Brendan Nyhan

Disturbing poll on beliefs about Obama's birth

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

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

Here are the details:

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

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

Yes      77
No       11
Not sure 12

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

         Yes   No   Not sure
Dem       93    4    3
Rep       42   28   30
Ind       83    8    9

Northeast 93    4    3
South     47   23   30
Midwest   90    6    4
West      87    7    6

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

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

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

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

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

Overstating public incoherence on the deficit

Matthew Yglesias calls the public "ill-informed and hypocritical" based on a New York Times poll that found "Most Americans continue to want the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy... [y]et at the same time, most oppose some proposed solution for decreasing it."

The problem, however, is that the available evidence doesn't support Yglesias's conclusion (which is encouraged by the way the poll is framed in the Times). When you look at the raw poll results (PDF), you'll see that the public prefers reducing the deficit to stimulating the economy 58%-35%, but 53% oppose cuts in public services and 56% oppose higher taxes. Those numbers may seem "ill-informed and hypocritical," but the problem is that we're dealing with aggregate data (this is what is known as an ecological inference problem). We can't draw any strong conclusions about the proportion of individual members of the public who have incoherent preferences about deficit reduction without access to the raw data. Ideally, we would break out the members of the public who advocate deficit reduction over stimulus and see how many of them oppose both higher taxes and reduced services. That's the quantity of interest, but it's unfortunately not available to us at this point.

Update 7/30 12:12 PM: Yglesias has generously updated his post to note that you "can't infer very much about individual preferences from this aggregate data."

Update 7/30 1:59 PM: Per Steve Greene's comment below, I want to make clear that there is (of course) substantial evidence that many individuals have contradictory preferences on public policy issues. It is therefore quite possible that the Times poll data will reveal that many people have incoherent views on deficit reduction. My purpose in writing this post was simply to clarify that we can't reach such a conclusion on the basis of aggregate data alone. Moreover, we should be cautious in condemning "the public" as a whole for incoherence when the proportion of the population that support deficit reduction but oppose any measures to achieve it might be relatively small.

Eugene Robinson reads Sgt. Crowley's mind

Bob Somerby has caught another pundit exercising his psychic powers in the Henry Louis Gates affair. Following in Judith Warner's footsteps, the Washington Post's columnist Eugene Robinson has published a column in which he purports to read Crowley's mind (my emphasis):

[F]or the sake of argument, let's assume that Crowley's version of the incident is true -- that Gates, from the outset, was accusatory, aggressive and even obnoxious, addressing the officer with an air of highhanded superiority. Let's assume he really recited the Big Cheese mantra: "You have no idea who you're messing with."

I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It's not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn't have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved -- uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop -- that Crowley couldn't abide.

As Somerby points out, Robinson uses the weasel word "[a]pparently" to justify his projection of thoughts into Crowley's head, then uses the word "uppity" to insinuate that the police officer's actions were racially motivated. Unfortunately, he can't possibly know any of this to be true. It's a journalistic act as inexcusable as George Will's distortions of climate data, but one that's likely to draw far less attention.

More conservatives denounce birthers

Time to add Bill Pascoe, a former GOP operative now blogging at CQ Politics, the editors of National Review (via Andrew Sullivan), and Mary Katherine Ham of The Weekly Standard to the growing list of conservatives (headed by Michael Medved) who have denounced the Obama birth certificate myth. As I noted yesterday, even Ann Coulter and American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. have disowned it. When will leading members of the GOP do the same?

Update 7/29 11:39 AM: Per Jay's comment below, I've retitled this post (previously, it was "More conservatives exit birther bandwagon").

Update 7/29 12:38 PM: Per the last sentence of the post, I'm delighted to see that GOP chairman Michael Steele has finally spoken out against the birther movement (via Ben Smith). Here's the key portion of the statement that was provided to Greg Sargent by an RNC spokesperson: "Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen."

Update 7/29 3:09 PM: One step forward, two steps back -- conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt is also denouncing the myth, but Rep. Roy Blunt just called the issue a "legitimate question" and Rep. Louie Gohmert signed on yesterday as a cosponsor of Rep. Bill Posey's birther-inspired bill in Congress.

Dobbs: "Obama is a citizen ... in my opinion"

Last night Lou Dobbs revisited the Obama birth certificate misperception on his CNN show. With pressure growing against him and his network, he did not encourage birther conspiracy theories in his normal fashion. However, even while backtracking on the issue, Dobbs twice mischaracterized Obama's citizenship as a matter of opinion rather than fact (my emphasis):

New developments tonight in the controversy over the president's birth certificate. Yesterday the director of the Hawaii Department of Health issued another statement that she had, in fact, seen Barack Obama's original so-called long form birth certificate on file with the Department's Office of Vital Records. That official repeated her opinion that the president was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4th, 1961.

...A left wing group's liberal mainstream media have stepped up some attacks on me for reporting on the controversy over the president's birth certificate when in fact I've stated many times that President Obama is a citizen of this country in my opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, called on CNN to fire me for my even discussing the story.

At this point, Obama's citizenship is proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It's absurd for anyone on "The Most Trusted Name in News" to be treating it as a matter of opinion.

Meanwhile, CNN president Jon Klein, who backed down from a memo declaring the birther issue "dead" and continues to allow Dobbs to cover the issue, got zinged during a Q&A with TV reporters yesterday (via Media Matters):

Q: If Dobbs wanted to explore whether the British had won the Revolutionary War, would that be a legitimate topic?

A: It would not be legitimate for Lou or anyone else at CNN to explore whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. That's why he hasn't done that. And I think the people who are making noise about that have to look at closely what the discussions have been. It's all about the phenomenon of doubters.

Nonsense. Let the shaming continue...

Michael Medved: Myth-busting hero

To change elite incentives, we need to not only shame elites who promote misperceptions like the Obama birth certificate myth but reward those who debunk them, especially on the side that is promoting the myth. That's why we should honor Michael Medved, a conservative talk radio host, for taking a leading role in fighting the birth certificate myth. His decision to actively combat this misperception is a real act of political courage. It's not easy to dissent within the conservative movement, and Medved says his decision to do so has provoked a larger backlash from his listeners than any other stance he's taken on his show. Some are already trying to get stations to drop it from the air. Hopefully his increased national visibility as a voice of reason on this issue means that the net effect of his stance will be positive.

Shaming CNN and the birthers in Congress

With my research indicating that corrections are frequently ineffective (here and here), I've recently argued that the most effective way to combat misperceptions is to shame the elites that promote them. It's time to put that strategy to work.

Specifically, we've reached a crucial moment in the debate over the increasingly popular misperception that President Obama is not a citizen of this country. It has now been endorsed by conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh, promoted by CNN's Lou Dobbs, and reinforced by ten GOP members of Congress who are backing a birther-inspired bill about birth certificate requirements for presidential candidates. Other GOP members recently failed to disown the myth in interviews with Mike Stark of Huffington Post.

Last week, Dobbs drew national attention to the issue and was widely mocked by commentators. And yet CNN president Jon Klein, who called the story "dead" in an internal email that was made public, later seemed to back down and has allowed Dobbs to continue to raise the issue on his network.

We are therefore at a key turning point in the debate. Reputational pressure must be applied to force elites to stop promoting this scurrilous rumor. It shouldn't be hard -- a number of prominent conservatives have already condemned the rumor as false. Even hardcore anti-Clinton conspiracists like Ann Coulter and R. Emmett Tyrell have disowned it. So why can't CNN stop covering it? Every day that they fail to do so is an embarrassment to all of the journalists who work there. The same principle applies to the GOP, which needs to use its institutional leverage against members who fail to disown the myth.

Update 7/28 10:42 AM: I've corrected this post to remove criticism of Rep. Michelle Bachmann for blocking a vote on a resolution that described Hawaii as Obama's birthplace -- my source for the claim, Think Progress, appears to have misinterpreted Bachmann's procedal objection. (I should take my own advice about trusting the Center for American Progress.)

Reading the minds of Gates and Crowley

America's pundits are rushing to meet the demand for commentary on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr by Cambridge police officer James Crowley. A lack of agreed-upon facts is no obstacle!

For example, Bob Somerby flags Judith Warner asserting in the New York Times that Crowley's report is wrong about a disputed fact (whether Gates referred to Crowley's mother) and then purporting to reveal the inner thoughts of the two men:

Perhaps the most telling moment in Sgt. James Crowley’s account of his now epoch-defining arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. occurs about three-quarters of the way through the report that the officer subsequently filed with the Cambridge Police Department.

In his story of their verbal tussle, Crowley describes himself as overwhelmed by the noise in Gates’s kitchen, as the black professor loudly accused the white cop of racial profiling. Seeing that Gates could not be persuaded to use an inside voice, Crowley retreated to the street, inviting Gates to join him outdoors.

“Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside,” Gates allegedly told him.

Gates denied referring to Crowley’s mama. “The idea that I would, in a vulnerable position talk about the man’s mother is absurd,” he told Gayle King of Sirius radio. “I don’t talk about people’s mothers … You could get killed talking about somebody’s mother in the barbershop, let alone with a white police officer … I think they did some historical research, and watched some episodes of ‘Good Times.’”

I think there’s more to it than that. I think it’s very likely that Crowley really does believe he heard the insult to his mother. And that’s because Gates wasn’t the only one in that house, on that day, whose thoughts were traveling well-worn grooves chiseled by race. Both men were, consciously or not, following scripts in their heads, stories of vulnerability and grievance much more meaningful than their actual exchange.

Unfortunately, Swami Warner doesn't actually know what happened between Gates and Crowley, and she certainly doesn't know what their thoughts were as the exchange took place. That's a level of epistemological doubt she's unwilling to acknowledge. She concedes later that "We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind," but as Somerby points out, the adverb "precisely" is absurd; we simply have no idea what Crowley was thinking. What's missing from Warner's vocabulary -- and that of most elite pundits -- is one simple phrase: I don't know.

The end of the Obama honeymoon

Just to briefly elaborate on the point I made last week, here are comparable plots of President Obama's overall job approval and approval of his handling of health care:

As you can see, what's happening on health care is a leading indicator of the end of Obama's honeymoon period. As we return to our normal, highly polarized political climate, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will disapprove of a Democratic president's performance in office and his handling of high-salience issues, especially in a bad economy. As a result, Obama's numbers will inevitably decline across the board -- this reality shouldn't be surprising to anyone who works in or reports on politics.

Going forward, we should focus on more important questions. First, how much will Obama's approval numbers decline? Given the state of the economy, it wouldn't be surprising to see him in the low- to mid-40s by the end of the year. Second, what is the distribution of opinion on Obama's handling of health care? Aggregate public opinion on the issue is less relevant than how it's playing in the states of key senators whose votes will determine the fate of the legislation in Congress.

The Dadaist Sarah Palin

The resentment politics of Sarah Palin have always had a Dadaist quality to them, as in this bizarre passage about the media from her farewell speech to Alaska (via the New York Post and Salon.com):

"First, some straight talk for some -- just some -- in the media because another right protected for all of us [by the military] is freedom of the press. You have such important jobs reporting facts and informing the electorate and exerting power to influence. You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you and that's why our troops are willing to die for you. So how about in honor of the American soldier you quit making things up?" (3:56-4:40 in the YouTube clip below)

What does "the American soldier" have to do with the way the media covers her? It's a total non sequitur. You can say the military protects everything in the US. Our troops are no more or less relevant to the press than they are to any other institution in America. It's all too reminiscent of the way the Bush administration repeatedly invoked the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to try to silence dissent after the fact (though notably less coherent).

More Maddow follies on MSNBC

Back in April, I flagged Bob Somerby's work on how Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show was recapitulating the flaws of cable news (ideologically-motivated dissembling and ratings-driven sensationalism) in a liberal format.

Somerby is back on the Maddow beat this week and his conclusions are just as depressing. Like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, Maddow has been pandering to her audience with a tabloid-like focus on Republican sex scandals. And Somerby busts her blatantly misquoting Pat Buchanan after his segment to put him in a less favorable light.

Unfortunately, very few comentators want to defend Buchanan, especially on the issue of race, so you're not likely to hear much about this. More generally, there's an incentive problem that extends to most cable news shows -- many media elites are likely to avoid criticizing Maddow because they want to get booked on the show. Finally, within liberal circles, there's a tendency to rationalize Maddow's behavior by saying that she's still better than comparable conservatives and that the cable news medium is at fault. As a result, there's largely been a blackout on critical perspectives on her show.

The collapse of Sarah Palin

The Washington Post is reporting that a new ABC/WP poll shows a major decline in Sarah Palin's favorability ratings. Her favorables have dropped from a peak of 58% after the GOP convention in September to 40% now, while her unfavorables have surged from a low of 28% to 53% now. Her 40/53 favorable-unfavorable ratio puts her into Hillary/Bush/Cheney territory as one of the most polarizing figures in American politics -- quite an achievement for someone who was a completely unknown less than a year ago.

It's almost impossible to imagine Palin getting the GOP nomination in 2012 at this point (though Intrade still puts the probability at 16%). With numbers like that, her general election prospects are dim, and the Post poll shows growing doubts about her among Republicans as well:

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents continue to rank Palin among the top three contenders in the run-up to 2012, however, with 70 percent of Republicans viewing her in a positive light in the new poll. But her support within the GOP has deteriorated from its pre-election levels, including a sharp drop in the number holding "strongly favorable" impressions of her.

And while Palin's most avid following is still among white evangelical Protestants, a core GOP constituency, and conservatives, far fewer in these groups have "strongly favorable" opinions of her than did so last fall.

...Perhaps more vexing for Palin's national political aspirations, however, is that 57 percent of Americans say she does not understand complex issues, while 37 percent think she does, a nine-percentage-point drop from a poll conducted in September just before her debate with now-Vice President Biden. The biggest decline on the question came among Republicans, nearly four in 10 of whom now say she does not understand complex issues. That figure is 70 percent among Democrats and 58 percent among independents.

Her favorability numbers also stack up extremely poorly against the rest of the expected 2012 field, as this graph illustrates:

The candidates are ordered left to right by their favorable-unfavorable ratio in the most recent poll on Pollingreport.com. As you can see, Palin's numbers are even worse than Newt Gingrich (!) -- the other highly polarizing candidate -- and she has less room to change her image because so many Americans already have an impression of her. By contrast, Romney, Huckabee, Jindal, and Pawlenty start the race without that sort of baggage and are therefore much more likely to make a serious run for the nomination.

To be sure, it's not impossible to come back from numbers like Palin's. Hillary Clinton overcame numbers that were nearly as bad and almost won the Democratic presidential nomination, but she did so with a great deal of hard work and discipline -- qualities that Palin appears to lack. Runner's World photo spreads, feuds with David Letterman, and useless policy op-eds are not going to turn her image around anytime soon.

(Cross-posted at Pollster.com)

Misperception interview coming up

I'll be talking misperceptions on KTRS 550 AM in St. Louis at 11:15 AM EST for those who are interested.

Amateur drama critics on Obama presser

The short-attention-span press corps was bored by the policy details during the President's "snoozer" press conference and, not surprisingly, devoted much of its coverage to amateur theater criticism instead. His hair looked more gray! He was more passionate about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.! (Etc.)

Much of the coverage of health care reminds me of David Broder's description of how he "almost nodded off" during Al Gore's speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000 and Ted Koppel's admission that the details of the Gore-Bush debate over taxes "turns [his] brains to mush." This is why we need reporters and pundits with policy expertise, not aspirations to be the next Maureen Dowd (or Broder or Koppel).

Disturbing growth in "birther" movement

It's pretty shocking to see Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican from Delaware, being berated by people who think President Obama isn't a citizen of this country:

Unfortunately, things are only going to get worse. CNN's Lou Dobbs recently treated the controversy as a legitimate issue on his radio show (audio), country singer Pat Boone is touting it on Newsmax.com, the Fox News website Fox Nation is promoting it, Liz Cheney is refusing to say it's false, and -- most ominously -- Rush Limbaugh is actively endorsing the myth (via Ambinder). And these are just the latest developments in a long series of statements by conservative media commentators and analysts promoting the myth.

As the Washington Independent's David Weigel and The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder have pointed out, the potency of this issue with the hardcore conservative base is putting Republicans in a difficult position. Many of them are already giving the myth greater legitimacy. In particular, Rep. Bill Posey's birther-inspired bill requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificate is up to nine GOP co-sponsors in the House and is likely to attract more in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, growing Republican and conservative support means the birth certificate myth will spread widely among the public, particularly among the conservative base, and probably supplant the related Obama Muslim myth as the #1 misperception about the president. Given how difficult it is to correct misperceptions, this is an ominous development -- even well-intentioned debunkings like the one administered by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night are likely to fail.

Most importantly, the attention being paid to this myth -- which suggests that the President of the United States is illegitimate -- is sadly reminiscent of the way that many conservatives inside and outside of Congress lost their minds during the Clinton administration. Are we headed down that same road again? Is the birth certificate myth the equivalent of the conspiracy theory that Clinton had Vince Foster murdered? (Foster's suicide took place on July 20, 1993 -- almost the same point in Clinton's administration. Things spiraled out of control soon afterward.) It's a scary thought.

Leonhardt on health care reform landscape

David Leonhardt of the New York Times has written the single best overview of the political and policy challenges facing the Obama administration in its efforts to reform health care -- it's well worth a read.

Obama's approval drop not surprising

If you follow politics for long enough, you may notice that coverage of presidential approval suffers from a bizarre ahistoricism. Reporters typically have almost no understanding of the forces that drive presidential approval or the patterns it tends to follow during the course of a president's time in office.

That's why it's amusing to see so many people acting like it's news that approval of President Obama's handling of health care and overall job performance numbers are trending downward (particularly among independents and Republicans). Of course his numbers are going down! It's been a virtual certainty that this transition would take place since the day Obama took office. The only question was when it would happen and how far down they would go.

The reason is simple. Presidential approval tends to decline after the honeymoon period as the opposition party begins to be more critical of the president. These messages remind opposition party members and sympathetic independents why they dislike the president. As a result, his approval numbers go down. This decline was likely to be especially significant in Obama's case because his initial Gallup approval levels were the highest for any president since JFK.*

The same reasoning applies to approval of Obama's handling of health care, which has also declined. At first, Obama benefitted from what the political scientist John Zaller calls a one-message environment in which Congressional Republicans offered platitudes about their desire to work with him on health care. However, as the legislative process has moved forward, the GOP and its allies in the press have begun to aggressively attack his approach to the issue. As such, Republicans and sympathetic independents in the electorate are now more likely to tell pollsters that they don't approve of Obama's handling of the issue.

The upside for Obama is that these numbers don't seem to indicate anything specific about the prospects for his health care plan. It would be surprising if the public didn't start to split along partisan lines at this point given the nature of the proposal. There isn't much information here that the two parties couldn't have anticipated (though it would be helpful to put the numbers in context -- how do Obama's health care approval numbers compare to, say, Clinton's in July 1993?)

The downside, however, is that Obama's plan to rally the public to support health care reform in the coming weeks is unlikely to change these numbers, as Mickey Kaus reminds us:

When was the last time a President's campaign style attempt to sell a policy has actually succeeded in selling the policy? I can't remember it. I can remember lots of flops (e.g.,Bush on Social Security). Traditional trips to non-Beltway places like Cleveland get heavily filtered by the media, for example. Prime time news conferences don't get huge ratings, right?

In general, political scientists have found that presidential efforts to change public opinion on domestic policy initiatives are rarely successful. The combination of the media filter and the offsetting effects of opposition messages tends to neutralize White House sales campaigns.

In a highly polarized era, opinion on the president and his policy proposals is likely to be, well, highly polarized. Again, there's not a lot of news here. The media should instead be focusing on the Senate, which is where the fate of health care legislation will be decided.

* In an article for National Journal, Mark Blumenthal attributes the timing of the decline to the state of the economy. He may be right -- there's no doubt that economic perceptions influence approval. But it's hard to isolate one factor as the cause of Obama's decline in approval with such a limited amount of data.

Update 7/21 12:34 PM: The other reason it shouldn't be surprising that Obama's numbers are declining is that the aggregate preference of the electorate for more or less government -- what the political scientist James Stimson calls public mood -- tends to move in the opposite direction of a dominant governing party. His current plot of mood data for 1952-2008 illustrates the point:

As such, we should expect the public to move in a conservative direction over the next few years.

Update 7/21 2:14 PM: More ahistoricism from Drudge, who is claiming it's a "danger sign" that Obama's approval levels are less than Carter's were at this point in his presidency:

In fact, however, Carter was quite popular in the first year of his presidency -- more popular, in fact, than George W. Bush pre-9/11. I'm pretty sure Drudge didn't see that as a "danger sign" for Bush at the time.

(PS From a graphical perspective, note also how Drudge's extremely narrow graphic exaggerates the negative slope of Obama's approval trajectory.)

Update 7/21 3:48 PM: For more on Obama's declining health care approval numbers, see this new post from Gallup, which finds that more people disapprove of Obama (50%) on the issue than approve (44%). By contrast, the Post poll linked above finds 49% approve of how Obama has handled health care and 44% disapprove.

Post & WSJ repeat bogus "hiring tax" claim

Just like in 1993-1994, the prospect of health care reform has unleashed a wave of misleading claims and bad reporting.

The latest example is the suggestion that a proposal to levy a tax on employers who don't provide health care for their employeees would hinder the economic recovery, which was recently made by GMU's Brian Caplan. But as Kevin Drum pointed out, the provision wouldn't go into effect until 2013 (see pp. 179-188 of the House bill PDF) -- long after the recession is likely to be over.

Unfortunately, the meme is likely to continue to circulate. Here's the New York Post making an identical claim in an editorial Thursday:

Having abandoned any notion of lightening the load with spending cuts, House Democrats have put forward a 1,000-plus-page proposal dripping with new taxes, surcharges and fees.

The biggest losers? Small businesses -- companies with as few as five employees, who'll have to pay a penalty of up to 8 percent of income unless they provide their workers with health insurance.

Now, these are the same businesses the administration thinks will hire workers laid off during the recession. But why would they do that if Washington effectively imposes a hiring tax?

And here's the Wall Street Journal repeating the claim in an editorial today:

Unemployment is at 9.5% and rising, but Democrats will nonetheless impose a new eight percentage point payroll tax on employers who don't provide health insurance for employees. This is on top of the current 15% payroll tax, and in addition to a new 2.5-percentage point tax on individuals who don't buy health insurance. This means that any employer with more than $400,000 in payroll would have to pay at least 25% above the salary to hire someone.

Note how both the Post and the WSJ suggest that the tax would take effect immediately (and therefore prolong the recession) without ever making the claim directly. In this way, they can maintain plausible deniability while still misleading the vast majority of their readers.

Goldblum corrects Goldblum death rumor

Here's one strategy that is likely to be effective at correcting a misperception about current events:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum

Politico reporters can read minds!

Politico has made quite a splash since it was founded in 2007, in part because of a relentless focus on creating buzzworthy stories. Its pursuit of that goal has often resulted in coverage that pushes various pathologies of the political media to a new level. At this point, no publication can match Politico's hyper-focused coverage of politics and process, minute-by-minute accounts of the news cycle, and personality-driven coverage of politicians.

One especially disturbing example of the way Politico has supercharged news media pathologies is its formalization of the all-too-common practice of faux journalistic mind-reading. As I've shown over and over again, reporters and pundits frequently make claims about politicians' inner thoughts that can't possibly be verified in order to create dramatic narratives. But these claims are usually made without quotation marks. Politico has now started to write whole articles centered on fake inner monologues attributed to politicians.

Back in March, I pointed out that Politico editor John F. Harris and reporter Jonathan Martin had written an article titled "What Obama said and what he meant" that purported to provide a "translation" of the President's statements at a press conference.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown wrote a similar piece titled "Reading Barack Obama's mind on health care" (via TPM). In it, she writes that she did "a little imaginary spelunking in the caves of the presidential mind and came up with this take on what Obama might really be thinking when it comes to health care." In other words, she made it up.

If this is the new model for political journalism, we're in trouble.

More on how TPM has moved downmarket

A few weeks ago, I commented on the move downmarket by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, a formerly excellent blog* that increasingly panders to its liberal audience with outrageous language, faux mind-reading, unsupported factual claims, and salacious details of conservative scandals.

The example I focused on was the wall-to-wall coverage of John Ensign's affair, including (bizarrely) a slideshow of the house owned by Ensign's staffers. Since then, the pattern of over-the-top Ensign coverage has continued, culminating in a post by TPM founder Josh Marshall pondering the relative emasculation of Ensign and his accuser:

There's a lot of salacious back and forth today about the Ensign scandal. But beneath the tabloid headlines there's a critical question that needs to be asked:

Which is more emasculating? Getting paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife? Or being a fifty-something United States senator and still needing mom and dad to cut the check to pay off your mistress and her husband?

Truly, no one but a media economist could have predicted back in 2000 or 2001 that Josh Marshall -- a wonky political journalist with graduate training in history -- would be writing posts about how "emasculating" it is for someone be "paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife." There's no better illustration of the power of commercial incentives to shape media content.

*At times, TPM is still an excellent news source, but the substantive blogging on which it made its reputation is now the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time I'd characterize its content as something akin to talk radio for liberals.

(Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign's opponent, Ed Bernstein.)

Sarah Palin in Runner's World!?

I know politicians love soft news coverage, but the strategy of seeking out non-political outlets works better for wonky politicians who need to be humanized. That's why I don't understand the decision for Sarah Palin to do a story with Runner's World in their August issue (presumably completed before her bizarre resignation). It's the opposite of the serious, policy-focused coverage she so desperately needs. If you haven't seen it, the interview isn't so bad, but the posed pictures are pretty embarrassing. That's why politicians have communications staff around -- to prevent pictures like that from being taken. At this point, the Runner's World story is obviously the least of her problems, but it does further illustrate the misguided approach she and her advisers have taken to managing her career.

NPR "On the Media" interview on corrections

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.)

Nyhan world HQ: Moved

Apologies for the lack of posts -- Nyhan world HQ has just been moved to Ann Arbor. More soon...