Combining the natural political talents of Martha Coakley with the warmth of Don Rickles

Romney, in Daytona:

But the crowd initially booed Mr. Romney, who occasionally struck a discordant note, as when he approached a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos. “I like those fancy raincoats you bought,” he said. “Really sprung for the big bucks.” And when asked if he was a fan of the sport, he mentioned that “I have some great friends who are Nascar team owners.”

(h/t David Karol)

Maps in wartime

Susan Schulten has another great post up on a Civil War skirmish in northeastern Virginia in early 1862. Maps again play a key role, and those with any geographic knowledge of the area are immediately valued. Susan relays the story of an escaped slave named Harry, who quickly rises in stature due to his intimate knowledge of the region:

On Jan. 24, a slave named Harry escaped to the Union picket line. Rather than return him to his owner, as other officers might have, Captain Heine took him on as a guide and servant. He gave him a uniform, a pistol, a sabre and “a good horse.” A full year before the Emancipation Proclamation or the enlistment of black soldiers, Harry became the first black cavalryman of the war. He knew every road and path in the area, and, according to Sneden, “would fight to the death before allowing himself to be captured.”

This intelligence on the ground was augmented by aerial reconnaissance. In late January, Thaddeus Lowe used a balloon to survey the landscape, and noticed that Confederates were building earthworks to the south (marked in red on the map). Heine immediately organized a raid on Colchester with two goals in mind: to measure these earthworks that Lowe had spotted, and to capture the rebel smugglers. On the night of Jan. 29, he took 50 men from the 37th New York, with Sneden and Harry to guide them. Just five days earlier, Harry had been a slave; now he was leading an armed raid against his former owners.

Linkerbell

• A helpful reminder from Jonathan Bernstein that Ross Perot was all ears and no cattle.
• Romney is so far failing to secure endorsements from heavy metal bands.
• Some more fretting about the brokered convention that will never happen. I'm a bit confused -- who are the party "adults" referenced in the article?
• What was the most important presidential election ever? David Mayhew has some good answers.
• Negative ads work, right? Not so fast, says John Sides.
• New book coming out shows the behind-the-scenes negotiations during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
• Adam Sorensen to the Maine GOP: No caucus-handler you. I deride your caucus-handling abilities.
• Neutrinos don't actually go faster than light. No flux capacitor for you.
• All Downton Abbey, all the time: Great episode recaps from Vulture. Has Downton jumped the shark? Not possible, says William Hogeland -- it's a soap. And, via Ari Kelman, perhaps the best essay ever written on Downton.

You can't afford *not* to buy a Death Star!

A few years ago, someone (I can't recall who -- the link is dead) estimated it would cost $15 septillion to build a Death Star. I estimated it would cost several orders of magnitude less, considering that the original estimate was based on Earth's primitive and costly methods of transporting material into orbit. Now some students at Lehigh have estimated the cost at about $850 quadrillion. Kevin Drum points out that this is far less intimidating than it might look. If we wait about 500 years to build it (at which point our technology might have advanced to Star Wars-like levels), this figure will only be about 65 times world GDP. Spread the project out over 20 years, and that's only 3 times world GDP. Moreover, spread it out over the wealth of tens of thousands of star systems in the Galactic Empire, and suddenly this is looking quite affordable.

Drum concludes from this that building the Death Star was "totally worth it." Well, that's not obvious. One must ask, compared to what? I mean, what was the point of the Death Star in the first place? To intimidate planets that might have considered undermining the Empire. It couldn't be everywhere at once, but the example of destroying Alderaan had to have served as a deterrent for other planets. Notably, the Rebellion had few options for bases after that. They stayed on an ice planet briefly, and after that had to wander space in a few random ships. But, of course, the deterrent value was limited, since the Death Star had been destroyed. Everyone knew the Empire could build another one, but until they did, the threat was going to wane. So they threw together another one, which again got destroyed.

Now, just as building a Death Star sent an important message to non-compliant planets, destroying a Death Star sent a powerful signal, as well. It was a huge public relations coup for the Rebellion. So the Death Star, while a devastating weapon, was also a tempting target. There were some basic conceptual design flaws (both versions were destroyed by a small smuggling ship and a handful of single-person fighters), but really, even if it had survived Yavin, it was doomed to spend much of its operational time fighting off attackers, simply by virtue of being such a big fat target.

Had the Empire instead used that money to build thousands of additional star destroyers, that likely would have been a much wiser investment. Then they really could be everywhere at once. Hell, park one in orbit around every system in the Empire. Then when Leia says, "They're on Dantooine," Tarkin can just call up the ship hovering over Dantooine and say, "Are there rebels there?", and the captain can say, "Uh, no. She's lying." Saves a lot of time. Plus, even if the rebels could down one or two star destroyers, that doesn't provide them with anywhere near the public relations value of taking down a Death Star.

So, on balance, I'd say it was a bad investment, even if an affordable one.

One other point: It was really stupid to put both the Emperor and his chief enforcer on an uncompleted Death Star right before an attack they knew was coming. Had Vader and Palpatine been back on Coruscant when that went down, the Rebels would have won an impressive victory, but the Empire wouldn't have fallen. It would have been like Al Qaeda sinking the USS Nimitz -- serious, to be sure, but hardly death to America.

Spending on presidential elections

On Monday, Dave Gilson produced this wonderful graph of spending by presidential candidates since 1860, in constant 2011 dollars. It suggested that we really have seen a departure in the last two cycles, with 2004 being the most expensive race up until that point, and 2008 burying 2004. Jonathan Bernstein points out that inflation-adjusted dollars really don't tell the whole story, since the country has been growing. So I've divided Gilson's cost figures by the number of votes cast* in each election (as recorded by David Leip), producing the graph below:

What surprised me is the stability of the figures over time; in 12 of the 18 elections, the campaigns spent between $2 and $5 per vote cast, in 2011 dollars. That includes most of the elections before the early-70s reforms, suggesting that, contra Jon's point, the reforms did not force campaign spending to artificially low levels. 2004 did see an unusually high level of spending, but not quite as much as was spent in 1968. And 2008 really did see a lot of spending, although 1896 still holds the record.

Like Jon, I don't see any particular problem with increased levels of campaign spending. Most of that spending consists of voluntary donations by wealthy Americans financing ads that inform middle-class Americans about presidential candidates. I fail to see the harm to the Republic.


*Jon suggests that it might be better to measure money spent per eligible voter, rather than per vote cast, since it is the eligible voters that the campaigns are trying to reach. I agree, but figuring out the eligible electorate in many of these years is a tad tricky. Millions of Americans were legally eligible to vote from the 1870s to the 1960s but nonetheless faced taunts, beatings, or death for trying to do so.

Update: See here to see campaign spending as a function of real GDP.

Updated forecast

Nate Silver has updated his election forecast models based on current assessments of the Republican candidates' ideological positions and the status of the economy. The numbers look substantially better for Obama since the last time Silver drew up these calculations. There are still legitimate reasons to quarrel with Silver's estimates of candidate ideology (especially the conclusion that Gingrich and Santorum are equally conservative) and of the impact of ideology on an election, but he's notably being a lot more transparent about the methods this time around.

Anyway, I've updated my chart of the forecasts based on Silver's numbers, assuming Obama has a 50% approval rating:

How do 527s fit in with parties?

If parties are networks, where exactly do 527s fit in? Are they out on the fringes, running messages inconsistent with what the party leaders and candidates want? Or are they highly central to the party networks, doing the work that the more formal branches of the parties are prohibited from doing?

Richard Skinner, David Dulio, and I investigate these questions in a new paper that just came out in American Politics Research called "527 Committees and the Political Party Network" (PDF, ungated). The way we approached this was by collecting a dataset consisting of all the employment records of the 100 most active 527s between 2004 and 2006. We then researched these employees' backgrounds to find out where else they have worked. Then we constructed a network using the employment ties between different organizations. The chart below shows all the groups that were linked to the liberal 527 America Coming Together via shared employees:

The network analysis finds that 527s are closely tied to the party networks, assisting them in coordinating messages across different groups. The study also suggests that 527s played a particularly important role for the Democratic Party during this period when Republicans held control over the Congress and the White House: they were a place of employment for key Democratic staffers until their party could return to power.