I'm Perplexed

as others are. What's the goal of this McCain ad? Couldn't it just as easily, with a few tweaks, be an Obama ad instead? What am I missing?

One Small Chunk of Data

Speaking to my point about the "undemocratic" nature of the Electoral College, via Matt Ygelsias:



UPDATE: The larger picture:

Worst Ads of the Season?

Politico says it's these.

A Much More Precise Electoral Map

from the NYT

Election Night Update

Okay, this will shock you all, I realize, but I have run into a Gigantor-sized bureaucratic fol-de-rol in trying to get something set up for election night. So how's this for an alternative plan: I'll end my Tuesday night class a bit early (we'll set a time this coming week), and we can head over to my apartment (about ten blocks north). I've two TVs in separate rooms, so we can bounce back and forth. And if you can find someplace not terribly expensive for Kosher food, we'll order in, and it will be on me. I'll ask you guys to be responsible for beverages, and paper/plastic cups and plates (or we can pick them up on the way). This is not ideal, I know, but it seems our best alternative without too much mishigos (spelling?). How's this sound? (Brief reply in comments).

"The Weirdness of Campaign Reporting"

Newsweek's Michael Hastings via Ezra Klein. With just a little Hunter S. Thompson.

We're Number 36! We're Number 36!

Press Freedom Index, 2008

Bias?

From a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

• Coverage of Obama began in the negative after the conventions, but the tone switched with the changing direction of the polls. The most positive stories about him were those that were most political -- focused on polling, the electoral map and tactics.
• For McCain, coverage began positively, but turned sharply negative with McCain's reaction to the crisis in the financial markets. As he took increasingly bold steps in an effort to reverse the direction of the polls, the coverage only worsened. Attempts to turn the dialogue away from the economy through attacks on Obama's character did hurt Obama's media coverage, but McCain's was even more negative.
• Coverage of Palin, in the end, was more negative than positive. In all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive and 33% were neutral. Contrary to what some critics have suggested, little of the coverage was about Palin's personal life (5%).
• Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden was nearly the invisible man. His coverage enjoyed just one large moment, the vice presidential debate, which also provided the only positive or neutral contribution to his coverage. Aside from that week, the limited coverage he did receive was far more negative than Palin's, and nearly as negative as McCain's.
• The economy was hardly a singular lens through which the media perceived the race. Though it was the No. 1 campaign topic overall, in five out of the six weeks analyzed, other topics drew more media attention, and the economy accounted for not much more of the campaign newshole (18%) than did assessments of the candidates in the four debates (17%).
• Horse race reporting, once again, made up the majority of coverage, but less so than earlier in the contest or in previous elections. Since the conventions ended, 53% of the newshole studied has focused on political matters, particularly tactics, strategy and polling -- twice the coverage focused on policy (20%). The focus on tactics and horse race increased in the last three weeks as both campaigns became more negative in their rhetoric.

Read the rest HERE.

Deep Geek Blogging

Pull up your socks -- I'm back. I'll pop in and comment on your newly-posted bloggy goodness within the next few days, but meanwhile, take a look at this nice, very different kind of fact-checking, via the political scientists at The Monkey Cage. Fun fact: one Dutch graduate student offered me an exegesis on how Heroes offers a keen window into American culture. Hmmmm. . . .

Blog Pause

Okay, I'm off. Back next week. Posting will be light, at best, though I will try to pop in periodically. Meanwhile, play nice, keep reading, keep watching, keep thinking, and post wise, insightful, professionally-formatted things. I'll probably not see the final debate, so tell me what I missed, especially as it relates to the media coverage.

Brave New World

Virtual ads.

"The Irrational Electorate"

Larry Bartels, reviewing questions and literature that should now be familiar. Worth your time.

Goodbye to All That?

Nate Silver on the "Bradley Effect"

More Kathleen Hall Jamieson

on Bill Moyers Journal.

A Whole 'Nother Kind of Debate

On Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 PM, in Weissberg Commons, the YC and SCW Political Science Society will host a debate with representatives from the McCain and Obama campaigns. I will serve as moderator. Questions will be drawn from those submitted by students: send yours (YU students only, please) to: yuelections@gmail.com.

I'd be especially grateful for some questions that stand a chance of provoking more than stump-speech responses or sound bite answers. And those that go beyond the very narrow range of matters subject to public discourse so far. And, of course, questions about media and the campaigns.

Pass along the e-mail address to your friends, as well.

Fake Advice to the Next Fake President

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

"The Haunting of the Present by the Past"

Trailer for new BBC documentary, "The American Future: A History"

Man in the Arena and Dr. No

If Ever I Need a Press Spokeperson

Please remind me not to hire this guy:

Effete, Pointy-Headed Intellectuals at Work

Non-media edition. Berkeley economist Brad De Long, prepping for class, modeling what Hofstadter meant by "intellectual":

Now I have to think about my Great Depression lectures: what have I learned from the financial crisis of the past fourteen months that should change what I think about the Great Depression? And how should I change what I think?

Self-Incriminating Evidence

re: something I said earlier tonight:

But, in this election year, the most interesting current or former state legislator is undoubtedly Senator Barack Obama from Illinois. While the National Journal has rated him the most liberal member of the Senate in 2007, the methodology that generated this result is suspect (as it was in 2004). I’d turn instead to the results of the far superior Poole-Rosenthal NOMINATE ideal point estimation algorithm, which finds Obama to be one of the more, but not the most, liberal Senators (just slightly to the left of Senator Clinton).

But what about Obama’s service in the Illinois General Assembly representing Hyde Park? How liberal was he then? So far, it’s been quite difficult to tell. Of course, both sides of the political debate have strong incentives to spin his record; the Democrats want to portray him as more centrist, the Republicans more liberal. During the primary campaign, Clinton attempted to critique Obama as insufficiently liberal, pointing to his voting “present” on a number of controversial topics.

So what’s the truth? The answer: Obama as an Illinois state senator was very liberal, but there were others substantially more liberal still. Of all 295 incumbents who served from 1996-2004 in Illinois, State Senator Obama ranked in the 14th percentile on my liberalism scale. In the Democratic party, he ranked in the 27th percentile. Comparing Obama to all incumbent state legislators in the United States in the mid 1990s to the mid 2000’s, he was in the top 11th percentile. He was about as liberal as James Meeks, pastor and Illinois state Senator. Obama was more liberal than Emil Jones, the president of the Senate and one of Obama’s political mentors, is not as liberal as his protege, ranking in the middle of his party for liberalism, and in the top quarter of the Legislature as a whole. Michael Madigan, the Speaker of the Assembly, is slightly more liberal than Obama, ranking in the top 16 percent of his party and in the top 8 percent of the legislature as a whole.

Uses (and Misuses?) of Local Media

Bloomberg and Term Limits:

As for Mr. Bloomberg, a packed press corps asked whether there wasn’t something undemocratic about his effort to persuade the City Council to whisk away term limits — which the public voted for twice — and engineer a third term. Sure, he likes the job, and sure, he’s very good at it, but there is that will-of-the-people thing.

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

The Daily News had to do something of a backflip, having frantically opposed any effort to change limits. The New York Times has historically opposed term limits for city offices, so it was less of a walk.

The New York Post was far and away the most enthusiastic: On Sept. 30, the day after the Dow dropped a historic 777 points, the far bigger headline on the cover of The Post nonetheless belonged to “Mike the III.”

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.

Oddest Chart of the Day

from the NYT:

Inevitably

More Pointy-Headed Goodness

The Economist polls economists on candidates' economic policies.

James Baldwin and Barack Obama

Speaking of pointy-headed intellectuals, Colm Toibin in the New York Review of Books. Worth your time, especially, perhaps, for you English Major-types.

On Palin

I have avoided saying too much about Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin because (a) there is hardly a shortage of discussion and debate about her, (b) it is difficult to make any observations without sounding like a partisan, which I've no interest in, and most importantly, (c) I've had a hard time making sense for myself of what her nomination "means." I'm still working on it, but some formative thoughts:

Palin, on the one hand, is an almost logical product of the post-1964 political history Rick Perlsetin recounts in Nixonland -- a politics that builds an electoral majority through the division of parts of the electorate against each other, and that seeks to do so by tapping into social and class-based resentment; envy; bitterness over slights real and perceived; and, most saliently, through fear: fear of exclusion (of not being among the "in" crowd) on the one hand, and the cultivation of fear among the public to gain adherents, on the other.

That so much of Nixon's rise (and Reagan's, importantly) can be traced to the successful tapping of racial fear and resentment seems of note as we live through the first contest in which the possibility of a black President is real, if perhaps still not addressed in any direct or forthright manner. (Who would have thought that with Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee, we would talk so very little about race in America -- that's, of course, in part because the Obama campaign is itself afraid to discuss it).

This is often talked about in language of a "culture war," but it's almost always more than that, and at least as much about economics -- and about class -- as it is about "hot-button" social issues. More broadly, Palin's nomination has once again sought to frame the election as a battle between "average" Americans and out-of-touch "elites."

But there's something that extends beyond the merely tactical here, and seems to tap into something deeper and more enduring. Perhaps inevitably, Richard Hofstadter's great book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, has been much on my mind. For with Palin, what seems to me most salient is not -- let us be frank -- her rather profound ignorance of American history, political institutions, or matters of public policy, both foreign and domestic; much more interesting to me is the (implied?) claim that this is, in contemporary parlance, a feature, not a bug. Her ignorance, her inexperience, her insularity, her lack of nuance and intellectual sophistication, her failure to travel broad, all of this is a virtue -- for thereby can she see that there is "a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, DC." It's time, she has suggested, that an ordinary American finally have a shot at the Vice Presidency.

As Hofstadter writes of the larger phenomenon, and the denigration of expertise:

Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man [sic], especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools.

But, he continues a few pages later:

It seems clear that those who have some quarrel with intellect are almost always ambivalent about it: they mix respect and awe with suspicion and resentment.

And still later, I think getting to the nub:

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

For Hofstadter, who was writing in the wake of McCarthyism, that period of anti-intellectualism was a reaction to the government-by-experts of FDR's New Deal and, to a lesser extent, JFK. It's an anger and bitterness born of frustration and the fear of exclusion. As with Nixon, it's both real (as a personal reaction to exclusion) and then turned into a tool -- resentment used to cultivate resentment, and to build allegiance.

It is, we might even venture to say, akin to other Fundamentalisms -- a reaction to a host of forces we associate with Modernity. In this way it is not, I suspect, mere coincidence that the least intellectually curious (or playful, in Hofstadter's language) of contemporary politicians -- Palin and President George W. Bush, most notably -- are also among the most radical in their public recourse to religion. It's part of what Hofstadter calls "The Evangelical Spirit." It helps, in part, make some sense of the certitude of Bush, even (or especially?) in the face of contrary evidence, and of Palin, too. When asked to join the ticket, Palin told Charlie Gibson that she didn't hesitate, didn't even blink. To have paused, to have weighed the pros and cons, to have contemplated the sheer enormity of it, would have been, in the anti-intellectual wordlview, weak and effeminate. Reflection and contemplation are themselves suspect.

I'm not sure this is hanging together, but I'll forge on for a bit more before surrender. There's one more piece to this puzzle, and I want to talk about it as cynicism. Not your run-of-the-mill cynicism (oh, all politicians are corrupt in their own way), but something deeper and more dangerous, something that's revealed as increasing numbers of Republicans/conservatives distance themselves from Palin: whether Palin (or Bush) is aware of the depth of her own ignorance is an open question, but it is surely known by leaders in the McCain campaign. Do they truly believe that she is capable of stepping in to function as President? They can't. But they choose not to care in order to achieve political power. She is merely a tool, in that regard, a means toward an end. But a willing accomplice.

What creates conditions of cognitive dissonance so great, however, that such an effort may potentially fail is this: Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, whatever their partisan affiliation or their policy preferences, have demonstrated themselves to be intellectuals; they are technocrats, they are experts, they are, let it be said, elites. And if ever there were circumstances in which people seem to appreciate the value of pointy-headed intellectuals, it would seem to be now. Who would like to make the argument that because, say, they are raising a passel of children, can manage a complex household budget, and are able to see Wall Street from their apartment that they are, therefore, suitably qualified to replace the Chairman of the Federal Reserve or the Secretary of the Treasury? It's silly, of course, not to mention dangerous. But this is, after all, the argument that Palin is making in respect to assuming the role of Vice President of the United States.

Surely it need not be partisan to also acknowledge the sheer silliness of that claim? And what does it say about the state of American politics that the reaction to Palin is not more along the lines of this classic reaction to another Vice Presidential candidate, Sprio Agnew? (But, of course, Nixon and Agnew won. . . . .)

What's Wrong with the National Press, #548

From the NYT:

The Palins reported taxable income in 2007 of $166,080, consisting largely of Ms. Palin’s salary as governor. . . in 2006, the couple reported taxable income of $127,869, which consisted mainly of Mr. Palin’s income from BP Exploration Alaska and an income of less than $5,000 for Ms. Palin from the State of Alaska before she was elected governor. . . . Yet for a couple with modest incomes, the Palins have amassed a sizable portfolio that consists mainly of retirement investments and real estate.

Such incomes place the family at over three times or over two times the median family income, respectively, and firmly within the top 20% of all households nationally. But for Leslie Wayne and her editors at the NYT, these are "modest" incomes.

Ad Spending

Good overview, with links to new ads.

Maybe in Ohio, But Not in America!

Homer votes, in an episode supposedly slated to air November 2.

Hot Off the Presses

Election prediction model edition of PS: Political Science and Politics. See esp. Lewis-Black and Tien to start.

Not So Negative?

Buell and Sigelman:

Our measure of negative campaigning is the attack propensity score, which simply states the percentage of all campaign statements that attacked the opponents. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown for each party:

Democrats Republicans
1960 65.6% 45.0%
1964 64.6% 66.3%
1968 57.1% 49.6%
1972 64.1% 49.7%
1976 47.2% 41.6%
1980 54.5% 58.6%
1984 66.0% 38.7%
1988 61.5% 57.5%
1992 59.6% 65.8%
1996 51.8% 48.4%
2000 36.7% 53.2%
2004 71.9% 52.9%
2008 45.6% 37.5%

. . . . Bottom line: Although the 2008 presidential campaign has already emerged as one of the oddest in modern times, its negativity is unusual only by virtue of being less, not more, in evidence.

Take a look at the article; but what this approach doesn't measure is the degree or quality of negativity, merely the crude quantity of negative messages. I wonder if there's any research that gets at that kind of question (that is: surely not all attacks or all lies are created equal). I need to take another look at the book (not handy at the moment), but I don't think that they distinguish between "attack" and "contrast" statements or ads. . . .

UPDATE: Compare with this

In Honor of Andrew P

(whose class I made watch this over and over and over again as I argued that it may be one of the best political ads ever. . . )

Hey, Where is Everybody?

Holidays notwithstanding, I'm surprised not to see commentary on the first Presidential Debate. So, maybe you can offer some thoughts about that and tonight's VP debate together? The tee vee blather about "what each candidate MUST do" and the talking-heads chatter about the supposedly careful line Biden MUST walk are interesting. Well, at least to me. And it's interesting how much impact the Couric interview(s) seems to be having on pundits -- and, some polling suggests, voters? Any new ads catching your attention? Any wise observations about how the financial crisis is affecting the campaign narrative(s)? Fell free to use this as a Debates open thread.