Brendan Nyhan

New York magazine’s Jennifer Senor has written a devastating review of Lewis Lapham’s new book, a name-calling screed in which he engages in the popular post-9/11 tactic of comparing one’s opponents to the Taliban:

Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, are landing in bookstores. Both, to varying degrees, suffer from a distorting case of Bush-phobia. Lapham’s “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” is by far the more trying of the two. The editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and its Notebook columnist for more than 25 years, Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

Well. At least his point of view is unambiguous. But unless you agree with it 100 percent — and are content to see almost no original reporting or analysis in support of these claims — you may feel less inclined to throttle Lapham’s targets than to throttle Lapham himself. For this book is all about Lewis Lapham: the breathtaking lyricism of his voice, the breadth of his remarkable erudition. He goes across the street and around the corner to confirm the worst stereotypes about liberals — that they’re condescending, twee, surpassingly smug. “What I find surprising is the lack of objection,” he writes of the misguided American public. “The opinion polls show four of every five respondents saying that they gladly would give up as many of their civil rights and liberties as might be needed to pay the ransom for their illusory safety.” Wouldn’t Lapham be a more interesting columnist if he took this finding seriously? And analyzed it, perhaps, giving it its due?…

People who are serious about politics don’t just preen. They report, explain, explore contradictions, struggle with ideas, maybe even propose suggestions. If they do none of these things, they’re simply heckling, and if the best Lapham can do is come up with 50 inventive new ways to call Bush an imbecilic oligarch, that’s all he’s doing: heckling. Like his worst counterparts on the right, he compares those he doesn’t like to fanatics, as when he refers to David Frum and Richard Perle as “Mufti Frum” and “Mullah Perle,” adding, “Provide them with a beard, a turban and a copy of the Koran, and I expect that they wouldn’t have much trouble stoning to death a woman discovered in adultery with a cameraman from CBS News.” Possibly, but provide Lapham with a blond wig, stiletto pumps and a copy of “The Fountainhead,” and I suspect he wouldn’t look much different from Ann Coulter. He’s just another talk-radio host, really — only this time by way of Yale and Mensa.

Ouch.

The New Republic and Slate have many talented writers, but they’re also responsible for taking the cult of the “counterintuitive” to dysfunctional extremes. That’s why I was shocked to see TNR’s Bradford Plumer slamming the latest everything-you-know-is-wrong piece from Slate:

Yes, yes, people who live in glass houses and all that, but Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg is taking this whole counterintuitive shtick way too far:

[T]here are reasons why the Democrats might be better off denying Republicans the defeat they crave in November. For the Democrats to win the House this year would offer the unappealing prospect of responsibility without power. With a slim majority in the next Congress, Democrats wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything significant. The party would still lack the votes to pass health-care reform or to repeal the Bush tax cuts.

But with control of even one chamber by one vote, the failure to act on such issues would now be their fault as well. Iraq and the fiscal mess would no longer be just Bush’s problems. The Democratic Party will have a much clearer story line heading into the 2008 election if it is simply the party out of power and can call for a complete change.

Good lord. From the folks who brought us “Deep down in his heart, John McCain is secretly a liberal,” and “Anti-Roe justices would be awesome for abortion rights,” it’s the latest bit of “unconventional” liberal wisdom: A Democratic victory in November would be terrible … for Democrats. As my cubicle-mate Elspeth says, it all sounds a lot like some dude psyching himself out of talking to the cute girl in homeroom.

Is it really true that Republicans would benefit by having Nancy Pelosi ascend to the speaker’s throne so that they could “run against her” in 2008? Most voters have no clue who Nancy Pelosi is. Most people will never know who she is. The thinness of models on Project Runway have a better chance of being a campaign issue in 2008 than Nancy Pelosi. Weisberg also thinks the Democrats might have a “clearer story line [in ’08] … if it is simply the party out of power and can call for a complete change.” But a shocking number of American voters never know which party controls Congress. Why would a midterm victory change any of that?

And it strains credibility to think that a Democratic House would have no power. Of course it couldn’t pass universal health care. But if, say, Saint McCain was of the mind to steer a pro-torture bill through the Senate, a Pelosi-controlled House would be in a position to scuttle it. That seems important, no? Virtually every piece of legislation that has emerged from Congress in the past six years has been a combination of a shockingly nutty bill from the House and an only-slightly-less-nutty Senate bill. Most conference committees are dominated by Republicans. Having a Democratic House would change this whole dynamic and stanch the nuttiness factor somewhat. (Of course, given the way Democrats are rolling over for torture these days, maybe that’s overly optimistic.)

One other consideration. In the modern-day Congress, power breeds power. Democrats in control of the House would undoubtedly put themselves in position to make further gains in 2008. The leadership could offer plum committee assignments to vulnerable Democrats, to bolster their electoral chances. They could put an end to harmful votes on wedge issues like flag-burning. And so on. The idea that political parties can “lose by winning” seems unconvincing. Barry Goldwater lost in 1964 and supposedly saved the Republican Party. But look what happened right after he lost: Democrats in Congress expanded the welfare state and essentially cemented support for entitlement spending for generations to come. Hardly the model to emulate.

Coming in two years from Slate: Democrats will be better off losing in 2008 since voters will be really sick of Republicans by 2012. Everything you know is wrong!

Clarification 9/24 10:11 AM: I relied on Plumer’s summary of Weisberg’s article, but as a commenter points out, Weisberg does ultimately reject the counterintuitive “win by losing” argument at the end of his piece. That means both TNR and Slate have both criticized it, which is virtually unprecedented for a faux-clever “counterintuitive” argument (remember, Slate is the publication that ran articles praising the entertainment value of the Pistons-Pacers melee and giving a winking endorsement to voter fraud, while TNR recently published an incoherent liberal defense of Ann Coulter). Has a backlash begun against the cult of the counterintuitive?

It’s unclear why President Bush’s approval ratings have risen, but the Washington Times offers a suggestion we can safely rule out — the masterful PR work of Tony Snow:

Former talk show host Tony Snow took over as President Bush’s communications point man four months ago, beefing up the press office staff, honing internal operations and deploying a quick-response strategy.

Now, polls show, the president’s approval rating has jumped to its highest level since January.

Could Mr. Snow be responsible for the surge?

Answer: No. That is all.

RNC chair Ken Mehlman has repeatedly suggested that Democrats don’t want to fight the war on terror since 9/11. So it’s quite a coincidence when he happened to use the verb “surrender” (rather than “renounce” or other synonyms) to describe Democrats’ desire to shut down various anti-terrorism measures in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday (subscription required):

In 46 days, the American people will make an important decision about how we prosecute [the war on terror]: Do we stay on the offense and use every tool available to defeat the enemy, or do we elect leaders who would weaken America and surrender key tools we need to defeat the global jihad?

“[L]eaders who would weaken America and surrender…” — subtle.

Wonkette flags this passage from a World Magazine profile of George Allen:

Allen actually had a pretty credible defense for what he said. No one—including The Washington Post, which featured the story repeatedly for several weeks—ever demonstrated that “macaca” really has such murky racial connotations in any language. But in northern Italy, where Allen’s mother had close family connections, “macaca” does seem to mean “clown” or “buffoon.” Allen says now that’s what he was trying to communicate.

Josh Marshall interprets this passage as meaning “it’s a word he picked up from his mom and it means buffoon”; Wonkette suggests the same interpretation (“now we’re blaming mom again”).

However, the wording of the article is actually unclear. The statement “Allen says now that’s what he was trying to communicate” could mean that Allen has said he was trying to call the Webb cameraman a clown or buffoon (ie the “shithead” alibi, which followed several others), not that he acknowledged picking it up from his mother. Without further clarification from World, we don’t know.

In related news, the Tradesports futures market puts George Allen’s chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination at about five percent, down from a high of close to forty.

Update 9/23 3:16 PM: Red State asks similar questions about the meaning of the World Magazine passage. I’ve emailed World for clarification.

Update 9/24 3:43 PM: Writing in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter appears to endorse the Marshall/Wonkette interpretation:

First [Allen] said he didn’t know what the word meant, then that he made it up from the word “Mohawk,” and, most recently, that it’s Italian for “buffoon.”

A week ago, I questioned a Wall Street Journal editorial claim that “Last year ABC News reported that 11 top al Qaeda figures broke only after ‘waterboarding,’ which induces a feeling of suffocation and is the most controversial of the known techniques employed.” I cited a Media Matters report stating that no such ABC News report was broadcast, which I confirmed in the Nexis news database by searching transcripts of ABC News broadcasts.

However, it turns out that the WSJ was referring to an article published on ABCNews.com that a reader sent to me today. Here is the relevant text:

Of the 12 high-value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

I apologize for not finding it sooner. I’ve emailed Greg Sargent to ask him to update the Horse’s Mouth post (Media Matters now has a correction up).

I went through a number of flame wars at Spinsanity, but two aspects of the TAP controversy have been especially interesting:

1. The invention of a fictitious Brendan. Atrios and a number of readers have created a bizarre caricature of me as some sort of aspiring David Broder who kowtows to the center and constantly asserts moral equivalence between the left and right in an effort to become a national pundit. (One especially excitable reader just called me “a Bushite sycophant” who supports “the illegal, unnecessary war of aggression.”) Please. I do believe in criticizing both sides if they undermine reasonable debate, but in case people have forgotten (or don’t know), I spent months co-writing a book that remains the preeminent guide to the PR tactics of President Bush. We explain in it that we chose to focus on Bush because of his importance and the sophistication of his tactics, but also warn that liberals are trying to follow his example. The book is simply not mechanically balanced; we lost many conservative readers as a result of writing it. And if I were trying to become rich and famous, I would not be in graduate school or working as a non-partisan critic of political spin, both of which pay virtually nothing and attract far less attention than partisan vitriol.

2. The jargon of “concern troll.” This phrase, which I had never heard before, has become a popular insult to apply to me on comment threads. It’s apparently being used by the angry liberal partisans online to dismiss and stigmatize criticism of them. When someone objects to an extreme statement by a liberal (like me) they get called a “concern troll,” which is used to shut down a substantive discussion of the criticism they’ve raised. According to this blog post, it is a term from Daily Kos that originally referred to people who “pretend at being progressive Democrats, but at every turn seem to suggest the most obviously damaging or boneheaded or offensive thing they can.” However, the blogger notes that, “anthropologically, the term has become synonymous with two groups: 1. anyone who calls for civility in a blog, and/or 2. Centrist Democrats.”

Interestingly, the tactic seems strikingly similar to the way that some conservatives use “political correctness” to shut down criticism, which I wrote about on Spinsanity:

At first, [the term] referred to specific incidents in which colleges and other institutions attempted to enforce liberal norms some perceived as oppressive. Over time, however, as UCLA’s Phil Agre argued, some speakers began to use the phrase (or the variants “politically correct”/”politically incorrect”) to imply coercion without making a specific argument that it had actually taken place or stigmatize any opposition to a political view as “political correctness.” In this way, a set of associated stereotypes could be triggered in increasingly vague and pathological ways.

Both of these mechanisms have the effect of essentially making up a straw man version of me to attack. It’s fine; I can take it. But I thought it was worth explaining how the jargon works. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

A USA Today article yesterday made some exaggerated claims about the effect of gasoline prices on President Bush’s approval ratings:

When it comes to President Bush’s approval rating — the number that measures his political health — one factor seems more powerful than any Oval Office address or legislative initiative.

It’s the price of a gallon of gas.

Statisticians who have compared changes in gas prices and Bush’s ratings through his presidency have found a steady relationship: As gas prices rise, his ratings fall. As gas prices fall, his ratings rise.

For some Americans, analysts speculate, gas prices provide a shorthand reading of the general state of the economy. Even though prices at the pump are largely outside the president’s control, he gets credit when they fall — and blame when they rise.

“Gas prices are a price everybody knows because it hangs on the street in big letters,” says Stuart Thiel, an economist at DePaul University in Chicago who has been tracking the trend for several years.

A statistical analysis by Doug Henwood, editor of the liberal newsletter Left Business Observer, found that an “uncanny” 78% of the movement in Bush’s ratings could be correlated with changes in gas prices. Based on trends in crude oil prices, Henwood predicted last Thursday that it “wouldn’t be surprising to see his approval numbers rise into the mid-40s.”

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, Bush’s rating rose to 44%, his highest in a year. Average gas prices, which peaked at more than $3 a gallon in August, had dropped under $2.50, the lowest since March.

The problem, however, is that Henwood’s analysis is not correct, nor is he a statistician as Page’s lede implies (he actually did graduate work in English). To explain why, I’ll have to go through some statistics.

Henwood’s finding that “78% of the movement in Bush’s ratings could be correlated with changes in gas prices” is based on an incorrectly specified statistical model. He used the logarithm of nominal gas prices to predict President Bush’s approval rating. There are two problems with this, one conceptual and one technical. The conceptual problem is simple: 9/11. It boosted President Bush’s approval ratings into the stratosphere, and they’ve more or less declined consistently since then. Meanwhile, gas prices have trended upward over Bush’s presidency. The two series are correlated, but any variable that trended upward during this time period would show a similar relationship (I can “explain” 62 percent of the variance in Bush approval using a variable that just counts the number of months he has been in office). Second, the model is incorrectly specified (it suffers from what’s called serial correlation, which means the errors at time t and time t+1 are correlated).

When we estimate a quick-and-dirty model for presidential approval from January 2001-June 2006 using a lag of approval in the previous month (which corrects the serial correlation problem), a variable capturing the 9/11 approval boost in Sept./Oct. 2001, a variable for the Iraq invasion in March 2003, average hourly wages, total payroll employment, and the logarithm of inflation-adjusted gas prices, we find that the effect of gas prices is negative but not quite statistically significant at conventional levels. 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, by contrast, have highly significant effects. (A more complex model that takes account of the long, slow decline in the 9/11 boost would likely wipe out the gas effect completely.)

Now it’s certainly plausible that gasoline prices have some effect on approval, but not to the extent that Harwood or Page suggest. Given the weak relationships that existed during past administrations (which Harwood acknowledges), the relationship that we observe during Bush’s presidency seems likely to be a statistical artifact. It is very premature to call gas prices the “strongest factor” affecting approval. (For those who are interested, The Macro Polity is to my mind the definitive political science work on the factors influencing presidential approval.)

Update 9/22 10:47 AM: Using sophisticated techniques and better data than my quick-and-dirty model above, the distinguished political scientists Nathaniel Beck, Simon Jackman, and Howard Rosenthal report results for the determinants of Bush approval that mirror my analysis above (PDF):

Immediately note that the approval series is dominated by the long, almost uninterrupted decline after the peak in the 9/11 aftermath. Hence, any variable that trends in a similar way will emerge as a good predictor of approval, at least in these data. Figures 9 and 10 plot the
relationship between weekly gasoline prices and approval and cumulative U.S. deaths in Iraq,
and presidential approval, respectively. The latter variable trends up, by construction, and
gas prices also generally trend up over the post 9/11 phase of Bush’s presidency. We entered
these variables, plus the log of first time unemployment claims in an augmented version of our
transition model… The coefficient on the
covariates are something of a mixed bag, with the estimated effects on changes in gas prices
not unambiguously signed at conventional levels of statistical significance (i.e., the posterior
probability that changes in gas prices drive approval down is just .77). Cumulative U.S. deaths
in Iraq appears to drive approval down (again, if for no other reason than both variables trend
in the same direction over much of the time series). Similarly, first time unemployment claims
generally trend down over the course of the Bush presidency, around seasonal variation, and
so picks up an unambiguously positive coefficient.

Reuters reports that President Bush claimed Democrats will raise taxes if they take control of the House:

President George W. Bush charged on Thursday that Democrats would raise taxes if put in control of the U.S. Congress, turning to a familiar campaign theme as he seeks to stave off Republican losses in November.

“If they get control of the House of Representatives, they’ll raise your taxes. It’ll hurt our economy. And that’s why we’re not going to let them get control of the House of Representatives,” Bush said.

Just to review: Under separation of powers, legislation must be approved by the House and Senate and signed by the President. No matter what happens in November, there’s no way Democrats could get a 2/3 vote in both houses to override a presidential veto — and it’s hard to imagine Bush agreeing to sign a substantial tax increase. This is a phony threat until at least the end of his term.

During the same speech, Bush also offered yet another insinuation that tax cuts increase revenue: “The best way to balance the budget is to keep pro-growth economic policies in place that are generating additional tax revenues into the Treasury, and be wise about how we spend your money.”

But as I’ve written many times before, tax cuts do not generate “additional tax revenues,” as Bush suggests. Virtually all economists agree that they decrease the total amount of revenue taken in by the government, as even Bush’s own economists have repeatedly stated in contradiction to his claims.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank eviscerates a House committee for its absurd debate on the definition of torture:

Confronted with one of the weightiest issues of the times — whether to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions’ torture prohibitions — the committee members quickly retreated to the familiar terrain of extraneous and off-point arguments.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), leading the debate for the Democrats, asked to put into the record an article written by a former prisoner of the KGB about techniques such as sleep deprivation that the Bush plan could allow.

“Objection,” the chairman growled, without explaining himself or looking up from his newspaper.

But the talk of sleep deprivation caused Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) to stir. “Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours of sleep and cannot be awakened for interrogation,” he said. “The average inmate gained about 15 pounds, was receiving better medical care by far, dental care, you name it: being given a Koran, they pray five times a day, there’s an arrow on the floor in each of the rooms . . . so they know which way Mecca is so they can pray accordingly.”

Sensenbrenner responded with a deep cough. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) set about building a straw man. “We just heard that not guaranteeing eight hours of sleep in Guantanamo has been interpreted by some as inhumane,” he said.

“Who?” demanded Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), for nobody had said such a thing.

But Feeney was just warming up. “There is not an American mom that is guaranteed eight hours of sleep every night. There are very few people in the business world . . . who are guaranteed eight hours of sleep.” Further, he added: “There are suggestions that playing loud music is inhumane treatment. . . . The bottom line is, that means virtually every teenager I know is torturing mom and dad.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) appealed for reason: “Although I’m sure parents do feel tortured by their teenagers, I don’t think that’s in the Constitution.”

Nadler raised the ante. “Sleep deprivation [for] eight hours? How about 40 hours?” he asked. “How about waterboarding? How about holding people and subjecting them to hypothermia?”

“Absurd! Absurd!” heckled Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), who accused the Democrats of “hyperbole.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) seconded the “absurd” accusation. “We are facing sleep deprivation here in this Congress at the shutdown of every single session,” he cracked.

And to think they call the Senate the world’s greatest deliberative body…