Brendan Nyhan

Newt Gingrich’s think tank sent out a press release about its decision to open a Silicon Valley office that cites this bit of evidence of their techno-savviness:

An example of American Solutions’ dedication to using new technology occurred when Newt Gingrich made an appearance in the virtual world of Second Life for a Solutions Day workshop on September 27, 2007.

If you haven’t seen it, the video of the “appearance” is one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen (skip to about 1:15 in the video) — Newt flies in and rambles on about technology in front of a crowd of about fifty wacky-looking avatars:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote this about the appearance:

Gingrich’s “American Solutions” project is a collection of workshops… designed to look at the nation’s problems through the lens of new technology.

The most radical example was a question-and-answer session that Gingrich hosted in “Second Life,” an on-line realm in which large numbers of people — using 3-D characters — interact with each other.

The “metaverse” is an important way to create new kinds of classrooms with participants from all over the world, Gingrich said. “This is the new technology of the 21st century,” he said.

There were some bugs. The comments of cyber-hecklers had to be removed. And upon arriving in a digital amphitheater, Gingrich’s figure was immediately approached by a lovely young digital lady, who arrived moments before her clothes did.

I hate arguments like this one from Geraldine Ferraro:

But if [superdelegates switching to support Barack Obama] are actually upset over the diminished clout of rank-and-file Democrats in the presidential nominating process, then I would love to see them agitating to force the party to seat the delegates elected by the voters in Florida and Michigan. In those two states, the votes of thousands of rank-and-file party members will not be counted because their states voted on dates earlier than those authorized by the national party.

Because both states went strongly for Mrs. Clinton, standing up for the voices of grassroots Democrats in Florida and Michigan would prove the integrity of the superdelegate-bashers. The people of those states surely don’t deserve to be disenfranchised simply because the leaders of their state parties brought them to the polls on a day that had not been endorsed by the leaders of our national party — a slight the voters might not easily forget in November.

The sad reality is that Democrats in Florida and Michigan were disenfranchised the day that the national party punished them for moving up their primaries. Without a competitive race in their states, voters never had a real chance to evaluate the candidates. Under those circumstances, the frontrunner will win every time. The votes that were cast are just not a meaningful expression of Democrats’ preferences, particularly in Michigan, where Obama and Edwards weren’t even on the ballot (!).

Bill Kristol trots out the buzzwords of 2000 and 2004 in an attempt to link Barack Obama to negative stereotypes of Al Gore and John Kerry:

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s sadly predictable. I can see “preening self-regard,” but how is Obama patronizing or haughty?

Kristol’s subsequent claim about how John McCain differs from Obama is even less believable:

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

While it’s true that McCain himself doesn’t claim to “fix our souls,” his political program is based on the idea that dedicating oneself to the country is a patriotic duty that gives meaning to life, as Matt Welch writes in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick and a Reason Magazine article:

I have learned the truth,” he writes in Faith of My Fathers. “There are greater pursuits than self-seeking.…Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself.”

That “something” is the “last, best hope of humanity,” the “advocate for all who believed in the Rights of Man,” the “city on a hill” once dreamed by Puritan pilgrim John Winthrop… Any thing or person perceived as tarnishing that city’s luster has a sworn enemy in the Arizona senator. “Our greatness,” he writes in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions, institutions that should transcend all sectarian, regional, and commercial conflicts to fortify the public’s allegiance to the national community.”

…For years McCain has warned that a draft will be necessary if we don’t boost military pay, and he has long agitated for mandatory national service. “Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, indulging their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect,” he wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2001. “Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals.”

McCain’s attitude toward individuals who choose paths he deems inappropriate is somewhere between inflexible and hostile. Nowhere is that more evident than when he writes about his hero Teddy Roosevelt, a man whose racism… and megalomania… do not merit more than a couple paragraphs’ pause in McCain’s adulation of his expansionist accomplishments. “In the Roosevelt code, the authentic meaning of freedom gave equal respect to self-interest and common purpose, to rights and duties,” McCain writes. “And it absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.…His insistence that every citizen owed primary allegiance to American ideals, and to the symbols, habits, and consciousness of American citizenship, was as right then as it is now.”

Newsweek’s Jon Alter has joined the chorus of criticism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, calling it “one of the worst run campaigns in modern political history.” But how do we know that? Mostly because she seems to losing the race for the nomination. I want to believe Hillary’s campaign is not well run — that’s certainly been my personal view for the last month or two — but we should be cautious about indulging that impulse. Virtually every losing campaign is described as badly run, particularly when the candidate once led in the polls. Hillary-bashers like me can point to various anecdotes about mismanagement and infighting, but losing causes those sorts of anecdotes to leak and become the focus of media coverage.

In a general election, the same sort of inferential problem applies — everyone thinks Michael Dukakis ran a terrible campaign in 1988, for instance, but the state of the economy suggested that George H.W. Bush would win. More generally, the literature on projecting presidential outcomes suggests that campaigns and/or candidates may only matter on the margin.

So how can you objectively determine what a good campaign is? In a general election, you could look at how the campaign did relative to the projected outcome based on the state of the economy, though this puts a lot of faith in your model of the presidential vote. For instance, Bill Clinton outperformed the projected outcome in 1996 as estimated by the “bread and peace” model of Douglas Hibbs. Given that many experts also think he ran a good campaign, we might have more confidence in that judgment. By contrast, Michael Dukakis did almost exactly as well as the model predicts, suggesting that he was not really the problem.

The problem in Hillary’s case is that we have no equivalent models for primary elections, so it’s not at all clear how to project outcomes and measure possible effects of campaign management or candidate performance. In other words, beware of 20/20 hindsight on the quality of Hillary’s campaign.

Matthew Yglesias, who backed off the last time he claimed to read John McCain’s mind, is again stretching it with the claim that McCain “doesn’t even care about the economic challenges facing the country”:

If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he’ll have to turn himself into in just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who’s a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven’t started enough wars, and one who doesn’t even care about the economic challenges facing the country.

What the evidence to support that claim? How would we even know if it were true without him admitting it outright?

One interesting aspect of the controversy over John McCain’s possible/alleged affair with a lobbyist is that it’s forced the New York Times to admit that the newspaper is loathed by many conservatives:

Later in the day, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers directed strong criticism at The Times in what appeared to be a deliberate campaign strategy to wage a war with the newspaper. Mr. McCain is deeply distrusted by conservatives on several issues, not least because of his rapport with the news media, but he could find common ground with them in attacking a newspaper that many conservatives revile as a left-wing publication.

Here’s a followup story the next day:

Operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, many conservatives who had long distrusted Mr. McCain on a variety of issues, including his peculiar fondness for talking to reporters for hours on end, rallied to see him at war with a newspaper they revile as a voice of the left.

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz needs to keep his weird fantasies to himself:

On Hannity & Colmes, while conducting a focus group analysis of the February 21 Democratic presidential debate, Frank Luntz asked the focus group participants: “How many of you want [Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton] to really argue? Raise your hands.” Luntz then asked: “And how many of you want them to make love to each other?”

Yikes.

The Politico’s Ben Smith quotes more silly Mark Penn spin:

“It would be hard to imagine a nominee from this party who didn’t win” any of a series of big states — New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (I’m not sure whether he mentioned California, but obviously that’s on the list.)

But as Chris Orr notes, Penn’s argument is nonsensical:

Even leaving aside the fact that two of the states on this list had votes that don’t count and three others haven’t voted yet, this is another example of sheer nonsense emanating from the Clinton camp. Illinois, where Obama basically doubled Clinton’s vote, is larger than Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. Indeed, including Massachusetts on this list at all is just daffy, as Obama has already won four states (Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Washington) that are larger.

That’s right. As I pointed out, Obama has won four of the ten most populous states that have voted so far (excluding Florida and Michigan).

Can Bill Richardson possibly expect to raise much money with this email?

I am writing to you today because we still have a substantial debt left from the campaign. It is my firm intention to meet every obligation we incurred. But I need your help.

Will you make one more contribution to help us zero out our debt and close the final chapter on “Bill Richardson for President”?

I can’t imagine anyone besides New Mexico lobbyists is fired up about retiring Bill Richardson’s debt. And why would you run up debt on a long-shot campaign in the first place? It’s not like spending another $100,000 (or whatever) was going to make the difference.

You should know that “The Hollywoody Show,” a satirical online video series about entertainment co-produced by my friend (and former Spinsanity co-editor) Ben Fritz, is now featured on the newly launched Comedy.com. (Woody first appeared on Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news site that Ben co-edits.)

Also, Julie Buxbaum, one of my wife’s best friends from college, just published an extremely well-reviewed debut novel called The Opposite of Love.

Make sure to check them both out today…