Friday, January 18, 2008
Life Update!
Ok, so I know many of you are probably wondering what the hell I'm doing with my time lately since I've been unemployed for almost two months now and underemployed for about five. Well, I'm confident to say that I don't foresee being unemployed much longer. I actually just turned down a job offer on Tuesday. Why would I do that, am I crazy? Yeah, probably, but the job didn't pay enough to excuse the fact that it would be a one year commitment and I wouldn't actually get to do any science, but would basically be a glorified number checker. In fact my job security couldn't have been that great since I can't imagine it would be very hard to design a robot that could do the same job and not demand health benefits. On the plus side though I have more interviews coming up, and it seems the job availability in the city is on a bit of an upturn, so hopefully the outlook is a good one. Ok! Now you guys can stop asking me awkward questions about the subject, and I promise you once I do find a job I'll let everyone know.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Iowa
I don't know how many people read the comments, so I wanted to do a fresh post rather than respond in the comments to a few things that Kevin and Ty said. Of course, I'm not sure many people read the blog overall, but I think this is an interesting debate. This post will be written as a response to what they said.
About the importance of Iowa in the primaries. I think that we're in agreement that whoever wins in Iowa gets a huge boost in media attention, even placing relatively high like Dean did in 2004 can make the media treat someone like a serious candidate. The argument you guys seem to be making is that this is overall beneficial, since it can raise a candidate who may otherwise have been written off to a higher prominence. It can level the playing field between candidates that have a lot of financial support and others that may be a better overall candidate. And I can see where you're coming from, and it's a perfectly reasonable argument, but I think that what just happened in New Hampshire might be evidence of why I don't think the Iowa hype is a good thing.
After the Obama win in Iowa, he went from being regarded in the media as an underdog to being heralded as the reincarnation of JFK. It's hard to know whether the surge he got in polling in New Hampshire was an effect of the increased media support he received or a genuine change in people's attitudes towards his candidacy. When he lost New Hampshire by a few points despite being up almost double digits in the polls I think we got our answer.
Now I completely support Obama, I would like to see him as our next president, so it's hard for me to argue that the media boost he got after Iowa was a bad thing. I think he should have been regarded as a much stronger candidate beforehand. But my point is that different electorates obviously would elect, and much prefer, different candidates, and the republican primary race makes that point starkly clear. So far three different candidates have won a state in the race. McCain won New Hampshire, Romney won Wyoming, Huckabee won Iowa. So obviously in a race that contested, there is no one candidate who deserves the kind of media bump awarded when a candidate wins Iowa.
In the recent case, the undeserved Iowa bump for Obama turned out to be as much a slam against Clinton as it was an increase in praise for Obama. The media likes a good narrative and hers was to be written as the precipitous collapse of a political powerhouse, a campaign that seemed as much an inevitability as an election. But her campaign was never an inevitability, and Obama's win in Iowa was not a momentous upset. Obama won Iowa because his support system in the state was huge, because his oratory skills are peerless, and because Iowans thought he would best help their state. New Hampshire selected Hillary for similar reasons. Or at least they should have. But with the tremendous amount of influence the media has over the way people vote, it's hard to ever be sure. Obama's bump in New Hampshire was likely the effect of a psychological effect where people tend to agree with the last one to speak in an argument or a debate. Or it could have just been people's tendency to agree with what they perceive to be the majority. My point is that any focus on any horse race aspect of a campaign leads people to vote irrationally. Rather than voting in their own self interest they vote according to who the media tells them is going to win. People like to back a winner because they like to be right. It's the reason that assholes in Arizona or Michigan right now are cheering for the Patriots. Nothing benefits them from it, and if the Patriots were 0-16 this season instead of 16-0, they wouldn't think twice about them.
I may have had more to say on the subject but I've lost my train of thought. It happens.
About the importance of Iowa in the primaries. I think that we're in agreement that whoever wins in Iowa gets a huge boost in media attention, even placing relatively high like Dean did in 2004 can make the media treat someone like a serious candidate. The argument you guys seem to be making is that this is overall beneficial, since it can raise a candidate who may otherwise have been written off to a higher prominence. It can level the playing field between candidates that have a lot of financial support and others that may be a better overall candidate. And I can see where you're coming from, and it's a perfectly reasonable argument, but I think that what just happened in New Hampshire might be evidence of why I don't think the Iowa hype is a good thing.
After the Obama win in Iowa, he went from being regarded in the media as an underdog to being heralded as the reincarnation of JFK. It's hard to know whether the surge he got in polling in New Hampshire was an effect of the increased media support he received or a genuine change in people's attitudes towards his candidacy. When he lost New Hampshire by a few points despite being up almost double digits in the polls I think we got our answer.
Now I completely support Obama, I would like to see him as our next president, so it's hard for me to argue that the media boost he got after Iowa was a bad thing. I think he should have been regarded as a much stronger candidate beforehand. But my point is that different electorates obviously would elect, and much prefer, different candidates, and the republican primary race makes that point starkly clear. So far three different candidates have won a state in the race. McCain won New Hampshire, Romney won Wyoming, Huckabee won Iowa. So obviously in a race that contested, there is no one candidate who deserves the kind of media bump awarded when a candidate wins Iowa.
In the recent case, the undeserved Iowa bump for Obama turned out to be as much a slam against Clinton as it was an increase in praise for Obama. The media likes a good narrative and hers was to be written as the precipitous collapse of a political powerhouse, a campaign that seemed as much an inevitability as an election. But her campaign was never an inevitability, and Obama's win in Iowa was not a momentous upset. Obama won Iowa because his support system in the state was huge, because his oratory skills are peerless, and because Iowans thought he would best help their state. New Hampshire selected Hillary for similar reasons. Or at least they should have. But with the tremendous amount of influence the media has over the way people vote, it's hard to ever be sure. Obama's bump in New Hampshire was likely the effect of a psychological effect where people tend to agree with the last one to speak in an argument or a debate. Or it could have just been people's tendency to agree with what they perceive to be the majority. My point is that any focus on any horse race aspect of a campaign leads people to vote irrationally. Rather than voting in their own self interest they vote according to who the media tells them is going to win. People like to back a winner because they like to be right. It's the reason that assholes in Arizona or Michigan right now are cheering for the Patriots. Nothing benefits them from it, and if the Patriots were 0-16 this season instead of 16-0, they wouldn't think twice about them.
I may have had more to say on the subject but I've lost my train of thought. It happens.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Monkey sex
Guys, this is the reason that you can't resist cranking the volume up when watching porn, and why those herbal essences commercials made you have to sit down for a little while. Ladies, I understand modest inhibition but you can't argue with science. It helps us, so please, for our sakes, speak the fuck up.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/071218-monkey-call.html
God I love science.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/071218-monkey-call.html
God I love science.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Primaries, Caucuses, and the absurdity of the media/viewership relationship
Let me be honest here. Obama won Iowa by 9 percentage points because of the caucus system. I'm not saying he wouldn't have won Iowa in a straight vote, the numbers show that he almost certainly would have. But he definitely wouldn't have had the same margin of victory, nor would he have had quite the ensuing surge in the media that followed that news. Let's look at the numbers in New Hampshire vs Iowa: (from CNN.com's election center coverage - http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries)
Iowa:
Obama - 38%
Edwards - 30%
Clinton - 29%
Richardson - 2%
Biden - 1%
Kucinich - 0%
New Hampshire:
Clinton - 39%
Obama - 37%
Edwards - 17%
Richardson - 5%
Kucinich - 1%
For those of you that don't know how that caucus system works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucus
The low numbers of second tier candidates in Iowa vs the slightly higher numbers seen in New Hampshire indicate that several voters probably decided to switch candidates after their original choice turned out not to be viable. With the unlikelihood that a Richardson or Kucinich supporter would ever consider Hillary Clinton, it's a safe bet to assume that both Obama and Edwards got a boost, which may have been what led to Clinton's third place finish.
Now what these numbers ALSO show, is that if New Hampshire had a caucus system, Obama definitely could have won New Hampshire as well! Still, I won't get into the relative merits of a caucus system right now. What I want to focus on is how much attention these early races are getting in the media. You won't find a single news broadcast for a month that doesn't devote almost half it's time to primary coverage, and the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries have been hugely hyped.
This is why the media is goofy. They hype these races not necessarily out of their importance but because of their need to improve ratings and get people to watch their broadcasts. To get people to watch their networks they need to hype the importance of these races so that people will care about them, and feel that they are important enough to pay close attention to them. Then, since people are so convinced by the media that these races are so important, their voting patterns are influenced by the results of the early races, which are otherwise nearly statistically insignificant. Now part of the problem is that the primary system is incredibly ineffective. It cripples the chances of candidates that don't have big money backing by weeding them out early based not on their ideas or experience but based on how much money they can afford to spend campaigning in the early states. This has always been a problem with the current system, but the new problem turns out to be the 24 hour news cycle.
in 1992, Bill Clinton was heralded as the comeback kid because of his 2nd place victory in New Hampshire. An afterthought in the Iowa caucuses, he managed to crawl back into the primary race due to his brilliant politiking and the fact that he hadn't yet been written off by the public or the media. Yet now, in 2008, Hillary's campaign was deemed almost dead after barely placing third in ONE STATE, and Edward's campaign is now deemed lifeless after a second and a third place finish. In under two decades the importance of the state of Iowa, which was already incredibly important in deciding the primary races, has skyrocketed.
One of the things that I told people when I was campaigning in Iowa (for a whole one day, what a champion of democracy I am), was that they had the unique opportunity of being an Iowa caucus voter, and therefore had an incredibly disproportionate ability to influence the course of the nation. The truth was, and still is, that the next president will almost certainly be a democrat, and they had the ability to choose who that democrat would be. That message certainly rang true with many Iowa voters, seeing as how the number of people participating in the Iowa democratic caucuses nearly doubled from about 120,000 in 2004 to almost 230,000 in 2008. Still, the system doesn't make a lot of sense, not just because it focuses on the horse-race personality contest, because all elections in America do now-days. But because such a huge influence on the future of our nation is placed on less than 1% of our nation's population.
The motivation seems evident to move all the primaries to the same date, or at least move them closer together. And that is the move that many states have made this year. However they have to do so with the blessing of the DNC or RNC since the respective parties are the ones that, in the end, choose the presidential nominees. Of course, to the surprise of no-one raised in a free-market economy, the motivation for states to move their primaries forward wasn't so much about democratic equity, but about money. In one case the strategy even backfired. One state you'll hear almost nothing about during the democratic primary race is Michigan. That's not because of the unimportance of the state when it comes to the general election, or because it's number of delegates is inconsequential to the outcome of the democratic primary. It's because Michigan moved it's primary date further up the calendar than the DNC was comfortable with, and as a result it's delegates are barred from voting in the democratic primary nomination. Seriously, if you're having trouble following what I'm talking about here, I encourage you to do a little research on our primary system, at least read the wikipedia articles about it, it's pretty fucked up.
Iowa:
Obama - 38%
Edwards - 30%
Clinton - 29%
Richardson - 2%
Biden - 1%
Kucinich - 0%
New Hampshire:
Clinton - 39%
Obama - 37%
Edwards - 17%
Richardson - 5%
Kucinich - 1%
For those of you that don't know how that caucus system works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucus
The low numbers of second tier candidates in Iowa vs the slightly higher numbers seen in New Hampshire indicate that several voters probably decided to switch candidates after their original choice turned out not to be viable. With the unlikelihood that a Richardson or Kucinich supporter would ever consider Hillary Clinton, it's a safe bet to assume that both Obama and Edwards got a boost, which may have been what led to Clinton's third place finish.
Now what these numbers ALSO show, is that if New Hampshire had a caucus system, Obama definitely could have won New Hampshire as well! Still, I won't get into the relative merits of a caucus system right now. What I want to focus on is how much attention these early races are getting in the media. You won't find a single news broadcast for a month that doesn't devote almost half it's time to primary coverage, and the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries have been hugely hyped.
This is why the media is goofy. They hype these races not necessarily out of their importance but because of their need to improve ratings and get people to watch their broadcasts. To get people to watch their networks they need to hype the importance of these races so that people will care about them, and feel that they are important enough to pay close attention to them. Then, since people are so convinced by the media that these races are so important, their voting patterns are influenced by the results of the early races, which are otherwise nearly statistically insignificant. Now part of the problem is that the primary system is incredibly ineffective. It cripples the chances of candidates that don't have big money backing by weeding them out early based not on their ideas or experience but based on how much money they can afford to spend campaigning in the early states. This has always been a problem with the current system, but the new problem turns out to be the 24 hour news cycle.
in 1992, Bill Clinton was heralded as the comeback kid because of his 2nd place victory in New Hampshire. An afterthought in the Iowa caucuses, he managed to crawl back into the primary race due to his brilliant politiking and the fact that he hadn't yet been written off by the public or the media. Yet now, in 2008, Hillary's campaign was deemed almost dead after barely placing third in ONE STATE, and Edward's campaign is now deemed lifeless after a second and a third place finish. In under two decades the importance of the state of Iowa, which was already incredibly important in deciding the primary races, has skyrocketed.
One of the things that I told people when I was campaigning in Iowa (for a whole one day, what a champion of democracy I am), was that they had the unique opportunity of being an Iowa caucus voter, and therefore had an incredibly disproportionate ability to influence the course of the nation. The truth was, and still is, that the next president will almost certainly be a democrat, and they had the ability to choose who that democrat would be. That message certainly rang true with many Iowa voters, seeing as how the number of people participating in the Iowa democratic caucuses nearly doubled from about 120,000 in 2004 to almost 230,000 in 2008. Still, the system doesn't make a lot of sense, not just because it focuses on the horse-race personality contest, because all elections in America do now-days. But because such a huge influence on the future of our nation is placed on less than 1% of our nation's population.
The motivation seems evident to move all the primaries to the same date, or at least move them closer together. And that is the move that many states have made this year. However they have to do so with the blessing of the DNC or RNC since the respective parties are the ones that, in the end, choose the presidential nominees. Of course, to the surprise of no-one raised in a free-market economy, the motivation for states to move their primaries forward wasn't so much about democratic equity, but about money. In one case the strategy even backfired. One state you'll hear almost nothing about during the democratic primary race is Michigan. That's not because of the unimportance of the state when it comes to the general election, or because it's number of delegates is inconsequential to the outcome of the democratic primary. It's because Michigan moved it's primary date further up the calendar than the DNC was comfortable with, and as a result it's delegates are barred from voting in the democratic primary nomination. Seriously, if you're having trouble following what I'm talking about here, I encourage you to do a little research on our primary system, at least read the wikipedia articles about it, it's pretty fucked up.
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