A Failure to Communicate

How do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble?

It's long been clear that the Republican party has built a bubble for their base as part of a very successful tactic to secure party loyalty.  By filling the bubble with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the right wing blogosphere, the party has been able to create an alternate reality where Democrats are always wrong, Republicans are always right, Democrats routinely devise nefarious plans to destroy America and Republicans ride in to save the day. The bubble has shielded the base from reality, so Republicans don't have to acknowledge decades of data showing that trickle-down economics increases debt without doing anything to grow the economy or create jobs.

But the stunned looks on the faces of the Fox News team when Ohio was called for Obama, the refusal of Karl Rove to accept what had happened, the fantastical rationalizations coming from the right in the aftermath (Romney wasn't conservative enough!) have lead to a disturbing conclusion.  It appears that, at some point, the Republican leadership crawled into the bubble after their base, sealed it behind them, and the air is becoming increasingly toxic in there. 

If you want to be a competent politician, you can't buy your own spin.  It's routine to downplay bad poll numbers, but in private you're still supposed to take them seriously.  If Nate Silver wasn't playing party politics when he correctly projected the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, then he probably isn't playing party politics now.

In fact, I think some of the critical failures of the Romney campaign stem from the candidate's inability to see beyond the Republican bubble.  At key points in the campaign, Romney picked themes that were staples of the bubble, but known falsehoods outside of it.  Themes like: Obama took a bad economy and "made the problem worse", "you didn't build that", Obama didn't say "Act of Terror" for 14 days and Jeep will be "moving all production to China".

Saying that Obama had made the economy worse was the opening gambit of the Romney campaign.  Inside the bubble, the complete failure of Obama's economic policy is gospel.  Outside the bubble, people know that Obama turned an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month to one that has been adding 100,000 - 200,000 jobs a month since 2010, which does not meet the definition of the word "worse".  With so many Americans still suffering, angry and desperate for a faster recovery, Romney's best case for himself was the economy, but he undercut that case by providing a false assessment of what was really happening.

The Republican Convention was Mitt's big chance to reintroduce himself to the American people after the Republican debates.  Unfortunately, Mitt chose "you didn't build that" as the convention's theme.  This was very popular inside the bubble, where people accepted the bizarre notion that the President of the United States would actually believe that entrepreneurs should be denied credit for the businesses they created and that America should abandon the free market.  Outside the bubble, it was clear that the President was talking about infrastructure.  While individuals can build businesses, they can't build the infrastructure necessary to support those businesses, so a healthy economy requires both individual achievement and responsible government.  Basing the convention on a known falsehood was one of the reasons the convention flopped.

In the second debate, Romney had a real chance to score points from the tragedy in Benghazi.  He squandered that chance by basing his attack on the bubble myth that Obama did not use the phrase "act of terror" until 14 days after the  attack.  The myth held that Obama was trying to pretend that he had defeated Al Qaeda entirely, was embarrassed to be proven wrong, and was trying to cover up by pretending terrorists were not involved.  In truth, Obama claims to have severely compromised Al Qaeda's central leadership, greatly reducing their ability to mount another 9/11 scale attack, but he has made it clear the Al Qaeda and its affiliates still exist and terrorism remains our top national security threat.  Also, Obama is on tape the day after the Benghazi attack clearly using the phrase "acts of terror".

Finally, the warped reality of the bubble led Romney to spend the last day of a very close race lying to the people of Ohio about the auto industry.  Outside the bubble, Bloomberg News had reported that Chrysler was planning to resume Jeep sales to China and would eventually produce those Jeeps locally.  Back in the bubble, a blogger with stunningly poor English comprehension skills took this to mean that Jeep would be shipping all US jobs to China, and Romney believed him.  Even after the real Bloomberg story was revealed, the CEO of Chrysler made it clear that Jeep would not be moving any US jobs and was in fact planning to add 1,100 new US jobs, and interviews starting popping up with Ohio voters who made it clear they know a lot more about Jeep than Mitt Romney does and they don't appreciate being lied to, Mitt still couldn't be convinced to climb out of the bubble and accept reality.  In spite of the evidence, he and his running mate Paul Ryan kept repeating the lie to the bitter end.  Thanks to the bubble, Mitt Romney spent the last day of the campaign poisoning the voter pool in America's most critical swing state.

So how do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble? 

How do you communicate with someone who has had that bubble hermetically sealed and covered the interior with reflective paint?  How do you convince them to scratch off a patch of that paint and see for themselves what the outside world looks like? 

To help residents of the bubble understand what objective reality actually looks like, I hope the following thought experiment might be helpful:

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush was a Democrat.

Imagine that nothing else had changed.  That everything happened exactly the way it did in real life, except that instead of having a capital "R" after his name, Bush had a capital "D".

Imagine that a Democrat had turned a surplus into the largest debt in history.  Imagine he accomplished this, in part, by simply giving away the surplus, spending a large percentage on bureaucracy in the process, then initiated two wars and an expensive prescription drug program without providing any way to pay for them.  If a Democrat did that, would we be referring to Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility?

Imagine that a Democrat presided over eight years of the weakest economic growth in modern history, followed by the most catastrophic economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that understands business and the economy?

Imagine that the most devastating terrorist attack in US history had occurred on a Democrat's watch.  Imagine that the Democrat responded by starting the two longest wars in US history, and was unable to conclude either war by the end of his presidency, or to find the terrorist most responsible for the attack.  Imagine that one of these wars turned out to be entirely unnecessary and counterproductive, in spite of costing twice as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks and more Iraqi lives than Saddam Hussein.  Would we call Democrats the party that's tough on terror and dependable on defense?

Imagine that a Democrat lost a great American city and over 1,000 American lives due to inaction in the face of a great storm.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that brought competent, business-like management to the White House?

Imagine that a Democrat had inherited an America at the peak of its power, the one undisputed economic and military superpower in the world, and left an America so damaged that many, both at home and abroad, were questioning whether our best days were behind us.  Would we describe Democrats as the party of bold leadership?  As the party we could trust to keep America strong?

If a Democrat had that record, how long would it be before we trusted Democrats again?

Yet Republicans never lost faith.  In 2008, they chose John McCain, who essentially promised to keep the Bush administration going.  In 2010 they voted in a House that promised to double down on Bush's policies, and promptly became the most incompetent and unpopular congress in history.  In 2012, they chose Mitt Romney, who not only pledged to return us to Bush era policies, but filled his campaign with ex-Bush staffers, the exact same people responsible for these disasters in the first place.

Now try the same thought experiment for Barack Obama:

Imagine that a Republican inherited the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.  An economy so bad that many analysts said that avoiding a new depression may be impossible.  And yet the Republican President did exactly that.  He halted the economic collapse, prevented a new depression, turned the recession into a recovery, transformed an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month into one that for two years added 100 - 200,000 jobs a month so that, by the end of four years, he created more new jobs than his predecessor had in eight and along the way he had saved the US auto industry.  Would we be calling this a failed presidency?  Would we be saying that Republicans had made the economy worse?

If you say that we should take steps to speed up the recovery, most people would agree with you.  If you say that much of Washington is broken and in desperate need of repair, most people would agree with you.  If you want to have productive discussions about the size and role of government, most people would be happy to join you.  But if you say that Obama's policies have failed, that he took a bad economy and made it worse, that we could improve our situation by providing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that our country is on a more dangerous trajectory now than it was four years ago, you are simply wrong.  You are making statements that are utterly and demonstrably false. 

If you are more frightened by the direction our country is heading in 2012 than you were in 2008, there is something fundamentally wrong with your reality testing.

Unfortunately, fundamentally flawed reality testing has been a defining feature of the Republican party for some time now, and in 2012 it cost them dearly.  It's clear that the bubble is running out of air, and Republicans need to poke some holes in that thing if they want to survive.

When Neutrality Becomes Bias

There seems to be a paradox in modern politics.  Every election the technology for fact checking grows faster and easier, and yet it seems as if it also becomes easier for politicians to get away with lying.  My suspicion is that this is because we've lost the mainstream media as the arbiter of truth.

Back in the day, it was the responsibility of the media to hold politicians accountable for their actions.  This required investigative journalism, which was very expensive, but it was an investment that paid off.  Major scoops, like Woodward and Bernstein's work on Watergate, was what differentiated newspapers and drew readers from the competition. 

But two things changed that.

First, political operatives discovered that if they couldn't counter the message of a story, they could still attack the messenger.  Accusations of bias became an effective technique for derailing any story.

Second, the advent of the internet fragmented the media market.  Investigative journalism lost its status as the primary draw to news outlets, while remaining just as expensive.  

Now that it had become both dangerous and unprofitable, mainstream news sources abandoned investigative journalism in favor of parrot journalism.  In the new paradigm, the news would simply repeat what other people said.  Instead of investigating a quote, the media would simply "balance" it with a quote from someone else who disagreed.  Since the media never made a judgment for themselves, they were off the hook for accusations of bias, and they could save the money they would have spent on investigating.

Unfortunately, this new paradigm required the media to base its reporting on a fundamentally false premise: that being unbiased and remaining neutral are equivalent.

The premise holds true for matters of opinion.  When two politicians disagree on values or political philosophy, it is appropriate for the media to demonstrate lack of bias by remaining neutral.

However, in matters of fact, neutrality becomes a form of bias.  When two politicians disagree on a fact, there are only two possible explanations: either one is right and one is wrong, or both are wrong.  Whatever the explanation, to remain neutral the media must portray both politicians as being equivalent.  But if one of them is right and the other is wrong, the media can only accomplish this by pulling  down whoever is right and lifting up whoever is wrong.  In effect, the media is showing bias towards whoever is wrong.

The unintended consequences of playing it safe is the we have created a media that is not biased towards the left or the right, but is instead biased towards falsehood.  In the process, they have made lying a viable political tool.