False Equivalency

I recently saw an MSNBC spot on its morning show "Morning Joe" with Joe Scarborough and others. One of the hosts, Willie Geist, went out in the upper west side of Manhattan with a McCain/Palin t-shirt, trying to find McCain/Palin supporters. Here is the video. Most importantly, watch the commentators' discussion at the end. They act as if the reactions were far out of bounds because they don't like what McCain stands for and refused to talk about it while they were living their lives. One host called it "troubling." Mike Barnicle called the people "closed minded" and insinuated it was "loathsome." Joe Scarborough called it "hostile." Later, one called the reaction of the Manhattanites "venom" (although it is not on the video - I saw it live). Geist says at the end that Republicans in Nashville would have disagreed "in a polite way" if he did the same thing there with an Obama/Biden t-shirt. I don't think this video shows much rudeness to be honest. Everyone seemed relatively polite. They just chose not to speak to Geist for very long if at all.

Compare that to videos such as this, this, and this.

Oh, how I long for Republican kindness and politeness. Those Democrats are so rude.

NOTE: I especially love the McCain supporters who yell at the Obama supporters to "Get a Job!" As if people going to a McCain rally have jobs, but those protesting at the same McCain rally must not.

Don't Panic

Democrats and other Obama supporters are a skittish bunch. Every time a tracking poll shows Obama's lead down a point, we are sure it is a trend. If his lead goes up a point, we are sure it is just staistical noise. As a Red Sox fan, I had many years of experience in this area of emotional masochism. The latest point on my graph of pessimism would have to be FoxNews new poll, which showed Obama's lead down to three from his nine point lead only a week before. Panic set in.

But then I, and others, checked the internal numbers, and discovered that the later poll had a much smaller democrat to republican ratio than the earlier poll. Doing some basic math shows that if they had used the ration from the earlier poll, Obama's lead would have been seven points (50-43) instead of three.

Now many of us would like to believe this is another example of Fox bias (as if we needed another one). But as Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com correctly points out: Fox News has never weighted for party identification, so this is simply the luck of the draw. The fact that Fox hasn't pointed out the difference is, however, the example we are looking for.