Uglies

Roll Call has pictures of what it considers the five ugliest House districts coming out of the current round of redistricting.

What makes a district "ugly"? Mainly, that it's not compact; to a lesser extent, the specific complaint that one or more sections of the district are connected by only a thin bridge. Districts must be contiguous (in fact, that, and rigorously equal populations are about the only strict rules out there), but in one Ohio district along Lake Erie, Democrats are arguing that "when Crane Creek State Park beach is covered during high water" the district doesn't even achieve that.

My feeling? I'm all for ugly districts. Compactness is, to be blunt, a stupid criterion for drawing district lines. Communities of interest, sure; other political jurisdictions, okay; and as far as I'm concerned, whatever political goals the majority has in mind are fine by me. Note that there's a real limit on partisan gerrymandering because while parties collectively want to win as many seats as possible, individual party politicians want very safe districts -- and safe districts require "wasting" votes won in landslides that could have been used to make some other district better for the party. Since politicians are the ones who pass redistricting maps in most cases, the most likely results are bipartisan gerrymanders, which maximize safety for incumbents of both parties at the expense of maximizing partisan gains. That doesn't always happen, but it happens quite often, even when one party controls the entire process.

At any rate, the question of district shape is really separable from the question of whether political goals should be used to write districts, although in practice reformers use the prejudice against "ugly" districts as a constraint against political motivations that they can't get the courts to knock out. Purely on their own merits, however, I see nothing at all wrong with ugly districts.

Sunday Question for Liberals

A variation of the question for conservatives: what foreign policy or national security policies are you most concerned about if Republicans win the presidency in 2012?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

By my count, at least four GOP candidates, including Mitt Romney, advocated war against Iran if that was the only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear. Assuming that the various other things that they advocated prove futile (no, Prince Herman, it doesn't really seem likely that the US can achieve energy independence before Iran gets the bomb, nor is it clear exactly how that would stop a nuclear campaign, anyway)...do you expect war with Iran if the Republicans win the White House in 2012?

CBS/NJ South Carolina Debate

As with the CNBC debate last time around, the clear winner was the format: relatively narrow topic debates sure seem to be a lot more substantive than open topic debates. In large part, that's (I suspect) because it means that we get very few gotcha and political questions, and virtually no gimmick questions. I haven't counted yet, but I'd bet that almost everything tonight was a straight policy question.

In terms of horse race, it's unlikely that much happened tonight. Mitt Romney probably didn't hurt himself. Rick Perry rebounded well, probably having his best debate -- he's now been okay in two of the last three debates, and has done about as good a job as possible recovering from the CNBC disaster. Herman Cain was utterly lost again, especially without the 9-9-9 crutch to fall back on, and at least for now he's lost his humor and zing. Newt? I suppose if you like what he's selling, you'll like him tonight. As for the rest, no effect, even indirectly, on the horse race at this point, regardless of what they do.

Of course, the substance was quite depressing for anyone who opposes torture and supports the rule of law. Others will cover it better than me, so I'll just stop at that. Meanwhile, it certainly is interesting that a large chunk of the GOP is hopping on the pro-Mubarak bandwagon.

Oh, and the CBS/NJ feed during the last half hour was clearly the big loser of the night, for whatever that's worth.

So: if there's any political news at all, it's going to be that Rick Perry managed to get through 90 minutes without making a complete idiot of himself. I see on Intrade that he's currently a bit below 4% (and Newt is up to 14%...I'm confident that Newt Gingrich doesn't have a 1 in 7 chance of winning the nomination, and I suspect Perry has a much better than 1 in 25 chance, but it's hard to tell.

What Mattered This Week?

Europe, again, especially Italy and Greece.

Ah, we had an election, too! Or, more properly, lots of elections, many of which mattered a lot to the people whose lives will be directly affected by the results. I'd be very cautious, however, about extrapolating at all. It was a good day for the Democrats (although hardly a landslide; the Dems did well at a few high-profile elections and ballot questions, but there was a lot of status quo elsewhere). But it probably means just about zero for 2012.

And the continuing troubles in Syria and Yemen shouldn't be forgotten, either.

So, what do you think mattered this week?

Friday Baseball Post

Ah, time to assess a trade: Jonathan Sanchez for Melky Cabrera.

Here's the thing...first, it's pretty obvious to all (as Steve Rubio noted and quoted) that Sabean is trading away a guy at his lowest and trading for a guy coming off a freak good season. But of course in some ways that doesn't matter; the goal is to maximize wins in 2012, not to get the best trade value. Sure, in hindsight Sabean should have traded Sanchez earlier if he was going to trade him, but that's yesterday's mistake, not this week's.

What it all comes down to, really, is whether Cabrera can handle CF. He just had a fine year, with an OPS+ of 121 at age 26; even if it turns out that he's really no better than a league-average hitter or a touch below (and his lifetime OPS+ of just 93 isn't encouraging, but then again he's only 26), then as long as he can play CF he's not really going to hurt the team.  One way to think about it is that going into the off season Sabean had vacancies at SS, CF, and one corner spot, and now he's filled one without spending much money. If, that is, Cabrera can handle CF. If not, he's more of a 5th OFer than anything else.

As far as Sanchez, what I'd say is this: he was heading into his last year of arbitration. His value was low. So, I think there are two reasonable ways to go. One is to trade him for whatever you can get, as Sabean did; the other would be to sign him to a three or even four year deal while he's cheap. I don't know which way I'd have gone, but I could see arguments either way. Both are ways of cashing in on his current value; both entail risks.

Now, the problem for me is that on the raw numbers it makes a lot of sense that the guy who spiked up last year at age 26 is a much better bet than the guy who spiked up in 2009 at age 32 and then collapsed back down at age 33...but I've been a Torres fan for a while (pre-success, that is), while I've never much thought Melky was worth anything. So my gut feeling is that Torres would actually be better next year. But I'm sure the numbers don't say that, and I can't really blame Sabean for letting Torres go. And without him, there's really no other CF option, so again as much as my instinct says that this is a lousy deal and Melky isn't really a regular CFer, I'm really not sure that the numbers say that.

I do know that going in, I'm not looking forward to rooting for him. Ah well; there are plenty of guys I do like, and if you don't have a CF, you're going to give up an awful lot of inside the park HRs.

Oy, Bai

Argghhhh....

But we do expect them to really believe in the things they propose — to have the requisite conviction to know and recite with passion the basic policies that someone on their team stayed up nights to craft. Say what you want about Mr. Bush, but no one ever doubted his deep well of resolve on tax cuts or education reform. He had command of his own plan, if not all the underlying data.

Remind me: what exactly did it get George W. Bush that everyone (supposedly) thought he was "authentic"??? George W. Bush, in case Matt Bai has somehow forgotten, was a massively unpopular president. And he probably somewhat underperformed in the 2004 election against (supposedly) inauthentic flip-flopper John Kerry.

I mean, if you think about this for more than a second, it's obviously just silly. George H.W. Bush, the guy who invented snack preferences just for a campaign (not to mention flip-flops on issues from abortion to taxes to taxes again) as more authentic than Mike Dukakis? Did Americans think that Dukakis was presenting a phony persona of a boring technocrat, and that's why he lost to Bush? Of course not.

Rick Perry wasn't hurt because making a fool of himself on TV undermined his authenticity, as Bai proposes; he was hurt (assuming he was hurt; we don't really know that for sure yet) because he made a fool of himself on TV.  Sometimes, it isn't actually more complicated.