# A lot of people like what Obama does until they are told that Obama is doing it. Then they hate it. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 13, 2015, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548 "2015-02-13T06:43:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/61 "2015-02-16T14:29:33Z")
> [@John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](#): > > Well golly, I am _still_ being asked to prove a negative! This is a logical error. You’re trying to prove something from the negative. In such cases you need to prove the negative. Otherwise you have nothing. If you’re saying you can’t prove a negative then you need to back off your original claim. > [@Mijin](#): > > That’s quite disingenuous though. > If someone points a camera, and puts a mic in front of me, I’m not going to correct anything they say unless I’m 1 million percent sure I’m right. > So you ask me if I’m looking forward to Halley’s comet’s return in 2018…I’m 99% sure that’s not right, but 99% is not sure enough to correct someone on TV. Or maybe I just misheard you and you’re talking about another comet that sounds like Halley’s? So I’d probably run with it. > > Ironically it’s because one doesn’t want to look stupid on TV, and no-one expects this kind of set up. You may be missing the point of that demonstration. It’s not that people agreed with the suggestion that these were Obama’s policies. It’s that they acknowledged that they supported him because of those policies (which is what’s relevant to this thread). If they merely accepted that these were Obama policies they could have provided other reasons for their support. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_stamos_left_ear/32/3198_2.png) [@John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Stamos_Left_Ear)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/62 "2015-02-16T15:03:59Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > This is a logical error. > > You’re trying to prove something from the negative. In such cases you need to prove the negative. Otherwise you have nothing. If you’re saying you can’t prove a negative then you need to back off your original claim. [You’re 100% wrong and should never speak of logic again](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof#Proving_a_negative). ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/63 "2015-02-16T15:06:53Z")
You’ve clearly misunderstood your cite. Exactly what your misunderstanding is is hard to figure, since you didn’t specify what your point is. Whatever. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_stamos_left_ear/32/3198_2.png) [@John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Stamos_Left_Ear)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/64 "2015-02-16T15:18:28Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > You’ve clearly misunderstood your cite. > > Exactly what your misunderstanding is is hard to figure, since you didn’t specify what your point is. Whatever. You’ve clearly misunderstood that one cannot prove a negative. Whatever. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/65 "2015-02-16T15:21:42Z")
No, that’s not the issue. Even if you can’t prove a negative (not always true, but let’s leave that aside), that doesn’t mean that you can prove other things from negatives that have themselves not been proved. Presuming to do so - which is what you’re doing here - is a logical error. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/66 "2015-02-16T15:29:43Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > It’s not that people agreed with the suggestion that these were Obama’s policies. It’s that they acknowledged that they supported him because of those policies (which is what’s relevant to this thread). If they merely accepted that these were Obama policies they could have provided other reasons for their support. That distinction is not significant here. The same kind of leading question can be used for either case. It’s like this: Any assertion the interviewer makes, the interviewee will assume is correct because they don’t want to look stupid or ignorant of the facts. But then, once they’ve agreed with a particular statement, the interviewer can ask _why_ they agree. Once again, they don’t want to look stupid, and fessing up now that actually they are not so sure that the statement is correct might make them look daft. So they scramble around for some supporting reason, even though, in reality, it may be a statement that they think is false. It’s a common enough interview technique that politicians are generally well prepared for it. Ordinary members of the public however are not. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/67 "2015-02-16T15:37:56Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > That distinction is not significant here. The same kind of leading question can be used for either case. > > It’s like this: > Any assertion the interviewer makes, the interviewee will assume is correct because they don’t want to look stupid or ignorant of the facts. > But then, once they’ve agreed with a particular statement, the interviewer can ask _why_ they agree. > Once again, they don’t want to look stupid, and fessing up now that actually they are not so sure that the statement is correct might make them look daft. So they scramble around for some supporting reason even though it may be a statement that really they think is false. > > It’s a common enough interview technique that politicians are generally well prepared for it. Ordinary members of the public however are not. The distinction is significant here, and you seem to be conflating two things. The assertion that the interviewer made was “Obama supports Position X”. What you write here would hold if the question was “why does Obama support Position X?” But the actual question was not about why Obama supports Position X, but about why the interviewee supports Obama - about which no assertions about been made. Point being that the interviewee could easily accept that Obama supports Position X for reasons you give but then describe their own support for Obama as being based on his support for Position Y, which has not been mentioned by the interviewer, or based on personal qualities or the like. In sum, the issue - and the point I was making here - was not about Obama’s positions but about the interviewees modeling their own positions on what they (incorrectly) assumed to be Obama’s positions. This has nothing to do with the dynamic you describe. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/68 "2015-02-16T17:12:02Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > The distinction is significant here, and you seem to be conflating two things. > > The assertion that the interviewer made was “Obama supports Position X”. What you write here would hold if the question was “why does Obama support Position X?” But the actual question was not about why Obama supports Position X, but about why the interviewee supports Obama - about which no assertions about been made. > > Point being that the interviewee could easily accept that Obama supports Position X for reasons you give but then describe their own support for Obama as being based on his support for Position Y, which has not been mentioned by the interviewer, or based on personal qualities or the like. > > In sum, the issue - and the point I was making here - was not about Obama’s positions but about the interviewees modeling their own positions on what they (incorrectly) assumed to be Obama’s positions. This has nothing to do with the dynamic you describe. What you simply said earlier was that the interviewer said “Do you support Obama because of his position X?”. That _is_ a leading question of exactly the sort I’m describing. Let’s say I support Obama for various reasons, principal of which is ACA. And someone asks me if I support Obama because of his policy of increasing import tariffs. I might still answer “yes” even though that’s not in my list. Why? Because up to that moment I was not aware that he was proposing this policy. And in this exact moment, I don’t want to look foolish. Simple, affirmative answers are generally safer and lead to fewer follow-up questions. Negative responses often get the “why not?” response. When I try to ask someone a question in my second language and they don’t understand me, if the person is not comfortable saying “What?” they will give an affirmative answer; it’s natural. It could be that the segment on Howard Stern demonstrated a bias existing, in which case your description of it so far has not done it justice. From the sound of things currently, it’s the normal leading question interview technique that can be used to make people say whatever you want. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/69 "2015-02-16T17:40:17Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Let’s say I support Obama for various reasons, principal of which is ACA. And someone asks me if I support Obama because of his policy of increasing import tariffs. I might still answer “yes” even though that’s not in my list. > Why? Because up to that moment I was not aware that he was proposing this policy. And in this exact moment, I don’t want to look foolish. Simple, affirmative answers are generally safer and lead to fewer follow-up questions. Negative responses often get the “why not?” response. This seems unconvicing to me. If you don’t know anything about import tariffs it’s seems trivially easy to respond “no, I support him because of his healthcare policy” or something else. If people were as malleable and afraid of contradicting interviewers as you suggest, it would render all polls completely useless, as people would respond affirmatively to all questions. But they’re not. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/70 "2015-02-16T17:45:18Z")
> [@Deeg](#): > > Why would you reject it? Unless there are some sort of studies that show it why would one expect liberals or conservatives to be much different on broad human emotions? From my position in the middle both sides are partisan whenever they can gain something out of it. I’ve discussed this at great length in other threads, but there’s not some principle that states that for every action on the political left there’s an equal and opposite action on the political right and vice versa. As a big and relevant example, there’s Fox News. Whatever you might think of Fox News, it’s ridiculous to say that there’s a precise liberal equivalent of Fox News currently. The current incarnation of the Republican Party (at the leadership level) is made up of a specific set of people, who are influenced by another specific set of people, and they have built up a set of practices and traditions and cultural beliefs and so forth. Why should it be the case that however they act is somehow precisely balanced by equivalent people in the current incarnation of the Democratic party? To put it a different way, if you name just about any human vice (or virtue), there will be at least SOME of it present in any large group of people, including current Dems and current Reps. But people’s actions are influenced by their own character, their peers, their beliefs and the structures that surround them, and there’s no reason to think that any of those are identical between Dems and Reps at present. So while I suppose it’s possible that the level of X happens to be precisely equal between right and left right now, where X is just about anything, if so it’s just a coincidence, not because some principle that takes “well, both sides do it” to an extreme and states that both sides are always precisely equal in all things. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/71 "2015-02-16T20:33:06Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Absolutely, I agree. > > Nevertheless, I stand by what I said. If you said to group A “Do you approve of policy X” and to group B, “Do you approve of GWB’s policy X”, you’d find greater support in group A, I’d stake my reputation on it 🙂 > And that would be a bias, even if he was a useless president. > > ETA: I guess it’s because people virtually parse it as two questions: “Do you support GWB?” and “Do you support X policy?” I’m sure there would of been some effect. Kind of like trusting a business opportunity offered by a successful venture capitalist than one offered by Slippery Lou. But not as big, and not as immediate. Evidence - lots of people believed the WMD story. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/72 "2015-02-16T22:11:48Z")
Don’t want to derail the thread, but about that WMD thing. Just reported today in the NY Times: > **[C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons ...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0)** > > The purchase plan, which began in 2005 and involved a secretive seller, yielded at least 400 warheads, some containing the nerve agent sarin, officials said. ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/73 "2015-02-16T22:20:47Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > Don’t want to derail the thread, but about that WMD thing. Just reported today in the NY Times: > > [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html?\_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0) This is not news: > [@](#): > > These munitions were remnants of an **Iraqi special weapons program that was abandoned long before the 2003 invasion** , and they turned up sporadically during the American occupation in buried caches, as part of improvised bombs or on black markets. We knew there were remnants of old weapons programs. That is not what Cheney et al. predicted would be used against us. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/74 "2015-02-16T22:23:15Z")
That’s fine. It’s just inaccurate to say Iraq didn’t have WMD. They didn’t have current programs, but they had not actually destroyed the unaccounted for weapons. That much every intelligence agency on Earth agreed on, and common sense dictated that it had to be so, yet there were actually politically motivated people arguing that the nonsensical position that they didn’t exist. Because Bush. And now it’s relevant to the thread.🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/75 "2015-02-16T22:34:34Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > That’s fine. It’s just inaccurate to say Iraq didn’t have WMD. Bush and his cadre lied about WMD. Nothing in your cite contradicts that. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/76 "2015-02-16T22:38:36Z")
They did lie about some stuff. And Obama lied about his health care plan. Whether it’s important that a President lied about all of it or part of it tends to depend on your partisan leanings. While there’s no excuse for misrepresenting intelligence on Iraq, Iraq did present a proliferation threat and did in fact illegally possess WMD. I could argue that the basic rationale for war was never really in doubt, even before we heard this story. But then perhaps that’s because I’m a conservative. It’s also quite possible that had the war been a smashing success and Iraq a functioning democracy that liberals would still not have supported it. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/77 "2015-02-16T22:39:58Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > That’s fine. It’s just inaccurate to say Iraq didn’t have WMD. They didn’t have current programs, but they had not actually destroyed the unaccounted for weapons. But, those were unusable. It is accurate to say, at the time of the invasion, Iraq didn’t have WMD. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/78 "2015-02-16T22:42:16Z")
Unusable? That depends. Not really usable the way militaries like to use them but plenty usable in guerilla warfare or to proliferate. But I’m not disagreeing that Bush lied about the nature of the threat. I’m just making the point that most of the people opposed to the war were emotionally wedded to the idea that Bush lied about EVERYTHING and that Saddam had no WMD at all. And while we always knew about some ancient chemical weapons that were found early on, the stuff that’s being reported no now was a lot more lethal. If one is not wed to the idea that Bush must be hated or that Bush must be loved, one can dispassionately review the evidence and decide what he said that was true and what he said that was not. I don’t see much evidence that liberals are doing that. I also remember several fake scandals from the Bush years, such as the fake turkey that dominated a couple of news cycles, the fake brush clearing, and liberal displeasure with Bush’s “undiplomatic” language towards our enemies, which was stupid back then supposedly but fine when Obama chooses to call a spade a spade. Because Obama smart, Bush stupid. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/79 "2015-02-16T22:48:30Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > They did lie about some stuff. And Obama lied about his health care plan. Whether it’s important that a President lied about all of it or part of it tends to depend on your partisan leanings. What precisely is your point? That (nearly) everyone is at least somewhat partisan? Cheerfully conceded. Or are you claiming that Bush’s lies/errors before the Iraq invasion are equivalent to Obama’s while debating Obamacare? Are you seriously making that claim? Or are you saying that dems and pubs are approximately EQUALLY partisan? Well, that’s a difficult situation to analyze, which is why many people in this thread have requested that someone show an equivalent poll in the other direction. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2015, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548/80 "2015-02-16T22:53:22Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > But I’m not disagreeing that Bush lied about the nature of the threat. I’m just making the point that most of the people opposed to the war were emotionally wedded to the idea that Bush lied about EVERYTHING and that Saddam had no WMD at all. That’s just ridiculous. I strongly believe that the evidence that Bush and Cheney and poor Colin Powell were presenting and trumpeting at the time of the run-up to the war was some combination of cherry picked, taken out of context, and flat out made up. I don’t know enough about the situation to distinguish which of those is the most accurate, but all of them are bad and the sum result is clearly deception… and deception leading to an incredibly grave national decision, which, as we know, turned out to be a total clusterfuck (for related although not identical reasons. It would certainly be possible to lie your way into a war and then have the war be a smashing success, or lie your way into the war and then have the war fail for reasons totally out of your control, but in this case it’s hard not to see the same cavalier attitude behind both the half-assed analysis of whether we needed to go to war and the half-assed attempt to actually rebuild Iraq after the predictably quick military victory). What I do NOT believe, and never believed, is something like “there is not one single teensy weensy bit of WMD in Iraq at all ever”. Again, as you often do, you are passionately arguing against positions that (almost) no one is actually espousing. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-lot-of-people-like-what-obama-does-until-they-are-told-that-obama-is-doing-it-then-they-hate-it/712548.md?page=5)