March 28, 2024

4 thoughts on “The Pelosi Premium

  1. @IAMB: Totally true. It’s like the whole “Bush brought the recession” in 2000– before he even became President. Simply because a person is in office when something bad happens doesn’t mean that they caused it.

    I guess this graphic is to attempt to head off the fallacy in the other direction. Unfortunately, in modern political discourse people aren’t as concerned about the facts as they are their impression of the facts.

    I was reading an article the other day (I’ll have to go find it again at some point) where the idea was put forth that negative comments (even after being proven false) tend to stick to a person. The idea was that a person could make a false accusation, and a rebuttal could be made, but over time the accusation would still be remembered because of the initial impression whereas the rebuttal may not.

    An illustration of this is the “Obama is a Muslim” idea. It’s reinforced with his middle name. Obama certainly is not Muslim, regardless of what school he was brought up in, but polling data suggests that this falsehood has stuck to him.

    Same thing with a political party or politician being blamed for something that is much more complex than the implication, and yet it sticks.

    Thanks for the useful observation.

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