As for “the Iraq War debate” in the U. S., I missed that. Did we have one? All that happened was that the Congress officially ceded the power to declare war to the President.

To verify a probability distribution you need several, ideally many, samples. In prognostication you only get one. So if I say that a future event will occur with probability .001% and that event occurs, I can say I wasn’t wrong, it just so happened that an improbable event occurred.

I suppose we might be able to use a number of wrong probability predictions to get a broad estimate on pundit accuracy, but this would be difficult because they’re estimating a different distribution with each prognostication.

How about simply ‘the entire CFR’?

From the movie: “It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.” “What elements?” “Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.”

I don’t have the graphic novels to hand, but the major villain in Planetary explains that he and his associates are old, powerful, and get bored, so they’re letting the heroes provide a challenge, but mustn’t get to thinking that they can actually win.

I think this is the sort of framework in which American punditry makes sense. It’s there to entertain. A good story needs some drama and surprises. But people don’t go to see romantic comedies and expect many potential couples to end miserably and apart, nor to action movies to see heroes suffer pointlessly and then die as villains triumph. Punditry serves various audiences that want to feel like there’s a basic legitimacy and reliability in American politics, and that includes a measure of real challenge but no more than a measure. Contrarianism is most welcome to the sponsors and target audiences when it ends up reaffirming how good we’ve got it.

Immediately after the record-breakingly narrow 2000 Presidential election George Will poo-pooed the very idea of mandate and proposed that Bush act as if he had one, and Bush was very successful in doing so. By Will’s standards Obama did have a mandate, and by everyone else’s standards he had a reasonable claim to having a mandate. But lo!— the standards for mandates had miraculously changed since 2000. If Obama had gotten 60% of the votes and 99% of the electoral votes, he still wouldn’t have had a mandate.

Which would have been fine with him, since changing things was not his goal.

Lazy writing. At least twenty individuals should have been named, starting with William Kristol, James K. Glassman, and Kevin Hassett. Or you could just have written “fifty to a hundred major conservative pundits.”

There was, in fact, terrific and groundbreaking work done before the 2008 election, not least Nate Silvers 538.com, and some of the opinion poll analysis at Pollster.com.

There’s a clear distinction between people like Nate and the Pollsters who may (or may not) have an identifiable sympathy towards one political wing, but who attempt to make their methodology clear and transparent, and those who are basically engaged in rhetoric and/or spin.

Silver/538’s work was testable – he was putting up clearly falsifiable forecasts, and his final forecast wasn’t just pulled out of the air, it was backed up by months of updated analysis and data (I especially enjoyed the field reports from Republican and Democrat campaign teams in the different states. The enthusiasm gap was clear, but again there was no attempt that I could see to present the best of one side and the worst of the other).

They certainly shouldn’t challenge basic precepts of American public debate such as the awesomeness of US world leadership
Reminds me of Steve Walt’s ten commandments for ambitious policy wonks.