Brendan Nyhan

The WSJ's postmodern scare quotes

Wall Street Journal editorial page fans such as myself have come to love their use of scare quotes, which is as incoherent as their ideas about economics.

Their two favorite subjects for scare quoting are, naturally, tax cuts and torture. As I wrote last year, drawing on the seminal work of TNR's Jon Chait and Isaac Chotiner, the Journal has referred to (in quotes) "the deficit," the "cost" of fixing the alternative minimum tax, and "torture" by American interrogators. Presumably, the goal is to call the reality of these concepts into question (rather than, say, the editors' sanity).

While these implicit claims are absurd as matters of fact, the Journal's use of scare quotes to call a word or phrase into question is at least grammatically correct. But as Chotiner noted back in October, the WSJ also uses scare quotes in ways that make no sense:

[T]hey go on to continue putting torture in quotes every time they use the word, regardless of context. So, for example:

The notion that the U.S. goes around unnecessarily "torturing" people...

C'mon guys! Even you admit that the United States is "torturing" people; you just don't think that we are torturing people.

Then, a few weeks ago, Chotiner noticed it happening again:

[T]hey seem to simply be placing quotation marks around words for no particular reason at all. The piece begins:

We've been saying for some time that the economy could use another tax cut, so perhaps we should be pleased that Washington is suddenly talking about a fiscal "stimulus." The challenge now is getting politicians to distinguish between policies that actually "stimulate" and the equivalent of dropping hundred dollar bills from helicopters.

No, no, no! Why is the word "stimulate" in quotation marks? They are discussing real stimulation, not "stimulation". But now to something they don't like--spending:

As for "spending it," we tried this a few years back and it didn't work very well.

No again! If the Journal wants to accuse people of spending money, they should not put quotes around "spending". It reads as if the Democrats did not actually spend the money, when of course the Journal thinks they did! Can someone please discuss this problem with the paper's editors?

The latest example comes from an editorial today on the controversy over Attorney General Michael Mukasey's position on waterboarding. It leads off with a string of scare quotes around "waterboarding" and torture":

If Senate Democrats thought Attorney General Michael Mukasey was someone they could push around to score political points, yesterday they discovered their error. The new AG stood his ground on the legal war on terror, despite five hours of grandstanding over an interrogation technique that the CIA doesn't even practice anymore.

We refer, of course, to "waterboarding," which the political left has made into a proxy for the Bush Administration's alleged "torture" of enemy combatants, which Democrats seem to think is a winning political issue.

The Journal, continuing directly, then puts "illegal" in scare quotes:

Thus the grilling of Mr. Mukasey to prod him to declare that he had now concluded that "waterboarding" is in fact "illegal." Democrats would then be able to flog the Bush Administration from here to November, declaring that "even Attorney General Mike Mukasey says..."

But this, again, is wrong -- Mukasey would hypothetically be concluding that waterboarding is actually illegal (not "illegal").

Finally, the Journal credits Mukasey with refusing to discuss a hypothetical, referring to his "point about 'context'":

Mr. Mukasey was true to his promise during confirmation hearings to investigate the legality of government interrogation practices. And so yesterday he certified that all techniques currently in use are legal. However, in a letter to the Senate, he added that, "I do not believe it is advisable to address difficult legal questions ... in the absence of concrete facts and circumstances."

This displeased some of the Senators, who accused him of dodging the waterboarding issue. But Mr. Mukasey is right to avoid hypothetical legal judgments over something that is no longer practiced. The former judge was careful to point out that legality depends on context, and he couldn't judge the actions of others in 2002 without knowing the circumstances.

...Judge Mukasey's point about "context" is something that Democrats surely understand, since many of their leaders... were briefed about waterboarding at the time. There's no evidence they objected then. But they're making a fuss now that their anti-antiterror supporters have made "torture" a campaign theme...

Why is "context" in scare quotes the second time it is used? The Journal doesn't quote Mukasey saying the word and they agree with him that context is relevant. Can someone send a high school English teacher over to Paul Gigot's house?

(PS If the incorrect use of quotation marks drives you nuts, you'll love The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, which I found via a commenter on one of Chotiner's original posts. Pure genius.)

The jargon of "Juan McCain"

A commenter on an old post of mine just referred to John McCain as "Juan McCain." The nickname, a nasty reference to his previous support for comprehensive immigration reform, turns out be all over conservative message boards. (It's the McCain equivalent of "Barack Osama/Barack Hussein Osama", which is still circulating -- it was just used on Fox News by a conservative radio host the other day and was mentioned by a Missouri voter interviewed in the New York Times today.)

Update 2/1 10:00 AM: Think Progress flags Glenn Beck and a fill-in host using "Juan McCain" on his radio show and in an email to listeners.

David Rohde on Fresh Air

One of my faculty mentors at Duke, David Rohde, is interviewed on today's edition of Fresh Air:

Delegates, superdelegates, penalized states with half their delegates — or none. This year's political primaries are putting renewed focus on the delegate system, but what does it all mean?

Political scientist David Rohde joins us to unravel the complexities of the primary system, and about how the withdrawals of candidates John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani will affect the campaign.

Check it out on your local NPR station or online (audio will be up at the link above at about 4 PM EST).

Giuliani on formatting McCain adjectives

Rudy Giuliani forgets the old writer's adage "show, don't tell" in his McCain endorsement speech:

He's a man of honor and integrity, and you can underline both 'honor' and 'integrity.'

Can I italicize them too? Maybe put them in bold?

The search for Giuliani defeat narratives

In the same way that journalists attribute general election defeats to various quirks of the candidates rather than, say, the state of the economy (see Dole, Bob), there's currently a rush to "explain" Rudy Giuliani's collapse. The New York Times offers this litany:

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.

He accumulated a fat war chest — he had $16.6 million on hand at the end of September, more than Mitt Romney ($9.5 million) or Senator John McCain ($3.2 million) — but spent vast sums on direct mail instead of building strong organizations on the ground in South Carolina and New Hampshire.

...[C]uriously, this man with the pugnacious past declined to toss more than light punches at his Republican opponents.

But as I wrote before, Giuliani is fundamentally unacceptable to the GOP. Like Joe Lieberman in 2004, his early lead in the polls was built on name recognition but he was never going to win. This passage in the Times article comes closer to the real dynamics at work:

Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.

Update 2/1 10:24 AM: The Washington Post has a long account of the tactical failures of Rudy's campaign. The prevailing theme, though, is that he was fundamentally unacceptable to conservatives.

Will liberals embrace dishonesty post-Bush?

It makes me sad to see Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein -- two of the best young liberal pundits out there -- soft-pedaling the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton's recent attacks on Barack Obama.

On January 14, Yglesias wrote that "the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her." While this statement may have been tongue in cheek, he added the following last week:

Paul Waldman says Hillary Clinton is going after Barack Obama just like a Republican would -- without a lot of honesty or conscience. Frankly, I don't have a big problem with that. As Ezra Klein says "The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican."

Here's what Klein wrote on the same subject:

I'm a bit conflicted over this Paul Waldman column. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton is running a bare-knuckled, often unfair campaign, and pundits should mention that. On the other, the sort of attacks she's levying -- misrepresenting Obama's payroll tax plan, or exaggerating his comments about Reagan -- are pretty much par for the course. We're not hitting some sort of new low in politics, here. And the overarching theme of Waldman's column -- that Clinton is "running like a Republican" -- almost pushes me to her side on the issue. The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican.

This is part of the general trend toward liberals embracing dishonest spin tactics that we discussed in the conclusion of All the President's Spin as a response to the success of the spin tactics of the Bush administration. It's the reason we've seen the rise of framing gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen and organizations like the Center for American Progress.

Clinton's campaign also seems to be following Bush's lead in its approach to the press. Michael Crowley's description in TNR of the way the Clintonites interact with the press will sound familiar to anyone who has read about the struggle to report on the current administration:

Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument... Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Here's a similar excerpt from Ken Auletta's 2004 New Yorker story on the Bush administration's approach to the press:

What seems new with the Bush White House is the unusual skill that it has shown in keeping much of the press at a distance while controlling the news agenda. And for perhaps the first time the White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders—pleaders for more access and better headlines—as if the press were simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.

...Dana Milbank, one of three reporters whom the Post assigns to the White House, says that the Administration speaks with one voice partly because officials have “talking points that they e-mail to friends and everyone says exactly the same thing. You go through the effort of getting Karl Rove on the phone and he’ll say exactly the same thing as Scott McClellan”—the White House press secretary. NBC's David Gregory says, “My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach with the White House press corps, generally speaking, to engage us as little as possible.”

...The White House was enraged by an article by Dana Milbank, which appeared on October 22, 2002, under the headline "For Bush, Facts are Malleable"... According to Maralee Schwartz, the Post’s national political editor, Fleischer, Hughes, and Rove each complained to her about him, and suggested that he might be the wrong person for the job. The White House now says that it does not “believe that anybody has ever asked for his removal.”

The White House, Milbank says, tried to freeze him out, and for a time stopped returning his calls.

(Howard Kurtz reported yesterday that the Obama campaign is also keeping reporters at arm's length, though it's not clear that their animus against the press is as great as the Clinton campaign's is.)

Sadly, our prediction in ATPS that the next president will follow Bush's lead is likely to come true:

Some citizens might hope that things will get better when Bush leaves office. But the problem is unlikely to disappear regardless of who occupies the White House. Bush's presidency has changed the rules of the game, accelerating a larger trend toward PR-driven deception. By altering the incentives for other politicians and political organizations, Bush has fueled an ongoing arms race in which both sides employ ever more sophisticated tactics to manipulate the public and the press.

Yglesias and Klein should talk to Andrew Sullivan, who praised the "rhetorical smoke screen" of the Bush administration's campaign for tax cuts back in 2001 but has since come to recognize the corrosive effects of the administration's dishonesty. Let's hope they see the light a little sooner.

(Meta-comment: Isn't it strange that Yglesias and Klein are declaring their comfort with Clinton's dishonesty? The conservatives whose tactics Yglesias and Klein think liberals should copy don't advocate dishonesty in public. In fact, they'll swear up and down that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, that the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all accurate, etc.)

Two-candidate dynamics in the GOP race

John McCain has won Florida. As a result, Rudy Giuliani apparently dropping out to endorse him (hurray!). Though Mike Huckabee seems to be staying in the race, it should become something of a two-man showdown between Mitt Romney and McCain heading into Super Tuesday.

Under these circumstances, we would tend to expect conservative elites and the activist base to coalesce around Romney, the more conservative candidate, and beat McCain in closed GOP primaries, as a Talking Points Memo reader suggests. I predicted (perhaps foolishly) back in 2005 that the conservative establishment would block a McCain nomination in the same way it did back in 2000.

However, as Charlie Cook points out, McCain is widely (and probably correctly) seen as the party's best hope of preventing a Clinton or Obama presidency, which may be why he's getting strong support from Republican elected officials. Also, the contempt for Mitt Romney among conservative elites seems to run pretty deep and McCain will get fawning media coverage for the next week.

But there's an additional factor that could hurt Romney's chances which no one is talking about yet. For him to beat McCain, he needs conservatives who were backing Huckabee to switch over and vote strategically for him as the best alternative to McCain. But many of Huckabee's supporters are evangelical Christians who may not be comfortable with Romney's Mormon beliefs. Will they make the switch? It's not clear.

Update 1/30 9:15 AM: Via Ross Douthat, exit poll data from Florida shows that "49% of those who voted for Rudy today picked Mitt Romney as their 2nd choice while 44% picked McCain" while "those who voted for Huckabee overwhelmingly picked McCain as their top 2nd choice over Mitt Romney, 54% to 32%." I'm puzzled about what's going on, but this is certainly not good news for Romney.

SOTU "average" tax cut stat

As Matthew Yglesias notes, the State of the Union (which I skipped) includes yet another misleading "average" statistic about the tax cuts:

Unless Congress acts, most of the tax relief we've delivered over the past seven years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800.

Actually, the Tax Policy Center estimates that the middle income quintile will received an average tax cut of $814 in 2010 from the 2001-2006 tax cuts. The "average" of $1,800 is skewed upward by the vast tax cuts received by those with the highest incomes.

The missing earmark caveat

Kudos to David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, who included this disclaimer in his story on President Bush's quixotic effort to scale back earmarks:

As lawmakers know, earmarks, which make up less up than 1 percent of the federal budget, have incalculable political value. Congressional leaders award or withhold them to reward or punish lawmakers. Incumbents like to use federal money to curry favor with donors and constituents.

Like welfare and foreign aid, the cost of earmarks as a proportion of the federal budget are vastly exaggerated. Sadly, I'm guessing most stories today will omit this necessary context.

Rudy Giuliani flames out

Sad but fitting:

The Giuliani campaign chartered a 727 on Monday for a day of barnstorming on the eve of Tuesday’s big primary, but none of the rallies at airports in Sanford, Clearwater, Fort Myers or Fort Lauderdale drew even a hundred supporters.

...And Mr. Giuliani — who as mayor once told a man who called in to his weekly radio show to protest the city’s ban on pet ferrets that “there is something deranged about you” — called Monday for an end to the “name-calling” in the race for president.

Monday was the first time in the campaign that Mr. Giuliani had allowed the traveling press to fly with him. But the crowds at some of the airport rallies were so small that it might have been more efficient to fly them to the candidate, instead of vice versa.

When the microphone went out at the first rally, outside the airport in Sanford, the crowd was intimate enough that the actor Jon Voight, who was introducing Mr. Giuliani, found that he did not need it. “I can talk to you guys!” he said, perfectly audibly, as he lowered the broken microphone.

Rudy is the Joe Lieberman of 2008 -- his name recognition led to strong early numbers in national polling, but he's just fundamentally unacceptable to the base. People have mocked his strategy of waiting until Florida to compete, but what was he supposed to do? He tried to campaign in New Hampshire earlier but it didn't work.

Matt Welch's anti-McCain primer

If you've neglected my recommendation of Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick make sure to check out Welch's debunking of the various myths about his unwavering devotion to honesty, principle, and "straight talk" that newspapers have been pushing in their endorsement editorials. Inoculate yourself before Super Tuesday!

Sheryl Gay Stolberg fails Stat 101

Once again, a journalist has misinformed the public due to a fundamental lack of understanding of basic quantitative data.

In today's New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes that President Bush "has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents."

But as Dean Baker points out (via Ezra Klein), the actual economic data (!) show that "President Bush's growth record is better than his father's, but it is worse than the record of every other president in the last half century" -- here's the graphic Klein made:

Indeed, when compared to economic recoveries in the post-World War II era, the current one lags by virtually every measure, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed:

How can Stolberg not know this? And why is the Times letting her write about this subject without the assistance of someone who does?

Postscript: Much later in the article, Stolberg does state that "[t]he economic expansion that came after [Bush's] tax cuts has largely benefited the wealthy." While this is accurate, it implicitly assigns undeserved credit for the expansion to Bush's tax cuts. Also, according to the NBER committee that dates recessions, the expansion began in November 2001 -- after Bush's first tax cut but before his second one.

Update 1/29 7:45 AM: What's especially pernicious about this is that Stolberg's statement about Bush's record of economic growth doesn't quite count as an error in the journalistic sense, so it probably won't be corrected. But if the Times misspells your name, you can guarantee they'll promptly correct the record. What a bizarre culture.

The ironies of dynastic politics

Barack Obama's campaign against one political dynasty (the Clintons) is endorsed from the descendant of another one (Caroline Kennedy).

Why do we care again?

Update 1/28 10:06 AM: On the other hand, today's endorsement from Ted Kennedy is a much bigger deal. In particular, as TNR's Jonathan Cohn and a commenter below note, it could help Obama with Latinos and working class whites.

Update 1/28 2:23 PM: Josh Marshall offers a similar take:

If the issue is dynasticism in politics, I guess there's some measure of irony in the group endorsement I'm now listening to from the Kennedy family.

Obama white vote exceeds expectations

Contrary to a previous poll showing him with support from only ten percent of whites in South Carolina, Barack Obama got a quarter of the white vote:

About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama. Black women turned out in particularly large numbers. Obama, the first-term Illinois senator, got a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.

Nonetheless, the racializing of Obama as the "black candidate" (see here and here, among many other things) spells trouble on Super Tuesday. Shame on the Clinton campaign and their surrogates for helping to bring us to this point.

Bob Herbert quotes random blog comment

Today Bob Herbert questions the nasty attacks on Barack Obama by Clinton surrogates -- a fine subject for a column. But then he transitions to a random quotation from the Internet:

The Clinton camp knows what it’s doing, and its slimy maneuvers have been working. Bob Kerrey apologized and Andrew Young said at the time of his comment that he was just fooling around. But the damage to Senator Obama has been real, and so have the benefits to Senator Clinton of these and other lowlife tactics.

Consider, for example, the following Web posting (misspellings and all) from a mainstream news blog on Jan. 13:

“omg people get a grip. Can you imagine calling our president barak hussien obama ... I cant, I pray no one would be disrespectful enough to put this man in our whitehouse.”

Herbert's reference to a "Web posting" on a "mainstream news blog" suggests that the news organization wrote the quotation in question, when it was actually just a random comment on an ABC News blog post about Bob Kerrey's reference to Obama's middle name. Memo to pundits: Stop quoting random web commenters. You can find a crazy comment on any blog -- it just doesn't prove anything.

Obama's low white support in SC

I've been worried about Barack Obama's relatively low support among whites but these numbers from South Carolina are worse than I expected:

But while Mr. Obama seeks to transcend race, his campaign cannot avoid the politics associated with it. A new poll on Friday, conducted by MSNBC/McClatchy Newspapers, showed that Mr. Obama was winning support from 59 percent of black voters in South Carolina but only 10 percent of white voters. The majority of the white voters are splitting their support between Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards, the native son.

The national numbers are also showing heavy racial polarization:

In the poll last month, Mrs. Clinton held a 40 percent to 23 percent lead over Mr. Obama among whites, as well as support from a majority of African-Americans. Mrs. Clinton’s lead among whites has widened, 53 percent to 24 percent, and Mr. Obama has a 63 percent to 23 percent lead over Mrs. Clinton among African-Americans.

It was probably inevitable that Obama would end up with more support among blacks than whites, but it's sad that the priming of racial issues (often by Clinton surrogates) seems to have actually hurt him among whites over the last month.

McCain's anti-Hillary Google ad

John McCain is running this lovely anti-Hillary Google ad, which just showed up in my sidebar:

If you click on the ad, you go to a mock quiz touting McCain's electability against Hillary.

NYT questions McCain's supply-side claims

Unlike last week's article by Michael Cooper, today's New York Times report by David Leonhardt (an economics reporter) questions John McCain's pattern of claiming that tax cuts increase revenue:

On several occasions over the last year, Mr. McCain has said that tax cuts can reduce the deficit by spurring additional activity that, in turn, leads to more taxes being paid. But numerous studies have found that not to be the case.

In the interview, Mr. McCain said, referring to tax cuts, “Whether they actually pay for themselves dollar for dollar, obviously there are differences in opinion.”

"[D]ifferences in opinion" between ... Arthur Laffer and virtually every economist. Close enough!

(PS The article is pretty credulous about McCain's claims that he will be able to cut spending significantly. Doing so with a Democratic Congress is likely to be difficult to impossible.)

Laffer on the conspiracy against him

Supply-side guru Arthur Laffer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the case for the fantasy that tax cuts increase revenue:

In the 1920s, the highest federal marginal income tax rate fell to 24% from 78%. Those people who earned over $100,000 had their share of total taxes paid rise -- from 29.9% in 1920 to 48.8% in 1925, and then to 62.2% in 1929. There was no inflation over this period.

With the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s, when the highest tax rate fell from to 70% from 91%, the story was the same. When you cut the highest tax rates on the highest-income earners, government gets more money from them, and when you cut tax rates on the middle and lower income earners, the government gets less money from them.

Even these data grossly understate the total supply-side response. A cut in the highest tax rates will increase lots of other tax receipts. It will lower government spending as a consequence of a stronger economy with less unemployment and less welfare. It will have a material, positive impact on state and local governments. And these effects will only grow with time.

The suggestion of a political conspiracy against his ideas in the concluding paragraph (which follows directly) is the best part, however:

Trained economists know all of this is true, but they try to rebut the facts nonetheless because they believe it will curry favor with their political benefactors.

So why have current and former Bush administration economists publicly contradicted President Bush and other administration officials who claim tax cuts increase revenue? They have no political incentive to do so. And what about the overwhelming majority of economists with no political ties who agree with them?

The NYT doesn't endorse Rudy

In the course of endorsing John McCain, the New York Times rips apart Rudy Giuliani:

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

Tell us what you really think!

Yet more McCain supply-side "straight talk"

Jon Chait catches the latest supply-side flim-flam from John McCain:

Mr. McCain proclaimed himself a believer in the notion that cutting taxes increases revenue for the government by spurring economic growth. “Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes,” Mr. McCain told supporters gathered here under a tent in a driving rain. “Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues. And is there anybody here that needs to have their taxes increased?”

The campaign did not put a dollar figure on the cost of the tax cut. Asked later how he would pay for it, Mr. McCain said that he would start by eliminating pork-barrel spending.

As Chait notes, the statement is obviously false yet it was not fact-checked by the New York Times, which reported it without comment. They have little excuse -- McCain and the other Republican presidential candidates has made similar statements numerous times before. Here's a timeline I compiled from my previous posts to illustrate the point (it is posted permanently here and will be updated as the campaign continues):

Rudy Giuliani
"When I became mayor of New York City, things were out of control. I lowered taxes, I reduced the growth of government, made government more accountable, and New York City boomed. I would do these things for America because I know they work. I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues. Democrats don’t know that. They don’t believe that." (11/29/07).

"Remember, you collect more money with lower taxes than you do with higher taxes. I reduced the income tax in New York by twenty-four percent, and I was collecting forty percent more revenues from the lower tax than the higher tax" (9/28/07).

"I regard myself as a supply-sider for sure. I mean, watched Ronald Reagan do it and learned it, saw it work. Taxes get reduced, more revenue come in" (3/27/07).

John McCain
"Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes. Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues" (1/17/08).

"I would suggest that most economists agree that there was an increase in revenues... associated with the tax cuts" (12/5/07).

"Tax cuts—tax cuts increase revenues. The tax cuts, the revenues increased because of it. The spending outpaced the tax cuts" (11/27/07).

"Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues. So what’s the argument for increasing taxes? If you get the opposite effect out of tax cuts?" (3/5/07).

Mitt Romney
"If you lower taxes enough, you create more growth. And if you create growth, you get more jobs. You get more jobs, more people are paying taxes. You get more taxes paid, the government has more money by charging lower tax rates" (3/29/07).

Fred Thompson
"The results of the experiment that began when Congress passed a series of tax-rate cuts in 2001 and 2003 are in. Supporters of those cuts said they would stimulate the economy. Opponents predicted ever-increasing budget deficits and national bankruptcy unless tax rates were increased, especially on the wealthy.

"In fact, Treasury statistics show that tax revenues have soared and the budget deficit has been shrinking faster than even the optimists projected. Since the first tax cuts were passed, when I was in the Senate, the budget deficit has been cut in half" (4/14/07).

Even President Bush's economists disagree. So when are reporters going to start speaking up?

(PS McCain's quote doesn't really make sense -- presumably he is saying not to listen to the "siren song" of raising taxes, not cutting them. And just to point out the obvious, he doesn't need to explain how to pay for his tax cut if it will increase revenues. Even answering the question exposes the absurdity of his claim.)

A test of the "RATS" effect

Do you remember the controversy over the Bush campaign's negative ad in 2000 that flashed the word "RATS"? It seemed like a silly issue, but I just came across a paper in which Joel Weinberger and Drew Westen (the newfound Democratic strategy guru) find that a subliminal stimulus in the word "RATS" is flashed "increased negative ratings of an unknown politician." (They also find that subliminal exposure to Bill Clinton's picture decreased negative ratings of both an unknown politician and former California governor Gray Davis.)

When tax families attack!

Paul Krugman notes the return of "tax families" in a White House fact sheet on the president's views on economic stimulus:

While passing a new growth package is our most pressing economic priority, Congress needs to turn next to the most important economic priority for our country - making sure the tax relief that is now in place is not taken away. The President's tax cuts are set to expire in less than three years. If Congress allows that to happen, we will see an end to many of the measures that have helped our economy grow - including the 10 percent individual income tax bracket, repeal of the Federal death tax, reductions in the marriage penalty, the expansion of the child tax credit, and reduced rates on regular income, capital gains, and dividends. This would mean that:
-A single mom with two children and $30,000 in earnings would see her taxes go up by 67 percent.
-An elderly couple with $40,000 in income would see their taxes go up by about 155 percent.
-Twenty-six million small business owners would see their taxes increase by nearly 17 percent - or about $4,000 on average.

However, these examples are selectively chosen and the "average" small business owner tax cut is highly unrepresentative -- see All the President's Spin and Spinsanity for much more on the administration's misleading use of statistics in promoting its tax cut proposals.

Demand for Bloomberg surges!

Eight days after launch, the Draft Bloomberg petition is up to 1971 signatures!

And I thought Unity '08 (35,000 members in eight months and 124,000 members at the time of its hiatus) was a debacle...

PS Only 14 percent of the public has a favorable view of Bloomberg according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll last month (14% favorable, 30% neutral, 23% unfavorable, 33% don't know/not sure), and he drew approximately 10 percent of the vote in trial heats late last year. Clearly the American people are clamoring for his candidacy...

Matthew Yglesias reads McCain's mind

Matthew Yglesias is usually pretty careful, but this McCain riff is Dowd-level mind reading -- time to break out the swami:

After all, throughout all his flipping and flopping and back again of the past ten years, the "cares about people in economic pain" persona is one he's never tried on. And I think he's never tried it on because it runs contrary to his entire schtick, which is all about finding causes greater than ourselves, salvation through nationalism, etc., etc. On some emotional level, he probably thinks a woman who needs to declare bankruptcy because [she] racked up massive credit card bills while her uninsured husband was dying of cancer should just grin and bear it the way he did as a POW. (emphasis mine)

Update 1/23 8:11 PM: Yglesias concedes error in a much more reasonable followup analysis of why McCain might be vulnerable on the economy.

Worrying too much about debates

Based on his performance in last night's slugfest (which I skipped but caught up on this morning), Josh Marshall worries about Barack Obama's ability to defend himself in the general election:

One observation stands out to me from this debate. Hillary can be relentless and like a sledgehammer delivering tendentious but probably effective attacks. But whatever you think of those attacks, Obama isn't very good at defending himself. And that's hard for me to ignore when thinking of him as a general election candidate.

Marshall shouldn't worry too much. There's a general tendency among pundits and reporters to overthink the role of debates, but as the eminent UNC political scientist Jim Stimson shows in Chapter 4 of his book Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics, the evidence that they make much difference is limited. By the time the debates happen in the fall, the eventual winner has generally taken the lead that he will hold until the end, as this graphic (which combines the trajectories of 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 2000) illustrates:

Here are the trajectories of the specific races:

While you can tell stories about debates mattering on the margin in a few close elections, Stimson's conclusion is that their influence is vastly exaggerated:

What can we conclude, then, about the debates? What we have seen is perhaps some influence. The evidence is inconclusive to say either that debates matter or they do not. But if they do matter at all, their influence is vastly smaller than, say, the conventions. The reelection landslides show that once voters have decided, debates will not change the outcome.

There is no case in which we can trace a substantial shift to the debates. But in elections that were close at debate times, there are cases (1960, 1980, 2000) where the debates might have been the final nudge. As to why they are so often featured as the central story line of a presidential election campaign, I lean to the idea that they are conveniently available TV footage.

Stimson's argument suggests that Democrats who are concerned about electability should put less weight on debating performance and focus more on other considerations -- in particular, Obama's vastly superior favorability ratings. (Of course, Hillary backers and Ezra Klein will dispute that point, but Jon Chait does a nice job of summing up why they are probably wrong.)

Rudy Giuliani's obsession with payback

It's a good thing Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is collapsing. In addition to his contempt for democratic checks and balances and crazy foreign policy advisers, he has a shameful record of using the powers of government to punish his political enemies, as the New York Times reports today:

Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy...

Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessness and became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.

After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.

Do you want that man in charge of the Justice Department and the FBI?

Mitt Romney makes America cringe

Things that make me uncomfortable -- Mitt Romney dropping some hip-hop knowledge in Florida:

Mitt Romney, whose 1950s manner and celebratory drink of choice call to mind a milkshake man more than a rap singer, gave a shout out Monday that left no doubt that he had spent little time listening to hip-hop.

Mr. Romney, the Republican candidate from Massachusetts by way of Michigan and Utah who enjoys a milkshake at the end of a long day, stopped by a staging area for a Martin Luther King Birthday parade here. In his dress shirt and tie, and with his unwavering smile, he walked over and posed for photographs with a group of black youngsters. Putting his arm around a teenage girl, he waved to the cameras and offered, “Who let the dogs out?” He added a tepid “woof woof.”

Somewhere, the Baha Men, the Bahamian group whose 2000 song the candidate was referencing, must have been shuddering.

Kevin Madden, one of Mr. Romney’s campaign boyz on the bus, said the candidate had been joking around and had responded to someone who asked, “Who let you out?”

Later, Mr. Romney admired a child’s gold necklace and said, “Oh, you’ve got some bling-bling here.”

On the other hand, any New York Times article that mentions the Baha Men is a good one. Maybe Romney can get them to open for him -- I'm sure they're available...

Dog bites man: Earmarks will continue

This has to be one of the most mundane political headlines ever: "Earmarks Seen Likely to Continue". Yes. For me, it's right up there with Michael Kinsley's favorites "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative" and "Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality."

An Obama ceiling in white support?

The pundits are trying to figure out if or when John Edwards will drop out of the Democratic race and which candidate would benefit if he did so. Given his apparent leanings toward Obama, one reason for Edwards to stay in, as the New York Times notes today, is that he splits the white vote with Hillary:

some political strategists say Mr. Edwards also has another compelling reason to stay in, at least in South Carolina. He could end up sharing the white vote with Mrs. Clinton, thus helping Mr. Obama, whom Mr. Edwards has signaled he favors.

As Phil Klinkner points out at Polysigh, Obama's white support has been disturbingly low and consistent, suggesting a possible ceiling in the support he draws from whites:

The exit polls from Nevada provide more evidence that Obama has been unable to break out of his ceiling of approximately one-third of the white vote. In fact, in each of the three Democratic contests thus far, Obama's support among whites has been remarkably consistent:

Iowa: 35%
New Hampshire: 36%
Nevada: 34%

If this 35% ceiling does, in fact, exist, it's interesting to compare it to Jesse Jackson's performance in 1988. Despite the passage of 20 years and the fact that Jackson and Obama are very different candidates and personalities, Obama hasn't performed significantly better than Jackson. During the 1988 primaries, especially once the race narrowed down to Dukakis and Jackson, Jackson's white support ranged between 20 and 35 percent.

I want to believe that a ceiling doesn't exist or at least that it isn't that low. We've come a long way as a country since 1988, and Obama is a very different candidate than Jackson was. But those exit poll numbers make me nervous...

Why Tom Brokaw makes the big bucks

Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press this morning:

I've just gotten back from Florida. Rudy Giuliani's ads on the air don't mention terrorism. He's the man who reduced the corporate taxes in the city of New York, created new jobs, reduced crime and also took a lot of people off the welfare rolls.

Rudy's new ad airing in Florida:

Voice Over: “When corruption ruled, he challenged it. When welfare failed, he changed it. When crime thrived, he fought it. When government broke, he fixed it. And when the world wavered. And history hesitated. He never did. Rudy Giuliani. Leadership. When it matters most.”

Mayor Giuliani: “I’m Rudy Giuliani and I approve this message.”

It's insights like these that make Russert's roundtables unwatchable.

Obama: I actually have a weakness

This riff by Barack Obama on the Democratic debate in Nevada is great stuff:

But there's nothing subtle about Las Vegas. With a high-stakes match on the line Saturday, Obama embraced local traditions by debuting a biting political standup routine Thursday night that mocked his rival.

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

"Folks, they don't tell you what they mean!" he said.

The racist/panderer distinction

Kevin Drum quotes from the Reason article delving further into Ron Paul's ugly past:

Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists — and taking "moral responsibility" for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past — acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.

Question: what's the difference between a "racist" and someone who was "complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists"? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except that at least the former is bit more honest about things.

I'm no fan of Paul or people who pander to racists generally, but I have to object to Drum's claim that there is no difference between racism and pandering to it. While both are abhorrent, I'll go on record as saying that actual racism is worse.

More importantly, however, equating the two furthers the political strategy that's used to defend politicians like Ronald Reagan and John Ashcroft who are accused of exploiting racial fears. As I've written (here and here), that kind of criticism is usually answered with the charge that Reagan and Ashcroft are being accused of racism, which is a loathsome smear of good men who are not racists (blah blah blah). Since no one can prove that Reagan and Ashcroft are racists, the issue frequently dies at that point. Similarly, as the authors of the Reason article note, Ron Paul may not be a racist. We'll never know and it's pointless to debate the issue. Simply put, we can't read the minds of public officials. What we can do, however, is judge them by their public records -- and Paul's is loathsome.

Update 1/20 1:56 PM: Phil Klinkner at Polysigh disagrees:

Brendan misses the point that politicians make choices about pandering and that these choices reflect their underlying beliefs. Deciding to pander to white racists means that you think it is OK to validate and even exacerbate resentment against blacks and, thus, to hinder black political and social inequality. That, to my mind, reflects underlying anti-black attitudes on the part of the pandering politicians. For example, Ronald Reagan was willing to pander to white racists in ways that he probably never would have pandered to anti-Catholics or anti-Semites. My guess is that Reagan believed that it was just fundamentally unfair and wrong to something like that to Jews and Catholics, but that it was OK to do it to blacks.

The point that politicians may be more willing to pander to prejudices they share could be true as a general claim, but there's no way to know for sure. More importantly, such a pattern doesn't prove anything in a particular case such as Reagan's. (The key phrases above are "to my mind" and "[m]y guess.") Let's leave the mind-reading to Maureen Dowd and criticize politicians for their public records, not speculation about their private beliefs.

Draft Bloomberg has 817 signatures!

As expected, two co-founders of the Unity '08 debacle launched another ill-fated movement yesterday -- a committee to draft Michael Bloomberg, the one man who can purchase the third party infrastructure they failed to create, into the presidential race. And it's already setting the world on fire -- 817 signatures on their petition so far! Here's the widget so everyone can keep tabs on their progress:

I know that Bloomberg has no constituency or rationale for a candidacy, but this is ridiculous. MoveOn gets that many signatures on petitions in 30 seconds.

Ron Paul's defense falls apart

TNR's Jamie Kirchik summarizes the collapse of elite support for Ron Paul in the wake of his story documenting the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial content contained in decades of newsletters put out under Paul's name.

Most devastating to Paul, though, is this post from Matt Welch, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine (the flagship libertarian publication). While Paul has claimed that he did not write the articles in his newsletter and that the controversy is "old news and has been rehashed for over a decade," Welch shows via a basic Nexis search that Paul took direct responsibility for the content of the newsletters in a series of 1996 articles in Texas newspapers.

What I don't understand is how so many libertarians fell in love with this guy -- and gave him tens of millions of dollars -- without knowing anything about him. This stuff is in the public record. Did they not know, or did they just choose to ignore it? The pro-Paul journalists, in particular, have almost no excuse.

Update 1/16 11:28 AM: Reason has a new story up attributing the newsletters to Lew Rockwell, a Paul associate who remains close to the candidate.

Norman Podhoretz: "What's a Kurd, anyway?"

Another reason to be thankful for the collapse of Rudy Giuliani's potentially disastrous presidential campaign:

Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

Just to refresh your memory, this is the same "adviser" who wants to bomb Iran and thinks Iraq's WMD are in Syria. Assuming Podhoretz wasn't questioning the legitimacy of the Kurdish identity, that's an unbelievable lack of knowledge for someone who was serving as a foreign policy adviser to a major presidential candidate.

The missing Brooks correction

In his column yesterday, David Brooks apparently confused Ward Churchill (the controversial leftist professor) and Ward Connerly (the African American critic of affirmative action) in his column yesterday. The mistake has been fixed in the online version, but oddly there's no disclosure of the correction.

Brooks's mistake comes only days after Bill Kristol led off his new NYT column by confusing Michael Medved and Michelle Malkin. Unlike the Brooks column, Kristol's column includes a disclosure at the bottom of the correction. So what's the difference?

PS Who knew it was so hard to differentiate people with same first and last initials?

Update 1/21 10:06 AM: A correction appears in Brooks's latest and has been appended to the original column.

Rudy Giuliani: Polarizing and unpopular

The new ABC News/Washington Post poll reveals that support for Rudy Giuliani's potentially disastrous presidential campaign is collapsing. He's not even well-liked any more, which destroys any rationale for why Republicans should accept his heterodox social views:

Giuliani for the first time has slipped under 50 percent favorability among all adults, down steeply from a high of 67 percent just over a year ago; at a 46-46 split, as many now view him unfavorably as favorably.

Indeed, Giuliani is now viewed much less favorably than Hillary Clinton, who has a 58%/40% favorable/unfavorable rating in the same poll. Ouch.

George W. Bush: Obsessed with exercise

How obsessed is President Bush with people's exercise habits?

Bush, who prides himself on his ability to judge character, seems to use exercise as a proxy for discipline, complaining about former economic aid Lawrence Lindsey's failure to exercise before firing him and asking possible Supreme Court nominee J. Harvie Wilkinson III about his workout habits.

Now Samantha Power reports in the New Yorker that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy who was killed in Iraq, impressed Bush with his "lean physique," causing the president to say "You must work out":

The Americans were surprisingly enthusiastic about Vieira de Mello. A few weeks before the invasion, he had pulled off an unusual feat for a U.N. official: he had charmed President George W. Bush. On March 5th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President, impressed by Vieira de Mello’s lean physique, greeted him by grasping his shoulder and saying admiringly, “You must work out.”

Is this really how the President of the United States assesses the character of the people he interacts with? Yikes.

How Obama is like George W. Bush

Here's an unlikely comparison that seems to be becoming a meme: how Barack Obama is like George W. Bush.

First, Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka drew the analogy in a Saturday NYT op-ed:

By losing the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Barack Obama found himself sharing common ground with an adversary whose politics he has often criticized: George W. Bush. Like Mr. Bush in 2000, Mr. Obama finished second in a primary he had expected to win.

As it happens, this is not the only way that Mr. Obama resembles Mr. Bush. The Illinois Democrat seems to have learned a lot from the first presidential campaign of a Texas Republican.

Mr. Bush positioned himself in 2000 as “a uniter, not a divider,” and Mr. Obama, while carefully avoiding using the word “uniter,” now offers a similar message. Just as Mr. Bush’s message of compassionate conservatism appealed to many Democrats and independent-minded liberals, Mr. Obama’s politics of hope seems to disarm Republicans and rightward-leaning independents.

Unfortunately for those conservatives drawn to Mr. Obama’s message of unity, he almost certainly can’t deliver on it. Just as President Bush failed to unite Washington and instead ended up contributing to its divisiveness, so Mr. Obama will eventually have to accept that conflict, rather than unity, is the natural condition of politics.

Then, in his column today, Paul Krugman offers a less flattering analogy between Obama and Bush:

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

I think there's actually something to this comparison. Like Bush in 2000, Obama is letting his non-threatening persona do the work and benefiting from a personality-based narrative that lets him get away with more in terms of policy. But Burka is right -- personality is not a solution to polarization. It's hard to imagine Obama succeeding at "bringing people together" unless he wins in a landslide. Think of it this way: do you think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are going to want to work in good faith with him? Or are they going to try to undermine him at every turn?