My shocker so far is this: the Indiana exit polls (with 2336 respondants) show 9% of voters decided whom to vote for TODAY. Today. Really. Ok, that’s — well, maybe not shocking, but close to it. But more suprising is that people who decided for whom to vote today or within the past week are going strong for Obama. I expected McCain to shore up in the waning days, not Obama. I see it as very good news for O. In addition, independents are also going very strong for Obama. If the Indiana exit polls are prescient Obama will “upset” McCain there on his way to a major national victory.
Down to the wire, what’s in play? October 30, 2008
With hundreds of polls spread throughout almost every state in the U.S., the POTUS08 landscape can seem a daunting challenge to keep up on. Here’s how I’m looking at things.
As I’ve said from the very first issue of this (well, it started as an emailed newsletter to a few contacts), individual polls at best give minor guidance and at worst are horribly misleading. When you catch a news story you are almost always hearing the results of a single poll, and that often a national tracking poll. But we don’t elect the POTUS by national voting, we elect by state. And when each poll in each state hits at most 0.01% of the electorate, you need to keep a very skeptical eye on what you see. So what’s a poor politco to do?
You could average the polls. This is essentially what pollster.com does and while I think straight poll averaging is a recipe for statistical disaster, it is a decent guideline for what’s going on in a race. A better analysis takes past performance of individual pollsters along with other factors to create a weighted average, which is what fivethirtyeight.com does a very good job of. Even that analysis, though, can be misleading.
The best method right now, in my opinion, is to step back and look at the polls in “scan” mode. Not to trust single-number averages or regressions, but to take in all available information to see the most obvious patterns. Do this on all of the “close” states and this is what you see:
- In Colorado, it has been over a month since John McCain has led a poll (I told you he’d peak at 2% in Colorado in that poll and he has). Obama has led every single poll taken here in the month of October with a range of 0.3% to 12%. That span is over ten different pollsters, which is a critically important consideration, as each has its own sampling methods and extrapolation methodologies. Is Colorado close? Maybe, but the fact that Obama is leading every single recent poll taken here, over many polls, is telling of his strength here.
- Arizona seems shockingly close, with McCain only up by 2 points in two recent polls and 4-5 in some others, but there is not a single poll that has him losing. Arizona is in play if you consider the poll spreads, but not in play if you consider the fact that there is no poll showing a tie or Obama winning.
- Ditto states like Georgia and Mississippi. Some Obamaites recently noticed that poll numbers are tightening in Mississippi. How can red-as-red-can-be Mississippi be in play? It’s not. Trends might be down for McCain, but the closest Obama comes to McCain in any poll there is 8 points. Not a single poll has Obama anything closer than that. Mississippi is not in play. In Georgia the polls are tighter, but again, only one poll out of dozens has Obama winning. Every other poll has McCain winning Georgia. And he will.
- Montana is another intriguing state. A state that McCain should have no problem whatsoever wrapping up (Bush beat Kerry there 65-35). The polling is uncomfortably close there, but again, McCain is winning all of them. Small margins, yes, but he’s winning every poll save one (by a very inexperienced pollster).
- McCain has been spending time in New Hampshire, begging for votes there, but he hasn’t led a poll there in over a month. Same with Pennsylvania. Many are wondering why McCain has been wasting his time in PA. You might think it’s a close state, but there has been a ridiculous amount of polling there and not a single one of them has McCain winning and at least half give Obama a double-digit lead.
So, all that noted, where are the candidates competitive? In quite a few states, actually. The problem for McCain is that they are all red states that he should have locked up. Those true “toss-up” states that have thoroughly mixed poll results, with both candidates winning different polls (with some ties thrown in for good measure), are:
- Florida
- Indiana
- Missouri
- North Carolina
- North Dakota (seriously!)
- Ohio
- Virgina (maybe)
The last state, Virgina, really should be in the upper list, as McCain hasn’t led a poll there since Sept. 28th. But McCain led many of the September polls, so isn’t necessarily dead there.
The upshot? The early returns will tell you all you need to know. The east cost returns will come in first, and you should key in on VA and NC. North Carolina is really the bellwether state. If both VA and NC go Obama, the rout is on and he’ll get an Electoral College number in the mid-300’s. If ND and MT go Obama, he could approach 400 EV’s.
(McCain) wishing this was over…. October 29, 2008
Well, a week of elk hunting proved frustrating. Fun as hell, but ultimately unsuccessful. I love being at 11,500 feet on an open pass in a 40mph blizzard at 25F and hiking 10 miles and 5000 vertical feet in a day with a .308 on my back just as much as the next sportsman for Obama, but it would have been nice to be looking toward a long winter with 100 lbs of elk in my freezer. Oh well.
While I was gone the race played out its predictable patterns: Obama opening a bigger lead and the McCain campaign responding by running harder and faster to the substanceless. McCain realizes that despite his well-delivered “I am not George Bush” line at the final debate, he is not offering a clear path to change here, and he will lose because of it. The Robert Draper cover article in the NY Times Sunday Mag did a good job of laying out what has been the McCain campaign’s meanderings of message as they’ve tried tack after tack just groping for something to stick.
The fact that Obama is running on his own ideas while McCain (and more so, Palin) is running on Barack Obama makes it very clear that McCain has little of substance to offer here. So the only thing left is to try to tear down the opponent with repeated salacious gossip or just outright lies (as if Bill Ayers, repeated often enough, is an actual story). No problem, this is just politics in America and if the shoe was on the other foot, the Obama campaign would likely be doing the same thing. But I think that McCain is secretly disgusted by it. We see glimpses of McCain’s dignity when he occasionally corrects people at his rallies or back away from strong statement by others in his team, but unfortunately for McCain he is now tied himself to the worst elements of his party. And the further problem for McCain and the Republican party in general is that while McCain would clearly repudiate the morons in his rally line, Sarah Palin probably wouldn’t. (Well, she clearly wouldn’t, as all she has left is to try things like this.) She very likely agrees with them, even if on a more subtle level.
McCain wants out. He probably genuinely does not like Obama, but he hates being caught up in the nastiness. Both men have oodles of dignity, the dignity that so many smaller party operatives (both sides) will never have. In some way McCain might have run to try to rid his party of the small-minded sleaze that brought him down in 2000. It’s not going away, at least for now, John. But in the last five days you could go a long way to taming the wild dogs on your side of the fence.
CNN and Politco catch on October 15, 2008
I guess if you’re a blogger you can tell the world in late August/early September that Barack Obama is still going to win in a landslide even when John McCain seems to have a small lead in national polling. (Especially if you’re an anonymous blogger?) I suppose if you’re a big media machine you have to be more circumspect, so it has taken this long for CNN and Politico to realize that in three weeks Obama-Biden is going to make McCain-Palin look silly. But obvious it has become. So obvious that Richard Lugar just endorsed Obama.
Here is what has seemed obvious to me since the conventions:
- Obama has a message where McCain has appeals to history. Those appeals to history are dead in this election and McCain has not/cannot replace them with substance. This has become all the more obvious in the aftermath of McCain’s failed white-horse ride into D.C. just before the Paulson Power Grab hit Congress.
- Palin-love was going to fade hard and fast. She was a great pick at the time, but it became clear that she had no substance to back up the smile. Now she’s a huge liability as independents (the key to any POTUS election) realize that the prospect of having her a heartbeat away is truly frightening and the Christian Conservative base realizes that it is McCain that they will be voting for, after all, and he’ll give Ms. Palin no portfolio in his White House. Palin has given the campaign nothing except redundant attacks on Obama, and now a Troopergate report slamming her for abusing the powers of her office (i.e. corruption). The turn-out rate for the R base is going to be abysmal in three weeks.
- I was writing back in January that D registrations were 15-20 points higher than R registrations this year, giving Obama an automatic handicap. Clearly that tide has no physical basis on which to turn. The economy is on the R’s and the news out of Iraq isn’t good enough to help the R’s (and for those Americans who care, Afghanistan and Pakistan are quickly turning into a dangerously mismanaged fiasco).
- With Bush at 30% approvals and worse, it wasn’t going to be hard to tie McCain to Bush enough to make a major impact on McCain’s negatives.
Fact is, McCain started in a big hole and doesn’t have a shovel to get himself out.
In other news, I love to see that the Bush Administration is practicing socialism and fascism at the same time. Is it January 2009 yet?
the rout is on October 7, 2008
Partly it’s the economy, mostly it’s just the fundamentals. Obama was always a stronger candidate in this election. The fundamentals favoring Barack and hindering McCain were the obvious things like
- Long-running and now-obvious W+Cheney mismanagement; and
- Congressional R excesses; leading to a
- strong “change” predilection from voters.
- McCain’s age vs. Obama youth and energy; and
- McCain’s long record of doing the wrong thing on current issues (funny to see him trying to run away from that record right now, but a record is a record); both
- feeding into the “change” equation.
The R talking box machine got a few days of play out of McCain pulling essentially even with Obama in the national polling and even in the electoral college polling. The standard talking point then was, “Obama should be crushing McCain right now and he’s not. They are tied. Therefore Obama’s a much weaker candidate than people think.”
Those salad days for the R’s are gonzo. As I said before, McCain was going to get a good and temporary bounce from his youthful energy Palin pick. He did, but that bounce quickly fizzled and now the rout is on. Back on September 17 I wrote that McCain was peaking in Colorado and nationally. I said that his then 2-point polling edge in Colorado was soon over. It clearly is over now, with Obama pulling ahead strongly. But if Colorado is a bellwether state in this election, so are Pennsylvania, Florida and New Hampshire, and Obama is starting to pull away in all, even after recent leads by McCain.
Typical swing states are one thing, traditionally red states are another. Obama is polling ahead in Virgina, North Carolina and Ohio, and making Indiana and Missouri competitive. This all adds up to one thing: the rout is on and as I said weeks ago, Obama is going to crush McCain on November 4th. The 344-194 number fivethirtyeight has up right now wouldn’t surprise me (note that the number changes daily, so might be different when you’re reading this).
It’s not even going to be close, and that’s very good for the country. We need an election that’s not decided by a thread so the new prez can have some moral authority to claim the “uniter not divider” mantle that W abdicated on the day after his inauguration. How big does the spread have to be to get some semblance of unity? Bill Clinton won 370-168 in 1992 and that didn’t exactly lead to kisses and hugs all around. But Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton and might do more to force civility where Clinton was a strong partisan fighter. In any case, what we definitely do not need is another “effective tie” to stoke the political hate. Time for a change (I think) also means time for people to cool off. Hopefully a big win will help that along.
the veep play October 2, 2008
Wow, did Sarah Palin really pull that off? Well, sorta.
As most figured she could, Palin “won” by not losing. Every D in the land was hoping for a performance along the lines of her horrid interview series with Katie Couric. Palin not only did not bomb, she held her composure throughout the spate. Many commenters figured that anything but a clear bomb would have the R’s shouting victory.
Not quite. Palin reinforced her greatest strength: her folksy likability. She also reinforced her lack of command of complicated issues and of political history. If you’re watching the debate for the attention to detail, for how the candidates handled the actual issues, then Biden cleaned her clock. But Palin not only didn’t wither, she shined throughout the debate as confident, sincere and spirited, and I’m sure many people picked up on her general confidence more than on her actual words.
The only “gotcha” I’ll take from the affair is the exchange on climate change. As she did throughout the debate, Palin dodged the real question: “is climate change natural or man-made?” Her answer was that climate change is real but I don’t really want to debate what caused it, it doesn’t really matter. Biden nailed her to the wall with his answer: if you can’t agree on the cause of the problem then you can’t agree on the solution. And he’s absolutely right. It makes no sense for Palin to agree that we should cap emissions (while also drilling baby drilling to depletion?) while thinking that climate change is due to natural causes. I wish Biden would have gone further than his strong acknowledgement of his own view that climate change is human-caused by bringing up the IPCC and really delving into it. Biden could have made Palin look silly on the topic but let her off easy and I don’t expect many picked up on the exchange.
In all, Palin did well enough to staunch the bleeding from the Couric interviews. She wasn’t technically good, but she was confident in her presence, made the points she wanted to make and probably gave most R’s a sigh of relief. Biden won the debate without a doubt, but again, perhaps Palin won by not losing.
bad and worse September 30, 2008
The Palin bounce (down the stairs) effect is now confirmed. After seeing acts like this, Dems no long need to point out Palin’s total lack of qualification to be veep, because the R’s are doing it for them. Palin is now an anchor on John McCain’s boat, no longer the helium helping him rise. The McCain/Palin numbers will only drop from here, and the downtrend will be due both to McCain’s economy-managing fiasco as much as from Palin’s stunning unsuitability for the job. The McCain campaign is clearly shielding her from further public interviews and contact with the press as they can’t afford more Couric-type interviews.
As far as the markets, the left/right divide on the $700B Paulson power grab has been fascinating to watch. In Colorado the voting outcome was mixed. Those on the left and right in safe seats voted Y (Degette, Perlmutter and Tancredo) and neither of these players are necessarily considered moderates. The Nay votes were both from contested races (Udall and Musgrave) and from a D (Salazar) and R (Lamborn) in safe seats. In other words, there’s no real pattern here. The media has made much of the fact that rank-and-file R’s voted against the plan across the country (and they did by 2-1) just as 40% of rank-and-file D’s did, showing (supposedly) that conservatives and liberals both are in agreement on hating the compromise Paulson Power Grab, just for different reasons.
Are the reasons really that different? R’s, D’s and moderates all around see the same things here: just two weeks ago Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, McCain, etc. were all spouting that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and that everything was roses. Now they are asking for $700 billion in taxpayer money in a panic rush, telling us that if they don’t get it the economy is gonzo. Voters are very rationally asking the WTF question while their reps are squirming around, ready to push the nuclear button after about two days of debate. Again, it’s times like this I am thankful we have a slow Congress designed to make sure we don’t make panic decisions.
Finally, speaking of the Paulson Power Grab, if you thought the weekend compromise bill ameliorated the No Longer Invisible Hand provisions, think again:
What attracted far less notice in the bill was a set of provisions that would have given Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson virtually unfettered authority to set up and run the new organization designed to stabilize the financial system — bypassing federal acquisition rules and competitive hiring procedures in the process.
The 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act would have allowed Paulson and his eventual successor to waive provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation “upon a determination that urgent and compelling circumstances make compliance with such provisions contrary to the public interest.”
“It’s unprecedented in American history and American government,” said Donald F. Kettl, a political analyst and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The blank check is blanker still given that we don’t know who will be signing dollar bills on Jan. 21.”
The department would have had to notify the House Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees, as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committees of any waiver within seven days. But the bill would not have granted the panels explicit power to block any such contract.
And it goes on and on….
Sportsmen for Obama September 22, 2008
Anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes in politics in America knows that real political power lies in knowing, understanding and managing the myriad distinct constituencies we have in this land. For instance, Sarah Palin as a proud “Hockey mom?” As easy as it appears to be to draw well-defined distinctions, clearly there is no single constituency that can be labeled “Hockey Moms.” Instead you have 40-something hockey moms who lean left and have right-voting husbands, 30-something hockey moms who just bought the new Metallica album but usually vote Republican, 42-yr old Hispanic hockey moms who have 3 dogs, etc.
And so it is with people who own and use guns. To those who do not, especially those of the metro East Coast political analysis cadre, there probably isn’t much perceived nuance: if you own a gun, especially if you own one for hunting, you’re voting with the NRA and therefore with the Republicans. This, of course, is absurd, but strange as it may seem, the NRA loves this perceived distinction. It gives them a strong wedge issue with which to stoke their funding base, so the NRA does nothing to disabuse the public of the perception.
Fortunately for America, while the NRA does dominate gun politics here, it does not represent all (or probably even a majority) of gun owners. Yes, the NRA has an impressively huge membership and ostensibly represents all American gun owners. But like hockey moms and soccer moms and NASCAR dads and west coast elites and coal miner’s daughters and single black men in their 30’s and elementary school librarians, the “gun owner constituency” is not a single-minded, single-issue, black-and-white politics constituency. Far from it. And while the NRA is proudly and staunchly protecting the interests of gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to own any and every gun ever manufactured, it is not doing nearly as well for the silent majority of gun owners. Amongst others, those are gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to hunt in pristine lands.
I am in the latter category. I am an avid big game hunter, a bird hunter and a fly fisherman. I own — well, let’s say more than a couple — guns, mostly for hunting. But more importantly, I am a gun owner who doesn’t feel threatened by gun control laws. I am a gun owner who doesn’t want any friggin crazy to have the right to own an assault rifle or a semi-automatic pistol. I am an avid gun owner who feels sick when yet another massacre comes down from a kid or kids who should never have had access to a gun. I am a gun owner who becomes incensed when gun rights groups don’t even wait until the smoke clears to declare that the massacre occurred because of gun control laws, not in spite of them. I’m a gun owner that thinks nobody in America needs to own an MP-5 or an HK416. And because of all this and more, I am a firearm owner who feels totally alienated by the National Rifle Association. (more…)
peaking? September 17, 2008
The economy being the headline is not good news for the McCain campaign. You can see McCain reaching, groping for something, anything. And you can see Palin flailing with no answer. McCain’s “fundamentals are strong” comment was probably one of his biggest stumbles of late and unfortunately for him, his long Senate record on addressing these issues does not support his recently tougher talk.
My guess is that the carnage is not over on Wall Street, and that there will be a direct correlation between McCain’s polling numbers and the financial sheet news. ARG has a slew of new numbers out today. Unfortunately they are delayed, so while the post date is Sept 17th the sample date is generally in the Sept 10-13 window. This means that McCain’s 2-point lead in Colorado, for instance, is suspect because it samples before the recent visits by Obama and Palin.
Interestingly, the ARG numbers have a tighter race in Montana than I would have expected. McCain has only a 2-point lead in MT and the survey questions ignore the fact that both Ron Paul and Bob Barr will be on the ballot there, and that there are a slew of good statewide D candidates running, including the popular D governor Brian Schweitzer. MT is not a pivotal state in terms of Electoral College votes by itself, but it could add with another smaller state to become so for Obama (because McCain is expected to win there). That state could be West Virginia, where McCain’s lead is also surprisingly small in the ARG survey.
As far as Colorado, if McCain’s 2-point edge was accurate as of Sept 10-13, that’s where he will peak. I think McCain will not open a bigger lead on Obama here and I expect that if Obama can come to CO a few more times, especially to the western slope, he will win this state. Of course, Obama must talk about western issues. He must come out strongly pro-hunting and recreation without looking like John Kerry pandering. He must press on clean energy issues without alienating those that make their money on oil and gas development here. And he must realize that westerners want to be given a reason to vote for him.
home stretch of potus08 September 16, 2008
Swimming amid the on-again/off-again currents, for the rest of this political season I’ll try to ramp back up to the steady stream of analysis I had going during the Dem and Rep primary season. I’ll be totally upfront about my biases: I have every desire to see Barack Obama win this election and no desire whatsoever to see Sarah Palin be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office chair. Despite that, my point in creating this blog was to go for analysis not partisanship. You can find the partisanship in a million other blogs. You can only find real analysis in a few of them (see the blogroll to the right for those).
So let’s start here: the second I heard about the Palin pick I was impressed. I guess I had the same intuitive reaction that John McCain had: Palin was going to be good energy to add to the ticket and was going to give him very good buzz. And has it not? Palin gave McCain immediate buzz, a new look from the religious right (without whom John McCain can absolutely not win this election), and a great rise in the polls.
But let’s face it: for all the buzz, Palin is completely lacking in substance and it is bound to catch up to the McCain campaign. I’m already seeing signs of that inevitable truth coming to bear, and over the next two weeks you will see the Palin effect erode further until it fades nearly into the background noise.
The fact is, the R’s are facing a real problem now: Barack Obama has already been through the buzz wringer and came out looking better than ever. Why? Because behind the flash is substance. Obama’s appeal is based on the fact that people believe in him in a way that they never will believe in Sarah Palin. People actually believe: a- that Obama wants to do what he says he wants to do; b- has the resolve and intelligence to actually do it; c- will do it if elected. Aside from judging Palin as a person, nobody can believe any of that about a Republican right now, and while that’s not Palin’s fault, it is reality. Palin’s party’s actions over the past few years, including the two major politicans from her own state, have ensured that nobody can trust an R to do what they say they want to do. Inevitiably it is a condition that will come back to inflict the Dems, probably sooner than later, but for now it is squarely an R problem.
Obama has passed the smell test by getting through the very difficult D primary season. Palin has no such luxury (if it could be called that). Palin has a few more weeks of the D’s making her look like a lying, incompetent (and ultimately irrelevant) a-hole and the R’s trying like hell to dislodge those attacks. And the more time the D’s have to strip away the initial sheen, the more Palin’s buzz will wear into the background noise. Obama faced the same challenges and came looking as good as ever. Palin will not.
Congratulations to Jared August 15, 2008
August 12 has come and gone on the sun-burnt plains of Colorado CD-2. Jared Polis pulled out a good win against Joan Fitz-Gerald and Will Shafroth, keeping Will’s strengths in check while whittling down Joan to the very end.
Much can be said about this race and how it turned out, but the key was this: Jared had the right combination of the resources, the skills and the dedication to pull this off. Much has been made (here as elsewhere) about Jared’s limitless funds but it should be obvious to anybody seriously considering the picture that money won’t buy you anything if you don’t have the awareness and the political skills to match.
Jared’s biggest strategic move was to have the foresight and the cajones to dump an unworkable campaign manager months ago when his campaign was bumbling along without a strong, seasoned leader. Jared picked up Robert Becker and it was off to the races. Becker had the flexibility to run circles around Joan’s campaign and Mary Alice just couldn’t keep pace. Every JFG attack was old and tired, the same old soundbite about Jared’s cash that came across as a whine. The Joan campaign didn’t have fresh material or a fresh attitude and it cost them. When Jared produced solid dirt on Joan the answer was mismanaged.
Jared did well to pick up a campaign manager equal to the task, but clearly the bulk of the credit must go to the candidate himself. He didn’t just rest on the laurels of his money, but wore out the shoe leather as well as Will or Joan (also see his comment here). Only the candidates themselves know how much they are working door-to-door but there’s one bit of evidence I think says pretty clearly that Jared was working as hard as possible for this seat: he had a bigger margin over Joan in Adams and Broomfield Counties than in Boulder County.
Clearly I was supporting Will in this race but as I said previously, if it wasn’t Will it would be Jared for me. I think both were good candidates but Will was stronger on my issues (longer track record and more dedication) and had some intangibles I liked. Even so, I was very impressed with how quickly Jared picked up these issues, how prepared he was for them at the climate/energy debate, and especially by how willing he has been to engage and comment on this blog. Thanks for that, Jared!
So here’s a congratulations to all for a race well played. Jared comes out the big winner in all this, Will comes out as well with a new load of street cred for pulling a lot of weight when every observer thought the two biggies would bury him. As for Joan? I won’t be catty about it, but politically Joan comes out the big loser in this. She started with all the weight and prestige behind her, started as the out-size runaway favorite. And lost. She didn’t lose because she got out-spent, she lost because she got out-campaigned, and that’s that. Despite that, Joan is still to be thanked for putting in the extraordinary effort it takes to run for a seat like this.
Good luck Jared, and serve us well.
loves mining, drives a Prius, hates nuclear, loves mining August 7, 2008
We knew that the mining industry was an enthusiastic supporter of Joan Fitz-Gerald before the CD-2 primary race started. And throughout the race she hasn’t even bothered trying to distance herself from those ties. As the race has worn on more of Joan’s mining support has come out, become more clear, stood up, been counted, shown its face, and given her opponents juicy ammo. All this exploded this week as Jared Polis’ campaign released a letter in which Joan tried to back Summit County away from banning cyanide heap leach gold mining (see previous post and ColoradoPols threads about this).
(Note that it didn’t take long for Jared to come out strongly against cyanide mining. Great job, Jared! I can tell you’ve been a passionate and dedicated opponent of this technique for years! Way to stick your neck out and take the opportune obvious expedient right position! Way to be a real leader on this! Oh wait, I guess Jared’s not so clean after all.)
On one of the Pols stories I commented about Joan’s cameo appearances in two different Colorado Mining Association newsletters (one in 2003, the other in 2006), praising her for her support for the mining industry.
Is this a problem? As some commenters in the Pols’ vigorous debate argue, we use the materials derived from mining constantly. We rely on those materials, so what’s the problem? Why is Joan’s defense of the mining industry a problem?
Mining itself is not the problem. We do rely on minerals, and to get those minerals we must mine for them. The problem is that the mining industry is comprised of private and publicly-held mining corporations and the only responsibility these companies have is to their owners or shareholders. They (and rightfully so), strive for maximum profit, and therefore minimal expenses. Mining cleanly? Mining with the utmost care and attention to the environment? An obvious expense.
Society has a different calculation to consider: minerals, yes, but not at the cost of a destroyed environment. The People need to balance minerals extraction with environmental preservation.
So we have a natural and unavoidable tension: mining companies want to make money, society wants the products and a clean environment. We create government regulations to try to ensure we get both, but it is clearly in the companies’ best interest to ensure the minimization of regulations.
So it is industry’s interest to not be regulated, it is in our interest that they are. The relevant question to be asked here is: which side is Joan Fitz-Gerald on? After seeing her praised in print by the CMA twice, after seeing her letter to Summit County, after noting her PAC contributions from mining industry groups, it’s pretty damn clear which side Joan is on. If she is acting in the interest of Mining can she also be acting in the interest of stringent regulations of mining? Not bloody likely. The relevant question for CD-2 voters is: does such a strong supporter of the mining industry warrant our vote?
Joan peppered the CD-2 energy and climate debate with platitudes about the environment, how she drives a Prius, how she’s against all things nuclear, etc. But Joan is walking a razor’s edge espousing a Prius-driving lifestyle while pushing counties away from banning potentially destructive mining practices and taking oodles of mining PAC money. This kind of hypocrisy may be present in most political officials, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it or accept it. In Joan I don’t.
Shafroth picks up two major endorsements July 27, 2008
Two days ago the Denver Post announced its endorsement for Will Shafroth for CD-2, a major feather in Will’s cap. This followed by a week the Rocky Mountain News’ own endorsement of Shafroth. The only other newspaper endorsement that means much to this race, that of the Daily Camera, will be announced this week.
Grabbing the two Denver papers is a major coop for Shafroth and a major embarrassment for Joan Fitz-Gerald. While nobody with any ounce of insight into this race would expect Jared Polis to pick up these endorsements, most probably guessed that Joan would have had the inside line. Her years as a state politico and deal maker presumptively marked her as the “inevitable” choice, and she has certainly been positioned as that from the start of this race. Whether coming from her own people or from detail-watchers like ColoradoPols, most have been touting Joan in much the same way that Mark Penn positioned Hillary in the beginning of her race. We all know how that turned out and my guess is Joan goes down the same path.
So why didn’t Joan get the nod over Will? Only the editors of the dailies know, but here’s my guess: personality. Whisper it loudly: once people actually get to meet and talk to these candidates they have opposite reactions to Will and Joan. Will they like more, Joan they like less. Biased by my own experiences perhaps, but I have heard this from CD-2 voters time and again. Joan comes off as something nearing bitter, Will comes off as affable. Quite simply, Joan just turns people off. We can talk about policy differences all day long, but in the end their policies are not far enough apart to matter much. This is about personality. As for Jared? As nice a guy as Jared may be, he comes off as the over-eager new car salesman trying to get you to just jump in and take this thing for a ride. That he is trying to buy this race is obvious, but what is dragging him down like a leaded sea anchor is that he doesn’t have the personality skills to make his purchase irrelevant.
In the end, these endorsements may matter not at all. But they are a major boost of credibility to Shafroth’s candidacy and should give anybody who lays down on conventional wisdom a pause.
The layers peeling away May 9, 2008
I first used the word “inevitable” on February 10. Nothing along the way, through the ups and downs in momentum for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, has made me alter my perception. Barack’s nomination became inevitable after SuperTuesday and became a near mathematical certainty by the end of February. No amount of HillarySpin or wins in coal mining states was going to change that.
Now that Obama has yet again soundly won a big primary day in popular votes and delegates, the layers on HRC’s campaign that had slowly, slowby been peeling away are starting to come faster and faster. The SuperDelegates are turning and the hole in the dam grows daily. Bill Richardson’s endorsement started the flow and by this past Tuesday BO had just about caught up to HRC in spoken-for SuperDelegates. Not only had Obama been gaining SD’s far faster than HRC, many SD’s were switching to Obama after having declared for Clinton. After this Tuesday’s results the hole in that dam has gone from pea-sized to baseball-sized. In the next two weeks the flow will continue and Barack Obama will have overtaken HRC in the SuperDelegate column. Hillary may stick it out through early June (the last primary is Puerto Rico on June 7 — this post has the list of remaining primaries) but the race’s results are as inevitable now as they were two months ago.
If you’re really bored…. May 2, 2008
Sorry dear readers, but I’ve been decidedly un-bored for the past two weeks. In fact, I’ve been underwater mostly with little time to post. That will change shortly, I hope.
In the meantime, check out CQ’s new VP Madness game. Somebody at CQ (i.e. intern) had nothing to do so took 32 possible running mates for McCain and paired them into a March Madness-like bracket. You get to play along and the result gets sent to McCain. And I’m sure he’ll take the public up on it because, well, because VP picks are always totally logical, aren’t they?
Some of the 32 are totally laughable (Tom Coburn???) but hey, they had to fill the field somehow. My 1st round picks were Hagel, Graham, Sanford, Blackburn, Pawlenty, Powell, Barbour, Hutchinson, Palin, Thompson, Steele, Pence, Cantor, Lieberman, Thune, and Crist.
Joan drops a gotcha on Jared’s head April 24, 2008
In the biggest oops of the CD-2 campaign so far, the Denver Post today ran a placement story by the Fitz-Gerald campaign that has Polis looking like a big, fat environmental hypocrite.
Fitz-Gerald’s environmental liabilities in this race were already known by insiders (not by voters, yet) and Polis has been trying to hammer her from a dual angle: taking special interest money from anti-environmental sources. Polis has also been playing himself as the green candidate, giving his website an eco-feelgood look and putting up significant verbiage on his enviro positions. But today the Fitz-Gerald campaign got the story they wanted in the Post when it ran a Karen Crummy investigative article on Polis’ investment history. Unfortunately for Polis he detailed in a self-disclosure form past holdings in multiple oil/gas and mining companies.
Polis listed income from 20 or more oil and gas companies, such as the China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., ConocoPhillips and LUKOIL, the largest oil company in Russia. He also was invested with pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithCline, Sanofi Aventis and Novartis, and he had stock in mining companies such as Southern Copper Corp., which operates open pit mines in Peru and Mexico.
He also was invested in companies that routinely draw fire from liberal groups, such as Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart of Mexico, Altria Group (previously known as Philip Morris) and Imperial Chemical Industries.
Even so, from January through April, his campaign has continually slammed Fitz-Gerald for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from political action committees and special interests, specifically the oil, gas, mining and pharmaceutical industries.
The article was clearly researched, promoted and pushed by the JFG campaign:
