imaginary family values presents
yesh omrim
a blog that reclines to the left
Summary page 30 of 36
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- 19 Feb 2004 — Here comes the Judge
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The Ten Commandments begins: “I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the domain of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). Some medieval commentators were bothered by this introduction. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for God to introduce Himself as the creator of the whole universe, instead?
No, it wouldn’t be.
Suppose you bought new Ford car, and after a few years driving it, you discover the owner’s manual in the glove compartment. Flipping through the manual, you come across a warning message: “Do not drive this car to any Chevrolet dealership.” If you would feel morally bound by this restriction, because it was imposed on you by the creator of your vehicle, then you might be qualified for a job as a medieval theologian. If not … you see the problem. Yeah, God created the universe, and now He doesn’t want me to light a fire on Saturday. Why should I care what He wants? This is where the Exodus comes in.
A few verses before the burning bush, “the Israelites were groaning from their slavery, and they cried out (vayiz`aku); their pleas from their slavery went up before God” (2:23). The root z-`-k only appears in one other place in the Chumash, namely, God’s description of the situation in Sodom: “The outcry (za`akat) of Sodom and Gomorrah is very great” (Genesis 18:20). In both places, people are not merely crying out from pain; they are crying out because they are being treated unjustly; in response, God executes judgment on their oppressors.
Through our cries, we acknowledged God’s role, not as Creator, but as Judge. Having done so, it would be hypocritical for us to say “OK, you were right to trash the Egyptians, thank you very much, but you shouldn’t punish us for not doing what you want.” The Israelites in the desert, even when they sinned, understood this principle. Except perhaps for the golden-calf incident, they never said, “We’re glad to be out of Egypt, but we’re going to defy God’s commandments anyway.” Whenever they rebelled against Moses, they talked about going back to Egypt—denying that salvation from Pharoah had given them any benefit.
- 18 Feb 2004 — Not a standards-compliant Web browser, but a remarkable imitation
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Typography freaks know that in a properly formatted block of text, the first paragraph should not be indented, but the first line of every subsequent paragraph should be. On the Web, you can describe this kind of formatting in CSS2 as follows:
p { text-indent: 0; } p + p { text-indent: 0.2in; }Unfortunately, IE doesn’t understand the
p + pselector. IE does allow you to insert Javascript into a stylesheet, so I can fake the selector like so:p { text-indent:expression( (this.previousSibling == null || this.previousSibling.tagName != "P") ? "0" : "0.2in" ); }Javascript within stylesheets is yet another Microsoft feature with a security flaw hidden inside it, but I promise I will only use my Web hacks for good, never for evil.
Well … hardly ever for evil.
inspired by Svend Tofte’s max-width hack via dive into mark b-links
- 18 Feb 2004 — Aspiring Presidential candidates, take note
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Post-mortems for the Dean camapaign can be found all over the Net, but I’d like to call your attention to this one, from a woman who volunteered for Dean in Georgia.
If I had to point fingers, I’d point one squarely at former campaign manager Joe Trippi. The guy was over his head and out of his league from day one. As proof of his ineptitude, the best presidential candidate I’ve seen in years, the guy with the most money and best early poll numbers, has failed to take more than 15% of the primary vote. It takes a special kind of incompetence to let that happen….
Until the launch of his campaign in early 2003, Dean was widely considered to be a New Democrat: a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Governor at home within the Third Way movement. Even his healthcare plan was designed to achieve consensus….
Yet, in spite of Dean’s solid mainstream credentials, Trippi choose to run him as an insurgent. Why? Because that was the only kind of campaign Joe Trippi knew how to run, and to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail….
For all their talk about listening to the “grassroots”, Dean for America was a black hole. In addition to volunteering here in Georgia, I worked on creative projects with other supporters from around the country. The two most common criticisms heard repeatedly from EVERYONE were that DfA was a) very difficult to reach and b) extremely unresponsive. There was no established means of communication even for State group coordinators, let alone the hundreds of creative pros who repeatedly attempted to donate time and expertise to the campaign, much of whose work product was superior to anything coming from TMS [Trippi McMahon & Squier, the media firm that produced Dean’s ads]. Since taking over from Trippi, Roy Neel has tried to open a few channels, but it’s all too little, too late.
…Knowing what I know now, every time I hear Joe Trippi say “this is your campaign”, or “you made this happen”, I want to hurl. Because I know how much better we could have done with capable leadership at the top and a little money at the bottom….
While Internet penetration in the US is around 65%, television penetration is closer to 98%. That’s 4% more than have telephones. Failure to master TV is still an unpardonable sin in politics. For his part, Trippi believed that money would fix everything…. But all the money in the world can’t make up for poorly conceived and sloppily placed TV ads, or for a campaign that is routinely blindsided by news coverage….
Collectively, the media is a big, hungry animal that lurches at the smell of blood. To blame them for airing the very public mistakes of the Dean campaign is somewhat akin to a matador blaming the bull for, you know, trying to hurt him or something…. If you can’t work the beast, then get out of the arena.
- 16 Feb 2004 — Reprinted without comment
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Excerpt from “Religion losing to youth sports on weekends” (link will rot), Boston Globe, 16 February 2004:
On a recent Sunday, Alice Gelwan, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, allowed her daughter to skip Hebrew school so she could take gymnastics lessons with a private teacher at Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex, an 80,000-square-foot indoor arena in Manhattan.
“This is much better,” said Gelwan, as she watched her daughter. “At Hebrew school, they give them a snack and go ramble about something that happened 500,000 years ago [sic]; but here, they are strengthening family ties, building friendships and self-esteem, and they know their parents are proud as can be.”
- 16 Feb 2004 — Cotton Mather should be rolling in his grave
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Here is the exact wording of an ABC News PrimeTime Poll, taken last week:
I’m going to ask about a few stories in the Bible…. The story about Moses parting the Red Sea so the Jews could escape from Egypt. Do you think that’s literally true, meaning it happened that way word-for-word; or do you think it’s meant as a lesson, but not to be taken literally?
Unfortunately, the poll results do not tell us how many people responded, “The Bible doesn’t say that Moses parted the Red Sea, you ignoramus.” Exodus 14:21 is quite clear:
Moses extended his hand over the sea, and the Eternal moved the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and He changed the sea to dry land; the waters were divided.
Oh, and Yam Suf, the Hebrew name that the Bible uses for the sea that the Jews crossed through, literally means “Sea of Reeds”. Whether or not you believe Exodus was written by God, it’s far from clear that the author was referring to the Red Sea.
Mark A. R. Kleiman calls this poll “profoundly depressing” because 64 percent of respondents (with a three-point margin of error) believe that story to be “literally true.” Personally, I’m profoundly depressed about how many people seem to revere the Bible without, y’know, reading it.
- 15 Feb 2004 — Janet Jackson’s breast: a Marxist analysis
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With all the outrage directed at Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Viacom, CBS, MTV, and the NFL, it’s a shame that nobody is directing their ire at the real enemy of decency, the root cause of the smut that pollutes our airwaves and degrades the morals of our youth. I refer, of course, to capitalism.
Imagine a typical man living in Europe a few centuries ago. If he wanted to get some beer, he would be lucky to have access to more than one neighborhood tavern. The professional guilds, the church, and the government all worked to restrict competition. As Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation, markets in preindustrial societies were always hemmed in to minimize their impact on traditional social forms. Furthermore, if this man wanted to see a forbidden part of a woman’s anatomy—say, her elbow—his best course of action would be to get married. Fornication might be entertaining for the two people involved, but the rest of the community had no incentive to permit it. The same institutions that protected the local tavern from ruinous competition strove to protect the local maidens from ruin.
Today, however, dozens of breweries, dairies, soda bottlers, and mineral-water vendors compete without restraint for the attention of every thirsty man and woman. The bourgeoisie does not invest in these companies for the sake of nourishing the public, but for yielding a certain rate of profit. Furthermore, it is now possible and socially acceptable for a man to acquire all the necessities of daily life—including, in many subcultures, sex—without binding himself in a vow of marriage.
We should not be surprised that in so many industries today, including television and professional sports, managers enlist sexual imagery to sell their products. To the extent that such marketing is effective, it would be irresponsible for them to do anything else. Marketing strategies that test the limits of public taste—and, by desensitizing the audience, expand those limits—are part of the inexorable logic of capitalism.
The only way to restore modesty to the public sphere is by destroying the economic system that rewards everything but modesty. Bluenoses of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your thongs!
- 12 Feb 2004 — “...to the least sinner of them all”
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(A week and a half ago, I gave the d’var Torah for the parsha at my synagogue for seudah shlishit. My talk was thrown together on Saturday afternoon, and I haven’t had a chance to write it up until now.)
The parsha of Bo gives two descriptions of the victims of the tenth plague. When Moses warns of the impending plague, he says “every first-born in the land of Egypt will die, from the first-born of Pharoah sitting on his throne to the first-born of the maidservant behind the millstone” (Exodus 11:5). But when the plague actually strikes, the text says “the Eternal struck every first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharoah sitting on his throne to the first-born of the prisoner in the pit” (12:29). The commentators, of course, notice this contrast and remark on it. I’d like to throw a third verse into the mix. Back when God is is still talking to Moses through the burning bush, He says: “[You will tell Pharoah that] I will kill your first-born son” (4:23). In this verse, the other Egyptians aren’t mentioned.
The story of the Exodus focuses on the relationship between Moses and Pharoah, but the ordinary Egyptians, like the ordinary Jews, were moral agents as well. How did the ordinary Egyptians exercise their own power of free will? Here are the examples that the text provides:
- Pharoah’s daughter takes pity on the infant Moses, rescues him, and hires a Hebrew nurse for him (2:5–10). There is no sign, however, that she intends for him to grow up as anything other than an Egyptian aristocrat.
- Moses, when he goes out among his fellow Jews, encounters “an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man” (2:11). The Midrash says this man was actually one of the Egyptian overseers, but the text does not bother to distinguish him as a particular kind of Egyptian.
- Before the plague of hail, “those who feared the Eternal’s word among Pharoah’s courtiers sheltered their servants and livestock indoors” (9:20) but did nothing to help the Jews.
- When Moses threatens the plague of locusts, the courtiers finally tell Pharoah, “let the men go and worship the Eternal, their god” (10:7). Pharoah offers to let only the men go (which, as the commentators observe, is exactly what the courtiers had suggested), and Moses turns him down. The courtiers do not object to this state of affairs.
- Finally, before the announcement of the tenth plague, the Jews are instructed to borrow silver and gold utensils from their Egyptian neighbors. The text goes on to say that “the Eternal gave favor to the [Jewish] nation in the eyes of the Egyptians, and the man Moses was also very great in the land of Egypt” (11:3). This could be read as a sign that the Egyptians are finally coming to respect the Jews. Nachmanides reads it this way: “the people of Egypt did not hate them on account of the plagues, but … said, ‘we are the wicked ones, doing violence, and it is obvious that God favors you.’” (The Egyptians were apparently foreshadowing Noam Chomsky.) On the other hand, if you interpret God’s “hardening of Pharoah’s heart” as a removal of Pharoah’s free will (the interpretation that Maimonides gives in Laws of Repentance), then it would be reasonable to say that the Egyptians, in their sudden favor for the Jews, are being similarly manipulated. After all, when God had given Abraham the prophecy that his children would be enslaved, He also said “in the end they shall go free with great wealth” (Genesis 15:14), and they had to get that wealth somehow.
- 12 Feb 2004 — Mysteries of Sisera’s mother
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The haftorah for last week’s parsha ends with the song of Deborah, celebrating her victory over Sisera. A few verses at the end (Judges 5:28–31) caught my attention. Here they are in the new JPS translation:
Through the window peered Sisera’s mother,
Behind the lattice she whined [gazed?]:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why so late the clatter of his wheels?
The wisest of her ladies give answer;
She, too, replies to herself:
“They must be dividing the spoil they have found:
A damsel or two for each man,
Spoil of dyed cloths for Sisera,
Spoil of embroidered cloths,
A couple of embroidered cloths
Round every neck as spoil.”
So may all your enemies perish, O Lord!…- In the original Hebrew, the spoil for each man is racham rachamatayim. The word racham, “female captive,” has the same root as rechem, “womb.” As we say in Feminism 101, these women are being reduced to a body part: the Metzudat David says “they are being called with insulting language by the name of the womb”. Somehow, I don’t think Sisera’s mother imagining these soldiers valuing these women for their ability to bear children. And yet NJPS translates “racham” as “damsel.” Does this word really have the same connotations to us as the original Hebrew word had to Deborah’s contemporaries? Or did the translators not have the, umm, cojones to use a more pungent Anglo-Saxon word instead?
- Sisera’s mother talks about Sisera getting dyed cloth as his spoil of war, after mentioning the men getting their, ahem, damsels. Does she think Sisera is getting both? Or does she think that even though Israelite women entirely worthy of being ravished by the invading army, her son is not one of the ravishers?
- A common trope, in poetry about war, is the women on the losing side crying over the death of their sons and husbands. But Deborah doesn’t envision Sisera’s mother bewailing her defeat. She envisions the mother imagining a victory over the Jews. Contrast this with the modern antisemite, who imagines defeat by the Jews, concocting theories of a Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings behind all the world’s ills. If, in the messianic age, the antisemites imagine themselves victorious over the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and therefore leave us the hell alone, it would be enough for us. “So may all your enemies perish, O Lord.”
- 10 Feb 2004 — Why we fight
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Excerpt from an article in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine, in which the reporter talks to an anonymous official of the Coalition Provisional Authority:
“Of course, we are an empire, but we are different,” he says. “Our empire is not defined by territorial ambitions but by ideas. A lot of ideas, like free trade, like democracy, like copyright laws.”
Copyright? Was my host really suggesting that we had carried out one of the largest land invasions since World War II to protect copyright laws?
“Well, yeah, our empire is about promoting free trade, it’s about promoting democracy and the ownership of ideas. Sure, it’s about McDonald’s and Microsoft and everything else. But the reality is we are not here only to do that. We are here to protect the security of America. That’s what the mission is about.
“That, and to help the Iraqi people build their own future,” he adds.
Oh. OK. Thanks for clearing that up, sir.
Proposed new antiwar slogan: “No blood for Microsoft!”
- 06 Feb 2004 — Vote early, vote three times
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For the past few centuries, political-science wonks have known that whenever more than two people are running for the same seat in an election, the way the vote is structured can have a decisive effect on the outcome. For example: In 1992, when Clinton and Perot were running against Bush the Elder, a voter might have preferred Perot to the other two candidates, but preferred Bush to Clinton. On the one hand, since Perot had no chance of winning a single state, and almost every state awarded all of its electors to whichever candidate got the most votes, our hypothetical Perot>Bush>Clinton fan would be tempted to vote “tactically” for Bush, rather than split the anti-Clinton vote. On the other hand, by voting for Perot, the voter would send a clear message to both parties. (If Perot hadn’t won 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, would Clinton have cared so much about reducing the deficit?) In a close three-person race, where each candidate does have a serious chance of winning a plurality of votes, the situation is even more volatile.
To ameliorate this problem, the wonks have proposed a variety of alternative voting schemes that let voters clearly express their preferences while still having an influence on the outcome. Since this year’s Democratic primary has four well-known candidates, I thought it might be interesting to see if different methods of counting the vote could lead to different winners. So I have constructed a Web page with three ballots for you to cast: one ballot that allows you to select only one candidate, one ballot that lets you check off every candidate that you approve of, and one ballot that lets you rank the candidates in whatever order you prefer them.
My trusty Web server will then give you the the results for three different kinds of election: the traditional first past the post system, the approval voting system, and the Condorcet method (specifically, what that page describes as “Copeland’s method”). There is no shortage of other proposals for tallying votes, but considering how much time I spent debugging the SQL for Copeland’s method, I think I’ll pass on trying to implement instant runoff voting, cumulative voting, or the Borda count.
The polls are open until 11:59 p.m., Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004, or until my server melts down, whichever comes first. Please vote now, and please tell your friends about this page.
P.S.: Yes, I know, a halfway-competent Perl hacker could write a script that pads the vote totals. If you want to prove that you’re that kind of 31337 h@x0r, don’t waste your time with my toy Web site, OK? Go bother the American Family Association or CNN.com or one of those other outfits that takes their online polls seriously.
P.P.S.: The Condorcet method is the only technique that’s immune to the “tactical voting” I described above. In an electorate that suffers from Condorcet’s paradox, the Condorcet method will not record any winner; the other methods will pick a winner that the majority of the voters don’t like. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, derived from Arrow’s impossibility theorem, proves that every voting method that chooses between three or more candidates must either have a dictator or be vulnerable to tactical voting.
- 04 Feb 2004 — Dead men running, addendum
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Digby has an article that makes the same point I did, and includes some actual figures from Clinton’s 1992 primary campaign.
At least we won’t have to go through another losing nominating process like the last time we had a large field. In 1992, they didn’t even hold the New Hampshire primary until the end of February, fergawdsake. Bigtime Loser Clinton won just 3 of his first 14 contests. In fact, he finished fourth four times, often behind “Uncommitted.”
[read the whole article for the numbers…]
As everyone keeps pointing out to me, that was a long, long time ago. Everything has changed completely. There is no point in even thinking about it, now.
Still, there is one important lesson to be learned from the past. By drawing out the primaries the way they did, the Democrats had far too much time to think about who they were voting for and they often voted for someone who wasn’t a winner. If Bill Clinton couldn’t win Iowa and New Hampshire, he had no business being the nominee. But, nobody told the voters or the press (who were fixated on Ross Perot at the time) so he managed to eke out the nomination when it was obvious that either Tom Harkin or Paul Tsongas should have run against George Bush.
It is a good thing we’ve learned from our mistakes. We won’t let that happen again.
- 03 Feb 2004 — Dead men running
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The dame’s hips were a liberal’s dream: small on the top, a robust middle class, and a popular base of support. She dropped into the armchair across from my desk. I poured her a shot of Jack Daniels. (After Iowa, the Gephardt boys had gone a little wild, and broke all my bottles of Scotch.)
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I asked.
The bell curve of her lower lip shook. “He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“Howard Dean.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Another plane crash?”
“I mean, his campaign.”
“Dead? Says who?”
“The news, the blogs … everyone. Their new campaign manager says they can keep going, even if they don’t win any states on Tuesday. But when I tell my friends that, they laugh at me and…” She downed the whiskey and choked back tears.
“Let me guess. They say something about Kool-Aid and dot-com bubbles, right?”
“Is it true? Am I crazy to hope?” Her lips left a mark on the tumbler, red as the 2003 Federal budget.
“Politics is a crazy business, sweetheart. Most of the national tracking polls, there’s a four-way statistical tie for second: Dean, Edwards, Clark, and Undecided. If Dean is a busted dot-com bubble, then Edwards is a factory on its way to China, and Clark is pinned down in his trench by enemy fire from all sides.”
“So that’s it? Two states have voted, and Senator Kerry’s big hair is going to lead the Democrats in November?”
I poured myself another glass. “Hard to say, sweetheart. On the one hand, Clinton skipped Iowa and lost New Hampshire in ’92, and he went on to be nominated. On the other hand, Clinton had a lot more time between New Hampshire and the next primary to connect with the voters and overcome his bad press. Your man’s only had a week.”
“Why is it different this year?”
“The Party decided to compress the schedule two years ago. They wanted to shut down the circular firing squad and pick a nominee as soon as possible, voters or not. Kennedy challenging Carter in ’76, Hart beating on Mondale in ’84—from Terry McAuliffe’s point of view, those guys were doing the Republicans’ job, making the front-runners defend themselves against someone in their own party instead of beating the drum against the Republicans.”
“But you said yourself, it took the voters a while to warm up to Clinton in the primaries, and he won two terms. And if the circular firing squad is such a bad thing, what have all the candidates been doing for the past year and a half?”
I refilled her glass. It was the best answer I could come up with.
- 29 Jan 2004 — Simply no pleasing some people
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Less than six weeks ago, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic created a new blog on TNR’s Web site, “Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe.” In the first message of that blog, Chait explained his motivation:
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for TNR that defended hatred of President Bush…. But recently I’m finding that Dean hatred is crowding out Bush hatred in my mental space. It’s not that I think Dean would be a worse president than Bush—he’d probably be better, although that’s extremely faint praise given that Bush is the worst president of the last 80 years. Bush is like the next-door neighbor who lets his dog poop on your lawn and his kid shoot bb’s at your house and who says something irritating to you every day on his way to work. Dean, on the other hand, is like the ne’er-do-well who’s dating your daughter. You realize the neighbor is a worse person than the boyfriend, but the boyfriend (and the frightening prospect that he’ll become your son-in-law) consumes more of your attention.
Now Chait is shutting down the blog. With all the news of Dean’s campaign woes, Chait’s phobia is receding…
…to be replaced by another one:First, obviously, Dean is finished as a potential nominee. He’s blown all his money, his campaign is in disarray, and he’s turned to an inside-the-Beltway Democrat to run his campaign. Dean may well play a potent spoiler role, but it’s almost impossible to see him winning. Even if he somehow pulls out a [plurality] of delegates and goes to a brokered nomination, the other candidates will pool their delegates and select a non-Dean.
Second, not only is Dean’s nomination dead, Deanism is dead as well. By “Deanism” I don’t mean Dean’s mix of issue positions, or his novel strategy of Internet organizing (which, I hope, will become a model for Democrats in the future). What I mean by Deanism is the belief that some combination of technology and Dean’s charisma can somehow suspend all the known laws of politics, that liberals can wish away unpleasant facts about the American electorate, and that the failure to do so represents cowardice, betrayal, and the absence of principle.
Finally, John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there’s anybody who could make Dean attractive, it’s Kerry. Kerry is a miserable candidate, bereft of political skills, and possessing of a record and a persona tailor-made for Karl Rove. The Republicans will merely have to say about Kerry what they said about Gore—that he wants to be on every side of every issue, that he’s culturally out of touch with mainstream America, that he’s a pompous bore—and this time the sale will be easier, because all these things are far more true of Kerry than of Gore.
- 27 Jan 2004 — The zeroth constituency
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Last week, I blogged about how Dean was the most electable candidate in the race, and the bastard went and lost an election. I still think that if he went head-to-head with Bush, he would do better than any other Democrat, but if he doesn’t win some primaries, such what-ifs don’t matter. There’s no medal for the guy who would have been the fastest runner if he hadn’t tripped over his shoelaces in the first lap.
No matter how this race turns out for Dean, though, he has revealed something very interesting about how to win elections in America.
According to conventional wisdom, in a race with party primaries followed by a general elections, candidates have two constituencies. First, they have the voters who care enough about their party to vote in the primaries. Second, they have the larger pool of voters who turn out for the general election. Primary voters are more likely to be from the party fringes than general-election voters, so candidates have to perform a balancing act. If they are too moderate in the primaries, then they won’t win over their first constituency. If they are too extreme in the general election, then they won’t win the general election. If they change their stances too noticeably between the primary and the general election, they will alienate voters from their first constituency who trusted them during the primary.
One of Dean’s admirers at The New Republic (Noam Scheiber?) observed that Dean had a novel solution to this problem: he campaigned with the style of a firebrand liberal, but his positions and record were firmly moderate. If he becomes the nominee, he can change his style to attract swing voters, but his hard-core supporters will be comforted by the consistency of his platform.
Dean’s collapse in the polls this month, and his disappointing show in Iowa, however, reveals a third constituency—or rather, a zeroth constituency: people who are willing to give their money and time to a Presidential candidate before the primaries even begin. Dean’s style built up an incredible base of support from the zeroth constituency. But once the Iowa caucus neared, he had to make himself attractive to the first constituency, the people who actually voted. Furthermore, in a primary election where all the candidates are trying to increase voter turnout, and where “electability” is on everyone’s mind, the first constituency looks more and more like the second one.
The Dean campaign seems to realize their strategic mistake. Dean has made the rounds of late-night TV shows, brought his wife to campaign events, and otherwise strived to look more mainstream; the hard-core Deaniacs are still devoted to him. Will that change be enough to carry him to the nomination? Stay tuned, true believers….
- 26 Jan 2004 — The four-ring circus
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The following table shows, for the four leading Democratic candidates, (a) which ones have certain qualities that, various pundits assure us, improve their chances of picking up votes in the primaries; (b) how they are faring in various tracking polls that were taken over January 21–23.
Clark Dean Edwards Kerry Veteran yes no no yes “Washington outsider” yes yes no no Southern yes no yes no No spending cap no yes no yes Did well in Iowa no no yes yes ARG (NH) 20 15 13 34 Zogby (NH) 14 22 7 22 Rasmussen (national) 14 14 15 31 (“No spending cap” is important because it means that Dean and Kerry, who have refused the strings that come with government campaign finance, can spend as much money as they can raise in the primary season, which means they might be buying 30-second commercials after Clark and Edwards have run into the spending caps.)
If you’re a Democratic voter, depending on how much weight you attach to various qualities in a candidate—and these qualities don’t have any mapping onto a “liberal/moderate” axis—you could reasonably prefer these four candidates in any order. So even thought Kerry is likely to win the NH primary, that leaves three other candidates competing to become the anti-Kerry. Who will attract the majority of the voters who don’t go for Kerry? As more candidates drop out of the race, who will their supporters gravitate toward, and will this process lead to someone other than Kerry being nominated? If only some mad scientist could stitch together a Superdemocrat with Dean’s grass-roots organizing skill, Clark’s military credentials, and Edwards’s economic populism….
This mess does have one silver lining: as long as the political press is covering how the Democrats are jockeying for position, there isn’t so much space left over for Bush’s campaign maneuvers—and as long as Bush’s team isn’t sure who they’ll be running against in the fall, it’s harder for them to put out messages tailored to undermine that person.
tracking polls via Mark Kleiman