The Self Made Pundit

I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________


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Wednesday, November 27, 2002
 
BAD NEWS FOR THE DEMS, BUT JUST HOW BAD?: The current political opinion polls have correctly been depicted in the news media as bad news for the Democrats. However, the news is not as bad as some of these polls indicate on a superficial level.

Take a look at the New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday. At first glance, it certainly seems like terrible new for the Democrats. One main finding is that 51 percent of the respondents view the Republican Party favorably while only 45 percent view the Democrats favorably.

I doubt that the news (while certainly not good) is really that dire for the Democrats. This poll was taken on the heels of two weeks of heavy media coverage depicting a triumphant Bush as ascendant over hapless, clueless and messageless Democrats. Such coverage undoubtedly depressed the Democrats’ favorability ratings.

I would wager that a substantial number of Americans that wanted the Democrats to win in the midterm elections now view their favored party with less than warm or favorable feelings. Indeed, the detailed breakdown of the poll results (largely ignored by the media) indicates that disappointed Democrats did play a role in the Democratic Party’s low favorability ratings. While 95 percent of Republicans expressed a favorable opinion of their party, only 77 percent of Democrats stated they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

A better gauge of the parties’ relative appeal to the voters would their favorability ratings on the eve of the midterm election. The New York Times/CBS News poll taken from October 27 to 31, 2002, actually found the parties in a virtual tie, with 55 percent of all respondents expressing a favorable view of the Democrats and 54 percent expressing a favorable view of the Republicans.

Equally suspect is the recent poll’s finding that Al Gore has a favorability rating of only 19 percent. While this is hardly good news, I find its significance dubious. Favorability ratings of politicians – especially before a campaign starts in earnest – can bounce around and be unreliable indicators. Gore’s own history of favorability ratings proves ths point. According to CBS News Polls, from February 1995 to June 1999 Gore’s favorability ratings dropped from 48 percent to a low of 17 percent. Yet, once Gore’s presidential campaign got underway, his favorability ratings generally improved, until he was at a high of 51 percent in December 2000.

Even CBS News’s own political reporters have warned that these poll results should be taken with a bagful of salt:

In the latest example of confusing poll results, the CBS News/New York Times poll conducted over the weekend says that only a third of Democrats think the party "should give Al Gore another chance to run and nominate him," while 55 percent think "the Democrats should nominate someone new." So the message from Democrats to Al Gore is: "Go Away." Right?

Not so fast. Last week, we reported on a CNN/Time poll that said 61 percent of Democrats would like to see Gore run again. The wording of the two questions produced two very different pictures of how the rank and file feels about the former vice president.

The CNN pollster, Keating Holland, suggests that the CBS wording may actually reflect the hard-core Democratic support for Gore since it tracks with the 34 percent of Democrats in their poll who say they'd vote for him in a 2004 Democratic primary field that included Hillary Clinton.

While we're at it, only 33 percent of Democrats in the CBS/New York Times poll had a favorable view of Gore compared to 70 percent in the CNN poll. Was it something he said on his book tour? Probably not. Once again the questions were worded differently. CBS/NYT asked people if their opinion of Gore is "favorable, not favorable, undecided, or haven't you heard enough about Al Gore yet to have an opinion?" Fully 43 percent of Democrats said they are undecided (28 percent) or hadn't heard enough (15 percent) about Gore (you wonder exactly where they've been, but that's another issue!) CNN asked a favorable/unfavorable question that pushes voters to express an opinion. And, when pushed, most Democrats were positive.

So what should he do? Probably take his own advice from this spring. Deep six the polls and follow his heart.


Since the poll also found that Americans tend to favor the Democrats’ policy positions over the Republicans’ positions, the news is not all bad for Gore and the Democrats. If the Democratic Party actually puts up a fight for what it believes during the next two years, it might just give Democrats a reason to feel favorable about their own party.


Thursday, November 21, 2002
 
MORE GORE: Democratic critics of Al Gore who do not want the winner of the popular vote in 2000 to make another run for the presidency in 2004 should pause and just listen to what Gore has been saying lately. In his recent media forays plugging his new pair of books (as well as reintroducing himself to the voters) Gore has been uttering plain-spoken common sense like a latter day Harry Truman.

Under Bush and the Democratic opposition, political discourse in America has devolved into an unprecedented combination of mendacity and timidity. While previous presidents have lied, members of the opposition party have usually not been timid in responding to political duplicity by the president and his party. Fearing Bush’s popularity as a wartime president, however, today’s Democrats have largely failed to confront an unabashedly partisan leader who has not been timid in engaging in such reprehensible tactics as misleading the public about his economic policies titled toward the super rich and attacking the patriotism of Democrats.

As articles in today’s New York Times and Washington Post illustrate, however, Gore is now engaged in a flurry of truth-telling that should put the Bush administration to shame. As the Post reports:

Gore said in an interview here that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network pose a greater immediate danger than does Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Bush's decision to shift attention to possible war with Iraq, he said, represented "an historic mistake" that has left Afghanistan facing chaos and U.S. intelligence agencies without some of the resources needed to carry out the war against terrorism.

....

At the same time, he urged Democrats to speak more boldly than they have done in the past. Exhibit A, he said, is health care. He argued in favor of a politically risky single-payer national health insurance system, saying incremental approaches cannot solve the problems of rising costs, bewildering bureaucracy and a steady increase in the number of Americans without health insurance.

....

Gore had stern words for Bush's economic policies, calling the administration's tax cuts, energy policy and approach to regulation of corporate America "payback and greed" that reward wealthy Americans and big corporations at the expense of middle-income families and individual investors.

Instead of offering tough regulation of the accounting industry, he said, the administration caved to lobbyists for the industry who demanded of administration officials "that they kneel and kiss their ring -- and they do." The average investor "was essentially told to go to hell," he said.


These are far stronger words than any other leading Democrat has used to discuss the Bush administration. There is also more honesty in these words than this administration has expressed in its nearly two years of existence.

Gore should run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. The Democrats discovered in the midterm elections what happens when you’re shy about expressing your beliefs. Whatever else he is, Gore is not shy.


Wednesday, November 20, 2002
 
DEPARTMENT OF THE TITANIC: It would be unfair to compare the rush to establish the Department of Homeland Security with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

A better analogy would be rearranging the lifeboats after the Titanic hit that iceberg. It might have been a good idea at one point, but that was probably not the best time to engage in reorganizations.

The creation of the Homeland Security Department is being hailed as the greatest reorganization of the federal government since Congress approved President Truman’s proposal to create the Department of Defense more than 50 years ago. The creation of the Department of Defense is instructive, however. FDR and Congress did not rush to reorganize the federal bureaucracy while America was engaged in the dire struggle of World War II. Instead, the country wisely focused its energies on defeating an undeniable Axis of evil before turning to a reorganization of the nation’s defenses that had the potential of being disruptive. As The New York Times notes:

President Harry S. Truman announced his plan to combine the War and Navy Departments into a single Defense Department in December 1945, three months after the American victory in World War II, but the plan was not approved by Congress for another two years.

Even supporters of the new department acknowledge the danger that such a massive reorganization of the government could disrupt anti-terrorism efforts in the short run:

“This is going to be difficult and it's going to take longer than anyone thinks,” warned Senator Fred Thompson, the Republican of Tennessee who was a leading sponsor of the Senate bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Comptroller General David M. Walker, who directs the General Accounting Office, the Congressional watchdog agency, said today, “It's going to take years in order to get this department fully integrated – you're talking about bringing together 22 different entities, each with a longstanding tradition and its own culture.”

He said that if the initial organization was handled badly and if the agencies that are being brought together in the department resisted cooperation, the result could damage the government's counterterrorism program as it exists now.

“If this is not handled properly, we could be at increased risk,” Mr. Walker said. “That's why you have to focus on a short list of priorities, including making sure that key people are in contact with each other.”

He added, “That's as basic as trying to make sure that things like voice mail and e-mail are linked up.”


It is not at all clear that whatever increased efficiencies may result from this new bureaucracy could not have been achieved – without substantial disruption – by such measures as improving coordination of existing departments and agencies. Determining that, however, would have meant actually studying the issue – as the federal government did in creating the Department of Defense – instead of rushing to rubber stamp a bill laden with giveaways to corporate special interests. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs in the long term, it probably would have been wiser to adopt interim measures in the short term since any disruptions in our anti-terrorism efforts now could be deadly on a massive scale.

Senator Byrd has been one of the few voices to warn that it is wiser to remain focused on the main goal of combating terrorism than to rush ahead for the sake of being able to claim that you did something:

Mr. Byrd, of course, is not one of those timid souls, and his recent speeches have been extraordinary even for the maestro of senatorial rhetoric, who turns 85 on Wednesday. While his colleagues have debated the fine points of the domestic security bill, he has been virtually alone in asking the larger question: Why is this new department suddenly so necessary? What will the largest and hastiest reorganization of the federal government in half a century do besides allow politicians to claim instant credit for fighting terrorism?

....

“Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard,” Mr. Byrd told the Senate. “With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy.” Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, “I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy,” and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, “Don't give up the bureaucracy!”

....

As he was waiting to speak on the floor yet again this afternoon, Mr. Byrd sat in his office and marveled at the rush to pass the bill.

“That Department of Homeland Security will not add one whit of security in the near future to the American people,” he said. “In the meantime, the terrorists are going to be very busy. I'm concerned that in our drive to focus on the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to be taking our eyes off what the terrorists may do to us.”


I fear that Senator Byrd may be right.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Department belongs in the same category as the Bush Administrations rush to invade Iraq. Perhaps such efforts will prove necessary in the long term. In the short term, however, America should be more focused on the greatest immediate threat to its security – Al Qaeda and the recently resurfaced Osama bin Laden.

I think it would be far wiser to remain focused on this immediate threat and devote more energy and resources to rooting out existing Al Qaeda adherents and cells in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries. Who knows, we might even find that fellow President Bush once said we would get dead or alive.


Monday, November 18, 2002
 
GORE’S SUPPORT IS FALLING ... UP: Gore is in a far stronger position for the Democratic presidential nomination than some media reports indicate. A case in point is MSNBC’s misleading treatment of a newly released poll.

MSNBC’s headline for the AP report of this new poll is:

Little Support for Gore in 2004

No clear Democratic front-runner, poll shows


If you read only the headline, you would think that Gore’s support among all Democrats is slipping. You would be wrong. The reverse is true.

The AP article reports on the result of a presidential preference poll of Democratic Party insiders, specifically 312 Democratic National Committee members:

THE POLL of 312 Democratic National Committee members – roughly three-quarters of the committee’’s total membership – suggests the contest is wide open, with none of the top possible candidates standing out as having particularly broad support.

Only 35 percent of those polled said Gore should run again, while 48 percent said he should not and 17 percent were undecided.

Asked who they favor in the 2004 race, 46 percent of respondents said they had no preference. Out of a list of 10 prospective candidates, 19 percent of those polled named Gore as their pick, 18 percent backed Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and 13 percent named Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the outgoing Democratic leader in the House, was chosen by 10 percent. The other possible candidates were in single digits, including Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the 2000 vice presidential nominee, who garnered 4 percent.
“It looks like a party that’’s desperately seeking fresh faces,” said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst in Washington.


The views of Democratic Party insiders, however, are not necessarily representative of the rank and file. In fact, recent polls indicate that Gore is actually gaining in support among all Democrats nationwide.

A CNN/Time poll conducted Nov. 13 to 14, shows that an overwhelming 53 percent of Democrats favor Gore as the 2004 nominee over his six most likely challengers (Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards and Howard Dean). Polls of Democrats in October and early November had found Gore to be the front runner, but with support in the 32 to 36 percent range against such likely challengers.

Given the disastrous approach many Democratic leaders took in timidly avoiding conflict with Bush in the months leading up to midterm elections, their lukewarm feelings towards Gore might not be such a bad omen for the former vice president. As discussed in my Nov. 15 post on “GORE, THE REPUBLICAN PROPHET,” unlike many Democrats, Gore has not been afraid to constructively criticize the Bush administration’s foreign policy failings.

Gore has proven himself to be far superior to most Democratic insiders in discerning what is best for his country and his party. Don’t count Gore out yet.


Friday, November 15, 2002
 
MOVIE REVIEW OF THE YEAR: While the Self Made Pundit is generally content to limit these posts to matters political, occasionally contributions to the arts deserve recognition.

The movie review tends to generate little respect as a literary form. The great Pauline Kael, late of the New Yorker, has too few progeny among today's movie reviewers.

Yet, every now and then a movie reviewer will achieve that perfect expression of some truth or heartfelt emotion that deserves to be praised as a work of art. I believe the Dallas Observer's Gregory Weinkauf has achieved that state of grace in the closing lines of his review of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." (Link via Slate.)

Weinkauf concludes his mostly favorable review of this movie by musing on its place in the cultural landscape of today's America:

[T]he film of Chamber of Secrets is a welcome delivery of childlike wonder for a planet of ever-increasing ugliness. We've accidentally allowed a retarded monkey to rule America, but otherwise it's not such a whimsical place. Perhaps works like this can help set that to rights.

While I doubt that Warner Brothers Pictures will feature the above quote in its ads for "Chamber of Secrets," it has swayed me. I'm seeing the movie first thing tomorrow morning.


 
GORE, THE REPUBLICAN PROPHET: While Al Gore may be an unlikely candidate for Republican Party prophet, the Bush administration has wandered into the very multilateral approach on Iraq proposed by Gore weeks ago. If the rest of the Democratic Party had followed Gore’s approach as much as Bush has, the Democrats would have done far better in the recent midterm elections.

As the Self Made Pundit has discussed in several recent posts, a major cause of the Democrats’ losses in the midterm elections was their timidity in confronting the Bush administration. Along these same lines, a newspaper column and a magazine article argue persuasively that the Democrats’ timorous approach in debating Iraq cost them an opportunity to advance both the national interest and their own partisan interests.

In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne examines how the Democrats missed a major opportunity to contribute to the formulation of policy as the Bush Administration zig-zagged between a unilateral approach aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and a multilateral approach aided at disarming Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction.

As Dionne notes, the Bush administration is currently in its multilateral phase. After threatening to go it alone in Iraq, the United States has successfully brokered a unanimous Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with weapons inspections.

Dionne rightfully castigates the Democrats for largely failing to criticize Bush’s herky-jerky approach to the vital issue of Iraq. Dionne believes that if the Democrats had urged Bush to take a more multilateral approach in the months before the midterm elections, they could have taken credit when Bush finally saw the wisdom of working through the U.N. As Dionne comments:

An effective opposition party might have something useful to say about all this uncertainty. .... But too many Democrats simply wanted to push Iraq aside so they could get to that economic message of theirs that worked so brilliantly on Nov. 5.

....

Had the Democrats made a concerted push much earlier for a tough multilateral approach to Iraq -- as former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke was urging them to do -- the party could have claimed victory when Bush turned toward the United Nations.


Dionne notes that these same points are made in Heather Hurlburt's wise article "War Torn" in the November issue of the Washington Monthly. Hurlburt also assails the Democrats’ timidity as self-defeating:

The irony is that a policy of using the threat of U.S. military power to enforce U.N. mandates in Iraq is one that both the hawks and at least some of the doves in the Democratic Party could have agreed on. Had they taken that position last spring--or even during the summer--Democrats might have helped shift the debate in a more sensible direction earlier, and served the country by limiting the negative international fallout from the hawks' unilateralism. They also might have helped themselves politically: When the president shifted his positions in September, it would have been seen, rightly, as a victory for the Democrats.

I agree with Dionne’s and Hurlburt’s analysis of the Democrats’ missed opportunity to constructively criticize Bush’s Iraqi policy. The failure of most Democrats is even more striking than Dionne and Hurlburt acknowledge, however, because Al Gore was recommending this forceful approach back in September.

On September 23, 2002, Gore made a major foreign policy speech in which he urged Congressional Democrats to push Bush to adopt the very policy that Bush eventually embraced:

I believe that the resolution that the president has asked Congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants and needs to be narrowed severely.

The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States.

But Congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time. If the council will not provide such language, then other choices remain open.

But in any event, the president should be urged to take the time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of action.


Needless to say, in the days that followed, Republicans attacked Gore’s speech as irrelevant and worse. Typical was one Republican Party hack’s comment that “It seems to be a speech that was more appropriate for a political hack than a presidential candidate, by someone who clearly failed to recognize leadership.” However, in the weeks that followed, Bush adopted the approach recommended by Gore.

Just as Gore suggested, Bush obtained “a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time.”

Such shameless disparaging of Gore’s and other Democrats’ ideas only to later embrace them is of course nothing new for the Republicans. One of the most outrageous recent examples involves the Democrats’ proposal of a Homeland Security Department. Bush spent months opposing the proposal, only to then embrace it and attack the Democrats as unpatriotic for not rubber stamping his version. Another example involving Gore was the Republicans’ ridiculing of Gore in the 2000 campaign for his suggestion that the internal combustion engine would eventually be replaced. The Bush administration has since adopted the goal of eventual replacement of the internal combustion engine.

I think I’ll watch Gore’s appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s David Letterman Show tonight to see if Gore makes any other policy suggestions that can be ridiculed by Republicans until a decent interval has passed, at which point they can be adopted by Bush.


Wednesday, November 13, 2002
 
THE RECYCLING PRESIDENT: The Bush administration has announced a new environmental agenda that shows that President Bush is dedicated to recycling.

Unfortunately, what Bush is recycling are old strategies for studying global warming from the administration of Bush the Elder. To be fair to Bush the Younger, however, his environmental plan is substantively different from his father’s since this time around the plan ignores much of what scientists have learned in the past decade about the human causes of global warming.

As today's New York Times reports:

The Bush administration, saying there are still many uncertainties about threats posed by human-caused climate change, has outlined a broad, years-long research agenda on global warming.

Among many other goals, the draft plan calls for new work to be completed in the next four years to clarify how much of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human actions like emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide or soot; to explain differing temperature trends in the upper and lower atmosphere; and to improve computer models that simulate climate and monitoring systems for tracking the real thing.

The proposal was lauded yesterday by industry officials and some scientists who have long questioned the mainstream view that global warming is mainly caused by people and poses big risks.

But many climate experts said the proposal mainly rehashed issues most scientists consider settled. For example, they pointed out, big international and national panels of climate experts concluded in the past two years that at least half of the warming measured since 1950 was indeed caused by human actions, namely smokestack and tailpipe emissions.
....

Some experts on global change said the research plan was deeply flawed because it ignored findings of a decade-long federal assessment of potential impacts of climate change around the United States that was published in 2000 by the Environmental Protection Agency.

That assessment has been attacked by industry lobbyists and some scientists as overly apocalyptic and shaped by Vice President Al Gore, and they have strongly pressed the Bush administration to expunge it from any new documents.

Dr. Mahoney said the previous climate-impacts assessment contained much high quality work that was left out to avoid new conflicts. "The important thing is to say how can we move ahead without fighting the old battles," he said.

Other experts said they doubted the new approach would speed action. It does not differ much from strategies set more than a decade ago by the first Bush administration, which also called for reducing uncertainties and improving the accuracy of projections, some experts said.


Perhaps we will also hear President Bush echo his father’s eloquent critique of Al Gore as “Ozone Man.” On second thought, it is unlikely that this President Bush would express his views so candidly. Instead, look for more studies on the environment that Bush can point to as showing his concern while doing nothing to disturb his corporate backers.

On the issue of global warming, Bush is merely fiddling while the world burns.


Monday, November 11, 2002
 
CRAFT ME A MESSAGE, VOTERS SAY: Post-election polling is confirming the view (expressed in last Wednesday’s Self Made Pundit, among other places) that the Democrats’ dismal showing in the midterm elections was more a result of their failure to craft a message than a rejection of any Democratic message.

A Newsweek poll of Americans finds that the Democrats’ failure to offer “clear alternatives” to Bush and the Republicans was a major factor in the Republicans’ electoral success:

FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT said one “major” reason was “the Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts and other economic issues.” They said three other reasons were “major” factors: “The Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to Bush and the Republicans on the issue of war with Iraq” (51 percent), “President Bush’s willingness to use military force, if necessary, to disarm and remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” (59 percent) and “President Bush’s personal popularity and campaign efforts” (53 percent).

Far from giving the Republicans a ringing endorsement, the respondents of this poll also viewed the prospects of Republican control of Congress with less than enthusiasm:

Asked about the Republicans winning control of both houses of Congress, 30 percent of those polled said it was a “good thing,” 34 percent said it was a “bad thing” and 29 percent believed it will be make “no difference” either way.

Considering that only 30 percent of respondents considered it a good thing that Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats certainly had the potential of doing much better in the election if they had articulated a clear Democratic program.

I think much of the debate now underway about whether Democrats should move to the left misses the point. The Democrats should forcefully fight for policies they believe will benefit Americans without getting bogged down in overly analytical arguments about whether a given policy is “liberal” or “conservative.”

Having a responsible economic policy that seeks to benefit the great majority of Americans strikes me as more conservative than a radical right-wing agenda that seeks to redistribute wealth to the super rich with tax cuts geared to the top 1 percent. Fighting corporate crime may be a progressive issue, but it is also a law and order issue.

The Democrats are certainly capable of crafting a message that voters will find attractive. In order for voters to hear that message, however, the Democrats need to be passionate and fight for it rather than to act shy and dispirited as they too often have during these past two years.


Friday, November 08, 2002
 
MEET THE NEW TONE, SAME AS THE OLD TONE: While the Democrats have ample reason to hold themselves responsible for their dismal showing in Tuesday’s elections (as discussed in Wednesday’s post-mortem post), it’s nice of President Bush to remind us that he and the Republicans played a little role too.

Bush gives us this reminder in his own inimitable style of lying about how he and his followers are full of good intentions. Now that the election is over, Bush rewrites campaign history by informing us that the secret of Republican success was to “change the tone” and eschew negative campaigning. As the Washington Post reports today, this is pure malarkey:

Democrats were particularly incensed yesterday about Bush's claim Wednesday that Republican candidates had succeeded because of their clean campaigns. "Their accent was on the positive," Bush told his top aides, gathered in front of the Oval Office fireplace. “If you want to succeed in American politics, change the tone.”

Bush usually stays above the fray, but some of his hand-picked candidates ran tough negative campaigns. Some used images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to try to tar Democrats as soft on national security. Bush occasionally joined in the attack.

The day before the election, Bush repeated a statement that had caused Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to issue a futile demand for an apology when the president first said it in October. Complaining in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about his stalled plan for a Department of Homeland Security, Bush said the Senate is “more interested in special interests, which dominate the dialogue in Washington, D.C., than they are in protecting the American people.”

....

Bush's candidates were as rough as anyone in a tight race. Before the death of Sen. Paul D. Wellstone, GOP candidate Norm Coleman referred to Minnesota's two senators as “a joke and a shadow.”

“I run against a guy who quite often I think is just the lowest common denominator,” Coleman, who won his race, said in July.

Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) used an ad featuring videotape of Osama bin Laden in his successful campaign to unseat Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who lost both legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion while serving as an Army captain in Vietnam.


So let me get this straight. Bush thinks that a Republican campaign is positive even if it implies that the Democrats lack patriotism and insinuates that a decorated, triple amputee war veteran is soft on Osama bin Laden.

I shudder to think what Bush would consider a negative campaign.


Wednesday, November 06, 2002
 
THE MORNING AFTER: You have to give people a reason to vote for you. The Democrats didn’t and they lost Congress last night. It’s that simple.

Fearing to confront a popular war-time leader, Democrats have too often shied away from confronting Bush and his disastrous economic policies in the past year. The Democrats have also failed to articulate their own alternative economic plan. By acting as if they were embarrassed to be Democrats, the Democrats have actually reinforced the Republican attacks on Democrats.

The Democrats have behaved as if voters would vote for them only if they didn’t make too much of a fuss. Instead, many voters heard Democrats asking to be ignored and those voters complied.

The Democrats’ timid approach flies in the face of American history, which shows voters want politicians to have plans to deal with problems. The Republicans’ Contract With America did not prove especially popular after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, but it had already served its purpose on the campaign trail by convincing voters Republicans had a substantive plan.

During World War II the Republicans did not shy away from attacking FDR and his domestic policies while supporting the war. Those Republicans were not viewed as unpatriotic for engaging in politics. Today’s Democrats need to realize that true patriotism requires one to fight for those policies – both domestic and foreign – that are in the country’s best interests. Besides being the right thing to do, such an approach will attract more voters than the Democrats’ fainthearted approach of the past year.

I hope the Democrats learn at least one lesson from this election. You can’t beat something with nothing.

As a final point for this election wrap-up, I note that many Democratic leaning pundits have egg on their faces for being too optimistic about the Democratic prospects in the election. The Self Made Pundit, however, is content to note that his electoral prognostication skills (see the previous post) have improved since his prediction in 1972 of a McGovern presidency.


Tuesday, November 05, 2002
 
ELECTION FORECASTS: The Self Made Pundit has a long and proud history of making insightful written election forecasts since he received an A on his paper in college analyzing and predicting the outcome of the 1972 presidential race. (While I hesitate to get bogged down in such minutia, for those of you curious, the title of the paper was “Why McGovern Will Win The Election.”)

I predict that the big news of the election will be that the Democrats take both Houses of Congress. So, continuing in the proud tradition of President McGovern, here are my predictions:

House:

Dems 220
GOP 214
Ind 1

Senate:

Dems 53
GOP 46
Ind 1

Close Senate Races:

Arkansas -- Pryor 52, Hutchinson 47
Minnesota -- Mondale 50, Coleman 46
South Carolina -- Graham 53, Sanders 47
Colorado -- Strickland 50, Allard 48
Missouri -- Carnahan 49, Talent 48
South Dakota -- Johnson 51, Thune 48
Georgia -- Cleland 50, Chambliss 49
New Hampshire -- Shaheen 50, Sununu 48
Tennessee -- Alexander 53, Clement 45
Iowa -- Harkin 54, Ganske 44
New Jersey -- Lautenberg 53, Forrester 44
Texas -- Cornyn 51, Kirk 48
Louisiana -- Landrieu 50.1, Terrell (24)
North Carolina -- Dole 50, Bowles 48

Governors:

Dems 29
GOP 21


 
THE POLLS’ DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: The polls have a dirty little secret. Put aside for a moment all those precise numbers listed as the polls’ margins of sampling error and confidence levels. The secret is that the polls’ election day forecasts are based on a large amount of guesswork.

While polls trumpet that they have 95 percent confidence that their margin of sampling error is 4 percent or less, what they don’t emphasize is the amount of guesswork that goes into determining the group of voters to poll as “likely voters.” At late stages in campaigns, polls typically focus on “likely voters,” not registered voters, since large numbers of registered voters do not vote in any given election. The guesswork comes in deciding what questions to ask to identify those “likely voters.”

Different polls use different criteria to select these groups of “likely voters.” For example, the Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll identifies “likely voters” as those voters “who say they are extremely likely to vote.” By contrast, Gallup labels respondents as “likely voters” through “a series of questions measuring current voting intentions and past voting behavior.”

This explains why polls of “likely voters” can be widely divergent. The most recent polls of “likely voters” show anything from a Democratic lead in the generic Congressional vote of two points to a Republican lead of seven points. The reason these polls are getting different results is that they use different criteria to select these so-called “likely voters.” They are polling different groups of people.

Thus, when Gallup says that it can say with 95 percent confidence that the margin of sampling error for its poll of “likely voters” is 4 percentage points, it is only expressing a degree of confidence in the sampling the views of people who have those “current voting intentions and past voting behavior.” Gallup and the other pollsters express absolutely no confidence level that the respondents they have labeled as “likely voters” are actually representative of those who will actually go to the polls. Due to the subjective criteria used to identify “likely voters” there is no measurable “margin of error” for whether actual voters are being accurately predicted.

Pollsters’ selections of “likely voters” can be particularly unreliable since they fail to measure the effects of Get Out The Vote (“GOTV”) drives by the political parties. If the parties had roughly similar GOTV drives, this failure might not make a big difference. But the parties are not equal in this regard. The Democrats have been far more successful at GOTV drives in recent elections. While Republicans have claimed to made advances, the Democratic operation still appears to be far superior.

The failure to measure the effects of GOTV drives is one reason that most polls failed to predict in 2000 that Gore would win the popular vote and that the Democrats would gain five Senate seats. Interestingly, Zogby, one of the few pollsters to correctly predict that Gore would win the popular vote, now has the Democrats winning the generic Congressional vote by 51 to 49 percent, while Gallup, which wrongly forecast Bush as the popular vote winner, now has the Republicans ahead in the Congressional vote by a margin of 51 to 45 percent.

I think Gallup is seriously underestimating turnout this year. Gallup forecasts that voter turnout will be 35 percent, which is less than in each of the last four midterm elections, which had turnouts that ranged from 36 to 39 percent. Since Gallup and other pollsters agree that the Democrats lead among all registered voters, any underestimation of turnout tends to underestimate the Democratic share of the vote.

Voter turnout today will probably be better than the polls are assuming, in large part due to the Democrats’ GOTV. States that have early voting (with voting starting in late October) have been reporting that turnout (at least of early voters) is up significantly this year. I suspect that tonight will be a far brighter night for the Democrats than many pundits are predicting.


 
ELECTION DAY ADVICE: It's finally election day. I had considered recommending that all of you vote, but then I realized that advice would probably be futile.

No, the Self Made Pundit has not received one of those Republican flyers designed to depress the vote and become apathetic. The reason I think such advice would be futile is that the possibility that anyone interested enough in politics to read this weblog is not already planning to vote simply boggles my mind. But, if you are that one special reader, please take my advice and vote today.

For the rest of you, my advice is try to convince some friends and colleagues to vote today. They'll be impressed at your civic mindedness. They'll look at you in a new light and you'll find yourself getting that date, that raise, that bacon cheeseburger you've been dreaming of.

Do whatever little thing you can to increase the turnout today. As I'll discuss in a post a little later this morning, this election will turn on the degree to which the turnout turns out ... to turn a phrase.


Friday, November 01, 2002
 
ARROGANCE PITTSONIFIED: Harvey Pitt’s job as chairman of the SEC may now be in jeopardy, though not for Pitt’s failure to do his job. As Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times column today, by not doing his job, Pitt is doing the job expected of him by the Bush administration.

Instead, the reason Pitt’s job may now be in jeopardy is his recent display of arrogance. Since Bush’s colossal arrogance is one of his few actual accomplishments, he may well be offended by Pitt’s acting as if he were a Bush.

As The New York Times reports today, Pitt arrogantly hid from his fellow SEC commissioners that William Webster, his pick to head the new government board overseeing the accounting profession had performed oversight duties as head of the audit committee of U.S. Technologies, a company now facing allegations of fraud. Pitt’s failure to mention this salient fact was particularly contemptuous of his colleagues since the SEC voted to appoint Webster in a 3 to 2 vote only over the strenuous objections of the Democratic commissioners that Webster lacked the credentials to head an accounting board.

Traces of Pitt’s deception can also be found in the SEC release announcing Webster’s appointment to the accounting board. The release contained a glaring omission, describing Webster’s audit committee experience as follows:

He has served on a number of audit committees, including Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc., Pinkerton Inc. and Maritz Inc.

Webster’s highly relevant experience as chairman of the audit committee of U.S. Technologies was somehow deemed not important enough to make the release.

As the Times comments sarcastically in an editorial today, it and other critics of the Webster appointment were wrong in thinking that Webster lacked relevant experience:

A correction is in order here. Last week we mistakenly wrote that William Webster lacked any relevant experience to serve as chairman of the new oversight board for the accounting profession. It turns out that Judge Webster has some very relevant experience, but of the kind that should have automatically disqualified him from being considered for the post, to which he was appointed last Friday.

From April 2000 until last July, Mr. Webster, a former C.I.A. and F.B.I. director, headed the audit committee of the board of U.S. Technologies, a company that is now nearly insolvent. The company and its former chief executive officer are being sued and investigated for possible fraud. Mr. Webster's committee fired the company's auditors in the summer of 2001 when they raised concerns about internal financial controls. Mr. Webster has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but even the most generous reading of his performance would disqualify him from heading a body whose mandate is to establish and police tough new auditing standards.


Pitt’s arrogance in preventing the other SEC commissioners from fulling vetting Webster’s qualifications should also disqualify him from heading the SEC.

Do I really think Pitt’s job is in jeopardy? Not yet. Since Pitt apparently remains loyal to Bush and has not been convicted of any crime, he meets all the stringent requirements demanded by Bush of his appointees. There will have to be a deafening chorus critical of Pitt to jar the Bush administration out of its smug satisfaction with its cronies.

If the Bush administration had any interest in an effective SEC – or even if the administration had a modicum of shame – it would replace Pitt now. Instead, the Bush administration is awash in the arrogance that Pitt now personifies.