Brendan Nyhan

APSA blog slowdown

FYI Posting will be slow (or nonexistent) through Saturday -- I'm at the American Political Science Association conference in Boston.

Myth of Casey 1992 non-speech everywhere

Given that Bob Casey spoke at the Democratic convention tonight, it's worth noting once again that his father was not barred from speaking in 1992 because he had pro-life views. Since I posted about this, Media Matters has been tracking this myth all over the press, including NPR, CNN, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press.

The abyss of cable news convention coverage

John Sides of The Monkey Cage has my favorite post so far on news coverage of the convention:

I turned on the CNN’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention for the first time, and within 6 seconds I heard Carl Bernstein refer to the “national Clinton psychodrama.” Shoot me now.

That's why I keep them on mute (when I watch at all).

Jacob Weisberg hypes Obama landslide myth

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is the latest journalist to suggest that Barack Obama should be winning by a large margin (via Andrew Sullivan):

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

"What gives" is that the fundamentals actually predict a close race. Leading political science models forecast that Obama will receive 51-53% of the two-party vote and he's at 51% in the Pollster.com estimate. Weisberg is right to suggest that racism may play a role in the eventual outcome (I've made the same prediction), but Obama's performance so far is not out of line with what we would expect from any Democrat. Unfortunately, as I've argued before, journalists tend to create dramatized narratives of campaigns and ignore quantitative analysis. The result in this year's election is anxiety bordering on panic among Democrats. Race may yet cost Obama this election, but he's doing fine so far.

Richard Cohen and his critics

Matthew Yglesias mocks Richard Cohen for comparing his liberal critics to Communists:

It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!

The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

Isn't this partially a function of ideological proximity? Liberals are sensitive to Cohen because he's supposedly a liberal columnist but is more of an establishment hack in practice. Similarly, Cohen is sensitive to liberal disapproval because his personal views seems to tend toward the center-left. By contrast, I assume conservatives have always disliked Cohen but they ignore him and he does the same. It's not unlike what happened to Joe Klein when he started blogging a few years ago and found out that liberals were unhappy with him.

Kevin Drum's new blog

If you haven't heard, Kevin Drum, who used to blog for Washington Monthly, is now blogging for Mother Jones. Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has taken over as head blogger for the Monthly. Congratulations to both.

Charles Blow's homophobic slur of Obama

Charles Blow, a "visual Op-Ed columnist" for the New York Times, offered an ugly homophobic slur of Barack Obama in his column yesterday, calling Obama's response to the crisis in Georgia "tepid and swishy" (links in online edition):

Lately, you’ve demonstrated an unsettling penchant for overly nuanced statements that meander into the cerebral. Earth to Barack: to Main Street America, nuance equals confusion. You don’t have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.

For example, your performance at Rick Warren’s faith forum came across as professorial and pensive, not presidential. McCain was direct and compelling. Your initial response to the crisis in Georgia was tepid and swishy. McCain was muscular and straightforward.

For those who are unfamiliar with this slur, here's the relevant definition of "swishy" from Merriam-Webster: "usually disparaging: characterized by effeminate behavior." In other words, Blow equates Obama's perceived weakness with effeminate behavior (i.e. homosexuality) and contrasts it with McCain's "muscular" response (i.e. manly and not homosexual).

In fact, if you watch the YouTube video that Blow links for the phrase "tepid and swishy," you'll see there's nothing effeminate about Obama's behavior (not that there's anything wrong with that). Blow is projecting the stereotype onto Obama because he disagrees with the candidate's response. It's disgusting.

PS Has anyone else noticed how a vast portion of center-left commentary on presidential elections consists of journalists like Blow giving tactical advice to professional politicians? Can we talk about something else?

Rove pushes "Obama is lazy" meme again

Karl Rove is again pushing the suggestion that Barack Obama is lazy, a claim that connotes ugly racial stereotypes about African Americans.

Back in September of last year, a "senior White House official" (apparently Rove) accused Obama of "intellectual laziness" in an interview with Bill Sammon of The Examiner:

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was "capable" of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

"It's sort of like, 'that's all I need to get by,' which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And a laziness, an intellectual laziness."

He cited an example from Obama's memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in which the senator complains that many "government programs don't work as advertised." Five days after the book was published last fall, Obama was asked to name some of those government programs by Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"And he can't give an example," the official said. "Look, if you wrote the book, you should have thought through what it was. But he's sitting there, fumbling around."

Then, in a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rove described Obama as "often lazy":

Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting "present" on bills important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun-control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.

Most recently, Rove revived the meme in a WSJ op-ed Thursday that suggested Obama needs to answer doubts that he is "intellectually lazy" at the convention:

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, needs to reassure Americans he is up to the job. Voters recognize he represents change, yet they are unsettled. Does he have the experience to be president? There are growing concerns, which the McCain campaign has tapped, that Mr. Obama is an inexperienced celebrity-politician smitten with his own press clippings.

And is there really a "there" there? Besides withdrawing from Iraq, it's not clear what issues are really important to him. Does he do his homework or is he intellectually lazy? Is there an issue on which he would do the unpopular thing or break with party orthodoxy? Is his candidacy about important answers or simply about us being the "change we've been waiting for"? Substance will help diminish concerns about his heft and fitness for the job.

Unfortunately, Obama's campaign has to expect that code words and innuendo will increasingly be used to inflame racial stereotypes in this way. It's shameful if not surprising.

How liberal are Obama and Biden?

In the wake of Joe Biden's nomination, Fred Barnes drags out the National Journal 2007 Senate ratings to argue that Obama and Biden are the first and third most liberal sentors:

Once regarded as a centrist, Mr. Biden was rated by the National Journal in 2007 as the third most liberal member of the Senate. Mr. Obama was rated the most liberal. Neither has a record of bucking the wishes of liberal interest groups or promoting bipartisanship.

However, as I pointed out back in February, the National Journal ratings are seen as simplistic by political scientists who study voting in Congress. The far more respected ranking produced by UCSD's Keith Poole and UCLA's Jeff Lewis places Obama and Biden as the 11th and 10th most liberal senators (respectively) in the first half of the 110th Senate (2007) and as the 21st and 29th most liberal in the 109th Senate (2005-2006).

By contrast, Poole and Lewis rate the "maverick" McCain as the eighth most conservative senator in the first half of the 110th and the second most conservative in the 109th, so the comparison isn't actually as flattering as Barnes thinks (though see my previous post on the methodological problems posed by his inconsistent voting record).

Things to remember Friday and Saturday

A handy clip 'n' save guide:
1. Vice presidential selections rarely affect election outcomes.*
2. The selection is therefore only likely to be important insofar as the VP choice (a) helps or hurts the president they serve during his time in office and (b) becomes more likely to be a future president.
3. The selection should therefore be assessed primarily in light of #2, not #1. (It will not be.)

* You could tell a story where Obama's VP could help prevent defections from white working-class voters who would otherwise have voted Democratic (a possibility that was obviously not relevant in past elections). However, this idea is purely speculative and would be difficult to test even after the fact.

Joe Biden's greatest blowhard moment

In anticipation of a possible VP pick, Mickey Kaus flags the New York Times destroying Joe Biden's various false boasts about his academic background back in 1988 -- it's the journalistic equivalent of "The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire":

Most of Mr. Biden's statement was in response to a report in this week's issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter's request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ''Frank.'' Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ''I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.''

He then went on to say that he ''went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,'' Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ''ended up in the top half'' of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ''the outstanding student in the political science department'' and ''graduated with three degrees from college.''

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ''I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.''

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ''I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors - I said 'three' and should have said 'two.' '' Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.

''With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,'' the statement went on. ''My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.''

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ''My recollection is - and I'd have to confirm this - but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.'' Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ''on half scholarship based on financial need.''

In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ''based in part on academics'' as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ''arranged for my first year's room and board by placing me as an assitant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.''

As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.

Here are two other recent Biden lowlights from my archives in case he gets picked tomorrow:

-Biden blames the Virginia Tech massacre and Don Imus's racial comments on the Gingrich revolution
-Biden falsely claims the Senate hearings he held in 2002 dramatically changed public opinion about Iraq

To be sure, Biden can be impressive, especially on foreign policy. But I still think he's an incorrigible blowhard.

Update 8/22 12:26 AM: With all that said, today's David Brooks column arguing for Biden is still reasonably convincing. Of the four who are reportedly under serious consideration, I think I'd ultimately prefer him over Bayh, Sebelius, or Kaine.

Update 8/24 11:10 PM -- Via Kaus, here is the video, which is not flattering to Biden:

Limbaugh: Obama "little black man-child"

Rush Limbaugh called Barack Obama a "little black man-child" yesterday, invoking cultural stereotypes which infantilize black men:

Obama's patriotism is not being attacked in an ad. McCain's just out there saying he's putting his own personal political ambition ahead of the country's. It's -- you know, it's just -- it's just we can't hit the girl. I don't care how far feminism's saying, you can't hit the girl, and you can't -- you can't criticize the little black man-child. You just can't do it, 'cause it's just not right. It's not fair. He's such a victim.

Previously, Limbaugh compared Obama to a "little boy," attributing this view to "some women" who "want to protect him":

He can't take a punch, he's weak, and he whines. I’m sure some women find that attractive because they would look at him as a little boy and would want to protect him … But it embarrasses me as a man.

It's loathsome stuff. Remember how many elites associate with this man despite his long history of offensive comments about race (among other things). Just a few weeks ago, all three Bushes (41, 43, and Jeb) called in to congratulate Limbaugh his 20th anniversary of broadcasting. In 2002, he was a commentator for NBC on Election Night. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams said in 2005 "it's my duty to listen to Rush." And Katie Couric asked Limbaugh to contribute a "free speech" segment to CBS Evening News in 2006.

Update 8/22 2:59 PM -- Here's the audio for those who are interested (QuickTime movie).

Converging to election fundamentals

I make a big point on this blog of highlighting the importance of the fundamentals in determing the outcomes of presidential elections. Andrew Gelman has a nice graph illustrating how the fundamentals become more relevant as the election approaches (I've added a red arrow illustrating how far out we are from election day right now):

We should expect to see this process continuing in the next few weeks. As UW-Milwaukee's Tom Holbrook points out, one of the key effects of conventions is to bring the polls closer to the expected outcome:

[C]andidates who are running ahead of where they "should" be (based on the expected election outcome) tend to get smaller bumps, and those running behind their expected level of support get larger bumps. In this way, the conventions help bring the public closer to the expected outcome and help to make elections more predictable.

On the other hand, the fundamentals seems pretty closely aligned with current polls so it's not clear how much either candidate will gain from the conventions. Leading models forecast that Obama will receive 51.5-53% of the two-party vote and he's currently at 50.8% in the Pollster.com estimate. At the most, we might expect a small net gain for Obama (i.e. a slightly larger convention bump).

James Fallows on the effects of debates

James Fallows claims in The Atlantic that "moments" from televised general-election debates have "figured in the ultimate outcome" in the presidential elections of 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004:

There have been nine series of televised general-election debates. These started with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, resumed with Ford-Carter in 1976, and have been a campaign fixture ever since. In all but one election, the debates produced a moment that figured in the ultimate outcome. (The exception was Clinton-Dole in 1996, when neither man said anything that changed a voter’s mind.) The dramatic exchanges that made a difference—Ronald Reagan’s amused and dismissive “There you go again” against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Michael Dukakis’s too-composed look when asked in 1988 how he would react if his wife were raped, George H.W. Bush’s desperate “when will this end?” glance at his wristwatch during a town-hall session with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992, Al Gore’s operatic sighs about George W. Bush in 2000—would have passed unnoticed in a transcript. The transcript conveys only part of, for example, the alarming meandering in Ronald Reagan’s soliloquy at the end of his second 1984 debate with Walter Mondale. Reagan, looking confused and forgetting his point, was rescued only when the moderator, Edwin Newman, announced that time was up: “Mr. President, I’m obliged to cut you off there, under the rules of the debate. I’m sorry.” Mondale should have been sorry, too.

But as I pointed out on Monday, journalists tend to construct post hoc narratives that attribute election outcomes to dramatic visuals like negative campaign ads and debate exchanges. Here, by contrast, is what the eminent political scientist James Stimson concludes about the effect of debates in a passage from his book Tides of Consent that I highlighted back in January (my emphasis):

What we have seen is perhaps some influence. The evidence is inconclusive to say either that debates matter or that they do not. But if they do matter at all, their influence is vastly smaller than, say, the conventions. The reelection landslides [1964, 1972, 1984, 1996] show that once voters have decided, debates will not change the outcomes.

There is no case where we can trace a substantial shift to the debates. But in elections that were close at debate times, there are cases (1960, 1980, 2000) where the debates might have been the final nudge. As to why they are so often featured as the central story line of a presidential election campaign, I lean to the idea that they are conveniently available TV footage.

The issue is that the debates happen so late in the campaign that the popular vote winner has generally already taken an insurmountable lead, as this graphic (which combines the trajectories of 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 2000) illustrates:

Here are the individual trajectories of the competitive races:

Stimson also makes several points about specific elections that conflict with Fallows. First, despite Reagan's shaky performance in his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, he regained his form and the debates ended up being irrelevant (Reagan won in a landslide). Also, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush actually gained ground on their opponents after the debates despite committing much-hyped gaffes. Finally, it's worth noting that Stimson points to a different Reagan line from 1980 than Fallows ("Ask yourself if you were better off than four years ago"), which highlights the subjectivity of debate interpretation.

The narratives of election smears

A New York Times Week in Review piece yesterday seems to attribute various election outcomes to widely publicized negative attacks:

For raw, crushing smear power, the 1964 “Daisy” ad, made for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would mean the end of life on earth, has still never quite been equaled.

And the 11th-hour telephone “survey” of Republican primary voters in South Carolina in 2000, asking “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” will probably keep its place on the Mount Rushmore of smear for a while.

...The unending news cycle, the explosion of the blogosphere and the freelance work of independent groups like the Swift Boat veterans of 2004, whose campaign severely undercut John Kerry’s bid for president, has made every campaign entourage a kind of road crew cum paramedic team.

... The rhythm of campaigning may have quickened, but the notion that a counterpunch delayed was a counterpunch denied did not seem to take hold in conventional wisdom until 1988.

That year, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts fell under the wheels of a negative campaign juggernaut — watching from a dignified remove as the supporters of George H. W. Bush wiped out Mr. Dukakis’s 17-point lead by defining him as the man who furloughed the rapist-killer Willie Horton.

While I obviously have normative concerns about misleading campaign attacks, it's much less clear that the LBJ ad had "crushing smear power," that the Swift Boat ads "severely undercut" John Kerry, or that Michael Dukakis lost his 17-point lead in the polls as a result of the Willie Horton ad. The leading models of presidential elections predicted that Goldwater, Kerry, and Dukakis would lose. Journalists tend to construct post hoc narratives based on dramatic visuals from debates and campaign ads, ignoring the fundamentals that actually drive elections (the state of the economy, presidential approval, war casualties, etc.).

Update 8/19 3:49 PM: Last sentence edited for clarity and style.

Nicole Wallace: Don't criticize McCain

McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace is at it again.

A little over a week ago, Wallace invoked McCain's war herosim in an effort to delegitimize criticism of her boss, saying Barack Obama was "fillet[ing] an American hero, a former POW" when he criticizes McCain on the stump.

Yesterday, she used the same approach in responding to the suggestion that John McCain might have listened to questions asked of Obama during an event with Rick Warren (via MoJo Blog):

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

"The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous," Ms. Wallace said.

Apparently, Wallace thinks McCain's POW heroism means that he shouldn't be criticized or forced to respond to questions about possible improprieties. It's wildly anti-democratic.

(Moreover, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the irony is that reporters and McCain's campaign keep claiming that McCain is reluctant to discuss his POW experience.)

NYT adopts conservative jargon

Since when do New York Times reporters use "big government" as an adjective? The lede of a Jackie Calmes story on Friday predicts "a new round of big-government financial regulation" that is vaguely attributed to "experts":

Modernizing the nation’s New Deal-era defenses against financial disaster is not high among the priorities that either Barack Obama or John McCain list for the next president. But events could well plop the issue right in the middle of the winner’s plate.

After a string of financial scandals and crises, a quarter century of deregulation and free-market experimentation is giving way to a new round of big-government financial regulation, regardless of who captures the White House, experts say.

Though a single expert (Alan Greenspan) is quoted expressing opposition to aggressive new regulation, the characterization of proposed rule changes as "big-government" is an embellishment added by Calmes. It's reminiscent of the way that newspapers adopted the jargon of "death tax" and "partial birth abortion" in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

What's especially striking is that the Times, which is frequently accused of having a liberal bias, used language that is more conservative than even the Bush White House. In a recent interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for "[m]ore modern regulation":

[W]e have a regulatory system that is very outdated. It was put in place many years ago, and...

MR. BROKAW: There's going to have to be more modern regulation...

SEC'Y PAULSON: Yes, absolutely.

MR. BROKAW: ...of Wall Street across the board.

SEC'Y PAULSON: Across the board. More modern regulation and more authorities.

Liberal media critics, take note.

Update 8/20 11:34 AM: Commenter Jinchi notes that the Times seems to use "big government" frequently in its news reporting. I'd want to go through the stories individually, but at a glance the frequency with which they're using the term is pretty surprising.

Frank Rich: The long blog

Maybe I'm late to this since I get the print New York Times on Sunday, but I thought it was interesting to see that Frank Rich's online column is like a long week-in-review blog post full of links supporting his claims. I'm not a fan of Rich (who frequently distorts facts in an effort to dramatize politics), but it's a useful way to improve the stale columnist op-ed format.

PS Rich's column today does a nice job of undermining the Obama landslide myth:

No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

However, he then attributes Obama's narrow lead to the fact that "the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is." And while it's true that the press coverage of McCain's background hasn't been particularly skeptical, a simpler answer is that the race is close because the political fundamentals are close. If the economy were in deep recession, then Obama would be leading by 15 points.

Belated slow blogging alert

I'm on vacation in California through Sunday so blogging will be light (or nonexistent) until next week...

The Obama landslide myth persists

Andrew Sullivan is the latest political writer to repeat the unsupported claim that Barack Obama should be winning by a greater margin. He describes Obama as having "stalled in the polls" and then tries to explain "voters’ reluctance to swing behind Obama in landslide numbers."

Similarly, former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd told the Washington Post that Obama "is underperforming where he should be."

Contrary to Sullivan and Dowd's claims, though, the political fundamentals predict a close election in November -- leading models forecast Obama getting 51-53% of the two-party vote. And, in fact, the Pollster.com estimate currently shows him getting about 51.4% of the two-party vote in national polls. So he's not far off from where he "should be" (though, to be clear, the polls at this stage are a relatively poor predictor of the eventual outcome).

Howard Wolfson plays the "If only" game

I don't have much patience with former Clinton flack Howard Wolfson's claim that Hillary would have been the Democratic nominee if John Edwards had been out of the race.

First, we don't know what would have happened if Edwards was out of the race. Al Gore could have jumped in or another candidate might have picked up momentum.

Second, we already know that almost anything can affect the outcomes of primary races, which have been shown due to be inherently unpredictable due to the role of momentum (voters shifting to support who they think is going to win).

Along the same lines, you can just as easily imagine multiple scenarios in which chance occurrences prevent Hillary from getting as far as she did. For instance, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky made Hillary a more sympathetic figure, pushing up her favorability numbers. If that affair doesn't happen, does she even reach the US Senate? You can play this game endlessly.

"Hot tubbing" of expert witnesses

Today's New York Times reports what may the best legal term ever and a good substantive idea to boot -- forcing opposing expert witnesses to testify together, which Australian lawyers call "hot tubbing":

He might have preferred a new way of hearing expert testimony that Australian lawyers call hot tubbing.

In that procedure, also called concurrent evidence, experts are still chosen by the parties, but they testify together at trial — discussing the case, asking each other questions, responding to inquiries from the judge and the lawyers, finding common ground and sharpening the open issues...

Australian judges have embraced hot tubbing. “You can feel the release of the tension which normally infects the evidence-gathering process,” Justice Peter McClellan of the Land and Environmental Court of New South Wales said in a speech on the practice. “Not confined to answering the question of the advocates,” he added, experts “are able to more effectively respond to the views of the other expert or experts.”

Balz: Close campaign still close

I don't understand political journalism. Dan Balz is a top reporter, but the lede for his big-picture analysis of the presidential campaign doesn't make sense:

The opening round of the general-election campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain has produced memorable images, negative ads, snarling e-mails and pointed exchanges over war, the economy and energy. What it has not done is begin to resolve questions among voters that both candidates must address to win in November.

Has any race with close fundamentals ever "resolve[d] questions among voters that both candidates must address to win" by August? Voters are not paying attention yet. The only races that are resolved by now are the ones that were destined to be blowouts.

Nicole Wallace undermines McCain criticism

One of the key tactics of the Bush White House after 9/11 was to try to delegitimize any criticism of President Bush. Media Matters reports that McCain spokesperson Nicole Wallace took a similar approach on MSNBC, telling David Gregory that Barack Obama is "fillet[ing] an American hero, a former POW" when he criticizes McCain on the stump:

GREGORY: Let's talk about this campaign --

WALLACE: Sure.

GREGORY: -- and talk about McCain campaign strategy. You have tried, the campaign has recently, to tarnish Obama's credibility and his image in a couple of ways. On the one hand, it is to describe him as a celebrity, to use Britney Spears, Paris Hilton to suggest he's sort of famous for being famous, that he's a lightweight. That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, it is to reduce his energy plan to the idea of the tire gauge, to suggest that his whole energy plan is really about whether there's enough air in the tires.

So the question is, are these ambush political tactics? And is that consistent with the original maverick that you [unintelligible] John McCain is?

WALLACE: You know, two quick things here, David. One, I never hear anyone put it to the Obama campaign, the internal deliberations that they may have gone to when they made the strategic decision to essentially fillet an American hero, a former POW, on the stump every day, which is what comes out of their candidate's mouth every day on the stump.

In other words, McCain shouldn't be criticized because of his experience as a prisoner of war. It's a profoundly anti-democratic statement. Here's the video:

Costas presses Bush in Olympics interview

Was anyone else surprised that Bob Costas made the traditional softball interview of the president by a sportscaster so substantive? (Hopefully the White House press corps was taking notes.) Judging by Bush's joke at the end of the interview about Costas not letting him leave, he may have been surprised too.

Update 8/11 11:13 AM: The YouTube video I had previously embedded has been taken down; here's an NBC video link that excludes some OS/browser/chipset combinations, including mine.

The myth of Bob Casey's 1992 non-speech

A New York Times story this morning headlined "Obama’s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics" begins with this parable:

Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party’s platform and powerful constituencies. Many Catholics, once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, never forgot what they considered a slight.

In fact, the campaign officials who made the decision said Casey was denied a speaking slot because he hadn't endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket, as Michael Crowley reported in The New Republic:

According to those who actually doled out the 1992 convention speaking slots, Casey was denied a turn for one simple reason: his refusal to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. "It's [Casey's claim that he was denied a convention speech because of his pro-life views] just not factual!" stammers James Carville, apoplectic over Casey's claims. "You'd have to be idiotic to give a speaking role to a person who hadn't even endorsed you." "Why are you doing this to me?" moans Paul Begala, who, with Carville, managed two Casey campaigns before joining Clinton's team in 1992. "I love Bob Casey, but my understanding was that the dispute was not about his right-to-life views, it was about the Clinton-Gore ticket."

Media Matters further points out that anti-abortion speakers have repeatedly been given the opportunity to speak at Democratic conventions:

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Sens. John Breaux (D-LA) and Howell Heflin (D-AL), and five other governors who opposed abortion rights did address the convention in 1992, as detailed in a September 16, 1996, article in The New Republic on the Casey myth. In addition, anti-abortion speakers have spoken at every Democratic convention since 1992, including Breaux in 1996 and 2000, former House Democratic Whip David Bonior (D-MI) in 1996 and 2000, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2000 and 2004.

Unfortunately, the story reinforces an accurate narrative about the parties dividing more clearly on the abortion issue. As a result, it lives on as conventional wisdom more than fifteen years later.

Update 8/7 3:28 PM: In its post on the controversy today, Media Matters unearths another salient fact: [T]he Times itself reported in an August 1, 1996, article that White House officials 'have always said that had [Casey] not declined to endorse Mr. [Bill] Clinton in 1992, he would have been allowed to speak to the convention.'"

Tom Maguire dissents, citing a 2005 post. I stand by what I wrote, but I do hope we can agree that the Times should have acknowledged that this claim is disputed.

McCain distorts Obama on nuclear power

When are the media going to start pointing out that John McCain and his campaign are misrepresenting Barack Obama's position on nuclear power?

On Monday, McCain said "[Obama] doesn't want nuclear power" and claimed that "[Obama] continues to oppose the use of nuclear power." Similarly, during a press conference yesterday, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin claimed "[Obama] has said no to nuclear power."

However, as Time's Michael Scherer points out, these claims are all false:

Does Obama oppose the "use of nuclear power"? No. But he is more cautious about expanding nuclear (which would require significant federal spending, say most analysts) than McCain.

Here's what Obama's position paper on energy says (PDF):

Safe and Secure Nuclear Energy: Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our non- carbon generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing four key issues: public right-to-know, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation.

And here's what he said in New Hampshire last year:

On one specific energy matter that is important to many in New Hampshire, he would not pledge to stop all new nuclear power plants.

"When you're a politician, you're always tempted to get some applause, but on this one I have to be more qualified," Obama said.

"We shouldn't simply remove nuclear power from the equation," Obama said. "But there has to be a high standard and a high threshold. ... I'm not going to automatically rule it out as a reasonable option."

None of this is particularly hard. Yet the New York Times failed spectacularly at fact-checking McCain today, referencing McCain's misrepresentation of Obama's position in an oblique, "he said"/"she said" aside:

Even before Mr. McCain left South Dakota, where he campaigned at the freewheeling Sturgis Motorcycle Rally on Monday night, and headed to the plant in Michigan, Mr. Obama’s campaign had put out a statement rebuffing what it called Mr. McCain’s misrepresentation of Mr. Obama’s position on nuclear power."

The Times then quotes the passage from Obama's policy paper above. However, the reader is not told what McCain said or why Obama's campaign alleged that he was misrepresented. And the wording used by the Times ("what [the Obama campaign] called Mr. McCain’s misrepresentation of Mr. Obama’s position") offers no indication that McCain actually did misrepresent Obama's position.

The myth of the Democratic landslide

John Sides reiterates an important point: the perception that Barack Obama "should" be winning by a huge margin (echoed today by David Brooks) is not supported by empirical evidence. The leading statistical models of presidential election outcomes forecast a narrow Obama win.

The consequences of this are actually more serious than most people realize. In the seminal work on mandates, Jim Stimson, David Peterson and two other political scientists argue that "mandates" are a collective interpretation of election results that carries an informational signal to nervous incumbents worried about re-election. As a result, members of Congress briefly shift their voting behavior in the direction of the perceived mandate (the three times in which this happened, Stimson et al argue, are 1964, 1980, and 1994). With expectations about Obama so high, there's almost no way that anything short of an LBJ-esque landslide will be perceived as a "mandate," which will make it harder for him to enact his legislative agenda.

Update 8/6 11:41 AM: A related story from the Financial Times: "Democrats anxious for Obama to widen lead"

I think one source of confusion on this issue is that the overall political environment is extremely negative for Congressional Republicans. Given the large number of retirements and competitive seats, particularly in the Senate, it looks like Democrats will pick up a number of seats in November. As a result, people assume that Obama has an equally strong advantage. However, as I argue above, the conditions that predict presidential election outcomes are much less definitive.

The Bush 41 grocery scanner myth

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Rainey revives a longstanding myth that will frequently crop up again in stories about "gaffes" and supposedly out-of-touch politicians:

In 1992, George H.W. Bush reportedly was surprised to find a price scanner in a grocery store, which "proved" he was out of touch with the common man.

In fact, however, the New York Times report on which this claim is based is groundless. The Times had not been at the event in question but instead based its story on a pool report, which indicated that Bush was impressed by new scanner technology that could weigh groceries and read damaged bar codes. Unfortunately, the Times report (which the newspaper did not retract) fit a popular stereotype about Bush and has thus persisted for years.

Update 8/4 3:23 PM -- Rainey responds by email that he meant to cast doubt on the story:

Indeed, that's why I used the term "reportedly". The point of the example was that its takes little or nothing to caricature some candidates.

If this was his intended meaning, my concern is that the wording was far too subtle -- most people (including me) will not recognize that he was implicitly questioning the validity of the report. I read it as him questioning the conclusion (that it proved Bush was out of touch), not the premise (Bush was surprised).

Update 8/5 5:04 PM -- Commenter David points out that the dreaded Mark Leibovich of the New York Times also repeats the myth in the Sunday Times:

Mr. McCain’s sense of wonder evoked the episode in the early 1990s when George H. W. Bush became overly impressed upon seeing a price scanner at a supermarket check-out counter. It suggested to some people that the president, who had spent four years in the White House after spending eight years as vice president, was out of touch with the lives of average Americans.

Obama's dollar bill comment triply distorted

Has anyone else noticed that Barack Obama's comment that George W. Bush and John McCain are going to remind voters that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills" is being distorted in multiple ways? It's a reminder of how disturbed the national debate on race can be.

Here's what Obama said:

Obama began his day Wednesday in Springfield, Mo., charging: "Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky."

In Rolla and then in Union, Obama issued similar lines. "They're going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he's got a funny name, and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills,' and they're going to send out nasty e-mails," he told an audience in Union.

First, as commenter Seth, Mark Thoma, and others point out, McCain did superimpose Obama's face onto a $100 bill in a previous campaign ad -- a fact that has been omitted from most coverage of the controversy:

Second, the tense of Obama's comment has been distorted by reporters and the McCain campaign, who are asking Obama to back up a claim he did not make. Here's what Dan Balz wrote on the Washington Post website:

Four things are already clear from the controversy. First, Obama campaign officials, lacking any example of McCain ever pointing directly or indirectly at Obama's race as an issue in the campaign, have backpedaled rapidly away from any suggestion that their Republican opponent is using the very tactics Obama suggested on Wednesday.

Campaign manager David Plouffe was pressed hard during a conference call on Thursday for examples and could not point to any. An inquiry to the Obama campaign later in the day produced no immediate response and later no answer to a direct question asking for evidence to buttress Obama's suggestion that McCain would try to scare people into not voting for Obama because he's black.

In fact, however, Obama's statement was a prediction, not a description of events to date. To review, he said "what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me... You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills." Obama did not say that McCain and Bush have appealed to racial stereotypes and prejudice thus far (though they have in various ways, including highlighting Obama playing basketball in an ad, suggesting that only McCain puts "country first", and accusing him of "intellectual laziness"). Predicting future misbehavior is a cheap way to attack an opponent, but it doesn't excuse distorting what Obama said.

Third, as I noted on Friday, Obama's statement that Republicans would make race salient has been distorted by the McCain campaign into the (false) claim that he accused John McCain of being a racist -- a frequently used tactic designed to delegitimize criticism of the political exploitation of race. McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said on "Today" that "We are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, to be able to be painted as racist." Similarly, McCain official Steve Schmidt said "we will not allow John McCain to be smeared by Senator Obama as a racist for offering legitimate criticism." And yesterday, Senator Joe Lieberman even invoked McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh to justify his claim that McCain "does not have a bigoted bone in his body."

As a result of these attacks, Obama consultant David Axelrod was forced to deny another claim that Obama did not make, saying "Barack Obama never called John McCain a racist." Obama later added that "In no way do I think that John McCain’s campaign was being racist; I think they’re cynical."

The reality is that non-racist politicians can and do exploit the issue of race. McCain's personal beliefs prove nothing about the political strategy of his campaign. Shouldn't reporters understand this?

McClatchy debunks VP hype

Yet another reason you should be reading the fantastic journalism of McClatchy's Washington bureau -- they debunk silly media hype rather than repeating it:

Excited about VP picks? In November, they rarely matter
By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Despite all the hyperventilating about whom they're likely to be, vice presidential candidates rarely make much of a difference in the fall elections.

"They can only make a small difference at the margins," said James Riddlesperger, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth.

They don't get much news coverage after an initial burst when they're selected, and they often lose their own states.

Where else have you read that in a news story in the last two months?

New projection: Obama 53%

Andrew Gelman notes that the political scientists Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien have released a paper projecting an Obama win with 53% of the two-party presidential vote based on leading economics indicators and current trial heat polling. The economist Ray Fair, who has a well-known model that I've criticized in the past (see this Larry Bartels paper [PDF] for more), updated his projection on July 31 and now predicts that Obama will get 51.5% of the two-party vote. The more respected Bread and Peace model of Douglas Hibbs projects an Obama win with 52% of the two-party vote.

While these may seem like relatively narrow projected victories, Gelman notes in a separate post that incumbent parties rarely lose the popular vote by more than a few points. This may be encouraging to the Democrats who think Obama "should" have a bigger lead in the polls right now given the favorable political environment. On the other hand, it highlights the incredible tightrope he has to walk as the first African American presidential nominee of a major party. If Obama's race costs him more than a point or two in the polls (something the above models cannot forecast and do not incorporate), it's likely to be decisive.

Obama and the "race card" debate

John McCain's campaign has accused Barack Obama of having "played the race card" for suggesting Republicans would highlight his race in the general election campaign:

Senator John McCain’s campaign accused Senator Barack Obama on Thursday of playing “the race card,” citing his remarks that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

...“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, charged in a statement with which Mr. McCain later said he agreed. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

According to MSNBC, Obama's campaign is (absurdly) denying that the "dollar bills" comment referred to him being black:

McCain has accused Obama of playing politics with race for predicting that the likely Republican nominee and others in the GOP would try to scare voters by saying the Democrat "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." Obama's spokesmen denied he was referring to being black, although all the presidents on U.S. currency are white.

This is silly. I don't think there's any question that Obama's race will be made salient by Republicans at various levels, though this is of course usually done in less blatant ways than pointing out that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." It's also not clear to what extent these insinuations will be made by John McCain and his campaign rather than surrogates and political allies.

There are two problems with these debates. The first is that our political discourse doesn't allow for any middle ground between race-neutral statements and (supposed) accusations of racism. For instance, during his confirmation as Attorney General, John Ashcroft was criticized for exploiting the issue of race. Ashcroft's supporters falsely characterized this as an accusation of racism and asserted that Ashcroft is not a racist. The same tactic was also used to defend Ronald Reagan from charges that he exploited the issue of race.

Now McCain's campaign is using the same approach, falsely suggesting that Obama said McCain was a racist:

"We are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, to be able to be painted as racist," Davis said Friday on "Today" on NBC. "We've seen this happen before and we're not going to let it happen to us."

..."Barack Obama never called John McCain a racist," Axelrod said on "The Early Show" on CBS. "What Barack Obama was saying is he's not exactly from Central Casting for presidential candidates."

A related tactic is for Republicans to raise criticisms of Obama with racial overtones but deny that those overtones exist (for instance, accusing Obama of "intellectual laziness" or raising his "trash talking" as "an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard"). Then, when Democrats like Obama object, they can be characterized as "playing the race card," not Republicans. (Using "the race card" to delegitimize critiques of racial insensitivity or exploitation of racial prejudice is similar to the "racial McCarthyism" buzzword promoted by David Horowitz and other conservatives.)

The irony is that "race card" was previously used by Democrats to describe GOP exploitation of the issue of race (as in the Harvey Gantt/Jesse Helms US Senate race). But increasingly Republicans have turned it back at Democrats. Here's one of the earliest high-profile examples from a New York Times article (7/12/91) on the Congressional Black Caucus announcing its opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas:

[Senator John C.] Danforth, who has acted as Judge Thomas's sponsor on Capitol Hill this week, accused the black lawmakers of "playing the race card" in much the same way Republicans have exploited the quota issue in the civil rights debate.

Since then, the phrase has increasingly been used against Democrats who criticize Republicans on issues of race. (For an example of a similar reversal, see our Spinsanity column on Republican use of civil rights jargon in the debate over the policies of Boy Scouts of America.)

On the flip side, however, the subtlety of racial appeals makes it easy to manufacture unsubstantiated or unconvincing allegations against Republicans. For example, like Matthew Yglesias, I don't buy the Josh Marshall critique (here, here, and here) of McCain's ad featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as racially coded:

I think the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it's a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama's black, and America's history, I think it's always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily imagine being deployed against a white candidate and, indeed, they're fundamentally similar to arguments Republicans regularly make against Democrats.

The problem, then, is that Democrats have an incentive to generate flimsy charges of racial exploitation and Republicans have an incentive to delegitimize them altogether. It's a no-win situation.

Update 8/5 9:56 PM: Via Ezra Klein, TAP's Adam Serwer has a useful analysis of why the GOP "race card" strategy works:

In a dispute about race, the McCain campaign knows it will end up with the larger half. For the most part, most white people's experience with race isn't one of racial discrimination. They can only relate to racial discrimination in the abstract. What white people can relate to is the fear of being unjustly accused of racism. This is the larger half. This is why allegations of racism often provoke more outrage than actual racism, because most of the country can relate to one (the accusation of racism) easier than the other (actual racism). For this reason, in a political conflict over race, the McCain campaign has the advantage, because saying the race card has been played is actually the ultimate race card.