Breaking: Big News Org Says Rudy Might Not Have Advantage On Terrorism!
December 29, 2007 -- 8:04 AM EST // //
Updated below.
Michael Cooper, the New York Times reporter who wrote that epic front-page fact check of Rudy's multiple falsehoods, has done it again.
In a piece today on Rudy's use of 9/11 on the campaign trail, Coop refuses to parrot the mindless conventional wisdom holding that Rudy has an "advantage on terror," something that you hear from pundits and reporters again and again. Instead, Coop does something downright heretical: He refers to actual polling on the question. To wit:
Some polls suggest that Mr. Giuliani may not have a decisive advantage on the issue of terrorism. In a New York Times/CBS News poll in September, Mr. Giuliani’s supporters were asked if they thought he would do a better job fighting terrorism compared with the other candidates running for the Republican nomination. A quarter of them said they thought Mr. Giuliani would do a better job than his opponents, but the large majority — 61 percent — said they would expect Mr. Giuliani to be about the same as the other candidates when it came to fighting terrorism.This is such an easy thing to do, and yet it's almost never done.
One side note on this. The other day, I posted some video here of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asserting barely minutes after the Bhutto assassination that the killing would rain political gold down on Rudy's presidential candidacy. In the post I ranted a bit about Scarborough's presumption that Rudy would benefit from Bhutto's death. In response I got an angry email from someone asserting that, yes, Rudy really does have an advantage on terror if you look at multiple polls.
But here's the point about this. The issue here is larger than the question of whether Rudy has an "advantage on terror" in this or that poll. Rather, the problem is the set of assumptions underlying the claim of Scarborough and others that the Bhutto killing will automatically benefit Rudy. Those assumptions are that in response to the assassination:
(1) Voters will simplistically gravitate towards the candidate who they deem "better on terror," ignoring any other criteria; and
(2) Voters will reflexively favor whichever candidate is seen as the "most willing to use force," to use one of the most loathsome phrases the pundit lexicon has to offer.
But in reality, voters' responses to violent and tumultuous international events are complex, varied, and ultimately unpredictable. There's no earthly reason to decide in advance that the electorate as a whole is uniformly incapable of having at least a somewhat nuanced reaction to global events or that voters will never respond by evaluating the candidates' actual foreign policy ideas, rather than by automatically ranking them according to who's deemed to have an "advantage on terror" or who's deemed to be "more willing to use force."
The point is, the "advantage on terror" or "who's more willing to use force" spectrum that pundits like Scarborough insist on using to predict voter reaction to such events is basically a construct, a device that cartoonishly oversimplifies the complexity of public opinion. Nonetheless, it continues to inform and define much of our political analysis and discourse to an extraordinary degree. That's the problem here.
Update: I meant Joe Scarborough, not Chuck. Apologies -- the above has been corrected.
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