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Apologies for the pirate snafu, which seems to be over. If you went to brendan-nyhan.com in the last two days, you saw one of my "Pirate Captain" posts instead of the regular homepage (that's why Google is currently displaying an awesome banner ad for a pirate website in the left sidebar). I still have no idea what happened but Typepad seems to have fixed the problem. Anyway, if you missed any posts while things were screwed up, please read down from here.
Matthew Yglesias comments on the need for Democratic superdelegates to make up their mind:
Ambinder says "given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they'll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there's no real reason for those superdelegates to choose in June. They'll have MORE information about electability in July or August... so why choose in an environment with less info?"
Well, I'd say the reason is that we're not really gaining more information as time goes on (Clinton backers, for example, were making the Wright/Ayers anti-Obama argument to pundits and no doubt superdelegates as well quietly for months before it "hit" the mainstream). What's happening, instead, is that both candidates' negatives are going up while resources aren't being applied against John McCain. Insofar as superdelagates genuinely want to pick a winner, they'll recognize that picking someone gives them a better chance of winning than does a summer of indecision.
This is actually a well-known decision-making anomaly that is described in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational
[C]hoosing between two things that are similarly attractive is one of the most difficult decisions we can make. This is a situation not just of keeping options open for too long, but of being indecisive to the point of paying for our decision in the end. Let me use the following story to explain.
A hungry donkey approaches a barn one day looking for hay and discovers two haystacks of identical size at the two opposite ends of the barn. The donkey stands in the middle of the barn between the two haystacks, not knowing which to select. Hours go by, but he still can't make up his mind. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of starvation.
You can see any superdelegate stalling after early June in the same way. Despite the questions I've raised about Hillary's electability, the fact is that the political fundamentals (the state of the economy and the war in Iraq) matter far more than candidate quality. But the process of voters converging to the decisions implied by those fundamentals may not begin until the Democrats pick a candidate. As such, there's a reasonable argument to be made that picking either candidate in June is preferable to waiting longer in the hopes of making the "right" decision.
Given Barack Obama's well-known weaknesses among downscale white men, his campaign seems to be trying to use sports to help him appear to be more of a regular guy. In addition to playing more basketball on the campaign trail (he's reportedly pretty good), Obama appeared on a local sports talk station this morning here in the Triangle and did an interview almost exclusively about sports -- UNC basketball, the White Sox, the Bears, etc. It's a good bet that he's doing more of these sorts of appearances across the board.
Update 4/30 10:02 AM: Obama was also scheduled to appear on the podcast of ESPN's Bill Simmons but the company made a decision not to feature either candidate during the primaries.
Update 4/30 1:59 PM: Along the same lines, here's Obama trying to take Tyler Hansborough to the hole in a pickup game at UNC yesterday morning:
For the record, Josh Marshall is once again wrong in describing the new DNC ad against John McCain as "[c]ompletely honest." McCain said he'd be ok with US troops staying in Iraq 100 years "[a]s long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." That may be unrealistic, but the ad omits the relevant context, suggesting that McCain is proposing staying for 100 more years of conflict at the current level:
During his appearance on "Meet the Press," DNC chairman Howard Dean was forced to admit what McCain actually said, but it's not in the ad.
Update 4/30 10:06 AM -- More flailing spin from Marshall here:
As you'll remember, there was some jousting a few weeks back over whether it was accurate to say that McCain is willing to continue the 'war' in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. This is because McCain adds the caveat that it's fine with him because he thinks that the occupation will soon be like our longstanding presence in Germany, Japan and Korea in which we have a substantial troop presence but no soldiers dying in hostile action since the population and governments are content to have us there. So is it really 'war' or only 'occupation' or 'presence'?
Once again, Marshall is acknowledging the missing context and then raising second-order questions that don't justify the content of the ad.
Update 4/30 5:00 PM -- Via Yglesias, more of the same in a new ad from MoveOn:
Chris Matthews, who was last seen critiquing the way Barack Obama ordered orange juice in a diner, is now obsessed with the idea that Obama can't connect with people in a diner:
A week after claiming that Sen. Barack Obama "can't walk into a dinette [sic] with five or six guys there, white guys, in some cases. He can't just shake hands and hang out," Chris Matthews asserted, "[Obama] doesn't seem to have the knack for walking into a dinette [sic] with regular people in it and just having fun, just connecting."
How does Matthews know this? How many diners, exactly, has he been in with Obama? And more importantly, why do we care?
This is the same silly script the press used in its 2000 coverage of Al Gore, which often described him as a wonky elitist who couldn't "connect" with regular people. While it's certainly true that neither is a natural retail politician like Bill Clinton or Bill Richardson, the point is that the facts are fit to the narrative just as they were with Gore. Matthews is almost certainly extrapolating from a few clips he's seen of campaign stops based on the "Democrats=elitists" frame that is embedded in his mind.
For some reason, my main page is defaulting to a 2006 post about the attempted impeachment of the NC State student body president known as the "Pirate Captain." Not sure what's going on -- maybe there are some pirate hackers out there? Anyway, I've asked Typepad for help, but in the meantime, just click on the "Main" link or my name at the top to go to the latest posts (here's the link).
I didn't know this -- the New York Times reports that after the presidential candidates made their embarassing appearances on WWE's "Monday Night Raw," the league staged a match between Obama and Hillary impersonators:
Trust me: it's worse than you imagine.
Can we put a moratorium on Hillary Clinton using a poem about the Holocaust to talk about free trade and outsourcing? Talk about inappropriate metaphors...
At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemoller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”
In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”
PS: This paragraph from the same story is a classic example of the bogus psychodrama of contemporary campaign reporting:
Since the race started, Mrs. Clinton has cycled through several political personas: the battle-tested White House veteran, the fighter, the girl — her word — tougher than any boy. Now she is the Dream Boss: the one who will give you a job and provide health insurance, but also understand just how hard you work and the mundane details of what you do.
Note the symmetry with the descriptions of different Al Gore "personas" in 2000 and ask yourself when you heard George W. Bush or John McCain characterized in this way.
Here's a New York Times lede that annoys me:
3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit
By LARRY ROHTER and MICHAEL COOPERThe Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars, according to tax and budget experts.
The reasons reflect the ideological leanings of the candidates, with Senator John McCain proposing tax cuts that go beyond President Bush’s and the Democrats advocating programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But for fiscal experts concerned with the deficit, both approaches are worrisome.
In other words, both sides are equally bad. But if you read a few paragraphs into the story, you'll see McCain's plan would be more than three times worse for the federal budget deficit:
Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.
See All the President's Spin for more on the problems with the conventions of objectivity and "he said," "she said" journalism.
One aspect of the media's failure to distinguish between primary and general elections is the way that they fail to differentiate between the types of criticisms candidates face in each stage of the campaign.
On Monday night, Jon Stewart asked Barack Obama this semi-facetious question that captures one aspect of this misunderstanding:
Senator Clinton's response to you is that you have not been vetted in the way that she has and that ultimately, in a general election, the Republican attack machine -- the big question was they would just go crazy on you. Now that you've been attacked so much, is the fear that, in the general election, the Republican attack machine wouldn't have anything left to pick over?
However, Obama hasn't really come under criticism from the right yet. Hillary has hammered him on the aspects of his background that are vulnerable in a Democratic primary, but his extremely liberal early policy record (which reflects the district he represented) has barely been touched. That will change in the general.
Similarly, Hendrik Hertzberg points out that Hillary Clinton's claims to have been fully vetted are also misleading (as Matthew Yglesias notes today):
[Obama] cannot mention many of her biggest general-election vulnerabilities, most of which involve her husband’s Administration, the awkward role that he might play in her own, and the potential conflicts of interest posed by the funding of his charitable and commercial activities. Bill Clinton remains popular among Democrats, if not as popular as he used to be.
The fact that the Clinton scandals have not been a major issue of debate in the primary does not mean they have gone away -- they'll be back with a vengeance if Hillary is the nominee.
I just deleted this comment from my post on the National Enquirer smearing Barack Obama:
B HUSSEIN Obama IS a muslime, always was, always will be. He has sold out the USA for $200 MILLION from muslimes for his campaign. He will turn over the country to them if he wins. America will cease to exist once he and his muslime thugs are done with us. Only a stupid moron would vote for this POS!!
Sadly, we're only going to see more of this in the coming months -- Floyd Brown is already suggesting Barack Obama and his supporters are un-American in fundraising emails to the Newsmax list:
Make no mistake, there are people in the United States who despise America... hate America... and hate our way of life. Barack Hussein Obama is THEIR CANDIDATE and they will do everything in their power to make sure that patriotic Americans do not understand exactly how dangerous Barack Hussein Obama really is. They'll hide his record and his past and they'll tar-and-feather his opposition.
Update 4/27 1:48 PM: While the closest parallel to John McCain as a presidential candidate may be George H.W. Bush, the closest parallel to his current campaign rhetoric may actually be Floyd Brown (via TPM Election Central):
"All I can tell you Jennifer [Rubin] is that I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States," McCain said. "So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare ... If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly."
For those who don't know, Brown is the loathsome individual who created the infamous "Willie Horton" ad of 1988. Is that the kind of company McCain wants to be keeping?
After weeks of bluster about Hillary Clinton's strength in key general election states, it's great to see the NYT's Patrick Healy make an obvious but crucial point (I've been repeating this for weeks):
[T]he Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made on Wednesday: that state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.
For more along these lines, see Josh Marshall, Jon Chait, and Matthew Yglesias.
In a separate post, Yglesias makes a closely related point that echoes my one of my running themes -- the fundamentals matter far more than the candidates themselves:
[I]t's important to remember that by far the biggest source of uncertainty about the November presidential election has to do not with the Democratic primary campaign, but with objective reality. I don't believe that the situation in Iraq or the economy will look radically better in November than they do today, but in principle either or both might. Something like that would make John McCain -- a popular and skilled politician who gets good press -- extremely hard to beat. But if the economy continues to be weak and Americans keep dying in a war that offers no light at the end of the tunnel, it's very hard for McCain to win. This kind of thing -- the inherent unknowability of things like the Q3 GDP growth rate and the future course of inflation, the possibility of new foreign crises or dramatic changes in Iraq -- is what makes the outcome uncertain. The differences, qua candidates, between Clinton and Obama are small in comparison to this haze of uncertainty.
In other words, the vote for Clinton or Obama in the fall will be portrayed as a reflection of their performance against John McCain but it's likely to be heavily driven by the state of the economy and Iraq.
Historically, it seems to be relatively unusual for a party to nominate a heterodox candidate at a time when they control the presidency. That's why I predicted (wrongly) that John McCain would not win the GOP nomination.
McCain's (exaggerated) reputation as a "maverick" is certainly an asset in the general election. But Democrats should remember that even if McCain does win in November, they are still likely to have significant majorities in both houses of Congress, including a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. By contrast, McCain would preside over a divided Republican caucus that does not trust him.
In some ways, the closest precedent for this scenario is actually George H.W. Bush. Like McCain, Bush 41 was a former critic of supply-side economics who experienced a forced conversion. Conservatives were never truly comfortable with Bush 41, just as they harbor deep-seated doubts about McCain. And Bush faced the same sort of Democratic Congress that McCain would confront. In short, it's a formula for a one-term presidency.
It's time to update my previous work on the predictors of support for Barack Obama. Here are updated plots of state-level support for Obama by race, which show that Pennsylvania is sadly consistent with the overall trend of racial polarization:
My standard regression shows that Obama's state-level support is still associated with the same variables: black population (+), the log of population (-), Democratic presidential vote (-), whether the state has a caucus (+), and education (+).
The excellent New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt has a profile of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain's top economic adviser, in today's newspaper that omits one very relevant fact.
Leonhardt's piece makes two important points. First, under Holtz-Eakin, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office started engaging in "dynamic" analysis of tax cuts but found that "any new revenue that tax cuts brought in paled in comparison with their cost... As Mr. Holtz-Eakin told Congress in 2003, a dynamic analysis of the White House’s tax and spending proposals made essentially no difference." In other words, the supply-side claim that tax cuts increase revenue is false.
Second, McCain's tax and budget plans (like those of George W. Bush in 2000) do not add up. Leonhardt notes that he "spoke over the past week with several other economists who admire Mr. McCain and have advised him over the years. None would defend his current fiscal package (or be quoted)." According to Leonhardt, Holtz-Eakin's (weak) defense is that "people are making is treating the McCain platform as if it were a finished piece of work. 'It’s April,' he said. 'We have until November.'"
But Leonhardt never forces Holtz-Eakin to address the other elephant in the room -- John McCain's repeated statements that tax cuts increase revenue, which directly contradict Holtz-Eakin's findings as head of the CBO:
"[H]istory shows every time you have cut capital gains taxes, revenues have increased, going back to Jack Kennedy" (4/20/08).
"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).
This contradiction seems especially newsworthy since the current administration has made numerous statements that have been contradicted by their own economists.
Weirdly, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, the usually reliable McClatchy Newspapers made the same mistake in a McCain profile that claimed the GOP presidential candidate "listens to tax-cutters on both sides" of the supply-side debate. Do reporters know what McCain has said? Or are they ignoring his statements because they conflict with his (phony) "straight talk" persona?
Update 4/23 12:21 PM -- It turns out that Leonhardt did ask Holtz-Eakin about one of McCain's previous statements in a story published on January 9:
Mr. Greenspan provided crucial political cover to the 2003 tax cut, only to turn around and criticize it in his recent memoir. Mr. McCain went the other way, first criticizing that tax cut as fiscally irresponsible and later claiming on several occasions that tax cuts reduced deficits. “Tax cuts increase revenues,” he told Charlie Rose in November.
I asked Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is Mr. McCain’s top economic adviser, about these comments, and he said that Mr. McCain had misspoken. Mr. Holtz-Eakin then called Mr. McCain on the campaign trail and later gave me this statement from him: “Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, but pro-growth tax cuts — especially along with spending restraint — spur the economy, which raises incomes, and offsets the revenue loss.”
At this point, however, Holtz-Eakin's explanation is inoperative. The long list of statements above -- including two made after Leonhardt's article -- suggest that McCain is not misspeaking.
It's time to break out the swami again. Maureen Dowd put her well-known psychic talents on display again today with this mind-reading of Barack Obama:
He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.
In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.
But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.
“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”
His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?
Or... he really just wanted to be left alone to eat his waffle.
The myths that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that he is somehow associated with Osama bin Laden continue to spread:
The sign in front of a small church in a small town is causing a big controversy in Jonesville, S.C.
Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.
It reads: "Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?"
Byrd said that the message wasn't meant to be racial or political.
"It's simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ," he said.
When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, "I don't know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim? I don't know. He says he's not. I hope he's not. But I don't know. And it's just something to try to stir people's minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody."
The New York Times reports that the presidential candidates all appeared on WWE Raw last night. The results, which are summarized in this YouTube clip from the WWE, were not pretty:
The full, cringe-inducing videos of the candidates' appearances are below the fold (via CQ's Craig Crawford). Apparently, the way to a WWE fan's heart is to parrot wrestling catchphrases.
Surprisingly, The Rockridge Institute, the think tank of George Lakoff, has shut down. I'm not sad to see them go -- I'm no fan of Lakoff or Rockridge, which we criticized in the conclusion to All the President's Spin -- but I would have assumed that Lakoff's status as the (false) prophet of framing would have made it possible to raise money from big liberal donors.
Barack Obama, who has criticized the politicization of science under George W. Bush, is doing some politicizing of his own. Yesterday, he joined John McCain in pandering to the vocal and well-organized lobby of parents who believe the increase in autism diagnoses is caused by vaccines:
"We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it."
--Barack Obama, Pennsylvania Rally, April 21, 2008."It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise among children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."
--John McCain, Texas town hall meeting, February 29, 2008.
Obama is wrong to say that "The science right now is inconclusive." As the Washington Post Fact Checker points out, "the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion is that there is no proven link between autism and the vaccines which include a mercury-containing preservative known as thimerosal":
At least five major studies have found no link between autism and thimerosal. A study released by the California Department of Public Health in January found that the autism rate in children rose continued to rise even after vaccine manufacturers stopped using thimerosal in childhood vaccines after 2001.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, "there's no convincing scientific evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site." Similar conclusions have been reached by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration.
Today's New York Times Magazine is a "green issue" that is full of interesting and clever ideas for reducing carbon emissions, especially at the individual level. But the issue is ultimately frustrating to read because most of the ideas (which are often complicated and difficult to implement) will never come into wide use without better incentives. For instance, there's no way that most individual consumers will ever have the right information to make good decisions about "carbon footprints." We just need a carbon tax, which uses the price signal to disperse information and align incentives. The whole issue should have been two sentences long.
Can we all agree that ABC's Charlie Gibson should stop pretending to understand economics? Here's what he said at the latest Democratic primary debate:
-“Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent and George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent and in each instance when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money.”
-"So why raise it [the capital gains rate] at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected.”
But as the folks at the Center and Budget and Policy Priorities point out, that's not accurate.
Cutting capital gains rates reduces revenues over the long run. That’s the conclusion of the federal government’s official revenue-estimating agencies, as well as outside experts and the Bush Administration’s own Treasury Department.
-The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation have estimated that extending the capital gains tax cut enacted in 2003 would cost $100 billion over the next decade. The Administration’s Office of Management and Budget included a similar estimate in the President’s budget.
-After reviewing numerous studies of how investors respond to capital gains tax cuts, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service concluded that cutting capital gains taxes loses revenue over the long run.
-The Bush Administration Treasury Department examined the economic effects of extending the capital gains and dividend tax cuts. Even under the Treasury’s most optimistic scenario about the economic effects of these tax cuts, the tax cuts would not generate anywhere close to enough added economic growth to pay for themselves — and would thus lose money.
Let me state that again. Once again, the supply-side argument has been undercut by the administration's own economists.
Of course, that didn't stop John McCain, who has frequently claimed that tax cuts increase revenue, from making the same argument on ABC's This Week today:
MCCAIN: And [Barack Obama] obviously doesn't understand the economy, because history shows every time you have cut capital gains taxes, revenues have increased, going back to Jack Kennedy.
The Wall Street Journal also made the same claim in an editorial Friday (subscription required). It's sad to see the mainstream media giving life to this kind of supply-side foolishness.
Update 4/21 1:06 PM -- Time's Justin Fox points to more contradictory evidence from former Bush administration economists (via Mark Thoma):
ut on this particular topic I tend to rely on professors at fancy universities who have served in the current Bush administration, because I figure it's hard to dismiss their verdict as political. The current consensus of this crowd is pretty well reflected in a 2004 paper by Greg Mankiw, the former chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and Matthew Weinzierl, which concluded that "for standard parameter values, half of a capital tax cut is self-financing."
Last week Tim Russert debunked Bill Clinton's misleading explanation of Hillary Clinton's false claims about a trip to Bosnia with a gusto that has been missing for most of the Bush years.
As Josh Marshall points out, that fact-checking gusto was also missing this week when Russert repeated the false claim that a picture of Barack Obama with his hands at his sides was taken during the Pledge of Allegiance.
The common denominator in both cases is that Russert's actions fit with the prevailing narrative. Everyone is suspicious of Bill Clinton's factual accuracy, so his statements get extra scrutiny. Similarly, Russert's question today drew upon the GOP/Clinton narrative about Obama:
David Axelrod, based on the last couple of weeks, many Democrats fear Republicans in the fall will string together an ad which shows Michelle Obama saying that she really never had pride in America until this campaign when Barack Obama was running, Barack Obama with his hands clasped in front of him rather than holding his heart during the pledge of allegiance, Barack Obama not wearing a flag pin, Barack Obama talking about clinging to faith and to guns, suggesting—Barack Obama meeting with Bill Ayers, a former Weather ground under—Weatherman underground figure. Are you concerned that all those kinds of issues could be strung together to create an impression of Obama that would make him almost unelectable to a lot of swing voters?
Most media fact-checking is narrative-driven in this way. Many of the Al Gore "lies" were embellished versions of minor misstatements he made that received great scrutiny from hostile reporters. Because those "lies" reinforced prevailing narratives about Gore, they were parroted by the talking heads. By contrast, as we discussed in All the President's Spin, President Bush was generally seen as personally honest so his misleading claims about policy received little attention. John McCain is now getting similar treatment.
Still, none of this excuses Josh Marshall's insinuation that Russert intentionally smeared Obama:
With his supposedly crack research staff, how does Russert manage to make a mistake like that? Where's the retraction and apology? Or is it intentional?
It's the latest instance of a long pattern of Marshall suggesting what he can't prove. Josh, please stop.
A week ago I argued that the creation of the Analyst Institute, which describes itself as "Moneyball for progressive politics," is an important indication that political organizations are finally starting to take measurement and experimental evaluation seriously. Here's another sign -- a group called Progressive Clarity is looking to hire two political methodologists to do similar work. Watch out, old guard...
I'm not one of those people who sees media bias in every picture choice by newspaper editors, but Chelsea Clinton has been getting a bad deal lately.
First, Politico ran a story on her press aide, Philippe Reines, that included a picture of him standing behind her looking like a psycho:
Then a critical Los Angeles Times story on her taking "[d]ramatic license" in her anecdotes included this unflattering picture:
I understand the incentive for editors to choose the most attention-grabbing picture, especially when it reinforces the theme of the article, but these are just awful.
I couldn't make myself suffer through yet another silly debate, and it seems like that was a good decision. As Media Matters notes, "[n]umerous media figures have criticized George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, moderators of the Democratic presidential debate on ABC, or the subject matter of the event, in part or in whole, as 'shoddy [and] despicable,' 'specious and gossipy,' 'cringe-worthy,' 'banal,' consisting of 'tabloid trivia,' 'flat-out repulsive,' 'embarrassing,' 'seem[ingly] slanted against [Sen. Barack] Obama,' 'shameful,' and 'an outrage.'" Reading the list of questions makes clear what a horrifying event it was.
The problem is the intersection of three factors:
1. The media's commercial incentive to entertain rather than inform;
2. Journalists' professional incentive to display voice, debate the horse race, and avoid "boring" policy issues;
3. Ongoing efforts by almost ever major figure in network news to avoid being accused of liberal bias (for example, Tim Russert going on Rush Limbaugh's show, George Stephanopoulos going on Sean Hannity's show, etc.).
#3 seems to be the most important factor explaining the difference in tone and content between the Republican and Democratic debates. Even Rush Limbaugh admitted yesterday that the questions were harsh.
Just for the record, this sentence from Gail Colllins's op-ed yesterday is wrong:
Witness Obama and Clinton at the debate, racing away from gun control as if they were a pair of greyhounds, forswearing middle-class tax cuts as if they were George H.W. Bush.
Actually, they ruled out middle-class tax increases. As her own newspaper reported, "Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama said they would not raise taxes on middle class Americans — those making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year."
Update 4/18 2:56 PM -- Commenter Dave raises another issue for Times copy-editors:
I never knew that greyhounds were such strong opponents of gun control.
Update 4/19 2:35 PM: Collins corrected the error in today's column.
Larry Bartels, an eminent political scientist at Princeton, writes in the New York Times about how Obama's description of less educated rural voters is wrong:
For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly in half), who do not have college degrees and who live in small towns or rural areas. For the sake of convenience, let’s call these people the small-town working class, though that term is inevitably imprecise. In 2004, they were about 18 percent of the population and about 16 percent of voters.
For purposes of comparison, consider the people who are their demographic opposites: people whose family incomes are $60,000 or more, who are college graduates and who live in cities or suburbs. These (again, conveniently labeled) cosmopolitan voters were about 11 percent of the population in 2004 and about 13 percent of voters. While admittedly crude, these definitions provide a systematic basis for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Obama’s view of contemporary class politics.
Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.
Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.
Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.
It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.
Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.
For more, see his working paper "What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?" (PDF). In general, it's amazing how little of this debate bothers to consider actual evidence.
Writing about the construction of campaign narratives reminds me of a Jacob Weisberg quote about his new Bush book
I think when you look at [Bush's presidency] in the way that I have, you end up in a position where you say nothing Bush did was surprising. If you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father, it all starts to be clear; and I think it was all certainly knowable by 2004, but mostly knowable in 2000.
The epistemological problem with this statement should be clear to anyone who has ever thought seriously about the contingency of history (sadly, a category that includes very few journalists). When Weisberg says that "nothing Bush did was surprising... [i]f you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father," what he means is that you can construct a narrative that rationalizes observed events by attributing them to visible causes (i.e. Bush's family history). The problem is that all history seems obvious and inevitable after the fact. However, making up post hoc narratives doesn't mean that we actually understand the causes of Bush's behavior. If Bush's presidency had gone differently, an equally intelligent writer could probably construct an equally plausible explanation based on that same family history. An identical argument applies to all the post hoc narratives that political journalists construct to "explain" whatever happens during campaigns, presidencies, etc.
I haven't read Weisberg's book, but Jacob Heilbrunn suggests that the whole volume suffers from this problem in an otherwise positive Washington Monthly review:
Instead of cudgeling Bush for his manifest shortcomings, however, Weisberg embarks upon a kind of psycho-biography in an attempt to explain what is really behind these character flaws and why the Decider decides as he does.
Weisberg locates the answer in the early history of the Bush family. The tensions between the Walker and Bush clans, he argues, formed the essential backdrop to George W.'s own troubled life and presidency...
In contrast to his father, he refused to approach the business systematically. Instead, George W., "who thought success was a matter of rolling the dice with borrowed money, never struck lucky." Sound familiar? It was Bush's pattern: decades later, in Iraq, he gambled again and lost. As Weisberg sees it, "Driven by family demons, overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity for self-knowledge, Bush seems to me to have done precisely what we should have expected of him."
What Weisberg means by this isn't simply that Bush flubbed up. It's that it was almost preordained, in large part because he engaged in a form of intellectual mutilation by rendering himself as incurious as possible...
The British historian Sir Herbert Butterfield referred to the "Whig interpretation of history," in which each event of the past is interpreted as inevitably leading to the strengthening of liberty and progress worldwide. Weisberg, who traces Bush's sins backward to his ancestors, may be engaging in a reverse form of Whiggism. He essentially contends that character is destiny, which would strike many historians, who are interested in larger trends and forces, as somewhat anachronistic. Missing in Weisberg's meditation on Bush is a larger context that takes into account the GOP's capture by the far right. Bush wasn't operating in a vacuum, and we know he isn't much of a brooder. How much of his presidency has been shaped by psychological forces, and how much by sheer opportunism?
We shouldn't focus just on Weisberg, however. Biography is an intellectually bankrupt genre, as Louis Menand pointed out in a critique published in The New Yorker last year that applies equally well to a great deal of political journalism:
[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print... [T]he premise poses a few problems.
For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others....
[The biographer Meryle] Secrest subscribes to this distinction between (as she puts it) “the private truth versus the public façade, appearance versus reality.” She is also, like many biographers, a believer in turning points—“pivotal moments in a person’s life when a single decision alters the future irrevocably.” It’s delightful to find (never concoct!) such moments, in which a chance encounter or a sudden revelation changes an ordinary life into the kind of life that people get paid to write books about, since those moments enable the biographer to construct the sort of conversion narrative, or Dick Whittington before-and-after story, that readers find familiar and take pleasure in...
The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the reader’s. We know what Coltrane or Cleopatra or Churchill achieved when we pick up the book, and we process the stuff we didn’t know, about their childhoods and their love lives and their abuse of whatever substances they may have abused, with this knowledge in mind. We are, in effect, helping the biographer do the work, because, like the biographer, we’re reading with an already formed image of the subject in our heads...
I would go so far as to say that most failures of political journalism result from a failure to grasp this epistemological problem. (Discuss!)
Update 4/16 8:25 AM -- Here's an excellent suggestion from comments about how to conduct a scientific test of this approach:
If it's as simple as Swami Weisberg claims, why don't we throw him some money for one of those experiments you were just talking about? Once we know who the Democratic nominee is, give him $100,000 (I'm being generous here) and a few months off with the express goal of researching the family history of McCain and Obama/Clinton and writing prospective biographies of how their presidencies will go. Then in 4 or 8 years, when that presidency is over, we can open that biography and compare it to reality. If Weisberg was close to right, let's hail him as a genius. If not, he can publicly admit that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.
Rush Limbaugh just called liberalism "the greatest threat this country faces":
[L]iberalism is the greatest threat this country faces, not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win, and are in power for four, eight years or more, they don't take Islamofascism as a threat. And we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Oba -- Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points.
Here's Joe Lieberman on the same individual:
"As an Independent, it doesn’t bother me at all to be honored at the same dinner with Rush Limbaugh.
In fact, to show you how much things have changed for me, one of my greatest missions this year is to convince Rush to support the Republican candidate for President!
The truth is I greatly admire Rush’s love for our country and support for our troops, as shown by his remarks tonight and his generous support of MCLEF. Rush has a big voice but he has heart that is even bigger."
For more on Limbaugh, see our Spinsanity articles and my blog posts on him (2001-2004 and 2004-2008, respectively).
Update 4/18 9:24 AM: Rush Limbaugh yesterday on his reaction to Hillary during the ABC debate -- "What a B-I-itch." But he's got a big heart!
Matthew Yglesias is correct to argue that the influence of campaign gaffes is probably overstated:
One thing I wonder about is how much do "campaign gaffes" really matter? My guess is that their perceived importance is mostly an illusion. I mean, people point to plenty of examples of campaigns that lost, in large part, "because of" this or that gaffe or damaging random thing dredged out of the record but you never see an example of a campaign that won because it successfully avoided gaffes.
As I've argued, the fundamentals (the state of the economy and war) drive presidential election results, but the process by which this occurs is not entirely clear. Who fills the void? Reporters and pundits who (a) see their job as interpreting the political process for citizens and (b) have a strong economic incentive to create an entertaining drama that will attract an audience. These journalists collectively end up constructing a plausible narrative to "explain" the trajectory of the campaign and its eventual outcome of the campaign. This narrative is often built around media-generated controversies that have little influence on the outcome.
Campaigns also tend to be seen as a referendum on the skill and quality of political candidates, which are also closely linked to gaffes. In almost every case, losers are seen as bad candidates and winners as good candidates even when we would have expected the actual outcome in advance. For instance, the collapse of Michael Dukakis in 1988 may have been because he was a bad candidate who made mistakes like riding in a tank wearing a silly helmet, but it also coincided with George H.W. Bush converging to his expected level of performance given the fundamentals.
With all that said, however, it's worth distinguishing between epiphenomenal gaffes and those with deeper political and cultural significance, especially when the latter is reinforced in paid media. While largely incoherent, Obama's statement about downscale whites in small town Pennsylvania was offensive and condescending in its phrasing. If enough money is spent drilling that message into the heads of lower income white voters, Obama's performance in the general election could be significantly affected.
In an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine, Grover Norquist claims falsely that "[t]he [Iraq] war spending is a fraction of the spend-too-much problem":
SOLOMON: Now that we’re facing an economic slowdown, not to mention a $9 trillion national debt, is it fair to ask whether the Bush tax cuts have damaged the country?
NORQUIST: Oh, no, no, the spending has done the damage.
SOLOMON: The spending in Iraq?
NORQUIST: That’s what the White House says. But it’s not true. The war spending is a fraction of the spend-too-much problem. When you want an extra dollar for the war, you have to give Congress $2 for other stuff.
But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows in the following tables, this claim is false -- the share of the federal budget devoted to domestic discretionary spending and its size relative to GDP per person have declined while defense spending has soared:
|
Table 1: |
|||
|
Share of Total |
2001 |
2008 |
Change |
| Defense & security |
21.7% |
29.2% |
+7.5% |
| Social Security, Medicare/caid |
45.9% |
43.5% |
-2.4% |
| Other mandatory programs |
14.0% |
12.5% |
-1.4% |
| Domestic discretionary |
18.4% |
14.7% |
-3.7% |
| Total program costs |
100% |
100% |
0.0% |
| Notes: Figures may not add due to rounding. The defense/security figures also include veterans, homeland security, and international affairs. Medicare is net of premiums. Figures for 2008 are CBO’s January estimate plus supplemental discretionary funding requested by President Bush. Totals exclude net interest. | |||
|
Table 2: |
|||
|
|
nominal |
real |
real per person |
| Defense & security |
12.0% |
9.1% |
8.1% |
| Social Security, Medicare/caid |
6.5% |
3.8% |
2.8% |
| Other mandatory programs |
5.7% |
3.0% |
2.0% |
| Domestic discretionary |
4.0% |
1.3% |
0.3% |
| Average, all program costs |
7.3% |
4.6% |
3.6% |
| See Notes, Table 1. | |||
Back in 2004, I wrote a post titled "Politics goes Moneyball" about the increasing use of experimentation to measure the effectiveness of campaign tactics. Since then, progress -- which has been led by Yale's Alan Gerber and Donald Green -- has been relatively slow but steady. Here's the latest sign that people are finally catching on -- the founding of a new organization called the Analyst Institute that practices "Moneyball for progressive politics":
A Job Posting from the Analyst Institute:
The Analyst Institute is hiring for several positions. We are looking for people who are analytical, quantitatively-minded, and comfortable with statistical analysis software. The more campaign experience the better, and the more experience with experimentation the better.
The Analyst Institute is a new organization that does cutting edge analytics and evaluation of voter registration, persuasion, and mobilization. We work in close collaboration with major progressive organizations around the country. Some people have described what we are trying to do as "Moneyball for progressive politics."
The executive director, Todd Rogers, is finishing a PhD at Harvard and has worked with Gerber on a turnout experiment (PDF).
The larger question is why everyone in politics, business, nonprofits, and government isn't constantly doing experiments to see what works and what doesn't. Yale's Ian Ayres recently asked this question about sports teams, which could use randomization to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies (say, a zone defense versus man-to-man in basketball), but the principle applies far more broadly. Despite all the folk wisdom out there about what works or what doesn't in politics or business, even the experts actually know very little -- it is very difficult or impossible to determine causality from observational data. By contrast, experiments are simple, cheap, and easy to evaluate. Academics in the social sciences are doing more of them, especially outside the lab (i.e. "field experiments"), but the real revolution will happen when white collar professionals start to catch on.
