Brendan Nyhan

Here’s an example of lazy AP journalism. In a story about the wildly optimistic new budget projections from the White House, the AP buries any critical perspective until this passage at the end of the story:

CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist at the Bush White House, warns that it is too early to predict whether the improvements seen recently will be long lasting and that in any event, the looming retirement of the Baby Boom generation presents intractable long-term problems that can only be fixed by curbing the growth in government benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Democrats — even before the new numbers were released — urged caution and warned that the long-term deficit picture is not as rosy as the White House projects since it leaves out the long-term costs of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and relies on cuts in programs annually appropriated by Congress that may prove unrealistic.

“We should not be lulled into complacency,” said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C. “Over the last three years, the Bush administration has posted the three worst deficits in history and though the deficit for 2005 has improved, it remains among the largest on record.”

OMB’s omission of costs for Iraq and Afghanistan is not a partisan opinion; it’s a fact, and they’ve been doing it for years. But the AP’s attribution of that fact to Democrats makes it seem like spin. “He said”/”she said” journalism sucks.

(For more on the problems with OMB’s Mid-Session Review, see the analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

It’s depressing to see how common attacks on dissent have become in post-9/11 politics.

Media Matters documents the latest salvo from Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly:

The anti-American press both here and in Europe is actually helping the terrorists by diminishing their threat. “Talking Points” urges you to begin holding people accountable for their position on the terror war. Walk away from media that excuses or sanitizes these brutal acts. USA is not the problem in this world. The terrorists are. And if you don’t agree with that, you are helping killers like [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi. Enough’s enough. London should be the last straw.

O’Reilly’s guest, Steve Emerson, said during the same show that, “in certain respects, BBC almost operates as a foreign registered agent of Hezbollah and some of the other jihadist groups.”

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting points out the use of similar language from another Fox News host, Sean Hannity, during an interview with former senator Slade Gorton:

You know, one of the thing, the criticisms I have had of the left in this country, Senator, I have felt at almost every step of the way from the very beginning they have often undermined the president’s war on terror. And they have accused him of targeting civilians for assassination, accused him of starting a war for political gain, accusing him of being responsible for torture policies when no such thing came true.

It seems like they’ve always looked to politicize it, which has hurt our effort to unite and combat this.

This sort of language has become so common, in fact, since 9/11 that its premises are starting to be taken for granted. For instance, MSNBC’s Amy Robach recently suggested that protestors at a speech by President Bush were unpatriotic, saying that “There were a couple of protesters we heard with a few signs, but for the most part, looks like a very patriotic crowd there.”

What’s worse is that this approach is increasingly being copied, rather than denounced, by Democrats. Via James Taranto, here’s Michigan’s Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, using the term “treason” to attack a Republican who criticized her policies:

An angry Gov. Jennifer Granholm said freshman Rep. Rick Baxter, R-Hanover, should be removed from office for co-writing a “treasonous” column trashing Michigan in the Wall Street Journal on the state’s tax and business climate.

Baxter, vice chairman of the House Commerce Committee, and Hillsdale College professor and conservative activist Gary Wolfram wrote a Thursday opinion page column criticizing Granholm’s tax reform and economic stimulus proposals pending in the Legislature.

…”When you are so engaged in building up your political party in such a way that you damage the state, that to me, that representative should be removed from office,” said Granholm, a Democrat up for re-election next year.

…Granholm asserted that Wolfram was “hired by the insurance industry to oppose our reform of the Single Business Tax.” She called the column a “kind of effort (that) is treasonous for the state of Michigan, frankly.”

The principle to speak freely about political disagreements is sacred in a democracy. How can we forget that given what is going on in Iraq and the Middle East right now?

Update 7/13: Matthew Yglesias links to this post on Tapped, but says that I “missed the best of the lot” — a Michael Ledeen column calling for greater censorship of “radical Muslim religious indoctrination”:

The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment — free speech extends even to license — stops us from taking proper steps to shut down the terror factories. Justice Holmes taught us that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and that no one has the right to scream “fire” in a crowded theater. London taught us that these principles require vigorous application.

I’m not sure this is an attack on dissent per se in the same sense as I describe above, but it’s certainly relevant. Also, I neglected to link to my big Spinsanity column from Sept. 2004 on attacks on dissent since 9/11. That’s the big picture that I’m referring to above.

Those wacky editors at the Wall Street Journal are still peddling the supply-side nostrums that every respectable economist disavows. In an editorial today, they trumpet the recent decline in the federal budget deficit as vindicating President Bush’s tax cuts:

Not even the most unbridled supply-sider predicted that President Bush’s investment tax cuts would unleash such a spurt of tax receipts this year. But thanks to sustained economic growth, more Americans working and improved business profits, individual income tax receipts have shot up by 17.6%. Even more astonishing is the nearly 41% spike in corporate revenues. There’s a fiscal lesson here that bears repeating: The best way to grow tax revenues is to grow the tax base, and that is what has happened this year.

This is wildly dishonest — tax revenues haven’t grown! As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, they’re down significantly from projections:

The recent increase in revenues follows three consecutive years (2001-2003) in which revenues declined in nominal terms, an extremely rare occurrence, and a year (2004) in which revenues were lower as a share of the economy than in any year since 1959. Even with the recent increase, revenues in 2005 will remain well below the levels at which they were projected to be when the 2001 tax cut was enacted.

Nor has economic growth been especially strong. But the Journal is still drinking the Kool-aid, so all of these points are omitted. Instead, here’s how the editors conclude the column:

All of this is to say that Washington doesn’t have a budget deficit problem, it has a spending problem. Thank goodness for Mr. Bush’s tax cuts or things would be much worse.

The implication, of course, is that the budget deficit would be worse without Bush’s tax cuts, which means that the tax cuts have increased revenue (the idea behind the so-called Laffer Curve). This claim has been made frequently by President Bush and other administration officials, and it is so outrageous that even the President’s economic advisers have cast doubt on it on two separate occasions. The reality, according to CBPP, is that revenues are lower than CBO projected in January 2002 after taking the tax cut into account.

Why the readers of the Journal continue to pay for this nonsense is beyond me.

Correction 7/13: Jon Henke’s comment below made me realize that I had misread CBPP and made a claim about projections from before the tax cut that wasn’t included in their article. This error has been fixed above – apologies. The salient point is that revenues are below CBO’s projections made in 2002, which came after the bubble bursting, Sept. 11 and major CBO technical adjustments that substantially decreased projected revenues.

Update 7/15: The Journal has published another editorial on the subject, which also suggests that tax cuts increase revenue (though less blatantly).

Jerry Bowyer is a conservative radio host in Pittsburgh who was nice enough to have me on his show a couple of times to talk about Spinsanity and All the President’s Spin. But his latest economics column for National Review Online is wrong-headed at best.

He writes that “states that went for George W. Bush in the last election are considerably poorer than the ones that went for Kerry. The notion that the GOP is the party of the rich simply doesn’t match the economic reality.”

But you can’t make reliable inferences about individual behavior from aggregate data; this is what is known as the “ecological fallacy”. And the obvious counterpoint to Bowyer is that the bivariate correlations between party and income are pretty clear.

Let’s consider the simplest measure — which party’s candidate people voted for in 2004. Using data from the (flawed) 2004 exit poll, we can see an obvious pattern. As voter income increases, their likelihood of voting for President Bush tended to increase, while the opposite pattern generally held for John Kerry:

The fact that Bush received more support in states with lower incomes does not imply that the pattern of increasing GOP support at higher levels of income doesn’t hold within each one of those states (in mathematical terms, the relationship could be approximately linear with differing intercepts by state). Bowyer also neglects many other factors that would have to be considered in a proper analysis, including variations in turnout by income level. In short, the article is a mess, and National Review Online should be embarassed to have published it.

Back on Wednesday…

According to political insiders polled by The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. But contradictory predictions about her chances in the general election abound. Marshall Wittman, a conservative turned centrist Democrat, is strangely optimistic, while Bob Kuttner, the liberal editor of The American Prospect, is more cautious.

So as part of my continuing series on Hillary 2008, I decided to take a look at her favorability ratings over time in National Journal’s online Poll Track archive, starting before she joined the Senate in 2000 and continuing up to the present. These are a key indicator of overall perceptions of a political figure before they run for office. The wording of the questions and the number of choices differ between polls, so a useful common metric is the ratio of favorable to unfavorable perceptions, formed by dividing the proportion of favorable responses by the proportion of unfavorable responses.

The key question: Has Hillary improved her image as much as her supporters claim?

The poll results suggest that perceptions of Hillary have improved since 2003, but only back to the levels of 2000-2001. Moreover, she remains highly polarizing, with unfavorable perceptions at or above 40 percent in most national polls.

The argument that Wittman and others make is that any Democratic candidate will be subject to vicious attacks:

It is far too soon to endorse any candidate for ’08. But what I am saying is that faint hearted progressives should not be dissuaded from supporting someone because they fear he/she would be subject to vicious right wing attacks. The truth is that no one is safe from the [vast right-wing] conspiracy. Take it from someone who knows this crowd intimately.

But the crucial difference is whether those attacks stick. Negative stereotypes of Hillary have deep roots, and many voters are likely to revert to them once she comes under serious attack. I worked for a Nevada Senate candidate in 2000 (Ed Bernstein) who had similar image problems to Hillary. He was well-known to most Nevadans and had a highly defined, polarizing personality. Over the course of the campaign, we built up his favorable/unfavorable ratings from 21/33 in late 1999 to 44/36 in Sept. 2000, and pulled within four points of our opponent in a DSCC poll. But when the Republicans unloaded a million dollars in negative ads on us, all that went out the window. Voters snapped back to their initial perceptions of Bernstein, his unfavorables spiked over 50 percent, the DSCC dropped us, and the race was over. Hillary is a better politician than Bernstein, but I think the dynamics are likely to be similar. As I’ve said before, a bad economy could put her over the top, but the combination of a polarizing persona and a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.

Who knew conservatives were so sensitive to people’s feelings? First David Frum wants to protect Christians from any educational content that might conflict with their principles, and now Daniel Henninger, a Wall Street Journal columnist, asserts that a link between 9/11 and Iraq exists, well, because some people feel it exists:

Nearly four years after what happened on September 11, we must now debate whether a linkage exists between that day and the war in Iraq. After President Bush associated the two several times in his defense of Iraq this week at Fort Bragg, both the House and Senate Democratic leaders pounded the linkage.

House Leader Nancy Pelosi was explicit: “He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq.” Senate Leader Harry Reid said the September 11 references don’t offer “a way forward” in Iraq and only remind us that bin Laden “is still on the loose.” To be able to separate September 11 and Iraq into wholly unrelated realms may be possible for very smart people–but not everyone.

On a very warm Wednesday this past May, during Fleet Week in New York City, a passerby at Ground Zero encountered some 150 astonishingly young Marines in fatigues, wet with sweat after a run, standing at attention on the site’s edge, outside the fence. They were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and they appeared to be in the middle of a formal ceremony. Yesterday the organizer of the May event, Maj. Dave Anderson, explained they were laying a wreath to honor the victims of September 11, and that the three Marines chosen to lay the wreath had earned Purple Hearts while serving in Iraq. When the ceremony ended, he said, a woman came out of the crowd, crying, and grabbed his wrist to say that her brother had died in there that day, and she said to him, “When people see you Marines doing this, they’ll know that you will take the fight forward.”

So it is that below the level of exquisite analysis now common in our politics, some Americans do exist who credit a connection between September 11 and events in Iraq. Perhaps there will be a poll out in a few weeks that will expose their sentiment to the greater weight and rigor of statistical science.

Conservatives used to criticize this sort of mushy-headed thinking; now it’s becoming de rigeur on the right. So what if there’s no reliable empirical evidence of a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks? Henninger has found some “sentiment” linking the two, so it must be true! Clearly, the reality-based community on the right has given way to the conservative postmodernists.

(Related post: The press notices Bush tying Iraq to 9/11, 6/29/05)

As Kevin Drum notes, National Review writer David Frum recently made the disturbing argument that “Christian principle” should determine what is taught in public schools:

[Frum on h]ow evolution should be taught in public schools: “I don’t believe that anything that offends nine-tenths of the American public should be taught in public schools. … Christianity is the faith of nine-tenths of the American public. … I don’t believe that public schools should embark on teaching anything that offends Christian principle.”

This sort of tyranny of the majority would irreparably harm education, imposing political and religious tests on all kinds of content that children need to be exposed to in a pluralistic society (not to mention violating principles of church/state separation). And what’s so ironic about Frum’s advocacy of a Christian litmus test is that it conflicts so directly with the way conservatives mock liberals for trying to protect students’ feelings. Frum himself conducted an approving interview with Sally Satel and Christina Sommers about their book One Nation Under Therapy in which they criticized the impulse to protect children from potentially offensive material:

SATEL & SOMMERS: The temptation to treat children as psychically fragile seems to be irresistible to many parents and educators… It is now the practice for “sensitivity and bias committees” inside publishing houses to expunge from standardized tests all mention of potentially distressing topics. Two major companies specifically interdict references to rats, mice, roaches, snakes, lice, typhoons, blizzards and birthday parties. (The latter could create bad feelings in children whose families don’t celebrate them.)

Apparently, “sensitivity and bias committees” are fine as long as they’re “sensitive” to the concerns of your side (and your side is the majority).

More importantly, whoever said you have a right to not be confronted with challenging or disturbing content in school? Both sides need to suck it up.

In the latest National Republican Senatorial Committee press release attacking Bob Casey, the Democratic candidate for Rick Santorum’s Senate seat, the NRSC bashes him for taking MoveOn cash. At the end of the release, there’s a headline stating that “MoveOn’s membership is less than mainstream.” The NRSC then lists a number of donors to MoveOn, calling it “A Sample Of MoveOn PAC’s Donors.” Obviously, it’s public information that these people donated to a PAC, but listing random individuals by name and city seems a little tawdry. The only proof that the NRSC offers that they are “less than mainstream” is the occupation/employer information submitted with the donation, which includes a self-described activist and a bookkeeper. Scary stuff!

In All the President’s Spin, we argued that liberals are rapidly following conservatives into the rhetorical sewer. Here’s more evidence that we were right — Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the editor of Daily Kos, making a series of feeble-minded comparisons between American conservatives and the Taliban:

Funny how the wingers try to claim American liberals are in league with crazy fundamentalist Muslims.

Reality is, we hate everything Islamic fundamentalism stands for. On the other hand, the Dobson’s of the Republican Party — you know, the people running the show — have far more in common with the enemy than they’d ever like to admit.

Religion in government

Al Qaida/Taliban: One and the same
American Taliban: One and the same
Liberals: Separation of church and state

Schools

Al Qaida/Taliban: Religious indoctrination. Run by clergy.
American Taliban: School prayer. Religious indoctrination (creationism and “intelligent design”). Private religious school system.
Liberals: Leave religious teachings to parents and sunday school.

Women

Al Qaida/Taliban: No school, must cover entire body, no rights
American Taliban: Government control over reproductive freedoms, hostility to Title IX, hostility to working women
Liberals: Equality of the sexes

Religious freedom

Al Qaida/Taliban: ‘Think like us, or we’ll whip you and/or chop off your head’
American Taliban: ‘Think like us, or we’ll condemn you to hell’
Liberals: To each her own

Homosexuality

Al Qaida/Taliban: Eradicate them from society
American Taliban: Eradicate them from society
Liberals: Equality under the law

You guys can take it from here.

Update (from the comments):

Torture

Al Qaida/Taliban: Torture them or chop off their heads
American Taliban: Torture them or homosexually rape them.
Liberals: No torture

Medicine and Science

Al Qaida/Taliban: Faith-based world view
American Taliban: Faith-based world view
Liberals: Reality-based community

Sadly, this is just the latest in a long string of comparisons between domestic political figures and the Taliban since 9/11.

There’s an important analogy here to the way that the Internet has broken down barriers protecting groups like travel agents from competition. Before the Internet, latent demand for demagogic liberal punditry that wasn’t being met because most of the so-called “liberals” in the press were Washington types who play by the rules of the mainstream media. The Internet has broken down these barriers to competition, enabling Kos and Atrios (among others) to meet the demand for partisan rants like these, and as a result they have become exceptionally popular and influential in left-liberal politics. (Conservative ranters like Powerline, Little Green Footballs, etc. have also come to the fore, but there were already mainstream conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh who were meeting that demand.)

In general, The American Prospect, The New Republic, and other more establishment publications have not gone down the same road as Kos et al, and as a result have lost a lot of influence. Look at this Alexa.com comparison of the traffic of Daily Kos vs. The American Prospect Online — it’s not even close. Same with Kos vs. TNR.

And as Jay Hamilton points out in his excellent book All the News That’s Fit to Sell, the same type of process has occurred in the news media. Barriers to entry and subsidies from parent corporations allowed journalists to produce highbrow network newscasts in the 1950s and 1960s, but increasing competition from other outlets has pushed them heavily in the infotainment direction. Coverage of politics in newspapers has shifted toward an infotainment model as well.

Unfortunately, when consumers speak in the media business, democracy rarely wins.

PS: This reminds me of something I wanted to point out from a couple of weeks ago. Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor for The American Prospect (who I met once in Washington and seems like a nice person), recently issued a similarly nasty charge on Tapped, suggesting that President Bush has intentionally failed to capture Osama Bin Laden:

Instead of attacking the patriotism of liberal victims of 9-11, Rove and the president should focus on catching bin Laden. The United States defeated Adolf Hitler’s army and the Italian fascists in three and a half years, but nearly four years after we got hit by Al-Qaeda, bin Laden is still at large and there appears to be no concerted effort to find him, even though CIA chief Porter Goss recently said we have “an excellent idea” where he is.

Why is that? Has America become less capable of military victory since World War II? Or was it that Franklin Delano Roosevelt unified the nation behind a determined course of action to defeat our common enemy, while Bush has preferred to divide the nation, undermine the strength of our armed forces, and let our enemy roam free?

Hopefully this isn’t a sign that the Prospect is going in the same direction as Kos…