Brendan Nyhan

As you may have noticed, I added some revenue-raising features to the site over the weekend in an effort to offset my hosting and service costs. There’s now a tipjar for donations as well as ads from Google and Kanoodle. All contributions and clickthroughs are appreciated!

I want to note that Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten also wrote a long column on appeasement rhetoric. It’s worth reading, although Rutten reverses the sequence of speeches (Cheney at VFW, Rumsfeld at the American Legion, Bush at the American Legion) by quoting Cheney and Bush and then stating that they “set the board for Rumsfeld.”

Here are my posts on The Horse’s Mouth today:
–MRC: Accuracy is relative — the conservative watchdog plays off the inaccuracies of “The Path to 9/11” by suggesting that they are less than “Fahrenheit 9/11”;
–Bogus tax cut statistics again — the Wall Street Journal exaggerates the benefits of the Bush tax cuts.

Here are my posts on The Horse’s Mouth:
–The Bush playbook keeps working — the parallels between a 2001 controversy over a statement by John Ashcroft and the recent controversy over Donald Rumsfeld’s speech to the American Legion;
–The launch of Pollster.com — a new site should help to raise the quality of polling information in the national debate.

Here’s yesterday’s post at The Horse’s Mouth:
–The Post crumples again — for the second time in a week, DC’s paper of record disregards its own reporting and reprints administration spin.

Peter Feaver, a faculty member in political science at Duke (my department) and a current National Security Council staffer, issued a challenge at the American Political Science Association meeting on Friday, which Steve Clemons summarizes:

Peter Feaver basically took exception to those who had suggested that members of the Bush administration had been out frequently “questioning the loyalty” of their critics and those who posed agressive questions to the White House.

Feaver had two well constructed memoranda that he showed me and which I hope he will email me to post on the site. One of these was a roster of leading Democratic voices including John Kerry, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and others who had questioned the loyalty of the administration or some agent of the Bush White House. He also had a clever roster of quotes from President Bush, Bill Frist, and many others calling for a polite bipartisanship. I really do want to post these here.

And then he challenged the some 20 or so people in our audience to send him by email clear cases — in quotes — of instances where senior administration officials, the President, or the Vice President, or other Republican party officianados had actually questioned another American’s loyalty or patriotism. He said that they might have questioned their “wisdom” — but hardly ever their patriotism.

Now, Peter is a great guy (and feisty on the basketball court), but I want to respond to his challenge by re-posting my compilation of GOP statements suggesting that dissenters are being disloyal since 9/11:

December 2001: In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration’s anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. “To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.”

February 2002: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle expresses mild disagreement with US anti-terror policies, saying US success in the war on terror “is still somewhat in doubt.” In response, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) says that Daschle’s “divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country.”

May 2002: After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements “are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.”

September 2002: Campaigning against Democrats who did not support his legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security (a department whose creation he had previously opposed), President Bush said that “the Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people.”

September 2004: As John Kerry steps up his criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror, Republicans repeatedly suggest that he is emboldening the enemy. Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) says that “while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.” President Bush says, “You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message… You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages.” And Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists “are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry,” adding that Democrats are “consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there.”

July 2005: Senator Dick Durbin states that a description of US interrogation procedures at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility sounds like something “done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others.” Presidential adviser Karl Rove responds by suggesting that Durbin and other liberals seek to put US troops in danger, saying that “Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”

November/December 2005: With critics of the war in Iraq growing increasingly vocal, Republicans lash out, suggesting that Democrats are encouraging the enemy and want to surrender to terrorists. President Bush says that “These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will.” Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) states that “Many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender” and Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) says that “[T]he liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.”

After DNC chairman Howard Dean says “The idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong,” Republicans reiterate the same line of attack. House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Dean “made it clear the Democratic Party sides with those who wish to surrender” and GOP chairman Ken Mehlman says Dean’s statement “sends the wrong message to our troops, the wrong message to the enemy, the wrong message to the Iraqi people.”

January 2006: President Bush suggests that “defeatists” on Iraq are disloyal by contrasting them with a “loyal opposition,” stating that the American people “know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.”

March 2006: Senator Russ Feingold introduces a motion to censure President Bush. In response, Republicans suggest that he is harming national security and endangering US troops. RNC chairman Ken Mehlman says that “Democrat leaders never miss an opportunity to put politics before our nation’s security” and that they would “would rather censure the President for doing his job than actually fight the War on Terror,” refers to “repeated Democrat attempts to weaken these efforts to fight the terrorists and keep American families safe,” and states that “Democrats should to be focused on winning the War on Terror, not undermining it with political axe-grinding of the ugliest kind.” Senator John Cornyn adds that the resolution would “make the jobs of our soldiers and diplomats harder and place them at greater risk.”

June 2006: In response to Democratic calls for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, President Bush suggests that Democrats want to surrender. “There’s a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done,” he said. “They’re willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off.” However, Bush adviser Dan Bartlett is unable to name a single Democrat to which this description applies.

I want to be very clear that there’s been some extremely nasty rhetoric from Democrats calling Republicans unpatriotic and un-American — Jon Henke put together a good compilation that probably overlaps with Peter’s.

With that said, however, I do reject Feaver’s claim — the Republican rhetoric has been more destructive overall. First, it carries more rhetorical power given the GOP’s control of the presidency, especially when President Bush was so popular after 9/11. Also, the left has historically been more associated with disloyalty than the right. Finally, the GOP rhetoric has been part of a consistent and probably calculated pattern since 9/11 rather than a series of isolated, ad hominem remarks.

The Tradesports futures market offers four contracts for the 2008 election — one for the Democratic nominee, one for the GOP nominee, one for the candidate who wins the presidential election, and one for the party that wins. Using these contracts, we can determine who the markets think are the most electable candidates.

The markets are currently putting the party who will win at even odds, so a good candidate would have a better than 50/50 chance of victory, and a weak candidate would have less than a 50/50 chance.

Here is a ranking of the candidates who have contracts offered in the winning candidate market by the market’s implied probability of victory if they are nominated by their party:

Interestingly enough, the market is implicitly ranking Rudy Giuliani as the most electable candidate in a general election, followed by Al Gore! Mr. “Straight Talk,” John McCain, is ranked third — a surprising finding given all the hype about his appeal to Democrats and independents. Interestingly, Hillary comes in at about 50 percent, where a generic Democrat would be, along with John Edwards, who many (including me) see as more electable than her. Finally, Mitt Romney and George Allen perform significantly below the generic Republican percentage of 50 percent. These prices probably reflect the (regrettable but perhaps accurate) perception that Romney’s Mormonism is an obstacle to his election, as well as the damage done to Allen by publicity of ugly racial history as a result of his “macaca” gaffe.

Note: The fact that these probabilities are surprising may be a sign of an immature trading market. Traders may not be sophisticated enough to see that, say, the winning candidate contracts on Hillary and Gore are overpriced given the price of their nomination contracts.

Charles Franklin, the Wisconsin political scientist who blogs at Political Arithmetik, has put together
an excellent graphic showing the long-term trend in Hillary’s favorable/unfavorable ratings:

Franklin comes to the same conclusion I reached a year ago — despite all the hype about how she’s become less polarizing, Hillary’s favorability ratings haven’t really changed since 2000. So why would her supporters expect a presidential run to be successful?

Maybe other people are catching on to this fact — the Tradesports futures market on a Hillary nomination has been trending down (to about 40 percent):

If you’re an early riser in the DC area, you can catch me on Washington Post Radio (1500 AM and 107.7 FM) at 7:10 AM tomorrow morning talking about my Time.com column on appeasement rhetoric.

Here are today’s posts on The Horse’s Mouth:
–FAIR responds — the media watchdog responds to my criticism, and I rebut their claims;
–Allen blames the media as post-“macaca” damage continues — the VA senator claims voters don’t care about the “macaca” controversy even as he sinks in the polls.