In Tuesday’s Times, David Brooks had a pop at political forecasters, including his colleague, Nate Silver, whose blog, FiveThirtyEight, is a popular feature on the Times Web site. Of course, Brooks was too polite to personalize his argument, but given Silver’s popularity and profile there can be little doubt whom Brooks was referring to when he wrote “I know … how I should treat polling data. First, I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.”
From now until Election Day, the Back Issues blog will be looking at this year’s swing states through the lens of the New Yorker archive. We’re kicking things off with Wisconsin—home of Representative Paul Ryan.
As imagined from the offices of The New Yorker, Wisconsin has sometimes seemed a little unreal—a foreign country, or a rural wonderland. In the magazine’s early days, brave reporters ventured West and brought home stories of the strange and improbable. In 1953, Eli Waldron wrote about a small Wisconsin town that had been overrun by millions of frogs (“the explosions of amphibians beneath the wheels of automobiles at night sounded like rifle fire”); in 1956, a Comment brought New Yorkers word of Wisconsin’s strange courtship rituals (“an ardent young man spelled out his girl’s name in dry nitrogen across a vast, rolling hillside; when her name presently materialized in lush green grass, she was so enchanted that she married him”). In 1960, Philip Hamburger reported on Milwaukee—a city, he wrote, where a man “is judged by the beer he drinks”:
On October 3rd, a mother, her three children, and a visiting relative were killed in the Turkish border town Akcakale when a Syrian bomb hit near their home. The Turkish military retaliated, shelling Syrian military targets just across the border. The following day, the Turkish parliament passed a motion allowing military force to be used in Syria. Then, on October 10th, a Syrian Airlines passenger jet en route from Russia was forced to land in Turkey, where Turkish authorities searched it for weapons. These incidents were the latest in a series of calamities that has all but shredded the long border between Turkey and Syria, which had once been allies. But the tension had been building for a long time.
“The only exception I have for, to have an abortion, is in that case of the life of a mother,” Richard Mourdock, the Republican Party’s nominee for Indiana’s Senate seat, said in a debate on Tuesday. “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is, uh, something that God intended to happen.” Is it now—and is that supposed to be some sort of comfort? It is not a revelation that Mourdock would limit abortion to women who might actually die; Paul Ryan, left to his own devices, would do the same, and so would a lot of Republicans. (See: Todd Akin.) What is striking here is how narrow his idea of mercy is for women in difficult circumstances—that, and, glaringly, the implication that a rapist might be God’s instrument. When that was pointed out to Mourdock, he released a statement that got him into even murkier theological territory:
A sporting addendum to yesterday’s geographic musings: it seems that the New York Islanders, the once-great Stanley Cup team of Bossy and Trottier and Potvin—more recently a pitiful squad playing in a decaying building to a mostly indifferent audience—are moving to Brooklyn and the Barclays Center! This is wonderful news for all of us who live on the 4 or 5 line, and can now see that team—or all the other teams (i.e., the Montreal Canadiens) who come to town to play them—with a minimum of trouble, and probably at less cost and with much less pain than it takes to go see the Rangers at the Garden. (Love the Rangers, love the Garden, but it costs an arm and a leg to get in—and if you wear the wrong sweater in the wrong section you might lose the other arm and leg before you leave.)
“Let me get back to foreign policy,” the moderator Bob Schieffer said, midway through a debate that was, after all, supposed to be devoted to that subject. He didn’t have much luck. President Barack Obama had just spoken at length about education here at home, and Mitt Romney felt a burning desire to defend the honor of fourth and eighth graders in Massachusetts, whose reading and math scores had, he said, been excellent during his tenure as governor. “And then you cut education spending when you came into office!” Obama said, interrupting. As they began arguing about the timing of a scholarship program—“That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President”—Schieffer tried to change the subject to military spending “because we have heard some of this in the other debates.”
By now, everybody has heard something about Mitt Romney’s geography lesson last night—the one he was (explicitly) trying to give, and the one that he was (implicitly) given. “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world, “ he announced ominously at one point in the debate. “It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel.” This ‘route to the sea’ business, is true, of course—though only in the sense that the Upper East Side is New Jersey’s “route to the river”: if Chris Christie, in a crazed, Springsteen-fuelled burst of imperial ambition, sent his troopers to occupy Central Park and invade Yorkville he would be able to get to the East River, though this little scenario ignores the truth that he doesn’t need the route to the river in the first place, since he’s got another river right in front of him. (The Hudson, for the non-New Yorkers out there.) Similarly, the Iranians could take Syria as a “route to the sea,” but hardly need to, since they already live on several. There’s the famous Gulf of Oman, the well-known Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf, all of which border Iran—while Syria, as it happens, does not. So if for some reason an Ayatollah wanted to break out toward the Mediterranean, he would first have to invade Turkey and/or Iraq, rather as Governor Christie, to conclude this equivalence, would first have to conquer the West Side in his relentless march to a staging area in Carl Schurz Park, and watery dominance.
Iran isn’t an easy subject for Mitt Romney. He wants to look tough; he needs to attack President Obama, to suggest that there was some miracle solution Obama could have found that would have stopped Iran’s nuclear program by now, something Obama refused to do because he’s too weak—but that Romney would do the day he was sworn in to office. But Romney also knows, presumably, that the most obvious something is war, or a significant use of force, and he’s not going to touch that idea, not in a Presidential campaign, and not at a time when Americans are sick of George W. Bush’s adventures in the Middle East.
But Romney’s found a way out of his problem—or something he apparently thinks is worth trying. During the final Presidential debate on Monday night, in the midst of an answer on Iran that made it clear his real plan would be to continue and extend Obama’s policy, he said,
I’d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it.
The most remarkable thing about Monday’s foreign-policy debate in Boca Raton was how unremarkable Mitt Romney was. That’s a compliment. For an hour and a half, Romney played to the American middle, courted the mainstream. More or less agreeing with every substantive position of President Obama’s, Romney tried to find small differences that would make him appear more cool, more reasonable, and more Presidential than the President himself. Romney made no calls to invade this country or that one, no messianic invocations of America’s mission in the world. He came off as calm and pragmatic, even boring, and unbound by the straitjacket of any ideology.
No big deal, right? Not unless you place the foreign policy Romney outlined Monday night against the extreme vision he has put forth in his domestic agenda. At home, in the areas of tax policy and the role of government, Romney (and Paul Ryan) would take America to places it hasn’t been since early in the last century. Many of the assumptions that underpin Romney’s fiscal and economic policies, like the idea that tax cuts will spur economic growth, are unsupported by empirical evidence.
Not much more than a week ago—though it now feels a lot longer—baseball spoiled us with four scintillating division series. For the first time since the addition of the wild card, in 1995, all of the opening-round matchups went to the maximum five games, and what compelling games they were. The San Francisco Giants became the first team in National League history to win a best-of-five postseason series after going down 0-2. Justin Verlander and C. C. Sabathia pitched dominant clinchers against, respectively, the pesky Oakland Athletics and the overachieving Baltimore Orioles. If that were not enough, the St. Louis Cardinals, who had to win a play-in game against the Atlanta Braves just to advance to the divisional round, were twice down to their last strike against the Washington Nationals before scoring four runs in the ninth to oust the team with the best record in the major leagues. This year’s playoffs picked up exactly where last year’s dramatic seven-game World Series ended: on the edge of a cliff. Baseball, it seemed, had put a hex on dullness.
