The Saturday NY Fishwrap Trifecta: The Krait, Angry Bob, & The Blowhard

Welcome to this new, improved blog with hypertext naviation tools! Bounce back and forth among the three Op-Ed columns from the opinioneers without a Pulitzer among 'em. Even lacking the cachet of a Pulitzer does not diminish the good sense of these pre-election observations. Good punditry drives out the bad. If this is (fair & balanced) rationalization, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] The Krait's Advice: Chill!
[2] Angry Bob Tries To Find The Race Card In Our 2008 3-Card Monte Game
[3] The Blowhard's Postmortem Examination Of The Geezer's October

[x NY Fishwrap]
[1]—Back To Directory
Our Election Whopper
By Gail Collins

Omigosh! It’s almost here. The one and only Election Day! Except, of course, in the 30-odd states where voting has been going on for some time. Nov. 4 is not quite as much of an event there, although it’s still a big date, what with watching the returns and celebrating Laura Bush’s birthday, along with the increasingly popular feast of Half a Week After Halloween.

Our two-year presidential campaign now ends with a monthlong vote, followed by weeks of litigation over provisional ballots. After that, the new president is sworn in and given 100 days to accomplish his legislative agenda, after which everyone will start plotting for 2012.

It is a grand system in that great American tradition that has given us the seven-month baseball season and the half-gallon cup of soda. We have supersized the election. And why not? Barack Obama’s campaign budget is now supporting half the national economy. I don’t know how we’re going to get along without it, unless we can convince Mitt Romney to start gearing up instantly for his comeback.

Although the polls have consistently shown Obama ahead, Democrats are all afraid of the infamous Bradley effect, in which people falsely claim to be voting for a black candidate so pollsters don’t think they’re racist. In the case of this campaign, you’d have to be paranoid enough to believe the canny closet racists were also falsely assuring the pollsters that they thought Obama would do better with the economy, health insurance and bringing change to Washington, and would appoint better people to his administration than McCain. Which does seem like a lot of effort to impress a stranger on the other end of a telephone line.

The polls also suggest that Sarah Palin has, in two short months, managed to scare the pants off large portions of the population. Confidence seems to be plummeting not only in her own qualifications but in McCain’s overall ability to pick good assistants. These concerns were probably not allayed by the candidate’s promise to take Joe the Plumber to Washington with him.

It also didn’t help when former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a McCain supporter, was asked on NPR whether Palin would be ready on day one to step in if a crisis occurred.

“Of course not,” Eagleburger responded.

This was a particularly cruel blow since Eagleburger is not just one of the five former secretaries of state that the McCain campaign constantly cites as having endorsed the ticket. He is one of the four who McCain was actually able to remember during a recent interview on “Meet the Press.”

To be fair, Eagleburger went on to qualify his statement and said that given some time in office, he thought Palin would be “adequate.” These days in the McCain camp, this may be what passes as a ringing endorsement.

Obama is going to be racing around from rally to rally over the final 96 hours — eight states in three time zones. This sort of last-minute dash around the nation is another American political tradition, which serves the dual purpose of setting a good example for the campaign workers and torturing the campaign press corps in retribution for all those months of writing down the things the candidate said.

Obama’s target audience is the 10 percent of voters who told this week’s New York Times/CBS News poll that they did not feel as if they had received enough information to make an informed decision on the presidential race. I believe we have met them before. They are the men and women who get up at a town hall meeting after the candidate had just made a 20-minute opening speech about his/her plans for health care reform, and say: “What I want to know is, what are you going to do about medical costs?” My theory is that whenever they hear someone start to discuss the issues, they cover their ears and make humming noises, the way my husband does when I say it is time to take a look at our 401(k)s.

In The Times’s poll, the percentage of respondents who said that they weren’t totally sure who they were going to vote for was almost identical to the percentage who said that they think the economy is doing well. Are they the same people? If so, perhaps they are still undecided because they are waiting to get their marching orders from well-informed friends like Abraham Lincoln, St. Catherine of Siena or Seabiscuit.

The best approach at this point is probably to ignore all polls and just wait to see what happens. Take a deep breath. Do a little meditation. Make a list of all the things you’re going to do once you no longer have to spend time worrying about who’s going to be the next president.

I personally am planning to read the Russian classics.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]
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[2]—Back To Directory
The Known Unknowns
By Bob Herbert

All the signs are pointing to an enormous turnout.

Already, in early voting, the numbers have been huge. In Charlotte, N.C., an elderly black woman showed up at a community college eager to cast a ballot for Barack Obama. The line ahead of her was daunting — at least two hours long. She knew she could not stand for two hours, so she went home.

The next day she came back with a folding chair. She sat down at the end of the line, which was even longer than the day before. Every few minutes, as the line inched forward, the woman would get up, move her chair ahead a little bit and sit back down.

The polls show Senator Obama ahead, but there is no reliable precedent for this election. There are too many “known unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld might have said.

The eagerness to vote is being driven to a great extent by anxiety. The financial sector, with hundreds of billions of bailout dollars from taxpayers, is trying to emerge from a state of shock. The auto industry, a house of cards for years, is in danger of collapsing. The economy is shrinking, joblessness is soaring and financial security for all but the very rich is going the way of the video cassette recorder.

An auto worker in Michigan told me, “I’m voting for my economic life, man.”

The most significant factor vying with the economy in this election is also the greatest unknown: the race issue. The election would likely be a runaway if not for Senator Obama’s race. He’s leading, but the question is whether the poll numbers accurately reflect what is going on with the electorate.

Of all the issues thrashed about in this interminable election season, the twin towers are still the economy and race.

“I am a strong nonsubscriber to the Bradley effect,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. He was talking about the frequently mentioned phenomenon in which some percentage of white respondents supposedly tell pollsters that they are voting for a black candidate and then go into the voting booth and do otherwise.

The race issue has hurt many black candidates. But there is very little evidence to support the existence of a Bradley effect, named for Tom Bradley, a black mayor of Los Angeles who, in 1982, lost an election for governor of California that he had been expected to win.

Mr. Miringoff does not believe that significant numbers of respondents are lying to pollsters because they are fearful of being seen as racist, or for any other reason. “If you actually listen to the interview process, you would see that people are extremely eager to have their views correctly recorded,” he said.

He recalled the David Dinkins-Rudolph Giuliani race for mayor of New York in 1989 in which Mr. Dinkins, who is black, only narrowly won. “We polled on the eve of that election, Monday night,” said Mr. Miringoff, “and we saw a big shift in the numbers. The race had gotten closer. Most of the polling had stopped two or three days earlier.”

There are many reasons why Senator Obama, or any other candidate, might do better or worse on Election Day than polls suggest. Respondents lying to pollsters is probably the least likely among them.

Turnout is the big wild card this year. Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll said that trying to gauge the size of the turnout and decipher its meaning “is probably the No. 1 challenge we’re looking at.”

An exceptionally high turnout probably plays to Mr. Obama’s advantage. It would indicate that large numbers of newly registered Democratic voters, including blacks and younger voters, were showing up in droves. With a better-organized ground operation than the McCain campaign, and with lots more money to spend, the Obama forces should have an easier time getting their voters to the polls.

A huge overall turnout could also be a sign that economic anxiety has become so great across the electorate that it trumps the concern that many voters might have about Mr. Obama’s race.

A potential pitfall for Mr. Obama is the danger that voters who have not expressed a preference to pollsters end up voting heavily for John McCain. Those voters could shift the balance in potential swing states, especially those states where Mr. Obama is ahead but is not polling above 50 percent.

There is some evidence that lower-educated, less affluent white voters — a group that tends to favor Senator McCain — may be somewhat more reluctant than other groups to respond to pollsters.

The Bradley effect may not be real, but race in this election looms large. The question that will be answered Tuesday is whether a bad economy looms even larger.

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]
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[3]—Back To Directory
October Demise
By Charles M. Blow

John the Contender and Sarah the Subverter limped into these last days hoping against hope. All else had failed, even McCain’s complete apostasy. Their flagging ticket had fallen in the polls, and they were preying for an upset for which there was no precedent.

According to a Gallup report released Monday, there have been only two upsets since 1952: Reagan vs. Carter in 1980 and Bush vs. Gore in 2000. Neither is particularly analogous to the current race.

In 1980, the candidates’ one and only debate was a week before Election Day. Reagan won the debate, and that turned the election. This year, McCain was drubbed in all three presidential debates. In 2000, the lead in the polls flip-flopped constantly. Gore eked out a popular vote win, but didn’t win the Electoral College. This year, McCain hasn’t held the lead in the polls since mid-September. And Obama already has enough states leaning his way to handily win the Electoral College, plus he’s either tied or leading in the toss-up states.

So McCain’s final volley was to brand Barack Obama a socialist, assail his associations and rile up the rurals. For that to work, everything else would have to fall in McCain’s favor. To say that it hasn’t is a gross understatement.

Oct. 19: Colin Powell endorses Obama.

Oct. 20: Al Qaeda endorses McCain.

Oct. 22: Sarah Palin gets smacked down for dressing up. (You know it’s hard out here when you primp.)

Oct. 23: The candidates personally reach out to a campaign volunteer who claimed that a black man had carved a backward “B” on her face during a mugging to punish her for not supporting Obama. The volunteer later confesses to fabricating the story. Scars all around.

Oct. 24: $22,800 for makeup. Wow.

Oct. 25: McCain’s people begin to turn on Palin, making her sound like the title character of a bad movie: “Whack job,” “diva,” “gone rogue.”

Oct. 28: The Pew Center reports that Obama leads among early voters by a margin of 19 percent.

Oct. 29: Obama buys a chunk of prime-time and broadcasts a love-in to himself, then he has a late-night rally with his former grudge buddy Bill Clinton. It looks like a coronation. McCain responds on Larry King in a room that looks like the lobby of a funeral parlor.

Throughout October: The Republican Egghead Revolt: the party’s highbrows huff that the appeal of the Grand Old Party needs to be broader than the audience of the Grand Ole Opry. Many defect to Obama.

And there you have it — a calamity of missteps and misfortunes.

Of course, anything could happen. There are three days left. McCain could still win. And, a drunk man wearing a blindfold could get a puck past Marc-André Fleury.

Yeah, unlikely. It’s a wrap. Fade to black.

[Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears every other Saturday. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Charles Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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