Brendan Nyhan

The American public may not be excited about a Michael Bloomberg presidential candidacy, but some people are fired up:

[E]xperts said a presidential bid by Bloomberg would mean an unprecedented bonanza for political consultants – with a small fortune being poured into polling, TV ads and direct mail in what would likely be the most expensive campaign ever.

Experts estimated that with a half-billion-dollar campaign budget, at least $300 million would be spent on television commercials, $75 million for direct mail, and tens of millions more for high-end travel arrangements and operations around the country.

“Bloomberg would want to try to put 60 percent of $500 million on paid advertising – broadcast, cable, Internet, minority outreach, radio,” said GOP consultant Scott Reed.

Throw in some enthusiasm from David Broder types in the national media and you can manufacture a draft Bloomberg movement. As President Bush might put it, some people call pundits and political consultants the elite; Bloomberg calls them his base.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to change his voter registration to independent has set off a predictable frenzy of speculation about an independent/third party presidential run. Don’t believe the hype.

First, can Bloomberg win? Pollster John Zogby claims “his chances are promising” and that Bloomberg “could win it” while Andrew Sullivan warns of a “viable third party challenge.” But as I’ve argued many times before on this blog, the factors preventing a successful third party bid — which include strategic voting for one of the top two candidates, party loyalty, ballot access, and the Electoral College — are essentially insurmountable. There’s a reason the two major parties have been entrenched since 1860. To have any hope of dislodging them, a third party would need a signature issue that cuts across the axis of major party competition. For Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, that issue was slavery. (Since then, the parties have successfully adapted and realigned around cross-cutting issues like civil rights and abortion.) No comparable issue exists today for Bloomberg.

In addition, Bloomberg is not exactly an ideal third party candidate. Polls show his appeal is limited. In addition, as Matthew Yglesias notes, as a Jewish ex-Democrat from New York, he’s especially poorly positioned to pick up working class/Southern Democrats who might be disaffected with Hillary Clinton, though he could pick up some moderate Republicans who don’t like a Thompson-style GOP nominee.

For all of these reasons, Bloomberg is unlikely to exceed 10 percent or so nationally if he does run. But will he realize that he can’t win? No doubt many people are currently telling him how great he is and that he should enter the race (including consultants hoping to make millions in ad commissions). Ultimately, however, I think he will pull a Colin Powell — bask in the adulation, engage in some phony posturing about major parties not talking about “the real issues,” and flirt with running, but back away in the end.

However, if Bloomberg does run, he will affect the outcome of the race. Who will he hurt more? Zogby says “my polling shows he would likely take more votes from the Democrat than the Republican.” On TNR Online, John Judis argues that Bloomberg would draw from “Blue-State Independents” like John Anderson in 1980, who “provided the margin of victory for Reagan in eleven states.” Writing on Tapped, Paul Starr agrees and (bizarrely) suggests an Obama-Bloomberg ticket. And, after considering a number of possible factors, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder seems to also come down on the side of Bloomberg hurting Democrats, noting that he may appeal to voters on traditionally Democratic issues, that the independents who are most likely to support Bloomberg currently favor Democrats by huge margins, and that Bloomberg might steal Democratic voters in California or the South.

However, an April Rasmussen poll shows Bloomberg pulling almost entirely from McCain and Giuliani in head-to-head matchups with Hillary Clinton, and recent state-by-state Survey USA polling indicates that he currently “siphons enough Republican votes to flip red states Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and New Mexico blue” (PDF). Finally, David Frum guesses that, after sinking in the polls, a desperate Bloomberg would start running heavily negative ads against “the candidate he dislikes more,” who will “almost certainly be the Republican.”

Who’s right? On balance, Bloomberg seems more likely to peel off Democratic-leaning moderates and independents than any other voters, as Zogby and Ambinder argue. The poll results I cite above are unlikely to hold up due to the logic of strategic voting — will Republicans vote for Bloomberg over the GOP nominee if it means they are helping to put Clinton, Obama, or Edwards in office? (Note: It’s hard to interpret how this will play out. The Anderson 1980 and Perot 1992 precedents are particularly difficult to apply because both of them picked up disaffected ex-supporters of an incumbent running for re-election. The last major third-party challenge in an open-seat presidential race was George Wallace in 1968.)

One final note — you should use the Bloomberg hype as an opportunity to evaluate political pundits on their understanding of politics and their willingness to hype implausible scenarios. Yglesias, for instance, had the best reaction to the Bloomberg news:

I stand by my one question licensing quiz for political pundits:

Is today the right moment to get excited about a third-party presidential run? If you answer “yes,” you need to find some other line of work.

Update 6/22 10:06 AM: Yglesias later wrote something similar to my analysis above about the 1980 and 1992 precedents:

Jimmy Carter was an incumbent president widely judged to have failed in office (recall Ted Kennedy’s very strong showing against him in the 1980 primaries). This created a large pool of people ideologically inclined to pick Carter over Reagan, but who also really didn’t want to vote for Carter. Much the same could be said about people who defected from George H.W. Bush to Ross Perot; in both cases actual incumbent performance drove disaffection and a proclivity for third party voting.

It seems to me that this kind of dynamic is pretty uniquely associated with incumbency, and probably doesn’t apply at all to the 2008 election and certainly doesn’t apply to the Democrats in 200[8].

TNR’s Noam Scheiber is a great writer whose work I frequently cite. But his new online piece about Hillary Clinton’s appeal to downscale voters is, I think, too clever by half.

In addition to taking for granted the questionable premise that Hillary is more experienced than Barack Obama, Scheiber offers an elaborate rationale for why she outpolls Obama among less educated voters:

Pretty much every poll taken since the beginning of the year has shown two things: First, that Hillary Clinton enjoys a sizeable cushion among working-class voters (a Gallup poll out Monday shows Hillary with a ten-point lead among voters with “some college” and a 23-point lead among voters with a high school education or less). And second, that Hillary has a huge advantage on questions about which candidate has the “best experience” to be president (66 to 9 over Obama in an early June Washington Post poll).

These two details are not unrelated. In fact, it’s pretty clear that working-class voters favor Hillary over Obama largely because they value experience. But it’s the reason they value experience that’s so interesting: Working-class Democrats, and particularly unionized Democrats, tend to see seniority as the only acceptable way of divvying up sought-after work. (And what is the presidency if not the most sought-after job on the planet?) For them, the problem with an inexperienced candidate isn’t that he or she is unprepared to be president. It’s that such a candidacy flies in the face of their basic sense of fairness.

…In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who’s paid her dues–first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York. If, after all this, Hillary doesn’t win the nomination, then the system they’ve bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down.

Obama’s base, by contrast, consists primarily of his sociological peers: highly educated achievers who get paid to think abstractly and believe that compensation should reflect performance. Nothing makes these meritocrats shudder like the thought of having the sharpest insight or the best proposal and yet still having to cool their heels while their less able, less creative elders plod ahead.

I’m afraid this is speculative David Brooks-style pop sociology – provocative but ultimately unconvincing. Who knows what’s really going on in working class voters’ minds?

A more plausible (and simple) explanation is that less well educated Democrats tend to have less political information, so they don’t know very much about Obama. These voters also tend to have less well developed ideological views and more of an emotional connection to the Democratic Party. As such, it’s not surprising that they back Clinton strongly — they have loved her and her husband for years. By contrast, upscale voters know more about Obama and are more likely to respond to his appeals for change.

This pattern is analogous to the way that downscale Democratic primary voters tended to back Gore over Bradley in 2000 and Mondale over Hart in 1984. It’s possible that these voters are expressing their views on the appropriate role of seniority, but it’s more likely that they just tend to stick with the default choice.

As a commenter noted last night, I haven’t posted anything about Mike Nifong being disbarred and removed from office as district attorney. I’m happy to see it happen; I just haven’t had anything to add to this point.

I do have a question now, though. Why did the university reach a legal settlement with the lacrosse players? On what grounds could Duke have been sued? Clearly, the university could have handled the matter better, but that’s not the same thing as being legally liable.

Some people here that I’ve talked to think it was just a move to avoid paying legal costs in case the players filed nuisance lawsuits, but an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal
asserts that Duke had “legal exposure” in the case:

Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university’s legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum.

So what, exactly, was the exposure? Lawyers, please help.

Update 6/20 9:09 AM: Durham in Wonderland blogger K.C. Johnson thinks the settlement protected the faculty from lawsuits:

Shortly thereafter, Paul Haagen, outgoing chair of the Academic Council, e-mailed other Council members to explain the settlement. The critical sentence: “As a result of the settlement, all faculty have been released from any claims of liability related to the lacrosse matter up through the date of the settlement (June 18, 2007).” While the Duke administration has been unwilling to hold a segment of its faculty to minimal standards of the profession, it seems that it was willing to use University funds to protect those same faculty members from legal action. From a tactical standpoint, the decision was a wise one by the Brodhead/Steel team—any lawsuit by the three families would have been a public relations nightmare for Duke.

Could you really sue the now-infamous Group of 88 for running an ad about “a social disaster”? Or specific professors for public statements about the case? I still don’t understand.

Famous last words from Matthew Yglesias:

Kaus notes that near the end of their most recent polling memo (PDF) Carville & Greenberg aren’t finding a ton of enthusiasm for the Senate compromise [on immigration]. It should be said, though, that the compromise with a description pulls about even. Without the description, it’s horribly unpopular.

It should also be said that the Clinton health care plan of ’93-’94 was actually quite popular when polled with a description that didn’t mention Clinton — and look how that turned out. The problem, of course, is that most people never hear a neutral description of controversial proposals.

Update 6/20 12:02 PM: Yglesias emails to point out that he has a “mildly unfavorable view” of the current bill; the original post title (“Yglesias grasps at straws on immigration”), which may have incorrectly suggested that he supports it, is now changed above.

Absurdity alert: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited the TV show “24” in a debate over constitutional protections and the war on terror (via Andrew Sullivan):

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge’s passing remark – “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ” – got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

…Generally, the jurists in the room agreed that coerced confessions carry little weight, given that they might be false and almost never accepted into evidence. But the U.S. Supreme Court judge stressed that he was not speaking about putting together pristine prosecutions, but rather, about allowing agents the freedom to thwart immediate attacks.

“I don’t care about holding people. I really don’t,” Judge Scalia said.

Even if a real terrorist who suffered mistreatment is released because of complaints of abuse, Judge Scalia said, the interruption to the terrorist’s plot would have ensured “in Los Angeles everyone is safe.” During a break from the panel, Judge Scalia specifically mentioned the segment in Season 2 when Jack Bauer finally figures out how to break the die-hard terrorist intent on nuking L.A. The real genius, the judge said, is that this is primarily done with mental leverage. “There’s a great scene where he told a guy that he was going to have his family killed,” Judge Scalia said. “They had it on closed circuit television – and it was all staged. … They really didn’t kill the family.”

This example illustrates how “24” is helping to wreck the debate about torture. When people think about these issues, their minds tend to turn to the most vivid examples, even if they are unrepresentative (ie worrying about dying in a plane crash rather than a car accident). As a result, we end up focusing on the ticking time bomb scenarios featured in “24” rather than the more mundane interrogations that are vastly more common in real life.

The guru primary is on!

If you haven’t noticed, a flood of titles promising new ideas and solutions for Democrats and/or liberals have hit the shelves in the past year, including volumes from Chuck Schumer, Laura Flanders, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Andy Stern (among others). In the next year, Paul Krugman, Todd Gitlin, Matthew Yglesias, and Peter Beinart are all releasing books. Even unconventional authors like Emory psychology professor Drew Westen are entering the fray (his book The Political Brain is built on academic brain-scanning research).

These books are literally popping up everywhere. At the end of a New York Times op-ed on rainforests and climate change, one of the authors listed this biography:

Glenn Hurowitz is working on a book about the importance of courage in Democratic Party politics.

Who isn’t writing about the future of the Democratic party and/or liberalism?

Bonus quiz: The flood of Democratic advice books is:

(a) A reflection of Democrats’ need for better tactics and/or a more compelling vision;
(b) An attempt to sell books in a favorable political environment;
(c) An attempt to supplant George Lakoff as the guru of the moment;
(d) A reflection of the anti-Bush animus of liberal book editors who can’t understand how Bush won two elections;
(e) All of the above.

Barack Obama has finally repudiated the nativist “D-Punjab” smear of Hillary Clinton that has infuriated the Indian American community (via a comment on my last post):

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama referred to as “stupid” and “caustic” his campaign’s memo last week that implied rival Hillary Clinton’s investments in India made the her fit to represent the south Asian country.

“It was a screw-up on the part of our research team,” Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, said during a meeting today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters. “It wasn’t anything I had seen or my senior staff had seen.”

The comments were the first in public by Obama about a research document circulated last week by his campaign referring to Clinton as “D-Punjab,” a play on journalistic shorthand meant to suggest the senator from New York as a Democrat representing a state in India.

The memo, obtained by the Clinton campaign, referred to Clinton’s investments in Indian companies and efforts to raise money from members of the Indian-American community.

It cited comments Clinton made to an Indian-American audience in March in which she said, “I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily.”

“That particular quote was a joke, I think, that Hillary Clinton made to an Indian-American audience,” Obama told the Register. “The research team thought it would be clever to put that at the top.”

Obama continued, “I thought it was stupid and caustic and not only didn’t reflect my view of the complicated issue of outsourcing … it also didn’t reflect the fact that I have longstanding support and friendships within the Indian-American community.”

Obama said, “I take responsibility for it, as does our campaign. and we quickly apologized and are communicating that in various circles around the country.”

Update 6/18 8:35 PM: Via Greg Sargent, the South Asians for Obama ’08 blog has posted an appropriately contrite apology from Obama to the Indian-American community:

I wanted to respond personally to the concerns you expressed regarding the recent research memo that our campaign put into circulation.

I believe that your concerns with the memo are justified. To begin with, the memo did not reflect my own views on the importance of America’s relationship with India. I have long believed that the best way to promote U.S. economic growth and opportunity for American workers is to continually improve the skills of our own workforce and invest in our own scientific research, technological capacity and infrastructure, rather than to try to insulate ourselves from the global economy.

More importantly, the memo’s caustic tone, and its focus on contributions by Indian-Americans to the Clinton campaign, was potentially hurtful, and as such, unacceptable. The memo also ignored my own long-standing relationship to – and support from – the Indian-American community.

In sum, our campaign made a mistake. Although I was not aware of the contents of the memo prior to its distribution, I consider the entire campaign – and in particular myself – responsible for the mistake. We have taken appropriate action to prevent errors like this from happening in the future.

Please feel free to share this letter with other members of your organization or leaders in the Indian-American community. I look forward to our continued friendship and exchange of ideas – during the course of this campaign, and beyond.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

Good news — Matthew Yglesias and other liberal bloggers may be ignoring the Barack Obama campaign’s nativist smear of Hillary Clinton as “D-Punjab,” but the Indian American community is pushing back very effectively:

Members of the U.S.-India Political Action Committee were outraged.

“For any candidate to imply there is something wrong with getting Indian-American support, that is upsetting – very upsetting – for our members,” the PAC’s boss, Sanjay Puri, told The Post, adding that he received numerous calls and e-mails from angered members.

Puri fired off a letter to Obama demanding the Illinois senator “respond directly” to media reports about the research memo “and let us know if indeed your staff is promoting these hurtful stereotypes.”

“We have been encouraged by your message of inclusion and your promise to bring a new kind of politics to our country,” Puri wrote.

“This is why we are so concerned about media reports indicating your staff may be engaging in the worst kind of anti-Indian-American stereotyping.”

Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, responded to Puri’s letter by saying: “Barack Obama has been a longtime friend of the Indian-American community, and our campaign is fortunate to have strong support from Indian-Americans across the country.

“The intent of the document was to discuss the issue of outsourcing, but we regret the tone that parts of the document took.”

In addition, the South Asians for Obama ’08 group is promising a more direct apology from the campaign (via Josh Gerstein of the New York Sun):

After reading the story, SAFO immediately went to work drafting a response to the campaign. As we were finalizing this response — but before we could send it — we received a call from the campaign in Chicago. We learned, as we had already suspected, that the memo did not reflect Senator Obama’s views regarding the Indian American community, and he was deeply disturbed by its content…

On Friday evening, Senator Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe issued the following statement: “Barack Obama has been a longtime friend of the Indian-American community and our campaign is fortunate to have strong support from Indian-Americans across the country. The intent of the document was to discuss the issue of outsourcing, but we regret the tone that parts of the document took.”

The response prompted a variety of reactions from our community. As organizers of an effort committed to building a relationship between the campaign and the South Asian American community, we were less than satisfied. However, we have new reason for optimism. We have been in contact with the campaign over the weekend and are confident that this issue is now receiving the attention of those at the highest level. The Senator himself is cognizant of our concerns (not just with the memo, but also the initial response) and has made clear his intention to address the situation personally. The campaign has already begun reaching out to individual members of the community, and a more public gesture will be forthcoming. Over the next several days, we will continue to communicate with the campaign to convey the sentiments of the community regarding this incident and work toward a positive resolution.

I hope this is true. The memo was more directly anti-Indian than anything I’ve seen recently in contemporary politics. Obama has a lot to apologize for.

(For more coverage of the controversy, see here, here, and here. The only well-known liberal blogger among the highly ranked blogs on Technorati who has criticized Obama for the smear is John Aravosis of AMERICAblog.)

Update 6/19 12:21 PM: Obama apologized for the smear yesterday. In a post today, Yglesias calls the memo “moronic” but says it “isn’t a very interesting issue.”

Via PRwatch.org, the PR industry is now literally fighting to change the definition of words or to eliminate them from the dictionary. Time is reporting that McDonald’s has launched a campaign against “McJob” that follows in the footsteps of a potato industry campaign against “couch potato”:

The late Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that the meaning of a word was derived from the way it is used in language. Not according to McDonald’s. The fast-food giant is currently lobbying dictionary publishers to change the meaning of the word McJob — or remove it altogether — on the grounds that it denigrates the company’s employees.

First used some 20 years ago in the United States to describe low-paying, low-skill jobs that offered little prospect of advancement, the term McJob was popularized by the author Douglas Coupland in his 1991 slacker ode Generation X…

In 2001, the term finally entered the Oxford English Dictionary, which defined it as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector.” And it has remained there ever since. But not for much longer if McDonald’s gets its way.

The company is leading a “word battle” on behalf of the wider service sector. The object, according to David Fairhurst, a senior vice-president of McDonald’s, is to change the definition of McJob to “reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding … and offers skills that last a lifetime.”

At first the OED, Britain’s dictionary of record, explained that it merely recorded words according to their popular usage. A statement from a company official said it was not their role to redefine meanings assigned those words according to the preferences of interest groups.

Representatives of McDonald’s responded by arguing that the OED’s definition was “outdated” and “insulting.”

So, the OED is turning to the public, inviting people to submit opinions on the definition of a McJob…

McDonald’s is hardly the first interest group to challenge the OED’s chronicling of unflattering slang. Last year, Britain’s Potato Council complained that the definition of couch potato implied that the nutritious tuber was inherently unhealthy, thus driving down business. Instead, the Council campaigned for the term to be replaced by couch slouch, even staging protests outside the OED’s Oxford headquarters — but to no avail.

This time, however, could be different — not least because of the size of McDonald’s war chest and its lobbying power. The campaign has already the garnered the support of heavyweight business figures such as Chambers of Commerce Director General David Frost. More impressively, Conservative party Member of Parliament Clive Betts last week introduced a motion into Britain’s parliament condemning the pejorative use of McJob…

But the McDonald’s “word war” is hardly confined to the corridors of power. Last Friday morning in Birmingham, TIME found a McDonald’s publicity team on the street, beneath an enormous TV screen atop a parked van beaming images of bright, happy McDonald’s staff, urging passers-by to sign a petition to change the definition of McJob.