Lufkin Politics
By BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - Ask national Republicans to name a model 2010 congressional candidate, and they're likely to mention Stephen Fincher. A 37-year-old farmer and gospel singer from Frog Jump, Tenn., Fincher has raised more than $675,000 in his bid to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. John Tanner.
His nontraditional background suits the GOP just fine.
"He'd never run for office before, never been to Washington, D.C., before," marveled California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who met Fincher on a recruiting trip for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "He said, 'Listen, Mr. Kevin,' he said he couldn't look his children in the eye and say he watched this country change and didn't do something about it."
That a political novice like Fincher could become a top GOP contender to win a historically Democratic district speaks volumes about the unpredictable political environment that has come to define the 2010 midterm elections.
Voters are angry. President Barack Obama's job approval ratings have sunk, particularly among the independents who helped put him in office. The Democratic and Republican parties are both unpopular. Independent voters are growing in stature and anti-tax tea party activists have become a potent political force.
The fractious atmosphere has sent both parties scrambling to find challengers and open seat candidates who fit the national mood, while they also try to protect incumbents from being steamrolled by it.
"Arguably, both political parties need to earn back voters' trust," said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "Republicans lost it and we need to gain it back."
It's not a slam dunk for Republicans, who long to retake control of both the House and Senate amid voter unrest.
They must contend with a party identity tarnished during George W. Bush's presidency and the pressures of tea party activists who believe the GOP has become too moderate. Tea party-backed candidates are running in dozens of Republican primaries across the country, setting up potentially messy and expensive intraparty battles.
And at least nine former GOP House members are running to recapture seats they held during Bush's presidency. Current and former members of Congress also are the GOP's nominees or front-runners for the nomination in six Senate contests so far.
That doesn't help the GOP make an argument it's the party of change. Newcomers like Fincher and little-known state legislators like Scott Brown do. Republicans scored a huge victory last month when Brown - with help from independents, tea party activists and the GOP establishment - took the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat away from Democrats in Massachusetts.
"There seems to be a spirit among thekind of challengers who've said, 'I don't really know a lot about politics, but I know what my community is all about,'" said Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who heads his party's campaign operation for House seats.
Brown's candidacy was well-suited to the anxious political environment. He focused on a narrow, fiscally conservative message while casting himself as an independent thinker untethered to partisan demands. While he was a featured speaker before conservative activists last week, he also voted with Democrats this week to end a Republican-led filibuster of a jobs bill backed by Obama.
Like Brown, Fincher isn't quick to identify himself as a Republican. He calls himself a conservative on his campaign Web site, adding, "My roots run deep in Tennessee, not politics."
Democrats also are advising their candidates to stress their political independence and avoid becoming caricatured as captives of Washington.
Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who chairs the House Democrats' campaign operation, points to his party's 5-0 record in House special elections last year as proof that his party can still win with the right candidates and message.
That record will be tested again this spring, with special elections to fill three House seats, all held by Democrats:
-The Pennsylvania seat of the late Rep. John Murtha.
-The Florida seat of former Rep. Robert Wexler, who resigned last month to run a Middle East think tank.
-The Hawaii seat of Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who's said he will resign Sunday to run for governor.
Van Hollen said incumbents facing re-election battles are being urged to "vote in an independent-minded way - sometimes with the majority, and sometimes not. Sometimes with Obama, and sometimes not."
Of the former GOP lawmakers running to reclaim seats, Van Hollen said, "Voters don't believe that turning the keys back to the guys who drove over the ditch in the first place is a good alternative."
Republican Steve Chabot, running for his old seat in a Cincinnati-area district he lost in 2008 to Democrat Steve Driehaus, is working hard not to fall into that trap.
Despite his seven terms in the House, Chabot believes he can still position himself as the independent outsider in the race and frame Driehaus as being too deferential to Democratic leaders in Congress.
"Rather than do what's right for the people here, he's followed Nancy Pelosi's lead on virtually everything," Chabot said of Driehaus.
Republicans consider Driehaus' seat one of their best targets, but Chabot said he's raising most of the money for his race in and around his district.
"I've always felt you're very much on your own when you are running," Chabot said. "If the party is able to help, we appreciate that, but we are not depending on it."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Dan Lufkin said,
February 15, 2010 @ 5:26 pm
Just offhand, it looks as though any selection process that ends up with 50% college-plus education has got some fundamental weakness somewhere.
[(myl) The authors write: "These distributions are generally unremarkable except perhaps for the high percentage of participants with at least a college degree—a function no doubt of the population being drawn from a college town as well as of our practice of screening for individuals with substantial interest in politics (a group more likely to be well-educated)."
I wonder if it's really true that interest in politics correlates substantially with degree of education — that's not what I would have guessed, based on personal experience. But anyhow, you have to give the authors credit for going beyond the usual experimental subject pool of undergraduates participating for course credit.]
On the other hand, I must say that my personal experience with conservatives validates the finding of a low disgust threshold. They tend to disgust easily and stay disgusted longer by many aspects of life.
[(myl) I guess it depends on what you mean by "conservative". I grew up with conservatives who had low expectations for their fellow humans, but generally responded to the confirmation of their prejudices with amused tolerance rather than disgust.]
ilana said,
February 15, 2010 @ 5:45 pm
Hi Mark.
You should be able to enlarge each page of the copy you've already linked using the zoom function of your browser (tested with firefox and chrome on mac - some older browsers may break page formatting when you zoom). The text of each page of the document is also reproduced (unformatted) in a box at the top of the corresponding web page.
Ewout ter Haar said,
February 15, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
A difference of the log of 0.0125 means that they are measuring differences in conductance of the order of 10^0.0125 = 3% (1% if its the natural log).
As you said, those are pretty small changes they are measuring, compared to the order of magnitude changes when people cough, stand up, etc.
Mr Fnortner said,
February 15, 2010 @ 6:18 pm
At the link given a panel displays at the top of every page, in my browser at least, titled "Unformatted Document Text" in which the entire page of the original document is presented as a stream of text in full size. This may prove useful. Alternatively, one could cut and paste any page of interest into a fully featured word processor and increase the type size.
[(myl) Yes, with a large amount of labor, a readable version could be (re-)constructed. But why?]
Carl Zimmer said,
February 15, 2010 @ 7:09 pm
The University of Minnesota psychologists Jonathan C. Gewirtz and Bruce N. Cuthbert wrote into Science about the paper and also raised the possibility that unfamiliar social environments are playing a role:
"If such speculation were justified, then we would predict that the results would be reversed if the experiment were repeated in a context that is particularly threatening to liberals, such as a gun show. Until this prediction is put to the test, it is safer to assume that political attitudes are related to people's responses to threat under specific circumstances rather than to a phenotypic difference in physiological responsiveness to threats in general."
Now *that's* an experiment I'd love to watch.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/321/5896/1667#12395
Ran Ari-Gur said,
February 15, 2010 @ 11:32 pm
I imagine that most IRBs are quite happy with experiments being conducted in contexts that are particularly threatening to conservatives, as long as the term for such contexts is "carefully controlled academic laboratory settings". By contrast, referring to contexts that are particularly threatening to liberals as "gun shows" seems less likely to win them over.
[(myl) Doing ethnography at gun shows would be fine. Bringing liberals to gun shows and attaching electrodes to them, not so much. Frankly, I doubt that the gun show organizers would be all that enthusiastic either. But you could reverse the polarity by doing the study somewhere like Liberty University or Regent University, starting (for example) with the theory that conservatism is a more independent and stoical sort of ideology, whereas liberalism tends to arise among people who want nanny-state protections because they don't have the grit to stand up to threats on their own.]
uberVU - social comments said,
February 16, 2010 @ 8:54 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by PhilosophyFeeds: Language Log: Physiological politics http://goo.gl/fb/suSz...
Matthew said,
February 16, 2010 @ 9:24 am
ctrl+ to enlarge font on a pc browser.
Nathan said,
February 16, 2010 @ 10:25 am
As usual with stories involving statistics, I see the tendency here (often remarked on at Language Log) to turn a small but statistically significant difference in group measurements into a sweeping statement about all individuals in a group. It's interesting how our monkey brains do that.
E. said,
February 16, 2010 @ 12:24 pm
I've always thought psychopolitical claims like this were bunk, based on myself: I sometimes feel physically ill over "threatening" photos(at least ones involving injury), I jump if I see something odd at the edge of my visual field(which often turns out to be a plastic bag or leaf), and unusual noises often make me start sweating; after these stimuli pass it takes several minutes for my heart rate and breathing to get back to normal. (I also get test anxiety, which means I'd probably feel fairly on-edge if experimented upon.) Nonetheless, I'm very far left and opposed to what this study calls "protective policies".
Kenny V said,
February 16, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
This seems to follow on the heels of the work of Jonathan Haidt, which seeks to describe the differences in the values/morals of liberals and conservatives, one of the findings of which was that conservatives value "purity" (i.e. absence of disgust) much more highly than liberals; as well as the recent philosophy of Martha Nussbaum (Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law 2004, and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution 2009), wherein she argues that disgust is one of the main contributing factors in the resistance to gay marriage.
Intuitively it makes sense. I wonder if these scientists are merely attempting to empirically confirm these lines of thought. It seems to me, however, (not that I am any expert) that a better method than this purely physical-response method would be simply to ask people to rate their own feelings about things. The reduction of an extremely complex set of human mechanisms that comprise our reactions to things and subsequent views about them to simple physiological responses doesn't sit well with me.
[(myl) It's an interesting fact, often noted here, that many people seem to feel that if a psychological phenomenon can be measured physiologically, so that it's shown to be "in the brain" as well as "in the mind", that this makes it somehow more likely (or even certain!) to be genetically determined/innate.
This is a peculiar connection, since it seems to apply even in the thinking of materialists, for whom every psychological phenomenon is somehow "in the brain".]
Nick Lamb said,
February 16, 2010 @ 2:09 pm
and the stranger for the fact that we know the mind definitely has considerable direct power over parts of the body which are far more remote from it than the brain. Your mind is definitely capable of inducing otherwise unexplained (but quite real) rashes for example.
I'd characterise the current state of most brain scanning type research as equivalent to you noticing that when you a very compute-intensive program on your PC the fan spins faster and makes more noise (note to those at home, your PC may or may not exhibit this behaviour depending on numerous factors). "So what?" seems very often to be the most reasonable reaction to these studies.
ThomasH said,
February 16, 2010 @ 2:19 pm
In addition my question would be why an inate feer factor (if there is such a thing) makes "conservtives" fear terroirist and criminals who can be deterred by gun ownership but not global warming and gun bearing friends and neighbors?
E. said,
February 16, 2010 @ 2:43 pm
@Thomas H: It might have something to do with the relatively long-term impersonal nature of global warming– it doesn't have the immediacy of someone holding a gun to your head. As for why "gun bearing friends and neighbors" are less scary than terrorists and criminals, it's probably an ingroup/outgroup thing.
Another idea: could having a stronger emotional reaction to pictures of gory injury actually be linked to pacifism, empathy, and related "liberal" values?
Spell Me Jeff said,
February 16, 2010 @ 3:20 pm
Even if we take the evidence at face value, I don't see how it points to a causal relationship. It's equally likely that whatever produces political views also contributes to certain physiological responses.
Messing up correlation and causation is the great bugbear of the popular media. Seems to me too, if you want some trivial research results to get you some attention, you might be willing to provide fodder for such gaffes.
Forrest said,
February 16, 2010 @ 3:47 pm
I'm glad somebody mentioned Jonathan Haidt - the similarity to his work was going to be the bulk of my comment, but I can see that's already been brought up.
I find it a little odd that liberals are supposed to be unafraid of disturbing stimulus, and as a result want more "protective policies." Especially that unafraid lefties want tighter control over the guns that they're less frightened by. I think the reason that the left is almost synonymous with gun control is a desire to be protected from people who would acquire guns and then misuse them; this seems a bit at odds with the less fear response notion. Of course you could rephrase things as conservatives wanting guns to protect themselves from dangerous criminals, which does fit the fear-inducement part of the hypothesis a bit better.
I'm also a little skeptical that there could be gene for being aligned with one or the other political party. That's probably a bit unfair of me, and might even be drawing the arrows of causation backwards, but I'm still incredulous. Haidt describes a set of moral domains and says that people feel some of these more or less strongly, so that the sum total of their moral makeup gives them an affinity for one or the other end of the political spectrum. But I wonder how this type of research would treat political opinions that don't easily fall under the "left/right" dichotomy?
required said,
February 16, 2010 @ 7:01 pm
What I find interesting is the conclusions drawn from the test.
From the Science article we can conclude (with the same confidence) that those opposed to "protective measures" are unsympathetic towards other people and less attuned to their environment .
The blink amplitude test is just pointless for the results Oxley, et al use it to obtain. Higher amplitude startle response in an individual correlates with fear, but relative amplitudes across individuals does not indicate which are more fearful. This may be why there was not significant correspondence with bivariate analysis. At best what Oxly, et al are describing is a test (assuming statistical significance, a problem) which shows that those opposed to "protective measures" are less responsive to stimuli.
Given the 3 "threatening pictures (a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it) it doesn't seem Oxley, et al were actually testing threatening images as much as empathy. If one wanted threatening images one would instead use a large spider or the barrel of a gun pointing at viewer, something which actually might be seen as threatening to the viewer.
a straight PDF of the disgust paper can be downloaded from a link here:
http://www.allacademic.com/one/prol/prol01/index.php?cmd=prol01_search&offset=0&limit=5&multi_search_search_mode=publication&multi_search_publication_fulltext_mod=fulltext&textfield_submit=true&search_module=multi_search&search=Search&search_field=title_idx&fulltext_search=The+Ick+Factor%3A+Disgust+Sensitivity+as+a+Predictor+of+Political+Attitudes
Aviatrix said,
February 16, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
A military base would seem to be the most obvious opposite facility to the university lab at which to test the uneasiness at test surroundings bias.
D.O. said,
February 16, 2010 @ 9:55 pm
Here you can download pdf of the conversation-starter.
[(myl) Thanks! As promised, I'll blog about it as time permits.]
Graeme said,
February 17, 2010 @ 7:44 am
I'm no social scientist, but couldn't cause-effect run the other way? Eg someone acculturated in a 'conservative' environment to be wary and fear the unknown may thereby come, mentally and physically to reflexively respond negatively to unusual or unexpected stimuli.
As E.Said said, the headlines that people who are more easily threatened are more likely to be conservative fail the 'look around you' test. I and many other 'liberals' of my acquaintance feel more vulnerable than the conservatives we know. You might as well say that this maps onto a desire for collective protections, a welfare state model, as to take this research and imply that progressives are innately more trusting.
ps - I'm a relatively newbie here. So forgive the impertinence. But I am wondering about the regular threads covering science in the news, and nature vs nurture. How do they fit into 'Language Log'? (Aside from the fact that Prof Liberman et al are ardent and exacting analysts on these topics?)
J. Goard said,
February 17, 2010 @ 8:40 am
I'm with Forrest in being majorly surprised that favoring more gun control would correlate with a higher threshold for fear. Among my many anti-gun friends and acquaintances, many have been unfamiliar with guns and expresed considerable nervousness at the idea, say, of keeping a loaded handgun in their nightstand. Conversely, among my many pro-gun friends and acquaintances, it's hard to think of anybody who ordinarily expressed fear about criminals breaking in, except perhaps for one friend for a short time after he was in fact a burglary victim. It seems clear to me that the antigun view owes most of its power to an inability to get over the visceral reaction to a gun, and thus reason coolly about cause-and-effect. I guess I could just be projecting my own personality, which is very low in neuroticism (not disturbed by holding a spider, treating an open wound, seeing gay porn, eating balut, etc).
Now, the conservative side does strike me as overly neurotic about the likelihood of government taking their guns away, but that seems like a rather different issue, a reflection of the nearly-universal pessimism about the political trajectory. (Too many people I know seem to think either that all MSM except Fox News is extreme left, or else that it's all extreme right, period.)
Stephen Jones said,
February 17, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
The point is that the NRA has successfully sold the gun as part of a defence of individual freedom. There is also the simple fact that there are more guns in rural areas, which now tend to be Republican.