Brendan Nyhan

I love this quote from a UC-Berkeley undergrad in The New Yorker:

Personally I have never understood the idea of protesting via tree, but I know many of my classmates find it admirable.

Somehow it seems to sum up the ethos of a place where tree-sitters and non-tree-sitters live in harmony.

I’m happy to announce that I’m one of the featured bloggers at the new Cross Tabs blog at Real Clear Politics. It’s a bipartisan cross-posting blog that will aggregate posts from a number of political bloggers. Besides me, the contributors are Justin Gardner, Kyle Moore, Betsy Newmark, Jon Keller, Sister Toldjah, Michael Stickings, and Michael van der Galien. Hope you’ll check it out. (Note: All my posts will still appear here first.)

Matthew Yglesias notes how improbable it was that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination:

The fact that Obama’s had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5 has tended to obscure the fact that his primary victory has got to be the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics. In retrospect, whatever happens looks obvious and somewhat inevitable, but back in the day all that was obvious was that Clinton had the party locked down. Obama’s entire meteoric ascent from the State Senate to the cusp of the presidency is just a very, very, very unlikely story.

It’s worth underlining this point. Consider, for instance, the Intrade futures market price on Obama winning the Democratic nomination, which represents his predicted probability of winning. It shows that he was given very little chance of winning as late as winter 2007:

John McCain was considered dead in the water during the same period:

In fact, the futures price on an Obama vs. McCain race was given near-zero probability as late as early December (note: the history on this contract only goes back to January 2007):

We haven’t had a campaign without a sitting president or vice-president since 1952, and both parties end up choosing candidates who were considered relative longshots. What an incredible year for politics.

Chris Matthew continues his efforts to suggest that Barack Obama is different and not a “regular” American:

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews criticized Sen. Barack Obama’s expression of patriotism, asserting that Obama “thank[s] America” because he “got certain things from it,” rather than, Matthews claimed, “express[ing]” “that gut sense of Americanism,” which, Matthews said, is “a hard thing for someone like Barack Obama … to express.” He also purported to distinguish Obama from “regular” Americans, saying: “People that don’t have anything, including beautiful families and Ivy League degrees, know what they got. They’re Americans.”

…As Media Matters has also documented, Matthews has a history of purporting to identify actions by or characteristics of Obama that he has suggested demonstrate that he is not a “regular guy,” including playing pool, ordering “weird” beverages like orange juice, and his bowling skills.

Similarly, National Review Online’s Greg Pollowitz objected to the playing of U2 at Obama’s rally Tuesday night because the group isn’t American
(via TNR’s Ben Wasserstein):

U2’s “Beautiful Day” is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?

Now that Obama is the nominee, we’re going to see a lot more of this garbage.

It’s easy to be a pop sociologist because you can just make things up:

On MSNBC, David Brooks asserted that “less educated” and “downscale” people “look at [Sen. Barack] Obama, and they don’t see anything,” adding: “And so, Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there.” Applebee’s officials have confirmed to Media Matters that its restaurants do not have salad bars.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson had the best response: “I tend to take the sociology a little more seriously when it’s delivered by people who actually eat at Applebee’s, you know, more than once in a decade.”

Brooks’s statement follows in the proud footsteps of Chris Matthews, who criticized Obama for shooting pool, which Matthews asserted falsely is mostly played by “people with money,” and for the way he ordered orange juice at a diner.

Is Hillary Clinton trying to reinforce the stereotype that she is calculating and power-hungry? I’m not the only one who noticed that she doesn’t seem to be putting the party first.

Two other points:

(1) The idea that Obama must appease her and her supporters or they will not back his campaign is reminiscent of the way that Democrats were held hostage to identity politics in previous decades.

(2) I don’t understand her endgame. One interpretation is that she’s trying to solidify her position as the frontrunner for 2012 if Obama loses in November, but she’s generating so much resentment among Obama supporters that it will arguably damage her standing within the party.

Update 6/4 1:47 PM: Matthew Yglesias notes in response that Hillary’s favorability ratings among Democrats have only dipped slightly, which is a fair point. However, I think it’s reasonable to believe that her standing among Democratic activists and donors who are backing Obama has dropped off much more sharply. Also, it’s important to remember that the only way she can run in 2012 is if Obama loses. And if that happens, she will receive a substantial amount of blame for the loss, which will drive down her support across the party.

As many observers of John McCain have noted, one of the reasons the press loves him so much is the way he signals his disdain for normal politics. Even when McCain delivers partisan attack lines, he winks and nods to reporters as if to say “I know this is silly.”

The problem his speech last night revealed is that those tics seems to have become so ingrained that, as Josh Marshall writes, McCain seems to “[find] it impossible to pretend he’s actually thinking what he’s saying.” The cheesy fake smiles that were interspersed with his attacks on Obama — which the press may appreciate as signals of insincerity — only enhanced the phoniness of the effect on television.

On a more substantive level, embracing the idea of “change” is probably the right idea given the political fundamentals, but — like Hillary — McCain’s identity and length of service mean that he will never take that role away from Obama. Also, unlike Hillary, he has few policies to promote that actually would represent significant changes from the current administration. In short, he’s boxed in, which means his message will ultimately boil down to the claim that entrusting Obama with the presidency is too risky.

On Monday night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart got bogged down in a semantic debate with Scott McClellan about whether the Bush administration “lied” and the extent to which its deceptions were willfull:

But as we wrote in All the President’s Spin (which Stewart generously praised back in 2004), this debate is unproductive — Bush rarely says things that are completely false and we can’t ever know people’s intentions:

George W. Bush’s dishonesty is different. Rather than simply lying, he has subtly and systematically attempted to deceive the nation about most of his major policy proposals. On issues ranging from tax cuts to stem cells to the debate over the war in Iraq, he has consistently twisted the truth beyond recognition in order to promote his policies.

Remarkably, he has done so while generally avoiding obviously false statements. Instead, Bush consistently uses well-designed phrases and strategically crafted arguments to distract, deceive, and mislead. The result is that all but the most careful listeners end up believing something completely untrue, while proving the President has lied is usually impossible.

Unlike famous White House dissemblers of the past, Bush almost never explicitly claims that black is white or day is night. Instead, he deceives the public with partial truths and misleading assertions… Because Bush’s statements are so often constructed in this way, he has walked away from one deceptive claim after another scot-free.

…A better approach is to judge public officials’ words against the known facts. We should focus on what the President and his top aides knew or should have known to be false or misleading at the time they made a public statement. By that standard, George W. Bush has been extraordinarily deceptive about public policy issues.

I think this is a standard for public debate that Stewart and McClellan could agree upon. It’s too bad they wasted so much time on semantics.

In a New York Review of Books essay on John McCain, Michael Tomasky points out something I missed — McCain is backing off his previous support for changing the GOP platform to allow legalized abortion in the case of rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life. As Tomasky writes, “This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in American electoral politics.” Platform issues may be obscure, but this could give Barack Obama a bludgeon to use when criticizing McCain’s potential Supreme Court appointments. Look for the issue to come up again in the next few months.

On WashingtonPost.com, Chris Cillizza reports that the Clinton campaign is denying an AP story stating that Hillary will concede tonight.

More importantly, though, notice how Cillizza describes her rationale for continuing:

The Clinton campaign, in fact, released a statement insisting that the Associated Press story that fueled this maelstrom was not correct; “Senator Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening,” the statement asserted.

Language is important here. An acknowledgment of Obama securing the delegates he needs to formally become the party’s nominee is NOT the same thing as a concession by Clinton.

Over the past few days, Clinton has focused almost exclusively on the popular vote count — all but ignoring the delegate race in a seeming concession of her inability to overcome Obama in that metric.

Therefore, Clinton may well use the national spotlight tonight to do two things: acknowledge Obama has the delegates he needs while also trumpeting her popular vote edge. Clinton could then spend the next 24 hours (or so) taking the pulse of committed and uncommitted superdelegates about their willingness (or lack thereof) to take her side.

A little-known fact about the 2000 race is that George W. Bush’s campaign planned to challenge a Gore victory in the Electoral College if Bush won the popular vote. Ironically, of course, Bush won under that exact scenario.

In the last few weeks, Hillary has followed in Bush’s (almost) footsteps by attempting to discard the agreed-upon institutional metric for determining the winner of the race and undermine the rule-based outcome. Beyond the obvious absurdity of changing the rules at the end of the campaign, the problem is that we can’t know what would have happened had either campaign been conducted solely on the basis of the popular vote.

PS Setting aside the debate over the different ways you can add up the caucus and primary popular vote totals, what makes Hillary’s argument more absurd is that Democrats prefer Obama in national polls.

Update 6/3 3:45 PM: Per comments below questioning my claim about a planned Bush challenge, I’ve pasted an original article from the New York Daily News below the fold.

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