Anyone with some high school math realizes that the race for the Democratic nomination has been over for about six weeks at this point. Obama continues to run a fairly classy, non-negative campaign largely because he has the luxury to do so. The Sound and Fury from the Clinton camp over the last two weeks is apparently important in the weird science of Television Entertainment (although on any other reality show I can think of she’d have been voted off by now … except maybe a special edition of ‘Biggest Loser’). It’s enough to inspire some wailing and keening and gnashing of teeth on sites like TPM Cafe, but even there it is done so in half-hearted angst. The season is over. Time to rest up and get ready for the playoffs.
Updating the chart of the vanishing superdelegate gap though Saturday (from the data in Politico’s logbook) the trend continues to illustrate this reality. Reconstructing the data day by day since Feb. 25th, I come up with a gap today of 24 delegates. Politico has it at 19 on another summary page, so things are close to an end from my data, but possibly closer in reality.
Although the polynomial trend (projecting when the gap vanishes) is still more satisfying, it is now coming in only a week earlier than the straight line forecast, and both before the end of May. (The exponential trend provides HRC with a margin +10 into June).
An update on the vanishing gap in superdelegate endorsements between HRC and BHO.
When we last checked in (data through April 2), the superdel endorsement gap had fallen to 33. Since then Barack is up another 10 endorsements, and Hillary is net +2, so the gap has shrunk by 8, and now stands at 25.
In the chart, the exponential trend line show HRC holding on to a 10 Superdel endorsement lead after the last primaries. The linear trend shows the gap vanishing around May 21st. and a third order polynomial trend (which I include for no other reason than I love the result) shows the gap vanishing by the end of April.
Politico maintains a page marvelous in its simplicity and high-grade information: a log of daily superdelegate announcements and other developments.
Following this page over the past month, it’s hard to fight the sense of growing momentum in the Obama campaign when it comes to the superdelegates … towards the end of February, the HRC campaign held a margin of almost 70 superdel endorsements when compared to Obama (they had the difference at 68 on Feb 25). Since then, the log book is a punishing repetition of Obama’s name, and as of April 4th, HRC’s overall count had gone up by 4, and Obama’s count had increased by 39.
The following chart presents the diminishing spread from February 25 (245 HRC to 177 Obama) through April 2 (249 HRC to 216 Obama).
I’ve fit two trend lines to this data looking out over the next 30 days, one linear trend and another (kinder) exponential, but both suggest the spread will fall below 20, and possibly below 10, by the end of the month.
It won’t quite develop that way. There are only 329 supers still in play at this point, and at a run rate of 10 Obama endorsements for every one picked up by HRC, 30 days would use them all up, and surely a core group will hold out for the convention. Although who knows? Recent polls have started to show a similar closing of the gap in the Pennsylvania Primary, and if that latest bastion of ‘the contest that really counts’ should slip away from HRC, it may be time to fold all the cards.
FREE! BILLION DOLLAR MARKETING IDEAS!
For Orkin pest control — introduce the B/C Scrub. For $200 ($300 for large-format flat panel TVs), you treat the customer’s television set so that it’s completely free of Bushes and Clintons for eight years.
For newspapers, to reverse the decline in circulation:
Premium subscribers get a B/C-free edition guaranteed to carry no mention or image of a Bush or a Clinton, ever.
For network news, to reverse the shrinkage of audiences, ratings, and revenues: same deal – no Clintons, no Bushes, no problem. Family dinner will be reinstated, and everyone will watch the evening news. We may even reactivate Walter Cronkite.
It’s a classic principle of free enterprise and American marketing know-how: stop making your customers sick at the stomach, and maybe they’ll buy your product.
And the corollary to that principle: we customers will take our dollars where they are decently treated, and right now none of you guys qualify. Except Orkin. They, at least, know a bedbug when they see one.
For seven years our papers and our channels were filled with Karl Rove talking points and Bush administration talking heads, and now they’re spewing out Clinton talking points and dumping them into our living rooms.
Enough is enough.
Oh, yes, and for an extra five bucks, you take McCain prisoner again.
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night
- Matthew Arnold (”Dover Beach”)
Frantic analysts are scrambling today to rationalize the complete failure of the pollsters to call the Clinton victory in the NH primary. Here is the actual rationalization. They all got it wrong because they were all measuring the wrong thing.
This sounds trite, but it is a mistake made constantly. Statistical models are based on three very basic assumptions. A) That you have a clear understanding of how a mechanism worked for the period of time you are studying, B) That you have clean data measuring the major components of that mechanism, and C) That this phenomenon will continue to work the same way in the future.
The fact that there are dozens of polls, each with different results for the same phenomenon, demonstrates that there is often disagreement about A.
Everybody’s got a theory, and these range from careful deduction to wild-eyed wishful thinking – and sometimes a dash of outright fraud attempting to create a bandwagon effect in the me-too media or to sow the seeds of panic in the enemy camp. All of these models attempt to represent a different mechanism. For this reason alone, at least the better political blogs need to stop running minute-by-minute headlines of the every latest poll’s findings. It lends to the idea that they are all comparable, and they aren’t.
B, collection of clean data, is the bugaboo of statistics. Hard to do well, and often assigned as a menial task to luckless souls without the capacity, means, or context to do it well. Sets of non-homogeneous garbage data are routinely gathered up and analyzed, and the most sophisticated statistical tests to find a trend or patterned distribution among them are about as effective as taking an aspirin for a case of bubonic plague. Garbage in, Garbage out.
C is the most insidious of all. That the mechanism will work the same in the future is the idiot assumption behind almost every financial, economic, and political projection you will ever see. Idiot, because bundled into the reason for even DOING the projection is that, if you don’t like where the trend is heading (and in a political contest, wherever it’s heading is bad news for somebody), you can DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. The forecast carries with it the seeds of its own undoing.
Team Hillary saw that terrible gap and they responded. I don’t always agree with the woman, but she and her staff are no dummies, and when Loss reared its head, they busily worked to change the game. Their opponents seemed eager to add their own ill-considered actions into the mix, the media was trumpeting each and every statement over the airwaves with the authority of Jove and the experienced news judgment of a pigeon … all of which creates a volatile mix in which surprising, and certainly unmodeled, things can happen.
I don’t argue that forecasts are meaningless, but they are not reality. They are mathematical tools normally far removed from their strictly defined mathematical aquariums, attempting to model phenomena usually not easily quantified. They are invaluable tools within the context of the Scientific Method, but outside a laboratory, they are ALL suspect, and we should treat them with the skepticism they deserve.
“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
- Thomas Jefferson
Mr. Jefferson quoted today by George McGovern in today’s WaPo, in which he lucidly states the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney.
Which is good enough for me. I would add the quote from historian Will Durant: “It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.” But the joke’s over.
My favorite excerpt from McGovern’s assessment: “The dominant commitment [of high crimes and misdemeanors] of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.”
I’m beginning to have second thoughts about my forty-year allegiance to the New York Times.
Two weeks ago I complained about their headline writers, one of whom managed to make it sound as if stem-cell research causes cancer, thus handing a bludgeon to every right-wing religious charlatan trying to replace science with superstition.
Next, they switched to some cheap, generic newsprint stock that curls at the corners of pages – a sure sign of editorial incontinence.
Then they hired a new Op-Ed columnist — William Kristol, an unreconstructed neo-con who has learned absolutely nothing from his unbroken, seven-year string of disastrous mistakes staunchly supporting Bush and the Iraq war and lately howling for war against Iran.
And today the Times runs an editorial praising Michael Mukasey for appointing an utterly dependent prosecutor – a Justice Department employee — to investigate destruction of the CIA waterboarding tapes. The Justice Department was a party to that decision – and the decision to torture in the first place – as was the White House. So now the Department will investigate itself and its bosses.
Guess whom the fox will finger in that henhouse.
They’ll indict a second assistant deputy administrative aide in the Misfiling Department and the apprentice electronics technician in charge of changing videocam batteries in the waterboarding chamber – those heinous violators of all the irreproachable commands issued by eminently blameless higher-ups.
I expect that the New York Times will then have to investigate itself to discover that hiring Kristol and publishing a hypocritical editorial were exactly what god had in mind for great newspapers.
If it weren’t for the Times crossword puzzles, I’d go back to my home town’s Kittanning Daily Leader Times, where they can’t afford Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, but they can unfailingly smell a rat.
We’re not often at a loss for words around here, but there are days.
Organizers of the Long Beach Veterans Day parade ruled that veterans who oppose the Iraq war can’t march. The head of one such group is a marine who served three tours in Iraq. He’s out. Others are Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out.
Why were they turned down? Because, as a city councilman who is also one of the organizers put it, “They have a political agenda.” His name (attention, documentary film-makers) is Val Lerch.
They have a political agenda? And he doesn’t? The parade doesn’t? What Lerch obviously means is that they have a political agenda that differs from HIS political agenda.
And guess which councilman will be waving and smiling from a bunting-encrusted limousine at the head of the parade.
Depending on the poll you consult, 60% to 70% of Americans – thus a healthy majority of Long Beach residents — are against the war. And the city’s money as well as the city streets are provided for the parade. Staffing, flags, banners, utilities, and police protection are all paid for by the citizens, like it or not, whatever their views.
It’s not just Long Beach. No doubt the same ignorant arrogance has been played out by self-appointed parade marshals in cities across the land.
But, hey, it’s Veterans Day.
Let’s honor the veterans – all of them.
And let’s start sending some parade organizers to Iraq.
Take a minute to read the letters to the editor in today’s New York Times.
Inured as the public has become to scandal during a presidency that seems to consist of nothing BUT, this past week seems to have pushed people over the brink.
I quote the first letter in full below, but read through the rest of them if you can. It’s the first time I’ve seen the NYT looking like the comments section of a DailyKos diary.
“Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations” (front page, Oct. 4) and “Bush Vetoes Health Bill Privately, Without Fanfare” (news article, Oct. 4) make me feel sick and desperate about what this president has done, and continues to do, to our once-proud country in only seven years. Could he have done more to debase us if he had set out purposely to destroy us, our economy, our moral values and our dignity?
To him and to his minions who tar their critics as America-haters, I borrow Paul Robeson’s words from another bleak age: “You are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
Monica Mori
Chicago, Oct. 4, 2007
Looks like Home Depot had better stock up on pitchforks…
Don’t tell anyone, but we have a private army.
It’s called Whitewater. Its assault troops train in the rapids of the upper Youghiogheny, where Blackwater fears to tread water.
Whitewater accepts no contracts from pantywaist draft dodgers masquerading as top government officials whose only combat experience has consisted of shooting unarmed ducks – who even in those romper-room fantasy wars cover themselves with camouflage and hide.
Whitewater sails into troubled waters protected by nothing more than a rubber raft. Once global warming raises the ocean levels, there will be nobody in the halls of Congress except Whitewater rafters, and then it will be time to get the people’s business done.
If there are still any Bush vetoes or signing statements floating around in the scum, they’ll be over-ridden, but not before they’re drowned.
A single squad of Whitewater warriors will be enough to take over the Supreme Court. I think they’ll have room in their rafts to save only four of the justices, but that should be enough.
