Brendan Nyhan

In a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee mischaracterizes the effects of the SCHIP children’s health insurance bill that President Bush vetoed, saying that he opposes “moving two million children from private insurance to government insurance”:

I was not criticizing President Bush’s veto as a matter of policy, but as a matter of politics. I fully believe that Mr. Bush should have negotiated a compromise and not let it get to the point of a veto. Mr. Bush indicated he was willing to spend more than the $5 billion he originally proposed, but less than the $35 billion the Democrats pushed through, so there was clearly room to negotiate. In no way do I support spending an additional $35 billion, or moving two million children from private insurance to government insurance, or letting Schip be a step on the path to socialized medicine.

Huckabee’s claim that two million children who currently have private insurance would be “moved” to government insurance is misleading. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office estimate that Huckabee is referring to states that “about one-third — or 2 million — of the 5.8 million children who would gain SCHIP or Medicaid coverage by 2012 under the legislation would have otherwise had private coverage,” a group that includes children “whose families would — in the absence of SCHIP or Medicaid — have purchased private coverage for these children at some point in the future, possibly many months later.” In addition, the choices made by parents are, of course, voluntary — no one will be forced out of private insurance.

Given my previous complaints about Barack Obama’s reluctance to go negative, I’m happy to see him start taking on Hillary, but the grounds on which he chose to do so is bizarre. You don’t take down a frontrunner by talking about what exactly she said about Social Security to some voter in Iowa — it’s the wrong issue substantively and politically and, frankly, no one outside the Beltway cares.

Obama later expanded his critique of Hillary not being sufficiently forthcoming about her views to Iran and Iraq, but again, it’s not a policy difference. At this point, 95% of Democratic primary voters couldn’t explain one substantive distinction between Obama and Clinton. Kevin Drum tries to come up with some ideas — maybe Obama’s people are reading?

Anyway, Obama’s coming to Durham on Thursday so I’ll hopefully get to see the road show in person.

Someone at the New York Times was amusing themselves with this juxtaposition of photos of Charlie Rangel and Dick Cheney:

You have to love ads with the punchline that Chris Dodd is old. It even has a bad 80s sitcom feel!

Matthew Yglesias argues for rejecting the politics of “character,” “leadership,” and all the other unknowable quantities of political candidates:

At the end of the day, it’s not about finding the candidate who “really” has the best views. Instead, insofar as the issues matter to you (and, obviously, there are considerations beyond “the issues” in play) it’s about finding the candidate who has the best platform. We can’t peer into their souls and we don’t really need to.

This is an argument I’ve made in other contexts. We can’t know politicians’ true intentions (for instance, whether they are attempting to mislead the public or not) and we also can’t know whether they are good people, devout, etc. in private (see, for instance, the case that was made on behalf of John Ashcroft during his confirmation hearings). Indeed, these are the areas in which politicians are most likely to be deceptive and in which the press is most likely to fall into narrative-driven pathologies (Bush is friendly, Gore is a liar, etc.). Though politicians do deviate from their campaign platforms, the positions they take are arguably a much more reliable guide to their performance in office than trying to read their minds.

You know the country is deeply divided when more than 100,000 people buy clocks counting down the seconds until the president leaves office:

As Campaign ’08 rages on and Hillary, Rudy, Barack and Mitt buttons dot the political landscape, a deeply unpopular President Bush is proving that he may be going but he’s clearly not forgotten.

Key chain-sized clocks that count down the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the end of the Bush administration have become hot items for Democrats – and some Republicans – who probably don’t hum “Never Can Say Goodbye” when they think of Bush.

“The clocks give people hope. It’s a countdown to a new start, a fresh beginning,” said Vince Ponzo, a 33-year-old New York City Democrat who began selling the key chain-sized digital clocks shortly after Bush’s second inauguration in 2004. “We’ve sold about 110,000.”

Here’s what they look like:

These days, exploiting polarization is big business.

The New York Times blog The Caucus has investigated why Fred Thompson keeps clearing his throat. Now that’s news I can use!

I’m not a fan of character-based meta-narratives about candidates, but I have to say it — Mitt Romney can’t even pretend to misspeak in a convincing way:

“I think that is a position which is not consistent with the fact,” Mr. Romney said. “Actually, just look at what Osam, uh, Barack Obama, said just yesterday, Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. ‘That is the battlefield. That is the central place,’ he said. ‘Come join us under one banner.’”

…It turned out, of course, that Mr. Romney was talking about an audiotape released Monday from Mr. bin Laden calling on insurgents in Iraq to unite.

Kevin Madden, a campaign spokesman, said, “Governor Romney simply misspoke,” calling the comment a “brief mix-up.”

No wonder people don’t believe Romney’s conversion to being anti-abortion is authentic. He said “Osam” before “Obama” and included “Barack” twice, which sounds nothing like Osama bin Laden. What’s funny is that there’s no tactical reason to attack Obama, who is running a terrible campaign and seems unlikely to defeat Hillary. But it’s a useful signal to the right that Romney will play hardball with Democrats.

It looks like Democrats are making modifications designed to pick up the votes to override a second veto of the SCHIP children’s health insurance bill. It would be a major political and policy victory, but there’s a downside that isn’t well understood. Expanding SCHIP would make the status quo more acceptable to moderate Republicans, which would in turn make it more difficult to pass a comprehensive universal coverage plan in 2009. Democrats need to pick up multiple seats in the Senate or the plans like those proposed by Obama, Edwards, and Clinton will die at the hands of a filibuster.

Update 10/25 9:20 PM: I spoke too soon — Democrats didn’t pick up any votes on their second try. The Washington Post’s Paul Kane concludes that “Democrats are almost out of political room to squeeze more votes to surmount the veto-proof majority.” It looks like they will make a political play instead:

The Senate will probably approve the revised bill next week. There is a veto-proof majority in favor of the bill in the Senate, but today’s vote in the House, as well as last week’s, signal that it will sustain Mr. Bush’s veto again.

If that happens, Democrats said, they may extend the existing insurance program for children through next summer. They would then schedule another vote on the issue in September or October, in the hope of inflicting maximum political damage on Republicans just before the 2008 elections.

Reading Rachel Morris’s devastating Washington Monthly article on Rudy Giuliani’s contempt for democratic checks and balances, I’m struck by the fact that my #1 concern in the presidential election is that he be defeated. The downside of a Giuliani presidency is far worse than any other conceivable alternative — he knows nothing about foreign policy, his foreign policy advisers are crazy, he has no understanding of the appropriate exercise of executive power, and displays little concern for the niceties of free speech. This man should not be put in charge of the executive branch.

People seem to be slowly catching on to the problem. Indeed, if Giuliani gets the GOP nomination, I think the Democrats might end up using the same playbook that they employed against Barry Goldwater. I’m not totally confident that it would work, though — Giuliani appeals to the belligerent authoritarian in all of us. After 9/11, that strategy may be all too effective.

Update 10/25 10:26 AM: The New York Times reports on Giuliani’s foreign policy advisers today:

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

…Mr. Giuliani has taken an aggressive position on Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear program, saying last month it was a “promise” that as president he would take military action to keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.

Warnings like that one and his reliance on advisers like Mr. Podhoretz, who wrote an article in June for Commentary magazine called “The Case for Bombing Iran,” have raised concerns among some Democrats.

Mr. Podhoretz said in an interview published Wednesday in The New York Observer that he recently met with Mr. Giuliani to discuss his new book, in which he advocates bombing Iran as part of a larger struggle against “Islamofascism,” and “there is very little difference in how he sees the war and I see it.”

Asked in a recent interview if he agreed with Mr. Podhoretz that the time to bomb Iran has already come, Mr. Giuliani said: “From the information I do have available, which is all public source material, I would say that that is not correct, we are not at that stage at this point. Can we get to that stage? Yes. And is that stage closer than some of the Democrats believe? I believe it is.”

The article also included this graphic on Rudy’s advisers (click for larger version):