Friday, September 30, 2016

Deflection, Projection, and Delusion

As a long-time political junkie, the current presidential campaign has been fascinating to me.  I recently wrote about the value of debates and polls.  Writing blogs is my attempt to inform.  I hope this one will do so also, but I acknowledge that it is an opinion piece.

What is especially troubling to me is the obviously and blatantly misleading statements coming from one side of the campaign.  Donald Trump’s surrogates have the unenviable task of answering tough questions from the media and the electorate.  Of course, the same can be said of any political campaign.  But I suspect that many people would acknowledge that, by necessity, more explaining and excusing is being done on the Trump side.  I say by necessity, due to the steady stream of outlandish statements made by their boss, along with the inevitable vetting being done regarding his past history.  New revelations crop up almost daily, and thus more questions.

Answering tough questions requires skill and tools which the public relations industry have honed over many years.  PR consultant Kim Harrison has a list of 8 ways to deflect tough interview questions.  The way he outlined and explained them was really enlightening, and most are readily recognizable.

“Some politicians and top managers have mastered the art of avoiding answers to difficult media interview questions.  Others haven’t. Dodging nasty questions can be achieved with some reasonable preparation and practice. Here are some smart ways you can deal with tough questions:

1. Acknowledge the question without answering it. (“That’s a good question, and I think we should consider the implications by looking at…” [avoiding an answer].)
2. Ignore the question completely. However, this is a high-risk approach because the interviewer may repeat the question or reword it slightly to return to the subject. This tends to make the interviewee look evasive.
3. Question the question.
  (a) Request clarification or further information about the question. This works as a delaying tactic in a short interview.
  (b) Reflect the question back to the interviewer (“Why do you ask me that?”). Some years ago an interviewer was floored by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when in a famous response to “Some people are saying you are too autocratic,” she said “Name some of them.” The interviewer was caught by surprise and wasn’t able to think of a suitable response, which made him look a bit silly.
4. Attack the question, on the basis of:
  (a) The question fails to tackle the important issue.
  (b) The question is based on a false assumption.
  (c) The question is factually inaccurate.
  (d) The question is too personal or objectionable.
5. Decline to answer. Refuse to answer on the basis that it is not your area of responsibility. (“You will have to ask [name, or ‘someone else’] about that because I’m not involved at all in that part of the situation.”)
6. Give an incomplete answer.
  (a) Partial answer.
  (b) Start to answer but change the subject.
  (c) Negative answer. You state what won’t happen instead of what will happen.
7. State or imply the question has already been answered (“I’m not going to go over old ground.”)
8. Defer to the will of others. Refer to the will of constituents or shareholders etc and imply you are doing your duty by complying with their will.”

Deflection is a frequently-used method of the Trump campaign surrogates.  Ask them about their boss not releasing his taxes, and they deflect to Hillary’s e-mails.  (They know that people aren’t as accepting of the audit excuse any longer.)  Ask them about his treatment of women, and they deflect to Hillary’s reactions at the time of her husband’s infidelities in the mid-‘90s.  Recently, one of his favorite surrogates utilized several deflection tools when asked about some of his published credentials, and then, using one more, walked out of the interview.

A very adept deflector is Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager.  She has been asked often about the birther issue.  This article speaks volumes about the use of deflection.  I could provide many more examples, but she appears often on the cable channels and I invite you to make a game out of identifying her examples of deflection.  She is a master.

Projection is, I believe, a uniquely Republican trait as it relates to expressing their arguments. Paul Waldman, writing in The American Prospect, a liberal publication, offered this explanation in 2012:

“There has seldom been a clearer political case of what psychologists call ‘projection', the propensity to ascribe to someone else one's own thoughts, feelings, and sins. It's true that we are in a polarized moment, and what is called nastiness often turns out to be genuine substantive differences between parties that represent distinct groups of Americans.  But Republicans have been, shall we say, vigorous in their opposition to this president, both completely unified and unrestrained in their criticism.  Yet they remain convinced that Barack Obama is the one who bears responsibility for whatever division has been sown.

“…for instance, one often hears Republicans claim that the Affordable Care Act was ‘rammed through’ Congress without Republican support.  You might recall that in fact the ACA went through over a year of hearings, negotiations, conferences, health care summits, endless efforts to cajole and encourage and beg and plead for Republican support, before those Republicans successfully kept every last one of their troops in line to vote against it.   But as on so many issues, all of that is washed from the story, leaving only Barack Obama and his divisive actions.”

Blaming Obama for fomenting class warfare is another example of projection.  Jonathan Weiler wrote in 2011,

“…when President Obama outlined his proposals last week for deficit reduction, he said he wanted to require Americans making more than $1 million a year to pay federal income taxes at a higher minimum rate than a significant chunk of millionaires are now paying.  In the context of deficit reduction, one intent of this so-called Buffett rule (since Warren Buffett, who has pointed out that he pays federal income tax at a lower rate than does his secretary, is an advocate of the proposal) is to recognize that the growing gap between the rich and the rest needs to be reflected in greater shared sacrifice.

“Republican leaders responded to the Buffett rule by screaming bloody murder over this intolerable foray into ‘class warfare’.  One might be puzzled by this attack. The GOP has engaged in a 30-year political campaign that has contributed substantially to a massive shift in wealth toward a tiny sliver at the top, while increasing the vulnerability of a vastly larger number of Americans.”

A notable story from the last presidential race was the behavior of Karl Rove on election night in 2012, which I believe illustrates another Republican trait- delusion.  Rove’s own network was calling the election for President Obama, but Rove was convinced otherwise based on his belief that Ohio would turn to Romney.

Now we have Trump surrogates claiming confidently that their campaign Is in “great shape” and “doing well”, based on polls after the first presidential debate.  Their belief that Trump had “won” was based on a number of unscientific computer fan-style polls run immediately after.  Even when the results of the scientific polls showed a significant win for Secretary Clinton, the same surrogates were still claiming victory.

Even the anti-Trump forces have succumbed to delusion, believing that Secretary Clinton would be losing badly to any of the other 16 Republican primary candidates.  The implication is that leaving the Trump phenomenon aside, the GOP is essentially in healthy shape.  But how do you ignore the notion that arguably they are responsible for Trump as nominee.

I have to wonder- if you don’t prepare for a debate, and then believe that you won despite that, why would you make changes.  I believe that the country would be better off with two prepared and well-informed candidates making their case to the American people.

D. Norman

Monday, September 19, 2016

Polling and the Debates in the 2016 Election

Very soon, the electorate in the U.S. will be afforded the chance to evaluate the candidates for President and Vice President in nationally televised debates. Voters are hoping that they will give them much-needed information. Rallies and tweets have provided scant substance on the policy prescriptions of each candidate. Hyperbole seems to be the only item on the menu.

Adding to the confusion, news outlets are focused on the many polls that come out on a daily basis, which seem to rise and fall for each candidate depending on what has occurred in the most recent 24-hour news cycle.

What is the real value of polls, and how much should we rely on their results? A recent article in Wired magazine tells the story of a start-up company called Civis Analytics that was formed out of the realization that traditional public polling was providing useless and misleading data. The wake-up call happened in the summer leading up to the 2012 election, when public polls in Michigan showed President Obama dropping 10 points. Analytics produced by the models that were invented by the founders of Civis showed otherwise, and the Obama campaign stayed the course rather than devote another large sum to advertising and other efforts. In the end, the polls proved to be wrong.

The article points out the current state of polling. “Today’s polling landscape appears so fraught that Gallup, long the industry leader, opted out of presidential horse-race polls this year; the reputational risk of being wrong was simply too high.”

Christine Campigotto, who oversees Civis’ work with nonprofits and NGOs, explains: “In public polling, you see a lot of big swings…driven more by poor sampling methods and bias in the response.  They’re making a headline out of statistical noise. Not that many people change their minds between Wednesday and Friday.”

The article points out the reasons for the failures of traditional polling:

“The classic pollster’s technique known as random digit dialing, in which firms robo-dial phone after phone, is failing, because an ever-dwindling number of people have landlines. By 2014, 60 percent of Americans used cell phones either most or all of the time, making it difficult or impossible for polling firms to reach three out of five Americans. (Government regulations make it prohibitively expensive for pollsters to call cell phones.)  And even when you can dial people at home, they don’t answer; whereas a survey in the 1970s or 1980s might have achieved a 70 percent response rate, by 2012 that number had fallen to 5.5 percent, and in 2016 it’s headed toward an infinitesimal 0.9 percent.  And finally, the demographics of participants are narrowing: An elderly white woman is 21 times more likely to answer a phone poll than a young Hispanic male.  So polling samples are often inherently misrepresentative.

“More broadly, Civis’ work is uncovering an uncomfortable truth for many horse-race pollsters: Public opinion just isn’t that dynamic.  Political support shifts slowly and subtly, generally over months and years rather than in response to the day-by-day, headline-­blaring gyrations the media trumpets as breaking news.”

Which brings us to the subject of the debates. I believe that the germane questions are: how useful are they, and what can the electorate truly learn about the fitness of the candidates for office.  Adding to those is the possibility that Donald Trump may choose not to participate. He has raised issues about the timing of the long-scheduled debates, and further has suggested that there shouldn’t be a moderator.

Politico made the case earlier in the year that “debates have ruined politics”. “Debates today, mostly frivolous popularity contests in which the candidates thump their chests and trade one-liners, tell us next-to-nothing about which candidate would actually make the best president—in fact, they put the most substantive competitors at a serious disadvantage.

“Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in debate in 1980 not by greater mastery of issues but by deft one-liners. “There you go again,” he said with a smile and a shrug when Carter recited Reagan’s record of opposition to Medicare. The line conveyed nothing of substance yet much of personality, and voters ate it up.

“More telling was the line Reagan used against Walter Mondale in 1984. An initial debate between the two showed viewers a Reagan they hadn’t seen: stumbling, confused, frustrated. The dismal performance raised grave questions about Reagan’s age and his fitness to continue in office. Even the Reagan-friendly Wall Street Journal asked if he was too old to be president. Reagan finessed the worries with a second-debate quip about not exploiting his opponent’s ‘youth and inexperience.’ The remark completely sidestepped the real issue, but viewers and voters laughed, and Reagan rode the laughter to reelection.

“Debates today don’t merely fail to reward attention to issues, they actively punish attention to issues.  Trump has led the way with a campaign built on emotion and personality, and his success has compelled other candidates to follow suit. Issues are boring, comparatively speaking, and boring doesn’t draw viewers and voters.”

Beginning with the 2000 presidential campaign, I have felt that there is a better way to find out what the candidates really know. Call it an impractical fantasy, but it originates from my time in school so many years ago, when I had to take the dreaded blue book exams. Logistical details are missing (e.g., who would conducts the test), but the outline goes like this:

1. Put together a list of questions relating to the most important policy concerns affecting our country;
2. Don't show the questions in advance to Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton, and the other two if we want to include them;
3. Put them in rooms by themselves. No phones or other way to communicate with the outside world;
4. From the list of questions, they would pick two for which to provide a discussion of the issue and their solutions to address them. Give them a supply of blue books. The top of each page would be imprinted with the name of the respective candidate;
5. Give them 2 hours maximum to complete the test. One hour each should be enough time for an informed person that wants to lead our country;
6. After completion, take photos of every page of each filled-out book and immediately post to social media.

Who would provide articulate and comprehensive answers?  I’d love to see those pages.

D. Norman