Brendan Nyhan

Kitty Kelley takes the following

As a politician, Prescott [Bush] grew in office. In his first campaign he stood up to the rampaging redbaiter Joe McCarthy — an act of political courage in 1952. As a United States senator, Prescott championed civil rights, whereas his son George Herbert Walker Bush called Martin Luther King ”a militant” and opposed the Civil Rights Act. George W. hung a Confederate flag on his wall at Andover, joined a ”whites only” club in Texas and as president refused to address the NAACP. Bush 41 and Bush 43 have far surpassed Prescott politically, but both presidents look like pygmies compared with the patriarch.

I haven’t read Kelley’s book and don’t know about the other allegations in this paragraph, but the NAACP claim is a red herring. Bush didn’t speak to the group because NAACP chairman Julian Bond has made all sorts of hateful and derogatory comments about him and the Republican Party, including claiming that Bush’s Cabinet nominees come from the “Taliban wing” of American politics. As a result, Bush has generally chosen to address other African American groups like the Urban League instead. This is hardly de facto proof of racism or being anti-civil rights.

This Washington Post article portrays House Speaker Denny Hastert’s announcement that he won’t bring bills to the floor that aren’t supported by a majority of Republicans as new and noteworthy. In a certain sense, of course, that’s true. But the howls of indignation from various good government types in the story seem vastly overblown. A better way to look at the trend is that Congressional Republicans are publicly acknowledging the sort of hardball politics that have been going on in private for a long time.

First, the party controlling the House rarely brings legislation to the floor that is opposed by the majority of the majority caucus. The Post’s Babington musters a single counter-example, NAFTA in 1993, but that was unusual and the result of heavy lobbying by President Clinton. A better way to look at this issue is to ask why we would expect anything different. The majority caucus elects the party leadership. If the leadership then helps pass legislation the caucus opposes, it will probably be removed. Hastert himself made precisely this point:

In a little-noticed speech in the Capitol a year ago, Hastert said one of his principles as speaker is “to please the majority of the majority.”

“On occasion, a particular issue might excite a majority made up mostly of the minority,” he continued. “Campaign finance is a particularly good example of this phenomenon. The job of speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of his majority.”

(For more on the logic of parties, see Why Parties? by John Aldrich, my advisor, or his more recent work with David Rohde on conditional party government, which argues that parties elect leaders to systematically move policy toward the median voter in their caucus — precisely what Hastert is trying to do.)

Second, the much-maligned Specter “loyalty oath” is essentially a more public version of the promises and assurances that are always made during the distribution of party leadership positions and committee chairmanships.

(To be clear, though, the Republican majority is historically significant in its partisanship in other ways; see this excellent Boston Globe series from earlier this year for more.)

According UMass prof Ray La Raja, Congressional challengers who lost but held incumbents under 60% of the vote were outspent by an average of $894,000 in 2004 according to Campaign Finance Institute data. This was a significant increase from 2000 and 2002. Thanks campaign finance reform!

(For more on the problems with campaign finance reform, see here, here, here, and here. Of course, other factors could account for part or all of the gap, but campaign finance reform appears to play a major role.)

In his new LA Times column, Jon Chait smacks around the idea that Hillary Clinton is a strong presidential candidate:

A secular Yankee like [Howard] Dean is about the worst possible candidate.

Unless, of course, the alternative is Hillary Clinton. OK, maybe she wouldn’t be worse than Dean. But she surely would go down in flames if she won the nomination in 2008. President Bush owed his victory in large part to cultural division. If there’s anybody who incites cultural divisions, it’s Hillary Clinton.

Her advisors point out that she’s religious and speaks the language of Scripture. That’s nice, but nobody seemed to notice it during her eight years in the national spotlight. She’s painfully uncharismatic. Her only political accomplishment is that she won a Senate seat in an extremely Democratic state, where she ran six percentage points behind Al Gore. Clinton’s supporters like to note that she’s not as liberal as people think. That’s exactly the problem. I can see the logic behind nominating a liberal whom voters see as moderate. Nominating a moderate whom voters see as liberal is kind of backward, isn’t it?

For more details on Hillary’s overrated Senate victory in NY, see this post from a few weeks ago. Here’s the key passage, which makes the same point as Chait in more detail:

First of all, her 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

Apparently, they

Truman’s library, that is, makes the president an actor within history. Clinton’s library makes him the focus of history. Arranged below each year’s timeline, for example, are loose-leaf notebooks containing every one of the president’s daily schedules for eight years. Most of these are uninformative, containing notices of meetings, jogs, down time and travels. And instead of showing important documents that might shed light, for example, on the failure of the Middle East peace talks, displays include flattering letters from celebrities like Oscar de la Renta, Chevy Chase, Tony Danza, Whoopi Goldberg (“You’re the cat’s pajamas”) and Dom DeLuise (“When I grow up I want to be just like you”).

Sighted in today’s

“I’ve been getting calls from California, Idaho, Washington, Alaska and Wisconsin,” said Ross Day, a Portland lawyer for the conservative group Oregonians in Action who co-wrote the law, Ballot Measure 37. “They all want to find out what our secret recipe was to get it passed.”

Apparently, restrictive land-use policies are equivalent to blatant attempts to defraud investors. The mechanical reframing of the issue in terms of Enron takes me back to the days of “Enronomics” in 2001-2002.

Media Matters catches Chris Matthews making up ridiculous stories after the fact about the election – one of his favorite tactics. See the Daily Howler for more on how Matthews completely changed his story on the Gore/Bush debates in his book to conform to the dominant media narrative. Why do pundits feel such a compulsion to tell apocryphal stories that rationalize the outcome of elections? (See: George H.W. Bush looking at his watch during a debate, Michael Dukakis’s answer to Bernard Shaw’s question about the rape and murder of his wife, etc.)

Fresh from publishing a tacit endorsement of vote fraud, Slate has found someone to be annoyingly, mechanically counter-intuitive on the Indiana-Detroit riot:

Sure, it was wrong for Artest to run into the stands, and wrong for Jackson to run in after him throwing haymakers, and wrong for the fans to douse the Indiana players with beer. But when a crazy basketball player charges into the stands and tries to pounce on some drunk jerks, I don’t fly into a rage on behalf of the nation’s children. Nope, I just kick back and enjoy the spectacle.

Everything you thought you knew is wrong! Last time I sarcastically predicted an upcoming defense of drunk driving and grand larceny — guess I wasn’t too far off…

A long and thorough American Journalism Review piece on coverage of campaign 2004 is now online. For those who care, it has several quotes from me about the institutional pathologies of the political media and the need for more aggressive fact-checking.

More prevarication from our good friend Michael Moore:

Entertainment Weekly, 7/9/04: “The patriotic thing to do is to aspire to [make] this country the one that our founding fathers thought it should be. Anybody who works hard to do that, whether they’re conservative or liberal, is doing the work of a true American. I would never call anyone on their side unpatriotic or traitorous.”

NPR’s “Fresh Air”, 10/18/04: “I would never make the accusation that the other side, simply because I don’t agree with them, are somehow un-American or, you know, they hate their country.”

“Democracy Now”, 7/28/04: “The way that you hate the troops is when you send them off, some of them, to their death, so that your rich benefactors can line their pockets even more. The Halliburtons, the oil companies. That is anti-American. That is unpatriotic. You do not support the troops when you do that.”