Brendan Nyhan

Who decided it was a good idea to headline Howard Kurtz’s online Washington Post column “Huckabee Becomes a Big Fat Target” yesterday?

Not very long ago, Huckabee was the Republican underdog that Democrats liked — the Bobos in Paradise-era David Brooks of the GOP primaries. He seemed like a nice guy, he was funny, he was something of a populist on economic issues, he refused to demagogue illegal immigration as much as the other candidates, etc. In the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg called it a “nice change” that Huckabee “seems to regard liberalism not as a moral evil, a mental disease, or a character flaw—merely as a political point of view he mostly disagrees with.”

But in the last few weeks, Huckabee has surged in the Iowa and national polls. Now Newsweek has put him on the cover — just in time for the emerging backlash that is going to destroy his campaign. Here’s a roundup of what’s already come out:

Huckabee apparently lobbied for the release of Wayne Dumond, a rapist who allegedly raped and murdered two other women, but now denies doing so or knowing that Dumond posed a threat. Some of those lobbying Huckabee for Dumond’s release believed he had been persecuted because his first victim was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton’s.

A closely affiliated pro-Huckabee third-party group is running a push poll in Iowa.

He hadn’t heard about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran 36 hours after its release.

He supports an absurd 23 percent national sales tax that even conservatives agree would lead to massive tax evasion. His website promises that “When the FairTax becomes law, it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness.”

He defends creationism and says it should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.

In 1992, he wrote on a candidate questionnaire that homosexuality is “aberrant” and “sinful” and advocated quarantining AIDS patients.

He seemed to credit God for his rise in the polls.

During a 1998 speech to Southern Baptist pastors, he said he “got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives … I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.”

An outside group backed by tobacco money paid him to oppose the Clinton health care plan, which included a cigarette tax, while he was lieutenant governor.

There’s something in here for everyone to hate! In all seriousness, it’s hard to imagine Huckabee and his campaign are going to be able to survive the backlash, especially when economic conservatives are also going to be hammering him for raising taxes in Arkansas.

Update 12/10 9:01 AM: You know you’re in trouble when the New York Times is fact-checking you effectively:

The sudden rise of Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who was hardly considered a factor a month ago, has shaken up the race and thrust him into the center of controversies.

He began the day defending his record on “Fox News Sunday,” where he argued that when he called in 1992 for taking steps to isolate people with AIDS, he was not advocating a quarantine…

Mr. Huckabee said that when he called for isolating AIDS patients, “we didn’t know as much as we do now about AIDS.” But as early as 1986, the United States surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, had stated that AIDS was not spread by casual contact.

Apparently many House Democrats want to bring back old-school filibusters:

Mr. Yarmuth said that he and many other House Democrats wanted their Senate colleagues to force Republicans to spend hours filibustering various bills, to illustrate for constituents why legislation is stalling.

I’ve never understood this argument, which is popular among many liberals:

(a) After the first filibuster, I’m not sure the media or the public would care.
(b) It would slow down work in the Senate to a crawl.
(c) To the extent it draws attention to an issue, it does so by giving a platform to the other side.
(d) The potential for being dragged into a mutually destructive cycle of retribution is obvious (in five or ten years, Democrats would be in the same position).

So what’s the rationale? Are Americans supposed to turn on C-SPAN, see a filibuster of an Iraq spending bill with a withdrawal deadline, and rise up as one? This strikes me as, um, a bit implausible.

Tim Russert’s interview with Rudy Giuliani on “Meet the Press” is a perfect reflection of the scandal-driven priorities of the Washington press corps. Guiliani is a top presidential candidate with little knowledge of or experience in foreign policy. Norman Podhoretz, one of his advisers, wants to bomb Iran and thinks Iraq’s WMD are in Syria. But what does Russert really care about? We’ll let the word count tell the story.

Horse race – 701 words
Iran – 1401 words
Iraq – 539 words
Questionable actions/statements/ethical allegations – 6129 words
Huckabee on homosexuality – 249 words
Balanced budget pledge and fuel efficiency standards – 328 words

Or, in USA Today style, here are Tim Russert’s real priorities:

Now, there are certainly serious ethical questions about Guiliani. But these pale in comparison to questions about how he would conduct himself in office, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. Unfortunately, however, Russert wants to break news and the way to do that is to force Giuliani to go on the record about skeletons in his closet.

Update 5:41 PM: I should explicitly clarify that Russert did ask Giuliani two questions about Podhoretz as part of the 1401 words of Iran discussion. However, as I argue above, Russert devoted far more of his program to ethics and honesty issues that are far less important for the country as a whole.

An ironic Rudy statement from today’s Meet the Press (my emphasis):

GIULIANI: …I don’t think the military option is the thing that we want. I mean, that isn’t the thing that we, we, we want to get to if we don’t have to. Again, we would only get to it if it was a last resort and under this kind of an analysis. Understanding it would be dangerous and risky, but that it would be more dangerous and more risky for Iran, a highly irresponsible regime, to be having nuclear weapons. It was the worst nightmare of the Cold War, the idea that irresponsible people would have nuclear weapons.

As I wrote back in October, he knows nothing about foreign policy, his foreign policy advisers are crazy, he has no understanding of the appropriate exercise of executive power, and displays little concern for the niceties of free speech. Rudy should not be put in charge of the executive branch and I certainly don’t want his finger on the red button. Do you?

(Obvious disclaimer that I meant to add per Rob’s comment below: I’m not saying Giuliani is the equivalent of the leaders of Iran.)

Despite my issues with the New York Times ad watch articles, yesterday’s installment on Rudy’s Reagan ad is pretty amusing.

Rudy:

I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages, and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing. The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as president of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t back down. I’m Rudy Giuliani, and I approve this message.

The Times accuracy check:

Although the hostages were freed less than an hour after Mr. Reagan was sworn in as president, the complex deal that led to their release was brokered by President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The hostages were released because the United States agreed to return nearly $8 billion in frozen assets to Iran, most of which Iran used to pay off foreign creditors. Some suggest that the Iranians continued to hold the hostages until Mr. Reagan was sworn in as a final affront to Mr. Carter; others say that there were logistical reasons for the delay. And while the advertisement seems to invoke Mr. Reagan as an example of standing up to terrorists, some members of his administration later went on to sell arms to Iran as ransom for hostages held in Lebanon, and to divert the profits to rebels fighting the Marxists in Nicaragua, contrary to official government policy.

The last line is the best part. Reagan’s a great example of how we should stand up to Iran… except for the fact that he sold them arms for hostages. Other than that, though, he was tough!

During a speech last night here at Duke, Rick Santorum called for a war against radical Islam but in the process made the English majors cry:

“Maybe [Islamic jihad] is a gathering storm that is a little shower, but the consequences of this could make World War II seem like a walk in the park.”

Ouch.

Ezra Klein objects to a John Sides post showing that Democrats and Republicans have the most divergent favorability ratings on Hillary:

John Sides’ effort to quantify how polarizing the various candidates are is interesting but, ultimately, quite flawed. “Polarization” is not a quality intrinsic to the various candidates…

Rather, candidates become polarizing as the press, and the political world, polarizes reactions to them. Hillary has been in the public eye for decades, endured all manner of smears and controversies, and is thus quite polarizing. But that’s a function of her time before the spotlights, not her personality.

…Take John Kerry. In January of 2004, his ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings 1.26, meaning he was net favorable, even though relatively few Americans knew his name. In the final poll before the election, his ratio was .87, meaning he was net unfavorable, despite almost everyone knowing his name. Currently, his ratio is .45, meaning people wouldn’t spit on him if he were on fire. During each of these periods, public awareness of Kerry has increased. And during each of these periods, that awareness has fundamentally shifted the electorate’s aggregate opinion of him. So too with Obama, or Huckabee, or Edwards. If any of them emerge their party’s nominee, they will be smeared, and attacked, and lied about, and derided. They will become polarizing, not because they are polarizing people, but because they are participating in a polarizing process.

That’s why I’m so uninterested in these arguments that so-and-so can bring us together. Anyone can look unifying and safe now. I’m sure that Bill Clinton, in 1992, running as a moderate Southerner atop promises to rid the Democratic Party of 80s-era orthodoxies, seemed like a pretty likable figure. By 1994, that wasn’t so much the case. Obama, for all his virtues, will be smeared as a Muslim, or a former coke user, and undergo the same process. Edwards will be derided for his haircut, his house, his looks. Polarization happens. The question is who can endure it, survive it, and win despite it.

Doesn’t this get it precisely backwards? While any politician will of course become more polarizing as they rise in prominence, it doesn’t follow that all of them will converge to some equilibrium level of polarization. The good politicians who endure, survive, and win usually do so by retaining some appeal to independents and moderates in the other party.

To illustrate the point about the lack of convergence, let me quote from a post last year in which I show that Hillary started her presidential campaign way behind both Al Gore and John Kerry in terms of polarization:

To put Hillary’s negatives in comparative perspective, let’s see where she stands relative to Al Gore and John Kerry, the two previous Democratic presidential candidates. With 28 months to go before the 2008 election, her favorable/unfavorable rating is 54 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable according to the latest Post-ABC poll — a ratio of 1.3:1. By contrast, the Post-ABC poll from July 1998 — the comparable period for Gore — shows that his favorable/unfavorable rating was 54 percent to 26 percent even though he was the sitting vice president. That is a ratio of 2.1:1. And two polls from late 2002 show that John Kerry’s favorable/unfavorable ratings were 31 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable and 31 percent favorable, 13 percent unfavorable — ratios of 4.4:1 and 2.3:1, respectively.

To sum up, Hillary Clinton is far more polarizing today than Al Gore was in 1998. And look what happened to Gore.

To bring this up to date, USA Today/Gallup currently has her at 50% unfavorable. In December 1999, Gore, the sitting vice president, had unfavorable ratings of 42% and 36% in two USA/Today Gallup polls. His unfavorables in that poll never exceeded 42% for the rest of the campaign. In November 2003, John Kerry, who has much less well known than either Hillary or Gore, had a unfavorable rating of 24% in the Gallup poll. His unfavorables never exceeded 44% in that poll for the rest of the campaign. In other words, Hillary is already more polarizing than either Gore or Kerry ever became during their races.

And even if we concede that Obama or Edwards would eventually become as polarizing as Hillary, Klein’s point still doesn’t hold. Surely it’s harder to win a general election when your opponents start out energized against you and almost half the electorate starts out with an unfavorable impression of you. Why would we think otherwise?

As I’ve said many times in my posts on Hillary’s campaign, I’m not saying she’s unelectable. The political environment is so favorable to Democrats that she could win, but there’s good reason to think she would perform worse than Obama or Edwards.

(PS Kerry’s numbers are especially awful now because Democrats are mad at him for losing in ’04. If he had won, his numbers would obviously be much better.)

In a Texas Monthly interview, former White House adviser Dan Bartlett admits that Washington reporters are generally driven by professional incentives, not ideology:

TM: Do you think the press corps is responsible for putting that word out—that the president was lying [about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]?

BARTLETT: I don’t think they’re purposely doing it. Look, I get asked the question all the time: How do you deal with them when they’re all liberal? I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven. Do I think that a lot of them don’t agree with the president? No doubt about it. But impact, above all else, is what matters. All they’re worried about is, can I have the front-page byline? Can I lead the evening newscast? And unfortunately, that requires them to not do in-depth studies about President Bush’s health care plan or No Child Left Behind. It’s who’s up, who’s down: Cheney hates Condi, Condi hates Cheney.

Unfortunately, those incentives are all wrong, as Bartlett correctly points out.

When you’re a journalist and therefore not an expert on anything substantive, attempt to read the President’s mind based on his body language — it’s swami time!

Q Thank you, Mr. President. I may want to apologize in advance because —

THE PRESIDENT: Please do.

Q — I can’t help but read your body language this morning, Mr. President. You seem somehow dispirited, somewhat dispirited.

THE PRESIDENT: I think you need to apologize for advance — (laughter.) This is like — all of a sudden, it’s like Psychology 101, you know? (Laughter.)

Journalists sure do love to read people’s minds and tell stories about the president’s visual appearance. But asking him about the mind-reading during a press conference might be a new low.