Is Kagan a Closed Book?

I don't know much about Elena Kagan yet, but I intend to read as much as I can in the coming weeks. So far, the general consensus seems to be that she's suspiciously uncontroversial.

In his column today, David Brooks argues that Kagan has never taken any real 'intellectual risks' in the course of her legal career. She has cautiously -- strategically -- hidden her feelings from the public. (Andrew Sullivan follows up and makes similar comments here.)

While it's certainly fair to wonder about Kagan's stance on important issues and to speculate about these kinds of things, it strikes me as a little cynical to assume that she's been deliberately concealing her views all this time.

Isn't it possible that Kagan is just one of those rare individuals who is able to see many sides of an issue? Because, if that's the case, she's exactly the kind of person that I would want on the Supreme Court.

Trim the Beard, Andrew!

Poor Andrew Sullivan. His readers have finally rebelled against his awful, unkempt beard.

My favorite dissent:

Was that a beard, or did a beaver die on your face? What am I saying? You'd never let a beaver anywhere near your face.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of beards. But come on, Andrew. This is just out of control . . .

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Tea Party: Partisan Frauds or Racists?

Andrew offers a pretty good description of how I've come to see the Tea Party Movement:

[O]n the fiscal front, they're total frauds. They have yet to propose any serious cuts in entitlements and want far more money poured into the military-imperial complex. In rallies, the largely white members in their fifties and older seem determined to get every penny of social security and Medicare. They are a kind of boomer revolt - but on the other side of that civil conflict, and no longer a silent majority. In fact, they're now the minority that won't shut up.

More and more, this feels to me like an essentially cultural revolt against what America is becoming: a multi-racial, multi-faith, gay-inclusive, women-friendly, majority-minority country. The "tea-party" analogy is not about restricting government as much as it is a form of almost pathological nostalgia. That's why there's much more lashing out than constructive proposals. And yes, a bi-racial president completes the picture.

He also offers this caveat, which I think is important:

And no, that doesn't mean they're all racists. Discomfort with social and cultural change is not racism. But it can express itself that way. [My emphasis.]

Questioning the Tea Party's Motives

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece on why he distrusts the Tea Party Movement:

[Tea Party members] have no genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. They seem very protective of Medicare and Social Security - and their older age bracket underlines this. They also seem primed for maximal neo-imperial reach, backing the nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, favoring war against Iran, etc. Only Ron Paul, peace be upon him, extends his big government critique to the military-industrial-ideological complex.

So they are truly not serious in policy terms, and it behooves the small government right to grapple with this honestly. They both support lower taxation and yet bemoan the fact that so many Americans do not pay any income tax. They want to cut spending on trivial matters while enabling the entitlement and defense behemoths to go on gobbling up Americans' wealth. And that lack of seriousness is complemented by a near-fanatical cultural alienation from the modern world.

. . .

When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

Let me be the first to say: I propose cuts to Medicare, progressive price-indexing of Social Security benefits, a raising of the retirement age, and reductions in defense spending. And, also, higher taxes on both the middle class and the wealthy.

Yes, Andrew, there are people like me out there on the electoral fringes.

Sullivan Defends Beck?

Andrew Sullivan offers a heavily qualified defense of Glenn Beck's pronouncement that Christians should reject their church if it preaches "social justice" or "economic justice."

Money quote:

I have to say I'm going to side a tiny bit with Beck on this matter.

It seems to me that although helping the poor is obviously a critical facet of Jesus' teaching, it is a legitimate matter of debate how to help the poor.

Socialism, for example, clearly does not help the poor: it just makes everyone poorer. It can spring from envy, not charity. It can instill dependency, not self-respect. And charity is not something anyone can delegate to an institution. A state cannot feel love and cannot be redeemed. Only a human being can. Sometimes, an over-weening welfare state can actually remove the capacity of many people to be personally generous by taxing their worldly goods before they have a chance to give them away.

My own view is that there should be a collective and strong safety net for the poor, combined with, for Christians, a very powerful, indeed binding, injunction to give and give generously to others, and to take a personal interest in the needs of others. There's a balance here, in other words, between social justice and statist redistributionism. And while Beck is obviously out of line - the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice could not be further removed from Ayn Rand - I'm suspicious of the dangers of taking the virtue of social justice and turning it into the system of socialism.

Amen.

Beck's statement is, I think, verifiably false. But the response to Beck has been a little overstated. Saying that Beck is wrong isn't quite the same as saying that free-market ideology is fundamentally un-Christian. I'm certainly not a Biblical scholar, but I think the conservative position on social justice is fully reconcilable with the message of Jesus.

A person can support social justice, while still opposing federal policies that seek to mandate social justice through income redistribution or price controls.

An Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan

Andrew,

You recently wrote:

The explosion in medical costs since 2000 or 2003, along with the brutal recession, and a greater awareness of the real suffering this has created, has also convinced me that systematic reform is necessary, as long as it is fiscally responsible.

This comes after a long string of posts in which you've encouraged Congress to "pass the damn bill." I understand the sentiment, but it still seems like you’re missing the point.

I agree that any genuine conservative should support a “fiscally responsible” health care reform plan that expands health coverage to millions of Americans. You’re right to criticize congressional Republicans who – in spite of their protestations to the contrary – seem to be aligned against any kind of meaningful reform.

But there are legitimate concerns as to whether this bill would actually be deficit-reducing or even deficit-neutral. Many of the key cost-saving provisions will likely be excluded (or diluted) if the bill is pushed through in reconciliation. And even in its current form, the Senate bill seems to contain an awful lot of cost-saving gimmickry that was thrown in to achieve an attractive score from CBO.

I’m not sure how you can read David’s latest column without at least pausing to consider whether the kind of systematic reform that we’re likely to get is truly going to control costs or simply create another large, unsustainable entitlement.

You continue to assert that the bill is “fiscally responsible” without – as far as I can tell – seriously addressing the concerns of those who suspect otherwise.

What's the deal?

Update: Is Andrew becoming an ideologue on this issue?

This response to Megan McArdle's criticism makes absolutely no sense to me. Are we looking at the same scatter plots?

Maybe I'm missing something . . .

Have Americans become more liberal?

The truth is, I don't know if Americans are becoming more liberal or more conservative. But I think one major miscalculation on the left has been interpreting Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Bush administration as resentment toward “conservatism” writ large. In fact, the opposite seems to hold true.

Whether they knew it or not, I believe that many Americans were reacting against the large-scale changes imposed by a Republican administration that was anything but conservative. It wasn’t a liberal impulse that caused Americans to become disenchanted with the Iraq War. It was genuine conservatism – a distrust of government power and large-scale foreign interventions – that ultimately compelled so many of us to abandon our support for President Bush.

“Change” was the theme of the 2008 campaign, but the underlying message was much simpler: putting things back to normal. The lesson that should be gleaned is not that Americans favor progressive – rather than “conservative” – policy solutions, but that Americans are skeptical of dramatic shifts in policy.

I think this is a big part of the reason why we’ve see support for many of the individual provisions in the health care reform bills that have been proposed in Congress, but an overall sense of opposition to comprehensive approach that would generate such sweeping legislation. Incremental reforms are fine, but package them together and you’ve gone too far.

In an era of change, conservatism makes sense. We are, after all, creatures of memory.

To quote Andrew Sullivan:

[I]n those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives. Sure, we all move on. In America, the future is always more imperative than the past. But the past lingers; and America, for all its restlessness, or perhaps because of its restlessness, is a very conservative place. . . . Intrinsic to the human experience – what separates us from animals –is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It’s part of what we are.

There's a lot more to this, of course. In many ways, America is also a deeply progressive place. We've always had a complex political culture, and we've always tried to have it both ways.

Anyway, just thought I'd think "outloud" for a bit. I'll try to write more on this later.

Update: In his column today, David Brooks makes a similar point about the Tea Party movement:

[B]oth the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.

As I recently explained to a friend, modern-day conservatism traces its roots to Edmund Burke. But Burkean conservatism is nothing like today's Movement Conservatism, which seems to have spawned the Tea Parties. Burke was skeptical of large-scale policy changes, favoring an incremental approach. Many contemporary conservatives seem to have abandoned this skepticism, as they routinely employ reactionary language and endorse dramatic policy shifts. Today, congressional Republicans appear to be far more focused on achieving specific ideological priorities, even when that requires massive federal legislation or massive changes in the status quo. It's not conservative to totally dismantle the Social Security system, for example.

I think it's good to be skeptical of sweeping policy changes, but it's also important to acknowledge that even that skepticism must be questioned regularly. For example, would slow, incremental changes have been appropriate during the Civil Rights Era, or are there some issues so morally pressing that we need to push for immediate, broad-based changes in society?

Defending Larry Summers

GMU's Alex Tabarrok has an interesting post on the sex ratio on U.S. campuses, which led me to this older post defending Larry Summers:

For the past week or so the newspapers have been trumpeting a new study showing no difference in average math ability between males and females. Few people who have looked at the data thought that there were big differences in average ability but many media reports also said that the study showed no differences in high ability.

The LA Times, for example, wrote:

"The study also undermined the assumption -- infamously espoused by former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in 2005 -- that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses."

Scientific American said:

"So the team checked out the most gifted children. Again, no difference. From any angle, girls measured up to boys. Still, there’s a lack of women in the highest levels of professional math, engineering and physics. Some have said that’s because of an innate difference in math ability. But the new research shows that that explanation just doesn’t add up."

The Chronicle of Higher Education said:

"The research team also studied if there were gender discrepancies at the highest levels of mathematical ability and how well boys and girls resolved complex problems. Again they found no significant differences."

All of these reports and many more like them are false. In fact, consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females.

. . .

Does this mean that discrimination is not a problem? Certainly not but we need the media and academia to accurately present the data on ability if we are to understand how large a role other issues may play.

Andrew Sullivan's more polemical defense of Summers can be found here.

Quote for the Day

Look, no one’s history, no one’s character that you look at like Barack Obama’s – agree with his policies or disagree with them – he is a thoroughly decent human being. To call that thoroughly decent human being –who’s trying to bring people together, as I believe he is – a 'racist' is just disgusting.

- Andrew Sullivan, on The Joy Behar Show.

Sullivan and Public Policy Polling

Today, Andrew Sullivan linked to this survey from Public Policy Polling, which seems to show that 52 percent of Republicans believe ACORN stole the election for President Obama. I've written to Sullivan before criticizing the results of another survey from Public Policy Polling.

A few points:

First, Public Policy Polling isn't exactly an independent polling agency. Josh Krausharr of Politico writes:

Though there’s little to indicate the firm’s Democratic affiliation on its website — clients are listed, but without partisan identification — [pollster Tom Jensen] said PPP makes no secret of its politics.

This certainly doesn't mean that Public Policy Polling is doing anything nefarious. But shouldn't this conflict of interest be noted? What if the situation were reversed, and a Republican Party-affiliated pollster found that 52 percent of Democrats believed that the Republican National Committee manipulated the election results?

Second, Public Policy Polling often gets results that are out of line with other mainstream pollsters.

For example, in the very same survey that Sullivan links to, Public Policy Polling reports that only 77 percent of African-Americans approve of the job that President Obama is doing. Gallup currently puts the figure at 95 percent for this demographic group (with a monthly average of approximately 92 percent, and a comparable yearly average).

Third, only 33 percent of the 1066 respondents in this survey identified themselves as Republicans. Thus, the sample size for Republicans is about 352, and the sampling error around 52 percent is +/- 5 percentage points. Public Policy Polling notes that "[o]ter factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify." So, the overall margin of error around the 52 percent figure could potentially be quite high.

Perhaps more importantly, Public Policy Polling uses Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to conduct its telephone interviews. As Brian Schaffner of Pollster points out, the use of IVR technology in polling is still quite controversial.

Schaffner explains:

[O]ne of the reasons for concerns with IVR polling is that citizens with only a cell phone cannot be reached by these pollsters and these citizens now comprise at least one-fifth of the population. Yet, while the cell-only problem may generally be an issue for IVR technology (and for live interview pollsters who aren't calling cell phones), it is less of a problem for polling on elections, and particularly in low turnout elections.

. . .

Where these polls may run into greater challenges is when they attempt to make inferences about the American public rather than registered (or likely) voters.

I think Sullivan should really consider some of these points before he links to another survey from Public Policy Polling without providing any context.

Update: The NYT will not publish the results of IVR polls.

Gay Marriage Bigotry

Rod Dreher over at Beliefnet writes:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state.

. . .

[U]nless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots -- and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice -- maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harassed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:

I probably wouldn't use the word "bigot." I don't think, for instance, that half this country thinks hate crimes against gays is a good thing. But I have no problem believing that half the country--maybe more--is deeply prejudiced against gays. This generally fits into my view of all -isms. I think prejudice is part of who we are as humans, and thus as Americans. Following from that, I think prejudice is one of the many forces that influence how we vote. Hence the notion that half this country is deeply prejudiced against gays really doesn't shock me.

I'm sympathetic to Coates's argument. In my experience, people who strongly oppose gay marriage do tend to be animated by some form of prejudice. However, I think this debate is extremely counterproductive. Charging your opponents with bigotry -- or even the lesser offense of "prejudice" -- is a surefire way to lose the argument.

Even some social conservatives would admit that the secular case against gay marriage isn't very strong. Those of us who support marriage equality should be engaging with that argument and trying to expose its tortured logic, not hurling ad hominem attacks at our opponents.

We can accept prejudice as a given, but it doesn't serve our purpose to use it as a trump card when we're in the minority. Instead, why don't we just call on our opponents to defend their position?

It shouldn't be hard to point out the illegitimacy of that position.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Sullivan Goes Overboard, and Young Follows

I was just reading through some of Cathy Young's old posts and I came across this bizarre assault on Andrew Sullivan:

As I said in my previous post, I have limited sympathy for Sarah Palin.

However, this, from Andrew Sullivan (on top of the never-ending flogging of Trig Palin conspiracy theories), is outrageous. I saw the reference to the “white trash concupiscence” Palin-slam in Douthat’s column and wondered who could have written that. Despite my knowledge of Andrew’s raging PDS, I was shocked . . . . I fully intend for this to be my last visit to The Daily Dish, and I have to say that at this point, if someone started a campaign to get The Atlantic website to drop Andrew, I’d back it. Imagine the reaction if a journalist/blogger writing about a black politician referred to “ghetto concupiscence”, without even using the word “black.” [Emphasis mine]

While I agree that Andrew Sullivan's criticisms of Sarah Palin during the election were often over-the-top (and sometimes downright nasty), I don't quite understand why Young finds this particular comment so uniquely offensive. How else would you describe the Palin Family's never-ending psychodrama? To me, the Levi Johnston affair alone seems like it could easily be described as "white-trash concupiscence" . . . .

Honestly, I wouldn't have expected this kind of politically correct nonsense from Young. In my opinion, she remains one of the most insightful and fair-minded feminist writers out there.

During the Kobe Bryant trial, Young penned a brilliant and well-reasoned op-ed on "rape shield laws." It's probably the most intelligent consideration of the subject that I've ever read.

An excerpt:

Like many such cases, the Kobe Bryant case is primarily a "he said, she said" matter, with ambiguous corroborating evidence that county judge Frederick Gannett characterized as weak even as he sent the case to trial. The woman's sexual activities prior to the alleged rape may well be relevant to the physical evidence; if, as the defense has hinted, she engaged in consensual sex shortly after her encounter with Bryant, it may well be relevant to the question of whether she was raped; if she is mentally unstable, it may well be relevant to her credibility.

These are wrenching questions. Obviously, a woman with a history of mental illness or substance abuse could still be a rape victim. Obviously, the prospect of having embarrassing personal details exposed in court (let alone paraded in the media) may discourage victims from coming forward. Just as obviously, suppressing relevant evidence may result in sending an innocent person to jail. And if it's frightening to put oneself in the place of a sexual assault victim who finds herself on trial in the courtroom, it is no less terrifying to imagine that you -- or your husband or brother or son -- could be accused of rape and denied access to evidence that could exonerate him.

For some feminists, the dogma that "women never lie" means that there is, for all intents and purposes, no presumption of innocence for the defendant. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- forgetting that as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and his accuser are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law. Wendy Murphy has blasted Kobe Bryant's attorneys for feeding uncorroborated rumors about the alleged victim to the media maw. Yet, appearing on Fox News, she made the claim, highly prejudicial to Bryant and so far untested in a court of law, that the woman "suffered pretty terrible injuries" the likes of which she had not seen despite having prosecuted "hundreds of sex crimes cases."

The Moral Certitude of Modernity

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers writes:

I've been reading Marilynne Robinson's book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Her essay entitled “Puritans and Prigs” sets out to defend the Puritans and contrast them to a group she calls prigs, the sort of politically correct thought police that the right used to rail against in the 1990s. I think her argument also has a lot in common with your indictments of fundamentalism and movement conservatism.

The Puritans' belief that we are all sinners, Robinson says, gives "excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain." However, she argues that modernity, of which prigs are emblematic, is essentially Stalinist, in that it believes that society "can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas."

. . .

Indeed, much the same could be said of today’s right. For my part, it seems all such prigs (left and right) stem from the fundamental epistemological arrogance of modernity--that all things can be known. This is as true of Darwinism as it is of Biblical fundamentalism. The older I get, the more folly such claims seem to contain. This is not a new insight: one need only look at Ecclesiastes. Efforts such as political correctness and movement conservatism are destructive of civil society and are based on nothing more than a chasing after the wind.

I think this is a brilliant summation of the problem with both the contemporary right and the contemporary left. Forgiveness and understanding are no longer virtues.

They've been replaced by self-righteousness and moral certitude . . .

Hate Crime Legislation

Today, Andrew Sullivan linked to an old piece that he had written for the New York Times Magazine ("What's So Bad About Hate?"). It's a brilliant exploration of hate crime legislation and the standard concept of "hate." Definitely worth reading.

Here's a short excerpt:

So the concept of "homophobia," like that of "sexism" and "racism," is often a crude one. All three are essentially cookie-cutter formulas that try to understand human impulses merely through the one-dimensional identity of the victims, rather than through the thoughts and feelings of the haters and hated.

This is deliberate. The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

In reality, human beings and human acts are far more complex, which is why these isms and the laws they have fomented are continually coming under strain and challenge. Once again, hate wriggles free of its definers. It knows no monolithic groups of haters and hated. Like a river, it has many eddies, backwaters and rapids. So there are anti-Semites who actually admire what they think of as Jewish power, and there are gay-haters who look up to homosexuals and some who want to sleep with them. And there are black racists, racist Jews, sexist women and anti-Semitic homosexuals. Of course there are.

Obama's Gay Problem

Andrew Sullivan blasts President Obama over his party's substantive failure on gay rights:

In some ways, Obama's fealty to the big gay lobby rather than to the real gay community is testimony to why Democratic party politics remain repulsive to me. HRC has achieved nothing substantive for gay equality on a federal level in the twenty years I've been observing them. But they sure know how to milk donors at swanky black tie affairs. They are the Rotary Club for affluent gays, and their prime job is to explain to the gay community why it is never in the Democratic party's interest to do anything for gay people that might actually resemble equality. Oh, yes, we'll get a lovely Obama speech. Like that costs him anything or proves anything. There is nothing Obama can say at this self-satisfied, well-heeled Rotary Club dinner that he hasn't said before.

. . .

If Obama wants to support gay equality, he knows what to do. If Pelosi and Reid want to support gay equality, they know what to do. If HRC believes in gay equality, they also know what to do. So spare us the schmoozing and the sweet-talking and do it. Until then, Mr president, why don't you have a nice steaming cup of shut-the-fuck-up?

Ouch.

The Morality of Grayson

I've never been a big fan of Matt Yglesias -- and I've never understood why Andrew Sullivan apparently finds him so fair-minded that he named an award after him.

Anyway, I'm glad that Sullivan finally called out Yglesias for his strained justification of Alan Grayson's vicious ad hominem against Republicans on the floor of Congress.

Yglesias's defense amounts to: "'So what?' Republicans engage in this kind of abusive rhetoric all the time. That's the real issue."

This seems to be the same moral logic that I used in grade school, when I tried to convince my mother she should overlook my cookie-stealing habit because what I had done was relatively less offensive than some of the things my friends had done.

They were the real problem children, after all . . . .

Update: There is another aspect of this controversy that's been bothering me. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Grayson called congressional Republicans "knuckle-dragging Neanderthals."

Grayson said:

What I mean is they [Republicans] have got no plan. It's been 24 hours since I said that. Where is the Republican plan? We're all waiting to see something that will take care of the pre-existing conditions, to take care of the 40 million Americans who have no coverage at all.

I've been hearing a lot lately that health care reform has been stalled by Republican "obstructionists." But are Democrats really waiting for the Republican plan, or is Grayson just posturing?

Right now, there are three bills floating around in committee: the House tri-committee bill, the Senate Finance Committee bill, and the Senate HELP Committee bill.

One major sticking point here is the public option, but there are many other points of contention (Ezra Klein offers a good summary of the main disagreements here). In the Senate, the Finance Committee bill (the "Baucus Plan") does not include a public option, while the HELP Committee bill does.

It's true that the virtually all Republicans (with the possible exception of Olympia Snowe) have refused to support either of the bills in the Senate, but the House Blue Dog Coalition is also largely opposed to a public option. More importantly, Blue Dogs seem to strongly favor the deficit-neutral Baucus Plan. The Democratic leadership, on the other hand, seems to be leaning toward the HELP Committee bill.

If the Democrats could unite on a single plan -- and perhaps convince Snowe to come on board -- they could easily pass health care reform. The problem is that they can't.

It's not Republican "obstructionists" who are holding up health care reform at this point. Most Democrats have already abandoned all hope for a bipartisan compromise.

The central conflict is now within the Democratic party.

A Letter to Andrew Sullivan, Ctd.

Andrew Sullivan posted my second letter questioning the results of this survey. (I previously posted about this here.)

. . . And this is why I love him.

A Letter to Andrew Sullivan

9/23/09

Andrew,

I'm not sure you should take the results of this survey at face value (as you seemed to here). The sample size for the poll is 621, and the margin of error is +/- 3.9%. But only 35% of the respondents are Republican. That means that the margin of error for this subgroup is closer to +/- 6.65%. The pollster also notes that "other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify."

If you look at some of the other cross-tabulations, they're very difficult to believe. For example, according the poll, 22% those between the ages of 18 and 29 believe President Obama is the Anti-Christ. This compared to only 5% of those age 30 to 45; 9% of those age 46 to 65; and 7% of those over the age of 65.

Since when are younger people more predisposed to believe President Obama is the Anti-Christ? This contradicts every polling trend we've seen.

Anyway, I just think it's worth mentioning that conspiratorial thinking may not be as prevalent among Republicans as this poll leads us to believe.

Best,

Jeremy Biggs