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Michael Crichton: a Prolific Author and Movie Director
Tweet Share on Facebook November 10, 2008 Comment (1)Michael Crichton, the prolific author and movie director, has died at 66. I can say that I knew Crichton, but only slightly. He was two years ahead of me at Harvard and was a colleague on the Crimson. As I recall, he was the book editor at one point and often ran his anthropology papers as book reviews, which tended to be long and tedious. You can look them up at theharvardcrimson.com. I wouldn't have guessed then that he would be a bestselling author, but he certainly was that—and more. Check out this Crichton piece from 1993 on "the coming end of the media's information monopoly." He also wrote a terrific essay on environmentalism as religion. Sad to lose him at what seems to me now a young age.
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A Decisive but Not Overwhelming Victory for Barack Obama
Tweet Share on Facebook November 7, 2008 Comment (66)This was a decisive but not an overwhelming victory for Barack Obama and the Democrats. As I put it in the lead of my U.S. News column for next week, it was a victory that was overdetermined and underdelivered. Obama's apparent percentage margin (we're still waiting for a lot of returns) is 52 percent to 46 percent, slightly higher than Bush 43's score in 2004 and slightly higher than Bush 41's in 1988. He owes his impressive 364-to-174 margin in the Electoral College to narrow wins in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana; he nearly added 11 more in Missouri.
I haven't had time to comb through the election returns yet to make definitive conclusions. I hesitate to crunch a lot of numbers that will change when final returns are in, but here are a few observations.
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National Polls Favor Obama, State Polls Trend Toward McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (21)Looking at the latest polls on the morning of Election Day, I see two contrary trends. On the one hand, the national polls seem to be trending toward Barack Obama. On the other, polls in seven battleground states with 114 electoral votes—Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania—seem to be trending over the last several days toward John McCain. Possible explanation: In the past week, there has been something closer to parity between the campaigns in ad saturation compared with earlier weeks, when the Obama campaign was far outspending the McCain campaign.
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Optimistic Election Night Scenarios for Barack Obama and John McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook November 3, 2008 Comment (26)Looking ahead to election night, I thought I'd offer some optimistic assessments of how it might go, hour by hour. Obviously, it's a lot easier to do an optimistic Obama assessment than an optimistic McCain assessment, given that realclearpolitics.com gives Barack Obama a significant lead in states with 274 electoral votes, four more than are needed to win, and John McCain a significant lead in states with only 132 votes. But if this election at this point seems less close than 2000 or 2004 did at this stage, it also seems closer than 1988 or 1992 or 1996 did at this stage.
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Could Affluent Suburbs Give Barack Obama a Win Over John McCain?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (15)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.
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Guess Who Has a New Blog? Princeton University Press
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (8)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.
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Election Prediction: Democrats Won't Get a Filibuster-Proof Senate
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (23)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.
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Two Books to Understand the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2008 Comment (4)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.
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Questioning the New Deal
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2008 Comment (16)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.
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Are Tightening Polls a Sign of a John McCain Surge?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2008 Comment (46)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.
Michael Barone
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.
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