Brendan Nyhan

Our political discourse continues to sink to new lows.

The state comptroller of New York, Alan Havesi, was forced to apologize after praising Senator Chuck Schumer as a metaphorical presidential assassin:

The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it. The toughest senator, the best representative. A great, great member of the Congress of the United States.

Meanwhile, conservative authors continue to outstrip my readers in their ability to generate inflammatory titles for their books. Andrew Sullivan flags a new tome titled The Marketing of Evil. Worse still, the book features this appalling cover quote from Michelle Malkin: “Now watch the cockroaches run for cover.”

As one of Sullivan’s readers pointed out, Malkin is engaging in explicit dehumanization:

What is disturbing is when incivility moves to dehumanization. One need look no further than Rwanda to see the cockroach invective in play. The Hutus commonly referred to the Tutsis as “inyenzi,” literally meaning cockroach. Though I’m certain that people like Malkin aren’t about to go on a machete waltz, the fact that political debate has devolved from disagreement to dehumanization is not a good sign. No good can come out of dehumanizing someone on the basis of politics.

When will we cast these people out of public life?

The movement led by National Popular Vote to award the presidency to the candidate with the most votes via an interstate compact took a step forward on Tuesday as the California Assembly approved the measure:

Seeking to force presidential candidates to pay attention to California’s 15.5 million voters, state lawmakers on Tuesday jumped aboard a new effort that would award electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide.

As it is now, California grants its Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state. Practically speaking, that means Democrat-dominated California spends the fall presidential campaign on the sidelines as candidates focus on the states — mostly in the upper Midwest — that are truly up for grabs.

Under a bill passed by the Assembly, California would join an interstate compact in which states would agree to cast their electoral votes not for the winner in their jurisdictions but for the winner nationwide. Proponents say that would force candidates to broaden their reach to major population centers such as California.

The bill is part of a 3-month-old movement driven by a Bay Area lawyer and a Stanford computer science professor. The same 888-word bill is pending in four other states and is expected to be introduced in every state by January, its sponsors say. The legislation would not take effect until enough states passed such laws to make up a majority of the Electoral College votes — a minimum of 13 states, depending on population.

“This is a bill that would allow California to be able to play a role in presidential elections,” said Barry Fadem, the Lafayette, Calif., lawyer spearheading the drive. Now, because the state is largely ignored, he said, “A vote in California is not equal to a vote in Ohio, and everyone would concede that.”

The bill — AB 2948 by Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Anaheim) — cleared the Assembly 49 to 31 with a single Republican vote from Assemblyman Rick Keene (R-Chico). To become law, it must be passed by the Senate and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

Fadem said he was surprised by the partisan divide in the Assembly vote. In the New York Legislature, Republicans introduced the bill, he said, and they support it in Illinois, Missouri and Colorado.But Republican Assembly members warned that the bill would empower big cities — whose residents tend to vote for Democrats — at the expense of small states.

If the compact is enforceable — a big if — I’m all for it, but it’s not a good sign that it’s passing the California legislature on a party line vote. This will only work if both parties support it. And remember that days before the 2000 election George W. Bush’s campaign thought he would be the candidate who won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College. Everyone has an interest in preventing that from ever happening again.

Here’s an example of how political myths are born through inaccurate paraphrases. Yesterday Washington Times columnist Greg Pierce claimed that Howard Dean had “suggested that opponents of homosexual ‘marriage’ are bigots.” This explosive claim that was immediately trumpeted by Matt Drudge, who inflated it to state that “Dem Chair Dean Compares Gay Marriage Opponents To Bigots.”

But if you actually read the passage that Pierce quotes, Dean never says the word bigot, nor does he directly imply that opponents of gay marriage are prejudiced:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean claims to be reaching out to red-state voters, but yesterday, he suggested that opponents of homosexual “marriage” are bigots.

Mr. Dean was responding to news that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, plans to bring to a vote a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban homosexual “marriage.”

“At a time when the Republican Party is in trouble with their conservative base, Bill Frist is taking a page straight out of the Karl Rove playbook to distract from the Republican Party’s failed leadership and misplaced priorities by scapegoating LGBT families for political gain, using marriage as a wedge issue,” said Mr. Dean, using the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

“It is not only morally wrong, it is shameful and reprehensible,” Mr. Dean said.

Perhaps Pierce objects to the word “scapegoating,” but the DNC chairman says nothing direct about the public in this statement, which reflects his interpretation of Frist’s tactics. You could reasonably infer that thinks Republicans will make a “political gain” by “scapegoating LBGT families,” but it’s a pretty significant leap from there to saying Dean suggested that gay marriage opponents were bigots.

I’m sick of people elevating the media into the central force in American politics.

The Note, an idiotic arbiter of media conventional wisdom if there ever was one, suggests today that the impending departure of Associated Press chief political writer “will change the contours of the 2006 and 2008 elections in ways that can now be only dimly understood.” No.

Jamison Foser, a columnist at Media Matters, recently wrote a column with a similar perspective, stating that “The defining issue of our time is the media…. The dominant political force of our time is the media.” Again, no and no.

The media matters a great deal in shaping the public’s perceptions about politics, as we argued at Spinsanity and in All the President’s Spin. But a new AP political writer will not shape the 2006 and 2008 elections, nor is the media the “dominant political force of our time.” The press does not have that sort of effect on macropolitical outcomes. In fact, we rarely observe significant shifts in public opinion in a political environment in which conflicting messages are in circulation — it is hard for politicians or the media to move the numbers in this context. (See John Zaller’s The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion or Page and Shapiro’s The Rational Public for more.)

A better way to understand the media is as a reflection of the larger society in which it exists. Journalists produce content that is heavily shaped by commercial incentives and the political balance of power. Because activists and journalists follow the output of the media on a daily basis, and because the media’s output tracks the prevailing forces in society, it often seems like the media is the main causal force. But that is silliness. (If you want to understand the ebb and flow of American politics from a macro perspective, read The Macro Polity.)

Does this mean the press can’t or shouldn’t do better? Absolutely not. The press has a crucial responsibility in a democratic society. But we should not overestimate its influence. If only reporters knew some political science…

Update 5/31 7:23 PM: Wonkette mocks The Note for the statement I quoted above.

Dear ABC News Political Unit,

Have you guys been outside lately? Not necessarily today, but maybe at any point since you became a member of a “political unit?” And again, not even necessarily that far outside, not like out to the “heartland” or “outside the beltway” or something, just anywhere outside the ABC News offices? It doesn’t count if you went there with the rest of the ABC Political Unit, by the way.

Anyway, good luck, Ron. Your new job will surely alter the very fabric of time and space, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Rather than manually approving every comment, which is time-consuming and slows down discussion, I have turned on a Typepad feature that requires commenters to verify that they aren’t a spambot before their comments can be posted. I still reserve the right to delete comments that are off-topic, inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate. (Trackbacks will still be moderated.)

Josh Marshall is angry about Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the state of the Democratic Party and so am I, but for very different reasons. Marshall thinks the article is cliche-ridden and out of touch with what’s really going on in the party. Maybe so, but the message it drove home for me is that much of the party’s base is still way out of step with mainstream cultural values.

Two passages stand out. First, Goldberg describes a New Mexico rally in honor of Howard Dean in which the secretary of state proudly refuses a veteran’s request to display an intact flag above her house:

Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans… Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor — a veteran, she noted — pointed out one day that her flag was “torn and tattered” and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, “I keep it here because it’s going to stay flying tattered and torn because that’s how this war is going. It’s going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over.”

Later, Goldberg describes the refusal by activists at a Center for American progress meeting to concede that too many abortions take place in this country:

Abortion-rights groups are uneasy when Democratic centrists urge them to shift the discussion from “a woman’s right to choose” to the need to reduce the number of abortions. Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank founded by the former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser, a former senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. “I said at the session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this country and that’s too many, and it’s too many for the majority of Americans,” Laser, who runs Third Way’s Culture Project, recalled. “Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that.”

After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience “by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?” As Laser remembers a moment, “It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also see something sad in what this procedure does.”

Both of these anecdotes enrage me, and I’m a moderate Democrat. I can’t imagine how they play with centrists or conservatives.

Update 5/31 8:27 PM EST: Via Marshall, here’s a link to the Goldberg piece. Also, I edited the title of the post in response to a comment by Oliver.

Just to briefly elaborate on my reasoning, I’m not arguing in favor of my positions because they reflect mainstream values. I’m arguing in favor of them because I believe it’s disrespectful to fly a tattered American flag above your house, and because I believe there are far too many abortions in this country. The first point is simply a matter of personal preference, but the second is subject to empirical analysis. And the statistics we have suggest that abortion rates in the US are high relative to other industrialized countries. We can do better.

In an editorial about new CIA director General Michael Hayden today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board slips in some revisionist history on “Team B,” the outside team brought in to provide an alternative analysis of the Soviet threat:

The CIA’s Iraq mistakes have been amply documented. But the agency’s career analysts also got their judgments of the Soviet Union’s condition badly wrong. The Ford Administration had the foresight to bring in outside experts to do a so-called Team B analysis of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, and they got it right.

“[T]hey got it right”? Here’s Fareed Zakaria’s assessment of Team B’s accuracy:

During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives
pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director
George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence
and come to their own conclusions. Team B–which included Paul Wolfowitz–produced
a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.

In retrospect, Team
B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union,
in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it
predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome
pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber “probably will
be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the
line by early 1984.” In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.

The reality was that
even the CIA’s own estimates–savaged as too low by Team B–were, in retrospect,
gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of
its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that
every year it had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat along
all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years
the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and
missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace
less than 60 percent of them.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Jon Chait has a perfect analysis of Hillary Clinton’s problems in the LA Times:

It appears the grand Clinton strategy is backfiring. As a prospective national candidate, she has two great vulnerabilities. First, many voters think she’s too liberal. Second, many voters also see her as cold, calculating and unlikable.

Her response to this was to position herself in the center, cozying up with her former GOP tormenters in the Senate, staking out hawkish positions and making an overture to cultural conservatives. The theory was that her centrist positions would endear her to moderates but that it wouldn’t cost her on the left, because years of conservative vilification caused liberals to bond with her emotionally.

But instead of moderates focusing on her positions while liberals focus on her persona, the opposite seems to be happening. Moderates fear she remains too culturally divisive to win. And liberals can’t stand her centrist positioning. It’s the worst of all worlds.What Clinton seems not to get is that few people evaluate candidates as the sum of their positions. Voters just don’t know enough about the issues to do it. (Nor, for that matter, do most political journalists.) Instead, they have a basic impression of the candidate’s character, and the issues feed into that.

Mark Schmitt, an extremely smart liberal at the New America Foundation, coined a saying that captures the dynamic: “It’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you.”

In other words, the literal popularity of an issue often matters less than the way that issue fits into a narrative of a politician’s character. John McCain used his support for campaign finance reform to craft a narrative of himself as a brave truth-teller unafraid of special interests. George W. Bush in 2000 used a couple of issue positions relatively minuscule in scale (faith-based initiatives, education reform) to craft an image as a compassionate innovator.

Clinton’s problem is that everything she does to staunch her perceived ideology problem compounds her perceived character problem. What she says about the issues may be popular, but what the issues say about her is that she’s a shameless self-reinventor.

Gore is winning plaudits because he’s in the opposite position. A couple of years ago he appeared to be veering too far left when he denounced the Iraq war and the administration’s disregard for civil liberties. But now, almost no one can argue with those positions — certainly not any prospective Democratic voter. And his focus on global warming, which may not rank high on the list of voter concerns in Ohio, points to his genuine conviction on the issue. Gore cared about the environment before it was cool (or, as it were, warm.) The issue helps him more as a character issue than a substance one.

This is exactly right. But again, the race may turn on whether the Hillary juggernaut comes off the rails among Democratic elites.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is popularizing a weird metaphor to make Democratic women seem tougher on national security.

In the latest New Yorker, Pelosi is quoted as follows:

I’m a mom. I have five children, and I have five grandchildren. I always say to people, ‘Think lioness.’ This is how Democrats are. You threaten our children — and that’s American — you threaten our country, you’re dead. You’re dead.” (italics in original)

It’s not the first time she’s used this formulation. Here’s Pelosi using two animal metaphors during an interview with Jim Lehrer on March 30:

I’m a mother of five. I have five grandchildren.
And I always say: Think of a lioness. Think of a mother bear. You come anywhere
near our cubs, you’re dead. And so, in terms of any threat to our country, people
have to know we’ll be there to preemptively strike.

In fact, a look at the Nexis database shows that Pelosi has been using the lioness metaphor since 2003. And the term is apparently spreading — a Hillary Clinton supporter is portrayed in a new campaign video using the same metaphor, saying “I think of Hillary as a lioness protecting children.”

I’m hopeful that voters are ready to trust female leaders on national security issues, but are lioness metaphors the answer? They just seem silly to me…

Update 6/1 8:41 AM: The Hillary video is now online.

Media Matters reports that MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews downplayed Senator George Allen’s public and private displays of the Confederate flag on Wednesday, comparing them to a Democrat wearing a Che Guevara or Karl Marx shirt during their youth. But as the New Republic pointed out, “Allen has either displayed the flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.” I challenge Matthews (and anyone else) to name one prominent Democrat who was seen wearing a Che Guevara shirt in the last decade. It’s an absurd comparison.

The problem with Ryan Lizza’s New Republic piece on Allen is that it generally framed the Senator’s racial insensitivity in terms of his personal history, allowing Matthews and various conservative pundits to downplay his actions as youthful rebellion.

But as Lizza and I document, Allen’s nearly lifelong insensitivity about race in his personal life dovetails with his years-long exploitation of the issue of race as a professional politician:
-Allen’s first statewide ad in Virginia portrayed the Confederate flag;
-Allen signed a Confederate History Month proclamation that called the Civil War “a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights” and did not mention slavery;
-Allen opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act;
-Allen opposed creating a state holiday to honor Martin Luther King in Virginia;
-Allen voted against changing a racially offensive state song as a state delegate;
-Allen initially praised Trent Lott when he came under fire in 2002 for praising Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat presidential candidacy.

Is that history really comparable to wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt as a kid? I don’t think so.