The other piece of goodish news comes from the Commerce Department, which announced a jump in April durable goods orders of 1.9 percent — the largest increase since December of 2007. But let me quote the Bloomberg write-up of the release:

The 1.9 percent increase reported by the Commerce Department today in Washington was the largest since December 2007, and followed a revised 2.1 percent drop in March that was more than twice as large as previously estimated.

Catch that? April’s increase looks so big because March’s decline was much worse than originally estimated. Taking into account all the revisions, new orders in April are actually a little lower than the new orders recorded in February, on a seasonally adjusted basis. So while the splashy release is good for confidence, the true economic picture is more complex than is being intimated.

There is a line of thought that’s been circulating recently among the conspiracy-minded, that the government has been systematically reporting better than actual advance data results, only to revise the data down in subsequent releases. I’m very skeptical of this hypothesis; as a former government stats guy, I don’t even know how this would happen. Most stats gathering is done in a very bottom up fashion. Still, the size of recent revisions indicates that one can’t get an accurate picture of the changing economy without digging beneath the headlines.

Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayers’s book on the juvenile court system.

I don’t know many conservatives who’d argue, in hindsight, that more citizen journalism about Bill Ayers (whose Weather Underground days were so mysterious that you can Netflix an Oscar-nominated documentary about them) was what the Right needed in 2008. But Malkin reminded me of Zombie’s other influential work: a lengthy essay titled “The Left’s Big Blunder,” about how the polls were biased, people were lying about their support for Obama, and the media was complicit. He used (among other examples) the test case of a German performing horse, Clever Hans.

Much of the media analysis, and even the strategies of the campaigns themselves, is based on the ongoing poll results indicating voter preferences state-by-state and nationwide. But I suspect that we are observing the Clever Hans Effect on a massive scale, and that the polls are in fact unreliable. Worse than “unreliable,” actually: they are inaccurate because to some degree they reflect not the honest feelings of the respondents but rather what the pollers want to hear. Since, as discussed above, most poll-questioners are likely to be Obama supporters, and since the Clever Hans Effect tells us that they likely slant their questions and/or provide subtle clues as to what the “correct” answer is whether or not they’re trying to be neutral and fair, the end result is that the poll results end up being tilted in favor of Obama. Pundits and journalists and campign directors are deriving supposed “information” from the poll results, and basing their actions on them — even though the polls merely reflect (to a certain degree) what the pollsters wanted to hear.

Barack Obama won the presidency by a 7.2 percent margin in the national vote and a 365-173 margin in the electoral college, picking off states like Indiana and North Carolina from the Republicans. Zombie updated his essay.

The effects described in this essay very likely did happen as I postulated, but not to a large enough extent to overcome Obama’s actual strength and McCain’s actual weakness. In other words, approximately 3% of people responding to polls did lie and say they supported Obama when in fact they did not (a ~9.5% predicted victory on average vs. a 6.5% actual victory).* It’s just that McCain was not close enough in real support for the Hans/Asch/Bradley Effect to make the difference.

This is a… let’s call it an innovative understanding of statistics. According to Michelle Malkin, we can call it “reporting.”

*Obama’s margin grew after this, after all West Coast votes were counted.