After writing my last two posts, about the ludicrous Joe the Plumber scam and the probably-bogus “tightening presidential contest,” I had a dark thought. What if McCain somehow pulls this out? My God, it’ll be attributed to Joe the Plumber! And we’ll see a lot more of this kind of stupid stunt in the future.”
Due to the eternal popularity of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (after this, therefore because of this), which confuses coincidence with causation, copy-catting questionable political gimmicks is a very common phenomenon.
A good example was the “abolish the car tax” message adopted by 1997 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jim Gilmore (the very man who’s running a hopeless Senate campaign against Mark Warner this year, after a brief and largely invisible presidential bid). Gilmore went on to crush Democratic rival Don Beyer (a car dealer, ironically), and for several years, Republicans running in virtually every state that had any sort of tax on automobiles made “abolishing the car tax” a centerpiece of their campaigns. Someone finally noticed that it wasn’t working much of anywhere, and the mania finally abated.
In retrospect, there were plenty of reasons Gilmore won in 1997, but it was far too easy to focus on the gimmick and go with it.
An even more vivid example of questionably successful gimmickry, similar in its fundamental stupidity to the Joe the Plumber furor, occurred in my home state of Georgia in 1992. A Republican warhorse, Paul Coverdell, was running against incumbent Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler. For most of the campaign, Fowler maintained a large and steady lead in the polls. One day, according to the legend, a beehived grandmother from South Georgia named Margie Lopp called up Coverdell HQ and sang them a campaign jingle she had composed.
Now Margie’s jingle was not only content-free (its deepest line was : “Let’s put Paul Coverdell in the Senate and put Wyche Fowler out!”), but gratingly annoying in a bad nursery rhyme sort of way. For whatever reason, the Coverdell campaign made it the sole sum and substance of about ten thousand radio and television ads. Political observers universally mocked it, and even Coverdell’s staff later admitted they were flooded with calls from supporters complaining about it.
But lo and behold, on Election Night, Coverdell ran surprisingly well, and though Fowler ran ahead of him, an archaic Georgia law requiring a majority of the general election vote for victory knocked the incumbent into a rare runoff. I’ll never forget watching local election coverage from the Coverdell party, where a gaggle of young Republicans were defiantly singing the Lopp classic. Coverdell went on to win the runoff (thanks mainly to a predictably small turnout), and headed to the Senate, where his main accomplishment was quarterbacking the Senate Republican fight against health care reform. Post hoc ergo poster hoc: Margie beat Wyche Fowler, and indirectly, Hillary Clinton.
As it happens, Coverdell’s win, despite the polls, wasn’t that surprising. Aside from the weird 50% requirement, Georgia was beginning its big trend towards the GOP about then (Bill Clinton won the state very narrowly in the presidential contest that year). And Fowler, a good and relatively progressive Democrat, had a bad habit of personally antagonizing key voting blocs (his hostile interaction with gay/lesbian activists led a significant number of Atlantans to vote Libertarian, feeding Fowler’s non-majority). My guess is that Coverdell didn’t win so much as Fowler lost. But like Gilmore’s car-tax gimmick, Coverdell’s Lopp jingle was the most obvious factor that accompanied his surprise win.
I recently ran across a semi-academic article quoting Coverdell campaign staff as suggesting that the jingle boosted their candidate’s name ID in an insidious way. I suppose this is the same theory by which some advertisers deliberately screen obnoxious ads that consumers at least remember (a theory I try to fight by, for example, swearing I will never buy insurance from GEICO until it not only kills but apologizes for its interminable “caveman” series). But it’s a dubious proposition at best.
There’s an interesting denouement to this saga. Coverdell died suddenly in 1999, and Roy Barnes appointed then-Democrat Zell Miller to the Senate seat. Miller had to face the voters for the remainder of Coverdell’s term in 2000, and his Republican opponent, Mack Mattingly (the very man that Fowler beat in 1986 to get to the Senate in the first place) dutifully brought Margie Lopp on board to compose a jingle. Mattingly lost decisively.
Maybe I’m looking at this whole thing in the wrong way. If John McCain does pull an upset, and Joe the Plumber gets the credit, then quite likely a whole host of future GOP politicians will slavishly imitate the stunt, with contrived and even imaginary “real people” exemplifying the sturdy folk virtues and heartland values of conservatism. I can’t imagine a better formula for big Democratic gains in the future.
Month: October 2008
In case you’ve been exposed today to all the “news” about a tightening presidential contest (sometimes referred to by conservative gabbers as a “dramatically tightening” contest), you need to spend some time at FiveThirtyEight.com. As Nate Silver has carefully explained, the poll most often cited for this proposition is a Gallup Tracking poll that utilizes a “historical” turnout model–i.e., one that is heavily based on 2004. This poll shows McCain within two points of Obama, at 49%-47%, which might be alarming to Democrats if somehow the turnout patterns happened to closely resemble those of four years ago, which hardly anyone credible expects.
But a second Gallup tracking poll, based on the “current intentions” of voters, shows Obama up by six percent. Gallup started releasing this second tracking poll recently for the precise reason that experts were criticizing its “traditional” model as potentially misleading.
If the “traditional” Gallup model is indeed skewed significantly towards a “redder” electorate than is real, then it wouldn’t be that surprising that McCain’s base-pleasing debate performance on Wednesday night might bump his numbers there a bit.
In any event, we’ll need better evidence than a half-self-repudiated Gallup Tracking poll to conclude that the race is in fact “tightening” to any significant extent.
John McCain hung his final presidential debate performance on an Ohio plumber who campaign aides never vetted.
A day after making Joseph Wurzelbacher famous, referencing him in the debate almost two dozen times as someone who would pay higher taxes under Barack Obama, McCain learned the fine print Thursday on the plumber’s not-so-tidy personal story: He owes back taxes. He is not a licensed plumber. And it turns out that Wurzelbacher makes less than $250,000 a year, which means he would receive a tax cut if Obama were elected president.
The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate isn’t looking like such an aberration anymore.
But the really weird thing today is that McCain and his backers are still talking about Joe the Plumber as though his story is not only legitimate, but iconic. As I noted yesterday, this is a particularly extreme example of the eternal Republican effort to put a middle-class face on fisal policies designed to relieve the wealthy of tax liabilities. Having found their white-male-from-Ohio poster boy for regressive taxes, they aren’t going to let go of him even though he’s pretty much a fraud. Indeed, some are even using ol’ Joe to reinforce the mood of self-pity and victimization that has infected conservatism so profoundly this year. Here’s the reliably obnoxious Michelle Malkin:
Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.
The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.
So here’s a guy who gets himself on televison (and right-wing talk radio) by making up an imaginary identity for himself and confronting a presidential candidate with a pack of lies. John McCain refers to him twenty-one times in a debate, as though his gripping tale of fiscal woe provides the irrefutable evidence of Obama’s socialist perfidy. And anyone who has an issue with that is a “thug.”
Why not just design an avatar and name it “White Working Class Voter” and parade it across the airwaves? Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what Joe the Plumber has become.
So, if the McCain-Palin ticket goes down to ignominous defeat, with concerns about Palin’s qualifications turning up prominently in the exit polls, she will retreat back to Alaska and serve out her term as governor in well-earned obscurity, right? Wrong.
As Sarah Posner explains in this week’s FundamentaList, the Christian Right has embraced Palin as its political future:
Charles Dunn, dean of the Robertson (as in Pat) School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, tells the American Family Association’s news service that Sarah Palin is the “heir apparent” to lead the conservative movement and the Republican Party, even if Barack Obama wins the White House. Dunn predicts we’ll be saying goodnight to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee in 2012.
Catapulting the Barracuda to a leadership role is also the goal of the fawning campaign biography of Palin, Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader, just out from Zondervan, a Christian imprint owned by Rupert Murdoch. While other tentacles in Murdoch’s media empire play the endless loop of smears and insinuations that Obama is subversive and un-American, the new Palin biography paints a vapid, unquestioning portrait of a salt-of-the-earth American gal whose supposed authenticity makes her the real embodiment of the change we’ve been waiting for.
The animating theme of the book is that Palin’s political values and judgment are best understood through her personal life rather than her political resumé, and can best be summed up by Trig, Track, Bristol. Not drill, baby, drill, but baby, war, baby.
The enduring passion of the Christian Right for St. Joan of the Tundra, even as the initial excitement over her elsewhere has faded, is another sign that these folks are increasingly going back to their habitual position of inhabiting a parallel universe that only occasionally intersects with mainstream Republican politics. But I somehow don’t think they realize that just yet.
Democracy Corps has a particularly cogent analysis of last nights debate. The overview follows:
John McCain entered tonight’s debate needing to halt Barack Obama’s momentum and fundamentally change the dynamic of the race. Not only did he fail to achieve this goal, McCain dug himself an even deeper hole.Undecided voters watching the debate felt McCain gave a decidedly un-presidential performance, appearing rude, negative, and easily flustered – a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s cool, commanding presence. Obama was seen as the clear victor in the debate, and a group that was much more disposed to support McCain at the outset instead shifted decisively toward Obama (42 to 20 percent) after viewing the debate.
If you’re not religious yourself, and derive your impressions of Christianity in this country from the news media and the shouting of self-appointed Prophets, you’d be excused for thinking that Christians are pretty much all divided into Catholics and conservative evangelical Protestants. Sure, you might be dimly aware that there was once a large group of people called Mainline Protestants, but they’re a relic of the past, decimated by their wishy-washy liberalism and reluctance to leap into politics to defend infallible truths.
But despite many predictions by both secularists and religious conservatives that they are a dying breed, the fact is that Mainline Denominations (as measured by affiliation with that quintessential “liberal” institution, the National Council of Churches) represent 45 million Americans, which is a lot more than a few. They’re a diverse group, to be sure, including denominations like the Eastern Orthodox churches which are quite conservative on many cultural issues. But by and large, they have dissented conspicuously from the Christian Right movement, and its alliance with conservative politicians.
According to a new analysis from Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman, this election cycle may represent something of a watershed for Mainliners, particularly those “whitebread” Protestants (the original WASPs) who have had an attachment to the Republican Party that goes right back to the Civil War and the Prohibition movement.
Here’s Waldman on the subject:
This used to be a solidly Republican group. In 2004, they went for President George W. Bush 54%-46%. This summer, John McCain was leading Sen. Obama among these voters 43% to 40%, according to a study by John Green of the University of Akron.
But an ABCNews/Washington Post poll released Monday showed Sen. Obama now leading among Mainliners 53%-44%, indicating that the undecided voters are breaking heavily for the Democratic candidate.
Why? The superficial answer is, as with so many other questions, the economy. In Beliefnet’s Twelve Tribes study, 68% of centrist Mainliners (what we called “White Bread Protestants”) said the economy was the No. 1 issue compared with just 4% who said social issues….
The Mainline shift to Sen. Obama may be partly an unintended consequence of Sen. McCain’s efforts to energize evangelical Christians, including through the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Though fiscally conservative, mainline Protestants are socially liberal – so they would be unimpressed by the Republican Party adopting the most antiabortion platform ever. Mainliners may be irritated or scared by Gov. Palin’s religious language and beliefs – including her attendance at a Pentecostal church espousing “End Times” theology (that we’re approaching the end of the world and Christ’s return).
In general, Mainliners have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the role the “religious right” has played in the Republican Party. According to a new survey by a progressive group called Faith in Public Life, Mainliners – by a margin of two to one — believe public officials are too close to religious leaders. Evangelicals, by a two to one margin, think politicians should pay more attention to religion.
For a long time, the GOP was able to count on the residual loyalty of Mainline Protestants while devoting virtually all of its religious outreach to conservative evangelicals and “traditionalist” Catholics. But shirking these Mainline believers, while allying themselves with religious spokesmen who frequently speak of Mainliners as little more than pagans who like singing hymns, is a gamble that has finally caught up with the Republican Party. And this backlash has not been helfpul to John McCain, a Mainline Episcopalian by birth who now calls himself a Southern Baptist.
Going into last night’s final presidential debate, John McCain was regularly getting two diverse bits of advice from conservative gabbers. Some urged him to forget negative attacks on Obama and present a fresh “solution” to the economic crisis, foreswearing conservative orthodoxy if necessary. Others (the vast majority) wanted him to pound Obama on every conceivable front, while clearly articulating conservative principles on every conceivable issue.
It’s pretty clear the latter point of view won out with Team McCain, perhaps because they went through all the file cabinets and didn’t run across some brilliant new approach to the economic crisis. And if nothing else, last night’s debate should help us all avoid a massive amount of post-election second-guessing from conservatives whining that McCain never really waged the culture war or explained how conservatives think about economic policy. We got to hear McCain relentlessly promoting the old-time-religion of growth-through-marginal-tax-rate reductions, spending freezes, attacks on “pork,” etc., etc., while arguing that such conservative chesnuts would somehow represent a sharp break from the policies of the Bush administration. And he certainly gave the ol’ college try to the Ayers Connection, along with a deafening echo of conservative whining about media favortism and double-standards.
In that connection, the two most memorable things in McCain’s presentation were (1) his sneering reference to the “health exception” from permissable abortion bans set out in the original Roe and Doe decisions; and (2) the whole Joe the Plumber litany, repeated endlessly as though it were a campaign-changing silver-bullet.
On the first point, you have to understand that it is an article of faith among conservatives that the “health exception” has turned the balancing act represented by Roe (no bans on early abortion, some bans on late-term abortions) into “abortion on demand.” They may even have a point, from a strictly empirical point of view. But the problem is that a majority of Americans agree with a “health exception,” and won’t react well to the suggestion that “women’s health” is just some sort of self-indulgent excuse for abortions that ought to be banned.
On the second point, much of the economic policy debate of the last three decades has revolved around conservative efforts to sell regressive tax rates, mainly benefitting the very wealthy, by dragging, or pretending to drag, as much of the middle class as possible into the tax-cut bonanza. Hence the central focus on Joe the Plumber (sort of a well-heeled Joe Sixpack), who sounds a lot more sympathetic a figure than Joseph the Investment Banker.
The idea that a three-percentage-point increase on marginal profits above $250,000 among the handful of small businesses that fit Joe’s profile is the difference between socialism and free enterprise, and between depression and recovery, is pretty stupid. But from the historical perspective of conservative efforts to promote trickle-down-economics with a human face, it makes sense. (McCain definitely overkilled it, though. And the only thing worse than listening to McCain mention the heroic Joe twenty-one-times last night was listening to Sarah Palin redundantly yammer about it this morning; she came close to an abandonment of sentences altogether in favor of an incantatory repetition of the Sacred Monniker).
I don’t have much to say about Obama’s performance, other than to note his efficient rebuttal of the Ayers nonsense, and his predictable but effective response to McCain’s “I’m not Bush” zinger. And I’m not the best judge of style points, but the decisive reaction of focus groups and the instapolled to the debate, in Obama’s favor, suggest that McCain’s frantic efforts didn’t go over very well.
In the end, McCain fell back on the exotic but strongly felt conservative belief that the errors of the last eight years were a combination of bad luck, insufficient conservativism, perceptions based on “liberal media” bias, and tactical mistakes in the culture wars. Nobody’s much buying it, but nobody can say any longer that it was the “path not taken” in this campaign.
In the CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll undecideds chose Obama by a margin of 53 percent to 22 percent, with 25 percent for a draw.
Independents preferred Obama 60 percent to 30 percent in the Media Curves poll.
The CNN/Opinion Research poill of “debate-watchers” gave the win to Obama by a margin of 58 percent to 31 percent. Among Independent debate-watchers, the margin favored Obama 57-31.
Democracy Corps ‘dial and focus groups’ survey of 50 undecided Denver voters said Obama won the 3rd debate by a 50 to 24 percent margin. After the debate 42 percent of the respondents said they would support Obama, compared to 20 percent who supported McCain.
A majority of the 23 uncommitted Arlington, VA voters in Frank Luntz’s Fox News focus group said Obama won the debate, while zero chose McCain.
It’s hard to scan conservative opinion outlets these days without running across monotonous attacks on the incompetence of the McCain-Palin campaign, typically for failing to throw anything at Barack Obama that might even conceivably stick. But Mike Gerson of the Washington Post took a different approach in his column today: claiming that McCain’s just a victim of bad timing. He’d probably be winning, Gerson suggests, in a campaign focused on Obama’s “character,” if it hadn’t been for the financial meltdown.
Well, if I had some ham, I could make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread. While the desire of Republicans for a substance-free presidential campaign this year is perfectly understandable, I don’t have much sympathy. Gerson writes as though the meltdown just happened, with nobody in particular to blame, and as though incumbent parties don’t benefit as well as suffer from circumstances not entirely within their immediate control (remember George W. Bush’s poor public standing and aimless agenda before 9/11?).
Sure, it’s painful for McCain to try to run away from his own party and policies when they are unpopular, and it’s even more painful when said party and policies are making voters want to punish somebody, anybody, with an R next to his name. But let’s remember John McCain had every opportunity earlier this decade to leave the GOP, to become a Democrat or an independent, and chose otherwise. This idea that he is, as Gerson suggests, a “great man” whose services as president have been denied by a twist of fate is simply ludicrous. He’s dancing with the one that brung him.
Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, Survey USA has some pretty remarkable numbers from polling early voters in five states. Obama’s up by 23% in New Mexico; 18% in Ohio; 6% in Georgia; 34% in Iowa; and 34% in North Carolina. Those polled represented at least 10% of each state’s overall likely voters everywhere other than NC (5%).
Notes Silver:
Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004.
Is this a typical pattern for a Democrat? Actually, it’s not. According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.
Looks like Obama’s much-vaunted ground game is already producing some results. And it’s worth remembering that even if the race tightens down the stretch, these early votes are already in the bank.
