Brendan Nyhan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But did her body language match her words?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a source-greasing passage from his New York Times Magazine article yesterday on “The Final Days of the Presidency of George W. Bush”, Peter Baker states that “[f]or years” Bush “got no credit for a long-running economic recovery”:

[T]here are no valedictory days for Bush. For years, he got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq. Now, it seems, he gets no credit for the improvements in Iraq because of deep discontent over the tattered economy. Housing and energy crises have only deepened public disaffection.

Presumably Baker isn’t actually familiar with the data on the recovery or he would know that the reason that Bush “got no credit for a long-running economic recovery” is that it did not improve the living standards of most Americans. Here’s what the Times itself wrote a few days ago in an article on a new Census report

Mr. Bernstein, from the Economic Policy Institute, agreed and said that while comparisons to 2006 showed some improvement, in order to understand the difficulties facing middle- and low-income families, it was important to consider these results in the context of the economic expansion since 2000.

For the first time on record, real household income is no higher at the end of an economic expansion than it was when the cycle began, Mr. Bernstein said.

The median income of working-age households — with household heads under age 65 — rose insignificantly in 2007, when adjusted for inflation, and was $2,010 below its 2000 level.

When the median income of working-age households declines during a recovery, you don’t get much credit. Shouldn’t Baker know this?

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