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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (80743)	10/26/2004 12:37:28 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793931

POWERLINE - History in the making St. Cloud, Minnesota is in the heart of Gopher state Bush country, 60 miles west of the Twin Cities. It is also the home of St. Cloud State University, a zany outpost of political correctness. Correspondent Gary Gross writes from St. Cloud: I just stopped at St. Cloud's Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters and was startled to find out that their office had handed out 20,000-plus BC '04 yardsigns to greater St. Cloud area residents, something that's never even been approached in years past. According to the lady at the BC'04 office, this blows away the previous record by thousands. I also signed up to go doorknocking tomorrow night and to drive voters to the polls on election day. The excitement in the office is high and they don't have enough workers to knock on doors of known Bush supporters this week. Although we are only a week from election day, events at St. Cloud State are overshadowing the political news in St. Cloud. At homecoming festivities this past Thursday, Fue Khang of Minneapolis was named homecoming queen -- the first male homecoming queen in the school's history. (See "To boldly go where no man has gone before" by our friend King Banaian, St. Cloud State economics department chairman.) Gross adds: By now, you've heard about the guy elected homecoming queen at St. Cloud State. My best friend's wife was quoted in the St. Cloud Times' Friday edition. This morning, the New York Times called and talked with her. The uproar over this event is huge and one can sense the uproar over this is changing votes daily. The bottom line to all this is that, based on this information, there isn't a snowball's prayer in hell that Kerry wins Minnesota. Is it possible that St. Cloud State's first gender-bending homecoming queen could boost President Bush's prospects of carrying Minnesota? The theory carries great appeal to those of us in need of karmic relief. Posted by The Big Trunk at 10:22 PM \| Permalink \| TrackBack (2) Israel too is about to make a fateful decision The Israeli Knesset will vote today on whether to accept Prime Minister Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. The issue is an agonizingly difficult one (Sharon has called his decision the most difficult of his life) and the debate could hardly be acriminious. The editors of the Jerusalem Post, who have relunctantly endorsed Sharon's plan, issue a plea that the result of the Knesset vote be respected. Posted by deacon at 10:01 PM \| Permalink \| TrackBack (1) Lesson learned Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post recalls "one of the most egregious failures in US military history" -- the murder by Hezbollah terrorists of 241 marines in the barracks at the Beirut airport on October 23, 1983. Glick is hardly one to look at the world through rose colored glasses. However, she finds it "hard not to be amazed by the radical transformation in thinking that the US military has undergone in the past 10-15 years." Glick captures a key part of that thinking in her concluding paragraph: Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe. Posted by deacon at 09:34 PM \| Permalink \| TrackBack (0) Back to the future? As Rocket Man has noted, with eight days left until the election we are in essentially the same place as at the corresponding time four years ago, with George W. Bush holding slight lead of maybe three percentage points over his Democratic rival. We know that four years ago the Democrat ran ahead of his poll numbers (although not much ahead if one takes into account the margin of error), finishing one percentage point better than Bush in the popular. How likely is it that this will happen again? The answer depends on why Gore closed so well in 2000. One theory credits the Democrats' "ground game." On this account, the Dems did a much better job of getting out their vote than the Republicans did. If this is true, then it could bode well for Kerry, although the Republicans seemed to win the ground game in 2002. However, there were other forces at work at 2000 that I believe also help explain the Gore bounce. One was the evaporation of Nader's support. I expect that this will occur again this year, but Nader's poll numbers are so low right now that this phenomenon would help Kerry much less than it helped Gore. Another factor in 2000 was the drunk driving story. I doubt that the Democrats can find a last minute stink bomb that will seriously hurt Bush this time, especially given the fact that he is such a known quantity now. This leads to the final factor that I believe played a role in 2000 -- the last minute tendency of voters to opt for the "devil they know" rather than the candidate calling for a major change. The conventional wisdom is that the undecided vote tends to break against the incumbent. However, my observation is that, in presidential elections, the undecideds tend to vote against major change. This has happened consistently in close elections -- 1968, 1976 (both of which became close as a result), and 2000. It did not happen when voters opted for change in 1980 and 1992. But in these elections the incumbent was far more unpopular than President Bush is today. Yet even in 1980 and 1992, polls showed a narrowing of the gap in the latter stages of the race, albeit one that could not be sustained. If anything, the tendency to stay with the known quantity should be more powerful this year, given the war against terrorism. Accordingly, although one can make the case for it, I don't expect a repeat of 2000.