Quote of the Day, Maybe Harry Reid Is Simply A Sadist edition.

Because this was, I think, needlessly cruel to Harry Reid’s own party base:

Reid then spoke of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the well-known political (and sports) writer whose grim forecast for the Senate Democrats recently created a small furor in Washington. Reid — echoing a Democratic Senate Campaign Committee memo — said Silver has consistently predicted Senate Democrats would perform worse than they have in recent campaign cycles.

“He gave me a 16 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Heidi Heitkamp an 8 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Jon Tester a [34] percent chance of being reelected,” Reid said, referring to Silver’s final 2012 forecast for the New York Times. “So all polls are about like Nate Silver’s predictions: good sometimes, bad most of the time.”

(Via Politico) I don’t exactly disagree with Harry Reid’s assessment of Silver’s ability to forecast Congressional races: it’s never been all that good. But this sudden switch from Nate Silver is the Delphic Oracle of our times to Nate Silver is smoking the crack can’t be good for the psyches of Democrats who notoriously spent 2012 taking comfort hits off of Silver’s site every time that they got scared that they were going to lose the election*. I normally wouldn’t care about the mental anguish involved, except… actually, wait, no, I can’t think of a reason why I should care.  Unusual for me; I’m usually more of a sentimentalist about such things.

Moe Lane

*Just to note, by the way: if Romney had won all of this would be his mess now. But, hey, Hope and Change, right?