Ready for the Next Mini-Maelstrom?

Dan Rather, on Morning Joe, just said something a handful of minutes ago that will dominate a lot of chatter today and will have implications for the race going forward. Asked by Tiki Barber about his take on Fox News' release of the Jesse Jackson off-camera video, Rather premised his take by noting that in today's 24/7 news media culture, you had better be ready for anything you say to be on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow, after being all over TV the day before.

Rather then proceeded to talk about his respect for Jesse Jackson, who had certainly "paved the way for Osama bin Laden." (Yes, the whole name.) Nobody reacted or said a word, and Rather did not notice. To drive the irony point home, he then finished by referring back to the "front page of the newspaper" a 2d time.

Rather has just given carte blanche for Republicans to "slip" and negate the hue and cry with "Rather made the slip too... innocent mistake!" Wonder if McCain himself will do it in one high profile way and Plead the Rather.

EDIT: slight quote correction (video link here)... "paving the way for an Osama bin Laden."

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Democrats Swayed More By Muslim Misinfo

A few hours after Nate argued earlier today that:

Put differently, if you oppose Obama, it becomes much more likely that you do so for reasons related to his race, or because you believe one of the smears about his character, if we also learn that you're a Democrat.

By coincidence a brand new Pew poll confirms exactly that insight. The title of the article explaining the poll results says it all: "Belief that Obama is Muslim is Durable, Bipartisan - but Most Likely to Sway Democratic Votes."

That's called prescient good timing.

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Equal Time

Dan Riehl of Riehl World View, whom I directed some criticism at the other night over the New Yorker cover faux-controversy, writes in.

Here's from my original post:

Hence, the irony of the cover art. (The right's favorite punchline about the cover seems to be, "all humor has it's basis in reality" [sic]. To which I'd ask: what part has the basis in reality? The terrorist part or the terrorist part?)

Here is the passage I quoted from Dan in fuller context:

"Oh, and lest someone else forget to point it out ... all humor has its basis in reality. Evidently the article doesn't, as it suggests the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been painting Obama to fit the cover. Since when has Hillary been considered part of that?"

Here is Dan (over e-mail):

I don't believe Obama is a "terrorist." If you read the reality portion of my post, it's in the graph with Hillary. In other words, yes, some have tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, potentially even a terrorist sympathizer - making the satire on mark. But much of that came from Hillary and Co. not the right. Though I'd expect it in the Fall when it matters. Hopefully a careful reading will make that more clear, though perhaps not. Best -- Dan

You can determine for yourself whether I mischaracterized Dan's original argument, but I'm actually very much in agreement with the argument as he clarified it in his e-mail. An awful lot of the most vicious anti-Obama smears have in fact come from the disillusioned left. Probably not "most of" -- but as Dan says, "much of".

Certainly, the right is not without blame. Fox News was responsible for the madrassa smear, the "terrorist fist jab", and the original and widely-distributed Muslim smear e-mail has been traced back to a RedState poster.

Still, there is no site more virulently and violently anti-Obama than the ostensibly left-leaning No Quarter, which bore responsibility for spreading the "whitey" smear" and on a daily basis accuses Obama of things ranging from faking his birth certificate to encouraging pedophiles through his "Kids for Obama" website.

Moreover, there is reason to believe that the "whitey" smear may have been propagated by pro-Clinton forces that went beyond Johnson. This is from a post I drafted about a month ago and never went live with, but which seems topical now.

There are no people who have to have seen the Michelle Obama "whitey" tape.

Furthermore, there are no people who claim to have spoken with anybody who has seen the Michelle Obama "whitey" tape.

This is because the tape does not exist.

There are three people who claim to have spoken with people who have spoken with people who have seen the tape. Those people are Larry C. Johnson, Bob Beckel, and Roger Stone.

What do these people have in common?

Larry C. Johnson is a Clinton -- let's call him a Clinton enthusiast.

Bob Beckel is a Democratic strategist.

So we have two Democrats. The oddball was always Roger Stone, who is a Republican dirty tricks maestro.

Except that today, in a video posted at Barack Obama's smear-fighting website, we see that Beckel told Sean Hannity that his source was someone in the Clinton campaign:

Because I have heard this from people who are not mid-level in the Clinton campaign, not at the lower level -- I've heard this from people who have a lot of credibility, to me, as serious people.

I am not suggesting that this was any sort of organized effort on the Clinton campaign's behalf. For one thing, many of the people involved may be capable of lying. For another, part of the Clinton campaign's problem was a lack of coordination, so we would probably be talking more a lone wolf sort of scenario where something went off and did something stupid without approval. But it does seem plausible to me that someone with some measure of authority in the campaign was inventing, and disseminating, these rumors.

If you want to get into circumstantial evidence, the timing of the rumors, coming at the very end of the primary process when Clinton's prospects for the nomination were slim and her campaign was desperate, would certainly seem to be more fortuitous for Clinton than the for the GOP. Her main objective at that point was to find some way to freeze the superdelegates and extend her clock, and this is the sort of thing that might have done it.

It would also make sense in terms of the degrees of separation involved. Nobody on the Clinton campaign can claim to have had access to the tape, because then the question would be why weren't they using it. But they can claim to have spoken with people who have access to the tape, and claim that those people were Republicans who were waiting to use it as an October Surprise. Why a Republican who was in possession of the tape would tell a high-level operative in the Clinton campaign about it, I don't know -- this would certainly seem to ruin the 'surprise' element -- but it provides some cover for plausible deniability.

Finally, the Clinton campaign was accused of this precise kind of behavior before -- not spreading a rumor, but spreading a rumor about a rumor -- back in November through the vehicle of Bob Novak.

I might also add that county chairs in the Clinton campaign were caught distributing the Muslim smear e-mail.

Here, I suppose, is the thing. There are all sorts of reasons to be opposed to Barack Obama's candidacy. Most of them are perfectly legitimate -- you think he'll raise your taxes, you want to keep in the troops in Iraq, you think he's too young and inexperienced to handle a crisis, etc. A small minority of them aren't as legitimate: you don't like black people. You think he's part of a Muslim sleeper cell.

If you take your typical Republican, they'll have lots of these legitimate reasons for opposing Obama's candidacy. They might have some illegitimate ones too, but the basic disagreements with the Democrats on economic and foreign policy would suffice to preclude from voting for Obama. That doesn't mean there might not be some strategic benefit to their spreading smears about Obama (see Dan's warning about expecting such things in the fall), but of the Republicans who oppose Obama, I'd assume that relatively few of them do so for such reasons.

On the other hand, if you're a Democrat, that takes a whole lot of the legitimate reasons for opposing Obama off the table -- particularly as his views were in alignment with those of his leading opponent, Hillary Clinton, on about 98 percent of issues. So most of the criticisms necessarily go to character, some of which are reasonable enough ("he's too arrogant") and some of which are not ("he's a black dude").

Put differently, if you oppose Obama, it becomes much more likely that you do so for reasons related to his race, or because you believe one of the smears about his character, if we also learn that you're a Democrat. Of course, there are many fewer Democrats who oppose Obama than Republicans. But I would guess that racism, hatred and stupidity are pretty evenly divided across the political spectrum.

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When Memes Collide

The cover is brilliant. But I read the New Yorker for the articles.

Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word epic by no means paints the most flattering picture of Barack Obama. His Obama is remarkably intelligent and very level-headed, but also understands every lever of power, and is ambitious to the point of being ruthless.

Well, no shit he's ambitious. For any American to go from a relatively unprivileged childhood (or a privileged one for that matter) to be on the doorstep of the Preisdency by the time he's age 46 requires a perfect storm of luck, intelligence, and ambition. Obama has ample amounts of each.

But the article is more remarkable for revealing what Obama is not.

One, he's not some Pierre Trudeau type of academic. Obama became interested in politics very early, and seemed to have some keen understanding of his upside potential. The sometimes languid pace of academia was not really compatible with that.

Two, Obama was not corrupt. He knew how to navigate the rules of the system. But he didn't cheat the system. Obama succeeded, for instance, in disqualifying Alice Palmer from the ballot in the Illinois State Senate because she faked hundreds of signatures to get her name on it, and then Obama called her out. That's maybe not the most mannerly, tea-and-crumpets way of doing things. But Obama didn't cheat. Palmer had cheated. What Obama did was to exploit some of the inefficiencies of the Chicago machine system. Tony Rezko donates, though legal channels, a bunch of money because he expects you to behave like a typical machine politician and do him illegal favors? What to do? Well, you take his money. And then you don't do him the favors.

Third, Obama is not any kind of radical, and particularly not any kind of radical black nationalist. His associations with people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers may have arisen out of a certain amount of political convenience; they were significant players in the South Side political scene. But there is no evidence that he shared many of their political ideas. Hyde Park is not some liberal enclave in the way that Berkley or Boulder is. It is, rather, a place where people are very tolerant of different ideas. Liberal and even radical ideas, but notably also, conservative ones (where do Leon Kass and John Mearsheimer teach -- and where did Milton Friedman?). Hyde Park prides itself on being a laboratory of free thought and free speech, and so these people can lead a relatively happy coexistence there. But their views do not represent the consensus, and there is certainly no evidence that they represented Obama's.

And moving out of Hyde Park into the South Side community at large, Obama enjoyed relatively chilly relations with many of the district's more predictably left-liberal black politicians. Obama isn't a Black Panther. But Bobby Rush was. Obama tried to primary him out of Congress.

And so while some on the right (and others, less coherently, on the loopy left) will try and excoriate Obama for the political equivalent of not helping old ladies to cross the street, a lot of their favorite narratives about Obama are blown up by this article. Hence, the irony of the cover art. (The right's favorite punchline about the cover seems to be, "all humor has it's basis in reality" [sic]. To which I'd ask: what part has the basis in reality? The terrorist part or the terrorist part?)

That does not mean that the Obama that emerges from Lizza's piece is particularly warm and cuddly. He is certainly a very political creature, and there is something a little steely and postmodern about it all. But it is also not clear that Obama is playing some kind of angle. He seems, rather, to hold a lot of fairly mainstream, somewhat empirically-driven views -- still an idealist in certain ways, but not highly ideological. The White House may represent to him some sort of final step in his self-actualization, but he's not going there to get a blow job, or to play out some sort of Oedipal complex. It's all actually sort of ... boring.



EDIT: Here's the other important thing to understand about the cover. It's certainly provocative. But it's not scary. On the contrary, it takes a scary idea, and makes it nonscary -- literally cartoonish. If the drawing of the Obamas had been a little more photorealistic, then you might have the sort of thing that would lie dormant in people's subconsciousnesses and potentially do some damage. But it isn't.

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Better to be Lucky...

So I decided to title this as one of National Review guys might just to get the point across. But there is both real reason to criticize the press -- and a layer-cake of irony in the way the media cycle has played out over the past 24 hours.

Something of importance actually happens in the world -- Iran test-fires missiles. The McCain people sense an opportunity, and for just about the first time in this campaign, organize a couple of those Howard Wolfson fire drill conference calls. Their candidate gets to get off the teleprompters for a few days -- and for the record, while I think that McCain engaged in some pretty bad distortions of Obama's position, he also looked in his element out there.

And then ... something of no importance of all happens. Jesse Jackson has a YouTube moment, and that story sucks up all the oxygen in the room.

I would agree with the conventional wisdom that the optics of the story are liable to be favorable to Barack Obama -- but that's in large part because the right-leaning punditry so strongly dislikes Jackson that they'll torpedo their own candidate's momentum to try and nail him. Kathryn Jean Lopez practically endorsed Obama today. Pat Buchanan, who also loved the Sasha/Melia interview, sounded on Morning Joe like he was just about ready to vote for him.

I'm not trying to be a party-pooper. It was an hysterically funny moment, like some kind of Larry David gag. It's good television. But it's not really news.

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Energy Gap: Following Campaign News "Very Closely"

As the political news shows bury themselves in the micro stories such as Affaire Clark, the macro factors continue to be the most striking indicators in this election. In addition to right track/wrong track numbers that in poll after poll after poll after poll (despite some Nate-noted problems with the LA Times/Bloomberg poll) presage a mammoth wave of voter dissatisfaction, voter enthusiasm disparity continues to be a macro-level harbinger of bad tidings for Republicans. (See case studies here, here, and here.)

Courtesy of Pew, we learn that Democrats are following news about this presidential race much more closely than Republicans. Since the start of the campaign, Pew has tracked the percentage of partisans and independents following campaign news “very closely.” As July 2008 opens, this index shows its widest gap since Pew began tracking: 52% (of Ds) to 28% (of Rs), a near double-up.



This is a fascinating chart. Three things jump out. One, the intensely competitive race began to climax interest-wise in late February with the onset of “Shame on You Barack Obama!” and Clinton’s drama-laden Kitchen Sink Strategy.

Two, for all of the initial hit from Kitchen Sink Strategy drama, for all the Jeremiah Wright and Bittergate controversies that began in mid-March and which captured the media’s collective breath, the "very close" public interest dropped sharply (10-15% across the board).

Three, the single most interesting time for Republican voters, to date, occurred not when John McCain won the nomination battle but when Obama and Clinton were going at it hot and heavy in the roughly ten-day runup to the March 4 primaries.

This final point has to be troubling and underscores the rationale behind the shakeup in the McCain camp yesterday. Whichever guilty party you want to blame it on – historic and dynamic Obama/Clinton campaigns, the “liberal media” obstinately refusing to report on McCain, lack of enthusiasm among Republicans for what their own party hath wrought, McCain himself for his gruntychucklish “that’s not change you can believe in!” lime-green delivery – the fact that the window of McCain’s own nomination win (mid-30s) was far less attention-capturing for Republicans than Obama v. Clinton for the March 4 runup (mid-40s) cannot be spun both positively and persuasively.

To win, McCain needs big Republican turnout to compete with the expected big Democratic turnout. He can’t rely solely on antipathy toward Obama. He has to inspire his own base, and he can’t do that if his base finds Democratic drama is 25-30% more riveting than him winning the nomination. For a game-changing move in the numbers, McCain needs game-changing messaging.

If there is any comfort for McCain partisans out of the chart, maybe it’s that there’s still room for Obama to be defined in the minds of less-attentive Republicans (and independents, who generally track with Republicans by this measure), particularly if the Republican base is not yet tuned into "campaign news." Underground smears, though not officially owned by the campaign, will certainly be a part of it. Just the other day an otherwise sweet girl solemnly informed me that Obama was secretly only “8.25% black.” (Yes, that is one-12.1212121212th black, for those scoring at home.) But something tells me the dissatisfied public right track/wrong track mood is going to dwarf the traction of smears. If I were a Republican, I wouldn’t feel comfortable betting on the smears.

Perhaps the most significant lesson Pew's chart teaches us is that Kitchen Sink attacks and "controversy" depress "very close" attention across the board. Counterintuitively for those who voraciously consume political news and have an emotional investment in the outcome, just when it seems like everything is becoming Urgent with a capital U because of some particular story, that very well may be when the aggregate of millions are tuning out.

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Irresponsible Journalism Alert

It took more than four months, but something finally beat out the Vicki Iseman story for its sheer chutzpah and utter irresponsibility.

The culprit is this piece from the Washington Post, which alleges that Barack Obama received a "discount" on his 30-year home mortgage when he purchased his house in Hyde Park in 2005. Obama's mortgage rate was 5.625 percent; the Washington Post cites databases stating that the average rate on comparable properties was 5.93 percent.

So Obama's rate was 30 basis points better than the average. However, the amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.

Unless the Washington Post has access to Obama's FICO score -- and unless it has rented an apartment to him, it probably doesn't -- it is missing a pretty important piece of information on what Obama's mortgage rate ought to have been. What was Obama's FICO score? I don't know, but considering that...

* Obama had just gotten a $2.27 million book deal from Random House -- about $1 million more than the value of the mortgage.
* The Obamas each had exceptionally secure jobs that paid them a combined annual salary of about $500,000 per year.
* The Obamas had just sold their condo, on which they had realized a $137,500 profit.
* The Obamas were prominent public figures whose political futures depended in part on maintaining a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
* The Obamas are known to be relatively thrifty and have no credit card debt but substantial savings.

...I would think that the Obamas were exceptionally creditworthy. So indeed, Obama received a "discount" -- the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.

And, yes, I apologize for being a little off-subject (and running three media-bashing pieces in a row), but one of the things that ties together my work over here and my work at Baseball Prospectus is that I want the media to be smarter and more accountable when they cite statistical information, be it mortgage rates or polling numbers or batting averages. This article was neither smart nor accountable. It's the equivalent of noting that Alex Rodriguez has a batting average 40 points better than the league average, and using that to infer that the umpires were biased in his favor.

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The Electric Minor Political Scandal Acid Test

Newsweek reports that the McCains did not pay taxes for four years on a piece of San Diego beachfront property. Is this a significant scandal? Will the story have any legs? Allow me to introduce the Electric Minor Political Scandal Acid Test (EMPSCAT). I've been thinking of rolling this out since at least dinnertime tonight.

EMPSCAT consists of a battery of five questions. The more of the questions that can be answered in the affirmative, the bigger the impact of the story. The five questions -- chock-full of Halperin style and/but/