Why binders matter

Picking a most depressing aspect of any Presidential campaign is going to be a challenge. Of course there are always plenty of things we can call stupid or frustrating or downright evil but those are par for the course and probably part of the attraction. This is politics, after all.  But for "most depressing" moment, we're looking for something that, in addition to all of those other elements, suggests to us the means by which matters will inevitably continue to deteriorate in the future.

There are a few days left and things could always change but right now I'm looking at this column by the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker for this year's honors.

Parker's thesis in that column was that American presidential politics, heretofore pristine and uncorrupted by exploitive television advertising, voter suppression, an overwhelming dominance of corporate money, or, least of all, an elitist celebrity punditocracy, has suddenly been reduced to gibberish by the "12 year old mentality" of social media users.

Oh, to be 12 again, the better to enjoy the presidential debates. Or rather, the better to appreciate the Twitterverse, where America’s obsessive-compulsive, attention-deficit population holds the zeitgeist hostage with tweets and memes that infantilize political discourse and reduce the few remaining adults to impolitic fantasy.

The population holds the zeitgeist hostage!  That's a nasty trick and likely an especially frustrating one for someone like Parker whose position as a nationally syndicated Pulitzer Prize winning opinion columnist rightfully bestows that privilidge on her.

The "12 year old" mental midgets don't get to infantilize discourse with tweets and memes about the First Lady's tasteless vacation or the total relevance of John Edwards' sex scandal to the 2012 election or  Barack Obama's American "blood equity." No no. That's obviously supposed to be Parker's job.

So let's see how she handles it here.  What, precisely is she upset about? 

In this, the first social-media presidential election, the debates have come to resemble reality shows during which virtual audiences cast ballots (and aspersions), hiccoughing their impulse-reactions to every word and movement into the intellectual vacuum we charitably call the body politic.

Two debates in, the complex issues of our day have been reduced to a large yellow bird and binders full of women.

Twitter has reduced our "complex issues of our day" to "Big Bird" and "Binders full of women." I have some quarrel with that statement but before we get into that let us first ask whether these particular reductions are, in fact, any more vacuous than when in previous elections the "complex issues" were reduced to "Earth tones" or unfortunate photo ops. Those are just two examples that spring immediately to mind. As is this event where a sitting President was asked to address the all important problem of underwear preference.

 

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The thing about all of these impulse hiccups is that they and many others like them occurred long before Parker's great lamentable hi-jacking of the zeitgeist by the un-tamed tweet people ever happened.

In other words, our politics was plenty dumbed down enough before the internet came along.  What we might say about the last 10 years, though, is that internet communications have created a more participatory public discourse. In this environment the "complex issues of our day" are brought into focus through a noisier, more chaotic, ultimately more democratic process than the old top-down system where we all waited upon elite thinkers like Parker to define the bounds of discussion for us.   

Don't get me wrong.  Clearly our discourse is still quite stupid.  I will argue, however, that it has become slightly less so. More on that in a moment. Just as clearly our elite pundits still dominate the environment.  But they are less in control now.  And this is what Parker is really complaining about. She may say she dislikes silly talk about binders and whatnot but as a professional purveyor of such babble, she has little room to criticize.

This week, an instructive parallel uproar has broken out among mainstream (though mostly conservative) pundits over baseball analyst-turned-political prognosticator Nate Silver's New York Times hosted 538 blog. Silver is no silly-minded tweet-memer.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  His model is based entirely on statistical analysis. This hardly makes it infallible. But it should at least insulate it from being labeled pure bullshit.

Still, Silver and PECOTA have been wrong thousands of times, often spectacularly so. He didn’t, and never intended to, make baseball more predictable. He had a coin flip’s chance of guessing the outcome of a single pitch or game. However, by adding up all those coin flips, he was able to see macroscopic patterns emerge out of microscopic randomness. What made his predictions so much better than a hack’s idle speculation was that they looked better as a whole. There is no human bias in PECOTA, and most of its error is due to random variance.

I say Silver's model should be hard to dismiss off-hand, but of course, that hasn't stopped many from trying.  Instead Silver, whose 538 model has given President Obama no less than a 60% chance of being reelected since June, has been hammered this week by critics through ad-hominems. He has been accused of being "thin and effeminate" or "too boyish" or of "openly rooting for Obama"

I don't want to get too bogged down in the details of Silver's model.  It isn't perfect. It isn't always right, although it has been fairly successful.  But here are some things that Silver does which are different from what his attackers have done.  Unlike these critics, Silver hasn't confused the job of taking an educated guess at election results with telling the story of what will explain those results, or what they will mean in the bigger picture.

A political opinion writer should be able to function as an advocate as well as an analyst without one function clouding out the other. But that's essentially what Silver's detractors are crossing up.  Many of them are behaving this way out of right wing imagined victimhood.  But mostly they're falling in line with the groupthink narrative that requires us  to read this column over and over. 

Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign says it still has momentum. President Barack Obama’s campaign says that’s all spin.

Meanwhile, there isn’t a single well-informed pundit between them who can tell you who’s right.

There never is, is there? Nevermind that Silver is a pretty informed dude himself, or that the informed people at TPM  or at Pollster.com, among many other professional pollwatchers, have aggregated poll results into electoral scoreboards that show the President holding a clear advantage.  The "well-informed pundits" who count are determined to sell the race as a "toss up" that nobody can predict and that's what they're sticking to.  They're not about to have the zeitgeist held up by effeminate 12 year olds who use too much of the Twitter and stuff because those people clearly are not very serious.

Which is why very serious TV pundit Joe Scarborough was unhappy enough with Silver's math to conclude that he is "an ideologue who should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days".  Silver called out Scarborough's statistical illiteracy by suggesting a wager. Seems appropriate enough given the odds. I don't know. But what did interest me was what Josh Marshall caught in the way NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan handled this blow-up.

Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has a post up taking Nate Silver to task for daring Joe Scarborough to a bet over who would win the election. Basically, she says making a bet like this diminishes the Times and he shouldn’t have done it. That may be so. I don’t know and don’t really care.
But she concludes with this line …

When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. But he lost something, too: the right to act like a free agent with responsibilities to nobody’s standards but his own.

I say this as an admirer of Silver and the Times. But I think this is almost a demonstrably false assumption and a sign Sullivan doesn’t fully grasp the politics and new media environment Silver operates in. 

Skipping some stuff so as not to copy Marshall's entire post.

Here’s what Sullivan doesn’t get. There are 7 or 8 different organizations running different flavors of systematic presidential poll analysis right now. They range from Silver to sites like TPM and RCP and Pollster to academic political scientists. And they all show pretty much the same numbers that Silver’s showing. But Silver’s the one who has the public rep as the brainiac polling-meister so he’s the one everybody’s focused on — both Dems who want to believe his numbers (and who tend to favor more science/evidence based analysis) and Republicans who desperately want him to be wrong. That is almost the definition of public credibility, which is what the Times purchased when they made their deal with him.

Silver's actual offense here isn't running some magically biased math game on the polls, nor is it some gauche egging on of a critic by challenging him to a bet. Instead it lies in going against the pre-determined narrative set by the club and in not showing enough deference to the hierarchy of established punditry or to the the Times as an institution.

In what will probably be his final attempt to address the controversy before the election Silver writes, 

My argument, rather, is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

There shouldn't be mutual exclusivity between information and entertainment.  But Silver is right that much of our established puditocracy does sacrifice one for the other. In the FOX News era, this can be done in order to sell the audience a canned ideology. But just as often it happens because lazy clubbish "insiders" are playing the same he said/she said game they've always played.

What's galling, though, is that it's these same lazy insiders who are turning up their noses at the noisy unserious vacuousness of a citizen-driven narrative that "holds the zeitgeist hostage" on the internet.  And yet, time and again, despite its silliness, the internet turns out not to be quite so completely useless.

Over the summer we watched this dynamic play out in New Orleans as the elite pundits in the "Legitimate media" had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from sycophantic defense of Roger Goodell by the bloggers and Twitterfolk whose analysis remained consistently more relevant despite the obvious limitations of their "12 year old" mentality.

This week, as Hurricane Sandy came ashore, and a lot of things were happening at one time, Twitter actually out-performed or at least greatly supplemented traditional news organizations in their efforts to separate fact from rumor.

Twitter beckons us to join every compressed news cycle, to confront every rumor or falsehood, and to see everything. This is what makes the service so maddening during the meta-obsessed election season, where the stakes are unclear and the consequences abstract. And it’s also what makes is so valuable during fast-moving, decidedly real disasters. Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace. To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: That we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity.

Initial misinformation has consequences, and a consensus correction on Twitter won’t stop any number of these rumors from going viral on Facebook. There, your claims are checked by your friends; on Twitter, if they spread, they’re open to direct scrutiny from people who might actually know the truth.

But even this process is dramatically condensed. The first draft of the popular history of 9/11 was written on live television by a group of exhausted, horrified and often isolated TV reporters. Misstatements, confusion, and some of the messier stages of live reporting, filtered across the country by phone, email and word of mouth without context. Much of the raw materiel of the “9/11 truth” movement is rooted in sloppy early news reports. Some of most insidious myths about Hurricane Katrina were seeded the same way. (It’s worth noting that tonight’s Con Ed rumor was effectively started on Reuters and ended with a tweet.)

Francis Bacon said  truth is "the daughter of time, not of authority."  The broad, open, and immediate discussion that takes place on the internet, and particularly on Twitter greatly decreases the amount of time necessary to arrive at the truth while pushing designated authorities like, for example, Kathleen Parker, further into irrelevance.

While Parker is busy shaking a finger at us for clinging to a phrase like "binders full of women" she diminishes what  was actually an instructive moment in that debate.

In response to a question about pay equity, Obama talked about addressing systemic discrimination with policy in ways that establish and enforce new standards so that, hopefully, everyone is working in a fairer environment.  Mitt, by contrast, told us about one time when he had to hire some people and so consulted a "binder full of women" that helped him make his choices.

Incidentally, Mitt lied about how this happened. The "binder" it turns out was provided by an advocacy group promoting women in Massachusetts government generally and not some benevolent moment of inspiration on his part.

But even if we accept Mitt's lie, he's still given us an anecdote from the life of Mitt that may or may not be of any use to women worried about being discriminated against in the workplace. Furthermore, it's a tacit endorsement of the concept of affirmative action by the GOP nominee.  Has his campaign taken an official position here? Because this will be coming up soon.

So in having fun with a goofy thing a candidate said during a debate, the "12 year olds" actually drew a lot of attention to a fairly significant point of distinction between the candidates and to a blatant lie told by one of them.

I don't think this is an accident.  In addition to being a "truth machine" Twitter is also an excellent bullshit detector. This is so in part because it allows a wide audience to help each other fact check with immediacy. But it's also where absurd lies are subjected to the cruel unrelenting scrutiny they deserve.

This morning's Washington Post editorial page calls Mitt's campaign an "insult to voters."

Within limits, all candidates say and do what they have to say and do to win. Mr. Obama also has dodged serious interviews and news conferences. He has offered few specifics for a second-term agenda. He, too, aired commercials that distorted his opponent’s statements.

But Mr. Obama has a record; voters know his priorities. His budget plan is inadequate, but it wouldn’t make things worse.

Mr. Romney, by contrast, seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong.

It's nice to see them say this. But the question we should be asking is, what took them so long? The most obvious lies from the candidates are also their most awkward moments.  Some candidates are better liars than others, of course, but most of the time, when there's bullshit being trotted out, it looks and sounds strange. People pick up on this. And unlike our sycophantic establishment press, the public at large has no incentive to pull punches.

This is why thousands of people using Twitter during the debates could say immediately with snark and derision what it took the Post weeks to get around to saying.  The 2012 Presidential campaign has been one long hideous insult to everyone's intelligence and the voters have known it all along.  When a lying piece of shit like Mitt Romney pretends that cutting PBS is a sound solution to an already bullshit fiscal "crisis" it does no good to spend a week in the news cycle debating and fact checking this stuff at face value.  As I said a few weeks ago, that's precisely what the candidate wants.  No, the only way to deal with bullshit is to call it bullshit.  Create a "Big Bird" Twitter account and call it bullshit.  Set up a "Binders" Tumblr and demonstrate how ridiculous it is.  Meet the insult with a fitting counter-insult.

I'm not saying this is an altogether good thing.  Only that it's a fitting reaction to the dismal presentation of American politics our establishment pundit club has given us.  We've been trained to pay as little attention as possible, to expect to be lied to, to believe an electoral result has little or no relation to tangible policy, and that there's little we can or should do about that anyway. We're not expected to take our elections seriously. Why should we expect the candidates to?

In a way Mitt is really the guy who best embodies this. Obama is a product of it as well but Mitt is its most elaborate caricature. He clearly has as much disdain for democratic process as our media elites do.  And this is why Parker is wrong to brush off the "infantilized" "impolitic" sarcasm of readers and voters reacting to the bill of goods they've been sold. It's precisely these outbursts that suggest Americans still suspect that maybe they deserve better than this after all.

And that's what makes this thing so depressing. After all, we're closing in on 400 years since Bacon and others like him gave us scientific method and still our politics aren't yet sophisticated enough to take climate change seriously.  It stands to reason, then, that no matter how many insults today's advances allow us to tweet back at it, our politics will continue to be dominated by the likes of Kathleen Parker and Mitt Romney for quite some time to come.