Brendan Nyhan

I continue to be struck by the unrelenting blogger love for Stephen Colbert’s unfunny White House Correspondents’ Dinner routine.

It’s reminding me of the days during the mid-’90s when many conservatives felt silenced by “political correctness.” They resented the fact that they felt like they had to self-censor themselves. So Rush Limbaugh or other commentators challenged the largely imaginary “PC police,” they went crazy. It was almost cathartic to hear someone say publicly what they had thought — but not said — privately.

Liberals who felt silenced after 9/11 seem to be reacting the same way to public criticism of Bush. Regardless of whether it’s actually funny or on target, they go crazy when someone goes after the President publicly. And if anyone doesn’t like it, they’re off the team.

Following up on his devastating story about George Allen’s ugly racial history, Ryan Lizza slams Allen again:

Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where’s Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there’s the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin (“Pin Prick,” May 8). Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen’s first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.

Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen’s high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. “[I]f we’re going to scrutinize people’s high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run,” columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad–as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward–his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.

In other words, what Allen supporters are trying to whitewash as youthful indiscretions actually mushroomed into a lifelong record of (a) embracing offensive racial symbols and (b) exploiting them politically. Sounds like a great president to me!

I’m sad to report that Mike Nifong, the district attorney who turned Durham into a media circus, has been elected to a full term in office:

District Attorney Mike Nifong kept his job as the county’s top prosecutor in a heated election that featured Nifong’s handling of the Duke lacrosse rape investigation as its central issue.

Nifong received 45.17 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff. He beat former prosecutor Freda Black, who had 41.53 percent and lawyer Keith Bishop, who earned 13.3 percent.

Talk about lucky: Nifong had a three-way primary and the opposition to him never fully coalesced around one candidate.

When President Bush came out against singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, I wondered if he had committed the same offense in the past. The answer, it turns out, is yes. Atrios points to this quote from Kevin Phillips’ book American Dynasty:

When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, [Bush] would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parites, sometimes joining in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish, sometimes partying with a “Viva Bush” mariachi band flown in from Texas.

Update 5/2 5:37 PM: Via Atrios again, here’s the original Think Progress item on Phillips’ book and a new one reporting that Bush’s first inaugural featured the Star-Spangled Banner in English and Spanish (commenter Sean points out that Think Progress has since retracted the second post).

Update 5/3 8:20 AM: The Washington Post reports that “[t]he State Department posts four Spanish versions of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on its Web site.”

Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution plots their approval trajectories. It turns out that disapproval of Bush right now is almost as high as Nixon’s when he resigned:

I have to admit that, like Noam Scheiber and Bob Somerby, I didn’t find Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner very funny. But a lot of people are obsessed with it and the media’s failure to devote much coverage to it. Here’s Scheiber’s analysis:

My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left–until recently more common on the right–wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value. Jon Stewart often says he hates when his audience cheers; he wants them to laugh.

I agree. The Daily Show and Colbert are increasingly focused on telling jokes that make liberals feel good about themselves. The result is that the shows are both pretty mediocre right now.

The problem, which Scheiber doesn’t fully acknowledge, is that the post-9/11 political atmosphere stifled a lot of dissent and made it cathartic for liberals when elites criticized Bush publicly. Bush reinforced this by hiding from the press and only speaking to screened audiences. The result is that there’s still a lot of bottled-up resentment more than four years later. That’s what made Colbert’s routine such a big deal.

I’m not a big Evan Bayh fan, but I’m excited he supports abolishing the Electoral College (via Drudge):

Q: “Why do you think we should abolish the Electoral College?”

BAYH: “I think our president should be chosen by the majority of the American people. That is ordinarily the case. But in 2000, as we all recall, we elected this president with fewer votes than the other candidate got. I just don’t think in the modern era that is appropriate.”

The problem, of course, is that passing a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College would be almost impossible. Hendrik Hertzberg recently promoted an interesting alternative being proposed by a group called National Popular Vote — an inter-state pact to award electors to the winner of the popular vote:

Here’s how the plan would work. One by one, legislature by legislature, state law by state law, individual states would pledge themselves to an interstate compact under which they would agree to award their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. The compact would take effect only when enough states had joined it to elect a President—that is, enough to cast a majority of the five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes. (Theoretically, as few as eleven states could do the trick.) And then, presto! All of a sudden, the people of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen..

There is very little doubt about the constitutional and legal feasibility of this plan. The power of state legislatures to direct the choice of their states’ electors, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, is essentially unlimited.

The idea is creative, but I’m sure legislators in individual states would try to break out of the compact to swing the outcome of the election. So here’s a question for the lawyers out there: Can states irrevocably bind their hands in an interstate compact? National Popular Vote says yes:

The proposed compact has a “blackout” period (of approximately six months) on withdrawals. This “blackout” period starts on July 20 of a presidential election year and continues until a President or Vice President are qualified to serve the next term (normally on January 20 of the following year).

The purpose for the delay in the effective date of a withdrawal is to ensure that a withdrawal will not be undertaken—perhaps for partisan political purposes—in the midst of a presidential campaign or, even more egregiously, in the period between the popular voting in early November and the meeting of the Electoral College in mid-December.

An interstate compact has the specific advantage of making the obligations of the participating states into a legally enforceable contractual obligation. Of course, legal enforceability is most relevant in the event that the winner of the nationwide popular vote did not carry states having a majority of the electoral votes (as occurred, say, in 1824, 1876, 1892, and 2000). A state whose legislature and governor are controlled by a political party whose presidential candidate who did not win the nationwide popular vote could, in the absence of an enforceable restriction on withdrawal, abandon its obligations at the precise moment when they would matter. However, once a state enters into an interstate compact, a state is prevented from unilaterally nullifying the compact because the impairments clause of the U.S. Constitution. The impairment clause provides that “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” Instead, a party to a contract (i.e., an interstate compact) must withdraw from the agreement in accordance with the agreement’s provisions for withdrawal. Most interstate compacts contain provisions that delay the effective date of a state’s withdrawal by a certain amount of time that is appropriate given the nature of the compact. The proposed compact limits withdrawal during the sensitive six-month time window of the presidential election period.

The six-month “blackout” period covers the following six important events relating to presidential elections: (1) the national nominating conventions, (2) the fall general election campaign period, (3) election day on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, (4) the meeting of the Electoral College on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, (5) the counting of the electoral votes by Congress on January 6, and (6) the scheduled inauguration of the President and Vice President for the new term on January 20

If the lawyers buy this, I’m all for it.

(PS Bayh’s father, Birch Bayh, is a member of the advisory committee of National Popular Vote.)

A defense lawyer in the Duke lacrosse case has requested the removal of District Attorney Mike Nifong, among other things, in motions filed today:

Kirk Osborn, the lawyer for one of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, filed legal motions this morning, including one that demanded that Durham’s district attorney drop out of the case.

Osborn, who represents Reade Seligmann, said District Attorney Mike Nifong had made improper comments about the case and sought national publicity in order to win Tuesday’s election.

Defense lawyers and legal experts have said Nifong might have crossed ethical lines in public comments about rape allegations involving Duke University lacrosse players, potentially prejudicing jurors.

For his part, Nifong says that he has done nothing wrong, though he has ceased talking with reporters about allegations made by an escort service dancer hired to perform at a March 13 team party.

Osborn’s filings Monday included an affidavit from Seligmann giving his account of the night, records from automatic teller machines and Duke dormitory entrance logs, cell phone records and other evidence Osborn said gave Seligmann an alibi during the time the rape is said to have occured during the party.

The motions, filed in Durham Superior Court, ask:
— For permission to retest all DNA evidence.
— For Seligmann’s $400,000 bond to be reduced to $40,000.
— The state to preserve rape kit evidence so the defense can do its own tests.
— A judge to throw out the accuser’s photo line-up identifications of Seligmann and his co-defendant, Collin Finnerty. The defense says the procedures used by the Durham police were unfair and violated department policy.

Hopefully Durham voters will help take Nifong off the case by voting him out in the primary tomorrow. If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree upon, it’s that he’s incompetent.

In an essay about his new book Hostile Takeover, David Sirota compares American politics to The Matrix (“the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”) before unleashing a barrage of frenzied populism:

The fact is, most of that nonsensical political discourse is designed to hide the two fundamental truths that nobody wants to talk about, but everyone knows: that our “democracy” is really a legalized bribery, and that every outcome in this system of legalized bribery is one that exclusively serves the interests of Big Money.

“Legalized bribery”? “[E]xclusively serves the interests of Big Money”? We can have a serious discussion of the role of money in politics, but this kind of rhetoric makes Bill O’Reilly look subtle.

Later in the post, Sirota raises the quality of our nation’s political discourse by suggesting former New Republic Peter Beinart wants to kill “dark-skinned people”:

[The] “left” in the media is largely occupied by out of touch elitists a la Tom Friedman, Joe Klein and Peter Beinart – loafers on the Washington cocktail party circuit who want us to believe that the real problem facing America is that politicians aren’t supportive enough of job outsourcing, are actually too populist, or are not sufficiently willing to indiscriminately bomb enough dark-skinned people throughout the world, respectively.

I haven’t read Sirota’s book yet, but if you’re interested in the problems with his previous handiwork, make sure to check out my posts and Spinsanity’s work on the Center on American Progress, where he used to serve as the Director of Strategic Communications. Sirota was also the “principal author” (PDF) of MoveOn’s Daily Mislead, which we also criticized at Spinsanity. In short, he’s a key figure in the emerging liberal PR machine that we warned about in the conclusion to All the President’s Spin.

[Disclosure: I worked on Joe Hoeffel’s Congressional campaign during the summer of 1998. Sirota joined the campaign as I was leaving to study in Australia during the fall semester. I don’t know him personally.]

The Republican plan to refund $100 to taxpayers to compensate for higher gas taxes doesn’t seem to be very popular:

Aides for several Republican senators reported a surge of calls and e-mail messages from constituents ridiculing the rebate as a paltry and transparent effort to pander to voters before the midterm elections in November.

“The conservatives think it is socialist bunk, and the liberals think it is conservative trickery,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, pointing out that the criticism was coming from across the ideological spectrum.

Angry constituents have asked, “Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?” said another Republican senator’s aide, who was granted anonymity to openly discuss the feedback because the senator had supported the plan.

Conservative talk radio hosts have been particularly vocal. “What kind of insult is this?” Rush Limbaugh asked on his radio program on Friday. “Instead of buying us off and treating us like we’re a bunch of whores, just solve the problem.” In commentary on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume called the idea “silly.”

This reaction highlights a fundamental misunderstanding: most voters aren’t narrowly self-interested in the sense that people tend to assume. My guess is that the public would prefer that politicians deal with the problem rather than get a $100 election-year pander. And libertarian conservatives have to be revolted at this kind of bread and circuses governance.

Update 5/1 10:31 AM: In comments, Tof offers a different interpretation that I considered but didn’t post — people may just be insulted by the size of the rebate. There’s a model in economics called the ultimatum game in which one person gets to propose a division of a fixed amount of money to a second person, who can either take it, in which case they both get their proposed shares, or refuse, leaving both players with nothing. The second person “should” take whatever is offered since otherwise they will get zero, but experiments all over the world show that people who receive low offers frequently refuse them because they are perceived as unfair. The reaction to the $100 rebate may be analogous.