No Bias Here, WaPost....Move Along

Sloppy analysis here by Chris Cillizza from The Washington Post.  Entitled "As the Fiscal Cliff Looms, Republicans Have No Political Incentive to Make a Deal With Obama".    His evidence? 

"Of the 234 Republicans elected to the House on Nov. 6, just 15 (!) sit in congressional districts that Obama also won that day, according to calculations made by the Cook Political Report’s ace analyst David Wasserman. That’s an infinitesimally small number, particularly when compared with the 63 House Republicans who held seats where Obama had won following the 2010 midterm elections. "

First off, note the (!) exclamation point...."just 15".  Ok, if I do my math, I divide by 234 to get a percentage of Republican House Members who sit in districts won by the President.   I come up with  6.4%.  Which means that 93.6% of Republicans in the House sit in districts that were carried by Mitt Romney.   Well, what percentage of House Democrats sit in districts carried by the President?  Cillizza tries to finesse this one later in the piece by switching from numbers to percentages (presumably he figured his readers wouldn't do the math for him).  "The picture on the Democratic side is less clear. Although 96 percent of House Democrats in the 113th Congress will hold seats Obama won in November".  So there we have it.  The percentage of Democrats sitting in Romney carried districts is EVEN SMALLER than the exclamation point earning figure above.  HOW DOES THIS NOT IMPACT THEIR WILLINGNESS TO COMPROMISE? This is of course, left unsaid.

Trying to pull his weak chestnuts out of the fire, Cillizza then shifts his emphasis to the Senate."fully one-third of the 21 Senate Democrats who will stand for reelection in 2014 represent states that Romney won."  And then, "First, with the exception of a dozen or so Republicans in the House and Maine’s Susan Collins in the Senate, the number of GOP members of the 113th Congress who see cutting a deal with the president — in the fiscal cliff or, frankly, anything else — as politically advantageous is close to zero. Second, while House Democrats are equally de-incentivized to working across the aisle, there is a large-ish group of Senate Democrats who must find ways of showing their bipartisan spirit if they want to win reelection in states that didn’t favor their party — or even come close to doing so — in the 2012 election. "

Which might be important if Democrats didn't control the Senate, and if anyone really considered Senate votes to be where the action is on the fiscal cliff.  It seems pretty obvious that if Boehner and Obama had a deal, Reid could get the votes needed.  But Boehner and Obama couldn't get a deal because BOTH the Republican and the Democratic caucuses did not see any profit in making a deal. 

You wouldn't know that from the headline, or the exclamation points.