{"id":137587,"date":"2013-03-08T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=137587"},"modified":"2013-12-09T11:28:53","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T16:28:53","slug":"targeted-killing-ok-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/08\/targeted-killing-ok-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Targeted Killing: OK If Obama Does It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Targeted killings: OK if Obama Does It?<\/a> by Joan Walsh in Salon.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> Civil libertarians have worried that some of President Obama\u2019s comparatively hawkish national security policies are silencing \u201cliberal\u201d Democrats who would have opposed such measures under President Bush or another Republican. Now there\u2019s new evidence that Obama\u2019s support for such policies isn\u2019t just silencing them \u2014 it\u2019s winning them over.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the finding of new research by Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler, who studies what he calls the \u201cracialization\u201d of political issues in the age of Obama: mainly, the way voters\u2019 attitudes about race can make them more or less likely to support policies once they know those policies are supported by Obama. Last year he made headlines with an American Journal of Political Science article about the way racial attitudes shaped opinions on the Affordable Care Act.<\/p>\n

Examining almost 20 years of polling going back to President Clinton\u2019s efforts at healthcare reform, Tesler found that white voters were less likely to support reform under President Obama than under Clinton, with whites who exhibited the most conservative racial views (more on what that means below) the least likely to back the ACA. With African-Americans strong supporters of healthcare reform under both presidents, Tesler found that the racial divide between black and white opinions was 20 points greater in 2009-10 than it was during the Clinton-backed reform push in 1993-94.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But Tesler learned something else interesting: White voters with liberal attitudes about race were more likely to support policies once they knew Obama backed them than they were without the president\u2019s imprimatur, and so were African-Americans. That was true not only on the ACA, but on gay marriage, the stimulus bill and taxes, among other issues.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally I learned of Tesler\u2019s research around the time the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret Obama \u201ckill list\u201d authorizing the use of drones and other measures to kill suspected terrorists last June. I wondered whether Obama supporters would be more likely to back such measures under this president than they would otherwise. I asked Tesler if he had any data on national security, and he promised to add some questions on those issues to his ongoing polling in partnership with the Internet polling group YouGov. In another coincidence, he sent me his findings the week after NBC\u2019s Michael Isikoff revealed the unconvincing Office of Legal Counsel \u201cwhite paper\u201d summarizing the legal grounds for targeted assassination of American citizens.<\/p>\n

In a YouGov poll of 1,000 voters last August, Tesler found significantly more support for targeted killing of suspected terrorists among white \u201cracial liberals\u201d (i.e., those liberal on issues of race) and African-Americans when they were told that Obama supported such a policy than when they were not told it was the president\u2019s policy. Only 27 percent of white racial liberals in a control group supported the targeted killing policy, but that jumped to 48 percent among such voters who were told Obama had conducted such targeted killings (which Tesler refers to as the \u201cObama cue\u201d). He found a similar difference among African-Americans, but cautions that the sample size, of 60 in a control group and another 60 who were given the \u201cObama cue,\u201d is small. \u201cWe can be pretty confident that blacks are more supportive when given the Obama cue, but not at all confident about how precisely large that difference is,\u201d he told me via email.<\/p>\n

White \u201cracial conservatives\u201d were more likely than white racial liberals to support the targeted killing policy overall, and Obama\u2019s support for it didn\u2019t affect their opinion, as it had on issues like healthcare reform. You can see the results in the graphs below (more explanation comes later).<\/p>\n

\"Graph<\/p>\n

\"Graph<\/p>\n

Tesler\u2019s first book, \u201cObama\u2019s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America,\u201d showed how deeply Americans\u2019 racial attitudes were entwined with their views of our first black president. Co-authored with UCLA\u2019s David O. Sears, the 2010 book showed how polls that revealed racial resentment could predict a huge divide in attitudes toward the president and his policies. As early as April 2009, Pew showed a gap of 70 percentage points in Obama\u2019s approval rating between racial liberals and racial conservatives \u2013 a gap they hadn\u2019t found in polling attitudes toward Obama\u2019s five White House predecessors.<\/p>\n

Now Tesler\u2019s at work on a second book he\u2019s tentatively titled \u201cMost-Racial: President Obama and the Growing Racialization of American Politics.\u201d So far most attention has been paid to Tesler\u2019s research on white racial conservatives opposing policies they might have supported because Obama backs them. It\u2019s been intriguing that it might work the opposite way too, as Tesler and other researchers found to be the case on gay marriage. The fact that Obama could make his national security policies more popular with liberals who might otherwise be skeptical of them is less heartening.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019ve written about Tesler\u2019s work before, I\u2019ve gotten questions about how he defines \u201cracial liberals\u201d and \u201cracial conservatives,\u201d so it\u2019s worth taking a moment to explain it. Much of his research relies on a battery of four questions used to measure \u201cracial resentment:\u201d Do blacks face the same obstacles to success as white immigrant groups did, meaning they should advance themselves without \u201cspecial favors\u201d? Would they achieve the same as whites if they only tried harder? Or have slavery and discrimination made it harder for black people to rise? And have they in fact gotten less help than they deserve in recent years?<\/p>\n

Solid majorities of white people answer yes to the first two questions and no to the last two; among African-Americans, opinions are roughly reversed. The white respondents who answer more like African-Americans \u2013 that is, they believe racial inequality is due to structural barriers, not merely a question of individual effort or merit \u2014 are considered more \u201cracially liberal.\u201d They\u2019re the ones Tesler has found are more pro-Obama, and pro-Obama policies \u2013 included targeted killings.<\/p>\n

Tesler also uses questions to tease out what he calls \u201cold-fashioned racism\u201d \u2013 a belief in black inferiority and support for social distance between the races. One reliable proxy for such attitudes is one\u2019s opinion about interracial dating (at least among white people). Whites who were the most strongly supportive of interracial dating were also influenced by Obama\u2019s support for targeted killing: They were about 20 percentage points more likely to support it when they knew it was Obama\u2019s policy than when they didn\u2019t. Again, there wasn\u2019t much difference on the policy among whites who opposed interracial dating, regardless of whether they got the Obama cue (and since only 10 percent of whites strongly oppose interracial dating, the sample size was small).<\/p>\n

A few caveats about the research: Tesler simply asked about the president \u201ckilling suspected terrorists without trial.\u201d He didn\u2019t refer specifically to American citizens, or the precise operational details of the broader \u201ckill list,\u201d or the use of drones to do the killing. But Tesler\u2019s polling research is widely respected, as is YouGov\u2019s; Nate Silver found that YouGov polls performed \u201crelatively well\u201d in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, ahead of Rasmussen, CNN\/Opinion Research and Marist College.<\/p>\n

YouGov is also one of the only outfits to conduct recent polling about public opinion on drones, and partnering with the Huffington Post, YouGov polls have found some interesting divergence from other polls on the overall issue of targeted killing. A widely cited Washington Post\/ABC News poll from a year ago found that 83 percent of Americans approve of the Obama administration\u2019s use of drones to kill terrorists, including 77 percent of liberal Democrats. However, that was before the Times\u2019 revelation of the \u201ckill list,\u201d or Isikoff\u2019s exposure of the white paper justifying the killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism.<\/p>\n

After the revelation of the kill list, Pew conducted a global survey about the use of drones, which found that Americans supported the policy 62-28, with Republicans at 74 percent and Democrats lower at 58 percent (Americans were the only national group polled who favored the policy).<\/p>\n

But Huffington Post\/YouGov polling after Isikoff\u2019s scoop found that while 56 percent of respondents support using drones against \u201chigh-level terrorist leaders,\u201d only 13 percent think they should be used against \u201canyone suspected of being associated with a terrorist group.\u201d And only 27 percent supported using drones \u201cif there was a possibility of killing innocent people.\u201d Another 13 percent opposed the drone program entirely. Given that only a minority of those killed by drones to date are \u201chigh-level leaders\u201d \u2013 the New American Foundation estimates it\u2019s as low as 2 percent \u2013 Americans may be more skeptical of the policy the more they learn about it.<\/p>\n

Tesler\u2019s research, though, suggests that their reaction may be informed by their support for the president, which is at least a little bit troubling. The U.S. is moving into uncharted political, military and moral territory with the use of drones, as well as expanded claims of presidential powers on targeted killings, on what seems to be a global battlefield in a time of endless war. Some of the very people who might be expected to raise objections to such moves are instead accepting them because they are made by Obama, and they like and trust him.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s common sense, on one level, but in a country that\u2019s supposed to be governed by laws above men, it\u2019s disturbing \u2013 and certainly worth talking about. Ironically, the very fact that the president himself has begun to promise more congressional oversight and transparency may make it more acceptable, among his supporters, for other politicians to demand it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Targeted killings: OK if Obama Does It? by Joan Walsh in Salon. The Text: Civil libertarians have worried that some of President Obama\u2019s comparatively hawkish national security policies are silencing \u201cliberal\u201d Democrats who would have opposed such measures under President Bush or another Republican. Now there\u2019s new evidence that Obama\u2019s support for such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":137590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nTargeted Killing: OK If Obama Does It?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Salon exclusive: Study finds "liberals" more likely to favor targeted killings once they know it\u2019s Obama's policy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/08\/targeted-killing-ok-obama\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Targeted Killing: OK If Obama Does It?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Salon 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