Hillery, Obama, Edwards and the Democrates

Bad news for Hillary lovers that think the election fat lady has already sung.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=071126191523.oorozvs5&show_article=1

"He was totally into it," rx tells us. "Not sure if he completely understood what I was up to, but neither did I. God love him for spending the time. Every politician should be this cool."

John Edwards released his plan to help Americans with the rising cost of heating their homes this winter.

His proposal calls for the government to release the 700 million barrels of crude oil and 2 million barrels of home heating oil that we keep in reserve to protect consumers, increase funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, create federal programs that work with non-profits and states to administer low- or no-interest emergency loans to families, and double the budget of the federal home weatherization program to $500 million a year.

On the regulatory side, it calls for strengthening anti-trust laws, reversing the deregulation trends of the past seven years, repealing subsidies and tax breaks that benefit oil companies, and greater enforcement of the environmental standards already in place on carbon-intensive industries. It also calls for investment in clean, cheap renewable energy, as well as improved CAFE standards, increased appliance and building efficiency, and wider use of biofuels.

okie wrote:

Bad news for Hillary lovers that think the election fat lady has already sung.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=071126191523.oorozvs5&show_article=1

I'd happily grant you the comfort, but this is pretty much the polling equivalent of a hoax.

This Zogby poll, as pollster.com warns, "used a non-probability sample. Respondants had previously volunteered to be interviewed online."

Yes - Zogby polled a group of people who voluntarily applied to be polled, rather than a random sample of respondents. A group, in short, that is not necessarily representative of anything except for those who are most willing to take part in polls...

A cursory comparison with the results of other, recent match-up polls show that the results of this poll are out of whack.

Debating for Dummies
Eric Alterman

I've seen debates on TV before, of course, and attended them from journalists' pens and spin rooms. But sitting in the audience of CNN's November 15 Democratic presidential debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, focused my mind on the egregious manner in which our media dumb down the process by which we pick our Presidents.

It was less a debate than a two-hour advertisement; not only did viewers see CNN = Politics graphics everywhere but unbeknownst to the television audience a network producer ran around the stage, ginning up the crowd like a high school cheerleader. (This backfired when a group of rowdies--angered by the inanity of the questions--shouted down Wolf Blitzer and had to be removed from the auditorium.)

From the start it was obvious that Blitzer & Co. had little interest in illuminating the candidates' positions on actual issues; they sought merely to create controversy. The first part of the debate was given over to attacks on, and counterattacks from, Hillary Clinton--a surefire newsmaker that left the other candidates twiddling their thumbs. Next Blitzer went down the line, demanding to know whether the candidates supported driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, apparently unaware that licenses are the province of governors and state legislators, not Presidents. When Barack Obama tried to outline his overall approach to immigration in response, Blitzer repeatedly cut him off. ("Is that a yes or a no?" was a typical Blitzer interruption.)

Blitzer also demanded an up-or-down answer from members of the panel on the question of merit pay for teachers, another issue for which the Constitution gives the President no role whatsoever. What's more, Blitzer's reductive formulation--"What if there's an excellent teacher in that team and a crummy teacher?"--failed to define who would make the decision, what criteria would be used and how they might be implemented. This turned out to be the moderator's modus operandi. Discussing the future of Pakistan, for instance, Blitzer reduced the question to the purely theoretical and profoundly misleading "Is human rights more important than American national security?"--as if the two were somehow contradictory by definition and either answer might plot out a plan in Pakistan.

As is so often the case in MSM election coverage, CNN's hectoring of the Democratic candidates reflected an unconscious internalization of Republican Party talking points. As Michael Kinsley pointed out during the 2004 Democratic convention, "It's true enough that this is a moment when the Democrats are called upon to reject extreme liberalism (whatever that might be) and to embrace moderation. But that is only because every moment is such a moment." He termed this meme "one of the very safest in all of punditry," which, as the old song goes, is really saying something. So we heard Blitzer robotically repeating, "The teachers' union, very powerful--teachers' unions, very powerful" before inquiring of Dennis Kucinich, "Are there any issues with unions--teachers' unions, or other unions for that matter--with which you disagree?" (Leave aside the fact that Blitzer apparently believes that all unions agree with one another on everything; are Republican candidates routinely asked to disassociate themselves from conservative Christians or the Fortune 500?)

The same syndrome was evident when, after a woman in the audience posed a question about what qualities the candidates would seek in a Supreme Court Justice, Blitzer and Suzanne Malveaux reinterpreted her question to restrict its scope to whether each would "require" judges "to support abortion rights." Of course, the questioner might have been interested in FISA, rendition, torture or the Bush Administration's multipronged assault on our constitutional rights, but where's the buzz factor there? Not only did CNN's anchors deliberately distort the woman's question; they replaced it with one posed within a hostile linguistic framework. Democrats, as we are all aware, speak of the issue as one of "reproductive freedom," "choice" or, as it is defined in Roe v. Wade, Americans' "right to privacy." The way Blitzer rephrased Malveaux's original distortion--demanding to know whether the Democrats would "insist" that judicial nominees "support abortion"--he might as well have been addressing a right-to-life rally.

We saw a similar dynamic every time voters were invited to ask a question: their concerns were ignored as Blitzer and Malveaux twisted their inquiries into "gotcha" traps. When an Arab-American asked an impassioned question about airport racial profiling, Malveaux used his story to try to trip up John Edwards. "You obviously voted for the Patriot Act, which gives the government extended powers of surveillance," she explained. "What do you say to people like Mr. Khan, who says he's been abused by that power?" Yet Mr. Khan never mentioned the Patriot Act, which, as Joe Biden finally noted, has nothing to do with racial profiling.

The night's final absurdity came at the evening's close, when a UNLV student was given the microphone and asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred diamonds or pearls. Sitting in the audience, I was among those who thought her idiotic inquiry shamed both herself and her university. Yet it turns out I was being unfair. As she later explained on her MySpace page, she had been planning to ask a question about nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, but at the last minute she was instructed by a CNN producer to switch her question to diamonds and pearls, which she had submitted in advance when asked by the network to provide questions of a "lighthearted/fun" nature. The folks at CNN apparently considered this inquiry to be such a stroke of genius they chose it as their lead story for the website the following day, under the headline Diamonds or pearls: Clinton wants both.

Really, Democrats, there's gotta be a better way.

December 1, 2007, 8:02 am
The grim truth
That's the title of an article in National Review. What they mean, of course, is the grim possibility of a Democratic sweep next year. (Hat tip to Daily Kos.)
NR warns its readers that

Quote:

It's almost impossible to exaggerate the Democratic advantage on domestic issues: If it's an issue, they lead.

And their greatest fear is that if the Democrats do win,

Quote:

It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.

December 2, 1993 - Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends. The timing of the memo dovetails with a growing private consensus among Republicans that all-out opposition to the Clinton plan is in their best political interest. Until the memo surfaces, most opponents prefer behind-the-scenes warfare largely shielded from public view. The boldness of Kristol's strategy signals a new turn in the battle. Not only is it politically acceptable to criticize the Clinton plan on policy grounds, it is also politically advantageous. By the end of 1993, blocking reform poses little risk as the public becomes increasingly fearful of what it has heard about the Clinton plan.

The stakes for each party -- as a party -- became very clear very fast. Democratic strategists were telling lawmakers that a health care bill was critical to their re-election efforts; a much-circulated memo by Mr. Kristol in December warned Republicans that passage of the Clinton plan "will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Along with taking charge while giving the professionals free rein, Clinton offered up a third dimension to her crisis character: humanity. She said she felt "grave concern" when she first heard the news of the hostage-taking

Unlike Edwards, Clinton did not see fit to directly respond to today's National Intelligence Estimate questioning the existence of the much-hyped Iranian nuclear program. Instead, her campaign sent out a release from their "national security director":

Statement from Lee Feinstein, Clinton Campaign National Security Director "The new declassified key judgments of the Iran NIE expose the latest effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends. The assessment of the NIE vindicates the policy Senator Clinton will pursue as President: vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation, and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns. Neither saber rattling nor unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad will stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. Senator Clinton has the strength and experience to conduct the kind of vigorous diplomacy needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons."

Now compare that with John Edwards' statement:

"The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy. This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war. And it's why I have proposed that we pursue a comprehensive diplomatic approach instead."

One of these statements communicates the primary conclusions of the NIE, which is that the Iranian nuclear program has been dormant since 2003. The other doesn't say anything of the kind, and instead emphasizes the "vigorous diplomacy needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons" and "Iran's nuclear ambitions." One, in other words, uses the report to ratchet down tensions on Iran, the other uses it as an excuse to look tough. This is, to say the very least, a disappointing performance from the Clinton campaign. This country does not need a Democratic candidate dedicated to hyping threats to in order to score political points or imply their ceaseless willingness to take the country to war.

--Ezra Klein

• On Sunday, Edwards released his plan to address predatory lending and the abuses of the credit card industry. It includes creating a Family Savings and Credit Commission to review financial services products and provide guidance to help citizens determine whether the terms are reasonable and fairly disclosed. It also calls for federal programs to help non-profits and states provide low- or no-interest emergency loans.
  
  
• Obama followed on Monday with his plan to reform credit card practices, which includes formalizing a "credit card bill of rights" for consumers and creating a credit card rating system run by the Federal Trade Commission that assesses consumer-friendliness of companies.

Hahah! Thanks for the explanation, I should have been more specific, and asked the question: What are the trends you may have noticed [when tracking the polls month by month], which haven't shown up yet [in the pollster.com graphs], specificially?

OK, so I've been improvising a bit...

What I've been doing is taking the individual poll results (on both Iowa and NH, but right now I'm just talking Iowa), as registered on pollster.com, and calculating month-to-month averages for the period since June.

Well, as close to month-to-month averages as you can responsibly get, because I didnt want to base any averages on less than 5 polls at a time, so what you get is an average for June + July, one for August + most of September, one for late September + October, one for the first half of November, and one for the second half of November.

The result is a bit more sensitive to short-term trends than the pollster.com trendlines -- but also more vulnerable to the impact of outliers and other statistical "noise".

I've plotted the results out in this graph, on the right, with for comparison's sake the corresponding bit (1 June - 31 December) from the pollster.com graph on the left.



As you can see, the additional graph I made yields some extra stuff to speculate on. For example, it appears to show that in the first half of November, Hillary's rapid rise was suddenly reversed and she started losing support. At first, it was not Obama who was benefiting, however - he was stagnating, in fact. It seemed like Edwards and Richardson were picking up support instead. But then came the last two-three weeks, and now it's Obama who seems to be positively surging.

Are those short-term trends that the cautious pollster.com trendline doesnt pick up on (yet)? Or is it just random statistical variation, caused by the differences in methodologies of different pollsters, margins of error, etc? Quite possibly, a lot of it is the latter.

On Obama's steady rise in the Iowa polls, in any case, both graphs agree. They also agree that Richardson's best days are over, for now. The graph on the right does seem to show, at least, two additional developments that don't show up in the Pollster trendlines (yet?): Hillary's rise being actually reversed, not just weakened; and Edwards' fall being reversed as well, not just slowed down.

In addition, they may be showing that Obama now really has the momentum, with his rise in the polls escalating. But we'd better wait to see what, if any, impact the Hillary "hostage crisis" and her health care attacks on Obama will have - we should know more in a week or two!

Milestones: Hillary Rodham Clinton
An interactive timeline of Hillary Rodham Clinton's life and career.