Brendan Nyhan

Grover Norquist's Communist obsession

Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, has a disturbing obsession with Communist metaphors and tactics. According to David Brock, Norquist keeps a portrait of Lenin and frequently quotes Lenin's saying "Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses." And in a New Yorker profile this week, Norquist compares his efforts to take over the country via democratic means with a Communist-style revolution -- maybe the comment is supposed to be sarcastic, but I find it disturbing:

[Norquist] talked about how to build a broad coalition. "If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters," he said. "But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that's a much bigger section of the population." To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles over a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote "guns," in the second he wrote "taxes," in the third he wrote "faith." There was a small area where the circles intersected. "With that group, you can take over the country, starting with the airports and the radio stations," he said. "But with all of the three circles that's sixty percent of the population, and you can win politically."

This is hardly the only example of the parallels that are explicitly drawn by conservatives. A 1983 Cato article (PDF) lays out a "Leninist strategy" for privatizing Social Security. Liberals could never get away with this stuff.

The Americans for Tax Reform pledge protects special interests

John Cassidy's New Yorker story on Grover Norquist includes the text of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, which I had never seen before:

I ,____________, pledge to the taxpayers of the _____ district of the State of _________ and to the American People that I will:
ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

I understand why they make people pledge never to raise taxes (though I think that sort of inflexibility is idiotic). But the second provision of the pledge surprised me. To me, a big part of tax reform is reducing the economic distortions and inefficiencies created by the tax code. This means keeping the system simple and preventing special interest deductions and credits from proliferating. The potential efficiency gains from this sort of reform are arguably at least as great as the ones from reducing marginal rates. But ATR is so focused on reducing taxes that it implicitly protects deductions and credits, saying that they can only be eliminated if matched dollar-for-dollar by new tax cuts. What a shame.

The continued dominance of the white quarterback

Why are black quarterbacks still so rare in football? There are more black coaches than ever before (though still very few) and a number of black QBs have been highly successful at the college and pro levels, but the position is still ridiculously white. Don't believe me? Check out this picture from a New York Times article on a camp for the top high school quarterbacks in the country:

The sycophants of Power Line

Via Andrew Sullivan, the obsequious rhetoric of Power Line:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Hyperbolic? Well, maybe. But consider Bush's latest master stroke: the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The pact includes the U.S., Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea; these six countries account for most of the world's carbon emissions. The treaty is, in essence, a technology transfer agreement. The U.S., Japan and Australia will share advanced pollution control technology, and the pact's members will contribute to a fund that will help implement the technologies. The details are still sketchy and more countries may be admitted to the group later on. The pact's stated goal is to cut production of "greenhouse gases" in half by the end of the century.

What distinguishes this plan from the Kyoto protocol is that it will actually lead to a major reduction in carbon emissions!

No wonder Power Line is so popular -- this makes Rush Limbaugh look like an independent thinker. And, of course, the author (John Hindraker) fails to mention that Bush's plan has no enforcement mechanisms. What a visionary! All we have to do to cut carbon emissions is make vague promises of long-term reductions! He's the Van Gogh of environmental politics! The Einstein of carbon emissions!

Bill Frist's stem cell decision

Bill Frist's decision to back an expansion of stem cell research is fascinating. Frist has been assiduously courting Christian conservatives for years in anticipation of a presidential run. So why did he decide to burn them now on a litmus test-type issue?

Some possibilities:

1) He decided that stem cell research is just too popular to resist. The fact that someone like Frist would back stem cells suggests that this issue is a political loser for conservatives and will soon be conceded by everyone to the left of Rick Santorum.
2) He realized that he's not the candidate of choice for conservatives, so he's trying to appeal to a broader swath of the Republican primary electorate and build up his general election appeal.
3) He realized that backing stem cell research plays up his greatest personal strength -- his medical background.
4) After months of shameless pandering, he went with his instincts as a doctor rather than making a political calculation.

The stem cell debate is, of course, closely related to the abortion debate, but with one key difference -- it's playing out in the political realm without court involvement. So it's a great test of the hypothesis that abortion politics are so polarized because Roe v. Wade removed the issue from the democratic process and prevented compromise. If that hypothesis is correct, then conservatives should eventually accept the legitimacy of stem cell research. The fact that so many conservatives have already accepted President Bush's original plan -- which allows for the destruction of embryos -- suggests that the Roe theory is correct. Frist's decision may be another step down that road.

The myth of Hillary as moderate

Hillary gave a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council on Monday, and all hell broke loose. The funny thing is that if you actually read it, you'll see it was largely Democratic boilerplate with only a few vague rhetorical gestures toward the center, as Mickey Kaus pointed out. But lefty bloggers lost their s---, helping Hillary position herself as a centrist without actually acting like one. As Kaus wrote, "it's now also clear that her shift to the right doesn't have to be that dramatic, because the ... press is ready to interpret even the subtlest, most insubstantial shading as part of Hillary's New Moderation. She can get credit for centrism without having to actually take too many positions that the left would disagree with."

I don't understand why people are falling for this. Even the very smart Matthew Yglesias claimed that Hillary is a moderate:

Ron Brownstein's article on Hillary Clinton and the DLC twice asserts that she was once seen as a "champion of the left." The question is: by whom? Not by the left wing of the Democratic Party which has always, and correctly, seen her as a moderate. Not by the moderate wing of the Democratic Party which has always, and correctly, seen her as a moderate. Instead, she's been seen as a left-liberal by conservative propagandists and the public at large.

However, as I showed before, Hillary actually is a liberal according to the best indicators we have. Her Poole-Rosenthal DW-Nominate score (the standard in political science) rated her as the 12st most liberal member of the Senate in the 108th Congress -- substantially to the left of the Democatic mean. And this is after her supposed turn to the center in the Senate. Here's the chart again:

If she's a moderate, then Carl Levin (13), Pat Leahy (14), John Kerry (16), Chuck Schumer (18) and Chris Dodd (20) are practically centrists. You would think the left would be thrilled at the prospect of a nominee with a more liberal voting record than Kerry, but instead they're freaking out.

In the end, this reaction is very strange, but it certainly helps Hillary reposition herself stylistically, if not substantively, as a centrist. Kaus's readers may have it right:

Several readers have suggested that Hillary Clinton is only attempting a mirror image of the trick George W. Bush used to gain the presidency in 2000: Set a moderate tone ("compassionate conservatism") while making sure the fine print pleases the base.

If so, the question is whether that trick will work again. It depends on the underlying political circumstances (Bush's popularity, the state of the economy, the war in Iraq, etc.), but I doubt it. The way the press incessantly portrayed Bush as a "different kind of Republican" seemed driven by a combination of his charm, Clinton fatigue, and reporters' dislike for conservative ideologues like Newt Gingrich. It's hard to imagine that sort of dynamic lasting very long with Hillary given the way she's been treated by the media in the past.

What is a quality candidate?

A question recently came up during a conversation I had with Jason Reifler: what makes someone a good political candidate? Right now, political science models focus on variables like partisanship, economic performance, etc., and don't take the personal qualities of the candidate into account. Is is true that personal qualities don't matter, or is the problem that we can't measure them well? And what should we measure that can be measured? For instance, the best data we have for Congressional candidates simply measures whether they had run for public office before or not, which is pretty crude. What are we missing?

In terms of whether quality candidates matter, I'm thinking in particular of our good friend HRC. The argument I've made is that she is a well-defined public figure with high unfavorables, which makes her a bad candidate.

Amy Sullivan made a similar claim recently in the Washington Monthly:

[W]hile her “favorables” are good—57 percent of Americans have a positive impression of her—her negatives are disturbingly high as well. This long before an election, most voters have yet to make up their mind about a candidate. Even as close to the primaries as December 2003, 66 percent of voters didn't know what they thought of John Kerry. That's not the case with Clinton. While at this point in George W. Bush's first presidential campaign, Bush also had favorable ratings around the mid-50s, an additional 30 percent of voters said they either hadn't made up their minds about him or they didn't know who he was. Compare that to Hillary: Only 7 percent of respondents aren't sure what they think of her, and—not surprisingly—no one says they haven't heard of her.

Never in American political history has a candidate faced such a decided electorate at this early a point in a presidential race. That's a disadvantage when you consider that one of the lessons of 2004 was that once voters develop a perception about a candidate, it's as immovable as superglue. No one who thought George W. Bush was a likable, friendly guy could be convinced that he was corrupt or misleading. And once John Kerry became identified in voters' minds as a “flip-flopper,” no amount of arguing could change that image. It's a problem for any candidate. For Sen. Clinton, it could be fatal. Americans know exactly what they think of her. And nearly 40 percent say they would never consider voting for her.

But there are a few potential counter-arguments:

1) Personal qualities don't matter; the economy does. Models focused on the economic predict presidential voting very well. Candidates are just stand-ins. So Hillary will win in 2008 if the economy is bad, and lose if it's good.
2) Hillary is polarizing, but Bush's 2004 campaign proves that a polarizing figure can win the White House if they turn out their base (this is arguably related to #1).
3) Personal qualities don't ultimately matter because they are socially constructed and change over time. Al Gore was seen as a Boy Scout before he was completely redefined as a liar/leftist/etc. from 1997-2000, and now his profile looks like Hillary's. In the jargon of social science, they're endogenous. Dick Morris has made a similar argument that "charisma" is socially constructed.
4) Hillary has a unique (but completely unproven) ability to move the Democratic Party to the center, which can help increase a party's vote share depending on the model you use and the assumptions you make.

What do you think?

Durham in summer: Pros and cons

It was an inferno here the last few days, but on the upside, I got to watch Grant Hill play pickup basketball against the Duke guys at the gym. Pretty cool.

Things have been busy; more soon...

Seth Mnookin includes corrections in paperback edition of Hard News

Good for Seth Mnookin! The journalist has taken the unusual step of including a dedicated corrections section in the paperback version of his book about the New York Times:

Random House will publish the paperback of Seth Mnookin's 2004 book, "Hard News," on August 9. An advance copy received by E&P reveals that the book has a new subtitle, a new afterword by the author, and, in a rare move, three pages of corrections.

The subtitle has been changed from "The Scandals at 'The New York Times' and Their Meaning for American Media" to "Twenty-one Brutal Months at 'The New York Times' and How They Changed the American Media."

Mnookin says he only made a few errors but, to continue his commitment to "transparency," he is "offering up a relative rarity in the world of book publishing: a corrections section."

Most of the corrections (like the Times') are of a minor scale, such as the executive dining room of the paper being located on the 11th, not 14th floor, and Clyde Haberman stringing from City College of New York, not Columbia University.

The more substantial correction concerns the original's assertion that two Timesmen, Jon Landman and Jim Roberts, had a testy relationship. Mnookin notes that this was based on a New York magazine story and that Landman tells him that though the two editors are not "drinking buddies," they do share mutual respect.

It's a little different than Ann Coulter, who "corrected" one mistake in her error-riddled book Slander, and that correction was itself misleading. Similarly, Michael Moore changed one deceptive caption in his fact-challenged documentary "Bowling for Columbine," but his correction was, like Coulter's, still misleading. And many, many other filmmakers and book authors never correct any mistakes. Mnookin deserves credit.

More spin from Eleanor Smeal

In an email to supporters after the announcement of John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court, Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal falsely suggests that Roe is in danger of being reversed for the second time since Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation:

Let there be no mistake about it. The case most likely to be reversed or pivotal in the coming Supreme Court nomination fight is Roe v. Wade. But even some of our progressive friends tend to marginalize the abortion issue. We must rally the millions of women and men who support reproductive rights if Roe is to be saved.

...The Feminist Majority will continue to examine Roberts' record, and it will demand that Senators not confirm Roberts unless he makes clear that he will not reverse Roe and civil rights for women, minorities, and the disabled.

But of course, Roe does not need to be "saved"; there will be five votes supporting Roe on the Court after Roberts is confirmed. And the weasel phrase "reversed or pivotal" allows Smeal to suggest that Roe will be reversed, but gives her an out (since it could be "pivotal" without being "reversed").

What's ironic is that Smeal used almost the same misleading language in her last email, yet FM sent out a correction to this one stating that "In the original version of this email, the Feminist Majority, we believe, incorrectly stated that John Roberts represented Hooters in a sex discrimination case. Also, at a rally today, which may be appearing on CSPAN, Ellie Smeal inadvertently also made this error. We regret the error." It's great that they corrected the error, but pretending that Roberts will cause the court to reverse Roe is far more misleading.

Josh Marshall asserts White House behind Fitzgerald probe

According to two paragraphs at the end of a long Reuters story, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is chaired by Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, will "hold hearings on the use of espionage cover" and "review the probe of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame case for nearly two years."

I'm no fan of Roberts, who has repeatedly dodged the White House's manipulation of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction before the war in Iraq. But with the certainty of a scandal-mongering true believer, Josh Marshall quickly asserted that the order to investigate Fitzgerald came down from the White House:

Can any Senate Democrat not see now that Sen. Roberts only use for his committee is as a tool to defend the political interests of the White House? And will anybody deny that the decision to investigate Fitzgerald comes down on the orders of the White House?

And then in another post he did the same thing again:

And yet now we hear that [Roberts] plans to investigate Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation itself.

What this man won't do when Karl Rove calls.

This is close to an accusation of obstruction of justice. And Marshall has no proof; he just asserts that the White House is involved. Didn't Democrats used to object when the GOP acted like this during the Clinton years? It may turn out that the White House was involved, but who knows? Roberts may have decided to do this on his own. And that's the point -- we just don't know.

Atrios suggests Roberts is gay

Just a day after I denounced conservatives for manufacturing a conspiracy to suggest that John Roberts is gay, Atrios has made the same suggestion, even though the judge allegedly described in the story was reportedly removed from contention:

I Wonder Who This Was?

And did he wear plaid pants?

Amid the political hullabaloo surrounding white-bread Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, gay activist Michelangelo Signorile remembers a much more colorful candidate.

"There was a contender for the federal judiciary in the George W. Bush administration who I began receiving information ... about him making sexual advances on men in gyms in Washington and other cities," Signorile told us Friday. Immediately after sex, "he would ... go into a religious tirade and then tell them how morally wrong all this was. His record was really conservative."

...Having heard the stories about the would-be federal judge, the writer made a few calls to the White House.

"They said they'd have someone call me back, and they didn't," Signorile laughed.

"The upshot of it was, this person was just quietly no longer a contender!"

I'm revolted.

Update 7/25: A commenter suggests that maybe Atrios is mocking the blog post in question. It's possible. But then why does he repeat the Signorile rumor? Also, the comments I read on the post appeared to be taking the suggestion seriously.

Update 7/26: Atrios says it was a joke in comments. It wasn't clear to me given that the "joke" was combined with a suggestion that he wants to out the judge in the Signorile story, nor was it clear to his commenters who read it the same way. But fair enough; I'll take his word for it. I've updated the title above to reflect this clarification.

Update 7/26: A further thought about this -- you would think Atrios would understand why his intent might be confusing when he jokes about a phony conspiracy to suggest Judge Roberts is gay while endorsing the outing of a gay conservative in the same post. Those two ideas don't fit together particularly well.

Turning the world against us: Rich Lowry/Tom Tancredo edition

One of the primary criticisms of the Bush administration's approach to foreign policy is to say that it unites the world against us. There's some truth to that, but being popular is only useful insofar as it helps the US achieve its objectives, so I tend to think you need a more reasoned case for why having international support is a good thing: cooperation in the war on terror, support for US initiatives in multilateral institutions, etc.

What I never expected was how willing some conservatives apparently to go even further. Haven't they done enough damage to America's standing in the world? Don't they realize that we stand on the precipice of radicalizing a generation of Arab youth against us? Yet in the aftermath of the London attacks, two prominent conservatives suggested ridiculous approaches that would have united our enemies and divided our friends.

Rich Lowry approvingly passed on "thoughts" from a British friend, including this: "There should be retaliation. Find a terror camp somewhere and hit it. Terrorists should, for these purposes, be treated as one nation, and all should be held responsible for any one attack." And Tom Tancredo said the US should bomb Mecca if radical Islamists strike us with nuclear weapons.

Mecca is the most holy site in Islam. Destroying it would turn every Islamic country on earth against us. How hard is this to understand? The same thing applies to random strikes on "terror camps" before we know who committed the bombings. If we treat all of Islam, or all of the various terrorist groups, as one undifferentiated enemy, that's what we'll get.

And now there's apparently a report in The American Conservative detailing plans to strike Iran after a second 9/11-type attack on the US -- even if Iran is not involved. I'm all for a hawkish stance on anti-terrorism, but the war of ideas is part of the war on terror, and we're going to lose it if this crowd stays in charge much longer.

Hillary moving to the center?

With a big lead in her New York Senate race and early 2008 trial heats, is Hillary Clinton continuing to try to move back toward the center? Drudge is claiming that she will support John Roberts and has a background quote supposedly bashing MoveOn.org:

Senator Hillary Clinton has confided to associates that she intends to vote FOR Bush Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Unless some unforeseen development occurs around Roberts, Clinton will throw her support behind confirmation, says a top source.

"Look, we're not thrilled President Bush is in office and gets to make these choices," said a top Hillary source, "but we have to make the best of the situation until the next election!"

With her support of Roberts, Clinton ignores pressure from the reactionary-activist wing of the Democrat party.

"She is simply doing what is right for the country, not MOVEON.ORG," the Clinton insider explained.

Given what Drudge did to Clinton in the 1990s, it would certainly be ironic if her campaign is actually leaking to him now. But given Drudge's standards of "journalism," this might be complete garbage. We'll see.

Manufacturing an anti-Roberts conspiracy

Via Kevin Drum and Unfogged comes one of the wackiest blog posts I've ever read. The author, Charmaine Yoest, a conservative apparatchik now at the University of Virginia, accuses the left of insinuating that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts is gay. What's the evidence for that very serious charge? A blog post on "Manhattan Offender" (whatever that is), a joke on Wonkette, and a New York Times article that Ann Althouse thinks is intended to suggest that Roberts is gay. The alleged problems with the Times story: it mentions that Roberts played Peppermint Patty in a Charlie Brown play at his all-male boarding schools, shows a series of pictures of him among men (shockingly enough, people who attend all-male schools are frequently photographed among men), mentions the fact that he married in his 40s, and includes a picture of him as a teenager in plaid plants.

That is a ridiculously flimsy basis for suggesting a leftist conspiracy. But Powerline, the ugly id of blog conservatism, pounced on Yoest's post, exaggerating it even further:

[Democrats] are hinting that John Roberts is a homosexual because he was once photographed--more than thirty years ago--wearing plaid pants. You think I'm making this up? Charmaine Yoest has the story. If you think that's contemptible, consider this: some on the Left have also suggested that Roberts' four year old son is "gay."

Throughout American history, until now, there have been limits. There have been depths beneath which Americans would not sink for the sake of partisan advantage. Even during the Civil War, when the Democrats were fighting to preserve slavery, limits were observed. Now, all civility is gone. There is no depth to which some Democrats will not sink. Hold your nose. Things are only going to get worse. With MoveOn and the Daily Dose dominating Democratic politics, all constraints are gone.

Who needs evidence when you can make up a conspiracy against you? In the Kabuki theater of 21st century politics, everyone wants to cobble together an offensive attack against them so they can denounce their enemies and portray themselves as victims. It's the same approach Republicans used when they claimed that several blocked judicial nominees were the victims of anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic bias (a claim that may be revived during the Roberts nomination fight).

And how ignorant are the people at Powerline about politics? The idea of a mythical age of political civility is nonsense. Here are the limits observed before the Civil War:

His opponents countered by making fun of Lincoln's limited experience as a statesman and his "slang-whanging stump speaker" style, which they said reflected a limited intellect that would be an embarrassment to the nation should he be elected President. The Charleston Mercury ridiculed his looks, depicting him as a "horrid looking wretch . . ." unfit for office. Cartoons showed Lincoln dancing with black women and championing "amalgamation" and "miscegenation" (mixing of the races). One widely distributed picture showed Lincoln steering a ship with a thick-lipped black man embracing a young white girl sitting at his feet on deck. Other pictures were much cruder and even more blatantly racist, of a type never before so prevalent in a national election. One secessionist in Georgia warned that Lincoln planned to force the inter-marriage of black and white children, and that within "ten years or less our children will be the slaves of Negroes."

Yes, as Drum mentions, this is Time's 2004 blog of the year. We are losing our minds.

More George Allen follies

In addition to catching flak from Democrats for his ugly racial history, Virginia Senator George Allen's recent pre-presidential trip to New Hampshire reportedly also managed to annoy Republicans, as Robert Novak reports:

Sen. George Allen of Virginia, the hottest early prospect for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, blundered on his visit to New Hampshire May 3 by conducting two fund-raisers there.

GOP insiders in the nation's earliest primary state did not want to criticize him publicly, but called Allen's New Hampshire performance "odd." That's because presidential candidates are supposed to spend funds in the state, not take money out. Allen was raising money for his 2006 Senate re-election campaign.

Did Ari Fleischer dissemble before the Plame grand jury?

Via Wonkette, here's an ex-Bush administration official speaking in late 2004 with The Nation's David Corn:

"[Ari Fleischer] testified before the [Valerie Plame] grand jury for six hours. Afterward someone asked me if I thought he could get through all that without saying something untrue. Ari talk for six hours without saying something untrue? That's not possible."

I'd amend that to "misleading" since part of Fleischer's genius is to say things that aren't exactly untrue but leave a false impression. Still, it's amusing, and it gets at a real question: was Fleischer was able to restrain himself after befuddling the White House press corps with disinformation for more than two years? The legal system plays by a whole different set of rules. There are already suggestions that he may be in trouble; we'll see.

For more on the greatest spinner to ever hold forth from the White House podium, see Spinsanity's posts on him, including our Fleischer retrospective; the many Fleischer references in All the President's Spin; and Jonathan Chait's 2002 Fleischer takedown in The New Republic.

Conflict of interest watch update: Ron Brownstein

Back in May, I wrote about how Los Angeles Times Ron Brownstein had failed to disclose his engagement to John McCain's communication director when he hyped McCain's 2008 presidential prospects. To his credit, Brownstein eventually ran a disclosure after getting married. LAT Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus later commented it was ok for Brownstein to discuss McCain "in a minor way." I've been corresponding with McManus in the period since in the hopes of getting more specifics on the newspaper's policy toward Brownstein's relationship, but no official statement has yet been produced.

I don't want to pick on Brownstein, who I think is one of the nation's very best political reporters and analysts. I would hate to see him taken off the beat because of his marriage. At the same time, though, I think it's crucial for him to be aggressive about disclosing the conflict of interest that exists. In the clubby world of Washington, those sorts of disclosures rarely happen because the relationships are well known among elites (but rarely known by the wider public). Thus, NBC's Andrea Mitchell fails to mention she's married to Fed chairman Alan Greenspan; Time Magazine's Matt Cooper doesn't note that he's married to Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald; and so forth.

So I decided to take a look at the transcripts of Brownstein's frequent television appearances -- the worst medium for disclosures because guests have no control of the topics that are discussed and very little time in which to speak. As a result, disclosures almost never happen. And that's exactly what's happened with Brownstein.

The list of times McCain has come up since Brownstein got married is growing. Brownstein briefly discussed McCain's views on immigration on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on May 20 and McCain's views on the filibuster/"nuclear option" debate on "Inside Politics" on May 23, July 1, and July 4, never mentioning his wife (you can find transcripts for those shows here). And Brownstein implicitly praised McCain's immigration proposal in a LAT column on July 11 that ran without a disclosure.

I would rather see Brownstein write and speak about McCain as much as he wants, but disclose the relationship as openly as possible so that readers/viewers can draw their own conclusions. Instead, we're getting a worst of both worlds solution where Brownstein doesn't talk about McCain much, but when he does there's no mention of his relationship. This is especially ill-advised on television, where there can be no reasonable assumption that CNN viewers read Brownstein's LA Times disclaimer.

Jon Chait on the exercise president

Like me, Jon Chait is troubled by the President's obsession with exercise over substance:

A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise...

Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? I don't mean the fact that Bush would vet his selection for the highest court in the land in part on something utterly trivial. That's expected. What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

My guess is that Bush associates exercise with discipline, and associates a lack of discipline with his younger, boozehound days... The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood -- or, perhaps, the president himself.) But Bush's apparent belief in it explains why he would demand well-conditioned economic advisors and Supreme Court justices.

Bush's insistence that the entire populace follow his example, and that his staff join him on a Long March -- er, Long Run -- carries about it the faint whiff of a cult of personality. It also shows how out of touch he is. It's nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.

Dog bites man

Breaking news from Drudge: "Mel Gibson's next film will feature abundant violence..."

A Federal Reserve for gas taxes

We have a problem in this country: we use too much oil. It pollutes the air, increases global warming, and forces us to police the Middle East to ensure a stable energy supply, which has helped radicalize angry Arab youth. What's the easiest way to reduce oil consumption? A gas tax, as Matthew Yglesias noted recently. Taxes cause some inefficiency, but shifting relative prices is a far more efficient and effective way to reduce oil consumption than government mandates. That's why even conservatives like Greg Mankiw, the former top economist in the Bush White House, have supported it. Mankiw wrote a 1999 article in Fortune titled "Tax Gas Now!", which argued that a gas tax paired with an income tax cut "may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer."

So what's the problem? The public hates it, and politicians won't go near it (Mankiw had to eat his words later). One reason is that the government's commitment to ensuring that people get a fair deal from a gas tax is not credible. Politicians have every incentive to take the extra revenues and put them toward more pork while taking back the accompanying tax cut over time. So why not have an independent Federal Reserve-type board of economists that's responsible for adjusting the tax cut to maximize fuel efficiency without creating economic dislocation? The board could also be responsible for creating a yearly tax rebate that could be administered separately from the normal income tax system. That way people would see the proceeds from the gas tax coming back to them in a transparent way.

If we're going to make progress on reducing fuel consumption, we need a different approach. Why not this one?

Mortgage junk mail

Since my wife and I bought a house, I started getting a ton of junk mail peddling home repair services, second mortgages, etc.. Does anyone know if my mortgage company is selling my contact information, or if the junk mailers are getting it from public documents? If it's the former, can I opt out? Or do we need a law to fix this?

Best picture ever

Don't miss today's New York Times story on the indigenous female pro wrestlers of Bolivia, which includes the greatest front-page photograph in the history of the newspaper:

What is Richard Cohen talking about?

On Tuesday, I predicted that John Roberts will be easily confirmed (see here and here). Today, Richard Cohen, a reasonably influential left-of-center pundit, agrees in the Washington Post, but his reasoning is bizarre:

Another hanging chad has dropped. His name is John G. Roberts Jr., and he undoubtedly will turn out to be opposed to abortion rights, affirmative action, an expansive view of federal powers and a reading of the Constitution that takes a properly suspicious view of the state's embrace of religion. In these and other matters -- the death penalty, for instance -- he is expected to substantially reflect the views of George W. Bush, the man who nominated him to the Supreme Court, because that was what the election of 2000 and its sequel were all about. You hang enough chads, and you get to change the Supreme Court...

It seems to me that it is the Democratic Party that has a problem. It can either come to terms with reality or appear, to much of the country, both petulant and in the grip of special interests, particularly the pro-choice lobby. In effect, the fate of this nominee was settled back in the year 2000 when Florida, for better or for worse, squinted hard and pronounced George W. Bush its winner. The chads have spoken.

What does the 2000 election have to do with Roberts' nomination? If John Kerry had won in November, he would be appointing O'Connor's replacement right now. And the fact that Bush won both elections doesn't mean he gets to put whoever he wants on the Court. What a dumb column.

Affirmative action for the fit in Bush White House

Today, Elizabeth Bumiller reports in The New York Times that George W. Bush wasted time asking a potential Supreme Court nominee about how much he exercises:

When President Bush sat down in the White House residence last Thursday to interview a potential Supreme Court nominee, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, he asked him about the hardest decision he had ever made - and also how much he exercised.

"Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day," Judge Wilkinson recalled in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn't want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill." The president, Judge Wilkinson said, "took umbrage at that," and told his potential nominee that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested. "He thought I was well on my way to busting my knees," said Judge Wilkinson, 60. "He warned me of impending doom."

Bush may deride academic expertise, but he sure cares about how much people work out. According to the Washington Post, Larry Lindsey's failure to get in shape was part of the reason Bush soured on Lindsey before forcing him out in 2002:

Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor, was at loggerheads with O'Neill as the administration devised a package of tax cuts that is to be a centerpiece of Bush's legislative agenda next year. Bush blamed Lindsey for many of the administration's economic missteps in recent months and even complained privately about his failure to exercise, aides said.

Looks like the big tent isn't big enough for all of the overweight people out there. And they say the administration looks like America...

Will Democrats lay down a marker during the Roberts confirmation hearing?

It should become pretty obvious in the next few days that John Roberts is unlikely to be defeated. Game theory says that players should anticipate their rivals' next move and play their best response to that move. So if the Democrats play like game theorists, they may focus on laying down a series of markers for any future confirmation hearings for justices nominated to replace William Rehnquist, strengthening their hand for the next round in the game. That assumes, of course, that they don't have to engage in kamikaze attacks against Roberts for the benefit of the liberal interest groups that are already calling for his head.

Update 7/20: Scott Ferguson rightly asks me to explain "laying down a series of markers," which was more than a little obscure. What I mean is that Democrats might gear their questioning strategy toward a) reasserting their right to try to block objectionable nominations and b) setting a series of precedents and standards that might trip up a future Rehnquist replacement. The next nominee will be expected to answer any questions that Roberts answers now; any stands Roberts takes now will make more conservative stances taken later look extreme; and so forth. I'm not sure it will work, but it seems like their optimal strategy.

Michael Tofias also suggested to me that President Bush might be looking forward to the next judicial battle in the same way. If he doesn't want to nominate someone who's not currently on the Court for Chief Justice, he puts Roberts on the Court now and gets a quick confirmation. Then, when Bush is replacing Rehnquist, he can put up someone who's battle-tested and less controversial than Scalia or Thomas. It's quite possible.

Update 7/21: Guest-blogging on WashingtonMonthly.com, Lindsay Beyerstein advocates a forward-looking strategy along the lines of what I forecasted above:

Bush will confirm a conservative judge. Barring some shocking revelation about Roberts, I don't think it would be worthwhile to filibuster him. The next nominee would probably be equally bad. It's far wiser to stiffen up our own discipline. First, we use the confirmation process to draw attention to critical issues. Second, we send a message to Bush: this far and no further.

A unified Democratic party will send a powerful message. There will probably be at least one more confirmation battle during this administration. If we aren't strong now, the Republicans will be emboldened to nominate an even more extreme candidate next time.

What is Eric Alterman talking about?

On his Altercation blog today, Eric Alterman is the latest liberal to repeat the canard that approving an anti-choice justice means that Roe v. Wade is doomed, joining Eleanor Smeal, Atrios and Josh Marshall :

Anyway, the Roberts nomination seems to mean we should plan on saying goodbye to thirty-two years of life under Roe, which is not entirely a bad thing, even for pro-choice advocates. After all, Bush did terrific with unmarried women without college educations. It would be helpful, politically (and democratically) for them to learn just what it was they were voting for.

Even if Alterman means that Roe will be curtailed rather than repealed, his language clearly gives a false impression.

David Ignatius worries about GOP disinformation

As political scandals develop, establishment moderates are the canaries in the mine shaft. When they get upset, you're usually in trouble. So it's important that David Ignatius, a centrist foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post, blasts Ken Mehlman's use of the "Big Lie" to defend Karl Rove in his latest column:

In place of accountability, the Bush White House has embraced the three-pronged strategy of attack, attack, attack. If anyone had forgotten how these trash-the-enemy rules operate, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman gave an astonishing demonstration on Sunday's talk shows. Mehlman had a tough case to argue, given uncontroverted evidence that (a) Rove had been a confirming source for columnist Robert D. Novak's initial story that the man who was making trouble for the White House on its arguments regarding weapons of mass destruction, Joseph Wilson, was married to a CIA employee and (b) Rove was the initial source for Time's Matthew Cooper on information that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA on WMD issues.

Mehlman didn't bother to defend the indefensible. He attacked. "Democrat partisans on the Hill have engaged in a smear campaign where they have attacked Karl Rove on the basis of information which actually vindicates and exonerates him, not implicates him." Now, I'm sorry, but that's about as close to the Big Lie as we get in American politics. It's like claiming that the blue sky overhead is actually some other color -- and then challenging the dissenter to prove it's blue. Mehlman's comments have the effect of undermining the shared ground on which government operates.

The last sentence is crucial. When people deny obvious facts, it undermines the possibility of rational debate. We repeated that point over and over again at Spinsanity, so it's good to see Ignatius make it.

The demeanor fetish

News reports are already playing up the "demeanor" of John Roberts as a selling point. But isn't this a silly way to judge a person in politics? George W. Bush's 2000 campaign was largely based on how his demeanor was different than conservatives like Newt Gingrich, and it fooled a lot of people into thinking he was a moderate. We can only judge a politician or a judicial nominee based on what they have said and done in the past. Whether they have a friendly demeanor or a "good heart" is irrelevant.

John Roberts will be confirmed

Per my post below, this is over before it begins. Roberts was approved by unanimous consent on the Senate floor in 2003 after passing the Judiciary Committee on a 16-3 vote. Given that he just went through the confirmation process, it's extremely unlikely that anything will turn up that would allow the Democrats to defeat him, but I'm sure we'll hear lots of hysteria from the liberal interest groups anyway.

The pick is interesting from another angle, however. As Ed Kilgore noted, Roberts served as deputy solicitor general under Bush I, was nominated for the federal bench by Bush's father, and served as an adviser to Jeb Bush during the Florida legal battle in 2000. Bush appears to view a track record with him and his family as an acceptable way to demonstrate one's bona fides (see Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell, Margaret Spellings, etc.) -- part of his general tendency to favor loyalty and machine politics over doctrinaire conservatism. Roberts was not the top choice of DC conservatives, but he has a history of loyal service to the Bush family and he's likely to be confirmed at little political cost. It fits the pattern.

Update 7/21: This post was updated to clarify that Roberts advised Jeb Bush, not George W., during the Florida legal battle.

Blocking Bush's nominee is unlikely

I can't understand why liberals are acting like they will be able to block President Bush's Supreme Court nominee. No matter who Bush picks, he or she is likely to be confirmed. As James Taranto pointed out, "[n]ot since 1968 has the Senate blocked confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee while the president's party held a majority -- and that was a lame-duck president and a very different Senate." Matthew Yglesias recently made a similar point, noting that "[t]his is basically a battle the Democrats lost last November -- you can't block bad stuff if you don't have the votes, and Democrats don't have the votes." It's the same pattern we've seen over and over again since 2001 -- the combination of Republican votes and vulnerable red state Democrats is virtually unstoppable.

The problem is that we tend to forget the underlying factors that drive most political outcomes. We tend to attribute the defeat of judicial nominees to various scandals or ideological positions rather than the configuration of the Senate relative to the presidency. But many of those nominees would have been confirmed under different circumstances. "Scandals" are largely the creation of institutions. Congressional committees and the media investigate nominees, creating the raw material for scandal, and political parties provide a mechanism for coordinating opposition to a nominee around a set of talking points. If enough people don't agree that a scandal exists, then it doesn't exist. Conversely, as we've seen many times, "scandals" can be manufactured out of virtually nothing.

The same reasoning applies for presidents. Consider the difference between 1995-2000, when Bill Clinton faced a hostile Congress that investigated him mercilessly, and 2001-2004, where the Democrats have been powerless to use committee resources to investigate the Bush administration except for a brief period when they controlled the Senate. "Scandal" production was much higher from 1995-2000 for reasons that seem unrelated to the relative conduct of the two administrations.

What's ironic is that Republicans surely realize they are likely to win, but they have no incentive to say so, because it only raises expectations of victory. Portraying the fight as difficult makes it possible to declare a great victory when President Bush triumphs in the end -- a boost they need given how badly he has been pounded over the last few months.

Matthew Yglesias is wrong about Medicaid fraud

On Tapped, Matthew Yglesias takes on the excellent New York Times series uncovering massive Medicaid fraud in New York (part 1, part 2):

TWO CHEERS FOR WASTE AND FRAUD. This is a bit awkward, but I feel compelled to raise a red flag about The New York Times' decision to run a multi-part series on waste and fraud in Medicaid at just the moment when waste and fraud in Medicaid is being used as a pretext for efforts to gut the program. It would be silly to deny that waste and fraud exist, or that it's legitimate for journalists to cover such stories, but questions of timing and context exist as well.

Realistically, waste is an endemic feature of human affairs.... The overwhelming odds are that the cuts being planned and proposed at the moment will have bad consequences for poor people's health care and minimal effects on actual abuse. Journalists do their readers a serious disservice when they obscure that reality.

Of course, it's true that reporters should put the waste, fraud and abuse issue in a political context, but that's not the purpose of the stories in question. And that's ok. The Times stories Yglesias is criticizing are classic muckraking showing how taxpayer dollars are being misused. More generally, Yglesias makes much of the fact that we can't get rid of all waste, fraud and abuse, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it whenever possible. Bill Clinton showed that efforts to tackle waste increase confidence in the ability of government to do good. The lesson of welfare reform is that if liberals won't confront these problems, they are more likely -- not less -- to lose the political fight over the program in question.

Correction 7/20: I accidentally wrote "Medicare fraud" instead of "Medicaid" in the title. Oops. Maybe this means there's a job for me in the Bush White House...

Bob Somerby on the threat to non-political truth

Like me, Bob Somerby is worried about the way liberals are sliding down the slippery slope of spin.

He first quotes from Paul Krugman's column Friday:

[W]e're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth.

But this problem is hardly limited to conservatives, as even Somerby points out: "No question— conservatives pundits recited bogus claims last week, as they’ve done for years and years. But today we ask a further question— is a similar habit of thought developing now on the left?"

He cites a recent Josh Marshall post as an example:

We refer to this Saturday post by Josh, which attempts to explain (away) an obvious mistake Joe Wilson made all through 2003. Throughout that year, Wilson insisted that Dick Cheney had surely seen an official report about his trip to Niger. He was “absolutely convinced” of this, Wilson said on Meet the Press the day his New York Times op-ed appeared. Throughout the year, Wilson battered Cheney for daring to say that he hadn’t seen such a report. By now, pretty much everyone, including Wilson, agrees that no such report went to Cheney’s office. In his post, Marshall was explaining (away) Wilson’s mistake.

Because remember— in the America Krugman described, your side can never be wrong about anything; your side can’t make a mistake. “There is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth,” Krugman complained; indeed, “the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.” We think it would be a tragic mistake for liberals to begin behaving this way— but we were forced to think of Krugman’s description when Marshall explained (away) Wilson’s error.

Why did Wilson turn out to be wrong on this matter? Why didn’t the CIA send a report about his trip to Cheney’s office? Marshall asked this question in his post, saying “this actually is a relevant fact in understanding the story.” Then he gave the following answer— an answer which really did shock us:

MARSHALL (7/16/05): The explanation confected by the authors of the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] report was the rather contradictory one that either Wilson's trip generated no substantive information or that it in fact tended to confirm suspicions of an illicit uranium traffic between the two countries. No one who's looked at the evidence involved believes that. Nor is that cover story compatible with the CIA's subsequent and repeated attempts to prevent the White House from using the Niger story.

Why didn’t the CIA send a report? We’ll summarize Marshall’s full answer below. But according to Marshall, the authors of last summer’s SSCI report “confected” a “cover story” when confronted with that question. Just how fake was their “cover story?” This fake: “No one who’s looked at the evidence” believes at least one part of their story! Josh goes on to explain his claim further (see below), but that’s his claim about the Senate report. And that’s the claim that we found shocking— and the claim that recalled Krugman’s piece.

Why was Josh’s claim so shocking? Because of what he didn’t tell readers. After all, who were the authors of that “confected” “cover story?” The SSCI report was unanimously presented by seventeen senators, eight of whom are major Democrats.

de Marchi and Munger on Senate Judiciary polarization

Scott de Marchi and Mike Munger, two of my illustrious professors, have published a nice analysis of polarization on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Raleigh News & Observer. Here's the conclusion:

[T]here is no room for compromise, no "swing" votes for the chairman to appeal to. In fact, if Specter tries to compromise, his only option would be to turn to the Democrats, forcing a 9-9 tie on the committee...

You can bet that White House strategists are looking at the same Judiciary Committee scenario and seeing that an extreme choice could get through the committee. The opportunity to change policies and precedents for a generation may be too much of a temptation to resist...

In political terms, we have a majority party with no desire to compromise and a minority with no compromise to offer. Don't worry about the empty middle on the Supreme Court. The problem is the large -- and growing -- hole in the middle of U.S. society.

Matt Bai on George Lakoff

Matt Bai's much-touted article on professor/framing guru George Lakoff came out in the New York Times Magazine this week. I have to admit that I was hoping for more new material (see my previous posts on Lakoff), but Bai does carry the ball forward in a few areas:

1) The disturbing ubiquity of Lakoff among Democrats -- Bai writes that Don't Think of an Elephant! became "as ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao's Little Red Book once was in the Forbidden City." He also has a novel explanation for the Lakoff obsession:

What the framing experts had been telling Democrats on the Hill, aside from all this arcane stuff about narratives and neural science, was that they needed to stay unified and repeat the same few words and phrases over and over again. And these "outsiders" had what Reid and Pelosi and their legion of highly paid consultants did not: the patina of scientific credibility. Culturally, this made perfect sense. If you wanted Republican lawmakers to buy into a program, you brought in a guy like Frank Luntz, an unapologetically partisan pollster who dressed like the head of the College Republicans. If you wanted Democrats to pay attention, who better to do the job than an egghead from Berkeley with an armful of impenetrable journal studies on the workings of the brain?

2) Lakoff's ideas about framing aren't very good, as the Republican pollster Frank Luntz points out:

What Lakoff didn't realize, Luntz said, was that poll-tested phrases like "tax relief" were successful only because they reflected the values of voters to begin with; no one could sell ideas like higher taxes and more government to the American voter, no matter how they were framed. To prove it, Luntz, as part of his recent polling for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, specifically tested some of Lakoff's proposed language on taxation. He said he found that even when voters were reminded of the government's need to invest in education, health care, national security and retirement security, 66 percent of them said the United States overtaxed its citizenry and only 14 percent said we were undertaxed.

3) Lakoff is taking advantage of the need for a simplistic explanation for Democrats' electoral weakness and allowing himself to be framed as the answer. Kenneth Baer, who previously criticized Lakoff in the Washington Monthly, tells Bai that "Every election defeat has a charlatan, some guy who shows up and says, 'Hey, I marketed the lava lamp, and I can market Democratic politics.'" Bai shows that, while Lakoff has described reframing as a long-term process, Democrats are interpreting him to be offering a tactical edge that can be obtained without rethinking old ideas:

The message Lakoff's adherents seem to take away from their personal meetings with him, however, is decidedly more simplistic. When I asked Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the minority whip and one of Lakoff's strongest supporters, whether Lakoff had talked to the caucus about this void of new ideas in the party, Durbin didn't hesitate. ''He doesn't ask us to change our views or change our philosophy,'' Durbin said. ''He tells us that we have to recommunicate.'' In fact, Durbin said he now understood, as a result of Lakoff's work, that the Republicans have triumphed ''by repackaging old ideas in all new wrapping,'' the implication being that this was not a war of ideas at all, but a contest of language.

4) Harry Reid, unlike Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, is smart enough not to be talking to reporters about how he hopes to manipulate people using frames:

Reid waved away the suggestion that language had much to do with the party's recent successes. ''If you want my honest opinion, and I know you do, I think people make too much out of that,'' he said... Reid credited the ''team effort'' and message discipline of the caucus for its victory on the filibuster issue...

After leaving Reid, I walked across the Capitol to see Nancy Pelosi, who told a different story. She assured me that Lakoff's ideas had "forever changed" the way Democratic House members thought about politics. "He has taken people here to a place, whether you agree or disagree with his particular frame, where they know there has to be a frame,'' she told me. "They all agree without any question that you don't speak on Republican terms. You don't think of an elephant."

5) As Bai finally drives home, the Democrats still need ideas -- frames aren't a substitute for them:

The larger question -- too large, perhaps, for most Democrats to want to consider at the moment -- is whether they can do more with language and narrative than simply snipe at Bush's latest initiative or sink his nominees. Here, the Republican example may be instructive. In 1994, Republican lawmakers, having heeded Bill Kristol's advice and refused to engage in the health-care debate, found themselves in a position similar to where Democrats are now; they had weakened the president and spiked his trademark proposal, and they knew from Luntz's polling that the public harbored serious reservations about the Democratic majority in Congress. What they did next changed the course of American politics. Rather than continue merely to deflect Clinton's agenda, Republicans came up with their own, the Contract With America... Those 10 items, taken as a whole, encapsulated a rigid conservative philosophy that had been taking shape for 30 years -- and that would define politics at the end of the 20th century.

By contrast, consider the declaration that House Democrats produced after their session with John Cullinane, the branding expert, last fall. The pamphlet is titled ''The House Democrats' New Partnership for America's Future: Six Core Values for a Strong and Secure Middle Class.'' Under each of the six values -- ''prosperity, national security, fairness, opportunity, community and accountability'' -- is a wish list of vague notions and familiar policy ideas...

Consider, too, George Lakoff's own answer to the Republican mantra. He sums up the Republican message as ''strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government and family values,'' and in ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' he proposes some Democratic alternatives: ''Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government and mutual responsibility.'' Look at the differences between the two. The Republican version is an argument, a series of philosophical assertions that require voters to make concrete choices about the direction of the country... Lakoff's formulation, on the other hand, amounts to a vague collection of the least objectionable ideas in American life...

What all these middling generalities suggest, perhaps, is that Democrats are still unwilling to put their more concrete convictions about the country into words, either because they don't know what those convictions are or because they lack confidence in the notion that voters can be persuaded to embrace them. Either way, this is where the power of language meets its outer limit. The right words can frame an argument, but they will never stand in its place.

What no one is talking about, though, are the implications of an arms race in the systematic manipulation of political language. This quickly leads to a war of buzzwords and nasty frames, such as denouncing the other side as practicing "Enronomics" or comparing them to the Taliban or terrorists. And in the long term, it eats away at the very possibility of rational debate. Already, an official within the Bush administration has spoken about its efforts to create its own reality. The conclusion of All the President's Spin argues that this dynamic can be reversed, but the success of Bush's disinformation campaign from 2000-2004 and the Democratic embrace of framing since the election are making me increasingly pessimistic.

A Washington Post primer on the Plame/Wilson/Rove saga

Via Josh Marshall, make sure to check out the Washington Post's recap of "Plamegate," which does an admirable job of laying out the whole saga for readers who haven't followed every twist and turn -- something newspapers don't do nearly enough.

Michelle Cottle on Bush administration relativism

More on the conservative movement's slide toward relativism from TNR's Michelle Cottle:

[Karl] Rove is just the latest, most egregious example we've seen. Before that, America watched as the CIA head who screwed up the Iraq WMD intelligence was given a pass--and then a medal. Ditto the geniuses who botched--or rather failed to do any--postwar planning. Meanwhile, the man who helped build the legal foundation for the scandalous abuses at Abu Ghraib got himself bumped up to Attorney General and may soon be on his way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then there's Thomas Scully, the former Medicare chief who reportedly threatened to fire his top actuary if the man dared admit to Congress that the White House was low-balling its cost estimates for the Medicare drug bill. Later asked to investigate the matter, the Government Accountability Office, citing federal law that bars the government from paying the salary of any official who prevents another employee's communication with Congress, ruled that the administration should require Scully (who had since decamped for a private-sector post) to repay half of his previous year's salary. The administration refused, insisting that, in its view, Scully had done nothing improper.

Of course not. Because, in Bushworld, the definitions of such terms as "proper" and "right" and "good" depend entirely upon whether the act in question serves the goals of, and the version of truth propounded by, the administration. At the end of the day, despite all its moral posturing, this White House has a highly fluid, relativistic approach to right and wrong that one typically associates with fuzzy-headed lefties. The main difference seems to be that, for Bushies, the defining philosophy isn't "I'm OK. You're OK," but rather "I'm OK, and if you agree with me then pretty much anything you do is OK too."

Whatever obvious charms this approach may hold for members of Bushworld, this is no way to run a nation. An administration serious about personal accountability and moral absolutes and "doing the right thing" would--as promised--kick Rove's butt. This one is more likely to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bill Frist tries to criminalize dissent

In response to a Democratic amendment intended to strip Karl Rove of his security clearance, Republican leaders retaliated "with a measure designed to strip the security clearance of the chamber's top two Democrats." Here's the Post's summary of the stunning amendment:

Frist offered his aimed at Reid and Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.). Frist's amendment would have denied clearance to any senator who refers to a classified FBI report on the floor, a shot at Reid's May 12 reference to a report on a Bush judicial nominee. It also would have stripped access to classified information to an officeholder making a statement that is "based on an FBI agent's comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations." That was aimed at Durbin's comments last month comparing the treatment of detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to techniques used by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.

Josh Marshall has the exact text:

Any federal officeholder who makes reference to a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the floor of the United States Senate, or any federal officeholder that makes a statement based on a FBI agent's comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations thereby putting our servicemen and women at risk, shall not be permitted access to such information or to hold a security clearance for access to such information.

To point out the obvious, stripping clearances based on statements that are "used as propaganda by terrorist organizations" would essentially make it impossible for members of Congress to criticize the administration. And the implication that criticism of the administration puts "our servicemen and women at risk" is equally anti-democratic.

Fortunately, the amendment was so loathsome that 20 Senate Republicans couldn't stomach it and voted with Democrats against it. But 33 United States Senators voted for it. Here's the list of scoundrels:

Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Frist (R-TN)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Martinez (R-FL)
McConnell (R-KY)
Santorum (R-PA)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Vitter (R-LA)

What is Anne E. Kornblut talking about?

New York Times reporter Anne E. Kornblut needs a history lesson. Here's what she wrote about Ken Mehlman's apology yesterday:

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, spoke at the N.A.A.C.P.'s convention in Milwaukee. In his most extensive comments yet on the subject of race, Mr. Mehlman apologized for the so-called Southern strategy that his party employed nearly a half-century ago, when Republicans used the hostility of the civil rights era to pit Southern conservatives against blacks.

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," he said. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

"Nearly a half-century ago"? The so-called Southern strategy was used at the national level up through at least 1988, when Willie Horton and the crime issue were carefully exploited by Lee Atwater, George H.W. Bush's campaign strategist. And it was used even longer in congressional campaigns such as Jesse Helms' re-election campaign in 1990. Sadly, this isn't ancient history.

Failure of private accounts buried

Why isn't this on the front page of the New York Times?

With no consensus in sight, even among Republicans, the chairmen of the Senate and House committees with jurisdiction over Social Security have decided to postpone further consideration of the issue at least until September.

With every passing week, the prospects for major Social Security legislation, President Bush's top legislative priority, appear dimmer.

The combination of Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement and the Karl Rove/Valerie Plame controversy is overshadowing the failure of private accounts, which is huge news. Bush staked his "political capital" on it; he said he'd keep touring the country until he passed it; he claimed a mandate; etc. And he can't even get a bill out of committee! Yet the media -- which beat up Bill Clinton for months when his health care bill failed -- has dropped the issue off the agenda.

John Gibson and the WSJ reach a new low

Almost every prominent conservative in Washington, including the President, denounced the leak of Valerie Plame's identity two years ago. But now that Karl Rove is in trouble, Fox News host John Gibson and the Wall Street Journal are arguing that it is a good thing that Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent was revealed. As Lewis Black said in a very different context, when did that go up for grabs? How far gone are we as a society that this is even an issue? She's a national security operative in the middle of a global war on terrorism! End of discussion.

The New York Post joins the post-London attack on dissent

Following in the footsteps of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, the New York Post has published yet another vitriolic attack on dissent in the wake of the London bombings:

Democratic attacks on the president, his party and his war policies come in two basic categories -- essentially self-serving and insidiously subversive.

Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton indulged in a little of the former yesterday evening -- indecently demanding even more money for New York before all of the bodies in London had been identified.

Howard Dean & Co., meanwhile, have been taking advantage of America's historic impatience with foreign entanglements -- to say nothing of the media's fascination with the Iraqi butcher's bill -- to undercut the president's moral authority to wage a just and necessary war.

In another time, that would be called giving aid and comfort to the enemy -- or something a bit more harsh.

It is one thing to serve as the loyal opposition -- but it is quite another to undermine an anti-terrorism policy that was ratified by the American people a scant seven months ago.

The assumptions built into this passage are staggering. It's "subversive" to ask for more funds to protect New York? It's treasonous to criticize the president's policies? Democrats are obligated to preserve Bush's "moral authority to wage a just and necessary war"? They must remain silent because Bush won re-election by the narrowest margin of any incumbent since Woodrow Wilson?

Countless Americans have died to protect our right to free speech, but the Post would casually throw it away for a momentary tactical advantage. Despicable.

Update 7/17: As Noumenon points out in comments, the Wall Street Journal also recently used the same tactic in a June 27 editorial (subscription required) -- here's the passage in question, which follows quotations about Iraq from Ted Kennedy and Chuck Hagel:

The polls show the American people are growing pessimistic about Iraq, and no wonder. They are being rallied against the cause by such statesmen as the two above. Six months after they repudiated the insurgency in a historic election, free Iraqis are continuing to make slow but steady political and military gains. Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.

Douglas Jehl should read his newspaper

In a story yesterday, New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl expressed puzzlement at the lack of suicide bombings in the West before the London attacks:

Why suicide attacks have not previously emerged in the West is a mystery. In the Middle East and in Asia, the tactic has spread in recent years far beyond its origins in Lebanon in 1982, where it was pioneered by the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah.

But as University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape wrote in the Times back in May, "What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."

As such, it's not surprising that suicide bombings have been primarily used in the Middle East and Asia; that's where the occupations have taken place. And as Pape documented in another Times op-ed last week, Al Qaeda is currently shifting its attention toward US allies supporting the Iraq occupation in order to try to force them to withdraw; hence the bombings in Madrid and London.

The problem is that Jehl examines suicide bombings as a tactic, but they are part of larger strategies employed by terrorist groups. Once they are examined in that context, the patterns of use become more clear. Yet another example of why reporters need to call political scientists more often!

He said/she said reporting at the AP

Here's an example of lazy AP journalism. In a story about the wildly optimistic new budget projections from the White House, the AP buries any critical perspective until this passage at the end of the story:

CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist at the Bush White House, warns that it is too early to predict whether the improvements seen recently will be long lasting and that in any event, the looming retirement of the Baby Boom generation presents intractable long-term problems that can only be fixed by curbing the growth in government benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Democrats -- even before the new numbers were released -- urged caution and warned that the long-term deficit picture is not as rosy as the White House projects since it leaves out the long-term costs of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and relies on cuts in programs annually appropriated by Congress that may prove unrealistic.

"We should not be lulled into complacency," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C. "Over the last three years, the Bush administration has posted the three worst deficits in history and though the deficit for 2005 has improved, it remains among the largest on record."

OMB's omission of costs for Iraq and Afghanistan is not a partisan opinion; it's a fact, and they've been doing it for years. But the AP's attribution of that fact to Democrats makes it seem like spin. "He said"/"she said" journalism sucks.

(For more on the problems with OMB's Mid-Session Review, see the analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Attacks on dissent from O'Reilly, Hannity and Granholm

It's depressing to see how common attacks on dissent have become in post-9/11 politics.

Media Matters documents the latest salvo from Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly:

The anti-American press both here and in Europe is actually helping the terrorists by diminishing their threat. "Talking Points" urges you to begin holding people accountable for their position on the terror war. Walk away from media that excuses or sanitizes these brutal acts. USA is not the problem in this world. The terrorists are. And if you don't agree with that, you are helping killers like [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi. Enough's enough. London should be the last straw.

O'Reilly's guest, Steve Emerson, said during the same show that, "in certain respects, BBC almost operates as a foreign registered agent of Hezbollah and some of the other jihadist groups."

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting points out the use of similar language from another Fox News host, Sean Hannity, during an interview with former senator Slade Gorton:

You know, one of the thing, the criticisms I have had of the left in this country, Senator, I have felt at almost every step of the way from the very beginning they have often undermined the president's war on terror. And they have accused him of targeting civilians for assassination, accused him of starting a war for political gain, accusing him of being responsible for torture policies when no such thing came true.

It seems like they've always looked to politicize it, which has hurt our effort to unite and combat this.

This sort of language has become so common, in fact, since 9/11 that its premises are starting to be taken for granted. For instance, MSNBC's Amy Robach recently suggested that protestors at a speech by President Bush were unpatriotic, saying that "There were a couple of protesters we heard with a few signs, but for the most part, looks like a very patriotic crowd there."

What's worse is that this approach is increasingly being copied, rather than denounced, by Democrats. Via James Taranto, here's Michigan's Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, using the term "treason" to attack a Republican who criticized her policies:

An angry Gov. Jennifer Granholm said freshman Rep. Rick Baxter, R-Hanover, should be removed from office for co-writing a "treasonous" column trashing Michigan in the Wall Street Journal on the state's tax and business climate.

Baxter, vice chairman of the House Commerce Committee, and Hillsdale College professor and conservative activist Gary Wolfram wrote a Thursday opinion page column criticizing Granholm's tax reform and economic stimulus proposals pending in the Legislature.

..."When you are so engaged in building up your political party in such a way that you damage the state, that to me, that representative should be removed from office," said Granholm, a Democrat up for re-election next year.

...Granholm asserted that Wolfram was "hired by the insurance industry to oppose our reform of the Single Business Tax." She called the column a "kind of effort (that) is treasonous for the state of Michigan, frankly."

The principle to speak freely about political disagreements is sacred in a democracy. How can we forget that given what is going on in Iraq and the Middle East right now?

Update 7/13: Matthew Yglesias links to this post on Tapped, but says that I "missed the best of the lot" -- a Michael Ledeen column calling for greater censorship of "radical Muslim religious indoctrination":

The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment -- free speech extends even to license -- stops us from taking proper steps to shut down the terror factories. Justice Holmes taught us that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and that no one has the right to scream "fire" in a crowded theater. London taught us that these principles require vigorous application.

I'm not sure this is an attack on dissent per se in the same sense as I describe above, but it's certainly relevant. Also, I neglected to link to my big Spinsanity column from Sept. 2004 on attacks on dissent since 9/11. That's the big picture that I'm referring to above.

Wall Street Journal recycles supply side nonsense

Those wacky editors at the Wall Street Journal are still peddling the supply-side nostrums that every respectable economist disavows. In an editorial today, they trumpet the recent decline in the federal budget deficit as vindicating President Bush's tax cuts:

Not even the most unbridled supply-sider predicted that President Bush's investment tax cuts would unleash such a spurt of tax receipts this year. But thanks to sustained economic growth, more Americans working and improved business profits, individual income tax receipts have shot up by 17.6%. Even more astonishing is the nearly 41% spike in corporate revenues. There's a fiscal lesson here that bears repeating: The best way to grow tax revenues is to grow the tax base, and that is what has happened this year.

This is wildly dishonest -- tax revenues haven't grown! As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, they're down significantly from projections:

The recent increase in revenues follows three consecutive years (2001-2003) in which revenues declined in nominal terms, an extremely rare occurrence, and a year (2004) in which revenues were lower as a share of the economy than in any year since 1959. Even with the recent increase, revenues in 2005 will remain well below the levels at which they were projected to be when the 2001 tax cut was enacted.

Nor has economic growth been especially strong. But the Journal is still drinking the Kool-aid, so all of these points are omitted. Instead, here's how the editors conclude the column:

All of this is to say that Washington doesn't have a budget deficit problem, it has a spending problem. Thank goodness for Mr. Bush's tax cuts or things would be much worse.

The implication, of course, is that the budget deficit would be worse without Bush's tax cuts, which means that the tax cuts have increased revenue (the idea behind the so-called Laffer Curve). This claim has been made frequently by President Bush and other administration officials, and it is so outrageous that even the President's economic advisers have cast doubt on it on two separate occasions. The reality, according to CBPP, is that revenues are lower than CBO projected in January 2002 after taking the tax cut into account.

Why the readers of the Journal continue to pay for this nonsense is beyond me.

Correction 7/13: Jon Henke's comment below made me realize that I had misread CBPP and made a claim about projections from before the tax cut that wasn't included in their article. This error has been fixed above - apologies. The salient point is that revenues are below CBO's projections made in 2002, which came after the bubble bursting, Sept. 11 and major CBO technical adjustments that substantially decreased projected revenues.

Update 7/15: The Journal has published another editorial on the subject, which also suggests that tax cuts increase revenue (though less blatantly).

What is Jerry Bowyer talking about?

Jerry Bowyer is a conservative radio host in Pittsburgh who was nice enough to have me on his show a couple of times to talk about Spinsanity and All the President's Spin. But his latest economics column for National Review Online is wrong-headed at best.

He writes that "states that went for George W. Bush in the last election are considerably poorer than the ones that went for Kerry. The notion that the GOP is the party of the rich simply doesn't match the economic reality."

But you can't make reliable inferences about individual behavior from aggregate data; this is what is known as the "ecological fallacy". And the obvious counterpoint to Bowyer is that the bivariate correlations between party and income are pretty clear.

Let's consider the simplest measure -- which party's candidate people voted for in 2004. Using data from the (flawed) 2004 exit poll, we can see an obvious pattern. As voter income increases, their likelihood of voting for President Bush tended to increase, while the opposite pattern generally held for John Kerry:

The fact that Bush received more support in states with lower incomes does not imply that the pattern of increasing GOP support at higher levels of income doesn't hold within each one of those states (in mathematical terms, the relationship could be approximately linear with differing intercepts by state). Bowyer also neglects many other factors that would have to be considered in a proper analysis, including variations in turnout by income level. In short, the article is a mess, and National Review Online should be embarassed to have published it.

Beach trip

Back on Wednesday...

Hillary 2008 watch: Favorability ratings and stereotypes

According to political insiders polled by The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. But contradictory predictions about her chances in the general election abound. Marshall Wittman, a conservative turned centrist Democrat, is strangely optimistic, while Bob Kuttner, the liberal editor of The American Prospect, is more cautious.

So as part of my continuing series on Hillary 2008, I decided to take a look at her favorability ratings over time in National Journal's online Poll Track archive, starting before she joined the Senate in 2000 and continuing up to the present. These are a key indicator of overall perceptions of a political figure before they run for office. The wording of the questions and the number of choices differ between polls, so a useful common metric is the ratio of favorable to unfavorable perceptions, formed by dividing the proportion of favorable responses by the proportion of unfavorable responses.

The key question: Has Hillary improved her image as much as her supporters claim?

The poll results suggest that perceptions of Hillary have improved since 2003, but only back to the levels of 2000-2001. Moreover, she remains highly polarizing, with unfavorable perceptions at or above 40 percent in most national polls.

The argument that Wittman and others make is that any Democratic candidate will be subject to vicious attacks:

It is far too soon to endorse any candidate for '08. But what I am saying is that faint hearted progressives should not be dissuaded from supporting someone because they fear he/she would be subject to vicious right wing attacks. The truth is that no one is safe from the [vast right-wing] conspiracy. Take it from someone who knows this crowd intimately.

a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.

Daniel Henninger: Feelings equal truth

Who knew conservatives were so sensitive to people's feelings? First David Frum wants to protect Christians from any educational content that might conflict with their principles, and now Daniel Henninger, a Wall Street Journal columnist, asserts that a link between 9/11 and Iraq exists, well, because some people feel it exists:

Nearly four years after what happened on September 11, we must now debate whether a linkage exists between that day and the war in Iraq. After President Bush associated the two several times in his defense of Iraq this week at Fort Bragg, both the House and Senate Democratic leaders pounded the linkage.

House Leader Nancy Pelosi was explicit: "He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq." Senate Leader Harry Reid said the September 11 references don't offer "a way forward" in Iraq and only remind us that bin Laden "is still on the loose." To be able to separate September 11 and Iraq into wholly unrelated realms may be possible for very smart people--but not everyone.

On a very warm Wednesday this past May, during Fleet Week in New York City, a passerby at Ground Zero encountered some 150 astonishingly young Marines in fatigues, wet with sweat after a run, standing at attention on the site's edge, outside the fence. They were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and they appeared to be in the middle of a formal ceremony. Yesterday the organizer of the May event, Maj. Dave Anderson, explained they were laying a wreath to honor the victims of September 11, and that the three Marines chosen to lay the wreath had earned Purple Hearts while serving in Iraq. When the ceremony ended, he said, a woman came out of the crowd, crying, and grabbed his wrist to say that her brother had died in there that day, and she said to him, "When people see you Marines doing this, they'll know that you will take the fight forward."

So it is that below the level of exquisite analysis now common in our politics, some Americans do exist who credit a connection between September 11 and events in Iraq. Perhaps there will be a poll out in a few weeks that will expose their sentiment to the greater weight and rigor of statistical science.

Conservatives used to criticize this sort of mushy-headed thinking; now it's becoming de rigeur on the right. So what if there's no reliable empirical evidence of a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks? Henninger has found some "sentiment" linking the two, so it must be true! Clearly, the reality-based community on the right has given way to the conservative postmodernists.

(Related post: The press notices Bush tying Iraq to 9/11, 6/29/05)