Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 266 Editor's Choice: 45
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This is Quite a Narcissistic Theory
[Read the article: How bashing Hillary backfired]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I doubt very much that New Hampshire voters decide their votes on the basis of media coverage of any candidate, positive or negative. They are the most spoiled voters on the planet, considering themselves to have a divine right to personal, retail politics. The Democratic voters of New Hampshire don't need Chris Matthews to go one way so they'll go another. They know the candidates and vote as their encounters with them--in person or via advertising saturation or by doorbelling by surrogates--lead them.
The shame is that outside New Hampshire and Iowa, the rest of the country never sees this treatment. If you're in a red enough or blue enough state, you don't even get it at the general election. Presidential candidates come to most places just to raise funds; it's only the privileged few who get anything like real campaigning. It's a sick system, and it needs to stop, but the media are complicit in it (on whom is the $5 a vote spent in Iowa after all?), so it's not going to stop.
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Don't misunderstand me about statheads
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My problem is not with statistics or with people who use them (As you'll see, I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the literature). It is with their attempt to completely hijack the Hall of Fame arguments into statistical arguments. The Hall of Fame's own bylaws make it clear that voters are supposed to take more than that into account. Moreover, it's a Hall of Fame, not a hall of statistics. James is absolutely right that we all have our own personal Halls of Fame and Lord smite anyone who would dare to take mine away.
But the problem with these statistics, as I tried to explain, is that their proponents keep changing them on us. And one year they prove that Jim Rice is great and the next year they prove that Jim Rice wasn't so great, using the same raw statistics (they don't change), but going from WARP2 to WARP3 or whatever. Bill James makes this very point about himself and the 1978 MVP vote in one of his books; he once "proved" Rice rightly beat out Guidry and then later "proved" that Guidry should have beaten out Rice. In the first edition of his Historical Abstract he rated some players significantly differently than he rated them in the second edition, some going from near the top to the middle of the pack.
They play around with "park effects" so much you can't recognize what they're talking about, and they do the same with fielding stats. In one place in Win Shares, James says that differences of three or fewer Win Shares shouldn't be taken into consideration, and then spends half the book "proving" that MVP awards were wrongly awarded to people where the difference was less than three Win Shares.
Use statistics all you want, but recognize that you're making a decision that's for all time (in or out) based on statistics you may be disowning next week.
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Get off the 22nd Amendment Bandwagon
[Read the article: How bashing Hillary backfired]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Where were all of you when W. was running with his father's entire posse (including Cheney as head of VP committee morphed into VP candidate, and unconstitionally running as a Wyoming resident when he clearly was from Texas), and a resume as thin as tissue paper to be President (the Governor of Texas isn't even the third most powerful elected official in the state).
Hillary Clinton was serving on the House Judiciary Committee staff when W. was serving his country by being coked up instead of doing his National Guard service. She was nationally prominent on children's issues when Ronald Reagan was bitching about his Vice President wanting him to find his wayward son a job. And she was seriously dealing with national health care issues when W. was figuring out ways to soak the voters of Arlington, Texas into giving him a lot of public money to prove his free market credentials.
She is far more qualified to be President, based on what she has done in her public life before she ran, than not just W., but Reagan, Carter, Kennedy and her own husband.
I don't support Hillary, but to argue that she is just a shill for her husband is ridiculous. Have you made that argument about Elizabeth Dole?