Brendan Nyhan

In an interview with the Helena Independent Record, Senate Finance chair Max Baucus defended his emphasis on trying to solicit widespread GOP support for the health care bill by claiming that bipartisan legislation is “more sustainable… more durable and long-lasting”:

In a 50-minute interview with the Independent Record’s editorial board, Baucus defended his huddling with just two other Democrats along with three Republican senators to hammer out a health reform package, at a time when his party controls the White House, the House of Representatives and has a 60-vote majority in the Senate.

Baucus has drawn fire from members of his own party for being too compromising on reform. Some Democrats believe he’s bowing to pressure from pharmaceutical and insurance industry interests as well as from Republicans.

“I just think if it is bipartisan, it’s more sustainable, it’s more durable, long-lasting. There will be more buy-in around the country,” Baucus said. “We’re going to make some mistakes. If it’s bipartisan, it will be easier to fix the mistakes, work together to fix the mistakes. It’s just better for the country.”

This claim has become an article of conventional wisdom in Washington. It’s certainly plausible, but as I noted back in June, there’s no empirical evidence that it is true. While the leading political science study (PDF) on the issue finds that policy durability (i.e. the likelihood of a law being amended over time) does decrease as the size of the enacting coalition declines, a preliminary reanalysis of the data by co-author Charles Shipan found no evidence that bills that receive greater minority party support are more durable.

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

Good news — widespread denunciation of the euthanasia/”death panel” myth as false by the press is prompting conservative elites to distance themselves from the claim.

National Review is calling Sarah Palin’s “death panel” rhetoric “hysteria.” Senator Chuck Grassley quietly retracted his claim that the government could decide to “pull the plug on grandma” under proposed health care legislation in Congress. And even more extreme sources like Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Dick Morris have been forced to concede that there is no explicit “death panel” provision in the legislation (though they argue that it may will create rationing that amounts to “de facto death panels”).

This trend gives me hope that the elite-focused naming and shaming strategy that I’ve advocated (here and here) can work.

Unfortunately, myths spread so quickly these days that the damage to the health care debate may already be irreversible. A Pew poll released yesterday finds that 86% of Americans have heard of the “death panel” claim. Among this group, fully half of Americans either believe the claim is true (30%) or don’t know (20%), including 70% of Republicans (47% true, 23% don’t know). Results from a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll using different wording are nearly as discouraging — they estimate that 11% of Americans and 28% of Republicans think “death panels” are real, and an additional 17% of Americans and 31% of Republicans aren’t sure. Either way, it’s not clear that subtle backtracking by conservative elites will move those numbers back down anytime soon.

Update 8/24 10:25 AM: The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer also admitted that “there are no ‘death panels’ in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate.” However, like Fox, Beck, and Morris, he then goes on to claim that the funding of end of life consultations is “intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.”

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

I’ve been critical of Josh Marshall for pandering to his liberal audience, so I have to give him and TPM DC blogger Brian Beutler credit for calling out the vile “treason” rhetoric of New York Democrat Eric Massa. (Massa said Chuck Grassley’s false claim that health care reform would create “a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma” was “an act of treason.”)

With that said, though, note the lengths to which Marshall had to go to avoid antagonizing his audience. The original post had the milquetoast title “That’s a Bit Much.” Marshall then quickly put up a followup post noting that “We’re getting some push back from readers” who demand leniency for extreme rhetoric to match the GOP. He reiterated his opposition to the use of treason accusations in that post in semi-apologetic fashion, but then posted two more reader emails that attempt to justify and contextualize Massa’s language. The first engages in brief throat-clearing about how treason is a “very strong word” before switching to a prolonged denunciation of extreme GOP rhetoric, while the second suggests that Massa’s status as a cancer survivor somehow excuses his behavior.

Also, it’s worth noting that TPM blogger David Kurtz approvingly quoted a reader email calling the GOP “a party of … treason” back in 2007, though Kurtz “hedge[d]” on the charge of “treason” in a parenthetical.

Does Max Baucus really call handheld video cameras “YouTubes”?

As he traverses the state he has represented in the Senate for 31 years, Mr. Baucus, the Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, never seems far from being buried under some rhetorical avalanche.

After speaking at a preventive-care conference here last week, he was swarmed by protesters. Or, in Mr. Baucus’s words, “agitators, whose sole goal was to intimidate, disrupt and not let any meaningful conversation go on.” There were a couple of people in the crowd “with YouTubes,” Mr. Baucus added (meaning cameras), and he posited that the agitators were paid and probably from out of state. (“I could just sense it,” he said.)

I love that the reporter has to translate for Baucus. He’s apparently been getting up to date on the latest technology with John McCain (“it’s a Google”), George Bush (“the Google”), and Ted Stevens (the Internet is “a series of tubes”).

NBC released a health care poll (PDF) last night that deputy political director Mark Murray summarized in an article with the subhed “Misperceptions abound on president’s health overhaul initiative”:

Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.

Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

That also is untrue: The provision in the House legislation that critics have seized on — raising the specter of “death panels” or euthanasia — would simply allow Medicare to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, if the patient wishes.

While it’s great to see major news organizations polling on misperceptions, the wording of the NBC poll questions means that we can’t draw sharp conclusions about the extent to which the public has mistaken beliefs about the actual contents of the legislation before Congress.

Here is the relevant segment of the poll results with question wording:

The problem is that NBC asked respondents if various results were “likely to happen” under the proposed health care plan, a vague phrase that allows for the implausible but increasingly popular fallback position that the provisions in question are not in the plan but will somehow result from it in practice. (See, for instance, Rudy Giuliani’s defense of the “death panels” myth.) It would have been preferable to first ask respondents what provisions they thought were part of the legislation and then to ask if they think “death panels” and other doomsday scenarios would be the eventual result.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

An update on state polling on the Obama birth certificate myth — Public Policy Polling has released a preview of a new poll showing that 43% of Colorado Republicans think President Obama was not born in this country and an additional 24% were unsure. Those numbers are comparable to the numbers that PPP found in Virginia (41% no, 27% not sure) and North Carolina (47% no, 29% not sure) and much worse than those found in Utah (13% no in a poll conducted by local media), suggesting that birther-ism may be prevalent among Republicans in states outside of the South that lack large black populations.

Update 8/20 9:24 PM: Here are the full poll results (PDF).

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has written a provocative new article arguing that the Obama administration won’t be able to knock down the “death panel” myth and should stop talking about it entirely:

[H]e’s going after folks in the middle—people who’ve heard about the death panels but aren’t sure what to believe. Will his defense work on those people? Perhaps a few of them. He’ll probably convince some Americans that death panels are a myth—but at the same time, Obama’s very public refutation of the story is bound to raise its profile. Death panels have now become front-page news… And as several studies in psychology have shown, people often mistake familiarity for veracity. That’s why fighting a rumor can sometimes backfire: If we hear something often enough—even if it’s in the context of a refutation—we’re likely to think it’s true.

That’s the dilemma Obama faces in trying to debunk the lies surrounding the health care debate. In True Enough, my book published last year, I argued that despite techno-utopians’ many high hopes, modern communications technology—talk radio, cable TV, and the Web—have fractured society along ideological lines. Because we can now get our news from sources that reflect our political views—and we can avoid sources that we find suspect—lies and misinformation tend to proliferate and linger. I examined several case studies—the Swift Boaters, the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, and claims that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election—and concluded that it’s now easier than ever before for people to live in worlds built entirely of their own facts. We’re becoming impervious to rational opposition. Once a substantial minority of the population believes a lie, it achieves the sheen of truth and becomes nearly impossible to debunk.

Now we’re seeing that dynamic play out in the health care debate: Myths have taken root, and the White House is having lots of trouble fighting them. Over the last couple of weeks, the administration has tried various efforts to stem the spread of misinformation. It has made videos, sent e-mails, had its spokespeople go on TV, and asked supporters to report “fishy” claims. Now Obama himself is on the stump calling out the lies. Nothing has worked. During the last few years, I’ve spoken to many experts on the proliferation of rumors. Based on those conversations, I’ve got some simple advice for Obama: Shut up about the death panels already. Don’t keep fighting this rumor. You’ve lost—and the more time you spend trying to make things better, the worse off you’ll be.

Manjoo knows what he’s talking about — True Enough is an excellent primer on the ways in which people resist unwelcome information and the consequences of that resistance for contemporary politics. There’s certainly a very good argument that the administration’s efforts to correct potent misperceptions like the “death panel” are doomed to failure. And Manjoo is correct that the administration’s correction strategy is increasing the salience of the myth, which creates the potential for making the situation worse.

With that said, though, I wouldn’t argue that the White House should “shut up” entirely and let these myths circulate unchallenged. A passive response by Obama could encourage administration opponents to promote new misinformation and start the cycle anew. By contrast, I’m hopeful that the elite-based name and shame strategy that I’ve advocated (see here and here) could potentially reduce the incentives for these sorts of campaigns.

(Disclosure: Manjoo cites my research with Jason Reifler [PDF] on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions.)

In a post on fact-checking of the “death panel” myth last week, I noted the tendency of media outlets to revert to “he said,” “she said” reporting on false or misleading claims that they have previously debunked. Since then, Media Matters has flagged two more leading news outlets that have reverted to treating the claim as a matter of legitimate factual dispute.

First, ABC’s Kate Snow, whom I praised for aggressively debunking the “death panel” myth as “misinformation,” reverted to describing the facts of the matter as being in question:

Sarah Palin is taking on President Obama in the battle over health care. In a new Facebook posting, the former governor says the president is, quote, making light of concerns about a provision in the House bill that would pay doctors for consulting with patients about end-of-life care. Palin says because of pressure to reduce health care spending, it’s no wonder some might view those consultations as a way to minimize end-of-life care. But the president contends the provision is voluntary, and no one will force a senior to make choices based on cost.

As Media Matters points out, the ABC medical editor had described the claim as false on “Good Morning America” just an hour before Snow’s statement.

Similarly, I lauded the New York Times for publishing a detailed account on the creation and dissemination of the “death panel” myth, but an online story published yesterday reverted to describing it in “he said,” “she said” terms (the article was subsequently revised):

The Obama administration and its Congressional supporters also continued to deny that a health care plan would set up “death panels” to determine care for patients who are close to dying.

… Conservative opponents have accused the president of planning to set up panels that would decide which treatment an elderly or terminally ill patient might receive toward the end of life. But Ms. Sebelius, speaking on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” said that all the administration was thinking about was reimbursing doctors who would engage in bedside consultations with families whose relatives are near death and who are “conflicted about what to do next.”

… Debating with [Senator Orrin Hatch], Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Democrat who switched from the Republican Party earlier this year, noted that Senator Hatch had sidestepped the question about “death panels.”

“The fact of the matter is that it’s a myth,” he said. “It’s simply not true. There are no death panels”…

What’s incredible about this backsliding is that the “death panel” claim isn’t simply misleading; it is unambiguously false, as more than forty outlets have already reported. If there were any factual dispute in which reporters could make an authoritative claim about truth, “death panels” should be it. Unfortunately, however, the tics of “objective” news reporting are hard to shake.

In a LA Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago, former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards joined the long list of current and former legislators who bemoan the end of bipartisanship. Like almost all of these members, Edwards fails to understand that the mid-century peak in bipartisanship was a historical aberration. Once the parties realigned on race and Southern Democrats lost their one-party monopoly, it was essentially inevitable that the political system would return to the historical norm of partisanship and polarization.

However, the most annoying part of the piece was his conclusion, which recapitulates the phony “party-in-a-laptop” meme of 2003-2004:

Political theorist Bernard Crick wrote that “politics is how a free people govern themselves.” Strong political parties, on the other hand, are how a free people lose that ability. Parties choose which candidates can be on the November ballot, and do so in primaries and conventions that cater to the extremes. Parties reward fealty and discourage independence. In an earlier time, before the Internet, when it was hard to get information about candidates and they had to depend on party support for campaign funds and volunteers, political parties made sense; today, they are passé, black-and-white television, remnants of a time that has passed.

The idea that parties are “passé” or no longer needed as a result of the Internet is simply absurd. (If this were true, what explains the polarization that Edwards decries?) The reality is that political parties do more than simply provide campaign funds and volunteers. The organizational structure they provide in legislatures and the collective accountability mechanism they provide in elections are essential to democracy. For more, see the classic Why Parties? by my Ph.D. adviser John Aldrich.

NRO’s Jonah Goldberg objects to the New York Times story on the “death panel” myth that I praised earlier today (and mocks me as “think[ing] the Times story is just frick’n awesome, just as it is”):

My own question is why the Times couldn’t bother to at least quote Obama’s interview with . . . the New York Times:

LEONHARDT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you – how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

I don’t think Obama’s calling for a death panel here, if by death panel you mean something out of Logan’s Run. But, it sure sounds like something that even a non-conspiratorial person might worry about. If Obama said he wanted a “free-speech panel” to offer guidance on what newspapers should or shouldn’t say, the Times would get its knickers in quite a twist (at least I hope they would).

Note that even Goldberg has to admit that “I don’t think Obama’s calling for a death panel here, if by death panel you mean something out of Logan’s Run.” He’s instead reduced to defending the argument that Obama’s statement about an advisory panel providing advice on difficult end-of-life issues is “something that even a non-conspiratorial person would worry about.” However, Sarah Palin and her allies made a much stronger claim, as Politifact pointed out:

We’ve looked at the inflammatory claims that the health care bill encourages euthanasia. It doesn’t. There’s certainly no “death board” that determines the worthiness of individuals to receive care. Conservatives might make a case that Palin is justified in fearing that the current reform could one day morph into such a board.

But that’s not what Palin said. She said that the Democratic plan will ration care and “my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.” Palin’s statement sounds more like a science fiction movie (Soylent Green, anyone?) than part of an actual bill before Congress. We rate her statement Pants on Fire!

Goldberg goes on to criticize the Times for not discussing a Peter Singer article in the New York Times Magazine that called for rationing health care:

Also, now that I think of it, the Times story could also have mentioned a huge piece by Peter Singer in this magazine called the New York Times magazine called “Why We Must Ration Health Care.” It drips with examples, illustrations, and arguments about why oldsters should be offed to save money. Again, it can’t be held against Obama, but if you’re trying to figure out why conservatives think liberals want to do this sort of thing, the Times might ponder just a bit harder where conservatives got the idea in the first place. It’s all fine to point fingers at Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, but both of those guys actually cite evidence that comes from the Left’s own words and actions. A real truth-squadding piece would look at the actual evidence.

What’s unclear, however, is how a magazine article has any relevance to the truth value of a (false) factual claim about the content of a bill in Congress. I think Goldberg might need to brush up on how the legislative process works.