In recent months not only Democrats but many other Americans as well have become increasingly dismayed by the growing irrationality and even downright delusional thinking that appears to be taking hold among many conservatives and Republicans.
The most recent evidence of this trend was a September poll of New Jersey voters that not only showed 33% of self-described conservatives accepting the notion that Obama was not born in the United States but 18% also agreeing with the statement that he is “the Anti-Christ.” The appearance of this view in a northern industrial state like New Jersey indicates that these kinds of beliefs can no longer be dismissed as geographic peculiarities of rural areas or the South rather than as a significant component of modern American conservatism.
Despite the concern, however, there has actually been little serious discussion of how opinion polls might be used to track the growth of genuinely delusional thinking in American politics. It is true that ever since many commentators began using the number of people who accept the “Birther” narrative – that Obama was not actually born in the U.S. – as a shorthand measure of conservative and Republican irrationality there have been similar attempts to demonstrate that an equal number of Democrats believe false “Truther” narratives about the 9/11 attacks. As we will see, however, these discussions have all been based on survey questions that do not accurately distinguish between genuinely delusional beliefs and non-delusional ones and, in the specific case of the “Truther” narratives, also ignore key polling data that does not support the “one extreme equals the other” point of view. As a result, these discussions are useful primarily as ammunition for partisan political debates and not as a basis for serious social analysis.
In contrast, in order to use public opinion polling to seriously attempt to track the growth of delusional thinking in American politics we need to first consider two questions.

1. Can peoples’ responses to survey questions be used to detect psychologically disordered thinking?
2. Can survey questions reliably distinguish between views that are so irrational as to be genuinely “delusional” in a clinical sense and those that are merely extreme or implausible?

The answer to the first question is actually not difficult to determine. In psychology there are a number of “self-report” questionnaires that use people’s response to written questions to gauge characteristics like paranoia, hypochondria and other psychological disorders. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), for example, is widely used and – although far, far from perfect – has been found to be sufficiently predictive for use in a variety of screening and assessment settings.
The key to answering the second question, on the other hand, is to carefully focus attention on beliefs that are genuinely “delusional” — a term which is defined as “a rigid system of beliefs with which a person is preoccupied and to which the person firmly holds, despite the logical absurdity of the beliefs and a lack of supporting evidence”
The current version of the DSM-IV — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a Delusional Disorder as follows:

“A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.”

In diagnosing a delusional disorder there are three generally used criteria:

•certainty (held with absolute conviction)
•incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary)
•impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently untrue)

Obviously there is often not 100% agreement among clinicians in diagnosing a particular delusional disorder, but there is generally a commanding consensus.
With this framework in mind, let’s examine both the “Birther” and the “Truther” narratives:

Read more…

So what’s going on with the House Republican leadership, the hard-core conservative base probably wants to know. Are they going soft and moderate?
First we learn that House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of VA participated in a very civil discussion of health care policy with Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott, sponsored by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. According to Dana Milbank’s account of the event in the Washington Post today, it was a very tepid affair:

No talk of death panels. No complaints about illegal immigrants. Nothing about killing Grandma, no mention of socialism, nobody calling anybody a Nazi. And at no point during the 90-minute forum on health care did Cantor, or anybody else, call President Obama a liar.
The Richmond area lawmaker wouldn’t have had any trouble riling up the people in the audience, many of whom wore “Tea Party” or “9-12 Project” T-shirts. But “what use is that?” he said after the session. In fact, he came away with some advice for his colleagues: “Stop the revival stuff and let’s talk.”

I was wondering what Glenn Beck would say about that when I got an email from Richard Viguerie, the legendary hard-right organizer and scourge of all things moderate, with the subject line: “Are you kidding? Boehner says Obama Not a Socialist!” Seems that on Meet the Press Sunday, David Gregory specifically asked if the House Republican Leader thought the President was a socialist, and he finally allowed as how he didn’t think so. Boehner has in the past called Obama’s agenda “a socialist experiment,” but never mind.
As you can imagine, Viguerie’s pretty upset at this backsliding, so he’s put out a poll of his internet readership to find out whether they think Obama is a socialist, or maybe a Marxist, a traditional liberal, or even a “centrist.” He promises to pass the results on to Boehner and others when they are in. I figure it will be “Marxist” in a landslide.
Ah, can’t trust these weasely Washington Republicans. It’s probably time for another Tea Party to stiffen their spines.

If you are really, really into health care reform, you should definitely check out the remarkably exhaustive summary done by Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress’ Wonk Room about the vast number of amendments to the Baucus bill being offered in the Senate Finance Committee. Volsky organizes them by subject-area, and as “helpful,” “dubious” or “political.”
Overall, Democratic amendments, as you might imagine, are aimed at pushing the Baucus proposal in the direction of what we’ve seen from the House and from the Senate HELP committee. Republican amendments generally represent efforts to unravel the Baucus proposal by eliminating essential elements such as the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion, or to promote longstanding conservative hobbyhorses like medical malpractice “reform” or preemption of state insurance regulations. There’s also a lot of extraneous crap about ACORN and “rationing” and so forth that is pure posturing.
Only a few of these amendments from either side are likely to have a big impact on what the Finance Committee actually produces. A couple of Democratic amendments aim at paring back the excise tax that Baucus uses as his main financing vehicle in order to reduce middle-class exposure, which is a big deal politically. And Sen. Snowe tossed in her “triggered public option,” which could wind up being the linchpin for ultimate congressional approval of health care reform, though perhaps at a later date.
But what you are mainly seeing here, particularly from Republicans, is a preview of what we will be hearing on the Senate floor. It’s a reminder of how long this process is likely to take, and why either cloture or reconciliation will be necessary to get to a final vote. Since Republicans are also prepared to offer long lists of points of order against proceeding on health reform via reconciliation before the debate time limits kick in, even that route won’t necessarily produce anything like a brisk floor debate. We’re going to be talking about health care reform well into this year’s pared-back Xmas shopping season.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website provides a timely indication of just how marginal are the Obama-haters the conservatives are trying to claim are a majority. Teixeira cites a new Pew Research Center poll, conducted 9/10-15 and explains:

…The public’s view of Obama remains, in fact, very favorable across a wide range of characteristics. The conservatives’ extreme views on Obama are just that—extreme—and should in no way be confused with the American people’s views…In the Pew poll, 83 percent describe Obama as a good communicator, 78 percent describe him as warm and friendly, 70 percent describe him as well informed, 69 percent describe him as well organized, 68 percent describe him as “someone who cares about people like me,” 65 percent say he is a strong leader, 64 percent say he is trustworthy, and 58 percent say he is able to get things done.

Teixeira also notes that Obama has impressive credibility as an innovator, according to the Pew poll, which found that “the public says by 63-30 that Obama brings a “new approach to politics in Washington” rather than “business as usual.” Teixeira concludes that it’s no surprise that “conservatives are confusing their own benighted views with those of the general public.”

In The American Prospect TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg reviews an important new book by Lynn Vavreck, “The Message Matters.” Greenberg, whose strategic advice was instrumental in electing and re-electing Bill Clinton and helping Al Gore win the popular vote in 2000, says that Vavreck “breaks new ground in showing how presidential candidates effectively use the economy when it works in their favor and how some candidates win even when the economy is working against them.” In his review, Greenberg explains:

For decades political scientists have tried to predict the outcome of elections by constructing statistical models that use different measures of economic performance and ignore the character of the candidates and the choices of their campaigns. As a pollster who has helped direct campaigns, I have never found these academic models all that convincing. Missing the final vote by up to 8 points, as their forecasts often do, would have gotten me fired. And in most presidential elections, predicting the winner is not rocket science, and barbers and bartenders do as well as the modelers.
With considerable elegance, Vavreck departs from the dominant tradition in election forecasting by focusing on the strategies that candidates follow, including the narratives they build, and by showing respect for what voters learn from the campaigns. Voters do use the economy to judge the incumbent’s leadership and project future performance, but in some elections they also respond to other issues such as trust, domestic policy, and national security.

And further,

According to Vavreck’s analysis, if you want to know who wins the presidency and by how much, you start with the candidate who has been helped by the economy during the nine months before July 1 of the election year. If the economy has been growing, that’s the candidate of the incumbent party; if the economy has been stagnant or declining, it’s the challenger. Each of these is in a position to run what Vavreck calls a “clarifying campaign.” That is an appealing phrase for me, as it implies that what counts is not just the economy but how a campaign frames the economic argument to political effect.
…Strategy and message do indeed matter. You come away from this book with a new respect for the power of the economy. While other issues matter in elections, when a presidential candidate focuses on the economy, voters are more likely to listen and more likely to use the economy in assessing the candidates. But you also come away with a new respect for the campaign and candidate. The campaigns that understand the times and run the right clarifying or insurgent strategy add 6 points to their vote share.
Although Vavreck draws heavily on quantitative data and modeling, she conveys a sense of excitement about her breakthrough in understanding how presidential elections work. Human decisions matter: Campaigns can rise above the dull determinism of the economy. And voters are fairly discerning about what campaigns are saying on issues that matter to them.

Greenberg moves toward his conclusion with a comment that may be particularly important for team Obama to fully-appreciate:

As I write in my book, “Dispatches from the War Room“, national leaders often want to tout macroeconomic growth before it has produced gains that people see firsthand. The Democrats lost in 1994 as Clinton spoke prematurely of his economic successes, though by 1996 real gains in income helped produce a very different outcome.

Given current economic forecasts of “at best, halting growth” in the months ahead, Greenberg concludes “The message will matter in 2010 and 2012, more than ever.”

This item is cross-posted from the Progressive Policy Institute site.
The long-running campaign to make inclusion of a “public option” a progressive litmus test for Democrats on health care reform has entered a new and potentially dangerous phase: growing demands that congressional Democrats use the budget “reconciliation” procedure to avoid a Senate filibuster and lower the effective threshold for enactment of a bill to 50 votes.
As Brian Buetler explains at TalkingPointsMemo, two major new grassroots initiatives–one sponsored by Democracy for America (and headed up by Howard Dean) and another by a new group called CREDO Action–are asserting that reconciliation can easily be used for health reform. The clear implication is that any failure to go this route is proof of Democratic irresolution if not betrayal.
The temptation to insist on the reconciliation route is certainly understandable. Aside from making enactment of a bill by the Senate much easier, reconciliation, if successfully pursued, might make Republicans irrelevant to the process, while vastly reducing the influence of those Democrats who are obdurately opposed to the public option. It could also narrow the gap between House and Senate bills, which currently makes approval in either House of the ultimate conference committee report a difficult challenge.
But unfortunately, use of reconciliation isn’t the no-brainer it’s sometimes made out to be.
There are two major risks to the use of reconciliation which have nothing to do with fear of Republican shrieks about “cramming through a bill” or with fading hopes of bipartisanship.
The first involves the arcane budget provision called “the Byrd Rule,” which creates a point of order in the Senate against material in reconciliation bills that is not germane to budgeting. If the Senate parliamentarian (to whom the chair invariably defers on such matters) rules in favor of such a point of order–and Republicans will raise them constantly–it requires 60 votes to override such a ruling, which eliminates the entire advantage of taking this route to begin with. Nobody seems entirely confident that, say, creation of health care exchanges would be judged as germane.
The second problem is that it’s almost impossible to enact permanent changes in law via reconciliation; provisions can only operate within limited-time “windows.” This problem is best illustrated by the consequences of the GOP decision to enact the big Bush administration tax cuts via reconciliation. The “limited window” requirements of the Budget Act explains why there is still a federal estate tax, even though Congress voted in 2001 to phase it out; and why the remainder of the Bush tax cuts haven’t been made permanent. Creating an elaborate new system for health care on a temporary basis could be more than a little hazardous.
There’s a deeper problem, too, which is reflected in the evolution of the “Byrd Rule,” named after the famously imperious appropriator, the senior senator from West Virginia: non-Budget Committee senators in both parties naturally resist the routinization of reconciliation as a way to bypass the authorizing and appropriating committees. This isn’t a matter of party or ideology, but of institutional prerogatives that are zealously defended even by senators who might favor the kind of health reform legislation that reconciliation would be designed to enact.
It’s entirely possible that the potential payoff of using reconciliation is worth all the risks, particularly if hard-core Republican opposition to health reform makes it the only viable option, and/or if Democratic opponents of a public option refuse to vote for cloture to allow an up-or-down vote. But the key point right now is this: the decision isn’t easy, and the White House and congressional leaders may decide against reconciliation for reasons that should not expose them to angry charges of timidity or subservience to the health care industry.
UPDATE: The indispensible Jonathan Cohn has a post up at The New Republic on reconciliation and health care that makes a similar warning about its perils.

There’s a great piece up at TNR today from Jonathan Cohn succinctly describing the state of play among Senate Democrats on the subject of how to finance health care reform. It focuses on the proposal in the Baucus bill, originally suggested by John Kerry, to raise a very large chunk of cash through an “excise tax” on high-end private health insurance policies.
An immediate problem, as those following the debate may recall, is that some major unions have negotiated very generous health care benefits for not-necessarily well-compensated workers that could be exposed to the tax. Such union members also tend to be older, and/or work in risky occupations, both of which boost the price tag for insurance. Moreover, people in states with unusually high health-care costs could run afoul of it as well. As Cohn points out, the Senate Finance Committee, which must approve some plan for health care reform financing, has a large number of Democrats who represent one or the other of these sensitive constituencies. But there’s a potential solution:

There’s a way out of this dilemma. Since the Kerry proposal taxes insurers rather than individuals, it would be relatively straightforward to dictate that groups facing high costs because of age, unusually large regional variations, or physical risk don’t see their prices go up by that much (or at all). And while carving out some exceptions to the insurance tax change would mean reducing the revenue from the tax, that money could be made up by making the tax itself larger–or adding some other revenue source, whether it’s a smaller version of the House income tax or maybe even a small tax on sugary sodas.

This won’t be easy, but resolution of the financing issue is at least as important as all the high-profile arguments over the public option.

If you are confused about the state of public opinion on health care reform, check out an exhaustive post at pollster.com by the respected nonpartisan observer Charles Franklin. Looking at every poll from virtually every available perspective, here’s what he concludes about recent trends:

[T[he big picture is that opposition ramped up significantly through June or July but has recently slowed or stopped. Support fell less precipitously but has been working back up for a month (despite or perhaps because of the circus coverage in August.) We could pick a chart to fight over the details, but we shouldn’t. It is the big picture of public opinion that is important here. Within a couple of points, opinion is evenly divided. The White House has gained a bit of momentum, but will be challenged to lower the opposition numbers, not just raise the support numbers.

All the data that Franklin analyzes was gathered before the President latest media blitz. It will take a while to assess its effectiveness, particularly since it is ongoing. But it does not look like the administration or congressional Democrats are bucking an adverse trend any longer. And it also appears the townhall meetings and the associated conservative hysteria may not have changed much of anything, and might have even backfired a bit.

My concerns about President Obama’s media blitz over-exposing him to ‘gotcha’ questions were unfounded, judging by his effectiveness on three interview programs I watched, Meet the Press (NBC), This Week (ABC) and State of the Union (CNN). He seemed more comfortable and persuasive as an interview subject now than he did as a candidate.
The formats of these three programs were one-on-one interviews with David Gregory, George Stephanopolis and John King respectively — all three of whom were even-handed enough. In addition the President was interviewed only for a portion of each program, 18 minutes, for example, on “This Week.” Although his left critics will not be happy with his flexibility in key issues like the public option, Obama did extraordinarilly-well on nearly all topics, with one exception.
The President did his homework and demonstrated an impressive grasp of the issues regarding current health care reform proposals. He didn’t bristle, calmly but firmly correcting questions based on false assumptions with a friendly spirit, and demonstrated his characteristic ‘cool’ to good effect. Equally importantly and in glaring contrast to his GOP critics, he projected the conciliatory spirit of a leader who was not a rigid ideologue.
Obama did a good job of refusing to be distracted by the efforts of interviewers to get him off on a tangential argument about race, which he called “catnip” for conflict-hungry reporters, or the fuss over ACORN which he pointed out was kind of trifling, compared to the huge issues facing America at the moment. He also called the media to account for sensationalizing debates over serious issues with side-show distractions, stating on CNN that “the easiest way” to get on CNN, FOX and other big media was to “say something rude and outrageous” and telling the MTP host that the media “encourages some of the outliers of behavior.”
He emphasized on MTP (video here) that physicians and nurses support his basic plan and Obama once again extended a bit of an olive branch to the GOP in noting that he was bucking his Party some on tort reform. Regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said he wasn’t one who supports “indefinite occupation of other countries” and that the U.S. must avoid ‘mission creep’ and stay forcused on eliminating al-Qaeda.
But the one comment that I doubt played very well among many viewers was his statement, made on all three programs, that his Administration was still doing an assessment to formulate strategy on Afghanistan. The President correctly pointed out that you don’t commit resources to any major endeavor until the strategy is determined. But he has been in office for 9 months now, and even if there are good reasons for not having his Afghanistan strategy in place, it’s a tough sell. Yes, the public knows that the situation is highly complex, but I doubt he can delay putting a strategy in place much longer without losing support at an accelerating pace.
Afghanistan notwithstanding, health care reform remains the critical issue of the hour, and I think any fair-minded evaluation would have to give him good marks in making his case in the format allotted. I doubt he lost any support in the political center. Although speechifying is still his big edge as a communicator, the President proved he can deliver his message one-on-one as good as any Democrat, and better than most. (HuffPo has video clip highlights of his media blitz.)
Perhaps one measure of President Obama’s effectiveness was how forgettable were the comments responding to his answers in the politician and media pundit circle jerks. On MTP, Rep. John Boehner parroted the conservative sound bites unconvincingly, and Sen. Lindsay Graham was only marginally less carping. The overall impression I was left with was how predictable and nitpicking were their comments. It might have been more interesting to hear responses from a panel of public health experts.

It’s been a big week for anti-anti-racism. Virtually the entire conservative world has waxed indignant about Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that racism is responsible for the unusual virulence of anti-Obama sentiment.
Listening to it all, you’d think the so-called “race card” was a much bigger problem in American society than racism itself, and that does seem to be what a lot of conservatives think. But it’s getting to the point where the argument seems to be that if anti-Obama protesters have any non-racial motives for their behavior, then mentioning race as any sort of factor (hard to avoid given the revival of screaming about “welfare” and the preoccupation with the marginal organzing group ACORN) is a terrible insult.
Witness David Brooks’ unintentionally hilarious column in the New York Times today. David jogged through last Saturday’s Tea Party demonstration on The Mall, and can assure us all that there were no racists there:

[A]s I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

Now David is a Yankee, so perhaps he can be forgiven for believing that mingling with black folks, listening to their music, and allowing them to prepare one’s food are things no racist could possibly do. If that’s the case, of course, there’s never been any racism in the Deep South, and neo-Confederate sentiments really are and were just about abstractions like “states’ rights.”
Unfortunately, the Brooks column never much rises above this sort of superficial argument that if there’s any evidence of non-racism among Obama opponents, then even mentioning racism is an outrage.
His main contention is that the Tea Party movement reflects an authentic all-American populist tradition dating back to Jefferson that is “ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.” So it’s “not race,” says Brooks. “It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old,” and it’s mainly about Obama’s “elitism” and a “producerist” revolt against redistributionist policies. Nothing to see here, folks, it’s just good old-fashioned American populism.
You’d think maybe his own reference to Father Coughlin as an example of right-wing populism would alert Brooks to the folly of his argument. Was Coughlin solely motivated by anti-semitism? No, almost certainly not. Does that mean the anti-semitism he stimulated wasn’t real and dangerous, leading eventually to his suppression by his own bishop? Absolutely not.
Lord have mercy, David, think about it: the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t just “about race;” it was about hostility to immigrants and to some extent to capitalism; early twentieth-century Kluxers, in alliance with William Jennings Bryan, thought of themselves as “progressives.” That was rather cold comfort to the people they tormented and threatened.
No, I am not comparing the Tea Party folks to Klansman; I am simply noting that every racially tinged political movement in American history has, of course, had other, non-racial motivations, so simply citing such motivations doesn’t address the possibility of racial motivations.
It makes you wonder: what if Jimmy Carter had simply said that Obama’s angry opponents were “ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top.” I suspect the overall conservative reaction would have been just about as wounded and self-pitying, but I doubt David Brooks would have agreed with him.
Indeed, this column concludes with the signature Brooks assertion of the equivalency of right-wing craziness and the reaction to it:

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

So if you object to Glenn Becks’s ravings, you’re as guilty as he is of extremism, and moreover, you think small-town folks are dumb wackos.
That charge is at least as offensive as any over-attribution of racial motives to Obama-haters.