul Krugman described it in one column:

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered.

From this description, you would think that Reagan's speech focused on state's rights. But as David Brooks writes, the phrase was invoked once in a short passage on education:

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: "Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level."

The use of the phrase is inappropriate and inflammatory in that context, but the overall content of the speech still doesn't correspond well to Krugman's description. From his account, you would also not know the Reagan spent the following week appealing to black voters, as Brooks notes. There's no excusing appeals to racism, but there's no reason to exaggerate them either. Many other things Reagan said and did were much worse.

Update 11/13 1:23 PM -- Tom Maguire continues the search in a comment:

How precisely must we match the loaded "state's rights" phrase?

From his days as Governor, here is Reagan in 1967 - the topic was federal legislation on water use:

We believe the essential ingredients of an acceptable augmentation study to be: ...(4) that the rights of the states and regions be fully respected;

And in general remarks to some Republicans in 1967:

It is not enough for our senators and our representatives to seek to pass legislation involving the several states, they must also work to insure that legislation does not infringe on the rights of the individual states...

And that is not the product of a comprehensive search - I just went to a collection of Reagan speeches and clicked on two likely ones.

That said, the book "In His Own Hand" - the collection of Reagan radio addresses - does not contain the loaded phrase, if we can trust an Amazon search.