Brendan Nyhan

Joe Klein reads Hillary's mind

Bob Somerby flags some absurd mind-reading by Time's Joe Klein, who claims to know that Hillary Clinton's two innocuous references to RFK's 1968 assassination mean "that Obama's vulnerability to racist nutjobs has been in her mind for months now":

I take all of Karen’s points below—and the fact that Hillary Clinton mentioned Bobby Kennedy's assassination in conversation with Rick Stengel in March shows that Obama's vulnerability to racist nutjobs has been in her mind for months now—but still, I have a certain amount of sympathy for her. The woman is clearly exhausted.

Even elite journalists like Klein (who probably gets paid $5/word for his Time columns) do not understand logic or epistemology. They do understand what sells, however -- cartoon-style psychodramas that can only be constructed by pretending to know the innermost thoughts of the candidates.

PS If you go to Klein's house, he'll read your palm too.

Do divided parties matter?

Paul Krugman is worried that divisions within the Democratic Party will cost it the presidency in an otherwise favorable year:

Here’s the point: the nightmare Mr. Obama and his supporters should fear is that in an election year in which everything favors the Democrats, he will nonetheless manage to lose. He needs to do everything he can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I've also suggested that the division caused by the primary campaign may hurt the Democrats. On the other hand, as John Sides points out in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, "the reality is that presidential campaigns tend to unify each party behind its nominee." Consider the 2000 election:

Early on, Democrats and Republicans appeared less than fully enthusiastic about their candidates. For instance, in June 2000, only 71% of likely Democratic voters said they would vote for Gore in the general election, according to the National Annenberg Election Study, a survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The rest said they would either vote for Bush or another candidate, or were undecided. Among Republicans, only 82% said they planned to vote for Bush. But voters in both parties overcame or set aside their early doubts as the campaign unfolded. According to the Voter News Service’s election-day exit poll, 86% of Democrats voted for Gore and 91% of Republicans for Bush. Most partisans rejoined the fold.

Sides concludes by suggesting that even those Hillary supporters with race-related qualms about Obama (see the latest Newsweek poll for more) will mostly end up voting for him due to increasing polarization between the parties and the high salience of partisanship. That may be true, but as I wrote before, I still think Obama is likely to underperform relative to what political science models predict. If that happens, expect Hillary to get the blame even if it's a largely inevitable result of racial factors.

Hillary's bogus 1968 and 1992 comparisons

The firestorm over Hillary Clinton's mention of the RFK's assassination seems overblown to me -- I don't see any reason to believe she was bringing it up to suggest that Barack Obama would be assassinated. The problem is the misleading comparisons she was making to 1968 and especially 1992, which were debunked in the New York Times yesterday (see also Andrew Sullivan and Atrios [can't find link] among others):

Speaking to The Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, S.D., she added: “You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Critics seized on the comments, with some accusing her of suggesting that she was staying in the race because tragedy might strike Mr. Obama.

In her letter to The News, Mrs. Clinton wrote: “I pointed out, as I have before, that both my husband’s primary campaign, and Senator Robert Kennedy’s, had continued into June. Almost immediately, some took my comments entirely out of context and interpreted them to mean something completely different — and completely unthinkable.”

...In her letter to The News, Mrs. Clinton wrote: “I want to set the record straight: I was making the simple point that given our history, the length of this year’s primary contest is nothing unusual.”

The campaigns she cited, however, began much later than this one did, and, in 1992, Mr. Clinton unofficially locked up the nomination in March, when his last serious opponent dropped out.

Today, the Times went even further, devoting a whole "Check Point" article to revisiting what happened in 1992:

The news media’s attention focused on Mrs. Clinton’s invocation of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy after the California primary in June 1968. But she also cited the 1992 contest that ended with Bill Clinton’s nomination.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary,” Mrs. Clinton told the paper’s editorial board, “somewhere in the middle of June.”

But for weeks before that June 2 contest, few doubted that Mr. Clinton would be the party’s nominee, including those involved with the campaign of his remaining challenger, former Gov. Jerry Brown of California.

“Even if it wasn’t technically finished, it was clear to everybody involved that it was over well before June,” Steve McMahon, a media strategist for Mr. Brown in the 1992 race, said Monday in an interview.

The same caveat was even included in the initial Times report on Hillary's comments, though Terry McAuliffe was quoted making the same point without correction earlier this month. Still, this is a positive development. It's not enough to simply fact-check a claim once. It needs to be done over and over again.

NYT repeats phony Obama quote

The New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller repeats the myth that Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton was pretending to hunt ducks with a revolver in a Week in Review article today:

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain have both derided Mr. Obama as “elitist” for his remarks about bitter rural voters who “cling” to guns and religion, even as Mr. Obama, in a counterpunch, mocked her courtship of gun owners, depicting her as a kind of ersatz Annie Oakley “packing a six-shooter” in a duck blind. And Mr. McCain, throwing a haymaker of his own, pointed out in a recent speech to members of the National Rifle Association that “someone should tell Senator Obama that ducks are usually hunted with shotguns.”

But Obama never said Hillary was "'packing a six-shooter' in a duck blind." His actual quote was the following:

She's talking like she's Annie Oakley. Hillary Clinton's out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday. She's packing a six-shooter. C'mon, she knows better.

As TNR's Jonathan Chait pointed out, "Obama was joking that Clinton was putting herself forward as someone who hunts ducks every Sunday and carries a six-shooter, not that Clinton hunts with a six-shooter."

Chait has documented how this myth has been promoted by John McCain, who misquotes Obama as saying "like she's on the duck blind every Sunday, packin' a six-shooter!" His misquotation already been repeated by the Washington Post and the Associated Press as well as a previous Bumiller article. Will the Times correct the record before this myth becomes conventional wisdom?

How to predict the general election

The usually savvy Matthew Yglesias gets things a bit wrong in this post on the utility of state-level polling:

It's really too bad that the folks behind Five Thirty Eight.com have gone and created such a compelling website based around state-by-state general election polling. It's all really well done and, as such, I can't really bring myself to look away. But this stuff is all really and truly meaningless. Six months ago, no polling showed Barack Obama winning the Democratic race, and no polling showed John McCain winning the Republican race and the general election is about six months away.

The comparison in the last sentence isn't valid, however. Presidential primaries are inherently unpredictable for reasons including the lack of clear ideological differences and the greater importance of perceived viability. General elections, by contrast, can be forecast with a high degree of accuracy.

That doesn't mean that state-by-state polling is the right way to predict outcomes -- previous research has shown that macro-level variables like the state of the economy, job approval of the president, war deaths, and/or the length of the incumbent party's time in office explain most of the variance in the national two-party vote. Yglesias and others should focus on those predictors instead. But UW-Milwaukee's Tom Holbrook did find that spring 2004 polls were reasonably predictive of the eventual outcome. For instance, here's his plot of May polls against state popular vote totals in November:

And here are Holbrook's conclusions about the predictive validity of the data:

[W]hen the polling margin was fairly narrow the outcome was truly up in the air. In fact, across all four months [March-June] the poll result called the wrong winner in 17 of the 36 cases in which Kerry's share of the two-party vote in trial-heat polls was between 47% and 53% (this excludes two cases in which the poll result was tied). These results suggest that we should take the term "toss-up" very seriously. At the same time, the poll result was wrong in only 3 of the 44 cases in which Kerry's poll margin was outside this range.

As for me, I think Douglas Hibbs's forecast that the Democrats will get 53-54% of the two-party vote is a reasonable baseline, though I fear that an anti-Obama backlash will reduce that total by 2-3 points. (The Intrade futures market puts the odds of a Democratic win in November at 62%.)

This American Life on the financial crisis

If you've had a hard time making sense of the financial crisis that came out of the housing bubble, This American Life co-produced an entertaining show on the subject with NPR News that does a great job of making the story understandable. Highly recommended.

Tucker Carlson for president?

Via Mike Munger, my department chair here at Duke and the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, there are rumors that Tucker Carlson may take a shot at the Libertarian presidential nomination.

I'm not sure if this is for real or not, but I'm not as surprised by the idea as you might think. Many people forget that Carlson was a conservative but non-dogmatic print journalist before he started doing shout TV. In particular, he wrote a Talk magazine story about George W. Bush in 1999 that got him in a lot of trouble with conservatives. Along the same lines, I had lunch with him once in DC when he was doing Crossfire and I remember thinking that his views were more heterodox than his TV work suggested (he might have even referred to himself as a libertarian). And he was also kind enough to blurb All the President's Spin even though it wasn't in his interest to do so.

In any case, I would love to see a debate matching Carlson against Bob Barr and Mike Gravel.

Update 5/23 5:41 PM: Via Tommy Christopher, Jake Tapper at ABC News is reporting that Carlson isn't running:

Carlson tells me he was never running.

He's right now with his family in Maine rather than in Denver with the Marijuana Policy Project and the like.

"I probably should have done it," Tucker emails me. "Imagine the bus trip."

NYT corrects Obama myths in FL

The New York Times has a nice article today correcting various misperceptions about Barack Obama that were reported by older Jewish voters in Florida:

Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors about Mr. Obama have flourished. Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

This kind of journalism is a substantial improvement from man on the street reporting that simply repeats incorrect quotes (like the false claim that Obama is a Muslim) without correcting them.

Hillary's outlandish FL/MI rhetoric

Like Rick James, Hillary Clinton is a habitual line-stepper. The latest: comparing the non-recognition of the Florida and Michigan primaries to slavery and civil rights along with Zimbabwe. How long will this scorched-earth strategy go on?

The 22nd Amendment strikes back

I have no idea if the report out of Israel that President Bush wants to attack Iran before leaving office is true (the White House denies it), but the fact that we're debating it should highlight the problem with the 22nd Amendment, which removes democratic accountability from second-term presidents. President Bush is deeply unpopular, but he has no personal incentive to adjust his policies to public opinion. If he had the option to run again, things might look very different right now. It's certainly hard to imagine that he would even contemplate starting another war in the Middle East.

Update 5/22 9:16 AM: Of course, as readers point out via email and in comments, Bush's unpopularity is so massive at this point that he might not not run again even if he had the option to do so, which is true. However, the second-to-last sentence above is my way of suggesting that Bush's behavior throughout his second term probably would have been different if he had the option to run again (politicians don't usually leave office voluntarily). As such, he probably wouldn't be so unpopular now and thus would be at least a marginally viable candidate for a third term.

How bad was MS-01 for the GOP?

American University's Brian Schaffner has a nice graph illustrating the implications of the GOP's defeat in the special election in Mississippi's first district. He plots the vote for GOP House candidates in open seat elections in 2006 against President Bush's vote total in the district in the 2004 election and then superimposes the MS-1 result in red:

Candidates who performed as well as Bush would appear on the diagonal line from the bottom left to the upper right. Deviations below that line indicate underperformance; those above that line represent overperformance. As Schaffner notes, only three open seat candidates in 2006 performed as poorly as Greg Davis did last week (and that doesn't take into account the fact that the special election was in Mississippi). Given the way the fundamentals are looking, we may be looking at a historic pro-Democratic swing in November.

Quick KY and OR results analysis

Updating my series on the state-level predictors of Obama support, the graphs below (which include 95% confidence intervals around predicted linear fits using data from before yesterday's primaries) show that white support for Obama in Oregon and Kentucky fits the pattern we expect by education but not by black population:

The insipid Iran threat debate

Are the presidential candidates actually going to have a debate about whether the threat posed by Iran is comparable to the previous threat posed by the USSR?

Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.

McCain made the attack Monday in Chicago, Obama's home turf.

"Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess," McCain said in an appearance at the restaurant industry's annual meeting.

He was referring to comments Obama made Sunday in Pendleton, Ore.: "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, 'We're going to wipe you off the planet.'"

A video clip of Obama making the comments was distributed Monday by McCain's campaign.

McCain listed the dangers he sees from Iran: It provides deadly explosive devices used to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, sponsors terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and is committed to the destruction of Israel.

"The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny," McCain said.

This strikes me as a classic Washington gaffe. What Obama said is indisputably true -- Iran does not "pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us" -- but McCain is using Obama's comments to suggest that the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn't take the Iranian threat seriously.

Note also how McCain falsely implies that Obama said that the threat posed by Iran is "tiny" (he actually said Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela "are tiny compared to the Soviet Union"). This is similar to the way McCain distorted an Obama joke about Hillary Clinton to suggest that Obama thinks people hunt ducks with revolvers (as documented by Jonathan Chait). Not exactly straight talk, is it?

Why Al Gore's favorables improved

I'm obviously sympathetic to Ezra Klein's critique of the "gaffe-hunting, sound-bite-obsessed media," but I have to take issue with this passage:

Filtered through the lens of a couple of awkward turns of phrase and an oratorical style that could seem tendentious, Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing years, he stepped out of campaign journalism. He began sending his speeches out directly over MoveOn.org's e-mail list, made a movie that asked people to sit down and listen to him for the better part of two hours, and did his rounds on interview shows on which he could have fairly lengthy conversations with hosts.

The result? A massive rehabilitation of his reputation, including in the eyes of the very political pundits who once spurned him. According to a CBS News poll, Gore's favorable rating late last year was at 46%, up from 18% in late 1999. At 46%, incidentally, Gore's rating is higher than the most recent ratings of Bush (30%), Obama (44%), Clinton (42%) or McCain (32%).

I wish substantive media appearances were that important, but the improvement in Gore's favorable ratings seems more likely to be the result of (a) him not being criticized by Republicans and conservatives as much and (b) winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Also, if you look at the timelines of Gore's favorability ratings across multiple polls (rather than just CBS), it's not clear how much they have changed in recent months.

Bush's history on appeasement/strawmen

Back in 2006, I proposed Nyhan's corollary to Godwin's law in a column for Time.com:

A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin's law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

Let me propose Nyhan's corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

What's incredible is that my prediction has come true only days after Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

During a speech before the Israeli Knesset, President Bush seemed to mischaracterize Obama's declared belief in negotating with foreign governments as a belief that the US "should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals" and linked it to appeasement of the Nazis:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of the enemies of peace, and America utterly rejects it...

The Bush administration has repeatedly invoked the specter of Nazi appeasement in this way to undermine opposition to its foreign policy, as my Time.com column shows. In particular, Donald Rumsfeld used the same quote as Bush in a 2006 speech to the American Legion. (The statement, which was made by Senator William Borah, is a key trope of conservative appeasement rhetoric -- Time/Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer used in his August 11, 2006 newspaper column about Iran as well as columns denouncing the alleged appeasement of China in 1989 and North Korea in 1994.)

It's also worth noting the way that Bush attacks straw men in his speech, which makes vague references to "some" who "seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals" and "some people" who "suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away." Bush frequently uses formulations like these in his public addresses as a way to caricature his opponents while saying something that can be defended as an accurate reference to some (usually unspecified) extremist. Along these lines, White House spokesperson Dana Perino denied that Bush was referring to Obama, saying "when you're running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you."

Here's a brief sampling of the administration's eight-year war on straw men:

"When the tax cut takes effect, the typical family of four will save $1,600 every year. Some say that's not much." (3/3/01)

"They tell me it was a shallow recession. It was a shallow recession because of the tax relief. Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper." (9/1/03)

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern." (4/30/04)

"[T]he natural tendency for people is to say, 'Oh, let's lay down our arms.' But you can't negotiate with these people. There are no negotiations that are to be had. Therapy won't work." (5/10/04)

"The idea of emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve plays -- would put America in a dangerous position in the war on terror." (5/19/04)

"Sometimes you'll hear people say that moral truth is relative, or call religious faith a comforting illusion. And when you hear talk like that, take it seriously enough to be skeptical. It may seem generous and open-minded to say that everybody, on every moral issue, is equally right." (5/21/04)

"I reject this notion -- and I'm not suggesting that my opponent says it, but I reject the notion that some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free, you don't desire freedom." (10/1/04)

"I rejected the kind of intellectual elitism of some around the world who say, well, maybe certain people can't be free." (1/29/05)

"Now, I understand there's some in America who say, well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack." (1/25/06)

"There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off." (6/28/06)

"I would hope people aren't trying to rewrite the history of Saddam Hussein -- all of a sudden, he becomes kind of a benevolent fellow. He's a dangerous man." (9/15/06)

"It's hard to plot and plan attacks against the United States when you're on the run. I need members of Congress who understand that you can't negotiate with these folks, you can't hope that they change their mind, that the best way to protect the American people is to defeat them overseas so we do not have to face them here at home." (9/21/06)

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals... Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away." (5/15/08)

Update 5/19 8:39 AM: Don't believe Perino's statement or President Bush's vague denial that he was talking about Obama. As a commentator notes, members of the administration admitted that the President's statement was directed at the presumptive Democratic nominee: "Although the president didn't name names, administration officials are privately acknowledging this was a shot at Barack Obama."

Update 5/19 5:50 PM: The White House is protesting NBC's editing of Bush's response -- here's the full exchange:

ENGEL: “In front of the Israeli palm at the Knesset, you said that negotiating with Iran is pointless — and then you went further, you saying — you said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama? He certainly thought you were.”

THE PRESIDENT: “You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon. But I also talked about a vision of what's possible in the Middle East.”

I interpreted Bush's (clipped) statement as a denial, but the White House is claiming that NBC's omission of "You didn't get it exactly right" suggests that Bush agreed with Engel's premise. In any case, as I noted above, administration officials acknowledged privately that Bush's language was directed at Obama, so it's hard to take them seriously now when they call this a "media-manufactured storyline."

Update 6/10/08 8:45 AM: A historian alerts me that there are questions about the veracity of the alleged Borah quote.

Fact-checking Matthews on Obama and pool

There's no fact that Chris Matthews can't get wrong -- this is one of my favorite Hardball fact-checks ever:

On the May 13 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, discussing Sen. Barack Obama, host Chris Matthews asserted: "I think, being an African-American, it's all the more important to get in there and show who you are, introduce yourself as a person, not as an identity group, but as a human being, and connect with people. I think that's still going to be his challenge." Matthews then stated: "Playing pool, not a bad start, but it's not what most people play. People with money play pool these days." Matthews added: "The guys who have pool rooms in their house in the basement. You know what those tables cost?" After Matthews spoke, Hardball aired footage of Obama shooting pool. ...

According to a Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association 2007 study posted on the Billiards Congress of America website, "There are 46,990,000 Billiards participants in the U.S." -- defined as people who play billiards at least once a year -- and "60% of all Billiards participants have a household income of under $75,000 per year." Additionally, 54 percent of billiards participants also participated in bowling, and "30% of all Billiards participants have a college degree or higher."

Matthews constantly does this sort of projecting of his Democrats-as-elitists narrative onto Obama:

As Media Matters for America has documented, Matthews has on numerous occasions purported to analyze whether Obama has the ability to "connect" with "regular" voters. Specifically, during the April 1 edition of Hardball, Matthews referred to Obama's bowling performance at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and asked, "[C]an Obama woo more regular voters -- you know, the ones who actually do know how to bowl?" During another segment on March 29, Matthews asked Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), "Let me ask you about how he -- how's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?" Additionally, on the March 31 edition of Hardball, Matthews said of Obama: "[T]his gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder." Matthews has also criticized Obama for turning down an offer of coffee at a diner in favor of orange juice and asserted that Obama has "got another problem. ... He 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. He doesn't seem to, 'Hey, you know, how are the Eagles doing?' Or 'How are the Phils doing?' "

There's nothing like inside-the-Beltway millionaires lecturing political candidates about the habits of regular people. But you won't hear anyone prominent object because they all want to be on Hardball!

PS It defies belief that some people think Matthews should run for the Senate in 2010.

West Virginia results by demographics

As predicted, Obama got drubbed in West Virginia, so it's time to update my series on the predictors of his state-level support. If we put the exit poll data in context, we can see that he did much worse among whites in West Virginia than we would expect based in states with similar black populations:

However, he did about as poorly as we would expect among whites given the proportion of state residents with college degrees, though West Virginia has fewer college graduates than any previous primary state in the sample:

[Both graphs include linear fits with 95% confidence intervals that are predicted based on previous primary results.]

Update 5/15 10:07 AM: Josh Marshall argues Obama's struggles with downscale white voters are the result of the cultural and racial history of Appalachia, the location of most counties that he's lost by wide margins (in purple):

NPR story on transgender children

Don't miss Alix Spiegel's NPR series (part one, part two) on the struggles of families with transgender children, though it will break your heart. Our society has such a long way to go in how we deal with these issues. As Spiegel notes, the parallels to the "treatment" of homosexuality in past decades are all too obvious.

The Obama plague!

Did The Onion ghostwrite this Robert Novak column on conservatives "[promoting] the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency"? Can this possibly be real?

Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain's candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as "God's candidate" for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee's course.

Huckabee's announced support of McCain is unequivocal, and he is regarded in the McCain camp as a friend and ally. But credible activists are spreading the word that Huckabee secretly allies himself with the bitter-end opposition. That hardly seems possible considering his public backing, but critics of Huckabee's 10 years as governor of Arkansas say he is all too capable of playing a double game...

[T]he word is that some evangelicals dispute Huckabee's support. One experienced, credible activist in Christian politics who would not let his name be used told me that Huckabee, in personal conversation with him, had embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible's prophecy.

According to this activist, at the heart of the let-Obama-win movement is longtime Virginia conservative leader Michael Farris -- the nation's leading home-school advocate, who is now chancellor of Patrick Henry College (in Purcellville, Va.) for home-schooled students. Best known politically as the losing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1993, Farris is regarded as one of the hardest-edged Christian politicians. He is reported in evangelical circles to promote the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency.

In conversations with me, Huckabee and Farris both denied saying that an Obama presidency should be inflicted on the country.

Warnings of the anti-Christ are soon to follow. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Great moments in Supreme Court citations

Some Antonin Scalia news you can use from Slate's Dahlia Lithwick:

[Antonin] Scalia's writing style is a disarming mix of the lowbrow and the lofty. He recently served up the Supreme Court's first citation to Oscar the Grouch (PDF).

2008 vs. previous races by education

A reader shared the link to an excellent table that was posted on the website FiveThirtyEight.com back in April:

Hillary performs fully 11 points better against McCain than Obama does among voters with a high school education or less. But Obama performs 6 points better than Hillary among adults with some college, 10 points better among college graduates, and 13 points better among those with postgraduate educations.

Rather than analyzing these numbers by themselves, let's compare them to previous election cycles, and see how other Democratic nominees performed in these categories. I was able to track down exit poll data for 1992-2004, as well as 1976 and 1980.

Though it's way too early for the 2008 numbers to be strictly comparable to the exit polls from previous elections, the table illustrates the differences in the support Obama and Clinton get against McCain and changes in the Democratic coalition over time. In particular, note how Obama does about the same as Kerry among high school-educated voters and those with a postgraduate education, but makes significant gains among those with some college or a college degree. By contrast, while Clinton gets more support than Obama from high school-educated voters, she doesn't improve on Kerry's showing with voters who have some college or college degrees and does 14 points worse among voters with postgraduate education.

Update 5/13 9:55 AM: A reminder -- as BG points out in comments, these numbers collapse across other demographic categories such as age, race, and gender.

Profiled in Duke Magazine

For those who are interested (hi Mom!), there is a brief profile of me in the current issue of Duke Magazine. It includes some of my thoughts on the relationship between Spinsanity and my academic research.

ABC: 82% say wrong track

The latest ABC News poll/Washington Post poll shows how negatively the public has come to view the direction of the country under President Bush (PDF):

82% of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track, which is just one percentage point lower than the 1973 record. (John McCain, once again, is in big trouble.)

The poll also includes yet another illustration of how Bush's approval numbers have been in terminal decline since 9/11 except for a blip upward around the invasion of Iraq:

Back in early 2002, I wondered whether President Bush would become a transformational president who would define a political era like Ronald Reagan. Instead, Bush squandered his post-9/11 popularity so completely that he has provided Barack Obama with the opportunity to be a transformational president. (The situation is actually relatively parallel to the way that Jimmy Carter's presidency created the conditions under which Reagan could emerge.)

Update 5/12 9:29 PM: A closely related graph from Gallup:

The randomization reform agenda

Thought of the day: Couldn't reform-minded liberals and pork-busting conservatives agree that we should have randomized evaluations of almost everything the government does in social welfare, health care, etc.? When will Washington join the experimental revolution and find out which programs actually work?

Update 5/12 10:19 PM: In comments, Dave White points to a CRS study titled "Congress and Program Evaluation: An Overview of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and Related Issues" (PDF) that provides considerable detail on the key issues in this debate.

Obama smear watch

Media Matters notes that the Washington Times quoted a man in Indiana saying "I can't stand [Barack Obama]... He's a Muslim. He's not even pro-American as far as I'm concerned" without pointing out that Obama is a Christian. Similar reports appeared in the LA Times, the websites of the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, and Maureen Dowd's column.

Meanwhile, Media Matters also points out that Dick Morris said on Fox News that "the determinant in the election will be whether we believe that Barack Obama is what he appears to be, or is he somebody who's sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn't believe in our system and is more in line with Wright's views?"

Hillary's latest extrapolation fallacy

Hillary Clinton has sent a memo to House Democrats touting her victories in swing districts. The problem is that the memo, like so much of Hillary's electability arguments, depends on the fallacy that primaries are an accurate guide to general election outcomes. You just can't assume that to be true. What we need instead is polling in those districts among registered voters.

Debates with my colleagues

Discussions that have I've been having with my colleagues at PIPC this week:

(1) What happens to Joe Lieberman if the Democrats take the White House and expand their Senate majority to 56 or 57 seats? Despite his support for McCain, I think Democrats will want his vote on non-war-related issues, so they'll hold their nose and let him keep his seniority in the caucus. Others say he'll be stripped of his seniority, lose his chairmanship of the government affairs committee, and then leave the party to become a Republican.

(2) What happens in the fall campaign if John McCain is outspent 3:1 or 4:1 by Barack Obama? Obama has raised more than $250 million in the primary and seems likely to raise at least that much for the general. McCain will most likely only have $85 million in public financing. If money ever matters in politics, this is the time.

PS In his column today, Paul Krugman makes a similar point to the one I've been making here -- namely, that the political fundamentals are heavily tilted against John McCain. The combination of those fundamentals and Obama's vast fundraising advantage may be enough to offset his likely underperformance among downscale white voters.

Update 5/11 9:13 PM: In response, Matthew Yglesias argues that "there's very little logic to keeping [Lieberman] in the party," but TNR's Josh Patashnik raises the key caveat:

My sympathies are with those who'd like to give Senator Lieberman the boot... The question that needs to be asked, though, is this: Is Joe Lieberman the type of vindictive, thin-skinned individual who would be likely to cast aside his longstanding moderate-to-liberal record on most domestic issues in order to join Republican filibusters and make life miserable for Democrats in retaliation for their snubbing him? I think the answer is quite possibly yes, and that's a very good reason for biting the bullet and putting up with his shenanigans until 2012.

Josh is right. The Lieberman-defenstrators out there don't appreciate the fact that the Connecticut senator's overall voting record in the current Congress is actually pretty close to the middle of the party. If he switches parties, that's unlikely to continue -- previous party switchers have drastically changed their voting patterns. The resulting shift would make it that much harder for a President Obama to end Republican filibusters and get his agenda passed. My guess is Democrats will realize this and let Lieberman stay in the caucus. (However, if McCain defies the odds and wins, it's possible that Democrats will take Lieberman down in their post-election wrath, particularly because they'll want the Government Affairs committee in reliably partisan hands.)

Update 5/12 9:49 AM: Via email, Yglesias makes a point I may have neglected -- the danger of Lieberman retaining his chairmanship for Democrats is that he might aggressively investigate an Obama administration. Once he launched those investigations, removing him from the chairmanship could provoke a major controversy, hence the possible need to remove him before that point.

Ensign: Liberals want to weaken defense

In a fundraising email to supporters yesterday, NRSC chairman John Ensign suggested that one of the top legislative priorities of "Big Labor, MoveOn.org and extremist environmental groups" is "weakening our national defense":

Dear Republican Supporter,

Big Labor, MoveOn.org and extremist environmental groups have promised to spend millions to elect angry liberals like Al Franken to the U.S. Senate in November.

What's more outrageous is that these groups expect the Democrats to payback their efforts by implementing their top legislative priorities like eliminating the secret ballot and weakening our national defense.

I've added this to my timeline of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11.

PS What does Ensign mean when he says another top liberal priority is "eliminating the secret ballot"?

Update 5/8 8:49 PM: Commenters and correspondents report that Ensign is referring to the Employee Free Choice Act, which "would for the first time in 60 years allow workers to organize without putting the issue to a secret-ballot vote" -- a process that labor unions believe benefits employers. The problem is that Ensign never makes clear that he's talking about union votes. His jargon is so obscure that readers might end up thinking that Democrats want to weaken the secret ballot in federal elections.

[Disclosure: I worked for the Ed Bernstein for Senate campaign in Nevada in 2000 against John Ensign.]

The Post fact-checks Bill Clinton's face!

Self-parody alert -- Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," is fact-checking Bill Clinton's facial expressions:

"Tonight we've come from behind, we've broken the tie, and thanks to you it's full speed on to the White House."
--Hillary Clinton, May 6, 2008.

Brave, defiant words from Hillary Clinton. But observe the facial expressions. For many people watching television on Tuesday night, the most striking impression from the Clinton victory rally in Indiana was not the words that came out of Hillary's mouth, but the look on Bill's face. It was the look of a man who knows that a dream is slipping away.

The Facts

Try this experiment. Take a look at this extract from Clinton's speech in Indianapolis with the volume turned down. Watch the expressions on the faces of Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea, and let me know what you think.

Here is what I saw. A candidate with a mask of upbeat determination on her face, who knows deep down that the game is lost but is still on auto-pilot, unwilling to accept defeat. A proud and loving daughter who will support her mother to the very end. An exhausted spouse who is sick at heart because he knows, from his vast political experience, that the fight is over. He dutifully applauds at the right moments, and occasionally punches his fist in the air, but his face reveals his true feelings.

Even as the hope of a miraculous upset faded away, Hillary still came across as the energizer bunny, running on batteries that never seem to wind down. After giving it his all, in dozens of small town meetings across North Carolina and Indiana, Bill looked as if all the energy had suddenly been drained out of him.

The Pinocchio Test

The Fact Checker will no doubt be ridiculed by many readers for checking facial expressions, rather than verifiable facts. But sometimes body language can be more eloquent than the most stirring rhetoric. The look on Bill Clinton's face said it all, qualifying for a Geppetto for agonized, heart-felt honesty.

I would like to become a charter member of the group objecting to "The Fact Checker ... checking facial expressions." The fact that Dobbs thinks he can read Clinton's mind tells you all you need to know about (a) why we started Spinsanity and (b) the deep epistemological problems of political journalism.

PS The swami is working hard tonight.

Chris Matthews and Harold Ford enlighten us

In the annals of great Chris Matthews moments, this interview with former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. is one of my favorites -- it's swami time!

MATTHEWS: Do you think Hillary Rodham Clinton has the soul of a vice president? Do you think she would really feel right about that job? She was first lady, a supporting person to the president for eight years through all the turmoil of that. Do you think she really wants to be on the ticket that wins, wants to serve as VP for four or eight years under a young president?

FORD: I take Senator Clinton at her word. She is deeply committed to this country, believing that the last seven, eight years of leadership in the White House has been difficult, at best, if not disastrous on certain fronts for the country, and is committed to being a part of a team to straighten that out and to fix that. I can’t answer that for her.

As we jump a step or two ahead here, I think this is a scenario that we in the party, and Barack and Hillary and their campaigns and their teams, ought to begin contemplating. I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were advising the Obama campaign tonight—I’ll say it again, tomorrow morning they ought to find as many super delegates outside of the Pelosi and Reid and Gore, but in the category right beneath him, who are willing to endorse him and to call for this campaign to play itself out in orderly way, but to be clear that the one with the most pledged delegates and the popular votes—it looks as if that will be Barack on both fronts—is going to be the nominee.

I think we have to begin to think seriously about a healing process in this party. Frankly, an Obama/Clinton ticket might address huge concerns that both sides have about personal differences and animosity, and frankly, some of the concerns that some in the party have about Barack’s ability to attract white working class voters, particularly white men going into the fall election.

What does it mean to have the "soul" of a vice president? And what does Harold Ford know about Hillary Clinton's soul?

Ford's response is almost as bad. As Matthew Yglesias points out, it's bizarre to suggest that adding Hillary Clinton to the ticket will help Obama with working class whites in the general election.

Obama support in NC and IN by race

Time to update my previous work on state-level predictors of Obama support. It turns out that Indiana and North Carolina were strikingly consistent with the trends in racial voting we've seen thus far. Here is a graph of total white and black support for Obama by the state's black population (click for an enlarged version):

The lines are fractional polynomials fit to the data before yesterday's primaries and the shading represents 95% confidence intervals. As you can see, the black vote in Indiana slightly overperformed for Obama but the other results fit almost perfectly with the predicted values.

Update 5/7 3:11 PM: To answer Rob's question in comments, the y-axes represent the share of the total white+black Democratic vote received by Obama from whites and blacks, respectively. For instance, the total white vote (the left y-axis) is calculated as Obama's percentage of the white vote multiplied by the proportion of the white+black electorate that was made up by whites. The total black vote is defined analogously.

The simpler graph below tells a similar story:

Update 5/7 10:38 PM -- Here's an equivalent graph to the top one using just Obama's margin over Hillary in the white vote (corrected after Josh pointed out an error in comments):

Gravel-mentum! Gravel-anche!

Who are the 12,000 people who voted for Mike Gravel yesterday in North Carolina? And what planet are they from? I'm so confused.

Update 5/7 2:28 PM: Phil Klinkner suggested an even better title. Watch out below!

Obama's anti-political utopianism

I thought Barack Obama gave a great speech tonight, but it's just silly for him to claim that he will end negative politics:

I didn't expect when I ran for president that I would avoid this kind of politics [GOP character assassination]; I ran because it is time to end it ... We will end it by telling the truth. Forcefully, repeatedly, confidently ...

Andrew Sullivan loved this passage. But to me, it's absurd. As I wrote last year, there's no way Obama can deliver on this promise -- polarization is not going to go away:

[M]ost of Obama's appeal comes down to his call for a new politics that is less cynical and polarized -- a vain hope. Bill Clinton and many other politicians have called for such a change, and none have succeeded. The underlying structural forces that promote polarization are unlikely to relent. And more importantly, polarization is a two-sided phenomenon. Calling for depolarization once you are president is, in practice, a call for the opposition to go along with your initiatives -- as in President Bush's call to "change the tone" (see All the President's Spin for more). It's an absurd promise that no candidate can deliver on...

And as I argued after seeing Obama speak back in November, there's something vaguely anti-democratic about his promises to end negative attacks and transcend partisanship:

He said the reason he ran for president is to "change politics" -- a goal that is, frankly, absurd and borders on the anti-democratic. The forces driving the trend toward increased partisanship won't go away if he's elected. Consider the only time in recent memory that the two parties "got along" and "worked together" -- the aftermath of 9/11. During that period, President Bush's high approval ratings silenced dissent among Democrats, providing the context for approval of the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in fall 2002. It's not a great model.

To be fair, Obama could be right in the following narrow sense. If he overcomes the negative ads and wins a convincing victory in November, it might help force the GOP to move beyond its aging 1980s template of attacking Democrats as too liberal, elitist, and unpatriotic. But the trend over the course of the campaign has been for him to make statements suggesting that there's something wrong with partisanship and opposition. After living through the GOP's efforts to silence dissent since 9/11, he should know better.

McCain v. the fundamentals

Despite all of the questions that are being raised about the electability of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the reality is that the political fundamentals are heavily tilted in their favor. Yesterday, Bill Kristol reported that the McCain campaign realizes how difficult a task it faces:

Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with McCain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.

And the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.

Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Kristol then mentions talk within the McCain camp about choosing the young Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal as a vice presidential nominee. But that's unlikely to make much difference. The problem for McCain is that he is likely to regress toward the Republican number no matter what he does.The reality is that presidential elections are highly predictable. Candidates probably only matter on the margin. This empirical reality is often inverted in journalism, which typically attributes results driven by the fundamentals to the candidates' political skill (or the lack thereof). As a result, McCain's likely failure will be interpreted as the result of some tactical mistake (my prediction: the loss of his "maverick" luster) rather than the result of an unfavorable political environment.

Brooks misquotes Hillary

Today, David Brooks repeats the false report that Hillary Clinton referred to "Wall Street money-grubbers" -- a widely circulated misquotation:

Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party.

In fact, as her campaign's fact-checking blog points out, she actually criticized "Wall Street money brokers" -- you can listen to the audio here (MP3).

A "he said," "she said" highlight and lowlight

Media Matters flags a terrible example of "he said," "she said" journalism in this Washington Post story:

The Washington Post uncritically quoted a voter's assertion -- apparently referring to a chain email containing a photograph of Sen. Barack Obama standing, but without his hand over his heart -- that "[f]rom what I can tell, if he becomes president he will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance."

Would the Post reprint someone saying the sun rotates around the earth without saying the claim is false? What's especially ridiculous, as Media Matters points out, is that the Post's fact checker blog already debunked the Obama Pledge of Allegiance myth.

On the upside, however, the New York Times has finally called John McCain on his distortions of Democratic health care plans -- the lede of the "Check Point" feature is remarkably unhedged for political coverage in a major American newspaper:

Senator John McCain has been repeatedly suggesting that his Democratic rivals are proposing a single-payer, or even a nationalized health care system along the lines of those in countries like Canada and Britain.

The suggestion is incorrect.

Will the gas tax help Obama?

Jon Chait makes the counterintuitive argument that Barack Obama's refusal to pander on the summer gas tax holiday will actually help him, but I think he omits a key factor: Obama will be proved right if a holiday is enacted and prices at the pump don't fall much or at all this summer. (It might be true that prices would have be a bit higher in the absence of the gas tax holiday, but people have a hard time with counterfactuals.)

In the main political science model of presidential pandering, one of the key variables is whether the policy will be revealed as having succeeded or failed before the election. The finding is that presidents will only pander to public opinion when they are marginally popular and believe the public is unlikely to find out about the policy's success until after the election.

In that framework, Clinton's position makes perfect sense -- the Democratic primary contest will be over before the failure of the gas tax holiday would become clear -- but McCain's position seems irrational. It only makes sense if he believes (a) Congress won't pass a gas tax holiday and/or (b) the public won't be able to tell if it succeeds or fails.

Brit Hume v. reality on Fox's audience

Brit Hume, the Washington managing editor of Fox News, makes up a "fact" to fit a narrative he wants to promote:

All of a sudden, the once-frosty relationship between Fox News and the Democratic candidates seems to have grown warmer. Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, who steadfastly refused to attend Fox-sponsored debates last year, are now giving plenty of interviews as they court Fox’s viewers, who are largely white, conservative and undecided.

“It’s probably true that we appeal to white working-class voters,” said Brit Hume, the network’s Washington managing editor and the host of “Special Report.” “The candidates are going where the voters are.”

In fact, however, Fox's audience is far more affluent than the working class:

The regular cable news viewer can be personified as a married, middle-aged man who has at least 14 years of education. He earns well, with a median income of $62,000, and tends to live in the suburbs. He has a high degree of hard-news consumption, and that links to his moderately high knowledge of current affairs. He is fairly adaptive to technology (more likely than other news consumers to own a PDA, iPod or Tivo). Compared to viewers of other media, the cable news viewer earns more (local and network news viewers have a median income of $45,000) and is also much more adaptive to technology. He is also younger than viewers of network news (who are nearly 53 years of age). The average cable viewer is 47.5, and there are only marginal differences by channel.

...Fox News viewers are the oldest at 48.7 years, followed by CNN (47.1) and MSNBC (46.5). Of the three, the CNN viewers have the lowest median inc