Month: August 2008
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Joe Biden’s greatest blowhard moment
In anticipation of a possible VP pick, Mickey Kaus flags the New York Times destroying Joe Biden’s various false boasts about his academic background back in 1988 — it’s the journalistic equivalent of “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire”: Most of Mr. Biden’s statement was in response to a
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Limbaugh: Obama “little black man-child”
Rush Limbaugh
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Converging to election fundamentals
I make a big point on this blog of highlighting the importance of the fundamentals in determing the outcomes of presidential elections. Andrew Gelman has a nice graph illustrating how the fundamentals become more relevant as the election approaches (I’ve added a red arrow illustrating how far out we are from election day right now):
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James Fallows on the effects of debates
James Fallows claims in The Atlantic that “moments” from televised general-election debates have “figured in the ultimate outcome” in the presidential elections of 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004: There have been nine series of televised general-election debates. These started with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, resumed with Ford-Carter in 1976, and have been
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The narratives of election smears
A New York Times Week in Review piece yesterday seems to attribute various election outcomes to widely publicized negative attacks: For raw, crushing smear power, the 1964 “Daisy” ad, made for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would mean the end of life on earth,
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Nicole Wallace: Don’t criticize McCain
McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace is at it again. A little over a week ago, Wallace invoked McCain’s war herosim in an effort to delegitimize criticism of her boss, saying Barack Obama was “fillet[ing] an American hero, a former POW” when he criticizes McCain on the stump. Yesterday, she used the same approach in responding to
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NYT adopts conservative jargon
Since when do New York Times reporters use “big government” as an adjective? The lede of a Jackie Calmes story on Friday predicts “a new round of big-government financial regulation” that is vaguely attributed to “experts”: Modernizing the nation’s New Deal-era defenses against financial disaster is not high among the priorities that either Barack Obama
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Frank Rich: The long blog
Maybe I’m late to this since I get the print New York Times on Sunday, but I thought it was interesting to see that Frank Rich’s online column is like a long week-in-review blog post full of links supporting his claims. I’m not a fan of Rich (who frequently distorts facts in an effort to
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Belated slow blogging alert
I’m on vacation in California through Sunday so blogging will be light (or nonexistent) until next week…
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The Obama landslide myth persists
Andrew Sullivan is the latest political writer to repeat the unsupported claim that Barack Obama should be winning by a greater margin. He describes Obama as having “stalled in the polls” and then tries to explain “voters’ reluctance to swing behind Obama in landslide numbers.” Similarly, former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd told the Washington Post