Brendan Nyhan

Bob Somerby has a very important post today on the pathological news coverage of Hillary Clinton that is already taking shape. It’s true that lots of people (myself included) sometimes feel like she is disciplined or calculating in her public appearances. But that’s no excuse for reporting that frames her every move as spin.

So far, the primary offender is the New York Times reporter Patrick Healy, who writes today that “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton strived for an Oprah moment yesterday night, the third of her presidential campaign, by sitting in a fake living-room set and fielding questions on a live video Webcast about her vote for the Iraq war.” Can you tell what the script is?

He later added that “Her answers suggested various personas that she wants to convey to voters: a hometown girl, a mother, a moviegoer, a churchgoer, a standard-bearer for women and a critic of the war.” How does Healy know that Clinton wants to suggest those personas? Answer: He doesn’t. He’s mind-reading.

The problems began yesterday with Healy’s report on a Clinton health care event:

The visit to Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center, which is just blocks west of Broadway (and is named after two neighborhoods it serves), was highly scripted political theater.

Reminiscent of the scene this month when Representative Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to be speaker of the House, children surrounded Mrs. Clinton and climbed over their parents in the audience. The event was intended to convey both her policy smarts and her warmer maternal side — a combination new to presidential primaries.

But as Somerby pointed out, all political events are “highly scripted”:

Readers, every time major candidates do public events, the events are, in some sense, “highly scripted.” It’s only a question of when a journalist chooses to put such a phrase into print. And in the case of Hillary Clinton, Healy knows his cohort’s prize narratives. When Clinton does it, it’s “highly scripted.” Those are the rules of this game.

And again, how does Healy know what “[t]he event was intended to convey”? He doesn’t!

The problem is that journalists don’t want to be passive reporters writing down what politicians said and did; instead, they want to inject their own voices into stories. That’s great when they fact-check the substance of what politicians say. But it’s far more common for reporters to try to deconstruct politicians’ tactics and try to explain their “real” motivations — a habit that frequently devolves into phony mind-reading, useless tactical critiques, and pathological narrative-driven coverage.

And where do these narratives come from? Columns like this one from National Review’s Rich Lowry:

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential exploratory committee while sitting on a couch in her living room, she didn’t project warmth so much as a sense that she was desperately trying to project warmth.

As TV producer Steve Rosenbaum wrote of her performance on the liberal website The Huffington Post: “Hillary is struggling with words that are not her own. You can practically see the teleprompter reflected in her eyes. Every word has been word-smithed, every phrase looked at by a team of consultants.”

Welcome to the Hillary Clinton campaign, which will be the most blatantly calculated presidential campaign in memory. Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting, but it is Hillary’s lot in life not to be able to fake it well, so the scriptwriting and the consultants’ work show through. She seems to take the advice to “act naturally” literally, and the acting is always more in evidence than the naturalness.

The blogger and law prof Ann Althouse is even more stupid in commenting on a Washington Post report about Clinton’s answer to a question about her favorite movie:

She hedged on her favorite movie, saying that, as a child, she had loved “The Wizard of Oz,” only to discover “Casablanca” in college and law school, watching it so often that she memorized the lines. (Her passion for the Meryl Streep-Robert Redford classic “Out of Africa” came later, she said.) But she was clear about her own conviction that she can become president.

Can’t you just picture the robotic brain gears turning, trying to think of a movie that would say just the thing she needs said? Oh, why didn’t she have a “favorite movie” planned before she went into this on-line chat to humanize herself? “Wizard of Oz,” can’t go wrong there…. except it’s childish, and not very imaginative or distinctive. “Casablanca”! That’s a great movie everyone loves. Possibly more sophisticated than “Wizard of Oz.” But anyone could think of “Casablanca.” I need something that would have at least some individuality to it. Was there ever anything that ever stirred me? Damn it, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been sitting around like you cookie-bakers staring at screens, waiting for some damned moving image to stir some — what is it you people have? — emotion. Oh, hell, there was that thing…. “Out of Africa”!

The Hillary is fake meme is everywhere. Anonymous blogger “Not Paul Begala” at Blog P.I. posted this (complete with picture):

Notice how she’s been giving interviews in a living room setting, on a couch, with her elbow up on the armrest. This is supposed to convey a warm family scene with her kicking back and inviting you, the viewer, into her home.

Now, I dare anyone in Hillaryland to tell me that she’s just doing this on her own and that her political team didn’t consciously decide to portray her in this new way to give her the humanizing, “woman’s touch” look for her presidential run. It’s so obviously contrived it’s funny.

How could we possibly know whether she was told to put her elbow up on the couch? We can’t! But the belief of people like Healy, Lowry, Althouse, and Beutler that everything she does is calculated can’t be disproved. Meanwhile, they can frame her every move as phony.

Correction: William Beutler did not write the post at Blog P.I. quoted above as this post previously indicated; his anonymous co-blogger “Not Paul Begala” did.

A warning to anyone considering hiring Charles Krauthammer to give a speech — you can’t trust him with the facts.

For example, check out his misleading paraphrase of a comment by John Edwards during the last presidential election:

As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.

But as Krauthammer himself noted at the time, Edwards actually said something else entirely:

If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

Notice the difference. Edwards said “people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk”; he did not say “Reeve will walk again,” as Krauthammer suggests. Apparently he decided the quote needed improving the second time around. Will the Post set the record straight?

(PS After catching this, I found a Media Matters article making the same point.)

Really, really unpopular:

According to a CBS News poll conducted Thursday through Sunday, 28 percent of Americans approve of the way the president is handling his job, and more than twice as many, 64 percent, disapprove. It is the lowest approval rating the president has received in a CBS News poll, though it is statistically little different from the rating of 30 percent he received earlier this month.

Only Jimmy Carter has received a lower approval rating, 26 percent, in 1979, in surveys conducted by CBS News or its polling partner, The New York Times. In a Gallup poll conducted in August 1974, just before his resignation, Richard M. Nixon had a 24 percent approval rating.

In a new ABC News/Washington Post poll made public on Monday, only 33 percent approved of Mr. Bush’s job performance, and 65 disapproved, tying the record for his worst marks in that poll.

Charles Franklin’s latest presidential approval analysis shows that the 28 percent number may be an outlier, but the trend is negative:

Franklin’s plot of the long sweep of Bush approval (through January 21) looks even worse:

And as he notes (echoing my point about the myth of the bully pulpit), there’s little reason to expect tonight’s State of the Union address to change Bush’s numbers:

Despite the increased prominence of the speech, the effect of State of the Union addresses on presidential approval has generally been small to non-existent. The average change from before to after the SotU since 1946 has been -0.3 percentage points. Of the 50 post-war speeches for which we have good data, 30 changed approval of the president by 2 percentage points or less. So it is unlikely that President Bush’s address Tuesday night will do much to alter public perceptions in either direction, despite the hype around the speech.

A strange ad ran on my site advertising Charles Krauthammer’s speeches:

Do people book five-figure speeches from Google ads? Is the market for inside-the-Beltway neoconservativism drying up?

PS If you do book Krauthammer, make sure to ask for his favorite appeasement anecdote! He’s great at customizing it for the foreign policy situation of the moment…

National Journal’s Carl Cannon has written a useful piece on presidential lies for The Atlantic. The distinction he makes between personal falsehoods and “governing lies” is especially important (it echoes a point we made in All the President’s Spin):

Some falsehoods — like many campaign lies — are relatively harmless; they may soil an opponent’s résumé or polish one’s own, but their consequences are slight. Deceptions to promote or protect a policy or presidential action — call them governing lies — are more consequential, and it is by their consequences that [presidents] should be judged

Still, I would argue that Cannon’s focus is too narrow; we frequently cannot prove that a president is intentionally deceiving the public, but misleading statements matter regardless of whether they are intentional or not. In addition, the administration specializes in half-truths that leave an incorrect impression rather than statements that are completely false, as we noted. (For both reasons, we set aside the debate over what is and is not a lie in ATPS, as we explained in the introduction.)

Cannon also hypothesizes that “although statements made by Bush as president have proven to be untrue, Bush generally believed they were true when he made them” in a query to the author David Corn. But he fails to consider the most important case — the “trifecta” anecdote justifying the return to budget deficits which we recount at length in the book. Here is our summary from the introduction:

In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, “when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.”

It was a good story, but there’s no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly no — Bush continued to repeat the “trifecta” story for months after it had been debunked.

It’s worth noting that Bush variously described the questioner as “somebody,” “a fellow,” “a reporter,” “the guy,” “they,” “one of the reporters,” and “a male reporter” (see Appendix C). He also repeatedly asserted that the discussion took place in Chicago (though no proof has ever surfaced to justify that claim) and claimed that he “told the American people” about his pledge. Could Bush possibly believe that his anecdote was accurate as he repeated it almost twenty times?

Finally, Cannon offers an accusation of dishonesty that appears to be incorrect, writing that “Al Gore told a labor crowd that his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby with ‘Look for the Union Label’ (a ditty written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old).” But as Bob Somerby pointed out, Gore said afterward that he’d been joking about the song — a claim that was corroborated by (a) the fact that his audience laughed at his statement and (b) the fact that a longtime family friend was quoted six weeks earlier saying that “Al jokes that when he was a little boy, I used to sing him the ‘Union Label’ song.’”

We knew it was coming. Hillary & Co. are hyping her prospects as a presidential candidate, facts be damned. Here’s what she says in the announcement on her website:

I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine. After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.

But Clinton’s wins aren’t that impressive. Her 2000 win — the only one against serious opposition — represented an average Democratic performance for New York, as I wrote:

[H]er 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

And while it’s true Clinton blew out John Spencer, her opponent in 2006, he was a pathetically weak candidate who she outspent more than seven to one.

Mark Penn, Hillary’s pollster, has posted an article on her site seeking to allay concerns about her electability:

She has national ratings that are higher than the winning presidential candidates of the last two decades had on Election Day and beats or statistically ties the leading Republican presidential candidates in most recent polls. A December Newsweek poll even had her beating Sen. John McCain by 7 points.

The people who have come to know Hillary the best love her the most. Hillary won a huge victory in New York, with 64 percent of the vote, after getting 83 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. In addition to her strong base in the city, she won over the highly Republican areas in upstate NY, where she has been strong since 2000, and went up 17 points this election in the Republican-leaning NYC suburbs. New Yorkers reaffirmed their support of her in her reelection, and she won 37 of the counties won by George Bush in the last election.

…Even before announcing her presidential campaign, Hillary has already proved wrong all the pundits who say that people already know her and that voters won’t change their minds. In the last year, the percentage of people who have a favorable impression of Hillary Clinton in the CBS poll rose 34 percent (from 32 to 43, the highest of any Democratic contender). In the December Washington Post poll, she now has the highest favorable rating of any known Democrat (56 percent), and these were her best ratings since 1999. Hardcore Republicans don’t like Hillary for the simple reason that they know she can win, and if she does, she will change the policies of their hero, George W. Bush. She has a strong appeal among both Democrats and independents, the two groups it takes to win.

But these are the same bogus arguments I shot down last July. For instance, Penn’s right that Clinton’s favorables in the CBS poll (PDF) are up from 32 to 43, but the same poll puts her unfavorables at 38 percent. Penn’s statement that “these were her best ratings since 1999” is apparently misleading — the Pollingreport.com summary suggests CBS didn’t ask a favorability question about Hillary between 1999 and 2006. And his statement that Hillary “has a strong appeal among both Democrats and independents” neglects her 41 favorable, 33 unfavorable numbers from the CBS poll he cites.

Neil the Ethical Werewolf (?) has more on Penn cherry-picking his polls:

The only head-to-head Hillary-versus-a-Republican polls that Penn includes come from this Newsweek story, which has Hillary beating McCain by 7 and Giuliani by 1. It allows Penn to say, “Hillary Clinton is the only Democrat who beats John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the latest Newsweek poll.” That’s not as exciting as it seems, because that Newsweek poll included only one other Democrat — Barack Obama. And depending on what time of day Penn released his memo, it might not even be true. Just today, Newsweek came out with another poll showing Hillary leading McCain 48-47 and trailing Giuliani by the same score. But there is one Democrat who beats both McCain and Giuliani — John Edwards, who leads McCain 48-43 and leads Giuliani 48-45. This is consistent with past polling data — when you do a collection of head-to-head polls, Edwards usually outperforms everyone else against Republicans.

Penn trumpets Hillary’s high favorability ratings while ignoring her equally high unfavorables from the same polls. He cites a CBS News poll with Hillary’s favorables at 43%, which he notes as higher than any other Democratic contender. Of course, the same poll puts her unfavorables at 38%. John Edwards, by comparison, has a favorability number of 34% and an unfavorability of 21%. You get the same with the WaPo poll of Democrats Penn cites — it shows Hillary with a higher unfavorability number (18) than Obama (5!) or Edwards (11) as well.

It’s one thing to cherry-pick your favorite polls, or to pass off name-recognition advantages as indicative of some broader strength. But what really gets me about this Penn memo is that his citations of individual polls are themselves misleading.

Update 1/22 6:20 AM: The University of Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin has compiled Hillary’s favorable/unfavorable numbers going back to the early 1990s (adjusted for “house effects” from individual polls):

The bottom line is that there may have been a slight upturn in her favorable numbers in the last few months, but she remains a highly polarizing figure with unfavorables consistently over 40 percent. And remember, it’s much easier to move people from favorable to unfavorable than the converse.

PS Has there ever been a first-time presidential candidate who was so polarizing so early in the race? I’m struggling for comparisons.

Update 1/22 9:31 AM: Penn’s memo, which says it was updated, also includes this passage suggesting she is a “fully tested” candidate and her opponents are not:

Some of the commentators look at the ratings of people who have not yet been in the crossfire, and say they might have a better chance. Recent history shows the opposite. The last two Democratic presidential candidates started out with high favorable ratings and ended up on Election Day (and today) far more polarizing and disliked nationally (see the CBS poll below). Hillary is the one potential nominee who has been fully tested, with the Republicans spending nearly $70 million in the last decade to try to defeat her. She is not just strong, but the strongest Democrat in the field. Hillary is the only one able to match or beat the Republicans after years of their partisan attacks on her.

While Al Gore and John Kerry did end up “far more polarizing and disliked nationally,” as Penn notes, it doesn’t follow that Democrats should nominate someone who is already deeply polarizing. Gore and Kerry started out with better numbers than Hillary would, so why wouldn’t we expect her to end up being even more unpopular?

There may be a new subject of the unending hype about a third-party presidential candidate. Hotline on Call reports that Republican Senator Chuck “Hagel was a guest on C-SPAN’s ‘Newsmakers’ and the network’s P.R. dept. is trumpeting Hagel’s non-answer to the question of whether he’d run for the WH as an indie”:

[T]he non-answer to the question about an indie run in ’08: “I have not decided I am going to run for president, so maybe that’ll be the next set of questions that you could ask after I decide what I’m going to do.”

I like Chuck Hagel, but he’s not going to have more success as a third party candidate than anyone else.

Back in June 2005, I argued that John McCain’s high favorability ratings were doomed to decline:

McCain spiked upward in popularity at the time he made his run in the 2000 presidential primaries, and has barely declined since — even though he has generally been a strong defender of President Bush.

The reason, I think, is that Democratic politicians don’t criticize McCain (some even ask him to be their vice presidential nominee). He’s more or less the only partisan politician who Democrats and Republicans generally praise. As a result, the public likes him across the board — the Quinnipiac poll shows his favorabe ratings as 37% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Republicans; 31% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Democrats; and 40% favorable, 9% unfavorable among independents.

But this will inevitably change if McCain runs in 2008. The reason is that he’s never received significant Democratic criticism. He was defeated in 2000 before the Democrats felt the need to open up on him, and since then they all praise him because they want to look bipartisan and co-sponsor bills with him in Congress. But he won’t get the Republican nomination unless he starts unloading on the Democrats, and if he does get nominated (which I think is unlikely), things will turn around really quickly. Pretty soon Democrats will start pointing out that he’s a pro-life, ultra-hawkish, government-cutting conservative, and his favorability profile will start to look like most other Republicans. And even though McCain’s numbers look great today, few Democrats would actually vote for him — if he’s only getting 15% against Hillary Clinton right now, imagine what he’d draw against a more moderate Democrat like John Edwards at the end of a vicious presidential campaign.

Eighteen months later, this sounds just about right — Democrats have turned against McCain already and his support among independents is apparently declining in key primary states, as Ezra Klein noted on Tapped. Josh Marshall concludes that McCain is “going nowhere” in the presidential race. I’m not sure that’s true, but the combination of McCain’s pandering to the right and his position on Iraq is likely to burn through most of his capital with independents and Democrats during the primaries. If McCain does win the GOP nomination, he’s not likely to be the intimidating candidate that many Democrats fear.

The New Republic’s Jon Chait has done it again, launching one of his signature hack takedowns against the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds, a pseudo-expert who is challenging the top academic economists studying income inequality in a transparent attempt to muddy the waters.

But what makes Chait’s piece particularly excellent is his deconstruction of the PR tactics used to create uncertainty about complex scientific issues:

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds’s role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not–indeed, he must not–be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

You might suppose that somebody in Reynolds’s position would do everything he could to mask his own ideological preferences in order to lend credibility to his research. But Reynolds is completely up front about his beliefs…

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack’s strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment’s campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack’s most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. “The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need,” Reynolds writes in the Journal. “Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded.” So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who’s right?

One of the incidents that led to me quitting blogging for The American Prospect was a dispute over a post on Atrios that used a suicide to score cheap political points. But it turns out that there was no suicide.

To review, here’s a quick summary of the controversy from my Time.com column:

Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee’s suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the “wanker of the day” and to call on TAP editors to “rethink things a bit.” Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the
Prospect’s comment boards with vitriol.
In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine’s online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here
) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

The original post on Atrios that I criticized read as follows:

Compare and Contrast

The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide – unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, “Okay, you’ve covered your ass.”

Where did the claim that the ticket agent committed suicide come from? Atrios guest blogger Avedon Carol linked to a Suburban Guerilla post that linked to a Daily Kos diary about an appearance on Oprah by Michael Touhey, one of two agents who checked in Atta, who said on the show that “a good friend” of his told him that “‘That girl that checked in Atta committed suicide.’”

But the blogger William Beutler (formerly of The Hotline’s Blogometer), who originally noted the lack of documentation for Touhey’s claim, has set the record straight after receiving this email from an American Airlines spokesperson:

William,

I stumbled on to your blog today as I was doing an Internet rumor search. You’ll easily guess what rumor I was tracking down. ABC’s Nightline called today asking about a rumor that an American Airlines agent in Boston had checked in Mohamed Atta and then killed herself later out of guilt. I couldn’t remember the name of the US Airways agent who had fabricated the rumor and that is how I came upon your blog – through the omniscient Google, of course.

Because of privacy policies, I can’t give you a ton of information. However, I can tell you that the American Airlines agent who checked in Mohamed Atta is alive.

I realize this is coming to you several months after your blog string, but you’ve now got this for closure.

Best regards,
Tim Wagner
Spokesman
American Airlines

I’m glad to know she’s still alive.