Brendan Nyhan

Talk about trying too hard to get on the news — Rep. Bob Filner made English teachers cry during a speech against a proposed new Blackwater compound outside San Diego:

Blackwater is a black mark on American democracy. We can’t let them blackmail us into this so they can blackmail democracy further. What they’re doing is playing blackjack with the environment. We’re going to stop them.

Note to hack speechwriter: The last line should have been “We’re going to blackball them.”

The New York Times reported yesterday on disturbing xenophobia in Swiss politics, focusing on a poster distributed by a leading ultra-right party:

The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.

A poster at a rally for the Swiss People’s Party showed a white sheep kicking out a black one.

“To Create Security,” the poster reads.

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country.

However, they only show the poster in the background of one of the pictures that accompanied the story, so I thought it was worth including the full image here:

It’s important that we remember what xenophobia and intolerance look like.

I got a fundraising call from Hillary Clinton’s campaign last night. During the call, the phone bank guy, who admitted he was paid, said my donation would help demonstrate her grassroots support. He then said this was important because Obama has more grassroots support to date. I’m pretty sure that isn’t in the official script.

FYI the post on Eric Alterman now has two updates responding to him.

In his Media Matters blog, Eric Alterman often attributes evil motives to his political opponents — a tactic that the group criticizes non-liberals for on a near-daily basis.

The latest example came Thursday during a discussion of President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have expanded the SCHIP children’s health insurance program:

Bush’s preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die for his own ideological obsession is a fundamental fact of his presidency and of the Republican Party’s guiding ideology.

Needless to say, Alterman does not know and certainly cannot prove that Bush has a “preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die.” He’s describing his prediction of the veto’s results as Bush’s “preference.” That’s like saying Alterman’s support for withdrawal from Iraq represents his “preference” for genocide or full-blown civil war (two of the worst possible outcomes that could result).

It’s not the first time Alterman has used language that suggests his opponents have nefarious motives. For instance, back in 2005, he wrote the following:

In the name of fighting “terrorism,” the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.

As I pointed out at the time, “[t]he phrase ‘in order to’ clearly implies that the Bush administration wanted to ‘create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.’” After my post was published, Alterman engaged in a long series of silly attacks on me. We finally had an email exchange in which he claimed the following:

[T]o someone who is familiar with who I am and my work, it would be obvious that I was pointing out that [creating more terrorists and not finding bin Laden] was the result, rather than the intention.

I assume he will make a similar argument this time around. But as I said then, even if he is correct that his fans know what he means, what about all the readers who aren’t familiar with Alterman and his work? Where’s the secret decoder ring?

Media Matters does important work, but publishing this sort of nonsense seriously undermines their credibility. The parallel is direct: they would clearly write about Alterman’s rhetoric if he were a conservative. Here’s just one example of the group criticizing conservatives for impugning liberals’ motives:

In discussing the Terri Schiavo case, several prominent media conservatives have accused liberals of wanting Schiavo to die and have imputed motives to them far beyond the belief, expressed by many liberals, that the courts were right to allow Schiavo’s husband to make end-of-life decisions on behalf of his wife.

I’m sure you can find many more. Pot, kettle, etc.

Update 10/8 1:48 PM: Alterman has responded with a screed that amusingly suggests that I “apparently decided it would be a good idea to join Rush Limbaugh’s campaign of vilification against Media Matters” (note the language characterizing my motives):

In “The Irony’s Getting a Bit Thick in Here, Department.,” Brendan Nyhan woke up the other morning and apparently decided it would be a good idea to join in Rush Limbaugh’s campaign of vilification against Media Matters. Thing is, he didn’t have evidence on hand, or at least didn’t want to bother to try to find any. So he went through his files and found an item he calls “Eric Alterman: My Enemies Are Evil,” here…

Nyhan’s cluelessness is aiding and abetting a campaign led by Limbaugh and others to delegitimize Media Matters and the careful work it does. See for instance here. One cannot depend on either the intelligence or the good will of those in the MSM and conservative media not to use Nyhan’s nonsense for the purposes of further manipulation and misrepresentation. There is a campaign by GOP Bloggers and others flooding the internet with an argument that the group’s work is somehow “illegal” and should be prosecuted. See here. Nyhan’s evidenceless character assassination, to which Glenn Reynolds has already linked, must be viewed within this context. And regardless of what one thinks of my work, I find that extremely disturbing…

Given that I’ve just finished my seventh book and I’ve written many thousands of articles, columns and blog posts over the past twenty-five years, I’d not be surprised if Nyhan could find an example or two of my failure in this respect, should he bother to do the work he should have done in the first place. But he hasn’t and whatever the reason, he’s chosen to parade his own failure to do so in support of Limbaugh’s, the GOP, and others’ anti-Media Matters jihad. Why he’s chosen to lend support to so nefarious and dishonorable an enterprise…well, I don’t like to speculate……

Obviously, I’m not trying to aid the anti-Media Matters crusade by Rush Limbaugh. I specifically wrote in the original post that they do “important work,” and I was one of the leading Limbaugh critics before Media Matters even existed (see here for the Spinsanity archive). Alterman is engaging in guilt by association of the same sort that conservatives used when they tried to link opponents of the war in Iraq to Saddam Hussein (“objectively pro-Saddam,” etc.).

The irony gets even thicker in Alterman’s response to the substance of my post, which accuses me of “[denying my] readers the opportunity to see the items in context” and then links to an earlier post in which he impugns Bush’s motives even more viciously:

Unfortunately, this gets a little funny in the “Get this man some help” category, he picked an example of my work that proves only that Nyhan can be a bit clueless at times and appears to be proud of it. What’s more, he denies his readers the opportunity to see the items in context and appraise that cluelessness for themselves.

Assuming he is in fact sincere, Nyhan fails, in both of the cases he mentions, to understand the difference between my alleged imputation of intentions to Bush, Cheney, etc, and my description of the results of their actions. His only link is to a throwaway phrase I used late last week regarding Bush’s veto of the SCHIP bill, rather than to the earlier item two days earlier, in which I quote not only from Bush’s own justification for his veto, but also from the conservative movement’s ideological and historical justification for such positions, in the form of arguments by George F. Will and Milton Friedman. (And Friedman, being more honest than Bush, would have pronounced this position proudly, rather than as Nyhan insists, with some imputation of “evil.” He told me once he thought it fine if poor kids never went to school.) Judge it for yourself here. As for Nyhan’s accusation that I do this “on a near daily basis,” well, the one additional example he does provide, and for which he provides no link, context, or date, proves again that he cannot distinguish between intentions and results. Here, too, he adheres to Limbaugh-like standards of argument and evidence (Really, if I were going to invent an adversary as a plant, I could hardly do much better than Mr. Nyhan….)

Readers should note that when I called Alterman on his false claim that the mainstream media called President Bush “well-liked,” he took repeated shots at me on his blog without even providing my name, let alone linking.

As far as the item two days earlier, that’s only relevant context if you need to read Alterman every single day to correctly parse his intended meaning. More importantly, Alterman’s link actually reinforces my point. Here’s what he wrote last Wednesday:

Again, according to MSNBC.com:

Bush argued that the congressional plan would be a move toward socialized medicine by expanding the program to higher-income families.

So this is the point. Bush’s argument is explicitly ideological. He wants children to get sick and die in order to prevent what he believes will be a slide toward what he calls “socialized medicine.” Conservatives may not wish to claim him anymore, but this speaks to a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives, and it’s not just about letting kids get sick and die.

Note that Alterman, in the post he thinks justifies his claim, writes that Bush “wants children to get sick and die” (my italics). This allegation is even worse than the claim I criticized above, which states that Bush has a “preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die.” The invocations of George Will and Milton Friedman that Alterman cites (which you can read in his post) do nothing to justify his smear. And the fact that Alterman is sending me an even worse example as a defense tells you all you need to know about his use of these tactics.

In addition, while Alterman claims that my other example does not include a “link, context, or date,” the post above includes all three, which can easily be seen if you scroll up. And he falsely claims that I accused him of impugning his opponents’ motives on a “near-daily basis.” In fact, I wrote that Media Matters criticized conservatives for doing so on a “near-daily basis” while Alterman does so “often.”

Arguing with the notoriously prickly and egocentric Alterman is tiresome, but the larger point stands — Media Matters is paying someone to produce the sort of agitprop they criticize from conservatives.

Update 10/9 2:56 PM: Alterman, who objects (falsely) to me not linking to an item of his above, has posted a second response in which he refers to me a “gnat” and tries to link me to Rush Limbaugh again:

I can’t keep spending my time swatting at gnats like Brendan Nyhan, who apparently unironically carries an endorsement from Wonkette atop his blog as if he’s proud of it, but I am happy to explicate further on my statement that George W. Bush vetoed the SCHIP extension because of his “preference” that poor children get sick and die, as opposed to encouraging what he calls “socialized medicine,” as Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan have seized on it and I imagine others of ill will will do so also for the purposes of confusing people of good will.

Look, ladies and gentlemen, either medical care saves lives and prevents illness or it doesn’t. I’d argue that it does, and I think even George W. Bush might agree. Granting that, poor children who have access to it are less likely to die from serious sickness and less likely to contract various preventable diseases and maladies if they do have access to such care. If they don’t have such access, they will more likely “get sick and die.” This strikes me again as a statistical certainty and again, if you could get Mr. Bush to give a straight answer on the question, I don’t see how he could disagree either. Now, given that we know what the result will be of refusing to allow states to cover more poor children with health care — and remember, these are the children who are most vulnerable to sickness in the first place — that there will be more sickness and death on the part of these same uncovered children, just what are Mr. Bush’s own stated reasons for vetoing the program? They can be found in Bush’s own words, here and here, and they all involve the prevention of what he fears will be a slippery slope to “socialized medicine” to which he objects entirely and unashamedly on ideological grounds.

Note that I do not claim and never said that George W. Bush wants poor kids to get sick and die, per se. I don’t think he does. I said only that he prefers this to signing the SCHIP bill, and in doing so, demonstrated his commitment to his own stated (but rarely followed) ideology. In other words, Bush has “a preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die for his own ideological obsession.” I suppose one might quibble with the word “obsession,” but the rest of it strikes me as a clear statement of fact, albeit the kind of fact from which the mainstream media traditionally tend to whitewash, the same way there is virtually no coverage of Iraqi casualty figures even though those are the obvious and unarguable result of Bush’s decision to bomb the hell out of the place. Again, am I saying Bush wants to bomb Iraqi civilians for the fun of it? Are you an idiot: (For the record, I don’t personally think Nyhan is an idiot; I think he just plays one — in this case, a useful one for Rush Limbaugh’s campaign against Media Matters and the political accountability it demands for his inflammatory words — sometimes for effect.)

I’m glad to hear that Alterman doesn’t think “George W. Bush wants poor kids to get sick and die, per se.” But the second round of his defense, which focuses on Bush expressing a “preference” for this by vetoing the SCHIP bill, falls short for the reasons stated above. Also, don’t forget that he also claimed Bush “wants children to get sick and die in order to prevent what he believes will be a slide toward what he calls ‘socialized medicine’” (my italics) — an even more direct suggestion of motive.

Matthew Yglesias flags netroots activist Chris Bowers hyping a graph plotting gas prices (inverse) against presidential approval:

It isn’t discussed often enough, but Professor Pollkatz regularly produces updates one of the most important statistical projections for American politics, ever:

A round of semi-apocalyptic pontification then ensues:

Our move off the petroleum economy is still slow, and will even take decades under an extremely aggressive Apollo style renewable energy program. So, in short, there is no reason to expect that future administrations will have approval ratings dramatically better than those currently enjoyed by both Bush and Congress. Ending the war will help, and providing millions of people with health care will help, too. However, gas prices will still remain high, making approval ratings in the 40s and 50s about the best anyone can do even under the most favorable conditions until at least 2020.

The days of super popular administrations, ala the fourth, fifth and sixth years of Reagan, and like the final five years of Clinton, are probably over for the foreseeable future…

Really? No more popular administrations? I’d be happy to take that wager.

More fundamentally, as Yglesias notes, this is a classic example of the fallacy in which people see a correlation and infer a causal relationship:

I was super-impressed the first time I saw that chart, but now I’m not so sure. Aside from the fact that gasoline has generally gotten more expensive and Bush generally gotten less popular, are we really seeing a correlation here? There must be any number of quantities that have also generally moved in one direction during the relevant time period.

Consider the quality of the basketball teams fielded by the New Jersey Nets. Like Bush, they were at their best in the season immediately following 9/11 and have been in slow but steady decline since then. But the Nets aren’t exercising a causal influence on Bush’s popularity. What’s more, I think the price of gas is being demarcated in nominal terms here, which is clearly the wrong way to do it.

Yglesias is right — since 9/11, any quantity that has been trending in one direction will be correlated with President Bush’s approval (this is elementary time series statistics). And if you look at the immediate period after 9/11 period, you see that Bush’s approval shot up before the price of gas declined, which makes no sense if you think gas is driving his approval ratings. Finally, there is no obvious relationship between the two before 9/11.

Does this mean the price of gas doesn’t affect approval? No. But this chart greatly exaggerates the relationship.

Update 10/8 4:34 PM: I forgot I debunked this argument much more thoroughly last year:

When we estimate a quick-and-dirty model for presidential approval from January 2001-June 2006 using a lag of approval in the previous month (which corrects the serial correlation problem), a variable capturing the 9/11 approval boost in Sept./Oct. 2001, a variable for the Iraq invasion in March 2003, average hourly wages, total payroll employment, and the logarithm of inflation-adjusted gas prices, we find that the effect of gas prices is negative but not quite statistically significant at conventional levels. 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, by contrast, have highly significant effects. (A more complex model that takes account of the long, slow decline in the 9/11 boost would likely wipe out the gas effect completely.)

Now it’s certainly plausible that gasoline prices have some effect on approval, but not to the extent that Harwood or Page suggest. Given the weak relationships that existed during past administrations (which Harwood acknowledges), the relationship that we observe during Bush’s presidency seems likely to be a statistical artifact. It is very premature to call gas prices the “strongest factor” affecting approval. (For those who are interested, The Macro Polity is to my mind the definitive political science work on the factors influencing presidential approval.)

Update 9/22 10:47 AM: Using sophisticated techniques and better data than my quick-and-dirty model above, the distinguished political scientists Nathaniel Beck, Simon Jackman, and Howard Rosenthal report results for the determinants of Bush approval that mirror my analysis above (PDF):

Immediately note that the approval series is dominated by the long, almost uninterrupted decline after the peak in the 9/11 aftermath. Hence, any variable that trends in a similar way will emerge as a good predictor of approval, at least in these data. Figures 9 and 10 plot the
relationship between weekly gasoline prices and approval and cumulative U.S. deaths in Iraq,
and presidential approval, respectively. The latter variable trends up, by construction, and
gas prices also generally trend up over the post 9/11 phase of Bush’s presidency. We entered
these variables, plus the log of first time unemployment claims in an augmented version of our
transition model… The coefficient on the
covariates are something of a mixed bag, with the estimated effects on changes in gas prices
not unambiguously signed at conventional levels of statistical significance (i.e., the posterior
probability that changes in gas prices drive approval down is just .77). Cumulative U.S. deaths
in Iraq appears to drive approval down (again, if for no other reason than both variables trend
in the same direction over much of the time series). Similarly, first time unemployment claims
generally trend down over the course of the Bush presidency, around seasonal variation, and
so picks up an unambiguously positive coefficient.

While I’m amused by the New York Times anecdote about Fred Thompson asking an audience for applause, I don’t trust it or the rest of the story and you shouldn’t either. Given the tone of Adam Nagourney’s report, there’s good reason to be suspicious that he is fitting the facts to the “Fred is lazy” narrative, especially if you know about the horrors of the “Gore is a liar” coverage of 1999-2000.

Update 10/8 8:38 PM: Via commenter TCW, Thompson’s request for applause is on YouTube and appears to be legit:

I remain suspicious about narrative-driven reporting on Thompson, however.

How hard is it to try to resolve factual disputes over controversial policy issues? Too hard for the New York Times:

Mr. Bush argues that the expansion is too costly and would push people who could afford private insurance onto the government rolls, steering the program away from its initial aim of helping poor children. He said that states like New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and New Mexico spend more money on adults than children, and he reiterated his contention, which the authors of the bill dispute, that the measure could benefit some families earning up to $83,000 a year.

“That doesn’t sound poor to me,” the president said.

Welcome to the dystopia of “objective” journalism. What’s particularly sad here is that other publications have already addressed this issue — the Times could have just cribbed from them. For instance, here’s the relevant passage from McClatchy that I praised on Monday:

President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program “would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year.”

That’s not true.

The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state’s Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.

States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush’s Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.

Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn’t change it.

Any chance McClatchy can take over the NYT’s Washington bureau?

Update 10/5 11:14 AM: There’s even more lameness in today’s NYT story on the SCHIP debate, in which Rudy Giuliani is allowed to make an unsupported claim about “crowd out” without any contradiction from the writer or supporters of the bill:

In an interview yesterday on New Hampshire radio, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani framed the insurance program itself as a “typical Democratic, Clinton kind of thing” that substitutes government solutions for private section options.
“Half to two-thirds of the children that they’re going to take care of already have private insurance,” Mr. Giuliani said. “They’re going to move them to the government. It is not just a beginning, it’s a big step in the direction of government-controlled medicine.”

Actually, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that about one-third of the children who will be added to the program already have private insurance — here’s McClatchy again:

The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.

That’s true.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that was inevitable to some degree when any government program expanded. The CBO estimates that the legislation would attract 5.8 million new enrollees by 2012. Of them, 3.8 million would be uninsured and eligible under current requirements, and 2 million probably would have had private coverage before the expansion.

That’s a rate of about 1 in 3 new enrollees dropping private insurance. “We don’t see very many other policy options that would reduce the number of uninsured children by the same amount without creating more” dropouts from private insurance, Orszag said.

The best response to the Iranian dictator’s visit yet:

The New York Times has an article today on the backstory behind the video.

After Jon Stewart mocked Hillary Clinton’s laughter during interviews, Patrick Healy wrote an entire New York Times article about “The Cackle” that has now launched a mini-frenzy of coverage, including a “body language expert” calling it “evil laughter” on Fox.

The implications of this debate for American democracy are so obvious and depressing that I won’t dwell on them, but I do want to emphasize the journalistic problem with coverage like Healy’s. He’s not just making fun of Hillary’s laugh. Like most personality-driven campaign journalism, Healy constructs a narrative based on unverifiable assumptions about her thought process and state of mind. Every tic is treated as calculated, strategic, and revealing of the politician’s innermost character.

To illustrate the point, I’ve highlighted Healy’s mind-reading in italics below:

It was January 2005, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had just finished a solemn speech about abortion rights — urging all sides to find “common ground” on the issue, and referring to abortion as “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.”

Stepping offstage, she took questions from reporters, and found herself being grilled about whether she was moderating her own pro-choice position. And suddenly it happened: Mrs. Clinton let loose a hearty belly laugh that lasted a few seconds. Reporters glanced at one another as if we’d missed the joke.

This was my first close encounter with Senator Clinton, and with The Cackle. At that moment, the laugh seemed like the equivalent of an eye-roll — she felt she was being nit-picked, so she shamed her inquisitors by chuckling at them (or their queries).

Friends of hers told a different story: She has this fantastic sense of humor, you see, but it’s too sarcastic to share with the general public because not everyone likes sarcasm. (An example from personal experience: Mrs. Clinton sometimes likes to tweak people for missing an obvious point by saying to them, “hello!”) So, instead of alienating Iowans who might not vote for edginess, Mrs. Clinton goes for the lowest-common-denominator display of her funny bone: She shows that she can laugh, and that her laugh has a fullness and depth.

Perhaps. The reality is, Mrs. Clinton is the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination right now, and the commensurate political attacks and criticism are coming at her from all sides. She needs ways to respond without appearing defensive or brittle, her advisers say.

She often responds to attacks with a counterargument: At the televised debates, she has pushed back at criticism from her rivals by saying there is little difference between herself and them (over the Iraq war, say), and recalibrates the discussion by focusing on the differences with President Bush rather than those among the Democrats. Doing so makes her look like a spokeswoman for a unified Democratic position — even though there are real differences among the candidates, as she showed at Wednesday’s debate by refusing to go into the same detail as some rivals about Social Security’s future.

And then, less often but more notably, she copes with the pressure by using The Cackle. At Wednesday’s Democratic debate, for instance, former Senator Mike Gravel complained about her vote on an Iran resolution and said he was “ashamed” of her. Asked to respond, Mrs. Clinton laughed before responding, as if to minimize the matter.

Last Sunday, meanwhile, she appeared on all five of the major morning talk shows. I don’t know what she had for breakfast, but her laughter was heavily caffeinated at times. Chris Wallace, of Fox News, first pressed Mrs. Clinton about why she was so “hyper-partisan,” and that drew a huge cackle. (Coming from Fox, that question is pretty funny, her aides said.) But at another point Mr. Wallace switched gears and said, “let me ask you about health care,” and she responded, “Yeah, I’d love you to ask me about health care” — and then let it rip, again, a bit quizzically.

The weirdest moment was with Bob Schieffer on the CBS News program “Face the Nation” when he said to Mrs. Clinton, “you rolled out your new health care plan, something Republicans immediately said is going to lead to socialized medicine.” She giggled, giggled some more, and then couldn’t seem to stop giggling — “Sorry, Bob,” she said — and finally unleashed the full Cackle.

The Schieffer moment seemed particularly calculated because Mrs. Clinton has most certainly not laughed, in other settings, when she has been accused of pursuing socialized medicine. She faced that accusation charge during a forum in Las Vegas this summer, for instance; she turned frosty and traded barbs with the audience member who made the accusation. It was clearly no laughing matter in that venue…

Update 10/4 9:18 AM: Andrew Sullivan flags an even more absurd example of over-interpretation from Ann Althouse:

I think it was [Hillary’s] strategy to make us talk about that instead of substantive problems she has. It’s a distraction. She’s deliberately laughing in a way designed to derail us from going in a direction that would hurt her. (So was the cleavage.)