Brendan Nyhan

There’s no getting around the fact that liberals dominate the academy. The question is what to do about it. Some conservatives have called for what would essentially be ideological affirmative action in academic hiring. But Michael Munger, a political science professor here at Duke, has what I think is exactly the right take on the issue (Quicktime video):

You asking me “what are my political views” belongs outside the classroom. Now there are plenty of people on the left who don’t do that. They’re bad teachers. That’s not an issue of political repression. They’re bad teachers, and I would say the same thing about someone on the right who did that. The last thing that I want is a university or department of equal numbers of people on the left and right who impose their views on students.

So the solution is not to hire more people on the right. The solution is to take politics out of the classroom, to develop a norm of pedagogy that says “I challenge students to try to get them to think.”

[Note: Mike is on my dissertation committee. He’s also a blogger and a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate.]

Is someone trying to be the next Maureen Dowd?

The Times op-ed columnist made her name as a reporter by using stylish, slashing rhetoric in news stories, such as her famous lede for a 1994 story about Bill Clinton’s return to Oxford: “President Clinton returned today for a sentimental journey to the university where he didn’t inhale, didn’t get drafted and didn’t get a degree.”

Jennifer Steinhauer’s profile of Nancy Pelosi in the New York Times today is reminiscent of Dowd’s approach. Steinhauer writes that, “For Republican strategists laboring to maintain control of Congress, [Pelosi] is the personification of liberal lunacy, an Armani-clad elitist who will help push lawmakers toward an agenda of multicultural, tax-raising appeasement.” But what does “multicultural, tax-raising appeasement” mean? It’s just a series of code words strung together nonsensically. Perhaps the phrase is meant to mock GOP rhetoric, but it’s more likely to reinforce the Republican caricature of Pelosi.

It gets worse later in the piece when Steinhauer describes the Democratic leader’s voting record as “among the most liberal in Congress,” writing that Pelosi “favors alternative sentencing over prison construction, schools without prayer and death with taxes.” The last two phrases are absurd representations of GOP spin.

First, what evidence is there that Pelosi “favors… schools without prayer”? As she noted in 1998, “Under the First Amendment, students and citizens are not prohibited from the opportunity for religious expression. Students are free to pray privately or at school.” Her concerns were with the potential for coercion during organized periods for prayer in the classroom.

Similarly, Pelosi’s opposition to the estate tax does not mean that she favors “death with taxes,” a phrase that reinforces the “death tax” slogan that has misled so many people. Death is not taxed in this country. The estate tax applies only to a tiny percentage of the richest Americans – according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the threshold is $2 million and the tax only applies to the wealthiest .5% of those who will die this year. Moreover, Pelosi supports a Democratic alternative to estate tax repeal that would, she claims, “exempt 99.7 percent of all estates in America.”

One Dowd is more than enough. Can’t the Times do better than this?

Last week, I asked what happened to Josh Marshall, an excellent blogger, who wrote the following about GOP gubernatorial candidate and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell:

Helping steal the 2004 election wasn’t enough. Down by double digits and facing a career-ending election, Ken Blackwell accuses Ted Strickland of being pro-pedophile, possibly gay.

The phrase “helping steal” implies the election was stolen. And while there are serious allegations against Blackwell, there’s no credible evidence to support the insinuation that the election was stolen (ie the wrong man won).

Now Marshall is pushing slime against Lynne Cheney, the Vice President’s wife. Yesterday, he wrote, “Lynne Cheney gets amnesia about her lesbian fantasies.” The post Marshall linked shows that Cheney may have dissembled about the fact that her novel has lesbian characters. But it doesn’t prove that Cheney has “lesbian fantasies” or that the scenes in her novel are representations of her “fantasies.” That’s phony mind-reading.

In addition, Marshall is pushing George Allen to release his sealed divorce records, writing, “Now that the Allen campaign is about to go on the airwaves about sex scenes in Jim Webb’s books, maybe you should know about this too.” The attack on Webb’s fiction is phony, but it doesn’t make Allen’s divorce records publicly relevant.

What’s going on?

[Disclosure: The post about Lynne Cheney that Marshall linked to was written by Greg Sargent, who I blogged with at The Horse’s Mouth before quitting.]

The Republican Party is trying to use John Kerry and Ted Kennedy’s recent $500,000 donations to party campaign committees as a fundraising tool to raise $2 million online. An email to supporters today from Sen. Bill Frist (PDF) measures the party’s progress toward its goal with what has to the best thermometer-style fundraising graphic ever:

Update 10/28 11:00 AM: Ted Kennedy sent an email to John Kerry’s supporters where he looks a lot like the GOP thermometer picture:

PS In the GOP picture, why are Kennedy and Kerry’s heads floating over a field of grass?

I enjoyed today’s New York Times op-ed on the proliferation of unhealthy snacking during children’s activities. But given that we’re losing the war in Iraq, North Korea just tested a nuclear bomb, Iran is actively developing one, and there’s a national election in just a few days, is now the time to be running op-eds about children’s snacks?

The Hill reports that Hillary Clinton is spending a fortune in New York even though there is no way she’ll lose:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) spent nearly $7 million from her Senate campaign account last month running for reelection in New York.

The figure ranks among the most ever spent by a Senate candidate in such a short period, and many New Yorkers cannot even name her opponent.

Clinton’s onslaught is drawing comparisons to George W. Bush’s 1998 gubernatorial race in Texas, when he outspent his opponent 4-to-1 and used his big victory as a springboard to the presidency.

An overwhelming win would help a Clinton presidential campaign, chiefly by allowing her to say she can appeal to independent and conservative voters. It would dampen criticism that she is too polarizing to win in the 2008 general election.

The reason she’s doing this is clear. There are serious questions about her electability as a presidential candidate. And her performance in New York in 2000 was not impressive, as I wrote:

First of all, her 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

I’m sure she will end up winning by a huge margin, but a landslide against a nothing candidate in a Democratic state in a highly favorable political environment proves very little.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank savages President Bush’s campaign trips in support of ethically challenged candidates, which I noted yesterday. Apparently the “responsibility era” hasn’t begun yet:

During National Character Counts Week, Bush Stumps for Philanderer

So it has come to this: Nineteen days before the midterm elections, President Bush flew here to champion the reelection of a congressman who last year settled a $5.5 million lawsuit alleging that he beat his mistress during a five-year affair.

“I’m pleased to be here with Don Sherwood,” a smiling president told the congressman’s loyal but dispirited supporters at a luncheon fundraiser Thursday. “He has got a record of accomplishment.”

Quite a record. While representing the good people of the 10th District, the married congressman shacked up in Washington with a Peruvian immigrant more than three decades his junior. During one assignation in 2004, the woman, who says Sherwood was striking her and trying to strangle her, locked herself in a bathroom and called 911; Sherwood told police he was giving her a back rub.

At a time when Republicans are struggling to motivate religious conservatives to go to the polls next month, it is not clear what benefit the White House found in sending Bush to stump for Sherwood — smack dab in the middle of what Bush, in an official proclamation, dubbed “National Character Counts Week.”

The president encouraged public officials “to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs” — but public officials responded with some unusual ceremonies and activities: The House ethics committee is holding hearings on the page sex scandal; the FBI raided buildings as part of a probe involving Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.); and Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), the eighth person convicted in the Abramoff lobbying scandal, is refusing to vacate his seat in Congress.

On the other hand, while other Republicans proclaim their independence from Bush, Sherwood is one of the few still eager to bask in the president’s faint glow. (Another was Sen. George Allen of Virginia, who, after a summer of racial and religious gaffes, was happy to welcome Bush in Richmond on Thursday evening.)

Character counts!

News.com has posted a list of the worst political websites. They take a lot of easy shots at crackpot amateurs, but don’t miss my personal favorite, Rep. Bob Inglis, whose website features a bizarre Flash animation of him dancing with giant glasses on. Here’s what it looks like:

Yes, that is a member of the US Congress.

Matthew Yglesias slams Gregg Easterbrook for this asinine commentary on the recent cluster sampling estimate of deaths in Iraq:

The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to “unknown causes.” The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It’s gibberish.

As Yglesias points out, Easterbrook seems to have no understanding of statistics:

The authors used a statistical method that, as they perfectly well knew, doesn’t generate especially precise results. That’s why when they calculated the confidence interval for their estimate it turned out to be rather wide. The 654,965 number is the middle point of the confidence interval. The true number could very easily be thousands higher or lower than that, but the true number is extremely likely to fall somewhere within the band they laid out. This isn’t hard stuff and it certainly isn’t gibberish.

So how does Easterbrook have a resume like this?

In addition to writing Tuesday Morning Quarterback, Gregg Easterbrook is the author of “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” and other books. He is also a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Bloggers have been speculating wildly about the outcome on Election Day, so I thought it was worth taking a look at the new Tradesports futures market contracts for House seat swings. Using basic rules of probability, I translated the contract prices into the following graph:

I’m struck by the steep dropoff above 25 seats. Given yesterday’s release of a paper from three respected political scientists projecting a 32 seat swing, the contracts that pay if the Democrats pick up more than 25 or more than 30 seats are looking underpriced.

(Note: Using the same methodology a couple weeks ago, I extrapolated predicted probabilities for Bush approval in November.)