The Flip-Flop Flap

Noam Scheiber and Jonathan Chait debate whether or not John McCain's flip-flop attacks against Barack Obama will work. Since Chait seems to think these attacks are both effective and unfair, it might be nice for him to spend some time dealing with the unfair flip-flop charges coming from his colleague James Kirchick. But beyond that, my thought on this question is that conventional wisdom radically misconstrues the nature of the relevant decision-making process. In my model of the electorate, the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of... [read full story]