Brendan Nyhan

It’s no longer “news” when President Bush links Iraq and 9/11, but his latest email (PDF) to the RNC list contains a particularly egregious example of the ways in which he seamlessly blends the two:

After the enemy attacked us, I vowed I would rally this nation and use our resources to protect you. And that is exactly what we have done. We have reformed our intelligence services to make sure we can find the enemy before they strike. We have fought to deny them safe haven in Afghanistan and Iraq so they cannot plan and plot again.

The fight for freedom in Iraq is the fight for the security of the United States of America and we must prevail. If we leave before the job is done, the enemy that attacked us would be emboldened.

For much more on the administration’s use of this tactic, see All the President’s Spin.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m highly suspicious of most expert predictions, which studies have shown to be terrible. So it’s amusing to see William Kristol Josh Marshall):

Last night, for the first time this election cycle, I watched a Democratic presidential debate. It was appalling. But it was also, in a way, encouraging. Before last night, I thought it was 50-50 that the Republican nominee would win in November 2008.

Now I think it’s 2 to 1. And if the Democrat is anyone but Hillary, it’s 4 to 1.

I’ll take those odds! In fact, lots of people would — right now, the Intrade prediction market puts the likelihood of a Republican winning the presidency at 39 percent. Kristol, by contrast, is saying it should be 67 percent. In addition, Kristol’s statement that “if the Democrat is anyone but Hillary, it’s 4 to 1” would put the odds of an Obama or Edwards general election victory if they get the nomination at 20 percent. But the markets are currently putting an implicit probability on an Obama or Edwards general election win if nominated at 47 and 42 percent, respectively. If only Kristol had to put his money where his mouth is…

In an op-ed in the New York Times today, Reed Walters, the DA who is prosecuting the so-called “Jena Six,” offers a seemingly reasonable defense of why they should be charged with aggravated second-degree battery. However, the primary reason for the protests is that five of them were charged with attempted second-degree murder, a fact that he barely acknowledges:

[T]he offenses of Dec. 4, 2006, did not stem from a “schoolyard fight” as it has been commonly described in the news media and by critics.

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

Unfortunately, many readers may find the piece convincing and not realize the extent to which Walters is dodging his critics.

Clarification 9/26 2:47 PM: A commenter points out an ambiguity in my language — the defendants were charged with attempted second-degree murder (the victim did not die). I’ve clarified this above.

After asserting that there is a quota permitting only one black justice on the Supreme Court, NYT columnist Bob Herbert pulls a Maureen Dowd, purporting to read George H.W. Bush’s mind and then attributing a quote to him with the weasel words “seemed to be saying”:

In 1991, the first President Bush poked a finger in the eye of black America by selecting the egregious Clarence Thomas for the seat on the Supreme Court that had been held by the revered Thurgood Marshall. The fact that there is a rigid quota on the court, permitting one black and one black only to serve at a time, is itself racist.

Mr. Bush seemed to be saying, “All right, you want your black on the court? Boy, have I got one for you.”

Journalists just can’t pass up the faux mind-reading.

Best NYT headline of the day: “In Beach Enclave, Affluent Are Split Over Effluent.” It’s the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” for coastal elites!

However, that triumph is offset by this clunker, which ran over a typically dreary editorial: “Gunfight at the S-Chip Corral.” Ugh.

Update 9/25 5:00 PM: ABC News has an especially inane headline on air travel: “Could Cranky Passengers Become Extinct?” Answer: No.

Update 9/26 8:55 AM: McClatchy DC gets snarky:

Bush astounds activists, supports human rights

Also, like TNR’s Michelle Cottle, I’m a little disturbed by the email (PDF) from Bill Clinton to Hillary’s list with the subject line “You, me, a TV, and a bowl of chips.” Yikes! Not sure I want to know what that means — and I say that as a hater of the spammish subjects that most campaigns use (sample from Obama: “RE: This is real”).

Pot/kettle alert: According to Drudge, a senior White House official accused Barack Obama of “intellectual laziness”:

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was “capable” of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

“It’s sort of like, ‘that’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”

Mr. Senior Official, you live in a glass (White) house. What a bizarre angle for the administration to attack Obama. If anything, the Illinois senator comes across as too academic, not intellectually lazy.

I’m also troubled by the use of “laziness” as the grounds to attack the first serious black presidential contender. I assume it was unintentional, but can’t we talk about Obama without language that echoes racist stereotypes?

Update 9/24 11:33 AM: The Bill Sammon article in the Examiner that Drudge quoted is now online. It provides more details on the “intellectual laziness” charge (the first paragraph below continues directly from the passage quoted above):

[The senior White House official] cited an example from Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in which the senator complains that many “government programs don’t work as advertised.” Five days after the book was published last fall, Obama was asked to name some of those government programs by Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“And he can’t give an example,” the official said. “Look, if you wrote the book, you should have thought through what it was. But he’s sitting there, fumbling around.”

Obama did tell Russert that “we don’t use electronic billing for Medicare and Medicaid providers.” But the White House official said the vast majority of such transactions are indeed billed electronically.

…Nor does Obama know his facts very well, according to the senior White House official. The official said in March, Obama was flummoxed by questions about his health care plan at a Democratic forum in Las Vegas. Two months later, the candidate drastically overstated the death toll from Kansas tornadoes.

“Ten thousand people died,” Obama told an audience, when the actual death toll was 12.

“Over time, we’ll see other things like that,” the White House official said. “I’m going to be validated on Barack. He’s not done the hard work necessary to prepare himself. And it’s too late to do it.”

Since that prediction, Obama has made a series of foreign policy gaffes that has allowed Clinton to cast herself as the candidate of experience.

Obviously Obama has made mistakes — it’s hard to be fully prepared for every question on the campaign trail — but, again, these are bizarre criticisms from an administration headed by a man who has misstated basic facts about his policies since 1999, didn’t even write his own book, and touts his low grades in college.

Update 9/24 1:08 PM: Josh Marshall says the RNC is promoting a similar theme:

don’t think this allusion to generations of stereotypes about black men was just some stray comment.

The RNC just shot off an email building on the slur. With the headline “Razzle Dazzle”, the email continues the theme that Obama is just another black fancy-pants with a slick smile and nice turn of phrase but either without the candle-power or stick-to-it-iveness to actually get things done.

“Chicago Star Obama Continues His All Show, No Substance Campaign With Event On Broadway,” the email begins.

Update 9/25 9:10 AM: Slate’s Sonia Smith says “Duke political science doctoral student Brendan Nyhan sees racism in the Obama criticism,” but that’s wrong. I said that I assume the echo of racist stereotypes was unintentional, but that it should be avoided. The leap from racial insensitivity to racism is one of the problems with modern debate about race. For instance, here’s what I wrote for Spinsanity about the debate over John Ashcroft’s nomination to be Attorney General in 2001:

Ashcroft backers used a complicated set of rhetorical techniques to take control of the debate. These were aptly demonstrated by Rich Lowry in the National Review Online. Lowry begins by claiming that “the charges of racial bias… came from all liberal quarters”. He cites three examples of these “charges of racial bias”: the Jackson and Clinton statements above plus a 1999 accusation of racism against Ashcroft by Rep. Maxine Waters. Note how different these statements are – Clinton alleges differential treatment by race and gender, Jackson criticizes a political appeal to race, and Waters says that Ashcroft acts “like a racist”. Yet Lowry defines them as essentially the same – accusations that Ashcroft is racially biased. And racism, he says, has a clear definition – “animus against individuals or groups based on race”. Therefore, according to Lowry, Ashcroft’s opponents are saying that John Ashcroft dislikes black people in his heart.

This rhetorical trick left Ashcroft’s opponents reeling. By most accounts, Ashcroft is a decent person who does not personally hate people on the basis of race – and no one can definitively prove otherwise… But this does not mean that Ashcroft should be exempt from criticism for capitalizing on racial animus and being indifferent to civil rights in his political career. As Confessore puts it, “The problem is that the language of race in America is too cramped to adequately describe this brand of indifference. Terms like racist, bigot, and Nazi can’t suffice; they imply questions of character and intent that are unanswerable.”

In the end, Ashcroft’s supporters created a standard that is effectively insurmountable, precluding race-related criticism of the more ambiguous political appeals, statements and positions that constitute the vast majority of American politics. Ashcroft’s confirmation was therefore a major conservative victory in the debate over race.

The same principle applies here. I cannot prove — and do not allege — that the senior White House official is a racist. Indeed, his inner beliefs or intentions are irrelevant to my criticism, which is that his language inappropriately echoes racist stereotypes. Those are not the same thing!

Update 9/26 2:38 PM: Slate has deleted the offending language and published a clarification:

Clarification, Sept. 26: The article originally claimed that Nyhan saw racism in the White House official’s remarks. As his post indicates, he thought the stereotyping was unintentional. We regret the confusion.

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested that Republicans who opposed efforts to force a withdrawal from Iraq don’t care about protecting the troops:

“They want to protect the president more than they want to protect our troops,” said Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

This is a nasty smear that directly mirrors GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11 that use the “they care more about X than fighting terrorists” framework:

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 2006: During a press conference the day after the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11th, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, “I wonder if they [Democrats] are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people,” adding, “They certainly do not want to take the terrorists on and defeat them.” When asked if he intended to accuse Democrats of treason, Boehner replied, “I said I wonder if they’re more interested in protecting the terrorists… They certainly don’t want to take the terrorists on in the field.”

Reid also recently stated that President Bush is “letting Osama bin Laden roam free while we keep our troops mired in an open-ended Iraqi civil war,” a baseless smear suggesting that Bush is intentionally failing to capture bin Laden.

Speaking at the NRA yesterday, Rudy Giuliani said that the MoveOn ad smearing General Petraeus “passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass”:

Whether you agree with the war in Iraq or you don’t; whether you agree with the surge or you don’t; Democrats even came back from Iraq and said that he’s having more success than anybody had thought.

So to attack the man’s integrity, and honesty, and decency, is in my view indecent. It passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass.

This statement (which his campaign declined to disavow) echoes Giuliani’s little-noticed statement to Sean Hannity that criticism of Petraues “should not be allowed”:

This is being done purely for political campaign strategy. It’s a calculated political campaign strategy. You should not be allowed to malign someone’s reputation unfairly just because you think it’s good for your campaign.

As I wrote before, Giuliani’s ugly history on free speech issues makes this rhetoric especially troubling. He owes voters an explanation.

One of the themes of The Black Swan, an excellent book I’m reading now, is that experts are terrible at prediction and that all of us, but especially experts, overestimate the precision of our estimates. A seemingly great example is what Stephen Biddle at the Council on Foreign Relations told George Packer about Iraq:

The likelihood is that it doesn’t become a regional war, but there’s a roughly thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance that it’ll spread. During the Cold War, we spent trillions worrying about infinitesimally small risks. Thirty-to-forty-per-cent chance of a real, honest-to-goodness catastrophe is something that ought to factor into our policymaking now.

Is that estimate of “roughly” 30-40% based on real data? I’m guessing the answer is no. In any case, I am highly skeptical that we can estimate the risk of regional war with that level of precision.

Matthew Yglesias notes the bizarre conclusion that the MoveOn “General Betray Us” ad is the reason Democrats failed to force a troop withdrawal:

People find it comforting, I guess, to try to convince themselves that MoveOn is the reason our troops will be engaged in at least 18 more months of futile combat in Iraq, but it’s just not true — legislative defeat in September was inevitable, and the war is still very unpopular and still a very promising issue for 2008.

But as he notes, this is completely wrong:

The whole fracas of Petraeus, Crocker, MoveOn, etc. has had, to a good first approximation, no impact whatsoever on anything of any significance. Bush continues to be stubborn. Republicans continue to back Bush. The war continues to go poorly and continues to be unpopular. There was nothing else that ever could have happened. A bunch of editors and politicians talked themselves into believing that this September showdown was crucially significant, but they were all wrong and their theory never made any sense.

The only showdown that mattered happened months ago. Democrats passed a war appropriation that funded the phased withdrawal of troops. Bush vetoed that appropriation and said he would only sign an appropriation that funded open-ended war. Bush sought to portray a congressional refusal to appropriate money for an open-ended military involvement in Iraq as some kind of plot to leave the troops starving and without bullets in Iraq. The press largely bought into this frame, which was re-enforced by the fact that many leading Democrats immediately decided to buy into as well. The party then decided not to try to fight to reframe the issue but, instead, to accept it…

The pattern for the entire Bush presidency has been to blame various Democratic defeats on tactical mistakes (hence the search for ridiculous gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen) or the failure of various dissident Republicans or technocrats to oppose Bush strongly enough. If only Colin Powell had resigned in protest before we invaded Iraq! If only Alan Greenspan had opposed the Bush tax cut! If only Harry Reid had used more magic Lakoff frames! Etc. etc.

However, President Bush had unified government for much of his time in office and sky-high approval ratings for a couple of years after 9/11. And despite Bush’s current unpopularity, Democrats don’t have the votes to break a filibuster or override a veto. That’s where the causal story begins and ends. The Democratic base doesn’t want to face this hard reality, so they have spent the last six years in a perpetual cycle in which false hope gives way to disappointment and a search for scapegoats.

Update 9/21 2:32 PM: Phil Klinkner points out correctly that Bush’s post-9/11 approval surge had largely dissipated by 2004. I amended the description of this above.