Brendan Nyhan

It received almost no media attention here in the US, but the cause of democracy won a major victory yesterday. Under pressure from other African countries, the ruler of Togo was forced to resign yesterday, aborting an unconstitutional takeover of power. And Hosni Mubarak is promising a multi-party presidential election in Egypt, though his regime has imprisoned an opposition leader and it’s not clear whether this is a feint to placate critics abroad. Still, today I will join David Brooks in celebrating the cause of people around the world pushing for democracy, and be hopeful.

Dueling press releases:

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: “THE REVIEWS ARE IN: SANTORUM’S SOCIAL SECURITY ROADSHOW WAS A BUST!!! … Pennsylvanians – Young and Old – Reject Santorum’s Scheme to Privatize Social Security”

National Republican Senatorial Committee: “Rather Than Offer Ideas or Solutions, Democrats Offer Doom and Gloom Attack Politics… Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) Social Security Town Hall Meetings Are A Success”

I’m not sure what the NRSC is talking about here. Both sides clip the most favorable quotes out of context from media reports on Santorum’s meetings with constituents, but even Santorum himself was forced to admit to the New York Times that the meetings did not go well:

After a bruising weeklong recess, Congressional Republicans will return to work on Monday chastened by public skepticism over President Bush’s plan for private accounts in Social Security. One leading Republican, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, acknowledged that the opposition was better organized while another, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said bipartisan compromise was unlikely unless the president can change the public mood.

“It’s a heavy lift,” Mr. Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said Friday, after a week spent crisscrossing his home state to play host to 17 town-hall-style meetings. He said the sessions ended “without my getting much of a consensus of where people are, except general confusion,” and with the president still facing “a major job of educating people.”

The story was much the same throughout the country, as Republicans – some already skittish over Mr. Bush’s plan – spent the week trying to assuage nervous constituents. Instead of building support for Mr. Bush’s proposal to allow younger workers to divert payroll taxes into private retirement accounts, some of the events turned into fractious gripe sessions and others did not go nearly as well as their hosts had hoped.

…Mr. Santorum complained that he was dogged all week by opponents of the White House plan who dominated news coverage. Mr. Santorum, who is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership and chairman of the subcommittee on Social Security, was heckled by college students – the very audience the Bush administration was counting on – and peppered with questions from retirees.

“Clearly the other side is better organized,” Mr. Santorum said. “They got people to all these events. They had seniors lined up to ask questions, they had staff people running up passing them notes.”

Even so, Mr. Santorum described himself as encouraged at the level of interest; both he and Mr. Grassley said it was far too early to predict the outcome…

AARP, the powerful retirees’ organization that opposes private accounts financed by payroll taxes, has been tracking the meetings…/p>

“We’ve yet to find one where there was an enthusiastic reception,” said John Rother, the group’s policy director. “The most positive reception people are getting is lots of questions, and there’s significant skepticism. This is proving to be a tough sell, and our polling suggests that the more people know, the harder the sell.”

As I said a couple of weeks ago, Bush’s plan is dead in the water and no one knows it yet. The White House has not been able to create a majority coalition in favor of private accounts, and the intensity of feeling at the grassroots is much stronger among opponents. The only question is when the administration will start moving toward a less risky compromise or pivot to another issue.

Update 2/27: The Washington Post reports that Republicans are already start to push for such a compromise, and offer this ominous warning:

Over four years, this president usually has chosen defiance rather than difference-splitting in dealing with opponents. He has dismissed making premature concessions by saying he does not like to “negotiate with myself.”

But history suggests waiting too long can be equally self-defeating. In late 1993 and early 1994, there were ample signs that Clinton’s comprehensive health care plan was in trouble, but there were also many senior Republicans who said they would work with him to pass incremental reforms. Some of these measures would have been substantial — expanding health insurance for children or providing subsidies to help more individuals buy their own insurance.

Clinton, at the urging of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, refused to yield. In the 1994 State of the Union address, he waved a pen and warned Congress that he would veto any plan that did not meet his goal of universal coverage for every American. By summer, when it become obvious that his comprehensive plan was dead, Republicans were relishing Clinton’s political troubles and none was still willing to compromise. That fall, Republicans swept to control in Congress, an advantage they keep to this day.

The Washington Post has published a useful fact-check of misleading claims about Social Security, including two I’ve flagged before: Bush’s claim that Social Security going “bankrupt” and Democratic suggestions that Bush’s private accounts plan is intended to enrich Wall Street. But Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Weisman mess up the numbers pretty badly in the middle of the story:

For virtually everyone, those future rates of return [under the traditional Social Security system] would fall below the 4.6 percent gains the government actuary anticipates for money that would be invested in personal accounts under Social Security. But under the administration proposal, anyone investing in the accounts would lose 3 percent of their gains to help finance the new system. So beating the current system is not a sure thing.

This is just wrong. People who create private accounts would not lose “3 percent of their gains” – they would have their benefits reduced by the amount of funds diverted into their private accounts plus 3 percent interest. Depending on the returns they receive on their investments, that could amount to as much as 100% of their gains or more. Weisman is an economics reporter who already had to correct a story explaining how Bush’s “benefit offset” plan would work; shouldn’t he be able to get this right by now? It’s reminiscent of all the reporters who wrote that 4 percent of payroll taxes would be diverted into private accounts rather than 4 percent of eligible salary.

Update 2/27: I emailed Weisman and a number of editors yesterday in an attempt to notify them about this mistake so it could be corrected before Sunday’s final print editions went out, but I’ve received no response and the online edition still contains the same error. I’m starting to get annoyed with the Post, which also ignored my request for a correction explaining the definition of “waterboarding” after they published two different definitions.

Courtesy of Robert Cox, the proprietor of TheNationalDebate.com and the driving force behind the Media Bloggers Association (of which I’m a member), here is MP3 audio of the relevant portion of Chris Cox’s highly misleading speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. (For those who are interested, Bob has an interesting and thoughtful post up about his experience blogging at CPAC.)

In the Washington Post today, E.J. Dionne gently mocks the Democrats’ Commission on Presidential Nomination Timing and Scheduling:

When the going gets tough, Democrats form commissions.

It’s an old habit: If an election is lost, there must be some fix in the party’s rules and procedures that will turn things around.

The commission is co-chaired by Rep. David Price (D-NC), who is my Congressman and a professor in Duke’s department of political science (where I’m a graduate student). Dionne praises Price, but urges the commission to examine larger questions about Democratic “values, ideas and policies.” This is silliness. A commission is not the way to address those questions; does anyone think that Price could actually change the party’s values or policies by issuing a report? The changes that are needed will take time and happen in a necessarily decentralized and chaotic way; the process can’t be managed from above.

More importantly, when Dionne belittles procedural reform, he’s missing a crucial point. From a small-d democratic perspective, the front-loaded nomination process is a bad thing. It creates a bandwagon dynamic based on a few primaries in small states, preventing most party members from having a voice in the choosing of the nominee. And from a tactical perspective, the nominee that emerges is not battle-tested, which ends up hurting them in the end. In 2004, John Kerry essentially won the nomination over the course of a month as a result of positioning himself as the viable candidate who was not Howard Dean. He never had to establish a winning positive message, and he paid dearly for it in the general election. Of course, that’s not the only reason he lost, but the way in which he was chosen so quickly did not help him or the Democrats.

Let’s hope Price ignores Dionne and focuses on reforming a process that badly needs it.

My friend Ben Fritz, who co-edited Spinsanity with me and Bryan Keefer, has a good post up on his blog about two creative ideas to promote national service. First, Philip Longman wrote a fascinating article in the Washington Monthly about innovation in medical care at the Veterans Administration. It’s so good, Longman argues, that we should consider expanding VA eligibility to the parents or relatives of young people who complete a national service requirement. And a Boston Globe op-ed by two City Year executives endorses a New America Foundation proposal for a “National Service Baby Bond” — a fund invested at birth for children by the government that would grow over their lifetime and could be redeemed after two years of national service. Ben is a passionate advocate of national service after spending a year in Americorps’ National Civilian Community Corps (read his Salon article about it). It’s time to start implementing these kinds of proposals, which will encourage more people to have that same kind of experience.

I called Rep. Chris Cox’s office this morning to ask if he had been accurately quoted in the Salon article I posted on over the weekend, which includes this passage:

Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.” Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

I just received this statement in response from Cox via James Freeman, his legislative and communications director:

Michelle Goldberg, writing in Salon, has committed the egregious but all-too-common journalistic sin of tendentiously editing quoted material. The sentence she quotes was not a vague, general statement. Rather, it was immediately followed by two sentences that clearly explained the biological agent referred to was ricin and the chemical agent was sarin — and that these might be packaged in, among other things, perfume containers.

Here is the passage in context (note there is NO reference to WMDs, which is an assumption you made, understandably, based on the tendentious report that appeared in Salon):

“Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Left persists with the fiction that our efforts in Iraq are a distraction from the war on terrorism. No, this is the war on terrorism. We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq, and even more about their intended use. A plan to disperse sarin and the lethal poison ricin in the United States and Europe was actively being pursued as late as March 2003. The facility in which the weapons were being made also housed a large inventory of perfume atomizers of various shapes and sizes to mimic the existing brands on the store shelves in the United States. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand the implications, but it does take imagination and determination to combat it, which is why it is so important we have an administration that gets it.”

What I said came straight from news reports the preceding weekend. That is why, as Goldberg wrote, “most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries” and did not gasp when I said it. The following is excerpted from the article “Oil-for-Food a Failure From the Start?” which appeared on FoxNews.com on Sunday, February 13, 2005:

The Iraqi Survey Group also found that supposed “humanitarian” imports under Oil-for-Food gave Saddam the ability to restart his biological and chemical warfare programs at a moment’s notice. [UN weapons inspector Richard] Spertzel said what scared him the most in Iraq was the discovery of secret labs to make deadly weapons like the nerve agent, sarin, and the biological poison, ricin, in spray form.

“If that were released in a closed [area], such as Madison Square Garden or, even some, some of your smaller closed malls, shopping malls, it would have a devastating effect … killing hundreds or thousands,” Spertzel said.

But Spertzel believes Saddam was cooking up an even more sinister plan – putting the poisons on department store shelves across the United States and Europe. He said that plan was “actively pursued” as late as March 2003. And that plan was at least, in part, funded by Saddam’s corrupt Oil-for-Food activities.

“Some of the photographs that were obtained from this same laboratory had multiple different shapes of glass spray bottles, perfume spray bottles – presumably to mimic different brand names,” Spertzel said. “Can you imagine somebody going into Macy’s department store and spray a little bit of a perfume to see whether they like the scent, only instead of perfume they’re getting a face full of sarin?

“That would kill within, within a few minutes. If this were to appear at a couple different locations, imagine the economic impact in the U.S. – people would be afraid to buy anything.”

There is an enormous difference between what I said (and clearly did NOT say about WMD), on the one hand, and what you inferred, based on the skimpy Salon out-of-context quote, that I must have said about new discoveries of Iraq WMD. Sarin and ricin are ugly terrorist tools, but they are a separate issue — and my remarks left no doubt which I was talking about. You may not agree with my political judgment — that it’s good we have an administration that “gets it” — but I hope you will help me point out that I have been misquoted. I appreciate your saying that I am a very trustworthy person (that is the message that was passed on to me) and I have every intention of remaining so.

Thanks.

Sincerely,
Chris Cox

Just to clarify, I didn’t say Cox was “trustworthy”; that’s a message that was garbled in translation. What I actually did say to his press secretary was that I thought of Cox as being smart and well-informed, so I was surprised to read the quote and wanted to verify that it was accurate. Unfortunately, I’m disappointed to say that it may be time to reassess my view of him — he’s misconstruing the FoxNews.com article that he claims backs him up and exaggerating scraps of evidence from the Duelfer Report.

First, how can he claim that “there is NO reference to WMDs” in his statement? He specifically said “weapons and facilities.” Second, the Fox article never describes the discovery of “biological and chemical weapons” in Iraq. In fact, it specifically says “CIA investigators recovered no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” (though it later implies weapons were found, saying the UN “could have done more to stop Saddam from acquiring deadly weapons”). In addition, Cox’s claim about an alleged plan to “disperse sarin and the lethal poison ricin in the United States and Europe” is also wrong. He refers to “[t]he facility in which the weapons [ricin and sarin] were being made,” but the article never says that such weapons were being produced there. Instead, FoxNews.com refers to Saddam’s “ability to restart his biological and chemical warfare programs at a moment’s notice” and “secret labs to make deadly weapons.”

If Cox had consulted the Duelfer Report, the definitive compilation of the findings of the Iraqi Survey Group, it states (PDF) that “While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter.” And as the liberal group Media Matters points out, the report states that the alleged perfume-sprayer plan reportedly could not be carried out due to a lack of chemical weapons agents:

A former IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] officer claimed that the M16 directorate had a plan to produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard in rifle grenades, and a plan to bottle Sarin and sulfur mustard in perfume sprayers and medicine bottles which they would ship to the United States and Europe. The source claimed that they could not implement the plan because chemicals to produce the CW agents were unavailable.

A few chemical munitions have been found, but they all appear to all be leftover pre-1991 stocks:

Since May 2004, ISG has recovered dozens of additional chemical munitions, including artillery rounds, rockets and a binary Sarin artillery projectile (see Figure 5). In each case, the recovered munitions appear to have been part of the pre-1991 Gulf war stocks, but we can neither determine if the munitions were declared to the UN or if, as required by the UN SCR 687, Iraq attempted to destroy them.

Also, there was no evidence (PDF) found of an active biological weapons program:

ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW
program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite
evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of
discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.
Iraq would have faced great difficulty in re-establishing an effective BW agent production capability. Nevertheless,
after 1996 Iraq still had a signifi cant dual-use capability—some declared—readily useful for BW
if the Regime chose to use it to pursue a BW program.

…Depending on its scale, Iraq could have re-established an elementary BW program within a few weeks to a
few months of a decision to do so, but ISG discovered no indications that the Regime was pursuing such a
course.

…ISG judges that in 1991 and 1992, Iraq appears to have destroyed its undeclared stocks of BW weapons
and probably destroyed remaining holdings of bulk BW agent. However ISG lacks evidence to document
complete destruction. Iraq retained some BW-related seed stocks until their discovery after Operation Iraqi
Freedom (OIF).

So once again — what is Chris Cox talking about? This is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee we’re talking about. Why do I know more about the Duelfer Report than he does?

Update 2/22: Congressman Cox just called me to follow up on his email. I guess he hadn’t read this post yet. He was very gracious, and in fairness to him I do want to emphasize something that I neglected in my original post. The Salon article should have included the references he made to the sarin/ricin lab. Cox did not make a general statement about the discovery of WMDs — it was a specific factual claim, and should have been reported as such. That said, however, I did say to him that I believed he was misrepresenting the FoxNews.com article and urged him to re-read it. I also tried to make clear why I believe that his remarks were substantively misleading given the findings of the Duelfer Report that Iraq did not have active biological or chemical weapons programs.

One final clarification: When Cox states in his email above that “there is NO reference to WMDs,” he was apparently making a distinction between nuclear and biological weapons, which are weapons of mass destruction in the sense of being able to kill many thousands of people, and ricin and sarin, which are smaller-scale chemical weapons. He emphasized this distinction to me and said that he doesn’t think of ricin and sarin as WMDs. I pointed out to him that they are usually classified as chemical weapons, but we agreed that the term “weapons of mass destruction” is vague and it’s better to speak precisely about different types of weapons.

[Disclosure: Spinsanity was a featured column on Salon for most of 2002.]

It’s been clear for months that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and had a very limited WMD program before the war. Yet in late October 27% of Americans falsely believed that Iraq had WMD before the war and an additional 22% believed it had a major WMD program (PIPA poll [PDF] – see page 8). The message is not getting through because the White House and other conservative elites are encouraging these misperceptions. The latest offender is Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA), who Salon just caught making stuff up (via Atrios and Kevin Drum):

“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.”

Where’s the proof, Congressman? Let’s get Charles Duelfer on the phone ASAP!

In all seriousness, if the media doesn’t follow up on this, there is no hope. None. We need to make sure Salon quoted him accurately, but if they did, there should be hell to pay.

Dan Drezner and Kevin Drum are mulling a question that I had a couple days ago — are blogs really bringing down high-profile targets like Trent Lott, Howell Raines and Eason Jordan, or is it something else?

The answer, I think, is that the role of the blogosphere is being dramatically overhyped. Here’s why. Within any institution, there are a number of possible coalitions that could be organized against its leader(s) depending on what issues are relevant. The problem their opponents face is that, even if the leaders are unpopular, there is no easy way to coordinate on an angle of attack when the system is in equilibrium. But when a leader trips up and a blog-fueled media frenzy ensues, it shocks the system out of equilibrium and provides what Thomas Schelling, one of the giants of game theory, called a “focal point” that opponents can coordinate around to construct a new majority coalition. So when a leader goes down, the underlying cause is the coalition of forces pushing them out, which in most cases is only partly driven by whatever provoked the blogs in the first place.

The evidence suggests that this has been the case for almost all of the prominent “blog scalps,” which capitalized on pre-existing discontent or vulnerability to push someone out of an institution where they were forced to answer to a constituency. Think of Howell Raines at the New York Times or Jordan at CNN. A similar process is going on right now at Harvard (though blogs have played a relatively minor role there) — deeply rooted faculty opposition to Larry Summers’ leadership has coalesced in an attack on his comments about female underrepresentation in math and science. If he goes down, will his comments have been the cause? Only in a very shallow sense. Or consider the flip side of this phenomenon. Many other public figures who’ve been targeted by blogs (Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Maureen Dowd, Brit Hume, etc.) have ridden out the storm because they either don’t answer to a constituency or have institutionally secure positions.

It’s time to stop getting so carried away with the influence of blogs — helping make it possible to take out a few public figures with a weak grasp on power is consequential, but not exactly earth-shattering. And the jury is still out on whether the political blogosphere is playing a positive role in the national debate. As we wrote in All the President’s Spin, blogs can be an important voice for good by fact-checking the media and politicians, but the reality is that the trend is increasingly going in the other direction — we’re seeing growing factionalization and an incentive structure that rewards bad polemics, precisely what Cass Sunstein warned about in his book Republic.com. I hope he’s not proven right.

Update 2/19: My former Spinsanity co-editor Bryan Keefer has a good post along similar lines about partisan hysteria and the thirst for scalps in the blogosphere.

David Horowitz, that shoddy right-wing provocateur, has debuted his latest project, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which is tagged as “A guide to the political left.” I learned about it from an ad in The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, which simply included the URL and promised to reveal who really controls the Democratic Party.

The site claims that it “identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left’s (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas.” But if you click on “individuals”, it includes terrorists (Mohammed Atta, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Zacarias Moussaoui), anti-American dictators (Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro) and other hated and disreputable figures (Lynne Stewart, John Walker Lindh) alongside John Kerry, Barack Obama, Howard Dean and many other mainstream Democrats.

Let’s be clear. There is no possible justification for lumping these disparate figures together other than pure guilt-by-association. The best Horowitz can do is to claim that the section of the site “examines activists for leftwing agendas and causes, radical egalitarians, and opponents of American ‘imperialism.’” This is the crudest sort of pseudo-logic — Kerry, Dean and Obama do not share an agenda or association with Al Qaeda, Castro, Arafat or Khomeini.

The rest of the site appears to consist of recycled articles from Horowitz’s FrontPageMagazine.com and a mapping tool that draws vague links between various left-wing individuals and foundations.

Horowitz is a blight on the political debate. Like Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, he should be shunned.