Brendan Nyhan

I have no idea what David Brooks means when he calls the Obama campaign the “champion of policy change” and the McCain’s campaign “the champion of systemic change”:

Now the campaign has become a battle between two different definitions of change. The Obama camp has become the champion of policy change — after eight years of failed Bush-McCain policies, it is time for different, Democratic ones. The McCain campaign is the champion of systemic change — after two decades of bickering and self-dealing, its time to shake up the whole system in order to get things done.

The Obama change is more responsible and specific, but it has all the weirdness of a Brookings Institution report. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The McCain promise of change is comprehensive and vehement, though it’s hard to know how it would actually work in office.

How can a promise of “systemic change” be “comprehensive” if Brooks can’t even define what it means or how it would work? What does “systemic change” mean if it’s not about policy? Other than his quixotic campaign against earmarks (which consume a tiny part of the federal budget), it’s not clear that McCain would change much of anything about the “system.”

In reality, the way “policy change” and “systemic change” typically happen is that party control of the presidency changes or the balance of power shifts in Congress. Contra Brooks, electing McCain to face a Democratic Congress will largely preserve the status quo, not change it. (The most likely exception, of course, is foreign policy, where the president has more latitude to act unilaterally.)

The meme late last week was that Sarah Palin’s speech was an appeal to the Republican base that wouldn’t play well with independent and crossover voters (see: James Fallows, Matthew Yglesias, Mike Murphy, Josh Marshall). In a Democratic year, several of them argued, the GOP’s traditional anti-elite rhetoric won’t work. That may yet prove to be true, but the apparent size of the Republican bounce suggests otherwise.

The problem with these analyses is that we don’t know how effective Republican appeals to resentment against cultural elites will be against a black presidential candidate. Even in an election year, if these critiques take on an explicit or implicit racial tinge (as they often do), it’s possible that they will damage Obama more than pundits anticipate. Remember, the fundamentals predict a close race. All it would take is for Obama to underperform by a couple of points and he will probably lose.

In her column on Saturday, Gail Collins of the New York Times makes the important point that earmarks aren’t a pressing national priority:

McCain hates, hates, hates earmarking — the Congressional habit of sticking appropriations for special back-home projects in the budget without going through the normal priority-setting process. He talks about it with an enthusiasm that he never manages to summon for the economy, health care or education.

Earmarks are indeed a bad thing. If you ever become a U.S. senator, please dedicate yourself to getting rid of them. But for the chief executive of the country, they’re about as critical a problem as the overlong Christmas shopping season.

The problem is that Collins never actually proves her point. Without the relevant data, the statement above is just an assertion. Here’s what’s missing: the reason earmarks aren’t a critical problem is that they are a tiny percentage of total federal spending.

For instance, estimates from watchdog groups of total earmark spending in fiscal 2008 range from $16-18 billion. Current estimated outlays for the federal government in fiscal 2008 are $2.9 trillion (PDF). That’s less than one percent.

To put it another way, the current projected deficit is roughly $400 billion. Even if John McCain got rid of every earmark (an impossible task), it would only make a small contribution to deficit reduction. (See Factcheck.org’s takedown of McCain’s exaggerated claims of how much it can save by reducing earmarks.)

If only Gail Collins could tell her readers these things…

Back in the 1990s, if you had predicted that journalists would suggest using Hillary Clinton as an emissary to Reagan Democrats, people would have laughed in your face. And yet here’s Tom Brokaw interviewing Joe Biden on Meet the Press yesterday:

Will you send Hillary Clinton into those working class states that she won and where there are a lot of independents or the so-called Reagan Democrats who have not made up their minds, states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana, will she be a big player for this campaign for your candidacy in those states?

Brokaw doesn’t seem to grasp what should be an obvious point: the fact that Hillary Clinton got more votes from working class Democrats than Barack Obama doesn’t mean she is some sort of incredible surrogate. She was the wife of the former president running against a “wine track” black candidate with an upscale liberal base. It would have been shocking if working class Democrats didn’t back her. And on the margin, her campaigning might help keep Obama’s numbers up with that demographic group. But the question isn’t the Democrats who vote in party primaries — it’s the disaffected ex-Democrats and independents who aren’t sure who to support, and I’m pretty sure that Obama can find someone who is more appealing to that group than a culturally polarizing figure with unfavorable ratings in the mid-40s.

One of the most offensive spin tactics is to associate your political opponents with hated foreign leaders and groups (Nazis, Communists, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, terrorists, etc.).

For instance, in a post last night, Josh Marshall smeared Rudy Guiliani by suggesting his speech was Nazi-like and comparing his hand gestures to Joseph Goebbels:

With Rudy’s speech, to riff on the brilliance of the immortal Molly Ivins, I think I preferred this speech in the original German.

On a more serious note, I think it will eventually be clear to people that the Republicans made a major mistake putting Rudy in prime time. Given the state of the campaign, they have to take the fight to Obama. But you need to choose the right person. Rudy comes across as curdled and angry. Great for rousing diehards. But I don’t see this speech working with undecideds.

10:27 PM … What’s weird is that Rudy seems to get genuinely angrier the longer the speech goes on.

I will admit he’s got the Joseph Goebbels hand gestures down pat.

As I’ve argued many times before, including here, casual Nazi analogies demean and cheapen the discourse — it’s an easy way to active a series of unflattering associations and attach them to a public figure that you don’t like.

On the other side of the aisle, Matthew Yglesias notes that President Bush implicitly drew an analogy between Vietnamese Communists and the “Angry Left” in his convention speech:

If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will.

The problem with this construction is similar. Bush is activating the negative associations people have toward the Communists who tortured McCain and attaching them to liberals in domestic politics.

Kevin Drum notes that Sarah Palin repeated the misleading claim that she opposed the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in her speech last night:

Palin repeated her lie from Friday about standing up against the Bridge to Nowhere. There have been days and days of coverage thoroughly debunking this, showing beyond doubt that she was an enthusiastic supporter of the bridge and an enthusiastic supporter of the earmark, giving up only after the earmark was rescinded and Alaska was given the same amount of money to spend on other projects. She didn’t turn down a thing. And yet she repeated the lie because she knows perfectly well that 30 million people will see the speech and only a couple million will read the fact check tomorrow. That’s some straight talk for you.

This shouldn’t be suprising — McCain’s campaign has been repeating debunked claims about policy for months. The problem is that the Bush administration has broken down any remaining stigma against this practice over the last eight years. All the President’s Spin contains numerous examples of talking points that Bush and other administration officials repeated endlessly long after they had been shown to be misleading. We predicted at the time (2004) that future administrations would adopt similar practices if the media and the public did not push back. Unfortunately, it looks like we were right.

Ross Douthat is surely right that it does not benefit the Democrats to have “a debate (which the McCain campaign plainly wants to have) over the relative qualifications and accomplishments of Barack Obama and the Republican vice-presidential nominee.” It’s particularly problematic because Palin’s critics are repeating many of the same charges that were directed at Obama (i.e. she’s charismatic but light on substance). Reminding the public of those critiques in order to challenge a potential VP seems like a poor decision to me.

Following in the footsteps of Pat Buchanan and Fred Thompson, John McCain has suggested yesterday that Sarah Palin is especially qualified to be president because Alaska is really big:

With Ms. Palin facing a torrent of inquiries from reporters, Mr. McCain joined other Republicans in assailing news outlets when he told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday that “Sarah Palin has 24,000 employees in the state government” and was “responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply.” He added that he was entertained by the comparison of her experience to that of Mr. Obama and that “I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America.”

He’s right, though, that describing Obama’s leadership of his campaign as executive experience is a weak talking point.

Patrick Healy gets off a nice turn of phrase at the end of this article on the contrast between the two conventions:

The Democrats also had a band that played a variety of pop anthems, whereas the Republican hall has been filled with a mix of country music and mellower harmonies. Delegates in both cities have occasionally broken into dancing, and rhythm’s challenge has appeared bipartisan.

Indeed.

Politico reports on a misleading new Obama radio ad that falsely claims “as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal”:

“Let me tell you: If Roe vs. Wade is overturned, the lives and health of women will be put at risk. That’s why this election is so important,” says the nurse-practitioner who narrates Obama’s ad. “John McCain’s out of touch with women today. McCain wants to take away our right to choose. That’s what women need to understand. That’s how high the stakes are.”

An announcer then claims that “as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal,” before playing an exchange on “Meet the Press” in which McCain told moderator Tim Russert that he favors “a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions.”

“We can’t let John McCain take away our right to choose. We can’t let him take us back,” says the ad.

Civics 101 time: The president can’t make abortion illegal. If John McCain appointed new conservative Supreme Court justices (who must be confirmed by the Democratic Senate), it is possible that the Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade. In that case, the issue would be returned to the states, who would each create their own abortion policies through the legislative process. The odds of McCain successfully passing a constitutional amendment to create a national ban on abortion are zero — there is simply no way he “will make abortion illegal.”

Update 9/3 1:01 PM: The comments below (50 and counting) offer three principal objections. First, they claim the ad is essentially accurate because McCain supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. So why not make the perfectly reasonable claim that McCain “would try to make abortion illegal” or “wants to make abortion illegal”? Obama’s people surely understood this distinction. Indeed, consultants frequently include distortions of this sort in their ads as a way of generating press coverage (i.e. “free media”). Second, people object to the title of the post, which I’ve updated to be more precise (“Obama claims McCain ‘will make abortion illegal’”). Finally, some people claim that Congress could pass a legislative ban on abortion if Roe were repealed but my understanding is that federal jurisdiction over abortion policy in a post-Roe world is unclear (I would welcome clarification from legal experts). In any case, such legislation could not pass Congress in the foreseeable future.

Update 9/3 1:54 PM: Matthew Yglesias misconstrues my position in a critical response to this post:

For one thing, conservative members of congress regularly seek to pass federal legislation restricting reproductive freedoms (”partial birth” abortion bans, etc.) and I see no reason to think that would change if Roe were overturned. And more broadly, the idea that it’s unfairly deceptive to characterize McCain’s position on abortion accurately — he favors outlawing abortion throughout the country — on the grounds that it’s extremely unlikely that McCain would be able to deliver legislatively on his policy preferences seems like an odd standard. Democrats will almost certainly have a congressional majority in 2009 which makes it very unlikely that any aspect of his domestic agenda will pass precisely as proposed. Does that make it unfair to critique his domestic policy proposals?

Yglesias is knocking down a straw man here — I’m not promoting “the idea that it’s unfairly deceptive to characterize McCain’s position on abortion accurately” (the issue is whether the characterization is accurate) or the “odd standard” that it is “unfair to critique his domestic policy proposals” because they might not pass in a Democratic Congress (people can critique whatever they want). My issue is with the false suggestion that McCain could somehow make abortion illegal during his term by appointing justices who would repeal Roe.

Note: A lawyer who emailed me argued that prevailing interpretations of the Commerce Clause would allow for federal legislation regulating abortion. However, it is not clear whether expansive readings of the Commerce Clause would be scaled back under a more conservative Supreme Court. If so, federal jurisdiction might be less clear. As I pointed out above, a federal ban could not pass Congress in the foreseeable future in any case.

Update 9/3 5:04 PM: I was wrong on the Commerce Clause — various lawyers assure me that federal jurisdiction over abortion is not going away. That’s what I get for straying into a subject I don’t know very well. My claims above are struck out accordingly.

Also, just for the record, I know that many political ads use the phrasing “Candidate X will do Y.” That doesn’t make it ok, especially when speaking about the president, who is often perceived to have vast executive powers. In this case, Obama’s phrasing is especially pernicious because it plays on the widespread misconception that repealing Roe would make abortion illegal.

Finally, here’s MP3 audio of the ad from CBS News.