Brendan Nyhan

Has anyone noticed how aggressive John McCain’s allegedly exploratory presidential campaign is being? He’s sending fundraising appeals (PDF) and running Google ads already:

The biography (PDF) on his exploratory site also offers some interesting clues to the stances he may take in the campaign. For instance, it does not mention the losing issue of private accounts in Social Security, stating instead that “John McCain is determined to save Social Security once and for all by stopping the politicians from
raiding Social Security funds to pay for new government programs and wasteful spending.” He didn’t mention private accounts (PDF) in his recent speech to the Republican group GOPAC either. Will other Republican contenders also run away from the issue after seeing President Bush’s proposal go down in flames?

The North Carolina State Bar has hit Durham district attorney Mike Nifong with much-deserved ethics charges:

The North Carolina bar filed ethics charges Thursday against the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case, accusing him of saying misleading and inflammatory things to the media about the athletes under suspicion.

The punishment for ethics violations can range from admonishment to disbarment. The complaint could also force District Attorney Mike Nifong off the case by creating a conflict of interest.

…Among the four rules of professional conduct that Nifong was accused of violating was a prohibition against making comments “that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”

…The bar cited 41 quotations and eight paraphrased statements made to newspaper and TV reporters, saying many of them amounted to “improper commentary about the character, credibility and reputation of the accused” or their alleged unwillingness to cooperate. Most of the comments were in March and April, in the early days of the case.

Among them:

– Nifong referred to the lacrosse players as “a bunch of hooligans.”

– He declared: “I am convinced there was a rape, yes, sir.”

– He told ESPN: “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong.”

– He told The New York Times: “I’m disappointed that no one has been enough of a man to come forward. And if they would have spoken up at the time, this may never have happened.”

Nifong was also charged with breaking a rule against “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” The bar said that when DNA testing failed to find any evidence a lacrosse player raped the accuser, Nifong told a reporter the players might have used a condom.

According to the bar, Nifong knew that assertion was misleading, because he had received a report from an emergency room nurse in which the accuser said her attackers did not use a condom.

How weak is Nifong’s case? Here’s how the usually cautious AP summarizes it:

In recent months – and especially after last week – legal experts and even Nifong’s own colleagues have warned openly that the case appears pitifully weak.

…The weaknesses in the case include the lack of DNA evidence; the accuser’s ever-shifting story; one player’s claim to have an alibi supported by receipts and time-stamped photos; and the defense’s insistence that the photo lineup that was used to identify the defendants violated police procedures and was skewed against the men.

Other that that, it’s a slam dunk!

PS The Smoking Gun has posted the full text of the complaint.

Update 12/29 11:53 AM: In comments, Steve Verdon criticizes my first post on the case back in March:

I’m disgusted. The lacrosse team has already forfeited two games. I hope they forfeit the rest of the season.

Yeah, Mr. Reasonable all right. You got so taken in by the hype and Nifong’s bluster. Here’s a hint, next time either couch your comments with those wonderful weasel words like, “if this accusation is true…”, or simply don’t run off with your preconceived notions taking the place of the truth.

Contrary to Verdon’s insinuation, however, the post does say that the accuser was “allegedly gang-raped” (italics added). And the statement of disgust he quotes comes after a description of a racial slur that was indeed disgusting. It is true that, like many other people here, I took the charges very seriously at first. But if you look at my posts on the case over time, though, you’ll see that I immediately began raising questions about inconsistencies in the accuser’s story — see here, here, here, and here for a sampling from the first few weeks.

It’s been amusing to see the confusion among pundits as President Bush has apparently decided to put more troops into Iraq rather than using the Iraq Study Group report as a pretext to move toward withdrawal. They shouldn’t be surprised.

In each situation like this since Bush took office, he has done the opposite of what the Washington establishment has expected. After his disputed victory in 2000, pundits asserted that he would have to govern from the center once in office. Instead, he pushed through a partisan tax cut. After 9/11, pundits asserted Bush would seek to bring the country together to fight the Islamist threat. Instead, he campaigned against Democrats in 2002, asserting that they are “not interested in the security of the American people.” After his narrow victory in 2004, pundits asserted he would pursue a more bipartisan agenda. Instead, he tried to push through his divisive and unpopular proposal to add private accounts to Social Security. And today, with Iraq collapsing into civil war, pundits assert that he will try to cut US losses and begin to withdraw from Iraq. Instead, it appears he will do the opposite.

Intelligence analysts have a term for this. It’s called mirror-imaging — the error of assuming that the object of one’s analysis is like oneself:

One kind of assumption an analyst should always recognize and question is mirror-imaging–filling gaps in the analyst’s own knowledge by assuming that the other side is likely to act in a certain way because that is how the US would act under similar circumstances. To say, “if I were a Russian intelligence officer …” or “if I were running the Indian Government …” is mirror-imaging. Analysts may have to do that when they do not know how the Russian intelligence officer or the Indian Government is really thinking. But mirror-imaging leads to dangerous assumptions, because people in other cultures do not think the way we do. The frequent assumption that they do is what Adm. David Jeremiah, after reviewing the Intelligence Community failure to predict India’s nuclear weapons testing, termed the “everybody-thinks-like-us mind-set.”

Failure to understand that others perceive their national interests differently from the way we perceive those interests is a constant source of problems in intelligence analysis. In 1977, for example, the Intelligence Community was faced with evidence of what appeared to be a South African nuclear weapons test site. Many in the Intelligence Community, especially those least knowledgeable about South Africa, tended to dismiss this evidence on the grounds that “Pretoria would not want a nuclear weapon, because there is no enemy they could effectively use it on.”70 The US perspective on what is in another country’s national interest is usually irrelevant in intelligence analysis. Judgment must be based on how the other country perceives its national interest. If the analyst cannot gain insight into what the other country is thinking, mirror-imaging may be the only alternative, but analysts should never get caught putting much confidence in that kind of judgment.

The David Broders of the world need to take note. President Bush does not share your worldview and he doesn’t play by your rules, so there’s no reason to expect him to do what you would in any given situation. In fact, it’s far more likely he’ll do the opposite.

How much did I bother dogmatic liberals when I was blogging for The American Prospect?

Some guy posted a computer script online called the DeBrendanator that automatically strips my posts out of TAP’s blog:

DeBrendanator
Description: Removes posts by Brendan Nyhan from prospect.org
Written By: Mike J
Tags: Brendan Nyhan prospect.org Horse’s Mouth Horse’s Ass
Script was last updated on December 28, 2006.

My wife is hoping he can make one for the dinner table…

Since there’s a John Edwards ad running in the sidebar, here’s the standard disclaimer: accepting an ad does not imply endorsement.

We need to take steps to equalize opportunity in this country, which is plagued by a vicious combination of high income inequality and low income mobility. More and more Americans are recognizing that the status quo is unacceptable. But Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, is taking the wrong approach to the problem. Rather than trying to build a bipartisan consensus, he wants to reinstitute confiscatory taxes on the rich:

To equalize opportunity, all Americans would need access to far better schools and more affordable health care. All would need extended unemployment insurance and wage insurance. All would need affordable access to post-secondary education. And to pay for all of this, and guarantee upward mobility, the tax system would have to be made far more progressive than it is today – starting with excusing the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes and removing the $100,000 cap on those taxes, and getting back toward the 70 to 90 percent marginal tax on the highest incomes we had under Eisenhower and JFK.

There’s a strong case to be made that top marginal tax rate rates of the sort that we had under Clinton (39.6%) did not distort economic incentives or growth, but “getting back toward the 70 to 90 percent marginal tax on the highest incomes” is both politically infeasible and economically unwise. Let’s start with rolling back the upper-income Bush tax cuts and instituting a carbon tax and go from there.

Stuart Taylor, the National Journal legal columnist, and K.C. Johnson, the Brooklyn College professor and respected Duke lacrosse blogger, have published a devastating Wall Street Journal op-ed today on the case. It’s all worth reading, but their summary of the evidence is especially damning:

How can we be confident that the charges are false? Let us count the ways: The police who interviewed the accuser after she left the March 13-14 lacrosse team party where she and another woman had performed as strippers found her rape charge incredible, and for good reason. She said nothing about rape to three cops and two others during the first 90 minutes after the party. Only when being involuntarily confined in a mental health facility did she mention rape. This predictably got her released to the Duke emergency room for a rape workup, whereupon she recanted the rape charge.

Then she re-recanted, offering a ludicrous parade of wildly implausible and mutually contradictory stories of being gang-raped by 20, five, four, three or two lacrosse players, with the other stripper assisting the rapists in some versions. After settling on three rapists, the accuser gave police vague descriptions and could not identify as a rapist any of the 36 lacrosse players whose photos she viewed on March 16 and 21. These included two eventual defendants: Dave Evans, whom she did not recognize at all, and Reade Seligmann, whom she was “70%” sure she had seen at the party, but not as a rapist.

All of the 40-odd other people at the party have contradicted every important part of the accuser’s various accounts. The second stripper called the rape claim a “crock” and said they had been apart less than five minutes. The accuser told doctors she was drunk and on the muscle relaxant Flexeril, whose side effects include badly impaired judgment when taken with alcohol. She has a history of narcotic abuse and bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by wild mood swings from mania to depression, and spent a week in a mental hospital in 2005.

In court filings last week, even Mr. Nifong conceded that, contrary to his claims since March, medical records show no physical evidence of rape–let alone injuries consistent with the accuser’s April claim of being beaten, kicked, strangled and raped anally, orally and vaginally by three men in a small bathroom for 30 minutes. Above all, DNA tests by state and private labs, which Mr. Nifong’s office had said would “immediately rule out any innocent persons,” did just that. They found no lacrosse player’s DNA anywhere on or in the accuser and none of her DNA in the bathroom.

Yet two weeks ago we learned–only because dogged defense lawyers cracked a prosecutorial conspiracy to hide evidence of innocence–that the private lab did find the DNA of “multiple males” in swabs of the accuser’s pubic hair, panties, and rear after the supposed rape. None of this DNA matched any lacrosse player.

…On March 31, [Nifong] instructed police to conduct a third photo ID lineup, and to show the accuser (and tell her that she was being shown) photos of only the 46 white lacrosse players.

On April 4, when this third photo-ID process took place, the message to the accuser was, effectively: Pick three, any three. At random, if you like. You can’t go wrong. This setup trashed the defendants’ constitutional due process rights and specific Durham, state, and federal principles for identification procedures. To test the reliability of often-mistaken eyewitness ID’s, these principles require showing at least five “fillers” (non-suspects) with each suspect and telling the witness that the lineup may or may not include a suspect. Mr. Nifong recently defended his procedure through word games, asking, “What is a lineup?”

The accuser’s responses demonstrated her unreliability in ways too numerous to detail here. For one, she picked four as rapists. For another, the only player she twice identified with 100% certainty as attending the party could prove he was in Raleigh that night. But the accuser gave Mr. Nifong enough to obtain three indictments from a rubber-stamp grand jury. When he went to the grand jury, Mr. Nifong knew that the DNA results were inconsistent with the rape allegation. But he pressed ahead with the charge until the defense exposed his efforts to conceal the forensic evidence. Then he abruptly changed his theory of the crime.

The op-ed’s author bio states that Taylor and Johnson are writing a book on the case, which is good news. Someone needs to record what has happened here for posterity.

In an editorial condemning an increase in the cap on income subject to the payroll tax, the Wall Street Journal continues to pass off the false comparison between currently legislated Social Security benefits and estimated benefits from private accounts. Consider this graphic, which runs alongside the editorial:

The problem is that there is no such free lunch. Moving to private accounts would incur trillions of dollars in transition costs because workers’ contributions would be diverted from the Social Security trust fund into private accounts. That’s why the Bush administration proposed a “clawback” that would reduce your traditional benefit by the number of dollars contributed to your private account plus 3% interest above inflation annually. Such a mechanism would vastly reduce the gains from private accounts.

Writing on TNR’s Open University blog, University of Texas professor Sanford Levinson proposes a Rudy Giuliani third-party run (rather than the more conventional call for an independent McCain candidacy):

The two-party system remains vulnerable to a challenge, and Rudy, for better and, definitely, for worse, is precisely the kind of person who could explode a lot of verities. He would offer Republicans who are sick and tired of the stranglehold over their party of the religious right a “safe harbor,” without having to vote for, say, Hillary Clinton. Ditto those (unlike myself) who admire Lieberman and feel his pain at the ostensible leftward drift of the Democratic Party. One can easily imagine such a ticket winning enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House (the long-awaited train wreck), and there are even scenarios, albeit longshot that could have them winning enough of the large states plus some others to take the whole thing.

But what states would Giuliani and Lieberman win? Voters aren’t idiots. If they know that the major party tickets are going to be the top two contenders, the logic of “wasted votes” (ie strategic voting) will cause many Giuliani supporters to shift to their second choice, which has a better chance of winning. You can partially overcome that dynamic as a one-issue protest candidate (a la George Wallace) but Giuliani has no such issue to run on. And a Rudy third-party candidacy would undermine the lucrative consulting gigs and speaking engagements that he is currently getting from the GOP establishment.

[See my many previous posts on third party hype. I previously criticized Levinson’s proposal to get rid of the presidential veto.]

At its worst, John Edwards’ shtick verges on hokey populism — he signs emails to supporters “Your friend, John” — so it’s disappointing but not surprising that he sent this patronizing email to his list last week:

For the past two years, we’ve worked together to build an America
that lives up to its promise — one where we all share in prosperity
at home and one that shows real moral leadership around the world.

I’m proud of our successes fighting poverty, supporting working
families, and standing up for what we believe.

Now, we have a big decision to make — and I do mean we.

I’m getting ready to take this effort to the next level – to bring
Americans together in all fifty states to tackle the big challenges
facing our country, from poverty and lack of health care, to energy
and global warming.

But this is our effort, and we can only succeed if we’re all in it
together. So before I make a final decision, I need to hear from you:
Are you ready?

Talk about faux responsiveness. Does anyone think Edwards is going to decide not to run because of what his supporters will say? Of course not. The New York Times confirms that Edwards has already decided to run in an article today:

Mr. Edwards, who is arguably the most Web-savvy candidate in the ’08 race to date, is using Thursday’s event to try to gin up his supporters via the Internet. He sent out an e-mail message earlier this week, saying he was on the verge of making a decision that his aides say has, in fact, already been made.

This kind of hucksterism reinforces the stereotype of Edwards as a pandering ex-personal injury lawyer. In a race in which the top two Democratic candidates (Clinton and Obama) are brilliant graduates of elite law schools, it’s not an appealing perception.