Everyone lies

TV's Dr. Gregory House has several rules for diagnosis. Number one is that "everyone lies." Number two is "I don't ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do."

 

Maybe political pollsters need to adopt a similar approach. In a recent Rasmussen poll, nearly half of respondents said it was very or somewhat important to elect a president with military experience. In the last four presidential elections, voters have chosen candidates with no meaningful military experience, even though in each case the major party opponent did have that experience. Voters chose draft-dodger Bill Clinton over World War II veterans George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, then chose George W. Bush, who didn't even show up for his National Guard duty, over Vietnam veterans Al Gore (passed up the National Guard to serve as an Army reporter in Vietnam) and John Kerry (Bronze Star, Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts). Kerry''s service was actually mocked by Republican opponents, who took to wearing adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them. Of current presidential candidates, only Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter and Republican Sen. John McCain have significant military experience, both in Vietnam, but neither are performing particularly well in polls, and it is likely that our next president will have little or no military experience.

 

I see three possible explanations. One is that voters really do want this in a president, the tracking polls are wrong, and McCain and/or Hunter will garner many more votes than current polling suggests. The second possibility is that, while voters do want this in a president, there are other experiences and qualities that they place a greater value on. The third possibility is that this poll is simply wrong, and voters don't really care about a presidential candidate's military background or lack thereof. Any of these possibilities suggest problems with the poll, which should lead us to also question the accuracy of tracking polls.

Running off

Kentucky holds its Gubernatorial primary election today. Despite approval ratings which rival the President's, incumbent Governor Ernie Fletcher is expected to win the Republican nomination easily.

The Democratic nomination is a different story. It seems to be a relatively even four-way race among Steve Beshear, Steve Henry, Bruce Lunsford, and Jody Richards. In the most recent polls, Beshear has held a modest lead, followed by Lunsford, Henry, and then Richards; however, the four have traded the lead throughout the campaign, and none have even come close to achieving majority support. If no candidate reaches 40% of the vote, a runoff will occur, forcing the candidates to spend money that could otherwise be banked for the general election.

This creates a peculiar dynamic, in which front-runners try to steal votes, not from each other, but from the other candidates. Imagine Bush and Gore attacking Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, respectively, rather than debating each other. (OK, so Gore did attack Nader, that's exactly the point!)

The problem is that, too often, political candidates argue that we should vote for them because they are likely to win, rather than because they are the best candidate.

The much bigger problem is that, all too often, this tactic succeeds.

Restrictive ballot access = Jim Crowe?

Speaking Wednesday night at a fund-raiser to retire the debt from his 2004 presidential campaign, Nader complained that Democratic Party powerbrokers had kept him off the ballot in such Southern states as Georgia and Virginia - which reminded him of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that denied African-Americans equal rights. "I felt like a [n-word]," remarked the 70-year-old white multimillionaire graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Maybe that explains the harsh reception Nader has gotten from Supreme Court Justices Rehnquist and Thomas.

Yesterday, Nader said he was using the word in the same spirit as the Black Panthers of the 1960s: "as a word of defiance." But few were buying that explanation.

According to Al Sharpton, "If Ed Koch had said what Ralph Nader said, we'd be marching. This doesn't rise to the level of a march. It rises to the level of a wrist slap...Nader is not a racist by any stretch of the imagination."

Tags: Politics, Election, Supreme Court, Ralph Nader

Ohio voting "glitch" favored Bush

According to a report by the Associated Press, errors in electronic voting machines in one Ohio precinct gave President Bush an extra 3,893 votes. The machines reported Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democratic Sen. John Kerry's 260; however records show that only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.

Sean Greene, research director with the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project, said that while the glitch appeared minor, "that could change if more of these stories start coming out." In one North Carolina county more than 4,500 votes were lost in the election because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did, and in San Francisco a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

While we are on the subject, it is worth remembering that Diebold Election Systems' CEO Walden O'Dell was a Bush Pioneer who raised more than $600,000 for the Bush/Cheney campaign and promised in 2003 to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to the president next year."

According to Democratic Underground.com, "in EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their [sic] EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error...EVERY STATE that has EVoting, but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5 percent when exit polls are compared to actual results."

Perhaps this one "glitch" wasn't enough to cover the margin of difference. But was this the only "glitch"?

Is Business Week reading me?

When I opened my email this morning what did I find, but a link to a Business Week story ("The World Has Changed, Not the Dems: Another Presidential election has been lost, and more could be on the way unless the Democrats shake up the party").

This is basically what I've spent the last two days saying here (see "Democrats in Denial" and "The Day After")

Is someone at Business Week reading this blog? Or am I just so good that I know what the days' headline will be before its written?!

Democrats in Denial

According to a report on NPR this morning, Democrats believe that the close outcome of the race vindicates their decision to ignore the South, the West, and rural areas in general.

Hello? McFly?? YOU LOST AGAIN! With one of the strongest economies of the last 50 years, the Democrats still managed to lose in 2000. With one of the weakest economies over the same time period, the Republicans managed not only to retain power, but to strengthen their hold (see The Day After...). Clearly, it is NOT the economy, stupid!

According to exit polls (which clearly underestimated Republican support), about 22% of voters felt that "moral values" were the most important issue of this campaign. Not the economy. Not the war in Iraq. Not terrorism. Moral values. This is the driving force behind the overwhelming passage of gay marriage/civil union bans in 11 states.

If the Democrats are to ever regain power, they must find a way to appeal to these voters.

If the Tables Were Turned....

The mid-day headlines blare, "Kerry calls Bush to concede."

According to CNN, a Kerry adviser said the campaign had concluded that the too-close-to-call battleground state of Ohio was not going to come through for the Democrats. The adviser said there was no way to gain votes on Bush without an "exhaustive fight," something that would have "further divided this country."

If the tables were turned, what would Bush have done?

Four years' experience suggests that he would have fought with every ounce of strength he could muster, with every penny he could raise, regardless of the divisive effect on the nation. Four years' experience suggests that if the tables were turned, Bush would seek another "judicial election," or any other means to serve his goal.

There is a saying: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." For four years Americans have been able to argue that they had been fooled, or that Bush had been foisted upon them by the Supreme Court. Today I begin to wonder if we as Americans deserve everything that this administration serves us. Shame on us all.

The Day After

So here we are again, the day after election day, still waiting to find out who will be President of the US. But regardless of how the few remaining votes in Ohio (and hence the Electoral College) go, it is clear that President Bush has won the popular vote by more than 4,000,000 people. In the House of Representatives the Republicans increased their lead to a majority of approximately 30 seats. In the Senate the Republicans attained a solid 55 to 44 majority (with one independent), and defeated Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Of eleven states with ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage, all eleven passed. Republicans held 28 governor's mansions and Democrats 22, and there seems to be no change in this balance.

The few bright spots for Democrats include Barack Obama's landslide victory over Alan Keyes in Illinois and Ken Salazar's defeat of beer magnate Pete Coors. In the strongly Republican state of Alaska, Democrat Tony Knowles made a strong showing against incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski but lost by 4% despite gaining traction with charges of nepotism (Murkowski was appointed to the Senate by the Governor of Alaska - her father).

So now the Republicans hold the Senate, the House of Representatives, a majority of Governors, a majority of state houses, and probably the Presidency. A majority of Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican administrations. Even in many states won by Democrats, their margin of victory was razor thin. The question now is clearly where do the Democrats go from here. They appear to be a party in disarry, with few leaders left and little sense of direction.

A cursory look at maps of the 2004 and 2000 elections will show that the parties seem to have become more sectional, with the Democrats drawing support from the Northeast (New Englant), Midwest (Rust Belt), and Pacific coast, and Republican support coming from the South and West. If this sectional division continues, demographic trends strongly favor the Republican party. Also, Republicans seem to have made much more of an effort to woo Hispanic voters, another demographic in their favor.

In short, although the close popular votes of the last two presidential elections may not reflect it, the Democratic Party runs the very serious risk today of becoming marginalized. We may be headed for a (brief) period of one-party rule, as was seen in the early- and mid-1800s, followed by the growth of a new party out of the ashes of today's Democratic Party.