Brendan Nyhan

Dear CBS,

Who allowed Andy Rooney’s offensive rant about how the presidential contenders’ names aren’t presidential (i.e. WASPy) enough on the air? He’s been a joke for years but this one really crosses the line.

Yours,
Brendan Nyhan

I finally read Matt Bai’s The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics over the break. I’ll have more to say about it soon, but my favorite anecdote has to be this illustration from 2005 (which I missed) of how Howard Dean often fails to restrain himself verbally:

The other main part of the chairman’s job description, aside from fund-raising, was getting the party’s message out. Here, too, Dean did little to reassure his critics in Washington or in more conservative states… In June 2005, Dean made headlines when he charged that Republicans had “never made an honest living in their lives,” then outdid himself a few days later when he said, “They all behave the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white, Christian party.” During a subsequent appearance on MSNBC, Dean accused Republicans of playing “hide the salami, or whatever it’s called,” with nominations to the Supreme Court. He was stunned to learn from aides, on his way out of the studio, that he had just suggested that Republican leaders were copulating in the cloakroom. Dean had had no idea what the term meant. It had just kind of popped into his head.

Here’s the exact quote from Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that the president can claim executive privilege [in refusing to release documents about Harriet Miers’ work as White House counsel]?

DEAN: Well, certainly the president can claim executive privilege. But in the this case, I think with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, you can’t play, you know, hide the salami, or whatever it’s called. He’s got to go out there and say something about this woman who’s going to a 20 or 30-year appointment, a 20 or 30-year appointment to influence America. We deserve to know something about her.

Am I glad Dean isn’t negotiating with foreign dictators? Yes.

I don’t understand the premise behind the new site Big Think, which is profiled in today’s New York Times. The article calls it “a YouTube for ideas” and says the business model is to “attract enough viewers, then sell advertising,” but why would we expect a wonky general interest video site to ever become large enough to become profitable from advertising revenue? We already have YouTube and the videos posted there of intellectuals debating ideas aren’t exactly setting the world on fire. While I’d love to see the site succeed, it seems like a dubious business proposition.

Josh Marshall’s post yesterday illustrates why Ezra Klein is wrong (here and here) to suggest that all prominent political figures end up becoming equally polarizing — John McCain isn’t (yet, at least):

Yesterday, Kos posted some Rasmussen numbers of favorable and unfavorable numbers of major presidential contenders. Kos’s point was that whichever candidate you choose you’ll basically start with one who about half the country likes and about half the country doesn’t.

But there’s one number that’s substantially outside that pattern: McCain’s. Rasmussen has him down at 53% favorable, the highest but by an insignificant margin and 37% unfavorable. The next closest unfavorables are Edwards and Thompson, both at 42%. All but one of the others is 50% or over.

As I wrote before, there’s no reason to expect all candidates to converge to some equilibrium level of polarization. Will McCain’s negatives go up if he’s the GOP nominee? Of course. But he’s starting from a better position than Hillary.

John Sides is doing yeoman’s work at The Monkey Cage debunking myths about the Iowa caucus and the primary process. Here are two of the most interesting posts:

1. New Hampshire doesn’t have a better track record than Iowa of predicting the eventual nominee.

2. Democratic and Republican primary voters are not substantially different than Democratic and Republican general election voters according to a Forum article by Alan Abramowitz (PDF).

He also highlights a series of misconceptions from a Forum article by Peverill Squire (PDF).

Update 1/4 10:11 PM: To clarify, claim #2 is that primary voters are not substantially ideologically different from general election voters — as Rob correctly notes in a comment, the Iowa and NH electorates are absurdly unrepresentative of the nation’s demographic composition.

In a recent column, Richard Cohen correctly criticizes Barack Obama for getting his facts wrong (the number of black people in college actually exceeds the number of people in jail), but then links it to questions about the accuracy of Obama’s first book and suggests that the Democratic presidential candidate may have a truth-telling problem. Given Cohen’s ugly record in hyping a similar narrative about Al Gore, we should be very wary of pundits manufacturing such a storyline about Obama as he comes under more scrutiny post-Iowa.

Update 1/4 10:05 PM: Via a commenter below, Mark Kleiman says Obama’s claim is right — looks like I was right to distrust Cohen:

There were 534,000 black men in prison at year-end 2006. (P. 6.)

There were another 296,000 blacks in jail (as opposed to prison)

Since about 85% of jail inmates are male
that means roughly 240,000 black males in jail.

Another 36,000 black males were held in “secure” (i.e., locked) juvenile facilities:

That gives a total of 810,000 black males behind bars at any one time.

By contrast, according to the Census Bureau there are 370,000 black men enrolled full-time in four-year colleges, plus another 40,000 in graduate school.

As always, the number you get depends on the definition you use. Iain Murray, from whom Dobbs copied, arbitrarily decided that only those under the age of 24 counted as “young.” He also counted part-time and community-college students as “enrolled in college.” So it’s not fair to accuse Murray of “mendacity”: he merely chose the numbers he wanted to make the point he wanted to make.

If you restrict both the inmate population and the college population to the under-35s, the comparable figures are 400,000 behind bars and 380,000 in college.

So Obama’s claim is perfectly defensible, and your reference to his “mendacity” had no basis. You owe your readers a public retraction and, and Sen. Obama an apology.

My #1 concern in the presidential election is the defeat of Rudy Giuliani, so I have to join
Steve Benen and Josh Marshall in giving thanks for his terrible showing yesterday. Some day the phrase “February 5th strategy” will be a joke among insiders…

Michael Barone:

The metrically minded will see a common thread. Every 16 years–in 1976, 1992 and now in 2008–American voters have seemed less interested in experience and credentials and more interested in a new face unconnected to the current political establishment. What can explain this 16-year itch?

Chance. As Atrios would say, this has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

Seriously, though, Barone should know better — political scientists spent years debating a hypothesized 36-year cycle of realigning elections that broke down under scrutiny. The same thing will inevitably happen to this even shakier hypothesis. After considering possible explanations of the supposed 16-year pattern, Barone ends up arguing that “over a period of 16 years, there is enough turnover in the electorate to stimulate an itch that produces a willingness to take a chance on something new.” But why not 12 or 20 years? 16 is an entirely arbitrary number and, as Barone admits, the theory breaks down for 1944 and 1960. So in other words, the premise for the column is based on a grand total of three elections (1976, 1992, and 2008). It’s absurd.

A better argument might consider the fact that the public tends to eventually turn against the party in power, which creates openings for resurgent opposition parties, particularly when the incumbent president is weak. In 1976, 1992, and 2008, the Democrats were looking for new faces to challenge the GOP after periods of 8+ years in which Republicans defeated many of their established leaders.

A few weeks ago, I pointed to the signs of an anti-Huckabee backlash. While liberals’ soft spot for Huckabee is gone at this point, the Huck haters on the right have obviously lost round 1 (i.e., Iowa). However, there’s almost no precedent for someone winning the nomination with as little elite support as Huckabee (see, in particular, the work of Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller [here and here] who find that elite activist support is the best predictor of primary outcomes). That means the establishment will be coming to destroy Huckabee in the next few weeks. John McCain’s 2000 defeat in South Carolina may look like a tea party…

PS: Anticipation of this outcome may be the reason Huckabee’s probability of winning the GOP nomination on the Intrade futures market is still only 16.8%.

I think this David Brooks analogy is apt:

With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.