“Politics as Lived” versus “Politics as Is”

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7 Responses

  1. Will says:

    Damn. Good post.Report

  2. This sounds exactly right to me, Jamelle.Report

  3. Jamelle says:

    I kind of feel like I might be stating the obvious here though.Report

  4. Klein says:

    Gonna hop on the “great post” bandwagon.

    This might be over-analyzing, but I find Ambinder’s comment more interesting when I think about the author himself and his rather successful blend of reporting on both the trite and the substantive issues of the day. He’s so…earnest?…that even when reporting on a stupid unattributed quote and whatnot it usually takes the shape of a serious-minded outsider taking a peek at the bedlam, even though he is very much a part of the DC politi-pundit scene. Perhaps he himself doesn’t like the book for precisely the reason he projects to political scientists. If you’ve seen any of the video convos he’s done with Sullivan et al then you’ve seen a very keen mind at work, one that (probably) ultimately doesn’t dig the sycophant/stenographer/inside fantasy baseball stuff like Game Change.

    Which means his parents fed him too many vegetables. Not enough trips to the circus, &c.Report

  5. mike farmer says:

    What books like Game Change can tell political scientist is that our present political system attracts some of the worst characters in our society and rewards their character defects.Report

  6. finzent says:

    ” At basic, elections are determined by the fundamentals: the economy, incumbency, population distributions etc, and the vast majority of presidential elections can be predicted by the macro-factors.”

    That’s probably right, but it doesn’t really hold for primaries, does it? (At least not nearly to the same extent). Given that primary candidates are ideologically very much closer to one another than presidential candidates, it seems pretty reasonable to expect the way their campaigns are conducted to have some impact on who gets to be president in the end.Report