Lincoln Mitchell

Blog

This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Can Obama Lead Again? →

Obama's presidency has been different. While all presidencies need to set the agenda on important pieces of legislation and respond to domestic and international events, Obama has not mastered this balance. This has contributed to both the administration's lack of real legislative success since the stimulus bill as well as the ongoing political problems confronting Obama and his party. Moreover, this situation has gotten worse, not better, as Obama's presidency has progressed.

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How Good Was Frank Thomas-Ranking Right Handed Hitters

A more interesting question about Thomas’s career is how he ranks among the greatest right handed hitters ever. There are some players who were right handed hitters who were more valuable because of the positions they played and their ability to contribute defensively such as Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt and Honus Wagner, but when looking at batting numbers only, there are fewer right handed hitters who were clearly better than Thomas. Thomas is one of only eight right handed hitters to have over 9,000 plate appearances and an OPS+ of 150 or better, and one of only four with 10,000 or more plate appearances and an OPS+ of 150 or better

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Not All Payroll Differences Are the Same

When the Yankees won the World Series last year there were predictable complaints that the Yankees had bought their World Series victory. Others argued that in baseball championships can’t be bought offering the fact that the Yankees had the highest payroll, by far, in baseball for several years running andhadn’t won in 2004-2008. It seems clear that, at least on some level, the Yankees bought the championship in 2009, just as the Phillies bought the championship in 2008 and the Red Sox did in 2007. All these teams invested money and ended up winning the World Series. The more accurate way to phrase it is that the Yankees paid more for their championship, have had the highest payroll for the last several years, by a significant margin, and that while high payrolls don’t guarantee championships, they certainly help a great deal.

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Is the Orange Revolution Over or Did It Never Happen

In other words, maybe the Orange Revolution never really happened at all. Obviously, the events on Kiev’s Maidan in late 2004 happened, leading to Yuschenko’s becoming president, but it is possible that in the excitement of the moment, too much was read into these events. The victory in December of 2004 by a former prime minister under Leonid Kuchma over Kuchma’s sitting prime minister may simply not have been the pivotal and revolutionary moment which it looked like at the time. Rather, it may have been another stage in Ukraine’s continuous path from Soviet republic to something else.

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On Health Care Smaller Might Be Better →

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts immediately jeopardized President Obama's health care bill and forced the White House to figure out a strategy for what to do about health care reform and the bill itself. At least for the moment, the strategy seems to be to put health care on the back burner while focusing more directly on job creation so that the administration can demonstrate its awareness of, and try to do something about, the ongoing impact of the economic crisis, particularly with regard to unemployment.

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What Obama Still Can Learn from Ronald Reagan →

The question this data raises is, so what? What is the value of Obama and his policies being more popular than his foes or his allies, particularly in a political system where Obama needs 60 Senate votes to accomplish anything? If Obama continues the strategic approach he used in his first year, including a willingness to bargain too early in the negotiating process, refusing to pressure Democrats in Congress -- particularly the Senate -- to support the party's position, and never going on the offensive against an aggressive Republican leadership, his popularity will not help him. However, popularity, particularly when it is bolstered by support for policies, can be an important asset to a president if it is used well.

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A Bad Week for China and the U.S.

This has been a very interesting week or so for U.S. China relations. During this time, internet censorship, the Dalai Lama, Iran, and arms sales to Taiwan have been at the center of the interaction between the two countries. It seems the relationship has come quite a distance since the fall when President Obama traveled to Asia and outlined the import of China to the U.S.

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Is Strategy Baseball's New Market Inefficiency?

Michael Lewis’s influential book Moneyball explained the concept of exploiting market inefficiencies in the context of building a baseball team. Exploiting market inefficiencies begins with avoiding paying for the skills or commodities that the market overvalues, while identifying and buying at a discount the skills or commodities that the market undervalues. The example throughout Moneyball was that on base percentage was a historically undervalued skill and players who walk a lot were not compensated in a way consistent with their value. This specific example no longer applies in baseball as many teams now understand the value of a player who can consistently get on base by drawing walks.

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Fame and the Hall of Fame

There is another issue which should be part of that discussion as well which is the question of the central definition and role of the Hall of Fame. According to theHall of Fame’s mission statement the Hall of Fame seeks to “Honor(ing), by enshrinement, those individuals who had exceptional careers, and recognizing others for their significant achievements.” This sounds pretty straightforward, but there is an implicit, if at first glance insignificant, conflict between this definition and the name of the institution. It is, after all, the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Excellence. This suggests that fame should also be an important consideration for considering election to the Hall of Fame. It is this notion of fame that often makes Hall of Fame voting more complicated. It seems pretty clear to many that, for example, Dwight Evans was a more valuable player than his longtime teammate Jim Rice, but the latter was certainly more famous which helps explain why Rice is in and Evans is out.

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Ukraine's Election and the Value of a Divided Electorate

Speculation about who will win the election, and how that person will govern, can overshadow the democratic advances Ukraine has made since the Orange Revolution of 2004, particularly when contrasted with Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the other two post-Soviet countries to have Color Revolutions in the last decade. All three Color Revolutions were, at the time they occurred, hailed as democratic advances, but Ukraine is the only one of the three countries that can accurately be said to have experienced greater democratization since those dramatic events. According to Freedom House, for example, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have the same level of democracy as they did before the Rose and Tulip Revolutions, while Ukraine has become more democratic that it was before the Orange Revolution.

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Obama After Massachusetts →

Scott Brown's victory was a major victory for the Republican Party as it demonstrated that they are, at least for now, a political factor again, but in some respects it was less significant for the Democratic President and his party. The Obama administration, and his party, was in trouble before this special election given the ongoing economic problems, growing discontent with Obama's policies from, predictably, the right and, less predictably, the left, and a compromise on health care that only further angered these groups. The election in Massachusetts was additional evidence of a trend that was already strong, rather than a turning point of some kind.

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International Responses to the Earthquake in Haiti

International assistance following a natural disaster of this sort is not new. Many of the same actors provided support to the victims of the Tsunami in 2004. It may, however, become more common in the next decades. Unusual weather events will likely be one of the first impacts of climate change which will be felt. Although the event in Haiti was an earthquake with no likely connection to climate change, the general pattern of a devastating natural disaster occurring in a country that has already had more than its share of misfortune which will both cause immediate tragedy and perhaps set that country’s development back years may become more common.

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The Paradox of Historically Great Pitchers in a Hitter's Era

While the last fifteen years have not been a great period for pitching in general, it has been a surprisingly good period for a small handful of individual pitchers. The quartet of Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez, was able to post extraordinary numbers during this period despite the increase in offense. Several other pitchers such as Zack Greinke in 2009, Mark Prior in 2003 and Kevin Brown in 1996 had one or more great seasons in this period as well.

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Limbaugh, Robertson and Trevino on Haiti →

Recent comments by Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson and now US Senate candidate from California Chuck Devore's communication director regarding assistance to Haiti are so hateful, misguided, myopic and, in the case or Robertson, downright strange, that they obscure the question of what they are trying to accomplish by making these comments. Robertson's comments are extraordinarily insensitive, focusing not on the suffering and desperation of the innocent victims of the Haitian people, but on a belief that the earthquake was a form of supernatural intervention as Satan himself has finally extracted his deathly fee for help in liberating Haiti from France.

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The Red Sox and Phillies Strike Back

In recent days the Red Sox and Phillies have improved their chances of stopping the Yankees from defending their championship. The Phillies came within two wins of winning the World Series in 2009 and by adding Roy Halladay, while losing Cliff Lee, have made the top of their rotation stronger. John Lackey gives the Red Sox one of the best and deepest rotations in baseball, while the signing of Mark Cameron helps offset the almost certain loss of Jason Bay; and Marco Scutaro will be a big upgrade at shortstop. Dumping Mike Lowell will also help the team. It seems likely that the Red Sox are not quite done yet this off-season and may add another corner infield bat. Other teams, notably the Seattle Mariners have made some big moves, in the Mariners case the acquisition of Cliff Lee and Chone Figgins, that may allow them to emerge as a strong contender in 2010.

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Democracy, Primaries and Party Leadership →

Harold Ford Jr.'s interest in running for the senate seat from New York currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand has been met by discouragement from the Democratic political leadership in New York and Washington. Ford is, in many respects, not a great candidate for that seat. His record on abortion rights and marriage equality is not likely to be well received by a New York primary electorate. His roots in the state are not deep, as he only moved here following a narrow defeat for a U.S. Senate seat from his home state in Tennessee in 2006, although there is some precedent of electing people from out of state to the Senate in New York. Should Ford decide to run, Senator Gillibrand's substantial initial fundraising edge would give her an additional advantage.

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Five New Foreign Policy Challenges for the New Decade

During the next ten years, the U.S. will confront a broad range of policy challenges. Some will likely be largely unchanged over the course of the decade. Others, like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the fight against terrorism will probably remain important issues but will change and evolve during the decade. There are some issues, however, which seem somewhat remote today, but which may dominate headlines by the year 2020. We cannot, of course, know for certain what these issues are, but the five issues below all may become very important by 2020.

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The Strange Case of Will Clark

Sometimes players who would be expected to be borderline candidates get elected, such as Dawson this year or Jim Rice last year, but sometimes similar candidates get little consideration at all. One example of this type of player is Will Clark who got less than 5% of the vote the first time he appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot and was dropped from future ballots. Will Clark’s story is well known. He had a few great years with the Giants before moving to the AL where his career took a downturn, but had one last great run in 2000, the last season of his career as a late season pickup by the Cardinals where he filled in for the injured Mark McGwire down the stretch run.

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Five Foreign Policy Issues That Will Be With Us for Another Decade

When this decade, which is now only a few days old ends, we will almost certainly be confronting foreign policy challenges that are hard to foresee right now. In January of 2000 few would have foreseen that a terrorist attack on the U.S. would so radically reorient and drive our foreign policy for most of the decade or that we would spend most of the decade embroiled in a seemingly endless war in Iraq. However, it is likely that some of the foreign policy issues confronting the U.S. now will not go away and will remain confounding problems throughout the decade. Some issues such as the problem of combating terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain, but may take very different forms over the course of the decade. These five are likely to remain substantially unchanged over the next ten years.

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2009 Was Not the Senate's Finest Year →

The U.S. Senate is a very unusual political institution. Revered by members and the political class as the world's greatest deliberative body, it is the only legislative body in the U.S. that violates the principle of one person one vote and is based on the notion of unequal representation. Some states, such as North Dakota are awarded one senator for roughly every 320,000 residents, while larger states such as California get by with one senator for roughly every 18 million residents. This principle is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but similar principles of basing legislative bodies on representing polities rather than people have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in cases such asGray v. Sanders or Board of Estimate of New York City v. Morris.

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