Archive for the ‘Election 2008’ Category

Senator McCain was forced to drop his attempts to associate Senator Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In the end, McCain himself had to defend Obama as a “decent man.” The problem, of course, was that calling Obama a terrorist was inciting people to feel physical action, such as killing a prospective future President of the United States, would be justified. Yet, McCain doesn’t seem to have learned the danger of peddling fear.

He’s now calling Sen. Obama, Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Sen. Harry Reid “dangerous.” To this, Ms. Pelosi responded,

“It’s interesting to hear Senator McCain talking about the dangerous Obama, Reid, Pelosi. Dangerous is not really a word that should be a part of a national debate as we go into a presidential race.”

While this may seem a small thing, and perhaps part of the rough-and-tumble of modern politics, citizens who want a well functioning democracy should view these kinds of comments harshly. Just like the Ayers problem, labeling senators, congresspeople, and other political figures as “dangerous” incites violence. The word “dangerous” implies something untoward, life threatening, and illegal. Uniformed people will begin to think that there is a real physical threat, and that they are then compelled and justified to take dramatic action. Hence the people at Gov. Palin’s rallies who were shouting to “kill” Sen. Obama. This is unprofessional and should not be tolerated in political discourse.

Its the last debate, so I’m keeping up the tradition of the quick poll round up. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

UDPATE: This morning (Oct 16), a regular poll

Fifty-eight percent of debate watchers questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll said Democratic candidate Obama did the best job in the debate, with 31 percent saying Republican Sen. John McCain performed best.

The poll also suggests that debate watchers’ favorable opinion of Obama rose slightly during the debate, from 63 percent at the start to 66 percent at the end. The poll indicates that McCain’s favorables dropped slightly, from 51 percent to 49 percent.

NOTE: see my other posts on previous polls and their comments for notes about poll accuracy, bias, perhaps even deceit.

Personal attacks have become increasingly sharp in the U. S. presidential election. The McCain campaign has even reportedly decided to make character attacks on Senator Obama a primary strategy. Just recently, Telegraph reported,

A former McCain strategist familiar with the senator’s tactical discussions told The Sunday Telegraph that he would pursue the “nuclear option” targeting Mr Obama personally in the final month leading up to November’s vote.

This strategic turn has resulted in Governor Sarah Palin making a big fuss about Senator Obama’s casual encounters with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In response, Senator Obama’s campaign has been reminding Americans about Senator McCain’s participation in the Keating Five scandal. Certainly, the punch-counterpunch will continue as we approach the election, but does negative campaigning like this work?

It depends. Sometimes, negative campaigning works effectively, particularly when the allegations are largely true. But other times, the attacks can make the attacker seem petty and weak. For example, during last night’s second presidential debate, voter’s reactions to both candidates dipped when the candidate made an attack.

Nearly every time one candidate threw a jab at the other, the voter reaction dipped measurably.

The dips were minor for small digs but slipped further if a candidate continued criticizing his opponent.

SenseUs, a firm that does polling about emotional reactions, recently did study of two anti-Obama ads and two anti-McCain ads. They found that,

Of the four negative ads (two Anti-McCain and two Anti-Obama) examined, the only one to significantly better the standing of the sponsor was an Obama ad which challenged and disproved McCain’s assessment that the country is better off than it was eight years ago.

I can’t wait for the official polls, so I like to troll the sites watching the quick polls. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

*UPDATE 10/8/08: The actual WSJ poll has been removed from the page it was on. For a while just after the debate the poll was radically for McCain but then switched to favor Obama. Comments to the poll suggest there might have been tampering, and that would make sense as in the last two debates (prez and VP) the poll seemed to track CNN’s poll.

A CNN poll of 675 debate watchers found, “64 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama after the debate, an increase of four points from his pre-debate showing.”

NOTE: I know a lot of you believe the polls from various organizations are biased or even mischievously manipulated. I’m not endorsing any one poll, but I do believe that about the best guess you can get of how the viewers judged the debates is from large numbers of responses, hopefully accurately collected from a random sample. So I’m compiling here the polls from any site, conservative or liberal, that I find. Pundits, focus groups, person-on-the-street interviews, straw polls of debate watching groups are all basically meaningless as far as how the debate was really received.

Political spin is now a sophisticated art form, one that is really unhelpful to voters. The intentional half truths, radical distortions, and even outright lies that candidates use in attacks on each other significantly burden the work of becoming an informed voter. Fortunately, over the last 10 years or so, many news organizations have kept focus on checking the facts.

One of the fact checkers that I really like is Politifact, provides extensive evaluations of candidate’s claims. However, although evaluations for each candidate are provided, Politifact doesn’t give a side-by-side comparison. So I’ve compiled one from their data for Obama vs McCain, using what was available today on their website. The comparison is shown in the graph below.

See the table below for the data. You can see that well over one hundred statements by each candidate have been evaluated. Obama’s have been 73% Mostly True, while McCain’s were only 55% Mostly True.
Notes on the Graph

• The “Pants on Fire” designation means the statement “is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
• Politifact evaluates the claims of candidates and categorizes the claim as True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire. I grouped the categories True, Mostly True, and Half True into one category, Mostly True.

WSJ Interactive Polls

Speaking of polls, this interactive chart on The Wall Street Journal is cool. You can see the trajectory of many different polls over time with key moments in the campaign overlayed on the chart. You can go nationally or state by state. I also like that by putting your cursor over a node you can see how many people were involved in the poll.

Click on the link above, and then when you see the electoral map, scroll down to the graphic shown at right on this page. Click that. Its beyond me why there isn’t an easier way to link directly to it, but I tried a bunch of things and they didn’t work.

UPDATE: WSJ gives an interesting discussion on why the polls might be wrong or at least off.

ith any big political event like tonight’s debate between Vice Presidential candidates Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, the pundits are out in force before, during, and after the debate. Of course also present are the spin masters from both the Republican and Democratic parties. Additionally, all the news outlets will be interviewing people on the street, in neighborhood bars, and at local watch parties. Tonight, they’re all trying to answer “Who won the debate?”

My advice is to ignore them all. The purpose of the debate is to impress a majority of voters, and thus the only indicator that counts is a random poll of a large number of people. As of this writing, here’s what I’ve found and you can of course check the links because some of these polls are still in progress.

Of course, the quick polls always say that they aren’t scientific. That’s because they aren’t random and they usually represent the bias of the readers of that publication. But they do usually have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of respondents. So, its also good to factor in the random polls that they news and polling organization do.

A CNN poll of debate watchers now shows Biden the winner, 51% to Palin’s 36%. Any one of the polls taken alone might be too small to be representative of the larger population or biased, but by taking a look at several polls, and considering the number of respondents for each, you can get a much better idea of who won than from listening to pundits and on-the-street interviews.

Why only look at these polls? Because the spinsters will say their side won even if the candidate broke down into tears and stormed off the stage. The news’ interviews of people on the street will have people supporting both sides, and they can’t interview enough people to be representative. You would think that pundits, who are supposed to be experts, would have something meaningful to say. But the evidence that I’ve seen shows that they often have no idea what the voters are really thinking. So their opinion isn’t much better than asking your spouse or your bartender.

You can realize this for yourself by taking a look at the CNN report cards. I did an analysis of the pundit scores versus the reader’s scores for the convention speeches as well as for the first Obama-McCain debate, and the pundit’sopinions are frequently far off from the readers. Check out the table below.

Both of the major U.S. 2008 presidential candidates are proposing radical changes to the health care system, as it is clear that the system is teetering. According to Fortune Magazine,

The U.S. now has 47 million uninsured, and costs are out of control. The Department of Health and Human Services predicts that if things continue as they are, health spending will almost double by 2017 to $4.3 trillion, or one-fifth of GDP, vs. 16% today.

The ins and outs of each program are complex, so I’ll try to simplify them here. Fortune states that essentially,

McCain wants to create a kind of national insurance market that shoves more decision-making power into the hands of consumers; the Democrats are aiming for a Medicare-like federal superprogram.

Information reported in The Wall Street Journal, drawing from analysis by The Tax Policy Center, provides a great comparison of Obama vs McCain’s health care plans. The comparison is summarized below.

Here’s a few additional comments and observations:

• It seems there is quite a difference in costs for the newly covered person, in terms of cost/newly insured. For Obama, that is roughly $47,058; for McCain, it is $260,000.
• The general consensus seems to be that McCain’s plan is either bolder or a gamble, depending on the political party of the speaker

For more in depth reading:
WSJ: Why Obama’s Plan is Best
Fortune Magazine: Why McCain’s Plan is Best
Benefits Execs Prefer Obama’s Plan
Carly Fiorina Extols the Benefits of McCain’s Plan

The McCain campaign has been trying to paint Senator Obama as intending to raise taxes. In fact, Obama’s plan calls for cutting taxes for the majority of Americans, as shown in the table below.

Republican VP nominee Gov. Sarah Palin explained the discrepancy in a recent interview with Charles Gibson:

GIBSON: … Why do you both keep saying that Obama is going to raise people’s taxes? It’s been pretty clear what he intends. [Obama's] talked about middle-class tax cuts, extending Bush tax cuts on everything but people who own or earn more than $250,000 a year — cuts taxes on over 91 percent of the country. Why do you keep saying he’s going to raise people’s taxes?

PALIN: Well, I would argue with the whole premise of that, that his mission is to not increase taxes. He’s had 94 opportunities to either vote for a tax cut or not support tax increases. And 94 times, he’s been on the other side of what I believe the majority of Americans want.

So in this rather dubious line of reasoning, Palin attempts to argue that Obama is just instrinsically motivated to raise taxes or has some kind of mission to raise taxes as much as possible, and she discards his stated plan to actually reduce taxes more than McCain’s plan. This would be like Biden arguing that McCain intends to reduce taxes until the government is broke and falls apart. But politicians don’t raise or lower taxes just for the sake of it, they do it to achieve certain social goals. To call someone a “tax raiser” or “tax lower” without reference to the sought after goals of the action is just intentionally trying to stir people up and confuse the real issues.

For a dizzying array of information on tax policy, see the Tax Policy Center.

It’s pretty unlikely now, but a “Clinton-Clark campaign” would have had a nice ring to it and a powerful punch. As retired four-star General Wesley Clark himself comments at a recent Clinton campaign rall, Mrs. Clinton can bring the economic understanding that is sorely needed right now. And of course, General Clark himself brings the military and foreign policy experience. 

Cooler By the Lake gives a nice summary of the possible vice-presidential options by candidate, noting that Wesley Clark might be a likely pick if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic candidate. But wouldn’t he also be a good pick for Obama? Mr. George Sand on Arkansas Politics raised this idea quite a while back, and Bernie Quigley recently discussed a similar idea on his blog, noting that Clark has been an prolific and articulate in his opposition to the Iraq War.

Admittedly, I’ve been a Clark fan since before his 2004 presidential bid. In fact, I was one of those who called for him to join the race 2004, so I’m biased. But, my reasoning is that not only does he have comprehensive ideas for how the Iraq War needs to be resolved, his perscepective is well grounded in his experience as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO during the Kosovo War. As he discussed in his book, Waging Modern War, many of his activities were diplomatic. So he has both the military and political experience in reasonably similar situations.

The current state with most politicians is to cast the options as a choice between immediate withdrawal or staying indefinitely. Both of these are ridiculous oversimplifications intended to create a wedge issue for Republicans and Democrats. In reality, it is a complex situation that needs a well thought out, sophisticated, mulitpronged response. General Clark has called for a comprehensive approach intended to establish a stable democracy. For example, from a speech last summer,

The military’s part of the solution. It’s not the answer. The answer’s the politics. The politics inside Iraq are not just people who are afraid. It’s not just a group of people who say, ‘Gee, if I just, if I could just let my kids go to school, I wouldn’t have to join a militia.’ Maybe there’s some of that, but there’s a lot more than that going on. This is a power struggle within religious factions. It’s a power struggle between religious factions. And it’s a geo-strategic struggle between different nations in the region–All playing out on the ground in forms of violence, intimidation, blackmail, corruption, payoffs, influence, healthcare, coaching, counseling, there’s no telling how many different intelligence agencies and means of action and influence from different nations are present in Iraq. It’s a whole lot more then the number of nations participating in our coalition.

Unfortunately for an Obama-Clark ticket, Clark has also been critical of Obama. Still, although he might not be a long-time friend of Obama’s, he could bring a powerful antidote to what is doubtlessly going to dog Obama—McCain’s widely accepted better understanding of the military.