The Seven Deadly Sins of Political Punditry

Today's blog originally appeared in Counter Punch.

It’s high season for political punditry.   Pundits offer their take on who is ahead or behind and what every insignificant event or utterance means.  But before anyone gets too excited over what they spin,  their observations should be taken with a grain of salt because more often than not their analysis is faulty, corrupted by the seven deadly sins of political punditry.  What are these seven sins?

Confirmation Bias. 

People seek out information that confirms their pre-existing political biases and ignores that which contradicts it.  We surf the web and find memes which confirm what we already know to be the truth and repost and send to others.  One great example–the legendary meme that quotes Donald Trump in  a 1998 People Magazine story saying “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”  To my Democrat friends the meme must be true but alas it is fake and there is no such story.

Cognitive Dissonance. 

Cognitive dissonance refers to the process of having or holding contradictory beliefs and the resulting stress in tying to reconcile and act upon them.  Look at how GOP presidentialswingcandidates and consultants put their best face on in supporting Trump, twisting over issues such as the recent controversy involving his attack on the Khans.  Or how liberals can embrace Clinton even though she supports the death penalty, free trade, and a muscular foreign policy.  One tool to relieve the pressures of cognitive dissonance is by appeal to confirmation bias–simply dismissing contradictory data or evidence.

Making Too Much Deal About the Polls.

There are lots of reasons to question the infatuation of pundits with polls and how too much of a fuss is made over statistically  insignificant changes in their results.  Post RNC and DNC, a lot of noise was made in  terms of convention bumps and who was in the lead.  Historically presidential candidates get convention bumps but after a couple of weeks it fades.  No news here.  Pundits  nonetheless angst over them, especially when they pay for them and make them their main news story, such as what CNN has done recently.

Finally, aggregate public opinion polls in presidential races are meaningless–remember it is not the popular but the electoral vote that determines the president.  The race for the presidency is really 51 separate elections, of which only about ten really matter because that is how few swing states there are.

Misuse of Statistics and Selective Quotations.

Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of falsehoods–lies, damn lies, and statistics.  Political punditry excels in th art of creative lying with statistics.  Candidates do it by only quoting those statistics that support their views, ignoring those which do not.    They also understand that most people are confused by statistics, don’t know the truth, or simply will not bother checking the sources of claims made.

Pundits do the same, especially on all the cable talk shows. Look too at Facebook and the social media.  There is literally very little posted that anyone can really trust.  People repost stuff with full knowledge and reliance upon the belief no one will every check to see if facts are true–such as the Trump meme noted above. This is also the case with posting stories long after they were originally published and now out of context, conveying the impression that it is new when it fact it is out of date or simply wrong now.

Confusing Short and Long Terms Horizons. 

What is true or news today may not be true on election day let alone tomorrow.  The Trump-Khan controversy is a great example.  Yes, it is great news and copy today buts its longer term impact is unclear.  Polls that reflect convention bumps, as noted above, fade, and one should not read too much into short term fluctuations.   Many pundits love to declare events as game changers.   Rarely do we see something as a game changer when it happens and it may take a long time to appreciate what really matters in a campaign.

Thinking what Happens Between Boston and Washington is all that Matters. 

Richard Nixon was famous for asking whether it will play in Peoria.  His point was that what the pundits think is important within the Boston to DC corridor may simply not matter to folks in the rest of the country.  Pundits are too obsessed with inside baseball, thinking that what matters to them and their friends is what matters to the rest of the country. Pundits simply talk to one another.  Watch CNN, MSNBC, and FOX.  They have the same cadre of insiders talking to insiders, predictably saying what you think they would.

Reacting to the Reaction.

Finally, the inside baseball problem of thinking only what happens between Boston and Washington is closely related to the problem of reacting to the reaction, or to unverified rumors.  Too much punditry is about one pundit saying something and then others react to that statement and then others react to that reaction.  At some point pundity is not about real politics but instead is a game of reporting on who pundited about what.  Punditry becomes so wrapped up in itself that it defines its own truth and logic–punditry for the sake of punditry.

So there you have it–the seven deadly sins of punditry.  The next time you see a post on social media or a comment by a pundit on television or elsewhere watch to see how many of these sins they commit.

Trump and Clinton are the Face of What is Wrong with American Politics

There is something wrong with American politics if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the

presidential nominees for the Republican and Democratic parties.  Their candidacies speak both to the flaws of the presidential campaign selection process, the parties, the media, the substance of policy debate in America, and even to them as individual candidates.
Let’s start with the fact that both Trump and Clinton are horribly flawed candidates.  If all the polls are correct, they are the two most unpopular individuals to potentially get  their parties’ nominations in the last 40 years.  For both, more than half of those surveyed indicated that they do not like them or would not vote for them, potentially suggesting a race where significant numbers of voters stay home or hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.  In a normal year with good choices neither of these candidates would get their party’s nomination and if they did, would be trounced by the opposition.
By the time the primary season is over barely 10 million people will determine the party nominees.  We have super-delegates, caucuses, and arcane party rules that make no sense, rendering it less than a fair democratic process to select party nominees.  These rules make the Electoral College seem fair and intelligent by comparison.  What is clear is that the primary process is unfair.  Trump and Sanders are correct–the process is hugely rigged and controlled by insiders, insulating the party against the change and reforms that are needed.
For Trump, his racist, sexist, and jingoist world view, his near vacuous policy stances, and his overall simplistic political views are embarrassing and they will do little to help the white working class who are his core supporters.   Trump’s claim to fame is his mastery of the media and his ability to bluster and pout his way over others.  He does well in a year where his part has abandoned working and middle class America and has embraced a plutocratic vision of America.  He talks a good game to help the people the GOP has left behind but offering many of the same policies that put the USA into the terrible shape it is.  Moreover, his stance on many social issues is simply the  same as what many Republicans have advocated for years, but it says it more clearly.  For example a few weeks ago when he said and then retracted his statement that women should be punished for having abortions, he was saying no more than really what many of the extreme pro-life really imply when they want to make abortion illegal.  Trump is both the logical extension and death of the Republican party.
For Clinton, yes sexism is part of her problem but certainty not every criticism of her is sexist. She tried this argument against Obama and it failed then.  She has a real credibility problem, consistently espousing positions that she repudiates when it seems politically convenient.  In 2008 she moved to the left when she say the party and Obama moving that way, she is doing that again this year with Sanders. But even if that is not true, face it, she embodies a neo-liberal corporate perspective on the world that is reinforced by a rather hawkish foreign policy perspective that is more classically found in Republicans.  Face it–Clinton is not a progressive. Yes she and her supporters like to point to a 92% voting agreement between her and Sanders in the Senate.  That proves nothing.  Given the polarization, almost all Democrats votes together nearly 90% of the time.  Moreover, that 92% reflects votes on issues on the agenda, not ideological views on where candidates stand or how they would vote on issues if they could set the agenda themselves.  Overall, Clinton’s selection kills off the future of the Democratic Party ready to be inherited by Millennials who see no good reason to support her and who will walk away from the political system if she gets the nomination.
Taken together, the choice between Trump and Clinton is that between two establishment elites who have marketed their personalities to the top of their respective parties.
Notice I say “marketed.”  The two have not so much campaigned as marketed their campaigns.  In fact, on of the main problems this year with the 2016 elections is the degree to which marketing has replaced politics and the news, and ideology has replaced facts. Look at the coverage by FOX, MSNBC, and CNN for example.  They are no longer covering the news so much as they are marketing it.  The debates and their political coverage–the issues the cover, the slants on facts–all reveal a bias in favor of how they can sell the news for profit.  This year the mainstream media, including the NY Times, and the Washington Post, abandoned all pretense of objectivity.  They created Trump because he sold advertising and ratings.  Recent studies point to all the free media coverage given to Trump and how little to Sanders.  We saw that in the repeated attacks on Sanders, in how they keep wanting to declare him dead.  Even such liberal stalwarts as Paul Krugman write less with authority and more with his biases showing.  He writes as a privileged Baby Boomer clueless to what Millennials and real people think and feel.
Part of the reason the mainstream corporate media has so misunderstood this years elections is because of their corporate and political biases, but also because of their inside the beltway perspective on the world that insults them  David Brooks recently confessed that he never understood the degree to which Americans were hurting and how they contributed to the populism fueling Trump and Sanders.  I guess it is kind of hard to see economic hardship when you vacation in the Hamptons,  own the Mar A Lago in West Palm Beach and are worth billions, or dwell in Chappaqua, NY and make $28 million per year.
The media have not only missed how the two parties have largely ignored most Americans, but it has missed the power ful generational forces, the polarization, and other trends driving American politics this year that distinguish it from last year.  They have largely assumed the present year is no different than the past.
But the media marketing of politics goes hand in hand with the candidate marketing of their views, and their surrogates doing the same thing.  Truth seems to be a major victim this year along with sanity and thoughtfulness.  Candidates and their surrogates spew and emote over inconsequential things, pushing interpretations of facts into the realm of fantasy.  “Liar Liar” and truth meters are working overtime.  I have also seen too many people I know better move way beyond offering cogent discussions into politics, demonizing those who support rivals (even of the same party) as stupid or worse.
There is something just wrong with our political system this year and Trump and Clinton are the face of all that is flawed and the are really a by product of all that has gone wrong.  Realistically, can’t we do better than this?

Signals v Noises: How and Why the Pundits, Pollsters, Politicians, and Polticial Scientists are Confused About the 2016 Elections

Trump and Sanders perplex the professional politicians, pundits, pollsters, and even political scientists.  When I say Trump and Sanders I do not just mean them but instead they are proxies for the entire US 2016 presidential process thus far and probably until election day November 8.  No less than Nate Silver, Politics 538, and the pollsters blew it with the Michigan Democratic Primary last week.  The forecast was for a double digit Clinton victory, prompting Nate Silver to give Clinton a 98% chance winning that state’s primary.

So the question is why?  The core reason is laziness–assuming and following conventional wisdom is correct and failing to see the proper signals suggesting that something was unique about the 2016 election cycle.

Take us back to May 2015.  Back then the conventional wisdom among political insiders–and that includes politicians, political operatives, and pundits (journalists and commentators)–was that  Clinton and Bush would march to their party nominations and that the final general election would be a contest between these two predicted candidates.  Furthermore, even though Jeb Bush was going to win, the GOP had other strong candidates in Christie, Walker, and Jindal for example such that they would mount a powerful lineup against the inevitable Hillary Clinton.  Sanders campaign was dismissed as Quixote at best, with polls pointing to 60-70% leads by Clinton over him.  Trump too was dismissed as at best a vanity candidate would repeatedly implode, especially after each one of his insulting statements that all were sure would doom him.  But now of course nine months later and well into the primary season Trump is in a terrific position to win the nomination and Clinton, while leading Sanders in committed delegates, is not guaranteed and there are still reasonable scenarios for the Vermont Senator to win.  Even moving forward, assuming a Trump-Clinton contest the received wisdom is
that Clinton wins.

From my perspective all of this is wrong.  Last May I wrote about the chances of Trump and Sanders potentially winning, and I think that in a Trump-Clinton race Trump may win.  So why did do many get it so wrong?

Laziness is the issue.  Better yet, the answer is “Inside the Parkway” or “institutional disease.”  Specifically, those making the predictions are all politicians or pundits who are part of the establishment.  They are located with the narrow confines of Washington, D.C., viewing the world from that perspective.  They share the same world.  Look at CNN, MSNBC, FOX.  All the journalists know one another, their guests are from there.  They all share the same biases and perspectives and fail to see how the world looks from outside the parkway, outside of the formal institutions of power-Washington government on big  corporate for-profit

media–and they do not write from the perspective of how people view the world from the fly over regions of America.  Watch these dreary  shows, read all the on-line publications, and not just th partisan ones, and they reinforce one’s another’s biases.  They have a tight little club with the regular suspects of commentators or analysts  and none of them really look at the world from a different perspective beyond what they see from  their desks and studios in Washington.  They drool out conventional wisdom about how they view or think the world should operate, failing to recognize that just because they so it does not make it so.

What they missed of course then is the depth of anti-institutionalism pervading American society.  They confuse what has politically worked in the past with what is happening now or what will work in the future.  They simply think that the past is a certain predictor of the future without asking if there are any changed conditions that might suggest a new reality this year.  This is the laziness I speak of; and it is the source of confusing signals and noise.

What are some signals that should have been seen?  First, few appreciate the generational shift occurring in American politics.  Baby Boomers just don’t get this.  They are near clueless that  the power shifted from Boomers to Gen Xers with Obama and now it is shifting to Millennials.  They seem clueless to the different objective conditions driving Millennial politics.  This is a structural shift in politics and Clinton and her supporters largely fail to understand this.  Clinton represents old style politics–the type that brought us the Iraq War, massive student loan debt, a grim economic future, and global warming. The Boomers wanted a revolution to change the world and they not only failed but handed Millennials a crappy future.  The politicians and pundit class are Boomers.

But what is also missed is something else.  In a bipartisan fashion the policies of both the Democrats and Republicans over the last two generations have screwed over most people.  Republicans have explicitly become the party of plutocrats, losing track of the strategy Kevin Phillips endorsed in 1969 The Emerging Republican Majority which said that Nixon and the Republicans could capture the silent middle class majority by developing policies to help them. Reagan walked away from this strategy and the GOP has done little to address the economic problems of their base.  Similarly, the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, became corporate Democrats, and they too have done little for middle class America. This is even true of Obama who worried more about restructuring Wall Street with tepid laws than in helping homeowners. He never supported reform to labor or union laws, never pushed on the minimum wage. Trump and Sanders  emerge as challengers to this anger.

The Republican and Democratic leadership has simply assumed they are the party and do what they want and often do not think that what others think matters.  Yes we have primaries and caucuses, but the GOP establishment has their silent primaries to pick who they want and the Democrats have their super delegates as the fail safe against  the people.  In both cases the leaders of the party are saying that the real people do not matter.  Create an insulated structure like this and it is no wonder the parties failed to see what is happening.

But the other signal missed this year is not understanding on the one hand that presidential politics is mostly television-driven, assuming what I have said is a politainment status that favors candidates who look and speak well on television.  Thus Trump.  But politics also goes to those who can best master new communication forms, and again Trump and Sanders have an advantage.  But at the same time one of the noises confusing so many is that too many come to believe all that is posted on the Internet or that simple spin is enough or that if one blurts out enough rage that will be  enough to change minds or win votes.  In effect, too many people are inferring too much from the social media in terms of what it tells us about the election.

Another noise has been the polls.  Polls have become rarefied and objectified into the belief they are firm predictors of the future. Remember, polls are snap sots of public opinion in time that  reflect knowledge and awareness at a point T in time.  People’s opinions change and they gather information and pay attention.  Pollsters have assumptions about who will participate or vote they are often flawed and even the best polls may not sample properly (this is especially the case with younger cell phone users).  Finally, statistically even the best polls run at least a 5% chance of being wrong, and this does not count sampling errors.

Overall, the point is that laziness, inside the beltway disease, group think, and a host of biases and failures to see signals versus noises is what is making it so hard for so many to make sense out of the 2016 elections.

Jerry Springer Without Jerry: Thoughts on the First Republican Presidential Debate

Let’s be serious–this was not a debate it was pure entertainment.  More accurately, the first Republican presidential debate (including the junior debate for the also-rans or wannabees) was pure politainment.  It was the spectacle of demonstrating what happens when we merge politics and entertainment, we get politainiment.  It is about the transformation of news into entertainment where the focus is on ratings and making money, and it is about the effort of candidates to become media personas to succeed in politics.  This is what Ronald Reagan did, as did Jesse Ventura.  Now we have FOX, Donald Trump, the first debate,  and might I say, the departure of Jon Stewart from Comedy Central all occurring on the same night.  Welcome to politainment and the 2016 election cycle.

Jon Stewart and Comedy Central never pretended to be real news but so many people treated like it was.  It was pure politainment representing the fine line between politics and entertainment.  But FOX national news (as opposed to the local FOX affiliates) has be pure partisan politics pretending to be news.  It has brilliantly figured out (in ways that MSNBC has yet to) how to break down the walls of partisanship, news, and entertainment and package it into a multi-billion dollar force that serves as the unofficial house organ for the Republican Party and often crackpot conservatives theories.   Thus Fox is conflicted with competing demands of pushing ideology, making money via ratings, and entertaining.  This is the context of the Thursday so-called debate.
Had this been a real debate the first question would not have been about honoring party endorsements and third party candidacies.  It would have been one asking candidates questions about global warming, ISIS, unemployment, or their stand of the treaty with Iran and what alternatives they had.  I heard so many people say the journalists did a good job asking tough questions.  No, they were terrible in terms of encouraging a debate on serious matters of public policy.  Instead they were provocateurs do their best to ask questions to hype ratings and get a fight started–no different than what Jerry Springer did so successfully.

The debate was made for Trump.  He is the ultimate politainer of our age.  Setting up with an opening question to get Trump mad was brilliant entertainment. It made for perfect theater.  And in setting up a format where Trump was the star–and also the object to be attacked–perhaps Fox was also trying to protect mainstream Republicanism from what it has become–Trump.
So much has been made of Trump’s racism with his immigration comments and sexism with comments about women and allusion to Ms. Kelly and her menstrual cycle (at least he did not say she was “on the rag” or was PMS but you knew he wanted to say that).  But the fact of the matter is that the other candidates are just as harsh on immigration.  They have all taken extreme positions on abortion and women’s health.  Even though no federal funds pay for abortion, they all want to cut Planned Parenthood off from federal funds that pay for women’s health.  Jeb Bush said too much money is being spent on women’s health.  Huckabee said he would send in federal troops to prevent abortions.  Rubio will not support abortions even when a woman’s life in endanger.
Trump scares the Republican Party because he actually is what the GOP has become, except he is not shy to run away from his racism and sexism.  The rest of the party wants the benefits of racism and sexism but without owning up to it.  They pretty up their policy positions–no immigration, no abortions, restrictions on voting–but want to deny the real reasons or implications of their policies.  Texas tried to justify its voting restrictions but a Fifth Circuit this past week upheld a lower court decision finding a racial impact to its voter ID laws.  Trump is laying bare where and what the Republican Party is and has become, and   faced with that reality FOX is trapped.  Does it come to the defense of the kinder and gentler Republicanism that wants and cake and eat it too or does it exploit Trump for all the money and ratings they can garner?  This is the problem for FOX and the Republican Party now.