Brendan Nyhan

I didn’t know this — the New York Times reports that after the presidential candidates made their embarassing appearances on WWE’s “Monday Night Raw,” the league staged a match between Obama and Hillary impersonators:

Trust me: it’s worse than you imagine.

Can we put a moratorium on Hillary Clinton using a poem about the Holocaust to talk about free trade and outsourcing? Talk about inappropriate metaphors…

At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemoller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”

In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

PS: This paragraph from the same story is a classic example of the bogus psychodrama of contemporary campaign reporting:

Since the race started, Mrs. Clinton has cycled through several political personas: the battle-tested White House veteran, the fighter, the girl — her word — tougher than any boy. Now she is the Dream Boss: the one who will give you a job and provide health insurance, but also understand just how hard you work and the mundane details of what you do.

Note the symmetry with the descriptions of different Al Gore “personas” in 2000 and ask yourself when you heard George W. Bush or John McCain characterized in this way.

Here’s a New York Times lede that annoys me:

3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit
By LARRY ROHTER and MICHAEL COOPER

The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars, according to tax and budget experts.

The reasons reflect the ideological leanings of the candidates, with Senator John McCain proposing tax cuts that go beyond President Bush’s and the Democrats advocating programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But for fiscal experts concerned with the deficit, both approaches are worrisome.

In other words, both sides are equally bad. But if you read a few paragraphs into the story, you’ll see McCain’s plan would be more than three times worse for the federal budget deficit:

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

See All the President’s Spin for more on the problems with the conventions of objectivity and “he said,” “she said” journalism.

One aspect of the media’s failure to distinguish between primary and general elections is the way that they fail to differentiate between the types of criticisms candidates face in each stage of the campaign.

On Monday night, Jon Stewart asked Barack Obama this semi-facetious question that captures one aspect of this misunderstanding:

Senator Clinton’s response to you is that you have not been vetted in the way that she has and that ultimately, in a general election, the Republican attack machine — the big question was they would just go crazy on you. Now that you’ve been attacked so much, is the fear that, in the general election, the Republican attack machine wouldn’t have anything left to pick over?

However, Obama hasn’t really come under criticism from the right yet. Hillary has hammered him on the aspects of his background that are vulnerable in a Democratic primary, but his extremely liberal early policy record (which reflects the district he represented) has barely been touched. That will change in the general.

Similarly, Hendrik Hertzberg points out that Hillary Clinton’s claims to have been fully vetted are also misleading (as Matthew Yglesias notes today):

[Obama] cannot mention many of her biggest general-election vulnerabilities, most of which involve her husband’s Administration, the awkward role that he might play in her own, and the potential conflicts of interest posed by the funding of his charitable and commercial activities. Bill Clinton remains popular among Democrats, if not as popular as he used to be.

The fact that the Clinton scandals have not been a major issue of debate in the primary does not mean they have gone away — they’ll be back with a vengeance if Hillary is the nominee.

I just deleted this comment from my post on the National Enquirer smearing Barack Obama:

B HUSSEIN Obama IS a muslime, always was, always will be. He has sold out the USA for $200 MILLION from muslimes for his campaign. He will turn over the country to them if he wins. America will cease to exist once he and his muslime thugs are done with us. Only a stupid moron would vote for this POS!!

Sadly, we’re only going to see more of this in the coming months — Floyd Brown is already suggesting Barack Obama and his supporters are un-American in fundraising emails to the Newsmax list:

Make no mistake, there are people in the United States who despise America… hate America… and hate our way of life. Barack Hussein Obama is THEIR CANDIDATE and they will do everything in their power to make sure that patriotic Americans do not understand exactly how dangerous Barack Hussein Obama really is. They’ll hide his record and his past and they’ll tar-and-feather his opposition.

Update 4/27 1:48 PM: While the closest parallel to John McCain as a presidential candidate may be George H.W. Bush, the closest parallel to his current campaign rhetoric may actually be Floyd Brown (via TPM Election Central):

“All I can tell you Jennifer [Rubin] is that I think it’s very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” McCain said. “So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare … If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.”

For those who don’t know, Brown is the loathsome individual who created the infamous “Willie Horton” ad of 1988. Is that the kind of company McCain wants to be keeping?

After weeks of bluster about Hillary Clinton’s strength in key general election states, it’s great to see the NYT’s Patrick Healy make an obvious but crucial point (I’ve been repeating this for weeks):

[T]he Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made on Wednesday: that state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.

For more along these lines, see Josh Marshall, Jon Chait, and Matthew Yglesias.

In a separate post, Yglesias makes a closely related point that echoes my one of my running themes — the fundamentals matter far more than the candidates themselves:

[I]t’s important to remember that by far the biggest source of uncertainty about the November presidential election has to do not with the Democratic primary campaign, but with objective reality. I don’t believe that the situation in Iraq or the economy will look radically better in November than they do today, but in principle either or both might. Something like that would make John McCain — a popular and skilled politician who gets good press — extremely hard to beat. But if the economy continues to be weak and Americans keep dying in a war that offers no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s very hard for McCain to win. This kind of thing — the inherent unknowability of things like the Q3 GDP growth rate and the future course of inflation, the possibility of new foreign crises or dramatic changes in Iraq — is what makes the outcome uncertain. The differences, qua candidates, between Clinton and Obama are small in comparison to this haze of uncertainty.

In other words, the vote for Clinton or Obama in the fall will be portrayed as a reflection of their performance against John McCain but it’s likely to be heavily driven by the state of the economy and Iraq.

Historically, it seems to be relatively unusual for a party to nominate a heterodox candidate at a time when they control the presidency. That’s why I predicted (wrongly) that John McCain would not win the GOP nomination.

McCain’s (exaggerated) reputation as a “maverick” is certainly an asset in the general election. But Democrats should remember that even if McCain does win in November, they are still likely to have significant majorities in both houses of Congress, including a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. By contrast, McCain would preside over a divided Republican caucus that does not trust him.

In some ways, the closest precedent for this scenario is actually George H.W. Bush. Like McCain, Bush 41 was a former critic of supply-side economics who experienced a forced conversion. Conservatives were never truly comfortable with Bush 41, just as they harbor deep-seated doubts about McCain. And Bush faced the same sort of Democratic Congress that McCain would confront. In short, it’s a formula for a one-term presidency.

It’s time to update my previous work on the predictors of support for Barack Obama. Here are updated plots of state-level support for Obama by race, which show that Pennsylvania is sadly consistent with the overall trend of racial polarization:

My standard regression shows that Obama’s state-level support is still associated with the same variables: black population (+), the log of population (-), Democratic presidential vote (-), whether the state has a caucus (+), and education (+).

The excellent New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt has a profile of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s top economic adviser, in today’s newspaper that omits one very relevant fact.

Leonhardt’s piece makes two important points. First, under Holtz-Eakin, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office started engaging in “dynamic” analysis of tax cuts but found that “any new revenue that tax cuts brought in paled in comparison with their cost… As Mr. Holtz-Eakin told Congress in 2003, a dynamic analysis of the White House’s tax and spending proposals made essentially no difference.” In other words, the supply-side claim that tax cuts increase revenue is false.

Second, McCain’s tax and budget plans (like those of George W. Bush in 2000) do not add up. Leonhardt notes that he “spoke over the past week with several other economists who admire Mr. McCain and have advised him over the years. None would defend his current fiscal package (or be quoted).” According to Leonhardt, Holtz-Eakin’s (weak) defense is that “people are making is treating the McCain platform as if it were a finished piece of work. ‘It’s April,’ he said. ‘We have until November.’”

But Leonhardt never forces Holtz-Eakin to address the other elephant in the room — John McCain’s repeated statements that tax cuts increase revenue, which directly contradict Holtz-Eakin’s findings as head of the CBO:

“[H]istory shows every time you have cut capital gains taxes, revenues have increased, going back to Jack Kennedy” (4/20/08).

“Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes. Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues” (1/17/08).

“I would suggest that most economists agree that there was an increase in revenues… associated with the tax cuts” (12/5/07).

“Tax cuts—tax cuts increase revenues. The tax cuts, the revenues increased because of it. The spending outpaced the tax cuts” (11/27/07).

“Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues. So what’s the argument for increasing taxes? If you get the opposite effect out of tax cuts?” (3/5/07).

This contradiction seems especially newsworthy since the current administration has made numerous statements that have been contradicted by their own economists.

Weirdly, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, the usually reliable McClatchy Newspapers made the same mistake in a McCain profile that claimed the GOP presidential candidate “listens to tax-cutters on both sides” of the supply-side debate. Do reporters know what McCain has said? Or are they ignoring his statements because they conflict with his (phony) “straight talk” persona?

Update 4/23 12:21 PM — It turns out that Leonhardt did ask Holtz-Eakin about one of McCain’s previous statements in a story published on January 9:

Mr. Greenspan provided crucial political cover to the 2003 tax cut, only to turn around and criticize it in his recent memoir. Mr. McCain went the other way, first criticizing that tax cut as fiscally irresponsible and later claiming on several occasions that tax cuts reduced deficits. “Tax cuts increase revenues,” he told Charlie Rose in November.

I asked Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is Mr. McCain’s top economic adviser, about these comments, and he said that Mr. McCain had misspoken. Mr. Holtz-Eakin then called Mr. McCain on the campaign trail and later gave me this statement from him: “Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, but pro-growth tax cuts — especially along with spending restraint — spur the economy, which raises incomes, and offsets the revenue loss.”

At this point, however, Holtz-Eakin’s explanation is inoperative. The long list of statements above — including two made after Leonhardt’s article — suggest that McCain is not misspeaking.

It’s time to break out the swami again. Maureen Dowd put her well-known psychic talents on display again today with this mind-reading of Barack Obama:

He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.

In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites.
That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

Or… he really just wanted to be left alone to eat his waffle.