A Scientific Analysis of the Op-Ed Kerfuffle



The purpose of this post is to explore the NYT's reasons that the McCain op-ed response to the earlier Obama op-ed was rejected. At its core, the objection seemed to be that while Obama's op-ed laid out substantive policy proposals, McCain's submission was more of a de rigueur talking points rebuttal. While I believe that their rejection was made in good faith, I conclude that it says more about the editorial board's sensibilities than it does about the merits of McCain's article.

My process was to break each article down sentence by sentence, and to classify it as belonging to one of four categories:

• Statement of Fact: A sourced statistic, direct quote, or other objective material evidence.


• Statement of Strategy: A concrete policy proposal, or statement of principle based primarily on statements of fact.


• Opinion: An assertion based heavily on debatable premises.


• Hyperbole: Tautologies, platitudes, false dichotomies, and other assorted rhetorical refuse.

This naturally involves some hair-splitting, so at the end I include all my data and work for interested readers to run their own protocols and publish results. I think my choices will ultimately withstand scrutiny. For instance:

• Fact: "Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats." While this contains a little opinion (how does one measure "reeling?"), the rest of it presents sourced, objective, refutable claims.


• Strategy: "Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been." While many would debate this, it generally serves as a useful statement of policy and principle.


• Opinion: "Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown." A sweeping statement riddled with unjustified assertions. At the very least you need to be more specific about what constitutes "nearly every threat we face" and what "grown" means. Al Qaeda, for instance, has not attacked the US mainland since 9/11--which to many observers would suggest it is in fact less of a threat.


• Hyperbole: "A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us."

After running the numbers, I came up with the totals below. For your playing along at home, you can download the full Excel spreadsheet--the mechanics should be fairly self-explanatory.

The weighting of the op-eds is different, and yet not dramatically so. Both engage in closely-comparable amounts of the politics of Hope (Fact and Strategy) and Fear (Opinion and Hyperbole). I score McCain a little higher in the Opinion department, and Obama a little higher in Hyperbole, which may primarily represent my own bias. Switch them if you want--it doesn't change much.

The really interesting thing I see, though, and what I think would stand up to scrutiny, is that McCain's article has substantially more statements of Fact, which Obama's has more which are statements of Strategy.

This is not a value statement on my part. Obama's platform seeks to change the status quo, and so there is a lot for him to explain what the new policy would look like. He makes a few statements of fact and opinion to suggest why we need to change, and then focuses on what that change would look like. McCain, by contrast, does not have anything new to propose--he believes the current policy is still the correct one, and so has relatively less to say about what that policy is, and more as to why it is still the correct path.

NY Times editor David Shipley's rejection note stated that,

"It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors
Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in
concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq."

And yet there is no evidence to suggest that any similar ritual mortifications were required of Sen. Obama, whose views are largely coincident with those of the Times' editors. This is certainly not for want of possible tough probing questions. Shipley could, for instance, have asked Obama to justify his opposition to the surge in 2007, given that its success is the primary reason a general withdrawal today might result in something less than an unmitigated apocalypse.

At this point it is hard to complain, given that the McCain campaign will probably get far more value out of the rejection than it would ever have gotten from the published op-ed. But it does suggest that the Times ought to drop all remaining pretense and simply display an Obama '08 logo on the editorial page through election day.