Change Math

I’ve gotten something like six million copies of an Obama campaign statement saying, among other things, “If Governor Palin and John McCain want to define ‘change’ as voting with George Bush 90% of the time, that’s their choice, but we don’t think the American people are ready to take a 10% chance on change.”

This was a line out of the Democratic Convention, too, but it doesn’t make sense. They’re construing “change” as a binary quality and saying that the Bush-McCain overlap means that change is unlikely to occur. But this is a very strange interpretation of the voting statistic. The normal way of construing it would be that Bush and McCain agree about a lot of stuff, so McCain’s brand of change is going to be small-scale incremental change. But the Obama campaign is interpreting it as meaning that there’s a 90 percent chance of things staying exact the same, along with a 10 percent chance of things changing dramatically, as if a McCain administration is going to set its course at random.