As for the ‘batshit crazy’ thing that you bring up again, you rather obviously fail to refer to the context in which it arose. You claimed that Mark Schmitt was making threats that he wasn’t delivering on; specifically that “Mysteriously, despite his threat to check my other sources and show that I “strip mine” data for political purporses, no further postings appeared at all.” What Mark had said was

I hadn’t previously questioned your three paragraphs on the data, but I’m beginning to think that you have simply strip-mined the academic literature for evidence that proves your point, rather than evaluated it seriously

This isn’t a threat of any variety whatsoever. Nor could anyone reasonable read it in good faith as being a threat. I don’t know whether your most peculiar reading of this statement can be attributed to some degree of paranoia, or to a dishonest desire to inflate it into something that it rather obviously isn’t. Nor do I especially care. On either reading it doesn’t suggest that you’re really worth engaging in intellectual debate with.

On Open University I said as follows. I will leave it up to your readers to decide if this was a failure to engage with Schmitt’s point much less a “piss poor” crawl into a HOLE failure. Bye bye

“Women voted exactly as they professed, Schmitt asserted, invoking the Annenberg studies of political beliefs done before the election. Women were 7-9 points more liberal than men on the subject of the Iraq war, according to Annenberg, and 11-15 points more liberal than men on the all important right track/wrong track question. And they voted 10 points more for the liberal, Kerry, than men did.

What this missed, of course, is that for purposes of establishing a disconnect between their beliefs and their votes, it does not matter how much more liberal women are than men; what matters is how liberal they are objectively versus how liberally they behave in the polling booth. But I had thought that women WERE objectively robustly liberal, not just comparatively liberal, and, in 2004, say, were just voting “irrationally”
. . .
But Schmitt forcing me to look hard at the actual, rather than the relative, Annenberg data has refined my thinking. The real problem may not be that women see themselves as liberal but vote irrationally. Instead, it looks like women are objectively liberal on most underlying discrete issues, but don’t put their positions together to identify their positions as making a liberal stance. They are metaphysically irrational, rather than politically irrational.

As of 2004, according to Annenberg, 69 percent of women thought the government should restrict gun use, 50 percent strongly opposed banning abortions, only 45 percent favored private school funding, 51 percent opposed the anti-gay amendment, and 61 percent thought the country was on the wrong track. In the same survey, the women classified themselves as only 26 percent liberal to 36 percent conservative. Similarly, women expressed a wild disconnect on their opinion of the presidency. Only 37 percent of women thought the Iraq War was worth it and a mere 43 percent approved of the way Bush was handling the economy. But 51 percent of them told pollsters they approved of how he was doing his job as president!

Men, on the other hand, come a lot closer to understanding that their positions on particular issues, bundled together, make a conservative political picture. Men were only 51 percent for additional gun control, but 54 percent for private school funding, 49 percent (more than half the respondents) for the anti gay amendment, 43 percent right track, and 38 percent conservative to 22 percent liberal. (Only on abortion did men tip robustly liberal.) Similarly men approved of Bush as a whole only slightly more than they approved of his domestic and international policies: 46 percent men good with the economy, 46% war worth it, 48 percent Bush doing a good job.

In the end, this should not have surprised me. Women often say they believe in abortion rights and equal employment opportunity, but they are not, ick, feminists. Just as conservatives made feminist a dirty word, they made liberal a dirty word. As I said in the Post, women are very sensitive to descriptions that have become unfashionable. So women make a category mistake—not recognizing that their liberal commitments together make a package called liberal. Then, when it comes time to make the simple binary choice at the voting moment, they have no easy touchstone to know what to do.

What to do to win an election when your largest base is metaphysically irrational? . . .

Here’s what Mark said:

And as to your question,”[why did] only 51% of those liberal, pacific, tolerant gender gaping women, who Greenberg describes, vote for Kerry?,”—you’ve got to be kidding. No one said that ALL women have liberal views. The gender difference on issues ranges about 3-15 points, depending on the issue. In 2004, for example, in the Annenberg poll the on marriage gap and gender gap, cited by Greenberg, the gender gap on the Iraq war was 9 points, the gap on “right track/wrong track”—the key election-predictor question—was 11. And the gender gap in the actual Kerry vote was 10 points, just about the same.

He was talking about issues, not liberal ID.

As to the word press, you got me.

There’s nothing shameful about not knowing about how Wordpress works, but you should have refrained from making baseless accusations against Ann Bartow if you didn’t know what was happening.

As to the word press, you got me. It’s a miracle I can even work my Blackberry. How did internet mavens like Barry wind up with their formatting not carrying over, whatever that means?

I accused you of conspiracy theory for writing this on Ann Bartow’s post:

so here’s what’s weird. Both “Alas, A Blog” and “Creative Destruction” post the IDENTICAL comments on this site, even including the grammatical error of not putting quotation marks around their excerpts from Pollitt’s review. Both Alas and Creative tell us in the identical words that they didn’t independently discover that Pollitt was critical. “[…] Ann at Feminist Law Professors directed me to this excellent Katha Pollitt piece.”
Now how likely is it that both Alas and Creative posted identical verbatim comments to Ann’s piece, including the same grammatical error?…
Could it be, dear readers, that someone sent Alas and Creative selected excerpts from the Pollitt piece, which is, on the whole, supportive, along with the template about how to present them as NEGATIVE?! And then, mirabile dictu, the same text surfaced not only on their blogs but as two identical comments on this website

Now, to anyone who knows the first thing about how Wordpress works, it’s obvious what did happen: Ann Bartow posted a link to Katha Pollitt’s review, with virtually no commentary. Barry Deutsch (“ampersand”) wrote a post about Pollitt’s review, with a link to Ann’s post, and posted it at two different blogs. Wordpress’s trackback software then left trackbacks (which appear as comments on Ann’s post) with an excerpt from his post.

You instead posit that someone sent “Alas” and “Creative” excerpts from Pollitt’s piece along with instructions on how to write about it so as to make you look bad. That’s a conspiracy theory. And it’s a conspiracy theory based on profound ignorance as to what you’re talking about in this case. It’s no wonder that Bartow isn’t fond of you.

(Incidentally, there’s no grammatical error in Barry Deutsch’s post; he used block quotes rather than quotation marks to set off Pollitt’s words, and the formatting didn’t carry over to the automatically posted trackbacks.)

As for the substantive point, I don’t much feel like engaging with someone whose first instinct is to accuse her critics of intellectual dishonesty, but in very brief:

a) Your response to Schmitt at OU seems to concede his point, that women vote more liberally than men to about the same extent that they have more liberal positions on the issues, and changes the subject to liberal vs. conservative identity and Bush’s approval rating.

b) If you’re concerned about the results in the electoral college, shouldn’t you be looking at state-by-state results? In the 2000 election, women and men supported different candidates in 17 states; the candidate women supported won 11 of those 17 (if I remember correctly).

As to the voting/preferences point, are you pressing me for an answer to Schmitt’s argument because you don’t like my position on stay at home moms or do you really want an answer? (Hard to tell, because you accuse me of conspiracy theory just after Laura tells me that people are hounding me on my methods because they don’t like my message!) If you just don’t “like” my message, there’s really nothing I can do. If the latter, had you looked a little harder, you would have seen my post on the Open University at TNR on that very subject: http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?week=2007-02-12. Here’s the first paragraph: “I had an interesting experience on the Internet last week after I opined in the Post that women are disaffected from politics. Surprise: Even serious people behave strangely in the blogosphere. Once you clear the noise away, though, sometimes important work gets done. In this case, pressed by Mark Schmitt, a pretty smart thinker generally, I have been digging into the CW that women are reliably liberal. It turns out the disconnect may be not at the voting stage, but between many women’s discrete policies and their political identity. With an election coming, and one with a good probability of a female candidate, this is important news.”

You can see the rest of the argument at TNR. It may not be a perfect answer, but it is the current product of a sincere look at this important question, with, as I freely acknowledge, a push from a well-respected political scholar. I think my published record of data, analysis and openness to criticism not involving reference to regurgitation is pretty good. But no one could live up to a standard that says we hate your overall message so we are never going to accept any methods or data you use.

Henry, is Laura accurately representing your standards for public discourse? I notice that you have not responded to my defense of the significance of the data in the Luskin and Bullock, an important and interesting question. Is that because you didn’t actually care about whether female DK’s are an exception to the finding, but only hated my message in “Homeward Bound”? I thought we had a possibly productive exchange going on about, well, half anyway of the gap in political knowledge, and you went silent on me. Your criticism of my argument was a little opaque, but I did my best to parse it out. Did I misunderstand your point?

ps
I did not realize that “speaking of vomit” and “fuck you” were what passes for wit in the academic blogosphere. Silly me. But there’s your vomit reference, Henry. If you don’t like it, take it up with Ann Bartow.

Doctor Slack, you’re right that the larger thesis requires getting the details right; in that vein, I haven’t seen a convincing response from Hirshman to Schmitt’s point that the gender gap in voting, ten points, seems commensurate with the gender gap in issue preferences, which is consistent with the idea that women and men are voting their issue preferences at the same rate. And this paragraph, from Hirshman’s original op-ed, seems strange:

Women have voted more Democratic than men recently, but since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, only once has the women’s vote arguably been different enough from the men’s vote to determine the outcome of a presidential election. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, more women, like men, favored the winning Republican candidate over the losing Democrat. Geraldine Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic ticket in 1984 apparently made little difference. In 1992, more women, like men, favored the winning Democrat over the losing Republican. The men’s vote was so divided in 1996 that exit polls show Clinton one percentage point behind among men (a statistical tie), while winning the female vote. In 2004, more women, unlike men, favored the losing Democrat, but by such a small majority (51 percent) that they had no effect on the outcome of the male-driven election. Since the ‘96 elections was so close among men, it’s fair to say that only in 2000 did women clearly part company with men, voting for Democrat Al Gore in large enough numbers to offset the male votes for Bush—but the female majorities were not distributed among enough states to carry the electoral college.

Even if we accept the standard that the gender gap can be ignored unless it is the decisive factor in the election (and I don’t see why we should), this suggests that in the last three elections women and men voted for different candidates, and in two of them the womens’ candidate won the popular vote. It seems like cherry-picking to dismiss 2000 just because quirks of the electoral college and a corrupt Supreme Court overturned the will of the people. And even if we take it that men’s votes were tied in 1996, the result was that women’s votes led to Bill Clinton’s decisive victory.

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=159

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=682

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=685

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=949

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=985

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=1470

Finally, I had the below exchange with Linda in the comments to this post:

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=711

Hirshman said: ‘What is up with this site? As this full version of Pollitt’s smart and favorable review reveals, my book, “Get to Work” anticipated Pollitt’s and Ehrenreich’s well-taken and long overdue critiques of “choice feminism” (phrase mine). It’s one thing to say I make you vomit — any reader can take that sort of thing for what it’s worth. But it’s quite another to truncate a review so badly that it leaves the opposite impression of what was actually said. Bartow’s version of Pollitt on Hirshman resembles nothing so much as those concocted “reviews” failing Broadway shows make up.”

Bartow replies: If you re-read the above post, you will see that I simply linked to the full text of Pollitt’s review above when I posted this link WITHOUT ANY EXCERPTS WHATSOEVER. Sheesh. I didn’t cull any quotes at all, no less only critical ones, so your accusations are completely unwarranted. Then YOU very conveniently quote the favorable parts of Pollitt’s review in your comment here, but leave out the negative parts, while terming it a “full version.” Sheesh again.

On balance I don’t read Pollitt’s review as particularly favorable. You are entitled to your opinion, and to have your say here, but dishonesty will not go unchallenged.

By the way, as I tried to explain previously, when I blogged elsewhere about vomit, etc. in relation to your new book, it was a sarcastic response to your exhortations to feminists to be more harshly judgmental.

And then you accuse me of being unable to write a plain English sentence? If we are going to shed some light on this interesting question, how about a couple of plain English sentences?
At the risk of making my opponent’s argument better, I’ll guess that what you are saying is this: Luskin and Bullock find that when they test the DK answers against all the other answers and by every other test to plumb them for ignorance, the DK answerers show profound ignorance, and, worse, affirmatively wrong beliefs. Nonetheless, in the case of women saying DK, DK still really means correct knowledge. Women would then be an exception to L and B’s findings about people who say Don’t Know. Since L and B tested all the DK’s together, for this to be true, the male DK’s would have to be staggeringly, unbelievably ignorant and wrong when they say DK to offset the accuracy of the knowledge underlying the female DK answers. Otherwise L and B could not have reached the conclusions that they did. Worse, women disproportionately answer DK, so the depth of the male DK’s ignorance and error would have to be almost as deep as the hole you assigned me to in your original post in order to offset the accurate information underlying the female DK. Did I parse your sentences correctly? And if so, does this seem likely? If Mondak et al had been able to defend the assignment of DK randomly or to a third category on grounds of overall hidden knowledge, the argument that women who say DK actually do know would have been much stronger.

The funny thing about all this fuss is that even Mondak and Anderson assert only that female DK’ism accounts only for at most HALF of the difference in the tests of political knowledge. Just based on the affirmative answers, a knowledge gap substantial enough to support my entire article remained, which is why it was just a side issue in the discussion to begin with.

But you attacked me, so I’m laying it out. If it takes this much verbiage to tease out what the problem might be, then even if I’m wrong I’m not “piss poor” or “bat shit crazy.” which brings me back to my original question: what is going on here? What do you mean my description of my opponents as “self-indulgent barf celebrators?” It was not my idea to preface an analysis of my work with “and speaking of vomit” or to add “Fuck You” as a forensic device in arguments with other academics or intellectuals. That came, with no prior involvement on my part whatsoever, from University of South Carolina Law School Professor Ann Bartow.(“Linda Hirshman Makes Me Feel Like A Freak”)after I published “Homeward Bound” in the Prospect. Is that what you are referring to? I suggest you direct your rhetoric at her, if you don’t like that tone in the discourse. I don’t remember saying “fuck you” or “speaking of vomit” to the arguments on the other side in “Homeward Bound” or in the answers to arguments in “Get to Work.” Otherwise I wouldn’t have been so surprised to see that kind of language, especially from an educated and trained arguer like a law professor. But my surprise at those forensic moves is a legitimate part of an article about what it was like to be in the maelstrom, which is what the Post asked me to address.

As for your apparent distress at me being rude to you – I’ll cite back to your own Washington Post piece which alternates between repetitive self-congratulation and rather unpleasant descriptions of your opponents as self-indulgent barf-celebrators etc. I’m happy to engage in civil conversation with people who are interested in doing the same back – but when people have a very clear track record of doing otherwise, I’m disinclined to give the benefit of the doubt.