Brendan Nyhan

Marc Ambinder’s RNC inbox tells the story of modern opposition research:

The war against Hillary is already 24/7 more than a year before the general election. Also, we know who the RNC thinks the Democratic nominee is going to be.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has issued a must-read analysis of the SCHIP debate that reveals the emptiness of White House claims that we should put “poor kids first.” As it turns out, the SCHIP bill is structured to do just that, and the Bush administration’s policies are not (shocking!).

CBPP notes that the “poor kids” catchphrase was apparently constructed by a Republican pollster:

The White House is confident it will prevail. But a win for the president doesn’t erase the long-term challenge for Republicans to unify around a coherent message on health care, an issue on which Democrats — especially the party’s presidential candidates — have taken the lead.

By 57% to 31%, a majority of voters expressed more confidence in Democrats than Republicans on handling health-care and drug issues, according to a survey of 1,000 registered voters from David Winston, a Republican strategist and adviser to House Republican Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio). Among independents, the gap was wider: 63% to 19%. The numbers shifted when Mr. Winston tested the idea that Republicans will support CHIP but want to “put poor kids first” rather than expand coverage to adults, illegal immigrants and those already with insurance. Independents favored that message 47%-38%.

Shockingly enough, in the last few weeks, Boehner, Republican members of Congress, President Bush, and other administration officials have all invoked the poll-tested “poor kids first” catchphrase. Who cares if it makes no sense?

All hail Ramesh Ponnuru, reality-based conservative, who is challenging supply-side myths on National Review’s blog The Corner.

Here is his first post on the subject:

“What’s A Republican?” [Ramesh Ponnuru]

The New York Sun asks, and offers a list of unifying ideas. The top item on their list concerns taxes.

Reductions in top marginal tax rates provide incentives for growth and lead to greater government revenues in the long run. That is not always the case. There is a point on the Laffer Curve at which tax cuts on the top margin stop generating increased income, but we are nowhere near that point now.

Presumably what they mean is that the top income tax rate is higher than the revenue-maximizing rate, but I'm not sure why they think that it is. Bush's tax cuts appear to have caused revenue to be lower than it would otherwise have been, which suggests that we're already below the revenue-maximizing tax rate.

And here is the followup:

Taxes and Revenues [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Yesterday I noted that Bush's tax cuts had caused revenue to be lower than it would otherwise have been. A number of people have emailed me saying that I'm wrong: Revenues have been growing fast, and are higher than they were before the tax cuts took effect.

That shows that the tax cuts were compatible with rising revenues, not that they caused them. The tax cuts may have boosted our economic growth, but we would have had some growth without them. So the question is whether tax cuts boosted growth so much that they ended up raising money.

I can't think of any serious economist who thinks that happened. The 2003 Economic Report of the President said that "[a]lthough the economy grows in response to tax reductions… it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by the higher level of economic activity." Bush's own Treasury Department has disavowed the view that Bush's tax cuts have raised revenue.Rob Portman and Ed Lazear, while serving in the Bush administration (as head of the OMB and the Council of Economic Advisers, respectively), said that the tax cuts had reduced federal revenue.

I'll give the last word to Alan Viard, an economist who worked at the White House before joining AEI. Last year, the Washington Post quoted him: "Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There's really no dispute among economists about that."

After terrible coverage of President Bush’s misleading claim that the SCHIP children’s health insurance bill covers kids from families making up to $83,000, the New York Times finally breaks the issue down almost two weeks later:

Mr. Bush said Monday that the bill would expand eligibility for the program up to $83,000.

But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and an architect of the bill, said Tuesday that the president’s argument was specious. “About 92 percent of the kids will be under 200 percent of the poverty level,” Mr. Hatch said at a news conference with supporters of the bill, including the singer Paul Simon.

Another Republican author of the bill, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said the White House claims were “flatly incorrect.”

States establish income limits for the child health program. A recent survey by the Congressional Research Service found that 32 states had set limits at twice the poverty level or less, while 17 states had limits from 220 percent to 300 percent of the poverty level. Only one state, New Jersey, has a higher limit. It offers coverage to children with family incomes up to 350 percent of the poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four.

In New York, which covers children up to 250 percent of the poverty level, the Legislature this year passed a bill that would have raised the limit to 400 percent of the poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four. The Bush administration rejected the proposal, saying it would have allowed the substitution of public coverage for private insurance.

States that cover middle-income children often charge premiums and co-payments on a sliding scale, so the coverage is not free.

While the bill passed by Congress would not prohibit states from setting the income limit at $82,600, it would set stringent new standards for such coverage.

In general, after Oct. 1, 2010, a state could not receive any federal money to cover children above 300 percent of the poverty level unless a vast majority of its low-income children — those at or below 200 percent of the poverty level — were already covered. To meet this test, a state would have to show that the proportion of its low-income children with insurance was at least equal to the average for the 10 states with the highest rates of coverage of low-income children.

Moreover, if a state was allowed to cover children over 300 percent of the poverty level, the federal payment for those children would, in most cases, be reduced. New Jersey and New York would be exempt from the cuts if they met the bill’s other requirements.

Citing that provision, the White House said Oct. 6 that the bill included a “grandfather clause” allowing higher payment rates for children above 300 percent of the poverty level in New Jersey and New York.

Jocelyn A. Guyer, a researcher at the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University, said: “This is a wildly contentious political issue, but it’s largely a theoretical question. More than 99 percent of children in the program are below three times the poverty level, and New York is the only state that has expressed any interest in going to four times the poverty level.”

Suzanne Esterman, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Human Services, said that 3,000 of the 124,000 children in the state program — about 2.4 percent — had family incomes exceeding three times the poverty level.

Annoyingly, the NYT’s Robert Pear closes the article by citing “confusion” with a past bill — as if the White House can’t distinguish between the two:

Some of the current confusion can be traced back to a bill introduced in March by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, both Democrats. They would have explicitly allowed all states to expand eligibility to families making four times the poverty level. But the bill passed by Congress did not go that far.

Via Mark Thoma and others, the libertarian blogger Megan McArdle, who was last seen claiming that supply siders have “been rather thin on the ground lately,” had a review spiked for admitting that tax cuts don’t increase revenue:

A conservative publication, which I will not name, just spiked a book review because I said that the Laffer Curve didn’t apply at American levels of taxation, even while otherwise expressing my vast displeasure with the (liberal) economic notions of the book I was reviewing. This isn’t me looking for an alternative explanation for the spiking of a bad review: the literary editor accepted it, edited it, and then three hours later told me it couldn’t be published because it violated their editorial line on taxation.

I suppose I ought to have known, but I didn’t. Go ahead liberals, pile on: you told me so. The Laffer Curve and the supply siders pushing it seem to be the teacher’s unions of the right.

I’ll skip the gloating. But as Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, and Matthew Yglesias point out, the equivalence between teacher’s unions and supply siders seems misleading. While both are influential interest groups, liberals frequently bash teacher’s unions in print. More importantly, teacher’s unions don’t enforce an implausible empirical claim as a litmus test.

In the latest attack on dissent, the Wall Street Journal editorial board suggests Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “foreign policy intrusions” may be “consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq”:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famous for donning a head scarf earlier this year to commune for peace with the Syrians, has now concluded that this is the perfect moment to pass a Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of 1915. Problem is, Turkey in 2007 has it within its power to damage the growing success of the U.S. effort in Iraq. We would like to assume this is not Speaker Pelosi’s goal.

To be clear: We write that we would like to assume, rather than that we do assume, because we are no longer able to discern whether the Speaker’s foreign-policy intrusions are merely misguided or are consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq…

If Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos want to take down U.S. policy in Iraq to tag George Bush with the failure, they should have the courage to walk through the front door to do it. Bringing the genocide resolution to the House floor this week would put a terrible event of Armenia’s past in the service of America’s bitter partisanship today. It is mischievous at best, catastrophic at worst, and should be tabled.

Continuing a troubling pattern of unsupported claims, Josh Marshall and his burgeoning media empire are falsely accusing GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson of suggesting Iraq had WMD at the time of the US invasion.

In an October 1 post on his main blog, Talking Points Memo, Marshall touted a new post on TPM Election Central:

Thompson on Saddam Hussein: Good we got him when we did since he had WMD, had an active nuclear program and was about to become “new dictator of that entire region.”

The clear implication of Marshall’s paraphrase “[g]ood we got him when we did since he had WMD, had an active nuclear program” is that Thompson claimed Saddam had WMD and an active nuclear program when the US invaded.

However, the post he was promoting, which was written by Eric Kleefeld, does not support this claim. In fact, it shows that both Marshall and Kleefeld misconstrued Thompson’s words, rephrasing the candidate’s statement that Iraq “had had” WMD and a nuclear program in the past to suggest that Thompson claimed Iraq “had” WMD and a nuclear program at the time of the invasion:

Thompson: Saddam “Clearly” Had WMD And A Nuke Program
By Eric Kleefeld – October 1, 2007, 9:30PM

During a campaign stop in Iowa today, Fred Thompson unambiguously stood by the premise of the Iraq War — and went so far as to say Saddam Hussein “clearly” had weapons of mass destruction and a nuclear program that posed a threat.

“Saddam Hussein, today, had we not gone in, would be sitting on this power keg and be in control of the whole thing,” Thompson said. “He would have been the new dictator of that entire region in my estimation. He is — was — a dangerous irrational man who, by this time, would have been well on his way to having the nuclear capability himself.”

Thompson also seemed to say that the failure to find WMD was simply a matter of particulars, of where and when America has looked.

“We can’t forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD,” he said. “He clearly had had the beginnings of a nuclear program, and in my estimation his intent never did change.”

This distortion-by-paraphrase is reminiscent of the way that Al Gore’s (accurate) statement that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” was twisted into the phony claim that Gore said he “invented the Internet.”

I’ve written extensively on misperceptions about weapons of mass destruction at Spinsanity, in All the President’s Spin, on this blog, and in ongoing academic research. There is a serious problem with politicians making statements that encourage these false beliefs. However, while Thompson’s claims that Saddam would be “new dictator of that entire region” and that he “would have been well on his way to having the nuclear capability himself” by now are implausible, Thompson did not claim Saddam had WMD and a nuclear program at the time of the invasion, as Marshall and Kleefeld suggest. (Ironically, their work is actually fostering a misperception about a misperception.)

Most importantly, there’s no excuse for mischaracterizing Thompson’s words, just as there’s no excuse for suggesting that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped steal the 2004 presidential election, asserting that the White House ordered Sen. Pat Roberts to investigate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, claiming that the White House “engineered” the timing of the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s trial, stating that the President was “a party to the same underlying crime” in the Scooter Libby case, or writing that “the president was involved [in the Plame scandal] from day one” and “was always in favor of doing it [outing Valerie Plame]” without sufficient supporting evidence. Marshall and his team know better.

The AP’s Ron Fournier has returned from his failed Hotsoup venture to write strange “analysis” articles for the news service, including one titled “Is Edwards Real or a Phony?” and another titled “Obama Presidency a ‘Stretch’ for Voters.”

The latest installment in the “Do Democrats Suck?” series is titled “Obama a ‘Courageous Leader’?”

Nobody can dispute that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start and, with striking prescience, predicted U.S. troops would be mired in a costly conflict that fanned “the flames of the Middle East.”

But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator’s claim that he was a “courageous leader” who opposed the war at great political risk.

The truth is that while Obama showed foreign policy savvy and an ability to keenly analyze both sides of an issue in his October 2002 warnings on Iraq, the political upside of his position rivaled any risk.

And, once elected to the U.S. Senate two years later, Obama waited months to show national leadership on Iraq.

However, as in the Edwards case, Fournier is passing off his own judgment as an objective assessment of a fundamentally non-testable claim. There’s no definitive way to address whether a leader is phony or courageous. And the framing of these articles seems tilted against Democrats. As I said before, I’m waiting for the “Giuliani: Sane or Crazy?” piece.

I’ve blogged several times about Deborah Solomon’s uncomfortably harsh questions for interview subjects in the New York Times Magazine. It turns out that some of those questions were never asked — indeed, public editor Clark Hoyt reveals today that the print version of the interview is fundamentally misleading:

WHEN you read Deborah Solomon’s “Questions For” in The New York Times Magazine, it’s like crashing an exclusive book party at Tina Brown’s East Side garden apartment.

There you stand, sipping white wine, as Solomon and a famous author or politician or media personality trade zippy repartee. Her sharp, challenging questions elicit pithy, surprising answers — a disloyal comment about an employer, a confession to a Diet Coke habit, what’s in Jack Black’s iPod.

That is the illusion of Solomon’s column. The reality is something else: the 700 or so words each week are boiled down from interviews that sometimes last more than an hour and run 10,000 words. Though presented in a way that suggests a verbatim transcript, the order of the interview is sometimes altered, and the wording of questions is changed — for clarity or context, editors say. At least three interviews have been conducted by e-mail because the subjects couldn’t speak English or had other speech difficulties. And, Solomon told me, “Very early on, I might have inserted a question retroactively, so the interview would flow better,” a practice she said she no longer uses.

“Questions For” came under fire recently when a reporter for New York Press, a free alternative weekly, interviewed two high-profile journalists — Amy Dickinson, the advice columnist who followed Ann Landers at The Chicago Tribune, and Ira Glass, creator of the public radio program “This American Life” — who said their published interviews with Solomon contained questions she never asked.

While the vast majority of Solomon’s interview subjects have never complained, these are not the first who have. Last year, The Times Magazine published an angry letter from NBC’s Tim Russert, who said that the portrayal of his interview with her was “misleading, callous and hurtful.”

After recounting the complaints of Dickinson, Glass, and Russert, which appear credible, Hoyt calls Solomon’s journalism into question:

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review in 2005, Solomon said: “Feel free to mix the pieces of this interview around, which is what I do.”

“Is there a general protocol on that?” her questioner asked.

“There’s no Q. and A. protocol,” Solomon replied. “You can write the manual.” Solomon told me she was joking.

In fact, there is a protocol, and “Questions For” isn’t living up to it. The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage says that readers have a right to assume that every word in quotation marks is what was actually said. “Questions For” does not use quotations marks but is presented as a transcript. The manual also says ellipses should be used to signal omissions in transcripts, and that “The Times does not ‘clean up’ quotations.”

Marzorati told me, “this is an entertainment, not a newsmaker interview on ‘Meet the Press.’” But that does not relieve it of the obligation to live up to The Times’s standards or offer an explanation when it deviates from them.

I think editors made a mistake by not publishing an editor’s note with Russert’s letter, acknowledging error and explaining the reforms. Now, I believe, if they want to preserve the illusion of a conversation, they should publish with each column a brief description of the editing standards: the order of questions may be changed, information may be added for clarity, and the transcript has been boiled down without indicating where material has been removed.

If such a disclaimer destroys the illusion, maybe “Questions For” needs to be rethought.

The squabble taking place between Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan is truly bizarre.

In his latest post, Sullivan bashes Klein for writing the following about NYT/IHT columnist Roger Cohen:

Roger Cohen may feel like he is a liberal hawk, and thus distinct. But what Roger Cohen feels does not matter, because Roger Cohen does not control any branch of the American military. Who he empowers, and which actors in American politics find their ideas legitimized by his columns, is all that matters. And in that, he is worse than a neoconservative. He’s a liberal hawk who knows better, but whose interest in writing about his own virtue overwhelms his judgments concerning the actual actions of those who wield power. He is not a neoconservative. He is a narcissist.

According to Sullivan, this is an “attack” on “independent thought”:

It’s an attack on any independent thought outside of the situational demands of a political coalition. It is a full-throated and not-even-regretful support for the subjugation of free inquiry and free ideas to the demands of political organization. It makes Sidney Blumenthal seem intellectually honest…

[Cohen] has arguments to make, arguments that can be agreed with or disagreed with, but that have merits of their own that should be addressed regardless of the arrangement of political power at the time. This isn’t narcissism; it is the duty of any writer and thinker to state his own views as best he can without concern for how the world might greet them, who might use them unfairly, or who might expropriate them for insincere purposes. Without this independence, a writer is merely a hack. Or, worse for a writer, an activist.

What’s so strange about this argument — which I agree with is — is that Sullivan engaged in the same sort of reasoning as Klein after 9/11 and before the war in Iraq, a period in which he repeatedly suggested that criticism of the war on terror or war in Iraq had the effect of aiding terrorists or Saddam (he’s since changed his views). For instance, he wrote that “The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead – and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column” and called the BBC “a military player” that is “objectively pro-Saddam.”

In both cases, Klein and Sullivan argued that we must divorce the (supposed) effect of a writer’s words from their intent. To criticize the war effort, according to Sullivan circa 2001-2003, has the effect of aiding the enemy and is therefore illegitimate. To express a hawkish liberal view, according to Klein, has the effect of supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy and is therefore irresponsible. In each case, they are trying to silence views they dislike, though Sullivan’s tactic of equating speech with treason is far more objectionable.

So when will Klein and Sullivan realize they share common ground?