Uncategorized
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Is Rudy the next Goldwater?
Reading Rachel Morris’s devastating Washington Monthly article on Rudy Giuliani’s contempt for democratic checks and balances, I’m struck by the fact that my #1 concern in the presidential election is that he be defeated. The downside of a Giuliani presidency is far worse than any other conceivable alternative — he knows nothing about foreign policy,
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John McCain plays the POW card
As John McCain tries to resuscitate his presidential campaign, he and his staff are repeatedly flogging his undeniably heroic experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The problem is that it has nothing to do with being president. During the most recent Republican debate, McCain got off a seemingly scripted jab at Hillary Clinton:
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Surowiecki on the supply-side myth
The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki has written an excellent piece on the popularity of the myth that tax cuts increase revenue (disclosure: he links to one of my posts). He highlights the two essential points — there is no evidence to support this claim, and yet it is an article of faith on the right:
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The misquotation of Mankiw
Greg Mankiw reconstructs an amusing/disturbing game of political “Telephone” in which a quotation from his blog was distorted beyond all recognition in Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism: 1. Gabaix and Landier make a modelling assumption for purposes of analytic convenience. 2. I describe their model and its implications on this blog. 3. Wessel quotes part of that
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Jon Chait on “entitlement hysteria”
The New Republic’s Jon Chait skewers the Washington pundits whose obsession with the fiscal status of Social Security defies reason: Those afflicted with entitlement hysteria are identifiable not by the realization that big social programs will need a fix–which is widely understood– but by the urgency and gravity of their pleas. Entitlement hysterics’ favorite statistic
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The seduction of Drudge
A New York Times article on Hillary’s relationship with Matt Drudge highlights the unbelievable lengths to which parties and campaigns now go in courting his favor: On the Republican side, a generation of campaign consultants has grown up learning to play in Mr. Drudge’s influential but rarefied world. They have spent years studying his tastes
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Can Hillary’s unfavorables go higher?
Ezra Klein has responded to my post by disavowing the Liberal Oasis claim that Hillary is “no more polarizing than other Dems” and trying to reframe the question: The question of whether Hillary Clinton is uniquely polarizing is actually pretty hard to answer. For instance: The metric you use matters quite a lot. If you’re
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Bush: A strict constructionist … sometimes
Here’s an interesting contradiction that I mentioned to my class on the presidency — the Bush administration claims to support strict constructionist judges, yet its vision of untrammeled executive power relies heavily on a sort of inferential constitutional interpretation that it otherwise decries. (Think, for instance, about the constitutional basis for warrantless wiretapping, sweeping claims
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The exploitation of Iraq misperceptions
The NYT’s Janet Elder details how the conservative group Freedom’s Watch is continuing the political exploitation of misperceptions about Iraq: Some conservative political groups, seeking to continue the policies of the Bush Administration, are capitalizing on the murky understanding of some voters about who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and why the United States
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Is Hillary the most polarizing candidate?
Ezra Klein links approvingly to a post on the blog Liberal Oasis that claims Hillary Clinton is “no more polarizing than other Dems”: Here’s some poll data that I don’t believe has received much attention. *** ABC NEWS/WASHINGTON POST POLL. Sept. 27-30, 2007 “If [see below] wins the Democratic/Republican nomination for president would you definitely