Brendan Nyhan

Nooooo — it’s back! Following in Ron Brownstein’s footsteps, Mickey Kaus has revived the silly claim that John McCain has a real chance as a third party nominee in 2008:

WSJ’s Brendan Miniter argues that Republicans shouldn’t move to the center by embracing McCain and McCainism, because “[c]onservatives can and do win elections for the Republican Party.” That may be true. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have to run as a Republican. He can run as a third-party candidate, Perot-style. Isn’t it, in fact, intuitively obvious that that’s what McCain will do, once he’s sufficiently infuriated by his rejection by GOP conservatives? … And he might win. Polls show voters are dissatisfied with both parties, no? Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote despite being labeled (unfairly or not) as wacky. That’s a good base to start with. … McCain would steal both moderate GOPs and moderate Dems. Suddenly the Republicans would too have to worry about the center, in a way they maybe wouldn’t if they were just running against a Democrat. … 3:39 A.M.

In fact, it’s not “intuitively obvious” at all. A McCain candidacy would doom his career as a Republican in the Senate and cause him to be defeated in the next GOP primary in Arizona. And, as I wrote before, there’s no reason to think that a third-party candidate could win the presidency absent extraordinary circumstances:

[W]e have this little thing in political science called Duverger’s Law. As the introductory political science text I teach to freshman puts it, “In any election where a single winner is chosen by plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins), there is a strong tendency for serious competitors to be reduced to two because people tend to vote strategically.” Why would we expect a third-party challenge to overcome this dynamic? The two parties have vast advantages in financial resources, mobilization, and voter loyalty. To convince people you could win, you’d have to create an inordinate amount of momentum. And to do so, you’d have to have a constituency that supported you — the Internet is not an ideology or a voting bloc…

In addition, as Brownstein points out, winning the electoral college would be difficult to impossible — “the strongest [third-party] candidate could still face the syndrome of finishing second almost everywhere, trailing Republicans in the red states and Democrats in the blue. To have any chance, an independent would need to nearly run the table in battleground states — like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that don’t tilt decisively to either side.”

Even though third party candidacies are wildly unrealistic, Kaus, Brownstein, Joe Trippi and others keep touting them because they make great copy. So what if they’ll never succeed?

Previous entries in this series:
–Brownstein falls for centrist third party fantasy (4/25/05)
–The moderate party fantasy (3/27/05)
–The “party-in-a-laptop” bubble (11/15/04)
–Futurist nonsense (11/2/04)

I’ve given Factcheck.org a hard time lately, so I wanted to link to a new piece that does a good job debunking a bad statistic I had assumed was correct. Here’s the summary:

Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

This claim is false. It’s based on an an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of 43 states found that abortions have actually decreased.

The story of how the claim started is ridiculous — some ethics professor just calculated a bogus statistic and put it in a relatively obscure op-ed, and pretty soon top Democratic politicians were repeating it as fact. It reminds me of some of our all-time great myths on Spinsanity — the NEA and 9/11, Ken Lay and the Lincoln Bedroom, and Bush and the Taliban, all of which started with one misinformed or misleading source and then exploded. And the worst part is that once a compelling myth is in the media bloodstream it’s almost impossible to stamp out for good.

E.J. Dionne gets it right about the deep ambivalence of the conservative movement toward truth and factual accuracy, which are selectively invoked as absolute standards for the media when it’s strategically useful but completely set aside when it comes to claims from the White House:

Conservative academics have long attacked “postmodernist” philosophies for questioning whether “truth” exists at all and claiming that what we take as “truths” are merely “narratives” woven around some ideological predisposition. Today’s conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations — and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

The Media Research Center is the perfect illustration of what happens when you start treating the truth as relative. For instance, it recently published a study that Media Matters points out defines “[a]ny news story not dominated by unadulterated Republican spin [as], by definition, a case of ‘liberal bias.’” Or consider Josh Marshall’s analysis of how the Bush administration seems to believe that its disagreements with experts who hold contradictory views are simply reflections of differing ideology:

If you’re a revisionist — someone pushing for radically changing the status quo — you’re apt to see “the experts” not just as people who may be standing in your way, but whose minds have been corrupted by a wrongheaded ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, ‘the experts’ look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad. The Pentagon civil servant quoted above told me that the standard response to warnings from the Joint Staff about potential difficulties was simply to say: “That’s just the Joint Staff being obstructionist.” Even if the experts are right in the particulars–the size of the deficit, the number of troops needed in Iraq–their real goal is to get in the way of necessary changes that have to be made.

In that simple, totalizing assumption we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months–and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration’s take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through. But in numerous cases it prevented them from implementing even their own plans effectively.

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn’t just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is…well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because “the facts” aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don’t agree with you, they’re just the other side’s argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that’s all the facts are, it’s really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.

And of course there’s the famous passage from Ron Suskind’s New York Times Magazine article on the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The worst part is that the liberal vanguard is following movement conservatives down the rabbit hole. It’s a rapidly shrinking “reality-based community” out here in, um, reality. Send reinforcements!

You would think that the last thing college-bound students need is training in narrow-minded thinking. But according to a perceptive article by Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine, that’s exactly what the new SAT persuasive essay is doing — with potentially disastrous effects for kids who have grown up watching partisan foodfights on TV:

The real problem with the SAT persuasive essay assignment isn’t what it conveys about spontaneity or style but what it suggests about how to argue. Students are asked to ponder (quickly) a short excerpt of conventional wisdom about, say, the advisability of following rules, and they are then instructed to ”develop your point of view on this issue.” But if the goal of ”better writing” is ”improved thinking,” as the College Board’s National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges has pronounced, perhaps it’s worth asking whether practice in reflexively taking a position on any potentially polarizing issue is what aspiring college students — or the rest of us — need most.

As those sample essay questions at the start reveal, and as any test-prep book will confirm, at the homiletic heart of the SAT writing assignment is the false dichotomy. The best strategy for a successful essay is to buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question, and then try to sell it as if it were really yours. Essayists won’t be penalized for including false information, either, according to the official guide for graders. ”You are scoring the writing,” it instructs, ”and not the correctness of facts.”

False analogies, of course, were an old SAT staple, but at least test takers got credit for picking only the true one. By contrast, the test-prep industry bluntly says that a blinkered perspective pays off on the essay — and nobody knows better than the professional SAT obsessives. ”It is very important that you take a firm stance in your essay and stick to it,” insists Kaplan’s ”New SAT.” Practicing what it preaches, the prep book doesn’t let go. ”You are not fair and balanced! (Well, you should be fair, but definitely not balanced.)” Kaplan drives home the point yet again, just in case. ”What’s important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.”

This doesn’t bear much resemblance to an exercise in critical reasoning, which usually involves clarifying the logic of a position by taking counterarguments seriously or considering alternative assumptions. The English teachers may worry that in the rush to prepare for the SAT expository essay, personal writing will get short shrift in schools. In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit. ”Don’t panic and write from the opposing point of view” is Kaplan’s calming advice.

You have to hand it to the College Board: the new essay seems all too apt as training for contemporary social and political discourse in this country, and for journalistic food fights too. But don’t colleges want to encourage the ”strengths of analysis and logic” that the Board itself has said are so important to ”the citizenry in a democracy”? Out in the ever more competitive world, it is hard to communicate if the only side of an argument you can hear is your own.

Via Jay Rosen, here’s New York Press writer Matt Taibbi laying waste to Newsweek and the newsmagazine genre:

It was humorous to see how quickly Newsweek lost its cachet with
Middle America. So long as it went about its usual revolting Neanderthal literary mission — wrapping
4000 words of inane speculations about the historical Jesus around breathless updates on the value
of Martha Stewart stock (Pie Chart, p. 37!), and startling new insights about “the real George Washington” — no
one had any problem with Newsweek.

An ethical magazine is one that uses up its news pages asking questions
like Can smiling prevent cancer? and makes sure at least twice each calendar year to do a
“What the fuck is wrong with our ungrateful, disobedient children?” story, so that angry suburban
parents have something to read in the doctor’s office while they wait to have their bunions shaved.
That — plus the occasional feature on Shrek 2 as the crowning achievement of the human
creative impulse, and the odd investigation into why cell phones in restaurants are so darn annoying — is
what good journalism is all about.

An economist writes in to Andrew Sullivan to dispute his ridiculous characterization of Daniel Okrent’s criticism of Paul Krugman as “damning”:

You are dead wrong (as well as sloppy and lazy) in your portrayal of Okrent and Mankiw’s statements about Paul Krugman. (For the record, I know both Paul and Greg, although not well.)

The Okrent case is the more egregious: he says that Krugman “slices and dices” data to support his point of view, without offering an example. I’m an economist myself, and know the macro data very well. I can’t think of single example to support Okrent’s statement. (Paul has published corrections regarding a couple of minor, and non-substantive, points.) Most conservative attacks on his arguments involve innumeracy or sheer ignorance of basic facts or basic principles of economics; many involve willful misrepresentation.

Now consider Greg’s statement (and I’m paraphrasing) that “Paul seems to think that everyone who disagrees with him is either fool or a liar.” To begin with, I’ll stick to economics. The plain fact is that the Bush Administration has been consistently and deliberately mendacious in its public portrayal of its economic policies. (This characterization, by the way, is the overwhelming consensus in the professional economics world, which includes many conservatives.) Capable policy apointees (like Greg or Glen Hubbard) have had no meaningful input in this Administration; nor has the professional staff at places like Treasury or CEA. All economic policy involves politics. But the politicization of the policy making process in this Administration is without precedent in my professional life.

Paul would have been called a moderate or even conservative Democrat prior to this Administration. (Read his classical essay, “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” if you’re under the illusion that he’s some sort of leftist.) So would I. Paul appears strident only because he’s had the bad manners to say that people are lying when they’re obviously lying. (A prominent case in point: many of the President’s public statements about the finances of the social security system have been plain, simple untruths.) And what’s maddening to Paul, and to me, is that there’s no core of conservative principle in this Administration. A conservative devotion to free markets has been displaced by reckless spending, reckless tax cuts, crony capitalism and special interest give-aways. What “balanced” take on these issues should Paul offer?

More generally, you should know better. Remember, I’ve confined myself so far to economic policy. Do you want to defend the honesty and integrity of this Administration on, say, abuse of detainees?”

Indeed. But see also Spinsanity on Krugman and Jon Henke’s comment below my original post, which notes several allegations of dishonesty against Krugman (the first two are rather semantic, but the third seems to have merit).

A Wall Street Journal editorial condemning Amnesty International’s description of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as the “gulag of our time” ends with this:

It’s old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda. A “human rights” group that can’t distinguish between Stalin’s death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can’t be taken seriously.

Now, I’m not going to endorse Amnesty’s language; certainly there’s an important distinction between the Soviet gulag and Guantanamo. But that doesn’t make the group’s charges “pro-al Qaeda.” This is part of a long and disreputable pattern of labeling dissent as “pro-Saddam,” “pro-terrorist,” etc. since 9/11. It has got to stop.

From The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper:

Three crosses were burned in separate locations in Durham late Wednesday evening, Durham Police Department officers reported. Ku Klux Klan fliers were also found at one location, police told The Associated Press.

DPD Lieutenant Kevin Cates classified the cross burnings as a “hate crime.”

“It is too early into [the investigation] to tell if it is actually directed at one person or one group,” Cates said. “We just have to wait and see.”

According to a DPD press release, the first incident was reported at 9:19 p.m. near St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at 1737 Hillandale Road. Officers and firefighters responded to a second call a half-hour later near the intersection of South Roxboro Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. Officials found a cross burning on a hill near a construction site. A third cross was reported in a field near Holloway and Dillard Streets at 10:28 p.m. No injuries were reported.

In the long tradition of conservative attacks on dissent since 9/11, Rep. Spencer Bachus has likened some fairly innocuous comments by Bill Maher to treason (via Josh Marshall — see also the Bachus press release):

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., takes issue with remarks on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, first aired May 13, in which Maher points out the Army missed its recruiting goal by 42 percent in April.

“More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club,” Maher said. “We’ve done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies.”

Army Reserve Pfc. England was accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“I think it borders on treason,” Bachus said. “In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country.”

…”I don’t want (Maher) prosecuted,” Bachus said. “I want him off the air.”

And on an even darker note, Newsmax reports on a disturbing Bill O’Reilly “fantasy” (their word) about the decapitation of Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley:

It all started with a [Los Angeles] Times editorial urging the shutdown of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and access to attorneys for detainees.

That set off O’Reilly. During the broadcast of “The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly” on May 17, he declared:

“How can they think this way? How can anyone think this way? You know, ‘Shutting down Guantanamo and giving suspected terrorists legal protections would help restore our reputation abroad.’”

Said O’Reilly: “That’s like saying, ‘Well, if we’re nicer to the people who want to kill us, then the other people who want to kill us will like us more.’”

Then he fired off the big gun, saying the paper’s editorial board will “never get it until they (the terrorists) grab Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off. And maybe when the blade sinks in, he’ll go, ‘Perhaps O’Reilly was right.’”

The Times counterattacked in a May 24 editorial. Questioning why people the U.S. has liberated from tyranny “don’t love us,” the paper stated: “It doesn’t seem worthy of decapitation to suggest that ghastly stories (not all fabricated by Newsweek) about abuse of prisoners don’t help.”

…For the moment, O’Reilly is in the liberal paper’s crosshairs, warning: “O’Reilly should be careful. Any further decapitation fantasies could get him in serious trouble with the Secret Service.”

It seems the paper has difficulty distinguishing between a threat and a “fantasy.” And when it comes to actual threats against its employees, the paper may want to check with its lawyers on whom to contact.

The Secret Service deals with threats against the President and Vice President, not editorial writers.

This is the Coulter-ization of political discourse. It’s not normal — or acceptable — to “joke” about the murder of your political opponents. When will we cast these people out of public life?

Here’s Daniel Okrent’s parting cheap shot at Paul Krugman:

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales “called the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint’ ” nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.

No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd’s way, and some of Krugman’s enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn’t mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn’t hold his columnists to higher standards.

I didn’t give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.

The claim that Krugman has the “disturbing habit” of “shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults” is a generalization that is unsupported by a single example, as Bob Somerby and others have pointed out. But to Andrew Sullivan, professional Krugman hater, it’s a “damning” argument:

MANKIW ON KRUGMAN: Almost as damning as Dan Okrent.
– 3:32:00 PM

It’s just textbook. Lord, Ross and Lepper’s 1979 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a classic reference on this phenomenon:

[S]ubjects supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to two purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones…

(Now, I think you can fairly object that Krugman portrays his ideological opponents in cartoonish ways. But the same applies to Sullivan, and Okrent’s use of numbers criticism is just an assertion without supporting evidence. We’re talking about a John Bates Clark medal winner here. Krugman does make mistakes, but most of the blogger criticisms of him that I’ve looked into range from unconvincing to downright dishonest.)