Enik Rising

Ophthalmology 100 years ago

2012-02-01T13:25:00.001-07:00

I was interested to follow the story of Mrs. Patmore, the house chef in "Downton Abbey," (which, if you're not watching, you really should be). Toward the end of season 1, Mrs. Patmore was losing her vision to cataracts, to the point where she was making dangerous mistakes in the kitchen. Rather than fire her, her employer sent her to London for surgery, and she eventually returned able to see. What exactly was the procedure for dealing with cataracts in 1914?

I checked in with the closest available source: my father, an ophthalmologist. He informs me that cataract surgery was regularly done back then, but it was a pretty barbaric procedure compared to how it's handled today. There were no implants to replace the lenses, so doctors simply removed the clouded lenses and fitted the patient with thick glasses. Even this was usually an improvement over advanced cataracts, which blocked out most light. But the procedure of removing a lens from an eye was very dangerous: there were no sutures available for stitching up the eye post-operatively, patients had to remain perfectly still for weeks afterwards to allow the eye to heal (held in place by sandbags), and the chances of infections and other complications were very high. Nonetheless, Mrs. Patmore's prognosis was certainly possible, although if she's walking around without glasses in season 2, that will be a bit surprising.

Meanwhile, as a followup, where did lens implants come from? According to my father, it had to do with World War II ball turret gunners on bomber aircraft. It was common for the gunners to be hit by shards of the plastic from which the ball turrets were made, and occasionally these shards would wind up in the eyes of the gunners. Doctors at the time found that the eye was remarkably tolerant of the plastic shards and few infections developed. It was later theorized that such plastic could be molded into a replacement lens for cataract patients.

A pair of pliers and a blow torch

2012-02-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Last week, after Gingrich's upset victory in South Carolina, I wrote the following:

My assumption is that the system has not changed significantly, and that party insiders will rise up again to crush Gingrich as they did back in December. And Lord knows they have the material to do it.

Did they ever. It was ugly. It seemed like every Republican member of Congress who served with Gingrich took to the airwaves or the op/ed pages to pillory him. They even dug up Bob Dole to slap Newt around a bit. And it seems to have worked quite effectively.

Now, what do I mean by "they"? I'm speaking of the party insiders, what some might call the "establishment." To understand this, it's important to read Jonathan Bernstein's post on the subject. As he notes, the concept of the party "establishment" is not terribly useful, and it can be very difficult to distinguish between party "insiders" and "outsiders." I stick with the idea that the bulk of "insiders" (officeholders, major donors, activists, media figures, and others) are backing Romney and set out to crush Gingrich over the past week. But, of course, Gingrich did get the recent backing of Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin, and I hesitate to call them (well, at least the latter two of them) "outsiders." Perry, despite being a rather pathetic campaigner on the national stage, is still the Republican governor of Texas, and Palin is, of course, the party's most recent vice presidential nominee.

Similarly, how do we classify Gingrich? Sure, he's running as an "outsider," but as Ezra Klein notes, Gingrich is a rather odd person to claim outsider status, given his two decades in Congress, his four years as Speaker, his doctoral degree, his penchant for using Isaac Asimov books to generate policy ideas, and more than a decade of work as a DC consultant, party elder, and Sunday morning talk show mainstay. This is hardly the stuff of raw populism. But being an insider or an outsider isn't simply a function of one's résumé. He's running this way precisely because the bulk of insiders are already in Romney's camp. He has no choice.

In The Party Decides, Cohen et al. talk about the importance of endorsements by out-of-group elites. The example they use is a vegetarian recommending a fish restaurant; if the vegetarian likes it, that sends a signal to people with lots of other preferences that the restaurant probably has a lot of good selections, even if their speciality is fish, and a whole group of people with diverse preferences may end up converging on that restaurant. Similarly, if, say, a prominent evangelical Christian backed Romney, that would be an important signal to other prominent party activists, and would probably be more impressive than if he got endorsements from other northeastern Mormon businessmen.

The example we have today is that the bulk of Republican members of Congress who served with Gingrich are now backing Romney. It wouldn't be terribly impressive if they had backed Gingrich -- we'd have expected that kind of loyalty to the former Speaker. But the fact that they know him well and are refusing to back him is very meaningful. David Frum had one of my favorite quotes on the subject: "Suppose it were Gingrich v. Obama. And suppose we restricted franchise to Republicans who served in Congress 1978-1998. It'd be a close vote."

Now, when party elites have converged on a candidate (as they have largely done in this case), it tends to be easy for the media to portray other rival candidates as flaky or eccentric, and the insider-backed candidate can exploit that. (Think Gary Hart '88, Howard Dean '04, Ron Paul in several cycles.) But with Gingrich, that's like shooting fish in a barrel.

I had suggested a while back that this election was turning into a great test of The Party Decides, and so far it's looking like a resounding win for the theory. But Gingrich may have made it a bit easy for them.

Winning the future

2012-01-31T22:23:00.002-07:00

Exit polls from Florida Republican primary:

Romney in Two Primaries

2012-01-31T21:30:00.001-07:00

Here's a graphical comparison of Romney's performance in the Florida primaries of 2008 and 2012 among different demographic groups:

The red line is where Romney's support would be if he'd done the same in 2012 as he did in 2008. Obviously, he did much better overall, garnering an estimated 46% (as of 11:30 EST) as compared to 31% four years ago. And he improved in all the subgroups I've charted above. But he improved in some quite a bit more than in others.

He seemed to make the greatest inroads among the wealthiest voters, Catholics, women, the elderly, and those who believe the economy to be the most important issue. He made his weakest gains among Evangelicals, pro-lifers, men, and Protestants.

The gender gap strikes me as an interesting story this year. There was an enormous gender disparity in turnout in 2008, with men outpolling women 56-44. This year, the electorate was just about even between men and women. In 2008, meanwhile, Romney got 32% of men's votes and 30% of women's -- not much of a difference. This year, Romney got 41% of men and 52% of women. (Gingrich seems to have attracted men to his campaign much more than women.)

Strange bedfellows

2012-01-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Below is California super-lobbyist Artie Samish (bottom left) and the Shah of Iran (top center). I really wonder what they discussed.

(c/o Jake Ehrlich)

Linkin' Logs

2012-01-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

James Fearon: States are less belligerent after acquiring nuclear weapons. (Yes, I knew this, having studied as an undergrad under "proliferation optimist" Ken Waltz, but it's nice to see some more data backing it up.)
Larry Bartels: The homicide and suicide rates vary importantly with the party in control of the White House.
Lynn Vavreck on lying in politics.
Here's then-Speaker Newt Gingrich trying to convince a conservative not to run for Congress in order to protect a moderate incumbent. (I don't see this as a blemish on Gingrich's record. This is just the kind of thing you have to do when you run a congressional party.) (h/t Hans Hassell)
Me, Jon Bernstein, the authors of The Party Decides... we're huge in France. (h/t Hans Noel)
And that makes three of my fellow Colorado national Democratic delegates from 2008 who are now in the statehouse.
There have been more Republican debates this cycle than there were episodes of "Firefly," "Freaks & Geeks," or "Police Squad."
Eels always look like they just told a joke and are waiting for a reaction.
Not only is James Bond a crappy spy who likes watered-down drinks, but he's also a prick. (h/t Robert)

The Wii Cake

2012-01-28T15:04:00.004-07:00

Model in foreground.

I tried a new type of fondant called Choco-Pan -- a combination of buttercream and white chocolate. A bit pricey, and difficult to soften up at first, but after that it handled very nicely, and tasted much better than other fondants. Recommended.

Quote of the day

2012-01-28T09:45:00.004-07:00

A reported exchange between Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich: "Why do so many people take an instant dislike to me?"
Dole: "It saves time."

Why the State of the Union matters

2012-01-24T17:04:00.001-07:00

No, the speech won't change much. But Matt Glassman reminds us of some reasons why it's important to watch anyway. I liked this one:

The State of the Union address... portrays a more basic and correct understanding of the foundations of our republic. The executive is invited to come to Congress by the leadership of the legislature, at a time satisfactory to them. If he accepts, he leaves his residence and comes to the institutional heart of the republic, the chamber of the House of Representatives. He then waits at the door of the chamber until he is introduced by the agents of the legislature, who then lead him down the aisle, where he is received by the elected Representatives of the people and the States. He passes by the Justices of the Court, members of his government, and finally he ascends onto the House dais, where he is again introduced and received by the legislature.

He then begins to talk. What he says may or may not matter, but the way in which he says it sure does. He does not tell the legislature what he is going to do in the following year, for there is very little he can do. He tells the legislature what he believes needs to be done, and then he asks the legislature to do it. In the endless string of presidential debates it can often feel like the President has the ability to wave his hand and enact a policy. But the State of the Union Address reminds everyone that the President of the United States can no more make a law than he can walk on water; never is it more evident how our system of government works. The President comes and visits the Representatives of the people, and he pleads with them to do what he thinks is right for the country.

Anyway, I'll likely be Tweeting the whole thing obnoxiously and enjoying the patriotic spectacle. Enjoy!

Can conservatives count on Newt?

2012-01-23T11:21:00.001-07:00

I've got to strongly disagree with the Economist's RLG here (via Sullivan):

It's not that Mr Gingrich would be the best president. But watching Mitt Romney pivot to the centre with the smoothness of a consultant flipping to his next slide, a manoeuvre we can all expect him to execute the minute he wraps up the nomination, will be depressingly predictable. The perception that he will say whatever he feels he must to become president is not founded on sand. Mr Gingrich, by contrast, can almost certainly be counted on to be the same Mr Gingrich we've seen in the primaries. Say what you like about the man, but he has ideas, says arresting things, and most of all, would make the clearest possible contrast with Barack Obama in the general election. [emphasis added]

On the contrary: Newt is an enormous flip-flopper! Does anyone out there recall his big debate with then-President Bill Clinton in New Hampshire in 1995? This was the first opportunity for Americans (well, C-SPAN viewers, anyway) to see these two titans of the mid-90s -- the great intellectual leaders of conservatism and liberalism, the warriors anointed by rival tribes -- duke it out mano a mano. And this was right after the 1994 elections, during which Gingrich had led his team to victory claiming that Democrats were the party of incest-perpetrators and child-killers. How did he do against Clinton?

He was civil, pleasant, and conciliatory. He spoke about saving Medicare, he praised Americorps, he shook hands with the president over lobbying reform. They shared some laughs. The bomb thrower vanished in the presence of the Democratic president.

In general, Newt's policy positions are famously unstable, to the point where he makes Romney look like a rock in contrast. But the idea that he's going to stick it to Obama in the debates? Well, there's just no evidence for that. Picking a nominee solely because he'd be a good debater is generally a silly idea, but particularly so in Gingrich's case.

What the second coming of Newt means for party scholars

2012-01-21T20:45:00.001-07:00

According to the latest tallies, Newt Gingrich has defeated Mitt Romney in South Carolina by 14 points, after trailing him by double-digits just a few days ago. Yes, that's pretty astounding. So what does this mean for those of us who study parties for a living?

Readers will recall that I have strongly endorsed the Cohen et al. book The Party Decides on several occasions. I consider this probably the most important book on presidential nominations in print. I am currently teaching it to my undergraduates, and I subscribe to its thesis that party insiders determine nominations. It would be hard to read this book and come away thinking that anyone other than Romney will be the Republican nominee this year. After all, he's had a strong advantage in insider endorsements for the past year, and polling suggests that while he's certainly not everyone's first choice, he's a lot of people's second choice. That is, he's broadly acceptable within the party, even if most people aren't enthusiastic about him. That's classic nominee material. (The one important caveat is that a lot of insiders have declined to endorse so far.)

Newt Gingrich, conversely, is precisely the sort of candidate who should not win according to this theory. He has astonishingly little support among Republican insiders. (Indeed, the opposite: Republican elites have gone out of their way to trash him.) He has little money. He is sustained only by his savvy use of the media. Previous candidates who have attempted this path to the nomination include Jerry Brown '92, Howard Dean '04, Gary Hart '88, Mike Huckabee '08... basically, the really interesting losers. No one has pulled this off, really, since Jimmy Carter in '76, and that was before party insiders had learned to master the post-McGovern-Fraser-reforms system.

So, as I've said before, this contest is turning into a fantastic test of the Cohen et al. thesis. If Gingrich were to somehow win the nomination, that would be pretty astounding, and we'd have to say that the system has changed. Perhaps the overwhelming number of debates changed the dynamic, and party insiders didn't control those as well as they can control primaries. Perhaps the rise of Super PACs made a difference, allowing a very, very small number of eccentric wealthy people to have inordinate influence over the contests.

Again, my assumption is that the system has not changed significantly, and that party insiders will rise up again to crush Gingrich as they did back in December. And Lord knows they have the material to do it. But at the very least, this is already becoming a more interesting contest than most of us predicted.

Update: For more on this topic, be sure to check out Nate Silver's post, although you probably already have.

Well, the math is easy

2012-01-21T19:55:00.001-07:00

I suppose they're obligated to show us a race cross-tab in the South Carolina Republican exit polls, but still...

Essential party readings III

2012-01-20T16:18:00.001-07:00

Unnamed Democratic party boss, as quoted by journalist T. H. White in 1956:

Look, let me explain in terms of my own governor. When I decided to nominate him, I called him in and said, "Today, I'm the boss. But when I nominate you and you're elected, you'll be the boss because you're governor. I'm putting a gun in your hand and you can shoot me with it."

What endorsement?

2012-01-19T21:26:00.001-07:00

Interesting. Perry drops out and backs Gingrich this morning. By this evening, two of his three superdelegates remain unaligned, and one has switched to Romney.

The GOP Field

2012-01-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

Important point from Jonathan Bernstein:

It's just worth remembering that the real GOP field this time was at least Romney, Pawlenty, Perry, and Barbour, and perhaps also several others, including Palin, Thune, Christie, and Daniels. That's the real field that we should consider when assessing what Romney beat. Most of the others who showed up for debates and even took votes in some primaries, such as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, were just sideshows.

It gets a bit fuzzy when we try to determine exactly who the field of candidates is in a given year, since many of them are selected out during the invisible primary stage, long before anyone begins voting or conducting debates. Kerry wanted to run in 2008. Gore wanted to run in 2004. So did Daschle. But after enough discussions with potential donors, activists, and endorsers, they became convinced it wouldn't happen, so they decided not to run.

What's more, it's often the highest quality candidates -- the ones who understand the difference between a winnable and an unwinnable campaign -- who select out of the pool the quickest. The Pawlentys and Christies of the world likely looked at the way the field was shaping up (specifically, how much inside support Romney had) and figured they just couldn't make it happen this year. The people who are left in by the time the voting starts either don't realize they can't win (Bachmann, Santorum), are just trying to raise some issues of importance (Paul), or have nowhere else to go (Gingrich).

A man with a plan

2012-01-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

This explains basically everything you need to know about the man:

A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled "Some Projections on West Georgia College's Next Thirty Years."

Funding in the 2012 elections

2012-01-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Mark Schmitt wrote last week about how Super PACs were allowing for zombie presidential candidates who now have the funding to walk the Earth long after a lack of endorsements or victories should have finished them off. I think this is just the beginning of the ways that some post-Citizens United funding innovations will affect the 2012 presidential election.

It's hard to know, going into the race, which side will have more mysterious funding backing it. There is no shortage of wealthy benefactors in either party who would be willing to give millions of dollars if they thought it might affect the presidential election. But this lack of knowledge increases the uncertainty surrounding the election considerably.

In 2008, McCain's team went into the general election knowing it was facing a condition of asymmetric warfare: Obama's team could outspend them 2 to 1 anywhere. Now, there are tactics you can pursue knowing you're facing such a situation in order to confuse your opponent, such as being ambiguous about just where you're devoting your resources. I think McCain did some things along these lines. Not that they helped him a great deal in the end, but in a closer race, perhaps such tactics could make a difference.

This year, conversely, neither side really has any idea what the funding situation looks like in advance. Yes, Obama and (presumably) Romney will be able to look at each other's campaign finance disclosures, but those will only reveal a modest percentage of the spending that will occur this year. Where will these Super PACs deploy their spending? What sort of messages will they convey, and will those messages be consistent with what the campaign is trying to say? How do you form a strategy if you have no idea what your opponent's capabilities are, or if you don't even know what your own capabilities are?

Political Networks... in Colorado!

2012-01-17T23:10:00.002-07:00

I'm pleased to announce that the fifth annual Political Networks Conference will be held in Boulder June 13th-16th, and is being co-sponsored by the University of Colorado and the University of Denver. Boulder's Anand Sokhey and I will be the host chairs. The call for papers can be found here and we are accepting applications through March 1st.

The conference features both introductory and advanced trainings in networks methods, as well as many panels and poster sessions with some cutting-edge political networks folks. This is a great opportunity to learn about this topic and meet some of the people doing this research.

Apply now!

Great moments with Mr. Linkin

2012-01-16T18:21:00.001-07:00

John Sides: Martin Luther King, Jr., was actually once a controversial figure.
Matt Glassman: Why libertarians should support civil rights laws.
Mark Schmitt: Super PACs are sustaining undead presidential candidates.
Jonathan Bernstein: The Senate is not in recess, something senators will be happy to prove once they're back from recess.
Andrew Sullivan: The left and the right are similarly deluded about Obama's presidency, which has been remarkably successful.
Matt Yglesias: The public sector ~~shrunk~~ shrank by more than a quarter million jobs last year. Step 3: Profit?
Erik Klemetti: If you fell into lava, you would float rather than sink. The experience would still be unpleasant.
Oh, and it turns out orcas eat great white sharks' livers. As a palate cleanser.

Note: Must credit Rob Rushing for noting my incorrect grammar.

Americans Elect: Voters, schmoters

2012-01-16T16:39:00.001-07:00

Remember Americans Elect, the mysteriously-bankrolled third party group seeking ballot access in all fifty states? Remember how they're going to have a big on-line convention this June so that you get to choose the ticket? Well, it turns out they're doing most of the choosing for you. They're trying (so far unsuccessfully) to recruit some established political figure with weak parties ties to run. They've already called Bob Kerrey, Lamar(!) Alexander, Joe Lieberman, and Chuck Hegel to no avail, although I assume they still have plenty of other retirement-aged white guys in their Rolodex. (Is Lowell Weicker still available?)

Now, I have no problem with party leaders narrowing the field of candidates -- that's what parties do! But Americans Elect has been going out of its way to argue that it's not a party. It's supposed to be something different. They invite you to nominate candidates and have a vibrant debate. CEO Kahlil Byrd claims that the group "has no candidate and has no issue."

And now it turns out they're just like the other parties, with insiders doing the selecting for you. The only difference is that they don't stand for anything.

Information is power: Civil War edition

2012-01-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

Susan Schulten has a typically awesome piece up in the New York Times about the use of the telegraph during the Civil War. Being able to coordinate war efforts in real time was a tremendous advantage for Lincoln, but it wasn't exactly laid out as such when he moved into the White House:

When he took office in March, the telegraph extended only to the Navy Yard and the War Department, not the White House. For several months thereafter the administration had to use the city’s central telegraph office to send its dispatches.

By contrast, the nerve center of the Union war effort in 1861 was found at the headquarters of Gen. George McClellan, who had actually issued a standing order that all messages were to be given solely to him. Such was the situation in October 1861, when telegrams reporting the disastrous Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff were brought directly to McClellan as he met with Lincoln in the White House. McClellan withheld the news from Lincoln, who later learned of both the defeat at Ball’s Bluff and that his close friend Edward Baker had been killed in action. Such a policy was unacceptable, and Lincoln soon transferred control of the telegraph from McClellan’s headquarters to the War Department.

Why go "proportional"?

2012-01-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the Southern Political Science Association conference in New Orleans. (Ate a lot of fried stuff.) I attended a particularly interesting panel on the role of the states in the current presidential nomination race. Josh Putnam, one of the panelists, was asked why the Republicans have gone with a somewhat more proportional delegate allocation system this year. After all, the Republican method has traditionally been winner-take-all, while Democrats have traditionally favored proportionality. What led Republicans to believe that a potentially protracted nomination battle was better for their party?

Now, Josh has already dispensed with the idea that Republicans have really gone proportional. (Hence the quotes in the title above.) But to the extent they've changed the system at all, he offered an educated guess. Josh noted that the new rules were essentially handed down by then-chairman Michael Steele after the last presidential election. It is possible that Steele noticed that the Democrats' protracted nomination battle in 2008 not only didn't end up hurting the ticket in the fall, but may have ended up helping. That is, Obama/Clinton contests on rarely-fought terrain like North Carolina and Indiana allowed Obama to build up a campaign infrastructure in the spring, which he could translate into a general election infrastructure in the fall. (And yeah, the campaign infrastructure in those swing states could have made the difference.) So perhaps the Republicans were actually looking for a somewhat drawn out spring contest, hoping it would give them a better shot against Obama this fall.

Admittedly, this is an educated guess, but it sounds like a pretty good one to me.

Pass the putzy on the left-hand side

2012-01-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

My brother put together this video for his wife's birthday, featuring friends and family members throwing with their non-dominant hands. It's pretty damned funny, but what particularly interests me is the fact that up until just a few years ago, this video would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and required some serious professionals who knew how to film and edit. Basically, it wouldn't have been made. Today, it's almost costless to crowd-source the video work, and the editing took a few hours on a home computer.

Trading it in for a bucket of warm spit

2012-01-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

Bill Keller's Sunday NYT op/ed suggesting that Obama drop Joe Biden from the ticket and replace him with Hillary Clinton strikes me as rather silly. While not as mean-spirited as the Caddell/Schoen please-wreck-your-party memo, I can't imagine what purpose such a suggestion serves. I can understand that some people, particularly Hillary supporters from the 2008 days, would like to see her name in the top slot on the party's ballot and may want a chance to vote for her for national office. But beyond that, I think this idea suffers from two important errors:

Error 1: Hillary Clinton would help the Democrats retain the presidency. I see no evidence that she brings any voters to the Democratic side who aren't already there. Yes, I know her approval ratings are currently higher than President Obama's, but that's basically because she isn't the president and isn't receiving blame for economic difficulties. Remember, Obama has basically polled ahead of where economic conditions would predict him to be. Also remember: she's a deeply polarizing figure! She may not look that way now, but put her on the executive ticket and see what happens. Besides, everyone already knows she's a prominent member of the Obama administration. Why changing her job title would bring in additional voters escapes me.

Error 2: The Vice Presidency is a promotion above Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton has been the United States' public face abroad during a period of extraordinary international changes. My impression is that she's managed this position rather well, projecting U.S. interests and priorities without appearing overtly pushy or imperialistic. It's a serious job and she's handling it in a serious way. Conversely, what would she be doing as Vice President beyond sitting around waiting for a close vote in the Senate or President Obama's death? When was the last time you read about Joe Biden when it wasn't about him making a gaffe? I have no doubt Biden has been important behind the scenes in dealing with colleagues on Capitol Hill, and Clinton could do the same thing, but this role is very much out of the limelight and it's not obvious just how effective she could be there, particularly if Republicans retain control of at least one chamber.

More indicators of Romney's insider advantage

2012-01-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

The good folks at Democratic Convention Watch have been keeping tallies of the Republican superdelegates (or "automatic delegates") who have pledged for the various candidates. This distribution looks a lot like the others:

Some important points to note here. First, as with most other indicators of insider support this year, a lot of people are remaining publicly neutral. There are still 118 superdelegates (89% of the total!) who could pledge toward a candidate but have not yet done so. Maybe they just haven't made up their minds, maybe they lean Romney but are scared of possible blowback if they publicly endorse... it's hard to say.

Second, the distribution above again convinces me that Rick Perry remains the only viable alternative if Romney somehow falters. Yes, his public performances have ranged from abysmal to just passable, with the median being closer to abysmal. But he still has the broadest insider support after Romney and would probably be the easiest for the party to rally around.

Update: Another way of looking at the above data:

Where the race now stands

2012-01-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

Despite Santorum's admittedly impressive performance in Iowa, it is very hard to see a way in which Mitt Romney is not the Republican nominee this year. Romney continues to maintain an enormous edge over the other candidates in terms of insider endorsements and funding. He has the advantage of being the insiders' candidate: he can run everywhere, and he can withstand a setback anywhere.

Santorum, meanwhile, gives every impression of being a flavor of the week who happened to hit at just the right time for a surprise in Iowa. If Iowa had happened a week earlier, it would've been Paul with 25%. Two weeks before that, it would've been Gingrich. I expect Santorum to do reasonably well (15%? 20%?) in New Hampshire but just not have the funding or infrastructure to maintain a run beyond that. He could do okay in South Carolina, but Rick Perry's decision to compete there means the Evangelical vote will be largely split, providing a big help to Romney.

All this said, Romney is a very curious candidate. I can't think of a previous presidential candidate with such an enormous advantage in insider support who was nonetheless so despised by such a substantial chunk of his party. (Hubert Humphrey? Maybe, but he at least had an impressive track record on issues like civil rights that might have reassured liberal activists in 1968. Romney has no such goodwill among conservative activists.) The question is what that means for this year. My impression has been that conservatives will largely suck it up. Despite their misgivings about Romney's faith and his pretty recent liberalism, they will come to view him as far superior to four more years of Obama, and they will turn out for him. Some Republicans tell me otherwise, though. Will Evangelical activists stay home? Will Tea Partiers back a third party candidate? What if Ron Paul runs as a Libertarian or on the Americans Elect ticket? Yeah, that could mess up the election for Republicans big time.

Campaigning like a nominee?

2012-01-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

Charles Stewart III has a really nice quickie analysis comparing the county-level Republican caucus votes in Iowa in 2012 and 2008. There are a couple of cool findings in there. One is that the strongest correlation from one cycle to the next comes from the Huckabee '08 vote versus the Bachmann + Perry + Santorum vote -- basically, the social conservatives. It reinforces the idea of the Iowa Republican caucus goers being divided pretty neatly into three persistent camps: social conservatives, business Republicans, and libertarians.

The other cool finding was that Romney's 2012 caucus vote correlates slightly better with McCain's 2008 vote than it does with Romney's 2008 vote. This means... something. I'm not entirely sure what. I like to think that it means that Romney, the likely nominee this year, absorbed some of the infrastructure and tactics of McCain, the eventual nominee four years ago. But that may be a stretch.

White Men Can Count

2012-01-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

First of all, I'd like to commend C-SPAN for its coverage of Iowa Caucus events. If you watched last night, you saw regular Iowa citizens getting together to try to pick a president. They gave unpolished speeches, they voted, they counted the votes, they called in the results, then a few stuck around to talk about platform positions and to decide who would represent the candidates at the county conventions. People often compare caucusing with primary voting, describing the former as involving more conversation and taking more time. But it some ways it's closer to jury duty, only a lot less depressing. It's regular people coming together to perform an important civic duty. It was great to watch. Okay, maybe watching Iowans count green sheets of paper isn't your idea of a good time on a Tuesday night, but if so, you're probably not reading this blog.

Second, I want to address this article about Ron Paul's post-caucus strategy. The gist is that the Paul people are very organized and made sure that their supporters stuck around after the initial counts to run for delegates to the county conventions. This is how you ultimately end up with a greater share of national convention delegates than your caucus-night showing would predict. The naive campaign treats a caucus like a primary and leaves as soon as the voting is done. The smart campaign realizes that the caucus is just the first step in the selection of delegates and sticks around to try to control the post-caucus selections. (I wrote about this with regards to Obama and Clinton back in 2008). Anyway, I think Josh Putnam is right that Paul could end up with significantly more delegates than expected thanks to this level of organization, although I agree with Jon Bernstein that this won't make a difference for the nomination.

One point I'd like to add: In the Business Insider article linked to above, the author writes:

Iowa's Republican caucuses are non-binding — they are technically just a straw poll, so once selected, delegates are free to vote for whichever presidential candidate they choose.

I think the whole binding/non-binding thing is a bit of a red herring with regards to caucuses. I hope Josh or Jon will correct me here if I'm wrong, but the way that caucuses get to choose their delegates to the next levels (county, district, state, national) all but ensures that those delegates will be extremely loyal to their preferred candidate. After the Iowa caucuses last night, Romney supporters in each precinct gathered together to pick the people among them who would best support Romney at the county conventions. Now, there'd be no official sanction if one of them defected to Paul or Santorum, but that person would be a fool to do it. She'd be immediately distrusted and despised among local Iowa Republicans, and if she cared enough about her reputation in local politics to get involved in the county convention in the first place, that's an outcome she'd like to avoid. Now, if Romney somehow dropped out of the race and encouraged his supporters to back Santorum (this won't happen, but stick with me), that delegate would be happy to follow his request. But short of that, he can expect a great deal of loyalty from his "non-binding" delegates.

Get your nerd on

2012-01-03T14:46:00.000-07:00

Iowa Caucus day. I can't tell you how jazzed I am. I don't have a whole lot to say so far that hasn't been said elsewhere, so I'll just link to some of the better recent posts. But I will post this recent polling chart, noting that the Ron Paul wave has probably already crested and that Santorum probably timed his wave about as well as possible... maybe just a few days too late.

Not that he really did anything to cause this wave to happen, or course. Near as I can tell, Santorum's been saying and doing roughly the same things for months. I saw him briefly interviewed on Fox last night, where he was asked why he's been rising in the polls. He didn't know. That's not a dig on Santorum. It's just a sign that what's going on out there has very little to do with the candidates' actions and a great deal to do with voters and activists still desperately seeking a conservative alternative to Romney. It also reminds us that if the anti-Romney activists could somehow unite on a single candidate, they could probably win this thing. But we've seen little evidence that they're capable of doing that with the given field of candidates.

Anyway...

Brendan Nyhan has a nice piece on the media's role in creating a post-Iowa narrative.
Jonathan Bernstein feels patriotic about today, and so do I.
John Sides and Lynn Vavreck (reporting live from Iowa!) offer some evidence that the Iowa caucuses are actually pretty representative of the state.
Josh Marshall watches the GOP establishment crush Gingrich and becomes a convert to The Party Decides (even if he doesn't mention it by name).
Eitan Hersh finds that caucus goers aren't really different from primary voters in terms of ideology, but they do tend to be more passionate about community activism.
Brendan Loy: "In the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of being the Anti-Romney."
Think Iowans are a bunch of hicks? Think again:

Filibuster ≠ nullification

2011-12-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

I've got to strongly disagree with Kevin Drum on this one. Drum says that minority obstruction powers in the U.S. Senate, allowing one senator to hold up legislative business, are the equivalent of nullification, the early-19th century theory that a state could negate a law imposed by the federal government. In the case that Drum cites, the outcomes are roughly similar. That is, a Republican senator is refusing to allow the appointment of an Obama administration nominee, essentially shutting down the oversight board to which the nominee was appointed. Yes, this has roughly the same effect as preventing the federal government from enforcing a duly passed law. But the means are very, very different, and that matters.

The filibuster, construed as any form of minority obstruction in the Senate, is legal, subject only to the rules of the Senate, which the Senate may determine for itself. Nullification runs flatly against the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Just because the outcomes may be the same doesn't make them equivalent. The assassination of federal officers would similarly obstruct the enforcement of federal laws, but that doesn't make it the same thing as filibustering appointees.

Yippee ki yay, Momofuku

2011-12-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm currently attempting to make the Corn Flake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookies from the Momofuku Milk Bar's cookbook. I have to say, this is a somewhat frustrating cookbook. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Momofuku Milk Bar is a series of restaurants in New York City specializing in high-end desserts made from surprisingly pedestrian ingredients. These cookies, for example, contain Corn Flakes, powdered milk, mini-marshmallows... probably stuff you have in your pantry but never thought to put in cookies. Oh, and tons and tons of butter. But don't let the low-end ingredients fool you; the author, Christina Tosi, has a lot of fancy techniques she insists are essential (creaming butter and sugar for eight minutes, using a paddle and stand mixer rather than a hand mixer, forming the cookie dough on a tray and refrigerating it for hours, etc.). And the dishes are shockingly labor-intensive.

The book seems to assume that the reader has some familiarity with the dishes at the restaurant. There are not a lot of illustrations telling the reader, say, what the final product should look like. Anyway, I followed the cookie recipe precisely and came up with this:

That just can't be right. And it was pretty frustrating, since I started with what was easily the best cookie dough I'd ever tasted. I tried several times and couldn't help coming up with enormous, flat cookies. I found this variation of the recipe online and followed the suggestion of freezing the dough, thinking the fridge wasn't cool enough for the cookies to hold their shape. Nope. I'm not sure what shape they're supposed to be in, but I'm pretty sure it's not the one I've got.

After a little experimentation, I've lowered the temperature to 350F, cut each dough ball in half (the original recipe called for scooping them in a 1/3 cup measure), and reduced the cooking time from 18 to 11 minutes. I tried cooking them on a baking stone, but as you really need to have them cool before removing them from the tray, the Silpat seems to work a lot better. Here's what I've got now:

Again, given the thinness, they're still coming out more like lace cookies, but the flavor is quite good. I don't know why my cookies won't hold their shape (whatever that shape is supposed to be) -- whether I failed to whip the butter properly, whether it's an altitude thing, or what. But still, yummy.

I've also made the Crack Pie and will serve it to my guests tonight. More details later when I find out how it came out.

Update: The Crack Pie was a hit. Tastes like pecan pie without the pecans.

Six days from Iowa -- stuff to know

2011-12-28T17:52:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a class on party nominations that conveniently starts the same day as the Iowa Caucuses and ends the week of Super Tuesday. Anyone want to bet on whether the Republicans have a nominee before my class is done? Anyway, here are some important links I'll probably be using in class:

Josh Putnam explains the delegate allocation rules for all the Republican contests. The quick version: the GOP has made some slight nods toward proportionality, but the contests are still overwhelmingly winner-take-all.
Also from Putnam: the primary & caucus calendar. He's even put together a version you can download for iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar. Total stud.
Matt Glassman thinks Romney is the near-certain nominee, but explains why everyone has an incentive to make the contest seem more uncertain than it really is.
Ron Paul seems to be cruising toward a win in Iowa, and Nate Silver thinks Paul will do better than the polls currently predict.
Jonathan Bernstein handicaps the current Iowa poll standings, noting the volatility and closeness of the contest. Basically, anyone other than Huntsman and Gingrich has a non-trivial chance of winning.
I predicted Newt's collapse a month ago, but whatever. Predicting Newt will lose is like predicting Rocky will win (episodes II through V only).

The party, deciding: Virginia edition

2011-12-26T10:46:00.001-07:00

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have failed to qualify for Virginia's Republican presidential primary. Gingrich has responded typically with bombast and inappropriate historical metaphors. But rather than criticizing the campaigns as incompetent or Virginia's rules as bizarre, we might note what this means for our understanding of party nominations.

One of the things that party insiders provide for their preferred candidates, in addition to money and endorsements, is expertise. That covers a wide range of things, including people who know how to read polls and put together ads and basically run a campaign on a national scale. But it also includes people who understand the arcane rules of nomination contests in the 50 states. Those rules can get weird. For Virginia, a candidate needs 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 from each of the state's 11 congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats vote for delegates, rather than candidates, and Hillary Clinton had some problems there in 2008 when her campaign failed to find a full slate of loyal delegates prior to the primary. Caucuses bring their own level of weirdness that primaries lack. Texas has both a primary and a caucus.

The point is that someone with insider backing within the party doesn't usually make mistakes along these lines. They're provided with people who can avoid these snafus. That doesn't mean that outsider candidates can't achieve this level of expertise -- notably, Ron Paul made the Virginia ballot -- but it's a lot harder when you don't have the backing of party elites. This is one of the ways that party insiders pick winners.

Update: Important point from Josh Putnam: This is the first time that the Virginia GOP has bothered to validate signatures. They now do so as a result of an independent candidacy for the state legislature in 2011. Again, a well-backed presidential campaign would know these details, but this is an important wrinkle.

F-ing polls -- how do they work?*

2011-12-21T22:51:00.001-07:00

Roger Simon has written one of the most anti-intellectual columns of the week, asking whether polls are really "magic." Not only does he appear not to know how polls arrive at the answers they do, but he seems to have no interest in learning. He even falls back on the classic "they never call me" trope. Some highlights:

I have never been called by a political pollster and don’t know anybody who has, but I know some pollsters, who assure me they don’t make the numbers up, and I believe them.

Pollsters, or rather the phone-bankers who make call after call (or computers that make robo-call after robo-call) do get people to talk to them. Not vast numbers of people, but pollsters do not require vast numbers.

[...]

We are a nation of nearly 313 million people. So how many people did the pollsters actually speak to? If you have extremely good eyes, you can find the answer in tiny type at the bottom of a chart: The Post-ABC poll was conducted by phone “among a random sample of 1,005 adults.”

That represents 0.0003 percent of the nation at large. (The number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents was an even smaller sample of 395 people.)

[...]

This poll has a very good reputation and I “believe” the results in that I believe they were calculated carefully and (unlike some partisan or campaign polls) without any agenda.

[...]

Does Obama really lead Gingrich by 8 percentage points in a (currently) imaginary matchup?

I dunno. Sounds right to me. But I am an even smaller sample than 0.0003 percent.

You really don't need to be a statistician to understand this stuff. Why can a survey of 1,100 people be accurate in telling us how the whole nation is thinking? The metaphor I always liked was a blood test. For a doctor to determine if there's a problem with your blood, she doesn't need to remove it all -- she can just extract a small vial. This vial of blood represents the rest of your blood well because it's constantly being mixed up, so that a few cc's of your blood in your arm looks like the blood anywhere else in your body.

It's the same thing in surveys. You can poll a fairly small number of people as long as you can be confident that you're getting a representative sample of American voters. (Talking to your friends and neighbors? Not representative. Calling people randomly across the country? Much better.) And some relatively simple math can tell you just how likely it is that your sample believes what the rest of the country believes. Picking 1,100 people for a survey means you have a margin of error of roughly 3%. That means there's a 95% chance that the actual population is within three percentage points of what your sample believes. Pollsters have settled on that as a pretty reliable margin. You could get it down to 2%, but only by interviewing lots more people, driving up the costs of the poll considerably without improving its accuracy by much.

The sad thing is that Simon has an audience who might really appreciate a better understanding of how polling works, but he decided to waste their time with some blather about how polls are magical and therefore beyond our understanding. They're not, and Simon's readers deserve better.

*Must credit Brendan Nyhan for the Insane Clown Posse reference.

A socialist blog post

2011-12-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich, 1989:

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

I'm actually hard-pressed to think of an idea that Gingrich opposes that he has not summarily labeled "socialist." Perhaps, at other times, he has uttered these words:

I expect you to put my groceries in plastic bags. The idea that you'd use paper bags is essentially a socialist argument.

I wanted half-and-half in my coffee. 2% milk is the path to socialism.

I certainly hope that the band's absence represents a short intermission and that they will soon return to the stage to perform "Free Bird." If this is the end of the show, then the socialists have won.

Bella should stick with the free-enterprising Edward. Everyone knows werewolves are socialists.

Feel free to add more.

Who's enforcing journalistic standards?

2011-12-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

Marc Herman has some interesting stories about the relationship between publishers and journalists, helping to explain why he released his work on Libya as an Amazon Single. I found this passage particularly compelling:

In traditional publishing, particularly books, the impulse to enforce professional standards comes more and more from the reporter and less and less from the editor. This suits me, but it’s the reverse of how things usually go. Traditionally, the reporter pushes to include material. The editor evaluates the material’s appropriateness. The final balance of source and information happens in the editor’s office, not the reporter’s notepad.

A dramatization of the system a lot of people know comes from the old movie version of the reporter’s classic All the President’s Men. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, as the reporters, want to run a damning story about the President. Jason Robards, as the editor, keeps telling them they haven’t got the story yet.

Great in a 30 year-old movie. In my 20 years, I’ve never had an editor say that. I’ve said it to editors lots — that I don’t have it yet.

Jar Jar Links

2011-12-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

GOP primary voters actually do care about electability.
Why might Evangelicals prefer Gingrich to Romney? It's easier to forgive sin than membership in a "cult."
Social movements can actually happen without Twitter. In fact, they sometimes decide not to use Twitter at all.
Don't expect a new presidential candidate to jump into the GOP race.
Sadly, Christine O'Donnell probably meant this as a complement.
Picking Gingrich because he'll expose Obama as a weak debater is just like nominating Kerry because he'd expose Bush as a chickenhawk. How'd that work out?
I don't think lots of debates are necessarily a bad thing, but I found Fred Barnes' take interesting.
How educated are state legislators?
The Onion explains pretty much every local news story.
The original plan for BART would have allowed you to travel from San Jose to Napa.
A reminder that an unfortunate name needn't preclude a career in public service.
George Takei calls for a truce between Star Wars and Star Trek fans and a war on Twilight.

The Hillary challenge: How is this story still alive?

2011-12-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

I thought we were done with speculation that Hillary Clinton would challenge Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but then a version of this Bogdan Kipling op/ed showed up in Sunday's Denver Post. His main argument for a Hillary challenge seems to be that Obama sucks:

Contrary to mainstream opinion, Obama is a mediocre politician.

Go on.

Were it not so, surely he would have known instinctively that people get wise to polished repetitive, but empty speeches — and know the difference between bread and butter now and pie in the sky later.

I'm guessing he knows that, but continue.

Joblessness and fear of watching retirement savings vanish weigh heavier on the nation’s collective mind than long-range climate change and health care reform. The president’s touted political instincts should have told him all that. But, as James Carville once noted so cogently, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

But while Obama talked jobs and initiated a jobs bill in Congress on his sixth day in office, almost all of his mind and determination remained focused on health care — his overriding priority.

Kipling is engaging in a number of classic pundit fallacies here:

Mind-reading: Regardless of Obama's public speeches and actions, his "mind and determination remained focused on health care."
The Green Lantern theory: If Obama were sufficiently determined, the economy would be better by now and his reelection prospects would be stronger.
The Executive Branch Has One Employee theory: It is impossible for an administration to be working on improving the economy while also working on health care reform.

It's all rather silly and ignores some basic truths: the state of the economy will largely determine Obama's reelection prospects (something Obama assuredly knows); we've recently experienced a collapse of the financial sector, which tends to freeze up lending and investment for many years; it's hard to see how Obama's actions could have made for a much stronger economy at this point (except for a larger stimulus, and you tell me how he gets that through Congress without resorting to the Green Lantern theory).

And then there's the other big point: the forces currently making Obama's path to inauguration day 2013 a difficult one would be doing the same thing to Hillary Clinton were she the nominee.

Will 2012 be the Tofu/Fried Twinkie election? Who cares?

2011-12-11T16:07:00.001-07:00

Just when you thought it was safe to analyze elections, David Wasserman drags us back to the politico-cultural waters David Brooks sailed years ago. To wit:

In 2012, the campaign might be a contest between these alternate universes of culture and cuisine: Whole Foods Markets and Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel —a record 45-point gap.

And then the articles goes on to talk about the unique cultures of these two stores. Wasserman even attempts to pin the stores down on their political views:

Though Whole Foods refused to comment for this story, Cracker Barrel says there’s no connection. “Politics don’t play any role in our site selection process,” said Julie Davis, a spokeswoman for the company.

First of all, good for Whole Foods for not even playing this game. (And by the way, given that Whole Foods' CEO is an anti-union libertarian, that's kind of an odd institution to cast in the role of liberal cultural leader.) Second, yeah, Cracker Barrel's main objective in siting its stores is not the advancement of some political agenda; they're trying to make a buck, just like other stores. This really isn't news.

Now, it is somewhat interesting, if hardly novel, that food tastes and other cultural indicators correlate with political preferences, at least at the county level. But does it mean anything beyond that? Does it really mean anything to say that 2012 will be the Whole Foods/Cracker Barrel election? Does this tell us anything we didn't already know about the election?

Oh, and what was this?

In the 2008 primary, Obama was able to overcome Hillary Rodham Clinton partly because the Democratic Party had become more Whole Foods than Cracker Barrel.

Sigh.

Newt's got no peeps

2011-12-10T12:20:00.001-07:00

Ezra Klein offers a fantastic list of 21 reasons Newt Gingrich won't become the GOP nominee, ranging from his palling around with Democrats to his absurd defenses for his adulterous affairs to his confusion of sci-fi and reality. Please read it. But I'd assert that there's a bit of a leap from the final item on his list to the statement "And I don’t believe they will choose someone like that."

That is to say, Ezra shows us why Gingrich won't become the nominee, but not how he won't become the nominee. That's trickier. Remember, even though Gingrich is way behind in endorsements, he's currently polling way ahead of Romney et al. in the earlier primary and caucus states. So how do elite preferences get translated into votes?

The key thing here is that Gingrich has no backers. Romney can slip up -- make a silly statement or give a bad interview -- and there are legions of journalists and elected officials who can explain it away or provide context or still point to his other qualities as a candidate. When Gingrich messes up -- as he most assuredly will at some point in the next few weeks -- no one's got his back. He'll be on his own, forcing to either recant what he said (flip-flopper!) or double down (loony!). What will his next apostasy be? I don't know, but it's exciting to watch.

Undead FDR SMASH Denver Post

2011-12-07T11:43:00.001-07:00

Today's NY Times:

Though unemployment levels dropped to 8.6 percent last month, they remain higher than the level at which any president has been re-elected since the Great Depression. [emphasis added]

The version that appeared in today's Denver Post:

Although the nation's unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent last month, no president has been re-elected with an unemployment rate so high.

For the record, here are the unemployment levels during FDR's three successful reelection bids:

1936: 16.9%
1940: 14.6%
1944: 1.2%

What, there wasn't space for the four words that would make the sentence true?

Grrrr...

No one can make a cheeseburger

2011-12-06T12:25:00.001-07:00

Last year I linked to Matt Ridley's wonderful TED lecture in which he argues that no one person knows how to build a computer mouse from scratch. Extracting petroleum from the ground, turning it into plastic, building a circuit board, refining the metal for it, etc.... these are highly specialized tasks. Ridley estimated that it takes perhaps a million people to actually build a mouse. He took this as a positive sign; we are all profoundly interconnected, allowing us to create things that none of us could create on our own.

Via Brad DeLong, Waldo Jaquith makes a similar argument about the cheeseburger, which he attempted to create from scratch:

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in the fall. Mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not…

This is something to celebrate. Perhaps with a cheeseburger.

Fairness and power in redistricting

2011-12-05T23:22:00.001-07:00

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled in favor of state Democrats' plan for Colorado's new congressional districts. It's been interesting to listen to the rhetorical arguments on both sides during this drawn-out process. Republicans have been arguing in favor of keeping districts as similar to the previous map as possible, citing the inviolability of county lines (Douglas County is split into two districts in the new map). Of course, hewing close to the current districts aids Republicans, who currently control 4 of the 7 CDs.

Democrats, for their part, have been arguing in favor of greater competitiveness. Here's what attorney Scott Martinez had to say:

The Supreme Court supported the needs of Colorado families over election-day politics today by creating more modern, competitive districts.... Instead of contributing to the hyper-partisanship in Washington D.C, the court supported Colorado's opportunity to elect moderate candidates who see the needs of our state over the needs of one party or another. In these districts, problem-solvers will win while partisan politicians will struggle, and we are all better off for that.

District competitiveness is an odd goal for a party, as it can mean that more districts swing away from your party in a bad election year. So were the Democrats being foolish in their approach?

In the below graph, I compare the voter registration in the current districts (as measured by the Democratic share of major party active voters) with the figures in the new districts. The green diagonal line charts where the district would be if there were no change; if a district is above the line, its Democratic share of registered voters has just increased.

From this graph, it looks like the Democratic redistricters did the smart thing for their party. They drew some Democratic voters out of their safest districts -- the 1st (held by Diana DeGette) and the 2nd (held by Jared Polis) -- and drew Democratic voters into some Republican-leaning districts -- notably the 3rd (held by Scott Tipton) and the 6th (held by Mike Coffman). The 6th is really seeing the biggest shift. Just a few years ago, this was Tom Tancredo's district, and now it's a tossup.

So, yeah, you could see this as goo-goos moving the state toward greater competitiveness. But you could also see this as a pretty aggressive move by Democrats to break Republican hegemony on one of seven districts.

Once again, the 70s were awesome

2011-12-04T20:42:00.001-07:00

Cover of the 1971 legislative handbook of the Minnesota chapter of Americans for Democratic Action:

Can you dig it?

2011-12-03T08:40:00.001-07:00

Wordle of Cyrus' speech from "Warriors." Happy Saturday.

The Activists

2011-12-02T19:15:00.001-07:00

I want to bring some attention (and maybe a bit of money) to a film project called "The Activists: War, Peace, and Politics in the Streets." The film is a documentary of political activism in the United States over the past few years, focusing mainly on anti-war activism. Political scientist Michael Heaney, a co-author of mine, is one of the producers of the film, and he conducted some of the interviews while we were surveying protesters at the Democratic convention in 2008.

The film is in post-production now and they need a few thousand more dollars to get this thing out the door. If you'd like to help, please check it out.

A Newt win would be very surprising indeed

2011-12-02T10:22:00.001-07:00

Okay, we are right in the middle of a massive Newtmentum surge, or the Newtening, or Electric Newtaloo or something. Gingrich is surging in the polls. Yes, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain all had surges, but maybe this time it's different?

Personally, I'm unconvinced. Here's why:

The above chart shows the percentages of endorsements from governors, U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, and former presidential candidates claimed by the current GOP candidates (courtesy of Nate Silver). As can be seen, Romney and Perry are splitting in terms of gubernatorial endorsements, but the former is walking away with all the other categories.

Remember, as The Party Decides reminds us, endorsements do a much better job predicting presidential nominations than polls do, and insider support is much more important than one bad TV interview. Now, is it possible that the universe described by The Party Decides no longer exists? Sure! Maybe Internet fundraising has changed everything, maybe the Tea Party has thrown off the equations, etc. It's hard to say in advance. But given the choice, I tend to fall in with the argument that what has governed elections in the past probably governs them today.

At any rate, this race is turning into a great test of Cohen et al.'s theory.

CSM gets rolled by Americans Elect

2011-11-30T11:13:00.001-07:00

There are a number of problems with Andrew Mach's profile of Americans Elect in a recent edition of the Christian Science Monitor. The line I found most egregious was this one:

The drive, if successful, would mark the first time a presidential candidate nominated directly by the American people achieved ballot access.

The only way this statement is true is if you regard Democrats and Republicans as somehow not the American people. Otherwise, the American people have been nominating presidential candidates for some time now.

I was kind of confused by this point:

So far, 1.9 million people in 24 states have signed the petitions. [...] In California, organizers submitted 1.6 million signatures in early October, more than for any single initiative in state history.

Is this right? In this allegedly grassroots, nationwide movement, Californians have provided at least 84% of the signatures? Either these numbers are wrong, or this is just evidence that Americans Elect's deep pockets are buying ballot placement with the help of California's vast petition signature collection industry. (And incidentally, the petition to recall Gray Davis in 2003 received 1.7 million signatures, although only 1.4 million were able to be validated. Not sure whether the Americans Elect signatures have been validated yet, but I'm guessing not.)

Oh, and speaking of deep pockets, Mach seems to accept the following story without bothering to check whether it's, you know, legal:

Financial backing for the endeavor is a mystery. Americans Elect is funded exclusively by some $20 million in contributions from unnamed individuals, says Mr. Byrd. The group's website says it intends to repay the initial financiers so that no single individual will have contributed more than $10,000.

Could an unnamed donor provide millions to the Democratic Party, maintaining anonymity as long as the party later paid him or her back? Is that legal? If not, how does Americans Elect qualify for an exemption? Or do they?

Either Cain's a dolt, or he thinks you are

2011-11-30T10:55:00.001-07:00

I generally try to refrain from taking specific pro/con stances on candidates for office on this blog, but I've been insulted. By Herman Cain. And so have you. If you haven't seen it yet, please check out Cain's "assessment of our key country relations," available on his campaign website:

This map makes this 1980s parody of Ronald Reagan's worldview seem nuanced in comparison. Either this is the way Cain sees the world, or this is the way Cain thinks you see the world. Either way, it's horrifying.

Jon Bernstein writes this morning that Cain "doesn't appear to be willing and/or able to converse about basic foreign policy issues at a level that wouldn't embarrass a strong high school student." I strongly disagree. The above map would embarrass a strong elementary school student.

How revolution spreads

2011-11-30T10:46:00.001-07:00

Marc Herman is back home from Libya and has written up his experiences as a Kindle Single called The Shores of Tripoli. (Be sure to read his recent blog post about the market forces in the magazine industry that led him to choose this outlet.)

It's a fascinating read. One of the points that particularly compelled me was the discussion of the rebellion finally hitting the small mountain town of Nalut. The residents knew of the uprisings in the big coastal cities, and the local loyalist soldiers knew of them, too. And they had all seen videos of the regime slaughtering protesters. But nothing had yet happened in Nalut. As one of the residents says,

"Some guys from school, and some people who are just my neighbors. We decide to do this thing," as he described it. The thing they would do was to walk to the local Nalut office of Internal Security the next afternoon and tender a request that Moammar Qaddafi, Libya's leader of forty-two years, abdicate. They they would stand there and dare the guards to shoot them, hit them, gas them, or, if they preferred, agree with them. They did not reallly think about what would happen after that.

The book offers a case study as to how a movement spreads. Part of it is simply organic - it was just time, and the thing went viral. Part of it is manufactured - a NATO operative plays a role in the local resistance, and the rebels find help from across the Tunisian border. But it nicely connects the local individual stories to much larger social forces. If you're trying to figure out why something like Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party takes off and other movements don't, here's a nice piece of research for you.

Tab-Dumping on Democrats

2011-11-28T13:24:00.001-07:00

Ross Douthat: What is it with liberals and their worship of the mediocre-at-best presidency of John F. Kennedy?
Jonathan Chait: What is it with liberals and their dissatisfaction with the actually-quite-impressive presidency of Barack Obama?
David Atkins: Actually, liberals have quite legitimate grounds on which to be dissatisfied.
Steve Kornacki: By the way, liberals aren't any more prone to eating their own than conservatives are.

The nerd war goes on

2011-11-22T21:23:00.001-07:00

If you thought the debate over election forecast models was over, you thought wrong. Sean Trende has pushed back against my pushback. Well, fair enough. And he does make some important points in there, chief among which is that none of us need to be debating against straw men. Almost no journalists think the economy irrelevant to elections, just as almost no political scientists think the campaign irrelevant. To that extent, we largely agree.

Nonetheless, Trende goes on to question the value of economic forecast models of elections. He notes several presidential and congressional elections in which political science forecasts were wide of the mark, and suggests that we can't ever really know ahead of time whether we're going into an election in which the classic models will work well or not.

I want to respond a bit to that. First, I don't think it's fair to lump congressional elections into this argument; as any election modeler will concede, those elections turn on local as well as national factors and are much harder to predict. Second, yes, we can certainly cherry-pick some presidential election forecasts that missed, but they still, on the whole, tend to come quite close.

Note this collection of forecasts (PDF) submitted roughly two months prior to the 2008 presidential election. The median of the nine forecasts had McCain getting 48 percent of the two-party vote, just one percent more than he actually got. Seven of the nine forecasts came within three points of the actual vote. The most accurate forecast was made 99 days before the election.

Note also Nyhan and Montgomery's collection of forecast models for elections since 1976. Sure, some individual forecasts miss by quite a bit, but the "ensemble" forecasting model rarely deviates from the outcome by more than a point or two.

Now, my posse and I (yeah, I've got a posse) could keep going back and forth with Trende and his posse like this, but I'm not sure how productive that would be. I think instead it might be more useful to address the question of just what these forecasts bring to our understanding of elections.

Forecasts are certainly entertaining. They can also be lucrative. But their real value for political science is that they allow us to test theories about elections. This is why modelers spend a lot of time "predicting" elections that have already happened, a task that might seem silly to some. We're trying to understand just what drives elections. We have theories about the importance of the economy, even about different measures of the economy. We have theories about ideology, about wars, and other things. We also have theories, as John Sides notes, about how the campaigns take advantage of these features of the political environment and make them matter to voters. When we make a forecast, we're attempting an empirical test of our theories. We're trying to figure out just what matters in elections and how much it matters. And each new election improves our understanding of the fundamentals of elections.

In the comments on my last post on this subject, Jay Cost wrote in to say the following:

I would say that I have learned so much more from the history than from the political science. If somebody asked me "How do I understand the 1968 election?" I'd point them to Ted White's Making of the President before any quantitative study in the APSR.

If we're talking about comparing an in-depth study of campaign actors with a forecast model, well then I totally agree. These models tell us very little about any one given election. However, a thick study like White's will offer quite a few reasons why one candidate won and another lost, from the economy to the Vietnam War to the presence of a divisive third-party candidate. What our forecasting models do is provide us with some explanations of just which aspects of the political environment tend to drive elections and which ones don't.

Okay, enough for now -- I've got to go deal with some Thanksgiving stuff.

Update: Hans Noel has a great post up at the Monkey Cage further explaining how forecast models are used to test theories.

"Is this as good as it gets?"

2011-11-21T09:35:00.001-07:00

Chris Matthews:

In the above interview, Chris Matthews mourns the lack of a narrative in Obama's bid for a second term:

There is no Peace Corps... There is no Moon program.... What are we trying to do in this administration?... What's he going to do in a second term? More of this? Is this it? Is this as good as it gets?

He goes on to whine that Obama doesn't invite him to late night parties and doesn't call members of Congress often enough, and that there's too much e-mail communication or something, and then there's those darned kids running the White House....

Look, Matthews is obviously under no obligation to be one of Obama's foot soldiers, but I find this idea that Obama can't win without a compelling "narrative" really annoying. Obama could promise a mission to Mars or a cure for cancer or a new season of "The Wire," and I doubt it would make a lick of different for his reelection prospects. Those would be fairly vague, if inspirational, promises about the future, when voters tend to be highly attuned to what is going on now and what has happened recently. Specifically, they will retain him in office if they are sufficiently satisfied with improvements in economic conditions, and if they're not, they won't, regardless of what he promises.

As for Matthews' dismissive "more of this" comment, I'd imagine quite a few people would be happy with that, if "this" includes health care reform, preventing a depression, financial reform, student loan reform, killing Osama, toppling Kaddafy, etc. That's a solid record to run on. I'm sorry if Matthews doesn't think it's as exciting as a Moon landing. It's just, you know, governing.

Caddell and Schoen crack me up

2011-11-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

If you want to read some first-rate hackery, be sure to check out Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen's op/ed in today's Wall Street Journal. No, it shouldn't surprise anyone that these allegedly Democratic pollsters don't have Obama's best interests at heart, but beyond that, the op/ed reveals deep and profound misunderstandings about partisanship.

The basic premise of the piece is absurd: Obama is so unpopular that he can't win next year, and even if he somehow won, he'd have to run such a negative campaign to do so that he couldn't govern in a second term. Therefore, he should decline his party's nomination and let Hillary Clinton run in his place.

Okay, granted, Obama may need to run a very negative campaign, just as he did in 2008! And he still managed to govern because, you know, he had a Democratic Congress for his first two years in office. Caddell and Schoen are convinced that we've had gridlock recently, though, because of Obama's strident tone:

We warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be "guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it." The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline.

There are quite a few people who would disagree with the notion that Obama has been intransigent in his recent dealings with Republicans. (Remember the debt ceiling negotiations? Who was being intransigent then?) But beyond that, did it ever occur to Caddell and Schoen that this might have more to do with just the president's tone? That there might be sincere and enormous policy differences between the parties?

Wait, here's another good one:

If President Obama were to withdraw, he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate.

Yes, conceding defeat is a great way to extract concessions.

But the piece gets even better when they start talking up Hillary:

Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.

Ah, yes, nothing like Hillary Clinton to rise above partisan politics. I'm sure the Republicans wouldn't start opposing her vehemently once she were the nominee. It's not like her name was ever synonymous with every evil thing conservatives attribute to liberals.

I know it's been a few years, but do Caddell and Schoen remember that these were exactly the reasons many people supported Obama over Clinton in the primaries? He was supposed to be the one more likely to "step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington." How's that worked out so far? Oh, and remember when Bush ran as the uniter, not the divider? How'd that go?

Folks, it's not that these politicians are lying -- I'm sure they'd sincerely like to reach out to people across party lines. But partisanship is bigger that one politician, and it's certainly not a function of tone. There are massive, historic forces compelling the parties apart from each other. Hillary Clinton would be just as polarizing a president as Obama, if not more so.

Nonetheless, I'm sure her path to the White House next year would be an easy one after Obama's decision not to run. Just ask presidents Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey.

Update: More goodies from Matt Glassman. His conclusion:

I’ll just leave you with a funny thought an old college buddy emailed me, writing “the only upside to Gingrich winning the nomination and then taking on HRC for the presidency would be that Kurt Cobain would probably come out of hiding with like 5 full albums worth of great new material.” Amen to that.

Ecological inference and vampires

2011-11-19T10:38:00.001-07:00

Via Sullivan, here's a map by Goodreads in which they map out reviews of the book "Twilight" by state. Bluer states have more negative reviews of the book; redder states have more positive reviews:

The mysteries presented are twofold:

Why does this map seem to mirror voting patterns so sharply? That is, why do Republicans like "Twilight" while Democrats hate it?
Why has Utah generated such a disproportionately high number of reviews?

The second one is easy: the author, Stephenie Meyer, is Mormon, and a graduate of BYU. I can only assume that there's been a disproportionate share of buzz about her in Salt Lake City. Still, it's curious that Utah departs from the partisan trend; she has so many readers, but most of them dislike the book.

The first one is trickier. What can account for Republicans liking the book so much more than Democrats do, other than, as Erik Loomis says, "Republicans having horrendous taste in literature"?

Actually, we don't know that. This is a classic case of ecological inference fallacy. It is certainly possible that Republicans like the book more than Democrats do, but the map can be deceiving. The people in these states who vote in presidential elections may not be the ones who register opinions on Goodreads. Indeed, a goodly number of "Twilight" readers are probably under 18.

The only way we can really test the partisan connection is to examine individual level data, and Goodreads (regrettably) does not collect data on party ID. Still, there might be a way to infer party ID from Goodreads profiles, perhaps by looking for hints of political preferences in the "about me" section. If Gary King or some other enterprising individual would like to work on this, have at it.

Sharia gay marriage

2011-11-18T14:24:00.001-07:00

At the APSA meeting in Seattle this year, the great Thad Hall stormed into a hotel bar demanding to know why conservatives were so convinced that the chief liberal goals were both Sharia and gay marriage. He couldn't understand why conservatives seemed to be so terrified of two things that were bound to annihilate each other. This prompted a lively conversation, and then a contest, and both Hans Noel and I subsequently managed to insert the term "Sharia gay marriage" into our paper presentations. We thought it was a joke.

Imagine our surprise when PolitiChicks, a conservative alternative to "The View" featuring Victoria Jackson and some of her slightly more stable friends, decided to have a long, uncomfortable conversation about the threat America faces from both Sharia and gay marriage. Folks, this is sincere.

(h/t Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Everything but the kitchen link

2011-11-18T13:58:00.001-07:00

John Sides attempts some closure to the recent nerd-slam over economic forecast models of elections. As he notes, the economy and campaigns are not mutually exclusive influences on an election; the campaign makes the economy matter.
Debates are highly mediated political events. So sayeth Jon Bernstein.
Being the non-Romney candidate in the GOP is like being the #3 person at Al Qaeda.
Mapping religious adherents.
Americans' views of Godfather Pizza are polarizing.
Apparently Mr. Rogers was never a Marine Corps sniper or a Navy SEAL.
My Google Scholar profile. Sadly, my one foray into ophthalmology remains my most cited work.
I never tire of reading 1970s Weight Watchers recipe cards. And if you like those, you'll like this chicken salad recipe that features tuna, Cool Whip, lemon Jello, but no chicken.
I am really loving the "Guy on a Buffalo" series.
Can you go a week without "Star Wars"? I doubt I can.

The plummet

2011-11-17T14:28:00.001-07:00

Bernstein's right: the New York Times should be ashamed of itself for repeatedly printing the works of Drew Westen. Just to pick up on one of Westen's points:

After his grand bargain on the debt, for example, the president’s approval ratings plummeted.

That's a pretty steep plummet! My ears just popped!

Read Jon's post for more gems, especially the part about no one knowing what Obama truly believes. Ack.

Don't freak out about a congressional paycut

2011-11-16T12:27:00.001-07:00

So yesterday, Rick Perry proposed a dramatic change to the way Congress is run: cut their pay by half and make it a part-time legislature. There have been some very good and appropriately horrified reactions from the likes of John Sides, Jon Bernstein, Matt Yglesias, Jamelle Bouie, Matt Glassman, and others. The modal response is that amateur legislatures tend to be weaker compared to professional ones. Part-timers lack the expertise and time to devote to governing, and as a result tend to be more easily manipulated by the executive branch, bureaucrats, interest groups, and others. It's not particularly great for the concept of republican democracy.

That said, let's not all freak out about this proposal. Sure, it's a) irresponsible and b) highly unlikely to become law, but does that really distinguish it from the other policy proposals being bandied about during the 2012 Republican presidential nomination race? Rick Santorum called for war with China. Michele Bachmann called the leader of Iran a "genocidal maniac," which suggests future war. (You can't leave a genocidal maniac in power, can you?) Herman Cain wants to abolish progressive taxation. Mitt Romney promised to repeal Obama's health reform by January 21, 2013. Rick Perry wants to abolish three cabinet agencies, two of which he can name.

It might be just my fuzzy memory, but I'm having a hard time remembering a presidential contest that involved so many campaign promises so fundamentally divorced from reality. It's as though most of these candidates have either no concept of governing or no expectation that they'll ever have to actually try it.

Seen in this light, Perry's amateur Congress proposal is nothing unusual. Perry's campaign is hurting, badly. His proposal is a Hail Mary pass thrown vaguely in the direction of the people in the Republican Party who are reluctant to back Mitt Romney.

Historical accuracy is overrated

2011-11-16T10:05:00.001-07:00

Are you not historically accurate?

In listening to the History of Rome podcast, I was somewhat saddened, though hardly shocked, to learn that "Gladiator" (2000) wasn't really very faithful to history. Well, it was accurate in the sense that there was once a pretty good emperor named Marcus Aurelius who was succeeded by his son, a pretty crappy emperor named Commodus, and Commodus' sister later hatched a plot to assassinate him, but it failed. And there was a Roman general named Maximilianus who scored some big wins late in the Germanic wars. Otherwise, the whole plot of "Gladiator" was just kind of made up.

Still, pretty good plot. And on the more general details, I'd say "Gladiator" was more historically accurate than, say, "Dirty Dancing."

Essential party readings II

2011-11-15T14:49:00.001-07:00

Today's entry comes from U.S. Rep. Pete Kostmayer (D-PA) in 1988:

Just shut up, gays, women, environmentalists. Just shut up, and you will get everything you want after the election. In the meantime, just shut up so we can win.

(h/t David Karol)

We're racin' for links

2011-11-14T09:47:00.001-07:00

Ezra Klein applies the Bawn et al. Theory of Parties to the current GOP race.
Jon Bernstein: Sure, Rick Perry probably shouldn't be left unsupervised near sharp objects, but let's not overlook Herman Cain's profound ignorance.
God wanted both Bachmann and Cain to run for president.
Outsiders versus insiders on a Colorado Republican vacancy committee.
The weird, twisted campaign finance histories of Perry and Romney.
A faculty flash mob at Miami University in Ohio. I may do something like this when I'm department chair, only the dancing will look more like this (starting at 1:17).
Could a single U.S. Marine unit take down Caesar Augustus' whole empire?
Pictures of a healthy duodenum.
If Batman were in Oakland today, he'd apparently be kicking some hippie ass.

Economic forecast models: the pushback

2011-11-12T10:40:00.001-07:00

Nate Silver's 2012 prediction model has produced some interesting responses across the blogosphere. Brendan Nyhan notes that Silver's estimate for the effects of candidate ideology in presidential elections just has to be too big*, and he finds that Silver's model underperforms when compared to others. John Sides responds to Mike Tomasky's dissing of political scientists. Then Alan Abramowitz offers a model that includes an important variable that measures how long the incumbent party has held the White House, and Sean Trende pushes back a bit on that one and on the whole concept of economic forecasting.

I want to respond to what Trende wrote, but I'd first like to point out that it's fantastic that we're even having this debate. Just a few years ago, it seemed like political scientists were tearing their hair out just trying to convince political journalists that elections weren't determined entirely by campaign activities, and that the economy and other fundamental aspects of the political environment might be relevant. Now, the debate among political scientists and journalists appears to be more like, "Come on, the economy doesn't explain everything." So I feel like this discussion has moved in a very good direction in the past few years.

Okay, back to Trende's piece. He ticks off a bunch of things that you have to believe if you're going to accept the validity of an economic forecast model. For example:

First, at a basic level, you have to accept that something as complex as voting can be reduced to a simple, three-variable equation. And you have to accept that this equation is linear.

Well, no, you really don't. Now, we have good evidence that you can explain a very high percentage of what goes on in elections with just two or three variables, but that doesn't mean that everyone's vote choice is a result of just those variables. These models do have error terms. Sometimes other things can affect votes. They just usually don't.

And just because most of these models are linear, that doesn't mean that they have to be. If you get way out in the tails of economic performance, you can see that the effect on votes isn't quite linear. Hoover did better in 1932, and FDR did worse in 1936, than a linear model of economic growth would predict, if for no other reason than that any major party presidential nominee is guaranteed close to 40% of the vote; their hardcore partisan supporters simply won't defect no matter how bad things get. But most elections don't occur under such extreme conditions, and the linear model works quite well for those.

Here's another point Trende makes:

You have to accept that there is no problem predicting the president’s vote share from only 16 data points.

That's silly. Of course there's a problem with that. But that's all the cases we have, and they work pretty well. Indeed, it's pretty amazing we get such robust results from so few cases. And keep in mind that a lot of the truths we cling to in American politics, such as "the president's party loses House seats in midterm elections" or "Democrats lose when they nominate liberal New Englanders," are based on this many cases or fewer.

You have to accept that presidential elections haven’t changed at all over the past 64 years. ... You have to accept that the enfranchisement of African-Americans and poor whites in the South, as well as the enfranchisement of 18-to-21-year-olds nationally, had no effect on the outcome of the later races. A casual glance at the results of the 2008 elections would seem to suggest otherwise.

No one I know is claiming that elections are exactly as they were 64 years ago. But the same basic trends do seem to hold: voters blame the incumbent party when the economy underperforms and reward them when the economy does well, and they tend to turn against parties that have been in power a long time. I don't know why he singles out 2008 as some sort of evidence that these fundamentals have changed. In fact, such forecasts nailed the '08 results within a single percentage point.

You have to accept that anything that happens past the end of the second quarter of an election year matters only at the margin. If the economy absolutely collapses, and a previously popular president goes into Election Day with a 20 percent approval rating amid a full-scale depression, where the economy is contracting by 10 percent a quarter, it wouldn’t matter much. If we are attacked and enter a war, it wouldn’t matter much. If a president becomes mired in scandal, it wouldn’t matter much.

Again, no one argues this. A lot of modelers pick the second quarter as a cut-off because it allows time to make a forecast several months before the election while still capturing much of the economic activity on which the incumbent party will be evaluated. It's very rare that an economy that's humming along at three percent growth for a year or more will suddenly plunge into recession the quarter prior to an election. That certainly can happen (and it kind of did in 2008), but it's a very rare event. Similarly, if the forecast models showed Obama likely to win next year, but he decided to shoot Tom Hanks in the face on live TV on October 31st, yeah, he'd probably lose the election. It's not that last-minute twists don't happen, it's just that they're rare, and the things that happen to the economy in the third quarter of an election year usually look a lot like the things that happened in the first and second quarters.

There are a few other similar points that Trende makes. Some are good caveats for forecasters, and it would generally be good for us to be straightforward about the assumptions of our models. But many of Trende's arguments are simply straw men. Look, we have some models that do a pretty good job explaining elections -- a lot better than claims about campaign quality or candidate optimism or likeability. But past performance does not guarantee future results. Make of these models as you will.

*I hope my post using Silver's numbers to draw out a prediction plot wasn't taken as an endorsement of Silver's model. I simply did it because I thought it would look cool.

Mental note: campaign managers do not like economic forecast models

2011-11-07T14:43:00.001-07:00

From an e-mail to supporters from Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama 2012:

This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran a long analysis of the 2012 election headlined, "Is Obama toast?"

It uses a mathematical formula to conclude who will win this race.

In other words, it says neither you nor Barack Obama has a role to play in this election, because the outcome is essentially predetermined.

We disagree. [...]

[The] dramatic differences between the Republican nominee and President Obama will be crystal clear to Americans as the 2012 election approaches, because our grassroots organization in all 50 states will be having conversations every single day with their friends, families, co-workers, and neighbors.

That grassroots organizational advantage is a critical factor in this election that the Times' "formula" doesn't consider at all.

There's a quite natural hatred by campaign managers toward economic forecast models like Nate Silver's. They pretty much deny the campaign any agency at all. And that's not really fair. After all, there have been plenty of studies showing at least modest campaign effects -- a campaign's decision to devote resources to particular areas at particular times can affect votes, a campaign's message can affect how voters evaluate candidates, etc. But it's quite possible that opposing parties' campaigns largely cancel each other out. At any rate, we know that you can predict elections pretty reliably without any reference to the skills or decisions of the campaign managers.

If I were a campaign manager, that would piss me off, too.

Ulysses S. Grant: Bad for the Jews

2011-11-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

I must admit I was not aware of General Order 11, which General Ulysses Grant issued in 1862:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department [the "Department of the Tennessee," an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

He apparently did this to stem the black market in cotton, in which some Jewish traders were involved. Grant later rescinded the order and publicly repudiated it, allowing for a titanic influx of Jews back into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. (Okay, that never happened.) At least according to this Wikipedia entry, Grant managed to win a majority of the Jewish vote in 1868, although I'd really like to see the exit polls backing that up.

Some forecasts

2011-11-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

The 2012 presidential election forecaster up at fivethirtyeight.org is great fun, and you could get lost in the numbers for a few hours there. Basically, Nate Silver has made assumptions about the Republican candidates' ideological positions and plugged those into a forecast model, along with growth in gross domestic product and Obama's approval ratings. Just for giggles, I put together the following graph based on the forecasting data used in that model. I have assumed Obama's approval rating remains at 43 percent.

The official forecast for economic growth is 2.7%, by the way, which would put Romney and Obama at a near dead-heat.

Now, here are some reasons not to take these numbers too seriously:

First, Obama's approval rating is not independent of economic growth. If the economy begins to grow at a quicker clip, his approval rating will probably rise into the 50s. It will likely drop into the 30s or worse if we experience an actual recession.
Second, even if economic growth stays right where it is today, Obama's approval rating is likely to change somewhat as a function of the campaign. Nearly all Democrats will come to approve of his performance, even if they may have reservations today. And nearly all Republicans will come to disapprove, although they're probably doing that already.
Third, perceptions of the Republican nominee's ideological stances may well change by next year. It's very hard to make realistic projections of Cain's governing ideology since he's never governed before. Perry would be facing a more liberal electorate than he's ever faced, and Romney would be facing a more conservative one. Plus, given Romney's history, there should be substantially large error bars on either side of his line.

Update: Graph label fixed.

Where's the pro-phosphate candidate?

2011-11-05T11:38:00.000-06:00

You've probably noticed by now that your dishwasher isn't working as well as it used to. Lots of people have noticed that. As you may know, this has nothing to do with your dishwasher; instead, most of the detergent manufacturers have stopped using phosphates in their soap. They did this to accommodate various state governments, which have recently banned phosphates in detergents to help avoid the buildup of algae in runoff water. Now, there are some ways to deal with the problem, such as running the washer on a deep clean cycle or using a citrus additive like Lemi-Shine or just hand-washing them. Or you can pay top dollar for old school detergent. But still, we're talking about an actual inconvenience affecting millions of American households due to government and environmentalists. Where are the Republican presidential candidates?

Some conservative activists have already started complaining about this, but unless I've missed it, not a single Republican presidential candidate has championed phosphates as a campaign issue. This seems tailor-made for Michele Bachmann, who has ridden the compact fluorescent lightbulb issue as far as it can take her. But phosphates seems like an even better issue for her. Buying expensive bulbs is certainly an inconvenience, but they actually function for something like five times longer than traditional bulbs, meaning that you probably break even on the price and might even save money. Phosphate-free detergent, however, is an inconvenience every time you run your dishwasher. This is real nanny-state stuff! No, Obama isn't directly responsible for it, but he isn't responsible for the bulb thing either (Bush signed that into law), and he didn't engineer a government takeover of health care. The details are unimportant. There's enough vague truth in there for a legitimate campaign issue. If she doesn't want it, Ron Paul should jump all over it -- today (remember remember, the fifth of November). Or maybe it can save Herman Cain.

Chart of the day - Supreme Court tenure

2011-11-04T23:08:00.001-06:00

From Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren:

To quote Calabresi and Lindgren:

Justices have been staying on the Court for longer periods and retiring later in life than ever before.

Yes, longevity has increased, but it didn't suddenly shoot up in the 1970s.

Take the journey

2011-11-04T22:57:00.000-06:00

If you're looking for a really dumb but enjoyable film, I highly recommend the 1959 version of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The setup is great. A recently-knighted geologist at the University of Edinburgh (James Mason) is presented with an unusually heavy volcanic rock by his graduate student (Pat Boone, at the height of his "safe Elvis" fame). Mason, like any good scientist, blows the rock up and finds a man-made object inside, marked with the writings of a Swedish geologist who's been dead for centuries. This, of course, proves that it's possible for people to travel to the center of the Earth, which Mason and Boone then proceed to do, along with the widow of a rival geologist, a giant Icelander name Hans, and a duck named Gertrude. I am not making this up.

The film is great for all the expected reasons -- cheesy effects, tacky dinosaurs, bad science, absurd sexual politics, selectively-employed Scottish accents -- but there are a few other gems I particularly enjoyed. One is the portrayal of academic life. Mason's character, chancing upon an important discovery, decides to skip teaching classes for several weeks to devote himself to his research. When his dean comes knocking to find out what's up, he explains the importance of the research and says he simply can't be bothered to lecture to undergrads right now. Awesome! There's also a legitimately clever scene where the two brilliant scientists are trying to interpret the coded transmissions of what turns out to be Gertrude the aforementioned duck.

One of Boone's many shirtless scenes.

Another thing I loved was that the film was, at least at some points, a borderline musical. Mason's students sing to him in class when he gets knighted. (My students don't do that.) And Pat Boone never misses an opportunity to burst into song. (Even though they had to carry a year's worth of provisions on their backs, Boone still managed to find room for a concertina.) And for whatever reason, Boone slowly disrobes over the course of the film. He spends at least half the film shirtless, and by the final scenes, he is quite literally naked, holding up a sheep to cover his genitalia. I swear I am not making this up.

At least for now, Xfinity On-Demand is offering this film for free. I'd recommend taking them up on the offer.

Dark Knight and the War on Terror

2011-11-04T11:22:00.000-06:00

I just got done showing "Dark Knight" (2008) to my film class. I hadn't watched it since the year it came out, and I'm surprised how different the film feels today, just a few years later, particularly when viewed as a metaphor for the War on Terror.

The film is filled with visual references to 9/11. We see buildings explode and collapse, firetrucks burning in the street, firefighters standing in burning rubble, and of course Batman (seen above) sitting amidst twisted metal, wondering how he failed. And then there's Heath Ledger's Joker, possibly the most interesting on-screen villain of the past decade, standing in for Bin Laden. He's a true supervillain, smarter than his pursuers, able to exploit people's fears to pursue his goals, and totally undeterrable by conventional forms of power.

What does it take to bring down such a villain? As Golda Meir says in "Munich" (2005), "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." And indeed, Batman must break some rules (including, eventually, the no-kill rule so essential to his identity) to protect Gotham. He famously does so by building a surveillance device that blatantly violates the privacy of every mobile phone user in the city, a device so monstrous that it nearly forces the resignation of his confidante Lucius Fox. This device could serve as a metaphor for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, or "enhanced interrogations," or any other Constitutional violation enacted in order to protect Americans. But Batman rescues his device from abomination by building in important safeguards: it can only be used once, and it can only be used by Fox, the person who despises it most. The device also has the virtue of working -- Batman finds the Joker and brings him to justice. If Bush-era torture had such built-in safeguards, and if it had clearly brought Bin Laden to justice, might we have a different view of it today?

Even this, though, is not enough. Batman is not content with Gotham being protected by a secretive vigilante; if the city's going to ever have hope of being a decent place to live, it will need public servants unafraid to stand in the daylight. So Batman ultimately sacrifices his own reputation to advance what he sees as a necessary lie. He's willing to be the villain himself, loving his city so much that he's willing to be hated by it. This is a decision that no elected official can make -- if you're hated, you're quickly out of power.

The ideas that some truths are too important to be revealed to the people and that sometimes leaders must be despised to do their jobs makes for a rather anti-democratic and complex message. And the film is decidedly ambivalent about how a society of laws should deal with an enemy who appears bound by no laws at all. It also takes on somewhat different meaning today, when our own supervillain has already been caught, killed, and exposed as a sickly middle-aged man sitting in a room full of porn.

So much grooviness, so little time

2011-11-02T21:37:00.001-06:00

Larry Bartels finds that voters consider the economy a president inherited when evaluating presidential economic performance. Models accounting for the 2009 economy predict a strong Obama victory next year; models ignoring 2009 predict he'll lose.
Steve Smith shows that congressional Democrats are no less unified than congressional Republicans.
Nick Confessore argues for an expanded party model. Not really new for political scientists, but good for the NYT.
Mann and Ornstein: "True Independents and swing voters aren’t best captured through clever centrist political positioning. They have almost no ideological frameworks with which to judge the candidates and parties; they are quintessentially referendum voters, with low levels of information and focusing almost exclusively on performance."
Jon Bernstein suggests a fairly plausible political nightmare scenario for next year.
Dave Weigel: "Prediction: Cain wins Iowa caucuses. Gets up to give speech. Says: 'The Aristocrats!' Walks offstage, having told best joke ever."
A bleak chart.
Via Steve Greene, evidence that oenophiles have no idea what they're talking about. (But I'm sure my dad would have gotten it right.)
Speaking of my dad, an ophthalmology poster we co-authored won a third-place prize in Vienna.
My university considers me a "person to watch." In a good way, I hope.

Hosting the debate

2011-11-02T20:58:00.001-06:00

I got this pic of Mayor Michael Hancock and
Chancellor Bob Coombe making the announcement.

As you may have heard, the University of Denver will be hosting the first presidential debate next October 3rd. This is, obviously, very exciting for all of us. I have no idea whether I'll be able to sneak into the event or in what capacity I might do so, but rest assured I'll be doing pretty much whatever I can to get in there. Maybe I can put on my Vulcan costume and claim to be Sam Donaldson...

Third party chutzpah

2011-11-02T20:26:00.001-06:00

Remember Americans Elect? That group that plans to run as a third-party ticket and is currently seeking placement on all fifty state ballots? According to Dan Froomkin, they are now refusing to disclose the identity of their donors. That, of course, is illegal for a political party. But now they're claiming that they're not really a party:

Kahlil Byrd, the group's CEO, said it is operating "completely within the bounds" of the law. He noted that unlike a traditional political group,"Americans Elect has no candidate and has no issue."

Um, yeah, but according to their own website, they're planning a nominating convention for next June to, you know, pick a candidate and a platform:

Americans Elect is creating the first nonpartisan presidential nomination in U.S. history.
YOU DECIDE THE ISSUES.
YOU CHOOSE THE CANDIDATES.
YOU NOMINATE THE PRESIDENT.

So why would they want to hide the identity of their donors? Froomkin continues:

As for the donors, [Byrd] said, the reason they want to remain secret is to avoid political payback. "This is a very tough political environment," he said. "Retribution is real."

Huh? Personally, I think donating to the organization is a waste of one's money, but I wasn't planning to kneecap anyone for doing it. Just who is planning some sort of "retribution"?

(h/t Kevin Collins)

East End boys and Westen's pearls

2011-10-31T11:46:00.000-06:00

Drew Westen is once again filling valuable column inches in the New York Times with cheap pop-psychological claims about parties and politicians. John Sides goes in for the quick kill, and Jon Bernstein helps mop up. I'm a bit late to the show, but I saw another claim in Westen's piece that really begged to be addressed.

Westen:

Democrats... are too likely to view intellect as both necessary (which it is) and sufficient (which it is not) for high office. They have repeatedly presented the American people with candidates — Hubert H. Humphrey, Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — with more than enough gray matter to be the world’s chief executive but not enough of the other skills that matter to the American people. [...]

The ability to “read” the emotions of the electorate and to speak to those emotions in a compelling way do more for both electoral success and legislative success than I.Q. Similarly important is the ability to articulate a vision and a set of values, which is a far better predictor of voting behavior than positions on “the issues.”

This is something Republicans understand far better than Democrats, and something Ronald Reagan mastered.

This is classic post hoc reasoning that doesn't even belong in an undergraduate essay in an intro-level class, no less on the Sunday op/ed pages. The reasoning goes: Mondale ran, Mondale lost, therefore Mondale was lacking some important qualities [insert whatever qualities you like in people]. One major factor that is being ignored here, of course, is the economy. Mondale ran against a popular incumbent during an enormous economic boom. Are we to believe that Bill Clinton would have defeated Reagan in 1984?

Another point: Did Nixon "read the emotions of the electorate" in 1968? Did he "articulate a vision and a set of values"? Or did he just happen to run in a year when the incumbent party's candidate was suffering from his association with a slowing economy and a deeply unpopular war?

Yet another point: Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000! No, that certainly doesn't make him president, but nor does it demonstrate that the voters rejected him due to his purported inabilities to read emotions or articulate visions.

Still another point: Yes, Ronald Reagan possessed some excellent public speaking skills, but that didn't help him when the economy was floundering during his first term. His approval ratings dropped into the 30s in 1983. Maybe in all the economic turmoil, he briefly forgot how to read emotions and articulate visions.

That's no moon... it's a pumpkin

2011-10-30T19:05:00.001-06:00

My first attempt at a Death Star Jack-o-Lantern.

Getting money out of politics

2011-10-26T22:49:00.002-06:00

A friend posted a Facebook link this morning to a group called Get Money Out, which wants to, quite simply, get all private money out of political campaigns. Now, I would normally quickly dismiss such a group, but this seems like a good opportunity to discuss campaign finance reform and some of the arguments used in its favor.

Campaign finance reform strikes me as a solution in constant search for a problem. It's actually quite hard to identify specific and egregious incidents of bribery that would have been prevented by removing private funding from campaigns. Yes, there are occasional abuses -- Rod Blagojevich selling an Illinois senate seat, Tom DeLay shaking down lobbying firms in exchange for access, Duke Cunningham offering contracts to a military contractor in exchange for a yacht -- but these are exceedingly rare and, more importantly, the abusers were caught and convicted under existing laws. But these are not the problems reformers tend to highlight. Rather, they voice a more general concern that everything "bad" in American politics stems from the private financing of campaigns. Note the opening statement on Get Money Out's website:

Bailouts. War. Unemployment. Our government is bought, and we’re angry.

The insinuation is that if our campaigns were publicly financed, there'd have been no bailouts or war, and that unemployment would be lower. This is pretty ridiculous on its face (who exactly is lobbying for high unemployment, and who in Congress or the White House is keeping unemployment high to satisfy donors?), and one could easily point to countries with publicly-financed campaigns that have nonetheless found themselves with persistent high unemployment and prolonged wars in recent years. Nonetheless, the reformers persist in their quest.

One might ask, what's the harm? That is, maybe driving private money out of elections wouldn't exactly create Heaven on Earth, but maybe it would make politics a bit cleaner and make our officeholders more representative of our needs. Why not try it?

I'm actually working on a book on this very topic right now, but here's the quick answer: campaign finance reform, to a very large extent, simply hasn't worked. That is, every time a government tries to enact a specific contribution or spending limit to reduce the amount of money in elections (FECA, BCRA, you name it), innovative donors and candidates figure out ways around it. You want to give more than the limit to a group of candidates? Fine, just donate to a 527 or some sort of independent expenditure committee that can spend unlimited amounts on behalf of a candidate. Colorado's Four Millionaires showed how this can be done. This is part of the reason that, despite decades of campaign finance reform, the amount spent in campaigns continues to rise, much faster than inflation.

What's more, all this regulation has a price. If you want to know who contributed to the campaign of a president or a senator or a state legislator, it's not as easy to figure it out as it used to be. All these webs of committees that have cropped up to get around campaign finance limits end up obscuring the path of the money. Some of the money comes from individual donors, who can be identified in FEC records, but lots of it comes from groups who only have minimal disclosure requirements, and the donors to those groups may be other groups of people bundled together. Who's backing a candidate? It's almost impossible to tell nowadays.

The end result is that these reforms designed to reduce the role of money in campaigns not only don't end up reducing the role of money in campaigns, but they actually reduce accountability and transparency.

Update: I had missed Matt Yglesias' take on this same topic last month (h/t Andrew Long). He notes that banning all contributions to campaigns tends to make it difficult for anyone to run for office, and wonders just what problem this solves. He also cites Dylan Rattigan's specific proposed constitutional amendment:

No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office [emphasis added].

Beyond the problems noted above, it seems odd to write a rule into the U.S. Constitution proscribing behavior by people who are not Americans. I'd think it would make somewhat more sense if the candidate, rather than the prospective donor, were the subject of the rule.

Reconstituted nuggets

2011-10-26T13:40:00.000-06:00

The economy's problem is lack of demand, not "regulatory uncertainty."
Susan Schulten explains how the Union got demolished at the Battle of Ball's Bluff for want of a map.
Frances Lee wrote a nice review of Greg Koger's book on the filibuster.
Great Jon Stewart coverage of Pat Robertson's claims that GOP presidential candidates's rhetoric is sounding too extreme.
Interesting screed about Michael Moore. Personally, I'm not a big Moore fan -- I think he's a bully and his films are a mess, but he does highlight some important events (Bush reading "My Pet Goat," the city of Flint dying, etc.) that the media tend to overlook.
Jonathan Bernstein smacks around Newt Gingrich a bit. I'll give Gingrich a bit more credit than Bernstein does for recruiting quality candidates in 1994, but beyond that, our assessments align.
Pretty fascinating 1994 exchange between Herman Cain and Bill Clinton about small businesses and health care reform. Both come off well.
Some excellent back-to-school drinks. I'm a fan of the goldfish corpse reviver.
The new Peter Gabriel is really good, but I don't get his fascination with Ane Brun, who basically ruins "Don't Give Up."

Different approaches to reporting the news

2011-10-20T17:35:00.001-06:00

Screen capture provided by Chris Zorn. Click to enlarge.

Some like it cold

2011-10-19T16:49:00.000-06:00

Nate Silver examined the turnout at various Occupy Wall Street rallies during this past Saturday. He notes a couple of reasons why more people might turn out in one city than in another, including racial politics, organizational technology, and city political structures. Here's another idea: temperature. Does cold weather keep people indoors?

To answer this question, I used Silver's rally turnout estimates (Excel file) for the 36 largest rallies and divided them by each city's 2010 population to get a per capita estimate. Then I collected high temperature data for each city on that date. Here's the result:

Quite the opposite from expected: the protesters like cold weather! Of course, the coldest weather for any of these cities that day was in the 50s -- this graph might look quite different if the protests were held a month from now. (In general, I'd advise starting massive outdoor social movements in the spring rather than the fall.)

Also, there's a big heteroskedasticity problem in the data, and there just aren't many cases above 85 degrees. But dammit, I collected that data, and I was going to put the scatterplot up no matter what it said.

Beautiful dialogues

2011-10-19T11:08:00.000-06:00

I want to highlight two recent dialogues that have been fascinating and quite enlightening for people interested in politics. The first is Ezra Klein's dialogue with Matt Miller. Miller recently wrote an article urging a third party candidacy for the presidency (an idea Hans Noel and I have picked on before), and Klein responded with this piece. Their current dialogue is far-reaching, but generally focuses on the idea of speeches versus institutions; Miller believes that an inspiring speech from a candidate untied to the current party system could change the way things are done, and Klein believes that Miller's approach totally misunderstands and misrepresents how American politics actually works. A highlight from Klein:

People in this country have different roles in the political process. And you and I have a particular one. And our particular one is to inform people, to try to explain to people how things are working and how they’re not working, and to give them a realistic idea of why. I talk to business leaders, too, and I talk to a lot of people in American politics. I talk to a lot of politicians. I talk to pundits. I talk to cable news people. I talk to all of them. And I almost never meet the structural pessimist, actually. All I meet, as far as I can tell, are people who think we just need more “leadership.” We need a president willing to stand up and fight. We need a leader who will finally take advantage of the moment and push this country forward. We need somebody willing to make the tough choices. And I find it borderline irresponsible.

Klein also mentions the dangers of a center-left presidential candidate for those who care about liberal policy goals.

Let’s say that Barack Obama runs against Rick Perry and against Matt Miller’s candidate. Do you think there is no risk in a world where Matt Miller’s candidate gets 22 percent of the vote, a remarkable showing, and throws the election to Rick Perry? You don’t think that is a risk at all?

Hans Noel has been mentioning this possibility a lot recently, and it deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Anyway, loyal readers of this blog will know that I'm partial to Klein's arguments, but it's a really informative dialogue, and if you have relatives who sound more like Miller (as I do), you'll want to learn this stuff before Thanksgiving.

Okay, dialogue number two: John Sides' discussion with.. well... himself, in preparation for a panel last night with some serious political elites on the topic of whether American politics is broken. Sides addresses the most important question: what do we mean by "broken"? Political observers love to claim that the system is broken, but they rarely explain what they mean, and the meaning has important consequences:

Q: What does “broken politics” mean?

A: People tend to mean one of two things. First, the political process is broken. Complaints about process involve different things—incivility, hyper-partisanship, gridlock, and so on. This is a complaint about means to ends. Second, they mean that the political system is unable to reach certain ends, which means people’s preferred policies. So politics is broken when the government can’t pass certain pieces of legislation, for example.

Q: Why does this distinction matter?

A: For two reasons. First, I think complaints about broken politics tend to involve the latter more than the former. Even when people complain about process, their complaints typically arise because their policy goals have been stymied. Complaints about gridlock usually don’t mean that people want just any policy to pass; they want their preferred policy to pass. Second, the two meanings of “broken politics” can imply very different solutions. If your concern is incivility or partisanship, then your solution is more consensual forms of decision-making. If your concern is policy, then you may not necessarily need to care about process. The easiest way to enact landmark legislation is often (mostly?) to get large partisan majorities and leverage their power, even at the risk of incivility or hyper-partisanship.

I give the Enik Gold Seal to both pieces. Please read.

Jensen's utopia

2011-10-17T13:29:00.002-06:00

Arthur Jensen's memorable monologue in "Network" (1976) is a brilliant piece of propaganda. The vision it outlines is simultaneously Marxist, utopian, and capitalistic. It takes every anti-globalization screed you've ever heard and recasts it in a positive light. My students were dissecting it the other day, and we had some disagreements over its meaning. I was particularly focused on the conclusion of the monologue:

Our children… will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

The question I asked my students was, are we now living in the world that Jensen prophesied? It is notably not a very Jeffersonian utopia that Jensen promises. No promises of freedom or knowledge or enlightenment. But yes, war is on the decline, dictatorships are on the run, stock ownership is up, famine (at least in the U.S.) has been nearly eliminated, and thanks to Prozac and the iPhone, anxiety and boredom have been conquered.

Are we there yet? And is this as good as it gets?

Tasty morsels

2011-10-16T20:48:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Bernstein's been making some important points lately about how "Obamacare" bears basically no relationship with the Affordable Health Care Act for America.
John Sides: Just about no evidence that negative ads affect elections or depress turnout.
P.M. Hartigan: Opposite-sex friends play some peculiar role in the transmission of mononucleosis.
No, it's not your imagination; natural disasters really are on the rise. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
It's been four months since Chris Matthews predicted that Michelle Bachmann would best Mitt Romney in New Hampshire.
A brilliant skit about a malfunctioning Blackberry.
I made an awesome baklava this weekend, and you can too!
Peter and Melanie Gabriel performing "Wallflower."

Insiders holding back

2011-10-13T22:50:00.001-06:00

Here are the two most important graphs for understanding the state of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest. First, the endorsements derby, as of 9/20:

The lesson here, of course, is that Romney is way ahead in collecting insider endorsements. And endorsements, as we know, do a much better job predicting who will get the nomination than money, polls, or anything else.

Okay, now the second graph (via Mark Blumenthal), which provides vital context for the first:

The lesson here is that very, very few insiders have endorsed yet. They're waiting. Which means that Romney most definitely does not have this thing sewn up. There's still plenty of time before Iowa for insiders to pick a different candidate and rally behind him or her.

That said, it's hard to say just what exactly the insiders are waiting for. The field is set. Several potentially good candidates have decided to sit this one out. So insiders can go with Romney or they can pick from the others who we saw on stage this week at the debate, and that pretty much means Perry. And we already know about as much about Perry as we're going to know. He's a lousy debater and he's probably going to stay that way. He's a bit off the party message on immigration and vaccinations but is otherwise pretty reliably conservative. Meanwhile, the economy will probably continue grow at a weak pace but probably not go back into a recession, leaving Obama vulnerable but not automatically toast. The information just won't get much better than that. What more do they want to know?

Perry still viable

2011-10-12T12:49:00.000-06:00

It seems clear from last night's GOP roundtable debate that Rick Perry is either unwilling or unable to improve his debating skills. I mean, if you can't attack Romney as a flip-flopper, even after a month of prep, you really shouldn't be at that table. I'm sure Perry has some fine qualities, but debating isn't one of them.

Romney, meanwhile, has really thrived in the debates. He consistently comes off as informed, eloquent, and comfortable. He can attack without appearing petty, and he can defend his stance on health reform quite capably, even if it doesn't make a ton of sense. He's even funny once in a while, something others (I'm looking at you, Huntsman) keep failing to be.

What of the others? You can pretty much forget them. Yes, Cain is currently polling well, but lest we forget, polls do not predict presidential nominations. Endorsements do a much better job of that task, and those are leaning strongly Romney's way. (Cain isn't even on the chart.) Yglesias accurately describes the non-Romney-Perry part of the contest as essentially a book tour.

So why would I say that Perry is still viable? Because Romney remains a bitter pill for much of the GOP to swallow. Yes, the Mormon thing is a problem for the Evangelicals in the Republican base, but my sense is that the bulk of them would be still find a way to turn out votes for a Mormon over whatever they think Obama is. Of greater concern is the fact that Romney is a really unreliable conservative. Sure, as long as he believes he needs the right's support to get into or stay in office, he'll advocate what they want, but can they trust him to stay faithful to the cause? I imagine that a President Romney would work quite well with a Democratic Congress. That thought has to terrify conservative activists.

So what do you do if you're a conservative activist? You go with Perry. There really isn't much of an alternative right now. You reassure yourself that debates don't matter all that much, that Obama is pretty vulnerable, and that Perry has some retail politicking skills that will benefit him greatly in the next year. Until Perry proves that he absolutely can't win a general election (and we're not there yet), I would expect a lot of Republicans to stick with him. And this Michael Bay-esque appeal would, I imagine, win more than a few activists over to Perry's side (h/t Steve Greene).

The parties on foreign policy

2011-10-11T22:18:00.001-06:00

America's two major parties now offer us a stark choice. One indiscriminately kills thousands who have nothing to do with terror. The other illegally kills dozens who have something to do with terror.

Talking us into a recession

2011-10-10T22:08:00.000-06:00

Yoni Appelbaum, writing in the Atlantic, argues that William Jennings Bryan single-handedly created a double-dip recession for the United States when he delivered his Cross of Gold speech in 1896:

Bryan's speech is well remembered. Its consequences are not. Wall Street panicked. For ten days after Bryan's nomination, capital fled across the Atlantic, halted only by the formation of an extraordinary consortium. Even in the months leading up to the convention, the likely ascendancy of silverite forces had spooked businessmen and investors. After Bryan's improbable triumph, the bottom fell out of the economy. The uncertain climate of the spring of 1896 gave way to a prolonged slump. Interest rates rose, investments fell, stock and bond issues dried up, building permits slumped, and new orders for capital goods failed to materialize. Industrial and commercial activity declined across the board.

I can't claim to be any sort of an expert on the Gilded Age economy. I'm sure Appelbaum pursues this line of research in greater detail elsewhere, and I really don't have data to counter him here. But given how little power presidential speeches actually have, I'm skeptical of his argument. Were investors really so skittish and naive as to believe that the claims of a presidential nominee were soon to become law? Even if Bryan were to somehow win (McKinley beat him 51-47), would he be able to get this agenda through Congress? (Republicans held a 246-104 majority in the House at the time Bryan delivered his speech.)

I suppose this is possible. I mean, if Rick Perry were nominated next year and gave a speech at his convention promising to move the U.S. to a monetary system based solely on tungsten, yeah, some folks might panic a bit. But my guess would be that the relationship between Bryan's 1896 address and American economic problems was one of correlation rather than causation.

Update: Matt Glassman notes that Bryan's nomination itself (more so than the speech), was something of a surprise, as few observers expected the silver advocates to secure two-thirds of the convention vote. So perhaps Wall Street did panic when they saw one of America's two major parties being taken over by a faction they perceived as manifestly irresponsible. Still, I'd love to see some hard evidence. I guess I need to read Appelbaum's book.

Ides of March

2011-10-10T09:52:00.000-06:00

(Spoilers ahead.)

I took some of my students to see "The Ides of March" last night. The film was considerably better than I'd been led to believe from some of the reviews. The performances were excellent. The basic story line about ambition and betrayal was quite solid and compelling. I thought the title was a bit of a misnomer: we didn't see anything quite like the assassination of an emperor. Instead, the film reminded me somewhat of "City Hall" (1996), which showed how the routine transactions of politics can lead to tragedy. This film much more capably showed how relatively minor events -- campaign sex, beers with a rival, forgetting which cell phone is yours -- can lead to major catastrophes.

Somewhat unfortunately, the main villain in the film is ambition. Ambition is, of course, a very desirable trait in politicians, but it can admittedly be unpleasant to observe, and just because something is, on the whole, good for a political system doesn't make it good for personal human interactions. Place this film alongside "Primary Colors" as a solid study of the dark side of ambition in the context of presidential nomination politics.

So, on the whole, I'd recommend the film. But it had a number of pretty glaring (to political geeks like me, anyway) inaccuracies that I feel compelled to mention.

Following in the tradition of "The Contender" (2000) and "The American President" (1995), "Ides" imagined a liberal, idealistic politician who was supposed to be both inspiring and electable, yet whose policy stances put him way outside the mainstream. Clooney's Morris was an atheist, promised to eliminate the internal combustion engine within a decade, and pushed for two years of mandatory national service from 18-year olds. I'm sure these seem like mainstream stances in Hollywood, but a quick glance at easily-available polling would have shown just how fringe these views are. Or they could have run the script by one or two political geeks. We work cheap.
The film imagined a scenario in which Republican voters, led by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, raid Ohio's open Democratic primary to cast strategic votes for Morris' opponent, apparently because they consider Morris the more electable Democrat. This is not completely impossible, but given that the Republican nomination contest was still undecided, it's hard to believe that Republicans wouldn't want to weigh in on that race instead of trying to tinker with the Democratic one.
Morris believed he had suppressed the intern scandal when he took on Stephen as his campaign manager. But the scandal is going to come out anyway! The police who noted Molly's drug overdose surely also noted from the prescription labels that the drugs in question came from a nearby abortion clinic; an autopsy will confirm a recent abortion. The clinic will note that the abortion was paid for in cash, and at least one nurse there might recognize the man who accompanied Molly to the clinic as the campaign manager from all the recent TV and newspapers stories. In other words, it won't take a terribly gifted reporter or investigator more than a few days to determine that right before her death, Molly had an abortion paid for by the Morris campaign. That's already fairly damaging, and probably more will come to light after that. (You think she's the first intern he'd slept with?)

These little inaccuracies and holes are hardly fatal for the film, but they could have been thought through a bit better. Still, given the relative paucity of films about primaries, go see this anyway.

The complex racial views of Jess Robin

2011-10-09T13:40:00.000-06:00

As far as I know, "The Jazz Singer" (1980) is the only mainstream Hollywood film that can be considered Yom Kippur-themed. (No, "Atonement" doesn't count.) Thus I find myself thinking about the Neil Diamond film every year on Yom Kippur. Just FYI, despite the fact that the film is broadly labeled a bomb and that Lawrence Olivier himself derided it as a "piece of shit," it is considered a classic in my family and can be quoted from liberally by my relatives just as easily as "Godfather" and "Princess Bride."

This year, I found myself stewing over the film's bizarre racial message. To wit:

Jess Robin's (Neil Diamond) best friend in the film is an African American singer named Bubba, who is trying to make a living as a member of an all-black band called the Four Brothers. When one of the Brothers gets arrested, Robin fills in at a gig at an all-black nightclub by wearing blackface (see picture above). Yes, blackface. Now, I know this is a shout-out to the 1927 Al Jolson version of the film, but still, blackface.
In this same scene, an audience member outs Robin as caucasian. He notices this not from the fact that it's Neil Freaking Diamond on stage wearing shoe polish on his face (no, that was apparently convincing enough), but because the singer doesn't have any pigment on the back of his hands. The audience member (a pre-"Ghostbusters" Ernie Hudson) shouts, "He ain't no brother; he's a white boy!" A riot ensues. Yes, a riot. This was 1980. Every person in that audience could remember race riots in the 1960s fought over things like poverty, injustice, bigotry, assassinations.... This riot occurred because someone discovered that Neil Diamond was white.
Robin later moves to L.A. (where Bubba has already gone) to try to break into popular music. His first audition is a big failure, so he, the Four Brothers, his manager Molly (Lucie Arnaz), and others decide to throw a really lame party. This involves Robin singing an idyllic song about the postbellum South ("The Robert E. Lee") right in Bubba's face.
Later, after a taste of success, Robin freaks out and hitchhikes to the Deep South, where he fronts a country/western band in local honky-tonk. While he's told no one where he went, Bubba nonetheless finds him, presumably due to some magical negro powers or something.

Yeah, it's a weird movie. It's also ripe for a remake. Maybe they should mix things up a bit and cast Natalie Portman as the cantor longing to stray from her Brooklyn roots. Streisand could play her cantor mother. Just a thought.

The best of the best

2011-10-09T13:14:00.000-06:00

Ezra Klein does a beautiful job investigating the flawed (if somewhat defensible) economic assumptions of the incoming Obama administration in 2008-09 and asks whether things could have gone differently.
Steven Greene: "[George] Will is not particularly bright. He’s just got a good vocabulary and wears bow ties. That’s enough to fool most people."
Christie and Palin decided not to run for president? Jonathan Bernstein thinks they actually were running (see here and here), and got selected out by the invisible primary.
Greg Koger provides some context for what happened in the Senate last week. See also Sarah Binder, a.k.a. The Senate Whisperer.
John Sides provides a Moneyball-esque perspective to campaign finance.
Great interview with Steven Pinker about declining violence worldwide. Interesting quote: "Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans still kill at a higher rate than Europeans."
Via Chris Federico, a Soviet-era ad for Aeroflot. It's not obvious to me why a government enterprise with no competitor needed to advertise, nor why the Russians couldn't find any better dancers.
How to carve a Death Star Jack-o-lantern and turn your dog into an ATAT.
White people had a hard week.

How quickly we forget

2011-10-05T22:55:00.001-06:00

A busy schedule and a tight budget unfortunately kept me from attending last weekend's Clinton '92 campaign reunion in Little Rock. I have no idea if the Washington Post's coverage of the event is representative of what really went on there, but I really hope not:

The class of ’92 cast its reunion as a tacit — and sometimes not so tacit — rebuke of the current president and his un-Clintonian aversion to the political fray. Some erstwhile Clinton aides wore “I Miss Bill” T-shirts and “It’s Still About the [Expletive] Economy, Stupid” buttons. Others privately regretted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s acceptance of the secretary of state post — the theory being that she would be better positioned to replace Obama if she had stayed in the Senate.

I'm pleased to see President Clinton himself in the article dismissing the Obama comparisons as off-base. But really, do these folks remember what that first term was like? I remember showing up to work when Clinton's approval ratings were in the 30s, lower than Obama's have ever been. And yeah, there was a lot of soul searching -- Were we doing it right? Why wasn't his message getting through? Did we misread the voters in 1992? Was he doomed to be a one-termer? But I don't remember any of us saying that the country would have been better if we'd backed Harkin or Tsongas or Brown.

I would agree that Clinton had more of a love for the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics than Obama does, but exactly what did he have to show for it by this point in his first term? Yes, Clinton's first budget passed, including a tax hike on upper income earners, but he lost on the stimulus that year. Health reform was in ruins. Don't-ask-don't-tell was a compromise that no one liked. His only other big legislative wins were NAFTA and the crime bill, both of which were staunchly opposed by sizable chunks of liberal congressional Democrats. Contrast that with Obama's record on health reform, student loan reform, financial sector reform, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the end of DADT... it's really quite impressive, and not something liberals should be dismissing. Sure, liberals have plenty of reasons to be upset with Obama's concessions to Republicans on budgetary matters, but does no one remember Clinton's concessions? His triangulations after the 1994 election? His hiring of Dick Morris?

This is not to disparage Clinton's accomplishments as president. There were many, and I am proud of the very small role I played in them. But the fierce partisan fighter some folks seem to recall is largely fictitious, and to the extent it was real, just how great was it? Winning the news cycle is not the same as enacting an agenda.

In a world where jurors are dyspeptic...

2011-10-04T14:56:00.001-06:00

Here's the theatrical trailer for "12 Angry Men." I've seen many cases where the trailer is far better than the film, but this is one of the few where the film absolutely buries the trailer. They try to make it look like an action movie, for Heaven's sake. I can only imagine audiences walking out saying, "But it was just some guys talking!"

Looking presidential

2011-10-03T22:07:00.001-06:00

Sullivan's been very good to me, but I've got to disagree with him here when he decides that Chris Christie's weight may be a disqualifying factor:

Presidents in the modern age are increasingly required to look presidential. No baldies or beards, for example, since Eisenhower and some dude in the nineteenth century. Perry and Romney are almost made in a presidential Ken factory - and both presumably dye their hair (as, obviously, did Reagan). Looks, in other words, matter on an unconscious level in a president. We respond to these signals before our frontal cortexes kick in.

As John Sides reminds us, this is empirically wrong on the specific area of girth: overweight male candidates are evaluated somewhat more positively than thin ones (although overweight female candidates suffer a penalty). Besides, we've actually had overweight presidents. Taft was enormous (this was hardly a secret even before television), and Clinton struggled with his weight before heart troubles forced him onto a strict low-fat diet. (Does he look more presidential now that's he's gaunt?) So to say that overweight men don't look presidential seems a bit odd when we've had overweight presidents.

More generally, though, the idea that candidates have to "look presidential" is highly problematic, giving sanction to all sorts of bigotry. It's hard to separate "looking presidential" from "looking like the presidents we've already had," which leads to some uncomfortable areas. It wasn't too long ago that a sizable chunk of Americans wouldn't have found an African American "presidential" looking. No doubt many feel that way about women today. And Jews. And short people. And people with disabilities. Would that ultimately affect many people's votes? My guess is that it would be hard to find a measurable "presidential-looking" effect that moves votes beyond the major influences we can detect (economic growth/recession, war/peace, extremism/moderation). But maybe there is such an effect. Should we cater to it?

Do parties consciously nominate slim candidates, concerned that voters will be turned off by heavy ones? I really don't know. But if so, this sounds like bigotry, plain and simple. It's no different from Spencer Tracy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" opposing his daughter's marriage to a black man, not because he had any problem with blacks, but because he was concerned that other people did. Any way you slice it, you're disqualifying someone based on physical appearance.

Misplaced nostalgia

2011-10-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

An actual tweet:

I LOVE PANAM. WISH I COULD HAVE LIVED BACK THEN AND BECOME A PANAM STEWARDESS. HOW EXCITING !!! #PanAm

This was posted after last night's episode of "Pan Am," in which Christina Ricci's character used a fork to fend off an attempted rape by a drunken passenger only to be hushed by her colleagues (warning her to not jeopardize her job) and ridiculed by a pilot (who tries to mollify the rapist with a scotch). The show doesn't handle the subplot particularly well -- Ricci gets a little you-go-girl moment toward the end of the episode, and I'm assuming that's the last we'll hear of that. And, of course, it's just a minor subplot, not meant to distract from the overall glamor of the show or its basic message, "It was really cool to be a servant." The message apparently got through to the tweeter above.

Compare this attempted rape scene to the portrayal of the rape of Joan by her husband in "Mad Men." It's a truly terrifying scene, even though much of the action occurs off-camera; not only does Joan have no way to stop the assault, but she has no recourse for it afterwards. There was not event a concept of spousal rape for her to report to anyone. It was simply one of those things that some women had to endure in exchange for the security of married life.

"Mad Men" demonstrates the dangers women (even white, educated, relatively successful women) faced fifty years ago by virtue of being women in the United States. "Pan Am" suggests that it was glamorous being a woman then, and that the dangers, while real, could be fended off with utensils and a little pluck.

It's not fair to say that "Pan Am" sucks because it's not as good as "Mad Men" -– few shows are. But it seems to be nostalgic for an era that doesn't necessarily deserve it.

Party before government

2011-10-03T09:50:00.000-06:00

It looks like some enterprising individuals are trying to construct parties in Libya:

As Libya's new leaders work on setting the country right and eliminating the last holdouts of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists, budding politicians are looking forward to the planned elections.

"Our party is being formed," said Abdel Dayem al-Gharabli, a lawyer from Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, after lengthy talks in a cafe with a group of friends.

To be called the National Democratic Encounter, it aims to be broad-based, supporting the rule of law and respect for liberties, he said.

The really interesting thing here, of course, is that there's not yet a government for the parties to influence, a legislature to which to recruit members, or elections in which to participate. There's a provisional government, and there will likely be a constitutional convention next year, followed a year later by some sort of legislative and presidential elections. Parties are forming now with an eye to influencing the process of creating a government.

This is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the argument advanced in The Party Decides that America's constitutional Founders were essentially a party. They built a government that would protect and advance their interests, and deliberately made that government very hard to change (the amendment procedure is a very high wall, and the separation of powers structure is filled with veto points making it difficult to pass sweeping laws). Importantly, they organized and planned to control a government prior to that government's existence.

In Libya, it is not entirely clear on what basis these parties are being formed. They certainly have their roots in geography and ethnicity, but some sorts of ideological claims may be built on top of those.

(h/t Marc Herman)

Assortment

2011-09-30T23:14:00.000-06:00

Susan Schulten on how maps exposed the inefficiency of slavery.
Matt Glassman makes some extremely important points about what democracy is and isn't.
Could Chris Christie lose votes because of his weight? Just the opposite, actually.
Quit saying that Obama has lost support among [subgroup] because of [stances you disagree with]. He's lost support among all subgroups.
The GOP "power outsiders" are warming to Romney and cooling to Perry.
Doctor Glitter remembers Magic Johnson's last game 20 years ago, when Magic dominated the interregnum between Kareem and Kobe.
Springsteen's new sci-fi concept album.
My brief review of the new TV season: "Pan Am"? Meh. "Terra Nova"? Feh. But "New Girl" is funny.

Millionaires are rich

2011-09-30T20:14:00.000-06:00

I'm glad to see that John Steele Gordon's perfectly execrable "Five Myths About Millionaires" post is receiving well deserved scorn from the likes of Steven Greene and Andrew Gelman. It would be all too easy to join in the piling on. So let's get started.

First of all, I just can't leave Gordon's claim that millionaires aren't rich alone. If you're making a million annually, I totally get that you probably don't feel rich. You probably work pretty damned hard for your money. And you can easily amass a million in annual expenses through a mortgage and tuition and clothes and transportation and a bunch of other things. And you probably work with other people who make at least as much as you do, making this sort of life seem like the norm.

You are making more than everyone in the above graph.

But you know what? It really isn't the norm. You're pulling down more than what 99% of the rest of the nation pulls down, and you're living in one of the richest nations in the history of the planet. You know what else? You could sell your nice house and buy a much less expensive one somewhere else, you could take the bus or the subway to work or buy a Hyundai, you could send your kids to public schools, you could shop at Macy's or Marshall's, etc. Yes, there might be some social costs to doing this, but the point is that you could reduce your expenses by roughly 90% and still live a very nice life with a higher standard of living than the vast majority of Americans. People making $50,000 a year really can't do that without starving.

And this comment by Gordon is really rich:

Today, a well-invested $1 million might generate $50,000 in a combination of investment returns and interest income. That isn’t chump change, but it’s roughly equal to the 2010 median household income.

Okay, if you can earn the median household income without actually working, you just might be rich.

Oh, and I can't let this one pass, either:

Income can’t be used to predict political opinion. In 2008, for example, Obama won the votes of 60 percent of those with a family income under $50,000 and 52 percent of those earning more than than $200,000. McCain carried the middle class.

I challenge anyone to look at the exit polls from 2010 and conclude that income doesn't predict political opinion. I also challenge Gordon to explain what he means by "middle class."

Update: Income distribution graph added above. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The endorsements derby

2011-09-26T13:34:00.001-06:00

The state of the 2012 Republican presidential race, as determined by endorsements.

Data collected by Race 4 2012, as of 9/20/11.

Trends that are not actually occurring, Obama donor edition

2011-09-25T10:33:00.001-06:00

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Confessore has a piece up claiming that Obama's small donors, who were such a major part of his support in 2008, are not showing up for him during this election cycle. The thrust of the piece is qualitative, involving interviews with some of Obama's 2008 donors who are now disappointed with him and haven't given him any money yet. But behind these assertions is a quantitative claim: Obama is not commanding the same level of support he was four years ago. As Confessore says:

Through June 30, the close of the most recent campaign reporting period, more than 552,000 people had contributed to Mr. Obama’s re-election effort, according to campaign officials. Half of them were new donors, and nearly all of them gave contributions of less than $250.

But those figures obscured another statistic: a vast majority of Mr. Obama’s past donors, who number close to four million, have not yet given him any money at all [emphasis added].

Okay, there's a big and very obvious problem with this comparison. The half-million people who have donated to Obama's 2012 campaign so far (that is, through June of 2011) are being compared with those who donated through the entirety of the 2008 campaign season. The bulk of donors don't get involved until much closer to the primaries and general election. The appropriate comparison point would be those who donated through June of 2007. According to the FEC, there were just over 77,000 donations to Obama in the first half of 2007, roughly a third of which were under $250.

So, just to review, Obama has received more than seven times as many donations at this point in the 2012 cycle than he did by this point in the 2008 cycle. What's more, the share of his donations coming from small (under $250) contributions is now greater than it was four years ago.

Now, of course, there are plenty of reasons why these two elections cycles don't make for a great comparison. Obama is the president now, and he was only a modestly-famous freshman senator four years ago. Conversely, he was going into a hotly contested primary back then and appears to be unopposed for the nomination today. That said, there is no quantitative basis for Confessore's assertions.

That's not to say that there are no 2008 Obama supporters who are disappointed with his presidency -- I'm sure there are plenty! And I haven't collected the data that would tell us the extent to which those supporters are contributing today. But to say that the half-million who have given to Obama this year compare unfavorably to the 4 million who gave to him previously is really grossly misleading.

Do good politicians need help?

2011-09-23T10:29:00.000-06:00

This post by Gladstone at Cracked is a bit old, but contains some important notions about presidential popularity that deserve to be addressed. Gladstone is discussing the website "WTF Has Obama Done So Far," a tongue-in-cheek project designed to demonstrate that Obama's presidency has,in fact, been marked by a great deal of accomplishments of which liberals should be proud. One would hardly expect such a website to have an enormous impact on elections or public discourse, but Gladstone actually takes it as evidence of Obama's failure as a politician:

A true presidential politician articulates a vision for America, wins over the public support and then gets the Congress to follow him because everyone wants to be on the winning team. And by that standard, Barack Obama has not met his objectives. How do you know? Because after two years in office, he needs the liberal devout to engage in an Internet campaign to explain what he's even done. [...]

[T]wo years into Reagan's term no one had to be told what he did. It didn't even matter if it were true. Americans would tell you Reagan cut inflation, made us stronger abroad and restored our national pride. Furious, the liberal intellectuals would then take to the media to explain why Reagan's seeming accomplishments were a smoke screen. Why he had taken credit where none was due. And point out all the unforgivable things he hadn't done or did in secret. Meanwhile, the right would merely smirk at those brainiac, detail-orientated liberals, while mumbling things like, "There you go, again," because they knew they'd already won.

Gladstone is funny and compelling, but also profoundly wrong about a few key items here. First of all, the obvious one: Reagan was deeply unpopular two years into his first term! In January of 1983, Reagan had approval ratings in the mid-30s, well below Obama's lowest point thus far. That doesn't make him a bad politician or a poor communicator; it's just a reminder that presidents are, to a great extent, victims of circumstance. The economy was in the middle of a full-blown recession, and that takes a toll on even charismatic politicians like Reagan.

Second, how did Reagan manage to win reelection in 1984? It's simple: the economy recovered. If "no one had to be told what [Reagan] did," that's because everyone could experience economic recovery in their own lives. More people were finding work, employed people were making more money than they were the previous year, their buying power wasn't being wiped out by high inflation, etc.

Third, even if people didn't have to be told what Reagan did, they were told anyway. No, there were no sarcastic websites in 1984, but there were plenty of conservative operatives at work getting that message out. They could largely be found in places like the White House, the Republican National Committee, the Reagan/Bush reelection campaign, and more than a few newspaper editorial desks, and they spent a great deal of time, money, and energy telling Americans that their lives were better because Reagan was in charge. In other words, they were doing exactly what liberal activists are trying to do for Obama today.

If most Democrats can't recite a laundry list of Obama's accomplishments, well that's just because very few voters can do that about any president, not because Obama's a bad politician. And if economic growth actually ramps up in the next year, Gladstone will be amazed at how good a politician Obama suddenly appears to be.

Ignite

2011-09-21T11:17:00.002-06:00

I'm just learning about a new style of presenting research being promoted by an organization called Ignite. You present in five minutes using precisely 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Below is a presentation by James Fowler describing his "Connected" research. I'm honestly not sure if this is a better way to present information that the more typical lecture-discussant format (Am I intrigued by James, his research, or the gimmick?), but it certainly is novel. I might try to do one of these some time.