Mickey Kaus argues George W. Bush destroyed a coalition that didn't have to fall apart. But Mickey, Reagan's choice of Bush Sr. as VP set up W. to win and wreck what Reagan had built. We are now in the final year of George W "Wrecking Ball" Bush.
The Reagan Coalition didn't die of natural causes: It's now steel-vault CW that the tripartite Reagan Coalition (national security conservatives, social conservatives, economic conservatives) has sundered. There's a tendency to portray this as some sort of inevitable process, a working-out of an ideological dialiectic. Hence Fred Thompson was just a fool to run on a Reaganite platform--the old coalition doesn't exist and can't exist.
There is at least one sense in which the coalition was a victim of its own success: by successfully pursuing elimination of the welfare (AFDC) entitlement, the Gingrich Republicans removed a major reason for public distrust of liberal "affirmative government." But that merely meant the R.C. was fighting an increasingly unfavorable battle against Democrats who wanted the non-welfare welfare state to expand (i.e., to provide health care). It didn't mean the Coalition had fractured.
It took President Bush to accomplish the latter, through two willful decisions: a) the decision to invade Iraq and b) the decision to pursue an ambitious immigration reform that included mass legalization. The former decision discredited Republicans and cost them the support of conservative realists. The latter split businessmen and libertarians from both social and law-and-order conservatives. Neither decision was in any way inevitable. To explain them, the internal dialectic of the Bush family (effectively described in Jacob Weisberg's new book) is more useful than any grander diagram of political or social tensions. [But the business wing of the GOP would have been mad if Bush had opposed the immigrant legalization "reform"--ed. Bush didn't have to make a big issue of immigration at all. And it wouldn't have been one if he hadn't. A few stronger border-security measures to placate the base and the whole dilemma would easily have been kicked past his term in office. The real demand for "comprehensive reform" came from intellectuals, ethnic interests and political strategists who saw a transformative potential in winning the Latino vote. Like Iraq, it was a war of choice. In the event, it turned out businesses didn't care nearly as much about it as Karl Rove, John McCain and Tamar Jacoby. Bush was reduced to urging businessmen to lobby for his plan.]
Bush is a large part of the problem. But he had a lot of help on Iraq and immigration from the neocons. At this point we need to get the neoconservatives out of power. A victory by a Republican aligned with the neocons would be a disaster.
On immigration and Iraq McCain looks like the worst choice. Hillary would probably be better on Iraq and probably won't be any worse than McCain on immigration and might even be better. Where does Romney stand vis a vis the neocons? I do not see any big neocons supporting him. But I'm not watching him closely enough to know for sure.
Update: McCain strongly supports the same positions which tore apart the Reagan Coalition when Bush supported those positions. If McCain wins the Republican nomination the lack of support for McCain from key elements of the Republican base could assure Hillary a victory in the general election. But while Romney won't alienate the Republican base on these issues his Mormon beliefs will keep many fundamenalist Christians home on election day. The Republicans might just manage to put Hillary in the White House.
Bush is a disaster for the Republican Party.
Facing the most difficult political environment since they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans begin the final two months of the midterm campaign in growing danger of losing the House while fighting to preserve at best a slim majority in the Senate, according to strategists and officials in both parties.
Over the summer, the political battlefield has expanded well beyond the roughly 20 GOP House seats originally thought to be vulnerable. Now some Republicans concede there may be almost twice as many districts from which Democrats could wrest the 15 additional seats they need to take control.
President Bush's low approval ratings, the sharp divisions over the war in Iraq, dissatisfaction with Congress, and economic anxiety caused by high gasoline prices and stagnant wages have alienated independent voters, energized the Democratic base and thrown once-safe Republican incumbents on the defensive.
Go back to when Bush first took office in 2001 and consider decisions he could have made to avoid damaging Republican popularity with the electorate.
First off, Bush could have passed on invading Iraq as colossal waste of time, money, lives, security, and US influence in the world. Iraq would have pumped more oil with Saddam Hussein firmly in control and the US could have allowed him to up production. This would have slightly reduced the run-up in oil prices.
Second, could have cracked down on illegal immigration and supported a reduction in legal immigration - especially of the less skilled. That would have reduced housing costs, improved wages for the lower classes, and even reduced domestic oil demand. Plus, the reduction in low skilled low wage immigrants would have reduced pressures on state and local governments to pay for the services and prisons to deal with the immigrants.
Lower class people hardest hit by immigration would have been far more supportive of the Republicans if the Republicans had come down on firmly on their side.
Bush also could have formulated a more aggressive energy policy designed to reduce demand for oil from Muslim oil sheikdoms. Conservation measures and greater funding for research and development into alternative energy sources would have positioned the Republican party as working to reduce our need to buy increasingly expensive oil.
Republicans, your leader's decisions have shafted the party.
Mr. Rove remains a dominant adviser to President Bush, administration officials say. But outside the White House, as Mr. Bush’s popularity has waned, and as questions have arisen among Republicans about the White House’s political acumen, the party’s candidates are going their own way in this difficult election season far more than they have in any other campaign Mr. Rove has overseen.
Some are disregarding Mr. Rove’s advice, despite his reputation as the nation’s premier strategist. They are criticizing Mr. Bush or his policies. They are avoiding public events with the president and Mr. Rove.
Influential conservative commentators have openly broken with the White House, calling into question the continued enthusiasm of evangelicals, economic conservatives and other groups that Mr. Rove has counted on to win elections. Some Republicans are ignoring Mr. Rove’s efforts to hold the party together on issues like immigration and Iraq.
Rove is spending big time on Republican get-out-the-vote campaigns. That'll help the Repubs.
Bush could spend the next 2 years under investigations by Democrat-controlled Congressional committees.
Mr. Rove has warned associates that a Democratic takeover in Congress would mean an end to Mr. Bush’s legislative hopes and invite two years of potentially crippling investigations into the administration.
Yet Bush refuses to shift position on immigration. He refuses to acknowledge the obvious on Iraq. Maybe he (and, more importantly, the nation) needs having him whacked up side the head by Congress for a couple of years.
My nightmare scenario is that Bush will make an immigration deal with a Democrat-controlled Congress and bring on a massive wave of immigration that makes the current problems small by comparison. He'd be willing to do it. I think the Democrats in Congress would too. What would stop them? Popular opinion? I figure they think they can get away with ignoring it.
One policy the Democrats would push through is a big increase in the minimum wage. That would reduce the demand for low skilled Hispanic immigrants. I think the Democrats should hike the minimum wage to $12 per hour. They could do it believing that no reduction in demand for labor would result. I'm happy to have them act on their delusions on this issue. But I'd rather they didn't act on their delusions on immigration policy.
Update: Also see Lawrence Auster's post We dodged immigration catastrophe this year—but what about next year? Larry argues that Republicans in the Congress need to run on immigration restriction if they are to have any chance of keeping control of houses of Congress. I agree.
Cheney allies were sprinkled across the bureaucracy, even in the State Department, and they helped keep Libby in the information loop. After Wolfowitz left the administration to become president of the World Bank, the number three spot at the Pentagon was given to Eric Edelman, once Libby's deputy in Cheney's office.
"His staff intervened at select but critical junctures when they thought State was going to push policy off track," said one Cheney ally who works elsewhere in the administration.
Bush's top people and their neoconservative aides and neoconservative allies in the press and think tanks are the authors of the Iraq debacle.
Here's the first praise of Condi Rice I've read that has substance behind it: She blocks Cheney.
The power of the vice president's office appears to have diminished somewhat in Bush's second term, in part because of Libby's legal troubles and also because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proven to be an effective counterweight, administration officials said. But Cheney remains extremely powerful, in part because of the effectiveness of Libby, who ran a small but talented staff that kept its pulse on the bureaucracy. At key moments, Libby or Cheney would weigh in, often tipping the scales in the direction they sought.
You go girl!
Will Cheney's weakening in any way change the course of events in Iraq? Does Libby's indictment make a US withdrawal from Iraq any more likely? The US death toll in October 2005 is running well above the war's average. So much for the idea that government Iraqi soldiers are shouldering more of the burden of fighting. If they are then the insurgents are growing more effective faster than the Iraqi military. What's Cheney's explanation for this? How does Bush explain it? Well, they just ignore the basic facts.
The history we celebrate today is a testament to the power of freedom to lift up a whole nation. On Independence Day, we remember the ideals of liberty that led men from 13 colonies to gather in Philadelphia and pen a declaration of self-truths. And we remember the band of patriots who risked their lives to bring freedom to a new continent.
On July 4, 1776, more than five years of the Revolutionary War still lay ahead. From the battle of New York to the winter at Valley Forge, to the victory at Yorktown, our forefathers faced terrible losses and hardships. Yet, they kept their resolve. They kept their faith in a future of liberty, and with their hard-won victory, we guaranteed a home for the Declaration's proposition that all are created equal. (Applause.)
Through the centuries, the Declaration of Independence has remained a revolutionary document. As President Kennedy said on the 4th of July, 1962, "The Declaration unleashed not merely a revolution against the British, but a revolution in human affairs."
So far so good, Nice things about the revolutionaries. But then he goes on a long tirade about the threat of terrorism. The he dishonestly ties that threat to the war in Iraq.
At this hour, our men and women in uniform are defending America against the threats of the 21st century. The war we are fighting came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people, we will not wait to be attacked again. (Applause.) We will bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies. (Applause.)
Our enemies in this new war are men who celebrate murder, incite suicide and thirst for absolute power. They seek to spread their ideology of tyranny and oppression across the world. They seek to turn the Middle East into a haven for terror. They seek to drive America out of the region. These terrorists will not be stopped by negotiations, or concessions, or appeals to reason. In this war, there is only one option, and that is victory. (Applause.)
We are pursuing a comprehensive strategy to win the war on terror. We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. (Applause.) We're denying our enemies sanctuary and making it clear that America will not tolerate regimes that harbor or support terrorists. And we're spreading freedom, because the terrorists know there is no room for them in a free and democratic Middle East. (Applause.)
By advancing the cause of liberty in a troubled part of the world, we will remove a source of instability and violence, and we will lay the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren. (Applause.)
Iraq is the latest battlefield in the war on terror. Our work there is difficult and dangerous because terrorists from across the region are converging on Iraq to fight the rise of democracy. The images of cruelty and suffering we see on television are real, and they are difficult for our compassionate nation to watch. Yet, the terrorist violence has not brought them any closer to achieving their strategic objectives. The terrorists tried to intimidate the Iraqi Governing Council, and they failed. They tried to delay the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, and they failed. They tried to stop the free Iraqi elections, and they failed. They continue to kill in the hope that they will break the resolve of the American people, but they will fail. (Applause.)
The President of the United States is telling a bright shining lie. No, the war in Iraq is not a war against the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11.
Here once again Bush repeats the fallacy that most Iraqis care much about freedom.
The lesson of this experience is clear, the terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom. This January, the world watched as the Iraqi people defied intimidation, dipped their fingers in ink and cast their votes in the country's first free and democratic election in decades. (Applause.) And last week, on June the 28th, the free nation of Iraq marked the first anniversary of the day when sovereignty was restored to its rightful owners, the Iraqi people. (Applause.)
By helping Iraqis build a free and democratic nation, we will give strength to an ally in the war on terror, and we'll make America more secure. To continue building a free and democratic Iraq, Americans and Iraqis are fighting side-by-side to stop the terrorists and insurgents. And our military is helping to train Iraqi forces so they can defend their own liberty. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and then our troops can come home to a proud and grateful nation. (Applause.)
He's trying to say Iraq is like the American colonies. But in that case American soldiers in Iraq today would be like the French who helped in the American Revolution. Picture, if you will, French soldiers fighting the British in the colonies while American colonials attacked the French soldiers. Imagine the French King proclaiming that the French soldiers would continue to do the bulk of the fighting at Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, Trenton, Bunker Hill, Brandywine, Cowpens, (and those are Revolutionary war battlefields for any historical illiterates) and countless other battlefields while the French patiently waited for the American revolutionaries to stand up and do the fighting.
Did the French fire the first shots at Lexington Green? I think not. Did the French fire all the shots at the British as the British soldiers retreated back to Boston? Again, NO! The analogy does not work. The Iraqi insurgents are much more eager fighters than the Iraqis who join the Iraqi government army. The Iraqi people are none too eager to stand up for the Iraqi government unlike the American revolutionaries who fought for little pay under trying conditions against the powerful British Army and Navy. The Iraqi soldiers are so untrustworthy that the US Army puts them in isolated parts of US bases because too many of them have sympathy for the insurgents.
Thanks to Greg Cochran for the tip.
A new Zogby poll shows President Bush's popularity continues to decline.
President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll. And, in a sign of continuing polarization, more than two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.
The Zogby America survey of 905 likely voters, conducted from June 27 through 29, 2005, has a margin of error of +/-3.3 percentage points.
Just one week ago, President Bush’s job approval stood at a previous low of 44%—but it has now slipped another point to 43%, despite a speech to the nation intended to build support for the Administration and the ongoing Iraq War effort. The Zogby America survey includes calls made both before and after the President’s address, and the results show no discernible “bump” in his job approval, with voter approval of his job performance at 45% in the final day of polling.
If Bush pulled out of Iraq now he might be able to bounce back enough to prevent a big Republican Congressional loss in the November 2006 elections. Otherwise will the Democrats get control of the House in the next election?
Some people want to impeach Bush. But Dick "last throes" Cheney would replace him. Still, the impeachment might serve a useful purpose.
In a sign of the continuing partisan division of the nation, more than two-in-five (42%) voters say that, if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment. While half (50%) of respondents do not hold this view, supporters of impeachment outweigh opponents in some parts of the country.
Among those living in the Western states, a 52% majority favors Congress using the impeachment mechanism while just 41% are opposed; in Eastern states, 49% are in favor and 45% opposed. In the South, meanwhile, impeachment is opposed by three-in-five voters (60%) and supported by just one-in-three (34%); in the Central/Great Lakes region, 52% are opposed and 38% in favor.
Impeachment is overwhelmingly rejected in the Red States—just 36% say they agree Congress should use it if the President is found to have lied on Iraq, while 55% reject this view; in the “Blue States” that voted for Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry in 2004, meanwhile, a plurality of 48% favors such proceedings while 45% are opposed.
The audience was apparently rather small and composed largely of Bush supporters -- 50% of those who tuned in were Republicans, a much higher proportion than exists in the general population but similar to what Gallup has found in polling following other Bush speeches.
Overall, the sample of 323 speech watchers rated Bush's speech in positive terms -- with 46% describing their reaction as "very positive" and an additional 28% "somewhat positive." That is well below average when compared with other major speeches Bush has given, which have averaged a 60% very positive rating in similar flash polls. That includes a 67% very positive rating for the famous "Mission Accomplished" speech he gave aboard an aircraft carrier in May 2003, in which he declared the major fighting phase of the Iraq war to be over.
He's going to have to try a lot harder to reach more people to have any chance of turning public opinion around on the Iraq war. But I don't think he can succeed in that. Unless the Shias decide to start fighting against the Sunnis (basically join a civil war) I don't see how conditions in Iraq can improve. I do not expect the Shias to put their lives on the line in significant numbers as long as American troops will do it for them. So things are going to stay bad or get worse in Iraq.
Thanks to Greg Cochran for the link.
According to a different poll done over the weekend Bush's job performance disapproval has hit new highs.
The number of Americans disapproving of President Bush's job performance has risen to the highest level of his presidency, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.
According to the poll, 53 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance, compared to 45 percent who approved.
Again, I expect the Bush ratings decline to continue as long as the Iraq war goes on. Most people now think the invasion was a mistake. The death and injury rate for American troops shows no signs of declining. The Shias obviously do not want to take up arms to defend democracy. The WMD argument was a deception.
Bush's Social Security proposal is dead as a door nail.
WASHINGTON — Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is handling Social Security by a ratio of more than 2-to-1, a new low for the White House on its top domestic policy issue, according to the latest USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.
The poll, taken over the weekend, showed a steady erosion in the president's handling of Social Security since early February, when 43% approved. Now, 31% approve and 64% disapprove, the first time disapproval has risen above 60%.
If we are lucky Congress will get it together to pass a law to raise the retirement age for Social Security. But I fear Bush's privatization proposal has poisoned the atmosphere against any Social Security reform.
Deep Throat, the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post's groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark Felt, The Post confirmed yesterday.
As the bureau's second- and third-ranking official during a period when the FBI was battling for its independence against the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, Felt had the means and the motive to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and coverups that led to Nixon's unprecedented resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, and to prison sentences for some of Nixon's highest-ranking aides.
...
Felt's role places the fact of a disgruntled FBI front and center.
...
Wounded that he was passed over for the top job, furious at Nixon's choice of an outsider, Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III, as acting FBI director, and determined that the White House not be allowed to steer and stall the bureau's Watergate investigation, Mark Felt slipped into the role that would forever alter his life.
If Felt had been appointed head of the FBI would Felt have still become an informant to Woodward? Or suppose J. Edgar Hoover had lived a few more years and remained in control of the FBI. Would Hoover have shielded the FBI well enough from Nixon that Felt's disgruntlement would not have risen to the point of pushing him to become an informant?
How essential was Felt's role in bringing down Nixon? Would the basic story still have developed, albeit over a longer period of time?
A section from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's famous book "All the President's Men" reminds me of the Bush Administration:
"On evenings such as these, Deep Throat had talked about how politics had infiltrated every corner of government -- a strong-arm takeover of the agencies by the Nixon White House. . . . He had once called it the 'switchblade mentality' -- and had referred to the willingness of the president's men to fight dirty and for keeps. . . .
The Iraq invasion and the corruption of the integrity of the intelligence agencies that preceded it strike me as a parallel to what happened to law enforcement agencies during the Nixon Administration.
Steve Sailer notes the misplaced attention given to imagined CIA or FBI efforts against JFK.
J. Edgar's Revenge: Hoover Loyalist Brought Down Nixon Administration: For decades, vast controversy swirled around the JFK Assassination, with tens of millions believing the Kennedy Administration was ended by the FBI and/or CIA. In contrast, almost nobody cared about unraveling the mysteries of the end of the Nixon Administration, even though it was always much more plausible that Nixon, rather than Kennedy, was brought down by the FBI and/or CIA.
The liberal media hated Nixon. So they weren't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Update: Speaking of parallels between Bush and Nixon, the recently deceased David Hackworth, at the time of his death the most decorated living American soldier, said in February 2005 that Bush is trying to copy Nixon's Vietnamization as a way to get out of Iraq.
Now the increasingly flummoxed Bush team is stealing the page on Vietnamization from Nixon’s Exit Primer, coupled with the same deceitful tactics he used to get us out of the almost decade-long Vietnam quagmire: telling lies.
...
More recently, Pentagon hype claimed 140,000 trained and equipped Iraqi troops were set to go toe to toe against an estimated 15,000 insurgents. But when congressional pressure from both Republicans and Democrats lit fires around the feet of both SecDef Rummy’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, they were quick to admit that only 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were ready to meet the tiger. The rest, according to Myers, “were useful in less-taxing jobs ... in relatively stable southern Iraq.”
The hard truth is that it takes a good 10 years to build an army from the ground up. And the major emphasis must be placed not on numbers such as how many battalions have been fielded or how ready the recruits are, but rather on good, old-fashioned officer training. Until this happens and the corrupt Iraqi officer leadership – from gold bar to four stars – gets a good scrub, our troops are stuck in the tar.
Does the Bush Administration's Iraqization strategy have any better prospects to succeed than Vietnamization? Maybe. I see one big difference: Bush has basically sent in US advisors who used to support paramilitaries in Latin America. Perhaps this plays to Arab strengths. If the paramilitaries start killing and kidnapping relatives of insurgents then maybe sheer terror can put down the insurgency. And then again, maybe not.
A record number of students define themselves at the political extremes of "far right" and "far left," according to the results of UCLA's annual survey of the nation's students entering undergraduate classes. The fall 2004 survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, finds that 3.4 percent of students consider themselves as "far left" and 2.2 percent as "far right."
"Although these percentages are small, the change between 2003 and 2004 numbers — concurrent with the presidential election year — reflects the largest one-year shift in students' political orientation in the 35 years that it has been included in the survey," said Linda J. Sax, UCLA associate professor of education and director of the survey.
Identification as either "liberal" (26.1 percent) or "conservative" (21.9 percent) is also up from last year. "Middle-of-the-road" remains the most popular category at 46.4 percent, but reaches its lowest point in more than 30 years, and marks a nearly four-percentage point drop since last year (50.3 percent in 2003). (See Figure 1.)
Now in its 39th year, the UCLA survey is the nation's longest running and most comprehensive assessment of student attitudes and plans. The survey serves as a resource for researchers, practitioners and policy makers throughout the world.
The 2004 freshman norms are based on the responses of 289,452 students at 440 of the nation's baccalaureate colleges and universities. The data have been statistically adjusted to reflect the responses of the 1.2 million first-time, full-time students entering four-year colleges and universities as freshmen in 2004.
It would be interesting to see break-downs on these trends by sex, race, ethnicity, parental income, and SAT scores. Are men more likely to be extreme than women? Probably. Also, since women are a growing percentage of college students is that shifting the results toward the political Left? Also, are political differences between men and women narrower in college and then wider as single women out in the work force raising kids alone find themselves with much different political interests?
The races are becoming more separated socially.
Recent declines in interaction patterns are also evident, with 67.8 percent of freshmen in 2004 stating that they frequently socialized with someone of a different racial/ethnic group in high school, a decline from 70 percent in 2001. Moreover, while 63.1 percent of entering freshmen report that chances are "very good" that they will socialize with someone of a different racial/ethnic background during college, the current figure is the lowest since the question's inclusion in the survey in 2000. "In an increasingly multicultural world, curricular and co‑curricular activities designed to improve students' knowledge and skills in this realm, such as diversity courses and inter-group dialogue, may be especially important," Hurtado said.
One would like to see this survey done on college seniors as well. How do their expectations match up with their eventual experiences? Which races are least likely to socialize with each other? My guess is that the greater the difference in cognitive ability (e.g. use the differences in SAT scores as a proxy) the less likely the races in a given college or university will socialize together. So a school that has smaller differences between the races in incoming classes will have lower self-segregation by race. People who are not on the same intellectual level are going to have less to talk about with each other.
Also, comparison with college seniors would be interesting in terms of how the college experience changes student attitudes. Though to be rigorous about it the same students who get interviewed as freshman should be re-interviewed as seniors. The differences in drop-out rates as a function of race, sex, and intellectual ability are going to cause average senior attitudes to differ from average freshman attitudes. Therefore given that some will drop out the original freshman answers should be saved and separately tabulated for drop-outs and non-drop-out to compare how they differed as freshmen.
I expect to see deepening differences in attitudes in the American population in the future for a number of reasons. First off, the differences in economic outcomes continue to widen. Also, the growth of large numbers of narrowly aimed media channels such as blogs and cable TV channels producing content for narrow demographic segments is reducing the amount of common experiences of the population. The more cable channels, talk radio programs (which are going to grow even more as satellite radio takes off), and internet sites the more people are going to dial in to hear and read the thoughts of like minds.
Immigration is another cause of a decrease in the feeling of common interests. Each major racial group performs at a different average level in school and achieves a different average level of success. Some ethnic and racial groups self-segregate while at the same time some groups literally flee from the presence of other groups. Increased mobility is allowing increased segregation. The term "cocooning" to refer to people who stay in their houses and in small social circles denotes another way that segregation is being put into practice.
A decline in the feeling of common interests can produce an effect similar to that of a snowball running down a hill getting bigger as it goes along. When people feel less common interests they will push for interests more narrowly their own. This will reduce the benefits they receive that they share in common with all and therefore reduce their feelings of loyalty and interest in institutions that span the entire society. Altruistic behaviors such as being willing to provide information such as eyewitness descriptions about crimes committed against others can be expected to decline in frequency.
Does anyone reading this agree or disagree with this assessment? Are there reasons why we can expect an increasing sense of sharing common interests? The only reason I can think of off the top of my head for a future growing sense of common interests is the images of disasters on TV. People can feel for earthquake and tsunami disasters better today because they can see the images from those disasters live and in color on TV.
It is not clear to me whether international trade increases or decreases the sense of shared common interests. Maybe it does both but in different directions to different segments of populations. Elites feel more in common but the lower classes feel less in common with their own elites or with the distant lower classes they compete with. Sound right or wrong to you?
Note that, tellingly, in second place as an indicator of GOP predilection, in between Years Married and Total Fertility, is
- the growth in housing prices between 1980 and 2004. The coefficient is -0.82.
The negative sign means that the more housing prices have risen, the more Democratic the state was.
Steve says immigration works against family formation of natives and thereby drives natives toward the Democrats.
Expensive housing retards family formation, which helps the Democrats. Rising housing prices transfer wealth from young people to old people.
Importing more foreigners, as the Bush Administration suicidally wants to do, drives up the price of homes by increasing demand.
That makes it harder for young voters to start down the road to homeownership, marriage, babies—and committed Republicanism.
See this link for a larger list of factors correlated with voting.
Also see my previous posts Steve Sailer: Time Married Best Predictor Of Pro-Bush Voting and Steve Sailer: Immigration Restriction Will Move Hispanics Toward GOP.
Steve Sailer has discovered that the number of years married for white women aged 18 through 44 is an even stronger prediction of voting for Bush than fertility for white women.
Overall, Bush carried the top 25 states ranked on years married for white women. The correlation coefficient with Bush's share of the vote is 0.91, or 83 percent of the variation "explained." That's extremely high. Years married also correlates with the 2000 election results at the 0.89 level (80 percent). So it's no fluke.
The r-squared when years married and fertility are combined in a multiple regression model is improves to 88 percent. (Small-sounding change, perhaps, but actually an important (30%) reduction in the unaccounted variation - from 17 percent to 12 percent.)
Steve says low housing costs and generally low living costs are key to higher early marriage and white fertility rates. Immigration raises housing and living costs and so shifts people into patterns of living that make them more likely to vote for the Democratic Party.
What is the simplest way to keep population density under control and public school quality up—thus allowing more young people to afford the Republicanizing blessings of marriage and children?
Cut back on immigration.
One of the ways that immigration lowers white fertility is by creating more populations that whites want to flee from to escape crime and social pathologies. Whites end up needing to spend more money to get into more exclusive neighborhoods to escape what becomes of white working class neighborhoods when lower skilled and more crime-prone Hispanics move in. The competition becomes more intense to get into neighborhoods whose kids are less likely to be disruptive in school classrooms or to require lots of special education tutoring. Also, whites end up commuting much longer distances and this both adds another cost to households and also makes it extremely difficult for the two parents to share child-raising chores like, say, taking Johnnie to the doctor or picking up Jill after music lessons. If the husband is driving an hour or two into the big city to go to work every day then the wife is going to be less keen on procreating.
I do not think we have the slightest moral obligation to import the rest of the world's problems. It is time to shut down immigration entirely.
Update: Steve answers some of his critics. Note that the critics are just character assassins. Someone asked in a comment to this post for substantive critiques of Steve's analyses. But knee-jerk politically correct left-liberals can't be bothered to engage in rational analysis.
States, however, differ significantly in white fertility. The most fecund whites are in heavily Mormon Utah, which, not coincidentally, was the only state where Bush received over 70 percent. White women average 2.45 babies in Utah compared to merely 1.11 babies in Washington D.C., where Bush earned but 9 percent. The three New England states where Bush won less than 40 percent -- Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island -- comprise three of the four states with the lowest white birth rates, with little Rhode Island dipping below 1.5 babies per woman.
Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule...
In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats' anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites.
Among the fifty states plus Washington D.C., white total fertility correlates at a remarkably strong 0.86 level with Bush's percentage of the 2004 vote. (In 2000, the correlation was 0.85). In the social sciences, a correlation of 0.2 is considered "low," 0.4 "medium," and 0.6 "high."
You could predict 74% of the variation in Bush's shares just from knowing each state's white fertility rate. When the average fertility goes up by a tenth of a child, Bush's share normally goes up by 4.5 points.
This result can not be explained away by the effects of lower IQ people having more children than higher IQ people (even though that is really happening). In spite of left-liberal imaginings to the contrary Bush did well in many states that have higher average IQs.
Democrats, however, tend to be more inegalitarian, with higher highs and lower lows than the more middling Republicans.
This is clearly visible in the biggest blue state of them all, California.
Census Bureau figures show that California, traditionally America's trendsetter, is pioneering a new kind of class structure—ominously like that of highly unequal Latin American countries like Brazil or Mexico.
...
The Golden State is now one of only three states with above average percentages both of people who never got past elementary school and of holders of graduate degrees. (The other two are New Mexico and Rhode Island). In California, 10.7 percent of grownups have no more than elementary schooling, compared to only 6.4 percent in the other 49 states. Of all the states in the Union, California now has the lowest percentage of its population with a midlevel education consisting of at least a high school diploma or some college, but not a bachelor's degree from a four-year college. California's educational inequality is driven by both foreign immigration and domestic migration. The state has attracted the top and the bottom of the schooling pyramid, while repelling the middle.These upper-middle-class newcomers tend to be liberal, especially on cultural issues.
In contrast, Mexican immigrants supply much of California's huge number of less-educated people. According to a 2000 Census Bureau survey, 65 percent of America's Mexican immigrants never finished high school versus only 9.6 percent of natives.
Highly egalitarian yet highly Republican Utah is closer to the egalitarian ideals that the Democratic Party quite falsely claims to champion. But unegalitarian California represents the future for America as a whole. The flood of Hispanic lower class immigrants will increase the size of the lower classes and the resulting greater inequality bodes well for the Democratic Party in the voting booth.
Utah, the destination of so many disgruntled ex-Californians, is emerging as the anti-California. It leads the country with only 2.4 percent of its residents never having attended high school.
Paradoxically, this staunchly Republican state, where Bush won 71 percent in 2004, exemplifies some of the supposed egalitarian ideals of the Democratic Party. A 2000 study by the Economic Policy Institute found Utah to have the most equal income distribution of any state.
Still, Utah is more likely to be the anomaly and California the harbinger of the United States' future.
The Republicans are committing political suicide by trying to curry favor with Hispanics by offering amnesty programs, worker permit programs, and lax immigration law enforcement. The United States of America is going to become like Latin America.
Before Steve posted his explanation of total white fertility as an incredibly strong correlation with Bush's vote A gnxp.com post started an interesting list of speculations on what might yield such a strong correlation with a pro-Bush vote. Check it out.
My own thoughts: Is the fertility rate a proxy for something else? For instance, my guess is that white women who have more children tend to be married longer than white women who have fewer children. At the same time, there is a huge gap (which I'm in too much of a rush to find a link for) between voting patterns of single and married women. Married women vote Republican in much larger numbers (the difference is almost 20% - a big swing) than do single women. I would be very curious to know what the correlation is between ratio of white men to white women voting for Republicans versus total Republican vote in each state. Did the Red states swing more Republican because the male-female pro-Republican voting gap is narrower in Blue states than in Red states?
Of course, the kinds of women who have more children have different values on average from women who do not have as many children. For instance, they assign a higher relative value to having children. Either that or they find it easier to find men who they think make suitable partners.
In a related vein divorce rates are an imperfect measure of family values. One reason for this is that marriage rates are higher in Red states. So the Red states have more marriages to be at risk of breaking up in the first place.
Then there is the evolutionary biological angle to the differences in fertility rates of white women in different states: Will white fertility rates eventually start rising as the women who have the strongest genetically-caused instinct to reproduce have more children than women who have weaker instincts to reproduce? A few months ago I was watching a C-Span broadcast from a Washington DC demographics thinktank (and if anyone can find this report I'm about to describe please tell me - dummy me I forgot to write down the thinktank name and I can't find this report after many hours searching). The thinktank had just released a new study where they reported that in some African countries the fertility rate has stopped dropping and has even increased in some cases. My interpretation is that natural selection is selecting for women who will have more children in spite of the influences of modernity. This does not bode well for the optimistic view that problems will come from human population growth will eventually be solved by massive numbers of voluntary individual decisions to have progressively fewer children.
Update Read the full article here. His arguments for why the gap exists between the Red and Blue states is pretty convincing.
The published results of exit polls on the Hispanic share of the vote are internally inconsistent.
Here's the background: the NEP exit poll, as reported on CNN and other leading outlets, breaks out Presidential election numbers at three levels: nationally, regionally (East, Midwest, South, and West), and by states.
In each of the regions, not just the South, the sums of the individual states' number of Hispanic votes for Bush add up to less than the exit poll's total regional number of Hispanic votes.
The NEP reports the Hispanic share of the total vote in all states, but it only reports exactly whom Hispanics voted for in those states where there's a statistically significant sample size of Hispanics.
In the South, for example, only four of the fourteen states have enough Latinos for the NEP to break out Bush's and Kerry's shares: Florida, Texas, Georgia, and, last and least, Oklahoma.
By combining the exit poll data with turnout data from the United States Election Project, we can see that the Bush's Hispanic vote totals appear to be systematically inflated.
Steve goes through some calculations (click through to see the details) and then comes up with the bottom line that shows how obviously the Latino vote counts were fabricated:
So, if Hispanics made up 9% of the 38.382 million voters in all 14 states of the South, then there must be 0.474 million Latino voters in the other ten states. And if Bush really carried 64% of Hispanics overall in the South, then he must have won 0.480 million Hispanic votes in those other ten states.
That means he won 101% of these states’ Hispanic vote.
The Midwestern numbers bring to mind the old Chicago political machine saying "vote early, vote often". It would have taken multiple voting per Hispanic Bush supporter in the Midwest to get this result:
Similarly, the exit poll claims that in the West region, Bush took 39% of the Hispanic vote. But in the eight broken-out states, which account for something like 97% of all Hispanic voters in the West, Bush only garnered 34%. So for the unspecified states (Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Utah) to raise Bush's regional share from 34% to 39%, their Hispanics would have had to cast about 167% of their votes for Bush. In the Midwest, the exit poll purports that Bush won 0.489 million votes from 1.527 million Hispanics (32%). But in the four broken-out states, he won only 0.216 million out of 0.735 million (29%). So Bush would have had to capture 0.273 million in the unspecified states. The exit poll reports that there were just 0.222 million Hispanic voters in those other states. So Bush must have won a 123% share of them.
So obviously the reported high Bush Hispanic exit poll vote reports are very wrong. Bush and Rove have not made a great breakthough with the growing Hispanic population. The Republican Party is still headed for demographic oblivion and of course the nation as a whole is still headed for demographic disaster.
Long time ParaPundit visitor John S. Bolton provided Steve with the crucial clue that got Steve thinking in the right direction. See this post Steve Sailer: Exit Poll Estimates For Hispanic Vote Not Credible and read John's observations in the comment section.
So how to explain these results? Are staffers of the major news organizations whoe produced these bogus numbers morally corrupt or mathematically illiterate? I tend to favor incompetency as the explanation but it was probably incompetency of a sort that does not reflect well on the character of those who made the mistakes.
Ashcroft thinks he was used by Bush to placate religious conservatives.
Ashcroft, 62, has been one of the most controversial and influential figures of Bush's first term. Ashcroft provided reliable fodder for Democrats on the campaign trail and served as a visible representative of the evangelical Christians who played a crucial role in reelecting the president.
...
A longtime friend of Ashcroft's expressed bitterness that the White House had originally welcomed him as a lightning rod who drew criticism away from Bush, then decided not to stand by him. "He was something to offer to evangelicals," said the friend, who declined to be identified. "They used him, and now they're done with him and he's being tossed aside."
In addition, he never developed a close relationship with Mr. Bush and annoyed some members of the White House staff who thought he was at times a grandstander who was overtly politicizing the Justice Department. One Republican close to the White House said on Tuesday night that Mr. Ashcroft had gotten a "strong signal" from the administration that his resignation would be accepted.
The White House turned down Ashcroft's offer to stay longer.
Sources said Ashcroft submitted his handwritten, five-page resignation letter before Election Day but was "energized" after Bush's victory and told the White House through his aides he was willing to stay on indefinitely as the nation's top cop.
The White House said no. Ashcroft will remain in office only until his successor is chosen.
White House counsel and George W. Bush Texas chum Alberto Gonzales has been chosen to replace Ashcroft at DOJ. Gonzales was the person who rewrote and gutted DOJ Solicitor General Theodore Olson's briefs opposing racial preferences in the Supreme Court University of Michigan cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz and Hamacher v. Bollinger. Theodore Olson almost resigned over Bush's abandonment of the conservative base's firm opposition to racial preferences. Now Gonzales is going to be Olson's boss - unless Olson resigns.
The appointment of Gonzales as Attorney General comes at an unfortunate time for the recent victory of Arizona Proposition 200 aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting and at preventing illegal aliens from getting various forms of welfare and other state services. Gonzales may well decide to use the power given to DOJ by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to disapprove Prop. 200.
Even though passed by a clear majority of Arizona voters, there is a possibility that the Arizona Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act will never become law.
Any law that affects voter's rights must be approved by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure it conforms to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Conservatives can expect bad decisions from the Bush Administration when issues involve immigration or racial preferences. My guess is that Gonzales will be worse than Ashcroft on both issues. But on the bright side at least Gonzales' appointment as AG reduces the chances he will be put on the Supreme Court.
Check out this CNN chart comparing Bush's takes on various groupings of the population in 2004 versus 2000. Keep in mind that these figures are preliminary. As we learned early election day from preliminary exit polling that showed Kerry ahead 2 percentage points initial statistical sampling and analysis can get things pretty wrong.
I am still digesting this. But a few things leap out.
First, there has been talk in the last couple of years about the idea of "security moms". Well this election shows evidence for this. While Bush gained 2% among males to rise to 55% he gained 5% among females to rise to 49%. So the gender gap shrank 3%.
Second, by age bracket Bush's biggest gains were among oldsters. CNN doesn't have data on 18-29 year olds. Bush gained 4% with 30-44 year olds and only 2% with 30-44 year olds. But Bush gained 7% with age 60 and older. So Rove made the best decision for Bush by supporting the Medicare drug benefit. Of course all the rest of us will have to pay for that for decades to come.
Another point: He gained most among those who had less than a high school education (a full 10% to capture 49% total!) and gained 3% from those with high school degrees and with college education short of bachelors degrees. He made a 1% gain with college grads to tie Kerry at 49% each and made no gains with people who pursued post-grad education.
Also, Bush made gains in all racial groups. His biggest gain was a 9% swing with Hispanics. I find this hard to believe and am looking forward to more detailed analyses by Steve Sailer. But the gain among those with lower education might explain a big part of the Hispanic gain. Or was Bush's worker permit proposal a factor?
There appears to be a mistake in their chart about voting and church attendance. They show huge swings in favor of Bush with those who attend church regularly. How could Bush have gained 25 points to get to 58% among those who attend church weekly? That'd mean that Bush got less than half the regular church attenders in 2000. That is absurd.
The three biggest hot button issues for voters were Moral Values (22%), Economy/Jobs (20%), and Terrorism (19%). For those who thought Moral Values were most important Bush got 80% of the vote. For those who thought Economy/Jobs were most important Kerry got 80%. For those who thought Terrorism was most important Bush got 86%. The terrorist threat definitely worked in Bush's favor. Note that Iraq was in fourth place in ranking at 15% and of those who thought that issue most important Kerry got 73%. That issue was less important and also caused less of a shift than the top 3 issues.
My guess is that absent 9/11 John Kerry would have won. Kerry needed to address the terrorist threat offer a more effective critique of what was deficient about Bush's response to terrorism. But as a very liberal Democrat Kerry wasn't about to stump for better border control and immigration policies or more capabilities for federal agencies to track down terrorists with computers and databases. So Bush wins.
Imagine the Democrats had chosen a popular politician from Ohio as their Vice Presidential nominee. That might have swung enough votes for the Democrats in Ohio to cost Bush a defeat in the Electoral College.
Are any of Ohio's Democrats in Congress popular and at all charismatic?
Of course, the Democrats had a more fundamental problem: John Kerry at the top of the ticket. The Democrats nominated a liberal from Massachusetts who has a lifetime American Conservative Union voting score of 5 out of a possible 100. Great for energizing the Democratic base (though hatred of Bush was the real energizer of the Demos). But not great for winning swing voters in Middle America.
If you are bummed at Bush's apparent victory (and I'm more bummed that either Bush or Kerry had to win than that Bush in particular seems to have won) then perhaps Noah Millman's fairly subdued endorsement of Bush might provide some silver lining to your cloud of gloom. Noah says he understands that Bush doesn't deserve reelection (which is an important point to understand) but Noah still thinks Bush is a better choice than Kerry.
I'm not convinced by Noah's reasoning though. Even if one posits that Bush will be better than Kerry would have been that does not strike me as a decisive reason to vote for Bush. The reason is simple: punishment of Bush by defeat would have been an important lesson to future Republican Presidential wannabes. Bush betrayed his base on spending, racial preferences, immigration, and enough other topics that punishment was needed. But it now looks like he got away with it. Bush reminds me of Clinton. They are both baby boomer politicians who got away with too much.
On the bright side a President in his second term doesn't have the incentive to spend money to pay off voting groups to get himself reelected. So Bush might be more fiscally responsible in his second term. Though part of the fiscal damage Bush did was through entitlement program expansion that will be politically impossible to roll back. Since initial reports are that Bush gained more of 60+ years old crowd he and Rove made a good decision for Bush (though not for America) in locking in a new entitlement that will become increasingly more expensive.
Update: I just came across a pre-election endorsement of George W. Bush over John Kerry written by Jane Galt of Asymmetrical Information. She covers a great deal of ground (go read the whole thing) on Bush and Kerry on a large number of issues and along the way makes an important point on health care that I think I agree with: a candidate who is going to support more government take-over of health care is essentially supporting policies that will cause large numbers of deaths.
Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change. "If you can't live with him exactly the way he is," she told me, "then don't marry him, because he'll say he's going to change, and he might even try to change, but it's one in a million that he actually will."
Kerry's record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. Combine that with his deficits on domestic policy -- Kerry's health care plan would, in my opinon, kill far more people, and cost more, than the Iraq war ever will -- and it's finally clear. For all the administration's screw -ups -- and there have been many -- I'm sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.
Is Kerry worse than Bush from a rational and well-informed right-wing perspective? Probably. But the value of a Bush defeat would not have been its effect on the next 4 years of governance. The value would have come from a message that the Republican base will punish poor performance by a Republican elected official. Unfortunately that message has not been delivered and this bodes poorly for the Republican base in the longer run.
Bryanna Bevens makes the argument that women care greatly about security and would have been attracted by proposals for better border security.
The strategic blunder: Homeland Security.
Not the "Homeland Security" policy that launches a 500 billion dollar war in Iraq that in no way secures our homeland or locates any terrorists.
Women want a more tangible Homeland Security—that reassures us our children will be safe, and in one piece, when we pick them up from school.
In short, the Homeland Security that has yet to happen.
Eric Lustbader, quoted in my epigraph above, is right: Women want stability.
Shutting America’s borders until we can reform our immigration policy to include effective security measures is the simplest, non-violent approach to terrorism.
Well, to date Bush has been unwilling to pay a high price in terms of abandoning his Hispandering to pursue proper border security. Kerry shows little sign of a willingness to do much better. Neither candidate has come up with an aggressive set of proposals to defend Americans on the edges and entry points of America. Bush has been willing to spend hundreds of billions in Iraq (though clearly he underestimated what he was getting us into there) which was not a major source of terrorists motivated to attack the United States. But Bush did not try to spend even a tenth that amount on border control and tracking of foreigners here.
What amazes me about this state of affairs is that even though two New York City skyscrapers were knocked down by terrorists the liberal elite is truly so clueless that it hasn't come around to supporting really effective close-in defense as an alternative to Bush's reckless foreign policy.
This election is a sign to me that the United States needs a new political party. The two main parties seem like they are hopeless. Maybe some future debacle in the Middle East or on the domestic front will shake one of the parties out of their intellectual rut. But so far 9/11 was clearly not enough to break many loose from their ideological moorings.
Steve Sailer looked at their military aptitude test results and says Bush may well be smarter than Kerry.
Most significantly, at the age of 22, both men took the IQ-type tests of candidate military officers. (The U.S. which has studied to intelligence testing.)
...
The two tests aren't perfectly comparable. But they provide no evidence that Kerry is smarter. If anything, Bush is smarter than Kerry.
What is amazing about Steve's article is that it attracted the attention of the New York Times. Our liberal elites try to claim that IQ doesn't matter and profess to believe a sort of Lysenkoist view where intelligence is caused almost entirely by the environment. They entirely ignore the role of natural selection in order to make a place for all environment all the time (and this from people who like to look down on fundamentalist Christians for denying Darwinism - human minds can sustain amazing internal contradictions).
Yet deep down the liberals all know that most of the differences between people in intellectual ability are inherited and they know that intelligence matters a great deal. So many more liberals are reading Steve's article than are writing about it. Still, the Grey Lady stepped up to the plate, unable to resist. John Tierney of the New York Times distills out the basic conclusions of Steve's analysis of the intelligence of George W. Bush and John Kerry.
Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.
Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.
On her web site Linda Gottfredson has many of her research papers on psychometrics available to be read if you want ot learn more about psychometric research on intelligence and IQ.
One problem with a comparison of tests of cognitive ability taken a few decades ago is that Bush has probably done more damage to his mind than Kerry has in the decades since. Bush too much alcohol for too long and alcohol certainly does kill brain cells. Plus, there are the rumors about Bush's cocaine abuse and coke also definitely kills brain cells. (any doubters should see here and here and here and here)
Bush has two other problems on top of likely brain damage. He also lacks curiosity and misunderstands the world as a result. Plus, there is something obviously morally deficient about him.
Of course Kerry has his own set of deficiencies. Some of those deficiencies are obvious enough to voters that Bush is probably going to win the election. Whichever one wins America will lose. About this election I'm increasingly of the attitude of Que Sera Sera.
Steve has some reader emails making interesting comments about the Kerry-Bush comparison. Check out the comments.
BTW, Tierney's career at the Grey Lady might be at risk if anyone noticed, but he's more reality-oriented than the average Times reporter. See my previous post John Tierney On Cousin Marriage As Reform Obstacle In Iraq.
The full detailed breakdown of this ABC News "Primetime Lives" poll will not be available until released on a TV news broadcast on Oct. 21, 2004. So one obvious question is arises: given that more males than females are Republicans does this gap represent a greater level of sexual satisfaction among males than females? Or are Democrats just plain less happy with sex and even less happy with life in general? (or do Democrats manage to be happier with life by avoiding sex?)
Of those involved in a committed relationship, who is very satisfied with their relationship?
Republicans — 87 percent; Democrats — 76 percentWho is very satisfied with their sex life?
Republicans — 56 percent; Democrats — 47 percent
It would be interesting to see these results placed in a larger context. Are Republicans or Democrats more satisfied in general? It is worth noting that Republicans and Democrats have different patterns of reproduction.
Do people who have more children also typically have more satisfying sex lives?
No matter what happens this November, in the very long run, the fate of the two parties will depend on the "battle of the cradle" and on immigration policy. In 2000, Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white birthrates, so the Republican Party will remain heavily white.
The fertility of white Democrats is low: of the 10 states with the lowest white birth rate, all except Florida voted for Gore. The Mexican-American birthrate, however, is quite high, so the Democratic Party, which already received 31 percent of its votes from minorities in 2002, is likely to become nonwhite dominated if immigration continues full speed ahead.
When the Democrats become the Hispanic and Black party will their average level of sexual satisfaction improve? How does sexual satisfaction in America break down by race and sex? Anyone found any polling data on this question?
For instance, Alaska has $2 million in homeland security funds it apparently doesn't know what to do with. The state recently proposed buying a jet with the money; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said no, but was "happy to entertain" other options.
Further, the money that went to Alaska is three times the amount per resident than went to New York - clearly a problem, unless the general consensus is that Alaska poses a greater terror risk than New York.
James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation reports that even within states money is allocated toward rural areas.
Within states, rural, less populated areas often receive a disproportionate amount of money as well. For instance, in Iowa, the capital city of Des Moines, population 199,000, will be receiving $250,000. Sioux County, Iowa, with a population of 31,600, will be receiving $299,000.
Other spending is curious, too. Reportedly, California distributes its federal grants in base-amounts of $5,000 to each county, an amount so small that it is difficult to imagine how it could be used productively.
Even the Urban Area Security Initiative grants, monies targeted at major population areas that are also considered potential targets, produce some strange results. The three criteria used are population density (50 percent of the weight), presence of critical infrastructure (one-third), and finally, credible threats (about one-sixth). Using this formula, San Francisco, with a population of 800,000 and Los Angeles, with a population of 4 million, get about the same amount of money. As Rep Anthony Weiner (D-NY) correctly pointed out in recent Congressional hearings, this formula seriously undervalues actual intelligence and known targets.
It is not hard to figure out where terrorists are most likely to strike. They want to hit places where there are high concentrations of people. They want to hit high profile targets and national symbols. New York City and Washington DC stick out as by far the most likely targets.
Veronique de Rugy reports that there is considerable resistance in Congress to channelling homeland security money to where it will do the most good.
And right at the beginning of the third debate Kerry even insinuated that the current administration had cut homeland security funding. That may seem surprising to some, since proposed funding for homeland security for FY2005 is $47 billion, a staggering 180 percent increase since 2001. But Kerry's instinct to spend more is hardly unusual. Too many politicians focus on the level of spending and too few consider the quality of that spending.
...
While most lawmakers seem content with the status quo, even hoping to increase the cash flows allocated in this manner, Republicans are moving toward a consensus that the allocation of homeland-security spending needs to be based on more rational, cost-benefit analysis. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Chris Cox (R., Calif.) has been fighting to change the criteria used to allocate these funds so that they are based exclusively on the risk of terrorist attacks and the magnitude of potential damages. Democrats are vehemently opposed to this idea. Senator Leahy, for instance (D., Vt.), a member of the powerful Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, argues that dropping the all-state minimum formula would "shortchange rural states." For some, apparently, homeland security is becoming another entitlement program.
We have far too many big buildings, tunnels, subways, airports, and the like to harden and defend them all. The bigger focus ought to be on keeping terrorists away from the homeland in the first place. The homeland security spending ought to be channelled away from aid to states and more toward border control, visa screening, and tracking of higher risk foreigners within the US. Given the massive upcoming fiscal crisis that will hit when the baby boomers start to retire we can not afford to treat the threat of terrorist attacks on US territory as an excuse to waste billions of dollars per year on pork barrel spending.
I just got off a phone conversation where in the process of discussing the candidates for the US Presidential election I was told "I distrust people who do not have enough vanity to lose weight".
Context? An ex-girlfriend complaining that the reason she doesn't like Senator John Edwards' wife is because the woman couldn't be bothered to lose a lot of weight for her husband's VP campaign run. She thinks there is something wrong with a pretty boy guy running for VP with a lardo butt wife. Really, I am not making this up. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to make it up. Besides, I didn't know that Mrs. Edwards even had a weight problem since I rarely watch TV political coverage. But thinking about this it dawned on me that her reaction to Mrs. Edwards is surely not an isolated case.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign ought to get Kerry's wife to take a rush trip to Beverly Hills to be treated by Dr. 90210 and get that episode aired before the election. They have little time to film and broadcast Mrs. Edwards' liposuction if they do not to lose the vote of people whose judgement is more than skin deep. Best done, it would include Sally Struthers on the good doctor Robert Rey's schedule for the same day. Get the celebrity angle in there to pique viewer interest.
The large voting block of voters making adipose-deep decisions (and that is at least in the millions) are being ignored by the Democrats. This is amazing when you think about it, especially in light of reports that John Kerry gets botox injections. Is Kerry's botox just by chance and unrelated to his run for high office? Also, and more importantly, do the high-paid sharp Democratic Party campaign strategies never watch reality TV shows and hospital documentary shows? Are they too busy cussing at the O'Reilly Factor to notice what is really important to the American people? When hardly a week goes by without the broadcast of at least one liposuction procedure how can these political operatives be so blind to what is clearly of the utmost importance?
Or have these Democratic Party campaign operatives approached Mrs. Edwards about liposuction (or stomach stapling) and been rebuffed? If so, then there was an absoutely huge mistake made by Democratic Party strategists back when Edwards was being vetted for the VP slot or even earlier when he was running in the primaries. Any candidate and spouse of a candidate needs to be vetted for their willingness to undergo plastic surgery, preferrably on live television. Any opposition clearly demonstrates a lack of willingness to go the distance. Plastic surgery is going to become just so de rigeur that by 2016 anyone who hasn't had work done won't even be able to recruit a campaign staff let alone make a run for the Presidency. Young aspiring candidates who are getting work done now ought to film their procedures for future release in the 2016 and 2020 New Hampshire primaries.
Here's my weird conclusion before I present the argument for it: The Iraq War debacle is benefitting Bush. Why? Because Kerry looks weak on foreign policy and national security. Democrats generally look weak on foreign policy and the military to most American voters and Kerry is no exception. The mess in Iraq is accurately recognized by the American people as being a serious problem. Here is where the Iraq mess works to George W. Bush's benefit: The American people know the United States is in a serious military and political mess in Iraq and therefore want a strong aggressive masculine figure in the White House. A clear majority see Bush as possessing more of the masculine and aggressive qualities than Kerry. You don't win a US Presidential election based on perceived higher intelligence.
An Associated Press/Ipsos poll asked registered voters to assess the character of each nominee. Nearly 75 percent said Bush was "strong"; only 54 percent said that of Kerry. Three-quarters called Bush "decisive"; a measly 37 percent applied that term to Kerry. Bush was seen as more likeable. The only character face-off in which Kerry led Bush was intelligence. Eighty-four percent considered Kerry smart; 63 percent reported they believe Bush is "intelligent."
Kerry is hobbled by all sorts of things. First of all, he has a voting record in the Senate that is not pro-military spending or even pro-military action in conflicts such as the first Gulf War that the American people supported. He has his record of early 1970s anti-Vietnam War and anti-US soldier (supposed war criminals) rhetoric weighing against him. Plus, and this is a subtle point that most commentators miss, Kerry is wealthy because he married wealthy. That is just not a masculine real man way to riches in America. Whereas Bush made his money in baseball (never mind that he did it through politics and a bond issue for a sports stadium). Baseball is for real men.
More people trust Bush on terrorism than trust Kerry.
Fifty per cent had "a lot" of confidence Bush could protect the United States from terrorism, up from 43 per cent last month. Just 26 per cent expressed such confidence in Kerry, down from 32 per cent in August.
Never mind that Bush is not pursuing many different border control and visa policies that would reduce the ability of terrorists to get to the United States in the first place. Never mind that the second Iraq war has increased Muslim anger toward the United States and probably made Al Qaeda recruitment easier even while it drew US forces away from the Afghan-Pakistan border where there are plenty of Al Qaeda members. Most people are not thinking thoughts that complex.
To the extent that terrorism is a worry Bush benefits.
In CNN/USA Today/Gallup Polls conducted this month, Bush moved ahead in Ohio and several other key swing states, though voters favored Kerry by major margins on the economy, health care and Iraq. But on the issue of terrorism, Bush was ahead by stunning margins, including by 87 percent to 9 percent among registered Ohio voters who cited that issue as key.
Kerry might be able to do a better job of explaining Bush's Iraq mistakes. But he is not going to offer a convincing and honest case of what he'd do instead (not that Bush is being honest about his own intentions in Iraq at this point - Bush might be getting ready for a US withdrawal from Iraq next year). Also, Kerry is not going to come out and advocate more effective policies against terrorism on the home front because ethnic immigration lobbies would object and privacy rights advocates would oppose more effective use of information systems against terrorists.
If Bush wins reelection it will be because the American people are more focused on foreign poilicy than on domestic policy. They will vote for Bush in spite of his big foreign policy and domestic security mistakes. Personally, I think Bush has a 65:35 chance of winning reelection. He will manage to win reelection in spite of a failure of his immigration policies to pull any more Hispanics to the Republican ticket and in spite of the degree to which he has angered his base on immigration.
There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.
Brooks used data from the Center for Responsive Politics (probably from their opensecrets.org web site) to look at which occupations and industries give to Republicans and Democrats. Brooks provides a buch of examples of occupations which are heavily oriented toward the written word that lean heavily toward the Democrats.
Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's. Actors like paragraphs, too, albeit short ones. Almost 18 actors gave to Kerry for every 1 who gave to Bush. For self-described authors, the ratio was about 36 to 1. Among journalists, there were 93 Kerry donors for every Bush donor. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.
Brooks doesn't provide as many data points for his "spreadsheet Republican" side of the argument. Though he notes that accountants lean heavily Republican and of course analytical numbers-oriented engineers lean Republican as well. But do academic physicists donate to Republicans or Democrats?
Brooks argues that humanities majors in college start to develop resentment toward majors in economics, accounting, engineering, and other "hard subject" majors. This resentment then causes the resenters to join a political party that is opposed to whatever these "hard subject" types favor. Perhaps resentment plays some role in this split. But a more likely explanation is that people who can apply mathematical techniques to what they learn process data about the world differently than those who are limited to verbal reasoning. Hence mathematically skilled people tend to come to conclusions that the verbally oriented people are not even going to understand, let alone agree with.
The opensecrets.org web site has per industry giving to Republicans and Democrats over a period of years. Accountants gave 52% of their donations to Democrats in 1990 but now in 2004 give 66% to Republicans. Why is that? Pharmaeceuticals shifted from 54% Republican in 1990 to 65% Republican in 2004. Part of that shift can be accounted for by the fact that the Democrats controlled the US Senate and House of Representatives in 1990 whereas the Republicans control both houses today. To have influence donors organized by industry tend to donate to incumbents who almost always win reelection. One has to be donating more out of ideological fervor (e.g. college profs or even most of the entertainment industry actors) rather than out desire to bolster an industry lobby in order for one's donations to reflect one's true beliefs. To what extend are donations in each industry made due to firm convictions versus a naked attempt to buy influence?
Check out some of the other industries. Note that computers/internet donations have shifted from a Republican dominance to about a tie. I suspect this is in part due to a heavy media industry presence on the internet. The electrical engineers and computer programmers are probably a shrinking portion of that industry sector.
Update: Mathematical ability is just one component of a larger set of cognitive differences that are likely to be the cause of diffferent political affiliations. People are attracted to political parties because they are attracted to people who share their sensibilities and emotional reactions. (PDF format)
But a recent study by Paul Goren at Arizona State found that voters typically formed their party affiliations before developing specific political values. They become Democrats first and then decide that they, say, oppose capital punishment and support trade unions. But how do they make that initial decision to be a Democrat?
...
Those M.R.I. scans suggest an explanation. Perhaps we form political affiliations by semiconsciously detecting commonalities with other people, commonalities that ultimately reflect a shared pattern of brain function. In the mid-1960's, the social psychologist Donn Byrne conducted a series of experiments in which the participants were given a description of several hypothetical strangers' attitudes and beliefs. They were then asked which stranger they would most enjoy having as a co-worker. The subjects consistently preferred the company of strangers with attitudes similar to their own. Opposites repel.
Occupations that experience a shift in the average personality types in them will show a cha