Joel Jacobsen

Campaign 2008,

Big bailout,

Cognitive dissonance

Friday

24Oct

Aid for Obsessives

FiveThirtyEight - i.e., the total number of electoral votes - is hands down the best website for political obsessives this year. It rounds up the poll numbers and organizes them and performs statistical analyses on them and, best of all, also critically examines the pollsters' methodologies, the subject of the very first post in this new blog.

Here's a particularly good post on the topic, complete with chart. The author is Nate Silver, a "saber" of fame in the world of that other great spectator sport. Here's a short interview from Harper's, and here's a longer piece from Newsweek.

I find Silver's analysis particularly helpful in making sense of things like the comprehensive Pew poll (14% lead for Obama) followed a day later by the AP poll (statistical tie). The media usually report the bottom line as if it were the data rather than the interpretation.

I've never understood the logic of the so-called Bradley effect - that poll respondents lie to pollsters by saying they will vote for a Black candidate when, in the privacy of the booth, they won't. It seems so psychologically unlikely. The assumption is that people will vote for someone they're ashamed of voting for. Does that sound like anybody you know?

The other assumption behind the Bradley effect is that respondents care what a pollster thinks about them - but can't think of any way to explain their vote. I think that's implausible on two counts: humans are capable of rationalizing anything; and anyway the white guy's campaign is spending millions to remind you of all the non-racist reasons for supporting him.

Silver discusses - that is, debunks - the Bradley effect here. At Real Clear Politics, V. Lance Tarrance, a Republican pollster, explains why the Bradley effect never existed in the first place. Most polls predicted a close race and Bradley won the election-day turnout. He was swamped by the absentee votes, and the notoriously inaccurate exit poll left those out of the equation.

In other words, it wasn't a matter of racist voters. It was a matter of pollsters failing to perceive a significant change in voter behavior. (Early voting provides an opportunity for pollsters to make exactly the same mistake again, which - perhaps - gets us back to the Pew and AP polls.) Bradley's first loss was also 26 years ago.

Kathleen Parker's column had an interesting discussion about what she calls the reverse-Bradley effect: Republicans who will vote for Obama but not admit it to their Republican friends.

Are they are worried about higher taxes, a premature withdrawal from Iraq, and Obama's inexperience in matters executive? You betcha. But they do not want to vote for a divisive, anti-intellectual ticket headed by a man who, though they admire him, lately has made them embarrassed to be Republicans.

"Embarrassed to be Republicans." That's remarkably harsh.

But psychologically, I think, her thesis makes a great deal more sense. It's easy to imagine people being afraid of ostracism among friends but voting as they think is right. (Politically active lawyers who live in states with judicial elections know all about it.) It's hard to imagine people being afraid of a pollster's disdain and voting in a way that shames them.

Charles Fried, the former solicitor general and central figure of Lincoln Caplan's The Tenth Justice recently became one more Republican supporting Obama. So maybe Parker's wrong about Republicans worrying about ostracism.

UPDATE: Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com responds to Silver and sheds more light on the pseudo-scientific way pollsters choose likely voters. Or, as Blumenthal would say, the "art" of choosing - which, I think, is his way of saying the pseudo-science. I can understand why pollsters feel defensive about it, but I don't think they should. Of course there's no way to predict accurately who will vote.

What they should do instead is reveal their assumptions, which Silver basically did for them.

Moreover, it seems self-evident that the availability of early voting - like the absentee voting that did in Mayor Bradley in 1982 - will change the likelihood of a person voting. There aren't any historical precedents for predicting exactly how it will change it. All pollsters can do is guess, and that's not anything to be ashamed of. But it's also not science. (Or art.)

Joel Jacobsen |

Friday, October 24, 2008 at 11:06PM

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Campaign 2008

Sunday

19Oct

Realignment?

Of all the states listed as "solid McCain" by Real Clear Politics, only two have major league baseball teams: Arizona and Texas.

There are a variety of electoral-vote maps on the web, with interesting little differences between them. Here's Pollster.com, and here's CNN, and here's the estimate from Karl Rove & Co., via the LA Times.

But take a look at any of them and you'll be struck by the regional solidarity. McCain is strong in the Deep South and the tier of states going straight up from Texas, and the northern Rocky Mountains. And that's it.

According to the electoral vote estimates, the strong-Obama and leaning-Obama states would give him either 277 electoral votes (according to CNN), or 286 (RCP), or 313 (Pollster.com and Karl Rove). (Since there is a total of 538 electoral votes, 270 are required to win the presidency.)

If you look at the maps, you'll see that the pollsters put only a few more states in the Obama columns than in the McCain columns. According to RCP, Obama has 20 strong states and 4 leaning (Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia), while McCain has 18 strong and 1 leaning (Georgia). That's a different of just five states, with 8 still up for grabs.

But according to the RCP estimate, Obama's column includes 53% of the electoral votes, while McCain's column has just 28%. That's a pretty grim figure for the Republicans to contemplate.

Obviously any number of things could happen before election day, although fewer this year than in previous years, thanks to early voting. A lot of people have cast their ballots already.

But quite apart from the horse race, there's that vivid regional divide.

I think the divide reflects some deep-rooted problems for the Republicans, similar in a way to what happened to the Democrats in the 1970s. For American parties, it's bad news when the activists take over.

The American parties traditionally haven't been parties at all, in the European sense, but coalitions. For FDR, the coalition included labor unions, Blacks, and the Solid South, which didn't exactly make ideological sense.

The Republicans, at least since I've been paying attention, have been a coalition of two distinctly different types of conservatives, libertarians and authoritarians. Reagan's coalition included those who wanted to get the government off our backs and those who wanted to outlaw abortion and bring back prayer in the public schools.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party was taken over by activists who perceived themselves to be part of a movement. As a result, first the Solid South skedaddled, and then the blue-collar vote slipped away.

Today the "movement" is conservative. Or, rather (if these polls are to be believed), yesterday it was.

When movements take over American parties, the coalition falls apart. My impression is that the Republican Party is in the process of shedding its pro-business libertarians. It's stripping itself down to its core. And the core turns out to be the Deep South and the strip of states stacked on top of Texas, plus the Mormon West of Utah and Idaho.

Karl Rove said he wanted to be the new century's Mark Hanna, and the author of a similar generation-lasting realignment. He might have succeeded.

Joel Jacobsen |

Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 02:24PM

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Campaign 2008,

Bush legacy

Monday

13Oct

Czech purity

The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes reports that 58 years ago, Milan Kundera supposedly informed on a Western spy. Kundera "fiercely denied" the contention, saying:

I am totally astonished by something that I did not expect, about which I knew nothing only yesterday, and that did not happen. I did not know the man at all.

The Guardian reports that Kundera "was expelled from the party for 'anti-communist activities' in the same year the alleged betrayal took place," which on the face of it makes the report seem unlikely, both psychologically and politically.

I'll also point out the obvious - informing on a genuine spy for an unfriendly power is different from informing on one's neighbors or on people who think they're your friends. Besides, the early CIA had such a dismal record inserting spies into Communist countries, as documented in Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, that one has to wonder if the Czech secret police needed any help.

Then there's the very personal remarks made by the author of the report, who said his report "indicates there may be other reasons for his reclusiveness than we previously imagined." And: "(He) was always at pains to prevent interpreters linking his life with his writing, but some parallels are only too obvious".

The nastiness of those digs made me think of something Bill James pointed out. Bill James, in case there's anyone who doesn't know, is the great baseball statistics guy. He once observed that when teams do badly, and even sometimes when they go well, fans blame the best players, not the worst.

It seems counterintuitive at first, but it's not, really. Yankee fans don't expect Brett Gardner to carry the team. They demand that of A-Rod. If things go badly, it's not because Gardner got zero home runs (not to pick on him - he was a rookie and may develop into a good player) - it's because Rodriguez hit only 35.

But even more than that, I think, anything that breeds admiration will also produce resentment. It's only because Rodriguez is among the greatest ever to play the game that a fan can take any satisfaction from bad-mouthing him.

I see a parallel in the way Czech purifiers take after their great writers. Josef Skvroecky had to put up with something similar, except about his wife, and it made no difference that they ran Sixty-Eight Publishers from Toronto, keeping dissident Czech literature in print through the Dark Ages.

Or, rather, it made a difference: it made them A-Rod-like magnets for resentment. The guy who said those things about Kundera was never going to get his name in the Guardian by his literary merits. He certainly didn't do it by demonstrating his political courage doing the bad years.

But when he got noticed for trying to tear down someone who had done both, didn't it prove who was the better man, after all?

Joel Jacobsen |

Monday, October 13, 2008 at 03:00PM

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Czech literature

Sunday

12Oct

The Bush legacy

Johann Hari of London's Independent had a sobering reminder of last election's October surprise:

Just five days before the 2004 election, [Osama bin Laden] released a video effectively endorsing John Kerry. He told Americans to imagine corpses crying: "Call to task those who have caused our death!" and said they should "return to what is right," rather than reward "the liar in the White House".

Why would he do this? Bin Laden's long-term strategy is to "provoke and bait". He explains to his supporters: "We conducted a war of attrition against Russia with jihad fighters for 10 years until they went bankrupt. We are continuing in the same policy – to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy." To achieve this, "all we have to do is send two mujahideen [to a remote, irrelevant area] and raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qa'ida' in order to make the [US] generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses."

This is his goal, in his own words – to bleed America through irrational, wildly expensive wars that will tilt thousands more fanatical young men from Islamism to full-blown jihadism. So who would you want in the White House? The guy who will wean the US off Middle Eastern oil and the wars and tyrannies it supports to get it – or his opponent? Bin Laden is a monster, but he is not an imbecile. He knows that his endorsement is a kiss of death. The man he publicly praises is the man he wants to lose. Kerry failed to expose Bin Laden's trick; Obama must do it as soon as the tape hits the air.

Here's an American reminder of the same incident, from the late, conservative New York Sun.

George W. Bush has succeeded in combining Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy with Herbert Hoover's economics, which is pretty remarkable in and of itself: the work of two presidents accomplished by one.

For those who see our recent history in terms of an Oedipal struggle, there are remarkable (read: depressing) parallels between the Bushes' Iraq wars and banking system bailouts which prove: everything Dad did, Junior can do less competently. More or less as Junior always secretly suspected.

But Hari touches on a much broader point, which is how completely Bush played into bin Laden's hands. Taking as a given that bin Laden doesn't care about killing people, including (perhaps especially) his own people, it's difficult to imagine any response to the 9/11 atrocity that could have more comprehensively benefited bin Laden.

First and most obviously, there was the decision not to make the pursuit of bin Laden the highest priority, which can only have been welcome in his household. The decision to shift the nation's focus instead to the invasion of Iraq will go down in history, I think, as one of the most bizarre ever made by an American president, rather as if FDR had responded to Pearl Harbor by invading Indonesia. Further, from bin Laden's point of view, it must be cheerful news that even more Americans have died in Iraq than in 9/11.

Then, as Hari suggests, there's the effect of all the killing on young Arabic men. Some will have been radicalized, as he suggested. But far more have acquired simpler reasons to want revenge.

Then there's been the revelation that the American military, which once - not so very long ago, during the presidency of a man almost universally despised within the American military itself - seemed invincible, isn't.

Then there's the problem of military overstretch, emboldening Russia - and where have we heard that before?

Then the cumulative economic effect of borrowing billions every month and sending it overseas to blow it up, so reminiscent of what Bush, when he was young and irresponsible, did to his investor's money.

Now we're hearing all this warning of another Great Depression.

Really, could things have worked out any better for bin Laden?

Joel Jacobsen |

Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 09:25PM

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"Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe"

Bush legacy

Thursday

09Oct

Onion or nononion?

Could The Onion do better than this?

But it's not a pseudo-AP report. It's the real thing. I think this ranks right up there with "you can see Russia from there."

I'm increasingly convinced Palin isn't running for vice president. She's running for a lucrative post-election career giving speeches to conservative groups. I'm pretty sure she's going to win.

Joel Jacobsen |

Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 10:49PM

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Campaign 2008

Friday

03Oct

Living up to expectations

Engdahl's comments (see From a great height) reveal cultural attitudes well-described in Adam Kirsch's Slate article. Australians used to write about the "cultural cringe." A certain class of upper-middle-class Europeans thinks nothing could be more natural than that their existence would produce such a reaction, and are rather put out when it doesn't.

Walter Pater once wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music. All serious literary criticism, I think, aspires to the condition of fashion magazines. And Engdahl is obviously someone who takes himself very seriously indeed as a literary critic, which makes him particularly dogmatic about what's hot and what's not.

But he did - inadvertently, I think - finally explain what the Nobel Prize in literature is awarded for. He told us that the judges start with a certain template in mind. Then they search for the writer whose works conform most closely to the template.

Engdahl pretty much came out and said that he looks for writers who meet his expectations - writers whose imaginations and sensibilities most closely resemble those of a self-serious, middle-aged Swedish academic.

That's what I've always suspected. But there's two things I still don't get. Why did Harold Pinter, whose imagination and sensibility seem exactly like those of a particularly severe Scandinavian academic, have to wait so long to get his prize? And how come the committee occasionally awards the prize to great writers?

Inefficiencies in the system, I guess.

Joel Jacobsen |

Friday, October 3, 2008 at 09:52PM

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Literary prizes

Wednesday

01Oct

From a great height

In one of Paul Theroux's books - not Sir Vidia's Shadow, which I haven't read, but one of the travel books, I think - he quotes V.S. Naipaul commenting on the Nobel Prize Committee's selection of William Golding. The committee, he supposedly said, was "pissing on literature from a great height."

Golding wasn't the worst selection ever, by any means. (Take a look.) The selections seem remarkably hit or miss, which I suspect is because it's not very clear what purpose the prize is supposed to serve. Nobel's will specified that the prize should go to "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," which sounds remarkably like a modern mission statement.

Now Herr Doktor Professor Horace Engdahl has dissed American literature big time. Here's a semi-serious news story and follow-up piece of snark from the Guardian.

But then, to describe Philip Roth as "insular" isn't exactly saying anything new. Self-absorbed, solipsistic, Newark-based wanker - these and similarly hurtful epithets have been flung his way since he stopped trying to write an English professor's idea of a great novel, a transformation that occurred about the same time he first hit the big time.

Even his alternative-history novel, The Plot Against America, which I loved (of course the ending is contrived - how could it not be?), featured a protagonist with a first and last name markedly reminiscent of the author's own. This guy's fantasy novels are autobiographical. (Eat your heart out, Guy Gavriel Kay!)

My vague impression is that the purpose of the Nobel Prize is to shovel a boatload of money to writers who, generally speaking, have long since outgrown any particular need for it. It also has a sub-Oprah's book club impact on sales, I understand. Figuring that there must be some deeper purpose, I went to the website and found these reassuring words:

Alfred Nobel's will clearly indicates that the Nobel Prize is an award to an individual writer, not to a nation or a political direction or to any other category of people. ... We don't consider literatures, we consider individuals.

You will have already guessed the speaker's identity.

(Incidentally, the Herr Doktor Professor offers an explanation for why Hardy, Tolstoy, Lawrence, Auden, Woolf and Joyce never won the prize - "they died too soon, ... their work wasn't sufficiently known when they disappeared". The same doubtless is true of Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera.)

Engdahl, whose Ph.D. thesis (he tells us) was "a pioneering re-evaluation of Swedish Romanticism", also founded a journal, "the importance of which for the renewal of the Swedish view of literature in the 1980s can scarcely be overestimated". (Uh, the Swedish view of literature?) (And what about the Swedish view of literature in the 1990s? Why does that always get overlooked?)

It shocks me a little that, in late 2008, he's still bragging about introducing Swedes to the Nazi collaborator and all-around con man Paul de Man. Being taken in 25 years ago was one thing. Refusing to recognize that one has been duped is something else again.

Still, it's interesting to trace Engdahl's thinking, which isn't hard to do. First, "you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world". Second, American writers tend not to engage with Europe. Case closed: "too isolated, too insular."

Freud, that echt European, had a word for that kind of thing.

Joel Jacobsen |

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 11:10PM

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Literary prizes

Wednesday

01Oct

Tomorrow's news analysis today

For the benefit of analysts called upon to provide an instant analysis of tomorrow's debate between the candidates for Vice Presidential, I offer this time-saving template:

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was the hands-down winner in her debate with Senator Joseph Biden. Refuting her critics, she did not once drool on her stunning [red, or possibly blue] outfit.

Even more impressively, she spoke her memorized lines as steadily as if reading a teleprompter.

By failing to land a knock-out blow, Biden blew his only chance to demonstrate Palin's inability to speak the English language.

"Biden's failure will likely haunt the Democrats," said [random name], widely considered the dean of president debate scholars.

Instant poll results tended to confirm that assessment. A whopping 72% of respondents agreed with the statement that "Sarah Palin struck me as not nearly so bad as I had been led to believe."

Joel Jacobsen |

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 10:11PM

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Campaign 2008

Tuesday

30Sep

Why would anyone trust them?

I'm deeply suspicious of anyone claiming that we have to spend $700 billion right now. In fact, I'm suspicious of anyone telling me I really need to spent $10 right now.

Still, Daniel Gross's angry post in Slate - who knew economic writers could get so worked up? - is alarming. As Howard Devoto once said, "Maybe it's right to feel nervous now."

But how did it all hit the fan all at once? How did so many bright boys fail to see it coming?

And, given that they failed to see it coming - or did, but had no idea how to avert it, or even to get their own companies out of the way - why should I believe that they know how to solve the crisis?

How can they go from being so clueless a couple weeks ago to knowing all the answers today?

Giving these people $700 billion to invest a month ago would have been a really, really bad idea. What makes it a good idea today?

I'm not saying it isn't. But it feels a whole lot like buying a second used car from a guy who ripped you off the first time.

Joel Jacobsen |

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 09:54PM

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