Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

I was convinced that Rudy Giuliani would win the Republican nomination. I was wrong.

I was convinced that John McCain couldn't possibly win his party's nomination, even before the campaign implosion during the Summer of 2007. I was wrong.

I was convinced that Barack Obama was too unserious a candidate to win the election. I was utterly, utterly wrong.

In my defence, I did call both nominations for Obama and McCain the day before the Iowa caucuses, but I don't think that excuses my swivel-eyed insistence that we'd be looking at a President-Elect Giuliani today.

The lesson I've learned is that polls count, but only in the last few weeks of a campaign. Conventional wisdom is worth more than it's fun to admit.

Personally, I blame the financial crisis for changing the election trajectory. The candidates' reactions reversed the McCain=serious/Obama=unserious dynamic that I thought would win it for McCain ("suspending" his campaign was a pretty ridiculous stunt). The worldwide recession also caused a major drop in the price of oil, robbing McCain of his "drill, baby, drill" message, which I thought was pretty good.

Next time I'll keep a closer eye on the polls I don't like, although Rasmussen again had the most accurate polls comparing their final polling numbers with the actual results. Anyway, roll on 2012, roll on Palin-Gingrich!

Predictions

My final prediction for the presidential election is:



That's McCain 273, Obama 265. I'm banking on a coal backlash, apathy among Obama supporters who think it's a done deal (never rely on young people!), and maybe a little bit of the Bradley effect.

Will it happen? Let's see tomorrow night.

Be careful what jokes you make!

Apparently the two doctors on trial for terrorism (OK, I suspect they are guilty, but that's not the point) "joked about martyrdom" – and this is being used against them at their trial.

Think back to the jokes you've made in the last few days between yourself and your friends. Were any of them in bad taste? Did you joke about terrorism, or race, or even paedophilia? Of course not! Because if you had, you would almost certainly be implicated in a crime to do with one of those things.

If Mohammed Asha and Bilal Abdulla are found guilty based on the actual evidence, then great. But please let's not pretend an offensive joke is anything but a joke.

Why I'll still admire John McCain if he loses

It seems depressingly likely that Barack Obama will win the presidential election, barring a Truman-esque turnaround for McCain. As I've written before, it's silly to predict that any election is a sure thing until one side actually concedes – if you're right, who cares?, and if you're wrong, you look like an idiot – but with a week to go before the election, I'll write about why I admire John McCain, come what may.

People often criticise political campaigns for turning into popularity contests that "neglect the issues", but if that means they'd rather a dry debate over tax policy, count me out. It's a fairly banal thing to say, but the only real constant in politics is change. No-one can know what circumstances will be like over the next four years, and circumstances will radically affect what a president can and must do. If voters in 2000 had known that the next four years would be marked by the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbour and two foreign wars, they might very well have voted differently. I can think of at least one primary candidate who might have been better-suited to those events than either Al Gore or George W. Bush – how different things might be now!

John McCain has the strongest character of anyone who has run for president in my (pretty short, in fairness) lifetime. For me, character isn't about being dispassionate or analytical, as Obama is frequently described. It's about being passionate about what you believe in and having the courage to do unpopular things to do the right thing. Even if I don't agree with McCain on every issue, I admire that he has put his name on unpopular legislation (like the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) and stuck with seemingly-lost causes through to the end. The double-thrust in 2006 of pushing for both a troop surge in Iraq and the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, upsetting both Democrats and Republicans respectively, is emblematic of what it is that I like about McCain (along with the obvious good judgment that those things show). By pushing for possibly-fatally unpopular changes in policy and war strategy, McCain has demonstrated that he genuinely loves his country and will do whatever he can for it, even if it means standing in the wilderness.

Yes, McCain has run a poor campaign. Yes, he has some serious personal flaws (although I don't know why having a temper is considered a bad thing in a leader). But John McCain has shown the he'll these are dangerous times. Being a great campaigner isn't a qualification for President – but being a great man is.

Sense and Sensitivity

Sackboy, Islamophobe and star of LittleBigPlanet
 

Sony has had to withdraw a massively-anticipated new PS3 game, LittleBigPlanet, because of a song in the soundtrack that features 'two expressions that can be found in the Qur'an', something which is apparently offensive to certain Muslims.

I know, I know – offended Muslims? It's not a mistype, though. The Cartoon Jihad, in all its absurdity, has proven to have been a far more effective weapon against free speech than all the suicide bombers in Iraq combined, by cowing publishers into submission whenever something happens to upset a (presumably small) section of the Islamic world. Some of the most ridiculous cases have been Burger King withdrawing its ice-cream logo because the swirl looked like the Arabic for 'Allah', or the Tayside police force withdrawing a poster depicting a puppy sitting in a police hat – dogs are unclean in Islam, you see!

What's depressing about all this isn't simply that there are people deranged enough to get upset about this sort of thing, but the fact that our culture has slumped to the extent that companies like Sony and Burger King find it easier to submit than stand up to threats made by crazy people.  But what can we do to defend free speech? It's difficult to know, when your enemy is prepared to burn down a building over a cartoon.

McCain isn't done

It looks bad for McCain – it's been a month since he's had even a one-point lead, and Obama has had a decisive lead since the end of September. What little I know about opinion polling makes me trust Rasmussen above most others because it gave McCain more of a shot than any other company during the primaries, and predicted the 2004 election most accurately – but obviously all polls should be balanced against each other.

Polls can be misleading (as the primary season proved), but it's a dangerous fallacy to assume that because they can be wrong, they will be: if McCain's only hope is that he's constantly being underpolled, he's pretty well doomed. But, even if they're accurate, polls are only a snapshot of current opinion, something lots of people seem to be forgetting.

Events and circumstances are what will affect the next two-and-a-half weeks and just as the financial turmoil has favoured Barack Obama, instability in foreign affairs will benefit John McCain. Maybe Kim Jong-il will die? Maybe Russia will start flexing her muscles again? Even something relatively minor like OPEC reducing their oil output could turn things around entirely. Maybe nothing will happen, but that's the point – we have absolutely no way of knowing until election day.

Blogs Abide

Posts have been non-existent recently. Sorry about that! It hasn't been blogger's block or too much else going on in my life, it's simply been a reluctance to post – anyone who's kept a blog (is that the right way of putting it?) will understand.

I'll try to be a little more adventurous from now on and post things that come to mind or strike me as worth saying. Stay tuned!

I Don't Understand Why the Banks are Collapsing...

...but someone who does is Graham at the Irish Liberty Forum blog. Anyone curious about why the short-selling ban was a mistake, and why the current "bail-out" plan could be a catastrophic mistake.

Something for the Weekend

Posts will be more-or-less non-existant over the weekend, I'm afraid.

In the meantime, why not think about this -- which Simply Red song is better, Stars or Fairground? For my money, it's Fairground all the way, but Margaret thinks otherwise.
Have a great weekend!
Stars


Fairground

Election '08 Roundup, 19th September

A collection of interesting reads on the state of the US Election (warning: obvious pro-McCain bias):

The historian Victor Davis Hanson (author of the excellent Why the West Has Won) argues that Palin's character trump's Obama's, among other observations.

Poll analyst Nate Silver think McCain is in trouble and has "blown his wad too early".

The McCain campaign tries linking Obama to the credit crisis – did you know that Obama took the second-highest amount of lobbyist money from Fannie May and Freddie Mac of any US Senator?

The influencial George Will says McCain should take a leaf out of Michael McDowell's book and run against one-party control of Congress and the Presidency. It certainly wasn't great when the Republicans had it.

A poll roundup from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com.

Sean Oxendine gives the reasons McCain might win at The Next Right.

And Obama regains the lead in the Gallup tracking poll...

Sporadic Posting

Posting will continue to be infrequent until Smart Telecom install broadband in my new house. Just think of this as the teething problems that come with any newborn!

In the meantime, why not bookmark Pull Out the Pin or, better yet, your RSS subscription list?

For RSS virgins, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a simple way of having the posts from all your favourite blogs compiled in one easy-to-use reader – my favourite is Google Reader. This allows you to save a huge amount of time by not having to visit every site that you like every day. To start using Google Reader, simply sign in with your Google Account and start adding feeds by clicking the "Feed It!" icon to the right. It's easy-peasy and really streamlines the day.

Again, apologies for the sporadic posting. Full service will sume (the blog's only been going for a few days so it can hardly resume) shortly.

Why the Progressive Democrats Died

Last night's news that the Progressive Democrats are going to shut up shop and succumb to the inevitable made me think about the factors that led to this outcome. The PDs' failures can be attributed, in my mind, to their own mistakes:

1. Taking on the Health and Justice ministries: Thankless and ultimately fruitless tasks. The day something as convoluted and esoteric as "hospital co-location" became the watchword for the PDs was the day things became hopeless.
2. Giving up any economic ministry: How could a party whose chief selling point was its economic liberalism sell itself to the electorate with no economic record whatsoever?
3. A lack of local involvement: By their nature, the PDs were a "big ideas" party, but it's a truism that in Ireland elections are won on local issues. The PDs never became involved in their local football clubs, residents' assoctiations or anything like that, and so they could never have hoped to establish themselves in the same way as the larger parties.
4. Missing the Europe boat: This is arguable, but I think the emergence of Libertas during the Lisbon Treaty campaign was symptomatic of the strategic incompetence of the Progressive Democrats. Wedded, like all the other mainstream parties, to the idea of "the EU, right or wrong", the PDs failed to see the opening for a pro-business, anti-authoritarian party. By failing to recognise how sick the electorate was of "trust us" politics, the PDs lost any chance to differenciate themselves from Fine Gael or Fianna Fail.
5. Campaigning on ridiculously unpopular policies: Policies like the above-mentioned co-location, and cuts in the upper rate of tax. These might both be great policies but no-one understands them, and when you're explaining, you're losing.
6. Allowing the brand to collapse: The PDs were really passionately hated by a large part of the electorate, for failing to associate themselves with policies like the minimum wage (wrongheaded ones, but popular ones). Furthermore, the full party name is such a mouthful that it was inevitable that it would be shortened to "pee dee", but it hurt the party hugely. The day people start talking about "eff eff" or "eff gee", some of the other parties can worry too.

Ireland's lost its liberal party, for now. The grim hopes of some PDs that a recession would cause the electorate to flock back are misplaced, but it seems inevitable that something resembling the PDs will re-emerge someday.

Update: Check out Stephen Spillane's take here. For what it's worth, I expect most of the membership to go to Fine Gael (in votes, if not an actual membership swing).

The Obligatory Sarah Palin Post

Everyone's caught Sarah Palin fever – you can read some varying opinions on her and the stories surrounding her here, here and here – and this blog's launch (slow, stuttering posting frequency aside) would be incomplete without my own take on the lady from the North.

I like Sarah Palin. I'd always held her as my fantasy pick for McCain's VP, back in the old days when we all thought it was T-Paw, T-Paw, T-Paw all the way, and people thought Obama was going to win. I, like pretty much everyone else, first learned about Palin from the Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President blog, and I, like pretty much everyone else, knew she didn't have a chance in hell of winning McCain's Vice Presidential nomination.

Until she won the nomination.

Since then, an awful lot has changed. Barack Obama's looking a lot more like John Kerry or Michael Dukakis than that other guy from Massachusetts who ran for president. John McCain is still old – in fact, he's even older than when he began his campaign, a fact that the lithe, cunning Obama campaign will no doubt take advantage of – but he's gotten into his swing and has taken a slim lead in most polls. And the search for Joe Biden continues.

All of these facts, surely, can be attributed to Sarah Palin. Most important, though, is McCain's polling surge among white women – a twenty-point swing from Obama to McCain. In polling terms, this is monumental: white women are how presidential elections are won, having the highest turnout of any demographic. If McCain leads among white women on polling day, he will win the election. Clearly, Sarah Palin is an electoral asset to McCain, and may become the first running mate to affect the result of a presidential election since 1960 (arguably, had Al Gore won in 2000, Joe Lieberman could have taken the credit, but it's a moot point). Some people think Palin will implode and drag McCain down with her, but she's tough to attack, and attacks on VPs rarely make much difference in the real world. If anything, the "Troopergate" investigation's result (due shortly before election day) will benefit Palin even if, as expected, it is critical of her: the facts of the case only accentuate Palin's ordinary-ness (wanting to fire an abusive ex-brother-in-law won't strike many people as out of line) and remind people why they liked Palin in the first place.

But so what if she's a great campaigning choice? Most criticism of Palin attacks her inexperience: she's been Governor of Alaska for a year and a half, and that's not enough time to competently assume the Presidency if John McCain pulls a William Henry Harrison. This argument on its own is plausible, but the people making this argument are not. When Barack Obama began his run for president, he had been a US Senator for 768 days. When Sarah Palin began her run for vice-president, she had been a Governor for 637 days. What happens in those 131 days, what switch flicks, that suddenly made Obama capable?

By no measure, whatsoever, is Obama qualified to be president. It's true that Sarah Palin probably isn't either, but the difference is this: my inexperienced, wish-fulfillment, eye-candy candidate is at the bottom of the ticket; yours is at the top.

Welcome to Pull Out the Pin

Hello! Welcome to my weblog, Pull Out the Pin. You might have been a reader of my previous blog (same name, different host), but for anyone who isn't, here's a chance to start afresh.

I looked around online for some "How to Write Your First Post" articles, but they weren't very helpful – so here goes my own stab at a "first post".

This site will be a repository for my thoughts, mostly (but not exclusively) on politics, and links to things written by people more interesting, intelligent and articulate than I am. I read Irish, American and British blogs, and this reflects my interest in the politics of the English-speaking Atlantic world (if anyone can recommend some good Canadian blogs, I'd be grateful).

You'll quickly figure out where I lie on the political spectrum but generally I'm a hard-nosed, anti-authoritarian classical liberal – 'nuff adjectives for ya there? I don't believe in a perfect world, or trying to make one (it usually doesn't turn out too well), and I don't equate bad luck in life with being owed something by the government. Ultimately, governments get their money at the point of a gun, and I don't like them pointing that gun unless it's really, really necessary.

I could immunize myself from criticism and say that this is all for myself, but the truth is that I will be obsessing over my readership statistics and furiously, shamelessly, promoting myself. I want and care about getting readers, and I don't believe bloggers who say they don't. I love comments (who doesn't, really?) and I love getting emails, so please give me both whenever you can!

I have a blogroll to the right, but these are only a tiny selection of the ~200 RSS feeds that I read every day – it would be pointless to list them all on the page, so I've given a selection of blogs that I think might appeal to the readers of this blog. If you think your blog might belong there, please get in touch.

I hope you give Pull Out the Pin a try. You could add it to your bookmarks or, if you're feeling techy, your RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader). I hope you'll enjoy reading!