Farewell to Ed Quillen

The Denver Post's Ed Quillen has passed away at the age of 61. I must admit I was rather a fan of his columns. He came off as kind of a lefty mountain crank, but his columns were cogent, well-written, and well thought out. Note this one, in which he compares modern day Republicans with the Confederates of 1860. I don't necessarily subscribe to everything he wrote, but it's a nice observation about the persistence of ideology, even if party labels may jump around a bit.

Rest in peace, Ed.

New Media and the 2012 Presidential Campaign

On May 11th, the University of Denver hosted a panel on new media and its effects on the 2012 presidential election. The panelists were Brent Blackaby (Trilogy Consulting), Jay Newton-Small (Time), Dorian Warren (Columbia University), and Dave Weigel (Slate/MSNBC). Professors Nancy Wadsworth, Peter Hanson, and I moderated.

The discussion was wide-ranging, covering the use of social media sites by campaigns as well as the impact of such media on journalism, voters, and candidates. I found the discussion fascinating, but don't just take my word for it. You can watch the video here.

The effect of social media on presidential elections

I'm co-hosting a panel today at my university on the effects of social media on journalism, politics, and the current presidential election. The panelists are Dave Weigel (Slate/MSNBC), Jay Newton-Small (Time), Dorian Warren (Columbia), and Brent Blackaby (Trilogy Consulting). You can watch it live from 2-4pm Mountain time here.

What apathy?

Along the lines of the story I mentioned the other day in which a writer claimed that there was no enthusiasm for Obama while providing evidence to the contrary, here's a story in the American Prospect claiming young voters are apathetic compared to how they were in 2008, entitled "Young, Restless, and Not Voting." Note that the entire premise of the story hangs on the following piece of data:

According to a poll released late last week, 61 percent of college-age Millennials (the futuristic-sounding name given to the generation born in the late 1980s and early 1990s) are registered to vote, but only 46 percent say that they will likely do so in November. By way of comparison, in 2008, 58.5 percent of the same age group was registered to vote, and 48 percent of them actually did.

Go ahead, read it again. Okay, let's sum up. Voter registration is higher today among this age group than it was four years ago. And 46 percent claim they will vote in November -- just two percentage points shy of the allegedly staggering 48 percent that voted four years ago. The poll on which that 46% figure was based, by the way, has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points (it says so on p. 40). In other words, predicted voter turnout among young voters this year is statistically identical to actual voter turnout four years ago.

The rest of the article goes on to try to offer some rationale for why this trend that isn't actually occurring is occurring.

I certainly understand the desire to force findings into a theory, even if they don't fit perfectly, but here the evidence is precisely the opposite of the narrative. Maybe we could change the narrative?

Palin, Secret Service, and dog whistles

Somewhat related to the Secret Service prostitution scandal, it was revealed last night that one of the agents recently fired in the scandal had been assigned to then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008 and was "checking her out" and posting about it on Facebook. Obviously, that's truly unprofessional behavior and shouldn't be tolerated. And obviously, that won't faze Palin, who has a famously thick skin about these sorts of things.

No, wait, I forgot that Palin has the thinnest skin in politics, and whenever anyone disses her, she gets to go on Fox to talk about it. (Damn, I want that deal.) So here's the transcript of a truly painful interview with Greta Van Susteren in which Palin repeatedly tries to link the Secret Service agent's behavior to Barack Obama (who was a U.S. Senator at the time of the incident) and Van Susteren tries (unsuccessfully) to keep the train on the rails. A few key moments:

Palin: Well, this agent who was kind of ridiculous there in posting pictures and comments about checking someone out. Well, check this out, bodyguard. You're fired. And I hope his wife kicks his ocoli and sends him to the doghouse, as long as he's not eating the dog, along with his former boss.

Oh my God, she totally went there! No, I don't know what an ocoli is, but she totally jumped on the Obama-eats-dog meme, giving a subtle shout-out to all the hockey moms out there who disapprove of presidents who eat dogs, or something.

Van Susteren then tries to suggest that maybe Obama should just be held accountable for things that happened during his presidency. But Palin wasn't buying:

Well, Greta, it's not just this particular issue, though, with GSA or with the Secret Service, it's everything that's going on in our federal government right now. What are we getting for the tax dollars that are being taken from our incomes, being sent to the federal government today? 

We're getting higher unemployment numbers than when Barack Obama first took over. We're getting less energy [security] than when Barack Obama took over.... 

And the number one thing, Greta, that he is responsible for is -- he today violating Article I, Section [9], Clause 7 of the United States Constitution in not having a budget. Going on three years, over a thousand days with no budget, no blueprint to run our federal government!

Is this a conservative talking point that I missed? Obama is violating the Constitution by not having a budget? Because you know who's supposed to create a budget? Yeah, the Congress -- that's why is mentioned in Article I. Not that the president plays no role here, but suggesting that Obama is somehow violating the Constitution is a real stretch.

Then Van Susteren concedes that the buck does stop with the president. And Palin's all over that.

Yes. Exactly. That's the bottom line. And thank God we live in America, where in this republic, we have these democratic votes that are taken, you know, every four years in November. And we get to decide whether we want the positive change that we so seek, that we so need in order to keep our nation solvent. 

Thank God that we have that freedom. Thank God that we have the United States military fighting for the defense of freedom!

Yeah, well spoken. You might have thought that after four years with a lot of interviewing experience, Palin would be less of a trainwreck on camera than she was in 2008. You'd have been wrong. For the life of me, I don't know why these interviews keep happening. Are they good for Fox? Are they good for Republicans? Are they good for Palin? I'm kind of doubtful on all three counts.

Political scientists, bloggers, and journalists

I'm just back from a truly delightful meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. Other than a creepy me-stalking meme and some underwhelming smelt at Miller's Pub, it was a big success both professionally and socially (as though I could still distinguish between the two).

I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion called "Toward a Greater Dialogue: Political Scientists Meet Journalists," chaired by Lynn Vavreck. John Sides and I represented the world of political scientist-bloggers, while the journalists were Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and James Warren of the Chicago News Group. (Gilbert maintains the Wisconsin Voter Blog. And be sure to check out Warren's recaps of MPSA for The Atlantic, here and here.) The roundtable made for a really nice discussion (and should be available in podcast format soon), but I wanted to revise and extend my remarks a bit here.

Journalists-meet-political-scientists panels are becoming a regular feature at academic conferences, and I think this is a positive development. If I may draw an historically inspired (if probably inappropriate) analogy, journalism a few years ago was like Kate Winslet in Titanic -- lovely, enjoying first class, but lost in its own world and its own problems. It was largely oblivious to political science (Leonardo DiCaprio in this scenario) -- smart, wanting to impress journalism, but carrying a bit of a chip on its shoulder. In recent years, though, we've begun seeing each other, dancing to Irish music, enjoying the occasional hook-up in the jalopy, enriching both our lives.

Obviously I don't want to push this metaphor too far, since it results in political science frozen to death at the bottom of the North Atlantic. But I think one of the things that has brought us closer together in recent years (other than Billy Zane or sea ice) is blogging. Nyhan, Drezner, Bernstein, Putnam, Greene, Dionne, Glassman, the crews at the Monkey Cage and LGM, and many others have been working at making political science research more accessible to journalism and to political observers at large. (I've been trying to do my part, as well.) It was extremely heartening to read, for example, Mark Blumenthal's coverage of the early presidential primaries and caucuses, or this article from the Idaho Spokane Spokesman Review quoting four political scientists on the topic of Tea Party influence in state legislatures. I took these as evidence of the political science perspective working its way into mainstream political coverage, and while these things could have happened without blogs, I'm pretty sure blogs made them more likely.

While I believe this growing relationship between journalists and political scientists has helped to improve the quality of political coverage, it's clear we're not reaching everyone. I was curious if it was possible to measure political science's penetration of journalism. Below is one attempt: I used a Google News search to count the number of times the term "political scientist" appears in the text of New York Times and Washington Post articles annually. This is far from a perfect measure. Nonetheless, two trends emerge: we are quoted more in election years, and we are quoted with decreasing frequency.

Now, as Sides pointed out, if our perspective is being adopted by journalists, maybe they don't have to quote us at all. But it's also possible we're just reaching a small group of journalists, although perhaps they will influence their colleagues. I certainly don't expect us to reach everybody. I imagine the Chris Matthewses and Maureen Dowds of journalism will continue to claim that politics is driven by "narrative" and personality and manliness and tone and clothing and that elections are won by the taller candidate with the best smile whom you most want to have a beer with. But I still imagine we can reach more people. The question is how.

I was heartened during the roundtable to hear the journalists (including one in the audience) say that they actually want our input in their stories -- they seem to think we have something useful to say. One reason they don't always include us is because there are only so many hours in the day, and we have a penchant for droning on and on with caveats and jargon. I think many of us are guilty on this count, and it would frankly be good for us to learn how to describe our research, and that of our peers, with the journalistic audience in mind. Many of our schools offer media training, teaching us how to talk to reporters. We should do this training. Not to dumb down our work, but to learn how to describe it in a way that seems interesting to a broader audience than three reviewers for the American Political Science Review.

I'd also like to encourage more blogging by political scientists. The ability to boil down ongoing research into a few punchy paragraphs is a great skill to have, and not just for talking to reporters. Lynn Vavreck also suggested some sort of poli sci boot camp for journalists, where we spend a day talking to reporters and describing how we approach research questions. And as the reporters made clear, just getting into each others' Rolodexes is a great start. They'll call us if they know who we are, and we should feel free to call them if we have an idea for a story.

I left the roundtable feeling quite encouraged for the future of both political science and political journalism. I'm hoping this conversation is just getting started.

How not to cover academic research: Obamacare edition

I was pleased to see how much coverage the paper on the health reform vote I did with Brendan Nyhan, Eric McGhee, John Sides, and Steve Greene received last week. While I see this as an encouraging sign for both academia and political journalism (and blogging!), it also serves as a reminder of the different perspectives and professional goals of academics and reporters.

Basically, we analyzed the impact of a two-year old roll call vote on an election that occurred a year and a half ago. While that may be interesting scholarship to some, it's not really "news," in the sense that it's not, well, new. What is potentially newsworthy is the idea that the effect we reported in the paper -- voters turning against House Democrats for supporting health care reform -- could still be in play for 2012, possibly costing Democrats the Senate and the White House.

Now, notably, our paper doesn't mention this. In our blog write-ups of the paper last week, we offered some very tentative speculation about an impact on 2012. Sides noted several reasons why the Obamacare vote might not matter much this year, concluding in his op/ed that Obamacare may well end up a "sideshow" in the election. Nyhan notes that the economy will be the big salient issue in this year's election. Here's what I had to say:

One reason ACA might not have much of an effect in Congressional elections this year is that all the vulnerable Democrats were kicked out in 2010. The ACA supporters who remain have relatively safe districts. It may be that a few senators who were not up in 2010 could still pay a price (this may be part of Ben Nelson's reason for retiring), but that's much harder to say.

All pretty hedged, tentative stuff, as out-of-sample predictions really have to be. But some recent coverage has gone way beyond this. Doyle McManus at the LA Times thinks that the unpopularity of ACA could spell "serious trouble" for Obama's reelection prospects. And here's what Jeffrey Anderson and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard had to say:

[The authors] conclude that Democrats’ support for Obama-care led voters “to perceive them as more liberal,” “more ideologically distant,” and “out of step.” This was particularly true for independent voters. In other words, voters not only oppose Obamacare as policy but view it as a symbol of a commitment to big-government liberalism.

This strongly suggests that the more Obama-care becomes an issue in the fall, the more it will highlight President Obama’s liberalism in the minds of voters—particularly independent voters. It correspondingly suggests that the more this election is focused simply on stewardship of the economy, the less Obama’s big-government liberalism will be highlighted in voters’ minds.

A few things here. First, the electorate of 2010 will look rather different from the electorate of 2012. To say that our study shows that "voters... oppose Obamacare as policy," as Anderson and Kristol do, is to elide some pretty important differences between the two elections. Second, we really don't know (and our study didn't say) what kind of effect health care reform would have on President Obama. Voters go into a congressional election typically not knowing a great deal about the congressional candidates. A highly salient roll call vote on health care reform could provide a convenient (and not terribly inaccurate) information shortcut for such voters, helping them fill in the blanks in their assessment of the incumbent. But does the health reform vote provide any new information about Barack Obama, whom is already pretty well known by the 2012 electorate? He ran for president in support of this legislation four years ago and championed it throughout 2009 and 2010. What does his support of health care reform tell you that you didn't already know about him?

Meanwhile, Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner goes even further:

Democratic support for Obamacare cost House Democrats their majority in 2010 and could whack Senate Democratic backers of the president’s health care plan this year, according to a new analysis provided to Washington Secrets.

Well, I suppose it could still hurt Senate Democratic backers of ACA, but we really didn't say that. Here's more:

With the Supreme Court and both parties gearing up for another bruising fight this year over Obamacare, the issue is likely to crash into the fall elections. Masket said that could undermine Democratic efforts to keep control of the Senate, since far more Democratic senators who voted for health care reform are up for reelection this year than in 2010.

That may be true about more ACA supporters being up for reelection this year, but I don't recall saying it or even thinking it. I can't find any claim to this effect in our paper or in our later write-ups. As far as I can tell, Bedard's "Masket said..." statement is pure fiction.

News reporting of academic research is inevitably tricky. Hedged conjecture becomes certain prediction. Statistical controls are often ignored. Discussion is often projected outside the data that produced the original findings. Key concepts about statistical significance are often missed. But it would be nice if columnists and reporters could acknowledge some of the uncertainty inherent in such research, or at least refrain from making stuff up.


Update: Yesterday was a ski day for me, so I'd missed that Jonathan Bernstein made many of the same points about presidential elections. My bad.

Who's enforcing journalistic standards?

Marc Herman has some interesting stories about the relationship between publishers and journalists, helping to explain why he released his work on Libya as an Amazon Single. I found this passage particularly compelling:

In traditional publishing, particularly books, the impulse to enforce professional standards comes more and more from the reporter and less and less from the editor. This suits me, but it’s the reverse of how things usually go. Traditionally, the reporter pushes to include material. The editor evaluates the material’s appropriateness. The final balance of source and information happens in the editor’s office, not the reporter’s notepad. 

A dramatization of the system a lot of people know comes from the old movie version of the reporter’s classic All the President’s Men. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, as the reporters, want to run a damning story about the President. Jason Robards, as the editor, keeps telling them they haven’t got the story yet. 

Great in a 30 year-old movie. In my 20 years, I’ve never had an editor say that. I’ve said it to editors lots — that I don’t have it yet.

Different approaches to reporting the news

Screen capture provided by Chris Zorn. Click to enlarge.

Trends that are not actually occurring, Obama donor edition

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Confessore has a piece up claiming that Obama's small donors, who were such a major part of his support in 2008, are not showing up for him during this election cycle. The thrust of the piece is qualitative, involving interviews with some of Obama's 2008 donors who are now disappointed with him and haven't given him any money yet. But behind these assertions is a quantitative claim: Obama is not commanding the same level of support he was four years ago. As Confessore says:

Through June 30, the close of the most recent campaign reporting period, more than 552,000 people had contributed to Mr. Obama’s re-election effort, according to campaign officials. Half of them were new donors, and nearly all of them gave contributions of less than $250.

But those figures obscured another statistic: a vast majority of Mr. Obama’s past donors, who number close to four million, have not yet given him any money at all [emphasis added].

Okay, there's a big and very obvious problem with this comparison. The half-million people who have donated to Obama's 2012 campaign so far (that is, through June of 2011) are being compared with those who donated through the entirety of the 2008 campaign season. The bulk of donors don't get involved until much closer to the primaries and general election. The appropriate comparison point would be those who donated through June of 2007. According to the FEC, there were just over 77,000 donations to Obama in the first half of 2007, roughly a third of which were under $250.

So, just to review, Obama has received more than seven times as many donations at this point in the 2012 cycle than he did by this point in the 2008 cycle. What's more, the share of his donations coming from small (under $250) contributions is now greater than it was four years ago.

Now, of course, there are plenty of reasons why these two elections cycles don't make for a great comparison. Obama is the president now, and he was only a modestly-famous freshman senator four years ago. Conversely, he was going into a hotly contested primary back then and appears to be unopposed for the nomination today. That said, there is no quantitative basis for Confessore's assertions.

That's not to say that there are no 2008 Obama supporters who are disappointed with his presidency -- I'm sure there are plenty! And I haven't collected the data that would tell us the extent to which those supporters are contributing today. But to say that the half-million who have given to Obama this year compare unfavorably to the 4 million who gave to him previously is really grossly misleading.

Seeking legal remedies where no law exists

Reporting from Tripoli, Marc Herman describes a horrific attack on a family by a group of Khaddafi loyalists. But what remedies are available? As Marc concludes,

If what appears to have happened to the Mrayed family really did, it would surely be a war crime, and almost certainly only one of many such cases that will emerge from Libya's war. But journalists, to our great frustration, lack subpoena power or the ability to compel on-the-record testimony. The Mrayed family must not only wait for a formal investigation by a viable legal authority, they must wait for Libya to build one.

Journalistic trends both awesome and terrible

If you care about campaign journalism, I've got good news and bad news for you.

Let's start with the bad news. That would be Kathleen Parker's latest column about Rick Perry. Excerpt:

The same things that drove liberals mad about George W. will repeat themselves with Perry. It’s that certitude mixed with bravado. It is also, dare I say, their certain brand of manliness. Weathered, creased and comfortable in jeans, they convey a regular guyness that everyday Americans relate to. Take it or leave it, it happens to be true.

Regular guy,
comfortable in jeans.

Please just kill me. I can handle the stuff about candidate personality and pop psychology, I can handle the outlandish claims about fundraising and advertisements tipping elections, but I feel like if I have to go through another whole election cycle filled with this sort of gender-stereotyping, regular-guyness, Americans-can-relate-to-him-because-he-jogs-with-a-gun-and-never-rethinks-anything, my-schoolgirl-crushes-correlate-with-American-voting-behavior-at-1.0 kind of crap, I'm just going to snap. Quick reminder, Ms. Parker: W. lost the popular vote to an egghead in 2000, barely beat another egghead in 2004 despite being a very manly commander-in-chief during a war, and left office with an approval rating in the 20s. Even if Americans can relate to such "regular guyness" -- a dubious proposition -- there's about zero evidence that matters politically.

Luckily, there is a decidedly good development in campaign journalism pulling me back from the abyss. A few weeks back, political scientist Hans Noel challenged journalists to try covering the party aspect of nominations rather than the candidates themselves. Mark Blumenthal has decided to do exactly that, conducting a survey of party elites (or what he calls the "power outsiders") in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The survey questions are pretty limited so far, but this approach has the potential to yield some very useful information about how the party picks its nominee -- a lot more useful than information about Michele Bachmann confusing Elvis' birthday with the anniversary of his death, entertaining though that may be.

For some other encouraging coverage along these lines, check out this piece by Jay Cost and Nate Silver's recent post that features this awesome Venn diagram:

Kudos to Cost, Silver, and Blumenthal, and to Hans for saving the universe.

All Whitey, all the time

I recently visited relatives in New England, and my visit roughly coincided with the FBI's apprehension of gangster Whitey Bulger. It's hard to express just how much this story has dominated the area's news. The newspapers have lead with the story of Bulger's arrest for a week now, and the local TV news have covered it nonstop.

Last week, I watched what I believe was the local NBC affiliate interviewing Whitey's neighbors in Santa Monica, where he'd resided since the mid-90s. (We were apparently neighbors for a year or so.) They then managed to get a rare interview with actor Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg, of course, was one of the stars of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," in which Jack Nicholson played a fictitious character inspired by Whitey Bulger. Not surprisingly, Wahlberg had little to add to the coverage.*

All this media attention has a cost, of course. Boston reporter David Bernstein informs me that on Tuesday, the state of Massachusetts had to pass an emergency 10-day extension of its budget because the FY 2012 budget is late. That's actually pretty big state government news. Nonetheless, both the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe used Associated Press reporting to cover that story, since all their regular reporters are off in Whiteyworld.


*It's a pet peeve of mine when actors are interviewed about the political aspects of movies they're in or characters they've played. It's not that they're not smart or informed about such matters -- they certainly can be -- but it's just so far from their area of expertise. This is why I love "Inside the Actor's Studio," where actors get to talk about the challenges of acting and filmmaking. I could listen to Stallone tell the Rocky-esque story of the making of "Rocky" a hundred times and not be bored. In general, I'd much rather hear Julia Roberts talk about the difficulties of playing Erin Brockovich than hear her talk about Erin Brockovich's legal research.

Covering a scandal

Let's say you're the editor of a prominent newspaper covering a competitive election. Your reporters are hearing rumors about a sex scandal involving one of the leading candidates, but your newspaper has endorsed the other candidate. It's just a few days before the election. Do you run the story, potentially affecting the outcome of the election? If you do, what if it turns out the rumors were wrong? On the other hand, if you sit on the story, what happens if it turns out the rumors were right, and through your passivity, voters elect a time bomb?

Well, we needn't speculate further, because this is happening right now. Last Tuesday, Denver voters elected Michael Hancock as their next mayor over Chris Romer by a 58-42 margin. Yesterday's Denver Post, however, detailed a story that the Post had clearly been sitting on for some time: the records of a defunct prostitution service known as Denver Players show that a "Mike Handcock"* who worked for the city and had the same cell phone number as the mayor-elect had hired hookers from them on at least three occasions.

This is actually a pretty interesting case study in media politics in a one-newspaper town. These allegations were first publicized by a local Drudge-style blog shortly before the election, but were never circulated in the print or televised media or even most major blog coverage. I was following the mayoral race pretty closely, and I never heard anything about this until election night, when a reporter made an offhanded comment about it to me (even though he didn't actually report on the story). And one can certainly sympathize with the Post's awkward position** -- this could have tipped the race. Yeah, I know Hancock won by 16 points, but my impression is that a lot of those votes were pretty malleable and would have been swayed by this sort of news.

I'm curious where this goes from here. Does anyone know of a similar situation, where a candidate is elected but a serious scandal emerges before he/she takes office? What happens?


*Hee hee.
**Interestingly, the Post's coverage yesterday was not "Hancock has a hooker problem" but rather "Hancock promised us his phone records and is now reneging."

Obama scandal starting in 3... 2...

Brendan Nyhan has a really interesting piece up on the rather remarkable lack of scandals emerging from the Obama administration. Really, you have all the pieces in place -- an opposition party that despises the president and has subpoena power, a polarized political environment, a media system predisposed toward scandal coverage, etc. Where are the scandals?

Brendan suggests that Obama has been blessed, in a way, by a series of substantive events that have eaten up much of the available media time:

Just as slow news periods seem to encourage scandal coverage, my research shows that pressure from competing stories diverts attention and media resources that could have been devoted to negative coverage of the administration, reducing both the likelihood of presidential scandal and the volume of coverage those scandals receive. In Obama’s case, it is clear that external events have consumed much of the news agenda over the last eighteen months, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Arab Spring revolts, the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the killing of Osama bin Laden. The saturation coverage that these stories received left little room for scandal, particularly given the volume of debate over the merits of the president’s legislative agenda and his confrontation with the new Republican majority in the House.

I suppose one can quibble about the definition of scandal. The birther controversy, for example, was held as important by a nontrivial portion of the Republican Party, although it hardly derailed the administration and didn't really result in hearings or trials. But we really haven't seen anything like a Watergate, an Iran-Contra scandal, or even a Whitewater (which was based on only slightly more substance than the birther affair). At this point in Clinton's presidency, Dan Burton was already conducting simulations of Vince Foster's death using a handgun and a pumpkin in his backyard. Are these guys even trying today?

Brendan estimates that the likelihood of an Obama scandal will increase substantially over the next year. And so we wait.

Newt as the Republicans' Frankenstein

Jonathan Bernstein, on Newt Gingrich's attacks on the Ryan Medicare plan:

He’s still the same old irresponsible Newt, willing to say pretty much anything as long as it’s phrased as strongly as possible. Even if he said the opposite, in just as dire terms, two weeks ago. Or yesterday. Only this time, since he’s in a GOP primary, he’s going to turn some of that fire on his own party. And, yeah, they don’t like it. But they might have thought about that before, during the decade they were pretending he deserved to be on the Sunday shows and the op-ed pages, making the case for why Clinton or Gore or Kerry or Obama was fundamentally wrong for America. They propped him up. Now — for a while, at least — they’re going to have to live with him.

I remain a bit fuzzy on the whole mechanism of how prominent people get to be on the Sunday political talk shows or get printed in op-ed sections. Bernstein suggests here (and elsewhere) that Newt's regular appearances on "Meet the Press" and "This Week" and everywhere else have been on the orders of, or at least with the permission of, the national Republican Party, broadly defined. And to some extent, that's probably true -- if Newt was going to go on TV and talk about how Obamacare was radical socialism, I doubt too many Republican leaders were going to protest.

In another sense, though, just how much control did Republican elites have over him? Gingrich is a well-known egomaniac given to bombastic rhetoric, meaning a) he'll want to be on TV as much as possible; and b) TV shows will be happy to have him on because they can count on him saying something newsworthy. If Newt calls up Cokie Roberts and says he'd like to be on the show next week, does he really need to check in with anyone else first? Even if a Reince Priebus or a John Boehner or the Koch brothers didn't want Newt to do a show, just how much influence would they have over him?

No looting in Japan?

Some of Andrew Sullivan's readers do a nice job taking apart the pernicious "there's no looting in Japan" myth by citing stories of, well, looting in Japan. So while one angle here is that Japanese looting has been underreported, the other is that American looting has probably been overreported. The media reported many stories about looting and other illegal behavior in the days after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. However, as Cooper and Block noted in their book Disaster, these stories were often false or grossly exaggerated. Moreover, they point out, these reports tended to ignore another notable human reaction to the collapse of infrastructure: spontaneous community building. The book cites numerous instances of people banding together to create kitchens, shelters, and modes of transportation in New Orleans at a time when local, state, and federal governments failed to do that.

Japan's a big country. No doubt some people are looting, while others are trying to help each other, and others are just trying to stay alive. You can report on whichever aspect of this you want, although the resulting story is probably more reflective of the culture of the reporter than that of the afflicted country.

Showing government groping

I really hope the Denver Post got permission from the people depicted in these photographs.  It's one thing to be groped by TSA.  It's quite another to have the groping appear on page one.

Evolution of a Headline

• Jonathan Bernstein's blog: "Next! (Why Romney and Palin May Be Overrated)"
• The New Republic blog: "Next! (Why Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney Are Overrated)"
• The New Republic website: "Bernstein: History Proves That Palin and Romney Won’t Get the GOP Nomination"

Funny how academics don't engage the world of journalism more.

America's funniest moral scold

I ended up showing Jon Stewart's closing rally speech to both my classes today. While I disagree with Charli Carpenter that this will someday be seen as one of the Great American Speeches, it's a very good speech, and one whose content merits some reflection.

The speech was very much in line with some of Stewart's earlier reflections on needless partisanship in the media, particularly his epic Crossfire appearance.  The main argument, that people who disagree should still be nice to each other, is hardly controversial.  But he goes beyond that, saying that we really do need more comity in government, that excessive partisanship is hurting the country. As he said on Saturday:

We hear every damned day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done. The truth is, we do! We work together to get things done every damned day! The only place we don't is here [the Capitol] or on cable TV!

But Americans don't live here, or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done--not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.

He then goes on to draw a rather creative metaphor of cars entering a tunnel, who still manage to merge from 20 lanes to two despite their various disagreements.  But this is a false analogy.  Liberals and conservatives can merge lanes, or work together in an office, or live together as neighbors because those tasks have very little to do with being liberals or conservatives.  Those philosophies are governing philosophies.  We should not expect liberals and conservatives to get along when making governing decisions the way they do in other aspects of life because those decisions are essential to what it means to be a liberal or a conservative.  Compromises are, in some sense, betrayals.  When a liberal adopts a conservative policy stance, she has made herself less liberal in the process, and she has disappointed or even betrayed her cohort.  Yes, sometimes governing requires compromise, but it's quite another thing to suggest that ideologues should compromise for the sake of creating a more agreeable work environment.

A friend of mine (Hans Noel - see comments) also pointed out that the Jon Stewart at the rally would have some real disagreements with the Jon Stewart who interviewed President Obama last week.  The latter Stewart was criticizing Obama for compromising too much on health care reform and other policy matters.  He apparently wanted Obama to be more confrontational, regardless of how that affected the tone in Washington, because he thought the outcome was important.

And there's the rub.  We always want politicians to be nicer to each other, until they're arguing about things we hold dear, and then we want them to fight tooth and nail for those things.

So, okay, he's being a little ideologically inconsistent here, but he's no worse than the rest of us.  And I'm willing to grant some slack to the guy who created a battle of the bands between Ozzy Osbourne and Cat Stevens.