Entries for October 2008

Talk about hubris. Way back in June, I decided to take a chance on what sportswriters typically do and predict the season's champion before the games begin.

On the RobertEmmet blog in the first week of June I wrote: Bottom line: President Obama. Big. With 382 electoral votes.

So here, Morgan and Rob, is what I forecast way back then. You can add it to the Thomas Jefferson St. election picks.

On the bright side, I gave Bambi almost all the industrial Midwest, two of the important, contested Rocky Mountain States, and Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida.

I also—big mea culpa here—predicted that he would carry Texas.

OK, this is terribly self-indulgent, even for someone named Aloysius.

And admittedly tenuous, even for a people known for stretching ancestral relationships to extremes.

But it turns out that Barack Obama...is Irish.

Saints be praised! Who knew?

On his mother's side, don't you know. (Thanks to the lovely Irish-American writer Caledonia Kearns for the tip.)

Now, everybody, sing along! From the ol' Blarney Stone to the green hills of Tara... There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama....

I've caught a little grief from folks who aren't pleased with the way I explained the differences between the McCain and Obama tax plans yesterday.

Some of it is ideological, from partisans wearing their Limbaugh-Hannity blinders, who simply refuse to recognize that, under Obama's plan, the mythical Joe the Plumber, married with two kids, and earning $200,000 a year WOULD GET A $6,474 TAX CUT!

Which just happens to be the identical tax cut that McCain is offering to that same upper-middle-class family.

Now, where I come from, families earning $200,000 a year are still making a lot of money. They may be annoyed at the country club assessment, or stretched by the cost of prep school tuition, or upset with the price of gasoline and auto insurance for the cars they have given their teenage children, but they are far from hurting. Yet Obama still wants to cut their taxes—significantly.

That, my friends, is not socialism.

Other critics, more reasonably, have asked why I used broad tax categories—the middle 20 percent, the richest 1 percent—in yesterday's post, since most folks don't know where they fit, percentagewise, in the universe of taxpayers.

Fair enough.

We've been hearing some pretty hysterical things said by Barack Obama's critics about Obamanomics.

Socialist. Destroyer of wealth. Enemy of small business.

So, here's a primer on how Obama, if elected, will be "spreading the wealth around" in the next four years—and why he's far from a socialist radical.

And even, to a struggling but hopeful entrepreneur like myself (call me Jack the Writer), not cause for alarm.

Maybe Peter Hart is one of those Democrats who, like Chicago Cubs fans, have gotten to within a few games...outs...strikes of victory so often, only to have it cruelly denied, that they take a gloomy disposition into any favorable circumstance.

Or maybe the 2008 election ain't over 'til it's over.

Is there a Steve Bartman out there getting ready to lunge for a foul ball and deprive the Democrats of their triumph?

On a rainy and gloomy October day in Washington, the über-pollster Hart has conveyed an appropriately glum report for his fellow Democrats from a focus group he conducted in Ohio yesterday.

OK, Rob. About those screwy polls. For those among us who are polling junkies, the fellows at fivethirtyeight.com have put together a couple of primers on the science of public opinion.

Here is an explanation of the many tracking polls, which explains how the various polling organizations get their samples and other tricks of the trade.

And this post goes over some of the same territory but with a persuasive analysis that the polls showing Barack Obama with a sizable lead are real.

Here's my favorite factoid, which is based on the reality that, despite the growing multicultural nature of American society, white folks still elect our presidents.

Did anyone hold it against Carrie and the gals when they bought all those ridiculously expensive Manolo Blahnik shoes?

Did we not root our hearts out for Miss Vivian when she returned from that shopping trip on Rodeo Drive, put on that amazing red dress, and found happiness in the arms of Richard Gere, her very own Prince Charming?

Didn't Andrew Lloyd Webber make a gazillion bucks with Evita?

Friends, I really don't think that Sarah Palin is going to pay too much a price for her $150,000 wardrobe. Not as our newest celebrity Cinderella.