Brendan Nyhan

Drudge is running summaries from Bill Sammon’s Strategery this week. Today’s has two suspect quotes from Karl Rove that are worth noting.

Here’s the first:

Although Memogate was initially expected to harm the president, it ended up backfiring spectacularly on the press.

“The guy that it hurt most was Dan Rather and the executives at CBS,” White House strategist Karl Rove said in an interview for STRATEGERY. “It further disgraced a network which is third in ratings and, if you look at the demographics of their consumers, it’s like 70 percent Democrat.”

However, this Pew poll of news viewers found 16 percent of Americans regularly watch the CBS Evening News, which breaks down into 13 percent of Republicans, 19 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of independents. The only way you get to 70 percent of viewers being Democrats is if Democrats made up 59 percent of the public, which is obviously ridiculous.

In addition, this quote is pure spin:

Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign.

“From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign,” Rove said of Mapes and Rather.

So Rove can tell from their body language that Mapes and Rather were trying to help Kerry? If he’s a psychic, maybe he should be at the CIA analyzing Bin Laden tapes instead.

A New York Times poll reported today found that “Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to a higher federal gasoline tax, but a significant number would go along with an increase if it reduced global warming or made the United States less dependent on foreign oil.”

Here are the most important results:

The problem, however, is that these results are partially artifacts of the polling process. Once voters hear arguments why a gas tax is a bad idea, these numbers will move back down.

Still, however, a gas tax is an economic necessity, so it seems like a good time to revive my idea of a Federal Reserve for gas taxes, which is designed to head off many potential objections from opponents:

We have a problem in this country: we use too much oil. It pollutes the air, increases global warming, and forces us to police the Middle East to ensure a stable energy supply, which has helped radicalize angry Arab youth. What’s the easiest way to reduce oil consumption? A gas tax, as Matthew Yglesias noted recently. Taxes cause some inefficiency, but shifting relative prices is a far more efficient and effective way to reduce oil consumption than government mandates. That’s why even conservatives like Greg Mankiw, the former top economist in the Bush White House, have supported it. Mankiw wrote a 1999 article in Fortune titled “Tax Gas Now!”, which argued that a gas tax paired with an income tax cut “may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.”

So what’s the problem? The public hates it, and politicians won’t go near it (Mankiw had to eat his words later). One reason is that the government’s commitment to ensuring that people get a fair deal from a gas tax is not credible. Politicians have every incentive to take the extra revenues and put them toward more pork while taking back the accompanying tax cut over time. So why not have an independent Federal Reserve-type board of economists that’s responsible for adjusting the tax cut to maximize fuel efficiency without creating economic dislocation? The board could also be responsible for creating a yearly tax rebate that could be administered separately from the normal income tax system. That way people would see the proceeds from the gas tax coming back to them in a transparent way.

If we’re going to make progress on reducing fuel consumption, we need a different approach. Why not this one?

Update 2/28: Matthew Yglesias comments at Tapped:

Noting widespread public opposition to the good idea of a higher gasoline tax, Brendan Nyhan seeks to revive his notion of a fed-esque board for gas taxes that would remove the subject from day-to-day political controversy and assure that gas taxes operate in a revenue-neutral manner with the revenue raised rebated by lowering other taxes. This is an ideal with some merits, though it’s not obvious to me it would be all that easier to implement politically than simply hiking the gas tax.

The other thing to consider is that barring a massive turnaround in public opinion, whereby the electorate decides that old people should be left to starve in the streets or get sick and die of treatable diseases, the current gap between federal spending and federal revenue is going to keep growing. At some point, Congress will respond to this by raising taxes, which will be politically unpopular. A gas tax increases might be a good way to accomplish some of that since conservatives regard that sort of thing as the least-bad way to enhance revenue. Revenue neutral tax reforms are the sort of thing you primarily want to think about when the revenue-spending relationship is on a sustainable track.

Quick response: Any tax increase proposal that starts with 12 percent support is doomed without some sort of different approach to implementation. It is true, as Yglesias points out, that a gas tax hike is one of the “best” tax increases. However, it’s also the most transparent to voters and one of the most regressive. The combination makes it politically explosive. That’s why a revenue neutral approach in which gas tax proceeds are legally sequestered and refunded to voters makes so much sense. It can address conservative concerns that gas taxes will be wasted on pork and liberal concerns that the poor will suffer disproportionately.

Redressing the long-run imbalance between federal revenues and expenditures will be difficult and politically painful even after the Bush upper-income tax cuts are rolled back. Making a gas tax part of that package will make the backlash all the worse. Let’s keep these problems separate.

Update 2/28: Ezra Klein (Ezra Klein and here) and Atrios have posted more thoughts on this – I’ll reply tomorrow…

This New York Times report on a challenge to a Vermont campaign finance law that the Supreme Court will hear today makes no sense:

The Vermont campaign finance case, Randall v. Sorrell, No. 04-1528, tests the court’s current understanding of its watershed ruling 30 years ago in Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld limits on political contributions but determined that campaign spending was a form of political speech that the First Amendment did not permit the government to curtail.

A majority of the current court has expressed disagreement, or at least discomfort, with one or another aspect of that ruling. Justice Kennedy has called it a “halfway house” that does not provide a coherent framework for addressing the role of money in politics.

But a federal appeals court panel in New York, ruling last year in the Vermont case, went further. A 2-to-1 majority said Buckley v. Valeo had not, in fact, completely shut the door on regulating campaign spending. The appeals court found two justifications sufficiently “compelling” to overcome constitutional objections: deterring corruption, and relieving politicians of the distractions of nonstop fund-raising.

Vermont’s spending limits, ranging from $300,000 per election cycle for a governor’s race down to $2,000 for a seat in the Vermont House, may well be constitutional, the appeals court said while sending the case back to the Federal District Court in Burlington, Vt., for an examination of whether there were other means, less close to the line, to accomplish the same result.

“[R]elieving politicians of the distractions of nonstop fundraising?” The Vermont law caps contributions at $400. In a state that small, finding enough contributors to max out your funds is (I assume) difficult. Presumably, if the appeals court were actually concerned about relieving politicians of this burden, they would strike down contribution limits, which force candidates at the state and especially the federal level to spend most of their time calling donors begging for a few thousand dollars at a time. This not only keeps politicians away from ordinary people, but makes it exceptionally difficult to raise the funds necessary to challenge entrenched incumbents.

As I wrote before, “We should have unlimited individual donations and instant disclosure online, which would keep more money flowing to parties and candidates who are directly accountable to voters and make it possible for more challengers to wage well-funded campaigns. Let people make up their minds about the sources of campaign funds.”

Since 9/11, demagogues have frequently tried to silence dissent on the grounds that it demoralizes the troops. I’ve never understood this. Soldiers are also citizens who have their own political views. Some of them oppose the wars in which they are fighting, and all of them are part of our democracy.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that a new poll suggests that many soldiers in Iraq disagree with President Bush, as Nick Kristof reports in the New York Times (Times Select subscription required):

A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq — and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, “How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?”

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush’s position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw “immediately.”

Our troops are adults. They can handle dissent. So why can’t our leaders?

(Caveat: Polling soldiers in a combat zone is an inexact business, so these results should be regarded as preliminary and inexact.)

CBS/New York Times polls frequently show the lowest levels of support for President Bush among major firms, so it’s hard to know how much weight to put on their latest survey, which shows him at 34 percent approval — his lowest ever.

Still, it seems clear that the President is taking serious damage on the Dubai ports deal and will be forced to cave soon:

Americans are strongly opposed to the Bush administration’s agreement to allow a Dubai company to operate terminals at six American ports and are increasingly negative about the situation in Iraq, according to the latest CBS News poll.

Seventy percent, including 58 percent of Republicans, said Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the emir of Dubai, should not be permitted to operate at United States ports, while 21 percent supported the arrangement.

In addition, 62 percent of those polled said the efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq were going badly, up from 54 percent last month.

The port agreement and the pessimism on Iraq appear to be significant factors in driving Mr. Bush’s approval ratings back down to the lowest levels of his presidency. In the poll, 34 percent approved of how he is handling his job, down eight points from a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in January.

Mr. Bush’s latest job performance rating is the lowest measured for him in a poll conducted by The Times or CBS News, though virtually indistinguishable from the 35 percent job approval in a CBS poll last October.

The long-term trend in Bush’s job approval looks grim for Republicans:

Is it time to fire the Regnery copywriter?

An email (PDF) sent today by the notorious conservative publisher promoting Bill Sammon’s new Regnery book Strategery seems, uh, about a year out of date:

Try as they might, the liberal media and far-left Democrats simply cannot beat President George W. Bush. Washington Times White House correspondent Bill Sammon shows that, despite the Left attacking President Bush on everything from Iraq to Supreme Court nominees to hurricanes, the president has applied his unique brand of “strategery” to vanquish John Kerry and embark on a breathtakingly audacious second-term agenda.

They can’t beat him! His second-term agenda is “breathtakingly audacious”!

Oh, wait:

After his far-reaching domestic agenda of 2005 collapsed along with his poll ratings, [President Bush] and his advisers have concluded that grand proposals of the magnitude of restructuring Social Security or rewriting the tax code are unworkable in a time of war.

Instead, Bush has come around to the notion that a presidency can handle only one truly big thing at a time, and for now that thing is Iraq. As long as U.S. troops are fighting overseas, advisers now say, the domestic agenda will be limited to more incremental, less polarizing ideas — singles and doubles instead of home runs, in the vernacular of the Bush White House.

“He’s a very practical, business-oriented CEO president who looks at the landscape, wants to continue to get important things done, and I think he articulated an agenda that can be prosecuted,” said John Bridgeland, who directed the White House domestic policy council in Bush’s first term. “There’s a sense of learning. The country and the Congress didn’t seem quite ready for Social Security reform.”

…Democrats mocked the turnaround. “A year ago, the president overreached by threatening to privatize and dismantle Social Security,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), referring to the plan to allow Americans to invest some Social Security payroll taxes in stocks. “This year, he reached for too little.”

Instead of reinventing the nation’s retirement safety net, Bush was left talking about how wood chips might be made into fuel someday. He consigned Social Security to the third commission on entitlements in recent years. The menu of policies he presented included pumping more money into scientific research, science education and the development of alternative fuels. He called for an expansion of health savings accounts and limits on malpractice litigation.

Not only did he drop the health care tax credit he championed for five years — a plan once estimated to insure 6 million Americans at a cost of $89 billion over 10 years — the White House also dropped a plan to allow Americans to deduct out-of-pocket medical expenses…

Instead, the president proposed allowing only low-income people with health savings accounts to deduct medical expenses…

Overall, Bush’s domestic slate was so modest that the National Taxpayers Union found it the least expensive of any he has offered since becoming president. By studying the known costs of programs outlined Tuesday night, offset by promised spending cuts, the union estimated the net cost of Bush’s State of the Union pledges at $91 million. By contrast, his promises totaled $12.8 billion in the 2005 address and $106.6 billion in the 2002 speech.

But that wood chip plan is breathtakingly audacious! He can’t be beaten!

Update 2/28: A Human Events promotional email (PDF) flogging Sammon’s book takes a similar tack:

Strategery picks up where Misunderestimated left off, tracing John Kerry’s challenge to the President, the hard-fought and hard-won election, and the tumultuous year that followed — in which George W. Bush would consistently (though usually without any credit at all from a virulently hostile liberal media) outwit his foes at home and abroad.

Once again, huh? Bush’s top agenda item in 2005 was Social Security. Inside the conservative cult of personality, do they think that everyone is just pretending private accounts are dead? Maybe they think it’s just all part of the strategery, rather than a sign that Bush is an unpopular second-term president whose 9/11 popularity boost has worn off…

Here’s a summary I wrote up of my discussant comments last week at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies conference on Casualties and Warfare. My panel, which was titled “The media and casualties,” featured presentations by Cori Dauber (University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill), Robert Entman (George Washington University) and Sean Aday (George Washington).

In response to the panelists’ presentations, I pointed out that we need to distinguish between media framing as an independent variable and media framing as a dependent variable. In both cases, we face both a normative and an empirical dilemma.

The panelists focused on media framing as a dependent variable. But the empirical dilemma we face is that it is difficult to determine what causes the framing we observe — bias, professional norms, outside political pressure, etc. And the normative dilemma is that we don’t agree on what kind of framing reports should use — strictly neutral fact-based reporting, interpretive reporting that seeks to put facts in context, etc.

When considering media framing as an independent variable, the dilemmas become arguably more profound. Normatively, we’re generally troubled by framing effects, which suggest that citizens are easily manipulated by elites. At the same time, however, we often hope that citizens respond to certain kinds of normatively important factual information, such as casualties, probability of victory or evidence regarding the reasons for war.

The related empirical dilemma is especially difficult. Recent research by Jamie Druckman and others has shown that framing effects are substantially weaker in the presence of counterframes or debate with people of differing viewpoints — precisely the conditions that obtain under the conditions where we care most about public opinion. These effects, moreover, are nearly impossible to document outside an experimental context, and those experimental effects that we can demonstrate may be short-lived or artificial.

Our normative and empirical dilemmas intersect, then, in the context of the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Research on media framing as a dependent and independent variable seems normatively crucial. But in the current context, it’s not clear what causes the framing we observe, nor what effect media framing has on public opinion (if any). In addition, we don’t agree on what effect framing *should* have from a normative perspective.

As a result, drawing clear empirical inferences or normative conclusions about the effect of media framing on public opinion toward America’s dual wars is very difficult. But the panelists are to be commended for pointing the way toward valuable future work in this area.

Human Events, the conservative magazine that features Ann Coulter’s hateful columns about Muslims on its website, has sent an email to its readers promoting a whole series of anti-Islamic books.

The message is hard to miss. The subject of the email? “The ugly truth about Mohammed.”

Now, I’m no scholar of Islam, and I’m sure there are aspects of the history of the religion that are ugly. But you know what? Virtually every other religion, including Christianity, has a dark side. This email is a loathsome attempt to profit from anti-Islam sentiment. We need to promote an Islamic reformation led by moderate Muslims, not fan the flames of bigotry.

(Postscript: See also my previous posts about Human Events.)

I knew that the White House has been wasting homeland security money by distributing it as pork to areas that face little or no terrorist threat. But this is ridiculous.

A New York Times profile of the emptiest county in the country — Loving County, Texas — mentions that the county “landed $30,000 in antiterrorism money from the Department of Homeland Security to upgrade its emergency radio system.”

$30,000! For a county with approximately 70 people, that’s $428 per person. Does anyone actually think Al Qaeda is targeting Loving County?

Howard Kaloogian, a conservative candidate for Duke Cunningham’s open Congressional seat in California, has sent a fundraising email (PDF) to Human Events readers that includes a classic scare picture of prominent Democrats: