Wherefore the historical ballot?

In my last post, I laid out how I would've voted in every U.S. Presidential election ever. Why? Well, mostly because it's occurred to me to think about that from time to time, and it's getting all election-season-y so I thought I'd post it. But I do have a point I'd like to make about the concept of a historical ballot. I think party platforms should include one. Or, I dunno, I guess it would sound weird to say something like, "This is the Democratic Party, and we wish Henry Clay had beaten our guy in 1844, because he was more anti-slavery." But I'd like to hear parties give their account of whether they are, in retrospect, glad that they lost certain elections, or wish they hadn't won one that they did.

For example, Republicans currently favor the continued existence of Social Security. Does that mean they're glad the guy who created that program, Franklin Roosevelt, won his elections? They also favor the continued existence, in one form or another, of Medicare, and they support the Civil Rights Act. (Well, most of them do, anyway.) So are they glad that the man behind the Civil Rights Act defeated conservative icon Barry Goldwater in 1964, and went on to create Medicare?

Particularly for a conservative/regressive party, I think these are tricky decisions to answer. If you want to stop the advance of policy in a particular direction where it is currently, but you don't want to reverse it at all, does that mean you're glad it got exactly this far? If you want to roll things back to where they were 20 years ago, does that mean you're happy things got as far as they were 20 years ago? If not, does that tell us that you'd really like to roll things even further back, but you just don't think it's politically feasible? It'd be nice to get the Republicans on record on whether they think FDR's accomplishments were a good thing, or whether they would rather Hoover and Landon and Willkie have had a series of mediocre Republican terms that probably would've included a pretty solid economic recovery but wouldn't have created a whole new innovative welfare state. Because right now they're saying that they're still in favor of the things FDR did continuing to not have been undone, but it's kind of hard to imagine Mitt Romney, or Paul Ryan, or Chris Christie or Marco Rubio or any of the others, pulling the lever for Roosevelt in 1936, had they actually been there.

A progressive party, by the way, that thinks public policy has been moving in a good direction on the whole over the last many decades and would like to keep it moving in that direction, has less trouble with this. We're glad that Democrats accomplished the things they did, we wish Republicans hadn't had so much opportunity to impede further progress, and we'd like to move things even further along than any of our previous Presidents have taken us. Since we have at no point conceded that the past was a decent model for the future, we don't have to answer questions about exactly which part of the past we're so nostalgic for.

My Historical Ballot

Since we're getting into election season, I thought I'd write a post laying out how I would have voted in every U.S. Presidential election from 1789 through 2012. I have a point that I'm planning on making with this concept, which I'll get to in a subsequent post.

Who Will Be America's (Next?) Next President?

Today the Republicans are, regrettably, partying on in Tampa. I don't want to write about it, because I don't want to pay attention to it beyond reading things that other people write about it, because I can't stand listening to Republican politicians. So, instead, let's gossip about 2016! Because, you see, the British betting site Ladbrokes is already offering odds on the identity of the winner of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. They're really expansive odds, going down to Karl Rove at 200/1. (There really needs to be a way to short the odds given by these bookmakers.) No one else is listed at worse than 100/1, where we find Julian Castro (D), the Mayor of San Antonio; Jon Huntsman (R), who lost badly in the 2012 primaries; Donald Trump (R?) who, well, you know who he is; Condoleeza Rice (R), the former Secretary of State; Rahm Emanuel (D), the Mayor of Chicago; and Ron Paul (R-ish), who'll be 81. Cory Booker (D), the Mayor of Newark and hopefully the Governor of New Jersey by that point, is the only person listed at 80/1. The 66/1 crowd includes Mike Huckabee (R), David Petraeus (R?), Sarah Palin (R), and Rand Paul (R). At 50/1 we find Deval Patrick (D), Eric Cantor (R), Michael Bloomberg (I), and Rick Santorum (R). Elizabeth Warren (D) clocks in at 40/1, and Bobby Jindal (R) and Chris Christie (R) are at 33/1. Martin O'Malley (D) and Andrew Cuomo (D) are at 25/1, while Jeb Bush (R), Marco Rubio (R), and Joe Biden (D) are at 20/1. Paul Ryan's got 14/1 odds. Then we get Hillary Clinton (D) at 6/1.

And then there's Mitt Romney. He's the favorite, of course, and the odds on him are 5/1. Aside from the existence of these odds in the first place, that's really the point of my post, because that strikes me as an incredibly bearish number for Romney. Let's do the math, shall we? 5/1 odds mean that for every time the event occurs, it would not occur 5 times, so it equates to a prediction that the event in question will occur 1 in 6 times, or about 16.6% of the time. Now, in order to win the 2016 election, Mitt Romney basically needs to win the 2012 election first, and then win re-election four years later. If you assume that the odds of Romney winning each election are the same as each other, if he gets to them, that's an implicit 40.8% chance of winning each election. Now, I don't know about you, but I feel like Romney's a lot more likely to win the 2016 election conditional on his having won in 2012 than he is to win in 2012 right now. Among other things, incumbents win most of the time, and we're sort of slated for a decent patch of economic growth over the next four years, although I'd be the first to tell you that four years of Republican governance isn't the best thing for the trajectory of the economy. So I'd say the implicit odds here are a bit worse than 40% that Romney wins this election.

Okay, that's not particularly bearish, is it? I suppose the FiveThirtyEight numbers give him worse odds right now. But consider the following: bookmakers set their odds so that they get to keep a bit of money, on average. That means overstating the probability of everything. In other words, if they actually though Romney had a 16.6% chance of winning the 2016 election, they wouldn't give him 5/1 odds, they'd give him 4/1, or maybe 7/2 or something. So the 5/1 odds actually give us a slightly lower estimate of that percentage, which in turn gives us a lower estimate of Romney's odds of winning each election separately. Which in turn gives an estimate of the state of play for 2012 that's very similar to the 538 numbers, which are pretty lousy for Romney. So, yet another sign that, as of today, Obama's winning.

It's About Dishonor

So, here was an absolute gem of an interview exchange featuring the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania, Tom Smith:

Interviewer: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

Smith: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn't have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape.

Interviewer: Similar how?

Smith: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

Interviewer: That's similar to rape?

Smith: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father's situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I'm pro-life, period.

Here's his spokesperson trying to explain these comments:

"Tom Smith is committed to protecting the sanctity of life and believes it begins at conception," she said in a statement. "While his answers to some of the questions he faced at the Pennsylvania Press club may have been less than artful, at no time did he draw the comparison that some have inferred. When questioned if he was drawing that comparison, Tom's answer was clear, 'no, no, no.' Tom was speaking to the difficult decision faced by his family, not the nature of his daughters conception.”

Sorry, but that's not good enough. Yes, it's true that Smith wasn't actually saying the extramarital sex his daughter had that resulted, accidentally or otherwise, in a pregnancy was akin to rape. (Pun really not intended, at least not until after I typed it.) But let's analyze that last comment. It confirms what I said in my previous sentence, because he's not talking from his daughter's perspective. He's talking from "a father's situation." Now, you might hope that a father would, in that situation, adopt a more or less wholly empathetic view, and be trying to view the situation from his daughter's perspective. Tom Smith, it's clear, doesn't want us to do that, so what other view of the situation does he have in mind? Well, it's hard to avoid thinking that he's thinking about questions of honor.

I suppose it's not exactly news that lots of people think out-of-wedlock pregnancy is dishonorable, and that having one's daughter get so situated is dishonorable for a father. And I suppose it's also not news that some people, at least, aren't willing to make an exception for this judgment of dishonorableness when the pregnancy is the result not of anything your daughter did but of something that was done to her. But at this late hour in human history I think it's a bit past time we still had candidates for U.S. Senate hawking the view that premarital sex is shameful, which, let's be clear, Tom Smith did in this interview, even though he didn't actually say that it's the same as rape. And one also doesn't typically think of the whole "being raped is dishonorable" thing being prevalent in this country, but rather in various Islamic countries with which the whole "honor killing" thing is generally associated. It's edifying, I suppose, to learn that respectable (well, almost respectable) political candidates hold a very similar worldview right in our own nation.

So let's be clear about what Tom Smith said: no, he didn't say that having premarital sex is like being raped. He just said that having premarital sex, especially if you get pregnant, is shameful, and that being raped shares that shamefulness.

Gee, I wonder why so few rapes get reported.

No, Seniors Don't Prefer Romney on Medicare

Another interesting tidbit from the recent Washington Times poll. They asked whether people thought Romney and the Republicans or Obama and the Democrats were more likely to try to cut Medicare, and broke down the results by age. Overall, 46% said Romney was more likely, 27% said Obama, 19% said neither, and 8% were unsure. That's a +19 disadvantage for Romney here, since a higher number is presumptively worse. Among voters under 30, Romney's net disadvantage was +23%. Among voters aged 30 through 49, that figure was +22%. Among voters 50 to 64 years old, the gap shrunk to 15%. Among those 65 or older, the gap was 17%. So, okay, Romney does a little less badly among the elderly, but he's still losing the issue. A lot.

Here's one interesting thing of note, though: the percent saying "neither" is really strongly correlated with age. By age group, in ascending order, those figures were 21%, 25%, 16%, and 9%. If one lumps "unsure" in with "neither," which might or might not be valid, it's 33%, 30%, 25%, 17%. Seniors, in other words, are really scared everyone's trying to cut their Medicare.

But they're still more scared of Romney than of Obama.

That's an Interesting Lifestyle Choice

This is considerably more random than my usual fare, but it caught my attention and is funny so I thought I'd write about it. I just saw the following question from a recent Washington Times poll:

"You may have heard about major league pitcher Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals, who is recovering from elbow surgery. His team is trying to make the playoffs, but needs to decide whether to let him pitch the rest of the season or shut him down to protect his arm. What should the team do? Let him pitch the whole season. Shut him down early, no use risking his arm."

The results were 11% let him pitch, 47% shut him down, 42% unsure. That doesn't surprise me, given that the way this poll is phrased you almost can't say you think he should continue to pitch. They mention that he's recovering from elbow surgery, which is slightly misleading given that he's done rehabbing from the surgery, and the concerns are just about a pitcher coming off of surgery. They mention that the Nationals are trying to make the playoffs, but not that Strasburg is one of the best pitchers in the league. Then they also mention that shutting him down would "protect his arm." Now, maybe these arguments are correct, but it's a hell of a slanted question. But that's not the point.

No, the point is the sample of which they asked this question: 800 likely voters nationwide. Now, I'm not sure why you wouldn't limit this to baseball fans, or more specifically to Nationals fans since they're the only ones, presumably, who care about the Nationals' making the playoffs. Maybe it would've made sense to limit it to the Maryland/DC/Virginia area? Who knows. But, more to the point... likely voters? Huh? This isn't actually going to be on the ballot in the fall elections, guys. There's exactly no good reason only to care about what people who want to vote in the 2012 Presidential election think about the Great Strasburg Debate. Hell, I'm not even sure "all adults" is the right theoretical sample. Lots of children and teenagers are avid baseball fans; why not let them have a say?

That this happens to be about baseball, an interest of mine, and more specifically about a baseball story I've been following somewhat in detail, is a nice coincidence, but ultimately this is mainly a great example of the way pollsters and those presenting poll results don't think about the context of the question. If something isn't going to be up for a vote at the next election, it really doesn't matter who's registered or likely to vote. If something isn't the kind of thing you can vote on, which side has the majority might not be the best way to analyze the results. Don't just treat every poll as though it's a variation on the basic Presidential horse-race theme.

You Don't "Build" a Company, Anyway

(Apologies for how late this post is relative to the original controversy. I'm pretty sure that this is a post I had meant to write some evening a few weeks ago, but never got around to it, and then only remembered what I had meant to write a few minutes ago.)

The conservative take on Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" line, which was of course in reality a slightly awkward of phrasing the general liberal idea that every successful business enterprise can only succeed because of a general environment of well-maintained infrastructure, a stable legal regime protecting property rights etc. that's created by the government, is that he instead alleged that small business owners did not genuinely deserve credit for the success of their businesses. This was always a stretch, for a lot of reasons one of which is that it's clearly not what Obama was saying. Moreover, many of the businesspeople that the Romney campaign has trotted out with big "WE DID BUILD IT" banners have demonstrably taken lots of government support for their businesses, which is nice and embarrassing.

But the way you know that the whole thing is nonsense, even without bothering to go back and look at the full text of Obama's speech and see that, yep, obviously the antecedent for "that" was roads and bridges and stuff, is by reading those banners. They sound ridiculous. Seriously, read that banner again. "We did build it"? "You did built that"? It just sounds absurd, on a purely linguistic level. Part of the problem is the use of the dangling pronoun, which only serves to highlight the fact that the entire Republican interpretation hinges on a flagrantly wrong reading of the original pronoun. Another part of the problem, I think, is the use of the word "build." Obama, of course, was using the word "build" in a purely literal sense. He was talking about roads and bridges, things which are built, as in constructed, and he was making the accurate observation that very few small business owners are responsible in any meaningful way (except tax dollars!) for the construction of the general infrastructure.

Now, people do use all sorts of wacky words to describe expansion and growth using transitive verbs in the economic context, most famously with the concept of "growing" the economy. I guess you might hear a person saying something like, "I built this business from the ground up," in which case they're very explicitly invoking a metaphor of physical construction. But to use the word as Romney is using it just strikes me as unnatural. You wouldn't say, "he built that business," again unless you added a modifier like "from the ground up" or "with his bare hands" to create a more specific metaphorical image. You might say "he created that business" or "he grew that business" or something. But the specific use of "build" in "we did build it" just sounds awkward and weird. And that's the very first thing about this whole bloody nonsense that should've tipped you off that it was nonsense.

Even the Very Most Independent Business Didn't Build The Roads

Apparently, some prominent speaker at the Republican National Convention this week will be a businesswoman named Sher Valenzuela. As this Daily Kos article points out, her business has received a whole effing lot of government loans and government contracts, etc. That's all very well and good for liberals looking to poke fun at Republicans' efforts to criticize Obama's "you didn't build that" remarks, by pretending he meant something completely unconnected to what he actually said. But I'd like to point out that all of this explicit government support for this business is irrelevant to how applicable Obama's actual statement is. After all, the "that" in "you didn't built that" isn't your own business. If it were, then things like the Daily Kos article might well point out that, well, yes, the government had a substantial hand in building this business. But in reality, as opposed to Republicanland, Obama meant society at large, acting through the government, is responsible for the environment of physical infrastructure, a stable legal order, etc. that's necessary for a thriving capitalistic society and necessary for any small business to succeed. You, the small business owner, didn't built that infrastructure.

Note that this is true even for the hypothetical company that's never taken a dime in explicit government support. It didn't create the whole setting of a stable, developed capitalist society that has allowed it to prosper. So all of the Small Business Administration loans taken out by Ms. Valenzuela's business are irrelevant. She didn't built that, not in the sense Obama clearly meant, and she wouldn't have built it even if those loans and contracts had never happened.

Policies, Justifications, and Taking It Back

I have not written much, or, well, anything about the recent Todd Akin controversy, in part because there's not much to say that isn't being said elsewhere. What he said was horrid, on a whole lot of counts, which I won't bother getting into here. The point I want to make is that he didn't just say all of this out of the blue. His notion that women rarely get pregnant as a result of rape was the justification for one of his policy positions, namely that abortion should be banned without exception, including stuff like the morning-after pill. To me, the fact that his quote was a justification for a specific policy is tremendously important in considering his "apology" for those remarks. Because the thing is, he has, of course, stuck by that policy. He still thinks abortion and the morning-after pill should be banned absolutely, with no exceptions. Presumably he still has reasons for thinking that. It's not remotely unlikely that his continued reasons for holding that policy preference are the same as the reasons he articulated and then got in trouble for. Unless he gives some alternate justification for the same policy, every time he continues to advocate his preferred policy on this issue he is implicitly re-uttering these same remarks about how women don't get pregnant much from being raped. For him to "take back" the justification without taking back the thing it's justifying just doesn't work, and I suspect has a lot to do with why this controversy seems to have staying power.

Now, as it happens he does have a parallel justification, and it's the second and much less focused-on part of the quote, about how the punishment in cases of rape resulting in pregnancy should fall on the perpetrator and not the innocent child. Honestly, I have a non-trivial degree of sympathy with that perspective as a private ethical matter, and in general think that the world would be a better place if people cared a bit less about where people's DNA came from, in these among other circumstances. However, none of that makes me think that abortion ought be criminalized, in these cases or in any other. I have a feeling that if Akin tries to make a particularly public articulation of this parallel justification, in a way that anyone hears, he's not going to find that the people who were offended by the first half of the quote get much less offended when he only uses the second half. And if he doesn't make it clear that in his own personal ideology this thing about punishment is capable of doing all the work of upholding his "no abortion (or morning-after pill) ever, no exceptions, not even rape" policy, then what I said earlier holds, and he hasn't actually taken back his full remarks, not one tiny bit.

No, Social Issues Are Not A "Distraction"

It's always really easy to make parallels between the current Presidential campaign and any ol' previous campaign, because there are usually lots of similarities between any two complex things and if you just ignore the non-similarities, well, there you go. Of course, it's easier to compare this election to some previous ones than others; I have a hard time seeing the 2012-1912 parallel, for instance. One previous cycle a lot of people have compared this year's election to is the 2004 race, often noting a supposedly ironic antiparallel. That year, the thinking goes, a Republican incumbent who had been presiding over a mediocre economy and had middling, polarized approval numbers faced a rich man from Massachusetts considered unlikeable by most. The opposition party felt that the only priority was to beat the incumbent. The incumbent party wanted to talk less about the disappointing state of the economy and more about cultural issues and national security. Flip the parties, and it sounds very similar.

One particular sub-genre of the 2004/2012 comparison is when people, typically moderate-ish pro-Romney types, I think, talk about how, well, in 2004 the Bush campaign was desperate not to talk about the economy, but instead to use gay marriage and abortion as "wedge issues," and now Obama's in the same position of trying to distract from the lousy economy with social issues. The Romney campaign, of course, makes the second half of that complaint explicit, and are very adamant that everything except the continued mediocrity of the unemployment figure is a distraction. So can I just say, for the record, that this is not the case? Yeah, proper macroeconomic management is important. A lot of other things are important, too. Public policy on sex ed/birth control, a category I consider to include the morning after pill and therefore the recent Akin controversy, is tremendously important to aggregate human happiness. So, of course, is the structure of the welfare state, as Republicans are often in a mood to keep reminding us. So, actually, are gay rights, a "fringe issue" in that they only directly affect the lives of a small-ish number of people but they affect those people's lives to a very comprehensive degree.

Now, there's a sense in which the major problem with American public policy right now is the poor macroeconomic management. Matt Yglesias loves to pound that theme, and I think he makes a persuasive case both that this mismanagement is inexcusable and that it does tremendous harm, both by causing immediate suffering and by lastingly impoverishing the future. So yes, maybe in a certain way "the economy" deserves to be the #1 issue of this campaign. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be the only issue, and if we didn't live in a world where one party happens to be more wrong than the other party about almost everything all at once, I could easily imagine voting for the candidate who I thought, on balance, would do a worse job of managing the economy, if I also thought that they had a clearly better policy platform in general. The Romney campaign wants to convince people that this is wrong, and at times seems to me to be making an odd jump from political science literature suggesting that people typically vote against the incumbent if the economy is poor to the idea that people ought to do this. You can make a good case, though, that the mechanistic "economic determinism" voting pattern political science claims to uncover is a bad thing, and that people ought instead give more weight to overall ideology and policy preferences.

So stop complaining about Obama trying to "distract" us from the economy. Maybe his campaign likes it when we talk about things that aren't one of its relative weaknesses, but there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no good reason for thinking that weakness is the only thing that matters just because we call it "the economy."

The (Maybe) Coming Female Democratic Wave

Among the two Senate classes not up for election this year, there are a total of six female Democratic Senators, out of a total of thirty Democrats overall. That's 20%, which is mediocre in absolute terms, sort of average worldwide (for an entire legislature), and better than the whole U.S. Congress right now. However, there's a real possibility that the elections this November could up that figure substantially. This is unlikely to happen if most of the toss-up races don't go the Democrats' way. Dianne Feinstein of California, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Maria Cantwell of Washington are all incumbents almost certain to be re-elected, and Mazie Hirono is quite likely to win Hawaii's open-seat race. That's another six, bringing us to 12 Democrats, which would not be terrible representation for a minority caucus which is what Democrats would be if those are the only women they elect this year.

But suppose the Democrats are having a really good night. Maybe the Paul Ryan thing has been a fiasco, maybe the economy's improved, whatever. Obama's winning by around the same margin as last time, if not a bit more, and he's got substantial coattails/the Republican ticket has substantially poisonous ones. Then we might also see Massachusetts electing Elizabeth Warren, Missouri re-electing Claire McCaskill, Nevada electing Shelley Berkley, North Dakota electing Heidi Heitkamp, and Wisconsin electing Tammy Baldwin. That would get us to eleven total Democratic women from this year's class, which could be as much as half the total although on a night this good the Democrats could easily be gaining seats overall which would mean electing more than twenty-two new Democrats. It would bring us to 17 total female Democratic Senators, nearly one-third of the caucus. And it might, hopefully, set an expectation that future elections would see a whole lot of Democratic women nominated for winnable Senate races. The 2014 cycle, unfortunately, looks to be a bit of a bloodbath, with tons of Democrats up for election and Obama's midterm likely to be causing problems, so it might not be the best opportunity to add. But in 2016, with hopefully some strong Democratic Presidential candidate and all of the vulnerable 2010-cycle Republicans having to face the not-as-conservative-as-they-are voters for the first time, we might be able to add a dozen new women to the caucus. It's about damn time, too.

(For what it's worth, there are three female Republican Senators not up for re-election this year, namely Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. In the good-day-for-Democrats scenario I'm envisioning, those three might be joined by Deb Fischer of Nebraska, but that's about it. So yeah, Democrats are way the hell better at electing women, and the gap might be about to grow substantially wider.)

Risk is Risky

As Nate Silver explained shortly after the pick was announced, there's a pretty good reason why Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan makes at least a certain kind of sense: Romney is currently losing. He's been losing very steadily for months, and there's no particular reason to think that will change. That, therefore, makes it more sensible than it would otherwise be for him to do something risky, and picking Ryan is definitely risky. So, in a sense, good for Romney in recognizing that he needed not to just go with the boring ol' Senator from a swing state, hoping to gain some modest advantage in Ohio or Florida or wherever. (Although another way for Romney to take a risk would've been to pick a moderate(ish) Republican like Nevada's Brian Sandoval, which arguably would have been a better risk.)

But while one can recognize the need for Romney to do something risky and shake up the current "Obama narrowly but very clearly and very steadily in front" dynamic, that doesn't mean that the risk will pay off. And if it doesn't pay off, it's quite likely that it will not pay off in a big way. Specifically, I'm thinking that the odds of an Obama landslide, by at least as big a margin as last time around, is much bigger now than it was last Friday. I suppose it's possible that the new plan will work for Romney, although it doesn't look like it to me and the private despair of many Republican strategists has me feeling pretty confident about that. But it's at least as likely that the plan will go horribly wrong, that the decision to switch the election over to a grand ideological struggle in which you're clearly on the unpopular side will go about as well as it sounds like it should, and that Obama will rack up close to a double-digit margin of victory. Maybe win all his 2008 states, perhaps minus Indiana, and plus, say, Missouri and Arizona? Something satisfying, anyway.

A while ago I noticed that being re-elected with a smaller Electoral College margin of victory that your initial election is really rare. Madison did it in 1812, but that was before the popular-vote era. Woodrow Wilson did it in 1916, but his first election was a wacky three-way contest with Taft and Roosevelt that allowed him to rack up an electoral landslide despite getting 42% of the popular vote. So it's rare. Obviously, Presidents lose re-election all the time, but when they win they tend to extend their margins. For the past many months it's looked like Obama was going to win re-election but with a narrower margin than 2008. I'd say the Ryan pick has made the alternative much more likely.

People Can Be Weird Sometimes

So, following a series of links from a random xkcd comic, I just spent a few minutes perusing the Wikipedia article about the so-called "two-envelopes problem." The idea is this: suppose I give you two identical envelopes, each of which has some money in it, and allow you to pick one of those envelopes and take whatever money is in it. Now suppose that after you pick up one of the envelopes, I give you the chance to switch your choice to the other envelopes. If we call the amount of money in the envelope you originally chose "A," and assume it's equally likely that A is the higher amount or the lower amount, then there's a 50% chance that by switching you'll gain A dollars, and a 50% chance that you'll lose A/2 dollars, so on average you gain money by switching. But now, once you've switched, suppose I offer you the chance to switch envelopes again. Well, calling the amount of money in your new envelope "B," I can reason exactly as before, and convince you to switch. In fact, if I keep offering switches and making this argument, I can get you to switch forever!

Romney's Advisors Knew Ryan Was a Bad Choice

So, the initial reaction to the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI01) as Mitt Romney's running-mate has been kind of curious. Republicans are elated. So are Democrats. Electoral politics is a zero-sum game, so this is weird. Now, to be fair, there's arguably a tactical advantage in appearing publicly to think that things are going great for your side, so maybe this isn't so weird. But the fact remains that at most one side can be right in their elation over the Ryan pick. Which one?

Well, obviously, being a Democrat I tend to think that the Democrats are right, and that Ryan will turn out to have been a giant mistake. But here's a piece of evidence that makes me much more confident in that thought, and much less scared of the idea that there's some secret plan that will make Ryan a genius pick. Specifically, I've seen a few stories recently saying that all of Romney's advisers were dead-set against picking Ryan. The impetus to choose him came entirely from the candidate. The great thing about this is that there's no particular reason to think that Mitt Romney, himself, has a perfect grasp of all the relevant evidence about whether Ryan would be strategically advantageous for the ticket. There is a reason to think his various advisers have such a grasp, however, namely that it's their job. It's not the candidate's job. So the fact that all of the people in the campaign whose job it is to know what decisions will make strategic sense for the campaign didn't want to pick Paul Ryan is tremendous news. It suggests that they agree, in their heart of hearts, with the Democratic reaction to the Ryan pick.

Now, these stories could be wrong. But if they're not, they make me feel a lot better about feeling good about Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential nominee.

Burying the Lede with Joe Walsh

A few days ago I saw headlines like this one: "Joe Walsh accused of racial insensitivity for referring to Obama as 'son.'" Now, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL08) is one of the slimiest sleazeballs elected to Congress in the last election cycle, so I'm not particularly surprised by such a headline. Today I had occasion to see the full quote, and, well, the part where he calls Obama "son" isn't the worst part by a long way:

“There’s something different on the ground, and I think it’s going to overtake us all again, think it’s going to overtake the political class. I think it’s going to respectfully pick this president up and pat him on the head and say, son, son, son, Mr. President, you were never ready to be president, now go home and work for somebody and find out how the real world works.”

Work for somebody?

Work for somebody?

Work for somebody?!?

Seriously, though. Is he seriously suggesting that the former President of the United States, upon his electoral defeat this November, get an ordinary job, with an ordinary boss and an ordinary salary? That can't be right, can it? I mean, that's just not a thing. Ex-Presidents, among other things, get Secret Service details! And, you know, they were President. They're not just going to get some random job working for somebody. Now, if you wanted to suggest that Obama just start up some private enterprise of his own, which could be something public-spirited like what Bill Clinton has done, that would be different. If you want to say that Obama doesn't know how to run the economy because he's never had a "real job," fine; it's a load of bull for many reasons, but I sort of see what the argument is trying to be. But Walsh said Obama should work for somebody, in the future, as the ex-President.

To my mind, this can only be explained in terms of race. I don't think it would be possible to see a white President being told that, upon his defeat and return to private life, he should get a mundane job where he would have a boss for whom he worked. The only explanation has got to be that Walsh was speaking from the worldview in which the natural order has all the black people working for other, presumptively white people. Seriously, though, how else can you possibly explain telling the incumbent President that he needs to go work for someone? Is there any other possibility? I really don't think so.  

Accuse People of Killing People More, People!

Apparently, Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman, said that President Obama has "blood on his hands" regarding Medicare cuts. The Huffington Post appears to have reacted to this as if it's some horrific over-the-top accusation of murder on Priebus' part. What Reince actually meant was that, whereas Paul Ryan has merely proposed cutting Medicare, Obama has actually done so, in the form of the roughly $500 in Medicare spending reduction in the Affordable Care Act. Now, one can bicker and argue all day about whether that counts as Obama cutting Medicare, since he mostly cut the wasteful spending that got added to Medicare during the Bush Administration (with much support from that noted deficit hawk, Paul Ryan). And I certainly think it's fine to use colorful metaphors in describing things like this; as with Obama's "you didn't build that" line, it's clear from context that Priebus wasn't saying anything about Obama being a murderer, having blood on his hands that all Neptune's oceans couldn't wash out like Macbeth.

But my point in writing this blog post is a stronger one than simply that colorful metaphors are okay. I think it should be much more common for politicians to say when they think their opponent's policies would result in people dying unnecessary deaths. After all, public policy is important, and lots of people die when it gets done wrong. That's important! Arguably it's the most important thing about public policy. Elections, therefore, might sometimes want to focus on it. So saying, "my opponent's policies will result in people dying" should be, when factually accurate, fine. Desirable, even, since it should help prevent person-killing policies from getting enacted. Now, actually using the word "murder" could be a little too intense/inflammatory, and there's always the general desire not to have people running around saying false things. But when you honestly think, with good reason, that your opponent's policies will lead to people dying, say so, please. If Reince Priebus thinks that Obama's Medicare cuts will kill old people, which is a defensible claim though I doubt it's true, he should say so, explicitly. If he wants to say that Obama has "blood on his hands" because of his Medicare cuts killing old people, good for him. Don't let's freak out because he dares talk about the idea that electing the wrong person gets people killed.

(Oh, and for the record, of course I believe that electing Mitt Romney will get lots of people needlessly killed, compared to re-electing Obama instead.)

Oh Wait, They Did

So, apparently it is going to be Paul Ryan after all. Sweet. There is nothing about this choice that scares me; for my analysis of why not, see my previous post. It looks to me like Obama is going to win this election, barring something changing rather dramatically, for two very good reasons: nobody can stand Mitt Romney, and nobody agrees with Paul Ryan's policies. It'll be nice, assuming it does play out the way it looks like right now, to see those two very sensible, substantive reasons triumphing over the "let's hope voters are stupid and just vote against the incumbent in a bad economy" thing.

Of course, if Romney does win now, it'll be just that little extra bit super depressing. Don't screw this up, okay Barack? I really don't want these guys in power any time soon.

Oh Yes, Please, Nominate Paul Ryan for VP, Please

Apparently there's an increasing pressure building from the right wing of the Republican Party for Mitt Romney to choose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District as his Vice Presidential nominee. The thought of this makes me kind of giddy. Here's why.

First of all, Ryan offers essentially no geographic advantage for Romney. Nate Silver's calculus showed that, while a Rob Portmann or Bob McDonnell or Brian Sandoval pick could boost Romney's odds of winning the Electoral College by close to 2% by providing a home-state bonus, Ryan would only add 0.1% to Romney's victory odds. That is to say, more or less nothing. That's because Ryan is not that popular in Wisconsin as a whole, since after all he only represents one of its eight Districts; his statewide net positive rating is just +4.9%. That translates, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, into an additional +0.7% in the Wisconsin popular vote tally, which translates into an extra 2.5% chance of winning Wisconsin, which translates into an extra 0.25 expected electoral votes. Which translates into an extra 0.1% chance of winning the electoral college. So in terms of geographical math, a Paul Ryan pick accomplishes nothing. So far, so good.

How Do You Tell if Mitt Romney's Lying?

Typically, when you ask of someone, "how can you tell if so-and-so's lying?" and the answer is supposed to be, "because their lips are moving," it's an exaggeration. The person tells an awful lot of lies, presumably, but it's not literally everything they say that's a lie. But, I dunno, I think in the case of Mitt Romney it might be pretty close to a literal statement of reality. In the past couple of weeks he's attacked Obama for saying something he literally didn't say, the whole "you didn't build that" nonsense; he's attacked Obama for suing to stop soldiers from getting to vote early in Ohio, whereas in fact Obama is suing to get everyone else to be allowed to vote early in Ohio, also; and just now he's attacking Obama for gutting the work requirement of the 1996 welfare reform, when in reality Obama is soliciting plans from the states to get welfare recipients jobs more efficiently. It's really astonishing how small a percentage of Romney's attacks are actually grounded in the slightest bit of factual evidence.

Meanwhile, Romney's favorability ratings continue to lag far behind Obama's. I wonder why? Hopefully people will be smart enough not to vote for the person they like worse.