There really very little to add to this:

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

--Kathleen Parker, National Review

Not the first time: As with Captain Queeg and the strawberries, McCain has resorted to the old "I must suspend my campaign to deal with the important issue facing the country" excuse before, as Matt Welch points out.

A Heartbeat Away? I believe this has something to do with "energy":

Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first.

--Sarah Palin, sans teleprompter, at a McCain-staged "town-hall" meeting yesterday.



Remember when we thought the Republic was doomed because Dan Quayle was next-in-line....

Although I practice bankruptcy law, the type of filing that Lehman Brothers initiated this morning is way out of my league. Although Chapter 11 filings have become more popular for individuals in recent years, mainly due to the archaic secured debt limitations of Chapter 13 cases, there tends to be very little overlap between practitioners of consumer and business bankruptcies. Business bankruptcies are almost always filed by large, corporate law firms with a huge support staff, whilst consumer cases are typically handled by humble country lawyers like myself.

For those of you who are interested, here is a copy of the Voluntary Petition filed by Lehman, and the supporting affidavit by its CFO describing how Lehman got into this position. More to come....

Princess Sarah: I come back from a lovely half-month in the Old World, only to find out that the usual suspects are playing the same game. When I first heard Governor Palin use the line about lipstick and pit bulls, my first reaction was to darkly note that "it was more like putting lipstick on a pig," but that it was a shame the Democrats couldn't use that line without seeming sexist. Little did I realize that Obama didn't have to, since the McCain camp would do the dirty work for them. I don't know if Barack Obama deliberately used that hoary cliche to rattle the McCain campaign (since he's used that line about a dozen times before McCain picked his running-mate, I would tend to doubt it), but McCain's reaction to the line seems so overblown as to enter a realm of imbecility not seen in Presidential elections since the Goldwater campaign complained about the once-aired Daisy Ad.

Think about the ways the McCain campaign has bulloxed this. First, they publicized an unfavorable image of the best thing it has going right now. I suspect one of the big reasons why Sarah Palin has struck a nerve among white voters is her attitude: tough, sassy, one-of-the-guys, a "pitbull with lipstick," to use her memorable phrase. By equating that phrase with the line, "lipstick on a pig," they have now created a counter-image that will float in the subconscious of every voter from now until Election Day, foe and supporter alike. They've taken a favorable metaphor about their candidate and turned it into an albatross.

The second thing they botched is much more in the tradition of the modern Republican Party, something that inevitably arises out of the fact that the GOP is the nation's white male party. Whenever the Republican Party tries to hype a non-white or non-male as a potential leader, it has attempted to create a narrative about how that person doesn't perceive him or herself as a "victim," unlike those pesky Democrats who are always trying to fight racism or sexism in whichever form it takes.

Their work in trying to portray Palin as a qualified candidate for the Presidency was always going to be difficult, but her cutting speech at last week's convention seemed to offer a way forward. Even the media seemed sold on the notion that she was a tough partisan who was unafraid to mix it up. By playing the sexism card, and creating the appearance that Palin is willing to dish out the sarcasm but has a case of the vapors when a joke is aimed at her, they've made her into a female version of Clarence Thomas, a bully who resorts to the same cliches of victimization that conservatives have long accused others of doing.

Lastly, in exchange for a couple of hours of media hype, the McCain camp has drawn the scorn of many of the same pundits who had placed on an Olympian pedastal in the past. They not only change the narrative about their Veep selection, but they also manage to erode McCain's support among his most loyal constituency, the Beltway Punditocracy. In the future, it will be more difficult to gin up "crocodile tears," as conservative Mark Halperin so aptly put it, at attacks from the Obama campaign because they went so overboard on this one.

But for now, I'm going to say that the first f***-up was the most important. You don't want to have potential voters look at a candidate's cosmetics during a debate and think of an animal that cavorts in its own excrement. And that's an image that's not Barack Obama's fault.

Spiro: Since the apparent goal of the GOP is to utilize their Veep-nominee as a smug attack dog, I think it bears noting the somewhat eerie similarities between Gov. Palin and a previous Republican nominee for that position, Spiro Agnew. Both were governors of small states for less than two years when they were tapped by their party's standard bearer for the number two spot on the ticket, and both had spent most of their adult life in politics holding down local political offices. And apparently after tonight, both were adept at using code to disparage their political adversaries (as if there is any doubt as to who "cosmopolitan elites" are).

But Agnew presents an even more fruitful point of comparison, for two reasons. First, the consensus about the pick at the time it was made was almost completely wrong. At the time, Agnew was viewed as an attempt by Nixon to appeal to the liberal, "Rockefeller Wing" of the Republican Party. Agnew had been elected governor in 1966 running to the left of his Democratic opponent, who was a Zell Miller-type States Rights segregationist. '66 was a very good year for the Republican Party, and the mid-term elections turned out to be the last hurrah for the Eastern, liberal wing of the party: not only did it's symbolic leader, Nelson Rockefeller, win reelection as governor of New York for a third term, but his brother Winthrop defeated a racist Democrat to become the first Republican governor of a Deep South state, Arkansas, since Reconstruction, and men such as Edward Brooke, Clifford Case and Charles Percy also won terms to the Senate. Agnew's victory that year was seen in that context, and he was, not surprisingly, an early supporter of Rockefeller's expected run for the White House in 1968.

According to Gerry Wills, whose Nixon Agonistes was the Myth of a Maverick of its era, Agnew had expected an important role in any Rockefeller Administration, and was shocked to learn that Rocky didn't think so highly of him. When Rockefeller made the decision not to run for the Presidency, he failed to consult with his backer, causing Agnew considerable embarrassment. And his performance in office gave clues to anyone who was interested what his true politics were: partisan, vicious, smug, and contemptous of "elites."

Thus, anyone looking for clues as to Palin's true priorities should look not to either her banal obeisance to far right positions on social issues, or to her recent flip-flopping on the "Bridge to Nowhere" and pork barrell spending in general, or even on her willingness to raise taxes on Big Oil (a position which, more than anything, has ensured that most of her deadliest political foes in Alaska are from her own party), but instead on that ever-present chip on her shoulder, a chip that she has borrowed from every small town and suburban hack who has been made to feel like a hick every time she visits the Big City.

And of course, the second important point of comparison with Agnew was in their shared careers in local politics, and all the small-time corruption that has traditionally entailed. Since the media has already begun looking down that avenue, whether she is as big a crook as Spiro Agnew remains to be seen.

Obama by Eight: Since it's too late to use the "Juno Alaska" reference, let me say that concerning McCain's Palin-drome, that ain't no etch-a-sketch: This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. A bad Veep pick, and the subsequent delay in rectifying the problem, is how the Nixon-McGovern race transformed suddenly into an historic rout.

And yes, the Governor not only praised her daughter for choosing to keep the child, an option she would deprive every other woman, but she also mandated "abstinence only" sex-ed for Alaska's children. Phuket, Thailand !!!

Needless to say, Europe seems to be having a blast with the creationist-spouting, ex-in-law firing, Pat Buchanan in 2000-supporting Veep nominee of the GOP. I fear they may be laughing at us, since the assumption has been over here that there is no way America will elect a black man to the Presidency....

Mile High: Understanding, of course, that I was watching the speech at 4 in the morning (en route to Marseille), it was the best performance at a political convention that I've ever seen. Obama is the Sinatra of politics.

For the poli-blogs, the Conventions are our Summer Olympics, a four-day excuse to pretend that what we do is important, and thereby obsess over every speech for the four days. In that spirit, I would like to remind everyone that, concerning the event that the blogosphere will be liveblogging over the next two weeks, there is one big difference between, say, the Democratic Convention and the Olympics: people at least give a rat's ass about the Olympics.

Anyone who believes that George Bush won the last two elections because the GOP threw a better, more partisan convention each time is too retarded to be allowed near machinery as sophisticated as a computer. No one is watching that which you care so much about. No one changed their vote from Kerry to Bush in 2004 because of Zell Miller, just as no one jumped on the Kerry bandwagon because they liked Obama's Keynote. As far as the voters are concerned, the only thing that mattered last night was that Ted Kennedy pulled a Lou Gehrig, and that Michelle Obama may not, in fact, be a dragon lady. Beyond that, anything else written about last night is waste of brain activity.

A tip for the traveler: Do not order the BBQ ribs at the diner in the international terminal in Toronto. The meat does not exactly "fall off the bone."

Meanwhile, I'm in Barcelona, celebrating the start of a cruise in the Mediterranean for the next two weeks. Hopefully, this will be the first of many such indulgences, now that Obama has assured the nation's bankruptcy lawyers a continuation of this Administration's policies in that area through his nomination of the Democrat who helped design them.

When you have a very common name, this sort of thing happens a lot. My late father and namesake was also a bankruptcy lawyer, and we happened to share the same moniker ("Steven E. Smith") as another bankruptcy lawyer in Century City. I remember appearing in court representing my dad on a matter in which he was the Chapter 7 Trustee, and the other Steven E. Smith represented an objecting creditor on a disbursement motion. We made our appearances, and hilarity and hijinks ensued.

During the 2004 election, John Kerry had a bit of an embarrassment when it turned out that a story he had told years before about listening to Richard Nixon lie about Americans not fighting in Cambodia, when he happened to be in Cambodia at the time, turned out to have some discrepancies. In what was supposedly "seared" into his memory, he claimed to be on the border on Christmas, 1968, listening to South Vietnamese shooting off rockets to celebrate the holiday, when his own diary placed him hundreds of miles away that day, and it's as likely that the disproportionately Buddhist demography of the Vietnamese would have permitted a raucous Yuletide celebration as it would be for an American unit in Iraq to go overboard celebrating Purim. Also, Nixon wasn't President, yet, in December 1968.

It turns out the candidate had confused his big holidays. He was in Cambodia, but six weeks after Christmas, during the Tet Holiday, when it is common for celebrants to shoot off rockets and go crazy. By then, Nixon had already been President for about a month, so the story rang true in most of its particulars. But the damage had been done. No matter how many times the addled memories of the "Swift Boaters" were shown to be false or fabricated about other aspects of Kerry's wartime accomplishments, the Right could always point to this and proclaim that Kerry could not be trusted, since he wasn't in Cambodia at Christmas.

I wonder how much slack the American people will give John McCain about his likely-aprocryphal "Cross Story." Making up an anecdote about faith, like George Bush pretending to have been brought to Jesus by Billy Graham, isn't really judged harshly by the true believers; what's important is the Pander, and secondarily the possibility that the candidate might be one of the them. In McCain's case, stealing an anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitzen Charles Colsen has the added benefit of tying his experience with that of one of the most famous prisoners of the 20th Century; even if the story was false (and I wouldn't be surprised if the late Russian writer and virulent anti-Semite had copped the story himself; it sounds like something that might have appeared in one of the stories of the early Christian martyrs), the important thing is that McCain was still in a POW camp for five years, and suffered brutal torture almost every day.

But it's still embarassing to have been caught embellishing one's past with a clearly plagiarized anecdote. The human memory is a tricky and unreliable thing, geared mainly towards validating our own importance. We tend to place ourself more in the center of things than the facts can justify, and it's not hard to catch us out when it turns our memories are faulty, as any good criminal lawyer will tell you.

For most of my life, I had a vivid memory of meeting Robert Kennedy when I was four years old. It was in San Francisco, and he was already putting out feelers for his crusade for the Presidency in 1968. My father, who worked for RFK's major backer in the state, Jesse Unruh, was in town to strategize, and my mother and I went up to the Bay Area to be with him. One afternoon, my nanny, Mary Jane, came in and excitedly told me that we could go meet the Senator, who was already my hero. I felt like I was meeting a god; I even told him that his brother was my favorite President, because he had died in 1963, the year I was born. He smiled at what must have been a very painful and callous thing to say, and said something nice to me.

It was, as I said, a very vivid and powerful memory for me, and most of the particulars are true, especially my father's role in the California campaign, and the fact that I went with him and my mother to San Francisco when I was four. What wasn't true, though, was the fact that I ever met Robert Kennedy. It never happened. I had picked up enough details over the years, from my parents, the aforementioned nanny, and from what little I remembered of my early childhood, to piece together an incident that I thought had actually happened, and even now the incident is still quite vivid and real. But it wasn't.

So I'm going to be a bit hesitant about calling John McCain a "liar" about this story. He may not have started using this story until after reading The Gulag Archipelago, and the exact details may not be true, but it wouldn't surprise me if he thought that an incident like that had happened to him at the Hanoi Hilton, even if he wasn't simply confusing some other random act of kindness by a prison guard with SolzhenitzenColsen's religious story.

UPDATE [8/18]: The story originated with Charles Colsen, Nixon's former hatchet-man, who had erroneously attributed it to Solzhenitzen years ago. In fact, McCain isn't even the first ex-POW U.S. Senator to have told a similar tale. Apparently, the "guard drawing a cross in the dirt" is a hardy chestnut that probably predates the Crucifixion.

Hit&Run, the blog run under the aegis of Reason Magazine, usually posts contrarian bullshit about how sweatshops and slave labor are kinda cool, or why anabolic steroids are fun for the whole family, so it's not surprising that they've taken the pro-dictatorship position on why the President was right to slouch his way through the Opening Ceremonies in Beijing last week:

Carter's boycott, done in the name of human rights, accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm willing to say that Bush is a worse president than Carter (who at least deregulated airline ticket pricing and interstate trucking, and invited Willie Nelson to the White House), but it's Bush who has gotten it right when it comes to superpower-charged Olympics.

To have Bush out there, saying what he's saying where he's saying it—and pursuing a larger policy of engagement via trade and other forms of exchange—is absolutely the best way to pull China into something approaching Western-style democracy, complete with robust individual rights and the sort of economy that will ultimately force governments to loosen up. Milton Friedman famously said that as people get richer, they demand the ability to live however they want—that economic freedom, which increases prosperity, helps create the conditions for political freedom. It seems clear that the Chinese government, like all governments, doesn't want to yield power if it can avoid doing so. It's also clear that the more a country trades with the world—for goods, services, and even cultural identities—the less its government can control its people. Here's hoping that the Beijing Olympics, regardless of the predictable and bizarre repressions going on right now to ensure a "stain-free" event, push that process along.

My take on boycotting the Olympics can be found here; there are plenty of good reasons to send a team to China, although we could have saved a lot of money and just sent Michael Phelps for all the medals we're going to win. The canard that unrestricted trade leads inexorably to "freedom" (which is belied, obviously, by the fact that our liberalized dealings with Russia and China don't seem to have done much to make those societies "free") clearly isn't one of them. And far from accomplishing nothing, the 1980 boycott effectively diminished that event in the eyes of the world; without the U.S. (and West Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc.), those Olympics were little more than an Iron Curtain track meet, and the enormous propaganda benefit that Hitler received in 1936, and that the Chinese are getting this year, was denied the Soviet Union.

It's safe to say that the 2008 Olympics will bring as much positive change to China as the '36 Games brought to Germany.

The Elephant in the Room: Josh Marshall, on what the Edwards Admission on Friday really means:

I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards' affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton's public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards' revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they've applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.

What he's talking about, of course, is this incident, where the presumptive nominee dumped his ailing first wife in favor of a much younger (and richer) woman in 1979. It's hard to imagine an incident occurring thirty years ago to be particularly relevant in determining who should be Commander-in-Chief, but there it is.

Let the closure commence...Edwards admits he did have sexual relations with that woman, but was not the baby-daddy...if true, the Democrats can slot him just before Elvis, Wednesday night at the Convention. As far as days to leak the story, the day the Olympics starts is almost as good as Super Bowl Sunday.

The Panty-Sniffers Manifesto: Mickey Kaus gamefully tries to provide an ex post justification for obsessing about the comings and goings of a former Senator from North Carolina, and some of what he says bears true. Edwards remains an important figure in American politics, and even if the recent rumors about him are correct, stands to play an important role in any future Democratic Administration (fortunately for Edwards, the "scandal" is coming out almost a half-year before any future Obama Cabinet is selected, more than enough time for the public to come to terms with the issue). If he's been cheating on his dying wife (the woman whom Kaus sarcastically has named, "St. Elizabeth"), he's disgusting.

But he doesn't quite explain why he's so obsessed with the issue, why he has spent almost the last two weeks writing about nothing but this story, which so far hasn't progressed much beyond the charge that Edwards was in the same thousand-room hotel as his alleged mistress in the wee hours of the morning, or Kaus' demand that other organs of the "MSM," particularly the Los Angeles Times, should drop every other story they're working on to focus on this tawdry episode. Kaus didn't spend two weeks hectoring others when another newspaper made some rather similarly-vague allegations about John McCain and a blonde lobbyist, or even when the National Enquirer identified a woman who was Bill Clinton's mistress last month.

I mean, it's not like there's a Presidential campaign going on, or an Olympic Games about to start. It's no wonder that the Times is losing readers, when it insists on breaking stories about the identity of the real Anthrax Terrorist and other such trivia, rather than letting its bloggers regurgitate this week's Enquirer headline.

There is a good reason why the National Enquirer, in spite of its rather lame record in defending libel suits, still enjoys one of the largest circulations in the country. People who are interested in gossip, who enjoy panty-sniffing and everything that comes with it, who can't get through the week without a crotch-shot of Britney or Lindsey, can have their interests sated through the Enquirer. If the Enquirer wants to send two reporters to stalk a failed Presidential candidate with an interesting personal life, then let them. That sort of reporting is a different skill set from the type of reporting that breaks the Anthrax story.

But there should be newspapers for those of us who aren't focused on that sort of thing, who think a pol's proclivity for adultery is not the most important thing in the world. For us, we expect that a newspaper is going to be cautious when it reports, that it doesn't simply repeat hearsay, particularly from gossip rags. If the Times (or, more appropriately, one of Edwards' home state newspapers, where he continues to be an important public figure in spite of his unsuccessful role on the national stage), does pursue this story, or better yet, any such story involving McCain or Obama, then it should apply the same investigative standards it applies to any other story it covers.

Andrew Sullivan, on the "Aragula Card":

For all McCain's personal qualities, we're learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions - how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda's new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? - we are debating people's cultural insecurities and food choices.

I suspect that McCain's recent improvement in the polls has come at a cost: the perception that he was a different type of Republican politician, one who campaigned with a sense of honor and integrity, is gone. Something like this happened in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter overturned a double-digit lead by Ronald Reagan to pull even in the polls, by going hard negative against his opponent. That turned out to be a short-term palliative: once the American people were reminded of how crappy the economy was, and discovered that Ronald Reagan wasn't as much of an ogre as he had been portrayed by Carter, the jig was up. But it did make that race closer for most of the campaign than it had any right to be.

UPDATE: And one of Senator McCain's more famous contributors agrees.

One of the scummier sidelights to the Presidential campaign has been the whispering campaign against former candidate John Edwards. Sex scandals have always been a favorite way to target political figures who threaten the status quo, from Charles Parnell to Martin Luther King, so it shouldn't surprise that John Edwards has been the focus of one such fatwa. Mickey Kaus has hyped this story since it began (in fact, I think he might have actually dreamt this one up by his lonesome), and hasn't stopped since, even after Edwards dropped out of the race in February. Since Kaus hates Democrats, and liberal Democrats especially, his prudishness may blind him to the fact that sex scandals, so long as they involve two consenting adults engaged in legal activity, don't actually do much to derail the political fortunes of progressive pols (in fact, it's money scandals that usually derail the good guys; having a mistress is disproportionately harmful to conservative pols).

Much of the original dirt came from Ann Coulter, who attempted to float the meme that the former Senator from North Carolina was a "faggot." Needless to say, when NaziPundit speaks, few listen, and the Edwards-as-a-closeted-gay-candidate rumor didn't catch fire. Subsequent efforts to nickname the candidate the "Breck Girl" were confined to the habitats of her homophobic ilk, and like the "Barack Hussein Osama" meme, was considered to be part of that dark corner of the political sphere that viewed Jesse Helms as a "patriot," and used the word "illegal" as a noun and "jew" as a verb.

Then, some months ago, Mickey Kaus began hyping the rumor that Edwards had an affair with a staffer. The story was denied by all concerned, and seemed to have died a natural death until last week, when the National Enquirer "broke" the story that the former candidate had visited said staffer at an hotel in Los Angeles, along with several other parties. Frustrated that most of the organs of the "MSM" did not pass along the story, unfiltered from a source known for making up stories whole cloth, to the masses, Kaus began targeting his favorite bete noire, the Los Angeles Times.

This morning, Kaus chose to publish an e-mail sent by the LA Times internet supremo, Tony Pierce, which broached the controversy in the following manner:

In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I've excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce's email address]:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. ...

It's hard to guess what's more pathetic: Kaus' obsession with the private life of a former political office seeker, or Kaus' disingenuous summary of Pierce's e-mail. To put it simply, an editor instructing his minions that the Times would prefer that they not use their unmediated blogspace to comment on a story in which the only source is one of the few American publications that actually loses defamation actions brought by public figures, is not the same thing as a newspaper "forbidding" or "banning" discussion of same. Since Kaus admits that another Times blogger went ahead and wrote about the controversy anyway, it can hardly be said that Tony Pierce "silenced" anybody.

I guess it must have been a slow day on the immigrant-bashing front. Pierce is one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere, a nice, friendly mensch who is as good to his friends as he is generous to strangers, as I found out the first night I met him. It is thanks to Pierce that the Times has one of the liveliest blogging sections of any major newspaper; that he chose to remind his staff that the obligations of posting at one of the country's most important newspapers means being careful with the facts is a tribute to his journalistic integrity, and should not be used to settle old scores. Whatever the reason for his hatred of John Edwards (Kaus later cruelly derides the Senator's wife, who suffers from terminal cancer, as "Saint Elizabeth"), he should leave good people out of it.

Those of us who support the legal recognition of gay marriage can be cautiously optimistic from this poll, which shows the initiative to outlaw such ceremonies already trailing by a significant margin. The Field Poll, which conducted the survey, has an uncommonly eerie track record of accuracy in California, and historically, ballot initiatives are much like golfers who find themselves trailing Tiger Woods going into the final day of a major: they are doomed to defeat.