Brendan Nyhan

Earlier this week, I mocked liberals who attribute the Obama administration’s domestic policy compromises/failures to a lack of presidential will. If only Obama had tried harder, they say, he could have passed the public option, expanded Medicare, etc.

As I’ve argued, this claim, which I call the Green Lantern theory of the presidency^TM, fails as a description of political reality. But it’s also worth noting that this sort of president-centric perspective has real costs both for the political movements that promote it and for the country.

In the short term, the liberal elites who publicly blame Obama rather than the structure of Congress for the loss of the public option are fostering long-term disappointment that will depress Democratic turnout and enthusiasm in 2010 and 2012. Kos, Jane Hamsher, Move On, and Congressional liberals can certainly put more pressure on Obama than, say, Joe Lieberman, but they are poisoning the well for their own movement in a way that we didn’t observe among conservatives during, say, the debate over the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Over the long term, Green Lantern-ism promotes cynicism and distrust in the political system. Who wouldn’t feel betrayed if they thought that the president could achieve an important goal but wasn’t willing to try hard enough to get it? Unfortunately, the press does an exceptionally poor job of explaining the structural constraints that presidents face. We shouldn’t be surprised by this failure — journalists tend to lack detailed knowledge of the legislative process and have strong commercial incentives to cover politics as a dramatic narrative — but it means that the Green Lantern message goes largely unchecked.

Yesterday Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein accused Joe Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people” after the Connecticut senator scuttled a health care reform compromise (my emphasis):

The Huffington Post and Roll Call are both reporting that Joe Lieberman notified Harry Reid that he will filibuster health-care reform if the final bill includes an expansion of Medicare…

Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane objected to Klein’s language:

Let me repeat: Klein essentially accuses Lieberman of mass murder because he disagrees with him on a policy issue about which there is considerable debate among people of good will across the political spectrum.

This is disgusting, and pretty illogical, too. Klein brandishes a study by the Urban Institute showing that the lack of health insurance contributed to the deaths of 137,000 people between 2000 and 2006. But last time I checked, Joe Lieberman does not oppose insuring everyone. Indeed, he is on record favoring “legislation that expands access to the millions who do not have coverage, improves quality and lowers costs while not impeding our economic recovery or increasing the debt.” He simply opposes the public option, as well as Harry Reid’s last-minute improvisation on Medicare. Klein’s outburst only makes sense if you assume that there is one conceivable way to expand health insurance coverage, and that Harry Reid has discovered it.

Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait then endorsed Klein’s position. Chait, for instance, wrote that Lieberman “seems to view the prospect of sticking it to the liberals who supported his Democratic opponent in 2006 as a goal potentially worth sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans to fulfill.” Klein also defended his position here, here, and here.

I have to side with Lane on this one. Klein creates a worst-case scenario (Lieberman’s actions could “cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people”) and then asserts that Lieberman is intentionally trying to cause that outcome (Lieberman “seems willing” to cause those deaths). Of course, he has no idea what Lieberman’s motives actually are. The senator’s justifications for his position may be contradictory or incoherent, but that does not justify Klein’s language.

Unfortunately, the tactic Klein used is an increasingly common one, especially on this issue. Rep. Alan Grayson recently attracted widespread criticism for saying, “If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: ‘Die quickly!’” Similarly, I criticized Eric Alterman back in 2007 for suggesting that President Bush had a “preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die for his own ideological obsession” and “wants children to get sick and die in order to prevent what he believes will be a slide toward what he calls ‘socialized medicine.’”

What Klein, Alterman, and other liberals don’t seem to realize, however, is that this same tactic is frequently used against them when conservatives smear dissent as treasonous. For instance, was it fair for Karl Rove to say this?

Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

As in Klein’s case, Rove constructs a worst-case scenario (Durbin’s statement “[puts] our troops in greater danger”) and then suggests that Durbin is seeking to cause that outcome (“No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals”).

What’s especially absurd about Klein’s language is that the stakes are relatively small. Lieberman’s actions killed a compromise proposal to allow people ages 55-64 to buy into Medicare and a limited public-option provision, not the bill itself. Hundreds of thousands of people will not die as a result of those provisions being dropped. The process continues to move forward.

Moreover, as Lane points out, one could apply Klein’s logic to accuse virtually any member of Congress who has threatened to vote against the bill at different points in the process (a group which includes many liberals). Are all of those members “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people”? Where do we draw the line? It’s entirely arbitrary — and that’s the point.

Update 12/15 7:29 PM: Continuing the symmetry with conservative rhetoric against Iraq war opponents, Klein defends his language in yet another post by resorting to the consequences defense:

[T]here seem to be two rejoinders in Lane’s post. The first is that it is “an accusation of mass murder.” It is not. It is a statement of consequences.

Conservatives who suggest that liberal anti-war rhetoric aids the enemy frequently offer the same argument. However, as so often occurs in the anti-dissent case, Klein’s statement actually included an insinuation of nefarious motives (Lieberman “seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people”). The parallels are almost too perfect.

Update 12/16 8:54 AM: The NYT’s Ross Douthat makes a similar argument against Klein’s language (but more elegantly!) on his blog.

Update 12/16 5:49 PM: In comments, Dean Eckles offers a useful pointer to the research of Joshua Knobe at Yale, who has shown (PDF) that “people’s intuitions as to whether or not a behavior was performed intentionally can sometimes be influenced by moral considerations” – i.e. “their beliefs about whether the behavior itself was good or bad.” That logic seems to apply very clearly in this case.

Matthew Yglesias pinpoints an important — and absurd — meme in which liberals blame Obama’s legislative compromises on a lack of will (see, for instance, Kos and Hamsher on health care reform):

I sort of want to stop writing about Matt Taibbi, but his decision to respond to his critics with an article on “Obamania” compels me to write more… [W]hen it comes to domestic policy issues, and certainly when it comes to financial reform, you’d be hard-pressed to find an issue on which there’s a majority in the House, and a majority on all the relevant House committees, and a majority on all the relevant Senate committees, and 60 votes in the Senate for some progressive bill but Barack Obama is standing in the way of reform…

Whatever failings the package may have, they’re not the fault of the Obama administration. And whatever ties the Obama administration may have to big banks, the banks like the Republicans’ ideas a lot better than they like Obama’s.

If you want to complain about the Obama administration, you should complain about their conduct of issues they actually have control over… [O]n legislative matters that require the concurrence of congress, it’s not clear what pushing Obama to the left would accomplish. Rather than “Obamamania” I think a lot of the left is infected with a kind of “Presidentmania” in which they assume that the White House could get anything done if only they really wanted it. But let me promise you, the White House wants to sign a health care bill. They really, really do. Having their top priority bogged down for months is not part of a secret plan.

During the Bush years, Yglesias coined the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics* to mock conservatives who believed that “[t]he only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower” in foreign policy. What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. And, like the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics, this view is nonfalsifiable. Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower. (Hamsher, for instance, claims that “The failure to establish a public option to control medical costs and increase competition is President Obama’s failure alone.”) It’s a fantasy world.

Update 12/15 1:35 PM: Green Lantern alert! Here’s MoveOn.org demanding Obama “not allow Senator Joe Lieberman to hold health care reform hostage” (via Jonathan Bernstein):

Today, MoveOn.org members will hold an emergency rally outside of the White House telling President Obama to not allow Senator Joe Lieberman to hold health care reform hostage, and to urge the President to fight for real reform with the public health insurance option. MoveOn members want to remind the President that the country elected him, not Joe Lieberman, to fix our nation’s broken health care system.

Who knew that Obama could just “not allow” Lieberman to threaten to oppose health reform? It looks like the liberal elite need a lesson on how a bill becomes a law…

Update 12/15 3:26 PM: Yglesias returns to the theme this morning:

I know a lot of people out there on the Internet seem to feel that the White House could have saved the public option if only they’d put more “pressure” on Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, etc. or done some more “arm-twisting” as seen in colorful LBJ anecdotes. Do people think the administration forgot to use its magic pressure button to get Senator Nelson to endorse the deal? Or is it possible that a minority of legislators are relatively immune to pressure and blandishment from the White House?

I should also note that CJR’s Greg Marx was implicitly criticizing the GL theory in this article back in August:

[T]he rapidly coalescing media narrative—both in the mainstream press and from liberal-leaning outlets—is that Obama and his team have bungled their push for health care reform by compromising too readily, or not articulating and sticking to a vision more forcefully…

[M]uch of this criticism proceeds from the assumption that a different approach—either more detailed, or more aggressively partisan, or more specific and straightforward—would have commanded majority support in Congress. Where’s the evidence for that assumption?…

This close scrutiny to “theories of power” suggests that there is one that can be counted on to work—but history shows that no matter what strategy is employed, a president has only limited power over Congress…

Given the current configuration of Congress, the fate of health care is likely to depend, in the end, on the incentives confronting conservative Democrats…

* Here’s Yglesias explaining the Green Lantern reference:

[T]he Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.

…[The ring] lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user’s combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of “overcoming fear” which allows you to unleash the ring’s full capacities…

Josh Marshall argues that the GOP landslide in 1994 was driven by the changing political landscape of the South — a point I’ve made before — and that 2010 is likely to be different:

The main cause of the Dems 1994 rout was structural. And most of the other causes, tended to play off or feed off that one, big reason.

Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s an entire region — the South — moved decisively from the Democratic to the Republican column. Something similar happened in the inter-Mountain West and in border state parts of the Midwest. But the full impact of the transformation was hidden by incumbency and the stretch of Republican presidential rule from 1980 to 1992. As long Southern Democrats tended constituencies and could selectively hedge positions and pivot off Republican presidents, most could hold on. But that made this leg of the Democratic majority extremely brittle…

The big game changer — paradoxically, because he was a Southern Democrat — was Bill Clinton… [T]he truth is that the pre-94 Democratic congressional majority was never going to survive another Democratic presidency. A Democrat in the White House, pursuing any substantial part of the agenda of the party who put him there, would deprive those members of Congress from the Greater South (South and overlapping border state areas) and West of that ability to balance and hedge. And so it did…

As you can see, if my theory is right, 2010 is fundamentally different. The key problem for Dems isn’t unpopularity. It’s a highly apathetic Democratic electorate facing an extremely energized Tea Party GOP.

Marshall is strangely agnostic in his introduction, however, about the odds of a GOP takeover of the Senate:

I wanted to address this question of what if any meaningful parallels there are between 1994 and the 2010 mid-term elections. The short answer is that I think the parallels are significantly overstated. That doesn’t mean that the Dems couldn’t lose one or both houses of Congress; they could. But if they do it will be for different reasons.

While it’s of course technically true that Republicans could take back the Senate, the odds of them doing so are extremely low — the Intrade futures market currently puts the probability at 6%. And as I’ve argued, a GOP House takeover, while more plausible, remains unlikely (the current Intrade probability is 35%).

I’m sympathetic to the case that Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias (among others) have been making against the institutionalization of the filibuster in the Senate, but the debate has often felt highly abstract. Other than a brief spate of posts on whether the filibuster helped block President Bush’s Social Security legislation in 2005, advocates of reform have rarely grappled with how legislative outcomes might change in a filibuster-free Senate.

To make things more tangible, I’ve created the following table listing the pivotal voters for proposals moving policy toward the president under majority rule and the filibuster*:

Congress	50th vote	60th vote
107 (’01-’02)	Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)	Tim Johnson (D-SD)
108 (’03-’04)	Susan Collins (R-ME)	Tom Carper (D-DE)
109 (’05-’06)	Mike DeWine (R-OH)	Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
110 (’07-’08)	Evan Bayh (D-IN)	Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
111 (’09-)	Kay Hagan (D-NC)	Ben Nelson (D-NE)

Looking at these names, it’s clear that a switch to majority rule would have had a substantively important effect on the ability of the president and his party to enact legislation (with the possible exception of the 110th Congress in which the Democratic House was the key check on President Bush). Under the gridlock zone model of Congress, the filibuter pivot is the key constraint on the president’s legislative agenda (unless the median voter in the House is further away from the president).

To illustrate the point, I constructed a table of key votes selected by Americans for Democratic Action that attracted majority support but failed to reach the 60-vote threshold for cloture:

Year	Majority vote, no cloture
2002	Permanent estate tax repeal
2003	Estrada and Pickering judicial nominations
2004	Medical malpractice damage limits
2005	Patriot Act reauthorization
2006	Estate tax cut (attached to minimum wage increase)
2007	Iraq withdrawal deadline
2008	Reid stimulus proposal

In addition, many other policies would likely have passed the Senate in substantially different form (i.e. more conservative in 2001-2006, more liberal in 2007-2009).

In the end, the institutionalized filibuster adds yet another veto point to a system that already has too many, which weakens the democratic responsiveness of American government. But there’s a very real tradeoff — the price of responsiveness is responsiveness to ideas you don’t like when your party is out of power. There’s no getting around that fact.

* Rankings drawn from the Lewis-Poole Optimal Classification scores for the 107th-111th Senate. I assume the proposal in question would move the status quo toward the president, so the pivotal voter under majority rule would be the 50th most conservative (under Bush) or most liberal (under Obama) since the vice president would break the tie in favor of the president. Similarly, the filibuster pivots are the 41st most liberal (under Bush) or 41st most conservative (under Obama). I adjusted the 111th Senate rankings to account for the replacement of Ted Kennedy with Paul Kirk (who I assume is more liberal than Hagan and Nelson) but otherwise didn’t account for special elections and appointments.

Update 12/9 4:25 PM: Matthew Yglesias argues that “the three progressive initiatives that were blocked by the filibuster [in the table above]—higher minimum wage, Iraq withdrawal deadline, and timely economic stimulus—are considerably more significant than the conservative initiatives that were blocked.”

That may be true, but two other factors are worth considering. First, as I noted above, the filibuster prevented more extreme versions of major conservative proposals such as the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts (correction: passed under reconciliation). Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are presumably a number of other bills in 2001-2006 that might have attracted fifty votes but were never brought to the floor because they couldn’t reach the threshold for cloture. If it’s clear that a bill can’t pass, it’s likely not to be considered. Conversely, the list above is skewed toward nominees (who can’t be amended to mollify the filibuster pivot) and high-salience issues (on which senators are more likely to want a recorded vote even if it fails).

My friends and former Duke mentors Scott de Marchi and Jay Hamilton have just written You Are What You Choose, a book about the factors that predict individual choices in political and economic life. The authors argue convincingly that a battery of personality characteristics they call TRAITS (Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness) are powerful predictors of choice above and beyond the demographic and microtargeting data typically used by marketers.

The genre of scientifically-inspired books on marketing and mass behavior is obviously getting crowded, but I think this book stands out in two important respects. First, it is not a gloss on published research by a journalist, but the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between a political scientist (de Marchi) and an economist (Hamilton) who believe that their disciplines have neglected the role of personality characteristics in decision-making. Second, the authors present a variety of creative tests of their theory on real data, something you almost never see outside the academic literature.

Going forward, there is a great deal of work to be done in reconciling psychology with political science and economics. I hope de Marchi and Hamilton will investigate how their measures perform in comparison with existing scales and literature in psychology.

For more, see Time’s Q&A with the authors and the book’s website.

(Disclosure: I got a free copy of the book from the authors.)

Apologies for the blog hiatus — Thanksgiving and a series of project deadlines intervened. To get things rolling again, here are some quick hits adapted from my Twitter feed, which I’ve been using to post original content more than I expected (follow me!):

–Via Seth Masket, the Denver school board hired a therapist to help resolve its conflicts but now is being forced to let the public in on the therapy session.

-It’s not a good sign when the Afghan foreign minister sounds like Bob the Builder: “Can we do it? That is the main question.”

–Via Bill Simmons, a bizarre Chinese CG animation of what they thought might have happened with Tiger Woods — I expect CNN to start using this technique soon.

-“V” fuels anti-vaccine paranoia.

-How do we convince people that overtreatment can be as bad as undertreatment?

A New York Times story on President Obama’s approval rating yesterday included this unpersuasive claim:

If Congress passes Mr. Obama’s health care bill, the White House — and many independent analysts — believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president’s approval ratings back up.

I can see why the White House might make this argument to wavering Senate moderates, but who are these unnamed “independent analysts” and what are they talking about? I don’t know any reason to expect that Obama will receive a significant approval boost from passage of health care.

Let’s consider the last three presidents who passed a “signature campaign promise” during their first year in office — Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. (I’m omitting George H.W. Bush, who didn’t have much of a domestic agenda.)

-Congress passed Reagan’s budget on June 25, 1981 and passed his tax bill on July 29, 1981. Here are his approval ratings from Gallup from that period:

6/5-8/81	59%
6/19-22/81	59%
[Budget passes June 25]
6/26-29/81	58%
7/17-20/81	60%
7/24-27/81	56%
[Tax bill passes July 29]
7/31-8/3/81	60%
8/14-17/81	60%

Do you see an approval boost? I don’t.

-Bill Clinton signed his deficit reduction bill on August 10, 1993 (the major votes were on August 5 and 6). You can argue about whether this was a “signature campaign promise” (Clinton increased his focus on the deficit after taking office), but it was the major legislative accomplishment of his first year in office and there’s no evidence he received a boost from it:

6/29-30/93	46%
7/9-11/93	45%
7/19-21/93	42%
[Bill passes August 5-6]
8/8-10/93	44 %
[Bill signed August 10]
9/10-12/93	47

-Finally, there’s George W. Bush, who passed his tax cut bill on May 26, 2001 and signed it into law on June 7, 2001 — as with the previous two examples, there was no discernable bump in approval (I’m omitting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill, but the story is the same there):

4/20-22/01	62%
5/7-9/01	53%
[Bill passes May 26, signed June 7]
6/8-10/01	55%
6/11-17/01	55%
6/28-7/1/01	52%
7/10-11/01	50%

The larger story here is that many journalists and political operatives have a wildly exaggerated view of the president’s ability to change public opinion outside of a foreign policy context (as with the Obama’s health care speech). The reality is that Obama, like his predecessors, is largely at the mercy of the economy and external events unless a new war or foreign policy crisis emerges.

Update 11/25 8:50 PM: Via a reader comment on Pollster, here’s another useful comparison — LBJ’s approval numbers when Medicare was enacted (it passed Congress July 27-28, 1965, and was signed into law on July 30):

5/13-18/65	70%
6/4-9/65	69%
6/24-29/65	66%
7/16-21/65	66%
[Bill passes July 27-28, signed July 30]
8/5-10/65	65%
8/27-9/1/65	64%

The same conclusion applies.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Via Ben Smith, an utterly baseless claim by Sarah Palin that Obama does not “acknowledge the sacrifices” of US military:

“There’s been a lack of acknowledgment by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country,” Palin said during an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women — our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters — are providing this country to keep us safe.”

“They’re making sacrifices,” said Palin, who visited the Army base at Fort Bragg on Monday as part of her ongoing book tour. “They’re putting so much on hold right now so that the homeland can be safe and they can fight for democratic ideals around our world. I want to see more acknowledgment and more respect given to them.”

Mrs. Palin, let me Google that for you — here are just a few examples from the first page of search results:

February 27 (speaking to the troops in Iraq): “Under enormous strain and under enormous sacrifice, through controversy and difficulty and politics, you’ve kept your eyes focused on just doing your job.”

Memorial Day address: “These are some of the ways we can, must, and will honor the service of our troops and the sacrifice of their families.”

June 30: “Through tour after tour of duty, our troops have overcome every obstacle to extend this precious opportunity to the Iraqi people. These women and men are not always in the headlines, but they’re in our hearts and prayers, and we will forever honor their selfless service and sacrifice, as well as the service and sacrifice of their families.”

November 20 (speaking to the troops in North Korea): [W]hile you made sacrifices that few Americans will ever truly understand, I want to assure you — every American appreciates what you do. I say today, on behalf of the American people: We thank you for your service. We honor you for your sacrifices. And just as you’ve fulfilled your responsibilities to your nation, your nation will fulfill its responsibilities to you.

I could go on (feel free to peruse the results), but the point is clear — Palin’s suggestion that Obama hasn’t “acknowledge[d] the sacrifice” of US troops is simply false.

The only thing worse than pretending to read minds is offering long-distance diagnoses of mental illness in your political opponents — a practice that has become increasingly common among pundits on the left and right.

In the last few weeks, the board-certified psychiatrist trio of Michelle Goldberg, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage have diagnosed Sarah Palin and Barack Obama with a variety of mental disorders. Instead of the swami, I’m debuting a new graphic for bogus pundit psychiatry — Lucy’s psychiatric booth from Peanuts.

Here’s Goldberg, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect, diagnosing Palin at The Daily Beast:

Palin, however, lies when there’s little to be gained by lying, and she lies when everyone knows the truth. If Bill Clinton were a Palin-style liar, he’d still be insisting that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was entirely chaste, or he’d claim that he never denied it in the first place. If Hillary Clinton lied like Palin, she’d put the Bosnia anecdote in her next memoir. Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, coupled with her recent media appearances, evinces a dishonesty that seems as much clinical as opportunistic. Maybe Palin really does suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.

And here are transcripts of Glenn Beck on Fox News and Michael Savage on his syndicated radio show courtesy of Media Matters:

Beck and psychiatrist [ and Fox News contributor Keith] Ablow not psychoanalyzing the president — just discussing what’s “wrong” with him. On the November 11 edition of his Fox News program, Beck stated to Ablow: “I wrote to you, and I said, ‘Do you see anything wrong here as a — ‘ I’m not asking you to psychoanalyze the president. I’m saying, psychoanalyze the American people. Are we crazy for saying something is not right?” In his reply, Ablow stated: “We’re not crazy for saying something’s not right. It’s a little crazy that more people aren’t saying it more loudly.” Ablow later stated: “[T]here is a big, cavernous gulf, apparently, between the president’s ability to generate emotion and charisma and gripping words that move people when he’s scripted. And then, when there’s less time to prepare, there’s some sort of lack of connectedness, a true lack of connectedness with at least what moves the majority of us.” In discussing Obama’s statements about the Fort Hood shooting, which Beck claimed were “disconnected,” Ablow said: “[I]f he’s not scripted to deliver the emotional cues, if he’s not scripted to have lots of time and a teleprompter to do it, then he tends to stumble. And this was a huge stumble. This was a big, big window on the man’s soul, I think.” [Fox News’ Glenn Beck, 11/11/09]

Savage’s psychoanalysis: Obama has “deep psychological problems,” “deep-seated inferiority feelings.” While discussing Obama’s bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito, Savage stated that “this man has deep psychological problems” and that “since we know he is only a man, and therefore since all men suffer from psychological problems, is it not logical to assume that he may have psychological problems? And if so, what are his psychological problems, and how do they affect this man’s behavior and his overt contempt for America, its history, and its people and his love of everything third-world?” He later claimed that “you start to put a picture together of a guy who has such deep-seated inferiority feelings, it seems as though he’s looking for his father all over the world.” [Talk Radio Network’s The Savage Nation, 11/17/09]

Update 11/25 8:30 AM: See also Bob Somerby on the questionable factual basis for Goldberg’s claims about Palin’s lying.