Brendan Nyhan

Whatever your politics, the disenfranchisement of DC is just unconscionable. I lived there for almost three years, and having one non-voting Congresswoman and no senators sucked. So please make a pledge to rename RFK “Taxation Without Representation Stadium.” It’s a brilliant PR ploy, and they won’t ask for money unless and until someone takes them seriously. Tomorrow’s the first game — help them out!

I’m one of the two representatives from political science to GPSC, the graduate student council here at Duke. It’s a strange job given our disciplinary views on politics. Everyone knows that investing the time necessary to learn about politics is irrational in an economic sense, so no one cares what we do and there are no defined preferences for us to represent. And it doesn’t matter anyway since the other rep and I know that our votes are almost never going to be decisive. So what are we doing? We’ve decided that we’re basically the fire alarm for the department — there to make sure something bad doesn’t happen that our constituents would object to. It’s a strange role since the other GPSC reps are very gung ho. Sometimes I feel like a shirker, but I’m doing what my department wants — surveillance, and not much else.

Also via QandO, someone is being threatened with a lawsuit by the Ultimate Warrior of old-time WWF fame after calling the Warrior a racist. The UW is apparently giving conservative political speeches at colleges now, though why anyone cares what he thinks is beyond me. The reason you have to read the post linked above, though, is to bear witness to the saga of the Director of Communications for “Ultimate Creations” stalking the guy over the Internet and harassing his father by phone. Not to be missed. Apparently, this is what faded celebrities and their employees do in their free time. (Note: it’s three pages – keep clicking the next page links).

This Media Matters article on the alleged leaking of a CIA operative’s name during a Senate committee hearing bothered me for downplaying the fact that many media outlets reported the matter virtually the same way as Drudge. Via QandO’s Jon Henke, here’s Kevin at Wizbang explaining what’s wrong with the Media Matters “analysis”:

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America attempted to smear Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge for attempting to smear Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) by linking to an Associated Press report that falsely suggested that Kerry and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN) “may have blown” the cover of CIA officer Fulton Armstrong.

Rather than direct their watchdog ire at the Associated Press (who were responsible for the story), or the major newspapers that ran the story like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian UK, The New York Post, etc., Media Matters elects to attack Matt Drudge for merely linking to the story. Examples of the headlines are shown below:

Los Angeles Times – Senators May Have Blown Cover of CIA Agent

Drudge headline – Kerry Blows CIA Agent Cover?…

Drudge’s transgression appears to modifying an AP headline to focus on Kerry, while ignoring Lugar. No offense to Senator Lugar, but his name hardly captures reader interest the way a former candidate for President does. Nowhere does Media Matters accuse mainstream news outlet of attempting to smear Kerry (or Lugar) by running the AP story, that honor is reserved for the one site the link to that merely linked to a wire service copy of the article. By leading off with an attack on Drudge, Media Matters shifts the focus off the real story – the shoddiness of Associated Press reporter Anne Gearan’s research. Even rudimentary web research on the name Fulton Armstrong indicates that his “cover” was not blown.

Finally! The DLC is showing some backbone on estate tax repeal — part of an encouraging trend where they stop acting like wimps. I’m a DLC type myself on policy, but their weak-kneed tendencies make me nuts. So this is good news. Here’s the conclusion to the article:

[F]or Democrats, opposing this proposal is as simple a matter of basic principle as can be imagined. Democrats should also make it abundantly clear that this giveaway decisively and permanently undercuts any argument for changes in Social Security that will add even more to the national debt and indirectly, to the obligations of our retirement system.

We don’t always share the views of some in our party who seem to want to make every single vote in Congress a test of partisan loyalty, since a party that defines itself purely in terms of the opposition’s priorities can’t make its own values clear. But this is an occasion where the positive and negative responsibilities of governing exactly coincide. Democrats should stand up to the “death tax” rhetoric that tries to make a perfectly sensible policy sound like grave-robbing, and have the courage and persistence to explain to the American people the deeply regressive nature of this proposal, which will shift the cost of government from trust-fund babies to hard-working families.

If there was ever a moment when Democrats should be loud, proud and united about exposing the skewed values of George W. Bush’s GOP, this is it.

I’ve been meaning to write more about George Lakoff, the linguistic guru who’s all the rage among Democrats in DC. We criticized Lakoff and his Rockridge Institute in All the President’s Spin (here’s the Amazon Inside The Book link) for trying to win the debate with linguistic manipulation rather than better ideas.

Since then, he’s become a mystical swami figure to a party desperate for answers, as The Atlantic’s Josh Green explains:

Lakoff offers no new policy ideas. Instead he suggests that the Democrats reposition the ones they already have, and spruce up some unpopular terminology while they’re at it. He advocates referring to “trial lawyers” as “public-protection attorneys,” replacing “taxes” with “membership fees,” and generally couching the entire Democratic message in palatable—even deceptive—language in order to simplify large ideas and disguise them behind innocent but powerful-sounding phrases.

Cognitive linguistics may not rate with Iraq, terrorism, and health care in surveys of voters’ concerns (it doesn’t rate at all, actually), but it has achieved that status among a surprising number of Democratic leaders. Lakoff has twice addressed the caucus on how to frame its policies, and his book is a surprise best seller in Washington; it has become as much a partisan totem as the lapel-pin flags worn by Republicans. Lakoff and a handful of other self-appointed gurus have raised tactical phrasing to something approaching a religion.

With “messaging efforts” under way throughout the party, more Democrats appear to be coming around to the belief that—election results be damned—what they stand for may not be the problem after all…

Strangely, the Democrats’ fixation with messaging has grown so intense as to revive, in their eyes at least, the standing of an avowed foe, the Republican pollster and message-meister Frank Luntz. The wunderkind strategist who helped develop the terminology for Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Luntz has since drifted far from the inner circles of Republican power. Most GOP insiders question both his skills and his professional priorities, which seem to put his own celebrity above his party. But superstitious Democrats, cheered on by Lakoff, now credit Luntz’s framing and wordsmithery—calling for “tax relief” rather than “tax cuts,” for instance—with much of the Republicans’ success over the past decade.

Not long ago, when a memo Luntz had written on how Republicans should talk about Social Security leaked to the media, there seemed to be only a single suspect (Luntz, of course), and a single—if singularly unlikely—audience for its wisdom. Most Republicans ignored the memo, but the Democrats went into paroxysms of envy. In a private meeting of officials the new party chairman, Howard Dean, vowed that he would “make George Lakoff the Democrats’ Frank Luntz.” That’s the kind of idea that passes for visionary when you’re committed to the pretense that your party isn’t short of ideas.

It’s not too early to examine the results of all this linguistic plotting and scheming. One of the opening salvos from the brand-aware Democratic Party was the “New Partnership for America’s Future.” (Heard of it? No?) The plan, outlined in a handy brochure, is a predictable rejoinder to the Contract With America—attention-getting only in its lateness. It consists of six “core values to promote a strong and secure middle class”: “Prosperity. Opportunity. Community.” To my untrained ear, many of these core values are indistinguishable from the earlier, outmoded ones recklessly put forth in the days before the linguists’ role was properly understood. That is to say, they’re the sort of thing you normally see plastered beneath some purposeful-looking minority student on a subway poster pitching continuing-education night classes.

Rather than defining the Democrats as a group powerfully apart from the Republicans and their alleged linguistic sorcerers, the terminology in this brochure sounds—well, it sounds like Frank Luntz might have a very good case for copyright infringement. His memo offers, with scarcely Einsteinian originality, this thought: “The best way to communicate values is to use words and phrases that no Coke-drinking, apple-pie-eating American could disagree with. Family. Freedom. Opportunity. Responsibility. Community.”

Of course, buzzwords are not going to rescue a failing party. That so many Democrats have achieved the Olympian state of denial necessary to believe otherwise suggests that the tempting abstractions of language and messaging have diverted them from a truth that ought to be perfectly clear: rather than being misunderstood, they were understood all too well.

And not only are buzzwords insufficient to reverse Democrats’ fortunes, but Lakoff’s politics are going to point them in the wrong direction, as Kenneth Baer wrote a few months ago in a Washington Monthly review of his book:

I am not a cognitive linguist (the limits of my expertise in the field begin and end with the Wittgenstein quote above), and I cannot critique Lakoff’s linguistic analysis. But I can say confidently that his political analysis is severely lacking. Don’t Think of an Elephant is a small volume big on assumptions and short on the historical and political context that would shed light on why Americans respond to certain language in the ways that they do. In some places, Lakoff offers superb advice to candidates, but after reading this book—which, as a collection of many previously released articles, is disjointed and repetitive—it seems that Lakoff is primarily concerned with using linguistics to make the case for his liberal-left politics. That may bring comfort to his neighbors in Berkeley, but there’s little evidence that it will win elections.

…By reducing American politics to language, Lakoff ignores the context that gives meaning to those words. Language only motivates people if the ideas and policies it’s connected to resonate with a majority of Americans. It has to be consistent with the realities of American history and the American national character. Throughout his book, Lakoff ignores this context, using his theories to push for an agenda that resonates with him (and possibly his friends at the fringes of left-wing politics), but reflects neither what most Democrats—nor most Americans—believe.

…When it comes to foreign policy, Lakoff shows not only a misunderstanding of America, but also of the history of liberalism and the Democratic Party today. In a chapter written immediately after the attacks of September 11, Lakoff argues that President Bush quickly framed the attacks as a strong father would: It’s about good versus evil, and we need to wipe out this evil even if people get hurt. While an earlier chapter admonishes progressives for ignoring the importance that nurturant parents place on protecting those that they are responsible for, in this discussion he argues that progressives should offer a frame on entirely different terms: “Justice is called for, not vengeance. Understanding and restraint is what is needed…we should not take innocent lives in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Massive bombing of Afghanistan—with the killing of innocents—will show that we are no better than they.”

If this is the type of advice Democrats are listening to, they will soon go the way of the Whigs and the Know-Nothings. To draw a moral equivalency between the invasion of Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11 between the United States and al Qaeda is disgusting. Beyond that, Lakoff’s apparent view of the United States as a malevolent force in the world and the accompanying reluctance to use American power to ensure national security was as out of step with Americans’ belief about themselves when it was propounded in the 1960s and 1970s as it is now.

The new issue of The Atlantic features a remarkable letter from one J. Russell Tyldesley, which ends as follows:

There is a great intellectual divide in America, and people inclined to think deeply about contemporary issues are increasingly turned off by both major parties. In fact, many see little hope in electoral solutions so long as the two establishment parties maintain an iron grip on the levers of power. Ralph Nader is hardly exaggerating when he calls the two major parties a duopoly or a two-party dictatorship. The “third parties” of politics and culture are effectively shut out, and their ideas and solutions will not reach the masses. Some of these ideas could save humanity from itself. It is not the confused independents in the middle who hold the key to salvation; it is the marginalized few. After all, how many followers did Jesus have? The magnitude of the major parties’ tragic effort to silence these voices may become clear only when it is too late.

There are ways out of the gloom, but not through the political process. A parallel system based on barter and the Internet may be the answer.

“A parallel system based on barter and the Internet?” This has been driving me crazy — what the hell does that mean? It’s like the Lewis Black routine about how he’s tortured by the girl who says “If it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

First of all, how do you even get your Internet service if you only use barter? Maybe mow your ISP’s lawn or something? And second, why barter? What does that have to do with anything? The reason why even the least developed societies have some form of quasi-currency is because barter is insanely inefficient. It’s much easier to make trades using money than to find someone who wants what you have and vice versa. I suppose we could create elaborate barter exchanges via the Internet, but why? Who has time to try to search out and negotiate an exact match?

I just don’t understand. But maybe that’s the point…

Via Defamer, an amusing report from the intersection of politics and pop culture:

City council candidate Rick James says having the same name as the late funk legend is no laughing matter — his campaign signs have been stolen or defaced because of a popular sketch on Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show.”

“It’s gotten so bad, I can put out a sign and the next day, sometimes the same day, it will be gone,” the 53-year-old political hopeful in Hattiesburg told The Associated Press.

At first he was confused about the popularity of his “Vote for Rick James” signs, having never seen the show.

Friends then informed him about the sketch, in which comedian Dave Chappelle dresses as James and utters a catch phrase beginning, “I’m Rick James … “

Even when dropping off his 15-year-old daughter at school, James said he can hear people sometimes yelling the phrase.

The popularity of the signs has stretched far beyond Hattiesburg. James has heard that his signs have been spotted up to 100 miles from the south Mississippi city. James also has be informed by local college students that his signs are often seen in dorm windows.

Here he is in all his glory:

Via Atrios, I came across a Center for American Progress blog post reprinting a letter they wrote to The Hill claiming Byron York misrepresented their work in his new book:

York’s ‘headlines’ weren’t headlines

From Judd Legum and Christy Harvey, editors, The Progress Report:

We write in response to the excerpt from Byron York’s book about the work of the Center for American Progress that appeared in the Thursday, April 7, issue of The Hill.

None of the “headlines” of “The Progress Report,” the daily electronic newsletter of the American Progress Action Fund, cited in the column by Byron York were actually headlines. Instead, York selected snippets of text drawn from the entire report. Here are the actual headlines:

– Oct. 5: “Paige Papers Over Problems”

– Oct.13: “The Stem-Cell Debate”

– Oct.18: “Troops Talk Back”

– Oct.26: “IRAQ, The $225 Billion Mess”

– Oct.28: “Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action”

What the real headlines reveal is that “The Progress Report,” like the organization itself, presents a combination of positive policy prescriptions and criticism.

The American Progress Action Fund welcomes scrutiny of our work from York and others. (We urge everyone to go to progressreport.org and make their own conclusions.) But while York is entitled to his own opinions, he is not entitled to his own facts.

Legum and Harvey claim to encourage readers to “make their own conclusions.” But does the post link to York’s excerpt or the issues of the Progress Report in question? No. So I went and looked up the source material myself.

Here is the York excerpt in question, which includes the following passage:

A few headlines from the month of October shows what the Report had become by the end of the campaign:

October 5: “[Cheney] In Bed with the Axis of Evil”
October 13: “Bush Can Run, but He Can’t Hide”
October 18: “Bush Will Say Anything to Avoid Responsibility”
October 26: “Administration Pushes Bogus Theory”
October 28: “All the President’s Excuses”

And when you look up the October 5, 13, 18, 26 and 28 editions, you’ll find that all of York’s headlines were correctly quoted. The ridiculous trick that CAP uses in the letter is defining “real headlines” to mean only the lead headline at the top of the newsletter. The bold headlines used to introduce other sections and subsections of the newsletter — precisely what York quoted — are absurdly defined as “snippets of text drawn from the entire report” in the letter and as “fake headlines” in the blog post title. Does only the lead headline in a newspaper count as a headline? Come on. But once again, a reader of CAP’s letter or its blog post would have no way of knowing how misleading its claims actually are.

For more on CAP’s pattern of deception, see:
-my blog posts about them
-my Spinsanity column about the way the Progress Report distorts quotations
-the pathologically dishonest response from CAP to earlier Spinsanity articles by Ben Fritz (here and here)
-our discussion of CAP in All the President’s Spin, which supports York’s description of it as a “talking points factory”

Josh Marshall’s announcement that he’s starting a group blog with a bunch of high-profile contributors made me realize something: I hate most group blogs. So I have to say I’m not hopeful that this one will be any good.

The problem is that most group blogs are either chaotic and choppy due to too many contributors posting on too many different subjects (ie Volokh) or the tendency of the writers to start having annoying, self-indulgent conversations with each other rather than generating interesting content (this is why I loathe The Corner). So I generally don’t read them. The only ones I like have a common voice or topic to keep the voice relatively consistent and the content focused on shared themes (ie Tapped in the old days). And given the diverse perspectives of the contributors to the Marshall group blog, I’m not sure how disciplined they’ll be.

Are there any good group blogs I’m missing? Or am I right that the best blogs are all one-person shops?