I just saw Steve Schmidt on The Rachel Maddow Show. They were talking about the internals of the campaign. Mostly, I thought it was a lot of nonsense. Schmidt claims to know a lot of things that I don’t think he does. But I can give him the benefit of the doubt.
Then they discussed the polls. Schmidt claimed that the Romney campaign really believes they are going to win on Tuesday. This is a ridiculous claim. If Romney felt he was really going to win on Tuesday, he wouldn’t be changing his whole campaign strategy with two days until the election to try for a long shot win in Pennsylvania where Obama is consistently up by 3% to 8%.
Watching the show, all I could think was, “This guy is an MSNBC analyst?!” Because he wasn’t acting like an analyst. He was acting like a Romney surrogate. I’ve noticed over the last year that the closer we get to the election, the more Schmidt has become indistinguishable from an RNC lackey.
See if you agree. I think MSNBC needs to find someone new. At the moment, Michael Steele is a more insightful commentator than Steve Schmidt.
About two weeks ago, I wrote about how it seemed that Intrade was being gamed by Republicans. The Intrade Exchange Operations Manager, Carl Wolfenden, commented that I was wrong about a particular trade that had looked fishy. It turned out to be a statistical fluke that worked itself out. Still, I had questions.
And I still do.
Right now, Intrade gives President Obama a 65.0% chance of re-election. This is much lower than the polls would indicate. But more important, this is significantly less than the other betting markets. PredictWise reports that Betfair gives Obama a 77.8% change of re-election. And further, IEM (Iowa Electronic Markets) gives Obama a 77.3% chance of winning the popular vote (which polls suggest he should have a smaller chance of winning).
What is going on here? Intrade gives Obama 12 percentage points less a chance of winning re-election than the other betting markets. This just doesn’t make sense. If it were the case that betters at Intrade knew something that others don’t know, they could make more money by moving to Betfair or IEM.
Again I ask: are Republicans gaming Intrade?
Update (6 November 2012 8:37 am)
Intrade has moved a lot since I wrote this. They are now giving Obama a 72.5% chance of winning—much closer to the other firms.
It’s a funny OpEd. The President does not bring the issue up lightly, but he isn’t going to lie, either:
Now, Americans have grown accustomed to hearing a lot about jobs, Medicare, and national security in recent months, so I can understand that it will be confusing when I suddenly begin to speak exclusively about making up for this country’s past mistakes by exempting black people from paying all taxes. I know that using the last few days of my campaign to push for a comprehensive reparations plan will, at best, alienate voters and, at worst, incite frustration, disgust, and outright contempt toward me—not to mention irreversibly recast my presidential legacy.
This brings up an obvious question: how many conservatives will tweet and email this articles to friends and family. “Can you believe what Obama is doing!?” We may even get some blog posts. Like the ONION‘s Obama, I am serious about this. The problem is that the ONION has too perfectly created the Obama that conservatives think is real.
I first heard this line applied to Doctor Faustus: “It has a beginning, a muddle, and an end.” The truth is that this could describe most of drama, but it does seem very fitting for Christopher Marlowe’s play. It has a fundamental problem that is nonetheless repeated constantly: there aren’t a lot of third acts to follow a first act when the protagonist sells his soul to the devil.
Ever since Goethe, writers have tried to find a clever way to get the hero out of his deal. In Goethe’s case, it turned out to be a syntactic trick and no one that I’m aware of has much improved on this. Marlowe at least has the good taste to treat Faustus as a tragic character with no way out. But even in this case, Doctor Faustus seems more like an essay than a play: tell the audience what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them. Boring.
For the past year, I’ve been working on my own Faustian play, but at least I have the good sense to make Mephistopheles the star, rather than Faustus. He’s the interesting character, because he’s the guy who gets to watch Faustus make the same mistake that he has observed (and probably also committed). This is explicitly in the original play:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands
What strikes a terror to my fainting soul!
In other words, Faustus is an idiot. And thus the play is about an idiot who makes a choice, delays the choice for the second act, and then suffers for the choice in the third act. This, more than anything, is why the play is so rarely done. People love the idea and the dialog, yet it is always and forever unfulfilling.
And yet, I do love it. It is clearly the play of a very smart and erudite man. And it is hard for any intellectually inclined person to no see it as a metaphor for his own search for knowledge. The only filmed version of it is the tedious Richard Burton production. It does have one shining aspect: Andreas Teuber’s performance as Mephistopheles. It somehow makes sense that Teuber went on to be a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. Unfortunately, all I can find of the film online is the most famous scene, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships”:
If you are interested, here is the whole play (as much as these things ever are) that was filmed. It is directed by Jeremy Cole.
This is shocking. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Politico is a pathetic publication.
Digby (who either reads 3000 words per minute or has some kind of magical power) directed me to Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen’s new article, Lessons learned from 2012. Not everything they have to say is wrong, much less shocking. They note that the Republicans really need to start running more reasonable candidates. The Tea Party types may make the base feel good, but they scare away everyone else. That’s true, but hardly the kind of “first to publish this stuff” material that Politico is known for (and the main reason they suck so much of the time).
They also note that “white men” is not enough of a coalition in a two party system. But I guess this is supposed to mean that Obama too doesn’t represent the country. They write:
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
Currently, white men make up 36% of the electorate and Obama is likely to win about a third of them. I don’t see how doing poorly with one demographic group that is shrinking means that Obama does not have a broad mandate. But maybe there is something else going on here.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are two white male reporters. I think that perhaps their white maleness is causing them to over-value their own demographic group.
Britain launched their first recorded invasion at the end of second century as part of a Roman campaign against what is today France. This was the start of a pattern: Britain has invaded France more than any other country. This is all the more impressive when you consider that Britain has invaded more countries than any other. According to Stuart Laycock in his book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To, at one time or another, Britain has invaded every country but 22.
An article on this little factoid appears in this morning’s The Telegraph in a cheekily titled article, British have invaded nine out of ten countries—so look out Luxembourg. Some of the other countries who have avoided British incursions are Guatemala, Tajikistan and the Marshall Islands. There are other countries where Laycock has given Britain the benefit of the doubt. For example, Mongolia may have been invaded. The British definitely got within 50 miles of the country, but he couldn’t confirm that they actually went into it.
Britain isn’t the only country with such a record. France has also invaded a great many countries. Part of this is just history. When Rome had their empire, much of the world was unknown. It is hard to invade Costa Rica (as has Britain) if you don’t know it exists. And other countries are too young to have racked up too long a list. But they try:
Other countries could write similar books—but they would be much shorter. I don’t think anyone could match this, although the Americans had a later start and have been working hard on it in the twentieth century.
Of course, we don’t use the term “invade”; we prefer “spread democracy.”
But if England invades Luxembourg, you’ll know what’s going on. People should finish what they start.
I just saw Steve Schmidt on The Rachel Maddow Show. They were talking about the internals of the campaign. Mostly, I thought it was a lot of nonsense. Schmidt claims to know a lot of things that I don’t think he does. But I can give him the benefit of the doubt.
About two weeks ago, 
According to the ONION, President Obama has made a major announcement, 
This is shocking. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Politico is a pathetic publication.