Brendan Nyhan

Via Angus at Kids Prefer Cheese, a fantastic New York Post photo composite of your favorite dynastic couple:

Amusing, and much classier than their offensive “surrender monkeys” cover from 2006:

Following up on my post on where Obama is winning and losing, here are some updated graphs breaking down his support at the state level.

First, here’s a plot of a flexible polynomial fitted to state two-candidate vote totals by date — you can see the upward trajectory in Obama’s support levels, though the line weights each point equally:

In a linear regression, the strongest predictors of Obama’s overall support are whether it’s a caucus (+), Democratic presidential vote (-), and black population (+). Here’s the plot of presidential vote, which indicates that Obama does worse in heavily Democratic states (the fitted line excludes the outlier of Washington, DC):

By contrast, Obama does better in states with larger numbers of African Americans, though the trend is concentrated among primary states (the linear fit is only for those states):

State education levels (specifically, the proportion of the population with a college degree) are also somewhat positively correlated with Obama support:

Finally, the strongest predictor of Obama’s white support is the number of Southern Baptists in the state (-), which has been suggested as a measurable proxy for “Southernness”:

Out of sample predictions from a model like this are likely to be highly inaccurate, but for what little it’s worth, a regression of Obama support on black population, Hispanic population, state population (logged), 2004 Democratic presidential vote, a dummy variable for whether the state has a caucus, proportion college graduates, and Southern Baptist population predicts narrow losses for Obama in PA (48%) and OH (49%) but a big win in Texas (66%).

I’m usually a hater when it comes to people floating third-party scenarios, but why isn’t anyone talking about a Ron Paul third-party run? What is he going to do with all that money? He can’t possibly spend it all on his lame ads, can he?

Josh Marshall resuscitates an unwelcome bit of liberal jargon by referring to the so-called “Taliban wing” of the Republican party:

The truth is that there’s little apparent difference between Obama’s position [on Israel] and Hillary’s or, for that matter, anyone else in the mainstream of the Democratic party or most of the non-Taliban wing of Republican party

As we noted at Spinsanity, this phrase was popularized in 2001 by Julian Bond, the former head of the NAACP, and subsequently came into wide usage as part of a disturbing post-9/11 pattern of comparing one’s political opponents to terrorists, Saddam Hussein, etc. By 2004, Senator Tim Johnson — a moderate Democrat from a red state — was using it on the campaign trial. It had seemingly died down since then so I’m sad to see it back in use.

Maureen Dowd Sunday:

Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.

Via Bob Somerby, what Hillary actually said:

She slipped into a “you all” and criticized Bush, the former Texas governor.

“There’s a great saying in Texas,” she said, “all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and lot more cattle.”

It’s all too reminiscent of her misquotation of President Bush as saying Al Qaeda is “not a problem anymore” back in 2003, which spawned a widespread media myth, or her distortion of a quote by Alberto Gonzales about the Geneva Conventions. Imagine if she hadn’t been a reporter first!

(For more, see my previous posts about her on this blog and our coverage on Spinsanity.)

It took David Brooks four years to write his first New York Times column about a random book he found on his way to catch a plane:

Last week, while driving from a campaign event in Keene, N.H., I stumbled upon a used bookstore that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. I stopped in — even though I was rushing to catch a plane — and came upon a sad book published anonymously in 1911.

But it took the precocious William Kristol less than three months to match that feat:

Browsing through a used-book store Friday — in the Milwaukee airport, of all places — I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell’s essays. That’s how I happened to reread his 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Given Orwell’s perpetual ability to elucidate, one shouldn’t be surprised that its argument would shed light— or so it seems to me — on contemporary American politics.

It’s the equivalent of the Thomas Friedman column about his taxi driver on the way to/from the airport.

It’s great to see Tim Russert using his position as moderator of “Meet the Press” to bring some new voices into the Sunday show world. Oh wait…

Then we reunited the renowned “Capital Gang” for some insights and analysis on this extraordinary campaign. With us, Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News, Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times, Kate O’Beirne of the National Review and Mark Shields of PBS’ “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

I don’t understand. No one watched “Capital Gang” when it was on CNN. Why would we want a reunion now? The fresh insights of Robert Novak and Mark Shields?

From the troubling counterfactual department: What if George Allen was the presumptive GOP nominee right now? Many Republicans have lamented that he would have been the candidate with the greatest appeal to the different wings of the party. But he also has an ugly history on racial issues that could have made a general election race against Barack Obama incredibly ugly. (By contrast, with McCain as the Republican candidate, the racial issue is seemingly off the table.)

My post breaking down state-level support for Barack Obama is cited by Jonathan Last in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (where we had a Spinsanity column back in 2004):

None of this is to say Obama cannot win white votes, too. His victories in quite-white Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota all prove that. But those are caucus states and states with homogeneously white populations. Obama has not been able to win consistently in (a) primary states with (b) racial makeups closer to the national average. His victories in Missouri and Connecticut are important because they show that he can win this type of primary. But regression analysis suggests race is a factor in these contests.

Here’s Duke poli-sci fellow Brendan Nyhan summing up the phenomenon: The theory is that “Obama’s race isn’t an issue in overwhelmingly white states because race isn’t salient there, whereas Obama can win in states with large black populations using a coalition built on black support. But in states with moderate black populations, race is sufficiently salient to reduce his vote totals among whites, and he can’t ride the black vote to victory in the same way as he does in more heavily black states. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the data are at least broadly consistent with the story.” Other academics and pollsters, including the indispensable Jay Cost of Real Clear politics, have noticed much the same.

For those of you who enjoyed this, this, and this, see Ann Althouse for another example of Eric Alterman dissembling in his attacks on a critic. Pretty soon he’s going to be busting out his resume…