On Coming Up Short, Again

(Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

This was not the Dodgers year, rationally speaking.

They lost 40% of the planned starting rotation for the season in April because of injuries to Hyun-Jin Ryu and Brandon McCarthy. Jimmy Rollins underperformed. Joc Pederson fell off a cliff offensively after a great first half. Yasiel Puig was in and out of the lineup with various injuries and looked like a shell of the star we’d seen the previous two years.

Yasmani Grandal, the prized return in the Matt Kemp trade and one of the best-hitting catchers in the league to start the year, was 6-for-94 (!) to finish the season because of a left shoulder injury he played through. The bullpen was better than last year but never inspired a huge amount of confidence.

Change the Rules: Presidential Nominations

Jeb Bush speaks before the Iowa Agriculture Summit in March (Jim Young/Reuters).

What is it about Iowa and New Hampshire? What is so special about those two states that warrants them going first during every single presidential cycle?

Neither state is that particularly heavily populated. Iowa ranks 31^st among states, New Hampshire 42^nd, according to 2014 Census estimates. No city in either state has more than 220,000 people.

It’s not diversity either. Both states are considerably notably whiter than the rest of the nation. Iowa is 92.5% white and New Hampshire is 94.2%, compared to 77.7% for the country as a whole (*).

The actual reasons these two states get to go first is tradition and inertia. In Iowa’s case, a major factor was the availability of hotel reservations in Des Moines in 1972. New Hampshire has passed laws entrenching it as the first primary, and the national parties have never bothered to overrule them.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is not a good reason, and it’s not without consequence. Both states winnow the field considerably, typically eliminating all but three or four candidates before the vast majority of the other states get to weigh in. Not to mention a quadrennial boost in tourism, which has benefits that should be more evenly distributed among all states.

But Iowa and New Hampshire’s outsized influence is just one problem with our nomination process. As the presidential campaign gets underway, it’s worth reviewing the rules by which our next nominees will actually be picked. It is, like so many things in the American political system, a bizarre convoluted process. We can and should do much better.

Tweetstorm: Proportional Representation and the UK Election

I became mildly obsessed with United Kingdom general election during the last few weeks of the campaign. Unfortunately, the centre-right Conservative Party won a majority of seats in the House of Commons. I tweeted some things today about proportional representation and what the implications of implementing it in the UK would be:

Can Hillary Turn the Tide?

Hillary Clinton made clear what most have known for some time on Sunday: she will seek the presidency again in 2016.

Regardless of my own feelings on Clinton, she is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. A lot can happen in 18 months, but in my eyes, she is also a slight favorite in the general election against whoever wins the Republican nomination.

But if Clinton wins, she confronts a political landscape structurally hostile to the Democratic Party and progressive change. This dynamic must change is she wants to achieve anything beyond the incremental and infrequent victories that Barack Obama has been limited to since the 2010 elections.

Scott Walker, Donors, and Foreign Policy

Scott Walker hasn’t even formally announced he is running yet, but he is already a formidable presidential candidate. It’s early, but he has eclipsed Jeb Bush in the polls as the Republican frontrunner.

It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing though. Walker has made several eyebrow-raising remarks, seeming to compare ISIS terrorists with union activists and calling Ronald Reagan’s 1981 decision to fire the air traffic controllers “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime.”

Running Commentary: House of Cards, season 3

Netflix released the third season of House of Cards yesterday. Just for fun, I thought I'd do a running commentary of my reactions to each episode along of the lines of what my friend Mark did for the most recent season of Orange is the New Black. It might a couple weeks to get through all 13 episodes (1-4 so far), but I'll get there. Don't read if you want to stay un-spoiled. 

I talked about the second season of the show on an episode of The M&M Report last year.