Brendan Nyhan

Given that Bob Casey spoke at the Democratic convention tonight, it’s worth noting once again that his father was not barred from speaking in 1992 because he had pro-life views. Since I posted about this, Media Matters has been tracking this myth all over the press, including NPR, CNN, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press.

John Sides of The Monkey Cage has my favorite post so far on news coverage of the convention:

I turned on the CNN’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention for the first time, and within 6 seconds I heard Carl Bernstein refer to the “national Clinton psychodrama.” Shoot me now.

That’s why I keep them on mute (when I watch at all).

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is the latest journalist to suggest that Barack Obama should be winning by a large margin (via Andrew Sullivan):

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

“What gives” is that the fundamentals actually predict a close race. Leading political science models forecast that Obama will receive 51-53% of the two-party vote and he’s at 51% in the Pollster.com estimate. Weisberg is right to suggest that racism may play a role in the eventual outcome (I’ve made the same prediction), but Obama’s performance so far is not out of line with what we would expect from any Democrat. Unfortunately, as I’ve argued before, journalists tend to create dramatized narratives of campaigns and ignore quantitative analysis. The result in this year’s election is anxiety bordering on panic among Democrats. Race may yet cost Obama this election, but he’s doing fine so far.

Matthew Yglesias mocks Richard Cohen for comparing his liberal critics to Communists:

It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!

The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

Isn’t this partially a function of ideological proximity? Liberals are sensitive to Cohen because he’s supposedly a liberal columnist but is more of an establishment hack in practice. Similarly, Cohen is sensitive to liberal disapproval because his personal views seems to tend toward the center-left. By contrast, I assume conservatives have always disliked Cohen but they ignore him and he does the same. It’s not unlike what happened to Joe Klein when he started blogging a few years ago and found out that liberals were unhappy with him.

If you haven’t heard, Kevin Drum, who used to blog for Washington Monthly, is now blogging for Mother Jones. Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has taken over as head blogger for the Monthly. Congratulations to both.

Charles Blow, a “visual Op-Ed columnist” for the New York Times, offered an ugly homophobic slur of Barack Obama in his column yesterday, calling Obama’s response to the crisis in Georgia “tepid and swishy” (links in online edition):

Lately, you’ve demonstrated an unsettling penchant for overly nuanced statements that meander into the cerebral. Earth to Barack: to Main Street America, nuance equals confusion. You don’t have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.

For example, your performance at Rick Warren’s faith forum came across as professorial and pensive, not presidential. McCain was direct and compelling. Your initial response to the crisis in Georgia was tepid and swishy. McCain was muscular and straightforward.

For those who are unfamiliar with this slur, here’s the relevant definition of “swishy” from Merriam-Webster: “usually disparaging: characterized by effeminate behavior.” In other words, Blow equates Obama’s perceived weakness with effeminate behavior (i.e. homosexuality) and contrasts it with McCain’s “muscular” response (i.e. manly and not homosexual).

In fact, if you watch the YouTube video that Blow links for the phrase “tepid and swishy,” you’ll see there’s nothing effeminate about Obama’s behavior (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Blow is projecting the stereotype onto Obama because he disagrees with the candidate’s response. It’s disgusting.

PS Has anyone else noticed how a vast portion of center-left commentary on presidential elections consists of journalists like Blow giving tactical advice to professional politicians? Can we talk about something else?

Karl Rove is again pushing the suggestion that Barack Obama is lazy, a claim that connotes ugly racial stereotypes about African Americans.

Back in September of last year, a “senior White House official” (apparently Rove) accused Obama of “intellectual laziness” in an interview with Bill Sammon of The Examiner:

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was “capable” of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

“It’s sort of like, ‘that’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”

He cited an example from Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in which the senator complains that many “government programs don’t work as advertised.” Five days after the book was published last fall, Obama was asked to name some of those government programs by Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“And he can’t give an example,” the official said. “Look, if you wrote the book, you should have thought through what it was. But he’s sitting there, fumbling around.”

Then, in a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rove described Obama as “often lazy”:

Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting “present” on bills important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun-control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn’t know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.

Most recently, Rove revived the meme in a WSJ op-ed Thursday that suggested Obama needs to answer doubts that he is “intellectually lazy” at the convention:

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, needs to reassure Americans he is up to the job. Voters recognize he represents change, yet they are unsettled. Does he have the experience to be president? There are growing concerns, which the McCain campaign has tapped, that Mr. Obama is an inexperienced celebrity-politician smitten with his own press clippings.

And is there really a “there” there? Besides withdrawing from Iraq, it’s not clear what issues are really important to him. Does he do his homework or is he intellectually lazy? Is there an issue on which he would do the unpopular thing or break with party orthodoxy? Is his candidacy about important answers or simply about us being the “change we’ve been waiting for”? Substance will help diminish concerns about his heft and fitness for the job.

Unfortunately, Obama’s campaign has to expect that code words and innuendo will increasingly be used to inflame racial stereotypes in this way. It’s shameful if not surprising.

In the wake of Joe Biden’s nomination, Fred Barnes drags out the National Journal 2007 Senate ratings to argue that Obama and Biden are the first and third most liberal sentors:

Once regarded as a centrist, Mr. Biden was rated by the National Journal in 2007 as the third most liberal member of the Senate. Mr. Obama was rated the most liberal. Neither has a record of bucking the wishes of liberal interest groups or promoting bipartisanship.

However, as I pointed out back in February, the National Journal ratings are seen as simplistic by political scientists who study voting in Congress. The far more respected ranking produced by UCSD’s Keith Poole and UCLA’s Jeff Lewis places Obama and Biden as the 11th and 10th most liberal senators (respectively) in the first half of the 110th Senate (2007) and as the 21st and 29th most liberal in the 109th Senate (2005-2006).

By contrast, Poole and Lewis rate the “maverick” McCain as the eighth most conservative senator in the first half of the 110th and the second most conservative in the 109th, so the comparison isn’t actually as flattering as Barnes thinks (though see my previous post on the methodological problems posed by his inconsistent voting record).

A handy clip ‘n’ save guide:
1. Vice presidential selections rarely affect election outcomes.*
2. The selection is therefore only likely to be important insofar as the VP choice (a) helps or hurts the president they serve during his time in office and (b) becomes more likely to be a future president.
3. The selection should therefore be assessed primarily in light of #2, not #1. (It will not be.)

* You could tell a story where Obama’s VP could help prevent defections from white working-class voters who would otherwise have voted Democratic (a possibility that was obviously not relevant in past elections). However, this idea is purely speculative and would be difficult to test even after the fact.

In anticipation of a possible VP pick, Mickey Kaus flags the New York Times destroying Joe Biden’s various false boasts about his academic background back in 1988 — it’s the journalistic equivalent of “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire”:

Most of Mr. Biden’s statement was in response to a report in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ”Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”

He then went on to say that he ”went to law school on a full academic scholarship – the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ”ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ”the outstanding student in the political science department” and ”graduated with three degrees from college.”

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ”I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.”

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ”I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors – I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.

”With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,” the statement went on. ”My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.”

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ”My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ”on half scholarship based on financial need.”

In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ”based in part on academics” as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ”arranged for my first year’s room and board by placing me as an assitant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.”

As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.

Here are two other recent Biden lowlights from my archives in case he gets picked tomorrow:

-Biden blames the Virginia Tech massacre and Don Imus’s racial comments on the Gingrich revolution
-Biden falsely claims the Senate hearings he held in 2002 dramatically changed public opinion about Iraq

To be sure, Biden can be impressive, especially on foreign policy. But I still think he’s an incorrigible blowhard.

Update 8/22 12:26 AM: With all that said, today’s David Brooks column arguing for Biden is still reasonably convincing. Of the four who are reportedly under serious consideration, I think I’d ultimately prefer him over Bayh, Sebelius, or Kaine.

Update 8/24 11:10 PM — Via Kaus, here is the video, which is not flattering to Biden: