Brendan Nyhan

The bottling up hypothesis

Why did President Bush's presidency seem to implode over the last six weeks or so?

I think one factor hasn't been given adequate attention: 9/11. By pushing his approval ratings up so high, it muted Democratic opposition to Bush until late 2003, bottled up virtually all conservative dissent through 2004, and warded off any serious first-term scandals.

But now that the approval boost has finally worn off (just after the election, as UNC's Jim Stimson showed), all the fundamentals that had been suppressed are kicking in hard. Bush is an unpopular president who has presided over a weak job market. His major second term initiative (private accounts in Social Security) never came close to passage. Hurricane Katrina recast his 9/11-influenced aura of "leadership." Harriet Miers shined the spotlight on his administration's penchant for cronyism. The long-deferred Valerie Plame/Wilson scandal is now reaching deep into his administration. And conservatives finally stopped marching in lockstep behind Bush and started acting like a typically noisy, demanding political base.

In short, the equilibriating forces of American forces are reasserting themselves. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's new book Off Center may be, in this sense, too late. However, the damage Bush has done to American democracy will be long-lasting. As we showed in All the President's Spin, a series of norms against misleading presidential propaganda have been shattered. And norms, once destroyed, are difficult to rebuild. Unfortunately, one of 9/11's legacies may be a dishonest, PR-driven presidential style of governance.

The significance of the Miers nomination

Before the Alito slugfest kicks into high gear, it's worth taking a step back and considering how the failure of the Miers nomination will shape the future of the Court.

Two points stand out. First, as William J. Stuntz argued on The New Republic Online, "Harriet Miers is to the Supreme Court what Dan Quayle was to the vice presidency: a sign of rising standards." Samuel Alito is an experienced judge and prosecutor, and it's hard to imagine any president nominating another unqualified crony in the future.

Second, early opposition to the nominee may be key, particularly now that new media makes it possible for opposition to coalesce quickly, as John Fund argues today:

As President Bush prepares to make a new appointment to the Supreme Court, the lessons of the failed Miers nomination are still being absorbed.

One that deserves study is how a lightning-fast news cycle, a flat-footed defense and the growth of new media such as talk radio and blogs sank Ms. Miers's chances even before the megabuck special-interest groups could unload their first TV ad. Ms. Miers herself has told friends that she was astonished at how the Internet became a conveyor belt for skeptical mainstream media reports on her in addition to helping drive the debate.

The rapidity with which Supreme Court nominations can become full-scale political contests would astonish previous generations. While one out of five previous nominees to the highest court failed to be confirmed, the battles used to be far more gentle. Nominees didn't even show up at confirmation hearings until 1925.

I'm thinking about studying court nominations as a classic kind of positive feedback coordination game in which opposition must reach critical mass to overcome the norm of senatorial deference to executive branch nominees. In the past, nominees have (I think) generally been defeated at the committee stage after a long process of written submissions and oral testimony. Now, however, it's possible to mount a strong defense very early in the process.

We have to be careful, though, not to exaggerate the importance of the Internet and other new media. The fundamentals remain key. Miers needed enough votes to pass the Senate, and she didn't have them. In addition, President Bush has an approval rating in the low 40s and needs conservative support after the indictment of Scooter Libby. So it makes sense that she was pulled.

"Scalito" for SCOTUS

Bush runs back to his base:

[Samuel Alito] has been nicknamed "Scalito" for his ideological similarity to United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

Will this cause a nuclear option showdown? That's the biggest question here. The end of the filibuster could completely change the Senate.

Pete Williams: A walking conflict of interest

Can you blame the public for not trusting the media when you read things like this?

Because the case involves the intersection of politics and the press, the day sometimes had a hall-of-mirrors element. At one point, Mr. Cheney's onetime press secretary, Pete Williams of NBC News, asked Mr. Fitzgerald how the prosecutor could take the word of "three reporters" (including his current bureau chief and boss, Tim Russert) "versus the vice president's chief of staff," with whom Mr. Williams served in the Pentagon when Mr. Cheney was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration.

Scooter Libby: Sycophant

Yikes:

"When I find a time when I disagree with Dick Cheney, I say to myself, 'Why am I wrong?'" Mr. Libby said in an interview in 2001.

Let's just say that Libby doesn't seem like a man who goes out on a limb without his boss's approval.

Heterodoxy on National Review!

The editors of National Review are, surprisingly, speaking truth to power rather than recycling GOP talking points:

Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn't, he should face the consequences.

So, too, is Andy McCarthy on NR's blog The Corner:

Some observations from the wrenching experience of watching TV last night and witnessing people I admire -- people who were on the right side of the Clinton wars and have heretofore been strong rule-of-law conservatives -- engage in what is a startling defense of the conduct alleged against Scooter Libby.

The claim that Libby is being smeared with the allegation that he leaked classified information even though he hasn't been charged with it, and that because he has not been charged he has no way to get his good name back from the said smearing, is specious.

This is not a case where a person has not been charged with any crimes at all, where the government doesn't have the nerve to put its money where its mouth is, or where the government itself is leaking out damaging innuendo. The government has not filed a bare-bones indictment, as it could legally have done. Instead, the special prosecutor has given Libby elaborate notice, extensively describing his alleged conduct. We are not at a loss here to make our own judgments about what the conduct means if it is proved.

Update 10/30: Brad DeLong points out that the Wall Street Journal has taken a different approach:

Unless Mr. Fitzgerald can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Libby was lying, and doing so for some nefarious purpose, this indictment looks like a case of criminalizing politics.

As DeLong says:

Libby's story is contradicted not just by a few journalists, but by his own notes and more than a half-dozen senior administration officials as well.

Hence the Wall Street Journal's declaration that if the obstruction of justice is successful--if it keeps the prosecutor from being able to prove the underlying offense beyond a reasonable doubt--it should not be prosecuted.

Bush nominee under fire for attacks on media

Oh, how things have changed in the last year.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a Bush administration nominee is under fire for demagogic claims that the media is helping Al Qaeda:

The senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee vowed Tuesday to defeat President Bush's choice for chief Pentagon spokesman, citing an op-ed article the nominee wrote in April accusing American television networks of aiding Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin of Michigan, during and after a committee hearing to consider the nomination of J. Dorrance Smith to be assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, cast serious doubt on Mr. Smith's chances to win approval by the full Senate.

Mr. Smith, a former ABC News producer who has worked as an adviser in both Bush administrations, said in an article in The Wall Street Journal on April 25 that the Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera operated on behalf of terrorists and that American networks aided them by televising Al Jazeera's videotape.

What's amazing, though, is that Republicans aren't coming to Smith's defense:

Even some Senate Republican aides said Mr. Smith's nomination appeared in jeopardy. After the hearing, the committee chairman, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, issued an uncharacteristically tepid statement saying only that the committee "will continue to process this nomination." A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, declined to comment except to say that the confirmation process should be allowed to run its course.

All of a sudden, 9/11 demagoguery is no longer ok! It's amazing what a low 40s approval rating will do.

What is Daniel Henninger talking about?

The first three paragraphs of Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal column today are mesmerizing in their incoherence:

Here's my guess why the President pulled Harriet. It was past midnight. In the wee a.m. hours Wednesday the President was up past his bedtime. The First Lady was asleep. He had just watched the Astros go down three-zip to the White Sox, and he says to himself: "Bad karma." And he pulled her.

That's all the explanation I need. George Bush's opponents, on the left and on the right, have wanted to shove his presidency into a hole for a long time. Their chance was at hand. He just took it away from them. No matter which of two briefcases Patrick Fitzgerald brings to work today, it's time for this presidency to go back to work.

Last week here we were plotting the Bush revival. For the record, if he signs on to an across-the-board spending sequester, I will do dinner for 62,040,606, the number that popularly voted for fiscal rectitude in 2004. More important than that, however, was the distinction embedded in that advice-to-the-Rovelorn column: "A Supreme Court nomination, however important, is a political obligation. Iraq is a moral obligation." With 2,000 U.S. dead in Iraq, that idea holds. Iraq transcends everything. This is the 9/11 presidency.

Apropos of nothing, Henninger makes up a story about why Bush pulled Miers that comforts him (shades of the Bush personality cult), asserts that Bush voters in 2004 "voted for fiscal rectitude," and claims that Bush's "9/11 presidency" is the reason we should stay the course in Iraq. Huh?

The AP on the state of the Bush presidency

Here's a devastating little Associated Press summary of the political situation faced by the President:

Bush, beset by poor poll ratings, an unpopular war in Iraq, high energy prices and the possibility of indictments of White House officials, offered no hint about his thinking on a new nominee. He pledged to make an appointment in a "timely manner."

Other than that, things are going great!

Miers falls on her sword

First Jeff Sessions, now Harriet Miers:

President Bush on Thursday accepted the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, according to a statement from the White House.

In the statement, Miers said her nomination presented a "burden for the White House." Miers, the White House counsel, was nominated earlier this month by President Bush to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the high court.

Who's next -- Jeb Bush? And what's up with the timing of this announcement? Maybe they want to drown out the forthcoming indictments, but it seems like we'll see the opposite effect - it will magnify the (correct) perception of an administration in disarray.

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism

Writing on The New Republic blog The Plank, Jason Zengerle slams Jonah Golberg's new book:

I'd been thinking about doing a parody of conservatives' race to the bottom when it comes to turning out hysterical books on Hillary Clinton, but I see that some prankster has beaten me to it. Check out this brilliant parody. Getting Mussolini and Hillary into the same phrase--genius! And I love how it traces campaign finance reform's roots back to the Third Reich--the milk just shot out of my nose! I just hope Jonah Goldberg doesn't find out about it, lest he sic his lawyers on this comic genius.

But he still doesn't do justice to the astounding book that Jonah Goldberg is apparently writing -- check out the cover:

And here's the summary featured on Amazon:

Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of fascism at their conservative opponents. LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism.

Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that "political correctness" on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives--from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment--and rousing cheers from the Right.

In short, it's a book-length argument that liberals are like Nazis. Apparently Ann Coulter's Treason was too subtle and erudite for the conservative book market. Random House should be ashamed of itself.

Update 10/27: Paul astutely points out in comments that Goldberg has denounced Nazi analogies in the past. Let it rip, old Jonah!

1/5/01: "Nazism and the Holocaust are hardly joking matters. So let me be very careful in how I talk about this.

"If you honestly think John Ashcroft or elected Republicans in general are Nazis, then you are either a moron of ground-shaking proportions or you are so daft that you shouldn't be allowed to play with grown-up scissors."

..."Calling someone a Nazi is as bad as calling them a "nigger" or a "kike" or anything else you can think of. It's not cute. It's not funny. And it's certainly not clever. If you're too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn't advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn't assume he's a Nazi and you should know it's pretty damn evil to call him one."

6/19/02: "[T]he use and abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some time

9/4/03: "Suffice it to say that the Nazis weren't simply generically bad, they were uniquely and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they made every day.

"And yet, in polite and supposedly sophisticated circles in America today it is acceptable to say George Bush is akin to a Nazi and that America is becoming Nazi-like. Indeed, in certain corners of the globe to disagree with this assertion is the more outlandish position than to agree with it."

..."When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years...

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo -- or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment -- are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Update 11/1: I emailed Goldberg to ask about the text and he responded that he didn't write it. He didn't necessarily disavow it (he claimed not to have read it), but said he will not comment further until he finishes the book. So I will withhold further comment until the book is complete.

Defend Harriet Miers... or run!

According to the New York Times, a majority of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee question the choice of Harriet Miers. A number of prominent conservative pundits are up in arms. And Jeff Sessions, at least, appears to be pressing the panic button on the nomination:

Asked if the debate had become "one-sided," with too few defending Ms. Miers, Senator Sessions, the Alabama Republican, struggled for words, then pushed a button for a nearby elevator in the Capitol building and told an aide, "Get me out of here."

If it were me, I'd run too.

Jumping the gun on Fitzgerald

With apologies to Chris Rock, the problem with the Fitzgerald investigation is simple: liberals are too happy, conservatives are too mad.

Liberals are thrilled that the Bush administration is under the gun, to the point of celebrating the expected indictments that the special prosecutor may issue as soon as next week as "Fitzmas". The phrase "Grab the popcorn" is also making the rounds.

Meanwhile, conservatives like Jeffrey Bell and William Kristol are issuing disingenuous defenses of potentially illegal acts as an attempt to "criminalize" conservatism.

But the whole point is this: we don't know if anyone broke the law. Just because Ken Starr leaked everything that came through his office doesn't mean that we have a complete picture of the Fitzgerald investigation. Liberals are celebrating prematurely; likewise, conservatives are denouncing the investigation way too soon. That's why I don't write much about this subject. We just don't know anything -- it's all speculation, hearsay, and leaks.

As Matthew Yglesias wrote on Tuesday in responding to Jacob Weisberg:

Evidence hasn't emerged because Patrick Fitzgerald hasn't made any charges public or revealed what evidence he may or may not have to support those charges. It would convenient for us in the commentariat if he'd been running a sloppy investigation full of grand jury leaks giving us more juicy nuggets to chew over, but the Ken Starr precedent aside that's not what prosecutors are supposed to do. If Fitzgerald's charges, when they emerge, prove to be trumped-up, overblown, or unsupported by the evidence then naturally it would make sense to start condemning him. But concluding that his case is bogus before we see his evidence because we haven't seen his evidence would be bizarre.

The opposite also applies. Concluding that the case is legitimate and worth prosecuting just because Fitzgerald continues to gather testimony is also bizarre. Let's not jump the gun here.

The ugliness of College Republicans, part 2

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has written a devastating profile of Patrick McHenry, a young Republican Congressman who is the prototypical foot soldier of the Rove-DeLay-Norquist machine. It's all worth reading, but this paragraph below is yet another window into the ugly training in smear politics that College Republicans gives future party elites:

The College Republicans have legendarily been the starting point, the training and networking ground, for the careers of all of the party's most influential activists: Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove. And producing Roves and Atwaters, tactical geniuses and election-winners, is exactly what the organization is set up to do: The organization is a four-year crash course in how to win votes from conservatives, in electioneering, with its members running endlessly for College Republican state board, College Republican state treasurer, College Republican national committee. There's a balls-out element to these contests, to the infighting; when I talked to College Republicans in North Carolina, I heard constant, ridiculous allegations thrown at rivals within the organizations. This rival had an illegitimate son in Tennessee, that one paid for an abortion for some poor girl from Missouri. When I asked an innocent question about a network of political consultants in Raleigh, one College Republican stopped me immediately: "Surely you must have heard," he said ominously, his drawl thick, "about them bisexual orgies."

Later, the smears continued during the recent leadership fight within the organization:

At the convention, things got competitive, then grotesque. Convention speakers were deleted out of the program at the last minute, replaced by figures who supported Gourley. Delegations switched allegiances for mysterious reasons in the dead of night; virtually everybody accused virtually everybody else of being gay. As The New Republic's Franklin Foer reported in a recent account of the CRNC convention, the Gourley-Davidson contest began in earnest after Norquist reminded delegates from the podium that "there are no rules in a knife fight."

(For more on the ugliness of the College Republicans, see this post.)

Harriet Miers: Negative on a 1-100 scale!

Via Kevin Drum, Byron York quotes an anonymous conservative strategist slamming Harriet Miers:

The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end....Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings.

But she's a good bowler! Remember, Bush can still take my advice and make her press secretary...

Jon Chait on the irony of conservative outrage over sexism charges

Jon Chait is saying what needs to be said about conservative outrage over the sexism/elitism charges the White House is directing at critics of Harriet Miers:

Conservatives certainly have a right to be outraged. After all, they oppose Miers on the basis of her lack of qualifications and suspect ideology, not her sex. But there is something comical about their shock. After all, Bush administration officials and their allies in Congress have been using this same technique on the Democrats for years — and the conservatives in the party never saw fit to object.

Virtually every time the Democrats objected to one of Bush's judicial nominees, the president's allies accused them of discrimination...

The Republican Party has adopted the hair-trigger racial sensitivity of a campus diversity activist, except that its motivation is cynicism rather than genuine left-wing ideological fanaticism.

It's funny that conservatives never objected to these smears when they were being deployed against the left, and even participated on occasion. In fact, they sometimes piled on themselves. ("Senate Democrats are blocking [Owen's] nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female," wrote National Review Editor Rich Lowry last spring.) For some reason, they must have thought they could go after a Bush nominee and be spared its standard operating procedure for squashing judicial dissent. It's not the first time they misjudged this administration.

Bush misinformation on Medicare RX benefit

Jason Reifler points me to some fishy-sounding Bush administration "errors", which just happen to make the Medicare prescription drug benefit sound more appealing:

Information issued by the government, while generally accurate, tends to give an upbeat assessment of the new benefit, emphasizing the advantages. But the new program is so complex that the government, by its own account, has made two significant errors in explaining it to the public.

Federal health officials incorrectly described the standard minimum drug benefit in an advertisement that appeared on Sept. 25 in Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement with a circulation of more than 37 million. In addition, the official Medicare handbook, sent to all beneficiaries, significantly overstates the number of prescription drug plans that will be available without any premiums for low-income people.

The Bush administration has notified Congress of the errors and says they will be corrected in future brochures and on the Medicare Web site.

Oops, they did it again.

Cameron Diaz and Marshall Sella reinvent the celebrity profile

Marshall Sella has a fascinating profile of Cameron Diaz in this month's issue of GQ. To counter the pathological nature of celebrity journalism, Diaz insisted that the story allow her to respond midstream:

The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near enough, this is it. And she has a few salient points to make about celebrity journalism. So the idea (her idea) is as follows: We'll spend some time together, and I'll write it up. Then she'll elbow me off the page and respond -- busting me if I've misquoted her, addressing the strangeness of having the media create an omnipresent "Cameron Diaz" persona, and in general conveying what it's like to have your life turned into a weekly, wildly overpublicized sem-fictional soap opera. After that, bringing a knife to a gunfight, I'll respond to her response. And so on, back and forth.

And it works -- Sella's article helps us understand Diaz in a way that is impossible in the traditional semi-fictionalized format of glossy magazine profiles. Politicians and political journalists, take heed!

The New Republic on Harriet Miers' qualifications

George W. Bush on Harriet Miers:

Asked point-blank whether she was the most qualified person in the country to serve on the high court, Bush said, "Yes. Otherwise, I wouldn't have put her on."

The New Republic on Harriet Miers:

Let's take as the standard, then, arguably the least qualified justice currently on the Court: Clarence Thomas. Thomas went to Yale Law School, served as the assistant attorney general of Missouri, held a variety of civil rights posts in the Reagan administration, and spent a year on the D.C. federal appeals court before he was nominated for the Supreme Court. Miers, on the other hand, has a law degree from Southern Methodist University, went on to head the Texas bar association, and held the high office of chairman of the state lottery commission. Does Clarence Thomas know anything about bingo? We think not.

Washington Times omits key Boxer quotation from story

On Sunday, the New York Times printed an interview with Barbara Boxer that included this passage about her forthcoming novel on Washington politics:

Q: But how can you say that "A Time to Run," your first novel, represents the world of Washington politics when the Democratic characters are portrayed as saints, the Republicans as snakes?

BOXER: Let the reader judge. I come to the book with a point of view. But my characters, I believe they're multidimensional.

Q: What about Greg, who becomes an operative for a wealthy Republican businessman and tries to destroy the career of a Democratic congressman who was his friend in college? Do you think Democrats are just more virtuous than Republicans?

BOXER: As individuals? No. But as parties, I think the Democrats have virtuous goals.

Today, a Washington Times article about Boxer's book draws on the Times interview, but carefully quotes around Boxer's statement that individual Democrats are no more virtuous than Republicans:

Sen. Barbara Boxer's debut novel has yet to be published, but it already has created a dark and stormy night for Republicans. They're mostly villains in "A Time to Run," a suspense tale penned by the California Democrat.

The New York Times questioned Mrs. Boxer's portrayal of Republicans as "snakes" and Democrats as "saints" in the book, which chronicles the adventures of a diminutive redhead who assumes her husband's Senate seat after he is killed, then tries to foil the nomination of a conservative woman to the Supreme Court.

...In an interview with the Times on Sunday, however, Mrs. Boxer acknowledged writing the book "with a point of view," adding that as a party, the "Democrats have virtuous goals."

Mrs. Boxer told Publishers Weekly last month that her novel was "definitely a struggle between liberals and conservatives, and knowing that I wrote the book, you can imagine who wins the day."

(Note: See my Spinsanity column on the NEA/9-11 myth for more on the nation's most dishonest newspaper.)

Breaking news: "Karl Rove's garage turns out to be typical"

Yes, the Associated Press is reporting on the contents of Karl Rove's garage. Weep for our civilization (via Drudge):

He is "the architect" who steered George W. Bush to victory four times, twice as Texas governor and twice as president.

But can Karl Rove organize his own garage? Can the master of Bush's political planning figure out where to put the ladders, paint cans and cardboard boxes?

Rove's wife, Darby, raised the white garage door one morning last week to show journalists outside the million-dollar brick home that the deputy chief of staff, assistant to the president and senior adviser wasn't home. All the interest came on the eve of his testimony Friday before a grand jury investigating who in the White House might have revealed the identity of a CIA operative.

There was no car in the garage. And the stuff left behind turned out not to be much different from what gathers dust inside most American garages.

Fascinating! And yes, there's a picture of the inside of the garage:

Apparently, the AP has taken a page from US Weekly. Coming soon: Pictures of Karl Rove taking out the trash!

Judy Miller: Hacktacular

Wonkette says what needs to be said about Judy Miller:

The New York Observer reports that Miller dragged her feet on writing her own piece on the leak investigation for so long that the paper's entire package (including the 6K word report on the paper's internal investigation) was held from early editions. There's a word to describe going to jail as a First Amendment martyr only to have your paper restrict its own coverage -- that word is "bullshit." Miller says that when her second attorney, Robert Bennett approached her, he said: "I don't want to represent a principle. I want to represent Judy Miller." And that is good, because Judith Miller doesn't represent a principle, either.

Bogus 2% approval statistic

On today's Meet the Press, Tim Russert was the latest media figure to hype the ridiculous 2% approval figure for President Bush among African Americans in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (PDF). This number is based on a tiny subsample -- 89 people! It is not a reliable statistical estimate. But that hasn't stopped Russert and many others from parroting it as fact. For much more on the problems with this figure, see Mystery Pollster here and here.

Harriet Miers is memorable

No discernable philosophy:

"We spent 1,200 hours together and I calculated that we addressed more than 6,000 agenda items, and I never knew how she was going to vote until she voted," said Jim Buerger, who served with Miers on the City Council from 1989 to 1991.

Buerger said Miers was something of a nonentity on the council.

"She didn't express any views, she didn't campaign for anything and I'm unaware of any cause that she championed," Buerger said. "This is a lady who keeps close counsel with herself."

But, uh, she's a a good bowler:

"You know, she's a very gracious and funny person," said Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Ms. Miers succeeded as deputy White House chief of staff in 2003. "I was racking my brain trying to think of something specific."

In the next breath, Mr. Bolten recalled relaxing with her at Camp David. "She is a very good bowler," he said. "For someone her size, she actually gets a lot of action out of the pins."

Update 10/16 -- Even Republican senators found her notable mostly for "banal chatter":

Lawmakers and staff contend that during her first round of courtesy calls, Miers had anything but a commanding presence, looking more like a prom date next to the confident Senators. Republicans said she seemed unwilling or unable to answer questions about whether she viewed particular cases as important precedents and said she offered little beyond banal chatter.

Ted Kennedy's destructive direct mail rhetoric

I just opened a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraising letter from Ted Kennedy that begins with this loathsome sentence:

The reckless abuse of power by George Bush and his right-wing allies is an imminent danger to the nation and must be stopped.

"Imminent danger to the nation" is a loaded phrase that is generally used to describe grave threats to the US from foreign powers. It's not appropriate for describing your domestic political opponents.

Kennedy should know better. He's clearly thought about what phrases like "imminent danger" and "imminent threat" mean, since he said in March 2004 that "Iraq was not an imminent threat." So why is he saying that George Bush is?

Scott McClellan smears Helen Thomas

The White House is lashing out at journalists who criticize them again. As Richard Bradley points out on Huffington Post (via Alterman), the latest target is syndicated columnist Helen Thomas. Here's an exchange from Thursday's White House briefing:

THOMAS: What does the President mean by "total victory" -- that we will never leave Iraq until we have "total victory"? What does that mean?

McCLELLAN: Free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East, because a free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a major blow to the ambitions --

THOMAS: If they ask us to leave, then we'll leave?

MCCLELLAN: I'm trying to respond. A free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the broader Middle East will be a major blow to the ambitions of al Qaeda and their terrorist associates. They want to establish or impose their rule over the broader Middle East -- we saw that in the Zawahiri letter that was released earlier this week by the intelligence community.

THOMAS: They also know we invaded Iraq.

McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --

THOMAS: It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.

To state the obvious once again, pointing out that Iraq and 9/11 are unrelated does not mean that you oppose the war on terrorism. I'm no fan of Thomas, who's become pretty wacky in recent years, but that's a smear.

Update 10/16: An Editor & Publisher article on the exchange (via Romenesko) reveals that Bradley truncated a further exchange between Terry Moran of ABC, Thomas, and Moran. Here it is, continuing directly from above:

MCCLELLAN: ...The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.

Terry.

MORAN: On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?

McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.

MORAN: And speak for her, which is odd.

McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns --

THOMAS: I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- she's expressed her concerns.

Michelle Kosinski plays Today viewers for fools

And people wonder why no one trusts the media (via Drudge):

If Michelle Kosinski's canoe had sprung a leak on NBC's "Today" show Friday, she didn't have much to worry about.

In one of television's inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera -- making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep.

Matt Lauer struggled to keep a straight face, joking about the "holy men" who were walking on water.

"Have you run aground yet?" Katie Couric asked.

"Why walk when you can ride?" Kosinski replied.

Later, an NBC News spokeswoman explained that Kosinski had been riding in deeper water near an overflowing river down the street, but there were concerns that the current was too strong for her.

"It's not like we were trying to pass it off as something it wasn't," spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said.

Riiiight.

Update 10/16 -- Here's the picture of the incident that's featured on Drudge:

Update 10/19: I've been wondering why this post has been getting so many Google hits, and now I know -- the video clip was featured on "The Daily Show" on Monday night.

Harriet Miers: Presidential editor

Former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully offers a testimonial to Harriet Miers in the New York Times today that includes this passage about her work as staff secretary from 2001-2003:

It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us.

So does that mean we can hold her responsible for all the weak arguments, bogus statistics and inconsistent claims that Bush made in speeches from 2001-2003? (See Spinsanity and All the President's Spin for more.) Also, if the speeches that were delivered were dramatically improved by Miers' edits, I can only imagine what the speechwriters were giving her.

Update 10/16: Matthew Scully again draws attention to the White House's low standards for factual accuracy in a New York Times interview about Miers:

"Sometimes when you're doing these speeches, you sort of think, 'This can slide, nobody is going to challenge this,' but that was not a high enough standard for Harriet."

It's useful to know that those are your standards, Mr. Scully, but look at how much she didn't challenge! Clearly, as I argued, she's better qualified to be press secretary than Supreme Court justice.

A better job for Harriet Miers

Commenters claimed it was unfair for me to juxtapose Harriet Miers' fawning letters to George W. Bush with the legal writings of Antonin Scalia. So let's offer her a fairer playing field and consider her published writing instead. Take it away, David Brooks:

Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early 90's, while she was president of the Texas bar association, Miers wrote a column called "President's Opinion" for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn't even rise to the level of pedestrian.

Of course, we have to make allowances for the fact that the first job of any association president is to not offend her members. Still, nothing excuses sentences like this:

"More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems."

Or this: "We must end collective acceptance of inappropriate conduct and increase education in professionalism."

Or this: "When consensus of diverse leadership can be achieved on issues of importance, the greatest impact can be achieved."

Or passages like this: "An organization must also implement programs to fulfill strategies established through its goals and mission. Methods for evaluation of these strategies are a necessity. With the framework of mission, goals, strategies, programs, and methods for evaluation in place, a meaningful budgeting process can begin."

Or, finally, this: "We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support."

I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers's prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.

Or as she puts it, "There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law." And yet, "Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority."

Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers's columns provide no evidence of that.

With conservative discontent over Miers showing no signs of relenting, pundits are already proposing exit strategies. For instance, Mickey Kaus suggests that Bush nominate Miers for a federal appeals court instead. But let me offer a different alternative. Bush's PR machine is falling apart. Scott McClellan lacks Ari Fleischer's talent for "[fastening] together clumps of non sequiturs into an elaborate web of obfuscation." And there's a desperate need for more "empty banality" at the White House after the departure of deputy press secretary Claire Buchan. Given Miers' ability to produce large amounts of vacuous verbiage, it's clear that Bush can put her unique talents to better use at the White House podium. Miers for press secretary!

Picture of the day: UNICEF's Smurf-based PR

Apparently, it's good politics to leverage pop culture just about anywhere. First, the New York Times reported that Venezuelan state television is using Darth Vader's theme music from "Star Wars" to hype the supposed assassination threat to Hugo Chavez. And now AP is reporting that the Belgian office of UNICEF is using the Smurfs to dramatize the effects of war on children. Here's a poster from the campaign, which also includes a TV ad:

What's next? Will Vladimir Putin feature the Huxtables in his next TV ad campaign? Will Hu Jintao use the painful decline of "The Simpsons" to illustrate why American geopolitical dominance can't last forever? Only time will tell!

[PS For those who have never considered the Communist and anti-Semitic overtones of the Smurfs TV show, Wikipedia has a hilarious entry on "Smurf Communism" that's not to be missed. Try finding that in Encyclopedia Brittanica!]

Update 10/13: Oops, I implied the Smurfs were American. They were actually created by a Belgian. Mistake corrected above.

Update 10/15: Here's video of the Belgian TV commercial showing the Smurfs being bombed.

Condolences to Dan Drezner

I just read the sad news that Daniel Drezner, a leading scholar-blogger, was denied tenure by the University of Chicago's political science department.

For me, the decision raises two big concerns. First, as commenters at Drezner's blog pointed out, the mentoring system at Chicago failed. Drezner wrote that he was "genuinely surprised" by the news; that should never happen at the end of the tenure process. As a graduate student who will be in the same situation in about ten years, I'm troubled. Second, the decision may be taken -- rightly or wrongly -- as somehow related to Drezner's blogging, which would be a shame since he's arguably the most prominent untenured scholar-blogger out there. Let's hope he finds a good job soon.

Harriet Miers: A well-qualified nominee

Intellectual giants of the Court.

Harriet Miers:

"[Miers] also found [Governor Bush] 'cool,' [and] said he and his wife, Laura, were 'the greatest!'"

..."Ms. Miers wrote to thank the Bushes, saying,'Texas has a very popular governor and first lady!'"

..."Ms. Miers wrote to thank [Bush] 'for taking the time to visit in the office and on the plane back - cool!'"

Antonin Scalia:

"If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility."

"The Freedom of Information Act is the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored."

"There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all."

Update 10/11: You can view some of the correspondence between Bush and Miers here.

Dick Morris' book-selling whoredom

Dick Morris has kept himself afloat by becoming a professional Clinton-basher, but this quote from his new book Condi vs. Hillary (co-authored with his wife) is especially pathetic:

If elected, Clinton would "reinvent what we have called the secret police to destroy those who stand in her way."

Apparently Halloween has come early. Watch out for the Clinton secret police! Boo!

Postmodern anti-US agitprop in Venezeula

Here's a snapshot from the strange world of 21st century politics in Venezuela, where left-wing dictator Hugo Chavez is hyping the possibility of a US assassination attempt against him:

Bush administration officials may not hide their distaste for Mr. Chávez - that, everyone agrees, is a big part of the problem - but American officials still cringe at the accusations, which they dismiss as ludicrous.

"The U.S. has not planned, is not planning, will not plan and cannot plan to assassinate Hugo Chávez," the American ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, said in Caracas. "It would be a violation of both U.S. law and policy."

In Venezuela, though, where state television has broadcast video images of American officials criticizing Mr. Chávez as the evil empire music from "Star Wars" plays in the background, the threat is taken seriously.

It's the symbolic equivalent of asymmetric warfare - using our own pop culture against us. I'd love to see that video.

Bush's penchant for straw men

If you read All the President's Spin closely, you'll be astonished at the Bush administration's love for straw men. Here's a great example from President Bush's speech on Iraq yesterday:

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

As Matthew Yglesias points out, this is a ludicrous argument:

The president takes an accurate statement ("extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq"), rephrases it in straw-man form ("our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of the radicals"), and then rebuts the straw-man ("we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001") and goes home. Obviously, there were radicals before the Iraq War. But as the CIA has pointed out, there are now even more radicals thanks to it. That Bush inherited a pre-existing bad situation is hardly an excuse for making it worse.

Claire Buchan gets the smackdown

The New Republic's valuable guide to the Bush hackocracy has a particularly brutal take on Claire Buchan, a former White House "spokesbot" who was made chief of staff of the Department of Commerce, from a reporter who worked with her:

Some of Buchan's erstwhile colleagues in the White House press corps were left speechless when her new assignment was announced in February. One White House reporter who worked closely with Buchan for five years called her "the most useless in a Bush universe of enforced uselessness. She took empty banality to a new low."

Tell us what you really think!

What is Al Gore talking about?

Al Gore gave a thoughtful speech on the media and democracy today that was marred by this paragraph:

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

There's no evidence that the White House "placed" Jeff Gannon/Guckert in the White House press pool - they merely approved his credential. The journalists they allegedly paid for positive stories were actually pundits (Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher), not "reporters." And the claim that "every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President" is also unsubstantiated -- the administration certainly pushes back against press coverage it doesn't like, but what evidence exists that they "unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts" against journalists each day?

I have worked to expose the dishonest tactics of the White House PR operation for more than four years. I share much of Gore's outrage, but this sort of partisan attack will obscure, rather than clarify, the fundamental democratic issues that are at stake.

Update 10/6: As the Washington Post explains, Williams was paid to "promote Bush's No Child Left Behind law through advertising on his cable TV and syndicated radio shows and other efforts," while Gallagher "had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's" marriage initiative, which included "drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials." Both Williams and Gallagher offered favorable commentary on the policies they were being paid to promote at the same time that they were receiving funds from the administration. Whether they were paid to promote Bush administration policies is more complicated, however, so I have amended the phrasing above to state that they were "allegedly paid for positive stories" (referring to Gore's claim).

Update 10/7: Michael Barone of US News & World Report linked to this post on his blog today, calling Spinsanity "admirable" and describing me as "a liberal who places honesty and accuracy ahead of scoring partisan points." Thanks Michael!

Bush propaganda ruled illegal by GAO

In a little-noticed development last week, the Government Accountability Office, an independent government watchdog, ruled that the Bush administration's "covert propaganda" efforts are illegal:

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

...Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

...The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government.

This is a crucial step in avoiding the ugly dystopian future of Karen Ryan that we warned about in the conclusion to All the President's Spin. Americans should not have to wonder whether the news they are viewing is disguised government PR.

Update 10/5: Here's the GAO report.

Richard Clarke on homeland security spending

Despite all the posturing and rhetoric, this administration has simply failed to make us safer at home -- here are some disturbing statistics from Richard Clarke's Atlantic column this month (subscription required):

[T]he Bush administration simply dislikes spending money on many domestic initiatives, in contrast to its open-ended attitude toward military outlays and expeditions. Of all the new funding that went to national defense in the four years following 9/11, only 14 percent went to homeland security. People concerned about readiness on the home front have taken to comparing the cost of specific projects to the "burn rate" of spending on the war, as in this analysis published in Mother Jones: security upgrades for all subway and commuter-rail systems, or twenty days in Iraq; security upgrades for 361 U.S. ports, or four days in Iraq; explosives screening for all U.S. passenger-airline baggage, or ten days in Iraq.

Matthew Continetti goes off the reservation

The anti-Bush/DeLay conservative underground continues to go public. The latest dissident to follow in the footsteps of David Brooks, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and many others is Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, who published a scathing New York Times op-ed about the state of conservatism on Saturday:

Young conservatives in particular will react to the new, post-DeLay reality in different ways. I know I have. First, looking at your party's troubles, you see perverse confirmation of conservatism's animating idea: that as the sphere of public decision-making expands, so do the opportunities for graft and wrongdoing. Next you note, with sadness, that while political power helped bring about some achievements - welfare reform, pro-growth tax cuts, an assertive, moralistic foreign policy - it may have also exhausted conservatism's fighting spirit, lowered the movement's intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying.

But then you take solace in the idea that the Republican Party has once again bested the Democrats, who after all took 40 years to sprout the warts of power.

Who will go public next?

Karen Hughes gets "under God" wrong

A lot of people don't realize that "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the 1950s. But it's pretty embarrassing that Karen Hughes, our illustrious Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, is telling opposition leaders in Egypt that the phrase is part of the Constitution (via It Affects You by way of Atrios):

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: I had one person at one lunch raise the issue of the President mentioning God in his speeches. And I asked whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites "one nation under God." He said "well, never mind" and went on to something else. So he sort of was trying to equate that with the terrorists' (inaudible). So I explained that I didn't really think that was something you could equate. And he sort of dropped it and moved on. He was one of the opposition leaders in Egypt.

Bush administration diplomacy at work!

The disturbing hype of Teach for America

The New York Times reports that absurd numbers of college grads are applying to Teach for America -- "12 percent of Yale's graduates, 11 percent of Dartmouth's and 8 percent of Harvard's and Princeton's" and "a record 17,350 recent college graduates" overall last year.

That sounds great, but the problem is that the program isn't very good. Everyone I've ever known who has done it was thrown into a difficult urban classroom with little preparation and quickly became burnt out. As a result, they all left teaching at the end of their stint rather than getting the training they would need to be successful. End result: no new recruits for the nation's teacher corps, no qualified teachers in failing urban schools.

Here's the evidence on the effectiveness of the program reported by the Times:

It has also helped, on all campuses, that Teach for America now has a track record: An evaluation last year by Mathematica Policy Research found that Teach for America members produce slightly higher math achievement and no worse English results, than other teachers. And a June 2005 evaluation by Kane Parsons & Associates found that 63 percent of the principals in the schools where they work regarded Teach for America teachers as more effective than the overall faculty.

However, a study of Houston student achievement released this year by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford and others found that although Teach for America teachers performed as well as other uncertified teachers, their results did not match those of certified teachers. Teach for America officials contend that the study was flawed.

Let's review: "slightly higher math" and "no worse English" results count as a positive finding? We're spending all this money and human capital to barely nudge the bar? And the Darling-Hammond et al study supports the conclusions I present above -- namely, unqualified teachers don't perform well, period, no matter how smart or energetic.

That's not to say that TFA isn't well-intentioned or that the people in it aren't trying their best. But couldn't all that good will and money be put to better use? In addition, TFA falsely suggests that bad urban schools can be fixed on the cheap with low-paid, undertrained young teachers. The real problem, however, is far more deep-seated and difficult to solve. Let's not fool ourselves.

Update 6/11/08 9:18 AM: A new Urban Institute report (PDF) finds that TFA grads are more effective teachers than previous studies have suggested. It's an encouraging finding, but unlike the Mathematica evaluation cited above, it was not based on a randomized evaluation, so I have less confidence in the results.

Harriet Miers: Biggest hack ever?

Harriet Miers is a classic Bush nominee: the stealth loyalist. She's probably better than, say, Janice Rogers Brown, but what she told David Frum is just ridiculous:

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. She served Bush well, but she is not the person to lead the court in new directions - or to stand up under the criticism that a conservative justice must expect.

I'm not one of those people who makes sweeping claims about how dumb Bush is -- he's actually quite savvy in a certain limited way -- but the most brilliant man she ever met? To me, that suggests she's a hero worshipper who's far too deferential to power and authority, and that's not the person I want to be a swing vote on the Supreme Court. Yikes.

(Frum quote via Matthew Yglesias by way of Josh Marshall)