Brendan Nyhan

Via Politico’s Ben Smith, Josh Marshall correctly casts doubt on online rumor-mongering about the Democratic primary election in New Hampshire being stolen. But as I pointed out last October, he made a similarly unsupported claim of a stolen election, accusing former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell of “helping steal the 2004 election” — a claim that is not backed by credible evidence.

Unfortunately, his post in October is part of a recent and uncharacteristic pattern of Marshall making misleading and unsupported claims that reinforce liberal conspiracy theories. He shouldn’t be surprised to discover now that his readers are drinking the Kool Aid.

Even after the Obama surge took the wind out of the stillborn draft-Bloomberg movement, the hype continues. AP reports that the New York City mayor is polling to test the waters for a possible independent candidacy:

Adding to the most wide open presidential campaign in a half-century, associates of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg disclosed he had authorized polling and voter analysis in all 50 states in a possible precursor to an independent candidacy.

…Bloomberg, a second-term mayor of New York, has repeatedly denied interest in a White House bid, but associates said his decision to gather information on a possible run was made months ago. His spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to comment.

A neutral assessment would presumably find that a liberal-leaning New York City billionaire with no national constituency or rationale for a presidential bid would have little chance in a system that is stacked against third parties. Unfortunately, any pollster or consultant working for Bloomberg has a powerful financial incentive to tell him otherwise.

This Newsmax Google ad appeared in the left sidebar a little while ago:

More timely agitprop, please!

Update 1/10 10:03 AM: I got an email (PDF) promoting the same Newsmax “poll” on the GOPUSA email list yesterday afternoon. Maybe they think conservatives will say “no” and be motivated to subscribe to Newsmax to get negative information about her?

The Hotline reminds its audience of bloviating insiders that no one knows what’s going to happen in the presidential race:

Before we fall into the same trap of trying to crystal ball WH’08, we offer a quick nod to NH Dems, who stuck it to the pundit class 1/8 by doing the wildly unexpected. This race will go on a long time; Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Who knows? We don’t. And neither do you.

I’d love to see this run as a disclaimer when pundits start confidently making predictions about future outcomes. Or maybe CNN could just throw up my swami graphic in the corner as a disclaimer:

As a general principle, experts are terrible at making predictions, but reporters need quotes and cable networks need to fill air time, so we get an oversupply of nonsense.

Huh?

The voting in New Hampshire did little to clarify the muddied Republican field. The McCain, Romney and Huckabee campaigns are all girding for battle, and some political analysts still see Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee as a wild card in Southern primaries.

At this point, isn’t Fred Thompson a “wild card” only in the sense of how completely he will be humiliated? He’s currently around 13% in South Carolina and I don’t think he’s about to catch fire…

Recriminations — and speculation — have already begun in the wake of Hillary’s unexpected win in New Hampshire last night. The debate centers on why the polls were so wrong. David Kuo and Andrew Sullivan (among others) suggested that it might be the so-called Bradley Effect in which white support for black candidates is lower at the ballot box than in polling. However, as a friend pointed out to me last night (and as Matthew Yglesias also noted), the polls came close to predicting Obama’s support. They were just way too low on Hillary. So where did the additional votes come from? There are some indications that it was a surge of previously undecided voters, which would be surprising because she is, in effect, the quasi-incumbent in the race, and undecideds usually break heavily against the incumbent.

PS: There’s already a search on to find “moments” and “events” that explain the outcome (particularly the debate or Hillary choking up), but I think it’s going to be hard to establish that those made the difference.

Update 1/9 9:53 AM: The Washington Post has a good rundown of the various explanations for what happened and the available evidence for them. The short answer: It’s unclear.

Sadly, it turns out that Ron Paul’s conspiracy-minded direct mail is only the tip of the iceberg. TNR’s Jamie Kirchick dug up a series of newsletters published under Paul’s name since the mid-1970s that were much, much worse:

[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

Paul’s denials to have known what was being written under his name ring false, as Kirchick points out:

Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

Here’s a sample of the offending material. Can we please stop treating Ron Paul as a serious candidate now? He keeps saying absurd things in the GOP debates and the other candidates don’t challenge him because they don’t want to offend his supporters. Someone in the media and/or one of the candidates needs to step up.

Amidst the focus on the intra-party battles in the presidential race, pundits and reporters have given little scrutiny to the candidates’ cheap shots at the other party, which is a bad precedent for the fall campaign. These sorts of falsehoods shouldn’t be allowed to become accepted and no longer “news” (like the claim that tax cuts increase revenue) — but that’s exactly what’s happening on health care right now.

For instance, consider this passage from a New York Times article on Mitt Romney:

So Mr. Romney talks about calls for national health insurance.

“I don’t want to show up at the hospital and have the guys who ran Katrina taking my blood pressure,” he said Sunday in Nashua, to much laughter.

The Times gives no indication that Romney’s claim is misleading. In fact, none of the top Democrats are calling for a single-payer system in which the government operates health care facilities. They’re proposing health care plans with a public option comparable to Medicare — an insurance plan that pays private facilities and doctors for care.

It’s not like this is a new issue – Romney said virtually the same thing during Saturday’s GOP debate:

We don’t have to have government take over health care to get everybody insured. That’s what the Democrats keep on hanging out there.

The truth is, we can get everybody insured in a free market way. We don’t need Hillary-care or socialized medicine.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board pushes a similar line in a recent editorial:

Whatever the minor policy differences among Democrats, their major domestic ambition this campaign season is the government takeover of the health-care market. The Republican nominee will need a free-market alternative, and a way of explaining it that is more concise and compelling than we’ve heard so far.

It’s hard to overstate how important it is that this misleading claim be countered. Health care is going to be a central issue in the general election campaign. And if the press doesn’t do a better job, millions of Americans will once again be fooled into believing that Democrats want government to take over the operation of health care.

Dave Roberts of Grist has written an email to Ezra Klein that perfectly captures my feelings about gender and racial dynamics of the Democratic race:

I’ll grant upfront that my thoughts on misogyny and racism in the campaign are somewhat fraught, since as your run-of-the-mill privileged white dude, I hardly have the most direct window into their effects. Nonetheless, I’ll venture an observation: misogyny is a much bigger player in this election than racism.

When Obama and Clinton first started running, I cringed in advance. I expected all sorts of crude race and gender stereotypes to come bubbling up — not only from the right, where you’d expect it, but from the media and even from some quarters of the left.

When it comes to racism, I’ve been somewhat surprised to find that I was wrong. Very little of the narrative around Obama’s run has touched on race; very few of the attacks on him have been coded racism, and those that have — the occasional mention of his drug use, the links to his “madrassa” — have come off as unspeakably crude and sunk like a stone,registering only in the fever swamps. If anything, the perception of Obama as “post-racial” (yes, I know there’s no such thing) has been an asset, almost an insulator. (Expect that to change, obviously, if he makes it to the general. Jonah Goldberg’s “the coloreds will riot!” post of last week is a preview.)

On misogyny, though, I’ve been shocked in the other direction: it’s been more overt, more odious, and more unashamed that I could have predicted. The serial depictions of Clinton in the media (and yes, in blogs and op-eds both right and left) are a veritable hit parade of stereotypes about women: She’s humorless. No, she cackles. She’s a cold robot. No, she’s a hysterical crybaby. She wears ugly pant suits. No, she’s showing too much cleavage. Virgin, whore. Ballbreaker, weakling. Chris Matthews has been the standard-bearer here, but he’s just the leader of an astonishingly large chorus of crude gender resentment — a chorus that lamentably contains quite a few women.

I’m not a Hillary voter, for any number of reasons. I happen to think she’s the wrong candidate for the historical moment. But I’d be crying too if I were her. This stuff is just gross.

Update 1/8 9:06 PM: A new, ugly example from the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, who wrote that Hillary Clinton “needs a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy.” Stay classy!

Charles Franklin’s updated aggregate polling estimates show a significant Obama bounce in New Hampshire — it’s real:

Given the positive press he’ll get out of this win and his increasingly likely victory in South Carolina, it’s getting harder to see how she stops him, even if she does win the Nevada caucus. The futures markets agree — her price is collapsing on Intrade while his is soaring: