Decision ‘08

Pity Poor Paul, Still Peeved At The Polls

It must be tough being a Paul Krugman or a Frank Rich, people who, despite their wealth and coddled lifestyles, see hate-filled conspiracies around every corner and bile rising every time they contemplate their President. For example, Paul Krugman still hasn’t reconciled himself to the election of George W. Bush in 2000:

There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn’t change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book “Steal This Vote” - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I’ve seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: “Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election.”

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris’s “felon purge,” which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

Krugman then rehashes every unproven liberal urban legend related to the two Bush victories, in the manner of the most strident Kossack, before concluding:

We aren’t going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we’ve seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

You’ve got to hand it to Kruggie, he’s got some nerve, rerunning the last elections and then saying he won’t. That’s not what the media consortiums found, anyway; Krugman is just flat lying.

What are the facts?

(1). In the first full study of Florida’s ballots [after the 2000 election] ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.

(2). A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.

So when Krugman tells you a new book says Gore won, keep the above FACTS in mind (and note my citations are from PBS and CNN, not exactly the most friendly venues for Republicans). It’s an academic debate, anyway: the Supreme Court ruled as it did, Gore conceded, and the Electoral College, as always, determined the victor: George W. Bush.

What about Election 2004? We’ve heard stories and rumors from both sides, but here’s a fact from a legal proceeding:

The suspects in an Election Day tire slashing will stand trial.

The five Democratic Party campaign staffers are accused of vandalizing several vans the Republicans rented to bring voters to the polls.

A Milwaukee judge rejected motions Thursday to throw out the charges.

What have you got, when you strip it all away? Another Paul Krugman column devoid of facts, full of specious reasoning and speculation, all storm and fury, signifying nothing.

15 Responses to “Pity Poor Paul, Still Peeved At The Polls”

1 Dmac Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 9:46 am
I wish the Dems would put aside their 24/7 bitterness and bile campaign and try to focus on actually winning an election.

Can you imagine if Nixon had contested the election he lost to Kennedy?
2 Mark Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 9:49 am
And of course, he actually had a case (it’s pretty much accepted wisdom that the mob delivered the winning margin) - oops, now I’m sounding like a conspiracy theorist!
3 Eric Lindholm Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 11:41 am
So close: you could have had “Perpetually Peeved at Past Polls” for the alliterative trifecta!

I can’t believe the NYT editors continue to allow him to submit an article. This one has all the bitter amateurishness of a Seattle arts weekly.
4 Mark Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 11:46 am
Eric, dammit! I tried to work a ‘P’ in there for ’still’, and came up short! I should have consulted you first (your own posts have the most consistently amusing titles I have come across)…
5 AcademicElephant Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Note to Paul: That ship has sailed. Let it go. Look around you at all the extraordinary things occuring in our world and write about something that actually means something.
6 utron Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Krugman has to be the most fact-challenged pundit in all of MSM journalism. The only pundits lousier are people like Bob Herbert and Modo, who have quit using facts entirely.

I just wish Krugman would start giving stock tips–say, “Bulls and Bears of the Week.” I’d buy up his losers, and within a year I’d be in Monaco, hobnobbing with the Eurotrash elite.
7 megapotamus Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
I think there is a silver… nay, platinum lining to this sort of thing. The more the SoreLosermen are heard from the more likely we are to get genuine electoral reform. Now, I don’t much care what form it takes so long as it includes a requirement for identification at the polls. The Democrats who are in charge of things know that their margins, such as they lately are, can not survive any real discrimination between ACTUAL voters and fraudsters so they are in a bind more cunning than a Chinese fingertrap. Yes, elections are a mess. Let’s ID voters. You can do damn near anything else, but ID voters and the rest will fall in train.
8 Mark Says:
August 19th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
megapotamus, utron, two big thumbs up…let’s ID the voters, and force Krugman to give stock tips…then we can RULE THE WORLD! Bwaaaa-haaaa-haaaa…
9 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Sorry, Mickey, But Krugman Is Still Wrong Says:
August 20th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
[…] Mickey Kaus, whose work I greatly admire, comes to the rescue of Paul Krugman, whose work I greatly dislike. Specifically, Kaus argues that Krugman is correct to say that Al Gore would have won the election without the Supreme Court’s intervention. Sorry, Mickey, it doesn’t wash. […]
10 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Krugman Gives Ground - Sort Of Says:
August 22nd, 2005 at 1:01 pm
[…] Though his pride apparently will not let him admit to mistakes (that’s the opinion of former NY Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who had this to say upon his departure: “Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults”), Krugman almost admits one in a followup to his widely criticized recent column: This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner. […]
11 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Krugman Needs a Correction of His Correction Says:
August 26th, 2005 at 10:31 am
[…] In a rarity by any standards, Paul Krugman has admitted a mistake! Well, sort of…he has admitted he was wrong, then to correct himself, he issued the same wrong statement. We took the fact-challenged pundit to task on two occasions already regarding election 2000, but he keeps on digging: In my column last Friday, I cited an inaccurate number (given by the Conyers report) for turnout in Ohio’s Miami County last year: 98.5 percent. I should have checked the official state site, which reports a reasonable 72.2 percent. Also, the public editor says, rightly, that I should acknowledge initially misstating the results of the 2000 Florida election study by a media consortium led by The Miami Herald. Unlike a more definitive study by a larger consortium that included The New York Times, an analysis that showed Al Gore winning all statewide manual recounts, the earlier study showed him winning two out of three. Michelle Malkin, in reporting this, seems to buy into the Mickey Kaus assertion that Gore WOULD have won if the Supreme Court hadn’t stopped the recount, an analysis I reject because it relies on hypotheticals (not only regarding the Supreme Court decision, but regarding the ’smoking gun’ that the presiding judge PROBABLY would have allowed overvotes to be counted - that’s a lot of ifs). Donald Luskin gets it right: …[T]he truth is that the study Krugman is talking about involved four methods for statewide recounts, and Bush won in three of them. Here’s the way USA Today tells it (emphasis added): […]
12 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Paul Krugman: Partisan Hack, Says Times’ Public Editor Says:
September 16th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
[…] Maybe Calame has it in for Krugman? Well, let’s see what the first Public Editor of the Times, Daniel Okrent, had to say: I learned early on in this job that Prof. Krugman would likely be more willing to contribute to the Frist for President campaign than to acknowledge the possibility of error. When he says he agreed ‘reluctantly’ to one correction, he gives new meaning to the word ‘reluctantly’; I can’t come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass his general attitude toward substantive criticism. I and many others spotted Krugman’s lies from a mile away; the Public Editor called for a correction, not of Krugman’s opinions, but of plain factual inaccuracies; Gail Collins, the viciously partisan Times editorial page editor, says Times columnists are required to issue corrections; yet no correction has been issued. […]
13 Doctor Biobrain Says:
June 2nd, 2006 at 12:36 am
Why is it that people who accuse Krugman of deception have to rely so heavily on deception to prove their case? Or is this just a sign of poor reading comprehension? I read those two links you cited which supposedly prove that Krugman was wrong, and they showed that he was right. And you were wrong.

I quote from the first link:
“…the Herald pointed to one scenario under which Gore could have scored a narrow victory — a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards.”

and
“If those numbers did not stand, the Herald reported, a more generous hypothetical revisited recount would have scored the White House for Gore — but with only a 393-vote margin.”

Now remember that Krugman was referring to a “full manual recount”. The part you cited was only referring to a partial recount of Florida; not a full recount. And according to the study, a full recount of the entire state would have given Gore a slight victory. And remember, it also said that they didn’t consider “overvotes” at all; referring to people who voted twice on the same ballot. And there were 110,000 of those. Overall, this study used four different scenarios to determine who won: Bush won in two, and Gore won in the other two. And in the scenario inwhich all votes in Florida were manually recounted, Gore won. And that’s exactly what Krugman said.

Your second source wasn’t any better for you, saying:
“That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.”

and referring to those overvotes, it said:
“In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate’s name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes.”

and this:
“According to the study, more than 15,000 people who voted for either Gore or Bush also selected one candidate in the second column, apparently thinking the second column represented a new race.

Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.”

That’s right, Gore would have netted thousands of extra votes in an election that Bush officially won by under six hundred votes. Still so confident in your smears on Krugman? Did you actually read what those articles said, or were you just repeating what you were told they said? Sure, maybe Bush should have won, or maybe Gore should have won; but one thing is clear: What Paul Krugman wrote in the NY Times that day was correct, and all your smears against him were incorrect. The studies said what he said they said, and you just didn’t read them well enough.

And just so you know, I’m not trying to re-live the 2000 election. I’m writing a blog post about the irrational Krugman haters, and how they wrongly smear him for being deceitful yet are forced to rely upon deception and insults to make their point. And your site was the first I found. I’ll be sure to link to this place, as you certainly fit the bill of the irrational Krugman hater. I might just make you my sole attraction. Thanks.

Oh, and speaking of a biased media, I’ll give the last word to the ubiquitous Daily Howler:
“Krugman is right—press reports tended to “stress the likelihood” that Bush would have won under certain scenarios. And they tended to bury the fact Krugman cited last week—the fact that Gore would have won if all votes were recounted. Unsurprisingly, this tendency was visible in Krugman’s own paper, where Richard Berke’s “analysis” of the Times recount completely failed to mention the outcome that had Podhoretz so bollixed last week. (The Times news report, by Ford Fessenden, was more forthcoming.) People like Berke deep-sixed this result—and four years later, people like Podhoretz were outraged by Krugman’s “whopper!” But so it has gone, in so many areas, over the past dozen years.”
14 Mark Says:
June 2nd, 2006 at 7:52 am
Yes, yes, Krugman was right and Bush stole the election - wonderful. Keep on dreaming.

In the words of former NY Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent:

“Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”
15 buttermyself Says:
June 8th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Yes, yes, Krugman was right and Bush stole the election - wonderful. Keep on dreaming.

Reptilian logic and reading incomprehension, neat!