Brendan Nyhan

If you’ve had a hard time making sense of the financial crisis that came out of the housing bubble, This American Life co-produced an entertaining show on the subject with NPR News that does a great job of making the story understandable. Highly recommended.

Via Mike Munger, my department chair here at Duke and the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, there are rumors that Tucker Carlson may take a shot at the Libertarian presidential nomination.

I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but I’m not as surprised by the idea as you might think. Many people forget that Carlson was a conservative but non-dogmatic print journalist before he started doing shout TV. In particular, he wrote a Talk magazine story about George W. Bush in 1999 that got him in a lot of trouble with conservatives. Along the same lines, I had lunch with him once in DC when he was doing Crossfire and I remember thinking that his views were more heterodox than his TV work suggested (he might have even referred to himself as a libertarian). And he was also kind enough to blurb All the President’s Spin even though it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

In any case, I would love to see a debate matching Carlson against Bob Barr and Mike Gravel.

Update 5/23 5:41 PM: Via Tommy Christopher, Jake Tapper at ABC News is reporting that Carlson isn’t running:

Carlson tells me he was never running.

He’s right now with his family in Maine rather than in Denver with the Marijuana Policy Project and the like.

“I probably should have done it,” Tucker emails me. “Imagine the bus trip.”

The New York Times has a nice article today correcting various misperceptions about Barack Obama that were reported by older Jewish voters in Florida:

Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors about Mr. Obama have flourished. Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

This kind of journalism is a substantial improvement from man on the street reporting that simply repeats incorrect quotes (like the false claim that Obama is a Muslim) without correcting them.

Like Rick James, Hillary Clinton is a habitual line-stepper. The latest: comparing the non-recognition of the Florida and Michigan primaries to slavery and civil rights along with Zimbabwe. How long will this scorched-earth strategy go on?

I have no idea if the report out of Israel that President Bush wants to attack Iran before leaving office is true (the White House denies it), but the fact that we’re debating it should highlight the problem with the 22nd Amendment, which removes democratic accountability from second-term presidents. President Bush is deeply unpopular, but he has no personal incentive to adjust his policies to public opinion. If he had the option to run again, things might look very different right now. It’s certainly hard to imagine that he would even contemplate starting another war in the Middle East.

Update 5/22 9:16 AM: Of course, as readers point out via email and in comments, Bush’s unpopularity is so massive at this point that he might not not run again even if he had the option to do so, which is true. However, the second-to-last sentence above is my way of suggesting that Bush’s behavior throughout his second term probably would have been different if he had the option to run again (politicians don’t usually leave office voluntarily). As such, he probably wouldn’t be so unpopular now and thus would be at least a marginally viable candidate for a third term.

American University’s Brian Schaffner has a nice graph illustrating the implications of the GOP’s defeat in the special election in Mississippi’s first district. He plots the vote for GOP House candidates in open seat elections in 2006 against President Bush’s vote total in the district in the 2004 election and then superimposes the MS-1 result in red:

Candidates who performed as well as Bush would appear on the diagonal line from the bottom left to the upper right. Deviations below that line indicate underperformance; those above that line represent overperformance. As Schaffner notes, only three open seat candidates in 2006 performed as poorly as Greg Davis did last week (and that doesn’t take into account the fact that the special election was in Mississippi). Given the way the fundamentals are looking, we may be looking at a historic pro-Democratic swing in November.

Updating my series on the state-level predictors of Obama support, the graphs below (which include 95% confidence intervals around predicted linear fits using data from before yesterday’s primaries) show that white support for Obama in Oregon and Kentucky fits the pattern we expect by education but not by black population:

Are the presidential candidates actually going to have a debate about whether the threat posed by Iran is comparable to the previous threat posed by the USSR?

Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.

McCain made the attack Monday in Chicago, Obama’s home turf.

“Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess,” McCain said in an appearance at the restaurant industry’s annual meeting.

He was referring to comments Obama made Sunday in Pendleton, Ore.: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’”

A video clip of Obama making the comments was distributed Monday by McCain’s campaign.

McCain listed the dangers he sees from Iran: It provides deadly explosive devices used to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, sponsors terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and is committed to the destruction of Israel.

“The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny,” McCain said.

This strikes me as a classic Washington gaffe. What Obama said is indisputably true — Iran does not “pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us” — but McCain is using Obama’s comments to suggest that the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t take the Iranian threat seriously.

Note also how McCain falsely implies that Obama said that the threat posed by Iran is “tiny” (he actually said Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela “are tiny compared to the Soviet Union”). This is similar to the way McCain distorted an Obama joke about Hillary Clinton to suggest that Obama thinks people hunt ducks with revolvers (as documented by Jonathan Chait). Not exactly straight talk, is it?

I’m obviously sympathetic to Ezra Klein’s critique of the “gaffe-hunting, sound-bite-obsessed media,” but I have to take issue with this passage:

Filtered through the lens of a couple of awkward turns of phrase and an oratorical style that could seem tendentious, Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing years, he stepped out of campaign journalism. He began sending his speeches out directly over MoveOn.org’s e-mail list, made a movie that asked people to sit down and listen to him for the better part of two hours, and did his rounds on interview shows on which he could have fairly lengthy conversations with hosts.

The result? A massive rehabilitation of his reputation, including in the eyes of the very political pundits who once spurned him. According to a CBS News poll, Gore’s favorable rating late last year was at 46%, up from 18% in late 1999. At 46%, incidentally, Gore’s rating is higher than the most recent ratings of Bush (30%), Obama (44%), Clinton (42%) or McCain (32%).

I wish substantive media appearances were that important, but the improvement in Gore’s favorable ratings seems more likely to be the result of (a) him not being criticized by Republicans and conservatives as much and (b) winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Also, if you look at the timelines of Gore’s favorability ratings across multiple polls (rather than just CBS), it’s not clear how much they have changed in recent months.

Back in 2006, I proposed Nyhan’s corollary to Godwin’s law in a column for Time.com:

A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

What’s incredible is that my prediction has come true only days after Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

During a speech before the Israeli Knesset, President Bush seemed to mischaracterize Obama’s declared belief in negotating with foreign governments as a belief that the US “should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals” and linked it to appeasement of the Nazis:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of the enemies of peace, and America utterly rejects it…

The Bush administration has repeatedly invoked the specter of Nazi appeasement in this way to undermine opposition to its foreign policy, as my Time.com column shows. In particular, Donald Rumsfeld used the same quote as Bush in a 2006 speech to the American Legion. (The statement, which was made by Senator William Borah, is a key trope of conservative appeasement rhetoric — Time/Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer used in his August 11, 2006
newspaper column about Iran as well as columns denouncing the alleged appeasement of
China in 1989 and North Korea in 1994.)

It’s also worth noting the way that Bush attacks straw men in his speech, which makes vague references to “some” who “seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals” and “some people” who “suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” Bush frequently uses formulations like these in his public addresses as a way to caricature his opponents while saying something that can be defended as an accurate reference to some (usually unspecified) extremist. Along these lines, White House spokesperson Dana Perino denied that Bush was referring to Obama, saying “when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you.”

Here’s a brief sampling of the administration’s eight-year war on straw men:

“When the tax cut takes effect, the typical family of four will save $1,600 every year. Some say that’s not much.” (3/3/01)

“They tell me it was a shallow recession. It was a shallow recession because of the tax relief. Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper.” (9/1/03)

“There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern.” (4/30/04)

“[T]he natural tendency for people is to say, ‘Oh, let’s lay down our arms.’ But you can’t negotiate with these people. There are no negotiations that are to be had. Therapy won’t work.” (5/10/04)

“The idea of emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve plays — would put America in a dangerous position in the war on terror.” (5/19/04)

“Sometimes you’ll hear people say that moral truth is relative, or call religious faith a comforting illusion. And when you hear talk like that, take it seriously enough to be skeptical. It may seem generous and open-minded to say that everybody, on every moral issue, is equally right.” (5/21/04)

“I reject this notion — and I’m not suggesting that my opponent says it, but I reject the notion that some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free, you don’t desire freedom.” (10/1/04)

“I rejected the kind of intellectual elitism of some around the world who say, well, maybe certain people can’t be free.” (1/29/05)

“Now, I understand there’s some in America who say, well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack.” (1/25/06)

“There’s a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They’re willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off.” (6/28/06)

“I would hope people aren’t trying to rewrite the history of Saddam Hussein — all of a sudden, he becomes kind of a benevolent fellow. He’s a dangerous man.” (9/15/06)

“It’s hard to plot and plan attacks against the United States when you’re on the run. I need members of Congress who understand that you can’t negotiate with these folks, you can’t hope that they change their mind, that the best way to protect the American people is to defeat them overseas so we do not have to face them here at home.” (9/21/06)

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals… Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” (5/15/08)

Update 5/19 8:39 AM: Don’t believe Perino’s statement or President Bush’s vague denial that he was talking about Obama. As a commentator notes, members of the administration admitted that the President’s statement was directed at the presumptive Democratic nominee: “Although the president didn’t name names, administration officials are privately acknowledging this was a shot at Barack Obama.”

Update 5/19 5:50 PM: The White House is protesting NBC’s editing of Bush’s response — here’s the full exchange:

ENGEL: “In front of the Israeli palm at the Knesset, you said that negotiating with Iran is pointless — and then you went further, you saying — you said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama? He certainly thought you were.”

THE PRESIDENT: “You know, my policies haven’t changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn’t get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you’ve got to take those words seriously. And if you don’t take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn’t take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon. But I also talked about a vision of what’s possible in the Middle East.”

I interpreted Bush’s (clipped) statement as a denial, but the White House is claiming that NBC’s omission of “You didn’t get it exactly right” suggests that Bush agreed with Engel’s premise. In any case, as I noted above, administration officials acknowledged privately that Bush’s language was directed at Obama, so it’s hard to take them seriously now when they call this a “media-manufactured storyline.”

Update 6/10/08 8:45 AM: A historian alerts me that there are questions about the veracity of the alleged Borah quote.