December 2003 Archive

The Columnists

• George Will I. They don't make presidents like they used to.
• Paul Krugman. It would be good if journalists covering the 2004 election paid attention to actual policy proposals, but I'm not optimistic.
• Bob Herbert. Devious Indians have taken all our high-tech jobs.
• Charles Krauthammer. Bush's policies have succeeded brilliantly in forcing Iran to agree to inspections, but we have to bomb them anyway.
• David Ignatius. Fundamentally, the president can't decide what the point of his foreign policy is -- it's "a healthy tension."
• David Brooks. Michael Oakshott probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq, but if he had he would have done it without a proper plan so, you see, it's okay that Bush has screwed everything up.
• Richard Cohen. I probably should've written this column about metrosexuals a couple months ago when someone might have cared.
• Thomas Friedman. They may not like us in France, but the USA is big in Poland.
• George Will II. Why mention Howard Dean's explicit disavowals of a third party candidacy when doing so would ruin a perfectly good column?
• Jim Hoagland. The future's hard to predict.
• David Broder. Looking back on a year's worth of criticism of my work, it turns out that I was right.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Juan Cole and Shahin Cole discuss the future of Shi'ite politics in Iraq

NOONAN ALMOST THERE: With today's column, Peggy Noonan has 23 for the year, still one short of the 24 (two per month) necessary to qualify for the final Lying in Ponds Top Ten list. Mary McGrory is in the same boat, having written 22 columns before illness prevented her from continuing.

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Mr. Brzezinski's personal records show that he collected almost $170,000 for attending eight such meetings in the 1990's, according to an aide. Mr. Buckley estimated that he had earned perhaps $200,000 or more. Mr. Will could not recall how many meetings he attended; an aide later confirmed that the per diem for each meeting was $25,000.
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In a column syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group in March, Mr. Will recounted observations Mr. Black had made in a London speech defending the Bush administration's stance on Iraq.

In a rebuttal to Mr. Bush's critics, Mr. Will wrote, "Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers."

Asked in the interview if he should have told his readers of the payments he had received from Hollinger, Mr. Will said he saw no reason to do so.

"My business is my business," he said. "Got it?"

Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of The Washington Post Writers Group, said he was unaware of Mr. Will's affiliation with Hollinger or the money he received. "I think I would have liked to have known," Mr. Shearer said.

Additional criticism is offered by Paul Krugman.

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The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled "Waking Up From the American Dream." The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains--or even points out what is happening--as a practitioner of "class warfare."

The institutions of free, representative government and those of political partisanship have been intertwined -- and at odds -- since the founding of the American Republic. As with so many other disputes in the public sphere, the primary problem lies in failing to draw bright lines and to keep each category of political activity within its proper confines.
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Basically, the political game will attract public attention and involvement only if there are (at least) two distinct and competitive teams, but it will not command the public trust and confidence without distinct and inviolable rules and nonpartisan referees and commentators.

In journalism and in the public policy business, for example, it's okay to have strong opinions about issues and to advocate them (though not in a way that warps the news coverage of politics). But it's not okay for partisanship to intrude in the discussion. Right now, if you'll pardon the oversimplification, left-of-center folks tend to vote Democratic and right-of-center folks tend to vote Republican. But left-of-center journalists and political activists should be willing to criticize Democrats when they enact bad policies or engage in unethical conduct. Similarly, right-of-center commentators should be willing to criticize Republicans on principle or policy, whatever the short-term impact on public opinion or elections.

Okay, I'll pick up her tattered banner and defend Ann Coulter on her abortion article...

..what she is saying in her piece, rather clearly, if too starkly for some, is that there is a moral equivalence between killing an abortionist and performing an abortion. You may disagree with this belief, but it's hardly "kooky": Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe abortion should only be allowed in the most extreme of circumstances, as it is believed to involve the taking of innocent human life. (Among other things, a majority believes life begins at conception-a pretty "kooky" view to the bulk of the out-of-the-cultural-mainstream press: CNN, CBS, and the like).

In truth, Coulter's article does a considerable service to ideological balance on this issue, given that the pro-abortion media make it seem as if every abortionist's life is at risk for his line of work. If you saw the numbers in percentage terms, the lack of real risk to abortionists might be clearer-a baby carried by his/her mother into an abortion clinic has a nearly 100% risk of being killed, while seven murdered abortionists divided by some number in the thousands would be some small fraction of one percent.

These are numbers that most of the press would rather ignore, especially the total number of abortions since '73-when do you ever see that?

It may seem crude or inept or offensive to make the point as bluntly as Coulter does, but people who consider the question honestly may be persuaded by her argument, which, again, assumes that the abortionist's life and the aborted baby's life are equally valuable. If one assumes otherwise, it's not surprising that offense is taken.

I wasn't able to put links on the poll itself, so here they are: Joe Conason, Ellen Goodman, Cragg Hines, Derrick Z. Jackson, Rich Lowry, New York Times unsigned editorials, Robert Novak, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Steyn, and WSJ OpinionJournal.

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This brings me to a general problem about the approach of Lyinginponds.com. They only count up pro-and-anti-Democratic and pro-and-anti-Republican comments. This approach assigns to everyone a numeric score that is, of course, an abstraction. Nothing wrong with abstraction so long as you don't forget that that's what it is. If you forget that you are dealing with an abstraction, then you commit--I think this is right--what Whitehead called "the fallacy of mis-placed concreteness." Well, never mind about that part. But mistaking something more abstract for something less abstract is an error, anyway. The weakness of the Lyinginponds approach (and remember, I like that site and find it helpful) is that it abstracts away from all content other than the pro- and anti- references aforementioned. That means that somebody smart, knowledgeable, and seemingly well-intentioned like Krugman gets put into (roughly) an equivalence class with people like Michael Moore and Anne Coulter. So, though this is informative, it isn't very informative.

Although it pains me greatly to be forced to discuss baseball, I'm willing to endure the pain for the greater good. The batting average is the statistic most often used as a simple measure of hitting prowess. But by no means should it be assumed that the two players with the highest batting averages in the league are the two best overall players, because the batting average does not account for power, is only slightly affected by speed, and does not even attempt to take into account fielding or intangible assets. I believe that the batting average is a useful abstraction, even though it is not comprehensive.

I also believe that the Combined Partisanship Index is an abstraction which does a reasonable job of detecting actual extreme partisanship which goes far beyond ordinary party preference. So I believe that the recent writings of Mr. Krugman and Ms. Coulter are both extremely partisan, as clearly shown by this imperfect analysis of dozens or hundreds of columns on a multitude of topics over two years or more. But the two pundits are certainly different in other important ways, which the Lying in Ponds rankings do not attempt to address. My favorite source of information for some of these other characteristics is Spinsanity. While Paul Krugman is only rarely criticized there, Ann Coulter suffers the indignity of her own section on the Spinsanity topics page.

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I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.
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Now his administration has taken to honesty like a drunken sailor. It has made a fetish of candor and forthrightness. Things are wildly out of control.

But the tone shifts at the end and Mr. Brooks seems to acknowledge that too much honesty might not be a good thing after all:

Sometimes you've got to be slippery to accomplish real good. The Bush administration is thus facing an insincerity crisis. It has become addicted to candor and forthrightness. It needs an immediate back-stabbing infusion.

Perhaps Al Gore could be brought in to offer advice.

So I evaluated the first 9 references to George W. Bush and the administration as positive, and the last 4 as neutral or negative. But it's possible that I misinterpreted Mr. Brooks' tone, and he was still being sarcastic by saying "you've got to be slippery to accomplish real good."

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Ann Coulter seems happy to continue to fill the kook niche. How's this for a column intro?

THE FIRST killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going.

I guess stuff like this sells books to fanatics. But one wonders how many fence-straddlers on the abortion issue are going to climb over to Coulter's side after reading that?

I've always wondered why I hear so often from defenders of Paul Krugman but no one ever writes me to defend Ann Coulter. I guess it means that even her fans don't dispute the partisanship of her writing.

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Robert Bartley was an occasional target of criticism from Lying in Ponds because of his partisan commentary. He finished in fourth place in the partisanship rankings last year, and was currently in ninth place this year.

UPDATE: More from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The National Review, Daniel Henninger, Mona Charen, and Slate.

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To be fair, the looting is a partly bipartisan affair. More than a few Democrats threw their support behind the Medicare bill, the energy bill or both. But the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress are leading the looting party. What are they thinking?

So how rarely do the pundits criticize their own parties? Here is how the Lying in Ponds Top Ten stack up this year, ranked by the number of columns per negative reference to their own party.

Number of Columns Per Single Negative Reference to Favored Party Paul Krugman 7.00 Molly Ivins 4.74 Mona Charen 2.05 Daniel Henninger 2.00 Ann Coulter 1.88 Robert Scheer 1.81 Michael Kinsley 1.34 Mary McGrory 1.00 Maureen Dowd 0.84 Robert Bartley 0.69

So Mr. Krugman has criticized Democrats in 2003 one time in every seven columns, or about once a month. An obvious counter argument would be that a Democratic pundit shouldn't be expected to criticize their own party very often when Republicans control the White House and Congress, but Mr. Krugman does it far less often than any other Democratic columnist in our rankings. For example, Thomas Oliphant made more negative Democratic references in a single column today (13, to Al Gore and Howard Dean) than Mr. Krugman has made over the entire year (12).

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ANOTHER VIEW OF MORAL POLITICS: George Lakoff's book Moral Politics was discussed here a few weeks ago. Mr. Lakoff's persuasive thesis is "that most of the differences between liberals and conservatives can be understood as resulting from two competing moral worldviews, which he calls "Strict Father Morality" (conservatives) and "Nurturant Parent Morality" (liberals)". Anthony Argyriou wrote about the same book earlier in the year on his blog, Rant+Rave:

Early in the book, Lakoff asks "Why should readers be willing to reason about a government in this way? Why don't they just reject the metaphor as ridiculous?" In chapter 19, he partially addresses this question by asking "Can there be a politics without family values?" He demonstrates that government and politics cannot be separated from moral questions, by showing that principles of the government have a moral foundation, and that many of the operations of the government are to further moral rather than practical ends. Lakoff says that family-based morality is all-encompassing for many people, therefore they will always frame political questions in light of their family values. However, this does not demonstrate that alternative views of the relationship between a government and its citizens cannot be formulated, or even become predominant, just that some people will not accept those views.

KRAUTHAMMER UPDATE: Robert Cox at The National Debate weighs in on the Charles Krauthammer ellipses controversy:

We here at TND fully appreciate that the column was meant as satire. There is still, however, an obligation on the part of the columnist and the paper to quote statements accurately and, if an ellipsis is used, not to truncate a quote in such a manner so as to materially alter its meaning. Others have raised valid concerns but our deepest concern with this column is the use of an ellipsis to link a reply to a question with a different question thus dramatically mispresenting Howard Dean's comments. This is misleading, creates a false impression in the reader's mind and appears to be a violation of the standards of The Washington Post. It is not only unfair to Howard Dean but to the many WaPo and WaPo syndicate readers.

So you see what Krauthammer's ellipses removed -- and you see how men like Krauthammer subvert your democracy. As anyone watching this program would know, Dean was joking when he made his statement about wanting to break up Fox. But then, anyone who read the transcript would know that too -- the transcript records audience laughter two times, and shows Matthews asking Dean to "be serious." But men like Krauthammer hate your democracy; they want to reduce you to the status of rubes. So the creative man began cutting-and-pasting, making you think that Dean had been serious. The Washington Post should do the right thing. They should fire Charles Krauthammer -- now.

The Rittenhouse Review and Don Luskin offer similar criticism, and Tapped reprimands Mr. Krauthammer for finding it "irresistible to blame mental illness for other people's refusal to agree with his view of the world."

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• David Corn in The Nation on Ann Coulter and the movie Patton.
• David Corn in The Nation on Ann Coulter and "a religious war".
• Joyce Wadler in The New York Times on Ann Coulter and Ed Koch (link via Romanesko).
• William F. Buckley, Jr. on Ann Coulter's book Treason (link via Romanesko).
• Tom Maguire in his JustOneMinute blog on attending a Krugman talk.
• Alex Beam in The Boston Globe on Paul Krugman and "Internet kooks" (say what?).
• John Cole in his blog Balloon Juice declares a Krugman-free zone.
• Matthew J. Stinson in his blog also declares a Krugman-free zone (note to Matthew: Go 'Pack).
• Zimran Ahmed in his blog Winterspeak on the Krugman/Economist/DeLong debate (scroll down).
• Bradley Rhodes in his blog DocBug on "why we should care if Krugman is partisan".

I suggest that they be replaced by the editorials of six newspapers (USA Today, WSJ, NYT, LA Times, WaPo, Chicago Tribune). Since most of these often write about very local politics, or the joys of spring, you would need to select the relevant ones.

I've always wanted to evaluate the unsigned editorials of The New York Times, etc., but have been scared away by the amount of work which would be involved. Our current pundits write at most two columns per week, but the Times has several editorials per day. Even if you exclude the local ones and the cultural ones, you still have at least one per day. That's the equivalent of about three new columnists. But if many others agree with Mr. Kurtz that they would prefer adding unsigned editorials instead of more columnists, I'll consider it.

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The word "partisan" carries a strong negative evaluative component. Should it, in this case? Isn't the most interesting thing the fact that a guy whose underlying type is not that of a strong partisan is nevertheless writing such "shrill" criticism of the Bush administration?

Paul Krugman himself certainly believes that partisanship is a bad thing -- he explicitly denied being partisan in response to Lying in Ponds, and routinely uses the word pejoratively ("raw partisanship", "partisan hack") -- most recently in yesterday's column: "Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common."

I do think it's interesting that despite Mr. DeLong's assertion that his "underlying type is not that of a strong partisan", Mr. Krugman's writing for The New York Times has become so amazingly one-sided. Nicholas Confessore offered one explanation in his Washington Monthly profile of Mr. Krugman:

"There's been a kind of missionary quality to his writing since then," muses Princeton's Blinder. "He's trying to stop something now, using the power of the pen." But that's not all. The change is deeper: Krugman now takes politics seriously. As Kuttner puts it, "The interesting thing about Krugman is that he was a mainstream neoclassical economist who was moderately liberal as a citizen, but tended to look at politics as an illegitimate distortion of the perfection of the market economy. He viewed the left and the right as symmetrical evils. Krugman has now discovered power."

Krugman seems to agree. "I think we were all living in a fool's paradise in the late 1990s. There probably wasn't as much energy in my criticism of the right. I was wrong, obviously," he says. "If I'd understood where politics would be now, it would have been quite different. I thought that Reich and Magaziner were proposing bad ideas, but that's not the same as being frightened of where they might be taking us. We can have arguments about trade policy later. Now I'm frightened."

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Krugman's transformation is viewed with far less charity from the right, as in this current example from Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard (link via Betsy's Page):

So that must be his thesis--what happens to a country when its right-wingers in effect control the administration, Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media. (Wait--did I say that already?) So that must be his thesis. (Oops!) What happens is mayhem. Krugman sees a country in which free speech is disappearing, the poor are paying more taxes than the rich, and religious superstition is supplanting evolution in grade-school curriculums. That none of these things is actually taking place does not dampen his eagerness to spread the word. "This is hard for journalists to deal with," he writes. "They don't want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists."

Krugman is quite happy to, however--he may not have a choice--and it is this mixture of insouciance and paranoia that make his columns so unpleasant to read; painful, too, for anyone who took pleasure and profit from his earlier stuff in the 1990s. "Together," he writes, "these columns tell a coherent story." They do. Column by column, we watch a talented fellow jettisoning one gift after another--his humor, his prose style, his mental discipline, his taste--in a rush to alert everyone else to the terrible fantasy that grips him. "The Great Unraveling" should be of interest only to sadists and shrinks.

I really don't know whether the change in Paul Krugman's writing reflects a courageous attempt to warn us of impending disaster or a descent into paranoia, but I would point out that "'shrill' criticism of the Bush administration" is not the only reason for his lofty partisanship score. As I showed a few months ago, Mr. Krugman would be ranked as one of the most partisan columnists even if all references to Republicans are ignored, based solely on his favorable treatment of Democrats -- systematically avoiding criticism of Bill Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, Bob Torricelli, Gray Davis, etc. There are pundits such as Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich who are sometimes accused of shrill attacks on the Bush administration, yet find time to substantively criticize Democrats -- but Mr. Krugman is not one of them.

As I've said before, I don't see why Brad DeLong and others cannot simply concede that Mr. Krugman's columns for the Times have been very partisan, but then argue that his other strengths far outweigh that flaw. I doubt that I would agree, but many others would (scroll down), and a case for Mr. Krugman could be built which would be far more defensible than one which requires that the evidence provided by his most recent 375 columns be disregarded. For whatever reason, Mr. Krugman's columns have scrupulously observed party boundaries, finding unlimited time to discuss Thomas White and Trent Lott but no time at all for Marc Rich and Al Sharpton.

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Touche. But I would ask two questions:

Why are those 372 columns the "only basis for evaluation"? Why not feed in some of Paul's earlier columns from Fortune and essays from Foreign Affairs?

The word "partisan" carries a strong negative evaluative component. Should it, in this case? Isn't the most interesting thing the fact that a guy whose underlying type is not that of a strong partisan is nevertheless writing such "shrill" criticism of the Bush administration?

I really never intended Lying in Ponds to become devoted to evaluating the entire Paul Krugman canon, but I suppose I brought it on myself by venturing earlier than the 2002 starting point in the first place. Both Fortune and Foreign Affairs are charging a fee for each article in their archives of Krugman columns, but Bobby Pelgrift probably has most of them at The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive. Mr. Krugman's columns for Slate are accessible online; here's one which attacks both Bob Kuttner and Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich ("talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right").

I don't really doubt assertions by Mr. DeLong and others that Mr. Krugman's writing was far more non-partisan in the 90's (although others have noted his pique at being passed over for a Clinton administration job: "Krugman didn't take the rejection well, and lashed out at Clinton's appointees.") If any readers would like to suggest their favorite examples of Mr. Krugman's early criticism of Democrats or praise of Republicans, I would be happy to post links or excerpts. I'll try to give Mr. DeLong's second question the attention it deserves later this week.

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• Frank Rich -- A Lying in Ponds favorite while he was on The New York Times Editorial page, Mr. Rich was moved to the Arts page at the beginning of the year, where he writes columns which are more cultural and less political.
• Mary McGrory -- Sadly, Ms. McGrory has been sick since March and may not be able to resume her column.
• Michael Kelly -- Mr. Kelly was tragically killed while covering the war in Iraq.
• Collin Levey -- Ms. Levey has written only 16 columns this year, with a total of only 11 political references. Her writing is mostly about culture rather than politics; I should have realized that after last year.
• Bill Keller -- Mr. Keller was promoted to executive editor of The New York Times.
• Walter Williams -- Mr. Williams is also more of a cultural than political columnist; he has made only 74 political references in his 48 columns this year.

If anyone has an opinion on the subject, let me know.

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