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Reading the Presidential Tea Leaves
Do the polls have you worried? Are you fretting about the direction of the country? If so, take a deeeeeep breath and exhale and say to yourself over and over again the word “February.”
Because in February of 2016 this what you were hearing:
SANDERS ERASES CLINTON LEAD! RUBIO BEST BET IN NOVEMBER! BERNIE LEADS INDEPENDENTS OVER KASICH!
Mmmmm, ok.
How was February 2012?
ROMNEY IN DEAD HEAT WITH OBAMA! SANTORUM “SURGING” IN OHIO!
Yeah. That sounds right. Wanna trip back to 2008?
McCAIN BEATS BOTH CLINTON AND OBAMA IN FLORIDA! CLINTON TO CRUISE OVER OBAMA IN OHIO & PENNSYLVANIA! ABC/WaPOST: RUDY GULIANI BEATS McCAIN IN TRUST, LEADERSHIP AND UNDERSTANDING VOTERS!
Uh, huh. It’s science.
The bottom line? They don’t know crap. You don’t know crap. I don’t know crap. It’s all crap.
Published in Elections
So: “Its all crap, so pay $5.00 to fling poo in an orderly fashion at each other?”
Yah! Bernie can still do it. Democratic Socialism here we come. Peoples Revolution! And here I was worried that he was doomed. But now I have hope. Hope that God can work through him like he did through Cyrus the Great to enact his will in the world.
I have a daughter who until recently was a reporter in Washington D.C. where she was expected to turn in three articles every single day. There are hundreds of reporters out there all trying to write something that will get the editor’s attention and place them a bit higher on the pay scale. Has anyone ever noticed the number of stories you read that are simply rewrites from the Washington Post or the NY Times? Nothing beats a political horse race.
Iowa gave a Dem candidates a thorough review and concluded that Biden is not good enough. The headline should be national polls pushed false Biden story during impeachment, but actual votes tell the truth. OK. that is kinda long.
Damn straight. Orderly is the key word there. It’s the civil thing to do.
Rich Mullins said “God knows – The rest of us are just guessing.”
If Bernie wins it’s likely to be more like the beginning of the book of Amos.
William Goldman in his great book on Hollywood screenwriting, “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, famously said “Nobody knows anything . . . Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.”
True there. True here.
We’ll probably win this year. Then more of these mindless kids become old enough to vote and the Dems have years to come up with someone to lead them. More of us who lived through most of the 20th century will be gone. We better undo our schools over the next four years or it can’t end well. End is the key word; these kids aren’t just a new wave of back and forth. Imagine if we hadn’t defeated the Nazi’s for the German’s. Left wing totalitarianism won’t be like them, but they show how bizzare it can become. It’ll be media manages and new giants enjoying falling costs over unimaginable output and clever new themes and thrusts, but it won’t be republican, it won’t be decentralized and it won’t end the way we would like nor be reversible in ways we might expect.
“We march to the drum of a different plumber here at Ricochet.”
If I don’t know then how do I know that it’s crap?
Well, Crap!
Aroma?
Crappie
Its Scottish accent or lack thereof.
You mean like Nixon’s plumbers?
Nixon’s Liquid Plumbers – a Broadway retrospective.
Well Ricochet used to have a connection (@camerongray) to one of Nixon’s plumbers.
I beg to differ. I know a lot about crap! In fact, I’m full of it!
By the way. That last paragraph is much better if read by Mel Brooks in a Yiddish accent.
I say, when pundits pontificate, there should be a “box score” on the screen just like in sports. Predictions: 347, #Correct: 102, Accuracy .294.
Editor’s note: Due to a foreign accent the word crap should be pronounced clap. As in “he has the clap“.
Thank you for your lack of attention.
The upside of the Interwebs thingy is more divergent voices can be heard that weren’t getting out in the days of the three broadcast networks, the 1-2 major dailies per city and the two weekly news magazines.
The downside of the Interwebs thingy is there’s more room for voices with nothing new to say, but that need to say something to fill space on their website, especially since the immediate gratification response demands new content 24/7/365, or 366 this year. So even if you have nothing new to say, you’re obligated to say something 3-4 times per day, and the result is the same ‘hot take’ gets repeated over and over again, or — worse! — inane ideas that would have never gone past a handful of people in the past get transmitted to the world. Sure it’s moronic, but it’s new content and that’s what’s important.
Or old voices that repeat the same idiocy they were spouting for decades. Tonight I ran into folks on Twitter that insisted that Reagan fired air traffic controllers during a legal strike and the Swift boaters lied because John Kerry had all those awards. (The latter didn’t quite explain how Kerry’s Purple Heart made him a more trusted source than the guy with the Congressional Medal of Honor that made the charge but that’s all details. Someone on a website said it was debunked, damnit!)
the 2012 election was closer when you review in hindsight.
first, let’s remember that team Obama violated campaign election rules and ballot fraud and harvesting.
Despite foul play, Obama defeated Romney 51-48.
Florida was a dead heat almost – Romney probably won.
everyone learned the wrong lessons from 2012.
gop was too pessimistic.
Dems were too optimistic.
On labor day, 2008, McCain was leading Obama by 4 to 5 points.
No. The pollsters are up to their old games trying to foster opinion instead of reflecting it.
I actually respect Gallup for getting out of most political polling because they couldn’t maintain accuracy due to the arrival of cellphones and the inability to get accurate readings on short-term public sentiment. The other companies simply ramp up the sample sizes and tweak the metrics of the respondents to get the results they want, when their sponsors are seeking a specific result (and in political races, it used to be at the very least, the polling firms tried to be accurate with the last poll before an election, because that’s the one that would be measured against the final results. You don’t even really see that anymore, and there’s zero accountability for bad pre-election polling, based on the problems polling voters in the cellphone era).
McCain took a dive in a late round and threw the fight. Maverick!
I don’t know if he actually threw it as much as he was such a pompous/clueless arse that — even after The New York Times had libeled him earlier in the year along with the women he was alleged to have had an affair with — Maverick still thought he was going to get fawning press coverage for his statesmanship in suspending his campaign due to the mortgage crisis.
He really was that addicted to fawning media coverage, to the point that even after losing to Obama in 2008, he immediately began trying to curry their favor again when the next Congress began in 2009 (daughter actually seems to have caught on a little bit to the game, possibly because she’s married to Ben Domenesch, who the #NeverTrump people see as a pro-Trump shill because of his Federalist website).