Uncategorized
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Sinbad vs. Hillary Clinton
Via Ezra Klein (among many others), the 1990s comic Sinbad has resurfaced to contradict Hillary Clinton’s claims of foreign policy experience: Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton’s self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who
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The futility of Obama’s negation
Tyler Cowen notes that Barack Obama’s response to Hillary Clinton’s VP talk is unlikely to be effective: Read this, the headline is “Obama: I’m no V.P.”. That’s not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama’s words. My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming “I am not X”
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John McCain’s inconsistent voting record
As many people (including me) have pointed out, John McCain’s reputation for “straight talk” is highly exaggerated. Indeed, he’s changed his views so many times it’s hard to know what he thinks. At the same time, however, his voting record is more conservative than his “maverick” reputation suggests. A friend points out that the book
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National Enquirer smears Obama
The current issue of the National Enquirer contains some ugly smears of Barack Obama. The cover prominently features a picture of him along with the headline “Obama’s secrets… His close friendship with terrorist.” Out of context, this headline may reinforce the the myth that Obama is a Muslim, suggesting to casual readers that Obama is
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Bob Herbert reads Hillary’s mind
It’s time to get the swami graphic out again because Bob Herbert is pretending to read minds (my emphasis): More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama. In
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Using social pressure to get out the vote
There is a cool article in the new American Political Science Review reporting the results of a field experiment in which different mailings were randomly sent to voters. It turns out that making voting turnout public knowledge has a dramatic effect on turnout — here’s the abstract: American Political Science Review (2008), 102:33-48 Social Pressure
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Journalists squabbling on the air
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reporter and an anchor insult each other on live television before: Note: The first part of the clip is a prosaic news report about apartment maintenance — stay with it until it gets good (about a minute in).
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The 1968 analogy
Kevin Drum suggests that Democrats should calm down about the possibility of a long nomination fight hurting their chances in the fall: The hot topic of conversation right now is the proposition that a long, drawn-out Democratic primary runs the risk of destroying the party and putting John McCain in the White House. So for
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Updated Obama support graphs
Updating my posts analyzing the correlates of Obama support at the state level, here are some new graphs using the currently available numbers. In a linear regression predicting Obama’s proportion of the two-candidate vote (i.e. his vote plus Hillary’s) in contested non-home states (i.e. not FL, MI, AR, NY, or IL), the statistically significant factors
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Hillary exaggerates primary victories
After her wins last night, Hillary Clinton is engaging in simplistic primary->general election extrapolation: “No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary,” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “We all know that if we want a Democratic