Since I'm a relative newbie here, I would like to take some time out from my tedious policy discussions to let you know what I'm all about.  Before digging in, I have really enjoyed becoming a member of the TPM community and have appreciated all the blogs that I have read and the comments others have made on mine. 

Now, I am under no grand illusions that what I have to say will garner a large readership or a lot traffic, but I do believe that my experience with government and my chosen profession as a policy analyst has inspired me to take a rather unique approach to political blogging.  If your willing to read on, I'd like to tell you about it.

I believe in numbers.  And I believe that Political Ideology can destroy the process with which you gather and interpret numbers.  Unfortunately there a lot of cynics that would tell you that you can make numbers tell you what you want to know.  Even more unfortunately, those cynics are right.  Numbers in the hands of someone with an agenda can make them tell you whatever they want to tell you.

However, that is why public policy must be approached from a scientific and analytical perspective.  Formulate hypotheses, test those hypotheses using your statistical tools, then rigorously analyze the story those statistics tell you. Look at the distribution of your data to determine the effect on the entire population (the poor, the rich, minorities, etc.) and not just the mean; then test the same model using different tools to figure out exactly how robust your findings are.

Political Ideology precludes people from specifying and interpreting data correctly and thus leads to poor public policy decisions and failed policies.  I think that the TANF post I wrote earlier today is prime example of this.  Bill Clinton, seeking to triangulate between ideologies on the left and the right designed a policy that was completely ineffectual.  The President allowed the states and localities to continue to play the chief role in determining eligibility and benefits to satisfy conservatives on the right, completely overlooking the fact that the decentralized system was designed to keep African Americans off of the roles by 1935 southern Democrats.  This fractured the risk pool and crippled the program.

I am a Democrat because the numbers take me there.  This is not because Democrats do not let their ideology skew their analysis.  It is because Republican conservative ideology has become nothing but mere ideology that cannot be supported by any rigorous analysis. 

Thus, I will continue to bore you with tedious discussions on complicated issues that are critically important.  I hope that you will take the time to read along and comment on the way with your input.  Thanks.