Undecideds

This is my pat on the back posting. My effort to cheer you up. Remember that I offered some assurances recently that Obama would win this race, even though the numbers will tighten, and it might look like McCain is catching up. My argument - well, really Nate Silver's argument - was that Obama had reached all the persuadable undecided voters he could reach, and the remaining undecided voters would either break for McCain or stay home.

It appears that I failed to capture the complexity of racism in America. My racist was a guy who believed in the superiority of the white race. Picture a Klansman without the robe. Or maybe Bob Ewell, Mayella's hated-filled father from To Kill a Mockingbird, who attacks Jem and Scout after the school pagent and breaks Jem's arm. What do I know? I don't know these people. I was sketching out something blind. It turns out there is a range of racial biases. Let's turn to science for something more accurate.

Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com - who happens to be a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin - crunches some numbers and finds the undecideds will break about 50/50 between McCain and Obama. Three different polls have recently included the following question in their presidential campaign polling:

I'd like you to tell me whether you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: African Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing.

Okay, we can argue whether or not this digs deep enough to reveal racial animosity. The problem, of course, is if you ask someone if they hate blacks, they might very well deny it, even if they harbor animosities and fears and resentments that we would call, by almost any objective definition, racist. What is nice about this question is that we are asking respondents to characterize blacks, not themselves, but in the process we get a glimpse at respondents' attitudes. Franklin's finding is fascinating, and undercuts Silver's (and my) argument: among undecided voters, 27% strongly agree and 32% somewhat agree that African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing." Among the wider public, 26% of the nation strongly believes African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing" and 32% somewhat believe so. In other words, undecided voters don't appear to be different from the public at large in their racial attitudes. About a quarter of the nation evidences a strong racial bias, and the group of voters who remain undecided mirror this.

So, as things tighten up, take courage. I may have been wrong, and my earlier reassurances may not have been strong enough. Looking at polls might give us a good sense of what the final outcome will be, and undecided voters are not going to spoil the party.

Another source of anxiety related to polls: McCain and his spokesmen keep saying things about how unreliable polls are. Their argument seems to be that the polls are all over the place - some show McCain pulling closer in battleground states, others don't, some show the national race a tie, others give Obama a ten-point advantage. Polls, they are saying, can't be trusted. Okay. Take a breath. The polling numbers you see on Pollster or Fivethirtyeight are aggregates, reaching into the many, many polls taken, inputting some well-thought-out trend adjustments and other carefully applied statistical tunings. So the variations the McCain campaign is pointing to have already been addressed in the final numbers spit out by Charles Franklin, Mark Blumenthal, and Nate Silver. You can make an argument about their methods and the choices they make to weigh different factors - and lots of numbers geeks do, contributing to lengthy discussions on both sites. But in the end, there seems to be a high-level of confidence in their results.

Why would you be accepting any assessment of scientific findings from a Republican anyway? Think about it. This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Their approach to sowing doubt about global warming and evolution is the same method the McCain campaign is using now. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans (and the McCain campaign) is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.

It reminds me a little bit of my two-year-old. When all evidence available tells us that he is tired and should go to bed, he resists, offering spirited arguments, usually using claims that have nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence. But Daddy I want to watch Caillou. I'm hungry. Can I have a bar? I want to play with my cars. Then some nights he has a tantrum. But he is just postponing the inevitable. The McCain campaign is doing the same thing - offering arguments unrelated to the evidence, throwing a tantrum, and postponing the inevitable.

I'm still left scratching my head over these undecideds. What are they waiting for? How can they be confused about their choice. David Sedaris has a funny observation in the New Yorker:

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.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

Ashley Todd and Donald Segretti

The media will sell you the story that Ashley Todd, the young College Republican who faked her own attack and sexual assault and blamed it on a six foot four African American thug who became infuriated when he discovered she was a McCain supporter, is just a troubled girl. We should allow her to get the help that she needs. Clearly, a woman who fakes an attack and falsely claims to be sexually assaulted is troubled. But she is also part of an organization that celebrates dirty tricks and pranks and provocation. College Republicans are the Delta Tau Chi's of the political world. Whether that is a good thing - and you argue they are just having fun - or a bad thing is a matter of opinion.

Part of the legacy of Watergate is the role young saboteurs can play in presidential elections. One of the minor players in the Watergate scandal was Donald Segretti, a young Republican lawyer who did some nasty things but, in the end, really didn't threaten the Constitution the way the major conspirators did. He was just a punk with a really long leash and $500,000 in Republican campaign funds. Segretti engaged in what he called "ratfucking", which involved, in his case, trying to smear candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1971. He did this, for example, by stealing some letterhead from Edmund Muskie's campaign office, and circulating letters on that letterhead offering false details about Scoop Jackson's sexual preferences. He may have been engaged in a plot to get a black prostitute to seduce Jackson so the Republicans could snap photos. In the end he served four and a half months in federal prison for his misbehavior.

Segretti learned to be a political saboteur while a student at the University of Southern California and, in the process, created the template for similar-minded campus provocateurs everywhere. Their job is to stir the pot, create outrage on campus, poke fun at liberals, annoy people. And, more importantly, learn dirty tricks and pranks and the political value of provocation, so they can carry these lessons into their work as young operatives in the party's machinery. Fascinatingly, Segretti was the California co-chair of John McCain's ill-fated 2000 run for the presidency. You know, the campaign that was derailed by Karl Rove's success in circulating a story in South Carolina that said that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate biological daughter, the product of an adulterous affair with a black woman. In a weird twist, one of the stories Segretti tried to drop into the 1972 presidential race - one of the things he was sent to jail for - was a tale about Scoop Jackson's taste for young black prostitutes. Now Ashley Todd floats the story that a black man attacked her and assaulted her because she was a McCain supporter.

What do all of these stories have in common? Republicans seem to believe that African Americans, dropped deliberately into a smear campaign - cast in the roles of young seductresses, prostitutes, and street criminals - can derail opponents' campaigns. Lee Atwater derailed Michael Dukakis' campaign with Willie Horton, playing on white America's fear of black crime. This is exactly what Ashley was trying to do. She may be a troubled girl, but she is part of a long troubled history.

[Update 10/27: Nate Silver, over at Fivethirtyeight.com, has an essay about Ashley Todd, linking her story with other stories to reveal the play of responses to Obama's candidacy. Ashley Todd's response - to script a bit of fraudulent street theater designed to remind white voters that blacks are dangerous - is, as Silver carefully argues, directly connected to McCain's efforts to create an "emotional backlash against black people and against Barack Obama." McCain's closing argument is that you can't trust Obama, in part because he is black. I know some of you don't buy this. But consider something that happened yesterday at a rally in Iowa. Sarah Palin had just finished saying:

The lessons I believe we have taught our kids would start to erode. Those
lessons about work ethic, hard work being rewarded and productivity being
rewarded.

Someone from the audienced yelled "And he's a nigger." Why that reminder at that point in the speech? Because, for the fraction of the American public Palin was speaking to, African Americans are imagined to be lazy, living off welfare rather than working, like the rest of us do. We don't want, in Palin's phrasing, "our kids" to start living like they do. Electing Obama would contaminate our culture. We would all become welfare leeches if Obama wins, because his inner-city culture - the culture of black America - would befoul our farmlands and small-towns, the "real" America Palin celebrates. It's the McCain campaign blowing the dog-whistle again, communicating coded messages we don't hear, but racists - like that woman in the audience - do hear and respond to.]

John McCain: "That one is just off the boat"

In his stump speech, McCain has taken to saying:

I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her.

This refers to the fact that McCain's dad and grandfather were both admirals in the U.S. Navy. Taken at face value, it is standard political rhetoric, designed to position McCain as a patriot. But he could say that, and has said that, without reference to his heritage. In fact, in the same speech, he said:

I've been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it.

Great! I'm sold! He had me at hello. McCain is a patriot! And, oh yeah, he managed to remind me he was a POW too. Bang! A lot of ground covered in a sentence. So why bring his father and grandfather into this? It's that dog whistle he's been blowing lately. To racist and xenophobic audiences, McCain is saying: Obama doesn't come from a long line of patriotic Americans. His dad wasn't born here. He wasn't like you and me. His dad was foreign. And, embedded in McCain's comment, and clearly relevant to his audience, is the idea that you can't be certain that Obama will fight for America because he is not fully one of us. He isn't part of our narrative, our collective struggles. He's new here. It's a racist and xenophopic wrinkle on the experience angle: Not only is Obama not as experienced in government as McCain, but he is insufficiently experienced as an American.

This builds on claims that surrogates and other fringe wackos have been making for a long time. It plays on the idea that the longer your family is in America- the more immersed you are in the culture, the more you and your ancestors have been nourished by its soil - the more American you are.

It's time for someone to say to McCain: That's offensive! That's racist! That's unamerican!

How do blacks win? The McCain campaign's answer: they cheat

Today it became clear that the McCain campaign is launching a "How could it be?" strategy. The goal is to speak to racists who find it unfathomable that a black man could be running away with this election.

Typical of those opposed to affirmative action is the idea that African Americans could never succeed without unfair advantages - quotas in schools, preferential hiring, our liberal embrace of multiculturalism and diversity. Blacks' success over, in their eyes, obviously more qualified white applicants can only be explained by cheating. On a level playing field, blacks could never, ever, ever get the better of a white candidate.

So how do you explain the enormous lead that Obama has built in national tracking polls and, more importantly, the projections that show a near landslide win in the electoral college? It's the liberal media, helping Obama cheat by not asking the right questions, or investigating his past associations. The suggestion is: if the media was doing its job instead of following its liberal inclination to give a break to the black man, Obama would be losing to McCain by double-digits. And what about the explosion of newly registered Democrats, even in traditionally red states like Colorado and North Carolina? More cheating. It's ACORN and other liberal organizations inundating local authorities with fraudulent registrations. And what about all of Obama's money? Where is he getting all that money to run his campaign? Hollywood liberals of course. But also, maybe, radicals who want to bring down America.

OK. OK. I know some of you are saying: I'm not convinced this is racist. This is just the crap that Republicans always blather on about. Alright, I'll let you believe that. I don't have any internal McCain memos or anything that prove my point. But I will offer this line of evidence: 1. Throughout the suburbs and rural towns that make up much of the swing state territory McCain and Palin have been campaigning through, the hatred of affirmative action is powerful and unshakable. It's the same sentiment that Hillary Clinton was trying to employ in her primary fight with Obama. Like Hillary, what the McCain campaign and their supportive commentators are employing are the phrasings and issue framings that communicate to racists the way a dog whistle calls a hound. We might not hear it, but they sure do. Geraldine Ferraro used the same code words and messages, but did so so awkwardly and obviously that she blew it, and had to be sent home by the Clinton campaign. 2. This strategy has emerged at precisely the same moment McCain has been rolling out an effort to turn his rallies into ugly mob scenes with coded language emphasizing Obama's "difference." Suggesting that Obama has a lead in the race he doesn't deserve and is explained only by cheating and unfair advantages is the other side of this strategy. McCain is saying to racists in his party: Do you really want a black man to be President? Well he will be if we let him (and his liberal pals) steal this election.

The daily "Huh?"

This is either a new feature or a one time venture. I constantly see the McCain campaign saying things that make me say: "Huh?" I thought I should try to document some of them.

Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman, today complained about Obama's "run-with-the-herd mentality" and, in the same sentence, his "radical associations." Wait. Let's look in the dictionary. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines radical as “marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional” and “disposed to make extreme changes.” So, it seems to me, it would be difficult to both "run with the herd" and be "radical."

I thought I should, while I was at it, look up another word the Palin/McCain team uses a lot. Merriam-Webster defines maverick as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party." Kind of like a radical, I guess. But maybe less extreme. Sort of radical-lite.

As good as he'll get

A while ago, imagining a world where everyone loves their kids as much as I do, I positioned the possibility that even unreformed racists might go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Obama because they want a better future for their kids. Another possibility is that pure self-interest - the realization that Republican economic dogma is bankrupt and unsupportable - might lead racists to bite down hard and vote for Obama. A persuasive posting on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com argues otherwise. And, for your sanity as an Obama supporter, it might make sense to listen. Silver's argument is that many of the remaining undecideds out there are fully aware that McCain's economic proposals, in so far as they are fleshed out, will only prolong financial chaos, deepen the country's economic crisis, and result in more pain, dislocation, and hopelessness for the working class. But voting for Obama would require them to overcome a deeply rooted intrinsic racial prejudice. It would mean putting aside a worldview, held for their entirely lives, and perhaps handed down to them by their parents, that explains events in history, and their own poverty and powerlessness, as the product of conspirators or misguided do-gooders, who have created a world out of balance, in which inferior races have contaminated and dragged down America.

It seems unlikely that anyone who views the world this way will ever walk into a voting booth and cast a vote for Obama. These voters will either stay at home or vote for McCain. It might be that Obama has persuaded everyone he can persuade, so the gap between Obama and McCain will narrow as the few remaining undecided voters reluctantly drift toward McCain. They really have no other choice, because voting for Obama would invalidate their core beliefs and require them to reconstruct the world from the ground up.

The goal for Obama, then, is to register new voters and to convince wallflowers - all those registered voters who too often sit out elections - to get off their butts and vote, and the campaign knows this and has assembled a ground game to try to accomplish it.

So when the polls tighten between now and election day, and you imagine the sky falling (or, if you are like me, and see us fumbling the ball away at the 2 yard line), take a breath. Remember I told you this was going to happen. And take heart that Obama's campaign is ready for it. Oh, and get your ass off the couch and be part of that campaign.

Obligatory post-debate post

Oh. God. Andrew Halcro was right. Andrew Halcro ran against Sarah Palin in the race to be Governor of Alaska. He described her as the "master of the nonanswer" and adept at "glittering generality." With Gwen Ifell asleep at the moderator's desk, and repeatedly failing to push for more specificity, we were left with a lot of empty rhetoric from Palin that really no one could disagree with. For example, here are 10 things she is for:

1. The American workforce
2. A heck of a lot of good lessons
3. Energy
4. Marriage
5. A little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street
6. Freedom
7. Third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School
8. The kitchen table
9. Kids heading off to college
10. Living in America

All right, maybe we aren't all convinced we need a dose of reality from Wasilla. But, all in all, when it comes to any of the other items on the list, I think just about anyone would raise their hand and say, "I'm for that!"

Who would have guessed that we would be longing for a taste of Katie Couric's journalistic instincts? The reason Palin looked so bad in those CBS interviews is because Couric didn't allow Palin to deliver a stream of empty answers. Ifell, by contrast, didn't even ask Biden and Palin to circle back and answer the questions she asked. Did anyone else notice she asked a question about when WE would use nukes, and neither Biden nor Palin answered it? Any answer, any string of words, linked together in bizarre circuitous streams, was fine for Ifell. One note: I'm not a grammarian, but Sarah Palin's sentences are wild roller-coaster rides. Here's one that caught my ear:

If you're going to do any harm and mandate more things on me and take more of my money and income tax and business taxes, you're going to have a choice in just a few weeks here on either supporting a ticket that wants to create jobs and bolster our economy and win the war or you're going to be supporting a ticket that wants to increase taxes, which ultimately kills jobs, and is going to hurt our economy.

Other times, she threw out phrases masquerading as thoughts:

Also, John McCain's maverick position that he's in, that's really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has.

or:

Certainly, accounting for different conditions in that different country and conditions are certainly different.

Some of you are going to say: "Now you're just being mean." No. My point is to encourage you to look at her rhetoric. There is no "there there." No policy position. No logic. You can argue, as some have, that Palin talks this way because she doesn't know anything. But I don't think that's true. She employs this approach to political discourse and dialogue because she thinks it helps recruit support. On one hand, her meandering phrasing makes it difficult to know exactly what she is saying. Take this example:

Who's been there and he's faced challenges and he knows what evil is and knows what it takes to overcome the challenges here with our military.

She's talking about John McCain and his position on a draw down of troops in Iraq. But what she says has no meaning. It says nothing about McCain's policy. So how can you argue with it? Your own views can be mapped on to this string of words, giving meaning to a statement that can't otherwise stand on its own.

This is her other trick: if she voices solidarity with a lot of things we can't possibly disagree with, she believes we will be drawn in and take her side. Here is what she hopes the conversation inside our head looks like:

Sarah likes kids! So do I! She has some differences of opinion in her family! So do I! We are so much alike, I think I'll back her!

She talks this way because it works. If no one pushes back. I can't decide if Ifell is just incapable of taking control of a debate or, in the wake of the phony outrage about her upcoming book on race and politics, she was just afraid of looking pro-Obama if she called Palin on her hazy generalities and deliberate evasions.

But, out of all of her nonsensical and noncommittal blah, blah, blah, two strategies for shaping the remaining days of this race came through:

1. This race is about energy independence. And McCain and Palin, because of their commitment to drilling and Palin's "experience" with energy issues as Alaska's governor, are more likely than Obama to lead us forward into the day when all of our energy needs are met through fossil fuels we pump out of America's soil or dig out of America's mountains. The thing she said over and over: McCain/Palin are for an "all of the above" energy policy. What is appealing about this, for voters who don't look very hard, is the suggestion that we can get there without government spending and without asking for sacrifices - like conservation or smaller vehicles or excise taxes on fuel. It's a fantasy and, I think, largely beside the point in most voters' minds. People are worried about the economy, and unless McCain/Palin are prepared to contruct a more elaborately architectural argument that ties energy issues to the collapse on Wall Street and economic woes on Main Street, energy issues will remain a sideshow. One thing I heard from Palin - a claim that East Coasters are out of touch with folks in the West who want to profit from pumping out fossil fuels - may have relevance in some Western states, like California, Alaska, and Texas, but these states aren't really in play anyway.

2. Convince people that Obama will raise their taxes. If Obama can enact his tax plans (and it is a big if, given our economic meltdown and the obligations the Federal government is taking on), most people will actually see their taxes cut. Yet, Palin (like McCain) continues to shout her claim that Obama will boost taxes. Over and over again last night, Biden attempted to correct the record and beat back Palin's misstatements. Different media sources have tried to set the record straight. A visit to Obama's website tells the story, there is even a calculator online that let's you calculate your own "Obama Tax Cut." Yet McCain and Palin's claims still seem to have the ear of a majority of Americans. A friend last night asked: How can this be? My answer: people are more likely to believe a claim - even an untrue one - if it corresponds with some preexisting narrative or conventional wisdom. In this case, the American people are predisposed to believe Obama is a "tax and spend" Democrat, because conventional wisdom holds that Democrats tax (and Republicans cut taxes). But, again, like the energy issue, I don't think Americans care. In many, many studies, Americans have been found to be willing to pay higher taxes IF they value the public benefits they receive in return and they TRUST that these goods will be delivered. The goal for Obama, then, needs to be to continue to publicize the facts of his tax plan while also convincing the American people that his policies promise real benefits and he is a trustworthy public ally. In the end, even if he can't displace the widespread perception that Democrats are addicted to taxes, he can still win the argument that his policies are better for the majority of Americans and he is more trustworthy than John McCain.