Posted 10:37 PM by Robert

Subject To Substantial Change Without Notice II: Three Altered States

More from the always-questionable Los Angeles Times poll:

Bush has opened small leads — within the surveys' margin of error — in Ohio and Wisconsin, states where the presidential race was closer in Times polls taken in June. The new Times survey also finds Bush ahead in Missouri, though by a narrower margin than in June.

Bush is moving up in most new national polls, except the Fox News poll:

FOX News: Kerry +1
CNN/USAT/Gallup: Bush +3
Rasmussen: Bush +1
LA Times: Bush +3

Posted 9:55 PM by Robert

Third Ad From The Swiftees

It's short and to the point. It's also something hard for Kerry-Edwards to refute, since the campaign has essentially admitted that there was no real 1968 Christmas In Cambodia Memory for John Kerry - seared, pan-fried, fricasseed or otherwise.

Posted 10:42 AM by Robert

"Bothersome" Media Behavior

All else being equal, every social scientist, bureaucrat and researcher would prefer to have data earlier rather than later, right? If one can have the same data earlier - with no change in the reliability of that data - one's better off, one can do more, one's job is made easier. Right? Apparently not to the people the Associated Press [UPDATE: See "update" note below] interviews today in connection with the Census Bureau's release of its annual report on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (2003). Those people are mostly concerned that the data has been released earlier than it was in previous years. In fact, the AP article is mostly concerned with presenting the timing of this release as a kind of "tortious infliction of social data:" Eleven out of the total of eighteen paragraphs in the AP article are devoted to unsubstantiated speculation about the Report's early release. This is supposedly important and timely data - but not a single word is quoted from anyone expressing satisfaction over having the data sooner rather than later. One interviewee actually says that he finds the early release "bothersome." But early release without reliability costs cannot be "bothersome" except to a political partisan mostly focused on a desired election result, and not focused on the value of the data. That rather obvious fact is not discussed by the AP.

The New York Times' own article on the Report is better than the AP effort, and restricts itself to three reasonable paragraphs at the end respecting the relatively early release. But the Times does retail the Democratic criticism of the timing and includes not a single kind word from any user of the data praising its appearing sooner rather than later.

An aside: there is one howling inconsistency between this Times' article ("For campaign advisers to Senator Kerry, who have been striving to turn attention away from the bitter controversy over his Vietnam war record and toward economic issues, the new numbers were a welcome gift.") and another Times article on its front page ("The Kerry campaign continued to try to keep the [Swift boat] issue alive."). So many agendas, so many Timespersons trying in so many ways to spin the news in favor of Kerry-Edwards, that kind of thing is bound to happen. Unlike the Times, the New York Post pulls the two threads together:

[L]ike a senator scoring points in a debate, Kerry seems determined to try to have the last word, and right now, his team is crowing that it has successfully spun the story to blame the anti-Kerry ads as a sneaky Bush tactic. Republicans say they couldn't care less ? the media may be focused on that, but what real people see is that a shockingly large number of men who served with Kerry in Vietnam think he's unfit to be president. After all, 264 oppose him and just a few dozen back him.

Returning to today's Census Bureau report, here are some considerations (from the Senate Joint Economic Committee) not discussed by either the AP or the Times::

According to the Census Bureau, its poverty thresholds are not intended to be used as a complete description of what families need to live.

The poverty estimates shown in the Census report are based solely on money income before taxes and ?do not include the value of non-cash benefits such as food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, public housing, and employer-provided fringe benefits (p. 1) - and do not include many of the effects of recent tax relief, such as refundable tax credits.

Alternative and broader measures of poverty tell a different story than the more narrow headline data. In 2002, for example, the inclusion of capital gains and non-cash benefits reduced the poverty rate from 12.1 percent to 8.2 percent.

The new report from the Census Bureau confirms the cyclical nature of its poverty data. Poverty rates began to increase in 2000 as the economy began to fall into recession. In contrast, inflation-adjusted after-tax income actually increased in 2003 by more than 4 percent. It has increased by 8.6 percent since the end of the recession in 2001.

As a percentage of the total population, the number of people in the U.S. without health insurance in 2003 was not significantly different than data throughout the 1990s. It is interesting to note that the number of uninsured increased throughout the 1990s, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total population.

The number of uninsured as a percentage of total population recently peaked in 1998 at 16.3 percent. The latest Census report shows that 15.6 percent of the population was without health insurance coverage in 2003. According to the Census Bureau, ?Health insurance coverage is likely to be underreported on the Current Population Survey (CPS). While underreporting affects most, if not all, surveys, underreporting of health insurance coverage on the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) appears to be a larger problem than in other national surveys that ask about insurance (p. 52).

[For more information about health insurance coverage is in The Complex Challenge of the Uninsured. The full report can be found here. Chart: Percentage of Uninsured Below Recent Peaks;
Full Report: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (2003)]

Today the Times and especially the AP are concerned about the early release of the Census Bureau report, and neither of them locate a single user of this important report who actually gained anything from its early release. Of course, a few days ago the Times led the AP and much of the media in chastising the Education Department for failing to present an early report analyzing the first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools. The Times naively and embarrassingly signed onto a tendentious, bad analysis by the American Federation of Teachers purporting to "show" charter school students doing worse than students in regular public schools. Kausfiles and Eduwonk thoroughly dismembered the AFT report and the Times' role. An article in OpinionJournal discrediting the AFT report by William G. Howell, Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard was more withering of the Times' role:

It is not unusual for interest groups to issue misleading reports that further their political agenda. And for this reason, newspapers generally ignore them, treat them with great skepticism, or make sure they vet the study with independent observers. Not so in the case of the recently released study of charter schools issued by the American Federation of Teachers, which, after receiving top billing in the right-hand corner of the front page of yesterday's New York Times, was picked up by news media across the country.

The AFT analysis was so bad that even the Times distanced itself from it in a later article:

Statistics culled by the American Federation of Teachers from a national examination and then published on the front page of The New York Times revealed that charter schools, one of the most ballyhooed reforms, actually trail conventional public schools in bringing children of various ages, races, and incomes to proficiency in math and reading. .... Now, however, is the time to let go of the guilty pleasures of payback. The instant polarization that followed the charter school report misrepresented the issue in dangerous ways. .... Charter schools also enroll a higher proportion of racial minorities than do public schools as a whole. ... Thus, even as trenchant a critic of charter schools as Gene V. Glass, a professor of education at Arizona State University, has found himself leery of seizing on the data released by the American Federation of Teachers.

So the Times and the AP had no trouble signing onto what the Times now admits was a transparent partisan criticism of the Education Department disseminating premature, bad data. And now the AP spends lots and lots of ink questioning the earlier release of supposedly important data whose reliability has not been impaired by that release, and neither the AP nor the Times note that early release of data is better or include important and available information in their articles.

Now that's "bothersome."

UPDATE: The progression of the AP version of this story is curious. What seems to have been the first AP version was headlined "Poverty, Health Insurance Stats Draw Fire" and concerned almost nothing but unsubstantiated accusations that the timing of the release of the Census Bureau data was "politically motivated." The story seems to have evolved under the name of the same author (Genaro C. Armas), eventually with a new headline "Ranks of Poverty, Uninsured Rose in 2003," where it started small and without reference to "political motivation" - concentrating on how this was a "a double dose of bad economic news during a tight re-election campaign for President Bush." Over the next several hours, the story repeatedly appeared under the same author's name and grew longer through several versions (here and here and here and here) - eventually merging the "double dose of bad for Bush" theme with the "political timing" theme, as in this version. Eventually, the AP may have decided that the unsubstantiated "politically motivated timing" accusations were not really "news," because the AP (or the Times) substituted the current version of the story under the old link. The newest version of the AP story - which is the version to which the first AP link in the main post above has been redirected by the AP (or the Times) - contains no references to the Democratic accusations whatsoever.

No version of the story includes any reference to any actual user of this important CB data being more satisfied to receive the data earlier than in past years.

Thanks to an astute reader who e-mailed to point out the deletion of the Democratic accusations.

Posted 11:48 PM by Robert

Subject To Substantial Change Without Notice

Today, a few days before the Republican Convention begins, the Los Angeles Times is reporting on its new poll. It's not a good idea to take the Los Angeles Times opinion polls too seriously. The sampling methodology is often ridiculous and there are lots of other signs that the polling is largely result oriented. But there is one very interesting finding from the poll - a finding buried by the Times deep within its article and squeezed into just one sentence:

Those results suggested that a substantial part of the electorate remained open to change.

Gee, wasn't this supposed to be the election in which the electorate was completely polarized early? Isn't this the election in which there is a dearth of "persuadable voters" - a dearth that is supposed to account for the lack of a significant Kerry-Edwards post-Convention "bounce?"

But now the Times has a poll that suggests that a substantial part of the electorate remained open to change - and the finding gets buried way down deep.

My, my.

It's hard to know what to make of the rest of the poll or the article, since the Times' track record is as poor as its analysis of its polling results is pretentious. But here's the opening passage:

President Bush heads into next week's Republican National Convention with voters moving slightly in his direction since July amid signs that Sen. John F. Kerry has been nicked by attacks on his service in Vietnam, a Times poll has found. For the first time this year in a Times survey, Bush led Kerry in the presidential race, drawing 49% among registered voters, compared with 46% for the Democrat. In a Times poll just before the Democratic convention last month, Kerry held a 2-percentage-point advantage over Bush.

The reader can make of that what she likes. But I do note that it seems a little odd that right up front the Times is focused on comparing where Bush-Cheney stands now with the standing of Kerry-Edwards just before the Democratic Convention. It's as if the Times is just itching to compare the Kerry-Edwards non-Convention-bounce with whatever convention "bounce" may result from the Republican Convention - a "bounce" that would, of course, be reduced by the rise in the incumbent's standing in the poll now. Of course, Mr. Bush is rising in many national polls, including polls that don't seem to massage their findings for effect - a group that doesn't include the nutty Zogby poll, which is reporting that Mr. Bush continues to lose ground. But the Times sampling methodology and other polling and reporting irregularities often allow pro-Democratic results to be extracted even where better polls show something very different - a path the Times is declining to follow at the moment.

Is the Times reporting a rise in the President's standing in the hopes of facilitating a future story about the President's disappointing post-Convention "bounce?" Who knows. It says a lot about the Los Angeles Times that one just lets it all go with "Who knows."

But one certainly and easily finds signs that the phrasing of the poll questions has been designed to obscure the extent of the problems the Swiftees have caused for Kerry-Edwards. For example, consider this cheesey tidbit:

18% of those surveyed said they "believe that Kerry misrepresented his war record and does not deserve his war medals," while 58% said Kerry "fought honorably and does deserve" the medals.

That seems to be good news for Senator Kerry. But this dichotomy does not capture the threat posed by the Swiftee accusations to John Kerry. Voters don't have to conclude that John Kerry doesn't deserve his medals in order to believe that John Kerry has exaggerated and/or misrepresented his war record and injuries. Bob Dole, for example, has savagely criticised John Kerry with these well-reported comments:

One day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, `I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn't the only one in Vietnam. .... And here's, you know, a good guy, a good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out.

Mr. Dole apparently does not believe "that Kerry misrepresented his war record and does not deserve his war medals" and does believe that Kerry "fought honorably and does deserve" the medals. But Mr. Dole also believes that John Kerry has been exaggerating the significance of his war record and of his injuries - and that John Kerry should apologise for some of his excessive anti-war comments.

In other words, the Times analysis implies that Kerry-Edwards would be in great shape if everyone were thinking like Bob Dole. But that's not right.

Posted 6:22 PM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose

One of the particularly pathetic aspects of the Kerry-Edwards response to the Swiftees' assault on John Kerry's post-Vietnam anti-war record is that the assault, and even its finer structure, was easy to see coming, as was noted by the Man Without Qualities way back on February 22:

So far, the media have been very weak in discussing Kerry's post-Vietnam-return antiwar activities - or the rest of his past, for that matter. After all, many of the people now involved in the mainstream media of Kerry's age participated in many of the same activities. The nation has learned to forgive them. Even Jane Fonda has apologized for some of what she did in the depths of her Vietnam era insanity - and on this point Ms. Fonda is more responsible than Senator Kerry, who does not apologize but instead just misrepresents his past. But if Kerry keeps pushing Vietnam, the Bush campaign won't be so gentle -and, ultimately, the media won't remain gentle, either. At some point Senator Kerry is going to have to stop misrepresenting his antiwar statements and outright apologize for some of them - especially his assertions to Congress that American soldiers were routinely war criminals. Veterans on the campaign trail are going to demand that of him - to his face.

Isn't that exactly what's happening now?

Posted 10:34 AM by Robert

A Big, Bad Number For The Man From Massachusetts

Forty-six percent (46%) of those surveyed by the Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll now believe John Kerry is either exaggerating the truth (31%) or lying (15%) about his experiences in Vietnam while only thirty-nine percent (39%) now believe Senator Kerry is telling the truth. And that's before the public has had a chance to digest Kerry-Edwards' new admission that John Kerry's first Purple Heart may have been improperly awarded for an unintentionally self-inflicted wound and that Senator Kerry's own journal records that his boat had not been fired upon at the time of the supposed "engagement" for which that Purple Heart was awarded. One should expect those developments will further erode the Senator's credibility and standing.

Ouch!

Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush each attract 47% of the vote according to that Rasmussen poll - and the President is moving up in other polls, too. In my view, that 47% number is likely yet another disaster for Kerry-Edwards because the President and his campaign appear to be lying rather low at the moment - and are not making big efforts to get his poll numbers up. I believe they likely do not want to risk the grotesque mistake committed by the Democrats of peaking before the Convention - thereby destroying the post-Convention "bounce" and all sense of momentum. The Rassmussen Poll also confirms that the President hit a home run in proposing to bring home many American troops, with 59% of poll respondents approving the President's proposal. But John Kerry opposes that proposal.

Of course, the ever more preposterous Zogby Poll is always to be taken solely as comic relief - but then, its low numbers for the incumbent leave room for the bigger and MORE MEDIA ATTENTION GETTING post convention "bounce!"

Kerry-Edwards is now a prototype of a Presidential campaign adrift and without any momentum whatsoever at a time they should be in full throttle. Kerry-Edwards has become a campaign for the students at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to study, the way students at the medical school across the river study donated cadavers.

Posted 9:05 AM by Robert

Unsubstantiated Accusations From The New York Times?

An astute reader e-mails an excellent observation:

Both Bumiller and Zernike and Alessandra Stanley's articles in today's New York Times contain a phrase revolve around the concept of "substantiated." The Bumiller and Zernike article calls the Swift Boat Veterans' charges "mostly unsubstantiated" while Stanley says the charges "have not been substantiated."

It was my understanding that in the newspaper business, "substantiated" simply meant independent sources who said the same thing. While there is a lot of dispute about the charges, there are numerous eyewitness sources unconnected with the two authors of Unfit for Command who have made these charges. Of course, to call the charges "disputed," as they should be, would cast the controversy in an entirely different light, because no one thinks it is wrong to air "disputed" charges; the name we have for that process is called an election.

Does the Times have a different meaning of "substantiated" than the one I understand?

The Times seems to be treating the testimony of everyone who endorses the Swiftee accusations - even the testimony of actual, live witnesses on the scene in South East Asia - as incapable of substantiating the "unsubstantiated" Swiftee accusations against John Kerry. If so, that would be more than odd. How would the Times apparent terminology work in other contexts? For example, is a murder conviction that is proved "only" by the testimony of accusing eyewitnesses really an "unsubstantiated" conviction or one that is "mostly unsubstantiated" or one that has "not been substantiated" - even where the courts find that the crime has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt by exactly that testimony, which often happens? By way of another example, the Constitution provides that no Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. Would the Times report that a conviction of "treason" on the testimony of two eye witnesses to an overt act was "unsubstantiated?" (Of course, just to be clear, no one is suggesting that John Kerry ever committed treason, although he did accuse himself of committing war crimes.) The Swiftees do seem to have many more than two witnesses testifying for many of their accusations.

The Times terminology would be especially odd in this case because at least some of John Kerry's exploits on which some of his honors were predicated seem to be documented only by his own word. In other words, those honors were documented not just by the testimony of only one witness, but of a highly interested witness with a big conflict of interest. In the curious apparent argot of the Times, that would seem to make at least some of those honors "mostly unsubstantiated" or lead to a conclusion that the honors "have not been substantiated." Is that the conclusion the Times or Kerry-Edwards wants the public - or the language - to accept?

Strange it was. Passing strange.

Posted 3:43 PM by Robert

Justice Stings

Injustice is relatively easy to bear: what stings is justice. --H.L. Mencken (1880-1956).

Senator John Forbes Kerry is discovering the sting of Menken's observation first hand. The second Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertisement is unassailable on credibility grounds. Worse for kerry-Edwards, the second ad cuts to the core of what really angers this veterans group - and so many other veterans. There is no hidden agenda here. John Kerry is now up against the pure power of the truth.

The fact is that it is hugely unlikely that Kerry-Edwards can retain any of the modest sympathy from veterans that the phony patriotic act and speeches so dominating the Democratic convention cultivated at such great expense. This second ad makes that point with devastaing succinctness.