The world can be unkind. I explained this tonight to our young and fairly new red-striped (well, cream-striped) cat, Savio. Savio's been bummed out over the two new Manxes in our midst--he thinks we may not love him as much anymore. We do, I explained. At the same time, I added, it's a tough world out there.
Which he should already know, seeing as how he was rescued from outside a bar where someone had dumped him. Anyway, he needed our assurance we love him, and we gave it. I hope it helped.
From new Manxes to new polls--namely, this one from Newsweek. Simply put, suddenly Obama's not doing so hot--his Newsweek numbers have dropped amazingly from just last month. Says Newsweek, "Obama's rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. "
Yeah, as in right after his high numbers coming out of the primaries. As in, right at a time his numbers should be steadily rising. In other words, ohhhhhhh, shit.
Naturally, Newsweek, being a strong Obama supporter, is choosing its words carefully, but there's a depressed (and stunned) tone to the piece. Those of us who predicted this months ago aren't shocked, of course. Well, I am, a little--I didn't expect things to get so hairy so fast. Then again, Obama has shown, and continues to show, all the political savvy of a crumpled gum wrapper.
People will debate this latest poll's findings. Others will point out that polls don't mean anything. And most of them were saying nothing of the sort when polls showed Obama well ahead of McCain.
Note the article's mention of the faith-based stuff and its effect on his image. Last time around, I received several lectures about my alleged views regarding faith and politics and/or Progressivism and politics--which is funny, since I hadn't conveyed any. The whole point of my piece was simple: Obama's faith-talk is annoying a lot of progressives.
Proof? These two links provide a good start:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/30/43736/5222
http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=28011
My own views re religion and politics (in case you want to know) are simply summed up: religion is a feature of our culture and that fact should be reflected in and by our popular, representative democracy. The institutions of sports, business, education, and entertainment are represented 24/7 in and by our system--why not religion?
If religion is not to be represented in any way, then let's cut all official, taxpayer-dime associations between government and sports, business, education, mass media, and so on. And let's do it without delay.
Anyway, folks, I think we're looking at President McCain. I don't like the idea one bit, but no one asked me. Hell, I'm a Hillary supporter from Ohio. As far as the press is concerned, I can't even read, and I probably don't understand words when they're spoken to me.
Lee
2 comments:
As I said on the other side, the casual readers of polls like this never bother to read the fine print, namely the poll methodology. In their previous June poll, Newsweek oversampled Democrats. For this poll, they didn't.
The "gold standard" of polling, Gallup, has had Obama and McCain basically tied for quite some time. It's nothing new-Gallup had them basically tied 4 months ago as well.
One of the Newsweek editors, Evan Thomas, actually admitted in a print interview in the summer of 2004 that he and his media colleagues were in the tank for the Democrat. I'm sure they are this year as well.
I just read the Newsweek poll methodology (well, a good portion thereof) and didn't come to the same conclusion you did.
"Oversampled" can have at least two meanings here--giving too much weight to the responses of Dems, or disproportionately polling Dems. You mean the latter, right? In which case, the Dem/Repub ration isn't very different between the two polls. Not enough to account for the drop in O.'s lead.
Looking in detail at one of the non-Newsweek polls, I noticed that (as I suspected) measures had been taken to bring the respondent ratios in line with national norms regarding age, gender, income, education, etc. In other words, to avoid the lopsided representation you're citing as a problem with N.'s poll. I'm assuming the Newsweek poll took similar measures, unless there's a reason to suspect they didn't.
Naturally, based on past polls, a given polling outfit will anticipate a certain showing in regard to the features I mentioned above--it would be odd, I'm presuming, for 90 percent of a survey's respondents to be independents, for instance. I'm guessing that, so long as the turnout is within a give-or-take range, there'd be no cause for alarm.
Similarly, a Dem/Repub gap is to be expected, with no cause for alarm unless the disparity was outside an established norm.
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