Brendan Nyhan

It was ridiculous when Senator Orrin Hatch read a quotation from Disney’s Robin Hood to oppose the Obama budget back in April:

But Chuck Grassley’s disquisition on the battle between “Sir Tax-a-lot” and “the massive, fire-breathing Debt and Deficit Dragon” — complete with giant cartoon-style posters from Kinko’s — might be the most inane use of visual aids in the history of the United States Senate:

World’s greatest deliberative body indeed.

Yet another example of the statistical illiteracy of journalists in general and sports journalists in particular — the false claim in today’s New York Times that a champion player of the card- and dice-based baseball game APBA has “a knack for rolling doubles”:

The 16-year-old-Wells, a fast-talking native of Wyomissing, Pa., who has a summer job as a busboy, became the first person to win the tournament twice. His first title came in 2002, when he was 9, his second in 2008. The older players have accepted him, some begrudgingly, as a member of their fraternity.

…Wells has a knack for rolling doubles, which are the best for a hitter. Combinations like 66, 11 and 33 usually result in extra-base hits or home runs.

For the record, no one has “a knack” for rolling anything with fair dice. Either the dice are loaded, or Wells is rolling random numbers just like everyone else. He may be skilled at amassing better cards that offer higher probabilities of extra-base hits, but that’s a different matter entirely.

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein is smearing Republicans as “political terrorists,” writing that “they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition” (via TPM):

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don’t agree. Today, I’m going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

These are ugly words. Pearlstein is right to decry the misinformation that has been directed at the President’s health care plan, but the GOP’s efforts to defeat the plan are in no way disloyal or equivalent to terrorism. Party competition — which often produces various forms of ugly behavior — is an intrinsic feature of democratic politics in a free society. Opposition parties are in no way obligated to help the country reach a consensus on health care or any other issue. If Pearlstein wishes to condemn the tactics used by Republicans, there are variety of more constructive ways to do so.

Sadly, this column — which was quickly endorsed by Paul Krugman — is just the latest example of how liberals are increasingly adopting the popular post-9/11 tactics of comparing one’s political opponents to terrorists or other hated figures and smearing dissent as traitorous and disloyal. (For instance, Krugman recently accused Republicans of “treason against the planet.”) At this point, we’re stuck in a positive feedback loop of accusation, counter-accusation, and declining norms against this sort of rhetoric. The result is a more ugly and hateful debate.

Update 8/7 11:53 AM — Matthew Yglesias agrees:

The problem here is that all terrorists are “political” terrorists. Terrorists murder innocent people to advance their political agenda. And Republican leaders clearly aren’t doing that. They’re engaging in dishonest and hypocritical rhetorical gambits. That’s bad and people should say so. But it’s not the same thing. I think it’s an unfortunate aspect of U.S. political institutions that they make it so easy for a defeated and discredited political opposition to mount a successful rear-guard campaign of political obstruction, but we’ve been playing the game with these rules for a long time so nobody should be surprised.

Update 8/7 12:20 PM: Regrettably, Pearlstein’s column was also endorsed by Ezra Klein and Steve Benen. In particular, Benen highlights an unintentionally ironic line of Pearlstein’s that I had missed:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off.

For the record, describing the other party as disloyal “political terrorists” promotes neither trust nor civility.

Update 8/7 2:09 PM: Pearlstein’s column was also endorsed by Brad DeLong.

Update 8/9 9:32 PM: James Fallows too. It’s practically the whole center-left blogosphere with the exception of Yglesias. Sigh.

Another day, another disturbing birther poll. A new Pew poll finds that 79% of Americans have heard at least a little about the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in this country. Within this group, a staggering 39% of Republicans (as well as 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats) think there has been too little coverage of the issue in the media. Only 26% of Republicans think there has been too much coverage; 27% say there has been the right amount and 8% said they didn’t know.

Here’s the full table with partisan crosstabs:

Previous polls have shown that 28% of Republicans and 41% of Virginia Republicans think Obama is not a citizen of this country.

Between the birthers who promote the myth that the President was not born in this country and opponents of health care reform who falsely claim the legislation would promote euthanasia, there is a lot of misinformation floating around about the Obama administration. That shouldn’t be surprising, though; Obama’s honeymoon is ending.

What is striking is the extent to which birthers, led by Orley Taitz, and the health care misinformers, led by Betsy McCaughey, are working from a similar playbook. Here’s an outline of how the process works:

1. Take a complicated issue that people don’t understand (e.g. presidential citizenship reqirements and Hawaiian birth records or the complex health care reform bills pending in Congress).
2. Advance a disturbing hypothesis about the issue that will appeal to your side of the aisle (e.g. Obama isn’t a legitimate president; the health bill will take away your freedom).
3. Misconstrue available evidence to construct arguments supporting your point.
4. Promote these myths widely. If you are successful enough in doing so, the media will feel obligated to report on them. Coverage will then frequently be presented in an artificially balanced “he said,” “she said” format, giving further credence to your claims.
5. When your arguments are debunked, claim that the media is trying to silence you to prevent the truth from being revealed.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until various elites (e.g. John Boehner on health, Lou Dobbs on Obama’s birth certificate) start claiming you have raised legitimate questions about the issue of interest.

It’s been reasonably well-documented how Taitz and her allies have followed this process in promoting the birth certificate myth, but I’m not sure if most people understand the extent to which McCaughey — a more mainstream figure — has used an almost identical approach to promote several falsehoods about health care reform.

Following the model of her infamous 1994 New Republic article on the Clinton health care plan, McCaughey has cycled through steps 3-5 above three times this year. First, Bloomberg published a commentary in which she falsely claimed in February to have discovered a provision in the stimulus bill that would lead to government control of medical treatments. Then, in June, she falsely claimed on CNBC that “the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans” and was given space to make similar claims by the New York Daily News and the Wall Street Journal. Now she’s been spending the last few weeks promoting the false claim that the health care legislation in Congress would promote euthanasia, which was again featured in the Wall Street Journal and on former Sen. Fred Thompson’s radio show.

Each of these myths was widely disseminated in the news media, but the euthanasia claim has received the most enthusiastic response from sympathetic elites. It’s already been parroted by the RNC and various pundits as well as Republican members of Congress like Rep. Virginia Foxx, who suggested on the House floor that the Democratic plan would “put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” As a result, it is now circulating widely at the grassroots level.

Who’s to blame for this problem? I largely fault the media. While the Obama administration’s message strategy has hardly been perfect, it’s absurd to say, as Cynthia Tucker did on This Week, that Obama “allowed the opposition [to health care reform] to scare people” (my emphasis). In a polarized political system, the McCaughey/Taitz approach to concocting and promoting misinformation probably would have worked no matter what the White House did. As Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias recently argued, it’s extremely difficult to myth-proof a bill or to effectively counter these claims once they are made. Until the media stops giving airtime and column inches to proponents of misinformation, the playbook is going to keep working.

The political scientists Andrew Gelman and John Sides have published a must-read Boston Review article that fact-checks various popular claims about the results of the 2008 election. Send it to your favorite political journalist!

For those who are interested, I’ll be talking about the White House response to the misleading Drudge health care video today around 3:10 PM EST on KUOW (NPR) Seattle’s The Conversation with Ross Reynolds.

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

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling just reported on Twitter that a new poll his firm conducted finds that only 32% of Virginia Republicans think Obama was born in the US, while 41% think he was not and 27% are not sure. These numbers are even worse than the national results from the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released on Friday, which found that 28% of Republicans think Obama is not a citizen and 30% are not sure.

Here is a bar chart that combines results from the two polls to compare Virginia Republicans with Republicans and the public nationally (click it for a larger version):

Pretty depressing stuff.

Update 8/3 2:13 PM: Taegan Goddard has the numbers up as well.

(Cross-posted at Pollster.com)

Update 8/5 12:45 PM: The full report on the results of the poll is here (PDF).

Matthew Yglesias and Paul Krugman comment on the finding by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that Congress is essentially one-dimensional in the post-civil rights era — here’s Yglesias:

We often think of a simple 2-dimensional models like the Nolan Chart in which people should be sorted along both a left-right axis about economics, and then along a second axis about social/cultural issues like gay rights. But as Krugman observes, Congress doesn’t work this way…

To offer some qualitative examples, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are pro-choice Republican Senators. But they’re also the two senators who seem like they might possibly vote for a national health care bill. Rather than representing some kind of ideal type of upscale northeasterner who’s socially liberal but economically conservative, they’re less conservative across-the-board than their colleagues from the South and the Mountains. Conversely, when you stroll down to Arkansas’ Democratic Senators, you don’t see cultural conservatives with populist economics, they’re just more conservative across-the-board than their coastal colleagues.

Indeed, this pattern of polarization along a single dimension of ideology is the historical norm, not the exception. The equilibrium was disrupted for decades by the issue of race and the South, but as Krugman notes, the convergence of the parties on basic civil rights and the realignment of the South has led to the decline of the importance of the so-called second dimension (essentially, race) in Congressional voting.

On the other hand, it’s important to emphasize that Congressional unidimensionality is a product of institutions, not some sort of naturally occuring phenomenon. Politics is inherently multidimensional — for instance, bill co-sponsorship patterns were found to have three to five dimensions. However, as UCSD’s Gary Cox and Mat McCubbins emphasize, the majority party leadership in Congress blocks bills that would split the majority party from being considered on the floor, preventing alternate dimensions from being voted on. In addition, the combination of activist-dominated primaries and interest group fundraising make it difficult for any contemporary politician to diverge too much from the left-right ideological axis along an alternate dimension.

[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.]

Via Matthew Yglesias and Taegan Goddard, a new Daily Kos-sponsored poll from Research 2000 finds that only 77% of Americans, and 42% of Republicans, believe Obama was born in this country — a result that suggests the Obama birth certificate myth has circulated more widely than previously thought.

Here are the details:

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. All adults. MoE 2%

Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?

Yes      77

No       11

Not sure 12

And here are the partisan and regional breakdowns, which show that the false belief that Obama was not born in this country is most commonly held by Republicans and residents of the South:

         Yes   No   Not sure

Dem       93    4    3

Rep       42   28   30

Ind       83    8    9

Northeast 93    4    3

South     47   23   30

Midwest   90    6    4

West      87    7    6

To put these numbers in perspective, we can compare them to the most recent Pew poll on the prevalence of the false belief that Obama is a Muslim (click on the chart for a larger version):

As you can see, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the number of correct responses is much higher on the citizenship question than the religion question. On the other hand, the proportion of incorrect answers is also much higher on the citizenship question among Republicans, which suggests that the encouragement of the birth certificate myth by conservative pundits and Republican politicians has begun to activate the GOP base on this issue. I’m not sure if Michael Steele is going to be able to make this “unnecessary distraction” go away any time soon.

(Methodological details: The chart above describes responses saying Obama was born in the U.S. or not as “citizen”/”non-citizen,” which should be interpreted as shorthand for whether he is believed to be a natural-born citizen. It also groups all responses other than “Christian” and “Muslim” from the Pew poll into a “Don’t know” category, including the 6% of respondents who refused to answer the question among the general population and the unknown proportion of Republicans who refused to do so.)

(Cross-posted with minor edits at Pollster.com)

Update 7/31 11:53 AM: I’ve rewritten this post for coherence to avoid including multiple updates.