Brendan Nyhan

Columnist Koppel: Awful as predicted

Romenesko links today to my post bemoaning the hiring of Ted Koppel as a contributing columnist to the New York Times, as well as Jack Shafer's critique of the predictably insipid mess:

It's not Ted Koppel's fault that the New York Times has made him a Times contributing columnist. As Koppel writes in yesterday's (Jan. 29) debut column, "And Now, a Word from Our Demographic," the invitation came from an "editor friend of mine," so the fault belongs to whoever assigned, accepted, and edited or rewrote Koppel's self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television news. (It's bad.) It's not even Koppel's fault if he thinks he's any good at this columnist thing, when he isn't. If we were to belittle every person who stretched his talents until they pop, we'd have little time for anything else.

So, my critique isn't personal, it's institutional. Based on what did the Times think Koppel could write a compelling newspaper column? Did they not see disaster in this piece?

In case you missed it, here's the introduction to Koppel's piece, which was so incoherent I could barely follow what he was talking about:

Not all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.

After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:

The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.

They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.

The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.

A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.

Where to begin?...

Let me proclaim Nyhan's Law of Op-Ed Writing #1: Columns that include the question "Where to begin?" are bad. And of course, there's Nyhan's Law of Op-Ed Writing #2: Old ex-reporters make for awful columnists.

It's enough to make me long for more phoned-in columns from Bob Herbert.

George Allen is well-informed about the Fed

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man many GOP insiders think will be their next presidential nominee, inspiring confidence with his grasp of current events:

Wall Street may be intensely interested in just about every word ever uttered by Mr. Bernanke, the former Princeton economist and chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers who is President Bush's choice to succeed Alan Greenspan.

But in Washington, he is barely on some people's radar screens. Indeed, here is what Senator George Allen of Virginia, who is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said when asked his opinion of the Bernanke nomination.

"For what?"

Told that Mr. Bernanke was up for the Fed chairman's job, Mr. Allen hedged a little, said he had not been focused on it, and wondered aloud when the hearings would be. Told that the Senate Banking Committee hearings had concluded in November, the senator responded: "You mean I missed them all? I paid no attention to them."

Update 2/2: Apparently Allen overcame his ignorance about Bernanke -- Jim Bunning was the only senator who opposed the nominee during a voice vote on Tuesday.

The Alito filibuster vote and the power of the primaries

Yesterday's 72-25 Senate vote against a filibuster of Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court shows just how powerful an influence the Democratic presidential primaries can have on legislative behavior.

All five Democratic senators who are considering running for president in 2008 -- Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Russ Feingold, and John Kerry -- backed the filibuster. More revealingly, when we analyze the relationship between estimated ideology from the 108th Congress and the vote on the filibuster, we find that Clinton, Feingold and Kerry were likely to vote for the filibuster just on the basis of ideology, but Bayh and Biden were not (predicted probabilities are .13 and .33, respectively).

Will the vote help endear Bayh and Biden to the Democratic base? Probably not; I doubt either could win the nomination (Biden is a blowhard and Bayh is too conservative). But it helps keep their hopes alive. For now, that is enough.

The Wikipedia wars in the House and Senate

Via Michael Tofias, here's an amusing story on the battle to control politicians' biographies on Wikipedia:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan's campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

...Wikipedia's online honor system has made it ripe for abuse by vandals. Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.

In November and December, The Sun has learned, users of the House's IP address were temporarily blocked from changing content because of violations described by the site as a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia."

Stuart Rothenberg: "A good Democratic year is building"

Wow. Based in large part on the Abramoff scandal, Stuart Rothenberg projects an eight-seat Democratic gain in the House of Representatives, and no longer thinks a takeover of the chamber is impossible:

With a little over nine months to go until Election Day, Democrats are headed for gains in the United States House of Representatives. The only question is exactly how big those gains will be.

Democrats need a net gain of fifteen seats to get to the magic number of 218 seats and control of the chamber. That would make Representative Nancy Pelosi Speaker, install Democrats as chairs of House committees, and fundamentally change the political environment on Capitol Hill and nationally for President George W. Bush's final two years.

I recently raised my projections of likely Democratic gains to five to eight seats based on the continued deepening of the Abramoff scandal and continued voter sentiment for change. While it is still difficult to "count" eight certain Democratic House takeovers, the combination of macropolitical factors and credible Democratic opportunities add up to likely Democratic gains in the mid-single digits.

But, like the Federal Reserve, which often signals future interest rate shifts by noting that it has a "bias" to higher or lower rates, I like to indicate whether my projected range is likely to move one way or the other. And my current view is that projections of Democratic gains are more likely to grow than to shrink.

While Republicans could benefit from improved news from Iraq, perceived progress in the war on terror, an ethics/reform agenda, or future circumstances that no one can now anticipate, I think it far more likely that the political landscape, which currently tilts to the Democrats, could tilt even more toward Democratic House candidates later this year.

While a 15-seat Democratic gain remains difficult, I no longer think it impossible. Yes, Republicans do have a structural advantage in the House, and Democrats don't have as many top tier challengers at DCCC chairman Rahm Emanuel would have you believe he does. But the electorate's mood allows for Democratic prospects to improve further over the next nine months. Stay tuned.

Matt Bai and the problems with "objective" journalism

Matt Bai, the New York Times Magazine's political reporter, illustrates the essential formula for "objective" journalism: all criticisms must be balanced with praise, no matter how strained or implausible. That gives rise to incoherence like this:

Unlike most of his Democratic detractors, Bush has shown the vision to rethink time-honored orthodoxy, even at his own political peril; no matter what his critics may say, it took no small amount of courage to ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is or if the tax code could be simpler and less punitive. He recognizes that government should be more flexible and more consumer-oriented. But in every specific case, it seems, Bush has quickly settled on solutions that aim to dismantle government rather than to improve it and that leave the average family more insecure rather than more enabled. In Bush's version of the "ownership society," those who already own nice homes and stock portfolios get to make more choices about their health care and retirement, while everyone else gets to take his chances.

This is just nonsense. It certainly took political courage for Bush to try to alter Social Security, but Bai's framing of what happened is all wrong. The President did not "ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is," nor did he "quickly settle" on a solution that "aim[s] to dismantle government." Instead, since 2000, Bush had backed individual accounts, which would inherently weaken the program's finances by diverting payroll tax dollars away from the trust fund. Everyone knew it. And so it should not have been surprising that the overall package that he ultimately advanced would have moved the program's date of insolvency forward to 2030. It's not like the president went into the debate with an open mind.

Similarly, the account of Bush's tax cuts is bizarre. It took no courage to push through the 2001 tax cut at a time when the surplus seemed huge and permanent. Indeed, the courageous politicians tried to warn against trusting overly optimistic revenue projections, to little avail. And President Bush's 2003 tax cut was courageous only in the sense that it takes chutzpah to suggest that the way to stimulate the economy is by reducing taxes on dividends. Bush had just swept the 2002 elections, and Democrats were demoralized.

More importantly, as before, President Bush did not "quickly settle" on the 2001 plan; it was the central plank of his 2000 campaign. And rather than adjust to changing circumstances as the economy stalled, he simply reframed the plan, which was originally supposed to return the surplus to taxpayers, as a recession-fighter.

In short, President Bush may have gone into both debates seeking to dismantle government by phasing out Social Security and driving the government into deficit. These are openly stated goals of many of his allies. Bai ignores this possibility, asserting that Bush's intentions were pure, but that he just happened to choose policies that advanced the conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.

As happens all too often, "objective" journalism is getting in the way of the facts.

What is Andrew Kohut talking about?

The director of the Pew Research Center discusses the vain hope for a third party or a "strong, independent political figure" with the Christian Science Monitor:

If there is a genuine desire to bring the country together over policy issues, says Mr. Kohut, the more productive avenue would come via the rise of a third party or strong, independent political figure. But "that only happens in presidential [election] times," he says. "We're a good deal ahead of that discussion."

When do those things happen in presidential election times? In recent years, Kohut could point to Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 campaigns, but Perot never came close to winning the presidency and his Reform Party fizzled. In 1980, John Anderson pulled in 5 million votes an an independent presidential candidate, but he was never a serious threat to win.

More generally, every major party candidate since the rise of the primary system has had to win over his fellow partisans, which means taking stances that do not unite the country on policy. The mythology of the "strong, independent political figure" is a holdover from the days when generals like Eisenhower and Grant were put up as supposedly non-political candidates for the presidency, and third parties are, in general, a mythology (the last one to displace a major party was the Republicans in the mid-nineteenth century).

I'm glad this subject so fascinates reporters and pundits, but it's a waste of everyone's time. The winner of the 2008 election will be a major party nominee. The end.

What is Mike Pence talking about?

Mike Pence claims President Bush is "a man of unimpeachable integrity" and that "[t]he American people have profound confidence in him":

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., who appeared with Thune on "Fox News Sunday,", said all White House correspondence, phone calls and meetings with Abramoff "absolutely" should be released.

"I think this president is a man of unimpeachable integrity," Pence said. "The American people have profound confidence in him. And as Abraham Lincoln said, `Give the people the facts and republican governance perhaps will be saved.'"

But here's what the polls actually say:

ABC News: "Bush's bottom-line job rating -- 42 percent of Americans approve of his work, 56 percent disapprove -- is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since Watergate hammered Richard Nixon.

Time Magazine: "Although about half (48%) think that overall the Bush administration has been about as honest and truthful as other presidential administrations, one-third (34%) think the Bush administration has been less honest and trustworthy. Almost one-in-five (17%) think the current administration has been more honest and trustworthy."

Harris Poll: "A majority of U.S. adults believe the Bush administration generally misleads the public on current issues, while fewer than a third of Americans believe the information provided by the administration is generally accurate."

Steven Spielberg denies 9/11 analogy in "Munich"

In an interview with the German newspaper Spiegel linked on Drudge, Steven Spielberg denies the obvious implication of the closing shot of "Munich":

SPIEGEL: In a long closing sequence you show the -- then still standing -- Twin Towers of Manhattan, implying that you see a link between September 5, 1972 in Munich and September 11, 2001 in New York.

SPIELBERG: I don't think that these acts can be compared in terms of their perpetrators. There is no connection between the Palestinian terror of that time and the al-Qaida terror of today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.

So why does the film make the implicit -- and facile -- comparison? Spielberg told Time that he had to show the World Trade Center because it was still standing during the period portrayed in the movie, but the camera lingers on the towers in a closing shot that was obviously meant to have some larger meaning. Denying it now won't change that fact.

Hurrah for Drum and Yglesias

With so many pundits making absurd claims about a third party in the US, it's refreshing to see Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias taking a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of politics.

Drum writes in response to a New Republic article by an ABC News correspondent who notes the parallels between 1994 and 2006, but points out that liberals lack a figure comparable to Newt Gingrich. As Drum points out, though, Gingrich himself was not the key factor:

Yes, Gingrich was a pit bull, but the biggest thing he had going for him was simpler: he was on the tail end of a 30-year shift of white, mostly Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Pressure had been building along that particular tectonic plate for a long time, and in 1994 Gingrich was able to turn it into an electoral earthquake. Instead of gaining a few seats per election, he gained them all at a single time.

Without that underlying dynamic, the 1994 landslide would have been a fizzle, gaining a dozen seats, not 54. So while Democrats might very well need a Newt Gingrich of their own, what they really need if they want to win back control of Congress is a tectonic shift they can take advantage of -- and so far I just haven't seen any big, pent-up frustration on the part of center-right voters that might turn large numbers of them into center-left voters instead.

People have tended to overemphasize the need to mirror the specifics of 1994 in terms of leadership, "nationalizing" the election, running on a specific agenda, etc. But as Drum suggests, leaders riding a huge demographic/political shift tend to look brilliant. It's the same reason we overanalyze the tactics of various winning presidential campaigns that largely won because of the state of the economy. For instance, Reagan's 1984 campaign and Clinton's 1996 campaign were lauded for their successful tactics, but it's hard to imagine how either could have lost given the circumstances. Under those conditions, nearly any strategy will look prescient.

Yglesias makes a similarly important point about this passage from an E.J. Dionne column:

Canadians, devoted as always to subtlety and prudence, refused to give Harper a majority. Diane Ablonczy, a Conservative parliamentarian from Alberta, offered a perceptive take on the voters' verdict. She said they "want to test-drive the Conservative Party" before allowing it to govern without help. In stable democracies, voters can take test-drives.

In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.

As Yglesias writes, however, "voters" don't decide who gets a majority directly. The preferences that voters express are filtered through electoral and legislative institutions, resulting in a final outcome:

[I]t's important to be careful in attribute collective intentions to voters in legislative elections. Both Hamas in Palestine and the Conservative Party in Canada won pluralities, rather than majorities, of the total votes cast. Indeed, the Conservatives' margin over the Liberals in Canada was bigger than Hamas' margin over Fatah in Palestine. But Hamas wound up with a majority of seats and the Conservatives didn't because Canada and Palestine use different electoral systems (Canada uses first past the post voting in single-member constituencies like the US and UK, Palestine has a mixed system whose details I don't understand) and the third party dynamics in the two countries are different.

In short, electoral outcomes are mostly the result of state of the economy, long-term partisan trends, and electoral/legislative institutions, not personalities and tactics. If only more pundits appreciated this point...

Postscript -- For more on these points:
-The Macro Polity by Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson measures the influence of the state of the economy and macropartisanship on electoral trends in the US
-Issue Evolution by Carmines and Stimson explores how the issue of race transformed the two major parties in the US -- a shift that culminated in the 1994 election
-Making Votes Count by Gary Cox analyzes how electoral laws shape party strategy and voter behavior

Oprah's shaming of James Frey and Random House

One of the reasons we started Spinsanity, frankly, was to embarrass those in politics who would try to deceive the public. Even though we knew that we could never catch all the spin, we figured we could at least strengthen the norm against deception, which had atrophied in recent years.

Oprah Winfrey's belated public shaming of James Frey for his largely fictitious memoir willl serve, I think, the same purpose in book publishing, only on a vastly larger scale:

In an extraordinary reversal of her defense of the author whose memoir she catapulted to the top of the best-seller lists, Oprah Winfrey rebuked James Frey, the author of "A Million Little Pieces," on her television show yesterday for lying about his past and portraying the book as a truthful account of his life.

"I feel duped," Ms. Winfrey told Mr. Frey. "But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers."

She added: "I sat on this stage back in September and I asked you, you know, lots of questions, and what you conveyed to me and, I think, to millions of other people was that that was all true."

In particular, she attacked the way the publishing industry fails to fact-check the books it releases:

Ms. Winfrey pointed out that her producers had asked about reports of the book's truth in September, after the Hazelden counselor raised doubts, and that they were reassured by Random House.

"We asked if you, your company, stood behind James's book as a work of nonfiction at the time, and they said absolutely," Ms. Winfrey said. "And they were also asked if their legal department had checked out the book, and they said yes. So in a press release sent out for the book in 2004 by your company, the book was described as brutally honest and an altering look at -- at addiction. So how can you say that if you haven't checked it to be sure?"

Ms. Talese replied that while the Random House legal department checks nonfiction books to make sure that no one is defamed or libeled, it does not check the truth of the assertions made in a book.

Ms. Winfrey replied, "Well, that needs to change."

Let's hope that Oprah's actions can help spur that change, as the former publisher of Time Warner suggested:

One former publisher said he believed that the publishing industry would have to change its practices at the behest of its biggest patron, Ms. Winfrey. Laurence J. Kirshbaum, who recently retired as the chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group and who now runs his own literary agency, said in an interview yesterday that "there is no question what she said will have a far-reaching impact on our business."

"Agents, publishers and authors are all going to have to be much more cautious in the way they approach the nonfiction market," Mr. Kirshbaum said. "Traditionally, publishers have not done fact-checking and vetting. But I think you are going to see memoirs read not only from a libel point of view but for factual accuracy. And where there are questions of possible exaggeration or distortion, the author is going to need to produce documentation."

Update 1/27: Random House is already scrambling...

Retracted Reid document hit Allen

Last week, Harry Reid's office released a document that attacked a number of Republican senators. Although Reid later apologized, it's noteworthy that the document included early criticism of Senator George Allen's ugly racial history, which is likely to become an issue in Allen's 2008 presidential run:

[T]he document reached back into GOP Sen. George Allen's days as Virginia governor to note that he once "kept a noose and a confederate flag in his office and home" (a controversy dating from the 1993 campaign) and in 1994 called the federal government a "beast of tyranny and oppression."

The Georgetown protest against Alberto Gonzales

This picture, from a New York Times article on Alberto Gonzales' speech at Georgetown, is a case study in effective protest:

Amen.

When will the left disavow Cindy Sheehan?

The left made Cindy Sheehan the face of anti-war protest in this country. And they must - must - disavow her after this comment in Venezuela:

Anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, joined more than 10,000 anti-globalization activists in Caracas, where she hailed Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez.

"I admire him for his resolve against my government and its meddling," said Sheehan, who gained notoriety when she camped outside US President George W. Bush's ranch last year to protest the Iraq war. She said she hoped to meet Chavez later in the week.

Does she admire Chavez's record on human rights and civil liberties? He is a thug and a demagogue; Sheehan's decision to praise him puts her outside the bounds of the political mainstream in the US. Eventually, the media will stop going easy on her and report just how extreme her positions are.

More idle talk about McCain going independent

US News & World Report's Washington Whispers column carries more speculation about an independent presidential run by John McCain:

Sen. John McCain' s white-hot public approval ratings--59 percent in the new Diageo/Hotline poll--are fast giving rise to a new 2008 presidential primary scenario among Washington's political brain trust. If, as conservatives believe, McCain's liberal stands on gays and abortion kill his GOP primary chances, he may ride into the election as an independent.

But as I've explained, such a run is implausible. It's nearly impossible for third party candidates to win, and the likely effect of McCain entering the race would be to throw the race to the Democrat. How likely is that?

Belafonte and Aldrich: A parade of horribles

Many good speakers come to Duke, but we're on a bad streak lately. First, we had Harry Belafonte spouting leftist nonsense on Martin Luther King Day:

The controversial musician, actor and activist did not shy away from contentious issues during his speech.

Belafonte spoke against President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, particularly the alleged prisoner abuse. He likened the president to the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers, saying that both parties caused the sacrifice of innocent lives. "Bush has led us into a dishonorable war that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people," he said. "What is the difference between that terrorist and other terrorists?"

Belafonte previously had called Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" during a Jan. 8 speech in Venezuela, setting off a firestorm of criticism.

And tonight we're getting Gary Aldrich, anti-Clinton nutjob:

The most infamous of the Regnery titles is undoubtedly Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access, which included such "revelations" as lesbian encounters in the White House's basement showers, Hillary Clinton ordering miniature crack pipes to hang on the White House Christmas tree, and the claim--backed by anonymous sources--that Clinton made frequent trips to the nearby Marriott to shack up with a mistress "who may be a celebrity." That last bit helped catapult Unlimited Access to the top of The New York Times's best-seller list, though Aldrich soon revealed to The New Yorker's Jane Mayer that the Marriott story was "not quite solid" and, indeed, was "hypothetical." But according to Aldrich, it was Regnery editor Richard Vigilante who had moved the Marriott bit out of the epilogue (where it had been presented as a "mock investigation") and into the middle of the book (where it was presented as an actual occurrence). Vigilante, Aldrich told Mayer, threatened not to publish the book if Aldrich didn't agree to the changes.

Obviously, Duke does not endorse the views of these speakers, but I'm still embarrassed for the institution. Can't we do better?

Update 1/25 -- Here's what Aldrich said about the Clinton administration last night:

His negative experiences with the Clinton administration eventually led him to write his book, Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, which topped The New York Times bestsellers list. In the book, he discusses unprofessional behavior in the Clinton White House.

Aldrich told the audience that members of the Clinton staff used drugs, wore scandalous clothing, stole from their offices and were typically very unqualified for their positions. "One staffer told me he did drugs during the Presidential Inauguration -- he said it was to 'enjoy the experience' -- and this is the crop of the Democratic party," Aldrich said.

What about the crack pipes on the Christmas tree?

Ken Mehlman asks a silly rhetorical question

During a speech to the Republican National Committee's winter meeting, RNC chair Ken Mehlman insults the intelligence of the American people, asking, "Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?"

No. Pelosi and Dean want NSA to get a warrant. It's not very difficult.

That is all.

Update 1/23: Writing in Tapped, Greg Sargent reminds me of a similarly absurd quote from Karl Rove:

Let me be as clear as I can be. President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

Who? As Sargent says, "This statement is simply false. Can anyone name a single Democrat who's on record opposing the wiretapping of calls from Al Qaeda to America? In reality, Dems don't oppose wiretapping. They simply think Bush should get a warrant first -- and think it's illegal if he doesn't."

The NRCC runs scared on Social Security privatization

I recently received one of those fundraising "surveys" from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which included a remarkable question that indicates just how badly the GOP lost the debate over Social Security privatization last year (JPEG image):

Question 9: As uncertainty over the huge problems that will arrive as the Baby Boomers soon begin retiring in record numbers, many Republicans have proposed that today's younger workers be given a chance to invest a portion of their income into alternative retirement plans. How do you feel about this?
-I agree with it
-I disagree with it
-I'd need to know more about it before making a decision

This is truly a remarkable sentence. In addition to being gramatically incorrect (the clause at the beginning is missing a word like "grows" or "mounts"), the question omits any mention of the phrase Social Security -- and this is in direct mail to the Republican base! Has Social Security privatization become so radioactive that the NRCC can't even say the words "Social Security" anymore?

What's incredible about this is that the omission of Social Security from the statement makes the question virtually nonsensical. There's nothing stopping younger workers from investing in private retirement plans. The NRCC actually means workers should be able to invest a portion of their payroll taxes into "alternative retirement plans" other than traditional Social Security, but they're so hesitant to say what they mean that the question becomes gobbledygook.

Why overturning Roe will create chaos

I've always been sympathetic to the anti-Roe pro-choice position, which argues that the repeal of Roe would de-polarize the abortion debate and return the issue to the states, where it arguably belongs.

As a matter of law, Roe seems to have been poorly decided (though I'm no expert), and politically the hypothesis that it unnecessarily polarized the abortion debate seems plausible.

So why not let the states create their own policies? Few will ban abortion altogether, the argument goes, and the resulting debate will split the Republican coalition.

William Baude, a second-year law student at Yale, has the answer -- it's a novel argument that I haven't heard before:

The emergence of this pro-choice anti-Roe movement seems fueled by a hope that if it were left to the states, and not the Supreme Court, to set abortion policy, the result would be a more secure and less acrimonious compromise. But what would actually happen if Roe were overturned?

It's unlikely that Congress would pass a comprehensive federal ban on or right to abortion. So in the absence of Roe, states would largely be free to regulate the issue as they saw fit... A patchwork of state abortion regulations, however, will lead not to compromise, but chaos.

...States could make it illegal to cross state lines in order to abort a fetus - a tactic Ireland tried in the early 1990's, until a court decision and subsequent constitutional amendment recognized a right to travel. While the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to travel across state lines, it has also recognized exceptions.

If states can decree that life begins at conception, they might also be able to use child custody laws to curtail the movements of pregnant women...

Furthermore, in recent decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that a state can regulate its citizens' activities while they are elsewhere and prosecute them for violations of state law upon their return...

Abortion-rights states would undoubtedly respond in kind...

Without Roe, the federal courts would be flooded with such disputes. Abortion cases, now further encumbered by issues of family rights and the powers of states to regulate trade across state lines, would once again end up before the Supreme Court. And though a doctrine called "conflict of laws" exists to settle legal disagreements between jurisdictions, this kind of interstate regulatory warfare has been mercifully rare in our nation's history. The precedents are muddy, the standards unclear, and so it is almost impossible to know how a future Supreme Court would resolve the matter.

Indeed, American democracy has rarely resolved moral battles of this scope at the state level. The most significant moral conflict ever devolved to the states, after all, was slavery...

Overturning Roe and leaving the states to regulate abortion will not be the compromise that ends the debate. Rather, it will worsen it. Pro-choice and pro-life states will not enjoy an easy and untroubled coexistence, as some would like to believe. Nor will overturning Roe get the federal government, or the federal courts, out of the business of abortion jurisprudence. Instead, state regulation will make a complex legal matter even more complicated, and the divisions over abortion that much wider. If Roe is reversed, the ensuing chaos will demand a federal resolution to the abortion battle - again.

The sad reality is that the abortion debate is path dependent. If the states had originally made policy, the issue might not be so contentious. But Baude has convinced me that returning the issue to the states after more than thirty years of battle over Roe would not make things any better.

Postscript: While we're on the subject of abortion, Slate's Will Saletan wrote an excellent op-ed that ran alongside Baude's in the Times. He argues a position I believe in strongly -- that the pro-choice movement work to bring down the abortion rate through contraceptive distribution and health education. Here's Saletan's conclusion:

A year ago, Senator Hillary Clinton marked Roe's anniversary by reminding family planning advocates that abortion "represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." Some people in the audience are reported to have gasped or shaken their heads during her speech. Perhaps they thought she had said too much.

The truth is, she didn't say enough. What we need is an explicit pro-choice war on the abortion rate, coupled with a political message that anyone who stands in the way, yammering about chastity or a "culture of life," is not just anti-choice, but pro-abortion.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Presidency

Via Brad DeLong, Matthew Baldwin of defective yeti has written a hilarious satire of George W. Bush's presidency as a text-based computer game like Zork or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Note: It's much funnier if you've actually played that type of game. I used to love to play Hitchhiker's Guide as a kid.)

Hillary Clinton's "plantation" rhetoric

The New Republic says what needs to be said about Hillary Clinton's "plantation" analogy on MLK Day:

On Martin Luther King Day, Senator Hillary Clinton, flanked by the Reverend Al Sharpton, told parishioners at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem that the House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."

Unfortunately, the church's parishioners, who have presumably never worked on a plantation, didn't quite know what she was talking about (the New York Daily News reports that the comment "got muted response"). Apparently, the Simon Legrees in Congress were a bit confused, too. "I've never run a plantation before," House Speaker Dennis Hastert protested, in a surreal moment during a news conference on lobbying reform the next day. (Republicans have been known to deploy tortured plantation references from time to time themselves: "Since [the Democrats] think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion," Newt Gingrich said in 1994.)

But Clinton is sticking to her guns. When the Daily News asked on Tuesday night if she regretted the comment, she said, "Absolutely not. As I have said many times before, Congress is run in a top-down way." The last time we checked, an overly hierarchic corporate management style was not the biggest abomination of slave plantations, but perhaps congressmen have been separated from their families, chained together, forced to work for tobacco farmers, and publicly bought and sold during those mysterious closed-door sessions. And Clinton has been fond of the plantation metaphor for a while now: In a November 2004 interview on CNN, she said, "[T]hey're running the House of Representatives like a fiefdom, with Tom DeLay ... in charge of the plantation." Plantation, fiefdom: We see a rhetorical style developing here. Why doesn't she reach out to Jews, who've sometimes been wary of her, by comparing GOP K Street's intimidation tactics to pogroms in the Pale? And, come to think of it, why haven't any intrepid Democratic candidates seized the opportunity to describe Jack Abramoff's hustling of Indian gaming tribes as a "Trail of Tears"? Oh--because most of them have better taste, that's why.

Meanwhile, NPR brought on a theologian from Emory University to put the racially charged comments of Clinton and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin in perspective. Do you think NPR brings on evangelicals to put offensive comments from Pat Robertson in context?

What is Roy Blunt talking about?

Roy Blunt, the majority whip and a candidate to succeed Tom DeLay as majority leader, spouts supply-side nonsense on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

[T]he tax cuts have even helped reduce the federal budget deficit through record revenue growth fueled by an expanding economy.

But as I pointed out, revenues are way down as a result of the tax cuts, not up. The recent mini-surge in tax collections still leaves revenue levels far below what they would have been if we had never passed the tax cuts in the first place.

This is, of course, the same tactic used by President Bush and the WSJ editorial page. Any suggestions for a good analogy that would explain the fallacious reasoning behind this claim? (I'm struggling for something catchy and succinct.)

David Horowitz cites Spinsanity on "Fahrenheit 9/11"

Controversial right-wing gadfly David Horowitz cited my Spinsanity column on Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an email to the History News Network, saying it "showed the film is a tissue of misrepresentations and outright falsehoods." Given what we wrote about Horowitz, I'm surprised (and a little embarassed) that he endorsed our work, but I guess in this case the enemy of his enemy is still his friend...

Robert Bluey on the Gore "police state" quote

I just spoke with Robert Bluey about his Human Events Online story from last week, which misleadingly trumpeted an upcoming Al Gore speech under the headline "Al Gore to Attack Bush 'Police State.'"

As I wrote, the decision to put "police state" in quotes suggested that Gore would use the phrase in his speech, even though it appeared nowhere in the MoveOn.org press release from which Bluey quoted.

The potential deception was magnified when Matt Drudge linked to the story, reprinting the headline in giant type under an angry-looking picture of Gore.

Of course, the Vice President never used the phrase "police state" in his speech on Monday, a fact that Drudge and Bluey failed to note in their items on the speech.

When I spoke with him, Bluey admitted that the phrase "police state" was not a direct quote. Instead, he said that Human Events "inferred" that Gore was attacking "the police state," calling it a "buzzword." When I asked whether he understood how putting the phrase in quotes might leave readers with a misleading impression of what Gore actually would say, he said he did.

The real test, however, is whether Human Events will do better in the future. Given the publication's misleading direct mail and dissemination of the deceptive and hateful writings of Ann Coulter, it's hard to be optimistic.

My encounter with Susan Schmidt

Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt has been in the news lately for soft reporting on the Jack Abramoff scandal. So I thought it was worth mentioning my own run-in with Schmidt, who first became notorious for her slavish devotion to publishing spin from Ken Starr's office during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which leads the website Media Whores Online to nickname her "Steno Sue."

Back in 2002, I wrote an American Prospect Online article on Schmidt's attempts to get two of her critics fired for sending her angry emails:

Andrew Rentschler, an employee of a college in Pennsylvania, assailed Schmidt as having a "fanatical obsession with Clinton," said her work is that "of someone who has sold their soul to the devil," and asked if she was being blackmailed. An associate at a prominent New York City law firm wrote to Schmidt: "You sicken me. One last article filled with lies, distortions and blatant right-wing propaganda."

You get the idea -- the e-mails were, as the associate put it, "highly uncomplimentary," even abusive. But they did not threaten Schmidt in any way. These are the kind of garden-variety angry e-mails people in the political media receive all the time.

But after suffering through increasingly harsh criticism of her coverage of Clinton, Schmidt apparently snapped after receiving the emails, as MWO first reported (the story was then picked up by Jason Cherkis in the Washington City Paper).

According to both Rentschler and the associate, Schmidt researched the domain names the e-mails were sent from and forwarded their e-mails to their employers. While both have avoided repercussions, they are furious about what they regard as unprofessional actions from a journalist.

...What's Schmidt's side of the story? What's the Post's policy on this? I can't tell you. When contacted by phone, an upset-sounding Schmidt said "I don't have anything to say" and then "I'm sorry, I gotta go" before hanging up on me. Calls to Managing Editor Stephen Coll and National Editor Liz Spayd went unreturned, and the assistant to ombudsmen Michael Getler said he had been out of the country and couldn't comment. Spayd, however, told Cherkis that Schmidt has been attacked by a "coordinated campaign" and that "[a]t some point, it can get annoying."

A followup article explored the issue in more detail:

There can no longer be any doubt that Schmidt did send the e-mails in question. After a phone conversation with Getler in which he refused to confirm or deny the allegations, I received an e-mail stating the following:

As I said, The Post views this as an internal matter and is dealing with it that way. I deal with news issues involving material the Post has published. My understanding is that Ms. Schmidt did respond to two e-mails there [sic] were written on the electronic equivalent of letterhead stationery. I'm told that the Post has no formal or written policy on this, and my guess is that it had not come up before. I'm told that Ms. Schmidt has been told that she should not have contacted the e-mailer's employers, and should not do it again, even though there was understanding of her feelings and her desire to let their employers know they were using the names of those organizations to attack her.

In addition, the supervisor of Andrew Rentschler, one of the readers, also confirms that she received an e-mail from Schmidt.

As I argued previously, while it may have been inappropriate for Rentschler and the other MWO reader (an associate at a prominent New York law firm) to send political email from their work accounts, Schmidt's response is unsettling. Vitriolic email from readers is part of the job in the modern media age. Her first responsibility as a reporter is to basic principles of journalism such as serving readers and promoting open debate on issues before the public -- not intimidating her critics into silence.

Moreover, the justification that Getler presents is misleading. What the ombudsman calls the "electronic equivalent of letterhead stationery" used by the two readers -- Rentschler and the associate -- was merely their work e-mail signatures, which were appended to the end of their e-mails. There is nothing about either reader's signature to suggest that their views represent those of an institution.

Post Managing Editor Stephen Coll and Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. have failed to return phone calls and e-mails seeking to discuss the way the paper has handled the story. And even Getler, the reader's representative, refuses to recognize this incident as being under his purview.

Elections are the key to judiciary

There's an emerging consensus among Matthew Yglesias, Chuck Schumer, Noam Scheiber, and Dan Gerstein (sub. required) on the lesson of the Alito defeat: namely, that it is nearly impossible for a party that does not control any of the branches of government to defeat Supreme Court nominees (particularly given the Democrats' structural disadvantage in the Senate), and that the way to win victories in the judicial arena is to win elections.

This analysis is precisely right. And it's especially relevant right now, when many Democrats are bemoaning their defeat, rather than focusing on encouraging future trends. The key lesson of Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson's Macro Polity is that the "public mood" shifts in the opposite direction of the president. As a conservative president takes the country to the right, the public shifts back to the left, and vice versa. We're already starting to see this process take place, as Republicans are starting to realize. In fact, Dick Morris writes in The Hill that "the data are becoming overwhelming that the nation is moving left and is likely to stay that way through at least the 2006 election -- and, if President Bush doesn't adjust, for a lot longer."

Some may say that the courts can still impose their will. But if the public shifts left and Democrats win elections, it will largely hamstring Alito and the Court. Recent political science scholarship shows that the Court is highly responsive to Congress and the President (JSTOR sub. required) and public opinion (PDF). Alito and Roberts may still do damage around the margins, but they are far less likely to engage in major reversals of precedent in a liberal political climate.

WSJ smears wiretap opponents

The latest attack on dissent comes from a Wall Street Journal editorial on January 7, which casually suggests that opponents of warrantless wiretaps want to help Al Qaeda. Its subtitle: "Bush critics seek war-powers loopholes to benefit terrorists."

The text of the editorial includes a similar suggestion:

No one would suggest the President must get a warrant to listen to terrorist communications on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love.

According to the WSJ, "only a terrorist could love" the position taken by the President's opponents. This is unbelievably nasty stuff.

I'm continually stunned at how routine the smearing of dissent has become in our political debate. Most of the items I post on this subject are never mentioned anywhere else. Have we lost our capacity for outrage?

Update 1/17: Jon Henke has posted a trenchant comment on the very real phenomenon of "outrage inflation" that I want to highlight:

Have we lost our capacity for outrage?

No. There's just too much to get to. It's like sweeping the floor in a dirt hut. We'll never get to the bottom.

I think it probably doesn't help that, for the past few decades -- and especially with the rise of the Permanent Campaign -- outrage has become Standard Operating Procedure. When critics -- from every side -- are outraged at everything in sight, it becomes difficult to discern the outrageous from political differences.

There's been outrage inflation; a decline in the buying power of outrage.

That is, I think, ultimately destructive to everybody involved.

Harry Reid compares Abramoff/DeLay to the mob

Via Atrios, Harry Reid has gone overboard in a Houston Chronicle op-ed, comparing the Abramoff/DeLay corruption scandal to organized crime:

In 1977, I was appointed chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. It was a difficult time for the gaming industry and Las Vegas, which were being overrun by organized crime. To that point in my life, I had served in the Nevada Assembly and even as lieutenant governor, but nothing prepared me for my fight with the mob.

Over the next few years, there would be threats on my life, bribes, FBI stings and even a car bomb placed in my family's station wagon. It was a terrifying experience, but at the end of the day, we cleaned up Las Vegas and ushered in a new era of responsibility.

My term on the gaming commission came to an end in 1981, and when it did, I thought I had seen such corruption for the last time. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. It is not quite the mafia of Las Vegas in the 1970s, but what is happening today in Washington is every bit as corrupt and the consequences for our country have been severe.

Our nation's capital has been overrun by organized crime -- Tom DeLay-style.

The gangsters are the lobbyists, cronies and lawmakers who have banded together and abused their power to serve their own self-interest. The casinos are the Capitol, which has had its doors thrown open for special interests to waltz in and help themselves, and the victims, of course, are the American people. There is a price to pay for the culture of corruption, and we can see it in the state of our union.

Yes, the alleged corruption is awful, and must be rooted out. But there is as yet no evidence that the alleged crimes compare to those of the Mafia in scope or magnitude. (An obvious example: no one has tried to murder Reid.) The goal of the minority leader's guilt-by-association is to embarass DeLay in his hometown paper.

Update 1/17: Via Josh Marshall, Reid used the mob metaphor again today:

The idea of Republicans reforming themselves is like asking John Gotti to clean up organized crime. I thought I’d seen the last of corruption when I helped clean up Las Vegas thirty years ago. But, while its not quite the mafia of Las Vegas in the 1970s, what is happening today in Washington is every bit as corrupt and the consequences for our country have been just as severe.

[Disclosure: I worked for Ed Bernstein's 2000 US Senate campaign in Nevada.]

Gore doesn't say "police state"

After making the groundless suggestion that Al Gore would attack the Bush "police state" during his speech in Washington, DC today, Matt Drudge is now running the prepared text of Gore's speech, which does not include the phrase "police state." Unsurprisingly, Drudge fails to note the discrepancy.

Update 1/16: Thanks to Jon Henke for pointing out in comments that I attributed a quote to Drudge that Joe Conason and others have apparently taken out of context. The post has been corrected; apologies for the error.

Predicting 2008: Insiders vs. futures markets

The Washington Times' Inside the Beltway column (free registration required) touts PoliticalDerby.com's subjective power rankings of the 2008 presidential contenders. Notably, the site ranks George Allen #1 among Republicans based in large part on Ed Gillespie's support:

News that uber political guru Ed Gillespie has joined Team Allen has given the Virginia senator a significant boost as the story carried well beyond just the Commonwealth. Chatter suggests that Ed is too savvy to align himself with someone so early unless he is supremely confident.

Similarly, Hotline editor and NationalJournal.com columnist Chuck Todd also singled out Allen as surging (subscription required):

2008 Republican Presidential Candidate Who Had The Best Year George Allen
The guy's still in single digits, but the Republican intelligentsia mentions his name more as a "co-front-runner" than any other Republican not named McCain or Giuliani.

Research by a group of political scientists at UCLA suggests that elite support is crucial in securing a party nomination. However, it's interesting that the futures markets on Tradesports.com haven't registered the Gillespie news -- here's the price history of the share for Allen winning the nomination, which corresponds to a 16 percent chance of victory:

Meanwhile, the John McCain shares seem overpriced given the obstacles he faces in winning the Republican nomination:

Charlie Cook, the campaign guru, writes on NationalJournal.com about a recent poll he conducted with RT Strategies on McCain's prospects (subscription required):

[R]espondents were read the following question: "Some people say that McCain would be a good candidate for president because he has demonstrated a great deal of personal integrity%u2026 he has a strong military background and he has independent political views; while other people say McCain would not be a good candidate for president because at age 72 (his age in the fall of 2008) he is too old to run for president, he is too stubborn in his issue positions and he does not always represent Republican views on the issues." ... "Which of those two statements comes closer to your point of view on John McCain running for president in 2008?"

Among all adults, 48 percent were pro-McCain and 35 were anti-McCain. Among registered voters, 49 percent were pro-McCain and 34 percent were anti-McCain. But among Republicans, just 41 percent agreed more with the pro-McCain statements, while 45 percent favored the anti-McCain arguments. Among Democrats, it was 47 percent pro-McCain, 32 percent anti-McCain. Among independents, a whopping 55 percent agreed with the pro-McCain option and 29 percent agreed with the anti-McCain option.

Among the Republicans and independents who say they usually vote in GOP primaries, it was better for McCain -- 48 percent agreed with the pro-McCain position, and 39 percent agreed with the anti-McCain position, though this may well overestimate the true participation rate of independents in party primaries and caucuses. Among hardcore Republican primary voters, he ran about even -- 45 percent pro-McCain, 43 percent anti-McCain. In short, McCain has a real problem among Republican voters who seem, in [pollster Lance] Tarrance's words, to be "ambivalent about whether he is a good Republican."

So who's right? It's possible that the Tradesports.com shares aren't reflecting available information very well since most people aren't following the race and trading volume is relatively low. If the legality of trading in their markets were clearer here in the US, I'd be putting my money where my mouth is and buying Allen shares.

Interestingly, Cook and RT Strategies also asked respondents about Hillary Clinton, and the pattern was virtually the opposite from McCain:

Respondents were read the following statement: "Some people say Clinton would be a good candidate for president because she has White House experience in her husband's administration, as the first woman president she would bring in new ideas and she is personally a strong and charismatic leader; while other people say Clinton would not be a good candidate for president because she is too tied to all the problems of her husband's administration, she is too liberal to win a national election, she voted for the war in Iraq."

Among all adults, 42 percent chose the pro-Clinton option and 52 percent the anti-Clinton option. The numbers were almost identical among registered voters, with 42 percent choosing the pro-Clinton option and 51 percent the anti-Clinton option.

But as with McCain, the real story is in the party breakouts. A huge 66 percent of Democrats agreed with the pro-Clinton statement, with just 29 percent opting for the anti-Clinton package. But among independents, just 41 percent of independents chose the pro-Clinton case, with 51 percent favoring the anti-Clinton arguments. Not surprisingly, among Republicans, 76 percent opted for the anti-Clinton arguments and 18 percent opted for the pro-Clinton.

Among Democrats and those independents who usually vote in Democratic primaries, 60 percent chose the pro-Clinton package and 34 percent chose the anti-Clinton arguments, while among the hardcore Democratic primary voters, it was 65 percent pro-Clinton, 28 percent anti-Clinton. In Tarrance's eyes, Clinton has a "brand image problem." The negative brand of being "too liberal" is an enormous albatross around her neck among independents and Republicans.

Thus, it makes sense that Hillary's share price is still huge at approximately a 45 percent chance of winning (though Mark Warner is impressive at 20):

It's going to be a fascinating year as the candidates position themselves for the pre-primary fundraising and name recognition sprint in 2007 -- we'll see how the insiders and prediction markets react.

More third party dreaming from Andrew Sullivan

Apparently, the dream will never die -- here's another email from an Andrew Sullivan reader pining for a third party (see the first here):

I've always voted for Democrats, but like you, I've grown distrustful of the current direction of the party. I'll never be a Republican (the religious fundamentalists are anathema to me), but as your blog continually asks, I wonder/hope if there can't be a third way in American politics? Not a Bill Clinton "Third Way," but a true, grass roots, independent third party that combines some of the old-school conservatism of what used to be the GOP (fiscal sanity, foreign policy realism etc.) with the best of the Democratic party (inclusiveness, domestic competence, worker's rights etc.). Or more simply: Fiscally conservative, socially liberal.

Sullivan adds:

My dream too. And my book is an attempt to make the case more systematically than a blog can.

Once again, this will not happen (for my many posts explaining why, click here). It's a dream and nothing more. However, the threat of a third party, or of disenchanted moderates switching parties, can move the two major parties around. That's Sullivan's best hope.

Unsupported Gore quote bounces around echo chamber

Here's a case study in the workings of the conservative echo chamber.

Today, Human Events Online published a story headlined "Al Gore to Attack Bush 'Police State.'" By putting the phrase in quotes, Human Events suggests that Gore used it or is going to in his speech. However, the article itself, which quotes from a MoveOn.org press release, never documents Gore (or anyone else) using the term "police state." (The term does not appear anywhere in the release.)

Nonetheless, Matt Drudge is currently running an angry-looking photo of Gore above the headline "Al Gore To Attack Bush 'Police State'" (PDF of page):

The point of the tactic, of course, is to discredit Gore in advance by associating him with strident rhetoric -- even if the former Vice President didn't actually say it.

Update 1/14: Drudge demoted the Gore item at some point. He hasn't changed the headline, but the photo is gone and the link now points to the MoveOn release rather than the Human Events story. Again, the phrase "police state" does not appear anywhere in the release, which makes the headline/link combination especially nonsensical.

Duke prof Chemerinsky testifies on Alito

Erwin Chemerinsky, the Duke law professor who I'm TAing for this semester, testified in the Alito hearings today -- here's the summary on the Washington Post's nomination blog:

Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor at Duke University Law School, then addressed the impact on the Supreme Court of Alito replacing Sandra Day O'Connor, particularly on crucial questions of assertions of executive power.

He said he has carefully read Alito's memos, speeches and decisions and "they all point in one direction . . . great deference to federal authority." He cited Alito's support, in the Solicitor General's office, of absolute immunity for the attorney general in wiretap cases; his support, in speeches, of the "unitary executive" theory (under which presidential powers would be greatly expanded, he said).

"Over and again he comes down on the side of law enforcement," Chemerinsky said. As have other critics, he highlighted Alito's deference to law enforcement in the case involving the strip search of a 10-year-old girl.

Update 1/14: The New York Times published an excerpt from Chemerinsky's testimony today (full transcript here), along with a bizarre angled picture of Chemerinsky's image on a television:

I don't usually make a big deal out of unflattering news photography (and I understand the point the photographer was trying to make), but that's pretty wacky.

Another wiretap poll question

A Washington Post poll released Wednesday shows slightly more positive results than the AP poll I mentioned earlier:

11. Would you consider this wiretapping of telephone calls and e-mails without court approval as an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

           ------Acceptable------      ------Unacceptable------      No
           NET  Strongly  Somewhat     NET  Somewhat  Strongly      opin.
1/8/06     51      35        15        47      14        33           2 

For the sake of comparison, here are the AP results again (PDF):

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

Should be required to get a warrant.......................................... 56
Should be allowed to monitor without a warrant............................. 42
Not sure......................................... 2

Given the more positive framing of the Post question, it's not surprising that support for warrantless wiretaps increased. But the Post still didn't come close to the results of the awful Rasmussen question I slammed before:

Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?

As I pointed out, the question does not mention warrants, which artificially pushed approval up to 64 percent -- far higher than the Post or AP.

Ted Koppel as a Times columnist: why?

This announcement is annoying:

Ted Koppel, the former anchor of "Nightline" on ABC, has been named a contributing columnist for The New York Times. His column will appear on the Op-Ed page periodically.

Mr. Koppel's appointment, which is effective Jan. 29, was announced by Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page.

Separately, NPR announced yesterday that Mr. Koppel had agreed to join the radio network as senior news analyst in June. NPR said Mr. Koppel would contribute analysis, commentary and perspective about 50 times a year.

In addition, Mr. Koppel is to serve as an analyst of breaking news and special events. His work will also appear at www.NPR.org and on NPR podcasts.

Nightline was a relatively serious news show by the low standards of our political media, but Ted Koppel is highly overrated as a journalist. For an example of his failure to take his responsibility to debunk false information seriously, consider this exchange from an interview with Larry King after the first Bush-Gore debate:

KING: Okay. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy [math],” top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.

That is a professional embarrassment. Doctors don't say that information given to them by patients turns their brains "to mush." But Koppel, who ABC paid millions of dollars, couldn't be bothered to figure out the issues at stake in a presidential debate.

More generally, why do media outlets insist on giving precious commentary slots as rewards to supposedly distinguished old journalists? Think of David Broder at the Washington Post or Daniel Schorr at NPR. And the ironic part is that the Times is trying to charge people for its op-eds. I feel confident saying that no one on earth is willing to pay money to read Ted Koppel's fascinating insights into the world of politics. His "Meet the Press" appearance with Tom Brokaw was some of the most boring television that I've ever seen.

Update 2/1: Jack Shafer points out that Broder has been a columnist since middle age; my apologies for the error. A better way to put my argument is this: why do newspapers persist in drawing their columnists from the ranks of reporters, when the reporter's mindset generally makes for bad columns? Nick Kristof, Broder, Koppel and many other ex-reporters fit this profile.

What is Eric Alterman talking about?

I have previously criticized the methodology of the Groseclose/Milyo media bias study (PDF). But at the end of a diatribe attacking it on the American Progress website, Eric Alterman takes a cheap shot at the authors:

Check the fine print and one finds this study -- naively touted as both objective and significant by the UCLA public affairs office and published, inexplicably, by the previously respected Quarterly Journal of Economics, edited at Harvard University's Department of Economics -- was the product of a significant investment by right-wing think tanks. In 2000-2001, Groseclose was a Hoover Institution national fellow, while Milyo has been granted $40,500 from the American Enterprise Institute; both were Heritage Foundation Salvatori fellows in 1997.

This phrasing suggests that the funding Groseclose and Milyo received from Hoover and AEI supported this paper. But as the authors make clear, their home universities (UCLA and Missouri-St. Louis, respectively) "paid our salaries, funded our research assistants, and paid for services such as Lexis-Nexis, which were necessary for our data collection. No other organization or person helped to fund this research project." They even went so far as to choose research assistants "so that approximately half our data was coded by Gore supporters and half by Bush supporters." Alterman's attack is misleading. Yes, Groseclose and Milyo have been associated with conservative groups, but that doesn't mean that all their research is "the product" of those groups.

Update 1/12: I'm currently discussing the study on KTLK 100.3 in Minnesota.

Bush attacks dissent at VFW

During a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday, President Bush engaged in yet another attack on dissent:

We face an added challenge in the months ahead: The campaign season will soon be upon us -- and that means our nation must carry on this war in an election year. There is a vigorous debate about the war in Iraq today, and we should not fear the debate. It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly -- even in times of war. Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate -- and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail. And we have a responsibility to our men and women in uniform -- who deserve to know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm's way, our support will be with them in good days and in bad days -- and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory.

We also have an opportunity this year to show the Iraqi people what responsible debate in a democracy looks like. In a free society, there is only one check on political speech -- and that's the judgment of the people. So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy -- not comfort to our adversaries.

Note the juxtaposition Bush makes between "a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong" and "defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right." So people who think the war is doomed to fail are disloyal? Similarly, at the end of the passage, Bush suggests that debate about the war hurts troop morale and that questioning of the war brings "comfort to our adversaries." In short, he claims that "It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly -- even in times of war," but then attempts to rule out as "irresponsible" any debate that questions the war he initiated.

Isn't our democracy strong enough to survive people questioning the war? Isn't that the whole point of democracy?

(Postscript: It's also disturbing that the print version of the New York Times report on Bush's speech is headlined "In Strong Words, Bush Defines Terms of Debate on Iraq." Says who? Apparently someone realized that the headline implicitly endorsed Bush's attack on dissent because the online headline now reads "In Strong Words, Bush Tries to Redirect Debate on Iraq.")

Update 1/12: During a speech in Kentucky, Bush said that "one way people can help [in the war on terror] as we're coming down the pike in the 2006 elections, is remember the effect that rhetoric can have on our troops in harm's way, and the effect that rhetoric can have in emboldening or weakening an enemy." How can rhetoric weaken an enemy? And it's silly to suggest that people can help the war on terror by what they say in domestic political debate. Does Bush think Al Qaeda is watching "Meet the Press" every week? Listening to C-SPAN call-ins?

Answering John Henke's questions about George Allen

Jon Henke at Q&O attacks my post on the ugly racial history of George Allen, a Republican senator and 2008 presidential contender:

I'll ask Brendan: do you actually believe George Allen to be racist? Specifically:

• Are you alleging that the noose in his office was a reflection of Allen's feelings about black people, as opposed to being part of a western and/or legal motif?
• Are you alleging that the Confederate flag was a specific reflection of Allen's racism, rather than an innocuous part of a flag collection?
• How should a Southern State — the "Capital of the Confederacy" — formally remember its history? Can a Virginia Governor recognize Confederate History without being racist, or is there nothing but slavery to Confederate History?

The answers to these questions all appear in my original post, but I'll walk Henke back through them from the sake of clarity.

On the subject of whether I'm claiming Allen is a racist, let me quote from the original post:

Despite reader claims to the contrary, I'm not saying Allen is a racist -- I have no way of knowing what his private thoughts are. I can only judge him on his public actions and statements, and that record is troubling at best.

On the subject of the noose, again, I don't know that it reflects Allen's feelings about black people, but, as I wrote, "if the noose 'has nothing to do with lynching,' why was it hung from a tree? The symbolism seems obvious. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it in 2000, the noose was 'a reminder that [Allen] saw some justification in frontier justice.' Official hangings carried out under the auspices of the law presumably used real gallows, not trees."

The same goes for the Confederate flag. I don't claim that displaying it in his home makes Allen a racist, but it's still troubling in the context of his history on racial issues.

Finally, the Confederacy was obviously not only about slavery, but it is inextricably linked to it. And yet here is how Allen memorialized the Confederacy, according to the Washington Post: "[I]n the late 1990s, former governor George Allen (R) issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War 'a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights'... The declaration made no mention of slavery, angering many civil rights groups." So let me ask this: Is it appropriate to remember the Confederacy as a struggle for "independence and sovereign rights" without even mentioning the great evil it sought to perpetrate?

People have such a hard time with criticism of politicians who exploit racial issues. The typical response, as with Henke, is to equate such criticism with an accusation of racism -- a move that attempts to shift the terms of debate from publicly observable actions and statements to private feelings. We can't run a democracy based on speculation about the inner life of our leaders. All we can do is judge them based on what they do and say. And on that basis, George Allen fails to meet the standards I expect from someone who wants to be the president of the United States.

(Postscript: A great example of this is the presidential candidacy of George H.W. Bush in 1988. He aggressively exploited the obviously race-coded issue of Willie Horton. It was reprehensible. Does that prove that Bush hates black people? No, but it was loathsome nonetheless.)

What is John Micklethwait talking about?

In the special Economist issue "The World in 2006," US editor John Micklethwait notes the setbacks suffered by President Bush during 2005 -- the failure of Social Security privatization, our struggles in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the DeLay scandals -- before offering this ridiculous analysis (sub. required):

As a result, a president who stormed back to power in 2004 with more votes than any previous candidate will spend a good deal of 2006 on the defensive.

Using the number of votes as a metric of electoral success is ridiculous. (Ever heard of population growth?) By more standard metrics such as presidents' popular vote and Electoral College margins, Bush's re-election victory was one of the closest in history, as Ron Brownstein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times:

Measured as a share of the popular vote, Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That's the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.

The only previous incumbent who won a second term nearly so narrowly was Democrat Woodrow Wilson: In 1916, he beat Republican Charles E. Hughes by 3.1 percentage points. Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.

In that 1916 election, Wilson won only 277 out of 531 electoral college votes. That makes Wilson the only reelected president in the past century who won with fewer electoral college votes than Bush's 286.

Measured another way, Bush won 53% of the 538 electoral college votes available this year. Of all the chief executives reelected since the 12th Amendment separated the vote for president and vice president — a group that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson in 1804 — only Wilson (at 52%) won a smaller share of the available electoral college votes.

Not exactly storming back to power. So why does Micklethwait make it sound like the Bush decline was such a surprise? He lost the popular vote in 2000, he barely won it in 2004, his 9/11 popularity boost has finally worn off, and second-term presidents tend to be unpopular. Do the math.

A better poll question on no-warrant wiretaps

I previously slammed this awful Rasmussen poll question about President Bush's no-warrant wiretap program:

Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?

As I wrote, the obvious answer is yes, but the question is whether the NSA should have to obtain a warrant before doing so. The question fails to mention the warrant issue, and therefore the widely touted figure of 64 percent approval for Bush's policy is meaningless.

Via Atrios and Think Progress, here is a much better question from a new Associated Press poll (PDF), which yields very different results:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

Should be required to get a warrant.......................................... 56
Should be allowed to monitor without a warrant............................. 42
Not sure......................................... 2

Will the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Pat Buchanan and the many others who touted the Rasmussen poll retract or modify their previous comments? Not likely.

McCain liberal hatred watch III

How long will everyone love the senator from Arizona? Based on this Franklin Foer post from TNR's blog The Plank, not long:

Earlier this week Hotline excerpted a dispatch on a forthcoming John McCain visit to South Carolina. Buried inside there was a stunning revelation. It quoted McCain's spokesman, one Richard Quinn. He described McCain as a "strong advocate for the [Martin Luther] King Day" in Arizona. What makes this so stunning? In the 2000 race, McCain took heat for working with Quinn, who once edited the neo-Confederate journal The Southern Partisan. You may recall that this journal published apologias for slavery and that Quinn once advocated voting for David Duke. During McCain's contentious primary race with Bush, McCain declined to distance himself from Quinn. He claimed no knowledge of Quinn's writings. But a lot of time has passed since then. By now, McCain should have taken the opportunity to thumb through Quinn's work. I'm sure that McCain very badly wants the presidency. Does he really want it this badly? (Here's a People for the American Way dossier on Quinn's revanchist politics that McCain might want to check out.)

Endorsing George Wallace, Jr., praising Trent Lott and now employing Richard Quinn? The requirements for winning southern GOP primaries are taking McCain backward on race. As The Hotline pointed out, this is going to endanger his "straight talk" reputation.

(Previous installments: I and II.)

Fox News: Fair and balanced

The graphic tagline for a discussion on Fox News that I saw this morning: "Is Wall Street worried liberals are forgetting 9/11?"

Ed Gillespie signs on with George Allen

Much is being made of former RNC chair Ed Gillespie's decision to sign on with George Allen's PAC -- an important sign of establishment support for the Virginia Senator's 2008 campaign. Does that mean Gillespie isn't concerned about Allen's ugly racial history? Does he even know about it?

Dick Cheney on the rule of law: Up is down

Andrew Sullivan nails my reaction to Dick Cheney's nonsense:

Try reconciling what we know for a fact about what the administration has done and the words uttered by the vice-president yesterday:

I was in Washington in the 1970s, at a time when there was great and legitimate concern about civil liberties and about potential abuses within the executive branch. I had the honor of serving as White House Chief of Staff to President Ford, and that experience shapes my own outlook to this very day.

Serving immediately after a period of turmoil, all of us in the Ford administration worked hard to restore people's confidence in the government. We were adamant about following the law and protecting civil liberties of all Americans, and we did so. Three decades later, I work for a President who shares those same values. He has made clear from the outset, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the law of the land admits no exceptions in wartime. The President himself put it best: He said, "We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them."

So why violate our principles by authorizing torture of detainees? Why retain the right to torture them even after a law has been passed to prevent it? Why violate the terms of the 1978 law that was precisely a result of the worries about civil liberties after Vietnam and Watergate?

What is Howard Fineman talking about?

Via Dan Drezner, Newsweek conventional wisdom machine Howard Fineman has published a typically insipid column on MSNBC.com on "winners" and "losers" from the Jack Abramoff plea agreement. His prediction of a reformist third party winning the 2008 election "going away" is especially absurd:

WINNERSThird-party reform movement: If Sen. John McCain doesn't win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to "clean up" the capital as a third-party candidate. Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the '80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman. If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting -- perhaps Wes Clark for defense, Russ Feingold for justice, Colin Powell for anything -- they could win the 2008 election going away.

With this prediction (which I've debunked many times), Fineman joins the ranks of Mickey Kaus, Ron Brownstein, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other pundits in failing to appreciate or even understand the barriers that make it virtually impossible for third parties to win. Shouldn't political writers have to understand freshman-level political science?

The Hotline on McCain, the GOP and the South

The insider political newsletter The Hotline has a new blog called Hotline On Call that features an excellent post asking how Senator John McCain will handle the tricky issue of race in the GOP primaries -- a timely question given his recent praise for Trent Lott and George Wallace, Jr. Near the end, the Hotline also brings up how the question of how the issue will be handled by Senator George Allen, linking to my post on his ugly racial history:

Five years after the bitter McCain-Bush primary, SC's Confederate flag is down and the percentage of minority voters is up. And McCain is heading to the state on MLK day.

This could be the ultimate test of the senator's straight-talking skill set.

After all, some McCain watchers on the left say he has a lot to answer for, including most notably a vote in Congress against there even being a national holiday honoring MLK.

While he has since expressed regret on the MLK vote, some activists say the rest of McCain's voting record on civil rights is not without blemish.... including votes against portions of the '94 Racial Justice Act. Of more concern to them: a connection to SC political consultant Richard Quinn, who once edited Southern Partisan, a magazine that detractors say glorifies the South's racially divided past. (The magazine is more soberly described as embracing Dixiecrat culture; it rarely ventures into history, although its advertisers do.)

Moreover, McCain's return to SC -- the date was chosen by the Spartanburg Co. GOP -- brings to light his earlier waffling on the Confederate flag during the '00 primary. McCain has since apologized and it will be interesting to see if he recommits himself the issue. He has also distanced himself from Quinn's writings.

McCain walks a fine line.

We realize we're being reductionist here, but a fundamental conundrum for any GOPer who claims fidelity to racial justice principles is...the same as it was ten years ago.

Is it possible to get enough white votes without doing the sorts of things -- speaking at Bob Jones University, addressing the Council of Conservative Citizens, waffling on the flag -- that profoundly alienate black folks?

Perhaps McCain's '08 campaign will bridge the gap, allowing Ken Mehlman's project of expanding the GOP's share of the black vote to mature. Also: is it fair to cast aspersions on McCain because he's friendly with a guy who once edited a magazine that some -- but not all -- black critics think is racist?

Given that the media elite is always looking for racial angles to political stories, and given the very real, quite un-finished debates in states like Georgia over voting rights and the flag -- can elections in the South legitimately not press on symbolic (or what seem to be symbolic) racial trigger points?

More questions: Will immigration debates re-align ethnic voting constituencies? Or align them all against the GOP? Can any Republican running nationally ever exceed 12 percent of the black electorate? A question we've always wanted to ask Mehlman: What did you think when Bush went to Bob Jones? A question for those helping Sen. George Allen: are y'all prepared for questions like these?

Bush parses his "Nothing has changed" statement

While I was out of town, President Bush finally addressed the worst example from his long list of statements in 2004-2005 implying that all wiretaps require a court order.

On April 20, 2004, he said:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Here's his response to a question about this statement during an exchange with the press on Sunday:

Q In 2004, when you were doing an event about the Patriot Act, in your remarks you had said that any wiretapping required a court order, and that nothing had changed. Given that we now know you had prior approval for this NSA program, were you in any way misleading? THE PRESIDENT: I was talking about roving wire taps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA program. The NSA program is a necessary program. I was elected to protect the American people from harm. And on September the 11th, 2001, our nation was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use all the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people, which is what I have been doing, and will continue to do. And the fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States.

There's an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react. And it seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al Qaeda and/or an al Qaeda affiliate, and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why. They attacked us before, they will attack us again if they can. And we're going to do everything we can to stop them.

Talk about Clintonian parsing! Bush said "any time the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed." Even though he was speaking about roving wiretaps specifically, his language clearly suggested that all wiretaps required court orders.

In addition, we know that the FISA court will approve virtually any request backed by evidence, which means that Bush is stretching the phrase "associated with al Qaeda and/or an al Qaeda affiliate" to the limit.

WSJ touts flawed poll showing popular support for NSA program

This time, our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a poorly worded poll on the NSA's warrant-free domestic surveillance program:

Even more unserious has been the political posturing and mock horror that followed this month's revelations of the National Security Agency's warrantless phone intercepts. It's refreshing to know that 64% of Americans, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, approve of the eavesdropping, not that we ever had doubts about the seriousness with which the American people take the terrorist threat. It's the seriousness of American elites that concerns us.

But as the Newshounds blog pointed out, the Rasmussen question reads "Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?" And, of course, the answer is yes. But President Bush could get warrants from the FISA court for those suspects! The real question is whether Bush should be able to intercept the phone calls of Americans without seeking court approval. Any pollster who does not make that distinction clear is not addressing the issue at hand.

Update 1/4: Media Matters points out that "MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow, and conservative radio host Michael Reagan" have also touted the Rasmussen poll.

Update 1/4: I checked Nexis myself, and Fox News Channel's Jim Angle also touted the misleading poll while guest-hosting "Special Report with Brit Hume" on Dec. 28:

The National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on terrorists calling or e-mail people in the United States may be controversial in Washington, but far less so across the country. A new Rasmussen poll reveals that 64 percent of Americans believe the National Security Agency should be allowed to intercept such conversations, including 51 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents. Fewer than one in four actually oppose the idea. Well, what's more 48 percent believe President Bush is not the first president to authorize such actions.