delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/broderism-watch.html
Ronald Reagan Diary Watch June 29, 2007 Broderism Watch: Congressional Approval Ratings Robert Moomaw writes: As has been pointed out before, Congress as a whole traditionally gets lower approval ratings than the President for the simple reason that people on BOTH sides of the ideological aisle can disapprove of it -- the people backing the minority party will naturally disapprove of it, but a lot of the people backing the majority party will also say THEY disapprove of it because they don't think their party is doing an enthusiastic enough job of trampling the opposition underfoot. Well, the latest pollster to ask it is Fox News today -- and, like all other post-2006 election polls on the subject, they indicate that at the moment the Dems have very little to worry about, election-wise.
Broderism Watch: Congressional Approval Ratings: Comments The presidential primaries have been going on forever already. Everything has moved up a month and when the day comes, poof, not much of a bump. For the Republicans I am looking forward to the guy who tries to emulate that handsome hunk George Clooney and not shave for a weekend. Miami Vice to go with the Old Spice, the "I'm not a Republican suit" suit.
June 29, 2007 at 09:23 AM Good questions to Broder on his chat today, including this one: New York: Brad DeLong (an economist who was in the Clinton administration) argues that much of what Becker and Gellman report could have been reported as long ago as July 2001. Was the overall content of this report about Cheney's role really a surprise to you? Cheney had overruled Treasury Secretary O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chair Greenspan on budget policy "2. Cheney had overruled EPA Administrator Whitman and Treasury Secretary O'Neill on global-warming policy "3. Cheney had overruled Secretary of State Colin Powell on North Korea policy "4. George W Bush had neither the patience nor the intelligence to master the issues "5. It looked as though Bush had decided to rely on Cheney's opinion on pretty much everything." David S Broder: I do not know Brad DeLong and I have no wish to quarrel with him. But as I just said in answer to another question, I think it would have been nearly impossible to duplicate the Cheney series reporting until after the reelect of the Bush-Cheney ticket.
June 29, 2007 at 09:58 AM ben, thanks for bringing that to our attention: could broder possibly be more willfully obtuse? If Broder says that Gellman-Becker taught him a lot of new things, he looks like an uninformed idiot; if Broder says that he knew the broad outlines of Gellman-Becker beforehand, he looks like somebody who has been lying to his readers for half a decade.
June 29, 2007 at 10:36 AM Yeah, the most depressing thing about Broder's non-answer is that it shows how willful and non-senile his disingenuousness is. He's quick enough about it to say, truthfully, that Gellman and Becker couldn't have written the precise articles they did much earlier than they did, which (as Brad in effect observed) knowingly begs the question that there was plenty of other, hard evidence openly available many years ago that was more than sufficient to support essentially the same conclusions Gellman and Becker reached. If Broder had said something incoherent, it would support the "idiot"/senile conclusion. Instead he responded with a clearly knowing evasion (ie technically accurate, substantively disingenuous), proving the "liar for Versailles suck-ups" conclusion.
June 29, 2007 at 11:33 AM It seems that this thread thinks (collectively) that this: In short, the Effortfully Balanced Broder-type critics among the Talking Heads still don't know what they're talking about. they just don't want the great unwashed to know what they know.
June 29, 2007 at 02:19 PM These polls can be read as combination of the disgruntled without distinguishing who unhappy about what. Pollsters need to separate out those dems pissed at their congresscritters for not bringing the war to a halt.
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Brad DeLong's Other Weblog Feeds: * Shrillblog * Egregious Moderation About Brad DeLong * J Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, chair of its political economy major, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and was in the Clinton administration a deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury. His best work extends from business cycle dynamics through economic growth, behavioral finance, political economy, economic history, international finance to the history of economic thought and other topics.
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