 |  | | Jan. 28, 2015 |  | No. 156 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | When we talked about Mitt Romney and the 2016 Republican field last week, even I never suspected that he'd consider hanging a third presidential campaign around climate change. Whoa.
On the one hand, maybe this is all part of the long arc of history, and if Pope Francis is on the bandwagon, then that's good enough for the man who gave America Jonathan Gruber. But on the other hand, maybe there's some strategic jujitsu going on here.
As Romney troll extraordinaire Allahpundit notes, belief in anthropogenic global warming has risen among Republicans over the last year. So perhaps Romney thinks he can get to Jeb Bush's right on immigration and Common Core but still keep establishment centrists by throwing in with the climate change crowd. As Mitt Romney "rebrands himself with authenticity," the voyage of discovery is going to make for all sorts of excitement. So let's hope this campaign happens.
In the meantime, Hawkeye State voters got their first good look at the majority of the field over the weekend at the Iowa Freedom Summit. You can find all of the speeches, in both text and video form, here. By my eyes, Scott Walker was very good. Ted Cruz came across as stronger-much stronger-than a lot of people realize. And don't look now, but Chris Christie was pretty great, too. Whatever the substantive criticisms are of Christie, the fact remains that he's an enormous political talent. He has plenty of real strategic weaknesses. But as a retail politician, he's in the very top tier of talent with perhaps one or two other Republicans.
That said, if you needed a reminder that political talent doesn't always win out, I direct your attention to this story about Jeb Bush speaking to the National Auto Dealers Association last Friday. By all accounts, Bush's speech went over well, but what jumped out at me was a line in the news coverage about Hillary Clinton having given a speech to the same group last year, where she admitted that "The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996."
At this point, I want to remind you about the 2012 exit polls. Here's Jonah Goldberg with a quick recap, in case you've forgotten:
[T]he only poll you need to know about was the exit poll of voters in 2012, which asked, "Which one of these four candidate qualities mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?"
Romney won three out of four. On "shares my values," Romney won 55 to 42. He won on "is a strong leader" 61 to 38. He took "has a vision for the future" 54 to 45.
But in the category "cares about people like me," Romney lost by a staggering 63 points (81 to 18).
This suggests that if the Democrats do indeed nominate the senator from Goldman Sachs, she'll be vulnerable at the most foundational level. Because someone who gleefully admits they haven't driven a car in what will be almost a quarter of a century simply is not like most Americans. To pick just one example, compare Clinton talking about not driving with Scott Walker talking about how he finds bargains at Kohl's.
Surveying the stage in Iowa this weekend, Clinton seemed more beatable than ever. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "For his departures from mainstream Republican prescriptions, Paul has emerged as a favorite among the left commentariat, which relishes his critique of American 'empire' and advocacy of 'noninterventionism.' The Atlantic's Robert Wright proclaimed 'The Greatness of Ron Paul,' asserting that those who fail to sympathize with the Iranian regime's quest for nuclear weapons lack the 'moral imagination' that Paul apparently possesses. In the Huffington Post, former labor secretary Robert Reich lauded Paul's 'youthful magic.' Wrote Reich, 'The young are flocking to Ron Paul because he wants to slice military spending, bring our troops home, stop government from spying on American citizens, and legalize pot.'
"Asking 'Why Do GOP Bosses Fear Ron Paul?' the Nation's John Nichols hailed the candidate's unabashed isolationism. 'Paul's notion of foreign policy is in line with [what] conservatives used to believe,' he wrote, citing those Republicans who opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies in the years leading up to World War II. Paul's strident isolationism has inspired that rarity: left-wing praise for the enemies of a president liberals revere as the greatest of the 20th century."
-James Kirchick, "A Radical's Radical" from our January 30, 2012, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | The casinos, the mob, and the missing millions.
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The death of Skymall: a national tragedy.
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Kevin Trudeau, the infomercial king, goes to jail. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune investing in real estate and betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics.
"'America's lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,' Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 'We need to reinvent our whole system of life.' . . .
"Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week, said he's planning a conference in Palm Beach, Florida, at the Tideline Hotel called 'Closing the Gap.'"
-Bloomberg News, reporting how economic elites view the rest of us, January 23, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | The New England Patriots are my guilty sports pleasure.
By all rights I should hate them-as should all men and women of good character born south of the Connecticut River. For starters, they're a bunch of cheats. And they win so often that they've become the NFL version of the New York Yankees. Rooting for the Pats is, as was once said of the Bronx Bombers, like rooting for Microsoft. Also, they harbored an actual murderer on the team! (Allegedly.) And even worse, they denied the Philadelphia Eagles their best shot at a championship in a generation. The Tuck Rule, Spygate, Aaron Hernandez-pretty much every criticism of the Patriots is true.
Yet while I don't root for New England, I'm something of a Patriots sympathizer. It isn't that I admire them-not exactly. But what they've done over the last 15 years is baffling and amazing, and I doubt very much that I'll see anything like it in football again. So against my better judgment, I appreciate them.
I appreciate the way they ruthlessly manage the salary cap. I appreciate the way they find value in the most unexpected places (such as Corey Dillon). I appreciate the way they marched through the 2008 season with Matt Cassel at quarterback, went 11-5, and missed the playoffs without bellyaching. I appreciate the way they then turned around and shipped Cassel out the door to stockpile early draft picks. And I just love the way Belichick mumbles and is so tight-lipped about player information that the NFL had to change requirements for practice and injury reports.
This last bit hints at what Belichick's greatness is built on. He's clearly a guy who is looking to hack the NFL at every opportunity. He saw that teams weren't strictly required to give early-week injury and practice reports, so he lied about player health, constantly, in an attempt to sow confusion among his opponents. Early on, he understood that NFL rules had evolved to make passing undervalued in the league. Today, his pass-first (and second, and third) theories are conventional wisdom. And I've always been convinced that Belichick had found other, subterranean, ways to hack the league. And today we have evidence that he did.
No, I'm not talking about Deflategate. (My buddy Steve Czaban has the definitive call on that. Short version: Yes, they did it. Long version: No, we shouldn't really care.)
I'm talking about this amazing breakdown of what the Patriots have done with regards to fumbling.
Sports stat-head Warren Sharp decided to look at fumbles in the NFL. What he found is that over the last five years, the average NFL team ran 105 offensive plays for every fumble they lost. The worst teams in the league ran 76 offensive plays for every lost fumble. The second-best teams ran 140 plays.
The 2015 New England Patriots ran 187 plays per lost fumble. Which, statistically speaking, is insane. This season's Patriots are such a black swan that, as data scientist John Candido explained to Sharp,
Based on the assumption that fumbles per play follow a normal distribution, you'd expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten over this period, once in 16,233.77 instances.
Which in layman's terms means that this result only being a coincidence, is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0000616 probability to win. Which in other words, [makes it] very unlikely that it's a coincidence.
It gets unlikelier still: After finding this outlier, Sharp went digging and expanded his search to the last 25 years. And when he ranked the teams, by season, by the highest number of offensive plays per lost fumble, four of the top six seasons recorded were by the Patriots. And the Patriots have led the NFL in the category in every five-year period since 2007.
This sort of thing doesn't happen by accident. It suggests that while the rest of the league was sleeping, Belichick was in his mad scientist laboratory looking for hidden points of leverage within the game and not only discovering them, but finding out a way to exploit them, too. Is this about deflated footballs? I very much doubt that 1.5 psi could account for such a gigantic disparity. In fact, Deflategate is probably the least likely explanation.
No, I suspect that what happened is that Belichick had the some stat-head do a big, Sabremetric work-up of football statistics and discovered that lost fumbles have a disproportionate impact on wins. And I suspect that after learning this, he made fumble rates a key metric in personnel decisions. And I suspect that he did further analysis on what types of plays are more likely to result in fumbles, and then altered his play-calling schemes accordingly. In short, I suspect that Belichick has been doing Moneyball in football without anyone else knowing it.
I respect the heck out of that. So I'll be almost-rooting for him and the Patriots this Sunday.
(Which is why the Seahawks will probably win by 27.)
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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