Same as it ever was

So, two months ago, playing with Slate’s delegate calculator, I guessed that Obama would end up with 1677 delegates (thus needing 348 superdelegates).

http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/play-campaign-manager-in-your-own-home/

And today the default settings give Obama 1701 delegates (so he needs 324 superdelegates).

This isn’t because I’m a great pundit… it’s because the numbers were pretty much in two months ago.  It looked bad for Hillary.  And pretty much every state has gone the way anyone with a learner’s pundit permit guessed.  Yet it’s only now that the media seem to be stating openly that Hillary’s history.

At this point Hillary’s playbook must look like that S. Harris cartoon with the scientist staring at a blackboard with a bunch of equations on two sides, and in between “… and then a miracle occurs…”

 

Campaigning vs. governing

A very sensible article by Jeff Greenfield on how the skills required to campaign don’t correlate with those needed to govern:

http://www.slate.com/id/2189272/

Prime examples: Bill Clinton, whose 1992 campaign was exemplary and whose first two years as President were a mess, and George Bush, whose 2004 campaign was focussed, defy-the-odds victory leading to a disastrous presidency.

This is a good reminder because judging the quality of a campaign sounds much more reasonable than most of the drivel that gets posted. 

(Say, I just noticed that the Categories list in WordPress is sorted by how often you’ve used each one.  So the one you want is likely to be at the top.  Clever!)

 

Why businessmen shouldn’t be in charge

One of the best features of the New Yorker is James Surowiecki’s Financial Page.  This week he has a great article on the foolishness of our punitive bankruptcy law.  Go read it; it’s just a page long.

But in case you don’t: credit card companies a few years ago fantasized a “bankruptcy crisis”.  Bankruptcies, they pointed out, doubled between 1995 and 2004.  They didn’t emphasize that in the same period, their profits tripled.  Congresscreatures tut-tutted and passed a law making bankruptcy harder.  Bush promised that the law would make credit “more affordable”; naturally he was wrong– credit card rates and fees haven’t fallen.

 Now that the economy is tanking, the bankruptcy law is going to cause real harm.  Simply put, it’s lousy policy to drag out failure.  It will decrease entrepreneurship, since lenient bankruptcy laws make it easier to start over if a business fails, thus making it less risky to start one up.  It creates a disincentive to work, since a higher income just means more money going to creditors.  And by making credit card debt harder to avoid than mortgages, it’s added to the housing crisis.

The real puzzle here is how we get a law that’s bad for more people than it helps.  Do a majority of voters really favor laws that make their situation worse?

It’s not just lobbyists getting what they want from the Money Party.  The law fits a certain punitive, even self-punitive streak in conservativism.  Sometimes this is dignified as “moral hazard”.  The bankruptcy (sorry) of this line of thought is shown by the lack of concern for the moral hazard of executives.  The CEOs who brought on the mortgage meltdown will get multi-million-dollar rewards; firms like Bear Stearns that speculated irresponsibly get bailed out with taxpayer money. 

 

Why so Sadr?

As this Time article by Charles Crain makes clear, the clear winner of the recent operation in Basra was Muqtada al-Sadr.  It was supposed to shore up Nouri al-Maliki; now he looks weak.  It was hoped to marginalize Sadr; now his street cred is only increased, without losing his influence over what there is of the central government.

 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1726763,00.html

I have to ask again– after four years– why the US is at war with al-Sadr.   Sadr is obviously not a terrorist, and we can’t even label him an insurgent– his faction is a major force in the government.  We can’t even say we’re against warlords; we constantly tout our alliance of convenience with Sunni tribal leaders and seek to integrate their militias into the army. 

It’s pretty sad that my post of four years ago could be written today, except that all the names but Sadr’s have to be changed.  Even Bush will be gone soon.  Could a President McCain handle Sadr any better? McCain has opined that Sadr has to be “taken out” without apparently explaining how or why, and seems to think that Maliki’s operation worked.  Do we need four to eight more years of denial?

 

Actual policy discussed; world ends

Strange, almost eerie: a pundit is found actually pondering the possible policies of the presidential pretenders.  Paul Prugman, er, Krugman, compares the candidates’ ideas on the mortgage crisis:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html

 Krugman, an economist, spent much of 2000 hammering at the fiscal irresponsibility of George Bush; people really didn’t want to hear it, but in fact Bush is fiscally irresponsible.  So I’d take it as a serious concern that McCain sees the mortgage crisis– which was largely the result of an unregulated shadow banking system making irresponsible loans– and thinks the answer is deregulation.  If we’re going to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money to keep the system from collapsing– and McCain is in favor of “preventing systemic risk”, i.e. helping big business though not mortgage holders– then we need to look more closely at these guys, not less.

 Daniel Gross at http://www.slate.com/id/2187570/pagenum/2/ points out that McCain also wants $400 billion in new tax cuts, roughly the level of the current deficit.   

 McCain seems to be a pretty nice guy; but his positions are pretty much Bush again.  And Bush’s incompetence is only half the problem.

 

Rate this post from 1 to 10

I just finished William Poundstone’s book, which sports the clanky title Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It).  It’s about voting systems, a subject which, curiously, seems to engage only wonks.  Despite the object lesson of 2000, most Americans can hardly conceive that anything besides plurality voting exists, much less that it might be better.

 Till recently, game theorists were almost as pessimistic.  Kenneth Arrow’s 1948 paper seemed to show that no voting system was free of paradoxes.  Whatever you picked– plurality, single transferrable vote, Borda counts, Condorcet voting, instant-runoff voting, approval rating– you can construct an example where the wrong guy wins.  Plurality voting systems are prone to spoilers or clones; more sophisticated systems fall prey to strategic voting (where voters conceal their true preferences to give an advantage to their favorite); ranking systems in general fail if voter preferences aren’t transitive.

Poundstone unveils his own best candidate last (spoiler warning): range voting.  You very likely know it already: it’s the numerical ratings used at Hot or Not or rottentomatoes.  It bypasses Arrow’s paradox because it’s not a ranking system; it easily handles spoilers and strategic voting, and it’s simple to boot.

 

The bubble economy

Eric Janszen, a former venture capitalist, has an entertaining article on how the American economy has developed to run on bubbles.  If you like breezy historical overviews– this one goes back to WWI– you’ll love it.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

These days, as Janszen puts it, we’re all orthodox free marketers on the way up, but Keynesians on the way down.  That is, a modern bubble starts with deregulation (and Fed complicity) and earnest explanations of how the old rules don’t apply and the favored market will keep rising forever.  When it cracks, everyone wants the taxpayers to bail us out. 

 

Only we’re in a far worse state now than when the dot-com bubble burst: in contrast to the 6% Funds Rate, high dollar, high taxes, and government surpluses of 2000, we now have a 4.5% rate, a weak dollar, deficits, and insufficient taxes.

 So we need some kind of austerity program to deal with the loss of $12 trillion in fictitious value, or at the least a return to sensible regulation so financiers don’t keep messing up the economy?  Nah, we need a new bubble.  The best bubbles, Janszen says, are already in place, popular, and have a favorable tax treatment.  There’s only one industry that’s poised to take off: alternative energy.  Now you know where to put your millions.

 

Offense and BS

Given the debased standards of the last 16 years or so, the surprising thing about this election season has been its gentility.  The top candidates in both parties have been pretty careful about taking the high road.  That’s a sign that the electorate as a whole is tired of partisan nastiness.  

On the other hand, people have been taking offense as if Karl Rove was still in control.  Some advisor will say something impolitic, there’s a furor, and they’ll get canned by the candidate (who gets to show that they’re above the fray).  Timothy Noah has a good article in Slate on Obama’s very smart response to the latest incident. 

 This reminds me of the rather artificial righteousness that’s often on display after a forum goes through a split or a nasty flamewar.  Everyone’s on their best behavior– but it’s not a level of behavior that can be sustained, and really, getting offended can be just as aggressive and disruptive as trolling or flaming. 

Sometimes we need polite fictions.  Other times, they’re BS.  The brouhaha over Geraldine Ferraro or Jeremiah Wright strikes me as mostly BS.  Racism and sexism still exist, sometimes in pretty virulent form.  Obama is quite right to underline that things have improved and can continue to do so.  But pundits aren’t doing anyone any good when they take offense at some people’s continuing anger or bitterness over these issues. 

 Often a person’s views are not right or wrong, good or bad, but just part of their personal context.  As the first major-party female VP candidate, Ferraro very naturally sees things in terms of gender.  As a black pastor, Wright will see things in terms of race.  To the next generation, maybe these preoccupations look outdated… in fact, let’s hope they are.  But there’s still something to what they’re saying, even if their rhetoric is overdone.  Racism and sexism aren’t removed by punishing any rhetorical discussion of the topic; that just drives the anger underground and paves over politics with a layer of polite BS.

 

Play campaign manager in your own home

Here’s a neat toy from Slate that allows you to predict the results in the remaining primaries and see if Hillary or Obama wins.  You can be sure that a bunch of folks in each campaign are obsessively running similar tools with WoW-like intensity.

http://www.slate.com/features/delegatecounter/

Despite this week’s bad news for Obama, Hillary in bad shape, mostly due to the fact that the Democrats apportion delegates proportionately– so e.g. Obama’s 44% loss in Ohio still got him 59 new delegates.  I tried guessing the upcoming results based on those of neighboring states, and Obama ends up ahead 1677 to 1532 pledged delegates; the tool helpfully notes that he’d need 348 superdelegates to win. 

Hillary could win every remaining state in a 61% landslide and still lose the nomination.

 If you want to make your own predictions, this results page from CNN will help: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#D

 

Be Bugs, not Daffy

Amusing article in Slate, by Jeff Greenfield, arguing that whenever presidential candidates resemble Bugs Bunny and DaffyDuck, the Bugs-like candidate wins:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185720/

It’s probably not going to make it into poli sci courses any time soon.  But I think it’s true that voters prefer cool and optimistic candidates to frenetic and pessimistic ones, and don’t mind a little slyness.  On the other hand, they also tend to prefer the candidate who projects genial warmth over one that seems smart: cf. Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, JFK vs. Nixon, or any Republican since then vs. any Democrat except Bill Clinton.

More importantly, Greenfield annoyingly credits Chuck Jones with Bugs’s look and personality.  This is a base calumny.  Bugs’s look is due to Robert McKimson, and indeed, Jones’s own drawings (especially in the post-Warners period) make him look freakishly pudgy and feminized.  And the personality was a group effort, but the essentials were put in place by Tex Avery.  (Though it’s true that the ironic suavity that Greenfield wants to apply to politics was largely due to Jones; other directors made him more of a screwball wise guy.)