The Separate Reality of PIPA

As you've likely heard, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) recently released a report entitled "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" which purports to show how Bush supporters don't even understand Bush's actual policies, while Kerry supporters are extremely well-informed about Kerry's policies. The report has been used by Kerry supporters in predictably self-congratulatory fashion. But while I'm not too surprised by the first half of PIPA's assertion (regarding Bush), the second (regarding Kerry) set off major alarm bells for me, given what I've written about Kerry's positions and the consistent surprise I've heard from Kerry supporters when they discover what those positions actually are.

So I decided to examine the report's findings to see what was causing the disconnect, and the following statement jumped out at me immediately (in fact it practically clubbed me over the head, thanks to the portion I've bolded below):

Majorities of Bush supporters misperceive his positions on a range of foreign policy issues. In particular they assume he supports multilateral approaches and addressing global warming when he has taken strong contrary positions on issues such as the International Criminal court and the Kyoto Agreement. A majority of Kerry supporters have accurate perceptions of Kerry positions on the same issues.

The report later notes that 65% of Kerry supporters think he favors the ICC, while a whopping 74% think he favors Kyoto. And the authors laud the accuracy of these beliefs ("Kerry supporters were much more accurate in assessing their candidate’s positions on all these issues").

PIPA's conclusions here are utter hogwash. First, Kerry is opposed to the Kyoto Protocol; his official policy paper states unequivocally that "the Kyoto Protocol is not the answer." Second, Kerry is also opposed to the International Criminal Court, as he told the Boston Globe ("Kerry opposes role in tribunal," 10/5/2004): "I don't believe the United States should join the International Criminal Court until our concerns are addressed and the Court develops a solid track record of fair prosecutions of the world's worst criminals." So the fact that so many Kerry supporters mistakenly believe he supports both Kyoto and the ICC shows that they're not much better than Bush supporters when it comes to understanding their candidate's actual positions. Yet astonishingly, PIPA chose to feature these two issues in their summary of supporters' beliefs about the candidates' foreign policy positions (page 10).

Like me, you may be wondering how PIPA could possibly have justified their conclusions. The answer is in the fine print. If you examine the actual results on page 12, you'll see an asterisk next to the two rows in the table regarding Kyoto and the ICC, directing you to the following footnote: "Supports in principle but wants to negotiate terms for US involvement."

This is data fudging of the first order. In the case of Kyoto it's just an outright distortion; Kerry's statement on Kyoto itself is utterly unambiguous, although Kerry does pay lip service to the importance of addressing global warming. In the case of the ICC, the footnote is arguably a true statement, but at the very least it's highly misleading. A more accurate footnote would have been "Opposes, but is willing to consider US involvement if certain conditions are met" (as per the Boston Globe article). But in that case, the authors couldn't have supported their desired conclusion that Kerry supporters are well-informed about his policy positions.

It's also important to note that in the actual questions asked, PIPA absolutely did not offer any such caveats about Kerry's positions; the respondents were simply asked to assess whether or not Kerry thought the US should participate or not participate in Kyoto and the ICC. The footnoted qualifications were added by PIPA in their report after the fact, to allow the desired conclusion to be reached. Based strictly on the actual questions and responses for these two issues, then, PIPA's summaries are flat-out falsifications. And PIPA further fudged the results by translating the somewhat ill-defined phrase "participate in" in the questionnaire into the more definitive "supports" in the report.

PIPA also noted (correctly) the "cognitive dissonance" of Bush supporters, while ignoring extreme examples of the same sort of thing among Kerry supporters. For example, the report notes that "Nearly all Kerry supporters (92%) agree that if US intelligence services had said that Iraq did not have WMD and was not providing support to al Qaeda, the US should not have gone to war." Of course, this directly contradicts the statement of their candidate, who proclaimed--astonishingly--that he would still have voted for war even knowing there were no WMDs. Yet somehow this disconnect between Kerry's supporters and Kerry himself doesn't merit any comment by the report's authors. This same pattern is repeated elsewhere in the report.

The PIPA results are interesting, but they've been carefully crafted and in some cases practically falsified in order to present a misleading view of both Kerry and his supporters. As always, caveat lector.

Comments

[Dan Maloney]

I believe your assessment of the poll has decent evidence to back it up. But your characterization of the poll is wrong. It is not misleading on Kyoto: here is an abridged quote from the second presidential debate:

"Kerry: ...They pulled out of the global warming, declared it dead, didn't even accept the science.

I'm going to be a president who believes in science.

BUSH: Well, had we joined the Kyoto treaty, which I guess he's referring to, it would have cost America a lot of jobs....

KERRY: The fact is that the Kyoto treaty was flawed. I was in Kyoto, and I was part of that. I know what happened. But this president didn't try to fix it. He just declared it dead, ladies and gentlemen, and we walked away from the work of 160 nations over 10 years."

My assessment is that Kerry supports Kyoto but wants to fix the flaws.

This is exactly what the fine print on the poll points out "Supports in principle but wants to negotiate terms for US involvement."

You obviously have found Kerry on one side and I've found Kerry on the other side. SO I blame Kerry's inability to articulate a clear position and brand it as a distortion of Kerry's position.

On the ICC here is a another Kerry Quote:
"9. Do you support US participation in the International Criminal Court? Yes

I support U.S. participation in the International Criminal Court, but also believe that U.S. officials, including soldiers, should be provided some protection from politically motivated prosecutions.

Source: Peace Action Candidate Questionnaire"

This follows the fine print
"Supports in principle but wants to negotiate terms for US involvement."
so again we both find evidence of Kerry appearing on both sides of an issue. And again I blame Kerry but sadly people don't vote on these issues so Kerry can afford to be ambiguous

[John Caruso]

Dan,

Thanks for the comments. I'd most definitely agree that Kerry has tried to play both sides of these issues (as he's tried to do with so many issues), and that's part of the confusion. In the case of PIPA, however, they simply ignored strong contradictory evidence.

For example, you mention his quotes on Kyoto from the debates. The quote I'm mentioning, however, is from Kerry's official policy paper of August 19th, 2004, and couldn't be clearer; it says, in extraordinarily direct language for a political paper, "John Kerry and John Edwards believe that the Kyoto Protocol is not the answer." It goes on to state: "The near-term emission reductions it would require of the United States are infeasible, while the long-term obligations imposed on all nations are too little to solve the problem." Kerry's subsequent comments in the debates (which you quoted) don't contradict this unequivocal statement in substance, though they do blow smoke (Kerry's specialty on many issues, but particularly on this one; see this article for an analysis of Kerry's calculated "strategic ambiguity" on Kyoto).

Ironically, Kerry's stance on Kyoto differs very little from Bush's in terms of the reasons they cite for their positions.

On the ICC, you're correct about the Peace Action quote, and I think that may even have been PIPA's source (according to their footnotes). However, I'd recommend that you read the entire Boston Globe article I cited ("Kerry opposes role in tribunal," 10/5/2004), which specifically cites that response of his to Peace Action; in fact, that seems to have been one of their reasons for asking Kerry about this in the first place: they wanted to get an official statement of policy from him, so that they could resolve the apparent inconsistencies in his position. And that's the context in which Kerry verified that he opposes the ICC, thus negating his statement to Peace Action (which was made in early 2004).

I seriously doubt that PIPA was unaware of this, given that they were about to release a major policy report on his positions. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, however, I contacted them yesterday to ask them to issue a correction or retraction; if they choose not to, then the obfuscation on their part here is clearly intentional.

In fact, if you look at PIPA's sources for the foreign policy segment of the report, you'll find that they seem to have cherry-picked Kerry's statements and then tailored their questions to fit those statements--in an attempt to guarantee that the responses they received would produce the result they were looking for, I think. The sources are also particularly telling in that regard: they include Peace Action and also STAR*PAC (the "Stop the Arms Race PAC"). Surely PIPA knew that Kerry's statements to groups with that orientation would be particularly slanted, and therefore likely not representative of his official positions. And in any case, why take Kerry's feel-good pronouncements to leftist activist groups over his official policy statements? Incredibly, if you look at their list of six sources (on page 11 of their report), Kerry's own web site isn't even listed!

So I think my harsh characterization of PIPA is fully warranted. Had they at least given the same caveats in the questionnaire that they gave in the report, I might not judge them so harshly--but they did not. Again, though, I agree with you that Kerry himself has made a conscious effort to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Maybe that's why Kerry supporters are so "accurate" about his positions: because he has so many of them. And PIPA could have said exactly that as part of the analysis in their report by way of explaining the "cognitive dissonance" of Kerry supporters--but that would have required them to undercut their desired conclusion.