Well Said
by Brian Pierce • Feb 1st, 2008 at 9:10 am •
Ross Douthat (who is, by the way, a conservative Republican) on last night’s debate: “The Republicans last night looked like men competing for a chance to lose an election. Tonight, Hillary and Obama looked like they were competing to be President of the United States.”
Comment by J. Prescott on 1 February 2008 at 10:56 am:
“Well done is better than well said.” Benjamin Franklin.
Comment by JAL on 1 February 2008 at 12:08 pm:
Good, because I want McCain to lose.
Comment by here's a quarter call someone who cares on 1 February 2008 at 12:12 pm:
Right, like anyone gives two shits what some d-bag who happens to have set up a blog for himself says. Ross who? This is like quoting Jeff Schmuck’s (who happens to be a mediocre Giants fan) blog when he states, “watching the Pats play makes watching the Giants like watching a Pop-Warner game.” Big fuckin’ deal. Cut the snarky “cute” BS posts, because really, what you, or anyone else for that matter, “thinks” about this election doesn’t matter at all. This prediction BS a year before the big day is almost as bad as the 2 weeks of media coverage before the S-bowl.
Comment by here's a quarter call someone who cares on 1 February 2008 at 12:12 pm:
Right, like anyone gives two shits what some d-bag who happens to have set up a blog for himself says. Ross who? This is like quoting Jeff Schmuck’s (who happens to be a mediocre Giants fan) blog when he states, “watching the Pats play makes watching the Giants like watching a Pop-Warner game.” Big fuckin’ deal. Cut the snarky “cute” BS posts, because really, what you, or anyone else for that matter, “thinks” about this election doesn’t matter at all. This prediction BS a year before the big day is almost as bad as the 2 weeks of media coverage before the S-bowl.
Comment by here's a quarter call someone who cares on 1 February 2008 at 12:12 pm:
Right, like anyone gives two shits what some d-bag who happens to have set up a blog for himself says. Ross who? This is like quoting Jeff Schmuck’s (who happens to be a mediocre Giants fan) blog when he states, “watching the Pats play makes watching the Giants like watching a Pop-Warner game.” Big fuckin’ deal. Cut the snarky “cute” BS posts, because really, what you, or anyone else for that matter, “thinks” about this election doesn’t matter at all. This prediction BS a year before the big day is almost as bad as the 2 weeks of media coverage before the S-bowl.
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 1:04 pm:
Oooh, a poo-flinging Internet monkey.
Tell ya what, monkey. If you demonstrate that you’ve got as many brains as you have vitriolic spittle, you can stay.
We’ve domesticated others.
After all, a year ain’t crap. Last September, I predicted the results of the 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 1:06 pm:
Here’s an interesting clip about what’s going to happen next fall if McCain is the nominee.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by J. Prescott on 1 February 2008 at 1:21 pm:
So if it is a Hilary v. McCain race, McCain will win in a landslide because Coulter, who is hated by all the democrats, and disliked by a lot of republicans, will campaign for Hilary.
This could quite possibly be the best news for the McCain campaign yet. I guess the only thing that would be better is if Osama bin Laden came out to support hilary, but even then I think it would be a toss up.
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 3:37 pm:
No, Prescott, what this points out is that there isn’t a conservative in the country who will vote for McCain.
You don’t win elections by alienating your base. The conservatives and libertarians would rather see the GOP destroyed completely than elect a liberal Repubican into the Oval Office. I talked about this months ago.
Remember, voters do not behave using logic or rational thought if the results of the election are important to them personally.
Sheesh!
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by J. Prescott on 1 February 2008 at 5:21 pm:
You are pointing to Ann Coulter as being symbolic of the conservative base? Thats beyond silly.
And as I hoped to have established, just because you say something about the political arena doesn’t make it true. Many times, its quite the opposite.
Finally, McCain has won primaries where only self-identified Republicans have voted. Soooooooooo yeah. He can get conservative votes.
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 6:22 pm:
Oh, how many predictions so far have I been wrong about? I thought that I’ve been working far enough ahead that none of them have been tested yet.
Hell, you guys don’t even realize that the Iraq war is lost.
I will admit a moment of weakness when I wrote the answer to the Midnight Ride of Ron Paul and saw Giuliani as a possibility, but recovered quickly and tossed that out.
If I turn out to be completely right about the 2008 election, I will expect you to abase yourself, you know.
I am capable of being surprised, but not often.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 7:31 pm:
More conservative commentary on McCain:
I guess you could call Pat Buchanan a conservative.
Maybe Rush is kinda sorta a conservative, and he’s got 15 million listeners.
How about Joseph Farah, last time I checked, he was pretty conservative. Note line 11 where he says that the election of McCain and the other front-runners would be worse than the election of a Democrat.
Michelle Malkin…conservative.
And last, but not least, Thomas Sowell and a whole bunch of other guys at National Review.
Sure, you can call me crazy, Prescott. I will even admit that Ann is a little nutty. However, what you have here is virtually the entire conservative commentariat saying the same things that I was saying a year ago about John McCain.
Well, that’s ok–you and Billy Joe go right ahead and root for him. I, personally, welcome the new Repti-lesbian Overlordess that would result from his nomination.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by tet on 1 February 2008 at 7:34 pm:
Sorry, that last link was broken, here it is.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by kofi the hill/mccain 08! on 1 February 2008 at 11:14 pm:
Prescott is the last person who should be defining who is conservative and who is not. He may regularly vote Republican, but wasn’t he being mocked by several posters last summer for being a liberal?
And to add to Tom’s list, I believe Hannity also said he wouldn’t vote for McCain.
Yall must be delusional to think Republicans are going to fall in line behind McCain. It’d be like the Democrats nominating Lieberman for President. They shit a brick when he ran independent in Connecticut. There is no way they’d get behind him for a national campaign (even if he was able to somehow obtain the nomination) and he’s been a better Democrat than McCain has been a Republican.
Comment by J. Prescott on 2 February 2008 at 10:58 am:
First off, I didn’t attempt to define who was conservative or not. I just said that Ann Coulter was not indicative of the entire party. It is Tom who is attempting to define the entire party.
Fine, you want names, you get conservative names supporting McCain. Henry Kissinger, Jack Kemp, Norman Schwarzkopf, Jim Edgar, and a host of others. My point was this. Saying “he is not going to get any conservative support” is just plain silly and not borne out by fact. Romney might get more conservative support in the primaries, but he is not and has not gotten all of the conservative support. And there is that pesky fact that McCain keeps winning states that people say he can’t win.
And yes, someone did claim that I was liberal. His name was Tom, and he is the one who says he doesn’t like democracy, and while he doesn’t like large government, but does like smaller totalitarian government institutions where the “smart” people run things (smart being people Tom defines as smart) and use draconian measures to follow through and their code and “a shoot first” policy. So if he calls me a liberal, I guess that makes it true. I mean, I could see how my “abolish the corporate tax” plan, wanting to curtail government, and balancing the budge is all liberal poppycock. What probably really put me over the edge as liberal is me not condemning every function of government without thinking about its purpose and value, and asking about how to best cut government spending as opposed to tom and ron paul’s “Let’s cut indiscriminately, because that is how Eisenhower would do it.”
And as for Tom’s predictions, you are right. The vast majority are too far ahead to be truly judged or measured. My opposition is that most of Tom’s predictions utilize his unique ability to look at any bit of empirical evidence that doesn’t match up with his own perspective and say “it doesn’t matter, I know the truth, and I will not change my opinion.” Thats why I can’t trust it.
Comment by J. Prescott on 2 February 2008 at 11:19 am:
Although Tom doesn’t like polls, they do offer something.
See question 7.
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/020108_election_release_web.pdf
Are self identified Republicans not conservative enough?
Comment by tet on 2 February 2008 at 12:37 pm:
The poll had 20% of respondents backing Rudy in December. This is so far from the truth that I would have to discount the poll as worthless. It’s the same complaint that I had about Todd’s futures market, they have to have some kind of biased sample in order to get that kind of result.
Tom
Comment by tet on 2 February 2008 at 2:50 pm:
Augur: In your opinion, is this really coming from the McCain campaign or is it a black-ops email?
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by Brian on 2 February 2008 at 3:50 pm:
Tom,
I sort of agree with what you’re basically saying, but isn’t it entirely possible, even probable, that 20% of respondents really DID support Giuliani in December, and things changed between then and now? So it’s not that the poll Prescott cited is just wrong or so biased that it’s inaccurate, just that it’s not necessarily a predictor of what McCain’s support will be on election day eight months from now. So while it doesn’t prove that you’re wrong, it’s still evidence against you that can’t just be dismissed out of hand. I think that’s the sort of attitude that Prescott is getting irritated by.
As far as McCain’s current support goes, I do think there are reasons to believe it will change in a couple ways. One is what Tom’s talking about, dealing with the conservative base’s reactions to some of McCain’s more liberal views. But another that I think is even more harmful to McCain is the fact that, right now, a lot of support McCain gets is from independents who have negative views of the war. This would seem odd based on McCain’s actual stance on the war and his vociferous support for the surge. I think it’s awfully likely that a lot of that independent anti-war support is coming from people who have a view of McCain as a moderate maverick but don’t know much about his particular policy stances, and therefore I think it’s likely that a lot of that support will go away after a campaign in which his views are illuminated (the same way that Giuliani’s support was strong at first but eventually evaporated as conservatives came to learn about more than just the fact that he was Mayor of 9/11).
In other words, yeah, his support among the conservative base is going to be weaker than a more typical conservative candidate, but also his support among independents is going to be weaker once a lot of them become more educated on what McCain’s views on the war are. That makes it difficult to win regardless of who his opponent is, but especially so if he’s up against Obama (which, by the way, is looking more and more likely by the day).
Comment by tet on 2 February 2008 at 5:28 pm:
Brian, the link that Prescott provided has been taken down by Fox, as far as I can tell.
Did you, by any chance, see how many respondents were in that poll?
Three hundred.
Dude, if I had an agenda, I could hand pick that many people that could give any result I wanted, including a Ron Paul majority. Can you convince me that Fox doesn’t have an agenda?
Prescott, there are far, far too few people in this poll for it to be worth anything.
Rasmussen, which has been considerably closer to accurate over the last few months has John and Mitt in a dead-heat nationwide with about 30% each with Romney gaining over the last few days.
Of course, the point that I have been trying to make all along is that when voters’ emotions can swing in microseconds due to constant input, polls are virtually worthless. I believe that by the end of the election cycle, you will all understand this.
We’ll see Tuesday. At this point, neither GOP candidate can come close to a Hillary/Obama ticket, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by J. Prescott on 2 February 2008 at 5:53 pm:
Tom, you just spent a post saying how the entire conservative machine was against McCain, and I assume by your most recent comment that you think Fox is an institution with a conservative agenda. If these two things are true, why would Fox make a poll that shows strong support for a candidate you claim they despise?
Comment by J. Prescott on 2 February 2008 at 6:42 pm:
Also, Tom keeps telling us that Republican Party is going to collapse. Karl Rove doesn’t agree.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/107568
Also, a conservative pundit, Victor Davis Hanson, shows why people who say McCain is not “conservative” enough or does not follow in the vein of Reagan is mistaken. He compares McCain to the Bushes and Reagan, and finds that his policies (including on immigration) follows in the traditional vein of a republican president.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32078264&postID=6220704217341590354
Comment by tet on 2 February 2008 at 7:07 pm:
Actually, Fox has what I would call a “Republican machine” agenda.
Remember what I wrote about the history of the GOP? It’s a coalition of conservatives, libertarians, old-money NE capitalists and the southern evangelicals that joined them in 1980. The old-money NE capitalists (the Bushes, Rockefellers and their ilk) hate conservatives. They did their best to withdraw backing from Goldwater. They nominated Nixon in 68 and 72. In 1976, they nominated Ford/Rockefeller over Reagan. In 1980, Reagan assembled the present-day coaltion, which is falling apart due to the incompetence and greed of the Bush administration–see Peggy Noonan’s last month of columns for commentary.
(That’s right, Prescott, I call your Karl Rove–how’s he doing by the way, kinda screwed up the Bush administration, no?–and your Hanson and raise you Peggy Noonan–Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter–she ought to know.)
Now, let’s sum up what has happened so far in the race.
1) The establishment GOP attempted to convince the voters that Rudy Giuliani, someone no one wanted from a place no one likes, was the savior of the party.
2) The voters soundly rejected this candidate.
3) Next, the establishment of the GOP has attempted to convince the voters that John McCain, a war hero of the Bob Dole mold, is the savior of the party. (How’d that work out last time?)
4) Meanwhile, the libertarians in the party (5-15% depending on the state) are voting for Paul and the the evangelicals are voting for Huckabee or moving over to the Democratic party to vote for Obama because the thought of a Mormon president worries them.
5) The Conservatives, who have considerable problems with Romney are splitting their votes between him and Huckabee, leaning toward the Huckster.
6) All of the shifting interactions of the coalition are also being influenced by the political opportunists within the party, who are desperately trying to insure their continued influence in case a GOP president wins, as well as appointments in future cabinet offices. Hell, the same thing’s happening in the Democratic Party. A friend of mine in Washington asked my advice on whether he should support Obama (who he adored) because it might hurt his chances of getting a cush job if Hillary won.
OK, we’re coming up to Super Tuesday. The media (including Fox) would love to be able to predict the result of the votes. In truth, the situation is the same as it was with the earlier primaries–the numbers are all over the place. Some show a huge plurality by McCain. Some show a tie. Some show a rapid tilt in the voters for Romney.
In truth, no one is going to know what is going to happen. The volatility is so high that unexpected things are quite possible. At the moment, California seems to be a toss-up. Massachusetts is for Romney by a large margin. Colorado seems to be leaning towards McCain. No one is particularly interested in Illinois, to tell the truth.
The pollsters are in the same position as the candidates. It is impossible for them to have adequate coverage. I direct you to the commentary on Political Arithmatik.
Note especially these lines:
“Even large states such as New York and California have fewer than 10 polls since January 1, far fewer than we saw last week in Florida for example. As a result, we have many states with no data at all, preventing a comprehensive overview of the prospects for Tuesday. Even where we do have polls, we lack enough to consistently estimate the trend with data taken since Iowa.”
So, to sum up, Prescott–nobody knows what’s going to happen Tuesday. Even the experts are completely stumped because there’s no real information coming out. One thing is absolutely certain, however, whatever candidate emerges from the fray, it’s going to be good news to Hillary and Barack.
I love this. If it turns out that my hypotheses are wrong and McCain wins the nomination this week, I’ll gladly admit I’m wrong and adjust my perceptions to attempt to figure out why (and then explain it to you all.)
If ignorance is bliss, the political analysists have to be the happiest mofos in the country right now.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by tet on 2 February 2008 at 7:19 pm:
Holy crap–Maine caucuses, 57% reporting:
Romney–52%
McCain–22%
Ron Paul–19%
Huckabee–5%
Looks like RP’s picking up the slack. Cool.
Hell, don’t mean much, 18 elected delegates, but it’s still neat to see RP doing so well (and McCain so badly).
Tom Trumpinski