Nothing But Words

If Kerry wins Pennsylvania by two votes, you’ll know who to thank.

Here’s my armchair quarterbacking for tonight’s debate: Kerry has to accomplish two goals. First and foremost, he has to destroy the “flip-flopper” image that the Bush campaign has very effectively created for him. Most of what lies behind that image is a skillful manipulation of Kerry quotes to create a false image (if you don’t believe me, read this). Refuting it this late in the game is a tall order, given that the Republicans have been hammering away at this theme since the Democratic primaries, and spending precious minutes of the debate on defense (when you’re the challenger) isn’t where you want to be. Nonetheless, he has to do it. Second, he has to keep up what he’s been doing the past couple of weeks – arguing that Bush is lost in fantasy land when it comes to Iraq, and then specifying how his approach would be different.

I think Bush will spend a short period of time at the outset honing his “strong, resolute leader” image, and then shift his focus to a relentless assault on Kerry as too wavering and indecisive for the commander in chief job. As an incumbent leading a war that isn’t exactly popular, he’ll want to do everything he can to keep the focus on his opponent’s perceived shortcomings, instead of his own. However, unless most everything has been bright and sunny on your watch, being the incumbent is the tougher starting position. The debate leading to his second term as governor of Texas is the only debate in which he’s turned in a poor performance (that’s according to veteran debate watcher James Fallows – I haven’t seen that debate myself). Bush will have to defend his record on Iraq, and we’ll have to see to what extent he can successfully maintain his strategy of focusing on his lofty image for Iraq’s future, rather than being forced to debate the specifics of the ever-deteriorating nature of the current situation.

I’ll be watching the debate in Newport, with my brother and step-father. Kai and I are flying to RI later today to spend a long weekend with my family there. Depending on my Internet access, my blog may be silent for the next few days.

This picture is from a Kerry rally I attended last week. I had never been to a political rally before, and it was just a short walk from my office. I was amazed by the turnout and the energy of the crowd. It took place at “Hill Sqaure” which is a park that occupies most of a city block (between U Penn and Drexel), and it was packed. Kerry’s the teeny-tiny guy in the white shirt, down and to your left from the bright light in the middle of the picture (he’s that small even though I took the picture at 2x magnification).

The Daily Show’s Media Culpa segment the other night was absolutely brilliant. If you click the link, it’ll take you directly to the video clip – it’s about 5 minutes long. The part to watch for is Stephen Colbert’s analysis in the second half of the segment. (If the link doesn’t work for you, it’s probably because you’re not using Internet Explorer – the Comedy Central site doesn’t seem to work well with other browsers. Boo. Hiss.)

A similar bit of satire is in the new Onion: Documents Reveal Gaps In Bush’s Service As President

I mentioned in an earlier post that we had all the old, overgrown shrubs and trees on our property razed to the ground. Since then I’ve mulched the garden areas (we’ll start planting things in the spring) and I’m tremendously impressed with myself for growing some nice, thick grass in the spots that needed it. But we’re still the scary house on the block. One afternoon someone came by and stuck a Democratic Party flyer in our door. That evening I was out in the street playing with Kai and some of the neighborhood kids. A canvasser was working his way down the street, stopping at each of the houses where the flyers had been placed, and following up with the residents. I watched him as he approached our house. He stopped on the sidewalk in front, looked down at his clipboard, then up at the house, paused, looked down and then up again, paused again, and then walked right on by.

So the house looks better than it did a year ago, but we’re not there yet In a couple weeks we’re having the front door and the back door replaced. I’ve acquired many home improvement skills over the years – from tile work, to laying floors, to electrical work. But I’ve never gotten the knack of hanging doors (I think my problem is that, unlike most other home improvement skills, it’s an art, not a science). So I’m leaving that job to the pros (we’ve been lucky to find a very good contractor – it’ll be the same guy who did our kitchen windows).

I’ve realized in all this time I haven’t posted any exterior shots of the house yet (actually, I have, but you’d have to hunt for them: they’re tucked away in my Route 50 travelogue). So here’s a shot from when we moved in last year, and then a couple showing the recent yardwork.

What the house looked like when we moved in last year:

What it looks like now – we’ve removed the shrubs, and replaced the windows and roof:

Since taking this picture I’ve mulched the garden area and planted grass:

It’s incredibly frustrating to watch news stories that are accurate but are also woefully incomplete. That’s par for the course in this Presidential campaign. Watching “News Now” on CNN tonight, they covered the Kerry-Rumsfeld flap over troop levels in Iraq. They showed a clip of Kerry saying that General Shinseki “was retired early” because he predicted we would need a lot more troops in Iraq than Rumsfeld was saying, and Rumsfeld wasn’t too happy when Shinseki shared those higher numbers with Congress. Today Rumsfeld responded by saying Shinseki was not forced out, and that Kerry’s accusation was false and completely inaccurate. The reporter closed the story with a vindication of Rumsfeld, saying that the facts were on his side. This conclusion is at once both accurate and misleading. It’s accurate in that Shinseki did serve out his term as Army Chief of Staff. Even though he was not appointed to a second term, it’s a real stretch for Kerry to say he “was retired” (Kerry said this in such a way as to imply that Shinseki was forced out early). But Rumsfeld and CNN are also misleading by omission: CNN neglected to report that Rumsfeld was so angry at Shinseki that he announced his replacement a full 18 months in advance. This was an unprecedented move that made Shinseki a lame duck and badly undercut his authority. See here and here.

I happened to catch this one because I had followed the Shinseki story when it was unfolding at the start of the Iraq war. What am I missing in all the other stories that I don’t have the time to follow quite so closely? It’s no wonder blogs have exploded in popularity – folks are realizing they can’t count on the news media to tell accurate and complete stories anymore (the CBS scandal over the fake memos being the latest and most damaging example). Of course the problem there is blogs don’t even make a pretense of being objective, which means we may have more information, but we still have a lot of work to do sorting out fact from fiction (or, more to the point, tracking down the missing but highly relevant facts).

Juan Cole is a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. He blogs daily on the events in Iraq, and provides a superb historical context for understanding what’s really happening there. His is one of the few voices in the political blogosphere that offers truly original contributions. This month he’s had a couple posts in particular that I urge you to read: September 11 and Its Aftermath and If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?.

Kai has developed two strong new interests over the past month: drawing, and playing with blocks. The primary goal of block play is to construct a tower and then demolish it. I figure that’s fairly standard for a 3-year old boy. But what’s interesting is the design of his buildings: the only word to describe them is “organic.” I wouldn’t have thought that was possible with blocks, but he somehow manages to put them together with a minimum of right angles, and he has interesting ideas on how to use the arch-shaped pieces (he’ll typically center them on top of some other narrow piece, so they’re more like see-saws than arches). So far I haven’t been quick enough with the camera to get a picture of one of his creations before he smashes it, but I’ll keep trying.

His drawings are primarily focused on Thunderbirds. Here’s an annotated sample:

Today I came across a couple more articles that cast serious doubt on the quality of the poll results that are currently plasterd all over the media. The first – Why the Race Is a Lot Closer Than People Think – is by political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who I used to read frequently in grad school. His two main points are: 1. Republicans are oversampled in the polls, and most of the major surveys do not take this into account (Zogby is one of the few that does weight the samples appropriately); and 2. the more highly publicized “likely voter” (LV) results tend to be much less meaningful than the “registered voter” (RV) results. At the end of his piece, he reprints a letter he wrote to Gallup, taking them to task for their recent highly publicized historical analysis, which indicated Kerry was in trouble. They used their current numbers for LVs and compared them to the results for RVs in previous election cycles (i.e. they compared apples and oranges). He offered a rewrite of their report’s conclusion:

“In summary, the history of presidential elections since 1952 suggests that in all cases, the type of gap change that would be necessary for Kerry to tie or move ahead of Bush has occurred. If a gap change does occur, the odds are very strong (11 out of 13) that it would be in Kerry’s direction (i.e., a shrinkage rather than an expansion of Bush’s current lead).”

This clearly sounds quite a bit different [than what Gallup actually reported]. And thinking Kerry is behind by 1 point [Gallup's RV numbers], rather than seven points [Gallup's LV numbers], clearly makes a big difference when considering elections like 1960 and 1980, which loom large in your analysis. Kennedy was behind by a point in 1960 among RVs—the same as Kerry—and Reagan was behind by 4 points in 1980—more than Kerry…

The second – Relying on Phonies – casts doubt on the usefulness of phone-based polls in the 21st century. The author’s main point goes beyond the lack of contact with cell phone users that I mentioned in a previous post:

We Americans simply don’t answer our phones like we used to. Entire industries are now devoted to helping us not answer the phone. Voicemail, Caller ID, caller-specific-rings, cell-phones, even email have fundamentally transformed the ways we (don’t) answer the phone when it rings. These and other technological innovations have moved us from a late-20th Century near-pavlovian automatic response of answering the phone when it rang, to new levels of screening or ignoring calls without a sense that we might be missing something important. When pollsters call under these technological conditions they are now increasingly treated as any telemarketer or unknown caller would be, thus the people who pollsters actually get to talk to are becoming increasingly less representative of the general public. There now may be something unusual about people who are willing to answer the phone and talk with strangers, and we should be skeptical about generalizing from the results of these surveys…

[A Pew survey found that:] “More African-Americans than Whites have caller-ID (73% vs 47%) and a higher percentage of Blacks use it for call screening (34% vs 24%). Young people, ages 18-29 are the group most likely to say they always screen calls with caller-ID (41% say this), compared with only 12% those aged 65 or older.” Pew also found that more women than men were found to use features like call blocking (20% vs. 14%). If we can get over the paradoxical fact that this data was collected in phone interviews (and of course the point of this piece is that I’m not sure we can get over that) you can see that those profiled as being most prone to answering phone surveys tend to be: (more) White, (more) older, and (more) male.

Although no comments were posted concerning my argument that Kerry will win, I’ve been told by more than one person that I must be out of touch if I really believe it: the latest round of polls show Bush pulling ahead, and the conventional wisdom is that Kerry’s campaign is falling apart. I stand by my prediction, and I have three counter-arguments:

1. Don’t have a conniption over the polls: In the week before the 2000 election, Gallup and Time had Bush up over Gore 52% to 39%, and CNN had it at 49%-43%. Then just a few days later, Bush lost the popular vote. The one poll I put some faith in is the Zogby poll, which I think is the most methodologically sound – here’s John Zogby’s explanation of how his approach differs from others. When Gallup and Time incorrectly showed a commanding lead for Bush in the 2000 election, Zogby was much more accurate with Gore ahead 45%-43%. Yesterday’s Zogby poll has Bush up 46% to 43%, which is within the poll’s margin of error.
2. Kerry is pulling it together: I agree that Kerry has, for the most part, run a poor campaign so far. For whatever reason, he has established a pattern in his campaigns as being shaky until he gets close to the finish line, and then he pulls it together. I think he has reached that transition point now. Yesterday he finally did what he needs to do: he gave a speech with a strong and coherent critique of Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, and offered a clear description of how he would handle things differently (here’s the speech). Given that he’s been running a relatively poor campaign until now, and has nonetheless stayed right with Bush in the Zogby poll, he’ll clinch it if he continues to turn in performances like yesterday’s.
3. The debates will be pivotal: I was listening to James Fallows on the Tavis Smiley show the other night, and he pointed out that the Carter-Reagan debate gave Reagan a huge boost simply because he was on the same stage with Carter. By handling himself reasonably well, and by being near the President, he acquired something he previously lacked: he “looked Presidential” (although Reagan recently has been promoted to demi-god status, until his debate with Carter he wasn’t seen as Presidential material by many). I realized after listenting to Fallows that the Bush-Kerry debates will be the first ones since then which are head-to-head encounters between an incumbent and a lone challenger (I’m not counting the meaningless Reagan-Mondale matchup, and remember Perot was involved in the 1992 and 1996 debates). Kerry is a much more well-rounded debater than Gore, so I expect him to not self-destruct in the debates as Gore did (Gore had a reputation as being a ferocious debater, but he only knew how to be an attack dog, a role which he overplayed in the first debate, and then he essentially went mute in the second debate). Also, this will be Bush’s first public appearance in a long time that isn’t tightly scripted, so the odds for Bush gaffes are high (the Q&A during his last press conference was disastrous for him, and the town hall meetings that he’s currently doing on the campaign trail are so tightly scripted that they serve him poorly in preparing for the debates).

Barring an “October Surprise,” a major Kerry mistake in the debates, or massive electoral fraud, Kerry will win. You heard it here first . Not long after the DNC, Kerry lost his bounce in the polls, and now Bush is losing his post-RNC bounce (most of the current polls have the race back to a dead heat). So how can I call it for Kerry? I don’t have secret polling data of my own, but I have three hunches about what the polls are overlooking:

1. All the polls emphasize the results among “likely voters.” These are voters “who say they are very likely to vote in November, have a high level of interest in the presidential election and have voted in every or nearly every presidential election [empahsis added].” The intensity of this election cycle has pushed new voter registration up higher than usual. And, more often than not, the previously unregistered have Democratic leanings. Kerry consistently scores a couple points higher in the poll results that include registered voters, and not just “likely” voters (for example).
2. Most modern polls are phone based, and they only call those with land lines. They don’t call any of the 169 million cell phones in the United States. As Jimmy Breslin argues, young people are more likely to have cell phones than older people, and they’re the most likely group to have a cell phone but not a land line. And folks age 18-29 prefer Kerry to Bush almost 2:1 (see here). With a war on and talk of a military draft in the air, I think young people might turn out in higher numbers than usual as well. There are no numbers on this, but I’d be willing to bet that Breslin is right: there’s a population of several million in this group who aren’t being sampled at all in the polls.
3. There are 7 million Americans living abroad, who are also not included in any of the phone polls. With the intensity of this campaign, I think more expats than usual will vote this time. Extrapolating from a survey that indicates Kerry has an almost 2:1 lead among those who hold passports, I’d argue that the same holds true for US expats.

Back in the day, (all of 2 years ago), I found good stuff on Napster. The concerns over copyright weren’t significant in regard to my interests, as I was mostly looking for obscure tracks (B-sides, concert bootlegs, etc.) from obscure bands (NoMeansNo, Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, Steroid Maximus, etc.) – not the kind of stuff that’s going to hurt anybody’s record sales. (Rather than fighting new technology like most of the music industry, insound.com has embraced it, and they’re making a bundle, but that’s another topic…).

There were two reasons Napster had such a huge library: 1. it was the only significant online P2P system around at the time, and 2. it got a huge amount of free publicity from the news media. Now we have a number of different P2P networks and a variety of client software packages to choose from. Venturing into this world, I stumbled around for a while before figuring out the best approach. There are a lot of client software options: Morpheus, Limewire, BearShare, Xolox, Phex, neoNapster, Shareaza, and more. There are also different networks you can connect to: Gnutella1, Gnutella2, the eDonkey network, bitTorrent, and probably more.

I started out with Morpheus but it was a huge resource hog. It also came with spyware. I then tried LimeWire, which was much nicer to my PC and did not contain spyware. But my searches would not persist. What I mean is this: I’d enter a search, and it would chug away for 10-15 minutes, and then it would essentially forget about. My search would continue to display, but if I didn’t get any results right away, then I would never get any at all. I’d have to keep re-running the search to keep up with changes on the network. I’ve now settled on using Shareaza, which runs nicely, has no spyware, connects to all the major networks, and diligently runs my searches continuously.

The eDonkey network is better at finding what you’re looking for and has sophisticated handling for large files, which means a lot of the action, especially for movies, has moved there. The downside is that the queues on eDonkey can be mighty long (I often get a queue position over 1,000) so you have to be willing to leave your PC on continuously (and hope your network connection doesn’t go down, which will force you out of your queue position if you can’t get back online quickly). Out of curiosity I downloaded a couple of movies. I found the quality to be poor: really major compression artifacts were always a problem, and some of the movies were just recorded by someone in a theater with a camera, so you sometimes get people walking in front of the camera, ambient noise, etc. But given the ever-increasing bandwidth capacity of networks, and the ever-improving compression technologies, I imagine Hollywood is soon going to fully join up with the music industry in its war against filesharing.