Politika

My students learn early on a few things that really annoy me: imprecise wording and unsupported generalizations. And I labor to give them the analytical toolbox to help them understand politics, but more importantly, develop their critical faculties as citizens.

All this came to my mind when I listened to an interview this morning with Linda Killian, a journalist who has written a book on independent voters, and who I just heard on Here and Now.   The book follows a pretty standard script.

Act One: A glib typology that puts new labels on old bottles.  Lunchpail Democrats meet Reagan Democrats meet America First Democrats; Rockefeller Republicans meet NPR Republicans; Gen X meet The Facebook Generation. Can you be trying harder to get on the interview circuit?

Act Two: Link a few disparate empirical observations (the “science” portion) with unsupported claims and fill the narrative with anecdotes and quotations from interviews with a few dozen voters.  Don’t bother with actual data–that’s far too boring!

The closing act: a series of “reforms” such as the open primary, non-partisan redistricting, and changes to campaign finance.  Have we heard this all before?

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I can’t agree with Ben Smith about “pants on fire” politics.  Smith writes “Democrats attack on  Republican honesty is a campaign ploy, not an argument.”  He denies a charge of “cynical postmodernism,” but I think this is precisely what Smith is engaging in.

The background, of course, is Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech at the convention, and the litany of fact-checksthat followed.

Following close on the heels is Ryan’s claim that he ran a sub 3:00 marathon, whereas it turned out his actual time was over four hours.

Ok, I get it, the last one has nothing to do with politics.  But anyone who has run a marathon will tell you that they know within a minute, if not a second, what they ran. And the difference between a sub 3:00 marathon, which only a small percentage of runners ever meet (for the record, my own personal best is 3:00:33), and 4:01 is tremendous.  It reveals, if nothing else, a tremendous amount of braggadocio if not an ability to rewrite history.

But I’m more interested in Smith’s claim that the focus on deception is somehow a distraction from what a “real” campaign should be about: policy proposals and policy differences.  The problem is that the American public have not been fully informed about the policy options that are in front of them. Continue reading →

I have been reading the decision in State of Texas vs. Holder. I am no election lawyer, but Texas’s position at one point sounds a lot like it is trying to get the Supreme Court to rule Section 5 unconstitional. Continue reading →