CJK's blog

So Gallup is showing that Obama may be getting something of a bounce after Thurday's speech. He's now up six points compared to two points yesterday. Since the poll represents a three day average he probably was up even more on Thursday night.

Even allowing for the uncritical media treatment, shouldn't it bother us that four percent of the electorate changed their minds on the basis of nothing more than an empty cliche-ridden speech to a large crowd of Germans? Four percent isn't much but it could have swung the last two elections in the Democrat's favor. 

According to Gallup, Obama gained two points worth of undecided voters out of 12%. That means that at least 17% of undecideds decided they will back him because of his speech alone.

These are the people who get to decide our elections. Scary, isn't it?

If this bounce is either large or long, then the election is over. If people have bought into Obama because of his wall metaphors then they will certainly buy into whatever crap he will try to sell on the last week of the election. Just imagine: it's November and the polls are tied but on November 3 Obama delivers an "eloquent" speech in front of a huge crowd about the housing crisis where he talks about how the American dream is being stolen by Bush and McCain and he'll restore it. At this point he can just make up the facts. He gets a four point bounce and the next day he's in....

...Or maybe I'm just over-reacting.

Reading Barack Obama's speech today reminded me just how little this guy has going for him. If anyone else in politics delivered such a substance lacking speech they would be ridiculed to no end.

I mean, really, what is so new and great about his policy proposals? This is my take:

--He says we can't turn our back on problems in the world... unless were talking about Iraq in which case he may or may not abandon it to genocidal maniacs in 16 months.

--He says he wants to win the war in Afghanistan. So far, he has only articulated the Bush policy of throwing more troops in while begging NATO for help they don't want to give.

--He used to say trade agreements should be renegotiated, now he says that they are OK. Oh, yeah he'll also "end tax breaks for companies that send our jobs overseas" as if somehow that will bring our jobs back when it won't.

--He wants to give us affordable healthcare. While this is substansive, the general plan is no different from past Democrats running for president.

--He says he'll cut taxes for the middle class. On closer examination we find out these are tax credits (i.e. bribes), not actual tax rate reductions. Giving out a bribe is not a substansive policy proposal.

--He wants to balance the budget by soaking the rich. Analysis indicates that not even that will pay for his huge spending increases.

--He says he'll invest $150 billion into alternative energy sources. But he never tells us what exactly the money will be used for.

--His one innovative proposal is lifting the social security tax cap to further soak the rich in an effort to save Social Security. Unfortunately, not even this enormous tax increase will solve social security's long-term shortfall.

You get the picture. I hope I haven't missed anything here. Say what you want about McCain, but he does have some creative proposals on Afghanistan, taxes, healthcare, and energy.

There seems to be a lot of talk here and elsewhere about the "enthusiasm gap" between McCain and Obama. We know that Obama's supporters are far more enthusiastic about him than McCain supporters. This is supposed to be a big boon to Obama.

I don't see why. After all, if you cast an unenthusiastic vote, that counts as one vote. I you cast an enthusiastic vote that too counts as one vote. Oh, I know that grassroots campaign activities can be affective in the campaign. But you don't neccessarily need massive enthusiasm to do that.

I think the real story everone's missing is the Loyalty Gap, not the Enthusiasm Gap. Today's Rasmussen polling shows that, incredibly, despite continued incompetence by the McCain campaign and more Obama hype, the two are tied. However, McCain pulls 85% of Republicans while Obama only polls 77% of Democrats--an 8 point difference. This is consistent with other polling that shows McCain drawing more support from Republicans than Obama can from Democrats--despite the "enthusiasm gap".

I have several theories for this development:

It's normal--In the last election Bush got more support from Democrats than Kerry got from Republicans. However, in that election the difference was slightly less--4 points.

The bases have changed--There are less Republicans and more Democrats than 2004, meaning that the Republican base is more "concentrated" with partisans while the Democrats have swelled to include independents who are only lukewarm to them.

Obama still is a drag on white working class voters--This is supported by Obama's relatively poor performance among Democrats in polls in Ohio, where the latest Rasmussen one shows Obama capturing only 74% of Dems while McCain gets 88% of Republicans.

In any case, I think this is more substansive than any "enthusiasm gap" that the candidates have. Of course, the media probably will continue ignoring it since it would inconvenience the narrative of Obama being a uniter when he can't even unite his own party.

No, I haven’t actually read the book by Salam and Douthat. No, I am not by any means an expert on the various challenges that the Republican Party faces. But I can’t resist commenting on what I see as a misguided view of American politics:

--They say that we have to attract more working class (non-college graduate)* voters since these voters have been responsible for electing Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. Given that 67% of voters had not graduated from college as late as 1980, it is not terribly illuminating to note that Nixon and Reagan needed substantial backing from this group to win elections.  In the cases of 1968 and 1980 college graduates were more likely than “working class” voters to vote Republican.

This sounds sort of like the plan Karl Rove came up with to expand the GOP coalition to include Hispanics. In that case, open border policies were justified on the grounds that they helped the GOP win 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Note to Rove: 44% is still losing. It was absurd to think that introducing more poor minorities into the electorate would produce anything other than a net loss to the GOP. Similarly, sacrificing basic conservative principles on taxes, spending, and welfare (all of which would be needed to institute these guy’s pro-family reforms) in order to capture a larger share of a shrinking voting bloc does not make much sense either. Besides, we're never going to "out-welfarize" the Democrats no matter what.  

--They claimed in a National Review article that the upper middle class is moving to the left:

But as America changed, so did the upper middle class, growing larger and steadily more liberal. The upheavals of the 1960s produced a generation raised in affluence but steeped in a radicalism that would diminish but not disappear with age. The causes of their youth — feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights — became the orthodoxies of their adulthood, and the result was the rise of an upper-middle-class lifestyle politics defined by its rejection of mid-century social norms and its support for the new social order that the 1960s and 1970s had ushered in…

They define themselves against what they perceive as the crassness and sterility of corporate America, justifying their success as capitalists — what their younger selves might have described as “selling out” — with dollops of activism and social consciousness, and down-the-line Democratic voting…

Above all, the upper middle class has grown richer and larger and more mobile than it used to be, which in turn has insulated many of its members from the forces that used to make well-to-do voters conservative. In a sense, the post-Reagan Republican party is a victim of its own success at cutting taxes and crime and spurring economic growth — and pushing the Democrats toward the center on all three fronts. But the GOP is also a victim of the upper middle class’s success, which has made well-educated, well-off voters less sensitive to tax rates and crime rates — and just about everything else, in fact — than ever before, and left them free to vote their values rather than their investment portfolios.

What is the basis for this claim? Am I missing something here? After all, I myself came from an upper middle class/college educated/well-off family whose parents grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Neither of them has ever expressed the slightest sympathy for feminism, secularism, gay rights, the environment, abortion, gun control, ending the death penalty, "world peace", the U.N., "activism" of any way shape or form, etc. Thanks in part to Jimmy Carter, neither of them has voted for a Democrat since 1972 (even though their parents had voted Democrat), and they aren’t voting Democrat this year either. For the record they also are still sensitive to tax and crime rates.

I’m serious, what evidence is there to support the claim that the (non-coastal) upper middle class is infatuated with social liberalism?

Now, perhaps I'm being a bit unfair since, again, I haven't read the book. But based of many reviews and articles, this is my impression.

*I assume their term includes voters with “some college” but never graduated since it would be even harder to justify claiming that Republican successes are built on those with a high school education or less.

Although you may not know it if you only read Newsweek, the Democratic party has often engaged in the same sort of fear-mongering that they complain that Republicans engage in when talking about the war on terror.

I'm talking about social security of course. Every four years the Democrats claim that the Republicans are going to gut the social security system, and this year will be no exception. They know that private accounts are not popular with seniors and will run attack ads against McCain to remind people he supports them. They think this will reduce his large lead among elderly voters.

So if the McCain campaign is smart (a characteristic that they have shown only in rare quantities up till now) they will pursue an aggressive campaign explaining that he is really trying to save social security, won't cut benefits, and attack Obama for the crippling tax increase that his plan espouses. It might not work but it would be better than ignoring a potentially volatile issue.

Are GOP political fortunes held hostage to the will of white women?

Allow to me to explain.

The so-called "gender gap" first came into the public mind during the Reagan years when it was noted that women were 16 percentage points less likely than men to support Reagan over Carter, compared to no difference in 1976, quite possibly due to Reagan's stated opposition to big government. Since minority women already voted (and have continued to vote) for the Democrats heavily in these elections at pretty much the same rate as minority men, the phenomenon has mainly been noted as a substantial gap between white men and white women.

For a while, the gender gap was irrelevant to the ultimate outcome of the elections. Both men and women voted for Reagan twice, then Bush in 1988 , then Clinton in 1992.

Then 1996 rolled around. For those who don't know what happened, I'll summarize: Bill Clinton and the Democrats took some Chinese money to help finance their campaign and then proceeded crush Senator Bob Dole by an 8.5% margin. Clinton did three points better than he had done against George Bush in 1992. Yet at the same time he managed to lose, or come close to losing the male vote to Dole, meaning that he actually performed worse among men in 1996 than 1992. His increased margin was entirely due to more support from women: in 1992 they backed him by 7 points, in 1996 they backed him by 17 points.  Specifically, while white men backed Dole 49-38, white women supported Clinton 48-43. 

So why does this matter to us?

Well, it's no secret that George W. Bush's infamous "compassionate conservatism" rose about largely because of his campaign's need to appeal more to white suburban women who didn't like the GOP's anti-government actions in Congress. Republicans in Congress like Newt Gingrich had been painted as mean conservatives who wanted to cut funding for, well, just about everything.  Bush wanted to indicate that he wasn't like that, in fact he would increase spending even as he cut taxes and add even more inefficient government oversight to areas such as education.

Politically, Bush's pro-government message worked--barely. According to CNN Exit Polls, he managed to tie or beat Al Gore among white women in 2000 while maintaining a 24 point lead over white men. In 2004 his lead over white men was about the same while white women backed him by a substantially larger 10 points.

If the election was held today and only men voted, John McCain almost certainly would defeat Barack Obama. The challenge for conservatives and Republicans is to figure out how to erase the gender gap so we never fall into the same trap that Bush and the Tom Delay Congress did by acting as if they could win by acting like somewhat less generous Democrats.

Can Obama flip a solid red state?

He sure wants us to think that he can. He's spending money in Alaska (61% Bush), The Dakotas (62/59% Bush), Georgia (57% Bush) and other states that haven't voted for a Democrat in the last three to four decades. 

There is little precedence for such a dramatic flip, however. As Karl Rove pointed out recently, Bush managed to flip West Virginia, a Democratic stronghold that voted for the likes of Carter and Dukakis, by concentrating on a specific local issue (gun control, I believe) which gave him a narrow victory in 2000.  Obama lacks a similar local issue to push.

Furthermore, although some polls in these states show a close race, it is highly unlikely that they will remain that close on election day.  That's because the polls also showed McCain beating Clinton relatively easy in these states.  Given that the only real difference between Obama and Clinton was that Obama had even less experience than she did, most of the people switching sides from McCain to Obama must be falling for Obama's "hope", "change", and "new politics" nonsense. As we draw closer to election day it will become increasingly clear to those voters that Obama is just another phony politician who's trying to hide his liberalism and extremely partisan voting record.

Or at least that's my theory. In any case, McCain can't be goaded into wasting his money in these states when Obama is outspending him 2:1 currently, according to USA Today.  Based on that, we really should hope that his fundraising machine turns out to be a flop.

Step 1: Expose his liberalism

In his first two advertisements, Obama claimed credit for passing two bills, one of which he didn't vote for (health care for troops) and the other one he said he opposed at the time (welfare reform).  The RNC should be airing ads not only calling out his lies on this but also point out his previously unabashed liberalism on gun control, the death penalty, FISA etc.  His crippling tax increases on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars should become a theme.  Citing his flip-flopping is unnecessary, the voters will be able to see it for themselves.

Step 2: Roll out Ayres and Wright

The 527s should have a field day reminding voters of Obama's relationship with a terrorist on one hand and a crank on the other.  Although Wright might have gotten a bit stale since he was thrown under the bus, Ayres would still be fresh.

Step 3: Offer a viable alternative

I'm stunned that the McCain campaign still can't figure out that it should be calling for pro-family middle class tax cuts. Ceding a tax cut issue to Obama would be tragic. He should also be promising to strengthen the dollar whose weakness is largely responsible for the recent rise in oil prices.

Step 4: Challenge Obama on the Democrat's own turf

This means that he should actively challenge Obama on the healthcare issue. We've let the Democrats dominate this issue for more than a decade. It's time to get serious about discussing ways to bring down healthcare costs.  He should also hit Obama for wanting to raise taxes on companies at home ("closing loopholes") when what we really need is lower taxes to be more competitive in trade. 

In his third ad, Obama had the gall to say that McCain supports tax breaks for the oil companies.  Not only is that not true, but Obama actually voted for Bush and Cheney's energy bill in 2005 that gave tax breaks to the oil companies.  This presents a unique opportunity for McCain to get on Obama's left on an issue the Democrats constantly whine about.

McCain should also make a campaign stop in Chicago. Yes, Chicago.  He should go tour the slums that Obama allowed to develop in his district and deplore what happens when government is in the hands of the irresponsible.

As I see it there are two different victory scenarios for McCain that I find plausible. 

But first we should reconize the swing states that he absolutely must win in November.

The North-East:

No must-wins here!

South:

Florida--27 electoral votes, obviously of immense importance.  Fortunately, McCain appears to be leading here already.

North Carolina--15 electoral votes I thought this state was solid GOP but current polls show Obama within striking distance.

Virginia--13 Electoral votes, possible the most vulnerable Southern must-win state.

Misssouri--11 electoral votes, usually votes for the winner but has been leaning Republican recently.

Mississippi--6 electoral votes. Obama can win it if he drives the black vote through the roof but its unlikely to happen for reasons stated earlier.

Right now, McCain has a comfortable lead in the remaining Southern States. 

Midwest:

Indiana--11 Electoral votes, again, supposed to be solid GOP but polls are tied.

Ohio--20 Electoral votes, the most vulnerable must win state considering that Bush won it by 2.1% in 2004.

Great plains:

McCain has confortable leads here, except possibly Nebraska's first Congressional district.

West:

McCain is virtually assured to win traditional GOP strongholds like Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona.

The first scenario is what I call the "Bush scenario". This envisions McCain playing defense and trying to win all 29 states that Bush won in both 2000 and 2004, limiting resources in other states.  That would give McCain 274 electoral votes, four more than necessary, so it is technically possible that he could lose a small state like Montana and a congressional district in Nebraska as well and still win 270-168.

A drawback to this stategy, of course, is that Obama has made strong showings in Western swing states like Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico and exerts a special appeal due in large part to his untraditional "new politics" that is attracting libertarian whites who would have been turned off by Clinton. 

A bold alternative strategy could be to concentrate resources by trying to flip a midwestern/eastern state while writing off most of the west.  For example, assume that Howard Dean's wildest dreams come true and Obama not only carries New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada but also Alaska, Montana, and a Nebraskan district.  But assume he loses the above states plus Michigan.

He still loses 168-270.

It may sound foolish to "write off" the west, but McCain may have to prioritize his resources if he is going to be massively outspent as many are suggesting. 

I was looking at a past post by Josh Kahn regarding our message problems, in which he pointed out that our message is actually worse off than our image.  What also struck me as I was reading the supporting NPR survey, though, was how much we have let the Democrats get away with putting forward popular slogans repeated over and over again that are not only factually inaccurate but also somewhat destructive.

A good example is trade.  Since at least 2004, Democrats have frequently railed against giving “tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas”.  The mantra was repeated so often during the Democratic primaries that it became stuck in everyone’s head like a bad song played too many times on the radio.  In fact, Barack Obama’s second television advertisement explicitly referenced this too: “As president, he’ll end tax breaks for companies that export jobs, reward those that create jobs in America.”  I believe this is, in fact, the first policy proposal he has given in a general election ad.

But for all the outrage against the Republicans this has caused (especially in the Rust Belt), does ending these “tax breaks” make any sense?  The tax breaks that Obama and other Democrats are talking about refer to the long-time practice of not taxing company profits that are earned and remain overseas for further investment.  Forcing companies to pay the exorbitant U.S. tax rate would do nothing to stop outsourcing (considering that labor costs are much lower in India and China), but it will help cripple those companies in the face of foreign competitors whose governments don’t have to pander to the protectionist crowd.  

Its similar with Colombia. Democrats oppose a free trade agreement with Colombia that is disapproved by their union masters. This is in spite of the fact that only U.S. based companies would benefit from the agreement  because we already import the vast majority of Colombian goods duty-free.

If Republicans are serious about countering this issue, they should be constantly pointing out that the real problem with our tax code is that it imposes the second highest rate of taxation on corporations in the world, and thus it reduces our competitiveness.  The GOP has been defensive about trade for too long, and if they don’t fight back the Rust Belt will be gone for a long time.