Brendan Nyhan

Media Matters catches conservative pundit Laura Ingraham suggesting that President Bush was supported by “regular people,” which she offensively defines as white and middle class:

Well, I think it’s interesting that people like [New York Daily News chairman and publisher Mort] Zuckerman [who wrote a June 2 op-ed suggesting that religious conservatives may hurt the Republican Party] would be saying this now, coming off of an election where President Bush was elected with middle-class support, Bill [O’Reilly, host], from about $23,000 to about $50,000 bracket for annual salary. Bush won by six points in all Americans and 22 points in white middle-class voters. So the Republicans are clearly connecting with the regular people, where the Democrats aren’t.

A couple of weeks ago, substitute Wonkette Greg Beato caught Bill O’Reilly using the same kind of racial code — here’s the graphic he created:

A week or two ago, I decried what Newsmax described as Bill O’Reilly’s “fantasy” about terrorists beheading Michael Kinsley:

This is the Coulter-ization of political discourse. It’s not normal — or acceptable — to “joke” about the murder of your political opponents. When will we cast these people out of public life?

The often brilliant Tom Tomorrow has a scathing cartoon about what will happen if we keep treating this kind of hate talk as acceptable. The cartoon is on Salon Premium, so you’ll have to watch a short ad, but it’s well worth the wait.

Slate’s Mickey Kaus didn’t like my post criticizing his claim that John McCain can win the presidency as a third-party candidate:

Backfill: Ron Brownstein’s made the McCain/Perot point before. I’ve blogged Brownstein before. And Brendan Nyhan’s unconvincingly and condescendingly attacked Brownstein before. Nyhan does it again today. His big argument is Duverger’s Law, which says

“In any election where a single winner is chosen by plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins), there is a strong tendency for serious competitors to be reduced to two because people tend to vote strategically.”

But why wouldn’t McCain have a chance of making it into the top two? It depends on the other candidates, no? If the 2004 race had been Bush vs. Kerry vs. McCain, I’d say Kerry might have been the odd man out. … P.S.: Nyhan notes Brownstein’s admission that an “an independent would need to nearly run the table in battleground states—like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.” Again, that may be true, but why would it necessarily discourage McCain from giving it a shot? He’s not young, and this is his chance to make history. Oh, right–he doesn’t like the media attention! … P.P.S.: Nyhan says a third-party candidate could only win in “extraordinary circumstances.” And we all know how rare those are! …

I’ve been busy and hadn’t had a chance to reply, so here goes.

First of all, it’s implausible that Kerry would have been the odd man out in 2004. The (flawed) 2004 exit polls show that 37% of the electorate was Democrat, 37% was Republican and 26% was independent. Given the strength of party loyalty, it’s hard to imagine McCain — a conservative, albeit heterodox, Republican — pushing a Democrat into third place, particularly since it might mean the death of the Democratic Party (ask the Whigs).

The more general point is that it doesn’t really depend on the candidates, contrary to what Kaus claims. To even become a viable contender as a third-party candidate, you have to spend tens of millions of dollars to get on the ballot in most or all states, plus you need to compete in the ad wars and develop your own grassroots infrastructure from scratch. The party candidates can just plug into an established infrastructure that qualifies them for ballots, ensures them millions of loyal voters, and turns them out on Election Day. As a result, the relentless winnowing of Duverger’s Law (referred to above) means they are almost surely going to be one of the two top candidates. It’s certainly possible for a third-party candidate to become one of the top two, but it hasn’t happened since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (and he was an ex-president), and a third-party candidate hasn’t won since Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

In addition, these kinds of matchups almost never happen because good candidates like McCain realize that is almost impossible to win as a third-party candidate and don’t run. Why did Colin Powell not run as an independent in 1996? Bob Kerrey? Etc. McCain has obviously considered a third-party candidacy and rejected it, both for electoral and governing reasons. Here he is on what would have happened if he had accepted John Kerry’s offer to be his vice presidential nominee: “I would have been a man without a country!” He added, “The Democrats never would have really accepted me, the Republicans would never trust me again.” The same principle would apply to an even greater extent if McCain was a third party president (ask Jesse Ventura what it’s like to govern without a party supporting you in the legislature).

In fact, rather than trying to run as an independent, a new profile in the New Yorker recounts how McCain supported President Bush in 2000 after losing to him in the primaries, spent much of the 2004 campaign defending him, and now appears to be planning a run for president as a Republican in 2008. Even as the media keeps hyping third parties, it looks like the two party system is more robust than we realize.

PS: Kaus’s original post got picked up in the Hotline, which also cited me:

WHITE HOUSE ’08: What About A Third Opinion?
      Centrist Kausfiles, which along with the Los Angeles Times’ Ron
Brownstein, has been promoting the idea of an internet-based 3rd party
candidacy, on the effect of such a bid by John McCain: “Polls show voters
are dissatisfied with both parties, no? Ross Perot got 19 percent of the
vote despite being labeled (unfairly or not) as wacky. That’s a good base
to start with. … McCain would steal both moderate [GOPers] and moderate
Dems. Suddenly the Republicans would too have to worry about the center, in
a way they maybe wouldn’t if they were just running against a Democrat.”
Kaus is reacting in part to poli sci grad student Brendan Nyhan, a frequent
critic of the “centrist third party fantasy.”

Bill Clinton, who broke his pledge to serve a full term as governor in Arkansas so he could run for president, argued on Larry King Wednesday night that Hillary shouldn’t have to make the same type of pledge in her re-election campaign. Why? Well, because she might have to break it:

[Mr. Clinton] said Mrs. Clinton should not rule out the possibility of running for president in 2008, even if that means she cannot pledge to serve out a full second term.

In running for re-election, Mrs. Clinton will almost certainly be buffeted by Republican demands that she pledge to serve out her term if she wins.

In discussing the matter, Mr. Clinton suggested that his wife follow the strategy George W. Bush employed when he ran for a second term as governor of Texas in 1998: He refused to rule out the possibility of cutting short his second term in office to become president.

“If she wants to entertain that, she ought to do pretty much what President Bush did,” Mr. Clinton said during an appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Wednesday.

“He didn’t rule it out, and he shouldn’t have ruled it out,” Mr. Clinton continued. “He wanted to be in a position to continue his service as governor, and he had things he wanted to accomplish there. I think he was truthful and candid with the people in Texas, and they knew he might run.”

Interestingly enough, Mr. Clinton faced a similar predicament when he was running for re-election as governor of Arkansas in 1990. Mr. Clinton pledged to serve out his four-year term at the time. But he broke that pledge in 1992 to run for president.

Oh, the irony is thick. And there are so many psychological layers to this: is Clinton implicitly apologizing for breaking his pledge, or trying to suggest that the people of Arkansas “knew he might run” too? (PS Here’s the full transcript.)

Previous entries on Hillary ’08:
–The implausible scheming behind Hillary ’08 (5/31/05)
–Novak: GOP insiders predict Hillary vs. Allen in 2008 (5/14/05)
–Tomorrow’s anti-Hillary agitprop today (5/11/05)
–Joe Klein takes a stand against Clinton/Bush dominance (5/10/05)
–Will Hillary escape a pledge not to run for president? (5/6/05)
–How to make a political scientist cry — Scott Rasmussen’s “Hillary Meter” (5/4/05)
–Why is Hillary running for re-election in ’06? (4/19/05)
–No on any Clinton or Bush in 2008 (1/24/05)
–Chait on Hillary (11/27/04)
–Hillary and the upstate myth (11/15/04)
–Is Hillary a “good closer”? (11/8/04)

Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity collaborator, has a great post on his blog about this New York Times article on the alleged decline in the movie business:

There are two major problems with this piece:
1. The problem it identifies doesn’t really exist (and to the extend that it does, it hardly matters)

2. [The evidence it] marshalls to prove its point is absurdly non-representative.

Let’s start with 1. I’ll sum it up as the New York Times did: “For 13 weekends in a row, box-office receipts have been down compared with a year ago, despite the blockbuster opening of the final ‘Star Wars’ movie. And movie executives are unsure whether the trend will end over the important Memorial Day weekend that officially begins the summer season. Meanwhile, sales of DVD’s and other types of new media continue to surge. With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.”

Is box office down this year? Overall, yes, by a few points. But as my colleague Gabe Snyder pointed out in Variety a few weeks ago (subscription only, so you probably can’t read it), there have been fewer wide releases this year, for various reasons. On a per movie basis, which is surely what matters, Hollywood is doing better. And of course last year there was this little aberration early in the year called “Passion of the Christ.” Now maybe Hollywood should come out with more movies like that, but given how rare it is to have a mega-hit like that early in the year, it does make comparisons at this point a bit bogus.

It also seems a bit odd to say Hollywood is facing “serious new challenges” because people are spending a lot more time with DVDs. Who sells DVDs? The same studios that distribute movies at the box office. And in fact DVDs are a much higher margin business. So it’s not exactly clear what the challenge here is.

But the worst thing about this article, surely, is that most of the evidence for its thesis that people are turning away from movie theaters to spend time on interactive media at home comes [from] four interviewees presented as if they are representative of a trend. But this is a not a remotely random group of people. Who are they?
-A UCLA senior
-A VP of TheFacebook.com (an Internet social networking company for college students)
-A VP of IGN (an online media company that primarily covers videogames)
-A “video game entrepreneur”

The first “man on the street” seems like a random enough choice. But the other three? Do these choices strike anyone else as laughably biased? Apparently it didn’t bother the editors at the Times.

But to me, it doesn’t exactly illustrate a point about the public to discover that three people who work in online media and video games spend a lot of time online and playing video games. And thus they have less time for movies. Someone who works at TheFacebook spends his free time online? A VP at IGN says ” video games increasingly have taken up time she otherwise might spend watching television or going to the and prefers that to the movie theater? How shocking!

I can’t remember the last time I saw a better case of searching out the evidence to fit your thesis.

Here’s the best part: two of the “man on the street” interviews were with someone from Thefacebook, which the Times just profiled on May 26, and the “video game entrepreneur” Brian Goble, who Holson quoted in a different story two weeks ago. Clearly Holson just piggybacked on that reporting. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Martha Burk notes the apparent influence of George Lakoff on Howard Dean’s language during last week’s “Meet the Press.” But she doesn’t discuss my favorite part — Dean’s unintentionally revealing slip:

Absolutely. I’m not advocating we change our position. I believe that a woman has a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets, and I think Democrats believe that in general. Here’s the problem–and we were outmanipulated by the Republicans; there’s no question about it. We have been forced into the idea of “We’re going to defend abortion.” I don’t know anybody who thinks abortion is a good thing. I don’t know anybody in either party who is pro-abortion.

Lakoff-style framing is not a solution to the Democrats’ problems (see here and here), but it especially doesn’t work when you admit that you’re trying to manipulate people. It sounds like a NPR game show: “Wait, wait, don’t outmanipulate me!”

Finally, the big picture starts to dawn on the DC establishment:

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: Bush doesn’t have a mandate and he’s not a popular president. Without 9/11, he might have been Jimmy Carter.

After Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times, took a substance-free cheap shot at Paul Krugman in his final column, Krugman fired back with a letter denouncing Okrent. Now they’re battling it out on the new public editor’s website. Not sure I have the time or desire to wade through all the he said/he said on this one, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

This blog gets results! I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago noting the apparent conflict of interest in LA Times columnist Ron Brownstein writing an article touting John McCain’s chances as a third-party presidential candidate in 2008 shortly before marrying McCain’s communication director. The post, which was linked on the media insider site Romenesko, appears to have prompted a disclosure statement that appeared at the end of Brownstein’s column yesterday:

(Full disclosure: My wife recently took a job as an aide to Sen. John McCain [R-Ariz.], one of the judicial deal’s architects. Marriages that span the divide between the media and politics are common in Washington. They require both parties to draw a firm line between their personal attachments and professional responsibilities. I do not intend to treat McCain any differently as a result of my marriage, and my wife does not expect favored treatment for her boss. I certainly don’t expect any special treatment from McCain or his aides. Readers, of course, will have to make their own judgments, but I am confident that her new job will not affect my judgments, pro and con, about McCain and his initiatives.)

It’s late, but welcome.

Update 6/7: More here.

A Washington Post article by John F. Harris details Hillary’s planned presidential PR offensive:

Although focused principally on her Senate reelection campaign next year, her advisers are informally — and in some cases not so informally — planning for a White House run.

A presidential campaign, Clinton’s advisers acknowledge, would raise anew many of the old questions — about her marriage, her motives, and her balance of pragmatism and principle — that she successfully answered in her 2000 race in New York. She is the most popular politician in the state, even in many traditionally Republican areas upstate.

As her advisers see it, Clinton’s Empire State campaign and her five years in the Senate are a potent rejoinder to a refrain commonly heard among Democrats anxious about a potential candidacy. As the skeptics see it, she could probably win a nomination by exciting Democratic partisans, but she remains too personally and ideologically polarizing a figure to win a general election. Some members of her team, discussing strategy on the condition that they not be identified by name, acknowledge that answering this skepticism is among her biggest challenges in the next two years…

The strategy, confidants say, has three elements. On social issues, it is to reassure moderate and conservative voters with such positions as her support of the death penalty, and to find rhetorical formulations on abortion and other issues — on which her position is more liberal — that she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values. On national security, it is to ensure that she has no votes or wavering statements that would give the GOP an opening to argue that she is not in favor of a full victory in Iraq. In her political positioning generally, it is to find occasions to prominently work across party lines — to argue that she stands for pragmatism over the partisanship that many centrist voters especially dislike about Washington.

Behold this passage above — it’s a perfect summary of all the tropes claiming that Hillary can win. Let’s run through them:

1) Americans will learn about the “true Hillary” and change their minds about her like New Yorkers have, even though she remains wildly polarizing and controversial outside the coasts.

2) Her not particularly noteworthy victory in a New York Senate race somehow proves that she can win nationally.

3) She can paper over her liberal positions with “rhetorical formulations” showing that “she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values.”

Also, we finally get a definitive answer to a question I first raised when trying to figure out why she is running for the Senate in 2006. As I noted, she will be under intense pressure to make a pledge not to run for president, both from New Yorkers (who support a pledge) and the press. But apparently her camp thinks she can get away without making one:

Privately, her advisers say she may not have decided to run but she has definitely decided she wants to do everything necessary to keep her options open and allow her to launch a campaign if she decides to after 2006. Her out-of-state travel is increasingly strategic, including trips to swing states such as Ohio.

In 2000, she repeatedly pledged that she would finish her term without seeking the presidency. Aides say she will not issue such a pledge this time.

There’s another factor to consider: the press. Bill and Hillary (and Al Gore) were savaged by the press; there’s no reason to think Hillary will get off any easier this time around. In fact, it will be easy for the press and partisans to paste together some out-of-context anecdotes and quotations to bring the old Hillary back to life — and then she’s in trouble.

In particular, as I wrote, the press can use the pledge issue to reconstruct Hillary circa 1993-1994 and to frame her as dishonest:

[E]ven if she gets away without making a pledge, two years of slippery rhetoric and question-dodging will reinforce the meta-narrative that she is a dishonest, opportunistic politician like her husband, particularly as the media picks up on the parallels to him breaking his pledge to serve out his final term as governor of Arkansas. And if that meta-narrative shapes media coverage in 2007-2008, she has no chance in the general election.

(It’s important to note that almost any Democrat could win in 2008 if the economy is in bad enough shape. But Hillary goes in with considerable disadvantages relative to almost any other potential nominee besides John Kerry.)