Feedback

It's not just politicians who overestimate the importance of political attacks: It's journalists, and think tank types, and operatives. Tyler Cowen likes to say that when evaluating any situation, you have to ask yourself: What's the relevant scarcity? Here, it's feedback. The issue is where these groups turn to gauge response, how small their samples are, and thus how easily they see a couple attacks and generalize out.

Every day, politicians publish op-eds, give press conferences, go on television. All of these moves are carefully calibrated to achieve a single aim: An increase in positive public sentiment towards the politician and his agenda. But how do you gauge if it's working? Well, every morning, politicians get a list of clippings about themselves, compiled by some bright-eyed intern whose only job is to Nexis search their boss's name and staple together the results. When said boss gets the packet, that's his feedback, that's how he weighs the reaction to his latest moves. And if it's filled with Limbaugh transcripts and Wall Street Journal op-eds and a variety of other critiques, the pol probably thinks he's getting torn apart. If the Right musters some irate calls to his office and letters to his mailbox, the response will seem all the more vicious. Without an apparent counterweight to their excoriations, he's got no data points to counterbalance the sense that he's getting nailed, and it's hard to keep in mind that the way of the media is to report anger, not praise.

This is also why the blogosphere has been so effective against the media. Where politicians are used to some feedback, and have staffers and protocols for insulating themselves from it, individual op-ed columnists and reports have no such barriers. A magazine piece will elicit a couple letters that the author may or may not ever see. What they will see are blog posts, and e-mails, and comments, and no matter how hard they try to push away the negative feedback, it's human nature to recoil from attacks, and whether they admit it or not, they will often try to avoid stepping on the bright red button that triggers such abuse in the future.