For those who are interested, you can listen online to an interview I did with NPR's "On the Media" about my co-authored research investigating difficulties correcting the misperception that Barack Obama is a Muslim. (See also our previous research on correcting misperceptions.)
You stay classy, Grover Norquist:
“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”
Update 6/26 1:56 PM: Another Norquist gem via TPM: "[The Sanford affair] does indicate that men who oppose federal spending at the local level are irresistible to women."
For all the reasons I previously outlined, the New York Daily News should not have published Betsy McCaughey's misleading op-ed on the health care debate. She is not an expert and has no credibility.
GOP chairman Michael Steele has stumbled upon the solution to one of most vexing domestic policy issues of our time -- the ever-increasing cost of health care:
So if it's a cost problem, it's easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It's not that complicated.
Steele's appreciation of the nuances of health care politics is reminiscent of John McCain's strategy circa 2006 for ending the civil war in Iraq:
"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
Who says the GOP isn't the party of ideas?
Brad DeLong approvingly quotes a reader making the following claim about misperceptions among Republicans:
12% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. 8% thinks he faked his birth certificate. The new Washpost/ABC poll says that 22% of the electorate id's itself as GOP. Thus it is a fair inference that roughly half of declared Republicans are fringe lunatics--which explains why "respectable" conservative media outlets like National Review publish the Andy McCarthys and the Victor David Hansons, and why GOP politicians like Michelle Bachman and Steve King are now "mainstream" for the GOP.
DeLong's reader is way off. While the Muslim misperception is more widely held among Republicans, it's hardly an exclusively GOP phenomenon. The most recent Pew poll shows that 17% of Republican believe Obama is a Muslim -- not 50% -- along with 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats. No partisan cross-tabs are available for the dubious birth certificate poll, which was conducted for the fringe World Net Daily website, but I'd imagine they follow a similar pattern.
With that said, these levels of misperceptions are of course still much too high. For more on why these false beliefs tend to persist, see my new co-authored research with Jason Reifler and Duke undergraduates on correcting misperceptions about Obama's religion as well as my previous research with Reifler on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions (PDFs).
As I wrote back in May, Nate Silver is obviously a smart and energetic blogger, but he just isn't a social scientist. That's why it's frustrating when his quickie statistical analyses draw more attention than the relevant political science scholarship (of which Silver frequently seems unaware).
For instance, Silver published an analysis today that claims to measure "the impact of lobbying by the insurance industry on the prospects for health care reform." His statistical model predicts senators' support for the so-called "public option" using their estimated DW-NOMINATE ideal points (a measure of their policy views), health costs in their state, and their total campaign contributions from health insurance and HMO PACs. He finds that senators who receive larger industry contributions are less likely to support the so-called public option. Silver extrapolates from his model to a world in which special interest contributions are banned and concludes that "the insurance industry's influence appears to swing about nine votes against the public option."
However, as GW's John Sides notes on The Monkey Cage, "there is a potential endogeneity problem in the model that Silver constructs. Does health insurance PAC money make senators less likely to support the public option, or are Senators who tend to oppose or at least be skeptical about government health care programs more likely to get contributions from health insurers and HMOs?" In other words, we can't be confident that contributions are causing senators to oppose the public option. Silver acknowledges this caveat in a parenthetical, but then concludes his article by making the causal claim that "the money is why... Democrats are facing an uphill battle on the issue."
In addition, we can't say much of anything about a world in which health industry contributions aren't made. It's an unobserved counterfactual. Silver's estimate of nine votes being swung is essentially meaningless in its current form -- the model is extrapolating far beyond the available data.
What's so frustrating about Silver's post, which was (disappointingly) praised by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog, is that there is an extensive literature on this subject by political scientists and economists. Over the last 30+ years, these studies* have typically found minimal effects of campaign contributions on roll call votes in Congress even when scholars use more sophisticated techniques to address the causal inference problems described above (which are widely understood at this point). Given these prior findings and the inherent problems with Silver's analytical approach, we should be extremely cautious about putting any weight on his conclusions.
(* See, for instance, pp. 112-117 of Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003 [PDF] from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.)
Bob Somerby flags Maureen Dowd's bizarre interpretation of why the video clip of President Obama killing a fly during an interview was replayed so frequently:
The moment may have resonated so much because some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher on avaricious banks and vicious Iranian dictators.
Or maybe people just thought it was funny that he killed a fly during an interview? Even by Dowd's exceptionally low standards, that is absurd psychobabble.
I understand that people are concerned about the potential costs of health care reform, but it's immensely frustrating how Senate Finance chair Max Baucus and other prominent figures in Washington have become fixated on the idea that the reform bill shouldn't cost more than $1 trillion. I haven't heard a principled reason why that number is the right one -- it's just an arbitrary threshold. If we used the Euro as our currency, no one would be saying "Health care can cost 721.084511 billion Euros* and not a penny more." And yet the $1 trillion number is seriously constraining the debate over the substantive provisions of the bill.
(* According to Google's currency converter this morning.)
Sean Hannity, June 18, 2009 (via Media Matters):
CAROLINE HELDEN, PROFESSOR, OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: [President Obama] inherited a terrible political and economic situation from the previous administration.
HANNITY: Blah, blah, blah. I don't want to hear this anymore.
HELDEN: He had incredibly high approval ratings, Kennedy-esque approval ratings, and now they're starting to come back to earth. They're still very high for a president with these economic woes.
HANNITY: Let me ask this. This is not Bush's problem. It's his quadrupling of the deficit. He made those choices. He took over G.M., the financial institutions. He wants to nationalize health care. This is Obama's economy now...
Sean Hannity, August 17, 2001: "[T]his is still the Clinton economy, in case you forgot."
Sean Hannity, August 20, 2001: "[W]e have the Clinton economy, the Clinton slowdown... We are living under the Clinton economy, and the slowdown that started in the spring of 2000."
Sean Hannity, August 21, 2001: "This is the Clinton economy slowed down."
Sean Hannity, August 22, 2001: "[T]his is Clinton's budget, Clinton's economy... the slowdown began last July."
Sean Hannity, September 5, 2001: "[Y]ou're back to the old tactics of scaring the old people of this country, trying to blame Republicans for the Clinton economy..."
During a "conversation" with David Brooks on nytimes.com, Times columnist Gail Collins kicked things off by describing Brooks as "the go-to guy on how America lives." Noooooooo!
Michael Bérubé, who flagged this gem, offers the only appropriate response:
This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.
OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation. But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first. Once I regained the will to live...
Déjà vu alert: Betsy McCaughey is pushing misinformation about health care legislation in Congress again.
Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration's proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had read the entire 1300+ page bill and discovered this coercive requirement, but she failed to mention the provision stating that "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting ... [a]n individual from purchasing any health care services." (Incredibly, her article won a National Magazine Award and she went on to become lieutenant governor of New York.)
It's hard to understate the damage that McCaughey's article inflicted on the Clinton health care plan. The next week, former TNR editor Michael Kinsley slammed McCaughey's piece in his own column in the magazine, and subsequent reporting by James Fallows and Mickey Kaus showed it to be riddled with a number of false and misleading claims. By then, however, her claims had been repeated and disseminated throughout the national media. Hendrik Hertzberg, a former TNR editor now at The New Yorker, told me in previous reporting that "No Exit" was "the low point in the magazine's history since it stopped being sympathetic to the Soviet Union" and Fallows recently nominated her for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" during the 1990s.
For all of these reasons, it's disturbing to see McCaughey being given airtime on CNBC to promote new misinformation about the Democratic health care plan being developed in Congress. In this case, as Media Matters reports, she's falsely claiming that "the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans." And again, she's using the gimmick of pushing strained interpretations of specific provisions in the legislation ("That's Section 3101") while ignoring other provisions that directly undercut her arguments ("No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway").
Earlier this year, McCaughey tried the same close-reading gimmick with the stimulus bill, falsely claiming to have discovered that it will create "[a] new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology [that] will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective," leading to "rationing" for seniors.
How many times will we let McCaughey get away with this? It's time to cast her out of public discourse and shame anyone who gives attention to her claims.
Update 6/19 9:40 AM: McCaughey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same false claim. Under the Kennedy bill, she writes, "you must enroll in a 'qualified' plan or face a fine even if you and your employer are paying the entire cost of the plan you already have (section 161)." Again, the provision described above, which states that "No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway," is omitted. As TNR's Jonathan Cohn writes, "She has forfeited the right to be taken seriously, particularly when it comes to health care."
Back in 2002 or so, it would have been hard to imagine that Josh Marshall would be posting pictures of the house of the GOP staffer who had an affair with Republican senator John Ensign under the headline "Chez Hampton: Swank Vegas Digs of Former Ensign Love Triangle Staffers." (A later post added reader comments mocking the design of the house as "mafia chic.") It's yet another reminder of how Marshall's Talking Points Memo website has grown by moving downmarket.
(Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign's opponent, Ed Bernstein.)
We're just getting started on the health care debate, and political journalists' lack of substantive knowledge and devotion to "he said"/"she said" reporting is already resulting in misleading coverage:
-Media Matters flags a Politico story that quotes Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) saying "'Washington takeover' are two words we've been hearing a lot from the Obama Administration these days" without pointing out that the phrase has not been used by the White House -- it's actually a poll-tested GOP catchphrase.
-ABC reporter Byron Wolf repeated a misleading Republican talking point as fact in describing John McCain's criticism of a Democratic bill:
McCain pointed to a nonpartisan [Congressional Budget Office] cost estimate of $1 trillion over ten years for the major portion of healthcare reform suggested in a bill floated by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health Committee and said the cost was too high for American taxpayers, especially since the nonpartisan review foresaw 23 million would lose their current insurance plans under the proposal.
in fact, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out in criticizing a similar claim by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, the Congressional Budget Office report (PDF) did not state that 23 million would "lose their current insurance plans." CBO found that "15 million fewer" people "would be covered by an employment-based health plan" but 10 million of those would be choosing a subsidized plan from an insurance exchange over employment-based coverage. (The additional estimated decline of eight million people would be the result of shifts from Medicaid, CHIP, and nongroup coverage to the insurance exchanges -- not lost coverage.)
-Media outlets like the New York Times are covering the CBO report without explaining why the bill was found to be relatively ineffective at expanding coverage:
The rush to trim costs came as Senate Democrats and the White House struggled to respond to an initial financial analysis by the budget office showing that an alternate proposal, developed by the Senate health committee, would cost $1 trillion over 10 years but could still leave 36 million Americans uninsured.
The analysis by the nonpartisan budget office showed Democrats falling far short of their goal, which is to provide insurance to all Americans and offset the expense of doing so with new taxes or cost savings. Republicans quickly seized on the figures to charge that the Democrats’ efforts would fail.
The Democrats aren't "falling far short of their goal" -- they didn't try to get there in the bill that the CBO analyzed. Ezra Klein provides the context that's missing from the Times report:
A couple of months ago, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee sent the CBO a sketch of a draft of its legislation. And the CBO sent the members back a stab at an outline of an estimate. It was all very early, and very rough. But CBO's response was encouraging. The total cost was a bit higher, but the number covered was much higher. More like what you'd expect. More like what health reform is trying to achieve.
The draft the CBO examined last week, however, was in certain respects even less complete than the outline they were given months ago. In an effort to buy some extra time to negotiate with Republicans on the committee, the Democrats on HELP left out some of the more controversial policies in the hopes of reaching a bipartisan agreement sometime this week. The public plan, the employer mandate and the individual mandate were all absent from the proposal the CBO examined. The employer and individual mandates -- the first of which pushes employers to offer coverage and the second of which force individuals to purchase coverage -- are particularly key to increasing the number of Americans with health insurance.
You might ask what the HELP Committee was thinking, sending Swiss cheese legislation to CBO. Well, the HELP Committee's expectation was that the CBO, in crafting its preliminary score, would assume something similar to the outline it had seen months before. The CBO didn't. In fact, it did the opposite. CBO ran its estimates with no employer mandate and an individual mandate with a laughably small penalty.
Members of HELP were thus shocked by yesterday's score. The specific provisions of the bill that the CBO examined did not look like the bill HELP intends to write. Which means that the numbers aren't correct. If HELP is writing a bill with a strong employer and individual mandate, and CBO scores a bill with no employer mandate and a weak individual mandate, that's not a useful estimate.
By Monday night, members of the HELP Committee were scrambling to give the CBO something closer to the final legislation to examine -- this time including rough details of the employer mandate and the individual mandate. They're hoping to have a new set of estimates by Friday, though that's probably ambitious. Either way, I wouldn't put too much stock in these numbers.
There's just no way to responsibly report on the CBO analysis without making clear that three key Democratic policy provisions (public plan, employer mandate and individual mandate) were excluded (update: actually four). And yet many outlets have done so. It's not an encouraging sign.
From a Paul Krugman blog post about a new model he's working on:
In his new book The Myth of the Rational Market Justin Fox traces the lineage of the noise-trade assumption to an unpublished paper by Larry Summers that began, THERE ARE IDIOTS.
Biography:
-Assistant Professor of Government, Dartmouth College (2011-)
-RWJF Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of Michigan (2009-2011)
-Ph.D., Duke political science (2003-2009)
-All the President's Spin (2004)
-Spinsanity (2001-2004)
-Benetech (2001-2003)
