Matt Yglesias

Kerry’s Redemption

Did a TAP Online article about John Kerry’s awesome speech last night. For a sense of how much more awesomely attack doggy he was than everyone else, compare this word cloud to these other ones.

Travel Schedule

Just as a heads up, this blog and your humble blogger will not be in Denver for the Democratic Convention this week. I will, presumably, watch some stuff on TV and form opinions about it. But next week I will be at the Republican Convention in St. Paul which should be a lot less fun but probably better for blogging purposes.

A Cautionary Song

One thing to note about the Biden pick, is that all the prognostication about the implications of this for the campaign are almost certainly wrong. In practice, VP choices — despite the fact that they’re sometimes hugely consequential after the election (LBJ, Dick Cheney) — rarely impact the election and there’s little reason to believe that either presidential campaign will substantially alter its approach to bring it into closer accord with the strict logic of the choice:

By contrast with VP choices, which rarely matter politically but sometimes matter substantively, the national conventions coming up over the past two weeks are undeniably silly affairs but the best evidence available suggests that they are among the relatively small number of “campaign events” that can be clearly shown to influence election outcomes.