Category: Current Affairs

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Pre- and Post Mortem

The primaries are over. And now it’s time for … the 2008 Electoral Vote Predictor. (Would you like polls with that?)

The Clinton campaign is over. Now it’s time for the post mortems. The New York Times’ “this is how history unfolded” piece published online soon after Clinton gave her farewell address dwells on the backbiting and infighting inside Clinton World (and talks about the obvious ways, such as not recognizing until it was too late that Obama was blitzing Clinton in the caucus states, in which the campaign blew it). A better piece, for my money (editor’s note: US$0.00), is one from NBC’s Chuck Todd that focuses on other points, especially the Clintons’ decline over the past couple of years as forces in the party and the Clinton campaign’s early decision to de-emphasize the candidate’s role as history-making woman. And then there’s the people’s post mortem: readers at Talking Points Memo discussing the speech and the campaign.

Maybe the story has been written and I’ve missed it (send me the links), but it seems to me that there’s something substantial to say about what Obama did right. On one level, people have been talking about that for months—for instance, his success in grass-roots fund-raising. But I don’t think anyone really has a grasp of why this campaign took off the way it did. Going into the race, I think most people around the country knew him for the speech he made at the Democratic convention. Clearly there was something about him that reached a lot of people and that people remembered. During my brief tenure at the UC Berkeley Law School in 2005, I suggested that the dean, Christopher Edley, invite Obama out to do a fundraiser for the school (Edley was one of Obama’s professors at Harvard Law School). The dean responded that Obama was very hard to get; he had been told that Obama was getting 400 or 500 speaking requests a week. How many other freshman senators were getting that kind of attention after five months in office?

The last few decades are seemingly full of charismatic, smart, young Democratic presidential hopefuls who were seen as legitimate contenders and then wound up in the ditch. Some self-destructed: Ted Kennedy and Gary Hart. Some just seemed to evaporate when exposed to the harsh campaign climate (and real opposition): Jerry Brown and Howard Dean. Faced with competition arguably tougher than any of these guys, Obama succeeded. The mechanics of his success so far–the tangibles that go with all the intangibles–that’s what I’d like to hear about.

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A Vote for Newspaper Blogging

Doing a quick check on how soome major papers are handling the breaking news in the Hillary Clinton event (text of her speech, and it’s a damned good one, is here). As of 1:10 p.m. EDT, after the event had been under way for at least a few minutes:

–L.A. Times: Lame and badly edited Associated Press set-up story on the event.

—New York Times: Topping a boilerplate piece on the campaign (which includes the novelistic statement, “Mr. Obama stayed away [from the event] because he understood this was her moment”) with fresh developments.

—Washington Post: Doing on-the-fly rewrites in much the same style as the Times, but feels fresher.

—Chicago Tribune: Main coverage is in the paper’s The Swamp political blog. By far the best of the bunch. I like that they skipped the standard bylined story approach and just went with the blogger. The piece has a much more immediate feel, and you don’t really need the back story.

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Numbers ‘n’ Stuff

The New York Times op-ed page today features a column by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. To be honest, what drew my attention was a display quote in the column that says, “The math says that [Hillary] Clinton is quitting while she’s ahead.” Like many others who have watched the Democratic race, I’ve found it perplexing that Clinton won nearly all the biggest states but not the nomination. That’s an interesting and important topic—history will eventually show that despite Clinton’s insistence Barack Obama is some sort of defenseless naïf, he and his campaign just plain outsmarted her and hers—but that’s not what Tyson is writing about.

No—he’s taking a method of analyzing political poll results developed by another astrophysicist, Princeton’s J. Richard Gott III, and torturing it to come up with the claim that “if the general election were held today, Barack Obama would lose to John McCain, while Mr. McCain would lose to Mrs. Clinton.”

That’s a bold declaration, and you’d sure like to see it backed up. But that’s not what happens in the column. Instead, Tyson cites a paper by Gott and another author “that has been accepted for publication in the journal Mathematical and Computer Modelling” (meaning: you and I can’t read it to check the accuracy of Tyson’s summary of it or, feeble-minded as we is, try it out for ourselves). Here’s how Tyson describes what Gott & Co. discovered with their as yet unpublished new tool:

“[I]n swing states, the median result of all the polls conducted in the weeks prior to an election is an especially effective predictor of which candidate will win that election — even in states where the polls consistently fall within the margin of error.”

That’s it: no definition of “swing states,” no useful definition of “the median result of all the polls,” not even a precise statement of the time frame. But those details are dispensable, because this analysis is so powerful, Tyson writes, that Gott was able to correctly predict 49 out of 50 state races in the 2004 contest between Bush II and John Kerry. So Tyson decided to put it to work looking at the 2008 race, with results as mentioned above. Tyson says, with the certainty of Ptolemy describing the sun’s orbit around the Earth, that “this analysis does not predict what will happen in November. But it describes the present better than any other known method does.”

Being generous, one can only say about Tyson’s “analysis” that it reads as if substantial sections of explanation have been edited out to make the piece fit the page. His examples don’t illuminate much about Gott’s method. Beyond that, two flaws seem transparent. Tyson acknowledges one: that public opinion shifts over time. My translation: It’s ridiculous to project the electoral landscape in November based on iffy reading of polls five to six months ahead of time. Ask Michael Dukakis if you don’t believe me.

The other major flaw in Tyson’s “work” is his attempt to use a tool applied to a two-candidate race nearing the finish line in a single election and applying it to a wildly different set of circumstances. Poll respondents asked whether they’d prefer Obama or Clinton over McCain in May were being asked a theoretical question. Yes, it was certain that either Obama or Clinton would oppose McCain. But the very nature of the campaign at that point, as unsettled and increasingly divisive as it was, might skew the result. You wonder if Gott himself would make the predictive claim for his method, as applied here, that Tyson does.

(If Tyson’s piece was heavily edited, the Times would perform a public service by publishing the full piece. It would also help to have a link to Gott’s paper so that readers can judge for themselves whether Tyson is representing it accurately.)

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My Club

Because California has joined the national movement to hold presidential primaries no later than the beginning of the previous year’s Christmas shopping season, we had two primary votes this election cycle. On SuperDuper Tuesday, we voted for presidential candidates and a slew of ballot measures. Yesterday, we voted on state legislative races, a couple more initiatives, some local officials, and party central committee members. (Not that I know who the members of the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee are, and not that I understand what it is they do. I voted for one yesterday, Wes Van Winkle, because–I know someone who uses this method for betting on horses–I like his name. He didn’t win.)

I felt blasé about the election. I didn’t have any strong feelings about anyone or anything on the ballot. When I finally overcame my inertia to go vote late in the afternoon, the polling place was deserted. The poll workers acted like they hadn’t had much business all day (someone commented that I was the 57th person to vote for the day; they had been open for 10 hours at that point). This is in Berkeley, where people miss no opportunity and spare no effort to express their opinions.

I don’t know the city turnout. But countywide, 24.24 percent of registered voters cast ballots (that includes mail-in/”absentee” ballots). Pretty anemic, but better than the statewide figure, 22.2 percent. In our SuperDuper primary, 57.7 percent of registered voters participated, and 60.1 percent in Alameda County.

That February vote got a lot of attention because of the high turnout. It’s true that it was the highest in a long time (see the California Secretary of State’s table (PDF file) of primary election statistics going back to 1910). But if you go back to the 1980 primary, 63.3 percent of registered voters turned out–perhaps because of the presence on the ballot of Proposition 13, the initiative that slashed property taxes in the state and helped make it much, much harder for counties to raise them. Or maybe not: 1980 itself marked the beginning of a long term trend toward lower primary turnouts in presidential years. The primaries from 1964 through 1976 all recorded turnout from 70.95 to 72.6 percent.

Of course, if you look at yesterday’s statewide participation in terms of percentage of eligible voters, it’s much lower. California has about 23 million people qualified to go to the polls; about 16 million are registered. Yesterday’s turnout was just over 3 million, or a shade over 13 percent. I never thought that by voting I’d be in an exclusive club.

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A Pause with the Wretches

Phone rings about 9 p.m. I answer and get the “telemarketers’ pause” — that delay you hear in auto-dialed calls. Eventually a voice comes on the line:

Telemarketer: Steffen?

Me: No, no Steffen here.

T: Mrs. Breek? [So much for my deep, manly voice.]

Me: No.

T: Well … we’re calling everyone in California to let them know what’s going on. I’m from the U.S. Navy Veterans Association.

Me: We don’t have any money for you. We sent it all to Iraq.

–End of call.–

[Here’s a brief account of someone else’s call with the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, and here’s a Department of Veterans Affair link to info on the group. I’m holding on to that “we sent it to Iraq” line for when the Democrats call next.]

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Fire

Today’s big Bay Area news: a wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The wind is blowing hard from the north, and the blaze is moving fast. The images below are from a NOAA weather. The top frame (click for larger image) shows a smoke erupting (near Monterey Bay, the big scalloped area in the bottom center of the picture) at 5:30 a.m. The next frame (8 a.m.) shows the smoke plume spreading south two and a half hours later. The bottom image, from 10 a.m., shows a wider view of the coast with the southern end of the smoke plume off the coast of Santa Barbara County (also see the NOAA satellite loop).

Fire1-052208

Fire2-052208

Fire3-052208

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The Rules

[“Immigration raids terrify kids, House is told” — San Francisco Chronicle]

You know, it’s such a gift to have had ancestors who had the foresight to emigrate to the United States while the doors were wide open. I’m not saying that everyone involved in the melange of immigrants that led to me qualified as wretched refuse, but I’ve seen where most of them came from. There are a lot of rocks strewn across the fields they worked. There is plenty of wind. There are long winter nights to contemplate the season to come and how to keep the cold out. For the people who left there, nothing was in short supply but level ground, cash in hand, and a prospect that things might change for the better.

But they crossed, they did, and they were welcome to try what millions of others had tried. They farmed. They mined coal. They worked in the stockyards, taught school, ministered to parishes, and worked in banks. If any of them got rich, I never heard about it. They did something far more important: They made me and everything I know possible.

The country kept the door wide open back then, but that should not be mistaken for an act of warm-hearted generosity. The country needed willing hands to help realize its manifest greatness; those forebears of mine and the millions like them were more or less willing.

I have to wonder how they would fare today. The door is still open, but just the slightest crack. Yes, lots of people slip over, under, or around it. Once they do, they seem to embark on the same path those forebears of mine did–they are today’s willing hands, and in slaughterhouses and construction sites and farm fields far and wide they are building something that only their children and grandchildren will get to see.

Or maybe not. These new immigrants aren’t following the rules if they fail to wait their turn at the door (a door, it should be noted, that is unlikely to ever open for their ilk–poor, uneducated, unable to speak our language). The rules–that’s another thing I have to wonder about. In the debate over immigration today, descendants of yesterday’s immigrants’ are careful to point out what honorable, law-abiding rule followers their ancestors were. Without subjecting anyone to a historical treatise just now, let’s just say that the bar for entry for most of these huddled and rule-following masses was a lot lower than it is today–unless, of course, they were Chinese or Japanese or from some other group loathed by the rule writers.

So, many of our new immigrants aren’t waiting their turn. Today’s immigration rule writers have decided this behavior is a danger to the country and are taking steps to punish the rule breakers. What form does the punishment take? See the article linked above. It talks about immigration roundups. I know most of us know this is going on, have heard stories about workplace raids, and probably put the whole business out of our minds.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who teaches nearby told me about a student, one of the brightest in the class, who had come to school with his mother that morning. The mother was weeping. Why? the teacher asked. Because immigration agents had pounded on her door at 7:30 p.m., swept through her small apartment, and taken away three relatives. It was a shattering experience.

So this is what we’ve created to safeguard our bastion of prosperity–thug tactics in which a certain sector of the population is freely targeted and virtually without legal recourse. Oh, yes, none of this would happen if the affected people had just followed the rules, and we are, above all, a nation of rules. But there is a human cost here in the dismantling of people’s lives, the destruction of their sense of security, and in sowing emotional trauma. And for those who have got ours already, the sons and daughters of past generations of rule followers, there’s a cost in building the kind of apparatus that treats people as if they’re so much garbage to be thrown out. I’m all for rules–I’m not a fan of anyone coming into my house and taking my stuff, and I hate people who cut in line–but the rules need to have a humane edge. At our best, that’s the kind of rules we’ve written.

(Oh, and my solution for the illegal immigration issue: Amnesty, education, and citizenship.)

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From the Mailbox

Pandemic051507

Here’s an odd recent arrival, thanks to our letter carrier (the one we used to have a cordial relationship with before we got a dog, but that’s another story). The county health department wants us to know how to fend off the avian flu epidemic (sorry–pandemic) that was coming last year. Thanks, county health department. Inside the pictured folder (with its weird “up, up with people” logo) is a fold-out sheet with helpful information like the frequencies of the local emergency broadcast stations, addresses of hospitals, and reminders to wash your hands.

On the long list of things I worry about, the avian flu is pretty low–way behind my concern over George W. Bush being able to launch a nuclear weapon, for instance.

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Burma

Burmamap050807

From the New York Times: Satellite-based maps of the coastal area before and after this week’s storm struck. I don’t know from Burma–my most intimate knowledge came from reading the post-World War II novel (and seeing the movie) “Harp of Burma.” And the country has made incidental appearances in other readings. And then there’s been the news about Aung San Suu Kyi. And that’s it, except I’ve the name Irriwaddy River has always had a lovely resonance for me. Like Mississippi.

And now this. One of the breathtaking things about the maps is the storm track they depict. I’m not sure if that path is characteristic of storms in the region, but look at it; eyeballing the scale on the map, I’m guessing it scraped along the coastline for a good 400 miles. In the newsroom, my impulse would be to put that in terms familiar to the reader, so here goes: Imagine a storm of that ferocity traveling the coast from San Diego to San Francisco; or from Norfolk to Boston; or Memphis to Chicago.

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Burma

Burmamap050807

From the New York Times: Satellite-based maps of the coastal area before and after this week’s storm struck. I don’t know from Burma–my most intimate knowledge came from reading the post-World War II novel (and seeing the movie) “Harp of Burma.” And the country has made incidental appearances in other readings. And then there’s been the news about Aung San Suu Kyi. And that’s it, except I’ve the name Irriwaddy River has always had a lovely resonance for me. Like Mississippi.

And now this. One of the breathtaking things about the maps is the storm track they depict. I’m not sure if that path is characteristic of storms in the region, but look at it; eyeballing the scale on the map, I’m guessing it scraped along the coastline for a good 400 miles. In the newsroom, my impulse would be to put that in terms familiar to the reader, so here goes: Imagine a storm of that ferocity traveling the coast from San Diego to San Francisco; or from Norfolk to Boston; or Memphis to Chicago.

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