Revise and resubmit

Not going to stay this way, but:

Popular Vote

	Obama	Romney
Total	60,192,897	57,463,325
Percent	50.4%	48.1%

Spread: 2.3

My prediction  : between 2.5 and 2.3. Granted, I did give 2.5 as the headline number, but with votes still being counted, I'm feeling pretty good about it drifting up.

Did I call states right? Well I absurdly didn't make an electoral college prediction here, but I did elsewhere:

Obama: 290
Romney: 248

I assumed Obama would lose Florida and Virginia. I was mistaken about this, but for the worst reason: I made that prediction on Oct. 29, and was in anxiety mode, rather than the much earlier prediction.

So not great on the EC, but pretty alright on the PV. Which of course doesn't matter.

Romney

I call this debate for Romney. He's wrong, but he is better at it. Obama is struggling on his language and rhetoric. Also, he is pushing his time better.

Reversion to the Mean and Nov. 6

My operating principle: reversion to the mean

My dataset: every national poll from June 1 to today

My prediction: Obama wins Nov. 6 by 2.5 points over Romney

Granted, Romney has had a bad month. So what was the mean Obama's lead in polls taken prior to September? 2.3

August was Romney's best month so far. Mean Obama lead in polls taken that month: 2.1

So Romney at his best is 2.1 below Obama; Romney at his worse is 2.9 below Obama. I'm going to go with that as the floor and the ceiling and split the difference.

And things do not get much better for Romney if you look only at likely voters: among likely voters Obama has a mean lead of 2.7 points.

What should Romney hope for? Well, Obama's smallest lead was in August among likely voters, at 0.8. If the Democratic enthusiasm post-convention and post-47 percent speech is not maintained, then Romney is in much better shape.

Trash, don't pick it up

Mitt Romney, intimate & in person:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: "[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

 ....

That's the part that's got people abuzz. What I found interesting was this:

They'll probably be looking at what the polls are saying. If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can—I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected. But my own view is that if we get a "Taxageddon," as they call it, January 1st, with this president, and with a Congress that can't work together, it's—it really is frightening.

Three things, reversed:

Third thing: Taxageddon, or the fiscal cliff,  the sequester, or whatever stupid term you want, is the result of GOP intransigence on taxes. They were bluffing that they would default on the debt, and Obama was willing to call their bluff. But they were also willing to play chicken with it in an absolutely unprecedented manner. The result was the sequester. An underlying theme of the Romney campaign, however, has been: give in to the blackmailers. Congress can't work with Obama, not because Obama has not reached out, been willing to cross pretty much every red line that any Democratic constituency has ever drawn (Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare... and even the insistence that deficit reduction have some taxes; the sequester had no tax increases, which was supposedly the red line for any budget deal--although in fairness, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a card in the Dems hand). No, Republicans in Congress have decided not to work with the President. Romney's argument is that this is frightening, and that accordingly, we should encourage this sort of reckless behavior.

Second thing: Gotta love me some magic. Given that the Romney forecast is for 12 million new jobs in his first term, which is the currently scheduled forecast, it strikes me that his plan is "no additional growth, no additional jobs, just additional tax and safety net cuts."

First thing: Markets are up in September, during which it's seemed as though Obama is pulling ahead. They went up considerably on the 6th, the day after Clinton's speech that so many apparently loved. And then they went up again in response to QE3, which Romney has criticized.

Here or there.

NYTimes article about India. Could read for U.S. as well.

Scandal Poses a Riddle: Will India Ever Be Able to Tackle Corruption? A brazen brand of crony capitalism has created huge fortunes for a few, at the expense of the nation as a whole, which is falling short in energy infrastructure.

Pockets of Prosperity

While the adviser apparently believes in a liberal media bias, they are absolutely right about the sociological insulation of the media.

But frustration is building behind the scenes, egged on by a conservative media and Twitter conversation that has blamed the media for accusing Romney of a premature response to the crises in Libya and Egypt.
The adviser, granted anonymity to criticize a press corps the campaign still relies on every day, went on to blame a "green room, green zone kind of divide," saying the national press, most of whom live in New York or DC, "pockets of prosperity," are isolated from the realities of the harsh economy — and therefore, unable to grasp Romney's message.
Instead, they are preoccupied by concerns akin to war reporters relaxing in the green zone: "Too much chlorine in the pool, the parties are going on too late, why can't we get the right flavors of Haagen Dazs? Most people aren't living in that world."

However, I do not care that this means they aren't sympathetic to Romney's campaign message. Because no one is more insulated in the pocket of prosperity than Romney himself, and certainly the entirety of their platform is absolutely indifferent to poverty and unemployment. That's at least suggested by the fact that under their 'plan' they project to create as many jobs as under the current baseline plan, meaning, they do nothing. But yes, reporters are insulated and that's why they have completely failed in keeping political attention on the jobs crisis.

Notes

This is just a note for my remembering, regarding work being done by a colleague on evolutionary models in the social sciences. It is interesting to see even in 1884 the rejection of progressive language for a very explicitly evolutionary one, one that insists that there is not moral value in the process, despite what the Spencer's of the time are suggesting.

Le démocrate raisonne comme si la démocratie n'avait besoin ni d'apologie ni même de conseils ou d'avertissements. Elle est le progrès, cela suffit. Et qu'est-ce qui prouve qu'elle soit le progrès? Est-ce la nécessité avec laquelle elle s'impose? Tout ce qui arrive nécessairement, par le développement des sociétés, serait donc ipso facto un changement pour le mieux? Mais c'est là répondre à la question par la question. Cette supériorité relative que l'on attribue à chaque phase successive de l'humanité, on ne l'y trouve que parce qu'on a commencé par l'attacher à l'idée même du mouvement. Il vaudrait mieux, ce semble, substituer au terme de progrès celui d'évolution, qui exprime seulement que tel état de la Société était implicitement renfermé dans le précédent et devait en sortir par une loi naturelle. On aurait à cela l'avantage de ne rien préjuger quant à la valeur du changement dont on veut parler.

La Démocratie et la France, p.78, Edmond Scherer.

Why bother?

“I believe that if we’re successful in this election — when we’re successful in this election — that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that... My hope and my expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

He does not seem to realize that this motivates his defeat as well as it does his re-election.

If Romney is elected, we will see a resolution of the "fiscal cliff"--it'll just all be thrown onto the backs of the poor, the elderly, the working.

If elected, we might very well see pump-priming through the fiscal channel--it'll just all be throwing money at the executive class and the hangers-on and sycophant set. We'll almost certainly see more through the monetary channel, as the Republicans on the Fed will now no longer fear inflation given that the right sort of person is in the White House, revealing once again that they know neither how American government works nor anything about fiscal history in this country in the last 30 years.

And if the CBO projections are accurate, we'll see an eventual recovery--exactly in line with what Romney is already forecasting--that the GOP will take credit for. The fever will break, the sun will shine, and the world can go to hell.

Are you fucking kidding me...

A worser sort of trash...

I am going to excerpt massively, because, well because I'd rather that no one followed the link.

Sally Quinn announces the end of power in Washington - The Washington Post

"It was telling that Vanity Fair had bought more tables at the dinner than most of the Washington news organizations.

On the way home (we skipped the after-parties), I suddenly realized that this grotesque event signaled the end of power as we have known it. That dinner —which seemed to have more celebrities, clients and advertisers than journalists and politicians —was the tipping point.

The grotesqueness was being stuck between Ms. Gingrich and Ms. Kardashian at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Ms. Quinn has helpfully informed us that she was invited to the after-parties (obliquely/ostentatiously [depends on the reader I suppose] displaying her social credentials in passing is a strong point of Ms. Quinn's). She has suggested that she knows power, that the power she knows is the power we know, and she claims that this has passed. We shall see.

The decline of power has been happening for a while. In 1987, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “The Party’s Over.” In it, I chronicled the demise of the Washington hostess. That was 25 years ago, and people were complaining even then that Washington would never be the same.

I like the fact that she "suddenly realized" in 2012 what she had already chronicled in 1987. Frankly, I think that a piece titled "The Party's Over," in which the demise of the Washington hostess is the central narrative, would have been an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I wish it had been.

But power still trumped money in those days. Today, money trumps power. If Katharine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, were having a party today, and politicians or statesmen received a conflicting invitation to a party put together by Sheldon Adelson (Gingrich’s super PAC guy), where do you think people would go? Adelson. No question.

If the late publisher of The Washington Post were having a party today, I suspect the only persons who would choose Adelson's event would be those whose fear of the undead was stronger than their morbid curiosity. While Kardashian and Adelson might not be The Right Sort of People for Ms. Quinn, I would prefer them to anyone so uninterested as to skip the dead hostess' party.

Now, at a party, if you find people staring over your shoulder to see who’s more important in the room, they’re usually looking at someone rich, rather than someone powerful. (Or perhaps they’re staring at themselves in a mirror, as I once observed.)

She could have just observed, rather than noxiously informing us that this is one of her little wits, the pearls that make her such a card in the social circuit. Is this why she is given space in the Post? Because she has made clever little remarks at parties? Has she done anything, at all, ever?

Power in Washington used to be centered on the White House, the Congress, the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps and the journalists. Today, all of those groups depend on money for their very existence. The real power lies with the lobbyists, the money-raisers, the super PACs, the bundlers, the corporations and rich people. The hottest ticket on the planet is not an invitation to the White House but an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos....

Well she has appealed to my class prejudice against the wealthy and in favor of the democratically representative. Let's see where she is going with this.

The Obamas have been roundly criticized for not being part of the Washington social scene. The question is, does it matter? Could Obama win or lose the presidency because he has dissed the Washington community? I suspect the answer is no. It doesn’t matter anymore....

Oh for fuck's sake. "Roundly criticized" might be the only part of this paragraph that bears any resemblance to reality, considering its suggestion of the organizing committee of the Washington social scene going round and each criticizing Obama in turn.

“Good luck and good timing are great, but ultimately, a Washington party rises and falls with its power quotient. This has always been the case.”
Ain’t no mo’....

I don't even know what she means by party anymore. Does she mean political party? Dinner party? "Ain't no mo'...." Is this a saying? Did she see this on The Wire?

There you have it. Money is power. The fundraiser has replaced the Washington dinner party....

Could it be that the Obamas, not knowing Washington, think that’s all there is to the social life here? Who wouldn’t want to stay away? On the other hand, he is the president of the United States and, whether he likes it or not, the leader of social as well as political Washington."

As much as I dislike the dominance of the rentiers and the monied, it is certainly better than the dinner party set. The only think less democratic (in that great old-time democracy meaning of the term) than the fundraiser is the dinner party.

This is The Age of Innocence, without any of Wharton's wit, callous disregard, and self-awareness. While it may have mattered for those who were in its embrace, the passing of this social world is as great a loss as the passing of a kidney stone: sucks to be the one affected, but better for all involved once it's gone.

But let's not pretend for a second that this has really passed away. Rather, Ms. Quinn is showing the contempt of the beta bourgeois for the alpha bourgeois, the disgust of the useless, dreary, and destitute nobility with the social parvenus and climbers. That is, she is showing the least interesting or ennobling manifestation of class envy that is supposedly such an un-American trait: the dreary complaints of an inner-track that they are not the innermost, totally uncoupled with a recognition that there might be tracks even further along the radius.

Good to see...

The Franciscan brothers stand in solidarity with the women religious, criticize the CDF's report as excessive. They make a clear stand, using more temperate language and a thoughtful and considerate posture than I tend toward. 

The comments to this article are worth reading. Especially the mocking of the Jesuits, who will "barge through the door once others have taken it off its hinges."

Support the nuns...

... and not the criminals.

It has been clear for a while that a showdown was coming. The hard right turn of the Conference of Bishops, who as a result of the attacks against their memberships for covering up child rape have embraced the victimized persecuted posture of modern conservatism, while the institutional and network links between the right and the American church were deepened; the fact that shortly after the hard right turn of the Vatican an Inquisitor was sent to the U.S. to assess the role of the nuns; the fact that the nuns have continued to prioritize justice and downplay oppression, just as the global church and the Bishops were doing the opposite. All of this foretold what was to come.

But the idea that a body who has been living the life of service commanded by the Christ and the Church is to be suppressed with the full participation of the malignant opponents of criminal investigations, those who shielded of rapists from law (as opposed to accompanying them through their punishments and defending their humanity against the desire for retribution, the appropriate and infinitely difficult role of the clergy), and who put their own desire to secure their influence in the conservative movement above their duty to serve the spiritual and material necessities of their congregation, inspires a bitterness within me that cannot be holy. The nuns have been the counterweight to this malignancy; suppress them and we are left with a luciferic coven of the self-interested and well-established as the sole institutional voice of Catholicism.

Oh wait, there's always the Catholic League, faithfully dedicated to keeping lapsed Catholics lapsed and to advancing the ignominy of the Church.

I would say I'm genuinely torn...

... but I don't think I am.

Chris LeBarton jumped at the chance to get in on Facebook’s initial public offering. The Potomac investor and a group of friends pooled $50,000 to purchase $35 pre-offering shares through a hedge fund connection.
He said he knew it was a gamble, but he never imagined he would get cheated. After Facebook’s stock closed almost break-even its first day of trading and then fell for a few days before recovering modestly, LeBarton and his friends are looking at a paper loss of 6 percent.
“I went into this not even thinking about that possibility,” he said. “The big guys made out, and it seems the little guys got burned.”

When you are doing anything through a "hedge fund connection," you should be a little skeptical. When one has an inner track on something, it is tough to be too upset that your inner track wasn't the innermost.

The worst sort of trash...

BY ROBERT RUBIN Congress's failure to reach a fiscal "grand bargain" last summer manifested the deep economic-policy divide separating Democrats and Republicans. Fortunately, the so-called fiscal cliff will soon create an extraordinary second opportunity for a breakthrough compromise.

Oh thank heavens for that. I've always disliked the millennialism of the elite centrist class. This is their wet dream equivalent of the Marxist's "heightening the contradictions," that a worsening situation--the brink, the abyss, the fiscal cliff--will cause a fracture in the fabric of regular politics, an eruption of the stupendous energy that has been locked in gridlock. Yes, I mean the achievement of a bipartisan political settlement that will finally put politics behind us, or at least will put it behind us on the one thing they insist they care about. And this time, I promise, this time the Republicans will not turn around next time they have office and say that the largest single threat to the nation is a surplus, and that this must all be given away in upward tax cuts. This time Lucy will hold the fucking football and Charlie will kick it into fiscal heaven.

Washington's continued failure to get our fiscal house in order poses five basic risks. One, government borrowing risks crowding out private investment. Two, our unsustainable fiscal outlook undermines business confidence by creating uncertainty about future policy, economic conditions and our ability to govern, which in turn dampens investment and hiring.

Never you mind about the huge downside risks to actually living people who are already suffering and under severe economic stress. We have the risk of crowding out, of which there have been exactly zero indicators that it has arrived. Certainly if one continues to press on the accelerator, there comes a time when one goes faster than they can handle. Presumably, one starts to slow down when there are reliable indicators that they are indeed going too fast, and not just when one recognizes that one is speeding up. Crowding out is a real phenomenon. As such, it has real indicators of whether it is happening. It isn't. When investors are putting their money in government debt because of the prices it commands (currently costs them money to lend to the US government, and yet they continue to do so), and not because of the security it entails, that is the time to start worrying about crowding out.

Rubin, however, comes to a not terribly unreasonable position of a "10-to-12 year track of deficit reduction that stabilizes the ratio of debt to GDP and then begins to bring it down." That's not obviously problematic, although it was interesting to see the words "Health Care spending" mentioned not once, nor tagged with the clause (which should always follow) "... will devour private and public entities alike." By beef is with the tone, the "fortunately," and the total divorce of pearl-clutching concerns from reality.

Yes, but....

But the resulting uproar, in Washington and on Wall Street, has largely obscured a simple truth of the marketplace. Yes, Morgan lost big — but, as Mitt Romney has pointed out, someone else won. And that someone or, rather, those someones, turn out to be Boaz Weinstein and a wolf pack of like-minded hedge fund managers.

But the "resulting uproar" was not over the fact that there were winners and losers, but over the fact that (1) a systemically important institution had lost a couple billion (more? less?), and that accordingly there are consequences for the financial system and for the real economy that are are considerably magnified, (2) that the loss revealed that JP Morgan did not have control over its derivatives book, which again, is a magnified problem with the company in question is a systemically important one, and (3) that they had made these losses because they had turned their CIO, responsible for hedging investments and thereby reducing risk, into a high-stakes gambling shop.

The "simple truth of the marketplace" was not "largely obscured," but almost wholly irrelevant to the "resulting uproar." If Azam Ahmed does not realize this,[1] he should be on a different beat.

[1] The thing is, he probably does realize it. The line just sits there irritating me, a sloppy entry into his main feature: an obsequious piece of fluff on hedge fund managers.

Straw men to the left of me,

Yglesias might believe this. If he does, he has fallen into a fantasy world of straw men debates.

To an extent, the edu-left has been arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids and now Romney's arrived with a plan that will in fact give up on that aspiration.

One of the reasons I stopped reading Yglesias was not his neoliberalism, which I try generally to follow and at least keep abreast, but rather his tendency to debase the arguments of others. Left-inclined education policy thinkers tend to believe that (1) the primary determinant of education outcomes is the various non-education dimensions of the reproduction of poverty, and that (2) policies that might seem reasonable or even desirable in the abstract are in practices formulated and implemented in such a way that the public ends up distributing money upwards, to the wealthy and private interests. Which is Yglesias' point in this article.

Hence, they are reticent about charter schools, they would like state-wide funding, they are opposed to school choice not because of the choice, but because they are designed and implemented to suck money from the public coffers while not actually achieving meaningful school choice. These are the debates I hear among leftist education policy experts.

No one thinks it is unreasonable to expect schools to achieve improvements. But Yglesias postures that anyone who thinks that the possibility of gains is not linear, and that structural disadvantages make it increasingly difficult to achieve positive outcomes (the marginal effect of good education is greatest at the middle, it is smaller at the extremes... not very controversial), and who is conservative relative to on-the-table policy proposals is "arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids."

This is cheap, this is why I stopped reading Yglesias.

p.s. As good a time as any to link to Daniel Denvir's article on the battle over Philly schools.You will find lots of concern and conservatism relative to the proposed reforms, but you will find little in the way of suggestion that it is unreasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids.

For future reference, Section 4 of the VRA

Will be worth paying close attention to in coming months

Of Meese and Men

Edwin Meese III, former attorney general and proponent of aggressive use of "accumulated" executive powers under Reagan and Bush I:

“It’s kind of ironic you have Boyden [Gray] and me here because when we were with the executive branch, we were probably the principal proponents of executive power under President Reagan and then President George H. W. Bush,” Mr. Meese said, quickly adding that the presidential prerogatives they sought to protect, unlike Mr. Obama’s, were valid.

This was at a conservative symposium on “the unprecedented expansion of executive power during the past three years.” The "adding quickly..." clause is lovely. Not only does the "unlike Mr. Obama's" get no rejoinder from the Times (such as some discussion of what makes his use different), but one can almost hear Meese losing the crowd, prompting him to affirm what everybody there already knows: that it's Obama that has inaugurated the imperial presidency, and that the same actions done by conservatives were obviously constitutional because of some made up doctrinal fancyfeet.... well who the hell knows why.

I do not much care for the aggressive use of presidential prerogatives, and I do tend to side with the Jeffersonian persuasion that these are anti-republican vestiges of monarchy. But then again, Jefferson purchased Louisiana, and I am willing to accommodate that within a more dynamic understanding of separated branches contesting over powers than a more static constitutionalism might allow.

The problem is less that the president is willing, than that Congress as an institution has not been effective in balancing or checking. It is, possibly, one of the few advantages of GOP control of the House that they might actually be trying to do so now. That this involves them in absurd hypocrisy just makes an appropriate constitutional role more entertaining.

Better negative ads needed

The Tom Smith (R-PA) campaign might not be actively courting my vote, but they need to make their opponents more menacing if they are going to run negative ads.

He looks jovial, like a decent guy. Obama looks pretty friendly, not a smug power monger as they might be hoping. And Sestak looks both optimistic, which ultimately means tragic. I feel for him. If I were Steve Welch, I would approve this message.