In the flurry of mildly interesting disclosures from the Iranian military exercise this week, one is likely to be overlooked. Iranian state media report that on Friday, April 23, the Revolutionary Guard’s naval arm stopped two ships for inspection in the Strait of Hormuz. The ships, according to Iran’s Press TV, were French and Italian. The photo accompanying the story depicts a Kaman-class guided-missile patrol boat on which the boxy, Chinese-designed C802 anti-ship-missile launchers can be seen amidships. The stated purpose of the inspections was to verify “environmental compliance.”
The names of the foreign ships were not provided; sketchy details make it difficult to be certain exactly where in the strait they were stopped. But European ships — even private yachts — rarely venture outside the recognized navigation corridors in the Strait of Hormuz. If this news report is valid, it almost certainly means that Iran detained ships that were transiting those corridors.
That, as our vice president might say, is a big effing deal. That’s not because Iran has committed an act of war by intercepting these ships, as some in the blogosphere are speculating. The intercepts were not acts of war. The purpose of verifying environmental compliance is one Iran can theoretically invoke on the basis of its maritime claims lodged with the UN in 1993. Ironically, however, Iran has never signed the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS), the instrument by which the terms of its claims are defined. Many nations, of course, have yet to either sign or ratify UNCLOS, America being among them. In the meantime, world shipping has operated in the Strait of Hormuz for decades on the basis of UNCLOS’s definition of “transit passage,” which has customarily immunized ships in routine transit through straits against random intercept by the littoral navies (e.g., Iran’s or Oman’s).
Iran would be breaking with that custom by stopping ships for inspection in the recognized transit corridors. But this venue for a newly assertive Iranian profile is chosen well: stopping foreign ships that are conducting transit passage is uncollegial and inconvenient for commerce, but it is not clearly in breach of international law.
What it is, however, is an incipient challenge to the maritime regime enforced by the U.S., which includes the quiescent transit-passage custom on which global commerce relies. Mariners take care to observe the law as it is written, regardless of their nationality or national position on UNCLOS; but the guarantee of their unhindered passage isn’t international law, it’s the U.S. Navy. Demonstrations of force are required only rarely. Reagan put down revolutionary Iran’s only serious challenge to international maritime order back in 1988, in the final months of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, Iran has refrained from unilateral action against shipping in the recognized transit corridors of the strait.
It’s ingenious to use environmental inspection as a pretext for establishing a new regime of unilateral Iranian prerogative. Iran is probing the U.S. and the West with this move. Fortunately, for the time being, diplomacy is the ideal tool for making it clear to Iran that the U.S. won’t tolerate capricious interference with shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This initiative of Tehran’s must be nipped in the bud promptly, however. It can only escalate — and without pushback, it will.
Jennifer, Obama is the weakest Democratic candidate ever. Why is this not going to be a McCain landslide????
Don’t get too sanguine about Ohio. Apparently the Dems have done away with every voter registration requirement, including proof of identity, to be able to register in the state. They have been bound and determined to steal this state for eight years now and they just might pull it off this time.
If Rove is correct, then the V.P. should be either Romney or Cantor. Let’s go with Cantor and give the base something to cheer about.
“Are Michigan voters going to be impressed by a Berlin rally or will they roll their eyes in disgust?”
That sea of faces at the Tiergarten was really impressive, wasn’t it?
It must’ve been, because you mention it…a lot!
Be honest! If a turnout like that would’ve happened ANYWHERE for John McCain, we wouldn’t be able to count the campaign ads he would feature it in.
Pure jealousy, that’s all it is.
“the only number that matters is 270.– Jennifer Rubin”
Right you are (no pun intended). According to the electoral map at Pollster.com, Obama is at 284 today (224 solid blue, 60 strongly leaning Dem.) vs. McCain’s 154. If things stay this way, Obama will need none of the current toss-up states.
I agree that national polls are over-rated. The electoral map best shows the uphill climb McCain faces. This is reflected in the Intrade prediction market, which gives Obama a 61.1% chance of being elected to McCain’s 36.6%.
Final note: Remember that, right up through election night, Rove assured GWB that the pollsters were wrong and Republicans would prevail in the 2006 midterms. If you are “inclined to follow his advice,” you may be in for a rude awakening.
Liberal trolls are so easy to spot.
Raj- you must have lost a bundle on Intrade with your sophomoric analysis. Obama was AHEAD on Intrade in Indiana, Texas, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all in the days leading up to the votes. Before he LOST all of them..
As for Intrade- Giuliani and Clinton led by 25 points at one time 4 months before the voting started. How did that turn out?!
Karl Rove is not a man whose opinion is to be dismissed, pace Raj’s last paragraph. I think Rove, somewhat unintentionally, may have stumbled upon what is likely to happen in this election.
He pointed out that in most of the recent landslide elections, August polling numbers were a good predictor of the results; all except Reagan in 1980. I think that’s the model for 2008. I look at McCain as the incumbent Carter against a smooth-talking, graceful ideological challenger, Reagan. There was no break away until the last week(weekend?)when the public decided to take a chance on Reagan because of their sour mood and dissatisfaction with Carter.
We see this now. McCain has not gained. Obama has slipped slightly as the public takes a second(third/fourth)look at him. By November,like 1980, there could be a break away. My guess is the break will go to the young, graceful challenger who will receive the public’s benefit of the doubt in their disgust with Republicans and what I anticipate will be a lackluster and ineffective McCain campaign.
It’s the rightwing conservatives/noeconservative Republicans that hate America as it is,but they love America as it “should” be. America is now a prosocialist nation;the proof of that is the fact that the weakest democratic candidate ever is a socialist,and he may win. Why isn’t McCain way ahead if Americans despise Socialism? Maybe the Conservatives could try to pass a new Amendment to the constitution outlawing Socialism?
“Obama has slipped slightly as the public takes a second(third/fourth)look at him.”
The number one thing going for Obama is the color of his skin. There are many guilt tripped whites who wish to prove that “I’m not a racist.” This madness is unlikely to last until Election Day. As matter of fact, it should end shortly after Labor Day when a significant number of voters truly start paying attention.
Can any fan of the “prediction markets” point to a time when the contract final value usefully predicted anything? If you watch contract prices, they tend to follow the news, not anticipate it, and in that sense they’re classic lagging indicators. At the same time, the idea that a contract value of $61.10 “gives… a 61.1% chance” is at best a debatable hypothesis, perhaps an ideal, and is in any case belied by the extreme price volatility that’s a typical feature of thinly traded and highly speculative (in this case at leastly doubly “speculative”) markets.
In short, they’re conventional wisdom markets, skewed by underlying biases of different kinds (some having to do with the traders themselves, some having to do with mathematics). If, however, you insist on treating them as indicative of anything, the Intrade Obama to Win contract is well below its all-time high, in recent days having traded lower than at any time since Hillary suspended. You could argue that this price movement tends to confirm everything that observers like Ms. Rubin have been saying these last few weeks – not that Obama is no longer “the favorite,” but that his campaign hasn’t been very effective and has been giving off signals that reasonably ought to worry his supporters.
I personally wouldn’t make that argument, not because I disagree with the conclusion, but because I woudn’t expect anyone to be persuaded by prediction market evidence. I can look at Intrade and find support for my own preferences and prejudices, just as I can look at a collection of polls at pollster.com and “prove” to myself that everything will work out for the best as I see it, but both sets of opinion measurements have inherent problems, rely on faulty where not arbitrary premises and baselines, and are in different ways largely where not entirely backward-looking (some of the state polls incorporate volatile opinion sampling going back months).
Of course, the data can sometimes tell us things about trends and the relative impact of events, but for purposes of prediction on any matter that’s in any doubt, you’d do as well with a coin flip or maybe the Magic 8-Ball.
There are alot of things going. Even dead people are voting. Keep an eye of the Soros funded organization registering questionable new voters.
Nice to see that Jon S. and others are finally having their common sense views “officially” endorsed around here – i.e., that it’s electoral numbers that count.
Paul, I think you have your table-setting quite wrong in some respects.
I recall 1980 quite clearly. Lived in Washington, in your standard crowd of 100% liberal Dem young people. I don’t remember anyone, at any point, thinking Carter had a chance. The concept of the “late swing” is probably much more an artifact of the limits of polling than an actual phenomenon among voters.
As Jon S. and others have pointed out, the equivalent of “traffic analysis” in signals intelligence when applied to political polling is to spot any long-standing patterns that are broken. Obama’s failure to ever get the large standard challenger’s lead at any point is almost the only interesting polling info so far. I’d add to that his unprecedented (for the presumptive nominee, and in this case recipient of jaw-dropping media promotion/protection) annihilation in the PA and WV primaries. How one goes from all that – and Obama’s awful last two months – to the idea that he’s in the driver’s seat is beyond me.
The “young, graceful challenger” is hardly the image most voters have or will have of Obama by November. The inexperienced, arrogant, calculating guy with the bizarre friends/mentors, no foreign policy experience or apparent aptitude, and creepy cult campaign will face at best uncertain prospects among Reagan Democrat voters who hold the key to so many swing states (swing states that shouldn’t even be in play from Dem perspective).
As to McCain’s campaign, on personality comparisons he needs no fancy footwork to have a solid advantage with enough voters. On issues (less important in presidential campaigns, I think) he needs to stick to taxes, national security, and increasing oil supply. Talk about the winds blowing against the Dems – it’s hard to recall a year in which issues that actually are known to influnce voting behavior all touch on key Democratic weaknesses.
Your guess is as good as mine as to the direction of the “swing” – but I like my premises better ……
“Liberal trolls are so easy to spot.- LT JAF”
Powerful insight, especially since everyone around here knows how hard I try to disguise my partisanship. Easy to see why you are a LT and not a CPT or MJR.
“Raj- you must have lost a bundle on Intrade with your sophomoric analysis.”
Harsh. Mom and dad are going to be pissed that they wasted all that cheddar on my post grad statistics courses.
“As for Intrade- Giuliani and Clinton led by 25 points at one time 4 months before the voting started. How did that turn out?”
You mean markets are fallible? Remember that when you want to con people into sinking their Social Security savings into stocks. See, the thing about markets is not that they are always right about the future, but they tend to be more right on average. Hope that’s not too far over your head.
And since I apparently didn’t make the point clear enough for you, the significance of the Intrade spread (today’s consensus prediction), as I cited it, is that it tracks much better with the Obama advantage in the electoral map (large) that the Obama advantage in national polls (small). It therefore supports the argument, mine and Ms. Rubin’s, that the electoral map is more reflective than national polls of the state of the race.
Notably, you didn’t take any argument with this point: According to the electoral map at Pollster.com, Obama is at 284 today (224 solid blue, 60 strongly leaning Dem.) vs. McCain’s 154. If things stay this way, Obama will need none of the current toss-up states to reach 270 and be America’s next president. Woo hoo! Light up the Hopium pipes.
No, Raj. Are you being dishonest or do you suffer from dyslexia? What you call “strongly leaning Dem,” Pollster.com calls “lean.” They reserve the word “strong” for what you call “solid.”
If you take a look at one important example from your “strongly leaning,” their “lean” column, Ohio, you will see that the most recent polling data is from the end of July. Those polls happen to be very good ones for McCain, though the other polls that impact upon Pollster.com’s preferred measurement – regression analysis – go back to June and well beyond.
Ice Cold – always happy to read your contributions (start a blog!). The comparison between Reagan and Obama was also made by Sabato et al in their recent article, so pleasing to the Raj’s of the world, claiming that the election was nohwere near as close as most pundits and pollsters have been saying, and that in fact Obama was winning in a blowout. I guess it’s possible, but I found their analysis doubtful at best (except where they conceded that Obama is not, in fact, an Eisenhower-like figure – very deep). The comparison between Obama and Reagan is one of those content-free parallels that political “scientists” of a certain type are trained to look for. They can’t he’p it – though you’d think that even they would find the premise “IF Carter = McCain and Obama = Reagan…” just a bit too laughable. As for Mr. Zisserson, he may be a candidate for Prozac, Wellbutrin, or the Mel Brooks DVD collection.
CK MacLeod,
Dude, have you ever taken a finance or economics course?
You said: “If you watch contract prices, they tend to follow the news, not anticipate it,”
Market prices change in reaction to unanticipated news. How do you anticipate surprises? They are a reflection of all currently known information.
Someone better tell Warren Buffett that stock prices are not forward looking and do not incorporate predictions of things like future cash flows and costs of capital. This is not good news.
Raj, I traded stocks and futures professionally for several years. You seem to be unable to comprehend the difference between “incorporat[-ing] predictions” and meaningfully or usefully making predictions, just as you seem to be incapable of reading the plain language in a web site’s home page or of understanding what it means to take an average of (or perform a regression analysis) of polling data.
Warren Buffett made his fortune by buying when everyone was selling, and he retained his fortune among other things by plodding along when everyone else was in a frenzy of buying. If he’d followed your model, he’d be a poor schlub like the rest of us.
CK MAcLeod: “Are you being dishonest or do you suffer from dyslexia? What you call “strongly leaning Dem,” Pollster.com calls “lean.”’
MORONIC!
Do you really want me to qualify my remark that by “strongly lean,” I mean a lead between the 68% and 95% confidence intervals — and if I don’t do this, I am dishonest or dyslexic? All of the states have a lean. If it is a significant lean, pollster calls it leaning. I called it strongly leaning. I would use the same terminology for McCain’s results. This a blog comment, not a dissertation, you putz, and even if it were, why should I precisely parrot Pollster’s terminology. You get the point, and the point is accurate: Pollster says 284 Dem 154 Rep 100 toss up (Alaska moved from Republican lean to toss up in the last few days.)
CK MacLeod: “Warren Buffett made his fortune by buying when everyone was selling, and he retained his fortune among other things by plodding along when everyone else was in a frenzy of buying. If he’d followed your model, he’d be a poor schlub like the rest of us.”
Concrete proof of your ignorance. That’s the difference between traders, which you apparently were, and investors. Read anything Buffett has ever written. His influences were Ben Graham and Charlie Munger. Buffett is primarily a buy and hold investor. The key metric he uses is discounted cash flow. This is how he determines if a stock is over or under priced. It would be fruitless if the stock price weren’t a reflection of future estimates of DCF. Markets are forward looking. Amazing that I have to explain this to a conservative.
You are now officially embarrassing yourself.
No, Raj, to me it’s obvious that, if I’m going to refer to Pollster.com for authority, I should employ terminology that honestly reflects Pollster.com’s qualifications rather than inserting my own biases. It appears to me that the authors at that site are less credulous than you are regarding their own numbers.
And, yes, I’m rather aware that you are writing blog comments, not a dissertation. My arguments regarding the backward-looking bias of pollster.com’s numbers stand un-contradicted. If it makes you feel better to cling bitterly to a national “snapshot” that happens to be based on a shaky 3 – 6 month exposure, that’s your affair I guess. If the rest of us choose to point out why it’s not likely to be an accurate picture of current opinion, even on pollster.com’s own terms much less on the one’s you choose to impose, you’ll just have to cling all the more tightly I guess.
CK, I may indeed need some of the medication you cite(I don’t understant the Mel Brooks reference), but not because of my analysis. IceCold, in the 1980 I wasn’t around young lefties. My friends and associates were mixed and all saw a close race, verified by the polls that so many of you folks dismiss. I clearly remember the weekend before(or two) an NBC electoral map that started to change from tossups to Reagan and, for the first time during that campaign, I became optimistic. In other words, that election broke late. I don’t know of any analyst–right or left–that disagrees with that.
On this comparison between Regan and Obama. Sure, we are all Reganites now, but we either have surpressed some unpleasant memories of him or have forgotten. He was considered, like Obama, the shallow candidate and often he made rhetorical gaffes that he had to spend precious time correcting; remember all the ridicule of his being nothing more than a movie star who desperately depended upon his cue cards(a criticism that followed him throughout his terms). He, like Obama, could be ineffective in impromtu press conferences. Whether these were the creations of a hostile media is irrelevant. They were perceptions that were out there and caused the public to withhold their support until they had to make a decision on election day and Carter and the Democrats were more risky to continue in office than what was perceived as an B movie actor!
McCain is a well know public figure. In a sense, this makes him the incumbent. And like most contests, if the incumbent cannot poll around 50%, he’s in trouble. McCain is stuck in the low 40s–in many states, not just nationally. The public knows him well, but does not want him! It is waiting to be convinced that Obama, like Reagan, is worth the risk. Obviously my parallel’s conclusion will have to wait until election day, but the table is being set for a 1980, only in reverse of what many of us “Contention” folk desire.
Raj, that you seem to believe that your description of Buffett’s methodology in any way contradicts my description is typical of your tendency to turn facts into “factoids.” You still don’t understand the difference between reflecting or attempting predictions (i.e., being forward-looking) and making predictions (having the gift of prophecy).
Like any other investor or trader, Buffett has at some point to believe that his wisdom is superior to the market’s.
You must not realize how nonsensically self-contradictory that paragraph is. If the markets were accurately “forward-looking,” then there would be no over- or under-pricing for Warren Buffett ever to have exploited. The very term “over-priced” contains the assumption that the market price is in the only critical ($) sense wrong – that its implicit “prediction” (value based on expected returns of the underlying asset) is inaccurate.
Show an ability to respond to arguments directly, and to avoid petty jibes, or I’ll just go back to ignoring you.
Guess all this talk about 1980 got me thinking back, Paul. I just thought that a bit of Mel Brooks might bring you out of the dumps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH2nQHPs4aA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I
If you prefer the narcotics, that’s up to you or I suppose a professional…
Thank you, IceCold, for remembering my posts about the Electoral College being the only game in town. Even if the nationwide head to head polls were unbiased, they would still be meaningless other than to point out trends, and the trend here is discouraging for Obama. If the media memes were correct about this being such a great Democratic year, then he’d be well ahead of McCain, in the 7-10% range at least. That the two are statistically tied — especially considering the fact that most polls are heavily skewed toward the Dems by having more D’s and D-leaners by anywhere from 8-25%! — is the #1 takeaway from the pre-convention polling.
CK, you’re feeding the trolls again, but I sympathize: sometimes you need to jump in and tamp down the rabid nonsense. Raj seems to think that a bunch of folks trading on the conventional wisdom as bandied about by the MSM and then placing bets on that tired political wisdom is somehow akin to trading commodities. It isn’t. Intrade was right in 2004, but they were wrong last year when they picked Hillary to be the Dem’s nominee. Oooops!
Paul Z, my friend, it seems that you are bound and determined to ignore any good news that doesn’t fit your defeatist narrative. When the nationwide polls showed Obama ahead by more than the margin of error, you cited that as evidence of a big problem for McCain. Now that the polls are much tighter, you ignore them.
Let me give you just one example from Rove’s four states: Virginia.
Obama is counting on newly registered voters, at least 60,000 by his count, to put him over the top here — but new registrants rarely seem to turn out on Election Day in sufficient numbers to switch states from red to blue or vice-versa. And neither do young voters, whose share of the November vote is always much less than their share of the primary vote. But let’s look at the primary: of the 350,000 Virginia Dems who voted for Hillary, how many of these votes will go to the Anointed One? He’s going to lose a bunch of them for sure; my guess is at least 15-20% will either stay home or cross over for McCain (this number is below the % shown in at least 3-4 major polls). If I’m right, that could be as many as 70,000, more than the number of new Dem registrants the Obama campaign is counting on.
South of the James River, it’s all McCain country. That’s nearly 40% of the vote.
Finally, let’s remember that party ID nearly always favors Dems, in some elections in the last 30 years by as much as 12-15%! Right now the probable Dem lead is about 7-8% in terms of party ID. So clearly simply looking at party ID doesn’t do much for us political junkies: what counts more than party ID, since R’s have won so many elections while being out-ID’d? It’s values and issues, of course, combined with things like leadership expectations, experience, can I relate to the candidate (ie, is he like me?), and so on. Not party ID. This is why I and commenters here like CK, IceCold, JE Dyer, and others see a clearcut McCain edge.
Oh, and as for VA: I’m guessing he’ll take the state by a comfortable 4-6% margin.
I agree with Rove that VA, MI, OH and CO are the four main battlegrounds but I don’t agree with his analysis.
He assumes that McCain will keep all of the states Bush won so that Obama has to win either CO or VA and MI.
It seems pretty clear that Iowa will go blue and most probably NM.
So McCain needs to win 3 of the 4 states Rove mentions and at least split NV and NH.
All possible but not easy.
Point taken, Jon S, but since Raj was awarded “Commentary of the Day” just yesterday, an attention engorgement one might expect to last a month at least, I felt that a special tamping-down effort was probably justified, and in any event was unlikely to do much more harm than had already been done.
Raj was awarded that for his poor job making his case and coming across as uninformed. He was given the hannityesque role of highlighting losing arguments.
It is akin to fox news finding stupid angry black men to interview for what ever reason possible.
Or that fat head on CNN acting like a jerk to supposedly represent the right.. but people just hate him.
CK, thanks for those clips. Mel Brooks really had the creative juices flowing for his early movies. I’ve watched “Blazing” a number of times and seem to laugh equally hard each viewing. Good to see Terri Garr(who I understand is ill). She alone is medication for a funk.
Raj,
the more you argue with MacLeod about statistics, the more it become apparant why Munson singled you out for ridicule on his first “comment of the day” article. You know absolutely nothing about statistics, while McLeod is obviously an expert. Angry, arrogant and stupid is no way to go through life, son.