These are the kinds of things the lead DR to weep and wail and gnash his teeth. Here is the graphic accompanying a very short article, “All the Presidents’ Numbers“, by Andrew Kohut and Harry Campbell, on The New York Times’ Sunday Op-Ed page. The theme of the article is that Bush is in good shape politically relative to many of his predecessors.
Ok, there’s a case to be made here but they should have been very careful to make the data in the graphic correct, since that is what most people will look at and digest. DR practically fell off his chair when he looked at the far right hand side of the graphic and saw Bush’s current approval rating pegged at 56 percent and rising.
Rising?!? Pretty much every public poll for the last month, including the Pew Research Center poll which Kohut runs and from which he got the 56 percent approval rating used in the graphic, shows Bush’s approval rating falling steadily from the levels attained right after Saddam’s capture.
It’s bad enough that the press overplays it whenever Bush gets a bounce. But couldn’t they please just report the facts–instead of asserting the exact opposite–when the data unequivocally show his approval ratings are falling? It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
Right-Wing lies and propaganda? Say it isn’t so! Horror of horrors! Yeah, there’s alot of angry Democrats on the rampage and it’s about time we had a common cause to rally behind. It appears that the pendulum is beginning to swing to the left, but Democrats need to stay politically engaged and become pro-active to prevent this slide into fascism.
Sad that they had to tilt the poll to make Bush appear to be moving up in the polls. Why cant the press just report the facts. Fact is that GW is dropping in just about every poll that is taken. The trend is downward …not upward!
The more I think about this, the more I think this is a serious, serious SCANDAL.
Its very difficult to believe that between Kohut, Campbell, and the NYT fact checkers, that this “mistake” is not at least partially due to anti-liberal/pro-Bush bias. This is precisely the kind of bullshit that always leads to people thinking that Republicans are much more popular than they really are. The Washington Post has been whoring for Bush on poll numbers as well.
I’m sick of hearing people make purely the a priori argument that it is ridiculous to think that allegedly liberal papers like the New York Times would be biased against liberals. How many times do we have to get screwed before the pattern becomes clear?
If any of you fucking weasels at the Washington Post or the New York Times reads this:
FUCK YOU
We are sick of your shit and we are coming after you this time. No more of your bullshit like around impeachment, or Al Gore, or the Florida debacle, or Bush’s tax cuts, or the Iraq War, or WMD, or Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark, or Bush’s poll numbers.
We will EXPOSE your asses mercilessly. Your reputations will be DESTROYED. No more Ceci Connolly’s.
FUCK YOU
Angry? You bet your ass I’m angry. And you know what? I don’t need your fucking permission to be angry. How come you’re not angry? Answer: because you’re a bunch of fucking weasels.
FUCK YOU
Well, if there’s one thing about Kohut, he will always be there to support the conventional wisdom. The last thing he would ever want to do is make anyone uncomfortable with his poll results. He trades on his insider status and thus has to reinforce whatever most people are saying or want to hear said, particularly those in leadership positions — who of course are Republicans.
It’s shameful, it reminds me of Ruy and Clark’s polls!
That should say everyone else was in the 30s.
It’s pretty amusing this story appeared in the N.Y. Times the same day the CBS N.Y. Times poll showed Bush dropping from 60 to 50 percent in less than a month. BTW, Bush’s disapproval of 45 percent is the highest at this point in their presidencies of any president from Carter on. And it’s not even close. Clinton was at 40 percent dispproval and everyone was in the 30s.
Thanks, Ruy, for that post. I was shocked to see Kohut’s name on that piece of pro-Bush PR. I mean, I expect nothing less than partisan spin from a lot of the “straight-news journalists” at the WaPo and the NYT (it turns out that their reporting of their own poll was much more pro-Bush than either CBS’ report or the Washington Times! — see Atrios). But I really thought Pew was one source that could be trusted. Oh well.
It would be nice to see a systematic comparative study of how newspaper headlines/ledes described similar poll movements for Bush v Clinton v Dean etc.
Both the Wash Post and the NYT regularly give Bush the best possible spin on his numbers. People who work at those papers, like Richard Morin and Claudia Deane at the Post, should be ashamed of themselves.
Why would you expect them to stick to the facts? When their data showed that Gore won Florida they crafted a headline that said the exact opposite.
As Bartcop says, they bow down and kiss the ground for the almighty ditto-monkey dollar.
I have a dumb question: Is there any measurable effect in the polls when the media reports a candidate is rising/falling in popularity?
In other words, are poll ratings self-fulfilling?