I'm a bit surprised, looking back, that I haven't written more about Stephen Moore. There's this piece, but given how often I've rolled my eyes at Moore's smiling regurgitation of hackneyed talking points and false statements that he has to know are wrong, I expected to find more. I guess, despite his ability to make me roll my eyes, he hasn't had much to say that was particularly interesting. You would think any self-respecting organization that falls under the umbrella term, "Think Tank", would have kicked Moore to the curb long ago... but he has a sinecure at the Heritage Foundation.
So what brings Moore to mind? The declaration by Miriam Pepper, editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star, that "I won’t be running anything else from Stephen Moore" due to his numerous factual errors. (I think it's fair to say that the statements were factually incorrect, but I'm not so sure that they should be called "errors".)
"You assume Heritage has edited these pieces too," Pepper says. "But, lesson learned. There will be no future Heritage pieces published that don’t get thorough factchecking."
She might assume Heritage is concerned that its fellows push accurate facts and information. But let's just say, Moore's been doing this type of thing for a long time....
On June 14, Sunni rebels threatened Baghdad after seizing much of Iraq — and President Obama fearlessly played a round at the Sunnylands Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
The next day, the militants posted pictures of their mass execution of Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces — and Obama boldly teed off again, at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate.
These split-screen scenes were reminiscent of the weekend in March when Russia was about to annex Crimea. Obama played golf both Saturday and Sunday at Key Largo, Fla.’s Ocean Reef resort with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning and former NFL player Ahmad Rashad.
It’s enough to make one wish the president would take up a different pastime — like, say, stamp collecting.
Yes, a president needs down time. And, yes, he can run the country whether he’s in a sand trap or the Situation Room. But Obama’s golf habit needlessly hands his critics a gimme.
Only if reporters like Milbank treat it as a serious accusation, rather than dismissing it as tripe.
Former vice president Dick Cheney, writing in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz, complained: “Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing.” House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers gave a TV interview asking Obama to “please come back from the golf course” and find an Iraq solution.
An appropriate response to Rogers might be, "What do you imagine that the President might do to solve Iraq's problems that he is not already doing?" That would go for the Cheneys as well, but the absurdity of the Cheney accusation triggered another memory in Milbank:
I was one of the many who had fun with George W. Bush’s classic tee shot in 2002: “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” But as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz noted, Bush hung up his spikes after the Iraq invasion. (He busied himself with other leisure pursuits, such as clearing brush.)
Bush earned himself the jokes not by playing golf, but by foolishly adding the "Now watch this drive" line to what should have been a serious response to a serious issue. Had Bush stopped before that final sentence, it would have been just another day on the golf course. Don't take it from me -- take it from Milbank:
Don't watch this drive. In his first three years in office, Bush played golf 16 times. But, according to the White House's unofficial statistician, CBS News's Mark Knoller, Bush has not teed off since Oct. 13, 2003. Some muse that Bush was cowed by filmmaker Michael Moore's mocking of Bush's golf habit in "Fahrenheit 9/11" which featured footage of Bush mixing remarks on Middle East violence with a command to "watch this drive." But Bush's golf ban far predates the Moore film and seems to coincide with Bush's discovery of mountain biking -- a better sport for appealing to the common man.
For goodness sake, even Dwight Eisenhower played golf. Woodrow Wilson played golf. Harry Truman didn't play golf at all, so there's no inference to be drawn from his abstention. And really -- the staged brush clearing photo ops on the ranch G.W. sold immediately upon retiring from the White House? Milbank believed that stuff?
As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who dubbed the Crawford digs a "ranchette," said in 2004, "Bush is always inviting the media out to take pictures of him clearing brush. In my experience real ranchers spend virtually no time clearing brush. They're usually tending cattle....the cattle you see as part of the photo op aren't even his. They're somebody else's that he rents the land to."
Milbank complains,
The image problem isn’t from leisure activity per se but the type of leisure activity. A majority of Americans now believes that Obama doesn’t understand their problems, and images of him playing golf — perceived, fairly or not, as a rich man’s game — confirms this out-of-touch reputation.
Yet Reagan was a man of the people, and G.W. was a guy you would want to drink a beer with.... Go figure. Maybe Milbank would have the President take up a real "man of the people" hobby, like watercolor portraiture?
This is similar to the problem that dogged Mitt Romney, and now Hillary Clinton. The Post’s Philip Rucker this week noted that influential Democrats are concerned that her “rarefied, cloistered lifestyle could jeopardize the Democratic Party’s historic edge with the middle class.”
Wait... this happened because Hillary Clinton plays too much golf? Because if not, perhaps opportunistic demagogues like Rogers and Cheney aren't sincere in their mention of golf, but are using it as a basis for a criticism that they would be making no matter what the President were doing in his leisure time. Ya think? And as for Mitt Romney, he doesn't play golf, either... so it's actually possible to be perceived as elitist and out-of-touch without playing golf? Who would have thought....
Perhaps this is the real problem....
The game has driven another wedge between the president and White House reporters who, during their turns on pool duty, chronicle with envy his weekly outings with friends and aides.
“Beautiful day for hitting the links,” the Washington Examiner’s Susan Crabtree wrote from Fort Belvoir. “Unfortunately pool is headed to the base rec center for the duration.”
“Looked like a nice place to play golf,” wrote the Houston Chronicle’s Kevin Diaz from the “exclusive” Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, “at least from the maintenance shed where pool spent the day.”
How... moving. It must be tough to have to watch the President from a distance, rather than getting an up-close view as you're handed packaged talking points and photo ops.
Heck, if Iraq is so much more serious than golf, why are reporters following the President to a golf course where they know they won't get a story? Why is Milbank writing a story about those poor, unfortunate reporters? Think of all the shoe leather and column inches they could be devoting to stories on Iraq! I have to ask, though, did Milbank offer similar sympathy to White House reporters when they watched G.W. race off on his mountain bike?
I know that he has columns to write and deadlines to meet, but when his game is on Milbank can do so much better than this.
The Washington Post tells us what some conspiracy theorists have to say about the prosecution of JPMorgan Chase for the London Whale fiasco and for the sins of its acquired companies leading up to the financial crisis:
We’re less impressed by the more backward-looking attack on JPMorgan for allegedly misleading investors about the quality of securities it marketed before the crash. Mr. Dimon reportedly is facing a demand for $11 billion in fines and other payments to settle the case, under threat of a Justice Department criminal investigation. Yet roughly 70 percent of the securities at issue were concocted not by JPMorgan but by two institutions, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, that it acquired in 2008. Among the investors supposedly ripped off were the sophisticated government-sponsored enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As was inevitable, some say the case is payback for Mr. Dimon’s criticism of Obama adminstration policy.
The editorial continues,
We don’t take that view; nor do we pity JPMorgan, which is still a lucrative business despite its legal woes and which purchased the institutions for their valuable assets mixed in with their massive liabilities. When it bought them, it bought their legal issues, too — known and unknown.
There's an obvious tension between the Editorial Board's whine, "70 percent of the securities at issue were concocted not by JPMorgan but by two institutions, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, that it acquired in 2008" and their subsequent statement, "When [JPMorgan Chase] bought them, it bought their legal issues, too — known and unknown". If they're responsible, then the percentage doesn't matter. Even if you buy into the subsequent "poor little rich boy" argument, "then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. told Mr. Dimon that doing so would help the country by stemming market panic. That gives the case a certain 'no-good-deed-goes-unpunished' quality", the companies' misconduct was not exactly a state secret at that point and potential liabilities were factored into the fire sale prices. Robert Pozen offers another version of the "poor little rich boy" stance, that admits as much,
If JPMorgan had purchased Bear Stearns under "normal" circumstances, JPMorgan's shareholders would have been a reasonable target of the lawsuit. Typically, if one corporation (call it A Corp.) buys another (call it T Corp.), A assumes all of T's former liabilities-its bonds, pension obligations, and, yes, its legal liabilities.
The transfer of legal liability relies on the logic that A could have performed due diligence prior to acquiring T, and reduced its offer price to account for any potential legal liability. Thus, the expected cost of future lawsuits flows through to T's shareholders, as it should in the normal case.
But JPMorgan's acquisition of Bear Stearns was different. JPMorgan purchased Bear Stearns at the behest of top federal officials-who needed JPMorgan to quickly announce a deal in order to quell a potential financial panic. Furthermore, the offer price was effectively set by these federal officials. There was no opportunity for JPMorgan to learn about Bear Stearns' legal liability, nor to adjust its offer price accordingly. Indeed, JP Morgan initially walked away from the acquisition because it did not have enough time for due diligence.
Thus, punishing JPMorgan's shareholders does nothing to align incentives-it merely punishes shareholders for acts in which they are blameless. Even worse, this fine discourages companies from engaging in "white knight" acquisitions at the request of federal regulators. In the future, company executives will demand broad guarantees against losses from the government before taking over any troubled institutions.
The short answer to that is that, while I feel some sympathy for a company that plays white knight and ends up with a worse deal than it anticipated, nobody forced JPMorgan Chase to say "yes". Pozen admits that they understood the risk and chose to go forward with the purchase anyway. As for their being a fixed price and no room to negotiate, clearly there were negotiations - JPMorgan Chase was free to walk away, did so, reconsidered, and came back to close the deal. Further, the facts belie the notion that the government presented JPMorgan Chase with a "take it or leave it" price - they had initially agreed to pay $2/share, and it was the threats of Bear Stearns shareholders to fight the sale that inspired them to raise their offer to $10/share. The total selling price was less than the value of Bear Stearns' Manhattan headquarters - you can't look at the negotiations or the purchase price without recognizing that JPMorgan Chase knew it was taking on potentially massive liabilities.
As for future "white knights" being afraid to step forward, let's be honest: JPMorgan Chase acted because it saw a business opportunity. Pozen and the Washington Post Editorial Board assume that JPMorgan Chase was unaware of the possible downside. I don't attribute that level of incompetence to its negotiators, and have little doubt but that they carefully considered outcomes far worse than the present proposed fines when they agreed to buy Bear Stearns at a stock valuation of 7.5% of its 52 week high.
But more than that, if the Board sincerely does not endorse the view of the conspiracy theorists, the unidentified "some" who "say the case is payback for Mr. Dimon’s criticism of Obama adminstration policy", why did Fred Hiatt and his crew choose to title their editorial, "JPMorgan Chase’s political persecution"? Was Hiatt trying to mislead readers into believing that the Post endorses the stance of the conspiracy theorists? Does he understand what the word "persecution" means? And why are they suggesting that holding JPMorgan Chase responsible for misconduct for which they acknowledge it to have assumed liability imperils the government's reputation for impartiality? How would it be impartial for the government treat JPMorgan Chase more favorably than it would treat another, similarly situated company?
Alas, these are the types of questions that Fred Hiatt's Editorial Board can never seem to find space to answer.
Liberal economist and much-respected friend Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where he keeps the Beat the Press blog, has appeared on PBS NewsHour often over the years, and recently on these pages in "Don't Blame the Robots." He appeared here again Wednesday, decrying what he called the media's "mindless" budget reporting.
But when he wrote on his blog on Aug. 3 that "[t]he PBS Newshour won the gold medal for journalistic malpractice on Friday (Aug. 2) by having David Brooks and Ruth Marcus tell the country what the Friday jobs report means," he seemed curiously harsh and patently partisan.
I don't think it's either, actually, save in the sense that we're supposed to tiptoe around the fact that a lot of the analysis offered by "serious" news shows revolves around talking heads who know little about the subjects that they are discussing, but get more and more air time by virtue of their past history of being talking heads, and that it's thus "curiously harsh" to note that this phenomenon represents a manifestation of the Peter Principle. Had they invited Jenny McCarthy on to discuss the science behind vaccines, I suspect that Solman would have taken issue both with the invitation and with the implication that she had special expertise. Yet that is exactly what shows like PBS Newshour do when they present as authorities non-economists who pontificate on the economy despite a long, documented history of having paid very little attention to what actual economists have to say.
"Brooks and Marcus got just about everything they said completely wrong," Baker continued. "Starting at the beginning, Brooks noted the slower than projected job growth and told listeners: 'Yes, I think there's a consensus growing both on left and right that we -- the structural problems are becoming super obvious...'"
But, Baker insisted, "It's hard to know what on earth Brooks thinks he is talking about. There is nothing close to a consensus on either the left or right that the economy's problems are structural, as opposed to a simple lack of demand (i.e. people spending money). This is shown clearly by the overwhelming support on the Federal Reserve Board for its policy of quantitative easing."
Solmon notes that Paul Krugman agreed with Baker, then observed that while Brooks and Marcus aren't in fact describing an economic consensus their argument demonstrates how "Washington conventional wisdom... has clearly swung to the view that our high unemployment is 'structural', not something that could be solved simply by boosting demand".
If I took umbrage at those statements, my first response would be to explore whether or not there was a consensus among economists as to whether the economy's problems are structural. I would also wonder why David Brooks, who occasionally takes ill-informed potshots at his New York Times colleague, Paul Krugman, is not aware of Paul Krugman's years of argument on this subject. But instead....
Look, folks, there may indeed be no "consensus growing on left and right" about the predominance of structural unemployment, as David Brooks alleged. Just look at how vigorously Krugman and Baker took the other side. But I rather doubt Krugman's assertion that there is an "actual economic consensus" on the unemployment debate that favors his cyclical explanation to the exclusion of the structural. Unless, of course, Krugman means a consensus among economists he agrees with.
Why assume anything? Why not call other economists and ask?
A confession: Brooks is a friend for whom I have great respect, as I do for Ruth Marcus.
Well, that explains it... just not in a manner I find satisfactory.
Unlike Krugman and Baker, my main job for 36 years now has been to interview not only economists like them, but hirers and hirees, firers and firees. I've done so through both recessions and recoveries alike. I wheedled soundbites out of the drearily downhearted high tech-workers of the late 1970s and spoke to the happily hopeful hires of the late 1990s.
Then, friendship or no, there's really no excuse for the assumption. Solmon did find "A 2011 paper from the San Francisco Fed attributed 60 percent of long-term unemployment to cyclicality and 40 percent to structural factors," which is at best tepid support for Brook's' assertion that the issue is structural, but that two-year-old paper seems to be the best support he could find for Brooks' claimed consensus.
I'll admit, when I looked at the unemployment data, the fact that many workers displaced by the great recession were never again going to earn the sort of wage they had previously enjoyed, and the downward pressure on the middle class, my initial reaction to "This isn't a structural issue" was "Say way?" But in fact what Krugman and Baker are discussing is something else - the notion that there has been a seismic change in the economy such that we have to simply accept a higher unemployment rate than we have historically seen. Baker, Krugman and others have rebutted that "structural change" argument repeatedly and convincingly, to the point that if you're a business and economics reporter and are only just now taking note of it it's safe to say that you've chosen not to pay attention to material you should be covering. But Solmon seems mostly interested in the issue as a left-right political debate, and thus seems to think it's enough to circle back to Brooks as an authority.
Solmon gets partial credit for allowing Dean Baker to refute the "structural" argument, but he loses points for a response in which he changes the subject,
Baker's may be the best possible summation of the cyclicalist argument. Moreover, he may well be right: throw enough money at the economy, and at some point, everyone will be employed.
But if economics teaches us anything, it's that every decision has both benefits and costs. What might be the cost of Baker's Keynesian "Trillion-Dollar Solution"?
Baker, of course, didn't argue that the only way back to full employment was a $trillion stimulus, he simply described a theoretical means by which the economy could be brought to full employment. When you introduce an idea with, "Imagine someone found a $1 trillion bill in the street and decided that, as a public service, she would spend the money over the next 12 months to boost the economy", it's pretty obvious that you're not describing something you believe is likely to occur. Solmon then speculates about how productive newly created jobs would be, an argument that is in no way tied to the present time or economy. Solmon argues,
If the cyclicalists are right, spend a trillion dollars and new jobs will eventually emerge, as they indeed regularly have throughout American (and world) history. If the structuralists are right, however, history is in the process of changing and the government jobs will last only as long as the trillion dollars.
But the discussion was about consensus, right? And Solmon has completely abandoned the pretense that the consensus described by Brooks exists on either the left of the right. Solmon closes by offering a comment from his prior thread, in which a tech graduate describes being heavily recruited, with generous wage offers and stock options,
Those opportunities, however, are out there only for those with a set of specialized skills. If the structure of the U.S. economy is changing to employ those who have such skills and disemploy those who don't, the structuralists have a point.
But again, same as it ever was. When changes in technology and the economy led to the demise of the livery stable and blacksmith's shop, even as blacksmiths and stable hands struggled to find new work, other people were entering the job market with a very different set of skills and with far better job and income prospects. When the domestic garment industry collapsed in favor of offshore production, medical school graduates were doing better than ever. The fact that wages or opportunities in one corner of the economy are reduced even as opportunities exist "for those with a set of specialized skills" is not new - it's history repeating itself.
"I'm just a soul whose intentions are good...."
The concept behind factchecking websites is reasonable - politicians say things that may or may not be true, and the media does a poor job distinguishing truth from fiction, so why not have an independent agency or reporter assigned to "fact check" prominent claims and then rate their accuracy? The reality has largely failed to live up to the dream. As I noted during the past presidential campaign,
A while back I took part of an online quiz on a "fact checking" site, in which they asked readers to estimate how many... Pinocchios, flaming butt cheeks, or something like that... they assigned to various statements by politicians. The pointlessness of the exercise was best illustrated by the rating of a statement by Rick Santorum as being mostly false. The statement was one of opinion. Had the scale been the "Chauncey Gardner" garden rake scale, the person doing the rating would have been free to editorialize that the comment was so dim-witted and disconnected with logic that it ranked as a "hit in the face with a garden rake so hard that your zombie head gets knocked off", that would be fine. One opinion against another. Even if the rationale is, "That's such a baseless opinion that I can't believe Santorum holds it," it remains your opinion that he's lying as opposed to being ignorant or obtuse.
When self-professed fact-checkers stop checking the facts and start assessing the degree to which a politician may be shading the truth, they're no longer engaged in fact-checking. It's a perfectly legitimate function of the press to point to a statement that neatly avoids key issues or problems and to point out that it's not the whole story, but that's a different tasks than fact-checkers claim to be performing. It's interesting to me, also, that fact-checkers will use "Pinocchio" scales or a "pants on fire" meter, but they shy away from actually using the term "lie". You don't have to bring it out for every nuanced statement, but when a politician tells a real whopper why not tell it like it is? Instead, we have gasbag commentators who don't hesitate to call up down and the truth a lie, when they're talking about the other side, while the mainstream media at times passively "reports" on the controversy.
I occasionally follow a link to a "fact check" page, usually offered by one partisan or another to back up their claim that the other side said something that was false or misleading. Sometimes the analysis is helpful. Sometimes the effort to find truth in a false statement is a bit ridiculous. But for the most part the ratings are highly misleading to casual readers, and the "fact checkers" have largely reduced themselves to being a tool to advance political mendacity. Could factcheckers change that status quo? Yes, but it would be hard work and would probably necessitate their abandoning their simplistic rating tools, so I don't see it happening.
It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands and say there’s no role for the factcheckers to play on questions like [whether the Ryan Plan would "end" Medicare]. As Sargent argued at the time, “this disagreement ultimately comes down to differing interpretations of known facts—and not to a difference over the facts themselves.” At New York, Jonathan Chait ran through the proposed changes and then asked, “Is that ‘ending Medicare?’ Well, it’s a matter of opinion.”
That’s the wrong word, though, just as “opinion” is the wrong word for a lot of the deeply reported work that appears on the Op-Ed page. To say the Who are better than the Stones is an opinion. To say the Ryan budget wouldn’t “end” Medicare—and that it’s dishonest to claim it would—is a factual argument. (PolitiFact founder Bill Adair says the site practices “reported conclusion” journalism.)
PolitiFact, I think quite deliberately, chose to make a valid opinion about the Ryan plan its "lie of the year" because it knew that it would gain lots of attention. But it's like the Santorum comment that one fact check or another deemed a "lie" - you can't so easily brand an opinion as a "lie", let alone "lie of the year". To the extent that you offer a defense of your position by parsing through the facts, and even if you paint a clear picture of why you believe that the opinion is incorrect, very few people are going to read that explanation. They're instead going to hear politician and hacks use the "lie of the year" designation for purposes of demagoguery.
Having spent quite a few years of my youth in Canada, which has a national, single-payer Medicare system, it's not difficult to see the direct comparison between Canada's Medicare and the similarly named U.S. program - which is a national, single-payer insurance plan, limited in enrollment to the elderly and certain disabled persons. If you were to approach a Canadian and say, "If the Harper Government were to change Medicare so that rather than getting health insurance you received an allotment of money that you could use to buy insurance, and rather than having one government-run health insurance program you would choose between an assortment of private carriers, would it be fair to say that he's 'ending' Medicare", I think most people would say "Yes". If you added, "What if the government were still offering a state-run health insurance plan that you could select from in addition to the private plans," perhaps you would get a bit of head scratching - but if people realized that the net effect would be to cause the cost of the state-run plan to soar as it ended up insuring the sickest members of the population, I expect that most would again answer "Yes". Whether or not you believe I am correct in my estimate of the public's response, anybody saying "Yes" would be sharing a fair, fact-based opinion. Part of the outrage against the "lie of the year" label was that many people agree completely, in good faith and with the support of the facts, that Ryan's voucher plan (even as amended to allow Medicare to continue to exist in competition with the private plans) would end Medicare "as we know it" - primarily preserving the name, while dramatically changing and undermining the program. So PolitiFact was not only calling the politicians who took that position "liars", it applied that brand to tens of millions of of people who hold that fact-based, good faith position.
Here’s the logic: If Ryan’s privatization plan ends Medicare, what would we say of a proposal that actually ended it? Of course a scheme to give seniors two free aspirin a year and call it Medicare would count as killing the program, as Chait mused; but does everything short of that fall into some hazy, undifferentiated sphere of personal opinion?
I don't think it's necessary to regard everything between the two extremes as "hazy" - just as opinion. And you can argue that one set of opinions hews closer to the fact than another, but they remain opinions. If you view Medicare as a plan that allows for comprehensive health care coverage to seniors, it's more than fair to observe that the Ryan plan was designed to undermine the comprehensive nature of the coverage. Were it otherwise, Ryan could have proposed exactly the same plan but with one change: that every private insurer that participated in the plan had to start by offering the same coverage as Medicare, and that they would compete for customers by offering additional services for the same or a higher price or by offering the same services at a lower price. Ryan would never propose such a plan, because he has absolutely no faith in private insurers to be able to compete at that level. As Medicare Advantage indicates, when private insurers try to compete with Medicare they require subsidies. Why? Because even if they can do everything else as well or better than Medicare, they need to extract profits.
The factcheckers do issue some rulings that don’t provoke much disagreement. In these cases, questions of legitimacy fade into the background. This may happen much less often than we would like to think, though, and it’s a litmus test that political actors can easily game. To apply it too rigidly—to say these are the only questions factcheckers should rule on—would provide a powerful shield for politicians’ most misleading claims.
Sure, but if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it.... what does fact-checking contribute when pretty much everybody already agrees that a statement is false? If legitimacy is in the background, and you find only the controversial or inept "fact checks" in the foreground, what's the net contribution to the public debate?
More to the point, this is the wrong litmus test for a journalism that very deliberately rejects the “he said, she said” formulations that sustain the “View from Nowhere.” We can’t ask journalists to make the judgment that torture is torture—in the face of the rhetorical, political and legal apparatus that has been erected to redefine that word—and then also insist that they stick to pure “reporting.”
Did PolitiFact every "fact check" whether or not waterboarding is torture? This is the closest thing I could find, which holds that McCain correctly stated that water boarding had been historically prosecuted as a war crime, without actually taking a stance on whether it either should be described as torture or presently constitutes a war crime. If the defense of factcheckers is that they are free to fact check the definition of "torture", while "pure" reporters are ostensibly limited to telling us why the people ordering water boarding say that it does not constitute torture, they seem to be sleeping on the job. They may have a perspective, but neither shying away from controversies such as the Bush Administration's reinvention of what constitutes "torture" nor displaying indignation over matters of opinion do much to move us away from "the view from nowhere".
If, at the end of the day, factcheckers contribute little more to the public debate than editorials with eye-catching graphics and a score at the top of the page, they offer little that we can't already learn from the editorial and Op/Ed pages. And if the editorial content is risible, it doesn't even offer that much... save, perhaps as compared to the Wall Street Journal. Do they sometimes offer more, with the deeper, more nuanced exploration of the facts underlying their conclusions? Certainly - but, as exemplified by the Medicare fiasco, when fact checking is most important to political partisans the rating acts as noise that drowns out the signal. If you want to improve journalism, the place to start is with the larger enterprise of journalism. Factcheckers don't seem to be doing a good job of helping journalism find a better perspective than "the view from nowhere", and if they're relevance is in being controversial then that more than anything else is apt to drive their ratings.
Paul Krugman suggests an explanation for why the Clinton-era fake scandals kept on going, while similar efforts to build fake scandals involving the Obama Administration seem to be fizzling:
Maybe the news media have actually learned something; maybe they’re effectively disciplined, this time around, by the blogosphere. Anyway, the narrative of a scandal-ridden presidency seems to be evaporating as we speak.
I don't credit the media or blogosphere. I think there are two important distinctions, one relating to the Presidents themselves and the other relating to the scandals.
First, the Clintons had a history of engaging in activity that, although never determined to be anything but lawful, didn't always pass the smell test. The remarkable success of Hillary Clinton's one-type foray into commodities trading, for example, continues to strike me as the sort of investment opportunity that would not have been made available to her were she not the governor's wife. At the same time many of the accusations made against the Clintons were truly unfair, and one of Mike Huckabee's most tragic decisions as governor may have its roots in his acceptance of a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
I don't want to discount the role of public perception, or the media's role in building and perpetuating public perception. But in no small part Clinton himself fed the public perception that was willing to play fast and loose with the facts - his claim that he never broke the drug laws of the United States, that he did not have 'sexual relations' with 'that woman', "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is", etc. - so while "slick Willie" may have been something of a caricature Clinton himself kept throwing fuel on the fire.
In contrast, although various efforts have been made to suggest that Obama is guilty by association for his relationship with Tony Rezko, or "pals around with terrorists" because of his relationship with William Ayers, the overall picture is pretty clear: President Obama has spent his adult life conspicuously avoiding anything that smacks of corruption. While certain right-wing partisans nonetheless scream from the top of their lungs that the Obama Administration is "the most corrupt ever", the facts say pretty much the opposite.
In fairness, that distinction could affect the media - covering a fake Clinton scandal was likely to turn up a colorful character or two, a colorful statement from the President, and perhaps just enough smoke to justify the coverage. Some of the allegation were so absurd ("Clinton murdered Vince Foster") that, even if not taken seriously, they were frequently referenced by those who most hated Clinton (and thus did not particularly care if the allegation was credible) and his supporters (who could use that type of allegation to depict Clinton's attackers, sometimes quite accurately, as loonies). There's no excitement in chasing a typical fake Obama scandals. The only person who can maintain enthusiasm about trying to concoct a direct connection between the actions of some low-level IRS agents and the President seems to be Darrell Issa.
Second, as I just intimated, the Obama scandals are largely boring. The Republicans got quite a bit of mileage out of Benghazi because it involved conspicuous violence and some tragic deaths, but they've run out of "revelations" so the media and public are losing interest. Ken Starr knew how to build a rolling scandal - "Nothing to Whitewater? Then how about we look under these other stones to see what we find." That only works, though, if you find stones that you can turn over, and that scandal seems to be fresh out of stones.
The IRS non-scandal is boring. Complaining that the President was spying on Americans only goes so far when half of the Republican Party is asserting that the present NSA program is a vindication of Bush, and various fire-breathing Republicans (including Michele Bachmann, Steven King, Jeff Flake and Ted Cruz) as well as various Republican "older statesmen" (including Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham and Saxby Chambliss) knew exactly what was happening and did not lift a finger to stop the programs. While you do see somewhat comical statements from people like Jim Sensenbrenner ("Whodathunk the USA PATRIOT Act could be used to support this type of monitoring?") the Republicans are at a disadvantage - their most prominent spokespersons knew about the monitoring, did nothing to stop it, and even now have no intention of doing anything to significantly curtail it. "It's horrible that the Obama Administration did this thing that we knew about, didn't stop, and are allowing to continue."
Further, although it's easy enough to engage in fiery rhetoric about how the programs "were illegal" when you actually start looking into the law the discussion becomes rather arcane and the Administration's position starts to look like it was narrowly tailored to fit within established law and precedent. It's the sort of argument that only a lawyer could love, in part because it's somewhat arcane, and in part because if you're not a lawyer or a close follower of the Supreme Court you're unlikely to have the context to participate in a debate and (because you are likely to find it boring) even if you can find a media account that attempts to explain the background in understandable terms you're unlikely to read it. So it devolves into a series of exchanges in which each side pounds the table for a while, with anti-monitoring activists refusing to acknowledge the legal framework for the monitoring, and Administration defenders asserting the lawful nature of the program while avoiding the implications of such programs, until people lose interest.
There's a media angle to that, as well, in that the media wants to generate readers and viewers, and you don't draw an audience by boring them. But that's less a matter of having learned from past mistakes and becoming more disciplined, and more a matter of being less concerned with the story than with its appeal to the masses. A responsible media might bore us a bit with the legal stuff, then engage in a debate over the margins of privacy, how we can protect and value privacy in the modern era, and how to balance privacy and security. If you looked hard enough you could find that sort of discussion back in the Clinton era and you can find it now - but it's not the sort of information the mainstream media actively promotes so you can expect to have to work to find it.
When you watch syndicated columnists and talking heads, most notably those on the political right, you can see how quickly a particular theme or argument can be distributed - how the same words suddenly appear in the columns or are heard from the mouths of dozens of partisan opinion leaders. While sometimes a catchy turn of phrase will catch on quickly, in many cases it's more than fair to assume that they've received those talking points from a common source. More so when the words fit with a new political attack, or are part of a Frank Lutz-type effort to skew the language to be more favorable to a Republican cause.
Also, it's not particularly unusual to see a major newspaper carry an opinion column by a prominent person who otherwise has not demonstrated either the necessary interest or capacity to pen a coherent opinion column. Sometimes a co-author is credited, but sometimes it's pretty clear that the column was written by somebody else. That could be a staff member, but let's not forget that advocacy groups often write opinion pieces that they shop around to politicians - "Stick your name on this, and we can get it into the Post or the Times."
At the next level, we have the payola-type scandals that periodically hit the news, when it is revealed that a columnist is taking money to advance a particular cause or idea. Columnists caught with their hands in the cookie jar typically protest, "I took the money, but I wrote exactly what I would have written had I not been paid." But... do you believe it? Obviously the people paying them do not.
So when I hear that a columnist like Juan Williams has plagiarized, yes, the theory of double plagiarism could be true. It could be that Juan Williams believed that he was only plagiarizing his assistant, and that using his assistant's words without attribution was fair game because "everybody does it". But it could also be that the intern was given an instruction that he simply misunderstood. Something along the lines of,
Get me some content from an immigration organization that I can use to pump up my argument.
Under this theory, the intern may have believed he was tasked with researching the findings of organizations that had written reports on the subject, and then communicate that information back to Williams. But Williams may have expected that the intern would contact somebody within an organization whose beliefs were aligned with the argument he hoped to "pump up", not to get their published findings, but to get a pre-written passage or column that it was understood would be plugged into his column with few or no changes.
Many years I heard an interesting story from the employee of a manufacturing consortium. She was tasked with putting together the newsletter, and they were coming up on a deadline to send it to the printer. Her boss had instructed her that one of the articles needed to be more compelling, and told her to contact a specific U.S. Senator's office to get a quote supporting the article's thesis. She tried to get a quote, but was unable to get through. "Don't worry about it," she was told, "Run the quote and we'll get him to clear it after-the-fact."
When you have sufficient prominence and sufficient connection, the rules don't apply to you in the same way that they perhaps did during your earlier career. It's not really a surprise that some columnists think it's okay to take a payoff to write opinion pieces that they rationalize, "I would have written anyway," that they think it's okay to plagiarize their interns without attribution, that they borrow words, phrases, and even entire columns from advocacy groups who are trying to push the same message. What harm is there in letting somebody else do the heavy lifting for you, if you're already essentially on the same page, right?
The sad part, it seems to me, is that these games are played on a massive scale, the efforts to rein them in seem half-hearted, and the consequences for getting caught usually amount to nothing.
Ruth Marcus appears amused that some of her peers can't recognize obvious satire,
The item was too delicious to resist: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, he of the don’t-worry, be-happy approach to the federal deficit, had been forced to declare personal bankruptcy.
Except it wasn’t true. The tidbit was satire, from a Web site called the Daily Currant. The Currant’s “tell” was obvious to anyone who took introductory economics: Krugman, it said, had attempted, like a good Keynesian, to “spend his way out of debt,” after “racking up $84,000 in a single month . . . in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th-century English cloth” — a wink-wink reference to the classic examples of comparative advantage in international trade.
The piece would be stronger, of course, if it didn't open with Marcus caricaturing Krugman's views, or even if it were clear that Marcus knew what she was doing. It would have taken even the more credulous of her peers mere seconds, minutes at most, to determine the source of the Krugman satire, or that Krugman had not declared bankruptcy. So what's Marcus's excuse for not knowing the views of an economist who has been anything but a wallflower on these issues?
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest....
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.
Bear in mind that the budget doesn’t have to be balanced to put us on a fiscally sustainable path; all we need is a deficit small enough that debt grows more slowly than the economy. To take the classic example, America never did pay off the debt from World War II — in fact, our debt doubled in the 30 years that followed the war. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell by three-quarters over the same period....
So we do not, repeat do not, face any kind of deficit crisis either now or for years to come.
There are, of course, longer-term fiscal issues: rising health costs and an aging population will put the budget under growing pressure over the course of the 2020s. But I have yet to see any coherent explanation of why these longer-run concerns should determine budget policy right now. And as I said, given the needs of the economy, the deficit is currently too small.
In simple terms, Krugman is explaining that deficits matter, but that if they're at a sustainable level they're not a threat to the economy, and that the time to worry about balancing the budget is when the economy is booming in part so that you can avoid self-destructive austerity measures and afford sufficient stimulus spending when the economy is faltering. It doesn't seem that hard to understand... unless, as it seems, you're a Beltway pundit or a Republican partisan.
Do you remember who actually took the position that "deficits don't matter"? A guy whose administration used the Clinton surplus as an excuse to slash taxes for the rich, ran up huge deficits during a period of economic recovery, and crashed the economy on its way out of town. Did Marcus ever so much as whisper a word of criticism? If so, I missed it.
But, oh, something seems familiar about Marcus's quip. "Don't-worry, be-happy." Oh, right, the time Marcus humiliated herself by trying to take on Krugman in public. (Do I give her and her peers too much credit by assuming she's been introduced to at least one take-down of that piece? Mark Thoma: "Ruth Marcus Tries to Show Her Beltway Badge of Seriousness"; Brad Delong piles on. Krugman commented primarily to point out that Marcus didn't understand the statement that she had used as the centerpiece of her attack.)
I really think it's time for Marcus to do the tiny bit of work that she recognizes would have saved her colleagues from embarrassment, and take the few seconds to read what Paul Krugman is actually saying about the economy and deficits, even if it's more fun to believe the satire.
CJR offers the case in favor of newspaper paywalls. But as the article indicates, " A paywall is not a magic solution". Newspapers have experienced a drastic change in the way news is distributed and consumed, and although a well-designed paywall may help make up some of the lost revenue there's no going back to the way things were.
The problem is, people don't have unlimited time, attention and money. If you put content behind a paywall you reduce your audience, and if you don't get enough people to subscribe you can reduce or lose your relevance. With free online news, many people have become accustomed to obtaining information from sources they would not have consulted prior to the rise of the Internet, and many of the local sources of news coverage have crumbled or collapsed. But the person who might have once purchased a newspaper subscription may think twice about buying subscriptions to multiple online news sources, even if the net cost is lower. It's not just that the nature of the expenditure is different, and irrational though it may be it can feel different to have somebody deliver a tangible newspaper to your doorstep as opposed to browsing a newspaper website. It's that people can only process so much information.
Also, once behind a paywall the experience of reading news online is changed. If you use news aggregator sites, you are apt to favor the sources that are free or to which you already subscribe. If you try to change reader behavior - "Start at our site", or "Get your news through our app" - you're likely to trigger more frustration than satisfaction.
I have a ridiculous number of channels available as part of my cable subscription, most of which I never watch, don't care about, and wouldn't miss. If cable subscribers had to subscribe to them individually, many would go out of business. But the companies that sponsor those channels get a small fee each month, so that I can read their content. That seems like a sensible model for media companies - work through internet service providers, or perhaps through operating system developers, and work out a licensing scheme. Let people pick the media packages they want, paying a single fee to the provider, and thereby get access to "behind the paywall" content for the news companies in their package.
When I look at the few successful paywalls at large media companies, I can't help but think of the handful of cable channels that were once able to profit from individual subscriptions. I suspect that the future lies in packages.
I have commented before that I can respect Mitt Romney's reported cheapness, and some of it does appear to be genuine (such as occasionally flying coach), but when you hear a guy chatting up $million dressage horses with Sean Hannity, or has multiple multi-million dollar homes with cars sitting idle at each home, you know that a lot of it is window dressing. Case in point:
Last week, when the campaign stayed at a Marriott Renaissance, he lamented that a cheaper Marriott Courtyard was nearby. He washes his own Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts in hotel rooms. On one recent day, as he dashed to an awaiting car, he grabbed leftover boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and saved a bowl of fruit—not leaving anything for waste.
I find it very difficult to believe that Romney ever begrudged one of his business partners a suite at a top hotel. That is to say, I suspect that this is less about the careful pinching of pennies and is more about "Why do these peons need better than the cheapest room available, especially if I'm willing to bite the bullet." And yes, it's great that Romney is willing to stay at the "cheaper" hotel, himself, but that form of leadership seems only to occur when he's the top dog, not when he's among peers.
The part that most strikes me is Romney's supposedly taking time off from his campaigning and press appearances to wash his own shirts in the sink of his hotel room, presumably hanging them in the bathtub to dry, hauling out the iron and ironing board the next morning, wearing shirts that smell faintly of hotel bar soap or shampoo.... Frankly, if he's not being phony with that claim he's being, as they say, penny wise and pound foolish. It would be an inconsequential expense for him to have his shirts professionally laundered and, if he really thought it was not worth the cost, would be absurd for him not to delegate. It's neither fun nor efficient to try to do your laundry in a hotel room sink and, frankly, Romney's appearance belies the idea that he drip dries his shirts in his motel rooms.
Also, since when is the act of taking extra, sealed boxes of cereal from the hotel's breakfast bar an act of keeping the cereal from going to waste? If that's a form of cheapness, it's the brand that imposes an additional cost on the hotel in order to save a few dollars later in the day when you don't have to pay for a snack. By way of comparison, the guy who stuffs his pockets full of food from a buffet so that he doesn't have to buy another meal that day is demonstrating cheapness, but he only paid for the meal he actually ate at the restaurant.
Let me put it this way: I don't doubt that Romney can in fact be cheap, both at times with himself and more consistently with the people he doesn't deem worthy of largesse, but "I'll bet you $10,000" that this is an attempt by his campaign to oversell a value that "the polls say that voters like" through credulous reporters.
And the idea that every one of Romney's extraordinary indulgences can be written off with, "He likes to keep Ann happy?" Really, the man needs to take some responsibility.
Dean Baker describes a NYT reporter's reaction to the use of an unpublished study on the possible health risks of fracking as a basis for forming public policy:
From his blogpost, it sounds like Revkin gave Hill a really serious grilling about the ethics of allowing her unpublished study to influence debate on a major national issue. (Don't you wish reporters would just once give the same sort of grilling to Jamie Dimon or some other corporate honcho?)
There is something to be said for distinguishing published studies from unpublished studies, and peer reviewed studies from those that have not been submitted for peer review. But let's not forget, many publications exist to push an agenda, and lots of junk gets through peer review - you still have to be careful. When you're looking at unpublished research, it's more than fair to explore why it's not published and whether it's likely to be published. There are plenty of examples of people grabbing an unpublished concept based upon data that turns out to be erroneous or incomplete and... end up embarrassing themselves. (Again, that can also happen with published, peer reviewed studies - it's just that on the whole it's less likely.)
But that last sentence hints at another problem. Much of our nation's public policy is driven by assumption and ideology, not data. Politicians (and newspaper columnists) will at times express skepticism of science, with that skepticism at times more driven by ideology than by concern for the merits of a study, and may be quick to point out that a particular study is (or may be) incomplete, flawed, inaccurate.... But when it comes to making an actual decision, all too often we get assumption-based legislation driven not by any sort of study or analysis, but because the politician believes it will help him get reelected, or it's what lobbyists and special interests want.1 ---------------
1. Arguably, that's a subset of things that a politician believes will help him get reelected, but let's not forget those who position themselves to profit once they leave office, and perhaps before.
Have you ever been in a car with somebody, waiting to pass an accident scene, while they observe that the traffic accident is not obstructing the road and that the only reason traffic is slow is because of the gawkers? And then, as they pass the accident, they themselves are distracted to the point that they don't notice that the car in front of them has driven on and they're now the gawker causing the slowdown?
The beltway pundits who call for more polite, mannered political campaigns remind me of that sort of driver. Actually, some of them seem a bit worse - some of them would stop their car in the roadway, get out, and share their opinions on the seriousness of the accident and whether it merited gawking, and offer running commentary about the other drivers passing the scene, oblivious to the fact that they've become part of the problem.
When the accident is cleared, they might recite that they're happy that it's over, but they'll keep bringing it up until the next accident comes along, and even then it may become a point of comparison. In many cases they'll talk incessantly about an accident in the northbound lane and, when you point out another accident, they'll express that accidents in the southbound lane are completely different.
Today, Robert Samuelson offers a lot of hand-wringing over problems in the northbound traffic lane, deploring what he calls "character assassination on the campaign trail". I don't follow Samuelson closely, so I am ready to stand corrected if he has in fact deplored past attacks on President Obama - Joe Wilson's outburst at the State of the Union Address, Justice Scalia's outburst from the bench, the entire "birther" phenomenon (Romney's contribution), absurd accusations that he's a socialist (in Romney's softened version, Obama "takes his political inspiration from Europe, from the socialist-democrats in Europe."), attacks on his religion, both his actual Christian faith and his imagined Muslim faith.... If Samuelson has ever demonstrated the slightest bit concerned about any of those acts of character assassination, I'm afraid I missed it.
But, oh, his heart melts for his friends in the financial industry.
Obama practices a cheap populism. He seems to presume that the complexities of the ACA and his repeated attacks on business (on oil companies, insurance companies, banks, hedge funds, private-equity funds and “the rich” in general) have no effect on the climate for investment or job creation. This is dubious.
It should be noted that Samuelson provides no context for any of this "repeated attacks", no quotes, no links. He also provides no evidence that any of President Obama's so-called attacks have resulted in any changes of policy, any economic impact, anything at all. "Dubious"? That's the best Samuelson can do? He thinks that substitutes for facts and evidence?
I am aware that certain extremely wealthy people have complained that the President isn't sufficiently nice and deferential to them, and dares to suggest that they might bear some responsibility for the financial crisis and state of the economy. Samuelson apparently agrees with that. But when I look for what the President has actually said I find statements like this:
The tax cuts I’m proposing we get rid of are tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires; tax breaks for oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners.
It would be nice if we could keep every tax break there is, but we’ve got to make some tough choices here if we want to reduce our deficit. And if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. That means we’ve got to stop funding certain grants for medical research. That means that food safety may be compromised. That means that Medicare has to bear a greater part of the burden. Those are the choices we have to make.
While full recovery of the financial system will take a great deal more time and work, the growing stability resulting from these interventions means we're beginning to return to normalcy. But here's what I want to emphasize today: Normalcy cannot lead to complacency.
Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we're still recovering, they're choosing to ignore those lessons. I'm convinced they do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation's. So I want everybody here to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.
Does Samuelson have another, secret example of the President being mean? Because although I can characterize the elimination of tax breaks for corporate jets as symbolic, it's more than fair to suggest that calls for sacrifice should not stop with the middle class. Yet Samuelson sees that as an attack on "the rich"? Does Samuelson see a call for the end of subsidies as an attack on oil companies? An accurate assessment of the position taken by some within the financial industry, that the bailout signaled a right to return to business as usual, LIBOR fraud, reckless trading, manipulation of commodities prices, and the like, is an attack on "banks, hedge funds" and the like? Sadly, I expect so.
In the wake of a devastating financial crisis, President Obama has enacted some modest and obviously needed regulation; he has proposed closing a few outrageous tax loopholes; and he has suggested that Mitt Romney’s history of buying and selling companies, often firing workers and gutting their pensions along the way, doesn’t make him the right man to run America’s economy.
Wall Street has responded — predictably, I suppose — by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it has, in a way, been funny to see how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be. Remember when Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group compared a proposal to limit his tax breaks to Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Remember when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase characterized any discussion of income inequality as an attack on the very notion of success?
And I'll let you wager about which of the two gets invited to the billionaires' cocktail parties. As Krugman put it,
But here’s the thing: If Wall Streeters are spoiled brats, they are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal. And what they’re trying to do with that power and wealth right now is buy themselves not just policies that serve their interests, but immunity from criticism.
Fear not, young bankers, Robert J. Samuelson has your back.
Why is Samuelson suddenly so concerned about "character assassination"? Why is he suddenly willing to advance the silly argument that the President's occasional, seemingly consistently accurate, statements about tax distribution and the financial industry, are somehow the cause of a slow recovery? It's pretty obvious: the President's reelection team is targeting Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital for criticism, and those attacks appear to be working.
Samuelson is on the record about "character assassination," true or untrue, fair or unfair, in elections:
We have entered an era of constitutional censorship. Hardly anyone wants to admit this -- the legalized demolition of the First Amendment would seem shocking -- and so hardly anyone does. The evidence, though, abounds. The latest is the controversy over the anti-Kerry ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and parallel anti-Bush ads by Democratic "527" groups such as MoveOn.org. Let's assume (for argument's sake) that everything in these ads is untrue. Still, the United States' political tradition is that voters judge the truthfulness and relevance of campaign arguments. We haven't wanted our political speech filtered.
That is, unless it's working for the other side better than it's working for our own, in which case it's, "Look at that horrible accident in the northbound lane!"
Update: The substance of Samuelson's attacks on Obama, which were peripheral to the discussion above, have been ably tackled by Dean Baker.
Update 2: If Samuelson is concerned that Obama's occasional, accurate rhetoric is going to devastate the economic recovery by hurting the feelings of bankers, oh, how he must hate the facts.
Yes, we get it. A mini iPad could disrupt the 7" tablet market. An Amazon phone could disrupt the smartphone market. Or.... they may not. Thanks for sharing that type of insight, as it's unlikely people would otherwise have figured it out.
Presidents do themselves no favors when they run for office on the conceit that the incumbent somehow directly controls the economy, and imply that there's a giant spigot hidden in the Oval Office labeled "jobs" and that all the President has to do is open up the valve and job opportunities will magically proliferate. They do it for two reasons: It resonates with the public, not only because the incumbent President does bear responsibility for his policies, but because they've heard about the implied "magic faucet" throughout their lives. Also, if the economy is faltering it's an easy point of attack, whether or not the attack is honest under the circumstances.
In a big picture sense it is fair to say that when one party controls policy over a four or eight year period, they bear some responsibility for the outcome of that policy. But, do I need to say it, there is no magic faucet, and Congress has far more control over the day-to-day economy than does the President.
Nobody would expect a person as habitually disingenuous as Mitt Romney to break the trend. To the contrary, we have every indication that if Romney believes a statement or position will help him win the Presidency he's going to run with it, and that truth and fairness aren't even part of his calculus. You can reply that he's acting the part of a "typical politician", and you may be right, but let's not pretend it's good for the country.
“If there has ever been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee he told a crowd of 500 supporters today in Stratham.
But here's the thing: Romney (as always) has failed to identify anything the President could have done. His most substantive response to the President's speech, it would seem, is that it was "very long".
It's not unusual for a political party to want to have things both ways - to argue for one position while pursuing another. But it's more than fair to ask Romney, "If the President has the power to turn the economy around, to make job opportunities plentiful, to increase middle class incomes, what exact steps can the President take to accomplish all of that? What exact steps do you plan to take once you're elected?"
Romney, of course, has no answers. The closest thing he has to an economic policy is his embrace of the Ryan plan - cut taxes for the rich, cut Social Security and Medicare for everybody else, run up the deficit, and... how is that not a repeat of the Bush debacle? Granted, Bush ran up the deficit by expanding Medicare, not cutting it, and his Social Security privatization plan died within his own party, but even with that in mind it's difficult to see how entitlement cuts are going to create jobs.
Really, any time Romney suggests that the President could do something to improve job opportunities for the middle class, he should be asked "Like what?" And he should be pressed until he gives a concrete answer - or concedes that he has no answers. (And if there's an equivalent issue on the other side, the same rule should apply to President Obama.)
Also, Romney should be directly challenged on the inherently contradictory notion that the government is standing in the way of jobs, but that the President could "do something" magical that will suddenly create millions of new jobs.
Regrettably, that's not how the nation's media operates.
Or, at least, it shouldn't be. The reason the concept of the Kinsley gaffe, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."[3]", resonates is that the media does an atrocious job of informing readers and viewers when a politician is lying.
A while back I took part of an online quiz on a "fact checking" site, in which they asked readers to estimate how many... Pinocchios, flaming butt cheeks, or something like that... they assigned to various statements by politicians. The pointlessness of the exercise was best illustrated by the rating of a statement by Rick Santorum as being mostly false. The statement was one of opinion. Had the scale been the "Chauncey Gardner" garden rake scale, the person doing the rating would have been free to editorialize that the comment was so dim-witted and disconnected with logic that it ranked as a "hit in the face with a garden rake so hard that your zombie head gets knocked off", that would be fine. One opinion against another. Even if the rationale is, "That's such a baseless opinion that I can't believe Santorum holds it," it remains your opinion that he's lying as opposed to being ignorant or obtuse.
When self-professed fact-checkers stop checking the facts and start assessing the degree to which a politician may be shading the truth, they're no longer engaged in fact-checking. It's a perfectly legitimate function of the press to point to a statement that neatly avoids key issues or problems and to point out that it's not the whole story, but that's a different tasks than fact-checkers claim to be performing. It's interesting to me, also, that fact-checkers will use "Pinocchio" scales or a "pants on fire" meter, but they shy away from actually using the term "lie". You don't have to bring it out for every nuanced statement, but when a politician tells a real whopper why not tell it like it is? Instead, we have gasbag commentators who don't hesitate to call up down and the truth a lie, when they're talking about the other side, while the mainstream media at times passively "reports" on the controversy.
Here, Charles Pierce catches Mitt Romney in a "Kinsley gaffe",
Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you're elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you'd like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course.
So... by pumping a whole lot of money into the economy and propping up state governments, the stimulus did what, Mitt? Once you agree on the conceptual framework you need to provide something more than bombastic rhetoric - whenever the other party does something it's different... and wrong - and start explaining how you are being consistent in your positions. Or at least, that's what should happen. But it won't. And Romney knows it won't, which is how he manages to get away with saying, "Up" on Monday, "Down" on Tuesday, "Sideways" on Wednesday, and "I don't remember what I said on any prior occasion, but I agree with whatever it was" on Thursday.
Romney is a walking caricature of everything people say that they hate about politicians. And yet....
So how about this? How about having the mainstream media stop chuckling when a politician "tells the truth" and instead congratulate him for being honest about a difficult issue, and pushing him to state how the sudden introduction of reality into his rhetoric affects his stated policies and future plans?
Let's say you're a mediocre Member of Congress. You've served for ten or more years, your seat is safe, and by virtue of your tenure you have some decent committee assignments - but you have no legislative accomplishments, no national name recognition, no real agenda, no fire in your belly. Half the people in your district can't recall that you represent them, and many of those who do see you as having essentially bought your way into Congress based upon an inherited name and inherited money. You've been a reliable vote for whatever the presidents of your party wanted, but being a "yes man" can only carry you so far. Do you ride out the rest of your career in relative obscurity? Or do you look at some of the nut jobs who have managed to hitch their dimly lit stars to various reactionary movements and causes and say, "I can do that, too."
Now let's imagine that one of the positions you've gained is that of Chairman of the House Committee on the Budget. You are approached by the leaders of your party with a budget plan that is quite radical. They tell you, "Put your name on this plan, push it forward, and we'll stand squarely behind you. We'll line up commentators and columnists who speak of you in glowing terms." You might ask, "What's in it for me" - but you already know what's in it for you: the potential to be nationally known and recognized, the potential to escape your mediocrity. You might ask, "What's the downside", but you know that as well: really, nothing. The worst that happens is that your plan is rejected, the party says, "That was his idea, not ours," and you are left with some favors you can call in. Perhaps you can use those favors to attach your name to a significant bill, and at least seem less mediocre. You're not signing onto anything so radical that you're putting your seat in danger. Really, you can't lose.
There's nothing new in such a story. Change a detail here or there and you can find examples from pretty much any era, pretty much any country, pretty much any form of government. But in the modern era of 24-hour news coverage (take an hour's worth of news and stretch it to the point of breaking, add mediocre commentary and what passes for analysis, and call it a 24-hour news network), it's perhaps easier than ever to parlay a contrived alliance into at least short-term political fortune - as demonstrated by the mediocre candidates who were taken seriously during the Republican primary season, and the eagerness of the media to continue to cover a "race" that has for all practical purposes been over for quite some time.
Paul Ryan seems to be pretty much a classic example of this phenomenon. The problem from a policy standpoint is that the elevation of partisan mediocrity clouds the issues and harms the public debate. Actually, that's only a problem for the other side - that's your goal. When your party and the pundits and news commentators aligned with your party consistently misrepresent your plan as being some sort of stroke of genius, and the larger media goes along for the ride (or prefers to cover the horse race instead of the facts) the facts become irrelevant to the public debate.
Enter Mr. Ryan, an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one. The “centrists” needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated him for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations.
So you can see the problem these commentators face. To admit that the president’s critique is right would be to admit that they were snookered by Mr. Ryan, who is the same as he ever was. More than that, it would call into question their whole centrist shtick — for the moral of my story is that Mr. Ryan isn’t the only emperor who turns out, on closer examination, to be naked.
Fascinating, isn't it, how the spin applied to "your plan" can turn you from an example of Congressional mediocrity into somebody ballyhooed as fiscally responsible, an idea man, one of the most influential politicians in the nation (begging the question of exactly who it is that you are influencing).
There's another aspect to politics that has, over time, come to complicate the lives of politicians: A long history in which you lie to voters about your beliefs, lie to the media, and even maintain a consistent voting record consistent with your public image, while you work behind closed doors with other politicians (many of whom are as publicly dishonest as you are) to broker a deal based. You and politicians like you create a toxic public atmosphere around certain issues, but make sure that there are enough votes to pass a compromise bill. You may even prefer to make more concessions to the other side as a matter of sound public policy, but first and foremost your job as a Member of Congress is to get reelected, so if there are enough votes to pass the bill you helped craft you may even publicly denounce it and vote against it. If your vote is needed, you'll give a duplicitous speech about how the merits of the bill and needs of the country forced you to support a bad bill, and how you hope that parts can be repealed or will be overturned by the courts.
Think back to Evan Bayh, lamenting the "good old days" when Senators would socialize together, putting aside their partisan differences at night. That's easier when everybody understands that the public performance is largely an act, that at the end of the day everybody wants to get reelected - and to do that you need to pander to special interest groups and donors. The problem is that changes in the media, along with the rise of unofficial information channels (websites, blogs, Youtube), both help true ideologues rise to power and make it more difficult for politicians to ever deviate from their party's claimed orthodoxy, and easier for people to find and emphasize points of past deviation (even if, at the time, you were being a good foot soldier for your party). The parties continue to hold sufficient influence over the media and political commentators, perhaps especially the beltway types who love to think of themselves as powerful and well-connected, wise and influential.
If you're a media darling, though, with no real accomplishment, it's pretty easy for your party's leaders to shift the spotlight elsewhere. Had the spin of Ryan and his plan not worked, he would be long forgotten. Just another mediocre Member of Congress who voted for (can you believe it) Medicare Part D and TARP? His budget? Now spun as a stunt that his party never supported, just one guy trying to cover up his own voting history. How could somebody like that possibly be taken seriously as a fiscal conservative with that record, right? For all the talk about Ryan's influence it seems largely to be an illusion - it's not clear that he has actually influenced anything.
This much is clear:
The budget with Ryan's name attached won't ever become law, and even if it did his party would soon run, screaming, from the implications of everything but the tax cuts for the rich.
The only budget you can take seriously is the present budget, because in a year or two you're going to have a new Congress with a new agenda - and you can't bind them.
Warren Buffett offers a genuine solution to budget deficits - not necessarily wise on policy, but one that would unquestionably be effective:
If Congress wanted to balance the budget, Congress would balance the budget. The rest is a show.
A number of stories that have captured a great deal of public and media attention have, upon examination, been demonstrated to be predicated on exaggeration or outright fabrication. Shocking? Not really - with the rise of the Internet it sometimes feels like exaggeration is at an all-time high, but it's nothing new.
I read fiction, as well as accounts that are "based on true stories" (a distinction from outright fiction that sometimes seems razor thin), and appreciate them for what they are. But when somebody claims that their story is factual, I think it is reasonable to expect that they are making a sincere effort to convey facts, not the "real truth behind the facts".
I believe that this is important not just out of a slavish devotion to truth, but in recognition of why certain stories resonate, whether or not they are true. When you hear a story that rings true, inspires a public reaction and perhaps even motivates change, but turns out to be false, it's possible to argue that the lie served a greater good. But let's remember, we don't all share the same prejudices. We don't all share the same conception of what serves the greater good. No matter what your perspective, if you sort through lies that gained public traction you won't only find progress. You'll find lies that appealed to the worst aspects of human nature and pulled society (or parts of society) backwards.
At Forbes, Tim Worstall presents a partial defense of Mike Daisey's fabrications about Foxconn and Apple,
Assuming that we know we’re being lied to in search of that emotional reaction to the truthiness then indeed, it is being done with integrity. The problem comes if we are assuming actual truth while the artist is presenting us only with emotional truth. When theatre is presented as journalism say.
I’d go further too: I’m not just OK with, I applaud, laud, attempts to manipulate those emotional reactions in pursuit of some larger truth. It is what the arts of rhetoric and persuasion are all about after all. I’ve not even got a problem with people telling outright lies in order to get people to pay attention to an important point about our world. As long as we then get to the next stage.... Yes, once we’ve been manipulated, once our emotions have been aroused so that we do in fact take an interest in the subject, then we have to put that emotion aside and start to think rationally. We need to turn to journalism, to facts and reality, so that we can decide what, if anything, we are to do about this subject that has now been called to our attention.
It's easier to take a step back from a creative narrative that highlights an important problem and say, "Now let's figure out what the actual facts are and find possible solutions," than it is to step back from something you already believe to be true and start looking, in essence, for facts that contradict your beliefs. (Confirmation bias.) The manner in which the story is presented is important both to how it will be perceived and how wedded people will become to the narrative.
As for hidden camera video.... Let's give James O'Keefe some credit for finding a few ACORN workers whose reaction to his desire to be a pimp was anything but appropriate, and some genuine management deficits within the organization. But was it in the interest of the greater good, though, that through selective editing and implication, he misled people about the prevalence of the problems and the manner in which he obtained the information? If you're among the right-wing population that bought into the demonization of ACORN, the fact that the organization was taken down by accusations that were largely false is in the greater good of society.
For that matter, what about the misinformation that occurs in politics. When a politician running for national office starts prevaricating about Cadillac-driving welfare queens, or runs a "Willie Horton"-type ad, people react. Is that for the better of society? We get manipulated, our prejudices are triggered, our emotions are aroused, and... how do we then transition to "put[ting] that emotion aside and start[ing] to think rationally"? If we're among the people who matter - the people who are the targets of that type of misinformation campaign - we don't.
The media often does a poor job of explaining the facts, but that's only part of the story. Sometimes when you create a mythology, it takes on a life of its own and is highly resistant to correction based upon the facts. Take, for example, the huge population of Republicans who are wedded to various lies and misrepresentations about President Obama - you can smack them across the nose with a stack of birth certificates and all they'll see is a "cover-up". It doesn't help that some national political leaders who know better help advance the lies or dance around the issue, but even if you look to the efforts of more honorable politicians like John McCain to push back you can see that we're way past the point that the facts matter.
Worstall suggests that a public reaction to misinformation potentially opens the door to a reasoned discussion,
[N]ow that consciousness has been raised let’s have that discussion. The tragedy of Mike Daisey’s monologue is that by allowing his fable to be broadcast as factual he’s obscured, buried even, the very points that we should be discussing.
The difficulty with endorsing lies to raise public consciousness is that you are endorsing an approach that can work against the best interests of society, or of certain groups within a society, and which contributes to public cynicism about media and government. The problem with qualifying that with, "As long as we then get to the next stage" where we have a reasoned discussion of the issues is that you cannot know in advance if such a discussion will occur, with history suggesting that in most cases it either will not occur, will come too late, or will occur at such a low relative intensity that it has no significant impact on continued belief in the misrepresentation.
