Brad DeLong

Why Oh Why Can't Clive Crook Find Any Examples of Thoughtful Public-Spirited Republicans with Views Worthy of Respect?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Clive Crook is unhappy because Paul Krugman does not take him and his ilk of opinions-of-shape-of-earth-differites seriously:

Paul Krugman’s Proud War on Fools, Knaves and Lunatics: I think Krugman’s been right about U.S. fiscal policy -- the stimulus was too small and it’s being withdrawn too soon. But he’s wrong about many of the people who disagree with him…. A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other. That’s dangerous. Civil society depends on a minimum threshold of tolerance and mutual respect…. Krugman stirs up the right in much the same way that Rush Limbaugh, for instance, inflames the left. Granted, if you’re going to have a spokesman, better a Nobel laureate than a talk-radio clown. The fact remains that Krugman’s weary disdain for roughly half the country is self-defeating…. I just wish he’d meet a wider range of people…. [T]he modern Republican Party includes a growing number of extremists who have no interest in the kind of discussion I’m recommending…. But if Krugman got out of his bubble a bit more, he’d find… a lot of thoughtful, public-spirited Americans whose views on the proper scale and scope of government are different from his, yet worthy of respect.

Pigwich!

Highly recommended:

http://thelocalpig.com

Ezra Klein: This is why Obama can’t make a deal with Republicans

Ezra Klein:

This is why Obama can’t make a deal with Republicans: File this under “Jonathan Chait is right.”… [A] background briefing I attended with a respected Republican legislator who thought it would be a gamechanger for President Obama to say he’d be open to chained CPI — a policy that cuts Social Security benefits — as part of a budget deal. The only problem? Obama has said he’s open to chained CPI as part of a budget deal. And this isn’t one of those times where the admission was in private, and we’re going off of news reports. It’s right there on his Web site. It’s literally in bold type. But key GOP legislators have no idea Obama’s made that concession. The question my column left open was whether improving the lines of communication would actually change anything. Chait’s view is no, it wouldn’t. He begins by quoting Upton Sinclair’s famous line: “It is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it.” Chait continues:

If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

What happened next on Twitter proved Chait’s point in every particular. Mike Murphy… has been a top strategist for Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many other Republicans. He’s also, as his client list would suggest, from the party’s more pragmatic, even moderate, wing…. On Feb. 13, Murphy wrote in Time that “six magic words can unlock the door to the votes inside the Republican fortress: Some beneficiaries pay more and chained CPI, budgetary code for slightly lowering benefit increases over time.” The only problem? Obama has said all these words, as John Harwood of the New York Times quickly pointed….

Murphy responded by suggesting that sure, Obama has called for more means-testing in Medicare, but he’s not put chained CPI — CCPI, if you’re hamstrung by Twitter’s 140-character limit — on the board…. [But he] endorsed it as part of a cliff deal, and he’s kept endorsing it, as his sequestration plan clearly says, since the cliff deal fell apart. This was quickly pointed out to Murphy on Twitter, at which point, he promptly proved Chait’s thesis correct….

So let’s back up. Murphy’s initial view was that to unlock GOP votes for a budget deal, Obama just needed to endorse chained CPI and more means-testing in Medicare. Then it was pointed out that Obama has endorsed means-testing in Medicare, so Murphy wondered why he didn’t endorse chained CPI as part of a deal. Then it was pointed out that Obama did endorse chained CPI, at which point Murphy called chained CPI “a gimmick,” and said Obama had to endorse raising the Medicare age, drop his demands for more revenue as part of a deal and earn back the GOP’s trust.

Recall what Chait said would happen if the Republican legislator in my column was forced to react to the fact that Obama has endorsed chained CPI: “He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.” Check, check, and check. Which is all to say that there’s no deal here….

The bottom line on American budgetary politics right now is that… there’s no deal to be had…. It’s what Hill Republicans have told me, it’s what the White House has told me, it what Hill Democrats have told me. The various camps disagree on whether Republicans are right to refuse a deal that includes further tax increases, but they all agree that that’s the key fact….

But it’s unpopular for Republicans to simply say they won’t agree to any compromise and there’s no deal to be had — particularly since taxing the wealthy is more popular than cutting entitlements, and so their position is less popular than Obama’s. That’s made it important for Republicans to prove that it’s the president who is somehow holding up a deal. This had led to a lot of Republicans fanning out to explain what the president should be offering if he was serious about making a deal. Then, when it turns out that the president did offer those items, there’s more furious hand-waving….

The interesting question is whether the possibility of a government shutdown, a debt-ceiling breach or simply the pressure of the sequester’s cuts will, in the coming months, break one side or the other. But as long as the GOP’s position is they won’t compromise, there’s not going to be a compromise.

Other Predictions the Total Failure of Which Should Have Caused Certain Economists to Take Vows of Perpetual Silence...

Menzie Chinn reminds us of Casey Mulligan in October 2008:

My basic approach looks at the marginal product of capital… and at the wealth and substitution effects of the housing price crash…. I have plenty to say about how the economy will look a couple of years after the housing crash (in 2009 and 2010) but not much to say about the month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter path…. Because of the high non-residential marginal product of capital before and after the housing price crash, the incentive to save is strong, so the real U.S. non-residential capital stock should be significantly higher in 2009 and 2010 than it was in 2006 or 2007. Normally, three years would bring about 6% more real consumption -- and more with a high marginal product of capital -- but the housing crash had an adverse wealth on the order of -3%. So real consumption will be higher in 2009 and 2010 than in 2006 or 2007, but probably not 6% higher. Real GDP and employment will be significantly higher in 2009 and 2010, and so will unemployment, because of the shift in labor supply….

Current-Law Debt Projected by 2023 Would Go Up By $3,900,000,000,000 Under Cliff Deal...

 

At Least Ten Years too Late, Budget Arsonist Veronique de Rugy Is Sorry…

Budget arsonist Veronique de Rugy:

Salon (2003): With bipartisan opposition to the [new Bush tax cut] plan already evident, there is some question about how much of this [tax cut] proposal will actually survive the legislative centrifuge. For now, though, the die-hard supply-siders are thrilled. One of those happy tax cutters is Veronique De Rugy, an analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute based in Washington. She says she has been critical of administration proposals in the past — such as bills to boost education spending and federal farm subsidies — but she couldn’t be happier with the latest White House proposal. “I wasn’t expecting something so bold,” she says. “No one was expecting them to come with such a big cut in the tax on dividends”…

says now that she is sorry:

The Corner - National Review Online (2012): I have been saying for a while that the kind of fiscal deal it looks like the president and Speaker Boehner want may avoid broad-based tax hikes, but it won’t address our fundamental fiscal problems…. I understand that no one likes to pay more taxes. I also understand the negative consequences of raising taxes on everyone or  on higher income taxpayers only. However, there is a point at which Americans are going to have to make a choice between paying for the big government they claim they want or cutting spending. If we want a big government and the services it provides, we will have to pay for it or at least to pay more for it than we do now. And make no mistake, if we choose to maintain a big government, raising taxes on the rich alone won’t be enough. Taxes will have to go up for everyone, and they will have to go up much beyond a simple return to Clinton levels… 

Right-Wing Grifters at Play: Joe Hagan's Dispatch From the National Review's Post-Election Cruise

The thought of some poor right-wing D.o.a.B.--"Tall, Extremely-Tanned Blonde Kay from Greenwich"--paying good money so she can get investment advice from Kevin "Dow 36000" Hassett is truly dismaying…

Joe Hagan:

A Dispatch From the 'National Review's Post-Election Cruise: It was day five of the National Review magazine’s Post Election Cruise 2012…. Kevin Hassett, a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney…. “Minorities came out like crazy,” said Hassett, sighing. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-­Americans voting than they expected.”… Hassett… predicted economic doom under Obama, the most likely scenario being another Great Depression…. That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?” [Hassett] recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere…. How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”…

James Heckman: Yes, Charles, Poverty Can Be Fought Via Early Childhood Programs

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/ndf_james_heckman_reply_social_mobility.php

Charles Murray mischaracterizes the quality of the evidence on the effectiveness of early childhood programs. In doing so he suggests that my evidence is highly selective. The effects reported for the programs I discuss survive batteries of rigorous testing procedures. They are conducted by independent analysts who did not perform or design the original experiments. The fact that samples are small works against finding any effects for the programs, much less the statistically significant and substantial effects that have been found.

Murray questions whether any early childhood interventions can be effective because while some have worked, others have failed. His methodological stance is peculiar. In evaluating drugs to control blood pressure, we do not dwell on the failures except to learn from them. We should implement the successes. That is common sense and sound science. Perry and Abecedarian are rigorously evaluated, subjected to long-term follow-up scrutiny, and have shown high economic rates of return. Neal McCluskey’s claim that Perry is costly and has few benefits does not hold up. Perry’s high rate of return takes account of the program’s costs.

Murray misrepresents the evidence from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) in an attempt to bolster his argument. IHDP was not a replication of Abecedarian, but rather an application of the Abecedarian model to a low–birth weight population—not the target population of Abecedarian. The designers of IHDP recognized in advance of collecting the data that severely low-weight children had medical needs not likely to be addressed by the Abecedarian curriculum. IHDP had substantial benefits for high–birth weight babies at ages of eight and eighteen. It was particularly effective for children from low-income families, and it promoted maternal employment.

The right interventions empower people to be what they want to be without forcing them to adopt one way of life over another.

In addition, the evaluations of IHDP (discussed by Murray) and Head Start (discussed by Almagor and McCluskey), do not account for David Deming’s point that many members of the control groups of those (and other) studies were enrolled in other early childhood programs, biasing downward simple treatment-control comparisons. (This is called “substitution bias” in the literature.) For these and other programs, there is the additional problem that treatment intensity varies among subjects. Adjusting for these biases boosts estimated program treatment effects. Also, Head Start is a very heterogeneous program and has not had any long-term follow-up, so evaluations of it are not comparable to those of Abecedarian and Perry...

 

Aaauuuggghhh! My Eyes! Ruth Marcus!

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-is-paula-broadwells-wardrobe-fair-game/2012/11/21/a71dbaf0-3404-11e2-9cfa-e41bac906cc9_story.html>

 

Drew Linzer Observes Gallup's Frank Newport

Drew Linzer observes Frank Newport of Gallup:

Final Result: Obama 332, Romney 206 | VOTAMATIC: Recently there have been some complaints among pollsters – most notably Gallup’s Frank Newport – that survey aggregators (like me) “don’t exist without people who are out there actually doing polls,” and that our work threatens to dissuade survey organizations from gathering these data in the first place.

And Drew gives what seems to me the wrong answer:

My view is slightly different. I’d say that working together, we’ve proven once again that public opinion research is a valuable source of information for understanding campaign dynamics and predicting election outcomes. There’s no reason why the relationship shouldn’t be one of mutual benefit, rather than competition or rivalry. In a similar manner, our analyses supplement – not replace – more traditional forms of campaign reporting. We should all be seen as moving political expertise forward, in an empirical and evidence-based way.

The right answer would have been:

Obama took the race by 3.1%. Ten days beforehand Gallup had Romney up by 7%. Please stop polluting my aggregative averages with your extraordinarily error-ridden polls.

Paul Ryan: How Dare Those African- and Hispanic-Americans Vote!

Igor Volsky watches the train wreck:

In his first interview since losing the election, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wouldn’t admit that voters rejected his economic vision and instead chalked up President Obama’s victory to a large turnout of the “urban vote.” “I don’t think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare, we clearly didn’t lose it on those issues,” Ryan to local station WISC-TV. “I think the surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race.”

But Ryan’s post-election analysis contrasts sharply with his view of the race before Election Day. Throughout the campaign, Ryan — who was selected for the ticket because of his budget plan — insisted that the race presented voters with a “choice” between two different economic paths for the nation and repeatedly tried to sell the merits of his proposal on the stump. Republican lawmakers bragged that should the GOP ticket win, “they can justly claim a mandate” to push through Ryan’s initiatives...

So now it is unfair and unexpected for "urban" voters--that is, African- and Hispanic-Americans--to have turnout levels that are even within shouting distance of white Republican turnout levels?

Everybody who worked for, raised money for, or voted for this clown should be really ashamed of themselves.

If you love America, please don't do it again.

The War on Nate Silver: Radio Silence since Tuesday 3 PM from Heeresgruppe B Commander Josh Jordan Edition

War on Nate Silver Heeresgruppe B commander Josh Jordan has been under radio silence since Tuesday afternoon 3:23 PM EST. Pehaps Sam Wang's T-34s have conducted a deep-battle penetration raid and smashed the transmitters?...

But we will repost the greatest notes from his immortal "Nate Silver's Flawed Model" http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331192/nate-silver-s-flawed-model-josh-jordan:

The debate came... overnight Romney seemingly rid himself of the weaknesses that had been tacked on to him by over $100 million dollars in negative advertising... a dead heat... nationwide... worry built up among Democrats.... They began attaching their hopes to what BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith called “the bulwark against all-out Dem panic” — Nate Silver. Silver gained fame by correctly predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election.... 2008 was a wave election... easy to foresee.... Silver’s access to the Obama administration’s internal polling gave him information that most other analysts never saw... increase[d] his accuracy.... Nate Silver is openly rooting for Obama... it shows in the way he forecasts....

On September 30, leading into the debates, Silver gave Obama an 85 percent chance.... Silver still gives Obama a 67 percent chance... has [not] observed the same movement to Romney... as everyone else.... Given the fact that an incumbent president is stuck at 47 percent nationwide, the odds might not be in Obama’s favor, and they certainly aren’t in his favor by a 67–33 margin.

D.G. Myers's statement upon his firing from "Commentary" by John "Legacy" Podhoretz

http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2012/11/statement-on-my-firing.html

 

Going to the Corner: National Review's Corner, That Is...

Jay "Id" Nordlinger:

Encore: I’m going to sneak in one more letter… one of our regular readers from Georgia…. "The Right can’t field a better candidate. We put up an impressive, mainstream guy with super credentials, who made few gaffes, did well in the debates, and was amply funded. The result? A repeat of 2008, basically. If I’d known it would turn out like this, I would have backed a Gingrich-Palin ticket. More fun, less expensive — same result."

Mark "Fear the Hispanic Pizza Menace!" Krikorian:

Immigration & Delusion: Hispanic political activists are “the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty” who won’t be attracted to conservatism by a few changes in immigration law…

And Daniel Foster along with Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru launches The War Against Those Who Fought Against the War on Nate Silver;

On the Beatification of Nate Silver: I… found Nate Silver skepticism a respectable position… [on]the occasion of his elevation to sainthood by liberals… [and] their usual, empty, ritualistic signification of “math!” and “science!”… [I have] one more thing to say….

[B]y the end Silver’s famed model was… a different way of presenting a variety of polling averages. It was not sorcery… all the decimal places were too cute by half… [the] “Science Bless You! Haha Lolz” crowd are… cult members… journalists writing dire warnings about global warming or activists campaigning against intelligent design could learn about long-term climate modeling or the mechanisms of natural selection if they wanted to doesn’t change the fact most of them don’t….

[T]he question of “why didn’t conservative believe the polls?” and what that means for the future… are askable and answerable without ever making reference to Silver…. [C]onservatives… failed to internalize the fact that there are simply more Democrats than there were ten years ago…

Jonah Goldberg:

The Critique of Nate Silver’s Pure Reason: [P]eople talk about math as if it were divinely prophetic… subscribe to a religion that simply apes the terminology of science…. [Q]uestioning [Silver's] methodology is akin to rejecting evolution or the laws of thermodynamics, as if only his model is sanctified by the god Reason…. [P]eople are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched. Obviously this is a romantic view out of step with the times… the “age of chivalry is gone,” replaced by “that of sophisters, economists and calculators.” Still, isn’t it possible that the passionate defense Silver arouses from some people on the left has just a bit more to do with the comfort he dispenses than with the sophistication of his analysis?

After the Election of November 6...

The writers of the Republican Party
Published articles in various places
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the Republican Party
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the Republican Party
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Samuel Goldman watches Jay Nordlinger and Marc Thiessen, sore losers.

Romney Campaign Devoured by Killer Whale!

Joel Pollak: Exclusive - Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed Its Own Vote

John E.: The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

John Roberts, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Nino Scalia, and Company Handed Mitt Romney a Poisoned Chalice

The question from April onward was: "why is Mitt Romney still feeding the wingnuts? Why isn't he tacking back to the center?" By October we had concluded that he was not tacking back to the center because he really was a wingnut--and that any subsequent tack (which did happen) was not heartfelt--was last-minute tactical in an attempt to avoid defeat.

Sara Murray and Patrick O'Connor offer up a different theory, that maybe Romney really is Mr. Moderate and that the Hispanics-should-self-deport-I-don't-care-about-the-47%-moochers was a mask assumed to please funders all along:

How Race Slipped Away From Mitt Romney: BOSTON—Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest men ever to run for president. And yet the lack of money earlier this year stalled his campaign, and he never really recovered…. The GOP nominee emerged late last spring from a long and bruising Republican primary season… [in which he had] felt compelled to take a hard line on immigration—one that was the subject of debate among his advisers—that hurt his standing with Hispanic voters. More than that, Mr. Romney had spent so much money winning the nomination that he was low on cash…. So the campaign's finance chair, Spencer Zwick, huddled with political director Rich Beeson to craft a complex schedule that took Mr. Romney to the cities that were prime real estate for fundraising… California, Texas and New York—none of which were important political battlegrounds—while only allowing for quick side trips to swing states…. Mr. Romney ultimately garnered some $800 million or more…. But Mr. Romney paid a deep political price. The fundraising marathon reduced his ability to deliver his own message to voters…. Romney's heavy wooing of conservative donors limited his ability to move his campaign positions to the center, to appeal to moderate and independent donors.

I Am Sorry. Only Wonkette Is Capable of Dealing with the Crazy at an Appropriate Level Today

Wonkette:

Come, Drink In Delusional Mitt Romney’s Election-Night Sadness With Us: The lucky folks at CBS, America’s old-person network, got the scoop on the tragic emotional landscape of the Romney-Ryan campaign’s final night, when everyone’s sincere belief in their inevitable victory ran head-first into reality…. Here is the best part of the sad tale of Mitt Romney’s election night: Mitt Romney and his people were totally confident that they were going to win. Unless, of course, they are so determined to maintain a brave face at all times that they feel a need to anonymously leak to the press after the fact that they ran the campaign in a delusional bubble? That would be even weirder, so let’s just take this statement at face value:

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks — not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan — bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

[…]

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed--they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

Let that sink in for a minute: Team Romney was “unskewing” its internal polls… they didn’t like the reality they were getting from their own data collection and thus felt a need to fix it to conform to their inner emotional truth like some sort of woo-woo Californian New Ager.

By contrast, when after the first debate Obama’s people began getting numbers indicating that everyone thought he did a crappy job, the campaign flipped out and Obama agreed to make some changes he wasn’t keen on, because he wanted to win but recognized that he might lose.

Wonkette: "FEMA will be herding meth-addled real ‘Mericans from all across the heartland into railcars…"

Indeed. Wonkette:

Dispatches From The FEMA Camps: Obama’s Second Term Will Destroy American Values, Be Amazing: FEMA will be herding meth-addled real 'Mericans from all across the heartland into railcars and shipping them to camps.

Why trains? Because it’s more socialist that way.

Epitaph for the Romney Campaign: If Your Candidate Is a Grifter...

... who plans on saying one thing during the primaries, shaking the Etch-a-Sketch, and another thing during the general election--well, you should not be surprised at what you get.

You attract a staff of grifters as well. They will lie to you--so don't be surprised when the polls are wrong and the software does not work...

Wonkette sends us to Mitt Romney's transition website

http://touch.wonkette.com/wonkette/#!/entry/mitt-romneys-transition-website-was-live-an-entire-day-after,509bbcc9d7fc7b56704f2181 Rumored to require five years of tax returns if you want to apply for a job.

 

Byron York Watches Republican Epistemic Closure at Work

In 1992 we Democrats on the eve of the election did not know what the frack was going on and knew we did not know. In 1996 we knew we were ahead in the week before the election. In 2000 and 2004 we knew we were behind and needed to get lucky. In 2008 we knew we were way ahead, and in 2012 we knew we were ahead.

But apparently all the Republicans had bought and drunk their own snake oil. The defining moment, perhaps, was Karl Rove's end-of-Trading-Places "turn the machines back on" moment as he lectured Fox News on how they could not call Ohio for Obama. It was followed by Megyn Kelly, Pat Caddell, Michael Barone, and company speculating about how Romney might well win the popular vote because he was still ahead by 100K before the Left Coast had come in.

Byron York:

A few hours earlier, across the street at the Convention Center, the campaign’s supporters and volunteers fully expected Romney to be the nation’s next president. Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.

“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.” “We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.” “It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”

Some Romney aides were surprised too, especially since they had put an enormous amount of effort into tracking the hour-by-hour whims of the electorate. In recent weeks the campaign came up with a super-secret, super-duper vote monitoring system that was dubbed Project Orca. The name “Orca,” after the whale, was apparently chosen to suggest that the project was bigger than anything any other campaign, including Barack Obama’s in 2008, had ever imagined. For the project, Romney aides gathered about 34,000 volunteers spread across the swing states to send in information about what was happening at the polls. “The project operates via a web-based app volunteers use to relay the most up-to-date poll information to a ‘national dashboard’ at the Boston headquarters,” said a campaign email on election eve. “From there, data will be interpreted and utilized to plan voter turnout tactics on Election Day.”

Orca, which was headquartered in a giant war room spread across the floor of the Boston Garden, turned out to be problematic at best. Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., Orca still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes. Obviously that didn’t happen. Later, another aide said Orca had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” said the aide.

 

John Quiggin: "Given the position [Mulligan] is trying to defend, these are the best arguments available" Why Not Mark His Beliefs to Market Instead?

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/08/mulligan-talks-his-book/

 

Erick Erickson: "As long as the GOP keeps relying on the usual hucksters, charlatans, and con artists it’ll keep getting the same results"

http://times247.com/articles/erickson-senate-needs-to-clean-up-its-act

 

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport, Trapped in Silvergrad, Promoted to Feldmarschall

Never before in history has somebody capable of taking a random sample missed a presidential election by 7% one week out. Never.

Frank Newport says:

These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote [and are]... not designed to be predictive

Generaloberst Barone Discovers That His Brain Does Not Work in the Winter Cold of Silvergrad

The idea is supposed to be that people take and look at polls to see whether their ideas about fundamentals are correct, and to see if they understand the demographics and mechanics. Barone doesn't seem to have looked at any polls--save for Rasmussen.

Buce observes from Palookaville: Barone Admits He Was Wrong in his Prediction But Doesn't Have Any Idea Why:

Say this for Michael Barone: he is the only one (that I have noticed) of the "Obama will nail it" forces who has actually issued anything like a mea culpa. Here is is in the Washington Examiner:

I was wrong because the outcome of the election was not determined, as I thought it would be, by fundamentals. Some fundamentals, I thought, favored Obama. Americans like to think well of their presidents (and Obama’s approval ratings rose, slightly, over the fall) and many, perhaps most, Americans believe it would be a bad thing for Americans to be seen as rejecting the first black president.

On the other hand, most voters opposed Obama’s major policies and found unsatisfactory the sluggish economic recovery that seems to them to be the result—negative factors that seem to have been confirmed by responses to exit poll questions as they were by responses to poll questions for many months now. .... This is not, I think, a grand triumph for his ideas or ideology. It is a triumph for his campaign strategists.

What happened? I think fundamentals were trumped by mechanics and, to a lesser extent, by demographics.

This is syntactically coherent, but once you give it a moment's thought, it's incoherent. Absent any empirical justification, one could just as well say, "I was right about the mechanics, but wrong about the fundamentals." Or more baldly: "gee, it looks like the voters' 'fundamentals' are not the same as my 'fundamentals,' and I didn't know that before."

Amidst these competing possibilities, how could we choose? To answer that question, we'd need some evidence, and I don't see Barone providing any. I suppose we could fall back on the fact that Barone is Mr. Ear-to-the-Ground, having spent his entire professional career as the accumulator and expositor of voting behavior data: Barone knows fundamentals,don't ask. But if this is true (i.e., so he must be "right on the fundamentals")--if this is true, why didn't he also know what was going on with the mechanics? Is there some kind of jurisdictional no-raiding pact that keeps a "fundamentals" guy from learning about "mechanics."

And you could go a step further. If Barone knew nothing about mechanics on Monday, how does he know so much about mechanics on Wednesday? Was there some great whoosh of empirical input that overwhelmed him on election day, like an untimely tropical storm?

Or further still. When Barone talks about "mechanics" he seems to mean stuff that most people describe as ""ground game"--discipline, organization, getting out the vote. Faithful observers (although apparently not Barone) have been reading/seeing/hearing for weeks that Democrats appeared to be pretty good at their ground game. But they have also been hearing that Republicans were working hard to gin up an onslaught of voter suppression. If logical consistency is the goal here, couldn't Barone just as well have said "gee, I guess Republicans were just not at good as I expected at voter suppression"? Actually, he might have been right on that one, but again--it would have required an inference that he just isn't as good a data man as would have us believe.

That throwaway about "demographics" I do not get at all. Best way I can read it, he's saying "I didn't know there were so many (young voters) (old voters) (Latino voters) (one-armed nuns with sailing-vessel tattoos)." But this "demographics stuff" is precisely what is supposed to be his stock in trade.

Cut Off in Silvergrad, Rasmussen Finds the Temperature at -538

Erik Loomis: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/11/rasmussen: Rasmussen:

Scott Rasmussen tries to explain why his polls were terrible. I’m reading this over and over again but I keep missing the sentence that reads “My polls suck because I’m a partisan hack who values creating a narrative that favors Republicans over accuracy.”

Indeed. Scott Rasmussen says a +3% pro-Romney house effect relative to the pollster average--a house effect that has no foundation in the data--is no biggie:

In general, the projections were pretty good. The two differences I noted were share of white vote falling to 72 percent. That’s what the Obama campaign, to their credit, said all along. We showed it just over 73 percent. Also, youth turnout higher and senior turnout lower than expected. That’s a pretty big deal given the size of the generation gap. I think it showed clearly that the Obama team had a great game plan for identifying their vote and getting it to the polls....

The reality is that there were eight toss-up states. Some people projected Romney would do a couple of points better than the polls and sweep those states. Instead, it was Obama who did a bit better and swept them. I look at the campaign as about fundamentals. Obama job approval on Election Day was 50 percent. That meant there was a good chance he would get 50 percent of the vote. Also, 36 percent said their finances were in good shape. Up from 35 percent the day Obama took office. In other words, the fundamentals were just good enough for the president to keep his job.

Henry Blodget Tries to Understand the "If Not for That Meddling Nate Silver!" Scooby-Doo Villains

http://www.businessinsider.com/questions-for-those-who-scoffed-at-the-polls-2012-11