Brendan Nyhan

It’s a good thing Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign is collapsing. In addition to his contempt for democratic checks and balances and crazy foreign policy advisers, he has a shameful record of using the powers of government to punish his political enemies, as the New York Times reports today:

Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy…

Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessness and became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.

After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.

Do you want that man in charge of the Justice Department and the FBI?

Things that make me uncomfortable — Mitt Romney dropping some hip-hop knowledge in Florida:

Mitt Romney, whose 1950s manner and celebratory drink of choice call to mind a milkshake man more than a rap singer, gave a shout out Monday that left no doubt that he had spent little time listening to hip-hop.

Mr. Romney, the Republican candidate from Massachusetts by way of Michigan and Utah who enjoys a milkshake at the end of a long day, stopped by a staging area for a Martin Luther King Birthday parade here. In his dress shirt and tie, and with his unwavering smile, he walked over and posed for photographs with a group of black youngsters. Putting his arm around a teenage girl, he waved to the cameras and offered, “Who let the dogs out?” He added a tepid “woof woof.”

Somewhere, the Baha Men, the Bahamian group whose 2000 song the candidate was referencing, must have been shuddering.

Kevin Madden, one of Mr. Romney’s campaign boyz on the bus, said the candidate had been joking around and had responded to someone who asked, “Who let you out?”

Later, Mr. Romney admired a child’s gold necklace and said, “Oh, you’ve got some bling-bling here.”

On the other hand, any New York Times article that mentions the Baha Men is a good one. Maybe Romney can get them to open for him — I’m sure they’re available…

This has to be one of the most mundane political headlines ever: “Earmarks Seen Likely to Continue”. Yes. For me, it’s right up there with Michael Kinsley’s favorites “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” and “Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality.”

The pundits are trying to figure out if or when John Edwards will drop out of the Democratic race and which candidate would benefit if he did so. Given his apparent leanings toward Obama, one reason for Edwards to stay in, as the New York Times notes today, is that he splits the white vote with Hillary:

some political strategists say Mr. Edwards also has another compelling reason to stay in, at least in South Carolina. He could end up sharing the white vote with Mrs. Clinton, thus helping Mr. Obama, whom Mr. Edwards has signaled he favors.

As Phil Klinkner points out at Polysigh, Obama’s white support has been disturbingly low and consistent, suggesting a possible ceiling in the support he draws from whites:

The exit polls from Nevada provide more evidence that Obama has been unable to break out of his ceiling of approximately one-third of the white vote. In fact, in each of the three Democratic contests thus far, Obama’s support among whites has been remarkably consistent:

Iowa: 35%
New Hampshire: 36%
Nevada: 34%

If this 35% ceiling does, in fact, exist, it’s interesting to compare it to Jesse Jackson’s performance in 1988. Despite the passage of 20 years and the fact that Jackson and Obama are very different candidates and personalities, Obama hasn’t performed significantly better than Jackson. During the 1988 primaries, especially once the race narrowed down to Dukakis and Jackson, Jackson’s white support ranged between 20 and 35 percent.

I want to believe that a ceiling doesn’t exist or at least that it isn’t that low. We’ve come a long way as a country since 1988, and Obama is a very different candidate than Jackson was. But those exit poll numbers make me nervous…

Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press this morning:

I’ve just gotten back from Florida. Rudy Giuliani’s ads on the air don’t mention terrorism. He’s the man who reduced the corporate taxes in the city of New York, created new jobs, reduced crime and also took a lot of people off the welfare rolls.

Rudy’s new ad airing in Florida:

Voice Over: “When corruption ruled, he challenged it. When welfare failed, he changed it. When crime thrived, he fought it. When government broke, he fixed it. And when the world wavered. And history hesitated. He never did. Rudy Giuliani. Leadership. When it matters most.”

Mayor Giuliani: “I’m Rudy Giuliani and I approve this message.”

It’s insights like these that make Russert’s roundtables unwatchable.

This riff by Barack Obama on the Democratic debate in Nevada is great stuff:

But there’s nothing subtle about Las Vegas. With a high-stakes match on the line Saturday, Obama embraced local traditions by debuting a biting political standup routine Thursday night that mocked his rival.

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night’s debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork – something his opponents have since used to suggest he’s not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

“Because I’m an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, ‘What’s your biggest weakness?’” Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. “If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, ‘Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’”

“Folks, they don’t tell you what they mean!” he said.

Kevin Drum quotes from the Reason article delving further into Ron Paul’s ugly past:

Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists — and taking “moral responsibility” for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past — acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.

Question: what’s the difference between a “racist” and someone who was “complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists”? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except that at least the former is bit more honest about things.

I’m no fan of Paul or people who pander to racists generally, but I have to object to Drum’s claim that there is no difference between racism and pandering to it. While both are abhorrent, I’ll go on record as saying that actual racism is worse.

More importantly, however, equating the two furthers the political strategy that’s used to defend politicians like Ronald Reagan and John Ashcroft who are accused of exploiting racial fears. As I’ve written (here and here), that kind of criticism is usually answered with the charge that Reagan and Ashcroft are being accused of racism, which is a loathsome smear of good men who are not racists (blah blah blah). Since no one can prove that Reagan and Ashcroft are racists, the issue frequently dies at that point. Similarly, as the authors of the Reason article note, Ron Paul may not be a racist. We’ll never know and it’s pointless to debate the issue. Simply put, we can’t read the minds of public officials. What we can do, however, is judge them by their public records — and Paul’s is loathsome.

Update 1/20 1:56 PM: Phil Klinkner at Polysigh disagrees:

Brendan misses the point that politicians make choices about pandering and that these choices reflect their underlying beliefs. Deciding to pander to white racists means that you think it is OK to validate and even exacerbate resentment against blacks and, thus, to hinder black political and social inequality. That, to my mind, reflects underlying anti-black attitudes on the part of the pandering politicians. For example, Ronald Reagan was willing to pander to white racists in ways that he probably never would have pandered to anti-Catholics or anti-Semites. My guess is that Reagan believed that it was just fundamentally unfair and wrong to something like that to Jews and Catholics, but that it was OK to do it to blacks.

The point that politicians may be more willing to pander to prejudices they share could be true as a general claim, but there’s no way to know for sure. More importantly, such a pattern doesn’t prove anything in a particular case such as Reagan’s. (The key phrases above are “to my mind” and “[m]y guess.”) Let’s leave the mind-reading to Maureen Dowd and criticize politicians for their public records, not speculation about their private beliefs.

As expected, two co-founders of the Unity ’08 debacle launched another ill-fated movement yesterday — a committee to draft Michael Bloomberg, the one man who can purchase the third party infrastructure they failed to create, into the presidential race. And it’s already setting the world on fire — 817 signatures on their petition so far! Here’s the widget so everyone can keep tabs on their progress:

I know that Bloomberg has no constituency or rationale for a candidacy, but this is ridiculous. MoveOn gets that many signatures on petitions in 30 seconds.

TNR’s Jamie Kirchik summarizes the collapse of elite support for Ron Paul in the wake of his story documenting the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial content contained in decades of newsletters put out under Paul’s name.

Most devastating to Paul, though, is this post from Matt Welch, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine (the flagship libertarian publication). While Paul has claimed that he did not write the articles in his newsletter and that the controversy is “old news and has been rehashed for over a decade,” Welch shows via a basic Nexis search that Paul took direct responsibility for the content of the newsletters in a series of 1996 articles in Texas newspapers.

What I don’t understand is how so many libertarians fell in love with this guy — and gave him tens of millions of dollars — without knowing anything about him. This stuff is in the public record. Did they not know, or did they just choose to ignore it? The pro-Paul journalists, in particular, have almost no excuse.

Update 1/16 11:28 AM: Reason has a new story up attributing the newsletters to Lew Rockwell, a Paul associate who remains close to the candidate.

Another reason to be thankful for the collapse of Rudy Giuliani’s potentially disastrous presidential campaign:

Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

Just to refresh your memory, this is the same “adviser” who wants to bomb Iran and thinks Iraq’s WMD are in Syria. Assuming Podhoretz wasn’t questioning the legitimacy of the Kurdish identity, that’s an unbelievable lack of knowledge for someone who was serving as a foreign policy adviser to a major presidential candidate.