Shorthand for Nothing

The more reports I read from the campaign’s postmortem, the less convinced I am that John McCain really had control over his message at the end. Once he had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate and took a hard tack to the right, the campaign had entered into its final stages, with attack ads that took a turn for the nasty and a running mate who seemed to represent everything I have ever disliked about the conservative base. At that point he seemed less interested in acting like the moderate he has developed a reputation for being. It had become a campaign of gimmicks, of erratic and seemingly desperate stabs at the presidency.

Had they recognized they had lost before that point? Did they think their only chance was to hope the conservative base outnumbered Obama’s legion of supporters? Were they counting on the youth vote to be as unreliable as previously? The strategies after the conventions seemed risky. Sarah Palin seemed at once a cynical attempt to attract Hillary’s supporters, a grab to energize the Republican base, and a desperate stab at weakening Obama’s message of change by bringing someone else who can lay claim to being an agent of change.

I am not convinced that balancing act would have been possible even for a political mastermind, and I certainly don’t think Sarah Palin fits the bill. I grant her bloody, luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin that has a name; she may even be intelligent and clever. But she is not cunning. She is a creature of gimmicks. She was also almost entirely unknown, apparently even to the McCain campaign. The convention bounce came, held for a while, then faded into an Obama lead once the public got an idea of who she was–and was less than impressed.

But I’m not really here to talk about why the campaign failed. He was taking some risks and failed. I think they got away from him at some point. He lost balance, things happened too fast, and the only choice was to run with it and hope. I can’t say it was a civil campaign at the end. But I think it is important to remember at least this much: John McCain is not a monster. His supporters are not all hateful fearmongers. Perhaps it’s time to make the attempt to make some unity happen?

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Racism is not dead, it’s just taken a bizarre turn. Now you have some of the conservatives blaming the blacks for being racist. That’s right, folks: the blacks are now oppressing the white man. Those making these observations are almost invariably the wingnuttiest of the wingnuts, but the tone of the observation tends to vary from “idle sociological observation” to “THIS IS AN OUTRAGE WHY AREN’T THEY BEING ROUNDED UP.”

This is where racism has been lately. Most conservatives don’t think it exists anymore, unless it is the “blacks hating whites” variety they have no problem talking about. Now that we no longer have racist laws, racism is pretty much gone. The reason blacks are poor is because they choose to be poor! The reason you don’t see as many minorities in government as you would expect from numbers is because they just aren’t as qualified for office! We aren’t being racist, we’re just observing that in the land of opportunity, they don’t seem to be seizing the day very well.

This is the kind of racism that expresses itself by saying, “I’m not racist, I love my black friends.” It’s a sort of blindness to your own actions and a belief that what you do is perfectly normal and acceptable. “I’m more than willing to get past racism, I’m just waiting for them to go first.”

I think a really good awareness program would be just confronting some of these people with some basic sociological research on minorities in America.

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Just a quick update on an earlier post in which I said Republicans don’t threaten to move to Canada when they lose. Turns out some of them do! I think mostly younger ones. And a few are saying New Zealand or Australia or something. Apparently Obama is just that bad.

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As of this writing, the last few states are too close to call. It is clear that Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, and I’m not alone in feeling like this may be the start of something big for our nation–and I hope the world. His speech was spectacular and moving. John McCain gave a concession speech that was polite and dignified and everything a concession speech should be.

Tonight I’d like to look back at this election, all sarcasm, snark, and joking aside.

I really started following it towards the end of the primaries. I’d heard of Barack before, but didn’t know a lot about him. I knew I didn’t want to see Hillary as president–but I think more importantly, I knew that Barack Obama had a lot of grassroots support. He was energizing people–he was energizing the young, disaffected, cynical group I was a part of. There was hope for something new. So I started watching the primaries. Hillary had long odds against her when I started. Superdelegates were a big deal. And I started learning more about Barack Obama. He was intelligent, calm, dignified, charismatic. There was something inspirational about him, and this unbelievable sense of inevitability.

At some point during the summer, I started really watching the election in earnest. Blogs, news media, political analysts, polls. There was something almost absurd about Barack–there was so much eagerness, so much enthusiasm. The media was in love with him. Everyone I knew was in love with him. And it was infectious. I found myself laughing, not because he was a bad candidate, but because he was a good candidate. It was refreshing to joke about how awesome a candidate was, and to be sincere.

Still, I knew he wasn’t going to save the world. There was something almost Messianic about his presence. And it was easy for his detractors to paint him as if he had a Messiah complex. In the end I felt that he knew that really, this wasn’t about him–this was about inspiring the people of America. This was about reminding America that they could make a difference.

And what a difference we’ve made. I don’t need to explain how momentous this occasion is. I hope this energy lasts. If everyone remains as fired up as they were for the campaign, we really will be able to change America. Who can say if it will last, or how long it will take? But change has arrived in America. If Barack Obama can keep people as fired up for the next four years as he has for the past two, maybe we won’t be a nation of people who think it’s somebody else’s problem.

If that’s the case, that’s change I can believe in. (I know, I know.)

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Okay, this time I am prepared for it. This time I am ready. Here it is, Hope himself becoming a god.

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Surprise liveblog, after the jump!

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In a few short hours we find out whether America will finally fall to the black muslim Arab terrorist space demon communist freedom-and-america-hating freedom-hater terror-loving godless inexperienced elitist fraudulent anti-Christs. If this happens only a minority of America is actually America anymore, and we will soon change the name of the country to Obamaland, and the capital will be changed to Hopeville, and all good American patriots (ie, Republicans, who put Country First despite thinking half of the country is full of America-hating freedom-haters) will be rounded up and put in camps, where they will be forced to do work and get paid huge salaries, but all of their money will be taken away from them and given to fat lazy black people, who hate whitey and love sitting around and accepting handouts from the government. They will laugh quietly to themselves and give one another terrorist fist-bumps, because they know they are really just milking the system at the expense of the poor belabored patriots! They are all evil and selfish, statistically. Rich people just want to be able to enjoy their wealth without having to think about those horrible poor people, but they won’t be able to do that anymore, because soon the poor will control the government and it will be like Karl Marx but a whole lot bloodier.

Terrorists will randomly bomb churches and private schools and small businesses and good Christian homes and then fist-bump the puppet governments in the cities, and host fundraisers for Obama in their living room, where everyone will have to come and give all their money, ever. And everyone will profit off the labor of the Republicans in their slave labor camps and sit around being decadent and drinking wine that the French shipped over. The whole country will look like a war zone and it will be a mockery of everything America once stood for. The Freedom Eagle will circle the skies one last time, shedding a single patriotic tear, and fly off, crying like the phoenix, vowing to return one day and plant the seeds of freedom anew.

So yeah, I predict Obama with about 350 electoral votes.

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I’m not a statistician, or even a math student. But a number of people seem to not know how to read polls, or how to understand them. Some of this is due to a lack of understanding about methodology–some of it due to paying more attention to the headlines than the polling data itself. So here is a friendly guide.

First: a poll usually contains somewhere between 1000 and 3000 respondents, randomly selected so they can get a representative sample. Pollsters work very hard to try to remove any sort of systemic bias, both from their methodology and their results. For politics, they will often assign a party weighting system–that is, if more Americans identify as liberal than conservative, they will weight the results so it gives a reflection of that.

I don’t know the actual details behind this–that is what the pollsters are for. But let’s look at what I do know.

1. 1000-3000 is not the entirety of the American population. There will be errors. Some places have a house effect towards one candidate–this is not because the pollsters are biased, it is because their methodology isn’t working.
2. Nevertheless, the results are remarkably stable and show clear trending over the course of an election. The pollsters are evidently doing something right.
3. This is true despite the fact you occasionally end up with an outlier.

But let’s look more into how to read the polls. It is generally not the best idea to simply pick a pollster and rely exclusively on that one. So the first step in reading the polls is to read a number of them. Gallup is good, Rasmussen is good, they are both showing different numbers. Instead of assuming one of them is wrong and the other is right, perhaps you should consider taking them both into consideration? The more data, the better. If there is a legitimate trend, it will be reflected in multiple polls. CNN even conducts a “poll of polls” to get a better idea of the overall mood. And of course, fivethirtyeight.com, pollster.com, and realclearpolitics.com also perform poll aggregations (and include state polls).

But it’s also really tempting to assume, based on a poll’s numbers, that it is because of something your beloved candidate did or didn’t do. Guessing the motivations of the American public is tricky at best, so I recommend against this, but if you really want to see why there’s a change, look at some of the other numbers, and compare them to what they were earlier. Many pollsters report on a number of factors. They might ask if you feel confident or content that the economy will get back on the right track if this candidate wins. They might ask if you feel he is knowledgeable, or ready to lead, or understands your needs. They might ask if you feel confident that if he is elected the nation will have a good, capable leader.

These numbers are not reflected in the topline “Obama is up by eight points” data–but it can give you a good indication of a number of things. Are the people afraid of Obama? Is he likely to lose supporters? Is McCain’s negative campaigning having the desired effect? Is the race tightening because of that? Is the candidate improving his positive view among the American public, or are they increasingly worried about him?

These numbers make up the difference between a hesitant “I support John McCain” and an enthusiastic “I support John McCain.” You have been seeing the race tighten in the past few days, but the public doesn’t seem more optimistic about John McCain as president. I suspect what you’re seeing is a number of undecideds seeing that McCain is about to lose and deciding they are going to support him. They just aren’t happy about it.

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One of the conservative forums on which I lurk has a thread for predicting the election’s outcome. Approximately half of the 35 votes believe McCain will win (18/35, slightly better than half). In the interests of full disclosure, a lot of people on this particular forum seem to be under the age of 18. Still, I was surprised that fully half of voters thought McCain would win.

Some gems from the thread, after the jump.

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