Why does Sarah Palin suddenly care about the dollar?

Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin and variety of other right-wing cranks have become oddly interested in the falling price of the dollar recently. Their argument, however, does not seem based on a desire to see America orient itself more toward imports than exports, which is what a rising dollar would imply. Rather, they seem interested in a new economic talking point. Dan Drezner explains:

So, what's really going on here with the dollar obsession? I suspect that with the Dow Jones going back over 10,000, Republicans are looking for some other Very Simple Metric that shows Obama Stinks. The dollar looks like it's going to be declining for a while, so why not that? Never mind that the dollar was even weaker during the George W. Bush era -- they want people to focus on the here and now.

And they're helped in this by the fact that we call a lower-value dollar a "weak" dollar, which sounds bad even though it isn't bad. But the whole strategy is reminiscent of the dynamic identified in "It Feels Like We're Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy," a paper by the political scientists Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. The study examines voters' perceptions of the economy in the late-'90s, when the numbers were traveling in an unambiguously positive direction. What they found was startling: The more informed a voter was, the more likely he or she was to "partisan self-deceive." That is, more "informed" voters believed more things that weren't true but fit their preexisting biases.

This "weak dollar" nonsense is a good example of how it works. If the basic narrative held that the economy was improving, then most people would think that the economy was improving, and people who don't like Barack Obama would think that the economy was improving and Barack Obama is bad. But people who are reading Drudge and right-wing Web sites and Sarah Palin's Facebook page -- "highly informed voters," in other words -- would be exposed to all sorts of obscure statistics that seem to suggest the opposite. Where most people hear that the economy is improving, this groups hears that the dollar is falling, and that this is a terrible thing that weakens America. High-information voters, in other words, have access to a lot more information and a lot more filters that help them fit the world to their biases. This goes for folks on the left as well as the right, and it makes anything even approaching consensus politics virtually unthinkable.

Photo credit: Chris Miller/AP.