Brendan Nyhan

The latest phony salvo in the Hillary camp’s claims about experience comes from Bill, who described Obama as less experienced than he was in 1992:

Former President Bill Clinton said he was far more experienced when he made his successful 1992 White House run than Senator Barack Obama is today.

“There is a difference,” Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that will air this weekend. “I was the senior governor in America. I had been head of any number of national organizations that were related to the major issue of the day, which is how to restore America’s economic strength.”

But as I’ve pointed out many times, Obama and Hillary are equally inexperienced. Clinton’s criticism applies just as forcefully to her.

Here’s former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich making a similar point:

[I]t strikes me as unfair to claim that Obama lacks relevant experience for the presidency. When he ran in 1992, Bill Clinton had been the governor of a small, rural southern state; as such, he had only limited experience with national issues and no foreign policy experience to speak of. Incidentally, at this point in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton has served as an elected official in the U.S. Senate for not quite eight years, and before that a First Lady in the White House. Obama has so far held elective office for almost twelve years, at both levels of government – first as an Illinois state senator and then as a U.S. Senator. Before that he was a community organizer among Chicago’s poor, and then a civil rights lawyer – two experiences that in my view are critically relevant to anyone seeking to become president of all Americans.

If you’re not already, you need to read McClatchy’s DC news reporting. It’s the only place you’ll find clear fact-checking like this analysis of the debate over the SCHIP bill that President Bush just vetoed:

President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program “would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year.”

That’s not true.

The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state’s Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.

States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush’s Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.

Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn’t change it.

The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.

That’s true.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that was inevitable to some degree when any government program expanded. The CBO estimates that the legislation would attract 5.8 million new enrollees by 2012. Of them, 3.8 million would be uninsured and eligible under current requirements, and 2 million probably would have had private coverage before the expansion.

That’s a rate of about 1 in 3 new enrollees dropping private insurance. “We don’t see very many other policy options that would reduce the number of uninsured children by the same amount without creating more” dropouts from private insurance, Orszag said.

For more on Bush’s dissembling about S-CHIP, see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Ron Brownstein (via Mark Thoma).

Andrew Sullivan posted a Barack Obama speech at Howard University that included this striking claim:

Because when I was a state senator in Illinois we have a death penalty system that had sent 13 innocent people to their death–13 innocent men that we know.

My understanding is that it’s never been proven that any person who was executed in recent years in this country was innocent. Am I wrong? Or is Obama referring to people he thinks were innocent?

Update 10/2 12:42 PM: In comments, Dave White points out that Obama’s prepared remarks say that Illinois had “a death penalty system that had sent thirteen innocent people to death row. Thirteen innocent men that we know of.” So either Obama misspoke or Sullivan’s transcript is wrong. I’ve updated the title above.

Ron Paul may be a trendy presidential candidate among elite libertarian types, but he’s still pandering to the fringes. A recent fundraising letter to supporters included this passage claiming US sovereignty is under attack and the United Nations wants to take away our guns:

And yes, he did handwrite the letter. I’m afraid my scan doesn’t do justice to the Unabomber effect of Paul’s scrawl on faux yellow legal paper. Anyway, you can read the full letter here (PDF).

My friend Ben Fritz reports that Obama’s fundraising script claims that he will give his leftover funds to the party nominee if he loses. Has anyone else heard that? And has he made that pledge publicly?

It’s annoying to hear the political editor of CNN, which touts itself as “the most trusted name in news,” botching basic facts.

During the Race to ’08 podcast on Friday, CNN’s Mark Preston said Newt Gingrich “came out with the goal that if he could raise $30 million in three weeks he would get into the race. To me, that’s unrealistic to raise that amount of money in such a short period of time.”

Gingrich didn’t say he would need to raise $30 million in donations; he said he would enter the race if he collected $30 million in pledges, which are presumably easier to get. (Newt still decided not to run.) How did Preston fail to make this distinction? It was all over the news, including the CNN website.

Continuing his recent descent into supply-side boosterism, Rudy Giuliani told supporters listening to a National House Party Night webcast on Friday that tax cuts increase revenue (23:55 in the clip):

Remember, you collect more money with lower taxes than you do with higher taxes. I reduced the income tax in New York by twenty-four percent, and I was collecting forty percent more revenues from the lower tax than the higher tax.

As always, I will point out that nearly every economist disagrees with this claim. Even Bush administration economists have repeatedly contradicted President Bush on this point. But Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain are all touting it in an effort to win over economic conservatives. It’s a good thing supply-siders are “rather thin on the ground lately”!

TNR’s Michael Crowley has written an excellent piece on Barack Obama’s failure to draw sharp contrasts with Hillary Clinton. As Crowley points out, Obama seems to have a personal hangup about negative campaigning and it’s hurting his ability to close the gap with Hillary. The parallel Crowley draws to Bill Bradley is especially striking:

There’s a recent antecedent for this pacifist style: Bill Bradley’s campaign against Al Gore. Like Obama, Bradley campaigned on poetic themes of hope and changing the political status quo. And, like Obama, Bradley disdained negative campaigning. Whereas Obama posits the “politics of hope” against the “politics of fear,” Bradley spoke of “a contrast between a politics that’s nothing but tactics, and a politics that’s based on ideals and beliefs.” To one veteran of the Bradley campaign, Obama is making a grave mistake. “You cannot, in a competitive Democratic primary, create a new kind of politics,’” says Michael Powell, a former senior adviser to Bradley. “It leads to a warped logic that you end up not defending your own positions and you don’t challenge the views of your opponents.” Bradley, at least, organized his campaign around a universal health care plan that challenged Gore’s cautious piecemeal approach; Obama has no contrast- drawing policy equivalent. From the future of Iraq to health care to tax policy, Obama’s plans are either similar to or less ambitious than those of his opponents.

In short, Obama is paying the price for the easy road he had in 2004. The collapse of his main primary opponent and his landslide win in the general election meant that he never had to go negative. As a result, he is not comfortable doing so and spends much of his time spouting goo-goo nonsense about everyone getting along.

The reality, however, is that negative campaigning is essential to democratic politics, especially when you’re not the frontrunner. It’s how voters get (a) competition for their votes and (b) sharp contrasts between the candidates. Right now Obama’s reluctance to go negative is depriving Democratic primary voters of both.

Yesterday Michael Moore appeared on Oprah for a second time to talk about health care in America.

Setting aside my issues with Moore, what was striking about the episode was the extent to which Oprah herself has been converted to the cause. The format of the episode was stacked — it was Moore and the Princeton health care economist Uwe Reinhardt against the head of the health insurance lobby — and Oprah kept weighing in against the status quo. She even had her correspondent Lisa Ling (yes, Oprah has a correspondent) badger insurance companies Moore-style about specific cases in which viewers were denied care. Moore and Reinhardt obviously lean left, but the tone of the episode was much more populist than ideological and it went over very well with her audience. Maybe universal care is politically achievable after all?

Along the same lines, I was surprised by the poll findings on inequality highlighted by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post:

It’s no great achievement for a people to recognize that their nation’s economy has tanked, but recognizing that their nation’s class structure has slowly but fundamentally altered is a more challenging task. It’s harder still for a people who are conditioned, as Americans are, not to see their nation in terms of class.

Which is why a poll released this month by the Pew Research Center reveals a transformation of Americans’ sense of their country and themselves that is startling. Pew asked Americans if their country was divided between haves and have-nots. In 1988, when Gallup asked that question, 26 percent of respondents said yes, while 71 percent said no. In 2001, when Pew asked it, 44 percent said yes and 53 percent said no. But when Pew asked it again this summer, the number of Americans who agreed that we live in a nation divided into haves and have-nots had risen to 48 percent — exactly the same as the number of Americans who disagreed.

Americans’ assessment of their own place in the economy has altered, too. In 1988, fully 59 percent identified themselves as haves and just 17 percent as have-nots. By 2001, the haves had dwindled to 52 percent and the have-nots had risen to 32 percent. This summer, just 45 percent of Americans called themselves haves, while 34 percent called themselves have-nots.

The leftward shift in public mood in response to President Bush may end up being more significant than anyone realizes…

Law professor/blogger Ann Althouse has written a devastating review of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book The Nine:

It may well be that judicial intuition and ideology have more effect on the cases than do the arguments based on precedent and statutory and constitutional texts, but “The Nine” doesn’t put the reader in any position to reach a fair conclusion about that. Mr. Toobin spares us any tedious development of the legal issues and arguments as he dishes up the lively, impressionistic quotes and images that suggest decisions are a very personal expression of the nine individuals who sit on the Court. It’s just one big psychodrama — a psychodrama in which some justices — notably Justice Souter and John Paul Stevens —maintain an emotional commitment to the preservation of legal principles while others — Justice Thomas and Antonin Scalia — feel the pull of political conservatism. Others — Justice O’Connor and Stephen Breyer — seem instinctively to know what will work well, and one — Anthony Kennedy — is infatuated with law as “poetry.”

You’d never know from reading the book there was a complicated federal statute that affected how the Florida Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore. The constitutional law in that case? There was “an obscure provision of Article II.” The crucial constitutional precedent interpreting Article II? A “nearly incomprehensible opinion of the Court from 1892.” With these descriptions, Mr. Toobin expresses contempt for the reasoning. His approach asks the reader to accept the view that legal methodology doesn’t matter much.

Instead, human individuals drive the law, as Mr. Toobin tells it…

Mr. Toobin ends his story with a climactic scene, vividly written to show the long-dreaded “conservative onslaught” hitting at last. It’s June 28, 2007, and the liberal justices have lost the important case about school integration in Louisville and Seattle. Mr. Toobin works with the only evidence of judicial emotion he has: the faces of the nine justices visible above the bench.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is staring “in evident fury straight ahead of her.” So, she’s sitting there with her eyes open? But Mr. Toobin concludes, “The term had been a disaster, and she had no intention of pretending otherwise.” Justice Scalia seems to have moved his eyebrows: Toobin has his eyebrows “dancing in satisfaction.” Justice Breyer’s “sunny disposition” had “darkened.” He had a dissenting opinion to read. What did it say? You will have to look elsewhere if you want that legal analysis. All you need to know to understand things, apparently, is that Justice Breyer’s opinion was lengthy and that he announced it with “such passion.”

And then Justice Alito “roused himself and stared across the bench at Breyer.” Heavens! So, Breyer was reading, and Justice Alito looked at him. And then — oh, my! — a muscle in Justice Roberts’s face twitched. And that “face was as unlined as when he’d carried Rehnquist’s casket.”

“It was his Court, and everyone knew it.”

You will know it too, if you can swallow this argument by impressionistic psychodrama.

Indeed, this is a recipe for becoming a big-shot political or legal journalist. First, focus on personalities rather than policy or ideology. There’s a little problem, however — you know very little about your subjects as people. So you construct pleasing narratives and fit the facts into those narratives. And when there aren’t facts you can adapt to your purposes, you develop mysterious abilities to read the minds of your subjects. Voila! Time to call the Pulitzer committee (Maureen Dowd, 1999) and wait for the royalty checks to start pouring in.