A Fearless Forecast

The Geezer is getting a bit tired of reading and hearing about election politics, and the silly season has barely worked up a head of steam.  It seems everybody with a keyboard, mouth, or touch pad has issued some sort of forecast.  So, here is mine:

I think Mitt Romney’s solid win (39.4 percent in a large field) in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary ensured he will be the Republican nominee for president.

Ron Paul finished second in New Hampshire with 22.8 percent.  No one else came close. I think Paul’s supporters, a strange mix of libertarians, young Republicans, and independents who learn rightward, eventually will decide to push Paul’s views by convincing him to set up a new third party, or run as a Libertarian.

I think Paul’s third party candidacy will siphon off enough votes to do Romney in this November in a close election, just as Ralph Nader’s candidacy did Al Gore in not long ago. Thus, Barack Obama will win reelection in 2012.  

I think the Democrats will gain a majority in the Senate, but they will not take enough seats for a House majority. We will be in for another four years of frustrating stalemate in Washington.  

Stop by at the end of November, and we will review this set of opinions to see if the Geezer’s views have become reality.

Bad Strategy, Lefties


Ultra-liberal Democrats over the past several months have focused on discrediting Sarah Palin, while she busily cashes in on her popularity with the Tea Party by promoting a profitable book, appearing on her own television show, collecting paychecks from Fox News, and accepting hefty public appearance fees.


Actually, any sort of liberal nowadays is either a Democrat or an Independent. When relics such as Senator Olympia Snowe move on, which will be soon, there will be no place in the Republican Party for anyone who is not a conservative of one stripe or another. Already, there is darn little room for the more moderate conservatives.


What a change from the days of my youth. The Republican Party was born in Wisconsin (at Ripon). I also was born in Wisconsin. My progressive Republican parents hated any government waste of taxpayer dollars, and they had equal disdain for the Democratic Party, especially its members of Congress from the “solid South” who fought vigorously against civil rights legislation. My parents backed public education, anti-trust legislation, and tolerance of all in religious matters, including those who had no religious beliefs.


We seem to have turned 180 degrees. Republicans started the trend that has given us the biggest federal government deficits in history. They have blocked, or tried to block, any advances in social justice. They have undermined public education with policies designed to aid alternatives. They have removed restrictions on business consolidations, thus curtailing the very competition they give lip service to. Conservative religions are A-OK with the GOP, but those with other views are vilified as un-American.


Democrats, who earlier included our worst bigots, nominated an African-American for president. They restricted government excesses and produced the only federal budget surpluses in recent years. They more recently passed legislation to restore some semblance of control over financial institutions that were running amok and nearly caused a world-wide depression with their actions. They back many social programs abhorred by conservative religionists. Sixty years ago, most members of conservative Christian churches were Democrats.


And now, the Democrats, last haven for liberals in our society, are making a big mistake. They are trying to remove Sarah Palin from the political arena with all manner of criticism at every opportunity. If they’re smart, they’ll rethink that activity.


Sarah Palin is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party in a long time. Liberals should stop demonizing her. They need her as a Republican candidate for President in 2012.


There is nothing to stop Palin from running for the Republican nomination except the liberals’ attack strategy. She has enough Tea Party followers to make her a candidate. She can be stopped only if the Demos succeed in portraying her as totally without qualifications to the extent that a large number of the less-rabid conservatives oppose her.


If Palin stays in the running and loses the nomination fight, which is likely, her campaign will have fractured the Republican Party, probably guaranteeing a Democratic victory. What if, against the odds, she were to win the nomination?


Can you image Sarah Palin in a nationally televised debate with Barack Obama? Poor Ms. Palin would look silly when squaring off face-to-face with Mr. Obama to discuss policy issues.


There are more independents, like me, than either Democrats or Republicans. I can tell you right now how most of us would vote after watching the spectacle of Palin trying to match wits with Obama. The vast majority would not favor Mama Grizzly.

Swept

It was a clean sweep. Not a single Cocktail Party candidate prevailed in Tuesday’s elections. This was not the stunning setback some may think. The party did not back any candidates.

Never fear. The Cocktail Party (see 8/5/2010 Post, "Coffee, Tea, or . . . ) is merely saving its ammunition for the big one—Campaign 2012. The presidential race started about five minutes after the polls closed in most places and even earlier in some places.

We believe millions of those eligible voters who failed to exercise one of the great privileges of American citizenship and did not bother to cast a ballot in the midterm election include many closet Cocktail Partiers who heeded this wisdom from Kin Hubbard:

“We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.”

The Cocktail Party will rectify this situation as we plod toward November 2, 2012. We will develop a strong slate of candidates. Along the way, we will be staking out positions on important matters in words that cannot possibly be misunderstood.

We will create some unique proposals, but also borrow thoughts from others just as we lifted the Hubbard quotation for a website titled “Time Goes By.” We may or may not credit those we steal ideas from.

We expect to glean very few useful thoughts from current members of Congress or those who belong to other political parties.

Winning by Losing

In Arizona, a young man recently won an election for a Town Council seat in a small city when he drew a king to beat his opponent’s six. The candidates cut the cards after they tied in the balloting with 660 votes each. The news story said using a gambling method to resolve an electoral tie was relatively rare, but did happen in Arizona from time to time.

It happened in Wisconsin at least one time, but with a different twist, according to family lore. Apathy reached such a height (or depth) in my hometown about 60 years ago that no one could be persuaded to run for one of the vacant alderman positions. Two undercover campaigns apparently were launched without the knowledge of the candidates. When election results were tabulated, my father and the other noncandidate had identical write-in vote totals for the seat on the City Council.

Dad and the other man cut the cards to resolve the issue. Dad drew the high card. The drawer of the losing card won the honor of serving as a City of Tomahawk alderman.

Election Math That Didn’t Compute

Shortly before settling in to absorb a bunch of voting returns on election night I ran across a website that made the whole thing simple. The author presented a vast array of charts and numbers, with razzle-dazzle analyses, that purported to predict accurately who would be the next President of the United States of America based on just a few early ballots. It was impressive, and no flaws in the presentation were apparent. If you wanted a quick answer, all the number crunching boiled it down to this:

If the race was close in Indiana, and Obama won Virginia, there was a 100 percent chance that Obama would be our next President. If those two things didn’t happen, we were in for a close race and a long night.

The polls closed very early in both states, so I figured I could learn what was going to happen in not more than an hour after dinner. Maybe I could even win a few last-minute bets (we lost a dinner bet when Obama eventually won). Early results showed a close race in Indiana. The trouble was those unpredictable voters in Virginia just kept standing in line for several hours. About the time CNN was willing to call Virginia for Obama, Obama clearly had won the entire election. Following the wizard’s advice didn’t help me learn a darn thing any quicker than anybody else did.

It wasn’t the first time a flaw in human performance caused frustration when I was trying to follow the guidance of a statistical genius at election time. When I worked in public relations for Allis-Chalmers in the 1960s, our supervisor “volunteered” himself and several of us to work for the Associated Press on election nights. Supposedly, we were doing a civic duty by helping tabulate incoming election returns. Actually, we were trying to butter up the news people at AP. We knew it, and they knew it, but they needed help and we were available.

At that time, the Associated Press was the principal news organization that took it upon itself to declare winners in elections. They used a fairly sophisticated statistical program that incorporated samples from key parts of a state to predict winners. In Wisconsin, where we helped out, the samples were mostly from the heavily populated areas in the southeast, but also included a county or two in the northern rural areas.

On the night of my frustration, we added up totals from report after report, but our leaders refused to declare a winner in the most important contest. Midnight passed; still no call was made. We finally had added up nearly 90 percent of the precincts in the state, and started clamoring for a call. We were told that the statistical formula absolutely required returns from one small county in the north, and it hadn’t reported.

About 2 a.m. somebody got somebody in the northern county out of bed and demanded to know what was going on. Our contact had merely forgotten about the AP commitment and retired for the night hours earlier!

This very unhappy camper got home around 4 a.m. that election night, just about in time to get ready to go to work at my day job. I should have learned right then not to get mixed up with political predictions, but Tuesday night I did it once again.