Dr. Manhattan has a very nice piece at Blissful Knowledge on baseball, politics and Bill James. He links to an Eric Neel piece about how early Abstracts affected him. I had much the same experience, although it started with the 1982 Abstract and I was graduating from college at the time. I would love to see Bill James do something on politics. I know it's a subject that interests him from various writings I've seen. A few years before the 2000 election, and the red/blue America paradigm set in, Bill postulated that the US would eventually break up the way eastern Eurpoean countries were doing. While I disagree with this thesis, it was well thought out, and I don't discount the possibility that James (as he so often is) could be right.