April 2006 Archives

I'll be locked in my room the next day and a half working on my seminar paper, so I figured I'd pop up for air one last time before I submerge myself in ecological inference to tell you all about my Seders. (Only one more day of matza, yay!)

For the first night of Passover, since my parents live too far away, I had to look elsewhere for a Seder. Thankfully, fellow ex-MITers Naomi and Leah had invited me to their Seder in Long Island back in January. It turned out that their cousins (who live in Great Neck) were actually hosting this year, and they graciously welcomed me into their huge, gorgeous home. As the host family's observance is on the orthodox end of conservative Judaism, the Seder was all in Hebrew, meaning my Hebrew site-reading skills were put to the test. This choice of language also meant that the Seder was loooong; thankfully, Leah left at 11:20, giving me the excuse to leave with her...otherwise we would have been their past midnight.

So I took the train back to Princeton that night, giving me plenty of time to prepare for the 2nd night Seder that I was hosting. There was the normal two-hours-before panicking (or, at least as close to panicking as I ever get), but with the help of a few punctual guests, we started off the Seder pretty much on time and with everything in order (pun slightly intended). Huge props to Chicklet who put together a fabulous Hagaddah -- with a beautiful layout. We did everything in English, and the 20 (!) people who showed (especially the non-Jews) seemed to really enjoy it. (Luckily we reserved the community room so all those people did not have to fit into our apartment.) Even the kids from across the hall were heavily involved, reading long words such as "dialectical" and "globalization." And we gave the boys fun dinosaur packs for finding the Afikomen so quickly! The dinner was over before we knew it (6:45pm - 9:15pm for the entire event) -- a good way to introduce people to Jewish culture without boring them. All in all, a fantastic success. As they say, "Next year in the New Lawrence community room!"

Friday, Kosuke (the prof whom I work with) and I presented our paper at the NYU methodological conference. The presentation went well and the comments from the audience gave me a sneak peak about what will be asked a week from today when I present. My biggest gripe about the conference was the food! Here we were in the middle of NYC (Jew central) and they served nothing that was remotely kosher for Passover. For dinner, they were going to an Italian place! Well, in New York parlance, fahgetaboutit -- I hung out with Diesel instead.

Diesel had just returned from Good Friday services (or Jesus' funeral, as she called it), so she was ready for some debauchery. We bar-hopped: she knows some "shiny" places in NYC--one bar was completely unmarked on the outside, but inside it was packed with young hipsters smoking and swapping bohemian tales of their day in a bourgeois city. Then we went to her place to watch "The L word" :)

Saturday: another Seder! This time at Eva's place, who had the Seder a few days late because that was when her parents could visit. The dinner was very pluralistic with everyone swapping tidbits of tradition and knowledge they had picked up over the years. I had learned the true story of the orange when prepping for my Seder, so I shared that tale with the group. Fun side note: I found the Afikomen in record time (before Eva's father had even finished detailing the search boundaries).

But now I'm procrastinating writing my paper...I'll be up very late tomorrow in case any of you insomniacs out there need someone to talk to at 4am.

Oh, and in more personal news, which you'll have to ask me about off-blog, looks like I'll finally be seeing the inside of a (nice) eating club.

Two people have mentioned to me Joe Klein's article in this week's Time entitled "Pssst! Who's behind the decline of politics? [Consultants.]", and I feel compelled to respond publically. He begins with a vignette of RFK's speech during the night of King's assassination:

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, rather formally, respectfully. "I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news ..." His voice caught, and he turned it into a slight cough, a throat clearing, "and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee."
...
"My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,'" he paused, his voice quivering slightly as he caressed every word. The silence had deepened, somehow; the moment was stunning. "'Until ... in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"

Klein goes on to blame television and consultants for the lack of politicians who cite Aeschylus in their speeches. He then specifically attacks the consultants of the Gore and Kerry campaigns for causing their downfall. I agree with bits of the essay, but contend most of the substance.

First, I concur that television has changed everything. While previously, intellectuals could be elected to the highest office in the land, with the advent of mass communication, performers are much more suited to the task. (Roger Simon's book Show Time illustrates this point quite clearly.)

I also 100% agree with this sentence:

In fact, [the Democratic consultants] had it backward: the character of their candidate, they believed, would be inferred from the quality of his policies.

If there was one thing that the Dean campaign taught us, it was that neck-down campaigns are exceedingly powerful. But in high-profile races at least, it is the candidate, not their consultants, who dictate whether you can run a head- or heart-centered campaign.

Klein then slips into the fallacy that I've seen all too often: because the Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004, the consultant on the left must be terrible, while Bush's cadre must have the Midas touch. (Bush's current approval rating notwithstanding, apparently.) The simple fact that a party loses two Presidential races in a row does not mean that party's campaign structure is in shambles. Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, with much wider margins than Bush's: where were the "Republicans have it all wrong" stories then?

But enough musings, let's get down to facts. According to Ray Fair's Presidential Vote Equation, which is based purely in the cards handed to the candidates (e.g., incumbency, economy), Gore should have won 50.8% of the two-party vote and Kerry should have won 42.3% of the vote. This equation has a standard error of a little more than 2%. (Non-statistician's translation: most of the time the election will fall within 2% of the given number.)

How did the Democratic consultants do? Well, in 2000, Gore "only" received 50.3% of the two-party vote, well within the margin, but slightly underperforming the expected value. In 2004, Kerry received 48.7% of the two-party vote, demolishing the state-of-the-nation prediction. These numbers certainly don't support Klein's conclusion.

Plus, if Klein is going to blame the Democratic consultants, he should at least fault a specific action. For instance, in 2000, Bush stole West Virginia from Gore with television advertisements that blasted Gore's environmental record. Gore's polling showed him up by a good margin in WV, and thus his campaign didn't respond to these ads for weeks. During that time, West Virginia went from Gore country to Bush country and then voted GOP in Novemberl for the first time since 1984 (since 1956 if we exlcude 49-state landslides). Ironically, Klein recommends that Gore should have spoken more about the environment. Yeah, and Gore should have touted his pledge to register all new handgun purchases, too...

Have Democrats made tactical mistakes? Sure. Kerry probably should have bashed Bush at his convention. Gore should have spent more resources in Tennessee. But, the Bush campaigns were not immune from stupid decisions either. In 2000, Bush's consultants (who Klein specifically cite as a model for how campaigns should be run) decided to spend money on advertising in California. Recall that California media is almost prohibitively expensive and the Gore won the state with relative ease (53% to 42%). Gore's advisors wisely stayed out of an ad war in CA, and Bush wasted $10.8 million. Think of how many gross rating points those dollars would have bought in the Orlando-Daytona Beach market.

Politics has changed since RFK's time, and not necessarily for the better. Candidates have adapted to meet the public's and the media's shifting expectations. Consultants have learned to use new technology. But I'll take a system of government, advisors and all, which produces Barack Obama as a convention keynote speaker any day.

LOTD: And while we're on the subject of Al Gore: check out the trailer for his new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

After a year of being down 6 to 1 on the Prank v Hack/Caltech v MIT scoreboard, the current breed of MITers successfully jumped ahead with the requisition of Caltech's cannon. (My old dorm, EC, is in the background of the Globe's pic.) A group of hackers traveled to Caltech in late March and procured the cannon by posing as a construction company with legitimate work orders. Turns out that Caltech fell for the same prank twice, albeit 20 years apart. More pics are here; my fav:

MIT showing its true colors: pasty white lab tan.

Update: Of course the first place Caltech looked was Harvey Mudd...

Subject: Caltech cannon
Date: 28 March 06 19:56:34 PST
To: [HMC internal mailing list]

Howdy,

Did anyone steal the Caltech cannon Monday night/Tuesday
morning? They called and said it was stolen and were hoping it was here.

Chris Sundberg
Associate Dean of Students
Harvey Mudd College

Fear the Turtle, baby: the Maryland Terrapins just won the Women's NCAA basketball championship! A fade-away three-pointer by Kristi Toliver at the end of regulation sent the game to overtime, and Maryland played excellent defense on Duke's final possession to stymie the Blue Devils. Looking back on my picks, I'm embarrassed to say that I had the MD women losing to UNC in the Semis. That lack of hometown faith helped sink my ESPN picks to the 30th percentile.

On the men's side, I was disappointed by the lack of ACC representation in the Final Four. My ESPN bracket picks did excellently: 98th percentile and second place in the Politics Department's pool. I can't say the same for my family pool. I had great 5-team picks all set and ready to go (I was literally a few neurons firing from hitting the Send button), but I second-guessed myself and ended up much worse for the wear. (Even my father beat me this year!) The joke 5th-place prizes were:

A one way plane ticket to the southwest for a Quail shoot with Dick Cheney.

A tour of Bode Miler's Olympic Medal room.

An all-expense paid half-day outing on the Minnesota Vikings Loveboat!

Can't say I get the last one--guess I need to watch SportsCenter more.

After watching last night's episode of West Wing, I couldn't help but think that there was no obvious choice for Santos's new VP (assuming he wins). Thus, I'll open it up to the floor: who do you think it will be?

If you think I missed someone, let me know.

Props to Enjanerd for the recommendation to use XnView to upload my pictures from Gulfport. (Make sure you left-right scroll on the first pane to see all the thumbnails.) I've added some cellphone pics (see the bottom of the page) of the flood-damaged synagogue we went to.

I'll cover two topics today: FEMA and my fellow students. On Thursday night, three speakers from FEMA came to talk to us. Generally, they defended the organization. Actually, I take that back: generally, they avoided the topic of blame. Instead, they spouted number after number, acronym after acronym, scenario after scenario; as in: if your house was 47% damaged, you had hurricane insurance, but not flood insurance and you had $2,000 dollars in a savings account, then (after filling out the appropriate paperwork) you would be entitled to X amount from FEMA. When they did mention the general belief that FEMA did a terrible job, they said that most of the news stories were 90% to completely wrong. (Which I guess is possible.) However, after an excellent question from Princeton's JCSC, they readily admitted that having the extra, DHS layer of bureaucracy cost them 4-5 months in decision turnaround time in some cases. And they sidestepped my follow-up question about whether they had broken through that bureaucratic layer in preparation for the 2006 hurricane season. Not exactly confidence building.

As for my fellow students on the trip, they were all undergrads save one. Compared to my 2003 ASB trip to rural Mexico, these kids were less motivated to work. Though, we were not challenged to push our bodies to the limit in terms of labor. (Who can really tell how hard the staff could push before student rebellion?) Most people were fun, state-school types (note: I don't mean that in any sort of derogatory fashion--form your own mental picture), but there were some standouts. The entire crew from Vermont was awesome. There was a guy who led us in wonderful songs, including a fabulous Nigun which I can't get out of my head. As present was a true ultimate frisbee player, though I captained my team past his, 11-8, on the Shabbas Showdown game (see pic). And the females well outnumbered the males, so I flirted with quite a number of undergrads ;)

Briefly returning to my real world life: this weekend included Woody Woo Jewish cultural night and a Dar Williams concert at Sarah Lawrence. For Jewish cultural night, Roomie and I made absolutely fabulous potato kugel, which was a huge hit. And Dar Williams was fabulous as always--I'm grateful to Chicklet for thinking to invite me.

But for now it's back to coding and reading. And sleep (hopefully).