Sarah Palin Interview

Palin finally agreed to appear before the press. She embarrassed herself by not knowing what the "Bush Doctrine" is. The use of pre-emptive war with no imminent threat (the "Bush Doctrine") has been a major focus of our foreign policy debates for years now, and Palin didn't even know what it was.

After a brief deer-in-the-headlights moment, she almost tricked Charlie into telling her what it was, though.

[UPDATE: Crazy person Charles Krauthammer argues that it's unfair to criticize Palin over this, since foreign policy debates often argue over the precise doctrine of the "Bush Doctrine." Krauthammer argues that there are four different interpretations of the phrase (none of which he identifies). But this misses the point, since Palin was clueless as to all of them. She nodded her head and guessed that "Bush Doctrine" meant Bush's "world view." She was simply clueless.]

Charlie Gibson also embarrassed himself with some pretty bad reading comprehension. Palin had not explicitly said that Iraq was "a task that is from God." Instead, she had asked a gathering of people to pray that it was "a task that is from God." Watch the video yourself:


That being said, and despite her protestations to Gibson that "I would never presume to know God’s will," I think that it's important to point out that she also said at that same church gathering that it was "God's will" that Alaska build a natural gas pipeline.


She also made a big blunder when talking about energy policy. She said this: "…I've been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy..."


However, that is just plain wrong. According ot the Department of Energy, Alaska produces 3.5% of the country's total domestic energy. Palin was most likely referring to domestic crude oil production, of which Alaska provides 18.5%. I'm really sick of Palin equating "energy" with "domestic oil production."

UPDATE: Rep. Zack Wamp (R-TN) damns Palin with faint praise:

Governor Palin is confident, smart, disciplined and while not yet totally prepared on the issues, she clearly is getting there....The country likes her so she will get a pass or two. If she holds up beyond that, she could be a transformative woman in American history. If not, we will all be disappointed.

UPDATE II: Apparently Charles Gibson didn't show her enough "deference," so Palin is doing her next interview with college dropout Sean Hannity.

UPDATE III: The major news networks apparently hold Palin to a low standard. Hey, if some random guy on the street doesn't understand modern foreign policy debates, why should we expect the potential leader of the free world to know?

New Study: Network News Focuses Campaign Coverage on Strategy, Not Issues

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting has a new study out, detailing how ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News have been covering Election 2008. Discussion of the actual issues (which are relevant to everyone's voting decisions, and should be covered by any sensible journalist) has been largely replaced with discussions of campaign strategy (which requires no effort, and really only helps the candidates themselves - and they can already afford good PR people). Among its findings:

Of the 385 news stories aired on ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News:

• 252 stories were mainly about campaign strategy--the “how” of getting elected--and 79 of those were only about strategy.

Only 19 stories, or one story in 20, were mainly about issues.

Eighty six percent of the stories were about campaign strategy/analysis, while 41 percent mentioned issues.

• When issues such as the economy, immigration and the Iraq War were present in a story, they were more often than not referred to in passing, usually in relation to polling.

In the 55 stories that raised the Iraq War as an issue, the networks made no mention of any of the Democrats’ plans for troop withdrawal or their stances on the troop “surge.”

• There was a vast discrepancy in the amount of coverage candidates received, with Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, John McCain and Mitt Romney all receiving over 900 mentions, while Joe Biden, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich received ten or fewer mentions.

Kucinich appeared only seven times, with four of those reporting on his exiting the race.

To anybody who has been paying attention to the endless coverage of flag pins, pastors, comments by surrogates, how much you tip your waitress, how old you are, what happened to your passport, how much you paid for your haircut, what your bowling score is, what the ethnic breakdown of the next state is, etc. this comes as no surprise. But still, it's good to have something quantifiable to point to in the future.

UPDATE:


UPDATE II: Glenn Greenwald makes an important point:

In addition to how destructive is the premise that readers and viewers crave trivial political reporting, that claim also seems quite factually dubious. The same media outlets which operate on this assumption -- network news programs and newspapers -- watch as their viewership and readership disappears. Given their performance, they shouldn't be particularly confident in their ability to know what the public wants.

Moreover, polls consistently show that Americans hate the type of political coverage our establishment press feeds them. A comprehensive study (.pdf) by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and U.S. News and World Report is very instructive:


Specifically, Americans overwhelmingly believe "media coverage" of the 2008 presidential race focuses "too much on trivial issues":


They also say -- again, overwhelmingly -- that "large corporations have too much influence over what the news media reports" and "most journalists don't make the effort to get the whole story":


Similar data demonstrates that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the media provides far too little coverage of substantive issues and policy debates and far too much coverage of petty gossip and personality-based attacks.

It's therefore unsurprising that the news media is held in the lowest esteem of all institutions -- even lower than the widely reviled Bush-led "executive branch" -- and that perception is only worsening:


Leave to the side (for the moment) the question of whether political journalists have an obligation (by virtue of the numerous privileges in the law and otherwise they are given) beyond maximizing ratings. The standard excuse that journalists like Harris give for their obsession with insipid gossip -- "it's what The People Want" -- is the opposite of what The People say when they speak for themselves. And while it's possible that what The People say they want is not really what they want, the declining audience and influence of establishment news outlets across the board is potent evidence of how false is the justification that the political media focus on irrelevancies because it's what The People demand.

The political media focuses on trivialities because it's easiest, because it's what they do best, and because it's the way that they (and the sprawling corporations that own them) avoid alienating those in political power on whom they depend.

George Stephanopolous Fails at Logic

Former Clinton press secretary George Stephanopolous reads the exit polls, and then comes up with a bizarre conclusion:

We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.

Wow, that's some pretty seriously flawed logic there. It's as if he's straining to justify his network's obsession with the issue by once again inflating its importance.

First of all, you have a clear majority of voters who consistently say that Wright will not affect their vote at all (77% of those who lean Democratic say that it has absolutely no affect whatsoever on their vote). Therefore, to say that "what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote" assigns way too much importance to the issue in the first place. Second of all, to take a correlation and turn it into a causation is just plain bad logic. Perhaps the people who thought it was one relevant factor in the decision-making process had other reasons to vote the way they did. There are, after all, issues out there besides pastors and flag pins (health care, the war in Iraq, gas taxes, etc.). Third, even the data that Stephanoplous uses as his justification is pretty weak stuff. 65% of the Indianans responding to the survey who thought Wright was not important went for Obama, and we're supposed to assume that this was a determining factor? 70% of the Indianans responding to the survey who thought Wright was somewhat important went for Clinton and we're supposed to assume that this was THE deciding factor for them? Couldn't it be that those who were already predisposed to vote for Clinton were more likely to say that her opponent's scandal was a big deal?

This chart from Gallup perhaps explains the situation a little more clearly:

Charles Gibson: Wrong on Capital Gains Question

At the ABC debate, in between questions about flag pins, Charles Gibson made some eyebrow-raising claims about the capital gains tax and how he thinks it leads to increases in revenue. However, his claims were highly misleading. This is what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found:

Cutting capital gains rates reduces revenues over the long run. That’s the conclusion of the federal government’s official revenue-estimating agencies, as well as outside experts and the Bush Administration’s own Treasury Department.

• The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation have estimated that extending the capital gains tax cut enacted in 2003 would cost $100 billion over the next decade. The Administration’s Office of Management and Budget included a similar estimate in the President’s budget.

• After reviewing numerous studies of how investors respond to capital gains tax cuts, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service concluded that cutting capital gains taxes loses revenue over the long run.

• The Bush Administration Treasury Department examined the economic effects of extending the capital gains and dividend tax cuts. Even under the Treasury’s most optimistic scenario about the economic effects of these tax cuts, the tax cuts would not generate anywhere close to enough added economic growth to pay for themselves — and would thus lose money.

Gibson's claim was highly misleading, since the spike in revenue is only the short-term effect of investors reacting to a sudden change in tax rates:

While a capital gains tax cut can lead investors to rush to “cash in” their capital gains when the lower rate first takes effect, it does not raise revenue over the long run.

• Especially when a capital gains cut is temporary, like the 2003 tax cut that Gibson cited, investors have a strong incentive to sell stocks and other assets in order to realize their capital gains before the capital gains tax rate increases. This can cause a short-term increase in capital gains tax revenues, as happened after the 2003 tax cut.

• Capital gains revenues also increased after 2003 because the stock market went up. But the stock market increase was not a result of the 2003 tax cut, as a study by Federal Reserve economists found. European stocks, which did not benefit from the U.S. capital gains tax cut, performed as well as stocks in the U.S. market in the period following the tax cut.

• To raise revenue over the long run, capital gains tax cuts would need to have extraordinary huge, positive effects on saving, investment, and economic growth that virtually no respected expert or institution believes they have. In fact, experts are not even sure that the long-term economic effects of these capital gains tax cuts are positive rather then negative.
  
  One reason is that preferential tax rates for capital gains encourage tax sheltering, by creating incentives for taxpayers to take often-convoluted steps to reclassify ordinary income as capital gains. This is economically unproductive and wastes resources. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s director Leonard Burman, one of the nation’s leading tax experts, has explained, “shelter investments are invariably lousy, unproductive ventures that would never exist but for tax benefits.” Burman has concluded that, “capital gains tax cuts are as likely to depress the economy as to stimulate it.”

So in the end, ABC's questions were either trivial scandal-issues, or based on false premises. This is the journalism we have to put up with.

UPDATE: Brendan Nyhan points out that John McCain and The Wall Street Journal make the same claims.

Let me state that again. Once again, the supply-side argument has been undercut by the administration's own economists.

Of course, that didn't stop John McCain, who has frequently claimed that tax cuts increase revenue, from making the same argument on ABC's This Week today:

MCCAIN: And [Barack Obama] obviously doesn't understand the economy, because history shows every time you have cut capital gains taxes, revenues have increased, going back to Jack Kennedy.

The Wall Street Journal also made the same claim in an editorial Friday (subscription required). It's sad to see the mainstream media giving life to this kind of supply-side foolishness.

"Debate"

Danny Evans of Dormant, PA has this to say on the debate:

That was no debate--it was a rerun of Access Hollywood. If we Pennsylvanians should be bitter about anything, it's that our state debate was turned into a sort of media carnival, rather than dealing with the real issues facing our region, and the American people.

Still, if I had to find a silver lining? I admired the restraint Obama showed in NOT diving headlong into the fray. Though it did seem to frustrate him that over half the debate had nothing to do with substance, he held his tongue in check, defended his opponent on one occasion, and even said "she could win" without so much as batting an eye.

Hillary seemed to enjoy wallowing in ABC's mud just a little too much for my tastes. Especially since she still hasn't given a straight answer on her Bosnia lie, or how she can reconcile taking 800 thousand dollars from the Columbian government while campaigning AGAINST the Columbian Free Trade Agreement. All in all, I saw in Barack Obama a frustrated (yet honest) commitment to trying to stay away from the political pie-slicing that has paralyzed our country and silenced OUR voices for far too long, now.

As bad as it was to watch, what we did see (pay attention PA) is that we, as voters, need to seek out as much information as we can, not just what the networks and cable shows think we want to hear. Barack Obama didn't have his best night, yet carried himself with grace and dignity in the face of farce. That's my kind of President. Because NOT wallowing, NOT changing, means he really does stand for HOPE in ways we've not seen in a long, long time.

Danny Evans, Dormont

(h/t xpostfactoid)

Here is Brian Lehrer (who didn't watch the debate) on the debate:

The last eight minutes with Jared Bernstein are the best.

UPDATE: The Internet is quick.


UPDATE II: Obama responds

ABC Debate

Let ABC know what you thought about last night's debate. Send them an email here, or leave a comment here (13051 and counting).

UPDATE: Isn't it odd that abc would choose a former Clinton official (Stephanopolous) as one of its moderators?