Reports of Barack Obama-Joe Biden Democratic Party Convention Bounce

Here are part of reports from Politico.com and FiveThirtyEight.com on the Democratic party convention bounce for Barack Obama-Joe Biden.

Politico.com

“Barack Obama met the 50 percent threshold for the first time Tuesday in the Gallup daily tracking poll, a symbolic hurdle that until now had eluded the Democratic nominee.

The Gallup daily tracking poll has found that since the conclusion of the Democratic convention, Obama has risen 5 percentage points in the polls and now leads John McCain 50 percent to 42 percent. That represents a positive turn for Obama, after a couple of days in which he appeared to have peaked at the 49 percent mark while McCain was showing slight improvements.

The survey indicates that Obama’s overall post-Democratic National Convention bounce now appears to be roughly at par with the norm of past conventions. Though smaller than several of the sizable bounces of recent decades, the new polling suggests that perhaps the Democratic convention bounce has yet to subside.

While an improvement from 49 percent to 50 percent is statistically insignificant, the 50 percent mark holds significance for a party seeking to win its first majority since 1976, when Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent.”

FiveThirtyEight.com

“A large number of national polls have come out within the past 24-48 hours, most of which had conducted a survey close enough to the beginning of the Democratic convention to provide for a direct comparison. These polls show Obama having gained between 2 and 8 points since before the convention began, or an average of 4.4 points. Although this is slightly below the average convention bounce of 6 points, it is a pretty reasonable result considering that the Republicans had named their VP candidate immediately following the Democratic convention, a circumstance which had never occurred before. Moreover, the internals of these polls show Obama gaining ground among Clinton supporters, a group of votes that John McCain is likely to have a difficult time getting back.

It looks like Barack Obama may have gotten his convention bounce after all:”

Marc Ambinder on Sarah Palin’s choice as the vice-presidential nominee

Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic offers one of thoughtful analysis of  Governor Sarah Palin’s choice as the vice-presidential nominee by John McCain.  Here is part of the analysis –

“Did Palin change the dynamic of the race? Well, that enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans may begin to narrow. Let’s talk after the Republican convention. The McCain campaign has proven adept at getting inside the Obama campaign’s OODA loop, and the Obama campaign does expect her coming out week to be good for Obama’s opponents.  Once the campaigning begins, then we’ll see.  Don’t believe the polls this week.

Will women flock to the McCain campaign? Probably not.

Will a statistically significant number of women decide to support McCain? Anyone who claim to know is lying.  Check back on September 15.

How big are the risks for McCain? Enormous. The fighter pilot whose hero is TR is trying to land with zero visibility. It is going to be hard to wrest away from Obama the banner of change, and McCain risks being seen as unserious about national security.  Palin is smart and quick on the draw, but she is completely untested and prone to bursts of the mouth.  She seems to know very little about Iraq and the world and even about the national economy.  She is an identity pick, first and foremost, and a process-pick, second.   Women could be offended or inspired.

“Is the pick good for the Republican Party?  Absolutely. Even if McCain loses in November, the GOP’s new standard bearer will be a younger working mother from outside Washington and not a rich businessman with perfect hair from Massachusetts.  McCain may have saved the GOP at the expense of the campaign.”

Thomas Friedman on China and Energy

Part of Thomas Friedman’s opinion piece (in The New York Times) on China and Energy is reported below –

“As a result, there is a dawning awareness that if China is to break its own addiction to oil, it will take a much more fundamental shift from the growth model that powered its first 30 years. That model was based on two linked ideas: 1) energy was inexhaustible, inexpensive and benign; and 2) China could count on raising its living standards by forever being the world’s low-cost manufacturing workshop, based on cheap energy.

In recent years, though, fossil-fuel energy has become expensive, exhaustible and toxic, and rising wages — to some extent because of rising environmental considerations and social security requirements — have meant that the workshops of southern China are no longer the low-cost producers in Asia. Vietnam and Western China now beckon.

The only way forward, say officials, is for China to gradually develop a cleaner, knowledge-based, service/finance economy. It has to move from “made in China” to “designed in China” to “imagined in China.” In short, the economy here has to become greener and smarter. (Sound familiar?)

In 1992, China’s coastal economic powerhouses hit a similar wall when they found they could not grow further without the government loosening travel restrictions to attract workers from all over China. So, more personal freedom to move around China was unleashed then. Now, these same provinces need to allow more “mind movement” to get to the next level.

The problem for the ruling Communist Party is this: China can’t have a greener society without empowering citizens to become watchdogs and allowing them to sue local businesses and governments that pollute, and it can’t have a more knowledge-intensive innovation society without a freer flow of information and experimentation.

What surprised me is how much the party is thinking about all this. I actually came here at the invitation of Wang Yang, the Communist Party secretary, i.e. the boss of Guangdong Province. He had read one of my books on globalization in Chinese.”

An assessment of Sarah Plain by The Economist

How does The Economist assess the choice of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential by John McCain.  Here is part of the report –

“Ms Palin is the first woman on a Republican ticket; by selecting her the McCain campaign will hope to expand its reach to female voters, though she may be a tough sell to disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton. Born in small-town Idaho, Ms Palin moved to small-town Alaska when she was a child. She is a former beauty queen and a keen sportswoman—her aggressive style of playing basketball earning her the nickname “Sarah barracuda”. As a mother of five she will be able to empathise with other hard-pressed female professionals balancing home and career.

Opting for Ms Palin may also go some way towards soothing the nerves of social conservatives, who were aghast at Mr McCain’s recent suggestion that he would not necessarily rule out picking a vice-president who supports abortion rights. Mr McCain may have heeded the warning that such a selection would cause “the base” to stay at home on election day; one poll found that 20% of McCain supporters would be less likely to vote for him if his veep was pro-choice. But Ms Palin is a staunch Christian, a member of the National Rifle Association, and enjoys fishing and hunting.

Although she is popular with conservatives, Ms Palin will not be able to cement the evangelical wing of the party to Mr McCain in the same way that the selection of Mr Pawlenty would have done through his strong ties to the National Association of Evangelicals.

But the risks of choosing such an unknown quantity are enormous. An important aspect in selecting a vice-president is to reassure the electorate that should anything happen to the man in the Oval Office there is a competent and trustworthy stand-in ready to take over. John McCain’s age (he is 72) is an underlying factor with voters. Although Ms Palin’s youthfulness, she is 44, is an eye-catching contrast to the top of the ticket, questions will be raised about her ability to run the country if Mr McCain should ever be incapacitated.

And the tenures of both Al Gore and Dick Cheney as vice-president have raised the profile of the office. Vice-presidents were once expected to be solid and reliable but mostly boring. Messrs Gore and Cheney took on policy portfolios, such as government reform or preparing for war with Iraq. Barack Obama’s pick of Joe Biden for the role now seems all the more wise.

By choosing the governor of Alaska as his running mate, Mr McCain also turns the spotlight on the state’s politics, which is currently entangled in corruption scandals. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator ever, faces corruption charges in relation to building work on his home. Other state officials are under investigation in separate cases. And Alaskans are going through a period of introspection about politics and energy interests, on which the state has thrived.”

A historical perspective on why so-called bi-partisan Presidential teams may not work: So McCain-Lieberman may not be such a charm

Abstracted below is a wonderful piece on the failure of so-called bi-partisan Presidential team — it was tried once by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and it ended in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.  While the analogy may be not be linear and direct, there are obvious lessons for John McCain as he contemplates the viability of Joe Lieberman as his vice-presidential choice.

The complete opinion appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and it was written by Henry Olsen.  Here is part of that opinion –

“The possibility that Republican presidential nominee John McCain might choose Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as his running mate has sent the right into a tizzy. There are many arguments for and against such a decision, but the debate so far has assumed such a selection would be unprecedented.

It wouldn’t. Abraham Lincoln chose former Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice president in 1864. That episode ended unhappily, for reasons directly relevant to the current situation.

Republicans in 1864, like Republicans today, faced uncertain election prospects in the middle of a war whose outcome and popularity were also uncertain. Lincoln maneuvered within his party in the first half of the year to forestall a serious challenge from unhappy party activists. But even after he was renominated, he despaired of re-election.

With the survival of the Union at stake, it was not surprising that Lincoln and Republican stalwarts sought to broaden the party’s appeal to those Democrats who supported the war effort. Their gaze turned toward Tennessee Sen. Andrew Johnson, the only senator from a secessionist state who had not abandoned Congress. Staunchly pro-Union, Johnson was unfailing in his efforts on behalf of Lincoln’s war efforts.

With victory on the battlefield uncertain, the Republicans cast aside sitting Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. They even renamed the party to make clear the issue on which the election would be fought: Lincoln and Johnson were nominated on the National Union Party ticket.

These calculations made sense under the circumstances. The Civil War was the only issue that mattered to the electorate; all domestic issues were swept aside in its path. The Democrats’ platform condemned the war as a failure, advocated cessation of hostilities, and contemplated negotiation with the South. In short, the 1864 Democrats were a party of peace over victory, while the National Unionists were a party of peace through victory. Since the future of the war was essential to the future of the nation, all other considerations had to be cast aside.

But the Republicans would have cause to rue their choice. Following the party’s June convention, Democratic hopes for the presidency would begin to fade as Union forces began to roll up victories on the battlefield. And after the election, victory in the war became apparent. By April 1865 — a mere one month after Lincoln’s re-inauguration — the South surrendered. But Lincoln was also dead; and a Republican-dominated Congress had to deal with a lifelong Democrat as president.

Johnson shared Republican Party war aims, but little else. He did not approve of the domestic policy of the Republican majority. He’d spent a career attacking Whig and Republican efforts to improve the economy through encouragement of private enterprise as efforts to empower the rich at the expense of the common man. What’s more, he strongly disagreed with the Republican approach toward dealing with the South and the newly freed slaves. His policies — including a veto of the first Civil Rights Act, and opposition to the 14th Amendment — caused so much friction that he became the first president to be impeached by Congress and came within one vote from being removed from office.”

David Brooks on Biden as Obama’s Vice-Presidential choice

David Brooks has a thoughtful and public-spirited opinion (in The New York Times) on Joseph Biden as Barack Obama’s vice-presidential choice.  Here is most of that opinion —

“Biden’s weaknesses are on the surface. He has said a number of idiotic things over the years and, in the days following his selection, those snippets would be aired again and again.

But that won’t hurt all that much because voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people. And over the long haul, Biden provides what Obama needs:

Working-Class Roots. Biden is a lunch-bucket Democrat. His father was rich when he was young — played polo, cavorted on yachts, drove luxury cars. But through a series of bad personal and business decisions, he was broke by the time Joe Jr. came along. They lived with their in-laws in Scranton, Pa., then moved to a dingy working-class area in Wilmington, Del. At one point, the elder Biden cleaned boilers during the week and sold pennants and knickknacks at a farmer’s market on the weekends.

Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, have trouble connecting with working-class voters, especially Catholic ones. Biden would be the bridge.

Honesty. Biden’s most notorious feature is his mouth……Today, Biden’s conversational style is tiresome to some, but it has one outstanding feature. He is direct. No matter who you are, he tells you exactly what he thinks, before he tells it to you a second, third and fourth time.

Presidents need someone who will be relentlessly direct. Obama, who attracts worshippers, not just staff members, needs that more than most.

Loyalty. Just after Biden was elected to the senate in 1972, his wife, Neilia, and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. His career has also been marked by lesser crises. His first presidential run ended in a plagiarism scandal. He nearly died of a brain aneurism.

New administrations are dominated by the young and the arrogant, and benefit from the presence of those who have been through the worst and who have a tinge of perspective. Moreover, there are moments when a president has to go into the cabinet room and announce a decision that nearly everyone else on his team disagrees with. In those moments, he needs a vice president who will provide absolute support. That sort of loyalty comes easiest to people who have been down themselves, and who had to rely on others in their own moments of need.

Experience….When Biden was a young senator, he was mentored by Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield and the like. He was schooled in senatorial procedure in the days when the Senate was less gridlocked. If Obama hopes to pass energy and health care legislation, he’s going to need someone with that kind of legislative knowledge who can bring the battered old senators together, as in days of yore.

There are other veep choices. Tim Kaine seems like a solid man, but selecting him would be disastrous. It would underline all the anxieties voters have about youth and inexperience. Evan Bayh has impeccably centrist credentials, but the country is not in the mood for dispassionate caution.

Biden’s the one. The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that.”

Can we solve our energy problems with existing technologies today? Join The Economist in its debate

The Economist is currently inviting comments and debate on how we may be able to solve today’s energy problems.  Go to http://www.economist.com/debate/ for more details.

Here is the moderator’s opening statements on the debate —

“The formal proposition put forward for debate is this:

“This house believes that we can solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations.”

Joseph Romm lays out the argument in favour of the proposition forcefully. He points to various evidence, including the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to conclude that a climate crisis is looming. This, he argues, means the world “must deploy staggering amounts of low-carbon energy technology as rapidly as possible.” This means government policy must not be distracted by the slow, if sexy, process of technology development. He insists that policy must focus on the speedy deployment of the many clean technologies we already have ready or close to commercialisation.

Taken at face value, the Con side does not disagree with the notion that a great deal of low-carbon technology needs to be deployed. Peter Meisen opens his argument by invoking President George Bush’s famous line about the world being “addicted to oil” and acknowledging the climate problem, and goes on to cite various forms of renewable energy that can help. He even appears to agree with the side opposite that the key is “scale and speed.” However, he goes on to cite examples ranging from Iceland’s embrace of geothermal over coal generation to rural villages leapfrogging to micro-wind and solar that make clear he believes in the need for entirely new innovations. A “design science revolution” is required, he insists, but it is possible now because “emergencies help us focus.”

In short, this is not merely a Luddite battling a Techno-Utopian. We have a much more interesting battle of wits getting underway, one in which nuance and passion seem likely to be interwoven with the thrust and parry.

So what do you think? Judging from the intensity of the opening comments, this promises to be the most thought-provoking and certainly the most timely of our debates thus far. Please do jump in the fray and offer your views on this great debate of the age.”

The evolution of Communism in China

Nicholas D. Kristof reports (in The New York Times) on the evolution of Communism in China.  It makes an interesting read.  Here is the observation –

“On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.

Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.

That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.”

Age and Sports: What does Science have to say?

Dara Torres of the United States, a mother and a woman of 41 years, qualified for the Olympic games and  is now competing at the Beijing games.  Torres has stirred a debate and some suspicion among the general public and others asking the question, “Is this humanly possible?”

The answer appears to be “Yes.”  Here is part of the article from The New York Times(Gina Kolata) that discusses this matter –

“…exercise physiologists say, the conventional wisdom about age and sports is more urban legend than fact. Not only were there Dara Torreses in the past, these experts say, but they also predict that stories like hers will be more common in the future. The reasons are an infusion of money into many sports combined with improvements in sports medicine and training.

Exercise researchers cite athlete after athlete who competed at ages when conventional wisdom said they should have been washed up. Even sprinters, who are widely believed to reach their peak performances in their early twenties and decline a few years later, have defied expectations. In fact, said José González-Alonso, director of the Center for Sports Medicine and Human Performance at Brunel University in Britain, the notion about sprinters peaking early might have no basis in science.

In the last century, there were sprinters like Donald Finlay of Britain, who came in fourth in the 110-meter hurdles in the 1948 Olympics at age 39. More recently, the sprinter Merlene Ottey competed in seven Olympics, including the Athens Games in 2004, and won a total of eight medals. She turned 48 in May.

Of course, it is not easy to keep competing year after year.”

Anna Quindlen on Race, Affirmative Action, and McCain and Obama

Anna Quindlen (in Newsweek) writes thoughtfully and interestingly on the role of race and affirmative action in American life and particularly in the political world.   Here is part of that article –

“The fallacy at the heart of most discussions of affirmative action is twofold: that it replaced a true meritocracy, and that it means promoting the second-rate. The meritocracy theory requires us to believe that for decades no women and no people of color were as qualified as white men, who essentially had every field locked up. Belief in the ascendancy of the second-rate requires us to demean the qualifications of countless writers, jurists, doctors, academics and other professionals who gained entry and then performed superlatively. Part of the tacit deal for most of them was not that they be as good as their lackluster white male counterparts, but as good as the best of them.

“As good as the best of them” might well have been Barack Obama’s slogan as he rose to be editor of the Harvard Law Review, faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School, state representative and U.S. senator. It is easy to see all the ways in which his race could have played a part in his rapid rise, but not necessarily in the way his opponents might suggest. Being an outsider probably taught him how to work well in two worlds, the world of those who take their place of primacy for granted and the world of those who have no such place, or who have to fight for it twice as hard.

Much has been made by Senator McCain’s supporters of his history as a survivor of a Viet Cong prison camp, of the broken bones and psychological onslaughts that he withstood for five long years. They argue that such an experience builds character. They should also take note of the challenges faced by a black man in America, challenges that have built Senator Obama’s character. These may be harder to quantify than imprisonment and torture, but they are onerous in a different and inescapable way.

The McCain forces have accused the Democratic candidate of injecting race into the campaign. That’s silly. The man is black. His candidacy is indivisible from that fact, given the history and pathology of this country. When Senator Obama said that he did not look like the guys on our currency and that his opponents were likely to portray him as Other, he was stating the obvious. Perhaps he was also pointing out that, despite efforts to maintain the status quo by generations of conservatives, this remains a nation so progressive that an American from a group once held as personal property could become president. The suggestion of something untoward was pandering to stereotypes and fear. Senator McCain was playing the Caucasian card.

Does that sound offensive? I suppose it is, just as offensive as styling the race card a pejorative. But any black man or woman in America has heard worse. If people make assumptions about you simply on the basis of your appearance all your life, assumptions ranging from criminality to sloth to unearned opportunity, it can make you bitter and hard and cynical. That none of those things is part of the Obama character means that he has turned his particular version of the race card into an ace and is using it to play with the full deck. That is not a deficit. It is an advantage.”