The Continuingly Narrow Focus of the Debates

So, that debate was a lot better than the previous one. The moderator, more or less, knew what she was doing, both candidates actually said things (okay, granted, one of them didn't say very many true things, but still...) and, most importantly, the Democrat is widely perceived to have won. You know this because the Republicans are saying, well, the moderator was biased and Biden was smiling too much, but Democrats are just saying, hey, we won big. As David Roberts put it, "the GOP complaint...is that Joe Biden smiled & laughed too much while kicking their candidate's ass."

But, but, but... I'm not completely happy. You see, we're now two debates in, and this one had no particular area of focus, it was just the two Vice Presidential candidates discussing the election at-large. And yet, we've basically only had questions on the "to warmonger, or not to warmonger?" part of foreign policy, taxes, health care, the budget, and "the economy" in the sense of whether or not the labor market has been good under President Obama. That's, um, a narrow set of issues. Okay, last night had one late question about abortion, by far the worst framed question of the debate (in that it didn't just ask the candidates about abortion policy or whatever, but framed it around some nonsense about the candidates' personal religious beliefs). But, here's some stuff we haven't yet had a debate question on:

• Immigration
• Climate Change
• Gay Rights
• Women's Issues
• Criminal Justice
• Poverty
• Medicaid (and, you know, Medicaid is a health-care entitlement, we spent a lot of time hearing about other health-care stuff and entitlements, but nothing on Medicaid)
• Affirmative Action, which is in the news these days
• Labor Issues
• Campaign Finance Reform

This stuff is important! It was important when the first Presidential debate, allegedly on domestic policy, didn't talk about any of it. It was still important when the Vice-Presidential debate, allegedly without limitations on subject matter, didn't talk about any of it. It will still be important next week, when Obama and Romney meet for a town-hall debate. I dearly hope we get something about some of this stuff, but I'm not remotely optimistic it will be more than a small percentage of the whole time. Probably we'll just keep rehashing the same old budget-y economics stuff. And then, this stuff will still be important the week after that, when the "foreign policy" debate won't really provide an opportunity to talk about any of this stuff.

And then it will still be important two weeks thereafter, on election night.

My 2012 MLB Awards Preferences

Obviously, I don't have a vote, so I'm not calling this my vote, but rather just my preferences. Here goes:

National League Rookie of the Year: Bryce Harper, WSN. Harper didn't have the outlandish year that people expect him to have, or that a certain other youngster had in the other league, but he was clearly the best hitter of the National League Rookies. Norichika Aoki is the next-best competition, and according to Fangraphs he was nearly 2 wins less useful than Harper. Harper led all NL rookies who don't play in Colorado in home runs and led all rookies in runs scored, all while playing great defense at multiple outfield positions including center field. The main competition on the pitching side is Wade Miley of the Diamondbacks, who gets a very similar WAR number to Harper from Fangraphs. However, to be honest I think the phrase "Rookie of the Year" legitimately includes some concept of most "impact" rookie, and I think it's hard to deny Harper had lots of impact. You can make an argument that he provided the Nationals with credibility and optimism, although I don't think that's necessary to give him the award.

American League Rookie of the Year: Mike Trout, LAA. If Mike Trout doesn't win this award unanimously, it will be an outrage. His closest competition is probably Yu Darvish of the Rangers, the Japanese import who struggled at times but ultimately had a fine season that justified his All-Star selection. But those words "struggled at times" are crucial; Trout didn't. Yoenis Cespedes of the Athletics is the next-best position-playing rookie, but, uh, the leadoff-hitting Trout had more runs batted in than the middle-of-the-order slugging Cespedes. This better be unanimous.

National League Cy Young Award: R.A. Dickey, NYM. Oh, come on, like I was ever going to say anything else. As if Dickey needed any extra justification on top of how he dominated the league to the tune of 20-6 (for a bad team!) by using a variety of power pitching that just happened to rely on knuckleballs, he pitched the whole year with a big ol' abdominal injury. None of the other starting pitchers is particularly close to Dickey, in my opinion. I have to say that I won't be outraged if Craig Kimbrel wins this instead, because he has been obscenely good this year and in general I think relief pitchers get too little respect especially from the statistically-advanced sabermetric types. However, I'm voting Dickey. He's just that awesome.

American League Cy Young Award: Fernando Rodney, TBR. To be honest, no one had an absurd campaign as a starting pitcher this year. Verlander was great, sure, as always, and people like David Price and King Felix were good as well, but nobody really stands out. Except Rodney, who just posted the lowest ERA of all time (for non-trivial innings pitched). 0.60 runs allowed per nine innings. He allowed five runs all year, across 76 games pitched. Like, actually. I don't know how he did it and I don't know why he did it, but to me, the phrase "best ERA ever" tells me you should win the Cy Young Award. And yes, I know, arguably Kimbrel's season was even more dominant by various advanced metrics, and yes, I may be voting Dickey out of pure Mets rooting/awareness of how awesome the Sun God of Queens is. Get over it.

National League Most Valuable Player Award: Yadier Molina, STL. I really, really, really wanted to be able to say "David Wright" in this spot, and by WAR he's right in the middle of the conversation. But, man, he really just didn't have a good approach all through the second half of the year and it really hurt his team. He should definitely win the Gold Glove, but not the MVP. And, honestly, I have a long experience with how annoying it is to play against the Cardinals because of Molina's defensive ability, so given his current status as a reasonably elite hitter I think he probably contributed more to his team than anyone else.

American League Most Valuable Player Award: Miguel Cabrera, DET. I know, I know, Mike Trout played better than Miguel Cabrera this year. He played a tougher position, he played it better, he ran the bases better, etc. He blew Miguel Cabrera out of the water in WAR. Hell, Cabrera wasn't even second in WAR. Hell, even if you just look at raw offensive performance they were basically neck-and-neck using even a modicum of advancedness about one's stats. And I will not complain if Mike Trout wins this award. He easily deserves it. But, look, Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown. That's, um, impressive. Perhaps close to a majority of this country is not old enough to remember the last time it happened. Yes, I'm ultimately making the argument that the Triple Crown should basically just be an automatic (the precedent of the two times Ted Williams was denied the MVP despite winning the Crown strike me as basically miscarriages of justice, so not of much weight). But I also think that the entirely valid and important (well, insofar as anything in sports is important) critique of over-reliance on traditional counting stats has bled into a hyper-rational denigration of those stats. By "hyper-rational" I mean sort of the view that anything non-rational must be irrational, and therefore wrong. No, Miguel Cabrera's performance did not add as many wins to his team as Mike Trout's, compared to if he hadn't existed and some replacement player had been used. And in general I do think that WAR is a pretty good guide to MVP voting. But a few weeks back I said that if Cabrera won the Triple Crown I would think he needed to win MVP, and otherwise I'd think Trout needed to. There's a kind of magic in the Triple Crown, there's a reason why it's so hard, and honestly in the end I just think the award should this year be given to the sentimental non-rational candidate rather than the candidate who undeniably played better baseball.

Like I said, I have zero problem with things if the BBWAA decides to give the award to Trout instead. He pretty clearly does deserve it. But personally, this is a time when I would allow myself to let the mystical intangible stuff play the deciding role. Besides, Trout is probably going to have occasion to win this award some time when nobody runs up a Triple Crown against him.

The Greatly-Leveraged Man Theory of History

I am currently taking a course on English history from 1529 to 1660 (approximately), and one of the main focuses has been on the path of the English Reformation. Right now I'm doing some research for an essay on that topic, in particular by reading about the Reformations in other European countries as points of comparison. And the overall impression I get is that, by and large, the political disposition of a given country followed the inclination of that country's monarch. There are exceptions: Protestantism flourishing in Scotland under Mary Stewart's reign and surviving in England through the bloody years of Mary Tudor, and conversely failing in Ireland despite having the support of the English overlords. But by and large it seems that the personal inclination of the actual monarch played an enormous role in determining the religious fate of each country, that just about everyone in 16th century Europe knew this, and that the exceptions to the rule tend to feature pretty substantial countervailing dynamics (e.g., in Ireland Protestantism became associated with conquest and imperialism, Catholicism with nationalism and resistance).

Now, saying things like this, or for example "the English Reformation was caused by Henry VIII," sounds sort of like the "great man" theory of history, which glorifies (and/or vilifies) a handful of supposedly extremely important people who supposedly changed the course of everything simply by being so Great (or Terrible). The divide between this approach and the antithesis of its approach can be seen in the following analysis of the rise of the conservative Republican Party in America: "the conservative movement succeeded because it had such a formidable champion in Ronald Reagan" versus "the conservative movement was a decades-in-the-making cultural shift that would have found substantial success with any decently competent leader." And "great man" analysis is extremely unfashionable right now, and for basically sound reasons. I'd say in the case of the American political history analysis I just offered, the latter explanation is basically the correct one. It really isn't just kings and princes and Presidents who shape history, the great masses of not-in-power people are at least as important as the handful who rule.

But I also think that there is such a thing as power, and that some people throughout history have had a lot of power and have used it in unusually consequential ways not because they were particularly impressive people but because they happened to have power. Think of it as not being so much about the qualities of the person but about the situation they find themselves in. We can borrow a concept from baseball here, that of "leverage," or the relative importance of each situation to the overall outcome. If Randy Johnson started for the Diamondbacks against the Giants circa 2001, the at-bats in which he pitched to Barry Bonds would've featured arguably the "greatest" possible match-up possible in that year. But the game might have been determined by the Diamondback's weak-hitting shortstop facing some Giants middle reliever in the 8th inning with runners on base and a tie ballgame, or whatever. The cast of characters involved was more mediocre, and the result itself may have been eminently mediocre, an RBI groundout to score the winning run or something instead of a dominant strikeout or a majestic home run. But that result, because of the situation, would become leveraged into a far greater impact on the final victory or defeat than it, in a sense, deserved. But that doesn't mean it wasn't important! Modern statistical analysis of sports has helped de-emphasize the perception of some players as "clutch" just because they happened to do well in one or two extremely high-leverage situations, but that doesn't mean that what happens in those high-leverage situations doesn't tend to determine the game.

Suppose you have a country with a lot of people, each of whom has to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism, and one of whom is the king. We don't need to assume that the king is any different from any of his subjects to see that his decision might be a bit more importance. Certainly broad societal and structural factors play substantial roles even in influencing the monarch's own decision, but that doesn't mean the monarch is entirely constrained. If Queen Elizabeth had happened to die early in her reign, Mary, Queen of Scots would likely have inherited the English throne. And she was a Catholic. And she might well have lived as long as Elizabeth did or longer, and she might well have been able to do what Mary Tudor had failed at and properly restored Catholicism to England. Viewing history as contingent upon the quirks of who exactly happens to be in positions of power at particular times does not force upon us the view that these people were unusually great, or that they in any way deserved or earned their positions of historic influence. They may have done, or they may have been just fortunate to find themselves in their high-leverage situation.

Of course, one neat feature of the democratic age is that it blurs this distinction. Did the structure of American economic policy change forever in the 1930s because of a broad-based social movement, or because of the efforts of those in power? Both! The people in power were there because of the social movement supporting them! Franklin Roosevelt found himself placed in one of these highly leveraged situations because the people of America acting en mass felt it appropriate to place him there. Admittedly this is only of much use when the proposed "great man" is basically the President, or equivalent office; for instance, it doesn't help us resolve the debate over Reagan and the conservative movement. But in general the democratic identity of the government with its people ought to reduce the tension between observing the importance and, yes, in some cases greatness of individual leaders and paying proper respect to the power and importance of the people at large. Bill Clinton was a great leader and a great political talent, and the American people were pretty great in selecting him to lead them for eight years.

Elections as Arguments and the Debate

One way to view any electoral contest is as an argument. As to each candidate there are a number of different proposed reasons why they should be elected and a number of different proposed reasons why they should not be. These reasons can relate to the candidates' policy platforms, what kinds of judges they'd appoint, their moral character, their appearance, whatever. They can, in other words, be good reasons or bad reasons. And then you see how all the various reasons weigh with the polity, and what balance they eventually reach. Of course, the balance within the polity is really just the aggregated sum of all the balances in each member of the polity, each of whom can have their own individual weighting scheme among the various lines of argument.

I've had the feeling all throughout this election that political analysis pays insufficient attention to this argument-based model of an election, and treats elections more as some kind of point-scoring contest, where if X happens and X makes candidate A look good, then it adds points to candidate A's score, etc. So, for instance, we find the almost unanimous view that one of the few things that could materially damage Obama's rather robust lead at this point would be an economic collapse in Europe that spread to the United States. Why would this help Romney? Because political science literature suggests that the "vote for the incumbent because the economy is good" argument and the "vote for the challenger because the economy is bad" argument are among the strongest arguments out there, exerting disproportionate force over even those elections which are not viewed as being about the state of the economy. So, the thinking goes, anything that makes the economy worse is bad for the incumbent. In my view, it's harder to say.

In my view, that's a bit of a premature judgment. Sure, a new economic crisis might help Romney, if only because a new crisis should introduce greater variance and chaos into the whole process which will generically give the trailing candidate more of a chance than he had before. But the "European economic policy has screwed up in a truly massive way, so vote Romney" argument is pretty much incoherent on its face. At least, it's incoherent until and unless anyone develops a reason for thinking Romney would be better at dealing with the consequences of such a crisis, or until Obama displays poor judgment in his handling of the crisis. Either of those things could happen, but their opposites could just as easily happen. And if Romney reacted with a panic of the variety that affected the McCain campaign in September of 2008, the opposite probably would happen, and Obama probably would benefit politically. (Note that the "vote Obama '08 because of the financial crisis" argument is not incoherent, because that was a home-grown crisis that pretty much everyone felt was substantially the fault of the policies of the incumbent regime, and McCain was running on a platform virtually identical to Bush's.)

Now, the counterargument to my view is that I'm taking an overly charitable view of the electorate. I'm giving them too much credit for being smart, or for understanding the issues in some meaningful way that there's really no justification for. I don't mean to be. Remember what I said about how the arguments can be good ones or bad ones. Plenty of voters can give weight to silly arguments, like that one should vote for the candidate with the better speaking voice or whatever. But I do think that it's important to analyze events in the course of the campaign not just in terms of who looks better during them but in terms of how they reinforce existing arguments for or against each candidate or provide new such arguments.

About That CNN Snap Poll...

So, the main thing I'm happy to observe in the CNN snap poll about the recently-completed Presidential debate is that, though the respondents overwhelmingly said they thought Romney won the debate, the two candidates' favorability numbers didn't budge an inch between the initial round of calls before the debate and the follow-up after it. Specifically, Barack Obama went from 49% favorable, 50% unfavorable to a 49%/49% split, while Mitt Romney went from 54% favorable to 42% unfavorable before the debate to 56%-42% afterwards. So Obama gained one net point, and Romney gained two net points. Big effing deal.

But, uh, notice anything funny about those "before" numbers? They show Romney quite popular and Obama only sort of middling. That's not what any other poll has found for the general electorate these days. I'll let the pollster.com polling averages speak for themselves: Obama's got a 51.9% favorability rating in the aggregate, against just 44.0% unfavorable, while Romney's sporting just a 43.6% favorable score against 49.1% unfavorable. So in most polling heading into this debate, Obama is a net 13.4% more popularly perceived than Mitt Romney, but in the group of debate watchers in the CNN poll Romney was 13 points more popular than Obama. That's a skewed poll for you.

Now, that doesn't mean the poll is meaningless. Among people who watched the debate, most thought Romney won. But the poll is also telling us that "those who watched the debate" may well have been a Republican-leaning bunch. But that very fact is deeply informative, or should be anyway, of our analysis of the reaction to this debate. Regardless of who's more energized to vote this year, Republicans were far more energized about this debate. And this debate still doesn't seem to have changed very many people's minds about either of the candidates. So it looks to me like, while the debate was unquestionably a "win" for Romney, it may have been sort of a trivial one. And right now, he doesn't need trivial wins, he needs wins that he leverages into big swings in the polls. So far, it looks like he didn't get one. (Of course, that statement can neither be confirmed nor rebutted until about next Monday, when the first batch of post-debate polls will start coming in.)

There's More to Domestic Policy than the Economy

The "domestic policy" debate just concluded, and in my opinion, forgetting for a moment the question of who won it, is was just a stupid as hell debate. The biggest reason for that is that the entire debate was about what are considered in political contexts "economic issues." Nothing about the environment, gay rights, women's issues, immigration, etc. "Domestic policy" means "the economy." Now, okay, sure, the economy is important. It's probably the main issue in this election. But that doesn't make it the only issue. All those other things matter! A lot! Taken in the aggregate "domestic policy but not the economy" is probably as important for the welfare of the United States of America than "economic policy" by itself. Honestly I'm kind of offended that the people putting this debate on considered taxes and budgets and deficits and "the role of government" by which they mean the economic role of government the only meaningful domestic policy issues in this election. And not just because it's an enormous softball to Romney, given that Obama is an incumbent presiding over a mediocre economy. Because it buys into the view of life that denies the importance of anything besides money, that considers material goods the only goods that matter.

I think I'll close this blog post with Robert F. Kennedy's famous quote about the failings of the Gross National Product:

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Lying with Large Numbers, Gangnam Style

So, okay, I myself have no remote interest in this "gangnam style" thing that's been making the rounds. But I just noticed a column blurb on Huffington Post about how much time everyone "wastes" on the Internet titled something like "We have watched 2100 years of 'Gangnam Style'" That's supposed to sound like a lot. And, well, 2100 years is a lot of time. Except this isn't linear time, of course, it's time that's been folded and crunched wibbly-wobbly style into a couple of actual weeks. They're person-hours, in other words, X people watching for Y hours. And doing a bit of math we find that, on average, each of the 7 billion humans on earth has watched approximately 9.5 seconds of this video, if the 2100 years figure is correct.

In other words: there are a lot of people on this planet. A billion is a very big number. If you collected one cent from everyone on the planet you'd be filthy rich. And, likewise, if everyone on earth did something for an average of ten seconds you'd get over two person-millennia. The mantra from my A.P. Chemistry class becomes relevant here: you can't know the significance of a number if you don't know its units. Person-hours are very different from actual hours.

Also, of course, one can object to the use of the word "wasting" here; if people enjoy watching Gangnam Style, then good on them. But, as I didn't read the article, I don't really feel like I should delve very far into that point.