Ken Obama

It occurred to me this morning, that Senator Barack Obama is a lot like the late Enron founder and CEO Ken Lay. Ken Lay, when you examine his life, was man who seemed to do everything right and best in everything he did. Lay went to the University of Missouri, where he was the president of the Zeta Phi chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. Lay earned a PhD in Economics from the University of Houston, and went on to work at Exxon Mobil. Lay was enormously successful and in short order served as a federal energy regulator and became undersecretary for the Department of the Interior before joining Florida Gas. Lay was experienced and in perfect position to build his new company, originally named Houston Natural Gas but renamed Enron in 1985. Basically, for decades Ken Lay had the golden touch, never putting a foot wrong and succeeding at everything he did.

Until he finally found a situation out of his control. And rather than deal with Reality and accept the damage needed to survive, Lay instead drove the company into the ground all the harder. Lay never meant to hurt anyone, I do believe that. But he did hurt a lot of people, anyway, precisely because he could not deal with a situation out of his control. Lay had never accepted that he could lose at something, and when he was faced with that reality he started lying and cheating, anything to evade the scenario he could not control.

Barack Obama is turning out to be like that, himself. Obama has enjoyed a fortunate role in every major undertaking of his life. His education included the prestigious Punahou Academy, Occidental College in Los Angeles, then Columbia. Immediately upon graduation, Obama was mentored by major political figures in Chicago, and he joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, whose pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became a defining influence for Obama by his own account (prior to his recent run for President). Obama then entered the Harvard Law School, and graduated magna cum laude. Obama was then hired by Miner, Barnhill, & Galland. Obama has been involved in politics since his community activist work in the 1980s, and his volunteer work for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President. Overall, like Ken Lay before him, Barack Obama has worked hard and been tremendously successful at everything he tried, never tasting defeat at all. Obama’s meteoric political rise to the top of the Democratic Party ticket has been nothing short of Enron-like in its speed and scale, given his thin resume and lack of accomplishments. Just a few weeks ago, it seemed that nothing could stop Barack Obama from becoming the next President of the United States.

Enron, however, was never as solid as its image. Accountants inside the company warned of serious, fundamental, problems with the company’s structure and cash flow, warnings that were ignored or out and out quashed. So, when Enron finally came crashing to earth it did so with little hope of financial survivors; even half a decade later, forensic auditors have been largely disappointed in their efforts to find a functional sector or salvageable property or resource. It is now become apparent that the Obama campaign is similarly hollow and rotted-out. Initially, there were some questions about the details of Obama’s policies, and inconsistencies between what Obama had said in different places. Rather than clarify his position and expand on his plans, Obama became evasive, even dismissive. The problem was made worse when Hillary Clinton’s eighteen million supporters demanded he show public respect for her efforts and the historical significance of her campaign. Obama was so busy making sure he got props for his own campaign (which was not, by the way, the first, second, or even third time that a black candidate had run for President), that he spent no real effort at all praising the significance of a major female presidential candidate. Obama then ignored a promise he made to help Clinton clear up campaign debts, and refused to even extend the courtesy of vetting Clinton for the VP nominee short list.

Then McCain tapped Sarah Palin to be his running mate, and the cracks in Obama’s campaign became gaping holes. All those PUMAs Obama insulted and ignored began to rethink their support for the Democrat, and a bunch of women who thought this election had nothing of meaning for them decided that Sarah Palin made their support important.

The collective thought in Hopeychangeland?

“Ooops”.

Or various phrases with similar meanings.

You can learn some things about a person by their triumphs and victories. But you also learn about them, by how they address their mistakes, their setbacks, and their difficult times. John McCain screwed up his first marriage, he’s been very honest about that. But while he and Carol did not remarry, they did reconcile and she is very supportive of him. John McCain lost a bitter primary battle to George W. Bush in 2000. But he and President Bush worked out their differences and are solid allies who respect each other on many issues, even where they disagree. And John McCain spent over five years in a virtual hell, where he was physically and psychologically tortured, but during which time his fellow prisoners have said he was an outstanding leader and symbol of courage. That tells us some important things about John McCain.

Barack Obama has enjoyed many opportunities and advantages in his life, and there’s not a thing wrong in that. But we have not seen how he deals with his mistakes, how Barack Obama handles defeat, or how he faces serious adversity. But we can see what happened when a similar ‘golden boy’, Ken Lay, finally came face to face with something greater than his capabilities; Lay was just not up to the moral challenge.

The funny thing about Lay, is that he left Enron once, in pretty good shape. He came back to it when things were getting bad, and at that time he could have made a difference, when he actually could have saved the company and the investments of so many people.

But he could not handle a crisis of that type and scale, especially since it would have required him to admit that mistakes had been made, and that lies had been told. Instead, Ken Lay tried to cover them up and to protect his buddies. Ken Lay was inadequate to the task. His behavior over the past week indicates that Barack Obama is also inadequate for the role he desires to assume. When he found out that Sarah Palin had been nominated for Vice-President by the Republican Party, in spite of McCain’s congratulations the previous week Obama could not return the favor at first. Obama’s first impulse was to insult and attack, a practice he has repeated over and over again as he falls in the polls. Despite sending lawyers to Alaska to try to dig up something he could use to smear Palin, Obama’s campaign has only found lies and insults to use, and these only work against Obama. The promise of rising above petty bickering has been forgotten as Obama desperately seeks a way to slap down his opponent. Like a bad swimmer drowning in a riptide, Obama becomes more and more frantic in his behavior, first spewing puerile insults, then feigning innocence when called on it. He obsesses with his inability to counter the opposing party’s Vice-presidential nominee to such a degree that he completely ignores the issues and debates between himself and the GOP’s top-ticket nominee. The Democrats can do little more than stand by and watch in despair as their self-anointed Messiah proves no more than just another charlatan. When the test came, for all his expensive suits and crafted speech, Barack Obama was simply unready and ill-suited.

A Poor Attempt at a Poll

The Obama people, I am told, have been much encouraged by the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, pretty much because it is the only major poll right now which shows Barack Obama with the lead.

A one point lead.

With seven percent undecided.

And with an admitted margin of error between 4.7 and 5.0 percent on the major questions.

Further on, the polling group, Hart/Newhouse, tries to claim that the overall margin of error is +/- 3.3%, but the fact is a poll is only as reliable as its largest margin of error. One is left to consider whether Hart/Newhouse does not understand the significance of the math involved, or whether they simply wish to look better than they have done in preparing the poll. At best, they are being sloppy.

That sloppiness continues in the fact that there is no statement of methodology, nor are any of the internal demographics provided, much less the weighting. In terms of credibility, this is a poor effort.

Before looking further, I should note as well that if one visits NBC’s site (as I did to try to find the internals for the poll), the page for “Decision 08” includes a photo of Sarah Palin and the caption ”How many controversies can Sarah Palin’s candidacy survive?”. That, folks, is prima facia evidence that NBC (like MSNBC) is in the tank for Obama. This conclusion is supported by statements from the poll release, like this one from the third paragraph in the spin piece by Mark Murray; “The findings from this survey … are consistent with other recent national polls showing the race to essentially be tied after the conventions and vice presidential selections.”

I have no doubt that Mister Murray would like the race to be tied in all the major polls. But he’s wrong. ABC News and the Washington Post admit McCain is up by 2 points, which is also what CBS News is saying, and Gallup’s Daily Tracking has McCain up by 5 and says he’s been up that much for four days straight. In fact, USA Today and Gallup’s regular poll says that among likely voters, McCain is up by 10 points.

What’s significant about these polls is that all of them show McCain’s campaign as much stronger than before, while Obama has lost some ground. NBC/WSJ has not released a lot of head-to-head polls between Obama and McCain, but in general they have shown support as high as most polls for Obama, while generally suppressing McCain’s numbers relative to other polls. Consequently, if the NBC poll is admitting that McCain is within striking distance, they have admitted that McCain has gained strength compared to their own previous numbers. No NBC poll this year has shown McCain within 1 point of Obama before.

So, in summary, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll should be noted in these respects:

[] They have been consistently anti-McCain relative to other polls released at the same time

[] They have refused to release their internal data and weighting

[] They have made statements in their poll release which are factually incorrect, exhibiting either poor fact-checking or deliberate deceit.

And yet, the Obama campaign can find no better hope for its hype. That is significant, itself.

The Weight Room

I wondered about the way the polls came out in the past week. Maybe I’m just a suspicious type, but from what I could tell, a lot of voters had made up their minds before the conventions, and while I think Sarah Palin is going to make a big difference in the election, I did not expect a lot of voters to come over right away; I figure they want to find out more, first. The reason I say this, is that I found it strange to see poll numbers change so quickly. At least part of the answer, I found, was that the results were spun by fooling around with the weighting.

I visited Real Clear Politics, where I noted the new polls. Looking through them, I found two which provided the details on their party affiliation weighting; ABC News/Washington Post, and CBS News. Here’s how they cast the last two poll results:

ABC News/Washington Post
Sept. 7 (RV)____________Aug. 21 (RV)
McCain : 46%____________43%
Obama : 47%_____________49%
Republicans: 28%________26%
Democrats: 36%__________36%
Independents: 32%_______33%

I ignored “likely voter” results, because CBS News only tracked registered voters, and I wanted as much apples-to-apples as possible.

Demographics from washingtonpost.com (registration required)


CBS News
Sept. 7 (RV)____________Aug. 19 (RV)
McCain: 46%_____________42%
Obama: 44%______________45%
Republicans: 30.6%______28.8%
Democrats: 36.8%________36.3%
Independents: 32.5%_____35.0%


Both polls increased the weight of Republicans in the new poll. Should it surprise anyone then, that McCain’s numbers improved?

Let’s play a little game to show how this works. Working back the numbers, it appears that the following matrices of support can be shown using the data provided:

ABC News/Washington Post
August 21 (26% Rep, 36% Dem, 33% Ind)
Republicans: 7% Obama, 88% McCain
Democrats: 87% Obama, 8% McCain
Independents: 49% Obama, 51% McCain
TALLY – 49.31% Obama, 42.59% McCain

September 7 (28% Rep, 36% Dem, 32% Ind)
Republicans: 5% Obama, 92% McCain
Democrats: 87% Obama, 8% McCain
Independents: 46% Obama, 53% McCain
TALLY – 47.44% Obama, 45.60% McCain


CBS News
August 19 (28.8% Rep, 36.3% Dem, 35.0% Ind)
Republicans: 3% Obama, 87% McCain
Democrats: 84% Obama, 4% McCain
Independents: 40% Obama, 45% McCain
TALLY – 45.356% Obama, 42.258% McCain

September 7(30.6% Rep, 36.8% Dem, 32.5% Ind)
Republicans: 3% Obama, 93% McCain
Democrats: 84% Obama, 4% McCain
Independents: 38% Obama, 49% McCain
TALLY – 44.180% Obama, 45.855% McCain

I would point out that I am not making those numbers up – they come from actual poll internals I have been reading, and for this exercise you can see that if you plug them into the weights, you get the results published, more or less. Now, let’s take the average weighting of the four weights used, and apply it consistently, and then let’s see what happens to the published results:

[averaged weighting 28.35% Rep, 36.0275% Dem, 33.125% Ind]

ABC News/Washington Post
August 21, 49-43 Obama becomes 50-45 Obama
September 7, 47-46 Obama becomes 48-47 Obama

CBS News
August 19, 45-42 Obama becomes 44-41 Obama
September 7, 46-44 McCain becomes 44-44 tie.

This is not to say that these ‘revised’ numbers reflect a more accurate picture of voter support, but it does show that changing the party affiliation weighting can have a significant effect on the published results, especially in the headline which is all that most people read.

The problem with the weighting used in these and other polls, is that there is no science behind the weighting assigned to party identification. ABC/WaPo and CBS are just using whatever affiliation weighting they want to use, on no basis other than they chose to plug in that number. That’s fine for fooling around with the settings on a video game when you just want to have some fun, but it is hardly credible for a - purportedly - professional group to do this sort of thing. This kind of squirrelling around with internal controls on a poll is one reason, I think, why polls are so fragmented. I mean, Gallup does its own polls but also teamed up with USA Today. CBS News hires an agency for its own polls, but cooperates with the New York Times for a different poll. Disagreement on key demographic questions would explain that behavior, I think. I had a nice private discussion with one of Gallup’s executives back in 2004, and he agreed that the party identification problem is one of the big three for polling groups, largely because there is no consensus on what weighting should be used. Call me silly, but the best metric I have found to use, is the actual voter preferences from national elections.

In 2006, the National Exit Poll showed that 38% of voters considered themselves Democrats, 36% considered themselves Republicans, and 26% considered themselves Independent or supporting another party.

In 2004, the National Exit Poll showed that 37% of voters considered themselves Democrats, 37% considered themselves Republicans, and 26% considered themselves Independent or supporting another party.

In 2002, the National Exit Poll showed that 39% of voters considered themselves Democrats, 38% considered themselves Republicans, and 23% considered themselves Independent or supporting another party.

In 2000, the National Exit Poll showed that 39% of voters considered themselves Democrats, 35% considered themselves Republicans, and 27% considered themselves Independent or supporting another party.

In 1998, the National Exit Poll showed that 39% of voters considered themselves Democrats, 33% considered themselves Republicans, and 28% considered themselves Independent or supporting another party.

Those numbers look rather consistent to me, suggesting we could take an average of the last ten years of elections and get a practical idea of what to expect. Here’s how that shaped up:

Democrats: From 37 to 39 percent, average over the last ten years is 38.4%
Republicans: From 35 to 38 percent, average over the last ten years is 35.8%
Independents: From 23 to 28 percent, average over the last ten years is 26.0%


These numbers come from actual election exit polls from verified voters, and they demonstrate consistency over a decade of choice. They demonstrate that change does occur, but in small amounts and over time. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans should fear becoming a weak party anytime soon, nor should they fool themselves into thinking that their opponents are about to become irrelevant.

I cannot resist, however, applying these standardized party affiliations from known elections to the ABC/WaPo and CBS polls. Here’s how that worked out:

ABC News/Washington Post
August 21: 49-43 Obama original report. Historical weights indicate 49-48 Obama.
September 7: 47-46 Obama original report. Historical weights indicate 50-47 McCain .

CBS News
August 19: 45-42 Obama original report. Historical weights indicate 44-44 tie.
September 7: 46-44 McCain original report. Historical weights indicate 48-43 McCain.

I’m not saying you should count on those numbers, but I do think there’s better evidence for them.

The History of Bounce

Once again, I went trekking to one of my favorite archives, the records at Gallup for poll results during Presidential elections. There were no pre-convention poll results available for 1936 and 1940, so I had to begin with 1944. But there are some interesting numbers to look at, in terms of what value a post-convention “bounce” has for a candidate. The polls are for pre-both conventions, and after both conventions.


1944: Pre-conventions FDR 47, Dewey 45
Post-conventions FDR 47, Dewey 45
[ no bounce ]
Election result FDR 53.4%, Dewey 45.9%


1948: Pre-Conventions Dewey 49, Truman 38
Post-conventions Dewey 48, Truman 37
[ no bounce ]
Election result Truman 49.6%, Dewey 45.1%


1952: Pre-Conventions Eisenhower 59, Stevenson 31
Post-Conventions Eisenhower 50, Stevenson 43
[ Stevenson 21 point bounce ]
Election result Eisenhower 55.2%, Stevenson 44.3%


1956: Pre-Conventions Eisenhower 61, Stevenson 37
Post-Conventions Eisenhower 54, Stevenson 41
[ Stevenson 11 point bounce ]
Election result Eisenhower 57.4%, Stevenson 41.2%


1960: Pre-Conventions JFK 50, Nixon 44
Post-Conventions JFK 47, Nixon 47
[ Nixon 6 point bounce ]
Election result JFK 49.7%, Nixon 49.6%


1964: Pre-Conventions Johnson 76, Goldwater 20 (yes, 20 percent support)
Post-Conventions Johnson 65, Goldwater 32
[ Goldwater 23 point bounce ]
Election result Johnson 61.0%, Goldwater 38.5%


1968: Pre-Conventions Nixon 40, Humphrey 38
Post-Conventions Nixon 43, Humphrey 28
[ Nixon 13 point bounce ]
Election result Nixon 43.4%, Humphrey 42.7%


1972: Pre-Conventions Nixon 53, McGovern 37
Post-Conventions Nixon 61, McGovern 33
[ Nixon 12 point bounce ]
Election result Nixon 60.7%, McGovern 37.5%


1976: Pre-Conventions Carter 53, Ford 36
Post-Conventions Carter 51, Ford 40
[ Ford 6 point bounce ]
Election result Carter 50.1%, Ford 48.0%


1980: Pre-Conventions Reagan 37, Carter 34
Post-Conventions Reagan 39, Carter 38
[ Carter 2 point bounce ]
Election result Reagan 50.8%, Carter 41.0%


1984: Pre-Conventions Reagan 53, Mondale 39
Post-Conventions Reagan 56, Mondale 37
[ Reagan 5 point bounce ]
Election result Reagan 58.8%, Mondale 40.6%


1988: Pre-Conventions Dukakis 47, GH Bush 41
Post-Conventions GH Bush 48, Dukakis 44
[ GHW Bush 10 point bounce ]
Election result GH Bush 53.4%, Dukakis 45.7%


1992: Pre-Conventions Clinton 56, GH Bush 36
Post-Conventions Clinton 51, GH Bush 42
[ GHW Bush 11 point bounce ]
Election result Clinton 43.0%, GH Bush 37.5%


1996: Pre-Conventions Clinton 53, Dole 36
Post-Conventions Clinton 53, Dole 37
[ Dole 1 point bounce ]
Election result Clinton 49.2%, Dole 40.7%


2000: Pre-Conventions Gore 47, GW Bush 46
Post-Conventions Gore 47, GW Bush 45
[ Gore 1 point bounce ]
Election result GW Bush 47.9%, Gore 48.4%

2004: Pre-Conventions Kerry 49, GW Bush 47
Post-Conventions Kerry 48, GW Bush 47
[ GW Bush 1 point bounce ]
Election result GW Bush 50.8%, Kerry 48.3%


2008: Pre-Conventions Obama 45, McCain 45
Post-Conventions McCain 48, Obama 45
[ McCain 3 point bounce ]


Looking at these results, the following observations may be made:

In the sixteen elections for President between 1944 and 2004, in twelve of the sixteen the candidate leading after the conventions won the election. The conventions gave the aggregate bounce to the candidate who lost the election nine times, to the winner twice, and there was no aggregate bounce on two occasions. The 1988 election is the only time in the sixteen elections that the candidate who was trailing before the conventions went on to take the lead after the conventions on a bounce, and go on to win the general election. Of the nine times where the losing candidate enjoyed the best convention bounce, in six elections the trailing candidate was 17 points or more behind in the polls before the elections, and the bounce simply tightened the race. On average, the candidate leading in the polls after the conventions enjoyed election results 2.3 points higher than his poll support after the conventions, while the trailing candidate enjoyed election results 2.9 points higher than his poll support after the conventions.

Gallup was used exclusively for this examination, because only Gallup has consistent public results dating back to 1944, and only Gallup has maintained the same polling methodology for all of its election polling. When other poll agencies are similarly complete and consistent, I plan to start using their results as well.

UPDATE - What does it all mean?

Blogger does not let me attach Excel charts, which is a shame, because the graphic track is interesting. What happens on that track for the most part, is the candidate who wins the election tends to have strong (48%+) support during the end run of the race, while the loser, well, he is either far behind or slipping in his support (meaning he would have to spend a lot of effort shoring up his base). Timing is critical, in other words, and peaking too early really does kill your campaign.

Of course, I have to throw in some caveats. For a reasonable level of confidence, you really need 32 or more samples of data, and this gives only half that many, and there are a number of apparent outliers already. Truman appeared to come from way behind in 1948 to win, the only such case of the sixteen elections examined here. Also, 1944 and 1948 showed no apparent bounce from the conventions, but the 14 elections after them all showed a bounce effect. In most elections, the candidate ahead when the conventions began won the election, but in 2000 and 2004 the election winner was behind in the polls both before and after the conventions. It is all but impossible to know if there is significance this year in McCain's sudden lead after the convention, the first time since 1988 that a candidate went into the party conventions trailing but came out from the conventions with a clear lead.

Christians and Politics

Yesterday, my family and I went shopping, and in the parking lot of a superstore we passed a car with a bumper sticker which read, “Who Would Jesus Torture?” Like so many bumper stickers, this one was a trite attempt to suggest that Christians who support the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are hypocrites. I could have written a lengthy article on why the bumper sticker was itself hypocritical and malicious, but there is a larger, more important issue to be examined here – the political character of the Christian in the United States.

Lately, it has become fashionable for Liberals to pretend that Jesus Christ would prefer Barack Obama to John McCain. In so far as everyone has a right to make their case and have an opinion that is fine, but when someone who is not a practicing Christian decides that they have the authority to speak for the Master who warned ”My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), they show a disappointing arrogance which cheapens their position. Also, there are dozens of significant denominations, and each holds strong beliefs which differ in various ways from other associations; the idea that a single political opinion on a controversial question would be monolithically held through all Christian churches betrays a simplistic and biased view of the Christian mind. Further, the American character of Christianity is distinct from the rest of the faith; not better or worse because of its differences, but ignoring those differences is to ignore History. American Christians have often taken stronger positions than other Christians on political issues, though in the main the decision has always been individual, not so much institutional. And in the past generation, those religious “leaders” who demand a specific political stance from their denomination have more and more been those individuals whose work has been almost exclusively political, and thoroughly lacking in pastoral acts of charity and, well, feeding their flock.

I have studied the Scriptures extensively, and from what I see it is very difficult to find a political position that is perfectly, hmm, ”Christ-like”. Take war, for example. Jesus is known colloquially as the “Prince of Peace”, and Scripture tells us that he warned His disciples, that “all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” (Matthew 26:52). Yet it is also written that when a Roman Centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant, Jesus not only did so, but strongly praised the faith of the Centurion (Matthew 8:5-13). What’s more, there is not a single verse in the Bible where a soldier is condemned or war itself is condemned. There are verses, actually, which suggest the Lord thinks well of honest soldiers (e.g. Exodus 15:3, Deuteronomy 20:1, Judges 3:10, Judges 6:12, Revelation 19:11). That is not to say that God thinks war is always a good thing, or even usually a good thing. But it is a fact of this world that wars happen, and that good men have to fight in them. From there, reasonable people can differ about the decision to go to war, or the decisions made by leaders. But it is plainly arrogant to claim that Christ sides with your own political position, especially if you are not a practicing Christian.

There are a lot of issues like that, where there is no clear political position which a person can properly say God advocates. It’s easy to rip out something you found in the Bible that seems to say what you want, but in many of those cases the actual context of the Scripture is less obvious, especially given twenty centuries or so between the time they were written and today.

Both major political parties have been guilty at one time or another with playing the ’God likes me better’ card. From where I sit, it may play out to a temporary advantage, but for the tens of millions of Christians who do their level best every day to walk in Christ’s teachings, it mocks who we are and what we stand for. It’s fine if you hold different beliefs from me and honestly express your own opinion, although I may say that I think you are wrong. But if you try to pretend that a faith you don’t even believe in teaches morality according to your political position, that is simply lying arrogance. And it’s not fooling the people you think it is.

The Palin Trump Card: TURNOUT

Howard Dean almost made history in 2004. While John Kerry just plain fumbled the opportunity handed to him, Dean’s fund-raising and grassroots registration and turnout drives were spectacularly successful. Over 58 million Americans voted for Kerry-Edwards in the presidential election, an amazing success for the campaign’s workers and planners. President Bush, however, claimed over 62 million votes, on the strength of a similarly epic turnout effort. The 2004 election turned on many points of decision, but in effective terms both parties knew they had to maximize their turnout.

Fast forward to today. Rasmussen Reports (whom I distrust to some degree, because they do not reveal all of their methodology and weighting rationale to the media, bloggers, or academics) released a poll showing Barack Obama leading John McCain by 2 points, 48% to 46%. The race is statistically tied, says Rasmussen. Looking more closely, however, I noticed how Rasmussen has weighted the respondent pool, with 39.7% weighted as Democrats, 32.1% as Republicans, and 28.2% as unaffiliated.

The significance of this weighting is that, as I have warned before, it is not based on any established statistical record or census report. Instead, Rasmussen does what it calls “dynamic weighting”. What they do, by their own admission, is to establish “baseline targets” for party affiliation by reviewing “survey interviews with a sample of adults nationwide completed during the preceding three months”. When translated into English, Rasmussen is admitting that they use the results from previous polls to weight their new polls, even though this is - by definition – circular logic and is invalid for any poll which is authentically using pure RDD methodology in its respondent contact procedure (that is, a pure random method of contacting people means that you have near-absolute certainty that you are not calling anyone from prior polls, and therefore there is no connection between your present and former respondent pool except that they meet the defined criteria, and therefore conditions of the former do not influence the conditions of the present). Rasmussen has no effective basis for claiming the party affiliation in its polls, as a result of its invalid system. This happens a lot with polling groups, but it is a critical factor in the results they report, and as such I must warn the readers regularly about this practice. While no proven scientific method exists to track and report party affiliation between elections, the reader should at least expect a consistent ratio to be used, and for polling groups to obtain the basis of party weighting using outside and objective sources for their party identification data.

So anyway, using Rasmussen’s made-up affiliation numbers, we see that if Rasmussen’s poll is correct and if 39.7% of the voters are really Democrats, 32.1% of the voters are really Republicans, and 28.2% are really unaffiliated, then Obama-Biden has the support of 46 to 50 percent of the people responding to the poll, while McCain-Palin has the support of 44 to 48 percent of the people responding. But suppose that more than 39.7% of the voters are Democrats? What if more than 32.1% of the voters are Republicans? From my experience, I can say that self-identified Democrats and Republicans are much more likely to vote than people without a party affiliation. And what if some factor or issue makes some voters of a certain party affiliation stay home? That’s happened before you know, it hurt Bush I in 1992 and Humphrey in 1968, and there’s more than a few groups which have said earlier that they would sit at home this fall. Not too many people have talked about it recently, and the ones who did seemed to assume they were not problems anymore, but McCain had to worry about hard-line conservatives, while Obama had to worry about Hillary’s army. McCain needed to assure folks that his age and health were not reasons to doubt his ability, while Obama needed to assure folks that he had the judgment to make good executive decisions, even if his record up to now was empty. McCain needed to show Republicans he stood for the party’s ideals, and to show independents that he was a different man from George Bush. Obama needed to show Democrats he was a man able to accomplish their goals, while proving to the nation his claim to be able to reach across the aisle. There are a lot of folks with reasons to walk away from the election, and to doubt the claims of the nominees from either party. Victory may well come down to which party best retains its existing active support, and beings back its doubters.

That brings us to Sarah Palin. John McCain picked Palin to be his running mate after Barack Obama chose Joe Biden to be his VP nominee. Biden was essentially the “safe” pick, meant to shore up Obama’s clear deficiencies in foreign policy and resume depth. Hillary Clinton was an obvious choice for VP, but the Obama campaign clearly worried about whether Clinton would remain an ally after November, and the campaign could be embarassed if Clinton had publicly declined the post, as some rumored she would do. And because the Obama campaign depended so heavily on Barack Obama’s personal charisma, there was no effective way the VP pick could expect to retrieve those voters that were not already attracted to Obama.

Things were much different for McCain. The threat of mainline Republicans staying home was a serious problem; even the likelihood that they would vote for him but withhold campaign support for registration and GOTV drives could seriously damage McCain in key battleground states. McCain therefore needed a running mate who would strongly appeal to the conservatives, yet not alienate the other key GOP candidates from the primaries. McCain needed someone with the skills to step into the role of President if it became necessary, ideally someone familiar with the executive roles and with energy experience. Also, McCain was clearly chasing Obama in overall support, and needed a VP pick who would energize his supporters and create media interest in his campaign. In terms of strategy, McCain wanted a running mate who would increase the level of turnout his campaign could expect in November, who would be able to retain and protect gains he had made in recent months, and whose skills would complement his own. The selection of Sarah Palin proved a near-perfect response to those needs. Palin’s solid credentials as a conservative went a long way to satisfy demands from conservatives who worried McCain would be less like Ronald Reagan and more like Gerald Ford. Her accomplishments as a woman may not attract great numbers of Clinton supporters away from Obama, but those who had already defected to McCain are now more inclined to stay as his supporters. But more to the point, a huge demographic has opened for McCain-Palin, one which has been largely ignored by Barack Obama. In choosing Palin, McCain has taken advantage of yet another Obama blunder.

Palin’s credentials also directly undercut Obama’s claims to quality judgment and executive qualification. Even as Obama’s supporters tried to ridicule Palin’s experience as a mayor and governor, the scale of her accomplishments demonstrates that Obama and Biden, even put together, have effectively no executive experience of any kind, and worse, were unaware of that fact. Biden has shown that he does not understand the difference between committee experience in the Senate, and executive decisions made by a head of state, while Obama lamely tried to claim that running for President counted as executive experience (rather like saying that applying for a job means you have experience in it!).

This election, like 2004, will be decided by turnout, by which party convinces the most folks not only to like their candidates, but also to register and really, truly, go out and vote when the time comes. Sarah Palin is a trump card for which Obama-Biden simply has no answer.

Vetting

I am amazed sometimes, how well American businesses do. This is because the more I learn, from my career and from my graduate coursework, the more I realize that the average business, American or otherwise, is not planned, not effectively organized, and often seeks goals that make no sense. Yet an amazing number of businesses are successful in spite of all that. It’s because if you have the right idea and work hard at it, you can succeed without having to be perfect. That is the message I want to make regarding the vetting of Sarah Palin. Some mistakes were made although in the main the job was done right, her enemies (including the media being incredibly obvious in its partisan support for Obama) have posed outright lies and smears in their attempts to attack her, and in the end the American people will figure out well enough who she is and what she stands for.

John McCain had a while to decide who he wanted for his running mate, just as Barack Obama had several weeks to make his decision. Both campaigns started with a blank sheet of paper, because the person they’d want for their VP selection would depend at least in part on the issues and conditions of the moment, which could not be foreseen. Let’s begin with how Barack Obama chose Joe Biden for his running mate, The International Herald-Tribune’ who calls themselves the ‘Global Edition of the New York Times’, is about as pro-Obama a media outlet as one could hope to find. They published an account of Biden’s vetting on August 24, in which the paper reports that “his top advisers made a concerted effort not to disclose how he made his choice”, that ”Obama reached the decision … while on a weeklong vacation to Hawaii. That week, Biden's strengths in foreign policy were highlighted by the conflict between Russia and Georgia, giving his prospects a further boost”, showing that current events were a critical factor in the decision. The paper further observes that ”Biden had some powerful patrons in his corner whose opinions Obama respected, like Rendell; Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the House Democratic caucus; and Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts”. So, while Obama’s team made a great noise about Biden’s qualifications, the NYT-styled paper makes clear that Biden was primarily chosen to support an area where Obama saw a potential weak point, that Biden gained the top spot in large part because he had powerful friends in the Democratic Party, and that “what kind of partner I'm getting” was an essential choice. Few details about the actual vetting were released, except that the paper noted that ”the vetting team sorted through Biden's financial statements, political statements and medical records”.

Now, with that in place, the decision to select Sarah Palin may properly be considered and the lies from the Left dispelled through Obama’s own standards. Senator Obama’s campaign has admitted he decided on Biden as his running mate very soon before announcing the choice. That makes sense to me, but it blows apart the claim by some that McCain made a “last-minute” choice on Palin, especially since he made the announcement the week before the GOP convention even began. Lie number one shot down. Obama chose Biden for his foreign policy experience, a logical reason. But that means that choosing a female governor with a high approval rating in her state and a history of fighting against corruption is just as logical for McCain. The idea that McCain was acting emotionally or rashly is just lie number two, and it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Obama chose Biden because he was politically popular with a lot of Democrats, including the union base Obama needs. That makes sense, but of course that makes it reasonable for McCain to choose a VP nominee who is wildly popular with conservatives, whose life experience and personal character are well-suited to attract women voters and independents. So the lie that Palin is less valid than Biden for what she brings to the campaign also goes quickly down in flames.

Frankly, the Left has gotten pretty desperate in trying to find something to use against Palin. We’re told she’s “under investigation”, but the people who started that slimy rumor leave off that the situation was one in which Palin’s family was threatened, and the investigation has no statutory support for any potential action against Palin – it’s purely political, which makes all the more sense when people find out that Palin fought against corrupt officials in both parties in Alaska, and reformers often make political enemies. We’re told that news people going door to door in Alaska can’t find anyone who was asked about Palin, but that’s because vetting does not work that way. No one asked door-to-door in Delaware to see if Obama’s people chased down Biden’s old teachers or people he went to school with – that’s just another lie because the media knew they were misleading folks in how they portrayed the process. What is happening is what we have seen before, what we have to expect – the MSM has chosen a team, and objectivity be damned. Ironically, that won’t help them, and it could hurt their well-dressed if empty idol, Barack Obama.

If the media treated Sarah Palin the way way that they have treated Joe Biden, then it would be up to Palin to prove she was up to the challenge. Fluff just cannot be mistaken for muscle after a certain amount of time, and facades always fall when the wind blows. But it is a lie, and a stupid one, to pretend that Palin has not been vetted. As Bill Kristol pointed out last night, “The McCain campaign vetted Sarah Palin to the satisfaction of John McCain. He nominated her as his running mate. She is the governor of Alaska. She was vetted by the voters of Alaska”. Fred Barnes pointed out the lies as well, saying “I have been keeping a list of the things that the media has come out with, at least some parts of it that turned out to be wrong, including [the] thing about the Independence party. She wasn't a member there, she was a Republican the whole time. She didn't back Pat Buchanan. She was vetted. When you read how thoroughly she was vetted, I am sorry they missed the House Speaker, but I think they hit everybody else up there. They spent days and days up and interviewed her for a long time.”

Three facts have become obvious in the last few days about Sarah Palin:

1. She was properly vetted.

2. She does change the calculus of the election.

3. Judging from the reaction in the media and the Obama campaign, Joe Biden should be as worried as a moose in season.

Weighting and Other Poll Controversies

I have always found opinion polls to be fascinating, and yet I often mistrust the way in which polls are built and their results reported. It also occurs to me, that most folks do not really understand polling as a science, and so take it as, well, the political version of a horoscope. When I extrapolate that to the election, it explains quite a lot of just how some folks vote, but that’s beside the point for here. What I want to do today, is to explain just how it is that someone can take the opinions of a few to portray the opinion of the many, and what factors are the most influential in how a poll’s results are reported.

Let’s say you want to know how a group of a thousand people are likely to vote on an issue, say shareholders considering a potential merger with another company. If you ask one person, you will get one opinion, and that opinion would obviously represent 1/1000th or 0.1% of the group, so while you might be interested in that person’s opinion, you would not take it as a solid indicator of how the whole group feels. But at the same time, you really don’t want to have to ask all one thousand people, just to get an idea of what they would say now. If you ask a second person, you have still only addressed 0.2% of the whole, but at the same time your respondent pool has doubled in size and therefore increased in accuracy. To put it another way, let’s say that 665 of the 1,000 people would vote in favor of a proposed merger. It’s possible that you might get through all 335 people opposed to the merger before you get to anyone in favor of it, which would falsely indicate strong opposition, but if you make sure your queries are random, you are likely to start approaching a representative sample by the time you get to just ten people. Why? The key is partly how many people you ask – if you do it right, each person who answers your question lowers the statistical probability of error in your result by a relevant factor, a factor determined by the proportion of your respondent pool but also by the category of interest. In the example of the stockholders, for example, regional location, length of experience with the company, and preference for stock price or dividends might be relevant to how they would vote. That is, all of the stockholders who prefer a higher stock value to a higher dividend payment would be likely to vote the same way on the merger decision, and so the opinion of a relative few who have similar characteristics can reasonably represent the opinion of everyone in their group. Therefore, if the respondent pool includes a proportional representation of the whole population concerned, then statistically the small group may be expected to reflect the larger group’s opinion in scale. Over the course of the last seventy years, polling groups have found that once a respondent pool reaches eight hundred or more, the margin of error in a national contest is generally below four percent, meaning that in a two-candidate race the polling results for the candidate is within a four-point radius; if ‘A’ and ‘B’ poll at 42% and 48%, for example, A’s true level of support could actually be anywhere from 38 to 46 percent, while B could be anywhere from 44 percent to 52 percent in support. Frankly, in most elections this margin of error means that no clear message can or should be taken in terms of who is winning or by how much. The poll, however, is a valid tool for measuring development of support, when the questions and methodology used in the poll are consistent, and when the weighting used is consistent with Census norms.

This brings us back to weighting. By now it should be obvious that the weighting of a poll is critical to its determination. For example, let’s say you have a poll with exactly one thousand respondents. However, you have 700 Whites responding, with 150 Asians, 100 Hispanics, and 250 Blacks. The 2000 US Census reports that the racial breakdown is 71.6% White, 12.3% Black, 12.5% Hispanic, and 3.6% Asian. To match these demographic statistics, the polling data would then be weighted in the following manner:

The results from White respondents would be divided by 70.0 then multiplied by 71.6;
The results from Black respondents would be divided by 25.0 then multiplied by 12.3;
The results from Hispanic respondents would be divided by 10.0 then multiplied by 12.5; and
The results from Asian respondents would be divided by 15.0 then multiplied by 3.6.

This, of course, is only the racial weighting. Similar actions would be taken to adjust the statistical values of male and female responses to match Census norms, and responses would also be adjusted to match other relevant demographics, like age, geographic location, education, job category, military experience, and so on. The intent is to create an image aligned as correctly with the national model as much as possible. The problem, of course, is that every national poll is therefore manipulated to some degree.

There are three key problems to weighting polls. First, polls are driven by budget and time constraints, and as a result the weighting is often generalized, and not by the same method in each case. Some political polls, for example, start their age category with a broad “18-34” category, while others use a more narrow “18-24” or even “18-22” category to show college-age support. Worse, the range values sometimes fluctuate even by the same polling group, so that consistent methodology is lost, making the poll significantly less valid. Next, some polls have been known to fudge their weighting to match a different standard than the last Census. CBS and the New York Times, for example, have often ignored Census norms in favor of some arbitrary measure, which also violates the standard used in legitimate polling. And then there are the categories which defy clear definition. Almost no two major polls agree exactly, about what proportions of Republican and Democrat and Independent respondent should be used. Part of this is the fact that many states do not register political affiliation, and therefore the federal Census does not break down the population by party affiliation. So far, that doesn’t really bother me, except that the reader had better be aware that different polling groups will use different proportions in the way they weight political responses, because even though there is no official and firm balance of Republican-to-Democrat-to-Independent-to-Something Else, polls do indeed weight poll responses according to their party affiliation,. What’s worse, some of them will change the proportions from time to time, on no evidence beyond their belief that the mood has changed. This, of course, immediately invalidates the poll as an indicator of growing or lessening strength of support.

A poll is a useful indicator of trends and individual development of support by a candidate, provided the standards, methodology, and weighting remain constant. Otherwise, an opinion is absolutely worthless. Caveat Emptor, and then some.

Obama Says Palin's Family Off-Limits

"Let me be as clear as possible," Obama said. "I think people's families are off-limits, and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president."

Obama said reporters should "back off these kinds of stories" and noted that he was born to an 18-year-old mother.

"How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics, and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that's off-limits."

Good for Obama. I can't help but wonder how many of his trolls will trash the Palin family anyway, even after their leader has made it clear that they are out of bounds.

How Polls Work – And How They Do Not Work

In an earlier article, a reader noted that he was suspicious of CNN’s “Poll of Polls”. Frankly, he was right to do so. What CNN, Real Clear Politics, and other media outlets do, is to take poll releases from various polling groups in a certain time range, and aggregate them to find a sort of consensus. That is a very bad idea, however, if your intention is to accurately reflect the opinion of the general public. It’s a bit like saying that if you take everyone’s favorite version of spaghetti and mix them all together, you will get a really great-tasting batch of spaghetti. The odds are you will get a mess which won’t be worth the effort, and that’s what happens when you mix poll results. Polls, it should be noted, are the product of the groups and agencies which create them, and reflect a specific methodology which is usually similar to that used by other polling groups, but not exactly. That difference is why the two results cannot be mixed with confidence, and the more polls that are mixed, the less reliable would be the resulting report. Polls are best described as snapshots of opinion on one question at one specific point in time and place, not even movies much less reality. An example of this can be seen by looking at the most reliable of agencies, the Gallup Organization.

On August 24, Gallup showed Obama and McCain tied at 45% support each (with 10% undecided). But three days later, Gallup showed Obama with a six-point lead, 48% to 42%, and today Obama still leads by six points, 49% to 43%. The Gallup people seem to be claiming that Obama has increased his support while McCain has lost some. However, a look at the history of convention “bounces” would warn against making such an assumption. If history holds true, for example, McCain should enjoy a similar “bounce” after the GOP convention, yet this would not be a valid indicator of a stronger campaign, necessarily, but merely the effect of the focus from the convention. Even within the stable methodology of a well-respected poll, therefore, it is not valid to assume that changes in polling are necessarily indicators of a weaker or stronger election position.

With that said, it is important to consider other polling results. An August 30 release from Zogby, for instance, shows McCain at 47% support and Obama at 45%, at the same time that Gallup showed Obama ahead by six and holding steady support. How can two major polls say different things? Well, part of it is the fact that the variance between the polls is only eight points, which is equivalent to a four-point margin of error between them. If either poll had a respondent pool of 500 people or less, that disparity is within the standard deviation for such polling. That’s the mathematical point. What else needs to be considered, is that even where the same polling group takes polls, because of the randomness of the respondent pool, this means by definition that the people in different polls are not the same ones who answered the earlier poll, and even when conditions are the same and the same careful rules are applied, different people will probably produce different results. Also, as I have noted before, there is a clear bias in favor of or against the people in focus of polls by the polling groups. As a result, a composite of poll results cannot, by its character, produce an accurate or trustworthy result. At best, one of the polls might accurately reflect the opinion at that moment, but even if that is the case, mixing the results from all polls would only insure that the aggregate result was wrong to some degree.

Polls are not effective predictors of elections. The losing candidates of many past general and primary campaigns can point to any number of polls which indicated they would win. A candidate who trusts polls to indicate the precise amount and nature of their public support, is following the path of Tom Dewey. That is not to say, however, that polling is worthless. When a poll follows consistent methodology and asks consistent questions, and weights its demographics according to Census norms and the National Council on Public Polls standards (or the AAPOR), the results can be applied to illustrate trends and voter interest in key issues. Also, while the public is familiar with the polls which get published in their newspapers and favorite news sites, it should be noted that both the Obama and McCain campaigns have paid for private polling firms to identify target demographics and battleground states. Obama has spent almost 19 million dollars on private polling, while McCain has spent about 770 thousand dollars. It would fair to assume, I think, that these agencies are far more detailed in their questions and specific in their target demographics. So it may also be assumed from the amount of money spent, that there is significant confidence in the value of effective polling. The real question, as yet uncertain in its answer, is how to know which questions, which method, and which weighting is valid for the real condition.

Timing

John McCain out-planned Barack Obama. That is the summary of what happened this last week. Senator Obama apparently planned on the normal course of events as he prepared for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. He made a number of assumptions along the way, assumptions which were apparent enough that McCain was able to use them in his own planning. Obama assumed, for example, that a few symbolic gestures would mollify Hillary and her supporters, and that in a short matter of time he would have all but a few of them under his banner, ideally working for his election but at least not working against him. He assumed that McCain would stay out his way during that week, and that he would have not only the convention time but also the weekend after to enjoy the glow of a successful run to the nomination. He assumed that the media, which has been overwhelmingly in his corner all through the year, would make sure the spotlight stayed on Obama. On all three assumptions, Senator McCain took advantage of errors by Obama and played them to his own advantage.

McCain understood that the race was close, but that Obama’s nomination would likely give him a “bounce”, in real terms boosting his lead and making it more and more difficult for McCain to look to undecided voters as someone who could win. Therefore, McCain needed to do something unexpected, something which proved him a viable candidate. Part of this was accomplished through Obama’s double-fumble in selecting his running mate. First, Obama not only did not choose Hillary Clinton for his VP spot, an understandable choice and it is quite unlikely that she would have accepted the offer anyway, but Obama failed to vet her for the short list, and in so doing displayed a lack of respect to Hillary’s 18 million supporters. While it is true that for the most part, those voters will come around and vote for Obama anyway, some will sit out the election because of the way Clinton was treated, and some had already warned they would swing support over to McCain in 2008, in order to give Clinton the best opportunity for 2012. The second fumble was Obama’s selection of Biden, a move which is tactically foolish, because it effectively highlights Obama’s own limitations while gaining nothing among undecided voters. This left the door open for McCain to make significant gains through his own choice, an opportunity which would have been far smaller if Obama had handled his side of the aisle better than he did.

The selection of Sarah Palin is brilliant to a far greater degree than it is risky. Analysis of her credentials has already shown Palin to be strong in many areas, and what areas of weakness she has is matched to a more serious degree on the Democrats’ side. Choosing Palin will probably not win over additional Clinton supporters, but that was not the object – what matters is that McCain has not lost any ground with the Clinton supporters he already held, something the Obama camp is not mentioning, indeed he may not yet understand that fact. The timing of the Palin selection is also significant, having destroyed the Obama publicity campaign intended for this weekend. All the talk is about Palin. And the media, while it leans left most of the time, is now as it always was, about the big story, and Palin is simply a much bigger story than Biden ever could be.

The move is not yet complete, however. McCain gambled a bit of his own attention this week. Hurricane Gustav could steal some attention away from the GOP convention, especially as there is no suspense left about who will be in the VP slot. Having played the first half so well, it remains to be seen how well McCain has planned the second half of the convention operettas.

High Stakes Veeping

Wow, what a situation. In the last day, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have taken themselves out of the running for McCain’s running mate, and a lot of buzz has started up – again - about Governor Sarah Palin. The trouble is, there are now reports that she’s still in Alaska and the only guy from the field in the vicinity of John McCain is his old buddy, Joe Lieberman.

It’s difficult to imagine a vaster gulf between the two, in the effect they would have on the election. Palin would be a breath-taking choice, a masterful stroke which would be likely to reinvigorate McCain’s campaign and make Obama-Biden look dusty and old just a couple days after it kicked off. It would demonstrate bold leadership and an ability to simultaneously firm up the base and attract a lot of the Hillary supporters still angry at their shameful treatment by the Obama camp. If McCain chooses Lieberman, however, he would do just the opposite, burning bridges with groups he desperately needs in order to win, while doing effectively nothing to attract new support. Choosing Lieberman would prove McCain to be the doddering, out of touch man that Obama’s people say he is. This choice could single-handedly prove Obama right and advance his campaign, or prove McCain’s ability to make bold and unprecedented decisions which move things forward. We will know in a little while whether McCain has been a fool or brilliant, but this is a real high-stakes decision, either way.

Poll Bias 2008: What the Numbers Say

Back in 2004, I determined a general measure of bias in the Presidential election by polls. I did the same thing for this year, which may be useful in examining the post-Convention stretch. I began by noting the 2-way poll results from Real Clear Politics from January 1 2008 through August 25.

I made a spreadsheet with the name of the group or agency which conducted the poll, the starting and ending dates of the polling, and the results for Obama and McCain. From this information, I drew up another spreadsheet which produced the daily average for the polls. I then compared each poll against the average for the days polled, to see where each poll stood against the average, noting whether Obama or McCain was getting more or less support than the average in a poll. I then was able to apply that information to determine the average bias, the aggregate variance, and essentially the stability of each poll.

I want to stop at this point, and make an observation about the fairness of these polls. As polls make statements which favor Obama or McCain, it is becoming common to see this poll or that dismissed as being unreliable or unbelievable. This is generally unwise, because in examining the polls presented, I was struck by how well, overall, most polls were conducted. While I have concerns about the demographics base used, and the weighting assumptions inherent in modern polling, the conclusions of each poll were consistent with other polls at the same time. Since twenty-six national agencies or groups have conducted national polls used for my research, such consistency indicates a high level of professional standards. However, within that acknowledgment, there were some clear trends and characteristics, which I think are worth mentioning.

As I said, there were twenty-six separate groups or agencies which conducted polls. Of these, six conducted only one or two polls this year (Battleground, McLaughlin, Franklin & Marshall, Ipsos,POS/GQR, and NPR). Accordingly, I have not considered these groups for the purposes of comparative bias.
That leaves another twenty groups, however, which have conducted a measurable pattern in their polls. For this report, I will note the five polls which most favor Obama, the five which are least favorable to Obama, the five which are most favorable to McCain, the five which are least favorable to McCain, and the five which are, as an aggregate, the least likely to be off the average measure for that date. I would like to emphasize that bias is used here not as an attack on the poll’s integrity or veracity, but simply marks a tendency likely to continue in future polls between now and the election. It remains to be seen which of these polls will prove the most accurate in the final measure.
Here are the top five in each of the five categories, then:

Obama Favorable
1. ABC News/Washington Post (+3.33 pts)
2. CNN (+3.00 pts)
3. Quinnipiac (+1.97 pts)
4. Pew Research (+1.54 pts)
5. USA Today/Gallup (+0.92 pts)

Obama Unfavorable
1. Investor Business Daily/TP (-2.80 pts)
2. FOX News (-2.30 pts)
3. Cook/RT Strategy (-2.28 pts)
4. Hotline/FD (-1.62 pts)
5. LA Times/Bloomberg (1.26 pts)


McCain Favorable
1. Democracy Corps (+3.27 pts)
2. USA Today/Gallup (+2.83 pts)
3. Rasmussen (+1.89 pts)
4. CNN (+1.51 pts)
5. ABC News/Washington Post (+1.40 pts)

McCain Unfavorable
1. Investor Business Daily/TP (-4.55 pts)
2. CBS News (-2.80 pts)
3. Hotline/FD (-1.88)
4. Quinnipiac (-1.57 pts)
5. Time (-1.40 pts)


Aggregate Stability
1. NBC News/Wall Street Journal (1.81 avg total variance)
2. AP-Ipsos (2.06 avg total variance)
3. Gallup (2.17 avg total variance)
4. Pew Research (2.40 avg total variance)
5. CBS News/NY Times (2.53 avg total variance)


I will let the reader draw his/her own conclusions, after making three suggestions:

1. Notice which groups are favorable or unfavorable to both Obama and McCain

2. Aggregate Stability is a near-unknown quality, but represents a reason to have great confidence in a poll. If a poll does not miss the average by very much, it represents a reliable place for quick vitals.

3. Most of the variance shown is within the standard deviation for the population base used in the polling.

Clowns and Commerce

As often happens in these things, we are told that this election is about the economy. That’s no surprise, people often vote by how they feel about their jobs and homes and savings, and wrap the candidate they support in expectations that he will somehow make a difference for the better. The problem with that, is that very few elected officials have any effective idea how the economy works, much less how their actions will influence its behavior. The United States’ economy is a multi-trillion dollar economy, with thousands of job categories and descriptions in industries spanning historical classics to new types created within the past decade. The historical record shows that the government can damage the economy through excessive taxation or neglect of strategic needs, but as a rule government cannot help the economy except by reducing, as much as possible, its footprint upon it. The candidate, therefore, who promises to create jobs or revive the economy through government programs is a liar and a fool, and a poison to the nation he wants to control.

Veep Value

So, Senator Barack Obama has tapped Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate this fall. Senator John McCain may or may not know whom he wants, but in any case he has not announced a pick. At this point there’s not really much substance to the decision anyway, though I think the choices are interesting in what they say about the campaigns. That is, for all the hype, there’s not really much chance the VP choice does much to improve a candidate’s chances – in my entire life I cannot remember anyone saying something like ’I was going to vote for ‘X’, but when ‘Y’ picked so-and-so for his veep he won me over'. Sure, maybe there are some few, some very few voters somewhere that could be swayed by the running pick to vote for someone, but I have to think such a number is too small to really matter. It’s really more a case of three things; the VP pick is usually made when things are a bit slow and the campaign wants some good press – remember that the media is impressed more with the flash of a story rather than its merit, which is why CNN treats a Britney Spears event with greater attention than another success in the Iraq War. Also, the VP choice can be an opportunity to really screw things up, to pick some loser who damages the top of the ticket. Even there, the amount of damage done is generally not significant, as the first Bush’s pick of Dan Quayle in 1988 illustrated. The third thing that comes from the pick, however, is what it tells us about the candidate’s fears. In 1960, Kennedy’s campaign picked Lyndon Johnson because they were worried about the South and JFK’s thin resume. In 1968 Nixon tapped Spiro Agnew because he was worried about the Northeast. On the flip side, the pick sometimes reflects confidence. Bill Clinton’s choice of Gore in 1992 showed that he was comfortable with his team as it was, and Gore was picked because he fit what was already going. In 2000, Dubya picked Cheney for his VP because he saw Cheney as the most competent man for the role, ignoring the popular push to put McCain on the ticket to show party unity, or some prominent regional name to attract support from that area.

There are three effective reasons for picking someone as your running mate. One is the possibility that he might take your place, as five Vice-Presidents have become President through death or resignation since 1900. But Obama is in excellent health, and should expect great support from his party if he is elected. About the only way Obama could get impeached, would be if he announced immediately after taking office that his last name was really “Bush”. So that reason is not really in play. The second possibility is that Obama thinks Biden will help him win a certain region. Delaware is already locked in for the Democrats, and the Northeast is also a pretty deep Blue this year, so that possibility also falls by the wayside. This brings us to the third reason, the fear of some weakness in the nominee’s strategy. Obama picked Biden, it’s pretty obvious, because he hopes Biden’s three and a half decades as a Washington insider will make his own lack of work more tolerable. Obama’s naïveté in foreign policy statements will, he hopes, be overlooked in the light of Biden’s long experience in foreign policy. Of course, the historical record on that point is not promising. Ross Perot tapped an admiral for his running mate, but it did not make his own foreign policy credentials any more authentic. John Kerry got a lot of support from General Wesley Clark, but again the effort failed to undo the damage of Kerry’s own record. So a running mate with a long record does not do much to improve your own credentials. It does, however, prevent McCain’s camp from claiming that neither Obama nor his veep pick have experience in foreign policy.

Some are already saying that Obama’s pick of Biden is a good move, while some have said it was a mistake. At this point I do not really agree with either side. Biden is not likely to win over Clinton supporters who are still mad that Hillary was not even considered for the second slot – even though she would not have wanted the job, many in her camp see the decision to not even vet her as a deliberate insult. Biden is not likely to impress all those young people who are attracted to Obama because he is fresh and new in their minds, something Biden clearly is not. Biden is not likely to win over independents either, as his views have tracked with DNC talking points for a very long time. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume the move is a mistake, as there is no evidence – at least not yet – that Biden would prove a liability. While the man’s vanity and arrogant tone have brought him to many blunders in the past, at the moment Biden looks good where Obama needs him to look good, a union favorite and likely to reassure the party base.

The real effect of the Biden pick won’t be known for some time, partly because the effect will be demonstrated by how well Biden campaigns in battlefield states, but also because now the focus will swing to the question of McCain’s pick. McCain’s choice, like Obama’s, is more tactical in value than strategic, and he has more to lose from a bad choice than he stands to gain with a good choice. But knowing the Biden pick means that the McCain camp has the opportunity to choose a running mate who will appeal to the demographics missed by Obama-Biden.

Sexual Morality (Adults Only)

Jay Tea wrote a very good article this week about his stand on Abortion. In the course of that discussion and the debate in the comments following the article, opinions regarding sexual behavior and orientation were naturally expressed. That got me to thinking about sexuality and the moral imperatives we follow regarding them. From what I learned in various biology classes, the sexual imperative is arguably the strongest after self-preservation, and so a person’s sexual choices and behavior can be said in many ways to mirror the character of the person at their heart. The next obvious question, then, is the moral value of a person’s sexuality, and it is there that the discussion so often devolves into bitter attacks and accusations. Given how close to our heart our own preferences sit, it is not surprising that a practice which we find strange would also be seen as ”wrong” and offensive. What further complicates the matter is the fact that some behaviors go well outside acceptable boundaries of even the most tolerant consideration, particularly those which involve harm to other persons and deliberate assaults on the general sense of propriety. In between those extreme practices and what we might call ”normal” sexual behavior, however, is a range of practices which may be strange to us, but which may reasonably be considered the private business of those who practice it, while in some other cases the behavior may cross the line into moral offense.

I am a practicing Christian, but I understand that to a non-believer my Scripture will have no weight, so for this article I will try to consider the matter using reason and – hopefully – a common set of moral standards. I mention my faith here, for the reason that I wish to be clear about my own moral position, and while I may not understand every point as fully as I wish, I accept the Lord’s word as true. I would mention, however, that I do not always agree with those who quote a snip or scrap of the Bible in one place or another to support their argument, while ignoring the broader context of Scripture. What I mean can be seen by briefly considering the ‘Bible’ argument against homosexuality. The verses in Leviticus which condemn homosexuality, for example, are not far removed from verses condemning wearing garments made of mixed fibers, eating pigs or certain other ’unclean’ foods. You see, the Hebrew people in that time were in the wilderness, where any communicable disease could literally wipe out the nation. I am not trying to use that as proof that the Bible was tolerant of homosexuality, but those verses need to be seen in the context in which they were written and originally taught. Further in the Bible, other verses come up, including 1st Corinthians and 1st Timothy, but again there is reason to be careful about overstating God’s law regarding homosexuality. For example, even though I am sure that my Lord encountered homosexuals in various places during His ministry on Earth, there is no verse quoting Jesus condemning homosexuality. The case of the Roman Centurion whose faith Jesus commended (Matthew 8:4-6) is worth consideration in this respect, but I leave it at that. Speaking just for myself, I think the Bible warns us that what makes the sin in sexuality is the lust. It should certainly be obvious that lust has brought many a man to his ruin, and adultery is a grievous sin in the eyes of the Lord. There are verses in Proverbs, for example, which warn against treating a person as a thing, against thinking of a human being only as an object for serving a sexual desire.

I don’t know about you, but I worry a bit about my struggles to think of every person I meet in the right way. It’s easy to fall into stereotypes, to take a superficial image and assume that’s all there is to that person, but such thinking is an offense to the greater, unseen, person. We’ve come far enough in our cultural mores, to understand that a person’s race, gender, and age are not valid indicators of capability or character. Even so, what we see on the surface still affects our judgment and influences our actions, and when a sexual orientation is clear, that reaction might be strong. Also, we wrestle – or at least I do – with a variety of impulses in response to situations. I try not to judge other people for things they screw up, because my own record is not particularly impressive.

Some time back, I had what I think is a revelation for my faith – that the reason God makes us consider our sin and repent, is so we are not weighed down by that sin, that we are enabled to move ahead and grow into the person we are meant to be. With regard to sexuality, we must learn to govern strong desire and focus our actions to an appropriate goal. Not only that, but we must be careful to avoid that subtle temptation to believe that we can act without consequence. Adultery is wrong, divorce is wrong, and lust is wrong, because such things diminish the person and lead to destruction and suffering. Sexual sin is among the worst, precisely because it cuts deep into its victim.

Intelligence and War

The sudden invasion of Georgia by Russia has, once again, brought strong criticism on America’s intelligence community. Some of it is justified critique of a bloated bureaucracy, some of it is a kneejerk reaction from people who hate the intelligence services, and some of it comes from people who simply do not understand the structure, functions, and limits of intelligence. For example, more than a few people have blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for missing the warning signs of Russia’s invasion, while in fact it is the responsibility of the DNI, or Director of National Intelligence, who has the duty to advise the President of such threats. The head of CIA, the DCI, has since 2005 been a deputy to the DNI, one of several people who report events and analysis for his review. On paper, this arrangement gives the DNI more complete information to consider before he makes a recommendation to the president. In practice, however, the new office adds another layer on a system which is notorious for delay and in-house feuds. It’s very difficult from the outside to know whether the change in organization made things better or worse overall.

Looking more closely at the Russian invasion, though, it should be mentioned that effective deterrence would have required a number of things to have gone right. We would need to have understood the early troop movement in context, for example. That’s not as easy as it may appear – the Russians engaged in a full-scale military exercise in the area during July, for example, and it would have been all but impossible to determine when the troops stopped their exercises and began real combat operations. Satellite imagery and phone intercepts would not have told us Putin’s intentions.

So, we obviously needed HUMINT, human sources to provide insight about intentions and plans. Frankly, we have never had a lot of those, especially at the executive level. If it’s any consolation, no nation’s intelligence service has more than one or two such sources in a major country’s decision-making office, not least because such offices are careful indeed to protect access to national strategic decisions. If you ever want to know what sucks more than an IRS audit, check out sometime what goes into a “Personal Data Statement Questionnaire”, one of the key source documents compiled in the clearance process for vetting potential appointees and their staffs. And Russia, even before Putin, was legendary for its paranoia.

A third avenue of information is building a network of informants. Some information can be deduced by building a profile using alternative sources, and either putting together a composite of data removed from the primary source, or by using low-level sources to produce intelligence to support strategic analysis.

There are other means of collection and analysis, of course, which is one reason why there are so many different agencies and offices which handle intelligence. In addition to military concerns, economic, political, social, demographic, topological, and even weather information can be used to suggest a nation’s intentions and plans. More, events do not generally happen in the singular, which is to say that for every intelligence failure like the invasion of Georgia, there are unheralded intelligence successes. It is a rare individual, for example, who stops to consider why the recent border flare-up between India and Pakistan suddenly cooled down, without any publicly apparent diplomatic action. Of course, an observant reader would understand that the media is not in the business of accurately reporting events and their context, but rather the business of creating reaction and driving attention and emotion. As a result, wars which happen get press while wars averted are ignored. Also, intelligence services do not generally seek attention for their activities, especially when such scrutiny might reveal sources and methods of collection and analysis, in other words giving the enemy tools to close off access the next time they want to do something without us knowing about it in time to react.

Some folks have observed that the United States may have understood the Russian intentions, yet been unable to stop the invasion. One indicator of that is this week’s agreement between the US and Poland to station ten missile defense bases on Polish soil. The agreement’s timing suggests that the United States had been working towards the action as a optional response to potential Russian aggression; it was far too specific and finished to have been begun after the Russians invaded Georgia. This agreement and certain indications of additional protocols put into performance (ever wonder what Russia was reacting to, when it suddenly threatened NATO this week?), provide glimpses into how the event analysis helped structure an effective US response without escalating the crisis. Using warships to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia is another tactic which suggests careful and early planning by the US, making the Russian position more difficult without inviting casualties.

The intelligence community has its share of suck-ups, political assassins, incompetents and outright traitors. But it is important to understand that there are many agents and officers, in analysis as well as in the field, who do a difficult job well, without credit or reward, serving America as well as the troops sent into harm’s way.

Consequences of Twiddling

Some years back, the Democrats took a look at the process in Presidential elections – they were getting their keesters handed to them on a regular basis – and decided the way to fix it was to start the process early and get their nominee chosen much earlier. This decision resulted in Senator John “Magic Hat” Kerry getting nominated in 2004, and appears set to tap Senator Barack “Magic Suit” Obama for the spot this year. Kerry proved singularly inept as a candidate, and recent events have begun to show Obama’s failings at a time where he can ill afford it. The decision to ‘front-load’ the primary process has produced candidates of dubious qualifications, but more to the point, no effective vetting, so that surprise collapses and mistakes are inevitable.

The Republicans also decided to front-load their own primaries this year, which is one reason for the very weak choice of McCain. The theory, based as near as I can tell on nothing more than assumptions and guesses, is that most voters choose a candidate to support early on, and so there is a strong advantage in getting your party's pick out first. The idea seems to be, that getting your candidate chosen first gives the voters more time to get comfortable with them, and makes your candidate appear more solid than his/her opponent. The problem with that, aside from the basic premise, is that front-loading the primaries only changes part of the process; the actual election date remains the same, and what's more, the convention is still held in late summer, creating a period where events and opponent strategy can defeat momentum and support. Also, a front-loaded primary system is responsible for the schism between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters, as Clintonites claim - loudly- that Senator Obama claimed primary victory before the voters really knew who he was and what he stood for. Obama's poor job at Saddleback takes that claim further, as the Fairy-tale Senator proved unable to answer questions about his opinion. That's not to say that Senator McCain has been at his best this summer, either. McCain was slow to figure out that Americans want secure borders and protection of strategic resources a lot more than they worry about the Global Warming fraud or getting along with the other major party. If McCain had been held to the fire a bit longer by his rivals, he would have discovered what the party cares about a lot sooner. And both Obama and McCain have been remarkably dull at times in noticing that what the average voter wants has very little in common with what CNN or MSNBC care to broadcast. In past elections, the nominees of both Republican and Democrat campaigns came out of the primaries with relatively clear stands on the issues, and specific programs planned for deployment. It appears to me that neither of this year's nominees can say that, and playing catch-up in the last couple months before the election just does not look, well, presidential.

Not ‘The Asian Century’, After All

Every so often, it is fashionable for some political or economic magazine to pronounce the doom of American dominance. Numbers are presented to show the ‘inevitable’ decline of U.S. influence and power, which is to be replaced by either one dominant Asian nation, or a coalition of Asian nations. For several decades now, we have been assured that the future belongs to Asia, not the United States. This theme has been quite popular, but it is quite simply wrong.

History is not taught with the prominence it deserves, and students are seldom very happy to take a history course (which says something about most history teachers, more than it does about History, I would say), but the lessons of History are vital to anyone who wants to understand the nature of Mankind, the character of nations, and the course of civilization. Those who understand History, understand the unique character of the differing players of note, but also the truly unique place and role of the United States. This can be illustrated, perhaps, through examination of three Asian nations presumed to be rising, unstoppably it seemed, to dominance.

Japan: Following World War 2, the Japanese people had to effectively rebuild everything from the ground up. This caused them to be focused on efficiency and savings, two virtues which helped create a very strong economy within a generation. Companies like Sony, Honda, and Toyota became known first for low prices, then exceptional value. Japan gained great influence on the strength of its industry, which was (and is) directed by MITI, a government agency which directs large-scale business as a strategic asset. The Japanese strategy of keiretsu associations of separate businesses which helped each other without an obvious head of control, created advantages that companies from other nations could not match. By the late 1970s, the strength of Japanese business plus the focused direction by MITI made Japan appear unstoppable, and there were genuine fears that Japan would own the majority of influence in Asia in a matter of a few years. That, however, never happened. The first cause was that macro-economics can only be influenced by macro-level forces – by definition, the internal policies of Japan failed to establish control over the policies and operations of other nations. The keiretsu strategy was only effective when one Japanese company faced another individual company in competition. On the global scale, nations learned their lessons and adapted to the changing conditions. But Japan also failed to understand the one-dimensional nature of its power. A strong Yen and efficient business operations would not placate regional enemies, people with a long list of grievances. Both North and South Korea remain bitter about their treatment at the hands of Japanese invaders during World War 2, as does China. Few people outside the Asian sphere understand how greatly Japan’s intentions are mistrusted. Even before Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Land of the Rising Sun was seen by its neighbors as aggressive and voracious, on a scale not seen in the United States in memory. Worse, Japanese officials have been slow to apologize, and where apologies were made, they lacked specificity and a genuine sense of contrition. For example, when China demanded apologies for the medical experimentation of Chinese prisoners of war, the Japanese government agreed, but said the apology would have to wait until the last surviving member of the Japanese units concerned passed away, in order to avoid offending the honor of Japanese families of the men who had committed these crimes. This action outraged the families of the victims, naturally, but Japan has not budged from that position. Consequently, there is a sense in Asian circles that some Japanese companies are worth doing business with, but that Japan is not suited for a leadership role in the region.

India: Calling itself the world’s largest democracy, India has also enjoyed strong growth in economic terms, and India also enjoys a military power which is effectively unchallenged in the Indian Ocean. The Rupee is also rising against the US dollar, and the strong growth of technology in India has impressed many observers. Yet this growth began decades ago, and while impressive never seems to accomplish everything it promises. Like Japan, India has long controlled business through a central economy, relaxing a bit only after 1991, but even then not allowing companies to succeed or fail solely on their merits. In many respects, the Indian government acts in a manner reminiscent of the old Italian patronages by city-states controlled by ruling families, a peculiar mix of feudalism and socialism intended to achieve certain limited specific goals, which often come at the cost of the economic health overall. This would explain why, even here in the 21st Century, India retains a rigid caste system which effectively denies opportunity to many of its people simply on the basis of their race and family.

China: For more than a half century, it has been fashionable to call the Chinese ’unstoppable’. A nation of more than a billion people, with a growing industry and a largely literate people, is indeed an imposing force. However, just as an athlete on steroids may seem invulnerable at first but who dooms himself to the consequences of its poison, so Communism corrupts, and often destroys, the effectiveness of business within its control. Even though China has discarded the more draconian aspects of its practices, it still faces the consequences of their implementation. For example, the horror of the Sichuan earthquake was made much worse by the clear lack of building codes for residential housing and schools. Put plainly, many of the buildings which collapsed in the earthquake did so because there was no functional concern for the safety of such buildings – the Chinese tended to put together towns and cities where the government felt they were needed to support “crash” projects. No genuine infrastructure was ever planned, let alone built and maintained. There is no Chinese equivalent to the U.S. Coast Guard, no rehearsal of disaster drills and rescue operations with an equivalent of the U.S. Red Cross, no communications network to coordinate first responders to natural disasters. More than seventy thousand people died, and literally millions more lost everything they had, because their government wasted the resources which could have been prepared for the crisis. This catastrophe is relevant to the discussion of the nation’s course of influence, because a nation which does not consider the needs and welfare of its population, will destroy its own strength from within.

The same short-sighted set of values can be seen in China’s administration of the Olympic games. Several members of China’s female gymnastics are now known to be under the minimum age allowed by the IOC for Olympic competition, but China continues to pretend they are legitimate. Because the verification of age falls to the home nation of Olympic athletes, there is no way to disprove the claim but it clearly fails the smell test, not least because when the scandal broke, the Chinese government immediately refused to look seriously into the question, falling back on the predictable but unethical line that the government could not be challenged on such points. The men in Beijing who rule the nation fail to understand the message that this sends out – that China is quite willing to lie about essential points, if it means getting what they want in the short term. This behavior has already cost legitimate Chinese companies (like Lenovo or Tsing Tao) a chance at a serious world reputation, because it has become common knowledge that defects in workmanship and dangers in design may be covered up by the Chinese government, protecting short-term advantages at the cost of long-term confidence. Similar problems, however less publicized, are troubling the Chinese military. Rumors of accidents, failed projects, and defection continue to plague the PLA. It may well be that the Chinese military is capable of accomplishing objectives in the short term, but not in the long, as continued difficulty stabilizing Tibet is showing.

It seems counter-intuitive to say so, but many Asian countries are finding the United States the optimal choice, not so much as the leader in alliances and associations, but as an impartial referee. The reasons, however, are strong once they are considered. To begin with, for all its chaotic rises and falls, the US dollar remains the currency of choice for most currency exchanges, because of an inherent trust in its (long-term) stability and acceptance in transactions. Most effective trade practices, including governance codes, began in the United States, so much so that despite promises they would never embrace it, many European and Asian nations are considering implementing at least part of the once-vilified Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Moreover, the United States military enjoys the unique reputation as the only peacekeeper force which honors its promises. Even the Indonesian government, no friend of America these days, admitted that the US Navy was invaluable in saving lives and delivering relief immediately after the tsunami disaster of 2004. Despite the controversial nature of the invasions in 2002 and 2003, the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq are freer now than they have been in memory. When asked to leave by the Philippine government, the US left Clark AFB without complaint, just as when asked by the Japanese government to stay in Okinawa, the US made arrangements which considered not only its needs, but the priorities of the host country. Scandals in American conduct make the news precisely because they are rare, the exception rather than the rule. Consequently, because American companies generally honor their contracts better than major companies from Asian countries, and because the US military acts in a manner consistent with state policy, the American agents are considered honest brokers more often than many Asian competitors. For the foreseeable future, then, this century remains an American century, not an Asian one.

Foreign Policy: An Entrance Examination

The Russian invasion of Georgia is a genuine crisis, with significant meaning on many levels. In addition to the obvious military, political, and economic issues surrounding the conflict, a leader may be measured by his preparation for the possibility of such a conflict rising. Therefore, it may be useful to consider how much, if at all, each of the two main candidates for President of the United States, were aware of the potential crisis.

The Campaign Spot notes that Senator Obama specifically warned about Putin’s aggressive behavior one time in a speech, compared to three specific and detailed warnings about Putin from Senator McCain.

This does not include passing or general comments made by Senators Obama or McCain.

More specifically, Senator Obama has never mentioned Ossetia in any speech, while Senator McCain has done so twice, as far back as two years ago.

There is a clear difference, as to which candidate has studied this specific scenario and theater of operations, and is therefore capable of making an informed decision without dangerous assumptions or trusting banal generalities.