Split-Course Tournaments, Continued

Not for nothing, but on both days he's played the South Course Phil Mickelson has matched the low round of the day on it. The result is that he's tied for the lead heading into Sunday, and given his performances on Thursday and today, I'd say he looks to be in pretty good shape.

How To Be A Great Golfer

I saw an article recently about how Bubba Watson had been working hard on his putting because he sees that all the great players are multidimensional and, in particular, putt well. There's no question that putting well is very, very useful for being a great player. But I think the multidimensionality is more the key. There are a bunch of different ways to break down the various skills involved in playing golf, but for this purpose I think I like the five-part division: power, accuracy, precision, recovery, and putting. The difference between accuracy and precision is that accuracy is about hitting fairways and precision is about hitting into the green. Recovery includes the short game and the art of playing from poor positions from tee to green, which is a slightly composite category but whatever. My hypothesis is that being a truly great player requires having no more than one of these five be a genuine weakness, and to be an all-time great player requires having no weakness so weak that it can overpower your game. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.

How to Follow a Multi-Course Golf Tournament

Today at the Farmers Insurance Open, formerly the Buick Invitational, formerly the San Diego Open, the lowest round of the day was a 64 recorded by Sunghoon Kang. Alex Prugh and Rickie Fowler were one shot back at a 7-under 65, while Chris Kirk shot 66. The group at -5 included John Daly, Phil Mickelson, and Fabian Gomez. The first two are bigger names than the third, but there's a reason I mention them together: they're all tied for the lead.

Now, that might sound strange, but really it's not. After all, I could have said something very similar last week at the Bob Hope Classic, though given the actual nuances of that tournament I don't think it would have been relevant. You see, like the Bob Hope, the San Diego Open is played on multiple courses. A fair number of tournaments do this, but none of them are as spectacular in the dichotomy on display as San Diego. One of the courses is the South Course at Torrey Pines Golf Course, which hosted the spectacular 2008 U.S. Open (which means it's kind of tough). The other is the North Course, which has been known to be the easiest course on the PGA Tour. It plays about three or four shots harder than the South Course in some years.

So the reason Mickelson, Daly, and Gomez are tied for the lead is because they had the best days of anyone who played on the South Course. Now, Sunghoon Kang is also in that tie, because he holds the North Course lead. What becomes of this mess we'll only be able to tell tomorrow, when the golfers all switch courses. But at a tournament like this, I really think they should show you how each player stands for that subset of the field that played the same course as they did. For instance, Phil is nominally tied for 5th, three off the lead, but he's also tied for the lead among the South Course field. It doesn't matter so much near the top of the leaderboard, but when I look at people who seem near the cut line it might help to know that some of them are actually doing way better than the others, because they played the tougher course first.

For what it's worth, Tiger played the North Course. And he shot a 69, including zero birdies on par-5s. That puts him T22 overall, but T17 for the North Course field. Of course, to project how one would end up if everyone played both courses at the same level they played today, you need to double, so he projects into a tie for 34th. But I'm not worried, because this is his modus operandi: he never plays the North particularly great, but then he gets to the South and plays that course very differently from everyone else. Hell, he can beat that course with one leg tied behind his back.

The Spending People Want To Cut

A couple of polls are out, one from Gallup asking people which parts of government they want to cut and one from CNN asking specifically whether people prefer to cut a given program for deficit reduction or not. I prefer the latter, both because it asks more different categories and because I think it presents both sides of the debate better (and yes, that ends up with a higher average "let's cut it" percent, which is contra my interests in the matter). So, what do Americans want to cut? And what do they want to save?

The programs Americans do not want to cut significantly to reduce the deficit are infrastructure spending (39%/61%), unemployment insurance (38%/61%), Medicaid (29%/70%), education programs (25%/75%), Social Security (21%/78%), Medicare (18%/81%), and veterans' benefits (14%/85). What do Americans think it's okay to cut to shrink the deficit? Defense spending (50%/49%), "welfare programs in general" (56%/44%), pensions for government workers (61%/39%), and foreign aid (81%/18%).

A few observations: the things people do not want to cut include most of the left-wing stuff. It also includes the three welfare programs the government spends the vast majority of its non-military money on, so while Americans want to cut welfare in the abstract, they like the three big welfare programs we have very, very much. The public employee pensions thing is one where the public is just wrong, and I think it's the result of some populist demagoguery. And as to foreign aid, well, yeah, okay... try balancing our budget by cutting foreign aid. You can't; it's negligible. The polls that have done experiments on this are notorious: when asked what percent of our budget people think foreign aid should be, the average answer is an order of magnitude or two higher than what the figure actually is in real life. But people also think foreign aid constitutes 25% of our budget, whereas it's actually more like, uh, 0.25%.

But I also think one should take a poll like this in context, specifically the context of several polls showing that, while voters prefer "spending cuts" to "tax hikes" in the abstract, they prefer raised taxes to cuts in, say, Social Security, or Medicare. And they really, really prefer raising taxes on the rich to cutting those programs. So I'd say that if the public has a particularly intelligible, feasible preference for deficit-reduction strategy, it involves cutting defense spending and raising taxes on the rich. Sound like liberalism, much?

Two Thoughts About the State of the Union Address

First of all, there's a bit of a meme going around that says that Obama didn't mention global warming as a problem. Okay. He did not speak the words "global warming," or even "climate change." But he did spend a lot of time talking about renewable energy, and called for 85% renewables by 2035. And he explicitly said that these policies would, among other things, "protect our planet." That, to me, sounds like he "mentioned climate change." No, he didn't focus on it. What would focusing on it accomplish? Nothing more would get done, and given that the economy still sucks and it's winter, and a cold winter at that, it's not a great time to make a big point of focusing on something other than jobs jobs jobs. If people want to engage in a genuine debate about whether he should have emphasized climate change more, that's fine, although I think that I probably disagree. But to claim that he didn't mention it strikes me as fraudulent.

Second, someone (possible Jon Chait) commented that Obama took a well-hackneyed theme, "the future," and managed to weave it into all his various policy ideas. Yeah, he did. That's because his broad and seemingly varied agenda does in fact have a common theme, that of building a new foundation for American greatness. Or, as he put it, winning the future. I've been saying this for years, and I'm very pleased that Obama figured out that he has a theme, and a very "American exceptionalist" pride-inducing theme to boot, and that he should trumpet it as loud as he can. I wish his people had used the phrase New Foundation, because I think it's a perfect tag-line in the style of the agendas of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. But this was good enough.

(Oh, I liked the speech. Could you tell?)

The Solid South

It used to be that the South voted, routinely, 80% or 90% or 95% Democratic. That was back in the days that ended with Harry Truman, when the Democrats were still the party of not being the party of Lincoln. In recent elections where the Democrat hasn't been a Southerner himself, prior to Obama's election, the South voted solidly for the Republican candidate, what with the Republicans now being the party of not being the party of civil rights. But of course, the vote margins were never the absurdly lopsided blowouts of the '20s and '30s. "Solid South" meant the Republican got 60% of the vote in most Southern states, or mid-to-upper 50s, and won them all.

But maybe it's not so simple. I just did a little calculation of the percentage of the white vote in a few Deep Southern states that Obama lost in '08 that he would need to win in '12, keeping the racial proportions of the electorate and the non-white vote the same, in order to win those states. Here are the numbers:

Texas: 37%
South Carolina: 33%
Louisiana: 29%
Georgia: 28%
Alabama: 28%
Mississippi: 23%

He didn't come very close to winning any of these states. Closest was South Carolina at 9 points, followed by Texas at 12-ish points. Note that those are the states with the strictest white-vote requirement for Obama. In Texas he's only getting a very, very slight handicap from the non-white vote, at least compared to the real Black Belt states. But in places like Alabama and Mississippi, white people are still only giving about 11% of their vote to the pro-civil rights party. It's still the Solid South, about as solid as it ever was. It's just that now, they let the black people vote.

Expanding the Playing Field

As Barack Obama's poll numbers have steadily improved over the past month or two, I'm starting to think about where Obama might try to push the envelope beyond its '08 borders if he's in a strong position coming down the stretch in 2012. Which states should he try to win that McCain won last time? Here are my ideas:

- Missouri: This was the state McCain won by the narrowest margin. It's adjacent to his home state, and if he has any net improvement from '08 he ought to pick up Missouri. Also, there's a tough Senate race to defend with Claire McCaskill, which would be an ancillary benefit.

- Arizona: Obviously, this state wasn't in play in '08 because of the McCain home benefit, and Arizona's become sort of radicalized under the Jan Brewer administration. But it's still a very heavily Hispanic state, and the Hispanic vote ought to be overwhelming in '12. The neighboring states with heavy Hispanic populations, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, have all shifted toward the Democrats; it's time to take Arizona back.

- Texas: Nothing would hurt the Republicans more than losing Texas. There are a lot of Hispanics in Texas, and if their turnout increases noticeably then a Democrat can win this state. At the worst Obama should be able to drive the Republican into a massive arms race, which isn't a bad thing if you have a financial advantage.

- Georgia and South Carolina: Polling from PPP suggests that Obama's position has been improving in the South of all places. If that's true, then these two states ought to be somewhat in play. There are a lot of black people in these states, and I have to think that it would be possible for a strong Obama campaign to win here.

The other most logical place for him to expand would be the plains/mountains west; he did quite well (for a Democrat) in the Montana/Dakotas region and managed to pick off the Omaha, Nebraska electoral vote. But I'm not sure there's really much point focusing on that area in the Presidential race, since it's just all so trivial in terms of the electoral college.