WHAT BAD POLITICS LOOKS LIKE: One more thing Rachel won’t explain!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2015

Part 4—Our own Bizarro World: Was the news report accurate?

Is it true? Did Governor Bentley, current top racist in the red states, actually close 31 driver’s license offices? More to the point, was this statement true?

“Nearly all of the offices were in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

Well actually, no! Unless we grant a generous allowance for the imprecision of several terms, that statement just isn’t accurate. But the statement appeared in a news report in The Hill, a leading Capitol Hill daily.

When we asked The Hill for a source for this claim, we learned the horrible truth. As it turned out, that statement was a lazy paraphrase of other misleading statements. The Hill provided no source to justify its statement—a statement which is grossly misleading and almost surely just wrong.

It’s true that the mustachio-twirling Bentley closed 31 satellite offices in response to a budget cut by the Alabama legislature. (Some of the offices had been open just one day a week.) But those offices were located in 30 counties—and many of those counties are much more heavily white than the state as a whole.

Below, you see the eight largest counties which lost a driver’s license office. (With the exception of Lauderdale County, each county lost its only such office.) As a basic frame of reference, Alabama was 67.0% white in the 2010 census:

The eight largest counties which lost an office
Lauderdale County: 92,709 (86.4% white)
Lawrence County: 34,339 (77.6% white)
Chambers County: 34,064 (58.8% white)
Franklin County: 31,704 (83.0% white)
Geneva County: 26,790 (86.3% white)
Cherokee County: 26,021 (92.7% white)
Winston County: 24,484 (97.3% white)
Bibb County: 22,597 (75.8% white)

Were “nearly all the offices” located “in predominantly black neighborhoods?”

That statement made a pleasing story even better. But The Hill was unable to justify the claim. Almost surely, it's wrong.

This fascinating episode has lasted several weeks. It has created a classic case study of a type of extremely bad journalism, in which false or misleading claims are produced in support of a pleasing story.

That bogus claim in The Hill was just one part of a large body of bogus reporting. In the course of this dissembling, we liberals have been shielded from knowing a wide set of basic facts.

Uh-oh! In comments to a recent Washington Post report, one reader began pushing back against our dissembling! In our view, that reader’s comments help us see why this sort of tribal clowning represents bad liberal politics.

Those comments—the commenter’s name is Ken Black—are part of a wider trend. But first, let’s note one last part of our own tribe’s dissembling. This brings us back to Rachel Maddow, who has dissembled her way through five separate segments about this topic on four different Maddow Show programs.

On October 2, Maddow aired her first report on this topic. As she finished, she made a statement which is basically flat-out false:

“Out of all God’s great green evolving earth, Alabama Republicans really did manage to pick this one spot, this center of African-American life in their state, in the Black Belt, as the place where they could really save some money by cutting all those offices where you get what you need to vote.” (our emphasis)

Check that list of the eight largest counties to see how bogus that statement is. On Maddow’s show, this was the start of the process by which liberal viewers were misled, misinformed and dumbed way down concerning the facts of this case.

Maddow’s second report aired on October 13. Please note the important information she decided to share about Governor Bentley. Then, please note a basic matter she didn’t attempt to explain:

MADDOW (10/13/15): Governor Bentley was already unpopular with members of his own Republican Party at home. In part, that is because Governor Bentley’s wife filed for divorce this year after fifty years of marriage. And the rumors about that sensitive matter have only recently left the headlines in that state. In the uproar over that issue, Governor Bentley faced calls for him to resign, faced calls for investigation into potentially inappropriate use of state troopers on the state plane.

This has not been a great year for Governor Robert Bentley in Alabama. It has not a great year for him with his own party. But the past two weeks have just been a disaster.

After the news broke about Mr. Bentley’s plan to close all the DMVs in all those Black Belt counties, he first tried to defend it.

He told reporters that closing all of those offices in mostly black counties had nothing to do with voting rights whatsoever. He tried to defend his decision.

But in the end, he could not defend his decision—and today, Alabama press is reporting that those offices where you get that most common form of voter ID, those offices could reopen because now, Governor Bentley has decided to change course...

After she finished with Bentley’s divorce—the rumors lingered in the headlines!—Maddow reported that Bentley had “tried to defend” the office closings he had ordered “in all those Black Belt counties.”

According to Maddow, Bentley “told reporters that closing all of those offices in mostly black counties had nothing to do with voting rights...But in the end, he could not defend his decision,” she said.

Maddow said that Bentley had tried to defend his decision. She then forget to explain what sorts of things he had said in his own defense!

Why had Bentley and other officials said that the office closings wouldn’t affect voting rights? Maddow has never explained that Alabamians can still get a free photo ID for voting purposes in every Alabama county—a basic service which wasn’t affected by the office closings.

Beyond that, Maddow has never described the wider set of facts involved in the office closings. She has simply continued dissembling in the way shown above:

She keeps talking about office closings in Black Belt counties while failing to mention the office closings in larger, heavily white counties. Let’s put that another way:

She keeps forgetting to mention the basic facts Ken Black would note in his comments!

We’re sorry, fellow tribals! The office closings were not restricted to “this one spot, this center of African-American life in their state”—to “those Black Belt counties.” The office closings occurred in counties all over the state, affecting black and white Alabamians in a proportion which closely matches the population of the state as a whole.

In five full segments on this topic, Maddow has never explained those facts. It almost seems that she has tried to create a different impression!

Beyond that, Maddow keeps noting that Bentley tried to defend the motive behind his decision. But she keeps refusing to tell her viewers what the defense consists in!

In this way, liberal viewers are kept barefoot and deeply clueless. We’re pleased by the story our TV star tells—but we don’t know the basic facts.

We think there’s a special place in “cable news” Hell for corporate multimillionaires like the horrendous Maddow. By some bizarre mental process, such people feel they have the right to pick and choose the facts the rest of us rubes will know.

We’ve seen Sean Hannity play this game with conservative viewers for many years. When she isn’t clowning and wasting our time with pointless snark about Herman Cain, the horrible Maddow now plays this role in the lives of us liberal rubes!

This creates a new type of Bizarro World. All across the conservative world, voters are permitted to hear a fuller set of facts. But over here in our liberal cocoon, hustlers like Maddow now keep us under-informed!

Increasingly, the liberal world pays a political price for this kind of dissembling. That price was there for all to see when Ken Black began pushing back.

Alas! On October 17, the Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams did a blog post about Alabama. Before long, misinformed readers began leaving comments—clueless comments which reflected the line Maddow and others had pimped.

Liberal readers were full of bluster—and they were pitifully clueless. Ken Black had researched the facts!

Increasingly, this represents a very bad type of liberal politics. Tomorrow, we’ll tell you why—and we’ll show you what was said in those pitiful comments.

Tomorrow: Damaged by The Dumb

Supplemental: Exit Biden, cast as Lear!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2015

A classic press corps episode: Obviously, we had no way of knowing what Joe Biden was doing or thinking over the past three months.

Our best guesses were these:

It seemed fairly obvious that he hadn’t initially planned to run for president. In 2013 and 2014, there was no sign that he was harboring any such plan.

This spring, or perhaps this summer, that seemed to change—and on Sunday, August 2, a strange new reality took hold. On that day, the New York Times executed its ludicrous front page/opinion column twofer, in which a front page news report about Biden was “sourced” to a Maureen Dowd column—sourced to a column which offered no source for its principal claim!

Everyone agrees not to notice when the Times stages such gong-shows. At any rate, this was the day that we were told that Biden’s dying son had asked him to run for the White House with his last few nouns.

With his last few words, the dying son had chosen to slime the Clintons one last time! This was par for the course for Dowd, a major departure for Biden.

We think Biden has behaved badly from that day to this. This very week, as he neared the announcement, he was weirdly reinventing his previous accounts of a major event, the death of bin Laden—and he was embarrassing himself in today’s New York Times:

HARRIS AND MARTIN (10/21/15): Mr. Biden was not the only one seeming to eye Mr. Obama’s voters on Tuesday. A few hours before the event here, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign released a list of more than 50 black mayors supporting her campaign, more than half of them from South Carolina, an early nominating state where Mr. Biden is expected to compete aggressively should he run.

So far, Mr. Obama has done nothing to signal that he would bestow such a blessing on either his vice president or his former secretary of state. But Mr. Biden did his best to suggest that he and the president are all but joined at the hip.

He said the two of them spent four to seven hours every day together, that the president had given him veto authority over every cabinet pick, that he never disagreed with the president ideologically, only tactically, and that even their families were close.

“My grand-children and his children are best friends,” Mr. Biden said. “They vacation together.”

Mercifully, that last paragraph has been removed from the on-line version of this report. We’re reproducing it as it appears in our hard-copy Times.

(Lest anyone think we’re playing favorites: In our view, Candidate Clinton has embarrassed herself in her recent fawning to black voters too.)

As of early August, our best guess was this: Biden was trying to establish himself as the person his party would think of first if Candidate Clinton imploded under the weight of the email brouhaha. That said, his efforts produced a classic press corps episode, with the pundit corps restricting itself to a narrow set of scripts.

The press corps wanted Biden to run, if only for the excitement. Beyond that, many of our major pundits don’t like Candidate Clinton.

They don’t like her at all.

For those reasons, a tired old script was dragged from the can, a script in which Biden was dripping with “authenticity” and Clinton was a conniving phony.

The pundits have plenty of practice with this dull-witted old narrative. They used it extensively in Campaign 2000, when Candidates Bradley, McCain and Bush were loaded with “authenticity” and Candidate Gore was the fake.

Starting on August 2, this script returned to wide use. Beyond that, everyone agreed not to notice the fact that Biden was behaving rather erratically, not unlike an aging Lear wandering on the moors.

Even this week, as he prepared to relent, Biden was reinventing old stories and embarrassing himself about his grandkids’ vacation habits. Only then did the pundits start to let themselves note that Mr. Authenticity was perhaps somewhat off track.

We think that column about the late Beau Biden was one of the most unattractive plays we’ve ever seen from a candidate. We assumed the source of the tale must have been Hunter Biden, so badly did the use of that story reflect on the possible candidate.

Through thick and thin, we don’t think we ever saw a pundit brook a single thought about that. They had their script, and they knew what it said. Their script said “highly authentic.”

Our pundits dutifully stuck to their script. As we have in the past, we ask you again:

Are these life-forms human?

The problem with their group assessments: Let’s approach Lear from a different perspective.

In the famous play, the aging king can no longer tell which of his three daughters is “authentic.” His judgment is badly wrong. He sends Cordelia away.

Our pundit corps is like that. Unfailingly, the people they hallow as “authentic” have ended up lying in their faces.

(Remember Candidate Dole, their authenticity king in 1996, in the New Hampshire primary? Of course you don’t! By law, such things cannot be discussed! For the record, we like Bob Dole! Pretty much everyone does.)

None of this stops them from playing again. When it comes to such assessments, they seem to enjoy being wrong.

(For “I Got Fooled,” click this.)

WHAT BAD POLITICS LOOKS LIKE: The governor’s racism keeps getting worse!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2015

Part 3—The candidate’s fourth button: Friend, are you intrigued by the science of journalistic misstatement?

Are you interested in the science of false and misleading journalistic claims and portrayals? In the science of cherry-picked facts? In the science of bogus journalistic portrayals designed to serve partisan ends?

If you’re interested in that science, the case of the Alabama satellite DMV closings provides a fantastic case study. Warning to liberals and progressives:

In this particular case, the bogus statements and portrayals have largely been performed by journalists within our own liberal tribe!

As such, these bogus presentations create a fascinating case study of horrible pseudo-liberal journalism. But we also think they constitute a case of very bad liberal politics.

If you’re interested in this science, let’s state a basic premise. When a pleasing tribal claim gets started, there will be a tendency for journalists to embellish, misstate and distort the facts which drive the pleasing claim.

Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, journalists will tend to misstate basic facts to make an alleged offense worse. Within the literature, this widely observed tendency is known as “The candidate’s fourth button,” for reasons we’ll note below.

That said, let’s return to the case of the satellite DMV closings. Consider an account of this matter which appeared last Saturday in The Hill, a prestigious insider D.C. daily which “has the largest circulation of any Capitol Hill publication.”

A journalist sent us this account, wondering if there was anything to it. Here’s how the news report started:

FERRIS (10/17/15): Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Saturday accused Alabama lawmakers of advancing “discriminatory” laws to roll back voting rights, as she looks to shore up support with black voters.

In her first visit to Alabama as a presidential candidate, Clinton elevated her call for voting rights as she condemned the state’s decision last week to close 31 driver’s license offices. Nearly all of the offices were in predominantly black neighborhoods.

She urged Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and his Republican-controlled legislature to keep the offices open, and “not just for one day a month."

Say what? It’s certainly true that Alabama closed 31 satellite offices. That said, is the highlighted statement true?

“Nearly all of the offices were in predominantly black neighborhoods?” That sounded bad—extremely bad. The governor’s racism was growing!

Governor Bentley’s racism was growing—but was that claim actually true? We had seen no primary source which made any such claim.

Incomparably, we emailed an editor at The Hill, scientifically seeking a source for the claim. We received a link to this site, where we encountered the first four paragraphs from a TPM report:

SNEED (10/1/15): What happens when a state with a tough voter ID law suddenly makes it much harder for minorities to get driver's licenses? We are about to find out in Alabama.

Facing a budget crisis, Alabama has shuttered 31 driver’s license offices, many of them in counties with a high proportion of black residents. Coming after the state recently put into effect a tougher voter ID law, the closures will cut off access—particularly for minorities—to one of the few types of IDs accepted.

According to a tally by AL.com columnist John Archibald, eight of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters saw their driver’s license offices closed.

“Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one,” Archibald wrote.

According to the TPM report, Bama had “suddenly made it much harder for minorities to get driver's licenses.” The journalist cited several accurate statements from the John Archibald column which launched a thousand scripts. The statement which came closest to the one in The Hill was this:

“Alabama has shuttered 31 driver’s license offices, many of them in counties with a high proportion of black residents.”

That statement included two imprecise terms—“many” and “high proportion.” A journalist who wanted to speak a bit more precisely could have made this statement:

“Alabama has shuttered 31 driver’s license offices, eight of them in counties with a majority of black residents.”

That would have been a more precise statement. But nothing in the TPM report justifies The Hill’s paraphrase, in which “nearly all” the 31 offices were located “in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

Rather plainly, that statement is false. But dear lord, it feels so good!

As lovers of science, let’s review the road we took to that statement:

First, Archibald penned a column which included a selective collection of facts. He focused on office closings in a set of eight counties, counties which are majority black and are generally very small.

He didn’t detail the office closings in the other 23 counties. Many of those counties are larger, and are more heavily white than Alabama as a whole.

Archibald skipped something else. He didn’t mention the overall population of the 30 affected counties, or of the 28 counties which lost their only office. In each case, the overall population of the affected counties is a close match for the population of the state as a whole.

For our money, Archibald’s presentation was unwisely selective. At TPM, the selective presentation continued. It was helped along by a murky statement about “many” of the affected counties—and it featured a stirring statement which only mentioned the inconvenience to “minorities.”

No inconvenienced whites need apply!

TPM made no attempt to place Archibald’s statements in a wider factual context. Two weeks later, along came The Hill, and a murky statement was “improved,” as the scientists say.

Sure enough! We went from “many” offices being shuttered “in counties with a high proportion of black residents” to a more sweeping claim—the claim that “nearly all” the shuttered offices were located “in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

That is a much more sweeping claim. We'd seen no one make it before.

Within the literature, this familiar “improvement” of basic facts is referenced in an unusual way. This familiar practice has long been referred to as “the candidate’s fourth button.”

Here’s why the experts do that:

In the fall of 1999, an earlier bunch of national journalists were conducting a propaganda campaign. As part of this campaign, they were pretending to be disturbed by every possible aspect of Candidate Gore’s deeply troubling wardrobe.

His boots, his suits, his polo shirts, the height at which he was hemming his pants—every aspect of the candidate’s wardrobe was said to show us how fake and “inauthentic” he was. The problem even extended to the number of buttons on his suit jackets:

Three.

What was supposed to be wrong with three-button suits? In a performance which was crazy even for him, Chris Matthews seemed to claim that Gore’s three buttons constituted a smarmy signal to female voters, like the buttons sailors wear on the front of their pants.

Brian Williams advanced the same general theme concerning the candidate’s polo shirts. In February 2000, the repellent climber grew confused, complaining about the candidate’s troubling three-button sweaters.

Accidents happen when people like this go for the gold of Jack Welch.

In November 1999, one major pundit invented Gore’s fourth button. In a disgraceful performance on MSNBC’s Rivera Live, Arianna Huffington took out her needle and thread and sewed that button on:

HUFFINGTON (11/9/99): When you are talking about a consultant that you bring on to give opinions on how to dress and whether you’re an alpha male and how do you become a beta male—

Frankly, you know, what is fascinating is that the way he’s now dressing makes a lot of people feel disconnected from him. And there was this marvelous story in one of the New Hampshire papers saying, “Nobody here—nobody here in Hanover, New Hampshire, wears tan suits with blue shirts.” You know, it's just—

And buttons—all four buttons! You know, it's not just—it's just not the way most American males dress.

Gore had worn no four-button suits. Meanwhile, “It’s just not the way most American males dress?”

At the time, the pundit corps was saying and insinuating that the candidate wasn’t sufficiently masculine. After all, Al Gore hired a woman to teach him how to be a man! In line with this repellent theme, Arianna’s first statements in that passage referred to Naomi Wolf, who was relentlessly slimed all through the month of November.

(People are dead all over the world because Arianna did this. In fairness, she was still building her brand.)

Despite making a lot of people feel disconnected from him, the candidate went on to win the New Hampshire primary. But from that day to this, experts on American journalism refer to the familiar practice of “improving” accurate facts by a whimsical name. They call it “Gore’s fourth button.”

Our liberal world has been sewing fourth buttons with respect to these office closings. Once again, let’s review one specific chain of improvements:

John Archibald presented a selective set of facts in a local column. That said, he specifically cautioned against the assumption that the office closings were motivated by race.

One day later, a young scribe at TPM ignored those words of caution. She fashioned a rather murky claim about where “many” of the offices had been closed. She said the closings “suddenly made it much harder for minorities to get driver's licenses,” ignoring the much larger number of whites who were similarly inconvenienced.

Two weeks later, an even younger scribe at The Hill sewed on that fourth button. Readers were told that “nearly all” the office closings occurred “in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

Simply put, there is no source for that claim. Finally, we had a statement which was flatly false.

Let’s be fair! Aside from Archibald, each reporter who improved the facts is quite young. The TPM scribe graduated from GW in 2011. The reporter at The Hill graduated from Georgetown just last year.

Their editors are older, of course—but they seem to be oppressively absent, like Ingmar Bergman’s God. We’ll guess that Josh was off somewhere counting his barrels of cash.

At any rate, the governor’s racism has kept getting worse as we’ve played this familiar old game. Ironically, Archibald told the horrific Rachel Maddow this week that he now believes that the office closings didn’t stem from a racial motive.

We can’t tell you if he’s right. We can tell you what the overall data are, as opposed to the cherry-picked numbers which help us advance our tribal story.

Sewing that button can be good fun, but there’s one basic problem—the other side can see what we’re doing! This produces very bad politics, not that there’s any obvious sign that our leaders actually care.

Why do we say this is bad liberal politics? Tomorrow, we’ll finally start to explain. We’ll start with what happened in comments.

Tomorrow: It happened in comments

This is what The Crazy looks like: The pundits pounded the candidate’s wardrobe for months. At the end of November—“the month of Wolf”—Marc Fisher offered these pensées in his weekly column in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine:

FISHER (11/28/99): [W]hen Al Gore sneaks around and spends $15,000 a month to hire an oddball like Naomi Wolf, a controversialist who campaigns against the tyranny of the beauty culture and then plasters soft-lit glossies of herself and her perfectly teased hair all over the Internet and on her book jackets, we have two choices: We can say Gore's a good man who's been duped by over-eager aides, or we can say this is a man who does not know himself, a man who is unknowable, unreadable and therefore not fit to be president.

A person who makes her living by writing pop philosophy about sex tells a man who would be president of the United States that he must be a different kind of man, that he must be more assertive, that he must wear a brown suit of a sort that is alien to virtually every American. And he says, “Okay.”

To call him unreadable is to be charitable.

There was no evidence that Naomi Wolf had told Gore what to wear. Two of her three “pop philosophy” books had been chosen by the New York Times as “Notable books of the year.”

The candidate’s one brown suit was not “of a sort that is alien to virtually every American.” This column, like barrels of work from this time, was well over the line into the realm of The Crazy.

The liberal world accepted all this for two years. As a result, people are dead all over the world—and your favorite liberal stars of the era are fat, well off, quite happy.

You can still see them on Our Own Channel. They’ll be speaking with other folk of their general ilk.

Supplemental: Yglesias tells a discouraging tale!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015

Sadly, we think he’s correct: Our years of effort with respect to Matthew Yglesias have finally begun to pay off.

At Vox, he tells a discouraging tale. Sadly, we think he’s on target.

Yglessias tells a gloomy tale about the Democratic Party’s big-picture prospects. Gloomily but correctly, Yglesias starts as shown below.

We include his gloomy headline:

YGLESIAS (10/19/15): Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.

The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.

Yes, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in his seventh year in office. Yes, Republicans can’t find a credible candidate to so much as run for speaker of the House. Yes, the GOP presidential field is led by a megalomaniacal reality TV star. All this is true—but rather than lay the foundation for enduring Democratic success, all it’s done is breed a wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence.

Let us quickly add one point. If you still think that the “megalomaniacal reality TV star” in question can’t get elected next November, you may be living inside that “wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence” Yglesias skillfully names.

In our view, Candidate Trump could beat Candidate Clinton next year. To us, that possibility became even clearer when we watched excerpts from Clinton’s speech in Alabama on the Maddow Show last night.

People who watch Maddow clown each night may not understand that fact. But then, the strongest point in Yglesias’ piece in his constant return to the liberal world’s “atmosphere of complacence.”

Yglesias stresses the weakness of Democratic performance and prospects on the state and local levels. We’ll suggest that you read his piece to review the discouraging numbers.

As Yglesias notes, liberals and Democrats have built-in disadvantages at all levels of American governance, except perhaps for the race for the White House. But so what? We keep telling ourselves pretty stories even about these obstacles.

No, Virginia! In the main, the built-in Republican tilt in the House isn’t caused by gerrymandering, which our side engages in too. But so what! If you read the Yglesias piece, you will see him return, again and again, to our tribe's fatal flaw:

YGLESIAS: In some ways, the Democrats' biggest disadvantage is simply their current smugness. A party that controls such a small share of elected offices around the country is a party that should be engaged in vigorous debate about how to improve its fortunes. Much of the current Republican infighting—embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times—reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.

On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions…even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.

“If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, then anything is possible?”

We’d better hope that’s true! Candidate Clinton may end up running with a guy named Castro! Our party can’t even catch a break when it comes to our leaders’ names!

At any rate, there was Yglesias, speaking about complacency, overconfidence and smugness again. These are the qualities we’ll be discussing all week in our own primary posts, which will largely concern our tribe’s fealty to the twin gods, Snark and Snide.

Snark and Snide—and their trusted pseudo-liberal companion, Moral Overconfidence.

By the end of his gloomy piece, Yglesias is gloomily picturing the liberal tribe hitting rock bottom. Dude is riding with Cassandra by the end of his piece:

YGLESIAS (continuing directly): Whatever you make of this agenda substantively, there's no way to actually enact it without first achieving a considerably higher level of down-ballot electoral success than Democrats currently enjoy.

But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama's or drastically to its left. The differences between them are real, of course, and at least somewhat important.

But the much more significant question facing the party isn't about the White House—it's about all the other offices in the land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.

Our tribe is complacent, smug and uncomprehending, Yglesias just keeps saying. “That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out.”

Candidate Trump could win the White House next year. We’re not predicting that he will. But with every week that passes, it becomes more clear that he could.

In the meantime, if you doubt the claim that our self-adoring tribe is dumb and smug and complacent, just watch the ludicrous Maddow some night. As you drown in the silly campaign trivia, listen to Snark and Snide roar!

A tribe which tolerates clowning like hers is a tribe on its way to the bottom. On the brighter side, the money’s good for the tribe’s big stars.

The money’s good all the way down.

Isquith on Yglesias: Isquith thinks he’s on target too. To ruminate, just click here.

WHAT BAD POLITICS LOOKS LIKE: The persistently ludicrous Maddow rolls on!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015

Part 2—Her viewers get misled again: Will the Alabama driver’s license situation end up as a passing blip on the screen? Will the episode be remembered six months from now?

We can’t answer such questions. Last night, though, the persistently ludicrous Rachel Maddow presented her fourth and fifth segments on the crowd-pleasing topic. Seventeen minutes into the program, she teased the upcoming reports in a typically crowd-pleasing way:

“So on Friday night, we had a bit of a cliff-hanger story about one of the most controversial things being done anywhere in the country in a red state by a Republican governor…”

You can’t exactly say that’s false—and plainly, it’s crowding-pleasing. That said, what followed was, in our view, the latest dose of extensive cherry-picking.

Plainly, it was horrible journalism. In our view, it also constitutes horrible liberal politics.

Maddow started last night’s show with one of her ludicrous, time-wasting segments about the most trivial, crowd-pleasing aspects of the presidential campaign.

She started and ended by discussing her new puppy’s reaction to last weekend’s early snow, photographs included. She then wasted a bunch of time playing clips of Herman Cain’s dumbest remarks from 2011.

This allowed her to sing small bits of the song from the Pokemon movie on two separate occasions. Increasingly, this is the way the game is played on this pseudo-news program.

Wealth and fame have made Rachel Maddow a monster of self-regard. Her show is becoming one of the most awful in cable news history—a program which makes us think of the early years of Fox and Friends, or perhaps of the gruesome old segments in which Hannity and Colmes would go to war with the frightening head of the very frightening New Black Panther Party.

Maddow’s opening segment last night was the usual gong-show. Eventually, she finished her puppy-and-Pokemon palaver, then teased her upcoming segments.

When she returned, she introduced the Alabama excitement in the manner shown below. In our view, this horrible journalism—and bad progressive politics.

We’ll set the highlights in bold:

MADDOW (10/19/15): Republican Governor Robert Bentley put Alabama in the national news a few weeks ago when he shut down the place where you get a driver’s license in Alabama`s blackest counties.

In Alabama, you now have to show ID at the polls in order to vote. A valid driver`s license is the most common form of ID after that law went into effect.

Then recently, a few weeks ago, in every single Alabama county where at least 3/4 of the voters are African-American, Governor Robert Bentley closed down the place where you get a driver’s license in that county. Of the ten counties that went most strongly for Barack Obama in the last election, the governor closed the DMV in eight of those ten counties.

Every highlighted word is true. On their face, those words are also grossly misleading—and we include one part of the Maddow package we haven’t included before.

By now, we’d have to say something else. Assuming minimal journalistic competence on the part of Maddow and/or her staff, then by now those words are also dishonest.

Dishonest, and also bad politics!

In what ways is that factual overview misleading? Maddow stated some accurate facts about the counties which lost their satellite offices. But she also omitted a boatload of facts, as she has done in all five of her segments about this topic.

Governor Bentley “shut down the place where you get a driver’s license in Alabama’s blackest counties?” That’s perfectly accurate! But he also shut down the place where you get a license in many of the state’s whitest counties.

Maddow has never mentioned that fact!

Watching Maddow perform last night, a person could easily get the idea that these offices were only closed in those blackest counties—that they were closed nowhere else. This is what she said after playing clips of a speech by Candidate Clinton:

MADDOW: Hillary Clinton speaking in Alabama, in Birmingham, Alabama, this weekend. And with that kind of message on the way this weekend, with that kind of message telegraphed ahead of time by a Hillary Clinton campaign that was already making an issue of this voting rights situation, the closing of these DMVs in black counties in Alabama, you could understand why Alabama’s governor, Robert Bentley, would like to stop being the guy who closed the DMVs in these majority African-American counties in Alabama, right?

At some point, such selective presentation of facts can only be described as dishonest. Here’s the way Maddow opened her second segment on this topic last night:

MADDOW: In a story we have been following for weeks now, and about which we have had a ton of feedback from you guys, from our viewers, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley has now announced that he will unclose the offices where you get driver’s licenses, where you get the most common form of voter ID in Alabama. The governor announcing late Friday night that he is reopening the DMVs in Alabama’s most heavily black counties.

Actually, Bentley announced that he is reopening those offices in all the counties where offices had been closed. That’s a matter of 30 counties, 22 of which are majority white, many heavily so.

These closings didn’t simply affect “Alabama’s most heavily black counties.” According to this post by Kevin Drum, the total population of the 30 affected counties is 23.8% percent black.

In the 2010 census, Alabama’s statewide population was 26.2% black. In short, these closings didn’t simply affect “these majority African-American counties,” though a trusting viewer might easily get that impression from watching this person’s show.

Whatever you think of these office closings, they involved a wide swath of Alabama’s counties and a wide swath of the state’s population. Watching Maddow, you were treated to one pleasing part of the story—and denied the rest of the tale.

In the era of tribal journalism, dissembling has its rewards! Apparently, this crowd-pleasing cherry-picking has produced “a ton of feedback from you guys.” (Maddow made a similar claim during Friday night’s segment.)

Assuming this feedback really exists, it comes from Maddow’s trusting liberal viewers. They believe she is telling them the truth, not unlike the trusting conservative viewers who have put their faith in Hannity down through these many long years.

For the record, Maddow is obscuring a second part of the story through some slippery language. It’s the kind of language the press corps used to describe as “Clintonesque,” a moniker we thought was unfair to Bill Clinton.

Maddow is frequently Clintonesque, even if Clinton isn’t. These are the statements in question:

“In Alabama, you now have to show ID at the polls in order to vote. A valid driver`s license is the most common form of ID after that law went into effect.”

“Governor Bentley has now announced that he will unclose the offices where you get driver’s licenses, where you get the most common form of voter ID in Alabama.”

True, but slick! It’s true—a driver’s license is the most common form of voter ID in Alabama. But it isn’t the only form of ID, and Maddow has now failed, in five separate segments, to note that Alabamians can get a free photo voter ID in all 67 of Alabama’s counties.

The closing of the satellite driver’s license offices hasn’t affected that fact—and that fact is part of this story. When a journalist uses slippery language to steer you away from such facts, you’re being handed a pleasing tale through the use of widespread cherry-picking.

In her second segment last night, Maddow spoke with John Archibald of the Birmingham News. Back on September 30, Archibald’s somewhat overwritten column about the closings started the current pseudo-journalistic craze.

In the course of their discussion last night, Archibald told Maddow, two separate times, that he doesn’t think the closings were intended as a way to affect voting rights.

“I don't really think [Governor Bentley’s] intent—I’ve come to believe that his intent was not to deny voter rights,” Archibald said at one point. He made a similar statement a bit later on.

Maddow didn’t ask him why he said that. We’ll guess that might have undercut a good solid pleasing tale.

Last night, Maddow just kept picking those cherries. Once she got through wasting our time with her puppy and Herman Cain and other utterly pointless matters involving Candidates Christie and Paul, she turned to the topic which is apparently earning her a shitload of feedback.

She told us a pleasing part of the story, tickling our sense of tribal greatness—our “moral overconfidence.”

Very little “moral humility” was on display this night. For background, see yesterday's award-winning post.

Plainly, this is horrible journalism. In our view, it’s also lousy politics—although it’s probably very good for TV stars’ bank accounts.

We think this is lousy progressive politics. Tomorrow, we’ll start explaining why. We’ll start with effects of the wedge, then move on from there.

Tomorrow: As noted in comments

Supplemental: Professors hit it out of the park!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2015

Moral overconfidence, health care spending and us: Sometimes, the professors really come through!

Consider Professor Krugman’s latest column. Then, consider an important essay in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Krugman has been coming through for years, although to little avail. This morning, he delivers an interesting presentation concerning the benefits of life in little small Denmark.

Krugman’s column is very much worth reading. Sadly, it made us think of his series of columns in 2006 concerning the giant costs of American health care.

In the spring of that year, Krugman wrote a series of columns about an astonishing fact. Here in the U.S., we spend two to three times as much on health care, per person, as all other comparable nations.

Tremendous amounts of money disappear in that bloated spending. Liberal and conservative citizens get looted in the process, red and blue together.

People in the conservative world should be told about these remarkable facts. But almost a decade has passed, and we know of no attempt at liberal outreach to red-state voters on this important matter.

By the way:

“Outreach to red-state voters?” What in the world is that?

To us, that lack of outreach represents a massive liberal/progressive failure—an act of massive political impotence. This brings us to the second professor who really came through—the inimitable Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School.

Nohria’s essay appeared in yesterday’s Outlook section. Cuing off Professor Milgram’s famous electric shock experiments, Nohria explores an important pair of concepts—“moral overconfidence” and “moral humility.”

Milgram’s subjects kept delivering electric shocks to other subjects, even when they believed they were administering dangerous amounts of pain. In fact, no one was actually on the receiving end of the electric shocks, but Milgram’s subjects didn’t know that—and they kept administering shocks in response to Milgram’s demands, even after their fictitious recipients seemed to have lapsed into unconsciousness.

Would you be willing to do the right thing in some similar situation? In this passage, Nohria introduces his basic concepts:

NOHRIA (10/18/15): When I ask students whether, as participants, they would have had the courage to stop administering shocks, at least two thirds raise their hands, even though only one third of Milgram’s subjects refused. I’ve come to refer to this gap between how people believe they would behave and how they actually behave as “moral overconfidence.” In the lab, in the classroom and beyond, we tend to be less virtuous than we think we are. And a little moral humility could benefit us all.

Only one-third of Milgram’s subjects refused to deliver the shocks. But according to Nohria, two-thirds of his students say they would refuse.

Nohria says this “moral overconfidence” can be seen “in politics, in business, in sports—really, in all aspects of life.” We “tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities.”

This type of moral overconfidence “can lead us astray,” Nohria writes. “We may ignore or explain away evidence that runs counter to our established view of ourselves, maintaining faith in our virtue even as our actions indicate otherwise.”

For the most part, Nohria is talking about the way individuals can get led astray in various walks of life. But as we read the following passage, we thought about the way tribal groups can be led astray—even a tribal group as morally pure as our own liberal/progressive tribe:

NOHRIA: We would see fewer headlines about scandal and malfeasance, and we could get our actions to better match our expectations, if we tempered our moral overconfidence with some moral humility. When we recognize that the vast majority of us overestimate our ability to do the right thing, we can take constructive steps to limit our fallibility and reduce the odds of bad behavior.

One way to instill moral humility is to reflect on cases of moral transgression. We should be cautious about labeling people as evil, sadistic or predatory. Of course, bad people who deliberately do bad things are out there. But we should be attuned to how situational factors affect generally good people who want to do the right thing.

Nohria is still discussing the way individuals behave. But in that passage, we think he’s giving good advice to the world’s various tribes.

Might we state the obvious? We liberals tend to love the practice of “labeling people as evil, sadistic or predatory.” We’re strongly inclined to label tens of millions of people as The Others.

In this way, we’re like other groups all over the world. But our moral overconfidence makes it hard for us to see that we behave this way.

We liberals! All too often, we love the practice of “labeling people as evil, sadistic or predatory.” This instinctive trashing of The Others helps explain our lazy, self-defeating lack of political outreach.

In our main report this week, we’ll be discussing our recent journalistic gong-show concerning Demon Alabama. We’ll explain why we think our behavior, which is tribally pleasing, constitutes a very bad political move.

Our system is built on checks and balances; we keep insuring that we’ll be checked. Do we mainly want to loathe The Others? Or do we want to try to win?

This question rarely occurs to our tribe. Nine years later, those columns by Krugman continue to pile up dust.

“[We]’re not as virtuous as [we] think.” That’s Professor Nohria, not us!

WHAT BAD POLITICS LOOKS LIKE: The Washington Post just flat gets it wrong!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2015

Part 1—The science of disinformation: The science of misinformation and disinformation is grievously underexplored.

This weekend, some misinformation hardened. From the progressive perspective, we’d have to say that it represents the latest case of bad progressive politics.

Alas! This misinformation originated within our own liberal tribe. The misinformation turned to stone in Sunday’s Washington Post.

Candidate Clinton had gone to Alabama to deliver a speech. In her address, she had possibly pandered and fawned a bit to a key part of the base.

As a result, the Washington Post published its first news report about those satellite driver’s license offices which got closed in Alabama. Right in its second paragraph, our own tribe’s preferred piece of misinformation hardened and turned to stone.

Vanessa Williams’ news report ran a full 1100 words. Hard-copy headline included:

WILLIAMS (10/18/15): In Alabama, Clinton rebukes governor on voting rights for black Americans

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton came to Alabama on Saturday and waded into the national debate over voter rights, criticizing Republican leaders in this state and others for ID laws that she said have made voting harder for people of color and young people, two groups critical to her chances of winning the presidency.

Clinton slammed Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) for closing 31 driver-licensing offices in rural, mostly black areas, eliminating a source for the government-issued photo ID that is now required to vote in Alabama.

“This is wrong,” Clinton said. “Fifty years after Rosa Parks sat and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched and John Lewis bled, it is hard to believe that we are back having this same debate” about voting rights for black Americans.

We haven’t found a transcript of Candidate Clinton’s speech. But right there in paragraph 2, Journalist Williams offered a flat misstatement of some basic facts.

Had Alabama actually “closed 31 driver-licensing offices in rural, mostly black areas?” Even allowing for the fuzziness of the word “areas,” no—it plainly had not.

By now, though, our tribe’s preferred misinformation had basically taken hold. This is the way Bill Barrow began his news report for the Associated Press, whose claims go all over the country:

BARROW (10/17/15): Near the heart of the civil rights movement, presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton roused black Alabama Democrats on Saturday with a pledge to champion voting rights and accusations that Republicans are dismantling generations of racial progress.

Clinton criticized Alabama's Republican governor, Robert Bentley, for closing drivers licenses offices in 31 counties, many of them majority African-American. Alabama requires photo identification to vote.

“This is a blast from the Jim Crow past,” she told about 700 people at a luncheon of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the largest caucus of the state Democratic Party.

For whatever reason, Barrow obscured the facts by using a highly imprecise term—“many.” (He also slightly misstated the number of counties in which an office was closed.)

This is what his report would have said had he chosen to be more precise:

“Clinton criticized Alabama's Republican governor, Robert Bentley, for closing drivers licenses offices in 30 counties, eight of them majority African-American.”

That would have been a substantially different statement. After fudging the facts in the way he did, Barrow linked his fuzzy claim to a statement about “Jim Crow.”

Were Williams and Barrow deliberately misleading or misinforming their readers? What roles did their editors play?

We can’t answer those questions. But in each of these cases, you’re looking at terrible journalism.

You’re also observing an under-explored branch of science—the science of misinformation. You’re observing the way misinformation can congeal, then harden and turns to stone.

The AP and the Washington Post have made several weeks of bogus statements official. At liberal and liberal-ish sites, the children are going to follow behind, pleasing the base with factual claims which are false or misleading.

It doesn’t take long for this to happen. Here is New York magazine’s Jonah Shepp, who offered a link to Williams’ news report:

SHEPP (10/18/15): When Alabama announced at the beginning of October that it was shutting down 31 driver’s license offices throughout the state, many Democrats and voting rights advocates suspected the state of engaging in voter suppression through other means. Many of the offices are in poor, rural, majority-black counties, and since Alabama began requiring ID to vote as of last year, opponents said the move would effectively disenfranchise many residents of these counties.

Question: Why would a journalist use the word “many” when he could use the word “eight?” The answer is part of the science of misinformation.

Just this once, let’s be fair! In an earlier blog post, Williams included some information which didn’t appear in her longer, hard-copy news report in the Sunday paper:

“Although driver licenses and state photo IDs for non-drivers are the most popular forms of identification, Alabama officials argued that there were plenty of other alternatives for residents. Each county has a registrar’s office, which issues free photo voter IDs and the secretary of state's office also operates mobile voter ID vans that visit locations around the state, including street festivals and facilities such as nursing homes. Residents also can get their driver licenses renewed at other state offices, as well as online.”

That’s a basic part of this story. It didn’t appear in Sunday morning’s full-length, hard-copy report.

More significantly, neither Williams nor Barrow offered the simplest type of information about the racial breakdown of the twenty-eight counties which lost their only satellite offices. They never specified that eight of those counties are majority-black. They didn't say that the total population of those counties was roughly 28% black in the 2010 census, virtually matching the figure for Alabama as a whole.

Instead, Williams made a factual statement which was flatly false. Barrow made a needlessly imprecise statement which we’d call highly misleading.

Was it a good idea to close these satellite offices? We can’t tell you that. We’re here to examine the journalism, not the Bama state government.

The journalism about this matter has been very bad. Over the weekend, our own tribe’s preferred misinformation hardened and turned to stone.

Shouldn’t liberals and progressives be happy to see our con prevail? Shouldn’t we applaud ourselves for playing a winning game of realpolitik?

Shouldn’t we divest ourselves of our tired old bourgeois morality—of our tired old, outmoded scruples concerning the need for the truth? Shouldn’t we pat ourselves on the back for doing what The Others have always done?

In our view, this game constitutes bad politics for our own glorious side. All week long, we’ll be explaining our reasons for saying that.

That said, let’s be honest this once. No matter what tribe you may be in, some folk simply prefer to lie, distort or mislead.

Getting away with a glorious lie? The age-old practice has always made our lazier players feel good! How good it feels to make the rubes swallow a bogus claim!

Tomorrow: Uh-oh! As seen in comments!

SWEET DEMON ALABAMA: This is the way false impressions get spread!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2015

Part 6—Maddow falls for the third time: We love the smell of misinformation in the evening.

Check that! We’re fascinated by the way a set of perfectly accurate claims can create a massively false impression. Citizens need to understand the way this process can work.

If you don’t care about the way citizens get misled, you don’t have to keep reading! If you think that topic is important, we have an ongoing case which is state-of-the-art.

How do false impressions get created? Rachel Maddow’s reports on Alabama are creating a perfect case study. Liberal viewers are being misled as Maddow keeps pushing a claim in a way which is ugly and, by now, almost surely dishonest.

Last evening, Maddow presented her third segment on driver’s license offices in Alabama. Ironically, the segment started with the cable star saying this:

“We’ve been getting a lot of feedback asking for an update on this story. It concerns the great red state of Alabama, Republicans in complete control in that state.”

We don’t know if Maddow was really getting calls for an update. But as she tells it, the story concerns Republicans in a red state way down South.

Presumably for that reason, her viewers keep hearing highly selective, misleading presentations. This is the way she framed the facts for last night's segment, which was fairly short:

MADDOW (10/16/15): Last month, Governor Bentley announced that Alabama would close the places where you get a driver’s license in most of the heavily black counties in the state of Alabama. This of course follows a new strict voter ID law in Alabama for which a driver’s license is the most common form of ID that people show in order to be allowed to vote in that state now.

Well, Governor Bentley has tried to defend that decision since it generated a lot of outrage but it really has been an unending embarrassment at home and around the country since word got out. I mean, all the counties where the population is at least three-quarters black, all those counties, losing their driver’s license offices.

That’s the way she framed the story for last night’s segment, the third she has done on this topic.

Everything said there is accurate. That said, the accurate statements are highly selective—and we’d rate them as grossly misleading.

This is customarily known as “cherry-picking.” Maddow has now engaged in the process three times concerning demon Bama.

Does Maddow know that she’s cherry-picking? We can’t quite answer that. But in her treatment of this important topic, she has created a state-of-the-art example of the way false impressions get spread.

Were Maddow’s basic statements accurate? Last night, these were her only statements concerning the counties which lost their driver’s license offices:

“Governor Bentley announced that Alabama would close the places where you get a driver’s license in most of the heavily black counties in the state of Alabama.”

“I mean, all the counties where the population is at least three-quarters black, all those counties, losing their driver’s license offices.”

That first statement is somewhat imprecise. Let’s start with the second statement, since it’s more precise.

It’s true! In every county in Alabama where the population is at least three-quarters black, the driver’s license office was closed.

That fact can create a damning impression. Unless you know how few such counties there are, and how small those counties are. Unless you know about other counties which also lost their offices.

Maddow keeps skipping that information. So you’ll know, these are the counties which fit her description as of the 2010 census:

Population of affected counties which were at least 75 percent black
Macon County: 21,452 (82.6% black)
Greene County: 9,045 (81.5% black)
Sumter County: 13,763 (75.0% black)

Those counties did lose their only driver’s license offices, as did twenty-five other counties around the state. Here’s the missing context:

As of 2010, the total population of those counties was 44,260. This was Alabama’s total population:

4,779,745!

In short, those are very small counties. Taken together, they contain less than one percent of the state’s population!

They’re a tiny part of Alabama’s population. They’re a very small part of the state’s black population, which stood at roughly 1.25 million in 2010.

(For information on Alabama’s counties, just start here.)

Maddow stated an accurate fact. To do so, she focused on a tiny part of a fairly large state. She failed to tell you about other counties which lost their offices—counties like these, for example:

Population of affected counties which were at least 75 percent white
Lauderdale County: 92,709 (86.4% white)
Clay County: 34,932 (81.7% white)
Lawrence County: 34,339 (77.6% white)
Franklin County: 31,704 (83.0% white)
Geneva County: 26,790 (86.3% white)
Cherokee County: 25,989 (92.7%)
Winston County: 24,843 (97.3% white)
Bibb County: 22,915 (75.8% white)
Fayette County: 17,241 (86.9% white)
Cleburne County: 14,972 (94.0% white)
Lamar County: 14,564 (86.7% white)

The total population of these counties was 340,998. Do you start to see the problem with Maddow’s selective facts?

Overall, 28 counties lost their only driver’s license office. Three of those counties were at least three-quarters black—but eleven of those counties were at least three-quarters white.

Maddow keeps mentioning the first group of counties and she keeps forgetting to mention the second! Can you start to see the problem with her selective facts?

Don’t let us mislead you! Those lists might lead you to think that white Alabamians were disproportionately affected by the office closings.

The overall numbers don’t suggest or say that. In the 2010 census, Alabama was 26.2% black. By our count, the twenty-eight counties which lost their offices were 28.2% black.

(In this recent post, Kevin Drum assessed the thirty counties which lost an office. He thereby included two counties which lost an office but still have at least one. The population of those thirty counties was 23.2% black. Incomparably, we stuck with the more widely-referenced twenty-eight counties which lost their only office.)

Let’s quit for the day. As we do, let’s say this:

Race is our nation’s most important topic. In our judgment, people who clown, toy and posture with race should be consigned to a special circle in corporate cable news Hell.

Maddow has been toying with race as she pretends to discuss Alabama. In the process, she’s been pushing an ugly story—a story which pleases our tribe.

In our view, this is very bad politics, as we’ll explain next week. But make no mistake:

When you ride with Maddow, you’re frequently in a clown car. The other tribe understands this fact.

Do you think that’s good for our team?

Still coming: So much cherry-picking, so little time!

For the record: MSNBC hasn’t yet posted last night’s Maddow transcript. The Maddow site didn’t post the videotape of the Alabama segment.

They did post the videotape of last night’s “cocktail moment” segment. For a good time, click here.

Supplemental: Is Krugman allowed to say such a thing?

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2015

Also, transcript of Sanders: We can’t judge the issue ourselves. That said, is Krugman allowed to say this?

KRUGMAN (10/16/15): Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had an argument about financial regulation during Tuesday’s debate—but it wasn’t about whether to crack down on banks. Instead, it was about whose plan was tougher. The contrast with Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who have pledged to reverse even the moderate financial reforms enacted in 2010, couldn’t be stronger.

For what it’s worth, Mrs. Clinton had the better case. Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.

We don’t know if Krugman is right in that assessment. Today, though, we’re asking a different question:

Is Paul Krugman allowed to say that? This is our reason for asking:

On the whole, we thought Candidate Sanders was superb in Tuesday night’s debate. We thought Candidate Clinton was very good too.

We’ll happily vote for either one depending on who gets nominated. That said, an early question from moderator Anderson Cooper helps us see where things will go if Sanders heads the ticket.

Cooper asked Sanders about socialism. He then worked the honeymoon beat:

COOPER (10/13/15): A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

SANDERS: Well, we’re going to win because first, we’re going to explain what democratic socialism is.

[...]

Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.

COOPER: Denmark is a country that has a population—Denmark is a country that has a population of 5.6 million people. The question is really about electability here, and that's what I’m trying to get at.

The Republican attack ad against you in a general election—it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you're not a capitalist.

Doesn’t—doesn't that ad write itself?

Should Cooper have asked these questions? On the whole, that line of questioning makes perfect sense.

But good lord! He certainly ran to the honeymoon fast! And that’s exactly where things will go as soon as Sanders is nominated.

We were ten minutes into this first debate and Anderson Cooper wanted to know about that honeymoon! From a luxurious study carrel, Patton Oswalt sagaciously live-blogged thusly:

“A Vanderbilt heir is grilling the candidates on socialism.”

We’re often asked if we really taught Patton everything he knows. Normally, we try avoid answering questions like that. On this occasion, we began to think that we probably had!

Within ten minutes, Cooper had become the honeymoon-crasher. Later, he hit Candidate Clinton with this question about income inequality:

COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you address this issue? In all candor, you and your husband are part of the one percent. How can you credibly represent the views of the middle class?

Last year, multi-quadrillionaire Diane Sawyer had the exact same concern. We’re not even saying the question is wrong—just that it takes lots of brass.

Let’s try to return to what Paul Krugman said.

At present, some of us liberals are looking for ways to defeat ourselves in the overall sense:

The inevitable New York Times semi-employee has offered the inevitable F-bomb about Candidate Bush. Inevitably, supporters of one Democrat are deciding that the other Democrat is a demon.

It happens every fall! For unknown reasons, this letter was published in yesterday’s New York Times:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (10/15/15): Did your reporters watch the same debate I did? Because it wasn’t all about Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking Bernie Sanders, yet to read the first half of this article you’d think that was all there was to it.

Mr. Sanders made some pretty powerful points about income inequality and the role of big money in politics, and his defense of Mrs. Clinton and her private email server was the quotable event of the evening, one that strengthened her, but also strengthened him.

I thought that Mrs. Clinton’s performance was awful, and she suffered from more substantive attacks than Mr. Sanders—her support of the war in Iraq, her triangulation, the phony half-measures she supports. All of her bad qualities were on display, and I found myself liking her less at the end of the evening than I had before.

To me, Mr. Sanders was the winner—and most informal media polls found that a majority of those who responded agree.

With all the letters they must receive, we have no idea why the Times would publish one with so many amorphous complaints. The writer thought Candidate Clinton was awful! He was especially struck by her many bad qualities! Also, by the phony half-measures she favors!

He found himself liking her less! Inevitably, he ended with informal media polls which have no actual value.

Editorial judgments at the Times rarely cease to amaze. That said, let us take a guess. For many Sanders-nistas, one of Candidate Clinton’s “phony half-measures” would have been the position she stated regarding Glass-Steagall.

Opposition to Glass-Steagall has become a standard point within our tribe. Given that fact, is Krugman really allowed to say that Candidate Clinton had the better case?

For ourselves, we can’t judge this issue. We can judge the instinct that leads us to 1) love Bradley and therefore hate Gore; 2) love Nader and therefore hate Gore; 3) love Obama and therefore hate Clinton; 4) love Clinton and therefore hate Obama.

Reactions 1 and 2 gave us eight years of President Bush. Within our tribe, some can’t wait to do it again. We think people ought to be wiser.

We played nicely at the start of this post. We think Candidate Sanders is a very unusual politician with deeply accurate views about the big picture.

That said, he also took that honeymoon. Beyond that, Patton’s Vanderbilt heir didn’t have time to ask him about that spoken folk music album!

Later, pundits will.

Sanders did a remarkable thing at that first debate. He created an iconic moment, telling the press and the rest of the world to stop getting distracted.

His statement deserves to be recorded. It produced a long, insistent round of applause from the audience, who had watched an iconic moment:

COOPER: Senator Sanders?

SANDERS: Let me say this. Let me say—let me say something that may not be great politics. But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.

CLINTON: Thank you! Me too! Me too!

SANDERS: You know? The middle class— Anderson, and let me say something about the media as well.

I go around the country, talk to a whole lot of people. The middle class in this country is collapsing. We have [46] million people living in poverty. We have massive wealth and income inequality. Our trade policies have cost us millions of decent jobs. The American people want to know whether we’re going to have a democracy or an oligarchy as a result of Citizens Union.

Enough of the e-mails! Let’s talk about the real issues facing America!

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: Thank you, Bernie! Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

COOPER: It’s obviously very popular in this crowd, and it’s—hold on.

(APPLAUSE)

COOPER: I know that plays well in this room. But I got to be honest, Governor Chafee. For the record, on the campaign trail, you’ve said a different thing...

“It’s obviously very popular in this crowd,” the Vanderbilt heir observed. He then returned to pushing the scandal. The emails must go through!

We’re not trying to knock Cooper. Within the press corps, it gets a trillion times worse.

But that statement by Candidate Sanders is one of the greatest and most important in presidential debate history. He was insisting that we stop falling for the endless distractions we endlessly get handed.

Over the past thirty years, do you know how many distractions we’ve gone for? Two days later, one of Candidate Sanders’ supporters was offering that highly amorphous letter in the Times.

There’s zero reason why the writer shouldn’t prefer Candidate Sanders. But why is a Sanders supporters irate when Sanders himself seems so focused and sane?

The statement he made on Tuesday night is one of the most important in the history of our debates. Consider:

By December 1999, Candidate Bradley was actually saying that Candidate Gore invented Willie Horton. The statement was crazy and utterly false, but this is where it can go.

In that race, it helped produce a truly horrible outcome. Sanders wants a clear-eyed focus. His statement was wickedly great.

By the way, Krugman said Clinton had the better case on Glass-Steagall! Is Krugman allowed to say such a thing? Is it possible that one of her phony half-measures actually isn’t wrong?

SWEET DEMON ALABAMA: Greetings from greater Chumpistan!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2015

Part 5—The seven percent selection: When Alabama closed 31 driver’s license locations, was it trying to reduce voting by black Alabamians?

We can’t answer that. For our money, the pleasing claim becomes much harder to sustain in the face of a full set of facts.

Perhaps for that reason, some of our greatest liberal stars have been a bit stingy with their facts when they’ve discussed this topic. One star even gave one state official a free ride to Chumpistan!

We can’t tell you why Alabama closed those 31 offices. Sometimes a set of budget cuts is just a set of budget cuts, as Sigmund Freud famously said.

We can tell you this—the journalism produced by our cable stars has been embarrassingly bad. We think this produces bad liberal politics, for reasons we’ll cite below.

Where did the flawed journalism start? Yesterday, we showed you part of a column by Kyle Whitmire of the Birmingham News.

Whitmire’s column appeared on-line on September 30. Twelve minutes later, a second column appeared on-line, extending his presentation.

This column was written by John Archibald. It went hard-copy in the Birmingham News on October 2, right on page 1A.

Archibald’s column has been widely cited by national liberal stars. For our money, the column presented a somewhat selective assortment of facts.

When our national stars cited the column, they tended to openly cherry-pick its statements, creating a genuine problem.

Let’s be fair! Archibald didn’t allege a nefarious purpose behind the office closings. He specifically said that the office closings may not have had a racial or political purpose.

He did say quite a few other things—and he left some things unsaid, perhaps assuming that Alabamians would know them. At any rate, his was the presentation which launched a national script.

As far as we know, everything said below is accurate, except perhaps for Archibald’s conclusions. At the same time, remember this—an incomplete set of accurate facts can produce a misleading impression:

ARCHIBALD (9/30/15): Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.

[...]

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

But maybe it’s not racial at all, right? Maybe it’s just political. And let’s face it, it may not be either.

But no matter the intent, the consequence is the same.

Look at the 15 counties that voted for President Barack Obama in the last presidential election. The state just decided to close driver license offices in 53 percent of them.

Look at the five counties that voted most solidly Democratic. Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes and Bullock counties all had their driver license offices closed.

Look at the 10 that voted most solidly for Obama. Of those, eight—again, all but Dallas and the state capital of Montgomery—had their offices closed.

Closed.

[...]

So Alabama closes 31 driver license offices. And while the cuts come across Alabama, they are deepest in the Black Belt. The harm is inflicted disproportionately on voters who happen to be black, and poor, in sparsely populated areas.

For starters, saying “closed” again and again doesn’t prove any point. In fairness, columnists seem to columnize this way all across the nation.

That said, are Archibald’s conclusions accurate? Are the cuts to this service “deepest in the Black Belt?” Is the harm “inflicted disproportionately on voters who happen to be black, and poor, in sparsely populated areas?”

Based on the evidence Archibald offers, we can’t necessarily tell you. And by the time his rather limited claims went national, his limited claims had been greatly expanded by our cable stars.

Below, you see one gruesome example. This isn’t what Archibald said:

“But out of all God’s great green evolving earth, Alabama Republicans really did manage to pick this one spot, this center of African-American life in their state, in the Black Belt, as the place where they could really save some money by cutting all those offices where you get what you need to vote.”

Can you see that this declaration, however stirring, goes beyond what Archibald said? That declaration is also flatly, baldly, dumbly false, as we’ve noted before.

Our suggestion:

This may be what happens when corporate cable stars seek to pleasure the base. Or this may happen when true believing pseudo-liberals start fashioning preconceived tales.

In either case, we think this sort of journalism produces bad progressive politics. For now, let’s return to Archibald’s piece, which carried a lot of feeling and a set of accurate statements.

Alas! Not all accurate statements are created equal! For starters, consider this accurate statement, which our national TV stars ditched:

“Look at the 15 counties that voted for President Barack Obama in the last presidential election. The state just decided to close driver license offices in 53 percent of them.”

That statement is perfectly accurate. It also suggests that Archibald, a good decent person, was perhaps overinvested in his feelings about the office closings.

Analysts, please! Across the state, Alabama closed offices in 30 of its 67 counties—that’s 45 percent. Absolutely nothing is proven by the fact that it closed offices in 53 percent of the counties which voted for Obama. (That’s eight counties out of fifteen.)

That accurate claim tells you nothing—and that’s especially true when you understand how small those eight counties are. Consider this accurate statement:

“Look at the five counties that voted most solidly Democratic. Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes and Bullock counties all had their driver license offices closed.”

That’s true, but those are very small counties. Their total population is roughly 67,000—in a state with a total population of 4.8 million!

The total black population of those counties is roughly 51,000. Across the state, there are 1.25 million black Alabamians!

In short, Archibald is making accurate statements. But he’s making these statements about a very small portion of Alabama’s population, whether white or black.

How small a chunk of Alabama’s population is Archibald discussing? Consider one more accurate statement:

“Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters...All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.”

That’s perfectly accurate. But this is also true—those eight shuttered counties contain less than seven (7) percent of the state’s black population! The vast majority of black Alabamians don’t live in these small counties.

In terms of population, Archibald is talking about a very small part of the state. As he does, he basically skips some basic facts which would complete a larger picture for a national audience.

“The cuts come across Alabama,” Archibald finally says at one point. But he only says this in a subordinate clause in his final paragraph.

He never specifically cites the larger, heavily white counties which also lost their driver’s license offices due to the budget cuts. Perhaps he assumed that Alabamians would be familiar with that context.

Cable stars pretty much weren’t, or perhaps they chose to pretend. At any rate, these are the eight largest counties which lost their only office. Archibald discussed a group of very small counties, but never mentioned these:

Largest of the 28 counties which lost their only office
Lauderdale County: 92,709 (86.4% white)
Lawrence County: 34,339 (77.6% white)
Chambers County: 34,064 (58.8% white)
Franklin County: 31,704 (83.0% white)
Geneva County: 26,790 (86.3% white)
Cherokee County: 26,021 (92.7% white)
Winston County: 24,484 (97.3% white)
Bibb County: 22,597 (75.8% white)

Alabama was 67.0% white in the 2010 census. As you can see, offices were also closed in counties which are disproportionately white—including counties which are substantially larger than those which lost their offices in the Black Belt.

This brings us back to a basic fact which really can’t be omitted. Overall, the black population of the 28 inconvenienced counties is about 28% black, as compared to a statewide figure of 26.2%.

Archibald didn’t present any such statewide figures. When this story is told to a national audience, the omission of such basic information can lead to mistaken impressions.

Archibald omitted one other basic fact. Consider this longer passage:

“Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters…All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

“Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.”

It’s true! In Alabama, you now need a driver’s license to vote—or a “special photo ID.”

That statement about the “special photo ID” passed by rather quickly at the start of Archibald’s column. The special photo ID was never mentioned again.

Archibald may have felt that Alabamians understand how this works. National cable stars do not. Either that, or our national stars decided to play their viewers.

Actually, we’re thinking here of one cable star—our own Rachel Maddow. Maddow has now done two segments about this matter without mentioning the availability of free, state-issued photo IDs in all 67 counties.

We’re also thinking of the New York Times, which was almost as slippery with respect to this matter in its recent front-page report about the office closings.

Maddow has done two segments on this matter. By our lights, she has severely misled liberal viewers on both occasions. Then too, we were disappointed by Chris Hayes, who gave an Alabama official a free ride to Chumpistan in the one segment he did on this topic, back on October 6.

Those three segments were bad journalism. In our view, journalism of that lazy, lousy type tends to produce lousy progressive politics.

That said, we’ll have to postpone such ruminations till yet another day. In closing, we’ll say this:

Our stars know cherry-picking is wrong. But dear lord, those cherries taste good!

Still coming (gag): What bad politics looks like

For your viewing enjoyment: Maddow did her second segment on this topic this past Tuesday night. She told us about the governor’s divorce, once again forgot to mention those free voter IDs.

She didn't correct her gross misstatement from her first segment on this topic. This was strange, because she allegedly loves to correct her own mistakes.

To watch that second segment, click here. We’d say that segment was highly misleading and less than obsessively honest.

Cable news can be like a bowl of cherries! As noted, though, cherries taste good.

Supplemental: Extreme crank delivers the Bern to the Times!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2015

As Gabriel blows horn again: On Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders told the press corps to drop the incessant scandal crap and talk about substance for once.

The focus on emails is too damn high, the candidate more or less said.

The audience applauded. It was an instant iconic moment.

Alas! In her new column, Gail Collins has a strange take on the incident:

COLLINS (10/15/15): [Candidate Clinton] had a great debate Tuesday night. Her main opponent, Bernie Sanders, said America was sick and tired of the damned email thing! This is actually classic Sanders, who combines persistent truth-telling with extreme crankiness. But convenient as all get-out for Clinton, who did an excellent job herself on most of the questions. In a perfect world she wouldn’t have said “I represented Wall Street,” but all in all, a home run.

To Collins, Sanders’ statement seems to have been a manifestation of “extreme crankiness.” Later, she said that Clinton had been “surrounded by four crabby-looking men.”

This is the way they approach these things; nothing will ever change that. For a note on an “unlikeable” White House candidate, see below.

Meanwhile, reporter Trip Gabriel was at it in Iowa once again, pretending to evaluate voter response to this latest debate.

We last looked in on Gabriel after the second Republican debate. As we noted in this post, he had exhausted himself gathering voter reactions:

GABRIEL (9/19/15): A sampling of a dozen Iowans on Thursday who watched the second Republican debate—all of them close followers of the presidential race who are uncommitted—did not vary from the emerging national consensus about Mrs. Fiorina’s performance.

At the time, we suggested that a dozen Iowans may not be much of a sampling—that the sampling may be too damn small. It became clear this morning that the sensitive Times reporter took our critique to heart.

The headline above his new report says this: “Hillary Clinton Wins Iowa Fans With Debate Performance.” How big was his sample size this time?

This time around, nothing was left to chance:

GABRIEL (10/15/15): In Iowa, where Bernie Sanders’s call for “political revolution” has lit a prairie fire, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s insistence at Tuesday night’s debate that she, too, is a progressive but one who “likes to get things done,” brought her new respect and support.

Mrs. Clinton’s self-assurance, command of issues and ease in parrying Mr. Sanders at the forum in Las Vegas drew praise from Iowa Democrats, who will cast the first nominating votes on Feb. 1.

[...]

A third candidate, Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, was also cited as impressive in interviews with more than a dozen debate-watchers who had not previously committed to a candidate.

This time, Gabriel was careful about sample size. This time, he spoke to more than a dozen voters. We’ll guess that means thirteen.

We’re puzzled by work of this type. No one could fail to understand the problem with speaking to so few people, then drawing large conclusions about the way “Iowa Democrats” reacted to this event.

That said, the Times keeps publishing work of this type. It strikes us as an imitation of journalism. It seems to be based on the assumption that New York Times readers won’t notice.

To how many “Iowa Democrats” did Gabriel actually speak? He names ten people in his report. In theory, that means at least three missed the cut.

How representative was this small sample? According to Gabriel’s report, he spoke to a farmer, a mayor, a social worker and a waiter.

This suggests that he had perhaps been involved in a “Reimagine the Village People” drinking game, according to one of the analysts.

Fair enough, we thoughtfully said. The analyst's theory was reinforced by this:

GABRIEL: Sarah and Bryan Vanderpool, professional folk singers who recently moved from Los Angeles, began the debate as Sanders supporters. Mr. Vanderpool was still one afterward. “He really spoke to the issues and I’m really excited about him,” he said.

But Ms. Vanderpool found herself unexpectedly drawn to the gravitational field of Mrs. Clinton. “I came in really, really supporting Bernie, and now I like them both,” she said. “She really handled herself well: she has a history of working on the stuff she’s going to be dealing with if she’s president.”

Should a representative sample that small involve two folk singers? Let alone two professional singers who have just moved away from Los Angeles?

Gabriel’s sample was very small. At the Times, it was close enough for journalistic work.

That said, a reporter can’t really learn squat or squadoosh from speaking to thirteen Iowa Democrats.

“Please tell us that the Times knows that,” one of the analysts sighed.

Unlikable, the columnist said: Collins’ reference to the cranky crabby candidate made us think of something we recently read about the late Mary McGrory, the long-time columnist at the Washington Post.

John Norris has written a biography of McGrory. In Sunday’s Outlook section, Carlos Lozada broke the hearts of the world with a bygone quote:

LOZADA (10/11/15): Norris captures a bygone era of Washington journalism, yet reveals McGrory as a precursor to its current forms. Clickbait and harsh comments would not have been alien to her. Nor would conflicts between reporting and opinion, between personal and professional loyalties. “If I wanted to be fair and objective,” she explained, “I wouldn't be writing.”

That writing could eviscerate in single lines. Of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, she observed: “I had seen his likes all my life, at wakes, at weddings, at the junior prom. He was an Irish bully boy.” Robert F. Kennedy: “His tragedy was not only that he had not achieved his full potential, but that uncertainties and pressures had prevented him from seeing what it was.” Nixon: “A sense of grievance is not a good paramount quality in a president.” Carter vs. Reagan: “a choice between a Democrat who can't govern and a Republican who won't.” Gore vs. Bush: “a battle between the unlikable and the unprepared.” She would've been great on Twitter.

“The unlikable and the unprepared?” After reading Collins today, we remembered to look up the quote.

The quote appeared in the Washington Post five days before the 2000 election. It came with a reference to Gore’s “bad manners” at the first Bush-Gore debate.

We don’t recommend looking it up. As for the crabby Sanders, he crafted an important, iconic moment—an iconic debate moment for the ages.

The endless distractions are too damn high, the hopeful incomparably said.