Summary

Archives of political thoughts posted in 2004.

05-08		A Letter to The Rake
09-12		Head, Meet Brick Wall
09-17		Red State, Blue State, [Insert something clever here]
09-23		Truer Words...
10-04		Viewer's Digest
10-14		Undecided? Enough, already
10-17		Hope for the Intellectual Elite
10-19		This is sort of like a blog
10-20		ABTY — ABB
10-21		Another Set of Minor Distractions
11-25		Archive of Political Sidebar Links

Note: The url of each heading and (date) below is a permanent link.

This letter was recently published in The Rake magazine, in response to an article written by a Twin Cities writer entitled "The Land Of Milk And Honey" describing his experience of having a baby in Norway. (A recommended read, as are Eric's other fine works such as Minnesota Marvels and Scooter Mania.)

---

Many thanks to The Rake and Eric Dregni for the informative essay on the alternative social policies offered by the Motherland. Although Minnesota was settled largely by Scandinavians steeped in the principles of Social Democracy, recent political shifts in both our state and our country reflect a narrow-minded philosophy based on the credo "It's my money, mine! Mine! Mine!"

Too often we forget that a healthy civil society benefits all its members, that supporting young families and children helps ensure that they contribute positively to the world in which they grow, that our governments exist to provide for all citizens rather than to transfer wealth to the privileged. There is no such thing as a "tax cut," only tax shifts. We can transfer the responsibility for generating revenue from the rich to the poor, from the national government to states and cities, from "now" to "later." The long-term effect, however, encompasses the destruction of social safety nets that effect us all.

-- cbu (05/08/2004)

I find myself going through a cycle of being completed disgusted with President Bush, mad or disappointed with Senator Kerry, hopeful/pessimistic about the chances of ending the current lunacy we sometimes refer to as "fiscal policy," absolutely apathetic about the whole thing. At the end of this cycle I make yet another vow to stop paying attention to the race until the baseball season for the Minnesota Twins is over. (And I can stick to this for almost 24 hours before I happen to look at the newspaper, and then I am completely disgusted with...)

Unfortunately, I have as much control over who wins the presidency as I do over who wins the World Series.

-- cbu (09/12/2004)

I keep vowing to ignore the ignore the presidential campaign until the World Series is over, or at least until my Minnesota Twins have played their final game of the season. The World Wide Web is a relentless pusher, however. Like most junkies I have made a bargain with myself that simply moderates my intake: I will only check out the latest electoral college polling data once a week, and generally on Saturday afternoons. Or not until 5:00 p.m. during the week. Usually.

It seems to me that all electoral college predictors/calculators are dealing with three types of data, conveniently categorized as past, present, and future. And as one ponders one historical epoch, questions inevitably arise about the other two -- when attempting to guess how Ohio will turn on November 2, one would like to know what the current polls say, and what has happened in previous elections.

Dave Leip's Political Atlas is one of the best sources for historical data, taking the red/blue distinction to an extreme by mapping political results not just by state, but by county as well. In 1960 John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon 58.1% / 41.5% in Minnesota's Ramsey county, but received 878 fewer votes in Wabasha county. Yet another one of life's mysteries revealed, along with the number of electoral votes Thomas Pickney won in 1796. His site also includes an electoral college calculator for 2004 (both Deluxe and Simple versions, each a bit clunky) for your to create your own predictions.

The most recent state polls are not exactly the "present" but are of course historical artifacts as well, imperfect tools to describe an uncertain past, but provide me and my fellow junkies with the fix we need until the real ballots have been cast and counted. I can't afford a subscription to www.polling.com to access their state level data, so I rely on a variety of web sites that keep track of the latest polls. Several different web sites have electoral college calculators with a varying partisan bent, such as the liberal www.electoral-vote.com and conservative (with a Christian bent) www.electionprojection.com, indicating the current (well, recent past) leanings and their implications for the election. Both appear to have cherry-picking tendencies. The web site www.tripias.com does an admirable job of archiving state polling results, and unfutz.blogspot.com has been providing periodic summaries of a whole slew of these prediction sites.

The New York Times has a more sophisticated electoral college map, where shades of red and blue indicate relative strength, and the "battlegrounds" are colored tan. No actual polling numbers are provided, the historical information only includes margins of victory going back to 1960, and its option to create a representational map of the United States out of colored squares is just plain silly, but this is a valiant attempt to organize and provide a wealth of data in a "non-partisan" fashion that takes margins of error pretty seriously for those swing states.

The real fun comes with the calculators, in which you can test your own scenarios, armed with the latest polling data, using past and present data to guess the future interactively. Many of the above sites provide various (and generally clunky) options for this, but the delivery method of choice for my weekly fix has been a flash map published by the L.A. Times. This has earned my personal Edward Tufte nomination for the elegant presentation of a complex set of data, for they not only include the latest state poll results (they obviously can afford that pollingreport.com subscription) and not just historical data, but an interactive feature to test out various electoral college scenarios in a browser window that requires no scrolling or manual updating. Past, present, and future, all just a mouse click away. It provides a simple feast of political data, and its utility has only been improving over the past several months. I've also found its maintainers to be very receptive to feedback and suggestions.

Now if I could just convince some of those L.A. Times flash developers to do a little bit of moonlighting to present all of my new wave co-operatives data, maybe I could put all of this election business behind me. Until that happens, I've resigned myself to weekday excursions into the Major League Baseball web site to look once again at the current splits of Johan Santana. This allows me to go on a data-mining bender that at the very least blurs out all of those Swift Boat debates.

-- cbu (09/17/2004)

Has some KE04 operative made his way into the President's speech-writing team?

"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace."

-- George W. Bush, 21 September 2004            

(President Speaks to the United Nations General Assembly United Nations Headquarters)

-- cbu (09/23/2004)

Highlights from the GOP Convention, 30 August - 02 September 2004

This 2.5 minute QuickTime video summarizes the GOP message(s) from their convention, including the occasional reference to terrorism and danger.

Original source: http://home.earthlink.net/~houval/gopconstrm.mov

President Bush's highlights from the first debate, 30 September 2004

This 5 minute QuickTime video summarizes all of the hard work that President Bush described, and demonstrates the apparent toll it is has taken on his ability to communicate what he's seen on the television.

(Note: this video is perhaps a bit tedious, and the President's un-edited performance probably speaks for itself.)

Original source: http://howbushdid.blogspot.com/

-- cbu (10/04/2004)

So my Twins had an early exit, removing the one distraction I was using to stem my obsession with this electoral season. We'll deal with those damned Yankees next year, I guess. And now the debates are over, and I'm sick of the polls and the blogs and the latest news and I just want this election to be done so that we can retire President Bush and get on with our lives.

Consider this an open letter to anyone considering voting for Ralph Nader, plus to Andrew Sullivan and David Letterman :

---

I've been observing your electoral anguish for some time, which I think I can summarize as "I'm against re-electing President Bush but I'm not sure that I support Senator Kerry." And I have empathy for this situation -- I went through the same conflict in 2000 when I had serious reservations about voting for Al Gore.

If you don't want to see President Bush re-elected, you essentially have three options:

1. Don't vote.
2. Vote for a third-party or independent candidate.
3. Vote for Senator Kerry.

In my opinion, option (1) is an abdication of your responsibility as a citizen, and reduces your credibility to comment/complain about anything that happens in the next four years.

Option (2) might appease a guilty conscience, but is essentially the same thing as not voting. The most important lesson that I learned from Paul Wellstone was that it is much easier to influence an entrenched power structure than it is to reform that structure itself. I have no illusions that our two-party system is going to change in my lifetime, and I really don't have the energy or desire to implement a parliamentary system of governance in which third parties can be effective coalition members. In the end, I finally decided to join the Democratic party after years of declared "independence" because I felt that supporting a third-party "protest vote" candidate was a cop-out.

If you not only oppose the re-election of President Bush, but more importantly don't want to see it happen, then you really do have a responsibility to not only vote for Senator Kerry but advocate that others do so as well. This does not mean that you have to drink the Kool-Aid or stop discussing some of the obvious flaws, or even say that you're taking this action without mental anguish. Find your forum to complain about the candidate's views, and use it to lay the groundwork for influencing the policies of a President Kerry, but stop pretending that you can combat the excesses of President Bush's misguided policies without voting for and actively supporting the candidacy of his sole opponent.

-- cbu (10/14/2004)

Update: A portion of this post was reprinted in the Star Tribune.

Inspired by a recent Harris Interactive poll that broke down candidate support by various demographics including educational attainment, I decided to conduct a quick and dirty survey of my grad student colleagues to find out what the political climate is like back in Wallace Hall. I was mainly interested in how much time people during during their "work" day blowing off their research and paying attention to politics. I received 19 responses. This pool does not, of course, represent any random sample of our department, as the respondents obviously had an interest and/or a pre-disposition to participate in such an exercise!

Everyone indicated that a firm decision had been made about supporting a particular candidate in this year's election, there was collectively a 1% chance of any change between now and November 2.

Here's a summary of the other results.

Spending time on political issues

I was mainly interested in the "I should be working on my dissertation but I'm going to read more political news" guilt factor, hoping to get a gauge on how normal I really am. Turns out that I'm not too far off the deep end. Many complained that there is no such distinction, that we are on the clock during all waking hours. Yeah, I know...

    During Work  : 1.54 hours/day  (SD 2.61)
    Outside Work : 5.97 hours/week (SD 5.01)
    

These data include one self identified outlier, who is working full-time for a political magazine. I received several comments that politics are not discussed around the department very much, but that spending time on political issues isn't a proper "apolitical" measure.

Support for candidate

I asked: On a scale of 1 to 10, where 5 represents your 2000 level of passion for the candidate you voted for, how strong is your support for your current candidate?

Average support was 6.74 (SD 3.09)

     1 : XX
     2 : X
     3 : X
     4 :
     5 : XX
     6 : X
     7 : X
     8 : XXXXXX
     9 :
    10 : XXXXX
    

Choosing a candidate

I asked when they had made up your mind, and while I was expecting a response in terms of weeks or months, most answered contextually. Many referred to the end of the primary season, which I guess makes the most sense since you couldn't support a candidate until the party decided who that would be, but others made reference to the start of the Iraq War or the end of the 2000 election.

     0.5 : X
     2.0 : X
     7.0 : XXXXXX        (primaries decided candidates)
    18.0 : XX            (start of Iraq war)
    47.0 : XXXXXXXXX     (end of last election)
    

Recent decision makers cited New Jersey's new status as a possible swing state. Others indicated that choosing a candidate was easy, the more important decision to be made was where one should register to vote to have the greatest effect.

Straw Poll

All but one answered the optional "Who are you voting for" question.

    Kerry: 18
    Bush:   0
    Other:  0
    

The interesting finding is more than half of them supported a candidate from a different party back in 2000. A bit of buyer's remorse detected amongst the former Nader supporters, most of whom said that they made this decision either immediately following the last election or at the start of the Iraq war.

(Okay, enough quasi-statistical political analysis, get back to work!)

-- cbu (10/17/2004)

Although it is flattering to be mentioned in the Princeton Alumni Weekly I am somewhat embarassed that this site was the first "web diary" mentioned in the list that includes my colleagues Eszter Hargittai, Amy Sullivan. It also mentions Crooked Timber, a group blog that includes posts from Eszter and Kieran Healy.

You can tell that this isn't a real blog because the entries aren't posted in reverse chronological order. As I stated at the top, I'm just writing some thoughts down to get them out of my head, to help me stop obsessing with politics and focus on my research instead. (This only works sort of kind of, but oh well.)

If anyone else is actually reading these musings, that's news to me.

-- cbu (10/19/2004)

Update: Okay, the main page is in reverse chronological order now. More like a blog. Whatever.

(Copyright © 2004 Andy Singer)

The Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is currently curating a show entitled "The Art Of Democracy: Tools Of Persuasion" through the end of November. Each Saturday afternoon, artists are welcome to drop off work of a political nature. The works were initially hung salon style, but as the walls became covered from floor to ceiling the new ones were simply stapled over older submissions, so it looks more like the flyers on a construction boardwalk or in a NYC subway station.

More images are available, as well as further discussion.

-- cbu (10/20/2004)

Thank you, Red Sox. [Insert witty Kerry metaphor/analogy/prediction here, or perhaps something about Democrats and RS fans.] I was able to see former Twin David Ortiz slam his first inning home-run and Johnny Damon smash his grand slam before leaving to see Antibalas on their "Who is this America" tour perform at First Avenue. All in all, a pleasant set of memories to wake up with.

Here's a few more videos that I've run across. These will eat up less than 10 minutes of your productive work day.

Florida Diebold Machines

This amusing minute long QuickTime video demonstrates why predicting the Florida electoral results won't be so difficult after all. Credits are at the end. Created by "Boom Chicago,"an improv group in Amsterdam, you'll find them at the Leidseplein Theatre.

Original source: http://www.boomchicago.nl/images/Voting_Machine.mov

Also available in Windows Media Player format.

"Filmstrip International" presents ...

A little music video for the song "You're An A..hole" by Jim's Big Ego. Quite the pleasant tune, really.

Pirates & Emperors (or "Size Does Matter")

This film by Eric Henry is perhaps the Schoolhouse Rock questioning of the Iraq war.

-- cbu (10/21/2004)

Update: If you're determined to spend more time on issues that you can't control and want to have a better informed sense of outrage, skip lunch and watch this votergatethemovie.com video. (Just figuring out how to launch it and then watching the credits might require pausing to get a second cup of coffee.)

I'm still disgusted, and have little passion for reading/hearing any news or even thinking about politics. The American public will get what 51% of them deserve.

Here's an archive of my "sidebar" links that kept me up to date in the waning days of the 2004 electoral debacle. I'm curious to see what they look like in 2006 and 2008.

Political News

AP News
Daily Show *
New York Times *
PoliticalWire.com

FactCheck.org

Electoral College /
Polls / Analysis

Electoral-Vote.com
L.A. Times *
PollingReport.com
Race2004.net
Rasmussen Report
Wall Street Journal (Zogby)
WaPost Tracking Poll

Donkey Rising
Mystery Pollster

Blogosphere

Andrew Sullivan
CJR Campaign Desk
Crooked Timber
Daily Kos
The Poor Man
Wonkette

The "Andrew Sullivan" blog was somewhat entertaining as he struggled with his momentous endorsement decision, but his "the war was justified but the execution was flawed" argument is very tired, especially when he essentionally excuses all conservative/incompetent war-mongers in the end anyway. I doubt that he make the cut in future versions.

-- cbu (11/25/2004)

Copyright (c) 2004  Craig Upright,
All Rights Reserved.