Virtual Excitement

At the Cyber Games, Even Virtual Excitement Is in Short Supply
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By DAN ACKMAN
September 13, 2005; Page D8

New York

Cyber games may be small-time now, but Peter Weedfald has seen the future and the future is Korea. In Korea, top videogamers can earn six-figure salaries and have the status of sports stars. The "gamers" and their games are the subjects of two 24-hour cable television networks devoted to gaming the way ESPN is devoted to sports. "You'll see [gamers] on a box of Wheaties," Mr. Weedfald says. If you think his vision is far-fetched -- well, five years ago the popularity of poker on TV might have seemed far-fetched, too.

Mr. Weedfald is a marketing executive for Samsung Electronics, the lead sponsor for the World Cyber Games, whose U.S. final was held over the weekend at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. So his enthusiasm may be understandable. But he may have to wait for Wheaties if this weekend's event is any indication.


Hoping to exploit the popularity of videogames, the World Cyber Games promotes tournaments as both sporting events and cultural festivals. But are they either?


The World Cyber Games, owned by South Korea-based International Cyber Marketing Inc., aims to both exploit and expand the popularity of videogames and to be both the Olympics of cyber-sport and "a true world cultural festival." But even at the highest level, and with all due respect to the fans in Korea, a gamer in full action is still a kid staring at a screen while twiddling his thumbs on a console or fingering a mouse. Just as videogames are essentially cartoons of the action they parody, cyber games, even at their highest level, are parodies at best of sporting competitions.

If the U.S. finals of the World Cyber Games are any indication, they are joyless and don't provide much in the way of culture, either.

That gaming has a world-wide following is undeniable. Americans spent $9.9 billion on videogames last year, including software, consoles and accessories, according to the NPD Group, which tracks the industry. World-wide, 500 million people play videogames on a regular basis, says Robert Krakoff, president of Razer, a maker of videogame peripherals and a World Cyber Games sponsor. An untold number play the games seriously enough to compete in leagues and tournaments over the Internet. Those who aspire to gaming glory devote as much as 50 hours a week to the games, though most of the top players can maintain their skills by practicing 20 hours weekly.

The World Cyber Games is not alone: The gaming circuit competes for primacy with the Electronic Sports World Cup and the World E-Sports Games. About 40,000 entered World Cyber Games qualifiers, which are open and free of charge, organizers say. International Cyber Marketing flew 185 contestants (184 boys and young men, nearly all between 18 and 22, and one girl) to New York to compete for $34,000 in total prize money and a spot on Team USA, which will compete for a world championship in Singapore next month. There the prize money will total $420,000.

Last year in San Francisco, the U.S. team placed third, its best finish in four tries at the World Cyber Games, trailing Korea and a plucky squad from the Netherlands. Why doesn't the U.S. lead the world in cyber games? Don't American kids have more computers and more free time?

A partial answer may be found in the mix of games selected. The U.S. is good at shooting games, says Won Suk Ohm, executive vice president of World Cyber Marketing. It won the world title last year in Counter-Strike, a personal-computer-based game played between teams of mock terrorists and counter-terrorists, and Halo 2, an Xbox console game that mimics gunfights between genetically enhanced super-soldiers. But America is not so good at strategy games like StarCraft or WarCraft III, both for PCs. It also lags in FIFA Soccer.

True to form, most of the excitement at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Saturday was during the shooting events. In Halo 2, Dan and Tom Ryan, twin 19-year-olds from Pickerington, Ohio, representing Team 3D, a professional squad, beat another Team 3D pair in the final. In an earlier round, two-time World Cyber Games champion Matt Leto, at 21 an aging cyber-gunslinger, was knocked out.

The high point of the event was the Counter-Strike final, where another Team 3D squad beat Complexity in a tight final match. While Team 3D was defending champ in the five-man game, Complexity had won the Electronic Sports World Cup in Paris in July. The Team 3D Counter-Strike players are among the two dozen Americans who can make a living playing videogames, according to Craig Levine, 22, the team's managing director.

For all the artificial mayhem, the atmosphere in the ballroom was subdued. To be sure, the organizers do their best to inject excitement. "Cultural events" included an appearance by Mick Foley, a professional wrestler, who signed autographs.

Organizers employed "shoutcasters," who are something like sportcasters, only louder and more frenetic, to sit on stage screaming explanations of what was happening on overhead screens being manipulated offstage if not entirely out of sight of the small band of spectators who showed up.

For the most part, though, it was hard to get a rise out of either the gamers, whose eyes were locked on their video screens, or their fans. Victorious gamers all seem to have learned to mimic the most numbing clichés of actual athletes: "We were confident going in … We knew it was going to be a tough game" and so on. Team 3D's Josh "Dominator" Sievers, for instance, when asked to express his emotions after winning the final, expounded in slightly greater detail: "I guess anyone who ever played a sport in high school and won a big competition knows how it feels."

Gamers would know how it feels, too, if they ever pulled away from the screen and had the experience.

Mr. Ackman is a writer for Breakingviews, a financial news and opinion Web site that will have a regular column in the Journal's new Weekend Edition.

URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112655995000738479,00.html?mod=at%5Fleisure%5Fmain%5Freviews%5Fdays%5Fonly

See also: Ackman on Sports

Praising the Pitchman

From The Sunday New York Post (9/11/05)

HAWKER REDEEMED
By DAN ACKMAN

Victor Grillo Jr. has long been the red-headed stepchild of the advertising world.

Rarely singled out for praise, Grillo seemed to only get attention when folks mocked him for his informercials.

After all, it was Grillo who brought the Ginsu 2000 knife set and his Liquid Leather wonder product to late-night television.

Go ahead, raise your hand if you, too, gave Grillo's products a laugh.

Lately, though, it's Grillo and his brethren in the 1-800 advertising business that have been doing the laughing — all the way to the bank.

That's because after years of shunning the direct-response genre of advertising, the Fortune 500 crowd is moving in.

And Grillo, among the pioneers of the infomercial business, has been there to greet them, ringing up business for his Advanced Results Marketing company while still pushing his own products on the side, like the Everlife Flashlight — no batteries or bulbs!


Having several Fortune 500 companies as clients has brought Grillo not only more success, but a feeling of redemption. If Madison Avenue once considered him a cockroach, as Grillo is fond of saying, "At least now we're a big cockroach."

Feeding the growth of direct-response advertising is the ability of companies to directly gauge the impact of a commercial.

The basic idea is that rather than vague ideas such as brand-building, the advertiser knows precisely whether his ads are generating a return.

Lately, traditional advertisers such as BMW, Procter & Gamble and pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer have been spending at least part of their ad budgets on direct response. David McCracken, a spokesman for P&G, says the change in the ad mix is part of a renewed emphasis on return on investment. Grillo's ARM, based in Marlboro, Mass., now counts among its clients The Holmes Group, Conair and a half-dozen Las Vegas casinos.

Grillo, 39, is not the biggest as-seen-on-TV seller. Guthy-Renker, which claims more than $1 billion in annual sales, likely holds that title. And he is not the biggest direct-response ad agency either. But he is rare in that he does both. He is also unique as an on-air pitchman for his own ad agency, hawking ARM's services on morning cable news shows.

Grillo says his Everlife Flashlight is the No. 1 direct-response product on TV. He exaggerates, but just a little, as Jordan-Whitney, a company that ranks infomercial buys, says the flashlight has not top-ranked, but has been consistently in the top three in recent weeks. The flashlight will also be available in major retail chains this Christmas season.

Direct-response advertising, whether in long-form or full 30-minute infomericials, differs from traditional advertising. All ads have a "call to action," meaning a plea to call an 800 number, whether to buy a product or simply request more information.

Call-to-action advertising is popular because it is charged a lower fee than normal TV advertising. However, it is not guaranteed a time slot and is often banished to late-night or overnight periods.

ARM has recently merged with a Results Media, a traditional media-buying company based in Phoenix, in a $40 million deal. The combined company projects $200 in media buys this year, along with about $60 million in product sales.

Though he still relishes his Triple Edge Wiper Blades-hawking past, Grillo admits, somewhat ruefully, "We're getting to be respected."

See also my article in Forbes: Near-Perfect Pitch

The house Katrina built

This is from my column BreakingViews

Hurricane Katrina: The justly-maligned US government's Federal
Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has just contracted with
five major corporations supposedly to speed emergency housing
relief to Gulf Coast families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
The oddity is that there is already an abundance of unoccupied
housing in the US, not least in the areas affected by Katrina.


What's the explanation? Well, at one level, one might just
shrug one's shoulders. Perhaps it should come as no surprise
that the hapless Fema, now a unit of the vast bureaucracy that
has become the Department of Homeland Security, seems unaware
of the situation on the ground. At another level, one could
view this as another example of excessive government largesse
in the face of disaster - perhaps to quell disastrous
criticism of its initial poor response.

But it is also worth questioning Fema's motives for doling out
lucractive contracts. After all, the five contractors -
Bechtel, Fluor, Shaw Group, CH2M Hill and Dewberry
Technologies - may all be expert in massive engineering
projects. But none is known as a housebuilder. Curious minds
will also note that Bechtel and Fluor happen to be actively
engaged in Iraq.

Luckily for the US, there is no shortage of home builders.
Indeed, new home building has been proceeding at a torrid rate
for the past five years. And most of the building has been in
the south and west, in areas where Katrina's victims lived and
have now dispersed.

One consequence of all that construction, and of low mortgage
rates, is that the vacancy rate for rental housing is at or
near record levels. The rate for the US as a whole is just
under 10%, according to the Census Bureau. But it's higher -
at 12% - in the south. While Louisiana's rental vacancy rate
is on the lower side for the region, nearby Alabama, Texas and
Georgia are all among the highest nationally. Vacancy rates
for lower-priced houses are even higher than for more
expensive homes.

As there are 34m rental units in the US, that means that more
than 3m are empty. With thousands of refugees now housed in
sports stadiums and convention halls, it would seem there is
little time to await the construction of even temporary
housing. If the federal government could provide just a little
grease in terms of help relocating and some rental subsidies,
the problem of housing Katrina's refugees seems quite
solvable. Bechtel's expensive help is not required.

See also: Fresh Pricks in the Housing Bubble

Zero Tolerance... Zero Intelligence

President Bush has said many inane things on the campaign trail and during his presidency (for him, bascally the same). But some of his remarks in reaction to New Orleans have to be among the worst.

First, Mr Bush flew over New Orleans and parts of Mississippi's in Air Force One after famously "cutting short" his 33-day vacation by all of two days. Turning to his aides, he said: "It's totally wiped out. ... It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

This remark presumes that his aides had not been watching television, or worse, no one told the President about what had happened until he took off. What, one wonders, were his aides supposed to say back.

The next day Mr. Bush told Good Morning America: "I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving, or insurance fraud."

Say what?!? Was anyone thinking about insurance fraud? Of course, the President was talking about looters. Zero tolerance is always a dumb and empty phrase. But in this context, it proves a true moron. Should cops and judges really have zero tolerance for someone stealing food or diapers, or even if they are part of mob stealing TVs. Certainly if there was ever a time for some degree of tolerance, this is it.

Loosey Goosey Loans

One of the less explored angles of the recent housing booms has been the decline in lending standards. Loan officers in California and others familiar with the situation there tell me that they routinely give interest only loans and loans based on stated incomes that banks do not verify at all. See California's Home Boom Looks Like A Bubble But the question is why. Don't the banks want to make sure they are repaid?

Amazingly, the answer is they may not care. A article in today's Wall Street Journal puts a number on the selling of loans. It says: "U.S. lenders will make about $2.8 trillion in home-mortgage loans this year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The MBA estimates that about 80% of these loans will end up in mortgage-backed securities. Mortgage-backed securities outstanding at the end of the first quarter totaled $4.61 trillion, up 61% since the end of 2000. In the same period, total Treasury securities outstanding grew 35% to $4.54 trillion."

Once the bank sells the loan, repayment is not a big issue. From the borrower's pint of view, many assume that if payments get difficult, they will simply re-sell at a profit. It's all reminiscent of the Tom Lehrer line about Verner Von Braun: "Once the bombs go up who cares where they come down? That's not my department." See also: Fresh Pricks In Housing Bubble.

Iranian Pride Project

To me the idea of invading Iraq was never nearly as bad as the justification for it. There was merit in deposing Saddam Hussein: First, he was murderous to his own people; Second, he had a tendency to invade his neighbors. But no vague or waffling justification for war can ever be valid. War is something one does when one is 100% certuan, not 51%. And lying about war and peace is a cardinal offense for any leader:

Bush and Cheney told the Congress and told the world that that Iraq had WMDs. The mistake may be forgivable, but acting on it is not. It was never forgivable to play bait and switch over matters of war and piece.

This morning's Washington Post has a similar story. It says: "Traces of bomb-grade uranium found two years ago in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and are not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program," according to a group of U.S. government experts and other international scientists.

This is amazing to me (not that I have followed the Iran nukes story all that closely. But the idea that one can assert that a country has nuclear weapons or is trying to get them without being certain of the charge seems very dangerous.

The WP report quotes a "senior official" who says, "'The biggest smoking gun that everyone was waving is now eliminated with these conclusions.'"

Their conclusion is that Iran's long contention that the uranium traces were the result of contaminated equipment bought years ago from Pakistan is correct. Still, the Bush administration had pointed to the material as evidence that Iran was making bomb-grade ingredients.

That's stunning news in particular and worrisome in general that such weighty matters can be babdied about without extremely solid proof.

The Nation Comes to J.C.

Here is my piece from the New York Post on real estate in my adopted hometown of Jersey City.

City Dwellers

The New York Post

By Dan Ackman

August 14, 2005

The land rush under way in Jersey City is attracting some surprise players — the nation's largest homebuilders, much more accustomed to earning their profits in the greener pastures of suburbia.

But as large, profitable tracts on less crowded land are harder to come by, Pulte Homes, Toll Brothers and Centex have moved their equipment into urban landscapes for the first time.

They join a fourth builder, Hovnanian Enterprises, which had already made the move.

The new developments are part of what the companies call "urban infill" — a return to older cities.

Nowhere is the emerging business model for the publicly traded homebuilders more evident than just across the Hudson, in Jersey City and neighboring Hoboken.

Pulte Homes, based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Hovnanian, based in Red Bank, N.J., both have projects in Jersey City's tony Paulus Hook section.

Dallas-based Centex is building on the west side of town overlooking Newark Bay, where Hovnanian is adding a new phase to an existing project. Toll Brothers, based in Horsham, Pa., just broke ground on condos near the Holland Tunnel exit on the Hoboken border, adding to a pair of developments in Hoboken itself.

Two causes are sharpening the companies' focus more on urban locales.

First, there is increasing demand for homes that afford an urban lifestyle that is entirely dependent on the car.

Second, suburban communities are starting to rebel at perceived overdevelopment by implementing tighter building and zoning restrictions. To maintain their heady growth rate, the companies are being forced to come back to land that has long been developed and create new types of homes attractive to couples and young families as well as empty-nesters.

The latest arrival in Jersey City is Centex, which is building 120 town homes and loft-style apartments at Westside Station, the first of which are scheduled for delivery late this year.

Robert Forniadis, a senior vice president and director of land acquisition, says the proximity to Manhattan and the desire of buyers for more traditional communities are the reasons Centex has come to Jersey City.

While Centex and others have long been in the business of building planned developments, Forniadis concedes, "We call them neighborhoods, but they're really not." Jersey City, while less dense than the five boroughs, is closer to the real thing. More of their customers want shorter commutes and homes closer to entertainment, "not McMansions where you have to drive to get to the mailbox."

At the opposite end of town, Toll Brothers is building a 230-unit condominium called 700 Grove. While prices in Jersey City and Hoboken are still not at Manhattan — or even north Brooklyn — levels, Benjamin Jogodnik, a Toll Brothers vice president, says prices on their existing Hoboken projects have gone up by about 40 percent in two years.

Hovnanian, whose headquarters are just an hour's drive south, started its first Jersey City project called Society Hill in 1985. But it has ramped up its interest in the city recently. Not only is it adding 380 town homes in a development called Droyers Point, but it is building town homes and one- and two-bedroom condos in Paulus Hook, a historic section across the river from Manhattan's financial district.

Doug Fenischel, a spokesman for Hovnanian, says the regulatory process in suburban areas has made building there more difficult. But building in urban areas has become easier, at least in the sense that new technology has made land cleanup more feasible. The combination of factors has made returning to land long occupied often by factories, or even waste dumps, more attractive for builders and home-buyers alike.

Fenischel allows that no more than 5 percent of Hovnanian's business is urban. "But we expect that to increase dramatically."

Bubble Bubble

Paul Krugman has a good piece on the housing bubble today:

That Hissing Sound
By PAUL KRUGMAN
This is the way the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with a hiss.

Housing prices move much more slowly than stock prices. There are no Black Mondays, when prices fall 23 percent in a day. In fact, prices often keep rising for a while even after a housing boom goes bust.

So the news that the U.S. housing bubble is over won't come in the form of plunging prices; it will come in the form of falling sales and rising inventory, as sellers try to get prices that buyers are no longer willing to pay. And the process may already have started....

I, however, was writing the same thing back in April (not that I was the only one):

Our Schizophrenic Housing Market
Dan Ackman, 04.27.05, 11:16 AM ET

Yesterday, the news that new U.S. home sales were up 12.2% in March to record levels caused some confusion, as most economists had expected a slowdown amid a slight jump in mortgage rates and a decline in housing starts the same month.

Sales climbed to an all-time high, a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.43 million units--bettering the old mark of 1.3 million units set last October, the U.S. Commerce Department reported. Prices were up sharply, too. The gains were in all regions but were most pronounced in the South, where new-home sales jumped 18.6%. In the Northeast, the rise was just 1.2%.

This disparity highlights the schizophrenia in the U.S. housing market, both in terms of price and construction. Thus the answer to the debate about the housing bubble may be, "It depends on where you are."...

Misundertrusted

There is a good piece by Jack Shafer in Slate today on the phoniness of surveys that purport to show massive mistrust of the media. Why I Don't Trust Readers

Shafer makes the point that expressing mistrust of media is a largely political statement. To me, it's like saying "I'm counterculture," an some Republican suburbanites like to think of themselves that way, oddly enough.

I have long distrusted such surveys myself. What does it mean that 54% of the people believe what they read in the newspaper. Does that mean when the Daily News says the Mets beat the Cubs 5-3, half the folks think the Cubs, in fact, beat the Mets 4-2?

I wrote about a similiar survey a while back: For 53% Reliable Information, Click Here:

NEW YORK - According to a new survey, 52.8% of Internet users believe that most or all of the information online is "reliable and accurate."

Other highlights from the report issued by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy: About 61% find the Net "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, and Internet use is cutting into television time with Internet users watching about 4.8 fewer hours of television each week than nonusers. Among Internet users, 60.5% consider it to be a "very" or "extremely" important source of information. Just 25% consider it to be an important source of entertainment. The percentage of Americans who use the Internet actually fell, the survey says, from 72.3% to 71.1%, but the average time spent online was up substantially, to 11.1 hours per week.

That people are gravitating from the television to the Internet, especially for information, is, of course, extremely good news--at least for us. But while they are coming more, they are believing less: Last year the UCLA survey indicated that 58% of Internet users believed that most of what they read online was "reliable and accurate."

Return of the yellow peril (CNOOC)

As the CNOOC/Unocal drama looks over, here is a reminder of some of what i wrote for Forbes.com.


Top Of The News Yellow Peril Seeks Black Gold Dan Ackman, 06.24.05, 9:17 AM ET

OK, China, here's the deal:

You send us billions of dollars' worth of clothes and steel and fish and computers and things. Make it, say, $200 billion worth this year, and a little more each year after that. Wait, make it a lot more. We'll send you maybe $40 billion in plastics and computer chips and airplanes and all that. The rest we'll make up with dollars.

What should you do with all those dollars?

Heck, I don't know...go to Wal-Mart.

Right, Wal-Mart's got the stuff you sent us in the first place.... Right, bad idea....

OK, I got it: buy Treasury bills. We got one heck of a deficit problem here, and you can't really expect us to shoulder the whole load can you? What's that, you still have some dollars left? We can let you have some more of those T-bills. They pay 4% interest. Now that's free money, that's what that is.

What? You say you want oil....

Our oil! You want to buy a whole oil company?...

One of our oil companies?...

One of our Texas oil companies....

California, OK, I see....

That's a little better. But, wait a minute, China.... Just slow down there, fella! We gotta think about this....

I'm gonna put you on hold....

You sure you don't want more T-bills?...

OK, we'll get back to you. OK, China, I did some checking with the boys back at the home office. And I gotta be honest, this oil scheme of yours--they don't like it.
For MORE: http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/energy/2005/06/24/unocal-cnooc-chevron-cx_da_0624topnews.html

More on CNOOC:

Unocal's Bid For Asia June 27, 2005 CNOOC is not buying a U.S. company as much as it is buying Asian oil and gas assets owned by Americans.

CNOOC: Wave Of Future; Blast From Past June 23, 2005 Is China now about to put its export earnings to work buying U.S. assets, just as Japan did in the 1980s?

The First Justice Roberts

President Bush’s nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court comes, as it happens, on the 50th anniversary of the death of the Owen J. Roberts, a Supreme Court justice who is almost completely forgotten. The story of Roberts I illustrates the difficulty of predicting a nominee’s tendencies, a fairly well-worn point. But it also shows that few Supreme Court justices prove as important as we believe they’ll be at the time of nomination.

The first Justice Roberts had been a corporate lawyer in Philadelphia who gained some fame as a special prosecutor following the Teapot Dome scandals. President Hoover settled on him as a safe choice after his first choice, John L. Parker, was voted down by a Senate that was more heavily Republican than today’s senate. (Mr. Parker had made some racist remarks on the bench.)

The first big case after Justice Roberts’ confirmation was Near v. Minnesota, which involved a state law that allowed the state to enjoin publication of “malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper [or] magazine” articles. The case sounds like a no-brainer, and the Supreme Court did strike down the law. But the vote was 5-to-4, with Justice Roberts siding with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, also a Hoover-appointee. If the term “swing-vote” had been invented yet, Justice Roberts would have been deemed the swinger.

Justice Roberts did join the majority in the 1935 Schechter Poultry case, in which the Supreme Court held invalid a federal law that empowered the president to enact labor codes regulating the wages, hours and minimum wages of industrial employees. But the vote in that case was 9-0, and it did not prevent such regulations per se, but said Congress could not delegate regulatory power to the executive without some reasonably clear guidelines. Congress soon reworked the legislation in a constitutionally acceptable manner.

In 1937, Justice Roberts joined the majority in N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., a case where the court upheld the National Labor Relations Act. He was again the swing vote in the sense that he was one of five necessary to uphold the legislation. He joined another 5-4 majority in upholding validity of the federal payroll tax imposed as part of the Social Security Act (Steward Machine Company v. Davis). He sided again with the chief justice in another 5-4 vote upholding the validity of state minimum wage laws (West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish).

Justice Robert’s proudest moment on the high court may have been in dissent. If Brown v. Board of Education is the case lawyers and law students use to cast the Supreme Court in a heroic light, Korematsu v. United States is its polar opposite. In that case, the justices greenlighted the placing of Japanese-Americans, U.S. citizens, in internment camps. Of course, the decision came in time of a world war. But three justices voted ‘no,’ and Justice Roberts was one of the three.

No one remembers Justice Roberts today. He was not a leader on the court; his dissents don’t ring out. No one has written his biography. There is a school district in Pennsylvania named after him, but that’s about it.

Still, he serves as a reminder. First, as is often remarked, Supreme Court justices are often surprises. And second, in the long run, justices rarely prove as consequential as they first seem.

Roberts and Roe and Rove

With all the hue and cry about Judge Roberts and his nomination, I think there are still a few points yet to be made.

First, despite what they would have their own Christian right supporters believe, the last thing Bush and Rove really want is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Republicans have been gaining support and money based on their supposed distate for Roe for decades. if the decision is actually overturned, they would be faced with a real governing responsibility about what to do. If states started outlawing abortion, there would be a groundswell among the now understandably complacent pro-choice majority. The political force would switch sides. In other words, the Republicans would rather have the issue to campaign on than the actual victory.

Second, Roberts is above all a law man. He is, by all appearances, not an idealogue. He believes in the rule of law. And a belief in the rule of law translates into a belief in precedent. This belief is all over his jurisprudence. Here, for instance, is something from Ramaprakash v. F.A.A.,
displayTruncatedTitle("346 F.3d 1121") 346 F.3d 1121, 1124 (D.C. Cir. 2003), Roberts' very first decision on the D.C. Circuit: “[A]gency action is arbitrary and capricious if it departs from agency precedent without explanation. Agencies are free to change course as their expertise and experience may suggest or require, but when they do so they must provide a ‘reasoned analysis indicating that prior policies and standards are being deliberately changed, not casually ignored.’” (citations omitted).

Third, Roberts is a Bush I man. George H.W. Bush tried to get him a seat on the D.C. Circuit, but could not get him confirmed. Bush I appointed Clarence Thomas, but he also appointed David Souter. Roberts is too smart to be Thomas. I think he'll more likely be like Souter.