Krugman: The Pundit Delusion

[depakid]

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters.

This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.

...There’s no point berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the lives of people they know. Given the realities of a bleak employment picture, Americans are unhappy — and they’re set to punish those in office.

...The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19krugman.html?hp

[zipplewrath]

1. Didn't even try

That's the consistent theme out of this administration. They don't even try. In the end the most consistent explanation is because they don't want to. They didn't want a bigger stimulus, so they didn't even try. They didn't want single payer, so they didn't even try. When they want something, they try, like cadillac taxes and mandates. They even tried to get the health insurance industry on board like they did with Big Pharma. Didn't work, but they tried. They didn't want to get out of Iraq in 16 months, so they didn't even try. They didn't want to get out of Afghanistan, so they didn't even try. And many in the administration and the DoD are looking for ways to leave as slowly as possible. Biden said Sunday that the beginning of the withdrawl could start with as few as 2000 soldiers. When they want something, they at least try. They don't always get it, but they try. If they aren't trying, it's because they don't want it.

[dionysus]

16. what a load of garbage.

[abluelady]

2. A Conservative Questioned Me This Weekend

"Well, how do you feel about Obama now?" As I was trying to put my reply succinctly, he looked at me and said, "you don't think he's liberal ENOUGH, do you?" Bingo. I feel President Obama should have done much more, as Krugman points out, where this man felt he has done too much, i.e., the stimulus, health care, etc. And then after a small discussion, he basically pointed his finger in my face and said, "YOU"RE A SOCIALIST." I guess I was supposed to be offended.

[midnight]

3. The label socialism does not begin to describe the chess game

being played.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

6. It is the very fact that your friend thought you wanted him to be MORE liberal,

while he himself thinks Obama is TOO liberal speaks to a larger narrative:

This country is polarized, and Obama is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

He will always be berated by us on the left--including myself--for NOT being liberal enough (thought I always knew that he is no liber).

He will always be crucified by the righties because they have moved so far to the right that they fail to see that Obama's pro-corporate/hawkish proclivities have absolutely NOTHING to do with socialism.

Ask your friend if we have a single payer health care system? Ask him if he realizes that the health care reform has just awarded the insurance industry with 30 million more customers with no cap on how much these companies can raise insurance premiums.

When he can't answer these questions, ask him what "socialism" means.

[abluelady]

7. Once He Decided I Was a Socialist

the conversation almost ended, but not before he told me Communism and Socialism are one and the same! What is the point of having a conversation with someone like him. We are terribly polarized. I don't see that ending for a very long time. I can't even begin to imagine what will happen to this country if the Repugs win a lot of seats in November.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

10. To that point, I found the Boston Globe article fascinating...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane | July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

[abluelady]

12. I Was Familiar With This Article

It is very frustrating. I wish the author had a solution to this problem.

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. One party - two right wings

Krugs is exactly right!

[KansasVoter]

5. Dens worry about appearance, the GOP worry about their voter!

[Radical Activist]

8. The delusion is that he's unpopular.

After non-stop attacks from conservative media and the rest of the press rarely reporting anything positive about him he still has around 50% approval ratings. That's pretty damn good.

[Jakes Progress]

9. K&R Ignore Krugman at your peril.

[HughMoran]

11. Yeah, why didn't he do a stimulus like I WANTED! Waaaah!!1 Waaaah!!!

Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Krugman, that they simply 1) don't agree with your philosophy or 2) couldn't get a larger stimulus passed?

Rehash of "why didn't they do what I suggested" number zillion by Paul Krugman. He may be a genius, but he's also stubborn and arrogant.

[depakid]

15. He didn't push for effective policy- and that hurts everyone

even (and maybe especially) those in the Obama über alles crowd.

btw: it wasn't just Krugman- anyone who could do arithmetic and who isn't into faith based methods knew that the stimulus was a half measure and that the results (particularly when state budgets were accounted for) wouldn't get the job done.

Not only that- but it would discredit the very economic policies that might have pulled the US out of stagnation and long years of high unemployment.

[Phx_Dem]

13. Amen, Paul. n/t

[branders seine]

14. The fact is, he didn't even try.

Same as with actual health care reform.

Whoever pulls his strings reigned him in before he even tried.


More to the point, the DC echo chamber is utterly disconnected from reality.