Brendan Nyhan

It’s increasingly clear that the Hoyer-Murtha leadership race is hurting the Democrats by diverting attention from the party’s election victories and creating strife within the caucus. But I think most observers still haven’t grasped just how damaging it will be to the party if John Murtha is chosen as majority leader and Alcee Hastings is chosen by Nancy Pelosi as Intelligence Committee chair.

Neither was convicted of a crime, but both were deeply involved in alleged bribery scandals. Here’s Norm Ornstein on Murtha’s involvement in the Abscam scandal: “[Murtha] did refuse to take the money — but here is what he said: ‘I want to deal with you guys a while before I make any transactions at all, period. … After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind.’” And Hastings was removed from the federal bench for what the Washington Post described as “engaging in a ‘corrupt conspiracy’ to extort a $150,000 bribe in a case before him.” The Post noted that it was “the first time a federal official has been impeached and removed from office for a crime he had been acquitted of by a jury.”

Putting both of them in positions of responsibility will be a signal that Democrats aren’t serious about governing responsibly. And they will pay a price politically — the attack ads write themselves.

Update 11/16 12:20 PM: Hoyer won, so I guess it’s one alleged bribery target down, one to go.

Liberal hubris alert!

David Sirota, a disreputable lefty pundit, gets carried away in an online column for The Nation, suggesting that it was “a mandate election” that may be known as “the Great Democratic Realignment”:

There is one more election that will happen in this, the year that history may one day call the Great Democratic Realignment. It is the election for House majority leader between contenders US Reps. Steny Hoyer and Jack Murtha, set for Thursday.

…But after a mandate election like this year’s, Democrats do not have to settle. They have a rare opportunity to define themselves for the long-term on the crucial national security and economic issues key to changing our country and keeping control of Congress. They must find the courage to choose not a follower, but a majority leader. His name is Jack Murtha.

However, the best political science research suggests that realigninment is not a meaningful concept – electoral change is far more gradual and contingent than realignment theory would suggest. In addition, while I don’t believe in mandates (they’re essentially a social construction), it’s especially implausible to see this year’s results as a positive mandate for almost anything besides (maybe) a change in Iraq policy.

Media Matters has documented two outrageous attacks on dissent in which a conservative talk show host and the New York Post editorial board demand that Democrats prove their allegiance to this country.

In the first, the group points out that CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck recently hit Keith Ellison, a newly-elected Muslim member of Congress, with the post-9/11 version of “when did you stop beating your wife,” asking Ellison to “prove” he is “not working with our enemies” before disavowing the statement:

BECK: [M]ay we have five minutes here where we’re just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table?

ELLISON: Go there.

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I’ve been to mosques. I really don’t believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I — you know, I think it’s being hijacked, quite frankly.

With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, “Let’s cut and run.” And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Similarly, MM flags a New York Post editorial demanding Democrats confirm United Nations representative John Bolton to “demonstrate conclusively to America’s enemies that they don’t have enemies on Capitol Hill”:

The Democratic takeover of Congress appears to have taken its first scalp: It now appears likely that U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, faced with intransigent opposition from the new majority party, will have to step down.

That would be a tremendous loss for America’s diplomatic efforts. And it would send exactly the wrong signal to the nation’s enemies – who were rejoicing last week and feeling emboldened in the wake of the Dems’ victory Tuesday.

…Democrats have an obligation to demonstrate conclusively to America’s enemies that they don’t have allies on Capitol Hill. By moving so swiftly to torpedo John Bolton, they’ve sent precisely the opposite signal.

No American needs to prove their loyalty to these demagogues. Their McCarthyesque tactics have no place in public life.

If you ever doubted the impact of economic motivations on press behavior, the spectacle of ABC’s Mark Halperin groveling for conservative support before the election should have cured you. Here’s what Halperin said on “The O’Reilly Factor”: “[A]s an economic model, if you want to thrive like Fox News Channel, you want to have a future, you better make sure conservatives find your product appealing.”

Interestingly, Halperin’s groveling has implications for the debate among academics over media bias. A simple spatial model of media competition for consumers with ideological preferences suggests that outlets should seek to differentiate themselves by catering to the preferences (or biases) of a particular segment of the public. Two recent economic models explore the issue in more detail.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard argue that news outlets should divide the market and cater to the biases of one side or the other when consumers are heterogeneous, whereas Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago have suggest greater competition should decrease bias and increase accuracy motivations (contingent on the extent to which reporting on a subject is verifiable).

If the spatial model or the Mullainathan and Shleifer model were correct, we would expect the networks to differentiate politically given the vast amount of competition that they face from other outlets. Instead, however, the network news divisions have been going to great lengths to appease conservatives and maintain an ideologically diverse audience. Besides ABC’s Halperin, NBC’s Brian Williams and Tim Russert have been sucking up to Rush Limbaugh, and CBS featured Limbaugh in one of the first “Free Speech” segments on its revamped Katie Couric newscast. It’s possible that the networks are a special case for various reasons (including the political interests of their parent corporations and the risk of damaging the network audiences for non-news programming), but they certainly don’t fit well. On the other hand, Fox News, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and others are clearly seeking to appeal to particular segments of the ideological spectrum. I don’t know who’s right, or if we need some sort of hybrid model…

Via Crooked Timber, here’s a neat tool — the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, which shows “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006.” You can adjust a slider to move through time and see the changes in word usage represented graphically using font size — very cool.

I’m not a big fan of Slate’s trademark “everything you know is wrong” pieces, but Will Saletan’s article on how conservatives have failed to apply the lessons of welfare reform to Iraq is very clever:

[A]nti-communism abroad was only one of Reagan’s theories. Another was anti-socialism at home. A government that spends tens of billions of dollars to prop up able-bodied people, year after year with no deadline for self-sufficiency, breeds dependency. That’s what Bush has done in Iraq: He has made it the largest, most counterproductive welfare program in American history. Talk about leading your party astray.

Today’s New York Times features a graphic that illustrates just how disproportionate Hillary Clinton’s spending was in her Senate race:

If the Democrats hadn’t taken back the House and Senate, people would be asking why Hillary didn’t give more of that money to other candidates. She certainly didn’t need it.

Update 11/15 5:31 AM: Kevin Drum links to this post and asks:

Was this because she really, really wanted to win by a landslide and figured anything under 65% of the vote would be humiliating? Did she have a bet with Dianne Feinstein? (If so, she won. Feinstein won her race with an anemic 59% of the vote.) Was she trying to scare off her 2008 competition by showing that she has so much money she can literally afford to throw it away?

Here are the two main theories I have on Hillary’s spending:

-She wanted to win by a big margin to answer concerns about her electability before 2008. In particular, she may have been trying to (a) improve on her relatively unimpressive performance in 2000 and (b) drag House Democrats in New York to victory to show she has coattails.

-It would have looked bad to roll most of the money donated for her Senate race into her presidential account, so she spent a big chunk of the money to set up a quasi-presidential campaign, campaign for Democrats in key states, and create what her aides described as “a priceless reservoir of speeches, issue research, and financial networks nationally for any future use.” And she still has $10 million left over.

My guess: Both are probably true. What do you think?

Karl Rove’s pre-election exchange with NPR’s Robert Siegel is hilarious:

SIEGEL: We’re in the home stretch, though, and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about –

ROVE: Not that you would be exhibiting a bias …

SIEGEL: I’m looking at all the same polls that you’re looking at every day.

ROVE: No, you’re not. No, you’re not.

SIEGEL: No, I’m not.

ROVE: No, you’re not. You’re not. I’m looking at 68 polls a week. You may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally but that do not impact the outcome of –

SIEGEL: I’m looking at main races between – certainly Senate races.

ROVE: Well, like the poll today showing that Corker’s ahead in Tennessee, or the poll showing that Allen is pulling away in the Virginia Senate race.

SIEGEL: Leading Webb in Virginia, yeah.

ROVE: Exactly.

SIEGEL: But you’ve seen the DeWine race and the Santorum race – I don’t want to have you call races.

ROVE: Yeah, I’m looking at all these, Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math, I’m entitled to THE math.

SIEGEL: Well, I don’t know if we’re entitled to our different math, but you’re certainly –

ROVE: I said THE math. I said you’re entitled to yours.

Maybe Rove thought the White House could could create its own reality in which “THE math” showed a Republican win.

PS I thought conservatives opposed the new math!

Fresh from caricaturing Nancy Pelosi with the misleading claim that she “favors… schools without prayer and death with taxes,” New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer gives California the same treatment in today’s edition, referring to it as a place where “American values are said to go to die” and as having an image as “a hotbed of liberal lunacy”:

The nation’s most populous state has also counted itself among the most marginalized in the Republican era, a place where primary votes in presidential contests happen after the fact, federal dollars do not flow in sufficient amounts and American values are said to go to die.

…At the same time, there is some expectation that California, a wildly diverse, bipartisan, complex state, will be working hard to shed its image as a hotbed of liberal lunacy.

Promulgating crude liberal stereotypes is a good career move — it worked for Maureen Dowd! And as I said before, Steinhauer appears to be following in Dowd’s footsteps, although she does cast doubt on the “liberal lunacy” claim.

LA Times columnist Jon Chait (also of TNR) has written an amusing and insightful look at the wave of post-election spin from the right – not to be missed.