Brendan Nyhan

Here’s what passes for journalism at Fox News — from a Washington Post account of a Howard Dean press conference on Capitol Hill yesterday:

After several seconds, a booming voice cut through the noise. It belonged to Brian Wilson, a Fox News correspondent who was standing in the middle of the crowd. He asked Dean “if people are focused on the other things that you’ve said about hating Republicans, about Republicans being dishonest and then this latest comment about the Republican Party is full of white Christians. You say you hate Republicans — does that mean you also” hate white Christians?

Yes, he hates white Christians — even though he is one. Jeez. No wonder Mark Leibovich (who wrote the Post story) apparently wondered if Wilson was a GOP staffer trying to embarrass Dean.

6/10: See CJR Daily for more on Wilson v. Leibovich.

As I’ve written many times, the plague of modern political journalism is reporters’ unwillingness to aggressively fact-check the claims made by politicians (see All the President’s Spin for more).

So it’s a little depressing to see Entertainment Weekly doing a better job of fact-checking Tom Cruise than the political press does with President Bush (via Defamer):

EW: You are aware that your views about psychiatry come across as pretty radical to a lot of people.

CRUISE: In the 1980s, you were supposed to say no to drugs. But when I say no to drugs, I’m a radical? ‘He’s against drugs — he’s a radical! He’s against electroshock treatments — he’s a radical!’ [Laughing] It’s absurd!

EW: Yeah, but Scientology textbooks sometimes refer to psychiatry as a ”Nazi science”…

CRUISE: Well, look at the history. Jung was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War II. [According to Aryeh Maidenbaum, the director of the New York Center for Jungian Studies, this is not true.] Look at the experimentation the Nazis did with electric shock and drugging. Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler… [According to the Dictionary of Drugs and Medications, among other sources, this is an urban legend.]

Just a savage beatdown. I love it.

This is what passes for polling analysis in the mainstream media — from USA Today:

Bush’s supporters say his determination helped him win a second term. A Los Angeles Times poll taken a year ago found that 56% of voters said Bush was “too ideological and stubborn.” But on Election Day, surveys of voters found that of the 17% who said they voted for the candidate they thought was a strong leader, 87% voted for Bush.

Did it occur to Keen and Kiely that these findings aren’t inconsistent? We’ve known for decades that people’s survey responses about candidate characteristics are closely related to which candidate they support (in the jargon, they’re “endogenous”). That’s why almost everyone in the 2004 exit poll who chose “strong leader” as the most important quality of the candidate they chose voted for President Bush — it was one of the central rationales of his candidacy. But that doesn’t necessarily contradict the finding that 56% of Americans think Bush is “too ideological and stubborn”; the two groups are likely to be mutually exclusive, or very nearly so.

The Indiana Republican offers a strange definition of “fiscal discipline” in a defense of President Bush’s private accounts plan in USA Today:

The American people now see a very clear choice before them: The president’s bold vision for [Social Security] reform based on fiscal discipline and choice, and the Democrat vision for reform based on higher taxes. The cure for what ails Social Security is new ideas, not higher taxes.

Um, Mike? The President’s plan closes only about 30% of Social Security’s 75-year funding shortfall, moves the date that the Trust Fund is exhausted forward by 11 years, and — by Dick Cheney’s own admission — requires trillions of dollars in additional government borrowing. And that’s on top of the ten-year deficit of $2.5 trillion in his most recent budget, which also excludes military costs for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a fix for the alternative minimum tax. By any reasonable standard, this is the opposite of “fiscal discipline.”

Is someone trying to rebuild their shattered reputation? Here’s Paul Wolfowitz disavowing some of the extremes of the Bush administration’s pre-war rhetoric in a new Mark Bowden piece in the Atlantic (key passage in bold):

[BOWDEN] “You were one of those who was most emphatic prior to going into Iraq that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.”

[WOLFOWITZ] “I don’t think so.”

“I can quote you.”

“Okay.”

I read him a line from an op-ed article under his byline in the British newspaper The Independent for January 30, 2003: “There is incontrovertible evidence that the Iraqi regime still possesses such weaopns.” Wolfowitz had spoken in the same terms on numerous occasions.

“‘Inconvertible evidence’ is a pretty strong way of putting it,’ I said. ‘How did you feel when you found out they didn’t have such weapons?”

“Well, I don’t think they don’t,” he said. “You say it turned out they didn’t. By the way, read me the quote again.”

I did so. Wolfowitz said he needed to go back and review his prior statements.

“But clearly you believed they had stockpiles of such weapons?”

“You are putting the word ‘stockpiles’ in,” he said.

He was right: “stockpiles” was my word.

“See, that’s what — I wasn’t convinced about stockpiles. I always thought the nuclear thing was overstated. That was down the road. What really bothered me was biological weapons, and we know they made them. We know they know how to make them. We know there was a lot of deliberate effort to destroy evidence of all kinds of things. ‘Inconvertible,’ I agree, is a pretty strong word. But we know they’ve had the stuff and — let me put it this way — they were given a chance to come clean under [UN Resolution] 1441, to declare everything they had and to cooperate fully with inspectors. We caught them lying on the declarations on not insignificant things — mostly on the missiles they were working on and the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] they were working on. And there was lots of evidence of obstructing inspectors and moving things and hiding things. That was supposed to be the test of 1441 — not whether we could prove they had stockpiles.”

Has anyone of Wolfowitz’s stature ever disavowed pre-war claims of stockpiles and a looming nuclear threat before?

Tonight’s online poll from CNN’s fearmonger of outsourcing asks whether Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean is brash, bold, outrageous, or effective.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Not only are online polls unscientific, but these choices make no sense. Dean could be any possible combination of those four adjectives; they’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, Merriam-Webster Online lists the second synonym for “brash” as “foolishly adventurous or bold.”

During an interview on “On Point” last night about his Atlantic Monthly article predicting a future economic crisis, James Fallows was the latest commentator to endorse the third party meme that’s rocketing around the press (Real Audio – go to 38:00 in the clip):

I feel something different from what I’ve ever felt before in my depressingly long political life, which is I can imagine [in] another election or two a third party making it if people just feel the two established parties — [which have] been around since before the Civil War — that neither of them can deal with the actual issues that face the country. So this article proposes that in the third election from now the third party will win and I actually could imagine that happening.

And here’s Marshall Wittman today on TPM Cafe:

Conditions are developing for a possible third party alternative in ’08.

As the new Washington Post survey shows, independents are particularly estranged from the Bushies. The overall electorate is annoyed by both parties and the Washington politicians. The deficit is growing and the economy is anemic. The popularity of the Iraq war is plummeting and no end is in sight.

These are combustible conditions that could very well produce a third force in American politics. It is striking how similar the current situation is to that in 1992 when Perot emerged. Actually it is far worse – then, we were in the aftermath of a successful war although the economy was in a worse state.

The question is whether the Democratic party can fill this political vacuum – as Clinton did in ’92 It will take more than Bush bashing to appeal to the disaffected. That is why a reform agenda that defies the political establishment in Washington is so essential.

These are more cautious formulations than the rash speculation about 2008 that we’ve seen from Ron Brownstein, Joe Trippi, Mickey Kaus and others, and it certainly could happen. Still, I think Fallows and Wittman overstates the possibility of a successful third party. The fundamental insight of the political science literature on parties is that they are the vehicles of highly strategic politicians who react quickly to any threat to their hold on power.

To pick up on Wittman’s example, many people thought Ross Perot was a serious presidential candidate who would form a viable third party that could knock off one of the two established parties. But the parties quickly moved to defuse his appeal by addressing the deficit and Perot fizzled, failing to win a single electoral vote or establish his Reform Party as any kind of a credible alternative. Similarly, in 2004, John Kerry moved to try to defuse the appeal of Ralph Nader, who stole votes from Al Gore, and as a result Nader drew many fewer votes than he did in 2000. (If you go back further in history, there are many more examples like this.)

In short, there’s a reason the two parties have stuck around since the Civil War; they’ve adapted repeatedly to changing political circumstances, using their leverage as established parties to squash potential competitors and steal their issues. We shouldn’t underestimate how quickly they can turn on a dime and defuse an emerging threat. In all likelihood, the “political vacuum” will be filled.

Just how long is Bill Clinton’s painfully undisciplined autobiography? It took a voice actor 51.5 hours to read the whole thing:

Mr. Clinton was honored in absentia on Friday night at the Audies, the Audiobook Publishers Association’s version of the Oscars. He had been nominated for his reading of a 6.5-hour abridged version of his autobiography, “My Life.” A full-length, 51.5-hour version on 41 CD’s, read by Michael Beck, was a finalist in a category for unabridged works.

Has the real world has finally triumphed over the reality-creating machine that is the Bush administration? As I predicted, Bush can’t move the numbers on private accounts. His endless Social Security road show is doing nothing to improve public support for his dramatically unpopular plan. Still, for unknown reasons he has refused to want to walk away from it until now:

President Bush has all but conceded his plan for private accounts for Social Security is dead, admitting privatization won’t save the federal retirement system.

“You can solve the solvency issue without personal accounts,” Bush said in an interview with the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

Private accounts have been the cornerstone of Bush’s Social Security plan, and the White House insisted he’s not abandoning them. He still plans to talk up privatization as an option for young Americans, but his primary focus now will be on keeping the program healthy.

“The personal accounts, optional personal accounts, would make Social Security a much better option or deal for young workers, because you’d get a better rate of return,” Bush said.

(Via Atrios.)

Time for more fun with the Wall Street Journal. Today the WSJ criticizes Senator Sam Brownback’s hold on Julie Finley’s nomination to be ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (subscription required):

Last time we checked, it required a coalition to sustain a political majority, and Ms. Finley is being nominated for what is basically a security (not a social policy) post. Republicans don’t want to become the mirror image of those Democrats who blocked Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey from speaking at their convention in 1988 because he was pro-life.

Apparently the Journal can’t even get the dates right on the disinformation it spreads. Casey was prevented from speaking to the convention in 1992, not 1988, and it’s a myth that he was blocked because he was pro-life. Many other pro-life Democrats spoke at that convention. As Michael Crowley reported in The New Republic in 1996, the reason Casey was blocked is that he wouldn’t endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket.

Update 6/8: Media Matters makes the same point, noting that Casey actually did speak to the Democratic convention in 1988.

Update 6/15: Media Matters notes that the WSJ corrected the date but not the false claim about Casey.