Putting Your Money Where Your Political Bets Are
By Dana Milbank
Sunday, December 21, 2003; Page A10
Think the Democrats are a good bet to beat President Bush next year? Well, put your money where your mouth is.
Online betting services called "trading exchanges" have opened up shop for the 2004 elections. And, depending on your political hunches, there may be bargains to be found.
A 70-cent bet on Bush winning reelection will pay $1 if he is victorious in November, according to the recent line at Tradesports.com, an online exchange based in Ireland. That means a 30-cent bet on the Democratic nominee -- to be chosen later -- will get you $1 if Bush falls. Since trading began, bets on Bush have ranged from 58 cents to 73 cents.
If you can't wait until November, a 51-cent bet will get you $1 if Howard Dean wins the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt is trading at 42 cents, followed by Sen. John Kerry, who at 1.2 cents has junk-bond status.
The picture for the overall Democratic nomination is much the same. The Iowa Electronic Markets, a futures exchange, has Dean at 68 cents on the dollar, Wesley Clark at 11 cents, Gephardt at 8 cents, Hillary Clinton at 5 cents, Kerry at 3 cents and Joe Lieberman at a penny.
Some political junkies think they have found hidden bargains in online gambling. Bethesda businessman Tom Skinner recommends buying Bush to win Arkansas at 65 cents and West Virginia at 63 cents, but selling Bush at an overpriced 86 cents in Arizona and 73 cents in New Mexico.
Dean, Bush Share Yale Legacy
Discussing his foreign policy last week, Dean said he owes his status as a "multilateralist" to his studies at Yale. He cited his "studies under what I consider to be the best history department in the United States, Yale University, people like John Morton Blum, Gaddis Smith -- there are significant numbers, as you know. And that shaped my view pretty much as a multilateralist."
Slate's Will Saletan was not impressed with this credential. "I can see the ad," he wrote. "Left half of the screen: Bush. Won Two Wars. Right half: Dean. Studied at Yale."
There's another problem with Dean's argument. Another man who attended Yale about the same time also studied history under both Blum and Smith: President Bush. And he left with a decidedly different view of foreign policy. "I remember Professor Blum, and I still recall his dedication and high standards of learning," Bush said in a 2001 commencement address at Yale.
Dean may not be original in claiming the Yale history department as inspiration, but he apparently got better grades than Bush. U.S. News & World Report this past week obtained a copy of Dean's Yale transcript, which showed the future physician receiving seven "honors" grades, 17 "high passes" and 14 "passes." And it seems Dean was studying more than multilateralism at Yale. His course list included "Marxism," "Existentialism," "International Communism" and "Marxist Theory."
Belittling and Paying Pollsters
Speaking of Bush-Dean similarities, both candidates have a tendency to disavow any reliance on polls -- even as they pay pollsters six-figure sums to provide these supposedly worthless surveys.
"I remain skeptical about polls," Bush has said. "I don't run my administration based upon polls and focus groups." But his pollsters have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Republican National Committee.
Similarly, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi told Time magazine's Joe Klein: "We've used polling differently from every other campaign I've been involved with. We didn't use it at all until a few months ago. When Gephardt spent two weeks banging us on TV in Iowa, we wanted to see if that hurt. And I think we've done one focus group. . . . Anyway, we've got better ways to find out what people think."
According to its financial disclosures, the Dean campaign has made seven payments totaling $113,205 to the polling firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin & Associates, starting with $35,000 in May.
'Fantastic Irony' From Australia
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, whose campaign for the Democratic nomination has been less than spectacular, picked up the crucial endorsement of . . . President Bush.
This intriguing news comes from the Thursday edition of the Australian, a newspaper Down Under. "When US President George W. Bush visited Canberra in October, he told his friend [Prime Minister] John Howard that the Democratic candidate who, if he won the primaries, would be his most formidable opponent in the 2004 presidential election was Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman," the newspaper reported. "What a fantastic irony it would be if the capture of Saddam Hussein this week led to the derailing of former Vermont governor Howard Dean's anti-war candidacy and Bush had to face the formidable Lieberman in November."
Fantastic indeed.
RNC Chairmen Sat Here
The Lee Atwater Chair in American Politics has been awarded to Ed Gillespie -- literally. Gillespie, the new Republican national chairman, was at the Barbour Griffith & Rogers Christmas party recently and noticed a plaque on the back of partner Ed Rogers's chair saying it had been occupied by RNC chairmen: Atwater, from 1989 until his death in 1991, and Haley Barbour, from 1993 to 1997. Rogers agreed to lend Gillespie his chair, presumably making him an upstanding guy.
Quotable
"Here's the Bottom Line: Caucus and primary voters decide late." |
