Yes -- they're already polling 2012

My dreams of perpetual election season may finally be coming true!

Palin Pollin'

Apparently, something is wrong with this poll from PBS because at 10:34 am, the results to the question "Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States?" were exactly split between yes and no.

49% yes
49% no
and
0% didn't know

Am I missing something here?

Take 20 seconds and do your part to set this right.

GA-Sen: Woah! Chambliss at 50%, Dem Martin within 6

I follow the Senate races pretty closely but I have to admit this surprises me. Rasmussen has Sen. Saxby Chambliss of GA (the man who, you may recall, beat Max Cleland in one of the most depressing elections ever six years ago) just clinging to the magic 50% number, with challenger Jim Martin rapidly closing the gap. Who would have possibly expected this race would be competitive?

Of course, Rasmussen is right to point out that this could just be a bounce produced by Martin's finally winning the primary, and we are talking here about just one poll. But look how well it fits the trend:

And it's also true that Chambliss has like eighty bajillion dollars in his campaign account and Martin has, I don't know, $10. Which, regardless of close polls, makes the odds of a Democratic win here pretty microscopic. But it could happen if Martin picks up momentum (and remember, the presence of Bob Barr might cause screwy things downticket in Georgia)... keep an eye on this one.

--Another indicator of growing dissatisfaction with Republicans in unlikely areas: Oklahoma. A DSCC poll (and, yes, consider the source) has Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) at that same 50% mark, up 9 against his opponent Andrew Rice. Even if national numbers do now appear to be stalling, the picture in downticket races just keeping looking better for Democrats...

2nd national poll gives Obama double-digit lead (UPDATED)

When that Newsweek poll came out last week showing Obama over McCain by a whopping 51%-36%, I don't think I was alone in assuming it was a kooky outlier. But here comes Bloomberg/L.A. Times today saying basically the same thing -- they have Obama up by 12%, and if you add wildcards Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, Obama leads by 15 -- 48% to 33%, the same margin as Newsweek.

Folks, there are bounces and then there are bounces. You rarely see a presidential race poll this lopsided -- sure, current performance is not indicative of future resuts (see: Dukakis '88), but even with maximum skepticism there's no way to read these results as anything but a big advantage for Obama.

Pollster.com's national averages are here. As of this writing, they stand at Obama 48%, McCain 42%, without the aforementioned Bloomberg number.

UPDATE (June 26): Some questions have been raised by McCain partisans over Bloomberg/LAT's party identification numbers, arguing that this poll underrepresents Republicans. This actually is a valid concern -- though Republican identification has been declining drastically lately, it's hard to believe it's down to 22% of the country. But this goes to one of the most controversial questions in polling: do you weight for party identification, or not? That is, do you standardize your results to a known level of partisanship (as you do with things like race, gender, income, etc) or do you take what you get as a reflection of the national mood? Evidence has not answered that question in the affirmative or the negative, and polls using either methodology have been variously accurate, so this issue isn't enough to discredit the Bloomberg/LAT poll. Mark Blumenthal has more on this.

I say the real culprit, in both the matchup results and the party ID, is probably that both Bloomberg and Newsweek polled a universe of registered voters (as vs. likely voters, which is what many other pollsters use). Polls of registered voters always favor Democrats disproportionately, because our supporters -- being predominantly young, lower-income, and minorities -- tend to vote less regularly. But I think an RV poll is actually a much better indicator for the 2008 race at this point, both because we're trying to measure the state of the race as a whole (not predict its outcome), and because Obama will probably fuck up everybody's turnout models (thanks to his strength among African-Americans and young people, plus his legendary field operation). So for those reasons I'd give the Bloomberg and Newsweek numbers more credence than the McCain people want us to, and less to polls that use a likely-voter screen.

(NB: One criticism of the RV/LV argument for this discrepancy points out that the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll, which uses an RV universe, shows a much closer race than anybody else. But that's a tracking poll, which is really apples and oranges; it's designed to measure day-by-day trend shifts, not the overall picture.)

Poll: Statistical Tie in... Nevada?

Geez but the Obama campaign is a game-changer. Mason-Dixon has McCain 44%-42% Obama (16% undecided, MoE 4%) in Nevada, ordinarily a solid red state.

The swing region, if you're curious, is traditionally Republican Washoe County, which includes Reno and a sizable swath of desert towns. It's for McCain by just 3%; the Las Vegas metro area is for Obama (lots of unionized workers there) and the rural counties are strongly McCain. Another interesting figure: Hispanics are for Obama by a potentially decisive margin of 53%-28%. Not sure what any of that signifies.

(Note: I actually take the position, and I'll explain this in a long post sometime, that this election comes down 100% to Ohio and everything else is bullshit. Nevertheless it's interesting and comforting to see how Obama's widening the playing field.)

Looking to the next states

My favorite thing about this race, post-N.H., is that now we get to hear from states that aren't tiny and cold and 98% white. I was afraid that the two early states would exercise their monopoly and pick at least one nominee; but no, we got four contests and four different winners. (For the record, this hasn't happened since 1988 -- when New Hampshire voters looked at Iowa's choices of Dick Gephardt and Bob Dole, pondered a while, then collectively said "Fuck that, we want New Englanders." The result was Bush vs. Dukakis, the worst election ever.)

On the Democratic side, we have Nevada and then S.C. -- neither race can really be predicted, because they've never been early states before. We have no idea how voters there will respond to the national situation, we don't know what organizational tactics will move them, and we certainly don't know who will turn out. Polls are almost worthless in these states (especially Nevada, which is facing a caucus for the first time, so turnout will be completely unpredictable). We'll pretty much just have to wait and see what happenes there. Boring!

But the Republican contests are eminently predictable. Their two big ones coming up are Michigan and South Carolina -- both of which have polls coming out today that starkly contradict the conventional wisdom. Michigan, which is widely seen as Romney's firewall, per Strategic Vision today actually favors McCain (!?) by nine points, with Romney and Huckabee struggling for second. Meanwhile in South Carolina, the conservative Southern stronghold where Huckabee will presumably concentrate his fire, Rasmussen has in the lead... McCain (?!?!!?), 27%-23% Huckabee, with Romney and Thompson back. Neither of these places should be McCain territory; Michigan is an economically collapsing state that should be responsive to Huckabee's populism (see his latest ad there, which is all about the failing economy), plus Romney's dad was governor there in the 60s. And South Carolina is the deep south, the Strom Thurmond south (please download that song), the place where McCain 2000 was eaten alive by Karl Rove. But there you have it; McCain leads both.

The kicker? Both of these polls were in the field before McCain won N.H., which presumably would give him an even further boost in the standings.

Now, it's quite possible that these polls are outliers; they don't jive at all with earlier data (MI, SC). But it's not hard to imagine that in recent weeks, McCain has been quietly gaining, presumably both from the media tongue-bath he's been getting and from disaffected Romney supporters. If -- if -- we can confirm these numbers, I think you have to say that McCain is now the GOP national frontrunner. Again.

But there's many a slip between the cup and the lip. No matter how many poundings he takes from less annoying candidates, Mitt Romney will keep pouring his money into the game probably through Feb. 5; and if he and Huckabee both have to train their fire on McCain (rather than previously, when McCain and the Huckster were basically a tag-team against Romney), watch out for an anti-McCain backlash. Add that to the Giuliani factor in Florida (remember him?), plus a restive conservative base that still can't make up its mind, and it's quite likely that this race will become a giant Republican clusterfuck that rages on relentlessly for months. It is difficult for me to express my sheer giddiness about that. It's like Christmas.

So that's why I prefer the Republican race to the Democratic one. We have two frontrunners (two and a half if you count John Edwards), all of whom basically agree on almost everything. Republicans have four frontrunners who represent completely different wings of the party, plus Ron Paul. No contest. I'm going to go make some popcorn...

Obama in Iowa: I'll Believe It When I See It

UPDATE (January 4th): I see it and I believe it. Yeah, the Register poll was right, and I was completely wrong; Obama got his 80,000 first-timers (more like 100,000 actually), in what has got to be one of the most remarkable GOTV accomplishments of all time. So kudos to the Obama campaign (as well as Selzer and the DMR), and read below if you'd like to enjoy my complete and utter wrongitude. See you all in New Hampshire! --------

Well, the Iowa caucuses are less than two days away now, so I thought I'd poke my head out of my Canadian hole for a minute to talk about the polling situation there. (Disclaimer: as most of you know, I'm a pretty fervent Edwards supporter. I try not to let it colour my analysis; judge for yourselves.)

So the polling we have on the Iowa caucuses right now is a great big horrible clusterfuck:

Look at that mess. Every day there's three different polls saying three different things; I wouldn't be surprised if we woke up tomorrow morning and Zogby had Mike Gravel in double digits. (My theory is that Iowans, tired of being called up and interrogated all day, are engaged in a mass conspiracy to mess with pollsters' results until they all either quit or go bonkers.)

Let's focus, then, on one in particular: the Selzer/Des Moines Register poll, which was dead-on in 2004 and is widely respected across the field. They call it the gold standard of Iowa polling (which is a complicated business, for all sorts of reasons, and easily screwed up by amateurs). DMR this year has, rather surprisingly, Obama out in front with 32% to Clinton and Edwards at 25% and 24% respectively; this lead is entirely due to what the Register calls a "dramatic influx of first-time caucusgoers", 60% first-timers to be exact.

"Dramatic" is not quite the word I would use. I would choose something more like "fucking insane."

...60% Are they serious? The Iowa caucus is an obscure, ritualized, often intimidating process that requires you to spend upwards of an hour in a gym or (worse) a living room with total strangers at 7 PM on a cold January night. Generally less than a tenth of the electorate shows up. And for this they expect, what, like 80 thousand people who have never done it before to appear and vote en masse for Obama? Get off my lawn.

Yet Obama's strategy is banked entirely on getting these new faces (as well as large numbers of independents, hardly the world's most reliable demographic) out into the caucus rooms. Clinton is more focused on the traditional electorate, though she's still been trying to pump up turnout (especially among women); Edwards has run the most old-school campaign and trained his considerable organizational power mainly on caucus veterans (predominantly older and rural voters, who form the bulk of his base).

So victory in Iowa depends on who shows up. And this DMR poll suggests that Obama's ambitious (dare I say, "audacious") strategy is paying off; now, given the seismic shift it'd take to bring 60% new caucusgoers out on Thursday night, Occam's Razor suggests it's more likely this is just a crap poll. But assume for a moment that the Register is right and Obama really does pull it off. If he can seriously make this fundamental a change in the recalcitrant Iowa electorate, then -- regardless of whatever personal beef I or you might have with his candidacy -- that's a massive political accomplishment that has to be respected in its own right, and it'd be his best argument yet for the nomination.

That's the way I see it. We'll know more on Thursday, of course, and the entrance polls will tell us all we need to know about whose turnout models really paid off. (Less so the final results, which will be affected both by second-choice movements and the Party's disproportionate weighting, though that certainly doesn't mean we should ignore them.)

...And now for some BASELESS AND IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATION: I don't think Obama's going anywhere. This strategy reeks of bullshit. No, I say Edwards wins Iowa with a strong margin, say 5-6% over Clinton with Obama trailing, and his resultant bounce from undecideds and disillusioned Obama supporters pulls him almost even with Clinton in NH. She gets a narrow win over him there, Obama gets another embarrassing third and drops out (maybe he fights to SC but I doubt it). Edwards then gets a big boost in SC, where his numbers have been lower than they should be (voters there still aren't really paying attention), and the result is a dogfight between Edwards and Clinton all the way through Feb. 5 -- when, in all honesty, Clinton probably wraps it up off New York and California, though a man can dream (and if Edwards' press is good enough, you never know). That's how I see it playing out, anyway -- anyone else want to roll the dice?

What's Happening in Iowa?

The other day I wrote about the state of the Democratic race in New Hampshire; well, let's go through the looking-glass now, because I want to quickly analyze the condition of Republicans in Iowa. There are a number of breathless headlines today about Mike Huckabee's big surge in the CBS/NYT poll; how real is it? Well--

--no, that is not a lost Jackson Pollock, that is the story of IA-GOP 2008 thus far (from the invaluable Pollster.com). And it suggests that Huckabee's rise is quite real; he has been gaining consistently since the beginning of the year, and we can see him really start to take off shortly after midyear (which coincides with his breakthrough at the Ames Straw Poll in August). This CBS/NYT poll is not much of an outlier, either; we can see other numbers (Strategic Vision, ARG, even Rasmussen last month) putting Huckabee up in roughly that same neighborhood. The only reason there's so much press on this one is that it happens also to have Romney uncharacteristically low, giving the appearance of a competitive race.

The consistency of this rise is striking, in fact; Huckabee must be right in the pollsters' wheelhouse in order to get such smooth numbers (which makes sense; he targets religious and older conservatives, who are much more apt to answer their phones consistently and probably have an easier time getting through the complex IA caucus likely-voter screens). Romney, meanwhile, is all over the place; I think this is because his support is soft, which would certainly explain the fluctuating numbers between organizations (they push undecideds differently and use different screens, which would lead to different results for a candidate with shaky support). The CBS data bears this out -- from their uncharacteristically good analysis:

While Romney still has the lead in Iowa, his support base is softer than that of Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor whose campaign has gained momentum in recent weeks. Half of Huckabee supporters said they had made up their mind, compared to two-thirds of Romney supporters who said they could change their mind before caucus night.

We can see in this graph how Romney's rise came entirely at the expense of Giuliani and McCain, so I'm guessing a number of current Romney supporters are there solely because they jumped the Rudy/McCain ships and Mitt was the only recognizable alternative. If Huckabee continues to gain steam, watch for him to pull in a LOT of Romney's supporters, very quickly.

The other figure to remember is undecideds; CBS has 57%, which is even higher than the NH-Dem number that bowled me over on Sunday (48%). In this case, though, the trends are much more pronounced (as opposed to the Dem race which has been basically in stasis for months), so I'm a little more confident that they'll continue as more people in tune in.

Which means you should brace yourselves for a strong Huckabee showing, perhaps a victory, on January 3rd; which would make him a media juggernaut and a potentially serious threat very quickly. The consequences of which, I and
others have argued, could be dire...

Worth remembering for NH campaigners

The latest Globe/UNH poll -- results (PDF) here, boring Globe analysis here -- has an instructive lesson in understanding the condition of the New Hampshire primary. Even though voters there have been subjected for months to unbelievably intense lobbying by all possible candidates, what portion of them are still undecided?

48%.

Nearly half of NH voters are still "trying to decide" which candidate they support (and that figure's of likely voters, not just registered voters, who we can safely assume would show even less commitment). Another 28% are "leaning", leaving less than a quarter that's solidly committed to its candidate. For all the hooting and hollering about Hillary's "inevitability," the fact is there's still tremendous fluidity in the New Hampshire electorate. Here's an example that may jog your memory:

And that's an eighteen-day shift. With roughly two months to go at this point and this many people still undecided, there's plenty of room for any candidate to overtake Senator Clinton, or for her to build a totally unstoppable lead. NH is still anybody's game.

OTHER INTERESTING FINDINGS FROM THIS POLL (and I love UNH for releasing a wonderfully complete set of crosstabs and a full questionnaire -- more like this, please, pollsters):

...Obama leads among independents, 29% to Clinton's 22%. (Richardson does disproportionately well among independents, Edwards struggles)...

...Clinton and Edwards seem to be fighting for the same demographic, while Obama and Richardson are competing for a different set of voters; the former disproportionately win voters who are more partisan, have lower incomes, and are less educated, while the latter take more educated/wealthy and less partisan voters. (The most extreme figure: voters with a high school diploma or less favor Clinton overwhelmingly, 54% to Edwards and Richardson's 13% each, and Obama at just 9%. Meanwhile college grads and post-grads are split almost evenly between Obama and Clinton.) This is consistent with the conventional wisdom, which paints Obama as a sort of Gary Hart figure who appeals to more cerebral, creative-class Democrats but not so much the rank-and-file -- and it explains why Edwards (badly in need of momentum) has been consistently attacking Clinton but not Obama, since attacks on Obama would gain him nothing, whereas taking down Clinton removes the only barrier between his populism and its natural constituency...

...The notable exception to this pattern is secular voters (those who attend religious services less than 1-2 times a month, or never), who you'd think would trend to Obama with their stereotypical liberal-elite counterparts; not so. In fact Clinton is disproportionately strong among the non-religious. (This tracks with what Chris Bowers has been saying about the collapse of the Obama coalition, though I wouldn't be quite as dramatic or unequivocal as he is considering the fluidity of the race)...

...My knowledge of NH geography is limited (Garrett?), but there seem to be some interesting local trends -- for instance, Clinton pwns everybody in Manchester (50% to Obama's 18%, and Edwards at a pathetic 4%), but she's comparatively weak in the Connecticut Valley where Obama's sneaking up on her at 24% to her 28%, and John Edwards has a big base in the "Central/Lakes" region where he pulls 23% (ahead of Obama's 18%, in fact, and a comparatively small 12% behind Clinton). These are small samples with presumably large MoEs, so take them with a grain of salt, but it's interesting to see an urban-rural divide taking shape...

Anyway. Of course you cannot extrapolate from these numbers to anything nationwide, for the simple reason that there's no minorities involved (the fact that the two early states are both lily-white is a scandal of serious proportions) -- the race factor is absolutely enormous in presidential politics, especially when we have both a black candidate and one who has longstanding ties to the black community. But these numbers are nevertheless more valuable than the national polls being shit out in the press every other day (those results are almost meaningless, since only political junkies and early-state voters are seriously paying attention right now); and they portray a New Hampshire electorate that's divided and unsure of itself, fertile ground for a big-time political shift.

Ahem

Not to toot my own horn, but:

Republicans seem to be losing the anti-tax card that has helped them win elections over more than a quarter- century. A majority of poll respondents oppose leading Republican presidential candidates' plans to cut taxes on corporate profits and maintain lower rates on investment income such as capital gains and dividends.

A majority of Americans also say they would tolerate higher taxes to help pay for universal health care... By 52 percent to 36 percent, Americans favored health and education spending as a better economic stimulus than tax cuts.

R.I.P. Reaganomics. Like I've been saying, old-fashioned Republican complaints about tax and spending are losing their traction entirely (no matter how much they may crow about Charlie Rangel).

Bloomberg poll writeup here: full results & methodology from the L.A. Times here. I hope to write at length about this poll shortly; some of the breakdowns by gender and income level are worth further investigation.

Meanwhile, here's one other figure that jumps out: 13% of American households contain someone who's "staying in a job they want to leave mainly because of fear of losing your health insurance". Think about that: One in ten American families are being held back from employment opportunities because they can't trust our health care system. That's not right. (Also, interestingly, that figure holds pretty steady across income groups; people in solid middle-class or even upper-class jobs are just as afraid of being left without insurance.) I wonder what Jacob Hacker, who has been arguing for years that the most serious consequence of the modern economy is a spread of economic risk, has to say about this...

Troubling

So you know Mark Penn? The high-powered pollster who runs the most high-powered campaign in our party? The man whose data analyses substantially impact Democratic political strategy? Well, uh... heh-heh... turns out he's making shit up.

Ezra Klein writing for In These Times:

Unlike most pollsters, Penn never releases his raw numbers, only his analysis. So we must take it on faith that his methodology is rigorous, his polls accurate and his interpretations fair. [Penn's new book, "Microtrends,"] is our first opportunity to observe, at length, how adroitly Penn handles raw data. And the answer is stunning, even to a doubter like me. Mark Penn cannot handle numbers. If this book were turned in as the final to an entry-level statistics class, Penn would not only be failed, but the professor might well retire in shame.

[...]Penn was talking about actual lefties—people who are born left-handed. Increasingly grim, I absorbed the first hard blows of Penn’s interpretative technique: “More lefties,” he enthuses, “could mean more military innovation: Famous military leaders from Charlemagne to Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon—as well as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf—were left-handed.” He uses the same thunderingly awful logic to argue that we’ll see more art and music greats, more famous criminals, more great comedians, more “executive greatness,” and better tennis and basketball players.

This is what statisticians—or anyone who has taken a statistics class—call a “correlation/causation error.” It is not enough to cherrypick a couple famed military leaders, notice that they’re lefties and assume that something intrinsic to their handedness caused their tactical genius. It is not enough to say that past cultures discouraged left-handedness and use that as a stand-in for discouraging creativity of all sorts. To say that Bill Gates is right-handed does not suggest that a greater proportion of right-handed people would mean more Bill Gateses. For a professional pollster to imply that correlation equals causation is like a firefighter trying to put out flames by tossing a toaster into the blaze—it bespeaks a complete unfamiliarity with the relevant techniques.

What’s more amazing is this: A page earlier, Penn argues that the rise in lefties has nothing to do with there being more lefties, and everything to do with more permissive parenting. In other words, where children used to be trained out of left-handedness, now parents “shrug their shoulders, saying it’s okay.” So not only does Penn fail to prove that lefties are genetically different in some important way, he also suggests that the gene pool is no different, and that there are as many of them around now as always. It’s a fallacy atop an error built around something that isn’t happening.

Klein has several more examples, all equally hilarious -- my favorite is where Penn declares, apropos of nothing, that “ten people with bazookas can overcome 1,000 people with picket signs, but they can’t overcome 10,000 people with picket signs.” (Counterpoint: Yes they can. They have bazookas.) It's not just that this is flawed polling, rather it's TRANSPARENTLY flawed polling, which is subsequently used to back up insane conclusions that the data wouldn't support even if it WERE any good. The mind reels.

I am trying to convince myself that this is all just some giant Karl Rove-style headfake, an attempt to convince everyone that Hillary's campaign is obviously doomed and thus win the expectations game. It better be. Because failing that, I'm force to conclude that Mark Penn is not a brilliant pollster but rather the world's greatest bullshit artist, and I'm not ready to face such a discomforting fact.

Read the whole review. And if you're really a masochist, buy the book. But I caution that I am not legally liable for any brain injuries which may ensue -- you expose yourself to this stuff entirely at your own risk...

Country populism

A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that, in the large swing states of the nation, being friends with Teh Gay is still more likely to hurt a candidate than to help them, even in this age of growing tolerance.

Interestingly, though, coming in a close second to being friends with Teh Gay is being friends with Uncle Scrooge—that is, big business.

Perhaps reflecting a growing populism nationally, being the candidate endorsed by business groups is viewed as a big negative -- almost as much as being the gay rights lobby's candidate -- while labor support is a big positive for a candidate.

In all three states, roughly twice as many voters said a business groups' endorsement made it less likely that they would support a candidate.

I present this here not only for its interesting look into the national political climate, but because it shows that the American people are, by and large, exactly the opposite, politically, of what our Harvardian 'liberal' mentality is. Here, we're willing to go to bat for personal tolerance and minority-rights. But start supporting unions, or start quabbling with the free market, and you're likely to run into the knives of a lot of our 'liberals' here.

Problem is, Harvard students have an addiction to fancying themselves leaders. And without anyone to lead, that's a tough proposition.

Con-Sarn It

Fascinating numbers out of the latest Gallup poll -- they break down people's opinions on the war (mistake vs. not mistake) by age bracket. I have bolded the parts that grabbed me:

Did the United States make a mistake in sending troops to Iraq?

By age:

18-29 Yes - 56% No - 41%
30-39 Yes - 48% No - 50%
40-49 Yes - 52% No - 47%
50-59 Yes - 61% No - 38%
60-69 Yes - 62% No - 37%
70-79 Yes - 70% No - 28%
80+ Yes - 69% No - 26%

Holy shit. This is telling on a couple of levels. First, Attaturk of Rising Hegemon hits the nail right on the head in pointing out that the only age groups which still significantly support the war -- 30-49, basically -- "have no real recollection of Vietnam, and boy does it show." Absolutely. These are people whose formative experiences came in the late 1970s or the 1980s, just past the problems of the 60s and of Vietnam, but before the end of the Cold War and the Great Mellowing that ensued... no, this is the Reagan Generation, whose heyday was bookended by disco on one side and hair-metal on the other, and whose understanding of the world centered around Godless Communism and SDI Defense. These are people whose experience of military conflict boiled down to this:

Do not underestimate the colossal mental deadening that happened in the 1980s. You had to shut off your critical faculties just to survive the fashion, for chrissake, let alone the music. It produced a race of drones, incapable of thinking for themselves or grasping any kind of subtleties. These people still exist, having emerged in a sort of shell-shock; you see them today numbly mowing suburban lawns, mumbling to themselves, their hair gelled and their skin tan behind their hideous Ray-Bans. They still get their news off of shit TV or perhaps listen to Rush Limbaugh, and have no deeper comprehension of today's issues than their infant children. ("Global warming? But it's cold outside! Ha ha ha!") Their interest in anything does not extend beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings. They respond well to "Head On! Apply Directly To The Forehead" commercials. In other words, they are perfect Bush supporters.

(At this point I feel like a Dave Barry quote is in order. "Am I generalizing here? Yes, of course. But as is usually the case when I generalize, I do not care.")

Most of us young people understand fairly intuitively, I think, that these people are our enemy. Yuppies, and the like. Some of us are unfortunate enough to have them as our parents. (Me, I am blessed to have Baby Boomer parents, and the real kind -- Class of '72, with the sign-waving and the long hair and everything. Definitely outside the age bracket in question.) Inasmuch as they continue to blindly, stupidly support a blind, stupid political agenda, they cannot be tolerated; the yuppies MUST BE STOPPED.

----But there is a crucial second factor to be considered here -- the comparatively overwhelming opposition to the war among people 70 and up, normally a soundly conservative demographic. That's right, I'm talking about old folks. They can be very valuable to us.

First, to extend the war-experience frame, consider that everyone in this group experienced WWII (the youngest, this year's 70-year-olds, would have been 8 on V-J Day). I have no doubt that that would color their insights on military conflict, and it lends them great credibility.

Furthermore, this is the Greatest Generation, a group that for as long as we can remember has insisted that it knew the score, dammit, and it wasn't going to take guff from any young punk. That they have come down so firmly against Bush's war, even as he hews quite closely to their political agenda on other fronts, is a testament both to the quality of their judgment and the sheer transparency of Bush's presentation. Sure he might have fooled the yuppies and the dittoheads, and he might have temporarily fooled many of us impressionable youth or dispassionate Gen-Xers, but Grandpa knows better. After all, just because you're going deaf doesn't mean you can't smell bullshit.

There is much to be loved about the 70+ generation. They demonstrate an often-refreshing honesty ("Get a damn haircut, you look like a girl!"). They had fabulous music and fabulous movies. Not only are they capable of enjoying clogging--

--but they can enjoy it unironically. That is a monumental accomplishment.

My point is, we should appreciate our elders for what they are -- potentially valuable allies in the fight against conservatism. Picture Lisa and Abe Simpson on a tag team together; unstoppable. So if you're at home this summer, talk to your grandparents. See how they feel about the war in Iraq. (Also clogging.) You may be pleasantly surprised.

--UPDATE: As if on cue! Over at Daily Kos, meet 93-year-old Bruce, a lifelong Republican and WWII vet, who now refers to the President as "that Bush fellow" and has registered as a Democrat. An excellent sign.

Roundup -- So Close And Yet So Far

About this time in April at Harvard everything comes to a head. It dawns on you, and your TFs, that we have what -- five, six weeks left of classes? Holy shit. Crunch time. You expect the next 20 days or so to just rocket by in a barrage of papers and problem sets and Student Group Activities and housing lotteries and PANIC! But of course, time never goes slower than when you have lots of unpleasant crap to do, and you'll still spend what feels like most of the day watching asinine YouTube videos and weeping softly into your keyboard. The end result being, from now until reading period will feel like longer than the rest of the year combined. Hooray for college! Now look at this:

My favorite graph of all time. (Professor Pollkatz puts it together.) I love to show it to haters who claim that public opinion surveys are arbitrary or inaccurate -- TRY and tell me there's no science to that trend.

But the real insight here: look closely. The only periods post-9/11 where Bush approval has increased or levelled (other than the spikes for the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam) were July-December 2002, June-December 2004, and June-October 2006, all of which contained intense electoral campaigning which put the GOP in a better light. (Clearly, by the end of the 06 cycle, Dem messaging had got through and negated that effect.) At all other times, Bush's approval has been constantly declining at a remarkably consistent rate, and it continues to today. Logically, then, one should not necessarily assume it's going to bottom out. We could potentially see a decline even further, below Nixon territory and into uncharted waters, within the next few months. Hypothetically: impeachment could be on the table, and more importantly it could be widely popular.

Anyway. Why dwell on the "public" and its silly "opinions"? We have more pressing roundup matters to attend to! Like:

--STUPID BULLSHIT! Yes, the White House claims that it has magically "lost" a jillion emails that might pertain to the fired attorneys, presumably while the I.T. guys were waxing out the Intertubes. Every commenter on Daily Kos immediately pointed out how patently ridiculous this is; even Patrick Leahy had the sense to describe it as a "dog ate my homework" excuse. (DKos's Kagro X went on to suggest that we start calling this scandal "DogAte." You know, like Watergate and Travelgate, except cleverer. Truly we live in the end times.) Up next: Alberto Gonzales gets "stuck in traffic" on the way to his Senate committee deposition and is never heard from again.

--On a happier note: warm welcome to Endria Richardson, making her blogdebut at Cambridge Common with some cool poetry. Looking forward to more!

--Read David Sirota on the so-called "labor shortage," which he argues is a fiction produced by business interests trying to justify outsourcing and keep costs under control -- meanwhile wages here continue to stagnate (and let's not even get into the ugly truth about disposable income and purchasing power). Our economy is in deep shit. (But hey, did you hear? That American Idol guy survived another round! BIG NEWS!)

--An unwitting RedState writer sums up the mentality of the entire conservative intellectual movement. Special treat for Garrett:

I was listening to the re-run of an obvious spinster-to-be named Jenny Ballantine on Rush Limbaugh's radio show as she was kvetching and whining in New Hampshire in front of the Edwards "Couple" and I thought of that flag with the snake that said "Don't Tread on Me." It's still on the license plate, if I'm not mistaken.

Whatever happened to the rock-ribbed New Englanders that Norman Rockwell immortalized back in the day when Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post covers portrayed a different reality, one of a nation that worked out its difficulties through grit and gumption?

Yup. That'll solve our problems: grit and gumption. And we'll all wear an onion on our belt, 'cause it's the style at the time. Prohibition forever!

--Speaking of the olden days, Phyllis Schlafly is still alive and still writing op-eds about those darn feminists. Who'd have guessed?

--Have you been following the Michael Godelia story? Me neither. But kudos to Kameron Collins for handling it with such class. He's done the Harvard community a service.

--Mystery Pollster has a great look at some recent FOX polls that are insanely, ridiculously biased. We call them a "news" organization why?

--Best look yet at the New Populism, and how John Edwards fits into it. If I say it enough times maybe you guys will listen: this is how we win. "Edwards is a one-man 50-state strategy."

--If you'd like to be really disturbed, watch this British documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church (those people who protest soldiers' funerals). It's like a car accident, you can't tear your eyes away.

--MyDD's Matt Stoller, who has been strange and off-kilter lately, suddenly shouts out a wonderful and impassioned articulation of everything the New "Netroots" Left (or whatever we're called) stands for. Read it.

--Random Wikipedia Curiosity: "Erdős–Bacon number." Mathematicians apparently have lots of time on their hands.

--Band Madness's 4th round ends at 4:00, and Neil Young needs our help. He's down 400-some votes to Guns 'n' Roses. This cannot stand (I mean, "Sweet Child of Mine" is classic, but come on.) We can do it, liberals!

..AND that's all I got, save a closer; of all the tributes I've seen for the late Kurt Vonnegut -- who was one of my heroes, literary and otherwise -- James Wolcott's somehow seems to be the most appropriate.

But I can't say the atmosphere was any cheerier when I left. I was escorted down a corridor, a door opened, and standing there, waiting to enter, was Kurt Vonnegut, looking rumpled, baffled, and tired after his long inward journey through life. It was such a startling apparition--I had no idea Vonnegut had been booked and was taping immediately after me--that I couldn't even rustle up a hello, not that he seemed to notice. He was there to do his television duty, no more, no less. The look on his face so matched the mood in the studio that additional comment seemed superfluous. I wonder what he and Cavett chatted about during the commercial breaks, or if in lieu of small talk they sank into separate compartments of silence as the crew made busy little adjustments to the lights, sound levels, camera angles. It was all so long ago, sometime during the Age of Chivalry. Anyway, that's my non story about not meeting Kurt Vonnegut.

So it goes. This is an open thread.

On Protest, Majority, and the Value of Bitterness

Update (April 5): Katie responds and I respond back. Hooray for dialogue! --

(WARNING: long and serious post. If you don't want to deal with this abstruse quasi-intellectual shit on Spring Break, I understand. Here's a game instead.)

Katie Loncke at Cambridge Common has written the most interesting, important, and generally noteworthy blogpost I've seen at Harvard in quite some time. You need to read it all, but the key is:

Let's face it: at this point we are rallied and marched and vigiled out. Maybe these familiar variants of mass protests haven't completely outlived their usefulness (they still tap into an important legacy within our "repertoire" of collective action), but for the most part, they won't generate considerable energy even though the majority of college students here oppose the war. We can do better, and we must... Where are the weekly teach-ins? Where's the constant stream of consciousness-raising film screenings? Where's the urgency that pushes us beyond a cursory commemoration when the end of March rolls around?

After the jump I will argue that this entire perspective is counterproductive, and that a new attitude is called for in our (progressives') relation with protest and the public. Also I will discuss my cat.

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