Brendan Nyhan

My friend Ben Fritz appropriately mocks some breaking news from the New York Times — young people email links to their friends!

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them.

It’s all the news that’s fit to print … circa 2001. For a followup story, Ben suggests “Young people don’t communicate via postal mail anymore.”

Matthew Yglesias seems a bit puzzled that Democratic party elders haven’t stepped in to force Hillary Clinton out of the race. He writes that “insofar as it’s really true that [Nancy Pelosi] and ‘other leading members of Congress’ think [don’t think Hillary can win and want her to give up], they need to communicate it more clearly.”

By contrast, Marc Ambinder suggests that party elders have intentionally decided not to step in because “in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around” (via Michael Crowley):

John Edwards, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid – if these folks came together and threw their weight behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton would probably drop out by the end of the week. But the party elders have in some cases explicitly abstained from making such a determination because in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around.

But there’s actually a third possibility — that most party elders would prefer that Hillary withdraw but don’t want to pay the cost of pushing her out of the race. There are two classic economic problems here. The first is that the collective benefits of pushing Hillary out are much larger than the individual benefit to any one party leader (i.e. there’s a positive externality). Why would Pelosi or Reid risk becoming a hated figure to millions of Hillary’s supporters? As a result, everyone is likely to sit back and hope that someone else will pay the cost of forcing her out.

The second problem is it’s difficult to coordinate a joint effort to push her out. In other words, there’s a collective action problem. If all the leaders could magically come together to ask her to withdraw, it might be less costly to them individually to push her out, but any effort to make this happen would inevitably leak, generating untold recriminations and infighting. The incentives to defect from such an agreement would also be strong. As a result, no one is likely to chance it.

For both of these reasons, it’s likely that the race will go to the convention unless (a) Hillary decides to withdraw on her own or (b) the accumulation of superdelegate commitments after the primaries drives her out.

Update 3/25 10:01 PM: TNR’s Noam Scheiber outlines the possible scenarios in a recent piece — the key quote to me is in bold:

Democrats have never been known for Spock-like rationality, but even they see the logic of avoiding a convention fiasco. “It’s in nobody’s interest in the Democratic Party for that to happen,” says Mike Feldman, another former Gore aide. “There is a mechanism in place–built into the process–to avoid that.” That mechanism, such as it is, involves an en masse movement of uncommitted superdelegates to the perceived winner of the primaries. Almost everything you hear from such people suggests this will happen in time. “I think once we have the elected delegate count, things will move fairly quickly, ” says Representative Chris Van Hollen, who oversees the party’s House campaign committee. Increasingly, there is even agreement on the metric by which a winner would be named. Just about every superdelegate and party operative I spoke with endorsed Nancy Pelosi’s recent suggestion that pledged delegates should matter most.

Assuming Feldman and Van Hollen are right, that means Democrats won’t wait much past June 3–currently the last day on the primary calendar–before crowning a nominee. At the same time, it means there’s very little chance of ending the contest sooner. Undecided superdelegates on Capitol Hill, along with party elders like Pelosi, Gore, and Harry Reid, “don’t want to be seen as elites coming in and overturning the will of the people,” says one senior House aide. A Senate staffer says his boss “thinks this give and take is natural, it will be helpful in the end.” “That’s a view held by a majority of these guys who have been through the cut and thrust of politics,” he adds. Which means early June it is.

…The most optimistic scenario I could plausibly construct didn’t end the campaign until the second week in May. To make it happen, Obama would have to overtake Hillary among superdelegates–a key psychological barrier. He’d have to limit his margin of defeat in Pennsylvania to ten points, then hold serve two weeks later in North Carolina and Indiana, a pair of states he’s slightly favored to win. At that point, Hillary would face nearly impossible odds of overtaking him in the delegate race.

Unfortunately for anyone who wants the race to end soon, there are several problems with this scenario. For one thing, even if all this comes to pass, Hillary would still have to bow out voluntarily–an unlikely twist in any event, but highly implausible if the limbo states of Florida and Michigan still offer her hope. Meanwhile, any one of the aforementioned steps could easily fall through. Polls currently show Obama trailing by double digits in Pennsylvania; the good Reverend Wright could make that tough to change. And, though Obama now leads in North Carolina and Indiana, his advantage is either small or, in the latter case, based on a single, flimsy poll. As for superdelegates, as of this writing, the last two out of the closet opted for Hillary.

So, to review: The most optimistic scenario we have relies on a highly tenuous assumption; it’s unlikely to happen even if that assumption holds; and, regardless, it allows the Democratic contest to drag on for six more brutal weeks. The dream may never die, but it’s seen some better days.

Update 3/26 8:29 PM — Note how Harry Reid is also dodging responsibility for settling the issue in this interview (via Kevin Drum):

Q: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention?

Reid: Easy.

Q: How is that?

Reid: It will be done.

Q: It just will?

Reid: Yep.

Q: Magically?

Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.

In this context, “[t]hings are being done” means “we’re all trying to get someone else to do the dirty work.” I’m not sure we should believe him — Howard Dean doesn’t want to alienate half the party either.

Update 3/27 9:11 AM — In comments, Jesse Einhorn questions my claim that “The incentives to defect from such an agreement would also be strong,” asking “[w]hat possible incentive would there be to defect back to Hillary’s camp” from a possible joint effort to push her out given that she is extremely unlikely to win. However, my claim isn’t that the leaders would “defect… to Hillary’s camp” but that they would defect to a position of neutrality. Expect lots of mumbling about letting the process go forward, etc etc. The reason to do this that, while Hillary is likely to lose, her supporters (financial, activist, etc.) are and will remain powerful within the party. If you don’t believe me, ask Nancy Pelosi, who just got an ominous letter from Hillary’s top fundraisers:

We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.

With math skills like this, it’s no wonder Antonin Scalia went to law school:

A couple of years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in a Supreme Court death penalty decision, took stock of the American criminal justice system and pronounced himself satisfied. The rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is, he said, less than three-hundredths of 1 percent — .027 percent, to be exact.

That rate, he said, is acceptable. “One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly,” he wrote. “That is a truism, not a revelation.”

But there is reason to question Justice Scalia’s math. He had, citing the methodology of an Oregon prosecutor, divided an estimate of the number of exonerated prisoners, almost all of them in murder and rape cases, by the total of all felony convictions.

“By this logic,” Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a response to be published in this year’s Annual Review of Law and Social Science, “we could estimate the proportion of baseball players who’ve used steroids by dividing the number of major league players who’ve been caught by the total of all baseball players at all levels: major league, minor league, semipro, college and Little League — and maybe throwing in football and basketball players as well.”

Joshua Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor cited by Justice Scalia, granted the logic of Professor Gross’s critique but not his conclusion.

“He correctly points out,” Mr. Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., said of Professor Gross, “that rape and murders are only a small percentage of all crimes, but then has absolutely no real data to suggest there are epidemic false convictions in, say, burglary cases.”

Writing in the Boston Globe Ideas section, David Feige offers a more detailed critique of Marquis’s claims back in 2006:

Marquis’s most glaring error is his failure to acknowledge the fact that most felony arrests aren’t contested. In fact, 95 percent of them are resolved by plea rather than trial. Thus in 19 out of every 20 felony cases, there is no contested issue of guilt and no real claim of error.

Only trials in which someone is convicted while maintaining his innocence should be considered in computing an error rate. Of Marquis’s 15 million felony cases, 14.25 million were pleas. When the denominator in his fraction is changed from 15 million to 750,000, the error rate jumps from the arguably ignorable 3 in 10,000 to more like 50 in 10,000.

And Marquis’s numbers become even more disturbing with further analysis. Because of the overwhelming demands involved in reinvestigating a crime with an eye toward exoneration, it is almost exclusively defendants sentenced for rapes and murders whose cases get scrutiny from groups like the Innocence Project, the nonprofit organization that helped free Alan Newton. The chances that a drug defendant is going to interest them are virtually nil. Thus the only people who have any meaningful access to the possibility of exoneration are a tiny subset of criminal defendants. Murders constitute only 0.8 percent of all felony cases, and rapes less than 2 percent. In other words, less than 450,000 of Marquis’s 15 million felony convictions came in cases where the defendant has had a real shot at exoneration.

It is true that murder cases go to trial far more often than run-of-the-mill drug sales or check forgeries. In fact, some 44 percent of murder cases actually go to trial, with an average conviction rate of about 85 percent. But even taking this into account, of the 150,000 murder cases in Marquis’s 15 million, only 66,000 homicide defendants maintained their innocence through a trial, of which just over 56,000 were convicted. Using similar trial and conviction rates for rapes yields somewhere south of 200,000 contested convictions in serious cases. In the final analysis, Marquis’s error rate is off by orders of magnitude-his vision of a virtually error-proof system is simply unsupported by the numbers.

In the conclusion of All the President’s Spin, we predicted that liberal organizations would increasingly adopt the PR tactics of conservatives. Sadly, what we predicted has come true over and over again during the last few years.

A perfect example of this is a new Web video from Campaign for America’s Future, which has adapted the “John Kerry is French”/”freedom fries” nativism of the 2003-2004 era into an attack on John McCain for supporting an Air Force contract with Airbus, which is based in France. The entire video is devoted to mocking McCain using a series of crude stereotypes of the French:

From a policy point of view, the video is just misguided protectionism. As Matthew Yglesias notes, “the idea that Boeing should have a permanent monopoly on Air Force contracts because to work with rival firms would be ‘shipping jobs to France’ is absurd.”

More importantly, CAF’s appeal to nativism is repulsive. Imagine the outrage if it were an ad about outsourcing to Mexico featuring caricatured Mexicans and a narrator with an exaggerated accent. The same standard should apply here.

(For more on CAF, see what we wrote about them at Spinsanity.)

I know I’m late to the party, but this Dick Cheney quote really is staggering:

Five years after the start of the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney offered a positive assessment of the war today and called last year’s troop surge a “major success.”

“On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success,” Cheney told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz.

When asked about how that jibes with recent polls that show about two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it, Cheney replied, “So?”

“You don’t care what the American people think?” Raddatz asked the vice president.

“You can’t be blown off course by polls,” said Cheney, who is currently on a tour of the Middle East. “This president is very courageous and determined to go the course. There has been a huge fundamental change and transformation for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.”

Has any other president or vice president in the contemporary era expressed such open disregard for the views of the public before? While I don’t believe that elected officials should mindlessly follow public opinion, public opinion should always be a factor in their decisions in a democracy.

At a more fundamental level, this is the problem with the 22nd amendment — it puts lame duck administrations outside the reach of democratic accountability.

With my folks in town to see the littlest Nyhan, two conference papers to write, and March Madness under way, I’m on hiatus until next week. Enjoy the weekend…

Slate’s Mickey Kaus asks a good question:

What do the Democrats do when Obama loses Pennsylvania, not by 10 or 15 points but by 20 or 25 points? That seems to be the way things are headed. …

And, indeed, the polling trend from Pollster.com looks pretty grim (and this is before the Jeremiah Wright controversy fully registers):

Given the demographics of the state and the Jeremiah Wright controversy, there must concern in the Obama camp. Most pundits expect him to lose, but to get annihilated could make some undecided superdelegates very nervous (though, as I’ve argued, it wouldn’t necessarily mean much in terms of the general election).

Update 3/20 1:38 PM: Just to clarify, my point with the graph was that Obama didn’t appear to be closing the gap as we might have expected. Indeed, some recent polls suggest a larger gap than the estimated trends and, as I said, these were taken before the Wright controversy fully registers. For instance, the RCP average of recent polls is 51.8 to 34.2 and the last six polls show Hillary leads of 26, 16, 12, 13, 19, and 14.

John McCain touts his military and foreign policy experience, but apparently doesn’t understand the most basic distinctions between Sunnis and Shiites (i.e. Iran is Shiite, Al Qaeda is Sunni). I think it’s time for reporters to ask all of our leaders the question Jeff Stein of CQ posed back in 2006:

For the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?…

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

Update 3/19 1:22 PM — Here are the links to Stein’s pieces:

“Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?”

“Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda”

“Reyes Should Have Known Better, But He’s Hardly Alone”

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Depression, did President Bush really thank Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for working through the weekend?

Mr. Bush singled out Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. for praise, saying he had shown “the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation,” an assertion that was broadly disputed by the president’s critics.

“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” Mr. Bush said in brief remarks in the Roosevelt Room.

Are our standards really this low? Did Bush thank the Joint Chiefs for working weekends during the invasion of Iraq?

Update 3/19 8:18 AM: Via DeLong and Froomkin, the Los Angeles Times reports on a similar reaction:

In some ways it was a throwaway line, the kind of praise a boss tosses out casually. But as the economy teetered Monday, President Bush’s words to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson struck many as discordant and disengaged.

“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” Bush said as he met with his economic advisors at the White House. “You’ve shown the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation.”

Actually, many analysts and critics said, by focusing on Paulson’s working hours instead of on the fear gripping Main Street and Wall Street, the president seemed to show just the opposite — that he has failed to grasp the gravity of the country’s economic crisis.

“He has no idea what’s going on. Even by his standards, he’s wrong,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who said he had been trying to get the president to pay more attention to the economy for more than a year.

Bush’s “working over the weekend” line also suggested a comparison to another disaster in which he was accused of acting too slowly: Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the president was ridiculed for praising FEMA Director Michael D. Brown for doing “a heck of a job” — even as thousands remained stranded in floodwaters in New Orleans.

With Barack Obama preparing a major speech on race for tomorrow, it’s worth taking a step back to put the Jeremiah Wright controversy in a larger perspective.

As TNR’s Michael Crowley reminds us here and here, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church helped demonstrate his cultural authenticity to skeptical constituents in Chicago’s black community. But it’s created a major problem for him now.

The fundamental problem is that the issue positions and cultural affiliations that won elections in Obama’s state legislative district are a relatively poor fit to the presidential election landscape. (They’re arguably a poor fit to the Illinois electoral landscape as well, but the collapse of Obama’s primary and general election rivals in 2004 let him skate into the Senate without coming under serious criticism.) The fact that he has done so well in the presidential race despite the mismatch is a testament to what a remarkably gifted politician he is.

The genesis of this argument is my friend and co-author Michael Tofias, who has a working paper (PDF) showing that “members of the House are more likely to run for the Senate when their districts have high congruity to their prospective statewide constituency.” This constituency fit problem is a reason why it’s so difficult for black elected officials to win statewide (or national) office — many of them represent heavily minority constituencies (often the result of racial gerrymandering) that are quite different from the ones they would represent higher up the ladder.

Obama may be able to move past the Wright problem in the near term, but these sorts of controversies will come up again and again on other mismatch issues like gun control and the death penalty.

Update 3/18 8:22 AM: Commenter Rob notes that Matthew Yglesias made the same point as Crowley:

Obama’s going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset… Since emerging onto a larger stage, it’s been the reverse and Obama’s consistently sought to distance himself from Wright, disinviting him from his campaign’s launch, analogizing him to a crazy uncle who you love but don’t listen to, etc.