Messages posted by: bourseNYC

Gaw838,

The law is: "A person may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within 10 years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular component of an armed force."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/113.html

Clark retired in 2000.

I appreciate your thought about not liking it when the PC-police stifle debate on controversial subjects. I agree that's not healthy.

Where you see stifling a debate, I see encouraging a debate. The flap over Summers' comments provoked a lot of interesting discussion in the press and in higher learning.

Besides, it's not like Summers went to jail or was blacklisted from academia. He continued to teach at Harvard and he'll no doubt be welcomed by counltess other universities in the future should he so choose to rejoin a faculty. Those whom you characterize as "the PC police" are just one player in the marketplace of ideas, and while they win a battle here or there they're not a particularly dominant one (as they were, say, in academia 20 years ago).

I filled a lot of BIDs for Wes Clark as SecDef at about 5.0 the other day. Apparently someone didn't realize he's not legally eligible for the post. Free money!

Want a quick laugh?

Go to the Presidential Appointments contracts and click on the charts for ATT.GEN.GORELICK to see her photo...

GAW838 wrote:

FDR is of course the obvious exception to a president being blamed for bad times during his term.

I think a more recent exception would be Reagan not really taking blame for the early-80s recession (rightfully so, because it wasn't his fault).

I think a similar thing might happen with Obama, especially if he makes good on his commitments to end the Iraq war and gets to pass his stimulus and tax plans roughly as he has outlined them. People will remember that the crisis began before his watch and see that he took action to fix the economy.

If the recession is still going on by the 2010 midterms, but post-withdrawal Iraq hasn't exploded and Obama has acquitted himself reasonably well in whatever other crises may have arisen, we won't see a repeat of the 1994 midterms in 2010. It could be more like the '82 midterms where the GOP lost a bunch of House seats, held the Senate, and then won big on the back of a resurgent economy two years later.

I think that [overturning Roe] would be a disaster for the GOP electoral prospects. It would totally transform the way voter's think about the abortion issue. Some cross-pressured pro-lifers would begin to give other factors greater consideration in their voting decisions, while the opposite would happen for choice voters once the outlawing of abortions is imminent in many parts of the country.

It would shift thinking about abortion, but it wouldn't really shift attention away from it. If anything, having constant state-by-state fights over abortion laws would make it a bigger issue than ever (these do go on right now, but with Roe gone the states would have a lot more lassitude in what they could do to restrict abortion and so there would be more battles). This would probably be bad for the country on the whole as it would draw time, energy, and attention away from other social and economic issues. It would not, however, hurt the GOP politically, as more attention paid to abortion fights seems to benefit them rather than the Democrats.

The same poll, taken October 6-12 has different results definitely in Obama's favor.

The poll shows a 50-point swing in this demographic in the space of a week, with no clear motive as to why-- and that's supposed to lend it more credibility?

What is the reason that 18-to-24s have supposedly moved 23 points away from Obama and 27 points towards McCain in one week? Why have none of the other 10 or so national polls have picked up on this stunning development, instead showing the race as roughly stable among young people as well as among all voters over that time (flucutuating within a 3-point range or so)?

A fifty-point swing in a week's time that no other poll can see, with nothing to explain it, beggars plausibility.

What we have been hearing from the media is that these cell phone only house holds are predominantly pro-Obama.

Except that every poll other than IBD/TIPP that includes cell-only voters in its sample shows them favoring Obama by 15 or so points, and continues to show an Obama lead of 15-20 among age 18-24 or 18-29 voters.

When you have 10 polling outfits showing one thing and 1 or 2 giving an extraordinary result, the 1 or 2 naysayers should be able to come up with an explanation why they see something the others don't. Otherwise, they either have bad methodology or more simply their poll is an outlier.

The biggest reason is that both campaigns have been pushing very hard for early voting, which is now available in more states than ever. Everyone wants to promote the idea of beating the inevitable long lines on Election Day, and I think this has drilled out of people's minds in states that have early voting the notion that "Nov. 4 = Election Day", replacing it with "Two/three/four weeks or whatever of consecutive Election Days".

The nature of the Republican attacks on the Dem candidate is also different than in previous elections. They painted Kerry as an effete flip-flopper, Gore as a tree-hugging nerd, and Clinton as a lothario, but with Obama they have been more successful at convincing the hardcore conservative base that he is something more dangerous -- a terrorist-sympathizing radical socialist -- and I think this will make right-wing Americans come out in bigger numbers than before. This effort will be matched, and likely exceeded, by Obama's own ground game. The Dems have adopted some of the GOP's most successive GOTV tactics (like their special voter contact database software) and has come up with new ones which the GOP, in turn, will have to replicate in years to come.

I think there is about a 70% chance we will see 60%+ voter turnout, so the market is about in the right place.

When you ask about how much Palin is helping McCain, you're really asking two separate things. McCain clearly had two strategic goals in choosing her as his running mate: first, to shore up the Republican base, which saw McCain as insufficiently conservative; and secondly, to draw Hillary voters from the primary into his camp (primarily white women).

In his first objective, he succeeded admirably. Palin has indeed whipped up crowds and reinvigorated support for the McCain ticket among the party's right wing. She probably exceeded expectations in this respect.

However, in the second objective of drawing on Clinton supporters and women in general, Palin has been an unqualified failure. All recent polling shows that support for Obama among Democrats is in the high-80s, same as Republican support for McCain. Women who aren't conservative have been by and large repelled by Palin rather than attracted by her. She is the only one of the four Pres/VP candidates whose favorables are a net negative in many national polls (like NBC/WSJ and Pew surveys released yesterday) and in polls that break fav/unfav down by gender, she actually does worse among women than men. She's turning off moderates, too; yesterday's Pew poll, in listing respondents' primary concerns about McCain, had the Governor's qualifications to be President as the most-cited.

It also would seem that while Palin probably helped win a good share of donations to the RNC, she has accelerated Obama donations (they reportedly got $10 million of their $150 million September take in the 24 hours between Palin's RNC speech and McCain's). She excites the Dem base to work against her as much as she excites the GOP base to work for her.

Finally, there is the argument that the message shift hurt McCain. Up to and including the Dem convention, McCain's main argument was simple: I'm experienced and the other guy isn't. McCain could've more conceivably won the election if he had been able to make "experience vs. change" the central theme of the campaign by picking someone like Romney or Lindsey Graham. Instead, he hurt his own campaign theme and repositioned the ticket as "change through maverick-iness" in competition with "change by putting a new party in power". They tried running out the "executive experience" argument but the polls now seem to indicate that undecideds didn't buy it.

When the inevitable books about this election come out, I think that the Palin pick will go down as McCain's biggest mistake, and the only real counterargument will be the lack of a clear answer (Romney?) of who would be better.

It's true there is a limit to the effectiveness of advertising in communicating a message. I'm sure the people running Obama's campaign recognize this (and besides, this late in the race there are only so many choice TV advertising slots that are still available for purchased; most have already been paid for by another advertiser). However, as Tamalek mentions there is no shortage of ways Obama can spend this money to get out the vote.

Plus it speaks to something else: The enthusiasm of Obama supporters. I heard estimates that the campaign was going to announce a $80-$90 million haul, "maybe even over $100 million" as someone in TV was saying. The fact that the actual number far exceeded the least conservative estimates speaks to how good Obama's campaign is at managing expectations and then surpassing them.

How does this affect my trading positions? Based on where they've been advertising and where Obama and Biden have been visiting, it would appear at first glance that rather than building up a firewall in Colorado or Virginia where they can potentially construct a solid 10-point lead, and squeak past the finish line with 270-290 EVs, they have instead firmed up their positions in 264 votes' worth of states (those which either Gore or Kerry or both won) and are planning to supplement them with as many "coin flips" as possible (i.e. eight or so states that went for Bush twice which each now have a 40%-60% chance of going Dem; any one of which would be enough to swing the election). This, however, would seem to be a riskier strategy than the Obama campaign has displayed in the past. Time and again they have resisted the strategy of taking bold risks in favor of consolidating their advantages slowly (e.g. contrast choosing Biden, maybe the safest VP pick imaginable, and certainly more so than Clinton would've been, to McCain's unexpected choice of Palin, which has worked out badly for him overall). So my thinking is that they've already decided they have 270 in the bag based on their own internals and reports from their people working in the field, and that the purpose of spreading themselves out like this is partly to force McCain to likewise commit resources all over the map, and thus give up the chance to crack their firewall, and partly to increase the chances of a landslide, which would get everyone in the media using the word "mandate" and thus build support for his policies among Congress's endangered Republicans and fiscally conservative Dems.

So what's the state that Obama thinks he's locked up which nobody in the press has? My guess before yesterday was Colorado, but right now I'm thinking Florida or Virginia; more likely the former. FL not only has the military veterans, Jews* and seniors whom the Powell endorsement is most likely to swing, but also has been hurting more economically than VA and is extremely expensive for McCain's cash-strapped campaign to hold down. Florida is probably a good deal this morning at 68.0 for Obama.

(*Yes, Jews. A lot of people don't realize how popular General Powell is with old Jewish people like those in my family. They know the story about how he got his first job from New York Jews and even learned some Yiddish from them. He feels to them like one of their own, and this will put those who were on the fence at ease with Obama.)