Brendan Nyhan

Andrew Gelman notes that the political scientists Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien have released a paper projecting an Obama win with 53% of the two-party presidential vote based on leading economics indicators and current trial heat polling. The economist Ray Fair, who has a well-known model that I’ve criticized in the past (see this Larry Bartels paper [PDF] for more), updated his projection on July 31 and now predicts that Obama will get 51.5% of the two-party vote. The more respected Bread and Peace model of Douglas Hibbs projects an Obama win with 52% of the two-party vote.

While these may seem like relatively narrow projected victories, Gelman notes in a separate post that incumbent parties rarely lose the popular vote by more than a few points. This may be encouraging to the Democrats who think Obama “should” have a bigger lead in the polls right now given the favorable political environment. On the other hand, it highlights the incredible tightrope he has to walk as the first African American presidential nominee of a major party. If Obama’s race costs him more than a point or two in the polls (something the above models cannot forecast and do not incorporate), it’s likely to be decisive.

John McCain’s campaign has accused Barack Obama of having “played the race card” for suggesting Republicans would highlight his race in the general election campaign:

Senator John McCain’s campaign accused Senator Barack Obama on Thursday of playing “the race card,” citing his remarks that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

…“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, charged in a statement with which Mr. McCain later said he agreed. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

According to MSNBC, Obama’s campaign is (absurdly) denying that the “dollar bills” comment referred to him being black:

McCain has accused Obama of playing politics with race for predicting that the likely Republican nominee and others in the GOP would try to scare voters by saying the Democrat “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” Obama’s spokesmen denied he was referring to being black, although all the presidents on U.S. currency are white.

This is silly. I don’t think there’s any question that Obama’s race will be made salient by Republicans at various levels, though this is of course usually done in less blatant ways than pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” It’s also not clear to what extent these insinuations will be made by John McCain and his campaign rather than surrogates and political allies.

There are two problems with these debates. The first is that our political discourse doesn’t allow for any middle ground between race-neutral statements and (supposed) accusations of racism. For instance, during his confirmation as Attorney General, John Ashcroft was criticized for exploiting the issue of race. Ashcroft’s supporters falsely characterized this as an accusation of racism and asserted that Ashcroft is not a racist. The same tactic was also used to defend Ronald Reagan from charges that he exploited the issue of race.

Now McCain’s campaign is using the same approach, falsely suggesting that Obama said McCain was a racist:

“We are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, to be able to be painted as racist,” Davis said Friday on “Today” on NBC. “We’ve seen this happen before and we’re not going to let it happen to us.”

…”Barack Obama never called John McCain a racist,” Axelrod said on “The Early Show” on CBS. “What Barack Obama was saying is he’s not exactly from Central Casting for presidential candidates.”

A related tactic is for Republicans to raise criticisms of Obama with racial overtones but deny that those overtones exist (for instance, accusing Obama of “intellectual laziness” or raising his “trash talking” as “an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard”). Then, when Democrats like Obama object, they can be characterized as “playing the race card,” not Republicans. (Using “the race card” to delegitimize critiques of racial insensitivity or exploitation of racial prejudice is similar to the “racial McCarthyism” buzzword promoted by David Horowitz and other conservatives.)

The irony is that “race card” was previously used by Democrats to describe GOP exploitation of the issue of race (as in the Harvey Gantt/Jesse Helms US Senate race). But increasingly Republicans have turned it back at Democrats. Here’s one of the earliest high-profile examples from a New York Times article (7/12/91) on the Congressional Black Caucus announcing its opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas:

[Senator John C.] Danforth, who has acted as Judge Thomas’s sponsor on Capitol Hill this week, accused the black lawmakers of “playing the race card” in much the same way Republicans have exploited the quota issue in the civil rights debate.

Since then, the phrase has increasingly been used against Democrats who criticize Republicans on issues of race. (For an example of a similar reversal, see our Spinsanity column on Republican use of civil rights jargon in the debate over the policies of Boy Scouts of America.)

On the flip side, however, the subtlety of racial appeals makes it easy to manufacture unsubstantiated or unconvincing allegations against Republicans. For example, like Matthew Yglesias, I don’t buy the Josh Marshall critique (here, here, and here) of McCain’s ad featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as racially coded:

I think the McCain campaign’s “Celebrity” ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it’s a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama’s black, and America’s history, I think it’s always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily imagine being deployed against a white candidate and, indeed, they’re fundamentally similar to arguments Republicans regularly make against Democrats.

The problem, then, is that Democrats have an incentive to generate flimsy charges of racial exploitation and Republicans have an incentive to delegitimize them altogether. It’s a no-win situation.

Update 8/5 9:56 PM: Via Ezra Klein, TAP’s Adam Serwer has a useful analysis of why the GOP “race card” strategy works:

In a dispute about race, the McCain campaign knows it will end up with the larger half. For the most part, most white people’s experience with race isn’t one of racial discrimination. They can only relate to racial discrimination in the abstract. What white people can relate to is the fear of being unjustly accused of racism. This is the larger half. This is why allegations of racism often provoke more outrage than actual racism, because most of the country can relate to one (the accusation of racism) easier than the other (actual racism). For this reason, in a political conflict over race, the McCain campaign has the advantage, because saying the race card has been played is actually the ultimate race card.

From Dan Drezner via Kevin Drum, here is the Nexis search used by the Justice Department’s Monica Goodling to vet potential Bush administration appointees (see page 20-21 of the DOJ report [PDF]):

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

It’s the fever swamp of the conservative mind. Who knew that people’s past statements about racism, outsourcing, the Florida recount, or (my personal favorite) the spotted owl had anything to do with prosecuting terrorism cases for the Justice Department?

(By the way, the search string would make a great geek t-shirt.)

Update 8/1 10:06 AM: In a comment below, Drezner alerts us that someone has already made a CafePress store with the search string on
t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, etc.:

Two of our nation’s best newspapers apparently can’t find reporters who understand Social Security and/or have the courage to state the facts without faux “objective” hedging.

Michael Powell and Susan Saulny in the New York Times (7/28):

Mr. McCain also touched on domestic policy, saying he would not rule out tax increases in discussing Social Security reform with Democrats. He said he favored offering private investment accounts to younger Americans, though it was not clear that investment accounts alone could address the financial shortfall that the retirement system could face in coming decades.

Perry Bacon Jr. in the Washington Post (7/8):

McCain’s aides said he favors a bipartisan approach and is open to working with Congress on finding a solution to the long-term solvency of the New Deal-era program, indicating he could support an array of ideas such as raising the retirement age, reducing scheduled increases in benefits and allowing younger workers to put money they currently pay for Social Security taxes into personal savings accounts.”

As TNR’s Jon Chait points out in a post on the Times article, this phrasing is inaccurate: “Private investment accounts do not improve solvency at all. They make it worse.” In fact, as Media Matters notes in an article on Bacon’s piece, even Vice President Dick Cheney conceded that the transition costs associated with shifting to private accounts would cost trillions of dollars. Any chance the Post and Times could hire reporters who understand this?

Via TNR’s Chris Orr, John McCain made this fantastical claim about President Bush’s influence on the price of crude oil:

“In case you missed it, soon as the President announced that we were going to end the moratorium on offshore drilling the price of a barrel of oil went down $10,” the presumptive Republican nominee said at a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania town hall.

Orr links to an CNN.com article that instead attributes the decline to reports of “higher-than-expected stockpiles of crude and gasoline,” but isn’t the problem with McCain’s claim more fundamental? Bush’s action lifting the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling has no effect unless Congress also acts. Here’s the New York Times:

By itself, the move will have little impact, because Congress enacted a moratorium in 1982 that remains in place.

So why on earth would the market care? When McCain said “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he wasn’t kidding.

The New York Times quotes radio talk show host Warren Ballentine smearing John McCain as a racist who privately complains about having to speak to “Negroes”:

Warren Ballentine, one of black talk radio’s new stars, was on a tear against Senator John McCain as he broadcast from the Greenbriar Mall here last week, blithely dismissing Mr. McCain’s kind words about Senator Barack Obama at the recent N.A.A.C.P. national convention.

“He came out talking about how good of a race Barack Obama was running, and how proud he was of Barack,” Mr. Ballentine said. “You know he went back home and said, ‘I can’t believe I spoke in front of all those Negroes today!’ ”

“He was pandering to the crowd, talking about how he felt when Martin Luther King Jr. died,” Mr. Ballentine went on. “However, he didn’t vote for the holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.”

And yes, it’s only July.

Via Drudge, the Washington Post and Politico are suggesting that Virginia governor Tim Kaine is high on Barack Obama’s vice presidential shortlist.

Substantively, I don’t have strong feelings about Kaine either way at this point. But on a more practical level, did Obama and his vetters watch Kaine’s State of the Union rebuttal back in 2006? After watching it, I wrote that Kaine’s left eyebrow is “too distracting for the party to ever put him on national television again,” prompting the Columbus Dispatch to call this “the site for chatter about ‘Tim Kaine’s crazy eyebrow.”

You really have to watch the C-SPAN Real Player video with the volume off to understand, but here’s a screen shot that gives you some sense of what he looked like:

It’s true that (a) Kaine got elected in Virginia anyway and (b) vice presidential nominees probably don’t have a significant effect on election outcomes. But given that national politics is centered around television, do you want someone who looks that strange on TV on the ticket? Maybe I’m being superficial, but it seems like a legitimate strategic question.

ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that John McCain is questioning Barack Obama’s judgment because he didn’t serve in the military:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Monday hit Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, not for only being, in his view, wrong on the surge of troops in Iraq, but also for not having served in the military.
Arguing that he, unlike Obama, doesn’t “need any on-the-job training,” McCain said, per ABC News’ Jen Duck, that “I also agree with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said it would be very dangerous…to do what Senator Obama has advocated.”

Added the former Navy flier and Vietnam P.O.W.: “I hope we’ll pay attention to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Particularly someone that has no military experience whatsoever.”

As Tapper notes, McCain previously responded to Obama’s criticism of his position on a GI bill by saying he “will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did.” McCain also once jabbed incorrectly at Obama for using the spelling “flack jacket” rather than “flak jacket.”

Practically speaking, these comments are silly. McCain’s heroic service as a Vietnam War fighter pilot and POW is not relevant to being commander-in-chief. As Wesley Clark said somewhat tactlessly, “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

But what’s really objectionable is the anti-democratic idea that candidates have to serve in the military to serve as president and command American troops. Bill Clinton was handicapped throughout his presidency by this perception, which weakened his leverage in trying to get the military to go after Osama bin Laden. Some liberal pundits and bloggers have bought into a similar notion by describing pro-war conservatives who didn’t serve in the military as “chickenhawks,” which suggests that only veterans can argue for war.

A related problem is the growing politicization of the military itself, which has an increasingly conservative tilt, especially among officers. Since 9/11, President Bush has used military imagery for partisan purposes and repeatedly attacked Democrats during speeches at military bases. Rather than decrying these tactics, Democrats like John Kerry have fetishized their support from retired officers and hyped any criticism of President Bush by active-duty officers.

It’s time to restore balance in this relationship. The presidency is a civilian institution that controls the military, not the other way around.

Ross Douthat and Sadly, No! catch elite conservative economists making misleading suggestions that pork barrel spending has grown dramatically under President Bush. But this is a myth, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (among others) points out (via Yglesias). Funding for domestic discretionary programs has actually “shrunk both as a share of the budget and as a share of the economy” under President Bush — the growth in spending has largely taken place in the defense and homeland security budget. Shouldn’t economists writing op-eds and think tank papers know this?

More straight talk from John McCain:

NARRATOR: Gas prices. $4, $5, no end in sight. Because some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America. No to independence from foreign oil. Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump? (chant) Obama, Obama. One man knows we must now drill more in America and rescue our family budgets. Don’t hope for more energy, vote for it. McCain.

MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approved this message.

Attributing rising gas prices to Barack Obama is absurd, which is why the flaccid New York Times fact-check is so frustrating. The main claim of McCain’s ad is that Obama is somehow responsible for the increase in prices at the pump. But Larry Rother’s “accuracy” section spends over one hundred words on various details, asides, and non-sequiturs before finally getting around to mentioning that there’s no plausible way to blame Obama for the increase in global demand for oil:

ACCURACY Mr. Obama is not against all drilling for oil and gas, only drilling offshore, a crucial word in the debate on energy policy but one never mentioned here. Increasing domestic oil production is also by no means the only or even main road to long-term energy independence, as both candidates have emphasized on the campaign trail by endorsing alternatives like solar and wind power and corn-based ethanol (in Mr. Obama’s case) and nuclear energy (Mr. McCain). Mr. Obama, who has proposed a $150 billion decade-long government-backed effort to help develop clean-energy sources, does oppose the temporary gasoline tax rebate that Mr. McCain favors, calling it an election-year gimmick that does not bring meaningful relief to ordinary Americans. But that is a position many economists and energy experts share. Finally, even before the recent spike, oil prices had been rising for a decade, the result of a variety of political and economic factors in places as far afield as China, India, Venezuela and Nigeria. So it is difficult to understand how Mr. Obama, a first-term senator, can be held responsible for that phenomenon.

The conclusion to the fact-check then briefly describes the ad as “misleading on nearly every substantive point” before moving on to ad hoc analysis of its effectiveness and speculation about its impact — two tics of “objective” coverage of political ads:

SCORECARD Aside from correctly stating current gasoline prices, “Pump” is misleading on nearly every substantive point. But it is shrewdly conceived and may prove to be effective with undecided voters upset about having to pay as much as $100 to fill their gas tanks, yet uncertain as to the causes of the squeeze on their budgets.

With fact-checking like this, political candidates who run misleading ads have nothing to fear. (And most newspapers don’t even run fact-checks!)