Read Andrew Gelman, not Politico

Politico is the pleasure of the pundit-class. That being said, Andrew Gelman's site makes it rather clear that Politico is also US Weekly for politicians. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but their fixation on epiphenomenal froth should really have "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer. I'm picking on Politico because I don't want to crucify Howard Fineman again lest the dead shall rise to rebuke my abuse.

This post is prompted by Andrew's post, A Democratic swing, not an Obama swing:

I think Charlie Cook was closer to the mark when he wrote, "The political environment and momentum that Democrats seemed to have in recent months may have led to an unrealistic set of expectations. In this, perhaps we pundits share some blame." I don't think it makes a lot of sense to consider Obama's 53% "enormously impressive" and congressional Democrats' 56% a disappointment.

The data demolish the idea that voters in 2008 were pulling the lever for Barack but not for the Dems overall (not for "Nancy Pelosi," if you will).

Young pundits of diverse dispositions such as Will Wilkinson, Matt Continetti and Matt Yglesias are already brandishing data from Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. I believe that the new pundit class is naturally cognizant of the creative destruction wrought by the world wide web upon the marketplace of vacuous opining. It is simply trivially easy for anonymous individuals across the web to to produce a full-court saturation of Finemanesque stupidity which drives the per unit cost of drivel to $0.00. For example, a virtuosity of stupidity from D J Drummond:

The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition....

This is the tip of the iceberg as a colossus of hackery takes shape; an army of dunces is on the horizon. With the arrival of these legions capable of producing boneheaded punditry to satisfy the micro-targeted need for "conventional wisdom" among the mostly dull masses, there is going to be a market for those who can translate data & statistics into prose for individuals with a more discerning analytic palette. Next stop: Bayes Theorem.