Brendan Nyhan

I have to admit I’m amused that Barack Obama held a youth event named “Generation B.O.” What’s he trying to say?!

The Wall Street Journal editorial board warns that the immigration debate threatens to make the GOP a minority party. They’re right. It splits the Republicans right down the middle, demoralizes the base in advance of 2008, and is prompting a conservative counter-mobilization that could make Latinos a Democratic constituency for years to come.

Ironically, the issue was not pushed to the top of the legislative agenda by Democrats. As John B. Judis points out, Democrats have struggled to push through legislation that splits Republicans and forces a Bush veto (for now, at least, GOP party loyalty is generally too strong to overcome a filibuster).

Instead, Bush has been doing the Democrats’ work for them. In 2005-2006, he tried to push the unpopular concept of Social Security private accounts, which scared off GOP moderates and eventually died. Now he’s pushing an awkward immigration compromise that alienates conservatives without exciting anyone besides David Broder.

The combination of Bush’s lame duck status and the configuration of the House, Senate, and presidency means that it’s very difficult to pass important new legislation and keep your coalition intact. The President is finding this out at great political cost.

Correction 6/28 6:58 AM: In this Congress, Pelosi and Reid have passed two bills that Bush was forced to veto (an Iraq war funding bill and stem cell legislation), not zero. This error is corrected above.

An op-ed debunking third party hype is featured today on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal website. Keep ’em coming…

One of the most effective ways to smear dissent is to associate it with “helping the enemy,” as in this passage from a WSJ op-ed by James Taranto today:

Some politicians have also undertaken efforts on behalf of enemy fighters. Senate Democrats, joined by Republican Arlen Specter, have introduced legislation that would restore habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, although this is unlikely to become law as long as George W. Bush is president.

The Democrats and Specter is not trying to restore habeas rights “on behalf of enemy fighters.” They’re doing so on behalf of the Constitution (at least as they see it). Taranto may disagree, but it doesn’t mean they’re trying to help the detainees as such.

It’s also worth noting the up-is-down jargon Taranto uses to claim that the current system of handling enemy combatants “protects our freedom”:

In the long run, [handling detainees in the federal courts or courts-martialsystems] could also imperil the civil liberties of Americans. Leniency toward detainees is on the table today only because al Qaeda has so far failed to strike America since 9/11. If it succeeded again, public pressure for harsher measures would be hard for politicians to resist. And if enemy combatants had been transferred to the criminal justice system, those measures would be much more likely to diminish the rights of citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.

By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans’ physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.

This is demagoguery in its purest form — go along with my proposal to limit constitutional protections, or the mob will come and demand even more. It’s not unlike the Glenn Reynolds post from 2004 in which he warns of approvingly quotes an attack on the patriotism of reporters and then warns of the elimination of freedom of the press if things don’t change:

JOHN O’SULLIVAN looks at last week’s media goofs like the fake Iraq rape photos and general tendencies in reporting and observes:

Neither the media’s vaunted “skepticism” nor simple fact-checking on the Internet were employed by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, “too good to check.” As Mark Steyn argued Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe they were real. Indeed, it is worse than that — since the fraud was discovered and the Mirror editor fired, he has become a heroic figure in British circles hostile to Blair and the war.

Admittedly, reporters and editors make mistakes. But when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the United States or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something.

Namely, which side they’re on.

Try as one might, it’s getting hard to avoid that sort of inference. Not that they actively favor the terrorists, of course. They just view beating their domestic political enemies as more important.

…Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

(For more, see our Spinsanity articles and my blog posts on Taranto.)

Political magazines love to send reporters to infiltrate the other side and hear what they say to each other in private. As a result, stories about the fundraising cruises held by The Nation and National Review have become something of a cliché.

Nonetheless, TNR’s piece on the last National Review cruise (held after the election in November) has to be read to be believed.

My favorite quotes are Robert Bork accusing Fox News of unfair coverage of the war in Iraq and Norman Podhoretz claiming that Iraq’s WMD are in Syria (among other things):

Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

…[Norman] Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank God” for that.

…”Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” [William F.] Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.”

…For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, [Podhoretz] is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. “I don’t much care,” he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that “nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo” and that Bush is “a hero.” He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.

Dinesh D’Souza also ran down Democrats as “the party of [economic] losers” and denigrated immigrants from Central America (and Canada!):

D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”

… D’Souza summarizes the prevailing sentiment by unveiling what he modestly calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: An immigrant’s quality is “proportional to the distance traveled to get to the United States.” In other words: Asians trump Latinos.

There’s much more, including vicious anti-Muslim sentiment that apparently pervaded the entire cruise. To paraphrase Brad DeLong, it’s worse than I imagined possible, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than I imagined possible. Indeed, portions of this report and the ongoing Washington Post series on Dick Cheney sound like they were taken from the deranged rantings of a commenter on Daily Kos. The ranks of the shrill will be growing…

Correction 6/26 6:24 AM: As a commenter points out, I mislabeled Norman Podhoretz as his son John — the mistake is fixed above.

Update 6/27 8:56 AM: Eric Alterman reviews the political cruise genre, which he apparently inaugurated ten years ago, while Daniel Larison at The American Scene found the article’s revelations to be mundane from a conservative perspective:

This was supposed to be a story told from deep inside the world of NR, which you might think would offer some interesting revelations, but instead of something different we find Bernard Lewis churning out another piece of bad analysis of Near Eastern politics, Norman Podhoretz thanking God for the prospect of war with Iran and a perpetual gnashing of teeth over the lost war in Vietnam. Also, Dinesh D’Souza said something outlandish–hold the cover!

…That is, those who follow the internal discussion on the right and at National Review will read along through Hari’s piece finding various lines of argument that have cropped up time and again at The Corner and almost feel the urge to shrug.

David Broder — the high commissioner of Washington punditry and de facto leader of the Bloomberg base — is feeling the public’s “palpable hunger” for leadership:

More than that, there is a palpable hunger among the public for someone who will attack the problems facing the country — the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care — and not worry about the politics.

But as Ezra Klein points out, “not worry[ing] about the politics” makes no sense:

How do you tackle the country’s problems without worrying about the politics? Does running on a third-party ticket obviate the need for Senate approval? For Congressional majorities? Does Bloomberg’s $9 billion somehow trigger a filibuster-exception clause?

People don’t worry about “the politics” because they enjoy fretting. They worry about the politics because that’s what’s keeping them from attacking the problems facing the country. Broder happens to have picked the four policy areas Democrats have the clearest, most expansive plans on, but they can’t implement them because they can’t get to 60 votes in the Senate, or force Bush’s signature. That’s why “the politics” matter.

Or as Matthew Yglesias puts it:

If only, instead of the party that’s been governing the country for the past six years, there was some kind of second major party whose elected officials supported substantial policy shifts on Iraq, immigration, energy, and health care. Wouldn’t that be great?

Jonathan Chait nails the larger problem with the Broderesque perspective on Bloomberg in a must-read TNR column:

“Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” So declared New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg upon renouncing his membership in the GOP last week. The problem, of course, is that people don’t agree on what “real results” or “good ideas” are. Cutting taxes? Raising taxes? Funding stem-cell research? Banning stem-cell research? This is exactly why we have partisan battles in the first place.

You would think that anybody who failed to grasp this would be urged to study a high school civics textbook. Instead, Bloomberg is being urged to run for president and lauded for his statesmanship.

Bloomberg has thus become the most prominent example of what you could call partisanship scolds. These are people who believe that disagreement is the central problem in U.S. politics, that both parties are to blame in equal measure, and that rejecting party ties or ideology is synonymous with the demonstration of virtue. While partisanship scolds believe that they stand in bold contrast to Washington, they are probably more heavily represented among the Beltway elite than any other demographic.

The official lobby of the partisanship scolds is a group called “Unity ’08”–a collection of graying eminences from both parties who are calling for a bipartisan presidential ticket, perhaps led by Bloomberg. Their rhetoric appears to be targeted at people who enjoy kittens, rainbows, and David Broder columns. Specifically, Unity ’08 says its ticket will run on “ideas and traditions which unite and empower us as individuals and as a people.”

Well, that’s nice. Unfortunately, when the partisanship scolds get a little more specific, things tend to break down.

(Newsday also has an op-ed telling readers not to believe the third party hype.)

Horrifying news from Steve Benen at Talking Points Memo — misperceptions about Iraq are going back up:

As part of its cover story on “what you need to know now,” Newsweek conducted a broad poll on a variety of political and cultural affairs. There were plenty of interesting results, but one section was particularly noteworthy.

Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in ten Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right — and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.

For that matter, one in five Americans (20%) believe that we did find chemical/biological weapons “hidden by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Perhaps most troubling, the number of people who are confused about Iraq’s non-existent role in the 9/11 attacks has gone up in recent years. When Newsweek asked the same question in the fall of 2004, 36% said Saddam Hussein was “directly involved” with the attacks. Nearly three years later, that number is 41%.

Full results of the poll (which is mostly inane factual trivia) are here. See here for previous posts on misperceptions about Iraq.

In her speech to the Take Back America conference last week, Hillary Clinton was the latest Democrat to promote the myth (here, here, here, and here) that President Bush has instituted a “ban” on stem cell research:

You know, later today, apparently, the president will veto a bill passed by Congress to support stem cell research.

Now, this is research that…holds such promise for devastating diseases. Yesterday, I met with a group of children suffering from juvenile diabetes. I co-chair the Alzheimer’s caucus in the Senate. I’ve worked on helping to boost funding for research to look for cures and a way to prevent so many devastating diseases. And we know that stem cell research holds the key to our understanding more about what we can do. So let me be very clear: When I am president, I will lift the ban on stem cell research.

This is just one example of how the President puts ideology before science, politics before the needs of our families, just one more example of how out of touch with reality he and his party have become. And it’s just one more example as to why we’re going to send them packing in January 2009, and return progressive leadership to the White House.

In fact, President Bush has limited the number of embryonic stem cell lines that are eligible for federal funding. No such limitations have been placed on private research. This myth needs to die.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Joshua Muravchik smears dissenters against the war in Iraq as “hastening the advent of the next war”:

With the Bush administration’s policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president’s freedom to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq–all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

A bumper sticker I saw in the parking lot at Target yesterday said “I’m already against the next war.” I guess this is why.

PS The sad thing is that the “next war” may be different than Iraq (ie actually necessary), but every indication is that it will play out as a referendum on the current war. It’s yet another way the Bush administration has poisoned the well for its successor.

In an op-ed about Hillary Clinton, Peggy Noonan asserts without evidence that the Clinton campaign is behind a pro-Hillary site called hillaryis44.com:

But there is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week. It is a new Web site called HillaryIs44.com. It is rather mysterious. It does not divulge who is running the site, or who staffs it. It is not interactive; it has one informative voice, and its target audience seems to be journalists and free-lance oppo artists.

And it reads like The Warrior’s Id. Hillary “took on” a journalist this week and “beat him into submission.” Bloomberg has “stripped himself of allies” in “New York’s cutthroat politics.” “Expect stormy days ahead for Bloomberg,” who will wind up “lonely.” Republicans “will attempt to rip him to shreds.” “A May surprise announcement will be met with mounds of research accumulated over the next 11 months.”

In tone the site is very Tokyo Rose.

Encouraging readers to send in “confidential tips,” its primary target and obvious obsession is Barack Obama…

This appears to be the subterranean part of Hillary’s campaign, the part that quietly coexists with the warm, chuckling lady playing the jukebox with her husband. It coexists with the Maya Angelou part, the listening tour part, the filmed parts.

It is the war room part. I suspect the site is a back door to that war room.

…[I]f Mrs. Clinton’s aides want to understand better her likability problem, they should look at this site. It’s dark in there.

Note all the insinuations that Clinton’s campaign is involved with the site: “[T]here is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week,” “This appears to be the subterranean part of Hillary’s campaign,” “I suspect the site is a back door to [Clinton’s] war room.” But there’s no evidence that any of these suggestions are true. The website states “We are not affiliated with the Hillary For President Exploratory Committee, or any official Hillary Clinton organization in any way” and the domain is registered anonymously. In short, Noonan is asserting a connection based on sheer speculation.