Brendan Nyhan

This is like a “yo mama” joke: John McCain is so old that his campaign had to take out a special life insurance policy on him to secure a loan from a bank last November.

Following in Caroline Kennedy’s footsteps, Susan Eisenhower has endorsed Barack Obama in a Washington Post op-ed. Fascinating! Who’s going to find out what Tricia Nixon and Amy Carter think? Or maybe Harry Truman has a great-grandson who wants to share his views…

1. Barack Obama is the most liberal senator according to National Journal. However, the far more sophisticated ranking produced by Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis, which takes into account all the votes in a given Congress, places him as the tenth most liberal — see here, here, here, and here for more. (We wrote about the similarly misleading National Journal ranking of John Kerry as the most liberal senator at Spinsanity back in 2004.)

2. Bill Clinton called for slowing the economy to fight global warming according to Jake Tapper of ABC News. Actually, Clinton raised that possibility and then rejected it — for more, see here, here, and here.

Wall Street Journal editorial page fans such as myself have come to love their use of scare quotes, which is as incoherent as their ideas about economics.

Their two favorite subjects for scare quoting are, naturally, tax cuts and torture. As I wrote last year, drawing on the seminal work of TNR’s Jon Chait and Isaac Chotiner, the Journal has referred to (in quotes) “the deficit,” the “cost” of fixing the alternative minimum tax, and “torture” by American interrogators. Presumably, the goal is to call the reality of these concepts into question (rather than, say, the editors’ sanity).

While these implicit claims are absurd as matters of fact, the Journal’s use of scare quotes to call a word or phrase into question is at least grammatically correct. But as Chotiner noted back in October, the WSJ also uses scare quotes in ways that make no sense:

[T]hey go on to continue putting torture in quotes every time they use the word, regardless of context. So, for example:

The notion that the U.S. goes around unnecessarily “torturing” people…

C’mon guys! Even you admit that the United States is “torturing” people; you just don’t think that we are torturing people.

Then, a few weeks ago, Chotiner noticed it happening again:

[T]hey seem to simply be placing quotation marks around words for no particular reason at all. The piece begins:

We’ve been saying for some time that the economy could use another tax cut, so perhaps we should be pleased that Washington is suddenly talking about a fiscal “stimulus.” The challenge now is getting politicians to distinguish between policies that actually “stimulate” and the equivalent of dropping hundred dollar bills from helicopters.

No, no, no! Why is the word “stimulate” in quotation marks? They are discussing real stimulation, not “stimulation”. But now to something they don’t like–spending:

As for “spending it,” we tried this a few years back and it didn’t work very well.

No again! If the Journal wants to accuse people of spending money, they should not put quotes around “spending”. It reads as if the Democrats did not actually spend the money, when of course the Journal thinks they did! Can someone please discuss this problem with the paper’s editors?

The latest example comes from an editorial today on the controversy over Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s position on waterboarding. It leads off with a string of scare quotes around “waterboarding” and torture”:

If Senate Democrats thought Attorney General Michael Mukasey was someone they could push around to score political points, yesterday they discovered their error. The new AG stood his ground on the legal war on terror, despite five hours of grandstanding over an interrogation technique that the CIA doesn’t even practice anymore.

We refer, of course, to “waterboarding,” which the political left has made into a proxy for the Bush Administration’s alleged “torture” of enemy combatants, which Democrats seem to think is a winning political issue.

The Journal, continuing directly, then puts “illegal” in scare quotes:

Thus the grilling of Mr. Mukasey to prod him to declare that he had now concluded that “waterboarding” is in fact “illegal.” Democrats would then be able to flog the Bush Administration from here to November, declaring that “even Attorney General Mike Mukasey says…”

But this, again, is wrong — Mukasey would hypothetically be concluding that waterboarding is actually illegal (not “illegal”).

Finally, the Journal credits Mukasey with refusing to discuss a hypothetical, referring to his “point about ‘context’”:

Mr. Mukasey was true to his promise during confirmation hearings to investigate the legality of government interrogation practices. And so yesterday he certified that all techniques currently in use are legal. However, in a letter to the Senate, he added that, “I do not believe it is advisable to address difficult legal questions … in the absence of concrete facts and circumstances.”

This displeased some of the Senators, who accused him of dodging the waterboarding issue. But Mr. Mukasey is right to avoid hypothetical legal judgments over something that is no longer practiced. The former judge was careful to point out that legality depends on context, and he couldn’t judge the actions of others in 2002 without knowing the circumstances.

…Judge Mukasey’s point about “context” is something that Democrats surely understand, since many of their leaders… were briefed about waterboarding at the time. There’s no evidence they objected then. But they’re making a fuss now that their anti-antiterror supporters have made “torture” a campaign theme…

Why is “context” in scare quotes the second time it is used? The Journal doesn’t quote Mukasey saying the word and they agree with him that context is relevant. Can someone send a high school English teacher over to Paul Gigot’s house?

(PS If the incorrect use of quotation marks drives you nuts, you’ll love The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which I found via a commenter on one of Chotiner’s original posts. Pure genius.)

A commenter on an old post of mine just referred to John McCain as “Juan McCain.” The nickname, a nasty reference to his previous support for comprehensive immigration reform, turns out be all over conservative message boards. (It’s the McCain equivalent of “Barack Osama/Barack Hussein Osama”, which is still circulating — it was just used on Fox News by a conservative radio host the other day and was mentioned by a Missouri voter interviewed in the New York Times today.)

Update 2/1 10:00 AM: Think Progress flags Glenn Beck and a fill-in host using “Juan McCain” on his radio show and in an email to listeners.

One of my faculty mentors at Duke, David Rohde, is interviewed on today’s edition of Fresh Air:

Delegates, superdelegates, penalized states with half their delegates — or none. This year’s political primaries are putting renewed focus on the delegate system, but what does it all mean?

Political scientist David Rohde joins us to unravel the complexities of the primary system, and about how the withdrawals of candidates John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani will affect the campaign.

Check it out on your local NPR station or online (audio will be up at the link above at about 4 PM EST).

Rudy Giuliani forgets the old writer’s adage “show, don’t tell” in his McCain endorsement speech:

He’s a man of honor and integrity, and you can underline both ‘honor’ and ‘integrity.’

Can I italicize them too? Maybe put them in bold?

In the same way that journalists attribute general election defeats to various quirks of the candidates rather than, say, the state of the economy (see Dole, Bob), there’s currently a rush to “explain” Rudy Giuliani’s collapse. The New York Times offers this litany:

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.

He accumulated a fat war chest — he had $16.6 million on hand at the end of September, more than Mitt Romney ($9.5 million) or Senator John McCain ($3.2 million) — but spent vast sums on direct mail instead of building strong organizations on the ground in South Carolina and New Hampshire.

…[C]uriously, this man with the pugnacious past declined to toss more than light punches at his Republican opponents.

But as I wrote before, Giuliani is fundamentally unacceptable to the GOP. Like Joe Lieberman in 2004, his early lead in the polls was built on name recognition but he was never going to win. This passage in the Times article comes closer to the real dynamics at work:

Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.

Update 2/1 10:24 AM: The Washington Post has a long account of the tactical failures of Rudy’s campaign. The prevailing theme, though, is that he was fundamentally unacceptable to conservatives.

It makes me sad to see Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein — two of the best young liberal pundits out there — soft-pedaling the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on Barack Obama.

On January 14, Yglesias wrote that “the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her.” While this statement may have been tongue in cheek, he added the following last week:

Paul Waldman says Hillary Clinton is going after Barack Obama just like a Republican would — without a lot of honesty or conscience. Frankly, I don’t have a big problem with that. As Ezra Klein says “The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican.”

Here’s what Klein wrote on the same subject:

I’m a bit conflicted over this Paul Waldman column. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton is running a bare-knuckled, often unfair campaign, and pundits should mention that. On the other, the sort of attacks she’s levying — misrepresenting Obama’s payroll tax plan, or exaggerating his comments about Reagan — are pretty much par for the course. We’re not hitting some sort of new low in politics, here. And the overarching theme of Waldman’s column — that Clinton is “running like a Republican” — almost pushes me to her side on the issue. The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican.

This is part of the general trend toward liberals embracing dishonest spin tactics that we discussed in the conclusion of All the President’s Spin as a response to the success of the spin tactics of the Bush administration. It’s the reason we’ve seen the rise of framing gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen and organizations like the Center for American Progress.

Clinton’s campaign also seems to be following Bush’s lead in its approach to the press. Michael Crowley’s description in TNR of the way the Clintonites interact with the press will sound familiar to anyone who has read about the struggle to report on the current administration:

Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record–“They’re too smart,” one furtively confides. “They’ll figure out who I am”–privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary’s aides don’t hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument… Reporters’ jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. “They’re frightening!” says one reporter who has covered Clinton. “They don’t see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game.”

Here’s a similar excerpt from Ken Auletta’s 2004 New Yorker story on the Bush administration’s approach to the press:

What seems new with the Bush White House is the unusual skill that it has shown in keeping much of the press at a distance while controlling the news agenda. And for perhaps the first time the White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders—pleaders for more access and better headlines—as if the press were simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.

…Dana Milbank, one of three reporters whom the Post assigns to the White House, says that the Administration speaks with one voice partly because officials have “talking points that they e-mail to friends and everyone says exactly the same thing. You go through the effort of getting Karl Rove on the phone and he’ll say exactly the same thing as Scott McClellan”—the White House press secretary. NBC’s David Gregory says, “My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach with the White House press corps, generally speaking, to engage us as little as possible.”

…The White House was enraged by an article by Dana Milbank, which appeared on October 22, 2002, under the headline “For Bush, Facts are Malleable”… According to Maralee Schwartz, the Post’s national political editor, Fleischer, Hughes, and Rove each complained to her about him, and suggested that he might be the wrong person for the job. The White House now says that it does not “believe that anybody has ever asked for his removal.”

The White House, Milbank says, tried to freeze him out, and for a time stopped returning his calls.

(Howard Kurtz reported yesterday that the Obama campaign is also keeping reporters at arm’s length, though it’s not clear that their animus against the press is as great as the Clinton campaign’s is.)

Sadly, our prediction in ATPS that the next president will follow Bush’s lead is likely to come true:

Some citizens might hope that things will get better when Bush leaves office. But the problem is unlikely to disappear regardless of who occupies the White House. Bush’s presidency has changed the rules of the game, accelerating a larger trend toward PR-driven deception. By altering the incentives for other politicians and political organizations, Bush has fueled an ongoing arms race in which both sides employ ever more sophisticated tactics to manipulate the public and the press.

Yglesias and Klein should talk to Andrew Sullivan, who praised the “rhetorical smoke screen” of the Bush administration’s campaign for tax cuts back in 2001 but has since come to recognize the corrosive effects of the administration’s dishonesty. Let’s hope they see the light a little sooner.

(Meta-comment: Isn’t it strange that Yglesias and Klein are declaring their comfort with Clinton’s dishonesty? The conservatives whose tactics Yglesias and Klein think liberals should copy don’t advocate dishonesty in public. In fact, they’ll swear up and down that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, that the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all accurate, etc.)

John McCain has won Florida. As a result, Rudy Giuliani apparently dropping out to endorse him (hurray!). Though Mike Huckabee seems to be staying in the race, it should become something of a two-man showdown between Mitt Romney and McCain heading into Super Tuesday.

Under these circumstances, we would tend to expect conservative elites and the activist base to coalesce around Romney, the more conservative candidate, and beat McCain in closed GOP primaries, as a Talking Points Memo reader suggests. I predicted (perhaps foolishly) back in 2005 that the conservative establishment would block a McCain nomination in the same way it did back in 2000.

However, as Charlie Cook points out, McCain is widely (and probably correctly) seen as the party’s best hope of preventing a Clinton or Obama presidency, which may be why he’s getting strong support from Republican elected officials. Also, the contempt for Mitt Romney among conservative elites seems to run pretty deep and McCain will get fawning media coverage for the next week.

But there’s an additional factor that could hurt Romney’s chances which no one is talking about yet. For him to beat McCain, he needs conservatives who were backing Huckabee to switch over and vote strategically for him as the best alternative to McCain. But many of Huckabee’s supporters are evangelical Christians who may not be comfortable with Romney’s Mormon beliefs. Will they make the switch? It’s not clear.

Update 1/30 9:15 AM: Via Ross Douthat, exit poll data from Florida shows that “49% of those who voted for Rudy today picked Mitt Romney as their 2nd choice while 44% picked McCain” while “those who voted for Huckabee overwhelmingly picked McCain as their top 2nd choice over Mitt Romney, 54% to 32%.” I’m puzzled about what’s going on, but this is certainly not good news for Romney.