Slate on Obama's Kenyan Family

Great article here. An excerpt that makes me revisit my earlier outrage that Obama may know of but not help his relatives is:

Last August, Italian Vanity Fair "discovered" Barack's half-brother George, who lives in the marginalized outskirts of Nairobi; his plight was sensationalized by international media and in turn exploited by conservatives who suggested that the candidate doesn't care for his own family. Because of the widely brachiated nature of the Kenyan Obama family tree, as for many traditional African families, notions of family are very complicated. Certainly, the Obamas that Barack seems closest with appear loved, financially secure, and not at all resentful.

"Notions of family are very complicated." This line resonated with me because I remembered some friends of mine from the Congo, whose own family structure, though at first seemingly nuclear, I later grew to suspect were complicated and with sub-branches. Perhaps it's only right and fitting that Obama not feel that he owes something to the dozens of cousins he has.

Polls Tightening

Comparing today with Wednesday on Pollster.com:

• VA downgraded to light blue
• NM upgraded to dark blue

Also, Obama's lead is narrowing, though not in any way justifying panic. Still the fact that several polls (e.g. Rasmussen) don't show more than a 3-4% lead for Obama in VA makes me wonder whether I should get involved....

Speaking of numbers, only 45% of voters saw the Obamercial. I guess Rasmussen's report is typical of all pollster summaries, but it's so densely worded, it reads like an Onion parody. My favorite para:

Forty-three percent (43%) of those who have already voted watched all of the ad. Forty-eight percent (48%) of those who have yet to cast their ballots did not watch any of it. Nearly half (49%) of those who say they are certain to vote were non-watchers, while 26% of that group watched the entire program.

Returning to the Aunt Zeituni story, the Post took it up today. Apparently still no comment from the Obama campaign. The UK press continues this thread, though, with the Glasgow Record reporting Obama's half-brother Abongo is afraid he'll be killed.

Aunt Zeituni in Boston Public Housing?! So much for "spreading the wealth," Barry.

Saw it today. First broke on Times of London here, then I saw a more detailed report in the Boston Globe, here.

I am going to start my dissident alarm. How could Obama have allowed his aunt, whom he so tenderly referenced in his memoir, to languish in poverty and public housing? Why have we not known about her earlier? How can Obama or at least the campaign not possibly know she's here, especially when she's repeatedly been giving small donations?

This is strange. It's not "fishy" in the way that the conspiracy theorists and right-wing loons are saying. But for me, this is the first reason to doubt Barack Obama, to see him as being, quite possibly, an uncompassionate and self-interested person. He may have visited his father's village, but he seems not to believe that it takes a village. (Hmmm...Maybe that basic philosophical distinction would explain the added vitriol in the Obama vs Hillary primary?)

Obesity and Red-state-ness

Having lived in both the Deep South and the Northeast, it hasn't escaped my attention that there are way more obese people down there than up here. This map, based on CDC statistics, is a visualization of that fact.

Now does anybody else see a pattern between obesity and Republican-voting? If there is a correlation, it's only one way. If a state is obese (i.e. 28& or higher--brown and red on this map), it's almost definitely going to go for McCain. Note that Obama has sway with most of the 27's, the orange states--NC, GA, MO, IN, OH are this year's swing states.

However, the converse (leanness implying Obama) is clearly not the case. Only 4 of the 7 leanest states (dark and light green on this map) are reliably Democratic (and, off-topic, I'm proud that 3 of those 4 are in New England and that CT is the 3rd leanest state in the country). Put differently: while Utah is almost as lean as Rhode Island, but they're very different, politically.

A glance 4 years back: Obama as the only hope.

Barring the unforeseen, Democrats shouldn't have to go through the same soul-searching as we did on November 3, 2004, when Kerry conceded. That day--Black Wednesday--was the last day I posted in my blog Metastrophe before sinking into torpor and cynicism. However, there were some who did not sink back--they started fighting. Looking back at my last entries, the seeds of change were clearly geminating. That day, I had referenced the Daily Kos post "Values," which, as you can guess, was about the problem of Dems talking about "values." invoked Obama's way out as the key:

We need to retake the language. We need to reframe the notion of "value".

That's why Obama's speech below is so brilliant. He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me. It's faith used for the purpose of living a good life, rather than faith wielded as a weapon against a whole class of people.

While I don't see the speech "below," it must refer to Obama's speech at the '04 convention. And if you peruse the 711 comments section on that post, there were already lots of people, as here or here, turning to Obama as the only real choice, predicting him to be the next president (wow, I muse, how can these folks have been so prescient? Was I really that out-of-the-know not to have noticed Obama back then?). There were already people using slogans like "Yes We Can" and even referencing groups like "Philly for Obama." Does this mean we can make the case that Obama's campaign, spiritually speaking, began the day Kerry lost the election? I think the Kos post reveals that, yes, we can.

The Red Will Be Yellow & Yellow'll Be Blue and the Blues are still Blue!

First, I invite you to look my 2004 blog Metastrophe (which I just exhumed from a pre-Google-Account Blogspot account), and consider how completely dated the "Jesusland" map looks in comparison to what we're seeing today. (I also had a 2nd blog back in 2004, but it was less a blog and more a counter-argument.)

Mississippi and South Dakota are now only WEAK Republican states on Pollster.com. I don't know if this re-coloring happened today or yesterday, but it speaks to the trend of what could be an Obama tsunami (an Obami?). Also speaking to this trend are the analyses pegging GA, NC, MO, IN, ND, and MT as toss-ups (these haven't changed since I last checked on Monday).

FiveThirtyEight.com has Obama's chances of winning at 96.2% (it's remained steady the past few days), his chances of an electoral landslide (375+) remains high at 41%, and thanks to the Stevens' verdict, the Alaska race has been handed to Begich (his odds of winning now has a 87%). Still, this doesn't alter the odds of our hitting the magic number 60 in the Senate, which remains a 1-in-3 shot (not shabby, actually). If you feel inspired to increase those odds, perhaps you want to make a donation to some Senate campaigns?

Do I even need to point out that all the traditional "blue" states remain deeply blue, including PA and NH? Add to that Iowa and Virginia has veritably sapphire. In the spirit of Belle & Sebastian, then, I am inclined to croon:

I left my red states at the launderette.
You can put some money on it, you can place a little bet
That when I see my red states,
The red will be yellow, the yellow'll be blue,
And the blues are still blue!

{ alternative, even more optimistic version:

I watch the swing states on my TV set.
You can put some money on it, you can place a little bet
That when I see my swing states,
The yellow'll be blue and the red will be blue,
Hey, the nation's gone blue! }

Georgia now a TOSS-UP on Pollster.com, and Arizona now a weak red, with McCain's margins slimming in his home state (poll figures collated by FiveThirtyEight.com).

Re: More on Obama and Prop 8

In response to my criticism of the notion that Obama should make an ad against Prop 8, Present Tense writes:

Imagine an Obama spot that went something like this:

Hi, I'm Barack Obama. I wanted to take a moment to talk to you about Proposition 8. It's a divisive constitutional amendment here in California designed to distract from the vital issues we face in this election. I know there are disagreements on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that all people have the right to live lives free of discrimination, and not to have their rights taken away from them by right-wing extremists. I hope you'll vote for me this November 4th, and when you do, please, vote against Prop 8.

This is the ad that is somehow going to make Ohio factory workers concerned about layoffs, Colorado moms concerned about McCain's their kids' health care, and Virginia coal miners concerned about gas prices, suddenly switch gears and vote for the guy who believes "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" and has a new economic plan every twenty-four hours?

In order for that to happen, a hearty combination of the following things would have to be in place: (1) persuadable voters in OH, VA, FL, etc. with televisions tuned into California media markets; (2) a Republican candidate willing to demagogue the issue, or even discuss it; (3) a loathing of gays among those persuadable voters that's so intense, they would readily ignore every other issue and vote against a candidate who took any position mildly favorable to gay rights on a consitutional scheme in another state.

We have a combination of three related conditions.

• For condition (1), replace "televisions tuned into CA media markets" with "YouTube."
• For (2) replace "a Republican candidate" with "a person." All we need is one person with some technical know-how to see the ad on TV in CA, digitize it and put it on YouTube, and then send around the link to anti-gay-rights groups, conservative churches, etc.

Moreover, on point (3), we don't need anti-gay fervor in all of the persuadable voters, just a small subset. Why? Because an Obama victory could be razor-thin; it could come down to 1,000 votes in one state or another. Also, calling an explicit Obama appeal against Prop 8 an example of "any position mildly favorable to gay rights" is a massive understatement. Marriage is the Holy Grail, the ultimate goal, of LGBT activists in the U.S. (A position "mildly favorable to gay rights" would be something like hospital visitation rights, about which very few get riled up these days). What I'm getting at--and probably his advisors are getting at--is that any in-person, explicit endorsement of gay marriage in California from Obama will play up his socially liberal credentials and worry people who are on the fence. Let's go through this and do the math.

Let's say that in a given swing state (e.g. Florida or North Carolina), most of the swing voters, perhaps three-quarters, are against gay marriage--not necessarily rabidly, but just against it in some fashion. That is a safe, conservative estimate--remember, we're talking about swing voters, people not already lined up behind Obama, people likely to be socially conservative. Of these people, let's also say that most of them are unsure about Obama because he might be "too liberal." Let's quantify "most" as another 3/4. Anecdotally, I would guess the two most common (reasonable) problems people might have with Obama is his "lack of experience" or his "liberalism" (followed by more irrational and insidious problems, like disliking him for his race of for things he isn't actually, like being "Muslim" or a "terrorist").

So, let's revisit: 75% of the undecideds in a (hypothetical) state are against gay marriage and, of them, 75% worry that Obama's too liberal. So that's 56% of the swing vote. But, of course, most of these people are rational (to some extent) and also feel strongly against 4 more years of Republican (mis-)rule--after all, they're not telling pollsters they're for McCain--so they're not all going to switch to McCain. So let's say only a third of this 56% decide that a Obama ad expicitly urging people to support gay marriage is, well, over the top. So a third of 56% is about 19% of the total of the swing vote. Keep in mind, this ad is being propagated through the internet and possibly through direct mail DVD's (depending on how early it's aired), keep in mind that hundreds, if not thousands, of church pastors are mentioning Obama's "gay marriage" position in Sunday sermons across conservative America, 2 days before the election. So now for the math:

In certain swing states, up to 8% of the voters may still be undecided. I get this figure by looking at recent polls for critical states (e.g. here). Poll results like McCain 48, Obama 45, for Ohio, suggests 7% in that poll were undecided, third-party, or didn't answer. To be safe, for swing states in general, let's round this up to 8%. So what's 19% of 8%? It's 1.5% of the electorate, which translates to thousands of voters, which is just too big a margin to lose. (And while our remarks on "myopia" were probably too strong, we continue to hold that working toward an Obama victory is more important than same-sex marriage in California, in general, for the world, at this time in history.)

There is another, perhaps larger problem, in Obama's making a forceful, public plea, again going back to the perception of his "liberal" credentials. Regardless of what percentage of the swing voters a gay-marriage ad would turn off, it will definitely turn on the McCain-Palin base, who would work even harder on their own last-minute canvassing and GOTV efforts.

Contrary to what Present Tense presents (tensely), we at Red Yellow Blue are not disdainful of the importance of the Prop 8 issue--we have, in fact, made donations and e-mailed all our friends pleading for money on the NoOnProp8 campaign. We think, and have written elsewhere, that this is a critical civil rights issue (see below). And we think you are right about Obama's influence in bringing some black Californians away from supporting Prop 8. The question is how to undercut the risks posed for Obama to come out strongly, risks like losing 1.5% of the undecideds and energizing McCain's right-wing base?

One answer would be for Obama to air the ad on Sunday afternoon, after church, thus undercutting the ability of right-wing pastors to broadcast this news from the pulpit. A second answer for risk management would for Obama to (disingenously) mention a caveat in his ad, namely that he is "against same-sex marriage," while stating that Prop 8 is not the vehicle by which to oppose it. Or he could simply state that he is against federal "re-definitions of marriage," that he leaves it "up to the states," but that he is also "aganst taking away rights that have already been granted." With careful wording and the avoidance of any quick, out-of-context sound bites that sound like "I support gay marriage," or "I want my kids to learn about ass-fucking," or what have you, we might be safe enough. Barely.


But I'd like to ask a larger question---why Obama? If the problem in CA is black voters, why not have civil rights leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson or other black-church figures make an ad, or a speech, or join the No-on-Prop 8? Yes, yes, I know, because he is the reason that black voters are turning out in droves. But given that they're already turning out in droves, why not get some other black leader to address this issue?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P.S. We feel obliged to demonstrate our commitment to bringing down Prop 8 by sharing an e-mail we wrote to our friends on October 9:

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you because of a very serious issue facing voters this
November in California. Now wait, I know you do not live in
California, but this affects ALL of us, so hear me out.

Proposition 8 is an initiative on the ballot that threatens to
eliminate the right to marry for same-sex couples in CA. Mind you,
this proposition would *revoke* the more than 10,000 same-sex
marriages that have already taken place there! This proposition
affects ALL of us, straight and gay alike, because a step backward in
California tarnishes the entire country, making California and the
U.S. a more hostile, less accepting place.

I'm writing to ask you to do whatever you can to help defeat Prop 8.
If you have friends and family in California, especially those who
might not have thought about this issue, can you please talk to them?
Send them an e-mail? Or would you consider donating, as I have done,
to help "No on Prop 8" groups in their publicity and outreach efforts?
The coordinating website for these efforts is at:

http://noonprop8.com

Sincerely,

R*****

Getting 60 Dems in the Senate

So despite my worries about electronic vote-tampering, I'm realizing that for Republicans to get away with it this year, i.e. for it to be undetectable or unchallenged, it would require actual voting margins to be close. Barring an "October surprise" on the level of a terrorist attack (which none of us want, obviously), it looks like it'll be a pretty convincing Obama victory. The first chart on the left (from FiveThirtyEight.com ) shows various probabilities based on a complex, statistical calculations.


So, as a perpetual worrier and "what-next" kind of person, I turn now to the matter of the Senate. If we can get to 60 Democrats there, we'll have a filibuster-proof majority---unprecedented in recent decades!

This MoveOn page channels funds to critical Senate races. In a different and more general way, so does DailyKos's Orange-to-Blue campaign on ActBlue.com.


Now let's look at the second chart on the left, also from FiveThirtyEight.com. It suggests that:

- 6 are fairly winnable (VA, NM, CO, NH, OR, NC), though the MoveOn link above targets three of those (NH, OR, NC)
- 2 are close, barely tilting our way (Franken in MN, Begich in AK)
- 3 others are leaning red (MS, GA, KY), possibly to an extent not winnable on our end. *But* of those, the GA race is worth fighting largely because incumbent Saxby Chambliss is a vile, vile politician.

The strategy for the senate, then, would be to win VA, NM, CO, NH, OR, NC, MN, AK, and *one* more (maybe GA?). What do you guys think?

Stealing America

I'm somewhat impressed that this is the cover story of Time, and surprised that such issues are being discussed in the mainstream media at all. This year has been disillusioning enough for me, personally. Back in March in the CT primary, my vote never counted (the optical scanner count went from 537 to 537...I complained, basically got no follow-up). And then after my move to DC and my mailing them my voter registration, it disappeared into the ether. My experiences in CT and DC are not the consequences of intentional fraud or vote suppression. They were due to machine or bureaucratic ineptness. But then how do I reconcile that with the reported irregularities in 2000 and 2004? Even in 2004, in Ohio, I know of 2 OH friends who never received their absentee ballots.

Yesterday, I awoke to Democracy Now on the radio, Mark Crispin Miller talking about ballot-rigging and election-stealing. It was depressing to the point of disillusionment. On the same lines, see this MOVIE.

No Andrew, Gay Rights Not More Important Than Welfare of The Entire Planet

Regrettably, my friend Present Tense and the inimitable Andrew Sullivan are both wrong about what should be Obama's connection to Prop 8. Sullivan goes as far as to demand Obama make an ad against it. But I say the current silence is not only to be expected but good. And why should Obama, with victory within reach, suddenly take his eye off his own campaign to start lobbying for a different cause?

Prop 8 is an that I feel passionately about and, from an abstract enough angle, it is a civil rights issue, true. But we should admit it is also a political issue, and, unfortunately, still a divisive one. Moreover, with California allowing same-sex civil unions that are nearly identical, in terms of rights, to marriage, then it is less urgent a civil rights issue than is being claimed.

Obama's quietness on Prop 8 does not mean he is not against it; it is merely political common sense. It is in keeping with his campaign: consider that on BarackObama.com, under the Issues flyout menu, there are 25 choices of general themes, from Civil Rights to Women, with a miscellaneous "Additional Issues" tab. Hate crimes and employment discrimation are two sub-issues under "Civil Rights" where sexual orientation is mentioned, but GLBT does not merit its own tab.

There is, unfortunately, a certain myopia among some quarters of progressives. (And mind you, Sullivan is not even a progressive; he is a conservative once-apologist-for-the-Bushies who happens to be gay and socially liberal). The myopic view I'm referring is one in which GLBT rights trump all other issues, period. This view requires a Democratic candidate to campaign out-and-out for gay rights, even if it means losing conservative voters in critical states. Sullivan's outrage against Obama on Prop 8 is equivalent to feminists' protests against the Augusta National Golf Club. By which I mean it focuses on what is technically a civil rights issue in the absence of urgency or global context. Feminists should concede that women's admission to golf is not the most pressing issue facing women in the U.S., let alone facing their sisters in Africa and Asia. Even here in the U.S., there are concrete problems like pay disparity. Similarly, gays in the U.S. need to work concretely on issues of GLBT persecution around the world and know when to strategically pipe down (the HRC understands this, by and large). Consider that (a) California GLBT couples already have access to civil unions, (b) even if they had marriages, these wouldn't count federally or in 46 states, and (c) there are still many other GLBT problems, both here and abroad (e.g. persecution and torture across Africa and the Middle East, workplace discrimination in the majority of U.S. states, etc.). Surely these are issues that people can come together around. And while I admit it would be in an injustice for the 10,000+ same-sex marriages in CA to be annulled on November 4, surely we can agree this is not a greater injustice than Americans living without health care, or poverty, or hunger? A greater injustice than purposefully allowing America to remain in reckless, hawkish hands with further loss of lives in unjustified wars? In such a context, with so much at stake, it would be downright irresponsible of Obama---remember, a candidate already seen as aloof and liberal, already having made the "cling to their guns and religion" comment in San Francisco--to jeopardize his candidacy in order to push for No-on-Prop-8 via TV ads. Doesn't the GLBT community understand that Obama is on their side, and that time, too, is on their side? A little patience will yield marvelous results.

The philosophers among you may say Obama vs. No-on-8 is a false choice, but in 2004, the 11 states with anti-gay ballot measures had increased conservative turnout. Gay rights remains a divisive issue, and the current polling in CA is enough to demonstrate this. (As of 2 days ago, when I took a detailed look, even the 18-29 demographic was only 50% pro-gay-marriage). However, anti-gay views will only continue dissipate over the next decade.

Can't progressives just reasonably agree that, if faced with a choice, at this critical juncture the more urgent thing to do is to prevent another Republican administration, to prevent ecological and geopolitical disaster? Wouldn't that be the more general and more urgent human rights concern? Wouldn't we rather make peace with the world, avoid war with Iran, and focus on renewable energy and health care for all? And with so many other potential spokespeople who can help defeat Prop 8 if they wanted (e.g. Schwarzenegger? Oprah?), why drag the Obama campaign and the entire fate of the world into it?

"Present Tens"ions in PA

In his newly revived blog Present Tense, Cory talks about the McCain camp's focus on suburban Philadelphia. Despite the long-shot nature of this, it makes sense. According to today's analysis from FiveThirtyEight of the odds of various scenarios (shown left), Obama needs to win PA. If he loses OH & FL but not PA, he still has a 66% chance of winning (via states like CO, VA, etc.). But if he loses OH, FL, and PA, his odds of winning drop to 2%. Now, I'm not a statistician (Mike, want to comment?), but this is a dramatic difference in odds. And it's a fancy way of saying that if Barack loses PA, he has a 98% chance of losing.

So McCain has no other choice but to hope the polls are dead wrong in VA and CO (be it Bradley effect, bad polling, or last minute right-wing scare tactics), and then he needs to hope for the best in OH, FL, MO, MT, ND, NC and win all of those in addition to the states already in his column. In other words, the best McCain can hope for is to get all the states Bush got in '04 minus NM, and he can still win.

From the Obama point of view, the minimum to 270 is all the Kerry states (which, remember, includes PA) and then on top of that one of the following permutations:

• one of MO, OH, FL, or VA, of which VA looks likely, or
  
• NM + a state with at least 6 electoral votes, of which CO is the smallest likely shot
  
• NM + MT + ND (but none of the eastern battlegrounds, pretty unlikely)

You probably already know you can play around with electoral possibilities at 270towin.

The take-home message. If I were an Obama strategist, I'd fold operations in OH and FL and focus on PA, CO, and VA. At a more general level, I'd make sure we kept the Kerry states (incl. MN and WI) and then on try to win NM, CO, and VA with convincing margins.

Cell-only folks, & other minutiae

A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll shows Obama leading 2-to-1 among "cell-only" voters, of which I would be one. No surprise there. It's been my hunch for a while that traditional polls are grossly under-estimating the under-30 support for Obama because they can't reach those of us who use only cells. And practically everybody I know my age and younger is "cell-only."

Also, not related, these Electoral History Charts on FiveThirtyEight are very cool.

Lastly, adding to previous discussion of the Bradley and "Reverse Bradley" effects is the Obama Effect and why it will push Georgia into the blue column.

Today's upgrades and downgrades

To the left is the snapshot just now from Pollster.com. Pardon the Wall St lingo, and I may not remember everything correctly from yesterday, but:

• MN downgraded to light blue
• FL downgraded to yellow

Also, everyone go check out www.fivethirtyeight.com, especially the daily update. It's far more detailed than Pollster.com.

Virginia

On Pollster.com, Virginia moves to DEEP BLUE. Only a week ago or so, it was a toss-up. Is this evidence of the massive Obama ground operations in VA or of the shifting attitudes in general, or both?

There's been a lot of talk about the Bradley effect and "Reverse Bradley" effect (see here), so we can't pretend these numbers mean anything. Or can we?

What Pollster.com tells us about America

In 2008, the term "purple state" was born. This year, with Pollster.com's palette of five color choices, perhaps the term should be "yellow state."

The image here was the map on Pollster.com a few weeks back in early October. This isn't my own screenshot of Pollster.com, but the reason I started this blog, with only 15 days left till the election, is that I wanted to

(a) post an image of the Pollster.com national map as it changes day by day, and
(b) discuss the implications.

Here in my first blog post, I want to raise something I've been thinking about for a while. Over the past 6 weeks or so, as more and more "yellows" have solidified into either the red or blue camp, Louisiana has emerged as having a special quality. And that is, it is a nucleus of redness. By which I mean, it is the only state--red or blue or yellow--that is surrounded only by deep red states. Am I the only one that thinks it fair to read this as a reflection of a deep kind of backwardness? The changing electoral map (read: today VA is deep blue, NC still yellow, GA now a light red) redefines what we can expect from "the South," especially the "Deep South." Louisiana's being surrounded by deeply red states seems to me a Red Shield, an insulation from new ideas, from the New Politics. You would think my home state, with the experience of Katrina and federal bungling, with the eccentricities of New Orleans and the laissez-faire Catholicism of the southern third of the state, with its sizable black population and having at least two cities of moderate size, would at least be a light red? But no, it has been a consistent deep red, and is surrounded by deep red. And while it's not surprising, it still saddens me deeply.