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AUTHOR'S NOTE: The next column of Cinema Democratica will be uploaded on or about Monday morning.
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A person wouldn't be a regular reader of these columns and not also know, independently, that the poll data has completely come apart in the past ten to twenty days for the team of Lost 'Nam / Lose Iran, both in terms of the national trackers and the electoral vote whip-count. These very columns have been making the case in different forms for most of that time, and each day that the economy holds center stage seems almost automatically to be a terrific polling day for Barack Obama and a terrible day for John McCain.
The situation has gotten so bad that the media analysis has pivoted far more dramatically than the race itself, for fear of seeming behind-the-wave. After weeks of cherry-picking tight polling data to fan their ratings, the mainstream pundits--including some high-ranking republicans--are now suggesting out-loud in televised panel discussions that the race is already over. "John McCain has the chance," muttered infamous GOP operative Ed Rollins on CNN the other day, "to go down in history as the man who cost the Republican party ten senate seats in the 2008 election." ...A thought that garnered an audible and involuntary "wow" from the guy sitting right next to him, David Gergen.
There are plenty of good reasons to suspect that Mr. Rollins might be right. Despite having the thick-end of a month to work out a position on the matter, Team Red has yet to formulate anything to say about the looming economic plane-crash in our midst that isn't self-contradictory, hopelessly at variance with conservative principles, insufferably quotidian, or some combination of all three. Over the past three news cycles, CNN has run a story suggesting that rank-and-file Republicans are once again ready to abandon McCain over his pledge to transfer shoddy mortgages from private balance sheets to the public one, followed abruptly by a story in which Mr. McCain pledged to amend the tax-penalty clauses for cashing-out a 401k (nice to know that the 63% of our money that's left in there won't be taxed when we try to use it to keep from being foreclosed, huh?), followed abruptly by a story that featured Rick Davis, in the daily campaign conference call, ascribing the CREDIT to McCain for sabotaging the first draft of the bailout bill--despite the fact that McCain had "suspended his campaign" on a pledge to ensure its passage.
As the mood of the electorate turns dramatically toward Mr. Obama on the question of trust and confidence, the McCain campaign has responded by attempting to fan the flames of the Bill Ayers / Barack Obama connection--and even this has backfired. To begin with there is the surreal picture of Sarah Palin, chief attack-dog on the subject, standing before a microphone and telling us that we don't know who "the real Barack Obama" is, despite the fact that he has been campaigning for President for twenty months, and she has been a public figure for fewer than six weeks of that time. As has been noted previously in these columns, you can't attack your opponent on character after he's already passed the "living-room test," especially if the person doing the attacking, hasn't. Still this least-worst strategy hobbles on, at Palin rally after Palin rally, where scores of audience members can be seen standing with folded arms through the attacks, but whose evening newscast sound-bites are driving a thicker and thicker wedge between the ticket and its precious on-the-fence voters on the other end of the TV signal. If that was where the problem ended, it would be bad enough.
But the other thing that's been happening on the trail since McCain/Palin decided to "take the gloves off" is that those crowds of theirs, when doing something other than standing with folded-arms, have been scaring the hell out of the rest of the country. As has been widely documented, right-wing firebrands in the audiences of McCain/Palin campaign rallies have taken to calling for the literal murder of Barack Obama--a behavior at least serious enough to merit an investigation by none other than the US Secret Service, albeit a cursory one.
Even on this score, the campaign has delivered the very sort of uncoordinated, uneven response that earned Mr. McCain the "erratic" label in the first place, starting by trying to sell the self-evidently ridiculous notion that Mr. Obama himself is responsible, following that with silence, and eventually, one might even say reluctantly, with McCain himself taking the stage and calling upon audience members to recognize that Mr. Obama is an honorable man against whom they are allowed to stand opposed on principle but not to incite violence--a call which earned the Republican candidate a full-throated round of booing from his own supporters. None of this is helping Mr. McCain to close his deal with undecided voters, of this much you may rest assured.
Meanwhile, the attack-dog herself is perhaps not enjoying the national political limelight as much as she may have a few weeks ago up in Minneapolis. The biggest story with her name on it these days isn't about her relentless linking of Obama to Ayers; it's about her relentless and possibly illegal abuse of power as Governor, in trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the Alaska State Police. In case you missed it, the bipartisan report into the matter--commissioned by the Republican-controlled state legislature--found conclusively that the Governor misused her office, though the document itself was quietly pooted-out on Friday night when none of the major media sources were going to take (or receive) much notice. But this may not be enough to keep the contents of that report from stealing the Sunday-morning news talks, and in consequence possibly spilling over into Monday or perhaps even beyond.
This isn't even the only round of incoming for the embattled pit-bull, either: A separate investigation into those paltry two years' of recently-released income tax returns has revealed that the Palins may owe thousands of dollars in back taxes, for failing to report the per diem payments they received while they were at their home in Wasilla. This author takes a lot of pleasure in criticizing the recently de-fanged media, but if Palin's abuse of power comes up in Sunday-morning conversation, it seems unlikely that her claims to being a reformer will pass without a question or two into how she can make such claims while simultaneously cheating on her income taxes. Messrs Obama and Biden, incidentally, have shrewdly left all of this alone--though one may be equally confident that McCain's decision to name Bill Ayers in a television commercial won't pass completely un-retaliated.
With the highest-placed Republicans now falling apart on policy and on strategy, it can come as little surprise that their electoral fortunes are also... well... falling apart. Mr. Obama is at or near his highest numbers ever in tracking poll scores, polling margins, electoral-vote projections, and likelihood of winning the election. A candidate who is down by ten points on the national stage with twenty-five days to go is in very, very big trouble. Even the widely-echoed predictions of some inevitable tightening over the last few days of the race would seem to this author to be on questionable footing--at least if one were to base his entire predictions on the tracking poll graph of the 1996 election between Clinton and Dole, which didn't tighten one tiny little bit over the same time-frame.
Neither is Mr. Rollins' prediction of ugly consequences down the ticket unsupported by the polling analysis of his most trusted colleagues. Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss both appear to be in substantial trouble--something that wouldn't have been thought possible even on the day that John McCain was standing on a stage in Jacksonville and pronouncing our economy strong. Elizabeth Dole is being quietly regarded as a dead woman walking in North Carolina, where a popular Democratic candidate for Governor, together with a significant banking sector, are collaborating to drag the usually untouchable Republican brand down into one of the least-likely battlegrounds of the cycle. Noted Congressional whip-counter Stu Rothenberg--a former Republican speechwriter--has gone so far as to call his current projection of the November 4th results a bloodbath.
In Minnesota a last, desperate grasp to right the rapidly sinking fortunes of Republican Senator Norm Coleman--a man who seems to think that the best thing about poor people is that they make really good firewood--has manifested itself as a unilateral cessation of negative campaigning, presumably in the hopes that Mr. Franken's blossoming lead will be damaged whether he alienates persuadable voters by refusing to respond in kind, or weakens his own arguments by agreeing to do so. It's a tried-and-tested approach, often pulled out at the last minute by a trailing Republican, and it's not going to work this time, either. Franken will re-broadcast Coleman's earlier, chillingly venomous commercials, tagging each one with a stoic voice-over asking, "Who does he think he's trying to kid?" And that, friend and neighbors, will be the Minnesota Senate Seat (and with a little luck, the political obituary of Mr. Coleman into the bargain).
So what is left to Mr. McCain and his ilk, by way of salvaging the situation? Many loyal readers would undoubtedly predict electoral theft--and indeed there is some evidence to support this concern. Even as the rest of the country basks in the first rays of morning sunshine that would seem to be draining us of our eight-year national nightmare, the Republican administrations in several states are quietly carrying out yet another purge, with the same ominous predictions of legally-registered Democrats being forcibly and systematically disenfranchised. The difference is, this time it won't be enough: You can steal Florida when the other guy is winning it by 1.5%, but you can't steal Ohio when the other guy is winning it by 5%--especially when the other guy's party controls the state government.
No, what is left to Mr. McCain, and his ilk, is to destroy the Obama Presidency before it even begins--first by polarizing the country by continuing to fan the "kill him" sentiment on the trail, and then by hamstringing the eventual administration with a national situation so hopeless that none of his proposed initiatives are still on the table. "This country is going to vote for Democrats for precisely as long as it takes to clean up the mess," one learned friend of mine recently predicted, "and then they'll go right back to voting for the people who made it in the first place, again." I hate to say it, but he may have a point.
The Federal Reserve has proven in the past--notably with the first days of the Clinton Administration--that its supposed non-partisan mission to stabilize monetary policy can sound to an un-trained observer like a check on the Democratic agenda--a phenomenon that Robert Reich once famously referred to as "the vice": If he and Clinton tried to stimulate the economy, Mr. Greenspan informed them on the occasion of their first three-way meeting, Greenspan would simply nullify their action with higher interest rates. If this isn't a reason to look fatalistically on the sweepingly ambitious proposals coming from the Obama campaign, then it is at the very least a compelling reason to short the bond market.
But the likelihood of such a move by Ben Bernanke says nothing about the separate, openly partisan efforts of McCain/Palin to agitate the right flank of their party into a "kill him" frenzy. And on this score we come back to Rollins and his comments about the McCain "legacy." If indeed Mr. McCain has already quietly conceded his chances of becoming the next President--or even if he sees them as increasingly slim--it is plausible to imagine that he may already be thinking about how he will be regarded by history. If true, this hypothesis would go a long way toward explaining how McCain could have retreated so dramatically from the (mostly) noble plane on which he'd pledged to run his race at its inception: By galvanizing the crazies on the far right, to such an extent that they would stop at nothing to thwart an Obama Administration even on those issues where their own best interests might be served, McCain could be playing to limit the losses down the ticket, and by that measure look to history like less of a loser than he might otherwise.
...Of course, if the right-flank of Mr. McCain's party really wanted to make Mr. Obama's agenda impossible to consummate, then their current leader could effect this outcome far more easily than all of these complex narratives involving shady Bill Ayers / Tony Rezko / Barack Obama connections--by instead just blowing-up Tehran. But that's a different column, now, isn't it.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Slow New Cycle? Let's Play With the Map
I don't know about you, but I've been sensing a pronounced deceleration in the amount of political news being generated and, for that matter, reported, just at the moment. Mind you I'm not complaining: The less political news there is right now, the better it is for the man hoping to consolidate his lead--but it does put a columnist like yours truly in the unusual predicament of trying to figure out what to write about. (I most assuredly have not yet mustered the courage to devote even a single column to either a movie review or a travel narrative, and probably won't until after November 4th--despite having several such entries in the can.)
Instead I decided to take an unexpectedly idle Thursday afternoon to dust-off my old academic training in a specialty branch of statistics called econometrics, to run a simulation on how election night could unfold. This is distinct from my usual "let's go over to the map" mode, in that (a) I took a stab and projecting states that fivethirtyeight.com has assigned "leaner" or "toss-up" status, and (b) I paced the lighting of the states in accordance with their staggered poll-closing times.
I won't bore you with too many of the ugly details, but it turns out that it's possible to use statistics to predict the answer to a yes/no (or, in this case, a blue/red) question, employing something called a "logit regression"--which indeed can return rich enough results so as to enable not only the final answer, but how closely the matter will be run in the meantime. In my small-minded and cursory approach to all of this, I took the closeness of the call as a proxy for how long it would take the networks to make it, yielding a "stair-stepped" map that lights up in measured phases, just like the real one does on the big night.
The most significant factor in projecting who would win any given state and when, was of course the current fivethirtyeight regression value (no sense reinventing their hard work, after all), but in addition I decided to add a handful of other variables that I thought could easily influence when (if not how) a state fell. These were:
1) whether today's leading candidate is from the same party as the governor of a state
2) whether today's leading candidate is from the same party as that of the candidate who won the state in 2004
3) whether the fivethirtyeight regression line shows a narrower race than today's poll-of-polls number, or a wider one
4) whether the largest cities in the state are purple or blue or red, since blue cities tend to take longer to report in
5) ratio of advertising expenditures in the state, where known
It is also worth noting--before we play our dangerous game--that I am by no means a pro at this sort of thing. The fivethirtyeight guys are the pros, and I'm sure we can look forward to a similarly textured experiment from them, in the near future. But in the meantime it is (at the very least) a stress-relieving exercise to pretend that the election was ending today, if only because it would mean that we can get on with the rest of our lives. So without further ado, here are the results of my election-night simulation, based on today's polling data and projections. All times are EST.
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6:00PM: Unable to Call Indiana
The modern quadrennial tradition of electoral vote-counting on the major networks has reliably started during the east-coast broadcast of the national news, with two ominous red spluts, bang in the middle of the map. This year, if things hold up the way they are right now, only one of those spluts will be visible where it should be--Kentucky. Indiana is a nail-biter for the first time in significantly longer than I have been alive, and the networks' inability to call the state at the moment its polls close will form the keynote of the broadcast-news coverage--much to the dismay and possibly even the tangible peril of the McCain/Palin ticket.
McCAIN/PALIN: 8
OBAMA/BIDEN: 0
NEWLY UNCALLED: IN
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7:00PM: Unable to Call Virginia
Viewers of the Mountain Time-Zone broadcast of the national evening news will turn on their television sets to find a second conspicuous hole in what is usually an early patchwork of red. As Georgia and South Carolina fall to McCain immediately and New Hampshire and Vermont are sumarrily awarded to Mr. Obama, the state Virginia--emerging as possibly the single most important prize up for grabs in McCain's desperate gambit to stop Obama's momentum--sits there on the gray-painted map, conspicuously uncalled.
McCAIN/PALIN: 31
OBAMA/BIDEN: 7
NEWLY UNCALLED: VA
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+1:00)
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7:30PM: Three More States, All Too Close
At the bottom of the seven o'clock hour the polls close in two crucial states this year, plus a third state that isn't as rich in electoral votes but could sound a grim alarm-bell for McCain if my forecast of its stubborn refusal to fall comes true. The big states? North Carolina and Ohio--neither of which will surprise anyone for not being painted one color or the other at the first possible moment. But what will the news analysts do with the story of their own inability to call West Virginia? Remember, polls are still open in most of the country and many people hearing the analysis at this hour will not yet have voted: If it's already shaping up to be a long night for Team Crankypants, will the uncalled races in Indiana and West Virginia discourage any of McCain's supporters out west from voting?
McCAIN/PALIN: 31
OBAMA/BIDEN: 7
NEWLY UNCALLED: NC, OH, WV
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+1:30), VA (+0:30)
-----------------------
8:00PM: First Big Wave, No Big Prizes
At eight o'clock on the east coast the networks cut away from their prime-time lineups and roll with the news that none of the major states that were truly in play this year can yet be called. McCain is perhaps relieved to see that Tennessee falls abruptly and without fuss into his column (along with Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma), but a quick call for either Florida or Missouri would have stopped the party next door in Springfield dead in its tracks. Instead the Show-Me State gives McCain no succor from the droning network narrative of a long and increasingly ominous-looking night. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, quietly collects his home state, plus Michigan and everything northeastern except for Pennsylvania, piling-up Connecticut, Delaware, The District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine (both districts), Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey.
McCAIN/PALIN: 64
OBAMA/BIDEN: 99
NEWLY UNCALLED: FL, MO, PA
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:00), VA (+1:00), NC, OH, WV (+0:30)
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8:18PM: Quaker State Falls Startlingly Early
This would perhaps represent the first moment in the evening when the McCain/Palin surrogates start mentally composing their sound-bites about the role of a loyal opposition in Congress. Pennsylvania took most of the night to fall for John Kerry in 2004 (while West Virginia was called for Bush the instant the polls had closed there), and my simulation has them reversed, with the bigger and more important prize needing only a few extra minutes of cross-checking to verify a result that is, today at least, about as suspenseful as the Cubs not making the World Series.
McCAIN/PALIN: 64
OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:18), VA (+1:18), NC, OH, WV (+0:48), FL, MO (+0:18)
-----------------------
8:30PM: The Razorbacks' Quadrennial Fifteen Seconds
Hey, remember when we all used to hang on the edge of our seats to see what was going to happen at 8:30--when polls closed in Arkansas? Me neither.
McCAIN/PALIN: 70
OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:30), VA (+1:30), NC, OH, WV (+1:00), FL, MO (+0:30)
-----------------------
8:46PM: McCain Salvages West Virginia
...And as you surf the various networks for the next fourteen minutes of comparing maps, the rule is that every time someone on TV says "firewall," you have to drink.
McCAIN/PALIN: 75
OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:46), VA (+1:46), NC, OH (+1:16), FL, MO (+0:46)
-----------------------
9:00PM: GOP Pundits White-Knuckled For Indiana
As the top of the hour rolls 'round for the second time in prime-time, nobody can take their eyes of what is shaping up to be the dominant under-story of the night, the continuing inability to call Indiana (and what it means for the fortunes of the Republican ticket). Meanwhile Obama nabs Minnesota, which never was anything like as close as it seemed to be polling, together with a big pickup in New Mexico, plus New York and Rhode Island to round-out the northeast. McCain/Palin settle for Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska (except NE-02), South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, and (mercifully) McCain's home state of Arizona. The Florida-Florida-Florida of this election, Colorado, is conspicuously too close to call.
McCAIN/PALIN: 144
OBAMA/BIDEN: 180
NEWLY UNCALLED: CO, NE02
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+3:00), VA (+2:00), NC, OH (+1:30), FL, MO (+1:00)
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9:17PM: Indiana Says "Uncle"
A gigantic sigh of relief from the McCain campaign is postulated by all three network anchors--apparently too distracted by Indiana's final red hue to notice that the precinct reports from Virginia and North Carolina and Colorado look like an Obama fundraising tally.
McCAIN/PALIN: 155
OBAMA/BIDEN: 180
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: VA (+2:17), NC, OH (+1:47), FL, MO (+1:17), CO, NE02 (+0:17)
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10:00PM: Third Wave a Mini-Tsunami For Team Blue
With the smallest assortment of top-of-the-hour calls, the ten o'clock sweep manages, if not to steel the whole show, then certainly to lay the foundations for its theft. With unexpected confidence the networks climb over each other to award both Iowa (where Obama has been leading since early summer) and Nevada (which was supposed to be tied) to the Senator from Illinois, thanks in large measure to a flood of California-based canvassers in the Silver State. All of which begs only the question, how many water metaphors is too many for describing an outcome in the middle of the desert? McCain hangs on in Utah--by only thirty-five or forty points. Montana and North Dakota, on the other hand, aren't being called for anyone--yet.
McCAIN/PALIN: 160
OBAMA/BIDEN: 192
NEWLY UNCALLED: MT, ND
STILL UNCALLED: VA (+3:00), NC, OH (+2:30), FL, MO (+2:00), CO, NE02 (+1:00)
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10:13PM: First Truly Breathless Call
Here we were, just about to get up to root around in the fridge, and Tom Brokaw is cutting-off a meandering tale of childhood patriphilia by Doris Kearns Goodwin to announce that Virginia and all its suburban-DC commies have just turned their backs on the color red, and with it most of McCain's dwindling chances of becoming President.
McCAIN/PALIN: 160
OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+2:43), FL, MO (+2:13), CO, NE02 (+1:13), MT, ND (+0:13)
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10:24PM: Dakota Territory Goes Maverick
How a group of fifty-eight corn farmers could have gotten together and decided to cast their three electoral votes for the guy who hates ethanol is beyond me. But lots of things are, these days.
McCAIN/PALIN: 163
OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+2:54), FL, MO (+2:24), CO, NE02 (+1:24), MT (+0:24)
-----------------------
10:35PM: Nebraska's Second District Says Go Big Red
I guess if Sarah Palin is going to choose Omaha as her first stage on which to call Barack Obama a terrorist, the least the good people of that city can do to show their appreciation is... vote for her???
McCAIN/PALIN: 164
OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+3:05), FL, MO (+2:35), CO (+1:35), MT (+0:35)
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10:41PM: The Grandaddy of All Calls ...This Year
With most of the juciest electoral prizes still on the table well into the ten o'clock hour, the 2008 election has appeared to some observers to be unexpectedly close. Not anymore: Ohio's 20 electoral votes, while not quite enough to put Obama in the White House by themselves, remove all doubt that the Pacific will seal the deal in another few minutes. In a hotel room somewhere in Tuscon, Rick Davis is hog-holding John McCain to keep him from slugging Carly Fiorina in the eye, while Steve Schmidt is seated at the meeting table, trying to choose between the second draft of a concession speech, or a cyanide capsule.
McCAIN/PALIN: 164
OBAMA/BIDEN: 225
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:11), FL, MO (+2:41), CO (+1:41), MT (+0:41)
-----------------------
10:52PM: A Centennial Celebration
I guess those influence-hungry field workers in Durango and Grand Junction didn't want to let the whole matter get decided without their input--again.
McCAIN/PALIN: 164
OBAMA/BIDEN: 234
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:22), FL, MO (+2:52), MT (+0:52)
-----------------------
10:56PM: McCain Answers. With Montana.
Hey, it's better than not answering with Montana. In some way that I haven't thought of, yet.
McCAIN/PALIN: 167
OBAMA/BIDEN: 234
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:26), FL, MO (+2:56)
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11:00PM: HISTORY IS MADE.
As of this moment, the United States is no longer a country in which a black man can't be President. With the poll closings on the west coast, Obama tips comfortably over the 270 mark by securing California, Oregon, Washington State, and Hawaii, while McCain's Idaho victory escapes the notice of the candidate, who is already in the motorcade on his way to give the speech.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171
OBAMA/BIDEN: 311
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:30), FL, MO (+3:00)
-----------------------
11:10PM: As We Await the Speeches...
Even as McCain is making his way to the pavilion from which he will concede the race, the biggest contested electoral prize slips through his fingers and into the waiting arms of the President-Elect.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171
OBAMA/BIDEN: 338
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:40), MO (+3:10)
-----------------------
11:18PM: So Do We Cut Away From McCain's Speech?
Probably not--even though North Carolina hasn't had a blue hue for a long, long time.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171
OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: MO (+3:18)
-----------------------
12:00AM: Palin Pays Off?
Well, yeah--with Alaska's three electoral votes--though her pantsuit tails turn out not to be enough to save Ted Stevens from going down to defeat in his bid to become the first convicted felon reelected to the US Senate.
McCAIN/PALIN: 174
OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: MO (+3:25)
-----------------------
12:13AM: You Can Read About The Senate in Tomorrow's Paper!
The last state in the union finally falls--for John McCain--long after all but the most hardened political junkies have gone to bed.
FINAL TALLY:
McCAIN/PALIN: 185
OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
-------------------------------
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Instead I decided to take an unexpectedly idle Thursday afternoon to dust-off my old academic training in a specialty branch of statistics called econometrics, to run a simulation on how election night could unfold. This is distinct from my usual "let's go over to the map" mode, in that (a) I took a stab and projecting states that fivethirtyeight.com has assigned "leaner" or "toss-up" status, and (b) I paced the lighting of the states in accordance with their staggered poll-closing times.
I won't bore you with too many of the ugly details, but it turns out that it's possible to use statistics to predict the answer to a yes/no (or, in this case, a blue/red) question, employing something called a "logit regression"--which indeed can return rich enough results so as to enable not only the final answer, but how closely the matter will be run in the meantime. In my small-minded and cursory approach to all of this, I took the closeness of the call as a proxy for how long it would take the networks to make it, yielding a "stair-stepped" map that lights up in measured phases, just like the real one does on the big night.
The most significant factor in projecting who would win any given state and when, was of course the current fivethirtyeight regression value (no sense reinventing their hard work, after all), but in addition I decided to add a handful of other variables that I thought could easily influence when (if not how) a state fell. These were:
1) whether today's leading candidate is from the same party as the governor of a state
2) whether today's leading candidate is from the same party as that of the candidate who won the state in 2004
3) whether the fivethirtyeight regression line shows a narrower race than today's poll-of-polls number, or a wider one
4) whether the largest cities in the state are purple or blue or red, since blue cities tend to take longer to report in
5) ratio of advertising expenditures in the state, where known
It is also worth noting--before we play our dangerous game--that I am by no means a pro at this sort of thing. The fivethirtyeight guys are the pros, and I'm sure we can look forward to a similarly textured experiment from them, in the near future. But in the meantime it is (at the very least) a stress-relieving exercise to pretend that the election was ending today, if only because it would mean that we can get on with the rest of our lives. So without further ado, here are the results of my election-night simulation, based on today's polling data and projections. All times are EST.
-----------------------
6:00PM: Unable to Call Indiana
The modern quadrennial tradition of electoral vote-counting on the major networks has reliably started during the east-coast broadcast of the national news, with two ominous red spluts, bang in the middle of the map. This year, if things hold up the way they are right now, only one of those spluts will be visible where it should be--Kentucky. Indiana is a nail-biter for the first time in significantly longer than I have been alive, and the networks' inability to call the state at the moment its polls close will form the keynote of the broadcast-news coverage--much to the dismay and possibly even the tangible peril of the McCain/Palin ticket.
McCAIN/PALIN: 8OBAMA/BIDEN: 0
NEWLY UNCALLED: IN
-----------------------
7:00PM: Unable to Call Virginia
Viewers of the Mountain Time-Zone broadcast of the national evening news will turn on their television sets to find a second conspicuous hole in what is usually an early patchwork of red. As Georgia and South Carolina fall to McCain immediately and New Hampshire and Vermont are sumarrily awarded to Mr. Obama, the state Virginia--emerging as possibly the single most important prize up for grabs in McCain's desperate gambit to stop Obama's momentum--sits there on the gray-painted map, conspicuously uncalled.
McCAIN/PALIN: 31OBAMA/BIDEN: 7
NEWLY UNCALLED: VA
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+1:00)
-----------------------
7:30PM: Three More States, All Too Close
At the bottom of the seven o'clock hour the polls close in two crucial states this year, plus a third state that isn't as rich in electoral votes but could sound a grim alarm-bell for McCain if my forecast of its stubborn refusal to fall comes true. The big states? North Carolina and Ohio--neither of which will surprise anyone for not being painted one color or the other at the first possible moment. But what will the news analysts do with the story of their own inability to call West Virginia? Remember, polls are still open in most of the country and many people hearing the analysis at this hour will not yet have voted: If it's already shaping up to be a long night for Team Crankypants, will the uncalled races in Indiana and West Virginia discourage any of McCain's supporters out west from voting?
McCAIN/PALIN: 31OBAMA/BIDEN: 7
NEWLY UNCALLED: NC, OH, WV
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+1:30), VA (+0:30)
-----------------------
8:00PM: First Big Wave, No Big Prizes
At eight o'clock on the east coast the networks cut away from their prime-time lineups and roll with the news that none of the major states that were truly in play this year can yet be called. McCain is perhaps relieved to see that Tennessee falls abruptly and without fuss into his column (along with Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma), but a quick call for either Florida or Missouri would have stopped the party next door in Springfield dead in its tracks. Instead the Show-Me State gives McCain no succor from the droning network narrative of a long and increasingly ominous-looking night. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, quietly collects his home state, plus Michigan and everything northeastern except for Pennsylvania, piling-up Connecticut, Delaware, The District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine (both districts), Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey.
McCAIN/PALIN: 64
OBAMA/BIDEN: 99
NEWLY UNCALLED: FL, MO, PA
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:00), VA (+1:00), NC, OH, WV (+0:30)
-----------------------
8:18PM: Quaker State Falls Startlingly Early
This would perhaps represent the first moment in the evening when the McCain/Palin surrogates start mentally composing their sound-bites about the role of a loyal opposition in Congress. Pennsylvania took most of the night to fall for John Kerry in 2004 (while West Virginia was called for Bush the instant the polls had closed there), and my simulation has them reversed, with the bigger and more important prize needing only a few extra minutes of cross-checking to verify a result that is, today at least, about as suspenseful as the Cubs not making the World Series.
McCAIN/PALIN: 64
OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:18), VA (+1:18), NC, OH, WV (+0:48), FL, MO (+0:18)
-----------------------
8:30PM: The Razorbacks' Quadrennial Fifteen Seconds
Hey, remember when we all used to hang on the edge of our seats to see what was going to happen at 8:30--when polls closed in Arkansas? Me neither.
McCAIN/PALIN: 70OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:30), VA (+1:30), NC, OH, WV (+1:00), FL, MO (+0:30)
-----------------------
8:46PM: McCain Salvages West Virginia
...And as you surf the various networks for the next fourteen minutes of comparing maps, the rule is that every time someone on TV says "firewall," you have to drink.
McCAIN/PALIN: 75
OBAMA/BIDEN: 120
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+2:46), VA (+1:46), NC, OH (+1:16), FL, MO (+0:46)
-----------------------
9:00PM: GOP Pundits White-Knuckled For Indiana
As the top of the hour rolls 'round for the second time in prime-time, nobody can take their eyes of what is shaping up to be the dominant under-story of the night, the continuing inability to call Indiana (and what it means for the fortunes of the Republican ticket). Meanwhile Obama nabs Minnesota, which never was anything like as close as it seemed to be polling, together with a big pickup in New Mexico, plus New York and Rhode Island to round-out the northeast. McCain/Palin settle for Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska (except NE-02), South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, and (mercifully) McCain's home state of Arizona. The Florida-Florida-Florida of this election, Colorado, is conspicuously too close to call.
McCAIN/PALIN: 144OBAMA/BIDEN: 180
NEWLY UNCALLED: CO, NE02
STILL UNCALLED: IN (+3:00), VA (+2:00), NC, OH (+1:30), FL, MO (+1:00)
-----------------------
9:17PM: Indiana Says "Uncle"
A gigantic sigh of relief from the McCain campaign is postulated by all three network anchors--apparently too distracted by Indiana's final red hue to notice that the precinct reports from Virginia and North Carolina and Colorado look like an Obama fundraising tally.
McCAIN/PALIN: 155OBAMA/BIDEN: 180
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: VA (+2:17), NC, OH (+1:47), FL, MO (+1:17), CO, NE02 (+0:17)
-----------------------
10:00PM: Third Wave a Mini-Tsunami For Team Blue
With the smallest assortment of top-of-the-hour calls, the ten o'clock sweep manages, if not to steel the whole show, then certainly to lay the foundations for its theft. With unexpected confidence the networks climb over each other to award both Iowa (where Obama has been leading since early summer) and Nevada (which was supposed to be tied) to the Senator from Illinois, thanks in large measure to a flood of California-based canvassers in the Silver State. All of which begs only the question, how many water metaphors is too many for describing an outcome in the middle of the desert? McCain hangs on in Utah--by only thirty-five or forty points. Montana and North Dakota, on the other hand, aren't being called for anyone--yet.
McCAIN/PALIN: 160OBAMA/BIDEN: 192
NEWLY UNCALLED: MT, ND
STILL UNCALLED: VA (+3:00), NC, OH (+2:30), FL, MO (+2:00), CO, NE02 (+1:00)
-----------------------
10:13PM: First Truly Breathless Call
Here we were, just about to get up to root around in the fridge, and Tom Brokaw is cutting-off a meandering tale of childhood patriphilia by Doris Kearns Goodwin to announce that Virginia and all its suburban-DC commies have just turned their backs on the color red, and with it most of McCain's dwindling chances of becoming President.
McCAIN/PALIN: 160OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+2:43), FL, MO (+2:13), CO, NE02 (+1:13), MT, ND (+0:13)
-----------------------
10:24PM: Dakota Territory Goes Maverick
How a group of fifty-eight corn farmers could have gotten together and decided to cast their three electoral votes for the guy who hates ethanol is beyond me. But lots of things are, these days.
McCAIN/PALIN: 163OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+2:54), FL, MO (+2:24), CO, NE02 (+1:24), MT (+0:24)
-----------------------
10:35PM: Nebraska's Second District Says Go Big Red
I guess if Sarah Palin is going to choose Omaha as her first stage on which to call Barack Obama a terrorist, the least the good people of that city can do to show their appreciation is... vote for her???
McCAIN/PALIN: 164
OBAMA/BIDEN: 205
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC, OH (+3:05), FL, MO (+2:35), CO (+1:35), MT (+0:35)
-----------------------
10:41PM: The Grandaddy of All Calls ...This Year
With most of the juciest electoral prizes still on the table well into the ten o'clock hour, the 2008 election has appeared to some observers to be unexpectedly close. Not anymore: Ohio's 20 electoral votes, while not quite enough to put Obama in the White House by themselves, remove all doubt that the Pacific will seal the deal in another few minutes. In a hotel room somewhere in Tuscon, Rick Davis is hog-holding John McCain to keep him from slugging Carly Fiorina in the eye, while Steve Schmidt is seated at the meeting table, trying to choose between the second draft of a concession speech, or a cyanide capsule.
McCAIN/PALIN: 164
OBAMA/BIDEN: 225
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:11), FL, MO (+2:41), CO (+1:41), MT (+0:41)
-----------------------
10:52PM: A Centennial Celebration
I guess those influence-hungry field workers in Durango and Grand Junction didn't want to let the whole matter get decided without their input--again.
McCAIN/PALIN: 164OBAMA/BIDEN: 234
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:22), FL, MO (+2:52), MT (+0:52)
-----------------------
10:56PM: McCain Answers. With Montana.
Hey, it's better than not answering with Montana. In some way that I haven't thought of, yet.
McCAIN/PALIN: 167OBAMA/BIDEN: 234
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:26), FL, MO (+2:56)
-----------------------
11:00PM: HISTORY IS MADE.
As of this moment, the United States is no longer a country in which a black man can't be President. With the poll closings on the west coast, Obama tips comfortably over the 270 mark by securing California, Oregon, Washington State, and Hawaii, while McCain's Idaho victory escapes the notice of the candidate, who is already in the motorcade on his way to give the speech.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171
OBAMA/BIDEN: 311
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:30), FL, MO (+3:00)
-----------------------
11:10PM: As We Await the Speeches...
Even as McCain is making his way to the pavilion from which he will concede the race, the biggest contested electoral prize slips through his fingers and into the waiting arms of the President-Elect.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171
OBAMA/BIDEN: 338
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: NC (+3:40), MO (+3:10)
-----------------------
11:18PM: So Do We Cut Away From McCain's Speech?
Probably not--even though North Carolina hasn't had a blue hue for a long, long time.
McCAIN/PALIN: 171OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: MO (+3:18)
-----------------------
12:00AM: Palin Pays Off?
Well, yeah--with Alaska's three electoral votes--though her pantsuit tails turn out not to be enough to save Ted Stevens from going down to defeat in his bid to become the first convicted felon reelected to the US Senate.
McCAIN/PALIN: 174OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
NEWLY UNCALLED: (none)
STILL UNCALLED: MO (+3:25)
-----------------------
12:13AM: You Can Read About The Senate in Tomorrow's Paper!
The last state in the union finally falls--for John McCain--long after all but the most hardened political junkies have gone to bed.
FINAL TALLY:McCAIN/PALIN: 185
OBAMA/BIDEN: 353
-------------------------------
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Palin and McCain Campaigning Together???
You may or may not have heard that on Wednesday John McCain referred to either the US Senate or the American people (it's not actually possible to tell which) as "my fellow prisoners." Some pretty major news sources--notably NBC--ran with the story, while others--notably CNN--did not, but the blogosphere veritably exploded with speculation that Mr. McCain is unwell and getting worse.
Referring to fifty-seven states when one means to say forty-seven probably comes across, in the minds of most decent and up-standing Americans, as a brain-fart; being a rehabilitated POW who at age seventy-two refers to a group of free citizens as "my fellow prisoners" is, or at least could be, something different altogether. The McCain/Palin ticket, it is argued, could be in the advanced stages of full emotional meltdown, and the stress of this realization might be eating away at John McCain's mental faculties in a way that could justify worrying about the guy.
And yet, for all the cyber-back-and-forth that took place today regarding the comment, one relatively under-exposed aspect of the story was that Sarah Palin was standing directly beside McCain when he said this. And that, friends and colleagues, is an alarming sign to say the least.
As we all know, Presidential- and Vice Presidential candidates are manifestly not supposed to be traveling together in early October: One of them is supposed to stand on stages in toss-up states, acting stoic and Presidential and wholly above the fray, while the other is supposed to stand on stages in their own party's "leaner" states and fan the fires of resentment toward the other guy. Every speaking event at which Palin and McCain take the stage together, obviously, represents an empty stage somewhere else in the country--a terrible misuse of resources, particularly for the ticket that Gallup showed on Wednesday as trailing Obama/Biden by a whopping eleven points, 52-to-41. When you're down by eleven points, you don't waste your running-mate's time by making her stand silently through your own speech.
Unless you don't have any choice.
Governor Palin may not be as popular as she once was with persuadable voters in the middle (indeed she is not), but she is still wildly popular with the hate-and-switch crowd on McCain's right flank, and if she is McCain's warm-up act on the stump at this crucial stage in the campaign, then there really can be only one explanation: The crowds wouldn't come to see McCain speak by himself. He's just not popular enough at this hour, even with the people who have already been pre-screened as supporters so staunch as to deserve invitations to hear the candidate talk.
While most of us were opining about McCain's unnerving strolls across Tuesday night's stage, his dismissive and possibly racist reference to Obama as "that one," his terrible jokes, and his inability to counter Obama's observations about his behavior over the past year, we seem to have missed that McCain's only tangible effort at changing the discussion--a government buyout of home mortgages--would be so despised by the rank-and-file members of his own party so as to spark full and open revolt, if one of them thought he was the tiniest bit serious. The cautiously soporific event scored an eye-popping 41.2 share, according to Nielsen, and after it was over there were multiple indications that previously undecided voters were breaking for the first time in large numbers to the Obama/Biden. Team Blue is out-spending their opponents by a 17-11 margin, playing almost all of their enormous money advantage on the Republican side of the field, all the while consolidating their holds on the four easiest states to peel from Bush'04: Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Virginia--the last of which has been showing on fivethirtyeight.com as "Likely DEM" for well over a week, now. And there is late word that both of the Obama campaign's top field commanders have been dispatched to Florida.
So what options are left to Senator McCain? If the initial answer is "very few," then this must also be immediately qualified with the recognition that the candidate has very few obvious scapegoats on whom to place the blame. In a series of strategic and tactical errors so egregious as to leave some of us wondering who could possibly have been responsible, McCain has in rapid succession...
Columnists are now openly wondering if Obama has reached his ceiling: a 52-41 popular vote margin would rival the largest electoral landslides of the modern era, and further inroads by Obama are, it is argued, unlikely in the face of systematic prejudice. "The people who are still undecided are all f---ing racists," one canvasser told a fellow columnist, "and yet they're scared to death of what will happen to the economy." Clearly, when the remaining pool of undecided voters is talking in these kinds of bizarrely self-contradicting tones, we may take it as read that one of the two candidates has summarily and spectacularly failed to close the deal.
Mr. McCain has, at the end of the day, painted himself into a corner from which he essentially cannot emerge. He can no longer call his opponent reckless, inexperienced, or a fan of big government. The mainstream press is increasingly quick to point out the desperate straits in which his campaign has found itself. He inverts the tandem of character-then-policy attacks at the inescapable risk of appearing desperate. He loses among persuadable voters not just on likability and empathy, but now on competence as well. In such a poisoned environment, it is no wonder that Mr. McCain seeks the solace of his running-mate on the stage.
The question now, given her record, may well be that of how much longer she will give it to him.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Referring to fifty-seven states when one means to say forty-seven probably comes across, in the minds of most decent and up-standing Americans, as a brain-fart; being a rehabilitated POW who at age seventy-two refers to a group of free citizens as "my fellow prisoners" is, or at least could be, something different altogether. The McCain/Palin ticket, it is argued, could be in the advanced stages of full emotional meltdown, and the stress of this realization might be eating away at John McCain's mental faculties in a way that could justify worrying about the guy.
And yet, for all the cyber-back-and-forth that took place today regarding the comment, one relatively under-exposed aspect of the story was that Sarah Palin was standing directly beside McCain when he said this. And that, friends and colleagues, is an alarming sign to say the least.
As we all know, Presidential- and Vice Presidential candidates are manifestly not supposed to be traveling together in early October: One of them is supposed to stand on stages in toss-up states, acting stoic and Presidential and wholly above the fray, while the other is supposed to stand on stages in their own party's "leaner" states and fan the fires of resentment toward the other guy. Every speaking event at which Palin and McCain take the stage together, obviously, represents an empty stage somewhere else in the country--a terrible misuse of resources, particularly for the ticket that Gallup showed on Wednesday as trailing Obama/Biden by a whopping eleven points, 52-to-41. When you're down by eleven points, you don't waste your running-mate's time by making her stand silently through your own speech.
Unless you don't have any choice.
Governor Palin may not be as popular as she once was with persuadable voters in the middle (indeed she is not), but she is still wildly popular with the hate-and-switch crowd on McCain's right flank, and if she is McCain's warm-up act on the stump at this crucial stage in the campaign, then there really can be only one explanation: The crowds wouldn't come to see McCain speak by himself. He's just not popular enough at this hour, even with the people who have already been pre-screened as supporters so staunch as to deserve invitations to hear the candidate talk.
While most of us were opining about McCain's unnerving strolls across Tuesday night's stage, his dismissive and possibly racist reference to Obama as "that one," his terrible jokes, and his inability to counter Obama's observations about his behavior over the past year, we seem to have missed that McCain's only tangible effort at changing the discussion--a government buyout of home mortgages--would be so despised by the rank-and-file members of his own party so as to spark full and open revolt, if one of them thought he was the tiniest bit serious. The cautiously soporific event scored an eye-popping 41.2 share, according to Nielsen, and after it was over there were multiple indications that previously undecided voters were breaking for the first time in large numbers to the Obama/Biden. Team Blue is out-spending their opponents by a 17-11 margin, playing almost all of their enormous money advantage on the Republican side of the field, all the while consolidating their holds on the four easiest states to peel from Bush'04: Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Virginia--the last of which has been showing on fivethirtyeight.com as "Likely DEM" for well over a week, now. And there is late word that both of the Obama campaign's top field commanders have been dispatched to Florida.
So what options are left to Senator McCain? If the initial answer is "very few," then this must also be immediately qualified with the recognition that the candidate has very few obvious scapegoats on whom to place the blame. In a series of strategic and tactical errors so egregious as to leave some of us wondering who could possibly have been responsible, McCain has in rapid succession...
- sloughed the experience card by picking Palin
- waved-off the financial crisis by declaring the fundamentals of the economy strong
- painted himself as a hip-shooting debate skipper by suspending his campaign
- conceded his own ineptitude by showing at the debate with no bailout compromise
- squandered the opportunity to assail Obama's character until it was too late
- embraced government interventions wildly unpopular with his own party and completely at variance with his own record on the subject
Columnists are now openly wondering if Obama has reached his ceiling: a 52-41 popular vote margin would rival the largest electoral landslides of the modern era, and further inroads by Obama are, it is argued, unlikely in the face of systematic prejudice. "The people who are still undecided are all f---ing racists," one canvasser told a fellow columnist, "and yet they're scared to death of what will happen to the economy." Clearly, when the remaining pool of undecided voters is talking in these kinds of bizarrely self-contradicting tones, we may take it as read that one of the two candidates has summarily and spectacularly failed to close the deal.
Mr. McCain has, at the end of the day, painted himself into a corner from which he essentially cannot emerge. He can no longer call his opponent reckless, inexperienced, or a fan of big government. The mainstream press is increasingly quick to point out the desperate straits in which his campaign has found itself. He inverts the tandem of character-then-policy attacks at the inescapable risk of appearing desperate. He loses among persuadable voters not just on likability and empathy, but now on competence as well. In such a poisoned environment, it is no wonder that Mr. McCain seeks the solace of his running-mate on the stage.
The question now, given her record, may well be that of how much longer she will give it to him.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Was This The Inflection Point?
At the start of Tuesday night's Presidential debate there was broad consensus that John McCain needed to score a decisive victory; instead, by every available measuring standard (thank you, Fivethirtyeight.com), the clear victor in the event was Barack Obama. And the worst news of it for McCain is that the polling results probably don't even plumb the depths of the real story.
Mr. McCain, eager to show himself as the young and energetic campaigner that he manifestly is not, took the decision to stroll expansively across the stage as he spoke--a gesture that only managed to make him look predatory, frustrated, and, dare I say it? erratic. Neither his physique nor his temperament were suited to this Clintonesque approach of connecting with the Town Hall audience, a self-evident truth that only serves to buttress the emerging picture of a campaign trying to win on a one-size-fits-all metric of old formulas ill-suited to their guy.
It's been said before in these columns, but it bears repeating: Mr. McCain is squandering every aspect of his own personal brand, by pandering to the time-tested methods being espoused by the people who are supposed to be helping him. He isn't retail (despite promising earmarks at every stop, just before he rails against them), he isn't dirty (despite running ads that claim his opponent wants to teach sex-ed in kindergarten), he isn't Clintonesque (despite trying to be on Tuesday night), and he certainly isn't a champion of government oversight (which would play with the American public if there wasn't such a huge archive of counter-examples reposing in film canisters like so many unexploded Vietnamese land-mines).
This, more than any other macro-level reason, is why McCain was struggling to define himself and his opponent even before the Wall Street meltdown--and indeed probably would have lost, anyway. He's not the guy Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt have been trying to make out of him, and the harder he tries to be that guy, ironically, the more he comes across as a clone of George W. Bush. It's undoubtedly too late now, but the only true "shakeup" that would have actually challenged the structural dynamic of this race would have been to fire both of those idiots (presumably on the day Rick Davis was linked financially to FreddieMac), and replace them with people who knew and trusted McCain's own distinct appeal. And by the way, even then it may have been too late, at least if we are to believe a recent story suggesting that the Sarah Palin pick was the sole responsibility of Mr. Schmidt.
Hypotheticals aside, Tuesday night was McCain's de facto last chance to move the electorate in any meaningful way. True, the campaign has switched to fiercely negative tactics, both on the airwaves and the stump, but these represent a nearly-mute testimony to the compounded tactical missteps of their architects, since the new attacks are in violation of the first cardinal rule of the Lee Atwater playbook: You're supposed to question character first (anyone for a tank-ride?), then move in for the kill on policy (anyone for furloughing Willie Horton?). If you do it the other way around it looks as though you've given up trying to win on policy, and are now desperately trying to change the subject. Apparently someone forgot to tell the once-removed disciple of Atwater running Team Crankypants. And never mind that The Good Guys are responding far more effectively than any Democrat in memory. At all events, when you're down by eleven in one prominent tracking poll and eight in another, Bill Ayers isn't going to be your Willie Horton. You have to win it back yourself.
Too bad for Mr. McCain, then, that he chose the route of chippy, borderline exasperated responses to a host of questions, thrust from his lips in the manner of a suspect trying to lie his way past the police. By turns McCain linked himself to yet another questionably competent female CEO (Meg Whitman), floated a bevy of bizarre and palpably un-funny jokes (not you, Tom), quietly conceded that he would, in fact, tax health care benefits (by not swatting the accusation down in its tracks), and, in the end, committed what may be the most readily sound-bitable gaffe since Gerry Ford told a national audience that the Russians weren't running eastern Europe. The next morning, all the talk on all the major news sites was about his "that one" comment--which could have been racist, could have been merely derisive, but at all events may be the single least Presidential act by a candidate for President that this country has ever seen happening on live television.
The kids over on Fivethirtyeight had the luxury of watching the opinion dials throughout the evening, and McCain's rarely tripped above 50%, while Obama's rarely dipped below it. As one last barometer on just how bad the night went for Mr. McCain and his ticket, consider that the CNN "debate report card," which summarizes the reactions of their panel of political analysts, featured only one grade for Mr. McCain above a "C" (David Gergen's), despite the fact that one of the other panelists happens to be the unapologetically disingenuous Linda Sanchez--the same Linda Sanchez who had the gall to award Barack Obama a "C" for the speech that Pat Buchanan called the greatest he had ever seen.
With all of this data rushing in, and all of it pointing so squarely toward the same conclusion, one is left to wonder if the "fundamentals are strong" comment from three weeks ago was the pivot-point in this election, and if now what we've just witnessed is its corresponding inflection point--the moment at which undecideds begin breaking for Obama at self-amplifying rates, to spare the hold-outs from the potential embarrassment of sounding tone-deaf to the clarity of the situation. As for signs that this is indeed what has just happened? Look over the next few days for a bevy of Republican candidates down-ticket to begin attaching themselves to Barack Obama, in much the same way that Democrats did in 1980 and Republicans did in 1992. Few sentinels could be as conclusive as finding someone in a grocery store wearing a button that said, for example, "I'm voting for Obama and Libby Dole!" because such a button would signal that the embattled down-ticket candidates are fleeing from the vortex of McCain's sunken ship.
Look also for the tone of reporting in the mainstream press to become less and less favorable for a McCain comeback, as the editorial boards of the largest news sources shift from artificially holding things close in order to fan their ratings, to a fear of seeming out-of-touch with the reality on the ground. From here on, each new ploy by Old-Man POW and his reckless sidekick will surely be prefaced by the same lead-in about their "increasingly desperate" need to change things up--and the more the press takes this tone, the harder it will be for a persuadable voter to side with them, for fear of backing a loser.
Even late-campaign surprises in the area of current events would seem unlikely to move the matter far enough to change the outcome, now. The capture of Bin Laden will not lift the approval ratings of a President now rivaling the lows of Nixon on the day he resigned from office--at least not past the point that he continues to drag-down his aspiring successor--and a massive change in the national security fortunes of the country would only have helped McCain had he not already appeared erratic and volatile for the entire world to see. For all the Republicans' protestations, it is now Obama who has emerged as the "cool hand at the tiller," and that is as close to the death-knell for McCain's candidacy as a reasonably cautious analyst is likely to sound, between now and November 4th.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Mr. McCain, eager to show himself as the young and energetic campaigner that he manifestly is not, took the decision to stroll expansively across the stage as he spoke--a gesture that only managed to make him look predatory, frustrated, and, dare I say it? erratic. Neither his physique nor his temperament were suited to this Clintonesque approach of connecting with the Town Hall audience, a self-evident truth that only serves to buttress the emerging picture of a campaign trying to win on a one-size-fits-all metric of old formulas ill-suited to their guy.
It's been said before in these columns, but it bears repeating: Mr. McCain is squandering every aspect of his own personal brand, by pandering to the time-tested methods being espoused by the people who are supposed to be helping him. He isn't retail (despite promising earmarks at every stop, just before he rails against them), he isn't dirty (despite running ads that claim his opponent wants to teach sex-ed in kindergarten), he isn't Clintonesque (despite trying to be on Tuesday night), and he certainly isn't a champion of government oversight (which would play with the American public if there wasn't such a huge archive of counter-examples reposing in film canisters like so many unexploded Vietnamese land-mines).
This, more than any other macro-level reason, is why McCain was struggling to define himself and his opponent even before the Wall Street meltdown--and indeed probably would have lost, anyway. He's not the guy Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt have been trying to make out of him, and the harder he tries to be that guy, ironically, the more he comes across as a clone of George W. Bush. It's undoubtedly too late now, but the only true "shakeup" that would have actually challenged the structural dynamic of this race would have been to fire both of those idiots (presumably on the day Rick Davis was linked financially to FreddieMac), and replace them with people who knew and trusted McCain's own distinct appeal. And by the way, even then it may have been too late, at least if we are to believe a recent story suggesting that the Sarah Palin pick was the sole responsibility of Mr. Schmidt.
Hypotheticals aside, Tuesday night was McCain's de facto last chance to move the electorate in any meaningful way. True, the campaign has switched to fiercely negative tactics, both on the airwaves and the stump, but these represent a nearly-mute testimony to the compounded tactical missteps of their architects, since the new attacks are in violation of the first cardinal rule of the Lee Atwater playbook: You're supposed to question character first (anyone for a tank-ride?), then move in for the kill on policy (anyone for furloughing Willie Horton?). If you do it the other way around it looks as though you've given up trying to win on policy, and are now desperately trying to change the subject. Apparently someone forgot to tell the once-removed disciple of Atwater running Team Crankypants. And never mind that The Good Guys are responding far more effectively than any Democrat in memory. At all events, when you're down by eleven in one prominent tracking poll and eight in another, Bill Ayers isn't going to be your Willie Horton. You have to win it back yourself.
Too bad for Mr. McCain, then, that he chose the route of chippy, borderline exasperated responses to a host of questions, thrust from his lips in the manner of a suspect trying to lie his way past the police. By turns McCain linked himself to yet another questionably competent female CEO (Meg Whitman), floated a bevy of bizarre and palpably un-funny jokes (not you, Tom), quietly conceded that he would, in fact, tax health care benefits (by not swatting the accusation down in its tracks), and, in the end, committed what may be the most readily sound-bitable gaffe since Gerry Ford told a national audience that the Russians weren't running eastern Europe. The next morning, all the talk on all the major news sites was about his "that one" comment--which could have been racist, could have been merely derisive, but at all events may be the single least Presidential act by a candidate for President that this country has ever seen happening on live television.
The kids over on Fivethirtyeight had the luxury of watching the opinion dials throughout the evening, and McCain's rarely tripped above 50%, while Obama's rarely dipped below it. As one last barometer on just how bad the night went for Mr. McCain and his ticket, consider that the CNN "debate report card," which summarizes the reactions of their panel of political analysts, featured only one grade for Mr. McCain above a "C" (David Gergen's), despite the fact that one of the other panelists happens to be the unapologetically disingenuous Linda Sanchez--the same Linda Sanchez who had the gall to award Barack Obama a "C" for the speech that Pat Buchanan called the greatest he had ever seen.
With all of this data rushing in, and all of it pointing so squarely toward the same conclusion, one is left to wonder if the "fundamentals are strong" comment from three weeks ago was the pivot-point in this election, and if now what we've just witnessed is its corresponding inflection point--the moment at which undecideds begin breaking for Obama at self-amplifying rates, to spare the hold-outs from the potential embarrassment of sounding tone-deaf to the clarity of the situation. As for signs that this is indeed what has just happened? Look over the next few days for a bevy of Republican candidates down-ticket to begin attaching themselves to Barack Obama, in much the same way that Democrats did in 1980 and Republicans did in 1992. Few sentinels could be as conclusive as finding someone in a grocery store wearing a button that said, for example, "I'm voting for Obama and Libby Dole!" because such a button would signal that the embattled down-ticket candidates are fleeing from the vortex of McCain's sunken ship.
Look also for the tone of reporting in the mainstream press to become less and less favorable for a McCain comeback, as the editorial boards of the largest news sources shift from artificially holding things close in order to fan their ratings, to a fear of seeming out-of-touch with the reality on the ground. From here on, each new ploy by Old-Man POW and his reckless sidekick will surely be prefaced by the same lead-in about their "increasingly desperate" need to change things up--and the more the press takes this tone, the harder it will be for a persuadable voter to side with them, for fear of backing a loser.
Even late-campaign surprises in the area of current events would seem unlikely to move the matter far enough to change the outcome, now. The capture of Bin Laden will not lift the approval ratings of a President now rivaling the lows of Nixon on the day he resigned from office--at least not past the point that he continues to drag-down his aspiring successor--and a massive change in the national security fortunes of the country would only have helped McCain had he not already appeared erratic and volatile for the entire world to see. For all the Republicans' protestations, it is now Obama who has emerged as the "cool hand at the tiller," and that is as close to the death-knell for McCain's candidacy as a reasonably cautious analyst is likely to sound, between now and November 4th.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Live Blogging the Debate (Finally!)
Room sentiment? Obama played it really safe, didn't lose anything. McCain didn't do as well as he needed to. The summary judgment of the Democrats in the room: "If you say it often enough and loud enough, eventually it's true." The summary judgment of Republicans in the room: "McCain didn't capitalize."
10:33PM - I've had my fill of this, and I only got to see the last half-hour. The risk embedded in that comment is that, if people tuned this thing out after the first few minutes, the McCain people can cherry-pick the soundbites.
10:30PM - McCain doesn't answer the question, either.
10:29PM - Obama is ready with an answer to the "what don't you know" question, and it's a good answer, but it runs the risk of being spun by the other side as an unwillingness to admit that there's anything he doesn't know.
10:28PM - The idea of trying the talk on the basis that it's not costing us anything is a good wind-up, but Obama knows that he flubbed that one.
10:26PM - Listen, folks, Obama doesn't emote. That's usually a good thing when you're running against a hot-head, but on this one issue he's losing the question because he didn't plug in to the person asking the question and knew it, and got nervous, and went all wonky. It's unfortunate because it's coming at the end.
10:25PM - Iran/Israel question doesn't sound like it came from the guy who asked it, frankly. A puff-ball question for McCain, but the American public is smart enough to tell that. Besides, the "without preconditions" line is something that--still--seems to me like an unforced error by the McCain/Palin ticket. I said it before and I'll say it again: I think the American public is ready for some talking to take place without preconditions.
10:24PM - McCain's going to get the last word on Russia? Well, no need to worry--he's going to squander it by wonking-on about pipelines.
10:23PM - Obama said "more safe," when he meant "less safe," which is an honest brain-fart that will, regardless, be running as a commercial tomorrow from the RNC.
10:22PM - Obama gets to talk about Russia, and will hit McCain on the "moral support" line, which was preposterous. Obama needs to be a *little* careful about calling for foreign aid, though, since well over half of all Americans think that this country should provide zero foreign aid to anybody. The Russian-Peacekeeper thing is great because it makes Obama sound much more statesmanlike.
10:20PM - Russia is a big issue, and it's only going to get bigger with McCain's saber rattling in this and other venues. Palin must make the Russians think that Regan came up out of the grave and had a sex-change.
10:18PM - McCain's talking about the surge in Iraq? Uh, wasn't the question about Afghanistan?
10:16PM - Brokaw is moving on to Afghanistan and that's okay because the Obama line about McCain singing bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran will be the soundbite on the late news and tomorrow's morning news, anyway. I know I've only been here a few minutes, but I'm wondering, frankly, if that isn't the moment that pivots this entire election.
10:14PM - This is a big moment, and McCain knows that. He sang bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran and he did call for the eradication of North Korea, and there's really nothing to come back on.
10:11PM - McCain is wrong about Obama's position on Pakistan, and Obama just said so right in front of all of us. Bizarre that McCain is trying to spin Obama's position with the position itself sitting right there in front of us. I just asked if McCain has been doing as bad as he looks right now, and the room said that he was actually much worse, earlier. Obama is scoring with this impromptu follow-up, and McCain has nothing to come back with on the bomb-bomb-bomb moment.
10:09PM - Is this what's been going on all night? Audience members struggling to read what's written on these stupid cards??? That supposed "audience question" was almost too painful to watch. Obama has a great answer going here, in spite of the bag-of-crap he's been handed, but I do seem to want to think that he's giving McCain an opening for the whole "killing civilians" line that McCain's been hitting him on.
10:07PM - "A cool hand at the tiller" got an enormous, howling response from my room -- including from the Republicans. McCain just called attention to his own recent performance in this contest, by making himself sound tone-deaf to how un-cool he's been acting.
10:05PM - Obama is going to score with the tie-in between genocide and our damaged relationships with our allies, too -- if only implicitly, raising the curtain on McCain to drone on about the surge, which is exactly what he's doing.
10:03PM - Obama scores with a direct answer on the Iraq issue, and wows my friends in the room with what they're characterizing as a breakout from what has been a cooler performance up to that moment.
10:01PM - I just got started and it doesn't sound (from my colleagues in the room) like McCain is having a breakout performance. Indeed, those colleagues have made it sound like the whole event has been... well... boring. "Neither candidate is taking advantage of the format," is how one, measured-speaking friend put it. Click Here to Read More...
10:33PM - I've had my fill of this, and I only got to see the last half-hour. The risk embedded in that comment is that, if people tuned this thing out after the first few minutes, the McCain people can cherry-pick the soundbites.
10:30PM - McCain doesn't answer the question, either.
10:29PM - Obama is ready with an answer to the "what don't you know" question, and it's a good answer, but it runs the risk of being spun by the other side as an unwillingness to admit that there's anything he doesn't know.
10:28PM - The idea of trying the talk on the basis that it's not costing us anything is a good wind-up, but Obama knows that he flubbed that one.
10:26PM - Listen, folks, Obama doesn't emote. That's usually a good thing when you're running against a hot-head, but on this one issue he's losing the question because he didn't plug in to the person asking the question and knew it, and got nervous, and went all wonky. It's unfortunate because it's coming at the end.
10:25PM - Iran/Israel question doesn't sound like it came from the guy who asked it, frankly. A puff-ball question for McCain, but the American public is smart enough to tell that. Besides, the "without preconditions" line is something that--still--seems to me like an unforced error by the McCain/Palin ticket. I said it before and I'll say it again: I think the American public is ready for some talking to take place without preconditions.
10:24PM - McCain's going to get the last word on Russia? Well, no need to worry--he's going to squander it by wonking-on about pipelines.
10:23PM - Obama said "more safe," when he meant "less safe," which is an honest brain-fart that will, regardless, be running as a commercial tomorrow from the RNC.
10:22PM - Obama gets to talk about Russia, and will hit McCain on the "moral support" line, which was preposterous. Obama needs to be a *little* careful about calling for foreign aid, though, since well over half of all Americans think that this country should provide zero foreign aid to anybody. The Russian-Peacekeeper thing is great because it makes Obama sound much more statesmanlike.
10:20PM - Russia is a big issue, and it's only going to get bigger with McCain's saber rattling in this and other venues. Palin must make the Russians think that Regan came up out of the grave and had a sex-change.
10:18PM - McCain's talking about the surge in Iraq? Uh, wasn't the question about Afghanistan?
10:16PM - Brokaw is moving on to Afghanistan and that's okay because the Obama line about McCain singing bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran will be the soundbite on the late news and tomorrow's morning news, anyway. I know I've only been here a few minutes, but I'm wondering, frankly, if that isn't the moment that pivots this entire election.
10:14PM - This is a big moment, and McCain knows that. He sang bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran and he did call for the eradication of North Korea, and there's really nothing to come back on.
10:11PM - McCain is wrong about Obama's position on Pakistan, and Obama just said so right in front of all of us. Bizarre that McCain is trying to spin Obama's position with the position itself sitting right there in front of us. I just asked if McCain has been doing as bad as he looks right now, and the room said that he was actually much worse, earlier. Obama is scoring with this impromptu follow-up, and McCain has nothing to come back with on the bomb-bomb-bomb moment.
10:09PM - Is this what's been going on all night? Audience members struggling to read what's written on these stupid cards??? That supposed "audience question" was almost too painful to watch. Obama has a great answer going here, in spite of the bag-of-crap he's been handed, but I do seem to want to think that he's giving McCain an opening for the whole "killing civilians" line that McCain's been hitting him on.
10:07PM - "A cool hand at the tiller" got an enormous, howling response from my room -- including from the Republicans. McCain just called attention to his own recent performance in this contest, by making himself sound tone-deaf to how un-cool he's been acting.
10:05PM - Obama is going to score with the tie-in between genocide and our damaged relationships with our allies, too -- if only implicitly, raising the curtain on McCain to drone on about the surge, which is exactly what he's doing.
10:03PM - Obama scores with a direct answer on the Iraq issue, and wows my friends in the room with what they're characterizing as a breakout from what has been a cooler performance up to that moment.
10:01PM - I just got started and it doesn't sound (from my colleagues in the room) like McCain is having a breakout performance. Indeed, those colleagues have made it sound like the whole event has been... well... boring. "Neither candidate is taking advantage of the format," is how one, measured-speaking friend put it. Click Here to Read More...
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Ulitmate On-Sides Kick
------------------------------
AUTHOR'S NOTE: THE LIVE-BLOG FOR TONIGHT'S DEBATE WILL BE STARTING LATE, DUE TO WORK COMMITMENTS THAT WILL PREVENT THIS AUTHOR FROM SEEING THE OPENING MINUTES.
-------------------------------
In football, when the trailing team finds itself kicking-off in the waning minutes of the game, that team undertakes what is known as an on-sides kick: the place-kicker pooches the ball only a few yards, in the hopes that a crazy bounce will enable his own teammates to fall on it and retain possession. It might be the only play in all of football that both (a) almost never works, and (b) is almost never criticized by spectators--precisely because the kicking team in such circumstances has no other alternatives.
Well, before I pull the trigger on the obvious analogy, here, permit me to up the stakes just a bit.
It happens that there are two different types of on-sides kicks--the ones that everyone see coming, due to the circumstances, and the surprise on-sides kicks that are very occasionally called by a team's Head Coach in the middle of an otherwise non-descript segment of a game. And here's the thing about that: according to a recent article in ProTrade, the odds of success for an on-sides kick are well over sixty percent in the surprise category, but fewer than twenty percent overall. If everyone in the stands knows that you have no choice, it appears, then so does the other team.
The McCain/Palin ticket finds itself at the start of this week in the position of desperately needing to recover an on-sides kick. They trail by ten points in Pennsylvania, six points in Ohio, six points in North Carolina, and a whopping twelve points in Virginia. Their deficit in the national tracking polls seems to have stabilized in the neighborhood of around eight points, with Barack Obama sitting comfortably atop the magic 50% threshold in the eyes of every major tracking pollster in the land--even the notoriously venomous evangelicals over at Gallup. The folks at Fivethirtyeight have excitedly (and, I'm bound to say, a tad unrealistically) speculated as to the possibility that Obama's vaunted ground-game could flip Georgia. Surely Indiana is squarely in play, and this too is thanks in large measure to the veritable fusillade of Obama volunteers, canvassing the Hoosier State with a jaw-set determination usually reserved for immunization teams during an outbreak. It's been said in these columns before, but it bears repeating: nowhere on the red-and-blue map looks particularly encouraging right now for John McCain.
Moreover, time is running out far more quickly for McCain/Palin than appearances and calendars might suggest. Since state-level tracking polls tend to lag the national mood by about a week, the margins observable in the electoral whip-count are almost certainly lagging the overall break toward Obama in national sentiment. Almost none of these polls can fully reflect the public's further defection from Team Crankypants in the wake of Governor Palin's stilted and shamelessly manipulative debate performance, for a start. In the eyes of outside experts ranging from Lindsay Graham to Karl Rove, it's time for the grandfather of all on-sides kicks, the negative campaign, and the McCain campaign has obliged with vicious swipes at Obama, beginning over the weekend.
...Trouble is, the other side saw it coming.
Granted, the Obama people haven't done quite as good a job of responding to the Bill Ayers allegation as they could have (viz, David Axelrod suggesting that Obama hadn't known about Mr. Ayers' past when he and Obama began serving together on the same community non-profit board in their shared Chicago neighborhood). Granted, the attacks that have been leveled against Obama are all but certain to shave some of the froth from the Democrat's lead. But even as Governor Palin was accusing Obama of cavorting with terrorists, even as McCain was suggesting (unbelievably) that it is Obama who has lied about McCain's record, even as an audience member at a Republican town-hall meeting chose to call the Illinois Senator himself a terrorist, Team Blue was putting the finishing touches on the linkage between John McCain and Charles Keating--a counter-offensive that carries two advantages that McCain's last desperate gasp does not: it is topical in a larger sense, and it is true.
The video that the Obama campaign just released on the subject is outstanding--if also a bit on the long side, given how effective a few shorter segments of it can and possibly will be, in commercial form--but the larger point is inarguable: With John McCain on one side accusing Obama of having a limited record in government and of fraternizing with Bill Ayers, and Obama on the other side pointing out that McCain, as recently as March of this year, called for further deregulation of the financial markets, particularly on a day when the DJIA closed below ten-thousand for the first time in over six years, the team defending this particular on-sides kick seems to be firmly in command.
The "clock aspect" of this sporting analogy couldn't fit better, either: Early voting is continuing in earnest in a wide assortment of crucial states, and in which Obama is only widening his lead. The news reports of McCain's shift in tactics have included preambles that are openly ponderous of his dwindling chances. And all the while, Mr. Cool-as-the-Other-Side-of-the-Pillow seems at every turn to have just the right answer, at just the right time. So far, at least, the full Lee Atwater treatment doesn't seem to have worked.
What's left for McCain now is to rattle Obama in tonight's debate (when most of us fully expect the opposite to be far more likely to happen). Failing this, he will have "burned his last time-out." A decisive victory by Obama tonight, given the events that have transpired since their first meeting, and the Good Guy will slam the door on this matter in a way that not even Karl Rove / Swiftboat dirty tricks can disrupt. A strong showing for Obama this evening will be the exclamation point on Election 2008.
I can't wait.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: THE LIVE-BLOG FOR TONIGHT'S DEBATE WILL BE STARTING LATE, DUE TO WORK COMMITMENTS THAT WILL PREVENT THIS AUTHOR FROM SEEING THE OPENING MINUTES.
-------------------------------
In football, when the trailing team finds itself kicking-off in the waning minutes of the game, that team undertakes what is known as an on-sides kick: the place-kicker pooches the ball only a few yards, in the hopes that a crazy bounce will enable his own teammates to fall on it and retain possession. It might be the only play in all of football that both (a) almost never works, and (b) is almost never criticized by spectators--precisely because the kicking team in such circumstances has no other alternatives.
Well, before I pull the trigger on the obvious analogy, here, permit me to up the stakes just a bit.
It happens that there are two different types of on-sides kicks--the ones that everyone see coming, due to the circumstances, and the surprise on-sides kicks that are very occasionally called by a team's Head Coach in the middle of an otherwise non-descript segment of a game. And here's the thing about that: according to a recent article in ProTrade, the odds of success for an on-sides kick are well over sixty percent in the surprise category, but fewer than twenty percent overall. If everyone in the stands knows that you have no choice, it appears, then so does the other team.
The McCain/Palin ticket finds itself at the start of this week in the position of desperately needing to recover an on-sides kick. They trail by ten points in Pennsylvania, six points in Ohio, six points in North Carolina, and a whopping twelve points in Virginia. Their deficit in the national tracking polls seems to have stabilized in the neighborhood of around eight points, with Barack Obama sitting comfortably atop the magic 50% threshold in the eyes of every major tracking pollster in the land--even the notoriously venomous evangelicals over at Gallup. The folks at Fivethirtyeight have excitedly (and, I'm bound to say, a tad unrealistically) speculated as to the possibility that Obama's vaunted ground-game could flip Georgia. Surely Indiana is squarely in play, and this too is thanks in large measure to the veritable fusillade of Obama volunteers, canvassing the Hoosier State with a jaw-set determination usually reserved for immunization teams during an outbreak. It's been said in these columns before, but it bears repeating: nowhere on the red-and-blue map looks particularly encouraging right now for John McCain.
Moreover, time is running out far more quickly for McCain/Palin than appearances and calendars might suggest. Since state-level tracking polls tend to lag the national mood by about a week, the margins observable in the electoral whip-count are almost certainly lagging the overall break toward Obama in national sentiment. Almost none of these polls can fully reflect the public's further defection from Team Crankypants in the wake of Governor Palin's stilted and shamelessly manipulative debate performance, for a start. In the eyes of outside experts ranging from Lindsay Graham to Karl Rove, it's time for the grandfather of all on-sides kicks, the negative campaign, and the McCain campaign has obliged with vicious swipes at Obama, beginning over the weekend.
...Trouble is, the other side saw it coming.
Granted, the Obama people haven't done quite as good a job of responding to the Bill Ayers allegation as they could have (viz, David Axelrod suggesting that Obama hadn't known about Mr. Ayers' past when he and Obama began serving together on the same community non-profit board in their shared Chicago neighborhood). Granted, the attacks that have been leveled against Obama are all but certain to shave some of the froth from the Democrat's lead. But even as Governor Palin was accusing Obama of cavorting with terrorists, even as McCain was suggesting (unbelievably) that it is Obama who has lied about McCain's record, even as an audience member at a Republican town-hall meeting chose to call the Illinois Senator himself a terrorist, Team Blue was putting the finishing touches on the linkage between John McCain and Charles Keating--a counter-offensive that carries two advantages that McCain's last desperate gasp does not: it is topical in a larger sense, and it is true.
The video that the Obama campaign just released on the subject is outstanding--if also a bit on the long side, given how effective a few shorter segments of it can and possibly will be, in commercial form--but the larger point is inarguable: With John McCain on one side accusing Obama of having a limited record in government and of fraternizing with Bill Ayers, and Obama on the other side pointing out that McCain, as recently as March of this year, called for further deregulation of the financial markets, particularly on a day when the DJIA closed below ten-thousand for the first time in over six years, the team defending this particular on-sides kick seems to be firmly in command.
The "clock aspect" of this sporting analogy couldn't fit better, either: Early voting is continuing in earnest in a wide assortment of crucial states, and in which Obama is only widening his lead. The news reports of McCain's shift in tactics have included preambles that are openly ponderous of his dwindling chances. And all the while, Mr. Cool-as-the-Other-Side-of-the-Pillow seems at every turn to have just the right answer, at just the right time. So far, at least, the full Lee Atwater treatment doesn't seem to have worked.
What's left for McCain now is to rattle Obama in tonight's debate (when most of us fully expect the opposite to be far more likely to happen). Failing this, he will have "burned his last time-out." A decisive victory by Obama tonight, given the events that have transpired since their first meeting, and the Good Guy will slam the door on this matter in a way that not even Karl Rove / Swiftboat dirty tricks can disrupt. A strong showing for Obama this evening will be the exclamation point on Election 2008.
I can't wait.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Eyes Squarely on the Future, Indeed
You'd have had to be watching the baseball playoffs to have missed Sarah Palin's repeated admonitions that her opponent was hyper-focused on the past when she and her running mate were instead concentrating on the future. That much is obvious. What isn't so clear is what sort of time-frame Governor Palin has precisely in mind, when she says such things--and if it is a time-frame that benefits her boss.
The McCain/Palin ticket is officially in full tailspin at the moment, with national tracking polls showing margins anywhere from five to eleven points, averaging 8.25 according to this table appearing on Open Left:
If the present gap between the candidates isn't ominous enough, the trend certainly is: Mr. McCain is down to the last, Hail-Mary trick in his playbook and even that may not be enough. The campaign has already announced it will be running fiercely negative from here on in, both in terms of its air-war and its stump speeches, but the Obama people have come out with a highly effective strategy of suggesting that McCain is only desperately trying to change the subject from the ghastly consequences of failed economic policies that he himself has so consistently embraced as a Senator. At the moment the regressions on Fivethirtyeight are showing New Hampshire and Virginia both outside the cone of "leaners" for Mr. Obama, brining his electoral vote whip-count to 286, whereas Mr. McCain's current tally of 155 no longer includes either Montana or West Virginia:
Many pundits are now speculating that the freshly minted, personality-driven attacks against Obama by the McCain/Palin ticket will ring hollow with a persuadable middle, both because they are, in point of fact, an attempt to change the subject from the economy, but also because Mr. Obama's favorables are already locked-in at a level too high to be successfully assailed without backlash. On top of all of this are new worries that McCain's decision to sequester himself between now and Tuesday's second debate is an indicator of an inexplicable lack of urgency on the part of the trailing candidate.
In response to what appears to be a festering disconnect between McCain's fortunes and those of his running-mate, New York Times columnist Frank Rich has wondered in print if the Alaska Governor might already be quietly considering herself the President-in-Waiting, or even if Mr. McCain might be persuaded to spend his last, biggest shake-up card on inverting the ticket. A more commonly held version of much the same viewpoint, as articulated in these very columns on Friday and Saturday, would have the Alaska Hockey Mom ruthlessly plotting to turn on her benefactor in a far more obvious way, either shortly before or shortly after the outcome of this election is finally decided, so as to claim that her fresh- and better ideas had been stiff-armed by yet another stogy Old Boy who couldn't bear to cede his authority to her. At all events, Ms. Palin's repeated shout-outs to the notion of fresh ideas from new, outsider faces certainly doesn't seem to be from the same script as her running-mate's mantra about steady-handed experience being the key to our many challenges.
As successful as this strategy of biting the hands that feed her has been for Sarah Palin in the past, however, she would be well advised to bear in mind the extent to which she is playing in a completely different league these days. She is still considered significantly over-matched by the demands of high national office in the eyes of almost every Democrat and a comfortable majority of independents, according to the polls taken immediately following her debate with Joe Biden. She is still being damaged by the reprieves of her assorted misstatements by Tina Fey. And, most importantly, her past ruthlessness could still get her into a great deal of trouble--perhaps even enough that she ends up having to withdraw herself from the ticket.
On Sunday, as the rest of us were distracted by the back-and-forth on the subject of Obama's would-be connections to William Ayers, seven of Palin's current- or former employees in the Alaska State House quietly agreed to testify in the Troopergate investigation--possibly signaling the first large-scale crack in the Governor's stone wall. Seasoned journalistic veterans of such campaign tactics are speculating that Palin's unapologetic misrepresentation of Obama's non-existent connection to William Ayers might in the end severely weaken Mr. McCain's already weakened candidacy--both for the retaliatory strikes that it authorizes from the other side, and for the appearance of last-ditch underhandedness that it brings down upon her own ticket. GOP lawmakers are bracing for what could well be another round of massive losses in both chambers of Congress, and if it happens the way they are semi-secretly expecting, Ms. Palin could easily be identified as an Alaska-sized scapegoat, most notably for her atrocious performance with Katie Couric, if not for her shameless departure from the campaign's message.
Regardless of motive, context, or even proper thought-process, Governor Palin seems to be undertaking a gamble that is at least as high-stakes as the recent gambits undertaken by Senator McCain: She could still emerge as the heroine who rallied the base, scared the middle, and saved the day. She could emerge as the woman with the better ideas for how to win, but whom no one would listen to in time. Or she could be unwittingly positioning herself as the vindictive, self-promoting ingrate that a great many of us thought she was six weeks ago, when John McCain first asked her to run.
...And goodness knows--if she turns out to be the last of these three, the surprise of it won't be attributable to the thorough consideration she received before he made the call, now, will it.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
The McCain/Palin ticket is officially in full tailspin at the moment, with national tracking polls showing margins anywhere from five to eleven points, averaging 8.25 according to this table appearing on Open Left:
If the present gap between the candidates isn't ominous enough, the trend certainly is: Mr. McCain is down to the last, Hail-Mary trick in his playbook and even that may not be enough. The campaign has already announced it will be running fiercely negative from here on in, both in terms of its air-war and its stump speeches, but the Obama people have come out with a highly effective strategy of suggesting that McCain is only desperately trying to change the subject from the ghastly consequences of failed economic policies that he himself has so consistently embraced as a Senator. At the moment the regressions on Fivethirtyeight are showing New Hampshire and Virginia both outside the cone of "leaners" for Mr. Obama, brining his electoral vote whip-count to 286, whereas Mr. McCain's current tally of 155 no longer includes either Montana or West Virginia:
Many pundits are now speculating that the freshly minted, personality-driven attacks against Obama by the McCain/Palin ticket will ring hollow with a persuadable middle, both because they are, in point of fact, an attempt to change the subject from the economy, but also because Mr. Obama's favorables are already locked-in at a level too high to be successfully assailed without backlash. On top of all of this are new worries that McCain's decision to sequester himself between now and Tuesday's second debate is an indicator of an inexplicable lack of urgency on the part of the trailing candidate.
In response to what appears to be a festering disconnect between McCain's fortunes and those of his running-mate, New York Times columnist Frank Rich has wondered in print if the Alaska Governor might already be quietly considering herself the President-in-Waiting, or even if Mr. McCain might be persuaded to spend his last, biggest shake-up card on inverting the ticket. A more commonly held version of much the same viewpoint, as articulated in these very columns on Friday and Saturday, would have the Alaska Hockey Mom ruthlessly plotting to turn on her benefactor in a far more obvious way, either shortly before or shortly after the outcome of this election is finally decided, so as to claim that her fresh- and better ideas had been stiff-armed by yet another stogy Old Boy who couldn't bear to cede his authority to her. At all events, Ms. Palin's repeated shout-outs to the notion of fresh ideas from new, outsider faces certainly doesn't seem to be from the same script as her running-mate's mantra about steady-handed experience being the key to our many challenges.
As successful as this strategy of biting the hands that feed her has been for Sarah Palin in the past, however, she would be well advised to bear in mind the extent to which she is playing in a completely different league these days. She is still considered significantly over-matched by the demands of high national office in the eyes of almost every Democrat and a comfortable majority of independents, according to the polls taken immediately following her debate with Joe Biden. She is still being damaged by the reprieves of her assorted misstatements by Tina Fey. And, most importantly, her past ruthlessness could still get her into a great deal of trouble--perhaps even enough that she ends up having to withdraw herself from the ticket.
On Sunday, as the rest of us were distracted by the back-and-forth on the subject of Obama's would-be connections to William Ayers, seven of Palin's current- or former employees in the Alaska State House quietly agreed to testify in the Troopergate investigation--possibly signaling the first large-scale crack in the Governor's stone wall. Seasoned journalistic veterans of such campaign tactics are speculating that Palin's unapologetic misrepresentation of Obama's non-existent connection to William Ayers might in the end severely weaken Mr. McCain's already weakened candidacy--both for the retaliatory strikes that it authorizes from the other side, and for the appearance of last-ditch underhandedness that it brings down upon her own ticket. GOP lawmakers are bracing for what could well be another round of massive losses in both chambers of Congress, and if it happens the way they are semi-secretly expecting, Ms. Palin could easily be identified as an Alaska-sized scapegoat, most notably for her atrocious performance with Katie Couric, if not for her shameless departure from the campaign's message.
Regardless of motive, context, or even proper thought-process, Governor Palin seems to be undertaking a gamble that is at least as high-stakes as the recent gambits undertaken by Senator McCain: She could still emerge as the heroine who rallied the base, scared the middle, and saved the day. She could emerge as the woman with the better ideas for how to win, but whom no one would listen to in time. Or she could be unwittingly positioning herself as the vindictive, self-promoting ingrate that a great many of us thought she was six weeks ago, when John McCain first asked her to run.
...And goodness knows--if she turns out to be the last of these three, the surprise of it won't be attributable to the thorough consideration she received before he made the call, now, will it.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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