Brendan Nyhan

Matthew Yglesias calls the public “ill-informed and hypocritical” based on a New York Times poll that found “Most Americans continue to want the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy… [y]et at the same time, most oppose some proposed solution for decreasing it.”

The problem, however, is that the available evidence doesn’t support Yglesias’s conclusion (which is encouraged by the way the poll is framed in the Times). When you look at the raw poll results (PDF), you’ll see that the public prefers reducing the deficit to stimulating the economy 58%-35%, but 53% oppose cuts in public services and 56% oppose higher taxes. Those numbers may seem “ill-informed and hypocritical,” but the problem is that we’re dealing with aggregate data (this is what is known as an ecological inference problem). We can’t draw any strong conclusions about the proportion of individual members of the public who have incoherent preferences about deficit reduction without access to the raw data. Ideally, we would break out the members of the public who advocate deficit reduction over stimulus and see how many of them oppose both higher taxes and reduced services. That’s the quantity of interest, but it’s unfortunately not available to us at this point.

Update 7/30 12:12 PM: Yglesias has generously updated his post to note that you “can’t infer very much about individual preferences from this aggregate data.”

Update 7/30 1:59 PM: Per Steve Greene’s comment below, I want to make clear that there is (of course) substantial evidence that many individuals have contradictory preferences on public policy issues. It is therefore quite possible that the Times poll data will reveal that many people have incoherent views on deficit reduction. My purpose in writing this post was simply to clarify that we can’t reach such a conclusion on the basis of aggregate data alone. Moreover, we should be cautious in condemning “the public” as a whole for incoherence when the proportion of the population that support deficit reduction but oppose any measures to achieve it might be relatively small.

Bob Somerby has caught another pundit exercising his psychic powers in the Henry Louis Gates affair. Following in Judith Warner’s footsteps, the Washington Post’s columnist Eugene Robinson has published a column in which he purports to read Crowley’s mind (my emphasis):

[F]or the sake of argument, let’s assume that Crowley’s version of the incident is true — that Gates, from the outset, was accusatory, aggressive and even obnoxious, addressing the officer with an air of highhanded superiority. Let’s assume he really recited the Big Cheese mantra: “You have no idea who you’re messing with.”

I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It’s not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn’t have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved — uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop — that Crowley couldn’t abide.

As Somerby points out, Robinson uses the weasel word “[a]pparently” to justify his projection of thoughts into Crowley’s head, then uses the word “uppity” to insinuate that the police officer’s actions were racially motivated. Unfortunately, he can’t possibly know any of this to be true. It’s a journalistic act as inexcusable as George Will’s distortions of climate data, but one that’s likely to draw far less attention.

Time to add Bill Pascoe, a former GOP operative now blogging at CQ Politics, the editors of National Review (via Andrew Sullivan), and Mary Katherine Ham of The Weekly Standard to the growing list of conservatives (headed by Michael Medved) who have denounced the Obama birth certificate myth. As I noted yesterday, even Ann Coulter and American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. have disowned it. When will leading members of the GOP do the same?

Update 7/29 11:39 AM: Per Jay’s comment below, I’ve retitled this post (previously, it was “More conservatives exit birther bandwagon”).

Update 7/29 12:38 PM: Per the last sentence of the post, I’m delighted to see that GOP chairman Michael Steele has finally spoken out against the birther movement (via Ben Smith). Here’s the key portion of the statement that was provided to Greg Sargent by an RNC spokesperson: “Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen.”

Update 7/29 3:09 PM: One step forward, two steps back — conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt is also denouncing the myth, but Rep. Roy Blunt just called the issue a “legitimate question” and Rep. Louie Gohmert signed on yesterday as a cosponsor of Rep. Bill Posey’s birther-inspired bill in Congress.

Last night Lou Dobbs revisited the Obama birth certificate misperception on his CNN show. With pressure growing against him and his network, he did not encourage birther conspiracy theories in his normal fashion. However, even while backtracking on the issue, Dobbs twice mischaracterized Obama’s citizenship as a matter of opinion rather than fact (my emphasis):

New developments tonight in the controversy over the president’s birth certificate. Yesterday the director of the Hawaii Department of Health issued another statement that she had, in fact, seen Barack Obama’s original so-called long form birth certificate on file with the Department’s Office of Vital Records. That official repeated her opinion that the president was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4th, 1961.

…A left wing group’s liberal mainstream media have stepped up some attacks on me for reporting on the controversy over the president’s birth certificate when in fact I’ve stated many times that President Obama is a citizen of this country in my opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, called on CNN to fire me for my even discussing the story.

At this point, Obama’s citizenship is proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It’s absurd for anyone on “The Most Trusted Name in News” to be treating it as a matter of opinion.

Meanwhile, CNN president Jon Klein, who backed down from a memo declaring the birther issue “dead” and continues to allow Dobbs to cover the issue, got zinged during a Q&A with TV reporters yesterday (via Media Matters):

Q: If Dobbs wanted to explore whether the British had won the Revolutionary War, would that be a legitimate topic?

A: It would not be legitimate for Lou or anyone else at CNN to explore whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. That’s why he hasn’t done that. And I think the people who are making noise about that have to look at closely what the discussions have been. It’s all about the phenomenon of doubters.

Nonsense. Let the shaming continue…

To change elite incentives, we need to not only shame elites who promote misperceptions like the Obama birth certificate myth but reward those who debunk them, especially on the side that is promoting the myth. That’s why we should honor Michael Medved, a conservative talk radio host, for taking a leading role in fighting the birth certificate myth. His decision to actively combat this misperception is a real act of political courage. It’s not easy to dissent within the conservative movement, and Medved says his decision to do so has provoked a larger backlash from his listeners than any other stance he’s taken on his show. Some are already trying to get stations to drop it from the air. Hopefully his increased national visibility as a voice of reason on this issue means that the net effect of his stance will be positive.

With my research indicating that corrections are frequently ineffective (here and here), I’ve recently argued that the most effective way to combat misperceptions is to shame the elites that promote them. It’s time to put that strategy to work.

Specifically, we’ve reached a crucial moment in the debate over the increasingly popular misperception that President Obama is not a citizen of this country. It has now been endorsed by conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh, promoted by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, and reinforced by ten GOP members of Congress who are backing a birther-inspired bill about birth certificate requirements for presidential candidates. Other GOP members recently failed to disown the myth in interviews with Mike Stark of Huffington Post.

Last week, Dobbs drew national attention to the issue and was widely mocked by commentators. And yet CNN president Jon Klein, who called the story “dead” in an internal email that was made public, later seemed to back down and has allowed Dobbs to continue to raise the issue on his network.

We are therefore at a key turning point in the debate. Reputational pressure must be applied to force elites to stop promoting this scurrilous rumor. It shouldn’t be hard — a number of prominent conservatives have already condemned the rumor as false. Even hardcore anti-Clinton conspiracists like Ann Coulter and R. Emmett Tyrell have disowned it. So why can’t CNN stop covering it? Every day that they fail to do so is an embarrassment to all of the journalists who work there. The same principle applies to the GOP, which needs to use its institutional leverage against members who fail to disown the myth.

Update 7/28 10:42 AM: I’ve corrected this post to remove criticism of Rep. Michelle Bachmann for blocking a vote on a resolution that described Hawaii as Obama’s birthplace — my source for the claim, Think Progress, appears to have misinterpreted Bachmann’s procedal objection. (I should take my own advice about trusting the Center for American Progress.)

America’s pundits are rushing to meet the demand for commentary on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr by Cambridge police officer James Crowley. A lack of agreed-upon facts is no obstacle!

For example, Bob Somerby flags Judith Warner asserting in the New York Times that Crowley’s report is wrong about a disputed fact (whether Gates referred to Crowley’s mother) and then purporting to reveal the inner thoughts of the two men:

Perhaps the most telling moment in Sgt. James Crowley’s account of his now epoch-defining arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. occurs about three-quarters of the way through the report that the officer subsequently filed with the Cambridge Police Department.

In his story of their verbal tussle, Crowley describes himself as overwhelmed by the noise in Gates’s kitchen, as the black professor loudly accused the white cop of racial profiling. Seeing that Gates could not be persuaded to use an inside voice, Crowley retreated to the street, inviting Gates to join him outdoors.

“Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside,” Gates allegedly told him.

Gates denied referring to Crowley’s mama. “The idea that I would, in a vulnerable position talk about the man’s mother is absurd,” he told Gayle King of Sirius radio. “I don’t talk about people’s mothers … You could get killed talking about somebody’s mother in the barbershop, let alone with a white police officer … I think they did some historical research, and watched some episodes of ‘Good Times.’”

I think there’s more to it than that. I think it’s very likely that Crowley really does believe he heard the insult to his mother. And that’s because Gates wasn’t the only one in that house, on that day, whose thoughts were traveling well-worn grooves chiseled by race. Both men were, consciously or not, following scripts in their heads, stories of vulnerability and grievance much more meaningful than their actual exchange.

Unfortunately, Swami Warner doesn’t actually know what happened between Gates and Crowley, and she certainly doesn’t know what their thoughts were as the exchange took place. That’s a level of epistemological doubt she’s unwilling to acknowledge. She concedes later that “We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind,” but as Somerby points out, the adverb “precisely” is absurd; we simply have no idea what Crowley was thinking. What’s missing from Warner’s vocabulary — and that of most elite pundits — is one simple phrase: I don’t know.

Just to briefly elaborate on the point I made last week, here are comparable plots of President Obama’s overall job approval and approval of his handling of health care:

As you can see, what’s happening on health care is a leading indicator of the end of Obama’s honeymoon period. As we return to our normal, highly polarized political climate, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will disapprove of a Democratic president’s performance in office and his handling of high-salience issues, especially in a bad economy. As a result, Obama’s numbers will inevitably decline across the board — this reality shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who works in or reports on politics.

Going forward, we should focus on more important questions. First, how much will Obama’s approval numbers decline? Given the state of the economy, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him in the low- to mid-40s by the end of the year. Second, what is the distribution of opinion on Obama’s handling of health care? Aggregate public opinion on the issue is less relevant than how it’s playing in the states of key senators whose votes will determine the fate of the legislation in Congress.

The resentment politics of Sarah Palin have always had a Dadaist quality to them, as in this bizarre passage about the media from her farewell speech to Alaska (via the New York Post and Salon.com):

“First, some straight talk for some — just some — in the media because another right protected for all of us [by the military] is freedom of the press. You have such important jobs reporting facts and informing the electorate and exerting power to influence. You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you and that’s why our troops are willing to die for you. So how about in honor of the American soldier you quit making things up?” (3:56-4:40 in the YouTube clip below)

What does “the American soldier” have to do with the way the media covers her? It’s a total non sequitur. You can say the military protects everything in the US. Our troops are no more or less relevant to the press than they are to any other institution in America. It’s all too reminiscent of the way the Bush administration repeatedly invoked the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to try to silence dissent after the fact (though notably less coherent).

Back in April, I flagged Bob Somerby’s work on how Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show was recapitulating the flaws of cable news (ideologically-motivated dissembling and ratings-driven sensationalism) in a liberal format.

Somerby is back on the Maddow beat this week and his conclusions are just as depressing. Like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, Maddow has been pandering to her audience with a tabloid-like focus on Republican sex scandals. And Somerby busts her blatantly misquoting Pat Buchanan after his segment to put him in a less favorable light.

Unfortunately, very few comentators want to defend Buchanan, especially on the issue of race, so you’re not likely to hear much about this. More generally, there’s an incentive problem that extends to most cable news shows — many media elites are likely to avoid criticizing Maddow because they want to get booked on the show. Finally, within liberal circles, there’s a tendency to rationalize Maddow’s behavior by saying that she’s still better than comparable conservatives and that the cable news medium is at fault. As a result, there’s largely been a blackout on critical perspectives on her show.