Not a Big Truck

Just want to follow up on the electoral pool (which I most clearly didn’t win).

If we use electoral votes as the criteria: RedLine wins, unless Missouri goes for Obama (in which case Ying wins)

If we use state as the criteria: RedLine wins, unless Nebraska second district goes for Obama (in which case WashintonRocks wins) or if Missouri goes for Obama (in which case Ying wins)

It’s roughly 9:40pm Eastern Time…the election is basically over since Ohio and New Mexico (and Pennsylvania) have been called for Obama. But a quick visit to www.barackobama.com directs you to a page begging you to call voters in swing states. Someone tell these guys its over

(Well, at least they realize it’s election day, doesn’t look like McCain’s site has changed other than a small link to a find your polling place part of the site).

Starting after the election, we will be having a cabinet pool. More information will come out in the coming days but here’s an article on the subject to whet your appetite.

Jeffery Goldberg has a great article out in the Atlantic about the TSA.  Unlike some other critiques of the TSA, it’s not hysterical, and focuses mostly on the agencies most obvious flaws.

My favorite quote:

On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go.

I’ve found it useful to think about candidates policy proposals during an election as falling into a given location on a 2×2 matrix:

Any policy proposal can be catagorized by how sound it is, in terms of being effective policy, and how politically popular it is.

I’ve been considering this framework for a bit but am not sure whether it is accurate or significant. Some initial observations:

- Candidates will try to give themselves credit for their positions on which there is a consensus while making opponent’s proposals seem elitist.

- Social issues do not solve any policy problems and can only be judged by whether or not they are politically popular.

Saw this gem on Ben Smith’s blog over at Politico and thought it was good enough to repost here:

Sen. John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser cites a steamy romance 50 years ago with a Brazilian babe among the things that illustrate the candidate’s decades-long interest in Latin America.

Speaking at a panel discussion Friday on the next U.S. president’s Latin American policy, McCain advisor Richard Fontaine started out by mentioning an old Brazilian flame of McCain’s, who recently emerged in the press.

”Talking a little about his personal experience, he was famously born in Panama and has traveled all over the hemisphere for many years,” Fontaine said. “In fact, I saw, I guess it was last week, that his old girlfriend in Brazil has been found from his early days when he was in the Navy and was interviewed. She’s a somewhat older woman now than she was then, but it sorta speaks to the long experience he has had in the region — in the most positive terms.”

From Real Clear Politics:
North Carolina (15) 46.8 46.5 Obama +0.3

My favorite clip:

Watch CBS Videos Online

So the hype in the media lately is that Obama has fallen behind in the polls and that McCain is the clear front runner. In terms of nationwide, popular vote opinion polls, this seems to be the case. However, if there’s one thing we learned in the primary season (see, for example, Nevada and Texas), it’s that the Obama campaign knows that winning involves winning by the rules, and the rules don’t declare the popular vote winner the election winner. A look at the map over at Real Clear Politics shows that, assuming state-by-state polls can accurately predict winners (and many are within margins of error), Obama would win the election if it were held today (even without Virginia which is currently listed as a “tie”).

The Obama campaign knows that it’s the electoral votes that will win the election, and given their track record I would assume they also know how many it takes to win: 269.  Since democrats control state delegations in the house 26-21 (with 3 split) Obama would only need to 269 electoral votes to win. 

There are a couple plausible 269-269 situations (and I’d bet money the Obama campaign knows what they are):

- Obama wins Kerry’s states, plus Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada

- Obama wins Kerry’s states, minus New Hampshire, plus Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico OR Nevada

- Less plausibly, Obama wins Kerry’s states, minus MIchegan, plus Iowa, Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico OR Nevada

The more intersting 269-269 situation would come in the Senate, where Joe Lieberman would get to select the Vice President.

One would expect to find a biography of the Vice Presidential candidate and information about her qualifications if one clicks on the “who is Sarah Palin” link from the McCain campaign website. Alas, the entire content of that page is Gov. Palin’s speach from the Republican Convention.  But, I guess that’s all the information the campaign has to go on, given their vetting process.  We’ll just take her word for it.