Watching Chris Matthews find out that Bush is unpopular is like seeing a kid react to the news that there is no Santa. Were it not so funny, it'd be terribly sad:
MATTHEWS: I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I'm amazed when 50 percent of the people don't like him -- just don't like this guy. Thirty-nine percent like him. Are you surprised? Does that fit with the world you walk in?
But in every deranged statement lies a kernel of insight, and Matthews' plaintive protests against his own cognitive dissonance is no different. Indeed, he actually sheds light on the key dynamic of Bush's enduringly favorable press coverage which, even now, isn't near as hostile as an observer would expect. What Matthews reveals here is an availability problem, and he accidentally -- I think -- admits its near-ubiquity among the press corps.
But first, some background. Recently, Andrew Gelman, Boris Shor, Joseph Basumi, and David Park released a paper entitled Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What's the Matter With Connecticut? The report attempted to sync an apparent paradox: rich voters go for Republicans in greater numbers than ever before, but rich states tend to go Democratic. What their analysis of the voting data found was that, in poor states, the rich and better-off were even more likely vote Republican, becoming an impressively solid voting bloc, while low-income voters trended heavily Democratic. In rich states, like Connecticut, the rich still tended to mark the "R," but not in significantly greater numbers than the poor, as richer states tended to see a drop in correlation between income and voter preference. So why did the media continue on with the latte-liberal meme, stereotyping Democrats as the party of rich folks and Republicans as champions of the working-class? They write:
A national survey of journalists found that about twice as many are Democrats as Republicans (see Poynter Online, 2003, summarizing the work of Weaver et al., 2003). Presumably their friends and acquaintances are also more likely to support the Democrats, and a first-order availability bias would lead a journalist to overestimate the Democrats' support in the population—as in the above quote that has been attributed to Pauline Kael ["I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."].
However, political journalists are well aware of the latest polls and election forecasts and are unlikely to make such an elementary mistake. However, they can well make the second-order error of assuming that the correlations they see of income and voting are representative of the population.14 Journalists are predominantly college graduates and have moderately high incomes (median salary in 2001 of $44,000, compared to a national average of $36,000; see Weaver et al., 2003)—so it is natural for them to think that higher-income voters such as themselves tend to be Democrats, and that lower-income voters whom they do not know are Republicans. Michael Barone, for example, although no liberal himself, probably knows many affluent liberal Democrats and then, from a second-order availability bias, imputes an incorrect correlation of income and Democratic voting to the general population.
More to the point, pundits tend to live in urban supercenters, which do trend markedly Democratic, and hang out in intellectually elite circles, where people do drink lattes, so it's no surprise that even the conservatives among them stereotype Democrats upper-income, well-educated liberals populating their everyday routines. That said, now jump back to Matthews' final plea: "Does this [Bush's low personal popularity] fit with the world you walk in?"
Matthews is admitting that it doesn't fit with the world he walks in, the world of political professional, politicians, and highly successful pundits. Many of them believe the guy is doing a bad job, but none have let that judgment poison their well of personal esteem for George Bush. He's making a second-order mistake, assuming that since everybody he knows is like that, the regard for Bush's winning personality can be extrapolated out across the country. He's wrong. But in doing, he inadvertently admits what many of us have believed ever since the 2000 campaign. Whatever Bush's occupational failures, the profession responsible for confronting him is inexplicably charmed by the guy. If Matthews is making trouble letting go public, it's nevertheless obvious that he's sensed no backlash against the guy in his own social circle, and, in the manner of second-order availability problems, is overheating his mental control center trying to sync his everyday experiences up with the national data.
Last weekend, I was watching the Chris Matthews Show, and was struck by one of the promos that has him posed on dark, elegantly shadowed background, intoning that "I promise never to let them get anything by me." But lest you think I'm claiming Matthews didn't live up to his promise, believe me, I don't. I think he's doing an excellent job. It's just that, for Matthews, the American public, not the professional political class, is the "them" he's on guard against.
