Anti-Climacus

NOTE TO MARC AMBINDER:

Not all political scientists study American politics. Not all of the political scientists who study American politics study the Presidency or parties. What happens at conventions in the modern era is well understood and, I think, rather boring, on the whole. Political science does, or should, aspire to a certain level of remove from actual politics, all the better to gain analytic leverage on things when they do happen. Otherwise you end up overstating the importance of events, as Dan Drezner notes, or is evidenced by that famous Mearsheimer article about Europe after the Cold War.

APSA is on the weekend it is because that's always the weekend that it's on; the DNC convention is the interloper here.