Baseball and Politics

IQ, the standard measure of human intelligence for well over a hundred years, has two equally important components, math and verbal.  Just because you’re are good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at the other.  I’m almost two standard deviations, or 30 IQ points, better at verbal than I am at math. I get the impression that Silicon Valley is filled with people who have that ratio reversed.

Nate Silver and the gang at are math types, as are Sean Trende and others at Real Clear Politics.  These math guys are everywhere.  They’re always coming up with computer models and complicated equations to explain everything.  I don’t  buy it, but these guys do have their place.  Nate nailed it in 2012, and you can’t argue with results.  So I go their website once in a while to see what they’ve got.  Right now, they’ve got nothing.

A while back they tried to use their charts and equations to see how long Trump would last, comparing him to Bachmann, Cain, Perry and Gingrich from four years ago.  It was nothing but mathematical masturbation.  Trump bears no comparison to any of those people.  Now one of them has come up with some elaborate mathematical analysis of “continuation elections”, which occur when one party has controlled the White House for eight years.  In 2016, a generic Republican’s chances are directly tied to the Obama’s approval rating right now, in his sixth year in office.  Not his fifth, or eighth or seventh, but the sixth.

It’s science.

It’s also bullshit.  These guys are like the geeky baseball statistics guys who’ve never played the game, but have all the answers.  Baseball has been overrun by these nerds for years.  I turn off the sound watching a game so I don’t have to listen to the pitcher’s record against left handed pinch hitters in late innings.  Stop with all the numbers!

The Democrats are going to get their asses handed to them next year.  I don’t need a slide rule to figure that out.  It’s based on a long lifetime in and around politics, of reading, and thinking, and talking to people.  And it will be either Kasich, Cruz or Rubio who does the ass kicking.  That’s not based on some numerical analysis.  It’s based on understanding what I’m seeing with my own eyes.  These guys could make it.  The others won’t.

Take Jeb!  The 538 boys look at the amount of money he’s raised, the number of high profile endorsements he’s received, and any other numerical metric they can get their hands on.  Then they figure his chances.

What they don’t understand is that he never had a chance.  I figured that out two years ago, and it wasn’t based on any number.  It was based on exactly who Jeb! was, and exactly where I knew he would be coming from.  He’s a Bush, to his core.  We’ve had two of them.  We don’t want any more.  It’s that simple.

It’s not that Jeb! is a bad person, or was not a conservative governor.  He’s a Bush, which means he can’t be trusted.  We’ve had it with “kinder and gentler” and “compassion”, and now “joy”.  Stop, now!  We don’t want anymore of that soft shit in your mouth Bush bullshit.

Here’s a nugget from some poll in Iowa.  For every voter who chooses Bush, there are four who say they’d never vote for him.  Maybe it’s time to add another exclamation point, Jeb!!  Now that you’ve got Eric Cantor’s endorsement, maybe you should go down to Mississippi and call on Sen. Thad Cochran.  If you can wake him up, you might get his endorsement too.  That’ll get you some real grass roots enthusiasm.

We’re in the middle of a fire zone, and I can’t see across the valley because of smoke from a fire 40 miles away.  Yesterday two spot fires broke out less than two miles from our house.  CDF was right on it, with truck crews, airdrops, and helicopters.  They kept it to 80 acres.  I watched the whole operation.

It was good, really, to see that an arm of government can work so efficiently.

Thank you, firefighters.

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