Brendan Nyhan

US News & World Report’s Washington Whispers column carries more speculation about an independent presidential run by John McCain:

Sen. John McCain’ s white-hot public approval ratings–59 percent in the new Diageo/Hotline poll–are fast giving rise to a new 2008 presidential primary scenario among Washington’s political brain trust. If, as conservatives believe, McCain’s liberal stands on gays and abortion kill his GOP primary chances, he may ride into the election as an independent.

But as I’ve explained, such a run is implausible. It’s nearly impossible for third party candidates to win, and the likely effect of McCain entering the race would be to throw the race to the Democrat. How likely is that?

Many good speakers come to Duke, but we’re on a bad streak lately. First, we had Harry Belafonte spouting leftist nonsense on Martin Luther King Day:

The controversial musician, actor and activist did not shy away from contentious issues during his speech.

Belafonte spoke against President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, particularly the alleged prisoner abuse. He likened the president to the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers, saying that both parties caused the sacrifice of innocent lives. “Bush has led us into a dishonorable war that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people,” he said. “What is the difference between that terrorist and other terrorists?”

Belafonte previously had called Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” during a Jan. 8 speech in Venezuela, setting off a firestorm of criticism.

And tonight we’re getting Gary Aldrich, anti-Clinton nutjob:

The most infamous of the Regnery titles is undoubtedly Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access, which included such “revelations” as lesbian encounters in the White House’s basement showers, Hillary Clinton ordering miniature crack pipes to hang on the White House Christmas tree, and the claim–backed by anonymous sources–that Clinton made frequent trips to the nearby Marriott to shack up with a mistress “who may be a celebrity.” That last bit helped catapult Unlimited Access to the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list, though Aldrich soon revealed to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that the Marriott story was “not quite solid” and, indeed, was “hypothetical.” But according to Aldrich, it was Regnery editor Richard Vigilante who had moved the Marriott bit out of the epilogue (where it had been presented as a “mock investigation”) and into the middle of the book (where it was presented as an actual occurrence). Vigilante, Aldrich told Mayer, threatened not to publish the book if Aldrich didn’t agree to the changes.

Obviously, Duke does not endorse the views of these speakers, but I’m still embarrassed for the institution. Can’t we do better?

Update 1/25 — Here’s what Aldrich said about the Clinton administration last night:

His negative experiences with the Clinton administration eventually led him to write his book, Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, which topped The New York Times bestsellers list. In the book, he discusses unprofessional behavior in the Clinton White House.

Aldrich told the audience that members of the Clinton staff used drugs, wore scandalous clothing, stole from their offices and were typically very unqualified for their positions. “One staffer told me he did drugs during the Presidential Inauguration — he said it was to ‘enjoy the experience’ — and this is the crop of the Democratic party,” Aldrich said.

What about the crack pipes on the Christmas tree?

During a speech to the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, RNC chair Ken Mehlman insults the intelligence of the American people, asking, “Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?”

No. Pelosi and Dean want NSA to get a warrant. It’s not very difficult.

That is all.

Update 1/23: Writing in Tapped, Greg Sargent reminds me of a similarly absurd quote from Karl Rove:

Let me be as clear as I can be. President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they’re calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

Who? As Sargent says, “This statement is simply false. Can anyone name a single Democrat who’s on record opposing the wiretapping of calls from Al Qaeda to America? In reality, Dems don’t oppose wiretapping. They simply think Bush should get a warrant first — and think it’s illegal if he doesn’t.”

I recently received one of those fundraising “surveys” from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which included a remarkable question that indicates just how badly the GOP lost the debate over Social Security privatization last year (JPEG image):

Question 9: As uncertainty over the huge problems that will arrive as the Baby Boomers soon begin retiring in record numbers, many Republicans have proposed that today’s younger workers be given a chance to invest a portion of their income into alternative retirement plans. How do you feel about this?
-I agree with it
-I disagree with it
-I’d need to know more about it before making a decision

This is truly a remarkable sentence. In addition to being gramatically incorrect (the clause at the beginning is missing a word like “grows” or “mounts”), the question omits any mention of the phrase Social Security — and this is in direct mail to the Republican base! Has Social Security privatization become so radioactive that the NRCC can’t even say the words “Social Security” anymore?

What’s incredible about this is that the omission of Social Security from the statement makes the question virtually nonsensical. There’s nothing stopping younger workers from investing in private retirement plans. The NRCC actually means workers should be able to invest a portion of their payroll taxes into “alternative retirement plans” other than traditional Social Security, but they’re so hesitant to say what they mean that the question becomes gobbledygook.

I’ve always been sympathetic to the anti-Roe pro-choice position, which argues that the repeal of Roe would de-polarize the abortion debate and return the issue to the states, where it arguably belongs.

As a matter of law, Roe seems to have been poorly decided (though I’m no expert), and politically the hypothesis that it unnecessarily polarized the abortion debate seems plausible.

So why not let the states create their own policies? Few will ban abortion altogether, the argument goes, and the resulting debate will split the Republican coalition.

William Baude, a second-year law student at Yale, has the answer — it’s a novel argument that I haven’t heard before:

The emergence of this pro-choice anti-Roe movement seems fueled by a hope that if it were left to the states, and not the Supreme Court, to set abortion policy, the result would be a more secure and less acrimonious compromise. But what would actually happen if Roe were overturned?

It’s unlikely that Congress would pass a comprehensive federal ban on or right to abortion. So in the absence of Roe, states would largely be free to regulate the issue as they saw fit… A patchwork of state abortion regulations, however, will lead not to compromise, but chaos.

…States could make it illegal to cross state lines in order to abort a fetus – a tactic Ireland tried in the early 1990’s, until a court decision and subsequent constitutional amendment recognized a right to travel. While the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to travel across state lines, it has also recognized exceptions.

If states can decree that life begins at conception, they might also be able to use child custody laws to curtail the movements of pregnant women…

Furthermore, in recent decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that a state can regulate its citizens’ activities while they are elsewhere and prosecute them for violations of state law upon their return…

Abortion-rights states would undoubtedly respond in kind…

Without Roe, the federal courts would be flooded with such disputes. Abortion cases, now further encumbered by issues of family rights and the powers of states to regulate trade across state lines, would once again end up before the Supreme Court. And though a doctrine called “conflict of laws” exists to settle legal disagreements between jurisdictions, this kind of interstate regulatory warfare has been mercifully rare in our nation’s history. The precedents are muddy, the standards unclear, and so it is almost impossible to know how a future Supreme Court would resolve the matter.

Indeed, American democracy has rarely resolved moral battles of this scope at the state level. The most significant moral conflict ever devolved to the states, after all, was slavery…

Overturning Roe and leaving the states to regulate abortion will not be the compromise that ends the debate. Rather, it will worsen it. Pro-choice and pro-life states will not enjoy an easy and untroubled coexistence, as some would like to believe. Nor will overturning Roe get the federal government, or the federal courts, out of the business of abortion jurisprudence. Instead, state regulation will make a complex legal matter even more complicated, and the divisions over abortion that much wider. If Roe is reversed, the ensuing chaos will demand a federal resolution to the abortion battle – again.

The sad reality is that the abortion debate is path dependent. If the states had originally made policy, the issue might not be so contentious. But Baude has convinced me that returning the issue to the states after more than thirty years of battle over Roe would not make things any better.

Postscript: While we’re on the subject of abortion, Slate’s Will Saletan wrote an excellent op-ed that ran alongside Baude’s in the Times. He argues a position I believe in strongly — that the pro-choice movement work to bring down the abortion rate through contraceptive distribution and health education. Here’s Saletan’s conclusion:

A year ago, Senator Hillary Clinton marked Roe’s anniversary by reminding family planning advocates that abortion “represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.” Some people in the audience are reported to have gasped or shaken their heads during her speech. Perhaps they thought she had said too much.

The truth is, she didn’t say enough. What we need is an explicit pro-choice war on the abortion rate, coupled with a political message that anyone who stands in the way, yammering about chastity or a “culture of life,” is not just anti-choice, but pro-abortion.

Via Brad DeLong, Matthew Baldwin of defective yeti has written a hilarious satire of George W. Bush’s presidency as a text-based computer game like Zork or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Note: It’s much funnier if you’ve actually played that type of game. I used to love to play Hitchhiker’s Guide as a kid.)

The New Republic says what needs to be said about Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” analogy on MLK Day:

On Martin Luther King Day, Senator Hillary Clinton, flanked by the Reverend Al Sharpton, told parishioners at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem that the House of Representatives “has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about.”

Unfortunately, the church’s parishioners, who have presumably never worked on a plantation, didn’t quite know what she was talking about (the New York Daily News reports that the comment “got muted response”). Apparently, the Simon Legrees in Congress were a bit confused, too. “I’ve never run a plantation before,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert protested, in a surreal moment during a news conference on lobbying reform the next day. (Republicans have been known to deploy tortured plantation references from time to time themselves: “Since [the Democrats] think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion,” Newt Gingrich said in 1994.)

But Clinton is sticking to her guns. When the Daily News asked on Tuesday night if she regretted the comment, she said, “Absolutely not. As I have said many times before, Congress is run in a top-down way.” The last time we checked, an overly hierarchic corporate management style was not the biggest abomination of slave plantations, but perhaps congressmen have been separated from their families, chained together, forced to work for tobacco farmers, and publicly bought and sold during those mysterious closed-door sessions. And Clinton has been fond of the plantation metaphor for a while now: In a November 2004 interview on CNN, she said, “[T]hey’re running the House of Representatives like a fiefdom, with Tom DeLay … in charge of the plantation.” Plantation, fiefdom: We see a rhetorical style developing here. Why doesn’t she reach out to Jews, who’ve sometimes been wary of her, by comparing GOP K Street’s intimidation tactics to pogroms in the Pale? And, come to think of it, why haven’t any intrepid Democratic candidates seized the opportunity to describe Jack Abramoff’s hustling of Indian gaming tribes as a “Trail of Tears”? Oh–because most of them have better taste, that’s why.

Meanwhile, NPR brought on a theologian from Emory University to put the racially charged comments of Clinton and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin in perspective. Do you think NPR brings on evangelicals to put offensive comments from Pat Robertson in context?

Roy Blunt, the majority whip and a candidate to succeed Tom DeLay as majority leader, spouts supply-side nonsense on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

[T]he tax cuts have even helped reduce the federal budget deficit through record revenue growth fueled by an expanding economy.

But as I pointed out, revenues are way down as a result of the tax cuts, not up. The recent mini-surge in tax collections still leaves revenue levels far below what they would have been if we had never passed the tax cuts in the first place.

This is, of course, the same tactic used by President Bush and the WSJ editorial page. Any suggestions for a good analogy that would explain the fallacious reasoning behind this claim? (I’m struggling for something catchy and succinct.)

Controversial right-wing gadfly David Horowitz cited my Spinsanity column on Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in an email to the History News Network, saying it “showed the film is a tissue of misrepresentations and outright falsehoods.” Given what we wrote about Horowitz, I’m surprised (and a little embarassed) that he endorsed our work, but I guess in this case the enemy of his enemy is still his friend…

I just spoke with Robert Bluey about his Human Events Online story from last week, which misleadingly trumpeted an upcoming Al Gore speech under the headline “Al Gore to Attack Bush ‘Police State.’”

As I wrote, the decision to put “police state” in quotes suggested that Gore would use the phrase in his speech, even though it appeared nowhere in the MoveOn.org press release from which Bluey quoted.

The potential deception was magnified when Matt Drudge linked to the story, reprinting the headline in giant type under an angry-looking picture of Gore.

Of course, the Vice President never used the phrase “police state” in his speech on Monday, a fact that Drudge and Bluey failed to note in their items on the speech.

When I spoke with him, Bluey admitted that the phrase “police state” was not a direct quote. Instead, he said that Human Events “inferred” that Gore was attacking “the police state,” calling it a “buzzword.” When I asked whether he understood how putting the phrase in quotes might leave readers with a misleading impression of what Gore actually would say, he said he did.

The real test, however, is whether Human Events will do better in the future. Given the publication’s misleading direct mail and dissemination of the deceptive and hateful writings of Ann Coulter, it’s hard to be optimistic.