November 18, 2008

All signs point to President-Elect Barack H. Obama naming Eric Holder to be his Attorney General. Holder is basically a nonentity whose only claim to the office is that he represents continuity and stasis with the Clinton administration, having moved into Jamie Gorelick's job when she abruptly resigned in 1997 to become vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

We essentially know only one thing about Holder: He favored the pardon of fugitive financier and justice mocker, the aptly named Marc Rich. In fact, President Bill Clinton said that Holder's support as Deputy Attorney General was a key factor in Clinton deciding to issue the pardon (that plus the millions of dollars Rich's wife Denise donated to the Clinton library fund).

Funnily enough, the one thing we know about Holder is also the one thing that may stand in his path to the AG's job:

Well, let's be a little more specific: Rich fled the country to escape prosecution for income-tax evasion and trading with Iran while Iran was holding American hostages and on the banned-nation list; he renounced his American citizenship as well.

Mark Rich was close friends with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which gave him access to lucrative illegal trade deals. Prior to Khomeini's ascension, Rich put together a deal to make a fortune by exploiting the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974; his contacts with the corrupt governments of Iran and Iraq allowed him to buy cheap oil and sell it for more than a 100% profit in the United States.

Rich spent his exile in Swiss chalets and ski slopes with his fellow ultra-rich ex-pats and multinationalist vagabonds. After a few years of such penance, Clinton decided that the oil-crisis profiteer had suffered enough; the president gave Rich a full and complete pardon on the last day of Clinton's administration, despite the unease of his own Justice Department -- excepting Eric Holder, of course.

Thus, Holder is now nervous that his limp support and incuriosity -- Holder never wondered why the president would pardon a man who used his vast wealth (about $1.5 billion) to laugh at the American criminal-justice system -- might damage his chance to become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. But not to worry, because the Obama administration has the killer counterargument:

Yep; that's about the "size" of it; the Democrats have the votes, so to hell with the concerns of law enforcement.

Barack Obama: Stuffing his administration full of former Clintonistas; bullying the opposition; announcing practically the moment after his election that he didn't feel bound by any of his campaign promises; and already crowning himself with the glory of Franklin Delano "President Government" Roosevelt and (absurdly enough) Abraham Lincoln before serving even a single day as president. This is quite definitely "change I can believe in" from our President-Elect.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2008, at the time of 2:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 17, 2008

Rich Galen, of Mullings fame, wrote a cybercolumn about the 63-question "questionaire" that the Obama transition team now requires all applicants for administrative positions to fill out; it includes a very large number of very intrusive questions, which Galen compares to the "are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" type questions asked during the heyday of McCarthyism (which "ism" I happen to applaud, by the way, but that's not germane to this point).

Immediately after reading that issue of Mullings, I read this:

This raises an immediate impasse: How on earth is Hillary going to be able to answer even half the questions on the questionaire? Here are a few examples, complete with Sen. Clinton's answers (leaked to Big Lizards by someone who identified himself only as "Ted"):

Oh heck. Maybe they'll just pencil-whip her through without the silly, old questionaire at all.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2008, at the time of 3:56 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

November 14, 2008

Is President-in-Waiting Barack H. Obama finally agreeing to only hold a summit with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after serious and substantial preconditions are met? It would appear so from this story:

But what about that precondition? Oh yes, here it is:

Thank goodness President-elect Obama finally realizes that we cannot have a summit between the President of the United States and the head of some hostile state without some major precondition... and it appears that Obama is now considering whether to agree to that concession.

I'm sure that once Obama meets Russia's pre-meeting demand, Medvedev will be more than happy to join him for some of that hopey-changey talk we can believe in.

Reliable sources who must remain anonymous (because they are making it up as they go) predict that next quarter, Obama will agree to reduce Israel to its 1948 borders and disarm the Jewish state, formally recognize Tibet, Nepal, and Japan as provinces of the People's Republic of China, install Iran as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and introduce sharia courts into Utah... following which, the Palestinians, Red Chinese, Hezbollah, and the Nation of Islam will each agree to bless Obama with a summit.

But at least no one can ever again accuse him of talking to other heads of state without preconditions!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 14, 2008, at the time of 5:51 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

November 13, 2008

...And crimes against humanity, history, the environment, and "international law."

Well, it's official: The incoming Democratic majority of the 111th Congress has announced it intends to "investigate" the Bush administration... for the next four years straight:

Actually, much of the article in the Times is devoted to examining the inconvenient truth that there is some precedent for President George W. Bush continuing to assert executive authority to withhold internal documents from Congress, and prevent former aides from testifying, even after he leaves office; the precedents flow from Harry Truman through Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. But I find the comments from Democratic leaders like Rep. John Conyers (D-MI, 100%) more illuminating than the legal dithering.

This one, for example:

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI, 95%) is on both the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, well situated to make good his promise.

Democrats are obsessed with investigating the Bush administration for two reasons:

To many of them, especially unreconstructed Obamatons and Kossaks, "getting Bush" (and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) is more important than America succeeding. In fact, some may be so overwhelmed by their psychosis that they actively want America to collapse, as punishment for having betrayed ourselves by allowing George W. Bush to "steal the election" -- twice!

What do they have on tap that any rational human being imagines will resolve the staggering unfunded liability of "entitlement" programs? What wonderful plan have they developed to take care of the millions of people who voluntarily reject health-care insurance because they don't expect to get sick or injured? Iraq and Afghanistan will take care of themselves, if Obama just leaves those policies alone; but what have Democrats proposed that will actually keep Iran in check, deal with Red China and Russia, or find a good compromise between civilized Israel and the primitive but militant Islamists in Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ, and other such so-called "jihadi" groups?

By definition, this second group comprises those Democrats not infected by BDS: They may be corrupt, they may be concerned only with power, they may even be "evil" by some definitions; but they are by definition rational -- and they realize that they have nothing in their pockets but a pair of hands with some fingers on them.

But the good news is that ordinary voters have a much lower tolerance for investigations than do members of Congress; this is probably the "policy" where Democrats are most likely to overreach -- and the one that is most likely to infuriate voters, as Republicans found out in 1998. In fact, by 2010, after two solid years of investigate, investigate, investigate!, the GOP can surely use that itself as a major campaign issue: "The majority Democrats are wasting time and taxpayer money trying to 'get' a guy who isn't even in public office anymore, to cover up the fact that none of their policies is working!"

The recession will have mostly receded by then, but the underlying problems that caused it in the first place won't have. And all that "change" that Obama promised will have failed to materialized: The first two years of the Obama administration will look remarkably like the last two years of the Bush administration -- except the partisan rancor will be even worse, incubated by the mean-spirited and precedent-setting investigations themselves. The Democrats' own obsession will undercut everything voters thought they were getting by voting for B.O.

And that's good news for us. The "headwind" against Republicans will be nowhere near as intense in 2010 as it was in 2006 and 2008; in fact, the windsock may have swung around entirely by then, giving us the first tailwind we've had since 1994.

Maybe. Everything depends upon whether the pared-down GOP can finally clarify what it stands for, and whether it can make the case clearly to the American people. We must once again become the party of "hard America," not "soft America," to use Michael Barone's dichotomy. We cannot win the battle of airy-fairy hopey-changitude, where Democrats, as the party of vagueness, will always have an edge.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 13, 2008, at the time of 4:28 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

November 12, 2008

We all know what's right with this picture -- but what's wrong with it?

We'll get back to what's wrong with this picture in a moment. First, a little more of what's right. The HMS Cumberland noticed a dhow towing a skiff (cool maritime words whose meaning is lost on me, except they're both types of boats); they realized they'd detected some pirates that attacked a Danish ship yesterday, so they dispatched some Royal Marines in the Brit equivalent of a couple of Zodiacs. The pirates decided the best response would be to open fire on the Marines ("Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time"), and the rest is predictable:

Moslem pirates surrender

It sure was a vast improvement over this:

The Times (of London) dryly remarks that the Marines evidently have "a new policy of maximum robustness," which nowadays includes fighting back when attacked. Jolly good!

Oh, back to what's wrong with the last sentence of the second paragraph quoted at the very beginning of this post: "It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory." I note for the record that some of us have "living memories" that stretch all the way back to 1982 (and even earlier!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 12, 2008, at the time of 11:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

November 11, 2008

Obama's Brobdingnagian fundraising is simply too huge to be investigated

Politico casually drops a bombshell (and of course, tilts the story a bit towards Barack H. Obama):

It turns out that when Obama broke his word and refused to accept public funding in the general election, the first presidential candidate to do so in the modern era, he thereby skated away from the automatic audit that accompanies acceptance of such cash; while John S. McCain's honesty in accepting public funding as he promised is exactly why he will be audited.

Worse, the very hugeness of Obama's fundraising -- over $600 million through September and probably topping $700 million overall -- means that not even the millions of dollars of questionable and completely unmonitored credit-card donations will be investigated either: The formula the FEC uses to decide on an audit takes into account the amount in question as a percentage of the total raised by the candidate. Thus, substantial and well-founded allegations of even $5 million of potentially criminal fundraising would represent less than 1% of Obama's funds raised, and therefore the FEC is not required to investigate.

Of course, the commission could still simply vote to authorize an audit, no matter what their formula says about automatic audits; but it's unlikely to trouble itself. The commission membership is deliberately kept to an equal number of Democrats and Republicans (whether or not it's fully staffed or even has a quorum); and, well, the Democratic commissioners have signalled that they're going to vote en masse against any audit of Barack Obama's fundraising practices. Thus any vote on an audit will at best be a stalemate, with three for and three against (a majority is required except for automatic audits).

So Obama will almost certainly waltz away without any audit at all, while McCain will have to spend millions of dollars defend his own fundraising practices. Surprise, surprise on the Jungle Riverboat ride tonight.

Meanwhile, it appears, astonishingly enough, that even now, Politico is completely ignorant of the real scandal of the Obama fundraising machine: They deliberately disabled fraud monitoring of credit-card donations. This despite the fact that reputable conservative blogs with hundreds of thousands of daily readers -- more than many mainstream newspapers -- have published many substantial blogposts on the issue... for example, this sequence of posts from Power Line:

That series of eight posts represents quite a substantial and in-depth analysis of probable criminal violations not only of the McCain-Feingold fundraising laws but also credit-card fraud: The Obama campaign evidently turned off all fraud-monitoring processes whatsoever, in order to make it easier for anybody to donate any amount under any name... or even to charge donations to the credit cards of people who never authorized such charges.

You'd think such a substantial allegation of deliberate criminal fraud would deserve at least a mention in an article specifically on the possibility that Obama's campaign fundraising might possibly, but probably wouldn't be audited. But either Politico never heard a word of it... or else they're still in the tank for the One, even after he has been safely elected. Either nonfeasance or outright malfeasance; that's a heck of a dilemma that bodes ill for future reporting.

And they're hardly alone; the entire elite media has been mimicking the three monkeys (see-no, hear-no, report-no) throughout the 114 years of this campaign (except for Neil Munro at National Journal; see link 7 in the list above); and many appear determined to maintain the frantic pace of campaigning even after the campaign has ended. What started as rewriting the election is now metastisizing into rewriting history even as it's being made.

So it goes. And so it will go for the next four or even eight years... welcome to Obamaland.

I suspect there is only one solution to this problem: The GOP should likewise disable all monitoring and throw the fundraising valve wide open. We might not raise as much as Obama did, but at least we'll be at less of a disadvantage than we were this time, when we foolishly played by rules that were, in reality, "no longer operative."

If Chicago rules are the to be the new rules of the game, then we'd better begin playing by them as well. We should appoint nothing but absolute GOP partisans to the FEC, and they can deadlock on every vote on an audit of Republican candidates, just as the Democratic commissioners already do for their side.

In a bizarre way, the FEC's inaction is good: It makes the complete failure of campaign finance reform brutally clear. It's a backdoor way finally to overturn the unworkable, thoroughly discredited, and unconstitutional (no matter what the Supreme Court says) McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act," BCRA.

Too bad its collapse must take with it the perfectly reasonable laws against donations by foreigners; but as A.E. Housman says, we find ourselves "In a world [we] never made":

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2008, at the time of 12:56 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

November 10, 2008

What on earth was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger thinking? (Don't worry, I'll tell you.)

Understanding Arnold is not easy in the best of circumstances -- and I'm not even talking about that thick Teutonic accent that he practices into a tape recorder every night. He almost epitomizes the cult of macho, and he's very pro-business; but on the other hand, he's a typical handwringing Hollywood liberal on every soft-hearted, soft-headed social issue you can imagine.

On the specific issue we're on about today, same-sex marriage (SSM), he's been all over the map: He first said he was opposed to SSM but supported domestic partnerships; in fact, in 2005 he famously vetoed SSM legislation passed by the California legislature on the grounds that the people of the state had spoken in Proposition 22 five years earlier, and the will of the people was paramount:

But today, after the people spoke yet again -- this time with a state constitutional amendment, Proposition 8 -- Schwarzenegger suddenly decided that the will of the people is not paramount -- not when it conflicts with the vision of the judicially anointed. He called upon the California Supreme Court to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional... which I think might be a first:

The theory, evidently, is that an amendment to the constitution is unconstitutional if it conflicts with any previously adopted section of the constitution... including whatever section it amends! If you follow this reasoning, it means that no constitution can ever be amended, except to add new rights that never previously existed. (For example, the Twenty-First Amendment is "unconstitutional" because it repeals the Eighteenth Amendment allowing the prohibition of alcohol.)

Schwarzenegger is very politically savvy; given that Proposition 8 passed handily, primarily due to the votes of Hispanics and blacks, isn't it a rather peculiar flip-flop for Schwarzenegger to undertake? What in the world is going on here?

All right, I said I would tell you what he's doing; here we go. There are a few California facts you must bear in mind:

So my prediction is this: Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to switch parties and then run for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat in 2012; he might even lobby her to appoint him in her place, if he agrees to caucus with the Democrats for the first two years. Then he would endorse her and campaign for her as governor.

Even if she won't appoint him, he will still have a very good shot at winning in 2012, since whoever replaces her will not have the name-recognition and built-in base that Feinstein enjoys.

Now, it would be ludicrous for Schwarzenegger to switch from Republican to Democrat immediately after campaigning for the GOP nominee for president; so my prediction is actually that he will switch parties to independent after he leaves office, then run for the Senate two years later -- either as the incumbent, if Feinstein appoints him, or as the challenger of an unelected appointee.

Eventually however, probably after the 2012 election, I believe Schwarzenegger will caucus with the Republicans; he will become our Joe Lieberman.

The change in his stance on SSM, then, can be seen as an "olive branch" to the left-leaning independents and moderate Democrats in this state. He assumes he'll retain most of his Republican base anyway; after all, they know he's been a liberal Republican (on social issues) for a long time -- no surprise there.

So I predict that Arnold Schwarzenegger will switch to independent and run for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat. Just remember, you read it here first!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 10, 2008, at the time of 4:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

November 8, 2008

According to the Ass. Press:

Let's hop aboard my Syllogismobile and go for a ride...

Thanks, guys!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 8, 2008, at the time of 4:36 AM | Comments (26) | TrackBack (1)

November 7, 2008

It's a serious question: If a candidate like John S. McCain can be beaten by an empty suit with no experience spouting policies that "seem vague but are in fact meaningless," then what the heck are we supposed to do in order to win next time?

Surprisingly enough, I'll tell you what we should do. So there.

What's past...

In this election, each side did a great job of turning out their partisans: CNN's exit polling shows that McCain got 90% of the GOP vote, while Barack H. Obama got 89% of the Democratic vote. But Obama surged among independents by 8%, 52 to 44 for McCain. As far as ideology, Obama did somewhat better among liberals (89%) than McCain did among conservatives (78%); but again, it was the moderates that really killed McCain's chances, giving Obama a 21-point advantage, 60-39.

Clearly, Republicans are not able to appeal to independents merely by running "centrists"; it didn't work with McCain, George W. Bush, Blob Dole, nor George H.W. Bush. The last time Republicans won the nonaligned vote was with Ronald Reagan (remember those "Reagan Democrats" and "neoconservatives?") -- but Reagan was certainly not a moderate.

But on the other hand, running a staunch conservative is no guarantee of success, either, as President Barry Goldwater can attest.

Perpetual guest blogger DRJ at Patterico's Pontifications has an interesting take; I think she is correct but too specific... her thesis can be broadened a bit. She argues that what doomed McCain's candidacy was that he never presented (or even developed) a comprehensive economic policy with, one presumes, an overarching philosophy. Obama did -- however vague it was -- and that made all the difference on the issue of the economy... which turned out to be the only issue that mattered in this election.

But let's broaden this out a bit. It doesn't matter even if a candidate has a comprehensive economic policy, if he's unable to communicate it effectively to voters. And everything said about McCain's inability to communicate a comprehensive economic policy (whether or not he had one) can also be said about his inability to communicate a comprehensive policy on energy (drill everywhere -- except ANWR"), on climate change (his "drill, baby, drill" motto conflicts with his insistance that globaloney is real and the most urgent problem we face), on the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis (fight the war with everything we have -- but don't harshly interrogate captured terrorists, don't hold military tribunals, close Guantanamo Bay, and release the prisoners), on immigration (he argued for a process to allow eventual legalization of illegal aliens but never explained how that helps the American economy or national security).

I believe that all of those cases could have been made. Some would have required McCain to change some of his policies:

But other cases could have been made by more effectively explaining the very positions he already held: for example, the benefit to our economy and even our national security by immigration reform and a process of legalization of those here illegally. But the fact is that John McCain never really made any of those arguments; in some instances, such as energy and immigration, he didn't even try.

...Is prologue

He never even really articulated a long-term plan for resolving the financial meltdown, nor for dealing with the real root causes -- the "money for nothing" syndrome so evident not only in subprime lending but also in the Social Security and Medicare boondoggles. McCain really needed to tie everything together under a few simple precepts:

President Who?

I believe that the next Republican nominee for president must himself have a comprehensive and consistent set of policies, driven by an optimistic and truly American overall philosophy:

Nor should it be some airy-fairy fantasy about getting everything for nothing when "the world all comes together as one." We need realism, optimism, consistency, and an overall guiding philosophy... coupled with the ability to fully and effectively articulate this vision to the entire country.

That is what Ronald Reagan offered, but not a single Republican nominee since then has even attempted. Instead, except for 1988, Republicans have tried to negotiate the presidency. (In 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush simply coasted into la Casa Blanca by sheer momentum of the Reaganism that he personally despised).

We keep trying to put together a coalition of special interests (military hawks, deficit hawks, entrepeneurs, free-traders, libertarians, and social conservatives), then pick one from Column A, two from Column B, and so forth. This has usually worked, but it's not reliable -- as we just saw, where a decent, intelligent man of substance by beaten by a shiny, rainbow-colored soap bubble.

I think what I'm saying is that we need to nominate a great communicator and leader, not a great compromiser; not a nominee designed to appeal to just enough members of each interest group to hold the coalition together. There's a saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee; since our last strong horse in 1980, we've nominated nothing but camels, camels, camels, all the way down.

I also agree that we should look beyond the "usual gang of idiots" to candidates outside the D.C. beltway. Sarah Palin was a great choice precisely because she was the governor of an important state that was about as far away from the District of Columbia as possible (Hawaii is too liberal). Her problem was twofold: She was too recently elected, and the McCain camp did not let Sarah Barracuda be herself; they tried to micromanage her into a John McCain "mini-me." The electorate had never heard of her before the nomination, and many moderates and independents were furious that an "inexperienced" and "out of her depth" "lightweight" was put into such an important role.

The McCain campaign really blew the roll-out; but that shouldn't hurt Palin herself in 2012, provided she follows my advice below.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is also a strong contender... another "beltway outsider" with real experience governing. But we could look even further afield. How about Gen. David Petraeus? If it turns out that he has a comprehensive and consistent overarching philosophy of government that fits within the GOP orbit (which I strongly suspect to be true), he might be a fantastic candidate. We already know he's a wonderful communicator.

President -- how?

But whoever is the nominee should make it clear very soon now -- no more than a year from today -- that he (or she) is going to run for president. Then he should barnstorm the country, talking to anyone and everyone: from the Elks and Masons, to the local councils of La Raza, to NRA chapters, to businesses large and small, to campus groups -- lots and lots of campus groups! -- to various forums to which women voters pay attention, to organizations of black businessmen, to churches, synogogues, and mosques, and so forth. It doesn't matter if the group agrees or disagrees with the future candidate's policies; what matters is that he makes it clear that they matter to him.

And I have one final suggestion: When the campaign starts in earnest, I want this candidate to refuse to participate in mass "debates." Instead, he should challenge every other major candidate to a one-on-one debate... and offer to pay for it.

Any opponent who refuses should be mercilessly mocked for being afraid to face the candidate. These mass "debate" events are monkey debates; they're not really debates at all but just collective press conferences. The one-on-ones that our candidate offers would be real debates, a town-hall format where, besides questions from the audience, each candidate also puts questions to his opponent.

I think voters would find this format far more interesting, stimulating, even exciting, than the warmed over mashed potatoes we get nowadays. And it would also play to the strengths of the outsider candidate, rather than consummate insiders like John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

In other words, a presidential election is a nonviolent war, where the stake is leadership of the free world; for God's sake, can't we plan the next one with the same intensity that we would plan a military campaign?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2008, at the time of 8:33 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (1)

If you'll recall, the big concern in the months leading up to the election was how many new voters, homeless voters, felon voters, and young voters the campaign of Barack H. Obama registered via groups like ACORN and Project Vote... millions and millions of them; in fact, a study released today by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University found ten million new registrations.

But in the actual vote, this mass of new registrations did not translate into any increase in the percent of Americans over the age of 18 who voted. I'll use the total population as a proxy for the population of those over 18, because the former is easier to find. According to the U.S. Census Department, between 2004 and 2008, the U.S. population increased from 293.2 million to 305.6 million, a gain of 12.4 million or 4.2%.

And according to the study linked above, the number of voters increased from 122.2 million in 2004 to between 126.5 and 128.5 million this year; this translates to an increase of from 4.3 to 6.3 million -- or from 3.5% to 5.2%, with a midrange percentile increase of 4.3%. Thus, as Shakespeare put it, all that sound and fury appears to have signified nothing (not surprising, since it was a tale told by the idiots in the elite news media.)

In fact, there is little evidence even that registrations went up by much more than the ordinary increase in the American population would have predicted; registrations increased between 2004 and 2008 by about 4.8%, as compared to the population increase of 4.2%; the difference of 0.6% is the number of "extra" new registrations over and above what we would have expected.

The population increase alone accounts for 8.7 million of the 10 million -- leaving only 1.3 million "extra" registrations. But of that 1.3 million extra registered voters, better than one million of them failed to vote. At the midrange value, this means that all the hoopla and hullabaloo was over a measely increase of 300,000 new voters, or 0.2% of the vote.

That still might have made a difference in one or two battleground states; Obama won Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Virginia by 200,000 votes each. But even if the extra voters were perfectly distributed only within those four states, they cannot account for Barack Obama's victory. Absent those paltry few new voters, Obama would still have won at least three of those four states -- and John S. McCain needed to prevail in all four of them (along with Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri, the last of which McCain may still get).

Bottom line: New voters, felons, and bums did not impact the vote in any significant way. ACORN failed; Obama won the election not by bringing "new blood" to the voting booth but by doing a better job than McCain at wooing the traditional voter, the guys and gals who always vote.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2008, at the time of 7:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

November 6, 2008

I find myself curiously untheatrical about Barack H. Obama's victory last night, much as I'm appalled by his dishonesty, his radicalism, and his friends. I think I had seriously internalized that Obama was reasonably likely to be elected, so I got all the hand-wringing out my system early.

Besides, there's little to analyze there. I'm more interested in comparing the popular vote to the final polls released by the various pollsters. According to CNN, the current figures for the popular tally are 53% for Obama, 46% for John S. McCain. (We don't have complete figures, however, because the CNN site does not give actual tallies for those votes that went for neither major-party candidate; we'll have to take CNN's word for it.)

That gives Obama a 7% victory over McCain. So let's look at the final poll numbers.

Pollsters vs. voters

They range from a low of 3.5% from the averaged Battleground poll to a high of 11% from both Zogby and Gallup. The pollsters who came closest were CNN, Fox News, and Ipsos, who all appear to have called it exactly. Pew Research came close with 6%... but this was after having the spread as high as 15% (!) just a week before the election. This is an astonishing example of pollsters letting Obamania run away with their reason, then "walking the dog" back to rationality for the final polling release.

The following table ranks the polls from most Republican to most Democratic and includes both the raw difference and also the percentile difference; in that last column, for example, a pollster who predicted Obama by 11 points would have a raw differential of 4 (a predicted number of 11 minus the actual number 7), and a percentile difference of 57% -- 4 points differential divided by 7 points of actual victory:

First, it's very clear that, as expected, McCain significantly outperformed his final poll numbers -- and correspondingly, Obama significantly underperformed. Four polls underestimated Obama's lead, three got it right on the money -- and seven of the fourteen (half) overestimated Obama's lead. Clearly, the pollsters underestimated Republican strength in this election.

Just as in the primaries, McCain closed noticibly on Obama in the actual election... and just as in the primaries, when Hillary Clinton closed on Barack Obama, it wasn't quite enough: The big lead that Obama had built up proved insurmountable.

The Democratic victory -- convincing but not overwhelming

That out of the way, here is a comparison to bear in mind... Obama came into this election with:

Yet even so, Barack Obama did not do as well in the election as did Bill Clinton in 1996, the previous Democratic victory.

Obama has won at least 349 electoral votes, possibly as many as 375 (if he ends up taking both Missouri, where McCain leads by 6,000 votes, and North Carolina, where Obama leads by 14,000); and he had a 7% victory over John McCain. But in 1996, Bill Clinton won 379 electoral votes with a margin of 8.5% -- and that was after numerous substantiated allegations of corruption and wrongdoing by the president. (If McCain ends up winning either Missouri or North Carolina, then Obama will have done worse than both of Bill Clinton's elections.)

Obama's was not a landslide victory; it was more substantial than either of George W. Bush's victories, but it was still less than the average presidential margin of victory of the past few decades. There have been 27 presidential elections from 1900 to 2004; at least 17 of them (63%) have been more substantial than this year's, and possibly as many as 19 (70%).

The Democrats have definitely picked up at least five net Senate seats; but the Republican leads in three of the four outstanding races -- Georgia, Minnesota, and Alaska; the Democrat leads by about 8,000 votes in Oregon. If these results hold up, Republicans will retain 43 seats... probably enough to maintain a filibuster against the worse excesses of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika. (If, as some aver, Joe Lieberman switches to Republican after he is stripped of all his committee assignments from vengeful Democrats, that would bring the total up to a more comfortable 44 Republicans.)

Finally, Democrats gained at least 18 House seats, with 8 still undecided; if the parties split the undecideds, that would mean a gain of 22 for the Democrats -- nine fewer than they gained in 2006. (By contrast, Democrats picked up 52 net seats in 1930, and an additional 101 seats in 1932; Republicans recaptured 81 seats in 1938 and 54 seats in 1994. There have been many, many other elections -- possibly a majority -- where more than 22 seats changed parties.)

By all measures then, Democrats won a substantial victory Tuesday, but not an overwhelming one.

Ballot propositions

I had three priorities in this election; two succeeded, one failed:

That last is on the list because I believe traditional man-woman marriage is a cornerstone of Western civilization; I will be happy to debate Patterico -- or anyone else with a similar standard of rationality, honesty, and decency as he -- on its importance, but for now, I'm just very happy that it won, even in a down year for Republicans and conservative causes in general.

But in fact, conservatives fared quite well on our ballot initiatives here, except for Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification before minors could get abortions. For such a liberal state, California is still pretty conservative. The release-a-thug initiative failed big time, as did the global-warming "renewable energy" initiative; another victims' bill of rights initiative passed; and the bond initiative to pay people to buy "alternative fuel" vehicles was crushed.

There were no conservative issues with which I took issue this time, so I could stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with movement conservatives this time.

The only stupid-goofy initiative was the PETA-inspired, if not actually PETA-backed (I have no idea) free-range chickens initiative, which passed almost 2-1. Proposition 2 mandates that "calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely," with a few trivial exceptions. It sounds great -- but is it necessary? Is there really a problem? Is this even a current issue?

I voted against it for two reasons: First, we have no idea if this is necessary, because none of us has the relevant knowledge of current practices. Those who do -- farming communities -- seemed mostly opposed.

Second, this initiative was sold entirely on the basis of raw, seething emotion, complete with a "smoking gun" videotape propagated virally, showing chickens being abused.

The YouTube was produced by Mercy for Animals, founded by a "super PETA volunteer; MFA's statement of purpose is:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) also produces videotapes that it propagates virally; and many have been revealed as either very old (decades out of date on treatment), creatively and tendentiously edited, or even containing completely fabricated sequences. This doesn't prove that Mercy for Animals' YouTube is similarly propagandistic... but I think it's a pretty good bet.

Patterico totally bought into this video, embedding it on his site; but the video consists of a series of images (many of them repeated) of some chickens being killed and some chickens with injuries, while an MFA narrator tells us about all sorts of chicken atrocities observed by an "undercover" MFA "investigator." But such investigators (or even the narrator, for that matter) are about as impartial and believable as a charter member of Klanwatch "investigating" racism and incipient Naziism at a local NRA chapter.

Patterico sees that movie as dispositive. He may be correct, he may be wrong -- I don't know, and neither does he, because there is no way to check out MFA's claims unless we, ourselves, go "undercover" in an egg factory... or rather, many egg factories, so we can compare them; else we have only Mercy for Animals' word that this is really a problem, that these images are current, that they are widespread, that they spread disease, and so forth. I doubt that Patterico (and about 2/3rds of California voters) did so before jumping wholeheartedly aboard this bandwagon.

For that matter, much is made in the video of killing chickens by holding them by their feet and shaking them vigorously, to break their necks. They show images of such chickens still thrashing about after being allegedly killed. But in the first place, we all know that chickens can thrash and even run around even after being decapitated; and if Patterico doesn't like chickens killed in that manner, how would he prefer them killed? I know he's not a vegetarian.

But let's leave the realm of animal-"rights" hysteria and return to the very real issue of the survival of traditional marriage. With 100% of precincts reporting, the quasi-final tally on Proposition 8 is 52.5% yes, 47.5 no; no recount is going to change a five-point result, so I'm quite confident that the California constitution now formally recognizes only the traditional definition of marriage.

(To quote Larry Elderberry, "and now, the big butt...")

But, it will doubtless take several months before this result becomes final. Several things will happen in the interim:

I'm very glad that Arnold Schwarzenegger is our governor; he is a socially liberal Republican who personally supports same-sex marriage... but he has a history of upholding the rule of law on this very issue.

If we had a Democratic governor such as Cruz Bustamante, I have no doubt that he would simply ignore the initiative as if it had been merely a bad dream. We would have to find someone with standing to sue to force California to follow its own constitution.

Still, I feel sad and angry: A bunch of very nice and totally sincere same-sex couples who "got married" after the California Supreme Court decision will find their supposed marriages abruptly nullified, causing them to feel very understandable pain. But it's their own fault: They foolishly trusted radical "progressives" who told them, to hell with what voters want; the people will think what we, the anointed, tell them to think!

I feel sorry for those same-sex couples who just wanted to get married. They knew (or should reasonably have known) that the proper way to change the secular institution of marriage would be to qualify a clean initiative onto the ballot to overturn the year 2000's Proposition 22 -- which had the exact same wording as Proposition 8, but created only a law, not an amendment to the constitution. If such a clean initiative passed, we would have enacted same-sex marriage through the ballot box (and would be the first state to do so). This is the only valid way to change such an important principle of American culture... by the vote.

But many same-sex marriage supporters allowed themselves to be suckered into a dirty short-cut. Probably, they were convinced by the Left that there were so many bigots and homophobes in California (that bastion of conservatism) that the only way they could win was to force the decision through the courts. In any event, now it's a part of the California constitution... and all because professional political proponents of same-sex marriage (and in many cases, polygamy, polyandry, incestuous marriage, and eventually, the abolition of legal marriage altogether) decided to force it on the state, "whether you like it or not," as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom triumphantly crowed during an earlier attempt.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to the California electorate, which rejected the vile, slimy no-on-8 campaign... culminating in that despicable video assault that depicted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- by name! -- invading the house of some poor lesbian couple, trashing the place, and tearing their marriage certificate in half, while laughing at the pain they're causing.

What religious bigots. What bastards. I revel in the pain felt by the anti-religion, anti-democracy, and anti-marriage activists, even as I feel the pain of ordinary same-sex couples, a pain I ascribe almost entirely to the moral depravity of everyone who applauds judicial imperialism "for our own good."

But that wasn't the only state proposition that went in a direction away from Liberalism; here are a few other initiatives that appear victorious, from the CNN elections website:

In conclusion

So take heart, mateys; it was a bad election, but it probably won't be catastrophic. Don't throw yourselves into the Komodo dragon pit -- at least not just yet.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2008, at the time of 1:14 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

© 2005-2008 by Dafydd ab Hugh - All Rights Reserved