Polls, Cheney and Yellow Journalism
I want to make a comment on polls. Generally speaking most of them are probably not a true gauge of what will happen with the election. For one reason we do not elect a President by popular vote. So what matters more is state to state how things are going. The one thing I think we can take from the polls is the fact that the President is running under 50% in most of them and for an incumbent that's bad. History shows that the undecided voters usually break for the challenger. And as this poll shows, Bush's approval rating slipping:

Unease about the country's direction has eroded Bush's job approval rating into dangerous territory for an incumbent president. And Kerry holds a decided advantage on the domestic issues that will be the focus of their last face-to-face encounter.

[and]

But Bush's approval rating — the most reliable measure of a president's re-election prospects — has dropped to 47%, the lowest since July. Anything below 50% is considered a red flag for incumbents.

I've heard Howard Dean and others say that before the voters will look at the other candidate they have to first make the decision that the incumbent does not deserve to be reelected. The incumbents approval rating being below 50% is an indication of that being true. If that number is staying consistently under 50%, even nationally, that's bad for the incumbent. Historically if an election breaks against the incumbent it happens late and the challenger winds up with a pretty decent majority (Reagan in 1980). Another thing to remember is that most polls are done on likely voters, which does not take into account those that have registered in this election cycle. Remember they cannot fix an election if the polls are showing a blowout.

Bush on Friday night:

So I tried diplomacy, went to the United Nations. But as we learned in the same report I quoted, Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. He was trying to get rid of sanctions for a reason: He wanted to restart his weapons programs.

Look who else was gaming it, Cheney's Oil-for-Food Switcheroo

But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn't identified in Duelfer's report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Dick Cheney.

What has happened to your media? Yellow Journalism in Washington.

There, right in paragraph one, were those unnamed "senior administration and military officials" who so populate our elite press that they sometimes present crowd-control problems. These are the people our most prestigious newspapers just love to trust and who, anonymous as they are, make reading those papers a ridiculous act of faith for the rest of us.

- posted by Mom/Dad @ 6:57 AM