It had been my hope to go on vacation from the blog until our new President was sworn in, and start afresh in what I hope to be the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. But I couldn't let the opportunity go without recommending one of the best political blogs out there, ArchPundit, which specializes in Illinois politics, and which has been the one go-to sight since the Blagojevich Follies started. He's been right on this subject from the start, as this post from the week before the scandal broke nationally shows.

O !!!!!!!!

Election Eve News: Besides the favorable polls, and the bellweather result of the final Redskin home game, there's Dixville Notch and Pete Carroll, both for Obama. Also, Luc Robataille....

The Bradley Effect:

There should be a support group for all those beleaguered progressives who over the years anxiously awaited elections in the futile hope that the polls showing their candidate behind would turn out to be wrong -- but who this year are fretting just as much that the polls showing their candidate ahead are wrong.

--David Kurtz, TPM

In 1982, Tom Bradley led in the polls from the start of the California governor's race up to election day. The exit polls showed him winning a clear victory over the GOP nominee, George Deukmejian, and seemed to be on the verge of becoming the nation's first black governor since Reconstruction.

And in the end, he lost. Since then, every time an African-American politician underperforms his poll numbers, the phenomenum known as the "Bradley Effect." It happened when Douglas Wilder actually became the nation's first black governor in 1989 by a margin much smaller than his projected total from exit polls, and then when Harvey Gantt was beaten by Jesse Helms in 1990 for the US Senate, and even more recently, when Barack Obama was unexpectedly defeated in the New Hampshire primary by Hillary Clinton at the beginning of the year.

The "Bradley Effect," the notion that there is a hidden racist vote that doesn't appear in the polls, is an anchor that every African-American politician has to carry when seeking office before a predominantly white electorate. And it is the chief reason why even four days before the election, with a larger lead in the polls than anything Bradley or Gantt had at this time in their losing efforts, there is still some skepticism among liberals that Senator Obama really has this one in the bag.

Clearly, the Bradley Effect is something that has diminshed over time; as political historian Sherry Bebitch Jeffe points out, Tom Bradley was really screwed by a hidden racist vote in his first, unsuccessful campaign to be Mayor of Los Angeles, when Sam Yorty, one of the last vestiges of the pre-Depression Democratic Party in California that was more allied with William McAdoo and the South, painted the former cop as a secret Black Panther, and turned a sixteen-point Bradley lead into a six-point deficit on election day. Four years later, Bradley decisively defeated Yorty in the rematch, and went on to win a record five terms as Mayor.

Still, there is some reason for discomfort. Obama consistently underperformed his polling numbers when it actually came time to vote during the primaries; first in New Hampshire, then on Super Tuesday in states like Massachusetts and California, then later in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. He ultimately won his party's nomination because he was better organized, state-by-state, than his opponent, allowing him to survive some early defeats and take charge of the race after Super Tuesday, when Hillary Clinton's campaign ran out of money.

And there's the original Bradley Effect, in 1982. There has been quite a bit of revisionist claims that even in 1982, there was no hidden racist vote. Both Lance Tarrance, who polled for the winner, and William Bradley (no relation), who worked for the loser, as well as Prof. Jeffe, point to other factors in Deukmejian's win, including a gun control measure on the ballot that pulled in a lot of conservative voters, as well as a first-rate absentee voter drive that year by the GOP. In particular, William Bradley focuses on the flawed sample of voters polled by Mervyn Field on Election Day, a sample that also caused his outfit to project a victory for Jerry Brown in his losing Senate race against Pete Wilson; anyone who remembers the 2004 Presidential Election knows to take exit polling with a grain of salt when it comes to projecting elections.

But there was a Bradley Effect in 1982, and it can be found not in the exit polls, but in the final polling Mervyn Field did before election day. The link is to every major statewide race Field polled since 1948, when he, like the rest of his brethren, blew the Truman-Dewey election. Since then, Field's final polls have correctly predicted the winner in all but three races, and two of those races involved picks that held tiny pre-election leads and lost by slim margins. The outlier was the 1982 governor's race: Field's last poll showed Bradley with a comfortable eight-point lead, whereas the actual vote showed a two-point margin, a 10-point switch.

OK, so maybe his sample wasn't an accurate cross-section of California voters, as his exit-polling on Election Day would indicate, and as Tarrance, Jeffe and the other would concur. But the real problem with that argument is Field's final poll of the aforementioned US Senate race, showing then-Governor Brown losing by six points to Pete Wilson. As the chart shows, that was the exact margin Brown lost to Wilson. And it was a concurrent poll, taken in the final week of the campaign.

So the same polling sample, conducted concurrently, correctly predicted not only the win by the Republican Senate candidate, but the ultimate margin as well, while blowing the governor's race by ten points. I find it hard to believe that Field nailed the race that involved two white candidates, but somehow didn't pick up some trend having nothing to do with racism that would have skewed the same polling sample when it came to the governor's race.

A Critical Retraction:

From British theatre critic Mark Shenton: Critics are only human - we all make mistakes. And no one beats me up more for mine than me! So today it’s time to fess up, as they say Stateside, to one of mine: I’ve already admitted here to attending Waste at the Almeida (not so) fresh from a transatlantic return journey, and now I’ve discovered that I must have written my review, too, in an advanced state of jetlag, too.

In my Sunday Express notice, I referred to a fine ensemble cast that includes “Will Keen as the politician and the superb, graceful Phoebe Nicholls as his long-suffering wife. ” Except, of course, that Phoebe Nicholls is playing his sister, not wife.

(snip)

But at least I am not alone: I did a quick trawl of other reviews, and discovered that the identical mistake was perpetrated by two other colleagues! In his Tribune notice, Aleks Sierz even draws the conclusion that it reveals that the play suggests that the English are not much good at love: “When his wife, Frances, finally confronts him at the end of the story, Henry shows a sublime indifference which makes you wonder why the couple haven’t gone their separate ways long ago. No, the chief erotic drive in the play - and the only thing that makes it bearable to watch- is its boys’ club politics: not sex, but power. When the men talk affairs of state, the pulse quickens. Directed stolidly by Samuel West, Waste is a perfect example of the ghastly lack of warmth between the sexes among the English upper classes during the first part of the last century.”

And in the Jewish Chronicle, John Nathan writes, “Phoebe Nicholls as Trebell’s loving but sexually uninterested wife outshines even Keen’s excellent performance.” Those two further wrongs, of course, don’t make it right that I got it so wrong, too - and of course our common mistake is now embedded for posterity in the pages of Theatre Record and/or the internet. So I apologise unreservedly and publicly to Ms Nicholls....

His blunder was apparently the result of his having fallen asleep in the middle of the play, which I assume is a common West End malady, much like heading to the exits in the seventh inning is at Dodger Stadium. And of course, some of the responsibility for that snafu has to be shouldered by Phoebe Nicholls, an actress of such refined skill and classic beauty that she possesses the power to cloud the minds of even the most hardened critic into confusing filial devotion with marital ennui. Nevertheless, I may be making a quick, post-election trip to London to see Waste, so long as I can find lodging of some sort; before I die, I have to see the Phoenician on stage at least once.

Ad of the Year:



link via Andrew Sullivan

The Dowd Report: Christendom's most obnoxious corporate lawyer weighs in on behalf of his client, the Senior Senator from Arizona, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

I am advised that you have assigned two of your top reporters to spend an extensive amount of time in Arizona and around the country investigating Cindy (McCain)'s life including her charity, her addiction and her marriage to Senator McCain. None of these subjects are news.

(snip)

These allegations and efforts to hurt Cindy have been a matter of public record for sixteen years. Cindy has been quite open and frank anbert her issues for all these years. Any further attempts to harass and injure based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama’s drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescured them. Thus there is a terrific lack of balance here.

The reference to Obama's "poor relatives in Kenya" is a nice touch. This is the same John Dowd who spent a good deal of the late-eighties conducting a fatwa against Pete Rose, investigating his private life over a subject that had a good deal less importance than the behavior of the life-partner of a potential future President. More recently, Dowd had a very different attitude when it came to the private life of past and present major league baseball players.

So stay classy, John.

The '56 Conundrum: In every close Presidential election, some notice is usually paid to the uncanny record of Missouri in picking the winning candidate. Since 1900, the Show Me State has backed the next President in all but one election, with the exception being the narrow vote for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. With its location, just about dead-center of the country, and its urban-rural split, it should be inevitable that it would play such a role historically.

But the one thing that never gets explained is what the hell happened in '56. Why did Adlai Stevenson, who was essentially a sacrificial lamb going up against perhaps the most popular man of the 20th Century, who failed to win any other electoral votes outside the Deep South (and even there, he did poorly for a pre-Civil Rights Era Democratic nominee, losing Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, as well as several border states), capture the state that year, when he failed to do so four years earlier, when he ran a more competitive campaign?

In the context of this election, it is usually pointed out that Stevenson, like Obama, was a popular politician from the neighboring state of Illinois. But in '52, Stevenson was an incumbent governor, whereas in '56, he had been out of office for four years, with no recent record to allure Missouri voters. And Stevenson was crushed both times in his home state. Do you think there's any chance Obama will do worse in Illinois than he does in Missouri this time around?

And it wasn't as if some local trend was pushing Missouri into the Democratic column at that time. Four years later, the state went for JFK, but by a margin barely greater than Stevenson's win in '56; in other words, it went back to reflecting the national mood.

So what was it? Was there some local issue in Missouri that swung the ultimate Swing State towards the Man from Libertyville in a year when he was losing by 20 points to Ike everywhere else? Did they feel some degree of kinship to former corporate lawyers from Chicago? Or did they just wake up on election morning and decide they liked the only Presidential nominee in history to have been born in Los Angeles? Your guess is as good as mine....

Where we were eight years ago: The last time two non-incumbants battled for the Presidency, Bush had a lead similar to the margin now enjoyed by Obama. Of course, Gore not only closed the gap, he won the popular vote, and only through some legal machinations in the Supreme Court was Bush able to hoist the Presidency.

A couple of points should be made from reviewing those numbers. Bush had a much larger lead throughout the summer than Obama had, but like Obama, lost all of it and then some after the other party's convention. Without a market crash or a boneheaded Veep pick, Gore maintained the lead through early October, when a series of poor debate performances allowed Bush to surge into the lead.

Second, the perception that Bush was headed into a decisive victory seems to have been shaped by two really awful tracking polls, by USA Today-Gallup and by an outfit called Voter.com. Both gave the Texas Governor sizeable, double-digit leads, while other polling outfits showed a much closer race. Voter.com doesn't seem to have done much more damage to the Republic since 2000, but USA Today-Gallup has been the consistent outlier showing a dead-even race this time. [link via Volokh]

Bigots for Barack: It's mostly anecdotal, but Politico has an interesting piece on a trend involving an oft-misunderstood group of swing voters. In the end, I still doubt Obama will capture a majority of those voters....

Although I agree, generally, with Prof. Warren's advocacy against the 2005 BARF Act, there seems to be a real world perspective missing from her analysis, at least as it applies to the actual practice of bankruptcy law, that causes a blind spot in her writing. Here, she seems to argue that the 2005 law has exacerbated the meltdown of the housing market by making it harder for debtors to file Chapter 7, which enables a person to get a quick discharge of his unsecured debts (ie., credit cards).

I haven't seen much a decline, frankly; most of the people who want to file under Chapter 7 do so anyway, even if their income exceeds the state median, and most of the potential clients I meet who happen to own homes are looking to do a Chapter 13 repayment, not a straight Chapter 7. The reason why there was an initial precipitous decline in bankruptcy filings was due to the YBK panic on the eve of the new law in October, 2005. Everyone who ever thought about filing bankruptcy did so because they were led to believe that the new law would handicap them at the expense of their creditors. If anything impacted the currect credit crunch, it was the panic caused by the pending new law causing tens of thousands of people to file bankruptcy, and discharge debt, at the same time, not that those people can't file Chapter 7 cases now.

Of course, debtors have to jump through more hoops nowadays, thanks to the new law. If a filer's income exceeds the state median income, he is viewed as having presumptively filed in bad faith, which typically means...nothing. In some instances, the attorney will be sent an audit letter from the US Trustee, requiring him to produce certain financial statements and tax returns, as well as justifying certain monthly expenditures. But in most cases, debtors who make more than the median income who need to file Chapter 7 don't have a surplus income, once reasonable expenses are taken into account, and the present-day nightmare of skyrocketing adjustable rate mortgages is making the whole issue moot. According to the local US Trustee, less than one percent of all Chapter 7 filings that fall into this category are ultimately dismissed.

Moreover, Chapter 13 cases have become more routine, in large part because it is a more effective way to deal with secured debt, such as mortgages and car payments. Under Chapter 13, if the value of the home is less than the amount owed on the first trust deed, all deeds of trust that are junior to the first can be treated as unsecured debts, and potentially discharged completely at the end of the plan. Where I practice, this can be done with little more than a motion to the court seeking declaratory relief as to the value of the property; at a time when the housing market has been in free fall, such motions are infrequently opposed by lenders.

And that aspect of bankruptcy was unaffected by the passage of the 2005 BARF Act. That law has proved nothing more than an inconvenience to the experienced practitioner, since it only tangentially impacts a fraction of cases. In large part, that is due to the fact that it was drafted by lobbyists for the credit card industry, not attorneys with actual hands-on experience in the trenches of consumer bankruptcy.

Sure, there are more forms to fill out, but almost every practitioner has electronic forms that can be prepared within minutes. Potential filers have to take a pre-petition credit counseling course, but this step has proved to be ineffectual at providing debtors with non-bankruptcy alternatives, and the suspicion that many of these outfits have a conflict of interest in remaining on the good side of consumer attorneys is not unwarranted. And due to incompetent drafting, some of the more worthwhile provisions of the 2005 legislation, such as the attempt to terminate the automatic stay for repeat filers (which has proved to be illusory in Chapter 7 cases, since the law only halts the stay against debtors, not against the estate itself, which means that creditors still have to waste time seeking judicial relief), have been nullified.

The big winners of the 2005 BARF act, were, not surprisingly, bankruptcy lawyers. Its convoluted provisions took what was one of the few areas of the law that a smart, cost-conscious layperson could do by himself, and necessitated the hiring of licensed professionals at a much higher cost (try to fill out a Statement of Current Monthly Income at home if you don't believe me). And as I noted above, it hasn't done much to stem abusive filings, or check any of the shady abuses that existed before. But one thing the 2005 law didn't do was change how people could use Chapter 7 filings to save their homes, since it simply isn't an effective legal strategy, either before or after the law went into effect.

L.A. Is Burning: In fact, the fire shown here is about seven miles from my office, in the same vicinity as that train collision last month that killed several dozen. If you don't have to be outdoors for any reason, stay inside....

It seems I was the only sentient person in the blogosphere who blew off the Veep debate last night (I saw the Dodger playoff game at the local tavern instead), so all this talk about whether Gov. Palin exceeded the low expectations given her means little to me. In fact, televised campaign debates aren't that meaningful to me, insofar as I made up my mind on whom to vote for in this election as soon as the Democratic nominee was determined. As a partisan, it is unlikely I would be swayed by anything McCain or Palin might argue in one of these staged debates, so the only purpose to watch one of these things is to see if someone screws up, which I guess isn't much different from people who watch Formula 1 or NASCAR because of the possibility someone might crash. I just have better things to do.

Still, this bit of spin is pretty lame, even by the standards of modern political campaigns. No wonder McCain has lost ten points to Obama in two weeks.

Best Title of a Blogpost Ever: "The Successful Failure of the Angels' Strategy" by Matt Welch, who's spinning the Halos' tenth straight playoff loss (yawn) to the Boston Red Sox the way Reason Mag has been spinning the failure of free market policies on Wall Street the past two weeks. Give it up, Matt: '02 was a fluke, and the Rally Monkey is as dead as Dale Earnhardt !!!

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.