Month: November 2008

Don’t Read This If You’re Drinking Coffee

by tristero

David Sedaris:

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

From The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker.

h/t, my friend MC.

Studs

by tristero

Studs Terkel died. He was a wonderful man. I had the privilege of being interviewed by him once, it must have been at least 10 years ago, and I’ll never forget his intensity and charm. A terrific host and a great progressive.

Youthquake And Prop Hate

by digby

Dday wrote about this last night, but I thought it was worth another push. Here’s the latest from California’s Field Poll (the best one) on the proposition to ban gay marriage:

Prop. 8 trailed in The Field Poll’s initial measurement in July by nine points (51% No to 42% Yes) taken shortly after it qualified for the ballot.

The No-side advantage increased to fourteen points (52% to 38%) in September, when voters were asked to react to its original ballot description, which referred to the measure as the “Limit on Marriage” initiative. However, following the state Supreme Court’s ruling that the state’s existing same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, thereby making it legal for same-sex couples to marry in California, state Attorney General Jerry Brown changed Prop. 8’s official ballot title to the “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry” initiative. When voters were read this amended description in September, the No-side lead grew to seventeen points (55% No vs. 38% Yes).

Now, after more than a month of intensive campaigning on both sides, the initiative trails by just five points, 49% No vs. 44% Yes, with 7% undecided. Yes-side support has increased six points, and those opposed declining six points over the past month.

If you’ve ever wondered why these California propositions are so absurd, that should tell you why. Thank God for Jerry Brown, or we’d be losing this one big. The religious right is moving hard and fast with some of the most dishonest campaigning I’ve ever seen. (They are all going straight to a fiery, burning hell for it too.)

But there’s another little wrinkle. I’ve grown a little bit concerned about the stories I’m reading about the youthquake failing to materialize in the early voting.

Gallup polling in October finds little evidence of a surge in young voter turnout beyond what it was in 2004. While young voter registration may be up slightly over 2004, the reported level of interest in the election and intention to vote among those under 30 are no higher than they were that year. What’s more, 18- to 29-year-olds continue to lag behind Americans aged 30 and older on these important turnout indicators. As a result, 18- to 29-year-olds now constitute 12% of Gallup’s traditional likely voter sample, basically the same as the estimate in the final 2004 pre-election poll (13%). Gallup’s expanded likely voter model, which defines likely voters differently (on the basis of current voting intentions only), estimates a slightly higher proportion of young voters in the electorate (14%). However, even if the share of the youth vote were adjusted upward, doing so has little or no impact on the overall Obama-McCain horse-race numbers using either likely voter model. It is possible that the 18- to 29-year-old share of the likely voter electorate will grow in the final days of the election. Although interest in the election and voting intentions usually increase as Election Day grows nearer, Gallup did not observe much of an increase from mid- to late October 2004, because interest was already at high levels (as it is this year). A second possibility for heightened youth turnout would be voter mobilization efforts. Such efforts can convince people with little motivation or interest in the campaign to actually vote on Election Day. Gallup has been measuring voter contact in its daily tracking poll this week in an effort to gain a better understanding of this important component of the “ground game” in the final days of the campaign. As of Oct. 27-29 polling, 39% of 18- to 29-year-olds had been contacted by either the Obama or McCain campaigns. That is the same contact rate seen among 30- to 49-year-olds, but is well below that of Americans 50 and older. So thus far, in a general sense, mobilization efforts have not reached the young voters to the same extent that they have older voters.

It goes on to discuss the fact that the Obama campaign has been far more aggressive and successful at outreach to all age groups than the McCain campaign and then concludes:

While Gallup data do suggest that voter turnout among young people will be high this year (as it was in 2004) compared to historical turnout rates, the data do not suggest that it will be appreciably higher than in 2004. Even if more young voters are registered this year, they do not appear to be any more interested in the campaign or in voting in the election than they were in 2004. Unless turnout rates among older age groups drop substantially from what they were in 2004, young voters should represent about the same share of the electorate as in the last presidential election. And Gallup’s data suggest interest in the campaign and voting are the same or higher among older voters compared to what they were in 2004.

It concerns me that with Obama looking like he’s winning the young voters may have another reason to blow off voting on Tuesday. I don ‘t think this will affect an Obama victory. I’m sure they factored in the historical data that shows the youth vote to always be a little bit hyped. And the fact is that if the same percentage of the total vote as did in 2004, with the huge growth in voters of other age groups, that spells a very comfortable victory (assuming these numbers hold up, of course.)

But I am concerned about things like Prop 8 where the young people are far more liberal and open minded than the oldies and some conservative African Americans who may vote for Obama, but also vote for a constitutional amendment to discriminate against gays. It doesn’t feel like much of an election here in California — Obama’s ahead by 22 points. But it’s very, very important for the young and the liberal to vote anyway to make this election a truly historic, progressive victory.

If you have time to help with GOTV on Tuesday, and help defeat the latest attempt to discriminate against people the right wing doesn’t like, you can go here.

If you have some time to do a little phone banking this week-end, the campaign to stop forced childbirth and back alley abortions for 14 year olds, could use your help too. This one’s losing at the moment.

Both of the propositions are ones where the young voters could really make the difference. If you know any 18 to 29 year olds in California or elsewhere, give them a call on Tuesday and make sure they get their asses down to the polls.

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The Hillary Cluster

by digby

I was doing some research and came upon this article from 1998 by Christopher Caldwell, which I’ve blogged about before, but which now has a different set of implications from the one’s I’ve drawn over the past few years. Before, it always seemed that it felt right in theory, but had played itself out completely differently in fact. Now it seems as though it might have been ahead of its time. I’ll have to revisit in in another year and see what I think.

But in the meantime, there is a piece of this analysis that I found intriguing:

THERE is an ideological component to Clinton’s success and the Republicans’ failure. The end of the Cold War, the increasing significance of information technology, and the growth of identity politics have caused a social revolution since the badly misunderstood 1980s. It’s difficult to tell exactly what is going on, but in today’s politics such subjects for discussion as Communist imperialism and welfare queens have been replaced by gay rights, women in the workplace, environmentalism, and smoking. On those issues the country has moved leftward. In 1984 the Republicans held a convention that was at times cheerily anti-homosexual, and triumphed at the polls. In 1992 the party was punished for a Houston convention at which Pat Buchanan made his ostensibly less controversial remarks about culture war. Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt once teasingly drew a distinction between “liberals” and “Americans” while discussing water use, and pushed a plan to allow oil drilling on national wildlife refuges. By 1997 the New Jersey Republican Party was begging its leaders to improve the party’s image by joining the Sierra Club.

This is in part a story of how successful parties create their own monsters. Just as Roosevelt’s and Truman’s labor legislation helped Irish and Polish and Italian members of the working class move to the suburbs (where they became Republicans), Reaganomics helped to create a mass upper-middle class, a national culture of yuppies who want gay rights, bike trails, and smoke-free restaurants. One top Republican consultant estimates that 35 to 40 percent of the electorate now votes on a cluster of issues created by “New Class” professionals — abortion rights, women’s rights, the environment, health care, and education. He calls it the “Hillary cluster.” The political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain calls it, more revealingly, “real politics.”

And with this new landscape of issues Republicans aren’t even on the map. Because of the Reagan victory, the Democrats went through the period of globalization and the end of communism amid self-doubt and soul-searching. The experience left them a supple party that quickly became familiar with the Hillary cluster.

I don’t buy for a moment that it was Reaganomics that built the mass upper-middle class, but the mass upper-middle class certainly did become Democrats who care about those issues. (In fact, the concerns of Caldwell’s Hillary cluster are what used to be called “women’s issues” Don’t tell anyone.) The irony, of course, is that this Hillary cluster is what turned into a large portion of Obama’s base ten years later — upper middle class professionals.

It would seem, looking back, that the Democrats were building their party around them — while keeping African Americans on board and enticing the hispanic Goliath.I would guess that if it weren’t for 9/11, it would have emerged sooner. As it stands, we are in uncharted financial waters and there’s no knowing what will happen to some of these upper middle class workers if things go south. But it’s as true today as it was then that the Republicans simply have no answers for their questions and no solutions to their problems — Bush won by first blurring the lines and then running as a warrior leader. It was all papered over for eight years. These people aren’t going anywhere. The question is, is what they want, what the country needs?

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