The Bush Poll "Dance"

One of the articles discussed today was the Gershkoff and Kushner study which attempted and I believe successfully proved The Bush administration's intent to utilize the support of the war on terror in Afghanistan and equate that war with taking down Hussein's regime in Iraq. Their data is successful in proving that not only did Bush intentionally utilize this form of deception but additionally there was no media debate to counter the Bush administration's argument for the war in Iraq. Here the media failed unquestionably.

However, Green presents a very different activity of the Bush administration that I would argue is not deceptive but rather an intelligent way of getting the American people on his side. According to Green, President Bush claims to not use polling to guide him (specifically in this anecdote regarding National Security), but Green informs us that:

On the last day of February, the Bush administration kicked off its renewed initiative to privatize Social Security in a speech before the National Summit on Retirement Savings in Washington, D.C. Rather than address "Social Security," Bush opted to speak about "retirement security." And during the brief speech he repeated the words "choice" (three times), "compound interest" (four times), "opportunity" (nine times) and "savings" (18 times). These words were not chosen lightly. The repetition was prompted by polls and focus groups.

While this example shows that Bush is deceptive in his claim not to use polling to guide his policies, what is wrong with the President using polling to sell his policies. One of the roles of the President, is party leader. Part of being the "party leader" is selling your party's agenda. If the President can be more successful by utilizing polling to find out how to best market his "product" (legislation) to the American people, is he really doing anything dishonest?

Green argues that keeping the polling data of a president under lock and key is suspicious, do we blame coca-cola for keeping their recipe secret? While yes, the president represents us, the American People, and he does have a responsibility to have some level of transparency, if you don't like the way he is running his "business" don't cast your vote for him in the next election.

It is clear, that when it comes to issues of national security, an American, especially one going to or sending a loved one off to battle has a right to know what they are fighting for and why the enemy is the enemy. I believe, and perhaps this is the deeper argument of Gershkoff, that national security is a whole different ballgame. For the President to try and sell a national health plan using more popular language based on polling is one thing, creating a narrative that borders on fiction is another. One thing is for sure, anything our President does will never match the idiocy of this President:


The point, I believe, is that the President has a job to do, and if through successful and intelligent usage of polling data the President can better sell his agenda, he has the right to do that, but is responsible for the risks that come along with that plan of action.

Partying the Poll Away

In Michael Schwartz's "Opiate of the Electorate" he describes some of the difficulties and flaws in paying too close attention, and "getting addicted" to poll results. He discusses their imperfections and the drastic results of even a simple miscalculation. On October 30th Fox News, our right-wing biased news source released an article based on a single poll that suggested Mccain had narrowed his deficit to a mere 3%, placing him within the margin of error and in effect making the race a dead heat. However, nowhere in the article are we given information as to the day of the week the poll was taken (As Schwartz explains young adults, who tend to vote democratic are out partying on the weekends), the formulation of the question, or the number of people poled. This entire article, attempting to convince the reader that Mccain still has a chance is based on a single piece of information. 

If one were to examine this article further however, there is a small link in little tiny letters on the bottom that links to the raw data. This is where we can really begin to analyze how a poll can be misused if one does not now how to use the "drug" properly.  Essentially what Fox News is doing here is using one set of polls to attempt to draw a conclusion from one poll, despite the fact that only a week earlier Obama had a lead of 10%. This is one of the issues Schwartz warns against 

"The mass media- the pushers of this statistical drug- use the polls to build their ratings or sales and advance their political agendas".

 I found this comical video of Fox News on YouTube that attempts to prove that the race is close, because NICKELODEON polled kids and this placed Obama only 2 points ahead of Mccain.

Are you laughing yet?

The sad reality of polls, as is clear from Schwartz's article is that there are so many possible flaws and imperfections in polling, that to be distracted by their value (or lack thereof) is to be distracted from the real issues that an election presents. Instead of looking at what the polls tell us, decide for yourself what issues are important to and effect you, and leave the polls to the junkies and scholars.

Success of the Soft-News Network

My uncle shared this video with me. I was going to just post it, however I wanted to share a few thoughts. I think the message the maker of this video is trying to get across has three parts. Firstly, that Obama voters did not really know who or what they were voting for. Secondly, that these people didn't have the right to vote for someone that they didn't know. Thirdly,  (and this is where I agree with him) that the media did a really great job of getting the American people to know useless information about the candidates. They didn't discuss their policies but rather, the stuff that people would actually want to hear (like Palin's daughter becoming pregnant). I am interested to hear your thoughts after watching the video in its entirety. 

How Manly (or Womanly) is Your Blog?

I recently came upon a really cool blog "tool". This website  analyzes the words in your blog to determine whether it is written by a Male or a Female. If for any reason you are unsure how "manly" your blog might be, check out this really cool tool and find out for yourself. 

You Get Nothing!

This article is just one of the many that continue to cover Gov. Palin's potential to run for President in 2012. Now I can't truly decide if she is pushing herself into the limelight or if the media is puting her there because it gets the interest of their readership, although evidence points to the former :

"She has also hinted at a possible run for the top job in 2012 during a flurry of national television interviews this week, telling one network she would "plough through that door" if it was God's will."

Regardless of why the media chooses to cover this story almost as much as the fires in Calfornia is disturbing. Gov. Palin's spot in the limelight despite her loss makes me want to to tell her something that Willy Wonka says so well:


However, she doesn't seem to get that message from Mr. Wonka. She continues to talk about the same things she spoke about throughout the campaign, yet Americans seemed to reject (based on polling here) her general message. I find it interesting that the media chooses to continue to cover this (A news.google.com search of palin + 2012 will net almost 13,000 articles) despite the fact that Obama has not even been sworn in yet. While there is precedent for a losing VP candidate to run for President in the next election (Lieberman 04) a Google News search in the date range of past elections does not produce nearly as many results or as much of a discussion as a simmilar Palin search.

It seems that coverage of the Palin-2012 concept is overdone, if not unnessary at all. I think that media should be covering Obama's plans for the next 4 years and not the campaign that has yet to even begin. It is a disservice to the American people for the media to be calling the Palin-2012 news, as it is nothing more than speculation.

Where Has all the Money Gone?

We have spoken a lot in class recently of the relationship between this years candidates and the millions of contributions that came into each of the campaigns, as well as sorted them into different demographics of contribution size. However, if one looks back on past elections the amount of money spent on presidential campaigns has doubled from 2004 and has increased 30 times when compared to 1976. What has changed so much since 1976 (minus inflation of course) that elections have become just so expensive?

I'd first like to propose that while technology has become much more accessible, it has not lessened the cost of a campaign ad. It has open up more fronts than existed in 1976. If a campaign ignored one of the fronts (i.e. the internet) the amount spent on a campaign would drop rapidly. As an example, if Obama would have ignored internet advertising completely, he would have saved a whopping 12 million dollars. Print media, another 14 million, this does not even include the staff that produces these things. Therefore, the increase of media fronts has increased the costs of a presidential campaign exponentially.

Secondly the cost of producing an eye catching ad has risen significantly. No longer can one set up a home movie camera, film the candidate speaking for 30 seconds or a minute and have a complete TV Ad:


It takes many more staff, resources, and highly advanced technology to produce the eye-catching, enthralling political campaign TV ad of 2008:

This one has voice-overs, flashes, advanced video-editing, and various banners throughout the video that increase the production cost of such an ad.

Thirdly, the increased competition in the media market has caused an increase in the cost of TV campaign ads. There is no longer just 10 or 15 channels that one can access from their home (and thus the candidate can advertise) as in 1976, but hundreds upon hundreds of channels that one can access from their satellite or cable television. This increases the number of areas in which a candidate must advertise. Any home can be watching any of these channels at any time, and the candidates campaign needs to be sure that at least some of their TV ads reach these homes of voters.

The increase of technology, while making access to each voter significantly easier, has increased the cost of a modern campaign. This is why, when one looks back to the amount of money spent in 1976 and compares that to today, one would find an increase of almost 30 times. This number will only go up over time, as the cost of accessing these new technologies increases, and the candidate has no choice but to use them.

A Biased Media?

I must say that I personally believed that the media was not unusually biased in their coverage of the election. While each media source may have some sort of bias, I did not personally believe that the "Obama-mania" really had any truth. However today's Washington Post had an enlightening article that seems to support Daniel's understanding of Leighly (A narrative bias) in the Washington Posts Election Coverage:

"Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The Washington Post clearly articulates that they were creating a narrative of the election, not necessarily a comprehensive coverage of the nitty-gritty of the election. There are various other facts throughout this article to support the clear bias of the Post, most of which are difficult to really refute.

The local Jewish Paper of Los Angeles, The Jewish Journal, has had some really comprehensive and balanced coverage of the election, and this week there was an article featured that took a position that Mccain deserved to lose but Obama did not deserve to win. One of the supports for this argument was that

"The blatantly biased media did not explain the origins of the economic crisis; instead, the media consistently boosted Obama, who never actually had taken on his party, as the candidate somehow for change, while resisting any serious investigative reporting of Obama's myriad deficiencies and inconsistencies."

This argument fits with the seemingly obvious attempt of the media to creative a narrative of the election. If the media had actually made a serious attempt at covering the issues in the election it would ruin the "story" of Obama. Where I think some of these arguments may fall weak is in the result of the media's narrative about Obama. It was inspirational to Americans at a time when they were looking for inspiration, and the media would be lacking if it did not cover Obama's candidacy in the storyline of the civil rights movement of the last hundred years. While this may have created a bias in media coverage, it might have been the only way to truly grasp how this election fit into the narrative of American History. This video below from will.i.am really gives meaning to what it means in America for an African-American to be elected president.

Those Israelis....

CNN's Hologram Technology, thanks to our friends in Israel:

Obama: An Anti-Semite?

I have some news for everybody, President Elect Obama has named a Jew, educated in Jewish Day School in Chicago, and whose father fought in the Irgun, to be his Chief-Of-Staff, he has not yet accepted. PLEASE spread the word on this, as it is important that as a community we recognize our past misconceptions of our next President, and recognize that he is looking for a positive relationship with our community. The article is here. 

Is this why he Lost?

This video wont allow me to embed, but is this the reason that Al Franken lost by 570 votes? One of his main campaign ideas was Obama + Franken= Change. In other-words, he was trying to get people to vote a straight ticket, however was unsuccessful in convincing people that he was associated enough with Obama. While Franken is an intelligent character and has more to him that Stuart Smalley and other Saturday Night Live characters, but Sen. Coleman, who appears to be the victor here used ads like this to convince just enough people that Franken was too much of a comedian to be a U.S. Senator:

Oversimplifying Differences?

In Case you have yet to decide who you are voting for, Mccain has made this simple chart to compare himself to Obama, hmmm, lower taxes, more jobs, maybe I should have voted for Mccain...

The Stress of Campaigning and Those Angry Talking Heads

I was watching a replay of Senator Obama's interview with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show and I could not help but notice how much greyer Sen. Obama's hair looked. I decided to do some further research into some political commentary on this issue. Before reading some articles on the issue, I already had a theory of my own that the Senator used artificial means to darken his hair as there is no question in my mind that a person with grey hair has a much more distinguished, scholarly appeal.

In the photo above the full jet-black hair of the Senator is in a picture from January of this year and the gray hair is from this past week. It seems odd that someone would gray that quickly, even with all the stresses of running a campaign. While the Senator's Campaign denies that he has dyed his hair, I found an interesting quote from a recent campaign stop that I thought really supported my initial theory:

Mr Obama has seemed resigned to his more mature look. "The grey is coming quick. By the time I'm sworn in, I'll look the part," he told supporters in Colorado in July.

It just seems too good to be true, that they "grey is coming in quick" and after visiting here, here, and here, the science suggests that stress would not cause grey hair overnight, as Senator Obama seems to be claiming.

I think this connects quite well to our discussion Wednesday, of the effects of a TV camera getting up close and personal with the candidates. In a prior era where every inch of a candidates appearance couldn't be analyzed and picked apart, the candidates were safe from worrying about wearing makeup, dying their hair, or going for a daily shave. However now, they know that every pundit and political analyst will be sure to analyze their appearance, and especially how much their visit to the barber shop or salon set them back.

In addition to the effects of the debate and argument that Mutz's "In-your-face" television describes, I think that the close-up nature of television forces the candidates to be sure that their apperance is always up to the highest of standards for fear that the already damaging effects of endless, senseless debate are not made worse by their poor, undistinguished appearance.