Brendan Nyhan

February 2, 2005

MoveOn.org, which frequently engages in misleading tactics, is up to old tricks.

First, today’s New York Times features a print ad from the group that claims “George Bush said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and a ‘mushroom cloud’ was imminent.” Bush did use the phrase “mushroom cloud” to try to scare the public, as did other members of his administration — a tactic we criticized in All the President’s Spin. But he did not say a mushroom cloud was “imminent.” On Oct. 7, 2002, he said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannnot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Bush’s language (“peril”, “final proof”, “mushroom cloud”) was exaggerated given the evidence available at the time, but MoveOn’s summary is not accurate.

In addition, MoveOn is airing a television ad that FactCheck.org has rightly criticized as being deceptive. Here is the script in its entirety:

Video: A series of white-haired men and women perform menial jobs, kneading dough, lifting boxes, mopping floors, shoveling, washing bedding.

Announcer: First, someone thought up the working lunch. Then we discovered the working vacation. And now, thanks to George Bush’s planned Social Security benefit cuts of up to 46 percent to pay for private accounts, it won’t be long before America introduces the world to the working retirement.

Call your representative today and tell them no. George Bush can’t cut Social Security.

As FactCheck.org points out, the 46 percent cut applies to the reduction in promised guaranteed benefits for someone retiring in 2075, not the current retirees suggested by images of the elderly and the phrase “it won’t be long.” MoveOn is just not credible.

I just got a “breaking news” email from ABCNews.com — here it is in its entirety:

PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL SEES HIS SHADOW, INDICATING SIX MORE WEEKS OF WINTER

Where would we be without the Internet?

It looks like George Allen is

Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican accused in the past of insensitivity on race issues, introduced a bill on Tuesday to apologize officially for the Senate’s role in blocking antilynching legislation through decades of killings across the South.

Update 9/14/06 6:21 AM: Attention Talking Points Memo readers — don’t miss my comprehensive post summarizing Allen’s ugly racial history.

The emerging cliche that the White House is running Social Security from the same playbook as tax cuts and the war in Iraq is proven right once again. Today’s Washington Post suggests that the administration is looking at proposing a phase-in of its private accounts plan. This would do little to reduce the overall transition cost of adding private accounts, but would reduce the increased deficits they will cause when measured in conventional five and ten year projections. It’s the same kind of gimmickry they used with the tax cuts, which phase-in and expire in all kinds of strange ways, concealing their massive long-term cost.

Here’s the Post:

Bush, who plans to make Social Security the centerpiece of tomorrow’s State of the Union address, has privately told GOP lawmakers and aides that he would support phasing in changes to the system to keep deficits under control over the next several years…

One way of holding down short-term costs would be to allow Americans to shift gradually part of their payroll taxes into private accounts. Critics say this would do little to reduce the overall transition cost, which experts say could cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next two decades.

I haven’t seen a convincing answer to this claim, which Krugman

Schemes for Social Security privatization, like the one described in the 2004 Economic Report of the President, invariably assume that investing in stocks will yield a high annual rate of return, 6.5 or 7 percent after inflation, for at least the next 75 years. Without that assumption, these schemes can’t deliver on their promises. Yet a rate of return that high is mathematically impossible unless the economy grows much faster than anyone is now expecting.

For months (years?), Democrats have claimed that the effort to add private accounts to Social Security is an elaborate scheme to enrich Wall Street donors. A perfect example is DNC chair Terry McAuliffe’s recent statement referring to private accounts as the Republican “plan to cut benefits and funnel Social Security money to their Wall Street friends.” So this news must have come as quite a shocker:

Bush’s advisers have settled on a proposal for structuring the personal accounts to resemble the Thrift Savings Plan, a tax-deferred retirement investment plan for federal workers similar to a 401(k) plan.

…In the Thrift Savings Plan, federal employees have five investment options, including government and corporate bond funds, a stock fund that tracks the S&P 500, an international fund and other stock funds.

…The government would be responsible for keeping track of how much money was in each worker’s account and give the lump sums to a financial services company to invest, a mechanism aimed at keeping administrative fees low, officials said.

That would mean only a limited profit potential for Wall Street. More money might be available for industry if a second tier of investments were permitted.

There may be cronyism in the Bush administration, but ideology and political victory come first. And in this case, the White House is making the right choice. While private accounts are likely to be implemented badly, TSP is the best model to use because lower fees mean increased returns.

(Note: As I’ve said before, if private accounts are created, I believe that Social Security will be forced to offer more investment choices with higher fees over time. But the cronyism story is exaggerated and implausible.)

Good for the Associated Press — rather than writing another “he said”/”she said” article that fails to educate readers, national writer Matt Crenson has published a story that takes a clear stand on the facts. Contrary to President Bush’s claims, Crenson finds, Social Security experts believe that the program is not a bad deal for African Americans. Here’s the key graf:

On balance, the program may actually benefit blacks more than whites, according to analyses by the AARP, scholars such as Liebman and the Social Security Administration’s actuaries. Only the conservative Heritage Foundation has concluded otherwise.

As the bubbles used to say in the old Batman: Wham! Punch! Slam! This is very encouraging stuff. With Social Security rising to the top of the national debate, let’s hope other papers pick up the ball and run with it rather than just reporting Bush’s claims in the “he said”/”she said” style.

Update 2/2: Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation has added a comment stating that others besides Heritage have “concluded otherwise” about the net benefits of Social Security for blacks and whites. I’d agree that Crenson’s wording should have been more precise, but I think his point was that among the group of serious, original analyses only Heritage has found that Social Security is a bad deal for blacks. That may or may not be true (I don’t know), but I assume Crenson did some research on it. I checked out the Cato study (PDF) that Grossman references, for instance, and it appears to be largely derivative of other studies, including Heritage’s. Anyway, I’d welcome pointers to other examples.

Update 2/8: Grossman sent me an NBER working paper from 1983, which is not exactly current, but it appears there are multiple studies reaching a similar conclusion to Heritage. See the “What Other Literature Tells Us” section of this AARP analysis, among others, for citations and critiques.

Democrats who oppose Alberto Gonzales’ nomination to be Attorney General are frequently citing the talking point that he’s not independent enough, as in this McClatchy Newspapers story:

“By refusing to voice his own values and understanding of the law, he has failed to demonstrate the independent leadership he will need as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer,” [Senator Dianne] Feinstein said.

As with Rice, Democrats said that Gonzales was too loyal to Bush. Democrats said Gonzales’ personal ties to the president damaged his ability to pursue allegations of wrongdoing involving administration officials and their supporters.

But almost every Democrat venerates John F. Kennedy, whose brother Robert was probably the least independent attorney general ever when judged in terms of “personal ties to the president.” To my knowledge, Chuck Schumer of New York is the only Democrat to address the elephant in the room – here’s what he said during a committee hearing last week:

[T]he position requires a greater degree of independence than, for example, the secretary of State, whose obligation is to advance the president’s interests abroad. When the White House asks the Justice Department, Can we do X? — the Justice Department is charged with giving an objective answer, not one tailored to achieve the president’s goals. The bottom line is it’s hard to be a straight shooter if you’re a blind loyalist.

There are two models for an attorney general, loyalist and independent. We all know that there have been attorney generals over the years who have been close to the president. There is no better example than our colleague’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who served his own brother, President Kennedy. That said, no one ever doubted in the confines of the Oval Office that Bobby Kennedy would oppose his brother if he thought the president was wrong. History has documented those disagreements.

Judge Gonzales is more of a loyalist than an independent. That alone certainly doesn’t disqualify him, but it raises concerns. After an extensive review of the record, unfortunately and sadly, and despite my great personal affection for the judge, his testimony before the committee turned me around and changed my vote from yes to no. He was so circumspect in his answers, so unwilling to leave even a micron of space between his views and the president’s, that I now have real doubts whether he can perform the job of attorney general.

In short, Judge Gonzales still seems to see himself as counsel to the president, not attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the land.

I’m sure RFK and his brother had their disagreements in private, but this is hardly a convincing distinction. If independence is important in an attorney general — and it probably is — then that applies to RFK as much as Gonzales.

For me, Ed Kilgore of New Donkey makes the strongest argument against Gonzales, which is goes far beyond just the independence issue:

Gonzales doesn’t represent the truly hard cases on torture; he stands for the proposition that anything not explicitly prohibited by the administration’s extremely narrow interpretation of U.S. law and international treaties is just aces with him. And as a Washington Post editorial yesterday noted, after stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject initially, in his final hearing he squarely confirmed that this was indeed his position.

If you believe, as I do and I hope you do, that the war on terror is an ideological war in which perceptions of American values and good intentions are in the long run as important as military assets, then confirming the Poster Boy for Torture as Attorney General provides a propaganda victory for Islamic Jihadism that’s potentially just as damaging as those images from Abu Ghraib. Moreover, Gonzales’s confirmation will also reinforce the already dangerous impression that the United States will only obey those rules we get to set ourselves, an impression the administration finds ways to strengthen nearly every day.

Add it all up, and for me at least, the calculus is pretty clear: this guy should not become Attorney General, on the merits, and completely separate from the politics of the thing.

Andrew Sullivan catches the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes pushing the White House to try to silence dissenters on Iraq:

BARNES ON DISSENT: Fred Barnes is fighting mad that the Dems may be getting tougher in obstructing the president’s agenda. He thinks the tactic will backfire and will prompt the Dems to lose more seats in 2006. But we can’t wait till then! Here’s his recipe for White House response tactics:

Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what’s permissible and what’s out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.

Harrumph. Harrumph. One quibble: the White House will determine what constitutes “permissible” dissent? I assume he means that some dissent will merely be described as treason by the White House. They won’t actually try and stop such expressions, will they? Still, it’s an interesting insight into the mentality of some Bush defenders. It seems to me that if an opposition party wants to mount an obstructionist campaign, it has evey right to do so. And face the consequences. It’s called a democracy. You know: like we’re trying to foster in Iraq.

“Merely be described as treason”? Sullivan, who frequently suggested that dissenters were committing treason before he began to question the war in Iraq, appears to be covering his ass here. Attacks on dissent are hardly a minor matter, particularly coming from the White House (see Chapter 6 of All the President’s Spin for the Bush administration’s first term record of using these tactics).

In any case, when journalists are calling on the government to silence dissent, we’ve truly reached a new low in our political discourse.