The waning Southern strategy

The NYT had a great front-page item today following up on what I wrote a few days ago about the (sad) role of Applachia in the election.

Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

They accompanied the analysis with a great graphic too:

Basically I would just say that I hope the party continues its slide into irrelevance and ignorance. Let the GOP be the party of the uneducated religious zealot, the bigoted redneck and the gun-crazed nutjob. According to Beliefnet, 52% of the anti-intellectual elements of the party (namely Evangelicals) apparently believed that Obama was a Muslim. Yet they still believe the media is ridiculously liberal, despite the media's inability to inform them of the basic fact of the President-elect's religion. Sad.

The gods are smiling on me

They must be:

My healthy little boy is getting cuter and chubbier every day.

My candidate won the election. Change is coming.


My Gators won the SEC East. They should be ranked #3 today, and will likely be in the BCS Championship Game when they beat Alabama in the SEC Conference Championship. (Certainly so if Texas Tech loses to Oklahoma in two weeks.)

Appalachia

This morning I saw Krugman's cut on Zell Miller and wanted to find the source of his map (funny how some blogs are horrible about linking to important source material). I found it shortly thereafter at the NYT. (And this interactive one.)

What the map shows is what I feared months ago after the primaries: that the Appalachian region would solidly vote against Obama. Amazingly, only 22% of the counties of the entire USA voted more Republican this election than the last one. Guess where they are heavily concentrated?

Tazewell County is my home! The poorest, least educated, most religious parts of the country, of course! And it went 2:1 for McCain.

Charles Blow has more depth on the same topic.

Celebrate good times, come on!

The reason for celebration, of course, is that voters got to decide on whether or not to allow beer and wine sales from retailers on Sunday here in the unincorporated areas of Richland County.

They decided YES! By almost two to one margins! In the heart of Jesusland! Die blue laws, Die!

Oh yeah, and we will be seeing President Obama on Jan 20 too, and that was nice ;-)

Jan 25, 2007 was a long long time ago, and I often wondered if he could win, but my support for him has been pretty unwavering. McCain's concession was as classy as his campaign wasn't. What will I do now with all the time I used to spend following the election?

Oh yeah...


Can you fuc*ing believe that Alaskans re-elected a convicted felon? Jesus Christ.

So much for that rumor

When even the WingNutDaily affirmed the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate, other conspiracy-theory-minded nuts should've moved on (or back) to the Muslim Manchurian idea.

Now it's a little difficult to support this one.

State declares Obama birth certificate genuine

1 day ago

HONOLULU (AP) — State officials say there's no doubt Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said Friday she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.

Fukino says that no state official, including Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's certificate be handled differently.

She says state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest.

Some Obama critics claim he was not born in the US.

Earlier Friday, a southwest Ohio magistrate rejected a challenge to Obama's citizenship. Judges in Seattle and Philadelphia recently dismissed similar suits.

Another smear bites the dust.

Barack TV

I watched Barack's 30 minute ad and thought it was very well-done. This guy will win, and whether he does or not, he's forever changed the art and science of campaigning.

McCain further discredited

As we've watched McCain sacrifice his dignity to win by pulling out all the stops, it is helpful to remember that this mudslinger has his own shady associations to deal with.

Today a new story surfaces showing the same influence peddling as the NYT reported about Vicki Iseman...only about a Keating associate in a land swap deal.

NYT Magazine article on the McCain campaign

This is the piece I mentioned a few days ago in discussing the erosion of McCain's honor. Read it, or you could read this summary.

The erosion of honor

Nine months ago today, I wrote about whether I could live with a President McCain and said, largely, "I think so." But no more.

The NYT Magazine will apparently be printing a story on the failures in McCain's campaign, but I'm more interested in the failures in his character. The smear campaign that he is now running, which Barack hasn't turned back against him as effectively as he could have, has really hit bottom.

McCain used to be an honorable kind of guy. That is, if you ignore the ugly affair and divorce and a few personal failings, including a Senate Ethics investigation. However, in politics, he seemed the type not to capitulate principles for political gain. What we've seen over the past few months is the erosion of this honor and an evolution into a "win at any cost" liar of epic proportions.

McCain capitulated piecemeal: by hiring on the Bush crew to run his campaign, then this summer moving up wedge/smear-artist and Karl Rove's 2004 assistant Steve Schmidt to run the campaign and finally giving up his last remaining vestige of honor last month in hiring Eskew and the crew who smeared him in SC during the 2000 GOP primary, giving himself over to their Rove-Atwater tactics. And we see the fruits of it in Palin's recent "palling around with terrorists" and other BS. The coup de grâce, and this is truly amazing, is that McCain went beyond the typical dirty politics of using third-party groups to do robocalls by doing them himself (after complaining years ago about this)...and even hired the same crew who smeared him in 2000.

Whatever McCain once was, he is no more.

It's getting difficult to guard the optimism

As I said on Tue, the polls for Obama look great and if this holds, he should win in 23 days. As of this morning, fivethirtyeight.com shows him with a 91% win probability, a 5-point popular vote spread (51.9:46.6)and 348 EV (270 needed), Pollster gives him 320 EV and an 8-point popular vote spread (49.8:41.9), while Intrade has him with 80% probability to win.

One of the neat things you can do is go to 270towin and play with the states to see various outcomes for the election. Taking for granted a win in all the 2004 Kerry states, it appears that Obama has also solidly locked in Iowa and New Mexico, bringing him to 264 EV. Amazingly, all Obama has to do is win one of the remaining tossup states: FL, OH, VA, NC, IN, CO, NV, or MO. McCain has to sweep every one of these swing states to win...and that's why sites that run probabilities like fivethirtyeight have Obama winning with 9:1 odds given current polling data.

Basically, my predicted map is shown below, in which Obama wins OH but loses FL, wins VA but loses NC, wins CO but loses NV, wins 1 of the 5 NE districts (Omaha) but loses both MO and IN. This would give Obama 307 EV to McCain's 231. I also predict Obama to win around 51% of the popular vote and I think McCain will get around 48.5%, with third-party candidates drawing less than expected due to the financial crisis:

Aren't prognostications fun?

And here's a countdown clock for the election:

Golden line

From Gail Collins' column in today's NYT (links added by me):

Palin has been pressing the line that people don’t really know “the real Barack Obama,” and who could make the argument better than a woman who we’ve already known for almost six weeks? Really, she’s like one of the family.

We’ve gotten so close we’ve already learned that she didn’t actually sell the plane on eBay, didn’t actually visit the troops in Iraq and didn’t really have a talk with the British ambassador. As soon as we get the Trooper thing and Alaska Independence Party thing and the tax thing figured out, she’ll be an open book.

*drum sting*

PS: Economists who once backed McCain's economic plans are now balking at his proposal to buy mortgages directly from banks.

PSS: Someone should lose a hand (or at least a finger) over this.

Nostrobamus

He saw this coming from a mile away:

(H/T: Digg for "Nostrobamus" line)

Politics notes

Alaska's bipartisan investigation ends with the conclusion that "Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act." Read it for yourself. It's obvious that she got in trouble for lying about it more than anything else. And the stonewalling didn't help either.

The whole ACORN thing deconstructed.

After seeing his inflammatory rhetoric result in lots of blowback, Sen. McCain tried to walk back the harsh attacks on Obama's character today at a rally. He was booed. He called for "respect"...simultaneously, and with no hint of irony, McCain is running the "blind ambition" ad accusing Obama of "lying" about Ayers. Not that they'll bother to document this "lie" since it would expose their own.

Meanwhile, Cindy broke the irony meter when accusing Obama of running "the dirtiest campaign ever..."

Maybe Obama should release a video smearing Palin? Never mind.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz explains the causes of the current financial crisis:

The new populist rhetoric of the right—persuading taxpayers that ordinary people always know how to spend money better than the government does, and promising a new world without budget constraints, where every tax cut generates more revenue—hasn’t helped matters. Special interests took advantage of this seductive mixture of populism and free-market ideology. They also bent the rules to suit themselves. Corporations and the wealthy argued that lowering their tax rates would lead to more savings; they got the tax breaks, but America’s household savings rate not only didn’t rise, it dropped to levels not seen in 75 years. The Bush administration extolled the power of the free market, but it was more than willing to provide generous subsidies to farmers and erect tariffs to protect steelmakers. Lately, as we have seen, it seems willing to write blank checks to bail out its friends on Wall Street. In each of these cases there are clear winners. And in each there are clear losers—including the country as a whole.
...
The federal government needs to give a hand to states and localities—their tax revenues are plummeting, and without help they will face costly cutbacks in investment and in basic human services. The poor will suffer today, and growth will suffer tomorrow. The big advantage of a program to make up for the shortfall in the revenues of states and localities is that it would provide money in the amounts needed: if the economy recovers quickly, the shortfall will be small; if the downturn is long, as I fear will be the case, the shortfall will be large.

These measures are the opposite of what the administration—along with the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain—has been urging. It has always believed that tax cuts, especially for the rich, are the solution to the economy’s ills. In fact, the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 set the stage for the current crisis. They did virtually nothing to stimulate the economy, and they left the burden of keeping the economy on life support to monetary policy alone. America’s problem today is not that households consume too little; on the contrary, with a savings rate barely above zero, it is clear we consume too much. But the administration hopes to encourage our spendthrift ways.

What has happened to the American economy was avoidable. It was not just that those who were entrusted to maintain the economy’s safety and soundness failed to do their job. There were also many who benefited handsomely by ensuring that what needed to be done did not get done. Now we face a choice: whether to let our response to the nation’s woes be shaped by those who got us here, or to seize the opportunity for fundamental reforms, striking a new balance between the market and government.

BTW, Stiglitz is the most-cited economist in the world.

Politics notes

Following up an earlier item about the growing gulf between the GOP's policies and science's reality, the 63rd Nobel Prize winner has now endorsed Obama. The text of the letter which the signatories affirm:

This year's presidential election is among the most significant in our nation's history. The country urgently needs a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.

We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.

During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.

We have watched Senator Obama's approach to these issues with admiration. We especially applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance our nation's competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take – through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research – to meet the nation's and the world's most urgent needs.

Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world's leading country. We hope you will join us as we work together to ensure his election in November.

Do remember that my question to CNN involved retaining the USA's status as a scientific superpower.

Following up an earlier item on blaming the poor and minorities for the current financial crisis, Newsweek tackles the argument head-on:

The Community Reinvestment Actapplies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA likewise didn't apply. There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no-money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on subprime debt.

Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multi-year plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least subprime housing markets in the nation.

Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as The New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.

On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And, here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33:1, that instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Brothers to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default swaps business with abandon because ACORN members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?

Indeed.

Polls show a very good chance to win for Obama

Things are looking good in Obamaland. He's predicted to win with good odds.  Of course that means McCain will grow more and more desperate with each passing day trying to sling mud and hope that some of it sticks.  One wonders if McCain's "honor" of which he's written often (and his ghost writer Mark Salter) over the years will give him any sense of shame down the road.

fivethirtyeight.com's current analysis has him at 345 and pollster.com has him at 320.

As a supporter who has seen a lot since January 2007, it is amazing and I never knew if we'd ever get here. Like many Dems, there's a nervous gnawing sense that something will go wrong. But I just think, despite the best efforts of Faux Noise and the right wing, Obama will win absent a cataclysmic new revelation or gaffe during a debate. The problem for McCain is that the voters are, by now, almost all cemented in their choices with very few undecideds left and very few "swayable" decideds.

I'm showing two maps below:

fivethirtyeight's map:

And Pollster's map, which currently (10/7) gives Obama 320 with 55 tossup:


...my fingers remain crossed...

Keating economics: McCain's defining scandal

This is gonna hurt:

keatingeconomics.com

Here is the video link to the 13-min documentary and here is the video link to the 35-sec preview/trailer. The full 13-min documentary is embedded below:

McCain's shady associations and bad judgment

**UPDATE: I just got an email from David Plouffe sent to Obama supporters that directs to this website, where a 13-min documentary on McCain's role in the Keating 5 scandal and its parallels to today's financial crisis will be up today by noon. You can see the preview now. Ouch.**

So it seems that the McCain campaign will be slinging as much mud as possible in its last desperate attempt to win. They're now dialing up the volume on Obama's "character and judgment" based on his past associations.

Okay, let's play.

Palin is talking about Ayers. If talking about William Ayers, a man Obama barely knows and met as a fellow Professor at the University of Chicago, is germane then surely talking about Charles Keating is. The fact that McCain was formally investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee, while Obama has never been formally investigated by any panel, despite all the media digging, is telling. It's also telling that McCain's running mate is under ethics investigations, (despite all the stonewalling) as well.

If talking about how Rezko helped Obama by buying a part of his parcel then later re-selling it to him at fair market value is germane, then surely talking about how McCain's first failed marriage, followed by his mistress-turned-wife Cindy and her father launched McCain's campaign with their own money, then invested $350K into a Keating shopping mall in April 1986 is.

And it isn't like McCain's ability to be bought off by corporations ended 20 years ago. Far from it. In 1998 and 1999, McCain worked hard on behalf of a corporation with a hot lobbyist, writing letters to the FCC to push for deregulation to make those companies more money. Vicki Iseman (very sexy lady) schmoozed McCain for years, herself working as a lobbyist for Paxson and Glencairn, telecom companies who benefitted from McCain's influence to deregulate the telecom industry. Rumors abounded that McCain was fu&*ing the broad, but whether or not that's true, he definitely did her clients favors.

I just don't know if the McCain campaign wants to go down this road. If they do, then it's past time to counter-punch. Given the relevance of the McCain's ties to the S&L banking scandal of the 1980's and his ties to today's financial crisis through Phil Gramm and deregulation, I say, as King George famously said, "Bring 'em on."

Economists favor Obama by huge margins

Academic economists overwhelmingly favor Obama to win:

The detailed responses are bad news for Mr McCain (the full data are available here). Eighty per cent of respondents and no fewer than 71% of those who do not cleave to either main party say Mr Obama has a better grasp of economics. Even among Republicans Mr Obama has the edge: 46% versus 23% say Mr Obama has the better grasp of the subject.

...

A candidate’s economic expertise may matter rather less if he surrounds himself with clever advisers. Unfortunately for Mr McCain, 81% of all respondents reckon Mr Obama is more likely to do that; among unaffiliated respondents, 71% say so.

...

On our one-to-five scale, economists on average give Mr Obama’s economic programme a 3.3 and Mr McCain’s a 2.2. Mr Obama, says Jonathan Parker, a non-aligned professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, “is a pragmatist not an ideologue. I expect Clintonian economic policies.” If, that is, crushing federal debt does not derail his taxing and spending plans.

On his plans to fix the financial crisis, Mr Obama averages 3.1, a point higher than Mr McCain. Still, some said they didn’t quite know what they were rating—reasonably enough, since neither candidate has produced clear plans of his own.

Where the candidates’ positions are more clearly articulated, Mr Obama scores better on nearly every issue: promoting fiscal discipline, energy policy, reducing the number of people without health insurance, controlling health-care costs, reforming financial regulation and boosting long-run economic growth. Twice as many economists think Mr McCain’s plan would be bad or very bad for long-run growth as Mr Obama’s. Given how much focus Mr McCain has put on his plan’s benefits for growth, this last is quite a repudiation.

Mr McCain gets his highest mark, an average of 3.5 and a clear advantage over Mr Obama, for his position on free trade and globalisation. If Mr Obama “would wake up on free trade”, one respondent says, “I could get behind the plans much more.” Perhaps surprisingly, the economists rated trade low in priority compared with the other issues listed. Only 53% say it is important or very important. Neither candidate scored at all well on dealing with the burgeoning cost of entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.

The economists also prefer Mr Obama’s tax plans. Republicans and respondents who do not identify with either political party see Mr McCain’s tax policies as more efficient but less equitable. But the former prefer Mr McCain’s plans—43% of Republicans say they are good or very good—and the latter Mr Obama’s. Of non-affiliated respondents, 31% say Mr Obama’s are good or very good.

Either way, according to the economists, it would be difficult to do much worse than George Bush. The respondents give Mr Bush a dismal average of 1.7 on our five-point scale for his economic management. Eighty-two per cent thought Mr Bush’s record was bad or very bad; only 1% thought it was very good.

The Democrats were overwhelmingly negative, but nearly every respondent viewed Mr Bush’s record unfavourably. Half of Republican respondents thought Mr Bush deserves only a 2. “The minimum rating of one severely overestimates the quality of Bush’s economic policies,” says one non-aligned economist.

A nice thing to mention on the campaign trail. Plus the fact that McCain is advised by a bunch of financial lobbyists, while Obama is endorsed by economists 2:1 over McCain.

Setting expectations

I'm going in the opposite direction of the Obama campaign: setting the bar high for McCain bothers me. After blinking in a game of chicken, tonight is supposed to be McCain's "home field advantage" as everyone in the media tells me that McCain's "strength" is his foreign policy expertise. Well, I find that troubling...for many reasons:

McCain has made some serious errors in judgment in foreign policy, as well as some relatively minor confusions on the facts. Why then should he get the label "expert" in foreign policy?

This is, after all, the guy who confused the basic facts about the "Surge Policy" that he has claimed so much credit for.

The guy who won't meet with our ally - Spain?

The guy who is confused about his own position on the Iraq War, and whether or not he opposed it, and when, and whether or not he thought it would be "an easy victory"?

The guy who was confused about the need to go into Iraq way back in Jan 2002?

There's more:

Let's also not lose sight of the broader pattern. McCain thinks the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia was "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War." He thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border. He believes Czechoslovakia is still a country. He's been confused about the difference between Sudan and Somalia. He's been confused about whether he wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more NATO troops in Afghanistan, or both. He's been confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq. He's been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. He's been confused about Iran's relationship with al Qaeda. He's been confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi'ia. McCain, following a recent trip to Germany, even referred to "President Putin of Germany." All of this incoherence on his signature issue.

Indeed.

Democrats v. Republicans on the economy

Americans will be hearing a lot from the media in the next few days about the underlying causes of the financials market freeze-up, but they won't be hearing the hard facts:

1. When Bush and the GOP Congress started out this decade, they projected a $5.6 trillion surplus from 2002-2011. Instead, we will have a $3.8 trillion deficit. Thanks, GOP, for pissing away $9.4 trillion.
2. The "credit swaps" legislation passed by McCain's economic adviser Phil "nation of whiners" Gramm directly contributed to the current crisis. Thanks, GOP.
   
3. We've enjoyed stronger "fundamentals" under Democratic presidents than Republicans (I mentioned one of these fundamentals a while back -- income inequality)
4. Republicans are all for "capitalism"...so long as that means letting really really wealthy people make billions, then bailing them out: privatized profits & socialized losses. When the really wealthy power brokers of the GOP are getting hurt, it's time to step in with nationalized finance...but not when people like you and I are.
5. McCain and the GOP have no clue on health care, the leading cause of bankruptcy in America, causing 1.9 M / yr.
6. McCain's strong de-regulation emphasis goes all the way back to the Keating 5 scandal, and he has been shown to have been a major player in the S&L crisis that resulted.
7. On that note, McCain is advised by a bunch of financial lobbyists, while Obama is endorsed by economists 2:1 over McCain.