Better to be Lucky...

So I decided to title this as one of National Review guys might just to get the point across. But there is both real reason to criticize the press -- and a layer-cake of irony in the way the media cycle has played out over the past 24 hours.

Something of importance actually happens in the world -- Iran test-fires missiles. The McCain people sense an opportunity, and for just about the first time in this campaign, organize a couple of those Howard Wolfson fire drill conference calls. Their candidate gets to get off the teleprompters for a few days -- and for the record, while I think that McCain engaged in some pretty bad distortions of Obama's position, he also looked in his element out there.

And then ... something of no importance of all happens. Jesse Jackson has a YouTube moment, and that story sucks up all the oxygen in the room.

I would agree with the conventional wisdom that the optics of the story are liable to be favorable to Barack Obama -- but that's in large part because the right-leaning punditry so strongly dislikes Jackson that they'll torpedo their own candidate's momentum to try and nail him. Kathryn Jean Lopez practically endorsed Obama today. Pat Buchanan, who also loved the Sasha/Melia interview, sounded on Morning Joe like he was just about ready to vote for him.

I'm not trying to be a party-pooper. It was an hysterically funny moment, like some kind of Larry David gag. It's good television. But it's not really news.

There's More...

Contract Post

Irresponsible Journalism Alert

It took more than four months, but something finally beat out the Vicki Iseman story for its sheer chutzpah and utter irresponsibility.

The culprit is this piece from the Washington Post, which alleges that Barack Obama received a "discount" on his 30-year home mortgage when he purchased his house in Hyde Park in 2005. Obama's mortgage rate was 5.625 percent; the Washington Post cites databases stating that the average rate on comparable properties was 5.93 percent.

So Obama's rate was 30 basis points better than the average. However, the amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.

Unless the Washington Post has access to Obama's FICO score -- and unless it has rented an apartment to him, it probably doesn't -- it is missing a pretty important piece of information on what Obama's mortgage rate ought to have been. What was Obama's FICO score? I don't know, but considering that...

* Obama had just gotten a $2.27 million book deal from Random House -- about $1 million more than the value of the mortgage.
* The Obamas each had exceptionally secure jobs that paid them a combined annual salary of about $500,000 per year.
* The Obamas had just sold their condo, on which they had realized a $137,500 profit.
* The Obamas were prominent public figures whose political futures depended in part on maintaining a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
* The Obamas are known to be relatively thrifty and have no credit card debt but substantial savings.

...I would think that the Obamas were exceptionally creditworthy. So indeed, Obama received a "discount" -- the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.

And, yes, I apologize for being a little off-subject (and running three media-bashing pieces in a row), but one of the things that ties together my work over here and my work at Baseball Prospectus is that I want the media to be smarter and more accountable when they cite statistical information, be it mortgage rates or polling numbers or batting averages. This article was neither smart nor accountable. It's the equivalent of noting that Alex Rodriguez has a batting average 40 points better than the league average, and using that to infer that the umpires were biased in his favor.

There's More...

Contract Post

And Here I Thought John Kerry Lost...

...it turns out that the 2004 election was a "statistical dead heat".

From the National Council On Public Polls:

Certainly, if the gap between the two candidates is less than the sampling error margin, you should not say that one candidate is ahead of the other. You can say the race is "close," the race is "roughly even," or there is "little difference between the candidates." But it should not be called a "dead heat" unless the candidates are tied with the same percentages. And it certainly is not a “statistical tie” unless both candidates have the same exact percentages.

And just as certainly, when the gap between the two candidates is equal to or more than twice the error margin – 6 percentage points in our example – and if there are only two candidates and no undecided voters, you can say with confidence that the poll says Candidate A is clearly leading Candidate B.

When the gap between the two candidates is more than the error margin but less than twice the error margin, you should say that Candidate A "is ahead," "has an advantage" or "holds an edge." The story should mention that there is a small possibility that Candidate B is ahead of Candidate A.

From CNN:

(CNN) — With the dust having finally settled after the prolonged Democratic presidential primary, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama locked in a statistical dead heat in the race for the White House.

With just over four months remaining until voters weigh in at the polls, the new survey out Tuesday indicates Obama holds a narrow 5-point advantage among registered voters nationwide over the Arizona senator, 50 percent to 45 percent. That represents little change from a similar poll one month ago, when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee held a 46-43 percent edge over McCain.

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland notes Tuesday's survey confirms what a string of national polls released this month have shown: Obama holds a slight advantage over McCain, though not a big enough one to constitute a statistical lead.

"Every standard telephone poll taken in June has shown Obama ahead of McCain, with nearly all of them showing Obama's margin somewhere between three and six points," Holland said. "In most of them, that margin is not enough to give him a lead in a statistical sense, but it appears that June has been a good month for Obama."

[...]

The poll, conducted June 26-29, surveyed 906 registered voters and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

p.s. Yes, I was being being slightly facetious with the headline.

There's More...

Contract Post

Lanny Davis: Still a Hack After All These Years

From his new column at Fox News:

What is pretty clear, however, is that Sen. Obama leads Sen. McCain as of now nationally by a relatively small margin — and about the same margin that John Kerry led George Bush in June of 2004.

That is the good news.

The reason for continuing concern for the Obama campaign, with which I am sure they would agree, is that the Gallup tracking polls (and virtually every other mainstream national general election poll) continue to show that the two are still so close — even with all the bad news on the McCain side of the political equation, from Bush’s below-30% approval ratings, to more than two-to-one wrong direction-right direction ratios, to the self-identified Democrats and leaners (who are at the highest gap over Republican identifiers in decades), fuel prices skyrocketing, and McCain himself conveying neither coherent themes nor projecting positively in the daily TV sound bites.

Yet, over the last six months, really ever since Iowa and up to the present, Sen. Obama has rarely, if ever, won more than 47% or 48% of the general electorate. That apparent ceiling, at least so far, should be worrisome to the Obama senior strategists and probably has been noted. It is reminiscent of both John Kerry and Al Gore’s polling numbers vs. George Bush.

Two quick points. Firstly, Davis is flat wrong that John Kerry held a national lead of the magnitude that Obama has now. Kerry flirted with a 2-point lead in the Real Clear Politics average at various points over the summer, but he never had the 6-point lead that Obama presently has in the RCP number. Al Gore, for that matter, trailed significantly for most of the summer (Bush led by an average of 5.3 points over 34 polls conducted in June and July 2000) before making a comeback after the Democrats held their convention.

Secondly, is Davis really still at it with that whole Hillary Clinton racket? At the time she abandoned her nomination bid, Clinton held about a 3-point lead over McCain in the national averages, which was pretty much her high-water mark all year. That's still three points less than the lead that Obama holds now. And Obama's gains appear to have come precisely in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida that appeared to make up the core of Clinton's electoral argument (and also in Michigan, where Clinton never polled especially well), while he continues to poll strongly in places like Virginia and Colorado that Clinton might have had difficulty competing in. I would guess that, if you polled the 49 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, you wouldn't find more than a dozen who would want to replace Obama with Clinton on the ticket right now. But hell hath no fury like a surrogate scorned.

There's More...

Contract Post

Ebb and Flow

Remember what I said the other day about how the McCain campaign should have embraced the results in the Newsweek and LA Times polls so that everything else would look good by comparison?

McCain never really did that, but some on the right side of the blogosphere have gotten the memo. This is Ed Morrissey, whom I usually find pretty fair-minded and reasonable:

Those Newsweek and LA Times polls look more and more like outliers or worse. With both Gallup and Rasmussen showing either outright or virtual ties in their presidential tracking polls, Time offers even more evidence that Barack Obama has failed to pull away from John McCain after clinching the nomination.

[...]

The results should raise eyebrows anyway. Obama has actually lost ground since February, which dovetails with his collapse in the final months of the Democratic primary. This tends to underscore the shakiness of the Obama phenomenon; it hasn’t translated into general-election enthusiasm, and the trends are going in the wrong direction. Among the wider and less-predictive sample of registered voters, that has to cause a great deal of concern among Democrats who thought Obama would sail to victory on the puffery of “hope and change”.

Well, I don't know how you define "pull away", but Obama's lead is roughly 5 points larger than it was before the primaries ended. We have dozens and dozens of points of evidence to back that up.

Has there been a bounce since February -- the last time that Time conducted a national poll? You shouldn't really expect one. If you look at our Super Tracker graph, you'll find that February was the other time in this election that Obama was polling extremely well. If you held the election on February 12th, Obama would probably have won about 33 states. Same thing if you held the election today.

Some will say that the voters haven’t paid much attention to the race, and that Obama has plenty of time to put distance between himself and McCain. However, that ignores the attention Obama has received all throughout this campaign, especially in 2008. He has graced magazine covers across a wide spectrum of interests and the significance of his candidac has been widely discussed for months, while McCain has had relatively little time in the spotlight. Obama will receive more scrutiny and less celebration in the coming four months, while McCain’s profile will rise rapidly. Obama needed to have a big lead before then, a head start to ride out the coming storm.

The more people see of Obama, the less they seem to like him.

Well, I'd agree that Obama has been the focal point for media attention ever since he won the Iowa caucus. But it isn't as though the attention has universally been positive. On the contrary, Obama's media narrative was pretty brutal for substantial periods of March, April and May.

His polling did suffer during this time frame, and he'll have other cycles like this too; in fact, I sense one starting fairly soon. But with the exception of the couple of weeks surrounding Jeremiah Wright's debut onto the scene, McCain wasn't really able to overtake him. And including the Jeremiah Wright thing, Obama has been a very resilient and media-savvy politician. It's not clear which point on the Brooks-o-Meter represents the steady state.

That's been the ebb and flow of the race in a nutshell. At his high tide -- when his media narrative is good -- Obama should win a relatively convincing victory, which might be more impressive in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because of the way the states are aligned this year. At Obama's low tide, we'll have another 2000, where we're all staying up late on Election Night -- or maybe even until Alaska's results are counted the next morning.

But McCain has never been in control of this election. Even now, one has the sense that he's playing for a tie.

There's More...

Contract Post

Should McCain just embrace the bad polls?

I don't have a big problem with the details of the McCain campaign's pushback on yesterday's LA Times / Bloomberg poll, which had shown Barack Obama ahead by 12 points. In contrast to some of the memos that the press was treated to from the desk of Mark Penn, the McCain team's argument is relatively even-tempered and even-handed, fully acknowledging that their candidate does have a deficit to make up in the polls, if not the double digit margin implied by the LAT.

At the end of the day, what this really boils down to is an academic argument about whether one should weight polls by party identification, which is perhaps the most controversial subject in polling and one without any wrong answers. My take, for what it's worth, is that weighting by party ID may increase the precision of any one individual poll, but reduce the accuracy, particularly if you are able to look at several different polls at once.



My question, however, is just who is the audience is for this critique? It's June, and the election is in November. While the overall volume of polling data does give us some hints about what is more or less likely to occur in November, who the hell cares if McCain is down in any one particular poll? If he's down by 3, it's because he's down by 3, and if he's down by 11, it's because he's down by 11. The polling is simply a manifestation of that reality and not its cause.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that this is a spin war worth winning. If the media believes that Barack Obama is ahead by 5 points, then if a new poll comes out next week showing him ahead by 3, it will not get any attention. But if the media believes that Obama is ahead by 12 points, that same poll would create the perception of McCain momentum, and perhaps trigger a couple of days' worth of bad press for Obama as whatever had been going on over the past couple of days of the campaign would be taken as the cause for his polling decline. It might lead to harsher treatment of Obama's decision (flip-flop?) on campaign finance, for instance, or if Iran had been the subject of the week, as evidence that Obama wasn't resonating with voters on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign is absolutely right that the media ought not to focus too much on any one particular poll. But there are times later on when it's going to want them to do just that.

There's More...

Contract Post

Another Vote for Chuck Todd

For what it's worth, I agree with the spectrum of commentary from Kos, John Cole, Goldberg, Yglesias, etc. trickling in about the expansion of Chuck Todd's role at NBC, whether it's the helm of Meet the Press or his own show. Todd's been a breath of fresh air throughout this whirlwind primary season and clearly proved his value to number-crunching and political analysis.

It's a sad circumstance to be talking about this, and I'd guess Todd himself is still buried in the numbness of the loss of his friend and mentor. But we appreciate his work and want to add our voices to the quiet speculation about how NBC will realign its political talent in the wake of such an earthquake. Todd's been a revelation this campaign season and should have a bigger platform.

Also for what it's worth, Luke Russert is as impressive a 22-year old as I've seen in a long time. He's handled this event publicly with grace, humor, poise, courage, and a hell of a big heart. He strikes me as an old soul. That kid's character, clearly nurtured by his family, proves the amplified tribute to his father is authentic.

Here's echoing Nate's post last week about Tim Russert. Godspeed.

There's More...

Contract Post

Guess Who's Blogging for the National Press Club?

Last time I'll delve into this particular off-topic topic, but I was directed today to the writings of Steve O'Hearn, the chair of the National Press Club's New Media Committee who maintains a blog at the National Press Club's blogging website. Suffice it to say that I disagree with pretty much everything that Steve has to say -- from his position on Larry Sinclair to his insistence (three days after the Montana and South Dakota primaries and one day after Clinton announced that she would concede) that the Democratic nomination race was "far from over", to his calling Tom Shales, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize- winning media critic, a "cretin". And then there's the matter of his preferring AltaVista to Google...

But that's not what I wanted to draw your attention to. Instead, I wanted to see who else had a blog on the National Press Club's website. Not very many people do. There is O'Hearn's blog, and then blogs for several of the NPC's committees, and a blog for the Press Club's softball team. And then there is a blog for...

Jeff Gannon.

Yes, that Jeff Gannon. The fake reporter from a fake news organization who asked fake questions at White House press conferences. And who also happens to be a gay escort.

This man has a blog at the National Press Club's website.

In this context, the National Press Club's decision to host a press conference for Larry Sinclair makes a lot more sense.

There's More...

Contract Post

Tim Russert

Rest in peace, big guy.

It's better to ask one question too many than one question too few.

(Added 4:19 PM) I'm still trying to collect my thoughts about this. Everyone knew, I think, that Russert was a big deal. But this might also be one of those cases where people didn't realize quite how big a deal until after his passing. In particular, the institution of Meet The Press -- precisely because it asked such tough questions and presented such real risks for candidates -- also gave them the opportunity to shift the national media narrative in a way no other news program could.

There's More...

Contract Post