Sometimes you write the stories, and sometimes they write you. I awoke this morning to a big, blazing Drudge headline about Texan pop starlet and American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson having endorsed Ron Paul for president. As it happens, I'm probably the only conservative political writer in America who has taken Clarkson seriously at some length (see here, here and here; I still follow her on Twitter and Facebook and the like), while at the same time following my RedState colleague Leon Wolf's magnificant series on the lunacy of Ron Paul and his campaign (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for lots of gory details), and for that matter I've written about the intersection of music and politics with an exhaustive look at the culture and politics of my favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen, so this story has my name written all over it. There's actually some lessons to be drawn here, whether or not you have any interest in Clarkson per se.

The first point up is how Clarkson's tweets about Paul are revealing of the mindset of a lot of 'soft' Ron Paul supporters. Those of us who write about politics on the internet tend to assume that all of Paul's support comes from hard-core Ronulans, of the sort who will swarm you on the web with the kinds of barrages of talking points and - often - ALL CAPS and hate speech (or just rambling email manifestos) that carry an overpowering stench of political fanatacism. (This is a major reason why RedState has banned the Paul supporters for years; en masse, they make reasoned discourse impossible).* Even the more polite, otherwise reasonable people who support Paul in web discussions tend to be absolutely immovable in their support, to the point where there's no realistic chance they could support any other Republican.

But when you do polling and casual discussions with people not following politics all that closely, you discover a fair number of people who have gotten the whitewashed version of Paul and aren't aware of the full depth of his crazy - people I have to believe are still persuadable that Paul is toxic. And that's exactly what Clarkson sounds like here. It started with this tweet

I love Ron Paul. I liked him a lot during the last republican nomination and no one gave him a chance. If he wins the nomination for the Republican party in 2012 he's got my vote. Too bad he probably won't.

Then:

we shouldn't try & help/tell other countries how to solve their issues w/the poor when we can't even solve our own.

and

I am about progress. Ron Paul is about letting people decide, not the government. I am for this.

All of which sounds reasonable enough; Paul is certainly in favor of more liberty at home and a less vigorous American role abroad, and while I regard his brand of isolationism as deeply dangerous, the general concept of getting out of the UN and the 'world policeman' role is attractive to an awful lot of people who are not crazy. This is the sort of thing why I run into people - friends, family - who tell me "you know, Ron Paul has a lot of good ideas." It's also why some of the saner people in the GOP who have some overlap with Paul's ideas - from the more conservative types like Mike Lee, to Paul's son Rand, to the more libertarian types like Gary Johnson - might be better spokesmen for some of those ideas.

Unfortunately, you buy Ron Paul, you buy the whole batty package: the flirtations with 9/11 Trutherism and other conspiracy theories, the "we had it coming" view of anti-American terrorism, the anti-Semitism and pro-Palestinian bias, the racist newsletters, and whatnot, all of which you can find at length in Leon's posts. And Clarkson, with nearly a million Twitter followers and nearly 3 million Facebook fans and a prior record of trying to keep herself out of political controversies, got inundated with hostility she clearly wasn't expecting for backing Paul, ultimately complaining about the volume of "hateful" attacks. Thus, the backtracks:

I have never heard that he's a racist? I definitely don't agree with racism, that's ignorant.

I love all people and could care less if you like men or women. I have never heard that Ron Paul is a racist or homophobe?

I have never seen or heard Ron Paul say anything against gay people?

I am really sorry if I have offended anyone. Obviously that was not my intent. I do not support racism. I support gay rights, straight rights, women's rights, men's rights, white/black/purple/orange rights. I like Ron Paul because he believes in less government and letting the people (all of us) make the decisions and mold our country. That is all. Out of all of the Republican nominees, he's my favorite.

(There's a longer story here, which Dave Weigel has covered, as to why Paul still has apologists among gay liberals despite the content of his newsletters)

Most entertainers tend towards knee-jerk leftism, and even the more thoughtful ones - like Springsteen, who as I've discussed is in some ways a culturally conservative figure in his music despite his leftism - are often hard-core liberals or leftists. And the exceptions are sometimes no better; John Mayer came out as a vocal, hard-shell Paul supporter in 2008, and in Mayer's case that seemed to dovetail with some of his own more unsavory characteristics. One of the reasons I like Clarkson, aside from her music, is that she thinks for herself and is frequently a lonely voice for sanity in the insane world of pop music. Her words on the death of Amy Winehouse was one example of this:

Sometimes I think this job will be the death of us all, or at least the emotional death of us all. Maybe that is why as a little kid in sunday school I learned that God didn't want false gods or idols. I thought it was terribly selfish of God as a child but I think I get it now. He didn't want us following people or things that are imperfect and not so much for the followers but for the gods and/or idols who will never be what everyone wishes or needs them to be because we are made imperfect. He knew we wouldn't be able to handle the pressure, the shame, the glory, or the power the spotlight brings.

Her background ought to make her the kind of swing voter the GOP can reach: raised poor among strict Christian Texas Democrats, Clarkson is something of a stubborn holdout for decency and modesty in pop music, refuses to describe herself as a feminist, owns 9 guns and sleeps with a Colt .45 for protection, and is a self-described Republican but one who voted Obama four years ago:

I just want someone that's about change, and that's what [Barack Obama] campaigned on, and that's what I'm hoping happens. I'm very much a Barack fan.

How'd you celebrate the inauguration?

I was actually with two of my friends here in Texas -- we were in my kitchen watching it on TV. We were crying -- all three of us. Seeing Aretha Franklin -- who in her lifetime has seen oppression and now seeing a black man become President -- sing ... that in itself is such a beautiful message to the rest of the world.

A lot of people felt that way about Obama in January 2009, but the thrill is long gone, even in Hollywood.

Political coalitions, of course, inevitably involve picking and choosing positions that alienate some people you might otherwise reach. Ron Paul, now 76 years old, will be gone from the stage after this election, but the challenge of how to appeal to people who like some of the themes he projects but aren't fans of more conventional Republican ideas - people like Kelly Clarkson - will persist.

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If you ever wondered who would be depraved enough to stick up for Kim Jong Il, your answer would be the U.N.’s World Health Organization. Because, of course, North Korea has "universal health care."

As we all know by now, there's Good Newt and there's Bad Newt. If you want the full Good Newt experience, check out this speech he gave to the NRA convention back in April. If you don't have time for the full 26-minute speech, watch from around the 5:18 mark to about the 14:30 mark. It's spellbinding.

A bunch of us at RedState have a post up endorsing Perry.

The faster this race gets down to three candidates (or three plus Paul and Huntsman), the better for Perry, who can lie in wait to consolidate the conservative wing of the party when and if Newt collapses. I continue to believe Romney cannot win a long two-man race against a more conservative opponent who has the money to go the distance.

Let's imagine the primaries as a conversation between the conservative grassroots and the national media elite (including the conservative media establishment):

Elite: Time to find a new national standard-bearer, Republicans. But not somebody dumb, like George W. Bush.

Grassroots: We love Sarah Palin!

Elite: She's dumb. You can't have her.

Grassroots: We love Michele Bachmann!

Elite: She's dumb. You can't have her.

Grassroots: We love Rick Perry!

Elite: He's dumb. You can't have him.

Grassroots: We love Herman Cain! And you're not allowed to call him dumb!

Elite: He's...Ok, you got us there. But he doesn't know anything. He's ignorant.

Grassroots: So, you want smart, educated, knowledgeable, good in debates? That's your criteria?

Elite: Absolutely. Go find somebody like that. We have a pretty good idea what we have in mind.

Grassroots: You asked for it, bro. We love Newt Gingrich, Ph.D, historian and mad scientist! We love his debating style and his enormous head and his 24 books and his moon mining schemes! He's gonna lecture you guys until you beg for mercy!

[A few months later]

Elite: We give up! We can't take it anymore! Send us back that Perry guy! We have carpal tunnel from taking so many notes! We're sick of looking up obscure battles on Wikipedia and ordering out-of-print books on eBay to do fact checking! The pages of our thesauruses are falling out! We just want to ask a simple question without having our premises fundamentally challenged! Uncle!

Ideas don't run for president; people do. That's as true today as it was four years ago. So, it is understandable that much of the press and blog coverage of the 2012 GOP primary race has focused on the personalities, experience and record of the candidates rather than their ideas. In fact, until you know the candidates by their actions, you cannot meaningfully judge what their words will mean in practice. Mitt Romney is the prime example of this, having so inconsistent a record that it's impossible to take seriously the idea that he's guided by any sort of coherent political philosophy.

But as it happens, we do have three candidates in this race who stand for a distinctive philosophical approach to domestic policy. One of those, Ron Paul, espouses a radical constitutionalism that exists on the periphery of the conservative movement. Rick Perry, while his issue stances are more conventionally (but not always uniformly) conservative, can best be understood through the lens of his guiding principle as a Texas nationalist - a belief that a significant amount of the powers now wielded by the federal government should be returned to the states. And then there's Newt Gingrich. Newt generates so many new ideas - he develops more firmly-held political convictions before breakfast each morning than Romney's had his entire life - that it's tempting to view them as essentially random. But there is a method to the madness. Setting aside for a moment Gingrich's personal attributes, let's look at his ideas, with particular attention to two recent interviews he did - one with Ben Domenech, Brad Jackson and Francis Cianfrocca at Coffee and Markets, the other with Glenn Beck. Both provide a keen window into how Newt views domestic policy issues. In the interests of length, I'll pass over one of the three pillars of Newt's worldview (his futurism and faith in new technologies), which has been written about extensively, and focus on two others: his gradualism and his revival of what I call "Reform Conservatism."

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I've got a handful of essays on the 2012 primaries in the hopper if I can ever get them finished. For those of you who aren't following me on Twitter, here's the short summary of my thinking at present.

1. I'm still with Rick Perry, who would clearly be the best president and most reliable conservative in the race. Perry still has the executive experience and steady temperament best suited to the job (plus his service record and stable family life), and he still has the money and organization to go the distance if the primaries turn into a long slog, something candidates like Bachmann and Santorum lack. Perry has come from behind before - in his 2010 primary race against Kay Bailey Hutchinson he trailed by 20 points in some early polls, but he outworked and outlasted her. Obviously Perry is not a good debater, is prone to Bush-style gaffes and had some other missteps in reacting to the early onslaught of negative press, but he was also hurt by the dynamics of the race at that point - he's a better when given more time to speak (a problem on an 8-candidate stage), and Bachmann in particular has devoted most of her energies to running interference for Romney, which meant that when Perry emerged he had a stage full of people attacking him and nobody attacking Romney. Perry's virtues are more on display in this unscripted Veterans Day video he did for Ben Howe of RedState:

All that said, Perry's in a fairly deep hole at the moment, and realistically he may not be able to get out of it unless three things happen, none of which is all that unlikely individually, but running the table may be harder: (1) Newt implodes, (2) Romney fails to consolidate the support of the 75% or so of the voters who really don't want him as the nominee, and (3) some of the other candidates drop out so that voters are forced to look more closely at what's left.

2. I've been as surprised as anyone by the Newt boomlet, but it mostly comes down to the fact that Newt is an excellent debater, and there have been a whole lot of debates. I still think Newt 2012 is basically a bad idea, for a lot of reasons I've discussed before; I don't think he is really well-suited to be a chief executive, as streiff explains here. On the other hand, I've always liked Newt as an intellectual and rhetorical resource for the Right, and all things considered I have reached the point of having him as my second choice behind Perry, much as it astonishes me to type that. Anyway, much more on Newt to follow. If he's the nominee, he'll be a neverending smorgasbord for political journalism. The feeling may be mutual, as Ben Domenech has hilariously illustrated in the daily must-read Newt Judges You.

Newt's return from the political wilderness has some parallels to Nixon, Reagan, Churchill, De Gaulle, FDR...among others. But I think the best parallel is a guy I have seen for years as extremely similar to Newt, and that's Benjamin Netanyahu. Some conservatives may object that Netanyahu is awesome, but Newt would look pretty awesome from a distance of a few thousand miles as well. Closer observers of Israel know the flaws that come with Netanyahu's toughness, eloquence and deep patriotism.

The one thing Newt has improved the most since the 1990s is his demeanor. He's much more the happy warrior than the scowling bombthrower these days. Looking back, Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign suffered from the fact that he had mellowed with age; some mellowing, in Newt's case, may prove a great asset.

Newt is a whole lot of fun to watch do this, and for all my misgivings about him as the nominee, if that's what we come to, I intend to enjoy the ride.

3. One of the telling things to watch, previewed by his "$10,000 bet" debate line and Newt's broadside against his record at Bain, is how well Romney holds up to criticism of his wealth and business record. That's a theme Republicans have been - typically - hesitant to push too hard, but it will be the #1 avenue of attack by the Democrats, and as distasteful as that sort of thing is, we may as well see how he stands up to it now.

4. Not to lean too heavily on the work of my fellow RedStaters, but Neil Stevens explains why you should put no stock in the PPP poll showing Ron Paul within striking distance in Iowa.

5. Herman Cain's implosion will not teach the unteachable among us the perils of untested rookie candidates at the national level, but it should. I'd have gladly supported Cain for a governorship, but he was in over his head running for president.

6. Jon Huntsman has gotten a lot of second looks from desperate conservatives, partly because he's got the basics of a good resume with no obvious weaknesses (executive and foreign policy experience and a stable family as well as stuff like being tall and rich), partly because his policy proposals are really good and conservative, and his record is more conservative than people think. But we are ultimately imprisoned by our own choices, and Huntsman not only chose to abandon the domestic policy battles of 2009-10 to go work for Obama overseas, he chose to hire as his most visible political adviser John Weaver (the GOP-hating former McCain adviser who tried to get McCain to switch parties and whose termination in July 2007 coincided with the nadir of the McCain campaign) and to telegraph his disdain for conservative voters on a bunch of cultural and economic wedge issues, resulting in his candidacy attracting a vocal cheering section among people with the most poisonous of relationships with the primary electorate. (Huntsman's sneering unlikeability in debates hasn't been an asset either, nor his tendency to overrate his own sense of humor) He's the equivalent of a liberal blue-state governor launching a presidential campaign by touting his evangelical Christianity and mocking believers in evolution and global warming; that would go over like a lead balloon in a Democratic primary. The only way Huntsman could begin to repair that damage is by doing a fundamental reboot of his image, starting with sacking Weaver. His unwillingness to do that cements the suspicion that he's still at heart a rich guy from Palo Alto who doesn't much like the people whose votes he's asking for.

The $28 million is the whole article; the rest is details.

Apparently there are still newspapermen who talk like this.

One of my longstanding hobbyhorses in baseball analysis is two related points: (1) durability/quantity of playing time matters and (2) because baseball is played in seasons, it matters to study how much a player contributed by season. For example, one of my points of disagreement with Bill James' argument in his first Historical Abstract for Lefty Grove over Walter Johnson as the best pitcher in MLB history is the failure to adjust for the fact that Johnson was frequently at or around the league lead in innings; Grove carried a less demanding workload by the standards of his own time, and won two of his ERA titles late in his career (with the Red Sox) as effectively a Sunday pitcher, starting less than 24 games a year.

How often have pitchers been the best in the league (by ERA+, ERA adjusted for park and league) and led the league in innings in the same year? It's rarer than you might think - there are plenty of guys like Roy Halladay who have led the league in both, but never in the same year. Most likely because those last few innings can sometimes bring diminishing returns.

What's even more impressive is pulling the feat multiple times. As it turns out, only two pitchers have done it more than twice: Greg Maddux (four years running from 1992-95, including tying Denny Neagle for the league lead in innings in 1995) and Grover Alexander in 1915-16 and 1920 (interrupted by his service in World War I, which cost him most of 1918. I discussed the monumental nature of Alexander's peak and workload in this 2003 essay. Maddux got his just a bit cheaply (1994-95 were strike-shortened schedules, in which he led the league with just under 210 innings pitched each year), but it's still a staggering achievement when you consider how far he stood above the league.

Five other pitchers have managed the feat twice. One is Walter Johnson, who led the league in innings five times and ERA+ six times, and synced the two in 1913 (when he had a 1.14 ERA and 259 ERA+) and 1915. The others were Randy Johnson in 1999 & 2002, Roger Clemens in 1991 & 1997 (the latter an IP tie with Pat Hentgen), Steve Carlton in 1972 & 1980, and Bucky Walters in 1939-40. The rest to do it once are below the fold

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The Veterans Committee elects the late Ron Santo to the Hall of Fame, almost a year to the day after his death. Here's my April 2010 column on the great 3B, which rated him #6 all time and unquestionably a worthy inductee.

I cut off my examination of runs scored per times on base at 1920 because of the many ways in which the early game was different. But let's complete the picture with guys who reached base 3500 or more times and were active before 1920 (I went through the end of their careers this time, so the numbers for Babe Ruth are a little different here; Frankie Frisch's totals are different but the percentages are the same). The #1 man here, of the 24 guys who qualified, sure does stick out. I ran the numbers both with and without including homers, and ranked by the latter:

Player	R	TOBwe	HR	R/TOB	R/TOB(-HR)
Willie Keeler	1719	3585	33	47.9%	47.5%
Roger Connor	1620	3508	138	46.2%	44.0%
Cap Anson	1999	4451	97	44.9%	43.7%
Fred Clarke	1622	3707	67	43.8%	42.7%
Jesse Burkett	1720	3954	75	43.5%	42.4%
Bill Dahlen	1590	3665	84	43.4%	42.1%
George Davis	1545	3614	73	42.8%	41.6%
Jake Beckley	1602	3733	87	42.9%	41.6%
Frankie Frisch	1532	3639	105	42.1%	40.4%
Sam Rice	1514	3751	34	40.4%	39.8%
Max Carey	1545	3782	70	40.9%	39.7%
Ty Cobb	2246	5532	117	40.6%	39.3%
Harry Hooper	1429	3678	75	38.9%	37.6%
Nap Lajoie	1504	3892	82	38.6%	37.3%
Honus Wagner	1739	4508	101	38.6%	37.2%
Lou Gehrig	1771	3983	464	44.5%	37.1%
Eddie Collins	1821	4891	47	37.2%	36.6%
Tris Speaker	1882	4998	117	37.7%	36.2%
Sam Crawford	1391	3744	97	37.2%	35.5%
Goose Goslin	1477	3722	246	39.7%	35.4%
Rogers Hornsby	1579	4019	301	39.3%	34.4%
Babe Ruth	2174	4978	714	43.7%	34.2%
Zack Wheat	1289	3611	132	35.7%	33.3%
Harry Heilmann	1291	3556	183	36.3%	32.8%

Just out of curiosity, I ran the same numbers over the whole 1871-2011 period for three groups of players with over 2000 plate appearances who seemed likely to score a lot: players who scored at least 60% of their times on base overall, players who scored at least 0.85 runs per game, and players who stole at least 30% as many bases as times on base. It will not surprise you that this list is dominated by guys from the game's very earliest days; Keeler sticks out a lot less on this list, when compared to contemporaries and teammates like Hamilton, Delahanty, McGraw, Thompson, Duffy and Brouthers. It's sort of disappointing that the all-time leader here is the obscure Ned Cuthbert, who retired in 1884 with a career .276 OBP, but the #2 man is the game's very first dominant superstar, and the #3 man one of the founding fathers of organized professional baseball:

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So the Marlins have signed Jose Reyes to a 6-year, $106 million contract (with no no-trade clause). What does this mean?

1) It's almost impossible to evaluate whether it makes sense for the Mets to decline to match the Marlins' offer. As I've been saying for months now, the one piece of information Mets fans most need to evaluate the team's moves is the one we don't have reliable access to: the true financial condition of the team. Without that, everything we say is speculation.

2) That said, given the size of the Mets' market compared to the Marlins', and given that Reyes was a popular, homegrown player with strong ties to the community and (until now) a great fit with the dimensions and layout of Citi Field, it's almost certainly the case that Reyes was worth a good deal more money to the Mets than to the Marlins. Reyes' loss is a grievous blow to the Mets, who will likely be unable to meaningfully replace him in a market so short on quality shortstops (count me still a skeptic about Ruben Tejada as a hitter; at best he'll be adequate). But he may, at the same time, be terribly overpriced for the Marlins if their spending spree and new ballpark don't turn them overnight into a team able to run big-market nine-figure payrolls on an annual basis. A team with a $125 million payroll can afford to pay $17.5 million to a dynamite player who averages 120-130 games per year (Reyes averaged 133 games a year overall from age 22-28, 98 a year the past three seasons); a team with a $65 million payroll can't, because it won't have the flexibility to build around Reyes (think of the Rangers pitching staffs during the A-Rod era). And the $60.4 million payroll the Marlins shelled out in 2005 was the highest in franchise history; the average Marlins payroll over the past 19 years has been $35.6 million. Maybe that was all a multi-decade poor-me act designed to get them to the current status of having a taxpayer-funded stadium (now under SEC investigation, see here and here), but only time will tell if Jeffrey Loria is now ready to run the kinds of annual payrolls needed to justify a luxury item like Reyes, the baseball equivalent of a high-end sports car that's often in the shop.

3) Evaluating how Reyes translates into the new park is more complicated. He hit exceptionally well at Citi Field relative to scoring levels at the park, but the Mets are - in light of his departure - remodeling the place, and the new park in Florida is untested.

PS - Using the metric I was playing with on Friday, Reyes in his career has reached base 1699 times as a Met, third on the team's all-time list behind Ed Kranepool and David Wright, and he's scored 43.3% of the time, or 40.4% of the time if you exclude home runs - a rate that would put him among the elite of all time. Among the Mets to reach base more than 1000 times, the only other guy above 32.5% (excluding homers)? Mookie Wilson at 38.8% (lowest was Jerry Grote at 19.7%, even below Rusty, Kranepool, Piazza and Keith Hernandez).

What does it take to score runs? Well, getting on base is Job #1. But once you're on base, not everybody scores at the same rate. Among players who reached base (counting errors) at least 3500 times since the dawn of modern offenses in 1920, here's the 20 guys who scored most often:

Player	R	TOBwe	R/TOB
Babe Ruth	1972	4438	44.4%
Lou Gehrig	1888	4274	44.2%
Charlie Gehringer	1774	4075	43.5%
Kenny Lofton	1528	3527	43.3%
Alex Rodriguez	1824	4218	43.2%
Jimmie Foxx	1751	4111	42.6%
Johnny Damon	1643	3891	42.2%
Al Simmons	1507	3572	42.2%
Frankie Frisch	1511	3592	42.1%
Sammy Sosa	1475	3512	42.0%
Rickey Henderson	2295	5503	41.7%
Willie Mays	2062	4959	41.6%
Steve Finley	1443	3535	40.8%
Lou Brock	1610	4001	40.2%
Hank Aaron	2174	5404	40.2%
Derek Jeter	1769	4416	40.1%
Mel Ott	1859	4648	40.0%
Goose Goslin	1483	3739	39.7%
Craig Biggio	1844	4679	39.4%
Mickey Mantle	1676	4268	39.3%

There's no single common thread here. Most of these guys played on good offenses and/or in good offensive times, in particular in lineups with a lot of high OBPs. Many of them were excellent at getting to scoring position on their own, whether by power (Ruth, Gehrig) or speed (Rickey, Brock). Others, like Mickey and A-Rod, had both great power and, in their younger years, excellent speed. (Obviously, you could re-run this with adjustments for HRs and the like to see who scores from where they start).

Now, the bottom ten:

Player	R	TOBwe	R/TOB
Edgar Martinez	1219	3694	33.0%
Willie McCovey	1229	3735	32.9%
Buddy Bell	1151	3518	32.7%
Luke Appling	1319	4064	32.5%
Mark Grace	1179	3650	32.3%
Ron Santo	1138	3535	32.2%
Harold Baines	1299	4043	32.1%
Brooks Robinson	1232	3916	31.5%
John Olerud	1139	3679	31.0%
Rusty Staub	1189	4165	28.5%

No surprise here: Rusty is the slowest of a slow lot, and only McCovey - who played in a low-scoring era - had great power in this group. This is why Rusty is not in the Hall of Fame, despite being arguably a good enough hitter to be in there, compared to other guys with similar longetivity. Here's the rest of the list:

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