Brendan Nyhan

Via Dan Drezner, Newsweek conventional wisdom machine Howard Fineman has published a typically insipid column on MSNBC.com on “winners” and “losers” from the Jack Abramoff plea agreement. His prediction of a reformist third party winning the 2008 election “going away” is especially absurd:

WINNERSThird-party reform movement: If Sen. John McCain doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to “clean up” the capital as a third-party candidate. Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the ’80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman. If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting — perhaps Wes Clark for defense, Russ Feingold for justice, Colin Powell for anything — they could win the 2008 election going away.

With this prediction (which I’ve debunked many times), Fineman joins the ranks of Mickey Kaus, Ron Brownstein, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other pundits in failing to appreciate or even understand the barriers that make it virtually impossible for third parties to win. Shouldn’t political writers have to understand freshman-level political science?

The insider political newsletter The Hotline has a new blog called Hotline On Call that features an excellent post asking how Senator John McCain will handle the tricky issue of race in the GOP primaries — a timely question given his recent praise for Trent Lott and George Wallace, Jr. Near the end, the Hotline also brings up how the question of how the issue will be handled by Senator George Allen, linking to my post on his ugly racial history:

Five years after the bitter McCain-Bush primary, SC’s Confederate flag is down and the percentage of minority voters is up. And McCain is heading to the state on MLK day.

This could be the ultimate test of the senator’s straight-talking skill set.

After all, some McCain watchers on the left say he has a lot to answer for, including most notably a vote in Congress against there even being a national holiday honoring MLK.

While he has since expressed regret on the MLK vote, some activists say the rest of McCain’s voting record on civil rights is not without blemish…. including votes against portions of the ’94 Racial Justice Act. Of more concern to them: a connection to SC political consultant Richard Quinn, who once edited Southern Partisan, a magazine that detractors say glorifies the South’s racially divided past. (The magazine is more soberly described as embracing Dixiecrat culture; it rarely ventures into history, although its advertisers do.)

Moreover, McCain’s return to SC — the date was chosen by the Spartanburg Co. GOP — brings to light his earlier waffling on the Confederate flag during the ’00 primary. McCain has since apologized and it will be interesting to see if he recommits himself the issue. He has also distanced himself from Quinn’s writings.

McCain walks a fine line.

We realize we’re being reductionist here, but a fundamental conundrum for any GOPer who claims fidelity to racial justice principles is…the same as it was ten years ago.

Is it possible to get enough white votes without doing the sorts of things — speaking at Bob Jones University, addressing the Council of Conservative Citizens, waffling on the flag — that profoundly alienate black folks?

Perhaps McCain’s ’08 campaign will bridge the gap, allowing Ken Mehlman’s project of expanding the GOP’s share of the black vote to mature. Also: is it fair to cast aspersions on McCain because he’s friendly with a guy who once edited a magazine that some — but not all — black critics think is racist?

Given that the media elite is always looking for racial angles to political stories, and given the very real, quite un-finished debates in states like Georgia over voting rights and the flag — can elections in the South legitimately not press on symbolic (or what seem to be symbolic) racial trigger points?

More questions: Will immigration debates re-align ethnic voting constituencies? Or align them all against the GOP? Can any Republican running nationally ever exceed 12 percent of the black electorate? A question we’ve always wanted to ask Mehlman: What did you think when Bush went to Bob Jones? A question for those helping Sen. George Allen: are y’all prepared for questions like these?

While I was out of town, President Bush finally addressed the worst example from his long list of statements in 2004-2005 implying that all wiretaps require a court order.

On April 20, 2004, he said:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Here’s his response to a question about this statement during an exchange with the press on Sunday:

Q In 2004, when you were doing an event about the Patriot Act, in
your remarks you had said that any wiretapping required a court order,
and that nothing had changed. Given that we now know you had prior
approval for this NSA program, were you in any way misleading?
THE PRESIDENT: I was talking about roving wire taps, I believe,
involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA program.
The NSA program is a necessary program. I was elected to protect the
American people from harm. And on September the 11th, 2001, our nation
was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use all the resources at
my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people, which is
what I have been doing, and will continue to do. And the fact that
somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States.

There’s an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what
you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react. And
it seems logical to me that if we know there’s a phone number associated
with al Qaeda and/or an al Qaeda affiliate, and they’re making phone
calls, it makes sense to find out why. They attacked us before, they
will attack us again if they can. And we’re going to do everything we
can to stop them.

Talk about Clintonian parsing! Bush said “any time the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed.” Even though he was speaking about roving wiretaps specifically, his language clearly suggested that all wiretaps required court orders.

In addition, we know that the FISA court will approve virtually any request backed by evidence, which means that Bush is stretching the phrase “associated
with al Qaeda and/or an al Qaeda affiliate” to the limit.

This time, our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a poorly worded poll on the NSA’s warrant-free domestic surveillance program:

Even more unserious has been the political posturing and mock horror that followed this month’s revelations of the National Security Agency’s warrantless phone intercepts. It’s refreshing to know that 64% of Americans, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, approve of the eavesdropping, not that we ever had doubts about the seriousness with which the American people take the terrorist threat. It’s the seriousness of American elites that concerns us.

But as the Newshounds blog pointed out, the Rasmussen question reads “Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?” And, of course, the answer is yes. But President Bush could get warrants from the FISA court for those suspects! The real question is whether Bush should be able to intercept the phone calls of Americans without seeking court approval. Any pollster who does not make that distinction clear is not addressing the issue at hand.

Update 1/4: Media Matters points out that “MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow, and conservative radio host Michael Reagan” have also touted the Rasmussen poll.

Update 1/4: I checked Nexis myself, and Fox News Channel’s Jim Angle also touted the misleading poll while guest-hosting “Special Report with Brit Hume” on Dec. 28:

The National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on terrorists calling or e-mail people in the United States may be controversial in Washington, but far less so across the country. A new Rasmussen poll reveals that 64 percent of Americans believe the National Security Agency should be allowed to intercept such conversations, including 51 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents. Fewer than one in four actually oppose the idea. Well, what’s more 48 percent believe President Bush is not the first president to authorize such actions.

Via Mickey Kaus and Steve Bartin, here’s a story of how awful people are at getting their facts right.

On December 18, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by a local rabbi that made this claim:

We’ve all heard about the rise of the evangelical movement and about some of the excesses of its leaders. For instance, the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that Ellen DeGeneres played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina because she was the host of the Emmy Awards ceremony preceding both events.

Soon afterward, the Times was forced to correct the record:

A Dec. 18 article defending the separation of church and state stated that the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that Ellen DeGeneres played a role in the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina because she was the host of the Emmy Awards before both events. He made no such claim.

The apparent origin of the story is a satirical news article on Dateline Hollywood, the entertainment news satire website co-edited by Ben Fritz (my friend and former Spinsanity co-editor). In it, he and Gil Cunha, his partner, joked that Pat Robertson (not Falwell) blamed Katrina on the decision to have DeGeneres host the Emmy Awards telecast, an obvious satire of statements by various extremists who have blamed 9/11 and other disasters on various cultural transgressions.

The article began to be circulated as fact, forcing the Snopes.com urban legends website to post an article debunking the myth. A Sept. 18 article in the Toronto Star also pointed out that it was not true. But apparently Stephen Julius Stein, the author of the op-ed, didn’t bother to do any research, and the vaunted Times editorial staff (which Kaus appropriately mocks) failed to check his claim. As Atrios would say: time to convene a blogger ethics panel!

The always reliable Wall Street Journal editorial page touts yet another misleading statistic:

Remember the 2004 debate over the “jobless recovery” and “outsourcing”? Here’s the reality: The great American jobs machine has averaged a net increase of nearly 200,000 new jobs a month this year. Some 4.5 million more Americans are working today than in May of 2003, before the Bush investment tax cuts.

But, as I showed earlier, payroll jobs declined dramatically between January 2001 and May 2003:

Using the May 2003 start date vastly exaggerates both job growth since the last recession and the effect of the 2003 tax cuts (what about the ones passed in 2001?).

In fact, considered as a whole, the recovery has been one of the weakest on record, as the New York Times’ Edmund Andrews recently noted:

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little – and so long delayed – effect.

Spencer Ackerman has a useful article on TNR Online debunking the Bush administration’s deceptive claims about its lawless wiretapping program:

If there’s one point the administration and its allies have labored to emphasize, it’s that the program only spied on people clearly connected to terrorism. In a press conference last week, President Bush insisted that warrantless surveillance applied to “people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.” Gonzales said that for surveillance to go forward, “we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of Al Qaeda, affiliated with Al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with Al Qaeda, or working in support of Al Qaeda.” Later, Senator John Cornyn of Texas insisted that “in fact, this was narrowly applied to agents of Al Qaeda operating in the United States.” Bush cited the ease with which two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, escaped surveillance as justification for circumventing the FISA court.

Don’t believe them. As many have argued since the story broke, if the administration truly possessed “reasonable basis” that the targets of such surveillance were connected to Al Qaeda, it could have obtained warrants from the FISA court, which has rejected only a handful of warrant requests in its entire history. And as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, the failure to track Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi was a failure of bureaucratic coordination between the NSA and the FBI, not a result of the FISA court setting the probable-cause bar too high. So why would the administration choose for four years to shunt the deferential FISA court aside if it could connect surveillance targets to Al Qaeda? The program only makes sense if the administration doesn’t have the “reasonable basis” for searching that Gonzales insists it always does. That was the contention that one administration official made to The Washington Post on Thursday. “For FISA, [the administration] had to put down a written justification for the wiretap,” the official told the Post. “They couldn’t dream one up.” According to the paper, “the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious.” In other words, contrary to everything the administration has said about the program, the warrantless surveillance only makes sense if the administration is casting a massive electronic net for anything that
sounds remotely suspicious.

Indeed. As I wrote, the FISA court’s unprecedented resistance to administration wiretap requests means that the evidence backing them up is essentially nonexistent.

Meanwhile, the ACLU ran a tough ad in the New York Times today criticizing President Bush’s deceptive rhetoric about wiretaps, which I highlighted last week:

Let’s hope public pressure forces an investigation soon.

President Bush’s claim that Osama bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone after a 1998 leak published in the Washington Times appears to be nonsense, as Jack Shafer and Glenn Kessler report. NPR’s On the Media ran a good segment on the issue over the weekend (Real Audio).

Mickey Kaus can’t let go of the idea that it’s easier to run for president as an independent rather than win a party nomination. Here’s what he wrote this time:

Maybe she [Hillary Clinton] just can’t win in the Democratic primaries and needs to run as an independent! Of course, I’ve said the same thing about John McCain (if, as is possible, he can’t win the GOP nomination) and you could also say the same thing about Rudolph Giuliani. They can’t all run as independents, can they? … Right? ……. Hello? …

As I wrote before, “The forces of party loyalty, strategic voting, and the role the House of Representatives in resolving an Electoral College deadlock mean that major party nominees will win the presidency in almost every conceivable circumstance.” That’s why no major candidate is making a move to run as an independent.

I have argued that liberals will grow to loathe John McCain as he increasingly preaches to the GOP faithful in preparation for his 2008 presidential campaign.

In the first installment in this series, I noted that McCain endorsed George Wallace Jr., who has spoken four times to a racist hate group, and praised Trent Lott, who was driven out of the Senate leadership for praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign.

Now, via WashingtonMonthly.com guest blogger Steve Benen, here’s McCain’s take on teaching “intelligent design”:

“Let the student decide.” With those well-chosen words John McCain summed up his view on the teaching of “intelligent design” along with evolution in public schools.

Benen’s sarcastic response to this is just right: “In related news, McCain said he’d like to see students decide whether to believe the earth is flat, the South won the Civil War, the value of pi is exactly 3, and one can contract the AIDS virus through tears and sweat.”

The lovefest is going to end soon…