With all the attention that SEIU has received over rampant corruption in its largest California local, 6434 formerly headed by the disgraced Tyrone Freeman, and Michigan’s largest healthcare Union also formerly headed by, yet again another disgraced leader (Rickman Jackson), and now most recently the resignation of one of Mr. Sterns newly elected top International Vice-Presidents, Anelle Grajeda, for diverting members dues to her former boy friend, one must ask the question: “who does Andy Stern really support for President?” At first glance at the current situation with SEIU Andy Stern’s pick as our next President may seem unrelated to the corruption within SEIU. That is, until you examine closely how Mr. Stern has acted upon the alleged corruption within SEIU.
Instead of aggressively pursuing all available remedies to rid the corruption within the aforementioned SEIU locals and getting back to the business of electing a pro-worker candidate he has instead chosen to expend the vast majority of SEIU’s resources in a personal vendetta against arguably one of SEIU’s most successful union locals, SEIU-UHW West.
Why? Because SEIU-UHW West dared to hold Stern and his “Team” accountable for the inherent promise that SEIU be of the members, by the members, and for the members.
SEIU-UHW West has engaged Stern for close to 3 years in an internal debate over union governance that has challenged the destructive direction Stern has moved SEIU towards. SEIU-UHW West attempted to sound the alarm during the recent SEIU convention in Puerto Rico by bringing to the floor measures that would have ensured and preserved member governance, oversight, and participation at the highest levels of SEIU.
Unfortunately, Stern and his “Team” choreographed a textbook campaign that vilified SEIU-UHW West’s platform as centric only to the needs of SEIU-UHW West and devoid of any conscience for the plight of unorganized workers. He stated that SEIU-UHW West was only interested “in polishing their apples”. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact the platform put forward by SEIU-UHW West expanded the powers of its members and was a threat to Stern’s lust for control, power, and centralization of decision making within SEIU.
Second only to 1199 NY in its COPE contributions (member voluntary political fund) to the International, the leader in California COPE dollars by double the states locals average, and the fastest growing local in SEIU, SEIU-UHW West, instead of being utilized by Stern to ensure that we elect a President sensitive to the needs of the working class, is instead under a vicious and completely baseless attack from Stern and his appointed henchmen and surrogates that includes a threatened trusteeship on false charges of financial mismanagement.
It is important to note that this is Stern’s second bite at this apple. The international recently had their proverbial heads handed to them in the highest court in California on this very issue.
The court ruled that the International had no basis for their claims and dismissed all relevant claims made by SEIU with prejudice. Put simply, the court told Stern and his “Team” not to ever bring this frivolous matter before the court again. So now Stern wants to drag SEIU-UHW West thru the mud in an attempt to discredit them as well as distract attention away from the more serious previously mentioned malfeasance (and long known by Stern) of his handpicked appointees, Tyrone Freeman, Rickman Jackson, Annelle Grajeda.
With so much at stake in this years election one must wonder why a personal vendetta against SEIU-UHW West is the highest priority for Mr. Stern. At the SEIU convention in Puerto Rico this year, delegates endured wave after wave of self righteous indignation opposing SEIU-UHW West’s desire to debate internal jurisdictional issues. At stake was the very essence of what it meant to be a healthcare worker; the ability to advocate on behalf of patients, better staffing, improvements in working conditions, and the right to choose in a fair and democratic process what union local to be represented by.
Stern surrogates and appointees made statements calling SEIU-UHW’s arguments selfish and self-serving. One even stated, “People are dying right now as we waste time debating these issues. We have work to do! Let’s get to work!” Staffers from the SEIU continued to echo this same tired line at nausea throughout the debate process.
Certainly the work of electing a progressive pro-working class president falls into the category of “work to do”. And if it does why, with the incredible political fight before us, would Andy Stern sideline his second biggest political weapon against four more years of Bush’s failed policies in order to carry out a personal vendetta against SEIU-UHW West?
Stern has time and again issued the battle cry against corporate greed, affirmed his commitment to lift workers out of poverty, and boldly stated that SEIU will lead the battle to get universal healthcare and pass perhaps one of the most ambitious pieces of legislation ensuring workers rights to organize (EFCA).
So it defies logic that at the most critical time in the election process, where so many peoples lives depend on the outcome, Mr. Stern would allow himself to be consumed with forcing a trusteeship upon a union local that has a long and proven history of, not only adhering to the values he claims to hold dearly but, excelling at those same values.
And why would Mr. Stern schedule the Trusteeship hearing, not only during the most critical time of the general election but on the exact same dates (September 26-27) that the Obama campaign is attempting to mobilize California supporters to participate in a canvassing effort in neighboring “swing state” Nevada, where Obama trails McCain by 1 percentage point?
It begs the question, who ultimately wins if Mr. Stern allows himself to take action against a union local who has the power to help end eight years of failed economic and foreign policies? And whose’ hopes ultimately die if we fail?
Andy Stern prides himself on being a leader in the progressive majority movement. However, his current actions fly in the face of his alleged progressive values. He is jeopardizing real reform in our labor movement to fulfill a personal grudge. These are hardly the qualities of a true progressive and reformer, and certainly not the qualities that will bring hope and “Justice For All”.
Yesterday, five Alaska lawmakers–all Republicans–sued to stop the legislatures official, bipartisan Troopergate investigation. Their lawyer, Anchorage attorney Kevin Clarkson, sent out an email overnight, accusing Democrats inovolved in the investigation of… being Democrats:
“The Partisan actions of Sen. French, Sen. Elton and the Legislative Council have tainted the investigation beyond the appearance of impartiality required under the Alaska Constitution,” said Kevin Clarkson, Esq., of the firm Brena, Bell & Clarkson, P.C., and counsel in the suit.
The investigation, which began after Monegan’s dismissal in July 2008, is being led by outspoken supporters of Barack Obama and members of the Democratic Party. Sen. Elton, the Chair of the Legislative Council donated $2,000 to the Obama campaign but has failed to disclose this to the Legislative Council and he continues to preside over the Council with respect to the investigation, refusing to convene meetings of the Council at the request of a majority of the Council’s membership.
In fact, the GOP-majority Senate Legislative Coucil met last Friday, and issued 13 subpeonas, with a Wasilla Republican casting the deciding vote in defiance of mounting party pressure to fall into line. Palin herself has been silenced, with GOP operatives talking to the press in place of her, and, apparently, the entire Alaska executive branch. Meanwhile, AP reports the involvement of the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute, which TPM explains is connected to James Dobson. Alaska blogger/radio host and former GOP legislator Andrew Halcro has a list of 13 times–from July 18 to September 2–that Palin pledged full cooperation with “any investigation.” (full list on flip).
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Senator Chuck Schumer calls on McCain to release his medical records.
Senator Harry Reid calls on McCain to release his medical records.
John Aravosis noted that McCain didn’t tell anyone he had cancer surgery during the Republican primary, but waited until after he won to admit he had surgery to remove cancerous cells. 1,954 doctors have already signed the open letter to McCain asking him to release his medical records (via KathyG). And I took video of Senator Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer calling on McCain to release his medical records. Here’s the transcript:
Question: What do you think the relevance of John McCain’s cancer is on this election?
Schumer: I don’t know the relevance but I will say this. When you’re running for President everything should be public including your full medical records. I believe in the right to privacy but when you’re running for President which is such an important job the need of the public to know supercedes it.
Question: What is the relevance of John McCain’s cancer to this election?
Answer: When we’re talking about the President of the United States, health issues are extremely important. We learned that going back a long time ago, when you guys weren’t around, when Tom Eagleton because of his depression had had shock treatment. So this isn’t something we just dreamed up, it’s important, Eagleton had to drop out, and select a new Vice Presidential nominee. So I think there should be total transparency when a person is running for President of the United States. And it may be when President Bush went and had some things burned off of his head or John McCain a month ago had a little thing burned off his face. I think it’s important.
Even as Obama is moving ahead of McCain, not all is lost for the senior Senator from Arizona. While Palin was more popular than McCain, only twelve days later McCain is now comfortably outperforming Palin.
Today, a new poll from Rasmussen shows Obama leading Palin 50%-43%, while at the same time McCain led Obama by 1%. McCain also outperformed Palin in a hypothetical match-up against Biden.
Palin’s favorable ratio has also dropped from +21% to +14%, including a 10% increase in her “very unfavorable” rating in just eleven days. That is about 1% of the country shifting toward a “very unfavorable” opinion of Palin every day for the last eleven days. That, um, isn’t very, um, good.
The sheen is starting to wear off on Palin. The major problem, I think, is her inability to produce new content. Spending an entire week preparing for a new speech or interview doesn’t give people much to work with. In the down time, it is easier to expose lies about bridges, jokes about hockey moms grow stale, and faux outrage about said jokes gets played out fast. In politics, you have to produce new content in order to grab headlines and win news cycles, but Palin just isn’t producing much new content. Further, what she little she does produce will always be worse than her convention speech.
Ironically, Palin raised her expectations so high after the convention, that it is virtually impossible for her to ever meet them now. Of course, she only pulled that off because expectations were lowered so massively before her speech. The irony is delicious.
I just got back from a dermatologist for a check-up (growing up in Miami with outdoor summers requires this), and I asked her about McCain and skin cancer. He’s had various types of the disease and I wanted to get a sense of whether he’s really in danger or if this is one of those treatable forms of cancer. And she told me that basically, some skin cancers are not that bad, but malignant melanoma – the kind McCain has had in two separate places – is not one of those. It’s bad. Real bad. And unlike most cancers, it doesn’t really go away, even after years in remission. Sam Donaldson had it on his ankle, and thirteen years later it returned in the same spot. McCain has had it on two separate ‘primaries’ (not recurrences, which aren’t as bad), and you can clearly see the post-surgical scars of having his lymph nodes checked (and partially removed). This is not a healthy guy, this is a 72 year old man with a fairly high likelihood of serious illness and death within the next few years.
I asked Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, about John McCain’s cancer, and he said that McCain is in remission. The video is above. You can see above that Kyl is taken aback, but he says that he trusts what John McCain told him. But why? That might be good enough for a Republican Senator, but why should that be the test for the voters? Why should we trust McCain on his medical past? It’s not just that McCain has stretched the truth in this campaign, as even Karl Rove noted, or that he’s acted as desperately as you’d expect a dying man to act when stretching for his lifelong dream of the Presidency, it’s that McCain has simply refused to release his medical records to the public and confined select members of the press to a three hour window with no electronic equipment to examine his records. Brave New Films is on this question, and more than a thousand doctors have signed up to ask him to release his medical records. You should sign this petition and watch the video, it is downright scary. While this race is between Obama and McCain, President Palin is not an unlikely outcome (as Matt Damon noted).
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This is the moment in the Presidential campaign where no one has any control over what’s going on in a meta sense, the public starts to tune in, and voter registration and GOTV efforts matter. So go sign up to volunteer for Obama or for some downticket Democrat. There are some great ones on our page Better Democrats.
The markets are collapsing here, and in London shares are dropping to a three year low. This looks a bit problematic, but I feel like this financial ‘meltdown’ talk is silly. I mean yeah it’s going to screw up a lot of financial flows but who is this structure helping anyway? Elites are freaking out but is that really because they are concerned about you and me and the billions of others around the world? I don’t think so.
I mean, this was predicted years ago by many many people. I could see it and I’m just a random guy with a computer. Greed and selfishness only works to a point, then it consumes itself. That should be obvious; so why wouldn’t we expect the system to collapse? The real question is what replaces it, not how to prevent it from falling apart. That question has been answered at this point, it’s done or dying.
In the Kos tracking poll, Obama is up 4. This statement from Matthew Down makes sense to me: “The only things that are going to change the equation of the election are the four debates,” Mr. Dowd said, referring to the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate. “That’s it.”
That and the macro environment, of course. Like a financial meltdown.
This is a good piece from Brad Delong on how McCain will tax your health benefits.
Charlie Rangel continues to slide around ethical boundaries. Rangel should really retire, he’s 78, he’s obviously not able to distinguish between the public interest and his personal life anymore. I like Rangel but his time is past.
Better Democrat Alan Grayson is leading his opponent Rick Keller by 4 points.
Obama is not fundraising for other Democrats and making coordination somewhat tough. He does have a Presidential contest to win, of course.
“It is important Texans follow the rules. Stock up on food, water and ammo for an event like this.” – Texas Rep. John Culberson (R), offering his Houston-area constituents advice for preparing for Hurricane Ike during a weekend MSNBC appearance.
The public opposes giving the President more power by large margins.
Sam Graves is amusingly attacking Kay Barnes with the same crap he did earlier this year.
Less than two months before voters weigh in on the toughest challenge of his political career, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) is escalating his cultural war with former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes (D), accusing her of pushing “a homosexual agenda” and shopping a mid-1970s magazine article in which Barnes, a former sexuality consultant, encouraged masturbation.
The latest line of defense for John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, on the Troopergate Scandal, simply doesn’t hold up one millisecond for those who know the story so far. As noted by mcc in a quick hit, the AP is reporting that Palin’s administration has released a batch of emails supporting a claim that Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan was fired over budget disagreements, not because he refused to fire Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten.
There’s just one thing wrong with this: it’s a Rovian coverup involving more lies and deception than you can throw a stick at. Indeed, if it were true, there would have been no “Troopergate” in the first place. The whole scandal began when Palin had a subordinate fire Monegan, without giving any reason. If this were truly why he was fired, then why didn’t she just say so? Particularly since the failure to explain her actions caused an immediate stir in Alaska at the time.
On July 20, the Anchorage Daily Newswrote:
THE HONEYMOON IS OVER … So, will our Sarah change her claim of “transparency” to merely “translucence” given her refusal to say why she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan?
“Opaque?”
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Here we are, in the non-regulated bank economy which we were gifted with when Phil Gramm was in Congress (and before he left to be a big-time bank lobbyist… and financial advisor to McCain) that has left us with a 500 point drop in the Dow today, with Lehman Brothers going belly-up and with Bank of America swallowing Merrill Lynch.
There’s a summary of the whole works on Olbermann with a commentary about halfway in by Paul Krugman. Just go to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21… to view it.
Note… without the Republicans over the last decade or so, we would never be in the worse mess since the era of Herbert Hoover (who McCain seems to imitate) and the start of the Great Depression. Right now we seem to be up the creek, an Obama may be the last available paddle.
Great quip from Obama linking McCain to the hucksters who used to try to sell tourists the Brooklin Bridge (possibly apocryphal). Thanks to Mark Matson in Quick Hits and NcDemAmy for the youtube.
Linking McCain’s lies to a well known cultural motif like bridge selling is a good way to make the subject of McCain’s lies become a self-perpetuating narrative.
Update: TPM weighs in with another witty linkage (though perhaps less universal): “A Bridge Too Far”
That’s Mitt Romney calling McCain out on lying, following on Karl Rove’s assertions that McCain has “gone too far.” This is starting to look coordinated, and Rove doesn’t speak out of turn for no reason. Either there are some very angry conservative insiders knifing McCain or this is part of some dramatic PR ploy in which McCain will somehow be portrayed as a hero.
I don’t know, it’s a little spooky.
Update: My mistake. This video is from the primaries.
In part two of Sarah Palin’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, she gives lipstick-y lip service to the notion that human beings may, in fact, be contributing to climate change. What a difference a month (and a nomination) makes! ‘Cause back in August, before John McCain singled Palin out as our nation’s foremost expert on energy, Alaska’s climate change denier-in-chief told Newsmax.com that “I'm not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being man-made.”
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One of my very best friends has hated Obama from the very beginning, especially since the Rev Wright controversy erupted. He’s not a far rightie, I would describe him as a moderate conservative that frequently will vote for the Dems on a state and local level. We’ve been having a fairly friendly debate on the presidential race. Finally, I sent him a list of 10 reasons why he shouldn’t vote for McCain, issues that I know he doesn’t agree with McCain on. Including anti-abortion, anti-SCHIP, tax cuts for rich, privatize Social Security, and a few more. Here was his answer:
I do not vote for policies. No one implements their campaign promises, neither those you fear, nor those you cannot wait for to arrive.
I vote for character; I see little of it w/ BO and a lot of it w/ JM.
How do I answer something like that? He sees little character in Obama? I think it’s because of Rev Wright, he’s brought that issue up several times.
I’d rather not do it the Rove way, by mentioning McCain’s adultery, flip-flops, ambition, lobbyists, etc. And I don’t want to screw up our friendship, it is only 1 vote. And the rest of his family will be voting for Obama to more than offset his vote. But I can’t stand to think that my friend is voting against his own best interests like so many Americans continue to do because of personality, not issues. He’s very smart, very well informed (although he does get too much information from the right wing noise machine). I feel like if I can’t convince him, there isn’t much hope of convincing many other intelligent voters in this country either.
Any suggestions? Or should we just agree to disagree and move on?
Here you go: the retired Rear Admiral and former Judge Advocate General of the Navy who spoke for Obama at the Denver convention – John Hutson.
How do we get out the word that we’d like to hear from him once again?
However, with his B.A. from Michigan State, perhaps he never attended the Naval Academy. Was he in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at MSU? Bio on Wikipedia doesn’t give enough information. Here are the dates he spoke at the convention: August 25 and 27.
Generally, when I do a diary, I want to have something to say. Something to make you think. I want it to be worthwhile even if you disagree with me-or even, especially if you disagree with me. But lately things have been going so fast, it’s genuinely hard to digest things fast enogh to post about them before something else even more timely and thought-provoking comes along. And so the backlog grows.
Well, it stops here! Err… would you believe it slows down briefly to gawk at a roadside attraction? Well, never mind. Here’s an emergency catch-up potpouri, designed, if nothing more, to relieve some feelings of guilt I’m dealing with none too successfully. First up, John Dean’s observations on Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications from a Constitutional perspective. Oh, she’s not forbidden to be President, Dean says, but…
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Anonymous Liberal, who some of you may remember from his occasional pinch hits for Glennzilla, makes a point worth highlighting, The Media’s Moment of Truth:
This election is a test of the political media in this country. If journalists can’t find a way to dissuade the use of flagrant dishonesty as a tactic, they will have failed this country miserably.
A moment of truth, and a moment for truth.
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I find current discussions about the campaign sort of strange. There are lots of people saying Obama isn’t ‘going after McCain’ or ‘going negative’ or isn’t ‘on message’. I’ve seen this piece on HuffPo passed around at least five times, which emphasizes that he must go negative and stay on message. I hear that he must ‘fight back’ against McCain’s sleaze with a consistent theme.
What’s odd about these conversations is that they don’t acknowledge that Obama is doing just that. I blogged earlier about the attack ads Obama ran against McCain, all on economic themes. Why ignore them? Why assume he’s not making criticisms when he is?
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(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
The series grew rather long, so I want to concentrate on its basic premise, why it is so, and why it matters to us right now. The bottom line of all this simple: there is no silver bullet. No matter how brilliant you think your idea is, even if you’re absolutely right, it won’t be enough to win the election. It’s not silver bulletts, but systemic approaches that win elections, and beyond, build political power over time.
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Sarah Palin apparently has a limited understanding of the troubled mortgage finance industry, as she told voters in Colorado Springs (9/6) that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” She promised that “The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.” Perhaps Gov. Palin may be forgiven for her shallow knowledge of the secondary mortgage market. Andrew Leonard of Salon.com noted (9/8) that Fannie and Freddie have been private entities and haven’t cost the taxpayer a dime-so far. Ironically, the lack of regulation of mortgage bankers brought on the abuses that forced the government takeover. But taxpayers likely will end up picking up a substantial tab.
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Waxman’s investigators said they took statements from six political appointees involved in the videoconference who maintained that Doan asked her employees how they could help Republicans in the upcoming elections.
This is an aspect of the Republican crusade against Congressional earmarks that needs more attention. As usual, Republican reforms only exist to benefit Republicans. Any actual good they might do is purely incidental.
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The Obama campaign must be troubled by the professional feminist wing of its support, which just can’t help itself, it must comment endlessly on Sarah Palin. And then conservatives happily respond, and we spend another news day talking about Sarah and her rifle, Sarah and the polar bears, Sarah and her pregnant daughter, and so on and so forth. Did even the brilliant Karl Rove realize how bountiful a gift the Palin selection would be to the McCain campaign? How is it that our news continues to be dominated by this lady, veering the election (permanently, apparently) off the winning issue for Obama, the economy, and making it all about populist style, where he loses?
Well, let’s have Katha Pollitt of The Nation magazine (which fronts its page today with ‘Sarah and the polar bears‘ (gee, the environmentalists can’t help making it ‘all about Sarah’ either!) help you there. This ‘important feminist’ (her heretofore mucho Obamaism taking a backseat for however long) just can’t help herself, in her latest column — Lipstick on a Wingnut (a way to talk about or to right-wing Christians that ain’t) — she has to keep up the attacks on Palin, and she’s willing to make them anti-feminist, whatever will make sure we all know that the Palins of this world will never usurp the culturally ‘liberal’ feminist leadership. Here’s the anti-feminist rant parts of just the first paragraph:
the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin
She talks incessantly about being a mother of five
[She] uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop.
If you wonder how she’ll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you’re a super-sexist.
Palin . . . went back to work when Trig was three days old
her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol
Okay, and in sum: even if it were strategically not dumb-assed to help keep the focus ‘Palin 24/7’, that’s a non-rational, insinuating, anti-feminist, and non-issues-focused first paragraph.
But back to my main amazement: Will the (ostensibly all establishment Democrat) ‘leaders’ of the feminist ‘community’ ever get off Sarah Palin ass? Well, nope, I don’t think so, not even if it fatally hurts Obama’s chances of winning in November. Why? Well, besides pressing their most cherished ‘culturally correct’ buttons, Palin is a challenge to feminist officialdom’s authority:
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My brother pointed out that in Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson, she empathizes with the American people by saying ‘Everybody’s got issues, everybody’s got burdens’ while standing in front of the mansion she and her husband built two years ago and her own seaplane. And it’s worth noting that she has not released her tax records, though to be fair, my guess is that Palin does remember how many houses she has.
Ah, being a member of the political elite has its rewards.
Your own private seaplane? $150k.
Mansion on a private lake? Who knows?
Being able to bill your government for a travel allowance while staying at your mansion? $16,951.
Letting your family and husband who is under investigation by the state for abuse of power charge the state for travel as well? $43,490
Covering up your own corruption and greed with lies about Barack Obama? Priceless.
Yesterday was supposed to be “the first day of the rest of the campaign” according to the Obama team and the point at which they started to fire back, according to reports I read. So I was a bit disappointed when the day ended and the only “hitting back” were two rather uninspired ads. One ad is just Obama talking into the camera about as uncharismatically as Obama is capable of and saying the other side is talking about change but he means it. Nothing else in the ad, not even a symbolic item or two in the background. The other ad at least mocks McCain as being out of touch and unable to use a computer but I'm not sure how many votes this moves. In fact some lower information voters may not use a computer either and probably don't like to think of themselves as “out of touch.”
So either the campaign is just organically careful and unwilling to take chances at this point or they have a stealthy double-reverse psychology type of plan. While I fear the former, I'm hoping it's the latter and it goes something like this (follow along).
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Remember back in June, when Barack Obama “clarified” his positions on a whole raft of issues-including warrantless wiretapping-all in a rightward direction?
At the time, I felt there were three things worth noting:
(1) Some shifts away from majority positions to rightwing minority positions were presented as shifts “to the center”. Most notably, even most Republican voters now see “free trade” as more bad than good.
(2) We were told that this was a “political necessity.”
(3) We were told that this “always happens.”
(1) and (2) were particularly dubious when Obama backed away from his criticism of NAFTA, given how crucial Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are to winning the White House, and how hated NAFTA is among the very blue collar voters that Obama needs in order to beat McCain there. But #3, at least, seemed plausible to those who don’t recall the elections of 1968 and 1980. Even those who do recall those elections are likely to insist that they, too, followed the standard pattern of running away from the center in the primaries, and towards it in the general election. And now, at least, I’m not inclined to argue with them, because now we clearly have a counter-example on our hands: John McCain ran center in the primaries, and now is running right.
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I don’t know why people are so shocked that McCain’s lies are working. We’ve been over this before. Here’s John Bullock, and commentary from Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias from December, 2007.
Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters’ attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people’s thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.
There’s a lot we don’t know about political persuasion, and we’re particularly in the dark about how to combat systemic dishonesty. Gossip as a social tool, true or not, works, and attaching reputations to gossip-mongers has an effect both positive and negative, as does repetition from multiple sources. Simply calling out lies doesn’t work, you have to explain why someone is lying and it has to be attached to a larger frame.
One thing that we have known for a long time is that just saying ‘she/he’s lying’ doesn’t work. People will elect dishonest politicians, knowing they are dishonest.
For nearly two weeks now, I’ve been suffering from a newly-minted malady called Palin-paralysis–a nasty tv-transmitted virus I caught after watching Sarah Palin’s divisive and derisive acceptance speech. You know, that salute to “small town values” that lionized plucky, scrappy hockey moms and demonized yucky, crappy community organizers.
The primary symptoms are nausea, a perpetually clenched jaw, and a half-baked Alaska-induced brain freeze; can’t get out of bed, can’t blog, can’t even blog in bed. The surreal spectacle of the Palin pick, the depth of cynicism and carelessness that it demonstrated, and the embrace of this ludicrous choice for veep by so many folks is truly appalling. As Matt Damon told the AP:
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