Month: November 2007
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Rove: Everything Hillary does is calculated
In a Newsweek column, Karl Rove tries to advance the Al Gore-esque narrative that everything Hillary does is calculated: And against a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh, being seen as someone who says what he believes in a direct way will help. Of course, Rove has no idea why Hillary
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The GOP is not scared of Hillary
In an interview with Newsweek.com, Sean Wilentz makes the case for Hillary Clinton. I’m sympathetic to his criticism of Barack Obama’s anti-political tendencies, but his response to a question about Hillary’s electability is weak: You know who makes that argument more than anybody else? Republicans. This is a favorite Republican argument. They say, “We want
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The motive dodge
Writing on National Review, Mark Hemingway attempts to dismiss criticism of Ronald Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, MS by saying “Reagan isn’t a racist”: Krugman’s mentioned the Reagan/Nashoba incident four previous times over the last two years; Bob Herbert has mentioned it eight previous times going back to 1997. Enough already. Nobody believes Reagan is a
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Obama: Still not about issues
Despite his obvious discomfort with going negative, Barack Obama has been slowly edging toward the “Hillary is too polarizing” pitch that Andrew Sullivan and I have advocated. The problem, however, is that his core message is still about process rather than issues — and process candidates do not usually win primaries. During last night’s debate,
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David Brooks loves adjectives
Obscure historical justifications notwithstanding, the the table of adjectives about the candidates that David Brooks put together is utterly pointless. Couldn’t they just run a slug that says “David Brooks didn’t have a good column idea” and publish an actual article instead?
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Don’t trust Media Research Center
One thing I learned while working on Spinsanity is never to trust the Media Research Center, which continually puts out work based on quote-doctoring, taking things out of context, etc. (see here and here). As a result, I wasn’t surprised when Greg Sargent of TPM caught the supposed watchdogs of liberal media bias in the
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A unified theory of Russert
There’s a strange fight going on in the progressive blogosphere over the behavior of Tim Russert. Matthew Yglesias offered an essentially non-partisan critique of Russert’s “gotcha” style that was endorsed by Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein. The Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby, who previously suggested that Russert had a partisan animus, then declared “It’s time to
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Obama’s “process” email
A question: When you’re being criticized for running a campaign about process, should you be sending out emails less than two months before Iowa with the subject “Change the process”? (PDF)
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The NYT falls for the base rate fallacy
Why are journalists so bad with numbers? Reader Joel Wiles passed on this example from a New York Times article on the aging of Japan’s prison population: Between 2000 and 2006, while the total population of Japanese 60 and over rose by 17 percent, inmates of the same age group swelled by 87 percent. In
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A bizarre Bush defense from Peter Berkowitz
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers this paragraph as part of his argument for why it is wrong to hate President Bush: And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive