Month: April 2008
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Gaffes and the need for narrative
Matthew Yglesias is correct to argue that the influence of campaign gaffes is probably overstated: One thing I wonder about is how much do “campaign gaffes” really matter? My guess is that their perceived importance is mostly an illusion. I mean, people point to plenty of examples of campaigns that lost, in large part, “because
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Grover Norquist: Not reality-based
In an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine, Grover Norquist claims falsely that “[t]he [Iraq] war spending is a fraction of the spend-too-much problem”: SOLOMON: Now that we’re facing an economic slowdown, not to mention a $9 trillion national debt, is it fair to ask whether the Bush tax cuts have
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The coming experimental revolution
Back in 2004, I wrote a post titled “Politics goes Moneyball” about the increasing use of experimentation to measure the effectiveness of campaign tactics. Since then, progress — which has been led by Yale’s Alan Gerber and Donald Green — has been relatively slow but steady. Here’s the latest sign that people are finally catching
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Brad DeLong goes too far on John Yoo
I hold no brief for John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor and former Bush administration official who wrote the loathsome “torture memo,” but what justification is there for Brad DeLong accusing Yoo of “participating in a conspiracy to torture goatherds from Afghanistan who have been sold to the military by clan enemies falsely claiming they
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MSNBC on Obama and orange juice
Weep for the republic as you read MSNBC talking heads analyzing Barack Obama’s choice of beverage at an Indiana diner: On Hardball, while remarking on Sen. Barack Obama’s reported request for orange juice after being offered coffee at an Indiana diner, David Shuster asserted: “[I]t’s just one of those sort of weird things. You know,
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The anti-Obama tag team
Reuters accurately sums up the state of the presidential race in its lede, which explicitly groups Hillary Clinton and John McCain together as the “rivals” of Barack Obama who both attacked him today: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire on Friday for saying small-town Pennsylvania residents were “bitter” and “cling to guns
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The self-justifying war in Iraq
It’s become a cliché to point out the way that our failure in Iraq is used to justify the need for a continued presence in Iraq (we have to stay to clean up the mess we created), but I still can’t let this line from President Bush yesterday pass without comment: “Iraq is the convergence
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Brock’s McCain attack group
Just yesterday, I was complaining about the way Media Matters has contributed to the distortion of John McCain’s comments about staying 100 years in Iraq. And then today (Via Matthew Yglesias) I learn that David Brock, the head of Media Matters, is leading an independent group planning a $40 million attack campaign against McCain. It’s
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Graph of the day: Walmart & pickups
In search of demographic insights into Pennsylvania, Brian Schaffner posts an amusing graph from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study — the percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers vs. the percentage of pickup truck owners by state: His conclusion? “On these measures, Pennsylvania is most like Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and Illinois. And, of course, Obama
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Distorting McCain on “100 years” in Iraq
The constant distortions of what John McCain said about staying in Iraq for 100 years make me want to start Spinsanity back up. Liberals are tying themselves in knots trying to provide justifications for why it’s not being taken out of context. Sorry, but it is. Here’s what McCain actually said: QUESTIONER: President Bush has