Brendan Nyhan

Kerry is back to the rhetoric about stem cell research being banned:

Three years ago, George W. Bush put in place a ban on federal funding for stem cell research – a ban that’s tied the hands of our scientists and shut down some of our most promising work on spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, Parkinson’s and other life-threatening diseases.”

… And right now, there is such possibility for treatments that could transform our lives – but because of the stem cell ban, they are still beyond our reach.

…When I’m President, we’re going to stop saying no. We’re going to say yes. We’re going to lift the ban on federal funding for stem cell research once and for all.

Don’t believe him. Federal funding for stem cell research is not banned – Bush simply limited the number of lines that are available for federally funded research. Whatever you think about the issue, those are not the same thing.

Update (10/21): He did it again today.

Time Magazine, 3/1/04:

The Bush political team, though, believes it is getting the kinks out of the system. One example: campaign and Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) rapid-response makers had been labeling Kerry a “Massachusetts liberal,” not knowing that Bush likes attacks to be more specific.

“He doesn’t like it because it doesn’t tell you anything,” says a top Bush aide. “Tell people what that means. That’s what he wants.” Result: the campaign no longer uses the shorthand phrase Massachusetts liberal.

President Bush in the third presidential debate, 10/13/04:

He [Kerry] talks about PAYGO. I’ll tell you what PAYGO means, when you’re a senator from Massachusetts, when you’re a colleague of Ted Kennedy, pay go means: You pay, and he goes ahead and spends.

…You know, there’s a main stream in American politics and you [Kerry] sit right on the far left bank. As a matter of fact, your record is such that Ted Kennedy, your colleague, is the conservative senator from Massachusetts.

…And secondly, only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough.

Ken Mehlman, Bush/Cheney campaign manager, on “Meet the Press,” 10/17/04:

I think people looked at those debates and they saw some important things.  They saw that John Kerry is, in fact, a Massachusetts liberal who will increase taxes and who will increase government involvement in health care.

…And the middle class understands when a liberal from Massachusetts like John Kerry says “I’m just going to soak the rich,” they better grab their umbrella.

I guess the idea is that these are more specific attacks? Or did they just change their mind?

In an appearance in Los Angeles to showcase a new federal antipiracy effort, John Ashcroft somehow managed to link the issue to the terrorist threat. As my Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz reported in Variety (his day job):

The attorney general even drew on the scariest of associations, warning that due to the lucrative nature of the crime, intellectual property theft “risks becoming a potential source of financing for terrorists,” although he cited no examples of a connection.

Now it’s certainly possible that terrorists could engage in intellectual property theft to finance their operations. But in the absence of evidence to support that claim, this looks more like Ashcroft invoking the terrorist threat for political leverage — behavior that is not acceptable from anyone, let alone the Attorney General of the United States. At this rate, we’re going to hear any day now that we need to block John Kerry’s health care plan so that the terrorists can’t get government-subsidized health insurance…

People my age are obsessed with Jon Stewart. It’s a cliche at this point. But I have to give my own personal hallelujah here. In addition to being hilarious, the show is very important (as we explain in the conclusion of All the President’s Spin) because of the way it publicly shames the media and politicians for fecklessness and dishonesty. (We try to do the same thing at Spinsanity in a very different sense.) In the last few months, Stewart has taken his critique to a whole new level by openly blasting the national press to their face in interviews.

Yesterday, on “Crossfire,” he just embarrassed Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, mocking the show as bad political theater rather than serious political debate. And he did the same thing to Ted Koppel on “Nightline” during the Democratic convention, challenging Koppel and the national press to confront political spin rather than just providing a platform for it. The response from the establishment media in both cases was to criticize Stewart for his show not being up to journalistic standards, but as he says, it’s a comedy show. Koppel, Begala and Carlson are the ones doing allegedly serious political shows. So why can’t they get it right?

The transcripts of both interviews are below. Both are hilarious, but deeply cringe-inducing. The media isn’t used to people criticizing them to their face, and it gets very awkward. [Update: Here’s the video of Stewart on “Crossfire” – it’s a hundred times more uncomfortable than the transcript. Yikes.]

[Full disclosure: Stewart had Bryan Keefer, my Spinsanity co-editor, on to talk about our book and said nice things about it.]

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Bob Somerby is right – it is shockingly lazy that Bob Scheiffer didn’t look up the exact quote for this question:

QUESTION 18 (of 20): Mr. President, let’s go to a new question. You were asked before the invasion, or after the invasion, of Iraq if you’d checked with your dad. And I believe, I don’t remember the quote exactly, but I believe you said you had checked with a higher authority. I would like to ask you, what part does your faith play on your policy decisions?

How can a professional network host not bother to check what Bush had actually said? What if he had gotten it wrong?

And on the subject of laziness, I continue to see able-bodied Duke students using the wheelchair access button on their way into the gym because they’re too lazy to open the door without assistance. No wonder our society is getting so fat.

One of the most striking things about this campaign has been the quality of news coverage of the presidential and vice presidential debates. In particular, the AP and Washington Post have published long and thorough fact-checking articles within hours of the end of each debate that effectively help voters to sort through the spin. The Post online team has even created a “debate referee,” which is a real innovation in online political coverage (for instance, check out their annotated transcript of the third presidential debate).

So we know that they can do good fact-checking when they make it a priority. Here’s my question – why don’t we have political coverage like that every day, especially now? Four times every four years surely isn’t good enough. It’s clear that reporters are outgunned on a day-to-day basis, but they have shown that the tables can be turned.

Let me add a note of caution. The danger is that this sort of fact-checking can become perverse, as it did in 2000, when relatively trivial inaccuracies from Al Gore set off wild feeding frenzies that obscured much more serious policy deception. We’ve seen the same thing this year after the vice presidential debate, when Dick Cheney’s false claim to have not previously met John Edwards received vastly more attention than other, more serious falsehoods. (Josh Marshall even endorsed a reader suggestion to re-run the anti-Gore campaign in reverse, calling Cheney a compulsive liar, mentally ill, etc. with a focus on that silly mistake.)

Another risk is false equivalence, which ABC’s Mark Halperin warned of in a memo leaked to Drudge. As he put it, “We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.” In short, all deceptions are not equal, and reporters do not have to treat them as such, as they often do in debate stories.

All that said, however, the post-debate coverage we’ve seen in the last month has been the closest I’ve seen to the ideal the press should aspire to. Maybe we can build on that in the future.

At Spinsanity, we hold the media to a high standard, which we lay out in detail in All the President’s Spin. The nation’s press corps has a responsibility to fact-check the claims of politicians and expose any that are misleading, whether it’s the first time the politician has made the claim or the 500th.

Unfortunately, the media often fail in this regard. Many faulty claims are not adequately debunked when first introduced, and then those claims become old news that are ignored even as politicians endlessly repeat them. To see if the press is doing any better in this regard, I looked first at two tired bits of deception from the two candidates — George W. Bush’s claim that John Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes, and Kerry’s claim that the country has lost 1.6 million jobs under Bush — and then a newer claim, Bush’s assertion that Kerry would subject US national security decisions to a “global test” that he characterizes as a foreign veto.

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Peter Feaver, a professor here at Duke who is pretty much the nation’s leading expert on civil-military relations, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on a new Military Times poll showing 70+% support for President Bush among active duty troops as well as the National Guard and Reserves.

Feaver, who is a crafty point guard in department basketball games, places a good deal of blame on Kerry’s campaign, saying “Kerry’s scorched-earth critique of the Iraq war may excite the base, but it alarms the military. The point is not that members of the military are blinded to mistakes or difficulties in Iraq. Rather, the point is that Kerry has unwittingly revived two specters that haunt the military” — “the ghost of Vietnam” and Clinton’s tenure as president.

But the larger issue is what these poll results represent. Feaver is concerned that Kerry will be mad at the military and this will harm his ability to serve as commander-in-chief:

I worry about poll findings that show such a large tilt in favor of one candidate because they risk politicizing the military further, especially when it rebuts so decisively a central theme in one candidate’s marketing campaign. I worry also because of the reaction I have gotten from Democrats when informed of the poll results — there’s an abrupt shift midstream from crowing about how the military would turn on Bush this year to decrying the partisan Republican tilt of the military. The Democrats have wooed the military more ardently (though perhaps not more wisely) than ever before. Does the fury of a spurned suitor prepare someone to be a good commander in chief in wartime?

More important, though, is the political vulnerability these imbalances can create, which can undercut civilian control of the military when a Democrat is in office, and thereby threaten our national security. I challenge anyone to read Richard Clarke’s book and not wish that Bill Clinton had had more leverage to force the Joint Chiefs to undertake aggressive operations against Al Qaeda. Kennedy averted a similar power play by the Chiefs during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The President – no matter who he is – should be served by the military, not the other way around.

Today’s New York Times op-ed page has more proposed debate questions for the candidates from various public figures, including Charles Murray (aka Mr. Bell Curve), who offers this:

You promise to create millions of jobs, but many people who run businesses say that nothing in your life has taught you how much effort, risk and sometimes heartbreak goes into creating one real job. Could you describe your experiences when you last had to meet a payroll, or when your boss had to meet a payroll?

There’s nothing better than people who live off think tank sinecures lecturing politicians on the virtues of the free market. I don’t see any significant private sector experience in Murray’s bio (hence the “many people who run businesses” attribution).

More importantly, what does Kerry’s private sector experience (or lack thereof) really tell us? Murray clearly has very strong beliefs about the market and how it should be regulated even though he hasn’t run a business. Should we dismiss them for that reason? Surely not.

In the end, personal experience is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about the kind of leadership a candidate would offer. Kerry has more military experience than Bush, but I doubt Murray would support him on that basis. The same applies here. Let’s hope Bob Scheiffer doesn’t follow Murray’s lead tonight.

Today’s Washington Post features a Howard Kurtz story under the headline “Bush’s Health Care Ads Not Entirely Accurate.” You think? It’s right up there with the headline on Dana Milbank’s 2002 article “For Bush, Facts Are Malleable”. What are the editors so afraid of? And this is from the Post, which has been the most consistent critic of Bush’s dishonesty in the national press (see the conclusion of All the President’s Spin). With this sort of punch-pulling, it’s no wonder politicians don’t pay a significant penalty for deception.

Update (10/17): Post ombudsman Michael Getler criticizes the paper today for its wimpy fact-check headlines and ledes, though he’s much too gentle.