Brendan Nyhan

In his column yesterday, David Brooks apparently confused Ward Churchill (the controversial leftist professor) and Ward Connerly (the African American critic of affirmative action) in his column yesterday. The mistake has been fixed in the online version, but oddly there’s no disclosure of the correction.

Brooks’s mistake comes only days after Bill Kristol led off his new NYT column by confusing Michael Medved and Michelle Malkin. Unlike the Brooks column, Kristol’s column includes a disclosure at the bottom of the correction. So what’s the difference?

PS Who knew it was so hard to differentiate people with same first and last initials?

Update 1/21 10:06 AM: A correction appears in Brooks’s latest and has been appended to the original column.

The new ABC News/Washington Post poll reveals that support for Rudy Giuliani’s potentially disastrous presidential campaign is collapsing. He’s not even well-liked any more, which destroys any rationale for why Republicans should accept his heterodox social views:

Giuliani for the first time has slipped under 50 percent favorability among all adults, down steeply from a high of 67 percent just over a year ago; at a 46-46 split, as many now view him unfavorably as favorably.

Indeed, Giuliani is now viewed much less favorably than Hillary Clinton, who has a 58%/40% favorable/unfavorable rating in the same poll. Ouch.

How obsessed is President Bush with people’s exercise habits?

Bush, who prides himself on his ability to judge character, seems to use exercise as a proxy for discipline, complaining about former economic aid Lawrence Lindsey’s failure to exercise before firing him and asking possible Supreme Court nominee J. Harvie Wilkinson III about his workout habits.

Now Samantha Power reports in the New Yorker that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy who was killed in Iraq, impressed Bush with his “lean physique,” causing the president to say “You must work out”:

The Americans were surprisingly enthusiastic about Vieira de Mello. A few weeks before the invasion, he had pulled off an unusual feat for a U.N. official: he had charmed President George W. Bush. On March 5th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President, impressed by Vieira de Mello’s lean physique, greeted him by grasping his shoulder and saying admiringly, “You must work out.”

Is this really how the President of the United States assesses the character of the people he interacts with? Yikes.

Here’s an unlikely comparison that seems to be becoming a meme: how Barack Obama is like George W. Bush.

First, Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka drew the analogy in a Saturday NYT op-ed:

By losing the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Barack Obama found himself sharing common ground with an adversary whose politics he has often criticized: George W. Bush. Like Mr. Bush in 2000, Mr. Obama finished second in a primary he had expected to win.

As it happens, this is not the only way that Mr. Obama resembles Mr. Bush. The Illinois Democrat seems to have learned a lot from the first presidential campaign of a Texas Republican.

Mr. Bush positioned himself in 2000 as “a uniter, not a divider,” and Mr. Obama, while carefully avoiding using the word “uniter,” now offers a similar message. Just as Mr. Bush’s message of compassionate conservatism appealed to many Democrats and independent-minded liberals, Mr. Obama’s politics of hope seems to disarm Republicans and rightward-leaning independents.

Unfortunately for those conservatives drawn to Mr. Obama’s message of unity, he almost certainly can’t deliver on it. Just as President Bush failed to unite Washington and instead ended up contributing to its divisiveness, so Mr. Obama will eventually have to accept that conflict, rather than unity, is the natural condition of politics.

Then, in his column today, Paul Krugman offers a less flattering analogy between Obama and Bush:

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

I think there’s actually something to this comparison. Like Bush in 2000, Obama is letting his non-threatening persona do the work and benefiting from a personality-based narrative that lets him get away with more in terms of policy. But Burka is right — personality is not a solution to polarization. It’s hard to imagine Obama succeeding at “bringing people together” unless he wins in a landslide. Think of it this way: do you think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are going to want to work in good faith with him? Or are they going to try to undermine him at every turn?

Via Greg Mankiw, I just found out that Fox’s Chris Wallace pressed Rudy Giuliani and John McCain on their unsupported claims that tax cuts increase revenue during the Republican debate Thursday:

WALLACE: Mayor Giuliani, you announced plans for a big tax cut yesterday. And you have been run-ning ads that say reducing taxes actually will increase revenues. But the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, as well as two chairmen of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, all say that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, that in fact they add to the deficit, they don’t reduce it.

So, given that, do you stand by your statement?

GIULIANI: Well, the reality is that some tax cuts do add to revenues. Other tax cuts don’t add to revenues. It depends on the tax cut. And tax cutting has been part of the Bush program, the Reagan program, the Kennedy program, and it always led to significant increase in economic activity.

The Club for Growth looked at our plan, which is the biggest tax cut in history, and said that it would be a significant improvement in the economy and it would add to growth in the economy. Now, let me give you an example.

If you cut something like the corporate tax at 35 percent, you bring it down to 30 percent, you will get more revenues from that cut, because our corporate tax is the second highest in the world. If you cut some other tax, you might not get those kinds of revenues.

So, the question is: What tax are you cutting? Is it anti-competitive? If it is anti-competitive, you’re actually going to get more revenues from that tax cut. But that’s not the only answer to how you deal with a possible recession.

You also have to cut spending as significantly as you cut taxes. You have to be willing to impose cut-backs on each one of the federal agencies, the civilian agencies. I would do that the way I did as mayor of New York City, the way Ronald Reagan did it as president of the United States.

You have to be willing to engage in regulatory reform so that we have a picture here in the United States where we’re not regulating businesses out of the country. The main things you have to guard against are overtaxing, overspending, overregulating and over-suing. And if you can find balance there, you will do things that are necessary to prop up the economy and to allow us to have a growth economy.

It’s not just one thing.

WALLACE: Senator McCain, as a deficit hawk, I just want to ask you for a 30-second rebuttal on that.

Do you believe the tax cuts pay for themselves or do you believe that they add to the deficit?

MCCAIN: I think they stimulate the economy. I think that one of the first things we have to do that I forgot to mention is make these tax cuts permanent, because we’ve got to give some certainty to families and businesses all over America that these tax cuts will not expire and then give them the effect of a tax increase. So I believe they stimulate the economy, but, Chris, you’ve got to cut spending.

I’m proud to have been a member of the Reagan revolution, a foot soldier. And we cut taxes, but Ronald Reagan knew we had to cut spending at the same time. And that was our great failure as a party, is we cut taxes and then we let spending get out of control.

And frankly, it cost us a great deal. If we had adopted the tax cut package that I had, which entails spending cuts, then we would be talking about more tax cuts today.

It’s a start — good for Wallace.

The ill-fated Unity ’08 third party “movement” finally realized what I (and many others) have been trying to tell them for a long time — it’s not going to work:

At the current moment, we don’t have enough members or enough money to take the next necessary step – achieving ballot access in 50 states – to reach the goal of establishing our on-line convention and nominating a Unity ticket for president and vice president this coming fall.

The past year has taught us that it’s tough to rally millions to a process as opposed to a candidate or an issue. In the past, third party movements that have broken through the monopoly of the established parties have always been based on a person (Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 or Ross Perot in the last decade) or a burning issue (slavery in the case of the insurgent Republican party in 1860). Stirring people and moving them to action about a process change – replacing the quirky primary system that tends to drive candidates to the extremes with something more inclusive and sensible – has proven to be a lot harder than we expected.

How much harder? Back in December 2006, co-founder Jerry Rafshoon predicted that the group would have 5-20 million people participating in their online convention and that the party’s nominee would be ahead in the polls afterward. Oops. (Final numbers: 124,000 members and $1.5 million raised.)

As a result, Rafshoon and another founder have jumped ship to try to draft the latest object of third party hype, Michael Bloomberg, into the race. As I’ve written, I don’t think he can win, but he does have the advantage of being able to finance the organization that Unity ’08 failed to create.

Back in June, I criticized Peggy Noonan for asserting without evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is behind the site HillaryIs44.com.

Well, she’s at it again. In her WSJ column yesterday, Noonan again asserted that Clinton’s campaign is responsible for the site (via Instaputz):

if we are to believe the new voice will be a softer, more conciliatory and more engaging one, how to square that with what is going on at HillaryIs44.com, a Web site that is for all intents and purposes a back door to her war room? There you will see that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will soon “destroy” Barack Obama in a “scandal” involving an “indicted slumlord” who is Mr. Obama’s “friend of 17 years” and with whom Mr. Obama has been involved in “shady deals.”

This isn’t a new voice, it is the old one, the one we know too well. The item was posted on Thursday, two days after Mrs. Clinton announced her new approach.

Between sobs she is going to try to destroy Mr. Obama. She is going to try to end him. She will pay a price for it–no one likes to see the end of a dream, no one likes a dream killer. But she will pay that price to win, and try to clean up the mess later.

Note that the only evidence for her conclusion that Hillary is going to try to “destroy” and “end” Obama is the quote from the site. But where’s the proof that Hillary’s campaign has anything to do with it?

University of Chicago law prof Cass Sunstein has a useful post defending prediction markets like Intrade against critics who bashed them for failing to foresee Hillary’s win in New Hampshire. As he correctly notes, long shots sometimes do win:

Intrade had Clinton at about 8% likely to win, and 8% of the time, 8% chances should come through. (As in horse races, so on Intrade.) It would be a great surprise if 8% chances come though 0% or even 2% of the time. But on prediction markets, prices have been close to probabilities. Events that are priced to be 90% likely to happen occur about 90% of the time, events that are priced to be 70% likely to happen occur about 70% of the time, and so on.

The problem is that (a) people don’t understand probability and (b) prediction markets have been oversold. There’s an ongoing scholarly debate about the predictive value of prediction markets, but for the moment, we should all be able to agree that what happened in New Hampshire (a single event) proves little either way.

During the latest Republican debate, Mike Huckabee tried to deflect criticism with this little joke:

Mr. Huckabee, for his part, responded with trademark humor. “The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.”

The line probably played well on TV, but it doesn’t make any sense, as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw noted. In logical form, Huckabee’s claim can be described this way (where ~A means “not A”):

A->B
~A->~B

Unfortunately, the second statement does not follow from the first, as Mankiw illustrated:

Similarly, if you’re not an American citizen, you’re not President of the United States. I am an American citizen, so I must be President of the United States.

However, the hip hop listeners among you know the best recent example of this illogic — the song “This Is Why I’m Hot” by MIMS, which featured this chorus:

I’m hot ’cause I’m fly
You ain’t [hot] ’cause you’re not [fly]
This is why, this is why, this is why I’m hot

Maybe Huckabee has found a running mate?

Update 1/11 5:04 PM: Matthew Yglesias defends MIMS on grounds of “[i]nterpretive charity”:

Nyhan’s reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with “’cause” as a material conditional but there’s no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he’s hot because he’s fly and (2) you’re not hot because you’re not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn’t. I don’t, however, see a fallacy here.

Commenter Ernie P. suggests that MIMS may mean “You ain’t [fly] ’cause you’re not [hot],” which would be logically consistent. The Wikipedia entry for the song suggests, as does an Yglesias commenter, that MIMS actually means “you ain’t [hot] ’cause you’re not [hot],” which is even more tautological than fly->hot.

If you’re not confused yet, there’s a whole Village Voice article attempting to diagram the logic of MIMS.

PS If you haven’t heard the song, here it is (via Yglesias):

David Brooks claims today that “continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy” due to the fiscal gap:

Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy. The demographics have changed. The U.S. is an aging society. We have made expensive promises to our seniors. We can’t keep those promises at the current tax levels, let alone at reduced ones. As David Frum writes in “Comeback,” his indispensable new book: “In the face of such a huge fiscal gap, the days of broad, across-the-board, middle-class tax cutting are over.”

As a result, he claims “Republican economic policies are shifting” and “Republicans are adjusting their priorities to win back the anxious middle class.”

While there are a few encouraging signs of movement away from a near-exclusive focus on tax cuts, as he notes, Brooks never addresses the elephant in the room — the fact that almost all of the Republican presidential candidates claim that tax cuts increase revenue (a claim that even Bush administration economists disavow). As a result, it’s hard to imagine the GOP acknowledging the inevitable tradeoff between tax cuts and closing the long-run fiscal gap any time soon.