Brendan Nyhan

The New Republic’s Jon Chait wrote an excellent piece last year titled “The Case Against New Ideas,” which explodes a series of myths about the supposed power of new ideas to shape political outcomes. (See also my post on new ideas and the “gridlock zone.”)

The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein now offers a more mundane reason to question the fixation on “new ideas” — it’s a substantively meaningless term in practice:

It’s [not] just that Newt has no new ideas, it’s that his ability to convince the media otherwise exposes the bankruptcy of the whole new ideas concept. After all: Newt’s health savings accounts might as well be new. It’s not as if more than a dozen Americans even understand how health savings accounts work in the first place. And this goes for most policies. Newt could champion tort reform and, if Tim Russert wanted to call it blindingly brilliant and inventive, it’s not clear who’d stop him.

In a media landscape where nobody bothers to explain policies, all policies may be new, or they may be old, or they may be stolen, or unworkable, or brilliant. All that matters is the appended adjectives. Given that there aren’t media protocols for routinely talking through the details and evaluating the worth of policy proposals, they exist entirely in terms of their throwaway descriptors, which are in turn functions of candidate narratives, atmospherics, the reporter’s familiarity with the concepts at hand, etc. And because fairly few reporters are actually policy experts, it’s sadly easy to construct a reputation for big thinking out of loud talking. Newt [Gingrich] can spin old ideas into new ones because we have a media that doesn’t much traffic in ideas, and thus doesn’t know how to tell the difference. What they do know is that most candidates don’t talk about policies, and Newt does, and that makes him different. That his policies are generally bad is, again, a level of analysis we rarely reach.

Exactly right. A case in point is David Brooks’s latest column, which concludes with this:

Perhaps, as my friend Daniel Casse notes, what the G.O.P. needs is Newt Gingrich’s brain lodged in Fred Thompson’s temperament.

Remember, Gingrich is the pseudo-intellectual who used beach volleyball as the basis for a condemnation of government:

A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. Now it is not only a sport [but] in the Olympics. … And there’s a whole new world of opportunity opening up that didn’t even exist 30 years ago or 40 years ago, and no bureaucrat would have invented it. And that’s what freedom is all about.

But he talks about new ideas a lot, so he must have them, right?

Via Josh Marshall, the Boston Globe reports that Republican presidential candidates are following in President Bush’s footsteps by implying links between Iraq and 9/11:

In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would “follow us home” from Iraq — a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. ”

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

…[C]ritics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.

Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein’s support for terrorism — which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein’s backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Now, some GOP presidential candidates refer to “the terrorists” as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.

Romney said Friday: “You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We’ve got to make sure that we’re fighting a war on them.”

Romney’s comment in the earlier debate that “they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” struck some former intelligence officials as particularly misleading. Shia and Sunni, they said, are branches of Islam and not terrorist groups. There are an estimated 300 million Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, many of them fighting Al Qaeda.

“Are Shia and Sunni together? Is the Muslim Brotherhood cooperating with all these other groups? No,” said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst.

For more on the Bush administration’s use of these tactics, see pages 177-184 and 207-216 of All the President’s Spin.

Via Kevin Grier, here’s an exceptionally weird link for you. An Iraqi-born artist is living in an art gallery installation that allows visitors to his website to shoot paintballs at him. Here’s how the FAQ explains it:

In Domestic Tension, viewers can log onto the internet to contact, or shoot, Bilal with paintball guns. Bilal’s objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal will confine himself to the gallery space. During the installation, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. They will have the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Should they choose to do so, viewers will also have the option to shoot Bilal with a paintball gun, transforming the virtual experience into a very physical one. Bilal’s self- imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.

Update 6/5 8:41 PM: Bilal was profiled last week on NPR.

Thank goodness the New York Times is covering the important issues in the 2008 presidential campaign — like how Barack Obama plays basketball. As my friend Ben Fritz asked, is Jodi Kantor trying to become the next Maureen Dowd? Or is she just helping to generate material for Dowd’s next column?

In any case, it’s idiotic, as even Kantor is forced to admit in a nut graf that appeals explicitly to “armchair psychologists” (ie Dowd and other pundits who need new Obama material):

From John F. Kennedy’s sailing to Bill Clinton’s golf mulligans to John Kerry’s windsurfing, sports has been used, correctly or incorrectly, as a personality decoder for presidents and presidential aspirants. So, armchair psychologists and fans of athletic metaphors, take note: Barack Obama is a wily player of pickup basketball, the version of the game with unspoken rules, no referee and lots of elbows. He has been playing since adolescence, on cracked-asphalt playgrounds and at exclusive health clubs, developing a quick offensive style, a left-handed jump shot and relationships that have extended into the political arena.

Sadly, the (misguided) effort to use sports to gain insight into politicians’ psyches has a long history — see in particular the 1999 Don Van Natta story in the New York Times on Bill Clinton taking mulligans at golf, which is probably the most absurd example (Times Select sub. req.):

Indeed, the President does it again and again and again. He grants himself bushels of mulligans — off the tee, usually, but Presidential mulligans have also been witnessed while Mr. Clinton was ankle-deep in sand or lost in a thicket of evergreen trees. Mr. Clinton jokes that he gives ”Presidential pardons” to his errant golf balls.

As this vacation season draws to a close, and Mr. Clinton pursues another interlude of golf and fund-raisers, the mulligan presents itself as the perfect metaphor for his Presidency. The voters have given the Comeback Kid more than one mulligan. Mr. Clinton was granted a second chance by the Senate in February after the House impeached him for his behavior in the Monica S. Lewinsky matter. And it can be assumed that Hillary Rodham Clinton has given Mr. Clinton a few mulligans too.

Most past Presidents were golf purists who wouldn’t contemplate even asking for a mulligan (the term’s derivation is obscure), let alone taking one. George Bush apparently never took a do-over. For him, it was more important to put the game out of its misery; he once bragged that he raced through 18 holes in 1 hour, 42 minutes.

John F. Kennedy, probably the best golfer to occupy the White House this century, did not need to take mulligans. Richard M. Nixon, on the other hand, was known to kick the ball out of the rough to give himself a better lie.

Golf was also a defining metaphor of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidency. Ike spent so much time puttering around the links that his diversion symbolized his entire era of placid postwar prosperity and conservatism.

Mr. Clinton’s game symbolizes something else. In his new book, ”Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate” (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Bob Woodward writes that Gerald Ford, an avid golfer, was disgusted after watching Mr. Clinton repeatedly take mulligans during a round in Colorado in 1993. After playing 18 holes with Mr. Ford and the golf great Jack Nicklaus, Mr. Clinton told reporters he had shot an 80.

This claim apparently infuriated Mr. Ford and Mr. Nicklaus. Mr. Woodward writes: ”Nicklaus leaned over to Ford and whispered in disgust, ‘Eighty with 50 floating mulligans.”’

Matthew Yglesias takes issue with my concern that Barack Obama’s admitted history of drug use will be used to trigger racial stereotypes among voters:

I dunno about this. It seems to me that if you have an African-American candidate whose admitted to past cocaine use, that attacking him for past cocaine use is less an appeal to ugly racial stereotypes than a straightforward attack on his past drug use. An appeal to ugly racial stereotypes would be implying that a black candidate must have used cocaine in the past because, hey, that’s what those people do. I don’t personally have any problem with the idea that of a president who used cocaine in the past (though, admittedly, the George W. Bush experience hasn’t been very pleasant) but insofar as some voters do have a problem with it, they’re entitled to have a problem with it irrespective of the candidate’s race.

It’s certainly true that voters can legitimately object to a candidate’s personal history of drug use without reference to race. But does Yglesias really believe that the GOP won’t try to capitalize on Obama’s past history with drugs?

Let me expand on the point I was trying to make. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, it seems likely that the conservative attack on him would link his personal drug use with his liberal stances on racially tinged issues like crime and the death penalty. The message will be framed as “Obama: Too liberal” but it will carry racial implications. For instance, as an Yglesias commenter points out, analogies will be made between Obama and Marion Barry, a politician who (sadly) reinforced the fears of many white people about black leadership.

Unfortunately, these tactics reinforce each other. Attacking Obama for drug use (and thereby priming negative stereotypes about blacks and crime) is likely to activate the associated but more acceptable stereotype that blacks tend to be liberal Democrats, as this American Journal of Political Science article suggests:

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters’ judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the
case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters’ minds
to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate’s shadiness works indirectly by
increasing the perception that the candidate is liberal, even as the shady cue is rejected. Using three national survey-
experiments we randomly varied a candidate’s Jewish identity, ideology, and shadiness. The cue to the rejected social
stereotype indeed activates the more legitimate political stereotype. Moreover, voters give more weight to the candidate’s
perceived liberalism in their evaluation. Consequently, the candidate’s support suffers. However, when the candidate takes
a more extreme ideological position on issues, the effects disappear. The indirect influence of discredited stereotypes and the
limits of those stereotypes have implications for our understanding of voting and of the legacies of discrimination.

At this point, these issues are largely hypothetical, but there’s serious reason for concern given that John McCain is already making cracks about Obama and drugs. It’ll only get worse if he wins the nomination.

Via Tyler Cowen, David Leonhardt of the New York Times has performed some much-needed fact-checking on CNN’s Lou Dobbs:

The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago.

The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes” producer came across a 2005 news report from Mr. Dobbs’s CNN program on contagious diseases. In the report, one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the previous three years, far more than in the past.

When Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned the report and told him that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

With that Orwellian chestnut, Mr. Dobbs escalated the leprosy dispute into a full-scale media brouhaha…

Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.

That’s where leprosy comes in.

“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” Mr. Dobbs said on his April 14, 2005, program. From there, he introduced his original report that mentioned leprosy, the flesh-destroying disease — technically known as Hansen’s disease — that has inspired fear for centuries.

According to a woman CNN identified as a medical lawyer named Dr. Madeleine Cosman, leprosy was on the march. As Ms. Romans, the CNN correspondent, relayed: “There were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”

“Incredible,” Mr. Dobbs replied.

Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Romans engaged in a nearly identical conversation a few weeks ago, when he was defending himself the night after the “60 Minutes” segment. “Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy,” she said, again attributing the number to Ms. Cosman.

To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.

The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137…

So Mr. Dobbs was flat-out wrong. And when I spoke to him yesterday, he admitted as much, sort of. I read him Ms. Romans’s comment — the one with the word “suddenly” in it — and he replied, “I think that is wrong.” He then went on to say that as far as he was concerned, he had corrected the mistake by later broadcasting another report, on the same night as his on-air confrontation with the Southern Poverty Law Center officials. This report mentioned that leprosy had peaked in 1983.

Of course, he has never acknowledged on the air that his program presented false information twice. Instead, he lambasted the officials from the law center for saying he had. Even yesterday, he spent much of our conversation emphasizing that there really were 7,000 cases in the leprosy registry, the government’s 30-year database. Mr. Dobbs is trying to have it both ways.

I have been somewhat taken aback about how shameless he has been during the whole dispute, so I spent some time reading transcripts from old episodes of “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” The way he handled leprosy, it turns out, is not all that unusual.

For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”

When I asked Mr. Dobbs about this yesterday, he said, “You’ve raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive.”

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans…

Update 6/1 11:05 AM: Reader Joel Wiles points out via email that Leonhardt’s fact-check of Dobbs on the composition of the federal prison system in the article above is itself misleading. Let me try to sort things out.

Leonhardt criticizes statements Dobbs made during a 2003 broadcast. At the top of the show, Dobbs said this:

One-third of the inmates now serving time in federal prisons come from some other country — one-third. The cost to taxpayers, $1.5 billion. Bill Tucker will have the report.

He repeated similar language mid-show, but when introducing Tucker’s segment, Dobbs referred to illegal aliens as “an increasing part of America’s prison population”:

The great American giveaway. Tonight, we focus on illegal aliens. There are now an estimated 10 million illegal aliens in this country; some estimates even higher.

Those illegal aliens are also an increasing part of America’s prison population and its burden to taxpayers. The cost to taxpayers is simply astonishing. Bill Tucker’s here tonight with a report — Bill.

This phrasing is misleading. Dobbs uses the high proportion of non-citizens in the federal prison system, which houses a small percentage of the nation’s prisoners, to suggest (falsely) that the number of non-citizens in the overall prison population is increasing. Viewers may also end up thinking that non-citizens make up a significant proportion of the overall prison population, which is also false.

However, Leonhardt’s fact-check of Dobbs in the main text is bogus:

[Dobbs] has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

Note that Leonhardt is comparing apples to oranges — Dobbs was referring to the federal prison system, while Leonhardt presents statistics for the entire US prison population. To actually understand the dispute and see why Dobbs’s statement was misleading, you need to read Leonhardt’s sidebar, which I didn’t originally see (I came to the main article online):

Near the start of his Nov. 4, 2003, program on CNN, Lou Dobbs said, “One-third of the inmates now serving time in federal prisons come from some other country — one-third.” Later, he offered more details: “Coming up, we’re going to take a further look at the impact of illegal aliens. And it is an expensive proposition, particularly in our nation’s prisons. Illegal aliens, those citizens — noncitizens taking up a third of the cells in our federal penitentiaries.”

He also said that illegal immigrants were “an increasing part of America’s prison population.”

Here are the facts, according to the Department of Justice:

¶In 2000, 27 percent of the inmates in federal prisons were noncitizens. Some of these noncitizens were illegal immigrants, and some were in this country legally. In 2001, this percentage dropped to 24 percent, and it continued dropping over the next four years, falling to 20 percent in 2005.

Bottom line: illegal immigrants make up significantly less than a third of the federal prison population, and the share has been falling in recent years.

¶The share of state prison inmates who are noncitizens is much lower. (This is largely because immigration violations themselves are federal crimes.) In 2000, 4.6 percent of inmates in state prisons were noncitizens. This number remained quite steady over the next five years, right around 4.6 percent.

¶Over all — combining federal and state prisons — 6.4 percent of the nation’s prisoners were noncitizens in 2005. This is down from 6.8 percent in 2000.

¶By comparison, 6.9 percent of the total United States population were noncitizens in 2003, according to the Census Bureau.

Dobbs responded to Leonhardt by obscuring the issue further:

We reported that one-third of the federal prison population three and a half years ago were “non-citizens.” The columnist said the number was 6 percent. The exact number of the year in question was 29.3 percent for fiscal year 2001. And by the way, we’re putting up links on our Web site, loudobbs.com, so you can check the numbers for yourself.

But as you can see above, Leonhardt wrote that six percent of all prisoners were non-citizens, not six percent of federal prisoners.

Dobbs did retract the claim that the number of illegal immigrants in US prisons was increasing, however:

I introduced that report three and a half years ago by saying the number of illegal immigrants in our prisons was increasing and the financial burden rising. Well, we had to go back and check, and because our correspondent no longer has his notes to support that statement, that the number of illegal immigrants within a prison population of non-citizens, I have to retract it here tonight, and I apologize to you for the necessity of doing so. But like I said, I do make mistakes.

As I noted yesterday, the New York Times ran this caption alongside an article about opposing pro- and anti-war demonstrations at a street corner in Delaware:

Jeffery Broderick, foreground, standing alone last week in support of United States troops as demonstrators for peace occupy an opposite corner.

This language clearly suggests that Broderick “alone” supports the troops and that anti-war protesters do not.

Joel Wiles, the reader who alerted me to the caption, sent an email about his concerns to Clark Hoyt, the new public editor of the Times, and already got a response in which Hoyt agreed that the caption was inappropriate:

Dear Joel Wiles,

Thank you for your message regarding the caption under a picture in
yesterday’s New York Times.

I agree with you that the wording suggests that only the man holding a sign
in support of U.S. troops was supporting them and that the peace
demonstrators were, by implication, opposing the troops. One can oppose the
Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq while supporting the troops ordered to
carry out that policy.

I’m passing your complaint along to the newspaper’s Standards Editor for his
consideration.

I appreciate hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Clark Hoyt

When Hoyt was appointed, I cheered. So far, so good.

(Note: Wiles provided me with Hoyt’s response.)

Update 5/31 2:39 PM: Media Matters has an article up on the caption as well.

John McCain’s slam on Barack Obama last week is the first prominent attack on Obama’s admitted drug use:

McCain responds to Obama in tough enough, if predictable, language:

“While Senator Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military leaders on the ground in Iraq lead me to believe that we must give this new strategy a chance to succeed because the consequences of failure would be catastrophic to our nation’s security.”

But, McCain being McCain, he can’t help himself and goes the next step in the statement’s kicker:

“By the way, Senator Obama, it’s a ‘flak’ jacket, not a ‘flack’ jacket.”

Which is to say, “there is only one of us in this argument who has ever worn the uniform.” (my words)

And if you still don’t get it, a McCain aide blows away the anthill with, well, a rocket.

“Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong.”

Given Obama’s racial background, the danger is that these attacks will be used to trigger ugly racial stereotypes about him, particularly once Republicans shift from bong jokes to talking about cocaine, which Obama admitted to trying in his first book.

Note also how McCain invokes the phrase “my service” as partial justification for his position, attempting to use his (laudable) experience as a Navy pilot in Vietnam to invalidate Obama’s critique of the war. But previous military experience is irrelevant to the issue at hand — there are veterans on both sides of the debate. More importantly, military service does not make one uniquely qualified to speak on matters of war; this is the same mistake that Democrats make when they attack “chickenhawks.”

(By the way, Media Matters points out that “flack jacket” and “flak jacket” are both valid spellings.)

Update 5/31 3:14 PM: I have posted a response to Matthew Yglesias.

Reader Joel Wiles flags a caption in the New York Times suggesting that opponents of the war in Iraq do not support the troops.

The article in question describes pro- and anti-war demonstrators who stand on opposite corners of an intersection in Delaware:

On one side of the street, Jeff Broderick stands alone while he holds a sign. “Their only plan is to cut and run again. It never ever works,” the sign says.

On the other side, Patricia Kirby Gibler stands shoulder to shoulder with dozens of others, staring toward Mr. Broderick and silently holding small cardboard posters with black numbers. One poster states, “3,415 American Dead.” Another reads, “70,023 Iraqi Dead.”

However, the caption of the picture that accompanies the article states that Broderick was “standing alone last week in support of United States troops” and suggests that the “demonstrators for peace” do not support the troops:

Jeffery Broderick, foreground, standing alone last week in support of United States troops as demonstrators for peace occupy an opposite corner.

As Eric Alterman said, what liberal media?

The #1 rule of horse race journalism is that all decisions are motivated by politics.

The latest example: Associated Press writer Liz Sidoti’s assertions that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war funding bill because they are “[c]ourting the anti-war constituency” and that their votes “appeased the Democratic base”::

Courting the anti-war constituency, Democratic presidential rivals
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama both voted against legislation that pays for the
Iraq war but lacks a timeline for troop withdrawal.

…Their votes Thursday night continued a shift in position for the two presidential hopefuls, both of whom began the year shunning a deadline for a troop withdrawal.

…Both Clinton and Obama have faced intense pressure from the party’s liberal wing and Democratic presidential challengers who urged opposition to the measure because it doesn’t include a timeline to pull forces out of Iraq.

…With their “no” votes, Clinton, Obama and Dodd earned praise from the party’s left flank, which has been pushing for a quick end to the war and is an important part of the Democratic base in the primaries.

“This bold stand by three of the four presidential candidates in the Senate won’t soon be forgotten,” promised Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org’s political action committee.

Although they appeased the Democratic base, Clinton, Obama and Dodd did open themselves up to criticism from Republicans that they were denying 165,000 troops the resources they need — an argument that could be damaging in a general election.

Did politics play a role? Of course. But isn’t it possible that they ultimately decided to oppose the bill on principle? Sidoti doesn’t know what their motivations were (and neither do I).