Paul Ryan and the Liar Leitmotif

Since the 2012 campaign, I have noticed that many on the Left portray Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as "dishonest" or a "liar." I jokingly have noted that the critique comes from a central, all-controlling hand on the Left, who demands that all criticisms match up. This person offers short, staple critiques of figures on the Right--almost like Wagnerian leitmotifs, if you will--and then all criticisms of that figure need to work off of that leitmotif. Here are a few:

• George W. Bush - stupid
• Dick Cheney - evil
• Paul Ryan - liar
• Michelle Bachmann - crazy
• Sarah Palin - all of the above

I was thinking about this in conjunction with an article that emerged in The Fiscal Times, with the inflammatory headline of "Economics Say Paul Ryan Misrepresented Their Research." The author, Rob Garver, originally wrote that one economist whose research Ryan cited, Jeffrey Brown, noted that "while the [Ryan] paper cites the study accurately in a literal sense, it ignores the caveat that ‘there may also be other factors that would continue to limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed.'” Jeffrey Brown refuted this:

Speaking of “misrepresentation,” I take issue with your portrayal of my email communication to you as suggesting that Congressman Ryan incorrectly cited my work with Amy Finkelstein of MIT. You provided me the quote from his report and asked me if it was accurate, noting that another academic suggested it may not be. My exact response to you was: “That quote is an accurate representation of our work. My only caveat would be that although Medicaid has this effect, there may also be other factors that would continue to limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed.” The caveat was provided to help you – as the reporter – to understand the context for the citation in case you wanted to explore the policy implications of our work further and to help you understand why another academic might have felt the quote was inaccurate. But I did not suggest nor do I hold the view that Congressman Ryan “ignored” the caveat, as implied by your writing. Nor, as implied by the title of your piece, do I believe Congressman Ryan “misrepresented” my research. His citation was appropriate. Obviously, the interactions of Medicaid and long-term care are complex, and a full discussion would go far beyond the small summary they provided. But that is true of any summary - indeed, even our own abstract of the paper does not provide that caveat due to word count constraints. In short, I do NOT believe that my work was misrepresented in the Ryan document. Rather, I believe my email was misrepresented in your article.

That is somewhat devastating. When I read that, my thoughts drifted to Megan McArdle's new book about failure, The Up Side of Down. McArdle writes:

While it's undoubtedly true that some reporters consciously repress facts that threaten their prior ideological beliefs, I don't think that's really the issue in most cases. What bias does--in science, in media, in any situation where information is gathered--is affect what questions you ask. (pg. 151)

I love McArdle's framing here, and it allows us to accept that bias is pervasive and real without becoming conspiratorial. It seems very difficult to dispute that Garver was asking questions and looking for information to prove the leitmotif--that Ryan is dishonest. Garver was trying to add to "the pattern," thought he had found something, and went to press. (To his great credit--or to his editor's credit--Garver corrected it rather quickly. But that correction does not refute my point about leitmotifs as anchors or prisms for evaluation.)

I eagerly went to present this example of my leitmotifs theory being validated (confirmation bias is a danger here as well!) to my wife. While I was rambling about this on March 5, I saw this tweet from a liberal on Twitter named Mike Cohen:

@baseballcrank maybe he can break his own record for shameless lying set in 2012!
— Mike Cohen (@mcohen2) March 6, 2014

Note that he immediately goes to the "liar" meme. So I think there is something to this. Somewhere, somehow, "Paul Ryan is a liar" became the chosen line of attack from the Left. Thoughtful liberal commentator Jonathan Chait, I think, got part of the way to the reality when evaluating the emergence of the "Paul Ryan liar" leitmotif. He wrote,

A week ago, Paul Ryan’s political assets included — alongside his chiseled torso, plainspoken Midwestern demeanor, and the unshakable loyalty of the entire Republican Party — a firm reputation for honesty among the mainstream media. That reputation has suffered a massive, swift erosion. News stories about his speech at the Republican National Convention focused on its many rhetorical sleights of hand. Over the weekend, the revelation that he dramatically misstated a marathon time added a crucial, accessible piece of evidence to the indictment. Now liberals are calling him “Lyin’ Ryan” — a nickname that, a few weeks ago, would have seemed silly, like “Wimpy Palin.” Now mainstream pundits are defending Ryan with versions of the “well, all politicians fib” defense. Given that this constituency was once portraying Ryan as unusually honest, this represents a huge retreat for his political brand. 

[snip]

The thing about Ryan is that he has always resided in a counter-factual universe. He is a product of the hermetically sealed right-wing subculture. Many of the facts taken for granted by mainstream economists have never penetrated his brain. Ryan burst onto the national scene with a dense, fact-laden attack on the financing of Obama’s health-care bill that was essentially a series of hallucinations, pseudo-facts cooked up and recirculated by conservative apparatchiks who didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t care. His big-think speeches reflect the influence of fact-free conservatives and collapse under scrutiny.

One of my tenets of this blog is that I am trying to be like Arnold Kling, and to take the most charitable view of people with whom I disagree. I reject most of Chait's contentions here, but buried beneath the criticisms is a good point, in my judgment.

Prior to the 2012 campaign, Ryan's political brand--his "homestyle," if you will--was "serious" and "thoughtful." The media latched onto this, because Ryan presents himself a certain way, and also, because President Obama offered the same appraisal. Way back a million years ago, in early 2010, Obama noted, "You don't get a lot of credit if I say, "'You know, I think Paul Ryan is a pretty sincere guy and has a beautiful family.' Nobody is going to run that in the newspapers." (One could argue that Obama's comments established something of a "permission structure" on the Left and in the media for acknowledging Ryan as "sincere" or "well-intentioned." Such a concession could easily be construed as an argument against interest.)

In the heat of a tough campaign, however, that sort of thing goes away. The minute Ryan was chosen as the GOP nominee for vice president, "sincere" was not going to hold up. Paul Ryan is not John McCain: a war hero with an incredibly strong, well-established national brand as a "maverick" that wasn't going to be impeached by political attacks. Ryan was well-known among the politically engaged, but was relatively obscure otherwise. (Note: McCain lost in 2008 because no Republican was ever going to win as the incumbent party in the middle of a financial crisis brought about by banks. Jay Cost's appraisal from October 2008 still strikes me as the best read of how that played out.)

Ryan, then, enters the arena with a style of sincerity and thoughtfulness... but premises that are almost universally disputed by the Left. Liberals like Jonathan Chait call them "hallucinations" and "pseudo-facts," but if we strip that down to its core, it is essentially that the Right and the Left argue from very different core principles and premises.

As befitting his style, Ryan's speeches are somewhat policy-heavy. He presents math and "facts" in a way that is difficult to ridicule as "stupid," because he is articulate. Here's a classic example from his 2012 convention speech (more on the criticisms of the convention speech and fact-checkers in a later post):

You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.

This was an argument that was floating around on the Right for a while, but the mainstream media did not really pick it up. So hearing it from Ryan--thundering from the stage in Tampa--as fact, was galling. The reaction to this claim was uniform on the Left: Ryan is just making this up! Let's work through some specific responses, just to this particular claim. Here's Talking Points Memo:

Obama did use those Medicare savings -- in the form of targeted cuts in payments to providers, not in benefits to seniors -- to pay for the health care law. Ryan's budget calls for using them to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and deficit reduction. But by now calling to restore that spending commitment to Medicare, Ryan and Romney are pledging to hasten Medicare's insolvency by many years.

CBS offers a similar take:

The Romney campaign points to a CBO report showing that if the health care law was repealed, spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion from 2013-2022. The president's health care reform law is indeed paid for in part by reducing Medicare's expected rate of growth between now and 2022. According to data from the Kaiser Foundation, however, the reductions come primarily from cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, as well as in hospital reimbursements and in payments to other providers. The Obama administration casts them as savings that would streamline the system, reduce waste and fraud, reinforce the Medicare trust fund and extend its lifeline. It does not limit access to benefits for Medicare recipients, and actually offers new preventative care benefits, as well as increased prescription drug coverage. Republicans, however, argue it creates disincentives for hospitals and doctors to accept new Medicare patients.

Here's the NY Times:

The $716 billion cut to Medicare that President Obama made would reduce payments to health maintenance organizations, hospitals and many other health care providers.

And the Washington Post:

Under the health-care law, spending does not decrease in Medicare year after year; the reduction is from anticipated levels of spending in future years. Moreover, the “cuts” did not come at the expense of seniors. The savings mostly are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the health-care law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs.

Almost an echo chamber effect, no? To these fact checkers, the facts are not that PPACA reduced spending to Medicare Advantage. The facts are that those were "targeted cuts" to health care providers. There were several similar claims in Ryan's speech, which was a laundry list of arguments that had floated around on the Right. The Left rejects those arguments as invalid, and cannot see why any intelligent person would believe them. But Ryan is seen as intelligent. There are, then, two conclusions you can draw from those facts:

• Public policy is complicated, and there are many ways to look at the same sets of facts. Politicians will attempt to present those facts in a way that is most favorable to their own positions.
• Ryan is a liar.

As a pejorative, "liar" fits him well. Ryan certainly presented the facts in a way that was most favorable to his side. Thus the easiest rebuttal is to claim that Ryan is willfully misrepresenting the truth, not that he is a politician trying to make a political argument.

Whether you agree with the policy or not, the Affordable Care Act reduced funding to Medicare Advantage. That's a (narrow) fact. One can dispute whether this was a good idea, whether this constitutes "raiding Medicare," whether reducing payments to providers results in reduced benefits to customers, and a whole bevy of other issues. But it cannot be a "lie" to say, as Ryan did, that Obama cut Medicare to finance a new entitlement. Ryan is failing to paint both sides, but he is not lying. Here's another example of a politician speaking like a politician:

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too.

President Obama is not at all lying here. He is not presenting the opposing case, which would complicate his number greatly, but he is not lying: it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there is a persistent wage gap brought about by overt and structural discrimination, and there is social science research pointing to the 77 cent figure. You could also reject much of his conclusion, as Reihan Salam does. Note Salam's takeaway, though:

In discussing the gender gap, the president has (a) oversimplified and misdiagnosed the underlying problem, (b) obscured the gains that have been made by women in the marketplace, and (c) made claims regarding what public policy can achieve that are unrealistic and potentially counterproductive.

Salam's opinion of the president's argument is that it is unpersuasive. But he doesn't call it a lie; to Salam, it's just a bad argument.

There is no difference between the veracity of those two arguments. Yes, according to a study, on average, women make 77 cents for every dollar men make. Yes, the ACA moved money away from Medicare Advantage. On their own, those facts are meaningless. What you draw from those facts depends on your premises, context, and worldview. (For its part, Politifact rated the President's claim as "mostly true" and Ryan's as "mostly false." Unsurprising.)

Politicians should be given a great deal of latitude to make their arguments, and people should be willing to accept that politicians will slant the truth. But once a narrative is established, the media will anchor to it and work tirelessly to confirm it. Paul Ryan is no different than anyone else, but the narrative must go on.