Presidential Approval Ratings v. Real Elections

This report on Wisconsin’s governor’s race -- Democrat Doyle over Republican Mark Green by only 4 points -- suggests a big fallacy with much of the national polling we have been getting showing the President’s approval rating going down.

The unspoken assumption of those kinds of polls is that the alternative to the President is a fictional President with whom you would agree about everything. Notably, the assumption is content-free – a conservative Republican can “disapprove” of President Bush because of his stand on illegal immigration, while a liberal Democrat can “disapprove” of President Bush because of the War in Iraq. Both will end up in the “disapproval” column, even though the odds on them voting the same way in a real election are practically nil.

Put most simply: the President’s generic approval rating is always skewed low because he is being compared to the President of Nirvana. The President of Nirvana is a unique candidate because, no matter what you believe public policy should be, he agrees with you and implements it perfectly. Where you live now is always going to seem “on the wrong track” (as the pollsters say) if the comparison is to Nirvana.

What the report on Wisconsin shows, however, is that polls change immediately when a real named Democrat with real policies and real baggage is the opponent in an election where the people of a locale know both candidates intimately. Wisconsinites (I am one) know Governor Doyle and have known him for a long time. And there’s a lot to dislike about his tenure as Governor and his policies.

The same will be true about House and Senate races across the country. Mediacrats are all excited because of the Bush disapproval ratings. But Republican House members and Senators are not going to be running against the perfect candidate with whom everyone agrees and who has no baggage and who never makes a mistake. They are going to be running against real people, who the people of their state or district know well.
2006 is very very very important. But the notion that Democrats are going to sweep the field because of approval poll numbers is just silly.

Duke Lacrosse Update -- "Fake But Accurate"

As I've posted before, I don't know what happened in the Duke Lacrosse case. But the following comment from a North Carolina Central University student represents a trend in American culture and discourse that is very disturbing:

"Rape is wrong, sexism is wrong and classism is wrong," said Khari Jackson, an NCCU senior from Winston-Salem. "If it turns out [that the allegations are] not true, I'll still support her because of the deeper issues that's surrounding this case."

Just like in the Rathergate episode, now a story is apparently worthy of endorsement and publication even if it's a lie, so long as the lie supports an appropriate left-wing cause. "Fake but accurate" is the new mantra of the left.

Gas and Starbucks

Americans are either stupid or hypocrites or both. Every spring I hear the same complaints about gas prices and see the same TV news stories, blah, blah, blah. Every year I do the same rant for my wife. The rant goes something like this:

1. Let's say gas costs $3.00 per gallon.
2. A 20 oz. cup of Starbucks costs about $3.00 too.
3. So, Starbucks coffee is about $20 a gallon, since a gallon has 128 ounces in it.
4. Where are the news stories about the high cost of coffee?
5. Consider: if you drink a 20 oz. cup of Starbucks a day for a year, you'll spend about $1000 on coffee.
6. Consider: if you drive a car that gets about 20 miles to the gallon and drive about 600 miles a month, you'll spend about the same on gas as you spend on coffee.
7. How many other goods or services do you spend an equivalent amount on as gasoline without the caterwauling that occurs whenever gas prices go up and down?
8. Consider: gas prices today are a little more than double what they were twenty-five years ago. Has the average price of a four bedroom home in a moderately nice suburb only doubled in 25 years, or has it gone up more than that? We all know the answer. Yet, we aren't clamoring for a Congressional investigation of mortgage companies, real estate brokers, builders, etc. And all that, even though Americans spend much more on their homes than they spend on gasoline.
9. There are lots of other examples too of good and services where, if the price goes up or down by 20% -- about what gasoline has done recently by going up around 50 cents -- we wouldn't even notice. In fact... do the test right now. A gallon of milk costs.... what? Would you even know? A six pack of beer -- 9/16ths of a gallon, by the way -- costs.... what? Would you even know? Would you get all bent out of shape if you had to pay an extra 50 cents for a gallon of milk or a six pack of beer?
10. I have three little kids. They drink about 5-6 gallons of milk a week... about how much gasoline I buy (my commute is only about 8 miles to and from work). And I don't have a clue how much we spend on milk, not even close.

As my Grandmother's sampler said, Kwitchyerbellyachin'! Sheeesh!

The President Is A Grown-Up

President Bush has shown an admirable (and unfortunately self-defeating) ability to do the right thing regardless of polls. The War on Terror is the prime example, of course, since we are now told ad nauseum that majorities of Americans have concluded that Iraq is a disaster. He doesn't care. He knows that majorities of Americans have also apparently concluded that playing No-Limit Hold-'em online while listening to rap is the height of entertainment. Grown-ups know better. Grown-ups know, for instance, that the appropriate measure of success in Iraq is not whether Fallujah can, with a wave of a wand, be turned into Shaker Heights, Ohio. That is, the appropriate measure of success for grown-ups in the real world is not Nirvana but whether the decisions we make lead to a world that is better than the world would have been otherwise. And, sometimes, the measure is whether the particular part of the world we are concerned with is only a bad place, and not a horrific place. Iraq today is not a very nice place... it's not your suburban soccer mom's Iraq. But it's not a horrific slaughterhouse, as it was under Saddam Hussein, and would have been but for our intervention.

The President is showing the same kind of courage in discussing illegal immigration. His own party appears to be in the grip of their own utopian fantasy... the fantasy that we can somehow wave a wand and deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants. We can't. The logistics just don't make sense. 11-12 million people clogging jails, 11-12 million people clogging federal courts. Imagine that we could wave a wand and arrest and hold and give due process to the 11-12 million illegal immigrants. You're talking about 250,000 busloads of 50 people to take them to Mexico.

"Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic - it's just not going to work," Bush said today. "You know, you can hear people out there hollering it's going to work. It's not going to work."

He's right. We've got to figure out a way to solve the illegal immigration problem without deportation. But the solution is not going to be one that will cause Nirvana to commence. Instead, it's going to be a solution that is less bad than the alternatives.

My view: (1) close the borders as best we can; (2) increase legal immigration, especially for educated professionals and people with technical expertise; (3) give illegals an opportunity to become legal through some kind of process that would include (4) a requirement that each and every new American citizen learn English as soon as reasonably possible.

Retired Generals, Rumsfeld, Innumeracy (Again!) and How the Media Can Lie About Anything

There has been a lot of media hype over the past few days about "retired generals" calling for Don Rumsfeld to resign as Secretary of Defense. The media reports the stories of several (less than ten so far as I can tell) retired generals criticizing Rumsfeld without -- again, again, again! -- providing the necessary numerical context.

The necessary context is this: the Army and the other armed services are very, very large institutions, larger than any company, larger than any other branch of government. There are millions and millions of people in the armed services. Those millions and millions of people are commanded by hundreds of thousands of officers (lieutenants, captains, majors, ensigns, naval lieutenants, lieutenant commanders), who are commanded by tens of thousands of senior officers (colonels, captains), who are commanded by thousands of general officers (generals, admirals). There are about 5,000 retired generals and admirals in America. Again, the Army and the Navy are big, big, big.

So, the upshot is, when 4 or 5 "retired generals" criticize the Secretary of Defense, all that really means is that 1/10th of 1 percent of the retired generals don't like him and wish he'd resign.

In short, the story's headline could just as easily, and more truthfully be, "99.9% of Retired Generals and Admirals Either Support Rumsfeld, or Else Think That Commenting On the Political Decisions Made By the Secretary of Defense Is Out of Place For Retired Officers."

Hat tip to Brain Shavings.

Duke Lacrosse

I am a graduate of Duke's graduate school and a huge Duke basketball fan. I am also a lacrosse fan since my days in college, where I had a number of good friends on the Princeton lacrosse team. So the Duke lacrosse scandal over the past few weeks would obviously have captured my interest.

Nevertheless, I haven't blogged on it. Why? Well, because it seems to me that there is literally nothing useful to say about a criminal case at this stage until we know a lot more facts.

We now know, for instance, that there were no DNA matches between the 46 white lacrosse players tested and any DNA found on the black exotic dancer who accused them of rape. There also were some discrepancies in the time line in the accuser's story. All of this could lead to a conclusion that she made up at least some of her story.

On the other hand, we also know that a nurse at an emergency room using a rape kit concluded that the woman had, in fact, been raped. We do not, however, have access to those results, and, to my knowledge, the nurse has not spoken in public. (She probably would be precluded from doing so by privacy laws.) But the results of that test tend to suggest that something happened.

But what? We do not know. A plausible story might be the following:

1. The lacrosse team hired a stripper for a party over the phone. Very possibly, they expected a young white girl.

2. The stripper they hired, however, shows up at the party, and is older (27) and black. The potential for at least some of the boys feeling disappointed and short-changed is high.

3. Meanwhile, from her perspective she sees a large group of white boys. She doesn't like white boys much. She particularly doesn't like rich white boys. And she most particularly doesn't like Dukes (she's from a much much poorer college in Durham, N.C. Central). The potential for her feeling on edge, intimidated, even hostile in that situation is high.

4. So she wants to get her business done with as quick as possible. She gets paid up front -- that would be normal (I assume) -- but then when she dances she does so only in a perfunctory manner and begins to leave.

5. The boys who set the thing up are humiliated and mad, and they ask for their money back. An argument ensues.

6. At his point, a nuclear bomb goes off.

7. By "nuclear bomb" I mean that one of the boys, who undoubtedly has been indoctrinated in "diversity" and "multiculturalism" at Duke, and because of that training on some level understands paradoxically that racist humor is highly transgressive and perhaps could even be viewed as "cool" (I'd bet a hundred dollars that most of those players have watched episodes of the Dave Chappelle show on Comedy Central), and who also undoubtedly is (a) drunk and (b) emboldened by the presence of his teammates (see Canetti's Crowds and Power) now utters what he thinks is funny, edgy, hip -- a racially-tinged insult/joke.

8. The black woman, who herself is already mad as hell and likely somewhat scared in this house of white boys, doesn't think it's funny.

9. Race, in fact, has become such a taboo, that she views this white boy's attempt at humor as a high crime, punishable by.... by what?

10. So she concocts a gang-rape story to get back at them, to ruin their lives, to get them arrested, etc., etc.

That's a possible story. But we just don't know yet. What we do know, however, is that no one in this sordid story comes out smelling too good, not the players who, after all, were spoiled rich kids hiring a stripper for kicks; not the stripper who, after all, was willing to accept $400 for taking her clothes off in front of strangers; not Duke, which has handled the whole thing badly; not the D.A., who is running for reelection and needs black votes, so he can't drop the case; not the academic left community, which as usual jumped to conclusions about race/class/gender relations that forgot the facts that real people often act in ways that don't fit all of the easy categories of their ideology.

Why couldn't it have happened at UNC?

The "Rule of Law" and the Logic of the Anti-Illegal Immigration Position

I am highly sympathetic to a position held by what appears to be a growing segment of my party and my political brethren, conservative Republicans, regarding illegal immigration. The position, fairly described, is that no bill should be passed or signed that essentially -- whether or not lathered about with rhetoric saying the opposite -- grants amnesty to illegal aliens who have broken the law by coming into this country without proper legal documentation. To do so, the "Antis" hold, does too much injury to the rule of law. To do so, the "Antis" hold, only invites more and more people to flout the law by coming to this country illegally. To do so, the "Antis" hold, is an insult to all of the legal immigrants who have spent time and money trying to get the proper documentation so they could work and live in the U.S.

All of this is logical and based on a high and important principle -- that we are a society of laws.

But the "rule of law" is only meaningful if the law is, in fact, enforced. And a law can only be enforced if it is, in fact, enforceable. And here's the rub, I think. The logic of the anti-illegal immigration position ultimately would require a will on the part of the government to locate, capture, and deport enough of the 11-12 million illegal immigrants and to identify and prosecute enough employers who employ those illegal immigrants as to make the prospect of remaining in the country illegally a dangerous and losing proposition; and then to vigilantly and effectively close our 2000 or so miles of border with Mexico to future illegal immigration. There are purely logistical problems with all of these "solutions." Here are some that come immediately to mind:

1. Building a "wall" along 2000 miles of border would be a project of extraordinary scope and extraordinary expense, running no doubt into hundreds of billions of dollars. Where does the money come from?

2. Building a "wall" cannot happen overnight and would, to the contrary, probably take decades. What happens while the wall is being built with all of the would-be immigrants in Mexico and Central America? (In the short term, even proposing to build a wall would cause an increase in illegal immigration.)

3. Capturing a significant percentage of illegal aliens would require an unprecedented and enormous use of law enforcement resources. Where does that money come from? Who will train the tens of thousands of new law enforcement officers that it will take? How long will that training take? And, what will be the consequences to other law enforcement activities... will we decrease our concentration on drug smuggling, gangs, white collar crime, etc.? Will we decrease our concentration on Homeland Security, anti-terrorism?

4. Deportation doesn't happen immediately.... it requires a legal procedure. Where will we put the hundreds of thousands or millions of illegals that we want to deport until they have been given due process? Prisons? Concentration camps? Where will the money come from to build those facilities? How will we train the guards of those facilities?

5. Again, deportation doesn't happen automatically.... it requires a legal process. Where are all those new federal judges going to come from? What happens when certain shortcut procedures are adopted -- they would have to be -- and those procedures are challenged in court, and some judge enters an order enjoining the federal government from deporting similarly situated persons until the issue can work its way through the court system and ultimately to the Supreme Court? Where does the money come from to build new federal courthouses? If we aren't willing to make a gargantuan expenditure on new judges and new courts, how much weight can the present, already overloaded judicial system take?

And all this begs the question of whether the 11-12 million illegals are going to just passively let themselves be captured, imprisoned, tried and deported without forming themselves into militias, terrorist groups, etc. I wouldn't expect such a wholesale repopulation of what is really a huge ethnic population would be wholly without violence.... that's never happened in the history of the world.

The point of all of this is that the logical position of the anti-illegal immigration position -- close the borders, enforce the laws, deport lawbreakers -- cannot, in the real world, be put into practice without enormous upheaval in our law enforcement systems, enormous expenditures of our resources, likely widespread violence, and extraordinary damage to our international reputation (do we really want to be known as a country that puts ethnic minorities in concentration camps?)

The President and "Leaks" of Classified Information

There was a lot of hyperventilating reporting yesterday about the fact that Scooter Libby has apparently testified that Vice President Cheney told him that President Bush had authorized him to "leak" classified intelligence estimates to the media to counteract the lies that Joe Wilson was telling about the President, the rationale for the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase uranium "yellowcake" in Africa, etc.

The problem with all of this bloviation is a fairly simple conceptual one: Presidents cannot "leak" classified information. The media apparently have the notion that there is some free-floating thing out there called "classified" information, and that this "classified" information has an ontological status somehow apart from the real people in real governmental organizations who did the classifying. But it doesn't. Classified information is simply information that the executive branch -- operating through its foreign policy and intelligence agencies -- deems to be worthy of being classified and hence subject to restrictions on who can be told about it. But the executive branch, again, is simply an organization of the government that under the Constitution has a single chief executive, the President.

So, ultimately, as much as it pains the liberal loonies in the media to hear it, classified information is simply whatever the President says it is. Again, Presidents cannot leak classified information. Period. End of story. If the President says it's not classified, it's not classified.

President Bush had the Constitutional authority to declassify information anytime he wanted, and, in this case, it was particularly important to do so, as, in time of war, Joe Wilson and the useful idiots in the media were publishing lies designed to undermine his conduct of the war and to place America in bad repute internationally. That was the real scandal.

Jobs and Context

So CNN reports that the Labor Department's employment report for March 2006 is now out, and it shows that the economy added 211,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate has dropped to 4.7%. Hmmmm… those are nice facts in isolation. Makes for a nice little story on page B3 of the business section.

But imagine…. what if CNN would have reported the following additional facts to put the story in some historical context:

1. The 211,000 jobs in March means that, in the 2 1/2 years since President Bush's tax cuts in the summer of 2003, the economy has created more than 5 million new jobs. That's right, this month's jobs report pushes the job creation figure for Bush's tax cuts past 5 million. That's a pretty newsworthy milestone, don't you think? But I guess you can't expect the CNN reporterettes to actually go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' webpage and look up a statistic like that, can you?

2. The 4.7% unemployment rate is exactly the same as the unemployment rate in March 1998, i.e., at the same time in Bill Clinton's second term, when my memory is that the media was full of stories about how great the economy was booming. Again, the BLS has the data.

Meanwhile, Gallup on February 17, 2006 reported that "[t]he attitudes of the average American consumer toward the economy remain relatively dour. Majorities of Americans rate economic conditions at the moment as 'only fair' or 'poor,' say economic conditions in the U.S. are getting worse, and perceive that now is a bad time to be looking for a quality job." Do you think that maybe the reason most Americans have this opinion of the economy -- which is demonstrably wrong, as wrong as if they thought that 2+2=5 -- is because the news media has either intentionally or negligently misrepresented the economic news to them for so long?

It's one thing to report the numbers. It's another thing to put them in context so that readers understand that, relative to basically every other time and place in the history of man, being alive in the USA in 2006 is as good as it has ever been for human beings.