Demand responsibility, not payback

Raymond Bateman's column on the effectiveness of New Jersey's senators (Courier-News, November 14) is a shallow treatment. He points to a study from Rutgers' Bloustein School to critique the inability "of our senators... to influence their peers" -- in short, we've been electing people who neglect us.

There are two fatal flaws in this thinking. First, that study ranks states in terms of federal money brought in compared to the amount we pay in federal taxes. It also points out that New Jersey is one of the wealthiest states in the nation -- we have the second-highest per capita income, and the highest median household and median family incomes. States with the wealthiest people will pay the most in tax money and least need federal aid.

Inappropriately evaluating lawmakers this way is a fundamental cause of our ballooning national debt. This pervasive bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility inspires reelection campaigns that universally flout local spending as heroic. It also speaks volumes about the spin machines candidates buy with their bloated campaign treasuries: imagine the gall required to talk about fiscal responsibility one day, and then boast about bleeding federal money to a district the next!

Voters in South Dakota recently proved that even Tom Daschle, a king of senatorial self-promotion, is subject to questions larger than, "What have you done for me lately?" I hope voters here in New Jersey continue asking our representatives to push the best national policies, not short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, reelection resume-building pork projects.

Amateur exit poll analysis, pt 1

I must begin by admitting a major flaw in this argument as I’ve been making it in conversations recently. Upon my first looks at the exit polls, I was astonished by the following question and responses, never mentioned in news reports I’d heard. Voters who came to the polls last Tuesday were asked:

On most political matters, do you consider yourself:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Liberal	21	85	13	1
Moderat	45	54	45	0
Conservative	34	15	84	0

This struck me as impossible to ignore: liberals, who I guessed had to number as many Americans as conservatives, didn’t bother coming out to vote. However, my conclusions were overreaching:

A CBS/NEW YORK TIMES poll cited by Nunberg showed that "just 22 percent of respondents were willing to describe themselves as liberals, against 35 percent who described themselves as conservatives." But when placed side by side with surveys outlining their political stance, Nunberg concludes, "a lot of people who call themselves moderates hold what most would describe as liberal views." (From PBS’s site.)

I looked up the CBS/New York Times Poll referred to above. (Click on “Interactive Feature: Complete Results: The New York Times/CBS News Poll”.) They’ve asked this question a bunch this year and back as far as 1993. Since then, the number of self-described liberals has generally hovered in the high teens/low twenties. Conservatives have remained pretty consistent in the low- to mid-thirties.

So my apologies to all: I've been wrong to say that the polls directly show how liberals were uninspired to come out for Kerry. I think they still indirectly show that, and they also show that Democratic leaders have gotten terrible at defending their positions in ways that appeal even to their base. I’ll leave it those whom are better equipped to argue that the cause of this is Democratic pandering -- simultaneously to the people they claim to represent and to the corporations they aim to woo. (Although I’ll probably touch on it in my next post on this subject.)

I’ve heard a bunch of mediocre criticism leveled at the reliability of this year’s exit polls. Ron Silver said on MSNBC on election night,

You can be in a certain profession and you can be of a certain ethnicity and you can be in a certain family, when it's much easier to vote for George Bush and walk out of the booth and tell your children, your friends, your family, and your colleagues, that you voted for Kerry. So I think these numbers are very suspect.

It strikes me as difficult to believe that large swaths of voters were so ashamed of whom they wanted to win that they bothered voting and then anonymously lied to pollsters over a range of questions. More plausible, at least in some regions, is that “exit polls may have overstated Kerry support because his supporters were more willing to be surveyed than Bush supporters.” Again, though, this presumes the guy who won -- largely on personal issues like character and faith, no less -- inspired shame in his supporters more than Kerry, the guy who ran on not being the other guy. Again, more on this next time.

Meanwhile, according to PBS’s analysis, somewhere between 10-15% of Americans are ashamed to call themselves liberal. The self-described moderates went for Kerry 54-45%. If there was any skew at all from shame, wouldn’t it be from people who didn’t want to admit they voted for Kerry -- or at least balance out the opposing vote?

Anyway, my point is, this isn’t necessarily the wake-up call I’d believed it to be (that the liberal vote was necessarily suppressed by the Democratic campaign’s reliance on looking and sounding like Bush but not actually being him). Kerry danced around Bush’s “liberal” label during the debates like he’d been called a dirty word, and it reminded me of Kerry’s floundering and sadly unfunny moment during his Daily Show interview:

JON STEWART:
Please refute if you will. Are you the number one most liberal senator in the Senate?
JOHN KERRY:
No.
…
JON STEWART:
[According to cable news, y]ou're the number one most liberal senator. More liberal than Karl Marx apparently. (LAUGHTER) Are you or have you ever flip-flopped?
JOHN KERRY:
I've flip-flopped, flop-flipped. … Labels don't mean anything.

It’s remotely possible that Kerry was trying to make a moral point, the sticks-and-stones lesson you pass to your children when they get called names by the schoolyard bully. But I understood these moments as white flags -- yet another election where liberals have been abandoned wholesale by Democrats. Should I be surprised that almost half of all liberals don’t like being called liberals when the (relatively) liberal candidate for president won’t even address the issue head on?

Let me see if I can present some further evidence.

21% of voters considered themselves liberal (consistent with Americans in general). 37% of voters considered themselves Democrats. For all the talk about how the conservative evangelicals tipped the election, it appears that as many Democrats as Republicans came out to the polls:

Question: No matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself as a:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Democrat	37	89	11	0
Republican	37	6	93	0
Independent or something else	26	49	48	1

Something else to note about the above question: Kerry won those coveted independents by a smidge. Nader wasn’t a factor on the base for either party. Few would dispute that Bush appealed more to the right than Kerry did to the left. So the difference in the election, in these terms, is that Bush pulled more Democrats than Kerry pulled Republicans. Kerry’s refusal to adopt a firm antiwar stance (despite majority support of that position in his party), attack the Patriot Act with any fierceness, take a clear stand on gay marriage (states’ rights isn’t exactly a moral argument), change labor laws or job-siphoning trade treaties, or our immoral health care system, were clearly positions carved out to appeal to moderates, not his party base.

I know this is far out there, people, but if we can entertain the possibility in our minds that Kerry could’ve simultaneously explained Bush’s failures and taken clear opposing stands to them, can we conclude that he could’ve kept the moderates and his base? Another scenario: plenty of Republicans, even in the Senate and House, moderates and extremists too, recognize that Bush’s Iraq policy has been slapdash, visionless, and sloppy; that civil liberties have been eroded more than they wanted by the Patriot Act; and that Bush hasn’t pushed to balance the budget at all. If Kerry had carved out clear, moral positions, he might have pulled as many Republicans as Bush pulled Democrats. And let’s face it, if Kerry lost people on “moral values” it’s because it’s much harder to stake out a middle-of-the-road on strictly moral grounds than a position to either the left or right.

But amid the “moral values” din from the punditry this past week, few note that Kerry won a proportionately equal amount of support from almost as many people on the economy and jobs as he lost on morality. The ground Bush gained on terrorism and taxes was more or less balanced by Kerry’s strength on Iraq, education, and health care. The difference: issues where Kerry did better (except the economy), he won 3 to 1. Issues where Bush did better (except taxes), he won 6 to 1. It does seem like Bush did markedly better because, on the issues he won, he commanded:

Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president? (Check only one)

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Taxes	5	43	57	0
Education	4	73	26	-
Iraq	15	73	26	0
Terrorism	19	14	86	0
Economy/Jobs	20	80	18	0
Moral values	22	18	80	1
Health care	8	77	23	-

About 18% of the electorate claimed to vote specifically against Bush, compared to 28% for Kerry. Compare that to 40% for Bush and about 8% against Kerry:

Was your vote for president mainly:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
For your candidate	69	40	59	0
Against his opponent	25	70	30	0

67% of voters thought Kerry attacked Bush unfairly, compared to 60% who thought Bush attacked unfairly. 37% of voters who fell into either category vote for the unfair attacker. My conclusion: the old adage is true, the perception of a negative campaign is a turnoff for voters:

Did either of these candidates for president attack the other unfairly?

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Only John Kerry did	22	5	94	0
Only George W. Bush did	15	93	7	0
Both candidates did	45	53	46	0
Neither candidate did	13	56	42	2

Just a little more

It's unsurprising that Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, offers the most bland post yet in Slate's dialogue on "Why Americans Hate Democrats." He makes the commonly-made point by those party centrists that they're consistently losing, but the key is that it's only by small margins. His stodgiest point:

We just need to convince a few more people that we'll keep them safe; that we believe deeply in the basic values of work, responsibility, family, and country; and that unlike the Republicans we have a set of ideas to reward and strengthen those values. [Italics mine.]

And thus, the status quo spin machine goes again. Someone needs to remind Reed how disastrous Bush's term has been in both foreign and domestic policy. Kerry designed his entire campaign around that fact and still lost by a healthy margin. Reed seemingly says that all the Democrats need to win is for the Republicans to continue screwing up everything thoroughly and then have a white southern male appeal to a few bigots. Then "we" win.

To be fair, a paragraph earlier he does bring up "the war on work" and suggest, "Democrats should offer a tax reform plan as ambitious in rewarding work as Bush's disastrous plan to protect wealth." [My italics.] If I didn't know better, I'd swear he was heeding at least one piece of advice from Nader stump speeches.

But again, it is unsurprising that after joining in the chorus of "we need to connect to southern values like Clinton did," the one place he talks about getting ambitious is in tax reform. Let's remember that Clinton wasn't a moralistic straight-shooter, he was the ultimate spin machine. The American Left operates out of morality and often speaks from moral high ground with great clarity; the problem is that Democrats no longer accurately represent the American Left.

I plan to post my take on the exit polls sometime soon, operating from my completely inexperienced background and my working theory that the Democrats were underrepresented because they had to cajole liberals to the polls with scare tactics like draft warnings rather than offering a different game plan.

Blame Kerry

This Chris Suellentrop piece brings up a great point from last night, although the title ("Blame Nader") draws the wrong conclusion. I was one of those undecideds who wound up voting Nader. My reader knows I was heavily leaning towards Nader all along. Still, I gave Kerry every opportunity to win me over, but he just couldn't -- I didn't even feel like he tried.

I have friends and family who are staunch Democrats, and when I literally begged them for reasons to vote for Kerry, the only ones even they could give is that he wasn't Bush. But Nader wasn't Bush, either, and it so happened he's a guy I wasn't revolted by. While I'm sure that Democrats will find ways to blame Nader, the truth is, in this realm it's all Kerry's fault.

Sadly, I agree with Jim Carville and the head-hanging Democrats on CNN last night, who despondently admitted their party is compassless right now and "heading into the wilderness." Though I don't care for Howard Dean and long ago gave up on Dennis Kucinich, I would've preferred the Democrats get creamed (in a Goldwater way) with one of them at the top of their ticket than have some excuse to continue four more years of pretending they have any sense of what America wants. Instead, as Nader often says, lukewarm Democrats lost to the worst of the right wing ideologues (Bunning, Coburn et. al).

As I look at some virtually meaningless exit polls, there are some numbers that are too big to ignore. Respondents were asked if they considered themselves Liberal (21%), Moderate (45%), or Conservative (33%). I can very easily believe that there are more moderates than liberals or conservatives in America. What I can’t believe is that there are so few liberals -- can we guess that they’re out there, just not voting?

Something small but potentially interesting: on the questions about invading Iraq and being there now, Nader only got 0-1% across the board. Ask anti-war Democrats today what they got by capitulating. Something else that confirms what Nader has said all along, about Democrats moving back into the fold this year: asked who they voted for in 2000, the 4% of "other" respondents went 68-18-8 for Kerry. The only other category of people with a statistically significant number of Nader voters was the "didn't vote in 2000" category. So it looks like Nader is, like he said, bringing new voters to the polls.

An aside: the results of P. Diddy's campaign: it seems most people chose death.

I'm voting for Nader. Step off.

OK, I purposely made myself an independent and undecided voter for the past several months because I wanted to send the point, in my mathematically meaningless way, that I am tired of being taken for granted by the Democratic party and I would not sell my soul for whoever wasn't Bush. I gave John Kerry ample opportunity to prove me he had a modicum of integrity, just enough to say something meaningful at the risk a little political lashing, I might have hopped aboard that swift boat. His lukewarm, long-overdue suggested minimum wage hike looked like a step in the right direction, but he's barely touched that one since he brought it up.

Let's face it here: the country is so polarized (and I chalk it up in part to those dirty political spin machines) that a guy could easily take non-middle of the road positions on a few issues and not throw the election to the other guys. In fact, Bush has. But whether Kerry is a centrist or just playing one on T.V., it doesn't really matter. He's unwilling to take a stand on issues that matter to me. Contrary to what my Democratic-voting colleagues and friends seem to think, that's not going to be enough to stop this country's dangerous slide into imperialistic-styled militarism, extremist-dictated morality, watered down labor, tax, and other economic policies, and abject ignorance for the physical state of the planet. I hope I'm proved wrong -- I hope Kerry wins and turns out to be a big liar, a liberal president who really has been just saying the things he thinks he needed to say to pad his coffers and become head honcho. But I'm not going to support him. And I think more likely than not, he will win, Republicans will retain both houses of Congress, Kerry will prove a rather mediocre centrist and wind up passing some rather conservative legislation, and John McCain will whoop his ass in 2008.

Well, my prognostications are no good when I get specific like that, but for the communal sense of election-eve fabrication, I'll leave that one for the ages. I endorse (and will vote for) Ralph Nader, and you will suck my balls.

more anti-Nader ridiculousness

Dear reader (and I do meean that in the singular), my apologies for my extended absence. One of the drawbacks to writing a blog regularly for no money in your spare time is that you have to, um, work to pay the bills the rest of the time.

Anyway, this is a response to an column by Robert Paul Reyes, also known as "Look at me, I'm going to rehash every stereotype you've ever heard about Nader's candidacy" Guy:

I read today your column on Ralph Nader, and I’m disappointed at how factually inaccurate it is. You wrote, “Nader disingenuously claims that he takes as many votes away from President Bush as from Sen. Kerry. Public opinion polls dispute that absurd claim.” In fact, only one poll (Gallup) has been asking Nader voters which other candidate they would support, and it has shown for three months that a majority would back Bush over Kerry. Maybe you were referring to The Nation’s poll of supposed Nader swing-state supporters, but the fine print of that poll explains that almost half of the respondents described themselves as planning to vote for Kerry or as undecided voters who like Nader. (So the biggest news flash there, Mr. Reyes, is that Kerry voters like Kerry.)

You also misrepresent one of Nader’s key positions: Nader does not “conten[d] that there's no real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.” Nader has long said that there are many similarities between the parties and these candidates, most often on fundamental issues too often ignored in the public discourse and particularly when compared to his own. Neither Bush nor Kerry support a health care system that covers everyone (which the rest of the Western world has had for decades), Kerry approved both Bush’s authority to go to war with Iraq and his ability to attack civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and both have remarkably similar plans for the continued occupation of Iraq. Only Nader consistently supports universal health care, has said that president’s invasion of Iraq was unconstitutional, and has developed a plan for the responsible withdrawal of U.S. troops to remove the target from America’s back. But Nader has never said there are no real differences, just that the differences are less important than the similarities. He also makes an excellent case that the leaders of both parties are influenced too heavily by the same corporate interests.

Perhaps Nader underestimates the differences, but you are certainly overestimating. We heard the same doomsday predictions about 3-4 retirements giving us an boogeyman conservative Supreme Court four years ago, but a whole presidential term has passed without a single retirement. Even Rehnquist seems on the road to recovery now. You also glossed over Kerry’s repeated support for preemptive strikes, a policy that predates Ronald Reagan and was expanded and codified under Bill Clinton.

But perhaps the worst thing you do is contradict yourself in describing the character of Nader: how can someone completely unconcerned with his “legacy” be “a selfish spoiler who can't see past his own press clippings”? If Nader were really concerned by his press clippings, he would have dropped out of the race (or jumped off a bridge) eons ago, because unfortunately most people who write about him don’t bother to get the facts straight, or pass off partisan rhetoric as fact. I wish I could say that your column helped shed some light on the candidate or dug into some new facets of the anti-Nader campaign – or better still, found something positive to say about any of the candidates – but unfortunately, it seems that you just dredged up the same old baseless accusations and presented them as facts.