emergent ink

From FiveThirtyEight.com:

McCain’s chances of victory are estimated at 1.9 percent, their lowest total of the year.

For those of you who prefer to end this campaign on a positive note, Obama’s chances of victory are estimated at 98.1 percent, their highest total of the year.

I realize that for some of you, that’s not a positive note. This is only a prediction. Anything can happen. That’s why they play the game.

The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Washington Redskins tonight. It was a home game for the Redskins. Between 1936 and 2004 there were eighteen presidential elections. For the first seventeen of those, whenever the Redskins won their last home game before Election Day, the incumbent party held on to the White House. And whenever the Redskins lost their last home game before Election Day, the incumbent party lost the White House. The Redskins lost to the Green Bay Packers at home in 2004, but John Kerry was unable to oust George W. Bush, breaking the streak. Still, that’s just under a 95% accuracy rate.

I’m not going too far out on a limb then when I say that western Pennsylvania will determine whether Barack Obama wins the election tomorrow.

Happy belated Halloween! Got this email last night:

Three children go out trick or treating. Two went out early - - the third slept late and then joined them. The three knock on a door, and the man who answered is shocked that two of the three have bags full of candy and the third had none. He declares that this is not right and then takes candy from the two and gives to the third so that all might share equally. One child goes away with a smile on his face (guess which one). Two children go away on the verge of tears and vow never to begin their trick or treat work day early again because - - what’s the incentive to work harder. By the way, the other one also resolved to continue to sleep late and never go out early to trick or treat because - - - why should he??!!!!! RESULTS: incentive dies on both sides of this issue.

Scary stuff, that socialism.

Last night I was down to my last two tootsie rolls when the doorbell rang. There at the door were two boys… and right behind them were another boy and a girl. The costumes they wore were confusing.

“I only have two pieces of candy left, so if you don’t mind explaining who you’re supposed to be, I’ll give this candy to the two of you who deserve it more,” I said.

The one boy said he was dressed as “Hope and Change”. It was a little hard to believe. The other boy was dressed up like a pilgrim, and he said, “Happy Thanksgiving! When our forefathers came to this great land…” then the first boy nudged him in the ribs with his elbow to shut him up.

I turned to the boy and the girl. The boy was wrapped in an American flag. He said, “Don’t give the candy to those two, they’re scary!” The girl was dressed in an expensive costume like she was going to a prom. She winked at me, and said that the boy who was dressed as Hope and Change “lives next door to the boy who egged your car.”

“I know that kid,” I said. “That was years ago. He’s a teacher now. But you haven’t explained what you’re supposed to be. So I’ll give you another chance.”

The boy who was wrapped in a flag said he didn’t care about washed-up egg-throwers, but I shouldn’t trust the boy dressed as Hope and Change anyway. The girl said I should give her both pieces of candy, because some guy named Joe the Plumber said so.

This election could be the most important one in our lives. America is facing many, many problems. Who would you rather hire to run things: the guy who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University School of Law, or the guy who went to Annapolis on a family exemption, and graduated fifth from the bottom of his class?

Who is the one who has done everything he could to achieve when given an opportunity, and who is the one who has taken advantage of the system whenever he could, and abused his privileges? Hint: read John McCain’s autobiography.

McCain is the trick-or-treater who slept late in the first story.

Look at the way the two candidates ran their campaigns.

They ran their campaigns exactly how you would expect a guy who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University School of Law and a guy who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class would run their campaigns. Think about how they would run this country. You might not like what the guy with the obviously better campaign stands for, but can we risk having the other guy running things? Country first, remember? And other than that he’s not a Democrat, what exactly does John McCain bring to this country? Besides fear?

It’s hard to believe that the 2008 presidential campaign that began almost two years ago will be over in a week.

I don’t know what I am going to do with all the free time I’ll have when I finally stop flipping between CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC in a futile nightly search for unbiased reporting. And I don’t know when the blue and red maps of the United States that were burned into my retinas by staring at different polling websites will fade away.

Of course we could still end up the way we did in 2000, with nothing decided on Election Day. That would be a Bad Thing. And not just for me.

The anger that was born in that debacle has been a key ingredient of the poisonous political climate that has kept Washington from working effectively over the past eight years.

Some Democrats refused to acknowledge that George W. Bush had been legally elected. Some Republicans, including the Bush Administration, responded by becoming defensive. It’s never a good thing when the White House gets defensive.

When we don’t trust the guy in the Oval Office, he tends to get into trouble. This is sort of a chicken and egg thing. Sure, we don’t trust him because he got in trouble. But sometimes, the trouble he gets into is because we don’t trust him.

I’m serious. It’s as if some presidents decide that the only way they can get things done is in the shadows.

They’re like young children that way. Treat them with respect and trust, and they feel they can tell you anything. Blame them for small mistakes, and you’ll find that they no longer want to tell you what they and their friends are up to.

It wasn’t Bush’s fault that he became president the way he did. And maybe so many people saying that he wasn’t really president forced him down a path where he felt that he didn’t really have to defend the Constitution.

I’m half serious about that.

I’m looking forward to a president we don’t have to use child psychology to understand.

The atmosphere over the past eight years has left little room for bi-partisan compromise. But you have to go back over another eight years of the Clinton presidency to see how long we’ve been at this. The Republican-controlled Congress was ready to fight Bill Clinton on everything, if not drive him out of office altogether. So, for most of the past sixteen years, politics has been about us versus them. It’s been a team sport of the worst kind, a rivalry as bad as anything between Red Sox and Yankees fans.

Party leadership and activists on both sides have encouraged this game of us versus them and right versus wrong, going so far as making party affiliation a choice between good and evil. We have become the Untied States of America.

While we have been distracted our jobs have disappeared; families are struggling to make ends meet; real wages have not kept up with the cost of living; health care costs more and covers less; our standing in the world has slipped; our armed forces are stretched too thin and are now unavailable if another crisis should suddenly develop.

What this country needs most of all is steady leadership in the face of global economic crisis. We need someone with intelligence capable of handling rapidly changing situations.

And we need this person to start as soon as possible.

We can’t afford to get bogged down counting chads or listening to lawyers for weeks after November 4.

The world doesn’t wait, not even for the President of the United States. Even Iraq, which looked like the big issue of this campaign a year ago, won’t wait for a new president. U.S. forces will be confined to base after January 1, 2009, when the United Nations mandate legitimizing operations in Iraq expires. Inauguration Day is January 20.

There is a withdrawal agreement that requires U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities by no later than June 30, 2009, and from all Iraqi territory by December 31, 2011. But the democratically elected government of Iraq won’t sign it.

If they want us gone, then the next president has one less thing to worry about. And many of our troops can start to come home, sooner than expected.

The next president is going to have his hands full anyway, with the global economic crisis.

The next four years will be about the economy. We are headed into a recession and we may not start to come out of it until 2010. This is not going to be like the 1930s, when the United States had an unlimited supply of cheap energy, there was a lot more room on the planet, and a lot fewer mouths to feed.

There are a lot of ways to compare the candidates, and we’ve been at it so long that we’re running out of things to talk about. John McCain has said don’t vote for the celebrity. Don’t vote for the pal of terrorists. Don’t vote for the socialist. That One. The Redistributor. Barack Obama has said don’t vote for four more years of Bush. It’s time to clear this all up.

I’m voting for the smart guy. For a change.

For some reason, we don’t seem to like smart guys. Maybe because the last guy to run as a real smart guy was Richard Nixon.

Jimmy (not James) Carter was a graduate of Annapolis, a submariner, a nuclear engineer. But he ran as a peanut farmer. Ronald Reagan was an actor.

George H.W. Bush managed to get elected in 1988 because he ran against a guy, Michael Dukakis, who looked even smarter. But when Bush ran up against Rhodes scholar Bill (not William) Clinton, he looked too smart. Clinton came across as less bright than he really was, and it helped him beat Bush and then Dole.

George W. Bush had a Harvard MBA but came across as a screw-up, which served him well against Al Gore, who had a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard (cum laude) but seemed a whole lot smarter… annoyingly smarter. And time has only made Gore seem that much more smarter than Bush.

Which brings us to 2008.

Barack Obama graduated with a BA from Columbia University and a JD (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School. He has taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School.

John McCain got into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis thanks to having a father and grandfather who were both four-star Admirals. He graduated 894 out of 899 in his class. He was not a very good pilot. I don’t get a good feeling when I read McCain’s autobiography, where he says he ignored the warning signal in his cockpit that a heat-seeking missile was headed towards his plane. It reminds me of how, a month ago, McCain said that the “fundamentals of the economy are sound.” On Meet the Press this past Sunday, McCain said that he doesn’t believe the polls; he trusts his own senses.

I don’t trust John McCain’s senses. Or his judgment.

I’m voting for the smart guy. Not the bully. Not the partying guy. With all that this country is facing, now is not the time to vote like this is a high school prom. So no, I’m not going to vote for the prom king and queen. I’m voting for the geek.