Brendan Nyhan

As Matthew Yglesias notes, the State of the Union (which I skipped) includes yet another misleading “average” statistic about the tax cuts:

Unless Congress acts, most of the tax relief we’ve delivered over the past seven years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800.

Actually, the Tax Policy Center estimates that the middle income quintile will received an average tax cut of $814 in 2010 from the 2001-2006 tax cuts. The “average” of $1,800 is skewed upward by the vast tax cuts received by those with the highest incomes.

Kudos to David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, who included this disclaimer in his story on President Bush’s quixotic effort to scale back earmarks:

As lawmakers know, earmarks, which make up less up than 1 percent of the federal budget, have incalculable political value. Congressional leaders award or withhold them to reward or punish lawmakers. Incumbents like to use federal money to curry favor with donors and constituents.

Like welfare and foreign aid, the cost of earmarks as a proportion of the federal budget are vastly exaggerated. Sadly, I’m guessing most stories today will omit this necessary context.

Sad but fitting:

The Giuliani campaign chartered a 727 on Monday for a day of barnstorming on the eve of Tuesday’s big primary, but none of the rallies at airports in Sanford, Clearwater, Fort Myers or Fort Lauderdale drew even a hundred supporters.

…And Mr. Giuliani — who as mayor once told a man who called in to his weekly radio show to protest the city’s ban on pet ferrets that “there is something deranged about you” — called Monday for an end to the “name-calling” in the race for president.

Monday was the first time in the campaign that Mr. Giuliani had allowed the traveling press to fly with him. But the crowds at some of the airport rallies were so small that it might have been more efficient to fly them to the candidate, instead of vice versa.

When the microphone went out at the first rally, outside the airport in Sanford, the crowd was intimate enough that the actor Jon Voight, who was introducing Mr. Giuliani, found that he did not need it. “I can talk to you guys!” he said, perfectly audibly, as he lowered the broken microphone.

Rudy is the Joe Lieberman of 2008 — his name recognition led to strong early numbers in national polling, but he’s just fundamentally unacceptable to the base. People have mocked his strategy of waiting until Florida to compete, but what was he supposed to do? He tried to campaign in New Hampshire earlier but it didn’t work.

If you’ve neglected my recommendation of Matt Welch’s McCain: The Myth of a Maverick make sure to check out Welch’s debunking of the various myths about his unwavering devotion to honesty, principle, and “straight talk” that newspapers have been pushing in their endorsement editorials. Inoculate yourself before Super Tuesday!

Once again, a journalist has misinformed the public due to a fundamental lack of understanding of basic quantitative data.

In today’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes that President Bush “has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents.”

But as Dean Baker points out (via Ezra Klein), the actual economic data (!) show that “President Bush’s growth record is better than his father’s, but it is worse than the record of every other president in the last half century” — here’s the graphic Klein made:

Indeed, when compared to economic recoveries in the post-World War II era, the current one lags by virtually every measure, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed:

How can Stolberg not know this? And why is the Times letting her write about this subject without the assistance of someone who does?

Postscript: Much later in the article, Stolberg does state that “[t]he economic expansion that came after [Bush’s] tax cuts has largely benefited the wealthy.” While this is accurate, it implicitly assigns undeserved credit for the expansion to Bush’s tax cuts. Also, according to the NBER committee that dates recessions, the expansion began in November 2001 — after Bush’s first tax cut but before his second one.

Update 1/29 7:45 AM: What’s especially pernicious about this is that Stolberg’s statement about Bush’s record of economic growth doesn’t quite count as an error in the journalistic sense, so it probably won’t be corrected. But if the Times misspells your name, you can guarantee they’ll promptly correct the record. What a bizarre culture.

Barack Obama’s campaign against one political dynasty (the Clintons) is endorsed from the descendant of another one (Caroline Kennedy).

Why do we care again?

Update 1/28 10:06 AM: On the other hand, today’s endorsement from Ted Kennedy is a much bigger deal. In particular, as TNR’s Jonathan Cohn and a commenter below note, it could help Obama with Latinos and working class whites.

Update 1/28 2:23 PM: Josh Marshall offers a similar take:

If the issue is dynasticism in politics, I guess there’s some measure of irony in the group endorsement I’m now listening to from the Kennedy family.

Contrary to a previous poll showing him with support from only ten percent of whites in South Carolina, Barack Obama got a quarter of the white vote:

About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama. Black women turned out in particularly large numbers. Obama, the first-term Illinois senator, got a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.

Nonetheless, the racializing of Obama as the “black candidate” (see here and here, among many other things) spells trouble on Super Tuesday. Shame on the Clinton campaign and their surrogates for helping to bring us to this point.

Today Bob Herbert questions the nasty attacks on Barack Obama by Clinton surrogates — a fine subject for a column. But then he transitions to a random quotation from the Internet:

The Clinton camp knows what it’s doing, and its slimy maneuvers have been working. Bob Kerrey apologized and Andrew Young said at the time of his comment that he was just fooling around. But the damage to Senator Obama has been real, and so have the benefits to Senator Clinton of these and other lowlife tactics.

Consider, for example, the following Web posting (misspellings and all) from a mainstream news blog on Jan. 13:

“omg people get a grip. Can you imagine calling our president barak hussien obama … I cant, I pray no one would be disrespectful enough to put this man in our whitehouse.”

Herbert’s reference to a “Web posting” on a “mainstream news blog” suggests that the news organization wrote the quotation in question, when it was actually just a random comment on an ABC News blog post about Bob Kerrey’s reference to Obama’s middle name. Memo to pundits: Stop quoting random web commenters. You can find a crazy comment on any blog — it just doesn’t prove anything.

I’ve been worried about Barack Obama’s relatively low support among whites but these numbers from South Carolina are worse than I expected:

But while Mr. Obama seeks to transcend race, his campaign cannot avoid the politics associated with it. A new poll on Friday, conducted by MSNBC/McClatchy Newspapers, showed that Mr. Obama was winning support from 59 percent of black voters in South Carolina but only 10 percent of white voters. The majority of the white voters are splitting their support between Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards, the native son.

The national numbers are also showing heavy racial polarization:

In the poll last month, Mrs. Clinton held a 40 percent to 23 percent lead over Mr. Obama among whites, as well as support from a majority of African-Americans. Mrs. Clinton’s lead among whites has widened, 53 percent to 24 percent, and Mr. Obama has a 63 percent to 23 percent lead over Mrs. Clinton among African-Americans.

It was probably inevitable that Obama would end up with more support among blacks than whites, but it’s sad that the priming of racial issues (often by Clinton surrogates) seems to have actually hurt him among whites over the last month.

John McCain is running this lovely anti-Hillary Google ad, which just showed up in my sidebar:

If you click on the ad, you go to a mock quiz touting McCain’s electability against Hillary.