Thoughts on Polling Data

The latest figures from RealClear Polling suggest, unsurprisingly, that President Trump is underwater on literally every issue.  Obviously, these numbers are continuously in flux, so you’ll have to trust Curmie that these were the figures when he was writing this piece.  (Statistics are accurate as of the early evening of April 4, he promises.)  Overall, he’s at -16.  On the issues: -23 on the economy; -17.1 on foreign policy; -8.7 on immigration; -31 on inflation; -4.2 on crime; -15.7 on Iran; -18.6 on Russia/Ukraine; and -5.9 on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

RealClear Polling draws its numbers from a host of different polls, then averages them.  Curmie is skeptical of polls in general, so these numbers may or may not mean literally anything.  Moreover, some of the poll results are now months old.  This can, of course, lead to a wide divergence in results.  There’s a difference of 59 points (!) between the Marquette (+34) and Gallup (-25) polls on Israel/Palestine, for example (that Marquette number is literally 30 points higher than any other poll on the same topic).  Also, both those surveys were taken over four months ago, so they don’t necessarily reflect anyone’s current thinking.  Among polls taken in the last two months, Trump fares best (+4) in Morning Consult on immigration and worst (-45) in Reuters/Ipsos on inflation; both those polls were taken in late March.

Another factor in all this is that it’s difficult to come to a consensus on the taxonomies themselves.  Take tariffs, for instance.  Are they foreign policy, or the economy, or more specifically inflation, since that’s the way most of us experience their effects?   What Curmie wants to concentrate on today, Gentle Reader, is not the overall numbers (Trump is a terrible President.  Duh.), but the responses to specific issues relative to each other.

It will come as no surprise that Curmie would be in the “disapprove” category both overall and on most issues.  He’d have to choose between negativity and neutrality on crime, perhaps.  Otherwise, it’s disapproval straight down the line.  More to the point here, the other issue that concerns him the least is inflation, which certainly is a cause for concern, but, except in terms of the contrast between campaign promises and reality, isn’t awful.  Yes, it will get worse unless someone considerably smarter than Trump—the average platypus, for example—finds a way out of the diversion war excursion in Iran, but we’re not there yet, at least officially. 

Curmie does understand why other people prioritize inflation as a negative, however: they see it first-hand.  We all do.  One of Curmie’s more GOP-leaning friends recently described food prices as “skyrocketing,” which is an accurate description for some but not all groceries.  By contrast, the fact that all the major stock market indices are down for the calendar year and we’re currently in a “correction” (down 10% from the previous high) doesn’t hit home unless you’re directly affected. 

Curmie’s retirement nest egg dropped almost 5% (not even counting the loss of buying power caused by inflation) just in March, but if you don’t have investments or you’re young enough that retirement funds aren’t an immediate concern, then it’s the fact that gasoline is a dollar or more a gallon more expensive than it was even a month ago, or that Netflix just raised their rates (again) that catches your attention. 

Plus, those price hikes are happening now, not a few months ago.  So we’re all attuned to those increases: they affect us all, and they’re on our minds right now.  The relationship between reduced buying power and the conflict with Iran is clear, but it’s more complex, and unless we have someone we care about who’s going to be shipped out, we’re (relatively speaking) unaffected in the short term, or at least we think we are.  So what’s happening in Iran isn’t as important to the average American now as, Curmie fears, it will be.

Those Israel/Palestine numbers are intriguing, too.  Perhaps it’s worth noting that whereas the page and the URL both reference “Palestine,” the link to the page says “Hamas,” instead.  That’s kind of a tell, don’t you think, Gentle Reader?  The survey results are going to depend a lot on how the questions are asked.  Ask Curmie whether he supports Israel against Hamas, and the answer will be unequivocally affirmative.  But if the “other side” becomes the Palestinian people, then Curmie’s response will change—maybe not 180˚, but certainly more than 90, enough to not be on Israel’s side, in other words. 

So Trump’s unconditional support for all things Israeli (or simply anti-Muslim) becomes more problematic.  Still, at least until relatively recently, that assistance was manifested primarily in financial and rhetorical terms; how many respondents will have changed their minds (in either direction) when military action started happening (not in Palestine, but you know what I mean, Gentle Reader) is difficult to determine.

Trump’s strongest area in the polls is crime, and the fact is that there’s little either positive or negative that comes to mind immediately.  Folks generally don’t have a lot of time to think about their responses to survey questions.  Given time to consider the boatload of pardons to drug lords, sex offenders, and those who actually attacked cops on January 6, Curmie has got to go with a negative rating, although still not as vehemently so as in other areas.

The topic Curmie finds most intriguing is the war between Russia and Ukraine.  Once again, the data is a little old, with only the Big Data Poll (-20) conducted in the last month, but the results have stayed pretty consistent over time: approval rates range between 34 and 41, disapprovals between 51 and 59.  What’s interesting here is that this is an “oh, yeah” topic.  That is, it’s no longer at or even near the top of many people’s lists of the most important issues.  When reminded, though, the majority of people responded with a version of “yeah, he fucked that up, too.”  Note, too, that the disapprovals are always not merely a plurality, but a majority.

Somewhat surprising but hardly shocking is another simple fact: while the American people don’t like Trump’s performance by a margin of 56.9-40.9, and the generic congressional vote favors the Democrats by 47.6-41.6, opinions on the Democratic Party are unfavorable by 20 points (55.6-35.6): worse than the GOP’s -15.4, and worse still than Trump’s favorable/unfavorable rating (not the same as his job approval, listed above) of -13.4.  Democratic smugness is explicitly contra-indicated.

Curmie dislikes the Democrats, too, although he’ll still probably vote for them for the same reason he’s voted for them more often than not in recent years: they’re not Republicans, and they’re especially Not Trump.  There comes a point when being Not Trump will no longer be sufficient.  Unfortunately, Dear Leader is so aggressively narcissistic, belligerent, and downright stupid (or treasonous; that might be an option, too), that virtually anything the likes of Newsom, Pritzker, AOC, et al. do will inevitably be seen as reactive. 

Curmie has read all the doomsday scenaria about stock market crashes, runaway inflation, international food shortages, etc., which are projected to happen before the end of the calendar year.  He’s not buying that rhetoric—not yet, at least.  But the only hope we have to avoid a collapse of epic proportions is that enough Republican Congresscritters will exercise a little concern for the nation and indeed the world instead of for their own standing with Dear Leader.  Replacing Mike Johnson with someone with both a brain and a backbone would be an excellent place to start.

That could happen.  So could the Rapture.  (Hey, it’s Easter.  Gotta be thinking about all the possibilities.)

Barney Frank may be a Democrat, but he’s no democrat

Barney Frank: he should know better than this.

Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank did a lot of good things in office. He served as a champion for gay rights, as he was the first Congressman to voluntarily come out as gay, and the first to marry a same-sex partner while in office. He chaired the House Financial Services Committee, from which position he co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Act, an important if bureaucracy-laden reform of the financial sector. Known for quick wit and a bluntness his admirers adored and everyone else despised (remember “trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table” line in a town hall meeting on Obamacare?), Frank was regarded as one of the smartest and most eloquent politicians around.

Even his supporters would have to admit, however, that his cleverness sometimes smelled too much of glibness, pomposity, and privilege, and his ethics were, shall we say, not always beyond reproach. Since deciding not to run for re-election in 2012 and being passed over to fill the remainder of John Kerry’s Senate term when the latter was confirmed as Secretary of State, Frank has become the Democrats’ answer to Sarah Palin: a divisive has-been who can be counted on to say something controversial any time a microphone is within range. And that means that a lot of what he says is utter crap.

Witness, for example, this screed in Politico this week, urging supporters of Bernie Sanders (and, by implication, those of Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chaffee, and Jim Webb) to be good little boys and girls and roll over and play dead so that the anointed Hillary Clinton can cruise to the nomination and be able to save all the millions of dollars donated to her campaign by her cronies on Wall Street and in the oil business for the general election. Needless to say, he doesn’t use precisely those words, but that is his clear intent.

Like his chosen candidate, Frank is more interested in wielding power than in making the right decision, and, again like HRC, he’s at best amoral about the process. Allow me to paraphrase Frank’s argument: “Finding a candidate the members of the Democratic Party want to support is of little concern. After all, what do they know? We should nominate the obvious choice, just like we did in 2008. Oops. Bad example. I mean, we should nominate the electable one, not the one with actual ideas, like we did in 2004, because that worked out really well. Oh. Well. We should nominate Hillary right now without all that messy input from… you know… voters, because… because I said so.”

Because it’s taken me a couple of days to get to this story, there’s already an excellent response out there from Cristóbal Reyes at Young Progressive Voices. Reyes does an admirable job of countering Frank’s anti-democratic impulses, and doesn’t pull any punches:

It is cynical to believe that hand-picking a candidate is preferable to allowing the people to choose, and egomaniacal to suggest that your allies will object to your truth simply because you had the audacity to speak it, even though there is next to no truth in your words. There is nothing tactical or strategic about it. The arguments are based on falsehood and speculation and protected behind the need for one such as myself to disagree, as if doing so will validate your nonsensical submission.

Still, whereas Reyes doesn’t concede the electability argument, he rightfully acknowledges that the media—occupied mostly by Clintonian faux progressives—are falling over themselves to declare Sanders unelectable. I think they’re wrong. This is not to say I’m predicting a Sanders presidency, but I’d say the only announced candidate on the Democratic side who has literally no chance of being elected President is Jim Webb, and even he might be in the running for VP.  That is, completely apart from the Stalinistic stench of Frank’s thesis, it’s also wrong on the facts.

Frank’s key assertion is this: “There is… no chance—perhaps regrettably—for Sanders to win a national election.” If I might channel Stevie Nicks for a moment, that argument is hauntingly familiar. Where HAS Curmie heard that before? Oh, yeah, it was the riff employed by Hillary Clinton herself (and, of course, the wannabe First Husband) to attract superdelegates when it was becoming clear that Barack Obama was the people’s choice (or, rather, the Democratic voters’ choice) for the Democratic nomination: “he cannot win.” Obama, of course, took 365 of the necessary 270 electoral votes that fall. Oops.

Curmie—in a previous blogging iteration—commented more than once on the 2008 election, specifically with respect to the “horserace” elements of the Democratic nomination process. On April 24, a mere three weeks after Clinton was using electability as an issue, I called on her to drop out of the race for two reasons: the nomination process was de facto over because Obama had a virtually insurmountable lead in actual delegates (as opposed to polls taken over six months before the Iowa caucuses), and because “he generally (admittedly, not always) fares better than Clinton in head-to-head match-ups with Senator McCain.”

Two days later, I posted a state-by-state analysis of which of the two candidates—Obama or Clinton—would have a better chance of winning. The result: a literal dead heat. A couple of weeks later still, when any candidate more interested in the country than in herself would have dropped out and endorsed her fellow Democrat, Hillary Clinton was running a borderline racist campaign, conflating “hard-working Americans” and “white Americans,” and sending the aptly named Harold Ickes out to say that Obama couldn’t win. Here’s Newsweek’s Suzanne Smalley:

[Ickes] stressed that if Obama can't win Florida or Ohio—both states in which he has polled less favorably than Clinton—then states like New Mexico and Nevada will take on more importance. And Ickes suggested Obama can’t win in those places either.

Obama, of course, won all four of those states.

By the way, it wasn’t until June, when the proverbial fat lady had not only already sung but also taken several curtain calls, that then-Senator Clinton finally conceded the obvious and withdrew from the race. It’s more than a little ironic—not to say disgusting—that Clinton minions are now calling on everyone to make way for her candidacy before a single vote has been cast, lest it hurt the party’s chances.

More to the point, just as was the case in the 2008 election, it’s not exactly clear that Clinton is indeed the more electable candidate. Saying it’s so doesn’t mean it’s so, and the evidence is certainly a good deal short of overwhelming. A Quinnipiac poll released this week, for example, shows that in three important swing states, Clinton and Sanders fare about equally well against three plausible GOP contenders—Bush, Rubio, and Walker. All three Republicans beat both Democrats in Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia. Clinton does better against Bush and Rubio in CO and VA, Sanders does better in IA; against Walker, Clinton does better in VA, Sanders in CO, and they’re the same in IA. Pretty much a wash in those terms, with a slight edge to Clinton.

But if we look past that bottom-line number, it certainly appears that Sanders has much better odds of improving his standing. In favorability, Sanders is at a -2 in CO, with a huge 39% not knowing enough about him to have an opinion; Clinton is at -21, with a 56% negative rating. In Iowa, Sanders is at +4, Clinton at -23, again with lots of DK/NA (don’t know/no answer) for Sanders and 56% negatives for Clinton. In Virginia, Clinton’s best state of the three, Sanders is at +1, Clinton at -9; the DK/NAs for Sanders are at 43%, and Clinton has 50% negatives. That gives Sanders an overall +1 between the three states to Clinton’s -18: nearly a 20 point advantage for Sanders.

Sanders is already in plus-territory in two of the three states, and needs only break even there with voters who don’t yet know much about him to stay ahead of Clinton in this metric even if every voter currently undecided about Clinton decides they like her. In Virginia, Sanders needs approval from only a slight majority of IDKs to best her there, as well.

The contrast is even starker in the “honest and trustworthy” metric. Clinton’s numbers are scary: -28, -26, and -16; her best state of the three, Virginia, gives her a 55% negative rating. Sanders? +17, +21, +26. Sanders wins this category by 45 points in Colorado, 47 in Iowa, and 42 in Virginia. Wow. Clinton does do a little better than Sanders in “strong leadership qualities,” averaging a +8 to Sanders’s +7. Anyone want to try to tell me that’s a significant difference?

True, a single poll doesn’t tell us much, especially if, as in this case, it’s not only very early but also likely to be an outlier. The Daily Kos’s Steve Singiser spells out some of the problems with giving too much weight to this data. (Interestingly, Singiser discusses only Clinton’s numbers, seeming to take Sanders’s at face value.) On the other hand, Quinnipiac is a well-respected polling operation, and whereas it’s likely they’re off a little, it’s unlikely they’re totally out in left field. In other words, it probably isn’t true that Clinton averages 54% negatives in the three states, but I’d be willing to bet they’re at least well into the 40s. And I’m virtually certain she’s in negative territory in the trustworthiness metric, too, although perhaps not by more than 20 points.

And there’s a new Gallup poll, too, this one nation-wide. It shows that Sanders has grown in both favorables and unfavorables since March (as would be expected). Meanwhile, Clinton’s favorables dropped and unfavorables climbed, leaving her at an overall -3. Sanders, meanwhile, is at +4, albeit with lower numbers than Clinton in both categories simply because she is better known. Clinton does have a substantial lead among Democrats, with an overall +56, compared to Sanders’s +29, but the ratios are almost identical: Clinton gets a favorable rating 4.1 times as often as an unfavorable one from Democrats expressing an opinion; Sanders is at 3.9. Moreover, Clinton’s positives are down since March among both constituencies who even might vote for her: down 5 points among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, down 6 points among non-leaning independents.

Indeed, Sanders is the only Democrat in positive numbers in favorability ratio, and there’s only one Republican, Marco Rubio, who can match Sanders in both raw and net favorability scores (Sanders: 24-20, +4; Rubio: 29-23, +6). Putative GOP front-runner Donald Trump, by the way, checks in at 32-56, -24. That’s the worst in either party by 17 points!

There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton is the candidate to beat on the Democratic side. But she was eight years ago, too, and we know how that turned out. Indeed, it sort of speaks to desperation on the part of a purported front-runner that she and her surrogates are resorting to electability arguments before voting even starts, especially when the last time we heard about a Clinton primary opponent’s “unelectability,” he got a higher percentage of the raw vote than any Democrat since LBJ. So before we simply gift-wrap the nomination and present it to HRC like a donation to her Superpac, let’s see how those numbers look when more people know Sanders.

This is really about whether the voters are going to get a say or whether we just turn over the process to the power elites. Barney Frank should be ashamed of advocating for the latter.

FLOHPA, Romney, and the Imminent Dusk

Conventional wisdom has it that whichever Presidential candidate wins two out of three of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania is really likely to win the election. In fact, the last candidate to win the Presidency without winning FLOHPA was named John F. Kennedy.

This is not good news for Mitt Romney. The numbers will vary a little from day to day, but as I write this, Nate Silver is predicting all three states for President Obama, with likelihoods of 97% in Pennsylvania, 83% in Ohio, and 68% in Florida. Those aren’t close. If Obama wins every state where Silver gives him an 80% chance, he wins. If he wins every state Silver says he’s got better than a 2/3 chance, he gets 329 electoral votes. He’s closer to winning North Carolina (39%) than to losing Florida (68%), his weakest current win.

But the news gets worse for the challenger: there are remarkably few undecided voters. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for Governor Romney to make a comeback, but he needs help. Even a series of excellent debate performances is unlikely to be enough. Obama needs to do something stupid, either in the debates or in his job, per se. And Romney needs to avoid the foot-in-mouth performances of recent weeks. Good luck with that, Mitt.

Here’s the thing: Huffington Post’s analysis of a host of polling data gives Obama over 50% in Pennsylvania. That means that a fair number of people who have already made up their minds will have to actually change their minds if Romney is to win the state. In Ohio, it’s currently 49-43; Florida is 49-45. That means that if no one currently intending to vote for the incumbent actually switches sides, Pennsylvania is off the table, and Romney would need to win 88% of the undecideds to take Ohio, and 83% to win Florida. The chances of that happening: well, certainly extant, but not great. The Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS News poll (shown above): well, it’s all over but the shouting.

Of course, it is possible to lose two out of three of the trio of battleground states with the most electoral votes and still pull out the election. If President Obama were to win only those states HuffPo describes as “Strong Obama,” he’d win Pennsylvania and Ohio and lose the election, with 265 electoral votes. By HuffPo’s calculus, there are seven states that will decide the election: if Obama wins New Hampshire, he’s guaranteed at least a tie; if he wins any of the others—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia—with or without New Hampshire, he wins a second term. Of these, Obama currently leads in all but North Carolina… actually, he leads there, too, but by a miniscule margin well within the margin of error. Obama is currently running at 49% in five of the swing states, 48% in one, and 47% in the other. Romney has a 47, five 45s, and a 44.

Talking Points Memo tells an equally if not more grim story for the challenger, with Obama currently at 49.9% in Pennsylvania and 49.8% in the other two FLOHPA states. Romney needs over 99% of undecideds in the Keystone State, 97% in Ohio, and 96% of Floridians. That’s a Herculean task for a candidate who isn’t exactly playing the game flawlessly.

True, there’s the Rasmussen poll, the most right-leaning survey that anyone takes even a little seriously. But even that gives Obama 237 “safe” electoral votes to 181 for Romney, with 15 votes leaning towards Romney and 105 toss-ups. 76 of the 105 show Obama with a lead. In other words, if the Rasmussen poll were precisely accurate (and it has traditionally over-estimated Republicans), Obama would cruise to a comfortable 313-225 victory.

It’s no wonder the Romney team is clinging to fictions about polling samples and such. According to this silliness, Romney in fact has a comfortable lead. Look, Rasmussen (!) has it 313-225 for Obama, albeit with some of that margin a little uncertain. The Fox News (!) poll has Obama/Biden with a 5-point lead nationally. I can’t find a state-by-state analysis from them, but their overall polling fits right in with everyone else’s, all of which show Obama with a small-to-moderate, not insurmountable, lead. The NBC/Wall Street Journal (!) poll gives the President a five-point lead among registered voters and a six-point lead among likely voters. Everyone… well, virtually everyone, agrees.

If you need a dentist or a plumber or a mechanic, you go to a professional. We can argue about which one is best, but when every single one of them tells you that you need a root canal or a new toilet or a carburetor, I really don’t care what your friend Bob down the street says, especially if he’s a restaurant manager or a football coach or an insurance salesman. Things could change in this election; they have in the past. John Kerry made a late run, for example, although it turned out to be not quite enough. But to say that Romney is currently ahead by 6-10 points is lunacy. Period.

This whole affair does fit remarkably well with recent trends in Republican thinking, however. They don’t trust economists about the economy, scientists about science, teachers about teaching. And whereas the Pentagon has certainly earned our distrust over the years, there are those Congressional buffoons (cough… cough… Paul Ryan… cough) who accuse the military brass of lying when they say they need less money down the road. So it’s no wonder they don’t trust professional pollsters, either. Many things that used to be true have been turned on their head in the last half-generation of politics; foremost among them: Republican recognition of the notion that experts know whereof they speak. But global climate change really exists, teaching to the test doesn’t really educate our children, and waterboarding really is a war crime… and it doesn’t matter what the preachers and the political hacks have to say about it.

Still, it’s a minority of the GOP that gives this particular silliness any credibility. Even the chronically if not acutely moronic Erick Erickson gets this one right. Sure, he’s skeptical that his guy is as far behind as the polls say he is, and it’s easier to rally the troops for a close race than for one in which your candidate is getting crushed. But his commentary leaves no doubt that whereas he may be guilty of a little wishful thinking, he’s not in the tin-foil hat brigade on this one:

I do not believe the polls are all wrong. I do not believe there is some intentional, orchestrated campaign to suppress the GOP vote by showing Mitt Romney losing. I actually believe that Mitt Romney trails Barack Obama. I think Republicans putting their hopes in the polls all being wrong is foolish.

I do understand Republicans’ frustration. After all, Obama ought to be eminently beatable, and the GOP chose the most electable of their bevy of second-teamers… well, not counting Jon Huntsman, who is actually a grown-up, but who, predictably, was gone by February. Of course, we’ve been here before, in the other direction. George W. Bush’s first term was even worse than Obama’s, but the Dems chose the “electable” John Kerry, a stinking rich Massachusetts pol who, unlike his primary opposition, didn’t have much in the way of core values. And they lost. Perhaps, Gentle Reader, you might notice something interesting about that description.

We’re left with two major points. 1). This race has shifted, largely because of Mitt Romney’s ineptness, from being about the incumbent’s record to being about what an utter disaster the challenger is. That’s good news for Mr. Obama. 2). It isn’t over. That’s good news—the only good news—for Mr. Romney. I unabashedly steal the closing reference from a piece by Jason Linkins and Elyse Siegel on the Huffington Post: for the Romney campaign, to quote Bob Dylan, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

It's Finger-Pointing Season. Again.

The decision by Standard and Poor’s to downgrade the US government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ has, unsurprisingly, led to a veritable feeding frenzy of finger-pointing, blame-assigning, and outright silliness.

This is serious business—the government’s credit-worthiness wasn’t thus questioned even during the Great Depression—but the prognostications of doom and gloom are no doubt exaggerated. For example, Edmund L. Andrews of the National Journal, hardly a bastion of liberalism, argues that:

Credit ratings, though hugely important, are only one of many factors affecting the cost of borrowing. The more important factors are broad forces of supply and demand for Treasuries, and the outlook for inflation and growth. That’s why Japan has been downgraded three different times in the past decade (it’s currently AA-) yet its long-term rates are lower than those on U.S. Treasuries.

And let’s face it, it’s pragmatic concerns like the cost of borrowing, not the symbolism of an official rating, that really matters. Moreover, as Andrews also notes

It’s also true that S&P is hardly some kind of Delphic Oracle. It and the other rating agencies were almost criminally negligent about the risks of subprime mortgages during the housing bubble. And it’s not as if S&P told investors anything about U.S. fiscal problems on Friday that they didn’t already know.

In announcing their move, S&P proclaimed “Standard & Poor's takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.'s finances on a sustainable footing.” Moreover, the rationale also criticizes the recent debt-ceiling agreement for “[envisioning] only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

That said, the analysis by Judd Legum at ThinkProgress seems fairly accurate: “In explaining their decision Standard & Poor’s cites both the decision by Republicans in Congress to turn the debt ceiling into a political football and the [Republicans’] intransigence on tax increases.” He cites a series of quotations from S&P’s explanatory document to bolster his point:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

[...]It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options.

[...]The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them.

[...]Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Most notably, Legum points to the “revised upside scenario,” which

incorporates $950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration is advocating. In this scenario, we project that the net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 77% in 2015 and to 78% by 2021 [vs. 79% in 2015 and 85% in 2021, as predicted if the Bush tax cuts are not allowed to expire].

Andrews concurs:

The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock. Part of S&P’s gloom, moreover, stemmed explicitly from what a new assessment of the GOP’s ability to block any and all tax increases.

In other words, the GOP’s willingness to play political games with something as serious as extending the debt ceiling—up to and including allowing the Donald Trumps, Pat Toomeys, and Michele Bachmanns to say remarkably stupid things without repudiation—is the real cause of the downgrade. Congressional Republicans’ puerile and petulant insistence on no new sources of revenue introduced a new element into the mix: the idea that government might be unable to meet its obligations because it chooses not to. No one serious believes the budget can be stabilized, much less balanced, without revenue enhancement: call it a tax increase, call it eliminating loopholes, call it asparagus for all I care, but more money needs to be brought into government coffers, and it needs to come mostly (not exclusively) from the people who have benefited most from tax breaks, subsidies, and loopholes: the rich.

When even S&P recognizes that, when 4000 millionaires pay no federal income tax at all, when the Balanced Budget Amendment that Rand Paul and his libertarian goon-squad wanted as a pre-condition to raising the debt ceiling is described by even Bill Kristol as “a pointless and embarrassing gimmick,” when Congress sets new records for disapproval, the GOP has a problem. The rank and file understands it. It’s the politicians themselves who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge reality.

They babble about how “the American people demand…” whatever they choose to ascribe to John Q. Public. Witness John Boehner’s proclamation that “Republicans have listened to the voices of the American people and worked to bring the spending binge to a halt.” All of which would be convincing indeed if that is in fact what the American public wanted (even if they were wrong). Except, of course, for that whole “not being true” thing that seems to haunt the GOP leadership.

Nate Silver’s analysis a couple of weeks ago is trenchant: even GOP voters favored a roughly 3:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue enhancement as their ideal debt ceiling deal. Independents were at about 2:1, Democrats essentially 1:1. There was, as Silver points out, “a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones” [emphasis his]. President Obama offered a mix of 83% cuts and 17% revenue—a position well to the right not only of the American people, but of Republican voters, and the GOP rejected it out of hand. Sooner or later, the public is going to recognize the adolescent posturing for what it is, especially since the Tea Party—whose political fortunes have been in decline since the population began to figure out just how crazy they really are—is now at just 18% in the latest New York Times poll, the lowest figure since the question started being asked.

Indeed, when we put that NYT poll (taken August 2-3) alongside the one from CNN (taken August 1), we get some pretty interesting numbers. In the chart below, I list the approval vs. disapproval ratings for a variety of political figures and groups. A + indicates an overall positive rating, a – means an overall negative rating. So, for example, a approval of 50% and a disapproval rating of 40% would result in a +10.

President Obama: +1 (NYT), -7 (CNN); specifically on debt ceiling negotiations: -1 (NYT), -7 (CNN)
Congress: -68 (NYT), -70 (CNN)
John Boehner: -27 (NYT)
Specifically on the debt ceiling deal: Congressional Republicans/ Republican leaders: -51 (NYT), -38 (CNN).
Specifically on the debt ceiling deal: Congressional Democrats/ Democratic leaders: -38 (NYT), -28 (CNN).
Debt deal should have included revenues: +6 (NYT), +20 (CNN).

Also, how about these figures from the New York Times poll: “Who do you think is mostly to blame for the federal budget deficit?” The Bush administration outpolled the Obama administration, Congress, and “someone else” combined, by 44-40%. Obama was blamed by only 15%, with “all of the above” and “combination” (neither of which was one of the prompted responses) chosen by 12%. A huge majority regarded the negotiations over the debt ceiling as an attempt to gain political advantage (82%) rather than doing what was best for the country (14%). Republicans in Congress were blamed for the difficulties in reaching an agreement by 47%, Obama and the Democrats by 29%, both (again, a volunteered response) by 20%.

The negotiations made 66% of those surveyed more pessimistic about Congress’s ability to “deal with future issues,” vs. only 12% more optimistic. Allowing the Bush tax breaks for the $250K+ crowd to expire: favored by 29 points. Impression of the Tea Party: negative by 20 points, with a huge (39 points) collection of variations on the theme of undecided. [Really?] The Tea Party has too much influence? 43%. Too little? 17%.

So… yeah… which brings us to the Republican response to all this, which is predictable in the extreme. Ultimately, I needn’t spell out all the variations on the same theme, which is basically that although Republican intransigence caused the problem, it’s all Obama’s fault, anyway. TARP was Obama’s fault. The Iraq War was Obama’s fault. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was Obama’s fault. The sacking of Constantinople was Obama’s fault. John the Baptist’s halitosis was Obama’s fault.

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t provide at least one specific example of a GOP Presidential candidate’s take—the MSNBC article on the subject (linked above for the Boehner quotation) has this: “Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor, said the downgrade is ‘a reflection of the failed leadership of President Obama. He really is inept when it comes to the economy. He's had over three years of being president. Barack Obama has had his chance and it's not working.’” Given the fact that President Obama has been in office about 31 months, which is not, in fact, “over three years” in my universe, perhaps we ought to leave the accusations of ineptness to those who can handle 3rd-grade arithmetic, eh, Tim?

The link, alas, is cowardice

One of the things any scholar does is to seek patterns other people might have missed. It becomes, in a sense, a variation on the theme of the $10K/25K/100K Pyramid. If you’d like to play along at home, here are the clues:

• a screed by Michael Moore about what Democrats need to do to maintain their control of Congress

• a story a couple of weeks ago that Senate Democrats would postpone until after the election a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone except the over-a-quarter-million-a-year-crowd

• a recent story week about how the Obama administration is issuing waivers to employers and insurance companies alike “to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new [health-care legislation’s] standards.”

• a travel advisory from the State Department about a potential terrorist attack in Europe

• a photograph of the statue of Oliver Goldsmith in front of Trinity College Dublin that came around on one of those annoying Facebook feeds

Okay… what do they have in common? The answer: Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman and philosopher. For the Goldsmith statue, the connection is that a statue of Burke is the other famous memorial at the front gates of TCD. For the others, it’s Burke’s best-known line, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Another way of putting that famous aphorism: “Have some damned balls, good guys.” With me, now?

I start with a point Moore sort of buries in his piece, but which would make a huge difference: “announce that you will force the Republican senators (who until now simply have had to say they ‘intended’ to filibuster in order to kill a bill) to have to actually filibuster! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and read from the phone book 24/7. They won't last a day. And America will see them for who they really are.” I’ve been saying this for a long time: make them do the Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” thing.

Conventional Wisdom and the New York Times story (if there’s a difference), say the reason Harry Reid is parading his signature brand of cowardice with respect to the Bush tax cuts is to “[spare] some politically vulnerable incumbents from casting a potentially difficult vote to let taxes rise for the rich.” The polls show a pretty much divided electorate, with different results apparently (to me, at least) a function of how the question is asked. Thus, a CBS News poll from late August showed that by 20 points (!) Americans believe “the tax cuts should expire for households earning over $250,000 per year.” And while a subsequent poll by CNBC seems to suggest an opposite finding, I’d argue that the difference comes in large part from the phrasing: “increasing taxes on any Americans will slow the economy and kill jobs.” (Note the italics!) Or so it would appear the question was—I pulled that phrasing from the story; the alleged “complete poll results” are, to be polite, incomplete.

By the way, lest you think that the change is better explained by when the respective polls were conducted, there’s another one from Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion, taken essentially contemporaneously with the CNBC poll. It shows a slight preference for continuing the Bush tax cuts for the middle class but not for those in the $250K income bracket. Interestingly, 54% of Republicans don’t think that income level qualifies as “wealthy.” Really. I’m a tenured faculty member at an accredited university; my wife is the Financial Aid Director at a community college. We’d need about a 150% increase in our family income to reach that threshold. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d suggest pretty damned strongly that bringing in a quarter million dollars a year would qualify a family as well off. Certainly, they’d be doing well enough to be able to afford a modest tax increase on income over $250,000 a year.

More importantly, it doesn’t matter. The nation is, at worst, divided. And this after an onslaught of post-Citizens United decision, anonymously-funded, misrepresentations of reality. The Republicans and their minions at Fox News (or is it the other way around?) have consistently mis-defined “small business,” fiddled with statistics, and pretended that they’re interested in the deficit while making sure their fat-cat friends continue to profit from the policies that are largely responsible for creating the size and scope of the deficit to begin with.

Even more to the point: you’re supposed to be Democrats. Stand for something, dammit! Remind people of why they voted you into office to begin with. Give them a reason to re-elect you, not just to prevent that lunatic you’re running against from getting into office. You’re going to be smeared by RepubliCorp anyway, so don’t worry about them. Put together a bill that extends the tax cuts for 98+% of the country. Vote down the inevitable amendment to extend the cut for the terminally-entitled rich.

And make the sons of bitches filibuster the bill! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and, in full view of the American people, argue against a bill that would prevent a tax increase for the overwhelming majority of us. Or, alternatively, to “read from the phone bill 24/7,” demonstrating such contempt for the middle class they pretend to care about that they’ll do anything to thwart a bill that would help the 98% at the expense of the 2%. Do this before the mid-term elections and run on your attempts to help regular people, contrasted with Republicans’ petulance, arrogance, disrespect for the Senate and the citizenry alike. The chances of this happening, of course, are precisely zero, because the only thing in American political life as certain as Republican mendacity is Democratic cravenness.

We see this phenomenon again in the Obama administration’s unconscionable capitulation on healthcare. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to bargain away anything that looked like real reform (in exchange for what? and with the upside of how many Republican votes?). No, they’ve got to grant waivers to everyone with a lawyer and a lobbyist. Come on, who honestly believes that McDonald’s can’t afford to provide the very fundamental level of health-care dictated by so-called Obamacare? Or that insurance companies can’t make money except by extortion? Give me a damned break. If some company says they’ll pull out of a market, let ‘em, because they are passing up an opportunity to make money.

Indeed, there is something to be said for the claims that President Obama is a socialist. Not for the reasons the professional prevaricators of the right are claiming, of course. But the President doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the free enterprise system. Even in this economy, companies need to compete for good employees. Cutting insurance coverage isn’t going to help do that. And executives who choose to make no profit instead of some tend not to endear themselves to investors. There are times to regulate markets and times to butt out. This is the latter, especially if the rationale is somehow to avoid criticism. As Mr. Obama has repeatedly pointed out in recent days, the GOP is going to complain, regardless. So do what’s right.

A different kind of cowardice is at play in the “terrorism” nervousness. Of course there’s going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, sometime in the not-too-distant future. There’s also going to be some crazy with a gun on an American university campus, soon. (A week after the fatal incident at the University of Texas, for example, an “armed and dangerous” murder suspect was spotted on my own campus.) The chances that someone will be driving while drunk, stoned, texting, making calls on a cell phone, or otherwise not paying attention at any given moment in my small town: metaphysical certitude. I’m driving to work tomorrow. I’m also going to London over the holidays. This isn’t reckless behavior. I may be peculiar, but I’m not crazy.

I confess to being somewhat at a loss to explain the State Department’s curious warning. There doesn’t appear to be any specific new information that precipitated the announcement, and the advice is remarkable in its uselessness: “U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” Exactly what “appropriate safety measures” might constitute, we’re left to guess. Well, pretty much so, anyway: in a telephone briefing, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy argues for “common sense precautions” like avoiding unattended parcels, knowing how to use pay telephones, having contact information for the American Embassy, etc. Wow. Has the nanny state really reached the point at which we need a government edict to not be freaking stupid?

More to the point, if “we’re not recommending, that American citizens of any kind–business, tourism, study abroad–we are not–we are not, not, not saying that they should defer travel to Europe at this time, absolutely not,” then what the hell is the point? What is gained from this bizarre release? If this were the Bush administration, I’d be looking for a wag-the-dog moment, and I’m not so naïve that I believe Democratic administrations incapable of such chicanery. But there’s no reason for it: no particularly bad news to try to bury, no scandals to cover up. And, if anything, the Dems have been making inroads into the presumed GOP landslide in next month’s elections.

The best I’ve got as an explanation is pure, unadulterated cowardice. Two terms of Bush/Cheney fear-mongering apparently took their toll. Democrats are running from their own good work, avoiding confrontation instead of standing on principle (with the result that they’re beginning to look like they in fact have no principles). Americans in general are supposed to cower at the prospect of a specter which will almost certainly affect someone, but which is extremely unlikely to directly affect any particular individual. The post-9/11 bumper sticker of the American flag with the cutline “These colors don’t run” is looking increasingly fanciful.

I didn't ace this survey because I'm agnostic; I aced it because I'm educated

The recently-released Pew Research Center U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey yields some fascinating results, most notably the most headline-grabbing finding, that “Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.”

Still, it’s difficult to be surprised, for two reasons. First, those whose belief systems are outside the boundaries of normative cultural Christianity are more likely to know why they occupy that space than do those who are content to worship as their parents did, without much need for evidence or argumentation. Second, and probably more importantly, while the survey does ask a few questions about specific theological matters, it seems much more designed to test respondents’ general knowledge about religious elements in historical and cultural contexts.

To be sure, it’s pretty embarrassing that over half of Christians and nearly half of Catholics got wrong what amounts to a true-false question about transubstantiation, or that 81% of Protestants and 91% of Catholics don’t know that the former but not the latter believe that salvation is achieved through faith alone. And that fewer than half of Protestants could identify Martin Luther from a list of three choices (the others being Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley) as the driving force of the Reformation is pretty sad. Even stuff any 2nd-grader should know seems to boggle the minds of a lot of people: on a multiple-choice question (!), over a quarter of Christians couldn’t identify the town where Jesus was born. Apparently they sang “O, Little Town of Jerusalem” in Sunday School.

Still, on questions about Christianity, Christians (barely) outscored the general population, averaging 6.2 correct answers out of 12 questions. White evangelicals averaged 7.3, beaten only by Mormons (7.9). But both Atheists/Agnostics (6.7) and Jews outperformed Christians in general on questions relating directly to Christian teachings, history, and world view.

It’s on the questions about world religions, especially those with relatively few US adherents, where Christians in particular fared poorly. Whereas Jews (7.9) and Atheists/Agnostics (7.5) both got over two-thirds of the 11 world religions questions correct, Protestants and Catholics alike managed well under half, both averaging 4.7. Similarly, the leaders in understanding of the role of religion in American public life (1st Amendment provisions, for example) were once again Atheists/Agnostics and Jews, at 2.8 and 2.7, respectively, out of 4 questions; Protestants and Catholics both averaged 2.1, or over 20% lower.

Overall, the bottom line here isn’t that there’s really a huge difference. To the extent that we can generalize at all, the conclusion is that American self-identified Christians know slightly more about the tenets and historical figures of their own religion than do non-believers, whereas those same Christians under-perform the norm by an even wider margin in areas like basic knowledge of world religions and the relationship between religion and, for example, free expression. Importantly, the level of sophistication required here is pretty low. Respondents are asked some pretty easy stuff: the Dalai Lama’s religion, the name of Islam’s holy book, the basic text of the 1st Amendment. In fact, anyone who gets more than a handful of wrong answers is either really stupid or purposefully ignorant… alas, that’s a whole lot of folks.

Indeed, for all the fact that the Pew folks themselves lead with the whole atheists-know-more-about-religion-than-religious-people-do thing, the real bottom line here is the stolidity and/or downright laziness of the average respondent. OK, so I’m probably not the typical American on this—whereas the average score was 16 out of 32, I got them all right (I confess that I wasn’t entirely confident of two responses). Of course, I fit a good deal of the profile of someone who, according to Pew’s analysis, would get a high score: I’m white, male, US-born, well-educated (including a single college-level religion course some 36 years ago), middle-aged and childless (why a couple of these criteria matter, I have no idea, but there you go). I have an on-line identity named for a bodhisattva. And, of course, I’m agnostic. I’ve also taught elements of both Hinduism and Buddhism in Asian theatre courses, so questions about who Vishnu and Shiva are, or what religion espouses the concept of nirvana aren’t likely to trip me up. But, of course, I knew the answers to those questions long before I contemplated taking, let alone teaching, anything about Asian culture.

There are some interesting seeming contradictions—for example, Republicans outscore Democrats in raw numbers but, all other criteria being equal, it’s the other way around. In other words, the Republicans polled may have been, for example, better educated than the Democratic respondents. Thus the average Republican score was higher, whereas college-educated Dems did marginally better than college-educated GOPsters, etc.

And that distinction is really the one that matters. It doesn’t make headlines because it’s simply to be expected: education makes a difference. Respondents who participated in religious education as children scored marginally better than those who didn’t (and we can assume the difference came in questions about their own religion). Those who have a high level of commitment to their own religion score slightly better than those who don’t. Those who discuss religion with family and friends do a little better than those who don’t. But the big distinction is also the most predictable: people with graduate degrees got over twice as many answers correct as those who didn’t finish high school (22.2 to 10.7). Those who took a religion course in college average more than four more correct answers than college-attendees who didn’t take a religion course, who in turn got five more right than those who never went to college. Well, duh.

In short, while there are some intriguing “gotchas” here, the most fundamental lesson is remarkably simple: if you want to learn about a topic—any topic—you’ll gain a little knowledge from someone trying to influence your opinion. You’ll learn more, though, from someone who wants to provide you with the facts with which to make up your own mind. Religious instruction vs. religious studies courses. My blog vs. my classroom. Fox News vs. real journalism.

But something else is clear, too. These scores are awful. Any reasonably intelligent, reasonably curious, and reasonably attentive high school graduate ought to be able to get a score in the mid-20s on this test. I’m frankly a little embarrassed that I knew only 30 answers with absolute confidence. And yet a 26, or a little over 81% (a B- in my grade book), qualifies as “top 10%.” A 23, less than 72%, i.e., a C-, would be better than the mean for people with graduate degrees. The average Christian got fewer than half of the questions right (I started to write “more than half the questions wrong,” which would have been inaccurate: “I don’t know” accounted for about half of the responses that weren’t the correct answer. If this were Jeopardy, those folks would have kept their money on those questions; they just wouldn’t have won any. So we could presumably add another couple of points onto lower scores if we wanted to give people credit for good guesses and not penalize them for incorrect answers—the way most Scantron tests work today, for example.)

Any way you slice it, though, these scores are deplorable, especially given how easy most of these questions are. Americans are consciously, unabashedly, willfully ignorant. And it’s getting worse. That’s how Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Sharron Angle have any suasion in our public life. It’s why the modern GOP is fast modeling itself on the Know Nothing Party of the mid-19th century: secretive (e.g. major funding of the Tea Party by the just-folks billionaire Koch brothers), rabidly chauvinistic (in the 19th century, the enemy was Catholics; now it’s Mexicans/gays/Muslims/blacks/single parents/teachers/unions/fill-in-the-damned-blank), and ultimately driven more by paranoia than by evidence. They probably think I’m equating their transcendent quest for ignorance with the phrase “know nothing.” That’s because they don’t know American history any better than they know the religion they purport to espouse.

Alfred Hitchcock and Knowingly Knowing

Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing. His films terrify us for two reasons. The first is the quotidian quality of his characters and situations—there’s nothing exotic at all about the heroes of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” or “North by Northwest.” Nor did Hitch need creepy old houses or dense woods to create his worlds: a concert hall or an open field in bright sunshine will do just fine, thanks—but I defy anyone who’s seen “North by Northwest” to ever look at crop-dusters quite the same again.

Hitchcock’s other insight was just as simple: he understood that the human imagination produces horrors far more vivid than any film-maker could possibly create in a studio. The scariest moments in “The Birds” don’t come when the… erm… title characters actually attack, but rather when, seemingly innocuously at first, they begin to gather on the telephone wires. Similarly, we don’t know what’s waiting at the bottom of those stairs in “Psycho,” but we know to be afraid of it. This is why there is more horror, in any legitimate use of that term, in any of a half dozen of Hitchcock’s scariest films than in all the Dead Teenager flicks ever made put together. We are, in short, hard-wired to be afraid of the unknown. Hitchcock knew it, and used that knowledge to make great films. Alas, today’s right wing knows it, too, and they play on that fear to attempt to legitimize their own prejudices and paranoia.

It was probably sometime in the late 1980s, a decade or so after I graduated from college, that I first heard the term “knowingly know,” a term that refers to not simply the fact that one’s acquaintance is a member of some group, but that one recognizes that they are. I’ve heard the phrase most often with respect to homosexuality. Even if only 2% of the population is gay, if you know 35 people, the chances are better than even you know someone gay. If I recall correctly, there were 306 people in my high school graduating class: even at the 2% figure (certainly at the low end of estimates), the mathematical chances we were all heterosexual would be about 1 in 500 (.98 ^ 306th). Still, I didn’t know any of my classmates to be gay—a very different thing from whether they actually were or not.

In college, I had one gay friend and a couple of acquaintances—or so I thought until years later, when I learned that another of my closest college friends was in fact gay. When, at some point in the early 1990s, my friend and colleague told me that she and her partner had traveled from Iowa to Wisconsin the previous weekend to be “married” in a Quaker ceremony, it took me a little by surprise—not because I didn’t know of their relationship, or because I disapproved in the slightest: I simply hadn’t given the concept of gay marriage any thought. I am pleased to say, in retrospect, that it took me less than two seconds to move from confusion to congratulations. It was, in short, a no-brainer: of course Karen and Penny should be able to marry each other. The fact that I’d hitherto never considered the possibility said something about the time, something about the small-town world I had always inhabited, and something about my own egocentric but perhaps understandable conflation of my own lived experience and the normative.

I will, of course, never know if my reaction would have been any different had the concept of gay marriage been presented to me in the abstract, especially if I’d never “knowingly known” any gays or lesbians. And this is the essence of the “knowingly know” phenomenon: being presented with an impersonal, generic concept is a fundamentally different experience than choosing whether to endorse a policy designed to better the life experience of one’s friends.

Anyway, that college friend I didn’t know was gay until years later? I was privileged to attend his wedding—complete with two plastic grooms atop the cake—in the early summer of 1994. Now, of course, practically everyone not merely knows someone gay, but knowingly knows. And poll numbers reflect that change in cognition. A CNN poll released Wednesday shows, for the first time, that the majority of those polled said that “gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married and to have their marriage recognized by law as valid.” While that’s good news from my perspective, other results from the same poll were more troubling. And that’s why this blog piece isn’t really about gay marriage at all.

What saddened me in particular was this question: “As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?” Over two-thirds of respondents, alas, opposed. True, there has been considerable fanfare about the opposition, not merely from the usual demagogues like Gingrich, Beck, and Palin, but also—chillingly—from the Anti-Defamation League, which issued what Salon.com’s Alex Pareene aptly describes as a “shameful, mealy-mouthed statement” about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”: touting religious freedom in one breath and then suggesting that because of “understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site,” the proposed site should be abandoned because “building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.”

Give me a damned break. First off, this is precisely the kind of namby-pambyism that used to give liberals a bad name. Someone might get upset? That’s a reason to suddenly forget the 1st Amendment? And who, exactly, would be “cause[d] pain”? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush, hardly a hard-core Islamophile, said this:

These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race. America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.

Whatever may have happened later, and indeed whatever his motives may have been at the time—political calculation, geo-strategic positioning, or deeply-held personal belief—Mr. Bush, then if never else, said and did what was right, and it seems that most people listened. True, there were some isolated incidents of violence against Muslims, vandalism against mosques, and the like, but it could have been far worse than it was, and President Bush deserves credit for his calming influence.

Unfortunately, that dose of reality seems to have worn off, and there are far too many today who appear incapable of distinguishing Islam from a tiny group of radicalized adherents (if, indeed, the hijackers can be said to be Islamic at all, any more than Fred Phelps can be described as Christian). These, then, are the pain-afflicted victims cited by the ADL: people who can endure the empty chair at the dinner table or the hole in the ground where colossal buildings once stood, but not an expression of the religious freedom central to this country’s identity for well over 200 years.

But then I got to thinking about knowingly knowing. The CNN poll is national; The Wall Street Journal commissioned one last month of just New Yorkers. The headline reads: “Poll: Majority of New Yorkers Oppose Ground Zero Mosque.” If one didn’t know that the WSJ is now another Rupert Murdoch mullet-wrapper instead of the corporatist but reputable newspaper it once was, one might be tempted to stop there and conclude that the people of the area have a real aversion to the completion of the Cordoba Initiative, as the project is called.

But read a little further. Manhattanites actually approve of the construction: “support for the $100 million project appeared to be strongest in Manhattan, where 46% of poll respondents said they were in favor of it, compared to 36% who said they were opposed.” Now, I realize that there was a time gap between the WSJ and CNN polls, but surely the real difference between them is the demographic profile of those surveyed: most especially where they’re from.

Lost in the rhetoric is the fact that a major impetus for the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which isn’t a mosque per se, and which is two full city blocks from Ground Zero) is simply this: it’s needed. According to a WSJ blog by Aaron Rutkoff, “The project is driven in part by the needs of a growing Muslim population in Lower Manhattan. The nearest existing Islamic prayer space, the Tribeca Mosque, has been holding three evening prayer services on Fridays to keep up with demand.” In other words, there are a lot of Muslims in Lower Manhattan. People there know them, interact with them, in many cases are them. In other words, they knowingly know.

But, outside a couple of major cities and a smattering of other areas, how many Americans knowingly know anyone of the Islamic faith? How many folks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, site of another backlash against Islam in general, actually have had a conversation with someone named Farooq or Mohammed or Amir?

Let’s leave aside the compelling arguments that the right’s outlandish rhetoric plays directly into the hands of radical Muslims by actually making the case that American foreign policy is indeed a “war on Islam,” when it plainly is not. Let’s also pass over the fact that dozens of Muslims died in the 9/11 attacks, that it was a Muslim man who alerted authorities to the bomb in Times Square in early May, that one of the prime movers of the Cordoba project is quoted as saying, “We decided we wanted to look at the legacy of 9/11 and do something positive,” and that she hopes “to reverse the trend of extremism and the kind of ideology that the extremists are spreading.”

Let’s just look at the numbers based on knowingly knowing, or, looked at differently, in terms of how much the respondent’s life would actually be affected by the completion or non-completion of the project:

General U.S. Population: Opposed by 39 points

New Yorkers (all five boroughs): Opposed by 21 points

Manhattanites: In favor by 10 points

If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a pretty clear correlation between knowingly knowing and supporting the Cordoba Initiative. Perhaps the right, erstwhile champions of local control, ought to STFU?

There will be anti-Muslim bias in some circles for a long time to come, just as there still is in some places against African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, gays… But there is an antidote to this poison. It’s called education: not the teach-to-the-test crap advocated by many on the right (and some, truth to tell, on the left), but areas like critical thinking, argument formation, written and oral communication, multi-cultural experience. Ignorance doesn’t merely breed fear: it is the very essence of fear. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock.

This is a battle, but one that must be won. That’s why I’m still in the trenches. Unafraid.