Last time we checked in with Nate, he was busy getting cursed at by wingnut radio talk show host and "documentary filmmaker" John Ziegler for daring to question a poll Ziegler commissioned that purportedly "proved" that Obama voters were somehow misinformed, and therefore Obama only got elected because his supporters are dumb. I'm sure Ziegler would disagree with that characterization, but it's pretty clear that's what he's supposedly trying to prove. The transcript Nate posted of their first exchange was rather lively. This second encounter doesn't disappoint.

I completely agree with Nate Silver: the Obama campaign needs to make better ads.

It's not that Obama's ads are bad by any normal metric. They're well produced and they usually hit the right themes. The problem is that they're very conventional. Obama is supposed to exude change. But his ads don't. They look like the ads we see every election cycle: images, text, and video footage linked together by the voice of a professional narrator. They may be marginally effective, but they are exceedingly forgettable and often make Obama come across as just another politician playing the same old game (even though his ads are much more honest than McCain's).

The Obama campaign needs to think a little more outside of the box. They should aim to produce ads that are either more creative/funny than a typical campaign ad, or more sincere.

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Nate Silver has written a piece called "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy To Oppose the Senate Bill." He says we need to stop being "polite" (who's polite these days?) and start being "real." In the spirit of impoliteness and reality (realness?), he offers some numbers in order to argue that the Left is nuts not to embrace the Senate health reform bill.

In that same "no-politeness" spirit, here's my response: Garbage in, garbage out. Is that "real" enough for ya? Progressives - and everyone else, for that matter - should keep fighting.

Silver's heart may be in the right place, and his math is right, but many of his assumptions are flat-out wrong. More importantly, he fails to place his work in the proper human and political context. It's like this: You can build the best model in the world for predicting the outcome of hockey games. But if you knew that sometime during the third period Rahm Emanuel was going to drive out on the ice in a Zamboni and flatten your team's entire defense, wouldn't that change your model a little? And if you knew half the hockey players would wind up bleeding and broken ... (Oh, wait - they do. Bad example.)

Progressives would be insane to do as Silver suggests. He tells us that "a picture's worth a thousand words" (and then gives us 1,795 words - but who's counting). Let's review both his analysis and his conclusions.

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