This post updated with a post script early Saturday morning.
I think about politics and enjoy it and write about it. I can’t say I’m all that serious about it, it just seems so in comparison to other people.
So, I’m watching the little fire I have in the living room and listening to Il Travatore (I wish I was making that up) and I’m thinking about some poll results I found curious. It’s a factoid. One poll that was “crosstabbed” (had subset info so you could see if the support of a candidate was male/female, age, race, economic class, etc.) caught my attention. It indicated that immediately following the Dem debate in So. Carolina, there was a jump with Obama losing points, almost all of which were picked up by Edwards. In fact, Edwards is now close enough to just maybe jump Hillary for 2d (if we believe these New Hampshire-esque polls with so many undecideds. Right, folks?)
Anyway, I wondered what happened in the debate that would move just one demographic — older, white, Southern male Democrats — so far so fast and so emphatically in one direction. I was mulling over the theories, including statistical “noise”.
Then, I had a horrible thought.
P.T. Barnum once said that you will never go broke underestimating the tastes of the American public.
What, I thought, awestruck, if Edwards is getting the shallow pretty vote?
What, I thought, horrified, if there were a Mitt Romney with the perfect amount of gray right at the temples, the corporate muckety muck, and John “$400 Haircut” trial lawyer big business baiting populist Edwards in the fall? What if THOSE two were the nominees?
Redistribution of the wealth versus “Greed is Good!”.
From such damn telegenic, pretty faces.
Not purists like Kucinich versus Ron Paul, a deathmatch between also-rans. But pretty pure social welfare state versus corporate welfare state.
And rock star good looks. I mean, really. Both those guys come out of central casting. It’s like West Wing with live bullets and no stuntmen.
And you’ve got that “Father Knows Best” on CBS and “Days of Our Lives” on ABC kind of personal soap opera thing going on with their families as a subtext.
It’s boffo television at its finest.
Just in time for the Fall Season of new shows!
It’s the perfect antidote for all those people who can’t concentrate on Tiger Woods because there’s so much crazy crap about gender and race going on in the kitchen. Two white guys, reasonably interesting argument and we can kick the rest of that crap on down the road for someone else to figure out. I’m too busy being pissed off at the economy and being sick of Bush. That’s the best I got and all I want to think about.
If it’s Obama-McCain, we have a campaign about the war.
If it’s Hillary-Guiliani, we got a subway series of New York nasty.
But, Romney-Edwards is a straight up show down about the economy.
On another, related, note… The blogosphere is wild west blazing guns right now. The Obama and Hillary people don’t seem to like each other very much. Every single one of Ron Paul’s supporters must blog, every single one of them. They are everywhere and very committed. And annoying as hell. Over on the other side of the aisle, they can’t seem to settle just who hates Hillary the most and the Bible verses do fly. Ann Coulter said McCain is like Bob Dole, minus the charm, conservatism and youth. OUCH.
Well, I think I’m onto something. Don’t pick a candidate: pick a match-up. That’s the ticket!
blogblah
Post Script: Only a month ago, the headlines asked if Barak Obama was black “enough”. Am I the only one that remembers this? Today, in South Carolina, the media looks at his heavy black backing in the polls and marginalizes him as a “black” candidate. WTF? I predict another tight grouping of the three Dems, as in Iowa, the narrow 1/3 of the vote for each making it fun to try to guess the order they will end up. If, as I guess, Edwards is leaking off white voters from both Clinton and Obama, and Obama has undermined Sen. Clinton’s black support, the N.Y. Sen. could well end up in 3d, although she will pull Obama down from 40+% to the mid 30s and get close enough for all three spots to be in play and if Mark Penn and Bill are good enough, might still pull out a win. In N.H., the polls pretty much nailed Obama and Edwards and under-reported her support and they are volitile enough for that to happen again. I likely won’t know until Sunday morning and the results are like a Christmas present that has been sitting under the tree for weeks. I can’t wait to open my browser and unwrap it.
FROM THE VIENNESE SQUEEZE OF JOHN X
Hi John, Yeah, Edwards looks like he’s been casted by Hollywood. I wouldn’t hold that against him (I mean, you don’t want people to hold it against you either, right
But make no mistake: I don’t think that the Clintons are any poorer than he is. I don’t know about Obama. It’s a pity that Kucinich is dropping out. He had no chance, but he never got a fair deal in the media either. He was ignored although he got more votes than a Guiliani or a Thompson some places so far. He’s the only one who REALLY called a spade a spade and REALLY was one who would have brought about change. The media coverage of the primaries is reminiscent of Russian media, which we in the West all call a dictocracy (actually, we call it Demokratur in German, from Demokratie and Diktatur). I am beginning to warm to Obama, though, since I’ve found out that right-wing(!!) Jews are mounting a campaign against him (because he wants to talk to Iran, I guess, something I would have done already about 10 years ago, if I were America). http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=948037&contrassID=25&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=1&listSrc=Y&art=1Haaretz is a major left-wing Israeli newspaper, BTW. (I have such trouble using your “liberal” since it means the exact opposite in Europe: free-marketeers. We call it “social democratic” or “left-wing”) Whenever there is a conflict down there and papers in Europe and America are squeamish about printing any criticism of right-wing Israeli politics, Haaretz isn’t squeamish at all, so I like their discussions, which as a result are pretty honest. But I do subscribe to Maersheimer’s and Walt’s theory in their essay, now book, “The Israel Lobby”, that by supporting right-wing(!!) politics in Israel at all costs, America is endangering itself and the rest of the world. Mixing up the narrow interests of right-wing Israeli politicians with Israel as such has been one of the crimes of politics in the last decade of the 20th century IMO. Anyway, I hate it how the right-wing has taken over Israel and is abusing the holocaust to further their political agenda. If it only were their own country it would affect, the damage would be limited. But their foolish politics have made the Middle East the powder keg it is and their power games have tended to have a major effect on the outcome of American elections – which is bad for all of us. Brigitte
VIENNESE SQUEEZE, PART II:
I am actually happy that Obama won NC. What is worrying, though, is the fact that he didn’t get the majority of the white vote, as far as I can see. There just aren’t enough blacks around in the US to secure his nomination. And – there I agree with the Spiegel-article you linked to the other day – I fear that the hispanic vote will primarily go to anybody but Obama. So he’d have to have the majority among blacks and whites to outweigh the hispanics, don’t you think? CA and FL will tell, though.
Brigitte
B
Did you forget that Obama won Iowa where there are virtually no blacks at all?
Turn the statistic on its head: Obama won 53% of the votes cast by WOMEN! What does this tell us about the “inevitability” of Clinton?
Just looking at the non-black vote in South Carolina, Obama carried a majority of the Under 40 demographic.
Obama is way behind in Calif., N.Y., and N.J., it’s true. However, he went from 30 points behind to 15 points behind to now 9 points behind. That’s Hillary’s basic problem: the trend lines show that the long the race goes, she stays stuck at 40% and Obama has gone up, up and up.
I was impressed by Obama’s organization. They walked away from the traditional black Democratic Party “machine” and built their own get out the vote efforts. The real story for me in S.C. is that Obama clearly was the candidate that increased the absolute and relative numbers of voters of all races and incomes through his campaign apparatus.
I’m not sure that Obama will take on Hillary head to head in California and New York. I think he will target congressional districts in those states, hoping to get a share of the delegates. Elsewhere, Obama’s Iowa organization moved to Wisconsin and (another state I can’t remember right now); his New Hampshire organization moved to Delaware and Conn.; his S.C. organization is moving to Georgia and Tenn.; his Nevada organization moved to Arizona and Colorado. He has a separate organization in his delegate rich home state of Illinois.
His goal on Feb. 5 is to avoid a knockout blow, get something like a tie, and rely on the fact that the longer the campaign goes, he seems to do better while Mrs. Clinton is static and/or fading.
From my perspective, the important thing going on now is that only as far back as the first of December, Hillary was leading in the Feb. 5 states by 20-30 percent and now is unlikely to win a majority of the 22 states that will vote or caucus on that date, even if she can pull more delegates.
It’s also important to remember that a very large number of the voters still haven’t “tuned in”, they haven’t paid any attention to politics at all. It’s not being reported, but there are still huge numbers of “undecided” that are not being reflected in the polls. As many as 15% of the voters in Iowa, N.H., NV, and S.C. did not decide until the last 48 hours before the voting. The same is true in all those Feb. 5 states.
Speaking of polls, everyone wanted to know what was wrong with the polls when they were 8% off in N.H., but they were off by an average of 16% in S.C. That’s a function of Obama turning out voters who don’t ordinarily show up to vote in a primary. In 2004, S.C. turned out about 200,000 Democrats but in ’08 almost double that voted, far exceeding all expectations. That’s the on-the-ground organization of the campaigns at work.
Bottom line: never bet on the jury box or the ballot box, ’cause strange things happen.