Duke v. Butler 2010: "Narrow Lead" And "Toss-Up" Are Not The Same

As we head to election day tomorrow, one of the ongoing tropes in the political media is that it's not possible to know who is favored in the Presidential election - that it is a "toss-up".

As a matter of analysis, the idea that this race is a coin flip is wrong.  Though the national polls show a slight Obama lead - slight enough to argue that the race is tied nationally - Obama, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, holds leads of at least 2 points in all the battleground states necessary for an electoral college victory except FL, NC, VA, and CO - trails only in VA and CO.

My point here is not to say that race isn't close - it is. Or to say that Romney can't win - he can.  But our political media's has not been able to deal with the concept of of a narrow but persistent lead. So I'm gonna provide a reference point.

If you are college basketball fan, you probably remember the 2010 National Championship game, where a scrappy mid-major program, Butler, lost by 2 points to Duke, the national power that everyone but Duke fans loves to hate.  As a Duke fan, I remember nervously watching a very close game, decided only when a last second three-quarter court shot by Butler's Gordon Heyward bounced off the rim.  So the game was close throughout.

But look at the play-by-play.  Butler led the game for just under 4 minutes of the entire contest total.  Butler never had a lead of more than 2 points, and Butler held its last lead at the 13:02 mark of the 2nd half.

The point?  Duke was narrowly leading virtually the entire game and was thus favored to win for most of the game. That did not preclude Butler from winning, as we know from the last minute of play, but it would have been an upset, even within the context of the game, had it happened.

This is directly related to Presidential race. It is not a "toss-up."  President Obama leads narrowly, but persistently, Mitt Romney has only led sporadically but he is can win. But it would be an upset. Just like if Heyward's shot hadn't bounced off the rim.

Paul Ryan's speech and The Political Press

The Republican convention concluded last night with a broad consensus that Mitt Romney either did or did not do some, most, or all of the thing he needed to do to be elected President.  However the most illustrative moment of the convention was the speech of Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan and the subsequent reactions. The reaction of the media shows a press corps so attuned to the idea of false balance and not being called liberal, that they are uncomfortable calling out conservative lies, even when they do it.

As has been noted in numerous places, Paul Ryan's speech and it's relationship to the truth was tenuous.  The question that many reporters are asking is whether or not it matters.  In fact, a number of articles have suggested that it doesn't.

The most interesting three pieces about the Ryan speech suggest  a political press corps so cognizant of not being branded as liberal and so guided by the idea that political balance is the most important value in reporting, that they don't even know that they sacrifice their own credibility.

In a post titled "Why Fact Checkers Fail, " Dan Conover, a journalist who managed political coverage for a number of news outlets in the south, wrote how he covered political lies.

A political editor walks the line between trying to find the truth and trying to publish the truth, and must constantly compromise the latter in the service of the former. That's because when the balance of truth favors one party over the other, presenting it that way destroys the journalistic fiction that Jay Rosen dubbed "The View From Nowhere." Media companies like that view because, in theory at least, it allows them to sell their newspapers (or TV programs) to the entire electorate.  

In other words, if the Republican Party produces 10 fact-mangling whoppers to every arcane Democratic stat-fudger, you've got a serious problem as a journalist. You simply can't present that ratio as-is without looking like a liberal hack. 

So here's what we did -- what I did -- and what others have certainly done as well: I downplayed Republican dishonesty while judging Democratic failings with an unfairly harsh bias. I applied this to assignments, to the tone and presentation of stories, and to the various gimmicks we invented to try to evaluate claims. The results didn't reflect the true scale of the dishonesty gap, but they at least demonstrated that a gap existed. At least, they had the potential to demonstrate the gap, but only to very careful readers with a knack for drawing subtle inference. Because we could never come out and tell you what we all knew in the newsroom: Yes, "all politicians lie" (a cynical dodge if ever there was one), but the modern Republican Party is based on a set of counter-factual and faith-based beliefs, and has been for years. Not only has that foundation consistently put the party on the wrong side of fact-checkers, it has led us to where we stand today, with Mitt Romney running a campaign that has abandoned even the pretense of fact. 

I'd recommend the whole piece, as it illustrates how the constraints of a political press corps afraid of being labelled liberal has led to privileging the most audacious of lies, and brought us to the most brazen, falsehood-laden campaign that Romney and the Republicans are running.

A second piece, by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a liberal policy wonk, suggests the lengths that reporters go to in order to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt.  Klein describes the lengths we went to to write an article giving Ryan every benefit of the doubt.

The original pitch was for “the five biggest lies in Paul Ryan’s speech.” I said no. It’s not that the speech didn’t include some lies. It’s that I wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see it from Ryan’s perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst. So I suggested an alternative: The true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech. (Note here that we’re talking about political claims, not personal ones. Ryan’s biography isn’t what we’re examining here though, for the record, I found his story deeply moving.)

An hour later, the draft came in — Dylan Matthews is a very fast writer. There was one item in the “true” section.  

So at about 1 a.m. Thursday, having read Ryan’s speech in an advance text and having watched it on television, I sat down to read it again, this time with the explicit purpose of finding claims we could add to the “true” category. And I did find one. He was right to say that the Obama administration has been unable to correct the housing crisis, though the force of that criticism is somewhat blunted by the fact that neither Ryan nor Mitt Romneyhave proposed an alternative housing policy. But I also came up with two more “false” claims. So I read the speech again. And I simply couldn’t find any other major claims or criticisms that were true.

 Klein goes on to explain is definition of "true".

I want to stop here and say that even the definition of “true” that we’re using is loose. “Legitimate” might be a better word. The search wasn’t for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context.

Forget his conclusion.  Look at the effort Klein goes through to give Ryan every benefit of the doubt.   And he does it to preserve the illusion that both sides are equally mendacious, even though the actual data his is looking at clearly indicates that is not true.


Finally, an article whose headline speaks for itself.  "The media coverage of Paul Ryan's speech: 15 euphemisms for 'lying."  So, even though the press recognizes what it it looking at, it refuses to call a lie a lie, because that would upset the very idea of balance.

What these three articles illustrate is that, ultimately, the conservative goal of demonizing the press as liberal has been internalized by reporters, so much so that they have an internal debate over whether to call obvious lies what they are, if they are uttered by Republicans.   That this is the current state of affairs is bad for the country and is bad for a free press, but unless the media's fear of being branded liberal has been what has allowed this to happen.

Fact Checkers and False Balance

Fact checkers complaining that Mitt Romney makes false claims during his campaign have a point. But because most of them have hewn to the ridiculous idea that "both sides do it" provides necessary balance, these fact checkers have neutralized themselves.  It explains why the Romney campaign can say, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

Case in point, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.   Kessler has correctly pointed out that the theme of first night of the Republican National Convention, "We Built It," was based on the distortion and truncation of a speech by Barack Obama, lifting it from all context and changing its meaning.  Writing on July  23rd, Kessler opined.

 [B]y focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different — and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous. That’s not very original at all.

After the first night of the convention, Kessler "upgraded" his rating to 4 Pinocchio's because: 

[I]n light of the GOP’s repeated misuse of this Obama quote in speech after speech, we feel compelled to increase the Pinocchio rating to Four.

Fine.  The GOP repeats a debunked lie and he upgrades it.  But in his piece, Kessler describes the complaints generated by the original 3 Pinocchio rating and that the original rating was a "compromise"

We originally gave Romney’s use of the phrase Three Pinocchios, a ruling that did not seem to please anyone, with Democrats complaining that Obama’s words were clearly taken out of context and Republicans arguing that even in context, his words exposed a philosophy that was deeply suspicious of — even hostile to — the private sector...So we believed Three Pinocchios was a reasonable compromise, given the ungrammatical nature of Obama’s phrasing. [Emphasis added]

Kessler goes on to write, "As we have often said, a gaffe can become an effective attack when it reinforces an existing stereotype about a politician. Democrats would have a stronger case for a complaint if they did not also yesterday release two videos that made ample use of gaffes by Romney that reinforced the stereotype of the GOP nominee being an uncaring corporate executive." [Emphasis added]

And there's the point.  Kessler does not independently think about whether the claim is true or not. Embedded in his analysis is the thought about how political actors use the claims.  For purposes of a "fact check" it does not actually matter whether the Democrats would have a "stronger" case if they did something different. If they are complaining, yet doing the same thing, it makes them hypocrites, but it doesn't make the statement any less false.   Yet that is not how Kessler treats the claim.

And thus the problem. The idea that you have to ding both sides is so embedded in the ideology of reporters who cover politics that even "fact checkers" do it when it is totally irrelevant to the "fact" they are trying to "check."

The fundamental progressive failure

In the wake of the agreement that prevented the federal government, the Obama Administration has planned an address this week to lay out fundamental entitlement reform.  Progressives have been loudly disappointed by the deal that prevented the shutdown, particularly the appearance of President Obama cheering the historic cuts the deal involved.  Thus there is little enthusiasm for Obama's speech among core progressives, even if he calls for the "grand bargain" which would raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans to shore up Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  (Whether that "bargain" is necessary is a whole other   subject).

But no matter what the immediate causes and reactions to these events are,  they represent a fundamental failure of progressives.  The most important economic issue being debated is not jobs, or income inequality,   or even basic societal fairness, but rather the federal deficit.  The most urgent issue for the future is not climate change, whose effects are approaching the point at which they will be irreversible, but the federal debt, which is reversible by a growing economy and some policy adjustments.

Essentially, the progressive view of the world which prioritizes a growing economy, greater economic opportunity for more people, and a future where we aren't faced by catastrophic climate effects, has been trumped by a worry about government debt.  And what is the real worry about the government debt?  That we won't we will have to have radical cuts in the social safety net because of that debt.  And what's the solution to that problem?  Radical cuts in the social safety net.

Are there structural impediments to making our case?  Yes.  But right now, even progressives tend to buy the frame around which these arguments take place. And that's a failure of persuasion.

We figure out a way to get people who don't already agree with us to listen to and believe in our arguments.

Three takes on the events in Tucson

I want to highlight three items that usefully analyze the events in Tucson.

James Fallows at The Atlantic, "The Cloudy Logic of Political Shootings"

We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did. If he is like [Sirhan] Sirhan, we'll never "understand." But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery, including SarahPac's famous bulls-eye map of 20 Congressional targets to be removed -- including Rep. Giffords. It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload.

George Packer at The New Yorker, "It Doesn't Matter Why He Did It"

This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We’ve all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

Peter Daou, "Gabrielle Giffords and the rightwing hate machine (on the bogus equivalence between right/left extremism)"

The deeply-etched themes that run through American politics reflect the right’s successful framing: Democrats and liberals are wimps, Republicans and conservatives are gun-toting patriots; Democrats and liberals despise their country, Republicans and conservatives are the only ones willing to protect it; Democrats and liberals want to intrude on your freedom, tax you and bankrupt the nation, Republicans and conservatives want to give you freedom, liberty and wealth. The current of eliminationism infusing the right’s worldview is an inevitable outcome of such contorted impressions – it’s a natural impulse to want to destroy that which is (supposedly) destroying you.

Those who foist the false right/left equivalency ignore this reality. Their definition of extremism is necessarily warped, since they have to stretch logic to fabricate a sense of balance. If you want single-payer health care, you’re a liberal extremist, but if you deny global warming, you’re simply a conservative skeptic. As the national discourse moves further and further right, only the most unhinged rightwingers are tagged as extreme, while all it takes for a liberal to be labeled an extremist is to espouse a policy position that is out of the mainstream. That is not to say there are not violent individuals and extremists on the left, but that it is absurd to argue that left and right are comparable in the language of violence and incitement.

When center becomes right and right becomes far right, conservatives can get away with wilder and weirder behavior. Exhortations from radio blatherers to bash liberals are dismissed as “entertainment.” Glenn Beck’s bizarre rantings barely get a yawn.

Five Things That Were True Before The Shootings In Tucson

Since the horrific shooting in Tucson that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others, a number of conversations have commenced about the extreme rhetoric that has emerged in the current political culture. Many on the right are angry that they are being blamed for the creating the context under which the shootings took place, especially since its become clear that shooter was an unstable, but not politically active, individual. Understand that, let me point to five facts that are true, whether or not the shooting ever took place.

Fact #1: In August of 2009, a protestor at a Giffords event dropped a gun that he had carried to it.

Fact #2: The day that the health care reform bill passed, Giffords' congressional office had a window either shot out or broken out.

Fact #3: Gabby Giffords' 2010 opponent held a campaign event shooting an automatic M-16, saying "Get on Target for Victory. Help remove Gabrielle Gifford from office."

So, to be clear, there were multiple instances of threats and violent rhetoric in Arizona's 8th Congressional District over the past two years. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had mentioned her concern over these incidents. So when a violent shooting incident nearly takes her life, it is incumbent upon those who don't think this history is relevant to tell us why, not on those of us who think this rhetoric creates a climate where attacks like this can occur.

Fact #4: Sarah Palin had a map of 20 Democrats who voted for health care reform targeted for defeat. Their districts, including Rep. Giffords, were placed under crosshairs. Palin later referred to them as "bullseyes."

Fact #5: On March 25, 2010, appearing on MSNBC, Rep. Giffords mentioned the crosshairs ad, saying," ...for example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action."

White Flight From The Democrats

Ron Brownstein, writing in National Journal has a profoundly interesting, detailed, and, for Democrats, ominous piece about exit polling numbers illustrating that Democrats are at a historical nadir among white votes. In the column, we get a number of explanations for why white voters have rejected Democrats.

Dick Wadhams, the head of the Colorado GOP, says that white voters reject Obama's view of government. "The voters who went with Obama in 2008 did not know what they were going to get with that vote. Now that they’ve seen the health care bill, the stimulus bill, the bailout, the cap-and-trade proposal—issue after issue, they don’t like what they see." Democratic pollster Mark Mellman echoes this type of argument, saying, "People felt government did a lot of big things that were inappropriate. They felt government took care of the big guys—and not me." Presidential advisor David Axelrod says that these are the voters who have born the brunt of the recession, so its understandable that they have moved away from Democrat. Jeff Bell, a conservative strategist argues that these voters have become part of a larger, permanent conservative coalition.

So, what's missing from this analysis? Well, in the over 4000 words of the column, the following words do not appear together "first," "black," and "president." In an article about white flight from the Democratic party.

To be clear, Brownstein has written an insightful piece that I recommend. But it does illustrate a fundamental failure of the dialogue in our political culture - that even in an article about racial voting patterns, race is a secondary issue.