Michael Gerson Doesn't Like Arithmetic....

I won't blame Michael Gerson for the title to his latest column, as it was likely chosen by an editor, but wow... what a ridiculous attempt at a play on words. Gerson is hopping on the Republican bandwagon by attacking Nate Silver, a guy who announced well in advance of the polling of this race, "Here's the formula I'm going to apply to the polling data to try to predict a winner in the presidential race," because he has done exactly that - he has applied his formula exactly as promised, in a clinical, nonpartisan manner, but... darnitall, his numbers keep favoring the President.

Gerson starts out with a reasonable point - that the specificity of the numbers produced by Silver's formula may be misleading. Gerson complains that Silver's formula, as of the time of his writing, put President Obama's chance of reelection "at 86.3 percent. Not 86.1 percent. Not 87.8 percent. At 86.3 percent." But the specificity is a product of the formula, not a claim that the formula is perfect. I'm not sure what difference it would make to Gerson, or to anybody else, if Silver rounded his numbers to the nearest one or five. For that matter, if Silver used a ten point scale, rounding off his number and saying "right now Romney has a 1/10 chance of winning", I would expect that Gerson and friends would be complaining about the lack of specificity and insisting that he use the "real" numbers from his formula.

But here's the thing: Gerson has no complaint about the polls themselves - just the algorithmic attempt to explain what the polls mean. He's fine with the race being declared "a dead heat" or "48:46". If the polls were coming back 60:40 for Romney I expect he would be ecstatic. What he doesn't like is being told that, if the polls as accurate, even if the polls are coming back with the candidates separated by a number less than their margin of error, the polls have a cumulative significance. A persistent small lead in poll after poll really does suggest that one subject has a genuine, persistent lead.

Gerson complains that analysts like Silver have their "bases covered",

If the state polls are correct, the aggregator gets credit for his insight in trusting them. If the assumptions contained in those polls — on the partisan composition of the electorate or the behavior of independents — are wrong, it is the failure of pollsters, not of statisticians such as Silver.

Well... yes. When somebody produces data that is correct, an analysis based upon that data is more likely to be correct. When somebody produces data that is wrong, "garbage in, garbage out." But that simply brings us back to the earlier point, if Gerson believes that the polls may be garbage, why isn't he objecting to the polls themselves rather than grousing about how statisticians analyze poll data?

Toward the end of his column Gerson complains that "current fashion for polls and statistics" extends to political commentary and,

Instead of making political analysis more “objective,” it has driven the entire political class — pundits, reporters, campaigns, the public — toward an obsessive emphasis on data and technique. Quantification has also resulted in miniaturization. In politics, unlike physics, you can only measure what matters least.

If that's Gerson's concern, the first question that comes to mind is why Gerson isobsessing over statistical analysis of poll data, rather than criticizing the larger, chronic tendency of his peers to cover elections as if they are a horse race. The second, where can I find the new breed of pundits who actually attempt to apply data to their analysis? Is Gerson talking about David Brooks and his marshmallows? Or is he pointing at Paul Krugman as the exception who proves the rule?

Gerson snarks, "Strongly consider a profession in which one is right, by definition, 100 percent of the time", never mind that if Silver's predictions are wrong he and his formula will take a hit. Gerson can produce, as a matter of habit, thinly reasoned column after thinly reasoned column and, as long as enough people read them, the New York Times will keep paying him a six figure salary and he'll be in a position to pick up far more than that on the lecture circuit and through book deals. If Silver's formula were as flawed, he would be discredited in the realm of politics.

Gerson continues his complaint about... was it polling... complaining that,

An election is not a mathematical equation; it is a nation making a decision. People are weighing the priorities of their society and the quality of their leaders. Those views, at any given moment, can be roughly measured. But spreadsheets don’t add up to a political community.

Who argued that spreadsheets, algorithms, statistics, polls, anything like that "add up to a political community"?

In a democracy, the convictions of the public ultimately depend on persuasion, which resists quantification.

Yet Gerson knows that is untrue. He worked for an administration that was dreaming of creating a permanent Republican majority, even if just 51% of voters, and was no doubt specifically tasked with crafting speeches meant to satisfy that narrow majority based upon aggregated polling data. He has seen how politicians running for office use polls to shape their message and their sound bites, to target segments of the population they believe are likely to vote for them. Gerson is rooting for a candidate who won't put on a shirt without checking the polls, who changes his positions on key issues every time the polls tell him that likely Republican voters want to hear something different.

Gerson declares,

The most interesting and important thing about politics is not the measurement of opinion but the formation of opinion. Public opinion is the product — the outcome — of politics; it is not the substance of politics.

Really? In that case it would be interesting to have Gerson explain to us how the vast fortune spent on political campaign ads over the course of this election have reshaped public opinion. How the campaign speeches have done so. When opinions have changed it seems to have been forces outside of the political sphere that have led to the change - a hurricane blasting the East Coast, for example - not politics. What election is Gerson looking at?

Also, when political scientists attempt to determine which people hold certain beliefs, then to determine why those people hold their beliefs, they're engaged in the study of how opinions are formed. Gerson knows that his party has made an artform of crafting language to persuade people to support its positions, and to obscure the truth behind them, labeling and relabeling their programs. "Privatize? We would never suggest that. Vouchers? Never heard of 'em." There's a reason why some political scientists study the phrases used in political speeches and, having penned a large number of them, Gerson has to understand that, even if he feigns ignorance.

If political punditry has any value in a democracy, it is in clarifying large policy issues and ethical debates, not in “scientific” assessments of public views.

Perhaps the takeaway from that is, "Perhaps that's why punditry, as presently practiced, has so little value in our democracy." Columnists may not be producing a "scientific" assessment of public views, but they're more than happy to label the nation's politics and leaders - "center-left", "center-right", etc. - and they're more than happy to declare what "the people" want and expect from their political leaders. Gerson believes that such statements are more valuable when they come from the gut, as opposed to from any attempt to methodically collect and analyze actual data?

And while I'm sure Gerson embraces the conceit that, through his column, he is "clarifying large policy issues and ethical debates", few columnists make such an effort. Most are happy to instead share their own opinions, or to advance the positions of groups that fund their speeches and buy their books, even if that means muddying the waters. Gerson played a lead role in the team that sold the Iraq War to the American public - not the entire public, but enough of the public such that the war could go on. Even if he might protest, "That was before I was a pundit," he's going to lecture others about clarifying issues of public policy and ethics? First, how about an apology?

Gerson next switches gears, and starts attacking political science and what he sees as its "mania for measurement". Let's note up front, Nate Silver is not a political scientist - to the extent that Gerson believes that any exercise in measurement and statistical analysis of a political question falls under the umbrella of "political science", he's mistaken.

Crack open most political science journals and you’ll find a profusion of numbers and formulas more suited to the study of physics. In my old field of speechwriting, political scientists sometimes do content analysis by counting the recurrence of certain words — as though leadership could be decoded by totaling the number of times Franklin Roosevelt said “feah” or George W. Bush said “freedom.”

You know, the sort of thing no pundit would ever do. What sort of pundit would devote a paragraph of an interview to a self-adulating politician's description of his insistence that God be named in a political platform based on the argument, "have you checked any polling lately" - and what sort of deeply religious columnist would not be offended by that? Oh... yeah.

Frankly, Gerson's comments suggest to me that he has read very little analysis by political scientists, and has even less of an understanding of what they do or how their work is used. He focuses on the word "political", and loses track of the fact that political science is much more about policy formation than it is about politics. Gerson speaks of political science as "a division of the humanities", "mainly the realm of ethics — the study of justice, human nature, moral philosophy and the common good".

A couple of years ago I sat through a series of presentations by political science graduate students, involving such efforts as an analysis of dental care training and treatment provided to impoverished preschoolers and its impact on their later dental and physical health - focused very much on the bottom line, the cost to a community that would implement such a program and the savings that would result. Sure, you could "go with your gut" on something like that, but when you have limited resources and don't want to waste money the statistics Gerson derides can be crucial to good policy formation, wise allocation of tax dollars and avoidance of waste.

Gerson's thoughts on political science seem a bit like his reaction to Nate Silver - "Deriving numbers and statistical probabilities from data? I don't get it." He again displays confusion about the precision of a statistic and its greater meaning, that political scientists are attempting to apply "the precision of mathematics in a field of study whose subject can yield no such certainty". Except as Gerson should know, you can find patterns in just about anything and can collect data to identify or clarify the significance of a pattern. The numbers produced by a statistical analysis may look precise, but you're going to be less concerned about the data and more concerned about the probabilities - how likely it is that the same result would occur by chance. And yes, even when you're using data and statistics, you actually can use political science as part of "the study of justice, human nature, moral philosophy and the common good".

By the end of the column, Gerson's argument appears to reduce to, "Statistics are cold and impersonal, and I would rather ignore them and talk about issues of ethics and values - the things that really matter." I guess he's calling for a return to his pet phrase, a concept that was never transformed into reality, "compassionate conservatism". I am not sure what role Gerson had in advancing Bush's use of empty catch phrases like "A hand up, not a handout", but Gerson's fundamental problem appears to be that he cannot distinguish politics from policy, rhetoric from reality. He gets misty-eyed when Republicans speak of "equality", but does not care that behind the rhetoric lie policies that will inevitably increase inequality.

Actually, perhaps that's why he hates the numbers and those who work with them. Perhaps he truly wants to believe that Paul Ryan's goal of undermining of public services and government programs that aid the poor and middle class, in favor of massive tax cuts for the rich, is in fact part of a larger goal of increasing equality, and when people inject reality into the mix his first urge is to run, screaming from the room.

If Paul Ryan quotes Lincoln, Gerson would ask us to listen to the pretty words, and to keep our eyes away from the reality he knows they are designed to obscure. And alas, whether he believes himself to be sheltering and nurturing a concept that will never reach maturity, if he's more cynically working to obscure the realities of his party's agenda and a Paul Ryan-type budget, or if he's focused on a narrow social conservative agenda and doesn't otherwise care about veracity, Gerson truly does seem to believe that to be his job as a pundit. Then again, maybe it's more simple than that: Maybe Gerson is comfortable in his assumption that the issues that are important to him - the ones that lead to his "the ends justify the means" commentary, his most mendacious claims and distortions of political reality - are equally important to others, and he's uncomfortable being confronted with data that suggests that he's wrong not only about the electorate but about his own party.

Public Approval of Supreme Court Decisions

Ilya Somin is watching the polls, and wants us know that a new opinion poll shows the Court's opinion to be unpopular. He argues that although public opinion appears to be shifting in favor of the law,

The difference may well be the result of the fact that a substantial minority of the public will tend to assume that any decision the Court makes is likely to be right unless they have very strong personal feelings on the subject.

Nonetheless, this result undermines the notion that the ruling will be a boost to the Court’s legitimacy or that its public image would have suffered had it ruled the other way. It’s unlikely that the Court’s legitimacy improved much in the eyes of anyone but committed liberals and legal academics.

But as Somin admits, pubic opinion of itself "says very little about whether [a] ruling is right or wrong" and some Supreme Court opinions that, in retrospect, seem backward, even atrocious, were popular at the time they were issued. Let's recall also that some opinions that were broadly unpopular, or unpopular in the regions of the country most affected by the outcome, now enjoy broad public support and acceptance. Somin notes that First Amendment opinions on flag burning, although legally correct, are unpopular.

In other words, a snapshot of public opinion means next to nothing.

I personally believe that Roberts crafted this opinion to try to quiet a lot of sound and fury in a manner that, quite possibly, will end up signifying nothing. I am skeptical that any of the significant holdings of the court will pose a problem to future sessions of Congress. You can't modify a federal grant without allowing states to maintain the status quo because that would be too coercive? Okay - we'll explicitly end the old program and create a new one. You can't impose a mandate under the Commerce Clause? We'll rephrase, or make it a tax. The case as it stands will most likely signify a turning point toward or away from the dissenters' perspective on the limits of the Constitution, but Roberts otherwise seemed to be composing an outcome he expects history to largely forget. Legal scholars will take note if future cases build off of this decision, but beyond that there's not much to remember. Reversing the ACA? That would have been an opinion for the history books.

Somin argues,

I do not believe that the Court should decide cases based on the perceived effects on its “legitimacy.” But for those who disagree, the individual mandate decision was not the great triumph that some imagine it to be.

In a big picture sense, of course the Court shouldn't focus on its "legitimacy". It should focus on the law and Constitution. Nonetheless, it will inevitably be presented with difficult questions for which there is a genuine difference of opinion about constitutionality, and it's appropriate for the Supreme Court in those contexts to consider its role in our system of government - as one of three co-equal branches of government - and to act as a court, not a legislature.

That's something conservatives have argued for years - that "judicial activism" harms the court as an institution. While reiterating that "judicial activism" is often a subjective concept and, depending on how you define it, does not have to involve acting outside of the scope of the Constitution and can actually benefit society - Brown v. Board is widely regarded as an activist decision - there's a lot of merit to the argument that political victory should come at the ballot box and not the courthouse.

That argument seems considerably stronger when a court is asked to review legislative action, as opposed to inaction, and again stronger when the legislation at issue was a significant issue in that party's election campaign. When the best the Supreme Court can say on a difficult constitutional question is, "It's a coin toss," there's a certain, potentially corrosive arrogance to nonetheless rejecting the opinion of both the Executive and Legislature that a particular legislative act is constitutional.

I believe that Roberts is aware that this is his court and his legacy, and that his status as Chief Justice of "The Roberts Court" influences how he approaches cases. But to the extent that thoughts of a legacy influence a judge, its better that the effect be to inspire modesty than arrogance.

Fools, Frauds and Politicians

Paul Krugman summarizes his "Fools and Frauds" theory of politicians, and its effect on the present Republican primaries:

I view the primary race through the lens of the FOF theory — that’s for “fools and frauds”. It goes as follows: to be a good Republican right now, you have to affirm your belief in things that any halfway intelligent politician can see are plainly false. This leaves room for only two kinds of candidates: those who just aren’t smart and/or rational enough to understand the problem, and those who are completely cynical, willing to say anything to get ahead.

FOF is a close cousin to the "stupid or lying" debate that has at times come up in comments to this blog - when politicians say things that are patently untrue is it because they're stupid (fools) or because they're frauds (lying). The fraud assumes either that you're uninformed, and not likely to become informed, or that you're too stupid to see the facts that are right in front of your face.

But here's the thing: even if it is a fine illustration of the phenomenon at work, FOF is not unique to the present primary campaign. In fairness, if that's the word, every politician is a little bit of a fool (asked to comment on issues that he doesn't fully understand, and bluffing his way through at risk of being accused of making a "gaffe") and a little bit of a fraud (making representations or campaign promises that he knows won't bear fruit, or that he knows are at best partial truths, because part of the problem is that the public often doesn't want the whole truth). To some degree, FoF stands as an illustration of the maxim that people get the government that they deserve.

One thing is certain, though, as long as fact checkers approach the issue of facts with fear of being accused of partisanship if they don't balance out their truth-telling between the sides, as long as the news media chooses not to "take sides" even when the truth is objectively determinable, and as long as the primary focus of "news analysis" is either partisan commentary or a battle between pundits who are often, themselves, fools and frauds, people will continue to have difficulty getting accurate information or separating the truth from fraud and fiction. And that's before we get into the foibles of the human mind, and how we tend to dismiss or diminish facts that get in the way of our beliefs, even when our beliefs are wrong or irrational.

I've recently commented on the bizarre impact that FOF is having on the Republican primary process, but I don't think it's so much the Republican candidates that are the problem. It's that they are dealing with a base of voters that has been trained and empowered to demand that candidates pass certain litmus tests, and that modern campaigns are driven by polls. The Democrats benefit, if you can call it that, from having a less cohesive base and thus far fewer "make or break" litmus tests, but the downside is that, at least historically, it's harder to unite the base behind a candidate.

It may be that polls are now so central to campaigns that we'll increasingly see candidates distinguishing themselves from each other in the manner of the present Republican campaign (or in the manner that Gore failed to distinguish himself from Bush during his campaign, lending credence to the myth that there was no significant difference between them).

That opponent is plain, ordinary supermarket vanilla. The candidate over there may taste like vanilla but he's vanillin, only pretending to be vanilla. The candidate in that other corner is Mexican vanilla. You may thing he tastes better than the supermarket brand, but don't be fooled. Oh, and my other rival? Vanilla bean paste - he's a little bit thick, if you know what I mean.

Me? I'm Tahitian vanilla. Strong, flavorful, aromatic (in a good way), and just what we need to bake a perfect Republic.

To the degree that this election is different from those that came before it, it's only a matter of degree.

I Hate Polls (Sort Of)

I read them, but I hate them. Actually, I'll acknowledge a like-hate relationship. They can be highly informative, or highly misleading. The way you phrase a question can dramatically skew the outcome, as can any number of other factors. For political junkies, they can be a lot of fun.

But although polls inspire much triumphalism and gloominess, what do they really mean? About six weeks ago, we heard a continuous whine from partisans and pundits that Obama wasn't polling at over 50%, and that this somehow meant he couldn't close the deal. As if you can close an election that far out in a nation that's pretty evenly divided, absent a horrendous scandal befalling your opponent. Then McCain had his post-convention/Palin bounce, and it was nothing but doom and gloom from Obama's supporters. Now Obama's polling significantly ahead of McCain, he's over 50% in a couple of polls, and we have people claiming that unless something big happens McCain can't win.

Guess what - the economic problems we're presently facing are big, and they happened. Lots of things can happen in five weeks, and it's not that you want any game-changers to come along, as they're often catastrophic, but... they could. And perhaps what we're seeing right now is a "financial bail-out bill bounce", not something that will hold any more than the McCain post-convention bounce. So let's take the polls for what they're worth, but remember that we're still five weeks away from the only poll that matters.