FEMA: Big Government's Got Your Back

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Mitt Romney said the Federal  Emergency Management Agency ought to be dismantled and it's work given to the states, or better yet, to private industry.

All the Tea Party folks cheered. 

The private sector is always better, more efficient Mr. Romney says.

Keep your government hands off my Medicare Joe Sixpack roars.

We don't need government. We need to shrink government until it's small enough to drown it in my bathtub. That's the Republican line. 

Don't want no govment. Until we need it.

Like when the Coast Guard (federal government) picks you up out of your floundering yacht.  The billionaires get that service for free. No, wait, their taxes pay for it, or their taxes would pay for it if they paid taxes--but their money is in the Cayman Islands, untaxed.

Romney: Sending Those Jobs to China

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

GM spokesman,  Greg Martin, said,  "We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days and no amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country," 
--Huffington Post

Ah, it's Karl Rove time.  The tactic is to attack the opposition at its strength. So President Obama saved General Motors and Vice President Biden pricked Mr. Romney with the quip, "General Motors is alive and Osma Bin Laden is dead."  So Rove and his Republicans simply say, well, "GM being alive is not such a good thing for America--they are sending work to China."

Of course, it doesn't have to be true, you just say it, and you've got autoworkers calling up their union to ask whether or not it's true.

You can say President Obama was born in Bagdad, and his father was Sadam Hussein, and all that stands between America and prosperity is government regulations and women who are legitimately raped will not get pregnant and anything you want and Rush Limbaugh will believe it and broadcast it to 15 million willing believers.  

I prefer the Republican, Lincoln, who shares only the name with the current bunch of reprobates going by that name:  You can fool all the people some of the time; and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Amen, Mr. President.

The Calm: No Drama Obama

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Ryan Lizza, writing in The New Yorker explains why the strategy of the Obama team was high risk from the outset, and why Romney's "surge" is in a way, predictable.

What they did was to "front load" the campaign, with a ton of $ spent on attack ads in September to discredit Mitt Romney (not difficult), knowing there would be fewer dollars left at the end.  The same thing was done by Karl Rove to John Kerry, effectively.  The risk is that when Romney appears to be capable of rubbing two neurons together in the first debate, and when the Koch brothers start spending massively in October, the advantage will erode, and this may be the reason the advantage Obama had in the polls existed in the first place, and predictably would erode as Nov 6 approached.

So, it may not be the turning point was one poor performance in the first debate, but the tide was due to come in eventually.

That's grand strategy. 

The ground game is the worm's eye view and I'll be out there again, stepping around downed branches, this weekend.

Republican Response to Sandy: Give to Charity

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

When George W. Bush was asked what Americans could do to help, after Katrina swept through, he said, "Contribute to the Red Cross."  

This is, of course, the Republican response. Government is BAD. Don't even think about using the government. Use the private sector.  This notion was articulated by Ronald Reagan's famous quip, "The nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." 

So what we rely on are the churches and charity. That way we owe nothing to our fellow citizens. What is required of us is nothing. What we give is only what we want to give. Painless charity.

Mr. Romney today is organizing a charity relief for victims of Sandy. This shows how big hearted he is.  Heaven forbid he should mention the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the job, helping, restoring, responding.  We Republicans don't believe in government. We believe in charity.

At least, that's what today's Mitt is saying.

Wind swept New Hampshire

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 10.24.12

Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. This man must have too much time on his hands, or he is really gone around the bend.

A little of both.
They sent us home from work. The governor of New Hampshire told everyone to get off  the roads by 3 PM. Apparently not even health workers were exempt--word came down from the hospital, get out.

There's a big storm blowing up the East Coast and into the heartland Midwest. It's howling and it's threatening.  My father called that kind of thing, "Pathetic fallacy" which is what the storm in King Lear is,  when it reflects the storm in the king's mind. 

And now we have the end of this election approaching and there is a big storm blowing.  It's shaking the windows and rattling the walls,  as the new bard (Dylan) would say. 

And it all seems pretty appropriate somehow. Obama came in to office and just before he could be sworn in the storm hit.  He took office as 2 1/2 million jobs were lost in a year, the stock market collapsed, and along with it the prospects for retirement for many; a tsunami of  foreclosures swept over the land ; evictions exploded; General Motors and Chrysler careened toward the financial brink; banks went up in flames, even the venerable  Lehman Brothers; a Great Depression loomed like a brick wall toward which the entire country was hurtling and Obama had to steer this boat which could not be turned on dime. And that was just the home front: In Iraq things were going from bad to worse, and we still hadn't found Osma Bin Laden, and Afghanistan, which had once been conquered, was now fighting us like the Viet Cong, from behind rocks and crevices. Pakistan was no help, and in fact, turned out to be hiding Bin Laden.

As the editors of the New Yorker (from which the above paragraph is drawn) noted, the Onion 's headline was "Black Man Given Nation's Worse Job."

Or, as Maud would remind us, the best description was that Mr. Obama had been handed a "shit sandwich."

And it all raged and raged and the captain lashed himself to the mast and did not abandon ship.  He guided us through that storm. And today's storm somehow reminds me, not of Katrina, with the What Me Worry boy himself saying "Great Job, Brownie," but of the storm which swept the nation at the beginning of Mr. Obama's term, and now as we come full cycle, another storm. 

Let us hope, in Lincoln's words, "This, too, shall pass." 
And let us hope the captain will be  given his due.

Worm's Eye View

This weekend, I approached a house with my computer generated list in hand to ask whether or not the woman living there was planning on voting and how she was leaning.  There was an American flag flying from the front porch and a big van with the name of a painting company on it in the driveway.  The husband answered the door and when I asked about the list of voters I had, it had his wife's name and a name I thought was his, but it turned out to be his son's name. His wife was on the phone and his son, he told me, is in the Special Forces and he could only guess the son was in Afghanistan.  I asked which way he thought his wife was leaning. He laughed. "We're all voting for Obama," he said. I was more than a little surprised. He didn't fit my Obama profile. 
"But you own a small business," I said, pointing to his van in the driveway.  "I'd have thought you'd like the businessman, with the business experience."  
He laughed, "I don't believe that bullshit," he said. "He's not been in a business like me. I got five employees. We're doing fine now. It's not easy, but it's getting better."

Down the road from him, I walked up the driveway to another man who did not look promising. He was working on an engine in his driveway. Country music was blasting from a stereo. I don't know why, but the F150 pick up, the work clothes, my Malcolm Gladwell blink told me this was a guy who had grievances. 
He did. 
But not with Obama.
"You tell me who the man is who could have dug his way out of the mess he got handed in four years and I'd like to see him."
Then he added, "They gave him a shit sandwich, when he got in. I'd give him another four years to get past that."

We can only hope there are enough of these people out there, who are not swayed by the advertisements, the catchy slogans, the bandwagons and who can remember where we started, and we can hope they are annoyed enough to vote. 

The "Undecideds": Science vs Intuition Poli Sci 101

There are many ways to acquire knowledge.  

One of them is "polling."  When I was in college, I took a course in surveying public opinion and learned the statistics, limitations and difficulties of using standard questions to assess the opinions of other people.

I had another experience, outside of school, which revealed my own limitations in misreading people.  As an 18 year old, I started an age group swimming team, with a friend of mine, at a newly built community pool. We recruited kids from age 8 to 17 to swim the different strokes and relays required by the county swimming league with an eye toward, eventually, creating a team good enough to enter the least competitive division of the county league. 

We told the assembled kids, before each practice, stories about kids we had swum with, how they failed at first, persevered and ultimately triumphed. The kids looked at us blankly, and I could not see past their eyes. Their expressions were not blank, but, to me at least, they were unreadable. Were they thinking, "Oh, spare me the pep talk, coach.  This guy is just all about himself.  This guy is coaching this team because he needs an audience" or what?
We arranged a meet with another team which had been formed a few years earlier and was now in the county league.   This other team had been pretty well crushed in it's first two summers in the county league, not having won a single meet. We brought over our kids' times from the time trials we had run, and the other coach looked them over and smiled and agreed to swim us. Finally, he had a team his kids could beat.

The morning of the meet, our kids assembled on the far deck, and I stood near the starter's gun at the near deck. When the gun went off, starting the first race, something happened which astonished me: Our entire team, about seventy kids, leaped to their feet and roared.  I looked down the deck to my friend,  and he was as stunned as I, but he just shrugged. 

We crushed them.  Our kids swam times which were ten seconds better than they had done in time trials. Ten seconds in the water is a lot of distance. Eight year olds swam an entire 25 meters breathing only once.  Our kids were, in a word, psyched. 

I had misread the crowd. The other team's coach was not pleased. He thought we had lied to him. He thought we had brought him numbers which were phony, doctored to make our kids look slow and easy to beat. But we had collected and recorded the numbers honestly. What we had not been able to measure was what was in those kids' hearts.

Yesterday, I went door to door with my clipboard and pencil and computer sheets.  At one home  there was an Obama sign on the lawn but I had only one name in the house to ask for: the husband. I'd ask if he was going to vote. Yes. Was he leaning in any particular direction?  No, he said, looking me in the eye, smiling. "Oh, I saw the sign on your lawn."  He looked me in the eye, "That's my wife's sign. You asking about how she's going to vote or about how I'm going to vote?"  That went down on my sheet and into the computer as Mr. Deadeye, "Undecided."

Back at the office, I was told some people simply take the secret ballot seriously. You cannot be sure how he is going to vote. I may have misread the man.   But there I am, standing there in my Obama hat, and the guy says he hasn't decided, a week before the election. 

Now, maybe, he is like Maud's friend, a man who will go into the booth thinking he's going to vote for Romney and then he'll vote for Obama. Maybe, after all this, he really is undecided, as if he doesn't yet know enough about Romney and Obama. Anything's possible. He may be the long lost King of France.  But I don't think so.

That response, "undecided," seemed like a pretty clear statement to me. The guy is in his own house on a Saturday, and I've pulled him away from whatever he's doing. He doesn't want to engage in a political argument. He just wants to get rid of me. So, fine. But why can I not enter him as a Romney vote? It's clear he is not voting Obama, or he'd tell the guy in the Obama hat that. In fact, he might say he was voting Obama, just to get rid of me. 

People who came to the door, when I was not wearing my Obama hat, who were voting for Obama, would often say they intended to vote, but they left it there, no mention of who they would vote for. Then I'd slide my hand down from the back of my clipboard and the Obama sticker would show through, and they'd smile conspiratorially, almost as if they were admitting they smoked marijuana when they were kids, and maybe now and then, even now. "Oh, yes. I'm for Obama. My husband, too."

So, my intuition about the "undecided" voter  told me I was talking to a Romney voter, or at least not an Obama voter, but science demands more evidence than gut instinct. The question is, does my taking in unmeasured data, a look, a set of circumstances mislead me, or inform me beyond what one measure--what the person actually says--can tell us?

In Malcolm Gladwell's world, did I know in a Blink?

And if this is a problem at the street level, what do we make of our polls?

The professor will tell you, it's all in the numbers. If you sample enough voters, the voters you get misleading responses from will wash out among all those who are straightforward.

We can always hope.  During the election of 1864, General George McClellan, who had been the beloved commander of the union Army of the Potomac (before Lincoln fired him) was a handsome, charismatic man, who would ride down the ranks of his soldiers, waving his hat to the cheers of his troops. He ran against Abraham Lincoln on a peace now platform. The troops loved McClellan,  and they were weary in the extreme. They were bitter, more often defeated than victorious, and one had to ask, why would they vote for the cerebral Lincoln, with his stentorian,  high pitched voice and his top hat?  

But they did. Like that crowd of young swimmers, they had something inside they weren't showing. They voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln; they voted to push ahead with the war, despite all the hard times, to push ahead with the war, which was unfinished and in doubt, and they decided the election and the outcome of the war with  the ballot. 

Those men, who could march twenty miles through the day, then charge across a field with musket and bayonet, who could find strength beyond exhaustion,  were Americans of another time.  They were different from supersized Americans today, who do their fighting on computer games. They were tougher not just physically, but, I suspect, mentally and possibly, morally tougher. 

The Union army had suffered defeat after defeat, had incompetent generals, not just for one debate but for battle after battle. It took over three years to find Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, to get them into position to push the war to victory.  The troops tolerated a lot of disappointment, defeat, government ineptitude and misery, but they could see that Lincoln was pointing them in the right direction, away from a slave nation, away from a divided nation where aristocracy lived on plantations and the 99% lived around them in meager circumstances, away from a world where those who were winners felt no obligation to help those below them, away from a world of meanness and heedless greed.

Every soldier fought for his own reasons. Each voted for the same reason: To go forward.

The nation, as a whole, fought for only two reasons: Ending slavery and preserving the only democracy on earth, the last best hope of man, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. That idea had not been put into any government anywhere else on earth, at the time. The civil war tested whether or not the idea of democracy could endure.

At a White House reception, Lincoln walked up to the diminutive Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He stooped forward to shake her hand and said, "So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."

Lincoln knew, as he said in his 2nd inaugural address,  the war was fought for moral reasons, because of ideas.  One hundred and fifty years ago, our people were able to see through the gibberish with moral clarity. I'm hoping today's Americans still can.