It’s hard to exaggerate the size of the gulf between what Democrats are willing to do to stop the Republican agenda and what the Republicans are willing to do to stop the Democratic agenda. I mean, let’s leave aside the fact the Republican crazy-talk now has a quarter of registered Republicans wondering whether the president is the antichrist and 57% thinking he’s a Muslim. They are using their power in the minority to force the cancellation of committee hearings. This is a form of government shutdown. I saw on the Rachel Maddow Show that the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, had to cancel a hearing with four commanding generals, one of whom had traveled from Hawaii and another from South Korea. Sen. Akaka had to cancel a hearing on wounded veterans and McCaskill had to cancel a subcommittee hearing on police contracting in Afghanistan. The Democrats would never do anything like this.
And, you know, sometimes, like with the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, I wish the Democrats would use all their power to oppose. But I don’t want them to act like the Republicans. I don’t want the Democrats to shut down the government, lie incessantly, poison the minds of their base against the government, call for special prosecutors every two seconds, or incite violence and intimidation against opposing lawmakers.
The GOP is not a healthy party, and we are not a healthy country.
Update [2010-3-25 8:2:24 by Steven D]: To be fair, the validity of the Harris poll’s methodology is being called into question by Gary Langer director of ABC polls:
The survey, done by Harris Interactive, apparently was designed to test the theories in a book claiming the “lunatic fringe is hijacking America.” The purpose seems to have been to see how many people the pollsters could get to agree to pejorative statements about Obama. Quite a few, it turns out – but with what I see as a highly manipulative approach to questionnaire design.
I’ll lay off the sampling, though this survey was done among people who sign up to click through questionnaires via the Internet in exchange for points redeemable for cash and gifts – not a probability sample. Been there before. This time let’s just look at what it asked.
The poll starts by telling respondents “here are some things people have said about President Obama,” then asking if they think each is true or false. Fifteen statements follow, with all (excluding “he is a Muslim”) unrelentingly negative. “True” answers run from a high of 40 percent, for “he is a socialist,” to a low of 13 percent, for “he wants the terrorists to win.”
The problems are fundamental. “Some people have said” is a biasing introductory phrase; it imbues the subsequent statements with an air of credibility – particularly when you don’t note that others say something else. (That approach can have problems of its own; the “some people” vs. “other people” format implies equivalence.)
The subsequent statements, for their part, are classically unbalanced – there’s no alternative proposition to consider. A wealth of academic literature, neatly summarized here, demonstrates that questions constructed in this fashion – true/false, agree/disagree – carry a heavy dose of what’s known as acquiescence bias. They overstate agreement with whatever’s been posited, often by a very substantial margin. (This reflects avoidance of cognitive burden, which tends to happen disproportionately with less-educated respondents, as is reflected in Harris’ results.)
Using all negative statements, rather than a mix of negative and positive ones, reflects another non-standard approach, one that can further bias responses. (The ordering of items, unclear in the Harris release, can be troublesome as well.)
Another problem, which I discuss here, is the challenge of over-literalism in evaluating survey results of this type. Rather than answering disparaging poll questions literally, people who are ill-disposed toward the subject may simply use these questions as an opportunity to express their general antipathy – not as a thought-out endorsement of the specific posit. And the use of hot-button invective is ill-advised in its own right; respondents may just blow it back.
