WhirledView

Monday Morning Bits & Pieces

by Cheryl Rofer

An Obama campaign worker tells me

In NM as of Thursday, 60% of all Dems have voted early…72% have voted in LA [Los Alamos County]. In order for McCain to win NM, everyone who votes on Tuesday would have to vote for him and there would have to be a big turnout. Every night the Obama campaigns puts in the data that the canvassers give them about what they learned about everyone they talked to and each day it gets a list of who voted from the County Clerks. This campaign is SO organized!

Meanwhile, in Washington... I wrote about the Bipartisan Policy Center's report on Iran a week or so ago. Carol Giacomo tells us that this report is part of yet more agitation in DC that appears to be headed toward war with Iran, analogous to the buildup to war with Iraq, but under the radar because of the overwhelming coverage of the campaign.

Meanwhile, Trita Parsi and Andreas Persbo make a nice case that inspection will provide early warning if Iran gears up for nuclear weapons production. Shows what you can do if you know something about the technical side of things.

Voting Blue

By Patricia H. Kushlis

New Mexico is one of the most politicized states in the country: Elections are especially fun here where tales of past electoral fraud and cliff-hanger results regale uninitiated and veterans alike and where even University of New Mexico political scientists who specialize in that sort of thing suddenly assume almost media celebrity status at home and abroad.

Besides, this state is one of the thirty five with early as well as absentee voting so I thought I’d explore where things stood from the banks of the middle Rio Grande in the Land of Enchantment just two days before the polls open November 4, 2008.

Swing and Bellwether

This is a swing and bellwether state with a tradition of voting for the winner of the national popular vote. The only time New Mexico failed to vote for the “winning” presidential candidate in nearly a century was Elections 2000 when the voters supported Gore by 366 votes in a cliff-hanger election – but you know all too well the finale that year. I personally consider New Mexico to have a solid 100 percent record of picking the real winner despite what anyone might claim otherwise – because, lets face it, the popular vote went for Gore and W won the election only because of scuzzy political shenanigans in Florida where his brother just happened to be Governor and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court that should have kept its opinion to itself.

The Big If . . .

Regardless, this state’s five electoral votes also help determine the outcome of a close race. This is why we get an inordinate amount of national political and media attention in the days, months and hours leading up to the Big Event.

One recent scenario has McCain winning the presidency without Pennsylvania if he carries Colorado and New Mexico. That’s a big if – and if he’s counting on New Mexico for that extra edge – I think he and his strategists are living in la-la land. The elections site FiveThirtyEight (see map above) has New Mexico in dark blue now – although RealClearPolitics’ colorists seemingly haven’t figured that one out yet – which makes me wonder why that website isn’t as up-to-date as it wants us to believe – or what else am I missing?

Rocky Mountain High?

The Long Good Bye: Me and My New York Times

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Checking through a recent credit card invoice, I noticed the item that renewed my New York Times subscription. The thought that followed was depressing. Very soon that disbursal will not be recurrent.

Kicking a habit isn’t easy, and I feel bad about the pending decision, but I’m verging on the enough-is-enough stage. More to the point, I’ve all but decided that this boluxed up, anorexic version of the NYT isn’t worth paying so much for.

First, the dimensions of my favorite newspaper were shrunk, which wasn’t entirely awful. An old fashioned broad sheet is hard to read on an airplane when you’re flying economy class (alas). However, the decrease in column inches per page was not accompanied by an increase in the number of pages. Result: I was getting less for my money.

The once weighty daily is getting lighter in other ways, too. When I scoop it up from the driveway, its shrinkage in ounces symbolizes a loss of breadth and depth, even as lifestyle sections proliferate. There’s no denying that the print press has lost its old monopoly on breaking news, but trustworthy backgrounders and solid analysis are still in short supply on the alternative media.

And speaking of style, the emergent way of handling the news all too often results in personality-driven stories written like human interest fluff pieces: heavy on anecdote, light on facts, numbers, logic. News lite. Too many words for too little substance. Time consuming to read, but unnourishing. I don’t need this.

Just Days Away

by Bill Stewart

With the election only a few days away, it looks increasingly likely that Sen Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. I say “increasingly likely” because nothing will be certain until the election is over and the votes have been counted. We need only remember the famous election of 1948 when President Harry Truman won one of the great upset victories of the 20th century. The polls showed that Republican Tom Dewey had such a big lead that Gallup didn’t even poll during the final week of the campaign. By so doing, Gallup – and much of the country – failed to note a last minute surge for Truman that carried him to his historic and improbable victory.

Could that happen again, but this time for Sen John McCain? This year, the polls indicate an almost certain victory for Obama, but with such serious unknowns in the polls that any such prediction is risky. How many of the young, presumably pro-Obama, voters will actually vote? How big a factor is race? How many of those “likely to vote” will actually turn out to vote? For whom have the astonishingly large number of early voters actually voted? By the end of this week, the race was tightening on a national basis, but much less so in the “battleground” states. Obama has maintained such a lead in traditionally Republican states as Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada, that we may well be seeing a remake of the political map. It could turn out that if Obama wins, his electoral college vote will be much larger than his popular vote might otherwise indicate.