Brendan Nyhan

Month: January 2007

  • John Kerry 2008: Game over

    University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin has an excellent new post up analyzing new favorability data on the 2008 presidential contenders. The coolest graph illustrates just how unpopular John Kerry is. Kerry’s rating of 22% favorable/48% unfavorable is far worse than anyone else in the poll. To give you a sense of how unpopular

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  • Questioning Hillary’s experience

    Here’s a question that everyone seems to be ignoring: why does Hillary Clinton get a pass on the experience question while Barack Obama and John Edwards are portrayed as inexperienced? Here are their respective resumes in public office: Clinton — six years in the United States Senate; Edwards — six years in the United States

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  • The Edwards primary strategy

    Everyone thinks John Edwards is hurt by Barack Obama becoming the “fresh face” in the Democratic presidential primary race. It’s also true that he can’t compete with Obama and Hillary on a number of dimensions — they’re celebrities who would make history if they became president, and both are brilliant at a level that he,

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  • Post commits journalism journamalism

    In a story on the Washington Post website, William Branigin manages the rare feat of casting appropriate doubt on the President’s misleading tax and budget claims: Democrats have long derided Bush’s deficit-cutting boasts, saying he routinely ignores the huge debt that the federal government has accumulated since he was inaugurated in January 2001. From a

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  • Bush: “Political statements” bad (from Dems)

    The AP highlights another passage from President Bush’s Wall Street Journal op-ed today: President Bush, facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the first time, is urging lawmakers to work with his administration and warning that “political statements” in the form of legislation would result in a stalemate. Bush, of course, has never pushed legislation with no

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  • Bush misleads again on federal revenues

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, President Bush falsely suggests that his tax cuts have increased federal revenue yet again: It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues. Because revenues have grown and we’ve done a better job of holding the line on domestic spending,

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  • Journalists as children’s characters

    A New York Observer article on the future of the public editor position at the New York Times includes

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  • Ted Rall calls me a neocon

    The lefty cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall called me a “Bush apologist” back in 2002 for debunking his conspiracy theories about the war in Afghanistan. Now he’s claiming he was right all along in a diatribe where he absurdly labels me a “neoconservative Republican”: Now that only 9% of Americans believe the war in Iraq

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  • Spencer Ackerman goes too far

    After my experience with The American Prospect, I’m sympathetic to Spencer Ackerman, who was fired by The New Republic after coming into conflict with TNR’s maddening pro-Iraq war politics. (Unfortunately, he signed on with TAP afterward, which is far more dogmatic than TNR.) But Ackerman takes his newfound freedom from editorial constraint too far in

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