I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats — rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift. What liberals haven’t had, in other words, is very many opportunities to feel good about themselves, or to feel good about the future. While the White House has achieved several wins, they have never been elegant or emphatic, instead coming amidst the small-ball banality of cloture vote after cloture vote, of compromise after compromise. Nate Silver ☀
Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.
The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.
Problem is, this Investor Business Daily poll is simply not credible (remember, too, this is the same news organ that egregiously proclaimed Stephen Hawking would be dead if he lived in the U.K.).
1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I’m aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points — the highest of any pollster that we tested.
2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: “Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?”. Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.
3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign — when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 — the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they’re doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don’t trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you’d think.
4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: “Responses are still coming in.” This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.
5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn’t bother to define the term “practicing physician”, which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that.
But that’s the conservative media drill these days — a corporatist propaganda organ issues some outlandish piece of puffery or outright absurd declaration and then all the right wing radio/cable news talkers pick it up and pound away into the skulls of their deluded disciples.
The reason that liberal blogs are cited more often in the mainstream media is because they are more plentiful and more widely-read than conservative blogs. Traffic on the Internet in general tilts toward the young and the more highly educated, demographics which — at least for the time being — are associated with more liberal politics. And yes, I do think that liberal blogs are “better” on average than conservative ones (with plenty of exceptions on both sides) but you can reach this conclusion without having to invoke qualitative conclusions at all. The analogy to liberal blogs is not conservative blogs but conservative talk radio, a medium where conservative hosts maintain a multifold advantage over liberal ones. How much more does Rush Limbaugh drive the conversation than, say, Randi Rhodes. A *lot* more. So does this mean the media has a conservative bias? Nate Silver ☀
One of the more unapologetically idiotic notions being advanced by certain conservative commentators is the idea that the poor performance of the stock markets represents a negative reaction to Barack Obama’s stimulus package. For one thing, the trading markets aren’t gauges of overall economic health. They are gauges of future anticipated profits for the large corporations that make up their components. In the long run, certainly, these two things should be correlated. But they needn’t be perfectly so: an oil price shock, for instance, is possibly good for the profitability of Exxon, while being damaging to the economy at large. Likewise, the announcement of a plan to take over and turnaround Citigroup, perhaps a necessary evil for economic recovery, would certainly not be good for Citigroup’s shareholders, who would probably get wiped out in the process. Nate Silver ☀
Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base — but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself. Nate Silver ☀
There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion. Nate Silver ☀
The battlegrounds change on a daily basis. Obama has to win Michigan and Pennsylvania. There are scenarios where he could lose one of them, but it would make things tough. Obama’s easiest path to victory is to hold the Kerry states and win Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico. That would give him 273 electoral votes. Right now he’s ahead in Iowa and New Mexico by seven or eight points, but Colorado is closer. The only Kerry states where McCain has a chance are Michigan and Pennsylvania, and maybe New Hampshire, but I’m not sure those four electoral votes will matter. McCain thought he might win in Wisconsin or Minnesota, but that doesn’t look likely now. And McCain has to hold on to Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and even Indiana and North Carolina could be close. So a lot of strange things could happen but Obama only has two “must-win” states while McCain has half a dozen. Nate Silver ☀
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