Brendan Nyhan

What is Tom Brokaw talking about?

In case you missed it, Tom Brokaw asked this puzzling question Sunday on Meet the Press of Colorado Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall:

MR. BROKAW: Congressman Udall, we've been checking the statistics in the Denver area. I'm quite familiar with it. In the second quarter of 2008, one in every 95 households in the Denver area were in foreclosure. The United States average was one in 171. Colorado ranked fifth in the nation statewide. A lot of that was a result of speculation for profit, people going in and hoping to make a quick buck and turn it around. Why should other taxpayers across the country have to now bail out those Colorado mortgage buyers who just did the irresponsible thing?

Um, wasn't the bill almost entirely focused on bailing out Wall Street firms whose balance sheets are loaded with "toxic" mortgage-backed securities? One of the primary critiques of the legislation was precisely that it didn't do enough to help homeowners in danger of foreclosure.

Brokaw also failed to object when Udall's opponent, former Congressman Bob Schaffer, promoted the dubious claim that tax cuts in the 1990s increased revenue and when McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt offered the misleading suggestion that Barack Obama voted to increase taxes on people making over $42,000.

All in all, it was a terrible performance on substance.

Zev Chafets reads minds

An alert reader spots some mind-reading in a LA Times op-ed by Zev Chafets on criticism of John McCain by Rush Limbaugh. Chafets claims (without evidence) that "Limbaugh never had any intention of breaking with his party":

If John McCain is elected president, he will have a lot of people to thank. Improbably, first on the list will be the man who didn't want him in the White House, Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh vociferously campaigned against McCain throughout the primary season. He accused the Arizona senator of being a closet liberal and a collaborator with Democratic enemies such as Sens. Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy. This caused a lot of glee in Democratic circles. Some optimists even predicted a devastating split in the GOP.

This was a false hope. Limbaugh never had any intention of breaking with his party. When he saw that he couldn't stop McCain, he swallowed hard and began trying to push McCain to the right. Limbaugh made it clear that he wanted a vice presidential candidate from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.

It's of course true that Limbaugh has generally followed the Republican party line over the years. But we have no way of knowing what his intentions were in any particular instance. Why does everyone seem so reluctant to admit this? No one expects you to be omniscient!

Blankley likens media to Nazi propagandists

In a loathsome Washington Times column attacking reporters' treatment of Barack Obama, Tony Blankley likens the mainstream media to the official Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and to "Goebbels' disciples":

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other. This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly and even half way honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press.

...The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeats any McCain gaffes, while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Internet sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Mr. Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventual one or two clear sentences from Mr. Obama. Nor do you see Mr. Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the United Nations. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

Blankley also engages in one of the most bizarre attempts at guilt by association that I've ever seen:

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting, is the shocking gaps in Mr. Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply has not reported on Mr. Obama's two years at Columbia University in New York, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers— after which they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Mr. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Mr. Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks the media has focused on all the colleges Mrs. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago and the close criticism of Mrs. Palin's mayoral political opponents. But in two years they haven't bothered to see how close Mr. Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Bill Ayers lived "a mere quarter mile" away when Obama was at Columbia? So did tens of thousands of other people -- it's Manhattan!

Why I don't (usually) comment on debates

Here's what I wrote back in June 2007 about why I don't (usually) comment on the substance of debates -- it still applies in the general election:

I frequently don't have anything interesting or new to say about debates, which are over-analyzed to the point of absurdity. There's usually not a lot of substance to discuss, so you end up offering McLaughlin Group-level observations about who "won," the way the candidates looked, the supposedly important "moments" of the night, or the implications of the debate for the horse race.

I have those (not particularly profound) thoughts just like anyone else, but why share them? You can already get similar stuff here and here and here and on cable news (among many other places). Blogging should be more than amateur hour for aspiring pundits.

Also, as I argued last week, the importance of debates is frequently exaggerated by media commentators.

LA Times nonsense on post-debate poll

The only thing worse than newspapers failing to report on other polls is the way they (mis)interpret their own findings.

The Los Angeles Times is currently running a story titled "Obama slightly widens lead after debate, poll finds" (via Yglesias). The basis for this claim is a 1% increase in Obama's support and a 2% increase in Obama's lead among voters in their poll who watched the debate (presumably a non-random group):

The much-anticipated first presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama on Friday appears to have helped Obama slightly widen a lead over his Republican opponent, a post-debate Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey shows.

Registered voters who watched the debate preferred Obama, 49% to 44%, according to the poll taken over three days after the showdown in Oxford, Miss.

That is a small gain from a week ago, when a survey of the same voters showed the Democratic candidate with a 48% to 45% edge.

An increase of 1% in Obama's poll numbers (or a 2% increase in his lead among the group that watched the debate) is meaningless. There are two problems. First, we can't be sure that the increase among the group who watched the debate is meaningful. Any time you survey people twice on their vote preferences, there may be minor fluctuations. A difference of 1-2% is almost surely not statistically significant. Second, we can't extrapolate anything meaningful from that group's change to the larger population of registered voters as a whole. The reason is that the voters who didn't watch the debate may also change their preferences as a result of media coverage, external events, etc.

Who allowed this nonsense to be published in a major newspaper? It's the statistical equivalent of 2+2=5.

Update 9/29 8:41 AM: The description of the problems with the article above has been improved and corrected with help from Joel Wiles.

Update 9/29 9:10 PM: Per Jonny Drake's comment below, the wording of the post has been clarified to distinguish between a 1% increase in Obama's support and a 2% increase in his lead among voters in the Times poll who watched the debate.

Thomas Friedman exaggerates bailout cost

Matthew Yglesias rightly objected to the people who rounded up the $700 billion tab for the financial bailout to "nearly $1 trillion" -- a description that is technically true but glosses over a difference of $300 billion.

He didn't follow up, but it's worth noting that Thomas Friedman (in one of his trademark fake letters from one foreign leader to another) actually called it "a $1 trillion bailout for our troubled banking system." No!

The AP reads the minds of Obama and McCain

A reader points out that the Associated Press has acquired the ability to read the minds of both John McCain and Barack Obama:

McCain hoped voters would believe that he rose above politics to wade into successful, nitty-gritty dealmaking at a time of urgent crisis, but he risked being seen instead as either overly impulsive or politically craven, or both. Obama saw a chance to appear presidential and fit for duty but was also caught off guard strategically by McCain's surprising gamble in saying he was suspending his campaigning and asking to delay Friday night's debate to focus on the crisis.

Just to reiterate the obvious point: we all can speculate about the strategic calculations of the candidates, but no one knows what McCain "hoped" or Obama "saw."

Vice presidential geography - Quayle & Palin

A compare and contrast exercise for the reader...

Sarah Palin on the geographic position of Alaska:

[I]t's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is -- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Dan Quayle on the geographic position of Hawaii:

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.

The Palin "task from God" myth

During his interview with Sarah Palin, ABC's Charlie Gibson misquoted one of her past statements, claiming that she said "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God."

However, Palin actually asked her congregation to "pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

In context, the phrase "for this country" in Palin's second sentence clearly links it with the request that people "pray" in the first sentence. Also, the third sentence clearly indicates that people should pray that US military decisions are part of a "task" or "plan" from God, not that she knows that to be true.

Even though Gibson came under fire for his statement, the myth is still out there. Most recently, the AFP, a foreign wire service widely available on American websites, claimed without explanation that Palin "has previously remarked that US soldiers in Iraq were being sent on a task from God."

Are convention bounces permanent?

UNC's Jim Stimson on the evaporating GOP bounce and the state of the race (posted on Sunday):

I wrote in Tides of Consent that convention "bounces" were permanent effects, persisting through election day unless counteracted by some later events. The Palin bounce of 2008 appears to contradict this conclusion. It appears that Obama was ahead by about two points going into the Democratic Convention. A 4 point bouce put him at 6. Then the more dramatic Republican/Palin bounce appeared to put McCain in the lead by appout two points, a net 8 point shift. Now, more than two weeks later, it appears that about half of the Palin bounce was transient and the other half almost exactly offsets the Democratic bounce of four points. That leaves the race exactly where it began in late August, with a small Obama lead. But a post-convention lead is much more solid than a pre-covention lead, because it represents mainly real voting intentions, as opposed to the much fluffier stuff of pre-convention polls, where large portions of the electorate have yet to think about the contest. Thus, after a period of unremitting second-guessing and hand wringing, it appears that the Obama campaign is the net beneficiary of the convention season, if not by much.

Stimson's poll-filtering algorithm (Excel spreadsheet) puts Obama at roughly 51.5% of the two-party vote, which is back in line with the fundamentals.

Inoculate yourself against debate hype

Deep breaths everyone -- as I pointed out last month, debates rarely matter as much as people think. Jim Stimson, who I quote in that post, argues the following in Tides of Consent:

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.

UW-Milwaukee's Tom Holbrook reiterates this point in a blog post showing that there is very little evidence of substantial swings in the polls due to debates. Of course, since the race is close, anything could affect the outcome, but it seems clear that the debates will be covered far out of proportion to their importance.

At a more meta level, to the extent debates matter, it's likely that the media narrative that's created (i.e. Gore's "sighs" in 2000) is far more important than the actual content of the debates since most people do not watch the debates and most of those who do watch are supporting one of the candidates. In this sense, people should worry less about their campaign's performance and more about the performance of their campaign's spin room after the fact. It's a sorry spectacle.

Rush Limbaugh says Obama is "Arab"

The President of the United States, August 1, 2008:

THE PRESIDENT: President George W. Bush calling to congratulate you on 20 years of important and excellent broadcasting.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. You've stunned me! (laughing) I'm shocked. But thank you so much.

THE PRESIDENT: That's hard to do.

RUSH: (laughing) I know, it is.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm here with a room full of admirers [Jeb Bush and George H.W. Bush]. There are two others that would like to speak to you and congratulate you, people who consider you friends and really appreciate the contribution you've made.

Rush Limbaugh, September 22, 2008:

These polls on how one-third of blue-collar white Democrats won't vote for Obama because he's black, and -- but he's not black. Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood? He doesn't have any African -- that's why when they asked whether he was authentic, whether he's down for the struggle. He's Arab. You know, he's from Africa. He's from Arab parts of Africa. He's not -- his father was -- he's not African-American. The last thing that he is is African-American. I guess that's splitting hairs, I don't -- it's just all these little things, everything seems upside-down today in this country.

Update 9/26 11:10 AM: Per Chris Lawrence's comment below, Bush obviously isn't responsible for everything Limbaugh says. However, as I pointed out in a previous post, Limbaugh has a long history of offensive racial comments. In that context, I think it's appropriate to hold Bush responsible for endorsing such a loathsome figure.

Political scientists take on the pundits

Yesterday I complained about how few people would learn about the repeated debunking of Thomas Frank's empirical claims. I want to make a more constructive point and recommend the two most important political science books of the year for general readers, both of which debunk claims promoted by pundits like Frank.

1. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina use graphics and clever statistical analysis (hidden from the reader) to resolve the paradox of rich states voting Democratic and rich people voting Republican. You'll never read David Brooks or Michael Barone the same way again.

2. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Larry Bartels has compiled a thorough analysis of various aspects of the politics of inequality. In particular, he undercuts the widely held perception that Republicans are better managers of the economy, showing that economic performance has been better under Democratic presidents since World War II.

Many people have complained that political science has forgotten about politics. These authors have not -- their work deserves your attention.

WSJ editorial page distorts CBO report

Here's yet another reminder of why you can't trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Earlier this month, the Journal wrote the following in an editorial blaming deficits on spending increases:

The real runaway train is what CBO calls a "substantial increase in spending" that is "on an unsustainable path." That's for sure.

In fact, however, the first quoted phrase comes on page ix of the report (PDF) and the second quoted phrase comes from page xii.

Here's the first quote, which pertains to the year-to-year change from 2007 to 2008 and also blames "a halt in the growth of tax revenues":

CBO expects the deficit to rise from 1.2 percent of GDP in 2007 to 2.9 percent this year (see Summary Table 1). The significant expansion in the deficit is the result of a substantial increase in spending and a halt in the growth of tax revenues.

And here's the second quote three pages later, which pertains to long-term trends in entitlement and health care spending:

Over the long term, the budget remains on an unsustainable path. Unless changes are made to current policies, growing demand for resources caused by rising health care costs and the nation's expanding elderly population will put increasing pressure on the budget...

The CBO then goes on to discuss expected growth in these costs over the next century and advocate adjustments in spending and taxes to reduce projected deficits.

The two quotes are substantially different in context and meaning. Yet the Journal jams them together without regard for accuracy. You just can't trust them.

[By the way, the Journal's argument in the editorial is misleading -- the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that 82% of the deterioration in the federal budget since 2001 that can be attributed to legislation comes from tax cuts (42%) and defense and homeland security spending (40%).]

I keep strange company

I was amused that the "Swing State Project" blog included me in a strange diatribe against campaign expert Stuart Rothenberg:

Rothenberg goes even further:

But if the DCCC is going to go out of its way to promote certain races, it ought to be responsible for those selections.

Responsible how, exactly? Should the DCCC be tried before a jury of Stuart Rothenberg, David Broder and Brendan Nyhan on charges of slight exuberance in the service of politics? Should we be demanding that MAD Magazine devote an issue to mocking the D-Trip? Should we get out there and tar-and-feather Chris Van Hollen?

That would be quite a jury, although I'm not sure what I have to do with Rothenberg's view of the DCCC's targeting decisions.

NYT attributes "privatization" to Dems

Here's another example of the bizarre relativism of "objective" news reporting -- the New York Times describes John McCain's support for private accounts in Social Security as "an approach that Democrats call privatization":

Mr. McCain also stuck by his support for allowing workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds, an approach that Democrats call privatization and that Mr. Obama has used to suggest Mr. McCain would subject retirees to excessive market risk.

Actually, John McCain called it "privatization" as recently as 2004 (via Think Progress):

Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.

And of course, McCain wasn't the only one -- literally dozens of conservatives called it "privatization" before 2005. But once Republicans discovered that the word polls poorly, they ran away from it. The sad part is that the New York Times has acquiesced to their insistence that the term is some sort of Democratic invention.

Update 9/23 10:19 PM: Media Matters has more.

Telling stories about McCain/Palin numbers

There's been an outbreak of storytelling about the predictable decline of John McCain's bounce and Sarah Palin's favorable/unfavorable numbers.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias attributes Obama's increasing numbers to the national focus on economic issues. Sam Wang calls it the "Palin Bounce." Similarly, Ross Douthat blames the decline "primarily" on "negative press reports on her Alaska career... ongoing coverage of the still-simmering Troopergate scandal - and especially by her widely-watched, none-too-impressive interview with Charlie Gibson."

From an epistemological perspective, we should be cautious about trusting any of these stories. The reason is that we have simpler explanations for both trends that have stronger empirical and theoretical support:

1. Presidential convention bounces tend to dissipate.
2. The poll numbers of national political figures become increasingly polarized when there is a two-way message flow about them (i.e. positive and negative information).

We can tell all sorts of (unprovable) stories about trends in polling numbers, which is what keeps pundits in business. At a minimum, it's important to be precise about the claims that we make, keeping #1 and #2 above in mind. The relevant counterfactual for Yglesias is whether McCain's bounce would have held up better had the national debate not shifted toward the economy. In the latter case, the question for Douthat is whether Palin's numbers would have polarized as quickly if she had not been subject to as much negative coverage. Unfortunately, there's no way to assess either of these scenarios.

Latest racial smears from the campaign

More racial codewords are being directed at Barack Obama, who was called "uppity" by an anonymous Bush adviser:

A PRESCRIPTION FOR McCAIN, from one of the smartest Bushies: “I personally would make a lot of ‘accidental’ straight talk on the plane with reporters. Oh no. McCain was chatting with the press, slipped up and called the Paulson proposal totally lacking on detail at best and nothing more than bailout of Wall Street fat cats at worse. Oh no. McCain said it is time for a recusal by Paulson given that he is conflicted five ways from Sunday. Let staff say that they will see about clarification. Let McCain come back and say that he won't apologize and in fact it is worse than what he said the first time. … And you also could guard against underwhelming debate performances, which McCain needs to be worried about given his ability in that regard and his history of performance. The tactics that got them to mid-September in a tie are not going to get them to 50 percent plus one in November. They need … an eye toward driving out the range of contrast that makes McCain different from Obama (action-oriented rhetoric v. grand prose; accessible v. uppity; humble servant of country v. arrogant).

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) previously called Obama "uppity," as Think Progress points out. (By the way, what happened to Brad DeLong, who accuses Allen of making up the quote with no evidence?)

Similarly, Rush Limbaugh accused Barack Obama's campaign of hacking Sarah Palin's email account using racially coded language about Obama being "[a] community organizer, the street agitator, the Chicago thug":

Obama, folks, is showing who he really is. A community organizer, the street agitator, the Chicago thug, clear the playing field, is finally being -- it's on display for everybody to see. Sarah Palin's emails, personal emails, have been hacked, no doubt by Obama thugs. They dropped 30 people up there in Alaska trying to dig up dirt on her. Now they got some thugs that found her personal email address.

On the other side, Obama tried to exacerbate ethnic tensions in a Spanish-language ad that tries to link John McCain to inflammatory quotes from Rush Limbaugh that were taken out of context:

I'm expecting things to get much worse before this is over.

Update 9/23 10:17 PM: Brent Stapes has more on the disturbing racial discourse of the campaign in the New York Times.

Debunking What's the Matter with Kansas

Princeton's Larry Bartels, who previously eviscerated Thomas Frank's influential What the Matter with Kansas?, reports that a new conference paper by Steve Nicholson and Gary Segura provides yet more evidence that Frank's thesis is overstated or wrong:

In What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank argues that the Republican Party has redrawn the landscape of contemporary American politics by displacing the Democratic Party as the party of the working class. Although others have tested the electoral implications of Frank’s arguments, no one has examined the phenomenon itself—the belief that Republicans are the party of the working class. To test this claim, we created a survey expressly for the purpose of examining the class-based images of the parties. Following Frank’s argument, we examine whether the public believes Republicans are the party of the working class and specifically whether the working class and Evangelical Christians are most likely to hold this belief. Contrary to Frank’s argument, the Democrats are the party most Americans associate with the working class. Furthermore, we find that the working class and Evangelical Christians are no more likely to hold this belief than respondents in other social classes or faiths.

Unfortunately, these critiques will reach .1% of Frank's audience, which will never know how little empirical support his claims actually have.

The Treasury bailout and equity ownership

Matthew Yglesias and Paul Krugman both suggest that taxpayers should get "a stake in the upside" (Krugman's words) in return for bailing out the financial industry. But that's unlikely to happen due to conservatives' deep-seated hostility to government ownership of private industry. During the debate over Social Security privatization, many people pointed out that we could capture the upside of private equity investment (high returns) without the downside of individual accounts (high management costs, poor investing decisions) if the government simply invested Social Security funds in the market. But conservatives (including Alan Greenspan) killed this idea, warning of the dangers of government interference in private markets. Obviously the dire situation on Wall Street has changed the terms of the debate, making it possible for the government to buy almost 80% of AIG without protest, but it's still not clear that the Bush administration would want the government taking equity stakes in all the companies it bails out.

Interview on NPR's Tell Me More Friday

For those who are interested, I'm doing another interview about the misperceptions research I've conducted with Jason Reifler. This one is with NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin and will be taped live at 9 AM EST. Check your local listings for when it airs in your area. Alternatively, archived audio should be online tomorrow afternoon at the Tell Me More website.

Update 9/19 10:04 PM: Here's the interview page which has a link to the audio clip.

Interview on The State of Things today

I'll be appearing on North Carolina Public Radio's show The State of Things today at 12 PM EST to discuss my research with Jason Reifler on correcting misperceptions -- you can listen live at WUNC's website. Here's the blurb:

Truth, Lies & Politics
Thursday, September 18 2008 by Daniel Zola and Frank Stasio

As the presidential election heats up, facts, figures and political fodder begin to fly. Reporters do their best to keep the candidates honest, but does fact-checking the claims really work? Duke Political Science PhD candidate Brendan Nyhan joins host Frank Stasio to discuss his research paper, "When Corrections Fail - The Persistence of Political Misconception” to uncover if the media are doing more harm than good.

Update 9/19 10:06 PM: Here's the MP3 clip.

Self-parody alert: WSJ prescribes tax cuts

Here's a dog-bites-man story for you. Guess what the Wall Street Journal editorial board thinks is the solution to the financial crisis and the looming recession? More tax cuts!

What the economy really needs is a big pro-growth tax cut, the kind that will restore confidence and risk-taking. This is an opportunity for both candidates, but especially for Mr. McCain. Instead of focusing on an extension of the Bush tax cuts, the Arizonan should offer his own tax cut to revive capital markets and prevent a recession. Democrats will claim he's helping "the rich," but our guess is that every American who owns a 401(k) will figure he's one of those "rich."

Has there ever been a circumstance when the Journal wouldn't recommend a tax cut?

Corrections research in Washington Post

My paper (PDF) with Jason Reifler on correcting misperceptions is featured in today's Washington Post:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research...

Reifler questioned attempts to debunk rumors and misinformation on the campaign trail, especially among conservatives: "Sarah Palin says she was against the Bridge to Nowhere," he said, referring to the pork-barrel project Palin once supported before she reversed herself. "Sending those corrections to committed Republicans is not going to be effective, and they in fact may come to believe even more strongly that she was always against the Bridge to Nowhere."

For more, see the full article, our paper, or a previous article by the same author, Shankar Vedantam, on the difficulty of correcting myths and misperceptions.

Update 9/15 11:07 AM: My co-author Jason Reifler is discussing the article with readers on washingtonpost.com right now (from 11 AM-12 PM EST).

Update 9/17 11:16 AM: Here's the Duke press release on our research.

Donald Luskin is a McCain adviser?!

Signs of the apocalypse: National Review Online's Donald Luskin describes himself as an "adviser to John McCain's campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice." This is the same Donald Luskin who UC-Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has repeatedly described as "the Stupidest Man Alive" for his shaky grasp on basic economics (like McCain circa 2007-2008, Luskin is a believer in the myth that tax cuts raise revenue). My primary exchange with Luskin was, shall we say, not inspiring. I wouldn't let him advise me on balancing my checkbook.

Friedman promotes McCain surge myth

How many people are going to repeat John McCain's absurd claim that his support for the troop surge in Iraq almost cost him the GOP nomination? Here's Tom Friedman parroting the claim:

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. Now the same guy, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.

As Andres Martinez points out on the Washington Post's website, however, the issue that almost cost McCain his party's nomination was immigration, not Iraq. Show me any evidence that the surge cost McCain votes in the GOP primaries. Does Friedman know anything about the Republican party? Indeed, McCain attacked Mitt Romney for supporting timetables for withdrawing from Iraq (often mischaracterizing Romney's position in doing so).

Hertzberg reads McCain's mind on Palin

Hendrik Hertzberg claims to know John McCain's motives in choosing Sarah Palin, which he calls "entirely tactical and mostly... cynical":

With the selection of Sarah Palin, McCain completes the job of defusing the enmity (and forgoing the honor) he earned in 2000, when he condemned Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.” His motives in choosing her were entirely tactical and mostly—the mot juste is that of Mike Murphy, once McCain’s top political aide, overheard by an errant microphone—cynical. Besides placating the right, those motives included the short-term goal of preëmpting the weekend news cycles that might otherwise have been devoted to reviewing Obama’s triumphant Democratic Convention. The price that McCain paid, and that could sooner or later be exacted from the nation, was the abandonment of what he had repeatedly called his overriding requirement for a Vice-President: someone who would be ready to take his place at a moment’s notice—“you know, immediately.”

Apparently this is why the New Yorker pays him the big bucks...

Bizarre defenses of Palin on "Bush doctrine"

I'm reasonably sympathetic to the point made by Charles Krauthammer, Michael Abramowitz, and others that Sarah Palin might have good reason to have been confused about Charles Gibson's question "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?" As they point out, the phrase "Bush doctrine" could reasonably be interpreted different ways.

But it's completely absurd for Abramowitz to imply and for Krauthammer and others to claim that the ambiguity of the initial question somehow excuses Palin. After she gave a vague response about fighting Islamic terrorism, Gibson explained that he meant the doctrine enunciated before the war in Iraq. At this point, someone who was familiar with the different philosophies described as the Bush doctrine would realize which one Gibson was citing. But Palin still did not understand. Indeed, she defended the right to attack a country or group that poses an imminent threat, a point on which Democrats and Republicans agree. Bush's position was that the US had the right to attack before Iraq became such a threat.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the transcript of the exchange in question:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president's job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

And here's the video:

Someone who was minimally conversant with the debate over President Bush's foreign policy would have recognized that Gibson was asking about preemptive attacks against countries that do not pose an imminent threat. Palin did not.

The Clinton/Obama lunch menu

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton met for lunch today, and the New York Times worked hard to bring you this important report:

The lunch menu, according to the campaign, was a choice of sandwiches and flatbread pizza from Cosi, plus salad. Beverages were not specified.

No details on the beverages?! The Pulitzer committee will not take this well...

McCain's campaign: Bush 2.0

Josh Marshall has a post up describing the current McCain campaign as "the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes." I'm not sure if that's true, but it is unquestionably sleazy and dishonest. What I think Marshall and others are missing, however, is the extent to which McCain's campaign builds on the precedents of the Bush White House (described in All the President's Spin) in its approach to the press and campaign communication, which is probably a result of the influence of former Bush operative Steve Schmidt.

Let's start with the media. During his presidency, Bush and other top officials have frequently challenged the legitimacy of the media and its role in the democratic process. For instance, then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card told the New Yorker "They don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election... I don't believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function."

When McCain's campaign was preventing the media from interviewing Sarah Palin, campaign manager Rick Davis expressed a similar view:

Why is she scared of answering questions? [Fox News Channel's Chris] Wallace asked.

"She's not scared to answer questions," Davis said, "but you know what? We run our campaign, not the news media."

Wallace said inappropriate intrusions into Palin's family and personal life aside, there are legitimate questions about whether she is prepared to be vice president.

"Sarah Palin will have the opportinity to speak to the American people," Davis said. "She will do interviews, but she'll do them on the terms and conditions" the campaign decides.

Like Bush, McCain's campaign has also tried to undermine dissent and harsh questioning. During the same interview quoted above, Davis told Chris Wallace that Palin won't be interviewed "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference" (via Steve Benen). Demanding "deference" from the press is almost explicitly anti-democratic -- Merriam-Webster defines it as "respect and esteem due a superior or an elder; also: affected or ingratiating regard for another's wishes." An elected official has no right to expect to be treated this way by a member of the press or the public.

Finally, McCain's campaign is following Bush's lead in making a series of highly misleading claims that are often based on some slender reed of truth (see here and here for compilations). For instance, as Bob Somerby noted on the Daily Howler, Palin's claim at the GOP convention that she put the state's luxury jet on eBay was "carefully constructed" to "mislead the public without misstating the facts." The jet actually did not sell on eBay and was later sold at a loss. Palin's statement was so well constructed that it even fooled McCain, who falsely claimed she sold the plane on eBay for a profit.

Similarly, McCain's campaign is relying on Obama's vote for a Democratic budget resolution to justify its claims that he will raise income taxes on all Americans. (In fact, Obama's plan would lower income taxes on most Americans by more than McCain's would.) The key to this strategy is to exploit the norms of "objective" reporting, which require a "he said"/"she said" approach even when disputes concern questions of fact.

What's incredible is how much McCain has been able to get away with in what seemed like a Democratic year. I have always attributed much of Bush's success at spinning the press in the 2001-2004 period to his post-9/11 boost in stature and legitimacy. McCain does not enjoy the same advantage and yet his tactics are still (seemingly) working. When will the press start calling him out?

Update 9/11 11:21 PM: The irony is that "objective" analysts like NBC's Chuck Todd and Time's Mark Halperin, who have not exactly been at the vanguard of the movement for more aggressive fact-checking, are drawing the line at the absurd "lipstick" controversy. While it's great to have them on board, where were they for the last eight years? What we're seeing now is the culmination of a process that they previously ignored.

Adam Nagourney reads minds

Josh Marshall flags another example of a political reporter pretending to read people's minds -- here's what Adam Nagourney of the New York Times wrote about the bogus "lipstick" controversy (more on that soon):

Here in Lebanon today, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois also made his own lipstick allusion, drawing on a very old aphorism as he belittled attempts by Senator John McCain and Republicans to embrace the change mantle that has been central to his campaign.

“John McCain says he’s about change, too – except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig – it’s still a pig.”

At that point, Mr. Obama paused for just a moment, no doubt imagining the whoops that were going up at the McCain headquarters where they were no doubt monitoring the speech, and aware of the extent to which both campaigns are seeking to seize on anything even approaching a slip of the tongue.

So he added: “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

For the record, Mr. Obama did not even mention Ms. Palin until a few minutes later in his speech. Still, within 45 minutes, Mr. McCain’s campaign – well aware of the competition for the women’s vote and how this might be interpreted among women voters – leapt onto the remark.

And this isn't Nagourney's first offense either -- back in July he and Patrick Healy pretended to read Evan Bayh's mind too:

In Indiana last week, Mr. Obama appeared with two of the more speculated-about names on Democratic lists, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia...

This is not, aides to both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama were quick to say, the kind of vice-presidential Off Broadway run-throughs that some past candidates — think Walter F. Mondale in 1984 — have forced potential running mates to endure.

But it is indeed calculated and does provide a chance for the candidates and their aides to assess how they and their prospective running mates look as a ticket, in the newspaper photographs and television images these events are producing. That is no small thing, as could arguably be seen in Mr. Bayh’s eyes last week as he cast a vice-presidential gaze at Mr. Obama.

The best part is "arguably" -- what's arguable about it? Either Nagourney can read minds or he can't. I'm pretty sure he can't. Does the Times have reason to think otherwise, or does it just think its readers are stupid?

Frum cracks the inequality divide

I'd have to see a lot more research before I was convinced by David Frum's argument that high inequality leads to more Democratic voting. What's important about the article, though, is that he presents a political rationale and a substantive argument for Republicans to take inequality seriously:

In short, the trend to inequality is real, it is large and it is transforming American society and the American electoral map. Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and the irrelevant.

Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle. We keep offering them cuts in their federal personal income taxes — even though two-thirds of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, and even though a majority of Americans now describe their federal income tax burden as reasonable.

What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs...

Unlike liberals, conservatives are not bothered by the accumulation of wealth as such. We should be more troubled that the poor remain so poor...

Meanwhile, the argument over same-sex marriage has become worse than a distraction from the challenge of developing policies to ensure that as many children as possible grow up with both a father and a mother in the home...

To make progress on inequality and similar issues like climate change where there's a partisan/ideological divide over the extent of the problem, people like Frum need to convince the GOP that it's politically costly not to act.

David Brooks on McCain & "systemic change"

I have no idea what David Brooks means when he calls the Obama campaign the "champion of policy change" and the McCain's campaign "the champion of systemic change":

Now the campaign has become a battle between two different definitions of change. The Obama camp has become the champion of policy change — after eight years of failed Bush-McCain policies, it is time for different, Democratic ones. The McCain campaign is the champion of systemic change — after two decades of bickering and self-dealing, its time to shake up the whole system in order to get things done.

The Obama change is more responsible and specific, but it has all the weirdness of a Brookings Institution report. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The McCain promise of change is comprehensive and vehement, though it’s hard to know how it would actually work in office.

How can a promise of "systemic change" be "comprehensive" if Brooks can't even define what it means or how it would work? What does "systemic change" mean if it's not about policy? Other than his quixotic campaign against earmarks (which consume a tiny part of the federal budget), it's not clear that McCain would change much of anything about the "system."

In reality, the way "policy change" and "systemic change" typically happen is that party control of the presidency changes or the balance of power shifts in Congress. Contra Brooks, electing McCain to face a Democratic Congress will largely preserve the status quo, not change it. (The most likely exception, of course, is foreign policy, where the president has more latitude to act unilaterally.)

Reassessing the GOP's base strategy

The meme late last week was that Sarah Palin's speech was an appeal to the Republican base that wouldn't play well with independent and crossover voters (see: James Fallows, Matthew Yglesias, Mike Murphy, Josh Marshall). In a Democratic year, several of them argued, the GOP's traditional anti-elite rhetoric won't work. That may yet prove to be true, but the apparent size of the Republican bounce suggests otherwise.

The problem with these analyses is that we don't know how effective Republican appeals to resentment against cultural elites will be against a black presidential candidate. Even in an election year, if these critiques take on an explicit or implicit racial tinge (as they often do), it's possible that they will damage Obama more than pundits anticipate. Remember, the fundamentals predict a close race. All it would take is for Obama to underperform by a couple of points and he will probably lose.

Gail Collins vs. numbers on earmarks

In her column on Saturday, Gail Collins of the New York Times makes the important point that earmarks aren't a pressing national priority:

McCain hates, hates, hates earmarking — the Congressional habit of sticking appropriations for special back-home projects in the budget without going through the normal priority-setting process. He talks about it with an enthusiasm that he never manages to summon for the economy, health care or education.

Earmarks are indeed a bad thing. If you ever become a U.S. senator, please dedicate yourself to getting rid of them. But for the chief executive of the country, they’re about as critical a problem as the overlong Christmas shopping season.

The problem is that Collins never actually proves her point. Without the relevant data, the statement above is just an assertion. Here's what's missing: the reason earmarks aren't a critical problem is that they are a tiny percentage of total federal spending.

For instance, estimates from watchdog groups of total earmark spending in fiscal 2008 range from $16-18 billion. Current estimated outlays for the federal government in fiscal 2008 are $2.9 trillion (PDF). That's less than one percent.

To put it another way, the current projected deficit is roughly $400 billion. Even if John McCain got rid of every earmark (an impossible task), it would only make a small contribution to deficit reduction. (See Factcheck.org's takedown of McCain's exaggerated claims of how much it can save by reducing earmarks.)

If only Gail Collins could tell her readers these things...

Brokaw suggests Hillary as Reagan Democrat

Back in the 1990s, if you had predicted that journalists would suggest using Hillary Clinton as an emissary to Reagan Democrats, people would have laughed in your face. And yet here's Tom Brokaw interviewing Joe Biden on Meet the Press yesterday:

Will you send Hillary Clinton into those working class states that she won and where there are a lot of independents or the so-called Reagan Democrats who have not made up their minds, states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana, will she be a big player for this campaign for your candidacy in those states?

Brokaw doesn't seem to grasp what should be an obvious point: the fact that Hillary Clinton got more votes from working class Democrats than Barack Obama doesn't mean she is some sort of incredible surrogate. She was the wife of the former president running against a "wine track" black candidate with an upscale liberal base. It would have been shocking if working class Democrats didn't back her. And on the margin, her campaigning might help keep Obama's numbers up with that demographic group. But the question isn't the Democrats who vote in party primaries -- it's the disaffected ex-Democrats and independents who aren't sure who to support, and I'm pretty sure that Obama can find someone who is more appealing to that group than a culturally polarizing figure with unfavorable ratings in the mid-40s.

Convention smear watch

One of the most offensive spin tactics is to associate your political opponents with hated foreign leaders and groups (Nazis, Communists, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, terrorists, etc.).

For instance, in a post last night, Josh Marshall smeared Rudy Guiliani by suggesting his speech was Nazi-like and comparing his hand gestures to Joseph Goebbels:

With Rudy's speech, to riff on the brilliance of the immortal Molly Ivins, I think I preferred this speech in the original German.

On a more serious note, I think it will eventually be clear to people that the Republicans made a major mistake putting Rudy in prime time. Given the state of the campaign, they have to take the fight to Obama. But you need to choose the right person. Rudy comes across as curdled and angry. Great for rousing diehards. But I don't see this speech working with undecideds.

10:27 PM ... What's weird is that Rudy seems to get genuinely angrier the longer the speech goes on.

I will admit he's got the Joseph Goebbels hand gestures down pat.

As I've argued many times before, including here, casual Nazi analogies demean and cheapen the discourse -- it's an easy way to active a series of unflattering associations and attach them to a public figure that you don't like.

On the other side of the aisle, Matthew Yglesias notes that President Bush implicitly drew an analogy between Vietnamese Communists and the "Angry Left" in his convention speech:

If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will.

The problem with this construction is similar. Bush is activating the negative associations people have toward the Communists who tortured McCain and attaching them to liberals in domestic politics.

McCain/Palin adopt Bush tactics

Kevin Drum notes that Sarah Palin repeated the misleading claim that she opposed the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in her speech last night:

Palin repeated her lie from Friday about standing up against the Bridge to Nowhere. There have been days and days of coverage thoroughly debunking this, showing beyond doubt that she was an enthusiastic supporter of the bridge and an enthusiastic supporter of the earmark, giving up only after the earmark was rescinded and Alaska was given the same amount of money to spend on other projects. She didn't turn down a thing. And yet she repeated the lie because she knows perfectly well that 30 million people will see the speech and only a couple million will read the fact check tomorrow. That's some straight talk for you.

This shouldn't be suprising -- McCain's campaign has been repeating debunked claims about policy for months. The problem is that the Bush administration has broken down any remaining stigma against this practice over the last eight years. All the President's Spin contains numerous examples of talking points that Bush and other administration officials repeated endlessly long after they had been shown to be misleading. We predicted at the time (2004) that future administrations would adopt similar practices if the media and the public did not push back. Unfortunately, it looks like we were right.

Will Democrats take the bait on Palin?

Ross Douthat is surely right that it does not benefit the Democrats to have "a debate (which the McCain campaign plainly wants to have) over the relative qualifications and accomplishments of Barack Obama and the Republican vice-presidential nominee." It's particularly problematic because Palin's critics are repeating many of the same charges that were directed at Obama (i.e. she's charismatic but light on substance). Reminding the public of those critiques in order to challenge a potential VP seems like a poor decision to me.

McCain embraces "Alaska is big" talking point

Following in the footsteps of Pat Buchanan and Fred Thompson, John McCain has suggested yesterday that Sarah Palin is especially qualified to be president because Alaska is really big:

With Ms. Palin facing a torrent of inquiries from reporters, Mr. McCain joined other Republicans in assailing news outlets when he told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday that “Sarah Palin has 24,000 employees in the state government” and was “responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply.” He added that he was entertained by the comparison of her experience to that of Mr. Obama and that “I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America.”

He's right, though, that describing Obama's leadership of his campaign as executive experience is a weak talking point.

Convention delegates can't dance

Patrick Healy gets off a nice turn of phrase at the end of this article on the contrast between the two conventions:

The Democrats also had a band that played a variety of pop anthems, whereas the Republican hall has been filled with a mix of country music and mellower harmonies. Delegates in both cities have occasionally broken into dancing, and rhythm’s challenge has appeared bipartisan.

Indeed.

Obama: McCain "will make abortion illegal"

Politico reports on a misleading new Obama radio ad that falsely claims "as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal":

“Let me tell you: If Roe vs. Wade is overturned, the lives and health of women will be put at risk. That's why this election is so important,” says the nurse-practitioner who narrates Obama’s ad. “John McCain's out of touch with women today. McCain wants to take away our right to choose. That's what women need to understand. That's how high the stakes are.”

An announcer then claims that “as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal,” before playing an exchange on "Meet the Press" in which McCain told moderator Tim Russert that he favors “a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions.”

“We can't let John McCain take away our right to choose. We can't let him take us back,” says the ad.

Civics 101 time: The president can't make abortion illegal. If John McCain appointed new conservative Supreme Court justices (who must be confirmed by the Democratic Senate), it is possible that the Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade. In that case, the issue would be returned to the states, who would each create their own abortion policies through the legislative process. The odds of McCain successfully passing a constitutional amendment to create a national ban on abortion are zero -- there is simply no way he "will make abortion illegal."

Update 9/3 1:01 PM: The comments below (50 and counting) offer three principal objections. First, they claim the ad is essentially accurate because McCain supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. So why not make the perfectly reasonable claim that McCain "would try to make abortion illegal" or "wants to make abortion illegal"? Obama's people surely understood this distinction. Indeed, consultants frequently include distortions of this sort in their ads as a way of generating press coverage (i.e. "free media"). Second, people object to the title of the post, which I've updated to be more precise ("Obama claims McCain 'will make abortion illegal'"). Finally, some people claim that Congress could pass a legislative ban on abortion if Roe were repealed but my understanding is that federal jurisdiction over abortion policy in a post-Roe world is unclear (I would welcome clarification from legal experts). In any case, such legislation could not pass Congress in the foreseeable future.

Update 9/3 1:54 PM: Matthew Yglesias misconstrues my position in a critical response to this post:

For one thing, conservative members of congress regularly seek to pass federal legislation restricting reproductive freedoms (”partial birth” abortion bans, etc.) and I see no reason to think that would change if Roe were overturned. And more broadly, the idea that it’s unfairly deceptive to characterize McCain’s position on abortion accurately — he favors outlawing abortion throughout the country — on the grounds that it’s extremely unlikely that McCain would be able to deliver legislatively on his policy preferences seems like an odd standard. Democrats will almost certainly have a congressional majority in 2009 which makes it very unlikely that any aspect of his domestic agenda will pass precisely as proposed. Does that make it unfair to critique his domestic policy proposals?

Yglesias is knocking down a straw man here -- I'm not promoting "the idea that it’s unfairly deceptive to characterize McCain’s position on abortion accurately" (the issue is whether the characterization is accurate) or the "odd standard" that it is "unfair to critique his domestic policy proposals" because they might not pass in a Democratic Congress (people can critique whatever they want). My issue is with the false suggestion that McCain could somehow make abortion illegal during his term by appointing justices who would repeal Roe.

Note: A lawyer who emailed me argued that prevailing interpretations of the Commerce Clause would allow for federal legislation regulating abortion. However, it is not clear whether expansive readings of the Commerce Clause would be scaled back under a more conservative Supreme Court. If so, federal jurisdiction might be less clear. As I pointed out above, a federal ban could not pass Congress in the foreseeable future in any case.

Update 9/3 5:04 PM: I was wrong on the Commerce Clause -- various lawyers assure me that federal jurisdiction over abortion is not going away. That's what I get for straying into a subject I don't know very well. My claims above are struck out accordingly.

Also, just for the record, I know that many political ads use the phrasing "Candidate X will do Y." That doesn't make it ok, especially when speaking about the president, who is often perceived to have vast executive powers. In this case, Obama's phrasing is especially pernicious because it plays on the widespread misconception that repealing Roe would make abortion illegal.

Finally, here's MP3 audio of the ad from CBS News.

Fred Thompson's signature move

I'm not watching TV, but I know Fred Thompson is speaking at the Republican National Convention because my post on his throat-clearing is starting to get Google hits. (For the record, I was actually mocking media coverage of it.)

Worst new pro-Palin talking point

In a column praising Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan introduces the dumbest talking point yet -- she's governor of a state that is really big:

Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.

None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

It must be exhausting governing all that empty land! Clearly she is ready for the vice presidency.

PS By this standard, Palin's job is more than seven times harder than Tim Pawlenty's. No wonder McCain picked her!

PPS I hear being governor of Siberia is also very challenging.

PPPS Delaware actually has about 25% more people than Alaska according to 2007 Census estimates.

Update 9/3 12:14 AM: TNR's Jonathan Cohn reports that Fred Thompson made a similar claim in his RNC speech tonight, saying that Palin is "a tough Alaskan governor who has taken on the political establishment in the largest state in the union — and won."

My question about the Alaska/Russia claim

If Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is near Russia, then is Barack Obama a naval warfare expert because he's from Hawaii?

Limbaugh's latest coded attacks on Obama

On the way into school today, I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to Barack Obama as having been a "street organizer," a bit of racially-coded jargon pioneered by the Republican National Committee. (It doesn't even make sense -- you can't organize streets.) Limbaugh, who previously called Barack Obama a "little black man-child," also contrasted Obama's past with Sarah Palin's "quintessentially American" life story -- classy stuff. I'll post a link to Media Matters when they have a transcript and audio up.

Update 9/2 8:13 PM: In fairness to Limbaugh, Rob points out in comments that Obama himself used the term "street organizer" to describe what he did. I'm still uncomfortable with Limbaugh using it, however.

The relativism of "objective" journalism

Ezra Klein makes an important point about the tendency of journalists to attribute uncomfortable facts to the other party in an effort to appear neutral:

Ryan Avent notices a big ol' Post headline today: “Democrats Say Palin Initially Backed Bridge.” ... [A]ssuming this isn't an undergrad philosophy class, Palin's support or opposition to the Bridge is probably part of the public record. And oh wait, here it is, right in the same Post story:

While campaigning in Ketchikan in September 2006, Palin indicated support for the bridge project, assuming there was no better alternative. “This link is a commitment to help Ketchikan expand its access, to help this community prosper,” she told the local chamber of commerce, according to an account in the Ketchikan Daily News.

In other words, Democrats don't "say" Palin initially backed the Bridge, Palin says she initially backed the Bridge, which is to say, Palin initially backed the Bridge, and Democrats are drawing attention to her statement. Attaching a "Democrats say" to "Palin initially backed bridge" makes no more sense than attaching a "Reporters say" to "Gustav Lashes Gulf Coast; Levee System Tested." It's a nonsensical appendage meant to undermine the authority of the story's conclusions: These things are either true or they aren't, and people are paying the Washington Post good money to clear up that ambiguity for them.

It's a great example of how "objective" journalism devolves into a "he said," "she said" posture in which reporters refuse to referee between competing factual claims (see All the President's Spin for more).

Bounds: Ticket has "command... experience"

Josh Marshall flags Campbell Brown's destruction of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on CNN last night:

During the interview, Bounds repeated the whole litany of misleading talking points defending Sarah Palin's qualifications as a potential vice president, including the silly claim that Palin is commander of Alaska's National Guard and therefore has military experience.

When pressed by Brown, Bounds failed to specify any actual decisions that Palin has made as commander of the Guard, but he nonetheless concluded the interview by suggesting that Barack Obama "doesn't have a lot of experience, certainly has no military experience, no command military experience, which both of our candidates have."

Just for the record, that "command military experience" consists of McCain directing a Navy training squadron and Palin holding an unused power to control the National Guard during a state emergency. Does anyone think either of those experiences has any direct relevance to the strategic decisions made by the Commander-in-Chief?

David Brooks: Not enough GOP experts

In his column on John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, David Brooks buries the lede, stating that "[t]here simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration" for John McCain:

If McCain is elected, he will face conditions tailor-made to foster disorder. He will be leading a divided and philosophically exhausted party. There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.

Brooks is acknowledging an uncomfortable fact -- ideological think tank "experts" are not a substitute for geniune experts from the reality-based community. Sadly, the right's reliance on think tank agitprop and repeated attacks on science have decimated the ranks of qualified potential GOP appointees. It's bad for the country when one party is too closely aligned with scientific expertise.

"Body language" expert reads Hillary's mind

Via Greg Sargent and Steve Benen, the CBS Early Show last week took the disturbing step of interviewing a body language "expert" who claimed to be able to interpret Hillary Clinton's feelings and thoughts as she gave her convention speech":

In her speech to the Democratic convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged fellow Democrats to vote for Barack Obama, and she did it in no uncertain terms -- verbally.

But did her body language match her words?

Body language expert and former FBI agent Joe Navarro says he doesn't think so.

Navarro, who wrote the book "What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People," explained to Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez Wednesday, "We need non-verbal (cues) to tell us what is important, what is significant, and what should we be looking for."

And Clinton's non-verbals, he says, were revealing.

"What we wanted to see was a Churchillian speech, something that would move her candidate to cross that magic fence. And she delivered a speech, but the gestures -- the non-verbals that give us the emotion -- really weren't there."

Navarro later added, "I think her message was supposed to be, 'Hey, go with me and let's vote for Barack.' There should have been a lot more emotive displays, and we just simply did not see that."

What a joke. If I wanted faux mind-reading, I would go to my local psychic and get the real (fake) thing.

On a related note, Matthew Yglesias argues convincingly that the John Kerry renaissance is the result of people not trying to divine the strategic motives shaping his every move:

For the past two years or so has been the first time in decades when it’s been clear that Kerry won’t ever be president, so his action can be — and be seen as — merely the actions of a United States Senator with a safe seat and a passionate concern for certain issues and causes. As with Al Gore’s somewhat similar liberation from Presidential ambitions, I think in part it’s about letting him find his own voice but also in large part about his voice finally being heard as his own rather than read through the lens of devious ambition.

There is no way to avoid the limitations of human perception and knowledge. As much as the media pretends to tell you otherwise, we can't know why politicians do what they do or what they are thinking when they do it. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to guess at politicians' motives and feelings (which usually leads to pathological narrative-driven commentary), why don't we actually listen to what they say a bit more? If we wanted to get a bit crazy, we might even talk about the consequences of their policy proposals for the country...