Uncategorized
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The ABC debate debacle
I couldn’t make myself suffer through yet another silly debate, and it seems like that was a good decision. As Media Matters notes, “[n]umerous media figures have criticized George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, moderators of the Democratic presidential debate on ABC, or the subject matter of the event, in part or in whole, as ‘shoddy
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Gail Collins needs a copyeditor
Just for the record, this sentence from Gail Colllins’s op-ed yesterday is wrong: Witness Obama and Clinton at the debate, racing away from gun control as if they were a pair of greyhounds, forswearing middle-class tax cuts as if they were George H.W. Bush. Actually, they ruled out middle-class tax increases. As her own newspaper
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Bartels on the political science of “bitter”
Larry Bartels, an eminent political scientist at Princeton, writes in the New York Times about how Obama’s description of less educated rural voters is wrong: For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly
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Weisberg and the narrative of Bush
Writing about the construction of campaign narratives reminds me of a Jacob Weisberg quote about his new Bush book that has been bugging me for a while. Weisberg, who is the editor of Slate, is known as one of the smartest political journalists in Washington, which is why I think this quote from his Fresh
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Limbaugh: “Liberalism is the greatest threat”
Rush Limbaugh just called liberalism “the greatest threat this country faces”: [L]iberalism is the greatest threat this country faces, not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win, and are in power for four, eight years or more, they don’t take Islamofascism as a threat. And we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning
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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,