Brendan Nyhan

Rush Limbaugh called Barack Obama a “little black man-child” yesterday, invoking cultural stereotypes which infantilize black men:

Obama’s patriotism is not being attacked in an ad. McCain’s just out there saying he’s putting his own personal political ambition ahead of the country’s. It’s — you know, it’s just — it’s just we can’t hit the girl. I don’t care how far feminism’s saying, you can’t hit the girl, and you can’t — you can’t criticize the little black man-child. You just can’t do it, ’cause it’s just not right. It’s not fair. He’s such a victim.

Previously, Limbaugh compared Obama to a “little boy,” attributing this view to “some women” who “want to protect him”:

He can’t take a punch, he’s weak, and he whines. I’m sure some women find that attractive because they would look at him as a little boy and would want to protect him … But it embarrasses me as a man.

It’s loathsome stuff. Remember how many elites associate with this man despite his long history of offensive comments about race (among other things). Just a few weeks ago, all three Bushes (41, 43, and Jeb) called in to congratulate Limbaugh his 20th anniversary of broadcasting. In 2002, he was a commentator for NBC on Election Night. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams said in 2005 “it’s my duty to listen to Rush.” And Katie Couric asked Limbaugh to contribute a “free speech” segment to CBS Evening News in 2006.

Update 8/22 2:59 PM — Here’s the audio for those who are interested (QuickTime movie).

I make a big point on this blog of highlighting the importance of the fundamentals in determing the outcomes of presidential elections. Andrew Gelman has a nice graph illustrating how the fundamentals become more relevant as the election approaches (I’ve added a red arrow illustrating how far out we are from election day right now):

We should expect to see this process continuing in the next few weeks. As UW-Milwaukee’s Tom Holbrook points out, one of the key effects of conventions is to bring the polls closer to the expected outcome:

[C]andidates who are running ahead of where they “should” be (based on the expected election outcome) tend to get smaller bumps, and those running behind their expected level of support get larger bumps. In this way, the conventions help bring the public closer to the expected outcome and help to make elections more predictable.

On the other hand, the fundamentals seems pretty closely aligned with current polls so it’s not clear how much either candidate will gain from the conventions. Leading models forecast that Obama will receive 51.5-53% of the two-party vote and he’s currently at 50.8% in the Pollster.com estimate. At the most, we might expect a small net gain for Obama (i.e. a slightly larger convention bump).

James Fallows claims in The Atlantic that “moments” from televised general-election debates have “figured in the ultimate outcome” in the presidential elections of 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004:

There have been nine series of televised general-election debates. These started with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, resumed with Ford-Carter in 1976, and have been a campaign fixture ever since. In all but one election, the debates produced a moment that figured in the ultimate outcome. (The exception was Clinton-Dole in 1996, when neither man said anything that changed a voter’s mind.) The dramatic exchanges that made a difference—Ronald Reagan’s amused and dismissive “There you go again” against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Michael Dukakis’s too-composed look when asked in 1988 how he would react if his wife were raped, George H.W. Bush’s desperate “when will this end?” glance at his wristwatch during a town-hall session with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992, Al Gore’s operatic sighs about George W. Bush in 2000—would have passed unnoticed in a transcript. The transcript conveys only part of, for example, the alarming meandering in Ronald Reagan’s soliloquy at the end of his second 1984 debate with Walter Mondale. Reagan, looking confused and forgetting his point, was rescued only when the moderator, Edwin Newman, announced that time was up: “Mr. President, I’m obliged to cut you off there, under the rules of the debate. I’m sorry.” Mondale should have been sorry, too.

But as I pointed out on Monday, journalists tend to construct post hoc narratives that attribute election outcomes to dramatic visuals like negative campaign ads and debate exchanges. Here, by contrast, is what the eminent political scientist James Stimson concludes about the effect of debates in a passage from his book Tides of Consent that I highlighted back in January (my emphasis):

What we have seen is perhaps some influence. The evidence is inconclusive to say either that debates matter or that they do not. But if they do matter at all, their influence is vastly smaller than, say, the conventions. The reelection landslides [1964, 1972, 1984, 1996] show that once voters have decided, debates will not change the outcomes.

There is no case where we can trace a substantial shift to the debates. But in elections that were close at debate times, there are cases (1960, 1980, 2000) where the debates might have been the final nudge. As to why they are so often featured as the central story line of a presidential election campaign, I lean to the idea that they are conveniently available TV footage.

The issue is that the debates happen so late in the campaign that the popular vote winner has generally already taken an insurmountable lead, as this graphic (which combines the trajectories of 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 2000) illustrates:

Here are the individual trajectories of the competitive races:

Stimson also makes several points about specific elections that conflict with Fallows. First, despite Reagan’s shaky performance in his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, he regained his form and the debates ended up being irrelevant (Reagan won in a landslide). Also, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush actually gained ground on their opponents after the debates despite committing much-hyped gaffes. Finally, it’s worth noting that Stimson points to a different Reagan line from 1980 than Fallows (“Ask yourself if you were better off than four years ago”), which highlights the subjectivity of debate interpretation.

A New York Times Week in Review piece yesterday seems to attribute various election outcomes to widely publicized negative attacks:

For raw, crushing smear power, the 1964 “Daisy” ad, made for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would mean the end of life on earth, has still never quite been equaled.

And the 11th-hour telephone “survey” of Republican primary voters in South Carolina in 2000, asking “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” will probably keep its place on the Mount Rushmore of smear for a while.

…The unending news cycle, the explosion of the blogosphere and the freelance work of independent groups like the Swift Boat veterans of 2004, whose campaign severely undercut John Kerry’s bid for president, has made every campaign entourage a kind of road crew cum paramedic team.

… The rhythm of campaigning may have quickened, but the notion that a counterpunch delayed was a counterpunch denied did not seem to take hold in conventional wisdom until 1988.

That year, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts fell under the wheels of a negative campaign juggernaut — watching from a dignified remove as the supporters of George H. W. Bush wiped out Mr. Dukakis’s 17-point lead by defining him as the man who furloughed the rapist-killer Willie Horton.

While I obviously have normative concerns about misleading campaign attacks, it’s much less clear that the LBJ ad had “crushing smear power,” that the Swift Boat ads “severely undercut” John Kerry, or that Michael Dukakis lost his 17-point lead in the polls as a result of the Willie Horton ad. The leading models of presidential elections predicted that Goldwater, Kerry, and Dukakis would lose. Journalists tend to construct post hoc narratives based on dramatic visuals from debates and campaign ads, ignoring the fundamentals that actually drive elections (the state of the economy, presidential approval, war casualties, etc.).

Update 8/19 3:49 PM: Last sentence edited for clarity and style.

McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace is at it again.

A little over a week ago, Wallace invoked McCain’s war herosim in an effort to delegitimize criticism of her boss, saying Barack Obama was “fillet[ing] an American hero, a former POW” when he criticizes McCain on the stump.

Yesterday, she used the same approach in responding to the suggestion that John McCain might have listened to questions asked of Obama during an event with Rick Warren (via MoJo Blog):

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Apparently, Wallace thinks McCain’s POW heroism means that he shouldn’t be criticized or forced to respond to questions about possible improprieties. It’s wildly anti-democratic.

(Moreover, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the irony is that reporters and McCain’s campaign keep claiming that McCain is reluctant to discuss his POW experience.)

Since when do New York Times reporters use “big government” as an adjective? The lede of a Jackie Calmes story on Friday predicts “a new round of big-government financial regulation” that is vaguely attributed to “experts”:

Modernizing the nation’s New Deal-era defenses against financial disaster is not high among the priorities that either Barack Obama or John McCain list for the next president. But events could well plop the issue right in the middle of the winner’s plate.

After a string of financial scandals and crises, a quarter century of deregulation and free-market experimentation is giving way to a new round of big-government financial regulation, regardless of who captures the White House, experts say.

Though a single expert (Alan Greenspan) is quoted expressing opposition to aggressive new regulation, the characterization of proposed rule changes as “big-government” is an embellishment added by Calmes. It’s reminiscent of the way that newspapers adopted the jargon of “death tax” and “partial birth abortion” in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

What’s especially striking is that the Times, which is frequently accused of having a liberal bias, used language that is more conservative than even the Bush White House. In a recent interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for “[m]ore modern regulation”:

[W]e have a regulatory system that is very outdated. It was put in place many years ago, and…

MR. BROKAW: There’s going to have to be more modern regulation…

SEC’Y PAULSON: Yes, absolutely.

MR. BROKAW: …of Wall Street across the board.

SEC’Y PAULSON: Across the board. More modern regulation and more authorities.

Liberal media critics, take note.

Update 8/20 11:34 AM: Commenter Jinchi notes that the Times seems to use “big government” frequently in its news reporting. I’d want to go through the stories individually, but at a glance the frequency with which they’re using the term is pretty surprising.

Maybe I’m late to this since I get the print New York Times on Sunday, but I thought it was interesting to see that Frank Rich’s online column is like a long week-in-review blog post full of links supporting his claims. I’m not a fan of Rich (who frequently distorts facts in an effort to dramatize politics), but it’s a useful way to improve the stale columnist op-ed format.

PS Rich’s column today does a nice job of undermining the Obama landslide myth:

No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

However, he then attributes Obama’s narrow lead to the fact that “the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.” And while it’s true that the press coverage of McCain’s background hasn’t been particularly skeptical, a simpler answer is that the race is close because the political fundamentals are close. If the economy were in deep recession, then Obama would be leading by 15 points.

I’m on vacation in California through Sunday so blogging will be light (or nonexistent) until next week…

Andrew Sullivan is the latest political writer to repeat the unsupported claim that Barack Obama should be winning by a greater margin. He describes Obama as having “stalled in the polls” and then tries to explain “voters’ reluctance to swing behind Obama in landslide numbers.”

Similarly, former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd told the Washington Post that Obama “is underperforming where he should be.”

Contrary to Sullivan and Dowd’s claims, though, the political fundamentals predict a close election in November — leading models forecast Obama getting 51-53% of the two-party vote. And, in fact, the Pollster.com estimate currently shows him getting about 51.4% of the two-party vote in national polls. So he’s not far off from where he “should be” (though, to be clear, the polls at this stage are a relatively poor predictor of the eventual outcome).

I don’t have much patience with former Clinton flack Howard Wolfson’s claim that Hillary would have been the Democratic nominee if John Edwards had been out of the race.

First, we don’t know what would have happened if Edwards was out of the race. Al Gore could have jumped in or another candidate might have picked up momentum.

Second, we already know that almost anything can affect the outcomes of primary races, which have been shown due to be inherently unpredictable due to the role of momentum (voters shifting to support who they think is going to win).

Along the same lines, you can just as easily imagine multiple scenarios in which chance occurrences prevent Hillary from getting as far as she did. For instance, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky made Hillary a more sympathetic figure, pushing up her favorability numbers. If that affair doesn’t happen, does she even reach the US Senate? You can play this game endlessly.