Brendan Nyhan

I just came across an incredible campaign anecdote while working on my dissertation. Check out this excerpt from a Washington Post story on the 1978 US Senate race in Maine:

Three independents are challenging Hathaway and Cohen, but only one of them, former state senator Hayes Gahagan, was expected to attract many votes.

The campaign of the 30-year-old conservative has foundered, however, since he announced that someone had implanted the word “sex” on his face in his campaign photographs.

He says he has since discovered the same word appears in Cohen and Hathaway campaign photographs and he makes no claim to know who is doing the implants. But he is calling for a congressional investigation of what he terms “a national scandal” of subliminal advertising.

His problem is that people outside his campaign, including this reporter, can’t see the words even with the aid of a magnifying glass.

Just to reiterate, Gahagan wasn’t some random loon; he was a former state senator who was a serious enough candidate that the Post reporter actually got out a magnifying glass to look for the word “sex.” Wow.

In the spirit of James Taranto’s “Great Orators of the Democratic Party” theme, here’s some inspirational rhetoric on democracy from the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger:

People tend to regard the idea of “democratic” politics with high reverence, when in practice it consists most of the time of the right of any citizen to describe one’s opponent as an idiot, or worse.

I love the scare quotes around “democratic.” Elitist much?

PS See my previous posts on Henninger for more.

Via Josh Marshall, Fox News head Roger Ailes suggested that Democratic presidential candidates dodging his network’s debate are going to be afraid of Al Qaeda:

And he had some choice words for Democratic candidates who have decided not to debate on Fox.

“The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda,” said Mr. Ailes. “And that’s what’s coming.”

Marshall’s response? Jokingly comparing Fox to terrorists:

Fox’s Roger Ailes says: “The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda. And that’s what’s coming.”

I guess we at least agree about the nature of the organization?

Late Update: From TPM Reader RT: “I guess he validates the theory you shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Inspiring stuff all around.

Once again, Maureen Dowd is allowed to pretend she’s omniscient in the pages of the New York Times (faux mind-reading in italics):

When Hillary admitted that she had not read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting to authorize the president to go to war, Senator Obama had a clear shot. The woman who always does her homework did not bother to do her homework on the most important vote of her Senate career because her political viability was more important than the president’s duplicity: She felt that, as a woman, she could not cast a flower-child vote if she wanted to run for president. At this fateful moment, she was thinking more of herself than her country. As someone who has been known to tailor the truth to accommodate her ambition, she looked away while W. was doing the same.

Maybe the Times should modify Dowd’s official picture to include a crystal ball and swami hat.

Recently, bloggers have been comparing the movement to draft Fred Thompson to the Wesley Clark boomlet in ’04. For instance, TNR’s Jason Zengerle writes that “the highpoint of his campaign will be the day he gets in the race, because once he’s a serious candidate–and not just the fevered daydream of a dissatisfied base–voters will realize he’s not all that.”

The comparison is amusing because I’ve always thought of Thompson as the equivalent of the popular generals that have run for president over the years (ie Winfield Scott or Dwight Eisenhower). The actual person who’s running is largely irrelevant; the candidacy is based on the biography and the persona. However, TV has made it difficult to impossible for inexperienced candidates like Clark to succeed.

In this case, Thompson has more experience than Clark did, as Matthew Yglesias points out. Nonetheless, the idea of Thompson is bound to be more exciting than the man himself.

Update 6/6 8:57 PM: On the last point, here’s Jennifer Rubin in the New York Observer:

Mr. Thompson will enter the race as the focus of many conservatives’ fixation to find an unblemished candidate. On the one hand, he seems to please many conservatives: no offense offered on social issues, sound foreign policy and soothing to the ears. However, it’s not clear that Mr. Thompson has either the experience or the ideas to rescue the G.O.P. from its current plight.

His “elder statesman” screen persona obscures the fact he is the most inexperienced of the major G.O.P. contenders, with seven dimly remembered years as U.S. Senator, no area of expertise, no executive experience and no major legislative achievements bearing his name.

Nor is it apparent—not yet, at least—that he is offering any original ideas to qualify him as the “change” candidate that Republican voters could sorely use.

Matthew Yglesias is asymptotically approaching my position on debate commentary (short version: it’s a pointless exercise that forces you to act like a McLaughlin Group panelist).

After the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, he suggested that debates don’t actually change anyone’s mind and disavowed “going meta or just doing amateur theater criticism”:

I’m trying to think of something interesting to say about the debate that doesn’t involve going meta or just doing amateur theater criticism, but I’ve really got nothing. Instead, a question: Did anyone out there in blog-land find this to be a helpful exercise? Like is there someone out there who wasn’t sure who they were going to vote for pre-debate who’s now more firmly in someone’s corner? Someone out there who was strongly leaning in one direction and is now back to undecided status? Not me.

My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it’s hard for the debate to change anything.

Then he instituted a “no meta” rule for his live-blogging of the GOP debate:

I’m gonna liveblogging this here looming GOP debate. Let me say at the outside that I’m going to be doing this under a “no meta” rule. Statements of the form “candidate x did well” mean that I, as a citizen of the Republic, was, in fact, favorably disposed to what he did; not that I, as a mighty journalist, speculate that typical people were favorably disposed to what did.

I think the business of picking “winners” and “losers” in these things is basically bullshit. Normal people don’t watch these things. The reason they matter is that they impact press coverage (and, these days, blog coverage). Which is fine. But people in the press should just cover the damn thing straightforwardly in a first-order way.

And halfway through the debate, he gave up:

I say — liveblogging sucks, and I’m not going to do it anymore.

PS He is right, however, that ignorant/misleading statements like this are worth pointing out:

To me, the takeaway message of watching the Republicans debate is that Democrats need to realize that in 2008 they’ll be matching up against a campaign of audacious — almost awe-inspiringly so — lies, and they need to be prepared to aggressively swat them down. For example, Rudy Giuliani said:

It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.

Now you might think this would count as a giant gaffe… It indicates that Giuliani is either totally ignorant about Iraq and al-Qaeda or else breathtakingly dishonest on the subject.

I’m not a huge fan of the “counter-intuitive” style that Slate’s Mickey Kaus usually practices, but this LA Times op-ed about similarities between President Bush’s approach to the issues of Iraq and immigration is surprisingly convincing:

Mainstream editorialists like to praise President Bush’s immigration initiative as an expression of his pragmatic, bipartisan, “compassionate conservative” side, in presumed contrast to the inflexible, ideological approach that produced the invasion of Iraq. But far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, rigid thinking that led Bush into Iraq, “comprehensive immigration reform” is of a piece with that thinking. And it’s likely to lead to a parallel outcome.

It just shows Kaus can do good work when he bears down. His 1992 book The End of Equality is particularly excellent.

Brad DeLong quotes Fareed Zakaria’s depressing review of the state of the GOP presidential race:

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. “This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood,” he recently declared.

But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq’s Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war — putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It’s stupidity.

I think every presidential debate on both sides should start with one of the candidates being asked to explain the differences between Shiites and Sunnis, as Jeff Stein of CQ has been doing.

Unfortunately, DeLong’s response to Zakaria was to call on “patriotic Americans” to “shut down” the GOP as a “liability and a danger we can no longer afford”:

I think it’s clearly time for all patriotic Americans to join in one common task: to shut down the Republican Party. It’s liability and a danger we can no longer afford.

In a two-party system, this kind of rhetoric borders on the anti-democratic.

Update 6/5 6:30 AM: In a comment, DeLong writes:

It’s not anti-Democratic, it’s anti-Republican.

A two-party system is a good thing–but not if one of the parties is the Republican Party as Zakaria describes it. We need to shut it down, and replace it with a different opposition to the Democrats.

But of course, I didn’t write that his statement was “anti-Democratic,” I said it was “anti-democratic.” There’s a big difference.

More fundamentally, you don’t get to pick the opposition party that you want. Calling on “patriotic Americans” to shut down the opposition party and replace it with one more to your liking is, well, anti-democratic. Consider this — if President Bush called on all patriotic Americans to shut down the Democratic Party, do you think DeLong would consider it a justified expression of his views or an attack on the democratic process?

(As always, I’ll also note the substantial obstacles to third party success, which are extremely high if you want to supplant one of the two major parties — the last time it happened was the mid-19th century when the Republicans replaced the Whigs.)

There appears to be some sort of unwritten rule that the Wall Street Journal has to publish supply-side nonsense like this every week or two:

So what are the facts? Did the tax rate reductions of the Bush administration spur or diminish economic growth? Grow or diminish federal tax revenues? Were they good or bad economic policy?

…The tax cuts have also produced substantial tax revenue increases–14.5% growth in 2005 and 11.7% in 2006. For the first seven months of the current fiscal year, total revenues were up 11.3% over last year, and individual income tax receipts were up by 17.5%. Total tax receipts in April were $70 billion higher than in April 2006.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Joint Tax Commission estimated that a reduction in the capital gains rate to 15% from 20%, which was passed in 2003, would cost the U.S. Treasury some $5.4 billion over three years. But actual revenues exceeded expectations by $133 billion, so the government profited substantially from our strong economy and the tax rate reduction. In fact, the tax cuts have actually expanded revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product. Over the past 40 years, federal tax receipts have accounted for 18.3% of GDP. That figure was 18.4% in 2006, and the CBO projects it at 18.6% in the current fiscal year.

These revenue increases have also had a positive impact on the federal deficit. Since the 2003 tax cuts the deficit has declined from $413 billion (3.5% of GDP) in fiscal 2004, to $318 billion in 2005, then $248 billion in 2006, and an estimated $150 billion to $200 billion (1.1% to 1.5% of GDP) in the current fiscal year.

Like Jerry Bowyer, however, Pete DuPont is measuring revenue growth from 2003 — the time of the second tax cut — while neglecting the fact that per-capita revenue growth in the current business cycle was “near zero” as of July 2006. Even Bush administration economists dispute the idea that tax cuts increase revenue. (For more, see this debunking of tax cut myths by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and my previous posts on the WSJ’s frequent suggestions that tax cuts increase revenue.)

A reader asked recently why I haven’t blogged about the presidential debates.

One reason is that they don’t matter very much at this point, so I have a hard time forcing myself to sit through them.

In general, though, I frequently don’t have anything interesting or new to say about debates, which are over-analyzed to the point of absurdity. There’s usually not a lot of substance to discuss, so you end up offering McLaughlin Group-level observations about who “won,” the way the candidates looked, the supposedly important “moments” of the night, or the implications of the debate for the horse race.

I have those (not particularly profound) thoughts just like anyone else, but why share them? You can already get similar stuff here and here and here and on cable news (among many other places). Blogging should be more than amateur hour for aspiring pundits.

Update 6/4 9:19 AM: I’m briefly cited at the end of a Newsday (NY) story on debate “spin rooms”:

Brendan Nyhan, a Duke University doctoral candidate and author of the bestselling book “All the President’s Spin,” said spin rooms gained prominence with the emergence of cable news networks.

Political consultants who before could hope to perhaps influence a handful of morning newspapers or place a sound bite in the next day’s evening newscasts, now see their views aired instantly and echoed repeatedly, as cable networks seek content to fill non-stop news cycles.

Update 6/4 12:04 PM: Matthew Yglesias illustrates my point:

I’m trying to think of something interesting to say about the debate that doesn’t involve going meta or just doing amateur theater criticism, but I’ve really got nothing. Instead, a question: Did anyone out there in blog-land find this to be a helpful exercise? Like is there someone out there who wasn’t sure who they were going to vote for pre-debate who’s now more firmly in someone’s corner? Someone out there who was strongly leaning in one direction and is now back to undecided status? Not me.

My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it’s hard for the debate to change anything.