Now that the election is over, I’ve been seeing a lot of crazy talk in the news. At least its not all coming from the McCain campaign.

Bush's Brain

Some is though. At least a few of McCain’s team are ripping on Governor Sarah Palin, calling her essentially an ignorant hillbilly. Now, I was not a Palin fan, but didn’t these guys select her as their candidate without really knowing anything about her? And now they are surprised and angry? This scorched-earth style is just so reminiscent of Schmidt and Wallace’s mentor, Karl Rove. If you don’t believe me, read Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.

Then there are people who are criticizing whatever name is floated for the Obama administration. Critics want him to get moving immediately and produce results. But, they also want him to do that without using anybody who has been in government before, especially from the Clinton or Bush administrations. (Those people are not change, they are “more of the same.”) Further, the critics also don’t want him to use the people who helped him get elected.

Now, let’s take a step back. How do you move fast? To move fast, you have to quickly find and bring in qualified and experienced people. Otherwise, there is going to be a long learning curve. But, since there has been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House for the last 20 years, the pickings are kind of small. And Obama has already said seances are out.

On top of that, how do you find people fast if you ignore the people you know well and trust? Searching for and vetting people is a time consuming process. This would take months even for a handful of people. Picking people without that kind of a process can be disaster, as the McCain apparently found out the hard way.

Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer

So realistically speaking, there are going to be a lot of Democrats and people who helped him get elected or who know people who helped him get elected in his administration. This is not cronyism, its just the way it has to be done. What he needs to do to create change though is bring together a mix of experienced people who have different perspectives and orientations, as well as a deep knowledge of government and world affairs. A great book recommendation for him is Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus. In the book, Professor Roberto discusses how leaders should organize the decision-making process for best results. While the book is geared toward corporate leaders, the principles still make sense for political leaders. In fact, the author recounts in detail how President Kennedy revamped the decision making in the White House after the Bay of Pigs disaster. So the debate here is not whether President-elect Obama will be tapping Democrats and people he knows, but whether he will tap ones that bring a diversity of perspectives and a wealth of current and profound knowledge.

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.

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.