Brendan Nyhan

Via Andrew Sullivan, Powerline’s John Hinderaker is throwing around an absurd metaphor:

Why Doesn’t the Administration Fight Back?

I don’t understand it, and neither does Bill Kristol. The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War. The administration can easily win the argument over Iraq, but instead it has abandoned the field to the enemy. Why? Kristol wonders, “[D]o they enjoy being punching bags at the White House?”

It’s as good a theory as any I’ve seen. Turning the other cheek may be good theology, but President Bush owes the country a far more aggressive response to the Democratic Party’s perfidy. Bush is letting down the country badly by failing to respond to the Democrats’ charges.

So apparently, Democratic criticism of the war in Iraq is more scurrilous than, say, the defenses of segregation offered by Strom Thurmond or George Wallace:

THURMOND: I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

WALLACE: It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

Here’s a disturbing sign of the GOP’s turn toward postmodernism under President Bush — a “close” ally of the White House “admiringly” describing the administration’s talent for “making their own reality”:

But the Bush White House has always been good at what one close Republican ally refers to admiringly as “making their own reality,” meaning that the president and his top aides stick doggedly to their political script and agenda, refusing to be knocked off course. What Democrats consider stubbornness and detachment, Mr. Bush’s admirers consider determination, and in this case that trait suggests the White House will be in no rush to acknowledge mistakes or to offer detailed explanations that might swamp the president’s second-term plans.

Are there any Republicans left who are members of “the reality-based community”?

In today’s New York Times, GOP consultant Rich Galen offers an analysis of the Bush administration’s predicament that is precisely backward:

“A White House that is aggressively on message is an unstoppable political tool,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant. “Just as the Clinton White House got itself back together in ’95 and after impeachment, this White House will get itself together, too.”

Will the Bush administration get itself back together? Sure, at least relatively speaking. It’s hard to imagine much more disarray than the last few months. But a White House is not unstoppable because it’s on-message. All White Houses try to be on-message. But only the ones with high approval ratings (the politically unstoppable ones, you might say) are allowed to be on-message by the press, which will otherwise keep the White House off-message by focusing on negative stories. And those approval ratings are driven by the political fundamentals, especially the state of the economy.

How do you think Clinton got back on-message so successfully after 1994? The economy started revving up and his approval ratings went up so much that he drubbed Bob Dole in the 1996 election. Afterward, we told stories about how Dick Morris brought Clinton back from the dead. But in reality, every politician looks like a comeback artist when the economy revives on their watch (see: Ronald Reagan, “Morning in America”). Similarly, it was easy for Clinton to stay on-message after impeachment when the economy was at the peak of a bubble.

In practice, what this means is that Bush won’t get back on-message unless the fundamentals turn around. And with the economy unlikely to improve much and war in Iraq looking increasingly unpopular, that’s hard to imagine right now.

The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki explains:

[I]f students resell their books, in effect the price they pay comes down; the textbook companies may be charging more partly to take account of the higher resale value. The real losers in this game are those who buy textbooks and hold on to them: graduate students, bookworms, and lazy people.

In this week’s Sports Illustrated, Jack McCallum is the latest media figure to quote Michael Jordan as saying that he didn’t endorse Harvey Gantt’s 1990 challenge to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms because “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” I thought I had remembered the accuracy of that quote being challenged, so I tried to trace it to its source in Nexis, but I failed. A professor is quoted using it in a 1996 Richmond Times Dispatch article about Jordan; Jason Zengerle attributes it to Jordan in a 1997 American Prospect article; and then it doesn’t pop up again until the release of David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps in 1999. In the book, Halberstam does not quote Jordan, writing, “Jordan did not take a stand, pointing out that Republicans buy sneakers too.” A careful journalist like Halberstam would not use Jordan’s exact words and portray them as a paraphrase, which suggests that the phrase was later taken out of context and put into quotation marks. So does anyone know where the quote comes from? Is it accurate?

Update 11/12: Zengerle emailed me to point out that he now shares my concern about the quote, which he recently questioned in a post on TNR’s excellent new blog The Plank:

I’ve always had my doubts about that “Republicans buy shoes, too” quote. The fact that it’s so perfect and that it’s secondhand–a “friend” of Jordan’s told Sam Smith [the author of the Jordan biography Second Coming] that Jordan said it–makes me wonder whether it’s a real quote. I’m not saying Smith made it up, just that maybe the person who told it to him did, or, at the very least, embellished it a bit.

Driving to the North Carolina mountains on Thursday night, my wife and I heard this illuminating soundbite from Scooter Libby attorney Theodore V. Wells, Jr about five times:

In pleading not guilty, [Libby] has declared to the world that he is innocent.

Uh, yeah. In fairness, here’s the full quote, which is less cringe-inducing:

In pleading not guilty, he has declared to the world that he is innocent, he has declared that he intends to fight the charges in the indictment, and he has declared that he wants to clear his good name and he wants a jury trial.

Luckily for Libby, Wells isn’t being paid $500/hour for his PR skills.

You can’t make this s— up:

RUSH: The more the left talks about Libby’s alleged perjury, the more you have to ask did Joseph Wilson commit treason.

Joe Klein’s source alleges a retaliatory campaign against George H.W. Bush’s adviser and friend for speaking out about the current administration:

It seems a fair indication of the West Wing’s
whigged-out desperation that Libby even attempted the oblique
argument that Wilson was not to be trusted because his wife, a CIA
analyst, had sent him to find out if Niger had sold uranium to Iraq.

But it is an even better indication of how the White House
reflexively dealt with unpleasant news: destroy the messenger. Last
week there was more of the same, according to a prominent Republican,
who told me that the White House had sent out talking points about
how to attack Brent Scowcroft after Bush the Elder’s National
Security Adviser went public with his opposition to the war in the
New Yorker magazine. “I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn
e-mail before I read it,” the Republican said. “But that’s all this
White House has now: the politics of personal destruction.”

Update 11/2: As Andrew points out in comments, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru thinks he received the same email, and described it as benign:

I am almost certain I know the email this “prominent Republican” is discussing. It’s too bad neither Klein nor his prominent Republican friend read it. It was not a how-to guide about attacking Scowcroft, and it did not make any personal attacks on Scowcroft. Instead it explained why the author regarded Scowcroft’s specific points and general philosophy as wrong. Is that a terrible thing for the White House to do?

Update 11/8: Via Mickey Kaus, Real Clear Politics has reprinted what it claims is the email sent about Scowcroft. If so, it’s certainly not “the politics of personal destruction.”

Here are some new political science papers that bring scholarly rigor to important substantive questions about American democracy.

1) Southern Illinois’ Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas on misleading rhetoric in the Social Security debate (PDF):

Scholars often attribute political ignorance to
individual-level factors, but we concentrate on the quality of the information environment.
Employing a combination of experimental methods and content analysis, we code statements
from the 1998-1999 debate over Social Security reform as either misleading or not misleading.
Then, using surveys conducted during the debate, we examine the impact of individual- and
environmental-level variables on political knowledge about the program’s future. We show that
misleading statements about Social Security’s future cause some citizens to get an important fact
about the program wrong. More precisely, many citizens mistakenly believe that Social Security
will run out of money because political elites occasionally use words that lead to overly
pessimistic assessments of the program’s financial future.

2) Princeton’s Larry Bartels on “What’s the Matter With What’s the Matter with Kansas?“ (PDF):

I focus on four specific questions inspired by [author Thomas] Frank’s account: Has the
white working class abandoned the Democratic party? Has the white working class become
more conservative? Do working class “moral values” trump economics? Are religious voters
distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is “no.”

3) MIT’s Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden and James M. Snyder, Jr. on exaggerated claims about divisions between “Red” and “Blue” America (PDF):

In this paper we challenge the culture war argument. As we read the works in this
vein there are three key assumptions. First, voters are divided or polarized over issues,
especially moral issues. There are few moderates on abortion, gay marriage, and similar public questions, and the divisions on these questions map into important demographic
categories, especially religion and type of community. Second, moral issues have more
salience or weight in the minds of voters than economic issues. Third, the division maps
into geography. Red state voters are more morally conservative and put more weight on
moral issues…

In this paper we estimate the weight that voters put on moral and economic issues,
as well as measure distributions of voters’ moral and economic policy preferences and
the relationship of such preferences to geography and social groups. We analyze election
results at the state and county level, and survey data from American National Election
Studies and General Social Surveys. The data reject the first two assumption of the
culture war thesis. Specifically, we find the following.

First, one of the basic facts of the Red and Blue America is simply wrong. The
partisan division across states and counties has, in fact, shrunk over the last 100 years,
and the divisions are quite small. Today, America is Purple (section 2).

Second, at the individual level most Americans are ideological moderates rather
than extremists, on both economic and moral issues.

Third, voters’ decisions are driven more by their preferences on economic issues
than by their preferences on moral issues, even today. The relative weight of moral
issues has grown over the past two decades, but economic issues still carry more weight.
Moreover, this pattern does not vary across social groups. Rural voters do not vote on the
basis of moral issues any more than urban voters. The same is true of Red-State voters
versus Blue-State voters. Evangelical Protestants and regular churchgoers place more
weight on economic issues than moral issues, just like everyone else.

4) Emory’s Alan Abramowitz on Morris Fiorina’s Culture War? (PDF):

The evidence presented in this paper does not support Fiorina’s assertion that
polarization in America is largely a myth concocted by social scientists and media
commentators. Fiorina argues that “we [ordinary Americans] instinctively seek the
center while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes.” But it is mainly the
least interested, least informed and least politically active members of the public who are
clustered near the center of the ideological spectrum. The most interested, informed, and
active citizens are much more polarized in their political views. Moreover, there are
large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state
voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. The high
level of ideological polarization evident among political elites in the United States
reflects real divisions within the American electorate.

Increasing polarization has not caused Americans to become disengaged from the
political process. In 2004, according to data from the American National Election
Studies, more Americans than ever perceived important differences between the political
parties and cared about the outcome of the presidential election. As a result, voter
turnout increased dramatically between 2000 and 2004 and record numbers of Americans
engaged in campaign activities such as trying to influence their friends and neighbors,
displaying bumper stickers and yard signs, and contributing money to the parties and
candidates. The evidence indicates that rather than turning off the public and depressing
turnout, polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

Why did President Bush’s presidency seem to implode over the last six weeks or so?

I think one factor hasn’t been given adequate attention: 9/11. By pushing his approval ratings up so high, it muted Democratic opposition to Bush until late 2003, bottled up virtually all conservative dissent through 2004, and warded off any serious first-term scandals.

But now that the approval boost has finally worn off (just after the election, as UNC’s Jim Stimson showed), all the fundamentals that had been suppressed are kicking in hard. Bush is an unpopular president who has presided over a weak job market. His major second term initiative (private accounts in Social Security) never came close to passage. Hurricane Katrina recast his 9/11-influenced aura of “leadership.” Harriet Miers shined the spotlight on his administration’s penchant for cronyism. The long-deferred Valerie Plame/Wilson scandal is now reaching deep into his administration. And conservatives finally stopped marching in lockstep behind Bush and started acting like a typically noisy, demanding political base.

In short, the equilibriating forces of American forces are reasserting themselves. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book Off Center may be, in this sense, too late. However, the damage Bush has done to American democracy will be long-lasting. As we showed in All the President’s Spin, a series of norms against misleading presidential propaganda have been shattered. And norms, once destroyed, are difficult to rebuild. Unfortunately, one of 9/11’s legacies may be a dishonest, PR-driven presidential style of governance.