September 2003 Archive

I'm not excusing the games Republicans play. But by projecting all evil onto Republicans, Democrats spread the same political disease: the notion that you don't have to be wary of lying or cheating unless the other side is doing it. Lying and cheating don't belong to Republicans or Democrats. We're all susceptible, and we're all guilty. Sure, some people are more guilty than others. But if that's your obsession, I commend to you the words of my colleague, Jack Shafer: If you're interested in which wing lies more, you're probably not very interested in the truth.

Rush Limbaugh and Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler both reacted to Mr. Saletan's article, prompting him to follow up:

That's the problem with a punditocracy of Limbaughs and Somberbys. Each side exposes the other's distortions. But you can't count on them to see, much less concede, their own. Somerby has done a terrific job of exposing the right's myths about Gore. But when it comes to the gamesmanship of Gore and Bill Clinton, he loses his critical eye.
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If you want to see the tricks of the right exposed, read Somerby. If you want to hear the tricks of the left exposed, listen to Limbaugh. But if you don't want to get trapped inside either wing's echo chamber, read Slate.

Lying in Ponds could not agree more -- that's the problem with a punditocracy of Coulters and Krugmans.

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NO REACTION: Daniel Henninger wrote a new column today, but he said nothing about the "wog" racial slur.

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You can either get the benign version of the American superpower, the one that comes with American values, such as a belief in self-determination even for the wogs, a version that most likely will include continued support for institutions such as the U.N. Or, amid derision and abuse, you may get the truly realpolitik version, which will be mainly about cold-bloodedly protecting the superpower's commercial interests, and will include little or no interest in the U.N. and similar platforms. Americans are patient. But they aren't punching bags.

I wasn't familiar with the term, but I agree with The Antic Muse that Mr. Henninger is wrong to use what is essentially a racial slur, and he should apologize to his readers. No doubt he intended to satirically mock the supposed attitudes of elite Europeans, but it's surely wrong to put a tainted word such as "wog" into the mouths of others.

YET ANOTHER KRUGMAN INTERVIEW: Here's a Paul Krugman interview on BuzzFlash I had missed.

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Collin Levey's score changed the most dramatically, from a high Republican score last year to a modest Democratic score this year. I guess that shows that I should follow the suggestion made to me a while back by reader Michael Kurtz, to rank only those pundits who make some minimum number of references. Peggy Noonan's Republican score is much higher this year, but that's because she has written fewer columns, and mostly about the Iraq war. The pundits who have changed the least are either those who have been the least partisan (Robert Samuelson, William Raspberry) or the most partisan (Paul Krugman, Robert Bartley). In the table below, positive changes are shown in blue, indicating scores which have moved in the Democratic direction, while negative changes are shown in red, indicating that the pundit's partisanship score has moved in the Republican direction.

Change in Partisanship Score from 2002 to 2003 Collin Levey 75 Peggy Noonan -45 E.J. Dionne 31 Michael Kinsley 25 Brendan Miniter -24 Daniel Henninger -22 William Safire -20 George Will -13 Maureen Dowd 13 Mary McGrory 12 Charles Krauthammer -11 Pete du Pont 11 David Broder -6 Richard Cohen -6 Paul Krugman -6 Robert Bartley -5 Robert Samuelson 4 William Raspberry 4

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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is an angry man. If he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears every time he hears someone say "tax cuts" or "George W. Bush" or "supply-side economics." All these things seem to set him off so much that he becomes just apoplectic, which he pours into twice-weekly columns that have become must reading for those on the left-wing fringe.

Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian on the other hand, sees his critics as "hysterical", and Mr. Krugman as "a mild-mannered university economist":

Still, there's an important sense in which his views remain essentially moderate: unlike the growing numbers of America-bashers in Europe, Krugman doesn't make the nebulous argument that there is something inherently objectionable about the US and its role in the world. He claims only that a fundamentally benign system has been taken over by a bunch of extremists - and so his alarming analysis leaves room for optimism, because they can be removed. "One of the Democratic candidates - who I'm not endorsing, because I'm not allowed to endorse - has as his slogan, 'I want my country back'," Krugman says, referring to the campaigning motto of Howard Dean. "I think that's about right."

I would not argue that liberals should abandon self-criticism; I've engaged in a lot of it over the years, and will continue to. But why should that be the definition of credibility? Aren't there others? Rush Limbaugh spreads vicious lies about the Paul Wellstone memorial. Al Franken corrects them. The Republican right doles out phony propaganda about its history on race, class politics, a whole host of things. Conason calls them on it -- as he did on Whitewater, about which he was prescient and dead right (though he suffered no small amount of ridicule back in 1995 and 1996 for having the courage to say so). From the one side, lies; from the other, attempts to correct the historical record. That, too, is a form of credibility, and I have trouble seeing why such authors are supposed to give equal time to liberalism's flaws in order to get their credibility tickets punched. . .

I think that Mr. Tomasky is guilty of a fairly common straw man argument in that last sentence, one that I often hear as a criticism of Lying in Ponds. The pundits at the very top of the partisanship rankings are not criticized because they fail to give equal time to the flaws of their own parties, but because they give virtually no time to such self-criticism. I've previously argued that some columnists reveal their partisanship when they find ways to refrain from criticizing their own party even during scandals which draw broad bipartisan criticism. A couple of examples from last year were the failure of some Republican pundits to criticize either Trent Lott's comments on Strom Thurmond or Republican complicity in the Enron scandal.

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Bobos unimpressed by Paul Krugman's crusades will relish Brooks' new appointment as an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Stationed at column right, he's likely to outlast William Safire, whose career-long cover-up exercises on behalf of Richard Nixon, Ariel Sharon and various intelligence sources have made no small contribution to Republican morale over his 30 years on the page (though Safire has also broken ranks to display a tender spot for civil liberties). Brooks, despite his Washington years, probably won't channel insider talk with Safire's gusto. What besides good fun can he bring to his coveted niche?

Here's one idea: "national greatness conservatism." In a co-authored 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, Brooks and William Kristol updated Teddy Roosevelt's nationalism to include "a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad." They advocated using "federal power to preserve and enhance our national patrimony -- the parks, buildings, and monuments that are the physical manifestations of our common heritage." And they weren't "unfriendly to government, properly understood." "Efforts to get big government off our backs, to strengthen families and to invigorate are healthy responses to the threat" of "the complacent mediocrity and petty meddling of the nanny state. But they are insufficient without the ambitions and endeavors of a conservatism committed to national greatness."

WEEK OF KRUGMAN: It seems to be all Krugman, all the time this week. Kevin Drum interviewed Paul Krugman for his Calpundit weblog, which generated hundreds and hundreds of comments. Here are a couple of quick things at the end of the interview:

Let's finish with some quickies. What are your three favorite Bush lies?

On economics, the one that got me going was Social Security during the 2000 campaign, when Bush basically said, I'm going to take a trillion dollars away and it's going to strengthen the system. Another one is the distributional stuff, just the raw lie that this is a middle class tax cut. I could come up with another economic one, but obviously I'm really exercised about the Iraq war. Even if you think the war was worth fighting, and I think that's a diminishing perception among people, we were lied into it, and that's scary, that's never happened before.

What are the three biggest problems the United States faces right now?

The budget deficit, joblessness, and, ultimately, what really, really scares me, even though I can't write about it all the time, is the environment. That's more important than anything.

Daniel Drezner commented on the interview, and that initiated a wave of comments on his weblog.

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In Norquist's vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that's a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives -- whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren't such a bad thing after all -- is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.

The definition of a partisan on LIP is:

a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

We think that the definition that drives the methodology of LIP however (which counts all references) is the former. And nothing more than a firm adherence to a party, faction or cause is not sufficient to make a columnist's writing the kind of "blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance" that we associate with excessive partisanship. What makes (many) Krugman and (all) Coulter columns so painful to read is not their allegiance, but their propensity to misrepresent, mischaracterize, mislead, use dubious data, etc... in their arguments. But that they nearly always only criticize Republicans and Democrats respectively isn't in and of itself indication of partisanship in the negative sense of the word. [It's worth noting that in his 1994 Peddling Prosperity Krugman had many unkind words for prominent Democrats, including Labor Secretary lawyer but wannabe economist Robert Reich, and economist Lester Thurow, whose then most recent book Clinton read on the campaign trail.]

We agree that a columnist that would only ever criticize one party might get tiresome to read -- and all too often those that do end up writing predictable (and excessively partisan) tripe. But both parties provide endless opportunities for criticism -- focusing one's attention on either may very well be tiring -- but it need not make one an unreasoned partisan.

SUNDAY COMICS AT BEGGING TO DIFFER: The guys at the great weblog Begging to Differ hosted a Sunday Comics feature yesterday, featuring several online comics. Be sure to check it out.

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"The Great Unraveling" collects Krugman's best work, catching those mistakes in snapshot flashes of criticism as they were being made. No one wrote with more clarity and foresight on the California energy crisis (which had nothing to do with environmental regulations and everything to do with energy companies rigging markets). No one took Alan Greenspan to task more vigorously for betraying his own legacy in embracing Bush's budget-busting tax cuts. No one rode Bush harder for his dubious past as a crony capitalist who made his fortune thanks to his connections as a president's son, and to self-dealing accounting of the same species that later turned into a national scandal during his administration, with the implosion of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and other corporate shell-game players.

Mr. Rosenberg offers some criticism of the format (organized by theme rather than by time) and the fact that the book is mostly old material (Mr. Krugman's columns in The New York Times). And something about this paragraph caught my attention, but I can't quite put my finger on it:

Within a couple of years, that new economy lay six feet under the dirt of a new recession, federal surpluses had turned into ominous new deficits, 9/11 had shattered the Pax Americana -- and Paul Krugman had become the most devastatingly precise voice of liberal outrage in American journalism. The Times' dismal scientist had swallowed a passion pill and turned into a partisan scrapper.

In a July 15 column in the New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman repeated Lyons' assertion, stating, "Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from 'people around the White House' urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein." Krugman misrepresented Clark's statement, alleging that the phrase in quotes referred to the call when it came before Clark even brought up the call. Clark actually mentioned "people around the White House" in response to Russert's question about who was attempting to connect Saddam Hussein to September 11.
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Finally, in an August 31 column in the Washington Post, George Will changed the order of Clark's quotes from the "Meet the Press" appearance to make it appear that he originally said the phone call came from the White House. Will then selectively quotes from Clark's "Hannity" and "Buchanan" appearances, along with the Times letter, to repeatedly conflate the phone call and accusations about the White House connecting 9/11 and Iraq, making it look like he contradicted his supposed original story:
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The question of who called Wesley Clark continues to be a mystery. But pundits on both the left and right just won't stop spinning a clearly false story that he alleged that he received a phone call from the White House on September 11 asking him to connect Iraq and the terrorist attacks. They need to stop the distortions and do some basic fact checking.

In an update to their article, Spinsanity notes that Gene Lyons had already corrected his error in a subsequent column. Paul Krugman and George Will should do the same.

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It's relatively simplistic: it merely counts the number of references in a column to a Democrat or a a Republican, assigns them a binary "plus or minus" for partisanship, and creates an eventual "partisanship index" derived from the numbers of "pluses and minuses".

As should be immediately obvious, this is woefully deficient. Operationalizing the concept of "partisanship" is tricky enough in the first place, but LiP's methodology systematically strips the inherently qualitative elements from columns. It misses the multiplying effects that things like sentence structure, tone, theme, and choice of words can have on the "partisanship" of a column. it punishes and rewards columnists based on merely the number of partisan references, leaving the severity of their references unremarked and untouched. This sort of methodology would be unacceptable when dealing with survey data, let alone the analysis of political texts; there's simply too much left out, and this raises serious questions as to the applicability of LiP's "index".

I agree that trying to quantify partisanship in political writing is going to be inherently difficult. Lying in Ponds is an experiment, to see whether such an approach is useful. All of the above criticisms would also apply to the Michael Tomasky report, which I praised a few weeks ago. To correct one misconception, I evaluate each partisan reference as positive, negative or neutral, just as Mr. Tomasky evaluates each editorial as positive, negative or mixed.

An underlying assumption of the counting of partisan references is that the number of negative references to one party, over a sufficiently large set of columns, is likely to be well-correlated to the intensity of the negative sentiment. I think that the results so far support that assumption. Each of the top four pundits (Ann Coulter, Robert Scheer, Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins) criticize the opposite party not only frequently, but also with great intensity. Although I've agonized about the fact that the method underestimates the depth of Ann Coulter's nastiness, she still tops the rankings, because the intensity of her hatred for Democrats inevitably results in screeds filled with a high number of negative references to them.

Returning to the dreaded baseball analogy, a simple batting average is only one way to measure hitting performance. There are many others, and smart people like Bill James will argue persuasively that some of them are clearly better as a broad metric. Therefore, just as I wouldn't say that a player batting .310 should necessarily be considered a better overall hitter than one batting .290, I don't use the partisanship rankings to decide whether Daniel Henninger or Michael Kinsley is more partisan. And just as a hitter batting .361 over most of a season is unquestionably a great hitter, I believe that the Lying in Ponds method is perfectly capable of detecting the extreme partisanship of a columnist who barely criticizes the President of the United States of his own party for an entire year, or one who wishes that their political opponents had been murdered.

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The book is about dealing with revolutionary France, the France of Robespierre and Napoleon, but he was clearly intending that people should understand that it related to the failure of diplomacy against Germany in the 30s.

But I think it's more generic than that. It's actually the story about how confronted with people with some power, domestic or foreign, that really doesn't play by the rules, most people just can't admit to themselves that this is really happening.

They keep on imagining that, "Oh, you know, they have limited goals. When they make these radical pronouncements that's just tactical and we can appease them a little bit by giving them some of what they want. And eventually we'll all be able to sit down like reasonable men and work it out."

Then at a certain point you realize, "My God, we've given everything away that makes system work. We've given away everything we counted on."

And that's basically the story of what's happened with the Right in the United States. And it's still happening.

You can still see people writing columns and opinion pieces and making pronouncements on TV who try to be bipartisan and say, "Well, there are reasonable arguments on both sides." And advising Democrats not to get angry -- that's bad in politics. And just missing the fact that -- my God, we're facing a radical uprising against the system we've had since Franklin Roosevelt.

If you want to understand Krugman now, look at his past. The books and Slate columns were both equal opportunity criticism, and the NYT column was as well until Bush's bad policy and egregious lies to the American people began with his phony tax cut plans. Then he started criticizing Bush, and when Bush became president and continued to push bad policy and to (at the very least) mislead the American people, he continued to point out both, even when nobody else had the guts. Yes, he does criticize Bush and the Republicans a lot. The question is not whether that makes him partisan, but whether they deserve it. When Helen Thomas (a person in a position to know) calls Bush "the worst president in history", I think it's pretty justifiable, and unless one is preciously naive enough to believe that doesn't have something to do with Congressional Republicans, they're fair game too.

Sorry, LiP, but I don't buy it, or the "maybe he's partisan but he's right" bit that you ended the post with. His pre-NYT works don't support that, and pseudo-psychological attempts to explain the shift from all-around critic to anti-Republican critic are blasted in the face of one key fact: he didn't change, Washington changed. I, for one, hope that it'll change back, and that Paul can go back to criticizing those on all sides. Right now, though, the Repubs are the biggest threat, and I can understand his desire to train his guns on them.

This amounts to a kind of Barry Goldwater "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" argument -- that current Republican domination of Washington is so bad that it would be irresponsible to spend time praising any Republicans or pointing out any Democratic imperfections. I see at least a couple of weaknesses to this argument.

First, I don't have a problem believing that Mr. Krugman practiced "equal opportunity criticism" in his pre-NYT writing, although others have noted his pique at being passed over for a Clinton administration job: "Krugman didn't take the rejection well, and lashed out at Clinton's appointees." But I must take issue with the notion that Mr. Krugman's early writing for The New York Times was balanced. I've already evaluated all of Mr. Krugman's columns from 2000 -- there were more negative references to then-presidential candidate Steve Forbes (5) in a single column in January than to the actual President of the United States over the entire year (3). That's not a misprint -- in 98 columns I could find only three negative references to Bill Clinton, all of them mild or indirect. I haven't evaluated Mr. Krugman's 2001 columns; perhaps he saved all the hard-hitting Clinton criticism for that year.

Second, Demosthenes isn't very convincing in trying to explain why Mr. Krugman is so much more one-sided than most other left-leaning pundits who face the same Republican "threat" and write about the same issues. Columnists such as Frank Rich, Michael Kinsley and Mary McGrory have criticized the Bush administration as harshly as Mr. Krugman yet have far lower scores, mostly because they occasionally criticize Democrats as well. Apparently such heresy allows them to be dismissed with: "they trend towards pro-Bush, because of fears of loss of access and the reality of outside factors clouding their judgement." Even Helen Thomas, cited by Demosthenes as an authority, often wanders off the reservation. Just browsing through her most recent few columns, one can see that she offers substantive praise for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and even Ari Fleischer and Condoleezza Rice, demonstrating clearly that it's possible to believe that George W. Bush is "the worst president in history" without being as one-sided as Mr. Krugman.

I've said many times that I suspect that the current partisanship scores of Democratic pundits are systematically elevated in the "target-rich environment" of a controversial Republican White House, and that Republican pundits would likely have topped the partisanship charts during the Clinton years, so I agree that the political context needs to be taken into account when trying to interpret the partisanship scores presented here. Demosthenes has vigorously made a case that Mr. Krugman is not partisan, and he may be correct that only a change of party control in Washington is likely to settle the question of whether Mr. Krugman's current extremism is based on principle or partisanship. I hope to continue Lying in Ponds long enough to find out.

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Apparently without reading our original articles or attempting to contact any of us, many commentators and syndicated columnists, including Ann Coulter and Cal Thomas -- George Will [op-ed, Aug. 10] apparently read but misunderstood our work) -- assumed that such a psychological analysis of ideology entails a judgment that conservatism must be abnormal, pathological or even the result of mental illness. The British media seem to have settled on the highly stigmatized and equally inaccurate term "neuroses." All of this reflects a crude and outdated perception of psychological research.