Ouch

A new poll indicates that Americans would prefer George W. Bush in the White House to Obama. Given that Bush left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in memory only two years ago, and that Obama has pretty much made a living off of blaming him for everything but halitosis since his election in 2008, that's not a good sign for the president. It's a certain sign that he's going to have to come up with something better than "at least I'm not Bush!" as a reason for people to vote for him in 2012. Given that he appears intent on taking on the GOP and fighting what Republicans feel will be losing battles for him after their presumptive takeover of the House on Tuesday, it's unlikely that he'll seek to position himself as an above-the-fray Clintonian triangulator either. I'm not sure that bashing the GOP for obstructionism is going to work, however, given that voters generally disapprove of his agenda and are poised to reward Republicans for trying to obstruct it over the past few years.

Why Won't The Stupid Voters Listen When We Tell Them What They Want?

Apparently mystified by persistent public opposition to his health care law, President Obama is blaming himself, not for signing a bill that started out unpopular and grew more so throughout the process of its passage, but for failing to sell it well enough. Obama continues to argue that the reason people don't like the law is because they aren't aware of all the benefits it will bring them. But as Reason's Peter Suderman points out, there's a simpler and empirically better supported explanation - that the public is aware of the law's benefits, which contrary to what the President thinks the Democrats have talked up to no end, but is also aware of its costs, which the Democrats have rather assiduously avoided discussing, and does not consider the former worth the price of the latter.

I haven't been polled, but I certainly fall into this category. I'm all for ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions can receive subsidized medical treatment for them if they can't afford it themselves, making health care plans more portable between places of employment, and the like. What I'm not for? The massive, cost-spiraling distortion in the health insurance market that forcing insurance companies to issue policies on which they are guaranteed to lose money will create. The higher taxes that will raise the price of new treatments and stunt medical innovation. The almost certain budget busting costs. The giant middle finger to personal freedom and constitutional rights that is the individual mandate. The unsavory backroom dealing that went into drafting the law. And most of all, the vast array of statistical gimmicks, euphemisms, blandishments, and outright lies via which the Democrats have tried to obscure all of this. I don't know how representative I am, but I know why I don't like the law, even though as a young person with a checkered travel history I stand to benefit from it in some ways, and it's not because I don't know what it's in. I'm not sure which is more offensive, the Democrats' arrogance in ramming this law through against the popular will, or their condescension in assuming that people oppose it because they're too stupid to know what's good for them.

It's widely expected that the Democrats will get hammered in the upcoming midterm elections, and very likely lose their governing majority in at least one house of Congress. I suspect that much of that is a result of the fact that the economy continues to sputter. But if health care does prove to be a salient issue in this campaign and hurts the Democrats as it almost certainly will if that's the case, they deserve it. Whatever the merits, or lack therof, of the particular laws they pass, parties that overinterpret their mandate and/or take the electorate for a pliable mass of idiots need to suffer for it.

Why Don't Democrats Run On Soaking The Rich?

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wonders. Andrew Sullivan offers the typical conservative viewpoint on why this approach doesn't resonate with voters - that "it's just not American to bash the successful". There may be something to this - the American political culture does appear to me more hostile to redistributive schemes than those of, say, Europe - but I doubt that it's the only reason, or even the most important one. Rather, I think that the seeming contradiction here - polls showing high support for taxing the rich more heavily, with actual voter behavior not reflecting that preference - arises from 1.)a misreading of what the polling results mean, 2.)a failure to account for the difference between stated preferences (poll responses) and revealed ones (actual voting), and 3.)a failure to attend to the fact that many polls (and particularly those which pose questions on general policy preferences such as these) do not use samples that are representative of the portion of the population that actually votes.

Firstly, I think it's likely that a very large number of voters do not interpret the phrase "tax the rich" the same way the Democrats do. To the Democrats, "the rich" has a statistical definition - it means "people in the top 20% of earners" or "people who make more than $250,000 a year" or whatever. I suspect, however, that to the majority of voters, even well-off voters, "the rich" means "people who make more money than I do". It's a well-known fact that a most Americans - even those who by any objective socioeconomic measure would have to be considered rich - consider themselves some variety of "middle class". Ask white-collar professionals making $200,000 a year (particularly those living in an expensive city like New York) whom they think of as "rich", and they'll probably name someone like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. They're unlikely to think of themselves. So when they hear the question "should we tax the rich more heavily?", they are very likely to interpret it as "should we raise Warren Buffett's taxes?", and unsurprisingly, many are in favor. I expect, however, that if you phrased the question differently, more along the lines of specific proposals of the sort Democrats like to make - say, "should we raise taxes on households that make more than $250,000 a year?" - you'd get much less enthusiastic support.

Even if we grant that voters are not interpreting the question differently, and that the type of voters I mentioned in the previous paragraph realize that the tax hikes in question will apply to them as well as to Warren Buffett, we have to consider the possibility that many of them may be more willing to support tax hikes in theory than they are in practice. It's not exactly news that people frequently say one thing and do another, particularly when there is social pressure to appear a certain way involved. Respondees who want to appear conscientious and socially responsible might very well say yes, I would pay higher taxes if it meant better government services for those less well-off than I am, or what have you. Whether such people are still willing to say that when the taxman is actually at the door is a test of conviction that I suspect not all of them will pass. Anyone who wants to can pay higher taxes doesn't need an act of Congress to do so - the fact that few people choose to pay more than they have to makes me thinks there's more than a bit of empty self-administered back-patting going on among these poll respondents.

Finally, there's the fact that poll results on a question like this may not and quite likely do not represent the opinions of the people that actually show up on election day. General preference polling like this often samples registered voters, who as a group are distinctly more liberal than likely voters, i.e., the people who generally turn up on election day to vote. There is also a strong positive correlation between personal wealth and regular voting, and as such the wealthy are likely to comprise a disproportionately heavy portion of any given electorate compared to their numbers in the population as a whole. As a result, politicians who run on raising taxes on the rich do not garner as many votes because of that position as polling might lead one to believe.

This is essentially the same conundrum that the Democrats faced on healthcare. Why, they wondered, was the Affordable Care Act so unpopular, given that the more ambiguous notion of "health care reform" polled well? It's because, as is always the case with public policy, the devil is in the details. Any policy is going to poll better when described vaguely and abstractly than it will when it's described in detail, because when you get into detail it becomes clear whose ox is being gored and opposition starts to coalesce. This is why politicians are so fond of campaigning in airy generalities and so averse to substance, and it's why adopting policy positions based solely on what the public tells pollsters (something Democrats are all too prone to do) is a stupid idea.

You Can't Sell The Sizzle If They Don't Like The Steak

The Democrats have unveiled their 2010 midterm campaign slogan, and it is "The Results Party". This is fair enough - they have succeeded in passing the stimulus bill, TARP, healthcare reform, and a number of other items that were on their agenda, so there's no denying they've gotten results. There's just one teensy little problem - the public doesn't like those results. The bank bailouts were wildly unpopular. So is health care reform, despite Obama's pre-vote promises to Democrats that once it passed widespread opposition to it would subside. Dickerson acknowledges this in his piece, but then suggests that Obama may be able to overcome the massive unpopularity of Congress by returning to the broad, idealistic themes that got him elected in 2008. Count me extremely skeptical. Empty post-partisan rhetoric is a well that starts to run dry almost as the cleanup for the post-election victory party starts, because it's easy to campaign as a post-partisan politician, but impossible to govern as one - as soon as the rubber meets the road, you start having to make controversial decisions, and in doing so start alienating voters and antagonizing ideological opponents. If what you're doing rubs voters the wrong way, your opponents can and will oppose it. In this case, the Republicans very possibly are guilty of politically motivated obstructionism for maintaining near unanimous opposition to most of Obama's agenda, but that's irrelevant. It's unlikely to hurt their stock much given that said agenda is broadly unpopular, and its signature accomplishment, Obamacare, was rammed through on a narrow partisan vote to boot. Furthermore, while the voters may give Obama somewhat higher marks than they give Congress, with a sub-50% approval rating himself he's not exactly in a position to be an effective pitchman. Poll after poll shows that independents turning against Obama and the Democrats, and without those voters, it's pretty tough to maintain a governing majority. All the soaring oratory in the world won't change that.

Oh, Democracy...

Memo to everyone involved in the healthcare reform debate: it's rather hard to take anything from polls that show that "a majority of Americans favor a public option" when it appears that barely 50% have even a vague idea what a public option is.

Perhaps we ought to focus on educating the public about its government first?

Those Crazy Jerseyites

Pollsters have gathered some interesting data on attitudes toward Barack Obama in New Jersey. Apparently, 8% of residents in the Garden State are convinced that Obama is the Anti-Christ, and another 13% aren't sure. Those numbers are even higher among registered Republicans (14% and 15%, respectively). 21% of those polled, including 33% of Republicans, are "birthers", believing that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. On the other end of the whacko spectrum, 19% of respondents, including 32% of Democrats, believe that George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. "Birthers" and "truthers" combined make up 37% of the electorate polled.

In my view, this is probably a reflection of the limits of polling as an apparatus for gauging public opinion - as has been well documented by people who study human communication, the same option can elicit vastly different responses depending on how it is presented. Furthermore, one cannot discount the "wiseass factor" - people are notoriously prone to lying to pollsters, and quite a few of my friends I suspect would tell a pollster they believed the President was the Anti-Christ just so they could laugh about it afterwards.

Assuming, however, that the results are somewhat reflective of real opinion, it's scary, because it means that we are attempting to operate a democracy in which 37% of the electorate (perhaps more - New Jersey had the lowest percentage of "birthers" of any state polled, though probably a higher percentage of "truthers") believe things that are, not to put to fine a point on it, absolutely batshit fucking insane. JFK-was-assasinated-by-the-Illuminati-the-Mob-and-Cuban-Agents-plotting-in-Area-51, tinfoil hat wearing insane. This is not because the beliefs that Obama is actually foreign-born or that Bush wished to let 9/11 happen so he could invade Iraq at the behest of the neocons are inherently as implausible, but because we have scads of contrary evidence that renders both notions implausible upon rational scrutiny. Believing something for which there is no evidence is one thing. Continuing to believe it when investigation has revealed nothing but masses of evidence to the contrary is another thing entirely. It's not a commitment to finding the truth. It's delusional psychosis. No democracy in which a third of the body politics consists of delusional psychotics can possibly stay healthy for long.

Ergo, I really, really hope that the data in this poll are correctly explained by my initial theory.