Congratulations, Dennis!!!  Sounds like a great and important book.  Can't wait to read it.  

And it's so great to see you on Ricochet!

And thank you, Peter.  That is a nice tribute to John.  He deserves it.

One reason is that it's very hard to show that campaign money is a quid pro quo.  Jeff Milyo, an economist at the Univ. of Missouri and my frequent coauthor, has written lots on this.  He has convinced me that people strongly overstate the degree to which campaign funds are quid pro quos.  

But this article provides some interesting evidence - perhaps most astounding the Kennedy quotes - that lots of the Obama campaign money is buying something.

The other reason is that the story comes from the NY Times!!!!  As my research shows, it has a strong liberal bias.  I'd bet that less than 5% of its reporters voted for McCain - and it's probably more like 1 or 2 percent.  I suspect that a few liberals are learning of the cronyism and getting disgusted with it.  That strikes me as big news.  

(However, I must say.  Immediately after seeing the story, I checked Intrade.  Obama's chances of reelection have not fallen.  Maybe bettors don't think it's big news.)

Mr. Gilley, you are a genius.

This is one of my main issues with Nominate - that before the early 1930s, it really doesn't measure what we nowadays call conservative and liberal.  Eg. suppose you take Nominate scores estimated only with votes from, say, 1933, and you do the same with votes from, say, 1928.  Next, list all the legislators who served in both 1928 and 1933.  It turns out that the legislators' 1928 and 1933 Nominate scores won't correlate very highly.  

This is evidence, I believe, that a "Grand Re-Alignment" in politics occurred in the late 1920s or early 1930s - that coalitions and the labels we use to describe ideology changed significantly.

It also explains, I believe, why Nominate counterfactually shows Democrats becoming less liberal during the period you mention - Nominate's not really measuring "liberalness" in the late 1920s.

Excellent point, Peter.  For the sake of argument, let's assume that gay-marriage issues received no votes in Congress before the late 1990s.  In the first roll call vote on gay marriage, suppose people like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank -- people whom Nominate had prior deemed liberal (based on issues besides gay marriage) -- voted in favor of gay marriage, and people whom Nominate prior deemed conservative voted against gay marriage.  Then Nominate would deem the pro-gay-marriage side "liberal" and the anti-gay-marriage side "conservative."

Some issues won't fit the liberal-conservative line segment that Nominate estimates.  E.g. this was very true with civil rights issues during the 1960s.  For this reason, the Nominate authors sometimes estimate two (or more) dimensions for Nominate.  They note that since the early 1980s, the one-dimensional framework predicts votes very well.  They argue there is little need since the early 1980s to estimate multiple dimensions for Nominate.

After the Nominate computer program estimates all the points on the line, the authors notice that people we usually call very conservative -- e.g. Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint -- are on one end of the line segment, and people we usually call very liberal -- e.g. Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank -- are on the other end of the line segment.  Seeing this, the authors reasonably conclude that Nominate has estimated how liberal or conservative legislators are.  

So, a shorthand way of saying what "conservative" and "liberal" mean with Nominate is simply, "they are just clumps of legislators that tend to vote similarly."  Although that definition sounds artificial, it does correlate very strongly to what pundits say when they call legislators "conservative" or "liberal."  Also, for what it's worth, Nominate scores are very highly correlated with the "Political Quotients" that I estimate for my book.  (Click here for details and a quiz that allows you to compute your own Political Quotient.)

Excellent question.  In the next few comments, I'll try to explain how Nominate defines conservatism and liberalism, and perhaps some caveats we should apply to the NPR claim.  

First, Nominate does not use the substance of bills to define conservatism and liberalism.  The data is just a bunch of 1's a 0's, indicating whether members of Congress voted yea or nay.  To construct the scores, the authors do not even read the text of the legislation.

Nominate constructs a line segment - where every legislator is represented by a point on the line.  Also, every issue -- i.e. every yea and nay alternative that was ever considered in Congress -- is also represented by a point on the line.  Every legislator is assumed to vote for the issue (i.e. point on the line) that is closest to the point that represents himself.  The Nominate computer program chooses points on the line to best predict votes.

Go Bucks!!! ( I used to teach there.)  Thanks, Ursula, for that awesome fact!

I scored 49.  The college professor in me pulled me in the low direction.  But the fact that I grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas pulled me in the high direction.  (Not only is it a small, blue-collar town, it's only a half day's drive from Branson.)  Bill Clinton grew up in the same town.  I bet he'd score about the same.  I bet Obama would score about half as high as Clinton.  Great post.  Thanks, Rob!

Although it's a separate question, I predict he will withdraw.  On Fox News Ed Rollins just advised Gingrich to do that.  According to Intrade.com, Newt's chance of winning the nomination is 0.6%.  (To compute that, I used the average of the bid and ask prices.)  By that measure, his chance is about 1/8 that of Santorum and about 1/2 that of Ron Paul.  More amazing, his chances are about half those of Jeb Bush, and he is essentially tied with Chris Christie and Sarah Palin.

I'm watching the pre-race show right now, and the announcers mentioned some of your points - but also omitted lots.  Wow.  Great stuff.  Thanks!

I gotta agree: No one sings the song as well as Carrie Underwood.  Except maybe Elvis. 

I think I'll concede your point.  Related, I should probably inform readers that you probably won't be able to find Velveeta in the cheese section.  It does not need to be refrigerated. So it's usually in a different section. An argument can be made that it's better than cheese!

The betting markets now say that Daniels has a 1.5% probability of being the Republican nominee.  He's actually in fourth place, slightly ahead of Santorum. 

I'd love for him to point the way!  Two more things:  1) I love your phrase from an earlier post, "America is my office."  Sounds like a great title for a book.  2) In your posts, I wish you'd give more details about where you're writing from.  Today, my guess was somewhere along I-40, well west of OKC. But perhaps it was east of OKC, maybe near that McDonalds with all the Troy Aikman memorabilia on the walls. Wish I knew.