Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the myth of the black racist voter.

Ahhh, already some comedy gold coming from that DOD document dump.

TPM Reader Kevin H. found this nugget.

Back in June 2006 there’s this email …

hi. jed babbin, one of our military analysts, is hosting the michael medved nationally syndicated radio show this afternoon. he would like to see if general casey would be available for a phone interview any time between 3 and 6 pm. topics would be: status of operations in iraq and if troop levels should/can/will be reduced.
…
please feel free to contact jed directly (contact info below) if the general can/would be available for the interview. this would be a softball interview and the show is 8th or 9th in the nation.

A short time later a press flack from the Office of the Secretary of Defense writes back …

Hi
Thanks for sending this.

Just fyi, probably wouldn’t put “softball” interview in writing. If that got out it would compromise jed and general casey.

Babbin is now the editor of Human Events Online.

The Obama campaign starts staffing up for the general election, according to an email obtained by TPM Election Central.

The question now doesn’t seem to be whether or not Hillary Clinton will continue to wage a campaign, but rather how she wages it as the final three weeks of primaries plays out. And her comments last week to USA Today concerning the white working-class vote suggest that the question is still up in the air …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

A number of interesting details in the new WaPo/ABC news poll.

First, on the horse race, Obama beats McCain 51%-44% and Clinton beats him 49%-44%. Statistically speaking, those are basically the same margins. But I strongly suspect we will see Obama’s numbers moving ahead of Clinton’s in the coming days.

This is one factor that’s been too little remarked on — I’ve never plotted the numbers out on a graph but who does better against McCain has tracked consistently with who’s getting the winner and loser headlines in the primary battle. So, consistent headlines that communicate Clinton’s or Obama’s power, effectiveness, winner-hood for lack of a better word, push up his or her numbers vis a vis McCain. That’s not particularly surprising when you think about it. But it does put the softness and mutability of those general election horse race numbers into perspective.

Next up, age.

39% of Americans said they’d be uncomfortable with president who enters office at age 72, as McCain would, whereas only 16% think same about a female president and only 12% say so about a black president.

I don’t think there’s any question that questions like this yield a substantial amount of self-censoring among respondents. Social Scientists have a reassuringly unwieldy term for this — which escapes me at the moment. But basically, many people won’t say they’d be uncomfortable with a black president because they know they’re not supposed to think like that, even if they do. On the contrary, there’s no comparable social stigma associated with thinking that about someone past retirement age.

Still, even with that factored in, that’s a very big gap — and a big slice of the electorate for whom McCain’s age is a big issue. No doubt that’s why we’re hearing a lot of references from Dems about honoring McCain’s many decades of service to America.

Finally, there’s this …

While overall discomfort with an African-American president is much lower, it rises among less-educated whites – the same group that’s been a challenge for Obama in the Democratic primaries. Among whites who haven’t gone through college, 17 percent say they’d be at least somewhat uncomfortable with a black president; that compares with just 4 percent of white college graduates. Clinton may face a similar problem, however; less-educated whites also are more apt to be uncomfortable with a woman president (21 percent, vs. 7 percent of white college graduates).

Late Update: As a stream of helpful TPM Readers have reminded me, the term in question is “social desirability bias.” Like I said, a reassuringly unwieldy term.

Lying Minority Leader John Boehner’s lie of the day.

Bob Barr, who we first met as one of the nuttiest of the mid-1990s Republican Revolution nutbars, has over the last decade refashioned himself as a fairly consistent supporter of embattled civil liberties and opponent of unbridled executive power. And today he announced his bid to be the presidential nominee of the Libertarian party, which will choose its standard-bearer at its national convention starting on May 22nd. (Libertarian muckety-mucks consider Barr the frontrunner for the nod.)

Normally these third party candidacies don’t amount to anything. And I don’t expect this one to either. But on this one … maybe.

Barr is enough of a media darling that if he runs he’ll get a lot of free media. And there’s enough weirdness going on in the Republican party right now that I could imagine a few scenarios where he’d draw non-trivial numbers away from McCain. As always in these cases the place to look isn’t in aggregate national numbers but in particular states where a drawing off a few points in one direction could make a state competitive where it otherwise wouldn’t be.

At first glance you might think Barr could hurt McCain in the South. Some people have this idea that by spurring massive rates of voter turnout among African-Americans Obama could put some Deep South states into play. But this has never made sense to me. States like Mississippi and Alabama have big African-American minorities. But short of heroic levels of voter turnout, there just aren’t enough Democrats in these states to win one of them. Certainly there aren’t enough African-Americans to do it on their own. But perhaps if Barr could pull some Republicans away from McCain, some of these states could be in play?

Not likely. The regional and ideological calculus doesn’t add up. One of the GOP base’s biggest complaints about McCain is his purportedly insufficient GOP hackdom. Barr doesn’t really do any better than McCain on that score. In fact, he’s probably less hackish than McCain. So that won’t be a good contrast. And in the South the Republican party is really about cultural traditionalism, race and war. McCain’s got war covered; and Barr’s against the Iraq War. So that doesn’t play. And his civil libertarianism probably doesn’t play well with cultural revanchists. (Barr was a pretty big culture warrior in the 90s. But I get the feeling that that’s been overshadowed by his civil libertarianism. And regardless he’d probably need to keep it under wraps to secure the Libertarian party nod.) So at the end of the day it’s really pretty rough sailing for Barr down South — notwithstanding that he made his political career in Georgia.

The anti-war, small-l libertarian stance is generally assumed to be more attractive in the West. And this raises some interesting possibilities since it’s in the West that Obama’s strength as a general election candidate has been most evident. As I explained earlier, if you draw a line from Michigan west to the southern tip of Nevada, it’s in the states above that line where Obama is outperforming Hillary Clinton and putting some traditionally Republican states into play. And a lot of those states are also ones where libertarian politics, if not Libertarian party candidates, have traditionally faired well. So I wonder if Barr’s candidacy could potentially have the net effect of adding to Obama’s traction in those states.

Finally, there’s the anti-war factor. Civil liberties is pretty abstract for most people. But the Iraq War isn’t. So a lot of Barr’s drawing power will be a test of just how much opposition to the Iraq War there is in the Republican party. How many Republicans are there out there who just won’t accept McCain’s Iraq forever position but can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat? And how many of them could Barr sop up?

I’m curious to hear other people’s views on this. Like I said, third party candidates seldom amount to anything significant in a presidential contest. But Barr’s media celebrity and the state of the GOP leave some chance of this one breaking the mold. So let me know your thoughts.

From Michael Barone’s glowing review of Doug Feith’s war memoir …

Unfortunately — and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush — the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.

O’Reilly, or a larval early version of O’Reilly, goes nuts on the set of Inside Edition …

NRO interviews Bob Barr about his highly righteous spoiler campaign for prez.

Following up on last night’s post, a knowledgable TPM Reader adds this …

Regarding Congressman Barr’s presidential run, I think that he undermines McCain without drawing votes to himself, and that’s good enough for Obama.

I think that your “does he get votes” calculus is understandably, but overly, shaped by Nader’s impact in 2000.

I think the impact of Barr out there running is that you now have two voices, one ostensibly from the Right, criticizing War On Terrorism policies, including Iraq. That’s going to make it harder for McCain to draw the usual “the Dems are weak, Republicans are strong” distinction. I think it’s going to have an impact on independent voters, even if that impact isn’t to draw them to Barr but to make it okay (you know what I mean) for them to vote for Obama.

You’re right that Barr has tended to attract quite a bit of media attention to himself – since Safire’s departure, he’s been the go-to “right-wing civil liberties guy.” Which is funny, because he was a huge “War on Drugs” guy (he now views medical marijuana as a states rights issue), and was an author of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“How many Republicans are there out there who just won’t accept McCain’s Iraq forever position but can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat? And how many of them could Barr sop up?”

See, I think you’re asking basically the right question there, but you’re still framing it in terms of “how many votes does Barr get?” Not many, I’d guess. I don’t think it matters much.

Then again, I suck at political prognostication.

I think this is right. But for the reasons noted last night, I think he could also pull a non-trivial number of votes.