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Swift Boat Watch: Judicial Confirmation Network

See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.

Who They Are: Judicial Confirmation Network

Purpose: The group supports conservative nominees to the Supreme Court. In this election, they oppose Barack Obama.

President: Gary Marx, former coalitions director for Bush-Cheney 2004 and Mitt Romney.

Funding: The group is a registered 501(c)4, funded through individual donations.

Cost of the Ad: $550,000 in a $1 million campaign.

Where It Ran: Michigan, Ohio, and nationally on the Fox News Channel through Friday, Oct. 10.

Claims: Tony Rezko, a slumlord who was convicted on 16 counts of corruption, donated money to Obama. Obama also associated with William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground who planted a bomb in the Pentagon in 1972 and later said he "didn't do enough." The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for years, blamed the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks. If Obama "chose" these people as associates and backers, the ad suggests, how can we trust him to choose Supreme Court justices?

Accuracy: The majority of the facts in the ad are correct. Rezko started to donate to Obama's state senate campaign in 1995, although Obama recently gave Rezko donations to charity. Obama and Ayers worked together on the board of the same Chicago anti-poverty foundation for three years. Ayers, when he was a member of the Weather Underground, planted a bomb and later said it wasn't enough. Wright did say in a sermon that African Americans should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America." But the ad is wrong to equate this statement with blaming the U.S. for 9/11. It was another controversial Wright statement—"America's chickens are coming home to roost"—that suggests the U.S. is partly to blame.

Background: The group was created in 2004 to help President George W. Bush's nominations get confirmed in the Supreme Court. The group campaigned heavily for Samuel Alito's confirmation.

Swift Boat Rating:

Although the facts in the ad are essentially correct, suggesting that these associations have anything to do with Supreme Court nominations is a stretch.

There Can Only Be “One”

In the beginning, there was “The One.” Now, thanks to an off-hand comment in tonight’s debate, there’s “that one.” The result: One "one" cancels the other "One" out.

McCain was discussing a 2005 energy bill “loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney. You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one,” he said, indicating Obama. “You know who voted against it? Me.”

The Obama camp immediately blasted out a one-liner to reporters: “Did John McCain just refer to Obama as ‘that one’?” In an otherwise forgettable debate, that’s already become the moment, with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe suggesting it reflects McCain’s “anger” and lumping it in with his refusal to look Obama in the eye last debate.

Which is, of course, utterly silly. “That one” is good-natured towel-snapping—another way of saying, Get a load of this guy. Anyone who knows how McCain talks knows this. He was joshing around. It wasn’t particularly funny—but it wasn’t mean-spirited either.

It could still matter, though. McCain’s campaign has had a good chuckle dubbing Obama “The One,” a tweak at the worshipful way some fans treat him. (And, some believe, a hint that he’s the Antichrist.) They’re still laughing, too. Just today, the McCain camp issued novelty cufflinks with a mock presidential seal on one side—a jab at Obama’s campaign seal—and “The One” engraved on the other.

But “that one” could mean the end of “The One.” Now, every time Team McCain resurrects their favorite moniker, Team Obama need only reply, Sorry, which one? Oh, you mean “THAT one.”

It’s a dumb response, but then again, it’s a dumb attack. After all, it takes one to know one.

Obama's Hanging Curve

Did Obama miss the best pitch he's going to see in this debate? The second question, from a man named Oliver Clark, asked the candidates: "Well, senators, through this economic crisis, most of the people that I know have had a difficult time. And through this bailout package, I was wondering what it is that's going to actually help those people out."

McCain responded first, giving an airy answer about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—institutions, he suggested, the questioner "may never even have heard of ... before this crisis"—and taking a snipe at Obama for his contributions from those institutions. At this point, the moment felt eerily analogous to the most famous question from the 1992 town hall debate below, in which a young woman asked the three candidates how the national debt had personally affected them. (She probably meant the recession.) George H.W. Bush's response (about 20 seconds into the video) was muddled and aloof, and Bill Clinton pounced on the opportunity to give a personal, compassionate-sounding response (2:30 in the video). The exchange was instant presidential-debate lore.

As Jack Shafer wrote in Slate today, Clinton's '92 playbook has more than a few valuable pages in it, and Obama's answer hardly lived up. After a mini economics lesson about frozen credit markets and their effect on business, he flipped the question into an attack on McCain's support for deregulation. The man-of-the-people card may not be Obama's strong point, but one can't help feel that he missed an essential opportunity to connect with voters. 

Swift Boat Watch: WakeUpWalMart.com

See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.

Who They Are: WakeUpWalMart.com

Purpose: To change Wal-Mart's business strategy and the way the corporation treats employees. In this election, they oppose John McCain.

Campaign Director: Meghan Scott

Funding: United Food and Commercial Workers International Union

Where It Ran: Aired three times during the vice-presidential debate on CNN and MSNBC in Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Related Groups: UFCW

Claims: 1.6 million women are charging Wal-Mart with pay discrimination. When equal-pay legislation came to the Senate, McCain "helped defeat it."

Accuracy: In the largest class action suit to date, 1.6 million women sued Wal-Mart for discrimination regarding pay and promotions in 2004. McCain opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in April that would have made it easier for people to sue their employees on the basis of discrimination. McCain did not vote on the bill but voiced his opposition on the campaign trail.

Background: UFCW created the group in 2005 to directly challenge Wal-Mart. Although the group has aired one previous ad attacking McCain's economic plan, it has focused almost exclusively on Wal-Mart in the past. According to the Federal Election Commission, UFCW has spent $596,570 in support of Obama so far this election cycle.

Swift Boat Rating: 0 boats

Swift Boat Watch: Defenders of Wildlife

See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.

Who They Are: Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund

Purpose: Protecting endangered species by promoting the election of pro-environment lawmakers

Senior Director: William Lutz

Funding: According to the WSJ, the group is funded mostly by small donors.

Cost: The group says it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for airtime but would not specify an exact amount.

 
Where It Ran: The ad has run in Florida, Ohio, and Michigan and will expand into Colorado and Northern Virginia.

Claims: The spot crosscuts between images of Sarah Palin and footage of aerial hunting, stating that Palin supported aerial hunting and also proposed a $150 bounty fee for the foreleg of any killed wolves in order to encourage the practice.

Accuracy: The ad describes the basics of Palin’s record correctly but fails to mention the rationale for aerial hunting, which supporters refer to as “predator control.” These proponents argue that killing gray wolves, which are abundant in Alaska though they have been on and off the endangered species list in the continental United States, is necessary to maintain sufficient levels of moose and caribou for subsistence hunters that rely on those animals for their food. Whether the policy really helps these hunters is another question. Various groups of scientists have also questioned the logic of the policy, saying it didn’t consider the imperative of maintaining predator populations. Critics have also said that predator-control operations should be limited to fish and game agents.

Swift Boat Rating:

The ad gets the essentials of Palin’s record right. While some may disagree with its characterization of aerial hunting, the characterization is not blatantly unfair.

Background: After Palin proposed the bounty on wolves’ forelegs, Defenders of Wildlife themselves filed a lawsuit that forced her to back off the policy.

The Four Coalitions To Court for Bailout Votes

The House of Representatives will vote on a financial bailout bill for the second time in a week this afternoon, and backers of the measure are desperately hoping to corral at least 13 more vote than they did on Monday, when the bill failed by a 228-205 margin.

In order to have any hope of wrangling those 13 votes, party leaders need to understand the unusual ingredients that made up the defeating coalition. Various Trailhead readers noted that the extremes of both parties voted against the measure, while donations from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae correlated with support for the bill.

Catholic University politics professor Matthew Green took that analysis a step further. He ran the roll call-vote against 14 factors that might have affected a representative’s vote: Data points like freshman status, membership in the various House caucuses, vulnerability in the upcoming election, and so forth.

Using a standard logistic regression model, Green discovered several factors that reliably predicted a "no" vote, and another few that reliably predicted a "yes" vote.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus, and those on the ideological extremes of their party were likely to vote against the bill with a high statistical significant (p < .05, if that means anything to you).

Meanwhile, party leaders, those not running for re-election, and members of the New York delegation were significantly likely to support the bill. Members of the Financial Services Committee also trended toward supporting the bill, but with a slightly weaker correlation.

This model essentially studies each factor in a vacuum, holding other factors constant in order to study its effects in isolation. So a lawmaker with multiple, conflicting traits—take for examples, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and a party leader—predicting the vote gets tricky.

Biden's Fishy Claim: Three Weeks in Iraq

Joe Biden claimed in tonight's debate that "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country." The claim sounds stunning, and Biden has made it before; he said the same thing in a March 2 New York Times op-ed and at a Senate foreign relations committee hearing a year earlier.

The key word here is building. To make the claim work, one needs to compare only the reconstruction costs in Afghanistan with the entire Department of Defense bill for Iraq. According to the most recent Congressional Research Service report on war appropriations, Congress has appropriated $653 billion for Iraq and $172 billion in Afghanistan. (See Page 16. Afghanistan is listed as "OEF" for "Operation Enduring Freedom.") By that comparison, it would take more than a year's worth of Iraq spending to equal the total cost of operations in Afghanistan.

Biden is referring only to rebuilding costs in Afghanistan, which are a small fraction of total spending. The claim is a classic apples-to-oranges analogy, and it's unclear exactly where Biden is getting his price for oranges. The same CRS report lists all foreign aid and diplomatic spending in Afghanistan at $12.4 billion on Page 19, which is getting us closer; if we use fiscal year 2008 numbers for Iraq, when combat costs totalled $145 billion, three weeks comes out $8.4 billion. Biden is probably parsing out that $12.4 billion figure even further. This September 2008 CRS report on postwar policy in Afghanistan says that the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent just under $7 billion in the country (See Table 14 on Page 65).

Is Biden hoping viewers will gloss over his caveats and think he's making a legitimate, apples-to-apples comparison? He certainly fooled this guy. If so, it's bad idea—even in a nation plagued by innumeracy, the claim that we outspend total funding for Afghanistan in three weeks in Iraq fails the smell test. If this isn't the strategy, Biden could try a little harder to explain his reasoning. It didn't help that, when he repeated himself in the debate, he left out all the caveats: "Let me say that again. Three weeks in Iraq; seven years, seven years or six-and-a-half years in Afghanistan."

The Palin Strategy

Sarah Palin got a tough rap this week for flubbing questions in media interviews. Her solution tonight: not answering them at all.

Gwen Ifill nobly tried to keep both candidates on task. But Palin demonstrated a knack for answering the question she wanted to answer—not the one that was asked. At one point, Ifill asked Palin to respond to a comment by Sen. Biden on health care. “I would like to respond about the tax increases,” Palin pivoted and proceeded to accuse Obama of raising taxes 94 times. A minute later, Ifill prompted Palin to respond about McCain’s record of deregulation. Again, Palin resisted: “I'm still on the tax thing because I want to correct you on that again.” Biden looked exasperated, prompting Palin to say, “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.” In other words, screw your questions, I’ve memorized a message and gosh darn it, I’m going to get it across. She even managed to steer Ifill at one point: “Can we talk about Afghanistan real quick?” “Certainly,” said Ifill.

It wasn’t just Ifill she ignored—Biden got the cold shoulder, too. When Palin said Obama voted to cut off troop funding, Biden pointed out that McCain has voted against troop funding as well, because the legislation contained a timeline for withdrawal. She did not respond. Same when he pointed out that Obama’s tax plan raises taxes only on those who make more than $250,000, not families who make as little as $42,000, as Palin and McCain claimed. She had talking points but few responses to Biden’s rebuttals. One notable exception was the time she corrected Biden on “McClellan’s” argument that counterinsurgency could work in Afghanistan as it has worked in Iraq. Biden conceded the point but didn’t mention that his name is actually Gen. McKiernan.

The strategy worked. Palin kept the conversation on her turf, avoided follow-ups, and came across both forceful and charming. She addressed the camera directly—part of the “straight to the American people” message—instead of addressing Biden (although she did turn his way to inform him, “Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq”). She’s also a master of the tonal pivot, going from beaming smile to sly grin to dead serious all within the same answer. The format helped, too. The two-minute rebuttal periods didn’t produce much cross-chatter, and Ifill didn’t ask many follow-up questions.

In her closing statement, Palin said she liked the debate because “I like to answer these questions without the filter of the mainstream media.” If by “filter” she means Couric-style follow-ups, requests for clarification, and other obstacles to the subjects she came to talk about, she’s right. This debate was a great medium for her.

Main Street, Wasilla

All four candidates have conjured Main Street in the two debates this fall, usually juxtaposed against the evils of Wall Street. Barack Obama got to it in the fifth sentence of his opening remarks in last week's debate, and McCain was quick to follow. Biden and Palin have both already invoked the proverbial boulevard of the middle class.

"I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C.," Palin said tonight. 

So, what's Main Street like in Palin's hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, where she was mayor for six years? Google Maps reveals a diminutive road of a few blocks connecting Wasilla Fishhook Road and Knik Goose Bay Road. To verify this, your intrepid correspondent called the Wasilla Public Library, located at 391 N. Main Street. (The time difference really benefits the Washington media elite.) The woman who answered the phone, who asked to be identified as Kathy, told me, after some consultation with a colleague, that it was four blocks long.

Expectations to the Rescue!

After Sarah Palin's interviews with Katie Couric, expectations could not be lower. Even showing up would be a victory.*

But as usual, both campaigns are engaging in the usual counterintuitive praise for their opponents. The best quote comes from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe as he tried to ratchet up expectations—reportedly provoking guffaws from the press scrum.

"Governor Palin is one of the best debaters in American politics,” Plouffe said. “If you look at her - no she is. Her 2006 debate, she knew where she wanted to take every question, and so I think she'll be relentlessly on message tonight, and again I'm sure she'll have any number of biting and witty one-liners. But our focus is on the person sitting at home in Canton, Ohio, tonight, Akron, Ohio, tonight, who's struggling economically."

*Update: The debate has begun. She is here.  

Swift Boat Watch: Winning Message Action Fund

See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.

Who They Are: Winning Message Action Fund

Purpose: A 501(c)4 nonprofit affiliated with NARAL Pro-Choice New York. The group advocates for reproductive rights. In this election, it opposes John McCain.

President: Kelli Conlin

Funding: Individual donors. Although they share staff with NARAL Pro-Choice New York, their finances are separate.

Cost of the Ad: Less than $10,000.

Where It Ran: Ran 92 times through SaysMeTV on various networks and markets. Airtime was never purchased for this ad. Instead, Winning Message Action Fund uses a company called SaysMeTV that allows individuals to pay to air the ad on networks ranging from BET to Animal Planet. For example, one ad in the Indianapolis suburbs on CNN between 7 p.m. and 12 a.m. costs $45. Airtime for this ad was mostly purchased in Pennsylvania.

Related Groups: NARAL Pro-Choice New York and National Institute for Reproductive Health.

Claims: McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and thinks it should be overturned. If it were overturned, 21 states would immediately start to ban abortions, making them illegal. The ad asks the question, “How much time should she serve?”

Accuracy: McCain explicitly states on his Web site that Roe v. Wade was a “flawed decision that must be overturned.” The Center for Reproductive Rights released the “What if Roe Fell” report (PDF) in 2007. On Page 10 of this report, it states that 21 states are at high risk for banning abortion. But only four states—Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Dakota—have enacted bans-in-waiting that would outlaw abortion as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned. Bans-in-waiting don’t violate federal law because they don’t go into effect unless Roe v. Wade is overturned and therefore wouldn’t require legal action to be enacted. The report lists jail time as the punishment for many of the states’ statutes. But in all four ban-in-waiting statutes, the punishments are for the person who performs the abortion, not the woman who receives it.

Background: The ad started as an Internet campaign in August, funded for TV by individuals. But the organization will start purchasing its own airtime this month. The organization is still unsure if it will use the “How Much Time" ad or create a second one.

Swift Boat Rating:

John McCain opposes Roe v. Wade, but the group’s 21-state estimate is a bit exaggerated. There is evidence that these 21 states could move to ban abortion, but nothing implies that action would be immediate. No statutes currently in existence would send a woman to prison for having an abortion—it’s an idea that’s commonly used as a scare tactic.

How To Predict a Bailout Vote

The 228 members of the House of Representatives who brought down the financial bailout bill on Monday represented a strange coalition, including many of the most liberal and most conservative lawmakers. Some state delegates banded together. All of Arizona voted against the bill, for example, while 25 of 29 New Yorkers supported it.

Reader Nili Gilbert wrote in today with a particularly compelling correlation. Gilbert matched the roll call for the vote against political donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dating back to 1989, using data compiled by Open Secrets. The results are striking: Members who voted for the bill have received an average of $8,588 in political donations from the two gargantuan lenders, which the government rescued from collapse in early September. Those who voted against this week’s bill received an average of $3,877 from the lenders. These figures include both donations from Freddie and Fannie’s political action committees and from employees of those companies. If you break out just the PAC donations, the divide looks just about the same: an average of $6,514 in donations to members who voted for the bill, compared with $3,051 for those who didn’t.

To be clear, we’re just looking at this data as a predictor of how a member voted on the bailout, not the cause. The two former “government sponsored enterprises” were bailed out in early September and placed in a conservatorship, bringing them under government control, and Monday’s vote wasn’t about doing Fannie or Freddie any favors. Instead, the data shed light on how some lawmakers are far more politically connected with financial institutions than others and how those connections matter when examining votes on financial issues.

Why do we still care about this? The Senate is voting today on a new version of the legislation that supporters hope will be more palatable to the House. Backers of the new bill need 13 more votes in the House, assuming they can retain the 205 who supported the first incarnation. Of the opponents to that bill, 34 have received at least $10,000 in donations from Freddie and Fannie in the past 20 years. According to this thesis, they would be logical people to try and flip. (For the dataphiles out there, this also means the median donation to members who voted against the bill is much lower than the average—just $675. The median for those who voted for the bill is $2,250.)

Got a better predictor of bailout votes? Drop me a line.

Nancy Pelosi’s $700 Billion Speech

House Republicans and the McCain campaign are currently blaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s speech today introducing the bailout package for its failure. According to this narrative, she managed to alienate a dozen Republicans who otherwise would have voted for the bill.

But read Pelosi’s speech. (Transcript here.)* She wasn’t bashing Republicans; she was bashing Bush. She said the $700 billion price tag “tells us only the costs of the Bush administration’s failed economic policies—policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.” Later, she thanked Democratic leaders Barney Frank and Rahm Emanuel while conspicuously omitting minority leader John Boehner. But she did thank Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Doesn’t he count?

Granted, it may have sounded unpleasant to sensitive Republican ears. But GOP members can hardly object to Bush-bashing—in fact, many of them have done it themselves. Vulnerable GOP congressmen have scrambled to distance themselves from the president on Iraq, immigration, Katrina, and now economic policy. Sure, Pelosi could have been more gracious to Boehner and other Republicans who voted for the package, especially after such delicate negotiations. But her speech also showed Democrats that you can be for the bailout and still run on a Bush-bashing economic message. It’s a message you’d think would resonate with Republicans, too.

So what’s the advantage of the “hurt my feelings” excuse? Not only does it defy belief—does anyone really think 12 members of the House of Representatives actually changed their minds on this bill because of a speech?—but it allows Obama to take the high road and look presidential. His campaign decried McCain’s “angry and hyperpartisan statement”—McCain had blamed the failure on Obama and fellow Democrats—but refused to point fingers back. “Now is the time for Democrats and Republicans to join together and act in a way that prevents an economic catastrophe.”

In the short term, at least, the advantage is Obama’s. First, it means the financial crisis is likely to stay in the news for a while longer—and he enjoys a huge margin over McCain when the issue is the economy. Second, McCain explicitly injected himself into the bailout negotiations, thereby lashing himself to the results. He was taking credit for this bill before it passed. Does that mean he should get blamed for its failure?

*UPDATE: Turns out Pelosi ad-libbed quite a bit of the speech, including this potentially divisive line: "... Democrats believe in a free market ... but in this case, in its unbridled form as encouraged, supported by the Republicans — some in the Republican Party, not all — it has created not jobs, not capital, it has created chaos." See the video here.

The House Vote Roll Call

We'll continue looking for patterns this afternoon. In the mean time, let me know if you think you've identified the voting pattern. An asterisk in the status means the seat is open and the member is not running for re-election.

Update, 5:30 p.m.: Slate's Timothy Noah points out that the 15 members of the Michigan delegation voted nine to six against the bill, even though the auto industry is uniquely vulnerable to a downturn—auto sales are already suffering from the credit crisis. This includes two of the four Democrats who represent the area around Detroit in the southeast corner of the state.

Reader Adam Tarr points out that the extremes of the political spectrum united against the bill as well. Of Voteview's ranking of members of Congress by ideology, eight of the 10 most liberal and all of the ten most conservative voted "no."

Update, 7:20 p.m.: Reader Bob Deaton tallied up the vote according to the status of the race, and noticed that representatives not running for re-election--most of whom are Republicans--were significantly more likely to support the measure. Of the 35 members about to leave Congress, 25 supported the bill. Among retiring Republicans, 75 percent voted for the measure. "There's something about giving up their seats that imbues our representatives with either integrity or reckless abandon, depending on your viewpoint," Deaton writes.