Dukakis replayed?

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I’m grateful to Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith at Politico for putting me onto this video.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a piece by Shankar Vedantem reporting on some recent research into the power of political misinformation.

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people’s minds after it has been debunked — even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

It’s worth reading — I find myself wanting to see the whole study. And I also find myself wondering what it says about a democratic system such as ours that people not may not take the trouble to become informed about the facts of a matter, but may actually prefer to be misinformed.

and as if Tina Fey weren’t enough for your average Monday,

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Garrison Keillor has a wonderful Salon column today about how the Republicans are running against themselves. I especially like this couple of paragraphs, in light of all the sneering and hand-wringing about elitism I’ve encountered lately.

. . . [A] former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, “I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you.”

In school, you couldn’t get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don’t uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

Right on!

And while I’m at it, here’s David Brooks scolding my guy for failing to correct the manners of vicious liberals.

. . . [Obama] needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin’s faith and family. Many liberals claim to love working-class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant. Obama needs to attack Bill Maher for calling her a stewardess and the rest of the coastal condescenders.

As a former hunter (in my childhood and youth) with an uneven college record, I can testify that no liberal has ever sprayed me with disinfectant. Nor has Bill Maher ever called me a stewardess. My neck is as red as the next man’s, but I am a proud liberal and member of the religious left, though I don’t believe in God in a creedal sense. In my checquered life I have managed to read a few books and perhaps learned a thing or two. My beloved, who is a real professor, tells me that I am an intellectual (though she may agree with Margaret Soltan that few professors are such). If this is true I got to be an intellectual over a long time and as a result of some honest labor. I don’t share most fashionable contempt for the professorial class (of which I am generically a member, having spent most of my adult life teaching and working in universities), though I do think the concerns of many academics are pretty parochial.

I’m thinking of writing something about the reconstituted culture wars here, and may do so soon. Today, I merely observe that Brooks’s comment about “coastal condescenders” is a self-indulgent piece of stereotyping to which Michael Kinsley quite rightly objects. Soltan doesn’t like Kinsley’s argument, but I rather do. And about the culture wars, Tim Burke has been writing some good posts recently. You can read a couple of them here and here.

behind those Tina Fey glasses

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Since this clip has now disappeared from YouTube, the victim of a take-down order from NBC, it’s worth knowing that you can still watch it here (where NBC would have liked you to watch it in the first place).

The video has already gone viral, as they say, and given rise to speculation as to the role of Fey in the McCain/Palin campaign (not to mention future SNL episodes). It hardly seems worth crediting that NBC would offer some pale Fey imitation as Palin, but given McCain/Palin’s penchant for bamboozlement, one never knows. Indeed, since Fey has a day job, as the AP reports:

For the long term, “SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels reportedly has an as-yet-undisclosed “Plan B” and “Plan C” for a Palin impersonator, in lieu of Fey.

If Governor Palin makes a future debut as Tina Fey inpersonating her, remember — you read it here first.

brushing up my Shakespeare

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It would be a good idea, I think, if the Democrats would get unified behind my guy’s candidacy instead of running around in circles like so many chickens, in a panic. Everybody, it seems, has some advice for the young Senator from Illinois, including me. Even Politico is piling on, with John Harris’s column today, filled with advice for Obama supposedly from Bill Clinton. Maybe we should all shut up.

In the wake of the first Palin interview, I’m thinking that the Governor of Alaska is already becoming old news, and that the more she talks the more she will tie herself to the tired old ideas of the Bush administration. I’m also thinking that the reason I got excited about my guy in the first place, back when I was a Clinton supporter, was that he reminded me of the excellence of my country at its best. Without appealing to chauvinism or nativism, without preaching American exceptionalism, he reminded us all of the America we can take pride in honestly. Right now John McCain is reminding us all on every hand of America at its worst, of patriotism that really is the last refuge of scoundrels.

I’m also thinking maybe Obama should apologize to Bill Clinton, as John Harris suggests. It might help unify democrats.

Simply put, Clinton will never be fully at peace with Obama until the Democratic nominee makes clear—in emphatic words, in public—that Clinton is not in any way racist, and did not try to “play the race card” during the Democratic nomination contest, as some commentators have suggested.

There’s no question that Clinton was impolitic in comparing Obama’s victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s victory 20 years earlier. But Clinton is understandably outraged that people would argue this remark negated a career-long commitment to racial equality—and that Obama stood by mute while such charges were made.

Clinton swallowed his medicine with his speech for Obama in Denver. Obama has still not fully swallowed his by making a public defense of Clinton on race.

I have criticized both Clintons for attacking Obama in ways that may have countenanced racism, but perhaps Harris’s advice is good no matter what may be the long truth about that issue. Obama could achieve a lot by putting his arms around Bill Clinton. Aside from anything else, the gesture would grab a lot of headlines and, again, be a reminder of America at its best.

And speaking of America at its best, an honest politician (and I believe that Obama has striven to be such) should put his own ad writers on notice that they are not to stretch the truth, not even a little. FactCheck.org find some occasional Obama stretchers in the media mix. They don’t help, it seems to me.

Well, there’s more advice, and I just offered to shut up. My guy is unveiling new ads and campaign emphases today. David Plouffe maintains the campaign is on course and will stick to its long term plan and also “that the attention being paid by national news media outlets to events like Obama’s lipstick comment was not mirrored in local news coverage.” Maybe we all need to quit obsessing about the lies coming out of the the Republican campaign. Maybe in the long run they will only hurt McCain. So at the end of the week I’m remembering those optimistic words of Shakespeare’s Earl of Kent, as he sits overnight in the stocks in king Lear.

Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!