Brendan Nyhan

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, who has already outshone his ineffectual predecessor, devoted his entire column Sunday to debunking a controversial Edward Luttwak op-ed published in the Times several weeks ago (via Matthew Yglesias):

ON May 12, The Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Muslim world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that Obama had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult.

Under “Muslim law as it is universally understood,” Luttwak wrote, Obama was born a Muslim, and his “conversion” to Christianity was an act of apostasy, a capital offense and “the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit.” While no Muslim country would be likely to prosecute him, Luttwak said, a state visit to such a nation would present serious security challenges “because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards.”

…The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions. But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture.

…I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

…Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate.

…Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

…All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. The Islamic press and television have reported extensively on the United States presidential election, they said, and Obama’s Muslim roots and his Christian religion are well known, yet there have been no suggestions in the Islamic world that he is an apostate.

…Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

More of this, please. Any chance the Times wants to keep Hoyt on permanently?

Brad DeLong, who frequently cites reasons he believes George W. Bush should be impeached on his weblog, has now called for Bush to be impeached because he is unpopular:

For a president to be so unpopular that congressman who represent highly rural parts of the prarie would rather spend time with their families than go to Bucyrus, Kansas to be photographed with the president–that is an impeachable offense.

Is this a joke? Since when did being unpopular meet the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors”?

Update 6/3 9:21 PM: DeLong writes in a comment below that this post is “simply not fair” but doesn’t offer a specific objection.

I don’t have much to say about Scott McClellan’s new book except to note the close similarities between the analysis of the selling of the war in Iraq in my favorite book on the subject and his description of it — in particular, the shared emphasis on (1) an elaborately planned PR campaign and (2) the administration’s strategic reliance on half-truths rather than outright falsehoods.

All the President’s Spin (p. 145):

The White House turned to tactics it had used in previous political fights to build public support. Mustering as much damning evidence as possible, the administration executed a carefully crafted public relations campaign centering on Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.

McClellan:

In the autumn of 2002 Bush and his White House engaged in a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We’d done much the same on other issues — tax cuts and education — to great success, but war with Iraq was different. Our lack of candour and honesty in making the case for war would later provoke a partisan response from our opponents that further distorted and obscured a more nuanced reality.

All the President’s Spin (p. 145):

[T]he White House glossed over gaps in intelligence and caveats about sources, frequently presenting worst-case scenarios as fact. Officials also used loaded rhetoric to make suggestions that could not be proven and invoked powerful images, such as a “mushroom cloud,” when discussing the threat Iraq posed.

…[T]he administration presented ambiguous information as if it were certain and used exaggerated rhetoric to present claims based on patchy evidence. At times, it also invoked connections, such as a link between the September 11 attacks and Iraq, which its own evidence did not support… [T]he overall pattern is one of sacrificing ambiguity for the sake of selling the war.

McClellan:

…[T]he administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception but shading the truth; downplaying the reason for going to war; trying to make the weapons of mass destruction threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain than they were; quietly disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and minimising evidence that pointed in the opposite direction.

They also encouraged Americans to believe as fact some things that were unclear and possibly false (for example, that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons programme) and other things that were overplayed or wrong (for example, that Saddam might have had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda). In late August, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Cheney said: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

…As the campaign accelerated, caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped altogether. Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or disregarded. Evidence based on high confidence from the intelligence community was lumped together with intelligence of lesser confidence. A nuclear threat was added to the biological and chemical threats to create a sense of gravity and urgency. Support for terrorism was given greater weight by playing up a dubious Al-Qaeda connection to Iraq.

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page dismisses McClellan’s claim that the administration used “propaganda” to sell the war by stating that Bush “[had] no choice but to make his case” (poor guy!):

[A]ny U.S. President has no choice but to make his case for going to war. It is an obligation of democracy. In Iraq, the long march to the 2003 invasion included months of debate at the U.N. and in Congress.

Outside of the WSJ, however, I think most Americans recognize the distinction between making your case and systematically distorting the evidence. That’s why a majority of Americans now believe that the administration “deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, per Ezra Klein, it’s important to note that the publication of this book does not excuse McClellan from his role in promoting the administration’s deceptions.

On the May 25 edition of Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Maureen Dowd about the contrast between a sharp exchange between Barack Obama and John McCain and a less cutting joke he told about Obama at a different event. Dowd’s answer, which again demonstrates her amazing ability to read minds, is revealing of the way that she and pundits like her construct cartoon psychodramas:
this exchange from the May 25 Meet the Press was revealing of the way that Maureen Dowd thinks:

RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, is it two John McCains on display?

DOWD: I think we learn something very interesting from this exchange. For one thing, McCain really doesn’t like Obama. And, you know, he thinks he’s the punk who hasn’t bled, as McCain people like to say, and doesn’t deserve to be in this arena. And we also learn that Obama is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton. He is much freer when he goes on the attack, much more confident.

Amazingly, Dowd’s crystal ball has revealed that McCain “really doesn’t like” Obama, thinks “he’s the punk who hasn’t bled,” and that Obama “is not as intimidated by John McCain as he was by Hillary Clinton.” But more importantly, note how her silly psychologizing substitutes for any strategic explanation of Obama and McCain’s actions.

For instance, while we can’t know whether Obama was intimidated by Hillary, a more likely explanation of why Obama aggressively attacked McCain is that McCain is that not a member of the same party. Primary campaigns are not the same as general election campaigns — Obama needs Hillary’s supporters on his side in November. Similarly, John McCain has to attack Obama aggressively because (a) the political fundamentals are so bad for the GOP this year and (b) the conservative base doesn’t fully trust or accept him.

What’s made Dowd such a phenomenon is this talent for stripping away context in order to interpret all conflict in politics as personal and psychological. It’s the only way to churn out soap opera-style narrative week after week. And it’s made her rich and famous.

Todd Purdum’s long inquiry into the various questionable aspects of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency in Vanity Fair shows how wrong Hillary Clinton is to claim that she (unlike Barack Obama) had been “vetted.”

But to me, the most outrageous part of the article is this response to Purdum from Clinton spokesman Jay Carson, who suggests Democrats should refrain from criticizing Clinton to “protect a strong brand for the party”:

The sensitivity among Clinton’s staff to these questions is such that, after I posed some queries about Clinton’s relationship with Burkle and Co., a spokesman, Jay Carson, e-mailed me this comment: “The ills of the Democratic Party can be seen perfectly in the willingness of fellow Democrats to say bad things about President Clinton. If you ask any Republican about Reagan they will say he still makes the sun rise in the morning, but if you ask Democrats about their only two-term president in 80 years, a man who took the party from the wilderness of loserdom to the White House and created the strongest economy in American history, they’d rather be quoted saying what a reporter wants to hear than protect a strong brand for the party. Repubicans look at this behavior and laugh at us.”

He’s not an ethically challenged ex-president, he’s a “strong brand”! Memo to Carson: It does not enhance Clinton’s brand to have his staff refer to him as such.

The larger lesson here is how both sides of the debate have adopted the tactics and strategies of corporate PR. In that sense, Carson’s statement is reminiscent of the famous Andrew Card quote about the rollout of the campaign for war in Iraq: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” For more, see All the President’s Spin.

(Note: Clinton’s staff later distributed a long memo attacking the article.)

Update 6/3 9:09 AM: A reader points out that Bill Clinton was not the “only two-term [Democratic] president in 80 years.” Carson meant to write 60 years, presumably.

Also, via Mickey Kaus, Mayhill Fowler at Huffington Post asked Clinton about the Purdum article and received a long harangue about how Purdum is a “scumbag” for which Carson later apologized (link includes audio). That’s not exactly presidential behavior — what happened to protecting the brand?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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%.)