andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-551 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
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1 In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? [sent-2, score-0.153]
2 When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. [sent-6, score-0.166]
3 Clinton may have personally weathered the storm but he never had a chance to implement the liberal program. [sent-8, score-0.344]
4 Carter, of course, was the original Gloomy Gus, and his term saw the resurgence of the conservative movement in this country, with big tax revolts in 1978 and the Reagan landslide two years after that. [sent-9, score-0.421]
5 Like Obama in 2008, Reagan came into office in 1980 in a bad economy and inheriting a discredited foreign policy. [sent-12, score-0.4]
6 The economy got steadily worse in the next two years, the opposition party gained seats in the midterm election, but Reagan weathered the storm and came out better than ever. [sent-13, score-1.049]
7 If the goal was to imitate Reagan, what might Obama have done? [sent-14, score-0.08]
8 - Stick with the optimism and leave the gloom-and-doom to the other party. [sent-15, score-0.084]
9 Take the hit in the midterms with the goal of bouncing back in year 4. [sent-18, score-0.261]
10 Maintain a contrast with the opposition party and pass whatever you can in Congress. [sent-21, score-0.24]
11 The Democrats got hit harder in 2010 than the Republicans in 1982, but the Democrats had further to fall. [sent-23, score-0.175]
12 Obama and his party in Congress can still hope to bounce back in two years. [sent-24, score-0.207]
13 Also recall that Reagan, like Roosevelt, was a statistician . [sent-25, score-0.079]
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
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Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. Bill Kristol notes that “Four presidents in the last century have won more than 51 percent of the vote twice: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and Obama”. I’m not sure why Kristol, a conservative, is promoting the idea that Obama has a mandate, but that’s up to him. I’m more interested in the remarkable bit of cherry-picking that led to this “only four presidents” statistic. There was one way in which Obama’s victory was large: he won the electoral college 332-206. That’s a thrashing. But if you want to claim that Obama has a “popular mandate” — which people seem to interpret as an overwhelming preference of The People such that the opposition is morally obligated to give way — you can’t make that argument based on the electoral college, you have to look at the popular vote. That presents you with a challenge for the 2012 election, since Obama’s 2.7-point margin in the popular vote was the 12th-smallest out of the 57 elections we’ve had. There’s a nice sor
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Introduction: This assessment by Tyler Cowen reminded me that, in 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “
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Introduction: Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports: Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress. One might be surprised that Obama and congressional Democrats are not doing more to try to bring unemployment down. On the other hand, just to speak in generalities (not knowing any of the people involved), I would think that Obama would be much much more worried about the economy doing well in 2010 and then crashing in 2012. A crappy economy through 2011 and then improvement in 2012–that would be his ideal, no? Not that he would have the ability to time this sort of thing. But perhap
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
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