Brendan Nyhan

Even by the dismal standards of the ideological “watchdogs” who manufacture accusations of media bias, this may be a new low. In a blog post yesterday that is linked on Drudge, Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters denounces journalists for allowing Barack Obama to pick his questioners and offers the reflexive media bias critic’s claim of a double standard (“Would [journalists] have allowed George W. Bush to pre-pick journalists like that?”):

According to Sun-Times columnist and long-time Chicago journalist, Carol Marin, journalists at Barack Obama news conferences have come to realize that Obama has pre-picked those journalists whom he will allow to ask him questions at the conference and many of them now “don’t even bother raising” their hands to be called upon.

One wonders why journalists are allowing this corralling of the press[.] Would they have allowed George W. Bush to pre-pick journalists like that? Would they meekly sit by and allow themselves to be systematically ignored, their freedom to ask questions silenced by any Republican? Would journalists so eagerly vie with one another for the favor of Bush like they are Obama’s?

Huston apparently didn’t watch any of George W. Bush’s press conferences over the last eight years because Bush repeatedly called on members of the press in exactly the same manner as Obama (and they barely protested then either). Here’s what we wrote in All the President’s Spin back in 2004:

[E]ven when Bush has held formal press conferences, he has tightly restricted the format and the order in which he calls on reporters. While hardly unprecedented — presidents have traditionally called on a reporter from one of the wire services for the first question — the Bush administration has gone further than any other, including apparently scripting the entire order for a prewar press conference on March 6, 2003.

Contrary to his expectations, then, the answers to Huston’s questions in the second paragraph quoted above are yes, yes, and yes. Don’t expect him to admit that these facts undermine the premise of his argument any time soon.

Mike Duncan, the head of the RNC, appealed to supporters yesterday (PDF) to express their “Grateful Gratitude to the President” by signing an e-card for him and donating to the RNC. Personally, I would suggest that they express their “thankful thanks” or “congratulatory congratulations,” but that’s just me…

Like many observers, I’m baffled by Barack Obama’s efforts to obtain 80 votes for his economic stimulus proposal in the Senate. Despite concerns from economists such as Paul Krugman that more than $1 trillion in stimulus is needed, Obama has proposed a $775 billion package under the assumption that the cost of the legislation will increase in Congress. He has also reportedly included a large proportion of tax cuts that Krugman and other economists think will be ineffective stimulus measures in order to try to attract additional GOP support.

While sympathetic observers like TNR’s Noam Scheiber and TPM’s Josh Marshall seem willing to assume that Obama is pursuing a brilliant behind-the-scenes strategy, I’m less sanguine. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the economy and other political fundamentals drive presidential elections. If the US gets caught in a Japan-style deflationary trap, it is extremely difficult to imagine Obama being re-elected. No amount of post-inauguration bipartisan goodwill will change that fact, as Matthew Yglesias correctly pointed out (see also Ezra Klein):

News reports over the weekend were talking about how Obama wants to see 80 votes in the Senate for his economic recovery package and I find that pretty puzzling… [I]t’s meaningless. If efforts at creating a strong recovery fail, the opposition will inevitable blame the governing party for the failure irrespective of who voted for what, whereas if efforts at creating a strong recovery succeed nobody will care by what margin it passed. You often find among political operators a tendency to overstate the extent to which little details matter politically when in fact it all tends to get swamped by the big picture.

This worldview is consistent with the approach to the economy taken by Bill Clinton, who passed a deficit reduction plan on a difficult party-line vote during his first year in office. It hurt his party in the 1994 midterm elections but the booming economy helped him defeat Bob Dole by a substantial margin in 1996. (Of course, whether Clinton’s plan helped drive the expansion is a matter for debate, but the administration certainly seemed to believe that it did.) In this case, the downside risk of inaction is far greater than 1993 and the consensus that government action could have a stimulative effect on the economy is far stronger. For those reasons, a fundamentals-driven approach would suggest maximizing the size and effectiveness of a stimulus package that can get 60 votes to defeat a Senate filibuster. The compromises necessary to get 80 votes seem likely to represent an unacceptable risk to the economy.

By contrast, the evidence to date suggests that Obama wants to take a different approach, capitalizing on his emerging honeymoon to split the opposition party and pass his legislation on a relatively bipartisan basis. (The model here might be George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cut.) According to this view, which was laid out by The Note last week, winning a big victory increases Obama’s so-called political capital:

This is not about losing a vote. It’s about losing a weapon. The stimulus package is Obama’s first big legislative push, the one he absolutely cannot afford not to win, on his terms. Winning in style (think 75 or 80 Senate votes) enhances his power when the hard stuff begins.

In other words, the Obama people think the marginal benefit of 15 or 20 extra Senate votes for future legislative initiatives is worth the marginal cost of a smaller and less effective stimulus. I couldn’t disagree more. As Jimmy Carter should have told Obama during the ex-presidents’ lunch last week, a president presiding over a weak economy has a tough time getting anything through Congress and an even tougher time getting re-elected.

Update 1/13 11:40 AM: Scheiber offers some useful thoughts on the Plank:

I’m not sure I completely buy the analogy to, say, Jimmy Carter. I’d guess we’re looking at a situation more analogous to Hoover/FDR, wherein the collapse under Hoover was so precipitous that it discredited the GOP for years and FDR was essentially given points for effort (and for not being a Republican) in 1936, even though we were still in a depression. I’d guess Obama could win re-election if the economy’s still struggling as long as it looks like we’re headed in the right direction and he seems basically competent and engaged. On the other hand, you could argue that our collective patience is much, much lower these days (for a variety of reasons–media, affluence, etc.), so I’m not sure I’d bank on this if I were Obama.

Second, I think Brendan may be slightly undervaluing those extra 15 Senate votes (I doubt it’s going to be 20), given the ambition of Obama’s agenda. Health care reform is going to be incredibly important–both substantively, politically, and to Obama’s legacy–and rancor built up during the stimulus debate could easily poison that process. So I see the logic of wanting the cushion.

Three, I’m hardly convinced a $1.5 trillion stimulus package, or whatever, could pass the Senate by any margin, so you have to wonder if there’s any point in trying. (Or, at least, it’s hard to begrudge team Obama for wondering this…)

Having said all that, I still come down on Brendan’s side, in that I think Obama should maximize the size of the stimulus rather than the number of votes he can pass it with (subject to his $800 billion minimum). The economic scenarios we’re looking at range from bad to terrifying. Beyond the economic and social benefits of avoiding the terrifying scenarios, you’d have to think the political payoffs outweigh everything I’ve just mentioned.

My point is just that, for Obama, it’s a much closer call than you might think.

Scheiber might be right that presidents are essentially graded on a curve for crises they inherit, particularly when the other party is tarnished by its role in creating the crisis, but the evidence is seemingly limited to the FDR case. As far as health care, I think there’s certainly reason for Obama to be concerned about maintaining GOP goodwill, but the reality is that it will take a while to get any legislation through a Congress that already has so much on its agenda. By then, Obama’s political standing with the electorate — which is largely driven by the state of the economy — may have a more significant effect on the GOP support he can attract than the bipartisanship of the Senate stimulus vote.

Mark Leibovich, who I’ve repeatedly criticized in the past, offers a skewed summary of presidential partisanship over the last 16 years in today’s New York Times Week in Review:

George W. Bush began his administration with a promise to “change the tone” in Washington only to end it with a lament over his inability to do so (unless, some argue, he made it worse). Bill Clinton began his second term by calling a halt to “acrimony and division” and then generated buckets of the stuff over the next four years (low-lighted by his own impeachment).

The first sentence suggests that it is a matter of dispute whether Bush, the most polarizing president in American history, increased partisanship and division in Washington. By contrast, Leibovich asserts that Clinton “generated buckets of [acrimony and division]”, including his impeachment, without even mentioning the conservatives who tried to delegitimize and destroy his presidency from his first days in office. While Clinton surely deserves some blame, particularly for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, it’s hard to see him as the prime mover behind the “acrimony and division” of his second term in office.

PS Contrary to Leibovich’s implication, Bush’s goal of “changing the tone” was hardly benign. As we argue in All the President’s Spin, the phrase was used as a way to implicitly delegitimize dissent, particularly after Sept. 11.

TNR's Jon Chait, the most distinguished Kreminologist of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has written an amusing takedown of the WSJ editorial page's bizarre usage of scare quotes:

Other uses of scare quotes so defy convention as to suggest a novel dialect of the English language. One editorial assailed legislation that would legalize "lower-cost 'generic' copies of biopharmaceuticals." Another complained, "we can expect a spate of 'analysis' stories purporting to tell us just how much America's top executives are making." Yet another–siding with Hank Greenberg against Eliot Spitzer–sputtered, "Mr. Spitzer's Starr 'report' claimed that Mr. Greenberg had benefitted from 'self-dealing.'"

Clearly, the Journal stands against, respectively, generic drugs, news analysis about CEO salaries, and accusations against Hank Greenberg. But the scare quotes seem to imply that the Journal further believes generic drugs are not actually "generic," news analysis is not actually "analysis," and Eliot Spitzer's report was not, in fact, a "report." (Would the Journal accept the term "dossier"? "Formal statement"? "Published finding of facts"?)

…The scare quote is the perfect device for making an insinuation without proving it, or even necessarily making clear what you're insinuating. A mundane fact–say, Paul Gigot taking a colleague to dinner–translated into Journal editorial-ese would be rendered, "Wall Street Journal editorial page 'editor' Paul Gigot recently patronized a 'legitimate business establishment' with his 'associate.'"

PS If you enjoy this, you will love The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

In a post that rightly excoriates apparent Surgeon General nominee Sanjay Gupta for his feckless fact-checking of Michael Moore’s Sicko, Ezra Klein acts as if journalists are being unreasonable in scrutinizing Moore’s work closely:

Begin with this: Michael Moore makes journalists lose their mind. They have an almost compulsive need to prove him wrong.

Similarly, Paul Krugman attributes Gupta’s report to “Village behavior”:

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right.

Reading Klein and Krugman, one would think that journalists routinely scrutinize Moore’s work. However, as Ben Fritz and I wrote last year in a column about the debate over Sicko, the reality is that Moore has always been an “uncouth” “outsider” yet his work drew very little mainstream scrutiny for years. Moreover, Fritz, our Spinsanity colleague Bryan Keefer, and I documented an extensive range of inaccuracies, errors, and distortions in Moore’s previous work, including his films “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” and his books “Stupid White Men” and “Dude, Where’s My Country?”. As Fritz and I argued, “[w]hile “Sicko” may not have any major factual errors, we shouldn’t let Moore (or anyone else) whitewash his many problems with the truth.”

I’ve been telling people for years that you can’t trust the Center for American Progress. The latest evidence is a post on their Think Progress blog with the misleading headline “White House Asked Howard To Stay In Blair House To Give ‘Some Plausible Reason’ For Refusing Obama,” which has been widely covered in the blogosphere today.

The problem is that the headline is based on speculation which is blown up and put in quotes as if it were known to be true. The Think Progress post is based on the following statement by Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”:

I reported…on December 11 and 12 that there were no foreign dignitaries booked into Blair House during that period of time… I have the feeling they asked him [Howard] to come and stay so that there might be some plausible reason for not letting the Obamas stay there.

Note the key phrase “I have the feeling,” which is Washington-speak for “I am making something up that will help create a dramatic character-based narrative.” Neither CAP nor Carlson knows what actually happened.

Unfortunately, they have spread the narrative around the blogosphere. For instance, the normally careful Matthew Yglesias, who works for CAP, paraphrases the post by writing “the Bush administration asked former Australian Prime Minister John Howard to stay at the place in order to give them a pretext to turn the Obamas down.” (TNR’s Jonathan Chait is more cautious, writing that he would “like to hear the White House’s explanation before passing judgment.”)

Good news: Chris Matthews is not running for the Senate as I feared. Now he can resume destroying our political culture via inane cable news chatter instead.

Much as it may endear him to hardcore conservatives, I can’t imagine Mark Sanford’s stonewalling on unemployment funds is going to endear him to the national electorate in 2012. Can anyone imagine him being anything other than a Goldwateresque sacrificial lamb?

PS The Times report also includes this detail on a very classy 2004 Sanford publicity stunt — can you say dignity problem?

Mr. Sanford once carried two piglets onto the floor of the House chamber to symbolize his opposition to what he considered wasteful spending. One of the piglets promptly defecated; lawmakers were not amused.

Here’s video of the stunt:

And here are some disturbing details on how things went wrong:

South Carolina’s Statehouse turned into a hoghouse Thursday when Republican Gov. Mark Sanford carried two oinking piglets under his arms to protest pork in the state’s $5.5 billion spending plan.

Sanford’s lunchtime arrival with the pigs came a day after the GOP-controlled House voted in short order to override all but one of his 106 budget vetoes.

“There was a lot of pork-eating yesterday,” said Sanford, juggling the tiny, squirming pigs. “Ultimately what was said yesterday was: ‘We’re not going to cut spending by one dollar.”‘

The governor stood at the House chamber doors with pig feces smeared on his shoes and coat and laughed about it…

The stench of manure permeated the air as Sanford carried the pigs up the steps to the Statehouse’s second-floor lobby.

Who’s going to take the delivery?” Sanford asked lawmakers as they crowded around him for a peek at the piglets he picked up from a Lexington County farm and nicknamed “Pork” and “Barrel.”

In the Senate, which later debated the governor’s vetoes Thursday, Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, called the Sanford’s stunt a crime.

Hutto said the governor should be charged with animal cruelty and defacing the Statehouse with pig poop. Sanford’s spokesman Will Folks cleaned up the mess.

Sen. Jake Knotts, R-West Columbia, defended the governor.

“If you pick up a pig and squeeze it, something is going to come out,” Knotts said. “I’m sure the governor didn’t know that.”

I’ve repeatedly cast doubt on the idea that Barack Obama will be perceived as having a mandate when he takes office. Political science research has shown that members of Congress change their voting patterns after a perceived mandate election but that such a response only takes place when both sides agree that a mandate exists. So far, however, most Republicans and even some prominent Democrats have denied or downplayed the existence of a mandate.

Given that context, it was striking to see former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson endorsing a “Democratic mandate” in his Washington Post column a few days ago:

During a long political season, Obama was both charming and charmed — favored by the gods of economic catastrophe, who turned a tight election into a Democratic mandate.

Will any other Republicans join him in doing so?