Larry Sabato is not on the Board of CCP, he is on the Board of Academic Advisors. If you’ve read what Sabato has said and written over the years on campaign finance, you’ll see that he’s strongly deregulation. And, in fact, if you really read Sabato more generally, you’d know he’s not a Dem shill. In any case, suffice it to say that I asked Larry to be on the Board of Academic Advisors, and suffice it to say that while we value his expertise on the issues that concern us, he has no role in the management of the organization. That’s not what academic advisors do.

The point of Sean’s posts, as I read them – is that we need to be careful of making accusation without good evidence, and careful of assuming that allegations are proven without better evidence. Your post about Sabato having great influence at CCP indicates that indeed you don’t understand that.

Here, Obama’s guilt seems (for most) to be assumed, and the demand here is that he prove it isn’t true. I’m not a journalist, but that doesn’t sound like investigative journalism to me.

That said, investigate away. I’ve called Obama on enough stuff, but I’ve usally waited until I knew what the facts were.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

To recap:

Point 1: Car dealers are overwhelmingly Republican. Thus, if you’re going to be closing dealerships, by definition you’re going to be closing an awful lot of GOP dealerships. This is not different than noting that if you’re hiring for an NBA basketball team, you’re hiring an awful lot of tall people.

Zero Hedge, linked to at the top of this diary, provides the following numbers in her table: Dem dealers, 244, GOP dealers, 514. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like the 2:1 ratio I refer to in my post.

Point 2, admittedly less powerful than the above point, minority owned dealers took the same hit as non-minority owned dealers on a proportional basis. If the Obama folks were using political criteria to close down their opponents, they probably (but not necessarily) would have taken a lesser hit.

And I have looked at the data. I’m not saying it’s not worth looking into. I’m saying it’s foolish to make the accusation before you have any real evidence, only theories. It’s also worth noting that we are looking at a grand total of 53 Clinton donor dealerships out of a total of roughly 3,000 dealerships. Does that suggest to you that a the movement of a few numbers one way or the other could change the results? If 25% of all dealers were supposed to be closed, that means on a randomly assigned basis you could expect 13.25 Clinton dealerships would be closed. What if only 8 were? Wow, only 15%, meaning a 40% ‘advantage’ to Clinton dealers!

When small number shifts make big changes to the results, you’ve got problems saying anything other than “there may be something here, or there may not be.” Which is somewhat short of “Obama’s guilty.”

Also, define “bulk of” and “democratic donors.” Because ‘bulk of” says half or more to me, which really isn’t possible when you look at the numbers. And “democratic donors” – looking at the zero hedge data, are you excluding Obama and other democratic donors from your definition of democratic donors, and only counting Clinton donors as democratic donors? Because what zero hedge’s data show (if it’s accurate) is that Dem and Obama donors don’t seem to have been treated any differently, only possibly Clinton donors.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

Now we’re discovering that the bulk of the people being closed are Republican donors while the bulk of the people *not* being closed are Democratic donors.

This statement is directly refuted by the Zero Hedge article being presented in the main post. They consider exactly the question of whether Republican (or Democratic) donations affect the likelihood of a dealership being closed, and find that it has no effect.

I don’t think that is an irrelevant point, and raising it is not “airy fairy dismissal”. Accuracy is valuable, as is well stated in this old EPU diary. Framing a debate and advocacy is important, but correctness has its place as well.

Yeah, that Ed Crane, he’s a real Dem shill…

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

At first glance, this bears investigation, wouldn’t you agree? Imagine if this was being done under the auspices of a Republican Administration and Democratic donors with excellent sales records were being closed while their less praise-worthy Republican competitors were being shut down? Would the Press be on it?

Now, if you want to know the reason why everyone is obviously thinking that you’re an obtuse idiot, it is the fact that you’ve offered no evidence that you’ve looked through any of the information gathered. The only thing coming from your direction so far is an airy fairy dismissal of the entire thing (i.e. “move along … nothing to see here”) while repeating Nate Silver’s wholly inadequate talking point as if it were the gospel truth.

That’s it. Thanks.

May your stay at RedState be as productive for you as it was for them.

For someone who allegedly “participate[s] in public policy discussions all the time,” and doesn’t “allow people to make simple assertions without evidence to back them up” you have shown a singular inability to comprehend what is being talked about and to date you have yet to provide anything to this but a series of unsupported assertions, as well as some vigorous fellating of the Administration.

Obviously your sense of shame is somewhat atrophied because otherwise you would have disappeared by now considering the number of self-beclownings you’ve performed so I must act in its stead.

Your next post that doesn’t contain some stunning analytical insight will be your last.

“Be respectful, or be banned. No Profanity.”

Worth considering, although given the prevailing winds here I’m more likely to get banned for daring not to instantly assume Obama is guilty just becuase somebody’s got a theory of his latest nefarious doings.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

But I loathe knee-jerk responses, and I despise theories masquarading as evidence. Theory is what you think happened or how you think something happened (or will happen – let’s not get hung up on wordplay). Evidence is what supports the theory.

What I see here is lots of theory turned into accusation, without much in the way of supporting evidence. Yeah, I’m open minded enough not to get fooled into adopting every conspiracy theory that comes along.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

Most of the “evidence” I’ve seen offered here are basically theories – “Obama’s a bad man, he’s from the Chicago machine, so this must be true, it’s up to him to prove it isn’t.” That doesn’t get very far with me, and frankly is just “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” not much different than “Bush Derangement Syndrome.”

And I don’t know who is “mysteriously” coming here to “sweep it under the rug.” You’ve got a couple of people saying they’re skeptical, and providing their reasons. I really haven’t seen much refutation/challenge to the reasons we’ve provided for being skeptical, just “Obama bad, story must be true.” Wow, I’m really not impressed.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

Look, you can adopt whatever standard you like. “Obama’s a bad man, so he’s guilty until proven innocent of everything he’s accused of” is pretty stupid in my book, but hey, whatever you want is fine.

It’s just worth remembering that there was something referred to here as “Bush Derangment Syndrome,” wherein every action by Bush was automaticaly assumed by certain individuals on the left to be part of the grand master plan to allow Halliburton to put poison in the wells and sell your grandmother to the Arabs. I thought those charges fairly ludicrous, just as I do these.

Obama Derangment Syndrome is not an improvement over Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org

Neil is correct that, given a high p-value, we cannot say that political donations didn’t determine dealership closings. However, we can say that this data set tells us nothing about the relationship between political donations and dealership closings.

That, at least, is the point I have been trying to make. It’s not that the Administration didn’t choose which dealerships to close based on owner; I suspect it’s likely that they did; it’s just that this data doesn’t say much of anything to that effect.

And even that is a separate issue from who the burden of proof should be on, which, as Neil keeps point out, is in every case the public officials in charge of making the decision.

Neil: Is this any better, at all?