Via Greg Sargent, Ben Smith has a fascinating piece about Hitler-stached pundit Larry Sabato’s pork-barrel prognosticating:
The race that took Sabato by surprise was close to home: In Virginia’s 5th Congressional District — which includes Sabato’s University of Virginia Center for Politics, in Charlottesville — a young, long-shot Thomas Perriello defeated the courtly, six-term Virgil Goode by the slimmest of margins.
Goode had been more than just a congressman to Sabato. The men are friends dating back to their college days, and Goode was also a benefactor, sending earmarks of up to $1.4 million per year to an educational program run out of the Center for Politics. With Goode’s defeat, that funding abruptly dried up. This year, Perriello rejected the center’s application for $1 million, and Sabato’s aides are scrambling to find an alternate source of money.
[….]But as polls suggested the race was tightening, and as Charlottesville mobilized to vote for Obama, the Crystal Ball held the line: “How optimistic should Democrats be? That remains to be seen. But if history is any predictor: not very,” the tipsheet stated Oct. 28, putting the race in its safer category: “likely Republican.”
It was, Sabato pronounced Nov. 3, a “Republican hold.”
It gets better: one of Sabato’s employees is thinking of running against Perriello and Sabato is whining about how “I say what I think, and if it costs us money, it costs us money.”
Predictions of victory from the likes of Sabato are no small thing. They influence insider chatter, which has a real impact on endorsements and fundraising and can swing a contest’s outcome.
[….]This is a classic example of the ways in which the lines slowly get blurred in Washington and of the ways in which the interests of incumbents and D.C. inside-game types intersect and reinforce each other.
Every time I see an “expert” on tv, I google the person to see who is paying for their services. A lot of time, it’s immediately obvious who the john is. But some escort services are more discreet than others.
Glocksman
Isn’t Sabato the author of Dirty Little Secrets?
This is one secret I didn’t read in the book. :)
geg6
Back in my undergrad days, as a political science major I couldn’t escape Larry Sabato. He wrote the texts for American Political Process I and II and we had his texts in an upper level electoral politics class and another on statistical modeling and polling analysis. He was the gold standard. Looks like he’s gotten fat, happy, and Villagerlike. Shame that.
Balconesfault
Reminds me of the recent comment in congress – I’ve heard it attributed to Ron Paul – that Congressmen should wear Nascar-jerseys with their sponsors logos on them.
Perhaps pundits should, as well.
Balconesfault
Oh – and earmarks were cancelled because Goode lost, eh?
This is clearly a good thing for John McCain.
John Cole
I had Sabato texts as an undergrad, too.
Johnny B. Guud
That was hysterical!…
That would sum it up.
BruinKid
As a grad student, this concerns me, because it probably means some grad students there who are doing work for the Center will lose their jobs, and some may be forced to drop out of grad school because they can’t get funding.
We’re facing similar problems here in the UC system.
Yutsano
Stupid question: if the earmark was that important to his center, why didn’t Sabato simply request it from Perriello? I mean political pride is one thing but at the end of the day business is business. Did Sabato just expect Perriello to hand it over without comment like Goode apparently did? In other words, how, exactly, is this loss of funding Periello’s fault?
Ked
Not that war, crimes of war, genocide, and all the other evil things the guy did aren’t worse, but it’s just awful how he totally ruined a perfectly reasonable facial-hair style for the forseeable future.
linda
wonder what kind of polling he did on earmarks. he always struck me as a hack.
DougJ
He did, and didn’t get it.
I wouldn’t fund it. If they don’t adopt reasonable standards of disclosure (not weighing in on races involving Congressmen who fund the project), they really shouldn’t be funded. Plus, if it’s so worthwhile they should be able to get money from non-earmark sources.
Martin
We’re facing entirely larger problems in the UC system since there’s a very good chance that you’ll see entire schools vanish at some campuses. I mean, do we need 9 engineering schools, or could the system save some bucks by closing the one at Santa Cruz? Or the Arts program at Riverside? Or the Computer Science program at Irvine?
Truly, that’s the only way that the system can retain its reputations given the budget cuts. Grants are a minor problem right now, to be honest.
And domestic grad students are going to lose out because there’s a push to bring in more international students. That takes the fee burden off of the state budget by eliminating their subsidy and onto faculty grants. That’ll mean fewer dollars to go around to the domestic students, and they’ll be increasingly on their own for support.
Yutsano
Thanks DougJ. I was wondering why this whole thing wasn’t adding up in my head. You’re right, anything university-based should be able to get an outside funding source easily. Or they don’t know how to lean on their trustees.
Crap, now I want to get Nate Silver to do some polling analysis on Periello’s chances now.
DougJ
Not easily, necessarily, but it should go through a grant-review process, not be pushed through by a Congressman crony.
mistermix
Sorry to hear this. First Rothenberg, now Sabato. I guess Charlie Cook is the only trustworthy political analyst left.
$1.4 mil/year is a huge number considering Sabato doesn’t do any independent polling (at least that I know of).
geg6
I honestly had no idea he’d become such a hack. But I do remember being rather puzzled by a lot of his analysis during last year’s election. It didn’t jive with my own analysis, which is still, in part, based on concepts I learned from Larry Sabato. Shoulda known he’d become a corrupt piece of shit. Very disappointing.
amocz
Er…I think that Mr. Sabato’s facial decoration is what is commonly known as a “pr0n-stache”, rather than a “Hitler-stache”.
Since I had neither seen nor heard of the man prior to this post, I just had to google him up to see what you were referring to. (Unless, that is, the linked photo represents an obsolete look for him; teh gazoogle has a lot of pictures of the guy, but they pretty much all look like this one.)
Mike in NC
Me, neither. The WaPo really venerated Larry Sabato’s prognostications. Interesting that he had his nose so far up the ass of “courtly” Virgil Goode, that dumb redneck bigot.
Yutsano
It makes a lot more sense now if you put the WaPo in the context of firing Froomkin. In other words they want to be FoxNewsPrint.
DougJ
Not bushy enough.
Anne Laurie
I first read that idea some 20 years ago, in a Calvin Trillin column, although I don’t remember whether Trillin attributed the original theory to someone else. Still a worthy concept, however many times it’s been invented!
Gawker also ran a mean, funny piece about Sabato, getting more specific about ex-Congersthing Goode’s career:
Pundit Will Call Race in Your Favor for Money
AhabTRuler
I only just now noticed the title; absolutely fookin’ brilliant Doug J. And since we are all you, er, me, er, us, that is, I will now pat us on the back for our brilliance!
burnspbesq
Jack Pitney, who was a year ahead of me in undergrad school and teaches at Claremont, is the Sabato of California politics. I find his pontificating insufferable.
Death By Mosquito Truck
Fuckers.
Warren Terra
Thanks for linking to the Gawker piece, Anne; good answer to the “courtly” guff, for one thing, and the “butler” riff puncturing Sabato’s elevated status was funny – if perhaps unfair, as many academic institutions with multimillion dollar budgets have press officers, though they’re not usually described as spokepeople for the boss individually, nor are they normally so distinguished as to plausibly contemplate a run for Governor.
It should also be noted that, while everyone is talking about Sabato and Goode, Piriello is an interesting character in his own right, in particular his foreign aid and community service experience and his mandate that 10% of volunteer time be tithed to charity work. There have been a couple of profiles of him in The American Prospect (iirc): one just after the election about his unusual campaign, and one in the current issue about how he and a Republican are each settling in as the most intereating freshmen in their respective parties. I’d search them out and link, but I’m browsing by phone, with limited capabilities.
DougJ
Thanks. I was quite proud of this one myself.
Warren Terra
Er, Congress, not Governor. Sorry.
JasonF
Back in my days as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in the early 90s, we referred to hm as “Meda Whore Larry Sabato.” Never stand between Larry Sabato and a TV camera or you’re liable to get trampled.
Arr-squared
Need a quote?
Never tarry.
Call UVA,
Ask for Larry.
ice9
Yeah, I gagged at “courtly” myself. When I knew Goode in the VA senate in ’76, he was a rebel Democrat, young gun, putting his boots up on the desk and joshing with us pages. Fast forward 30 years and he’s a homophobic paranoid Christer who tried to raise money with scurrilous attacks on Keith Ellison–one of the ugliest of the ugly cheap tricks I ever saw in politics, and not by any definition ‘courtly.’ Much was enjoyable on election night, but the greatest joy for me was watching Goode go down. And sure, it’s UVA–no Hokie can ever quite trust Charlottesville–but it’s also Monticello and the great legacy of Virginia liberal radical democracy. Goode and Sabato can find honest work now.
ice9
CalD
In 2006 I kept a spreadsheet of Pundit predictions for House races and then did a scorecard once the results were in. Out of 78 districts considered at least marginally competitive by at least two of the following 6 analysts/publications:
Sabato’s Crystal Ball and National Journal Hotline tied for first place with 60 correctly leaned races.
Stuart Rothenberg came in a close second with 59.
(My Meta-average of all six sources scored 58.)
Evans-Novak Political Report got 56 right.
Congressional Quarterly turned in a rather dismal 50.5 (I was awarding half a point for any race rated as pure toss-up if the election results were within one percent.)
Cook Political Report brought up the rear with 47.
In Cook’s defense, their stated policy of rating no race with an incumbent standing for reelection as more competitive than Leans [Incumbent Party] would probably work better most years than it did in a realignment year like 2006.