Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Darren Lewis, 45. I always thought his reputation for having a good glove was legitimate. Obviously, if you gave him 500 PAs it wasn't going to work out well, although it's hard to blame him for the Giants falling shot in 1993, I guess; amazing that the Red Sox gave him almost 700 PAs in 1998 and sort of got away with it. Although looking at that roster...wow, that is a depressing group of OFers. By the way -- that 1993 team sure had a lot of gloves, didn't it? Although the fielding stats at least as compiled at b-r shows them about even with the Braves, so no advantage there. What a great, great season for fans, even with the bitter ending. For all of the problems with the new double WC system, at least it brings back the possibility that we'll see something at least close to that again.

Enough about that: the good stuff.

1. Nice Walter Shapiro column on covering the conventions.

2. Ross Douthat points out why James K. Polk is the wrong model of presidenting for Mitt Romney.

3. Excellent piece on race, Romney, and Obama, by Ezra Klein. Interesting to see how mainstreaming of political science research on race will go.

4. Byron Shafer is blogging from the conventions. Recommended. (Via John).

5. And, sure, why not; Rebecca Schoenkopf on Obama, Breitbart, my brother, whatever.

One and Out

Kudos to the New York Times for not only running a fine op-ed against Barack Obama's silly rhetoric that he'd "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," but also using the recent biographer of James K. Polk to do it.  Or perhaps just kudos to Robert W. Merry for writing the piece, which amounts to advice not to take Polk's success too seriously.  Key point:

All this suggests a false dichotomy underlying Mr. Obama’s expressed resolve to render his presidential decisions without regard to his re-election chances — as if the choice were between political popularity and governmental success. A better approach for any chief executive is to assume that, in presidential politics, as in retailing, the customer is always right, and that the electorate’s verdict will be consonant with history’s consensus. Thus, the aim of every historically minded president, Mr. Obama included, should be to pursue a second term by bundling up voter sentiment into a collection of policies and programs that succeed in the crucial areas most on the minds of the American people.

When it comes right down to it, one of the most important fault lines in American politics is...well, in my view, it's over democracy.  It seems to me that if you like Obama's rhetoric -- if you basically assume that there's a right thing to do, and that it most likely will cost you with the voters if you do that thing -- then you're support for democracy isn't quite as strong as you might think that it is (I don't count it against Obama; it's popular rhetoric, and so using it helps him (horrors!) get reelected).   To me, belief in democracy requires a willingness to accept the outcome of representative relationships between constituents and elected officials -- that those relationships can produce policy that is good enough, or at least close enough to what people want.  And those of us who hold this position tend to be very wary of the idea that technocratic experts should be given wide latitude to set policy once elected officials point them in the right direction (a position most ably advanced in the blogosphere by Matt Yglesias).

I should say, by the way, that this is not something on which democratic theorists and political scientists in general are as divided as the population at large.  So while I do believe I'm right on this one (obviously, or I wouldn't say it), I'm reporting one person's informed position, here, and not a consensus from those who have studied and thought about it.   I try to be clear about that sort of thing as I write here, but I probably could do a better job of it.

Oh, also, Merry in his op-ed should really have included Ike as an example of a very well regarded two-term president, but he also inexplicably fails to mention Richard Nixon as a failed two-term president.  He is hesitant to put George W. Bush in that category, but I'll be pretty surprised if historians down the line wind up happy with Bush.