The example I focused on was the wall-to-wall coverage of John Ensign's affair, including (bizarrely) a slideshow of the house owned by Ensign's staffers. Since then, the pattern of over-the-top Ensign coverage has continued, culminating in a post by TPM founder Josh Marshall pondering the relative emasculation of Ensign and his accuser:

There's a lot of salacious back and forth today about the Ensign scandal. But beneath the tabloid headlines there's a critical question that needs to be asked:

Which is more emasculating? Getting paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife? Or being a fifty-something United States senator and still needing mom and dad to cut the check to pay off your mistress and her husband?

Truly, no one but a media economist could have predicted back in 2000 or 2001 that Josh Marshall -- a wonky political journalist with graduate training in history -- would be writing posts about how "emasculating" it is for someone be "paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife." There's no better illustration of the power of commercial incentives to shape media content.

*At times, TPM is still an excellent news source, but the substantive blogging on which it made its reputation is now the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time I'd characterize its content as something akin to talk radio for liberals.

(Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign's opponent, Ed Bernstein.)

“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”

Update 6/26 1:56 PM: Another Norquist gem via TPM: "[The Sanford affair] does indicate that men who oppose federal spending at the local level are irresistible to women."

So if it's a cost problem, it's easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It's not that complicated.

Steele's appreciation of the nuances of health care politics is reminiscent of John McCain's strategy circa 2006 for ending the civil war in Iraq:

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

Who says the GOP isn't the party of ideas?

12% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. 8% thinks he faked his birth certificate. The new Washpost/ABC poll says that 22% of the electorate id's itself as GOP. Thus it is a fair inference that roughly half of declared Republicans are fringe lunatics--which explains why "respectable" conservative media outlets like National Review publish the Andy McCarthys and the Victor David Hansons, and why GOP politicians like Michelle Bachman and Steve King are now "mainstream" for the GOP.

DeLong's reader is way off. While the Muslim misperception is more widely held among Republicans, it's hardly an exclusively GOP phenomenon. The most recent Pew poll shows that 17% of Republican believe Obama is a Muslim -- not 50% -- along with 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats. No partisan cross-tabs are available for the dubious birth certificate poll, which was conducted for the fringe World Net Daily website, but I'd imagine they follow a similar pattern.

With that said, these levels of misperceptions are of course still much too high. For more on why these false beliefs tend to persist, see my new co-authored research with Jason Reifler and Duke undergraduates on correcting misperceptions about Obama's religion as well as my previous research with Reifler on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions (PDFs).

For instance, Silver published an analysis today that claims to measure "the impact of lobbying by the insurance industry on the prospects for health care reform." His statistical model predicts senators' support for the so-called "public option" using their estimated DW-NOMINATE ideal points (a measure of their policy views), health costs in their state, and their total campaign contributions from health insurance and HMO PACs. He finds that senators who receive larger industry contributions are less likely to support the so-called public option. Silver extrapolates from his model to a world in which special interest contributions are banned and concludes that "the insurance industry's influence appears to swing about nine votes against the public option."

However, as GW's John Sides notes on The Monkey Cage, "there is a potential endogeneity problem in the model that Silver constructs. Does health insurance PAC money make senators less likely to support the public option, or are Senators who tend to oppose or at least be skeptical about government health care programs more likely to get contributions from health insurers and HMOs?" In other words, we can't be confident that contributions are causing senators to oppose the public option. Silver acknowledges this caveat in a parenthetical, but then concludes his article by making the causal claim that "the money is why... Democrats are facing an uphill battle on the issue."

In addition, we can't say much of anything about a world in which health industry contributions aren't made. It's an unobserved counterfactual. Silver's estimate of nine votes being swung is essentially meaningless in its current form -- the model is extrapolating far beyond the available data.

What's so frustrating about Silver's post, which was (disappointingly) praised by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog, is that there is an extensive literature on this subject by political scientists and economists. Over the last 30+ years, these studies* have typically found minimal effects of campaign contributions on roll call votes in Congress even when scholars use more sophisticated techniques to address the causal inference problems described above (which are widely understood at this point). Given these prior findings and the inherent problems with Silver's analytical approach, we should be extremely cautious about putting any weight on his conclusions.

(* See, for instance, pp. 112-117 of Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003 [PDF] from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.)

The moment may have resonated so much because some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher on avaricious banks and vicious Iranian dictators.

Or maybe people just thought it was funny that he killed a fly during an interview? Even by Dowd's exceptionally low standards, that is absurd psychobabble.

(* According to Google's currency converter this morning.)

CAROLINE HELDEN, PROFESSOR, OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: [President Obama] inherited a terrible political and economic situation from the previous administration.

HANNITY: Blah, blah, blah. I don't want to hear this anymore.

HELDEN: He had incredibly high approval ratings, Kennedy-esque approval ratings, and now they're starting to come back to earth. They're still very high for a president with these economic woes.

HANNITY: Let me ask this. This is not Bush's problem. It's his quadrupling of the deficit. He made those choices. He took over G.M., the financial institutions. He wants to nationalize health care. This is Obama's economy now...

Sean Hannity, August 17, 2001: "[T]his is still the Clinton economy, in case you forgot."

Sean Hannity, August 20, 2001: "[W]e have the Clinton economy, the Clinton slowdown... We are living under the Clinton economy, and the slowdown that started in the spring of 2000."

Sean Hannity, August 21, 2001: "This is the Clinton economy slowed down."

Sean Hannity, August 22, 2001: "[T]his is Clinton's budget, Clinton's economy... the slowdown began last July."

Sean Hannity, September 5, 2001: "[Y]ou're back to the old tactics of scaring the old people of this country, trying to blame Republicans for the Clinton economy..."

Michael Bérubé, who flagged this gem, offers the only appropriate response:

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation.  But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first.  Once I regained the will to live...

Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration's proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had read the entire 1300+ page bill and discovered this coercive requirement, but she failed to mention the provision stating that "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting ... [a]n individual from purchasing any health care services." (Incredibly, her article won a National Magazine Award and she went on to become lieutenant governor of New York.)

It's hard to understate the damage that McCaughey's article inflicted on the Clinton health care plan. The next week, former TNR editor Michael Kinsley slammed McCaughey's piece in his own column in the magazine, and subsequent reporting by James Fallows and Mickey Kaus showed it to be riddled with a number of false and misleading claims. By then, however, her claims had been repeated and disseminated throughout the national media. Hendrik Hertzberg, a former TNR editor now at The New Yorker, told me in previous reporting that "No Exit" was "the low point in the magazine's history since it stopped being sympathetic to the Soviet Union" and Fallows recently nominated her for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" during the 1990s.

For all of these reasons, it's disturbing to see McCaughey being given airtime on CNBC to promote new misinformation about the Democratic health care plan being developed in Congress. In this case, as Media Matters reports, she's falsely claiming that "the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans." And again, she's using the gimmick of pushing strained interpretations of specific provisions in the legislation ("That's Section 3101") while ignoring other provisions that directly undercut her arguments ("No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway").

Earlier this year, McCaughey tried the same close-reading gimmick with the stimulus bill, falsely claiming to have discovered that it will create "[a] new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology [that] will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective," leading to "rationing" for seniors.

How many times will we let McCaughey get away with this? It's time to cast her out of public discourse and shame anyone who gives attention to her claims.

Update 6/19 9:40 AM: McCaughey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same false claim. Under the Kennedy bill, she writes, "you must enroll in a 'qualified' plan or face a fine even if you and your employer are paying the entire cost of the plan you already have (section 161)." Again, the provision described above, which states that "No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway," is omitted. As TNR's Jonathan Cohn writes, "She has forfeited the right to be taken seriously, particularly when it comes to health care."

(Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign's opponent, Ed Bernstein.)