Pundit Boxscore for Friday 29 August 2003

HOW DEEP IS YOUR PARTISANSHIP? Last week, the blogger Demosthenes commented on the discussion ("nasty little blogwar"?) between Pandagon and Lying in Ponds on the definition of partisanship. While Demosthenes sees some merit in my attempt to distinguish between partisanship and ideology, he takes a much dimmer view of my treatment of Paul Krugman:

That being said, Lying in Ponds completely out to lunch on Paul Krugman; Krugman devastated the whole "partisanship" argument ages ago, driving a stake deep into the heart of LiP's methology that it has never truly recovered from. LiP's supposedly "quantitative" measurement of partisanship is entirely robbed of context, rendering it utterly useless, as (as Krugman noted) a supposed "partisan" could be an honest critic of a dishonest target. Partisanship isn't necessary for this and, because of this, is entirely unprovable by LiP's methodology. As the entire point of the exercise is to measure partisanship, it's rendered pointless, useless, and highly deceptive.

In the comments to that post, Demosthenes carries on the discussion with Markus, who had previously offered his opinion about Lying in Ponds on his own Dormouse Dreaming weblog (scroll down). Demosthenes reiterates the point that "Bush is a natural target because he's the president, and LiP ignores that aspect of Krugman's critique of his methods . .". Since that hypothesis comes up so frequently, I thought it would be useful to delve into it -- we can try to remove Mr. Krugman's treatment of George W. Bush from the data and see how that would change his partisanship score.

I'll be looking only at the Total Partisanship Index, which makes up half of the final Combined Partisanship Index, because recalculating the other half, the Median Partisanship Index is a lot more difficult, and shouldn't change the results much. The results are shown in the table below. If one removes every direct Bush reference from consideration ("Bush", "Bush administration", "George W. Bush", "President Bush", "George Bush", "Bushies", etc.), there still would be enough remaining negative references to the "administration", Dick Cheney, etc. so that Mr. Krugman's total partisanship score would drop only from 74 to 73, second only to Ann Coulter out of our 32 active pundits.

Well, what if we also remove all administration references which don't include the Bush name directly, such as "administration", "White House", "the president", and other members of the administration such as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? Even then, there would be enough remaining negative references to Tom DeLay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and generic references to "Republicans" so that Mr. Krugman's score would drop only to 53, still good enough for 8th place behind Mona Charen. In fact, even if every single Republican reference of any kind is ignored in Mr. Krugman's 2003 columns, his favorable treatment of Democrats alone would make his score 54, again earning him 8th place in total partisanship among the 32 active pundits!

Scope	D+	D-	D=	R+	R-	R=	Total PI	Rank
All	45	10	10	40	523	76	74	2
Remove all Bush references	45	10	10	21	290	40	73	2
Remove all administration references	45	10	10	20	87	21	53	8
Remove all Republican references	45	10	10	0	0	0	54	8

I'm a little surprised that Krugman fans such as Demosthenes don't take an approach closer to that of Markus -- sure, Paul Krugman may be partisan but he's also a brilliant economist, he's "the most important political columnist in America", etc. Instead, they continue to try various theories (Krugman is simply being critical of the party in power, he simply disagrees with the Republicans on economics, etc.) which don't stand up at all if one takes the time to systematically examine the complete set of columns over several years (which is the point of Lying in Ponds). As the above analysis clearly shows, Paul Krugman is not merely hostile to George W. Bush or to the Bush administration. Over the 250 columns analyzed so far, not a single one has consisted mainly of praise, however tepid, for any Republicans, and not a single one has consisted mainly of criticism, however gentle, for any Democrats. Perhaps one or two contrary columns will appear as the debate between Democratic presidential candidates heats up later this year, but I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that Paul Krugman is an extremely partisan columnist, regardless of how much one admires his views and shares his enemies.