Electoral Math
Reality-Based^TM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot

February 2005

My Life, Chapter 2 link
February 26
Now Playing: Dixie Chicks, "White Trash Wedding"

Previous chapters: 1

Even in this early chapter, which focus on Bill Clinton's early years, chapter two of My Life also gives us the life story that leads to one of Clinton's future political views [emphasis added]:

During the Depression, when nobody had any money, he [Clinton's grandfather] would invite boys to ride the ice truck with him just to get them off the street. They earned twenty-five cents a day.

This must where he became fond of after school programs to reduce youth crime.

In any event, Clinton uses most of chapter two to introduce his grandparents, who raised him for two years while his mother was at nursing school in New Orleans. Pappaw Clinton ran the grocery store in Hope, which put him in the unique position of having to interact with his black customers. After all, Hope was a small town, and you can't let the people you live next door to go hungry. As a result, Bill Clinton's grandparents were surprisingly egalitarian for a pair of rural white Southerners (see choice quotes). This pattern -- the removal of racial prejudice among whites when they are actually exposed to minorities -- is quite common, even today. My impression from canvassing during the election cycle is that working class neighborhoods have largely self-segregated. An all-white or mostly-white trailer park in Florida will likely have very few Democratic voters. But I found plenty of self-identified white Democrats in working-class neighborhoods that were more integrated. This is not to denigrate those who have decided to live in all-white or nearly-all-white neighborhoods--it often takes great courage or dire need to step outside one's comfort zone. But I think it does show how easy it is to assume the worst about people, especially those we don't know.

Bill therefore grew up in a household where it was acceptable for him to play with his black neighbors. Hi also live with a family who did not measure its well-being through material posessions. So long as everyone had a roof over their head, enough to eat, and felt secure in their home life, Bill claims they felt comfortable. An important aspect of this easily lost today--the Great Depression is not even a memory for most people of working age, and anyone under 30 has lived through economic expansion interrupted only by the 1991-1994 recession and the 2001-2002 collapse caused by 9/11. George W. Bush is now the first President since the Depression who grew up entirely immune from it; true, his father was a child in the 1930s, but the Bush family was highly aristocratic, and W. spent his youth at Andover and Yale. It might behoove us all to read this chapter of My Life and remember there was a time when the chase for more did not consume [pun intended] quite so much of everyone's life.

Up Next: Roger Clinton, childhood with Mother in Hope, Arkansas

Friday Chinchilla Blogging link
February 26

It's Friday, the pager gets turned off in less than eight hours, at which point the professional and social zoo of the last two months takes a welcome break. It's time for everyone to let it all out ...

... even the chinchillas.

I've been looking for one of those. link
February 23
Now playing: Sheryl Crow, "Steve McQueen"

Thanks to Kevin Drum's unintended spark of the "why are there no female political bloggers, or if they are why can't I find them?" powder keg, I have something I've been missing for a while: a list of female political bloggers.

While trying not to wade too deep into the mud pit (which will probably prove impossible), let me say the following.

• Shorter conversation I've had with more than one female (Democratic) political operatives: "Do you think the work environment is too aggressive and discourages women from participating? -- No. It is what it is. Plus I feel like I get respect from my peers when it counts--when we are discussing strategy or operational improvements; I would rather that then feel like I was treated politely but not respected. Being in politics attracts a certain personality type. If you fit that personality type, and you're a woman, it's fine. If you're not, and you want to be in this business, you need to quite frankly grow a pair."
  
  I was very to happy to hear the first part of her answer. After all, I would rather be respected than patronized.But If you think that my friend's last statement is a problem, then something ought to be done to make the political operative environment less hostile to those who don't want to "grow a pair", which doesn't necessarily strictly mean women.
  
  I don't know if a similar environment exists in political opinion writing.
  
• Drum's statement that the "food fighting nature of opinion writing", which I usually call the "chest-thumping nature of opinion writing", is unappealing to women is, I believe, being a bit misinterpreted. I believe it would be better put that the chest-thumping aspect would be less appealing to women--not that all women would dislike it, but that more would than men.
• Like Drum, I am going to avoid making any conjectures as to the origins of this imbalance, be they social, biological or whatever.
• The underrepresentation of women on the blogrolls of leading left-leaning bloggers is not unique; it could be said of African-americans, unions, schoolteachers, and many other groups that make up the backbone of Democratic party. The leading (in terms of traffic) part left-leaning blogosphere features all sorts of discussion on macroeconomic issues, microeconomic issues relevant to city life (crime, housing costs, fuel economy), farm-subsidy bashing, trying to understand working class white Christians so that they'll vote Democratic again, and political strategy. Issues like pay equity or family leave are rarely discussed directly. Race relations are discussed only at the abstract level of affirmative action and race-loaded issues like crime and poverty reduction, never in the concrete level of "how do we get along as individuals of different races". Unionization issues are almost completely ignored.
  
  In short, overrepresented urban white professional bloggers might want to consider getting a bit out of their comfort zone of reading other urban white professional bloggers and try something else every once in a while. There are lots of respectable writers who don't fit that mold.

So if you'll excuse me, I have to update my blogroll now.

Real Life Intrudes link
February 20
Now Playing: Zero 7, "When it Falls"

I am on pager duty for the rest of this week, so blogging will be light.

I know I promised an analysis of the present politics of Social Security, but real life is taking up more time than I expected. This is of course a good thing. What's more, I really need some better tools for analyzing the raw exit poll data -- at the moment it is more cumbersome and time consuming to work with than it ought to be. Copious Free Time^TM should reappear this weekend, giving me a chance to build some better tools and produce an analysis by Sunday.

My Life, Prologue and Chapter 1 link
February 20
Now playing: Soul Coughing, "So Far I Have Not Found the Science"

Bill Clinton puts almost no effort in creating an overarching narrative for his memoirs. Trying to emphasize narrative would mean giving short shrift to policy discussion or the details Clinton finds so fascinating. Therefore, there isn't much to lose by reviewing the book in a chapter-by-chapter basis, treating each chapter as more or less separate from all the others. I'll certainly have to reach back to previous chapters from time to time, but such theme-related work will be the exception, not the rule.

It would be impossible for any summary to capture completely the tenor of the biography. There is simply no way for me to include every side-story, every . To that end I heartily recommend that you buy a copy from Amazon.com, preferably in hardcover.[hey, you can't expect me not to do a little self-promotion]

On the whole, My Life is, well, a chronicle of the life and times of Bill Clinton. Of  its 950 pages, roughly 200 are devoted to his life from birth to the beginning of his political career in 1974. His 16-year career as Attorney General and Governor of Arkansas spans another 125 pages. The 1992 Presidential campaign lasts 75, and the remaining 500 pages are devoted to the Presidency. Much of the strength is the meandering style that such a length allows. In his interview with Charlie Rose, Clinton says that one of the reasons he wrote the book the way he did is to try and show that when you're President "everything happens at once". Of course, this is also true of life itself, so even his recounting of childhood bears a stylistic resemblance.

In the Rose interview, Clinton also mentioned in that one of the ways he tried to keep score in life was to ask the question "do people have better stories to tell". It would be hard for conservatives or liberals to say that Clinton failed in the regard. But this quote illustrates the importance of storytelling to Clinton's political style. Whenever possible he tried to point out the real life impact of his policy recommendations, or the success of individual experimental programs that he watned to adopt nation wide, or the risk of not adopting them. He also was willing to show people that at the end of the day, even the President is a human being, who has real feelings of joy and sadness, and real flaws, just like the rest of us.

In this spirit, chapter one My Life is a brief three pages on Clinton's birth and some background on his biological father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr. Blythe died in a car accident in May of 1946, three months before the birth of his son. Clinton goes on to give us single-paragraph vignettes of several characters who came forward after he became president to say that they knew his mother or his father. The most powerful statement is from the one that got away:

Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet's phone number and address, and the man said he didn't have it but would get it to me. I'm still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.

It's nice to remember that even after being President, there is always some unfinished business.

Up next: Chapter 2: Clinton's early childhood.

J. Bradford DeLong, Soft on Education link
February 18

Hopefully my first attempt at semi-tongue-in-cheek criticism will not offend anyone.

A man whose business involves teaching, and who has been in this business for much longer than I ever was, needs some help:

Right now I have the flu, and I'm trying to figure out whether we should give zero, one, or two points to someone who writes that the "Eerie Canal connects the Great Lakes with Hudson's Bay, and thus allows water transport from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean." Everything after the comma is 100% true...

UPDATE: The consensus is full credit: the part after the comma is right, we don't mark off for spelling mistakes under exam pressure, and from the viewpoint of San Francisco failing to distinguish between two bodies of water both named after Henry Hudson is excusable.

To which I say: Probably not. If, at some point, the student was expected to read a sentence that stated "Erie Canal connects the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, allowing uninterrupted water transport from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean" or something to that effect, or if such a sentence was uttered in a lecture or section that all students are expected to attend, then he or she is not correctly recalling the reading material and should be penalized -- if the scale were zero to two I would give a one; if the scale were zero to ten I would give a seven or eight. If, however, the Erie Canal example was not explicitly covered in course material, then it is acceptable to let the body-of-water confusion slide with the "Bay" crossed out in Red Ink and replaced with "River". By failing to administer tough love in this situation, DeLong is contributing to the general sloppiness of today's youth, and, more importantly, to grade inflation. After all, if you let this slide then you're aiding and abetting the confusion of Medicare and Medicaid, something I'm sure Mr. DeLong would not want even if he is happy to accept the political consequences.

DeLong is correct that in a timed exam one should not be penalized for spelling errors, especially if they would not be caught by Microsoft Word.

... And yes, I am almost certainly guilty of lots of said sloppiness.

Friday Chinchilla Blogging link
February 18

Here's Troy out of his cage for the first time. He'll stay put for a few minutes, but after that he wants to roam.

Islamic Law vs Talmudic Law link
February 16
Now Playing: Filter, "Hey Man Nice Shot"

Matt Yglesias seems to be getting a kick out of the religious-legal wranglings at the Q & A section of the Ayatollah's web page, as though tortured questions on the legality of certain behavior are sime peculiarity of the stricter strains of Islam. Clearly the esteemed Mr. Yglesias hasn't studied his own Talmudic Law. Does he need a refresher on the law regarding the obligation to return seeds based on the ratio of the quantity of seed to the size of the plot of land on which the seeds are found? Or the distinctions in impurity between tref land animals, shellfish, a woman who has not entered a mikva following a period of uncleanliness, and homosexuality? Or the legal fiction that makes Manischewitz wine kosher even if it has been handled by goyim because it has been quick-boiled?

Judaism is two thousand years ahead of Islam when it comes to making arcane twists and turns in an attempt to make a semi-coherent set of religious laws. Which is more amusing? The debate could go on forever. Let it rest until the coming of the next Messiah.

Friday Chinchilla Blogging link
February 11
Now playing: The Cure, "Lovesong"

They're not about to become the coat for some aristocrat. Chinchilla fur comes from chinchilla rabbits. I think.

Anyhow, here's bath time, by far the coolest ritual of any pet.

!#@!(%,&6! link
February 10

That:

"There's a town in Alabama that wants to abolish all laws except for the Ten Commandments" -- Sam Seaborn, The West Wing

This:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section."

But ... but ... that was on TV. This is real.

My Life, Audiobook Edition link
February 7

Like many Gen-X and Gen-XY Democrats I am a Clinton-phile (Clintoniphile? Clintonophile? Clintonaphile?) , I own a tattered copy of his book, and recently paid $21 for his audiobook. If you are considering buying the audiobook, I recommend the following instead:

1. Take out a one dollar bill and a twenty dollar bill.
2. Give the one dollar bill to amfAR, or better yet, an NGO focused on fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa or Asia.
3. Burn the twenty.
4. Go watch a video of the 1994 State of the Union.

Did you feel better? The two experiences are roughly equivalent.

The audio version of My Life commits the ultimate sin: it's abridged. I should have known better and not bought the darn thing once I saw it was abridged. But it was at least read by the Big Dog himself, so I figured that alone would be worth it. The problems is that the drastic cuts in the abridged version of the book reduces the story to a "greatest hits" of the Clinton Presidency: the campaign, gays-in-the-military, Whitewater BS, the Rabin/Arafat peace accord, the loss of Congress, the shutdown of government, more Whitewater BS, conflict in Bosnia, Oklahoma City, the re-election "contest", still more Whitewater BS, beating the "six year curse", Monica Lewinksy, Peace in Northern Ireland, conflict in Kosovo, Al Gore's campaign, Presidential pardoning BS; The end. The one plus to this approach is that it skips a great deal of mundane foreign affairs stuff, which makes up the plurality of day-to-day operations as President and therefore takes up more of the book than almost anyone cares about. "On Tuesday I met with the ambassadors to seven former Soviet Republics to discuss our plan to expand NATO without causing Boris Yeltsin too much grief politically. Planning our trip to Africa was going well," -- one can only take so much of this stuff before the eyes start to glaze over. The minus is that it misses all kinds of interesting color. Every single fun 'aside' in the paper version of the book is eliminated, as is the bulk of the chapter on his first two years as governor -- which may have been worse politically than his first two years as President--along with many entertaining little tales about life as President. The story of Zell Miller's zigging and zagging is gone. The fascinating insider look at the 1993 budget battle is completely eliminated. The NAFTA fight disappears. The list goes on and on. As a result the audiobook reads even more like a diary of events without any flourish, a complaint many had about the full book (though I don't).

One of these days I plan on starting a chapter-by-chapter review of My Life, to examine where Clinton has insights on democratic politics that he's not well known for, where he has learned lessons, and where he hasn't.  But for the time being, I have a bad taste in my mouth.

The Charlie Rose interview with Clinton, on the other hand, looks very tempting.

Political operative pig heaven! link
February 4
Now Playing: Blackalicious, "Aural Pleasure"

Via Donkey Rising, I see that the exit polling consortium has made their data available. Thus, while the rest of the world puts on nice clothing and goes out to fancy Italian restaurants and orchestral concerts, I shall curl up with thousand of numbers between 0 and 100 and glean some more information on where the Democrats should target their message on Social Security.

... and for the record, no, that is not my preferred way to spend Valentine's Day weekend.

Friday Chinchilla Blogging link
February 4
Now playing: Jadakiss, "Getting it in"

You can keep your cats and your dogs and your ferrets. I've got Chinchillas. Meet Troy (left) and Erica (right).

Karl Rove's fuzzy math, part #869 link
February 2
Now playing: Ms Jade, "Dead Wrong"

Large portions of the center-left blogosphere are already working very hard to debunk the numbers behind Bush's Social Security unreform. Suffice it to say that as with most of the numbers coming out of the White House, they're a pack of lies. First, long term imbalance in Social Security can be fixed with small changes; say, slightly lowering benefits for early retirees, slightly raising the retirement age, slighty raising taxes, etc. Second, social security benefits do not suddenly dissapear in 2042; at that point the surplus reaches zero and benefits drop to 80% of current law, which is still higher than current benefits. I refer you to any of the wise-men on center-left or left-left economics found on my home page, or Paul Krugman, or any number of other sources like the Center for American Progress, to find criticism of Bush's so-called "arithmetic".

But enough on the "finances" of Social Security. Let's get down to the politics of the situation. For reference take a look at the 2004 CNN exit polls. Note that these are the unadjusted exit polls which give Bush an overly optimistic share of the Hispanic/Latino vote; his true figure was somewhere between 33 and 40 percent. But there what we've got to work with; at most, the error affects results by a percentage point.

• Bush has said, very clearly, that workers over 55 will not be affected. The hope is that this promise will "buy off" seniors and prevent them from revolting against benefit cuts.
• Bush keeps tailoring his program "younger workers". There is very little effort to target those in between ages 30 and 55.

In Bush-world, the "winners" under the Bush plan are those over 55, and those under 30. The biggest losers are those just under the cutoff of 55. Also, in the real world, Bush plan is a wretched deal for the under-30 crowd. Let's look at how age affected voting patterns in the past election:

We can interpolate the 55+ vote to be roughly 53-47 for Bush. In a non-presidential year, the voting universe gets noticeably older, which is why its so important for Bush to appease seniors, and so important for Democrats to persuade them.

Still, the baby boomers are the largest voting block. What's more, the younger baby boomers, those between 45 and 55, are getting a terrible deal. These folks have already pre-paid some of their retirement thanks to the 1980s Greenspan Commission. Now they're getting a benefit cut; or rather, getting a benefit cut would be required to avoid massive borrowing.

In terms of prioritizing communication on Social Security, its worth targeting these groups, in order:

• Ages 45-55, particularly whites age 45-55 whose household income is under the payroll tax (today, somewhere between $80K and $90K). The Bush plan puts the screws to this age bracket in a major way.
• Ages 55+. Seniors are still the largest voting bloc, so they get priority over the yough vote. In this case it will be important to persuade seniors on grounds other than pure material grounds. One option is to attack the huge amount of debt the Bush plan will add to the deficit. Another option is to criticize the president for not addressing Medicare, whose finances are in much worse shape. Another is to make the moral argument that cutting benefits is the wrong direction for the country. Economists have a saying that we forget the mistakes our grandparents made; this is certainly true in the case of Social Security unreform.
• Ages 18-30. This is the voting bloc most skeptical that Social Security will last long enough for them. It's not true, but it's important to convince them that that's the case. Democrats must keep young voters in the fold. This will not be hard; the President is doing plenty that young voters disapprove of. It's unclear whether or not the new voters from the 2004 election will. These voters voted Democratic by a 53-46 margin. If half of them show up, then they will represent a 2-3% swing for the Democrats, which could be enough to turn several seats.

It will only take a small change in public opinion to turn the tide against the GOP. And the public already opposes what they have heard of the Bush plan. We just have to make sure it stays that way.

Does the President Support the Assault Weapons Ban? link
February 2
Now playing: Avril Lavigne, "Anything but Ordinary"

Here's a fun game: try and find a statement has President Bush saying the following words: "I support the extension of the assault weapons ban". Not "we should think about extending the ban" or "the ban is good" but "I want to extend the assault weapons ban", or something that straightforward.

You won't.

Now try and find a statement that "I oppose the extension of the assault weapons ban", or similar unequivocal words. You won't find that either.

Remember, folks, Bush is a man of principle. So principled, in fact, that he's not willing to speak his position on the assault weapons ban.

Multipolarity and Global Risk link
February 1

Big Media Matt has a meaty post on new the CIA's long-term security forecasts. Some observations that may take a bit of air out of his "there's really not that much to worry about" view of the National Intellligence Council's analysis:

• The EU may lift its arms embargo with China at some point in the near future. That would give China access to more than "outdated Russian [and Israeli] equipment". Already President Chirac and to a lesser extent Chancellor Schroeder are supporting an end to the arms embargo. So the day China acquires more advanced weapons may not be far off. But it's still not clear that this is an appreciable threat.
  
• Matt seems to think it's the NIC's job to come up with plausible scenarios that represent real threats to national security, like "China raises an army and takes over the West Coast. Would you believe Oregon? How about Guam? How about half of a fishing villiage on the shore of Guam?". That's not its job. The NIC's job is to assess risk and find points of uncertainty. So long as you don't think the US will go to war with Europe any time soon,  the largest points of uncertainty in the world are in India and China. The troubling thing about the rise of China and India is that they don't know what will happen. There isn't some country we can use as a case study for bringing a third-world country out of poverty at the scale and rate that China and India are improving.
  
• The most basic risk stemming from the rise of China and India, to security wonks, is their increasing energy demand. What happens when global oil demand is greater than global production? Again, no one knows, but if Chinese and Indian oil consumption continues to rise at the breakneck pace it rose at in 2004, we may find out soon. Therefore the real Nightmare Scenario is an not a regional alliance of east asian countries -- China, Japan, South Korea, etc. -- but alliance between China and various petrostates, as outlined by Paul Roberts in The End of Oil.  In this forecast, the combination of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, coupled with China's energy appetite, result in an oil embargo or semi-embargo against the US. Havoc ensues. This doesn't need to be military havoc in order to threaten US interests; OPEC managed to cause a lot of economic distress without a particularly large or well-equipped army. The threat of an Chinese-to-Arab arms supply might also raise the casualty rate of a hypothetical military action in the Mideast to point of being morally or politically unacceptable, especially in a case where we are clearly going to war for oil and not for ... well, I've lost count of the various reasons given for our "splendid little war".
  
• Matt makes one very high-quality insight [emphasis mine]:
  

  The main thing to worry about, I think, is not that putative rivals will grow too strong, but that potential friends won't be as strong as they could be. American military spending should probably shrink over the medium to long term. It would be nice if that didn't just result in a global anarchy. If the other rich democracies spent a sum somewhere between what they're spending now and what we're spending now, then the overall capabilities of the free world would be enhanced, the burden on America lessened, and we could have a more even sharing of the decision-making, less crazy overreactions on our part, less resentments and blowback from elsewhere, and a bunch of other good stuff.

  The gap between US defense spending an EU defence [sic] spending is in fact the Real Problem, but George Bush unintentionally stumbled upon a solution: bluntly, he pissed of Europe. This has accelerated the call for an integrated EU military and foreign policy, to provide a counterbalance to the United States. Today, the rest of the world has very little real leverage to prevent the US from doing whatever it wants militarily, as seen by the Balkan intervention and the Iraq War.
  
  The only solution is to create a military that has enough strength that it can act as a credible bargaining chip. Imagine if the EU army were three-fifths the size of the US army. In that case, it could reasonably commit between 80,000 and 120,000 troops, depending on the size of the other defence commitments this hypothetical has. It would be tough for a sitting President to justify turning down that many "free" troops and thus force the US to accept some European demands with regard to conduct of the war, post-conflict reconstructions, etc.
  
  Such a day is still a long way off. If Europe upped its defense spending to US levels tomorrow, it would still take years, perhaps a decade or two, to reach parity with the US military, because the US is so far ahead in both training and military capital (tanks, boats, planes, hi-tech foot soldier gadgets, communications gear, etc.). But Matt should be pleased that various anti-Bush leaders are getting tired of Texan Foreign Policy^[1] and are banding together to do something about it.
  
• I read only the Executive Summary, but I'm surprised potential conflict between India and Pakistan not particularly high on the list of threats. In fact it's not mentioned specifically at all.  I'm not sure what alliances a large-scale conflict would trigger, but I'm pretty sure the whole world would respond to The Bomb going off.

[1] LBJ may have the most impressive domestic accomplishments of any president since Franklin Roosevelt, which we should not forget when evaluating his presidency. But there must be something in the water in Texas when it comes to foreign policy.

Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 09:49 16 April 2005