Last Post Before the 2008 Election

Why I Have Supported Senator Barak Obama For President:
I have made it pretty clear that I have supported Barack Obama for President over the past year. Some of my closest friends find this unusual given that they know that I am not a “liberal” in the classic sense of most Democrats. The last candidate that I really supported was Ross Perot, both in 1992 and in 1996.

In general, I find Barack Obama’s views on civil liberties issues very congenial with my own. I find his positions on some domestic issues less congenial, although I agree that health care reform is essential and that we have to begin our shift to alternative fuels faster than the market might dictate.

However, I do not believe that Senator Obama or John McCain is close to a common sense position on deficits, public debt, the devaluation of the dollar, and the massive underfunded and unfunded liabilities of the state and federal governments – either one of them.

I also think that neither candidate has even begun to articulate the consequences of the fiscal crisis on the reduction of wealth in the United States. The growth of wealth creates options; the contraction of wealth limits options everywhere.

That said, where I think Obama excels over John McCain is as follows.

Competence Over Incompetence:
The Bush Administration is the living definition of “incompetent government,” by parochial and arrogantly incompetent insider bureaucrats like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfiwitz – two wars led by incompetent political strategists, budgetary leadership by long term government bureaucrats that have undermined the strong foundations of the American economy, political leadership designed to undermine our leadership in the world, and a moral leadership supported by Christian Evangelical Conservatives within the government that undermined our science policy, threatened the separation of Church and State, promoted corruption of honesty in the name of their self-proclaimed “moral ends”, and infused every area of policy with the standards of Christian imposed mediocrity. In other words, I don’t like them very much!

On this score, Senator Barack Obama is a real breath of the fresh air of competency, moral sanity, and real leadership. You could see it first in his wonderful mastery of the English language. Barack Obama is really smart. George Bush is not particularly intelligent and neither is John McCain, and it is really that simple. Does that make me an elitist; you bet it does. I want our government run by really smart people, and not incompetents.

Bush has not done one thing is his entire life that would demonstrate real intellectual leadership – not his grades, his written words, his ideas, or anything else. He is the definition of mediocrity – a rich son of a distinguished American, who got most things handed to him without hard work.

John McCain can be described in much the same way, except for a period when he was captured and is reported to have behaved very well and heroically. He has provided us with no gifted language, no history of intellectual achievement, and nothing of substance. He was the gilded son of Admirals, who barely got through Annapolis, who married “wealth” his second time around, and who offers another four years devoid of a single good idea.

Senator Barack Obama is anything but mediocre, and that has been true his whole life. The campaign will not play this up for fear of labeling the Senator as “elitist,” but Obama was selected the Editor of the Harvard Law Review, a selection that reflects the collective judgment of his student peers and their faculty at one of the best law schools in the United States. That position at Harvard University is arguably the single “highest honor” than can be accorded any law student of his class in the United States. You do not win this honor if you are not the best of the best! It is the on the same level as President Bill Clinton winning a Rhodes scholarship.

Obama has a demonstrable record of real personal achievement. He has written two books, himself, and they are readable, inspiring, and filled with ideas that matter. His words are his own, and they are words that reflect both his intelligence and his fundamental humanity and decency. Obama puts his “gift” for words, for ideas, and his humanity to work in his leadership, and we are going to need all of those to survive and even thrive during the next four years.

There is a singular rule of leadership in all organizations. Weak leaders almost never promote the talents of people who are demonstrably smarter than they are. If the leader of an organization is intellectually mediocre, as George Bush is; they will surround themselves with other mediocrities, just as George Bush did. George Bush did it; John McCain would do it; and Barack Obama will not.

Demonstrating Leadership:
Obama has demonstrated the quality of his leadership with two other important ventures – perhaps the most brilliantly organized and effective election campaign in American history and in the effort, already organized and operating, to bring the “best and the brightest” into an Obama Administration.

In both instances, Obama has provided the vision and he is supporting very competent people to execute that vision in the most efficient way possible. We can today see the results in his campaign organization and in the selection of a Vice President; and my expectation is that we will see the same level of competence in the replacement of some 3000 or so of Bush’s incompetent appointments, many of whom were selected because they wore their evangelical religious convictions on their sleeves, so that it could override the mediocrity of what was between their ears.

Above all else, Obama has all but completely eliminated lobbyists from any role on his transition team in selecting the next generation of administrative leaders in Washington, D.C. He can do that because his campaign was financed by a small army of independent Americans, rather than the lobbyists, and this is the benefit from that financing. He owes the special interests nothing and they do not get a seat at the table when the next leadership in America is decided. Contrary to what McCain says, and many actions by McCain are contrary to what he says, his campaign is largely the traditional one – paid for and run by lobbyists.

Redefining America’s Role in the World:
We are at the end of an era. The United States simply cannot carry the load internationally for the rest of the world, nor should it. If the United States wishes to remain a “great” country; we will start to redirect our investments into ourselves – the education of our children, our infrastructure, energy independence, and our science and technology. These are investments that have real paybacks, and not unnecessary wars that simply squander our resources.

Bush probably knew less about the rest of the world than any American President in the modern era, and it showed over and over again. He was and is about as parochial as a person can get, and he demonstrated it constantly in his choice of language and closest advisors, his self righteousness toward our allies, and in his over estimation of the value and importance of military power.

In the end, he is close to the most unpopular American President in the history of polling – both domestically and abroad. He has generously earned the disapproval expressed toward him by nearly everyone, except perhaps a right wing minority of the American people.

Obama is a symbol of hope to the world, representing an America which has long stood as the hope for mankind and a better future based on freedom and democracy. He represents the best we have to offer, and the world recognizes that already, even if nearly one out of every two Americans does not.

Moreover, I believe that the Obama appointments will inspire hope as well. They will not be “insider bureaucrats” like Rumsfeld and Cheney, skilled only in using their networks of loyalists to advance their careers. Like Obama, I expect that the new appointees will be men and women of independent achievement, bringing both new ideas and new leadership to a federal government desperately in need of it after our eight year nightmare.

The next four to eight years will necessarily involve a redefinition of America’s relationship with the rest of the world – friends and foes alike. We will have to end the War in Iraq, or at least America’s involvement in it; create a new and more stable strategy for Afghanistan; deal with the issue of nuclear proliferation and terrorism; redefine the role of NATO; and a host of other issues.

Culture Wars:
Right wing evangelicals declared war on America’s history of secular government about 40 years ago. Operating mostly through the Republican Party, they have demanded of all candidates a rather embarrassing public declaration of loyalty to the principles of the Christian Right Wing in American life as interpreted by the Christian fundamentalists.

Although the original movement grew out of Roe vs. Wade and the Supreme Court, it has evolved to demand an end to stem cell research with discarded fetuses, the infusion of “creationism” and “intelligent design” into our public school curriculum, affirmations that American is a “Christian nation,” and the packing of our court system to reflect these values.

Under the Bush Evangelical Regime, the Administration filled policy positions in Federal Agencies, particularly the science establishment, with right wing evangelicals, who were given free rein to distort science policy and the support of scientific research to reflect their vision of “Christian values.” Time and time again, we find them editing and rewriting scientific reports from these agencies to distort their findings to bring them in line with the Bush Administration ideological doctrines.

John McCain would have kept many of these people in place, continuing the religious politicization of science. With Barack Obama, these people will be sent packing. Nothing could be better long term for America, in my opinion. With Bush out of office, we will at long last gain a rational (rather than a fanatical religious) policy on stem cell research.

The Fiscal Crisis and the Role of the Lobbyists:
I am not naïve. We are not going to get rid of the lobbyists overnight, or ever. They will be ever present and doing their best to twist public policy to the benefit of their private interests.
However, there will be a dramatically different balance under Barack Obama and his appointees. The special interests do not “own” Barack Obama and his appointees. They have not financed his campaign because you and I did. They will have influence through the Democratic and Republican incumbents in Congress, whom they did fund, but much less through the Administration.

The financial crisis is all about “trust;” and for a very large portion of the world, they do not trust those interests who brought us the economic crisis not to twist the very expensive solutions to their own benefit, as opposed to the benefit of the broader public. With Barack Obama as President, I personally have a high degree of confidence that he will represent the broader interests of the American people as a whole, and not just a bunch of “fat cats” on Wall Street or in the American Banking Industry.

A Renewal of Faith in Democracy:
Of all of the Presidential elections in my lifetime, this one marks the largest departure between the past and the future of any of them. In the large area of Civil Rights, it will mark the symbolic end of a history that we all understand and would rather put behind us.

As I have written since last February, we are witnessing a “realigning election” that will leave for Republican Party a minority party for the better part of a generation. The Bush Administration was the apex of the influence of the Christian religious movement, and it will now go on the decline, relegated to exerting its influence on the nomination of Republican candidates in a minority party.

The Conservative swing of the Supreme Court will stay with us for a while, but new appointees will not share the view of the most ardent conservatives on the Court.

The unique campaign funding mechanism on the Internet, first developed by Howard Dean, is going to change the conduct of elections permanently in the United States, making it possible for outstanding candidates to launch their candidacies early, with limited funding, to challenge established incumbents, using the incumbent’s reliance on “special interest” campaign funding as a weapon against them with the public.

Again , the influence of special interest money on campaigns will not be eliminated, but we are looking at a new “balance” could reduce the “entrenchment” of incumbents and the ability of special interests to buy public policy.

I do not expect an end to the period of polarization within the electorate, but we might see some amelioration of it if Obama is true to his words during the campaign. Time will tell!

Just my opinion

Gordon Black

Another Errant Poll by Associated Press

What’s Wrong with the Polls?
A lot, but I can’t know precisely what without inside information, which I do not have. However, several polls were released yesterday that cannot exist statistically in the same world; meaning, they are so different that they all cannot be correct.

• The Associated Press/GFK Poll, released a couple of days ago, has Obama at 44 percent, McCain at 43 percent or a one point lead for Obama, with the race to close to call.
• The ABC News/Washington Post Poll, also released yesterday, has Obama at 54 percent, McCain at 43, or an 11 point lead.
• News week released on the 24th with a 12 point margin, and CBS/New York Times had a 13 point margin.
• The daily tracking polls continue to lag the one time polls, with margins of from 5 to 10 points, with an average about 7.5 points.

All of these polls, conducted largely at the same time, cannot be correct. The difference on the vote for Obama is over 10 percentage points, and that is so far outside of the confidence interval (or margin of error) that the difference cannot simply be a sampling difference.

The huge gap is between the Associated Press and the others, all of which are one time polls and not the tracking polls that I have already discussed, so it is not the call back problem I’ve discussed in the past.

How Does One Select When the Polls Are so Different?
There are a number of criteria that I use when I’m confronted with this problem. First, the other polls and the statewide polls all tend to support the major network polls – not quite by that big a margin, but much closer to it. The average spread among all the polls, tracking and one time, is 7.5 points, with Obama at 50, McCain at 43, and the remainder undecided.

Second, the state - wide polls, of which there are now a large number and growing daily, all support the view that Obama is headed toward a substantial victory, but short of a landslide, winning over 350 electoral votes and most of the close states.

Third, the ABC News/Washington Post Poll is conducted by people that I know pretty well, and trust that they do their job with knowledge of the problems of polling in America. GFK is a very large and reputable German firm, where their polling in the States is relatively new, and I do not know the people there well enough nor trust their experience.

Fourth, the AP interpretation for the supposed shift they find just doesn’t hold water at all. They claim that it is because of the debate, and that is totally impossible because Obama’s performance was preferred by a majority after the debate and the difference between the candidates was simply not great enough to have much of any impact on the vote.

The Interpretation is the News;
The news media is a very competitive business. The AP story, which runs counter to the prevailing results among other pollsters for the national media, makes news because it is different. The fact that it is probably bogus, based on an errant poll or improper weighting, will be forgotten in the ongoing rush of coverage of the campaign. The AP made news, and that seems to be all the matters. The poll, however poor, will be rebroadcast over the Internet to Republicans by the McCain Campaign to shore up their sagging optimism.

I know that this attitude is not the case with some of the other polls, but it is more common that you think. The “conventional wisdom” is not newsworthy. Polls that support other polls which got there first are not newsworthy. The AP story is newsworthy only because it is way out of alignment with the other polls, national and statewide, so it gets the top news story for the day.
They do not worry about “being right” because there is no day of reckoning until the final poll before the election, when all the polls are compared by the National Council of Public Polls against the actual results as reported for the states and nationally. Before the final poll, are errors and bad polling are simply forgotten.

My conclusion is as follows: the AP poll is probably just an errant poll, and the interpretation of an errant poll is flawed on the face of it. They certainly will never acknowledge their error, but the other polls are entirely independent and I do not believe that they will show convergence of the candidates at all.

The AP/GFK Poll created the “story” that “makes the news” for a day or two, that make marks success in the competitive business of journalism. The buzz about this poll will fade and it will be forgotten, just as AP will want it forgotten when other polls over the next week do not confirm their results. If the other polls trended toward their results, you can bet there would be a follow up story on “how AP got it right.”

OK – Where Do We Stand Today, October 25th?
I would offer the following as an interpretation of where I think this election stands at the moment:

• Senator Barack Obama enjoys at least a 10 point lead among those who have decided for whom they will vote.
• Governor Sarah Palin has turned out to be a real disaster, confirming one of my earlier blogs on her. She’s not competent to be President of the United States, no matter what the Republican apologists say, and the American voters have finally figured it out for themselves. The Conservatives, of course, will blame it first on the media, and later on McCain.
• The turnout is going to be substantial, exceeding 2004 by four to five points, mostly in new young voters and a surge of African-American voting all across the Country.
• The “surge” means that Democratic candidates for other offices who are close are going to win most offices in most places where they are competitive, resulting in a huge shift of office holding at the national and state level.
• The remaining “undecided” voters will probably split slightly for Obama, but many of them will not vote as in past elections.
• This is the beginning of a realigning period that will push up Democratic registrations and partisanship for a long time to come, weakening the Christian Coalition and the most conservative Republicans in general elections, but making them actually stronger in the nominating process.
• The Republican right wing will blame this election on McCain rather than on George Bush and his cronies, and we will see a “right wing theory” that exonerates the right wing of the Party and their apologists in the National Media.

The election is becoming amusing, frankly. Politics is such an entirely disgusting business, but necessary. The electorate in America moves through huge cycles that approximate generations, and the biggest “earthquakes” alter the landscape whenever one party captures the young decisively. These are termed “realignments.”

When a political party, this time the Republicans, oversteps the moral and ideological boundaries of the electorate, making it badly out of touch with the young voters under 35, in this case the Administration veering far to the right on religion, foreign policy, environmental issues, domestic spying, and a host of other issues, precisely at the time that younger voters are moving toward the left; the American electoral system corrects and it is now in the process of correcting.

The Republicans of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and FOX Broadcasting are in the very real process of losing the new generation in politics by a margin of more than two to one, and that new generation is where the future lies, at least for the foreseeable future. They have also ridiculed their opposition for nearly a decade, heaping filth on Democratic candidates in "last minute" discoveries that are fraudulant, but which cannot easily be refuted in the final couple of weeks of the campaign.

They made the bed that most Republicans embraced with great enthusiasm, often tinged with intolerance, arrogance and bellicose self-righteousness, and now they get to sleep in it for a long time to come. George (Herbert Hoover) Bush gets to rest for eternity on the dung heap of history, but Hoover genuinely was a finer and more competent man. Frankly, it serves them right and I feel no sympathy at all for them.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Anxieties and Opportunities

Anxieties for the Future:
The 2008 Election is nearly over, and it is one for the history books. With Senator Obama well on his way to becoming President Obama, I thought I would share with you some of the things that I worry about, regardless of my feelings about the election outcome itself, which pleases me greatly. I really do not have answers for these things; only concerns.

How Well Can Barack Obama Bond with Other Politicians?
Politics is perhaps the ultimate “people business.” We know for certain that Barack Obama is outstanding in his ability to bond with voters from a distance – in speeches, on television, at public events, etc. What I cannot determine at this point is whether Barack Obama can bond well with people up close – with his cabinet members, with the leadership of the House and the Senate, and with the myriad of other people on whom his Presidency will depend.

It’s a legitimate question and “interpersonal skill” is a talent that is simply invaluable in a President. Jimmy Carter was, for example, very intelligent, and an excellent and able campaigner, who I did get to watch up close, but he and his staff were simply disasters when it came to the insider’s game in Washington.

I have admired Jimmy Carter much more as a world citizen than I ever admired him in Washington, D.C., where his loner mentality and aloofness wore thin very quickly. The problem Carter had was the discontinuity between his campaign personality, which was all “southern hospitality and graciousness” and his real personality, which was cool, aloof, and often downright unfriendly. Many of the people on staff were just like him.

Carter was replaced by the ultimate “people person” in modern politics, President Ronald Reagan. Whereas Reagan’s policies would earn him many enemies, he had a gift for the small gestures of humanity and kindness , and a genuine warmth, that made him well liked by the people with whom he had to work in Washington, D.C., Republicans and Democrats alike. Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neil, on his retirement, jokingly complained that Reagan was simply too personable to dislike, even when he disagreed with him.

Bill Clinton is also a natural “people person.” Mayor Rudy Giuliani told me at dinner once that he thought Bill Clinton was the single more charming person that he had ever met in politics, maybe too charming for his own good. I never met Clinton, but many others have said the same thing to me.

I have never met Barack Obama either, so I do not know him. I was not in St. Thomas on the two occasions when he visited. Does he have the interpersonal charm and warmth – the people skills – to have a successful Presidency? I simply don’t know, but I worry about it. He faces a huge crisis of confidence in our American institutions where “up close and personal” people skills can make or break him, so I expect that we will all find out soon enough how skilled he is for his role.

Doing a Lot, With a Lot Less Money:
I have followed this campaign closely from the beginning, as you know. I share with most people an appreciation of Obama’s intelligence, eloquence and grace under fire. He started his campaign, however, 18 months or so ago in a substantially different world compared to the one in which we find ourselves today. No President in modern times has faced such a daunting range of financial challenges, with so little real money (as opposed to more massive debt) to spend on most of them. Obama will have overwhelming control over the entire government, which is very helpful in a crisis; but he is going to need to reconsider all of his priorities in the face of the short term fiscal future we face. Can he do this kind of about face after promising so many things? Will he do it? Again, I do not know! Unless he can change direction, however, recognizing the reality of our fiscal situation, we will all be the losers
.
Most modern politicians, unfortunately, face problems by simply throwing money at them, in the often misguided hope that some of it will stick and improve the situation. If they throw money at problems, the politicans will at least appear to be doing something they can brag about to the folks back home.

If Obama and the Democrats go down this well traveled road, they will simply explode the national debt, devaluing more the dollar and undermining the future for our children and grandchildren. Moreover, they are facing over the next eight years an explosion of costs for Medicare and Social Security, which will demand an ever greater share of our national wealth, and this is entirely on top of the hundreds of billions we have committed to holding off the credit crisis.

No very large problem, like the fiscal crisis, is solved by any single response, and this very large and growing fiscal crisis in spending requires a myriad of smaller steps, many of which will force the redirection of dollars from those that currently get them to others who desperately need them.

Basically, the Federal Government “gives away” vast amounts of money to interests for their support of incumbents. We’ve been doing so long that it seems a given that we have to keep on doing it. When you look at the many ways we waste truly “vast” sums of money, old John McCain’s “earmark crusade” seems pretty trivial.

However, if anyone would like to do more with less, here would be my suggestions, none of which I actually expect to happen:

• Immediately raise taxes more broadly, generating more revenue early in the first year of the administration and throughout. However, the Democrats would be attacked viciously as the “tax and spend political party” and John McCain will be the first to say, “I told you so!” One thing is certain, there isn’t enough wealth among the wealthy, by themselves, to buy our way out of this mess, and every reasonably educated person knows it.
• Get General Colin Powell to lead a large, very public effort to restructure and redeploy our defense spending: closing operations in Germany, Japan, and Korea (assuming that those governments are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves); ending our involvement in Iraq more quickly than planned, turning the costs over to the oil rich Iraqi government: closing dozens of unnecessary bases in the United States, and restructuring the cost of the overhead of defense spending to streamline the military services. Just like in our schools, the American military suffers from an acute case of “grade inflation,” only these are “pay grades” for generals and their staff, certainly unmatched in American military history, and everyone knows this as well as I do.
• End entirely all subsidies to the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, with law enforcement and auditing that force those fat cats to pay the same taxes imposed on small companies. If need be, nationalize the American fields and funnel that revenue into the government, just as is happening all over the rest of the world. Americans are really fed up with turning over our natural wealth to these bloated companies who do not pay close to a fair share in taxes for the wealth we give them, but turn around and spend a fortune on paid propaganda and campaign contributions to mislead the American taxpayer.
• Create a two or even three tiered system of capital gains taxes that actually reduces the taxes made on investments in smaller, high risk ventures and increases the capital gains on investments in larger established enterprises. The investments in smaller businesses, those under $100 million in revenue, usually translate directly into jobs faster than any other type of enterprise. If you look at the history of job creation in America, the new domestic jobs almost all come from smaller companies and the larger companies contribute almost no net new jobs -- they ship them overseas to lower labor cost markets as quickly as they are able.
• End all subsidies to agriculture since almost all of the subsidies fall into the hands of the five percent of the largest commercial agricultural companies and do not help smaller farmers at all. Subsidizing agriculture just drives up prices for consumers, allows the rich corporate farmers to get richer still, and contributes only to the profits generated by the powerful agricultural lobby. And, if you want to help consumers, lower the barriers on all agricultural products imported to the United States.
• End the iron clad control of the pharmaceutical companies over the price and supply of drugs in the United States, allowing the importation of “certified” drugs from other places in the world, the on line purchase of certified drugs, the easy importation of certified drugs from Canada and Mexico. By certified, I mean simply to have the FDA test the drugs chemically to insure that they are exactly what they are supposed to be, and that they are on the approved list of the FDA. The drug companies will scream with outrage and propaganda, but the consumers will love the FDA for a change.
• Change the entire corporate tax code so that all companies, regardless of their size and tax status, foreign and domestic, pay exactly the same percentage of their revenues – not some phony and manipulated profits – in taxes; a single flat tax that applies to every business, large or small, foreign or domestic, private or public in the United States. That will level the business playing field and eliminate all of the political benefits that the largest companies gain by playing with their costs and revenues and manipulating the politicians whom they have purchased in our nation’s capital.
• Eliminate the application of Sarbanes-Oxley to all companies with revenues of less than $500 million per year. At my old company, Harris Interactive, that would add at least $2 million in taxable income alone, reducing dramatically the exorbitant legal and accounting fees imposed on these companies. Do not punish, in effect, millions of companies and their shareholders for the misbehavior of a handful of giants, who would have been more impressed with $1 Billion added to our corporate law enforcement agencies than they are with Sarbanes-Oxley. If you don’t know it, these laws were written by the huge accounting and law firms, and they are nothing more than a welfare system for those that wrote the laws.
• Take the $50 Billion that the Federal Government currently spends on education and direct those monies toward the most underfunded school districts in America, eliminating most of the Department of Education in the process. There are many inexpensive ways to fix primary and secondary education in America, but they are blocked by the impenetrable wall of the public employee unions who control educational policies in the 50 states.

These are just a handful of the ways we can redirect the revenues of the Federal Government, and there are actually a whole lot more, many of them advocated for years by people who understand what the government does and does not do well.

End the Circulation of a Very Tired Elites:
The people in power in the Republican Administration have blown it. They obviously have to go, and that will happen. At the same time, if the tired old elite of the Republicans is replaced with an equally tired old elite of Democrats – the same faces in new chairs -- absolutely nothing will happen. America is filled with talent, and the best talent isn’t hanging around Washington, D.C., waiting, maneuvering and posturing for a cushy new job title to add to their resume.

Every great crisis, and we have one now, is an opportunity to change the entire playing field for the better (ans sometimes the worse). There are thousands of talented Americans with real ideas of how to do more with less, of how to get more performance out of the dollars we spend, of how to change the rotten system of interest group politics that destroys all of our opportunities in the name of their own narrow self-interest. This crisis is no different. It is a huge opportunity, but only if President Barack Obama and his key advisors make it one. That is the ultimate challenge we face; that soon-to-be President Barack Obama faces! I can always hope, for as the Bard says, “hope springs eternal in the human breast.”.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Discrepencies in the National Polls

The Problems with Polls – Other Than the Final One:
As you know, I have been particularly critical of the daily tracking telephone polls, arguing that they fail to conduct enough follow-up calls to reach hard-to-reach respondents. Because Obama supporters are generally harder to reach, particularly the young and the African Americans, overall completion rates, i.e., the percentage of the people called who actually complete a survey, are generally systematically higher for McCain supporters than for Obama supporters. This phenomenon, if uncorrected by accurate weighting, will systematically underestimate the Obama support relative to the support for John McCain.

There is a second problem that is difficult as the completion rates. Pollsters routinely have to estimate the percentage of support for the candidates based on samples that are filtered to those “certain” or “very likely” to vote in the election. Different polling companies use different standards for this filter and they only rarely share the methods that they use. In general, samples that are based more on registered voters, than on the most likely voters, typically report slightly greater proportions of Democrats, but this will depend on the relative motivations of different voting groups to participate.

Current Differences in Polling Results:
These problems with polls are brought into sharp perspective by a very simple exercise with recently conducted polls. There are six current tracking polls reported every day in the Web Site, realclearpolitics.com, which is an excellent source for information that I recommend to any of you who are following this campaign. The tracking polls include polls reported by Rasmussen, Reuters/Zogby, Hot Line, Gallup (regular), Gallup Expanded, and IBD.

The average margin by which Barak Obama leads in these six daily tracking polls is 4.7 percentage points, which makes the contest a relatively close one. This is as of yesterday, October 16th.

At the same time, there have been eight national polls (not tacking polls) completed and released in the past six days. These polls include ones by LA Times/Bloomberg, CBS/New York Times, USA TODAY, Pew Charitable Trust, IPSOS/McClatchy, ABC/Washington Post, FOX, and Newsweek. These are one time polls, not tracking polls, and the callbacks tend to be completed much more thoroughly than with the tracking polls.

The average margin by which Barak Obama leads in these eight one time polls is 9.3 percentage points, which makes the contest a near landslide. These polls are reported between October 9th and the 16th.

The differences between these types of polls are too large to explain away with the slight differences in timing of the polls. As I have said in the past, the tracking polls tend to understate the voters for Barack Obama because his supporters (younger and African American) are simply harder to reach by telephone polling, and the tracking polls do not follow up with sufficient callbacks to harder to reach respondents as successfully or as diligently as the one time polls do.

The Consequence of this Difference:
The national media relies on the national polls, their own and those of their competitors. They routinely, every day, “interpret” the direction of the election using these polls. In this instance, the polls provide two widely different pictures of the status of the election. In the first case, with the tracking polls, the results suggest that Obama is ahead, but that the election remains fairly close.

In the second instance, we have an election that is tending toward a landslide for Barack Obama; a landslide that would pull behind it increased numbers of candidates for most state and national offices, members of House, the Senate and Governors. This is a dramatically different election than the one suggested by the tracking polls, with significant national implications.

The second instance also suggests that Obama’s “race” is diminishing as a factor as the magnitude of the financial crisis seeps into the consciousness of the American voters.

Support for the Probability of a Landslide:
The reason that I looked at this at all is the profound difference in the story that is presented in a detailed analysis of the changes that have taken place among the state polls. Virtually all of the state polls are one time polls, and not tracking polls. Real Clear Politics does a nice job of summarizing these polls by providing an average of the polls conducted in the various states. There are fewer state wide polls in the individual states, and the average tends to overweight the older polls, which are less representative as they age.

The various state wide polls suggest that Barack Obama has enjoyed a dramatic surge in support over the past month that has shifted most of the so-called “toss up” states into the Obama column, shifted states leaning to Obama to solidly for Obama, and shifted some traditional Republican states into the competitive column. This is happening nearly across the Board, suggesting that a near landslide is building in American politics.

There have been changes in most states and these are some examples. Obama is leading in Virginia by an average margin of 8.1 points, and this is a state that a Democrat has not carried in 40 years. Obama now enjoys leads in Ohio (3.8 points), North Carolina (1.2 points), Florida (4.8 points), Missouri (1.8 points), and Nevada (3.0 points). These reflect changes of 8 to 10 points in states with McCain was leading a month ago.

Senator John McCain still retains a very small lead in Indiana and West Virginia, but the result is clearly too close to call. Finally, Georgia and North Dakota, both of which were solidly for McCain, are now in the “leaning McCain” category and attracting Obama resources for the first time.

Implications for Other Races:
I cannot summarize all of the other races that might be affected by the surge for Obama. However, it suggests that the Democrats will clearly win firm control over the Senate, with the outside possibility of reaching 60 seats, and improve their control over the House of Representatives by potentially more than 25 seats.

As I have pointed out in earlier posts, the Obama vote is composed of two segments that have a profound impact on these other races. First, there will most certainly be a dramatic increase in the participation of African Americans, relative to other groups of voters. This is the single most loyal voting bloc in American politics, supporting Democratic candidates at over 90 percent rates in elections from President to the local dog catcher.

The second voting bloc is the new voters under 35, which appear to split more than two to one for Barack Obama. Much more than older voters, these younger voters are likely to vote a “straight party vote” for the Democrats because they are less aware of the other office holders than are older voters.

Both of these voting blocs are much harder to reach by traditional telephone polling. Even with repeated callback attempts, polls frequently undercount these two groups and weighting is required to represent them properly in the results that are reported. Any systematic undercounting in the polls of these two groups will have the affect of diminishing the size of Obama’s margin of victory; thereby making the entire election appear closer than it is in reality. This actually aids Obama because it will stimulate the turnout of his loyalists.

Accuracy in Polling:
Polling companies do not report routinely their true completion rates on their polls. When we were in the process of developing Internet based polling at Harris Interactive, it was clear to everyone in the firm that completion rates in telephone polling were becoming the “dirty little secret” of the telephone polling community.

Completion rates on telephone polls have been falling since the 1960’s, but the problem became acute during the 1990’s with the rise of telemarketing and later with the development of national “Do Not Call” lists. Although telephone polling was specifically exempted from the Federal legislation restricting calls to do not call lists, the general hostility to unsolicited phone calls reduced cooperation and completion rates dramatically. Again, these “refusals”, do not answer; and answering machines, voice mail and the like give respondents easy and inoffensive ways to opt out of telephone polls.

I say “dirty little secret” because the conspiracy of public silence on the issue is a product of the self-interest by the polling companies and their media clients to avoid any real public discussion of the problem. Polling has become a highly integrated part of the news reporting process, and why would either side want to discuss a problem that undercut the validity and accuracy of the so-called “information” they were feeding the public on a regular basis.

The problem is even more acute with the state polls, as most people in the polling community recognize. The budgets for these polls tend to be more limited; the news media sponsors resist paying the cost that is required for accurate polling, involving repeated callbacks; and they have never been as accurate, on average, as the national polls. You can see this yourself simply by reviewing information at the Web Site of the National Council on Public Polls (NCPP).
The problem is compounded because of the candidacy of Barack Obama, where systematic undercounting of African Americans and the younger voters is likely to affect nearly every state, and every race, in which polling is conducted.

The Implications for the Election:
Senator Barack Obama is headed toward a large and perhaps landslide victory, bringing with him most of the close races for the House and the Senate, and even the state legislative races.
He will “seal the deal” with half hour broadcasts later this month that will allow him to represent his best case in his best medium. His “infomercial”, which I have urged for a time, will allow him to present his arguments in the most positive way possible, to what will be a very large audience of people who care passionately about politics, and the infomercial will be discussed by the national media for several days afterward.

We are in a “realigning period” that will reshape American politics for at least a generation. Younger voters, those under 35, are selecting the Democratic Party by a huge margin. These voters, compared with their parents and grandparents, are less religious and more secular, much more activist on global warming and the environment, and much less sympathetic to the political agenda of the Christian Coalition. The “tide” of the influence of the Christian Coalition in American politics is beginning a long process of "ebbing" and we may well be heading toward a politics that sounds more secular in tone.

The “young” have found the perfect candidate in Barack Obama – optimistic by character, moderate in his style and tone, activist in his political orientations, libertarian in his social views, secular in his public policy stances, independent of special interest constituencies, and very, very bright and articulate.

I do not envy Barack Obama! He is inheriting a mess, not of his own making, but that mess will dominate his Presidency for years. Like all of his, he is going to have to learn how to make do with less, and the less will get much worse unless he deals with the entitlement crisis on Medicare and Social Security that is approaching us like a tsunami.

Americans are a very resilient people. With proper leadership, I believe that we (at least a majority of us) will behave properly. Proper leadership, however, means that office-holders in Washington, D.C., and the state capitols are going to have to start telling the truth for a change, even if it makes some voters angry.

The very worse "sin" in a democracy is the systematic lying about conditions and events that all of us can see as lies” eventually. The lying, even when one politely calls it “spin”, erodes all trust, and we can see the terrible cost of the loss of public trust in the current economic crisis. The impact of that loss of trust in the current Administration ought to be apparent to nearly everyone, but will we learn the lesson? That is the question?

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Blame It on Poor Old John McCain

The Right Wing “Blame Game” Has Begun:
My Monday Herald Tribune brought the first of what is likely to be an elaborate effort by the right wing in Republican politics to shift the burden of responsibility for their losses in 2008 from themselves to Senator John McCain. The story quoted conservative political commentator Bill Kristol as saying on Fox News, “It’s a stupid campaign,” and “It’s really become a pathetic campaign;” things that he repeated in a column for the New York Times.

“Conservative Republicans” didn’t like McCain in the first place, largely because they did not see him as embracing their right wing religious and political agenda with sufficient zealousness; but they didn’t have a candidate like the one they found in born-again, George Bush.

However, their beloved candidate, President George Bush, is not on the ticket, having engineered one of the worst Administrations in American history, leaving with an approval rating that is among the lowest in the history of polling. Even not on the ticket, however, the failures of George Bush and his conservative cohorts hover eerily over the election like ethereal ghosts seem to hover over a battle field where tens of thousands have perished.

Dishonest to the Core:
Before this is over, the right wing Republican apologists and commentators will have convinced themselves, their unthinking zealots and partisans, and some elements of the uneducated America that John McCain is the reason they lost this election and their place in the sun. This will become the imaginative “conservative theory” for the Republican loss in 2008. It wasn’t George Bush, the Republicans in Congress, the Christian Coalition, or the conservative media pundits. It was John McCain, all by his lonesome, although some might say he had a little help from his friend, Sarah Palin.

They will say he ran a terrible campaign; that he did not demonize Obama sufficiently with their version of “moral clarity;” that he lost simply because of ineptness or that he wasn’t conservative (their version of conservatism) enough. That will be the spin line taken by Bill Kristol, Russ Limbaugh, Michael Savage and their like.

This is revisionist history at its worse; inaccurate, dishonest to the core, and totally self-serving for their conservative cause. McCain becomes the scapegoat for the Republican electoral failure while they ignore almost everything that would indict them and their cause.

It remains me of the notorious “explanation” for the German failure in World War I; where the Nazi’s blamed the entire loss on Jews and Jewish bankers. The right wing of the Republican Party is taking exactly the same tact with John McCain, although they cannot quite match Joseph Goebbels for viciousness– getting close with Bill Ayers, but not quite a match, yet!

The Republicans are losing for many reasons, with John McCain among the less important, and the failure to recognize these reasons will harm the Republican cause for years to come.
In the end, the Republican Party in Congress and the Administration quite literally forgot who they were and what they promised the American people. Promising responsible fiscal conservatism, they delivered instead the single most fiscally irresponsible Government in modern times. Promising to protect our national security, they have done more actually to undermine our national security than any administration in modern times. Instead of promoting a rational policy of supporting free market capitalism, they have moved American more toward socialism than any Administration in memory.

Eroding National Security and American Sovereignty:
The Republicans Conservatives particularly try to promote themselves as the champions of a "strong and powerful" America, with Democrats as "national security wimps." We entered the Bush Administration with increasing national power and sovereignty backed by a strong dollar, growing financial reserves, a healthy economy, and the strongest military in the world.

We will end the Bush Administration the greatest debtor nation in the world, beholden on all sides to unfriendly regimes that have trillions of our dollars; unparalleled and highly limiting national debt and deficits; an economy in full financial crisis; and a military whose strengths have been wasted on a hugely expensive and unnecessary war in Iraq. No administration in our history has ever left office with our sovereignty and security so remarkably diminished and imperiled at the hands of our elected leaders. These are the facts about national security; not the propaganda of Republican apologists like Bill Kristol.

We are in a new era of greatly reduced international ambitions, caused almost entirely by the Republicans in Washington, starting with the stars of the Bush Administration – George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfiwitz, the gang that truly could not shoot straight.

President Obama will find his options limited in virtually everything because there simply isn’t going to be any money available to do much of anything. We have got a lot of big bombs and the means to deliver them, but a diminishing amount of money to pay our soldiers. We cannot use money as a tool of diplomacy because we do not have the money. We cannot use our historically good reputation as a tool of diplomacy, because Bush clearly trashed our reputation worldwide. We cannot continue fighting two wars with debt financing because our system can barely stand the debt it has. The engine of our future prosperity, our powerful economy, has been hobbled by unfettered and uncontrolled financial systems, which we are now propping up with a heavy dose of state socialism.

The conservative Republicans will be the last ones in the entire world to acknowledge this catastrophe, because it happened on their watch, with their champions holding the power and the cards, and with their philosophies dictating policy. It is the perfect end result of the policies and people they espoused and supported for eight years. No, it is much better to blame it all on John McCain, whose primary error was the selection of Sarah Palin, whom these same conservatives pundits all vigorously applauded and defended.

The Worse Is Yet to Come for the Republicans, and the Country:
We are in a recession, and it may be a deep one if the collective governments cannot get the banks to stop overreacting and start lending money to people. Without bank financing, the automobile market will disintegrate and the new construction of homes will not recover, and those sectors in steep decline will send shock waves throughout Europe and the United States. There will be a recession, with lots of Americans and Europeans out of work, injuring the retail sales of nearly everything, and injuring the developing countries everywhere.

Young Americans under 35 are the most vulnerable. When job creation stops, they feel it first. They are supporting Barack Obama by a huge margin, and they will continue to support him for the full eight years if he does well as a President. These same Americans are not much interested in the religious doctrines and cant of the Christian Conservatives. They are far more liberal and libertarian than their parents; and the appeals of "cultural conformity" of the religious right will fall on very deft ears with a majority of these voters.

The Republican Party, particularly the Christian Conservatives, are driving a majority of the next generation of Americans firmly into the Democratic Party, perhaps on the same scale as the younger generation joined the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt from 1932 through 1940. Once these young people are securely identified and involved with the Democratic Party, they will guarantee an increasing Democratic majority as older Republicans pass on. Historians will eventually attribute this shift to the behavior of the Republicans during the Bush years.

The Republican conservatives and their religious allies can and will certainly rewrite history to suit their own interests. Their "villain" will be John McCain: with George Bush exonerated, his Administration deified and the conservative zealots (pundits and analysts) excused. The only thing they will prove, however, is that there is not an ounce of intellectual honesty in the lot of them.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

A Big "Win" Is A-coming?

Big Win or Moderate Win: But a Win for Obama, No Matter:
Senator Barack Obama is headed toward a victory on November 4th. After the longest and most expensive Presidential campaign on record, one that ran exceptionally close in the primaries and then very close for much of the general election, Obama is today headed toward a win that could range between very large to moderate, but not the nail biter we generally expected. At the moment, his lead is between 6 and 11 points, averaging close to 8, with leads growing in many of the states that were two weeks ago very close such as Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

The October Predictable Republican “Nasty” Campaign – DOA!
McCain has just plain run out of steam and arguments, and it shows. The nasty recent commentary delivered by Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain may excite his partisan crowds, but it is falling very flat with the rest of the electorate. Obama seems to grow more confident and effective even as both McCain and Palin seem to shrink before our eyes.
The much anticipated campaign of “guilt by association”, orchestrated by Dick Morris (Fox analyst) and Fox Television and supported by already prepared ads from the McCain campaign and its allies is falling flat on its face. Instead of the attack raising issues about Obama, the media is filled with speculation about the desperation of the McCain campaign and commentary about the end of journalism at FOX, which has never much cared about professional journalism anyway. The campaign was already Dead on Arrival!

The public today has a pretty good “feel” for whom the real Barack Obama is, and he is simply nothing like the absurd “distortions” against his character. As I argued earlier, the very long campaign has “insulated” Obama from this campaign in a way that a shorter campaign could not have accomplished. The attack plays well with the most extreme of the McCain partisans, but not with anyone else. Instead, the nasty charges just make the “attackers” look weak, mean spirited, cheap, and a little dirty – smaller by the day!

John McCain is simply getting killed politically by events and his own choices. His choice for a running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, has turned out to be a real disaster. She is regarded as an inappropriate choice by nearly everyone other than the Republican apologists who attempt to “spin” her inexperience into golden originality. The “abuse of her authority” conclusion in the firing of her police commissioner is just the icing on the cake. She was McCain’s very first Presidential “choice”, and she was a bad one; both politically for the campaign and for the American people. In a way, his choice was a perfect reflection of McCain’s personality – impulsive, risky, and wrong.

The Financial Crisis Undermines McCain:
The financial crisis has undermined McCain in many ways. First, it has upped the stakes for all Americans, making our individual votes matter much more to us. Second, Americans prefer the Obama response – cool, analytical and measured – to the McCain response – hot, impulsive, and erratic. Third, the crisis is the logical consequence of the financial world created under the Republicans, and it simply has to spill over to McCain no matter how much he attempts to distance himself from Bush. Finally, Obama’s obvious intelligence has become more important to voters precisely because of the complexity of the crisis. Voters are valuing “smart” more today than two weeks ago.

How Large is the Obama/Democratic Victory?
The only issue left is how large the margin might be – somewhere between 6 and 12 points I think, but we will not know until we can know both the turnout and the swing of undecided voters in the final week. Both of these variables have the potential now to swing the final outcome by up to four points – two points for differential turnout and two points for the undecided, enough to make things closer, but not enough to win.

My best guess is as follows: Obama will win the turnout battle, with the young and African Americans voting in much higher numbers than normal and some dispirited Republicans staying home. Obama’s organizational effort is dramatically superior to anything the Republicans can put in the field, and his voters have demonstrated higher levels of motivation from the beginning.

The real effect of the turnout battle, however, will be on marginal House and Senate races. The Democrats will gain substantial seats in the House, but I have no estimate of how many. They are quite likely to win as many 60 seats in the Senate. Whether they win 60 is down to a couple of races which are virtually tied, but where a voter surge could easily carry them for the Democrats. Democrats are suddenly competitive in far too many seats to count, and a three or four point bulge in Democratic voting is going to lift a lot of campaigns to victory. There will be affects at every level of voting.

On the last minute undecided swing, I think many of these people are simply not going to vote, but that Obama will win a plurality, perhaps 60 to 40, of those who do vote. At that margin, it might swing one point more to his margin.

In a sense, the financial crisis coupled with the ineptness of the McCain campaign is pushing the Democratic Presidential vote much closer to the Democratic Congressional vote. During this campaign, many analysts have noted that Obama’s vote was running well behind the vote for the Democrats in Congress, with his “race” the factor pulling the Obama vote lower. However, the actual vote for the President and Congress (according to the most recent polls) are likely to be much closer to each other with the clear meaning that many fewer American voters in the end allowed race to override their other concerns.

That is a fairly profound statement about the status of “race” in American life. In the end, we Americans appear to care more about our families and our economic well being than we do about a person’s race, and that is how it should be in the “better world” we are creating.

A Smaller Republican Party in the Future:
The Republicans are about to pay a very high price for the policies of the past eight years, and the general incompetence and corruption of the Bush Administration. The Democrats are going to be handed the strongest control over the government in modern times, and it is the start of a realigning period that will leave the Republicans a minority party – mostly Evangelical, Christian Conservatives – for many years to come. I argued that point in my blog early in February, where you can find the full rationale.

The Republicans have gainfully earned this painful rebuke by the American electorate. If they continue to genuflect to their right wing religious base, they will be delivered more rebukes in the future. The right wing is going to plague the Republican Party into the future, dominating the nomination processes and producing candidates who are less able to compete in general elections.

A sensible and pragmatic Democratic government will earn high marks, but they still have to deliver policies that a majority of Americans can embrace. Nothing is ever guaranteed. These are troubled times, both economically and militarily. We all would like a calm, but decisive, leadership at the helm, and Obama may prove to be the man for the times.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Good Economics from Bad Politics? Not Likely!

How Do You Get Good Economic Policies From Bad Politics?
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/11/stiglitz200811

The web site above is for an article by Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University Economics Professor who writes for Vanity Fair, among others. Dr. Stiglitz, who has won a Nobel Prize, has been writing with increasing pessimism about the consequences of the policies of the past eight years, and it is well worth reading, although sobering.

The only thing that disturbs me about the piece is the tendency for Dr. Stiglitz to stop with the economic questions themselves, and to not examine the question of how our political system could produce such terrible policies in the first place. It might be “politic” during an election to blame everything on George Bush, but doing so might distract us from the deeper problem that has evolved in the American political system.

Most Americans (including most economists) would agree with the following: that doubling the national debt in just eight years is not a wise public policy; that becoming the world’s largest debtor nation is not wise public policy for the United States, particularly when our debt is held predominately by such uncertain “friends” as China, Russia, the Oil Régimes, etc; that creating entirely unregulated and unsupervised financial markets are a risky proposition, given the capacity for greed of those involved with those institutions. In fact, most Americans would today agree with much and perhaps most of Dr. Stiglitz’s arguments.

If that is the case, then how did we get into this mess in such a short time? That is the question that Dr. Stiglitz and most economists fail even to address, much less answer. Unfortunately, until we answer it, we will not get to anything approaching the policies that Dr. Stiglitz would advocate or that the American people would approve. These grotesque economic politics are not accidents; they are the perfectly logical extension of a political system that is dangerously imbalanced in the direction of creating just these types of policies.

I have been making this argument for well more than a decade, most elaborately in a book my son, Ben, and I wrote and published in 1994, called The Politics of American Discontent (John Wiley and Sons). Our argument is relatively simple (and supported in the book with copious statistical information):

• The monetary costs of modern political campaigns began to increase dramatically following the advent of television and radio as the dominant means of communicating with voters, a change that really accelerated in the 1960’s and beyond.
• The primary sources of the largest financial resources for campaigns came from the highly organized national and state “interests” who wanted to affect policy to direct money and policy support to their “interests.” We call these “lobbies” and they come in a wide variety – the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, the ethanol lobby, the teachers’ lobby, etc. They all operate in much the same way.
• These “interests” are very rational about their campaign contributions; they primarily support incumbents by a factor of 15 to 25 to one over challengers because they want “certainty” of access after the election to those who win, and incumbents almost always win.
• Recognizing this symbiotic relationship between the incumbents and the special interests, the incumbents use this motivation to amass huge campaign war chests designed to discourage challengers from opposing them because the opponents do not have access to such funds.
  o The Incumbents receive historically unprecedented “permanence” in office, with no effective opposition and re-election rates approaching 100 percent for Congress and the States.
  o The “special interests” gain regular, continual and unfettered access to decision makers (incumbents) to influence public policy to promote their interests, e.g., more public money, contracts, lower taxes, more favorable tax treatment, less regulation, etc.
  o The public receives a nearly continuous completely one-sided flow of paid and unpaid propaganda from the incumbents to promote themselves, to distort the process that is producing the policies, and to insure that the voters like them, even when their institutions fail – all paid for with the money from the lobbyists.
• The “net policy effect” in most States and federally is to inflate spending (and future underfunded and unfunded liabilities) by an amount significantly greater than the public wants, that the tax system will support, or that good economic policy dictates, and in ways that are destructive to the longer term interests of America and future generations, i.e., our beloved (if unprotected by us) grandchildren.
  o The problem is compounded by the ability of the incumbents to vote the public benefits in the form of increased Social Security and Medicare today, where the benefit is an “unfunded liability” where the cost has been transferred to future generations who will have to pay for it and where the recipients pay little or nothing. This is taxation without representation at its very best – our grandchildren do not get to vote on their own indebtedness. How charitable of our ethical office holders!
  o The problem is compounded with public employee salaries, one of the largest special interests, where the incumbents vote pension increases to employees without requiring the funding in form of higher taxes to pay for them.

The net result is a badly corrupted and broken democratic political system! That is the primary cause of the past eight years. We have the policies that the incumbents of both parties delivered; and they delivered those policies directly to the special interests that funded their campaigns to insure their permanence in office as incumbents. The “special interests” that are funding the incumbents, at every level of office, are twisting public policy slowly and surely to favor themselves, to the detriment of what the public finds acceptable or what good economic policy might suggest.

We are in the midst of a very competitive Presidential election, and we are looking at a major shift in the strength of the Democrats in Congress. This creates the illusion of more competition and choice than is the case. Most incumbents in Congress will be returned despite the fact that 75 percent of us believe that Congress is doing a lousy job. Almost every incumbent will be returned in States like New York and California where the legislative process has been broken for years, and fiscal crises occur virtually every year.

Economics is a science that, for the most part, fails to take into account “political variables,” except as factors outside the models. But I was trained as a Political Scientist, which is a much less exact science, and I will say unequivocally to all economists that unless you can address the process above, you cannot get to anything approaching “optimal” economic policies. You can advise as much as you like what needs to be done, and it will eventually be twisted all out of kilter by the process of influence that exists because of the ability of special interests to purchase the loyalty of incumbents in office.

When the Democrats assume control, the process will begin all over again but with a slightly different constellation of special interests. The special interests are generally pretty bi-partisan in who they buy, contributing to both sides of the aisle in the states and federally

The policies that Dr. Stiglitz and so many other economists decry – massive deficits, huge debt, massive unfunded liabilities, uncontrolled spending, etc. -- are simply symptoms of a deeper political problem, just as a high temperature is a symptom of more serious illness.

The deeper problem (the "cause" as it were) is the unfettered influence of special interests of all kinds that is purchased through campaign contributions to incumbents and paid off with subsidies, favoritism, tax breaks, and the like to those interests after the election. We will simply never fix the economic symptoms unless we fix the political disease. This political disease is deeply entrenched; so entrenched that it has corrupted the morality of values of those in the system, creating a world in which “spin” is a substitute for candor and truth, when winning is worth so much financially that the social costs of winning are simply ignored, and where greed is the new public morality of office holding. Americans know this, frankly, and that is why they are so disgusted with politics and the people in it.

The system will continue to produce massively irrational (for our children and grandchildren) deficits and debt, and even greater unfunded liabilities, as long as the special interests can buy whatever they want from the government with the loyalty of incumbents they have purchased with their campaign contributions. It would be nice if we could focus on the cause, for a change, and not simply the effects.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

The Virtues of a Long Campaign

A Relook At A Long Campaign:
Commentators, including me, have been inclined to decry the extraordinary length of the 2008 Presidential election campaign. As it moves on, seemingly endlessly, for up to two years, we all become fatigued by the sheer repetitiveness of listening to the same candidates say the same things, over and again. To a considerable extent, the arguments of the candidates, no matter how meritorious, lose some of their merit with their restating, and the speeches lose their luster when repeated hundreds of time. Eventually, we decide whom we prefer and we start to “tune out” most of the rest of the campaign as noise.

I believe that most of this is true. However, I have begun to understand that a candidate like Senator Barack Obama would have had absolutely no chance in a short campaign, and I think we would have been the poorer for it.

For example, a shorter campaign would have required all of the candidates, including Obama, to rely almost entirely on the big hitters and special interests for their campaign funding. In effect, none of the more traditional Presidential candidates can even get to first base unless they sell a portion of their campaign to people who will own them afterward.

In this instance, Barack Obama started very early, with little more than seed money, and his campaign will have, when it is over, changed the face of American politics forever. What he did is to plant a really big idea that will bedevil entrenched incumbents for years to come. The big idea is this: a really smart, talented and charismatic candidate, without established funding, can start early, working smaller groups, and build up an online campaign that can eventually out raise and out spend the big hitters and the special interests. That is what Obama did!

A long campaign has another important virtue, which is becoming apparent as we proceed through the month of October. The Republicans of the Karl Rove School have perfected the mid to late October last minute smear campaign, launched when it is nearly impossible to counter. The Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a perfect example in 2004.

In this election, Senator Barack Obama is facing much of the same kind of nasty assault, with the Internet underground effort by Republican client groups to label him a Muslim and question his patriotism; the advertising attacks to link him to Rev. Wright and William Ayers; and the overall attempt to paint him a “left wing”, tax and spend “liberal”.

But it is not working, and it is not going to work, and we can all thank the long campaign for that. Everyone has now heard Senator Barack Obama for 18 long months, and many of them have already bought into the negative campaign and will not consider him. However, all of these attacks by the McCain campaign have become “old news” for everyone.

If you take a relatively less well known candidate like John Kerry, Ross Perot, and even Sarah Palin, and you smear them at the last minute, the strategy works because the voters lack the strength of context and exposure with which to ignore the slime. It creates “doubt” where prior knowledge cannot defeat it.

The long campaign has insulated Senator Barack Obama to a remarkable degree from the last minute Karl Rove slime tactics. Almost all of the voters have a thorough knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. The voters have heard it all before, hundreds of times and discussed both by Obama and commentators almost endlessly. Whatever effect this has had on voters has been had, and the voters will not give you a second shot at them on these issues raised so long ago. It is now “old news,” very old news, and no one is listening or interested – friend and foe alike.

The second problem is painting him as a left wing, flame throwing, radical liberal, or as someone “who really doesn’t understand,” or as a defeatist who wants to “lose” at any cost. We have all heard Senator Obama way too many times. He is way too smart, articulate and well informed to claim repeatedly that he doesn’t understand. It fell completely flat in the debate because it defied the obvious reality of Obama.

A flame throwing left wing radical: Obama tends to be at times excessively intellectual at times, given to eloquent and very positive language, in a tone of moderation and optimism. How do you paint this guy into something that he is so clearly not? It just doesn’t stick in this October.
Finally, how do you succeed in making him into a “military defeatist” when his primary “sin” is that he agrees with the American people that the War in Iraq was a mistake, to the detriment of the one that we needed to win in Afghanistan?

Finally, the long campaign has trained and prepared Senator Barack Obama: it has allowed him to collect a strong cast of senior advisors; he has honed his message, his tone, and his delivery; and he has weathered the worse, long ago, that they were going to throw at him.
We are going to see “long campaigns” proliferate in American politics, and maybe more “Barack Obama’s” will emerge to challenge the entrench incumbents backed by the big buck special interests who in the past have purchased public policy wholesale through campaign contributions.

And to John McCain, George Bush, and the “Karl Rove Strategists,” get ready for the big night because it isn’t going to be your night, this time.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black