Last year I began keeping track of clear-cut predictions by our 20 pundits; the list is in the right sidebar. The point is to evaluate whether the forecasts are accurate or not, in the hope that we’ll eventually be able to say something meaningful about the relative predictive ability of our beloved columnists, in the spirit of Tetlock’s excellent book. My plan is to revisit each prediction one year after it was issued, and each year after that if necessary.
So last July, Frank Rich boldly predicted Karl Rove’s resignation ($):
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.
A year later, Mr. Rove has not resigned, and Mr. Rich wrote last month that he was “freshly released from legal jeopardy ($)” without mentioning his previous prediction. Since Mr. Rich’s prediction was so unqualified (”only one certainty ahead”), let’s officially call it “Very Wrong” and assign it a value of -2, as opposed to “Wrong” (-1), “Murky”, “Too Early to Tell”, “Right” (+1), or “Very Right” (+2). I’ll update the original post and the prediction list to reflect the result.
Oddly, in that column he used the same chess metaphor as part of a new prediction:
While the Democrats dither about Iraq, you can bet that the White House will ambush them with its own election-year facsimile of an exit strategy, dangling nominal troop withdrawals as bait for voters. To sweeten the pot, it could push Donald Rumsfeld to join Mr. DeLay in retirement. Since Republicans also vilify the defense secretary’s incompetence, his only remaining value to the White House is as a political pawn that Mr. Rove can pluck from the board at the most advantageous moment. October, perhaps?
In this new chess game, Rove seems to have been promoted from a soon-to-be-sacrificed knight to the chessplayer and Rumsfeld is a soon-to-be-sacrificed pawn. Maybe in the next iteration, Rumsfeld can be the player, Condi can be the soon-to-be-sacrificed Queen and Rove can be a bishop — no wait — Rove can be a rook who is protecting the king after castling and is preparing to attack with Condi down the right wing . .
UPDATE (12/30/2006): The “facsimile of an exit strategy” prediction didn’t work out any better than the Karl Rove resignation prediction.
