Republicans (according to the Associated Press)

The Associated Press is providing an interesting place to learn about the contenders for the Republican candidacy for the next Presidential election. Yesterday, Liz Sidoti filed a story with the following lead:

And the leading Republican presidential candidate is ... none of the above.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

It used to be the Democrats that would agonize over what was wrong with "middle America." Now its the Republicans who ought to be nervous about what will happen at the Iowa primary:

Among the legions of undecided Republicans is Barbara Skogman, 72, a retired legal assistant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She isn't at all excited about any of the prospects. At one point, she favored McCain. At another, she was open to Giuliani. Now, she's leaning slightly toward Romney but says she's far from sold on him.

"I'm looking for a strong, honest person. Do you know of any?" she joked. She had an easy time detailing why she was queasy about each of the most serious contenders. "Isn't that sad?" Then she reached a conclusion: "I just don't know."

Perhaps the Republicans are discovering that appealing to "fundamental Christian values" is a double-edged sword. Now that we have a President who wants to reduce everything to good and evil, his party has to confront with solid like-minded citizens who may not give a lot of thought to the subtleties of diplomacy but sure-as-hell know sin when they see it. Guess what? They need look no further than any number of sites in Washington (replete with Republicans) to see it these days! It will be a supreme irony if the Republican party can not come up with a candidate whom these solid citizens feel is a better Christian than Hillary Clinton (who can wear her faith on her sleeve along with the best of them)!

In the interest of "equal time," by the way, I should point out that Jews are just as good at mustering the common sense to recognize sin when they see it. My favorite expression of this was a line from the film Hester Street delivered by one no-nonsense bubeleh in the cast. At one point she erupts at a young slicker trying very hard to put one over her with the line, "You can't piss up my back and tell me it's rain!" My guess is that just about every culture has a variation on this.

Meanwhile, a few of us will probably read all of Sidoti's story and as, "What about Ron Paul?" These days it seems that, if you want to read about him, you have to Google him; but at least his top-of-the-list hit is an Associated Press story. This one was filed by Jim Kuhnhenn on Monday and explains why he never showed up in the Sidoti report:

Ron Paul, the Lake Jackson congressman running a long shot campaign, reported raising nearly $2.4 million from April through June and ended the quarter with a similar amount in the bank.

The total is a remarkable showing for Paul, putting him in a better financial position — with less cash on hand but no debt — than Arizona Sen. John McCain. Paul still barely registers in public opinion polls and raised far less than McCain or the other leading Republicans. But his libertarian views and opposition to the war in Iraq have ignited a fire among nontraditional contributors, particularly on the Internet.

That's it: the guy still "barely registers." His presence is still not strong enough to stand above all those other candidates who told Sidoti that they do not like any of the Republican contenders. Personally, I am not sure I subscribe the extremity of his libertarian position; but I have to wonder how all those Republicans canvassed by Associated Press and Ipsos would react to Paul if they were aware of him!

The TBD of Crowds

Every now and then I get back on a hobby-horse to try to take Jimmy Wales to task for his naiveté about the social context in which his Wikipedia effort is embedded. What I had not realized until yesterday is that there is actually a very useful source in the social theory literature that directly confronts this issue. It turns out that whether or not a “great experiment” like Wikipedia succeeds or fails is a long-standing problem in social theory. A good introduction to the problem may be found in the paper “Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action,” by James S. Coleman, where it is called the “micro-to-macro problem.” As irony would have it, Coleman has an entry in Wikipedia. Indeed, this paper is included in the list of his “Selected Works;” but there is no mention of his contribution to the study of the micro-to-macro problem in the entry itself.

Simply put, the “macro” is about the sorts of relations that occur between social groups. The example Coleman cites is the classic thesis about the “Protestant work ethic” formulated by Max Weber, the causal relationship between Protestant religious doctrine and a capitalist economy system. The “micro” on the other hand is about individual behavior and thus occupies the “turf” of psychology. So, to continue with the Weber example, we have models for the relationship between Protestant doctrine and individual values; and we have models for the impact of individual values on the economic choices that those individuals make. What we lack, however, is a model that explains the relationship between those individual economic choices and the emergence of a capitalist social system. (Coleman also cites, as another example, the micro-to-macro problem with classical Marxism.)

Another way of looking at this is in terms of the two extreme models of crowd behavior. These are generally known as “the madness of crowds” and “the wisdom of crowds.” The fact is that neither model holds all the time, and which model prevails depends on a whole lot of contextual details that tend to be ignored. In this respect the problem of the “micro-to-macro problem” is our inclination to avoid those details (just as Wikipedia avoided saying anything about them in its piece of James Coleman)!