Brendan Nyhan

Just for the record, this sentence from Gail Colllins’s op-ed yesterday is wrong:

Witness Obama and Clinton at the debate, racing away from gun control as if they were a pair of greyhounds, forswearing middle-class tax cuts as if they were George H.W. Bush.

Actually, they ruled out middle-class tax increases. As her own newspaper reported, “Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama said they would not raise taxes on middle class Americans — those making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year.”

Update 4/18 2:56 PM — Commenter Dave raises another issue for Times copy-editors:

I never knew that greyhounds were such strong opponents of gun control.

Update 4/19 2:35 PM: Collins corrected the error in today’s column.

Larry Bartels, an eminent political scientist at Princeton, writes in the New York Times about how Obama’s description of less educated rural voters is wrong:

For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly in half), who do not have college degrees and who live in small towns or rural areas. For the sake of convenience, let’s call these people the small-town working class, though that term is inevitably imprecise. In 2004, they were about 18 percent of the population and about 16 percent of voters.

For purposes of comparison, consider the people who are their demographic opposites: people whose family incomes are $60,000 or more, who are college graduates and who live in cities or suburbs. These (again, conveniently labeled) cosmopolitan voters were about 11 percent of the population in 2004 and about 13 percent of voters. While admittedly crude, these definitions provide a systematic basis for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Obama’s view of contemporary class politics.

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.

It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.

Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.

For more, see his working paper “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (PDF). In general, it’s amazing how little of this debate bothers to consider actual evidence.

Writing about the construction of campaign narratives reminds me of a Jacob Weisberg quote about his new Bush book that has been bugging me for a while. Weisberg, who is the editor of Slate, is known as one of the smartest political journalists in Washington, which is why I think this quote from his Fresh Air appearance earlier this year is so revealing and important:

I think when you look at [Bush’s presidency] in the way that I have, you end up in a position where you say nothing Bush did was surprising. If you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father, it all starts to be clear; and I think it was all certainly knowable by 2004, but mostly knowable in 2000.

The epistemological problem with this statement should be clear to anyone who has ever thought seriously about the contingency of history (sadly, a category that includes very few journalists). When Weisberg says that “nothing Bush did was surprising… [i]f you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father,” what he means is that you can construct a narrative that rationalizes observed events by attributing them to visible causes (i.e. Bush’s family history). The problem is that all history seems obvious and inevitable after the fact. However, making up post hoc narratives doesn’t mean that we actually understand the causes of Bush’s behavior. If Bush’s presidency had gone differently, an equally intelligent writer could probably construct an equally plausible explanation based on that same family history. An identical argument applies to all the post hoc narratives that political journalists construct to “explain” whatever happens during campaigns, presidencies, etc.

I haven’t read Weisberg’s book, but Jacob Heilbrunn suggests that the whole volume suffers from this problem in an otherwise positive Washington Monthly review:

Instead of cudgeling Bush for his manifest shortcomings, however, Weisberg embarks upon a kind of psycho-biography in an attempt to explain what is really behind these character flaws and why the Decider decides as he does.

Weisberg locates the answer in the early history of the Bush family. The tensions between the Walker and Bush clans, he argues, formed the essential backdrop to George W.’s own troubled life and presidency…

In contrast to his father, he refused to approach the business systematically. Instead, George W., “who thought success was a matter of rolling the dice with borrowed money, never struck lucky.” Sound familiar? It was Bush’s pattern: decades later, in Iraq, he gambled again and lost. As Weisberg sees it, “Driven by family demons, overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity for self-knowledge, Bush seems to me to have done precisely what we should have expected of him.”

What Weisberg means by this isn’t simply that Bush flubbed up. It’s that it was almost preordained, in large part because he engaged in a form of intellectual mutilation by rendering himself as incurious as possible…

The British historian Sir Herbert Butterfield referred to the “Whig interpretation of history,” in which each event of the past is interpreted as inevitably leading to the strengthening of liberty and progress worldwide. Weisberg, who traces Bush’s sins backward to his ancestors, may be engaging in a reverse form of Whiggism. He essentially contends that character is destiny, which would strike many historians, who are interested in larger trends and forces, as somewhat anachronistic. Missing in Weisberg’s meditation on Bush is a larger context that takes into account the GOP’s capture by the far right. Bush wasn’t operating in a vacuum, and we know he isn’t much of a brooder. How much of his presidency has been shaped by psychological forces, and how much by sheer opportunism?

We shouldn’t focus just on Weisberg, however. Biography is an intellectually bankrupt genre, as Louis Menand pointed out in a critique published in The New Yorker last year that applies equally well to a great deal of political journalism:

[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print… [T]he premise poses a few problems.

For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others….

[The biographer Meryle] Secrest subscribes to this distinction between (as she puts it) “the private truth versus the public façade, appearance versus reality.” She is also, like many biographers, a believer in turning points—“pivotal moments in a person’s life when a single decision alters the future irrevocably.” It’s delightful to find (never concoct!) such moments, in which a chance encounter or a sudden revelation changes an ordinary life into the kind of life that people get paid to write books about, since those moments enable the biographer to construct the sort of conversion narrative, or Dick Whittington before-and-after story, that readers find familiar and take pleasure in…

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the reader’s. We know what Coltrane or Cleopatra or Churchill achieved when we pick up the book, and we process the stuff we didn’t know, about their childhoods and their love lives and their abuse of whatever substances they may have abused, with this knowledge in mind. We are, in effect, helping the biographer do the work, because, like the biographer, we’re reading with an already formed image of the subject in our heads…

I would go so far as to say that most failures of political journalism result from a failure to grasp this epistemological problem. (Discuss!)

Update 4/16 8:25 AM — Here’s an excellent suggestion from comments about how to conduct a scientific test of this approach:

If it’s as simple as Swami Weisberg claims, why don’t we throw him some money for one of those experiments you were just talking about? Once we know who the Democratic nominee is, give him $100,000 (I’m being generous here) and a few months off with the express goal of researching the family history of McCain and Obama/Clinton and writing prospective biographies of how their presidencies will go. Then in 4 or 8 years, when that presidency is over, we can open that biography and compare it to reality. If Weisberg was close to right, let’s hail him as a genius. If not, he can publicly admit that he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.

Rush Limbaugh just called liberalism “the greatest threat this country faces”:

[L]iberalism is the greatest threat this country faces, not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win, and are in power for four, eight years or more, they don’t take Islamofascism as a threat. And we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Oba — Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points.

Here’s Joe Lieberman on the same individual:

“As an Independent, it doesn’t bother me at all to be honored at the same dinner with Rush Limbaugh.

In fact, to show you how much things have changed for me, one of my greatest missions this year is to convince Rush to support the Republican candidate for President!

The truth is I greatly admire Rush’s love for our country and support for our troops, as shown by his remarks tonight and his generous support of MCLEF. Rush has a big voice but he has heart that is even bigger.”

For more on Limbaugh, see our Spinsanity articles and my blog posts on him (2001-2004 and 2004-2008, respectively).

Update 4/18 9:24 AM: Rush Limbaugh yesterday on his reaction to Hillary during the ABC debate — “What a B-I-itch.” But he’s got a big heart!

Matthew Yglesias is correct to argue that the influence of campaign gaffes is probably overstated:

One thing I wonder about is how much do “campaign gaffes” really matter? My guess is that their perceived importance is mostly an illusion. I mean, people point to plenty of examples of campaigns that lost, in large part, “because of” this or that gaffe or damaging random thing dredged out of the record but you never see an example of a campaign that won because it successfully avoided gaffes.

As I’ve argued, the fundamentals (the state of the economy and war) drive presidential election results, but the process by which this occurs is not entirely clear. Who fills the void? Reporters and pundits who (a) see their job as interpreting the political process for citizens and (b) have a strong economic incentive to create an entertaining drama that will attract an audience. These journalists collectively end up constructing a plausible narrative to “explain” the trajectory of the campaign and its eventual outcome of the campaign. This narrative is often built around media-generated controversies that have little influence on the outcome.

Campaigns also tend to be seen as a referendum on the skill and quality of political candidates, which are also closely linked to gaffes. In almost every case, losers are seen as bad candidates and winners as good candidates even when we would have expected the actual outcome in advance. For instance, the collapse of Michael Dukakis in 1988 may have been because he was a bad candidate who made mistakes like riding in a tank wearing a silly helmet, but it also coincided with George H.W. Bush converging to his expected level of performance given the fundamentals.

With all that said, however, it’s worth distinguishing between epiphenomenal gaffes and those with deeper political and cultural significance, especially when the latter is reinforced in paid media. While largely incoherent, Obama’s statement about downscale whites in small town Pennsylvania was offensive and condescending in its phrasing. If enough money is spent drilling that message into the heads of lower income white voters, Obama’s performance in the general election could be significantly affected.

In an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine, Grover Norquist claims falsely that “[t]he [Iraq] war spending is a fraction of the spend-too-much problem”:

SOLOMON: Now that we’re facing an economic slowdown, not to mention a $9 trillion national debt, is it fair to ask whether the Bush tax cuts have damaged the country?

NORQUIST: Oh, no, no, the spending has done the damage.

SOLOMON: The spending in Iraq?

NORQUIST: That’s what the White House says. But it’s not true. The war spending is a fraction of the spend-too-much problem. When you want an extra dollar for the war, you have to give Congress $2 for other stuff.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows in the following tables, this claim is false — the share of the federal budget devoted to domestic discretionary spending and its size relative to GDP per person have declined while defense spending has soared:

Table 1: Domestic Discretionary Funding  Is a Shrinking Share of Total Program Costs
Share of Total	2001	2008	Change
Defense & security	21.7%	29.2%	+7.5%
Social Security, Medicare/caid	45.9%	43.5%	-2.4%
Other mandatory programs	14.0%	12.5%	-1.4%
Domestic discretionary	18.4%	14.7%	-3.7%
Total program costs	100%	100%	0.0%
Notes: Figures may not add due to rounding.  The defense/security figures also include veterans, homeland security, and international affairs.  Medicare is net of premiums.  Figures for 2008 are CBO’s January estimate plus supplemental discretionary funding requested by President Bush.  Totals exclude net interest.

Table 2: Domestic Discretionary Funding Has Been Growing More Slowly Than Any Other Set of Programs (Average annual rate of growth, from 2001 through 2008)
	nominal	real	real per person
Defense & security	12.0%	9.1%	8.1%
Social Security, Medicare/caid	6.5%	3.8%	2.8%
Other mandatory programs	5.7%	3.0%	2.0%
Domestic discretionary	4.0%	1.3%	0.3%
Average, all program costs	7.3%	4.6%	3.6%
See Notes, Table 1.

Back in 2004, I wrote a post titled “Politics goes Moneyball” about the increasing use of experimentation to measure the effectiveness of campaign tactics. Since then, progress — which has been led by Yale’s Alan Gerber and Donald Green — has been relatively slow but steady. Here’s the latest sign that people are finally catching on —
the founding of a new organization called the Analyst Institute that practices “Moneyball for progressive politics”:

A Job Posting from the Analyst Institute:

The Analyst Institute is hiring for several positions. We are looking for people who are analytical, quantitatively-minded, and comfortable with statistical analysis software. The more campaign experience the better, and the more experience with experimentation the better.

The Analyst Institute is a new organization that does cutting edge analytics and evaluation of voter registration, persuasion, and mobilization. We work in close collaboration with major progressive organizations around the country. Some people have described what we are trying to do as “Moneyball for progressive politics.”

The executive director, Todd Rogers, is finishing a PhD at Harvard and has worked with Gerber on a turnout experiment (PDF).

The larger question is why everyone in politics, business, nonprofits, and government isn’t constantly doing experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. Yale’s Ian Ayres recently asked this question about sports teams, which could use randomization to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies (say, a zone defense versus man-to-man in basketball), but the principle applies far more broadly. Despite all the folk wisdom out there about what works or what doesn’t in politics or business, even the experts actually know very little — it is very difficult or impossible to determine causality from observational data. By contrast, experiments are simple, cheap, and easy to evaluate. Academics in the social sciences are doing more of them, especially outside the lab (i.e. “field experiments”), but the real revolution will happen when white collar professionals start to catch on.

I hold no brief for John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor and former Bush administration official who wrote the loathsome “torture memo,” but what justification is there for Brad DeLong accusing Yoo of “participating in a conspiracy to torture goatherds from Afghanistan who have been sold to the military by clan enemies falsely claiming they are members of Al Qaeda”:

I cannot help but think that it is time for some appropriate arm of the university that is expert enough to have an informed view to consider the matter, and to advise me and the rest of the faculty (a) why John’s memo of March 14, 2003 does not, despite appearances, rise to the level of participating in a conspiracy to torture goatherds from Afghanistan who have been sold to the military by clan enemies falsely claiming they are members of Al Qaeda…

There is so much to object to about what Yoo did and wrote — why suggest without proof that he wanted to torture innocent people? The fact that innocent people were tortured as a result of Yoo’s memo does not mean that he intended that outcome to occur. It’s the same rhetorical sleight of hand at work in Eric Alterman’s suggestion that President Bush has a “preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die” for opposing the expansion of children’s health insurance or in conservative rhetoric accusing opponents of the Iraq war of being “pro-Saddam.”

Weep for the republic as you read MSNBC talking heads analyzing Barack Obama’s choice of beverage at an Indiana diner:

On Hardball, while remarking on Sen. Barack Obama’s reported request for orange juice after being offered coffee at an Indiana diner, David Shuster asserted: “[I]t’s just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, ‘Here, have some coffee,’ you say, ‘Yes, thank you,’ and, ‘Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?’ You don’t just say, ‘No, I’ll take orange juice,’ and then turn away and start shaking hands.” Host Chris Matthews agreed, “You don’t ask for a substitute on the menu.”

Yes, there was a discussion on national television about the appropriate way to ask for orange juice at a diner. This kind of coverage is all too remiscent of the way Matthews and other members of the press made up bizarre narratives about the color of Al Gore’s clothing, his choice of shoes, the way he claps, and the number of buttons on his suit (among many other things).

Going forward, the important question is whether this will be the third presidential race in a row in which the Democratic presidential candidate is treated as an elitist stiff and endlessly psychoanalyzed. I haven’t heard anyone talk like this about how John McCain orders orange juice…

Reuters accurately sums up the state of the presidential race in its lede, which explicitly groups Hillary Clinton and John McCain together as the “rivals” of Barack Obama who both attacked him today:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire on Friday for saying small-town Pennsylvania residents were “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” in comments his rivals said showed an elitist view of the middle class.

Obama’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain both pounced on the comments Obama made last weekend at a fundraiser in San Francisco.

Pretty unbelievable.

PS Here’s the quote:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama, an Illinois senator, said.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he said.

Assuming (reasonably) that Obama meant “they” to apply to some people in those towns rather than everyone, this is a classic Kinsley gaffe — what Obama said is true but extremely impolitic to say, especially given his weaknesses with downscale white voters.

Update 4/12 9:09 AM: On reflection, Rob is right that the comment is condescending and elitist.

He cites Mickey Kaus’s take, which I find persuasive. Kaus argues that Obama’s race speech and this statement attribute various conservative attitudes on social issues (opposition to affirmative action and illegal immigration, support for gun rights, a devotion to evangelical religion) as the result of economic disclocation. While Obama’s rhetoric may be accurate for some people, it implicitly denies the possibility that people sincerely oppose affirmative action, believe in the right to own guns, etc. for legitimate non-ideological reasons.

Here’s the Kaus post:

The always-suspect Michael Lind nevertheless sends around a useful commentary on Obama’s gruesomely off-key condscension toward downscale Rustbelt voters:

According to Obama, working class (white) people “cling to guns” because they are bitter at losing their manufacturing jobs.

Excuse me? Hunting is part of working-class American culture. Does Obama really think that working-class whites in Pennsylvania were gun control liberals until their industries were downsized, whereas they all rushed to join the NRA …

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I used to think working class voters had conservative values because they were bitter about their economic circumstances–welfare and immigrants were “scapegoats,” part of the false consciousness that would disappear when everyone was guaranteed a good job at good wages. Then I left college. …

P.S.: Because Obama’s comments are clearly a Category II Kinsley Gaffe–in which the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks–it will be hard for Obama to explain away. [He could say he was tired and it was late at night?–ed But he was similarly condescending in his big, heartfelt, well-prepared “race speech” when he explained white anger over welfare and affirmative action as a displacement of the bitterness that comes when whites

are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition …

Obama’s new restatement confirms the Marxist Deskwork interpretation of the race speech, removing any honest doubt as to his actual attitude.

Rather than trying to spin his way out, wouldn’t it be better for Obama to forthrightly admit his identity? Let’s have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!]

P.P.S.: Note that guns are not the only thing Obama says “white working class” people “cling” to for economic reasons:

[I]t’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. [E.A.]

Hmm. Isn’t Obama the one who has been clinging to religion lately? Does he cling to his religion for authentic reasons while those poor Pennsylvania slobs cling to it as a way to “explain their frustrations”? … They worship an awesome God in the blue states because they’re bitter about stagnant wages! I think that’s what he said in his 2004 convention address …

Here’s Kaus’s original post on Obama’s race speech:

Marc Ambinder gives Obama credit for saying “white resentments … are grounded in legitimate concerns.” The problem is he said that only after the populist passage cited above. The clear implication was not that resentment about welfare and affirmative action was “legitimate,” but that these resentments were actually misguided symptoms of the legitimate anxiety, which would be anxiety over “stagnant wages,” etc. caused by “corporate … greed” etc.. … If you think concern over welfare and affirmative action has an independent, legitimate basis apart from anxieties about the “middle class squeeze,” it’s highly condescending for Obama to tell whites (and similarly disposed blacks, for that matter) that, in effect, that they suffer from false consciousness–‘I know you’re really concerned about economics and declining wages and in your anxiety you let yourself be distracted into blaming welfare and affirmative action.’ But that’s what he says, as I read it and heard it…

And here’s the relevant passage from Obama’s race speech:

[A] similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.