Brendan Nyhan

What’s the effect of Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama this morning on Meet the Press?

Matthew Yglesias suggests that “It’s a signal to every right-of-center person who maybe thinks the GOP has gotten too right-of-center that Obama’s okay.” That may be true, but I’m skeptical that endorsements matter very much.

I suspect that the practical effect will be to put the spotlight on the sleazy attacks on Obama’s race, religion, patriotism, etc. that Powell denounced. To date, reporting on those smears has been limited because Obama has frequently decided not to engage (for good strategic reasons). Powell’s statements create the conflict needed to sustain press coverage.

As expected, the “game” did not “change” last night. Not much else to say except that the way pundits are feeding the McCain anger narrative and purporting to read McCain’s mind is disturbingly reminiscent of the Al Gore “sighing” debacle. Josh Marshall has been out front on this for weeks.

Washington Post:

The Post asked John Podesta, Newt Gingrich, Mary Beth Cahill, Peter J. Wallison and Stuart E. Eizenstat what could make tonight a game-changer.

The real answer: Almost nothing. Obama is up by eight points in the Pollster.com estimate — there’s no evidence of a debate ever causing a shift of that magnitude.

PS Along the lines, check out the way the New York Times describes Reagan’s debate performance in 1980:

Mr. Reagan struggled until he met President Jimmy Carter in their only debate at the end of the campaign and voters decided they were comfortable enough with Mr. Reagan to take a chance on a relative newcomer to politics.

Compare that with Jim Stimson’s smoothed trajectory of the polls in that race (and two other competitive races):

As Stimson concludes, Reagan’s performance might have helped to nudge him over the top at the end of the race, but there’s little evidence that “voters decided” en masse to support him as a result of the debate.

It’s amusing to me that people think Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012 if McCain loses. Her favorable/unfavorable numbers in the new CBS/NYT poll are 32 percent favorable/41 percent unfavorable. That’s where Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were in early 2007 after 15+ years of negative press. By contrast, Palin has been in the public eye for less than two months. I find it hard to believe that GOP primary voters would see her as the person they think can defeat Barack Obama.

Update 10/15 2:28 PM: Matthew Yglesias comments:

Maybe so. It’s striking to me, though, that explicit “electability” arguments don’t seem to feature heavily in GOP presidential primaries. This is a huge contrast from the Democratic side, where both the 2004 and 2008 primaries ended up showing a heavy focus on those questions. All signs are that a lot of conservatives like Palin just fine. If she can connect with a donor base, it seems to me that she’d be a reasonably strong primary contender. She’d have the leg up, meanwhile, of being better-known nationwide at this point than just about any other eligible Republican.

The problem with this logic, however, is that the Democrats haven’t had an incumbent president since 1996. Isaac Chotiner at TNR makes the point I was planning to make:

Democrats chose an “electable” Democrat in 1992 after having lost three straight presidential elections. In 2000, the Republicans had been out of the White House for eight years and chose someone who sure looked electable (Bush may not have been as popular as McCain, but he was way ahead of Gore in the spring of 2000). Then, in 2004, Democrats were desperate to win back the presidency and nominated someone that was perceived as being more electable than Howard Dean. This year, Republicans may not have talked much about electability during the primary season, but it seems probable that after four years of an Obama administration, that will change.

I’m debuting a new use of the swami for people who blame market outcomes on their political opponents — check out this monologue in which noted economist Glenn Beck (PhD, Headline News) blames part of the market decline on Obama:

Trillions of dollars in wealth, evaporation; it`s all going away. And it`s natural that most experts are conveniently pointing the fingers at the usual suspects.

Oh, it`s the home foreclosures. It`s the greedy CEOs on Wall Street.

Well, while all of those things are absolutely playing a huge role, there`s something else playing a role that everybody, except the market, seems to have forgotten about — the presidential election.

The “REAL STORY” is that while investors hate recessions, they hate uncertainty even more and right now
we`ve got nothing but uncertainty. There`s uncertainty about corporate earnings, there`s interest rates, but now with Barack Obama`s now seeming inevitable coronation right around the corner, there`s also massive uncertainty about how much worse the policies of a filibuster-proof Obama administration will make things.

The market is always looking ahead, and right now they`re only seeing high unemployment and massive inflation coming next year. They`re also seeing a president whose answer to our problems will be to raise taxes and move money from the rich directly to the poor.

…[I]f words matter to Obama so much, then someone should ask, why he insists on using the phrase “tax cut” when talking about his plan for the Treasury to write checks directly to the people who don`t pay any income tax…

[S]tock markets don`t like it either. Investors who are now looking into 2009 and beyond are beginning to figure out that Obama`s pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of the “working families” is a joke. The truth, which you will find in the fine print, is that he`ll simply change the meanings of the terms…

Instead of calling a check from the federal government welfare, as we do now, he just calls it a tax credit. According to the tax foundation, these tax credits a.k.a. welfare checks will rise from $407 billion a year to over $1 trillion a year in the next decade. If anyone is still unsure whether or not what kind of economic policies does he have and will they help America recover quickly, take a look at your most recent 401(k) statement because the markets have already decided.

Update 10/16 10:50 AM: National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez reprints similar nonsense from a reader (via Hilzoy):

An e-mail: “OK, I’ll say it…I believe today’s massive decline was, in part (and maybe a big “in part”), in fear that the debate tonight won’t go well for McCain and the implications that will have for an Obama victory. The likelihood of a recession has been talked about and, probably, factored in to a lot of folks’ thinking already… …if tonight’s debate tracks well for McCain, you’ll see a positive response tomorrow; if it doesn’t, hold on; it won’t be pretty. Call it: ‘Flight to Safety (from Socialism).’”

Today’s dog-bites-man headline of the day from a Gerald Seib story in the Wall Street Journal:

Hopes Quickly Fade For a Postpartisan Era

Shocking! Who could have predicted that partisanship wouldn’t magically disappear on November 5th?

On a more serious note, it’s worth noting the underlying flaw with Seib’s call for bipartisanship:

None of this bodes particularly well for bipartisanship after the election. In fact, it’s starting to appear that the only way for Washington to overcome partisan divides may be if one party — the Democrats, in this case — wins by such commanding margins that it can overpower the other party.

This passage implicitly contrasts the contemporary period unfavorably with the mid-20th century, the supposed golden age of bipartisanship in Washington. But as I’ve written before, we paid a very high price for the bipartisanship of that period, which was made possible by by the ugly history of race in the South. Once the parties realigned on the issue of race and conservative southerners left the Democratic Party, the political system returned to the historical norm of sharp partisan conflict. In those circumstances, as Seib notes, big changes will tend to happen when one party has unified control of the federal government. There’s no reason to think that will change no matter who wins the presidency.

What makes McClatchy’s Washington reporting so remarkable is their willingness to fact-check misleading claims without any false balance or punch-pulling. It’s completely different than the Times and the Post.

Here’s the latest example, which debunks the widely promoted myth that lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to low-income homebuyers and minorities caused the financial crisis:

Private sector loans, not Fannie or Freddie, triggered crisis
David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that’s what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They’ve specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

Note how there’s no hedging whatsoever in the headline or the lede — it’s just not true. Full stop.

FYI I’ll be speaking at a panel on Muslim Americans and the 2008 election at Duke on Friday:

Three Duke University scholars will discuss the 2008 presidential elections and the potential impact of the Muslim American vote during a panel discussion Friday, Oct. 17, at Duke.

The event, “The 2008 Election and the Muslim Vote,” is free and open to the public. The discussion begins at 2 p.m. in the Breedlove Room in Perkins Library, on Duke’s West Campus.

Panelists include Jen’nan Ghazal Read, associate professor of sociology and global health and Carnegie scholar studying Muslim American politics; Kerry L. Haynie, associate professor of political science; and political science doctoral candidate Brendan Nyhan, who recently studied the impact of journalists’ attempts to correct misinformation on voter perceptions.

Following opening remarks about the 2008 election, the panelists will take questions and engage in an interactive audience discussion.

Seating for the event is limited and RSVPs are requested; contact Kelly Jarrett at (919) 668-2143 or [email protected] to reserve a space.

Parking is available for a fee in the visitor lot on Science Lot or the Bryan Center Parking Garage. For additional information, visit www.jhfc.duke.edu/disc/.

Remember this?

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Reports: Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and former President Bill Clinton are making very direct arguments to Democratic superdelegates, starkly insisting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., cannot win a general election against presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Sources with direct knowledge of the conversation between Sen. Clinton and Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., prior to the Governor’s endorsement of Obama say she told him flatly, “He cannot win, Bill. He cannot win.”

Oops!

The lesson here is that even very smart politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton have a hard time extrapolating beyond their own circumstances. The Clintons’ formative political experiences took place in contexts (Arkansas and the 1992 election) where a liberal black candidate was not likely to win. So it probably seemed obvious to the Clintons that Obama could not win a general election against a white war hero and supposed “maverick.” But America has changed and the public mood seems more hostile to conservatism than at any point since the aftermath of Watergate. In addition, politicians frequently don’t recognize how little candidates seem to matter. People tend to attribute Clintons’ victories to political skill, but the main reason he won is that the political fundamentals favored him in 1992 and 1996. Similarly, while Obama is a skilled politician, I tend to believe that almost any Democrat would be winning in this context.

It’s worth putting the political problems raised by Barack Obama’s (relatively modest) associations with William Ayers in a larger perspective.

What few people have recognized is that the political problem he faces is driven by the same underlying problem as the Jeremiah Wright controversy — namely, the profound mismatch between the electoral context of his Illinois state senate district and the country as a whole.

Here’s what I wrote back in March about Wright:

Obama’s membership in Wright’s church helped demonstrate his cultural authenticity to skeptical constituents in Chicago’s black community. But it’s created a major problem for him now.

The fundamental problem is that the issue positions and cultural affiliations that won elections in Obama’s state legislative district are a relatively poor fit to the presidential election landscape. (They’re arguably a poor fit to the Illinois electoral landscape as well, but the collapse of Obama’s primary and general election rivals in 2004 let him skate into the Senate without coming under serious criticism.) The fact that he has done so well in the presidential race despite the mismatch is a testament to what a remarkably gifted politician he is.

The Ayers problem in similar. In Chicago, Ayers is something of an establishment figure in liberal circles. Obama therefore had no reason to criticize the former Weatherman when he was trying to build his biracial coalition of white progressive reformers and black supporters. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that Obama is somehow associated with or responsible for Ayers’s loathsome past, as McCain/Palin and their conservative supporters have charged.)

You can also put Obama’s associations with Tony Rezko in a similar framework. It was apparently crucial for Obama’s career to have support from wealthy developers like Rezko, but that association now hurts his reputation as a reformer with a clean ethical record.

For more on the idea of district congruity, see the research (PDF) of my friend and co-author Michael Tofias, who finds that “members of the House are more likely to run for the Senate when their districts have high congruity to their prospective statewide constituency.”