28 July 2008

Making Sense Of Mitt

Last week the McCain camp let fly a few rumors they might make an announcement regarding McCain's veep choice. It didn't happen and most people concluded it was a play at attracting a little press during Obama's European Vacation.

Either way, the name that keeps popping up is Mitt Romney.

Long-time readers of this blog know that we backed Romney early in the Republican Presidential Primary. We liked him early because his politics most closely matched our own. However, endorsement of Mitts was a qualified one--to our mind, he was not the perfect candidate.

And we're not sure how much we like him for Vice President. Our desire to see Mitt do something on the national scene is superseded by our overarching desire to see McCain in the White House. Even then, unlike the Dems, we don't want him there because we see him as some sort of epochal answer to the world's problems.

Like many of the so-called paleoconservatives who frequent this blog, but never comment, we don't see McCain as perfect either. But we refuse to make the Ross Perot mistake many conservatives made in 1992 and 1996.

It helps that as we have come to know more about Senator McCain, we've liked what we've found.

For the stat-heads among us, those who appreciate a quantitative approach to their political evaluation, who follow the new statistical evaluations in baseball--sabermetrics, and are not cowed by regression analysis, we recommend fivethirtyeight.com.

The guy who writes fivethirtyeight, Nate Silver, is an Obama supporter and writer for Baseball Prospectus. Apart from his choice in candidates, he is very good and very methodical in his electoral evaluation. If you like Real Clear Politics poll combo thingy, you'll love fivethirtyeight.com.

The reason we share this website with you today, is that Nate has a fantastic post up about how VP candidate Mitt Romney might affect the electoral map. It is exhaustive and to the extent possible, empirical. It is, far-and-away, the best read on how Mitt might affect the race.


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