The Palin Hypothesis

Was McCain's choice of Palin a mistake, masterstroke, or both? There are compelling arguments to be made for both sides, but they're all just bullshit and conjecture. Therefore, I would like to state the Palin Hypothesis as follows:

Sarah Palin shall be considered a good choice if she is on a winning national ticket in 2012.

Personally, I think the caricaturing of her as some sort of Pat Buchanan in drag was the most brutally effective smear campaign since Lee Atwater discovered Willie Horton*. As governor, Palin did not oppose marijuana legalization, vetoed a bill that would have blocked gay partners of state employees from receiving spousal benefits, and has repeatedly stated--on the record--that she supports teaching about contraception as part of a sex-ed curriculum.

I expect the Obama campaign to elide facts like this, which is why we have an allegedly free-and-independent media to hold it to account. But "Caribou Barbie the Fool" was the preferred narrative, and so it stuck. The press's comeuppance shall arrive in the form of layoffs as 46% of the country continues its ongoing divorce from the DC/NYC/LA media-entertainment axis. Good riddance! The sooner network bosses replace 60 Minutes and NBC Nightly News with imported UK reality shows, the better off we will be as a nation. Just as one-party government leads inevitably to corruption, a lack of ideological diversity in newsrooms leads to stupefaction.

All that being said, if the media landscape is naturally hostile to you, then at some point it becomes disqualifying. It is a bridge too far to blame Palin for more than a minority share in McCain's loss, but she was very clearly a mixed bag. If she can rise above this year's loss and win in the next round or two, then McCain can claim some of a retroactive consolation prize for having launched the career of a future winner. If she does not, though, then what good can she be said to have done?

Dogs that Didn't Bark

On the whole I feel pretty good about my predictions. To recap:

1. Obama Wins: On the 22nd I said McCain had run a 45% campaign, which probably would have made me a winner on The Price Is Right.

2. The Black Vote Stuns, the Youth Vote Sucks: I score this one as a push. Both sucked and stunned simultaneously. First, total turnout was only incrementally higher than in 2004. For a long time liberal observers have said, "but what if these groups turn out like senior citizens in Nebraska?" Put simply, if they didn't show up for Obama, then I think we can close the book on that question for good, or at least a decade or two.

This is not to say however that these groups didn't matter immensely. Obama dramatically increased the Democrats' share of the 18-29 vote, and took the black vote to levels worthy of another Hussein. These may well have provided a critical margin of victory. What that means in the longer term is less clear. Much as 2004 probably defined the high-water mark for the evangelical vote, 2008 will likely be the crest of these other two.

3. Ohio and Florida Stay Red: Why yes, I am enjoying the crow, thanks for asking. #2 may well explain why.

4. Pennsylvania Stays Blue: Easy money.

5. New Hampshire Turns True Blue: Cow Hampshire is solidly trending towards becoming a one-party state just like its neighbors. There are still enough Republicans in state government to produce another governor or senator, but it will be as much by dumb luck as anything. I see an income tax in their future...

6. Senate races: The counting is still going on, but I guessed:

• Democrats pick up AK, NH, NM, OR and VA: Ted Convicted Stevens may still eke out a win, but I was 4-for-5 on the rest.
• Republicans hold GA, KY, LA, MN, MS, and NC: 4-for-6 so far, and it will be 5 if Franken fails to win the recount in Minnesota.

Smoking Poll

Oh, and one last thing: Networks May Call Race Before Voting is Complete.

“Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama
that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz
wrote. “We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to
engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.”

Does anyone other than these editors and broadcasters themselves feel that "calling" the election at any point provides a useful service to the public? One nice and straightforward way to resolve this would be for all the states to agree to begin releasing results at the same time--say midnight ET, when California starts counting.

While we're at it, why not make exit polling illegal within 200 yards of a polling place, and hold all results until noon or so the following day? The candidates could sit together on a stage in DC, and one by one the governors of each state could phone in the final, certified, we're-pretty-damn-sure results, until they reached 270, at which point the winner gets a 21-gun salute and a kiss from their choice of Miss America or the World Series MVP.

Democracy Schmemocracy

I went to vote on my way in to work this morning. Machine politics lives on here in the City of Boston, and one of the ways you see it is when your polling place is never more than a hundred yards or so from your house, and a ten-minute walk could get you to two others. Eastie has a rump Republican streak, and so there was one old codger with a McCain-Palin sign out in front chatting with a lady who works for the Menino syndicate pumping for contributions. And of course "No On 1" signs everywhere. I can't see it winning but OMFG I'd die a happy man if it did.

But the legacy of the machine lives on in another less charming way. Below Electors for the President and Vice President, and Kerry's Senate seat, there were a half-dozen races from the House down to city council and Keeper of Ye Game. I will freely confess I have no idea what the Registrar of Deeds and Probate does, and strongly suspect that the winner of said office matters only insofar as deciding whether the patronage goes to the micks, wops, beaners, or eggplants.

Nonetheless, I was gobsmacked to see that from the mongoloid townie congressman Michael Capuano on down, not one of these offices was contested, and Kerry's senate race was contested only in the sense that his challengers would not be executed after the election. The Presidential race is meaningful to the extent that the popular vote has some PR effect, but otherwise, the only reason to bother showing up for this were the ballot questions, all of which were the product of cranks.

I have a simple rule, along the lines of what Heinlein suggested, which is that when I don't recognize a name on a down-ballot race, I vote for the challenger. So, needless to say, if M. Mouse should win a City Council seat, I hope he'll fix some of my parking tickets, and I also have high hopes for D. Duck, W.E. Coyote, and R. Runner in their respective races.

In any case, I have toyed with the idea of registering as a Democrat in order to vote in the primaries, which is where many of these races are really decided, but that would presume that those races actually concern anything other than which particular tribe gets to divvie up the loot. Perhaps it doesn't matter who the register of deeds is, but shouldn't a city councilor or congressman be forced to, you know, run?

Final Predictions

I haven't followed the minutiae of the race this year like I have in previous ones. In part because I never believed the GOP stood much of a chance, in part because Real Life loomed much larger this time than it did 4 and 8 years back, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to get too excited.

In sports, the final score comes down entirely to the game, but politics is different. The referees decide whether the cameras are rolling when each side scores a point, and how loud the crowd cheers actually helps decide the outcome. I've never been a huge fan of the "damn liberal media" narrative, but this year caused me to start shopping for a pitchfork. The media has become dominated by a cabal of overeducated, latte-sipping, arugula-eating, Prius-driving coastal urban yuppies, and Obama is without a doubt the most catnippy candidate for them since at least Jimmy Carter, and maybe Adlai Stevenson.

If Obama wins, I suspect at least 75% of Republicans will consider the media complicit, and will view them as an occupying force for the next four years. This is probably the beginning of the end for many newspapers and nightly news programs as we know them. An interesting local question is whether the Herald might weather this better than the Globe, at least in relative terms. I suspect a lot of these Hillary voters around here won't be too happy about Obama's plans. Personally, I can't remember the last time I read the Globe, and am not sure why I'd do so now. I suppose I could pay attention to the business section, though my business isn't really that local, and if it was, I'd probably get the Boston Business Journal. How many sequential 8-10% declines in circulation can happen before the Globe starts to resemble the Metro?

Of course, if McCain wins, the talking heads will instantly shift gears to analyses of how they could be so bleeping wrong, very few of which will likely discuss their internal biases. Of course, this is by far the worse scenario for them, as many Obamaphiles will blame the media for making their side overconfident and depressing turnout, but that won't be until at least 2010 when the arguments about a Republican race war start growing mold.

Anyway...
I haven't bothered to play the map games, but here's what I'll be watching closely. Feel free in the comments to bet me a beer on any of the following:

1. The black vote stuns, the youth vote sucks: These two have been the hard six of electoral politics--a vast pool of untapped liberal voters who are harder to drag to the polls than corpses in Cook County. I'm splitting my money here, because I think young people are pretty much the same year after year, but this is a truly historic day for black America.

2. Ohio and Florida stay red: After 2000, the Democrats threw everything at these states and still got their asses handed to them in 2004. My guess is that turnout, while extraordinarily high, will be as much anti-Obama as pro-Obama.

3. Pennsylvania stays blue: I thought Bush could eke out a win here in 2004, and based on that, I'm betting a McCain win now to be far less likely, particularly with massive turnout in Philly and Pittsburgh. There have been anxieties on the part of leading Dems about Pennsylvania, but that's more because of the cost of losing it than the likelihood.

4. New Hampshire completes its transition to a safe Democratic state: Obama's margins look insurmountable here. If NH votes for a one-term black senator from Illinois with the most liberal voting record in the Senate over John McCain, then it will pretty much vote for any Democrat.

5. Democrats break 56 in the Senate but do not make it to 60: I have wavered on this one many, many times. Let's look at the key states: Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, Virginia. I am guessing the Democrats pick up AK, NH, NM, OR, and VA. In the remainder I am betting on ticket-splitting voters in relatively red states to blunt the charge. But 60 is not at all impossible, and that is quite something. While I suspect that would lead to vast overreaching leading to a 1994-style revival of the GOP, I'd really rather not see just how deep that rabbit hole goes.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Yes on Question 2

Massachusetts' ballot questions continue their libertarian streak with a question to turn possession of less than an ounce of weed into the legal equivalent of a parking ticket. Personally I would like to see marihuana legalization go a good deal further--decriminalizing petty possession is a good start, but wouldn't it make more sense to bring the whole supply chain into the light? After all, if the goal is to prevent the kiddies from getting their hands on it, it's a lot more effective to police a limited number of agents eager to maintain their licensed franchises. But it's a start.

As with many other libertarian issues, the best arguments against it are often the people supporting it. Whether Green or Libertarian, one must commit to a substantial degree of crank-ism in order to step outside the velvet coffins of the two-party system, and perhaps the only compelling argument for our two-party system is the greater than 87% efficacy of its crank-exclusion mechanisms. People who are really into pot are uniformly lacking in industry, personal hygiene, and respect for authority; they are almost wholly to blame for the continuing sale of patchouli, clove cigarettes, birkenstock sandals, tie-dye, and "jam bands," to name just a few. Big Tobacco and the liquor industry gave us Frank and the Brat Pack, while pot gave us the hippies--let's not even get into bicycles.

And yet there are times when the assorted fruits and nuts happen to be standing on the right side, even if purely by accident. Pot is no more potently intoxicating than alcohol, and in economic terms I cannot see any great advantage to its prohibition. In ethical terms, the effects of a conviction for possession are probably more damaging to life potential than the use of the drug, and are almost surely to fall harder on those with the least going for them.

These arguments are more challenging with drugs such as cocaine, ecstasy, or heroin, whose potency and addictive mechanisms render them a greater threat to users and society at large. In the frictionless vacuum of a libertarian paradise, perhaps people could be required to post a bond to pay for their treatment and then be permitted to indulge such appetites, but in the meantime an ersatz version of this already exists whereby upper middle-class first-time offenders generally receive much lighter sentences. This is of course framed as an injustice, but in practical terms it makes sense--the wealthier and more socially intact one is, the less of a burden he will likely place on the state to supervise.

But whatever you do, don't try lighting up a joint in a bar or coffeeshop--certainly we are not far away from that being punishable by death.