Brendan Nyhan

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:

In case you missed it, a few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum. Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.

My friends, no one can be president of the United States that supports projects such as these. And I believe that wasteful spending has got to be eliminated. And I will have this debate and win because she is a liberal Democrat and I am a proud, reliable, consistent conservative Republican. That’s why I’ll win.

The reference to McCain’s time as a POW was a hit at the debate. Now his campaign is running an ad featuring the clip in New Hampshire:

McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, sent supporters an even more tacky email today (PDF) that capitalizes on the 40th anniversary of McCain being shot down to raise campaign contributions:

He has given so much – join me in giving him a gift of $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or even $2,300 in remembrance of his past service to all of us and in support of a future McCain Presidency.

…P.S. Help me honor a true American hero on this 40th anniversary of being shot down over Vietnam by making a commitment to the
campaign. Follow this link and make a contribution to a better America.

Classy! McCain’s POW experience may become the equivalent of 9/11 for Giuliani…

Update 10/25 8:44 PM: Ezra Klein reminds me of Jon Chait’s TNR article on McCain exploiting the POW issue.

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:

This supply-side orthodoxy is striking in a couple of ways. First, it requires Republican politicians to commit themselves publicly to a position that is wrong—and wrong not as a matter of ideology or faith but as a matter of fact. Saying today that tax cuts will increase tax revenues is not like saying that bombing Iran constitutes a sensible foreign policy, or that education vouchers will wreck the public schools. It’s more like saying that the best way to treat sick people is to bleed them to let out the evil spirits. Second, despite the fact that the supply-side faith has no grounding in reality, within the Republican Party there is little room for dissent on the subject, as Jonathan Chait details in his new book, “The Big Con.” Last week, the blogger Megan McArdle wrote that she had a book review for an unnamed right-wing publication spiked because in it she dared suggest that, in the U.S., tax cuts decreased government revenues.

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 description in the Journal.
4. Reich reads the Journal and cites me as an authority using the partial quotation.
5. As a result, a modelling assumption morphs into an established fact.

Of course, those who have read Jonathan Rauch’s destruction of Reich’s Locked in the Cabinet know that his factual claims should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

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 is the retiree-worker ratio. In 1950, they will explain in somber tones, there were 18 workers for every retiree. But, by 2030, there will be barely more than two. Absent reform, they warn, we will all be wage slaves, toiling away as our languid baby-boom masters while away their declining years on cruise ships and RVs.

There’s some truth to their analysis, but it misses the point in a crucial way. The two largest entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, are in very different shape. The Social Security Trust Fund is scheduled to last until 2042, at which point we’ll have to hike up taxes or trim spending a bit. Medicare, on the other hand, faces a day of reckoning in 2019.

Yet one of the oddities of the entitlement hysterics is that they are far more obsessed with the minor problems of Social Security than with the massive problems of Medicare. Indeed, if you look closely at their dire proclamations, they inevitably follow the same pattern: They begin with an ominous summation about entitlements–thus lumping together Medicare with Social Security–then swiftly proceed to demand that Social Security be shored up forthwith.

…Since you can’t solve the entitlement problem without solving the health care problem, one might think that the entitlement hysterics would have gradually moved on to becoming health care hysterics… Yet this is another puzzling thing about entitlement hysteria: the sheer persistence of the obsession. It’s true we have some large federal programs that are going to have to be shored up. But why do they consider this to be a matter of such unique urgency?

How many Washington pundits understand that the entitlement problem is largely a Medicare problem? Five percent?

What’s actually going on is that the pundits now use a willingness to reform Social Security as a test of seriousness, as Chait points out:

Ten or 20 years ago, you could plausibly deem Social Security’s finances among the most pressing national problems. Those who were willing to take on the problem were admired for their farsightedness, bipartisanship, and seriousness of purpose. Social Security’s place on our list of national problems has long since been overtaken, but, among Washington establishment types who remember those days, the issue retains its totemic significance. Entitlement hysteria has become less a response to a crisis than an expression of statesmanship.

Can somebody get this article to David Broder?

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 and moods while carefully building close relationships with him that are now benefiting some Republican presidential campaigns — and that others are scrambling to match.

The early advantage on their side, in the view of several Republicans, seems to have gone to Mitt Romney, who hired the former Bush political aide who had been the central party’s prime point of contact with Mr. Drudge, Matthew Rhoades. His status was solidified after the 2004 election at a steakhouse dinner in Miami with Mr. Drudge, who for all his renown in politics is a somewhat spectral presence who rarely agrees to meet with political operatives or journalists and who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

So important was the Romney camp’s perceived advantage in the eyes of aides to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that at one point this year they even considered sending an emissary to Miami to build their own relationship with him, two former McCain campaign officials said. (Mr. Drudge ignored the invitation, one of the officials said.)

But, typical of a campaign with a reputation for exploiting every advantage and trying to neutralize every disadvantage, Mrs. Clinton’s communications team, led by Howard Wolfson, is not leaving Mr. Drudge to the Republicans. Five current and former Democratic officials said Mrs. Clinton has on her side the closest thing her party has ever had to Mr. Rhoades in Tracy Sefl, a former Democratic National Committee official, who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge — and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.

That effort has helped to mix some positive stories in with the negative fare about Mrs. Clinton that Mr. Drudge still serves up regularly, they said, though Ms. Sefl’s fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.

…”It seems to me that after the 2004 election, the Democrats realized the impact that the Drudge Report has, and made it a priority,” said Jim Dyke, a strategist for Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign and the communications director for the Republican National Committee in 2004.

The Democrats have come to believe, Mr. Dyke said, what Republicans have always thought: “No single person is more relevant to shaping the media environment in a political campaign.”

Few are willing to attach their names to any specific statements about Mr. Drudge or descriptions of their strategies in dealing with him, fearing that they might alienate him.

Former Republican Party and Bush campaign officials said that in 2004 they considered Mr. Drudge’s site so central in their efforts to undermine Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign that they systemized their approach to him.

Senior aides in the Bush war room, run by Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican communications aide, insisted on vetting any information to be fed to Mr. Drudge so as not to annoy and overwhelm him with items he might find unworthy. And, these officials said, when the approval was given, the main point of contact was usually the Bush aide who was closest to Mr. Drudge, J. Timothy Griffin, now a consultant to the campaign of Fred D. Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee.

Through that system, Mr. Bush’s aides funneled embarrassing tidbits about Mr. Kerry in which mainstream news reporters had initially shown less interest. From time to time, those former aides said, an item’s appearance on Drudge would drive it into mainstream news coverage: A video clip of Mr. Kerry contradicting himself, or a photograph of him wearing a protective germ outfit.

“It’s the stuff that speaks to the absurdity of politics, and it’s done with devastating effect,” a former Bush campaign aide said.

But, several strategists said, nothing is automatic with Mr. Drudge, whose tastes can be unpredictable, making a personal connection to him all the more valuable. Those who know him best say it takes special courting to build a real relationship.

Before Mr. Griffin left politics to work as a military lawyer in 2005, he had a dinner with Mr. Drudge and Mr. Rhoades to solidify Mr. Rhoades’s new place as the main Drudge Report contact for the central party. That dinner was first reported in the book “The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, published last year.

As the Bush political team dispersed among the Republican candidates this year, some of Mr. Rhoades’s former colleagues came to regret his special relationship with Mr. Drudge. Former aides to Mr. McCain said in interviews that they had cursed Mr. Rhoades’s name daily this year as Mr. Drudge ran a series of photographs making Mr. McCain look old and other items, like one wrongly raising the possibility that a bump he took to the head in Iraq was cancer.

Democrats have long known how the McCain campaign felt. And it is precisely why, a strategist close to the Clinton campaign said, her aides had decided to use the site more aggressively and capitalize on the line to him established by Ms. Sefl — now a vice president at the Glover Park Group, the former firm of Mr. Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, and an informal adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe. Ms. Sefl had no comment.

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 going by how many voters “definitely would not” vote for her, she’s less polarizing than John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney. But some say that number is a function of name recognition — that folks are sure they won’t vote for candidates they don’t know. So if you’re going by favorability numbers, then Clinton’s 44% unfavorable is fairly high. But that may just mean she’s further along in a process that any high profile Democrat will undergo. At this point in the 2004 cycle, John Kerry‘s unfavorables were between 13% and 20% — by the time the election rolled around, he was in the mid-40s, posting numbers pretty comparable to Hillary’s.

So that’s the question: Not whether Hillary Clinton is more polarizing right this second. Given that everyone knows who she is, that simply has to be true. But whether she’ll be more polarizing than John Edwards after eight months of haircut and hedge fund smears, or Barack Obama, after an election full of madrassa insinuations. Clinton’s numbers probably reflect the end point of that process — she’s been smeared with maximum energy and efficiency for 15 years now. Edwards and Obama haven’t, but if either captures the nomination, the GOP’s attack machine will boot up, and do to them exactly what it did to John Kerry. If someone has an argument for why, at the end of that political war, they’ll be less polarizing than Clinton, than that’s a fair comparison. But the current numbers are not.

In short, Klein thinks that the unfavorables of Kerry, Edwards, and Obama would increase into the 40s by Election Day, while Clinton’s “probably reflect the end point of that process” and wouldn’t increase further.

I agree with the former point, but not the latter. As commenters on Klein’s post note, there’s no reason to think that Hillary’s long political career will prevent her unfavorable numbers from increasing. She hasn’t come under sustained political attack since before the Monica Lewinsky scandal — how could months of negative campaigning against her not push up her unfavorables? They might not go up as much as other Democrats’ would, but each extra percentage point is far more damaging to her general election prospects than it would be to theirs.

Consider the trajectory of President Bush. By late 2004, he was very well-known and had unfavorables in the 40s, but they’ve since increased to well over 50 percent and might reach the 60s by the time he leaves office. Hillary’s profile is like his during the 2004 re-election campaign and it’s more than a year until the general election. How sick would America be of her by the end of her first term?

In addition, as Tapped commenters point out, even if Edwards and Obama would end up with comparable unfavorables to Hillary, more people have a visceral hatred of her than the other candidates, which may boost GOP turnout, organizing, etc.

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 of executive privilege, fighting wars without a declaration of war, etc.) No one ever mentions this and I don’t know why.

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 went to war in Iraq.

One such group, Freedom’s Watch, which has ties to the White House, ran television ads in the Philadelphia market and others around the sixth anniversary of the attack — when Gen. David H. Petraeus was also delivering his report to Congress on the progress of the war — suggesting a connection between the war in Iraq and the terrorist attacks.

One of the ads features Laura Youngblood, 28, from Sebastian, Fla. Mrs. Youngblood’s uncle was a New York City firefighter killed on 9/11 and her husband was killed in Iraq. The ad opens with photos of the two men. Mrs. Youngblood is heard saying, “I lost two family members to Al Qaeda, my uncle a fireman on 9/11 and my husband Travis in Iraq.” Mrs. Youngblood’s own story includes a tour of duty as a Marine Corps medic. Her husband Travis was also a Marine Corps medic and volunteered to go to Iraq while on shore duty in Illinois. “He said the terrorists have to be stopped and he would be one of the last men standing to make sure his family and his country were safe,” Mrs. Youngblood said in an interview. “We’re not in Iraq to fight Iraq, we’re in Iraq to defeat terrorism.”

As Elder explains, these misperceptions still persist years after the fact:

One of the most striking poll findings is the number of people who continue to think Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Depending on how it is asked, more than a third of Americans say Saddam Hussein was personally involved in those attacks. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll in September, 33 percent of the respondents said Saddam Hussein was “personally” involved. In June, when Princeton Survey Research, polling for Newsweek, asked if “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in planning, financing or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” 41 percent said yes.

There was a time, though, when a majority of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. In a Times/CBS News poll in April 2003, just after the war began, 53 percent of Americans said Saddam Hussein was personally involved. That wide perception didn’t last. By September of that year, 43 percent said Saddam Hussein was involved.

Though the causal linkages are not clear, these misperceptions are associated with support for the war in Iraq, increased perceptions of a threat from Iran, and high favorability ratings for Rudy Giuliani, who continually invokes 9/11 in his campaign:

The respondents in the Times/CBS News poll last month who said Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11 were more likely to say getting involved in Iraq was the right thing to do — 59 percent compared with 31 percent. These respondents were also more likely to see Iran as an immediate threat that cannot be contained.

The poll did not ask respondents whom they would vote for in the primaries, but it did ask them their views of individual candidates. Of those who see a connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks in the United States, a plurality, 44 percent have a favorable view of Mr. Giuliani, the highest for any of the candidates.

For more on how corrections fail to reduce misperceptions, see this post about my research on the subject, which is ongoing.

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 vote for him/her in the general election for president in 2008, would you consider voting for him/her or would you definitely not vote for him/her?”

PERCENT SAYING “DEFINITELY WOULD NOT”

Obama — 39%
Clinton — 41%
Edwards — 43%
Giuliani — 44%
McCain — 45%
Thompson — 54%
Romney — 57%

***

What’s does that mean?

1. Sen. Hillary Clinton is no more polarizing than other Dems, and less polarizing than every leading Republican.

The problem is that the question is not a good measure of whether a candidate is “polarizing” — it conflates familiarity with approval. In other words, some people may be answering “no” because they don’t know anything about a candidate, while others are directly expressing disapproval. Hillary’s 41% is likely to be concentrated in the latter group, while Obama’s 39% is likely to be a mix of both. You can see this if you look at the numbers in context — Hillary is the best-known candidate and thus has the highest percentage of voters saying they would definitely vote for her, whereas lesser-known candidates have much less.

A better measure of whether a candidate is polarizing is to look at their favorable/unfavorable numbers, as I’ve done in the past for Hillary. The most polarizing candidates will have high positives and high negatives approaching 50/50. And guess what? Hillary’s most recent numbers, which come from USA Today, show that her unfavorables are in the mid- to high-40s. By comparison, the unfavorables of Edwards and Obama were in the low- to mid-30s. Don’t believe the hype.

Update 10/22 4:15 PM: I posted a response to Klein’s Tapped post on the subject.

When are Republicans going to defeat crazy old Pete Stark (D-CA), who keeps saying things like this?

Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, told Republicans: “You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Claiming that George W. Bush is sending troops to Iraq to “get their heads blown off for [his] amusement” is, of course, a vile smear. True to form, however, Atrios refers to Republican objections as a “hissy fit” and calls the GOP “WATBs,” which means “whiny ass titty babies” — an ironic position given that he works for Media Matters, which throws “hissy fits” over similar statements from Republicans on a daily basis.