Brendan Nyhan

How bad is the political landscape for President Bush? Really, really bad:

No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public. Bush’s approval rating slipped below 50 percent in Washington Post-ABC News polls in January 2005 and has not topped that level in the 30 months since. The last president mired under 50 percent so long was Harry S. Truman. Even Richard M. Nixon did not fall below 50 percent until April 1973, 16 months before he resigned.

The polls reflect the events of Bush’s second term, an unyielding sequence of bad news. Social Security. Hurricane Katrina. Harriet E. Miers. Dubai Ports World. Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident. Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and Mark Foley. The midterm elections. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Alberto R. Gonzales and Paul D. Wolfowitz. Immigration. And overshadowing it all, the Iraq war, now longer than the U.S. fight in World War II.

Since winning reelection 2 1/2 years ago, Bush has had few days of good news, and what few he has had rarely lasted. Purple-fingered Iraqis went to the polls to establish a democracy but elected a dysfunctional government riven by sectarian strife. U.S. forces hunted down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, but the violence only worsened. Saddam Hussein was convicted, but his execution was marred by videotaped taunting. Perhaps the only unalloyed major second-term victory for Bush has been the confirmation of two Supreme Court justices who have begun to move the court to the right.

…Bush’s unpopularity appears to impose limits on where he goes. He turned down an invitation from the Washington Nationals to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day, pleading a busy schedule. The former baseball team owner instead hosted an invitation-only ceremony for a college football team in the East Room, where no one would boo. When commencement season rolled around, he stayed away from major universities, delivering addresses at a community college in Florida and a small religious school in Pennsylvania run by a former aide. And even then he was met by student and faculty protests.

Political scientist Charles Franklin’s latest trend estimate of Bush’s approval is 28.9%:

In addition, Franklin puts the right direction/wrong track numbers at a gruesome 21/73:

Republicans who haven’t bailed on Bush and the war are going to be heading overboard pretty soon…

Writing at The American Scene, Daniel Larison offers the appropriate response to conservatives’ newfound love for the persona on the unimpressive Fred Thompson:

I liked James’ post on Fred.  We need only refer to him as Fred from now on.  His last name is no longer necessary (and likely to confuse him with Tommy Thompson in any case), since he has acquired Bono or perhaps Oprah-like iconic status as That Guy From Law & Order With A Baritone Voice.  When Fred speaks, women swoon.  There is no need to consider such trivial things as "qualifications" or "record" or such antiquated notions as "policies" or "beliefs."  Fred comes to soothe your jangled nerves, and lift the burden of worry from your shoulders.  Silly Obama supporters think that their guy is the messianic deliverer, but obviously they were not familiar with the prophecy that said, "deliverance shall come from the house of lobbying and from the line of midlevel character actors." 

Attention Democratic primary voters — Joe Biden has the courage to make tough choices as president:

Coming soon: Joe Biden loves puppies.

In just one speech at the Naval War College yesterday, the President managed to suggest that Israel is a good model for Iraq and to appear to make light of the possible death of Fidel Castro.

Here’s the Associated Press on the Israel comparison (via Josh Marshall):

Bush cites Israel as model for Iraq

NEWPORT, R.I. — President Bush held up Israel as a model for defining success in Iraq, saying Thursday the U.S. goal there is not to eliminate attacks but to enable a democracy that can function despite violence.

…”Our success in Iraq must not be measured by the enemy’s ability to get a car bombing in the evening news,” he said. “No matter how good the security, terrorists will always be able to explode a bomb on a crowded street.”

He suggested Israel, the frequent target of terrorist attacks and a country in a decades-long, intractable and often violent dispute with Palestinians, as a standard to strive for.

“In places like Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks,” Bush said. “The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”

It was likely to be controversial — and possibly even explosive — for Bush to set out Israel as a model for a Muslim Middle Eastern nation.

Then, later in the speech, the New York Times reports on Bush accidentally encouraging “laughing and clapping” at the prospect of the death of Fidel Castro:

President Bush on Thursday raised the anticipated death of the dictator Fidel Castro as an opportunity to push for democracy in Cuba, which he called the “one nondemocracy in our neighborhood.”

“One day, the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away,” Mr. Bush said during remarks here at the Naval War College.

The audience reacted by laughing and clapping at what seemed to be a wink from Mr. Bush. But, in an apparent effort to dispel the notion that he was making light of Mr. Castro’s health, he hushed them, saying, “No, no, no,” and continued, “Then, the question is, ‘What will be the approach of the U.S. government?’

With a diplomat like this in the Oval Office, who needs the State Department?

In the mail: my friend Chris Mooney’s new book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. I’ll have more to say once I’ve read it, but the initial reviews are superb — here’s a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly:

Having witnessed Katrina’s devastation of his mother’s New Orleans house, science writer Mooney (The Republican War on Science) became concerned that government policy still ignored worst-case scenarios in planning for the future, despite that unprecedented disaster. He set out to explore the question of whether global warming will strengthen or otherwise change hurricanes in general, even if it can’t explain the absolute existence, attributes, or behavior of any single one of them. Since storm research’s early 19th-century inception, Mooney found, there has been a split between those who believed the field should be rooted in the careful collection of data and observations (e.g., weathermen) and those who preferred theory-based deductions from the laws of physics (e.g., climatologists). Whirling around this longstanding antagonism is a mix of politics, personalities and the drama of these frightening storms. The urgency and difficulty of resolving the question of global warming’s existence, and its relationship to storms, has only heated things up. Mooney turns this complicated stew into a page-turner, making the science accessible to the general reader, vividly portraying the scientists and relating new discoveries while scientists and politicians change sides—or stubbornly ignore new evidence. Mooney draws hope from some researchers’ integration of both research methods and concludes that to be effective, scientists need to be clear communicators.

And here’s what I wrote about Mooney’s first book, The Republican War on Science:

TRWOS takes a deeply reported and researched look at how conservatives are using PR to confuse debate over science and science policy on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to embryonic stem cell research.

…The problem Chris addresses is that PR has shown political organizations how to manipulate public debate – by creating confusion over known facts and accepted conclusions, which are amplified by journalists who play by the “he said,” “she said” conventions of “objective” journalism… And because corporations and the religious right have a shared interest in fighting back against the conclusions of scientists on a variety of issues, legions of conservative think tanks and faux-scientists are now waging a well-funded war to muddy the waters and promote their pre-defined conclusions.

TRWOS is a detailed takedown of this massive effort to distort and politicize science. Even if you don’t agree with Mooney’s politics, you should read this book.

I’m no fan of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but we agree completely on the pathologies of the campaign finance system, which reduces competition rather than promoting it:

We don’t begrudge Mr. Bloomberg a cent of his money, and he should be free to spend all of it on politics if he wishes, including on a run for President. The Supreme Court has said he has that right. But no one has so far explained why it’s fine for Mr. Bloomberg to advance his own political career using his personal fortune, but it would be “dirty” for him to bankroll someone else who shared his agenda. As long as voters knew where the money came from, they’d be free to decide whether it tainted the candidate or not. Such donations could be posted instantly on the Internet.

It is often said that billionaires should not be able to “buy” elections, and that strict donation limits weed out candidates without a broad base of support. But now a billionaire really can buy an election, in the sense that he is unrestrained by the limits imposed on everyone else. Mr. Bloomberg spent an estimated $160 million on his two mayoral campaigns, literally overwhelming his competitors with TV ads. Restricting billionaires to financing themselves, far from increasing political competition, has reduced it.

Barack Obama has defied conventional wisdom by raising enough money to compete with Hillary and Bill Clinton’s campaign juggernaut, but the rest of the Democratic field is less fortunate. Surely Chris Dodd, Senator from the hedge-fund capital of the world, could find some wealthy backers for his campaign if the rules permitted it. The money would hardly guarantee him success, but it would give him a fighting chance to put his agenda on the table, leaving voters to decide whether they liked what they heard. The same goes for New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a candidate of significant experience who is struggling to raise enough money because he comes from a small state and is less well-known than his competitors.

I think it’s clear that there would be a lot more well-financed Congressional challengers if donations were unrestricted. The difficult empirical question, however, is what happens if everyone can raise unrestricted money in a presidential race. Dodd et al could certainly raise more, but so would Clinton and Obama. The ultimate effect would seem to depend on how quickly the marginal effect of an additional dollar of funding declines as campaign budgets increase.

What is it with top Republicans and animals? First, we found out that former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist used to “bring cats home from animal shelters and dissect them” while he was in medical school. Now, Mitt Romney is in trouble for stuffing his poor dog into a carrier on his station wagon’s roof rack for a twelve-hour trip. Yikes.

Matthew Yglesias is defending his use of the phrase “stab in the back” against criticism from Jonah Goldberg:

Jonah seems upset that when I complain that American conservatives are perpetuating a “stab in the back” theory of the war in Iraq to explain away their own hideous errors of strategic judgment without bothering “to make a tight link between the National Socialist reaction to German surrender at the end of WWI.” Kevin Baker’s already lay it out [sic] in Harper’s at some length, so I haven’t bothered personally…

Suffice it to say that I think the main point of analogy is that mainstream contemporary American conservatism, like inter-war Nazism, believes that military defeats are primarily due to failures of national will. They believe this in part because they massively overestimate the significance of will in determining outcomes of this sort. They also, like Nazis, seem to deny that it might ever better serve the national interest to abandon a military adventure than to continue it. These beliefs serve to foster the further belief that several constitutive elements of liberal democracies — committed to free speech, to unfettered political debate, the existence of active political opposition movements — are a source of national weakness.

I’ve written at great length here and on Spinsanity about attacks on dissent since 9/11, so I share Matt’s concern about the increasing volume of rhetoric that attempts to blame opponents of the war for “betraying” US troops and causing defeat in Iraq.

With that said, however, the comparison to Nazis is not helpful. As I wrote in a discussion with Yglesias a couple of years ago, these analogies are almost never appropriate. First, they’re obviously overrepresented in contemporary debate because they are highly accessible in people’s minds and can be used to smear the other side with negative associations (as in Godwin’s law). And even when Nazi analogies are being used with serious intent, they still are likely to (a) automatically bring to mind negative associations between the other side and Nazis and (b) turn the debate into a foodfight.

To illustrate the way this works, note that Yglesias refers exclusively to “interwar Nazism” and “Nazis” in the post above. However, as Baker recounts, the phrase “stabbed in the back” was first coined by Paul von Hindenburg, a German general in WWI who served as president of the Weimar Republic and not a Nazi (though he eventually capitulated to Hitler and appointed him Chancellor in 1933). And the idea that “military defeats are primarily due to failures of national will” and that “several constitutive elements of liberal democracies … are a source of national weakness” are (sadly) hardly unique to Nazis.

(For more on the “stab in the back” debate, see Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, and Brian Beutler.)

I love this correction from the New York Times today:

Because of a transmission error, a film review yesterday about “Live Free or Die Hard” misstated the critic’s description of the plot. It should have been described as “logic-defying,” not “logic-defined.” (Go to Article)

By definition, the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster cannot be defined by logic. I’m not sure how the editors missed that one.

Kevin Drum nails something that makes me crazy — the way that wannabe gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen use academic credibility to legitimate ideas that aren’t backed by specific research:

Unfortunately, [Drew] Westen [the author of The Political Brain] then falls into the same traps that George Lakoff falls into. First, he uses his position as a clinical psychologist to pretend that the advice he’s offering is based on some kind of deep understanding of how the brain works. For the most part, though, it’s really not, no matter how many times he tosses off the phrase “activating a network.” There are a few nods here and there to brain research — some of which is genuinely interesting — but the bulk of the book is just Westen offering advice the same way any political consultant offers advice. This spurious appeal to authority probably shouldn’t bug me as much as it does, but there you have it. It bugs me.

Update 6/27 9:38 PM: If Westen’s agenda isn’t clear, this is all you need to know — he has a consulting firm with the inane tagline “To move people, you have to understand the neural networks that connect ideas, images, and emotions in their minds.”

On a related note, a friend reminds me of a very relevant study (PDF):

The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations
Deena Skolnick Weisberg*, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson,
& Jeremy R. Gray

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they
contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the
underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naive adults, students in
a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena
followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad
explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the
neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the
expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than
bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with
logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without.
The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad
explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.