Since my last few posts have obviously been leaning towards the Silver-mania that is sweeping the blogopshere, i want to quote from this Washington Post column (via Daily Howler):

The main problem with this approach to politics is not that it is pseudo-scientific but that it is trivial. An election is not a mathematical equation; it is a nation making a decision. People are weighing the priorities of their society and the quality of their leaders. Those views, at any given moment, can be roughly measured. But spreadsheets don't add up to a political community. In a democracy, the convictions of the public ultimately depend on persuasion, which resists quantification.

Put another way: The most interesting and important thing about politics is not the measurement of opinion but the formation of opinion. Public opinion is the product -- the outcome -- of politics; it is not the substance of politics. If political punditry has any value in a democracy, it is in clarifying large policy issues and ethical debates, not in "scientific" assessments of public views.

...

And so, at the election's close, we talk of Silver's statistical model and the likely turnout in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and relatively little about poverty, social mobility or unsustainable debt. The nearer this campaign has come to its end, the more devoid of substance it has become. This is not the advance of scientific rigor. It is a sad and sterile emptiness at the heart of a noble enterprise.

As the Howler points out, the reason there's a focus on Silver is because the pundits are worthless anyway.

This alleged presidential campaign has been a very bad joke. But guess what? That isn't Nate Silver's fault! And since predictions will be made, Silver performed an obvious service by making predictions with rigor.

In our view, the focus on Silver was overdone, for the reasons Gerson expressed. But that isn't Silver's fault or doing, and Silver performed a rare public service during this campaign.

Incredibly, Silver let people see what it's like to read a journalist who actually knows what he's talking about--a journalist who is working with a lot of data and information in an intelligent way.

Relegating the prediction business to Silver and other number crunchers and freeing up the pundits to talk about policy issues would be a decent step forward. Replacing our current pundits with people who would approach policy discussions with the same rigor that Silver uses for poll analysis is the real goal.