Let’s Get Something Straight
By: John Cole June 13, 2008 at 6:35 pm

I liked Tim Russert, even though I thought his BS gotcha nonsense was thorough idiocy and not helping the debate at all. He was a likable guy- friendly, always smiling. I understand it is a loss for the beltway folks, and he had a lot of really good friends and meant a lot to people, and I would be dishonest if I failed to mention that I feel sad by his passing.

MSNBC has been running nothing but a 5 hour (and presumably it will go until 11 pm or beyond) marathon of Russert remembrance. CNN has done their due diligence, and Fox news has spent at least the last half hour talking non-stop about him.

But let’s get something straight- what I am watching right now on the cable news shows is indicative of the problem- no clearer demonstration of the fact that they consider themselves to be players and the insiders and, well, part of the village, is needed. This is precisely the problem. They have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days.

Tim Russert was a newsman. He was not the Pope. This is not the JFK assassination, or Reagan’s death, or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. A newsman died. We know you miss him, but please shut up and get back to work.

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Devoting the whole NBC Nightly News bulletin (on Friday, June 13, 2008) was simply insane.

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INSANE.

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i followed him every Sunday.

But his slanted interview of Ron Paul left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

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Video
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The two-sentence excerpt run by NBC News (Brian Williams – Thursday, May 17, 2007):

They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.

And then Alan Greenspan’s spouse cut Ron Paul abruptly to give air time to Rudy Giuliani, who caricatured Ron Paul’s views and crashed him like he was aiding and abetting a Mid-East terrorist or something.

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What Ron Paul really said:

They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.

Ron Paul:

I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were – if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

I am happy to see that both Donald Luskin (“in all seriousness”) and Pat Buchanan (who views him as a “serious” contender) like Ron Paul’s ideas. See the “Ron Paul 2008″ site for their reaction.

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- Ron Paul on CNN responding to Rudy Giuliani

- Ron Paul on Blowback

The Illinois politician garnishing the biggest praise is not even running this year, our junior senator and future president.

Also Long On Barack Obama: Ex-BBC News and political betting blogger Mike Smithson…

- Big poll boost for Obama backers

- The Time cover that’s sparked off the excitement

My Take On Barack Obama: A fine man, no doubt, but too green. We’ll see whether Lance Fortnow’s wet dreams become reality in 2008, though. Anything can happen in politics. Incompetent politicians are elected at the highest office on a semi-regular basis (Carter, Reagan, Bush Junior).

A quick response to Chris:
Let me clarify what I think the key puzzle is: the odds of either Democrats or Republicans are – literally – unchanged since the week before the 2004 election. It seems amazing to me that there has been *no news* that is relevant to the 2008 election.

And I don’t really know which way it should have gone (I’m not yet calling ‘08 for the Dems). For instance, Bush winning in ‘04 provides the Republicans with an incumbency advantage. Countering that, the last two years have provided the Dems with an advantage in the midterms, which you might think could persist to ‘08. And the cast of possible candidates is also starting to take shape, and the absence of Warner, the rise of Barak, and the continuing dominance of both Hillary and McCain are all important factors that we didn’t know about two years ago. All of this is hard to reconcile with the odds remaining unchanged.

I[n] response to Mike’s point: he is exactly correct to emphasize the difficulty in discerning the direction of causation between election outcomes and economic outcomes. But that is precisely the point of my forthcoming QJE paper with Snowberg and Zitzewitz (available at: PDF).

In that paper (which is what I describe in the WSJ), we look at stock market reactions to what are clearly random (or exogenous) shocks to the expectations of Bush’s re-election – the leaked exit polls, and the subsequent vote count. These experiments allow us to draw inferences about how changes in electoral prospects drive economic outcomes.

The Abstract Of That Paper:

Partisan impacts on the economy: Evidence from prediction markets and close elections – by Erik Snowberg, Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz – (PDF) – 2006-03-XX

Analyses of the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in expectations about the likely winner during Election Day. Analyzing high frequency financial fluctuations following the release of flawed exit poll data on Election Day 2004, and then during the vote count, we find that markets anticipated higher equity prices, interest rates and oil prices and a stronger dollar under a Bush presidency than under Kerry. A similar Republican-Democrat differential was also observed for the 2000 Bush-Gore contest. Prediction market based analyses of all Presidential elections since 1880 also reveal a similar pattern of partisan impacts, suggesting that electing a Republican President raises equity valuations by 2 3 percent, and that since Reagan, Republican Presidents have tended to raise bond yields.