Making Bush tell the truth (11/8)

The media have to be tougher on the Bush administration's tendency to dissemble -- especially when it comes to war
By Brendan Nyhan
[First published on Salon.com]

On Election Night, Republican candidates backed by President Bush won a resounding victory across the country. Facing a transformed political landscape, with a newly invigorated president and a war with Iraq looming, it's time to ask a crucial question: Will the media finally hold the president and his staff accountable for their repeated evasions and dissembling?

In Washington, the maxim used to be that you get in trouble not by lying, but by trying to cover up the lie when you get caught. Bush has turned this tired piece of conventional wisdom on its head, running an administration that almost always tries to cover its tracks with misinformation rather than admit to an error or a lie -- and often gets away with it.

Will reporters let the president continue this strategy in the second half of his term, especially when it comes to war with Iraq? The evidence isn't reassuring. (Read the whole column.)

11/7/2002 08:51:37 PM EST |

The "Floridization" of political commentary (11/6)

By Bryan Keefer

The political culture that brought you such memorable catchphrases as "Clintonization" and "Enronize" has spawned a new buzzword: "Floridization." Playing on the associations of the legal and political wrangling following the Florida election of 2000, four different conservative commentators have used the term in the last two weeks in an effort to discredit everything from the Democratic party's maneuvering in New Jersey to place Senator-elect Frank Lautenberg on the ballot to complaints of voter intimidation.

First on the scene appears to have been James Gillen of the Las Vegas Mercury, who wrote on October 24 that "[I]t is the Democrats, not the GOP, who have continued to pursue the Floridization of elections. Specifically, when New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli barely survived bribery scandals only to see his poll numbers sink below GOP challenger Dogulas Forrester, he decided to quit the race in favor of former Sen. Frank Lautenberg."

On November 1, George Will used the term in a similar fashion to attack Democratic efforts to make absentee votes cast for Senator Paul Wellstone count for former Vice President Walter Mondale, who replaced Wellstone on the ballot:

In Florida, Democratic lawyers said: If you hold this and that ballot up to a bright light and really squint, you can see faint dimples, which mean these voters really, really wanted to vote for Gore. Minnesota's clairvoyant Democrats argued that everyone who mailed in an absentee ballot marked for Wellstone should be assumed to really, really want that vote counted for Mondale.

So began the pre-election phase of the Minnesota Democrats' post-election campaign. . . . The Floridization of the nation is the Democrats' aspiration.

Yesterday in a Weekly Standard article titled "The Floridazation of American Politics," Jonathan Last attacks Democratic allegations about voter intimidation with the word. Attacking a statement from Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, Last concludes that "Democrats will make every distortion, fight every fight. The Floridazation of America continues, apace."

John Fund makes a similar (though somewhat less partisan) claim in a column today in the Wall Street Journal. Running down a litany of election lawsuits filed by Democrats, Fund ends by noting that "A brand new federal law will give states money for better election systems and training, but at the state level we still need clearer laws and better protections against fraud if we are to avoid the further Floridification of our politics."

The term "Floridization" and its variations is of the same breed as Clintonize", "Daschle-ize" and "Enronize": nonsensical catchphrases coined in order to attach loaded emotional associations to whatever they are applied to. In this case "Floridization" is an ad hominem attack on Democrats for legal wrangling and complaints about voting rights.

Such phrases become shorthand used to discredit the actions and policies of opponents without addressing them on the merits (Last and Fund do substantively address real issues, though they clearly coin the term so it will be used in this manner). The powerful connotations of such words often allows them to become deeply imbedded in political discourse, especially as they are repeated with less and less context. "Clintonize," for example, has become shorthand for everything one perceives to be wrong with American culture. Such terms erode the vocabulary of politics, diminishing the discourse to little more than a battle of buzzwords.

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11/6/2002 06:36:25 PM EST |

McAuliffe charges voter suppression (11/5)

By Brendan Nyhan

As we report below, conservative pundits continue to make exaggerated and inaccurate allegations of voter fraud. On the other side, Democratic charges of voter suppression have received somewhat less coverage, but they share a similar characteristic: taking bits of evidence and stringing them together to suggest concerted strategies with little evidence. In the heat of electoral battle today, it's important that people stick to the facts.

The most egregious example is Terry McAuliffe's statement of October 29, which charges that "officials at the Republican National Committee and in Republican campaigns across the country are leading a coordinated strategy to intimidate voters and suppress the vote."

His evidence for this, though, is scanty:

With election day a week away, we have already seen a disturbing number of incidents in which Republican operatives are working to chill voter turnout.

In Arkansas, paid staff for Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson was illegally harassing African American early voters and had to be forcibly removed by law enforcement.

In Florida, an 'anonymous' telephone marketing scheme designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters by telling them to cast their absentee ballots after election day, at which point their votes would no longer count is being investigated.

In Missouri, the state courts were forced to intervene to stop the Republican Secretary of State's office from imposing egregious rules restricting voters' access to provisional ballots.

The Republican National Committee issued a report that falsely accused thousands of voters of 'double-voting' in the 2000 election. A thorough examination of these charges revealed that they were "completely unfounded."

Even if all of these are true, this is hardly evidence of a "coordinated strategy" by the GOP. It's unclear who is responsible for the calls in Florida and the fact that the Republican Secretary of State's office created rules on provisional ballots that are not to McAuliffe's liking is not proof that it is trying to "intimidate voters and suppress the vote." (John Judis makes a more extensive and reasoned case that such incidents are taking place, though the extent to which it may be a national strategy remains murky).

Ironically enough, Democratic National Committee spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri disavowed McAuliffe-style conspiratorial insinuations on Fox News Channel's "Hannity and Colmes" on October 30. "I'm not suggesting that there's some sort of secret memo by Karl Rove that the Republican party is trying to suppress or intimidate the African-American or Hispanic vote, but these incidents do pop up," she said. "I don't think that they're orchestrated, but they are certainly out there. They're troublesome."

Hopefully Democrats and their supporters in the media will take Palmieri's approach today and in the aftermath of the election.

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11/5/2002 11:33:29 AM EST |

A malicious story of Democrats gone bad (11/5)

By Ben Fritz

As Election Day approaches, political pundits have grown increasingly histrionic. In recent days, a number of conservative pundits have woven together false or exaggerated anecdotes and dramatically inflated jargon in an attempt to show that Democrats have been reduced to, as William Bennett wrote in National Review Online, “abuse of law, cynicism, a win at any cost approach, and lying.”

Both Bennett and Jonathan Last, in the Weekly Standard's online edition, go through a list of accusations that they believe combine to demonstrate that Democrats engage in “dirty tricks” and the like. Most of their examples don’t hold water, though.

The American Prospect’s weblog, Tapped, has knocked down most of Last’s points, such as his accusation that, “In South Dakota this fall, Democrats have pushed heavy voter-registration drives with Indians. So heavy, in fact, that lots of dead Native Americans signed up.” Bennett makes the same argument, saying, “South Dakota is being tainted by Democratic-party registration efforts on Indian reservations where the names of dead people are turning up on Democratic registration cards and absentee ballots.”

A story in South Dakota’s Argus Leader has demonstrated, however, that the total number of forged absentee ballot applications that have been found by the much-hyped probe is 15 and the state attorney general’s investigation has focused on one woman, a Democratic independent contractor. Not exactly widespread voter fraud. But false and exaggerated charges of voter fraud in South Dakota and elsewhere are being trotted out repeatedly by some conservative pundits and Republican politicians, as we previously showed.

Tapped also calls Last on his suggestion that Democrats are committing voter fraud in Detroit. The article in question in the Detroit News states that the mayor's staff believes that the official figure of more than 600,000 registered voters in the city is at least 150,000 too high. There’s no evidence that this is anything more than a case of outdated registration rolls, or that more people are actually voting than ought to be.

Last also claims that Democrats “broke the law” when they replaced New Jersey Senate candidate Robert Torricelli with Frank Lautenberg. As Tapped replies, “Last is free to criticize the New Jersey Supreme Court's decision,” but, “the Democrats asked the New Jersey Supremes to allow them to place a new candidate on the ballot, the court did, and the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the lower court's ruling.”

Bennett takes a different tack in criticizing Democrats for replacing Torricelli when he says, “The Democratic party, having failed to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court that Bush did not deserve to be president, won over the New Jersey supreme court…” Beyond the fact that both decisions may have affected the outcome of an election, though, there’s no actual connection between the two. Furthermore, Democrats were not questioning whether Bush deserved to be President in Bush v. Gore, but arguing over the methods of Florida’s voting recount.

Of the rest of Last’s and Bennett’s points, most are single incidents with no demonstrated connection to Democratic leaders, such as volunteers who gave cigarettes to the homeless in Milwaukee in returning for voting for Al Gore in 2000 and supporters of Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend passing out Oreos at a debate in a racial attack on Michael Steele, the black Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. These are certainly worthy of criticism, but they’re not even close to justifying the vitriolic attacks that follow.

“Democrats have been showing signs of a desperate, win-at-any-cost mentality,” Last charges. "Once the party of JFK and FDR, the Democrats are now the party of dirty tricks.” Bennett adds: “The Democratic party no longer runs a real danger; it crossed that line some time ago.” And both men compare the entire party to disreputable ex-President Richard Nixon, with Last saying, “The Democrats haven't just become Nixon, they've become the exaggerated liberal nightmare version of Nixon: Today Democrats are what they believe Nixon was.” Bennett uses very similar language to charge that, “their political contretemps — abuse of law, cynicism, a win-at-any-cost approach, lying — have turned the Democratic party into a Nixon party, a pre-1978 Nixon party.”

Last and Bennett further condemn the memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone, which is also the target of Christopher Caldwell, in the current issue of The Weekly Standard. Many were turned off by the partisan nature of parts of the service, but Caldwell condemns Democrats on this basis with absurdly aggressive and exaggerated language, saying the service was "twisted, pagan, childish, inhumane, and even totalitarian” and Democrats were guilty of “aggression and inhumanity.” He calls Wellstone treasurer Rick Kahn's plea to Republicans to support a Democrat to replace Wellstone "reminiscent of a Maoist reeducation camp" and "Maoist denunciations".

Criticizing the Wellstone memorial for being too partisan is one thing, as is calling Democrats on several other incidents of political manipulation. But there’s no excuse for the vicious and unsupported jargon attacks that so many of these commentators have engaged in, nor can Caldwell and Bennett defend their egregious lies. When, come election time, pundits whip up simple narratives based on a few anecdotes, citizens had best proceed with caution.

Correction (11/11): The original version of this post incorrectly said "the total number of forged absentee ballots that have been found by the much-hyped probe is 15." That has been changed to "absentee ballot applications." We regret the error.

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11/5/2002 10:57:59 AM EST |

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