Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I have trouble with the hagiography of Martin Luther King. Yes, he was a great man who did a great thing for which he should be duly honored: he was an inspirational figure in the non-violent civil rights movement in this country, as well as a remarkable speaker.

The two, of course, are related. It was his personal qualities of leadership and what George H.W. Bush might rightly call “the vision thing” that enabled King to bring together so many people to peacefully demonstrate in furtherance of a lofty and necessary goal, that of ending discrimination against blacks in this country.

As for the rest of it—well, I think it can be summed up by saying that King was a flawed human being. Perhaps MLK himself would be the first to agree; he was a preacher, after all, and he knew a lot about human sin and error. It’s pretty much certain he was a philanderer as well as a plagiarist, and in later life he seemed to veer ever more leftward (some think that’s a feature, not a bug). Does that diminish his achievements? I don’t think so, if we keep it in perspective. I’ve always been more interested in real human beings who accomplish great things despite their own weaknesses than I am in a pretended (and mostly unachievable) perfection.

[NOTE: One thing that’s long amazed me is that King was so young when he was assassinated. At the time I thought him a man in his 50s, but he was actually a mere 39 years old. If he were alive today, he would only have just turned 83 yesterday.

There’s a lot of speculation on what King would have thought of current trends had he lived. I’m no expert on everything the man wrote and said, but it’s my impression that although he seemed to be in favor of some sort of reparations—which he did not limit to blacks, by the way—he would not have backed affirmative action or gay marriage. However, people do change—as I know only too well.]

The primary primaries: game over?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of comments around the blogosphere from people who feel angry because the present primary system so often leads to the nominee being chosen (de facto, anyway) quite early on. The complaint goes like this: Why should a few stupid little states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina decide the whole shebang?

But every New Hampshire (or South Carolina, or to a lesser extent Iowa, because it’s done there by caucuses) voter stands for many thousands more. Each state isn’t typical of the whole, of course; state primaries are not the same as a poll in which the sample is carefully selected (and even those polls and samples are often flawed, sometimes deeply flawed). But I’d bet that when you average out the results of the first three or four or five states to vote, then the results become more and more typical of the entire country. And if the earlier results point pretty powerfully in a single direction to a single winner—which doesn’t always happen, of course—it’s a good bet that this will probably continue to be the trend unless some fresh scandal erupts or some new events emerge to change the picture.

My talk of cumulative representativeness in the early primaries doesn’t mean I like the way the primary system is set up at the moment; I don’t. I think it lends itself to a bandwagon effect, and that having so many primaries on a single day (“Super Tuesday“) favors the candidate with the most money (but then, just about everything about campaigns favors the candidate with the most money). I also think primaries lock in a candidate too soon and make it impossible for a party to retain enough flexibility to react to changing circumstances and events, as well as allowing a less popular candidate to be nominated when the vote is split on the other side by the entry and persistence of a large number of candidates from one faction of the party.

I think the latter is one of the reasons many conservatives are so angry at the growing sense that Romney may run away with this thing. Ah, if only more of the others would drop out, they say. Then the conservative vote would unite behind one candidate who could defeat RINO Romney and be nominated instead. While that argument may have some merit, I’m not at all sure it would work that way. I see all the alternative conservative candidates as having disqualified or marginalized themselves in the eyes of too many voters, and I think a substantial number of their votes would go to Romney.

Wiki lists a number of proposals that have been made in an attempt to improve the primary system. After a quick look, I lean towards one called a “balanced primary system“:

Under this plan, primary contests would be held during 13 out of the 18 weeks, starting in late January and ending in late May. California would vote about halfway through the process. Before California votes, each week’s contest would choose about 12% of the delegates necessary for the nomination, from a single state, or a group of contiguous states. After California votes, the contests would award more delegates in larger groups of states, since the positions of the hopefuls would be better known by then.

To provide balance, diversity in each contest would be maximized. Liberal states would be paired with conservative states; urban areas would be mixed with rural areas. The contests would move around so that each region of the country would award some delegates before California votes. In subsequent years, groups of states could trade off dates, so that the same states did not vote early in every election.

The advantages of this system include the feature that lesser known candidates could still have a chance by using retail politics in small states early, without giving those early small states too much influence. Travel time and advertising cost would be minimized by requiring that groups of states be contiguous, thus saving the hopefuls’ time and money.

Like many election reform ideas, though, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Many states have too vested an interest in being first. What’s more, it’s the sort of proposal that keeps falling by the wayside once the primaries and the election are over and we’ve got a lot of other and seemingly more pressing things on which to focus our attention.

Huntsman to drop out of the race

The New Neo Posted on by

Word is that Huntsman will drop out of the race on Monday and endorse Romney.

Huntsman never really caught on, and I think it was partly a personality thing. It’s hard to define why certain personalities appeal to voters and others don’t, but he seemed especially low-key and had no natural constituency to speak of. Not as conservative as some nor as well-known as others, he didn’t seem to have that fire in the belly. It didn’t help, either, that he was the ambassador to China under Obama.

My guess is that most of Huntsman’s votes will go to Romney. But since he didn’t have that many votes, I doubt it will be of much import.

Bain and the capitalism question

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since this Bain thing has been dominating the news, a lot of people—both pundits and commenters—have been saying that all Romney has to do is explain what he did at Bain and what Bain’s activities are all about, as though that were a simple thing to accomplish.
I’ve now spent an enormous number of hours (really can’t say how many, but I can safely say it’s more than most American voters are going to be willing to spend) trying to bone up on the subject as best I can, and it’s a daunting endeavor, to say the least.

The difficulty doesn’t just lie in the fact that the general topic is pretty technical and presupposes a fairly high level of intelligence, although both things are true. It’s also that it’s not easy to find an unbiased source. All the writers on the subject seem to have a dog in this race, and we’re not just talking about Romney as that dog.

The situation reminds me a bit of AGW, although the AGW controversy is even more convoluted and requires even more technical knowledge that most people lack. But the issues are similarly large, and in the case of the Bain brouhaha they involve nothing less than that old debate that has led to such turmoil around the world (just ask the residents of the former Soviet Union): is capitalism and/or the free market system inherently good or bad or neutral, and what limits should be placed on it?

You may be relieved to hear that I’m not going to tackle that question today. But don’t think I haven’t been thinking about it. I believe it would certainly be a good “dialogue” to have in public life—in fact, I think it’s one we’ve been having in some form or other for quite some time, maybe the entire history of the Western world since feudalism met its demise some centuries ago.

But a presidential campaign is not going to lend itself to a dispassionate discussion of the sort, even if such a thing were possible anyway. My guess is that Romney’s “explanation,” when offered, will be just as self-serving and fall just as short of the goal of an objective analysis of the situation as Newt’s feigned concern about the possible rapaciousness of Bain (or maybe I missed his previous crusade against leveraged buyouts) has been. Meanwhile, one could do worse than read this WSJ article by Holman W. Jenkins, and its accompanying comments section.

Is Romney down in South Carolina polls?

The New Neo Posted on by

One would think so from the news:

From an article entitled “Romney Slipping in South Carolina, holds just 2-point lead over Gingrich” [emphasis mine]:

Despite a historic sweep of the first two nominating contests in the GOP field, Mitt Romney holds just a two percentage-point lead in South Carolina, his smallest lead of 2012.

Romney is the favorite of 23 percent of South Carolina voters, narrowly edging Newt Gingrich’s 21 percent, according to the latest poll from Insider Advantage…

The numbers could indicate that Gingrich’s aggressive strategy ”” which has included controversial attacks on Romney’s business and abortion records ”” is gaining him traction by hurting the GOP front-runner.

In the three other major South Carolina polls completed in the new year, Romney was earning 37 percent, 27 percent and 30 percent, according to Real Clear Politics ”” meaning his 23 percent in the latest poll marks a precipitous decline.

And from an article entitled “Gingrich Surging in South Carolina” we have [emphasis mine]:

The InsiderAdvantage poll of South Carolina likely Republican primary voters shows Newt Gingrich surging.

There’s plenty more where that came from—article after article. But I like to do research, and my research tells me something interesting about Romney’s support in South Carolina, and especially that particular pollster’s (“Insider Advantage”) figures.

Take a look and you’ll see that this is Romney’s record in South Carolina in previous Insider Advantage polls:

10/16/11
Romney 16
Gingrich 8 [this was before Gingrich’s boomlet when Cain ran into trouble]

11/8/11
Romney 16
Gingrich 19 [this was about a week after the Cain sexual harassment story broke]

11/28/11
Romney 15
Gingrich 38 [this was very shortly before Cain dropped out of the race]

12/18/11
Romney 19
Gingrich 31

1/11/12
Romney 23
Gingrich 21

If you study the South Carolina poll results over time—and not just the Insider Advantage polls, either—you’ll see that Gingrich owned South Carolina from the time Cain started to fade until right after Iowa, a period of a little over two months. Then Romney came into a brief (about a week long) ascendancy, a post-Iowa bounce—but not in any Insider Advantage poll, because none were taken in South Carolina by that pollster post-Iowa till now. The previous most recent Insider Advantage poll in South Carolina (December 18) showed Newt with a commanding lead over Romney; the new Insider Advantage poll there shows gains for Romney and losses for Gingrich.

So who’s “surging,” and who’s dropping “precipitously?” One could just as easily make a case that the answer is the opposite of what all the stories allege, because the stories are comparing apples and oranges—the Insider Advantage polls with other polls—and haven’t paid attention to the trends over time.

Now it’s certainly possible that Gingrich will be surging in South Carolina, and that Romney is dropping precipitously. Attack ads often work. And of course, polls are hardly a perfect measure of anything. But they’re the best measure we have of public sentiment leading up to an election, and these polls show that Romney was never popular in South Carolina until the beginning of January (after Iowa), and we have no after-Iowa Insider Advantage polls with which to compare the latest results.

By the way, how reliable is Insider Advantage as a pollster? I dug up some old polls for comparison and (for example) on December 18, 2011, Insider Advantage had Romney “imploding” in Iowa:

GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney’s decision to campaign negatively in Iowa appears to have backfired, with a new Newsmax-InsiderAdvantage poll showing the former Massachusetts governor plummeting to fourth place in the Hawkeye State — a swift decline that pollster Matt Towery [of Insider Advantage] describes as “imploding.”

Romney’s lead in New Hampshire is evaporating as well, Towery adds.

If you look at other polls around that same time in New Hampshire, you’ll see the Insider Advantage is an outlier, understating Romney’s total compared to the other polls. And then there’s this from Nate Silver, one of the few writers who seems to have done his homework:

InsiderAdvantage has a mixed track record and rates fairly poorly in the FiveThrityEight pollster ratings, which is one reason to interpret these numbers with some care. In addition, Matt Towery, the head of InsiderAdvantage, formerly served as the head of Mr. Gingrich’s political organization from 1992 until Mr. Gingrich left Congress.

Let me repeat, because I want to make it crystal clear: this post isn’t about trying to prove that Romney’s doing well in South Carolina right now. I await further polls on this; I really don’t know. My point is the odd spin so many in the media have given this particular Insider Advantage poll, and their lack of ability and/or desire to look at the bigger picture.

[NOTE: I want to point out the clever little way in which the Justin Sink, the author of the very first article I quote in the post, tries to subtly guide the reader when he writes “[Romney’s] smallest lead of 2012.” It is certainly true, but how many readers will stop to think that 2012 is not even 2 weeks old? How many will go back and see that, for several recent months in 2011 and right up till January of 2012, Romney didn’t lead in South Carolina at all, Gingrich did?]

Mass downgrade…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of Western Europe:

Standard & Poor’s will cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and Portugal by two notches and downgrade France and Austria by one notch, a French newspaper said Friday, without citing its sources.

Yes, there is other news in the world besides the Republican primaries.