White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe recently protested that “you can manipulate the statistics in any way you want” when he was confronted with some tax rate figures he disliked. Apparently, Chris Matthews took note.
Matthews rehashed the Birtherism issue during a segment on Hardball about “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” and he put a melodramatic spin on a statistic about the percentage of Americans who believe President Obama was not born in America.
“One in five Americans are unwilling to say that President Obama was born in this country,” Matthews said, while a graphic on the screen showed the poll numbers. If you look at the graphic, though, Matthews characterization of the poll seems very misleading. The question was, basically, “do you believe Obama was born in the country?” 77 percent of Americans polled said “yes.” 3 percent said “no.” 19 percent said they had “no opinion.” Nineteen percent have no opinion on where Obama was born, three percent think he was born in another country – in Matthews’ mind, the most faithful way to report that statistic is to say 1/5 of Americans won’t say he’s born here and then try to require a Republican strategist to justify all this craziness in the GOP.
But it would be equally true to say that 96% of Americans are unwilling to say that President Obama was born overseas. And of that 96%, 77% say definitively that he was born in the United States. But that reading of the poll doesn’t fit the narrative that Matthews wants to push, so he spins a “no opinion” data point into a Birther scandal.
One of Matthews guests during the segment, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, said a key to reelection for Obama is that he “has to recapture the magic” of being able to “communicate through the public media.”
On Hardball, then, it appears that Matthews is the change he’s been waiting for (to paraphrase a famous quotation of Obama’s).
