Brendan Nyhan

Like Matthew Yglesias, I’m more upset about Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” statement being false potentially misleading than about presidential heckling per se. And while Wilson’s outburst was relatively unusual in recent history, it’s important to remember that standards of political civility have changed. Consider, for instance, the famous caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks:

Other countries, too, have more confrontational politics in their legislative chambers:

In comparison, a little heckling is no big deal.

Update 9/10 11:55 AM: Per Rob’s comment below, I should clarify my description of Wilson’s statement as false above. Here’s what Obama said:

There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

The interpretation of Obama’s statement — and Wilson’s response — depends on how you define “insure” and “reforms.” Obama is clearly referring to the the false claim that health care reform would provide free health insurance to illegal immigrants. Many people may interpret Wilson’s outburst as a defense of this claim (it’s impossible to know what he was thinking). However, as Rob correctly points out, Obama’s reforms would apply to everyone — including illegal immigrants — who purchases coverage through health insurance exchanges, including from a proposed government insurance program known as the public option. If you define the public option as insuring someone and describe it as a reform, then Obama’s statement could be seen as misleading and Wilson’s point could be seen as more supportable.

As such, I’ve revised the statement above to describe Wilson’s statement as potentially misleading rather than false.

Update 9/10 2:10 PM: Matthew Yglesias objects to the passage above:

Brendan Nyhan bends over backwards to construct an interpretation of the situation such that Rep Wilson is merely being highly misleading rather than telling an outright falsehood…

In other words, though the bills would prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving any taxpayer assistance in purchasing health insurance, the proposals on the table don’t do anything special to prevent an undocumented immigrant from buying health insurance with his own money. To characterize this as “insur[ing] illegal immigrants” strikes me as about on a par with claiming that Obama’s health care plans give ibuprofen to illegal immigrants. After all, nothing in the bill stops illegal immigrants from buying ibuprofen in a store! And the very same FDA regulations that assure citizens and legal residents and tourists of the safety of ibuprofen will also benefit illegal immigrants.

I think this is unfair. The government would run the public option, which would end up insuring some illegal immigrants. Obama’s denial that “our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants” is therefore imprecise — he means the proposed legislation would not subsidize the insurance costs of illegal immigrants. Yglesias and I know what Obama meant; others may not. Moreover, views differ over the extent to which the public option would end up being publicly subsidized in practice — many people, including me, believe it would end up receiving significant direct or indirect subsidies. In other words, getting insurance from the public option may be more like buying ibuprofen in one of those subsidized tax-free stores on military bases. From this perspective, you can argue that illegal immigrants would receive some benefit.

As yet additional context, here’s Wilson responding in a press interview in which he cites verification amendments introduced by Republicans in committee:

In this case, the argument is that the bill would also not take sufficient steps to verify the eligibility of applicants for insurance subsidies, leading to fraudulent claims. (Whether that’s true or not is an empirical question that I can’t answer.)

Update 9/11 7:36 AM: See also this followup from Politifact which provides more detail on the question of whether illegal immigrants could fraudulently obtain insurance subsidies.

Also, the online CBS News show Washington Unplugged has compiled an impressive highlight reel of political fights, including a lawmaker who uses a judo throw (!) about halfway through the clip (via Taegan Goddard):

Watch CBS Videos Online

Per Mark Blumenthal, all instant polls on reactions to Obama’s speech are scientifically useless — pay no attention to them. For instance, CNN touts its poll as showing a “Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan” but is forced to admit that “The audience for the speech appears to be more Democratic than the U.S. population as a whole.” I continue to expect that the ultimate effect of the speech will be minimal.

Update 9/10 7:13 AM: Blumenthal notes that instant polls showed a similar reaction to the 2006 State of the Union, and that wasn’t exactly a game-changer for the Bush administration.

President Obama is going to address the nation tonight about health care. Despite all the hype, it’s not likely to change much in terms of public opinion.

Over the last few years, I’ve frequently cited political science research showing that presidential speeches usually fail to change public opinion on domestic policy issues. From Bill Clinton’s failed push for health care reform in 1993 to George W. Bush’s ill-fated effort to add private accounts to Social Security in 2005, past administrations have repeatedly overestimated their ability to change public opinion. The reason is simple — the president’s message is typically offset by that of the opposition. In the aggregate, the effects tend to cancel out and the numbers don’t move.

(John Sides has an especially nice post on this point at the Monkey Cage in which he debunks the claim that Clinton’s approval surged after the 1993 speech.)

What’s so striking is that reporters and politicos alike still don’t understand this point. Why? One explanation is that people tend to conflate domestic policy with foreign policy, where the president has more freedom of action, the public has less information, and the opposition is often more deferential to the president (and is thus less likely to offset his message). In addition, some cases like the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts in which the president raised the salience of a relatively popular issue (but didn’t change public opinion) are often misinterpreted. Finally, there’s a tendency to explain away past failures via post hoc narratives of failed presidential leadership, bad communication strategy, etc. However, it’s not likely that any kind of leadership or PR tactic can overcome an offsetting opposition message and change public opinion on a controversial domestic policy issue under normal political circumstances.

Update 9/9 4:39 PM: As I said above, politicians just don’t understand — Obama’s own allies in the party are raising expectations to an unrealistic level:

[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said he thinks Obama’s speech will clarify the debate.

“I have every belief that when he finishes his speech tomorrow, the American people will be able to put aside some of the ridiculous falsehoods that have been perpetrated these past few weeks,” Reid, D-Nevada, said Tuesday.

A House Democrat said Obama’s specifics could be a game-changer in answering Americans’ anger and concern over health care reform, displayed in sometimes violent and rowdy town halls over the summer.

“The president is clearly not running away from this battle but rather confronting the challenges we’ve encountered these last few weeks head-on,” Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said. “He’s pulling out all the stops, and this level of involvement from the president could well be a game-changer.”

Rangel said the speech could be a great way to turn public opinion on health care around.

A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that Americans are evenly split over whether to support or oppose Obama’s health care plan.

Six in 10 younger Americans support the plan; six in 10 senior citizens oppose it.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the fight against “he said,” “she said” journalism is the inconsistency within news outlets about how they treat misleading or unsupported factual claims.

For instance, The New York Times just published another article directly identifying Betsy McCaughey as a proponent of health care misinformation (see also my post on the first Times piece). Note the laudable lack of hedging or artificial balance in this passage:

[McCaughey] incorrectly stated in July that a Democratic bill in the House would “absolutely require” counseling sessions for Medicare recipients “that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” drawing a “Pants on Fire” rating from the PolitiFact fact-checking Web site; her false assertion that the presidential health adviser Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel believed “medical care should be reserved for the nondisabled” helped inspire the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s discredited warning about “death panels’ ” deciding who is “worthy of health care.”

Two days later, however, the Times ran a story on national service programs that included this passage in which the absurd charges of Americorps critics are treated with kid gloves:

Critics say that these bipartisan programs [Americorps and other national service programs] provide little more than busywork for volunteers; some even see dark forces at play. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, cautioned that they might morph into mandatory “re-education camps,” while the conservative commentator Glenn Beck recited the AmeriCorps pledge (“I will get things done for America,” it begins) on television while wearing lederhosen — to make either a strained analogy to National Socialism or a daring fashion statement.

Bachmann’s claim is reported without comment, and the only substantive statement on Beck’s comparison to the Nazis is a description of it as “a strained analogy.” (Strained! The Nazis!) It’s not clear why the reporter felt like the story had to be balanced by this nonsense (surely there are more serious critics of Americorps), but if they are to be included, the Times has some duty to assess the likelihood of the scenarios that Bachmann and Beck are envisioning.

At a more fundamental level, the media needs to draw the line and stop reporting on the paranoid fringe. Is the Times going to balance every news story on the Obama administration with a paragraph saying Bachmann and Beck say that the White House is leading us toward socialism, fascism, etc.? These are not serious people and their claims do not deserve coverage.

Blogging will be minimal to non-existent until my paper is ready for the American Political Science Association conference next week in Toronto…

Update 9/6 12:39 PM: Apologies — my paper writing ended up converging with my trip to APSA (just leaving Toronto now). I’ll be back to blogging after Labor Day.

During the Bush years, many Democrats came to believe they were losing elections due to their inadequate framing tactics — a belief that turned the linguist George Lakoff into an unlikely guru figure. It’s a convenient excuse, but there’s little systematic evidence that framing tactics can change the dynamics of the national debate under normal political circumstances. (For specific reasons why Lakoff’s advice was likely to fail, see the links here.)

Now liberals are learning this lesson the hard way. A WSJ article reports that their elaborately tested health care messaging tactics aren’t working:

In the rhetorical battle over health care, the forces backing President Barack Obama’s overhaul have spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters — an effort that doesn’t at the moment appear to be working.

With both parties using these tactics, the likely result is a stalemate. It’s a classic arms race dynamic in which neither side improves their relative position and everyone ends up worse off. (See All the President’s Spin for much more on this issue.)

It’s good to see Politifact debunking the claim by Howard Dean that “[t]here’s no rationing in any of these [health care] bills” in Congress — a statement that suggests the plans would prevent or end rationing. It’s a misleading tactic that has also been used by the Obama administration recently on its Health Insurance Reform Reality Check website, which asserts that “Reform will stop ‘rationing’ — not increase it.” However, as I previously pointed out, the reality is that rationing is inherent to health care provision; all public and private health care systems do it now and will continue to do so regardless of whether reform is passed. We can argue about whether the health care system will ration care more (or less) efficiently or fairly under reform, but that’s a different matter entirely.

Talking Points Memo has a nice feature tracking the history and evolution of the “death panel”/euthanasia meme from its origins with Betsy McCaughey to the current “death book” for veterans myth.

Many liberal bloggers and commentators are now blaming President Obama for a strategic failure in his approach to health care reform specifically and his presidency in general. In a TNR Online article, Ed Kilgore compares this rising tide of liberal doubt to the “doldrums” of August ’08 when Obama was tied in the polls with John McCain, suggesting that the criticism may be overblown:

I am suggesting that this August’s sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August’s. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie… Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging…

These doldrums dissipated by the time of the Democratic convention later in the month, but reemerged in September, when McCain actually moved ahead in some polls. And the diagnosis of the problem was typically that Obama was too passive, and wasn’t articulating a clear enough message. This should sound familiar to connoisseurs of contemporary progressive concerns about Obama.

Now, this deja vu sensation I’m having obviously doesn’t guarantee that the current struggles over health care reform and climate change will have as happy an ending as the presidential contest. But it may well provide a plausible argument for giving the president the benefit of the doubt today as we should have done a year ago.

Though Kilgore provides plenty of caveats, the comparison is supposed to be reassuring — Obama had a plan then and it worked, so you should have some degree of confidence in him now. The problem, however, is that the underlying fundamentals have changed.

Back during the presidential campaign, the fundamentals always favored Obama (assuming no racial backlash). The August “doldrums” were a minor interlude before political gravity asserted itself. In the end, Obama converged almost precisely to the median forecast of leading election polls.

The fundamentals of the presidency are very different. The approval ratings of presidents tend to decline over time and they typically have a difficult time passing important legislation after their first year or two in office (i.e. once the low-hanging fruit has been picked). As Greg Marx and Matthew Yglesias have correctly pointed out, the president’s abilities to influence Congress on domestic legislation are actually quite limited. And in Obama’s case, he faces a poor economy that will push his approval numbers into the 40s very soon. The one factor working in his favor are the large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, but the Senate caucus lacks sufficient unity and discipline to push through health care and other controversial legislation in the form that he wants.

As a result, the August ’08 comparison isn’t particularly useful — Obama’s plan for the next six to twelve months is far less likely to succeed than his general election strategy. Unfortunately for Obama’s liberal critics, it’s not clear that a strategic change will make much difference either. Good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses (see: Karl Rove 9/12/01-11/2/04) and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look ineffectual (see: Karl Rove 11/3/04-1/20/09). In the current environment, there’s no magical strategy that will change the political dynamics of this presidency.

So what can we expect? Obama is likely to cut some sort of deal on health care and declare victory. He will then face an even more difficult menu of legislative battles (including the climate bill and immigration), many of which will not be resolved to the satisfaction of liberals. In the absence of a 9/11-type foreign policy crisis, Obama’s presidency — like almost all others — faces a downward trajectory of power and influence for the next couple of years. The big question is whether the economy will revive enough for him to be reelected.

The media backlash against the “death panel”/euthanasia myth continued on Sunday as CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer and ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos pressed prominent Republicans on the issue.

First, watch Grassley squirm as he tries to defend his false claim that the government could decide to “pull the plug on grandma” under proposed health care legislation in Congress (via ThinkProgress and Paul Krugman):

SCHIEFFER: Senator Grassley, you have talked as Senator Conrad has about a bipartisan approach. But you really caught some Democrats off guard, a couple weeks ago, when you said this the other day. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRASSLEY: We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHIEFFER: Now, Democrats say there is nothing in this legislation that would pull the plug on grandma, or even require people to discuss it. Why did you say that, Senator Grassley?

GRASSLEY: I said that because — two reasons. Number one, I was responding to a question at my town meetings. I let my constituents set the agenda. A person that asked me that question was reading from language that they got off of the Internet. It scared my constituents. And the specific language I used was language that the president had used at Portsmouth, and I thought that it was — if he used the language , then if I responded exactly the same way, that I had an opposite concern about not using end-of-life counseling for saving money, then I was answering –

SCHIEFFER: All right.

GRASSLEY: And relieving the fears that my constituents had, and from that standpoint, remember, you’re talking about this issue being connected with a government-run program which a public option would take you with. You would get into the issue of saving money, and put these three things together and you are scaring a lot of people when I know the Pelosi bill doesn’t intend to do that, but that’s where it leads people to.

SCHIEFFER: Well, that’s what I was trying to get from you this morning. You’re not saying that this legislation would pull the plug on grandma, you’re just saying there are a lot of people out there who think that it would. Or do you want to say this morning that that is not true, that it won’t do that?

GRASSLEY: It won’t do that, but I wanted to explain why my constituents are concerned about it, and I also want to say that there is an $8 billion cost with that issue, and if you’re trying to save money and you put an $8 billion of doctors giving you some advice at the end of life, doctors are going to take advantage of earning that $8 billion and constituents see that as an opportunity to save some money.

It just scares the devil out of people. So that ought to be dropped. And by the way, some newspaper people were saying that we dropped it from the Senate Finance Committee because of the hullabaloo that you just played, and that’s not true. We got this out of our bill a long time ago, and Sen. Conrad will tell you that I was in conversation with people on the Finance Committee way back in March, that we weren’t going to have any of this end-of-life stuff in our bill because it scares people.

Similarly, Stephanopoulos repeatedly challenged McCain on his misleading suggestion that the health care bill in Congress would create “groups that actually advise people as these decisions are made later in life”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: The president also says that the debate has been infected by
falsehoods. And probably the most notorious one is the one made by your former running
mate, Sarah Palin, who said that his bill would encourage death panels that would
encourage euthanasia. He called that an extraordinary lie and he is right about that, isn’t
he?

MCCAIN: Well, I think that what we are talking about here is do – are we going to have
groups that actually advise people as these decisions are made later in life and …

STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s not in the bill.

MCCAIN: But – it’s been taken out, but the way that it was written made it a little bit
ambiguous. And another thing …

STEPHANOPOULOS: I don’t think that’s correct, Senator. The bill, all it said was that, if a
patient wanted to have a Medicare consultation about end-of-life issues, they could have it
at their request and the doctor would get reimbursed for it, no panel …

MCCAIN: There was a provision in the bill that talks about a board that would decide the
most effective measures to provide health care for people, OK? Now, we had
amendments, we republican have said that in no way would that affect the decisions that
the patients would make and their families. That was rejected by the Democrats and the
health committee.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s not a death panel.

MCCAIN: So what does – what does that lead to? Doesn’t that lead to a possibility, at
least opens the door to a possibility of rationing and decisions made such are made in
other countries?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, every single independent group that looked at it said it just
wasn’t true.

MCCAIN: Well, then why did the Democrats turn down our amendments that clarified that
none of the decisions that would be made by this board would in any way affect depriving
of needed treatments for patients? I don’t know why they did that then.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you think Sarah Palin was right?

MCCAIN: Look, I don’t think they were called death panels, don’t get me wrong. I don’t
think – but on the best treatment procedures part of the bill, it does open it up to decisions
being made as far – that should be left – those choices left to the patient and the
individual. That’s what I think is pretty clear, which was a different section of the bill.

It’s going to take this sort of a confrontational approach to scare people away from promoting misinformation. People won’t change their behavior without strong reputational incentives to do so.