Brendan Nyhan

I knew that several Washington Times editors had close associations with white supremacist organizations and figures, but the open racism is apparently even worse than I thought — see The Nation’s investigation of the Times for the gory details. And yes, President Bush invited them to the Oval Office for an interview. Thank goodness we restored “honor and dignity” to the White House…

For a while, I’ve been wondering what happened to President Bush’s previous plans and timetables for Iraq. This administration has been masterful at goalpost-shifting without catching flak from the press. For instance, as we wrote in All the President’s Spin, Bush kept issuing new versions of his “plan” to cut the deficit in half (which omitted the costs of a number of proposals that he supported) during his first term. It’s clear he’s done the same thing on Iraq, repeatedly abandoning old plans and moving to new ones. Thankfully, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post revisits last year’s Iraq 2.0 plan:

A year ago, President Bush announced a new plan for Iraq, framed around “eight pillars” of U.S. policy for victory. In the past month, the president and his national security team have been busily working on a new recipe for success in Iraq, having declared the previous plan a failure.

But never mind what the politicians are doing. The bureaucracy churns on.

The State Department continues every Wednesday to issue a 30-page public report that details exactly how the U.S. government is meeting the goals set forth in the president’s now-abandoned plan. The report frames the data around Bush’s storied eight pillars, which include such goals as “Defeat the Terrorists and Neutralize the Insurgents” (Pillar 1) and “Increase International Support for Iraq” (Pillar 7).

In many ways, the report is a microcosm of the administration’s lost year in Iraq. The reams of details aimed at touting success belie the fact that few of the goals are being met.

How long until the forthcoming “plan” is thrown overboard?

According to the Wall Street Journal, it is “a canard” to claim that “workers are doing far more poorly than they did” in the 1990s expansion:

The latest reports on wages and income have been rolling in, and with them we can discount one more canard about the current economic expansion–namely, that wages are stagnant and workers are doing far more poorly than they did in that second Age of Pericles known as the 1990s.

Over the past year, the real average wage for non-supervisory employees has risen 2.8%. That equates to about a $1,200 increase in purchasing power for the typical household this year. Last year, real median household income was also up 1.1% after inflation. This rise in take-home pay helps to explain how Americans have had the disposable income this Christmas shopping season to pay $600 for PlayStation 3 computer games and $150 for the Kid-Tough Digital Camera for three-year-olds.

It is true that income and wages are still about 2% below the peak they hit in 2000 before the dot-com bust and recession. But a new Treasury Department analysis finds that, measuring from the start of the peak of each expansion, wages so far in this decade’s cycle are running ahead of the recovery pace during the 1990s. Thus the “stagnant wages” story can join the “jobless recovery,” the “outsourcing” crisis and the runaway budget deficit as other tales of woe that have all turned out to be evanescent.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out in this table, median income growth during the recovery has been poor:

Here’s how CBPP summarizes the 2005 income data:

Overall median household income rose modestly in 2005 — but significantly less than normal for a year during an economic recovery — while the poverty rate remained unchanged, also an unusual development for a recovery year. For the first time on record, poverty was higher in the fourth year of an economic recovery, and median income no better, than when the last recession hit bottom and the recovery began.

In addition, the 1.1 percent increase in median income that occurred in 2005 was driven by a rise in income among elderly households. Median income for non-elderly households (those headed by someone under 65) fell again in 2005, declining by $275, or 0.5 percent. Median income for non-elderly households declined for the fifth consecutive year and was $2,000 (or 3.7 percent) lower in 2005 than in the recession year of 2001.

Furthermore, the poverty rate, at 12.6 percent, remained well above its 11.7 percent rate in 2001, while overall median household income was $243 lower in 2005 than in 2001 (not a statistically significant difference).

Postscript for WSJ editors: No one is spending $600 on Playstation 3 “computer games.” The PS3 is considered a console, not a computer, and people are spending $600 (or more) to buy the system, not the games, which generally cost $50-$60.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Senator-elect James Webb attributed the release of his infamous exchange with President Bush to the White House:

Q: You have seen President Bush, with whom you had a famously tense exchange at a White House reception shortly after the election.

A: I think that was vastly overblown.

Q: Bush, according to the story, asked you about your son, a marine serving in Iraq. You replied that you’d like to get the troops out of Iraq, prompting Bush to say: “I didn’t ask you that. How’s your boy?”

A: I think what I said was appropriate.

Q: Yes. I was surprised that it erupted into a national debate about manners and etiquette, which seems so trivial compared with the issue of ending the war.

A: This was something that emanated from the White House. I did not say anything about this for two weeks. I said nothing publicly at all.

Q: Why would the White House release the information so long after the event?

A: Probably as an attempt to try to define me between the election and the beginning of the Congress. And that’s all I am going to say.

However, there were the two primary stories that recounted the conversation that were both apparently published on the same day. The Washington Post version contains no obvious clues to the sourcing, stating that Webb “confirmed the exchange between him and Bush” and that “The White House declined to discuss the encounter.” The version of the exchange published in the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill, however, specifically attributed the story to “a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.”

So did the White House leak the Post story first? Did the person who “heard about the exchange from Webb” leak it? It’s impossible to say…

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

With the 2008 presidential race barely underway, it’s striking that Edwards and Obama are already doing so well in key primary states and Hillary, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner, is faring so poorly. Via Kaus, Real Clear Politics boils down the latest results from Iowa and New Hampshire:

On the heels of the new poll in Iowa earlier this week showing Barack Obama tied with John Edwards atop the Dem field and Hillary plummeting to fourth place with 10%, Research 2000 has another 2008 poll out this morning for New Hampshire, conducted for the Concord Monitor from December 18 through December 20, 2006.

On the Dem side, Obama has leapt into a statistical dead heat with Hillary…

At first blush the horserace numbers don’t look too terrible for Hillary – and certainly much better than they did in Iowa…

But, as in Iowa, the real problem for Clinton in the New Hampshire poll is in the hypothetical head to head matchups…

Just like in Iowa, Hillary loses to Rudy and McCain but beats Romney. And just like in Iowa, Obama beats them all. Edwards doesn’t run as strong in New Hampshire as in Iowa – no surprise there – but he still manages a dead heat against McCain and Giuliani and handily beats Romney. So even though Hillary is clinging to a lead at the top of the field, she’s once again giving off the “unelectable” vibe in comparison to her two most serious primary challengers.

Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t representative of the rest of the country, but their voters are arguably paying closer attention to the presidential contenders than those elsewhere, which may make these trial heat results more meaningful than the national ones.

Also, is there a precedent for a clear frontrunner like Hillary losing her lead in key primary state polls this early? It seems pretty remarkable.

I started tracking early attacks on Barack Obama last week when I pointed out that Rush Limbaugh was calling him “Odumbo.” Now, via Media Matters, the conservative pundit Debbie Schlussel is engaged in a far nastier line of attack, questioning Obama’s loyalty to this country:

So, even if [Obama] identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?

NO WAY, JOSE . . . Or, is that, HUSSEIN?

This is the same dual loyalties smear that was used against John F. Kennedy when he was trying to become the first Catholic president. And it’s even more loathsome in this context given that we are fighting a war on terror against radical Islam. Schlussel is suggesting not just that Muslims are disloyal but that Obama, a practicing Christian, is disloyal simply as a result of the fact that his father was Muslim.

What do you do if you’re John Kerry and no one thinks you can win the 2008 presidential race? Apparently, you try to turn weakness into strength by reframing flip-flopping as open-mindedness — here’s what Kerry wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran under the snarky tagline “The case for flip-flopping” (via Power Line):

There’s something much worse than being accused of “flip-flopping”: refusing to flip when it’s obvious that your course of action is a flop.

I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world’s complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous — it is immoral.

I’d rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

Thomas Friedman should stick to foreign affairs commentary — here’s his fairy tale history of the US Civil War from last week’s “Meet the Press”:

We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human dignity and equality, about, you know, the right of one people to enslave another. They’re having a civil war in Iraq, only it’s not about ideas, it’s about tribal issues. There is no Abe Lincoln there. It’s the South vs. the South, that’s the problem with the fight right now.

I’m not a historian, but the causes of the Civil War are far more controversial and complex than Friedman appears to realize. It’s highly reductionist (at best) to claim it was fought “because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things… about human dignity and equality, about, you know, the right of one people to enslave another.” And that oversimplification of our history is only going to make it harder to understand the complex civil war unfolding in Iraq.

Amidst all the depressing news from Iraq, the story of a government minister accused of corruption escaping from a Green Zone jail was particularly awful — no one even told us he was gone until the next day:

Iraq’s former electricity minister, the most senior official arrested on corruption charges here, made a brazen escape Sunday afternoon from an Iraqi jail in the heavily fortified Green Zone.

There were conflicting reports about how the former official, Aiham Alsammarae, who is a citizen of both the United States and Iraq, was able not only to break out of jail but also to elude capture in the four-square-mile area that includes the American Embassy, Iraq’s Parliament and the homes of politicians and members of the American military command.

In fact, the Americans were not even told about the jailbreak until the next day, said a senior Western official familiar with the investigation.

But it gets worse — the official called the New York Times the next day to claim that he had already left the country via the Baghdad airport. Asked how he was able to leave via an airport where security officials were looking for him, he quoted “The Untouchables,” saying he did it “the Chicago way”:

The official, Aiham Alsammarae, who telephoned this reporter, said, without offering proof, that he was already outside Iraq after finagling his way aboard a flight at the Baghdad International Airport.

Incredulous Iraqi security and justice officials disputed parts of his account, saying that a figure as recognizable as Mr. Alsammarae could not possibly have slipped onto a flight when he was the subject of a manhunt.

Mr. Alsammarae, who holds dual American and Iraqi citizenship, scoffed at those assertions and said they were made by officials who spent too much time inside the protected Green Zone in central Baghdad and did not understand how the country really worked.

“Those suckers who are sitting in the Green Zone, they cannot go out and see the people they are governing?” asked Mr. Alsammarae, whose unmistakable speech patterns in English reflect his Iraqi and American backgrounds. “This is a joke.

“So why I cannot take the airport? It’s not because I am a smart cookie. Any Iraqi can do it, even if they have 10,000 court orders against him. This is Iraq.”

…If correct, Mr. Alsammarae’s tale of escape would mean that he not only worked his way free of the Iraqi police guarding the jail but also eluded the thousands of Western and Iraqi security forces stationed in the dense maze of checkpoints and blast walls in the Green Zone, which is the fortified heart of the American occupation and the Iraqi government.

When asked how he could have pulled off such an escape, Mr. Alsammarae, who moved to Chicago in 1976 but returned to Iraq just after the invasion, laughed uproariously for 20 seconds. Then, recycling a famous line from an exchange about Al Capone in “The Untouchables,” Mr. Alsammarae said with undisguised glee: “The Chicago way.”

How can we expect to defeat an insurgency if we can’t even keep a top minister in jail inside the Green Zone from leaving the country?

Cheers to Matthew Yglesias for noting the Sandy Berger debacle. Unfortunately, he admits that he previously ignored the story for ideological reasons:

With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use it as a lever to continue grossly failed foreign and domestic policies. That said, it’s a long way from Election Day and, seriously, a new Inspector General report says he “removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday.” Hid them under a a trash collector!

One assumes this will make it difficult for Berger to obtain any high-level executive branch appointments in the future.

I don’t mean to pick on Yglesias, who I think is unusually honest and reflective, but I wanted to note his admission, which perfectly illustrates the selection bias that plagues the blogosphere. Too many ideological bloggers just ignore uncomfortable stories for tactical reasons. If you read a daily newspaper, that’s no problem. But if readers who stick to ideological news sources like Atrios, Power Line, Air America, Rush Limbaugh, etc. may literally have almost no idea about these sorts of stories. Look, for instance, at the paltry list of Atrios mentions of Berger. And Yglesias is far more substantive than those guys. It’s a little depressing.

[Disclosure: Atrios and I had a dispute earlier this year.]