Paul Krugman: The whole focus on "focus" is, as I see it, an act of intellectual cowardice -- a way to criticize President Obama's record without explaining what you would have done differently.
John Allen Paulos: If one considers any sufficiently large data set, meaningless coincidences will naturally arise: the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index in the early 1990s was butter production in Bangladesh.
John Sides: If you had one thing, and one thing only, to predict which Democratic House incumbents would lose their seats in 2010, what would you take? The amount of money they raised? Their TARP vote? Their health care vote? Whether they had a Tea Party opponent? A Nazi reenactor opponent? The best predictor by far is none of those. It is simply how Democratic their district is.
Michael Tomasky: Democrats would probably do far better to invest $200 million in GOTV operations than in soul-searching, who-are-we projects.
Simon Johnson: Let us hope the White House has learned from the midterms that there are dire electoral consequences when the president shrinks from directly confronting misleading ideas.
George Packer: I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.
Nancy Goldstein: When Reagan said "There you go again" to Carter during the 1980 presidential debates, voters all over the country said, "At last." It didn't matter whether or not Carter's point about Medicare was legitimate: Reagan's shrugging, monosyllabic response tapped into people's frustration with professional politicians and complicated explanations.
Ian Morris: When experts disagree so deeply, it usually means that we need fresh perspectives on a problem.
Michael Kinsley: Joe Scarborough got it right in these pages last week when he argued that the 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting Tuesday for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party's candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. Scarborough might have added that neither party's candidates had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (except that they "support our troops," a flabby formulation that leaves Americans killing and dying in faraway wars that politicians won't defend explicitly). Politicians are silent on both these issues for the same reason: There is no solution that American voters will tolerate. Why can't we have calorie-free chocolate cake? We're Americans!
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