Worth Noting
Rove Calls It: Obama Carries Nebraska District
Omaha World-Herald by Robynn Tysver, 11/8/08: "For the first time ever, a blue circle will appear in Nebraska on national electoral maps. Democrat Barack Obama won the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District on Friday, scooping up one of the state's five electoral votes. Obama won 8,434 of 15,039 mail-in ballots counted Friday by Douglas County election officials. … McCain won the popular vote statewide and four electoral votes. … Obama's win will assuredly spark interest in the split electoral system, which only Nebraska and Maine use. All other states are winner-take-all on electoral votes."
The Wall Street Journal by Karl Rove, 5/8/08: "Mr. Obama…may make an attempt at winning one or two of Nebraska's electoral votes (it awards its electoral votes by congressional district)."
Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me
PETER SAGAL, HOST: What did you guys think of the election night coverage? Good, bad, indifferent?
CHARLIE PIERCE, THE BOSTON GLOBE: I don't know. I hate to say it, but you know who was really good?
PETER SAGAL: Who?
CHARLIE PIERCE: Karl Rove
AMY DICKINSON, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Yeah, he was on Fox.
CHARLIE PIERCE: He was doing the county-by-county thing on Fox, he was really good.
AMY DICKINSON: He was doing the John Madden, you know mark up on the board, he was really good.
CHARLIE PIERCE: And you could hardly notice the brimstone on his feet too, that was great.
On Target: Polling Accuracy in the 2008 Presidential Election
Which pollster came closest to predicting the 2008 presidential election? Comparing the margin of the last pre-election national poll to the actual results—as of 11/6/08, a 6.2-point Obama victory—reveals that Pew and Rasmussen were the closest to the mark, having predicted a 6-point Obama win.
Not Rocket Science
Karl Rove provides a wealth of interesting information. First, how junky were the exit polls?
The raw numbers forecast an 18-point Obama win, news organizations who underwrote the poll arbitrarily dialed it down to a 10-point Obama edge, and the actual margin was six.
One wonders why they even bother. But the end-all and be-all of ”change” elections is really continuity:
But we do know President-elect Obama ran better among frequent churchgoers (perhaps getting 10 points more than John Kerry did), independents (perhaps five points more than Kerry and eight points more than Al Gore), Hispanics and white men. He even made special appeals to gun owners and sent his wife to cultivate military families. This allowed him to carry previously red states like Florida, New Mexico and Iowa. This combination helped Senator Obama run four points better nationally than John Kerry did in 2004 and 2.5 points better than Al Gore did in 2000. These small changes on the margin meant all the difference between winning and losing.
It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right. Most pre-election polls and the wiggly exits indicate America remains ideologically stable, with 34% of voters saying they are conservative — unchanged from 2004. Moderates went to 44% from 45% of the electorate, while liberals went to 22% from 21%.
So he only did 4% better than Kerry, in many ways the quintessential dismal liberal candidate. And the electorate didn’t change much ideologically, either. What the Democrats did do was out-organize and out-perform the Republicans, in large part because they had an exciting candidate with a message which resonated with an available pool of new voters.
That helps clarify things a bit for Republicans. Perhaps wholesale reinvention isn’t what’s needed. A solid, well-articulated message with an attractive candidate and a whole bunch of nuts and bolts party-building will go a long way. A lot will depend on how successful the new President is. But it really is no mystery how he did it. Duplicating the feat may be tougher, however, especially if conservative wise-guys are bent on doing their best to tarnish potential candidates two days after the last election.
Obama: Polls Over Policy?
Senator Obama recently added a new line to his stump speech
claiming he is "worried about Americans who are losing their homes, and their jobs, and their life savings" while Senator McCain is "worried about losing an election."
It is curious that Sen. Obama is touting himself as concerned with policy and not polls, while claiming Sen. McCain's foremost worry is electoral politics. In reality, McCain has consistently advocated policies he believed right even when the winds of public opinion blew against him.
For example, take the surge of troops in Iraq. Sen. McCain advocated a surge in the number of US troops in Iraq, when it was unpopular. In a January 2007 Gallup poll, Americans opposed the surge by a nearly 2-1 margin. McCain went against the grain of public opinion to support a winning policy. At the same time, Sen. Obama played to public sentiment by introducing legislation to prematurely end the war. McCain has often said that he would "rather lose an election than lose a war." Obama's record suggests the opposite.
Likewise, on ethanol, McCain clearly proclaimed that he opposes subsidies while campaigning in farm-heavy Iowa. Sen. Obama pandered to Iowans by supporting the subsidies.
Political maneuvering is nothing new for Sen. Obama. As a member of the Illinois State Senate, he voted "present" on issues ranging from abortion to gun control. Obama has shown a reluctance to take stances that could hurt him politically, either at the time or in the future, even on issues he claims are dear to him.
The Obama campaign is one of the most thoroughly polled and focus group-tested in modern history. Sen. Obama speaks of providing a "tax cut" to Americans with no income tax liability. He doesn’t call this program welfare because the policy sounds better when dubbed a tax decrease. Obama has even run an ad calling government run healthcare "extreme." However, Obama's own website quotes him as saying that starting from scratch he would design a single-payer system. If that’s not political spin that prioritizes winning elections over candid explantions, I don’t know what is.
The examples go on and on. Sen. McCain has constantly advocated solid policies, regardless of focus groups and polls, while Sen. Obama has not. It’s odd that Obama would draw attention to this aspect of the campaign, considering both men's records.
Obama's New Deal No Better Than Old One
With victory in sight, Barack Obama's supporters are predicting that he will give us a new New Deal. To see what that might mean, let's look back on the original New Deal.
The purpose of New Deal legislation was not, as commonly thought, to restore economic growth but rather to freeze the economy in place at a time when it seemed locked in a downward spiral. Its central program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), created 700 industry councils for firms and unions to set minimum prices and wages. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the ancestor of our farm bills, limited production to hold up prices. Unionization, encouraged by NRA and the 1935 Wagner Act, was meant to keep workers in jobs that the unemployed would have taken at lower pay.
Republicans fear a Barack Obama victory would turn America sharp left
If Barack Obama wins the American presidential election in nine days’ time, it will be because he has beaten the Republicans at their own game, according to Karl Rove, the noted “architect” of President George W Bush’s two victories.
The Democrats have copied Rove’s formidable tactics and ground operation, pumping out a disciplined message, assembling a broad-based coalition which includes young first-time voters and African-Americans, and drowning their Republican opponents with money.
“I’ve got to tell you, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Rove said in an interview. “I can say, I’m deeply flattered.”
Rove recalled how Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, outlined their electoral strategy at the Democratic convention in August: “He explicitly said we have deliberately copied the army of persuasion of the Republicans.”
FULL ARTICLE: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5014706.ece
Media Coverage Far From Balanced?
A newly released study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has confirmed what some have already suspected—media coverage of this year's presidential race has been far from balanced.
The Pew study, released October 22, found that Sen. McCain has received nearly twice as much negative news coverage as Sen. Obama (57% vs. 29%) since the conventions ended. As for positive news coverage, 36% of news stories focused on Sen. Obama were positive while just 14% of stories focused on Sen. McCain were positive.
In addition to Pew's findings, a recent Gallup poll found more than twice as many Americans—nearly half of those polled—said the news media was too liberal rather than too conservative (45% vs. 18%).
Recently, the two candidates have received almost an equal amount of media attention—a marked difference to the pre-convention period as demonstrated by the following chart.
While increased coverage might seem helpful to McCain, in reality his increased exposure has been largely offset by its unfavorable tone, which has hurt McCain more than it has helped him. According to Mark Jurkowitz, of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, most of McCain's negative news coverage is self-inflicted—a result of his reaction to the current economic crisis.
Obama: Out Of The Mainstream On Life
In my Wall Street Journal column last week, I mentioned that Sen. Obama has been trying to position himself more in line with center-right Americans and away from his record as the most liberal member of the Senate. One of the avenues through which Obama earned his title as most liberal Senator is his extreme stance on abortion. A NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted last month found that 71% of registered voters in America believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion – that is, abortion should not be legal in all cases.
However, Obama has said that the first thing he’ll do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a far left proposal that would supersede almost all restrictions on abortion. The Congressional Research Service Summary of the FOCA declares “that it is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to… terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability” or “terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect her life or her health.”
This begs the question, at what point is a fetus viable? When deciding Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court set the date of fetal viability as somewhere between the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy. Based upon that definition, any regulation on abortion up to that point would be superseded by the FOCA, including parental notification laws.
Obama also supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, which has blocked most federal funding for abortion. If this amendment which has saved more than one million unborn children from abortion is repealed, it would ensure that taxpayer dollars go towards funding abortion through Medicaid and other federal programs.
Sen. Obama has worked hard to conceal his far-left views from the electorate. In two weeks, we’ll find out whether he’s succeeded.
Obama's 95% Illusion
One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today.
It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."
FULL ARTICLE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html