Oh If Only You Could Run As A Generic Partisan

Generic Republicans are leading generic Democrats in Congressional polling by ten points.  This would be remarkable news if the United States voted for parties rather than individual candidates.  To be sure, the President's party traditionally takes a hit in midterm elections and with the economy the way it is, the hit will be harder than usual.  But I'm sticking with my prediction that the Democrats maintain a narrow hold on both houses of Congress. Democrats may have demonstrated that their idea of good government is to deficit-spend even more and get the same results as the last guys, but gerrymandering and incumbency are still pretty powerful.

And the Republican insurgents are weighed down by the lingering truth that P.J. O'Rourke pronounced twenty years ago: Republican candidates campaign on the platform that the government is corrupt, bloated, inefficient, ineffective, and expensive, and then once they get elected they work as hard as they can to prove that those claims are true. Any Republican candidate needs to explain why she won't be like the ones who got thrown out of power in 2006 if entrusted with actual power. As for me, I'm disgusted with campaign platforms that amount to "Free Beer!" and "Freer Beer!"

I've yet to hear a politician of either party, other than Paul Ryan and Gary Johnson, even address the topic of how we're going to get ourselves out of debt in anything like a meaningful way.

Polling Reveals A Problem

I really really want to like Rand Paul in Kentucky.  I want to see him find a way to mediate basic libertarian ideas and appeals to social conservatives.  But he isn't doing it.  Hopefully, the worst of his gaffefest is over -- but my verdict remains: A Republican, in 2010, in Kentucky, ought to be leading his Democratic opponent by much more than eight points.

And, a Republican, in California, with a realistic shot at defeating Barbara Boxer, ought to be leading in the polls.  Instead, he's losing the more-conservative-than-thou game and getting totally swamped by the private fortune of a vanity candidate with little political experience:

Come on, social conservatives. It's true that Campbell is not ideologically pure; he's pro-choice and doesn't have any particular hatred for teh gheys. But you'd seriously prefer to give Boxer a fourth term rather than give a moderate Republican any space in the Senate? You can pressure Campbell once he's in -- but Boxer will just laugh at you, the way she laughs at Fiorina.

The problem in both Kentucky and California is that social conservatives want to have it their way and only their way and they no longer have any appetite for country-club Republicans like Campbell or libertarian thinkers like Paul.  If ideological purity is more valuable to them than actually electing Republicans to office, they are consigning themselves to eventually becoming a permanent minority party.

Reagan Not To Be On The Money

Once again, Americans prove to be remarkably conservative with their money – at least, with the issue of who and what is on their money. A proposal to take Ulysses S. Grant off the $50 bill and replace him with Ronald Reagan is almost universally thought of as a bad idea, according to a recent Marist poll. Even Republicans were 71% against the idea. Was this seriously on someone's agenda somewhere?

Now, I could file this under "Really Bad Ideas," but a proposal to change the face of the fifty from Grant to Reagan lacks the Wile E. Coyote-like, inherently destructive and easily-predictable but counter-productive qualitative results for which I reserve that tag's use. So instead, I'll just call this "Unimportant but Mildly Amusing."

Amusingly, I have it on good authority that the Ronald Reagan State Office Building is lovingly called the "Reagan SOB" by a good number of the civil servants who work there. I'm overall a fan of President Reagan, but I can see why people would critique him. And just because we're now a generation removed from his Presidency and can start to look back on it with some historical perspective doesn't mean he gets to be on the money. Frankly, I think it's too soon to have Eisenhower ("silver" dollar coin) or Kennedy (half dollar coin) on any money and even FDR on the dime is pushing it.

And here's your trivia -- without looking it up, who are the only two non-Presidents to appear on paper money that is currently recognized as legal tender in the United States? One should be easy to name, the other a little bit less so. It's easy to find that with a search engine, so you're on the honor system as to looking it up.

Hat tip to Ezra at Popehat.

Your Opinion Counts

If you read the blog on a news reader or similar appliance, please take a moment over the next week to actually log on to the page. I've a poll up asking Readers what they would like to see here in the future and I'd like to know what your preferences are. Thanks in advance, Readers.

Damn I Forgot David Carradine

Too many celebrity deaths in June. Of course, Michael Jackson wins the poll.

Baseball Movie Poll

We got two votes for "other" movies -- both were for Major League. The overall winner of "best baseball movie," however, goes to Field of Dreams, which narrowly prevailed over The Natural. Personally, my favorite baseball movie is Bull Durham; to me that movie most captures the way of life that is a part of baseball, and in my opinion, it is also the wittiest of the various big baseball movies.

No Consensus on Michael Steele

There was an almost even split on the question of whether Michael Steele is good for the GOP in the most recent poll -- "yes," "no," and "too soon to tell" got about equal numbers of votes.

For my part, I think he could be a really good force for reforming the party and he seems to have some instincts in that direction. Too bad he's not proving to have enough spine to actually get into that fight.

Not Ever Really In Doubt

The good news is, more Readers had an opinion on this question than indicated that they lacked enough knowledge to decide who the coolest Watchman is. The bad news is, a plurality of you haven't read or heard of Watchmen.

I figured, if you know who the Watchmen are, you have formed an opinion about which one is the coolest. I guess I was surprised that the vote was as close as it was but I'm not surprised at all about the winner. Rorschach is as cool a comic book character as has ever been conceived.

I'm not surprised that Ozymandias got no votes. I'm moderately surprised that Silk Spectre and Nite Owl got any, although I found Nite Owl (at least, Nite Owl II) to be the easiest character to identify with. That doesn't mean he's the coolest of them, though -- just the most human, the most normal.

Interestingly, Alan Moore describes Rorschach as a "right-wing" figure. I don't see him that way. Yes, he subscribes to an absolutist moral code and he's 100% vigilante. But I don't see the nationalism, only the intense desire for people to conform to a high standard of personal decency -- and a willingness to be brutal to those who do not. Of course, in the comic, we get a deep look into his psyche and an understanding of how he came to be who he is, in a way deeper than we get to see into any of the other characters. So part of the appeal is that glimpse into his mind.

The coveted role will be filled by an actor named Jackie Earle Haley in the upcoming film. The actor's challenge will not be portraying him with the mask off -- it'll be using his voice and his body, behind the mask, to be convincing while in costume. Hugo Weaving pulled it off in V For Vendetta, but it couldn't have been easy.

UPDATE: If you're still in the dark, the Fish Wrapper will school you.

Rating The Vice Presidents

There's a poll that CNN is featuring prominently in which 23% of Americans say that Dick Cheney is the worst Vice President in American history. This is about the dumbest poll I've ever heard of.

First of all, bear in mind that in other polls looking at similar populations, only 69% of the people could name the Vice President at all. Also in a recent poll of all Americans about their beliefs, 44% of Americans believe in ghosts, 36% in UFOs, 31% in witches and astrology, and 24% believe that they are reincarnated. 47% believe in evolution, 40% believe in creationism, which leaves 13% who apparently believe in neither. So we're not talking about a particularly well-informed population responding to the poll here.

So then let's get down to the real issue here. What is it that distinguishes a good Vice President from a bad one? By what criteria are we to distinguish Charles Fairbanks from Levi Morton? For much of our history, the Vice President's job has consisted of waiting around for the President to die, accepting bribes, and staying sober enough to cast the occasional tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

This does not seem like a particularly difficult job. To a very real extent, then, a successful Vice President is one who does not die in office. Yet seven Vice Presidents have not found themselves up to the task of continuing to breathe for the amount of time demanded of them by the Constitution so as to be able to take over in the event of such a need. Aside from that, it's kind of hard to figure out how to rank the performance of these forty-six men in discharging the minimal and vague duties of such a peculiar office over more than two hundred years of history.

Vice President Cheney has done and said a lot of controversial things over the past eight and a half years. I'm very much not a big fan of his sweeping vision of nearly unchecked executive power. He has taken a very active hand in guiding the shape of our government's policy as a trusted advisor to the President. He's been abrasive with Congress and high-handed towards the rest of the government and at times even to the rest of the country. Which is to say, he can be a real tool when he wants to be.

At the same time, he's damned smart. He did a lot to streamline the bureaucracy and make the flow of information and commands into and out of the White House more efficient. He's been a strong advocate for beefing up the military and has been a significant architect of the Administration's policies both good and bad. He has quietly served as an example of tolerance for gays in a party that at times seemed to be building its social policy platform on prejudice. He has willingly taken on the job of spokesman for the Administration's more controversial policies and gone out of his way to maintain press contacts to assist with that purpose. For better or worse, he has been a powerful political and influential policy force within and for the Administration, and the Bush White House would likely have been worse off without him. So there's some things to admire, too, even if you disagree with the particular policies in question.

Now, I'm neither defending nor attacking the choice of Cheney as "worst Vice President ever." But it does seem to me that the poll respondents have not really taken stock of some of the other available choices. Some Vice Presidents have excelled at odiousness, distinguished themselves as some of the most repugnant figures in our national history.

Consider, for instance, Aaron Burr. After killing one of the most prominent members of George Washington's inner circle, Burr distinguished himself by trying to raise a private army to wrest control of the Louisiana Territory and the Ohio River Valley so as to have himself made King of those lands, then tried to incite war with Spain, and was only narrowly acquitted of treason. Burr stands out as one of the great villains of American history. Is Cheney better or worse than this?

Have the poll respondents considered convicted extortionist, alliteration specialist and admitted bribe recipient Spiro Agnew? The author of wonderful political assessments such as "Ultra-liberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order," Agnew added luster to the remarkable emergence of criminal records from the Nixon Administration.

John Calhoun spent much of his time in the #2 office (under two different Presidents) laying the intellectual foundation for the secession of the Confederacy, most specifically the doctrine of nullification. 'Nuff said there.

The first two Vice Presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, did not grace the office particularly well, either. Adams excelled in his role as the Washington Administration's official public surrogate for the President for purposes of absorbing policy criticisms, and compounded his role by periodically going to the Senate and attempting to control the debates there, not leaving until he was literally hooted out of the place by the actual office-holders. Jefferson, as Adams' Vice-President, spent as much time and effort as he could using his considerable political talents to undermine Adams' Presidency and thwart the policy goals of the Adams Administration -- of which he was nominally part.

Thomas Marshall probably should have become President when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that rendered him paralyzed and unable to communicate with others. He was, however, kept in the dark about President Wilson's condition and for all intents and purposes, Edith Wilson was the functional President during Wilson's convalescence. Marshall should be faulted for allowing himself to be that far out of the loop, to have that few connections with the President, and that little juice that he could be shipped off to golf courses and chamber of commerce meetings instead of doing his job and taking the reins of the White House during the country's time of need.

And the Cheney critics appear very likely to have forgotten an even more recent favorite whipping boy.

Joe Biden has got his work cut out for him if he wants to sink to the bottom of this barrel, that's for sure.

But for the time being, the very concept of rating Vice Presidents is spectacularly silly. It's only in recent years that the Vice President has had much of an active role in government at all. Al Gore and Dick Cheney are the only two I can think of who actually were given any kind of substantial hand in crafting policy. The rest of them spent time doing ceremonial work, heading up token commissions, or at best, working the back channels with Congress. It's only when and if the Vice Presidents are called upon to step up to the plate and assume the powers of the Presidency that we can take their measure.

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon (himself an undistinguished Vice President) and he took a political bullet for doing it. But it was the right thing to do, it let the country move past Watergate and the realization that their President had been not only a crook but a world-class criminal. A decent man, who realized that he had all kinds of odds stacked against him, he used his time in the Oval Office wisely and quickly and when it came time to pay the price, he took it like a man. But that's really evaluating his performance as President, not his performance as Vice President.

John Tyler may have succeeded in the greatest coup in American history. When his President, William Henry Harrison, became the first to die in office, a strong argument could have been made that because the Constitution only provided that if the President died, "the Powers and Duties of the [Presidency] shall devolve on the Vice President," Tyler had no right to say that he was actually the President. But he seemed to win out in the political struggle and finished the rest of Harrison's term. His example was precedent for the assumption of the Presidency by seven successors. It only became enshrined in the constitution in 1967 and fortunately, we have not had to resort to it since then. Does that make him a good Vice President or a bad one? He was only Vice President for a month, anyway.

I think that George H.W. Bush (Bush the Elder) did a good job as VP. When Reagan was shot, it looked for a few hours like Defense Secretary and Nixon Administration alumnus Al Haig was trying to cut Bush out of the picture and take the reins of power for himself. Bush bitch-slapped Haig back into place while President Reagan recuperated -- and then, when Reagan was back on his feet, Bush readily stepped back into the shadows.

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Andrew Johnson, too. Here's a guy who made himself as lonely as a political figure could be -- a Democrat in a Republican administration, a pariah from his own party for his Unionist sympathy, and firmly insistent on the personal power of the Presidency against what was then an overreaching Congress. (I know, it seems hard to believe in today's world, but that's what Johnson had to deal with.) But as Vice President, he stepped up to the role of symbolically trying to reunify the nation, to reach out to the people who had fought against the Union and let them know that there was a home for them again.

So, it is possible to form a list, or at least the top and bottom of one. I really don't think there's much that we can do to sort out the muddled middle of the list -- it's senseless to take a John Nance Garner and decide, well, let's call him #23, but George Dallas, he was a little better, so we'll make him #22. To even attempt such a thing requires a deeper knowledge of American political and legal history than a lot of people possess -- even me and I think I've gotten pretty obscure here as it is. But I'm not the first to confront the issue.

If forced to choose, I think I'd start with such a list with these guys first:

1. John Calhoun -- for laying the groundwork that led to the Civil War.
2. Aaron Burr -- for killing Alexander Hamilton, inciting war with Spain, and apparent commission of treason.
3. Spiro Agnew -- for being a corrupt, petty bastard who presaged his President's fall from grace.
4. Thomas Marshall -- for letting himself get edged out of power by the First Lady.
5-11 (tie). In no particular order, George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, William Rufus King, Henry Wilson, Thomas Hendricks, Garret Hobart, and James Sherman -- for dying in office and thus rendering themselves unable to fulfill their singular duty of being alive to be President if necessary.
12. Schuyler Colfax -- for nearly bringing down his President's Administration into the biggest corruption scandal in American history.
13. John Adams -- for getting hooted out of the Senate and ruining whatever chance there was of the Presidency having a direct hand in guiding legislation. (He made a fine President, by the way, particularly considering that Washington was a hard act to follow -- but he was not a good Vice President.)
14. Dan Quayle -- for allowing himself to be made into a laughingstock, whether deservedly or not.
15. Thomas Jefferson -- for four years of stabbing his President in the back. (Also a very fine President, but not such a good Vice President.)

At the "best VPs" end of the list, I'd have to put all the men who actually did the real job of Vice President -- which is taking over and becoming President themselves in an emergency situation. So that would be John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford. Of them all, I admire Gerald Ford the most, Roosevelt next, and both Johnsons right after him -- but it's difficult to separate their deeds as Vice President from their deeds as President. And Tyler, for setting the precedent, should get a high spot, too. Also worth a mention would be Charles Dawes, who was the first American Vice President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cheney? I'd downgrade him for his scary vision of a nearly autocratic Presidency and his efforts to make that vision a reality; but I'd upgrade him for competence, political juice, and contribution to the effectiveness of his President's Administration. Really, I think that puts him pretty close to dead center of the list, at least until we move along in our history and start to gain some perspective freer from contemporary political biases than we possibly can be while Cheney is still holding the office.

NOTE: Wikipedia was not used in the drafting of this post.

Book Survey

I didn't pick books for last week's poll that were necessarily published in 2008. I wanted to find out which book had the biggest impact on 2008. And I wanted books that have only relatively recently entered the public consciousness; "The Bible" has kind of been around a long time. I also thought it would be interesting to pick some books that were very different from one another.

So every book got votes. I guess, Hollywood timing being what it is, I shouldn't be all that surprised at the winner:

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, got 40% of Reader votes. I guess I hadn't really understood, until recently, just how many of these books are out there and how many people -- girls -- are buying them. I confess, I don't get it. The vampire is sexy and romantic because he doesn't bite you? Well, I'm not exactly the target demo, the movie's a big deal, and it's the biggest thing since Harry Potter. So I guess it deserved to win.

The runner-up, The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, got 27%. I suppose I could make a snarky comment about how a vegetarian vampire out-polled the next President of the United States and ostensible leader of the free world, but that would just be too easy. Instead, I'll suggest that these votes were probably not really for the book (which has been out for some time) but rather for its author. I suspect that I would have voted for this book, too.

Third place, at 18%, went to The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. I think that in terms of long-lasting cultural impact, Dawkins' book (and to a lesser but appreciable extent for each, the similar-subject matter books by Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris) serves as a symbol for the cultural coming of age of non-believers. There have always been non-believers, atheists, and freethinkers out there in our society, but The God Delusion represents kind of a high-water mark for us asserting oursevles in the culture, demanding our place at the table, and explaining what we're really all about instead of letting others characterize and define us. I would have wanted to have voted for this book.

Tied for fourth place, at 5% each, were The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, and The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. Byrne's book took the self-help world by storm with its mushy, touchy-feely message of positive thinking; it took the Gospel of Prosperity and translated it into New Age language for a mass audience of Oprah-worshippers. I, um, guess that pretty much sums up what I think of that. Friedman, however, threw out some very tough ideas about what globalization means to the economy and our everyday lives. He indicated that no one is indispensible and world events have certainly proven that. I think a vote for Friedman is a vote for saying that the economy was the big story of the year.

Bringing up the rear, with only one vote, was A Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This political biography of the election of 1860 and the first Lincoln Administration was talked about quite a bit; it's been a while since a history book made this kind of a splash. More importantly, I think this book got so few votes not because it wasn't important or in diminishment of the ideas in it. I think that its ideas are really only just now coming in to play as President-Elect Obama assembles his Cabinet, which includes two former rivals for the Presidency, and his Vice-President being another former rival. The idea that this is the best way for a leader entering troubled times to consolidate political power and forge a new path forward is an idea that will really have its impact in 2009.

I'll be really interested to see how you all vote in the current poll.

Bond Songs

And here's the results of the James Bond Theme Song poll:

Song	Artist	Votes
Live And Let Die	Paul McCartney	6
Nobody Does It Better	Carly Simon	5
For Your Eyes Only	Sheena Easton	4
Goldfinger	Shirley Bassey	3
Another Way To Die	Jack White & Alicia Keyes	3
A View To A Kill	Duran Duran	1
The Living Daylights	A-Ha	1
You Only Live Twice	Nancy Sinatra	0
All Time High	Rita Coolidge	0
Goldeneye	Tina Turner	0
The World Is Not Enough	Garbage	0
Die Another Day	Madonna	0

As often happens, the Readership surprises me a little bit; you guys do know you voted for Paul McCartney when he was with Wings, right? Live And Let Die is not a Beatles song.

But the results are the results. My own favorite is A View To A Kill, by the way. (The song, not the movie. Either Goldfinger or Casino Royale is my favorite of the movies.) Usually (as you might expect) I find a woman's voice sexy and appealing; and Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better is quite sexy. But A View To A Kill is both exciting and musically challenging; Simon LeBon's voice is interesting and the women seem to think it's sexy, and that's all good with me. I really did not think much of the Jack White/Alicia Keyes song from the recent movie, but that's just my preference; it seems to have found some popularity with you all.

Socially Conservative Black Voters

In a comment a few days ago, a Reader asked if my observation about Black voters causing Prop. 8 to pass can legitimately be expanded to say that such people are actually socially conservative. The metric, it was suggested, was whether these voters also voted “yes” on Prop. 4, an initiative which failed and would have, if enacted, put restrictions on the ability of a minor to get an abortion without parental consent.

This, it seems to me, was an excellent question and a good measure of it. So I did a little looking around, and I found the Sacramento Bee’s exit poll on Prop. 4. To put the Reader's suggestion to the test, I have culled out not one but two two relevant statistics: race, and prop. 8 voting.

I've done this because the question is whether Black voters are socialy conservative. Prop. 4 and Prop. 8 provide the two easiest measures of social conservatism available on the slate of initiatives that appeared on the California ballot this year. Prop. 8, as you all know, amended the state's Constitution to foreclose the possibility of a same-sex marriage. A "yes" vote is considered socially conservative, and a "no" vote is considered socially liberal. Prop. 4, as you may not know, was an initiative statute which would have required parental notification and a waiting period before a minor obtains an abortion. A "yes" vote is the pro-life, or socially conservative, position; a "no" vote, the opposite.

So I hypothesize that a social conservative would have voted "yes" on both Prop. 4 and Prop. 8. The converse is true also, a social liberal would have voted "no" on both initiatives.

This leaves me with a bit of a taxonomic dilemma, because there are people who voted "yes" on one initiative and "no" on another. Applying the label "moderate" to a pro-parental notification but pro-SSM voter might be technically accurate but it is not particularly informative -- especially because that results in the exact same label being applied to someone whose voting pattern is diametrically opposite that.

Now, to the data. The average “Yes on 4” (that is, pro-parental notification law) voter voted “Yes on 8” 71% of the time, and “No” 29% of the time. The average “No on 4” voter (that is, the ones who did not want to put a parental notification requirement on a minor seeking an abortion) voted almost exactly opposite – these “pro-choice” voters voted “Yes” on 8 23% of the time and “No on 8” 77% of the time.

This is interesting because it shows an almost exact mirror image. If we assume that “Yes on 4” voters have a belief set which is informed by some combination of religion and social conservativism, we would expect them to vote “Yes on 8,” as well. And that is exactly what happened – with the corollary that those whose values on abortion are not informed by religion or social conservatism would be expected to vote against parental notification and in favor of same-sex marriage.

So now, let’s look back at the racial hypothesis. Here, we see that whites voted 45-55 on Prop 4 (“yes” votes come first), blacks voted 51-49, Latinos 53-47, Asians 57-43, and no data is given for other ethnic groups. The overt difference in racial voting supports, but not by a whole lot, the idea that Blacks are socially conservative – assuming that a parental notification law is socially conservative. A very slim majority of Blacks liked the idea. This leaves us with what could a three-dimensional chart, indexing two kinds of voting patterns with race. To go further, I need to make two assumptions and a disclaimer:

Doing the math, the results are as follows (table includes raw vote extrapolation and percentage by racial group):

Racial Group	Yes on both 4 and 8	Yes on 8, No on 4	No on 8, Yes on 4	No on both 4 and 8
White	2,314,670 35.77%	856,111 13.23%	759,046 11.73%	2,541,154 39.27%
African-American	524,869 51.10%	194,129 18.90%	199,861 6.90%	237,269 23.10%
Latino	715,320 38.69%	264,571 14.31%	199,861 10.81%	669,099 36.19%
Asian	220,445 35.77%	81,534 13.23%	72,290 11.73%	242,015 39.27%
Other	114,721 37.23%	42,431 13.77%	34,728 11.27%	116,262 37.73%

A few notes about how I assembled this data:

First, I assumed that the 71-29 or 23-77 split holds true, on average, across racial lines. Ths is likely not accurate. The question, which I cannot answer, is whether these splits are close enough across racial lines to use those splits as approximations. I do so, but there's your caveat -- my data is not cross-indexed enough, and extrapolating that result from the available information is the point of this exercise.

Second, I assume that every voter actually cast a vote on both initiatives. This is definitely not accurate. The Secretary of State (whose website is finally working again) shows a total of 10,703,198 votes cast on Prop. 4 and 11,084,210 votes cast on Prop. 8 - a difference of more than 380,000 votes. However, I deem the difference of 3.4% to be, while not negligible, not significant enough to render the exercise useless.

Finally, I note that no data was included in Bee's exit poll concerning "other" racial groups (like Indian-Americans, or Native Americans, for instance). So my extrapolation for them is based only on the at-large exit poll numbers.

Simplified to rounded percentages, it looks like this:

Racial Group	Yes on both	Yes on 8, No on 4	No on 8, Yes on 4	No on both
White	36%	13%	12%	39%
African-American	51%	19%	7%	23%
Latino	39%	14%	11%	36%
Asian	36%	13%	12%	39%
Other	37%	14%	11%	38%

Overall, white and Asian voters appear the most socially liberal. The differences between that bloc and combined Latino and "other" voters are very small, nearly insignficant. But standing in great contrast to this are the African-American voters. The proportion of African-American voters in the most conservative category is much higher than in other ethnic groups, and the proprotion of them in the most liberal category is much lower.

One interesting similarity appears, though. Across all ethnic groups, the clumsily-named "moderates," who voted yes on one of the initiatives and no on the other, are all just over a quarter of the total votes cast (about 26%). This is a reflection of the near mirror-image splits on the overall vote. If I could get better data on racial differences between the voting, I would predict more variability in this area of analysis.

But, my Reader's suggestion that African-American voters are particularly intolerant of homosexuality finds some statistical purchase, in that the African-American "split" votes weigh much more heavily in the "No on 4, Yes on 8" category than do the other racial groups.

I conclude from that my Reader and I are both right. As suggested, there does seem to be a measurably more intense strain of opposition to same-sex marriage within African-American voters. And, it is also true that a majority of African-American voters are in the most socially conservative category. Which dovetails back to my original thesis -- these voters were recruited from and motivated by churches and other religiously-affiliated groups and as a result can be expected to be socially conservative, all other things being equal.

This was a very unusual election indeed; it may well be that a significant national political realignment, affecting both parties and all sorts of conventional wisdom, has taken place, or is still taking place.

Now, please bear in mind that I am not, in this post, attempting to blame any group of people for Prop. 8 passing. The blame for that rests with the "No on 8" campaign and not with any ethnic group. But I am trying to understand what is happening politically. What I am observing here is that contrary to the traditional wisdom upon which I was raised and educated, African-American voters (not necessarily all African-Americans, mind you, the voters) have become among the most socially conservative voters out there.

That is not a normative statement. The poll numbers and the election returns are what they are; math is what it is, and I've done the math without consciously looking for a particular result. What I have done here is make a political science observation of moderate sophistication, one that I have endeavored to make in an open-eyed and unprejudiced way. That is all. What we do with this data, whether collectively as a society, as a political party, as a political movement, or as individuals, is a different question.

Post Election Poll Results

Like most of you Readers, by far the biggest surprise I had on election night was seeing Prop. 8 pass. I'd like to thank the one Reader who was most surprised by my loss of a bottle of Scotch -- thanks for the vote of confidence. And I agree with you Readers' second-biggest suprise being that Sarah Palin kept her ignorant yap shut said nothing during John McCain's concession speech.

Personally, I think she's got no viable political future; the campaign has thoroughly discredited her in my mind. But, like I noticed yesterday, she is going to Iowa. After all, a sitting Governor of Alaska surely has lots of regular political business to transact in Iowa -- trade missions to set up, language teachers to exchange, and of course fine-tuning the UN-administered corn-for-oil program.

And I bet that the same sort of people who continued to say that they approved of the way George W. Bush was handling the country even as thousands of our soldiers died every month in Iraq and the stock market got flushed down the toilet -- the same sorts who would approve of Bush if he strangled a live meerkat to death during a photo-op with the President of South Africa -- those are the same people who were genuinely surprised that McCain-Palin 2008 lost, and those anre the same people who are already jockeying for position in the Palin For President 2012 campaign.

Battleground States

In the quick pre-election poll, I asked Readers which battleground states Obama would carry. The results:

State	NAPP Reader Prediction	Actual Result
Florida	62%	Obama
Indiana	37%	Obama
Missouri	25%	No decision yet McCain
Montana	12%	McCain
Nevada	62%	Obama
North Carolina	50%	No decision yet Obama
North Dakota	25%	McCain
Ohio	37%	Obama
Virginia	75%	Obama

Overall, I'd say that was a fair read on the situation by you Readers. The big surprise, I think, is Indiana (I predicted that state would stay with the GOP, too), although I'm surprised that not even a majority of Readers predicted Obama's nail-the-coffin-shut win in Ohio.

Poll Anticipates Narrow Defeat For Proposition 8

Andrew Sullivan reports a very recent poll showing 50.0% of Californias to vote "no" on Prop. 8 and 45.4% to vote "yes." This will be too close to call tonight, I'm sure of it.

How To Make Things Better

I'm surprised that an actual majority of NAPP poll respondents thought that the way to make things better, faster, is to get back on the gold standard. That does not seem like particularly serious thinking to me -- control over the money supply is a critical tool to be used in incentivizing economic activity. A gold standard limits the amount of money. But there you go, that's what the poll said.

The Upcoming Narrowing Of The Polls

National polls show Obama leading right now by anywhere from four to ten points, with the average being a 6.8% advantage. This spells doom for my bet of a bottle of good Scotch. But on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is that no matter what the polls say in the weeks leading to an election, no matter what the issues are or who the candidates might be, the polls always narrow, the front-runner's lead always evaporates somewhat, right before the election happens and the results are closer than the pre-election polls would indicate. Which is to say that I should not give up hope for winning my bet the way I've given up any belief that McCain has a credible shot at actually winning.

But, comebacks from a deficit this deep are not unknown. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com (the best polling site on the net and I'm not being paid to tell you that -- so I don't mind hotlinking their charts all that much since I encourage you to go there directly and patronize their many fine advertisers) points out two elections in which a contender has narrowed a gap of that size, or more.

1968: Hubert Humphrey trailed Nixon by fifteen points in early October. But on election day, the result was a popular vote differential within less than one percent. Nixon slammed Humphrey in the Electoral College, but the point is the popular vote differential narrowed by almost enough for HHH to put himself in spitting distance of actually winning -- and he did it in less than four weeks.

1980: Ronald Reagan trailed incumbent Jimmy Carter by eight points as on October 26, 1980, and went on to win the election outright, with a popular margin of victory of nearly ten percent. That's an eighteen-point turnaround in less than two weeks.

There are 22 days left in this election. The polls will narrow, but realistic observers of any perspective should take a step back and understand what is really going on.

In both historical cases discussed by Silver, external events (the Vietnam War and the Iranian Hostage Crisis) as well as ongoing economic doldrums mitiated in favor of these "comebacks" and it seems likely to me that something was wrong with both of the polls used to describe the starting points of the turnarounds rather than a very sudden and dramatic shift in the electorate's mood on election day.

External events do not favor John McCain -- not because of anything he's done but rather because as the Republican nominee, he gets to carry water for the incumbent Administration which has presided over what 91% of the public feels is a complete meltdown of our network of financial institutions. (One wonders what, exactly, the other 9% are thinking. Maybe they're the short-sellers and they've made scads over the last month.)

And modern polling is significantly better than it was in the 1960's and 1970's. Not perfect, but pollsters have learned a thing or two about their craft and are better-able to formulate sample pools and use sophisticated mathematical models to extract data from them. I'm not saying the polls can be wrong. But I really don't think a "Dewey Beats Truman" situation is brewing here. Yes, a year ago the CW had it as a foregone conclusion that right about now it would be a within-a-point duel between Rudy! and Hillary! and everybody else was going to be an also-ran. Things have changed dramatically. But it's not 2007 anymore and Election Day looms in our immediate future.

The questions I have are not whether Obama will win, but rather by how much, and whether he will have any coattails, especially in the Senate. Projections are about one in four that Democrats will emerge from the election with a "fillibuster-proof" Senate majority of 60 or more seats. At that point, the real question is what will Democrats do once they absolutely control all of the political branches.

Chart Adjustment

Today's charts on fivethirtyeight.com look like this. That's Obama winning somewhere close to 9 in 10 of the random simulations, and functionally all of the realistic ones. It's hard to not be disheartened when numbers like this are out there. And that means that tonight's debate (starting more or less as I post this) won't make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

I'm resigned to an Obama Presidency now. Where before I thought McCain had a chance, now I don't think it matters. Tell it to your mama: Obama’s got no more drama. He looks strong as a Brahama. and his VP's hair looks like it came from a llama. Even if they catch Osama, it’ll still be Obama. So said my lama while he was wearing a pajama, and he could see the whole panorama. It's gonna be Obama.


...Look, I didn't really get a lot of sleep last night.

Proposition 8 Polling

Eugene Volokh posts a reminder that polling on Proposition 8 is still volatile. A recent Survey USA poll shows Prop. 8 ahead; the Field Poll still says otherwise. Prof. Volokh wonders if the recent advertisement featuring Gavin Newsom making provocative statements has anything to do with it. I know I've seen some activism on the pro-Prop. 8 side -- two doors down from my house, a neighbor has put up two large "Yes on 8" signs exhorting me to "Protect Marriage." (My marriage doesn't need protection, thank you very much.)

This makes me want to buy and post some yard signs urging my neighbors to vote "No on 8" to counteract it. I'll ask The Wife about that before I do it because ther are a number of people in the neighborhood who have anti-SSM propaganda.

Coattails

Things are looking really, really good for Camp Obama right now. Fivethirtyeight.com is projecting an Obama win in 87.4% of its randomized sample elections. That's seven out of eight. Intrade is a bit more moderate in its projection -- you can buy an "Obama to win" future worth $100 for $65.90. Seems like a safe bet to me. "McCain to win" futures are selling for $35.00 right now, so if you feel like lighting thirty-five bucks on fire... The AP has Obama ahead by 7 points. Marist College has Obama ahead by 5. CBS, by 9. Rasmussen by 8, Gallup by 7.

Now, sober analysts point out that elections always narrow as the actual election date approaches. But the outcome does not seem to be in any serious doubt at this point.

But the question I'm contemplating this morning is -- will Obama have substantial coattails? It seems inevitable that Democrats will make gains in Congress. Depending on how you count it, five to seven Republican Senate seats are questionable, if not leaning Democratic, as of this moment. No Democrat up for re-election is in any danger at all -- not a single one. Democrats are certain to hang on to the House and again, depending on who you talk to, stand to make relatively modest pickups. For instance, Congressional Quarterly suggests that twelve Republican seats, and one Democratic seat, are currently projected to switch control. That would be a net pickup of eleven seats for the Democrats in the House -- enough to be felt, but not enough to deny Republicans enough power to kill a moderately unpopular bill if they really, really wanted to.

This would be firmer control by the Democrats of Congress, but not so absolute as to render Republicans irrelevant. If the Republicans who survive in the minority maintain party discipline, there would still be enough Republicans in the Senate to mount a filibuster and there would still be enough Republicans in the House to put a stop on tax increases (but not enough to put a stop on social welfare spending increases). Coupled with the plans suggested by the Obama Administration and what seems to be a reasonable projection of significnatly diminished tax revenues as a result of the financial collapse underway as I write, the result of this state of affairs, inevitably, would be a significantly increased deficit.

Perhaps President Obama will alter his agenda from Candidate Obama's platform to mitigate this. I hope so. But I doubt it. Perhaps Candidate Obama will increase his legislative coattails. He could do that, if he focused his efforts there, and emerge a stronger President as a result. But I doubt he will do that, either. Instead, he will focus his efforts on increasing his margin of victory in the Electoral College -- he's making plays for Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri right now; look in the near future to see him pushing McCain on defense in traditionally Republican states with large Democratic minorities, places like Georgia, Tennessee, Montana. Also look for him to make a pay for West Virginia (!) because the economy theme plays especially well there. But a mostly-blue electoral map will not help him govern come January 21, 2009.