Jon Taplin's Home Page

Two of the big research themes of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab converged in last night’s VP Debate: Social Sentiment Analytics and Transmedia Storytelling. The analytics part is fairly straightforward. For the last year in association with the Signals Analysis and Interpretation Lab, we have been recording the real time sentiment on Twitter of the Presidential Candidates. This is a huge corpus of data and during last week’s Presidential debate we were analyzing about 1400 tweets per second. Last night Joe Biden seemed to overwhelm Paul Ryan both in volume and in positive sentiment on our real time dashboard.

Which leads me to the second part of our work, Transmedia Storytelling. As our Chief Advisor Henry Jenkins has taught us, Transmedia is the art of telling a single story across multiple platforms, with each piece adding to the total narrative. The story cannot be told in a single commercial or a single debate as each piece adds to the transmedia narrative. Last night Joe Biden helped clarify the Democratic narrative that had been so muddied in the first debate by Mitt Romney’s desperate dash to the center.Two elements of the Democratic difference were hammered home relentlessly.

Clashing in a feisty, hard-edged debate, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday night repeatedly accused challenger Paul D. Ryan and his running mate, Mitt Romney, of favoring the rich at the expense of middle-class Americans and engaging in loose talk that could lead the country to another war.

Ryan tried to put Biden on the defensive over Libya, but it didn’t work.

BIDEN: I will be very specific. Number one, the — this lecture on embassy security — the congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece. Number two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world. And this talk about this — this weakness. I — I don’t understand what my friend’s talking about here. We — this is a president who’s gone out and done everything he has said he was going to do. This is a guy who’s repaired our alliances so the rest of the world follows us again.

On Tuesday Obama will have an opportunity to press this theme. Romney has surrounded himself with Bush era Neocons like John Bolton and Dan Senor, who clearly would like nothing more than to start another war in Iran (and maybe one is Syria as well). I’ll have more to say on that subject on Monday, but for now it is safe to say that Biden got the Democratic Transmedia story back on track.

For Obama the debate was an unmitigated disaster. It was a low energy performance by a man who seems to think he is sitting on a lead and has to play a conservative game. Obama kept looking to moderator Jim Leher to be the fact checker on Romney’s rather outrageous statement that his tax plan didn’t mean what it means. But Romney had already intimidated Leher, who effectively became the empty chair.

From a body language perspective, Obama seemed listless and disengaged, almost as if he didn’t want to be there. He kept looking down and seemed to be constantly on the defensive. Most of all his “no drama Obama” demeanor was the wrong tone to carry in the face of such aggressive attacks from Romney. If Axelrod and Plouffe advised him to abstain from attacking Romney (not one mention of 47%, Cayman Islands, Vouchercare) they made a terrible miscalculation. Even if that was the game plan, why didn’t Obama realize it wasn’t working and assume a more aggressive stance in the second half?

Now it will be up to Joe Biden to take Paul Ryan to the woodshed next week. And then Obama will have to drink a double espresso in two weeks and come into round two ready to confront Romney on every issue.

I’d like to enlist your help in a project we have been creating at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . We have built an analytics tool to track sentiment around the two candidates using Twitter as the data feed. So we take in every tweet about the candidates and our language-ware reads the tweets and creates a score from 1-100, positive or negative. In the Presidential Debate this Wednesday we will probably be reading and analyzing up to 1000 tweets per second. Ideally our real time sentiment analysis will act like a million person focus group on the debate.This work is similar to the analyses we’ve done over the past 18 months on pop culture events like the Oscars, Summer Blockbusters, Fashion Week trends, and sporting events such as the World Series and Super Bowl.

So here is where we need help. Computers, as you might imagine, are not great at detecting sarcasm. Though advances in software and cognitive computing are helping us make great progress.When we first started this project I remember a tweet, “I’m so happy Michelle Bachmann has thrown her tin foil hat in the ring”. The computer thought that was a positive sentiment towards Bachmann, until a human student corrected it. We have built a human annotation page into the dashboard where you can correct any tweet you think has been mis-scored. From the main page of the site, click “Go to Tweets/annotation page”. There you will see a sampling of the latest tweets and their score. Click on any given tweet and you will be taken to an annotation page where you can manually correct the computer. Obviously the more people who do this, the better the outcome.

One last note. Obviously as you read some of the most negative tweets you will be appalled at what passes for political dialogue in the age of Twitter. We surmise that because many people tweet anonymously, they feel free to speak in the most hateful language. As you will see, most people tweet against a candidate rather than for a candidate. It says something about the psychology of Twitter, but I’m not sure just what it means for an digital democracy.

We’re learning quite a bit through this project and others about how analytics technologies can be applied to Big Data to understand and predict trends. Thanks in advance for your help.

Nate Silver is the most reliable assessor of political polling in our country. His latest column seems to indicate that President Obama is in pretty good shape. Here are some highlights

This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce…

First, the polling by this time in the cycle has been reasonably good, especially when it comes to calling the winners and losers in the race. Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).

There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate.

Instead, it’s actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points.

The last point seems the most salient. Political races often become self-fulfilling prophecies in the last few weeks. The stench that Romney is a loser grows and so contributions slow down.

But Mr. Romney’s grass-roots fund-raising is not nearly so robust as Mr. Obama’s. In order to match Mr. Obama dollar for dollar, as he intends to, Mr. Romney must therefore spend more time than the president at big donor events, at a time when challengers might traditionally spend more time on the road campaigning.

The conventional wisdom was that Romney would not need to raise as much money as Obama because he had the mighty Super-Pacs behind him. In a little noted article, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karl Rove and company are not have the influence they thought they would.

But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted. The flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.

On the presidential front, conservative outside groups backing Republican candidates say they already have played their most significant role, and that their influence will fade as the candidates themselves present their closing arguments to voters.

I believe this is because at a certain point there are diminishing returns to carpet bombing ads, especially for a product that people don’t want to buy like Mitt Romney. So now the remaining danger for the Democrats is overconfidence. If Obama can use what Nate Silver calls the “tendency of the contest to break towards the incumbent” and run a “throw the bums out” campaign (chart above) against a “do nothing congress” in the last month, then we really might have a choice election.

The conventional wisdom is that Republican Super Pac money will overwhelm Democrats in the last six weeks of the fall election. This week Bernstein Research put out some data that lead me to believe that the returns to scale on TV advertising may actually be diminishing.

We believe it is not implausible that at some point, consumers will get so annoyed at having seen a commercial over-and-over again that there could actually be a negative impact. The logic being, consumers would attach negative feelings toward the brand (e.g. presidential candidate), instead of positive ones.

Here is how Bernstein charts it.

Bernstein calculates that in the battleground states 95% of the viewing public will see between 75 and 100 ads for Romney per week. Although classic marketing theory suggests that seeing more than three spots per week on a product produces diminishing results, we have never seen such “ultra-high frequency” in advertising.

Only time will tell if we have hit a wall on political TV advertising and Karl Rove’s grand scheme for buying the election fails.

The apparent Obama post convention bump does not surprise me. Much of my life has been spent evaluating cultural projects as a producer or manager, from the early records of The Band, to Mean Streets or The Last Waltz, I was always pretty sure when the production made an emotional impact on the audience. Mitt Romney’s convention, with the exception of the Clint Eastwood/Samuel Beckett Moment, was as dull as dishwater. It felt like a Lions Club convention and all the faces of color seemed planted by a casting director for diversity on a reality show. In contrast the Democratic Convention had an air of authenticity that felt like the real America of 2012, not the fantasy America of Romney and Paul’s Back to the Fifties movement. The Republicans want to re-litigate issues like birth control, voting rights, and abortion that most of us thought were settled by 1964 when the voting rights act was passed or 1973 when Roe vs. Wade was settled by the Supreme Court.

So the Obama slogan of “Forward” worked. It would not only be back to the fifties socially with Romney/Ryan, but back to the freewheeling days pre 2008 crash on Wall Street. All it takes is a head of the SEC in the bag for Wall Street (like Chris Cox), for the Masters of the Universe to be unleashed again. John Paulson’s million dollar donations to Romney’s super pac will be a bargain. But I don’t think Paulson’s bet will pay off. Willard is a loser.

But more important than all of Republican convention failings was for the Democrats to give a series of really fine political speeches from Deval Patrick, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Every one of them had passion, ideas, poetry and hope. For the Democrats the staging was perfect (at least showbiz support counts for something) as when Barack arrived on stage at the end of Bill Clinton’s speech. For the Republicans it was amateur hour in Dixie to allow Clint to ramble on unscripted for the first 13 minutes of your prime time final night. Once you’ve screwed up the opening (as any film, TV or stage director will tell you), it’s almost impossible to get the audience back emotionally. Mitt didn’t. And so he left Tampa soggy and with a negative bounce down even before the Democrats started.

There have been times in the last four weeks when I have wondered if the Republican’s overwhelming money advantage and their very effective voter suppression operation might overwhelm Barack Obama in November. But listening to Michelle Obama’s inspired speech tonight has done what political conventions are supposed to do. It has given me the encouragement to get to work helping to re-elect the President. What I liked so much about the speech was that it felt so damned authentic. Yes I know there were speechwriters involved, but it felt like Michelle’s voice from the first word to the last. I loved this section.

And I didn’t think it was possible, but today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago…even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met.

I love that he’s never forgotten how he started.

I love that we can trust Barack to do what he says he’s going to do, even when it’s hard – especially when it’s hard.

I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” – he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above…he knows that we all love our country…and he’s always ready to listen to good ideas…he’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise.

Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward…with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

And he reminds me that we are playing a long game here…and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once.

But eventually we get there, we always do.

And as she was speaking these words the camera was on shots of the wonderfully rainbow colored audience, drinking it in and basking in the pride that we all feel in Barack and Michelle. My sense is that Barack is now moving into the lead in the race. Nate Silver tells us why.

1. Polls usually overrate the standing of the candidate who just held his convention.
2. Mitt Romney just held his convention. But he seems to have gotten a below-average bounce out of it. The national polls that have come out since the Republican National Convention have shown an almost exact tie in the race.
3. If the polls overrate Mr. Romney, and they show only a tie for him now, then he will eventually lose.

Michelle is right that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to defeat the plutocrats. But it is work worth doing.

From all the press coverage over the weekend, you would think that Paul Ryan was at the top of the Republican ticket. For those of us who have been having an intellectual battle with Libertarians for the past few years, it seems like this election might really be a referendum on the Koch Brothers Anarcho-Capitalist philosophy. Certainly Ryan is their favorite politician and water carrier as the Times points out this morning.

Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.

Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of climate change.

But it would be a mistake to focus on just Ryan’s efforts to bring an Ayn Randian philosophy to government where the Vice President would lecture the welfare “looters and moochers” in the language of John Galt, “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” Ryan’s view of America as the continuing unpaid policeman of the world is pure Neocon, as the Wall Street Journal points out with pride this morning in a piece called “Paul Ryan’s Neocon Manifesto”.

Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.

It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”

But as Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman points out this morning, the Ryan-Romney continuation of Neocon vision is a one way trip to nowhere.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Ryan may be put forth as the soul of midwestern Catholic probity, but even in this pose, questions are being raised.

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, sold stock in US banks on the same day he attended a confidential meeting where top level officials disclosed the sector was heading for a deep crisis.

The congressman on Monday denied profiting from information gleaned from the meeting on 18 September 2008 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, then treasury secretary Hank Paulson and others outlined their fears for the banking sector. His office said he had no control over the trades.

Public records show that on the same day as the meeting, Ryan sold stock in troubled banks including Wachovia and Citigroup and bought shares in Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s old employer and a bank that had been disclosed to be stronger than many of its rivals.

If Ryan’s excuse that this was not insider trading was that the trades were executed by his representative, can he swear that he had no communication with that representative after the meeting with Bernanke and Paulson? Ryan has boasted that he is an active investor and trader. Why all of a sudden does he act like his assets are in a blind trust? He will need to answer these questions.

As I said at the top, I welcome the addition of Ryan to the ticket. Romney was a total mushburger on policy, hoping to coast to the Presidency on Obama animosity. He realized that strategy was not working and has now thrown his fate to the ideas and pocketbook of the Koch Brothers. The election will decide whether we live in a democracy or an oligarchy;in a 21st Century world or a 19th Century fantasy.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the anomie that enveloped me when I attended the Aspen Ideas Festival. The sense that what was taking place in our economy and society was the effect of forces outside our control. The term used for this notion is globalization. So yesterday the New York Times put out a long piece about how through a combination of carrots and sticks we had gotten the Japanese auto manufacturers to put plants in America and hire American workers. The article asked this question.

For years, high-tech executives have argued that the United States cannot compete in making the most popular electronic devices. Companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, which rely on huge Asian factories, assert that many types of manufacturing would be too costly and inefficient in America. Only overseas, they have said, can they find an abundance of educated midlevel engineers, low-wage workers and at-the-ready suppliers.

But the migration of Japanese auto manufacturing to the United States over the last 30 years offers a case study in how the unlikeliest of transformations can unfold. Despite the decline of American car companies, the United States today remains one of the top auto manufacturers and employers in the world. Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.

I posted the article on my Facebook page and got this rant back from John Papola.

Why should the corrupt crony thugs in DC prevent Americans from trading with other people just because of some stupid line on a map. The “globalization gospel” is called “freedom” and “free exchange” and its the roots of western civilization. Are you seriously proposing mercantilism? The 17th century called. It wants it’s defunct doctrines back.

But my response to John is that his vision of freedom in America is a mirage. In the U.S. those with power use it to insulate themselves from competitive forces by winning favorable tax treatment and other forms of what economists call “rent seeking.” I reject the notion that all of these changes that make it so hard to find jobs for people without college educations, are just the inevitable forces of technological change. Globalization was a choice on the part of capital to weaken the bargaining power of workers by using outsourcing. As the auto “insourcing” model proves, there is no inherent reason why U.S. workers can’t be just as productive as Asian workers. Because the Reagan administration (and every one to follow) made it easy for companies to close down factories and move jobs offshore, the rent seekers triumphed.

The irony of course is that I know John Papola hates rent seeking crony capitalism as much as I do. For a liberal like myself, it is anguishing that both Clinton and Obama have been just as obsequious to the wishes of Wall Street as Reagan, Bush 1 and 2. What we need is a new reform politics that will combine elements of market choice (such as our discussion on school vouchers) with a simple set of regulations that bring the extraordinary power of capital to heel. We will still need a smart government to build the roads, run the police and fire departments and provide a social safety net. My guess is that the Democrats are less in the bag to the 1% than the Republicans and so they are better positioned to be the messengers of reform. As I have said before, cashiering Tim Geithner and hiring Joe Stiglitz would be a good start for Obama’s second term.

I don’t often do book reviews, but having just finished Luigi Zingales’ book, A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity, I think it is worth writing about. For the last four years I have suggested that there might be common ground between liberals and libertarians. But every time I have tried to advance the notion, either the liberals have savaged the idea or the libertarians have complained of half steps and put forth their “anarcho-capitalist” solution, which is just plain stupid. Zingales offers a middle ground.

Zingales is a free market Professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and his main fear is that Crony Capitalism is destroying the competitive nature of America’s economic system. He believes that government has an important role to play in society, but that as corporations become more dominant in financing politics, they “capture” the regulators who are supposed to control them. Similarly, the corporations lobby the congress to put through special subsidies for their industry, thus distorting competition. Zingales sees the cronyism on both sides of the political aisle, such as when Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin lobbied hard to get the Glass-Stegall Act repealed, in order to help Citigroup, which had already violated the law.

Rubin left the Treasury in July 1999, the day after the House passed its version of the bill by a bipartisan vote of 343 to 86. Three months later, on October 18, 1999, Rubin was hired at Citigroup at a salary of $15 million a year, without any operating responsibility. It is hard not to see the connection between these two events.

Zingales’ prescriptions for fixing this mess are pretty straight forward. Cut all government subsidies and special tax breaks to corporations. Eliminate all tax deductions for individuals, which “would reduce the marginal tax rate for all taxpayers by at least five percentage points, except for taxpayers making more than $500,000, who would see their marginal tax rate unchanged. Use Pigouvian taxes to correct distorted incentives and negative externalities. Examples of this are a progressive tax on payments to lobbyists by corporations; a tax on short term debt held by financial institutions (which he believed caused the 2008 crisis) and a tax on pollution flowing from industry.

It is on various social policies that liberals will find Zingales pushing them into uncomfortable areas. On K-12 education he advocates a progressive voucher system. All schools would have to compete for all children with schools getting paid more to take on under privileged kids. If schools hired bad teachers, they would face the possibility of going out of business. I for one think this idea is worth trying. The K-12 system is so screwed up in this country, we really need to shake it up and perhaps vouchers is the way. But it is in the area of healthcare that I find Zingales ignoring the obvious because of his attachment to the free market. He says that the reason American per capita healthcare costs are so out of control is that “healthcare, unlike most goods and services, is not purchased in a free market.” What this ignores is that the per capita healthcare costs that are so much lower in every other developed nation are directly accountable to their adoption of a single payer system that has the muscle to negotiate with doctors, hospitals and drug companies.

Ultimately taking on Crony Capitalism should be the main task of the next era of reform. Both political parties are so beholden to the corporation that this seems like an almost impossible task. Perhaps we have to start with getting the money out of politics as proposed by Larry Lessig’s Rootstrikers campaign. I know the Republicans are too in the bag to big business to take this on, but if Obama gets a second term, his first act should be to fire Tim Geithner and hire someone like Joe Stieglitz. That would send an unmistakeable message.