Brendan Nyhan

The National Journal Congressional Insiders poll asked a group of Republican and Democratic members of Congress whether “it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution.” In their responses, which are anonymous except for party ID, a disturbing 74 percent of Republicans said no. NJ provides a selection of textual responses to the question, including these choice quotes:

“In the ’70s, the ‘consensus of scientists’ was that we were beginning global cooling. Now it is global warming. Excuse me if I am skeptical of this newest form of secular religion. Perhaps we should pause and take a breath before we drink the new Kool-Aid!”

“What has been proven is that a well-targeted pop-culture campaign can trump even the best of science. The bad news is, a very few will get very rich, and the rest of us will foot the bill with mythical creations like cap and trade. The impact of such programs on the environment: Zero. The cost to the American public: Huge. The grin on Al Gore’s very wealthy face: Priceless!”

“It’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Democrats are OK with the idea of surrendering our spot atop the world economy.”

My favorite, though, is this quote, which indicates a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process:

“If there’s one thing poll after poll indicates, it’s that the science is not settled on this issue.”

How can polls tell us about whether the science is settled?

The front page article in the New York Times on the presidential candidates’ economic plans includes excellent fact-checking of two misleading Republican talking points:

[W]hile Mr. McCain has portrayed his tax cuts as benefiting the middle class, most of the benefits would go to the wealthy and to corporations, including his calls for the elimination of the alternative minimum tax.

…While Mr. McCain asserted in a speech in Washington on Tuesday that under Mr. Obama’s tax plan Americans of every background would see their taxes rise, Mr. Obama’s plan calls for cutting taxes on people earning less than $75,000 a year and for eliminating federal income taxes on elderly citizens who make less than $50,000 a year.

However, one problem with the lack of an institutionalized fact-checking operation is that the newspaper fails to draw on previous reporting, as in this passage from the story:

Experts say that both the McCain plan and the Obama plan would increase the deficit, and that neither man has adequately explained how his proposals would be paid for. But several analysts have said they believe that Mr. McCain’s plan would increase the deficit more, because of the size of the tax cuts he is seeking.

Why the vagueness about analysts who “believe” McCain’s plan would “increase the deficit more”? It’s not a close call — the NYT reported back in April that the impact of Obama’s plan “would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.”

Similarly, Media Matters points out that the NYT contradicted itself on Obama’s health care plan. An article on Monday falsely suggested Obama and Clinton supported “government-run health care” even though the newspaper previously reported that McCain “inaccurately described the Democrats’ health care proposals, using language that evokes the specter of socialized medicine.”

Apparently, Rep. Jim McCrery (R-LA) is so worried about the looming socialist threat that he named his leadership PAC Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism. Who knew capitalism needed preserving?

Via Brad DeLong, Digby notes the irony of this passage from John McCain’s forward to David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest:

It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.

As I noted last December, he said something similarly ironic about the US presence in Lebanon back in 1983:

The fundamental question is “What is the United States’ interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the US presence stabilize the region?…

The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.

What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.

Will anyone in the press ask him about these quotes?

How bad are things looking for the Republicans in November? Congressional insiders and expert observers expect Democrats to pick up approximately 4-6 seats, which would give them 55-57 and leave Republicans with 43-45, but National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Ensign is publicly setting a goal of preserving a floor of at least 41 Republican seats — the minimum necessary for a filibuster:

The chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee says Sen. Saxby Chambliss will be a key part of the firewall the party wants to build against stronger Democratic control of Congress.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., set a floor on the number of Senate seats the party must control: 41.

“The number that we get to is really, really important in the U.S. Senate,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons Saxby absolutely must hold his seat.”

Democrats now have 49 seats with two independents who vote with them. Republicans hold 49, with 23 up for re-election this year, and five GOP senators retiring. Democrats only have to defend 12 seats this year.

By holding at least 41 Senate seats, the GOP would prevent the Democrats from having the 60 votes required to end filibusters, which prevent votes on bills.

Mr. Chambliss said last week that he expects a tough contest no matter who the Democrats run against him.

Setting the bar that low can’t be confidence-inspiring for Republicans. Are things worse than we think? Chambliss isn’t expected to face serious opposition.

[Disclosure: I worked for the 2000 Senate campaign of Ed Bernstein against Ensign in Nevada.]

Who says John McCain is old and out of touch? Barack Obama may fist-bump his wife, but McCain can namedrop the hip new search engine that all the kids are using:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain joked on Monday that Google, the popular Internet search engine, had made investigating his list of potential candidates a little bit easier.

“You know, basically it’s a Google,” he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. “What you can find out now on the Internet — it’s remarkable.”

“[I]t’s a Google”? Really? I’m pretty sure no one under 60 talks like that. It’s one step removed from Ted Stevens’s “a series of tubes”.

Update 6/10 11:32 AM: Matthew Yglesias links, prompting one of his commenters to remind us that President Bush had a similarly awkward-sounding reference to “the Google” back in 2006:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

If we can briefly set aside the debate over Hillary Clinton’s merits as a presidential candidate, it’s worth noting the ways in which her loss represents a victory for our democracy.

First, two decades of Clinton/Bush dominance of the American political system will finally come to a close in January, preventing further entrenchment of the dynastic politics that I fear. (Similarly, on the Republican side, George W. Bush’s massive unpopularity seems to have killed off any lingering enthusiasm for Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.)

In addition, while it looked like the front-loaded primary calendar would result in the quick selection of early frontrunners, both parties ended up choosing nominees who were significant underdogs in late 2007.

It’s always hard to accept the defeat of your preferred candidate, but these are signs that the American republic is alive and well.

Before leaving for Europe this morning, President Bush took the opportunity to claim that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would “give this country a chance to help us through this difficult period by finding more supplies of crude oil, which will take the pressure off the price of gasoline”:

I’ll also remind them, though, that the United States has an opportunity to help increase the supply of oil on the market, therefore, taking pressure off gasoline for hardworking Americans, and that I’ve proposed to the Congress that they open up ANWR, open up the Continental Shelf, and give this country a chance to help us through this difficult period by finding more supplies of crude oil, which will take the pressure off the price of gasoline.

However, it’s unlikely that ANWR will “help us through this difficult period” by “[taking] the pressure off the price of gasoline.” The reason is that it would take years to develop and the amount of oil it would produce represents only a small fraction of domestic oil consumption — a quantity that is unlikely to have a significant impact on prices in the global oil market.

It’s yet another example of the Bush administration using a crisis or problem to justify a pre-existing policy proposal that is unlikely to solve the problem (see: the tax cuts, the invasion of Iraq, etc.).

Update 6/11 9:07 AM: Here’s more from Media Matters.

Dear New York Times opinion editors,

Please don’t publish op-eds from astrophysicists applying polling projection methods five months away from the general election:

If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.

Andrew Gelman provides the needed corrective:

Um . . . no, “if the general election were held today” is not a particularly interesting question. The polls can move a lot in 5 months. Remember President Dukakis? See here (from our 1993 paper):

The triangles on the right side of each plot are the actual election outcomes, and the little arrows on each graph show the dates of the Democratic and Republican conventions in each year. As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.

Thanks,
Brendan

Via Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias, Russell Baker quotes this swami-like passage from Elisabeth Bumiller’s biography of George W. Bush in the New York Review of Books:

[Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life.

Yglesias’s reaction is to condemn Bush, but why should we trust Bumiller’s account? It reads like a Woodward-style attempt to project an omniscient understanding of her subjects’ thoughts. And while I’m sure she interviewed Rice extensively, there’s no way Bush or Rice told her that “it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice.”