Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
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Deep Thoughts: Here's an SAT analogy for you:
The Real World:MTV :: Poker:ESPN
In five years, ESPN will no longer broadcast any sports, and for 24 hours a day will show Sportscenter, sports talk radio workalikes (Cold Pizza, PTI [which I love], Around the Horn, etc.) and poker, which under no circumstances counts as a sport.
Discuss.
"We simply cash the checks, count the votes, and move on" -- Maryland State Senator Clay Davis, The Wire Season 1
Andrew Rasiej, who's running for New York City Public Advocate, wants to know why neither party has done a very good job using the internets. As far as I can tell, the main answer is that it's not clear how email, the web, would dramatically improve Congress' ability to do their job. Email and internet communication (outside of advertisements) now sit in a large netherworld, where there are too many communicators for a Congressional staff to deal with each letter personally, and too few votes at stake for elected officials to take the internet seriously as mass media (there were roughly 300,000 unique visitors to johnkerry.com on the last day before the election) . Like talk radio, the internet has allowed a large number of people to feel like insiders, and that's a good thing as far as increasing party loyalty, but the audience size is still small enough that it's not quite on the radar of your average Congressperson.
The GOP correctly identified both that conservative talk radio would grow in size and that its audience was a set of self-selected opinion leaders who would then disseminate information through person-to-person networks -- you don't know how many times my mother has complained about her great aunt beginning sentences with "I heard on Rush that ...". It's clear that center-left internet news sites could be nourished into a counterbalance to conservative talk radio, but it's not clear that anyone is interested in both doing it and making sure that the network doesn't just become a half million choir-preachers.
Today's post is brought to you by the number 6371, the number of earmarks in this year's transportation bill, a six-fold increase since the last transportation bill Clinton signed, and a forty-fold increase over the 152 earmarks that made Reagan uneasy about signing the 1987 version of the bill.
Let us be honest, "The era of big government [being] over" is over.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 08:19 17 August 2005
