Yesterday a friend asked me why I was such a Perry fanboy, so I think it’s worth making this caution explicit: I’m not pro-Perry in any meaningful sense. I have no idea if he’d be a good, or even average, president. He probably wouldn’t be my personal preference for the Republican nomination. (I’ll carry a torch for Mitch Daniels until the convention opens in Tampa.) When I say that Perry is very likely to win the nomination and should stand a very good chance (at least even money) of unseating Obama in the general election, I’m not making an argument about moral or intellectual merit.

What I’m trying to do is be as clear-eyed as possible about the politics of the matter. And as a political proposition, I judge Perry to be very, very formidable. (In the same way, I remain convinced that Mitt Romney is a political joke with very little chance of electoral success–and this has nothing to do with whether or not he’s a good guy or would make a good president.)

The fallacy of most political punditry is that people conflate their personal wishes with their analysis. That’s why “analysts” often claim that a given party or candidate would be wildly successful if only they would take positions closer to those which the “analyst” holds themselves.

So when I say that Perry looks like a freight-train, it’s not because I’m a Perry guy and I want him to be president and I think he’ll wind up on Mt. Rushmore. It’s because he’s a disciplined campaigner and a stud politician who knows how to win elections. It’s because he’s positioned to unify the party in ways no other candidate in the race can. It’s because the macro-conditions of the race make Obama extremely vulnerable to any opponent, but particularly to one who can muster the arguments Perry is making. And as evidence that all of this may be true, I’d point to Perry’s launch, which has been the most successful and masterful opening to any presidential campaign I’ve seen, culminating in his jumping +9 points in Rasmussen. As I’ve said before, I believe he’ll overtake Romney in the RCP average in just a few weeks.

(Brotha’.)

Big Rick Perry round-up this morning.

* Best headline: Wall Street Journal’s “Bachmann-Perry Overdrive.” Pure gold.

* John Podhoretz is right, I think, when he claims that in a few months Democrats and the left will convince themselves that Perry is the Most Dangerous Ideologue/Theocrat/Fascist in World History. I’m already looking forward to lines like

“Even [Ronald Reagan/George W. Bush] never subscribed to Rick Perry’s brand of . . .”

“A principled moderate like Mitt Romney never stood a chance in the New Republican party that values . . .”

“A Christianist, xenophobe, and know-nothing of the first-rate, Rick Perry makes Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin look like . . .”

That–and worse–is coming soon to a theater near you. I’m sure you can come up with your own eschatological descriptions of Perry before the left gets around to it. Leave them in the comments.

* Texas Monthly has a bunch of pull quotes from people Perry has beaten over the years. Some of them are quite contradictory in their analysis, but it’s all still worth putting into the hopper. All the added emphasis is mine:

Some telling tidbits from people who ran against Perry. First, from lefty radio host Jim Hightower, whom Perry challenged and beat in 1990 for the position of Texas agriculture commissioner:

There was a debate on Channel 13 in Dallas. Just the usual stuff. He tried to use some of the Rove negative things, including the flag-burning stuff, I think. Off the cuff, he was nondescript. He hadn’t really developed any political chops at the time. Obviously he has since. I think he’s a good campaigner. I think that’s the one thing he actually does well, as opposed to actually governing or having actual ideas or principles.

Next, this is a guy who ran against Perry for ag commissioner in 1994 (and will now support him for president):

He hasn’t changed that much since I first met him. He doesn’t make a lot of loose talk. He doesn’t say things that you would use against him later on. He’s not his own enemy, is what I would say. If you look at our president today, he’ll say one thing one week, next week he says something else. So there’s always room to go back and say, “Well, you said this then. What’s the difference now?” And you never hear that much from the governor.

From the guy Perry beat for lieutenant governor in 1998:

He’s a relentless campaigner. I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule. Our money was about even, until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute.

From the guy who challenged Perry for the governorship in 2002:

I knew he had a disciplined team around him, that he shouldn’t be underestimated, that they were coaching him very well and that he would follow instructions very well. And he also had the benefit of watching George W. Bush do just that: run very disciplined campaigns, repeat the same message over and over, and minimize mistakes…. I would tell whoever goes up against him, Don’t underestimate his ability to perform on the stump. He doesn’t make mistakes. He follows instructions. He’s not going to have a “macaca” moment.

From a lady — not Kay Bailey Hutchison, but somebody else — who challenged Perry for the GOP primary for the governorship in 2010:

But I won both of the debates hands down. Perry’s demeanor when he initially came onto the stage the night of the first debate—it wasn’t serious. It was jovial, like “Great to be here!” It was almost comedic, you know? It was kind of a Three Stooge-y feeling. And that’s what was reported—that his answers were not good, he didn’t take the debate seriously, he may be a little arrogant. He was very confident in his place as the governor, and he got shown up. In fact, they both did. And I think that’s really the thing—that we had two people who spent almost their entire adult lives in service to our state who knew less about what was going on in our state than a nurse from Wharton, Texas.

His demeanor in the second debate was much more serious. But I still think I beat him.

After the primary election, I think, we initiated a call to Perry, and he agreed to take it, and we set up a time to talk. And I remember getting off the call and thinking, “I know why he wins campaigns; he’s a really smart guy.”

And finally, from the Democrat Perry defeated in 2010:

Rick Perry has a justifiable reputation as somebody who lives and breathes politics and has a fierce determination to stay in office. … He very rarely campaigned in person. When he did, he chose public appearances, where questions from the press would be limited. If his handlers had exposed him to more questioning, then he might have responded in a way that hurt him. One of the few—perhaps the last—impromptu sessions he had with a journalist occurred about six months before the election: After a meeting with BP executives he said that the oil spill might have been caused by an act of God. After that there weren’t many impromptu sessions with journalists.

* Galley Friend X sends along this observation from the weekend in re. Perry and Bachmann:

An interesting contrast w/ Bachmann at a side-by-side event in Iowa on Sunday. Bachmann has gotten better at almost every aspect of politicking as the campaign has gone on (witness, for instance, her deft sidestepping of reporters’ traps on the Sunday morning shows). But Perry is a natural. Think about the perfect pitch of what is already the best line of his embryonic campaign: Don’t spend all the money. Short, phrasing that could hit the ear either as folksy or hip, and an instant, obvious contrast w/ the president.

I’d agree about the money line. He’s already boiling the election down to the bullets that are exactly on point: “It is time to get America working again.” “I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

Toss in Perry’s biography (Paint Creek and Eagle Scouts vs. Indonesian Basuki schools) and you have very, very high contrast between the candidates in terms of both background and ideas; maybe the greatest contrast we’ve had since 1984.

* Kevin Drum lists ten factors that should make Perry a hard sell. It’s a good, sensible piece of analysis. But the fact that there are pretty simple political answers to each one of the problems Drum raises serves more to highlight how formidable Perry is, I think.

* Updated: One last thing–it’s going to be awesome when the media decides that the way to spin the uneasiness of the Team Perry and Team W camps is by painting George W. Bush as the thoughtful, sensible guy who just wasn’t comfortable with the brash, extremist Perry. You’ve never seen Strange New Respect like this!

Btw, www.perrypocalypse.com is still free if someone wants to grab it. Someone on the left will pay good money for that URL in a few weeks.

The left has spent a lot of time spinning its wheels the last two weeks arguing about why Obama’s presidency is such a failure. The dominant arguments seem to be: (1) He’s not liberal enough; (2) He’s liberal enough, but he’s not a dirty enough fighter; (3) His failings are temperamental–he doesn’t emote, connect, use the bully pulpit, etc.

All three of these arguments are the standard-issue failure rationalizations of politics. They’re basically what conservatives and Republicans said in 1992 and 1996, what liberals and Democrats said in 2004, and, most recently, what conservatives and Republicans said in 2008. The key difference is that in the Republican version of this argument, there’s usually a bitter debate between factions arguing that the candidate would have won if only he’d been more conservative or less conservative–depending on the viewpoint of the pundit making the argument. I haven’t seen any Dems arguing that Obama’s problem is that he’s been too liberal. Otherwise, both sides think they only loose because they’re too pure and the other guys are too mean. And for whatever reason, people love arm-chair psychologizing presidents, as if demeanor trumps policy completely. None of these rationalizations for Obama’s failures are particularly illuminating.

But a couple things strike me.

First, it’s odd that Democrats suddenly find the debt ceiling fight to be the sine qua non of liberal principles. Because when you jump up to 30,000 feet, Obama’s liberal accomplishments have been pretty impressive:

* He passed a giant healthcare law, giving the left much–though by no means all–of what it wanted. He did this in the face of bipartisan opposition; spent enormous political capital on it; and has suffered very steep political consequences as a result. It’s hard to square his bruising, year-long campaign for Obamacare with the contention that Obama compromises too much and doesn’t like to fight.

* He presided over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He didn’t push the button himself, but he made sure it happened.

* He has generally expanded the role of government.

As a top-line list of accomplishments, that’s not bad. But it doesn’t include the Big One: Obama has laid the groundwork to end both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences. Once upon a time, these wars were the single most important thing in Democratic politics.

Yes, I understand that from the Democratic perspective, Obama hasn’t ended them fast enough. Yes, he continued the presence in Iraq longer than they would have liked. But realistically speaking, of the three people who could have become president in 2008–Obama, Clinton, or McCain–Obama is the only one who would have gotten us to the point we’re at now in those two conflicts. He hasn’t been as liberal as many Democrats would like, but he has been much, much more dovish than Clinton or McCain would have been. It seems like that should count for quite a lot.

(And I understand that liberals could make a list of complaints about action items Obama didn’t deliver on–warrantless wiretaps, the Bush tax cuts, Gitmo, etc. I’m simply making the case that they ought to be, if not ecstatic, then quietly pleased with what they’ve gotten from him.)

So what good rationalizations are there to be made for Obama? (That is, if you discount the conservative critique, which I assume most liberals do.) I think there are two, though I haven’t seen any liberals making them.

(1) Obama is a hostage to events. By any measure, the last 36 months have been brutal for the entire world. Obama’s the president, not King of the Markets, and the U.S. is suffering not just from entitlement bloat, but from a financial crisis and a housing collapse, the latter of which could take decades to work out. On top of that, Europe is a complete disaster and even in the best of times, would be a drag on the world economy. On top of that, China has its own housing problems, not to mention looming demographic catastrophe. No president, pursuing any other set of policies, could have reasonably expected much better results than we’re seeing now.

(2) Obama is not a very good president. For whatever reason–strategic foolishness, political naivete, or maybe he’s just not that bright–Obama simply isn’t very good at the job. He loses control of issues by handing process off to Congress (Obamacare); he miscalculates political advantage (not passing his own debt ceiling increase because he wanted to hang this one on the Republicans); he just doesn’t have the skills/instincts/intelligence/take your pick to perform the job ably.

If I were a Democratic partisan, I’d be making the case for (1) now, and then for (2) after he loses the election. They’re both more helpful to the movement than the standard trio of rationalizations.

One final note: Jonathan Chait makes a case for something like (1) in this piece, where he argues that Obama still has a perfectly clear path to victory in 2012. I agree, to some extent. A sitting president always has a puncher’s chance. And Obama will have to run an insurgent campaign, as Chait suggests. (Though the fact that Team Obama spent part of this week trying to torpedo Mitt Romney tells you something about how smart they aren’t. Forget the current polling: Romney is the most beatable Republican in the field. He’s terrible at retail politics, has a glass jaw, and would not be able to take advantage of the two big issues–Obamacare and jobs–because of his “accomplishments” as governor and job-killer at Bain Capital. Team Obama should be doing anything they can to help Romney get the nomination. The fact that they misunderstand the nature of their Republican challengers ought to be really unsettling to down-ticket Dems.)

What I would caution Chait from doing, however, is putting too much stock in Obama’s base approval numbers. As a statistical matter, they’re skewed by the enormous disparity between black approval and everyone else. Which means that even if black voters turn out like everyone else (not often the case) in swing-states where blacks make up less than the national average (WI, IN, for starters) he’ll be at a much greater disadvantage than his approval numbers show.

(Also, this assumes there’s not Bradley Effect in approval surveys. I’m not sure I’d believe that.)

If you were setting the Vegas line on the date Rick Perry takes over the lead from Mitt Romney in the RealClear Politics poll average, where would you put the over/under?

I’d probably stick it at September 14.

Exit Question: If you were establishing the line on the date Hugh Hewitt jumps ship from Romney to Perry, where would you set that?

From John Heilemann’s great piece  in New York Magazine:

A month later, when he visited New York on a fund-raising swing, I asked who his political heroes were. ­“Reagan was certainly part of that,” Huntsman said, though he paraphrased Dutch’s ringing anti-statism as a commitment to “making sure government never exceeds boundaries and never gets out of control from a cost standpoint.” He also mentioned Nixon: “I mean, here’s a guy who created the EPA.”

As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.

Whoever employs this guy:

In exchange for anonymity, an official for another GOP prospect provided contact information for the ex-wife of the man Cheri Daniels married, in the years between her divorce and remarriage to Daniels.

I’ll give you three guesses.

Initial thoughts on the election. First, the recriminations!

* Mark Levin: Thanks. It was only, like, 16 points. Not that anyone should be surprised–after all, Levin’s the one person in America who likes Stephen A. Smith. And besides, it’s probably all the fault of the RINO’s anyway. After all, Levin is “an extraordinary intellect.”

* How’s that Limbaugh Rule working out? Or has it been downgraded to a mere hypothesis?

* It would be nice for the GOP to have Senate seats in CA and CT. And eMeg seems like a very nice and capable woman. But on the other hand, it’s encouraging to see that money can’t always buy votes. Unless you’re Mitt Romney, that is. (I mean the “encouraging” part, not the “can’t by votes” part.)

* Virginia was a purple state 24 months ago. Last night the 4 of the state’s 6 incumbent Dems lost and a fifth is on life-support, leading by 500 votes with 99% reporting.

* Jon Runyan wins in NJ-3. It’ll be fun having him in Washington. Expect chop blocks.

* If Lisa Murkowski holds on, then Mitch McConnell deserves some credit for finessing the situation after her primary loss. Remember the reports that the leadership was going to strip her of committee assignments, etc. if she mounted a write-in campaign? Good thing the GOP thought better of it.

* You’ve got to respect what Harry Reid did, coming from behind and grinding out a +5 win as the third most unpopular politician in America. Even while his son was losing the governor’s race by 12 points. Sure, the GOP helped him out by nominating Angle, but even so. Professional politicians win elections. Reid is a pro.

* That said, I would have gladly traded a Reid win for a Feingold, just on general principle. I won’t miss Feingold’s votes, but I’ll miss his general presence in the Democratic party.

* Where will the final House number be? It’s +58 now and we’re still waiting on 11 races. I suspect the GOP will end somewhere near +65.

* Remember when Obama told nervous House Democrats that “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” Turns out he was right!

* Data to be on the look-out for today:

* What was the won-loss record for Dems in districts carried by McCain?

* How close were the races at the margins? Did the Dems avert a much larger disaster by winning a bunch of races by a couple hundred votes, or did they have bad luck by losing a bunch of very tight contests?

* How did the Obamacare Dem dissenters do? Was staying away on that bill enough?

* What was the win/loss ratio on incumbents polling under 50 percent (but still ahead) at the end?

Update 10:30: This may be too deep a reading, but Sarah Palin emerges as somewhat of a loser from last night. A number of her candidates did well, and she can point to Nikki Haley in South Carolina and a number of other pick-ups in which she batted comfortably over .500. But her three most high-profile candidates–Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharon Angle–all got housed.

What’s more, those three candidates were each, in their own way, minor proxies for Palin as a political commodity. Miller tested free-base Tea Party-ism; O’Donnell tested the strength of anti-anti-Palinism sprung from deeply unfair treatment from the press and the left; and Angle tested the ability of a flawed candidate with high negatives to compete with a deeply unpopular liberal, Democratic incumbent on a relatively even playing field. You could read too much into this, but each of these losses undercuts, to some degree, the thesis that Palin could win a 2012 general election. (Mind you, I wouldn’t completely discount this thesis yet.)

But the thing which struck me as most problematic for Palin was a moment on Fox last night where, asked about O’Donnell’s loss, she said something to the effect of, Yeah, well the exit polling shows Castle would have lost, too, so why dontcha ask the lying MSM about that? (I paraphrase.)

This strikes me as not the kind of answer Palin should be giving. Her bread-and-butter is (or should be) authenticity. The correct response for O’Donnell supporters this morning goes somewhere along the lines of: “Yeah, it didn’t work out for us, but at the end of the day, the risk seemed worth the reward. If you’re going to make broad gains anyway, you might as well make some bold ideological bets. Some won’t pay out. And besides, did Republicans really need another guy in the Senate who’s been a professional politician since Calvin Coolidge graduated high school?”

That’s just about the only sensible response. Palin taking a Levin-like I-have-an-answer-for-everything is fine, except that that’s not who she’s supposed to be. She’s supposed to be a truth-teller, like a political Simon Cowell.

Update 12:25: Best lines so far:

* Rush Limbaugh was the big winner!

* Mark Levin says everything is great for conservatives. Because compromise is “irrational.” Sounds like he’s auditioning to be an Obama boogeyman.

Update 12:45: Meanest thing ever said about Jon Stewart:

Maybe it’s not fair to blame Jon Stewart for all this. He’s a comedian, after all. But he’s the left’s closest equivalent to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Fightin’ words.

Update 12:58: The Sex Cannon is BACK baby! Two tons of twisted steel and sex appeal, firing that ball in there deep, real deep, where it’s gotta be, ’cause he’s not a gunslinger, he’s a–GUH–WATCH THE BLINDSIDE!

(Where’s the Emo Eagles fan? We need him.)

Also, Tony Dungy and Rex Ryan intervene to help a troubled teen sort out some strange feelings he’s been having recently. Don’t miss this Very Special Episode of KSK.

Update 2:50: Dana Milbank writes, “At Rupert Murdoch’s cable network, the entity that birthed and nurtured the Tea Party movement, Election Day was the culmination of two years of hard work to bring down Barack Obama – and it was time for an on-air celebration of a job well done.”

While the thrust of what Milbank is getting at is true–Glenn Beck has played a large (if not irreplaceable) role in stoking the Tea Party movement, the entire Tea Party moment began on CNBC with non-politico Rick Santelli. Does no one remember?

Sarah Palin’s future is, of course, the subject of much discussion. Unfortunately, most people discussing Palin confuse their personal preferences with practical analysis, arguing “could” when they really mean “should.” (This tendency has reached epidemic proportions, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Yesterday Matthew Dowd tried to break out of that mold with a mildly analytical piece on Palin’s chances: Dowd posits that presidents with favorable ratings above 51 percent before Election Day have never lost reelection, while no POTUS with a rating under 47 percent has won. In response, stat-head Nate Silver has done some math using head-to-head favorability ratings and suggests that Palin still makes a weaker candidate against Obama than does Mitt Romney.

Whatever the individual merits of Dowd and Silver’s theses, they both deserve credit for not simply projecting their desires out into the future.

When looking at Palin, three things strike me:

(1) At this point, the only event “likely” to happen in 2012–that is, has a greater probability of happening than not happening–is that Barack Obama is likely to win re-nomination from his party. After that, every outcome is less likely than not. Three years out, presidential politics is like taking Tiger Woods vs. the Field: No matter how strong a contender looks, at this distance, the field is almost always the better play.

(2) I’m not the first to observe this (I think Michael Barone was), but you have to go back a long, long time–to FDR–to find a president who won re-election without expanding his support.

Since then, every president who won reelection did so by adding to his majority (or plurality). In other words, if you’re not growing your base of support, you’re losing. Obama was elected with a +7 margin. His style of governing and the ideological content of his policies do not, to my eyes at least, seem designed to increase his standing even further with independents and Republicans. (And he doesn’t have much room to grow with Democrats since he carried them 89 to 10.) This isn’t to say that Obama couldn’t win with +3 in 2012–trends are made to be broken! That said, it seems like an interesting number to watch.

(3) It’s hard to win both IA and NH. Since 1972, only three non-incumbents have pulled off the double (Kerry, Carter, Muskie). Two of them went on to win the nomination. No non-incumbent Republican has ever won the pair. That said, a candidate who does win both of the opening contests is very hard to beat under the modern rules of calendar, media, and money. Projecting out from here Palin would seem to have a reasonable (which is not to say probable!) chance to do just that. One assumes that she’ll be very tough in IA, a state that typically rewards cultural conservatives. And depending on what mood NH is in, she could do well there: This is a state that went McCain in 2000 and Buchanan in 1996. In other words, they’ve been open to cutting against the GOP establishment and backing reform, or even populist, candidates in the recent past.

The carefully orchestrated elevation of Rush Limbaugh to Grand High Muckety Muck of the Republican party is a confluence of interests. It’s in the interest of the Obama administration to have Limbaugh as a foil and it’s in Limbaugh’s interest to be seen as such.

Without taking a side in the question of whether or not Limbaugh fairly represents the face of the Republican party, I’m interested in a notion which everyone involved–even Republicans who object to Limbaugh–seems to stipulate to: That Limbaugh wields enormous influence. Is that true? Does Limbaugh really matter in any important way?

I don’t mean to be churlish. My own tastes in talk radio run exclusively toward sports talk, so I’ve listened to Limbaugh very little. On the few occasions I have listened to him–maybe 30 hours, total–he wasn’t my particular cup of chamomile. But really, who cares what I think? He has lots of listeners and plenty of professional radio people seem to believe that Limbaugh is very good at what he does.

Yet I’m not convinced that either of those things mean Limbaugh is influential.

Let’s take Limbaugh’s large daily audience. I’d argue that raw audience size is a very imperfect indicator of influence.

Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top 15 rated shows on TV. For five of those years it was in the top 10. It averaged 17.4 million viewers. Was Everybody Loves Raymond influential? I would argue that the show left a very small–maybe non-existent–cultural footprint.

If you sift through the Nielsens from recent years, you’ll find a number of highly-rated shows pulling in tens of millions of viewers, which were basically invisible after the credits rolled. This is true even at the very top of the heap: CSI and Home Improvement each finished #1 overall and yet, had they been canceled in the middle of their ratings dominance, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

That said, sometimes high ratings are an indication of influence. American Idol has been the top-rated show for the last four years and might be one of the most influential programs in the history of the medium. My point, however, is that it’s a mistake to assume that raw audience equals influence. You often see small shows (The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica) creating much larger (and longer-lasting) impacts than shows which draw many times their audiences.

So if the size of Limbaugh’s audience isn’t the determining factor of his influence, what is? Well, I’ll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn’t take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I’m not being pedantic–I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT’s best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey’s approval does.

But for the purposes of this discussion–political power–we have pretty good recent examples of Limbaugh’s influence. I understand that Limbaugh (and other conservative talk-radio hosts) weighed in heavily against the Bush immigration deal. That deal failed. But was this because of Limbaugh? Maybe. But presumably Limbaugh was against a great number of other Bush initiatives that passed–No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drugs, the omnibus energy bill, the Detroit bailout. (I’m just guessing here; if I’m incorrectly ascribing views to Limbaugh, I apologize in advance.)

The 2008 primary season provided a particularly good indication of Limbaugh’s level of influence. He seems to have supported Mitt Romney. Despite Limbaugh’s support, Romney received only 4.7 million votes. The candidate Limbaugh favored least and argued against most–John McCain–won the nomination. Again, I’m not a devotee of Limbaugh’s show, but my sense is that Limbaugh made his distaste for McCain very apparent. Republican primary voters paid little heed.

After the Romney flame-out, Limbaugh began promoting what he called “Operation Chaos,” where he instructed listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. Limbaugh claimed a good deal of credit for her subsequent victories, but I’ve never seen any data which suggests that his influence was significant, let alone decisive. To the contrary, almost all of the Democratic primary results–both before and after “Operation Chaos”–fit within a stable racial, socio-economic model.

Finally, in the general election, I presume that Limbaugh favored (to some degree) McCain over Obama. Again, Limbaugh’s influence failed to materialize.

I’m open to the argument that Limbaugh is influential; but I don’t think there’s a prima facie case for it. On the contrary, I’d argue that the evidence suggests Limbaugh is an expert entertainer in a medium with a small cultural, intellectual, and political footprint. He has very little influence in the world of ideas. And when it comes to actually energizing the masses toward action, his record is, at best, mixed.

Limbaugh’s powers of influence seem more on the level of Howard Stern. At his peak, Stern drew about 13 million listeners, which is in the ballpark with the 14 million or so Limbaugh has drawn through most of this decade. Like Limbaugh, Stern was credited with having a great deal of influence on his listeners. But that influence never really materialized beyond his ability to get people to tune in to a show he was giving away for free. Stern’s one attempt at translating his influence to the movies failed–the 1997 Howard Stern’s Private Parts opened to $14 million and grossed only $40 million. And when Stern moved to subscription-based satellite radio, his audience let him go without a second thought.

Just not about the topic you think.

This morning Sullivan posted (on The Atlantic‘s website) an item attacking his Atlantic colleague Ross Douthat and raising factual questions about Sarah Palin and her family:

Ross Douthat tells us he is very comfortable with outright lies in politics. In fact, it is so faux to care about truth in politics (but never faux to display outrage at journalists asking factual questions about Palin’s stories about her own family). He couldn’t get worked up about Clinton’s lies either, he tells us. Why? Because the ends always justify the means. If you’re going to ban all abortion, you just have to tell a few whoppers and demonize a few opponents along the way:

The point of being in national politics is to win elections and govern the country in accordance with whatever goals led you into the arena in the first place, not to please columnists who disagree with you on ideological grounds but appreciate a finely-tuned sense of political principle.

It’s really come to this? Notice the avoidance of what is at stake here: the basic question of truth: empirical, checkable, verifiable truth. How naive to care about that.

Pretty amazing stuff, no? Sullivan is walking as close up to the line as he can on the parentage of Trig Palin without actually having the stones to say so out loud. Look at that phrase: “asking factual questions about Palin’s stories about her own family.”

Someone, perhaps one of his Atlantic colleagues, should ask Sullivan to clarify exactly what factual question about Palin’s family he is referring to.

Remember that the only “factual” question about Palin’s family that Sullivan had previously asked was whether or not Trig Palin was Sarah Palin’s son. Unless he has a new, unarticulated question, it seems reasonable to assume that that’s what he’s still talking about. Irrespective of whatever arrangement he came to with David Bradley and the management of The Atlantic.

But wait! I promised you a retraction! Did Sullivan take back this barely-veiled attempt to question the parentage of Trig Palin? No.

In an item originally posted here Sullivan went after Douthat again, saying, “Mitt Romney calls McCain’s and Palin’s lies ‘wrong and reprehensible’ and a ‘massive mistake.’ So Mitt is now more concerned about basic levels of honesty in the McCain campaign than Ross Douthat. Yes, Ross is now officially more cynical than Mitt Romney.”

Upon having it pointed out that the Romney video dates back to the primary season, Sullivan removed the post in its entirety and issued a correction. (Though not an apology to Douthat.)

This seems like an important development.

Because it proves that when Sullivan and That Atlantic believe that he has made an error, The Atlantic‘s policy includes not only explicit acknowledgment of the error, but also wholesale retraction of the item.

The fact that Sullivan’s posts about Trig and Sarah Palin (here, here, here, and here) remain published must be an indication that the magazine and David Bradley are standing by Sullivan’s writing on the subject.

Shouldn’t Howard Kurtz ask Bradley why that is?

Update: Ace notes Sullivan’s further insinuations. And Victor Davis Hanson finally goads Sullivan into breaking his omerta on the subject of Trig Palin. Here Sullivan is, speaking for The Atlantic Monthly:

As for blog “rumors” about a Down Syndrome pregnancy, all this blog has done is ask for facts and context about a subject that the Palin campaign has put at the center of its message, facts about a baby held up at a convention as a political symbol for the pro-life movement, and cited in Palin’s acceptance speech. You do that, you invite questions about it. I make absolutely no apologies for doing my job.

I find the account of her pregnancy and labor provided by Palin to be perplexing, to put it mildly, and I have every right to ask questions about it, especially since we have discovered that this woman lies more compulsively and less intelligently than the Clintons. . . . And in the absence of any information from the Palin campaign, I have aired every possible view trying to explain it. What else am I supposed to do? Pretend these questions don’t exist? Pretend her story makes sense to me? I owe my readers my honest opinion. That’s not rumor-mongering, it’s fulfilling my core commitment to my readers. . . .

All my factual questions of more than two weeks ago, moreover, remain unanswered by the McCain campaign. They are all factual questions demanding simple factual answers that any campaign that wasn’t bent on deceit and lies would be more than eager and perfectly able to provide.

Why haven’t they? When will they?

Well there we have it. Andrew Sullivan is once again openly using The Atlantic as a platform to demand that Sarah Palin “prove” that she is mother of her youngest child.

It is a disgrace for the magazine and everyone associated with it. One hundred and fifty years of storied history set ablaze in fortnight by a single writer.

Since dissent is obviously tolerated at The Atlantic (see above) at what point to other staffers at the magazine have a duty to publicly and explicitly disavow Sullivan?

Update 2: Is the great Jeff Goldberg moving in that direction, using Jill Greenberg in personas Sullivanas? Here’s Goldberg writing about Greenberg. His comments seem eerily–perhaps not accidentally–applicable to Sullivan:

I don’t know Greenberg (I count this as a blessing) and I can add nothing to what James Bennet told the Post except to say that Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings. Why, this has even happened in the case of John McCain once or twice. What I find truly astonishing is the blithe way in which she has tried to hurt this magazine.

Update 3: A blogger named Alex Massie who says that he once guest-blogged for Sullivan has spoken out about Sullivan’s continued smearing of Trig and Sarah Palin.

I’m sympathetic to Massie’s complaint, which is that Sullivan’s sustained questioning of Trig’s parentage is doing terrible damage to a valuable intellectual institution. But Massie misses the larger point: The institution in need of protection here isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s blog–it’s The Atlantic Monthly.

I can’t emphasize this enough: There is nothing especially note-worthy about a blogger repeating unsubstantiated smears about a politic

ian’s personal life. Troll around enough websites and you’ll see plenty of it from the left and the right. You’ll recall the right-wing nutters who thought that the Clintons ran cocaine shipments out of an airstrip in Mena and were responsible for the deaths of Ron Brown and Vince Foster. (They were just asking question about the Mena airstrip, mind you.) So this sort of dirty pool is nothing new or remarkable.

What is noteworthy is that Sullivan has injected this sort of behavior into a once-great magazine that’s been at the forefront of American letters for 150 years. Institutions matter more–much more–than people.

Andrew Sullivan should be allowed to write whatever he wants about Trig and Sarah Palin. That’s not a scandal. The scandal is that The Atlantic is allowing him to write these things under their name.

And as a remind of what sort of things Sullivan is saying from his platform at The Atlantic, here’s his response to Massie:

Alex Massie is disappointed by my relentless vetting of Palin, specifically the bizarre facts in the public record about her fifth pregnancy. For my part, I stand by my skepticism of everything Sarah Palin says. [emphasis in original] . . .

[M]y working assumption now is that she is a pathological liar–even about things that are objectively checkable.

A pathological liar simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth about herself, even on a subject as routine as a pregnancy and infant son. I can’t believe I’m asking these questions either. But in the absence of any answers, what am I supposed to do?

I know this puts me out of the mainstream of acceptable Washington opinion. But let me just remind Alex that doubting the existence of Saddam’s WMDs put some people out of the mainstream of acceptable Washington opinion. Would the world be a better place if those people had refused to be silenced or intimidated?

That’s right: The Atlantic is now comparing rumor-mongering about Trig Palin’s parentage to the multi-national intelligence gathering operation about Iraq’s nuclear and biological weapons capability.

David Bradley shouldn’t try to “silence” Sullivan; he should simply disentangle his magazine from him.