A Political Glimpse from Ireland

I Won’t Buy These Obama Books

I received an email from MoveOn this week about the two factually lacking books attacking Senator Obama. The first book is written by Jerome Corsi entitled: “The Obama Nation.” The second book is written by David Freddoso entitled: “The Case Against Barack Obama.” Both these books have been scoured by the non-profit Media Matters and here is what they found:

Sampling from The Obama Nation, by Jerome Corsi-co-author of Unfit for Command:

1. Troops in Afghanistan: To paint Obama as weak on security, Corsi claims Obama supports “de-escalating” troops from Afghanistan. In fact, while Obama does support ending the war in Iraq, he has been calling for an increase of U.S. troops in Afghanistan since at least 2006.3 This is a policy John McCain long opposed before recently agreeing with Obama.
2. Killing newborn babies: Discussing his book on FOX, Corsi claimed, “Even if a child was born, [Obama] said the woman still had the right to kill the child in an abortion.” He repeated this claim on numerous Sean Hannity shows. This claim is blatantly ridiculous. No politician, Obama included, holds that position. Corsi was referring to a fabricated claim that choice opponents made about a piece of legislation in the Illinois Senate.
3. Obama’s sister: Corsi casts doubt on Obama’s description of his past by saying Obama’s autobiography “devotes the entire second chapter…to his time in Indonesia, but remarkably, he makes no reference to [his sister] Maya’s birth.” In fact, in the chapter discussing his time in Indonesia, Obama specifically writes about “the birth of my sister, Maya.”
4.  Obama’s campaign blogger: Corsi writes of Obama campaign blogger, “After leaving Harvard, [he] published an article in an avowedly socialist magazine.” In fact, the article was published in well-respected progressive magazine The Nation. It was later reprinted by the Socialist Viewpoint-and CBSNews.com! The link Corsi uses as a citation clearly says that the article was reprinted from another publication.

Sampling from The Case Against Barack Obama, by David Freddoso:

1. Fighting terrorists in Pakistan: To diminish Obama’s stance against terrorism, Freddoso claims that it was only a “slip of the tongue” when Obama said in a major foreign policy speech that America must be able to go after Osama bin Laden, even if Pakistan wouldn’t. In fact, Obama’s prepared remarks and the excerpts that Obama’s campaign emailed to reporters prior to the actual speech included this line: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
2. Meeting with foreign leaders: Freddoso claims that Sen. Joe Biden, who is highly respected on foreign policy, was “against Obama” when it came to meeting with foreign leaders. In fact, in the ABC interview cited by Freddoso, Biden was agreeing with Obama’s position.
3. Ethics reform: Freddoso cites a book by a Chicago journalist to characterize ethics legislation Obama passed in Illinois as “relatively harmless” and to claim the bill merely made Obama “look like a reformer.” In fact, the Chicago journalist said pushing the bill “was a tough assignment for a new lawmaker, since he was essentially sponsoring legislation that would strip away long-held privileges and perks from his colleagues” and that the bill “essentially lifted Illinois, a state with a deep history of illicit, pay-to-play politics, into the modern world when it came to ethics restrictions.”

The interesting fact I found out about the recent publication of the Obama Nation is that it is currently number 1 on the New York Times best sellers list. The problem I have is that why haven’t anti-McCain books made it on this list, like Cliff Schecter’s: “The Real McCain” or Brock and Waldman’s: “Free Ride: John McCain and The Media.” I figure there are four possible reasons; the first being that these books were not well written enough to be popular, the second being that no one wants to buy books about John McCain because he is that unpopular, the third being that Senator Obama’s popularity is a double-edged sword where people take in both the bad and the good and the last reason being the Media’s obsession with keeping the McCain “maverick” image intact. You decide…

On Obama and Polls

Crian hits on some good point in his piece concerning the media’s continued concern with Obama’s “poor poll numbers” (odd how the fact that McCain hasn’t led once among RVs all summer doesn’t reflect poorly on him). Crian notes that given Obama’s quick rise to prominence, people are more likely to view him as an unknown quantity whereas McCain’s been in the public spotlight ever since he began his bid in 1999. This is a fair point, but I also think it’s important to note that Obama is, in fact, leading, and he has been all summer long. Obama’s five point lead has been almost unbelievably consistent. The most recent Gallup poll has Obama at a — you guessed it — five point advantage over John McCain (47-42).

Another oft-overlooked fact is that Obama has reached fifty percent support in the Gallup polls several times this summer. McCain has yet to break 44 percent support among registered voters. The best the McCain camp can do is point to some brief leads their candidate has enjoyed among likely voters, but historically, this far from the election polls of registered voters are likely to be more accurate than those of likely voters (the reverse is true in the closing weeks of a campaign). This comes directly from the editor of Gallup himself, Frank Newport:

The July 25-27 USA Today/Gallup poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by a 47% to 44% margin among all registered voters but McCain leading Obama among likely voters by a 49% to 45% margin. This difference between registered and likely voters indicates that now McCain voters are disproportionately represented among the estimate of those most likely to vote if the election were held today.

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So, as a rule of thumb, registered voters are the relevant group to trend to establish basic patterns of change in voter support for presidential candidates. Likely voter modeling at this point is an additional analytic tool.

Even the conservative magazine National Journal views the likely voter models as suspicious, especially in light of how far off they are from the registered voter models:

Emory University political science professor Alan Abramowitz is undeterred. “A 7 point difference in [the vote preference] margin between actual voters and all registered voters,” he wrote me, “would be much larger than that found in American National Election Studies surveys in any of the 14 presidential elections between 1952 and 2004 — the largest gap in pre-election margin was 3 points way back in 1952, and the average gap was only one point.”

I think he has a point. Gallup’s data tells us that Obama’s narrow lead among registered voters depends on those who tend to score lower on measures that typically correlate with turnout. So, not surprisingly, the Obama campaign is investing heavily in efforts to register and turn out new voters.

What is less clear is whether news accounts ought to be emphasizing such snapshots in July when the mechanism for those estimates is so inherently hypothetical and potentially shaky.

But even giving McCain the benefit of the doubt here, among likely voters, McCain has lead only twice, once by four points, and once by a single point, and the poll which put McCain at a four point lead significantly underrepresented the youth vote even by 2004 standards despite the fact that the youth vote is likely to increase this year. Obama has carried every other likely voter or registered voter poll since the middle of May. Moreover, Obama leads McCain in total number of field offices by nearly 3 to 1. Effective voter outreach combined with a solid GOTV plan can add an extra two points to a candidate’s numbers on election day. The extended primary helped Obama in this sense, forcing him to organize and invest in states very early in the year, and putting him at a significant advantage over McCain.

To put it more bluntly, Obama is leading. He has the better ground operation, and it’s probable that the likely voter polls are filtering out many of Obama’s supporters (the youth vote), while over-representing likely McCain voters (the elderly). And yet, Obama is still leading. The fact that the race is narrow may actually benefit Obama by keeping his core supporters fired up, and guarding against an inevitably meme that could hurt the Senator in the long run.