Mermaid cake

I expected to make more of a princess in a dress for this cake, but my daughter really wanted a mermaid for her birthday. And it turns out that the fondant that coats a cake costs a ton of money. The mermaid didn't need any of that. Just tons of frosting.

The shell bikini took a lot of tries to get right. I'm still not 100% satisfied. I wish I'd taken some art classes on the female form.

Why hasn't Edwards endorsed?

I figured Edwards was just holding back on his endorsement because this thing might actually go to a convention floor fight, in which case his 27 delegates might be pivotal. That would make him some sort of kingmaker.

But that's not the reason, says New York Magazine. The real reason is that he was leaning Obama, but Obama blew it:

According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards's imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton's plan (and by extension Edwards's) for its insurance mandate.

That's actually pretty damning. One hears stories about how gracious and charming Hillary can be in a one-on-one meeting, even if that charm doesn't carry over during big speeches. Is Obama disadvantaged in the other direction? Is he great with the big crowds but clumsy in person?

Hard drive crashes

Loyal readers may recall that the hard drive on my MacBook crashed last summer when the poor thing was only about 3 months old. It got replaced for free, of course, but I did lose some data and e-mails. I now back up daily. But the same thing just happened to one of my colleagues, and she lost something like three years of data. It was the same batch of MacBooks that mine was - we got ours from the university at the same time.

Are Mac hard drives are somehow more vulnerable to crashes than PC hard drives? That certainly wasn't my impression, but it strikes me as a fishy coincidence that two MacBooks in the same office have crashed irreparably within their first year of ownership.

A further question: hard drives are especially vulnerable to sharp jolts, which is why you should never move a computer when it's hard drive is spinning. Why, then, is it okay to go jogging with an iPod? That little hard drive seems indestructible. So my book project is always in danger, but my Go-Gos music will apparently never die.

NES screws the pooch

If you use the political knowledge questions from the American National Election Studies, you really ought to read this. Turns out that NES kind of screwed up the open-ended response coding on some of the questions. For example, in 2004, they asked if respondents could identify William Rehnquist. The answer they insisted on was "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court." Rehnquist's actual official title at the time, Chief Justice of the United States, may have been coded as incorrect. So that's bad, and explains why only some 31% of respondents appeared to have accurately identified him even though he'd held that office for almost two decades.

Oh, respondents were also asked if they could identify Tony Blair. Here's the coding instructions for the questioners:

The reference must be specifically to "Great Britain" or "England" -- United Kingdom is *NOT* acceptable (Blair is not the head of Ireland), nor is reference to any other political/geographic unit (e.g. British Isles, Europe, etc.) If unsure whether correct, code as best you can and record R’s response as a remark.

Okay, I'm an Americanist, and even I know that's wrong. Blair, of course, was PM of the United Kingdom, which doesn't include Ireland (although it does include Northern Ireland).

This is pretty damned bad. I use some of these questions when I lecture about how uninformed the average American voter is, so at the very least I've been (slightly) slandering my fellow voters. This is worse, of course, for scholars who have been using these tainted questions in their research to study or control for information effects.

Arguably, it's even worse for our profession in general, since we're supposed to be experts on politics but know approximately dick about the U.S. Constitution and the United Kingdom.

Reached my limit

While a brokered Democratic convention would be great entertainment and a boon for me professionally, I'd really like Hillary Clinton to go away right about now.

That is all.

Calling McCain dumb

I've seen a number of blog posts recently -- including some interesting pieces from Digby and from Josh Marshall -- suggesting that John McCain is a wee bit dim. This actually surprised me a bit. We've all seen him in countless interviews. He handles some better than others, but he's always struck me as articulate, quick with a comeback, and self-effacing, traits that I, perhaps wrongly, associate with intelligence.

But could he be stupid? He's said some pretty stupid things lately, alleging that Al Qaeda is conspiring with Iran, suggesting that the solution to Iraq is to get Sunnis and Shiites together in a room and tell them to "stop the bullshit," conceding that he doesn't understand economics, etc. And it seems clear from his statements on the housing crisis that he doesn't have much of a grasp on that, either.

Of course, sometimes what appears stupid may be strategic (the Iran/Al Qaeda screwup may be a good example of that) or just a good old fashioned case of telling people what they want to hear, even if it's inconsistent with what you just told the last group of people.

There are a lot of ways that Democrats can win this presidential election. McCain seems determined to keep himself tied to an unpopular war (not that he could really untie himself at this point), and Democrats should not hesitate to point that out. Democrats could also lose this election.

May I suggest that calling the Republican nominee stupid is not a good way to win? Does anyone remember how well this strategy worked on Reagan and W.?

The case for polarization

Kudos to Matt Yglesias for making this case so clearly. It's a wonderful read. I'll be using it in my parties class in the future.

Yglesias does a great job talking about the advantages of strong, distinct political parties. But what he also ads to the mix is an explanation of why journalists and lobbyists are always complaining about partisanship and pining for the days of cross-party friendships:

From a journalistic point of view, the resulting system is tragically dull. Legislative outcomes become a simple matter of vote-counting: either a party has a majority or it doesn’t. There’s little room for journalistic sleuthing, and what stories there are to tell lack the color and drama of, say, Charlie Wilson’s War, in which an extremely hawkish Democratic congressman was able to persuade his party’s leadership to back a massive covert war in Afghanistan.

For veteran Washington hands—wheelers and dealers in the lobbying game or at the major interest groups—the new system is worse than dull. It’s emasculating. This is why political elites find polarization so distasteful. In a polarized world, elections and procedural rules largely determine policy outcomes; there’s little room for self-styled players to construct coalitions on the fly, and enhance their own power in the process. The growth in the lobbying industry might seem to belie the point, but consider Tom DeLay’s post-1994 “K Street Project”—which pressured lobbying firms who wanted access on the Hill to hire more Republicans—or the swing of the pendulum back after the Democratic takeover in 2006. Power in Congress is firmly in the hands of the party leadership; lobbyists become less powerful, not more, in a polarized system.

And then he gets in the kicker:

But for voters, the boring new ways can be looked at in another way—they’re straightforward. Elections have a predictable and easy-to-understand relationship to government action. Electing a Democrat means, on the margin, more spending on the federal safety net and more government regulation, while electing a Republican produces policies more favorable to business interests. You don’t necessarily get everything you want (ask any liberal disappointed by the continued flow of funds for the Iraq War), but at least on domestic measures, things move predictably.

To review: parties are good for voters and bad for lobbyists and David Broder. Anyone want to put this to a vote?