No Panaceas

2004-04-29T08:52:00.000-04:00

Random Question: Have you ever wondered why there were so many TV shows in the fifties and sixties that featured a widowed father and his one or three sons? Fury, Bonanza, My Three Sons, The Rifleman, The Andy Griffith Show, Courtship of Eddie's Father.

And then there were variations on the theme like The Beverly Hillbillies (widower and daughter) and Family Affair (uncle with niece and nephew).

Was there a single show back then that featured just a mother and child (or children), which now, as then, was the more common single parent type household? The first one I can think of is One Day at a Time, which came a bit later, and featured a divorced (egads!) mother and two daughters. I bet someone out there has written a dissertation on exactly this issue.

This is the kind of weird thing I think about when I've been doing too much grading.

2004-04-22T14:56:00.000-04:00

stay:

2004-04-15T12:11:00.000-04:00

McCain and the Veepstakes:

2004-04-05T15:34:00.000-04:00

The Irrelevance of Winning the Popular Vote: I've been planning on writing some posts about the Electoral College, that gloriously quirky institution the founders whipped up for our endless amusement. This editorial in yesterday's Post gives me a good starting off point. In it political scientist Thomas Schaller argues that the 2004 election might produce another situation where the winner of the national popular vote loses the electoral college vote, and thus the election. Schaller's twist is that it might be Bush who ironically loses the election despite carrying a plurality of the popular vote. (By the way, this is what lots of pundits thought would happen in 2000.)

Schaller refers to this type of outcome as a "misfired" election, and goes on to predict that, "Two misfires in a row would cause enough of an uproar to prompt a genuine national conversation about whether the Electoral College system is still the best way to elect a president." Perhaps, but I want to make a point here that always seems to get missed:
Winning the popular vote is completely and totally irrelevant. Candidates are not trying to win the popular vote, they are trying to win the electoral vote, and they makes choices accordingly.

Consider football. Let's imagine that after the Super Bowl fans of the losing team -- that is the team that scored fewer points -- nonetheless asserted that their team "truly" won because they produced more yards on offense. Would people buy that argument? No. First they would say that the game is about points, not yards. Then they would go on and say that, besides, since the game is about points and not yards, that the winning team probably made all kinds of decisions that reduced its yardage total in exchange for creating or protecting a points lead, e.g., kicking field goals, running instead of passing to run down the clock. If both teams' goal was to produce the most yardage then the game would have been played very differently.

This analogy applies almost exactly to this business of misfired elections, and the continued snide statements made by Gore supporters that somehow Bush "losing" the popular vote is relevant. (Note that I am not talking about Florida here -- which is a wholly separate issue.) If the goal in 2000 was to win the popular vote then both candidates would have done all kinds of things differently. They would have traveled differently, focused on different issues, and spent their money differently, all in an attempt to win the most votes nationally, rather than the most votes on a state by state basis. Under the Electoral College candidates expend little resources on a state that they know they will win or lose easily. But under a popular vote every vote counts equally. Thus, for example, Bush might have spent far more resources on California, Texas, and New York.

Here's the punchline. If we went back to 2000, but ran the election this time based just on the popular vote, we do not know who would have won.

There are some good reasons to change or scrap the Electoral College. The occasional "misfire" of this sort is a not one of them.

2004-03-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

Reductio ad absurdum: NFL owners are -- once again -- considering adding two more teams to the playoffs, thus bringing the total 14 out of 32. Here are a couple of supportive quotes:

"I'm for anything that gives my team a better chance to make the playoffs," San Francisco 49ers coach Dennis Erickson said.

"I think two more teams in the playoffs would increase the excitement in those cities," added Miami Dolphins president Eddie Jones.

Why don't we just skip ahead and create a 32 team playoff format? That way there will be excitement in all 32 cities and Erickson doesn't have to worry about losing his job, at least not because he didn't make the playoffs. NFL commissioner Tagliabue's fondest dream seems to be to have an NFL season where all the teams finish the regular season 8-8. Here's a parity design he'll love:

All teams play a 10 game regular season. The regular season provides the necessary data for seeding, but seeding matchups pit the highest seeds against the highest seeds and the lowest seeds against the lowest seeds as seen below.

NFC
Round 1
A. 1st seed vs 2d seed
B. 3rd seed vs 4th seed

C. 5th seed vs 6th seed
D. 7th seed vs 8th seed

E. 9th seed vs 10th seed
F. 11th seed vs 12th seed

G. 13th seed vs 14th seed
H. 15th seed vs 16th seed

In the second round the winner of Matchup A faces the winner of Matchup B, and so on. The AFC would have the same setup and the whole thing ends up with a Janet Jackson-free Super Bowl. Why have parity based on last year's results? If you are going to level the playing the field then by golly let's do it for the teams that really need it, the ones who stink this year. Of course this sets up totally perverse incentives where teams actually want to do poorly during the regular season, but so what? Nobody cares about the regular season anyway.

2004-03-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

It's not because Pennsylvania is a swing state, Bush goes there so often because he is trying to figure what's so great about the Liberty Bell: Sunday's Washington Post brings us this:

Republicans used to complain that President Bill Clinton used Air Force One as his personal campaign plane, taking many official presidential trips that had no real purpose other than to raise reelection funds or drum up votes.

But President Bush has been on the go even more than his predecessor, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution visiting scholars Kathryn Dunn Tenpas and Anthony Corrado and research intern Emily Charnock.

In his first three years in office, Bush took 416 trips to 46 states, compared with Clinton's 302 trips to 40 states during a similar period. Virginia was Bush's most visited state (not surprising, since presidents often take day trips across the Potomac for public events).

More notable, the scholars found, was the heavy proportion of Bush travel to "swing states" -- those where the vote margin in the 2000 election was within 6 percentage points.

Tenpas and Corrado found that 39 percent of Bush's trips were to swing states, compared with 28 percent for Clinton. Bush, for instance, took 27 trips to Pennsylvania -- more than to any state other than Virginia and California. Next up was Florida, the most swingy state of all last time, with 24 Bush visits. Texas, Bush's home, was fifth, and Missouri, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Georgia rounded out the top 10.

Several things. First, I hope the actual study is a little more sophisticated than suggested by this article. Thirty-nine percent of the trips went to swing states, where swing state is defined as those states with a 6 point or less margin. Okay. Here are the 2000 swing states:

Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa, Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Nevada, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maine, Arkansas, Washington.

That is 16 out 50 states or 32% of the states. In other words, 39% of Bush's trips went to 32% of the states. Perhaps taking Texas and Virginia out of the mix or, better yet, a reasonable multivariate analysis might show something a little more impressive. But the evidence cited in this newspaper article is lame. (I'll see if I can get a copy of the actual research article.)

Despite this data, it is certainly not a new argument -- at least among political scientists, maybe we don't send out enough press releases -- that presidents use travel for political purposes. But Clinton was hardly the first to do this, it goes back to, oh, James Monroe. Why do you think John Kennedy was in Texas in November, 1963? The Republicans during the Clinton years were just good at getting myopic journalists to make something old and routine sound new and scandalous. Every trip a president makes has political and presidential elements to it and those do raise ethical questions since taxpayers are footing the travel and security bill. This travel might include a tendency to go to swing states -- though that's not proven in the above data -- but it also means going to states to raise money -- New York might be a good place -- and to campaign for others.

By the way, it is not just domestic travel. Brace and Hinckley demonstrated a while back that there are some distinct political patterns to the timing of a president's foreign travel.

2004-03-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

Four for Four: And just because it never hurts to beat a dead horse a little more: do some simple bracket rearranging and the Final Four could just have easily included Cincinnatti or perhaps even Gonzaga. (Or play the tournament a few hundred times and maybe even "First Seeds" Stanford and Kentucky will get in once or twice.

Now if I were in office pool -- which of course I am not -- but if I were it would turn out that while I am -- or would be -- the only person to get all final four teams correct, I will still lose the pool because I did (or would do, if I were in a pool) rather poorly at predicting the second round. Go figure.

2004-03-24T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Pork Politics of Homeland Security: Time magazine this week includes a fascinating article by Amanda Ripley on the allocation of homeland security dollars. Here are some pertinent bits:

International terrorism, as most experts will tell you, is not as unpredictable as it feels. Terrorists follow patterns. And while we can't read the minds of zealots, we can get a good idea of what kind of damage they could do in any given location. We can estimate the cost of an attack on a port in Los Angeles vs. an attack on a port in Prince William Sound. We can calculate where a nuclear blast of a given force would kill 500,000 people as opposed to 50,000. These are the logical estimates that insurers and investment banks are seeking as they try to quantify the risk they face.

But while all this strategic thinking is going on in the private sector, the government has responded to terrorism in a less rational way....

...[T]he vast majority of the $13.1 billion was distributed with no regard for the threats, vulnerabilities and potential consequences faced by each region. Of the top 10 states and districts receiving the most money per capita last year, only the District of Columbia also appeared on a list of the top 10 most at-risk places, as calculated by [AIR, a risk-assessment firm] for TIME. In fact, funding appears to be almost inversely proportional to risk. If all the federal homeland-security grants from last year are added together, Wyoming received $61 a person while California got just $14, according to data gathered at TIME's request by the Public Policy Institute of California, an independent, nonprofit research organization. Alaska received an impressive $58 a resident, while New York got less than $25. On and on goes the upside-down math of the new homeland-security funding.

...

In early 2003, Congress announced a plan that sounded as if it might rectify the distortions in federal outlays?a new $100 million grant for "high threat" urban areas only. In April, Secretary Ridge said seven cities had made the "high threat" list because of population density, the presence of important infrastructure and credible threats?which is to say, because of risk. The roster of cities?New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and Houston?matched up perfectly with AIR's list of most at-risk cities. Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York, which received 25% of the new grant, says, "I was thinking, finally it seems we have a program based on merit, and clearly not based on politics?because a lot of these cities are not exactly Republican bastions."

Soon, however, the list of qualifying cities started mysteriously growing. Ridge's office and Congress had received calls from irate city officials who had been left out. In May the roster grew to 30 cities. But the pool of money also expanded by $700 million, so it didn't seem like a problem. "We're thinking, O.K., we're getting 18% of the pot. That's reasonable," remembers an aide for a New York member of Congress. Then, for 2004 money, the Department of Homeland Security announced an even longer list of 50 cities, including Columbus, Ohio, and Fresno, Calif. And the dollars shrank to $675 million. At that point, Weiner says, he lost heart. "We found a solution, and we're even screwing that up. We have some cities on there that don't even have minor-league baseball teams," he says. "Homeland security is just as much a pork barrel as every other program in Congress." New York City now receives 7% of the money.

Read the article, because it has some nice nuance, but the bottom line is that money is being spread out not because of any direct assessment of risk but because of the nature of Congress, especially the U.S. Senate. California, which has two high risk areas in LA and San Francisco, has as much representation in the Senate as Wyoming, which has no high risk areas. But it's natural for a small state senator, who is hired and fired by the citizens of his or her state, not of the entire nation, to want just as much money as everyone else. After all, Casper, WY or Burlington, VT or Santa Fe, NM might be victimized by terrorism. It takes a majority for a spending bill to pass and small state senators make up a larger proportion of the senate than do large state senators.

Blaming Congress for this is a bit like blaming a scorpion for its sting. Plus bureaucracies, highly attuned to the desires of members of Congress, will tend to conspire in the same distribution game. The one actor that has the ability to overcome these natural parochial tendencies is the president. But, of course, it is easy for the president to fall prey to his own parochialism. After all, the high risk areas we are talking about are not exactly areas of substantial Bush support.

2004-03-22T16:54:00.000-05:00

Bush's Approval: I was playing around with approval data while putting together a talk. I thought I would compare Bush's approval with that of other presidents during the same point of their administrations, i.e., March of the fourth year. Here's the breakdown going back to Eisenhower (which is more or less the beginning of time for public opinion analysis):

Johnson: 76
Eisenhower: 73
Nixon: 55
Reagan: 54
Clinton: 53
Bush 2.0: 50
Ford: 50
Bush 1.0: 42
Carter: 41

Everyone above Bush 2.0 was re-elected the following November (counting the Johnson case as a re-election). Everyone tied or below Bush lost. One shouldn't read too much into this data. It's only a bunch snapshots, eight months from the election, and each have an error term. I think the real lesson here is that the Bush is right on the edge and he needs the employment picture to improve a bit.

Here is each president's approval the following October (sans Bush 2.0, of course):

Eisenhower: 73
Johnson: 71
Nixon: 62
Reagan: 58
Clinton: 56
Ford: 51
Carter: 34
Bush 1.0: 34

For reasons I'll get into later, I think the states vote uniformly enough now that Bush will win easily if his approval gets up around 55. He'll probably squeak by at 52.

2004-03-17T15:01:00.000-05:00

Speaking of the national debt: I like to check this site on occasion. It's an effective way to make me pessimistic about my child's economic future. Today's number is $7,121,028,831,834. By my rough and ready calculations that is enough stacked dollar bills to circle the globe at the equater about one and three-quarters times. (What a completely useless piece of information.) Almost as useless is the information that every citizen currently owes $24,257.35. If every citizen really owed that much then Congress would balance the budget in no time. The better question is how much of the income of citizens under the age of, say, thirty go towards the gigantic and growing debt?

2004-03-17T14:46:00.000-05:00

Balanced Budget? We don't need no stinking balanced budget or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the National Debt :

From CQ.com's daily update:

The House Budget Committee today approved a budget enforcement bill that
would establish discretionary spending caps and revive pay-as-you-go rules
to limit mandatory spending. But tax cuts would not require offsets. The
enforcement bill was approved by voice vote after members turned back,
18-24, a Democratic amendment that would have required offsets for both
tax cuts and new entitlement spending. Even Republicans who were not
satisfied with the bill, such as Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Gil
Gutknecht of Minnesota, joined with Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, to beat
back the Democratic bid. "What you're doing is ignoring the elephant in
the room. Two-thirds of the [deficit] problem is in the tax cuts," said
John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C. "This is a dodge." Nussle countered that tax
reductions can stimulate economic growth. "We don't believe you should
have to pay for tax cuts," he said. The panel now is debating amendments
to its fiscal 2005 budget resolution, which is expected to win approval
later today.

Forget banning gay marriage, how about some movement on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

2004-03-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

March Lameness Returns: It's time once again to crown a mythical national champion of college basketball. I won't go through the whole exercise again this year. Here and here are my reasons why March Madness is a no more useful way to choose a champion than polling.

Oh, and my Final Four picks this year are Duke, UConn, Georgia Tech, and Oklahoma State with Duke beating GT for the MNC.

2004-03-11T11:45:00.000-05:00

Reforming the Nomination Process II or is Instant Runoff Voting really that great an idea?: What percentage of the vote did Kerry get in Iowa? 38% New Hampshire? 39%.

So, on the one hand, Kerry won both states. But he won only in the sense that the media declared him the winner because he won a plurality of the vote. He was, as they say, "first past the post." Yet, a clear majority in both states -- 62% and 61% -- preferred someone else. These two "victories" created such a powerful snowball effect that the race was effectively over.

My point is not to pick on Kerry, but rather it is to illustrate the extreme disparity between democratic ideal and democratic reality. It is not just that voters in two completely unrepresentative states have far more influence than voters in other states, it is that a tiny fraction of voters in those unrepresentative states, usually far less than a majority, have far more influence than voters in other states.

It is true that delegate allocation is more proportional, but what really matters is the perception in the press and among voters about who is a winner and who did well and who did poorly. These perceptions shape subsequent races and the ultimate allocation of delegates.

We know from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem that no election system is perfect. Yet, some are better than others and a system that uses plurality voting with many candidates is among the worst. This is one of the ways that the California recall was flawed and it is the way most of our primaries are flawed.

Let's imagine an electorate with 8 voters and 4 candidates, Red, Blue, Green and Brown. Suppose the voters preferences were as follows:

Voter 1: Red > Blue > Green > Brown
Voter 2: Red > Green > Blue > Brown
Voter 3: Red > Green > Blue > Brown
Voter 4: Green > Brown > Blue > Red
Voter 5: Green > Blue > Brown > Red
Voter 6: Blue > Brown > Green > Red
Voter 7: Blue > Brown > Green > Red
Voter 8: Brown > Blue > Green > Red

Straight up plurality voting yields the following:

Red: 3 votes
Green: 2 votes
Blue: 2 votes.
Brown: 1 vote.

So Red wins a plurality despite the fact that he was the least favorite candidate for a majority of voters. In fact Red could have been not just the least favorite but completely unacceptable to a large group of primary voters, yet won anyway. I am certainly not saying that this was the case with Kerry, but it is easy to imagine a situation where a candidate --perhaps an extremist candidate -- has a strong devoted following but is unattractive to everyone else. McGovern in 1972?

The reform receiving the most attention is Instant Runoff Voting. In more international settings it gets called the Alternative Vote or Preferential Voting. It's the way Australia elects MPs to its House of Reprentatives.

With IRV, voters ordinally rank candidate. If no one gets a majority of first preferences then the candidate who came in last drops out and then the second preferences of all the voters who voted for the last placed candidate are distributed to the other candidates. The process continues until a candidate breaches 50%.

For the above example, IRV would work as follows:

First Tally
Red - 3
Green - 2
Blue - 2
Brown - 1.

Brown drops out and her voters' second preferences are redistributed:

Second Tally
Red: 3
Green: 2
Blue: 3

Green now drops out and his voters' votes go to their highest ranked remaining candidate. For both Voter 4 and Voter 5 that is Blue. So Blue wins the election 5-3.

The good thing about IRV is that a candidate must demonstrate a breadth of support to win. In my opinion some supporters of IRV overstate its value. I'm thoroughly unconvinced, for example, that IRV will increase voter turnout. There is a big downside. If there are a lot of candidates then IRV can be a major pain for voters. Imagine if IRV were used for the California recall with its 135 candidates. Don't forget too that more than nine candidates were on the ballot in the some of the primary states. A total of twenty-three candidates were on the Democrat's ballot in New Hampshire.

It is possible to modify the balloting so that voters only rank the candidates they care about. But even still the process of finding and ranking candidates is tricky. Oops I meant Gary Coleman to be sixth not that watermelon guy! And what if you have preferences for the bottom of your list and the top of your list and then you are indifferent among everyone else? You would have to rank the entire list.

I think the above quibbles are not that big of deal. IRV is no panacea -- imagine that -- but it would be an improvement on first-past-the-post. I won't go into how delegates would be allocated, but that's not a difficult problem.

There is another alternative and that is Approval Voting. With Approval Voting you vote only for those candidates you like. So, let's imagine that in the above ranking all the voters disapproved of their fourth choice. The vote tally would be:

Red: 3
Blue: 8
Green: 7
Brown: 6

So Blue wins because she is acceptable to the largest number of voters. On a range of normative and practical criteria I think Approval Voting is the better choice, but both alternatives are reasonable. You could even construct an argument -- perhaps a naive one -- that either approach would reduce negative campaigning because candidates have to worry about driving up their own negatives.

2004-03-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

Reforming the Nomination Process I: Now that the nomination races are over it is time to return to that quadrennial favorite: How should we reform the nomination process? The problem with the process is well known. Mainly because of an historical accident two states -- Iowa and New Hampshire -- enjoy an inordinate amount of influence over who gets nominated. It's not so much that either state directly chooses the ultimate nominee, as much as the states directly influence who loses, thus limiting the choices available to voters in subsequent primaries and caucuses. This would be less of a big deal if the party electorates in these two states reflected the racial, ideological, and geographic diversity of the respective party's national electorate. But of course they do not. For example, the national Democratic electorate is far more urban and racially diverse than Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. Likewise the core of the modern Republican party is in the South and non-coastal West.

In response to the Iowa and New Hampshire advantage, other states have moved their elections earlier and earlier in the process. This has created a dramatically compressed schedule where voters have little time to focus on the campaign -- you can't expect all voters to pay attention much more than a week before an election.

The question is how to reform the process? (Assuming political conditions allow you to reform it, an issue I'll address at the end.) There are two criteria that need to be addressed. First, the voters who have the most say, i.e., those who go early in the process, should be diverse and they should change from election year to election year. Second, underdog (i.e., underfunded) candidates should have a chance to compete. One of the very positive attribute of both Iowa and New Hampshire is that their size, and the fact that they go first, makes so-called "retail" politics not just possible, but necessary. This puts a premium on organization and small group interaction between voters and candidates.

There are any number of ways a new system might be installed, but the best one I have seen is the Graduated Random Presidential Primary System, better known as the California Plan. Thomas Gangale's article in the recent PS does a nice job of explaining it. (Full cite: Gangale, Thomas. 2004. "The California Plan: A 21st Century Method for Nominating Presidential Candidates." PS: Political Science and Politics 37(1): 81-87. PS is a subscription periodical. It should be available in any university library and in most good municipal libraries.)

Without going into much detail, here is the basic plan. First, all states are indexed by their number of U.S. House seats. U.S. territories and the District of Columbia each are defined as having one seat. On a bi-weekly basis a set of primaries are held. The first set consists of randomly selected states whose index number sums to eight. Thus, for example, this first group of primaries might consist of Alaska (1), New Mexico (3), and Kansas (4). Or it might include just Minnesota (8). The second group of primaries include states that sum to sixteen, then followed by twenty-four and so on until the primary group that sums to eighty completes the full list of states and territories.

As Gangale notes, however, the above penalizes the big states, especially California (52). Under such a system California can never vote earlier than the seventh group. Thus the need for a modification, one that gives the big states a reasonable shot at voting early. Here is the sequence Gangale lays out:

8
16
24
56
32
64
40
72
48
80

Thus California has a chance to be in the fourth, sixth, eighth, or tenth groups.

This idea has a number of possible advantages. First, retail politics remains possible in the early stages of the campaign because the states will tend to be small. Yet chances are good that the early states will be rather diverse. DC and Vermont, for example, are both small but strikingly different in terms of race, location, economic base, etc.

In my view, a fundamental reform such as this should coincide with later primaries. That is, we need to shorten the election period. Why not have the first group start in April (just in time for Tax Day) rather than January?

Will anything like this happen? Probably not. At the end of the day the national parties get to make their own rules, so it is possible to overcome the Iowa and New Hampshire opposition. But those two states have done a "good" job of blackmailing the parties and presidential candidates into supporting Iowa and New Hampshire preeminence. (As Gangale notes, if one of the two parties went first, the other will follow, as was case with the McGovern-Fraser reforms that created the modern nomination system.)

What really is needed is for one of the party leaders, i.e., Kerry or Bush, to put his weight behind reform. But why would they? After all, the current system worked just fine for both of them.

2004-03-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

Wacky, but credible: I've started a context with my students to see who can come up with the wackiest "credible" VP candidate for Kerry.

Here's the criteria: The person has to be "credible" as in -- for a few seconds -- "Yeah, I can see that. Hmmmm." The person also has to be wacky as -- after a few seconds -- "No way, that's nuts!"

Paris Hilton is wacky but not credible. Dick Gephardt is credible but not wacky. The guess is even better if the candidate is mentioned by a major media outlet. So here is the list so far:

1. Bill Clinton
2. Tom Brokaw
3. John McCain.

All of the above have been discussed in major outlets: Clinton, Brokaw, McCain.

2004-03-04T17:56:00.000-05:00

The 9/11 Convention: Back when the Repubs announced they were breaking with tradition and holding a September convention most of the press trumpeted it as a brillant move. My first reaction was, "What a really really dumb idea!" The media craves -- absolutely lusts for -- controversy at national conventions. Modern conventions are so anticlimatic and so completely staged that the slighest bit of controversy will get way overplayed. (They've got to fill up that airtime and newspaper space somehow.) It won't be at all hard for the press to find all kinds of 9/11 victim's families willing to go on camera and completely and dramatically slam Bush for the crass political exploitation of 9/11. The Republicans will have to spend so much time and energy refuting these charges, that the impact from the locale and timing will be minimal if not negative. (Bush will probably still get a convention bounce, it just won't be the Grand Slam he thinks he can get because it is in NYC right before September 11th.)

These early complaints from 9/11 families are just the beginning.

2004-03-04T16:09:00.000-05:00

Veepstakes 2004: Now that the Democratic nomination contest is over it's time for the quadrennial veepstakes. Most of the time it's the only interesting election topic between the end of the competitive primaries and the convention. So who will it be this time? I asked my Presidency class this morning. Here's the list of possibilities they produced:

John Edwards, Bob Graham, Bill Richardson, Evan Bayh, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Wes Clark, Mark Warner, Tom Vilsack, Dick Gephardt, Jay Rockefeller. I also tossed in John McCain, since this Slate article talks about him. A few other people are getting mentioned in the press. Edward Rendall is notable. A bunch of female governors and senators are getting mentioned too. It's the season of the great mention.

As I've said before, when choosing a VP candidate presidential nominees should follow the dictum, "First, do no harm." There is not much evidence that voters vote for a presidential candidate because of the VP nominee. But I think there is reason to be believe that a poor VP choice can lose a candidate votes, e.g., Quayle in 1988 and Ferraro in 1984. Basically, if the VP becomes the news story then chances are it is because something bad is going on.

So what do you want?
1. You want someone with no skeletons.

2. You want someone with the poise, experience, and skill to handle a national campaign.

3. Relatedly, you want someone that people (and the media) can actually imagine as president. The last thing you want is a series of articles about how X isn't ready for primetime.

4 Next you want someone who won't alienate your base.

5. You don't want someone who will alienate moderates and independents.

6. Finally, if the person can help you win an otherwise difficult or impossible to win state then great. This last criteria is probably overrated and stuff like geographical balance is nonsense.

Quayle failed at 2, 3, 6, and perhaps 5. Ferraro failed at all but 4 (the skeletons had to do with her husband -- fairly or not). Eagleton, unfairly, failed at 1. Dole in 1976 failed at 2 -- by his own admission -- and perhaps at 3 and 6, too. Lieberman failed at 4 and 6, and I think cost Gore more votes than did Nader. Really good recent choices include Gore, Kemp, Mondale, and Bush. Gore especially was a very shrewd move on Clinton's behalf. He recognized that the need for geographic balance is a canard in modern America. I think Cheney and Bentsen were both a bit iffy. Cheney's health problems -- probably unfairly -- called into question #3, despite his unbeatable resume. Bentsen was an obvious and rather pathetic geographic pander.

Unless he chooses Zell Miller I don't think Kerry has to worry about alienating his base. Bush has effectively united the Dems. Heck, Kerry might even get by with McCain, though that isn't going to happen anyway.

So who fits these criteria? Lots on the list. I think both Clinton's run the risk of scaring off moderate and independent voters, Hillary especially. (The Bill Clinton idea is just plain nuts.) Here's my take on the above list. Note that obviously I don't know for sure who has skeletons and who doesn't. But obviously some of these people have been nationally vetted, i.e., faced a tough press, and some haven't.

If you look at the list I think the safest bets are Gephardt and Bayh. Richardson brings an intangible element since he would be the first Latino on a national ticket, but I think he is a rather unknown quantity when it comes to holding up in a national campaign. Bayh is not well known nationally but he has an impressive resume, has consistently excelled in a Republican state, and I suspect he would do very well in a national campaign. I think Edwards is rather vulnerable on 3 but he'd probably work as well. Frankly I don't see any female possibilities that wouldn't run astray of either 2 or 3. Dianne Feinstein is probably too old, otherwise she would be a terrific and safe choice.

2004-03-03T14:31:00.000-05:00

More on Scalia and recusals: Here is an interesting piece from the Legal Times about the Court and recusals. One thing it does is provide data on recusal frequency. On average Rehnquist and Ginsburg recuse the least (7 times per year) while Breyer recuses the most (42 per year). Scalia averages 12 per year. Most of the article recounts well known anecdotes about particular recusals, but the bottom line is that we know little systematically about why justices recuse and, as important, why they do not recuse. Plus it is a matter that remains thoroughly unregulated -- or, to be a bit more correct, self-regulated. My gut feeling is that this is something that does not really need to be regulated and that ultimately this particular little episode will self-correct because the other justices will convince Scalia to wake up and smell the hoisin sauce.

2004-02-26T19:35:00.000-05:00

The National Zoo as metaphor: I don't know how much the current crisis at that National Zoo has hit the national headlines -- living, as I do, inside this rarefied bubble known as inside-the-beltway it can be a little hard to tell sometimes what is national news and what is not national news. Anyway, suffice to know that the Zoo is a mess and it has been getting that way for a while.

Separate from the immediate issue regarding management , I think the marked decay of the National Zoo is a nice illustration of a larger shift in the nature of public policy in the United States. Simply put, most non-defense entities that rely on discretionary budget dollars are in decline and will continue to decline unless they can find other types of non-governmental revenue. It mainly started in the 1980s. Huge deficits drove up the amount of the budget devoted to interest payments. At the same time entitlements, insulated from cuts by its political support, continued to grow. That left discretionary spending to cut and, while the support for defense spending varies some, for the most part what it really left was domestic discretionary spending. What gets cut there? The kinds of areas that don't lend themselves well to Members of Congress taking yearly credit with their constituents and campaign financiers, e.g., earmarks. Something like the National Zoo and national parks are sitting ducks in such an environment. The National Zoo has been underfunded for years now and what has happened is that slowly over time the administration was forced to cut corners in lots of little ways. Eventually it all compounded into a rotting physical plant and, more distressing, animal care that's chronically deficient.

The new zoo director will ask for more money. He or she will not get it. That is the reality in a budget context of $500 billion plus deficits, multi-trillion debt, and politically untouchable but economically unsustainable entitlements. For the Zoo to survive it will have to find alternative sources of revenue. Look forward to the Coca-Cola Panda Pavilion. Maybe that is not such a bad thing. But the point is that we are, almost by default and virtually without debate, remaking the very nature of what our government has traditionally done in a wide range of areas including parks, the arts, scientific research, et cetera, in exchange for hugely expensive, and ultimately unsustainable, redistribution from one generation to the next.

2004-02-24T15:12:00.000-05:00

Quack, Quack!: There is a wonderful anecdote in The Brethren. (Though dated, it's still the best "insider's" view of the Supreme Court.) In the anecdote Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran visits Justice Hugo Black. They were old friends from the New Deal and Corcoran's daughter later served as a clerk with Black. So it wasn't so odd that Corcoran dropped by Black's office. But what made it memorable was that Corcoran tried to lobby Black on behalf of a client that had a case pending before the Court. Black was appalled and threw Corcoran out of his office.

I think of this anecdote every time I hear about the Scalia-Cheney duck hunting dustup. My how things have changed.

First, a couple of basic facts. 1.) Scalia did nothing illegal; 2). Scalia did nothing that violates Supreme Court rules. It might be a violation of a norm, but really it is the justice's individual call on these matters. Second, a basic assertion. I do not believe for a second that Scalia's decision in In Re Cheney will be in the least affected by his excursion.

Look. Justices are people. They had lives before joining the Court and they deserve to maintain and enjoy friendships, even if those friendships are with people in positions of power, influence, and legal controversy. But, once you put on that robe then you also accept a responsibility for something far greater than yourself. Probably more than any other major institution, certainly more than any political institution, the Supreme Court relies on its reputation for legitimacy. The Court has no real powers of enforcement and it leans on our shared sense that, while we may disagree with specific decisions, the Court nonetheless operates as an institution grounded in the rule of law and justice. If we lose that consensus, if levels of our "diffuse" support or loyalty for and to the institution ever erodes, then the very nature of our political system will shift in a way for the worse.

Virtually every justice in history -- certainly modern history -- has understood this point. I could point out numerous examples of justices making sacrifices of self or ideology for the greater good of the Court. Black understood this. That's why he was shocked and then furious over Corcoran's craven lobbying attempt. It's why it ended their friendship.

Love him or hate him, Scalia is a brillant jurist. But in many small ways, and now in this rather big way, he demonstrates shocking contempt for the Supreme Court. It's part of the reason why he has been a far less effective justice then he could be.

By the way, I was in a bookstore yesterday and noticed that there a biography of Tommy the Cork just came out. It looks pretty good.

2004-02-23T15:59:00.000-05:00

Nader: Some Democrats are apoplectic that Ralph Nader is running for president. Four years later I am still amazed that so many Dems overestimate the impact that Nader had on 2000 and yet underappreciate the implications of why Nader did as well as he did.

Democrats blaming Nader for the 2000 loss is like Red Sox fans blaming Bill Buckner for the 1986 World Series. Sure, it was Buckner's fault...if you conveniently ignore the other three games the Red Sox lost and you ignore the long list of mistakes and misfortunes that happened in that infamous six game. Likewise it was all Nader's fault, if you conveniently forget the other mistakes and misfortunes that beset the Dems in 2000. Let's not forget the derivation of the term "scapegoat." It was a cheap and easy way for villagers to "dispense" with their sins without need for introspection or reform. Nader is the Dem's scapegoat. Blaming him is easier then acknowledging that the party has a problem with the group that should be the party's most loyal supporters.

Liberals defected from Gore because of a general feeling (accurate or not) that the party had become Republican Lite. They were reacting to the Clinton-Gore mad rush for corporate dollars, DOMA, welfare reform, NAFTA, and Iraq, Haiti, and Kosovo. Then there was the addition of Lieberman to the ticket. (Plus they naively thought that Bush's Texas record (and the close partisan margin in Congress) meant that Bush would be a relatively moderate conservative president.

Post-2000 the Democrats as a party should have engaged in a wide internal dialogue about why there was such dissension on the left. Instead, most of the party leadership just vilified Nader and his supporters. Now we are seeing that same vilification cranked up even worse.

This is a mistake. It's a mistake because Nader is not a threat to Kerry. Not even close. You'd think that experienced pols like DNC chair McAuliffe would recognize this basic reality. This time around Nader is going without Green Party support -- which was organizationally crucial for him in 2000 -- and he won't enjoy the same support he had in 2000, if only because of the left's loathing for Bush. Nader will be luck to get on the ballot in more than a dozen states and his vote totals will be negligible in those states.

It's a mistake for another reason. The disenchantment that provoked the defections in 2000 is still there. You could see it in the Dean campaign. It will not manifest itself in major defections this time around because of Bush. But continuing to vilify Nader's 2000 supporters only guarantees that it will continue to fester and reemerge eventually.

2003-11-05T15:20:00.000-05:00

If we can send a man to the moon...: Just about this time of the semester I usually go off on a rant in my AmGov class regarding how we run elections in this country. The lecture rant just happens to be scheduled tomorrow, which is good timing given that I voted yesterday so I am reminded of the problem.

Think of just about anything governments do in this country and they do them better than they run elections. We put more thought and money into our 4th of July celebrations than we put into running our elections. It's a bit of problem given that, you know, elections are the basis of a democracy.

It's not just that poor equipment design and maintenance disenfranchises voters. That's part of the problem, and it gets a lot of publicity because of the 2000 election, but it's just one component of the problem. Take for example the fact that we hold most of our elections on work days. Thus most voters have to find a way to get to the polls before, during, or after work.

Ahh, but just try finding and getting to a poll in this country. You'd think we'd want to put our polls in very prominent places, places that are easy to find and have plenty of parking and (in urban areas) access to mass transit. Places like shopping malls or stadiums. But where do we put most of polling places? At elementary schools or churches that only a few people have ever heard of, let alone been to, that invariably are located on some narrow, hard to get to side street.

But let's say you find the place. Now just try and park. It's a school, on a WEEKDAY, so the parking lot is full which means you have to park on the street, a real challenge in some neighborhoods. But, hey, the committed voter does what it takes. So after you park you walk to the school (If it's November then invariably it's 35 degrees and raining), dodge rampaging students (I thought they got rid of recess), and fend off the political activists (No, I don't care who the Mcgillicutty party endorsed for School Board).

After all that you stagger inside ready to...wait...wait in line. In this country most poll workers are senior citizens. Why? In large part because most elections are held on weekdays, so only people with very flexible weekday schedules can work the polls. Now, I have nothing against senior citizens. I hope to be one one day. But speaking from experience, running a poll is a surprisingly complicated and exhausting task. It's exacerbated by poor eyesight, etc.

By constitutional design the states run elections. But what really happens is, for the most part, states pawn the task off on county governments. The financial capacity of county governments varies dramatically, and even the richer counties have the incentive to cut corners when it comes to funding elections, since there are no natural constituencies agitating on the issue. So in most parts of the country our elections limp along, understaffed, in hard to find places, with outdated, poorly designed equipment.

2003-10-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

Another Tory bites the dust: The British Conservatives just sacked another leader. It's like a mirror image of Labour in the 1980s. But here's the goofy part of this article:

The confidence vote was an unusual move in a party which had been seen as the natural party of government in Britain until Blair's landslide victory for Labour in 1997. Only two Tory leaders this century have not gone on to become prime minister.

Uhh, yeah two Tory leaders this century have failed to go to become PM: Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague, i.e., neither Tory leader from this century made it. Not to be picky, or anything.

2003-10-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

Clark's woes: Back in September I argued that Clark's campaign would go nowhere. Basically I made three points: 1) He would not appeal to Democratic activists; 2) he would commit gaffes; and 3) his campaign would be badly organized. He has not made any outright gaffes, at least not yet, but 1 and 3 have proved a big problem. Now his little flavor-of-the-month boomlet is done. The real question now is whether he can avoid mistakes and keep enough shine to attract a VP invitation.

2003-10-28T11:53:00.000-05:00

Ouch: Here's a very sharp quote from a betrayed congressional wife:

“I think Washington corrupts people,” she said. “He was a wonderful husband and father, the best I ever saw, until he went there. I told him I was trying to get him out of the dark side, all that power and greed and people kissing up to them all time. Now he’s one of them. All they care about is getting reelected. I hate them all.”

2003-10-11T16:51:00.000-04:00

On the other hand: This is why legislators hate academics. Most of us can't give a definitive answer to anything. While driving home yesterday I thought about the Schwartzman effect some more and decided that there is another way to test for punchcard error. By the way, I think examining Schwartzman's vote is something more than an exercise in trivia. What makes this case interesting is it's a situation where we have reason to believe that virtually no one voted for this guy on purpose. Thus most, probably 99%+ of his vote total is error -- human or machine. This makes this case a better one to examine than, say, the butterfly ballot fiasco in 2000 where Buchanan was a well-known candidate. With the butterfly ballot it was hard to disentangle Buchanan's intended vote from his accidental vote. Here that's not a problem.

On Friday I compared Schwartzman's vote in non-punchcard counties with his vote in punchcard counties. I argued that the difference across the two counties was neither statistically nor substantively significant. Another way to think about the problem though is to develop a model of Schwartzman's vote. I think we can assume that Schwartzman's vote was primarily a function of Schwarzenegger's. Yet, Schwarzenegger's vote varied across counties. Implicitly the analysis I did on Friday did not take this variance into account. So let's model it directly.

[Somewhat Technical Bits - (skip this para if you want to get to the bottom line) - Without getting deep into the technical specifics here is what I did. Using OLS I regressed Schwartzman's county by county vote totals on Schwarzenegger's. This initial result was exactly what you would expect: Schwarzenegger's vote correlated very very highly and positively with Schwartzman's. To get at the real issue though I needed to put in a few more variables. First, I included the number of votes cast in each county as a control. (You'd expect that both Schwarzenegger's and Schwartzman's vote totals will rise as the number of votes cast in the county rises.) Then I included a dummy variable for punchcard/non-punchcard counties. Then I interacted (multiplied) the punchcard variable with Schwarzenegger's vote variable. This let me get at the impact of Schwarzenegger's vote conditional on the presence of the punchcard ballot.]

Bottom-Line: I found two things: 1) Regardless of voting method the more people voted for Schwarzenegger, the more people voted for Schwartzman; and 2) the effect was slightly more pronounced -- and the difference is statistically significant -- in the seven punchcard counties.

The graph that follows shows the predicted Schwartzman vote for punchcard ballots and non-punchcard ballots:

The blue line shows Schwartzman's predicted vote in punchcard ballot counties given particular vote totals for Schwarzenegger. The purple line shows the same for non-punchcard counties. Look at the chart with care. What you should get from the chart is that the slopes are very very shallow. (The vertical axis only goes up to 2700 while the horizontal axis extends out to 800,000.) Namely, the slopes are about .003 and .002 for blue and purple, respectively. Nonetheless, these slopes are statistically significant from each other and each is statistically significant from zero.

What do they tell else? Let's take Los Angeles county, a county that uses punchcard ballots. Schwarzenegger got just shy of 790,000 votes in LA county so I have set that as the upper bound. The model predicts that given 790,000 votes for Schwarzenegger and punchcard ballots, Schwartzman gets 2539 votes. An LA-sized county without punchcard ballots yields Schwartzman 1385 votes, a difference of 1154. Is this a substantial amount? It's banal to say that any error is too much error? How much is acceptable? Obviously it depends on the likelihood of a super-close election.

But let's call it substantial for the sake of argument. Is the effect truly caused by punchcard ballots or are we just picking up a different variant of human error? Namely is their something about these seven counties -- like a lot of English-as-second-language speakers -- that may exacerbate error? I have some ideas for testing this notion, but I'd need more sophisticated data than I have now.

[More Technical Stuff -- Stop now if stats makes your eyes glaze over. First, now that I think about it I did not run a F-test comparing the main-effects and product-term models. So it might be that interacting punchcards and votes does not add much when looked at from an R-square perspective. Second, technically OLS is not perfectly suited for this type of data. (Hey, it's not like I'm getting paid for this.) The data is censored on one end -- there are no negative votes -- so something like tobit might be more suitable. I seriously doubt the results would differ all that much but if I were writing a paper on this I'd do take this issue into account. Obviously the data might be specified differently. One could use proportions, for example, and then eschew the control for total votes. My guess is such a model wouldn't get a very good fit. Plus, since the denominators vary so much you'd probably get a nasty case of heteroskedasticity and I, for one, don't believe that heteroskedasticity should be discussed on a family blog. Finally, the fits are terrific (>90% r-square), but looking at the residuals do show a few counties that stray from the line a bit. These outliers might provide some further clues about the impact of the other ballot types that I've clumped together into one category. I may return to this issue later.]

2003-10-10T15:08:00.000-04:00

Turnout update: California's Secretary of State now reports 8,374,681 ballots cast. Given 21,122,481 potential voters that yields an actual turnout rate of 39.6%. The Secretary of State incorrectly portrays turnout as 54.4%.

2003-10-10T13:57:00.000-04:00

The Schwartzman Effect: One of the recall elections's curiosities was the ninth place finish of George B. Schwartzman. Mickey Kaus (scroll down to October 8) at Slate raises the pertinent question. Was this because of machine error or was it simply because some voters confused Schwartzman with a well-known actor who was also a candidate? In an update, Kaus notes that one of his readers found that the Schwartzman effect came from the punchcard machines. I'm less sure. Here are some numbers.

First, while it is true that Schwartzman came in ninth, he nonetheless received fewer than 11,000 votes. That is less than 0.2% of the total vote. So the numbers are small and it would take an exceptionally close election for this error to matter. That said, what are the differences across counties? Using data from the Secretary of State's website, I divided Schwartzman's vote totals into two categories: votes from the seven counties that used punchcards and votes from counties that did not use punchcards. Schwartzman's vote totals were as follows:

Punchcard counties: 5336
Other counties: 5621.

So the punchcard counties provided a bit less than half of Schwartzman's votes. Yet these counties -- Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Clara, Sacramento, Solano, Mendocino and Sierra -- made up more than forty percent of the votes cast for governor. What we need to consider is the proportion of the vote Schwartzman received from the two groups of counties. Did Schwartzman's vote proportions differ significantly across the county types? Here are the numbers:

Punchcard counties: .00166
Other counties: .00125

Thus there is a .00041 difference between two proportions. From a substantive perspective that's getting really small-fry. Across a million votes .00041 adds up to a 410 vote difference. Is the effect statistically significant? Very technically it is since these numbers are populations not samples. But if you treat them like a sample and a run a difference-in-proportions test then the effect is not statistically significant at anything approaching acceptable levels of confidence. (For people wanting to check my math the overall vote totals were punchcard = 3220204 and non-punchcard = 4490601).

I am no fan of the punchcard voting, but I think the more likely explanation is simply that voters confused Schwartzman with Schwartzenegger.

UPDATE: I've looked at the question in a slightly different way this (Saturday) morning. I'll post the results when I have a chance.

Further UPDATE: I've now posted a new analysis. Like a true social scientist I contradict what I posted here (kinda).

2003-10-08T11:14:00.000-04:00

Turnout: I hate the way the press -- aided by election officials -- report turnout. Today's reports are ecstatically stating that yesterday's turnout rate was huge. It was perhaps 60%, maybe even more than 71% once all the votes are counted.

Uh, no. Let's just say that this is manure of the male bovine extraction.

This business of 60-71% is based on turnout among registered voters. Such a statistic ignores the millions of potential voters who did not register. To use an extreme example, let's say that you have a state with 100 adult citizens. Ten of these people registered to vote and seven of them cast a ballot. By the media's logic this is a turnout rate of 70%, despite the fact that only 7% of the electorate voted.

So what was the turnout yesterday? According to Michael McDonald at George Mason University, the number of potential voters in California (Adult citizens - prisoners) is 21,122,481. Okay. Thus far a little over 7.6 million votes were cast in the recall part of the election. Let's be very generous and say that turnout reaches 11 million. That would be 71% of California's 15.4 million registered voters . But the true turnout rate would be 52%. Looking at the current numbers I would say that eleven million is very very optimistic. A more realistic turnout of ten million yields a rate of about 48%.

In truth, 48% is pretty good, especially for a non-presidential election. But obviously it is a long way from 71%.

This is not just an empty exercise in number-crunching. Reporting numbers in the 60-70% range helps create an illusion that this election truly reflects the will of Californians. The reality is that only about a quarter of Californian voters chose the recall and a bit less than that chose Schwarzenegger to be governor. (By the way, you can say exactly the same type of thing about Davis's previous two victories.)

2003-10-08T09:38:00.000-04:00

Just in case you thought intelligence was a prerequisite for getting elected to Congress: Everybody already knows about Rep. Ballenger (R-NC) claim that one reason why his marriage failed is because the Council on American-Islamic Relations was headquartered near his home. But what's getting ignored is the further claim that his marriage failed because of House ethics rules. Check out this bit:

In addition to CAIR, Ballenger told the newspaper that another source of stress on the marriage was the 1995 decision by "holier-than-thou Republicans" in the House to ban gifts from lobbyists. The meals and theater tickets from lobbyists once meant "a social life for [congressional] wives," Ballenger said. His wife agreed, saying, "Just a dinner now and then" would do no harm.

Hmmm. So all this time we've been told that marriages are threatened by things like unfaithfulness, financial problems, no-fault divorce laws, and gays and lesbians.

Now it turns out that the reason why people get divorced is because there is no free lunch.

2003-10-08T09:21:00.000-04:00

The Supremes should pop open a bottle of champagne: The people who should be most happy about the California elections results are federal judges, especially the justices on the Supreme Court. The decisiveness of both the recall election and the governor's race means that neither Davis nor Bustamante have grounds to pursue an equal protection claim. Plus the ostrich initiative -- that would ban collection of information pertaining to race -- failed too. Its passage would have provoked a bunch of difficult and contentious court cases. So now the Supremes can focus on the important stuff, like whether Virginia can extend a water pipe farther across the Potomac.

2003-10-06T20:03:00.000-04:00

Just in case you thought racism was dead: Here is Pat Robertson talking about Morgan Freeman, in defense, I guess, of Limbaugh's McNabb comments:

He started off playing a chauffeur in 'Driving Miss Daisy,' and then they elevated him to head of the CIA, and then they elevated him to president and in his last role they made him God. I just wonder, isn't Rush Limbaugh right to question the fact, is he that good an actor or not?

2003-10-06T09:35:00.000-04:00

A white mule in the garden: The Cajun humorist Justin Wilson used to tell this story about how a farmer was showing off his garden to a neighbor. The neighbor commented that it was indeed a mighty fine garden but don't you know it would be a whole lot better if it had a white mule in it. All the best gardens feature a white mule. The farmer puzzled over why his garden needed a white mule but, since he needed a mule anyway, he decided that he might as well get a white one.

The story goes on from there but the ESPN-Rush Limbaugh saga reminds me of this the white mule story. Basically some really bright executive at ESPN -- who along with Howard Dean's staff probably thinks the Jets are in Philadelphia -- decided that what ESPN needed to spice up their pre-game show was a clown. I imagine that the other executives reacted about the same as the farmer. "A clown, why do we need a clown for a football show?" "All the other shows have them," came the reply. So the executives looked around and decided that they needed a new analyst anyway, so it might as well be a clown.

So they went and hired Rush Limbaugh. He must of been the logical choice since Jimmy Kimball, Jerry Glanville, Deion Sanders, Dennis Miller, and that doughboy now on Fox were already in use or used up. Except somebody forgot to tell these executives that Rush Limbaugh's brand of humor is the type that provokes protest and scares major advertisers away. Oops. You'd think they'd know that his reservoir of "common fan" musings would dry up faster than his supply of oxycontin. (I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. Neither could Arnold, apparently.)

I just hope ESPN fires the executive who came up with this idea before he suggests they get a Playboy model to do weather reports.

2003-09-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

In search of the mythical championship: Back in March I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about the way tournaments, such as college basketball's March Madness, don't crown a champion in any true sense. This is because of two problems: intransitivity and an insufficient number of games played between teams.

The baseball playoffs start today and so I thought I'd return to this subject as it relates to baseball. The bit about intransivity still applies and doesn't need repeating here. But what about the small-n problem? I think in baseball it's even worse. The reason is because baseball has an attribute that makes it notably different than virtually all other sports. In baseball it's the norm for a team's most important players to not play every day. Obvously I am talking about pitching. Imagine the impact on, say, the Lakers if they could only play Shaq every fifth game, their second best center every fifth game, their third best center every fifth game, etc.

That's what happens in baseball, at least during the regular season. Pedro Martinez or Mark Prior or whomever pitches about every fifth game. For those other games a team must field its second best, third best, and so on pitcher. Thus the probability of a team winning any particular game is dramatically dependent not just on the quality of the opposition but also on who is pitching. Barring injuries, this kind of variation does not occur in basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

Yet, in the playoffs the dynamic changes. Let's say that Team A has two incredible aces and three stiffs for its regular season pitching. Let's say that Team B has a good staff but no aces. (We might think of Team A as the Cubs and Team B as the Braves, whatever). In a five game series Team A can play with a three man rotation, starting one of its aces twice. In a seven game series it probably can get by with a three man rotation, but probably go with a four, and it can start its aces at least twice each, maybe one of them three times. In the 2001 World Series the Diamondbacks used a four pitcher rotation but started Schilling three times and Johnson twice.

The point is that in a short series a team can ride its aces. So let's take the Braves and the Cubs. In a five game series the Cubs have a huge advantage because of Prior and Woods. But if the two teams played a longer series -- nine or eleven games, say -- the chances are very good, probable even, that the Braves would win. (I'm rooting for the Cubs, by the way.) My larger point is simply that the nature of baseball makes the small-n problem even worse. Five game series are silly and I suspect that even seven game series don't really help matters like they do in basketball.

This brings me to a final point. Lot's of people yip about baseball's wild card system. The yipping grew loudest last year when two wild card teams -- the Giants and Angels -- met in the World Series. First, in general I agree with complaints about wild cards. Personally I think that college basketball, pro basketball, hockey, and, to a degree, the NFL have ruined their regular seaon by letting everybody and their dog in the playoffs. My fondest hope is that the NBA championship is one day won by one 38-42 team beating another 38-42 team in the championship series. Now obviously what the MLB has done is no where near as bad as what the NBA has done. But the wild card does water down the regular season a bit and that's bad. Because the regular season is what should matter not this little thing they do at the end. Adding wild cards will help inferior teams win. But so did splitting the leagues into divisions back in 1969, thus creating the LCS. (How was the DH rule a worse idea than this?) Or, for that matter, creating the World Series back in 1903. At least the original world series was best of nine.

2003-09-24T14:52:00.000-04:00

Book Review Roundup: After reviewing the Master of the Senate back in June, I thought I might regularly review the non-political science books that I read. (I'll also skip the untold number of books that I read to my toddler, though it might be kind of interesting to talk about them sometime. Some are great, some are good, some suck.)

Unfortunately, I've let the list of books pile up pretty high before getting around to this. I'll try to do better in the future, but over the next few days I'm going to post brief, impressionistic reviews on the books I've read since Master. Here's the list:

Tim Krabbe - The Rider
David McCullough - John Adams
Pat Toomay - The Crunch
Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley - Salome
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Ann Patchett - Bel Canto
William Berger - Wagner Without Fear
Rob Neyer - Big Book of Baseball Lineups
Augusten Burroughs - Running with Scissors

I think that's the whole list. I'll start off with the Krabbe and Toomey books.

Tim Krabbe -- The Rider
The Rider is one of the those cult favorite type books that I've been meaning to read for a while. It's a novella about a 1-day bike race in France, though it features frequent flashbacks to others races and events in the rider's life. If you are into bike racing -- either as a rider or spectator -- then you will like it a lot. If you are mildly into watching racing then you might enjoy it. It will probably bore a person who has no interest in cycling.

On several occasions I've seen The Rider described as the finest cycling novel ever. I don't know. Obviously we are talking about a small list. I've now read exactly two cycling novels. Despite the protagonist tedious misogyny, I'm slightly more partial to The Yellow Jersey.

Pat Toomay -- The Crunch
I picked up this book after reading an interesting essay that Toomay wrote for Salon. If you are an old Cowboys fan like me you will find the book an interesting, if disturbing, take on the team's true glory years. For example, through anecdotes Toomay shows how the Cowboys organization cynically, and more than a little hypocritically, helped its players avoid the Vietnam War draft.

Even for non-Cowboys fans it's a valuable book mainly because it provides a rare undistilled look at early 1970s professional sports. Basically it is a Ball Four for football. (A lot of these kinds of books came out about this time. The ultimate example, this time about college football, is Meat on a Hoof.

For Atlanta fans there is a great anecdote about Dan Reeves in his less, umm, conservative days. It involves the wives of Tom Landry and Tex Schramm, and a full moon.

2003-09-23T13:56:00.000-04:00

The Last Train to Clarkville: The other day I talked about why I think Wesley Clark's chances of getting the Democratic nomination are nil. The obvious other point to make about Clark is that his candidacy might be about something else. I suspect he really thinks he can win this thing. But he might also think that if he loses he can still be a dealmaker and perhaps even score the vice-presidential slot.

Clark's name started coming up quite a while ago as a possible VP candidate, especially for Dean. So does running for president enhance Clark's chances to run for number two? Yes and no. Let's think about this from the perspective of the presidential nominee. As I've said before, the first rule of choosing a VP nominee is Primum non nocere -- First, do no harm. (This, by the way, is the very reason why the Democratic nominee is not about to make Hillary Clinton the VP candidate.) Right now Clark's downside is unclear. That's because he has never run a major campaign and he's never been vetted by the media in the way that only the national media can vet someone. So if a nominee had to make a VP choice right now, the choice of Clark would be exceptionally foolish. You just don't know if this guy is going to meltdown on the campaign trail or turn up with a campaign-wrecking skeleton in his closet. By running for president now, Clark will be a known quality come convention time. We'll know where he is on issues, we'll know how well he handles a national campaign, and we'll probably know if he beat his dog or dabbed his 2d grade classmate's ponytail in his desk ink well.

On the other hand, by running now Clark guarantees that by convention time he will not be the flavor of the month. Even if he handles himself well on the campaign trail and no skeletons emerge, he'll be, by definition, a loser.

2003-09-23T12:17:00.000-04:00

And the ruling is...: So en banc the 9th circuit says the recall will be in October rather than March. I'll get into this later, but from a practical/constitutional standpoint this was probably the right decision. The real reason the election should have been delayed is because it's a colossal waste of money to hold a special election in October when the state is already holding an election in March.

Except there is nothing unconstitutional about wasting taxpayers' money.

2003-09-19T15:54:00.000-04:00

Celebrities and Generals: I have nothing against Wesley Clark, I just don't understand why he thinks, or anyone thinks, that he can get nominated for president. It seems that just about every four years we get a flavor-of-the-month "non-politician" who the media anoints as a potential super-candidate. This year it is Wesley Clark. Not long ago it was Colin Powell. Before Powell it was Ross Perot. Before Perot it was Lee Iacocca and so on.

As a people we have this weird jaded naivete thing going. We are jaded about all the politicians we know, but then we see someone we like for other reasons -- the movies they filmed, the armies they led, the money they made -- and we just assume that that person will be the perfect president. Inevitably it turns out that Mr. or Ms. Wonderful does not agree with us on every issue, says stupid things, makes mistakes, and after a couple of weeks pretty much looks just like the other candidates.

In a lower level race, like a race for Congress or maybe even governor, Clark might have a chance. But think about the types of voters who dominate the nomination process. Who will be voting in New Hampshire? Who will be caucusing in Iowa? Party activists. Ideologues. People who care and pay attention to politics and issues. Some of these people -- right this second -- might be attracted to a blank-slate war hero celebrity candidate. But that attraction will dissipate fast as Clark is forced to take stands, explain his lack of Democratic credentials, etc. A Schwarzenegger-type campaign will not work with this type of voter. Plus, the guy has never campaigned before and this is no place to figure out how to run a campaign. He will make mistakes and these mistakes will quickly get translated into: "He can't handle the big time." He will find the media hard to deal with now that he is a candidate. His campaign will have trouble getting organized unless he gets some incredibly talented and experienced people to run it for him. (If they are so talented and experienced wouldn't they already be working for someone else?)

To be sure, Clark is a new kind of creature. He combines military credentials with the celebrity shine gained from television. Or, perhaps more correctly, he used his military credentials to gain access to television which then made him a celebrity. That makes him a little different than war heroes past, including Eisenhower. But this goes only so far. Let's consider Eisenhower, since Eisenhower was the last "non-politician" to make it all the way. First, obviously Kosovo was no World War II. Eisenhower's fame, even without television, went way way beyond Clark's. Second, in retrospect Eisenhower was an extraordinary politician. That may be true of Clark, but chances are it is not. Third, after twenty years of Democratic rule the Republicans were desperate to win the White House. Desperate enough to hand the nomination over to a person with no Republican bona fides. The Democrats hate George Bush, and they really want to win the White House, but they are not yet to the point the Republicans were at in 1952. Fourth, it is a different world now. The type of party apparatus that handed the nomination to Eisenhower (and Grant and W.H. Harrison, etc) was far more centralized than it is today. Nominations cannot be won by cultivating party leaders (who care more about power than policy). Rather it has to be done in the trenches with those activists and ideologues I talked about earlier. For this same reason there is no way that Powell would have gotten the nomination from the Republicans in 2000. Powell was smart enough to figure that out....

What about Schwarzenegger in California? Here I think the dynamics are quite a bit different. First, you have the open field plurality voting scheme that makes it possible to win with far less than a majority. This gives novelty candidates like Schwarzenegger an edge. Second, if the election stays in October then the short campaign helps him. He does not have to buy name ID and the short race makes it less likely that he will say something foolish or, as bad, allow himself to be ideologically defined . Finally, the electorate is completely different. Ideologues on the left and right will not vote for Schwarzenegger. That is a given. But that still leaves a large group of independents and tepid Democrats and Republicans. These people will be far more prone to assuming the best about Schwarzenegger. This is why his current strategy of avoiding unscripted moments, like debates, and staying away from issue specifics makes very good sense. But it would be a hard stratagem to maintain until March.

2003-09-19T15:33:00.000-04:00

Those housing prices are sure to go down now!: Crashing planes. Anthrax. Snipers. A massive snowstorm. Exploding manhole covers. The NFL turns the Mall into a mudpit. Now a hurricane.

Is this somehow an indicator of the 21st century? I have internet access but no water.

2003-09-12T08:41:00.000-04:00

Johnny Cash: When NPR led off with a sample of "Jackson," I knew the inevitable had arrived. If I think back to the musicians I enjoyed at five and the musicians I listen to now at forty, the intersecting set is a singleton.

In 1968 a friend of mine had a copy of Ring of Fire. In retrospect I feel sorry for his parents. We would play the A side dozens of times in a row.

2003-09-10T16:04:00.000-04:00

Whither the Liberty Bell?: I visited Philadelphia for the first time the other day. I enjoyed it. I ate at a great restaurant and toured the new Constitutional Center, which is awesome. But my visit reminded me of a question I've had since I was a little kid.

What's the deal with the Liberty Bell?

What exactly is it supposed to signify? An ode to bad craftsmanship? A warning not to import stuff from the British? What? As a symbol of American liberty it's, well, a bit cracked. Why didn't they just melt it down and make it into something really useful -- like bullets for the Revolutionary Army?

Now to make things even worse the bell is getting swankier digs right in front of Independence Hall. I just don't get it.

2003-09-09T21:45:00.000-04:00

Fun with C-Span: Tonight the House passed the DC appropriations bill. It's almost a tradition for Congress to use this bill to carry out particular ideological and partisan agendas. The Democrats did when they were in power and now the Republicans are doing it. Tonight was no exception as, among other things, a school voucher program was inserted into the bill.

Here was the scene: The voucher amendment vote was 207-208 when time expired. It was a near-perfect party-line vote with the Republicans supporting the amendment. At this point ten members from each party had not voted. (Two of the Democrats -- Gephardt and Kucinich -- were up in Baltimore pretending to run for president.) As often happens the speaker held the vote open while Republican operatives scurried about looking for votes. Then came a nice surreal moment. One of the Dems -- I don't know who -- found an open mike and exclaimed: "Is the House physician on duty. Someone is getting his arm broken over here!"

Eventually the Repubs came up with a vote -- 208-208 -- and then a bit later 209 came forward and the gavel came down.

Assuming the Senate goes along, the District is about to get a school voucher program. I'm not going to get into it now, but vthe oucher idea has its theoretical merits. It's also has some disturbing theoretical demerits that are nicely foreshadowed by Hirschman's terrific Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

Vouchers are an idea worth exploring, but, much like abortion, activists on both sides have turned the issue into a litmus test for ideological purity. Consequently,we no longer debate about or experiment with vouchers. Rather, members of Congress just look for ways to score symbolic points with their bases.

That's what this is all about. In truth even the Republican members are not about to try and force vouchers onto their constituencies. There is way too much risk of alienating middle class swing voters. So instead they cynically force vouchers on the District and then they will run back to the relevant activists and say: "See, we are reforming schools just like you wanted."

This just brings us back to the real issue here. Congress did this because they can. They can do this because the District has no representation in Congress. It does not matter that most District citizens almost certainly oppose the voucher program. It does not matter that virtually all of the District's elected officials oppose vouchers. Eleanor Holmes Norton can debate the issue all she wants and she said plenty last night. But floor debate is nothing. It's a dog-and-pony show. Floor debate does not affect policy outcomes. Votes affect outcomes. The power of obstruction in the Senate affects outcomes. If DC had two senators this would not have happened. It would not have even been brought up.

2003-09-05T21:39:00.000-04:00

Hmmm: Okay, so yesterday we are told that the Park Service decided at the last minute to allow ABC/NFL to broadcast commercials on the Mall. Apparently there was a lot of hesitation within the Park Service since, after all, allowing commercials to be broadcast on the Mall is a blatant violation of federal regulations. But then suddenly the Park Service went along. I quoted part of this yesterday, but here is a fuller selection from yesterday's Post:

Vikki Keys, acting superintendent for the Park Service's Mall area, said she decided to allow the showing of commercials once she realized that it was an "event broadcast from the Mall to the Mall."

"Once I understood more about what would occur, I determined that it was in keeping with Park Service guidelines and policy," Keys said.

I still don't know what "Mall to the Mall" means. From the National Mall to the Pentagon City mall? From Mall to shining mall? Clearly she can't mean it was television filmed at the Mall for people at the Mall to watch. As far as I know there is not a football stadium at the Mall, at least not yet.

The more important part of the quote is, "Once I understood more about what would occur..." So I am watching this thing last night and imagine my surprise when President Bush came on doing a commercial for the NFL! You don't think...?

As for the event itself Tom Shales pretty much nailed it:

American bad taste is the most powerful bad taste in the world. That seems to be what was really being celebrated on the Mall last night at an excruciating 55-minute rock concert ostensibly convened to herald the new pro football season and televised live on the struggling ABC network.

Now on for another season of the only sports league in the world -- as far as I know -- that purposely enforces league-wide mediocrity. The day will come when every team will finish with 8-8 records and Paul Tagliabue will have his moment of nirvana.

2003-09-04T18:04:00.000-04:00

Manure by any other name still smells...: Well it turns out the NFL's Mall fest does not have commercials it has "sponsor recognition:"

Rules prohibiting commercial marketing on the Mall do not apply to this week's NFL extravaganza because the promotional aspects constitute "sponsor recognition" and not advertising, National Park Service officials said yesterday.

The decision also allows the National Football League to show tonight's season opener between the Redskins and the New York Jets, including commercials, on Jumbotron screens that will be set up between Third and 14th streets NW.

Check this out:

Vikki Keys, acting superintendent for the Park Service's Mall area, said she decided to allow the showing of commercials once she realized that it was an "event broadcast from the Mall to the Mall."

Well that really clears things up. Mall to the Mall?

Wouldn't it be refreshing if these bureaucrats skipped the Clintonian parsing and just said, "Hey, we just love football, so we decided to hell the with rules, we're having a party."

Anyway, I'm not quite katty enough to take pleasure in the fact that it's rained pretty much none stop all week.

2003-09-04T11:00:00.000-04:00

Estrada bites the dust:

Miguel Estrada, President Bush's embattled nominee for a federal appeals court judgeship, has withdrawn his name from consideration, ending a bitter battle with Senate Democrats who blocked his nomination, administration officials said Thursday.

This was just a matter of time. I'm surprised Pryor hasn't pulled out, too. But what does this really indicate? Is Estrada just tired of the fight? Or have Republicans privately told Estrada that the so called "nuclear" option is a non-starter so that, therefore, his chances of confirmation are nill? I suspect it's the latter.

2003-09-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

Panem et circenses: As you've probably heard, the NFL is starting its season with a multi-day corporate fest. It all leads up to a concert on Thursday just before the Redskins game -- though oddly or not the festival is on the Mall, rather than where the game is actually being played (somewhere in suburban Maryland). When I first heard about this I thought it sounded terribly vapid, and from the looks of the Mall today my first reaction was right.

Some now question whether such an event is improperly commercial for the Mall. I don't know. I tend to agree that this is way different than you normally see there. Sure there are commercial elements to many Mall events -- such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the National Book Festival. I'm a fan of both those events -- especially the Book Festival. But there is a big difference between an event with commercial components and a commercial event, and the NFL festival is nothing but a commercial event. Sure, football is the true national pastime and in some ways the love of football connects many Americans in ways that geography, race, religion, and party cannot. But this event is not about football as a sport, it's mainly about the particular product that the NFL (and Pepsi and dozens of other companies) sells.

Whatever. In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal.

Yet, there is another element to this that is a total disgrace. The Pentagon is tagging along with this as a way to "thank" our military. Thus uniformed military personnel and their families will get VIP treatment at the concert. That's all fine and good, but what is this really about? First, it's a television spectacle for the Bush administration, thus the need for uniforms. (Which are not required, but encouraged.)

Second, it's an inexpensive (read: free) way for the administration to "do something for the troops" while quietly axing veteran's benefits, and while leaving thousands in a dangerous, untenable situation in Iraq. (Hey, I lost my leg and can't get a job, but I got front-row seats for Britney Spears, so it was worth it!)

In other words, it's not bread and circuses. It's just a circus.

2003-08-27T14:44:00.000-04:00

What to do at APSA: I have a request to post something about what new graduate students should do when they visit the American Political Science Assocation (APSA) convention for the first time. (It starts today in Philadelphia.) It's a good question. After more than a decade of attending these things, I still wonder what I should be doing at them. But let's see what I can come up with here.

The first warning I should give about APSA is that it is big. It's by far the biggest political science convention in the world and, frankly, there's just something a little frightening about being in an area filled with thousands of political scientists. How do I put this without provoking trouble -- political scientists aren't the most socially well-adjusted group of people around. (This applies to neither you nor me.) If this is your first convention and you find it just too crowded and hectic, take note that there are lots of smaller conventions out there. But APSA is the one place where virtually all the nooks and crannies of the discipline have a place. Plus, unlike most conventions held in the U.S., this one attracts a large international audience. (Though I fear the current visa chaos will make this year less so.)

The details are laid out in the program but here are the basic formal activities that go on at APSA:

Paper Panels -- these are the backbone of the convention. Usually what happens here is about three or four papers are (hopefully) briefly summarized. One or two discussants then critique the various papers. If time permits the audience might ask questions or the panelists might discuss/argue among themselves. All the papers will belong to a broad category, e.g., Foundations of Political Theory, and they are supposed to share more specific topical or theoretical characteristics, e.g., the work of John Rawls. Sometimes these links can be a bit tenuous. Papers are available online through APSA.

Roundtable Panels: Roundtables feature a group of scholars who discuss a particular topic. This might be a research topic, a discussion of the discipline, the perils of graduate schools, etc. This year I am on a roundtable celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Kenneth Shepsle's Giant Jigsaw Puzzle.

Poster Sessions: Here authors present their papers in poster form, i.e., salient points are posted on a corkboard. Rather than formally present their paper, as with the paper panels, authors accompany their posters and field questions from interested passersby.

Caucus Meetings/Business Meetings: There are many sub-organizations within APSA and many of these hold a meeting during APSA. For example, one group I belong to is the Legislative Studies Section. They always have a business meeting -- mainly giving out awards.

Receptions: Many many university departments, book publishers, and other organizations hold receptions. These tend to be of the veggie platter/cash bar variety.

President's Address: Thursday night features the APSA president's address. This year's will be followed by the APSA's Centennial Celebration reception.

Book Room: Dozens of publishers set up their wares.

Okay, so what you should do if it's your first time at APSA? My best advice is to: just try to soak stuff up. Don't feel like you have to meet everybody, go to everything, etc. Definitely go to panels but don't try to go to a panel during every time slot for every day you are there. You'll burn yourself out.
Paper panels can teach you a lot about what you will be doing in your future career. Just going and watching will help demystify the entire process. it will teach you how to and how not to deliver a conference paper (you'll recognize the difference readily enough). It will give you a good feel for how discussants do their job. It's an excellent place to learn what the "cutting-edge" questions are in the discipline. WARNING: Panels can be deadly dull. But some can be quite interesting if you care about the questions asked. If you go to a bunch of panels that you thought were interesting and come away utterly dismayed at how uninteresting it all seems, this might be a lesson. It might be a sign that political science is not for you, or it might be a sign that you are not interested in the topic you thought you were interested in. APSA is so big and diverse that you might stumble onto something you didn't know existed (and find fascinating). All in all I can't think of a better place to find out what you want to do in political science or even if you want to do political science.

Posters sessions are still good for more informal one-on-one interaction with authors. It's a better way to meet people than just attending a panel. Roundtables are more freewheeling than paper panels and often the most interesting sessions held at APSA.

Virtually all receptions are open to everybody so go to a few. They are a great place to meet people. If you are a starving graduate student you might piece together a free meal. (Hope you like broccoli.) usually the cash bars are way overpriced.

You can't get much better than Theda Skocpol for a presidential address, and I've heard -- though I don't believe it's true -- that the Centennial Celebration has an open bar. (The Holy Grail for most graduate students.)

Business meetings are deadly boring, but they are a good place to put famous names to faces. Finally, definitely set an hour or so for the book room. You can learn a lot about what books are out there, and you can get plenty of ideas about building future syllabi. You might even get a free book and tote bag or two.

Don't feel like you have to be Joe-Networker at your first conference. However, you also shouldn't feel like you have to be an unseen, unheard from peon just because you are a graduate student. Feel absolutely free to ask questions when the chair solicits them during panels. Don't monopolize a person's time, but don't hesitate to introduce yourself at receptions to people you've heard of (or read). Most political scientists, even the famous ones -- famous within our little sandbox, that is -- are nice people. Some are not, but if some social retard treats you rudely you'll at least have a good story to tell about that person for years to come.

2003-08-27T11:39:00.000-04:00

It kind of reminds me of what happened to Jennifer Jason-Leigh's character in The Hitcher: Regardless of how you feel about William Pryor's fitness for the circuit court, it's hard not to feel sorry for him right now. Unless, of course, it's true that he's doing this to help out his judge candidacy (something I don't really believe). See here and here.

2003-08-26T09:58:00.000-04:00

Off again: Sorry for the sporadic posts. I've been traveling a lot. It's off again, this time to a conference in Philadelphia. Yee haw.

2003-08-23T15:35:00.000-04:00

John Travolta should run for Congress: John McPherson has revealed the truth about congressional debate. It's a better method than they used to use.

2003-08-16T21:10:00.000-04:00

Polling 101: An AP story today is headlined: "Poll: Bustamante leads Schwarzenegger."

Bustamante, a Democrat, had the backing of 25 percent of those questioned, compared to 22 percent for Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

...

It had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Uh, no. This is a classic case of the media maiking an assertion on very weak evidence. Let's assume that's it's a well done poll -- reasonable here. Let's also assume that the people who answered the poll really are likely to vote -- a more infy assumption. BUT.., the poll is showing Bustamante at 25 and Schwarzenegger at 22 with a FIVE point margin of error. Thus the true results are:

Bustamante: 20-30
Schwarzenegger: 17-27

In other words, it's a statistical tie. Besides I suspect that for a lot of people's preferences right now are rather fluid, which is also why I put zero credibility behind initial polls that showed the actor with a big lead. Especially for Schwarzenegger support is potentially skin deep, which is a big problem for him. But even if I think Schwarzenegger's chances in this race have been overstated, this poll does not demonstrate that he is behind. Yet.

2003-08-14T20:50:00.000-04:00

It doesn't get much worse than this: Kenneth Arrow and others demonstrated a long time ago that there is no perfect type of election. Any method you choose compromises some set of valuable principles. Here and there I've heard pundits wax ecstatic about the very democratic election California is about to hold for governor. Look at all this choice? Look at how there were virtually no barriers to the ballot so anyone could run? This is a great day for democracy!

Yeah, right. Almost certainly a majority of voters, probably a huge majority of voters, won't get their first choice for governor. They may not get their second, third, fourth, or even fifth choice. Indeed, it might not happen, but it's certainly possible with this kind of voting scheme, that a majority of voters will get their last choice from the list of serious candidates.

Plurality means whomever gets the most votes wins. So in a race with 165 candidates it's possible, though highly implausible, that the winner does so with less than 1% of the vote. Far more likely is a winner with something like 20%.

All of this you knew already, but it is only the beginning.

Off-year elections like this usually draw incredibly small turnouts. But this is such a unique, high profile occurence that it's possible that the turnout will be quite high. Quite high means about 50%. So if the winner gets 20% of the vote then he or she wins with the expressed support of just 10% of the electorate. There's a mandate for you.

Only it gets even worse. Warning: Light math ahead.

Here's a really simple example. Let's say we have 5 voters (V1-V5) who choose among 4 candidates: Orange, Silver, Gray, and Purple. Each voter has his or her own ranking from most liked to least liked and, of course, votes for the most liked candidate. Each voter ranks the candidates as follows:

V1: Gray > Silver > Purple > Orange
V2: Silver > Gray > Purple > Orange
V3: Purple > Silver > Gray > Orange
V4: Orange > Silver > Purple > Gray
V5: Orange > Gray > Silver > Purple

Who wins? Orange (2-1-1-1) with a landslide 40% of the vote. But look at this a little closer. Orange wins because he is the first choice of two true believers. But he was the last choice of the other three voters (fully 60% of those voting). Let's push this even farther and say that not only do V1-V3 rank Orange last, but they consider Orange completely unacceptable as a governor. It doesn't matter. In this kind of election Orange wins.

At this point feel free to define Orange as your worst nightmare: Communist, Fascist, Green, Religious Right, Larry Flynt, Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Carrot Top.

The example is hypothetical but not unrealistic. With the vote spread out over many candidates a candidate with a small but intensely loyal base can win even though that candidate is loathed by everyone else. Just about any other major election method would be better than this. Separate run-off. Instant Run-off. Approval voting. Borda Voting. All are flawed but all are better than this.

2003-08-13T10:59:00.000-04:00

California Follies: Now that I'm back from that mythical region that lies between the East and West coasts I suppose I should say something about California: Uhm, well at least with the recall we don't have to hear about the Kobe Bryant case twenty-four hours a day.

Who benefits from this? The media. Schwarzenegger's presence makes this a superhot story at the slowest news time of the year. So the media is thrilled. They get to pretend they are covering "substantive" news which then gives them cover to talk about Bryant and Peterson all they want in between. Besides, elections are the one kind of important political topic that the media like to cover, because elections can be presented as sports events.

President Bush. This is nothing but good news for Bush. Not because he might get a Republican ally in Sacramento -- that's an overrated asset -- but because this story distracts from the only other "substantive" news story of the moment: That little business about why we went to war with Iraq coupled with the continued attacks against our troops.

Who else? Local television stations that pick up some extra advertising cash during a slow season. Campaign consultants. Whatever vendor prints the giant ballots. Comedians. Video rental outlets who suddenly find Pumping Iron a hot item.

In other words, lots of people. Just not the people who supposedly this is for: the taxpayers and voters of California. They get to pay for a hugely expensive (at least $66 million, probably a lot more), utterly unnecessary election that probably will yield them a toxic divided government until 2006. What a bargain?

I'll talk about this tomorrow, but to make it all worse the election rules that govern this election are terrible. Terrible. You'd be hard pressed to find a more undemocratic way to elect someone and still be able to call it an election.

2003-08-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

DARPA for the traveling masses: On the 1st I was on a flight to Iowa (Their motto: Corn. Pigs. Presidential Candidates) and flipped open American's flight magazine. Imagine my surprise when I came across a puff-piece on DARPA. Oh, the timing. Probably because of the timing it made for interesting reading. It even included a nice bit of foreshadowing: "Pushing the envelope as DARPA does, though, can stir up occasional controversy." I'd say. Is it just me or did this futures market idea provoke more "outrage" than the far more potentially pernicious Total Information Awareness business?

Check out the piece on DARPA. They claim more innovations than Al Gore. (The internet, even.) My hope is that this most recent faux pas -- not a bad idea, just bad politics -- won't cause permanent damage. (Though I shed no tears for John Poindexter who betrayed his military oath years ago, and should have spent some time busting rocks in Leavenworth, followed by a tour as a cook's mate. But I digress.)

2003-07-31T16:12:00.000-04:00

Revisiting the Iraqi Freedom rally: I've looked at rally events within the context of the Iraq war several times. Most recently here. Bush's approval ratings have become a big topic in the press lately, so I thought I'd take a look at the most recent polls. As Gallup reports, Bush is now at 58 points. Adding this new data point to the chart I've shown before produces this:

As before I'm comparing Iraqi Freedom with a few other more or less comparably important episodes in recent U.S. history. As the figure indicates, Bush's approval is now back to about the level it was just before the war commenced. Thus it turns out to be a very typical rally event. There is a spike -- fourteen points in this case -- and then a fast decay.

A couple of points. First, I think this indicates that current press reports that Bush's polls are dropping due to the Niger uranium scandal and the continued chaos in Iraq are overblown. Of course it's impossible to completely disentangle what is going on with these numbers. But this rally event is so typical of past events that I'm inclined to say that the recent drop is almost completely the normal wearing off of war passion.

Second, from a historical perspective Bush is in pretty good shape. Looking at other presidents at similar points in their first terms, he is doing well. Yet, as everyone knows from Bush I, things can change very very fast. The first President Bush was in the low seventies at this time in 1991.

2003-07-31T11:15:00.000-04:00

Excellent use of vertical space: Here's a rental listing in Alexandria:

$500
2 Bed, 1 Bath
3 Sq. Ft

2003-07-29T11:13:00.000-04:00

This calls for a remake of Trading Places: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the Pentagon is setting up a futures market on the Middle East. Rather than trading in oil, pork bellies, or elections, this futures market will be, "trading futures contracts that deal with underlying fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus on the economic, civil, and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. involvement with each."

I think you can look at this from two angles: an intelligence gathering perspective and a public relations/politics perspective. Frankly, in principle I don't think this is such a bad idea from the perspective of gathering information. Futures markets can be pretty good predictors of what will happen because investors have a strong incentive -- making money -- to glean good information from bad. In a sense, such a market is an efficient way of making intelligence analysts out of thousands of citizens (assuming the market became popular.)

Furthermore -- and I wonder whether or not the people at DARPA realize this -- such a market might become the ultimate 'no spin zone' for Middle East politics. As I said, in a futures market investors have the incentive to separate good information from bad information, this means that wise investors try to filter out propaganda. Thus, the market might say something very different than the government. What if prior to the Iraqi war there was a market on whether Iraq had a viable nuclear arms program? (The trick is to appropriately define issues such as what constitutes a viable program and what constitutes proof; otherwise a market won't function properly.) What would such a market have said about the credibility of the Bush administration's claims? I suspect such a market would have indicated far more skepticism than what we saw in the public opinion polls. (Voicing an opinion in a poll is virtually costless, so respondents feel no obligation to actually know something about the topic.)

Before speaking to politics, there is another factor here to consider. Let's say one of the markets is predicting some seriously traumatic event in the Middle East, like the overthrow of a key U.S. ally. Let's make this more concrete by setting a share's value in cents equal to the believed probability that some event will happen. So, if you believe that an overthrow will happen with .75 probability, you as an investor will want to buy shares being sold for less than $.75, and you will want to sell shares for more than $.75. Let's say that the market reaches $.75 -- so the market is saying that there is a .75 probability that an overthrow will occur within X period of time. The U.S. then combines this information with other forms of intelligence in a way that convinces U.S. foreign policy leaders that we have to intervene. So we intervene and prevent the overthrow. How does this interfere with the market? Well, in theory investors will take the possibility of U.S. interference into account, and adjust their investment decisions accordingly. This might drop the market share to, say, $.50 because enough investors believe the U.S. will prevent an overthrow.

This is a problem because DARPA wants to use the market to learn about the Middle East and then adjust U.S. policy accordingly. Yet, this ability to adjust U.S. policy potentially distorts the market and thus renders the market less useful to U.S. policy makers in the first place. Perhaps a well-designed market would overcome these problems -- I think it is largely an empirical question. But the designers of this market will not get the chance to find out. It might be a good idea from an intelligence standpoint. From a public relations and political standpoint it is a terrible idea, and congressional pressure will nix this in less time than it takes William Bennett to drop a grand on video poker. There is no way to insulate this plan from the charge that it is nothing more than crass gambling on death and destruction. Here is one choice selection from today's NYT:

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in — and is sponsored by the government itself — people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?"

UPDATE: Who knows, Bennett might have been able to blow $2k in the amount of time this took. I suspect someone's career just hit a nasty roadbump.

2003-07-24T08:56:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't: For rather obvious economic reasons U.S. pharmaceutical companies don't want their drugs reimported from Canada and Europe. But for two reasons the political case is a difficult one for the drug companies to make. First, consumers, especially seniors, are increasingly angry over the high price of drugs in the U.S., as contrasted with Canada. Seniors as a demographic vote and they are well organized politically. Second, the drug companies are in the tricky position of having to seemingly argue against free trade. In truth, the situation is rather more complicated but complicated arguments don't sell very well in politics.

When you are on the losing side of a political fight one possible winning strategy is to transform what the debate is all about. It is usually hard to do, but clever reframing of the debate can rearrange the existing political coalitions to your favor. This is what the late political scientist William Riker called heresthetics . The drug companies tried to do this with the reimportation issue. Rather than make the fight solely about economics, the drug companies tried to reframe the issue as one about abortion. They wrote and funded a letter -- sent under the auspices of the Traditional Values Coalition -- making the argument that reimportation will greatly increase the availability of RU-46 in the United States. You can see why the drug companies came up with the idea. After all, many of the very same conservative legislators who are attracted to free trade arguments, and who have a lot of senior constituents, are also pro-life. So by transforming the debate away from free trade and expensive drugs to one about abortion, the drug companies hoped to peel off enough conservative legislators to stop reimportation.

Unfortunately for the drug companies the ploy was so incredibly cynical and so blatant that it has completely backfired. And many of those very same conservative legislators are now totally pissed at both the drug companies and the TVC. A few choice selections from yesterday's Post:

House Republicans were so offended by the mailings that they recently barred the TVC and its leader, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, from attending future meetings of the Values Action Team, an umbrella group of socially conservative Republicans. "We stand united in opposition to the unethical and unacceptable tactics you have employed to force pro-life members of Congress to support your views," Rep. Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) said in a letter to Sheldon.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), an abortion opponent who was targeted by the TVC mailings, said in an interview: "It makes me so angry I could spit."

...

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and several other conservatives are blaming the drug companies for the mailing campaign, though they offered no specific evidence linking the mailing to [the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America] or individual companies.

"I do not understand . . . how a religious organization can be manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry to do this sort of thing," Burton said. "They are supposed to be moral people. And yet I am confident, in fact I am dead sure, that the Traditional Values Coalition did not have the money to mail this kind of trash out to congressional districts all across the country."

Oops.

2003-07-18T13:44:00.000-04:00

They really need to keep this guy from talking to the press: Check out Rumsfeld assistant Lawrence Di Rita says about our learning curve in Iraq. (It's from the LA Times via Atrios.)

Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We're going to get better over time," promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. "We've always thought of post-hostilities as a phase" distinct from combat, he said. "The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum

"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said. "We'll get better as we do it more often."

I assume he didn't really mean what this sounds like he meant. I assume he really meant something like, "Sometime in the future, hopefully not soon, we'll have another war, and if that conflict leads to a post-war occupation then the lessons we learned in Iraq will prove invaluable."

Right?

2003-07-18T12:14:00.000-04:00

DC and Gun Control: This is a classic case of why DC should be a state (or part of a state).

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wants District residents to be able to own handguns legally, reviving a pitched debate over gun control in a city with some of the toughest restrictions in the nation.

The D.C. Personal Protection Act, introduced Tuesday by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), would repeal the District's ban on handguns, end strict registration requirements for ammunition and other firearms, and lift prohibitions on the possession or carrying of weapons at homes and workplaces. The legislation also would loosen the District's definition of a machine gun, possession of which is subject to additional sanction. The term now includes many semiautomatic weapons.

The issue for me is not whether gun control is a good idea or not. The issue for me is not whether this question is best decided at the federal or state level. The issue for me is that Congress can pass this sort of thing utterly without input from the American citizens who happen to reside in the District of Columbia. They don't get a vote and they don't have elected officials in Congress to leverage their opinions. Policy is imposed on the District by legislators motivated by concerns completely divorced from the District. This gun control measure -- and the education voucher's initiative -- are not about what's going on in the district they are about what's going on with interest-group and electoral politics in places like Utah. It's disgraceful.

2003-07-15T11:58:00.000-04:00

Maybe he can also send another hurricane to New Jersey: According to CNN, Pat Robertson is urging his TV audience to pray that God "remove three justices from the Supreme Court so they could be replaced by conservatives." Let's think about what this really means. How do justices get "removed" from the Court? They die. So Mr. Robertson is asking God to kill three Supreme Court justices. Now, if Pat Robertson really has God's "ear" then what he is doing is threatening the life of several justices. Isn't there a law against this? Of course, at his trial Robertson's defense lawyers might want to argue that he was not threatening a justice since he, in fact, enjoys no such position on God's staff of advisors. In other words, he could just admit that he is nothing but a charlatan intent on duping good Christian people out of their money.

UPDATE: Apparently he only wants God to convince the justices to "retire." How very benevolent. Here's a quote from Robertson's website:

One justice is 83 years old, another has cancer, and another has a heart condition. Would it not be possible for God to put it in the minds of these three judges that the time has come to retire? With their retirement and the appointment of conservative judges, a massive change in federal jurisprudence can take place.

2003-07-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

DC Taxation and Representation: I have not talked about the issue much here, but I'm a strong believer in DC statehood. Citizens of the District of Columbia have no representation in the U.S. Senate and only token non-voting representation in the U.S. House. Unlike the citizens of other federally controlled territories, such Puerto Rico, DC residents pay federal incomes residents. As the license plates say, it truly is "Taxation without Representation."

Frankly it's hard to find a more clear-cut issue than this one. I don't know of a single principled reason for denying DC statehood or at least full representation in Congress or letting DC become part of Maryland, something Maryland opposes. (And no, the statement "If you don't like the fact that DC isn't a state then move somewhere else," is not an argument of principle, but a false dichotomy.) So why isn't DC a state? For years I think the explanation could be boiled down to simple racism. Despite support from people like President Eisenhower, power over this issue largely resided with the Southern Democrats in Congress, and they did not want a black majority state. Today opposition comes mainly from Republicans, who oppose DC statehood simply because the new state would add two Democrats to the Senate.

I bring this up today because there are some interesting things afoot in the DC statehood movement. First, is the recent proposal by Tom Davis (R-VA) to increase the size of the House to 437 with one of the new representatives going to DC and the other to Republican-dominant Utah. This idea is pragmatic and practical, though it leaves out what is by far the more important issue, the Senate. But if you look at as a start, rather than an end, then I don't see anything wrong with this idea. The second development concerns the DC presidential primary, which despite my earlier doubts is meeting with some success.

Finally, this simmering idea about a commuter tax is heating-up. (Or hotting up, as Phil Liggett would say.) Currently there is a lawsuit against the federal ban on DC imposing a commuter tax. Today's news is that the DC Council is joining the suit. DC has an economic justification for the tax. Hundreds of thousands of commuters pour into DC everyday -- I'm one of them -- and use local services like sewage, roads, and fire and police protection, and really do not pay for them. A commuter tax is hardly unfair and certainly not unheard of. But, it's a wedge issue. Cities -- especially DC since it lacks congressional representation -- needs a regional alliance of its politicians and citizens. A commuter tax proposal splits that alliance. It will assuredly force even DC-friendly politicians, like Tom Davis, to go with his constituents' interests. That is after all what he is elected to do. Plus, as a spokesperson for Davis notes in the article, the congressional ban is almost certainly constitutional. Just because something is unfair doesn't mean it is unconstitutional. So if a lawsuit is frivolous, and it pisses off your allies, why do it?

At any rate, there are lots of websites out there that address DC statehood and related issues. Most useful is a series of articles by Mark David Richards on a wide range of political and legal issues pertaining to DC statehood. His articles are housed atDC Watch . There are also a couple of sites addressing the primary: Let's Free DC is a blog connected to the site DC First.

I have another idea. If DC residents cannot have representation then take away the taxation. Make DC exempt from the income tax. That would transform the political dynamics of the situation since lots of people, maybe even some Republicans, would then want to move to DC.

2003-07-11T14:27:00.000-04:00

What I don't get about the current filibusters: Here's another piece about the simmering battle over judicial nominees. Here's the most interesting bit: "Frist tried this week to move the Michigan nominees straight to the full Senate without a committee hearing. Democrats blocked the maneuver." To pull this off Frist needed unanimous consent of the floor. Obviously the Democrats are monitoring floor action to prevent this kind of thing.

The article goes on to talk about the pending Pryor hearings in Judiciary:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to soon tackle another controversial nominee, Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, who is up for a seat on Atlanta's 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Democrats and liberal groups strongly oppose Pryor...But Republicans hold a one-seat committee advantage and have used that edge to vote out all of Bush's nominees so far.

Some groups are lobbying Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, hoping he will vote against Pryor. Specter generally supports gay and abortion rights -- both of which Pryor vehemently opposes.

But Specter may have hinted his support for the nominee Wednesday with an apparent slip of the tongue when he talked about discussions of "Judge Pryor." Pryor has never held a judgeship.

He added: "I've never applied a litmus test on a Supreme Court nominee."

The Specter stuff is confusing. The bit about calling Pryor a judge probably is just an easy to make slip of the tongue. But what's with Specter's comments about litmus tests and Supreme Court nominees? Pryor has not been nominated to the Supremes. Is Specter being really coy -- he doesn't apply a litmus test to Supreme Court nominees but he does apply one to lower court nominees -- or is this quote taken out of context? I suspect the latter.

Regardless, given that Specter faces primary opposition in 2004 I have trouble believing he will oppose Pryor. So Pryor escapes Judiciary and will then join Estrada and Owen on the filibuster float.

Which brings me to a question. I have been meaning to bring this up now for quite a few weeks. I've yet to see anyone bring this point up: Why don't the Republicans fight the filibusters the old fashioned way: By going to the mattresses (or, more correctly, the cots)? One of the key ways that the Senate used to fight filibusters was by forcing the filibusterers to hold the floor and keep talking until they give up. Think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Now, if you think about one-senator filibusters -- like Strom Thurmond's 1957 record breaker -- the way to beat the fillibuster is to just make the individual keep talking until exhaustion or biological necessities intervene. (There is a great story about Estes Kefauver that I'll save for another time.) However, the Democrats would play tag-team filibuster, and since they would be working on the Executive calendar (used for confirmations), I don't believe individual senators would be limited to speaking only once. Thus the Democrats could go for weeks and weeks and weeks.

But think about what that would mean? The filibuster would attract intense media and public attention, and I think under these circumstances that eventually the public would turn against the Democrats because the Republicans would keep saying "all we want is a fair vote, isn't that democracy?"

One of the biggest mistakes the Senate ever made was adopting a rules change in the early 1960s that allowed filibustered bills to go into a type of suspended animation -- or onto a different "track" -- so that the Senate could continue business without disruption. This was a mistake because it made the filibuster so painless for everyone. But, I don't believe there is anything preventing the Senate from choosing to fight the filibuster the old way. It would be painful for the senators -- because everyone, not just the filibusterers would have to stay -- but fighting it this way would transform the politics. It seems like a much better idea then the "nuclear option" and the other ideas the Republicans keep talking about.

2003-07-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

More Blue Slip Wars: It looks like the Republicans are about to ignore a double blue slip rejection (where both senators from a state return negative blue slips.) This is the latest step in the war over 6th Circuit nominees from Michigan. From yesterday's CQ Today Midday Update:

The nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit have been held up by Michigan Democrats Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, who remain angry at the way the Senate treated former President Bill Clinton's nominees to the same court. Levin and Stabenow have insisted that some of Clinton's
nominees be given another chance....Both have returned negative "blue slips"...But Senate Republicans are mulling whether to hold Judiciary Committee hearings on the nominees..."I'm sure I'm going to be pushed into holding hearings," Judiciary Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said today.

Update: I took the above from the Midday update. Here's the fuller article at CQ.com.

2003-07-07T15:02:00.000-04:00

It takes a lot of luck: Lance Armstrong has won four TdFs in part because he is an extraordinary athlete. But it also takes a lot of luck. In 1999 Alex Zulle was crossing the notorious Passage du Gois -- it's underwater most of the day -- when a group in front of him crashed. He lost six minutes. He ended up finishing second to Armstrong by about seven and a half minutes. Who knows how the dynamics of the race -- especially given the pressure on a then relatively weak U.S. Postal team -- might have changed had Zulle been ahead of the crash rather than behind it. In Saturday's Prologue (a really short individual time trial) David Millar had a chain slip -- which he fixed on the fly -- and just barely came in second. Then yesterday a spectacular crash took down the three top American riders: Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and Tyler Hamilton. The latter two are done with broken bones. Armstrong is fine. It takes a lot of luck.

UPDATE: He has two fractures in his collarbone but Tyler Hamilton is still in it. I can't imagine that he'll be able to compete for the GC now, but you have to admire his guts.

2003-07-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

Ode to the Tour: It puts me among a puny fraction of North Americans, but my favorite sporting event is the Tour de France. It's better than the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the NBA and NHL Finals. It's better than any car race (yawn) or golf tournament (bigger yawn). It's better than Wimbledon, or the Ashes, or the Aussie Rules Grand Final. It's even better than the Olympics or the World Cup, though both these quadrennial events have their moments. Unlike any other event the Tour brings together pageantry, drama, danger, endurance, individual sports, teams sports, strategy, and skill into an extraordinary three week festival.

You want variety? Think about how many different competitions are going on at once. First, and best known, is the General Classification which is the competition for the fastest overall time in completing the tour. This is Lance Armstrong's target. Then there is the Points competition, which more or less goes to the best sprinter. The King of the Mountains contest goes to the best mountain climber and the Youngest Rider contest goes to the under-25 rider who places highest in the GC. Then there is the team competition, for the overall team that gets to Paris the fastest. Combine these competitions for the overall race with the 21 stages, each themselves a separate, highly prestigious competition. (There are even races within the individual stage races.) And then stages themselves differ dramatically, each offering a different set of dynamics that plays to the strengths of different types of bikers. Some end up with a high-speed bunch sprint at the end. Some lend themselves to break-aways where one or more riders get ahead of the main pack (peloton) and then try desperately to hang on for the win. Some stages feature brutal 8,000 foot mountains. Then there are the time trials where it is just the individual, and sometimes a team, against the clock.

You want pageantry? The Tour is one great big colorful traveling extravaganza. Sometimes it even has police raids. It's got obsessed, wacky fans who can sometimes literally reach out and touch the action. (And the price of admission is free.) There is a large variety of colorful uniforms with the contest leaders sporting trophy (or target, depending on how you look at) jerseys: Yellow for GC, Green for Points, Red-Polka dotted for King of the Mountains, and White for the Youngest Rider.

You want danger? Imagine going down a rain-slicked mountain road at 65 miles an hour on nothing but a couple of tires no wider than your thumb. Or imagine being in the middle of two dozen cyclists bumping and shoving at more than 40 miles an hour. One mistake and everybody goes down. Hard. Football linebackers are wimps compared world-class sprinters. I have not seen a comparision but when you add up serious injuries and deaths, cycling must rate near the top of dangerous sports. Broken bones are a given and cyclists die far too often. Andrei Kivilev, a wonderful rider who was in the Yellow Jersey for a while in 2001, died last March. Fabio Casartelli, who was a teammate of Armstrong's on the Motorola team, is the most recent Tour death. He died on a steep mountain descent in 1995.

How about endurance? Over 23 days this year's Tour riders will race in 21 stages for a total of more than 2000 miles. Oh, and they go right through the Pyrenees and Alps. Marathoners are wimps in comparison.

How about strategy? This is why I love the Tour. Every stage presents a variety of formidable collective action problems. I will give just one example. Let's say you are in a breakaway with nine other guys. It's fifty miles to the finish line. Now, if all of you work together -- sharing time blocking wind at the front -- then the chances are good that all nine of your will reach the finish line ahead of the pack. Ah, but which one of you will win the stage? Chances are it will be rider with the freshest legs? You can stay fresh by refusing to share the work. You stay in back. But, of course, if no one agrees to do work at the front, if your little breakaway becomes a disorganized blob and what inevitably happens is the peloton washes past you like a wave.

Unfortunately the Tour commits two cardinal sins, sins that guarantee that it will remain a marginal sport in the U.S. Americans rarely do well at it, a fact that makes Lance Armgstrong's success even more amazing, given how few Americans have ever even ridden in the Tour. (By the way, almost certainly this year has the strongest set of American riders ever. Aside from Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer are legitimate contenders for a top ten GC finish.) Second, and the gravest sin of all, it is not a sport that translates well on television.

2003-07-04T23:44:00.000-04:00

Let's not let petty facts get in the way of a good diatribe: Here is what Charles Krauthammer says in a recent column:

A foreigner might then ask: What exactly is your Constitution? Now we know the answer. The Constitution is whatever Justice Sandra Day O'Connor says it is. On any given Monday.

That modifier is crucial, because she does change her mind, and when she does, so does the Constitution. Seventeen years ago, she ruled anti-sodomy laws constitutional. Now she thinks otherwise.

Uhh no. Seventeen years ago she sided with the majority in a Bowers decision that declared that a sodomy law -- in this case a sodomy law that made no distinction by sexual orientation -- did not violate constitutional privacy protections. This time around she declared that the Texas law in Lawrence violated the constitutional Equal Protections since it criminalized only same-sex sodomy. In her decision she made a point of stating that she still believed privacy did not apply and that Bowers should stand.

It sounds pretty damn consistent to me. And am I only the one who found this business of our being held captive by her changing mind more than a little sexist?

2003-07-02T10:54:00.000-04:00

The Presidential Politics of Corn (isn't always as it appears): I think it is easy to overstate the importance of the Iowa caucus, the first significant event in the presidential nomination sweepstakes. (I'm sure I'll be back on this topic later.) Iowa -- with New Hampshire, the first primary -- acts as a filter, not an anointer. Yet, it's hard to deny that candidates have to take Iowa seriously and this gives the state important policy leverage, especially where it concerns corn, the National Crop of Iowa.

Here is an article I came across while in Omaha. It tells the story of how Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, and Graham all recently voted to boost ethanol consumption in the United States. Wrapped up in the flimsiest of conservation bows, the ethanol program is really about pork. No, not the other favorite product of Iowa (they love their pigs, believe me). Rather this regards the pork of the "please send me your tax dollars" variety. It turns out that in 1994 Lieberman, Kerry, and Graham voted against the ethanol program. Now, suddenly, for some reason, all three have seen the ethanol-fueled light.

The article draws the obvious conclusion, that each senator switched solely because of the Iowa caucus. (Edwards was not yet a senator in 1994.) It's an easy conclusion to reach if you think about the way the campaign works. In contrast to the other states, candidates spend months and months in Iowa and New Hampshire, going from small meeting to small meeting. And in the Iowa version of these intimate soirees, the candidates inevitably get asked, point blank, what they think about the ethanol question. Unlike most policy areas this one offers virtually no waffle room. For Iowans you are for it or against it, and candidates who are against it won't do well there. Thus, most candidates sign off the ethanol program. (In 2000 John McCain maintained his opposition to the program; he finished fifth in Iowa, behind even Keyes and Bauer.)

Yet, always the social scientist I'm a little unconvinced by the article. So the three senators switched their votes. Does this necessarily mean they did it because of Iowa? Maybe it really was because circumstances had changed since 1994. Namely, in 1994 a prominent ethanol alternative was MTBE, which later proved to be a major environmental hazard.

So let's go to the videotape. Fifty senators remain in the Senate from 1994. Of that group, twenty-seven voted against ethanol the first time around. Were there any of this group, aside from the current presidential candidates, who voted pro-ethanol in 2003? Yes. Plenty.

Here is a list of all the 1994 anti-ethanol senators who voted pro-ethanol in 2003: Biden (D-DE), Bingaman (D-NM), Breaux (D-LA), Byrd (D-WV), Cochran (R-MS), Domenici (R-NM), Hatch (R-UT), Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman (D-CT), Lott (R-MS), Murray (D-WA), Rockefeller (D-WV), Shelby (was D, now R-AL), and Stevens (R-AK). Out of the twenty-three original ethanol opposers, fourteen voted in favor of ethanol in 2003. Sure, so Kerry and Lieberman were part of this list, but frankly it is extremely hard to say their switch on Iowa came about because they are running for president, given that twenty-one other senators who are not running for president -- and most of these will never run for president -- switched their votes, too. What about Bob Graham? It turns out that while he did oppose ethanol in 1994, he did not even vote this time around. So it is misleading to say Graham "...helped the Senate pass a measure..." boosting ethanol consumption.

2003-06-27T10:50:00.000-04:00

On Stevens, Kennedy, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas: Well, the Supremes certainly know how to go out with a bang. In the last week they upheld affirmative action, overturned a death penalty case, decided a stealthly little redistricting/race case, and, of course, waxed the nation's sodomy laws.

Boy howdy.

I want to touch on some issues related to the sodomy case. First, no one in the press seems to have noticed this, but I'm struck at the role that John Paul Stevens played in this case. He wrote one of the dissents in Bowers, so you just know he was itching to write the majority decision in Lawrence. It was his call. On the Court the Chief Justice gets to assign the opinion if he is in the initial majority. If he is not, then the choice goes to the most senior justice in the initial majority. Thus for this case Stevens got to make the assignment, since Rehnquist sided with the minority. Stevens could have kept the opinion for himself. Instead, he gave it to Kennedy. It was a brillant strategic move. By giving the case to the most conservative member of the 5-4 "privacy" majority, Stevens guaranteed that the five-member majority would stay together. Were Stevens to write the decisions it was very possible that eventually Kennedy would get coopted by the opposition. (This might have led to a complicated split decision with five votes for overturning the Texas law, but only four for overturning Bowers, or O'Connor might have flipped to other side thus leading to the upholding of Bowers and the Texas law.)

In the end Kennedy wrote a decision that I doubt strayed very far at all from what Stevens himself would have written. (It is in a way reminiscent of the way Blackmun wrote Roe as liberal or even more liberal than Douglas, who desperately wanted the opinion for himself, would have written it.) Kennedy is a rather enigmatic figure. He is a conservative justice, both in terms of his judicial philosophy and his personality. (He is a devout Catholic, for example.) Yet, he wrote a decision that symbolically, even more than substantively, strikes a powerful blow for the civil rights of gays and lesbians: "When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice," (p. 6).

If you look at his overall voting record, it is very hard to characterize Kennedy as anything other than a conservative. Yet, his reputation among conservative observers is really rather spotty. He has the reputation of being vulnerable to liberal persuasion, supposedly because he wants to be liked and praised in the press (the so-called "Greenhouse Effect," after NYT reporter Linda Greenhouse.) This reputation was dramatically enhanced by Kennedy's participation in writing Planned Parenthood v. Casey . Well, if conservatives were griping about him after Casey, I can only imagine what they will be saying now.

As for O'Connor, I suspect that people will make all kinds of assumptions and assertions about her here. People will say that she was unable to admit she was wrong in Bowers and thus she had to go the Equal Protection route. Thus her concurring opinion. (The decision was 6-3 on overturning the Texas law but only 5-4 on relying on Substantive Due Process (privacy protections in this context) to overturn Bowers.) People continue to say that she has no real judicial philosophy -- as if liberal and conservative are the possible choices -- and thus always goes for the compromise decision (as with the Michigan cases.) Whatever. You can make the case -- as I largely did the other day -- that the Equal Protection route has the wider reaching implications. Sure, the privacy route directly affects more laws, since it nullifies all sodomy laws, not just those criminalizing gay sex. But I believe it's the Equal Protection route that promises gays and lesbians things like marriage and open membership in the military. It's very hard to make any kind of a privacy case for those items, which is a big part of the reason why people are wrong in framing this decision as 1:) mainly about homosexuality; and 2) a decisive step on the path towards much stronger civil rights for gays and lesbians. O'Connors decision, its explicit denials aside (see p. 7 of O'Connors concurrence), were it the majority opinion would have laid a stronger groundwork for gay equality.

To be sure, the decision is important for gays and lesbians. It is important for symbolic reasons, as I've said, and it does have key substantive effects for homosexuals, too. For examples, in adoption cases judges have presumed that gays and lesbians were criminals because of the sodomy laws. So in Virginia, for example, a gay couple may be denied adoption not because they are gay per se but rather because as a couple they are assumed to have criminal sex. In contrast, if my wife and I, as residents of Virginia, attempted to adopt a child a judge would make no such presumption, since as a couple we have the option of engaging in strictly sodomy-free sex. This decision takes away this presumption of guilt for gay couples and, more generally, it carves out a zone of privacy for intimate relations between consenting adults, whatever their orientation.

This then brings me to Scalia. Without question Scalia is among the most intellectually brilliant judges to ever sit on the Court. Unfortunately, I suspect that when scholars, including conservative scholars, look back at Scalia's full career they will view it as largely one of opportunities lost. Here again Scalia had an opportunity to write a measured, powerful legal dissent to a case, a dissent that might form the basis for a future reversal, the way Stevens's dissent formed a basis for the eventual reversal of Bowers. Instead Scalia chose to write a screed. For the most part he demonstrates that he just can't get over Casey, so he chooses to make this case about Casey. Why is, he asks, the precedent of Bowers so unimportant when this same writer (Kennedy) participated in the argument that Roe was a crucial precedent. To be sure, Scalia makes some good points, he just does not develop them very well because he'd rather engage in vitriol and sky-is-falling slippery slope scenarios then actually put his brains and writing skills to use. In the end his comparison of Roe to Bowers is utterly hollow, especially given the way that one of the Bowers majority (Powell) later completely disavowed his Bowers vote. Really, Scalia should have celebrated that the Court had the good sense -- from his perspective -- to disavow Equal Protection in this case and he should have then gone on to muster a powerful argument about the very flimsy constitutional ground upon which Roe and now Lawrence reside: the right to privacy. I wonder if conservatives realize just how terrible a Chief Justice Scalia would make. I think he would demonstrate an uncanny ability to turn potential conservative victories into conservative defeats. Perhaps, the Democrats should actually hope for a Scalia appointment when (if?) Rehnquist retires. ("Oh, please don't put me in the briar patch...")

Then there is Thomas. In a deliciously concise dissent he basically says something like what I said the other day: This is a really dumb law, but it's not our job to tell legislatures not to pass dumb laws. Of course, as I'm sure many many pundits will point out, he also says that he does not believe that the Constitution includes a right to privacy, which directly contradicts his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee way back when. How long before someone calls for his impeachment for perjury? I mean, perjury is an impeachable offense, right?

2003-06-26T12:24:00.000-04:00

Quote on Bowers: I'm just in the early bits but here' s a rather decisive quote (p. 3): "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, is not correct today, and is hereby overruled."

2003-06-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

Goodbye sodomy laws?: The early press reports have the Supreme Court striking down the Texas sodomy law on privacy grounds. Apparently it was a 6-3 decision in whole or part. Kennedy wrote, joined by Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and Ginsburg. O'Connor apparently agreed in part but wrote separately. Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas disstented. So the split is pretty classic. I am always very dubious about initial press reports.

2003-06-25T08:02:00.000-04:00

Waiting for Lawrence v. Texas: The two Michigan cases continue to garner a tremendous amount of attention, deservedly so since it is a case that might have changed things dramatically. It seems to me that the issues in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger presented rather straightforward legal and political issues (as difficult as those issues are to resolve). The case that really intrigues me though is Lawrence v. Texas. This is the kind of case where I'd like to be a "fly on the wall" during private Court deliberations.

At first blush this case looks simple. Texas law criminalizes same-sex sodomy while leaving heterosexual sodomy unregulated. I don't have proof, but I suspect that most Americans look at sodomy laws as rather silly governmental intrusions into the private sexual conduct of consenting adults, whatever their orientation. But just because a law is stupid doesn't mean it's unconstitutional. Legislators make dumb laws all the time. For good reason, the Courts are always hesitant to override laws passed by democratically-elected representatives. A generally agreed upon standard of "stupid" doesn't fly; after all, in theory the Texas legislature could simply repeal the sodomy law, if enough Texans see it as stupid. (I say in the theory because even if most Texans oppose the law (no idea) it's still very hard to pass legislation opposed by a committed minority.)

So, what is the constitutional basis for tossing the Texas sodomy law? Here is where things get really interesting. There are two main routes: equal protection or privacy. At first blush either or both seem really simple. But when you push at it a little you realize that both paths get rather tortuous and, to mix metaphors, those cans of worms start getting opened.

Let's take equal protection first. The case here is that in Texas, unlike in some other states, only same-sex sodomy is illegal. Thus the legality of a private, consensual oral sex, for example, depends soley on the sex of the person performing the act. (There is a Gertrude Stein quote here that I'm going to resist.) Consequently, there appears to be an equal protection claim. Why are homosexuals being singled out for sanction? That's a very compelling line of argument and I personally find it more than persuasive. However, think about the implications. Homosexuals are singled out for specific sanction in numerous areas, the prohibition of gay marriage, for example. If equal protection applies to sodomy then perhaps it should apply to these other areas as well. So would an equal protection finding in the sodomy case create a crucial precedent that applies to these other areas? Perhaps, and I suspect that such a prospect gives conservatives and even a few moderates plenty of pause.

Privacy is the other route. In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) the Court ruled sodomy laws were not protected by a right to privacy. This helped add to the overall confusion and controversy regarding whether or not a right to privacy resides in our Constitution. The Court may decide that it was wrong in 1986 and rule that a state has no compelling interest to interfere in this sort of private consensual sexual activity between adults. Almost certainly such a finding would nullify not just Texas law, but even the sodomy laws in other states that make no distinction between gay and straight sex. But think about what this means. The Court would reverse itself from Bowers. That is not a small step. More importantly the Court would buttress privacy rights. That potentially lends more heft to abortion-rights protections -- since Roe remains largely founded on a right to privacy -- and perhaps, just perhaps, it will strenghten privacy rights in other realms, such as other claims by gays and lesbians, and even claims against the Patriot Act. (Frankly, I think the Court will easily parse the difference between compelling interest in sexual matters versus those potentially related to a terrorist threat.)

So, whichever route the Court goes raises some very interesting implications. This case is about a lot more than just sodomy. What will they do? I think there is a real possibility that the Court will cope out and dismiss the case on some technicality. Maybe they will find that the police mishandled the case and and thus find for the petitioners on that basis. But if they do decide to take this on, then I have to think that they will find against the law in some fashion. It will probably be 5-4 or 6-3 with Kennedy and O'Connor as the key players here. My gut feeling is that they overturn their Bowers decision on privacy grounds but will nonetheless try to draw the decision as narrowly as possible. We should know pretty soon.

2003-06-24T16:05:00.000-04:00

How about them Rice Owls?

2003-06-23T11:48:00.000-04:00

It's a split decision: So the Supremes hand down a mixed decision on the Michigan Affirmative-Action cases. At first blush it all looks like only a minor modification to Bakke. Race remains a constitutional criteria but the Michigan undergraduate point system goes too far towards the quota side of the fence. A while back I wrote a post describing the details of the programs. Here and here are today's decisions.

2003-06-12T12:46:00.000-04:00

Omaha Bound: I know a lot of sports fans are bored this time of year, especially once the NBA playoffs end. But this is my favorite time of the sport's year because first there is the college baseball post-season capped by the College World Series. That is followed by the Tour de France. I'll talk about the Tour in early July, it is easily the greatest annual sporting event in the world. The baseball post-season, especially the CWS, is my favorite U.S. sporting event, especially as an event to attend in person. Every year I try to go to one of the regionals (the first of a three round sequence of playoffs) or the CWS. This year it's the CWS which has been held in Omaha for the last fifty-plus years. The CWS features a terrific mix of good baseball and great atmosphere. In just the first four days of the tourney you get to see eight teams play a total of eight games. As an event it's not too big, but big enough to have energy. The atmosphere is relaxed but not drunken stupid. College baseball as a game has its flaws, but like with the Grateful Dead the flaws are part of the fun.

The baseball playoffs suffer from many of the same intransitivity and small-n problems that I complained about earlier in regard to March Madness (here and here). Indeed, the problem is somewhat exacerbated here. Baseball differs dramatically from football, basketball, and soccer because of the importance of pitching. A team with one or two really good pitchers has an advantage in a short series that it will not necessarily have in a longer series, thus the small-n problem is more severe. Furthermore, for a couple of reasons the NCAA tries to limit travel distances in the regional and super-regionals. This yields extremely variable, and often unfair, matchups. A top team that happens to be from the West, where there are lots of good teams, will likely face a tougher regional and super-regional matchup than a topteam from the North or East. It is an artifact of the way college baseball remains a regional sport. If you drew a line from San Francisco east to the Atlantic you would have to go far back in time to find a team from above that line that won the CWS or even did particularly well in the post-season. Indeed, this year no teams north of the line made it to Omaha.

At any rate, it just so happens that my wife and I have alma maters in Omaha this year (Stanford and Rice). That is icing on the cake. If you like baseball it is a great event regardless of whether or not your particular team is in.

2003-06-10T15:22:00.000-04:00

A look at the Iraqi Freedom Rally Event: A while back (here and here) I discussed Rally Events in the context of the then upcoming war against Iraq. My speculation at the time was that Bush's rally would look somewhat like his father's Desert Storm rally, but then decay as fast if not faster. Iraqi Freedom provided this Bush nothing like the Desert Storm rally. Rather it is starting to look a great deal like Panama and the Iran Hostage Crisis. That's not exactly stellar company as far as major rally events go. Here's Iraqi Freedom compared to Panama, Iran Hostage, and the October Missile Crisis:

Iraqi Freedom provided a modest, ephemeral jump in Bush's approval level. It will be completely gone in a month or so.

2003-06-07T20:50:00.000-04:00

The Good Ol' Days: I just happened to be reading a portion of Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus today. It was an important book in it's time since it provided one of the first inside accounts of the national press corps on the campaign trail. A lot of the prominent figures are still around: Broder, Novak, Hunter S. Thompson (more or less).

Anyway, here's a selection on page 150 that cracked me up:

During one brief period in the early fall, when McGovern began staging media events, Cassie Mackin, the NBC correspondent, felt downright insulted. McGovern would spend a whole morning hauling the press corps to some farm in the Midwest just so that he could appear against a background of grain silos when he made a statement about the wheat scandal. "This is a Presidential campaign and we don't need pretty pictures to get on the air," said Mackin. "Why can't they just run their campaign and let us take the responsibility of finding something interesting to say about it? It would be fine with me if they did nothing for the media."

It was just starting to become all about television.

2003-06-06T15:58:00.000-04:00

Reforming the Filibuster: There's still some talk about reforming the filibuster for judicial nominees, but it's increasingly clear the Republicans don't have enough support even among their own senators to pull it off. I've said this all along, not that it was a particularly tough prediction. A piece in yesterday's Roll Call indicates that the nails are pretty much in reform's coffin. You can say goodbye to Estrada and Owens, too. Roll Call is a subscription service but if you get access to it, it's "Rules changes Unlikely" by Paul Kane.

Here's a few choice selections:

On the eve of a historic hearing on eliminating judicial filibusters,
key Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to change internal
rules and remained very reluctant to go the so-called “nuclear” route
any time soon.
...
Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), for example, has been a vocal opponent of
the Estrada filibuster, but said Tuesday there is no logical reason
to alter the rules solely for judicial nominations and not other
legislative matters...
As for the "nuclear" option:: “I think it’s a very dangerous course to embark on,” Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.
...
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said she would keep an open mind to the
different proposals, which she has yet to clearly study, but noted
that a strictly partisan move would come back to haunt Republicans.
“Whatever is done has to be done with the long term in mind,” she
said. “Majorities are here today, gone tomorrow. Whatever is done has
to be done with caution.”
Finally this completely accurate assesment by Mike DeWine (R-OH):: “This is going to have to get resolved by an
understanding between the parties,"...

There is another tactic the Republicans could try but no one seems to be talking about it. More later.

2003-06-05T14:49:00.000-04:00

Master of the Senate: I just finished Robert Caro's Master of the Senate. Reading a Caro book is a bit like a python eating a hippo. It takes a long time to accomplish, and even longer to digest.

This is the Caro book I have been awaiting for a long time. Caro and others have extensively covered the other parts of Lyndon Johnson’s life. Likewise, while I am sure that Caro will add some to the story of Johnson's presidency, that story has been recounted in numerous other places. But the story of LBJ's extraordinary, lightening-fast rise to the Senate majority leadership and the even more extraordinary story of Johnson's performance and power as Majority Leader, has never been adequately told. Until now.

Senate leaders rarely wield true power, the power to move numerous senators in ways they did not really want to go so that the entire collective chamber moves in a direction markedly different than it would go otherwise. Power in the Senate is simply too decentralized to the individual senator. House speakers have numerous institutional devices for manipulating their body. The means to easily shut off debate is just one important example. The Senate Majority Leader, while not the presiding officer, is nonetheless the top leader of the Senate and has virtually no such devices.

But the obstacles Johnson faced went well beyond institutional limitations. Current Senate leader Bill Frist enjoys a reasonably homogeneous caucus. The difference between moderate and conservative Republicans simply is not that great. In contrast, Johnson led the ultimate in divided caucuses. He served at the behest of the Democratic senators, and the Democrats of that time were badly divided between North and South. On many, many issues the Southern Democrats had far more in common with the Republicans, especially the Midwestern Republicans, than with the Northern Democrats. This is a Democratic party that featured both Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey, James Eastland and Paul Douglas. Imagine if Trent Lott and Hillary Clinton belonged to the same Senate party caucus today. It would not be all that different than the awkward, often hostile pairing of Russell and Humphrey in the 1950s. To say that Johnson had one foot on a banana peel and another on a roller skate is to understate the obvious. This is the Senate he led.

How did he do it? Caro makes a convincing case that Johnson combined very careful agenda setting with the innovative use of Senate rules, creatively built short-run coalitions -- often with Republicans and President Eisenhower as partners --, and, yes, the calculated use of his legendary one-on-one persuasive skills. For a while, at least, Johnson put on quite a show.

I have read all of Caro's four biographies (there are three about Johnson and one about Robert Moses). A Caro-written biography does not read like most biographies. Most biographies follow an understandably predictable trajectory: He was born, he grew up, he did stuff, and then he died. Caro writes a biography the way a plot-oriented writer writes a novel. He books feature something like a plot building towards a climax. When coupled with Caro's vivid writing style this approach makes for compelling, memorable reading. (I read Path to Power twenty years ago and I will never forget his description of 19th century life in the Texas Hill Country.)

Yet, a biography written like a novel creates distortions. (Insert your favorite complaint about Dutch here____________.) This is, after all, non-fiction biography and the events in peoples' lives really do not follow a script. Such distortions undermine Means of Ascent, the immediately previous volume in Caro's Johnson series. In telling the story of Johnson's 1948 Senate race -- the one where Johnson used voter fraud in the Texas Valley to squeak out his notorious "landslide" -- Caro opts for the oldest literary device around: good versus evil. Here Lyndon Johnson was the bad guy. Who was the guy in the white hat? Coke Stevenson. You do not have to know a great deal about Stevenson to know that, while he was not evil incarnate by any means, he was not the Lone Ranger, either. More crucial, in rendering LBJ "the bad guy" Caro reduced him to caricature, bereft of all the stuff that makes Johnson interesting. He was a monster with enormous capacity to do good. If you made an opera about LBJ it would be La Belle et la Bête and Johnson would play both roles.

Caro failed to capture this complexity in Means of Ascent. He nailed it in Path to Power and he recaptures it in Master of the Senate.

Yet, there is a different, somewhat less troublesome, distortion in this newest volume. For perfectly obvious reasons the "plot" in Master builds towards the climax: Passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. This means though that the dénouement covers three years, fully three-fifths of Johnson's time as Majority Leader. Caro completely skimps on these last years pausing only to visit Johnson's pathetic attempt to hold on to his Senate power after becoming Vice-President.

Perhaps Caro plans to address these last years in the next and final volume. Yet, in that volume he will cover the 1960 election, including the murky circumstances surrounding Johnson joining the national ticket, the Texas political feud that led to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, the lingering accusation that Johnson was involved in the assassination, and all that minor stuff that happened later, like the Great Society and Vietnam. Caro compares more with Faulkner than with Hemingway. He rarely writes a short sentence and he takes his time telling a story and making an argument. This is not a criticism, it is part of why I love his work, but I do not see how he will write the fourth volume in less than 1500 pages, even with the ridiculously small type used in Master. So I doubt Caro will deal further with Johnson's last years in the Senate, outside his run for the White House. This is distorting because there is a case to be made that the 1957 CRA was indeed Johnson's summit and that he was well on his way to being a far more pedestrian Majority Leader as the 1950s played out. The waning of power can be as interesting as the waxing.

There are a few things I will say later about the context surrounding Johnson, a context that Caro captures beautifully. It shows a dramatically different Congress and a dramatically different Republican party than exist today. (The Democratic party was dramatically different, too, but that is obvious.) Suffice to say that if you like political biography you will be hard pressed to find a better read than this. It much deserved the Pulitzer, even if Kinsley did not actually read it.

2003-06-01T20:26:00.000-04:00

Why does John Kerry want to be president?: The Post today did a puff-piece profile on John Kerry. It's souffle light but without question it's the most positive big press item I've ever seen on Kerry. Regardless, what struck me is that John Kerry will chafe at, if not absolutely loath, the restraints of the presidency:

[John Kerry] flies barrel rolls,...relaxes by windsurfing in a squall,...ran with the bulls at Pamplona and, when trampled, got up, chased the bull, and grabbed for its horns.

He also kitesurfs and rides a motorcycle. As president he can forget about this kind of stuff. It's over.

2003-05-22T11:39:00.000-04:00

GTT: Maybe I'll find those missing DPS documents. Back Tuesday.

2003-05-22T09:49:00.000-04:00

The byzantine world of taxation: From yesterday's Post:

But the Senate [version of the tax] bill -- thanks to an apparent oversight -- would allow companies to shell out a windfall dividend on all profits dating as far back as 1913, when the income tax was created. Companies controlled by a few wealthy shareholders could unload all their cash holdings on those owners as tax-free dividends.

Such a maneuver could be worth tens of billions of dollars, said Max Baucus (Mont.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Chances are this was just an honest mistake, but it helps illustrate the absurd circus that is tax legislation. The tax code is a hugely complicated labyrinth of interrelated provisions that gets "reformed" in a time pressured, high conflict, low information environment. It's the perfect place for mistakes and exploitation.

2003-05-19T08:55:00.000-04:00

Predictable tit-for-tat: From "Redistricting: Revenge Next?" in the May 15 Roll Call,

Emboldened by the hardball tactics of their Republican counterparts in Texas and Colorado, Democratic legislative leaders in New Mexico and Oklahoma told Roll Call on Wednesday that they too may revisit the issue of Congressional redistricting in the months ahead.

Both Democratic-controlled legislatures had the chance to draw new Congressional maps during their regular legislative sessions this year but held back - in part because they feared GOP retaliation in other states.

Now that Republicans are attempting to draw new boundaries in Texas and Colorado anyway, Democrats say they may follow suit during special legislative sessions.
...: Whether these are mere fighting words or actual Democratic strategy remains to be seen, however. The Democratic National Committee has quietly urged Democratic-controlled legislatures not to engage in any sort of "tit for tat" on redistricting, party leaders said, despite what is transpiring in Colorado and Texas.

"It allows us to remain on the high road," said one key House Democratic strategist.

All of this is terrible news for state governance. Redistricting battles are always incredibly difficult, which is why the courts so often get involved. But at least in the past it was a battle that had to be fought just once every ten years (with exceptions that were court driven by 'one person-one vote' and voting rights). Now the decennial norm is collapsing. Where does it stop? Will we now have redistricting battles every time party control changes in a legislature?

From a philosophical perspective I'd like to see gerrymandering -- of all stripes -- cease by changing the electoral system. There's nothing sacred about the way we elect members to the House. However, from a practical perspective reform will be difficult and, depending on what is chosen, will almost certainly have some negative effects (some foreseen, some unforeseen.) For example, shifting to a classic at-large system will end gerrymandering but dramatically and unfairly punish minority groups (be they partisan or racial minorities). Besides an at-large system faces a high legal hurdle (Branch v. Smith).

2003-05-16T12:25:00.000-04:00

Filibuster lawsuit: Judicial Watch has filed suit against the Senate over judicial filibusters.

2003-05-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

Doesn't anyone play 42 anymore?: Okay, so we all know about the Iraqi playing cards. Now we have the Texas Chicken D's playing cards. If you like the chicken theme then you can get the Chickenhawk playing cards. And while you're at, you can also get the Psychedelic Republican trading cards. They're sure to be a collector's item.

2003-05-15T12:02:00.000-04:00

Scapegoat search: Today's Roll Call reports on the other day's tax bill mixup. (Roll Call is a subscription service. The article is by Emily Pierce, "Tax Snafu Sparks Fight.") There's some partisan snipping over the snafu. Whatever. But what's important is the way the Senate Parliamentarian -- Alan Frumin -- is once again in the spotlight and crosshairs.

In addition to lambasting Democrats, some Republicans also questioned why Frumin took it upon himself to identify the problem when Democrats appeared to be unaware of the arcane rule requiring budget reconciliation measures, as the tax bill was designed to be, to follow a specific parliamentary order.

"He could be technically right," Senate Finance chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said of Frumin's ruling. "But there's no need to have a strict interpretation of the rules like that.
...: Some GOP aides even hinted that Frumin's position as Parliamentarian could be in danger if he continued to make rulings that disadvantaged their political goals. [Emphasis added] His decision could be crucial in implementing GOP proposed rule changes that would help them avoid filibusters of judicial nominees.

An aide goes on to claim that Frumin is "burning every bridge." But was the ruling correct?

"The Parliamentarian was correct in his ruling," said [Budget committee chair] Nickles.

Senate parliamentarians serve two masters and that puts them in a potentially untenable position. On the one hand parliamentarians serve the institution. Their job is to make sure that Senate procedure proceeds logically and fairly in keeping with the body's rules and precedents. They are supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law in a way that's not dissimilar to the way judges are supposed to let law and precedent guide them. As with judges, the substitution of precedent with ideology or partisanship can lead to capriciousness and unpredictability.

However, parliamentarians serve at the behest of the majority leader. As such they are subject to implicit or explicit pressure to rule in favor of the majority party. So it can be an impossible situation. Frumin's predecessor was fired because he annoyed the Republican leadership. Frumin appears headed for a similar fate, especially if the Republicans try to take on the so-called "nuclear option" on the filibuster.

If things continue along this path then eventually we will end up with parliamentarians who are purely agents of the majority party, a guarantee that party fighting in the chamber will get even worse.

2003-05-15T10:24:00.000-04:00

Are filibuster reform attempts causing a Republican split?: An article in today's The Hill hints at differences among Republican senators regarding reforming the filibuster. Unfortunately the article does not get too much over the nature and intensity of the differences. Is there general consensus on the need for reform but disagreements over the options? Or, are there Republican senators who oppose tinkering with the filibuster despite the frustration over confirmations?

Senate Republicans are split on forcing a change of filibuster rules that have prevented the Senate from voting on two of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

Nevertheless, a number of GOP lawmakers seem undaunted by a parliamentary maneuver that could permanently change the nature of the Senate.

"I think some are concerned it may upset the whole way the Senate operates and make it more like the House," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), referring to a bold Republican proposal that has become known as the nuclear option.

"You could make the argument for [banning the filibuster of] judges. I think you could make the same case for laws," he added.

The rest of the article reprises the Republican options and gives voice to Republican support for reform, but doesn't really dig into the supposed split, except for this quote from Frist:

Frist said the proposal to change the Senate rules either formally or by a ruling of the chair has: "engendered a lot of debate, discussion as I come back today."

I bet it has.

2003-05-14T14:57:00.000-04:00

Headline pet peeve: I hate it when a headline is really misleading or just inaccurate. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these things actually bother reading the attached article. Check out this AP piece that's running in Salon. The headline is "Study finds liquor ads popular with teens." What the story really is about is a finding that magazines that are popular with teens happen to run a lot of liquor ads. (Probably because the magazines are also popular with alcohol drinking young adults.) But the headline (purposely or just sloppily) implies that the ads cause the teen readership. So if AARP, the Magazine started running lots of liquor ads, do you think teen readership would go up?

2003-05-14T10:54:00.000-04:00

Killer Bees: Yesterday's Houston Chronicle has a piece on the 1979 Killer Bees.

2003-05-13T14:53:00.000-04:00

Now you know where your tickets dollars are going: One of my favorite Supreme Court decisions is Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National Baseball Clubs. In it the Supremes dictated that Major League Baseball was not subject to anti-trust laws because it does not engage in interstate commerce. The fact that teams traveled across state lines to play was merely incidental; baseball games themselves were intrastate events. It seems to me that if taken really literally this case denies the existence of interstate commerce except in cases where the parties straddle state lines. But, whatever, Federal Baseball has never served as much of a precedent, but it remains in effect, and baseball very much likes it that way and wants to keep it that way.

2003-05-13T12:11:00.000-04:00

More embarrassing than important: The Finance Committee sent the wrong tax bill to the Senate floor.

2003-05-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

The ultimate disappearing quorum: It's good to see that Texas politics hasn't lost all of its flavor. The Texas fight (or flight) over re-districting has now hit the national press as dozens of Democrats are hiding out in places like Ardmore, Oklahoma for the purpose of denying the Texas legislature a quorum. The Texas House Speaker can have legislators arrested and returned to Austin if they are absent without cause, but obviously Texas law does not extend into other states.

It reminds me of the 1979 "Killer Bees." In that case it was twelve Texas senators who fled to prevent the legislature from moving the Texas presidential primary forward for the purposes of helping John Connally's presidential campaign. (Not that it would have mattered much. Despite his abilities and the millions he raised, Connally ran a pathetic campaign.) It was a terrific story with radio stations constantly reporting Killer Bee sightings. I swear I saw all twelve of them one night at the Armadillo World Headquarters, but that's another story.

I suppose that hypothetically this could happen in Congress:

From House rule XX:
5. (a) In the absence of a quorum, a majority comprising at least 15 Members, which may include the Speaker, may compel the attendance of absent Members.

(b) Subject to clause 7(b) a majority of those present may order the Sergeant-at-Arms to send officers appointed by him to arrest those Members for whom no sufficient excuse is made and shall secure and retain their attendance. The House shall determine on what condition they shall be discharged. Unless the House otherwise directs, the Members who voluntarily appear shall be admitted immediately to the Hall of the House and shall report their names to the Clerk to be entered on the Journal as present.

From Senate rule VI:

1. A quorum shall consist of a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn. 2. No Senator shall absent himself from the service of the Senate without leave. 3. If, at any time during the daily sessions of the Senate, a question shall be raised by any Senator as to the presence of a quorum, the Presiding Officer shall forthwith direct the Secretary to call the roll and shall announce the result, and these proceedings shall be without debate. 4. Whenever upon such roll call it shall be ascertained that a quorum is not present, a majority of the Senators present may direct the Sergeant at Arms to request, and, when necessary, to compel the attendance of the absent Senators, which order shall be determined without debate; and pending its execution, and until a quorum shall be present, no debate nor motion, except to adjourn, or to recess pursuant to a previous order entered by unanimous consent, shall be in order.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of crucial differences between Congress and the Texas Legislature. (Well, there are plenty of differences...). First, legislators would have to flee the country because federal marshalls could make the arrest in any state. (Just imagine the hilarity at the Canadian and Mexican borders. "Sir, is that Tom Dashcle in your trunk?") More importantly, both the U.S. House and Senate have simple majority quorums. (It's less than a majority when the House operates in the Committee of the Whole.) In both Texas houses a quorum requires two-thirds present, thus making the disappearance act more attractive.

2003-05-09T13:58:00.000-04:00

Irony: It's illegal to burn the U.S. flag in Norway.

2003-05-09T12:02:00.000-04:00

More fun with DC housing listings:

Beds: 1 Bedrooms
Baths: 2 full baths
6 half baths
Price: $3,750,000
City: WASHINGTON

Ok, so a total of EIGHT bathrooms -- 2 full, 6 half -- along with ONE bedroom. All for $3.75 million. (It also has eight fireplaces and covered parking, so hey, what else could you want?) I don't know if it would make much of a place to live, but what a party shack!

2003-05-09T08:49:00.000-04:00

Stepping back from the brink: By last nite I was convinced that this whole "nuclear war" option was nothing but a trial balloon. Now I'm convinced that it was a trial balloon as this morning's Post reveals a new plan to limit, not abolish, filibuster's against judicial nominees:

Under the plan, a nomination could be forced to a vote within about two weeks. It is less drastic than several alternatives that are being threatened by Republicans, including lawsuits and tricky parliamentary maneuvers -- known as the "nuclear option" -- that some senators have warned would likely prompt all-out war in the Senate.
...
The proposal was modeled after a plan proposed recently by Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), although Miller would have applied the time limits to all filibusters, not just those on judicial nominations. Miller's plan, in turn, was patterned after an earlier proposal by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.).

An aide said Frist was "putting the idea out for discussion" with no deadlines for action, but wanted to "get this done as quickly as possible." The proposal is likely to go to the Rules and Administration Committee for hearings, the aide said.

The article also notes that the White House is staying out of it since, "it may have more chance of winning Democratic support without the White House imprimatur." Good thinking.

We'll see how this plays out. I'm vaguely hopeful that at some point some of our more mature senators from both parties will sit down and work out true confirmation reform. Here are several issues:

1. I don't like this word, but the Senate needs to take a more "holistic" approach to confirmation reform. The filibuster isn't the problem. The filibuster is just a new manifestation of a deeper underlying problem where extreme ideological polarization is fusing with Senate procedure to kill judicial nominees. In my view the filibuster poses a much less noxious problem than other aspects of Senate procedure such as blue slips, holds, and committee obstruction that allow a tiny fraction of the Senate to block confirmation. Next to these devices the filibuster is the pinnacle of democracy. At least with the filibuster, forty-one senators have to take a public stand to sustain it. So reform needs to look at the bigger picture. I laid out a reform idea here and here that calls for guaranteeing a floor vote for all nominees coupled with a super-majority requirement (to force current and future presidents to nominate moderate nominees.) For any reform to work the Republicans have to either 1: give the Democrats something tangible in return, such as the nomination and confirmation of some of Clinton's blocked nominees; or 2. postpone the reform's activation until 2005.

2. I'm not a fan of the filibuster, but it is constitutional. I believed that in 1993 when the Clinton administration whined about the filibuster, and I believe it now when the Bush administration is whining about it. A lawsuit would be a frivolous waste of tax-payer's money. If the Supreme Court ultimately declared the filibuster unconstitutional the decision would be based on judicial activism founded on loose construction. You can't get much less ambigious than: "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings..."

3. I don't buy for a second that all the Republican senators want the the filibuster weakened or abolished (either abolished totally or just for nominations). The filibuster enhances the power of individual senators and even if you are annoyed now, every senator knows that there are other times that the filibuster looks mighty attractive. Forty-five years ago it was the liberal Democrats who tried every trick in the book to abolish the filibuster. You say you support getting rid of the filibuster? Fine. Right now there are fifty-one Republican senators. Think about 2004. Illinois is already in major danger of going to the Democrats. It's not outrageous to think that Lincoln Chaffee will change parties or that the Democrats will pick up a couple of other seats. The Democrats have a good chance to take the White House. What do you think about the filibuster now? Or maybe Bush wins in 2004. How about President Hillary Clinton winning in 2008. Impossible you say. That's what they said about Nixon in the early sixities.

2003-05-08T15:44:00.000-04:00

Michigan Blue-Slips: The Hill has an interesting piece on blue slips and Michigan court nominees. Both Michigan senators are Democrats, and they are blue-slipping Bush nominees. Earlier this year Judiciary chair Hatch stopped considering single blue slip rejections but he's still considering double rejections (though it looks like he's wavering).

The article highlights an issue I've been thinking about for a while, without really developing it much. I wonder what overall impact blue slips have on the composition of the federal bench. Take the case of Michigan. Because Michigan has two Democratic senators, few Bush nominees will make the bench and as a result the 6th Circuit only has one Michigan judge out of the ten on the bench. Likewise, back during the Clinton administration it was virtually impossible for nominees from North Carolina to get confirmed because of Helms. Some senate delegations are all Republican, others all Democratic, and others are mixed, so the impact of blue slips will vary by state. Thus you might end up with some interesting state representation and ideological patterns due to blue slips.

Blue slips are part of the larger picture that also involves the filibuster. I've talked about confirmations and reform here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

2003-05-08T15:09:00.000-04:00

Filibuster Warfare: The Republicans have "hatched" (sorry) a ploy to banish confirmation filibusters by declaring that the filibuster rule (Rule 22) does not apply to the Senate's Executive Calendar. (Different types of Senate business go onto to different schedules or calendars.) The Executive Calendar contains items sent from the White House, such as treaties and nominations (both to the executive and judicial branches.)

The way it would work is the Republicans would ask for a ruling. The presiding officer, with the advice of the parliamentarian, then makes the call. The official presiding officer is, of course, Vice President Cheney, but he only sits for expected close votes or otherwise significant occasions. (This might be one.) The rest of the time the job rotates among majority party senators. If the presiding officer rules that filibusters don't apply to the Executive Calendar then all it takes is a majority Senate vote to uphold the ruling.

I'll have to think abou this a bit, but it is a brazen move for at least two reasons: 1) there is precedent for filibusters against Executive Calendar items, an implicit recognition that such filibusters are fine; and 2) the Democrats will go to war, and there are LOTS of ways that a completely pissed-off minority can make life in that body even more miserable then it is already. I feel really sorry for the Senate parliamentarian on this one. Talk about being stuck in the middle.

Read about the current plan here.

2003-05-08T09:05:00.000-04:00

DC outdoes Tokyo: Here's a listing I saw for a condo:

WASHINGTON, DC 20009
MLS ID#: DC4321386
$89,000
1 Bath
4 Sq. Ft.

A bargain at only $22,250 per square foot. I take it the bath is actually a bucket. A small bucket.

2003-05-07T16:31:00.000-04:00

Update on the Iraqi War rally event: Bush now sits at a 70 approval rating, a statistically insignificant drop from the 71 he reached at the war's start. (He was at 57 just prior to the war.) Clearly, 71 is the peak so it's down hill from here and probably very fast down hill. My guess is that Bush will get something similar to what Carter got with the Iranian Hostage Crisis or, a bit more optimistic for Bush, something akin to the longer lived October Missile Crisis rally. It's nothing like the boost his father received after the Gulf War and, of course, it does not compare to the September 11 rally. I talked about rally events and presented some data here and here.

2003-05-07T12:01:00.000-04:00

There she blows: I guess Georgetown no longer has the most powerful manhole cover explosions.