The November 2008 election saw dramatic increases in participation by traditionally underrepresented groups, including Americans of color and young voters, according to a new research memorandum released by Project Vote yesterday.
On Thursday, Kos posted a diary listing the states that fell into three categories of shift in voting margin for president from 2004 to 2008: those that had shifted to the GOP, those that showed no shift, and those that shifted to the Dems by 10 or more points. I took those states and compared them to the Gallup Party ID shifts from 2002 to 2008, and this is what I came up with:
There were 12 other states which also shifted Democratic by 10 or more points in party ID from 2002 to 2008. This is the strongest indication that the partisan vote shift over 6 years significantly exceeded the presidential vote shift from 2005 to 2008.
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest column with everyone here at OpenLeft -- a review of Bernard Goldberg's latest book, "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".
-K
That certainly didn't take long. Just shy of a week after Barack Obama took the oath of office, becoming America's 44th president, the nation's foremost right-wing publishing house has released a new tome by Bernard Goldberg that seeks to trash the supposedly liberal "mainstream media" for being in the tank for Obama.
The three-ringed circus of liberal media bias cryptozoology is nothing new for Goldberg. He's been part of this factually challenged freak show for years. This isn't even his first book on the subject -- he wrote 2001's creatively titled, Bias.
At DKos yesterday, Jed L posted the following map in a FP diary "Obama Won 197 Of 196 Battleground EVs": It's a map of supposed "battleground states" from the Washington Post's Dan Balz and Alec Macgillis on June 8, 2008:
As Jed L notes, Obama did indeed win more battleground EVs than the Post had identified just over a week after Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination. And therein lies a tale quite opposed to the current narrative of a "center-right nation."
We've all seen this county-level map, showing how isolated the shift toward the GOP was since 2004, against the much broader pro-Obama tide:
But this past week, Professor Charles Franklin, of Political Arithmetik and Pollster.com, has added considerably more to the picture of how broad Obama's win was, first by looking at race, then by looking at different demographic groups. Details on the flip.
Beyond the sheer mendacity of the 'center-right nation' meme, there lies serious discussion of whether the election we just had is, indeed a realigning election. The mendacious meme and the serious discussion are clearly related: if this was a realignment, then we can say, "Well, maybe it was a center-right nation, but it isn't anymore." There's just one problem: no one can quite agree on what a realigning election is. I can sympathize with this confusion, have struggled with it myself, but I've come to a embrace the view that realigning elections can only be understood by their place in the periodic cycles of American party systems-as I'll briefly recap on the flip.
On Tuesday, at DKos, DemFromCT called attention to two similarly-themed pieces that stopped short of calling 2008 a realignment-but did so on what I regard as dubious grounds:
Stu Rothenberg and Jay Cost have interesting pieces up about the realignment idea. Based on Obama's historic win, they both see this as more than a usual election, and less than a realignment.
Rothenberg's approach is to look at the good news for the Dems, say, "that's a lot," and then look at the not-so-good news, and say, "but there should be more if it's a realignment." Cost's approach eschews the term "realignment." Instead, he compares this election with 1860, 1896 and 1932, and concludes that it doesn't compare. While both writers make some good points, they miss both the complexity and the simplicity of a realignment. The complexity is that they are messy things, they don't always look the same. The simplicity is that one thing is certain: you can never go back again.
David's done yoeman's work here-and elsewhere-documenting the pernicious Versailles meme that despite the stunning victory won by Obama and Democrats running for Congress, America "remains a center-right nation" and therefore Obama must not enact his planned agenda. I finally got to the end of the 98-page post-election Democracy Corps report, "The Change Election Awaiting Change", and on page 94, I found something directly relevant to this pernicious Versailles meme: the American people overwhelmingly believe the exact opposite: that Republicans should give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with him to acheive his agenda.
Indeed, this sentiment is much more far-reaching than the core support for Obama's agenda in the first place. The reason is simple: the American people believe in democracy, they believe in elections, and they believe in giving their elected leaders (not the unelected Versailles punditalkcrazy) the opportunity to act on their electoral mandates. Here's the finding (click for a fill-width version):
As Media Matters pointed out, Brent Bozell is a little confused over whether Obama is a socialist or a Reaganite Conservative.
Socialist (From the October 27 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends):
BOZELL: This is the arrogance, I think, of the Obama campaign, but it's a well-placed arrogance in the sense that they've gone through this entire campaign without being questioned seriously by anyone except for this news network, the Fox News network, which is why they studiously avoid the Fox News network. But when you go through the entirety of the campaign saying the kind of things that you're saying in the debates, where on, for every question, you've got a redistribution of wealth answer, where you've got socialism, where you've got the government controlling every aspect of life. You don't expect a reporter to ask you, "Is this socialism?" Because the media don't ask that question. Well, some uppity reporter did -- and look what happened, they cancelled her. And, by the way, she won't be going to the ball, either.
Reaganite Conservative (From the November 7 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom):
BOZELL: There's a lot of work that needs to be done. But here's the key thing, Bill, that really isn't being reported: Anyone who looks at the exit polls this year will find two fascinating results. Number one, this country remains every bit as center-right as it's been for a generation. And number two --
HEMMER: You don't think that's changed -- you don' think that's changed at all?
BOZELL: No, it hasn't. Look at the exit polling. The number one issue was the economy, nothing came close. The American people are fiscally conservative, and the fascinating thing, Bill, is that Barack Obama ran as a Reaganite and won over the fiscal -- the public as a fiscal conservative. That's what the polling data shows.
HEMMER: You said there were two things. What was number two?
BOZELL: Well, number one is that the public is conservative; number two, Barack Obama won as a conservative. That means that Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the left-wing agenda he wants to enact. He didn't run on it, he ran from it. So, this is not necessarily bad news for conservatives.
But what happens if we just ignore the confusion, and go with #2? What does a Reaganite Conservative look like these days?
So, John McCain has taken to calling Barack Obama a "socialist". Why? Because Obama wants to "redistribute" the wealth. Of course, every time you tax someone, you redistribute wealth. And every time that government spends some money that benefits someone, that, too, redistributes wealth. By McCain's criteria, every government that ever existed in human history was "socialist." You might think that's sort of a whacked-out extremist position, somewhere two football fields to the right of the John Birch Society. And you'd be right. Because by John McCain's standards, I'd like to introduce you to four of the most prominent members of the Republican Socialists of America:
Here's another way of looking at how deep red the different swing states are that we're looking to take this cycle--a look at how seldom they've gone Democratic. (The "LAST" column records the last time they went Democratic pre-1960.)
This was inspired by a little back-and-forth about Montana vs. North Dakota. Although Montana extends the geographic reach of blue farther georgraphically, the fact that Clinton won there as recently as 1992 means it's not really that deep red in time. At least not compared to North Dakota, which has only gone Democratic once since Harry Truman won there in 1948. Make of this what you will in the comments.
(Paul's excellent swing state table can be found in the extended entry--Chris
John McCain is a blithering idiot, much like G.W. Bush, but every once in a while he manages to tell the truth, as when he confessed, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." He should have stuck with that, because his recent attempts to sound knowledgable have been cringe-worthy at best.
McCain recently attacked Obama's alleged "socialism," using the narrative trope of "Joe the Plumber" supposedly unmasking Obama's "hidden plan". This trope, of the simple everyman unmasking the "so-called experts" is a perennial favorite of rightwing populism, and McCain got lots of jollies from using it. Just one problem: the "hidden plan" he unmasked wasn't hidden, wasn't socialist, and wasn't even new. It consisted, quite simply, in some folks getting tax credits beyond the taxes that they owe. And, as this chart from Visualizing Economics makes clear, many low-income taxpayers already pay negative income taxes, largely thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit, first signed into law by that old Marxist, Gerald Ford, and later expanded by Comrade Reagan.
I'm really not temperamentally suited to being any better than any of you at making number-crunching prediction this close to the election. Yeah, I'll toss some numbers out--maybe. But my heart isn't it. I'm not interested in being right. I'm interested in dreaming big, making impossible predictions. Which is where October 2006 comes in. Because that's when I first let my thoughts about 2008 start to slip out... thoughts that had been seriously brewing since Katrina, 13 months earlier. Because that's what I do best.
Now, I didn't write specifically about 2008. Nostrodamus I am not. But I wrote about 2006 in terms of realigning elections, and I said that what was an overlooked key to them was two consecutive wave elections in the House. Well, it's pretty obvious what that means. We're about to say "hello" to number 2.
The chart below shows the House share controlled by Democrats (top, blue line) and the percent change in share (bottom, red line), regardless of whether its a gain or loss. The yellow lines mark the three realigning elections-two definite (1896 and 1932), one questionable, at best (1968). The dotted purple lines mark the congressional elections of 1974 and 1994:
As you can see, the volatility of House elections has declined significantly in the last few decades. Not shown on this chart is what happened in 2006--another wave election, smaller than 1994, in fact, a little bit smaller than 1980. But, of course, it started from a place of greater strength than GOP was before 1994. So being poised for a somewhat similar wave election this Tuesday, we really are set up for the first true realigning election since 1932. That's what I predicted two years ago, and I'm sticking with it.
More on what it means--and maybe what's ahead--on the flip.
Palin Calls Media Criticism of Her Smears of Obama A First Amendment Threat!
Of course it goes without saying that Palin is utterly clueless about the First Amendment. But what tickles me most about this is how utterly typical of the rightwing bully mentality it is. Everything's fine until someone dares lift so much as a pinky finger in response to her bottomless venom. ABC reports:
Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights
October 31, 2008 11:25 AM
ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
You remember this from third grade, right? The way the schoolyard bully burst into tears when someone finally stood up to them and popped! them one in the old schnozzola?
(An update on the ongoing fight against voter suppression. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
As everyone knows, John McCain and the GOP have been attacking ACORN for weeks. We've been pretty successful in recent weeks debunking their unfounded claims, but the traditional media's been so complicit in facilitating the attacks that they've largely missed the greater threat to a free and fair election this year: voter suppression and intimidation.
Already, reports from around the U.S. confirm the fact that voters are facing active campaigns to prevent their participation at the polls, coordinated by partisan operatives and now, insidiously involving law enforcement agencies at all levels, from the local all the way to the Department of Justice.
According to Project Vote, these instances of intimidation include everything from a county sheriff in Ohio announcing that he and his office were "seeking information" about hundreds of registered voters who voted during Ohio's five-day window of same-day registration and voting (despite recent court proceedings upholding the lawfulness of the practice) to a call issued by the GOP in Wisconsin to policemen, security personnel, and firefighters to serve as "volunteer poll watchers" in inner city precincts.
One of the most annoying things about John McCain is the creepy way he has of saying, "My friends," as if he were Mafia don, insinuating a deep connection that you were never a willing party to.
"9/11 Changed everything" we were told, so many times it just had to be false.
But in one respect it almost seemed true. Under St. Ronnie, there were good terrorists and bad terrorists. It was the heyday of moral relativism when it came to blowing up or blowing away innocent civilians. Rape and murder some Maryknoll nuns? Assasinate El Salvador's Arhcbishop Oscar Romero? It's all good! "One man's terrorists is another man's freedom fighter!" was the Reaganite battle cry. First Terrorist George Washington was not amused.
But after 9/11, suddenly all terrorists were evil. In fact, they were "evildoers." That was their defining characteristic. It's what made them tick. They did evil because they were evildoers. End of story, end of explanation, end of discussion, when do we start bombing? Of course, it wasn't really that simple. When Cuban security agents came looking for anti-Castro terrorists in Florida, they were promptly arrested and jailed as if they themselves were terrorists. But this wasn't for public consumption outside of South Florida. It was an embarrassing contradiction, and not to be spoken of in polite company.
Now, however, the exceptional has abruptly shifted from margin to center: Bill Ayers, terrorist? You betcha! Abortion clinic bombers? Not so much, says Palin, as McCain looks on in zombie sleep:
From the very beginning, there were consistencies and inconsistencies in Ashley Todd's narrative about the alleged attack she suffered. The inconsistencies were within the story itself (the reverse "B" most obviously). The consistencies were with a long, long history of lies about blacks that are inescapably linked with racism in all its forms, from slavery, through segregation, through the "colorblind" racism of the present day. Both leaped out at me as the story exploded. Among the consistencies were the 4,742 identified lynchings from 1882 to 1964, for which the breakdown of "causes" reads:
"Cause"
Number
Percent
Homicides
1,937
40.84
Felonious Assault
205
4.32
Rape
912
19.22
Attempted Rape
288
6.07
Robbery and Theft
232
4.89
Insult to White Person
85
1.79
All Other Causes
1,084
22.85
Total
4,743
100.00
Speaking of "Insult to White Person," although not strictly a "lynching" per se, I thought as well about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy murdered for whistling at a white woman. You see, the history of lynching is a history of terrorism, a history of collective punishment and mass intimidation. One black does something, however trivial-or is alleged to-and some black, any black, must pay, without all that "due process" stuff that's reserved for white people.
This, quite naturally, puts the entire black community at risk. Which is, of course, the underlying point. A point that's very much alive today, as revealed in a blog post from Fox Executive Vice President Joe Moody, titled, with unintended irony, "Moment of Truth":
If Ms. Todd's allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.
Revisit their support for Obama not because they are racists? Why then? What exactly is it, Joe, that connects a blackety-black man who attacks a white female McCain volunteer with support or lack of it for the Senator?
It's not just racism is a generic sense, but the specific tradition of racial terrorism that's being invoked here. Any black at any time can be singled out for any reason, even if he's on the verge of being elected President of the United States.
This is what a lot of conservatives are going to be telling themselves after election day: That Obama cheated, that the media cheated, that McCain wasn't a conservative anyway, and that the only reason Sarah Palin wasn't a hit with swing voters is that the press - with an assist from conservative quislings like Frum and Brooks and Parker and Noonan - poisoned the well. And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat.
I took a lot of flack from my own side in late 2004 (or was it early 2005?) when I purged this site of those I called "fraudsters" -- people who blamed our 2004 loss on voting machines and other Republican trickery. While there was systemic disenfranchisement of our voters in key states (like Ken Blackwell's Ohio), no Diebold trickery was needed to steal that election. Yet the obsession on those conspiracy theories by too many detracted from the true reform our party needed to undertake before it could win again.
My take? This is hatchet-think when we need a scalpel. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, Howard Dean was going to launch his 50-state strategy, with or without the help of 50 or 100 or 200 DKos diarists and their commenters and readers.
More fundamentally, the issues raised by the majority of "fraudsters" (myself among them) were not limited to claims that Kerry won, but touched on a variety of issues that even now have yet to be robustly addressed. Indeed, some never even claimed that Kerry won at all. Other issues included voters rights, election integrity, Democrats standing up to GOP bullying and criminality, and Kerry breaking his word about fighting to see that every vote would be counted. Georgia10 did a marvelous job of continually summarizing developments and articulating concerns, and her work alone was sufficient to demonstrate the complexity that Kos's mischaracterization seeks to erase. Additionally, I wrote a diary "OHIO & Lakoff: The Right Wing Power Grab Frame" in which I wrote:
What matters to me most about Ohio are 3 things: (1) Racism. (2) Voter Suppression. (3) The Right Wing Power Grab.
Keeping track of all the recent Conservative attacks on poor people and their "lobby" (ACORN) is getting to be a bit of a task.
The latest "outrage du jour" involves these (oh so obviously fake) voter registration forms that a few idiots (?) decided to turn in.
A few things to consider here.....
My, my! John McCain, flip-flopping to engage in baseless character attacks! No one could have foreseen....
ACORN to McCain: Have You Lost That Loving Feeling?
Senator Allied with ACORN as Recently as 2006, Now Turns Cold Shoulder
October 13, 2008, Miami, FL - U.S. Senator John McCain's recent attacks on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are puzzling given his historic support for the organization and its efforts on behalf of immigrant Americans. As recently as February 20, 2006, Senator McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN-sponsored Immigration Rally in Miami, Florida at Miami Dade College - Wolfson Campus....
Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer of ACORN, said, "It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans. Maybe it is out of desperation that Senator McCain has forgotten that he was for ACORN before he was against ACORN; he was for immigration reform before he was against immigration reform; and he was a maverick before he became erratic. We were thrilled to partner with him to help reform the outdated immigration laws in this country, and were pleased to work closely with him on this issue." [Emphasis added.]
The beauty part here, of course, is letting all the wingnuts know how close McCain has been to ACORN in the past.
