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« How Obamacare kills jobs | Main | Apologies for all the politics »

Well then your job sucks

Following up on the post below, here is the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza using Alice In Wonderland logic to explain why even though the CBO report on the ACA doesn't say what lazy pundits like him says that it says, it's still ok for him to say it.

My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality.

Wow. Gotta go to Brad DeLong for this one:

Note the assumptions here:
  • That what actually happens to Americans as ObamaCare is implemented is not the "real world"
  • That the real world is the world of "campaign politics"
  • That in this real world of campaign politics reality does not count-"perception trumps"
  • That it is not his job to report on the "rightness of the argument" about what the consequences of ObamaCare implementation will be for all those Americans who do not live in the real world of campaign politics but, instead live somewhere else
  • That it is his job to report on the perceptions of campaign politics-because that is the real world

Even if you accept that Cillizza is only a political reporter and it's not his job to report on the facts of Obamacare but only the facts of campaign politics, his immediate rush to declare this bad for Democrats in yesterday's article still amounts to, as i said below, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If he wanted to wait until after Republicans put out their "Obamacare killed 2 million jobs" ads and Democrats put out their "Bill was a 59 year old man with his cancer in remission who was ready to retire but was afraid of losing his healthcare until Obamacare was implemented" ads, then he's welcome to do analysis on that and tell us which was more effective. Instead he even now barely seems to understand the distinction and just says it's too complicated to explain. In his original article he called it "economic nerd-speak". Not sure what value he is bringing to the table.

By fnord12 | February 5, 2014, 4:46 PM | Liberal Outrage