Brendan Nyhan

Talk about post-hoc storytelling — The Economist’s Lexington column refers to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign as “obviously doomed” during the GOP primaries:

And whereas the Democrats usually engage in mud-wrestling to see who will get their party’s nomination, the Republicans are generally disciplined. They like to rally around a top dog as early as possible (for all the McCain mania in 2000, the insurgency was quickly put down, though George Bush senior was damaged by friendly fire in 1992). They even lined up behind the obviously doomed Bob Dole in 1996.

Indeed, given the conditions under which the election eventually took place, it was extremely unlikely that any Republican candidate would beat Clinton (from a political science perspective, anyway). But it’s not like GOP primary voters were passing up super-electable candidates — Dole’s closest competitors were Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan.

More importantly, Lexington is telling a fantasy version of history in which events are obvious before they happen. At the time of the GOP primaries, Clinton’s victory seemed less obvious to many observers, including The Economist itself. On March 9, 1996 — immediately after the GOP primary voters had chosen the “obviously doomed” Dole — the magazine wrote that Clinton’s “potential troubles loom large”:

Polls show Mr Clinton comfortably beating Mr Dole in a head-to-head race (by 52% to 44%, in a recent Pew poll). But such polls at this early stage mean little, and the president’s potential troubles loom large. Economic growth has slowed. Mr Clinton’s hopes of campaigning as a peacemaker have suffered setbacks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. His Whitewater worries are far from over.

Then, on May 18, it referred to the belief that the election was over as “foolish”:

If you believe the opinion polls, America’s presidential election is all but over, six months before the voting booths open. To believe that would be foolish, given that voters seem to change their minds even more often than before, and presidential campaigns are strewn with elephant traps. Yet what is extraordinary is that talk that Bill Clinton has already as good as won is coming not from complacent Democrats but from despairing Republicans–the same party that barely two months ago made Bob Dole its candidate-presumptive by an overwhelming margin. Mr Dole’s cause is hopeless, they mutter noisily, because, well, so is he. His speeches ramble, his campaigning is dire. The despair may be justified; or it may not be. Let Mr Dole prove his detractors wrong; this week he made a bold effort to do so by resigning from the Senate, his political home of 36 years…

By June 22, the magazine was touting Dole’s improving prospects in the wake of the developing Whitewater investigation:

All this is bound to take a toll. The presidential race is anyway starting to tighten. A month ago, polling by Time/CNN showed a 22-point gap between Mr Clinton and Bob Dole; that has narrowed to just six points. In a close race, the damage from scandal could tilt the balance.

Until recently, Mr Clinton was widely seen to be all but assured of a second term. Even Republicans despaired of their chances and their dreadful candidate. Now Citizen Dole looks revitalised and the president looks vulnerable. It would be no surprise if the “fourth annual White House Summer Picnic”, as the First Lady called it on Wednesday, turned out to be the last.

By September 7, the magazine was declaring that “barring calamity, the president[‘s] lead looks unassailable.” But it was indicating considerably more uncertainty before the fact. Maybe GOP primary voters were not as foolish as Lexington thinks.

Writing on Tapped, Robert Farley points out the problem with trying to make foreign policy based on vague analogies to the views of past and manages to work in an amusing reference to a “Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy” — the pundit equivalent of a triple axel:

Like Atrios, I wish that people would stop naming foreign policies after fantastic interpretations of what one president or another was supposed to have thought. Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan set the stage for this kind of nonsense with their 1996 article “Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”, a set of recommendations so “neo” that they bore no recognizable resemblance to the actual foreign policy of the Reagan administration. As a general rule, I’d prefer that progressives not try to emulate Kristol or Kagan. More to the point, the project of trying to derive specific recommendations from the invariably complex foreign policy of a presidential administration that operated in a completely different context will never yield good results. All that these efforts amount to is an attempt to associate the author’s pet policy recommendations with the warm fuzzies supplied by the word “Truman” or “Reagan” or “Roosevelt“.

All right, enough of that. Now time to get back to my magnum opus, “Fifty-Four Forty AND Fight: Towards a Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy.

[Disclosure: I resigned from blogging for TAP back in September.]

Writing on Hotline on Call, Hotline editor Chuck Todd articulates the risk that GOP presidential candidates are facing in ’08 from what has become an extremely unpopular war:

There are many GOP strategists who worry that if Iraq is still the major issue in ’08 and Iraq is still viewed as Bush’s war (translation: the GOP’s war), it won’t matter who either party nominates for president, the GOP will be in an unwinnable situation. The fact is, no matter how unpopular Bush is right now, the GOP desperately needs him to pivot on Iraq and find a way out or the entire party will pay one more time in ’08.

An emailer to Josh Marshall claims that “[t]he Iraq War is less popular than gay marriage, legalizing pot, banning handguns, and rescinding the death penalty.” It depends, of course, on how you define “popular” and what questions/polls you use. But the larger point is that we may be finally reaching the point where signaling one’s “toughness” by taking a hawkish position on Iraq is less important than the actual content of one’s position on Iraq.

Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon praised Trent Lott’s character in a speech before the whip election:

Inside the Republican senators’ November 15 closed-door meeting to pick their leaders for the next Congress, minority whip candidate Lamar Alexander had reason to feel good. His nominators had given enthusiastic pitches, and he had been campaigning hard for the job for nearly a year. Meanwhile, his opponent, Trent Lott, had entered the race just a week earlier–and was perceived to be damaged goods, having been spectacularly deposed from the leadership in December 2002 after he made a racially charged quip at his buddy Strom Thurmond’s one-hundredth birthday party. But then, Oregon Senator Gordon Smith rose to give a nominating speech for Lott. Smith’s address was deeply emotional: He described Lott’s honorable character and talked about the possibility of redemption. He even quoted from Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The room fell silent; Lott wept. When the doors opened, Lott had been elected minority whip by a single vote.

This statement tells you all you need to know about Trent Lott’s character:

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Shouldn’t Smith’s next opponent be running ads about how he backed Lott?

More silly third party hype from Unity ’08 co-founder Jerry Rafshoon in an insider interview on National Journal (sub. required):

Rafshoon: Our No. 1 goal is to elect [our ticket].

…Twenty percent of the vote is our minimum goal. It’s our minimum.

We’ll take it, certainly, if that’s what we get. But think about this: By the time we have this convention, we’ll have 5, 10, maybe even 20 million people on the Web site having this convention. Let’s say it’s 10 [million]. That’ll be more people than have chosen the nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, because they will have been chosen by the early primaries. It may not even break a million that have chosen those candidates.

That person will probably leap ahead in the polls then, because everybody’s going to have them on the cover…. There may be people who wanted to get either one of their party’s nomination and didn’t get it; there could be new people; there maybe people from other disciplines than politics.

The Unity ’08 nominee will “probably leap ahead in the polls” after their online convention? This whole proposition is absurd. What everyone fails to understand is that third parties are a giant coordination game. And once the participants realize, as they inevitably will, that barriers like ballot access, party loyalty and the Electoral College make a third party victory extremely unlikely, then the whole thing collapses before it begins.

Also, I’m offended by the vaguely anti-democratic notion of “unity.” Yes, polarization is extremely high. Yes, it would be nice if some semblance of bipartisanship were possible in Washington. But disagreement is inevitable, even necessary, in democracy. We should not want unity. There is no one optimal set of positions that everyone should agree on. Don’t give in to this fantasy.

Jon Chait’s Los Angeles Times column, which is always worth reading, contains a particularly disturbing anecdote this week:

Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

Consider a story in the latest Time magazine, recounting the efforts–before the commission was approved by Congress–of three supporters to enlist Condoleezza Rice to win the administration’s approval for the panel. Here is how Time reports it:

As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group’s potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, the President agreed.

The article treats this exchange in a matter-of-fact way, but, what it suggests is completely horrifying. Rice apparently believed that Bush would simply follow the advice of whoever he spoke with. Therefore the one factor determining whether Bush would support the commission was whether Cheney or Rice managed to get to him first.

If you read The Price of Loyalty or The One Percent Doctrine, this shouldn’t be surprising. But the implications are still awful to contemplate.

Writing in the New York Sun, Jim Geraghty is the latest figure to feed the hype around a third-party presidential run by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. The article begins with a remarkably credulous take:

The 2004 presidential race lacked a feature present in every campaign since 1992: a significant showing by a third-party candidate. Today, however, political strategists are coming to recognize that the presidential race in 2008 may be a threesome again. Mayor Bloomberg may have repeatedly denied that he is running, but after two terms as New York mayor, what else would he do with his money? “Half a billion dollars? Not a problem,” he was reported to have said earlier this year when asked what he was willing to spend on a campaign.

The prospect of an independent forcing a three-way split is not appetizing to the mainstream candidates. “There’s been discussion about Bloomberg, and no one likes the idea of a third party getting in the race with millions and millions of dollars,” an adviser to one of the leading Republican contenders said. “If the Republican candidate ended up being a real firebrand like” Senator Brownback of Kansas, “I can see Bloomberg carving out some territory.”

A veteran campaigner for President Bush and a current adviser to Senator McCain, Mark McKinnon, told New York magazine that if the primaries “squeeze out the moderates, you’ll have an ideal situation for a third-party run.”

The Internet guru credited with transforming Howard Dean from an unknown governor to a front-runner in 2004, Joseph Trippi, sounded almost enthusiastic. “Given his resources, it’s all sitting there for him,” Mr. Trippi said. “People are so sick of the polarization of politics that he could make the case that it’s time to move beyond the two parties and that he’s the one to lead us.”

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said his most recent surveys show that in a match up against Senator Clinton and a non-McCain, non-Giuliani Republican, Mr. Bloomberg polls in the mid-20% range.

The next part of the article, however, provides the appropriate response from a “Bush campaign veteran”:

Still, talk of a Bloomberg bid stirs laughter in some Republican circles in Washington.

“Is there a single American clamoring for a Bloomberg presidency? A single one?” a Bush campaign veteran, who is currently unaffiliated with any of the 2008 contenders, asks. “If he spends $500 million, they will piss it away. I’m not even sure if he gets 10%. And I have no idea who he hurts. … It’s not like Perot, who was a Texan and instinctively conservative.”

That’s the key question: who wants Bloomberg to run? Answer: No one — except the operatives like McKinnon and Morris who are hyping his prospects. By doing so, they get press attention and increase their chances of making a fortune by working for him if he does run. Self-funding candidates like Jon Corzine and Bloomberg are a bonanza for consultants.

The Perot and Nader examples are not particularly relevant to Bloomberg either. Third-party candidates typically build their campaigns around an issue that cuts across party lines (as in Perot with the deficit or George Wallace and Strom Thurmond with civil rights) or an extreme ideological position (Nader’s leftism). Bloomberg has no defining issue and he’s a centrist.

A better point of comparison is John Anderson, a moderate Republican congressman who ran in 1980. His experience (as described in the Wikipedia entry on Anderson) sounds like exactly what I think would happen to Bloomberg — he’d enter with a splash and then trail off:

In the 1980 presidential election, Anderson entered the Republican primary for the U.S. presidential election, in a crowded field that included Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. That spring, he dropped out of the primary race to run as an independent candidate for the fall general election. His campaign manager was New York media strategist David Garth. Anderson started out very well in the polls — over 25%. But as a top advisor reported, “Instead of rising to something on the order of 30 percent, he fell, steadily, about one percentage point every week and a half, down to 22 percent, then 20 percent, then 18 percent, and progressively worse.”

Most of Anderson’s original support came from Rockefeller Republicans who were more liberal than Reagan, but it bled away. Many prominent intellectuals, including the author and activist Gore Vidal and the editors of the liberal magazine The New Republic, also endorsed the Anderson campaign. He also had the support of many independents. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury ran several strips sympathetic to the Anderson campaign. The hope that Anderson would score when the Democrats split in their support of Ted Kennedy and President Jimmy Carter faded when Kennedy endorsed Carter and the Democrats held together. Anderson’s choice of little-known Democrat Patrick Joseph Lucey, a former Governor of Wisconsin, as his running mate signaled that Anderson was unable to win over any prominent Democrat. His poll numbers kept falling, despite a spirited debate with Reagan. He stayed in the race because he would receive federal election subsidies only if he received 5% of the vote, and millions of unpaid debts had been accumulated. In the end he received 7% of the vote in the election, with a total of about 6 million votes. He did not carry a single precinct in the country.

Unlike Bloomberg, however, Anderson did not have $500 million to spend. That alone could at least change the dynamic of the race. But will a businessman really choose to invest his money in a lost cause? I doubt it.

Check out this striking passage from an article in the current issue of The New Yorker (not online) — the social culture in suburban high schools is so brutal that Somali refugees think they’re awful places:

Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt on arriving in America. Having escaped the horrors of the civil war and spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya, she was resettled, first, in suburban Atlanta, where she was sent to an all-white high school. “And I tell you,” she said, “American high school is the cruellest place I’ve been.”

Anyone else notice an interesting juxtaposition on the New York Times front page yesterday? It featured a picture of Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech in which he suggesting he was moved and a headline for an article about China directly below that included the phrase “false modesty.”

Maybe just a coincidence, but I was amused…

Most news coverage of the Iraq Study Group report has been annoyingly reverential. To point out the obvious, the fact that the group is bipartisan does not give it a monopoly on wisdom. Its work must ultimately be judged by the content of its recommendations, not the process by which it was written. (Related question: Do we care what Sandra Day O’Connor thinks about Iraq?)

That’s what made Michael R. Gordon’s news analysis in the New York Times yesterday so refreshing. Because the ISG is bipartisan, Gordon can’t be accused of bias for covering it critically, which freed him from the artificially balanced “he said,” “she said” format that makes most American news reporting so useless. Instead, he stated his conclusions bluntly and without qualification.

The lede in Gordon’s article states that “The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers.” After detailing the problems with the recommendations made in the report, he concludes, “The study contains all the ingredients of a Washington compromise. What is less apparent is a detailed and convincing military strategy that is likely to work in Iraq.”

Indeed. Of course, the same could have been said about the Bush administration’s plans for Iraq since the insurgency began, but good luck finding a Times article that says as much.