Brendan Nyhan

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-CJR’s Greg Marx joins the call for reporters to acknowledge role of economy in political outcomes
-GWU’s John Sides illustrates how trust in government is closely linked to the state of the economy
-The bad economy/low trust combination is again bringing forward various naïve reform proposals like these — shades of “electronic town halls” circa 1992
-How Borders can make a social scientist cry
-Bayh’s timing may help Dems by letting party choose most centrist candidate — Ellsworth and Hill are some of the most conservative House Democrats (although obviously Democrats’ odds of retaining the seat fall dramatically with Bayh’s departure)
–The Bayh-for-president rumors, including speculation about a primary challenge to Obama, make no sense — in what world does he win Democratic primaries? The base loathes him.
-Every time I start to feel bad for Dan Quayle, he says something like this

Geoffrey Dickens at Newsbusters catches Fox News host Geraldo Rivera accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” and “encouraging another attack” by criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy.

During an interview Sunday with conservative pundit Ann Coulter, Rivera said the following (MP3 audio):

But don’t you think when the former Vice President says America is weaker than it has been that you are giving aid and comfort to the enemy, that you are encouraging another attack?

Rivera joins an emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left that includes Salon’s Joan Walsh, Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan (here and here), and New York Times columnist Frank Rich. I’ve started a timeline of these attacks here.

October 2009: Time’s Joe Klein suggests that some Fox News content “borders on sedition” and consists of “seditious lies.” DNC spokesperson Brad Woodhouse states that “The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize,” adding that Republicans have “proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn.” This statement was echoed by Media Matters and Daily Kos.

December 2009: Time’s Joe Klein describes a statement by Senator Tom Coburn that “There’s a lot of people out there today who…will say, ‘I give up on my government,’ and rightly so” as “borderline sedition.”

January 2010: Salon’s Joan Walsh smears Republican criticism of President Obama as “un-American” and “traitorous” on MSNBC and asked if they “want to give aid and comfort to our enemies.” Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan accuses Republican critics of the White House as “playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort.” New York Times columnist Frank Rich claims (without providing evidence) that John McCain “epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition” to Obama.

February 2010: Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan again attacks GOP critics of the president’s security decisions, writing that “[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” Fox News host Geraldo Rivera describes former Vice President Dick Cheney as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” and “encouraging another attack” for criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter suggests Republican criticism of Obama “emboldens the terrorists” and will “[give] serious help to the terrorists.”

April 2010: Time’s Joe Klein says recent harsh criticism of the Obama administration “from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin — were right next — right up close to being seditious.”

May 2010: Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick describes harsh opposition to President Obama in Washington as “almost at the level of sedition.”

July 2010: After RNC chair Michael Steele criticizes the war in Afghanistan, DNC spokesperson Brad Woodhouse states that Steele is “rooting for failure” and “undermin[ing] the morale of our troops.”

February 2012: In a response to a report that was critical of US drone strikes in Pakistan, a “senior American counterterrorism official” suggested that critics of the US policy want to help Al Qaeda: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

March 2015: The New York Daily News brands the Republican senators who wrote an open letter to the leaders of Iran “TRAITORS” in a front-page headline.

August 2015: President Obama says Iranian hardliners opposed to the nuclear deal are “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”

December 2015: The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes that “the constant sniping at each other does nothing to defeat the Islamic State. As those old soldiers on the Mall taught us, victory comes from unity.”

In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein points out that GOP obstruction of the confirmation process is making it more difficult for President Obama to fire his appointees because they can’t be easily replaced.

It’s worth noting the irony of this result. In the past, Republicans have argued against labor market regulations that would reduce firms’ flexibility to fire their workers, arguing that businesses won’t hire new employees if they aren’t free to reduce their workforce as needed. We’re now witnessing the same dynamic in reverse. Obama can’t fire underperforming appointees — the ones Republicans would seemingly most wish to see removed — because GOP obstructionism limits his inability to hire new ones. It’s a bizarre and counterproductive outcome.

Via Steve Benen, Stephanie Condon at CBSNews.com highlights a widespread misperception about changes in taxes under President Obama:

Of all the very information that came out of the recent CBS News/New York Times poll, one question stuck out, that of taxes.

Here’s the poll question: “In general, do you think the Obama Administration has increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans or have they kept taxes the same for most Americans?”

The answer:

• 24 percent of respondents said they INCREASED taxes.

• 53 percent said they kept taxes the same

• And 12 percent said taxes were decreased.

Of people who support the grassroots, “Tea Party” movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

Condon offers two possible explanations:

If so many tax cuts were passed, why have so few Americans actually noticed them?

Possibility 1 – the tax cuts were expansive, but small.

While the majority of the tax cuts, passed last February, affected 95 percent of working families, when they took affect by April of 2009, the monetary value was not too large — most families saw about $70 more in take home pay every month. Individual workers saw about $13 more a week.

Any tax relief is still relief, but many Americans may not have felt that the tax cuts had much impact.

Possibility 2 – the talk of raising taxes in the future clouded the landscape.

In his 2011 budget, the president has already made it clear that his administration wants to end the Bush–era tax cuts for wealthier families, set to expire next year. So it could be that people see that move as a tax hike already.

Both explanations are plausible, but the divergence between Tea Party supporters and other Americans suggest that the influence of these factors varies depending on people’s underlying views of Obama — a finding is consistent with previous evidence showing widespread divergence in partisan perceptions of the deficit, inflation, etc.

Update 2/15 9:42 PM: Along similar lines, see this Boston Globe article on misperceptions about rising crime, which also have a partisan component:

The year 2009 was a grim one for many Americans, but there was one pleasant surprise amid all the drear: Citizens, though ground down and nerve-racked by the recession, still somehow resisted the urge to rob and kill one another, and they resisted in impressive numbers. Across the country, FBI data show that crime last year fell to lows unseen since the 1960s – part of a long trend that has seen crime fall steeply in the United States since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, however, another change has taken place: a steady rise in the percentage of Americans who believe crime is getting worse. The vast majority of Americans – nearly three-quarters of the population – thought crime got worse in the United States in 2009, according to Gallup’s annual crime attitudes poll. That, too, is part of a running trend. As crime rates have dropped for the past decade, the public belief in worsening crime has steadily grown. The more lawful the country gets, the more lawless we imagine it to be…

The increasingly divisive partisanship of the past two decades may also play a role. Political scientists have found again and again that when the other party has the White House, hard-core partisans will invariably think the country is doing worse than it is. According to Gallup data, in 2004, for example, with a Republican in the White House, 67 percent of Democrats believed crime was up, to the Republicans’ 39 percent. Once Barack Obama was elected, however, the percentage of Republicans who believed crime was rising jumped from 63 to 79, while Democrats stubbornly held at 72. “People are extraordinarily partisan in the way they answer questions about the national scene,” says Gallup’s Saad. And the more partisan the country becomes, the stronger this effect is likely to be.

Matthew Yglesias imagines a counterfactual in which the Democrats enjoyed more legislative success during Obama’s first year in office:

If congress had committed itself to expeditiously enacting administration proposals on stimulus, on health care, on climate, and on financial regulatory reform the economy would be in better shape, Obama would be more popular, and congressional Democrats would be more popular.

Boosting the economy via a larger stimulus would likely have improved Obama’s standing, and thereby the Democrats’, but I’m skeptical that passing the other measures would have increased their approval ratings. It seems more likely that a series of liberal legislative victories would accelerate the expected shift in public opinion toward a preference for smaller government, and thereby reduce the popularity of Obama and the Democrats in the short to medium term.

Talking Points Memo’s Eric Kleefeld catches Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) reversing his position on smears designed to silence critics of the government’s foreign policy.

During the Bush years, Lieberman repeatedly suggested that criticism of the President and his foreign policy aided Al Qaeda and endangered the country. However, after Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan smeared Republican critics of the President as “serv[ing] the goals of al-Qaeda,” Lieberman said the following on MSNBC:

You can have a difference of opinion about how the Christmas-Day Bomber should have been treated without turning it into a political debate or suggesting that anybody who doesn’t agree with the way the administration handled the Christmas-Day Bomber is somehow giving aid and comfort to al-Qaeda.

However, one could raise similar questions about TPM itself, which has raised no objections about Brennan’s language despite criticizing previous attacks on dissent under President Bush (see, for instance, this Josh Marshall post back in 2003). It’s sad how few people and organizations have a consistent perspective on this issue.

Update 2/12 11:25 AM: While I was drafting this post, Josh Marshall posted a tortured parsing of the difference between the words of Brennan and previous Republicans:

A lot of people are saying that John Brennan went too far by saying that “politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” Given the past administration’s habit of arguing that dissent or questioning of counter-terrorism policies played into the hands of the terrorists, the words may have been ill-chosen. But it is simply wrong to equate the two things. Indeed, it’s the kind of distinction, regrettably, the daily press is seldom able to grasp, putting simple, structural equations above the substance of what is actually being said.

If you look at what Brennan actually said it was that sowing panic, telling people that the terrorists are far more powerful than they are and that our institutions are incapable of defending us against them just makes them seem more frightening than they are. That seems qualitatively different than trying to forbid any question of just how great the threat is or the means we’re using to counter it. In both cases, in and out of power, the Republicans are about the political mobilization of fear.

Contrast that with the conclusion to Kleefeld’s article:

We’ve contacted Lieberman’s office for comment on how these situations might be different. They have not gotten back to us at this time.

More substantively, it’s worth noting again that Brennan has made this point twice. Neither case is fully consistent with Marshall’s parsing.

First, consider what Brennan said in July:

“A lot of the knuckleheads I’ve been listening to out there on the network shows don’t know what they’re talking about,” he told me after the Christmas Day attempt. Some Republicans, including Cheney, were blatantly mischaracterizing the record, he fumed. “When they say the administration’s not at war with Al Qaeda, that is just complete hogwash.” It was the angriest I had heard him during months of conversations. “What they’re doing is just playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort, which is to get us to battle among ourselves instead of focusing on them,” he said. [emphasis added]

The point Brennan is making is that any political controversy sparked by GOP criticism (i.e. “get[ting] us to battle among ourselves”) necessarily detracts from the anti-Al Qaeda effort. Regardless of the substance of the dispute over the Christmas Day attack, his statement is a direct attack on dissent.

In the second case, while there was again a substantive dispute over anti-terrorism policy of the sort that Marshall notes, the reach of Brennan’s statement about “[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering” is much broader:

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America’s counterterrorism professionals and America’s system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd. [emphasis added]

Indeed, as I’ve argued, Brennan’s words closely track those of John Ashcroft in his infamous testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee — just switch the allegation from fear-mongering about the Al Qaeda threat to fear-mongering about the threat to civil liberties:

BRENNAN: Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.

ASHCROFT: To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists – for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

In short, Marshall’s claims contradict Kleefeld’s article and are unpersuasive on their own merits.

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Via Matthew Yglesias, Mark Schmitt has a nice take on how Harold Ford’s campaign is the latest independent/third party fantasy (see also my previous posts on the subject)
-My friend and former grad student colleague Kevin Morrison is featured in a Slate article on game theory and healthcare reform
-Emory’s Alan Abramowitz argues that Congressional popularity doesn’t matter in elections
-Princeton’s Sam Wang on the limits of fMRI studies of political opinion formation (the “new phrenology”)
-Shame on Oprah for giving a talk show to professional vaccine misinformer Jenny McCarthy
-Is there anything more idiotic than making up stories about why politics caused the stock market to do X?
–Best FOIA request ever — all files on UFOs, Roswell, flying saucers, Area 51 or the X-Files in John Podesta’s files from the Clinton White House

Senator Kit Bond of Missouri has called for the resignation of Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan after the publication of a USA Today op-ed in which Brennan smeared Republican critics of the President as “serv[ing] the goals of al-Qaeda.” It was the second time he had made such a claim — back in January, Brennan said that Republicans critics of the administration were “playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort.”

The White House responded to the call for Brennan’s resignation by issuing a statement yesterday calling Bond “pathetic”:

Through his pathetic attack on a counter-terrorism professional like John Brennan who has spent his lifetime protecting this country under multiple Administrations, Senator Bond sinks to new depths in his efforts to put politics over our national security.

In other words, the White House is not only standing by Brennan, but doubling down on his tactics (by claiming Bond is “put[ting] politics over our national security”). I hold no brief for Bond, who has engaged in equally disreputable smears of Obama, but I’m still waiting for the Democrats who were offended by the Bush administration’s tactics to speak up against Brennan and his boss.

It looks like I’ll be talking about President Obama’s approval rating on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “At Issue with Ben Merens” today from 5:07-6:00 PM EST. You can listen live here on WPR’s Ideas Network.

Update 2/11 4:40 PM: Never mind — it’s off.