This is my favorite Michael Dukakis quote in a long time — here’s Ezra Klein apparently joking about the Willie Horton ad making Michael Dukakis “seem too black”:
Similarly, attacks that should have shuttered Obama’s campaign did not. In 1988, the Willie Horton ads managed to make Michael Dukakis seem too black.
Uh, Michael Dukakis had a lot of image problems, but I’m pretty sure “seem[ing] too black” was not one of them:
He’s about the whitest man alive. As I’m sure Klein knows, the problem with the loathsome Willie Horton ad was that it primed racially motivated fears about crime and suggested Dukakis would be too lenient on the issue.
Update 10/9 9:54 AM: Commenters object that Klein is joking; updated the post above to try to be more fair.
John McCain’s efforts to blame his campaign tactics on Obama are becoming increasingly laughable.
First, he suggested back in August that Obama forced him to go negative by refusing his offer of a series of townhall debates:
Both men pronounced themselves thoroughly frustrated by the personal bitterness and negativism they have seen in the two months since they learned they would be running against each other.
“I’m very sorry about it,” McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. “I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings” together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.
Then on Satuday, the Washington Post quoted McCain advisers again attempting to pin the blame on Obama for the vicious last-ditch character offensive that McCain is launching:
McCain advisers said the new approach is in part a reaction to Obama, whose rhetoric on the stump and in commercials has also become far harsher and more aggressive.
They noted that Obama has run television commercials for months linking McCain to lobbyists and hinting at a lack of personal ethics — an allegation that particularly rankles McCain, aides said.
On Friday, I noted John McCain’s rather dire situation in the polls and suggested that we would soon be hearing a lot more about Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayres as the GOP becomes increasingly desperate.
As if on cue, the McCain campaign leaked word of a character-based assault on Obama focusing on Ayres and Rezko:
Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.
…”We’re going to get a little tougher,” a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. “We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,” said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
…Two other top Republicans said the new ads are likely to hammer the senator from Illinois on his connections to convicted Chicago developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko and former radical William Ayres, whom the McCain campaign regularly calls a domestic terrorist because of his acts of violence against the U.S. government in the 1960s.
Along those lines, Sarah Palin accused Obama Saturday of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country” (Ayres) despite the lack of evidence connecting Obama and Ayres in any significant way.
What’s especially striking about the know-nothing nature of these attacks is the fact that both Palin and a GOP flack cited a New York Times article debunking the Obama-Ayres hype as if it proved their case. Here’s Palin:
There is a lot of interest, I guess, in what I read and what I’ve read lately. Well, I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago.
I get to bring this up not to pick a fight, but it was there in the New York Times, so we are gonna talk about it. Turns out one of Barack’s earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that quote launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and US Capitol.
And here’s how CNN described this bizarre tactic in its story on Palin’s attack:
Palin cited an article in Saturday’s New York Times about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, now 63. But that article concluded that “the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called ‘somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.’”
Up is down! Seriously, the chutzpah of this is unbelievable — she was being mocked just a few days ago for her bizarre answer to a question about what publications she reads.
On a more fundamental level, McCain’s tactic will probably fail to revive his campaign. But we can’t write his obituary yet — we simply don’t know how voters will react to a vicious campaign claiming that a black presidential candidate is “not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.”
Update 10/6 9:09 AM: According to the Post article, McCain doesn’t want to raise the Jeremiah Wright issue, but Sarah Palin did so in an interview with William Kristol published today:
Palin also made clear that she was eager for the McCain-Palin campaign to be more aggressive in helping the American people understand “who the real Barack Obama is.” Part of who Obama is, she said, has to do with his past associations, such as with the former bomber Bill Ayers. Palin had raised the topic of Ayers Saturday on the campaign trail, and she maintained to me that Obama, who’s minimized his relationship with Ayers, “hasn’t been wholly truthful” about this.
I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?
She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”
Last week, I wrote about how Josh Marshall and other liberal bloggers had revised their early interpretations of the first presidential debate to conform to the meme about John McCain being “small and angry.” As I argued, it was the sort of pathological character-driven narrative that Republicans used so effectively against Al Gore, but no one seemed to recognize the parallel.
We though McCain was steamed when he wouldn’t make eye contact with Barack Obama. But he almost blew a fuse when he got some real questions from the editorial board of the Des Moines Register. In today’s episode of TPMtv, we analyze the tapes (with a little help from the DSM-IV):
Marshall then accused McCain of “a troubling lack of emotional control”:
Campaigns are filled with hyperbole. But this, the no-eye-contact business at the debate and even the over-the-top affect at the Des Moines Register editorial meeting together suggest that McCain feels a sense of palpable disgust with Obama or visceral antipathy for him that is so great he’s incapable of overcoming it in public settings.
That’s a troubling lack of emotional control. But it seems in line with the character trait many mention about McCain — that he is unable to engage in any contest without demonizing his opponent in his own head. There are a lot of other possibilities this seems to point to — none of them pretty.
And he later invited readers to speculate further on McCain’s mindset:
Not just a rhetorical question. What do you think has John McCain so angry? It’s like anything could send him over the edge. Look at the video (the McCain vids start about 30 seconds in). Send me your thoughts …
The debate and the editorial board meeting are pretty weak evidence for the sweeping claims that Marshall is making. McCain may loathe Obama and all he stands for (we’ll never know for sure), but an alien who read all this hype about McCain’s anger would be shocked at how restrained he was during the debate.
We’re at a historic moment — Barack Obama’s estimated lead in the national polls is over seven percentage points:
There are two ways to interpret what’s happened. Most journalists will soon converge on some narrative where John McCain has lost ground due to some combination of the financial crisis, the incoherence of Sarah Palin’s TV interviews, and McCain’s allegedly “small and angry” debate performance.
For instance, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who previously made the unsupported claim that “moments” from televised general-election debates have “figured in the ultimate outcome” in the presidential elections of 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004, now refers to John McCain’s “sourness and anger” during the first debate as a “moment” that ‘”mattered’”:
“Everyone knows,” based on a long string of past episodes, that some unintentional flash of character revelation usually turns out to be the memorable aspect of a presidential debate. Eg: Nixon looking furtive and sweaty in 1960, Ford momentarily seemed befuddled in 1976, Dukakis seeming bloodless in 1988, etc. All these moments “mattered” because they crystallized a feeling that, in retrospect, people knew they’d “always had” about the candidate.
In the days since the first Obama-McCain debate, it’s become ever clearer that John McCain’s sourness and anger are the traits unintentionally revealed in the debate and now working against him… Thanks to McCain’s hostile refusal to engage Obama as a human equal face-to-face at the debate, the image he is cementing is that of a seething older man. Like Bob Dole in 1996, with less of a gift for one-liners.
It all fits into a pattern in retrospect — but I don’t know a single “expert” who predicted that avoiding eye contact would be the enduring image of the first debate.
The key phrase is “It all fits into a pattern of retrospect,” which is precisely the point — humans are quite good at constructing post hoc narratives to explain observed events. Princeton’s Larry Bartels recently recounted an amusing anecdote along these lines:
I was very struck when I learned — many of you probably have seen, after each recent election, immediately after the election, Newsweek comes out with a big cover package on why, fill in the blank, won the election. And in 2004, they actually came out with a book that included a lot of analysis of why it was that Bush won the election. But before the election, they actually sent out an advertisement that had two books side by side; one was why Bush won the election and the other was why Kerry won the election. And given the times of producing these things, they actually had to produce most of the package, explaining to the readers of Newsweek the following week why it was that Kerry won the election.
Now, I didn’t read that issue, but I’m pretty sure that if I had read that issue, the narrative of how it was that Kerry had won the election would have been about as convincing as the narrative of how it was that Bush won the election.
So after the fact, it’s really easy to come up with explanations based on particular events, but to know whether those were the events that actually drove the usually pretty small deviations from the underlying fundamentals that we observe in a particular campaign is quite difficult.
As Bartels’s answer suggests, I think a better explanation is that the underlying political fundamentals are reasserting themselves — the dynamics of this year are simply remarkably unfavorable to Republicans. This account is consistent with Andrew Gelman and Gary King’s research showing how voters tend to converge to predicted levels of support for the presidential candidates over the course of the campaign.
Looking back, there’s a similar divide over 2004, which is frequently framed as a story in which Karl Rove’s tactical mastery and the Swift Boat ads triumph over John Kerry and his ineffective campaign tactics. The problem for Kerry, however, was that he was always fighting uphill. Political science models of the election published in the journal PS before the election had a median forecast of 53.8% for President Bush’s two-party vote:
Now, it is true that Bush’s numbers bounced around over the course of the campaign as various events occurred, as Charles Franklin’s plot below illustrates:
We can certainly tell stories about those events (such as the Swift Boat ads). However, the ultimate outcome was relatively close to the projection — Bush ended up winning as all the models projected (except for one projected statistical tie of 49.9%) and received 51.2% of the two-party vote.
This year, the comparable set of forecasts in PS, which was just published, shows a median two-party vote forecast for John McCain of 48%, which corresponds to 52% for Obama. Only one model projects that McCain will win:
If you include the projections from Ray Fair and Douglas Hibbs of Obama receiving 51.5% and 52% of the two-party vote, respectively, that I’ve previously highlighted, the median forecast remains Obama 52%, McCain 48%.
Obama’s lead now is consistent with those projections (he’s currently at 53.9% of the two-party vote in the Pollster.com estimate above). In fact, despite my previous warnings that Obama may underperform due to the influence of race, he is currently in a very strong position — the fundamentals favor him and he has a lead with approximately one month to go. Despite media hype about “October surprises,” these these plots of recent competitive presidential campaigns from James Stimson’s Tides of Consent illustrate that there are rarely dramatic shifts in the polls this late in the game:
That’s why I expect John McCain to start taking more risks in the next couple of weeks, particularly at the next debate. Expect to start hearing a lot about Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayres. They’re the three cards that McCain has yet to play.
Update 10/5 10:40 PM: Matthew Yglesias relates an anecdote that mirrors the one from Bartels above:
My mother worked in the pre-Photoshop version of Newsweek’s art department so I saw as a kid their “Dukakis Wins!” complete with a banner teasing their account of how he did it and why the prognosticators were all wrong. As Bartels says, most of that account would have to have been written in advance.
One of the most frustrating aspect of politics circa 2006-2008 is the way liberal pundits have picked up the bad habits they once criticized in conservatives — from content-free accusations of media bias to slipshod factual standards.
Bob Somerby points out the most recent example: liberal bloggers revising their interpretations of the first presidential debate to conform to an exaggerated character-driven narrative (McCain was “small and angry”, acted like Obama was “on par with dog shit”, etc.). Sound familiar? It’s exactly what happened in 2000 when (as Somerby has documented) pundits who originally declared Al Gore the winner of the first debate got caught up in the “sighing” meme and ended up deciding he was the loser.
Things went from tragedy to farce, however, when liberal pundits started quoting biologists about dominance behaviors in primates. This is exactly the sort of manufactured psychodrama that killed Al Gore. But now that the situation has flipped liberals don’t seem concerned any more.
With Barack Obama’s estimated lead at 5.6%, the Democrats who panicked during John McCain’s bounce are looking pretty silly. It’s hard to believe that this was the state of the race a few weeks ago:
Mr. McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate and the resulting jolt of energy among Republican voters appear to have caught Mr. Obama and his advisers by surprise and added to concern among some Democrats that the Obama campaign was not pushing back hard enough against Republican attacks in a critical phase of the race.
Some Democrats said Mr. Obama needed to move to seize control of the campaign and to block Mr. McCain from snatching away from him the message that he was the best hope to bring change to Washington.
In particular, the failure (thus far) of McCain’s vicious negative campaigning should underscore the weakness of the Rovian political approach that has received so much hype over the last decade. Any Republican strategist would have looked like a genius in the post-9/11 period — the president had sky-high approval ratings. But now that the political environment is unfavorable to Republicans, the Rove playbook (which is being ably executed by Steve Schmidt) has lost much of its potency.
In case you missed it, Tom Brokaw asked this puzzling question Sunday on Meet the Press of Colorado Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall:
MR. BROKAW: Congressman Udall, we’ve been checking the statistics in the Denver area. I’m quite familiar with it. In the second quarter of 2008, one in every 95 households in the Denver area were in foreclosure. The United States average was one in 171. Colorado ranked fifth in the nation statewide. A lot of that was a result of speculation for profit, people going in and hoping to make a quick buck and turn it around. Why should other taxpayers across the country have to now bail out those Colorado mortgage buyers who just did the irresponsible thing?
Um, wasn’t the bill almost entirely focused on bailing out Wall Street firms whose balance sheets are loaded with “toxic” mortgage-backed securities? One of the primary critiques of the legislation was precisely that it didn’t do enough to help homeowners in danger of foreclosure.
Brokaw also failed to object when Udall’s opponent, former Congressman Bob Schaffer, promoted the dubious claim that tax cuts in the 1990s increased revenue and when McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt offered the misleading suggestion that Barack Obama voted to increase taxes on people making over $42,000.
All in all, it was a terrible performance on substance.
An alert reader spots some mind-reading in a LA Times op-ed by Zev Chafets on criticism of John McCain by Rush Limbaugh. Chafets claims (without evidence) that “Limbaugh never had any intention of breaking with his party”:
If John McCain is elected president, he will have a lot of people to thank. Improbably, first on the list will be the man who didn’t want him in the White House, Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh vociferously campaigned against McCain throughout the primary season. He accused the Arizona senator of being a closet liberal and a collaborator with Democratic enemies such as Sens. Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy. This caused a lot of glee in Democratic circles. Some optimists even predicted a devastating split in the GOP.
This was a false hope. Limbaugh never had any intention of breaking with his party. When he saw that he couldn’t stop McCain, he swallowed hard and began trying to push McCain to the right. Limbaugh made it clear that he wanted a vice presidential candidate from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.
It’s of course true that Limbaugh has generally followed the Republican party line over the years. But we have no way of knowing what his intentions were in any particular instance. Why does everyone seem so reluctant to admit this? No one expects you to be omniscient!
This was a false hope. Limbaugh never had any intention of breaking with his party. When he saw that he couldn’t stop McCain, he swallowed hard and began trying to push McCain to the right. Limbaugh made it clear that he wanted a vice presidential candidate from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.