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Crowdsourcing and the next Netflix Prize
An interesting development on the polling front: Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is open-sourcing his polls. Yesterday he asked for suggestions on which state to poll next and posted a draft questionnaire for Joe Wilson’s district for comment. This approach, which I think is brilliant, raises a more general question: where’s the innovation in
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“You lie!” in comparative perspective
Like Matthew Yglesias, I’m more upset about Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” statement being false potentially misleading than about presidential heckling per se. And while Wilson’s outburst was relatively unusual in recent history, it’s important to remember that standards of political civility have changed. Consider, for instance, the famous caning of Senator Charles Sumner by
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Useless instant polls on Obama speech
Per Mark Blumenthal, all instant polls on reactions to Obama’s speech are scientifically useless — pay no attention to them. For instance, CNN touts its poll as showing a “Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan” but is forced to admit that “The audience for the speech appears to be more Democratic than the U.S. population
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Obama’s speech unlikely to move polls
President Obama is going to address the nation tonight about health care. Despite all the hype, it’s not likely to change much in terms of public opinion. Over the last few years, I’ve frequently cited political science research showing that presidential speeches usually fail to change public opinion on domestic policy issues. From Bill Clinton’s
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NYT inconsistency on “he said,” “she said”
One of the most frustrating aspects of the fight against “he said,” “she said” journalism is the inconsistency within news outlets about how they treat misleading or unsupported factual claims. For instance, The New York Times just published another article directly identifying Betsy McCaughey as a proponent of health care misinformation (see also my post
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Brief APSA hiatus
Blogging will be minimal to non-existent until my paper is ready for the American Political Science Association conference next week in Toronto… Update 9/6 12:39 PM: Apologies — my paper writing ended up converging with my trip to APSA (just leaving Toronto now). I’ll be back to blogging after Labor Day.
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Health care framing tactics failing
During the Bush years, many Democrats came to believe they were losing elections due to their inadequate framing tactics — a belief that turned the linguist George Lakoff into an unlikely guru figure. It’s a convenient excuse, but there’s little systematic evidence that framing tactics can change the dynamics of the national debate under normal
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Misleading pro-reform claims on “rationing”
It’s good to see Politifact debunking the claim by Howard Dean that “[t]here’s no rationing in any of these [health care] bills” in Congress — a statement that suggests the plans would prevent or end rationing. It’s a misleading tactic that has also been used by the Obama administration recently on its Health Insurance Reform
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Tracking the “death panel” myth
Talking Points Memo has a nice feature tracking the history and evolution of the “death panel”/euthanasia meme from its origins with Betsy McCaughey to the current “death book” for veterans myth.
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August ’09 isn’t like August ’08
Many liberal bloggers and commentators are now blaming President Obama for a strategic failure in his approach to health care reform specifically and his presidency in general. In a TNR Online article, Ed Kilgore compares this rising tide of liberal doubt to the “doldrums” of August ’08 when Obama was tied in the polls with