This election marks the 20 year anniversary of Bill Clinton’s historic 1992 campaign for President. It also marks the 20 year anniversary of my being permanently infected with the Political Junkie Virus. Ever since, I’ve been a little TOO excited by Presidential elections, going so far as to write blogs like this one!

What can we learn from the Bill Clinton experience? Guys like me make false predictions all the time. That is, elections rarely go the way people think they’re going to.

Political pundits love to declare winners and losers at every step along the way of an election campaign. I’m certainly not immune! The trouble is that pundits, reporters, and bloggers like myself are nearly always wrong.

 
As the fellow from Arkansas stopped and started, chatting with small children, fixing his gaze on all who shook his hand, the impatient husband tapped his wife on her shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, pointing to the clock. “You have to get to Boston. Anyway, there’s no point waiting for this guy. He’s not going anywhere.” 

That was a political reporter recounting what he said about Bill Clinton in 1992. He was hardly alone. Clinton’s now famous line claiming that he was the “come back kid” because he finished 2nd in the New Hamshire primary cut right to the heart of the issue.

The early primary states bare little resemblance to the rest of the nation in terms of electoral demographics. And, even if they did, the nature of the system is that there’s a feedback loop where the results of one primary influence how people make decisions in future primaries – each one compounding on the next. This can’t be discounted. Electoral Politics is a complex, dynamic system which makes prediction quite hard to say the least.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun exercise.  
So, my prediction for this election cycle is that Romney will eventually win the Republican race, and then lose the general to Obama. 
 
There are no Bill Clinton’s in this race. Certainly not on the Republican side. 

Robert Heinlein famously tried predicting the future and did a shockingly good job back in the ’50′s. For instance, he predicted cell phones.

Here’s what he believed would NOT likely ever come to pass.

Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:

— Travel through time
— Travel faster than the speed of light
— “Radio” transmission of matter.
— Manlike robots with manlike reactions
— Laboratory creation of life
— Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.
— Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
— Nor a permanent end to war.

Ron Paul is the ONLY candidate serious about the idea of pardoning every non-violent drug offender in the US.

Drug abuse is a disease, not a crime. The “war on drugs” is institutionalized racism – Paul wants to end that war. Can any other candidate say the same?

A fun debate has been going on between Sullivan and Woodward on whether the crap that is presented to us on Reality TV programs (the bulk of what appears on the Networks these days) is, in fact, real at all.

Sullivan says, “yes.” It is the reality of what people are like on reality shows.

Here’s Will Wilkinson on the subject:

I think Woods’ strongest argument would be that reality shows cannot reveal America’s Freudian Id because we are only ever shown people who thought it was a good idea to appear on a reality show. Reality TV selects for vain, emotionally volatile extroverts. Fear Factor doesn’t prove that, as a general matter, Americans will eat bugs for money. It proves that Americans who won’t eat bugs for money don’t show up at casting calls for Fear Factor. Sullivan’s argument that “There are simply too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows—for them not to be revealing something endemic” pretty clearly fails to get around the self-selection objection. But it does suggest that America contains a huge number of vain, emotionally volatile extroverts. That’s significant in itself. And surely the verbal and emotional scripts America’s dim, neurotic, self-infatuated chatterboxes most readily deploy are drawn from and thus indicative of the broader culture. “[T]he test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe,” are the monsters among us who most guilelessly channel and enact the ambient American spirit, and a huge swathe of the rest of us want to watch. It’s hard to see that as a “null” reality.

To me, it isn’t just the people ON reality shows that are reflections of who we are. Rather, it’s the people who WATCH them.

What does it say about American’s as a whole that we all watch at least one of this shows?

For me, it’s the Biggest Loser. And while I might defend myself saying things like, “It’s not like other reality TV. They actually DO help people. Contests show up on day 1 and are so fat that they will likely die an early death if they don’t lose the weight. And by the end of the show, they ALL lost the weight! That’s a GOOD thing.”

But, really, part of the fascination is that we like to watch fat people cry and tell us all of their reasons for being the way they are.

That’s true for all the Reality Shows. Reality shows are Soap Operas with real people. They express in over-the-top ways all the things that everyone in this country is actually feeling.

Sure, its ham-handed and “fake” in the ways that all drama is fake. But, sometimes fiction makes for the clearest reality.

I’m not going to go so far as to call this stuff Art. That’s not true. Most of it really is dumb. But, people watch it, and honestly identify with the people on screen because there is something about where America is, today, that is being reflected back accurately.

In my opinion, that “something” is the emotional flavor of life in a America.

A commenter on the Doonesbury comic strip over at Slate had this to say:

The quote in the first panel of today’s strip comes from “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” Ron Suskind’s terrifying article in the NYT Magazine of October 17, 2004. Here’s the full quote, which reveals just how delusional that administration was: “In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” My guess is that the senior aide was Karl Rove, but who knows? They were all crazy.

(Click here for the Doonesbury Strip)

A new paper by Bar-Gill (not Bar-GRill …) looks at whether the tendency of buyers to make irrational (emotion-based) choices works against the economic system as a whole:

Do the benefits of competition extend to a world with imperfectly rational consumers? I argue that sellers, operating in a competitive market, will design their products, contracts and pricing schemes in response to consumer misconception, resulting in both efficiency losses and harm to consumers. Under certain conditions, competition provides incentives for sellers to educate consumers and reduce misconception, but these mistake-correction forces are limited. The existence of biased demand, generated by imperfectly rational consumers, creates a market failure – a behavioral market failure. Mandated disclosure, deliberately designed for imperfectly rational consumers, or for sophisticated intermediaries that advise imperfectly rational consumers, can help.

The euphemism “imperfectly rational consumer” means stupid buyer. We’re all that. We make moronic decisions based on false information. Often we go out of our ways NOT to pay attention to the signs before us because facing the truth feels bad and uncomfortable.

I’m all for higher and higher levels of disclosure and transparency. I think that is a key element of a well-run free market system. But, we can’t pretend that will solve the problem (I don’t think the author claims it will).

Again, my fundamental theory of everything is that Humans are Dumb. More transparency will help, but you can’t eliminate stupidity.

In a recent interview, Ron Paul stalked out after being confronted – yet again – with allegations that some early newsletters in the 80′s and early 90′s contained explicitly racist remarks. Given that these newsletters had his name on them, we are all right to at least wonder if he honestly holds any of these views, and just why in the name of heaven they came out in HIS newsletters.

However … we’ve already gone down that road. He claims not to have written them and he has actively distanced himself from them. Given the nature of how large organizations work, it is quite easy to believe that those newsletters, with his name on them, where being sent out, month after month, without him even reading them. (I find this disturbing still. I would be infuriated to have such drivel associated with any project I was a part of.)

That’s all beside the point, though. To paraphrase Emerson, “Your actions speak so loudly I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” In this case, Paul’s actions are the policy positions he takes on issues directly effecting minority people.

Let’s see: does a candidate who does any of the following seem like a racist or bigot to you? 1) Be the only one in a Republican debate to oppose racial profiling 2) Frame his opposition to the death penalty and end of the war on drugs in terms of discrimination by the law and law enforcement 3) Implore citizens of Christian America to put themselves in the perspective of Muslims in the Middle East when thinking of our foreign policy?

Or take this view on Paul:

His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you’re someone who thinks that it’s wrong to lock people up without due process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American consumers ensure the strength of those cartels.

Here’s Andrew Sullivan on why he’s supporting Ron Paul for the GOP nomination:

In supporting Ron Paul, I am backing one of the few candidates in the GOP field not to have exploited racial code words, homophobia, illegal immigration, or generalizations about Muslims that come easily to the mind of, say, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, who actually said he wouldn’t appoint a Muslim to his cabinet! I am backing one of the few GOP candidates not to have endorsed torture and to have opposed the Iraq war. To pick Paul out as the core bigot in this crowd, and to regard anyone who backs him as tainted by bigotry … seems to me to be perverse.

Finally, to quote the New York Time on Ron Paul:

(Paul is) the kind of conservative that Tea Partiers want to believe themselves to be: Deeply principled, impressively consistent, a foe of big government in nearly all its forms (the Department of Defense very much included), a man of ideas rather than of party.

(Hat Tip: The Daily Dish)

Former New Mexico Governor, Gary Johnson is joining the Libertarian Party Presidential Race, quitting the GOP that totally ignored him.

Johnson appeared in only two of more than a dozen nationally televised debates and had trouble getting his shoestring campaign off the ground in early states. He will make an official announcement next Wednesday at a press conference in Santa Fe.

“His exclusion from the debates and lack of acknowledgement from the Republican establishment has been very frustrating,” Hunter told NBC News. “His commitment since day one to get his message out.”

It will be interesting to see what happens if Ron Paul starts to lose ground as the campaign rolls forward. If Paul chose to run as a Libertarian, any chance he’d pick Johnson as a running mate? It’s an interesting question to ponder.

Johnson running on his own will do very little to affect the general election between Obama and whoever wins this farce of a primary between the Republican dingbats (save for Paul). But, Ron Paul running as a Libertarian would, in my opinion, all but guarantee an Obama win.

So … I’m all for it!!

Ya, you heard me. Ron Paul now has his own comic book and can officially be called a super hero. Just don’t tell the GOP.

It is ironic that the headline for the Ron Paul comic book is “Political Power” given that that’s the one thing Paul argues that he doesn’t want (nor does he think any President should want it).

Slate asks the question, “Why don’t we sell eggnog all year?”

Simply put: It don’t sell well.

For today’s manufacturers, eggnog season begins in the last half of October, but the exact start date varies by region, as individual plants decide when to ramp up production. Meadow Gold, sold in the western half of the country, sometimes starts as early as mid-September. Every plant is at full bore by November.

Sales slowly but steadily increase until they reach a peak during Thanksgiving week, which tends to produce more than 10 percent of annual revenue. After Thanksgiving, demand dips slightly, but quickly picks up again, cresting at the end of December—about 20 percent of the yearly sales come during the week leading up to Christmas. After that, demand drops precipitously: The next week sees about half as many sales. Most plants keep producing eggnog through New Year’s, and start dumping their unsold product in January.