Entries for October 2008

My post earlier this week on the Pennsylvania polls and the implications thereof has gotten some attention, and so I thought I would check out one point I made: that Obama's lead in the state is largely due to an increase over previous Democratic presidential candidates in his percentages in affluent suburbs. Looking at other state polls that break down results by region, I find some confirmation, but also some qualifications.

Guess who has a new blog? Princeton University Press. PUP (they use the acronym) is run by my longtime friend Peter Dougherty, who, working under the late Erwin Glikes of Macmillan Free Press, edited my first non-Almanac book, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. The PUP webpage features a Bloggingheads interview of economist and PUP author Robert Shiller by Robert Wright.

If, as seems likely but not quite certain, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, a key question for public policymaking will be how many Democrats are elected to the Senate. Currently, there are 51 Democrats there, including Joe Lieberman, but Democrats are seriously contesting 11 Republican-held seats, and there is a by-no-means-trivial chance that they could win each one. Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously contesting either zero Democratic-held seats, or only one, that of Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. The only public polls there since July are from Rasmussen, and the latest shows Landrieu ahead of Democrat-turned-Republican John Kennedy by 53 percent to 43 percent. So, Landrieu, a narrow winner in 1996 and 2002, seems headed to a third term.

If you want to understand the economic events of the last half century, you should read two new books. One is Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, which explains how the abstract economic theories of Keynesian economists produced not the promised eternal economic growth but the longest sustained peacetime inflation in American history, rising to 14 percent in the times of Jimmy Carter. The other is David Smick's The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy, which explains how the abstract mathematical models of financial wizards produced not the promised eternal self-sustaining economic growth but rather a nontransparent financial system, which led to the coagulation of credit and our current financial crisis. Both show how abstract theories proved faulty in practice; both recommend similar common-sense responses: intelligently regulated transparent markets.

That's the subject of my Creators Syndicate column. The New Deal, I argue, was not as popular politically or as sustainable as public policy as is generally believed. For more, you can check out my 1990 book, Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan, now available through Amazon.com from $5.75.

The tracking polls seem to show the presidential race tightening. Rasmussen numbers released this morning show Barack Obama ahead of John McCain by only 50 percent to 47 percent—the narrowest margin in Rasmussen polls for more than a month and the first time McCain has been over 46 percent since September 24 (nine days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and two days before the first debate). Gallup's tracking released yesterday showed McCain behind by only 49 percent to 47 percent on its traditional-turnout model but behind by a much larger 51 percent to 44 percent on its expanded model.

John Zogby's numbers yesterday showed a 49 percent-to-44 percent margin for Obama, considerably smaller than the one he had a few days earlier.

Here's insight into the thinking of some Democrats. In Ohio, they're attacking state Rep. Josh Mandel for having fulfilled his military obligation to serve in Iraq. As Joel Mowbray tells the story, Democrats are saying that Mandel neglected his constituents in favor of "serving George Bush." In these Democrats' view, the war in Iraq is evidently a purely partisan cause, not one sanctioned by the U.S. Congress and ordered by the U.S. president. These people want the United States to prevail only if there is a Democratic president and take delight in American defeat if the president is a Republican. I've seldom seen such a disgusting display of partisanship over country.