Brendan Nyhan

Isaac Chotiner flags a disturbing statement by William Kristol from Fox News Sunday in which he suggests that Barack Obama would have backed Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln:

We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this.

Obama’s speech is a “can’t we get along” speech–sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858.[Italics Mine]

Note the inflammatory implications of this attack. Kristol suggests that Obama — a black man who is not African American — would have supported Douglas, who supported allowing settlers to choose whether to have slavery, over Lincoln, who opposed the expansion of slavery.

The near-godlike status of Ronald Reagan among conservatives is contradicted by his rarely acknowledged inconsistencies (including multiple tax increases), as Josh Green argued in the Washington Monthly. But it’s rare to see conservatives admitting this.

That’s why it’s surprising to see one of the Bush devotees at Power Line pointing out the truth about Reagan:

Beyond that, when, exactly, has this country ever elected the sort of pure conservative that this group, as depicted by the Times, yearns for? These Reagan alumni have perhaps forgotten how disappointed conservatives were through most of Reagan’s administration. (Remember “Let Reagan be Reagan”?) And who, if we put Reagan to one side, is the conservative paragon that the current candidates don’t live up to? William McKinley, maybe? I can’t think of anyone else in the last century.

Mitt Romney is even telling a joke about Reagan’s inconsistency:

Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has tried to explain his conversion on abortion rights, from support to opposition, with a made-for-television story: As he listened to a Harvard researcher discussing stem-cell science, and the destruction of embryos, he saw the antiabortion cause in a new light.

At some recent conferences for social conservatives, Mr. Romney has used a line that some conservatives find credible: “On abortion I was not always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Reagan.”

What will the Reagan hagiographers do?

Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has joined me in questioning the conventional wisdom that Obama is less experienced than Hillary:

And one last word about experience. Clearly, in his third year in the U.S. Senate, Obama enters the presidential race with the least federal experience among the leading Democrats. But I have a hunch this isn’t going to hold up as a credible knock on Obama’s candidacy, and here’s why:

Years in elected office:

* Obama: 10 years (7 state Senate, 3 U.S. Senate)
* Clinton: 8 years (8 U.S. Senate)
* Edwards: 6 years (6 U.S. Senate)
* Giuliani: 8 years (two, four-year mayoral terms)
* Romney: 4 years (one four-year gubernatorial term)
* McCain: 25 years (4 U.S. House, 21 U.S. Senate)

In this respect, Obama’s background doesn’t look that thin, does it?

Nope, it sure doesn’t. (Note that some of Benen’s numbers are wrong; Obama has been in the US Senate for two years and Hillary for six.)

Correction 2/11 3:28 PM: As pointed out in comments below, this post originally said Obama had served for four years in the Senate, not two.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who shares my obsession with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, destroys a cartoonishly dishonest editorial on health care:

Pointing out intellectual dishonesty on The Wall Street Journal editorial page has a certain tiresome dog-bites-man quality to it. I generally restrain myself to only the most hilarious and/or flagrant examples. Today’s editorial on health care, alas, fits the bill.

The editorial is the Journal‘s panicky attempt to persuade American businesses that they should oppose any form of national health insurance. “More than a few American businesses are tempted to go the government route because it would allow them to toss their liabilities on the taxpayer,” concede the Journal‘s editors. But they should resist the temptation. Why? Because it would lead to higher taxes. The following paragraph is the Journal‘s attempt to make this seem like a terrifying proposition:

Health care is a big reason that the overall tax burden is as high as it is in most of Europe. According to the OECD, the “tax wedge” as a share of all labor costs was only 29.11% in the U.S. in 2005. It was above 40% in most of Europe, and above 50% in France and Germany. These countries spend little on defense, so “national health care” and other social services explain the high tax burden.

Do you notice anything odd about that paragraph? If not, let me point it out. The editorial is saying that public health care is the reason Europe has higher tax rates than the United States, but it does not say how much Europe spends on health care vis-à-vis the U.S.

Why do they avoid pointing it out? I’ll give you one guess. Okay, here’s the answer: The United States spends far more on health care than any other country, including France or Germany. In fact, our system is so inefficient that the American government spends more money on health care per capita ($2,727) than either the French government ($2,476) or the German government ($2,350.) (Figures culled from OECD statistic available here.)

Just to review, a one-year subscription to the Journal costs $215. What kind of contempt do the editors have for their readers?

Back in December, I complained about a New York Times story that mischaracterized a controversial statement by former Harvard president Larry Summers :

Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics.

As I wrote, Summers did not make that claim. Instead, he said that the variability of mathematical and scientific ability may differ between genders, which means that there could be more men at the high and low end. It’s a more subtle claim and one that, while perhaps wrong, is not so easily dismissed.

Sadly, today’s Times includes another story by different authors that offers the same misrepresentation of what Summers said:

[The possible appointment of a female president of Harvard] comes two years after Lawrence H. Summers, then president of the university, set off a storm by suggesting that a lack of intrinsic aptitude could help explain why fewer women than men reach the top ranks of science and math in universities.

Have they even read the actual transcript of the event? Here is what Summers said, again, in context:

The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I’m focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it’s not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it’s talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it’s pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people’s ability to do that. And that’s absolutely right. But I don’t think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it’s something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

The way that Tim Russert’s trademark tactic was used against him in the Scooter Libby trial is pretty amusing:

Mr. Wells, using the technique that Mr. Russert is known for as moderator of “Meet the Press,” then put up on video screens throughout the courtroom Mr. Russert’s words in an affidavit he filed later. In an effort to avoid complying with a subpoena to testify about the same subject before a grand jury, Mr. Russert swore that he could not discuss the conversation because to do so would violate his deeply held journalistic principles.

“Did you disclose in the affidavit to the court that you had already disclosed the contents of your conversation with Mr. Libby” to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Wells asked.

“As I’ve said, sir … ,” Mr. Russert began.

“It’s a yes or no question,” Mr. Wells interrupted.

“I’d like to answer it to the best of my ability,” Mr. Russert replied.

“This is a very simple question. Either it’s in the affidavit or it’s not,” Mr. Wells said. “Did you disclose to the court that you had already communicated to the F.B.I. the fact that you had communicated with Mr. Libby?”

“No,” Mr. Russert said.

Busted! For more on Russert’s tactics, see Jack Shafer’s 2003 article in Slate, which makes clear that the host’s post-trial complaints are little self-serving:

“Sitting in that witness box is very uncomfortable because on `Meet the Press’ or the `Today’ show, you have a chance to finish your thought and complete your sentence. That’s not the case in a court of law. The defense lawyer will say, `Yes or no, yes or no’ and you’re trying very hard to listen intently to the question to make sure you answer as precisely as possible,” he added. “Otherwise it can be played back the next day. … It’s not pleasant, I have to say.”

Really? You have a chance to finish your thought or complete your sentence on “Meet the Press”? Maybe if you’re Dick Cheney, but Russert interrupts people and presses for yes or no answers all the time. It is true that you can sometimes elaborate on that answer on his show, but not always.

Most random Google ad ever — just saw this on Tom Maguire’s blog:

On the Internet, there is a site for everything.

In a New York Times op-ed, former CBS News political director Martin Plissner claims that a 1996 exit poll shows that Americans are ready to vote for a black presidential candidate:

On Nov. 5, 1996, Voter News Service — the organization hired by the TV networks to do exit polling — asked people at the polls, who had just given Bill Clinton 49 percent of the vote, Bob Dole 41 percent and Ross Perot 8 percent, how they would have voted if the Republican candidate had been Gen. Colin L. Powell. In an exit poll sample of 3,697 (three times the size of a standard high-grade public opinion survey), the result was this:

Powell: 50 percent.

Clinton: 38 percent.

Perot: 9 percent.

…[I]t does suggest there was a day when Americans, had they been given a choice of major party candidates, one of whom was black, would very likely have chosen the black one.

Most significantly, General Powell would have won the race because of the support of white voters — Bill Clinton outpolled him 2 to 1 among the blacks surveyed. Among white voters, whom Senator Dole had carried very narrowly (too narrowly for him to win), General Powell clobbered the incumbent, 53 percent to 33 percent.

Any poll analysis has to be hedged with qualifications, and this one more than most. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole had just been through bruising year-long campaigns and exposed to more than $100 million of take-no-prisoners advertising. Colin Powell had not. He was still being acclaimed for his role as the country’s top soldier in its only clear victory since World War II.

Still, even with these qualifiers, there is a pretty good, if not quite conclusive, case that America has for some time been ready to elect a black president. The question for Barack Obama is whether this time around it will be ready for this one.

I’m hopeful that Americans are ready to vote for an African American president too, but I’m not sure how much evidence this exit poll provides. As Plissner admits, Powell had received virtually no criticism at the time; indeed, he was one of the most widely praised nonpartisan figures in America. Needless to say, it’s impossible to make it to Election Day with that kind of profile.

Moreover, the hypothetical vote itself is cheap talk; what matters is who people actually vote for when they’re alone inside the voting booth. And unfortunately, many black candidates have underperformed their poll numbers because putative white supporters don’t vote for them when it counts.

Writing in Slate, Jacob Weisberg is notably more skeptical about a third-party presidential bid than his elite pundit colleagues:

It is a rather obvious point that leaving the country’s biggest problems to fester can’t be good policy. What is less obvious is that it may not be good politics either. A two-party system is a zero-sum game, in which Republican gain ought to mean Democratic loss, and vice-versa. But because the politics of blockage, blame, and stagnation tends to breed disgust with both sides, it can pave the way for big anti-incumbent swings and third-party movements. Both John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992 ran on their ability to break through the stalemate in Washington. Because of the strong and varied presidential field, a significant third-party bid seems less likely in 2008; John McCain and Barack Obama both owe their popularity to a reputation for speaking more plainly than other politicians. But if the logjam persists, it’s not impossible that a Michael Bloomberg or someone else could wage an independent candidacy on the argument that neither Republicans nor Democrats are leveling with the country.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are basing their new business news channel on the premise that the cheerleaders at CNBC aren’t friendly enough to corporations:

No one has ever accused CNBC, the cable TV home of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow and Maria Bartiromo, of being antibusiness. Until now.

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in the media industry, that the News Corporation will start a long-awaited business news channel in the fourth quarter of this year. In doing so, he also took a shot at CNBC, the leading television business news outlet, vowing that the new channel would be friendlier to corporations.

The new service, currently named Fox Business Channel, will be developed and overseen by Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of Fox News, with Neil Cavuto, the managing editor for business news for Fox, anchoring and overseeing the channel’s content.

The announcement, which was not expected until next week, was made in part because Mr. Murdoch himself discussed the new channel during a conference call with analysts on Wednesday.

At a media conference in New York yesterday, Mr. Murdoch said the Fox Business Channel would be “more business friendly than CNBC,” which he said was quick to “leap on every scandal,” according to a report on his remarks by BusinessWeek.com, whose parent, McGraw-Hill, sponsored the conference.

In a separate interview, Mr. Ailes elaborated. “Many times I’ve seen things on CNBC where they are not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be.”

He added: “We don’t get up every morning thinking business is bad.”

CNBC executives, on the other hand, get up every morning plotting Communist revolution.