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Brendan Nyhan
Political scientist and media critic
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Brooks cites McCain 1983 speech
In his column Friday, David Brooks cites John McCain's 1983 speech arguing for US withdrawal from Lebanon, writing "This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem. It was the speech of one who conforms policies to facts."
For those are interested, here is a more extensive excerpt from the speech that I posted back in December (it's drawn from Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick):
The fundamental question is "What is the United States' interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the US presence stabilize the region?...
The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.
What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.
Posted at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
My favorite award ever
I just found a post on Eat the Press (the Huffington Post media blog) naming my Time.com column on ending my guest blogging for The American Prospect as the "Most Overanalyzed Defenestration" of 2006. I'm so proud.
Dean: Keeping everybody happy
This quote from DNC chairman Howard Dean should be seen as more evidence that big name Democrats are not going to push Hillary Clinton out of the presidential campaign any time soon:
Faced with such disturbing trends, some Democrats want party elders either to persuade Clinton to drop out, or to orchestrate enough superdelegate endorsements of Obama to make her defeat inevitable. But high-profile Democrats, including former president Jimmy Carter, former vice president Al Gore, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, have refrained from such moves so far.
"My job is to make sure the person who loses feels like they have been treated fairly so that their supporters will support the winner," Dean told The Associated Press.
On the other hand, people are taking Clinton's statement that she's in the race through the convention much too seriously. Losing politicians have to claim they are going to stay in the race or their coalition will quickly unravel. She could still drop out at any point. As Josh Marshall writes, "saying she's in it till August isn't about August. It's not even about June. It's about stamping out doubts about her viability and determination to stay in so she can still be in the game in April and May."
NYT omits GOP's supply-side claims
Here's the lede to a Louis Uchitelle story in Wednesday's New York Times about the "political comeback" of supply-side economics:
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to cut taxes in what seemed, at the time, a magical way. Tax revenue would go up, not down, he said, as the economy boomed in response to lower rates.
Since then, supply-side economics, as it was called — first with derision but then as a label embraced by its supporters — has become a central tenet of Republican political and economic thinking. That's despite the fact that the big supply-side tax cuts of the 1980s and the 2000s did not work out as advertised, as even most supporters acknowledge.
But advocates see broader economic benefits from lowering tax rates, which is one of the reasons the concept has reappeared as a point of contention in this year's election campaign, in an amended form.
While Uchitelle does a good job of explaining why the supply-side claim that tax cuts increase revenue is almost certainly wrong, he is curiously non-specific about which politicians are making these supply-side claims -- only Reagan is mentioned. (There is an allusion to Arthur Laffer advising John McCain but no direct quotes of the GOP candidate.) The article focuses instead on the views of various economic advisers and economists. But how can a New York Times report on this issue fail to mention the fact that President Bush and other administration officials have repeatedly implied that tax cuts increase revenue? Or that McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson all made similar claims during the GOP primary campaign? Aren't those relevant facts?
Posted at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Yglesias: The case for partisanship
Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias does a good job emphasizing a point I've also made here -- namely, that the reduced partisanship of the mid-twentieth century was largely a result of the ugly history of race in the South:
Yet as today's presidential candidates call for a less divisive kind of politics, it's worth recalling the 1950s. While polarization has its drawbacks, the alternative is often worse.
The mid-20th century is sometimes remembered as an era of cozy political consensus, but in fact the corridors of power echoed then with starkly disparate voices... The politics were no less contentious than they are today. They were just less coherent.
The looser partisanship of the period was mostly the result of racism and its complex role in the politics of the time. The legacy of the Civil War had made the Democrats the party of southern white supremacists, but the legacy of the New Deal had also made them the party of northern liberals and many urban African Americans. These latter constituencies were demanding federal intervention in southern affairs to secure the rights of southern blacks. At the same time, many members of the GOP—the traditional home of black voters and the party of racial progress in many states—were resisting these demands, which struck them as violating the principle of a modest federal government.
The result was a muddle.
Indeed, as I've shown, the period was a historical aberration. Once the parties realigned on race and conservative Democrats left the party, the political system returned to its historical norm of partisanship and polarization.
There are certainly many negative aspects of this change, but as Yglesias rightly notes, it does reduce the complexity of the choices facing voters:
But for voters, the boring new ways can be looked at in another way—they're straightforward. Elections have a predictable and easy-to-understand relationship to government action. Electing a Democrat means, on the margin, more spending on the federal safety net and more government regulation, while electing a Republican produces policies more favorable to business interests.
Journalists who lament the glorious bipartisanship of the 1960s and 1970s would do well to remember these two points.
Bizarre blog comments
I've deleted a couple of choice comments to avoid wrecking the threads, but they're just too wacky not to share. Full details after the jump.
Continue reading "Bizarre blog comments" »
Hillary's still more polarizing
For years now, I've written about the potential weaknesses of Hillary Clinton in a general election campaign due to her high unfavorable ratings. Ezra Klein disagreed (here and here), arguing that any candidate in national politics becomes polarizing over time. But as I argued, there's a big difference between ending up as a polarizing figure (Obama, potentially) and starting out as one (Hillary).
If you don't believe me, consider the numbers. Obama has been pounded for weeks now by both Hillary and John McCain and embroiled in the controversy over his pastor Jeremiah Wright. And yet his profile is still much stronger than Hillary's. Her current rating of 37 percent of Americans having positive feelings toward her "is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York." The number of Americans with negative feelings in the same poll was 48 percent. Both numbers represent a significant dropoff from a March 7-10 poll showing 45 percent positive, 43 percent negative. In addition, Gallup recently found that Hillary "is rated as 'honest and trustworthy' by 44% of Americans, far fewer than say this about John McCain (67%) and Barack Obama (63%)."
By contrast, the same NBC/WSJ poll shows Obama's personal ratings at 49 percent positive, 32 percent negative. While his negative numbers have edged up, NBC found that "he's still much more competitive with independent voters when matched up against John McCain than Hillary Clinton" and that "the biggest shift in those negative numbers were among Republicans." Similarly, CBS found that "Unfavorable views have risen among Republicans" and that "[i]ndependent voters - a group Obama has successfully courted in many primaries and would try to draw in the general election - still view him favorably, about the same as last month."
In short, to the extent that candidates matter (an open question in political science), an objective observer would still probably take Obama over Clinton. Endi3ng up as polarizing just isn't equivalent to starting out that way.
Update 3/30 8:52 PM: Via Tim Russert on Meet the Press, here are the positive/negative feelings cross-tabs from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll -- wow:
Here's the favorable, unfavorable. Hillary Clinton. It is now 37 positive, negative 48. Just two weeks ago, Clinton was at 45, 43. She's dropped 8 points with her positive rating in two weeks. And look at the breakdown by party. Republicans, 10 positive, 79 negative; independents, just 24 percent positive, 56 percent negative; Democrats split 66, 17.
Obama, his positive is 49, 32. Two weeks ago, it was 51, 28. A modest drop in two weeks during the whole Reverend Wright controversy. Here's breakdown by party. His positive amongst Republicans is 19. Remember, Clinton's was 10. Independents, it's 49. Clinton's was 24. Democrats, it's 71. Clinton's was 66.
NYT: The cutting edge of youth culture
My friend Ben Fritz appropriately mocks some breaking news from the New York Times -- young people email links to their friends!
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them.
It's all the news that's fit to print ... circa 2001. For a followup story, Ben suggests "Young people don't communicate via postal mail anymore."
The economics of Hillary withdrawal
Matthew Yglesias seems a bit puzzled that Democratic party elders haven't stepped in to force Hillary Clinton out of the race. He writes that "insofar as it's really true that [Nancy Pelosi] and 'other leading members of Congress' think [don't think Hillary can win and want her to give up], they need to communicate it more clearly."
By contrast, Marc Ambinder suggests that party elders have intentionally decided not to step in because "in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around" (via Michael Crowley):
John Edwards, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid – if these folks came together and threw their weight behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton would probably drop out by the end of the week. But the party elders have in some cases explicitly abstained from making such a determination because in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around.
But there's actually a third possibility -- that most party elders would prefer that Hillary withdraw but don't want to pay the cost of pushing her out of the race. There are two classic economic problems here. The first is that the collective benefits of pushing Hillary out are much larger than the individual benefit to any one party leader (i.e. there's a positive externality). Why would Pelosi or Reid risk becoming a hated figure to millions of Hillary's supporters? As a result, everyone is likely to sit back and hope that someone else will pay the cost of forcing her out.
The second problem is it's difficult to coordinate a joint effort to push her out. In other words, there's a collective action problem. If all the leaders could magically come together to ask her to withdraw, it might be less costly to them individually to push her out, but any effort to make this happen would inevitably leak, generating untold recriminations and infighting. The incentives to defect from such an agreement would also be strong. As a result, no one is likely to chance it.
For both of these reasons, it's likely that the race will go to the convention unless (a) Hillary decides to withdraw on her own or (b) the accumulation of superdelegate commitments after the primaries drives her out.
Update 3/25 10:01 PM: TNR's Noam Scheiber outlines the possible scenarios in a recent piece -- the key quote to me is in bold:
Democrats have never been known for Spock-like rationality, but even they see the logic of avoiding a convention fiasco. "It's in nobody's interest in the Democratic Party for that to happen," says Mike Feldman, another former Gore aide. "There is a mechanism in place--built into the process--to avoid that." That mechanism, such as it is, involves an en masse movement of uncommitted superdelegates to the perceived winner of the primaries. Almost everything you hear from such people suggests this will happen in time. "I think once we have the elected delegate count, things will move fairly quickly, " says Representative Chris Van Hollen, who oversees the party's House campaign committee. Increasingly, there is even agreement on the metric by which a winner would be named. Just about every superdelegate and party operative I spoke with endorsed Nancy Pelosi's recent suggestion that pledged delegates should matter most.
Assuming Feldman and Van Hollen are right, that means Democrats won't wait much past June 3--currently the last day on the primary calendar--before crowning a nominee. At the same time, it means there's very little chance of ending the contest sooner. Undecided superdelegates on Capitol Hill, along with party elders like Pelosi, Gore, and Harry Reid, "don't want to be seen as elites coming in and overturning the will of the people," says one senior House aide. A Senate staffer says his boss "thinks this give and take is natural, it will be helpful in the end." "That's a view held by a majority of these guys who have been through the cut and thrust of politics," he adds. Which means early June it is.
...The most optimistic scenario I could plausibly construct didn't end the campaign until the second week in May. To make it happen, Obama would have to overtake Hillary among superdelegates--a key psychological barrier. He'd have to limit his margin of defeat in Pennsylvania to ten points, then hold serve two weeks later in North Carolina and Indiana, a pair of states he's slightly favored to win. At that point, Hillary would face nearly impossible odds of overtaking him in the delegate race.
Unfortunately for anyone who wants the race to end soon, there are several problems with this scenario. For one thing, even if all this comes to pass, Hillary would still have to bow out voluntarily--an unlikely twist in any event, but highly implausible if the limbo states of Florida and Michigan still offer her hope. Meanwhile, any one of the aforementioned steps could easily fall through. Polls currently show Obama trailing by double digits in Pennsylvania; the good Reverend Wright could make that tough to change. And, though Obama now leads in North Carolina and Indiana, his advantage is either small or, in the latter case, based on a single, flimsy poll. As for superdelegates, as of this writing, the last two out of the closet opted for Hillary.
So, to review: The most optimistic scenario we have relies on a highly tenuous assumption; it's unlikely to happen even if that assumption holds; and, regardless, it allows the Democratic contest to drag on for six more brutal weeks. The dream may never die, but it's seen some better days.
Update 3/26 8:29 PM -- Note how Harry Reid is also dodging responsibility for settling the issue in this interview (via Kevin Drum):
Q: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention?
Reid: Easy.
Q: How is that?
Reid: It will be done.
Q: It just will?
Reid: Yep.
Q: Magically?
Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.
In this context, "[t]hings are being done" means "we're all trying to get someone else to do the dirty work." I'm not sure we should believe him -- Howard Dean doesn't want to alienate half the party either.
Update 3/27 9:11 AM -- In comments, Jesse Einhorn questions my claim that "The incentives to defect from such an agreement would also be strong," asking "[w]hat possible incentive would there be to defect back to Hillary's camp" from a possible joint effort to push her out given that she is extremely unlikely to win. However, my claim isn't that the leaders would "defect... to Hillary's camp" but that they would defect to a position of neutrality. Expect lots of mumbling about letting the process go forward, etc etc. The reason to do this that, while Hillary is likely to lose, her supporters (financial, activist, etc.) are and will remain powerful within the party. If you don't believe me, ask Nancy Pelosi, who just got an ominous letter from Hillary's top fundraisers:
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
Justice Scalia inflates the denominator
With math skills like this, it's no wonder Antonin Scalia went to law school:
A couple of years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in a Supreme Court death penalty decision, took stock of the American criminal justice system and pronounced himself satisfied. The rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is, he said, less than three-hundredths of 1 percent — .027 percent, to be exact.
That rate, he said, is acceptable. "One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly," he wrote. "That is a truism, not a revelation."
But there is reason to question Justice Scalia's math. He had, citing the methodology of an Oregon prosecutor, divided an estimate of the number of exonerated prisoners, almost all of them in murder and rape cases, by the total of all felony convictions.
"By this logic," Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a response to be published in this year's Annual Review of Law and Social Science, "we could estimate the proportion of baseball players who've used steroids by dividing the number of major league players who've been caught by the total of all baseball players at all levels: major league, minor league, semipro, college and Little League — and maybe throwing in football and basketball players as well."
Joshua Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor cited by Justice Scalia, granted the logic of Professor Gross's critique but not his conclusion.
"He correctly points out," Mr. Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., said of Professor Gross, "that rape and murders are only a small percentage of all crimes, but then has absolutely no real data to suggest there are epidemic false convictions in, say, burglary cases."
Writing in the Boston Globe Ideas section, David Feige offers a more detailed critique of Marquis's claims back in 2006:
Marquis's most glaring error is his failure to acknowledge the fact that most felony arrests aren't contested. In fact, 95 percent of them are resolved by plea rather than trial. Thus in 19 out of every 20 felony cases, there is no contested issue of guilt and no real claim of error.
Only trials in which someone is convicted while maintaining his innocence should be considered in computing an error rate. Of Marquis's 15 million felony cases, 14.25 million were pleas. When the denominator in his fraction is changed from 15 million to 750,000, the error rate jumps from the arguably ignorable 3 in 10,000 to more like 50 in 10,000.
And Marquis's numbers become even more disturbing with further analysis. Because of the overwhelming demands involved in reinvestigating a crime with an eye toward exoneration, it is almost exclusively defendants sentenced for rapes and murders whose cases get scrutiny from groups like the Innocence Project, the nonprofit organization that helped free Alan Newton. The chances that a drug defendant is going to interest them are virtually nil. Thus the only people who have any meaningful access to the possibility of exoneration are a tiny subset of criminal defendants. Murders constitute only 0.8 percent of all felony cases, and rapes less than 2 percent. In other words, less than 450,000 of Marquis's 15 million felony convictions came in cases where the defendant has had a real shot at exoneration.
It is true that murder cases go to trial far more often than run-of-the-mill drug sales or check forgeries. In fact, some 44 percent of murder cases actually go to trial, with an average conviction rate of about 85 percent. But even taking this into account, of the 150,000 murder cases in Marquis's 15 million, only 66,000 homicide defendants maintained their innocence through a trial, of which just over 56,000 were convicted. Using similar trial and conviction rates for rapes yields somewhere south of 200,000 contested convictions in serious cases. In the final analysis, Marquis's error rate is off by orders of magnitude-his vision of a virtually error-proof system is simply unsupported by the numbers.
Campaign for America's Future: Nativist
In the conclusion of All the President's Spin, we predicted that liberal organizations would increasingly adopt the PR tactics of conservatives. Sadly, what we predicted has come true over and over again during the last few years.
A perfect example of this is a new Web video from Campaign for America's Future, which has adapted the "John Kerry is French"/"freedom fries" nativism of the 2003-2004 era into an attack on John McCain for supporting an Air Force contract with Airbus, which is based in France. The entire video is devoted to mocking McCain using a series of crude stereotypes of the French:
From a policy point of view, the video is just misguided protectionism. As Matthew Yglesias notes, "the idea that Boeing should have a permanent monopoly on Air Force contracts because to work with rival firms would be 'shipping jobs to France' is absurd."
More importantly, CAF's appeal to nativism is repulsive. Imagine the outrage if it were an ad about outsourcing to Mexico featuring caricatured Mexicans and a narrator with an exaggerated accent. The same standard should apply here.
(For more on CAF, see what we wrote about them at Spinsanity.)
Dick Cheney's democratic disregard
I know I'm late to the party, but this Dick Cheney quote really is staggering:
Five years after the start of the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney offered a positive assessment of the war today and called last year's troop surge a "major success."
"On the security front, I think there's a general consensus that we've made major progress, that the surge has worked. That's been a major success," Cheney told ABC News' Martha Raddatz.
When asked about how that jibes with recent polls that show about two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it, Cheney replied, "So?"
"You don't care what the American people think?" Raddatz asked the vice president.
"You can't be blown off course by polls," said Cheney, who is currently on a tour of the Middle East. "This president is very courageous and determined to go the course. There has been a huge fundamental change and transformation for the better. That's a huge accomplishment."
Has any other president or vice president in the contemporary era expressed such open disregard for the views of the public before? While I don't believe that elected officials should mindlessly follow public opinion, public opinion should always be a factor in their decisions in a democracy.
At a more fundamental level, this is the problem with the 22nd amendment -- it puts lame duck administrations outside the reach of democratic accountability.
Grandparent break
With my folks in town to see the littlest Nyhan, two conference papers to write, and March Madness under way, I'm on hiatus until next week. Enjoy the weekend...
What happens if Obama loses big in PA?
Slate's Mickey Kaus asks a good question:
What do the Democrats do when Obama loses Pennsylvania, not by 10 or 15 points but by 20 or 25 points? That seems to be the way things are headed. ...
And, indeed, the polling trend from Pollster.com looks pretty grim (and this is before the Jeremiah Wright controversy fully registers):
Given the demographics of the state and the Jeremiah Wright controversy, there must concern in the Obama camp. Most pundits expect him to lose, but to get annihilated could make some undecided superdelegates very nervous (though, as I've argued, it wouldn't necessarily mean much in terms of the general election).
Update 3/20 1:38 PM: Just to clarify, my point with the graph was that Obama didn't appear to be closing the gap as we might have expected. Indeed, some recent polls suggest a larger gap than the estimated trends and, as I said, these were taken before the Wright controversy fully registers. For instance, the RCP average of recent polls is 51.8 to 34.2 and the last six polls show Hillary leads of 26, 16, 12, 13, 19, and 14.
John McCain fails the Jeff Stein test
John McCain touts his military and foreign policy experience, but apparently doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between Sunnis and Shiites (i.e. Iran is Shiite, Al Qaeda is Sunni). I think it's time for reporters to ask all of our leaders the question Jeff Stein of CQ posed back in 2006:
For the past several months, I've been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?"
A "gotcha" question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don't think it's out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I'm not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who's on what side today, and what does each want?
After all, wouldn't British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?...
But so far, most American officials I've interviewed don't have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?
Update 3/19 1:22 PM -- Here are the links to Stein's pieces:
"Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?"
"Democrats' New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda"
"Reyes Should Have Known Better, But He's Hardly Alone"
Bush thanks Paulson for working weekends
In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Depression, did President Bush really thank Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for working through the weekend?
Mr. Bush singled out Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. for praise, saying he had shown "the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation," an assertion that was broadly disputed by the president's critics.
"I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend," Mr. Bush said in brief remarks in the Roosevelt Room.
Are our standards really this low? Did Bush thank the Joint Chiefs for working weekends during the invasion of Iraq?
Update 3/19 8:18 AM: Via DeLong and Froomkin, the Los Angeles Times reports on a similar reaction:
In some ways it was a throwaway line, the kind of praise a boss tosses out casually. But as the economy teetered Monday, President Bush's words to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson struck many as discordant and disengaged.
"I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend," Bush said as he met with his economic advisors at the White House. "You've shown the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation."
Actually, many analysts and critics said, by focusing on Paulson's working hours instead of on the fear gripping Main Street and Wall Street, the president seemed to show just the opposite -- that he has failed to grasp the gravity of the country's economic crisis.
"He has no idea what's going on. Even by his standards, he's wrong," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who said he had been trying to get the president to pay more attention to the economy for more than a year.
Bush's "working over the weekend" line also suggested a comparison to another disaster in which he was accused of acting too slowly: Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the president was ridiculed for praising FEMA Director Michael D. Brown for doing "a heck of a job" -- even as thousands remained stranded in floodwaters in New Orleans.
Obama, Wright, and district congruity
With Barack Obama preparing a major speech on race for tomorrow, it's worth taking a step back to put the Jeremiah Wright controversy in a larger perspective.
As TNR's Michael Crowley reminds us here and here, Obama's membership in Wright's church helped demonstrate his cultural authenticity to skeptical constituents in Chicago's black community. But it's created a major problem for him now.
The fundamental problem is that the issue positions and cultural affiliations that won elections in Obama's state legislative district are a relatively poor fit to the presidential election landscape. (They're arguably a poor fit to the Illinois electoral landscape as well, but the collapse of Obama's primary and general election rivals in 2004 let him skate into the Senate without coming under serious criticism.) The fact that he has done so well in the presidential race despite the mismatch is a testament to what a remarkably gifted politician he is.
The genesis of this argument is my friend and co-author Michael Tofias, who has a working paper (PDF) showing that "members of the House are more likely to run for the Senate when their districts have high congruity to their prospective statewide constituency." This constituency fit problem is a reason why it's so difficult for black elected officials to win statewide (or national) office -- many of them represent heavily minority constituencies (often the result of racial gerrymandering) that are quite different from the ones they would represent higher up the ladder.
Obama may be able to move past the Wright problem in the near term, but these sorts of controversies will come up again and again on other mismatch issues like gun control and the death penalty.
Update 3/18 8:22 AM: Commenter Rob notes that Matthew Yglesias made the same point as Crowley:
Obama's going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset... Since emerging onto a larger stage, it's been the reverse and Obama's consistently sought to distance himself from Wright, disinviting him from his campaign's launch, analogizing him to a crazy uncle who you love but don't listen to, etc.
Bill Kristol: Wrong on Obama/Wright
Bill Kristol cites a report by the "journalist" Ronald Kessler in today's New York Times claiming that Barack Obama attended an incendiary sermon by Jeremiah Wright on July 22, 2007:
It certainly could be the case that Obama personally didn't hear Wright's 2003 sermon when he proclaimed: "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. ... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."
But Ronald Kessler, a journalist who has written about Wright's ministry, claims that Obama was in fact in the pews at Trinity last July 22. That's when Wright blamed the "arrogance" of the "United States of White America" for much of the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.
What Bill Kristol doesn't tell you is that Kessler writes for Newsmax, the shady right-wing tabloid site. And as Marc Ambinder points out (via Josh Marshall), Kessler's report is contradicted by documentary evidence showing that Obama was in Miami that day (it has also been denied by the Obama campaign).
PS If you want a sense of what Newsmax is like, check out this excerpt from Spinsanity on the website's Deck of Weasels trading card set:
The most explicit comparisons [to Iraqi leaders depicted on the now-famous deck of cards issued by the Pentagon to troops in Iraq to help them identify top Iraqi officials], however, have been made by NewsMax.com and Greenpeace, who have both issued their own decks of cards featuring their political enemies. The NewsMax includes a picture of a politician or celebrity doctored to include a beret bearing the logo of the Iraqi Republican Guard and a "quote revealing his anti-American, pro-Saddam ranting". Prominently featured are French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac as the Ace of Spades (Saddam Hussein's position in the Pentagon deck) and "Sen. Robert 'KKK' Byrd" as the Ace of Diamonds.
This is who Bill Kristol is citing on the New York Times op-ed page.
Update 3/17 2:11 PM: Via Greg Sargent, Kristol has corrected his column:
In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama campaign has provided information showing that Sen. Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error.
James Joyner questions my criticism of Newsmax, citing Kessler's credentials as a reporter, but I think the institutional association tarnishes any such credentials. More importantly, the original article depends not on Kessler's reporting but on the word of a "freelance correspondent" that Kessler concedes may have gotten the date wrong (via Michael Crowley):
[T]he Obama campaign said the senator was not present at the July 22 service.
A few minutes ago, Kessler told us by telephone that "the NewsMax editors have talked with Jim Davis" and "he might have been wrong about the date."
Davis, Kessler added, "says he could have been wrong about the date, but it definitely happened."
Kessler added that he's confident about the rest of Davis' reporting because "I was impressed by the details he had." Asked if getting the date wrong isn't something that would raise questions about the rest of a reporter's work, Kessler said no. And he said that "in general, (Obama's) claim that he doesn't know anything about these sermons is ridiculous."
Kessler said NewsMax will be posting a new story about this shortly.
The site has also posted a vague "clarification":
The Obama campaign has told members of the press that Senator Obama was not in church on the day cited, July 22, because he had a speech he gave in Miami at 1:30 PM. Our writer, Jim Davis, says he attended several services at Senator Obama's church during the month of July, including July 22. The church holds services three times every Sunday at 7:30 and 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Central time. While both the early morning and evening service allowed Sen. Obama to attend the service and still give a speech in Miami, Mr. Davis stands by his story that during one of the services he attended during the month of July, Senator Obama was present and sat through the sermon given by Rev. Wright as described in the story. Mr. Davis said Secret Service were also present in the church during Senator Obama's attendance. Mr. Davis' story was first published on Newsmax on August 9, 2007. Shortly before publication, Mr. Davis contacted the press office of Sen. Obama several times for comment about the Senator's attendance and Rev. Wright's comments during his sermon. The Senator's office declined to comment.
Blog regulation "probably unconstitutional"
I love this quote -- a state representative from Kentucky admits that his bill banning anonymous blog comments is probably unconstitutional:
In response to a constituent whose high school daughter had been the target of derogatory comments online, Tim Couch, a state representative for Kentucky's 90th District, filed a bill to make it mandatory for people to register before posting to a blog.
"I'm not pursuing the bill, because it's probably unconstitutional," Mr. Couch said, "but the way I was looking at it, people who say something bad should have the guts to have their names attached."
Read The Black Swan
Like Matthew Yglesias, I'm a non-economist without much to say about the ongoing financial meltdown, but one recommendation I can make is that you should read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is by far the best thing I have read about the ways in which humans -- and particularly arrogant hedge fund types -- fail to understand and account for risk. I recommend reading it with CNBC on in the background tomorrow...
The politics of recession
Via Greg Mankiw, outgoing National Bureau of Economic Research president Martin Feldstein is worried that the United States is in for a nasty recession:
The United States is in a recession that could be "substantially more severe" than recent ones, National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said on Friday.
"The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad," Feldstein said in a speech at the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida...
Answering questions from the audience, Feldstein said the downturn could be the worst in the United States since World War Two.
If Feldstein is right, what are the political consequences? The last recession we had at the end of a president's term was Jimmy Carter (January-July 1980) and the result was an election that was perceived as a massive repudiation of Carter and his policies. Ronald Reagan's election -- while not a popular vote landslide -- was seen as a "mandate" election that led many Democrats to deviate from their usual voting patterns to support his early legislative program (see Mandate Politics by Grossback, Peterson, and Stimson for more).
While President Bush obviously isn't up for re-election, it's not hard to imagine that his already low approval ratings might go even lower, dragging down John McCain. The recession will also create an extremely unfavorable issue environment for McCain, who has admitted to knowing little about economics.
Under these circumstances, is a "mandate" election possible for a Democratic president? Maybe, although I suspect that the Democrats will lose a couple of percentage points from their popular vote margin due to their historically unprecedented choice of an African American or female nominee.
But this presidency still isn't some great prize for the Democrats. Even if they have a "mandate" for a few months, George W. Bush has created an almost impossible set of problems for the next president. Is there a historical precedent for a president leaving so many unsustainable policies to his successor? The exhaustion of the overstretched military will eventually require the troop surge in Iraq to come to an end. Our strategic failure in Iraq will require a humiliating and potentially bloody withdrawal. The situation is Afghanistan is deteriorating. The financial system is in near-collapse. Medicare is on an unsustainable financial course. And President Bush's backloaded tax cuts for the wealthy are scheduled to expire in 2010, setting up the next president to be accused of raising taxes.
These are the kinds of circumstances that make one-term presidents. The Democrats may be excited about their prospects in 2008, but things will get a whole lot harder for whoever wins on Inauguration Day.
Ventura's faux third party threat
I don't think anyone is clamoring for Jesse Ventura to launch a third party presidential campaign, but he's apparently using it to try to sell copies of his fourth (!) book Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! :
To hear Jesse Ventura tell it, he's either out to become president or an expatriate.
In the opening to his fourth book, due out April 1, the former wrestler and governor of Minnesota writes: "As I begin to write this book, I'm facing probably the most monumental decision of my 56 years on this planet. Will I run for president of the United States, as an independent, in 2008? Or will I stay as far away from the fray as possible, in a place with no electricity, on a remote beach in Mexico?"
...The epilogue of the book imagines eight months of 2008 headlines, as Ventura decides to run on a "WWE independent ticket." Ventura envisions "shoving McMahon off to the side" and announcing his candidacy before 70,000 fans at the 24th annual WrestleMania. Which must mean he can't be serious.
Um, yes.
Primaries aren't necessarily predictive
Let me join Matthew Yglesias and others in reiterating what I've said before -- primary election performance is not predictive of general election outcomes. Pundits: Stop doing this!
Here's a good example of why this approach is incorrect from TNR's Josh Patashnik:
John King on CNN just pointed out that Clinton did better in more Republican parts of Mississippi, and implied that this might mean that Clinton would do better among Republicans in November. This is patently the wrong conclusion to draw, and is a good demonstration of the perils of attempting to predict general-election outcomes based on primary results. Obviously, whites voted heavily for Clinton, and white areas of the state support Republicans in presidential elections--thanks to the votes of people who don't vote in Democratic primaries. Clinton's strong showing in these parts of the state doesn't demonstrate anything about the preferences of a single Mississippi Republican. This is a simple enough point that CNN should be able to convey it to viewers.
Jay Cost makes a similar point in his blog on Real Clear Politics:
[A] reader writes in with the following question:
I've been hearing a lot lately that since Hillary won battleground states of OH, FL, and MI (and will probably win Pennsylvania) then she is better positioned to win those states in the general election. But is this actually true?
Not necessarily. Clinton's flacks can indeed be seen on the airwaves arguing this point - but in so doing they are committing an inferential error. What they are assuming is that because partisan Democrats (her core support group) in a given state support Clinton over Obama - the entire state will. This need not be the case. It could just as easily be that Independents and persuadable Republicans would prefer Obama to Clinton in those swing states. So, in an ironic twist, Clinton would win the primary but not the general. Perhaps the Clinton campaign wishes to argue that Obama could not win in the general the voters she has won in the primary. Maybe - but the primaries alone do not indicate whether that is the case.
Obama's supporters have made their own errors. For instance, one can often find them arguing that his primary strength with self-identified Republicans is evidence of an advantage in the general. By themselves, primary results cannot indicate this. The only data we have on these voters is their self-identification. We do not have histories of how they voted in general elections. To argue that Obama's margins among self-identified Republicans is a sign of strength in the general, they would have to show that these voters are typically reliable votes for Republicans in the general who are being wooed away from their party. We cannot assume that this is the case. Remember that there is always a portion of each party that votes for the other side. So, these voters might actually be reliable Democratic supporters who see themselves as Republicans (lots of people see themselves that way..."I vote for the person, not the party" - but it always seems to be that the better person is of the same party!). In that case, their support for Obama does not necessarily portend general election strength.
As Cost points out, it's also not true that the higher Democratic turnout in the primaries (relative to Republicans) implies anything about general election outcomes:
Even when we exempt the years in which the Republican Party had non-competitive contests (1972, 1984 and 2004), the Democrats typically out-perform the GOP. Pulling in 62.2% of the primary vote [the current total for Democrats] is no unique feat for the Democrats. 1996 is telling. Bill Clinton had no serious challenge while Bob Dole faced a protracted battle against multiple opponents. And yet the GOP still only pulled in 55% of the primary vote.
Another key year is 1988. This is the best apples-to-apples comparison of 2008 that there is. That year, both parties had open nomination battles. The Democrats out-performed the GOP by a margin larger than what they have done this year, pulling in a little more than 65% of the total primary vote. Did it do them any good in the general? No. George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis, 54% to 46%.
Finally, smart pundits like Noam Scheiber and Yglesias are speculating that Obama could put states like Kansas, Montana, and the Dakotas in play, but that's just unrealistic. Obama's primary support in "red states" and his appeal to independents doesn't mean he's going to put heavily Republican states into play in the general election, as his supporters have suggested:
Mr. Obama has been toting up his victories to suggest a striking range of popularity in states that usually fall outside the Democratic electoral map. Yet though these states have helped give him a lead in pledged delegates, it appears far from likely that he would be able to carry some of them in a general election.
Kansas, Mississippi and Wyoming, for instance, tend to be reliably Republican states for that party's presidential nominees. And his big victories in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina were based in large part on black Democrats coming out in droves to support an African-American candidate.
"Most of those states haven't voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don't see that changing," said Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton. "They're great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November. He's winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election."
Look deeper, the Obama campaign contends, and there is another argument in his favor in traditionally non-Democratic states: He has drawn more votes from independents and Republicans than Mrs. Clinton has. But it is unclear whether independents and some Republicans in swing states or Republican-leaning states would choose him over Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.
The list of battleground states may change on the margin, but in the end it's going to look pretty similar to 2004. And if Obama's the nominee, he'll be focusing all his resources on those states in the end just like every previous nominee.
Chris Matthews: Ignorant about policy
Via Bob Somerby, MSNBC's Chris Matthews demonstrates his staggering ignorance about policy issues:
During the March 11 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, guest Chris Matthews asserted that in order to "get something done in this country," politicians need to "do the surprising move that grabs the center" and that "if a Democrat were smart, who gets elected president, they wouldn't go back to the old Canadian model ... single-payer model." In fact, neither Sen. Barack Obama nor Sen. Hillary Clinton has proposed a health-care plan that resembles the Canadian health-care system or a "single-payer model." Matthews also suggested that the Democratic candidates should "take something that looks practical out of Massachusetts with [former Gov.] Mitt Romney [R] ... and put [their] name on it" and "try some kind of mandated benefit." However, Obama's and Clinton's health-care proposals both include "mandated benefit[s]," and Clinton's plan has drawn comparisons to the plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts.
Contrary to Matthews' suggestion, the health-care plans proposed by Obama and Clinton do not follow the "Canadian model," which provides federally funded and managed universal health insurance. Obama's health-care plan does not require the government to manage or fund health insurance for all Americans; rather, his plan allows individuals to keep -- and pay for -- their private health insurance if they so choose, while establishing "a new public insurance program, available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP [the State Children's Health Insurance Program] nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees."
Despite my extremely low opinion of Matthews, this is still staggering. He's on TV every day and he has no idea what the Democrats are proposing on the most important domestic policy issue in this election. None!
To paraphrase Brad DeLong's saying about Bush, Matthews is worse than I imagined possible, even after taking into account the fact that he is worse than I imagined possible. But as Somerby (obsessively) points out, most pundits won't say anything about him because they want to go on "Hardball" and raise their profile.
Green/Gerber GOTV book event
Yale's Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, the co-authors of the voter turnout study (PDF) I mentioned last week, are releasing the second edition of their book Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout . There will be a seminar on the book and its findings at the Brookings Institution next Thursday for those who are interested:
The Brookings Institution Press will host a discussion of voter mobilization based on the findings of the book Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, Second edition. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, more than 100 new studies have been conducted in real electoral settings across the United States. Co-authors Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber will summarize the latest findings and explain how they affect organizing the grass roots and getting out the vote.
The event will shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of campaign tactics—door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail and telephone calls—as well as tactics that were not discussed in the first edition, such as Election Day festivals and radio and television ads. Professors Green and Gerber will examine the challenge of voter mobilization and the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events. Their analysis questions much of the conventional wisdom about what works and what does not in political campaigns.
Falk Auditorium
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
New Douglas Hibbs forecast for 2008
Via Mark Thoma, Douglas Hibbs has updated the 2008 forecast of his respected "Bread and Peace" model of presidential election outcomes and the news is good for Democrats (IE-only link):
This projection represents a substantial improvement for Democrats relative to Lane Kenworthy's previous estimate from the Hibbs model of approximately 50% (which I blogged about at the time).
Sinbad vs. Hillary Clinton
Via Ezra Klein (among many others), the 1990s comic Sinbad has resurfaced to contradict Hillary Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience:
Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton's self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who has come out from under a rock to defend Obama in the war over foreign policy credentials.
Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she's taking much grief on the campaign trail.
Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.
In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"
Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.
Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.
"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"
In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."
Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"
As Jon Chait writes, "When your main campaign theme is foreign policy experience, and that experience is persuasively refuted by a comedian, it's time to find a new theme."
I have nothing else to add; I just think it's hilarious that Sinbad has become relevant to the campaign. Who's next? Carrot Top? Gallagher?
The futility of Obama's negation
Tyler Cowen notes that Barack Obama's response to Hillary Clinton's VP talk is unlikely to be effective:
Read this, the headline is "Obama: I'm no V.P.". That's not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama's words. My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming "I am not X" is not much better than admitting "I am X." Either way it frames the debate. And avoid phrases like "If I'm not ready [for the Presidency]..."
The classic example is Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook." And indeed there is psychology research shows that the negation (i.e. "no" or "not") is frequently forgotten over time, as the Washington Post's Shankar Vendantam pointed out in 2004:
Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.
"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.
"If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."
Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all.
The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options.
I'm not a fan of politicians using advanced framing tactics; my interest in this research concerns its implications for correcting myths like the supposed connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Anyway, here's the abstract from Mayo's paper for those who are interested:
''I am not guilty'' vs ''I am innocent'': Successful negation may depend on the schema used for its encoding
Ruth Mayo, Yaacov Schul, and Eugene Burnstein
Negations (e.g., ''Jim is not guilty'') are part of our daily language and communication. Linguistic and non-linguistic negations can occur when receivers counter-argue what communicators are saying, when hypotheses are disconfirmed, or through negative cognitive responses and many other social interactive processes. Our study explores how negations are encoded by considering the predictions of two theoretical models. According to the fusion model, the core of a negated message and the negation marker are integrated into one meaningful unit. Thus, Jim in the example might be encoded within the schema ''innocence.'' According to the schema-plus-tag model, a negated message is represented as a core supposition and a negation tag, allowing for dissociation of the two at a later point in time. We compare the two models by examining the nature of inferences that are facilitated by negations. Our results show that the existence of a schema that accommodates the meaning of the original negation is critical in determining how a negation will be encoded. When such a schema is not readily available, processing a negated message facilitates negation–incongruent associations, in line with predictions of the schema-plus-tag model. This model is also supported by analyses of respondents' memory. We discuss implications of these findings for the communication of negated information, for discounting theories, and for the assessment of the truth of incoming information.
John McCain's inconsistent voting record
As many people (including me) have pointed out, John McCain's reputation for "straight talk" is highly exaggerated. Indeed, he's changed his views so many times it's hard to know what he thinks. At the same time, however, his voting record is more conservative than his "maverick" reputation suggests.
A friend points out that the book Ideology and Congress by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, the two authors of the most widely used estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress, can help square the circle on McCain to some extent.
On pages 2-3, they note that their algorithm tends to place McCain as highly conservative but that his voting record is especially inconsistent, causing the predictive accuracy of their estimates to be the lowest of all the members of the Senate during the sessions in which he has served (i.e. "the worst fitting"):
There are, to be sure, occasional mavericks in Congress... John McCain (R-AZ), normally one of the very most conservative members of the Senate, has been the worst fitting member of the Senate in each of his eight Senates, most notably the 103rd (2001-02), where he frequently voted with the Democrats, perhaps in pique over losing the race for the presidential nomination in 2000.
They later note that the rapid evolution of McCain's views is abnormal and not fully accounted for by their statistical model, which assumes members don't bounce around so much (p. 93):
Given the pace of events, it would be possible for the major dimension to show rapid legislator shifts. In our dynamic model, very rapid shifts are foreclosed by our imposition of the restriction that individual movement can only be linear in time. This restriction fails to capture a few cases. For example, John McCain (R-AZ) started as a conservative, became a moderate after losing the Republican nomination to George Bush in 2000, and recently reemerged as very conservative. McCain is an exception...
The fact that he's largely gotten away with this double evolution should be seen as an amazing political accomplishment. But I think the political environment is so favorable to Democrats that the media will eventually start hammering him. The questions about his dalliance with John Kerry in 2004 are already starting...
National Enquirer smears Obama
The current issue of the National Enquirer contains some ugly smears of Barack Obama.
The cover prominently features a picture of him along with the headline "Obama's secrets... His close friendship with terrorist." Out of context, this headline may reinforce the the myth that Obama is a Muslim, suggesting to casual readers that Obama is friends with a Muslim terrorist. In fact, however, the headline refers to Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of 1960s radical group the Weathermen.
In addition to scurrilous suggestions that the gay choir director of Obama's church was murdered to silence him from revealing what he knows about the presidential candidate, the article uses the Ayers connection to suggest that Obama is anti-American. It quotes Bill Hobbs (the Tennessee GOP flack who authored an infamous press release smearing Obama):
Asked about Ayers, Obama's campaign spokesman David Alexrod freely admitted: "Yes, they're friendly."
Bill Hobbs, communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, revealed there are other links between the senator and America's enemies.
"Obama has a foreign policy advisor, Robert Maley, who blames Israel for anything bad and suggests we ought to be doing business with Hamas (the radical Palestinian militants dedicated to Israel's destruction)," Hobbs told the enquirer.
Hobbs believes Obama will be putting America's strongest ally in the Middle East right in the crosshairs of our enemies.
Just as disturbing is the alleged link between Obama and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has referred to Jews as "dogs" and "pigs"...
Even worse, the Enquirer floats rumors that Obama is an Iranian agent without directly contradicting them:
The senator's questionable associations have fired up Internet bloggers and their imaginations.
The "New York Post" recently reported that some Internet "posts" even claim that Obama is an Iranian agent sent to take over the U.S. government and wage war against Sunni Muslims."
A pull quote stating that "Some posts even claim Obama is an Iranian agent" is featured in a separate picture of Obama that appears above the famous image of him in Somali clothing. Once again, the implication to casual readers is that Obama is a Muslim and possibly disloyal to the US.
While the tendency is to ignore the Enquirer as tabloid trash, it has a circulation of more than one million copies and is seen by many more people in supermarket checkout lines. We should not ignore what Mickey Kaus calls "the undernews."
Update 3/13 3:34 PM: Due to a legal threat from the Enquirer, I've removed the images and PDF previously included in this post from my website.
Posted at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBack (1)
Bob Herbert reads Hillary's mind
It's time to get the swami graphic out again because Bob Herbert is pretending to read minds (my emphasis):
More serious was Senator Clinton's assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also "certainly" crossed that "threshold," but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama.
In other words, if a choice on national security had to be made today between Senators Obama and McCain, voters — according to Mrs. Clinton's logic — should choose Senator McCain.
That is a low thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to do to a rival in a party primary. Can you imagine John McCain saying that Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or even the guitar-strumming Mike Huckabee might be less qualified than Hillary Clinton to be commander in chief? It couldn't happen.
But Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat.
Of course, Herbert has no idea what Clinton has given "a second thought" to during the campaign. But he pretends that he does anyway.
Using social pressure to get out the vote
There is a cool article in the new American Political Science Review reporting the results of a field experiment in which different mailings were randomly sent to voters. It turns out that making voting turnout public knowledge has a dramatic effect on turnout -- here's the abstract:
American Political Science Review (2008), 102:33-48
Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Christopher W. Larimer
Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received mailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.
Here's the key passage reporting their results, which show an eight percentage point increase in turnout from one mailing:
Here's a sample mailing:
While this might seem a little creepy, voting records are public information. It's important to remember that voting was an act performed in public before the Progressive Era -- a period when turnout was much higher than it is today.
Journalists squabbling on the air
I don't think I've ever seen a reporter and an anchor insult each other on live television before:
Note: The first part of the clip is a prosaic news report about apartment maintenance -- stay with it until it gets good (about a minute in).
The 1968 analogy
Kevin Drum suggests that Democrats should calm down about the possibility of a long nomination fight hurting their chances in the fall:
The hot topic of conversation right now is the proposition that a long, drawn-out Democratic primary runs the risk of destroying the party and putting John McCain in the White House. So for the good of the country, Hillary should withdraw.
Now, this might be true. But I'd like to offer a historical counterexample: 1968. Consider. The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ's Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party's eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.
In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.
If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. "Bitter" isn't even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost.
This is all true, but it's important to remember that Humphrey drastically underperformed in 1968 relative to what we would expect given the state of the economy at the time (a result that is often attributed to Vietnam War deaths). We can't quantify what damage was done by the polarizing primary campaign, but it's hard to see how it would help.
Democrats risk a similar scenario -- a destructive primary campaign could turn a possible rout in November into a 50/50 coin flip a la 1968. And even if they do win, any significant reduction in the popular/electoral vote margin could have significant legislative and political consequences going forward.
On the other hand, as John Sides points out at The Monkey Cage, the most prominent political science article studying this question did not find a significant negative effect (gated JSTOR link):
Divisive Primaries and General Election Outcomes: Another Look at Presidental Campaigns
Lonna Rae Atkeson
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan., 1998), pp. 256-271.
Theory: The divisive primary hypothesis asserts that the more divisive the presidential primary contest compared to that of the other party the fewer votes received in the general election. Thus the party candidate with the most divisive primary will have a more difficult general election fight. However, studies at the presidential level have failed to consider candidate quality, prior vulnerability of the incumbent president or his party, the national nature of the presidential race, and the unique context of each presidential election campaign. Once these factors are taken into account presidential primaries should have a more marginal or even nonexistent effect in understanding general election outcomes.
Hypothesis: Including appropriate controls for election year context in a state-by-state model and creating a national model that controls for election year context, candidate quality, and the nature of the times should diminish the effect of nomination divisiveness on general election outcomes.
Methods: Regression analysis is used to examine the effect of presidential divisive nomination campaigns on general election outcomes.
Results: Once election year context in the state-by-state model is controlled for, divisiveness has a much more modest effect. This modest effect does not appear to change general election outcomes. In addition, the election year model, which posits that presidential elections are national elections and not state-by-state elections, indicated that divisiveness was not significantly different from zero.
Updated Obama support graphs
Updating my posts analyzing the correlates of Obama support at the state level, here are some new graphs using the currently available numbers.
In a linear regression predicting Obama's proportion of the two-candidate vote (i.e. his vote plus Hillary's) in contested non-home states (i.e. not FL, MI, AR, NY, or IL), the statistically significant factors are black population (+), Democratic presidential vote (-), having a caucus (+), and levels of state education (+), while Hispanic population, state population (logged), and Southern Baptist population are not, which is largely consistent with my last post. Here are the relevant graphs:
Also, though these factors aren't statistically significant in a linear regression using the same predictors listed above, the white vote for Obama continues to be significantly negatively correlated with a state's black population and Southern Baptist population (the latter has been suggested as a proxy for "Southernness"):
(Notes: In the absence of a clear way to handle the hybrid Texas primary-caucus, I've counted the primary and caucus there as separate observations. The association between black population and Obama vote is concentrated among primary states and the linear fit above is only for those states. White support for Obama is only available in some states due to missing exit poll data. Finally, the fitted line above for Democratic presidential vote excludes the outlier of Washington, DC.)
Update 3/5 9:30 AM: TNR's John Judis has a nice analysis of the exit poll data, as does Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics.
Update 3/6 8:48 AM: By request, here is the graph of Obama support by black population with a quadratic fit, which is heavily influenced by his strong showings in caucuses in heavily-white states (by contrast, the plot above is a linear fit for primaries only):
Hillary exaggerates primary victories
After her wins last night, Hillary Clinton is engaging in simplistic primary->general election extrapolation:
"No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary," Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. "We all know that if we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win Democratic states just like Ohio."
She also said this:
"If we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win the battleground states, just like Ohio," she said. "We've won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Arkansas, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee!"
The New York Times echoed this take in its reporting, writing that "[t]he results on Tuesday also bring fresh questions about [Obama's] electability in crucial swing states like Ohio that Democrats are eager to carry in the November election." The paper added that "Mr. Obama's inability to win major battleground states beyond Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and his home state, Illinois, is a concern of some Democrats — especially since Ohio and Florida have become must-wins in presidential elections."
As I've argued, however, it's not clear that primary outcomes prove much about a candidate's likelihood of winning that state during the general election. In this case, the latest head-to-head matchups in Ohio from Survey USA, which were conducted February 25, show no difference between them (McCain beats Clinton 49-43 and Obama 49-41, a difference which is within the poll's margin of error).
The New York Times quote about Obama failing to win "major battleground states beyond Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and his home state, Illinois" is especially inane. If we use Time Magazine's map from 2004, there were (broadly defined) eighteen battleground states. (The list did not include Illinois.) Excluding the uncontested primaries in Florida and Michigan, thirteen of those states have had primaries or caucuses thus far. Obama has won seven (Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, Colorado, and Michigan) and Hillary has won six (Arizona, Arkansas, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico), although most of Obama's wins in those states came in caucuses and most of Hillary's came in primaries.
Marshall insinuates National Journal bias
What is this elliptical comment from Josh Marshall supposed to mean?
[I]f John McCain would be the big winner of a result tonight that would insure a continued and hard fought Democratic primary race, you have to figure that a big loser would be the National Journal who would be faced with the possible need to re-re-jigger their congressional voting rankings to make Clinton the most liberal member of the United States Senate.
Politics is a rough biz.
Is he really suggesting that National Journal, which is about as non-partisan as any publication in Washington, is out to get the Democrats? On what basis? As far as we know, the problem isn't bias -- it's the lousy methodology that National Journal uses. As in 2004 with John Kerry, if you look at more sophisticated classification algorithms used by political scientists, Barack Obama is not the most liberal senator in the current Congress.
Unfortunately, this post is yet another example of Marshall suggesting what he can't prove.
Update 3/4 7:57 PM: A reader points out that Marshall may instead be implying that National Journal manipulates its rankings in an effort to generate PR, which is another plausible reading of the post. It's important to note that the editor of NJ directly denies that the magazine had any advance knowledge of what Obama's ranking would be when it picked the votes used to generate the ratings.
McCain, Obama, and the fundamentals
Ezra Klein flags a new Pew poll showing that John McCain is becoming a much more polarizing figure:
Via the new Pew Poll comes evidence that McCain's broad coalition of People Who Like Him is beginning to polarize by party as he moves towards the Republican nomination. His favorability numbers among Democrats have tanked, and his ratings among independents have fallen, even if only to 51 percent. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to have discovered a newfound affection for the guy, and their recognition that he too supports endless war and upward redistribution have sent his numbers skyrocketing. None of this is particularly shocking -- in fact, expect to see the same phenomenon with Obama before very long -- but it suggests that McCain is vulnerable in exactly the ways everyone is saying he's vulnerable. As Matt noted the other day, both McCain and Obama have faced their toughest battles in primaries, and so very few voters have heard McCain attacked from the left, or Obama assailed from the right. But they will soon.
This is exactly the process that I predicted would take place if McCain won the nomination:
McCain spiked upward in popularity at the time he made his run in the 2000 presidential primaries, and has barely declined since...
The reason, I think, is that Democratic politicians don't criticize McCain (some even ask him to be their vice presidential nominee). He's more or less the only partisan politician who Democrats and Republicans generally praise. As a result, the public likes him across the board -- the Quinnipiac poll shows his favorabe ratings as 37% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Republicans; 31% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Democrats; and 40% favorable, 9% unfavorable among independents.
But this will inevitably change if McCain runs in 2008. The reason is that he's never received significant Democratic criticism. He was defeated in 2000 before the Democrats felt the need to open up on him, and since then they all praise him because they want to look bipartisan and co-sponsor bills with him in Congress. But he won't get the Republican nomination unless he starts unloading on the Democrats, and if he does get nominated (which I think is unlikely), things will turn around really quickly. Pretty soon Democrats will start pointing out that he's a pro-life, ultra-hawkish, government-cutting conservative, and his favorability profile will start to look like most other Republicans. And even though McCain's numbers look great today, few Democrats would actually vote for him -- if he's only getting 15% against Hillary Clinton right now, imagine what he'd draw against a more moderate Democrat like John Edwards at the end of a vicious presidential campaign.
The counterpoint to this is the finding in the same poll that Barack Obama's support lags Hillary's among some Democratic constituencies. But as Matthew Yglesias notes, these people are very likely to come into the fold by November:
Obama is winning even though he's doing unusually poorly among self-identified Democrats. In particular, older white working class Democrats seem drawn to McCain in pretty large numbers. But you've got to consider that at this point almost ever older white working class Democrat in America has been the target of a lot of messaging from Hillary Clinton arguing that Obama is too inexperienced and too dovish. They haven't, meanwhile, heard any messaging from anyone about how John McCain wants to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare benefits. Obama, in other words, is currently winning despite weakness with this demographic, and is also almost certain to look less weak among this demographic in November than he does today.
The tension here is between the predictability of partisanship and election outcomes on the one hand and the prevailing belief in candidate quality as a major factor in elections. During campaigns, the fundamentals end up pushing people in relatively predictable directions, but we tend to attribute many of those changes to political skill (or the lack thereof). In reality, the candidates themselves probably only matter on the margin, as Andrew Gelman argues (though you'd still rather be McCain than Romney and Obama rather than Clinton):
The predictability of election outcomes from fundamental variables suggests that different presidential candidates from the same party don't differ much in the votes they will receive in the general election. It's better to be a moderate than an extremist, and it's better to be a better campaigner etc., but all these things together probably only count for a couple of percentage points of the vote.
...Now, don't get me wrong: a couple of percentage points of the vote can make a big difference--just look at the tied elections of 1960, 1968, 1976, and 2000, as well as the very close election of 2004. Also, who knows how things will go with the unprecedented "woman or young black guy vs. old white guy" dynamic. But, based on past elections, I'd say the whole "electability" thing is overrated. Once Election Day comes around, people will find a reason to vote for the party they want to support.
For more, see the article Gelman and Harvard's Gary King wrote on this phenomenon, which shows how voters tend to eventually end up where we would predict over the course of the campaign:
Gelman, Andrew and Gary King. "Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls So Variable When Votes are So Predictable?" British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 23, No. 1 (October, 1993)...
As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast?
...We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections---not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues.
This plot in particular does a nice job of showing how the estimated effect of ideology and race increased over the course of the 1988 campaign, while the effect of other variables declined dramatically (see page 445 of the paper for details):
In addition, this plot shows how actual support for George H.W. Bush converged with his predicted level of support using regression weights from polls immediately before the election (see page 448 for details):
If John McCain ends up losing this election, expect a flurry of stories claiming he lost because he shifted to the right and lost his so-called "maverick" appeal. The state of the economy and other factors will get much less attention.
Bill and Hillary: Overhyped
Jon Chait has a nice piece in the LA Times that echoes the points I've made about Hillary's overrated 2000 victory in New York:
The real reason Clinton will lose is more prosaic: Obama is a far better politician.
Republicans have long had a kind of black-magic fear of the Clintons' political potency. From the right's perspective, Bill Clinton won the presidency at a time when the GOP thought it had an electoral college lock. Then he beat back the Republican revolution and the party's efforts to defeat him.
The reality is less dramatic. Bill Clinton defeated a recession-weakened president with some help from a third-party spoiler, stopped the GOP from cutting highly popular social programs, won reelection during an economic boom and rallied his own party to thwart a wildly partisan impeachment crusade. None of these triumphs required unusual political skill.
Hillary Clinton has tried to piggyback on her husband's ferocious reputation, boasting that she "beat the Republican attack machine." Of course, if anybody beat the Republican attack machine, it was Bill. Hillary Clinton wasn't on any ballot in the 1990s. True, her reputation was at stake, but that's a fight she lost: She ended that decade a highly unpopular figure. She remains one today, with about half of the public persistently telling pollsters they have an unfavorable view of her.
Nor was Clinton able to shed her baggage when she moved to New York. In her November 2000 Senate race, she ran five points behind Democratic ticket-topper Al Gore in New York, and Gore himself was hardly a beloved figure at the time. Six years later, she pummeled a token opponent.
One point Chait doesn't note: Hillary's numbers only improved in the aftermath of the Lewinsky affair, which made her seem like a more sympathetic figure. But by 2000 they reverted to her previous, highly polarizing profile.
The point about Bill Clinton's overrated political skill is also worth considering (Ezra Klein had a good post on this in the last month or two but I can't find the link right now). Bill is obviously a very good politician, but his political achievements are relatively underwhelming in retrospect and he's been an ineffective surrogate for Hillary in this cycle.
Another Obama smear from Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh, who has already said that Barack Obama looked like Osama bin Laden in a picture in which the Democratic presidential candidate was wearing Somali clothing, added on "The O'Reilly Factor" this week that Obama was "looking like [Osama bin Laden's chief collaborator] Ayman [al-]Zawahiri."
On a related note, I heard Limbaugh ranting today about how Obama is worse than Bill Clinton based on the overblown dispute over what an adviser allegedly told a Canadian diplomat:
[D]o you think Obama's faithful give a rat's rear end about the Tony Rezko deal and how Obama bought his house? You know, it strikes me... This is the kind of thing that we tried with the Clintons back in 1992, all of the character defects, the lying. It didn't matter. It really didn't matter. People were just so (sigh). People didn't care about it. When we tried pointing out the character flaws of Clinton, it just didn't matter. Now, this stuff with Obama is far more serious, and I'm not minimizing how bad the Clinton stuff was, but this is worse. This guy is actually incompetent. He is clueless. He has a Clinton problem in that he will just change a story on a dime, and make it sound like everybody else heard him wrong the first time.
It'll take better material than that for Rush to turn Obama into Michael Dukakis.
Is Barack Obama the next Michael Dukakis?
As Paul Krugman and Bob Somerby have argued, the risk that Barack Obama will turned into the next Michael Dukakis (or worse) is real.
After months of largely respectful coverage and debate, there has been a slew of attacks in the last few weeks on Obama as unpatriotic and/or a Muslim that are being widely reported in the mainstream press.
Just consider some of what's happened:
-The AP ran a story with the headline "No hand over his heart: Obama patriotism questioned" quoting GOP consultant Roger Stone saying Obama is "part of the blame America first crowd." Obama was asked about the attacks on his patriotism during a press conference and CNN ran an online poll asking "Does [Sen.] Barack Obama show the proper patriotism for someone who wants to be president of the United States?" (via Media Matters).
-The Washington Times published a story with the headline "Military Fears 'Unknown Quantity'" which claims that "[m]embers of Washington's military and defense establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama" (though, as Greg Sargent pointed out, only one person -- a retired general who now serves as a Fox News analyst -- is quoted expressing this sentiment). The piece also quotes a Pentagon official saying that Obama's victory would "give the Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in bragging rights. They win. We lose."
-The radio talk show host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama" at a John McCain rally at least three times and then seven more times on "Hannity & Colmes". (McCain repudiated his attacks.)
-A picture was circulated of Obama in Somali dress that was attributed to Clinton staffers by Matt Drudge. Rush Limbaugh referred to it this way: "Obama dresses up like Bin Laden, and if you mention it, it's a scurrilous attack" (via Andrew Sullivan).
-Time Magazine's Mark Halperin offered a list of "[t]hings McCain can do when running against Obama that Clinton has been unable to do well or at all" that included "Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama" and "Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama's unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism" (via Brad DeLong).
-The Tennessee Republican Party issued a press release titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" that referred to him as "Barack Hussein Obama," linked him to Louis Farrakhan and other anti-Semitic figures, and showed the picture of him in African clothing.
-Jonah Goldberg falsely claimed that Obama's "campaign headquarters in Houston had a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag hanging on the wall."
Going forward, the question is whether the press will continue to give credence to these attacks. There was a critical period in 1999 when Republican agitprop claiming Al Gore was a liar found a receptive audience in the press. Very quickly, a largely phony narrative about his truthfulness was manufactured that played out all the way through the general election. Is this the equivalent period in the Obama campaign? It's hard not to be concerned.
Given the stakes, it's important to push back against this sort of fear-mongering and credulous media reporting. At the same time, though, we should be wary of attributing all the attacks on Obama to some sort of sprawling McCain-directed strategy, as Josh Marshall seemed to do:
Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can't.
But that's not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They're like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it's the score that's the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.
Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain's repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don't be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as 'channel conflict'. You've got your multiple distribution channels. You've got the way McCain's selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you've got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.
Both can work simultaneously. In fact, in the kind of campaign McCain's running, they're both essential for success (see the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina). The key is just that the channels don't cross. Because that's when the trouble starts and they can begin to undermine or even short-circuit each other. And that's what threatened to happened here.
Don't insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain's plan for this race doesn't rely on hundreds of Cunninghams -- large and small -- across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it's the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.
If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he's done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we'll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.
Let's just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what's happening here and who's in charge.
However, Marshall -- who has recently acquired a penchant for asserting things he can't prove -- doesn't know that there is a "McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama" that tries to "drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab" and that McCain is "in charge" of it. The smear campaign against Obama is likely to be waged in a far more decentralized fashion than Marshall seems to realize. As the New York Times points out, "McCain clearly will not control all of the voices that could oppose Mr. Obama, from bloggers and talk radio hosts to other elected officials." Should McCain push back harder? Of course. Unfortunately, he has every incentive to sit back, allow the attacks to take place, and only criticize a handful of the most extreme and widely publicized smears (such as Cunningham's). That's loathsome, but it doesn't make him "in charge" of the whole process.
I am Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University and have served as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research and a faculty member in the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I also tweet at @BrendanNyhan, contribute to The Upshot at The New York Times, and am a co-organizer of Bright Line Watch. Previously, I served as a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review, co-edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin, and co-authored All the President's Spin. For more, see my Dartmouth website.
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Open Source, Digital Textbooks Coming to California Schools
by Contributor on Thursday Jun 11 2009
By John Timmer The cash-strapped Golden State has decided that, starting next school year, schools will be able to use open source, digital textbooks for a number of math and science subjects.
Bomb Threat Delayed An Air France Flight to Paris days Before Flight 447 Crashed
by Anonymous on Thursday Jun 04 2009
Wikinews has learned that Argentine media reported on May 27 that an Air France flight traveling from Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Paris, France, was delayed after the airline reportedly received a bomb threat, just days before Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

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