Brendan Nyhan

Eric Pfeiffer of the Washington Times interviewed me yesterday for a story on the continuing controversy over President Clinton’s “Fox News Sunday” interview with Chris Wallace:

“I do think this is helpful to Democrats for Clinton to go after Fox directly. It’s a smart play,” said Brendan Nyhan, former co-editor of the nonpartisan online watchdog Spinsanity. “Liberals are excited to see someone high-profile go after Fox News explicitly.”

Politicians attacking the media is nothing new. A perceived liberal bias in the mainstream press has been a staple of Republican strategy for decades.

“A reporter has a right to ask tough questions about the issues of the day,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “The real question is the larger context it’s being done in. It’s not an unreasonable feeling on the part of Democrats.”

Mr. Nyhan says Mr. Clinton’s continued popularity with Democrats helps give his criticism of Fox legitimacy.

…Despite all the criticism, some think Fox stands to gain as much from the controversy as the Democrats. The interview with Mr. Clinton gave “Fox News Sunday” its highest ratings since the capture of deposed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 2003.

“It’s the Howard Stern effect,” Mr. Nyhan said. “You have half the audience listening because they love it and half listening because they hate it.”

In the conclusion to All the President’s Spin, we discussed how the Center for American Progress, George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, and the Frameworks Institute represented the vanguard of a group of liberals attempting to match the sophistication of the White House’s PR tactics.

Sadly, the prominence of Lakoff and CAP has grown substantially since the book came out. Democracy for America, Howard Dean’s organization (now run by his brother), just conducted an online training event in which Lakoff instructed activists in how to “develop a message that can sway voters at the deepest levels and motivate them to vote.”

They’re likely to be disappointed. Not only is Lakoff destructively escalating the arms race of spin, but his theories and tactics are likely to be ineffective — see here, here, here, and here.

The political reporters of the New York Times have consistenly failed to challenge the dissembling of the White House. Today, the Times finally ran a piece on President Bush’s constant use of straw man arguments, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank covered in 2004 and the Associated Press reported back in March. And if you compare the three stories, you’ll see that the Times is the only outlet to portray the White House’s pervasive use of straw man arguments as a “he said,” “she said” debate rather than a fact.

Still, the article does usefully document a long series of straw man arguments from this administration:

Addressing Americans’ views of the Iraq war, President Bush recently told an interviewer, “Most people want us to win.”

Democrats heard a partisan implication in that statement that left them incredulous. “Like we want to lose?” asked Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware.

After Mr. Bush said at a Republican fund-raising event in Florida on Thursday that when it came to battling terrorists, “I need members of Congress who understand that you can’t negotiate with these folks,” Democrats were furious at what they heard as a suggestion that they backed a dialogue with Al Qaeda.

“No one in America thinks that,” Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said indignantly.

…In what may have been the leading edge of the effort, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a speech about the Iraq war to veterans late last month asked pointedly, “Can folks really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?”

But the Pentagon declined to provide an example of anyone who had proposed peace negotiations with terrorists.

…Similarly, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, said the president was not pointing fingers late last month when he said in an address to the American Legion, “We can decide to stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq and other parts of the world, but they will not decide to stop fighting us.”

Democrats took that as an accusation that they were somehow calling for a break in the pursuit of terrorists.

And Mr. Snow said Mr. Bush did not have Democrats in mind on Thursday when he said at a reception for Gus Bilirakis, a Republican Congressional candidate in the Tampa Bay area, that he needed help from lawmakers who “understand you can’t negotiate with” terrorists. Nor was the president impugning Democrats when he told The Wall Street Journal this month that “most people want to win” in Iraq, Mr. Snow said.

Grover Norquist, the influential conservative insider who runs Americans for Tax Reform, has never been one to take the high road. He’s compared bipartisanship to date rape, wants to make government small enough “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” and likened taxation of the rich to Nazi persecution of Jews.

So it’s not surprising to see more outlandish rhetoric from him in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly.

First, he has a long letter criticizing an Alan Wolfe article titled “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” which argued that conservatives in power end up “expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding.” Norquist’s response concludes with this remarkable passage:

Big government doesn’t work well. The East Germans really truly believed. There was no lack of faith in government in the Politburo. Limited government can do the limited number of things that governments can do if they are not constantly distracted by trying to do the imposible with the blunt force of the state as their tool.

Norquist is likening believers in “big government” to dictatorial Communist regimes, and suggesting that the failures of those regimes disproves Wolfe’s argument. It’s an absurd point — does the chaos resulting from the lack of a functioning state in Iraq disprove his belief in limited government? (I also love the tautology “Limited government can do the limited number of things that governments can do” — maybe they should teach logic at Norquist’s famous insider meetings.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Monthly editor Rachel Morris quotes Norquist making a hilarious “joke” about sending Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, to Guantanamo:

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, described Rep. Tancredo as “the face of the Republican party losing elections for the next 20 years.” (He added that the GOP might have avoided this problem by “sending Tancredo to Guantanamo”).

Like I said, he’s one charming fellow.

On Friday, I questioned the prevailing interpretation of this passage from a World Magazine profile of George Allen by founder Joel Belz:

Allen actually had a pretty credible defense for what he said. No one—including The Washington Post, which featured the story repeatedly for several weeks—ever demonstrated that “macaca” really has such murky racial connotations in any language. But in northern Italy, where Allen’s mother had close family connections, “macaca” does seem to mean “clown” or “buffoon.” Allen says now that’s what he was trying to communicate.

Wonkette and Josh Marshall interpreted this as suggesting that Allen picked up the word from his mother, while Jonathan Alter wrote that Allen said he was referring to the Italian meaning of “buffoon.” But as I wrote, the passage is unclear; Belz could have been interpreting the “shithead” alibi as being similar to the alleged Italian meaning rather than reporting a direct statement from Allen.

I emailed World for clarification on Saturday, writing the following:

I’m a blogger following up on Joel Belz’s George Allen profile. Some bloggers are interpreting a paragraph from the story as saying that Allen confirmed picking up the term “macaca” from his mother or the Italian. Is that correct? I’ve included the relevant portion of my post questioning this interpretation below. If someone could briefly clarify what Allen actually said, I would very much appreciate it.

This is the non-response I just received from Belz (via another staffer):

I think the story says enough. I said what I meant to say, and it is a very accurate account.

Is that indirect confirmation that the Wonkette/Marshall interpretation is correct? Is Belz concerned about getting Allen in further trouble? Inquiring minds want to know — what reporter will ask Allen’s campaign for comment?

In related news, Salon is reporting that “Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.” Futures contract prices on his Senate race dropped eight points yesterday to a 63 percent probability of him winning. And it’s increasingly hard to imagine Allen even running for president. How long until Ed Gillespie and Mary Matalin jump off the sinking ship?

Update 9/25 2:06 PM: The Allen campaign is denying both stories. Their response to World Magazine is that the Senator “did not say it. Notice that it isn’t a quote in the story.” And their online response to the Salon article is here.

Update 9/26 1:35 PM: Wonkette links here, saying “Mr. Reasonable himself, Brendan ‘Too Hardcore for The American Prospect’ Nyhan, thinks we aren’t even-handed enough.” Ha.

The Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti has written a new George Allen profile that includes this disturbing anecdote about his first run for Congress:

The Democrats nominated Kay Slaughter, a cousin of the retiring congressman. The most contentious issue in the special election was the Persian Gulf war, which Allen supported and Slaughter opposed. Allen ran an ad that featured a photograph of Slaughter next to a photograph from a Washington, D.C., antiwar protest in which activists had held up a banner declaring “Victory to Iraq.” Slaughter said the ad was sleazy. She lost, 62 percent to 34 percent.

A long history of exploiting the issue of race and suggestions that war opponents want the other side to win — the two major GOP smear tactics of the last twenty years. Who thinks this man should be president again?

Today’s New York Times features an investigation of the state’s bizarre system of town and village courts:

Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

By shining a light on the state’s outdated and dysfunctional system of local justice (read the article for many horrifying anecdotes), the Times may prompt some long-overdue reform. It’s the kind of long-form investigative journalism that newspapers do best.

Via Power Line, the Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen reports just how unpopular Hillary Clinton is in Iowa:

This survey is a further measure of just how unelectable Clinton may be. She loses Iowa, albeit by tiny margins, to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, two relatively unknown guys who lose the state to Democrats Vilsack, Kerry and Edwards.

Among all Iowa voters, Clinton is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 49 percent of the electorate. Only 43 percent see her in a favorable light, and 8 percent aren’t sure. Whenever a candidate’s unfavorables exceed their favorables, there is trouble ahead.

And this is before she suffers from two years of negative press and Republican attacks. Will she get to sixty percent unfavorable? (For more on Hillary’s prospects, see this more comprehensive post from June, which discusses her 46 percent unfavorable rating among independents nationally.)

FoxNews.com got caught promoting President Clinton as “crazed” in his interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” which aired today (text, video). And now others are picking up the talking point. Here’s National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on its blog The Corner:

It was Bill Clinton’s Tom Cruise moment, though Cruise sounded saner talking about anti-depressants to Matt Lauer. Any Oprah chats scheduled? If I were a Clinton aide, I’d keep him off couches when being interviewed.

And on a different National Review blog, Mark Levin goes even further:

Bill Clinton is nuttier than a pecan pie. He has spent the last six years traveling the globe dumping on George Bush. Yet he turns into an emotional wreck when Fox’s Chris Wallace tries to ask him a few questions about his demonstrable failure to pursue aggressively Osama bin Laden after repeated al Qaeda attacks on Americans and American interests.

Was Clinton angry and defensive? Sure, but that doesn’t make him mentally ill. This is a rhetorical tactic that has become all too common in recent years. Look for other conservatives to pick up the meme over the next few days.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich published this charming cartoon on Thursday:

It’s a nasty, unfunny cliche, but the New York Times still decided to republish it in the “Laugh Lines” section of today’s Week in Review. (I didn’t laugh.) Will they run Rush Limbaugh’s “El Diablo” routine about Tom Daschle next?