Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Honesty in punditry

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Today we have a little help in deconstructing the pundits.

This is Geoffrey Pullam, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and taking apart George Will for lying:

The domain of language already provides plentiful evidence of barefaced nonhumorous lying that in other domains might get you ridiculed or jailed. Language Log has documented some staggering examples. The most striking is probably George Will's repeated assertion that President Obama's egotism is revealed in the extraordinarily high frequency of the first-person singular pronoun in his speeches. Mark Liberman has published about 17 Language Log posts on this topic since early June 2009 (this post includes a list up to 31 March 2012; Will's latest and most extreme assertion is discussed here).

Counting occurrences of I, me, my, and myself in presidential speeches and news conferences, Liberman rapidly discovered that President Obama uses these pronouns far less than his predecessors. George W. Bush's speeches used the first-person singular pronouns 60 to 70 percent more than Obama does; Bill Clinton used them about 50 percent more.

Yet pundit after pundit has repeated George Will's lie. Professor Stanley Fish jumped on the wagon, building literary analysis on lies (Liberman analyzes Fish here).

John Sides does it for David Brooks and his misrepresentation of "fundamentals":

David Brooks's recent column argued this:

Why is Obama even close? If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now.

And thus this flight of fancy:

He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.

This is 'ESPN masculinity,' apparently.  Ezra Klein responds:

But the premise of the column is wrong: If you look at the fundamentals right now, the president should not be getting crushed. In fact, he should be slightly ahead, which is pretty much where he is in most polls'

'Pundits take political situations that can be explained through the fundamentals and then attribute them, without any evidence, to the telegenic characteristics of individual politicians or the messaging decisions made by their campaigns.

What's amazing about this episode is David Brooks did exactly the same thing in 2008.  Except in 2008'it was August when he wrote'he was puzzled as to why Obama wasn't crushing McCain.  Instead of asking 'Why is Obama even close?' he was asking 'Where's the Landslide?'  As my reply made clear, the fundamentals at that point did not predict an Obama landslide.  The average of the forecasting models was about 52%.

Closer to home, Chris "Both Ways" Shays is running against Linda McMahon to see who can lose to [D] Chris Murphy in the Joe Lieberman Replacement Derby. Hugh Bailey has a nice column on Shays' version of "forgive and forget the lying":

"Cut me a little slack," he said. Everyone got Iraq wrong. Why should Chris Shays take the blame?

The former congressman and current Senate candidate was talking to WNPR in Connecticut last week when he acknowledged that the Iraq war had not gone as planned, but that it really wasn't all his fault. "The CIA and others were totally wrong," he said. True enough.

And beyond that, he said he's learned some valuable lessons. ...

And he doesn't realize that he learned the wrong lessons. As the world has long known, the problem wasn't that people in power were wrong about Iraq. It's that people were lying.

[A reminder: Chris Murphy got it right all along.]

Gallup is flummoxed:

Fifty-six percent of Americans think Barack Obama will win the 2012 presidential election, compared with 36% who think Mitt Romney will win. Democrats are more likely to believe that Obama will win than Republicans are to believe Romney will. Independents are nearly twice as likely to think that Obama, rather than Romney, will prevail.

This, despite their own poll showing a close election. What's wrong with the public, anyway?

It is unclear why Americans are more inclined to predict an Obama than a Romney victory when the two are essentially tied in Gallup's latest election polling. It may be that Americans recognize the advantages Obama has as the incumbent and that historically, presidents seeking re-election usually win. For example, in March 2004, when President George W. Bush and John Kerry were about tied in voter preferences, more said Bush (52%) than Kerry (42%) would win. Or, Americans may expect in the months between now and the election that conditions in the U.S. will improve, which would make the incumbent's re-election more certain.

Americans are a bit more likely now to say Obama has a better chance of winning than they were at a similar point in 2008.

Nate Silver:

Put another way, if you are being very detail oriented, there is a case to be made that Mr. Romney's odds of being elected have improved somewhat over the past six weeks. I suppose we can be even more detail oriented once we get the general election model up and running. If you just want the 30,000-foot view ' well, it looks pretty close, as it did before.

Quinnipiac:

'New Jersey voters approved of same-sex marriage before President Barack Obama evolved, and they still do,' said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.  'That 4-1 support among young voters shows this is just a matter of time.

'New Jerseyans like Gov. Christopher Christie and are divided on whether his veto of the same-sex marriage bill was right or wrong.  And they're divided on whether the State Legislative should override the veto.

      'But voters overwhelmingly endorse Christie's idea of putting it up to a referendum.

'What was the political effect of President Obama's decision?   Little or none.'

The effect of most political stories is "little or none". Want an example? George W Bush has his drunk driving record come to light just before the 2000 election. Anyone still talking about it? Incumbency, the economy and presidential approval ratings. Those are the fundamentals, the rest matters (but generally is built into the approval ratings for an incumbent.)

As for what matters to the public about Romney, he's disliked (no surprise), but he is a major party alternative and starts with a floor of 45%. Nothing said or done by him or anyone else changes that. Everything else is about the 6% more it takes to get to 51.