Brendan Nyhan

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is the latest Democrat to suggest that opponents of President Obama may be committing sedition:

Patrick said that even “on my worst day, when I’m most frustrated about folks who seem to rooting for failure,” he doesn’t face anything like the opposition faced by the president.

“It seems like child’s play compared to what is going on in Washington, where it is almost at the level of sedition, it feels to like me,” Patrick said.

Merriam-Webster.com, the dictionary site, defines sedition as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

With his sweeping language about “what is going on Washington” as “almost at the level of sedition,” Patrick implicitly suggested that Congressional Republicans and their allies were engaging in treasonous behavior by criticizing Obama harshly and opposing his agenda.

Patrick later tried to walk back his statement:

After the forum, Patrick explained his remarks.

“I think that the number of people in the Grand Old Party who seem to be absolutely committed to saying ‘no,’ whenever he says ‘yes,’ no matter what it is, even if it’s an idea that they came up with, is just extraordinary,” the governor told reporters after the forum.

But did the opposition really border on sedition?

“That was a rhetorical flourish,” Patrick said.

Nonetheless, Patrick joins Salon’s Joan Walsh, Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan (here and here), New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, and Time’s Joe Klein on the list of pundits and officials who have likened criticism of the president to treasonous behavior.

Patrick’s language particularly echoes Klein, who described a statement by Senator Tom Coburn as “borderline sedition,” said some Fox News programming “borders on sedition,” and called statements by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and others “right up close to being seditious.”

I’ve added Patrick’s comments to my timeline of attacks on dissent against President Obama.

As I’ve written before, the Washington Post Style section helped create the snark-filled, mind-reading style of narrative writing that has infected political journalism. One of its stars is Robin Givhan,
who, to take just one example, wrote an entire article about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage.

Givhan’s latest contribution to American democracy is a 1000+ word analysis of Elena Kagan’s clothes and body language. Characteristically, Givhan takes a superficial observation — the idea that Kagan doesn’t cross her legs — as a pretext for psychologizing about the Supreme Court nominee’s preference for comfort (my emphasis):

In the photographs of Kagan sitting and chatting in various Capitol Hill offices, she doesn’t appear to ever cross her legs. Her posture stands out because for so many women, when they sit, they cross. People tend to mimic each other’s body language during a conversation, especially if they’re trying to connect with one another. But even when Kagan sits across from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has her legs crossed at the knees, Kagan keeps both feet planted firmly on the ground. Her body language will not be bullied into conformity.

She does not cross her legs at the ankles either, the way so many older women do. Instead, Kagan sits, in her sensible skirts, with her legs slightly apart, hands draped in her lap. The woman and her attire seem utterly at odds. She is intent on being comfortable. No matter what the clothes demand. No matter the camera angle.

The only problem, as Media Matters shows, is that Kagan was repeatedly photographed with her legs crossed during meetings with senators:

Here’s Kagan at Sen.
Daniel Akaka’s (D-HI) office:

Here she is with Sen. Jeanne
Shaheen (D-NH):

And with Sen. Blanche
Lincoln (D-AR):

And Sen. Herb Kohl
(D-WI):

Here she is with Sen.
Barbara Boxer (D-CA):

And with Sen.
Claire McCaskill (D-MO):

And with Sen. Al Franken (D-MN):

And finally, Kagan with a
former senator you may have heard of:

It’s a great illustration of how little empirical support is needed when writers like Givhan are piecing together their desired narrative. And yes, she won a Pulitzer in 2006. Who needs Woodward and Bernstein anyway?

Update 5/25 11:10 AM: Newsweek’s Jessica Barrett notes an amusing irony:

[T]he Post‘s own internal stylebook says that “references to personal appearance—blond, diminutive, blue-eyed—should generally be omitted unless clearly relevant to the story.” It cautions to “avoid condescension and stereotypes.” Yeah, this is a fashion story—we know. But still kinda funny, right?

CJR’s Liz Cox Barrett also rounds up pictures of Kagan with her legs crossed.

From my Twitter feed:
-AP’s attention to fact-checking is generally laudable, but (a) the popularity of those articles is probably driven by opposing partisans and (b) AP’s work (like Factcheck.org and Politifact) often suffers from forcing ambiguous issues into the fact-checking frame
–Video of Gallup event presentation by Temple’s Christopher Wlezien on forecasting midterm election outcomes
-Given Rand Paul’s belief in the mythical NAFTA superhighway, has anyone asked him about related misperceptions like a global currency, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc.?
-Sarah Palin says Rachel Maddow was “prejudiced” in her Rand Paul interview — a classic example of reversing civil rights jargon
-Politico analysis of primary results: “old structures that protected incumbent power are weakening” — not implausible, but the change seems to be concentrated in primaries (also, it’s not clear that defeat of party-switching Specter is proof of anything)
-Democrats hire framing guru Drew Westen in another misguided effort to use spin to solve structural problems

Third party hype is back! In a Washington Post op-ed, pollster Mark Penn predicts “new movements and even parties that shake up the political system” in the US:

Thursday’s elections in Britain could be a harbinger of what is likely to come to America in the not-too-distant future: new movements and even parties that shake up the political system…

Today, about 40 percent of Americans are political nomads, wandering from party to party in search of a permanent home…

There is also a structural problem — socially liberal and fiscally conservative voters believe, especially after what happened with health care, that they have no clear choice: They must sign on with the religious right or the economic left. It is just a matter of time before they demand their own movement or party.

Similarly, AP writer and third-party hypester Ron Fournier claimed a few weeks ago that Florida governor Charlie Crist’s decision to run for the Senate as an independent foreshadows a third party surge:

Charlie Crist’s departure from the Republican Party is not just a Florida story; it’s an American story — a tale of two parties driven by their ideologues, squeezing out moderate candidates, alienating independent voters and isolating the place in U.S. politics where most things get done: the middle…

Record numbers of people tell pollsters they are independents. The public’s approval of both parties is at an all-time low. Will more politicians follow voters out of the major parties?

But as I’ve argued many times before, third parties and third party candidates are highly unlikely to succeed in the US due to the structure of the American political system. Here’s TNR’s Jon Chait demolishing Penn’s analysis:

What’s missing from this explanation is the structure of the political system itself, where the combination of first-past-the-post voting and the electoral college makes third-party campaigns extraordinarily difficult. Under the right conditions, a third-party challenger might have a chance once in a while, but over time the structural forces favoring the two-party system will invariably reassert themselves. This is political science 101 stuff…

[P]ollsters and public opinion experts — a group that apparently excludes Penn — understand that independent self-identification largely reflects a desire not to be seen as a closed-minded, automatic vote. It does not, however, reflect actual voting independence. Most self-identified independents are at least as partisan in their voting behavior as self-identified Democrats or Republicans. It’s largely a class phenomenon, with wealthier and more educated voters being more likely to call themselves independent, but not more likely to go astray in the voting both. The rise of independent self-identification has little to do with voters moving toward the center or the parties moving toward the extremes.

As such, while third party movements or candidacies may occasionally succeed, the major parties are exceptionally difficult to dislodge in the absence of a major issue (like race) that divides them internally. As such, it’s far more likely that the parties will head off any threat, especially as the economy improves. Don’t believe the hype.

In a post on National Review’s blog The Corner, Jonah Goldberg complains about a double standard in media coverage of partisan misperceptions (suggesting, without any evidence, that liberals think 9/11 conspiracy theorists are “quirky and no big deal”):

“Birtherism” is dangerous and paranoid and “Trutherism” is quirky and no big deal, according to liberals.

Here’s the New York Times on the Truthers (if you can’t get through the firewall, here’s the Newsbusters synopsis). The Times called them “a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks.” Skeptics and scientists! No wonder even the Truthers hailed it as favorable coverage.

And here is the latest on the Birthers from last Friday’s New York Times. In fairness, the Times doesn’t call them racists or dangerous — I guess they leave that to Frank Rich & Co. — but it is quite fed up with them. The piece is all about how the Birthers have become an outright nuisance to state officials in Hawaii. Here’s the opening:

HONOLULU — The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of Hawaii state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.

If only the Times could have been this dismissive of the Truthers. I guess they never created any bureaucratic-paperwork hassles for government officials, so they’re okay.

There’s no question that the 2006 Times article which Goldberg quotes is irresponsible in its generally respectful treatment of the 9/11 conspiracists. In fairness, though, the author eventually notes that the claims that the WTC was brought down by explosives is “directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology” and that “the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts.”

In addition, Goldberg is wrong to suggest that the Times was not dismissive of the Truthers. An article published in September 2006 (and easily accessible via Google) is headlined “2 U.S. Reports Seek to Counter Conspiracy Theories About 9/11.” It describes the movement’s members as “an angry minority” of “an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others” who believe in “a shadowy and sprawling plot” that is “utterly implausible” according to government officials and faces “enormous obstacles to its practicality.”

More generally, Goldberg should be ashamed of himself for soft-pedaling birtherism (“the basic allegation isn’t that crazy, at least in the abstract”) and using the occasion of a Times article that is appropriately critical of birthers to complain about truther coverage from 2006. It’s yet another example of the reflexive way in which bias critics spew lazy claims of media double standards. Shouldn’t he be more outraged that people are making false accusations about the legitimacy of the president of the United States?

Update 5/17 4:40 PM: See also Jonathan Chait, who notes that the June 2006 NYT article Goldberg criticizes calls truthers “conspiracy buffs” and points out that birthers have received more coverage as a result of “gaining at least soft support” from numerous Republican elected officials (unlike truthers, who were widely shunned by Democratic politicians).

From my Twitter feed:
-Jacob Weisberg is starting to collect “Palinisms” on Slate, but these are likely to have all the same flaws as “Bushisms” and “Kerryisms”
-New Scientist special report on “Living in denial” — why people resist scientific and factual evidence they don’t like
-Outgoing SEIU president Andy Stern compares union dissidents to terrorists — classy!
-Yet another high-level birther emerges (South Dakota Secretary of State, GOP candidate for Congress)

For those who missed it, the ABC News/Washington Post poll (PDF) released last week included a question about the misperception that President Obama was not born in this country. They found that 20% of Americans think Obama was not born in this country, including 31% of Republicans:

What’s striking is that the results are almost identical to the CBS News/New York Times poll released last month, which found that 20% of Americans think Obama was born elsewhere, including 30% of Tea Party supporters:

In short, this myth isn’t going away any time soon. For more, see my previous posts on the birther myth and my research with Jason Reifler on the persistence of political misperceptions.

[Cross-posted on Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-Liberal efforts to close “hack gap” continue to pay dividends
-John Sides on the political science of “mavericks”
-Would it be asking too much for newspapers to not print false “death panel” letters?
–Ultimate Newsweek cover lines from Josh Green — I like “What Would Jesus Eat? The New Science of Biblical Diets”

From my Twitter feed:
-Matt Steinglass at The Economist blogs on my misperceptions research, writing that “Nyhan is right” on need to pressure elites to be more responsible, but he is “not optimistic” about strategies for doing so
-Blogger quantifies number and accuracy of rumors about Bush and Obama on Snopes (validity depends on Snopes methods)
-Conservative postmodernism alert — Washington Examiner columnist answers a factual claim with a poll (for past entries, see here)
-Taegan Goddard at Political Wire suggests Obama’s approval ratings with independents have received a “health care bump,” but that upturn may be a result of improved economic perceptions (see also Mark Blumenthal). Even if the increase is the result of health care, it’s probably less a “bump” than a reduction in bad press that was depressing Obama’s approval ratings.

The NYT’s Ross Douthat flags a very important article by Kevin Williamson in National Review debunking the myth that tax cuts increase revenue, an article of faith among George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans that even Bush’s own economists didn’t believe. Williamson describes this point of view as “magical thinking”:

What does Representative Gohmert [a Texas Republican] think about taxes? After 9/11, he argues, the United States was headed for a serious recession, even a depression, but tax cuts saved the day — and increased government revenues in the process. “With a tax cut, then another tax cut, we stimulated the economy, and record revenue like never before in American history flowed into the United States Treasury,” he said in a speech before the House. “As it turned out, the tax cuts helped create more revenue for the Treasury, not destroy revenue for the Treasury.” That last bit is fantasy. There is no evidence that the tax cuts on net produced more revenue than the Treasury would have realized without them. That claim could be true — if we were to credit most or all of the economic growth during the period in question to tax cuts, but that is an awfully big claim, one that no serious economist would be likely to entertain. It’s a just-so story, a bedtime fairy tale Republicans tell themselves to shake off fear of the deficit bogeyman. It’s whistling past the fiscal graveyard. But this kind of talk is distressingly unremarkable in Republican political circles.

And such magical thinking is not the exclusive domain of back-benchers from the hinterlands. The exaggeration of supply-side effects — the belief that tax-rate cuts pay for themselves or more than pay for themselves over some measurable period — is more an article of faith than an economic fact. But it’s a widespread faith: George W. Bush argued that tax cuts would serve to increase tax revenues. So did John McCain. Rush Limbaugh talks this way. Even Steve Forbes has stepped into this rhetorical stinker from time to time….

It is true that tax cuts can promote growth, and that the growth they promote can help generate tax revenue that offsets some of the losses from the cuts. When the Reagan tax cuts were being designed, the original supply-side crew thought that subsequent growth might offset 30 percent of the revenue losses. That’s on the high side of the current consensus, but it’s not preposterous. There is, however, a world of difference between tax cuts that only lose only 70 cents on the dollar and tax cuts that pay back 100 cents on the dollar and then some.

There is considerable debate among economists and federal legume-quantifiers about how large supply-side revenue effects are. The Congressional Budget Office did a study in 2005 of the effects of a theoretical 10 percent cut in income-tax rates. It ran a couple of different versions of the study, under different sets of economic assumptions. The conclusion the CBO came to was that the growth effects of such a tax cut could be expected to offset between 1 percent and 22 percent of the revenue loss in the first five years. In the second five years, the CBO calculated, feedback effects of tax-rate reductions might actually add 5 percent to the revenue loss — or offset as much as 32 percent of it. That’s a big deal, and something that conservative budget engineers should keep in mind. But the question of whether the CBO accounts for tax cuts at 100 cents on the dollar, 99 cents on the dollar, or 68 cents on the dollar is hardly the stuff that a broad-based political movement is going to put at the center of its campaigns.

Read the whole article for more, including an extended critique of the specific claim that recent capital gains tax cuts increased revenue. Williamson and National Review deserve credit for publishing this important article — let’s hope it has wide influence within the movement.

[Note: Williamson does make one significant mistake. In this statement, he wrongly suggests federal spending almost doubled under Reagan using figures that are not adjusted for inflation: “In 1980 federal spending was $590 billion and in 1989 it was $1.14 trillion.” However, using constant (FY 2000) dollars, spending actually rose from $1.175 trillion to $1.499 trillion between 1980 and 1989 — a more modest increase of 28%. Outlays were also flat as a percentage of GDP during this period (21.7% in 1980, 21.2% in 1989). See Tables 1.2 and 1.3 in the historical tables from the President’s budget.]