That is pretty good, but it would have been more effective in today's media environment, if it had been split up into a dozen tweets.
we hippie liberals have been telling you for years that a sizeable chunk of Republican voters are absolute blithering idiots. Also, racist. This is not news.
This x 1000. The GOP race has been fascinating and gross, but not surprising.
To be fair, I don't think the people who thought Trump couldn't win were in any way disputing the size of the chunk of Republican voters who were blithering idiots. Or racist. I think they thought that the Republican elites were better at manipulating idiots for personal and political gain. At least I did.
Atrios is so tough and cool. He uses curse words! On the Internet!
I guess I'd have thought that everyone -- Republicans themselves as well as Democrats -- was fully aware of the idiots, but assumed they'd sit out this election just as they (more or less) have every other, at least during primary season.
But I honestly don't know how many additional primary voters Trump has turned out. There's lots of talk about it, but I haven't run into any actual figures. Hrm, not sure what to google: "first time voters"? No, that gets youngsters, first time eligible. hm, voter turnout numbers aren't parsed closely enough to separate likely voters from (previously) unlikely voters, are they?
Maybe Chait takes this up; guess I'll go read him.
Atrios has been right about pretty much everything for a while, but at this point his basic critique of things hasn't changed for 15 years and is getting very stale and out of date.
I don't think the mainstream liberal or liberalish commenters (including me -- I made a bet!) did so based on underestimating the racism or overestimating the intelligence of the Republican base. They/we did so because there was a long history of the racist idiotsin the Republican base having their vote channeled away from celebrity outsiders and towards conservative assholes in the party's "mainstream," thus making it seem like the high early polling numbers were a blip and a bubble and eventually the party, including the racist morons, would unite around a more traditional candidate who was a more traditional politician of the kind who had enjoyed racist moron support in the past.
I still think that was a pretty good bet, and that the main difference this year was how crowded the field was and how weak Jeb and Rubio were. But I don't think the Republican base got more stupid and racist this year than it had been in the past.
More broadly it isn't 2004 anymore. The Washington insider/villager consensus that Atrios continues to go on about doesn't really exist anymore. Almost no one was lured into thinking that Trump couldn't happen because of the siren song of Broderism. Broderism is no longer a thing even at Georgetown cocktail parties. People thought Trump would lose because of what primaries in general and Republican primaries in particular looked like in the past.
I don't think the Republican base got more stupid and racist this year than it had been in the past
A distinction to be made here: They didn't get *more* stupid and racist, but in the wake of the Tea Party shitshow those traits have been celebrated and cultivated in a way they hadn't been before.
And I think people who thought that Trump wouldn't win--myself included!--overlearned the lessons of 2008, when there were a steady procession of flavor-of-the-week lunatics and celebrities; the trick was that in 2008 these guys would take the lead and collapse while Romney was plodding along in second place, whereas in 2012 Trump kept leading, while Carson, Rubio, etc. flamed out behind him.
Sure, but Trump wasn't and isn't a Tea Party candidate. I think everyone expected a candidate who would play to the Tea Party (ie traditional hardcore conservative) but Trump was surprising for not doing that.
Also, the GOP base certainly became more overtly racist as the country and the White House got less white (and the last southern conservative Democrats jumped the partisan fence).
I don't doubt that everyone that atrios is talking about are fully aware that there are a lot of complete idiots out there voting for Republican politicians - that's never been in dispute, and especially not among that particular group. What they didn't realize what what kind of idiots were out there, how many of them, and how central they were to the Republican party as a whole. They assumed that they were just that kind of small set of morons that occasionally throws a minor fit and makes some noise, and a larger set of people who just don't pay attention to what's happening.
But that's not the kind of idiots that the party is dealing with right now. The Republican party/Conservative Movement has spent the last twenty-five or so years carefully isolating the authoritarian white supremacist and theocratic voters, locking them into a controlled media structure, aggressively pushing them in more bigoted/nasty directions, and spinning them into screaming fits by feeding them complete nonsense. And each time they did it it got crazier, more divorced from any of the restrictions of reality, more openly vicious, and less and less controllable. That's what they've been, with great effort, ignoring. All we're seeing here is the result of that, like the Tea Party which was transparently just the same Republican base as always getting whipped up into a frenzy by a new set of totally-not-racist-or-whatever slogans. But who immediately got described as a whole group of new people being brought into politics and totally hadn't been right there before and so on. Expect to see this same dance happening with increasing volume as the election continues: "Trump represents the alt-right"; "Who are these people Trump is bringing into the Republican Party and how will they handle them!?"; etc.
Also in this election at least the 'divided field' thing gets a lot more credit than it really deserves.
JEB! deflated the moment he was poked, and probably would have had a lot of trouble if anyone remotely interesting had entered the race and caught the attention of the conservative base. Walker and Rubio were almost certainly just there for national publicity/to set themselves up for a VP nomination (and Walker at least proved not to even have what it took for that). And after that it was a long parade of lunatics (Trump; Carson; Cruz) and no-hopers (Fiorina; Paul; Christie; Kasich; the kiddy table debaters; etc.).
I mean, it's possible that having only one Establishment candidate in the race would have helped, but the competition between those guys really only started to happen when JEB! turned out to be as weak as he was and people were looking to jump ship. There were more insane people (who actually got appreciable supporters) dividing up that segment of the party than there were sensible-moderate-secretly-monstrous people. The percentage of support divided up by visible crazy candidates was a lot higher than the one divided up by the establishment people pretty early on in the race - certainly by early fall at any rate.
And I think people who thought that Trump wouldn't win--myself included!--overlearned the lessons of 2008, when there were a steady procession of flavor-of-the-week lunatics and celebrities; the trick was that in 2008 these guys would take the lead and collapse while Romney was plodding along in second place, whereas in 2012 Trump kept leading, while Carson, Rubio, etc. flamed out behind him.
That precisely describes my perception as well.
8 is totally accurate except for the four-years-in-the-past time shifting. How will the Trump voters vote in the 2014 midterms?
9: Trump wasn't and isn't a Tea Party candidate.
No? He isn't ostensibly so -- he doesn't run on their ticket,* so to speak -- but if you look at the divisions within the Republican party, it breaks pretty neatly with Tea Party types pro-Trump, other-than-Tea Party, anti-Trump.
I don't make a study of right-leaning outfits, but my impression is:
Breitbart et al., including Sarah Palin: pro-Trump.
RedState, National Review: anti-Trump.
Ted Cruz threw a wrench into the mix, as I, at least, had thought that he and Mike Lee represented the Tea Party in Congress.
From what I could see Cruz and Trump spent the last few months trying to drag Tea Partiers* to their sides. They essentially just ignored everyone else in the party, and rightly so given how few voters the non-Tea Party Republican "intellectuals" turned out to influence.
*The fact that there's no substantial line between Evangelical voters and Tea Partiers shouldn't really be a surprise, but they got treated that way an awful lot.
The asterisk in 15 was to go to the remark about Cruz and Lee as the Tea Party ticket ... except I'm not sure how accurate that is.
Checking: The House Freedom Caucus in 2015 didn't include Cruz or Lee.
15 - I have trouble telling what the "Tea Party" is and it certainly has porous boundaries and may not be a thing at all. But Cruz (and for that matter Carson, and others) seemed to make a push to win the support of organized right-wing political conservatives, whereas Trump did not. And Trump has many stated positions that are directly at odds with what the people who are the "Tea Party" leaders had been saying. What surprised me (and I think others) about Trump wasn't so much that a candidate who appealed to the most conservative/angry organized faction of the Republican party won, but that a candidate with no significant ties to any organized institutional faction of the party won. AFAIK that has never happened before in American political history.
It depends on whether you define the Tea Party as an ideological movement, or an attitudinal one. The longer I have watched them, the more I've come to believe that they aren't particularly conservative or even much political for that matter. Mostly they seem to just want to identify groups they don't like and call them names. As far as that goes, Trump is their avatar. But they are the result of years of "government is the problem" pounding. So as soon as they elect one of their own, they turn on them (eg, Eric Cantor) because now *they* are the government and hence the enemy.
They hate liberals, but don't seem to have much sense of what liberalism actually is, aside from "anything I don't like". So magically, for example, Islamic fundamentalism is now a liberal cornerstone.
The longer I have watched them, the more I've come to believe that they aren't particularly conservative or even much political for that matter. Mostly they seem to just want to identify groups they don't like and call them names.
Sure, but that faction of the Republican party (or for that matter the human race) has been around since forever. Until now they mostly got channeled into voting for politicians with some institutional support.
Wow, feels like 2003 all over again. Pass me some of that [recreational drug popular in 2003] and crank up the [band popular in 2003; possibly gangster rap?].
What's wrong with taking the House Freedom Caucus as a rough proxy for the Tea Party, institutionally? It's not like we have no idea who they are.
19/20 seem to me to be right about the Tea Party. It never had any genuine/distinctive ideology, just a couple new slogans and another step into the crazy-person-bubble. It was sold differently, sure, but that was just part of the "we're a new probably sane thing not just the same people with an excuse to pretend we weren't the ones calling everyone who didn't like W Bush filthy traitors".
What surprised me (and I think others) about Trump wasn't so much that a candidate who appealed to the most conservative/angry organized faction of the Republican party won, but that a candidate with no significant ties to any organized institutional faction of the party won.
This was also the argument I had against "oh it's 2012 again he'll flame out and someone new will pop up". Trump was never a factional candidate (in the standard Republican-coalition-sense). He drew support right across the board - hard righters, evangelicals, moderates, whatever. His support ratings for most of the primary were all within a few points of each other. 2012 was all about factions throwing up their guy to get his day in the sun, then backing down when it was clear no one else was going for it until they all settled on everyone's second choice. (He did obviously have a faction, but it was the "crazy white supremacist nastyperson bigot" one that is the common factor tying the party together so it's spread out across all the generally understood factions.)
23 -- If you use that metric, according to Wiki, of the 11 (!) house members who have endorsed Trump, a grand total of 2 are from the House Freedom Caucus. And the House Freedom Caucus has 41 members. So if that is the measure of support from the Tea Party, Trump didn't get Tea Party support.
23: If you're going to do that, I wouldn't make much of Cruz and Lee's non-membership (per 17.last), what with them not being members of the House.
25: Thanks for doing the homework on that for me.
26: Oh! God! Thanks, potchkeh. Good grief, I am embarrassed for myself.
So we know that the Tea Party was phony grass roots, organized and funded by Dick Armey. But the thing is, the actual people, the ones doing Founding Father cosplay and holding patently stupid signs up, weren't phony: they really were deluded, angry, racist assholes.
And they really had no reason to be loyal to Armey et al, especially since everyone from Fox to the NYT to elected Republicans flattered them that they were a true, grassroots, salt-of-the-earth movement. I think they genuinely didn't think of themselves as having leaders, just people who said things they liked to hear. If any Republican had succeeded at accomplishing a goddamn thing on the national stage, that could have changed, but what did Cruz do that was more substantive than what Trump has done? Cruz read Green Eggs & Ham, while Trump called Mexicans rapists.
I supposed this is banned, but it's a bunch of snake oil salesmen, none of them with an actual cure. The one with the gaudiest patter wins.
Cruz read Green Eggs & Ham, while Trump called Mexicans rapists.
In his prime, Pat Buchanan could have done both in a single day while still leaving time to accuse feminists of trying to destroy western civilization.
One factor in Trump's success that I think is underappreciated is how genuinely stupid he is compared to every other politician who has ever tried to pander to the racist idiot crowd. People like Cruz and Buchanan can play dumb for a bit. But only Trump can speak for an hour only using one or two syllable words and three or four word sentences. A lot of Trump's supporters really understand him in a way that they have never understood another politician before.
I mean look at Trumps answer to the question "how will you bring the American dream back"
We can bring the American Dream back. That I will tell you. We're bringing it back. OK? And I understand what you're saying. And I get that from so many people. "Is The American Dream dead?" They are asking me the question, "Is the American Dream dead?" And the American Dream is in trouble. That I can tell you. OK? It's in trouble. But we're going to get it back and do some real jobs.
Cruz or Buchanan would have tried to answer that question in a way that had a hint of content, and thus raised the possibility that they couldn't just create some real jobs using the sheer force of their personality.
Trump is truly an idiot's idiot.
I've found it interesting that Trump is so meta. He describes his interpretation of poll results, talks about campaign strategies, his campaign. It comes across as very transparent. Maybe it makes the people at his rallies feel like insiders with him. It is Trump's simplified version of horse-race journalism, but I don't remember other candidates doing it as much as he does. I wonder what in his reality show background told him that people would love it.
32 is right. It strikes me that some of his public conversation about polling is similar to what more traditional candidates do at closed fundraisers -- my poll numbers are x, here are candidate y's weaknesses, here's why we think we can win. It's all presented by Trump in the stupidest most possible way because Trump, and it's a horrible trend to have this be part of the public political conversation by candidates, but that does seem like something he's genuinely created.
31: I raised this theory with my wife, and she asked "more than Bush"?
Perhaps "real" candidates were supposed to be above all that, thinking about policy all the time. Their surrogates handled all the campaigning mechanics. Obviously there's a deep demand for that kind of campaign coverage, because I read reams of it on the internet. I don't know what told Trump that people would respond well to it coming directly from him.
34: Bush is the kind of idiot who garbles sentences. Trump's message is clear as day: "They're murderers. They're rapists."
Villagers have been overestimating the power of the Red establishment for decades. (I lost all patience with this belief during the Clinton Impeachment.) The idiot champion proved it weak beyond Village capacity to understand and accept in pretty short order.
So I went down to watch Bernie for a while today. Hard to disagree with any of the policy points, and they really is the future. I don't think he's going to win the nomination, and don't believe that the polls now about his general election prospects are particularly useful, but, otherwise, an uplifting experience.
In the future, we won't have subject verb agreement.
I mean look at Trumps answer to the question "how will you bring the American dream back"
From his recent rally in NW Washington I get the sense that the local reporter isn't impressed.
He incited cheers from the crowd when he started talking about immigration from Mexico and reiterated his plans to "build the wall."
"We will build a wall. It will be a nice high wall. This is peanuts," Trump said, gesturing at the stage cover maybe 40 feet above his head. "They sell the drugs. They destroy our children. They destroy our way of life."
and
He wrapped up by stumping his campaign slogan "Make America Great Again."
"You're going to be proud of your country again," Trump said. "We're going to win with our military. We're going to win with our trade deals. We're going to win with education."
That said, when he's not talking about policy he is a good speaker. Watch a minute or two of that. He's simple without being condescending, and, I hate to say it, engaging.
What kind of blithering idiot reads Jonathan Chait? Seriously, I don't respect that much more than I would a reader of E Eriksson.
Part of the core of liberal capitalist technocratism is the idea that people can be ignorant and educated away from their interests and values, than gain the enlightenment of greatest good for greatest number universal values just like mine. Blah blah.
Quit calling them idiots. They aren't. Maybe they are evil, or their values are evil, but Trump and his followers are not fucking dumb.
But they may be anti-intellectual of a sort, which in today's meritocratic elitist technocracy, would also be anti-elitist, and the first step everybody needs to make is that our elites are fucking it all up, that they will create very little if any space in the discourse for dissent, and so anti-elitist actions will look anti-intellectual.
Like Gerald Friedman. We can't play there, they are a gang.
I mean, try to understand the appeal of anti-intellectualism when 20 of 30 Nobel economists agree that you will never have a good job or own a home.
Am I gonna argue with Larry Summers about secular stagnation? Fucking why?
And then my hyperbole is met with
"Bob, name those twenty, list their views with cites, explain how they agree and how they differ, don't make any mistakes, and after that come up with your own way out of secular stagnation that those twenty economist agree was plausible and capable of being enacted.
Or lose your credibility...forever"
Yeah, anti-intellectualism is on the rise big time. And that is why portraying Trump and Trumpsters as idiots ain't gonna fly, this year or 2020.
I know one fellow who says he doesn't follow politics anymore much. He stopped listening to Alex Jones regularly.
I know another white engineer who says the same thing, but with respect to Rush Limbaugh.
A lot of this commentary sells Trump short as a candidate. The guy is pretty skilled. Yeah, there are a lot of racist idiots out there, but if it was that easy to rally them together there would be a Trump figure every election season.
That's both important and true.
Part of Trump's success is right-place-right-time, and actually seeing clearly who he's trying to appeal to. But the point where I really thought that he was a genuine power player was after watching his hilariously effective alpha-male games at the first debate.
And for all that people talk about the whole 'fourth grade reading level' thing in his speeches, that doesn't mean he's simple. It means he's speaking in a way that pretty much everyone can understand immediately without needing to think about it. Which is actually seriously difficult.
Haven't read the whole thread yet, but Atrios is righter than anybody......ok, shit, I saw Tigre's comment. Tigre basically OTM. Though I will say I'm just slightly less enthused by contemporary Democrat cock than he is. Probably just my black melancholic disposition.
Atrios' unimpeachable rightness would be blemished if he posted anything substantive more than once a month, but he'd also be a lot more interesting. What happens in his comment threads? Has the community by now developed their own dialect, incomprehensible to outsiders? Are they composed entirely of bots?
Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus are mostly down-the-line social conservatives. (TP at least started out as being about libertarian-ish issues, FWIW, but has been taken over by the SC types.)
What makes them worried is that Trump is showing he isn't a reliable SC; it's what makes Ryan not want to endorse him. What people seem to forget is that Trump is sui generis; he is not a typical Republican, typical SC, typical Tea Party member. Honestly, that's what makes him dangerous. For one thing, he apparently is attracting a lot of voters who don't usually vote. For another, he will have absolutely no compunction about saying whatever he needs to say to (ummm...) "make the deal." The guy has already signaled that he, if necessary, is perfectly happy to raise taxes on the rich, etc. Nothing he says can be relied upon. He is not the classic Republican yahoo. He is mostly about the resentments of the lower middle class and the worried middle class. There are plenty of people like that in the Dem "coalition," too.
I think we underestimate him. I am worried he could win.
And I agree with 46 that Atrios' screed is totally non-substantive. (Also, this community obviously is mostly bots*. "Moby Hick," I'm lookin' at you.)
* Clever bots, mind; clever.
It's very possible I'm a real person who has just automated some of his commenting.
What people seem to forget is that Trump is sui generis; he is not a typical Republican, typical SC, typical Tea Party member.
Some of us managed a pretty good level of prediction/analysis by believing the exact opposite of this.
Also the Tea Party didn't start out as anything other than boring standard Republican Base ressentiment assholes, except with new funding and a couple new slogans. The idea that they were ever some kind of interesting/new ideological phenomenon is purely an invention of, well, the people who paid for them. I have yet to see any really convincing evidence that he's attracting a lot of voters who don't usually get involved or vote, or who somehow represent some new faction. The Republican base was always tribal and never philosophical: they cared about minorities taking white people's power, and that kind of thing, but never about trickle down economics or any of that fancy sounding bullshit. (Even the social-conservatives: it was always about does-he-hate-the-people-who-are-worth-less-than-us?. And Trump does a good job of making clear that he absolutely does.)
And, yeah, he absolutely could win. But it's not because he's some kind of out-of-nowhere phenom. It's because he's a decent expression of exactly what the Republican party is at this point, with a fair bit of showmanship added to it. That's all.
Because he doesn't know what the Republican party line is, Trump often says things that make no sense, and also often says things that make total sense and are theoretically Democratic positions and are also extremely popular but Democrats never say them because their donors will get mad.
In 3 months this could very well be the equivalent of those infuriating social media arguments where one liberal (Trump) says "Wouldn't it be good if things were like they were in 1960, where the minimum wage was a living wage, you had job security if your company was doing well, we didn't have all these trade deals that ship jobs overseas, the rich paid more taxes -- it's terrible nowadays, all the economic growth goes to the rich and their taxes are lower than ever while your bills are higher than ever" and another liberal (Clinton) says "Look at this asshole, he wants to go back to when black people couldn't vote and women didn't have equal rights."
If I didn't know that Trump would end that statement with "..because of the Mexicans and Feminists" I would spend the next six months or more in a complete news blackout in order to avoid dealing with something that awful and infuriating. I mean, I'm still not going to enjoy it in any way, but as long as he's a full on white supremacist at least there's something to keep me from going completely nihilist.
Is 51 sarcastic? Why? Trump is already saying all those things. It's called populism. And Hillary is worse at it than John Kerry. Get your head out of the sand.
Fortunately the overlap group of persuadable to vote for a Democrat (as opposed to consistent Republicans) but resentful white guy losers like yourself who imagine that this non-existent message exists from Trump is small, but keep fucking that racist and sexist chicken and let the resentment flow.
I mean is anything more gross than an overducated white guy pretend populist who buys Trump's bullshit? No, nothing is. It's like all the resentment against women combined with none of the justification, plus an added dose of total delusion. Disgusting.
Step 1: Explain that people who would have voted for you 20 years ago, but are not voting for you now, are not voting for you because they are racist and sexist and also disgusting, and ignorant
Step 2: ?
Step 3: They vote for you
Step 4: those resentful white men wouldn't vote for any potential Democrat now in any current universe, and are not remotely necessary to win the election, which will be won on a wave of working class people of all races, women, and basically sane people who are now (thank God) enough to put a Democrat in office in a national election.
I'm not entirely clear on what Tigre has decided to go off on this time, but Cryptic ned is right here: Trump has absolutely said all of those things more than once, as far as I can tell largely by accident and because he just says whatever random crap gets applause.* The debate he described in 50 is pretty easy to see happening, and would be horribly painful, and you don't have to assume that in some sense Trump means that stuff or anything like that would happen if he was elected to believe that.
*But this applies to almost everything he's said that sounds like actual policy or political philosophy.
We're all feeling some amount of panic now because we are in the interim period when Bernie has not yet started campaigning for Hillary / against Dangerous Donald. When he does, it will help a lot. And if he doesn't... well, I will lose a lot of respect for him. But also see it as indicative of how much Hillary is relying on the corporate class liking her more than Dangerous Donald.
I hope everyone's ready for six more months of this.
63: How's paying attention to this election working out for you all? Had enough of this godawful spectacle yet? Fuck all of it. The weather is great and summer is months of fun stretching out before us. Go outside and get a hobby or get back into the one you're neglecting.
How's paying attention to this election working out for you all?
Eh, it's fine. I don't get as invested in arguing about it as some people.
The weather was admittedly pretty great today, though. Definitely the nicest day we've had so far this year.
We could pay attention to the next election(s) instead.
[Ted Cruz] announced Wednesday afternoon that he filed paperwork to run for his seat again in 2018, and that his senatorial campaign committee had been reactivated in the wake of the suspension of his presidential campaign. [...] Of course, a 2018 campaign to keep his Senate seat doesn't preclude another White House bid in 2020.
62 is pretty accurate except for the last sentence. If Bernie doesn't enthusiastically endorse Hillary, I don't think it would throw the election, or come close, or have anything real to say about the "corporate" class (since most of her support would still cone from working class people, especially women, just not from the only real working class folks that exist, hard working white men). But it would certainly confirm that he is worse than my (already pretty low) low opinion of him as basically a ego-driven fraud who is willing to lie to avoid political or policy reality or actually do real things to help real people. And, depending on who followed him into the abyss, it would confirm the extent to which his supporters are or are not dicks.
But I don't expect that to actually happen -- he'll endorse her. And he'll do so very enthusiastically and also encourage his donors to give to her. And as much as I've come to dislike him over the past few months I expect that's exactly what will happen. But we'll see.
It is too late at night for me to dig it up, but I said what Atrios is saying days ago here.
66: Have you gone and tried one of those day trip fishing charters for salmon, halibut, etc. yet?
Nah. I'm really not into fishing. Which, yes, is one of the ways I don't fit in up here.
71: You're killing me. Wait, when have you done any fishing? NM isn't exactly a destination for that. Maybe you could focus on the after part and buy a smoker and start smoking different seasonal catches.
I went trout fishing in Utah once when I was in my teens and staying with cousins. (There is some fishing in NM but you're right that it's not a major thing.) It was okay but I still don't really see the appeal. I hadn't thought about just getting a smoker and smoking other people's fish, but I guess I could do that. It's certainly not hard to get excess salmon from people in the summer.
YES. Now we're talking. I've been checking them out at Cabelas and while this one looks good, I'm getting a decent pay bump this summer and might end up getting tempted to really splurge.
Tell us you're at least knife-fighting grizzly bears?
I feel like Teo would love fishing. Maybe give it a try. One of my big regrets is not living in a place with decent fly fishing and not having enough time to fish at all. Maybe when the kids get big enough.
I feel like Teo would love fishing.
Based on what?
I dunno, you stand around in a nice location and look at stuff and think, and have something to do. It's not crowded or hectic. If going to Little Diomede alone sounds attractive, you'd probably like fishing.
I dunno, you stand around in a nice location and look at stuff and think, and have something to do.
Okay, but I can just stand around in nice locations anyway and don't particularly feel the need to have something to do.
It's not crowded or hectic.
Not necessarily true of the sorts of fishing people tend to do in Alaska. Not that I would have to do that kind of fishing, of course, but when people offer to take you fishing that's often what it is.
If going to Little Diomede alone sounds attractive, you'd probably like fishing.
Well, I mean, it doesn't to me, so.
Wait, you don't want to go to Little Diomede alone? What the fuck. You are blowing my mind with this personality revelation. I thought you were the ultimate go to Little Diomede alone dude.
When you've heard as many horror stories about Little Diomede as I have, you definitely don't want to go there unless you have to, especially not alone.
OK like what. Are we talking gored by walrus, murdered by locals, get lost and end up on ice floe, what.
74: Why not just build your own? All you need is a roughly refrigerator-sized plywood or sheet-metal box that leaks air a bit at the top and bottom, some reasonably non-toxic racks of one sort or another, and a washtub to build the fire in.
84: All of those are possibilities, but it's more likely you'll just get stuck there for weeks until the weather clears. (Days is more likely, but weeks really does happen.) And the locals probably won't murder you but they'll be dealing with a lot of serious problems of their own and may not be all that friendly.
85: Because I would end up with some contraption that looked like I was smoking meat in a remote third world village. I have a covered deck with an outlet and that stainless electric dealio looks like I could operate it without fear of burning my house down. I'm not so confident I'd be able to say that about something I slapped together from scraps of someone's demolished shed.
I mean, I realize you're just using Little Diomede as a symbol here (though I'm not sure of what exactly), but it's also a real place that I really might end up going to at some point so my perspective is a little different.
Fair enough. Just looking forward to being back in a part of the world where that sort of thing fits right in later this month, albeit briefly. And it does do a really good job of smoking stuff (fish, in our case).
64: Following the election is like following sports. The Eagles have completely disintegrated over the course of a year, and yet I can't look away.
Maybe. I'm not sure what that would mean.
Still probably more fun than arguing about the election.
The right response to 91 was "a little." I swear, things just haven't been the same since the Teo & Smearcase Show went off the air.
It's true. I am kind of off my game lately.
Maybe you need a new hobby. Or to get out more.
Maybe. I'm not sure either of those would help my commenting game much, though.
Since Teo's Diomede-splaining game is weak, this seems important and interesting for the election. The idea that Trump voters are "working class" whites is pure and utter bullshit (median household income - $73,000/yr vs. $61,000 for both Hillary and Bernie). And that's the same median income as Ted Cruz Republican voters.
Median overall household income for non-hispanic whites is $62,000/yr, so it's not like Trump is particularly drawing poor whites. It's resentful but relatively comfortable white middle class men.
98 is an important point that I've seen made elsewhere. And I can totally Diomede-splain more if that's what you want.
It's the "fuck you, I don't know if I got mine but I sure as hell ain't helping you" class.
Teo's commenting would definitely improve if he liveblogged walrus gorings/sled races/grizzly fighting. Fishing, I think, not so much.
I mean, other people being gored would be ok. I don't want to be unreasonable.
I could totally liveblog sled-dog races. (Well, not now, but next winter assuming they don't all get canceled for lack of snow.) Grizzly fights would be harder. I don't think walruses actually gore people, at least not often.
103.last you could test that assumption and live-blog the results.
103.last you could test that assumption and live-blog the results.
Let's not talk about Sanders, so over so boring.
Let's not talk about inequality, Repubs will make it worse.
Let's talk about Trump what an idiot, just vote Hillary, and don't ever say anything that will give enemies ammunition against her...
...8 years later...
...Well, yeah 1% got richer and HRC didn't get much from Congress and what she got had a price and economy is still slowmo...sorry about all the suicides and oxy overdoses but they don't live in the metros anyway...
...and shit man, Paul Ryan. Jesus just get behind Booker and push. SCOTUS and choice is at stake and racism!
106: Dude, Americans like inequality, and they will vote for it. We're just trying to hold back the tide here, and hoping demographic shifts will save us in the long run. If people wanted anything you wanted, they would vote for it. But they never, ever do.
Do they have bears in Texas? I would so totally watch Bob knife-fight a bear (my money's on bob).
I feel that walrus gorings would definitely increase under a Trump administration. Sadly, I can't vote in favor of that platform.
109 I suppose it depends whose walrus is being gored.
110: No Barry, the walrus does the goring. Their teeth are yuuuuge!
Reichsmarschall Walrus Göring. Pixar get on this.
I would say 112 is in poor taste, but the truth is I just didn't think of it in time.
Picked up a rescue dog yesterday. Appears to be mostly Anatolian Shepherd but at 26 months old right about half the size, 80 lbs (as soon as we fix his backyard starvation) instead of 120-150 but otherwise shows characteristics of breed. Got some neglect damage, as soon as he heals I'll have to take him running and swimming. Very fucking strong, energetic, smart, sensitive.
Bars? Anatolians catch and eat play and run with cheetahs. Top speed Anatol = 75 kph. Some nice pictures out there
Tough? Protective? Been barking at the thunder as if he could scare it off.
Glad to hear that Bob. I hope you have many happy years together.
I'm sure bob and his hounds bringing down a bar is a sight to behold.
Baying. Screaming. Drinking. Unforgettable.
Sometimes, you just can't not mention that people are very attentive to racism for reasons.
How could Trump Happen? A report from the suicide/overdose counties, marked in red for your pleasure. Using the ignoring of AIDS in the 80s for comparison, even more offense. All below in quotes
Lets be honest- Clinton doesn't give a shit about me. When Clinton talks about people hurt by the economy, she means you: elite-educated white-collar people with obvious career tracks who are having trouble with their bills and their 401k plans.
And let me be honest again- Trump doesn't have an economic plan for me either. What Trump's boys have for me is a noose- but that's the choice I'm facing, a lifetime of grueling poverty, or apocalypse. Yeah I know, not fun and games- the shouts, the smashing glass, the headlights on the lawn, but what am I supposed to do, raise my kid to stay one step ahead of the inspectors and don't, for the love of god, don't ever miss a payment on your speeding ticket? A noose is something I know how to fight. A hole in the frame of my car is not. A lifetime of feeling that sense, that "ohhhh, shiiiiiit..." of recognition that another year will go by without any major change in the way of things, little misfortunes upon misfortunes... a lifetime of paying a grand a month to the same financial industry busily padding the 401k plans of cyclists in spandex, who declare a new era of prosperity in America? Who can find clarity, a sense of self, any kind of redemption in that world?
Fuck it. Give me the fascists, I'll know where I stand...
But I went ahead and took a democratic ballot regardless. And voted for Sanders. And as long as chumps like me keep doing that, we'll keep getting the Clintons we deserve.*
...
I am of two minds. On the one hand, Trumpism is unspeakable. On the other hand the status quo is silence and death.
*Me. Yup.
How's paying attention to this election working out for you all? Had enough of this godawful spectacle yet? Fuck all of it.
*
This is the secret to Republican success, of course. Make everything suck, disengage decent people from the process, and try to harness the resulting rage of the nitwits.
*I'm quoting gswift here, but I do understand that the point that I am making is not really related to the one that he was making.
It is true that things are going to get worse for most people under HRC, but worse from a baseline that most people throughout human history would envy. Really what can you expect in a declining empire?
With Trump there is a realistic prospect that the general American standard of living could be cut in half. As someone on a pretty basic income now I'll take HRC over Trump any time.
It is true that things are going to get worse for most people under HRC
I doubt that, actually. Median household income's been climbing for the last several years in the US (pretty much since the Great Recession ended). Life expectancy has been steadily growing. This is going to reverse under Clinton? Why?
With Trump there is a realistic prospect that the general American standard of living could be cut in half.
I doubt this as well. This really only happens in situations like postwar Germany. There is, as they say, a lot of ruin in a nation.
I'm with Atrios. I think the mea culpas have largely failed to grapple with the actual failures by political observers.
Nate Cohn - a quant-oriented guy! - shows an aggressive blindness here, and was ridiculed here in realtime without the benefit of any kind of hindsight.
Quoting Cohn:
A recent YouGov poll, for instance, showed Mr. Trump at 34 percent in the 14-way race -- a better result for him than in most polls -- but in essentially a dead heat (51 to 49 percent, either way) in a one-on-one matchup against Mr. Cruz or Mr. Rubio.
To support his argument that Trump will fail once he's in a one-on-one race, he points to a poll that shows Trump only leading by a little bit. A lot of the Trump-will-lose rhetoric self-evidently failed on its own terms.
And mind you, he does this after Trump has had an unusually stable lead in the polls for something like 5 months.
Trump was a bit of a leap, but not that much of one, from the longstanding Republican tendency, and the media largely failed to recognize it because the media has spent decades being unable to acknowledge the nature of the Republican tendency.
I'm glad you got a new dog Bob. Trying to think of the most Bob-like dog name but can only come up with Gnarler of Liberals or GOL for short.
But Nate Cohn is not in any remotely meaningful sense "the media" or "the Village" or whatever worn-out cliche from 2003 liberal internet that no longer exists that you want to keep using ad nauseum. He is a quant guy specifically brought in, in large part, to please people who wanted more data-driven journalism and less typical Washington punditry. He did so, but got caught up by an unusual event that defied his model. He may have been wrong but it wasn't because the stench of the Georgetown cocktail party circuit with the zombified corpse of David Broder addled his brain, it was because he had a reasonable model of what happened in the past that didn't play out this time.
Either Inuyasha or Karl Barks. Done.
$51,939
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in September 2014 that: U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939 in 2013 versus $51,759 in 2012, statistically unchanged. In 2013, real median household income was 8.0 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the latest recession.
Life expectancy is somewhat mixed: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-for-white-women-falls-slightly-in-u-s/, but the increasing concentration of wealth is gonna take a while to really affect those numbers.
I feel like the loss of rights that we used to have before W that Obama ratified is worse than the economic numbers.
As far as there being a lot of ruin in a nation, that is true, but there is a lot of potential ruin implicit in giving an obviously unstable personality control of nuclear weapons.
125: My 123, as originally written, contained a bit of Tigre mockery that I removed for being gratuitous and no fun. But now you're forcing my hand! I can no longer resist!
Nate Cohn is not in any remotely meaningful sense "the media" or "the Village" or whatever worn-out cliche from 2003 liberal internet that no longer exists that you want to keep using ad nauseum.
Actually, I didn't use those phrases or advocate for them. But now I will!
How do you know that Nate Cohn of the New York Times wasn't acting as part of the Establishment Media Consensus? Because he disagreed with that consensus? Well, no, that's not it.
The Nates (Cohn and Silver) billed themselves as not being of the regular media and then fell in line anyway -- contradicting their own data. And neither has really 'fessed up. As Tigre tells us in 6 ("I still think that was a pretty good bet"), the analysis was fine -- it was reality that fucked up.
(An aside: We knew that Silver was going to fall victim to groupthink as soon as he invoked the parable of the fox and the hedgehog, and ridiculously labeled himself a fox. His whole career to that point was based on being a hedgehog.)
In the particular piece that I quoted (which was written loooong after it became obvious that Trump wasn't just some flavor-of-the-month), Cohn imagines the worst possible scenario for Trump - a race that quickly devolves into a one-on-one. Then he cites evidence that Trump would win such a race only by a little bit. This, Cohn told us, was evidence against Trump's eventual victory. Because reasons.
The Nates really do know One Big Thing. They just forgot it. Maybe it was a coincidence that their lapse just happened to put them in accord with the entire rest of the media and political establishment. I wonder what the odds of that would be.
"I feel like the loss of rights that we used to have before W that Obama ratified is worse than the economic numbers."
"We" meaning "straight we" here, obvs.
The Village hasn't ceased to exist just because you're tired of the term. There's a whole lot of money and self-image riding on the notion that there are people ultimately in charge, in some real sense. Reality bushwhacks the Village at nearly every turn, because its premises are self-servingly unreal.
131: Yes, that's that extremely convincing anti-populist argument again. You personally are worse off, especially on an economic level, and so is almost everyone you know personally... but look at these other people, they're a bit better off. Again, I doubt this would work in an election where the opponent is a normal politician instead of a world-renowned bigot.
Nearly every turn is an overstatement. But punditry keeps making the same mistake with respect of the masters' ability to control reality, and never seems to learn the lesson.
What I find amazing about Trump is how obvious the con is, and yet how effective. It's professional wrestling. Most of the audience is, I'd guess, more on less in on it, but are you not entertained really does seem to be the thing of it.
Are you not entertained by hatred of the people you hate?
Endorsing 130.
Drum comments on the Atrios rant, but the interesting(ish) bit is at the end, where he explains the reasons, as best as he understands them, that Trump actually did win (when, in previous elections, the same ignorant, racist GOP base didn't succeed in nominating an ignorant racist):
The GOP has long had a significant base that's susceptible to racial appeals, but ever since Pat Buchanan's suicide run in 1992 everyone assumed this would henceforth have to be kept carefully buried by anyone who wanted to be taken seriously. Trump surprised everyone by unburying it with no apologies. And guess what? It turned out nothing much had changed over the past two decades. Buchanan won about 30 percent of the vote in the early contests of the 1992 race, almost exactly the same as Trump got in the early contests this year. Against a single strong competitor, this wasn't enough for Buchanan, but against a fractured field, Trump's frank appeal to the racist vote was enough to keep him in the lead.I really think it comes down to that: without a single, strong competitor, why wouldn't Trump win?
If you ask me, the fundamental mistake about the election that was absolutely ascribable to a Village mentality was the idea that the Republicans formed a "deep field": it was obvious from two years ago that this was utter horseshoe, but bad work by the Nates et al was predicated in large part on it. After all, "The Party Decides" doesn't mean that the party can nominate any fool they pick; if the party is working with bad candidates, then they can only do so much. But everybody with a paid platform felt obligated to pretend that Bush or Rubio* were not only ready for prime time, but actually fearsome competitors. And the only way to believe that is to drink the Kool-Aid.
*I'll admit here that I worried about Rubio, but that was way back before it was clear just how much a lightweight he is/was: I figured he was at least competent, and that MSM fluffing would get him the rest of the way. Turns out, not even competent.
131- Yeah I guess we was wrong as I was talking to you, and now I remember you are a right-less foreigner.
BTW, the blockquote in 136 is one of 3 reasons Drum offers; it's not the whole thing.
130,32 - what eeevil big media influence are you talking about, in reality and in specifics and not just in the confusing march of demons and stereotypes and generalities that dance in your heads? Who do you think Nate Silver or Nate Cohn were trying to impress by excessively discounting Trump? Either would have done far better personally and professionally with an early pro-Trump call. There are not in fact parties, meetings, or anything else at the NY Times or anywhere else where people are talking about the sagacity of the Republican establishment or whatever. These guys gor misled if anything by (apparently) very accurate political science, specifically a book called The Party Decides. That they and this book got things wrong is interesting and important but what is not interesting or important is bashing them with an outdated analysis that has nothing to do with them.
In fact it was the traditional media types who took Trump seriously early, mainly because he seemed to provide interesting horse race coverage. The numerical stuff was designed as a way of getting out of the horse race coverage. (And obviously you two aren't dumb enough to think that when an improbable event occurs that means you shouldn't use probabilistic analysis, so I'm going to ignore that those comments could be read that way).
133: But the people who are better off also get to vote. This has been the blind spot of all of this "populist" blather: the idea that you can dismiss all of those people who've gained rights & freedom, because... it's never clear why. But it underlies the "SC Dems don't really count," it underlies "voting with your vagina", it underlies bob's and DeBoers' entire existences.
Everyone goes through life with economic status and sociopolitical status. For everyone outside the 1%, the former has been roughly static for the last 40 years, and absolutely static for the past 15. But for everyone who isn't a straight, cis white male, the latter has been improving over that same time period, sometimes by leaps and bounds. Republicans, without exception, are actively fighting to reverse that. And the white guys are saying, why doesn't anyone care about the only issue that matters, which is shitty income?
Straight white guys see 40+ years of failure on every front; the other 75% of the country does not.
140- There is something to your argument and If I were gay I'd definitely have things to be thankful for, but I'd be facing the same worse than stagnant economic situation. Also if I had kids natural or adopted I'd be pretty horrified by the consensus future bearing down on them.
"I feel like the loss of rights that we used to have before W that Obama ratified is worse than the economic numbers."
Maybe the govt combed through some emails or call records is not even remotely affecting the average citizen in the same way as the decline of the buying power of their wages.
Liberal internet, here are some things that no longer exist:
1) David Broder
2) Bipartisan consensus in Washington among elites
3) A belief in the importance of bipartisan consesnus among the elites of either party in Washington
4) A thriving political media staffed with prominent journalists with access to power
5) A wealthy political media that makes money and offers career advancement
6) A rag-tag band of liberal outsiders on the internet working for free who can somehow see the reality that all others have been blinded to.
Update your cliches, please! And, in doing so, 140 is a great place to start.
Everyone goes through life with economic status and sociopolitical status. For everyone outside the 1%, the former has been roughly static for the last 40 years, and absolutely static for the past 15. But for everyone who isn't a straight, cis white male, the latter has been improving over that same time period, sometimes by leaps and bounds. Republicans, without exception, are actively fighting to reverse that. And the white guys are saying, why doesn't anyone care about the only issue that matters, which is shitty income?
40 years, maybe. What about over the last 25 years? For sexual minorities, certainly, there has been massive progress. What has objectively improved for ethnic minorities since 1990? Or straight, cis white women for that matter? I'm very open to being convinced on this, because I know the Republican Party is one of the worst parties on earth, and it's immaterial because people growing up in the last 25 years are the most non-Republican people ever. But my impression is stagnation.
I feel like the loss of rights that we used to have before W that Obama ratified
What rights, specifically, have been lost? Genuinely asking, because I have no clear idea what you're talking about.
And I don't think Georgetown cocktail parties even exist any more. I mean, I don't doubt that people are drinking cocktails in Georgetown but the bipartisan elite Katharine Graham era is as over as the fax machine.
139: What caused Cohn and Silver to misinterpret their own data is an interesting question, but one that we can't get to until you're ready to acknowledge two points:
1 - that Silver and Cohn misinterpreted their own data in ways that were apparent in real-time and
2 - this failure led them to conclusions that matched the conventional wisdom
You seem to disagree on both. There doesn't seem to be any point in asking me to address why 1 and 2 happened when you're saying they didn't.
140: I have been unsatisfied for a variety of reasons with the Unfogged critique of Sanders, but I think this captures the valid portion of that critique - perhaps not as it applies to Sanders himself, but certainly to a noisy portion of his supporters.
147- Got to go. gswift seems aware. Due process and the 4th amendment in particular.
I'm not talking about conspiracies, meetings, evil generally. I'm talking about a conventional wisdom that's more about the confluence of self-interest and self-image than about "science." Did the data guys succumb to conventional wisdom? If their numbers were wrong, and that's how they went wrong, then ok, no.
1. Yay! Dog for Bob!
2. When building your own smoker, separate the heat source from the smoking box or be very sure you can keep the fire low. About 10 years ago I built one out of particle board and lined it with cement backerboard on the inside. Third time out, the particle board started on fire. Managed to save the meat inside (although who knows how many chemicals were on it) but the smoker itself was a total loss.
Alton Brown made a smoker out of stuff he stole from a hotel room.
I guess I agree with 150.2, though I'm not sure what "conventional" means and as I said above if anything Cohn and Silver were bigger Trump skeptics than traditional reporters -- quantitative analysis like theirs helped create the "Trump won't win" story as much as it responded to it.
150.1 I'm not so sure about. In retrospect the thing that they got wrong was not just looking at the polls. But as the polls stayed where they were closer to primary elections they changed their predictions. IIRC the people who were willing to bet (more) on Trump early on (a) weren't particularly confident about that choice and (b) were mostly up on Trump because they thought the other Republican candidates were qualitatively not strong. That latter point turned out to be right, but it was also the totally subjective horse-race punditry of the kind that Cohn and Silver were trying to use historical data to check.
Sam Wang was more right about Trump than Cohn or Silver, but not for reasons that had anything to do with Atrios' cliched analysis, it's because he's long had a difference with Silver over the value of polls-only vs polls-plus analysis. I'd have to go back and see the moment when Wang started taking Trump seriously and compare it to Cohn and Silver's responses -- that's the moment where I think it would be fair to say that it was somewhat clear in real-time that they were wrong. But IIRC there wasn't actually all that much difference.
And here's Mr. polls-only Wang arguing in 2015 that Trump shouldn't be seen as the front-runner. What a Villager! Clearly Sally Quinn got to him in a Georgetown townhouse.
What has objectively improved for ethnic minorities since 1990? Or straight, cis white women for that matter?
Obviously I can't answer this firsthand, but:
Black president who is unabashedly black, not some Republican-in-blackface or (sorry) Tom-ish conservative pol who doesn't scare the white people. As I said, we're talking sociopolitical status, and that's huge. How many black people said things along the lines of, "I never thought in my lifetime"? And while the reason for its existence is a horrible reminder of the remaining power of white supremacy, #BLM is probably the most vibrant black political movement since King and the Panthers.
Latinos have seen a big increase in political power, and are approaching plurality status in a number of states. Republicans hate them, but Dems treat them as central to their coalition, and a Latino is probably the VP frontrunner.
Women is more complicated because of backlash, but we're probably about to see a woman president, and she's one who came onto the scene explicitly as a feminist. There are more women in high office and executive office than ever before, even though progress has obviously slowed dramatically since the '70s.
In general, the internet and social media have allowed all of these groups to speak for themselves and be heard.
I'm not trying to suggest that anyone in these groups is satisfied with the status quo; I'm just saying that not a single one finds an appeal to the '70s engaging.
Silver:
1. Voters are more tribal than I thought.
2. GOP is weaker than I thought.
3. Media is worse than I thought.
Did he think these things because the data told him they were true? Or did he think them because everyone thinks them, even though, for a decade, it's been obvious that the trend lines were going strongly in the direction the Trump victory shows them to have gone?
Beltway CW made the same 3 wrong assumptions about the Clinton Impeachment. You could find easy analogues in the assumptions that underlay the belief that the Iraq was would work out, even if it was not necessary based on imminent threat.
A cliche isn't wrong just because it's old.
The article in 158 was prior to Trump's actually having the lead for an extended period of time. There certainly was a time where it was very reasonable to think he was a momentary blip, and mid July seems like a pretty good candidate for that time period. It was at the very latest in early January - probably given when this article was written it was in late December. And even then it was a 'whoops time to reevaluate this stuff' post not one saying that things had suddenly changed in a way that required changing his predictions. A few days later Silver wrote this very skeptical one about Trump's chances.
If there isn't a "Village" (I've always hated that term) then what's the word for the general polite(ish) consensus among prominent media analysts and political journalists about who is and who isn't a serious person with serious ideas (as opposed to silly hippy crap or obviously-not-representative-right-wing-nonsense), and who is and isn't a respectable politician or political operative (as opposed to a hideous or untrustworthy war criminal), and what is and isn't something that obviously needs to happen at some point soon, and so on? It's an obvious enough phenomenon that even with Broder being dead it still needs a name, and there's still plenty of polite both-sides-really bullshit out there so it's not remotely obvious that anything has changed even if the cocktail circuit isn't being run by Sally Quinn. I mean, if you don't like it then fine, I never liked that particular phrase. But invent a new one for us to use here.
It takes a village to create cliches about villages.
What caused Cohn and Silver to misinterpret their own data is an interesting question, but one that we can't get to until you're ready to acknowledge two points:
Slow down a moment. You may be correct, but there's an important point to make before we agree that they did misinterpret their own data.
I've been reading Superforecasting lately and one of the points that it hammers home is that unlikely events do happen. Let's say that somebody puts the odds at 80:20 against an event happening, and that event ends up happening. It's possible that their odds were wrong, or it's possible that their odds were exactly right, and we happen to be in the 1/5 universe in which it happened anyway.
Look at the Silver article linked in 162, he says things like, "Yes [Trump can win the nomination], although I continue to think Trump's chances are lower than where betting markets put them (My heuristic throughout the campaign has been to assume that Trump's chances are about half of what betting markets say they are. Betting markets currently put Trump's chances at about 25 percent, so I think they're about half that -- 12 or 13 percent.)."
You might take that as hedging or some sort of obligatory throat-clearing, but it's worth taking seriously the idea that he believed that (a) a Trump victory was unlikely but (b) not vanishingly unlikely -- slightly less likely than rolling a 6 on a single dice roll.
Continuing to read the Silver column linked in 162, you would have to say that this part of point #3 seems spot on:
How Trump could still win, even if the theory is right: Even if Trump's support is something of a media bubble, it's plausible it won't burst until many states have voted.
Personally I underestimated Trump's skill as a performer. I thought that his act would get tired after a while and he would start to become boring, and I was wrong about that. He showed much better ability to vary his presentation and modulate his tone than I expected. He also was able to suck in way more media attention than I expected, and that has to be part of any analysis of, "how could this happen."
||Fuck all your stupid presidents. Go to the other thread and argue about your stupid presidents who died a hundred years ago. Or at least about kitchen appliances. You'll feel better, and make more progress.|>
I feel like if I paid attention to 166, I'd be undermining Tooze by being an American attentive to the concerns of outlanders.
That only counts if you win the primary.
I thought that his act would get tired after a while and he would start to become boring
I thought this as well. But one of the ways in which his TV show really trained him for this moment is that TV is basically doing the same thing over and over again, yet entertaining people with it*. Or perhaps, people want a lot more of the same thing over and over than you'd think. I mean, if a show survives at all, it's likely to go on for 100+ episodes, and they're usually pretty much the same thing. People get bored and move on, but it's not the first 20 times they almost get off the island, it's 90+.
But that's too cynical, and too dismissive of Trump's talents. I think he has modulated his performance in a way to maintain its appeal. Basically all of the people who had their shots in 2012 bored the audience really quickly (largely because they were never that entertaining, but also because they couldn't riff, just rotely repeat a la Rubio); Trump never did.
*that's less accurate than it used to be, but at its heart it's the essence of the medium
The more I think about it the more it seems to me that there's a pretty easy and short way to explain why all the "how did I get it wrong?" articles that conclude "I thought there were fewer idiots" are still getting it wrong. And it explains what the people who didn't get it wrong were seeing more clearly, and were saying to people. It isn't that Republican voters are dumb - though of course a whole lot of them are and have been subjected to a concerted attempt to make them dumber, largely with the cooperation of the media overall. What they missed is that Republican voters are assholes. That's Trump's constituency, and who he appeals to.
Reality TV is great training for that too. You're fired! is the perfect tagline for a huge portion of the population.
Go to the other thread and argue about your stupid presidents who died a hundred years ago.
Thanks for the nudge. I hadn't read your summary but am reading it now and appreciate both the summary of Tooze and your editorial comments. Fascinating, and not history that I have any familiarity with.
You can do kitchens too! Mostly I'm worried about evryone's blood pressure.
What they missed is that Republican voters are assholes. That's Trump's constituency, and who he appeals to.
Well this was the premise behind Christie's campaign, no? Which the commentariat thought was viable, although they framed it (believed it?) as a weird, charismatic/competent/semi-moderate thing* that never made sense. Thinking of the two of them now, both NY metro blowhards, the striking difference is that Christie seems more aggrieved, no? Trump is the guy who gets snubbed by the maitre d' and either puts him down entertainingly or spends the evening riffing about him; Christie is the guy who freaks out and makes a scene, demanding to see his boss, etc. IOW, as assholes go, Christie is too on-the-nose. Not that he didn't have a million other flaws, but just thinking of them as assholes qua assholes.
Donald Trump: The Asshole You've Been Waiting For.
*like Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of a smart person, Christie is a (sorry) Villager's idea of a Republican candidate who could win the general. He checks off the following boxes: experience (so he's Serious), a veneer of moderation (so he has a hope in the general), and an asshole (to appeal to the base). But that was all wrong, even the asshole part.
Silver was 100% fooled by the numbers. National polls significantly ahead of an election don't have that much predictive value (as everyone who's bringing up the fact that Dukakis was ahead of Bush at this point is fond of pointing out). The "Party Decides" theory, which had empirical support, said that an important predictor was endorsements by party insiders. The numbers that historically mattered pointed away from Trump, and the main number that pointed towards Trump historically didn't matter.
164: In 139.last, Roberto wisely avoided making this argument. In fact, my argument is only trivially dependent on actual outcomes.
Note that in 123.2 I link an article by Nate Cohn from December, and also my realtime response to it, which I now quote:
holy cow, the media's assessment of Trump's chances has been remarkably stupid, and the presumably smarter Nates (Silver and Cohn) have published some remarkably myopic analysis of the Trump phenomenon.
How did I know the Nates were being dumb in realtime? Because I respected their methods more than they did. I think the rightness of my position has been borne out by subsequent events, but the most important part of my analysis was entirely independent of subsequent events.
I repeat the Cohn quote from 123:
A recent YouGov poll, for instance, showed Mr. Trump at 34 percent in the 14-way race -- a better result for him than in most polls -- but in essentially a dead heat (51 to 49 percent, either way) in a one-on-one matchup against Mr. Cruz or Mr. Rubio.
Remeber: Cohn presents this as evidence that Trump is unlikely to win, when in fact what this actually says is that in an imaginary scenario specifically designed to disadvantage Trump, Trump is still the slight favorite.
Cohn is wrong no matter what happens next because he has abandoned his own methodology and is being incoherent.
Had Trump been defeated -- which certainly could have happened -- Cohn would have been "right" in some sense, but not the sense I'm talking about. Cohn (and you and Roberto) would probably be saying Cohn's analysis of the polls had been correct, when in fact, it was his refusal to believe the polls that would have turned out to be justified by later events.
I don't know Cohn, but Silver's entire claim to fame is that he ignored the national polls that the media slavishly follow.
And here's Mr. polls-only Wang arguing in 2015 that Trump shouldn't be seen as the front-runner.
The headline on Wang's piece is a fair summary:
Donald Trump Is Not the Frontrunner. Smarter Polls Would Prove It.
So the actual polls made Trump the frontrunner; Wang was explicitly tossing out the conclusion of the polls to make his own judgment, based on what superior polling would show -- had such polls been conducted.
And on July 20, 2015, Wang's judgment looks pretty good. For one thing, the results of the polls actually did change in the ensuing months, and if you're going to predict Trump's downfall, a sensible time to do it is in the immediate, unpolled aftermath of his McCain gaffe comments.
Note that when I'm dissing Cohn, I am not dissing him for his contemporaneous piece, which in retrospect looks much worse than Wang's piece, but which is nonetheless based on real facts.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that one can find fault with Cohn's analysis here:
But media-driven surges are not sustainable. Eventually, the media coverage shifts from whatever initially propelled the bounce -- an announcement, a strong debate performance, a convention -- toward a more serious examination of the candidate newly at the top of the polls.
Cohn was led astray by something genuinely unprecedented - but by December, the new precedent had already been firmly established, and Cohn should have been able to acknowledge it, as wise commenters on Unfogged had done.
164: In 139.last, Roberto wisely avoided making this argument. In fact, my argument is only trivially dependent on actual outcomes.
I admit my comment largely ignored that point, simply because I didn't read any of Nate Cohn's analysis, don't have a sense of what he was writing, and don't have any interest in going back and re-reading it.
I did read Nate Silver's columns, found them mostly convincing at the time and would agree, in broad strokes, that he (and I) were late in shifting out thinking about Trump. So I think there's reason to do a post-mortem.
I just wanted to point out that, before we start arguing about why he (and I) were wrong we have to start thinking about, "what sort of evidence should have caused Silver to change his thinking earlier than he did." Your argument is that the National polls ended up predicting the outcome fairly well. But, just because you said that at the time and were correct doesn't mean that was the right piece of information to be looking at! As Walt Someguy points out, Silver had good reason for discounting that evidence, that weren't just based on conventional wisdom.
So, like Kevin Drum, I'm honestly unsure if Trump's success reveals a flaw in the standard toolset, or if, in fact, the standard toolset is good for most cases but fails because there are elements of Trump's campaign which are unique. That's an interesting question! I don't think we should gloss over it.
Cohn was led astray by something genuinely unprecedented - but by December, the new precedent had already been firmly established
What does that mean, what precedent are you talking about. To quote, again, from the Silver column that MHPH linked to:
National polls, even with barely more than three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, aren't highly predictive of the eventual outcome of nomination races. I know, I know: You've heard this spiel from us (and others) before. In fact, if you read this website regularly, you've been hearing it for nearly as long as Trump has been atop the polls.
Assuming that Silver believes that, what, in December, should have convinced him to change his thinking.
Looking up Harry Enten's mea culpa's here's what he wrote in December:
One of the biggest errors I think I made in 2015 was concentrating too much on who would win the Republican nomination and not so much on who would drive the conversation.1 You can see that clearly with Donald Trump (who I still don't think will win the Republican nomination). Not only did I dismiss Trump's candidacy on many occasions (here, here, here and here, for example), I was sometimes eager to do so in order to confirm my original belief that he wouldn't win.
But winning the race and affecting the race are different things. Trump may lose in Iowa, collapse in New Hampshire and disappear from the national stage. If that -- or something like it -- happens, much of the sound and fury surrounding Trump in 2015 will seem silly in retrospect. But regardless of where Trump ends up once voting starts, he has certainly been the dominant voice in the Republican nomination race so far.
One big reason I didn't take Trump seriously was because he entered the race with relatively poor favorability ratings, and putting too much stock in those was another semi-major mistake I made in 2015. My research showed that past nominees started their campaigns either well-liked or not well-known; Trump was the opposite: well-known and disliked. But I underestimated how much voters' impressions of even well-known candidates can change. Trump's favorability ratings among Republicans, while still mediocre, improved a ton.
And here's what he wrote a week ago (looking back, trying to figure out what mistakes he'd made). He ends up agreeing with you (see bolded comment), while still thinking that it was a genuinely difficult call to make in real time.
2. Take a nuanced view of the polls.
I focused on a lot of data in the summer, fall and winter of 2015 -- before I really started to think Trump had a chance. We had data on Trump's ideology and his lack of party support. We had data suggesting he'd face long odds in a general election. But I focused too little on polls that clearly showed Trump with a good chance of winning the primary. I should have given them more weight, especially as the Iowa caucuses neared.
Trump led in the vast majority of polls. I went back and looked at the 549 polls in our national primary polling database taken after Trump entered the race June 16. He led in 500, or 91 percent.1 More than that, Trump jumped into the lead very quickly. He led in 75 percent of the polls taken in July, and it only climbed from there. As Natalie Jackson, Ariel Edwards-Levy and Janie Velencia wrote Thursday at The Huffington Post, "A Trump nomination shouldn't be a surprise based on polls."
...
Why did I ignore these polls? Early polls, even a month before a primary election, haven't been very predictive. The candidates typically have varying levels of name recognition; most voters don't make up their mind until right before they cast a ballot. We all remember President Howard Dean, right? Yet, there were plenty of other candidates who led in the polling throughout and won, such as George W. Bush in 2000. I still think it was right to be highly skeptical of the polls in the summer and fall of 2015. But as Trump maintained and even expanded his lead into 2016, I should have been quicker to give them more weight than I gave to the lack of a precedent for Trump. (I did do this eventually; it just took too long.)
180: I found Silver and Cohn's mea culpas inadequate because (if my memory is correct on this) they failed to reckon with their misapplication of the data. As you anticipate, I think Enten gets it right.
And I'm not saying that predicting Trump's nomination was an easy call before the primaries -- just that the entire media, including the actual smart part of the media, performed their analysis poorly using the available facts.
It was reasonable to suppose that some black swan might come out of leftfield to derail Trump.* Trump himself had come from nowhere. But that's what it was going to take - any nonbiased reading of the data showed Trump in the lead in December, and many of the significant arguments against him had been destroyed.
What does that mean, what precedent are you talking about.
The Cohn quote that immediately preceded my comment was an entirely accurate reading of precedent, and Cohn was reasonable in predicting Trump's doom because, as he said,
media-driven surges are not sustainable. Eventually, the media coverage shifts from whatever initially propelled the bounce -- an announcement, a strong debate performance, a convention -- toward a more serious examination of the candidate newly at the top of the polls.
Again, by December we knew that media-driven surges could, in fact, be sustained over at least five months.
*An example of the rare triple-mixed metaphor.
As Walt Someguy points out, Silver had good reason for discounting that evidence, that weren't just based on conventional wisdom.
I didn't get Walt's point, so I don't think I get yours - but if you're saying that state polls showed something different from national polls, than I believe you and Walt are mistaken.
174: Well this was the premise behind Christie's campaign, no?
It sure was, or at least he was trying for it. I'm betting if Christie hadn't had the one-two punch of that picture of him hugging Obama and his reaction to the whole Bridge scandal thing he would have been a much stronger contender too.* In both cases those hurt him because he forgot to act like an asshole - in the first one by touching the Kenyan Usurper in a non-violent way, and in the second by being too retiring/apologetic/avoidant of the whole thing rather than just playing full on bully about it. If he'd just gone for full on nasty defiance and spent a bit more time yelling at unions/otherwise being an asshole he'd have been sitting pretty - if he'd been able to (legally) give the impression that, hell yeah, he fucked over that mayor good, and that'll teach him not to support Christie it would have been a power play and the base would have loved that.
*The DREAM act thing didn't help him either but that wasn't a big part of anything anyone was talking about. If he'd been a real contender it certainly would have though.
Also 181.3 is right: by the end of 2015 it was pretty clear that the "obviously it won't be Trump" arguments had moved from seeming flawed to me but still being worth discussing over to frantically grasping at straws without any real justification behind them ("he'll flame out and disappear"[way unspecified], "he has a ceiling on his support of [level of support in most recent poll]", "one of the other candidates will take him on and win" [candidate and method unspecified] or "he has no ground organization whatsoever" despite the fact that he actually did have one.)
I can't believe you guys trusted Cohn after all that shit he pulled with HUAC.
185: Well, he was one of Trump's early mentors, and if that's not indicative of trustworthiness, I don't know what is.
Anyway, I'm agreeing with pf pretty much throughout here. I think if you went back to the historic polls showing that early leads don't matter, you'd see a lot more volatility than we saw in 2015. It's sort of like dismissing the 2016 Cubs by pointing out that lots of teams in first place in mid-May don't reach the playoffs, while ignoring that many playoff-reaching teams are, in fact, in first place in mid-May. It shouldn't be your whole analysis, but it's not as if it's negatively correlated with ultimate success.
And, just to reiterate pf's point, if your view of the Republican race in December was substantially the same as it was in July, that doesn't suggest trust in your model so much as desperate clinging. We only have a small n for all of this; the second half of 2015 constituted a decent percentage of n, and should have led to a lot more model-questioning, instead of insisting that it would all go up in smoke.
182: I think the claim is that, like liars' estimates, early national polls are literally worthless: they provide zero evidence.
The old critique of this form of poli-sci is that they have a small dataset, one that only grows every four years*, and so the model gets rejiggered every 4 years so that it retrospectively predicts all of n. Lather, rinse, repeat.
*if that, given incumbency, etc.
187.1 is crazy since exactly the same people who you're criticizing are the ones who developed metrics that can tell us things that are actually predictive of how well the 2016 Cubs will do (and those metrics predict that they will do very very very well). It's fine to say Cohn or Silver missed something and got something wrong but it's shit-eating dumb to say that they did so because they were being insufficiently attentive to the predictive power of numbers (or, worse, were somehow conned into their conclusions by David Broder's ghost at the nonexistent Georgetown cocktail party). They were trying to model future election results based on things that in the past had proven predictive of future behavior, which is pretty much exactly the opposite of looking at the Cubs record right now, pointing out that some good early teams do worse later, and leaving it at that.
I was thinking of a SABR analogy before but pulled it, but the bizarre/insane thing about the turn against Silver/Cohn by people like Atrios is something like:
1) People on the internet criticize Joe Morgan for being stupid and want better SABR people to do the metrics.
2) The SABR people fail to predict the success of the 2006 Cardinals who won the world series despite probably not being that good of a team.
3) The same people on the internet then decide that the SABR people were worthless because they are corrupt Joe Morgan types.
WTF?
184: I was basically rooting for Trump as a big middle finger to the smug "he can never win" faction, but I'll admit that I found the idea that he'd crumble in the face of his first loss appealing. But that premise required a serious loss that revealed real weakness, not just losing by a few points in an unfavorable state. Not even Trump fans are so stupid as to think he'd run the table.
183: You make good points, but A. I don't see how he ever could out-asshole Trump, and even at his "best", he just didn't have the package to win as a non-asshole, and B. I stand by my original, pre-Trump analysis that his style of asshole doesn't really play in most of the country. It might feel good for the length of a YouTube video, but it would grate over months of exposure. And as I say, Trump's version of asshole has this sort of aspirational quality to it, a whiff of condescension that's aphrodisiac to authoritarians. This guy's just like you, but that guy's better than you, and he wants you on his team. I think "authoritarian" is a fine, suitable term, but let's not forget that a big part of the connotation is "toady". Whose toady would you rather be? The bully with the green teeth, or James Spader?
Also, different electorate every cycle. It's highly questionable how much the lessons of 1968 or 1980 apply in 2016.
191 is right but also something that both Silver and Cohn were super aware of, and qualitiative-oriented types who seemed more willing to hype Trump earlier were not.
189: the difference is that SABR has 100+ years of granular data, and Silver et al have, for primaries, the equivalent of 20 games played.
Imagine if sabermetricians had nothing to work with but the monthly records of each team since 2005, and they had to try to figure out the predictive patterns for reaching the postseason. That's where poli-sci is. Maybe you could say they also have run differential as an analogue to endorsements. but if you look at the factors in The Party Decides, there hardly are any, because there's just so little data.
If you want to be generous, you could say it's like McCracken's original DIPS theory, which was brilliant and much more predictive than ERA. But we've also spent 15 years gathering more detailed data that shows the original theory was seriously wrong on a bunch of points (pitchers do control vertical angle of hits, pitchers do control infield flies, pitchers do have varying HR rates; just this year we've learned that exit velocity stabilizes rapidly but also changes frequently, meaning that June Maeda isn't predictive of August Maeda).
I know, I know, this is why analogies are banned.
192: IMO the best thing Silver* did this year was to figure out how well district-by-district (or county-by-county?) demographic data predicted support, especially on the Dem side. It was done fairly early, and it was genuinely useful (because it showed that, Mich. aside, nothing that was happening was "surprising").
And actually, to go back to the banned analogy, this is where his type of analysis is more useful: where the data is rich. But the data isn't remotely this rich going back even a few cycles: we don't know how districts that went for Brown vs. Clinton in '92 were polling, what the exit polls said, etc. I don't even know how granular the demographic data is, nor how readily available. One of the important facts about Trump's campaign is that, in contrast to speculation by the Nates, his vote share was (early on) very much in line with the polling. But that's a layer of useful data we don't have for older primaries.
*I think it was him and not one of his underlings; could be wrong, but I'm not just crediting him with all 538 work
Sure, there's less data to work with, but the first people to acknowledge that would be people like Silver and Cohn and they actually do so regularly. What I don't get is saying "oh they were obviously wrong at the time because [the Villagers got to them in the Village which is totally a real thing that exists] [my random theory of which polls were more worth watching was better] [my spidey sense of how to evaluate the charisma of Marco Rubio was infallible and way more reliable than anything those guys were doing].
Obviously, they got a prediction wrong. The nice thing about those guys is that they can acknowledge that and try to do better next time. What I don't get is the insistence that their mistakes weren't based on a good faith reasonable effort to work with numbers in a more systematic way than most randos on the internet.
It's hard to see how people who got Trump right earlier were somehow unaware that 2016 was not like 1980 or whatever, since pointing out relevant features of the political scene right now was one of the biggest factors in the argument, unless that just Tigre sneering at people he spent months calling idiots but who turned out to have been way better at analyzing the race.
190.2: I agree that Christie probably wouldn't have been able to compete with Trump in the long run, though I think his general bullying of teachers/unions/whatever and bluster could have carried him relatively far. I don't think it would have hurt him much in New England or the South so he would have been a contender for at least a month or two if he made it to the actual contests with that reputation. Once he hit the midwest/west regions though I think he wouldn't have managed much, even compared to Trump in states like Minnesota where Trump did very poorly.
I have been heads down working the last 24 hours, but I have to chime in to say I endorse smoked fish of all sorts, disdain for the self-appointed "smart guy" pollsters named Nate, and hope Bob and his dog get along famously. Also nice to see DaveLHI.
The media didn't have to treat Trump's blather seriously for some while, with a pretense that views on the shape of the earth differ. He wasn't an elite politician.
It is my impression that, as a matter of fact, most media treated him as ridiculous.
So were the Republican voters deliberately saying eff you to the media, including National Review and Fox? Was it a matter of it did not matter what others said about him, as long as he was the subject of discussion? Or perhaps it is a matter of forwarded email chains, twitter feeds, and other subterranean communications. Who can say?
199 - Yeah, and in a lot of ways that was the funny thing. For once they didn't feel constrained to pretend Republican policies were sane or anything (as long as they didn't mention that his opponents for the most part had the same or crazier policies). The pretense was that Republicans were basically sane. And then they openly went for the one guy the press wasn't pretending was sane.
I think they went for him because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, without the hedging or pretense, and doing it in an entertaining way like one of those conservative talk radio guys. The primary voters liked the insane stuff and wanted to hear more of it so what the media thought was negative coverage wasn't.
200: That's "Mexican chefs", properly speaking.
||My Facebook "friend" the local cheese guy French immigrant who's a big Front National supporter has for some reason also decided to become a big Bernie Sanders supporter. Conspiracy theories re Hillary FBI emails, that fucking picture with the fucking bird, etc etc. All combined with insane Islamophobe pro-FN propaganda in French. Since as you all know I despise fraudulent asshole Bernie Sanders despite his legion of idiots being maybe useful idiots in the long run, you'd think I'd take this as some kind of validation, but I mostly can't figure out what the fascist French cheese guy's angle is. First you socialize America, then you fascist-ize it? Marine LePen must take up the role of woman President and there can only be one? Hard to tell. What does this all have to do with cheese? Does Trump hate cheese? Some kind of elaborate con game to win customers at the farmers market??|>
BTW, it's a real kick-LB-while-she's-down move for DaveLHI to comment on a thread where DaveLMA is.
204 Let's all change our pseuds! How does "M" strike you?
I honestly have never seen someone spouting nonstop vitriol and contempt toward Bernie Sanders himself, aside from this one person we have here. Towards the supporters, if someone happens to encounter particularly annoying supporters, sure, a lot of people are annoyed by certain supporters. R Tigre must be an actual Democratic Party fundraiser or something.
I have gone from general lack of knowledge/mild admiration for Sanders to affirmatively hating the guy as a bullshit artist who is into lying about policy and politics for self-promotion (the fact that his shtick is honesty makes it all the more grating). I do think that despite that on net his candidacy looks like it will have been pretty useful, so that's not a bad thing, but the campaign's willingness to consistently and outrageously bullshit is I think a bad reflection of the guy and a long-term problem for Democrats. Except for a few dicks I'm much more sympathetic to his supporters than I am to the guy himself.
203: Some sort of reverse historical materialism. Sideways? Wrong gear, anyway.
I think the Sanders campaign has been, on net, useful in making leftier Democrats likely general election voters. I think that forgives any number of Berniebros.
I can't actually think of anything he has said that counts as outrageous bullshit by the standards of running for president, but I don't give enough of a shit to look it up. I get that he's really upped his bullshit game to run for president, but if people aren't smart enough to take that with a grain of salt, it's their problem not his.
useful in making leftier Democrats likely general election voters.
I hope you're right!
I mean, I didn't vote for him and didn't even sweat the decision to vote for Clinton, but I don't the rage at him for actually paying attention to how you win a presidential election and playing the game.
I voted for him to show that I want Clinton to move to the left. (I do hope my signal wasn't lost in the noise of fascist cheeseocrats.) I'm more than happy to vote for Clinton in the general, as I've accepted for years. As to how I think he would actually perform in a hypothetical reality, I'm more or less with 209. On the other hand, I suspect that we're probably beyond the point where he's helping, although I think it's a recent changeover. Not sure what he hopes to gain right now.
First you socialize America, then you fascist-ize it?
Jeez, haven't you been listening to anything I've been saying?
The easy answer to 213 is (and remains since his position hasn't changed for months at this point) delegates.
Just because he won't have enough to take the nomination barring something unusual happening the more delegates he brings with him the more power he has both at the convention - which does more than just pick a nominee - and in general by demonstrating the strength of a particular part of the overall coalition. Sanders showing up with forty percent or so of the elected delegates is a pretty strong statement about the size of the faction that wants Sanders-y policies, and it's not hard for me to imagine how that would affect the bargaining power of, say, Keith Ellison within the Democratic caucus in the house.
So there are definitely good reasons to be there for the whole race that aren't even "lock Clinton down to where she is now and don't give her space before the nomination to quietly wander back to the right". (Moving to the center for the general is obviously guaranteed, though I'm not sure that there's any obvious benefit to it to her. But if she had the ability to take six to eight weeks to not have to campaign on those policies it would make moving that way a lot easier and she could do a lot more of it because, well, the press and most of the American public have the memories of goldfish and people in September knowing what kinds of stuff she was saying in April isn't really something you could expect.)
His position in the election, I mean. He was going to lose by a smallish but decisive margin before and he's still going to do that. Exactly how many delegates is up for question, but Democratic primaries don't really make it easy for people to make up ground and having that big block of Southern votes come early in the race made his campaign an uphill battle at best (which is basically the same thing that happened to Clinton in 2008).
211, 212 -- don't really have the time or the inclination to get into this here. But since I've been saying things like this a lot, my view is basically this: For basically all my life mainstream Democrats have pitched policies that are grounded in policy reality, have been vetted and thought through, and also reflect to at least some degree political reality (or, the political reality obtainable with actually-existing Democrats in office).
For all the faults of Democrats of the past 30 years that is not one of them. Becoming the good-policy thought-out-policy party is in many ways their great success over that period. Being actually credible and having policies grounded in the real world is really important. We should be the party of credible plans, not grandstanding and half-thought-out ideas. Especially our Presidential candidates.
Bernie violated this by, inter alia (and these are just the first examples that come to mind):
-- promising universal health care while wildly and ridiculously underestimating the costs necessary to obtain it;
-- promising free college tuition based on a "transactions tax" that can't even come remotely close to paying for free tuition, and which even if it acted as Bernie said it would still couldn't pay for free college tuition;
-- promising that his plans for government spending would lead to a wildly, fraudulently, estimated degree of economic growth (5% or more!) which is magical thinking;
-- promising that he has a legit plan for "breaking up the banks," and also wildly over-promising the results of "braking up the banks" however defined (e.g., the overall effect of repealing Glass-Steagal);
-- promising that this would come true through a vaguely and frankly ridiculousl "political revolution" without specifics.
So, those are the big ones. Maybe fudging the details of one of these would be fine in a more broadly-based campaign. But those are like all of his big campaign themes. And beyond that there's just a very high level of inattention to everything else a President needs to do.
In the short run, it's easy to say "eh who cares about details, universal health care and free college are good things and who doesn't like that, at least he's being bold." But in the long run I think this is ultimately self-defeating. If you're promising things that people want without plausible plans for, or ways to, get there, you're bullshitting them. And in the long run bullshit promises about health care, colleges, whatever aren't actually helpful for achieving your goals -- sure, they can move a conversation, but once they're recognized as not working they don't actually happen and help to discredit more modest steps to do good things.
And in his case the problem is made far far worse by his tendency and that of (some of) his supporters to treat anything connected to policy or political reality as "corruption," So he's not only (intentionally or not) lying to people, but affirmatively discrediting the non-bullshit steps that can be done to help people. (Not to mention that most of his "corruption" argument is, itself, bullshit). Once you go down that road you abandon decent policy very quickly. You become almost as idiotic, and more ineffective, if less evil, than the stupider wings of the Republican party.
Having said all that I'm ultimately optimistic that the conversation-starting, provocative side of his campaign will have more of a legacy than his willingness to spout appealing bullshit to the well-intentioned, and that thus on net his campaign will have been a net positive for the world. But that's not through any effort of his own. I think he personally is best seen as a (positive spin) gadfly (negative spin) bullshit artist. Gadflys and bullshit artists with good goals can be OK in pushing people in certain directions. But I do think that bullshit artists/gadflys ultimately are not what you want as your serious contenders for the Presidency if you're actually interested in being the party of good governance, which is what Democrats should be.
You have to let Trump define the standard for "fruadulent". Then estimating 5% growth seems cautious.
The TL;DR version of 217 is that Tigre reads the critical pieces on Sanders when they come out but then never gets around to reading the articles that come out a day or two later pointing out that those critical articles are usually based on really sketchy stuff (like assuming a single payer system wouldn't change the administrative costs we pay right now for healthcare, or that massively increasing our bargaining power when it comes to prescription drugs would result in paying a lot more for them), or even just openly dishonest reporting. And also he when he hears Sanders say something that sounds like it doesn't have details he doesn't bother to read/look further to see if there's anything more to what is being said.
His prescription drug plan really did piss me off. That was comically low-balled.
The TL;DR version of 217 is that
*tweet*
I'm not the comment police, but let me suggest that it would be better for everybody to not litigate that particular argument.
I do think 217 is overstated, I also appreciate RT writing it, particularly after 207, it's better to have the more fleshed out version of his thinking and I also think it's better to just leave it at that, rather than take it as the starting point for an argument (which we've already had).
I thought Trump would get bored and give up after getting the marketing and ego boost of running for a bit. I think my prediction failed 'cause he kept winning too much, and people kept dropping out. He's not the kind of guy to quit while he's a head -- he quits when he's losing.
In Sanders related news, Is Paris Burning?
Want a phony socialist? Have I got a guy for you. No, not Tsipras.
219: To be fair, Halford might argue that it's easy to say about him that "eh who cares about details. ... at least he's being bold."
Other people - like MHPH - are hung up on factuality and might point out that this, for instance, simply never happened:
-- promising that his plans for government spending would lead to a wildly, fraudulently, estimated degree of economic growth (5% or more!) which is magical thinking;
I guess technically an economist said that, and then the campaign took it up and continued to promote it as a promised result. Not much difference! But my reluctance to put that up was precisely that I don't have the time or energy to wade back through the individual arguments on policy proposals, which inevitably would then prompt some supporter to write a piece that says "well if you squint this way and that and make x y and z assumptions it's not that unreasonable." Suffice to say that I've read at least some of the back and forth and find the Sanders defenders on the policies I mentioned above very unconvincing, but also the most boring thing in the world is going to be a dragged out argument over this (which is of course why the Sanders supporters write those response pieces, so that everyone who's not deep in the weeds gets tired quickly).
People, get some priorities. Glory kickboxing is on tonight with Joe Schilling on the main card and tomorrow is UFC in Brazil with an amazing roster. Cook delicious meats and watch some fights. I've got a whole organic chicken thawing for tomorrow.
I'm undefeated against already deceased opponents.
Try eating the chicken raw and see how you do.
In other news, Obama going to Hiroshima cry cry cry while authorizing the biggest upgrade and terrifying expansion of the US nuclear weapon arsenal since Ronald Reagan. Obama Reagan. Obama Reagan. Nukes.
And who would ever claim that renewing the nuclear arsenal was doing stupid shit. Obama just don't do stupid shit, cause he's so cool. Republicans musta tortured him.
But not racist!!!!!
226: The election is like the UFC, but with nuclear weapons.
Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan "Obama to Make History with Hiroshima Visit, as U.S. Quietly Upgrades Nuclear Arsenal"
Walt, can you check out my blog? On the first page, I have two posts about Turing machines. And on the second page, I have a post about the classification of finite simple groups. I realize it would be to ask a lot to ask you to do more than quickly skim.