topaz

La la la la, we're all about the "lipstick on a pig" today, aren't we? Boy!

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com had this to say about the whole foofraw:

My first reaction upon hearing Barack Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was that it was deliberate. Not a deliberate attempt to smear Sarah Palin per se, but a deliberate attempt to provoke exactly the sort of fanatical reaction that they have gotten from the Republicans. The McCain campaign has spent a week campaigning on big themes and big personalities, and gotten a fair amount of mileage out of it. This takes everyone back down a notch, back down to the tedium and banality of partisan politics. It would be wishful thinking to call it a momentum-changer, but it may by default be a momentum-stopper. The convention/Palinmania phase of the news cycle -- a phase the Republicans clearly thought they were winning -- is now over. ("Lipstick", FiveThirtyEight.com)

Nate is a number cruncher -- a statistician whose day job is as a managing partner at Baseball Prospectus. He's not a professional political analyst. But I think sometimes he should be. His posts at FiveThirtyEight are absolutely required reading for this campaign. He brings a rigor and frankness to his polling analysis that, as far as I can tell, no one else is doing. It's extraordinary.

Having said that, there's something to be said for sticking to what you know, and what Nate Silver writes about political strategy should certainly be taken with a grain of salt. But he still is one of the calmer, more level-headed political observers I've seen out there this season, and I think that his data-driven approach puts him in a better position to evaluate each campaign's strategy than most of the blowhards. It's marvelous stuff.