Brendan Nyhan

Via TNR’s Jonathan Chait, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes reveals the bizarre standards of judgment President Bush uses in making decisions:

The
president is especially fond of General George Casey, the commander on the ground in Iraq. He invited Casey and his family to a meal at the White House last year, partly to size him up by seeing how he interacted with his wife and kids. In September, he told conservative journalists he was totally confident in Casey’s advice. “If Casey is wrong, I’m wrong,” he said.

Why not “size him up” by evaluating, say, how well Casey manages the war in Iraq? The President seems to rely heavily on snap judgments and irrelevant personality traits in making decisions. Consider what’s already publicly known.

Back in 2001, Bush famously claimed he “looked [Vladimir Putin] in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” According to the Washington Post, Bush “complained privately about [former economic adviser Larry Lindsey’s] failure to exercise physically” before forcing him out in 2002. And when interviewing Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Bush “asked him about the hardest decision he had ever made – and also how much he exercised.”

So how did Bush pick General Petraeus to replace Casey? Did Barney like Petraeus when he came to the White House? Maybe Petraeus has a better bench press?

Time to play economic literacy 101 with another supply-sider. Rep. Mike Pence, a conservative Republican who ran unsuccessfully for minority leader, writes in the Wall Street Journal today that the 1990 tax increase signed by George H.W. Bush “ushered in economic recession”:

We have been down this road before. In 1990, I was a young candidate for Congress when the last Bush administration sided with a Democrat majority in Congress to pass the largest tax increase in history, all in the name of bipartisanship and compromise. This compromise ushered in economic recession and a two-term Democratic administration in the White House. We cannot walk down the 1990 road to “compromise” again.

However, the National Bureau of Economic Research dates the beginning of the recession to July 1990, and the compromise bill that included a tax increase wasn’t enacted until November 1990. Bush didn’t even indicate he would support a tax increase until late June. This makes the Laffer Curve look like rigorous social science.

Oh, how the times change.

With John McCain proclaiming his conservative bona fides, it’s worth revisiting the media-fueled hype about him becoming a Democrat, which included two big magazine articles in The New Republic and Washington Monthly in 2002 and January 15, 2007

John Edwards has a big problem. He’s a serious candidate who will make Clinton and Obama sweat. But despite being a trial lawyer who often sounds scripted, he’s trying to run as the candidate of authenticity. That’s a mistake in a political culture that is obsessed with exposing hypocrisy and artifice. The way that Jason Zengerle savages Edwards in a New Republic profile is a preview of things to come:

Presidential candidates, of course, are given to pat answers–partly because they’re so often asked the same questions, partly because being candid carries so many risks. But Edwards’s exceptional guardedness seems strange for a candidate who now makes such a fetish of authenticity–for a candidate, in fact, who makes a pointed distinction between guarded, pabulum-spewing politicians and candid, truth-telling leaders. “What happens with politicians,” he recently told a public radio interviewer, “is that you’re conditioned not to be yourself. You’re conditioned to say the same thing over and over and over, because that’s the safe route. … We need a leader, or leaders, who are willing to be themselves, who’ll tell the truth as they see it.” Or, as he complained to me about the last presidential campaign, during which he seems to think he acted more like a politician than a leader: “It was just plastic, there was a lot of plasticity to it. You know–young, Southern, dynamic, charismatic, beautiful family, all that. People need to see who I am, what my character is.” Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like something Edwards says in a “behind the scenes” video his campaign recently posted on YouTube: “I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. … I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences.”

About the only time Edwards seemed to switch off autopilot during the interview was when he talked about poverty. “You should cut me off on this,” he warned, “because I spend a lot of time talking about this.” And he did. He talked about his various ideas for fighting poverty–raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, reforming public housing, creating one million federally funded “stepping stone” jobs at nonprofits or government agencies. He talked about just how much he still had to learn and how even he sometimes felt despair about the intractable nature of the problem. “The cultural component of poverty and what feeds the cycle of poverty–I don’t think I ever really got it until, like, for the fifteenth time I’m sitting with a 33-year-old, 32-year-old mother who has a 14-year-old who’s having the third child,” he said. “And you hear that and it’s just, ‘How will they ever get out?’ You know, it’s ‘What can you do?’” He seemed genuinely offended when I asked him whether he was surprised that Americans’ post-Katrina concern about poverty had waned so rapidly. “I think it’s very superficial to suggest that there was interest [and] it’s gone,” he said. “It’s not gone. It’s still there. It’s just not on the surface. … It’s deeper down.”

A few hours later, Edwards went to one of those places where the interest in poverty was anything but buried: the dinner banquet honoring local community activists… Edwards launched into a speech that followed, almost to the letter, the same trajectory as our interview: the same policy proposals, the same observations, even the same revelatory anecdotes. “One of the things that I’ve been struck by in the work that we’ve been doing over the last several years is that you sit with a mother, a single mom … and her 14-year-old daughter is giving birth to the third child. And it just feeds this cycle of poverty.” What had sounded so fresh and genuine to me only hours before already seemed stale and scripted.

At this point in the cycle, Edwards should be trying to address his weaknesses (lack of policy knowledge, not being as brilliant as his rivals), not reinforcing them. Zengerle’s piece is going to reinforce the conventional wisdom among reporters, which could create a narrative that will doom Edwards.

In a New Yorker article on the foreign policy views of the leading Democratic presidential contenders, Jeffrey Goldberg calls Hillary Clinton the most experienced candidate, but implicitly acknowledges the point I made last week — Hillary’s experience is largely as First Lady; she has no advantage in direct legislative or executive experience over her rivals:

Hillary Clinton, who has not announced her candidacy but is said to be close to doing so, is a connoisseur of statecraft, the candidate of the Democratic foreign-policy elite. She brings the most experience in foreign policy to the race—much of it gained vicariously, in her husband’s White House (my italics).

…Hillary Clinton’s decision to give Bush her approval in 2002 was influenced by her recent White House experience. “I have respect for Presidential decision-making and I saw what the Republican Congress had done to Bill on a range of issues, denying him the authority to deal with Bosnia and Kosovo and second-guessing him on every imaginable issue,” she said. “And I don’t think that that’s good for the country, and I had no problem in giving President Bush the authority to do what he stated he would do and what I was assured privately on many occasions would be done.”

Maybe I’ll print up some bumper stickers with the slogan “Hillary ’08: More vicarious experience”…

One important tactic in the conservative arsenal is to throw civil rights language back at liberals in order to put them on the defensive.

Here’s a case in point. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) recently made a nasty allusion to Condoleezza Rice’s lack of immediate family during a Congressional hearing on the war in Iraq:

Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.

Rather than simply stating that Rice’s family situation is irrelevant, Rush Limbaugh accused Boxer of “trying to lynch” Rice “right before Martin Luther King Day” (as Media Matters documented):

LIMBAUGH: Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this — an African American woman — right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here.

The statement is nonsensical on its face — the incident has nothing to do with Rice’s racial background or Martin Luther King Day. But by reversing civil rights language against Boxer in this way, Limbaugh is trying to delegitimize criticism of Rice generally.

I was surprised to see that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is already running text ads (PDF) urging a presidential run by Barack Obama:

Obama for President
Sign Dick Durbin’s
petition urging Barack
Obama to run for
President
www.DickDurbin.com

It’s customary to back your home-state colleague, but Durbin is being a team player to back Obama this early. Remember, Obama is the junior senator from his state. A recent comparison comes from Ted Kennedy, who offered strained endorsements of his junior colleague John Kerry in 2004 (he and Kerry, and their staffs, have a legendary rivalry). It’s hard to imagine Kennedy’s staff spending money promoting Kerry before he declared in 2003, and there’s no way they’re doing so now.

Via Andrew Sullivan, the Washington Post denounces Cully Stimson, the Bush administration official responsible for “detainee affairs,” for his loathsome comments suggesting that top law firms should not represent accused terrorists (Windows Media audio):

Most Americans understand that legal representation for the accused is one of the core principles of the American way. Not, it seems, Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. In a repellent interview yesterday with Federal News Radio, Mr. Stimson brought up, unprompted, the number of major U.S. law firms that have helped represent detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“Actually you know I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there,’ and you know what, it’s shocking,” he said.

Mr. Stimson proceeded to reel off the names of these firms, adding, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Asked who was paying the firms, Mr. Stimson hinted of dark doings. “It’s not clear, is it?” he said. “Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving monies from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

It might be only laughable that Mr. Stimson, during the interview, called Guantanamo “certainly, probably, the most transparent and open location in the world.”

But it’s offensive — shocking, to use his word — that Mr. Stimson, a lawyer, would argue that law firms are doing anything other than upholding the highest ethical traditions of the bar by taking on the most unpopular of defendants. It’s shocking that he would seemingly encourage the firms’ corporate clients to pressure them to drop this work. And it’s shocking — though perhaps not surprising — that this is the person the administration has chosen to oversee detainee policy at Guantanamo.

The New York Times adds more context. Stimson, who hyped the “major play” that the issue would get, apparently tried to advance his cause by leaking a blind quote to the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

In addition, Stimson’s views are so extreme that even the Bush administration (quietly) denounced them:

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson’s view. His comments “do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,” a senior Pentagon official said.

And Stimson’s disreputable suggestion that the firms are being paid by nefarious third parties is apparently untrue:

Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the approximately 500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is being paid, Mr. Ratner said. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling, which has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Mr. Ratner said that there were two other defense lawyers not under his group’s umbrella and that he did not know whether they were paid.

Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton who represented an Uzbeki detainee who has since been released, said: “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel. Any suggestion that our representation was anything other than a pro bono basis is untrue and unprofessional.” Mr. Moore said he had made four trips to Guantánamo and one to Albania at the firm’s expense, to see his client freed.

Update 1/13 9:51 PM: More administration disavowal via David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.

Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Maybe the appointment of Bob Gates has made a difference — do you think Rumsfeld would be running away from Stimson right now?

Update 1/18 7:58 PM: Media Matters linked to this post today in an article criticizing a CNN correspondent for referring to Stimson’s statement as “a few ill-chosen words” (the Pentagon official apologized today).

It’s official — the North Carolina Attorney General’s office is taking over the Duke lacrosse case. Thank goodness.

PS Can this passage from the ABCNews.com report on the announcement be correct?

Nifong, a career prosecutor for nearly 30 years, was “devastated” by having to prosecute the Duke case, his lawyer said.

“It’s devastating to him,” Freedman said. “He cherishes his reputation as an ethical attorney and prosecutor.”

His resignation does not reflect of the strength of the case overall, Freedman told ABC News, adding, “He believes in the case.”

Nifong didn’t “have” to prosecute anything. Cry me a river.

For those of you pondering the appropriate dance to celebrate the dethroning of Tom DeLay et al, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones chose the cabbage patch — and then chose (probably unwisely) to do it on the House floor:

Heady with victory, Democrats are feeling feistier and cockier than they have in years. This headiness was symbolized earlier that day, when Democratic Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio cast her vote to coronate Pelosi as speaker and then, with the whole House watching, broke out into a hip-hop jig known as the “cabbage patch”–a move that involves clasping one’s hands and swinging one’s arms as if churning butter. Such enthusiasm is understandable for Democrats, who waited more than a decade to regain power. Still, to some, turning the House floor into a dance floor sent a message of dubious taste. “You want to be magnanimous in victory, and then you see that,” says a dismayed House Democratic leadership aide. “Show some class!”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the cabbage patch, here’s a random YouTube demo (anyone have C-SPAN video of Tubbs-Jones?):