Brendan Nyhan

From today’s Meet the Press — the Clintons are still dodging the pledge issue:

MR. RUSSERT: She [Hillary] should avoid making a pledge that she’ll serve another full six-year term.

MR. CLINTON: Yeah, I think she should say she wants to be judged on both her record and her plans for the future, but I think, you know, for figures that are large figures in their parties who honestly don’t know and can’t know this early whether they’re going to run, we have no idea what facts will unfold. I don’t think they should make commitments. President Bush didn’t make a commitment when he ran for re-election as governor of Texas and he was remarkably candid. He said, “You know, the voters will have to take this into account if it bothers them,” but I think that that’s where big figures in both parties are in a position where two years in chance, they may think they will, they may think they won’t, but the truth is they don’t know because there could be lots of intervening events. So I think she should just run, put her service out there, put her plans for the future out there and trust the voters of New York to make a judgment.

Michael Barone, writing in the Wall Street Journal today, claims the following (subscription required):

Most Americans accumulate significant, six-figure wealth in the course of their lifetimes. During the late 1990s stock market boom, most household wealth was in financial instruments, but today and before the late 1990s the majority of household wealth was in residential real estate. And in politics the key economic issue for voters may be changing, from concern about short-term income to concern about the long-term, lifelong project of accumulating wealth.

Barone’s first claim is accurate — Census data shows that most Americans over age 65 have a median household net worth of more than $100,000 (though far fewer younger Americans do so). However, the same Census data shows that his claim that “most household wealth was in financial instruments” during the late 1990s is false. At the aggregate level, 53 percent of overall household wealth was invested in non-financial instruments in 1998, a figure that declined only slightly — to 51 percent — by 2000. Similarly, when we look at the disaggregated data, we can see that the middle quintile of households by monthly income had, on average, 53.4 percent of their net worth in real estate, motor vehicles and/or a business in 1998 and 50.7 percent in 2000. (Those in the lower two quintiles had even less invested in financial instruments.)

In short, the claim that “most household wealth was in financial instruments” during the late 1990s boom isn’t even close to correct. Did Barone even look at the data, or did he just make these claims up off the top of his head?

How quickly things change in politics.

In February and March 2005, GOP-leaning scholars surveyed by James Lindgren of Northwestern University implausibly rated President Bush the sixth-best president in US history.

Even on Sept. 7, almost two weeks after Katrina hit, Fred Barnes published an op-ed quoting a Bush aide who touted the President’s low approval numbers as proof that the administration is “changing history.” “The difference is between polls in the 40s and changing history and being in the 60s and twiddling your thumbs,” he said. “We’ll take the 40s. That’s our motto.”

Now, however, the administration is in full blown panic mode. Bush’s approval ratings are at unprecedented lows, as the Washington Post demonstrates in this graphic timeline (see this post for more):

And according to Rep. Tom Reynolds, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Social Security privatization — the centerpiece of Bush’s second term agenda — is dead in this Congress.

As The Note pointed out yesterday, Bush is an unprecedented situation:

He has never seen his poll numbers take this kind of hit among Republicans before.

He has never seen his poll numbers on “strong leader” and “can handle a crisis” take such a hit before.

…He has never had to take “responsibility” for such death-infused tragedy before.

…He has never been perceived as such a potential liability by others in his party looking to hold their seats before.

He has never lacked The Other — an enemy to demonize and to contrast with himself and his policies in the eyes of the media and the public before.

So what’s the plan? First, lots of spending. And as Josh Marshall has emphasized, Bush has put Karl Rove in charge of reconstruction, which will likely turn the disaster zone into a playland of patronage and half-baked conservative policies.

At a deeper level, though, it’s not clear the Bushies know what to do. Due to the approval boost provided by 9/11, they’ve never had to play by normal political rules. Many of the tactics that worked when Bush was at 60 or 70 in the polls are a flop at 38 or 41. Similarly, the President has never had to moderate his hard-edged pseudo-conservatism. What this means is that the administration is unlikely to adjust quickly enough to reverse its political fortunes, especially given that the economy may tip into recession before Bush leaves office.

The shocking result is that it’s actually possible to imagine President Hillary. Democrats are unlikely to pick up more than a few seats in 2006 due to gerrymandering, but they will be well-positioned for 2008. It’s hard to remember the last two-term president who left office as unpopular as Bush will likely be. Bush’s ratings are far below those of Clinton and Reagan at this point in their second terms. Aside from Richard Nixon, no modern two-term president has left office with these type of numbers. Of course, Bush has more than three years left, but the dynamics of the situation are all tilting against him going forward.

Meanwhile, conservatives are desperately trying to point fingers elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that, “[w]ith media help, Democrats and the left have used Katrina to portray a systemic collapse of ‘conservative’ government. It was certainly a collapse of government, but more accurately of bureaucracy and the welfare state.” And, via Brad DeLong, James Pinkerton is blaming the press explicitly for the drop in Bush’s approval ratings:

[T]he MSM is still out there, and it’s having an impact.

How much impact? Let’s look at the polls, which show that Bush’s approval rating has dropped three or four points, to between 38 and 42 percent…

So what happened? To put it plainly, the substantial pro-Bush contingent of the New Media — that is, cable news, talk radio, and the Net — was overwhelmed. Yes, the blogosphere could take down Dan Rather, but that was a dry and slow process of threshing out real and counterfeit typewriter fonts, military phraseology, and antique zip codes.

By contrast, Katrina is wetly overwhelming; even Fox News is in high dudgeon. So while a few bloggers are hacking away at the accreting conventional wisdom that Everything is Bush’s Fault, that battle is being lost even before Bush’s big “I take responsibility” concession on Tuesday.

In other words, the MSM got there firstest with the mostest.

Constantly finding excuses for the administration’s policy failures is an ugly habit of mind. As I’ve mentioned, National Review’s Rob Dreher has knocked down the idea that the administration didn’t screw up during Katrina:

It would be very wrong, I believe, to let the ignominious Michael Brown be the scapegoat for FEMA’s sins. Check out this front-pager from the WaPo. Turns out that a raft of FEMA’s top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize? The main reason I’ve been a Bush supporter all along is I trusted him (note past tense) on national security — which, in the age of mass terrorism, means homeland security too. Call me naive, but it’s a real blow to learn that political hacks have been running FEMA, of all agencies of the federal government! What if al-Qaeda had blown the New Orleans levees? How much worse would the crony-led FEMA’s response have been? Would conservatives stand for any of this for one second if a Democrat were president? If this is what Republican government means, God help the poor GOP Congressmen up for re-election in 2006.

Similarly, blaming the media for everything is a lazy excuse, as John Podhoretz points out on National Review’s blog The Corner (via Andrew Sullivan):

Perhaps today’s astounding DeLay quote about how there’s no way to cut the federal budget will offer a useful reminder to conservatives that while they may be aligned with Republican Congressional politicians, Republican Congressional politicians are just that — politicians first. There is too often a rush on to defend any and every GOP pol by conservative bloggers and e-mailers on the grounds that if they’re being attacked by the MSM, they’re victims of injustice. Sometimes, though, they’re just…indefensible.

The larger problem is that Republicans at the elite and mass levels have routinized the process of excusing President Bush for every screwup and mistake, as Matthew Yglesias notes in pointing to the findings of a CBS poll:

How is it, then, that Bush is rated so much better than the federal government he heads, and the disaster agency run by his appointee, the much-beloved “Brownie?” This is part-and-parcel of a very frightening cult of personality that’s been erected around the person of George W. Bush ever since 9/11 with the effective complicity of the rightwing media.

I’m constantly reading Weekly Standard articles about how Don Rumsfeld or someone is messing something up and betraying Bush’s pure and awesome vision, or seeing National Review writers talk about how Bush is a great president and it’s too bad he doesn’t care about limited government. Meanwhile, we’ve seen huge numbers of mainstream media types accept the view that “strong leadership,” “moral clarity,” and “bold vision” are the proper metrics for evaluating the performance of an elected official rather than actual policy results. The view that it’s his fault when bad things happen — or, at a minimum, that it becomes his fault when he refuses to take corrective action — doesn’t seem to occur to a very large number of people.

For democracy to work, we need to hold government accountable. And between the mishandling of Katrina, failing to capture Osama Bin Laden, a disastrously executed war in Iraq, and huge deficits looming in the future, there’s a lot to hold President Bush accountable for right now. I hope that’s something every American can recognize.

Update 9/16: Kevin Drum kindly let me know that I got Lindgren’s name wrong again – apologies. It’s fixed above.

Drudge’s headline:

REUTERS has acknowledged Bush ‘Potty Note’ photo was enhanced via Photoshop…

Sounds like the widely circulated pic was doctored, right? Wrong. According to the article he linked, Reuters just cleaned up some overexposure on the note. I’m sure someone will take the bait, though.

I’m swamped (my comprehensive exams are next week), so until I can post more, here’s your picture of the day courtesy of Gawker:

Today’s lesson in Rap 101? Vocabulary!

On the blackboard:

1. Cheddar
2. Shorty
3. Flossin’
4. Benjamins
5. Ballin’

Martha: “Is ‘cheddar’ cheese?”
Diddy: “No. No no no no no no. No.”
Us: Insert gun in mouth.

For almost five years, conservatives inside and outside the White House have refused to tell us what they really think about President Bush and the state of conservatism for fear of retaliation. Likewise, the media has generally been a lapdog, cowering in fear of accusations of liberal bias. But with Bush’s approval ratings at record lows and his departure from office looming, the dam appears to be breaking.

As Dan Froomkin points out, a slew of unflattering stories about Bush have been published in the aftermath of Katrina (see his article for links):

Amid a slew of stories this weekend about the embattled presidency and the blundering government response to the drowning of New Orleans, some journalists who are long-time observers of the White House are suddenly sharing scathing observations about President Bush that may be new to many of their readers.

Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you’ve been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?

Maybe not so much.

Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don’t emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies — the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department — has failed a big test.

Maybe it’s Bush’s sinking poll numbers — he is, after all, undeniably an unpopular president now. Maybe it’s the way that the federal response to the flood has cut so deeply against Bush’s most compelling claim to greatness: His resoluteness when it comes to protecting Americans.

But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere.

These stories were driven, in part, by rare blind quotes from high-level White House officials that portrayed Bush in an unflattering light. Via Kevin Drum, John Podhoretz notes the importance of this development:

What’s interesting about the stories [in Time and Newsweek] is that they suggest there’s been a change at the Bush White House because they feature unnamed sources saying nasty things about the president. One of the remarkable aspects of this White House has been the fanatical loyalty its people have displayed toward Bush — even talking to friendly journalists like me, it’s been nearly impossible to get past the feel-good spin. If that’s really changing, if staffers are beginning to separate themselves from their boss emotionally and indulge in on-background carping and cavilling, then two things are true. 1) Bush is about to suffer the agony that has afflicted all previous recent administrations — the “who said that!” rages that distract our leaders and make them feel isolated in their jobs. 2) News stories are about to get a whole lot more interesting, and White House reporters are going to stop complaining about how hard it is to cover Bush.

In addition, conservative pundits are starting to break away from Bush after years of marching in lockstep. As I’ve mentioned, David Brooks is castigating the GOP as “a party that doesn’t have a political philosophy” and admitting that “From Day One, [the Bush White House] had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest.” And, via Andrew Sullivan, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson is bashing the state of modern conservatism:

Conservative institutions, conceived for combat, have in power become self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists. The current story of Jack Abramoff’s lucrative self-dealing, involving as it does such movement stalwarts as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, may seem lunatic in its excesses, but the excesses aren’t the point. The point is the ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power. Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. The grease rubbed off, too.

…Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped–if I were a Marxist I might even say determined–by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism… that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the “author” on the cover. What a tumble! From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman–all in little more than a generation’s time. Whatever this is, it isn’t progress.

What will we find out next?

For those who are still interested in the vitriol of Eric Alterman, I’ve posted a second update to my post about his attacks on me below.

Chris Mooney, who appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, has written a very important book. I want to recommend that everyone pick up a copy of The Republican War on Science.

The reason why I am endorsing the book is simple: it addresses a very important part of the problem that we described on Spinsanity and in All the President’s Spin. In the public sphere, PR-driven spin is increasingly substituting for reasoned debate, and that is a very bad thing for democracy. Chris was one of the first people to understand the importance of what we were doing at Spinsanity, and I think that perspective informs his take here. TRWOS takes a deeply reported and researched look at how conservatives are using PR to confuse debate over science and science policy on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to embryonic stem cell research.

It is true, of course, that Chris is a liberal, but I want to assure people that he is no hack. He takes science very seriously, and has criticized liberals for abusing science as well. He makes a strong argument in the book that conservatives have gone much further in politicizing science than liberals, and that is reflected in the unprecedented response to this administration from the scientific community. In addition, the book is very careful to differentiate the science from larger policy questions. For instance, Mooney grants that one can legitimately oppose efforts to mitigate global warming because of, say, cost-benefit concerns. But he is rightly insistent that the scientific consensus about climate change should not be distorted for political reasons.

The problem Chris addresses is that PR has shown political organizations how to manipulate public debate – by creating confusion over known facts and accepted conclusions, which are amplified by journalists who play by the “he said,” “she said” conventions of “objective” journalism. (Mooney has written about this problem in the past.) And because corporations and the religious right have a shared interest in fighting back against the conclusions of scientists on a variety of issues, legions of conservative think tanks and faux-scientists are now waging a well-funded war to muddy the waters and promote their pre-defined conclusions.

TRWOS is a detailed takedown of this massive effort to distort and politicize science. Even if you don’t agree with Mooney’s politics, you should read this book.

Update 9/13: For those who are curious, Kevin Drum has posted a review that quotes part of Mooney’s argument for why Bush is different from Clinton in his treatment of science.

Update 9/15: Mooney is scheduled to appear on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today — see their website for more information.

[Disclosure: I read an early version of the manuscript for the book and gave Chris feedback on it.]

Media Matters has transcribed a fascinating admission from David Brooks during his appearance on The Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: Do you think there’s a problem with this? I remember when the president wrote in his diary — his father, President Bush senior — “you know, I picked [former Vice President Dan] Quayle the first time around, and I wish I hadn’t. But I’m stuck with him, and I can’t admit it.” Is there a problem with this president simply admitting, “I put the wrong people at certain jobs, I didn’t get back fast enough to the White House, I wasn’t calling the orders fast enough?”

BROOKS: From Day One, they had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest. Privately, they admit mistakes all the time. Publicly — and I’ve had this debate with them since Day One; I always say admit a mistake, people will give you credit —

MATTHEWS: Who do you debate this with?

BROOKS: With people who work in the White House.

MATTHEWS: I thought you were talking about with the president in the back room.

[laughter]

BROOKS: Not with him, but they represent what he believes, which is, if you admit a mistake, you get no credit from your enemies, and then you open up another week’s story, because the admission of a little mistake leads to the admission of big mistakes and another week’s story. It’s totally tactical and totally insincere.

When was Brooks going to tell us? He’s addressed this issue in the past, but never so explicitly, as MM points out:

Brooks himself previously addressed the Bush administration’s refusal to admit error — both in his Times column and on PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on which he makes weekly appearances. In his November 2, 2004, column, Brooks wrote: “I’m exasperated at the Bush communications strategy. His advisers came in with one rule: no concessions to elite opinion. They decided not to be open on how they make decisions. They would never admit mistakes.” In his September 9, 2003, debut as a Times columnist, he noted: “The Bush administration has the most infuriating way of changing its mind. The leading Bushies almost never admit serious mistakes. They never acknowledge that they are listening to their critics. They never even admit they are shifting course. They don these facial expressions suggesting calm omniscience while down below their legs are doing the fox trot in six different directions.” On the November 14, 2003, broadcast of the NewsHour, Brooks said of the Bush administration: “Well, the good news about them is that they won’t admit mistakes, but they are ruthlessly pragmatic when forced to be.” In none of these instances, however, did Brooks indicate — as he did on September 11 — that deception was premeditated, or that he had “since Day One” discussed with White House officials their strategy to engage in deception rather than admit mistakes.

In the Fred Barnes op-ed I mentioned last week, a Bush aide makes a striking statement defending the President’s terrible poll numbers:

[T]he simple fact of governing in Washington is that popularity is not a measure of power. In the late ’90s, President Clinton’s approval rating stayed well above 60%, even after he was impeached. But Mr. Clinton had almost no clout. True, this was partly because he faced a Republican Congress. A Bush aide was accurate (if self-serving) in drawing the distinction this way: “The difference is between polls in the 40s and changing history and being in the 60s and twiddling your thumbs. We’ll take the 40s. That’s our motto.”

Given that Bush’s poll numbers have slid even further since the Barnes op-ed, what’s the new slogan going to be? Building an empire in the high 30s?

On a more serious note, this quote shows that the Bush people have realized that the President is not very popular, but they’re still going to try to push ahead with their agenda (ie “changing history”) no matter what. Bush may be able to keep getting legislation enacted since the GOP controls Congress, but this approach doesn’t augur well for the Republican Party in the long term. The further they push now, the more the American people will push back later.