Brendan Nyhan

Dan Bartlett yesterday:

Speaking to reporters outside the campaign rally here, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that the tape should not affect the way Bush campaigns but that Kerry should have marked a 12-hour truce.

“You would think that there would be a, maybe, 12 hours to let the American absorb what has just happened today,” he said.

Prodded on why, if the tape ought not to affect the campaign, Kerry should have stopped criticizing the president, Bartlett revised his statement, saying that the problem was that Kerry’s attack had been “discredited.”

From a profile of Jeb Bush and his political power in Florida:

Lew Oliver, chairman of the Republican Party in Orange County, a key swing area that includes Orlando, calls criticisms of Bush’s role in the electoral process “a seriously bum rap.”

“As usual,” Oliver said, “the Democrats crawl around telling lies like Joseph Goebbels.”

Here are what lies from Joseph Goebbels actually look like:

Every Russian, English and American soldier is a mercenary of this world conspiracy of a parasitic race. Given the current state of the war, who could still believe that they are fighting and dying at the front for the national interests of their countries! The nations want a decent peace, but the Jews are against it.

And Oliver isn’t the only one tossing around Goebbels – so are Bill O’Reilly and a Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, among many examples. It’s getting totally out of control. Let’s put an end to this loathsome practice.

Here’s Ari Fleischer on the White House view of the press in The New Republic:

[T]he Bush administration does not regard the media as having a special role but rather as just “one of several constituencies to deal with,” says former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. “It doesn’t set them apart as more important.” This more dispassionate view gives Team Bush greater freedom to play hardball, refusing access and info that it feels aren’t in its best interest to provide or, in more extreme cases, shutting out outlets or reporters with whom it is displeased. Guilt isn’t a problem because, from the Bushie perspective, the mainstream media serves as an unwelcome liberal–or at least hostile–filter on information that the campaign thinks Americans should know. (This is, after all, the president who boasts that he doesn’t trust newspapers and so relies on his staff to tell him what’s really happening in the world.) In this White House, stiffing the press isn’t seen as thwarting the public interest so much as serving it.

This is the argument we made in All the President’s Spin, which goes back to Ken Auletta’s New Yorker piece on the White House. Bush and his staff don’t believe the press has any special democratic function, and feel no particular obligation to answer questions or provide information, as Andy Card told Auletta:

“They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election… I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”

Meanwhile, as Michelle Cottle, who wrote the TNR piece, points out, Democrats have a strange and often pathetic obsession with being liked by the press that translates into excessive appeals to reporters and leaking to them (see: the Clinton White House). Isn’t there a happy medium here?

This dumb Slate article gives the wink wink, nod nod treatment to people voting twice (italics in original, bold added):

At the same time, the Florida fiasco also made it clear how imperfect the vote counting process is—like “measuring bacteria with a yardstick,” in mathematician John Allen Paulos’ phrase—and sends the signal that your vote probably won’t matter after all. So, Democrats try to register every warm body, since new registrants tend to vote Democratic; for the same reason, Republicans are sorting through voter-registration forms one by one, looking for signs of fraud. Some people might justifiably worry that their precious vote won’t be counted—and vote twice.

For all the new concern about double voting, though, the odds of getting caught remain minuscule. Comparing voter databases county by county and state by state is a needle-in-haystack undertaking, even with the aid of computers. Why not vote twice then? Michael Moore probably shouldn’t do it. But you probably could.

Just don’t tell any reporters.

Why not vote twice? How about the fact that it’s illegal and morally wrong? This is taking Slate’s obsession with being counterintuitive to new, absurd extremes. Coming soon: The underappreciated virtues of drunk driving and grand larceny.

I saw this sign yesterday on my way home and took a picture of it this morning (it’s at the corner of Vickers and University in Durham, NC):

Is it serious? Or a parody of our ridiculous political debate? You be the judge.

Update: Hey Tapped folks! Hope you’ll check out the rest of the site…

Update 2: My wife heard a local reporter asking people about this – apparently there’s a backstory involving a guy putting up about thirty of these signs. This appears to be his website, which contains the following insightful commentary along with a lot more pictures of these signs:

Communists in Durham, NC have been stealing Bush political signs and then vandalizing other signs for mentioning it. These photos are time stamped and were taken 10/27/2004 mostly in the Forest Hills area of Durham, NC.

While there are a lot of good people in the Forest Hills community, the Forest Hills Neighborhood Association, for example, is dominated by fiercely anti-American types and anyone who speaks against communism, socialism, immorality etc. are banned from the Forest Hills Neighborhood Assn. email list. I am not sure if those running that list are that way or simply don’t have the guts to stand up for what is right.

Here are some photographic examples of “free speech” Democrat / Communist style that we enjoy in the Forest Hills area of Durham, NC.

You can guess why he might have been banned from the neighborhood association email list.

And in news from agitprop central, World Magazine’s voter fraud blog has already linked to my post with the tagline “Commies intimidate voters in North Carolina.” Once again, you can’t make this shit up. [Correction: World Magazine’s voter fraud blog linked to this post under a humor category, so I guess they meant it as a joke, though it wasn’t immediately obvious from context. Apologies.]

Disclaimer: Stealing or vandalizing signs is always wrong, but if it did happen here in Durham, I tend to doubt that Communists were the perpetrators.

Update 3: Here’s the latest update on the Durham sign wars – this guy is getting some competition…

Update 4: The Durham Herald-Sun has now issued a report on the controversy…

UNC’s Jim Stimson, the leading political science expert in public opinion time series data, has a running tally of presidential trial heat polls on his website that you should check out. Here’s the latest graphic — as you can see, it looks like Kerry is trending upward, though still slightly behind Bush:

It’s based on methodology he’s developed for combining polls that are only partially comparable and filtering the systematic component out from all the noise. Rather than getting caught up in tracking polls that are bouncing all over the place, check his page out instead – he updates it daily.

In an AP story today, Nedra Pickler offers this fascinating critique of John Kerry’s speaking style — when he says the line “I’ve got your back,” he doesn’t sound enough like a football player in the huddle:

Kerry’s style is illustrated by a story he’s been telling recently on the campaign trail about a woman who sent a message to him through one of his staffers: “Tell the senator we’ve got his back.”

Kerry delights in this casual phrase, a grin bursting on his face when he tells it, and he throws it back at his audiences at nearly every stop. “I’ve got YOUR back,” he says.

But there’s a formality in the way that Kerry speaks, even when he’s saying something as casual as this. He says the phrase slowly and carefully pronounces each word, so it doesn’t sound like it would if it came from a friend or a teammate who made the promise in a huddle.

Thanks Nedra! That’s some great reporting.

In an equally depressing turn of events, the Times voter guide section today is filled with gauzy, useless profiles focusing on the candidates’ personalities and styles, and the spin watch article and policy comparison table are buried inside.

This bring us back to the fundamental problem with political reporters: most of them would rather be campaign staffers or psychoanalysts than journalists. They love to pontificate about strategy and the candidate’s innermost thoughts at great length, even though they know little about either. And they skimp on the reporting of hard facts and policy that’s supposedly their job.

Maureen Dowd, this is all your fault…

Karl Rove yesterday (washingtonpost.com):

“They had to roll Clinton out of the operating room and onto the campaign trail in order to basically help Kerry with the weaknesses he has among core Democratic constituencies,” Rove said, taking liberties with his depiction of the former president as a near-invalid.

The New York Times had a disturbing article on judicial elections on Sunday. The upshot is that they are increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of our politics – nasty, partisan and money-driven:

Judicial elections, which used to be staid and decorous affairs, have been transformed this year into loud and vicious fights, fueled by money, venom and television.

Campaign spending has skyrocketed. In one Illinois race, two vying candidates have raised $5 million. In West Virginia, a group financed by business interests is spending $2.5 million to defeat a sitting State Supreme Court justice. About a third of the total spending nationwide comes from interest groups, much of it from the independent but partisan organizations known as 527’s. Their main contributors are business interests and plaintiffs’ lawyers, and their agenda is most often the election of judges who could help – or the defeat of judges who could hinder – efforts to impose limits on lawsuits seeking damages for injuries.

Voters in eight states are seeing television advertisements in judicial races for the first time. And the ads are as pointed as those used in races for legislative and executive positions. One charge, leveled in separate advertisements against sitting judges in two states, is that they released dangerous sexual predators.

When judges are not attacking their opponents, they are telling voters their views on the legal and political issues of the day, something they had avoided until a 2002 decision by the United States Supreme Court. Statements by judges on issues they might be called upon to decide were generally thought to violate codes of judicial ethics before that decision.

All these developments, many lawyers and legal scholars warn, threaten the reputation, independence and integrity of the judiciary in the 38 states that elect at least some of their judges. Even the people involved in some of the nastiest campaigns are critical of their own work, saying it is the upshot of an unfortunate but inevitable political arms race.

And the Independent here in Durham has a piece illustrating how the North Carolina judicial elections are going down the same track. With legal and ethical norms eroding, strategic candidates for the bench are going to play politics — bad news for every citizen who wants an effective non-partisan judiciary. That’s why all judges should be appointed. Let’s hold elected officials responsible for the judges they appoint, rather than politicizing the law. It’s the only workable solution.

For much of the last year, Fred Kaplan at Slate has been the go-to guy for debunking misleading GOP attacks on John Kerry’s voting record on defense. He’s partisan, but does the hard work other reporters often don’t to get to the bottom of some complicated legislative issues.

That’s why his article Friday on Bush’s “Wolves” ad is such a puzzle. He didn’t bother to find out which proposal of Kerry’s the ad refers to when it claims “John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations. By six billion dollars.” Instead, he says Bush may have been referring to one of two different proposals that would have cut intelligence funding. But the ad facts document posted on Bush’s site, which are usually released along with any new ad, explains quite clearly that the ad refers to Kerry’s 1994 omnibus deficit-reduction bill, not a 1995 amendment. Why didn’t Kaplan go look it up?

[Note: The ad is misleading, as Factcheck.org explains.]