I have no idea how many people even visit this site any more (besides Russ).  However, I have been posting my opinions to President-Elect Obama like crazy on Change.gov.  Suddenly, it occured to me (mere moments ago, in fact), that I should also post those comments here.  Well, I’m sorry that you have missed several of them that I now cannot remember (though the first two were just versions of my letter to Barack already posted on this site).  Here is the one I wrote today:

On Health Care Reform:

I believe this should be included in the economic stimulus package.  That may seem like over-reaching but this is a critical issue and it is the one Republicans will fight the hardest against– if you make adequate health care available to the rural South, the Republicans will lose their last stronghold in this country.  So, Health Care must pass when this new administration is at its strongest (during its first 100 days) and with the wide mandate the American people have given you to fix the economy.

I would like to see a radical change in health care, with the Federal Gov’t picking up all or most of the costs.  Individual employers would still facilitate the legistics of connecting people to their providers but then would be reimbursed by the Gov’t for all/most of the cost.  Employees would pay nothing.  The system would look effectively the same from the average person’s point of view: they would keep the exact same provider with the exact same services facilitated by their employer in the exact same way.  Except they will see more money in their paycheck.

As there is no additional cost to them, employers could then be expected to extend COBRAs indefinitely (or at least for a significant amount of time) until former employees found other work.  Chronically unemployed people could get their insurance directly from the State/County.  They would have access to all the same providers as we currently do but the local Gov’t would act much like our employers do.  As the sole purchaser of health insurance, the Fed could force costs down.

While, some of that would take time, where this would be an immediate stimulus for the economy is on the employer’s end.  Freed of the huge burden of health care costs, employers could spend that money on job creation, program development or expansion.  In fact, they could be mandated to do so (rather than on executive bonuses) for X amount of time (eg 24 months).

I think this could be sold to the American people: though it is a huge change, most of it occurs behind the scenes (ie health care functions exactly the same way on a day to day basis for most of us).  American’s like familiarity.  The change they will see will be the increased money in their checks and the increased health care benefits for the unemployed.  And they will understand the value of putting money in employer’s pockets.  In fact, big business would probably love the idea.

So, the only question is… can we pay for it?  Well, if you don’t change your mind on repealing Bush’s tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy, that would help.  But, I’m not an economist, so I’ll leave that up to you folks.

Below the fold, I have include a copy of the letter I will be sending to our future president.  It contains two long-standing suggestions I have for him.  I have no idea if he will ever see it but, at least now somebody will.  As I have not yet sent the letter, suggestions are welcome (though likely ignored).

Dear Sir:

I would like to congratulate you on a hard won and well earned victory.  I am more proud and hopeful than I could sufficiently say in this letter.  Simply put, I believe in you.

For this reason, I wanted to write you a letter and offer a couple of suggestions to you.  I know you are busy and I am sure you get many suggestions, so I appreciate any thought that you (or one of your aids) gives to these ideas.

When you are president, you will face the tremendous challenge of bringing the American people along with you as you try to transform this country.  Change is hard and we all often resist it.  If you hope to be successful, you will need the support of average Americans.  As such, here is my first suggestion:

Once in office, establish a Presidents Blog on the White House website.  Every week, post a video of you talking to all of us.  It needn’t be longer than 15-20 minutes.  Sometimes you will be at your desk in the Oval Office, other times you might be in the residence with Michelle or the children, and other times you might be talking to the camera while touring a disaster site or in the kitchen preparing a late night snack.  Some of these blogs would be humorous, some reflective, and some very serious. 

Your blogs would be all over YouTube and the nightly news and would be sent around the world.  They would serve as your version of FDR’s fireside chats.  When it came time to propose healthcare reform (or whatever), you could talk to Americans first, prepare people, reassure them and inoculate them against the inevitable attacks from your opponents.  If the American people believe that they have gotten to know you as a person, they will trust you and, if they trust you, they will follow you.

My second suggestion is a more complicated one because it tackles a complicated issue: education reform.  I work in one of the toughest middle schools in one of the toughest communities in California and I have learned a lot from my 9 years there.  A great deal of lip-service is given to this issue and some of the same old suggestions are mentioned (eg more pay and accountability for teachers).  However, if we are going to truly address this issue, we must address it systemically; we cannot fix our educational system without addressing its relationship to poverty, crime and access to healthcare.  I have thought about this issue for years and certainly do not have a comprehensive answer but I have a suggestion for a two-pronged expansion of the VISTA program that could be added to any plan:

The first prong would be to create an educational wing of VISTA.  This program would pay all or a portion of newly graduated students’ college loans (it would pay an increasing percentage based on time served) if they volunteer to serve in low income/at risk schools.  One of the problems I have seen is that there is a huge shortage of people to do the things that need to be done.  These volunteers could be teachers’ aides giving one-on-one attention in the classroom to students who are struggling.  In addition, they could help run after school programs, provide tutoring at school or in the home, or take the role of school counselor now that many schools can no longer afford to have one.  In my experience, many students are so far behind that their teachers cannot give them the individual attention they need to catch up.  They get discouraged and they act out.  If every student at my school who was academically behind had someone who had the time to make sure he/she understood the work (be it in class, after school or at home), it would make a significant difference for the whole school.  In addition to this one important role, the volunteers could also work closely with the PTA and other community programs to develop and implement projects designed to increase parental involvement in the school.

This leads me to my second prong: a locally based VISTA program.  If we are to strengthen schools, we must strengthen their surrounding communities.  The students at my school walk past fresh graffiti, broken windows and step over dirty condoms between classes; it is hard to respect your education when nobody else seems to.  However, people are understandably resistant to outsiders trying to “improve” their communities.  I would suggest a program that hires people on the most local level possible.  In other words, the national program would hire state coordinators who would in turn hire program managers in each city.  Those managers would then identify critical neighborhoods and hire people from those neighborhoods.  They would find somebody respected in that neighborhood, give that person some income, something positive to put on her/his resume, and a chance to help the neighborhood.  That person would be involved in planning projects and hiring neighbors for those projects.

This plan would bring employment to several members of an under-employed neighborhood.  It would also create investment in the projects the neighbor leaders developed; it seems to me it would be harder to continue littering, spray painting, or stealing if the programs designed to stop those things were being run by your uncle, former baby-sitter, best friend’s mother, etc.  I envision that the program would focus on three areas in each neighborhood: improved safety, beautification, and increased opportunity (for education and work).  In that last capacity, the neighbor leaders would work with the VISTA volunteers from their local schools to create cross-over programs, with the hopes of eventually replacing the volunteers with involved members of the neighborhood. Eventually, healthcare providers and a reformed criminal justice system could also have programs designed to enmesh with these existing ones. We need this sort of holistic approach if we are going to make headway on entrenched issues. 

Thank you so much for letting me share my ideas and hopes with you.  As I said earlier, I greatly appreciate any time you take considering my suggestions.  I share these ideas with you freely, without any expectation of acknowledgement or remuneration.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Remarkably, it appears that Sarah Palin is actually dumber than we thought.

I guess the fun just never ends.  Perhaps, she can run in 2012 on a platform of inviting the president of Africa to join NAFTA.

i want to give a tip of the hat to Scout Finch at DailyKos for finding this one.

what will they say about this election and why John McCain lost? 

Well, here is my answer (entirely unchanged from when I wrote it on October 19th):

I think the temptation over the immediate future will be to say it was the result of the “October Surprise” economic collapse.  However, with time, I believe this election cycle will be described as the perfect political storm.   In large part, I think this is true; the only way we could have gotten the massive, unequivocal wins we got (and elected our first black president) at this point in history is through a perfect storm of events.  WIth that in mind, here, in my opinion, are our top 10 (in chronological order):

1- The last 8 years and everything they represent; the scandals and hypocrisies summed up by Abramoff, Plame, the firing of the attnys, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Guantanamo, the imperial presidency, and on and on and on.

2- The Iraq War with its cost in lives, money and our international standing.

3- The netroots and how galvanized and organized they were after the 2004 loss (I’ll say more about them below).

4- The collapse of the housing bubble, which I differeniate from the banking collapse because, though they are obviously related, they both had a separate effect.

5- The rise of a young, handsome, eloquent and different presidential candidate in Barack Obama, who happened to be a community organizer and brought an entirely different way of doing things to this campaign.  His approach to politics was so far outside the norm for party insiders that neither of them (Hillary or McCain) who how to defend against it.  From his fundraising, to his fifty-state strategy, he dominated this entire race.

6- The fact that Hillary Clinton also chose this time to run, generating massive buzz for the Democratic ticket and cementing the idea that we are the party of change.

7- The long drawn out Democratic primary turned out to be critical.  Not only did it strengthen and prepare Obama for the Fall but, more importantly, it forced him to develop a ground game in almost every state, which was something he used to his fantastic advantage later.  And, most importanly, it aired all his dirty laundry before it could do any real damage. 

8- The Republicans were stuck with a candidate that NONE of them were very excited about.

9- In full panic mode, McCain chose Sarah Palin.  A decision that turned out to be by far his worst one but I will also say more about that later. 

10- The bank meltdown.  By this point, this crisis was really just the last nail in McCain’s coffin.  It was probably only the difference between a solid win and a blow out.

Of all of these events, I believe that, if there is one single thing to blame for McCain’s loss, it is his VP choice, not the economic crisis.  Had he chosen Pawlenty, he would have grudgingly gotten evangelicals behind him.  It is true, the base would not have been very excited and he may well have lost anyway.  However, he would have been able to continue doing what had worked all July– hammer Obama again and again on his lack of experience and celebrity status.  This might have continued to chip away at Obama’s lead.  If they had entered the debates with Obama slightly behind, he might have felt pressured and overreached during the debates.  Pawlenty would likely have done well against Biden in their debate.  Even the economic crisis might have been spun their direction if Pawlenty could show his economic experience as governor.  McCain still might not have won but this was the single decision that guaranteed he would not win.

Finally, a note about the netroots.  I cannot say enough about how important they have been since 2004.  I really believe that a small number of dedicated liberals gave a voice to the rest of us who have felt so disenfranchised for so long.  In a sense, the netroots served the purpose for us that church served for the right wing, it brought us together and gave us a sense of strength in numbers.  It taught us how to collectively wield the power we have had all along.  We won in 2006 and again this year because of the netroots.  I don’t want to overstate this but I really believe this is a real force with a real impact.  We would not have Howard Dean and we would not have Barack Obama without groups like the DailyKos.

BARACK OBAMA WINS!!!!!

CNN declares President Obama the winner at 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time exactly on November 4th, 2008.

For more info on how the night went (and how accurate I was), check out the newly named “Final Outcome” tab at the top of the page.  I will keep updating it as the last few races & CA ballot measures are decided.

According to Nate Silvers at FiveThirtyEight, there has been some tightening in the national polls after all, bringing Obama’s lead to about 5.4% on average.  As this matches almost perfectly my prediction on October 16th that “Obama’s lead will drop to about 5 points just before election day,” I would love to agree with him. 

However, I haven’t really seen the same tightening.  When I look at the last 7 days of polling (again 9 polls, although 4 of them done by CBS for some reason), I find Barack’s average lead to be 8.55, which is exactly in range with the last averages I did.  In fact, the average of those 3 sets of averages is 8.63.  So, the polls I look at find no change in Obama’s lead at all.

For the record, my polls have included: CBS, Pew, CNN/Opinion Research, FOX/Opinion Dynamics, NY Times, ARG, Diageo/Hotline, NBC/Wallstreet Journal, USA Today/Gallup, and many others.  In other words, all the big name polls, I believe.

So, why the difference?  I have no idea but I have to concede that I have nothing of the tracking capacity or head for stats that Nate does.  So, perhaps he has access to more studies than I do or he looks at variables I don’t.  Either way, I don’t think it’s worth debating because the national poll numbers aren’t that important.  State-by-state polling is much more important at this stage in the race and these polls are clearly showing there is now tightening in some state races.

Taking this tightening into account has caused me to scale back my prediction for Obama’s margin of victory from 364/174 to 353/185.  I shifted Missouri to the McCain column.  I think Indiana is probably out of reach but Arizona is now in the Indiana range.  Florida and North Carolina are also now less certain but I still include them in the Obama column because I think voter excitement and early voting are on his side.

So, my amended prediction for Tuesday:

Obama           353

McCain           185

For my full predictions, check out my “Final Predictions” tab at the top of the page.

Sorry, but not very…

As I listed last Wednesday, the 9 polls over the previous week had Obama leading by 7.77% on average.  In the week before that, he had lead by 8.45% on average.

Well, it would appear that the 7.77% i reported was disproportionately effected by the 1 point AP-GfK poll.  The 9 polls that came out over this past week give Obama the lead by an average of 9.625 points.

So, is the race tightening?  As best I can tell it is not.  Incidentally, this matches what folks like Markos and Nate are saying.  As I said last week, I’m surprised but folks appear to have settled in on their decisions.

I’ll be curious to see how the Obama ad tonight effects the polls.  My guess- not at all.

This is just some interesting trivia for you geeks out there:

During the Twentieth Century, there were only 3 presidents who won with less than 300 electoral votes:

1900   McKinley (R) 292 to Bryan 155

1916   Wilson (D) 277 to Huges 254

1976   Carter (D) 297 to Ford 240

During the same time period, there have also been 3 presidents who have gotten over 500 electorals:

1936   Roosevelt (D) 523 to Landon 8

1972   Nixon (R) 520 to McGovern 18

1984   Reagan (R) 525 to Mondale 13

I point this out just to say that we have gotten used to low victories and I think this serves as proof of how polarized our electorate has gotten in the last couple of decades.  In fact, Clinton’s 370 and 379 wins respectively were slightly below average.  14 of the 25 elections in the 20th Century saw victories above 400, while only 8 were in the 300 range.  So, Obama’s Clinton range victory will not be earth-shattering by the standards of the last 100 years but may be as good as it can get in this very divided country.

If he can pull off any portion of what he is promising, maybe Obama can have a breakout win in 2012.  It is worth pointing out that all 3 500+ wins were for 2nd terms.  Their first terms were:

Roosevelt  472

Nixon        301

Reagan      489

Chances are Obama’s going to beat Nixon’s first term victory, so who knows what 2012 brings.

Do you think I’m getting ahead of myself…

That’s right, it is exactly 10 days since the last debate and, as I had promise in two previous posts, here is my prediction for November 4th:

OBAMA       364

McCain       174

Obama will carry the Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, & Florida.  Yes, I give him Florida because the momentum has stalled both nationally and in Florida and there does not currently appear to be any real tightening in the race (much to my surprise).  Obama’s small lead in Florida has flatlined much like his larger national lead has. 

Of course, this could change by election day and Florida is the one state most likely to flip from blue to red.  In fact, here is my blue to red & red to blue flipping order:

Blue to Red                            Red to Blue

Florida                                   Indiana

Missouri                                North Dakota

Nevada                                  Montana

North Carolina

Ohio

I don’t think any other states have any chance of flipping at all.  By the way, I give NC a lower chance than Nevade because of the projected African American turnout, as already indicated by absentee ballots.

So, basically, I think Barack’s win victory could be as low as 316 to 222 or as high as 381 to 157.

I am currently predicting a gain of 7 Senate seats: Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Colorado, North Carolina, & Oregon, with either Alaska or Minnesota filling the 7th spot.

A House pick up of 25-30 seats, which is a huge increase from the last set of predictions I made.

Oh, and the Missouri governorship.

So there.

Anyone want to bet against me?

btw- I haven’t been following the state house/senate races closely enough to make any sort of accurate prediction in that regard, though I do know that about a dozen of them could switch parties.

The AP ran an article today by Liz Sidoti claiming that the presidential race has tightened to a dead heat, as evidenced by their new poll which showed Obama ahead by just 1 point (44% to 43%).  Sidoti went on to state that McCain has been gaining ground ever since the last debate, which she suggests he won.  She also states that his “Joe the Plumber” storyline has resonated with voters and is helping close the gap.

I was surprised by how much this story line existed outside of any narrative I was familiar with.   So, I decided to look at the latest polls myself.  When I last reported on the polls in my “Preemptive Post,” Obama had an average lead of 8.45% during the previous week of polling.  So, I ran the numbers for the 9 polls I found for the last 7 days and the average of those polls gave Obama a 7.77% lead.  The AP-GfK poll was the only one even close to a dead heat. In fact, 6 of the 9 polls had Obama leading by 8-14 points.

I was further reassured when I visited FiveThirtyEight and saw that Nate’s Super Tracker, “thinks that Obama is now no more than a half a point off his peak numbers.”  The fact that his .5% closely matches the .68%  difference I found between my two sets of polls, suggests that the race may be tightening (as I had thought it would) but not at an alarming rate.  If that rate of decline continues, Obama will lead by an average of 6 points on election day, which is again not far from my prediction of a 5 point lead.

In other words, don’t believe the spin; folks gotta sell papers.