Monday, August 5, 2024

Who reads the headlines, anyway? -- a tale told mostly in tweets

 
 
 

Saturday morning Twitter, or at least the corner of twitter that obsesses over politics and political journalism, started furiously exchanging takes triggered by this headline from the online version of the New York Times.

Political scientist Amy Fried appears to be the one who got the ball rolling at an embarrassingly early hour for a weekend.

The tweets tell the story here, but we'll set the stage first.

A few days ago, we ran a post about a piece by the New York Times editorial board which talked about how both sides could and should do more to facilitate debates, somehow failing to mention the facts that Harris had already been aggressively pushing for a debate while Donald Trump had just backed out of one. That piece so misrepresented what was actually going on that it crossed the line into distortion. This headline managed to do the same in a dozen words.

Just to get the obvious out of the way, there is no such thing as a unilateral agreement. Trump backed out of an agreed-upon debate giving a succession of sometimes contradictory reasons. He then made a counterproposal. An unserious counterproposal.

When the social media reaction started hitting critical mass, the NYT changed the headline without comment, but the damage was done.




The actual article didn't help.


The proposal itself was a poison pill, not to mention being completely at odds with the serious exercise in democracy the NYT had been pontificating about.


A bit off topic but still relevant.






It didn't take long for the usual suspects from Politico, the NYT, and the rest to start whining about the criticism. It did not go over well with the crowd.

 

You can read Marshall's excellent thread here.


"Anyway, my position remains that if you have a six-figure job in political media and strongly believe that nothing you do matters (and therefore you cannot be held to any standards for professional conduct), you should quit and let somebody who actually gives a shit have the job."  

Scott Lemieux


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Friday, August 2, 2024

I'm trying to wrap up the New York Times bashing thread but they keep giving me so much material

Written on 7/29/2024.

Lots to criticize here (the embarrassing "code switching" article alone would be good for a couple posts), but I am going to try stay on topic, and use the Harris 2020 headline to illustrate how the NYT is manipulated and how you can spot it. Keep in mind is that arrogant people are the easiest on and, with the possible exception of a Harvard physics professor, no one is more arrogant than a New York Times editor. They are the ideal marks. 

Are there notable disconnects between how prominent a story should be based on newsworthiness or interest and how prominent it actually is? Has a big story been buried or omitted entirely? Is a relatively trivial and boring story featured on the first page of the website and above the fold in the print edition while bigger stories are pushed aside? 

If you do see one of these disconnects, the next question you should ask yourself is who would be happy to see the minor stories played up big? Who would be relieved when the buried or omitted stories are forgotten? 

If you see a pattern of odd editorial choices favoring one side, you have intimidation and/or bias regardless of what the stories themselves actually say. No matter how good the articles happened to be, simply by putting those that favor one side on A1 and those that favor the other on A13 the damage is done. Of course, if the headline is inaccurate (and remember those are normally written by an editor), that makes the bad even worse. 

Look at what the New York Times considered the top election story of 7/29/2024, and ask yourself: 


1. Is this really the most important political development of the day? Is it what people most want to talk about? If you were editor, would you have put this above the Republican candidate promising to establish a national bitcoin stockpile, the increasingly intense demands from Democrats that Trump debate Harris, or this? 


 

1b. Were progressive ideas the primary focus of the Harris 2020 campaign or was it more about ability to challenge Donald Trump?


 2. Who would be happy to see the conversation shift to Harris's more liberal positions four years ago? Who would've been unhappy to see the conversation concentrate on Trump's crypto announcement, JD Vance's historically bad VP debut, or the fact that the Republican pulled out a schedule presidential debate?

3. Is there a pattern? I've been following the NYT with a critical eye for years now and I'm confident that I could easily write virtually this same post two or three times a week with examples as or more egregious than this. The New York Times has created a deeply flawed and self-serving code of ethics and they somehow manage to violate even that on a regular basis. They been bad for years and they continue to get worse which is not behavior we can afford from the paper of record.

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Thursday, August 1, 2024

The Return of Thursday Tweets -- “Cross of Doge” wins it this week

Let's start with representative Kimble.



Maybe it would be simpler if we gave people with children some kind of exemption for each child.



Rampell has always been in the impartial and nonpartisan school, but she's clearly getting fed up.




This part's also worth a listen.

Just to remind everyone, the obsession with having the right people breed is where the traditional far right meets the Silicon Valley variety, particularly the PayPal mafia.


On the subject of the MAGA/Techbro alliance:










It's been a while since we checked in on Elon.






Musk really needs people to start talking about those robots. See here and here for details.


He may have lost a step but he can still run circles around the pundit class.






One of the main worries about a Thunderdome convention was that various factions, particularly on the left, would set themselves up as kingmakers, locking Harris into unpopular positions and preventing her from taking advantage of openings like this.





On a related note.



In case you were wondering where the NYT finds all of those Biden voters who are switching to Trump.


We'll see how well Trump's attempt to deny ever having heard of his own platform will go over.






Sorry, ladies, but he's spoken for.


Only the body horror genre.







Because we need this...







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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

The New York Times Editorial Board loves narratives, but they especially love narratives where they're the hero

This is quite the piece of work. Sanctimonious and self-serving. It is such a platonic ideal of New York Times editorial board posturing that, if it were to come in tweet sized bites, you would assume it was actually written by the Pitchbot.

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee, has the chance to encourage and embrace the kind of close examination that the public so far has had little opportunity to witness during the 2024 race.

Americans deserve a campaign that tests the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates; that highlights their differences and allows scrutiny of their plans; that motivates people to vote by giving them a clear account of how their choice in this election will affect their lives.

Americans deserve the opportunity to ask questions of those who are seeking to lead their government.

You know that whenever the NYT offers to speak for those of us among the great unwashed, it's going to be embarrassing and, at least in that respect, this does not disappoint. Unless I've gotten hold of a truncated version, the entire thing comes in at around 350 words, so we could take it line by line, but fortunately there's one paragraph that epitomizes the self-righteousness, fatally flawed ethics, and general dishonesty of the whole piece.

But she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly. Ms. Harris ought to challenge Mr. Trump to a series of debates or town halls on subjects of national importance, such as the economy, foreign policy, health care and immigration. Mr. Trump claims that he is ready and willing to participate in debates once Democrats have officially selected a nominee. Americans would benefit from comparing the two candidates directly.

[The linked article is also a remarkable exercise in calling a spade anything but a spade.] 

Two of the three sentences are so bad that we either have to conclude that the editorial board is almost completely ignorant of what actually happened or that these are deliberate lies of omission. In the first the board leaves out the fact that Harris has already been challenging Trump to debates or at least demanding that he show up to the one he already agreed to. Check out this clip from the day before the NYT ran its editorial.

If anything, the second sentence is even worse. It is absolutely absurd to talk about Trump's willingness to debate while making no mention of the fact that he just backed out. I'm tempted to stop here since anything else risks going into "other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" territory, but it's worth noting that the rationale has shifted by the day from ABC being unfair to him, to the fact that Obama had not at the time endorsed her, to her not yet being the official nominee to this...  

 

Despite the recent posturing on the subject, the value of presidential debates is not all that clear. Based on the history of the last 64 years, they haven't been particularly good at conveying information and substantive arguments, and to the extent they have mattered at all, they have tended to hinge on trivialities, gaffes, and appearances. Nixon's decision to forgo makeup, Gerald Ford's obvious misstatement about Russian influence, Reagan's movie star fame.

But once you accept the premise that debates are essential for democracy (let alone the sacred institution the NYT has been building them up as for months now), then recent events lead to a story that the New York Times editorial board desperately wants not to tell: we need to have debates but Trump backed out. Harris responded by demanding debates and trying to pressure and shame Trump into going along but he keeps coming up with new reasons to avoid them.

The board hates this version for at least a couple of reasons. First, there's no way to tell it without making the Democrat look good and the Republican bad, at least not without dumping the pro-debate premise. "Something is good. The Democrat wants to do it. A Republican is trying to stop it." is the kind of thing that ends up on page A14 in the paper of record.

More importantly though, it is a story that makes the New York Times a trivial character. In the version they published, they are wise and impartial judges and advisors, standing above the fray, alone seeing the big picture. We, the New York Times, defenders of democracy, are out there fighting for you the voters if only both sides would listen to our counsel. 

No institution in journalism has a culture more centered around the belief in its own superiority than does the New York Times. Few institutions do, period. The one other example that springs to mind are the Ivy leagues schools and even there I think the comparison might be a bit unfair. 

The NYT has made a string of disastrous decisions over the past thirty years, starting with Whitewater, Bush V Gore, and the Iraq war. In each case and in all the cases since, it has reacted by denying his own culpability and clinging even more tightly to its own self-deceptions. 


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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Know your Narratives

I have to confess that, when I talk about narratives in the press, the term is often inconsistent, ambiguous and inchoate. Along with conventional narrative elements, I might be talking about shared beliefs, attitudes, and all sorts of related concepts. With that caveat out of the way, here are what I consider the standard narratives that have shaped the political discourse over the past few years.

The end of Donald Trump.

The establishment press found Donald Trump endlessly unnerving, not so much for his racism, corruption, and fascist tendencies (they could be surprisingly cool with those), but because he put the lie to arguably the most cherished of all late 20th and early 21st century political narratives, the fundamental symmetry between the left and the right. You cannot both-sides Trump, at least not without making an ass of yourself. Plus, there was something undeniably scary about the cult of personality that had formed around the man.

Given all that, you can understand why after Biden won the election, the press embraced the idea that being labeled a loser would cause Trump's followers to abandon him. This narrative was questionable from the very beginning (and even before that. Check out our comments from 2019), but it was so enormously appealing that it continued to drive political commentary until as recently as the beginning of this year.

The narrative peaked around the middle of 2022 fueled by a self reinforcing cluster of analyses and articles like "Hear Me Out: Trump Won’t Run Again" by Slate's Jeremy Stahl with each writer credulously repeating the dubious arguments of all the others. As journalism it was an embarrassment, but for social scientists looking at herd mentality, it was a wonderful case study.

The rise of DeSantis.

A direct byproduct of the end of Trump narrative. Starting as early as 2021 and reaching near universal acceptance among the establishment press by the middle of 2022, almost every major news organization was heralding Ron DeSantis as an all but unstoppable political force in the upcoming presidential election. The man's actual history (Florida backbencher who attached himself like a remora to Donald Trump and managed to sneak into the governor's mansion just as the state was turning blood red) and his political talents (embarrassingly subpar for the governor of a big state) were ignored by all but a few smart and independent observers such as Josh Marshall and Michael Hiltzick. The peak of DeSantis mania and the Trump is doomed narratives was probably a comically bad but extremely influential analysis from the New York Times (you can see our real-time critique here).

Dobbs won't matter.

Almost immediately after the decision came down, a number of establishment press institutions such as the New York Times and even more notably Politico came out with various articles, opinion pieces, and analyses arguing that the overturning of Roe V Wade would have little impact on the upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024. We can probably describe the appeal of this one both to the desire of these institutions to appear sober and above it all, and their reluctance to anger conservatives with bad news. Needless to say, this narrative has not fared well against reality. The result has been near continual strategic retreats, each of which can be boiled down to "sure, abortion was a big deal in this last election, and here's why it won't matter next time."

This narrative has been an especially interesting example for a number of reasons. First, for its longevity. While all three we've mentioned so far started about the same time, the first two are long dead. This one, however, remains not only alive but very much kicking. The New York Times in particular has gone to extraordinary lengths to defend it, up to and including selectively editing JD Vance quotes to give the impression that he was moderating his position.

Another interesting aspect has been the way that the actual story has evolved while the standard narrative has not. Almost immediately after states started passing draconian laws, the actual story started changing from one about abortion to one about reproductive rights and women's rights. Overturning Dobbs had sweeping implications. Any discussion of its political impact now has as much to do with prenatal care, in vitro fertilization, and contraception, as it does with what we normally think of when we hear the word abortion. The narrative, however, is still mostly stuck.

Much of the conventional wisdom around the upcoming election is based on the assumption that Dobbs will play a smaller role than it did in 2022 and in the various special elections where it made its presence known. While this might be true, there is also considerable evidence arguing the exact opposite. IVF was not an issue two years ago. The fetal personhood movement is far more vocal now. Horror stories about miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies have continued to accumulate. Red states have continued to pass more extreme anti-abortion laws, while numerous states will have ballot measures countering them. A recording has recently emerged of the Republican vice presidential candidate suggesting national intervention to prevent women from traveling to other states to have abortions. Trump continues to brag at every possible venue about getting Roe overturned. Finally, having a woman at the top of the ticket pushes the issue to the forefront.

Nonetheless, NYT luminaries (David Leonhardt being perhaps the most recent example) continue to fall on their swords in defense of the paper's "nothing to see here" position.

Hapless Kamala.

This is the narrative on this list that almost had the greatest impact. I say "almost" because, at the moment, we appear to have a more unified and energized Democratic Party than we've had in the past decade, possibly much longer than that. The extent to which the party has come together in terms of support, enthusiasm, and money is remarkable, even historic, but it was far from obvious that this was how things would play out.

Perhaps the biggest fear of Democrats who were concerned about Biden stepping down was that it would trigger a feeding frenzy where everyone with an overdeveloped sense of ambition with throw their hats in the ring and every special interest group would start vying to be kingmaker. This fear was heightened by the constant lobbying of the New York Times, Nate Silver, etc. to make the process as disruptive as possible. Their argument for repeating what looked a hell of a lot like another 1972 was that Harris was such a historically bad candidate that she absolutely had to go. (You can find an example of Silver trying unsuccessfully to shore up the official version here.)

As with the other narratives on this list, this one depended more on playing to the biases and desires of elite journalists than it did on any evidence. For a press corps raised on the idea of liberal bias and easily intimidated/manipulated by conservatives, going after a Democratic vice president is the safest of safe moves and, if you truly internalized that definition of bias, it even feels like you're doing the right thing. Add to that the same misogyny that these people directed at Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren with an additional dollop of racism for good measure. Anti-Kamala narratives were always going to be an easy sell.

What about the evidence? While Harris's history may not suggest a political talent on the level of Reagan/Clinton/Obama, it is even less consistent with the story the New York Times and company have been telling us. [Emphasis added]

Ross Douthat: It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. [Anyone who thinks Ross Douthat has special insights into these decision making processes please raise your hand and slap yourself with it. -- MP] Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.

Let's look at the record. In California Harris ran three races. In the first two she was an underdog. In the third she dominated both the primary and the general election. In the historically competitive 2020 race facing almost 30 opponents, she seriously outperformed a number of candidates with better name recognition and more money. It was a campaign with notable missteps and she never really presented a serious threat to the three frontrunners, Biden, Sanders, and Warren, but if you're going to call that a "disastrous" campaign, you're going to have to come up with whole new adjectives to describe how the bottom two thirds of the field did.

We can argue over Harris's political talents (though based on recent events, we should be able to put an X through the "voters won't respond to her" argument), but the idea that she was so terrible that we should have passed over the legitimate successor who clearly had the support of Democratic primary voters in the process alienating to of the key pillars of the Democratic base was never based on the facts. It was based on a story that the most influential people in journalism told themselves. Just like the idea that Ron DeSantis was a gifted politician was based on a story those same people told themselves. Just like the idea that abortion would not become a major political factor after Dobbs or that Donald Trump would just go away and leave us alone after 2021 were based on stories these people told themselves.

From a sociological standpoint, the rapid convergence on these narratives and their remarkable persistence is a fascinating topic. From a functioning democracy stand, having the discourse shaped by herd mentality and hubris, overseen by people who are frequently wrong but never in doubt is insane.

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Monday, July 29, 2024

Haberman and Swan being suckered by the Trump campaign's failed bluff is the schadenfreude cherry on top

While the New York Times is not as influential as it used to be, it still has a big direct impact and an even bigger indirect impact on the discourse. Along with a handful of other major players such as Politico, it largely sets the narratives that drive the majority of mainstream media coverage. If for no other reason, that makes it important to keep an eye on the paper, particularly when it starts getting just a bit revisionist.

 

One of the most notable and talked about aspects of the aftermath of Biden stepping down was how completely unprepared the Republicans seem to be for what was a widely anticipated turn of events.
From TPM:

It was a cacophony of a reaction from one man, but it’s reflective of the broader response on the far right to Harris becoming the likely Democratic nominee. In the hours after Biden announced that he would withdraw, Republicans from Trump on down flailed for a response. Some Republicans expressed anger, while others were visibly baffled by how to react to the shift. Many reacted by suggesting that the shift from Biden to Harris itself was illegitimate, calling the President’s withdrawal from the race a “coup” and proclaiming that they’re actually running against a system, not a candidate.

Trump’s own communications staff seemed caught off guard. Jason Miller, who has helped helm Trump’s PR apparatus since 2016, announced on NBC on Sunday that he had identified a core Harris vulnerability: “She wants to ban plastic straws.”

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and longtime friend of Trump, appeared to take the cue. In his Sunday evening broadcast, Hannity reminded his audience that Harris had committed to banning the straws, before proclaiming: “I love my plastic straws. I hate paper straws.”

He used that as part of a broader effort during his hour to depict Harris as a far-left radical, as hell-bent on banning the plastic straws cherished by all freedom-loving Americans as she is on joining with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to enslave Americans in “socialized” health care. Harris, Hannity said, co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare-for-All bill.

On the non-straw front, Stephen Miller sputtered to Laura Ingraham Sunday night about the unfairness of it all.

“They held a primary!” Miller nearly shouted. “People – they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”


The messaging was so bad that the Fox news personality Stephen Colbert used to refer to as "not Steve Doocey" actually tried to use a substantial jump in San Francisco conviction rates as part of an attack piece on Harris.

(This, of course, is coming from the same people who argued that Trump's criminal convictions would help him win the black vote.) 

The head-shaking over the lack of GOP preparation wasn't limited to political junkie sites like TPM. It was a topic of conversation across the mainstream media including this segment on CNN from the Monday after. [If you're in a hurry, just watch from the 90 second to two minutes marks.]


"Jonathan Swan and I did a story over the weekend about how the preparations that have been going on, and they've been going on for a while, but they seem unsettled on exactly what message they want to run against her." Listening to Haberman you would get the impression that the New York Times was on top of this from the very beginning. That is not, however, the impression you get reading the actual article.

Trump Campaign Prepares Attack Plan for Harris in Case Biden Withdraws
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Donald J. Trump’s campaign is preparing a major effort to attack Vice President Kamala Harris if President Biden steps aside as the Democratic nominee, including a wave of ads focusing on her record in her current office and in California, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The Trump team has already prepared opposition research books on Ms. Harris, and has similar dossiers on other Democrats who could become the nominee if Mr. Biden were to drop out of the race.

But the bulk of the preparations so far have been focused on Ms. Harris, including a recently concluded poll testing her vulnerabilities in a general election contest, according to the two people. The Trump team’s attention on Ms. Harris is based on its assumption that if Democrats were to bypass the first Black woman to serve as vice president, it would drive even deeper divisions in the party and risk alienating their base of Black voters. 


To be brief and blunt, the Trump campaign knew that they had nothing so they lied to Haberman and Swan everything was good to go in order to buy a little time and keep supporters and donors from panicking. It was a dubious story but the cream of the NYT's political reporting bench swallowed it without an apparent moment of hesitation. Not surprisingly, Josh Marshall had the best takes on this.

 

 

 

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Friday, July 26, 2024

Sixty years ago...

When I said Democrats wanted another 1964, that included a desire for the kind campaign that LBJ ran, unapologetically aggressive and most of all, willing to call a spade a spade. That's one reason why this...

... is a reliable laugh/applause line.

Sixty years ago these ads were playing over broadcast TV and radio at a time when almost everyone was tuned in to these two media. I doubt that any political advertising has had the same cultural impact before or since, particularly this:

"Daisy", sometimes referred to as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl", is an American political advertisement that aired on television as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Though aired only once, it is considered one of the most important factors in Johnson's landslide victory over the Republican Party's candidate, Barry Goldwater, and a turning point in political and advertising history. A partnership between the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency and Tony Schwartz, the "Daisy" advertisement was designed to broadcast Johnson's anti-war and anti-nuclear positions. Goldwater was against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and suggested the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, if necessary. The Johnson campaign used Goldwater's speeches to imply he would wage a nuclear war. 

...

The ad was pulled after its initial broadcast but it continued to be replayed and analyzed by media, including the nightly news, talk shows, and news broadcasting agencies. The Johnson campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, and implying that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. Several other Johnson campaign commercials would attack Goldwater without referring to him by name. Other campaigns have adopted and used the "Daisy" commercial since 1964. 

"Daisy" Ad  September 7, 1964



Telephone Hotline Ad



Which Barry Goldwater?



Ice Cream Ad



Social Security

 

 



Medicare



"Confessions of a Republican"



After Daisy, the most disturbing ad featured images of of a Klan rally and a quote from Robert Creel, grand dragon of the Alabama KKK, listing the targets of his bigotry and ending with his statement of support for Goldwater. Because of the language, it's been pulled from YouTube, but you can watch it here.

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Thursday, July 25, 2024

Nate Silver and Stuart Stevens from 2023

[Gelman addresses some similar points here.]

I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat the timing on this one.


 

Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly, November 24, 2010 [Emphasis added.]

Whatever the outcome of the attorney general's race, it's clear that Steve Cooley led most of the way and then blew it in the final days.

That's because Cooley ran a tentative and complacent campaign. If he loses, and trends suggest he will, it will be thanks to several tactical mistakes, an indifference to stumping for votes, and a gaffe on pensions.

Cooley can also blame Meg Whitman, whose 12-point loss probably sealed his defeat. But the fact remains that he could have won with a more aggressive campaign. Herewith, a post-mortem analysis.

Kamala Harris declared her intention to run for attorney general in the afterglow of the 2008 presidential race. She was a rising star, a member in good standing of Generation Obama. Like the president, she was a biracial candidate who had proven she could attract white votes.

But the glow wore off as Obama's approval ratings dipped, and by the time Steve Cooley entered the race early this year, Harris was all but written off.

She was a San Franisco liberal. She opposed the death penalty. In an anti-Obama year, she was an Obama clone.

Polls consistently showed her trailing Cooley by about five points, though a large chunk of the electorate remained undecided. Conventional wisdom held that he would do well in L.A. County, his home turf, because he was seen as a competent prosecutor, not a partisan Republican.

 

 

The tweet is yet another reminder of how lazy Nate Silver has gotten. He ignores two of the three races cited by Stevens, runs one metric, doesn't bother to look at other equally relevant numbers such as initial position in the polls, completely leaves out important context like campaign spending, the endorsement of the LA Times and the fact that Cooley went into the race as the popular district attorney of LA representing about one in four Californians, as compared with less than one tenth of that represented by Harris as the district attorney of San Francisco. Silver then goes on to draw a sweeping conclusion and adds an LOL just to push the dickishness level over the top.

There is a bit of an analogy here with Harvard's Avi Loeb. Both he and Silver are experts in their fields. Silver knows a great deal about certain aspects of political science while Loeb has done seminal work in astrophysics, but those are both big subjects and it is possible to be highly knowledgeable in parts of those disciplines and completely ignorant of others. Both men have been opining outside of their areas of expertise, and they have been doing so with an entirely inappropriate level of confidence.

This is also a prime example of one of the driving narratives of recent political coverage, hapless Kamala. Along with Trump's followers will abandon him after he loses an election, DeSantis has a lock on the nomination, and Dobbs won't matter, this is one of the stories that has guided journalists over the last four years. By now, two of these have been completely discredited and the other two are looking highly questionable. If you are new to this game, you probably think that being proven this wrong this often would humble Silver and Barro and all the other pundits and big-name reporters who have staked so much of their reputations on these claims, but what we've seen instead is defensiveness, denial, and evermore tortured logic trying to prop up failed arguments.
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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

1964, 1968, 1972, and a bit of 1980

What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my thoughts. I'll go even further and say I think it is true in the advisory sentence: when it tells you to do something, you should probably do it.

1964 was a very good election for the Democrats. 1968 was a bad one and 1972 was a disaster (at least with respect to the presidency). In the broadest sense, how can we characterize 64 versus 68/72?

Skipping a lot of back story, 1964 had a unified Democratic party spend the campaign aggressively attacking an ideologically extreme Republican as dangerous and erratic.

1968 had a divided Democratic Party largely focused on internal squabbles. 1972 took this to the next level, passing over the candidate who actually got the most primary votes for the one who had headed the committee that rewrote the nominating rules.

Like I said, this leaves a lot out, but if we take the analogy at this very high level I think it gets to the gist of what Democrats want and why they feel so angry with and disconnected from much, perhaps most of the elite mainstream media. The response to Kamala Harris clearly suggests they want 2024 to be another 1964, one where a united party concentrates all of its attention, energy, and resources attacking and unfit candidate and his wildly unpopular positions.

By comparison, viewed using this framework, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic have been actively lobbying for what looks a great deal like a combination of 1968 and 1972 with a little bit of 1980 thrown in. Ezra Klein is still whining over the lack of a Eugene McCarthy or a Ted Kennedy this time around.

It is almost impossible to take the arguments of the 68/72 crowd at face value. After months of complaining that Biden was too old and would leave the party divided, now they have a young candidate implicitly chosen by primary voters and currently backed by the near universal support of a reenergized party, and it's driving them crazy. 

Why are they so upset over getting what they claimed to want? I've heard cynics suggest that the editorial boards of papers like the New York Times secretly want Trump to win because he's good for the news business, or because they tend to represent the social class that will benefit from his tax policies, or because they secretly agree with parts of his philosophy. While there is some merit to the first two and perhaps just a little to the third, I don't think that's it. 

I believe they don't want Trump to win, but more importantly, they don't want him to lose in a way that makes them look bad and feel foolish. It is nearly impossible to overstate how invested institutions like the New York Times become in their narratives and how far they will go to defend them. Over the past four years, the standard narratives have been that Trump's support would evaporate once he actually lost an election, that Dobbs would not play a significant role in any upcoming elections, that DeSantis had a virtual lock on the Republican nomination, that JD Vance was the principled conservative and political talent we needed to counter Trump, and that Kamala Harris was an extremely weak politician who could not possibly unite the Democratic Party. Compared to the pain of owning up to all their mistakes, four more years of Trump doesn't seem that bad to these people.









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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

"It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters"

Yesterday morning I posted some thoughts on the elite press's fixation on open primaries under the title, "Straussians* of the Center Left" which concluded with...

There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic option. 

...

What we're seeing is the latest reminder of the long-standing indifference and often open hostility of the elite press, particularly the New York Times, toward the idea of democracy. You can find examples of this going back at least a century or so with the way papers like the NYT covered the rise of fascism in Europe, but the more telling cases are more recent and closer to home. There was virtually no pushback from the mainstream press in 2000 when the Supreme Court installed the candidate lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote as well. We've also seen it in the blasรฉ attitude toward voter suppression.  Since then things have only gotten worse. The disdain for Democratic primary voters has been palpable, culminating with the current enthusiasm for an option that will basically cut actual voters out of the process entirely.

None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times, New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people. This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the surface. 

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall ran a piece that made many of the same points (which if you're writing about politics, is always reassuring). 

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

The Wood article really is jaw-droppingly bad. His ignorance of the history and workings of politics would be embarrassing in a high school newspaper editorial. We'll get back to it if I have the time and the stomach for it.

Back to Marshall.

The point is that beneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.

 

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Monday, July 22, 2024

Straussians* of the Center Left


Democratic voters chose Harris.

While technically there may only be one name on the ballot, when primary voters pull the lever for the incumbent, they know they are voting for a ticket not an individual. They are choosing a candidate and that candidate's successor.

Much to the consternation of the pundits and in direct contradiction of their narrative, Biden and Harris sailed through the primaries with margins similar to that of Obama in 2012. The voter's preference was clear.

This never happened. If it had, you would have never heard of Dean Phillips (instead of just hearing about him and forgetting). It's true that no one wanted to be McCarthy '68, McGovern '72, or Kennedy '80, but that was an individual choice (and probably a good one).

There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic option.

You might, and I want to heavily emphasize the word "might," be able to make some kind of a case for an open convention if we had evidence of a huge groundswell of popular support for the idea, but we appear to be seeing the exact opposite. Based on polling, responses from across the party, and the stunning wave of small donor contributions, it seems that members of the party are (at least by Democratic standards) remarkably unified behind and excited about the successor that they overwhelmingly voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly in 2024. 

What we're seeing is the latest reminder of the long-standing indifference and often open hostility of the elite press, particularly the New York Times, toward the idea of democracy. You can find examples of this going back at least a century or so with the way papers like the NYT covered the rise of fascism in Europe, but the more telling cases are more recent and closer to home. There was virtually no pushback from the mainstream press in 2000 when the Supreme Court installed the candidate lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote as well. We've also seen it in the blasรฉ attitude toward voter suppression.  Since then things have only gotten worse. The disdain for Democratic primary voters has been palpable, culminating with the current enthusiasm for an option that will basically cut actual voters out of the process entirely.

None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times, New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people. This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the surface. 


* I'm using Straussian in the sense of someone who believes in rule by the elite.. That's an overly broad and somewhat sloppy definition, but what you expect from a blog?

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Friday, July 19, 2024

XKCD needs to update this one

Don't get me wrong. This is a great strip.



But Oumuamua's old news. These days everyone's overreacting to Dyson swarms.

(You have to get about halfway through the articles to find out that the researchers have said that these anomalies have more mundane explanations and probably aren't alien mega-structures, but that's not a catchy headline.)

Even Loeb has moved on.


This one has the best punchline.


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