Probably not my last note on this, but quite possibly my last for today: Kerry was not a bad candidate. There was not a magic candidate who would have gotten the Democrats 51% of the vote. Clinton didn’t win because he was from Arkansas, he won because he was an incredibly good campaigner. He might not have won this election. It’s not as if there’s any evidence that a more moderate candidate (and Kerry’s fairly moderate) would have done better. ...
Regarding new directions, I recommend to you David Neiwert, who remembers that the American progressive movement started both inside and outside the cities. But we have terminology issues here. At present, progressive is used as a substitute for liberal. I’m not entirely sure that’s accurate, considering that Teddy Roosevelt wound up a progressive in the end. My personal current bet is that within ten years we’ll have a moderate party and a conservative party. I hedge this by saying that I don’t think civil liberties are a liberal or a conservative issue — see also William Weld and (odd fellow traveller, here) Bob Barr. I think there’s a small chance that neither of these parties will be the Democratic Party. It’s possible that one of them will be progressive. ...
Well, that was unexpected and I have no explanation. Ohio is within the polling margin of error, so I’m disappointed but not shocked. The 5% margin in Florida is surprising. Possibly I should have been paying attention to Gallup. The interesting question for me, right now, is how the pollsters failed to catch a chunk of Bush voters, cause Florida wasn’t even close. And Zogby’s not gonna have quite as many clients next cycle. Ah, the perils of being a celebrity pollster. Then again, I seem to have made similar mistakes. ...
They won’t let me turn on the webcam. Pout. But that’s OK; it’s still an intensely fun night over here at the Tatro-Kaplan household. If anything you can’t find out anywhere else happens, I’ll post about it in this post. For example, I can report a strong Kerry lean in his household.
Everything you need to know about exit polls is right here. Note that the numbers are particularly likely to be off this year, because they weight the results based on past turnout at each precinct, and we know that the turnout this year is hugely unusually high. But yeah, the leaked numbers are warming the cockles of my heart, too. Even if I don’t think Kerry is actually going to win Pennsylvania by 20 points.
Yeah, it’s pretty much all guesswork now, as far as the pundits and polls go. So let’s look at unsourced rumors about what the campaigns think, via Chris Suellentrop in Slate. Could easily be people seeing what they want to see. Could be an accurate indicator of campaign mood. Could be that Kerry’s people have better campaign discipline than Bush’s people. You know what I think. See you on the flip side.
Mickey Kaus is not a guy I count on to get it right that often, but his endorsement of Kerry is rooted in a clarity of vision that I’ve seen from barely any pundit. I’m gonna go ahead and quote this, since he doesn’t have permalinks: What’s at stake isn’t how to give millions of relatively healthy Americans better health care. It’s how to stop millions of relatively healthy Americans (and other humans) from eventually dying at the hands of aggrieved groups who will in coming decades a) find it easier and easier to organize, thanks to the Web, and b) be increasingly be able to get their hands on increasingly destructive weapons, especially bioweapons. I get this basic framework from my colleague Robert Wright’s excellent series on terrorism, available here. (For appropriate accompanying atmospherics, I recommend the unsuccessful but eerily prescient film Twelve Monkeys.) Currently the dominant threat is Islamic extremist terrorism. But after that it will be some other flavor of terrorism—environmental radicals, perhaps, or animal rights fanatics, or separatists, or superempowered Columbine nihilists, or all of them at once. In the larger war on terror, however, it’s no contest. Both candidates will hunt down and kill existing terrorists. The issue is how many new terrorists are we creating—as Donald Rumsfeld famously wrote, “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get.’?” Let’s say that n is the number of net new terrorists who’ll come online in the next four years. Isn’t it obvious that n is a lot lower if Kerry is president than if Bush is president? Even if you think the Iraq war was worth fighting, as it may well turn out in the long run to have been, it’s hard to deny that it has angered millions around the world, and that Bush is a focal point of their anger. A tiny but definitely non-trivial percentage of these people will be angry enough to try to do us harm, and as the years go by technology will make it easier for them to accomplish this. We lower the volume of lethal hatred simply by thanking Bush for his efforts and retiring him. I’m continually amazed that bloggers, of all people, don’t appreciate the way intensely motivated individuals, operating without centralized state (or any other) control, can be empowered by new technology to do us tremendous harm. To put it in mundane current blogospheric terms, when it comes to preventing future attacks, the terrorists will more and more come to resemble bloggers in their pajamas and America will come to resemble CBS. That’s not a position we should be comfortable in. (Yes, it may be hard for small groups of non-state bloggers to develop nuclear weapons. But it might not be hard to acquire nuclear weapons. And bioweapons may well be developable by alarmingly small groups.) ...
If the Democratic Party expects to maintain moral high ground this election, there’s going to have to be a lot less of this sort of thing.
CNN’s Carlos Watson thinks it’s a tight race, but he’d call it for Kerry after months of thinking Bush had it in the bag. I think he’s being pretty realistic. Eleanor Clift, over at Newsweek, uses much of the same reasoning to predict a Kerry win (original). Once again, it’s about the end game (original). As I’ve said before, Kerry has the superior end game. Rove is terrifying, sure, but he’s known for slinging mud well before the election. He is not so good at handling those last few days. Remember in 2000, when he made the nearly fatal mistake of sending Bush to California in the closing days of the election? Whouley and Sasso have proven experience as closers. That’ll show this year. ...
Ron Suskind has a nice archive of Bush White House documents that he’s releasing now and again. Interesting stuff. One recent piece of interest was this projection of oil price rises (original) following an invasion of Iraq. Suskind notes the optimism inherent in the assumption that oil prices will be the only thing affected. Me, I notice the optimism that $45 a barrel is the worst case scenario. We’ve beaten that by $7 a barrel, for reasons that the memo doesn’t even speculate on. Namely, terrorist action to prevent the flow of oil.