Nate Knows Nada

From today’s Times:

But when pressed repeatedly if he would specifically denounce the
advertisements, which Mr. Kerry has said were being run with the tacit
approval of the Bush campaign, the president refused to condemn then.
Instead, he said he would talk only of the “broader issue” of the
political committees that take to the airwaves with attack
advertisements.

“Five twenty-sevens – I think these ought to be
outlawed,” he said. “I think they should have been outlawed a year
ago. We have billionaires writing checks, large checks, to influence
the outcome of the election.”

Two thoughts.  First, he does exactly the thing that he thinks
should be eliminated.  And like any self-interested person, I
can’t imagine that he really means keeping billionaires out of politics
applies to him.  Just the ways that billionaires (i.e., George
Soros) work against him.

Second, why shouldn’t billionaires be able to do this?  They have
money, and they want to use that money to advance a candidate for
election.  What’s wrong with trying to influence the outcome of
the election?  That seems to be what we do whenever we register
people to vote, run ads, do mailers, talk to our friends and neighbors
about politics, and so forth.  We all work to influence elections,
with whatever tools are available to us.  And when people argue
that we shouldn’t allow money in politics, how would they propose that
we do this whole process?  (Unless you’re willing to argue that
elections should be entirely publicly financed, money has to be part of
the political process, whether you like money or not [as many of my
lefty friends seem to feel].  And what would those who want
publicly financed elections do until we get those [which could be quite
a while in our system]?)

But Bush’s comment seems hypocritical, because the 527s have tipped the
money balance toward the Dems in a way that many Republican operatives
were not anticipating, and so they are unprepared.  This is less
about money and more about advantage.  I surmise that Bush wants
to stop MoveOn.org, not Swift Boat Veterans.

This is quite interesting, as it uses each day’s new poll data to predict an electoral college score.

My own profession has pretty bad record at this sort of thing.  At the last electoral-year meeting of APSA,
all the models predicted a win for Gore (which you can argue actually
did happen, if you’d like), but th margins of victory were all over the
place.  There’s a panel on this again this year.

In this week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand has an excellent piece on political science approaches
to the question of “how people vote.”  You may be surprised or
dismayed to read what we know, especially those of you (many of the
readers of this blog, from what I can surmise) who fit into the
“ideologue” category (which is not at all what you would think if you
listen to our modern political discourse).

…This absence of “real opinions” is not from lack of brains; it’s
from lack of interest. “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level
of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the
economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, in 1942. “He argues and
analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within
the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His
thinking is associative and affective.” And Fiorina quotes a passage
from the political scientist Robert Putnam: “Most men are not political
animals. The world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to
them—possibly benevolent, more probably threatening, but nearly always
alien. Most men are not interested in politics. Most do not participate
in politics.”

Man may not be a political animal, but he is certainly a social
animal. Voters do respond to the cues of commentators and campaigners,
but only when they can match those cues up with the buzz of their own
social group. Individual voters are not rational calculators of
self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users
of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles
bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth
carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and
assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For
most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a
social act than as a political act.

That it is hard to persuade some people with ideological arguments
does not mean that those people cannot be persuaded, but the things
that help to convince them are likely to make ideologues sick—things
like which candidate is more optimistic. For many liberals, it may have
been dismaying to listen to John Kerry and John Edwards, in their
speeches at the Democratic National Convention, utter impassioned
bromides about how “the sun is rising” and “our best days are still to
come.” But that is what a very large number of voters want to hear. If
they believe it, then Kerry and Edwards will get their votes. The ideas
won’t matter, and neither will the color of the buttons.

From Snarky Malarkey:

Take a quiz and “find out.”

Problems with this quiz:

1. Almost all  the choices are dichotomous (agree/disagree),
   except that it’s not agree or disagree, it’s more like stating a
   problem and then offering two solutions to it.  If you wouldn’t
   choose either of the solutions, you’re still stuck choosing one.
2. Sometimes the reason you disagree with an answer is because of the
   “because.”  For example, “As a society, we should spend more money
   trying
   to find a cure for AIDS than for cancer and heart disease because AIDS
   threatens younger people.”  Well, I disagree with the reasoning,
   but I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise.  But I choose
   disagree anyway, because I don’t think we should give HIV research
   higher funding because it more greatly affects younger people but because there are other reasons.

I tend to use green.

From the Salty Vicar:

I do wish that more Episcopalians felt more anchored – the
conservatives do have it right that the church has given its flock very
little. We progressive Christians have to recognize that fact and start
offering the Gospel, with clarity, with confidence, the Gospel that God
is here, now.

And this:

…When reading [conservative] blogs, you’ll find a lot of ridicule about
“inclusion.” They will attempt to diminish the radical power of “love
thy neighbor.” They caricature the liberal understanding of love by
conflating it with the “anything goes” gospel….

But, ye liberals, if someone ridicules “inclusion” you may bring up
Samaritans; you may bring up the Moabites, and you may bring up the
rules of hospitality. I advise, however, not to play the game.

Instead remind them that we don’t worship inclusion. Instead, it is
simply a practical way of bringing people to God. Surely, God invites
us into his love. This is what we mean by inclusion.

“Inclusion” is a tactic. It is not a religion.

GetReligion’s article about U2 the other day spawned this very insightful comment:

I recently saw a CD in a Christian bookstore of U2 songs covered by
Christian artists (“In the Name of Love”). When I asked the clerk if
the store carried CD’s by U2 themselves, I was greeted with a shocked
expression and told “No, we only carry CHRISTIAN CD’s here.” Apparently
the exact same song is “secular” if sung by U2 but “Christian” if
performed by Toby Mac.

Yes.  This is precisely the problem with many evangelical
Christians today.  Only when actions are taken by certain people
(designated “Christians”) can such actions be regarded as “good, holy,
and pleasing.”  Should the exact same action be taken by someone
who is not part of the designated group, it suddenly loses its approved
status.  The action’s ethical status depends entirely upon the
ethical status of the actor, not the action itself.

I’ve written about this before.

From the National Catholic Reporter, regarding the Deal Hudson affair:

This
past March 17, having paid tribute to the saint who drove the snakes
from Ireland, George W. Bush — first lady to his left, Irish prime
minister to his right — bounded off the Roosevelt Room podium. As he
began to work the crowd of Irish Americans and Gaelic-wannabees, the
president noticed a familiar face, a fellow Texan, among those
assembled at the annual St. Patrick’s Day White House
gathering.”

Immediately after George Bush spoke,” recalled former U.S.
ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn, “the first person he greeted was
Deal Hudson.”

Heady stuff, perhaps, to be the first among the gathered
Catholic glitterati to be singled out by the most powerful man in the
world. But by now Hudson — publisher of the conservative Catholic
monthly Crisis, Bush political operative, and one-time philosophy
professor — was accustomed to the treatment.

Hudson, a 54-year-old,
thrice-married former Baptist minister, is a regular White House
visitor, a leading Bush campaign Catholic proxy, and a widely quoted
partisan unafraid to use his pen to serve the Bush cause.

In more than
two dozen interviews conducted by NCR over a four-and-a-half-month
period, mostly with former friends and Hudson’s ideological kin, a
complicated portrait emerged. Though few of those interviewed would
speak on the record, many of them painted a far less flattering picture
of Hudson than his public moralizing would suggest, and several raised
questions about the allegations that ended his academic career.

Also check out The Revealer, which generally turns out good criticism of reporting at mainstream and niche press, left and right.

UPDATE:
The National Catholic Reporter has just posted the article that sparked
the Deal Hudson affair — even before it was published. Joe Feuerherd’s
expose is what religion reporting should be: tough, theologically and
politically informed, empathetic, and attuned to the intersections of
faith and the world. Here’s why it matters to everyone, religious or
not: “The perception that [Deal] Hudson controls Catholic access to the
White House is widespread [and] largely accurate.”

This isn’t attack
journalism. Writes Feuerherd: “In my 20 years as a writer and
journalist I’ve written what could fairly be termed “favorable stories”
about such conservative Catholics as Cardinal John O’Connor, Opus Dei’s
Fr. C. John McCloskey, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Jim Towey, director of
the Bush Administration Office of Faith Based Initiatives. The notion
that this story was somehow politically motivated is incorrect. I went
where the story led me. “

Cross posted at Command Post.