Brendan Nyhan

Tim Noah is right — newspaper editorials are worthless:

Almost every editorial I’ve ever read in my life has fallen into one of two categories: boring or irresponsible. Most are boring, because, in addition to the length problem, the opinions expressed in the editorials are usually either arrived at by committee, or arrived at by an individual writer or editor who has internalized the views of that committee, real or imagined. Whenever that happens, the end product can’t avoid being bland.

I have to admit I never, ever read the editorial page for this exact reason. I still think newspaper editorial boards can be a powerful voice on certain issues that are locally relevant or concern the newspaper itself. And in that case, let’s have editorials. Hell, put them on the front page like they used to do back in the old days. But the rest of the time, I’m with Noah — it’s time to abolish a staid format that outlived its usefulness decades ago.

With conservatism becoming increasingly decadent, I worry for the future of America.

I worry, like Ben Adler, that true economic conservatism has been lost to a crude pro-corporate mindset:

In yesterday’s New York Times, Jason DeParle writes about the Heritage
Foundation’s cushy summer internship program for young conservative activists and
intellectuals. One sentence in particular stands out: “Katherine Rogers, a junior at
Georgetown … is working in donor relations, which she thinks will be useful in her
intended career as a pharmaceutical lobbyist.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The earnest young right-wing politico dreams not of a
job where she learns new things every day, or grapples with ideas, or experiences the
satisfaction of helping other people. She dreams of shilling for a self-interested
corporation. And forget the political implications. What junior in college dreams
of lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry?

And I worry, like Andrew Sullivan, that conservatives are increasingly confusing ideological journalism with pro-GOP propaganda:

I found myself watching the Sean Hannity “interview” of vice-president Dick Cheney last night on Fox. I must say I have chortled through quite a few Larry King-style, fawning interviews by liberal journalists of liberal politicians in my time – all under the rubric of “objectivity.” But I don’t think I have ever witnessed a more fawning, sycophantic and simply rigged interview than that between Hannity and Cheney. In fact, the whole conceit that this was an actual interview is preposterous, along with the notion that Hannity is in any way a journalist. The first instinct of an actual journalist is to ask the tough questions even of someone you admire – perhaps especially of someone you admire. Hannity’s instinct is the exact opposite: ingratiation of his interview subject and his audience. The transcript reveals no distinction of any meaningful kind between the interviewer and interviewee…

This is a free country, and Sean Hannity and Fox News can broadcast what they want. Fox is far more entertaining than the other cable news channels and I can see its appeal, and the need for a less liberal network. But this was not journalism. It was propaganda, cloyingly arranged between interviewer and interviewee, based on talking points adhered to by both sides, and broadcast as if it were a real interview. I worry that viewers actually begin to believe that this is journalism, that asking questions designed to help the interviewer better make his case, in fact often supplementing his answers to improve their rhetorical power, is somehow what real journalists do. It isn’t. I wish I could provide a better kicker for this blog item than Sean Hannity did. But I can’t. So here’s his sign-off: “Lynne, I was too tough on him.”

And I worry, like Sullivan, about the censorious impulse to lump books by some of the leading thinkers in Western history together with those of Hitler and Mao:

I guess it’s not crazy to come up with a list of the “ten most harmful books” of the last two centuries. But it’s not a sign of intellectual health. It implies that some ideas are worth suppressing for the harm they might do. To my mind, an argument or a book should be read with as open a mind as possible. Its errors or moral failings are better brought to light by exposure than buried. But some of today’s conservative intellectuals believe otherwise; and this list by “Human Events” contributors is a disturbing one, and a sign of increasing morbidity in conservative intellectual circles. Sure, it’s hard to dispute the evil power of hackish tracts like Mein Kampf or Mao’s Little Red Book. (I’m surprised the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ didn’t make the grade.) But Darwin and Nietzsche, two of the greatest minds in Western civilization, whose works still mesmerize and intrigue smart readers and whose ideas are subject to countless interpretations? And Mill and Keynes and Freud? Please. If I were a young conservative mind, the first thing I’d do is read these Indexed books and make my own mind up. It should be possible to be a conservative with a genuinely liberal approach to intellectual inquiry. And that excludes exclusion of ideas deemed “harmful.”

Have conservatives forgotten that what’s good for corporations isn’t always good for the economy? That what’s good for the Republican Party isn’t always good for conservatism — or the country? That the free exchange of ideas strengthens democracy?

I worry.

In a Washington Post story on President Bush’s speech at a Republican fundraiser Tuesday, Mike Allen and Michael A. Fletcher repeat a classic misleading Bush administration statistic:

Bush said he has “laid out some plans that would nearly fix all of the Social Security problem.” The White House has said the plans he has outlined would close about 70 percent of the gap that is projected to open between promised Social Security benefits and the taxes that will be owed.

But here’s what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found when it looked into that claim:

These [White House] alterations in the Pozen [“progressive indexing”] proposal
result in the President’s proposal eliminating 59 percentof the
75-year Social Security deficit, rather than 70 percent. The White House has
claimed its plan would close 70 percent of the gap and that the Pozen plan
would close 81 percent of the gap. It turns out that the White House is
referring to the percentage of the solvency gap that would be closed in a
single year — the 75^th year (i.e., 2079). However, the
standard way of measuring the degree to which a proposal restores solvency is
to measure its effect on the total shortfall over the next 75 years, and the
White House plan closes only 59 percent of the 75-year shortfall.

In addition, the Center found that when Bush’s private accounts proposal is added into the calculation, his plan only closes 30 percent of the 75-year Social Security shortfall.

Allen and Fletcher should know better — the Post has been a leader in critical coverage of the President’s misleading claims. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign that the newspaper is backing off.

Despite GOP delusions to the contrary, Bill Frist has never been an attractive presidential candidate. He’s an awkward patrician who was elected to office with the help of family connections (sound like any other senators from Tennessee?).

But I still can’t believe how foolishly he’s squandered his one selling point: his medical expertise. The stories about him experimenting on stray cats during medical school were bad enough, but he has now abused his authority as a physician to misdiagnose Terri Schiavo (a fact now confirmed by her autopsy despite his protests to the contrary) and suggest that HIV could be transmitted through saliva or tears.

And as Bob Dole (among others) could have predicted, Frist’s tenure as Senate Majority Leader has made him less electable, not more. Conservatives are angry at him for the nuclear option deal, and protecting the senators who wouldn’t co-sponsor George Allen’s anti-lynching resolution is not exactly a selling point for independent voters (via Atrios).

Is Frist going to be the Phil Gramm of 2008?

CJR Daily, which has played a key role in watchdogging the Bush administration’s use of deceptive “video news releases,” has picked up a Chicago Tribune report about more than 30 new VNRs from the Dept. of Agriculture promoting CAFTA. Even after Karen Ryan and Armstrong Williams, this issue will not go away. When will the government get out of the fake news business?

Kevin Drum comments on Arnold’s motivation for calling a special election in California:

[W]e’re having an election next June anyway, and it’s unlikely that any of Schwarzenegger’s initiatives will have even a slight effect in the intervening seven months. Why not wait and save the $50 million or so the special election will cost?

Personal ego, of course, which seems to be Arnold’s speciality. I guess he’s a true Californian after all.

Schwarzenegger’s ego aside, there’s a better way to think about why he isn’t waiting for a regular election to put his initiatives on the ballot. Like every politician, Arnold is strategic. Why take heat for spending $50 million on a special election? Because he thinks it will help him achieve his goals. Here are two possible reasons:
(1) He’s already won an initiative campaign and believes the quasi-plebiscitary model plays to his strengths as a populist fighting the “special interests.”
(2) Special elections have low turnout, which means that winning is a matter of motivating your supporters to turn out, which could work to his advantage if he can fire up the base.

I have to say that think Schwarzenegger is going to go down in flames. California Democrats are up in arms and looking to channel their anti-Bush rage. He’s going to be the fall guy.

I’ve helped to document the pernicious influence of lefty language guru George Lakoff in All the President’s Spin and on this blog. But I never expected the Democrats to be so stupid when they try to use Lakoff’s flawed ideas for reframing policy debates. Both Howard Dean and now Phil Angelides have recently engaged in explicit discussion of framing tactics, which focuses attention on strategy rather than policy and (correctly) makes them look manipulative.

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Howard Dean’s appearance on “Meet the Press” featured the admission that “we were outmanipulated by the Republicans” on the issue of abortion — a tacit acknowledgement that Democrats tried to manipulate voters on abortion, but Republicans were better at it.

Now Mark Schmitt brings word of a similarly strange bit of self-confession from Phil Angelides, the Democratic treasurer of California and a prospective candidate for governor:

So I’m going to do it the way every good politician does: By reframing the issue. I am here to tell you today that we are not going to save the planet by converting one Hummer at a time.

No wonder the party can’t win elections!

On June 7, Eric Alterman wrote this on his Altercation blog:

This just in: The new ABC News/Washington Post poll, here, shows 52 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Bush is doing overall, reports ABC News’ Polling director Gary Langer — the most in more than 75 ABC/Post polls since his presidency began. His approval rating is 48 percent…
George W. Bush’s approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton’s was on the day he was impeached. Dear media, that means you gotta stop referring to him as a “popular president,” and no less important, stop treating him like one. If you want to be wimps about everything, fine, just don’t blame it on his ‘popularity.’ Blame it on yourselves.

So, out of curiousity about whether the press still buys into the myth that Bush is popular, I searched on Nexis for the phrase “popular president” that Alterman put in quotes. And, amazingly enough, a search of the major newspapers and news transcripts categories showed that no reporters or pundits have used it to refer to Bush since his inauguration — except for the frequently idiotic Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball”. Here’s the first example:

Matthews (4/11/05): “Let me ask you about this thing, about George Bush, George W. Bush. He’s been an amazingly popular president, much more popular than either of the guys who ran against him, obviously.”

According to Matthews, Bush was “much more popular” than Al Gore and John Kerry, yet Bush lost the popular vote to Gore and defeated Kerry by the narrowest margin of any president who’s been re-elected since Woodrow Wilson. And according to Gallup, Bush’s approval rating at the time of Matthews’ comments was an utterly mediocre 50 percent.

Matthews repeated the claim a month later, with somewhat more restrained language (“pretty popular” versus “amazingly popular”):

Matthews (5/11/05): “[W]e have a pretty popular president. I looked at the polls the other day. The president bounced up there again about 50 percent. People oftentimes like him more than some of his program ideas, even with the war. Does he have a successor?”

Still, it stretches credulity to call 50 percent (the correct number at the time according to Gallup) “pretty popular.”

Just for the sake of comparison, here’s Matthews on the “Today” show on 9/14/98 referring to Bill Clinton as no longer popular at a time when the Gallup poll showed Clinton’s approval rating at 63 percent:

You know what would be great for our system, if the president would come on television and say, you know what, I’m firing my lawyers, they’ve been charging me $ 400 an hour to lie to you. I’m going to tell you everything that happened, live with it. I think you’re still going to like me. If he had done that in January, he’d be still popular today. If he does it today, really does it, doesn’t play the game, the good cop/bad cop where he tells sort of an apology while his bad–bad guys are out there lying again I think the country would say, you know what, Bill, we liked you the first day we met you, we still like you.

Now, obviously people were mad at Clinton personally at the time due to the Lewinsky affair, and that anger wasn’t fully reflected in his approval ratings. But it’s pretty obvious that Matthews’ standards for presidential popularity are a little different this time around.

Writing in the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen makes a strange argument:

Yet even as interest groups were bemoaning the fact that a handful of centrists had narrowly prevented the Senate from blowing itself up [with the deal averting the nuclear option], the country as a whole was applauding the compromise. An independent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University found that 55 percent of respondents thought the filibuster should be used to keep unfit judges off the bench, as opposed to 36 percent who thought it should not. Moreover, the country seemed less worried about partisan judges than about partisan senators and representatives. In the days before the deal, a CBS News poll found that 68 percent of respondents said that Congress ”does not have the same priorities for the country” as they do. By contrast, the Quinnipiac poll found that a 44 percent plurality approved of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job.

Put another way, it would seem that, on balance, the views of a majority of Americans are more accurately represented by the moderate majority on the Supreme Court, led in recent years by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, than by the polarized party leadership in the Senate, led by Bill Frist and Harry Reid.

As Sam Rosenfeld noted in Tapped (see also Eric Alterman), these data just do not support Rosen’s claim. Methodologically, Rosen is comparing apples and oranges: a question about the priorities of Congress from one poll versus a question about approval of the Supreme Court from another. Second, the military and the judiciary almost always have higher approval ratings than Congress because they are generally backed by elites on both sides of the partisan divide. And it’s not clear that the comparison is meaningful. Approval of the Court — an explicitly non-representative body considering esoteric legal questions — does not seem directly comparable to approval ratings for Congress, which is a representative assembly with the job of addressing pressing public issues.

And even if Rosen is right that we should compare the public’s views of Congress and the Supreme Court, he’s wrong about what the numbers say. If you actually read the Quinnipiac polling results, you find that voter approval of the Court is quite low:

Voters nationwide approve 44 – 39 percent of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing, the lowest score for the court and down from a 56 – 27 percent approval in a March 5, 2003, poll by the independent Quinnipiac University.

Those approval numbers aren’t much better than the ones that other polls have found for Congress as a whole in the last month, which range from 29
percent to 41 percent, with approval ratings of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress in the 35 percent to 42 percent range.

Finally, a Gallup poll that ran as a sidebar to Rosen’s article, but which isn’t cited in the text, shows that 41 percent of Americans trust the Supreme Court “a great deal” or “a lot” – more than Congress (22 percent), but less than the presidency (44 percent). These numbers also seem to contradict Rosen’s thesis given that President Bush is the most partisan president in recent memory.

In short, the argument is a mess.

Update 6/16: Rosenfeld notes a new Pew poll showing a similiarly dramatic drop in favorability ratings of the Supreme Court among the public — the Court is viewed favorably by only 57 percent of Americans (down from 68 percent in January 2001), compared with 49 percent for Congress.

Ah ha! According to Google News, the Washington Post and New York Times aren’t alone in putting the anti-lynching resolution in the context of George Allen’s ugly history on racial issues — here’s the report from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one of Allen’s home state papers:

An Allen presidential campaign could spotlight the apology resolution if controversial parts of his record on race were targeted.

When he ran for the Senate in 2000, foes accused Allen of insensitivity to blacks. Newspaper stories reported he had displayed a noose in his former law office and had kept a Confederate flag in his home in Albemarle County.

When the Senate apology measure was introduced, Allen was quizzed by a CNN interviewer about his record, including his having promoted a Confederate history and heritage month when he was governor.

“One goes through life learning, and when one sees things that are wrong in the past and folks come to request my assistance, I wanted to help them,” he replied, referring to the apology measure.

Allen said last year that he no longer displays the Confederate flag and that he is a flag collector. An Allen aide said then that the noose was part of a law-and-order motif for Allen’s former law office, and it had nothing to do with racial issues.

What this leaves out, however, is Allen’s dissembling in February about the noose, which he called “more of a lasso” — the “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” of his image cleanup campaign.