Brendan Nyhan

President Bush may not have asked questions about Hurricane Katrina and doesn’t remember how the Iraqi army got disbanded, but he sure is vocal about his ice cream and mountain bike trails! You can protest that these are unfair anecdotes, but they fit with a larger pattern — Bush used to take two-hour lunches in Texas while rubber-stamping execution reviews in fifteen minutes.

Update 9/5 9:21 PM: Michael Crowley’s readers flagged this related passage from Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty:

Bush looked impatiently at [Andy] Card, hard-eyed. “You’re the chief of staff. You think you’re up to getting us some cheeseburgers?”

Card nodded. No one laughed. He all but raced out of the room.

The New Republic’s invaluable Jonathan Chait has released his first book: The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Here’s the beginning of an excerpt in TNR that highlights Chait’s devastating combination of empiricism and wit:

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago–that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best response to any and every economic circumstance or that it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government–are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.

After receiving encouragement from Arlen Specter, Larry Craig is apparently making noise about staying in the Senate, but I think the rest of the Republican caucus is going to be somewhat less receptive. As James Carville pointed out on Meet the Press, it is striking how few Republicans defended Craig:

What I found extraordinary about this is nobody came out and defended this guy. I mean, nobody said, “He’s a good man, done a bad thing.” “Here’s a decent guy who’s obviously been struggling with a problem.” “Here’s somebody who”—I mean, nobody. No Republican, no, no, no, no operative, no journalist. Nobody said, “Well, Larry Craig’s got nothing.” And I mean, they didn’t throw him under the bus, they hit him with the bus. I mean, he’s like, boom! Flattened him.

Here are a few examples from the wire story on Craig:

Craig came under a steady drumbeat of criticism from Republicans in the days before he announced that for the good of the people of Idaho, he would step down Sept. 30.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Craig’s actions “unforgivable” after the White House termed the situation disappointing. Republican Senate colleagues John McCain of Arizona and Norm Coleman of Minnesota said Craig should resign.

With Republicans defending nearly twice as many seats as Democrats in Nevada Sen. John Ensign, chairman of the Senate GOP’s election effort, said he would resign if was in Craig’s circumstances but stopped short of saying the Idahoan should give up his seat. Craig’s third six-year term in the Senate expires in January 2009.

You can’t back up the bus on this one. Indeed, I’d imagine Republicans would consider backing a primary challenger to Craig, who could put Idaho in play if he refuses to step down.

Michael Kinsley famously said that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Here’s the special interest version courtesy of David Kragnes, chairman of the American Crystal Sugar Company, who had a great Freudian slip during an interview with NPR’s Peter Overby:

OVERBY: [Kragnes] says sugar has a good story to tell and it’s important to keep telling it over and over.

KRAGNES: Then when farm bill time comes, hopefully you have made some relationships with the staff that have endured and then you explain to them once again why the provisions you put in — suggested to be put in any one bill are good for America.

Oops!

It looks like the coming debate over Iraq will focus on whether “progress” is being made as a result of the troop surge (see, for instance, Mary Matalin’s comments on Meet the Press). Administration officials and their surrogates are trying to lower the bar by suggesting that because the situation may be slightly improved compared to January (ie “progress”), we should stay. In other words, the expected utility of staying is now greater than it was back in January: E(staying at time=9/11/07) > E(staying at time=1/10/07).

But from a sunk cost perspective, all that matters is whether the expected utility of staying in Iraq going forward is greater than the expected utility of withdrawing. And, sadly, E(withdrawing at time=9/11/07) > E(staying at time=9/11/07). Whether things have improved slightly since January is irrelevant.

However, none of this really matters because of the configuration of the gridlock zone in Congress. All President Bush has to do is keep enough Republicans on board that a veto of a bill cutting off funding won’t be overridden. To give you a sense of how easy that will be, preliminary estimates from the 110th Congress indicate that the veto pivot in the Senate (the 67th most liberal senator) is Pat Roberts of Kansas. Vague claims of “progress” and references to unspecified troop reductions should be enough to keep him in line.

I’ve tried to avoid commenting on the Larry Craig scandal — it’s sad and I don’t have anything new to say — but I need to emerge from seclusion to complain about this soundbite from Mary Matalin on “Meet the Press”:

MATALIN: If you’re a liberal and you cheat on your wife, it’s a private affair. If you’re a conservative and you cheat on your wife, you’re a hypocrite. Normal people, when the husband cheats on the wife, the wife does not consider the politics before she gives a response on this. Normal people out there did just what James just referenced, they looked at Mrs. Craig, and I remember looking at Lee Hart and through the years this—these poor suffering families. The first thing normal people thinks are—think are, “What? Is—this is a family tragedy.” The second thing they think is, “Why is everybody in Washington glued to this? And can’t—and don’t you guys have something better to do?” And thirdly, I didn’t listen to the tape, I didn’t watch any of this, but the people that I talked to are not particularly Craig fans, or critics, said, “That sounds like entrapment. Don’t the cops have better things to do than tap dance in bathrooms in the airport?” I’m just telling you the normal person view at the end of all…

I don’t know what’s more annoying — the idea that Matalin thinks she speaks for “normal people” or the fact that she couldn’t be bothered to listen to the Craig tape before pontificating about it on national television.

In the process of bemoaning the accelerated primary schedule, the Wall Street Journal editorial board offers more lame third party hype:

Perhaps it will all turn out for the best this time around. But if the process leaves one or both parties lukewarm about their nominees, it could also open the field for a third party candidate to make a run. This is the scenario that New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been eyeing.

Third-party scenarios are like a**holes — everyone’s got one. But this isn’t 1860; Bloomberg probably won’t run and almost certainly won’t win.

Via Michael Crowley, the Washington Post reports a bizarre anecdote about the Iraqi national security adviser watching cartoons during a meeting with Rep. John Porter (R-NV):

But even such tight control could not always filter out the bizarre world inside the [Green Zone] barricades. At one point, the three [visiting members of Congress] were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. Rubaie was watching children’s cartoons.

When Moran asked him to turn it off, Rubaie protested with a laugh and said, “But this is my favorite television show,” Moran recalled.

Porter confirmed the incident, although he tried to paint the scene in the best light, noting that at least they had electricity.

“I don’t disagree it was an odd moment, but I did take a deep breath and say, ‘Wait a minute, at least they are using the latest technology, and they are monitoring the world,’ ” Porter said. “But, yes, it was pretty annoying.”

Yes, thank goodness the Iraqi government is “using the latest technology” and “monitoring the world.” I’m sure Rubaie will track down some insurgents on Dora the Explorer soon…

I’m currently blogging from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago. Check out the program if you’re interested in what political scientists are studying these days. (Answer: Everything you could imagine — the printed program is a 400 page book.)

Peter Boyer’s New Yorker profile of Rudy Giuliani contains some juicy nuggets I hadn’t heard before,
but he annoyingly takes the Giuliani crime-fighting legend at face value:

Loyalty is the virtue that he most prizes, and its absence in an aide is the surest route to exile. That was the fate of his first police commissioner, William Bratton, whose innovations in police strategies made Giuliani’s stunning reductions in crime possible.

In fact, there are real questions about whether the “broken windows” approach was responsible for the decline in crime under Giuliani. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write in Freakonomics that Giuliani got credit for a nationwide drop in crime that began before he took office and also benefited from an increase in the size of the NYPD that began under his predecessor, David Dinkins.

In addition, as Media Matters points out, Boyer is highly credulous in his treatment of the overhyped Giuliani record on terrorism, which includes many policy failures in the period between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11.

Given all the reporting Boyer did, shouldn’t his story at least acknowledge the questions surrounding Giuliani’s record on his two signature issues?