Month: September 2011
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Does Obama face a racial double standard?
Writing in The Nation, Tulane political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that President Obama may be suffering from “liberal electoral racism,” which she defines as “the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.” After arguing that Obama’s record of progressive achievements is comparable to President Clinton’s, she
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Twitter roundup
As will now be customary, the Twitter roundup is below the fold. Reminder: My new Twitter-free RSS feed is now available.
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New Twitter-free RSS feed
Thanks to a tip from Lorin Hochstein, I was able to set up an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes that excludes the Twitter roundups. I would recommend switching to that if you use RSS/Google Reader to follow the blog and prefer not to read them. Hope this setup works better for everyone; please let me
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Will Solyndra be the first major Obama scandal?
Back in May, I wrote an article drawing on my research into presidential scandal (PDF) which noted that Obama had managed to avoid a major scandal for more than two years: One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal
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Twitter roundup
Many thanks to everyone for their emails and comments in response to my request for feedback on the Twitter roundups. Enough people seem to find them useful that I would like to keep them, but I want to try to make the blog more useful to those who don’t. As a first step, I’m now
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Twitter roundups: Should I keep them?
I’ve been posting compilations of my Twitter feed as an experiment and to provide content between posts. Are those valuable to you, or would prefer irregular posts with nothing in between? Please let me know by email or in comments.
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Beware early general election trial heats
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that President Obama leading Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in the prospective general election polls known as trial heats. New TNR columnist/blogger Timothy Noah suggested that Obama’s standing was “remarkable” and that the poll showed that the GOP candidates “are unable to capitalize on the miserable state of
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New research on political misperceptions
My co-author Jason Reifler and I have just posted a new manuscript (PDF) titled “Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions.” It’s one of the followups to our Political Behavior article (PDF) on resistance to corrective information. Here’s the abstract: People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting