Usage Note: When Someone Interferes With an Election, That’s a Shenanigan

Someone sent an official-looking email to people affiliated with George Mason University saying that the election had been postponed a day.

But for the “are you fucking kidding me?” factor, dude here takes the cake:

From other things I’ve seen, it appears that the guy not holding the nightstick was an official poll-watcher, which makes it even worse.  He’s supposed to be making things work better, not intimidate people. Also, when police removed the man with the nightstick, the poll watcher was allowed to stay. (H/t: Clown College)

The comforting news is that these are pretty clearly two isolated headcases.

News: While he was indisputably standing there with a nightstick, it’s not clear if anyone officially complained.

Five Thirty Eight

Oh Lord, a new polling website.  They attempt to assign weights to various polls based on reliability, to *mumble* *mumble* regression *mumble*…, and then do 10,000 simulations to derive estimates of the popular vote, electoral vote and probability of each candidate winning.  So it’s either an entirely scientific approach to polling or complete voodoo.  Either way, it takes the fun out of polling, which is aggregating the results and then selectively ignoring the ones that displease you. Did I say fun? I actually hate that horse-race shit, even if I might partake in a moment of weakness.

You might describe my predictive strategy as equal parts prayer and terror.

Media Sexism

I don’t have anything to add, but you should watch this video (note: some profanity or offensive language). Most of these incidents were publicized when they occurred, but to see them all in succession left me shocked.

Sexism Sells — But We’re Not Buying It

The Electoral College

Marc Ambinder raises the possibility of Obama winning the popular vote and losing the electoral vote.  But unlike 2000, it might end up being several million votes.  My call is that if that happens, McCain might end up president, but there would be no way that the electoral college would last until 2012.

A peculiar side note is that there may be some ways in which the electoral college disadvantages some red states that have rapidly growing populations.

I can’t get upset about the electoral college, but it does seem oddly unmotivated, and the potential to create controversy is too great to justify retaining it.  One side effect might be that electoral fraud would become a nationwide issue instead of being isolated in close-fought states.

Question For You

Suppose you think that Clinton voters have been disenfranchised, and that this election has been handed to the people who disenfranchised them. You think you’re the only “real democrats” and that the party has been infiltrated by people who do not care about it.  You think that Clinton is the only one capable of representing you.

How do you deal with the fact that Clinton just endorsed Obama, if you think Obama represents everything bad about the party right now?

I think if you’re honest with yourself, I think you have to say “she just sold us out, she abandoned us, she never really cared.”  Maybe you say that she was humiliated and coerced into giving the endorsement.  But coerced how? With loss of power in a corrupt party that has already sold her out?

No, I think given your worldview, you have to say that you’ve been sold out by the candidate you trusted and counted on to represent you.

That should give you pause.

Because maybe, just, maybe, Clinton isn’t that sort of politician. She’s imperfect, and has made compromises, but I’ve never seen a serious accusation that she’s tried to sell out all of her supporters, and half of her own party.  And if she is that kind of politician, why be so angry on her behalf?  There’s no reason to respect someone who’d do that.

Maybe the simple explanation is the best one: that Clinton is someone who believes in the Democratic party, and that she endorsed Obama because she believes that he can faithfully represent it.  She thinks she would have been a better candidate, but that Obama is a good one.  She doesn’t think the Democratic party is controlled by interlopers, or that her supporters have been disenfranchised.  She’s not selling you out.  Now that she’s lost the election, she’s honestly endorsing the nominee.

Or you could think that during the last week, Clinton became evil.

Underexplored Research Topics

Jamelle’s post on Clinton running on an independent ticket raises some interesting questions:

Richard Thompson must be high on some potent chronic if he thinks Hillary Clinton could mount a successful third-party run:

Variations in Cannabis Induced Political Psychosis sounds like the sort of work that could win an Ignoble prize.  Who’s in?

Newt’s Ideas

By whatever weak standards govern politicians, Newt Gingrich is supposedly an important thinker and source of new ideas. So it’s interesting to see his proposals for turning around the republican party. He’s worried that the party could return to permanent minority status, and thinks they need to unveil a new agenda within the next few months. Here are his ideas:

1. Repeal the gas tax for the summer, and pay for the repeal by cutting domestic discretionary spending.
2. Redirect the oil being put into the national petroleum reserve onto the open market.
3. Introduce a “more energy at lower cost with less environmental damage and greater national security bill” as a replacement for the Warner-Lieberman “tax and trade” bill.
4. Establish an earmark moratorium for one year and pledge to uphold the presidential veto of bills with earmarks through the end of 2009.
5. Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically.
6. Implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system.
7. Declare English the official language of government.
8. Protect the workers’ right to a secret ballot
9. Remind Americans that judges matter.

A few remarks. One is the biggest bandaid imaginable, and also the issue that prompted James Fallows to run a contest for the stupidest bipartisan idea ever. Worse, it appears that a majority of Americans have been convinced that it won’t help.

In the middle of the list you have a few ideas that might be interesting, but they’re incremental reforms that are unlikely to excite the public. The best they might do is help the republicans ameliorate their current reputation for gross incompetence. But that’s the sort of thing that takes time to accomplish.

The only item on the list that is really a big issue is #3, and absent any details, it’s meaningless.

If you compare this proposal to the Contract With America, it comes up quite short. Setting aside whether the contract featured good ideas, it at least had big ideas. Perhaps Newt didn’t think he was able to make bigger proposals without the agreement of other figures in the conservative movement. Regardless of why this proposal looks the way that it does, it’s hard to imagine a Republican seeing it and finding a real answer to their problems in the current election.

Followup: After posting, I saw that Ross Douthat had his own take on Newt’s ideas. He’s unimpressed, perhaps because he also has ideas about how to change the Republican party, ideas that I’m quite curious to read.

The War Issue

This is perhaps the biggest ground for supporting Obama over Hillary. In 2002, Hillary voted to authorize the President to go to war in Iraq. Obama did not–while not in the Senate, he spoke against the war. This is not merely a matter of looking at old votes to see who was vindicated in hindsight. It is an important issue of how we confront the war machine. Imagine two debates:

Obama: “I have been against this war from the beginning.”
McCain: [war-mongering insanity]

or

Clinton: “We need to end this war.”
McCain: “You voted for this war, now you’re flip-flopping? We need to finish what you started!”
[Enter John-Kerry, stage left]

Aside from showing that I can’t write good dialogue, this is a huge problem for Clinton. Sometimes liberals worry about looking weak on national security. We’d do better to spend more time worrying about just looking weak and confused. We’re better off with a candidate who can speak confidently and with convictions the public can discern.

At a real level, Hillary’s actions don’t make sense. Sometimes people have tried to explain voting for the war by citing political necessities. But the fact is those political necessities were only there if you thought that the war would go well. If your belief was that war would go poorly, the political necessity is to vote against it–you might take heat in the short term, but you’ll be vindicated. In any case, if Hillary gets the nomination, look forward to a lot of tortuous explanations during the general election.

We don’t need to fear a direct confrontation–McCain’s ideas are dangerous and unpopular. What we need to worry about is whether we’ll be able to make that case or whether the message will be drowned out.

Nonvoters Can’t Save Us

One of the prime claims that Nader and his supports make is that there is a large contingent of non-voters out there who are sick of the way politics as usual works, and who could be motivated to change the system if the right candidate comes along. It’s perhaps a little awkward for them to explain why it hasn’t happened yet, since Nader has had so many chances (this year will be his 5th). On the merits, the first claim is accurate, but the second is false.

There is a long-running political fantasy among liberals that everyone is just waiting to support progressive policies if the right moment comes.  But so far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence that non-voters hold political views strongly different than voters. One survey found equal proportions of non-voters who supported Bush and Gore in 2000. Non-voters do differ in other regards: they are more likely to be young, poorly educated or to have low-incomes. Perhaps these demographic distinctions would lead to different voting patterns, if the nonvoters were politically engaged in the way that voters are.  But while the right efforts might get nonvoters to the polls, there’s no way we can just pretend that they’d change their entire outlook.  We already know that swing voters are primarily that way because they don’t enjoy politics, and don’t want to learn about it.  There’s every reason to think nonvoters are the same way.

Blow Me

Ralph Nader is running for president again. As George Bush said, “Fool me once…shame on…you. Fool me you can’t get fooled again!”

Never mind that this is probably the election with the greatest apparent differences in the candidates in the past 16 years.  Certainly it’s the election with the most liberal plan coming from the democratic candidates since then.  Never mind that Nader has already had the opportunity to see the effect his vanity campaigns have had.

Experience

I’ve been thinking about the experience issue between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama recently. It seems as if the issue has disappeared from the mouths of professional pundits, but it’s one that a lot of people are probably influenced by. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s something of a rorschach test, like much of the democratic primary.

Hillary Clinton has more years as a United States senator (7 to 3). Barack Obama has more years in elected office (11 to 7). Hillary Clinton has more years as a public figure (a whole ton). How do we weight those factors? If we look at the first two, the role of a US senator is probably what is most important, and it gives Clinton the edge. Yet this is an odd issue for this campaign: neither candidate has a truly distinguished record of holding public office–contrast them to Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, candidates whose two and three decades of service as Senators earned them nothing.†

So if this is an issue, it depends on Hillary Clinton’s time as first lady. I think it would be foolish to deny that this experience counts for something. For eight years, she was at the heart of what was going on in the Clinton administration, and she must have learned something from that time.

The rorschach test is deciding how much that counts? Is it just an extra little bit of credit that she gets, an intangible, but not one that would sway your opinion? Or will the experience she has from that time make her much more ready to get things done the moment she enters the White House?  I’m an Obama supporter, which indicates that I have an opinion: I think that he’s got experience enough and that the experience that she has didn’t prevent her from making a number of gross mistakes (voting for the Iraq  war being the big one).

Nonetheless, the more I think, the more I’ve come to think that it’s hard to make a charge like that stick.  I’ve come to see the experience issue as impossible to adjudicate.  Surely there’s some fact of the matter out there, but I can’t demonstrate my position to someone who sees Clinton’s experience as important anymore than they can demonstrate the importance of that experience to me.  In some ways that’s good news: the campaign has bogged down in these interminable issues because there are no major divisions in the party, because all the candidates have a lot of good ideas.

† Both candidates also have interesting experience outside of public affairs.  Weighing that goes well beyond what I’m doing here, though it could be important.

Games

I found three in the past few days.

1. Freerice, a vocabulary quiz that gives 20 grains of rice to the developing world for every question you correctly answer.  Try looking at rice the next time you eat some.  20 grains is…not much.  But vocabulary is swell!
2. A geography game.  This is easily the best thing ever.
3. A 36 question test that matches you to the presidential candidates who share your views.  I’m a smidge closer to Obama than Edwards, who both easily beat Hillary.  Interestingly, Giuliani is the best Republican excluding Ron Paul, but damn if I don’t uh…really hate Giuliani.

Bloomberg is Uninteresting

This NYTimes article on Bloomberg’s presidential ambitions is a few days old, but I liked this quote about Bloomberg too much to ignore it:

“Privately, Mr. Bloomberg’s supporters and advisers say that the mayor’s stances on a few hot-button issues are beside the point. His large personal fortune and ability to self-finance a campaign, they argue, would insulate him from the demands of special-interest groups, allowing him to serve as an honest broker in the White House, much as he has in City Hall.”

The argument from billionaire to honest broker is a bit rushed, I’d say. The gist of the article is that he doesn’t have many policy positions that distinguish him from the democratic candidates in the race.

I should say that I don’t know one way or another if Bloomberg would make a good president–certainly he has fewer strikes against him than a lot of the candidates in the race. To the extent that he might promote government accountability, transparency, etc, that’d be great–I don’t know if he could follow through on that or not. But none of this adds up to a compelling reason for a third party campaign.

Ouch

Fair points all: Huckabee’s Fair Tax zeal and Paul’s anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish…But if you’re going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: “I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don’t know that. They don’t believe that.” (They don’t believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can’t find a serious conservative economist who thinks it’s true.) (Ross Douthat)

This is why I tend to think that Mitt Romney is the best major republican candidate by a smidge. That said, I’m not completely convinced that Ron Paul’s economic beliefs are really much crazier than wanting to go to war with Iran (as Giuliani recently seemed to).

I can’t remember where, but today I read someone who said that Paul’s outlook seems to be “foreigners are bad, and so are people who mess with your money in any way whatsoever.”  Perhaps that’s what is so off-putting about the range of policies he advocates.

The Republican Primaries

Here’s a very good post by Ross Douthat on the state of the Republican primary campaign–almost all of his points are on target. I even agree with him that by the traditional metrics of success, the Republican candidates are generally more successful and experienced than the Democrats. There are exceptions to that, I’ll note, since Giuliani is running on a foreign-policy focused platform but his primary accomplishments in that realm include being mayor of a city that was attacked by terrorists–Marion Barry could have done that. But regardless, it’s a very helpful post if you’re confused by the Republican candidates.

Counterpoint-Update: Noah Millman disagrees, I think. At least he starts with a disagreement.