The latest Chicago School piece in The New Republic by Daniel Drezner argues that Howard Dean is about as credible as his fellow Democratic candidates on national defense, although Dean does share Dick Gephardt’s isolationist views on trade. (A number of relevant links are at Dan’s blog.)

Meanwhile, James Joyner thinks the combination of frontloading and proportional delegate allocation may lead to a brokered convention. Since nobody’s going to completely run out of money before the primaries are effectively over, there is a fair chance that no candidate will get a majority of the delegates; if any candidates are going to drop out, they’re probably going to do it before Iowa. And given that the presidential primaries often are both standalone (with no other races on the ballot) and open, there’s a reasonable chance there will be significant cross-over voting among Republicans, which may help fringe candidates and those who may be perceived as too liberal to win the general election—Sharpton and Dean could quite possibly pick up a large chunk of delegates in the South with a combination of black votes and Republican crossover voters acting as “spoilers.”

Since the last “mystery graph” was such a success (not), and because I have nothing else to write, here’s another from the “Dutch chapter.” Enjoy!

Actually, I do have another Dean post poking around in the back of my head, but I’ll save that for when I get home.

Apologies for the relative silence here at Signifying Nothing; I’m trying to finish the revisions on what I call the “Dutch chapter” (because it uses data from the 1998 elections in the Netherlands; there’s nothing particularly “Dutch” about it beyond that) of my dissertation. I have a few quick calculations to do, and about a page or two to write summarizing the results of two more regression models, and then it can be shipped off to my committee for further review (I may add more pretty graphs later).

Next up on the cavalcade: revisions on the “Nader chapter.” Then we get to go back to revise the “Hillary chapter,” the “sophistication chapter,” and the “heuristics chapter.” And, once that’s all done, I have to write the intro and conclusion. And then it will be done. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?