I’ve been pulling my hair out porting my positively ancient RoutePlanner program from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2 and trying to do it the “right” way—eschewing the old, working (but deprecated), humanly-comprehensible GtkCList widget for GtkTreeView [sic] and its friends. Actually, I would have stuck with GtkCList, but apparently the automated Glade conversion script decided to convert all of my widgets to use GtkTreeView. Damn annoying.

No doubt all this abstraction (separating the list into column view, overall view, iterator, storage, and selection objects) is a wonderful idea on paper, but in practice it’s a recipe for a giant headache, especially when trying to translate between the mostly-complete C API documentation and the virtually-undocumented Python API.

I’m starting to wonder whether SportsCenter is a sports highlights show or merely a daily hour-long infomercial for their new drama series, Playmakers. Over the past two weeks, several segments have basically been undisguised promos for Playmakers and its “realism,” to the point that former (and now-deceased) Ole Miss defender Chuckie Mullins, paralyzed on the field like one of the characters in the series, was dragged out of the grave as evidence of the program’s “ripped from the headlines” approach to the game—despite its lengthy disclaimer that alleges that the program isn’t simply a Tim Green book with the ISBN number filed off.

If the drafting of SportsCenter into the self-promotion campaign wasn’t enough, both Bob “I wish I was as famous as Berman” Ley and Jeremy “Not my dad” Schapp’s “serious” newsmagazine Outside the Lines was dragged into the plug-fest, including a 30-second promo for the show read by Schapp in one of those “I wish I wasn’t here” voices.

Disney’s use of its airwaves during “news” programming to promote its other properties (starting with ABC, and now increasingly on ESPN) is becoming egregious to the point of resembling the behavior of affiliates desparate for “tie-in” stories on the late news. My advice would be to quit while they still have some news credibility left.

One of the things I’ve promised myself to do this fall is to blog a bit about Mississippi’s off-year elections, particularly the down-ballot races that aren’t attracting much attention—in or out of the state.

However, one of the more fascinating races—and one that promises to have a high profile—is the Lieutenant Governor’s race, featuring Democrat-turned-Republican Amy Tuck and Democrat Barbara Blackmon. Blackmon, if elected, would be the first black woman elected to a statewide office in Mississippi history.

As for Tuck, she’s quite the polarizing figure. You can tell you’re not a very popular Democrat when the teacher’s union endorses your Republican opponent (as happened in the 1999 race, when then-Democrat Tuck was running against Bill Hawes). And you’re not a very popular Republican when the nicest thing that Scipio, a self-confessed member of the VRWC, writes about you reads as follows:

This woman is a menace. She should not be in public office, much less free on the streets. She’s a party-jumping hack, a publicity hound and morally bankrupt imbecile, which I suppose makes her no different than most Mississippi politicians, but entirely different from the average Mississippi voter. Why, dear God, do we keep electing the same damn poster children for forced infant exposure year after year?

Well, when our choice is between Democrats and warmed-over Democrat-leftovers, what can you expect voters to do?

Link via Patrick Carver.

I’m back in Memphis after returning from APSA in Philly yesterday afternoon, and will be heading back to Oxford sometime today. A few odds and ends:

• Dan Drezner (the only fellow blogger I knowingly ran into at the conference) has some choice quotes from attendees (none of which I can take credit for) and a modest proposal for a new organized section; Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber compares the APSA experience with science fiction conferences; and Laura McK notes that political scientists don’t talk much about politics:

  One truly amazing aspect of the political science conference is the lack of interest in real politics. You would expect political scientists would live and breathe current events. They should sit around arguing whether or not it's time to get out of Iraq, the merits of the Dean campaign, and the state of the deficit, but no, they don't. For academics, politics has to be discussed years after the events and with clinical coldness. They only touch politics with sterile rubber gloves.

  For what it’s worth, I did have a (not-very-sober) discussion about the prospects of the Dean campaign with my roommate and two Oklahoma grad students, reiterating my belief that due to the electoral rules in place and the lack of a consensus candidate backed by the party establishment it’s Dean’s campaign to lose.

• Five hours is far too long to sit in a single bar. But it was worth it to see Ole Miss beat Vanderbilt, in their typical, lacksadaisical fashion.
• Somehow I ended up with a pair of my hotel roommate’s pants. I’d keep them except they don’t fit (as a pair, we sort of resemble Laurel and Hardy).
• Most of the Ole Miss political science department would have been wiped out had our Northwest flight (nonstop from Philly to Memphis) crashed on Sunday.
• Now that I’ve told half the discipline that my dissertation will be done by the end of the month, I guess that means it’s time for me to start cracking!

The long off-season is over today as Ole Miss takes on Vanderbilt today in both teams’ SEC openers in Nashville at 12:30 Eastern/11:30 local time. I’ll be looking for a place with the game on TV in downtown Philly (it’s on regional TV in the southeast, but on satellite elsewhere).

Bill Keller, instead of revoking Paul Krugman’s op-ed privileges (my preferred strategy for fixing the New York Times), has instead apparently decided to “sex up” the newspaper. At least, that’s what Eric Muller, guesting at The Volokh Conspiracy, thinks.

However, there is no evidence of Andrew Gilligan’s involvement in the move.

Meanwhile, Matthew Stinson is quite unimpressed with the behavior of Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina “Xtina” Aguilera at the VMA, describing Madonna as having “reached the grungy anti-MILF stage of her life-cycle.” Ouch.

Dan Drezner (who I saw just to wave at yesterday) reminds us that things are happening outside APSA (and, more specifically, the Independence Brew Pub).

My shower this morning had water pressure that would be inadequate for drip irrigation, much less for shampooing one’s hair. Several times, the water inexplicibly stopped flowing altogether. Coupled with my discovery of several long hairs in the bathtub (indicating that the room hadn’t been very well cleaned) and the plug in the bathroom that makes everything I plug into it come crashing to the floor after a few seconds, color me less than impressed.

The going rate: $135/night. I’ve stayed at better places for a fifth the rate. But at least the lobby’s fancy…

Stephen Green points out that two of the authors of the dopey Berkeley piece (you know, the one that basically resurrected a discredited fifty-year-old theory by selectively mining the literature for bivariate correlations) have decided to take to the pages of the Washington Post in defense of their pathetic excuse for a journal article. Except their defense is basically impenetrable garbage that lacks even the minor benefit of the nicely-formatted tables with pretty stars that adorned their original piece. Try this paragraph on for size:

It’s wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives. True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity—all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains. Because we assume that all beliefs (ideological, scientific and otherwise) are partially (but never completely) determined by one’s needs, fears and desires, we see nothing pathological about this process. It is simply part of what it means to be human. Our “trade-off” model of human psychology assumes that any trait or motivation has potential advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation. A heightened sensitivity to threat and uncertainty is by no means maladaptive in all contexts. Even closed-mindedness may be useful, provided one tends to have a closed mind about appropriate values and accurate opinions; a reluctance to abandon one’s prior convictions in favor of new fads can be a good thing. The important task for social scientists is to identify the conditions under which each of these cognitive and motivational styles is beneficial, rather than touting one or the other as inherently and invariably superior.

If you actually understand this paragraph or can figure out what the hell these blithering idiots are talking about, feel free to explain it to me. Bonus points if you can actually relate this assertion to the actual contents of the article, which lacked such a noncommittal attitude toward conservatism.

And, in my humble opinion, the important task for these social scientists is to learn how to do proper research (or—better yet—original research!) instead of cherry-picking results from papers that agree with their research hypothesis and apparently discarding the rest. It might also help if they figured out that correlation is not causation, since they have presented absolutely no evidence that (for example) either “fear of death” or “lower cognitive complexity” is causally prior to “conservatism.” They uncritically accept that the articles they cite in favor of their arguments measured the things they purport to measure accurately. Nor do they explain how they concluded that Paul Krugman—a man not known for having either nuance or psychological training—was an authority on the relative cognitive abilities sophistication of conservatives and liberals.

But the note at the end is priceless:

Arie W. Kruglanski is distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. John T. Jost is an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. This article was written in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, both of the University of California at Berkeley.

I guess that answers the age-old question of how many professors it takes to fuck up a journal article or a WaPo op-ed.

The flight to Philly wasn’t entirely horrible, although at times I felt like I was on the screaming baby express. That and I had a nice aisle seat at the rear of the plane where I got to hear the engine up close and personal. I did meet someone else coming to APSA across the aisle from me (who flew from L.A.; I’m not sure how Memphis ended up on her itinerary), but I didn’t catch her name because of the aforementioned engine. Then when we arrived there was a nice scene where an irate man with an English accent decided to wig out because the shuttle van couldn’t carry all 324 pieces of luggage he and his wife/mistress/daughter had with him. Good times. Have I mentioned how much I despise flying?

After I checked in, being the good political scientist that I am, I wandered over to the convention center to pick up all my APSA goodies—and so I’d know where the hell I was going tomorrow. However, even though registration was open today, the free shuttle doesn’t start until tomorrow—and (for a change, not by choice) I’m at the hotel that’s furthest from the convention center.

So I had a nice pleasant 7pm stroll through downtown Philadelphia. Anyone who alleges that downtowns are the hub of life in America should try wandering the streets of a city after working hours. From what I can tell, Oxford’s a more happenin’ town than downtown Philly after 6 p.m. (This pattern is repeated in virtually every major downtown I’ve ever visited. New York may be an extreme outlier in this regard.)

To make an incredibly boring story short, I got my APSA stuff, including my name tag and lovely canvas bag and my irreplacable but inaccurate program (apparently APSA thinks that controling the distribution of programs will reduce free-riding; I think lowering the registration fee and junking the progressive taxation tiered membership dues structure would be more effective). So now I have to wander back to my hotel with a giant canvas bag that virtually announces to the world, “Hi, I’m a tourist! Please mug me!”*

In other news, my friend Sara (who got a hotel within non-mugging distance of the convention center) and I have been running up our cell phone bills with conversations that half the time include her ancient Sprint PCS phone going dead for no apparent reason. And I found out that if I’d signed up for the hotel’s frequent guest program before I left Oxford I could have saved myself the $10 I’m paying for this Internet connection tonight.

Apropos of this weekend, Daniel Drezner and Kieran Healy have some advice for first-time attendees of academic conferences, while Kevin Drum just wonders what all the fuss is about.

Yes, this is me singing “The Boys of Summer” (the Don Henley song, now famous once again in the form of the cover version by the Ataris) at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor earlier this month. See you on the flip side!

Jacob Levy continues presenting abstracts of APSA papers at The Volokh Conspiracy. I’ll probably be spending most of my time in Philly being poked and prodded by potential employers (no word yet on whether or not the Wonderlic test is involved), but I’ll try to blog about anything interesting I see in my fields of interest (which seem to be largely non-overlapping with the rest of the blogosphere).

Whose credibility is damaged more by the revelation that the National Organization for Women is endorsing Carol Mosely-Braun’s presidential campaign?

Via Bitter.

Dan Weintraub notes that the Los Angeles Times poll of California voters—the first to show a lead for Bustamante outside the margin of error—included a special sample of 125 Latino voters. Dan hasn’t get clarification yet as to how the Latinos were counted in the overall poll, which interviewed 1,351 (self-declared?) registered voters, 801 of whom were deemed “likely” voters.

The key question is whether the 125 Latinos were all “likely” voters or just registered. In terms of registration numbers, the count seems reasonable in terms of a sample of Californians; however, if all 125 were “likely” there was an oversampling of Latinos which should have been corrected. (* For more on this, follow the Read More link.)

So the big question is whether or not the oversampling was an issue in the main poll, and if so whether it was compensated for. If it wasn’t, the Times poll is giving us a very biased estimate of the population parameter (in this case, the percentage of likely voters who are planning to vote for Bustamante or leaning that way).

Another possible source of the high Bustamante number is that the Times poll included “leaners” in addition to voters who initially declared a preference for a particular candidate. (Generally in surveys on vote choice, if you say “I don’t know” to the first question, a followup question will ask if there’s a candidate you are leaning towards.) If other polls aren’t combining the two categories, this could explain a big part of the difference. It might also be of substantive interest; if Bustamante’s support includes a disproportionate share of leaners, they would be easier for other candidates to sway than voters who are committed to Bustamante.

InstaPundit passes on word from The Guardian that Andrew “008” Gilligan, the reporter at the center of the David Kelly scandal in Britain, has been removed from his day-to-day reporting duties to prepare for his likely grilling by the inquiry investigating Kelly’s death. Quoth The Guardian:

BBC executives denied that Gilligan’s departure from day-to-day reporting on the Radio 4 Today programme was linked to revelations last week that he sent emails to two MPs on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee suggesting questions they could ask Kelly that would be ‘devastating’ for the Government. ...

Gilligan sent his emails to a Liberal Democrat and a Conservative on the committee. The messages came to light when the Liberal Democrats forwarded their copy to the inquiry.

In related news, I have a very nice bridge over the Thames I’d be willing to sell you.

Nevertheless, government ministers have apparently decided to start making nice with the BBC by planning to continue to exempt it from government oversight:

Critics have long urged the Government to bring the BBC under the ambit of the new communications watchdog, Ofcom, which is to regulate all other broadcasters.

But following extensive lobbying from the commercial sector, the Government rejected this suggestion on the grounds that the BBC needs to remain independent of any government.

Of course, if Ofcom is going to regulate the behavior of other broadcasters, doesn’t it seem rather silly that the tax-financed BBC will be less regulated—and hence less subject to political meddling—than broadcasters who don’t receive their funds via the government treasury?

Venomous Kate links to the claim of responsibility for the bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad. Whodunnit? Al-Qaeda. Why, you ask?

“So why the United Nations? Number one, the United Nations (is against Islam), it is a branch of the American State Department and it wears the robes of an international organization.

“The double standard policies of the United Nations are against Arabs and Muslims. This issue does not need to be proved. It is clear like the light of the sun at midday,” the statement said.

The statement called U.N. envoy to Iraq, Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello, “America’s number one man.”

Do they not get CNN (or even al-Jazeera) in al-Qaeda-land? Anyone with the slightest clue in the universe would reject this statement as being completely devoid of sense (common or otherwise).

Virginia Postrel is apparently going all Wi-Fi.

I’m not sure I have too many thoughts to add on the issue. My Wi-Fi (wireless Ethernet) travels have been somewhat crippled by a laptop that currently refuses to recognize any PCMCIA card that requires an interrupt when running under Linux (and is generally becoming downright hostile to Linux in its old, semi-broken age—but that’s a story for another day). More to the point, short of war-driving, to my knowledge there isn’t much of a way to know where you can go and grab something to munch on while you take care of business via Wi-Fi. A few coffee shops in Ann Arbor advertised free Wi-Fi in the window, and the downtown Borders advertised T-Mobile’s service, but I only know that because I was walking around on foot and saw the signs. Not to mention that the one day I tried to use Wi-Fi in one of these establishments, the Internet access was out due to the after-effects of the Northeast power failure (the hot chocolate was good, but I wouldn’t have paid three bucks for it if I wasn’t getting some Wi-Fi too).

I do like the idea of malls installing wireless access, although I suspect the operators of most declining malls are so generally clueless that they won’t take advantage of it. And perhaps there is something to having Wi-Fi in the “fast casual” restaurant sector—restaurants like Fazoli’s and Steak ‘n Shake. But for now, here in the technological boonies such innovations seem very remote.

Steven at PoliBlog mentioned the wireless order-taking technology this morning too; that seems like the most promising direct business use of Wi-Fi at the moment, although similar (but less advanced) technology is already in widespread use by big retailers for inventory management, and has been for some time.

Justene Adamec, guesting at Dean’s World, has just been introduced into the glory that is TiVo. I’ll tell you, the month I spent without my TiVo in Michigan drove me positively batty, although it did have the slight benefit of making me watch a little bit less TV than I otherwise would have.

Walter Cronkite’s first column has been online for two weeks, but apparently it took this Eric Burns piece for FoxNews.com for it to garner much publicity. The “bombshell”: Cronkite concedes most journalists are liberals. Why?

I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities – the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated.

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful.

Perhaps we should just call it the Footnote Four justification for media bias.

Speaking of media bias, if you want to see some testable, positivist political theory, try this blog post on for size. Ah, if only I had a research grant…

Kevin Aylward at Wizbang! blames Sendmail, and by extension the Open Source movement, in part for the spread of viruses on the Internet. Specifically he claims:

Here’s the kicker – Sendmail had no capability to drop messages that contain viruses.

Sorry, Kevin, but I call bullshit.

• Sendmail can scan for viruses using the “milter” (mail filter) facility, which has been present for several years. Get up to date on the technology before you start spreading crap.
• There are numerous alternative mail transport agents (MTAs) to Sendmail that also have hooks for virus scanning, including Postfix, Exim, and (if you can stand DJB-ware) qmail.
• Virus scanners can also be hooked into procmail, if you don’t actually want to futz with your MTA configuration.
• Specifically, Debian and other Linux distributions include a complete, free anti-virus scanning suite that integrates with almost any mail server (specifically, clamav and amavisd); it also includes hooks for spam trapping. I had it set up and running within an hour on the box I administer at work. It’s catching all of our Sobig.F messages, and not even spamming unrelated parties with bogus “you sent me a virus” messages like certain commercial systems I could mention.

Yes, I freely admit that sendmail is a piece of bloated, outdated shit that I won’t run on any server I administer. But blaming sendmail, when you should blame lazy admins and ISPs who can’t be bothered to avail themselves of the available free virus scanners (not to mention the ample commercial offerings), is just silly, and exactly the sort of crap you’re complaining about in the behavior of some open source advocates.

Brock has more on this theme here.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry notes trouble brewing at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government between “rational-choice theorists” and “more traditional political scientists,” according to NYT Magazine writer James Traub.

This description belies a lack of understanding about political science. We can generally break the history of political science into two eras: the pre-behavioral period and the post-behavioral period. During the pre-behavioral period, political scientists basically did two things: descriptive analysis of political institutions and what I’d term “normative political theory,” a nebuolous field that generally involves the study of political phiolosophy, with a nice dash of prescriptivism thrown in just for entertainment value. Woodrow Wilson did a bit of the former, when he wasn’t being a prescriptivist or a racist (the three occupations kept him fairly busy).

Then came World War II, James Gallup, and the sample survey. A bunch of folks at Columbia and Michigan (among other places) decided that it might be a good idea to test whether all these theories people had come up with about the behavior of voters during the “pre-behavioralist” period were valid (and it turns out that they basically were wrong). Thus was born the behavioral revolution in political science—and, arguably, the entire idea of the study of politics using the scientific method (or empiricism).

Note that this account has not used the words “rational choice.” That’s because rat choice really has almost nothing to do with behavioralism. The roots of rat choice come from economics (notably the work of Anthony Downs and Mancur Olson), and in particular the idea of “utility maximization”; rational choice theory generally argues that people behave in a way that has the maximum possible benefit to themselves (“utility”). Utility has proved rather annoying to quantify in political science (in economics, utility maps rather nicely to monetary units; in political science, about the best we’ve done is OxPoints).

However, there are plenty of other ways to explain behavior in political science other than rational choice. Many behaviorists today—including myself—incorporate rationalist explanations with sociological and psychological explanations to formulate their theories of political behavior, which they then test empirically using either experimental or survey-based data with statistical techniques (usually, although not always, borrowed from other fields, including mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and biostatistics).

More importantly, this ignores other techniques used in other subfields of political science. In international relations (and some other parts of the discipline), many theories are formulated using game theory, which has some links to rational choice (mostly in terms of the institutions the procedures were developed at, most notably the University of Chicago and University of Rochester), or more advanced mathematical modelling techniques; sometimes these techniques are linked with rational choice under the rubric of “formal theory.” Some of these techniques (ironically, like normative political theory) have not historically been subjected to any real-world testing; however, now there is some interest in doing this through the NSF’s promotion of a series of EITM (Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models) workshops and works like that of Rebecca Morton.

So describing what I do as “rational choice” is something of a misnomer. It would be like describing all normative political theorists as “Plato scholars,” or all economists as Keynesians. The truth is that there’s room for many different perspectives on the study of politics in our discipline.

The problem is that I’m not sure most Perestroikans are aware that there are multiple empirically-based perspectives. For example, the book the Perestroikans hold up as validating their point of view comes from two political scientists grounded in the empiricist, Michigan school tradition. Now, I’ll agree that some leading journals often mistake sexy methodology with substantive importance; like in specifying any theory, simpler methods are preferable to complex ones—given similar explanatory power. (This also goes for theoretical articles; if the APSR is to be a journal that everyone with a graduate education can read, surely we should expect prose that is penetrable to non-specialists.) But to reject empiricism outright in a discipline that has science as part of its name is, in my view, a bridge too far.

Daniel Drezner has more on the Summers piece this morning, which will no doubt spark an interesting discussion, while this post (inexplicably) makes John Jenkins is glad he’s a theorist. He writes:

While I'm certain that good work can, has, and will continue to be done this way in political science, more often than not we end up with analysis so blatant in its biases that it's entirely useless. I am reminded of a study that we looked at in one of my methods classes that determined that, on the whole, those who were of [M]exican descent were paid far less than those who weren’t in some city in Texas. It failed utterly to account for how long the people had been in America (i.e. first-generation immigrants tend to work in low-paying jobs because of lack of training and lack of facility with English) and resolutely concluded that the disparity was due exclusively to racism. Anyone think there was a foreordained conclusion there?

Can you say omitted variable bias? Bad research is bad research, whether it’s empirical or not…

More to the point, I don’t think empirically-oriented political scientists claim to be able to make predictions on a par with those made by sciences solely governed by physical laws. In any event, that’s fundamentally not the point of science, which seeks explanations rather than predictions. Just because, as John puts it, “people will do stupid shit sometimes” doesn’t necessarily mean that their behavior isn’t at least somewhat explainable.

At first glance, the nation’s first statewide recall election in modern history seems like a fairly bad testing ground for past theories of political behavior. Yet there are a few things worth considering from the body of knowledge we already have from over 50 years of behavioral research (starting with Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee’s famous Elmira studies and the National Election Studies conducted at the University of Michigan):

1. The psychological effect of Duverger’s Law should be strong. As we’ve seen with the dropout of Bill Simon, it affects not only voters but also contributors and candidates themselves. Seemingly paradoxically, this effect will be stronger among the “non-gadfly” candidates: someone who wants to vote for Arianna Huffington, Larry Flynt, or (my personal fave) Georgy Russell may find Cruz Bustamante or Arnold Schwarzenegger a poor substitute for their preferred candidate, but a Ubberoth or McClintock voter may find the “mainstream” candidates more appealing. The longer the polls indicate a close election, the more likely this election is to shape up essentially as a two-candidate race. (This even holds in situations like Democratic presidential primaries, where the proportional nature of delegate selection is a fairly well-kept secret from the electorate.)
2. One interesting question is how the voting on the two-stage ballot will shape up. There are two groups of voters who are likely to vote no on the recall: those who want Davis to remain in office (probably around a quarter of the electorate, judging from his approval ratings) and those who believe that the second-stage winner will be a worse governor than Davis. Polls leading up to the election may determine how people vote on this question; if there is a sizeable contingent of hardcore Republicans who think Bustamante will win the second ballot, they may vote no on the recall, to retain the lame-duck Davis in office. Similarly, a Bustamante lead may encourage Democrats to vote yes on the recall, so a (potentially) strong incumbent can be on the ballot for the Democrats in 2006. The “no, Bustamante” strategy only makes sense for Democrats (at least, Democrats not named Gray Davis) in the context of a Republican (Schwarzenegger) lead; how long will they stick with it?
3. How much can Bustamante divorce himself from Davis’ coattails without alienating Democratic voters? In 2000, Gore ran to the left, thinking he really needed to stop Democratic voters from defecting to Nader (which he actually didn’t need to do), and generally didn’t run on the Clinton record. On the other hand, Clinton’s approval rating was much higher than Davis‘, and the economy was doing significantly better too. Assuming it’s in Bustamante’s personal interest to win the election, it’s probably in his best interest to run away from Davis’ record. More importantly, in the absence of any credible challenger from the left, he can run to the right—which makes his announced tax hike package seem like a rather boneheaded move, suggesting more is at work in his campaign than a simple desire to win the recall election.

The one thing political science can’t do is forecast this election; there’s simply no precedent for it. The big question remaining is whether or not the “no” strategy on the part of the Democrats persists much into September; if it does, the election isn’t effectively Bustamante vs. Schwarzenegger; it becomes Gray vs. Arnold. My belief is that the former election is probably much more winnable for the Democrats than the latter.

James Joyner at OTB* is getting rather tired of Rush Limbaugh’s anti-Ahnold schtick. As James points out, the state is mostly left-of-center these days (certainly relative to the rest of the country); at best, all the Republicans can hope for is someone who combines some semblance of fiscal conservatism with moderate social views. Someone channeling Roy Moore isn’t going to fly. Hence James concludes:

So, the question for California Republicans (aside from whether the recall was a good idea to begin with) is which of two plausible alternatives they prefer: Bustamonte or Schwarzenegger.

California isn’t Alabama. For some odd reason, a number of people in the state don’t seem to be capable of recognizing that.

In more recall news, Bill Simon has quit the race, essentially turning the contest into a three-way race between Davis Lite (Cruz Bustamante), Schwarzenegger, and right-wing darling Tom McClintock, as the left-wing gadflies like Arianna Huffington and Larry Flynt have failed to make any dent in the polls.

Kevin Drum basically sums up my reaction to the latest John Lott go-around. Since being an arbiter of whose econometrics is less shoddy is not (yet) my job, I’ll just say I’m not convinced by either Lott or Ayers & Donahue. So far, the case Ayers & Donahue have made is that using the corrected Lott data and Lott’s (quite possibly flawed) econometrics, there is no statistically-significant evidence of there being any effect.

What this means substantively largely depends on how much stock you put in the so-called precautionary principle (and thus is a political question). I’m one of those people who thinks human liberty is more important than fretting about what people might do with that liberty, so my inclination (even aside from constitutional guarantees) is to reject any regulation that does not show a significant positive effect.

Anyway, this is probably the last I’ll say about Lott until either (a) someone who actually knows what the hell they’re doing with econometrics analyzes the data (something I’ve seen absolutely zero evidence of thus far, since even the statisticians involved in the debate apparently refuse to dirty their hands with real-world data) or (b) I analyze it myself after sitting down with my copy of Greene for a nice long while and realizing I’m probably kissing my academic career goodbye by even getting involved.