At the gym yesterday I saw this inane exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Brian Todd about security at the Holocaust Museum:
TODD: …CNN’s security analyst, Mike Brooks, says his law enforcement colleagues in Washington are telling him this space — in here and in there, where you can enter again unchecked before you hit the security MAGS — could represent a vulnerability, Wolf.
That’s got to be something that they will be looking at.
BLITZER: But is there an alternative? Because there are a lot of museums in Washington that have exactly the same kind of security.
TODD: That’s exactly what I asked Mike Brooks. And he returned the question to me.
He said what is the alternative?
Are you going to have large crowds of tourists waiting outside in potentially bad weather elements to clear security?
Are you going to put security MAGS outside?
There may not be a great alternative here. But he says this incident, like the Capitol shooting more than a decade ago, represents one concept here. You have to remember, if someone has a gun and they want to shoot up a building like this, they can get into at least some kind of perimeter and have some chance to penetrate.
But he says after every incident like this, law enforcement, federal and local, they’ll review the procedures. They’re going to certainly going to review the layout of this building here and see what could have worked and what might not have worked.
BLITZER: I’m sure they’ll do a complete and thorough review (INAUDIBLE) study, as they call it.
In the wake of a tragedy like this, there is an understandable desire to improve security, but in this case the system (apparently) worked. The shooter did not clear security and the guards at the Museum immediately returned fire. The idea that it’s a vulnerability to be able to enter “unchecked before you hit the mags” (i.e. metal detectors) is crazy. As Todd admits, there’s no good alternative. If the security screening takes place outside, then a random shooter could still kill people there.
Frank Gaffney, the right-wing apparatchik last seen suggesting that President Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them,” has written an entire column for the Washington Times arguing that “there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself” (via MM). He bases this false conclusion upon a bizarre and elaborate exegesis of Obama’s Cairo speech that would embarrass even the most paranoid conspiracy theorist.
We’ve repeatedly seen members of the press and political figures promoting this myth (or claims that reinforce it) over the last few years. Just in the last week, Media Matters has documented Fox Nation falsely claiming “Obama Says U.S. Is a ‘Muslim Country,’” Fox News running a graphic about Obama titled “Islam or Isn’t He?”, former Washington Times editor Wes Pruden writing that Obama found “his ‘inner Muslim’” in Cairo, and Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb asking “if the president hasn’t been concealing some greater fluency with the language of the Koran.”
It’s therefore not surprising that a Pew poll in April found that almost half of all Americans still don’t know Obama’s religion, including approximately one quarter of the public that either thinks he is a Muslim (11%) or doesn’t know and has “heard different things” (13%).
In a new working paper (PDF), my co-author Jason Reifler and the undergraduates in my PS 199AS class here at Duke report the results of new experiments testing the effects of Obama’s efforts to correct the Muslim myth. Our findings, which extend my previous research with Reifler on correcting misperceptions, indicate that the myth has a strong social desirability component and that Obama’s attempts to correct it may backfire among Republicans. Here’s the abstract:
In this paper, we address the question of how to counter political misperceptions, which are often difficult or impossible to eradicate. One explanation for this difficulty is that corrections frequently take the form of a negation (i.e. “Tom is not sick”), a construction that may fail to reduce the association between the subject and the concept being negated (Mayo et al. 2004). We apply this approach to the persistent rumor from the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama is a Muslim, comparing the effectiveness of what we call a misperception negation (“I am not and never have been of the Muslim faith”) with what we call a corrective affirmation (“I am a Christian”), which should be more effective. As expected, we find that the misperception negation was ineffective. However, our hypothesis that the corrective affirmation would successfully reduce misperceptions was only supported when a non-white experimental administrator was present, suggesting a strong social desirability effect on the acceptance of corrective information. In addition, three-way interactions between the corrective affirmation, race of administrator, and party identification suggest that social desirability effects were more prevalent among Republicans. When nonwhite administrators were absent, the corrective affirmation not only failed to reduce Republican misperceptions but caused a backfire effect in which GOP identifiers became more likely to believe Obama is Muslim and less likely to believe he was being honest about his religion. We interpret this reaction as being driven by Obama’s embrace of Christianity, which may provoke cognitive dissonance among Republicans.
Update 6/10 9:57 AM: Matthew Yglesias makes a very important point in discussing these findings:
In other words, in politics getting your allies to lie about your opponents can be a very effective political tactic. Similarly, people who care about honesty ought to consider themselves very seriously obligated to reprimand people who are deliberately spreading misinformation. At the end of the day, it’s extremely difficult to actually counter misinformation, and so society needs there to be disincentives to spreading it.
That’s exactly right. Both this paper and my previous research with Reifler indicate that corrections often fail to reduce misperceptions and sometimes make them worse. For that reason, it’s essential that elites who promote misperceptions be publicly shamed in front of other elites. I think this was the most successful aspect of our work at Spinsanity and it’s probably the way in which Factcheck.org and Politifact are most useful as well.
Update 6/10 10:14 AM: Politico’s Ben Smith weighs in as well:
Brendan Nyhan, blogger and political scientist, is the lead author of a new working paper (.pdf) from Duke which attempts to study efforts to talk people out of believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The conclusion: It’s very hard, if not impossible. That jives with my realization, from the polling data, that the number of people who believe the rumor appears to have remained totally static since some time in 2008, which could mean that nobody is getting persuaded either way.
Nyhan’s study found that the only situation in which people who believed that he was a Muslim seemed to be talked out of it was when they were interacting with a non-white interviewer; in other circumstances, the assertion that Obama is Christian made them more likely to assert that he’s a Muslim.
I don’t understand the idea of a conservative boycott of GM. To the extent that it works, it will increase the odds that the firm will need more government cash and decrease the likelihood of the government quickly selling its stake back into the private sector — precisely the opposite of what conservatives would presumably want to see happen.
Update 6/9 11:08 PM: The link above goes to a TPM DC story that apparently mischaracterizes Rush Limbaugh’s position on the boycott. Hugh Hewitt’s support for it, however, seems well-established.
There’s more than a little irony in Republicans asking “WHERE ARE THE JOBS?” just a few months after the stimulus bill was enacted (via Paul Krugman). Remember, President Bush’s 2001 tax cut was sold as a recession-fighter, but payroll jobs declined steadily until mid-2003 (partly as a result of the economic shock associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks). The White House solution at the time was to disappear the 2001 tax cut and use a junk chart to falsely attribute the eventual uptick in jobs and employment to Bush’s second tax cut, which was enacted in May 2003 and had not had time to have a significant effect.
Nothing says action like a news correspondent reading the emails she is laboriously typing into the computer (“We … are … getting … some … feedback … on …. Twitter…”). The wacky gimmick is that she is writing to the author of the the fake Obama teleprompter blog, whose responses are then read back in a computer voice while showing a graphic of a teleprompter. I smell Pulitzer…
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is the latest conservative to smear President Obama as sympathetic to terrorists or disloyal to the United States, a claim that builds on the misperception that Obama is a Muslim.
As Think Progress points out, Inhofe called Obama’s statements in his Cairo speech “un-American” and suggested he might be on the side of terrorists (my emphasis):
Sen. Jim Inhofe said today that President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo was “un-American” because he referred to the war in Iraq as “a war of choice” and didn’t criticize Iran for developing a nuclear program.
Inhofe, R-Tulsa, also criticized the president for suggesting that torture was conducted at the military prison in Guantanamo, saying, “There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo.”
“I just don’t know whose side he’s on,” Inhofe said of the president.
This wasn’t just an off-the-cuff remark either. Brian Beutler of the TPM DC blog followed up with Inhofe’s communications director, who repeated the insinuation of disloyalty, saying Obama “certainly doesn’t seem to be on the side of our men and women in uniform”:
Curious which ‘sides’ Inhofe might have had in mind, I asked his communications director, Jared Young, to complete the picture a bit. According to Young, Inhofe was saying he’s “kind of confused about why the President’s going on foreign soil and in some cases echoing talking points from al Qaeda about Guantanamo Bay.”
So is he saying he think’s the President’s on the side of terrorists?
“No, no, he’s not saying that, no. He just certainly doesn’t seem to be on the side of our men and women in uniform.”
As Steve Benen notes, Inhofe has a history of making such allegations against Obama:
A month ago, Inhofe told a group of constituents that the president intends to let “hard-core terrorists” run “loose in the United States.” He was lying. In April, Inhofe insisted Obama is “disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war.” He was lying about this, too.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Inhofe asked, “Do you really want to have a guy as commander in chief of this country when you can question whether or not he really loves his country? That’s the big question.”
This isn’t the first time that Inhofe has demagogued national security either. Back in 2005, he voted (along with 32 other Senate Republicans) for a loathsome amendment that would have stripped the security clearance of any lawmaker who “makes a statement based on a FBI agent’s comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations” — an attempt to silence Democratic criticism of the Bush administration.
Sadly, Inhofe’s statements are part of a long pattern of suggestions by Republican officeholders, conservative pundits, and right-leaning media outlets that Obama is disloyal, a terrorist sympathizer, etc. — a tactic that echoes the numerous post-9/11 suggestions that Democrats who criticized the government were aiding terrorists. To illustrate the point, I’ve compiled the following timeline of smears suggesting that Obama is disloyal (please send me any examples that I’m missing):
December 2006: Columnist Debbie Schlussel notes that Obama’s father was a Muslim and asks “Where will his loyalties be?”
February 2008: Radio talk show host Bill Cunningham calls Obama “this Manchurian candidate” but says “I do not believe Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist or a Manchurian candidate.”
April 2008: During an apperance on Glenn Beck’s show on CNN Headline News, Ann Coulter asks “Is Obama a Manchurian candidate to normal Americans who love their country? … Or is he being the Manchurian candidate to the traitor wing of the Democratic Party?”
May 2008: Fox News analyst Dick Morris states that “the determinant in the election will be whether we believe that Barack Obama is what he appears to be, or is he somebody who’s sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn’t believe in our system and is more in line with [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright’s views?”
June 2008: During separate television apperances on Fox News and NBC, Dick Morris says “[T]he question that plagues Obama is … Is he pro-American?” and states that “[T]his whole debate about what kind of president [Sen. Barack] Obama would make has swirled around almost an existential level. Is he sort of a Manchurian candidate? A sleeper agent? Or is he the great hope of the future?”
April 2009: Frank Gaffney claims on MSNBC that Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them.”
May 2009: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich alleges on “Fox News Sunday” that there is a “weird pattern” in which Obama administration officials were “prepared to take huge risks with Americans in order to defend terrorists” and suggests that the Obama administration was proposing “welfare” for terrorists. He then claims on “Meet the Press” that the Obama administration’s “highest priority” is to “find some way to defend terrorists.”
June 2009: Senator James Inhofe calls Obama’s Cairo speech “un-American” and says “I just don’t know whose side he’s on.” Talk show host Lee Rodgers asserts that Obama is “an anti-American president” and that Obama’s policies will lead to a “few million dead Americans.”
This timeline will be maintained and updated here.
President Obama is once again suggesting that he’s seeking a bipartisan compromise on a major policy issue:
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, recalled how Mr. Obama made a personal pledge of bipartisanship when he and Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the committee’s Democratic chairman, joined the president for a private lunch at the White House last month.
“I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a problem,’ ” Mr. Grassley said of the public plan, “and he said something along the lines of, ‘If I get 85 percent of what I want with a bipartisan vote, or 100 percent with 51 votes, all Democrat, I’d rather have it be bipartisan.’ ”
No one — and certainly not Grassley — should take this especially seriously despite Obama’s history of goo-goo rhetoric.
Consider the example of the stimulus. The White House put out word it wanted 80 votes for the bill, but in the end they peeled off just three Republicans, one more than the minimum necessary to defeat a filibuster, and called it a day. Getting more GOP votes might have been possible, but it would have required Obama to make painful compromises on policy for purely aesthetic reasons. Not surprisingly, he chose not to do so.
The same is likely to happen with health care. He’ll pick up a few moderate Republicans, but not enough to create a truly bipartisan coalition (something that may not even be possible on such a salient partisan issue). At this point, I tend to agree with Jon Chait’s unified theory of Obama — this is positioning to make the Republicans look bad after the fact. When push comes to shove, Obama is no more willing than any other president to give up his policy priorities for the sake of bipartisanship.
Update 6/7 6:12 PM: In comments, Rob writes the following:
I don’t entirely disagree with what Brendan says, but we should keep in mind that there is some political advantage to Obama in having the health care plan receive a significant number of Republican votes.
There’s a high probability that a lot of people will be dissatisfied once the health care plan is in operation… If it’s a totally Democratic plan, the Democrats may be a target of such popular dissatisfaction. If, on the other hand, the plan has been embraced by Republicans as well as Democrats, the Democrats may be able to escape paying a political price. Getting at least partial Republican support–enough to characterize the final result as a bipartisan plan–would be smart political insurance.
I agree that Obama has an incentive to try to characterize the plan as bipartisan for precisely this reason. My claim, however, is that the policy compromises required to create a truly bipartisan coalition are just too difficult to make when Obama doesn’t actually need GOP votes. As I said above, it’s therefore more likely that he’ll pass the plan with the support of a few Republican moderates. At that point, he will probably claim that the vote was bipartisan, but I doubt the public will perceive it as such.
A proposal to eliminate Bunker Hill Day and Evacuation Day in Massachusetts prompted this hilariously absurd slippery slope argment from one state legislator:
Many Suffolk County lawmakers, who represent Chelsea, Revere, Winthrop and Boston, disagree. Senator Jack Hart, a Democrat from South Boston, warned last month of setting a precedent.
“If we eliminate these holidays today in Suffolk County, then what’s next?” Mr. Hart asked. “Do we eliminate maybe Presidents’ Day? Do we eliminate July 4th? Why don’t we get rid of Thanksgiving?”
December 2006: Columnist Debbie Schlussel notes that Obama’s father was a Muslim and asks “Where will his loyalties be?”
February 2008: Radio talk show host Bill Cunningham calls Obama “this Manchurian candidate” but says “I do not believe Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist or a Manchurian candidate.”
April 2008: During an apperance on Glenn Beck’s show on CNN Headline News, Ann Coulter asks “Is Obama a Manchurian candidate to normal Americans who love their country? … Or is he being the Manchurian candidate to the traitor wing of the Democratic Party?”
May 2008: Fox News analyst Dick Morris states that “the determinant in the election will be whether we believe that Barack Obama is what he appears to be, or is he somebody who’s sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn’t believe in our system and is more in line with [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright’s views?”
June 2008: During separate television apperances on Fox News and NBC, Dick Morris says “[T]he question that plagues Obama is … Is he pro-American?” and states that “[T]his whole debate about what kind of president [Sen. Barack] Obama would make has swirled around almost an existential level. Is he sort of a Manchurian candidate? A sleeper agent? Or is he the great hope of the future?” Fox News host E.D. Hill also asked whether a fist bump between Obama and his wife was “A terrorist fist jab?”
April 2009: Frank Gaffney claims on MSNBC that Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them.”
May 2009: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich alleges on “Fox News Sunday” that there is a “weird pattern” in which Obama administration officials were “prepared to take huge risks with Americans in order to defend terrorists” and suggests that the Obama administration was proposing “welfare” for terrorists. He then claims on “Meet the Press” that the Obama administration’s “highest priority” is to “find some way to defend terrorists.”
June 2009: Senator James Inhofe calls Obama’s Cairo speech “un-American” and says “I just don’t know whose side he’s on.” Talk show host Lee Rodgers asserts that Obama is “an anti-American president” and that Obama’s policies will lead to a “few million dead Americans.”
August 2009: On the Lou Dobbs radio show, substitute host Tom Marr says “I have to believe that there is still an inner Muslim within this man that has some sense of sympathy towards the number one enemy of freedom and democracy in the world today, and that is Islamic terrorism.”
September 2009: Gaffney says Obama is “pursuing [an agenda] that is indistinguishable in important respects from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission ladies and gentlemen, we know from a trial in Dallas last year, is to quote to destroy Western civilization from within by its own miserable hand.” Conservative pundit Tammy Bruce says on Fox News that Obama has “some malevolence toward this country.”
November 2009: Fox’s Sean Hannity suggests that President Obama was somehow responsible for the Fort Hood shooting, stating that “our government apparently knew and did nothing” about “a terrorist act” and then asking “What does it say about Barack Obama and our government?”
December 2009: Citing a dubious report that the Obama administration had threatened Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) with closing Offutt Air Force Base, home of the US Strategic Command, if Nelson didn’t support the health care reform bill in the Senate, Glenn Beck suggests that the allegation would constitute “high crimes,” asked “[H]ow much closer do you get to treason?”, and said the claim “borders treason” and “borders on treason.”
January 2010: The New York Post publishes an editorial asking “Whose side is the Justice Department on: America’s or the terrorists’? … [T]he president and his administration also owe the American people an answer: Is the government’s prosecutorial deck stacked in favor of the terrorists?” Former senator Fred Thompson also jokes that the US could win the war in Afghanistan if we “[j]ust send Obama over there to campaign for the Taliban.”
February 2010: During a conference call with conservative bloggers, Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) accuses the Obama administration of having a “a terrorist protection policy” and conducting a “jihad to close Guantanamo.” In addition, based on a superficial resemblance between two logos, Frank Gaffney suggests that President Obama’s missile defense policies “seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.”
April 2010: Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) writes an article for The Daily Caller alleging that Obama is “disadvantaging the United States one step at a time and undermining this country’s national defense on purpose.”
July 2010: Writing in the Washington Times, former GOP Rep. and third party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo calls Obama “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” and “a dedicated enemy of the Constitution,” while columnist Jeffrey Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute describes Obama as an “usurper” who is creating “a socialist dictatorship” and has engaged in “treasonous” behavior by suing Arizona over its immigration law.
August 2010: National Review’s Andrew McCarthy publishes an entire book claiming that Obama is pursuing an agenda that will aid Islamic radicals. The dust jacket states that “the global Islamist movement’s jihad … has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.” Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin writes that Obama’s “sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens” in a post criticizing Obama’s statement on the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero.
September 2010: David Limbaugh suggests that Obama may be “trying intentionally to take us over the cliff” in a Newsmax.tv interview.
September 2012: Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus alleged in a tweet that “Obama sympathizes with attackers [of the U.S. embassy] in Egypt.”
May 2013: When asked whether Obama “actually switched sides in the War on Terror,” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered, “You know, I just don’t feel competent to answer. I can’t tell.”
February 2014: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said “I do not believe that the president loves America,” adding that “He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
April 2015: Former Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that President Obama is acting as if he wants to “take America down,” saying, “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing.”
July 2015: After the announcement of a nuclear deal with Iran, Senator Mark Kirk said “the president supported Corker legislation [allowing Congress to review the deal] is because it allows him to get what he wants on Iran which is to get nukes to Iran” and that Obama will “ask the Democrats all to stand with Iran.” Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum also accused Obama of “[t]reason” and “unmitigated evil” and Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor called Obama a “cowardly anti-American.”
June 2016: After a mass shooting in Orlando, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested President Obama sympathizes with Islamic terrorism or is allowing these attacks. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other,
Trump said, adding, “we’re led by a man that either is, is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.”