starting up

its blogger. here i am ... what do i have to say? Let's start here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/phase-two/ I love when people draw statistical conclusions from such small samples. Presidential elections seem to invite this sort of analysis - they happen every four years, or to look at it another way, there have been only 10 in the last 40 years. Having said that, the 2000 campaign really stands out as a crappy job by the incumbent party. The only ones below the line with anywhere near that poor a performance are 1968 and 1976. Given that Viet Nam and Watergate were the two biggest political disasters of 20th century america, what does that say about Al's campaign? Not much. But, I think Kerry ran a worse campaign. Given a big fat target, he whiffed. Everyone blames the swift boating, but I think that was overrated. If he had made Bush the issue, it wouldn't have mattered at all.