Drawing Dead


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Published: Oct 8, 2008

Tuesday night I learned how to draw a cartoon of still-President George W. Bush. Sitting in the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater for "The Art of Political Satire," a joint production of The Economist magazine and Chicago's Second City comedy troupe, a packed house of what I think is fair to characterize as generally older attendees did the same — pen and paper in hand, scratching and scribbling with obvious glee.

In a portion of the show called stand-up cartooning, we took stroke-by-stroke cues from Kevin "Kal" Kallaugher, the magazine's longtime editorial cartoonist, and crafted on a blank page of the program Kal's trademark likeness of the little emperor — his crooked nose, squinty eyes, lopsided mouth, Dumbo ears, "W" chin and the many "perplexoids" that constitute his perpetually befuddled brow.

While Kal's shtick was more Mark Russell than Jon Stewart, it was amusing to watch this older crowd — older than me, anyway, and I emphasize it to point out that this was not some college Obama rally — absolutely rejoice in sending up the lame duck, proudly flying their liberal flags. There was a telling moment earlier in his act. While demonstrating the power of caricature, Kal cooked up renditions of Kerry and Gore and Palin and McCain. At one point he mentioned Barack Obama's name, and a round of oddly earnest applause circulated then quickly abated, as if its perpetrators, embarrassed, had forgotten this was a night for satire. People. This is not some college Obama rally.

I'm not sure why I found this surprising; The Economist has a professed liberal slant, though not in a knee-jerk, preach-to-the-choir manner. It's a liberal slant for a magazine that devotes so much coverage to economic markets. I guess these were those wine-drinking Dems you hear so much about. And I guess I've not spent much time in that crowd.

I've become a tiny bit addicted in the last few weeks to a Web site I mentioned here last week. Fivethirtyeight.com is the site of Nate Silver, a statistics wiz who comes to politics from another crooked field: baseball.

Silver is the guy behind Baseball Prospectus' projection system, PECOTA (a goofball acronym that nods to light-hitting utility infielder Bill Pecota), which has, over the years, made some pretty astounding and accurate projections. The gist is that it compares current players to players from the past and estimates how players today will perform in the future, weighing factors like age, body type, home field advantage, league difficulty and era. It's a complicated system that's had its share of successes — most recently and notably predicting the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays.

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Silver's fivethirtyeight.com attempts the same level of sophistication with political polling (538 is the number of electoral votes in a presidential election), aiming to filter the signal from the noise and cancel out bias in political polling. As of press time, the site's projections have Obama leading McCain by a healthy 345.4 to 192.6 in the electoral college and give Obama an 89.2 percent chance of winning. (If you don't think the campaigns take the site seriously, note that McCain/Palin ads have been running on the site exclusively.)

And that's before Tuesday's debates — the "that one" remark, the seeming refusal to shake hands — which most snap polls show Obama winning handily. (Read CP contributor David Faris' take on The Clog.)

Of course, polls are just polls. Furthermore, Silver's Baseball Prospectus gives the Phillies the worst odds of winning the World Series of the four remaining teams, and we know that's a load of crap. All of which is to say, let's not go taking things for granted. That could be embarrassing.

Speaking of the playoffs, we'll have our contributor/Sports Complex blogger E. James Beale inside the home games of the NLCS. Keep your browser pointed to sports.citypaper.net during games. He'll be giving you a taste of what it's like inside the Bank.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)