The questions of an inquisitive mind
split it and sprawl it in diffusive wind,
on paths indented with so many prints
of varied feet that are the only hints

that these paths might unite like rivers do,
and bring together all i ever knew.
But where they seem to meet has been the same
spot of the start of the chase of the game.

Yet this approach is but asymptote,
and now the path is not river nor moat
and is undefinable as the love
needed to seek out the questions above.

          For focusing on the end of the quest
          will keep mind and body
shackled from rest.

While cleaning my apartment today. I came across some poems I wrote while in college. I’ll post some of them from time to time, as I’ve been too busy to generate new content.

I’ve been busy with work for a while, but finally carved out some time this weekend to finish my first ever rigorous baseball projections. I don’t have time to write up my methodology at the moment (that’ll come soon), but I wanted to post the numbers before the first pitch of opening day. If you really want an explanation, here’s the brief story: I took four other forecasting models (links redirect to the sites containing the systems): Chone, PECOTA, Marcel, and ZIPS, measured their ability to predict statistics for the 2007 and 2008 seasons, and calculated a weighted average of their 2009 forecasts with weights applied according to the past accuracy of each model.  In the great history of naming forecasting systems after mediocre infielders, I’ve named this system after my favorite player as a kid – Shawon Dunston. (This also yields the fun sentences such as “Two forecasting models are Sean’s Chone and Shawn’s Shawon.”) I owe a great deal – the entire model, in fact – to the others out there providing these great forecasting models to the public. I also want to say that there are other excellent projection models out there, and I plan to incorporate many of those in the future. But I need past data, and this year’s forecast is a bit of an experiment. I’ll certainly add more forecasting systems in future years. For example, if I do this again, one thing I will defiitely add are Tom Tango’s community (of fans) forecasts. But I didn’t have the right data on hand to do this for 2009. So if you’re into baseball, go to his site and enter your predictions for the 2009 season!

So, without further ado I give you the 2009 Shawon’s for hitters, free (as in beer). (Note: I *only* project hitters at this point. I’m not sure if I’ll get around to forecasting pitchers this year.) If something looks awry, I’ve probably made a mistake somewhere. If you want a projection for a particular player not on the list, just let me know and  I’ll see if the projection is missing due to a lack of other model forecasts or due to a database error on my end.

Enjoy! (… and remember, this is for entertainment purposes only.)

Ken Burns, acclaimed documentarian, once made a defining series of documentaries about baseball, entitled “Baseball.” The main thesis behind this work was that baseball stood as a mirror for the United States of America. The documentary shows how the sport tracked the nation, from its founding on American soil, through two World Wars, and all the way up through the economic battles of the late 20th century. There were 9 innings to Burns’s documentary, the last of which brought baseball and America up to the early 1990’s.

Burns apparently has plans to extend his documentary past the to today, and I think the thesis fits the last 15 years; the era in baseball that most consider to span this time – the Steriod Era – also has important parallels to and lessons for present-day America as both the country and its pasttime recover from a period of short-sightedness at both the individual and societal level.

First, lets consider steroids themselves, and why they are bad. In my opinion, the problem with steroids aren’t that they make you better at what you do. Rather, the problem is that they do so at a great cost to your body in the long term. The fact that baseball players took performance-enhancing drugs despite these ill effects stands as a tremendous example of choosing short-term gratification while ignoring the long-term consequences of one’s actions. Similarly, the sport as a whole made a similar choice in refusing to regulate or monitor the clubhouses of its teams, allowing for a temporary boom in player performance at the expense of long-term damages to the integrity of the sport. Ultimately, the sport paid a price for its trangressions in a damaged image, which is nothing compared to the ultimate price paid by one of the players of the Steroid Era, Ken Caminiti.

Unfortunately, baseball and its athletes were not alone in their propensity to take short cuts to immediate gains without concern for longer time scales. Our country and its individual citizens have also taken on this mentality in many aspects of our lives. The societal and personal actions that stand as evidence for this are many: the neglect of climate change during both policy and lifestyle decision-making, our repeated build up of national and personal debts, our preference for unhealthy “fast food,” and for subsidies that have helped make these foods lighter on the wallet, a policy of deregulation of credit markets to spur growth, and the resulting individual choices for people to take on loans they could not afford to pay off. The results of all this have been disasterous. As a nation, we’re in debt, overweight, sick, and living in an environment sure to bring more pains to an economy that is already in shambles due in part to the inability of one set of individuals to pay off their mortgages and the inability of another set of individuals to value the packaged mortgages they created and traded.

The good news is that our society seems to be waking up from this period of short-sightedness. Most Americans are aware of climate change, believe our society is contributing to it, and are conscious of how they affect climate as individuals. Similarly, both Presidential candidates acknowledge this scientific consensus on climate change and are in favor of capping CO2 emissions (although their plans do differ in important details). Fast food consumption is on the decline, and our national debt is likely to go down during the next 8-10 years. More certain than that is that regulation of credit markets will be tighter, and that the criteria for lending will grow more stringent. Likewise, baseball has started to monirtor and punish the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and individual players appear to have decreased their use. Hopefully, this optimistic outlook is an accurate preview of the 11th inning of the relationship between our nation and its pasttime.

I am a Cubs fan,

model of innocent hopes

broken, crushed, and dead

Here are my long-promised thoughts on the democratic convention. This is going to seem a bit like 20/20 hindsight, but i promise i held all these beliefs before Obama’s rise in the polls the last month. I believe now, as I did during the primaires, that Obama is the perfect candidate for the Democrats at this point in time, both for the short- and long-scale strategies of the Democratic party.

In the short term, the Democrats needed someone to take advantage of the advantages they had over the Republicans in this election cycle: a sitting Republican president with historically low approval numbers, an unpopular war overseas, a sluggish economy (that has now taken a turn for the worse), and a base and infrastructure that was primed for a map-changing voter registration and GOTV effort. In short, the country is ready for change and the Democrats needed to nominate someone who embodied that change. Clearly, Obama does so. Hillary Clinton, who was vying to be the first-ever female president of the United States of America, also symbolically represented change. However, her ties to a former President and her longer amount of time in the public limelight made her less of a “change candidate.” Indeed, her best days in the primary came when her campaign questioned Obama’s experience and argued he was not ready to assume the role of Commander-in-Chief. That’s not the argument you make if you’re “the change candidate.” Ultimately, i think Hillary Clinton would have won the general election, as the populist message she adopted towards the end of her campaign would have been very succesful in the general election – particularly given the recent economic downturn. And her path to an electoral college victory would have been clear: John Kerry states (251 electoral votes) + Florida (27 electoral votes) = victory. She also likely would have expanded the map to include West Virginia, Arkansas, and perhaps a coule other states while keeping Ohio in play. However, even that doesn’t match the map Obama is pressing now, as Iowa and New Mexico already seemed poised to turn blue this year and Colorado, West Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and perhaps even Georgia are all currently in play for the Obama campaign. He only needs one more states to flip to blue (in addition to Iowa and New Mexico) to win the election, which is why he is currently projected to win 87.4% of the elections simulated by Nate Silver at www.FiveThirtyEight.com. Obama is almost a sure thing to win at this point, and the concerns people had during the nomination: that he couldnt carry Michigan and/or Florida because he didn’t campaign there during the primary and dissed the voters, that he can’t convince old, white women to vote for him, that he can’t win OH or PA because of his Appalachian problem, that he has ties to seedy characters and the Republicans are going to blow him out of the water for it, etc., etc., etc, – they all seem silly now, Part of the reason for this (and the turn towards Obama in the polls) is that elections are driven as much by news cycles as they are by the messaging/branding/campaigning done by the candidates and their surrogates. This election turned on a dime (soon to be worth a nickel), when Wall Street had a really, really bad day a couple weeks ago. But i honestly think that just accelerated an inevitable shift of the populace towards Obama, as its primary function was to put the convention storylines in the rearview mirror and turn the debate towards the issues. That’s something that would have happened a week later, anyways, once the debates started. The point is, people in Michicagn and Florida don’t care nearly as much about Obama’s position with regards to the delegates to the (now past) democratic convention as they do his policies with respect to regulation of credit markets. And voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio don’t care as much about William Ayers and Reverand Wright as they do John Keating and Phil Gramm. In the end, I expect John McCain to take a beting from the far-right wing of the Republican party when he loses this election. But in all honesty there’s not much he or anyone else could have done to win it. The deck was stacked against them, and they were up against a political team that knew how to play well when dealt a strong hand.

To make matters worse for the Republicans, it appears that the Democrats have finally found their long-awaited answer to Ronald Reagan in Barack Obama, who also appears set to follow through on the promise showed by Howard Dean’s conection to the grassroots in 2004. What the Democrats have needed for a long time now is someone that can translate liberal/progressive policies into values held by Americans and the morals espoused by American mythology and history. I don’t think there’s been a single Democrat in my lifetime that does it as well as this:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqoFwZUp5vc]

That was Barack Obama’s victory speech after winning the Iowa caucuses. It seamlessly ties together the values behind the policies he supports with his personal story, the personal stories of average Americans, and the great story that is “America.” His rhetoric has been less lofty in the general election, as he’s tried to show he’s about more than “hope,” “change,” and “pretty speeches,” and is now trying to woo voters instead of fire up the base to vote and volunteer for him. But if you think he will not return to this general style again, you are sorely mistaken. I expect a similar speech leading up to election day, and if he were to win you’d see a constant stream of lofty speeches from his victory speech on election night, to his inauguration address, to his annual state of the union speeches. And when he delivers those speeches, with powerful imagery combined with a charismatic speaker all placed in the context of the power of the bully pulpit, large changes in the dynamics of the electorate should be expected.

Combine Obama’s speaking prowess with his history as a community organizer and the degree to which the grassroots of the Democratic party are more fired up than they have been for a generation, and you have the potential for an election that will change the political alignment of this country for the next 10-20 years. The volunteering efforts in support of the Obama campaign are unprecidented and they’re blowing the opposing efforts from the McCain campaign out of the water. Having a great speaker helps convince people to volunteer (the volunteers on the Republican side seem to be overwhelmingly driven by their love for Sarah Palin), but in addition to attracting volunteers, the ability to organize those volunteers is something new on the Democratic side of the ticket. This year, the Democrats have spent an unprecidented amount on field offices and paid staff, which leads to more people making phone calls, registering voters, and knocking on doors. Additionally, they’ve upgraded their ability to handle the data collected by these efforts. This all has two advantages: 1.) a huge edge on the McCain campaign on word-of-mouth advertsising, and 2.) a huge increase in effiency at getting Obama supporters to the polls. The first of those is taken into account by polls but the second one is not. It may be that the pre-election polls may underestimate Obama’s support by a couple points due to their inability to account for the newfound efficiency on the Democratic side of the ticket. This will also help downticket races for Senate, Governorships, and House seats, and will indoctrinate a new generation of Democratic volunteers that will be called upon again in future elections.

What does this all add up to? Well, for one… a landslide in favor of the Democrats. Unless something changes the storyline dramatically between now and election day, i’d expect Obama to get over 350 electoral votes and ~53% of the popular vote. But that’s not the worst news for Republicans. No, the worst news is that they’ll be facing a president that will have the potential to change the map so its as unfavorable to them as it has been for Democrats the last 25 years. And the reasons why things are changing are the characteristics that many of them choose to mock. Yes, Obama is a celebrity. Yes, he gives wonderful speeches. Yes, he is a community organizer. And yes… that is also a big part of why the Republican party is in big trouble.

That’s probably it for my political postings for a bit. I’ll try to post my election predictions at the beginning of next month, and then after that a roadmap for where both parties can and should go in the coming years. But barring a major Obama gaffe at one of the last two debates or a dramatic news development unfolding (like John McCain personally catching Osama Bin Laden) i’m guessing the only suspense in the 2008 election will be whether or not the Democrats achieve a fillibuster-proof 60 seat majority in the Senate.

However, the baseball offseason is (unforunately) here. Ironically, this means I’ll try to write a little bit more about baseball, as i won’t be watching the games and i’m also going to be racing to prepare my statistical projection model in advance of the 2009 season. I’ll have one very brief baseball post tonight and then some descriptions of other baseball models before unveiling my model and its successes (and failures) at predicting the 2008 season statistics.

I’m currently taking a break from debugging my code (if you think its surprising i’m taking a break from work at 3:00 AM, you probably don’t know me very well), frankly because i’ve reached the point where i’m out of ideas on what could be wrong with the code and need to stop thinking about it for a while. (Is there such a thing as coders block?) So, i’m going to take the caffeine-induced late night work session to write a little bit about baseball, something i’ve been meaning to do for a while. I’m in the process of collecting different projection systems for the 2007 baseball season for the purposes of combining them in a simple, yet quantitative way that combines the best aspects of each system. For those that are interested in how these projections are done, i’m going to describe the one’s i’m going to use, ending with a description of my aggregate projection model. (Which doens’t have a name yet, so if you’ve got any bright ideas, send them my way.) Today’s post is on PECOTA…

PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), whose projections are available for purchase at Baseball Prospectus, was primarily developed by Nate Silver, the same guy that developed what i consider to be the best model for predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. Nate also recently wrote the first half of his annual take on the 50 best player in baseball, using (amongst other criteria) the predictions made by PECOTA. So what is PECOTA? Basically, PECOTA compares a player’s proudction to all the other players that have ever played the game, and then figures out which players have had career paths similar to the one whose future you’re trying to forecast. It then uses the career paths of those similar players to figure out what the player in question will do going forward. In doing this, PECOTA accomplishes two things: first, it takes into account the effects of aging; second, it acknowledges that different types of players age in different ways (because a guy that depends heavily on speed may age differently than one who relies primarily on his batting eye or one who relies on strength, or one who is fast and strong AND has a good eye and catchers may age differently than designated hitters or second basemen). Now, there’s a lot more to PECOTA, as it also accounts for “luck” in various ways and includes regression to the mean… but the main guts of the model are how it forecasts the future performance of a player based on how the careers of similar past players have developed.

To use an analogy people are probably more familiar with, this would be similar to a weather forecast that made a bunch of measurements (such as surface temperature, barometric pressure, wind speeds, etc.), and then compared those measurements to a huge database of past measurements for the same region. Once the model found past days with similar characteristics, it could then look at what happened in the days immediately following those similar days in the past in order to forecast the weather for the rest of the current week. The model wouldn’t have to make any calculations involving the phyiscs and chemistry of the atmosphere, because the chemistry and phyiscs in the atmosphere were there 10, 20, 50, and 100 years ago and were influencing the weather, probably in a way largely similar to the way the phyiscs and chemistry will affect the weather in the upcoming week. This is even a bigger advantage for baseball, because the fundamental conrols on what a player will do in the future are subject to the vagaries of psychology and biology at least as much as they are the products of physics and chemistry. In other words, not having to write the equations down helps a lot more when you have no idea what the equations are in the first place.

As with all these approaches, this one has its weaknesses. One could think of how climate change could doom weather forecasts such as the one described above. By definition, climate change involves changing the way weather operates on the planet… so if things don’t act in a manner similar to how they used to act, then forecasting based on historical trends becomes a little silly. Similarly, one could see how changes to workout regiments, diets, ballpark effects, climate change, and chemical enhancement could all change the way players progress through their careers compared to past players. (Indeed, many have used this as “evidence” that guys who defied a “natural” aging curve such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were steriod users. But more on that later… Maybe.) The other thing that PECOTA has a weakness in is predicting the career paths of players without much major league service time. This makes sense; the more data one has, the better job one will be able to do projecting a trend into the future. To use the weather analogy again, if you told me the temperature in Seattle today, i probably wouldn’t be able to predict tomorrow’s temperature nearly as accurately as if you told me the temperature for each of the last 7 days. Finally, PECOTA can struggle in projecting playing time. Figuring out the playing time of a player really comes down to three things: the ability of that player relative to his competitors for at bats, the likelyhood that the player (and his competitors) will be injured in the upcoming season, and the ability of a team’s manager to correclty assess the ability of their players. PECOTA doesn’t do as well as the predictions of fans for projecting playing time, and i suspect its because fans have a better grasp of the third of those issues – they follow the team enough to know that their manager loves, for example, playing scrappy, fast, defensive-minded, weak-hitting veterans. (Such managers may or may not like chewing on toothpicks.)

So, that’s PECOTA, and what i consider to be its major strengths and weaknesses. Its arguably the best projection system out there (although i hope to change that), and its been my primary tool for analyzing how good particular Cubs players will be in an upcoming season and for making decisions for my fantasy baseball team (the Mars Pioneers, currently locked in a battle for a playoff spot in the Keystone Fantasy Baseball League). But hopefully, that’s about to change. The things PECOTA isn’t great at should be handled well by a different projetion system, one that amounts to asking everyone, “So, what do you think Big Papi will do this year?” The wisdom of the fans will be the subject of my next proejction post, and the other fifteen percent may be wiser than you’d expect (they’re definitely smarter than i expected).

I’ll get to the Democratic primaries eventually (i promise!), but tonight i wanted to quickly jot down a thought that’s been simmering in my brain the last few days and that just started to boil over, related to how the public perception of Bush may change over the next month.

The guys at 538 have remarked on the unprecedented ad buys the Obama and McCain campaigns made for the olympics, but i think the bigger American political story will be an uptick in Bush’s numbers. I should note that this flies in the face of those who think Bush’s boredom at the Opening Ceremonies reinforces his image of being aloof, arrogant, and ignorant of his duties as our nation’s figurehead. I don’t think that perception is going to take hold in many new people at this point: if you have that reaction to Bush, you’ve probably been having that reaction to him for a while now. However, there’s room for growth in his positive numbers, and now that the artsy stuff is over and the games have started, the dude is completely in his element. He has come across as genuinely engaged in the action in/on the field/court/pool/whatever, has elicited positive remarks from a bevvy of athletes, and the whole event plays right into his pro-America-we’re-the-best wheelhouse. I thought he was coming across well, but that it wasn’t going to be that significant in the long run because he also may be viewed as a lame duck President that’s just on vacation watching his favorite sports team (“Mighty ‘Merica”).

But that opinion changed about 15 minutes ago, when i saw him interviewed by Bob Costas. I expected a complete fluff-piece interview, that was all about the favorite sports viewing experiences of the first family and the amazing culture on display at the opening ceremonies. That’s where the interview started, but Costas quickly changed direction and asked Bush a series of issues-oriented questions (all related to the Olympics) about China’s human rights issues, the Russia-Georgia dispute (which Bush had been discussing with Vladimir Putin during the opening ceremonies), the relative places of the U.S. and China in the world, and the importance of making sure athletes are clean and steroid free. It wasn’t a Tim Russert-style, hard-hitting interview, but the issues were there. And my first impression was that Bush came across as relaxed, confident, and even thoughtful in his replies to the questions. As our nation’s leader and primary diplomat, he also came across as subtle, savvy, and strong had something more complex than a black/white view of all foreign policy relationships. He even seemed to win over Costas, a man who has previously said, “It is sad to say, this is a tragically failed administration. That is to me an inescapable fact.” Its by far the best i’ve seen Bush come across in a long time, and i think the reason is that he hasn’t been had a good excuse to go “YEA, AMERICA!” since the middle of his 2nd term. The country hasn’t seen this side of him in years, and i think seeing it again will remind some people why they voted for him four years ago, and should soften the negative sentiments others have for him.

Given his approval ratings going into the Olympics, i never thought i’d say this: the more camera time Bush gets during the games, the better it will be for him, McCain, and the Republican party. Every time he is seen cheering on the U.S. athletes, people will get positive vibes from the image. That can only help his ratings, and as they go up, so should the public opinions of McCain and the rest of the Republican party. I don’t think this will prevent Obama and the Democrats from throwing the “third Bush term” attack McCain’s way, but i do think it will blunt that attack for the next couple weeks (fortunately for the Obama campaign, they’ve wisely decided to avoid attack ads during olympic coverage). The Republicans should try to turn all this into momentum going into the conventions (they will be held right after the games conclude), by pushing the “We’ve always loved America; America loves us back again!” motif, even if none of the top-line numbers climb over 50%.

Combine all this with Newsweek’s cover article by Fareed Zakaria entiteled “What Bush Got Right,” and the likelyhood of a resurgence in Bush’s numbers becomes more certain (hat tip to Bellweather Meltdown at Another Cubs Blog for pointing me to the article). My guess is you’ll also see McCain’s numbers rise with them. If McCain gets above 45 points before the conventions begin, he can thank Bush’s cheerleading and the Newsweek article for the lift in the polls. Call it the “Beijing Bump.”

Or, maybe i’m just excited at the opportunity to discuss sports and politics at the same time…

For those interested, here’s the video:

So, a looooong time ago I promised to give some strategic advice on who people should be advocating in the primaries. I got a little LOT sidetracked by actively campaigning in the primaries, finishing my work at Penn State, packing up my things, moving to Seattle, and unpacking my things. I’m settled in now and have a little more time to write. Unfortunately, I’m now writing long after the primaries were settled. I’m still going to deliver on what I promised oh so long ago, and give my opinions on who the various parties should have nominated this year. I’m going to start with the Republicans…

For the long-term health of the party, I think John McCain was a bad choice. He does do well with independent voters, and thus may present the Republicans’ best chance at beating Barack Obama. (Winning independents is a necessity for Republicans in 2008 – more on this below.) However, I don’t think McCain represents a radical new direction for the Republicans, which is something they sorely need. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Mike Huckabee all would have been better choices, but each one for different reasons.

Romney would have been a good choice because he’s an empty suit. He was already campaigning on the “change” mantra in the primaries, had a background of running (and winning office) in one of the more liberal states in the country, and is very charismatic. His empty suit, filled with the right message and delivered to the American public with his charm and political savvy (not to mention his money) could have allowed the Republican party to re-brand itself. Unfortunately for Romney (and his party) he thought “Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan” was a winning new brand strategy… and it wasn’t. So Romney would have been a good choice before the primaries started, but then he came (politically speaking) out of Mass., pandered way to the right and talked about “change” on one hand and “Reagan” on the other. In the end, he came across as cold, empty, and too…. political? Flip-floppy? A better strategy could have won him the nomination and possibly the Presidency. The route his campaign took left him with no shot at either.

A nomination of Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee would have been absolutely disastrous for the party in the 2008 election. Both candidates would have been viewed as too far to the right to defeat Clinton or Obama. However, both candidates also would have re-energized different subgroups of the Republican Party and would have been able to lay down strong, grass-roots structures upon which future campaigns could be built. (If you want a Democratic analogy, think Howard Dean 4 years ago.) Ironically, they represent two wings of the Republican party strongly at odds with each other.

Ron Paul is the libertarian’s choice, and that group showed how ready they are to take the Republican party and run with it. They carried his campaign with tremendous online communication and viral marketing strategies, and turned out incredible fundraising numbers. This group of people is fiscally conservative but socially liberal, and if the Republicans had chosen Paul their party would have been headed in that direction. Paul’s too conservative for the nation to elect him president this year, but his army would have re-built the Republican grassroots and onine movements and set themselves up for future runs for office at all levels of government.

I used to think Paul was the only choice that could have allowed the Republican party build for the future in this way, but now I think a Mike Huckabee nomination also could have done this. Huckabee also speaks to a highly energized, grass-roots wing of the Republican party that happens to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Paul’s supporters (see why the Republican coalition is so impressive?). He is supported by socially conservative/fiscally liberal Republicans, which are for the most part Christian conservatives. This wing of the party is the group that many people think carried Bush to victory in 2004. Despite losing independents to Kerry, Bush and his campaign turned out the base more successfully than the Democrats did, thanks in large part to laws/amendments banning same-sex marraige in swing states such as Ohio. These bills were put to public vote in large part to drive Christian conservatives to the polls and get them to vote for Bush while they were there. This group is well connected at the grass-roots level, and while they didn’t have the fundraising or electronic prowess of Paul’s followers, they could have developed it in the run-up to the general election. Similar to Paul, I think Huckabee’s stances on a variety of issues (primarily social ones) wouldn’t have wooed enough independents to achieve victory in 2008. But focusing the energy of the Christian conservatives may have set the stage for victories in 2010 and beyond.

However, none of these guys won the nomination. As I said earlier, I think the Republicans ended up making the best short-term and the worst long-term choice. McCain doesn’t electrify any of the huge sources of grass-roots support on the right, he’s too well-known to re-define himself (again), and his long, 8-year pander to the Republicans leaves him with little opportunity to redefine the party. (The John McCain of 2000 would have been the PERFECT choice for the Republicans, but that guy is looooong gone.) McCain does best amongst independents and “undecided” voters – a group of people who are generally less involved in politics and therefore less likely to donate to campaigns, knock on doors, and properly build the party structure for future success. These are the people you need to win elections, and he’s not going to get them. What’s worse for the Republicans, the Democrats (with a lot of help from George W. Bush) are quite motivated, and for a change are incredibly organized. Over the last 8 years, they have stopped competing with the Republicans for swing votes, and instead have focused on transforming their base into a mass-media outlet, online advocacy group, and large-scale fundraising machine that uses pyramid schemes to continually increase its own size. This is also why the Republicans need to win independents so desperately this year – the Dems are fired up (and ready to go), and have increased their ranks substantially… its almost a lock that the Democrats will win more votes form their base than Republicans will from theirs in 2008. This leaves Republicans with McCain being their best shot at the White House this year. Personally, I don’t think he’s going to get there, and I think the Republicans would have been better off falling on the sword this time around in preparation for battles down the road. If he wins, it doesn’t really matter if he was the wrong long-term choice for the Republicans because then they’ll have 4-8 years of a McCain presidency with which to re-define themselves. However, like I said… I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

Next up: hindsight analysis of the Democratic primaries. Hopefully it won’t be as long until my next post.