Brendan Nyhan

Revisiting a poll on inequality

Last week, I complained about a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Prof. Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University (subscription required) that framed social and economic mobility as a "he said"/"she said" issue rather than considering any empirical evidence. Here's the key passage from his piece:

Consider the evidence. While 92% of conservatives believe that hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage, only 65% of liberals think so...

Naturally, well-to-do liberals must be amazed at the gullibility of the millions of poorer conservatives who still cling to the idea of America's promise of a better future through hard work and perseverance. Sunny conservatives of all economic classes may very well prefer to see things their way about America. Are conservatives naïve, or are liberals unjustifiably dour? Reasonable people disagree on this question.

But as Joel Wiles, a former Duke student, pointed out to me, the poll question says something different. Brooks makes the position of 35% of liberals sound unreasonable -- of course "hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage" (my italics). However, the actual question used in the survey, which was conducted by the public affairs school at Syracuse where Brooks teaches, adds a crucial qualifier -- the word usually:

Would you agree or disagree with the following: While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.

The word "usually" shifts the meaning of the question from the possibility of overcoming disadvantage to the probability of doing so. And as I said before, the probability of moving upward in the United States today is far too low.

(For those who are interested, the data are here. I replicated the 65%/92% figures using the 2005 data, but the file also includes data from 2004 and 2006.)

Mike Gallagher: Wishing for another attack

Here's one of the more vile statements I've seen recently. Atrios flags conservative pundit Mike Gallagher -- the sixth most popular radio host in the country -- wishing for another 9/11 in order to silence left-wing dissent:

Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be.

It's time to stand tall, speak loudly and defend America against these enemies like Hanoi Jane.

She's back. Are we going to let her get away with it....again????

McCain versus Clinton: A closer look

Bob Somerby still hasn't corrected his mistaken post from yesterday claiming Hillary Clinton "has been ahead of McCain for months." Here's more evidence he's wrong.

Charles Franklin has compiled the data on McCain-Clinton trial heats. The story is clear -- McCain, not Hillary, has been leading for months, though the gap has recently closed (McCain is in red, Hillary in blue):

Unfortunately, like Time Magazine, Somerby is hyping an outlier.

The "Hillary is more experienced" meme

During an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Senator Chuck Schumer is the latest person to repeat the meme that Hillary is more experienced than her chief Democratic rivals:

Q: Will you be supporting Obama for president?

A: I’m supporting Hillary. I’ve worked closer with Hillary and, on experience, I would have to give her the edge. I think she’s terrific. When you see her work up close, she is really smart, she asks the right questions and has a good sense of how to balance things.

But as I've written, it's actually not clear that Hillary has more actual legislative or executive experience than her rivals -- unless you count being First Lady as experience:

Clinton has no executive experience, no experience managing a large bureaucracy, and less experience as an elected representative than Obama. Just because she's famous and has lots of experience in national politics doesn't make her more qualified to be commander-in-chief than her rivals.

Bush approval: Power Line vs. reality

Power Line's John Hinderaker has a post with the title "President Bush's support holding steady" that cites a Rasmussen poll showing Bush's approval at 42 percent. But if you look at the polls as a whole, as Charles Franklin does, it's obvious that Bush's support isn't holding steady. In fact, his approval numbers have dropped substantially -- Rasmussen is an outlier:

Jeb Bush imitates Jon Chait

Jonathan Chait on how conservatives interpret failure, 6/13/06:

The liberal author Rick Perlstein once said of the right's mindset, 'Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.' Bush has failed. Therefore, he cannot be a conservative.

Jeb Bush, 1/27/07:

It's important for us to realize we lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn't because conservatives were rejected. But it's because we rejected the conservative philosophy in this country.

What is Bob Somerby talking about?

Bob Somerby has been an invaluable critic of misleading reporting and commentary at his Daily Howler website, particularly during the 1999-2000 smearing of Al Gore. But today's post botches a couple of points about Hillary Clinton's poll numbers.

First, Somerby calls Andrew Sullivan "an ardent dumb-ass" for saying Hillary's polling numbers are "absolutely dead straight-line":

But then, omigod! It semi-happened! Howard Fineman almost mentioned the relevant facts! And he did cite that latest Newsweek survey:

FINEMAN (continuing directly): In fairness to her, after, after the roll-out she had this week, the numbers in our poll—the Newsweek poll and others—were very positive, very powerful actually. Cooties notwithstanding.

In fact, Clinton led McCain by seven in the Newsweek poll back in early December, long before last week’s events. And Fineman didn’t say the thing it kills pundits to say; Fineman didn’t specifically say that Clinton was ahead of McCain and Giuliani in several major polls. Viewers were left to puzzle about what sort of polls had been so powerful. But at least he made a first small step toward interjecting some relevant information. Not that it made a bit of difference to one ardent dumb-ass:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): If you look at her polling all these years, it is absolutely dead straight-line. People who don’t like her are not going to change their minds. And they’re about, over 40 percent.

But Clinton’s polling isn’t straight line—although, to be perfectly fair to Sullivan, he’s probably too clueless to know that.

Actually, Sullivan is making a perfectly accurate claim. The graphics produced by University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin, which both Sullivan and I linked, show remarkable stability in her favorable/unfavorable numbers. Her head-to-head trial heat polls against top Republican contenders are much more noisy, but that's because the election isn't for almost two years!

Somerby goes on to claim that Hillary "has been ahead of McCain for months":

Where do Dem voters, including Iowa “party activists,” get the idea that Clinton can’t be elected? In part, from endless TV propaganda, and from reports like Balz’s. People who watched the Matthews Show heard a pundit aggressively say that Clinton’s polling has been “dead straight-line;” no one in the panel managed to say that she’s has been ahead of McCain for months. This is how a nation of voters gets the press corps’ preferred ideas in their heads. This is how our “party activists” end up reciting the RNC’s points.

However, the majority of polls actually show Hillary trailing McCain. For instance, when considering polls taken in December or January that are listed in the pollingreport.com 2008 polling archive, Hillary is leading in the Newsweek and ABC/Washington Post polls, roughly tied in Time's and CNN's, and losing in the Diageo/Hotline, Cook, Investor's Business Daily, Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg, NBC/Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fox News, WNBC/Marist and GW Battleground polls. And in general, older polls show her doing worse. It's simply not true that she has been ahead of him "for months".

Mike Huckabee attacks dissent on MTP

I don't Huckabee.

During an interview on "Meet the Press" yesterday in which he announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee, the former Arkansas governor became the latest Republican to suggest that opposition to President Bush endangers US troops:

MR. RUSSERT: If you were in the Senate or the House, would you vote to oppose the president sending more troops to Iraq?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I think that's a dangerous position to take, to oppose a sitting commander in chief while we've got people being shot at on the ground. I think it's one thing to have a debate and a discussion about this strategy, but to openly oppose, in essence, the strategy, I think that can be a very risky thing for our troops.

Notice how sweeping Huckabee's language is -- it's "a dangerous position" to "oppose a sitting commander in chief while we've got people being shot at on the ground." But we've had people "being shot at on the ground" since October 2001. Should we suspend our democracy? For how long?

This kind of anti-democratic rhetoric has got to stop. We're going to have troops in harm's way for years. And it's especially disturbing from a man who wants to be president. If he wins, is he going to tell us it's "dangerous" to oppose him while troops are in the field?

Huckabee's language is also a case study in the anti-democratic misuse of the term "commander-in-chief" that Garry Wills criticized in a New York Times op-ed Saturday:

The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: "The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States."

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely -- more like never -- heard today. It is just "€œcommander in chief,"€ or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline.

I've added Huckabee's statement to my timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11, which is below the fold.

How bad are things in Iraq?

Very, very bad. Here's a disturbing fact mentioned in passing during a NPR report that aired on Monday about kidnappings in Iraq:

Some people now tattoo telephone numbers on their arms, so if they are killed their families can be contacted.

And here's Vice President Cheney on CNN two days later:

Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes [in Iraq] and we will continue to have enormous successes.

It must be fun to live outside the reality-based community.

Gates: Dissent emboldens the enemy

Sadly, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates has become the latest Republican official to attack dissent as emboldening the enemy:

Whatever their intentions, lawmakers pushing for resolutions against President Bush's troop buildup are encouraging America's enemies, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says.

Gates, in his Pentagon post just over a month, said Friday he was certain supporters of measures criticizing the president's plan don't intend to harm U.S. interests in Iraq. "But that's the effect," he said.

"It's pretty clear that a resolution that in effect says that the general going out to take command of the arena shouldn't have the resources he thinks he needs to be successful certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries," Gates said in his first Pentagon news conference.

"I think it's hard to measure that with any precision, but it seems pretty straightforward that any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks," he said.

This kind of rhetoric encourages the administration's enablers in the press, who are echoing its insinuations of treason and disloyalty. Here is an excerpt from yesterday's "Special Report with Brit Hume" in which Fred Barnes said the Congressional resolution against President Bush's troop increase plan "helps the enemy" and that Democrats "don't support the mission," aren't "for victory," and don't support the troops:

BARNES: I wanted to follow up on what Charles [Krauthammer] said about this idea that Nancy Pelosi and these anti-war Democrats and anti-war Republicans support the troops. You know, they don't support the mission. They're not for victory, which is what the troops want. General Petraeus said that passing a resolution in Congress and the House and the Senate that says -- that opposes the surge in troops could only encourage the enemy. Now, if you vote for that resolution and all these Democrats and a lot of Republicans are committed to it, it helps the enemy, how can you still say you support the troops? The fact is they don't.

An updated version of my timeline of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11 is below the fold:

Hagel joins third party hype

Hotline On Call notes Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, the latest subject of third party presidential hype, floated the idea during an interview with the Washington Post:

Hagel said in a wide-ranging interview this week that he is discussing his options with his family and other confidants and will make a decision in the next six weeks.

He said one possibility is forming a presidential exploratory committee and -- despite his outcast position within his party -- seeking the Republican nomination. Or he may seek a third Senate term. Then again, he might take a more creative path.

Hagel joked during the interview about teaming up with New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, and also floated the possibility of joining a bipartisan unity ticket with a Democrat -- with his name first, of course.

As Hotline points out, the "bipartisan unity ticket" Hagel referenced is code for Unity '08, the third party group I mocked back in December. Will he go through with it? I'm skeptical. Posturing as a maverick in the Senate is easier than putting your career on the line by challenging your own party's nominee.

Update 1/27 7:00 PM: The Washingtonian adds more silly hype:

If the 2008 presidential election turns out to be close, a few thousand votes here or there could sway the results—so both parties are working to stop a third-party bid.

Democratic strategists are concerned that a challenge from the left might undermine a centrist Hillary Rodham Clinton candidacy. Republican strategists are equally worried that if Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, or John McCain becomes the nominee, he might face a challenge from a right-wing anti-immigration candidate.

Who might play the role of spoiler in 2008?

Republicans around McCain have been watching CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who has been gaining popularity on TV with his anti-immigrant, anticorporate comments and segments like “Broken Borders” and “Exporting America.” It isn’t lost on political watchers that Dobbs is urging his viewers to switch their affiliation to “independent” to protest the corporate backing of both parties.

Author/globalization expert Ted Fishman says Dobbs is offering “the most direct assault on American big business by an establishment figure since Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the military-industrial complex.”

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is another strong contender for a center-right independent bid—he could write any size check to fund a campaign, and a bipartisan team at Unity ’08 is working to line up ballot access that might ease the way for a third-party run. Bloomberg has been reaching out across the aisle to Democrats like Al From, who heads the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

On the left, rebel union leader Andy Stern, head of the powerful Service Employees International Union that led the breakup of the AFL-CIO, could leave the Democrats if he feels workers aren’t being represented. Stern’s made no secret of his disdain for both parties, and his 1.8 million members would provide the army for a grassroots outside-the-system bid. In a not-so-subtle warning, Stern is scheduling a trip to New Hampshire and Iowa at the end of January as part of a book tour.

Why would Stern enter knowing that he would be guaranteeing Republicans a victory? That's ridiculous. The same with Bloomberg -- the businessman in him will realize that he would spend hundreds of millions and still lose. And Dobbs would have to give up his show on CNN, which I assume he is loathe to do.

The pilotless drone rant

Via the Freakonomics blog, here's a hilarious recording (MP3 audio) of a reader ranting about redundant language in a San Francisco Chronicle subhed. Definitely worth a listen -- I've already played it twice.

Update 1/30 6:51 AM: Don't miss the remix.

Beck denounces NPR report

Glenn Beck denounced the NPR report I criticized last night as "a hatchet piece" on his syndicated radio show this morning and claimed his comments were taken out of context. The NPR story suggested Beck was criticizing Limbaugh without explaining his own controversial statements -- and now Beck is alleging that it did so under false pretenses. As I said, David Folkenflik is usually an excellent reporter, so I'm reserving judgment.

The transcript below is transcribed from archived audio of this morning's program on Beck's website (Real audio; subscription required). It begins with Beck describing a conversation with a staff member:

"[A]nother article just broke." I said, "What's the other article?" "Apparently NPR has done an article with you taking down Rush Limbaugh." And I said, "Wow! Really? I don't remember doing an interview with NPR where I took down Rush Limbaugh." "Yeah, that's the way they shaped the story."

Now I'm going to give you the history of this one, and then I'm going to give you the story. And you just tell me if this sounds like anything anybody in their right mind would ever do. It starts with a conservative doing an interview with NPR! Does that sound like anything anybody in their right mind would ever do? This is 100 percent my fault and, quite honestly, Rush Limbaugh's fault as well because he did an interview with them as well. But I'm assuming they lied to Rush Limbaugh as much as they lied to me.

After recounting a previous experience with NPR, Beck describes his meeting with staff about the recent interview:

I get back to the office... So I go in and there's like this team of PR people. And I walk in and I'm like, "Guys - NPR. Are you out of your mind?" They all start "No, no, Glenn, we know this reporter"... "No, we have it on the highest assurances that this is not going to be a hatchet piece." I said, "Really? National Public Radio told you that, huh?" "Yes, not going to be a hatchet piece." "What is the piece going to be on?" "Well, it's going to be on talk radio." "And you don't think that's going to be a hatchet piece?" "No, it's not." "Ok, alright, I think I pay you guys too much money. In fact, I think I should be paying you zero if you really don't think that would be a hatchet job." And then I got this speech. "Glenn, look, I have a relationship with these people and they wouldn't burn us."

...So I do it. Well, because of that relationship, that individual was exactly right. They didn't burn me; they burned Rush Limbaugh instead and used me as the tool to do it. I was the fire that burned Rush Limbaugh... So I wrote Rush a letter last night, said, "Rush, uh uh. Didn't say this. Not about you, brother. Nothing to do with you."

...[Rush and I are] co-workers for the love of pete. Now, according to NPR, we're rivals. That's weird because I precede him on the same network. We work for the same company. We're on hundreds of the same stations.

...[after reading from the NPR story] This is supposed to be about talk radio, I thought. When I was doing the interview, it was about talk radio. This seems to be "building bipartisanship, not Limbaugh's problem." This is a hatchet piece on Rush Limbaugh. This has nothing to do -- I spent half the interview talking about people on the left and Air America. I talked about how people are being divided not because they actually believe it -- and in fact I said good things about Limbaugh and Franken because they actually believe these things.

...Now listen to this. This is where Glenn becomes the hatchet man. "Limbaugh says -- listen carefully - 'I'm just using humor to make a point.'" Now do I agree or disagree with that? This is where context matters. Do I agree or disagree with using humor to make a point? I was shocked last night to find out I not only disagree, I vehemently disagree. "But rival conservative talk show host Glenn Beck says such severe rhetoric only drives people apart," which is weird, because there's no quotation marks around that, which is very strange. Quote, "I truly believe it's going to be the death of us. It's going to be the death of us, the death of our country, if we don't stop dividing ourselves like this. It's just not right."

Wait a minute - what's not right? Dividing ourselves, or using humor to make a point? I'm not sure. I know when I was talking in the interview about that point it wasn't about Rush Limbaugh. It was about politicians separating us. It was about politicians using people to separate people. I believe in that same quote I quoted George Washington. I can guarantee that I didn't quote Rush Limbaugh. I can guarantee that Rush Limbaugh's statement that "I'm just using humor to make a point" was never even mentioned." Because if it would have been mentioned, I would have said, "Well, I agree with that. That's the soul of our show."

NYT repeats error on Kerry's botched joke

Yesterday, the New York Times made the same silly error in describing John Kerry's notorious botched joke about Iraq that it made back in November, even using the same exact language. In turn, the editors ran a correction that mirrors the last one almost word for word:

NYT article by Kate Zernike, 11/2 (now corrected online):

Mr. Kerry's prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." In his delivery, he dropped the word "us."

NYT Editor's Note, 11/3:

A Political Memo article yesterday about the fallout for Senator John Kerry over what he called a "botched joke" referred incompletely to the differences between prepared remarks and what he actually said about the Iraq war to students at Pasadena City College in California on Monday. Mr. Kerry not only dropped the word "us," but he also rephrased his opening sentence extensively and omitted a reference to President Bush. Mr. Kerry's aides said that the prepared text read: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." What he said: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

NYT article by Adam Nagourney, 1/25 (now corrected online):

Mr. Kerry's prepared remarks called for him to say, "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." In his delivery, he dropped the word "us."

NYT correction, 1/26:

An article yesterday about Senator John Kerry's announcement that he would not seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 incorrectly described what he called "a botched joke" he told before the November midterm elections. In telling the joke, which was assailed as an attack on American troops fighting in Iraq, Mr. Kerry not only dropped a word from his prepared remarks, but he also rephrased his opening sentence extensively and omitted a reference to President Bush. Mr. Kerry's aides said that the prepared text read: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." What he actually said: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

How did this happen? Zernike's original article is corrected online, yet Nagourney somehow managed to cut and paste her original text, and no one on the editorial staff noticed the mistake. Time for some quality control.

Update 1/26 10:13 AM: Gawker just picked up this post.

Update 1/26 5:11 PM: Gawker updated their post with a clarification from Times senior editor Greg Brock:

Because I oversee corrections for The Times, I wanted to drop you a note and set the record straight on the Kerry "botched joke" correction this morning. Despite the item posted on Gawker, Adam Nagourney did not make the error. The quotation was added to the article by an editor -- without Adam's knowledge.

Had I known that, the correction would have begun with our standard phrase: "Because of an editing error." The reason I did not know it was an editing error was because the editors preparing the correction did not talk to Adam or check with an editor to see if it had been an editing error -- our standard policy. We are never supposed to publish a correction without first talking to the reporter or the editor who made the error. We have slipped a few times. But, in general, no staff member is supposed to be surprised to see a correction about their work in the paper -- as Adam was this morning.

Just for the record, Adam covered the original "botched joke" story. His article on Nov. 1, 2006, had the correct quotation as spoken by Mr. Kerry. It was, as the Gawker item correctly points out, a subsequent Political Memo on Nov. 2 that carried the incorrect quotation. And we corrected that on Nov. 3.

NPR whitewashes Glenn Beck's extremism

David Folkenflik, a usually excellent media reporter, aired a story today on NPR about Rush Limbaugh that bizarrely juxtaposed Limbaugh's rhetorical extremism with the putative moderation of Glenn Beck:

LIMBAUGH: There's a whole psychology of doing a program the way I do it.

FOLKENFLIK: And that often involves barbs aimed directly at liberals. Some feminist leads become "feminazis." Recently, Limbaugh joked that new House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker in US history, might well breast-feed a child sitting on her lap during official ceremonies. Limbaugh says he's just using humor to make a point, but a rival conservative talk show host, Glenn Beck, says such severe rhetoric only drives people apart.

BECK: I truly believe it's going to be the death of us -- it is going to be the death of our industry, it is going to be the death of our country if we don't stop dividing ourselves like this. It's just not right.

FOLKENFLIK: Beck has TV gigs on CNN and ABC. Despite that criticism, he's unabashed about his own beliefs, and he's taken flak for them.

BECK: There's nothing wrong with pointing out differences. There's nothing wrong with having a heated debate. There's nothing wrong with doing all of those things even in an entertaining way. But they cannot define you.

It's absurd to quote Beck denouncing those who are "dividing" us without providing the necessary context that he spouts divisive rhetoric every night. Here are a few choice excerpts from the Media Matters hit parade:

• Beck warned that if "Muslims and Arabs" don't "act now" by "step[ping] to the plate" to condemn terrorism, they "will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West."
• He described as "surprising" a letter criticizing Al Qaeda in Iraq because "the man who wrote it" -- Islamic Society of Nevada director Aslam Abdullah - "is a Muslim."
• He said that "[t]he Middle East is being overrun by 10th-century barbarians" and "[i]f they take over ... we're going to have to nuke the whole place."
• Beck aired a segment mocking the names of several missing Egyptian students in which the announcer said that one "may or may not be accompanied by his camel." The segment showed pictures of crowds and pointed to random, unidentifiable people as the missing Egyptians. It ended with a reading of the students' names in quick succession followed by the announcer pretending to gag as he struggled to pronounce them.
• Beck claimed that there are three reasons that an illegal immigrant "comes across the border in the middle of the night": "One, they're terrorists; two, they're escaping the law; or three, they're hungry. They can't make a living in their own dirtbag country."
• Beck referred to "those who were left in New Orleans [during Hurricane Katrina], or who decided to stay" as "scumbags."
• After airing a clip from the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth in which former Vice President Al Gore states that global warming could cause many highly populated coastal areas to be submerged by seawater -- including the entire city of Shanghai -- Beck responded: "This is what would happen to Shanghai. Does anybody really care? I mean, come on. Shanghai is under water. Oh, no! Who's gonna make those little umbrellas for those tropical drinks?"

But he hates people who divide us!

Update 1/26 12:18 PM: David Seagal has a long and awfully generous profile of Beck in today's Washington Post. He does mention what he calls Beck's "most embarrassing moment":

Beck invited the country's first Muslim congressman, newly elected Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota, on the show and led off by lobbing this stink bomb:

"I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

After a long discussion of Beck's personal transition from alcoholism to Mormonism, Seagal asks:

But if Beck has left jerkdom for good, what explains that Keith Ellison question?

"If I could take back the wording of that question, I would," he says, sounding genuinely contrite. He then says he was trying to make the point that moderates of every religion -- his included -- need to face down the extremists in their flock. How exactly his "prove to me" challenge was supposed to tease out that point is a mystery. ***

Of course, the no-he-didn't interview style, as well as Beck's strange confection of lectures, self-deprecation and one-liners, is what earned him a ticket to Headline News. The suits at the channel have long cast an envious eye on Fox's superior ratings, and in 2004 they started tinkering with their all-news format for the first time in 23 years. The perpetually enraged Nancy Grace was one of the first acquisitions. Beck is the most recent.

So where are the rest of the quotes above? How will Seagal's readers know what kind of things Beck actually says on the air?

Update 1/26 1:43 PM: Beck has denounced the NPR story as a "hatchet piece" that took his comments out of context. Also, this story was picked up on Jim Romenesko's Media News page.

Update 1/27 2:42 PM: Late Friday, Media Matters posted an article criticizing the Folkenflik and Seagal reports.

Social mobility isn't a matter of faith

Prof. Arthur C. Brooks of Sycracuse has an annoying op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that frames different beliefs in social mobility as a matter of values:

While just about everybody -- left and right -- agrees that poverty is unacceptable ... conservatives do not share liberals' concern about income inequality. According to the 2005 Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality, self-described liberals are more than twice as likely as conservatives to say income inequality in America is a "serious problem." And while 84% of liberals think the government should do more to reduce inequality, only 25% of conservatives agree.

This is empirical substantiation for the old cliché that conservatives just don't care about the poor, right? Wrong. In fact, the data do not tell us that conservatives are uncaring; they actually tell us that conservatives are optimists. Conservatives are relatively untroubled by inequality, and unsupportive of government income redistribution, because they believe the American economy provides private opportunities to succeed. Liberals are far more pessimistic than conservatives about the possibility of a better future for Americans of modest means.

Consider the evidence. While 92% of conservatives believe that hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage, only 65% of liberals think so...

Naturally, well-to-do liberals must be amazed at the gullibility of the millions of poorer conservatives who still cling to the idea of America's promise of a better future through hard work and perseverance. Sunny conservatives of all economic classes may very well prefer to see things their way about America. Are conservatives naïve, or are liberals unjustifiably dour? Reasonable people disagree on this question.

But this isn't just a matter of faith or values. We have evidence to bring to bear on the question of whether "hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage." And the evidence, sadly, is grim. To take one example, The Economist reports that a recent study found "only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter [of the income distribution] had made it to the top quarter" nineteen years later.

CW recognizing Bush is weak

Conventional wisdom is finally catching up with political reality -- here's today's Hotline:

Dems (with the glaring exception of Jim Webb) appeared to sense they gained little ground by kicking the spectacularly weak president while he was already flat on his back.

Tell us what you really think!

Kerry won't run for president

Kerry isn't running:

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrats' losing presidential candidate in 2004, does not intend to run again in 2008, a Democratic official said Wednesday.

This official said Kerry intends to seek a new six-year term in the Senate.

Kerry plans to disclose his political plans in remarks on the Senate floor later in the day, according to this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a formal announcement.

You can only deny reality for so long when you have favorability numbers like Tom DeLay.

Shales doesn't listen to Bush

Shouldn't critics listen to the president's words? One of my fellow grad students here at Duke alerted me to Tom Shales' column on the speech in the Washington Post, which states that Bush "congratulated 'the Democratic majority' that he was facing en masse for the first time." But as Josh Marshall noted last night, Bush actually said "Democrat majority" -- a ploy he and other Republicans frequently use to get under Democrats' skin.

More ethics charges in Duke lacrosse case

The hammer comes down again on the Durham DA:

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong has been charged with new ethics violations for his conduct on the Duke Lacrosse sex assault case.

The North Carolina Bar today filed an amended complaint accusing Nifong of withholding DNA evidence from the defense and making misrepresentations to the presiding judge in the case. The Bar has accused Nifong of conduct that involves "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation." Nifong also allegedly violated a rule that "prohibits an attorney from knowingly making false statements of material fact."

Previously, Nifong had been charged with making inappropriate and potentially prejudicial comments about the sexual assault case against Duke Lacrosse players. Nifong's comments were made in a series of public interviews early in the case.

Today's must-read: Hillary coverage

Don't miss my new post on coverage of Hillary Clinton, which got pushed down by my Webb posts last night...

Webb goes after the war in SOTU response

What's more tedious: the State of the Union, or SOTU blogging? I'll pass.

The Democratic response is far more interesting -- Jim Webb criticizes the Iraq war from first premises, implicitly indicting his colleagues who voted for the resolution authorizing force along with President Bush:

Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

... The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable -- and predicted -- disarray that has followed.

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering.

Financially.

The damage to our reputation around the world.

The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism.

And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

Jim Webb's Facebook hijinks

How does he have the time? In addition to giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union, James Webb and his staff are keeping his Facebook page updated, including these amusing changes noted by William Beutler at Blog P.I.:

But my favorite is this change, which Beutler flagged back in October:

PS No matter how poorly Webb does tonight, he'll still do better than Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, whose bizarre eyebrow distracted everyone last year (resulting in the Columbus Dispatch calling this blog "the site for chatter about 'Tim Kaine's crazy eyebrow'").

Hillary and the discourse of fakeness

Bob Somerby has a very important post today on the pathological news coverage of Hillary Clinton that is already taking shape. It's true that lots of people (myself included) sometimes feel like she is disciplined or calculating in her public appearances. But that's no excuse for reporting that frames her every move as spin.

So far, the primary offender is the New York Times reporter Patrick Healy, who writes today that "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton strived for an Oprah moment yesterday night, the third of her presidential campaign, by sitting in a fake living-room set and fielding questions on a live video Webcast about her vote for the Iraq war." Can you tell what the script is?

He later added that "Her answers suggested various personas that she wants to convey to voters: a hometown girl, a mother, a moviegoer, a churchgoer, a standard-bearer for women and a critic of the war." How does Healy know that Clinton wants to suggest those personas? Answer: He doesn't. He's mind-reading.

The problems began yesterday with Healy's report on a Clinton health care event:

The visit to Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center, which is just blocks west of Broadway (and is named after two neighborhoods it serves), was highly scripted political theater.

Reminiscent of the scene this month when Representative Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to be speaker of the House, children surrounded Mrs. Clinton and climbed over their parents in the audience. The event was intended to convey both her policy smarts and her warmer maternal side — a combination new to presidential primaries.

But as Somerby pointed out, all political events are "highly scripted":

Readers, every time major candidates do public events, the events are, in some sense, “highly scripted.” It’s only a question of when a journalist chooses to put such a phrase into print. And in the case of Hillary Clinton, Healy knows his cohort’s prize narratives. When Clinton does it, it’s “highly scripted.” Those are the rules of this game.

And again, how does Healy know what "[t]he event was intended to convey"? He doesn't!

The problem is that journalists don't want to be passive reporters writing down what politicians said and did; instead, they want to inject their own voices into stories. That's great when they fact-check the substance of what politicians say. But it's far more common for reporters to try to deconstruct politicians' tactics and try to explain their "real" motivations -- a habit that frequently devolves into phony mind-reading, useless tactical critiques, and pathological narrative-driven coverage.

And where do these narratives come from? Columns like this one from National Review's Rich Lowry:

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential exploratory committee while sitting on a couch in her living room, she didn’t project warmth so much as a sense that she was desperately trying to project warmth.

As TV producer Steve Rosenbaum wrote of her performance on the liberal website The Huffington Post: “Hillary is struggling with words that are not her own. You can practically see the teleprompter reflected in her eyes. Every word has been word-smithed, every phrase looked at by a team of consultants.”

Welcome to the Hillary Clinton campaign, which will be the most blatantly calculated presidential campaign in memory. Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting, but it is Hillary’s lot in life not to be able to fake it well, so the scriptwriting and the consultants’ work show through. She seems to take the advice to "act naturally" literally, and the acting is always more in evidence than the naturalness.

The blogger and law prof Ann Althouse is even more stupid in commenting on a Washington Post report about Clinton's answer to a question about her favorite movie:

She hedged on her favorite movie, saying that, as a child, she had loved "The Wizard of Oz," only to discover "Casablanca" in college and law school, watching it so often that she memorized the lines. (Her passion for the Meryl Streep-Robert Redford classic "Out of Africa" came later, she said.) But she was clear about her own conviction that she can become president.

Can't you just picture the robotic brain gears turning, trying to think of a movie that would say just the thing she needs said? Oh, why didn't she have a "favorite movie" planned before she went into this on-line chat to humanize herself? "Wizard of Oz," can't go wrong there.... except it's childish, and not very imaginative or distinctive. "Casablanca"! That's a great movie everyone loves. Possibly more sophisticated than "Wizard of Oz." But anyone could think of "Casablanca." I need something that would have at least some individuality to it. Was there ever anything that ever stirred me? Damn it, I've been busy. I haven't been sitting around like you cookie-bakers staring at screens, waiting for some damned moving image to stir some -- what is it you people have? -- emotion. Oh, hell, there was that thing.... "Out of Africa"!

The Hillary is fake meme is everywhere. Anonymous blogger "Not Paul Begala" at Blog P.I. posted this (complete with picture):

Notice how she’s been giving interviews in a living room setting, on a couch, with her elbow up on the armrest. This is supposed to convey a warm family scene with her kicking back and inviting you, the viewer, into her home.

Now, I dare anyone in Hillaryland to tell me that she’s just doing this on her own and that her political team didn’t consciously decide to portray her in this new way to give her the humanizing, “woman’s touch” look for her presidential run. It’s so obviously contrived it’s funny.

How could we possibly know whether she was told to put her elbow up on the couch? We can't! But the belief of people like Healy, Lowry, Althouse, and Beutler that everything she does is calculated can't be disproved. Meanwhile, they can frame her every move as phony.

Correction: William Beutler did not write the post at Blog P.I. quoted above as this post previously indicated; his anonymous co-blogger "Not Paul Begala" did.

Krauthammer distorts Edwards quote

A warning to anyone considering hiring Charles Krauthammer to give a speech -- you can't trust him with the facts.

For example, check out his misleading paraphrase of a comment by John Edwards during the last presidential election:

As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.

But as Krauthammer himself noted at the time, Edwards actually said something else entirely:

If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

Notice the difference. Edwards said "people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk"; he did not say "Reeve will walk again," as Krauthammer suggests. Apparently he decided the quote needed improving the second time around. Will the Post set the record straight?

(PS After catching this, I found a Media Matters article making the same point.)

How unpopular is George W. Bush?

Really, really unpopular:

According to a CBS News poll conducted Thursday through Sunday, 28 percent of Americans approve of the way the president is handling his job, and more than twice as many, 64 percent, disapprove. It is the lowest approval rating the president has received in a CBS News poll, though it is statistically little different from the rating of 30 percent he received earlier this month.

Only Jimmy Carter has received a lower approval rating, 26 percent, in 1979, in surveys conducted by CBS News or its polling partner, The New York Times. In a Gallup poll conducted in August 1974, just before his resignation, Richard M. Nixon had a 24 percent approval rating.

In a new ABC News/Washington Post poll made public on Monday, only 33 percent approved of Mr. Bush’s job performance, and 65 disapproved, tying the record for his worst marks in that poll.

Charles Franklin's latest presidential approval analysis shows that the 28 percent number may be an outlier, but the trend is negative:

Franklin's plot of the long sweep of Bush approval (through January 21) looks even worse:

And as he notes (echoing my point about the myth of the bully pulpit), there's little reason to expect tonight's State of the Union address to change Bush's numbers:

Despite the increased prominence of the speech, the effect of State of the Union addresses on presidential approval has generally been small to non-existent. The average change from before to after the SotU since 1946 has been -0.3 percentage points. Of the 50 post-war speeches for which we have good data, 30 changed approval of the president by 2 percentage points or less. So it is unlikely that President Bush's address Tuesday night will do much to alter public perceptions in either direction, despite the hype around the speech.

Marketing Charles Krauthammer

A strange ad ran on my site advertising Charles Krauthammer's speeches:

Do people book five-figure speeches from Google ads? Is the market for inside-the-Beltway neoconservativism drying up?

PS If you do book Krauthammer, make sure to ask for his favorite appeasement anecdote! He's great at customizing it for the foreign policy situation of the moment...

Carl Cannon on presidential lies

National Journal's Carl Cannon has written a useful piece on presidential lies for The Atlantic. The distinction he makes between personal falsehoods and "governing lies" is especially important (it echoes a point we made in All the President's Spin):

Some falsehoods -- like many campaign lies -- are relatively harmless; they may soil an opponent’s résumé or polish one’s own, but their consequences are slight. Deceptions to promote or protect a policy or presidential action -- call them governing lies -- are more consequential, and it is by their consequences that [presidents] should be judged

Still, I would argue that Cannon's focus is too narrow; we frequently cannot prove that a president is intentionally deceiving the public, but misleading statements matter regardless of whether they are intentional or not. In addition, the administration specializes in half-truths that leave an incorrect impression rather than statements that are completely false, as we noted. (For both reasons, we set aside the debate over what is and is not a lie in ATPS, as we explained in the introduction.)

Cannon also hypothesizes that "although statements made by Bush as president have proven to be untrue, Bush generally believed they were true when he made them" in a query to the author David Corn. But he fails to consider the most important case -- the "trifecta" anecdote justifying the return to budget deficits which we recount at length in the book. Here is our summary from the introduction:

In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, "when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."

It was a good story, but there's no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly no -- Bush continued to repeat the "trifecta" story for months after it had been debunked.

It's worth noting that Bush variously described the questioner as "somebody," "a fellow," "a reporter," "the guy," "they," "one of the reporters," and "a male reporter" (see Appendix C). He also repeatedly asserted that the discussion took place in Chicago (though no proof has ever surfaced to justify that claim) and claimed that he "told the American people" about his pledge. Could Bush possibly believe that his anecdote was accurate as he repeated it almost twenty times?

Finally, Cannon offers an accusation of dishonesty that appears to be incorrect, writing that "Al Gore told a labor crowd that his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby with 'Look for the Union Label' (a ditty written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old)." But as Bob Somerby pointed out, Gore said afterward that he'd been joking about the song -- a claim that was corroborated by (a) the fact that his audience laughed at his statement and (b) the fact that a longtime family friend was quoted six weeks earlier saying that "Al jokes that when he was a little boy, I used to sing him the 'Union Label' song.'"

Hyping Hillary's chances in 2008

We knew it was coming. Hillary & Co. are hyping her prospects as a presidential candidate, facts be damned. Here's what she says in the announcement on her website:

I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine. After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.

But Clinton's wins aren't that impressive. Her 2000 win -- the only one against serious opposition -- represented an average Democratic performance for New York, as I wrote:

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

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

And while it's true Clinton blew out John Spencer, her opponent in 2006, he was a pathetically weak candidate who she outspent more than seven to one.

Mark Penn, Hillary's pollster, has posted an article on her site seeking to allay concerns about her electability:

She has national ratings that are higher than the winning presidential candidates of the last two decades had on Election Day and beats or statistically ties the leading Republican presidential candidates in most recent polls. A December Newsweek poll even had her beating Sen. John McCain by 7 points.

The people who have come to know Hillary the best love her the most. Hillary won a huge victory in New York, with 64 percent of the vote, after getting 83 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. In addition to her strong base in the city, she won over the highly Republican areas in upstate NY, where she has been strong since 2000, and went up 17 points this election in the Republican-leaning NYC suburbs. New Yorkers reaffirmed their support of her in her reelection, and she won 37 of the counties won by George Bush in the last election.

...Even before announcing her presidential campaign, Hillary has already proved wrong all the pundits who say that people already know her and that voters won't change their minds. In the last year, the percentage of people who have a favorable impression of Hillary Clinton in the CBS poll rose 34 percent (from 32 to 43, the highest of any Democratic contender). In the December Washington Post poll, she now has the highest favorable rating of any known Democrat (56 percent), and these were her best ratings since 1999. Hardcore Republicans don't like Hillary for the simple reason that they know she can win, and if she does, she will change the policies of their hero, George W. Bush. She has a strong appeal among both Democrats and independents, the two groups it takes to win.

But these are the same bogus arguments I shot down last July. For instance, Penn's right that Clinton's favorables in the CBS poll (PDF) are up from 32 to 43, but the same poll puts her unfavorables at 38 percent. Penn's statement that "these were her best ratings since 1999" is apparently misleading -- the Pollingreport.com summary suggests CBS didn't ask a favorability question about Hillary between 1999 and 2006. And his statement that Hillary "has a strong appeal among both Democrats and independents" neglects her 41 favorable, 33 unfavorable numbers from the CBS poll he cites.

Neil the Ethical Werewolf (?) has more on Penn cherry-picking his polls:

The only head-to-head Hillary-versus-a-Republican polls that Penn includes come from this Newsweek story, which has Hillary beating McCain by 7 and Giuliani by 1. It allows Penn to say, "Hillary Clinton is the only Democrat who beats John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the latest Newsweek poll." That's not as exciting as it seems, because that Newsweek poll included only one other Democrat -- Barack Obama. And depending on what time of day Penn released his memo, it might not even be true. Just today, Newsweek came out with another poll showing Hillary leading McCain 48-47 and trailing Giuliani by the same score. But there is one Democrat who beats both McCain and Giuliani -- John Edwards, who leads McCain 48-43 and leads Giuliani 48-45. This is consistent with past polling data -- when you do a collection of head-to-head polls, Edwards usually outperforms everyone else against Republicans.

Penn trumpets Hillary's high favorability ratings while ignoring her equally high unfavorables from the same polls. He cites a CBS News poll with Hillary's favorables at 43%, which he notes as higher than any other Democratic contender. Of course, the same poll puts her unfavorables at 38%. John Edwards, by comparison, has a favorability number of 34% and an unfavorability of 21%. You get the same with the WaPo poll of Democrats Penn cites -- it shows Hillary with a higher unfavorability number (18) than Obama (5!) or Edwards (11) as well.

It's one thing to cherry-pick your favorite polls, or to pass off name-recognition advantages as indicative of some broader strength. But what really gets me about this Penn memo is that his citations of individual polls are themselves misleading.

Update 1/22 6:20 AM: The University of Wisconsin's Charles Franklin has compiled Hillary's favorable/unfavorable numbers going back to the early 1990s (adjusted for "house effects" from individual polls):

The bottom line is that there may have been a slight upturn in her favorable numbers in the last few months, but she remains a highly polarizing figure with unfavorables consistently over 40 percent. And remember, it's much easier to move people from favorable to unfavorable than the converse.

PS Has there ever been a first-time presidential candidate who was so polarizing so early in the race? I'm struggling for comparisons.

Update 1/22 9:31 AM: Penn's memo, which says it was updated, also includes this passage suggesting she is a "fully tested" candidate and her opponents are not:

Some of the commentators look at the ratings of people who have not yet been in the crossfire, and say they might have a better chance. Recent history shows the opposite. The last two Democratic presidential candidates started out with high favorable ratings and ended up on Election Day (and today) far more polarizing and disliked nationally (see the CBS poll below). Hillary is the one potential nominee who has been fully tested, with the Republicans spending nearly $70 million in the last decade to try to defeat her. She is not just strong, but the strongest Democrat in the field. Hillary is the only one able to match or beat the Republicans after years of their partisan attacks on her.

While Al Gore and John Kerry did end up "far more polarizing and disliked nationally," as Penn notes, it doesn't follow that Democrats should nominate someone who is already deeply polarizing. Gore and Kerry started out with better numbers than Hillary would, so why wouldn't we expect her to end up being even more unpopular?

Hyping a third-party run by Hagel

There may be a new subject of the unending hype about a third-party presidential candidate. Hotline on Call reports that Republican Senator Chuck "Hagel was a guest on C-SPAN's 'Newsmakers' and the network's P.R. dept. is trumpeting Hagel's non-answer to the question of whether he'd run for the WH as an indie":

[T]he non-answer to the question about an indie run in '08: "I have not decided I am going to run for president, so maybe that’ll be the next set of questions that you could ask after I decide what I’m going to do."

I like Chuck Hagel, but he's not going to have more success as a third party candidate than anyone else.

McCain's numbers dropping

Back in June 2005, I argued that John McCain's high favorability ratings were doomed to decline:

McCain spiked upward in popularity at the time he made his run in the 2000 presidential primaries, and has barely declined since -- even though he has generally been a strong defender of President Bush.

The reason, I think, is that Democratic politicians don't criticize McCain (some even ask him to be their vice presidential nominee). He's more or less the only partisan politician who Democrats and Republicans generally praise. As a result, the public likes him across the board -- the Quinnipiac poll shows his favorabe ratings as 37% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Republicans; 31% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Democrats; and 40% favorable, 9% unfavorable among independents.

But this will inevitably change if McCain runs in 2008. The reason is that he's never received significant Democratic criticism. He was defeated in 2000 before the Democrats felt the need to open up on him, and since then they all praise him because they want to look bipartisan and co-sponsor bills with him in Congress. But he won't get the Republican nomination unless he starts unloading on the Democrats, and if he does get nominated (which I think is unlikely), things will turn around really quickly. Pretty soon Democrats will start pointing out that he's a pro-life, ultra-hawkish, government-cutting conservative, and his favorability profile will start to look like most other Republicans. And even though McCain's numbers look great today, few Democrats would actually vote for him -- if he's only getting 15% against Hillary Clinton right now, imagine what he'd draw against a more moderate Democrat like John Edwards at the end of a vicious presidential campaign.

Eighteen months later, this sounds just about right -- Democrats have turned against McCain already and his support among independents is apparently declining in key primary states, as Ezra Klein noted on Tapped. Josh Marshall concludes that McCain is "going nowhere" in the presidential race. I'm not sure that's true, but the combination of McCain's pandering to the right and his position on Iraq is likely to burn through most of his capital with independents and Democrats during the primaries. If McCain does win the GOP nomination, he's not likely to be the intimidating candidate that many Democrats fear.

Jon Chait on Alan Reynolds, think tank hack

The New Republic's Jon Chait has done it again, launching one of his signature hack takedowns against the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds, a pseudo-expert who is challenging the top academic economists studying income inequality in a transparent attempt to muddy the waters.

But what makes Chait's piece particularly excellent is his deconstruction of the PR tactics used to create uncertainty about complex scientific issues:

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

You might suppose that somebody in Reynolds's position would do everything he could to mask his own ideological preferences in order to lend credibility to his research. But Reynolds is completely up front about his beliefs...

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack's strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment's campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack's most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. "The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need," Reynolds writes in the Journal. "Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded." So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who's right?

No suicide by agent who checked in Atta

One of the incidents that led to me quitting blogging for The American Prospect was a dispute over a post on Atrios that used a suicide to score cheap political points. But it turns out that there was no suicide.

To review, here's a quick summary of the controversy from my Time.com column:

Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee's suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the "wanker of the day" and to call on TAP editors to "rethink things a bit." Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the Prospect's comment boards with vitriol. In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine's online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here ) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

The original post on Atrios that I criticized read as follows:

Compare and Contrast

The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide - unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, "Okay, you’ve covered your ass."

Where did the claim that the ticket agent committed suicide come from? Atrios guest blogger Avedon Carol linked to a Suburban Guerilla post that linked to a Daily Kos diary about an appearance on Oprah by Michael Touhey, one of two agents who checked in Atta, who said on the show that "a good friend" of his told him that "'That girl that checked in Atta committed suicide.'"

But the blogger William Beutler (formerly of The Hotline's Blogometer), who originally noted the lack of documentation for Touhey's claim, has set the record straight after receiving this email from an American Airlines spokesperson:

William,

I stumbled on to your blog today as I was doing an Internet rumor search. You’ll easily guess what rumor I was tracking down. ABC’s Nightline called today asking about a rumor that an American Airlines agent in Boston had checked in Mohamed Atta and then killed herself later out of guilt. I couldn’t remember the name of the US Airways agent who had fabricated the rumor and that is how I came upon your blog – through the omniscient Google, of course.

Because of privacy policies, I can’t give you a ton of information. However, I can tell you that the American Airlines agent who checked in Mohamed Atta is alive.

I realize this is coming to you several months after your blog string, but you’ve now got this for closure.

Best regards,
Tim Wagner
Spokesman
American Airlines

I'm glad to know she's still alive.

Hotline analysis of national House vote

The subscription-only Hotline has a useful analysis of cumulative national and state-by-state vote totals by party for the House:

We all know '06 was bad for the GOP. But the breadth of the Dem victory shows up starkly in a new Hotline analysis of the cumulative nat'l vote for House candidates.

-- Dems won 54.1% of the two-party vote in '06, much better than the GOP's 52.5% win in '02. That fueled Dem advantages in 27 states last year, compared to only 19 in '02. Most importantly, Dems carried the net vote in several swing states (OH, PA, MI, NV, NH), some of which they hadn't carried in more than a decade. Even in the reddest states, GOPers struggled to win more than 55% last year. They lost TN and NC outright. Also, Dems let only 10 GOPers go unchallenged in '06, compared to 45 uncontested Dem seats.

-- Heading into '08, this is good news for a party whose WH nominee hasn't carried a majority of the popular vote since '76. In broad (and surprising) regions, vast numbers of Americans pulled the Dem lever last year. Was '06 a blip of good Dem news? Or the start of a long-term improvement in the brand name "Democrat"?

They also had a nice overview of Iraq/2008 politics in yesterday's lede:

As he tries to sell his Iraq surge plan, Pres. Bush needs McCain more than ever, a new Diageo/Hotline poll shows.

-- The plan is widely unpopular, no matter who the author is. But the survey shows voters are more inclined to back a "McCain strategy" on Iraq than a "Bush strategy." McCain aligned himself with Bush in '04 to bolster his GOP creds; Now, Bush needs to cozy up to McCain to help sell the surge. Will McCain be open to that, considering the pitfalls of running as Bush's '08 candidate?

-- For now, he can afford to take the risk; Despite Dems' 18-point lead in an '08 generic, McCain leads all 3 top Dems (Clinton, Edwards and Obama) in head-to-heads. The best Dem scenario? Edwards vs. Giuliani.

-- Elsewhere in the poll: Pelosi's fav ratings have doubled since 10/06; her unfavs have only inched up slightly. Nearly 1 in 5 GOPers give her thumbs-up. Also, slightly more voters view Congress favorably, for the 1st time since at least last summer. Another pol who's popular these days: Lieberman. (Are you listening, Obama?).

Juvenile Democratic candidate narratives

Try to believe Newsweek pays Howard Fineman to write drivel like this (via Kevin Drum):

You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did. They were candidates in the student senate election. She was the worthy but puffed-up Miss Perfect, all poodle skirts and multicolored binders clutched to her chest. He was the lanky, mysterious transfer student—from Hawaii by way of Indonesia no less—who Knew Things and was way too cool to carry more than one book at a time. Who would be leader of the pack?

Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course, and that is especially true when, as now, much of the early nomination race is based in the U.S. Capitol. It is even more the case when the party in question, and here we are talking about the Democrats, is not sharply divided ideologically. They have a good chance in ’08 to oust the fading prep/jock/ROTC/Up With People alliance.

Actually, presidential elections aren't high school writ large; they just appear that way when idiotic political writers reduce the candidates to caricatures and frame the election as a popularity contest between them.

Revisiting Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

I want to briefly revisit the subject of Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York Times article that presented a misleading characterization of Carter's use of the term "apartheid" in the title.

In that post, I didn't comment directly the propriety of Carter's use of the term "apartheid," which he attempts to separate from the South African case by writing that "The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land."

On reflection, though, I do want to object to Carter's use of the term for the same reasons I object to Nazi analogies - it inflames rather than informs, bringing to mind powerful negative associations that operate outside of rational thought. Here's part of what I wrote in the post on Nazi analogies:

The other problem with invoking the Nazis is that the negative associations associated with controversial persons, historical figures, etc. are activated outside of consciousness. In the political science and psychology literatures, this has been shown to happen immediately and automatically. Thus, someone raising the Nazis can trade on the negative associations attached to the Nazis even as they disavow the exploitation of those associations. The same applies with race, as in the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which activated racial considerations without specifically mentioning race (as Tali Mendelberg showed in an excellent Public Opinion Quarterly article).

As much as Carter may protest, he's creating an association between Israeli and the racist South African government in the mind of his readers.

Halloween comes late: Schumer in his boxers

It's a good thing the snow here delayed delivery of my New York Times, or I would started my day with this mental image:

Mr. Delahunt, a six-term congressman, is the least prominent of the four [members of Congress who live together] but perhaps the funniest. More to the point, he is the only one willing to sleep in the living room with a close-up view of Mr. Schumer slumbering a few feet away in his boxers.

Headline of the year

From the Associated Press, my nominee for headline of the year:

Escaped Chimp Gets Snack, Cleans Bathroom

(AP) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator.

The 120-pound primate, Judy, escaped yesterday into a service area when a zookeeper opened a door to her sleeping quarters, unaware the animal was still inside.

As keepers tried to woo Judy back into her cage, she rummaged through a refrigerator where chimp snacks are stored. She opened kitchen cupboards, pulled out juice and soft drinks and took a swig from bottles she managed to open.

Keeper Ann Rademacher says Judy went into the bathroom, picked up a toilet brush and cleaned the toilet. Rademacher says the 37-year-old Judy was a house pet before the zoo acquired her in 1988, so she may have been familiar with housekeeping chores. Judy wrung out a sponge and scrubbed down the fridge.

It took a couple of tries, but the zoo sedated the chimp, who fell asleep on top of the refrigerator with half a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread she had pulled out of the freezer...

Clive Crook gets tax cut costs wrong

Writing in the Atlantic, Clive Crook claims that "All of the administration’s tax cuts account for only about a quarter of the deterioration in the ten-year projected budget balance since 2001. The rest is outlays—on defense, and on everything else." But that's not right -- according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Bush's tax cuts represent 51 percent of the cost of legislation enacted since January 2001. Where did Crook get that figure?

Happy vs. serious John Edwards

The email template for messages to supporters from the John Edwards campaign includes a picture of the candidate at the top. What's funny is that they have been changing the picture depending on the tone of the message -- here's happy John after he announced he was running:

And here's serious John criticizing President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq:

I love that the campaign had him make different faces but the pictures are otherwise identical. Do you think they took more pictures to use in future emails? Wacky John? Miffed John? Angry John?

Update 1/17 2:59 PM: Given my attempts to get a non-weaselly picture in the sidebar, people have suggested that I start including my own mood-specific headshots with each post...

Update 1/18 7:56 PM: Ian Carey of the Junkiness website created a satirical preview of a future Edwards email.

How liberal is Barack Obama?

With Barack Obama's announcement yesterday that he's creating a presidential exploratory committee, I thought it was worth comparing his voting record in the Senate with those of his rivals, especially given the hype about him being more liberal than Hillary, who has been very cautious. In particular, Obama opposed authorizing the President to use force in Iraq, while Clinton voted yes.

It turns out that UCSD political scientist Keith Poole just updated his DW-NOMINATE estimates of Congressional "ideal points," the most widely used in the discipline, to include the 109th Congress (2005-2006), which Clinton and Obama both served in. (These estimates are created by scaling all the non-lopsided roll call votes over a series of Congresses and are therefore more reflective of a member's overall voting record than interest group ratings, which are typically based on a handful of votes. Poole created the metric with Howard Rosenthal.)

Here's how the distribution looks for the Senate:

As you can see, the parties are almost completely separated on ideology (the only overlap is that Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson rates as slightly more conservative than the former Republican senator Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island, which isn't clear from the histograms). The Democratic mean is -.428 (closest senator: Harry Reid) and the Republican mean is .458 (closest senator: George Allen). If we look at the estimated scores and rankings for the presidential contenders, it's striking how similar some of the Democrats are -- Obama and Clinton have the exact same estimated ideal point:

Obama -.496 (tie -- 14th most liberal)
Clinton -.496 (tie -- 14th most liberal)
Kerry -.489 (16th most liberal)
Dodd -.447 (20th most liberal)
Biden -.324 (34th most liberal)
McCain .376 (39th most conservative)

Obama, Clinton, Kerry and Dodd are all tightly clumped in a group that is slightly more liberal than the Democratic mean, whereas Biden is (surprisingly) somewhat more conservative than the party mean. By contrast, John McCain is to the left of the Republican mean -- you can see why he's running to the right.

Still, the most striking finding is that Obama and Clinton actually have voting records that appear to be very similar in their overall liberalism.

Update 3/23 9:41 AM: As a point of comparison, the estimated ideal point for John Edwards in the 106th-108th Congresses was a somewhat more moderate -.375, while Clinton's was stable at -.496 for the 107th-108th (Obama only entered the Senate in the 109th).

[Note: These scores are constrained to stay relatively stable across a small number of Congresses.]

Bush: "I was the first to say" no WMD found

Spencer Ackerman points out that President Bush claimed with a straight face that "The minute we found out [Iraq] didn't have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so" during his recent 60 Minutes interview -- unbelievable:

PELLEY: You know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has not been straight with the country, has not been honest. To those people you say what?

BUSH: On what issue?

PELLEY: Well, sir . . .

BUSH: Like the weapons of mass destruction?

PELLEY: No weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Yeah.

PELLEY: No credible connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

BUSH: Yeah.

PELLEY: The Office of Management and Budget said this war would cost somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion and now we're over 400.

BUSH: I gotcha. I gotcha. I gotcha.

PELLEY: The perception, sir, more than any one of those points, is that the administration has not been straight with . . .

BUSH: Well, I strongly disagree with that, of course. There were a lot of people, both Republicans and Democrats, who felt there were weapons of mass destruction. Many of the leaders in the Congress spoke strongly about the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons prior to my arrival in Washington, DC. And we're all looking at the same intelligence. So I strongly reject that this administration hasn't been straight with the American people. The minute we found out they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so. Scott, all I can do is just tell the truth, tell people exactly what's on my mind, which is what I do.

Sadly, Scott Pelley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, didn't follow up. But if he had read the newspaper back in 2003, he would know that Bush's claim isn't true. As Ackerman notes (and as we documented in All the President's Spin), Bush actually claimed that we did find WMD in an interview with Polish TV on May 29, 2003:

Q But, still, those countries who didn't support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

It was flatly untrue that the US found WMD -- Bush's claim was false then, and his claim to have been honest about not finding WMD is false now. (It is even highly questionable whether the trailers had served as weapons labs. As we wrote in ATPS, "When fifteen experts from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and [State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] gathered in June [2003] to analyze the evidence, only one agreed with the conclusion that they were most likely biological weapons labs.")

And even though the President made a false claim about an extremely important issue on the highest rated news program on television, no critical coverage of it appears in Google News. None. Have we reached the point where presidential deception is no longer news?

The myth of the bully pulpit

As Atrios points out, polling suggests President Bush's speech failed to overcome the public's opposition to an increase in troop levels in Iraq:

President Bush's address to the nation last week failed to move public opinion in support of his plan to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq and left Americans more pessimistic about the likely outcome of the war.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, more than 6 of 10 people back the idea of a non-binding congressional resolution expressing opposition to Bush's plan to commit an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq.

But we shouldn't be surprised by this. As I pointed out back in February 2005 in the context of President Bush's push for private accounts in Social Security, the evidence indicates that presidents and political elites can rarely move public opinion significantly in their direction through PR campaigns. But the myth of the bully pulpit persists because journalists are generally ignorant about political science or quantitative evidence more generally.

[Note: Presidents can raise the salience of an issue by putting it on the public agenda, but it's much harder to change people's minds about it.]

Bush's strange personal judgments

Via TNR's Jonathan Chait, the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes reveals the bizarre standards of judgment President Bush uses in making decisions:

The president is especially fond of General George Casey, the commander on the ground in Iraq. He invited Casey and his family to a meal at the White House last year, partly to size him up by seeing how he interacted with his wife and kids. In September, he told conservative journalists he was totally confident in Casey's advice. "If Casey is wrong, I'm wrong," he said.

Why not "size him up" by evaluating, say, how well Casey manages the war in Iraq? The President seems to rely heavily on snap judgments and irrelevant personality traits in making decisions. Consider what's already publicly known.

Back in 2001, Bush famously claimed he "looked [Vladimir Putin] in the eye" and "was able to get a sense of his soul." According to the Washington Post, Bush "complained privately about [former economic adviser Larry Lindsey's] failure to exercise physically" before forcing him out in 2002. And when interviewing Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Bush "asked him about the hardest decision he had ever made - and also how much he exercised."

So how did Bush pick General Petraeus to replace Casey? Did Barney like Petraeus when he came to the White House? Maybe Petraeus has a better bench press?

Mike Pence dissembles on 1990 recession

Time to play economic literacy 101 with another supply-sider. Rep. Mike Pence, a conservative Republican who ran unsuccessfully for minority leader, writes in the Wall Street Journal today that the 1990 tax increase signed by George H.W. Bush "ushered in economic recession":

We have been down this road before. In 1990, I was a young candidate for Congress when the last Bush administration sided with a Democrat majority in Congress to pass the largest tax increase in history, all in the name of bipartisanship and compromise. This compromise ushered in economic recession and a two-term Democratic administration in the White House. We cannot walk down the 1990 road to "compromise" again.

However, the National Bureau of Economic Research dates the beginning of the recession to July 1990, and the compromise bill that included a tax increase wasn't enacted until November 1990. Bush didn't even indicate he would support a tax increase until late June. This makes the Laffer Curve look like rigorous social science.

Flashback: McCain party switch hype

Oh, how the times change.

With John McCain proclaiming his conservative bona fides, it's worth revisiting the media-fueled hype about him becoming a Democrat, which included two big magazine articles in The New Republic and Washington Monthly in 2002 and entreaties to become John Kerry's running mate, which were hyped as a real possibility on the front page of the New York Times in 2004.

What happened? Here are four potentially reinforcing explanations:

(1) Despite having a reputation as a maverick, McCain's voting record is strongly conservative. He would never be comfortable as a Democrat.
(2) Given McCain's record, Democrats would never truly accept him, and his apostasy would make him the most hated man in America among Republicans. He'd be a man without a country.
(3) McCain concluded that his best shot at becoming president was as a Republican rather than a Democrat or independent.
(4) The war in Iraq reinforced the foreign policy differences between McCain and the Democrats, precluding any possible switch.

I put the most weight on #4 -- it's not a coincidence that the 2002 articles came out before the Iraq invasion was seen as a real possibility -- but all four probably play a role.

John Edwards: Too scripted?

John Edwards has a big problem. He's a serious candidate who will make Clinton and Obama sweat. But despite being a trial lawyer who often sounds scripted, he's trying to run as the candidate of authenticity. That's a mistake in a political culture that is obsessed with exposing hypocrisy and artifice. The way that Jason Zengerle savages Edwards in a New Republic profile is a preview of things to come:

Presidential candidates, of course, are given to pat answers--partly because they're so often asked the same questions, partly because being candid carries so many risks. But Edwards's exceptional guardedness seems strange for a candidate who now makes such a fetish of authenticity--for a candidate, in fact, who makes a pointed distinction between guarded, pabulum-spewing politicians and candid, truth-telling leaders. "What happens with politicians," he recently told a public radio interviewer, "is that you're conditioned not to be yourself. You're conditioned to say the same thing over and over and over, because that's the safe route. ... We need a leader, or leaders, who are willing to be themselves, who'll tell the truth as they see it." Or, as he complained to me about the last presidential campaign, during which he seems to think he acted more like a politician than a leader: "It was just plastic, there was a lot of plasticity to it. You know--young, Southern, dynamic, charismatic, beautiful family, all that. People need to see who I am, what my character is." Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like something Edwards says in a "behind the scenes" video his campaign recently posted on YouTube: "I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. ... I'd rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences."

About the only time Edwards seemed to switch off autopilot during the interview was when he talked about poverty. "You should cut me off on this," he warned, "because I spend a lot of time talking about this." And he did. He talked about his various ideas for fighting poverty--raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, reforming public housing, creating one million federally funded "stepping stone" jobs at nonprofits or government agencies. He talked about just how much he still had to learn and how even he sometimes felt despair about the intractable nature of the problem. "The cultural component of poverty and what feeds the cycle of poverty--I don't think I ever really got it until, like, for the fifteenth time I'm sitting with a 33-year-old, 32-year-old mother who has a 14-year-old who's having the third child," he said. "And you hear that and it's just, 'How will they ever get out?' You know, it's 'What can you do?'" He seemed genuinely offended when I asked him whether he was surprised that Americans' post-Katrina concern about poverty had waned so rapidly. "I think it's very superficial to suggest that there was interest [and] it's gone," he said. "It's not gone. It's still there. It's just not on the surface. ... It's deeper down."

A few hours later, Edwards went to one of those places where the interest in poverty was anything but buried: the dinner banquet honoring local community activists... Edwards launched into a speech that followed, almost to the letter, the same trajectory as our interview: the same policy proposals, the same observations, even the same revelatory anecdotes. "One of the things that I've been struck by in the work that we've been doing over the last several years is that you sit with a mother, a single mom ... and her 14-year-old daughter is giving birth to the third child. And it just feeds this cycle of poverty." What had sounded so fresh and genuine to me only hours before already seemed stale and scripted.

At this point in the cycle, Edwards should be trying to address his weaknesses (lack of policy knowledge, not being as brilliant as his rivals), not reinforcing them. Zengerle's piece is going to reinforce the conventional wisdom among reporters, which could create a narrative that will doom Edwards.

Goldberg: Hillary's experience vicarious

In a New Yorker article on the foreign policy views of the leading Democratic presidential contenders, Jeffrey Goldberg calls Hillary Clinton the most experienced candidate, but implicitly acknowledges the point I made last week -- Hillary's experience is largely as First Lady; she has no advantage in direct legislative or executive experience over her rivals:

Hillary Clinton, who has not announced her candidacy but is said to be close to doing so, is a connoisseur of statecraft, the candidate of the Democratic foreign-policy elite. She brings the most experience in foreign policy to the race—much of it gained vicariously, in her husband’s White House (my italics).

...Hillary Clinton’s decision to give Bush her approval in 2002 was influenced by her recent White House experience. “I have respect for Presidential decision-making and I saw what the Republican Congress had done to Bill on a range of issues, denying him the authority to deal with Bosnia and Kosovo and second-guessing him on every imaginable issue,” she said. “And I don’t think that that’s good for the country, and I had no problem in giving President Bush the authority to do what he stated he would do and what I was assured privately on many occasions would be done.”

Maybe I'll print up some bumper stickers with the slogan "Hillary '08: More vicarious experience"...

Limbaugh: Boxer tried to "lynch" Rice

One important tactic in the conservative arsenal is to throw civil rights language back at liberals in order to put them on the defensive.

Here's a case in point. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) recently made a nasty allusion to Condoleezza Rice's lack of immediate family during a Congressional hearing on the war in Iraq:

Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.

Rather than simply stating that Rice's family situation is irrelevant, Rush Limbaugh accused Boxer of "trying to lynch" Rice "right before Martin Luther King Day" (as Media Matters documented):

LIMBAUGH: Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this -- an African American woman -- right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here.

The statement is nonsensical on its face -- the incident has nothing to do with Rice's racial background or Martin Luther King Day. But by reversing civil rights language against Boxer in this way, Limbaugh is trying to delegitimize criticism of Rice generally.

Dick Durbin's Obama '08 petition

I was surprised to see that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is already running text ads (PDF) urging a presidential run by Barack Obama:

Obama for President
Sign Dick Durbin's
petition urging Barack
Obama to run for
President
www.DickDurbin.com

It's customary to back your home-state colleague, but Durbin is being a team player to back Obama this early. Remember, Obama is the junior senator from his state. A recent comparison comes from Ted Kennedy, who offered strained endorsements of his junior colleague John Kerry in 2004 (he and Kerry, and their staffs, have a legendary rivalry). It's hard to imagine Kennedy's staff spending money promoting Kerry before he declared in 2003, and there's no way they're doing so now.