Lying in Ponds

Sorry, I just got back this afternoon after several days out of town (Little Rock, Atlanta). In comments to the previous post, John Salmon says:

Whoa-Ivins is criticizing Hillary for not being lefty enough to suit her-especially on Iraq. Those are hardly “Republican-leaning” references.

Of course Molly Ivins has not developed a sudden affinity for the Republican party, but criticizing Democrats counts the same in our scoring system as praising Republicans. Her motive is not to help Republicans, but any criticism of Hillary Clinton will unavoidably give aid and comfort to them. A conservative pundit is now free to say something like: even Molly Ivins can’t take Hillary’s “triangulation, calculation and equivocation”. (UPDATE: That’s exactly Jonah Goldberg did)

Look at it this way — when a pundit has a disagreement with someone in their favorite party, they can either: (1) simply express it as Ms. Ivins did; or (2) ignore it and concentrate on areas of agreement or write another formulaic screed attacking the other party. Until the Hillary column, Molly Ivins had spent the last three years choosing option (2), which is the obvious partisan approach. That one column doesn’t make her non-partisan, but she would be an ordinary moderately-partisan pundit if she wrote more like it.

Dreams really do come true. After analyzing 270 achingly predictable Molly Ivins columns over the past three years here at Lying in Ponds, I was shocked last week when it finally happened. Number 271, entitled “Not. Backing. Hillary.“, was her first “crossover column”, defined here as a substantive column (at least five positive or negative partisan references) in which the number of references favorable to the other party or unfavorable to one’s own party exceed those going in the usual direction. Ms. Ivins made 13 Republican-leaning references by seriously ripping Hillary Clinton and other Democrats she derided as “pragmatic folk”. Molly being Molly, she may not be capable of writing a simple column criticizing her own party — she also generated 12 Democratic-leaning references by praising Eugene McCarthy and other Democrats and criticizing the usual Republican suspects.

Maybe this will be a breakout year for Ms. Ivins if she becomes frustrated enough with her own party to step across the line more often. That’s what happened last year when Ann Coulter wrote an amazing seven crossover columns criticizing Republicans, after two previous years of almost perfect partisanship. Most pundits cross the line a few times each year in the normal course of discussing messy politics as practiced by two parties filled with flawed human beings, but a select few have perfected the art of obsessing about the other party’s scandals while whistling and looking away when their own party runs into trouble.

As usual, I took a blogging break after posting the wrap-up of last year’s partisanship rankings. So we start with a clean slate for 2006; the rankings now show only results from columns this year. The rankings can be expected to flop around quite a bit in the first couple of months due to the small sample sizes. For example, George Will is (presumably temporarily) classified as a Democratic pundit, because he’s mixed in a couple of sharp attacks on congressional Republicans with non-partisan columns on tobacco and basketball. Charles Krauthammer has not even made a single party reference in his three columns on the Middle East. On the other hand, I guess it’s comforting that Paul Krugman and Mark Steyn aren’t hindered by small sample size; last year’s princes of partisanship are still on top.

After seeing that the partisanship scores were becoming more and more stratified by party, I finally decided this year to split the rankings into separate lists for Democratic- and Republican-leaning pundits. The split is a recognition that in a time of one-party domination of Washington, pundits on the left and right are in different worlds. Democratic pundits have unlimited opportunities for criticism of the ruling Republicans, and their higher scores reflect that.

Paul Krugman has had the highest partisanship index of all Democratic-leaning pundits for all four years of Lying in Ponds rankings. He continued his six-year march of monolithic partisanship without a single crossover column in his entire tenure at The New York Times. His 69-1 ratio of negative-to-positive Republican references (621-9) fell just short of Ann Coulter’s 70-1 record of last year. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Krugman promised to “suggest steps to strengthen” Social Security, but never followed through, which, strangely enough, exactly mirrored the Democratic Party tactic of simply defeating George W. Bush’s Social Security initiative rather than pursuing counter-proposals. Mr. Krugman’s punditry moderated in one way — he wrote 14 non-political columns (no partisan references), mostly on economic issues. That’s a big departure from recent years (only one such column in 2004).

As in previous years, Molly Ivins and Joe Conason closely trailed Paul Krugman in the partisanship rankings. Ms. Ivins’ mind-numbing predictability was slightly enlivened by one near-crossover column, and an ever-declining level of civility, including the first use of a particular four-letter expletive in any of the approximately 7000 columns evaluated at Lying in Ponds since 2002 (not counting a Jeff Jacoby column quoting the words of others).

On the Republican side, Mark Steyn has staked a claim to the small exclusive club of excessively partisan pundits. In 26 columns, he had only 6 positive Democratic references, and 5 of those were to Joe Lieberman in one column. Of all ten Republican-leaning columnists, Mr. Steyn was the most favorable toward the doomed Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination, a strong indication of partisanship on an issue where most ideological conservatives came out strongly against Ms. Miers. Six months is a relatively small sample, so we’ll see if Mr. Steyn can remain in the thin air at the top of the partisanship rankings.

The most surprising development of 2005 was certainly the fact that Ann Coulter, winner of the last two partisanship titles, wrote no less than 7 crossover columns (with other near-misses), mostly attacking the Bush administration on both Supreme Court nominations. In previous years, she had dished out occasional criticism of the lone Democratic member of the Bush cabinet (Norman Mineta) and Arlen Specter, but this year’s crossovers were frequent enough to keep her partisanship score behind the Democratic leaders and Mark Steyn. Her attacks on Democrats continued at a somewhat reduced pace, with a ratio of 35 negative for every positive Democrat reference.

2005 was a year of structural changes for Lying in Ponds. At the beginning of the year, I switched to WordPress blogging software, replacing a homemade system of Perl scripts. In the middle of the year, the roster was revamped to consist of ten top pundits each on the left and right. Newcomers to the roster were Bob Herbert, Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson. I also decided to blog less frequently and began to examine errors and predictions in addition to partisanship. Expect to see further development of those areas in the future.

I want to thank all the readers and fellow bloggers who continue to make this fun. Peg Kaplan has been hugely gracious and encouraging; her writing almost tempts me to learn to play bridge (another time-consuming hobby!). Special thanks for a $50 donation toward the cost of a TimesSelect subscription by a reader who wished to remain anonymous, and to Jon Garfunkel, who offered a similar donation.