Brendan Nyhan

I know politicians love soft news coverage, but the strategy of seeking out non-political outlets works better for wonky politicians who need to be humanized. That’s why I don’t understand the decision for Sarah Palin to do a story with Runner’s World in their August issue (presumably completed before her bizarre resignation). It’s the opposite of the serious, policy-focused coverage she so desperately needs. If you haven’t seen it, the interview isn’t so bad, but the posed pictures are pretty embarrassing. That’s why politicians have communications staff around — to prevent pictures like that from being taken. At this point, the Runner’s World story is obviously the least of her problems, but it does further illustrate the misguided approach she and her advisers have taken to managing her career.

For those who are interested, you can listen online to an interview I did with NPR’s “On the Media” about my co-authored research investigating difficulties correcting the misperception that Barack Obama is a Muslim. (See also our previous research on correcting misperceptions.)

Apologies for the lack of posts — Nyhan world HQ has just been moved to Ann Arbor. More soon…

You stay classy, Grover Norquist:

“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”

Update 6/26 1:56 PM: Another Norquist gem via TPM: “[The Sanford affair] does indicate that men who oppose federal spending at the local level are irresistible to women.”

For all the reasons I previously outlined, the New York Daily News should not have published Betsy McCaughey’s misleading op-ed on the health care debate. She is not an expert and has no credibility.

GOP chairman Michael Steele has stumbled upon the solution to one of most vexing domestic policy issues of our time — the ever-increasing cost of health care:

So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It’s not that complicated.

Steele’s appreciation of the nuances of health care politics is reminiscent of John McCain’s strategy circa 2006 for ending the civil war in Iraq:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

Who says the GOP isn’t the party of ideas?

Brad DeLong approvingly quotes a reader making the following claim about misperceptions among Republicans:

12% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. 8% thinks he faked his birth certificate. The new Washpost/ABC poll says that 22% of the electorate id’s itself as GOP. Thus it is a fair inference that roughly half of declared Republicans are fringe lunatics–which explains why “respectable” conservative media outlets like National Review publish the Andy McCarthys and the Victor David Hansons, and why GOP politicians like Michelle Bachman and Steve King are now “mainstream” for the GOP.

DeLong’s reader is way off. While the Muslim misperception is more widely held among Republicans, it’s hardly an exclusively GOP phenomenon. The most recent Pew poll shows that 17% of Republican believe Obama is a Muslim — not 50% — along with 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats. No partisan cross-tabs are available for the dubious birth certificate poll, which was conducted for the fringe World Net Daily website, but I’d imagine they follow a similar pattern.

With that said, these levels of misperceptions are of course still much too high. For more on why these false beliefs tend to persist, see my new co-authored research with Jason Reifler and Duke undergraduates on correcting misperceptions about Obama’s religion as well as my previous research with Reifler on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions (PDFs).

As I wrote back in May, Nate Silver is obviously a smart and energetic blogger, but he just isn’t a social scientist. That’s why it’s frustrating when his quickie statistical analyses draw more attention than the relevant political science scholarship (of which Silver frequently seems unaware).

For instance, Silver published an analysis today that claims to measure “the impact of lobbying by the insurance industry on the prospects for health care reform.” His statistical model predicts senators’ support for the so-called “public option” using their estimated DW-NOMINATE ideal points (a measure of their policy views), health costs in their state, and their total campaign contributions from health insurance and HMO PACs. He finds that senators who receive larger industry contributions are less likely to support the so-called public option. Silver extrapolates from his model to a world in which special interest contributions are banned and concludes that “the insurance industry’s influence appears to swing about nine votes against the public option.”

However, as GW’s John Sides notes on The Monkey Cage, “there is a potential endogeneity problem in the model that Silver constructs. Does health insurance PAC money make senators less likely to support the public option, or are Senators who tend to oppose or at least be skeptical about government health care programs more likely to get contributions from health insurers and HMOs?” In other words, we can’t be confident that contributions are causing senators to oppose the public option. Silver acknowledges this caveat in a parenthetical, but then concludes his article by making the causal claim that “the money is why… Democrats are facing an uphill battle on the issue.”

In addition, we can’t say much of anything about a world in which health industry contributions aren’t made. It’s an unobserved counterfactual. Silver’s estimate of nine votes being swung is essentially meaningless in its current form — the model is extrapolating far beyond the available data.

What’s so frustrating about Silver’s post, which was (disappointingly) praised by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog, is that there is an extensive literature on this subject by political scientists and economists. Over the last 30+ years, these studies* have typically found minimal effects of campaign contributions on roll call votes in Congress even when scholars use more sophisticated techniques to address the causal inference problems described above (which are widely understood at this point). Given these prior findings and the inherent problems with Silver’s analytical approach, we should be extremely cautious about putting any weight on his conclusions.

(* See, for instance, pp. 112-117 of Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003 [PDF] from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.)

Bob Somerby flags Maureen Dowd’s bizarre interpretation of why the video clip of President Obama killing a fly during an interview was replayed so frequently:

The moment may have resonated so much because some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher on avaricious banks and vicious Iranian dictators.

Or maybe people just thought it was funny that he killed a fly during an interview? Even by Dowd’s exceptionally low standards, that is absurd psychobabble.

I understand that people are concerned about the potential costs of health care reform, but it’s immensely frustrating how Senate Finance chair Max Baucus and other prominent figures in Washington have become fixated on the idea that the reform bill shouldn’t cost more than $1 trillion. I haven’t heard a principled reason why that number is the right one — it’s just an arbitrary threshold. If we used the Euro as our currency, no one would be saying “Health care can cost 721.084511 billion Euros* and not a penny more.” And yet the $1 trillion number is seriously constraining the debate over the substantive provisions of the bill.

(* According to Google’s currency converter this morning.)