Why bother going through the whole pretense of a campaign? I already know how I’m going to vote in 2004, more or less.

On Saturday, Eugene Volokh noted a poll conducted by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics that showed that 78% of respondents believe the media would have leaked news of President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad—a belief that is essentially identical among Republicans and Democrats, though perhaps even more strongly held by Independents.

As someone whose research interest is in public opinion, I have to wonder how this opinion came about, and it’d be a fascinating case study. It’s a shame Fox doesn’t contribute polling data to ICPSR like the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS and ABC do…

Dan Drezner and Steven Taylor are among those to note the reports that my favorite fake Tennessean, Al Gore, is about to endorse Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination.

Is the primary process now effectively over? The part of me that’s been avoiding rereading Larry Bartels’ Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice hopes so (no insult to Prof. Bartels, who’s a smart guy—I just don’t have the time to reread it now), but as Lee Corso says, “not so fast my friend!” Why?

Well, for starters, nobody’s going to drop out until New Hampshire at least, and—more than likely—everyone will last through South Carolina. By March, the process may be effectively over, but there’s three months in which the unexpected can happen.

One potential response is that this will have a catalyzing effect on the “Anybody But Dean” faction. The ABD crowd is going to have to decide whether their mutual differences are sufficient to let them hand the nomination to Dean. Bear in mind that under the PR rules, candidates have to get 15 percent of the vote in a congressional district to get delegates; for example, if all the ABD guys are hovering at 10% in a district, but Dean gets 25%, Dean gets all of the delegates from that district. A promise that any one candidate’s delegates will support the ABD frontrunner at the convention is insufficient—because they won’t have enough delegates between them to make a difference. Plus, the more clearly Dean is the frontrunner, the more support he’s going to get in later primaries—such is the virtuous cycle that insiders call “the big mo.”

Especially with Sharpton likely to capture the support of a majority of the African-American primary voters, the ABD candidates are effectively screwed unless they get whittled down. Some of the candidates will figure this out on their own. The question is whether the credible ABD faction goes down from being five to two. (One alternative that might be effective is if the ABD faction executed a regional strategy: everyone but the best-positioned alternative to Dean stops campaigning in a particular state.)

The primary also still matters because it will largely decide who gets floor time at the convention. The more the ABD faction divides the vote, the more delegates are going to be gained by Dean and Sharpton under the 15% rule. Karl Rove must be salivating at the thought of Sharpton in primetime or seeing a procession of anti-war activists to the podium. Ironically, the better Dean does in the primaries, the less favorable the convention is going to be for his general election campaign—to be effective, he’s going to have to distance himself from the “anger” that brought him to the nomination, most fundamentally because most Americans are a lot angrier at Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they are at George Bush.

So, while Dean may be the presumptive nominee, the primary process is going to be an important factor nonetheless—both in how the convention is structured and, ultimately, how effective a bounce Dean can get from it in the general election.

You guessed it; this is my entry in the Beltway Traffic Jam. And, Matt Stinson thinks it’s payback for Gore’s being shafted by being in Clinton’s shadow.

Congratulations to Virginia Postrel, whose book The Substance of Style was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2003.

One of these decades (actually, hopefully later this week, once I’ve accomplished something on the job application and “sending the stupid impeachment paper out for review again” fronts), I’ll actually get around to writing up my thoughts on TSOS.

Today’s big exercise—besides watching the Indianapolis Colts defeat the Nashville Carpetbaggers—has been dealing with job applications. I’ve divided the pile of job listings, representing about 30 jobs, into four stacks based on the sort of packet they’ll get (Research/American, Research/Methodology, Teaching, and Post-Doc), updated and polished the vita, and printed out my old teaching evaluations.

One of the more peculiar requirements of many academic job applications, particularly in the “Teaching” stack, is that they require a statement of teaching philosophy—sometimes coupled with a statement of research interests. I have a broad idea of what I’d like to write, but these exercises, like the related need to write cover letters, always seem to call for a degree of introspection that makes me uncomfortable—I’ve never been a huge fan of the “self-marketing” exercise. I’ll get through it, but it still bugs me.

James Joyner is right that, if things play out the way they look, the BCS is in big trouble. However, the hidden story in this is why the BCS is in trouble. Let’s look at the ESPN/USA Today top five (i.e. the Coaches’ poll):

1. USC: 37 first-place votes, 1542 points.
2. LSU: 18 first-place votes, 1516 points.
3. Oklahoma: 8 first-place votes, 1449 points.
4. Michigan: 0 first-place votes, 1393 points.
5. Texas: 0 first-place votes, 1272 points.

As I’ve mentioned before, the major polls are compiled using a Borda count. The media poll (AP) has 65 voters, while the coaches’ poll has 63 voters. The Borda count procedure is fairly simplistic: the #1 team on each ballot gets 25 points, #2 gets 24… all the way down to #25, which gets 1 point. (In math terms, the points added for each team are 26 minus the ranking.) The Borda count, incidentally, happens to be a very rotten way of aggregating preferences, but it has the benefit over other methods (like Condorcet voting) of not requiring a lot of thought to apply.

With that aside out of the way, let’s stare at the numbers. The full ballots aren’t released (a glaring oversight in the system), but we do know that 8 people ranked Oklahoma #1. Assume, for the sake of argument, the “objectively correct” ranking of Oklahoma is no higher than #3; in other words, no voter should have ranked OU #1 or #2.* Oklahoma thus recieved 8×2 or 16 more points than it should have, reducing its total to 1433 points.

Let’s also assume that these 8 poll voters all ranked LSU, USC, and Michigan (a fair assumption); we don’t even need to know which team was ranked #2 on these ballots. Bumping Oklahoma to #4 bumps each of these teams up by 8×1 points. This gives USC 1550, LSU 1524, OU 1433 (per above), and Michigan 1393. Now, Michigan is within 40 points of being #3 (down from 56).

Now, let’s return to the original numbers. We know that some voters ranked OU above #3. Why? Well, for starters, they got 8 first-place votes. It also turns out that OU’s total of 1449 is exactly the total that they would have received had they been ranked #3 on all 63 ballots (63×(26-3)=1449). Now we have an interesting problem: reconstructing the position of OU on the ballots.

We know OU was #1 on eight ballots. They received 1249 points from 55 other ballots. Let’s assume the only reasonable rankings for OU on those ballots is 2, 3, 4, and 5. So we have an integer programming problem: (26-2)a+(26-3)b+(26-4)c+(26-5)d=24a+23b+22c+21d=1249, where a–d are all non-negative integers, and a+b+c+d=55.

Solving this problem iteratively, there are two possible ballot configurations: 17 second-place votes, 15 third-place votes, 13 fourth-place votes, and 10 fifth-place votes; or 18 second-place, 14 third-place, 12 fourth-place, and 11 fifth-place. Now, let’s also drop OU to third on these ballots.

Assuming there are 17 second-place votes for OU, dropping them to third will reduce their point total by 17. Assuming Michigan was ranked third or below on all of these ballots (a trivial assumption; we know they never were ranked #1, and we know they couldn’t have been #2 because OU was), OU loses 17 and Michigan gains 17. This makes the point totals: USC 1550, LSU 1524, OU 1416, and Michigan 1410.

If there were 18 second-place votes for OU, the “correct” point totals—if they’d actually ranked OU third—would have been USC 1550, LSU 1524, OU 1415, and Michigan 1411.

Now, we can broaden the analysis a little. Assume that some voters ranked OU as low as 6th. If that is the case, more than 18 voters must have voted OU #2 for them to get 1449 points. If 20 voters ranked OU #2, when they should have been #3, OU and Michigan would have been tied. And it’s possible, although unlikely, that as many as 24 voters ranked OU #2.

The moral of the story: the Borda count sucks. And so do the coaches.

James Joyner notes the upcoming Charlie-Foxtrot in the BCS standings resulting from Oklahoma’s drubbing by Kansas State in the Big XII title game and the convincing wins by LSU (over Georgia) and USC (over Oregon State). If I had a ballot, here’s how I’d rank the teams:

1. Southern Cal (11-1). Their only loss was in overtime, which—given the funky OT rules in college—is understandable.
2. LSU (12-1). Really, only three teams have even given LSU problems this year: Florida, Georgia (in the first game), and Ole Miss. Everyone else, LSU has basically destroyed.
3. Michigan (10-2). Probably the scariest team in the country today, even if John Navarre isn’t your prototypical great quarterback. Then again, he doesn’t have to be; he’s got Chris Perry in the backfield.
4. Oklahoma (12-1). The team folded like a cheap kite at the first sign of real adversity this season (the 5-8 Crimson Tide—with losses to NIU and Hawaii, along with practically everyone in the SEC—don’t count as “adversity” in this discussion). They’re lucky I haven’t dropped them below the TCU Horned Frogs or the Blue Turf Warriors of Boise State.
5. Texas (10-2). Really, just the best of a bunch of two-loss teams lurking below Michigan.

The brain trusts at ABC and CBS have decided to put the Big XII and SEC title games up against each other in prime time. Idiots. Thank God for DirecTV with TiVo.

• Lousiana State over Georgia (at Atlanta). The trendy pick is Georgia. I think they’re in serious trouble unless David Greene can figure out LSU’s blitz packages—something even Unitas Award winner Eli Manning couldn’t do consistently. LSU by 10.
• Oklahoma over Kansas State (at Kansas City). Ell Roberson and K-State will probably keep it close for a while, but Oklahoma has a stifling defense and too many receivers to cover. Sooners by 9.

The rampant BCS speculation is that LSU goes to the Sugar Bowl if both USC and LSU win. That, of course, assumes the pollsters don’t play dirty pool with the polls—something I wouldn’t put past the voters, particularly the AP voters who’ve never really signed on to this whole BCS thing (hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned: ask “major league asshole” Adam Clymer). You read it here first: the fix is in, and it’s gonna be Oklahoma–USC in N'Orleans.

For some reason (probably because Matt Stinson nominated us…), Signifying Nothing is nominated in the Wizbang! 2003 Weblog Awards. As the stereotypical “they” say, VEVO—although considering that we’re nominated in the same category as professional writer Roger L. Simon, I think we’re definitely in the #16 seed position at this point.

All the usual caveats about Internet polling apply. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself to try to block out the absolute drubbing we’re receiving…

The following IP addresses will no longer have access to Signifying Nothing; they almost certainly host spam crawlers:

66.98.208.4
207.207.48.165

Thanks,

The Management

I agree with Ryan of the Dead Parrots that the idea of replacing FDR with Ronald Reagan on the dime is true, unadulterated idiocy, which—given some Republicans’ worship of all that is Reagan—borders on idolatry. Besides, any good libertarian (or political scientist, for that matter) knows that the man whose face should be on the dime is James Madison…

Jay Rosen of PressThink has an interesting interview with Rodney Benson, a professor at NYU who is comparing the journalistic practices of American and French elite-oriented newspapers. Particularly interesting (to me, at least) was the discussion of the working theory of journalism’s role in mass politics, as articulated by Rosen:

A self-governing people need reliable, factual information about what’s going on, especially within their government. News provides that. The citizen at home absorbs the news, and maybe an editorial or column, and then forms her opinions. On election day she carries the information she got from the press, plus opinions formed on her own, into the voting booth, where she operates the levers of democracy. And that’s how the system works. Perhaps the most concise statement of this theory is, “get both sides and decide for yourself.” What you decide is your opinion. Later on, you vote based on that. For both activities one needs to be informed.

I’m not entirely sold on that model of opinionation in the mass public, which seems hopelessly idealized given Converse’s evidence of nonattitudes and Zaller’s R-A-S model, but it’s an interesting model nonetheless. I also found this comment by Benson interesting:

Sociologist Herbert Gans, who wrote the classic newsroom organizational study Deciding What’s News, has said that the American press could do more to promote democracy if it were less concerned with objectivity, and more concerned with presenting multiple viewpoints. Well, the French press, both individual media outlets as well as the system as a whole, does seem to me to approach more closely this kind of a “multiperspectival” ideal.

Anyway, if this sort of stuff interests you, go RTWT™.

Russell Fox of Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg (and Arkansas State University) and his wife Melissa are the proud parents of a baby girl. Congratulations and best wishes!

Fellow Ph.D. (gosh, it feels good to write that) Steven Taylor has the weekly update on the Toast-O-Meter, which now has a new feature—looking at the fortunes of the Nine versus Bush as well. After all, there’s now less than 11 months until Election Day! (Sick of the campaign yet?)

Meanwhile, Martin Devon joins the emerging consensus that Dean is virtually unstoppable at this point. Quoth Martin:

Even if Kerry and Gephardt lose early and withdraw from the race that still leaves four credible Dems spliting the anti-Dean vote. By the time two of the remaining four face reality it may already be too late for the survivors to win.

Sound familiar? I said the same thing three weeks ago.

Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered has some predictions as well; I think he’s lowballing the Democrats and giving too much credit to the Greens (I can’t see the Greens getting 7% of the vote, especially if Howard Dean is the nominee).

Amanda Butler of Crescat Sententia notes the rather inexplicable case of Michael Ravellette, who was prosecuted for burning an American flag, found guilty, and sentenced to two weeks in jail. There’s one minor problem: the statute is unconstitutional, and has been for fourteen years, per the Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson.

Even more inexplicable, according to the Southern Illinoisian of Carbondale, Ill.:

Ravellette’s defense attorney, McArthur Allen, wouldn’t comment Wednesday.

One suspects Mr. Allen needs to find another line of work if he’s somehow managed to get his client jailed for doing something that is not, and cannot be, illegal.

On Monday, the drive between my house and civilization will get several hundred feet longer (also see today’s Daily Mississippian), because the university wants to extend the runway at the Oxford airport by 900 feet—right across College Hill Road. They’ve been futzing around with this for almost a year now; I’m glad it’s finally done, even though it’ll be a little out of the way.

Both Robert Prather (a Mississippi State grad) and Steven Taylor have noted the hiring of Sylvester Croom as head coach of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, and believe it is a positive step, a position I generally agree with—although, like Steven, I wish the reason why the national media was paying attention to my adopted state was due to something other than race. (Apparently, there’s a law that the only stories about Mississippi are allowed to be about race—directly or tangentially—or WorldCom, neither of which usually reflect well on us. Ex-governor Kirk Fordice’s now-abandoned slogan—“Only Positive Mississippi Spoken Here”—reflects that frustration.)

Of course, the inevitable comparisons between State and Ole Miss had to be trotted out, both by ESPN, as noted by Steven Godfrey in Thursday’s Daily Mississippian, and by others—even relatively local media—as Spencer Bryan notes in today’s DM. ESPN dragged out decades-old footage of Rebel fans waving Confederate battle flags at Ole Miss home games—dating from when Ole Miss was too cheap to paint the helmets that came from the factory—while failing to note the inconvenient fact that purple-and-gold faux Confederate banners adorning LSU fans outnumbered the genuine article at the recent LSU-Ole Miss matchup. On the academic side of the ledger, Ole Miss’ record of hiring and promoting minorities is far better than State’s. And if the Rebels had gone 2–10 instead of 9–3, I think there’s a good chance that Croom would have been introduced at a very similar-looking press conference here in Oxford this week instead.

Other takes are at Outside the Beltway, The American Mind, and StateDOG.

I find the use of the word “blog” to describe an individual post in a weblog incredibly annoying. It makes no sense. Would you call an individual entry in a logbook a “log“? An item in a diary a “diary“? No and no.

Signifying Nothing is a blog. This posting is an entry, a post, or a diatribe. Got it? Good. End of today’s class.

Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest.

Stephen Karlson at Cold Springs Shops notes that the verb form of “blog” has an accepted precedent (and I don’t disagree—or have a problem with statements like “I so have to blog this conversation); my ire is actually directed at those who use the word “blog” as a noun to describe a single entry in a weblog. Just to clarify…

California’s idiot regulators have banned a glow-in-the-dark fish because it is the product of genetic engineering. Let’s watch the regulators explain the scientific basis for their decision:

“For me it’s a question of values; it’s not a question of science,‘’ said Sam Schuchat, a member of the state Fish and Game Commission. “I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.‘’

Now, if only the right to own glow-in-the-dark fish—let’s call that “economic liberty,” just for kicks—was as important in the eyes of our legal betters as the right to have sex with random people, maybe the courts would get involved…

The whole Valerie Plame business is rapidly approaching Theatre of the Absurd levels; Steven Taylor of PoliBlog and Glenn Reynolds have all the gory details. I’m not quite ready to proclaim the whole business “bogus,” but the bogosity meter is definitely edging toward 11 on the Spinal Tap scale.

Seen at the bottom of this ad for an otherwise normal-looking tenure-track position at Texas A&M University at Texarkana:

This is a security-sensitive position. Criminal background checks will be conducted on finalists.

I’m simultaneously amused, intrigued, and (slightly) disturbed.

Both Jane Galt and Steven Taylor ponder why Ralph Nader and Ross Perot elicit different reactions from “hard-core” partisans.

Interestingly enough, neither Nader nor Perot gained heavy support from self-identified strong partisans; the typical Nader voter wasn’t a hardcore Democrat, but rather a hardcore liberal with weak party identification—an important distinction to bear in mind. In a two-candidate race, the typical Nader voter would have been predisposed to favor Gore over Bush; however, that assumes he or she would have bothered to vote at all, something I’m not sure is the case. One other data point: more self-identified Democrats voted for Bush than for Nader.

The evidence that Perot cost George H.W. Bush the 1992 presidential election is very weak. If anything, Perot’s 1992 and 1996 candidacies hurt Democrats over the long term by costing Clinton the appearance of a mandate—bear in mind that Clinton didn’t receive more than 50% of the popular vote in either 1992 or 1996, thereby weakening his position.

I’ve put a copy of my dissertation up on my personal website; save yourself the bucks it would cost from UMI, of which I’d probably never see a penny anyway. (It’s copyrighted and most definitely not in the public domain; if you care about the particular licensing terms, ask me and I’ll think about it.)

If, hypothetically, you’d asked me in, say, the last two days what else you could get me for my birthday or Christmas, and—hypothetically—you were still looking, I wouldn’t mind this. Hypothetically available everywhere on Tuesday, December 9. Maybe even at Costco.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Now that I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I figure I’ll talk a little more about the defense. I had four professors on my committee, three from our department (my dissertation chair, Harvey Palmer; John Bruce; and Chuck Smith) and one from outside the department (John Bentley, of the Pharmacy Administration department; he’s their resident stats guy). During most of the defense, it was just the five of us, but another professor (Bob Albritton) ducked in toward the end.

Unlike David Hogberg’s defense, my committee didn’t huddle up at the beginning, and I’d been assured going in that I was over the “hump” so-to-speak—the defense wouldn’t have been scheduled if they thought I wasn’t going to pass.* I did have to make a brief (15-20 minute) presentation, in which I focused on fleshing out what I thought the meaning of “political sophistication” was, discussing the key contributions of the dissertation, and broaching some potential future avenues of research in the general area that would build on, and reinforce, the findings of the dissertation.

The question-and-answer session was actually less stressful than the presentation; even though there were plenty of hard questions, I felt like I could confidently answer them and take reasonably strong positions that were grounded in the literature. Toward the end, a bit of a scrap broke out between the “rat choice” and “psychology” camps in the room, which was fun (by the end, I was borderline giddy). Then I shuffled out of the room, talked with Dr. Albritton for a minute or two, and was waved back into the room. Of the three oral defenses I’ve faced (comps, prospectus, and dissertation) it was by far the least stressful.

There are a few more i’s to dot and t’s to cross—some paperwork apparently got lost, and I need to finish up some revisions and run off the final copy of the dissertation (and turn in the photocopies on the legendary 24# cotton bond paper), both of which I can probably accomplish today if I put my mind to it—but otherwise it’s a relief to be done. Now I get to worry about finding a job…