Posted on 10/26/2004 3:50:18 PM PDT by RWR8189
SOME REPORTERS spend the final week of the presidential race inside the Bush and Kerry campaign bubbles, following the candidates to swing states, eating fast food, obsessively checking their Blackberries, and writing up the candidates' stump speeches again and again and again. Not me. Today I'm in a well-appointed dining room in the St. Regis hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., where Bush-Cheney '04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman has come to talk to print reporters over lunch. And what a lunch: Caesar salad to start, then grilled chicken breast over rice and mixed steamed vegetables, then a strawberry mousse cake with extra strawberry sauce for dessert, all followed by lots of coffee. It's enough to make you feel sorry for the poor saps on the campaign trail. Or almost enough, anyway.
The several dozen journalists here, mostly reporters from major dailies, are eyeing Mehlman's food greedily, because he hasn't touched his plate. Which isn't a surprise, really, since he's too busy talking. He's talking about momentum, he's talking about the Bush campaign's get-out-the-vote strategy, and he's talking about adding new voters to the rolls. He's talking about undecided voters and important moments in the race and John Kerry's lack of conviction. Mostly, though, he's talking about numbers.
So many numbers! Listening to Mehlman, you have vague and disturbing memories of college statistics courses. Sometimes it seems like every sentence he utters contains at least half a dozen facts and figures. He says, for example, that when you average all the polls taken in the last week, the president leads by 3.3 percent. He says that since the third debate there have been 52 polls. Of those polls, Mehlman continues, the president led in 42. Of the rest, seven showed a tie. John Kerry led in three.
Then Mehlman mentions that in the latest Gallup poll, John Kerry had the highest unfavorability rating than any challenger since McGovern. He says Bush has made inroads with women, with African Americans, and with Latinos. And again, he has numbers to prove it: If you average the polls, Mehlman says, Bush has increased his support among women by 7 points since 2000; according to one poll, he's doubled his support among African Americans since 2000; according to another, he's increased support among Latinos by 7 points in the same time span.
THERE'S MORE. Mehlman shoots off campaign statistics almost as quickly as his boss Karl Rove. Reporters, scribbling furiously in their notebooks, can hardly keep up. "We have 7.5 million new activists," he says quickly. "We registered 3.4 million voters; we have 1.2 million volunteers; we have 65,000 precinct chairman; this weekend we will make 14 million volunteer contacts." He takes a breath, his eyes grow wide, and then repeats that last figure, obviously impressed with it: "14 million volunteer contacts."
No doubt all these numbers are impressive. But what do they mean? At one point Mehlman says the Bush campaign conducts "30,000 door knocks per night" in Florida. This could result in higher turnout among Republicans, which, of course, favors the president. Or it could result in a lot of annoyed suburbanites. When you look at these figures, and then listen to Mehlman talk about them, you realize that the numbers have become, in some sense, an end in themselves. After all, they won't mean a thing if Bush loses. Nor will the "aggressive web program" Mehlman boasts of during lunch. Nor the "multilevel targeting program" that "measures output."
Mehlman, of course, thinks that Bush will win, and that all these door knocks will have something to do with it. Maybe. He makes a more convincing argument for a Bush victory, however, when he turns his attention to the battleground states. Here's Mehlman's argument: Kerry is defending more territory than Bush. Some of the states Al Gore won narrowly in 2000 are now battlegrounds. And most of the states that were once squarely in the Democratic column are located around the Great Lakes: places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.
The potential problem for the Kerry campaign is that each of these states contains a rural population that has traditionally voted Democratic. But in many ways these voters are out of step with their party. They are social conservatives, they attend church regularly, and they are more likely to support the president on the war. They are more likely to support the president on national security, on abortion, on same-sex marriage. They are more inclined toward the president's leadership model, not John Kerry's. For these voters, decisive action trumps reflective judgment.
MEHLMAN ARGUES that such voters are beginning to vote based on their ideology, not their upbringing. This wouldn't be surprising. Over the last thirty years, it's exactly what happened to states in the South and Midwest. Social issues triumphed over economic populism. To writers like Tom Frank, this was the "Great Backlash" against 1960s-style social breakdown. To Republicans like Ken Mehlman, this was responsible for the Republican governing majority. And it could be happening again.
"The red states are staying red and the blue states are becoming purple. They're becoming redder," Mehlman says. He's exagerrating to some extent--no one honestly believes that Bush is going to win California or New York or even Pennsylvania. But when it comes to the Great Lakes states, maybe Mehlman is right. If he is, if voters in Michigan swing toward Bush, if Wisconsin and Minnesota end up in the president's column, if social conservatism trumps economic concerns in Ohio, then Bush may win, and a thirty-year transformation of American politics may be drawing to a close.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
So, CA and NY wanna stay blue? Fine with me. And I hope that the blue-zoners living in red-states, just pack up and move to the blue states. But for now, the pockets of insanity are being quarantined to the coastlines. This is sound strategy.
Now before anyone gets on their highhorse -- incoming ballistics from ships or from hostile countries would more than likely hit coastal zones. These can be readily defended if the inner states (flyover country) is ready for the drill. But if blue pockets remain sturdy in the mid-states, this creates a multiple-tiered need for national defense. My two cents.
"incoming ballistics"
I've noticed that too. If Kerry is elected and plays into the weakness of "static defenses", the most likely victims of an AQ attack will be large metropolitan centers: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, etc.
When the whole "gay marriage" issue went down in San Francisco -- the timing had me concerned. Taliban and AQ consider "gay marriage" a total abomination deserving of a violent death. Homosexuality, OTOH, is another matter to these terorrist islamofascists. But "gay marriage"? oh boy...
But to yours: Yes, major attacks would take place in the large "blue-centered" metropolitan areas. Biggest bang for the smallest buck. It's like I could hear insane radical Mayor Newsome screaming to the AQ: Hit us, hit us hard!
No in fact if you look at 2000 by county you find that only concentrated parts of CA and NY are blue, by area even these states are red FYI, has somebody got that county by county map from 2000????
I know the map very well. In fact, the vast majority of CA, for example is RED. the problem is the coastline. Look at Washington -- Seattle is the blue zone. Look at Oregon, Portland is the blue zone. Look at New York.. You are exactly right. And so, those who are big on defending terrorists, would in fact, be the first major targets reachable by ballistics. The fact that those in the blue-zones seem unwilling to recognize their own peril is exactly that which makes us recognize these blue-zone voters are mentally imbalanced, or enthralled to a death cult ideology.
I think I'll stay in California and continue volunteering to help make it red. Let me see... 2 years till the next senatorial elections, another 2 years till the next presidential elections. Lots of work to do! It won't be boring... :-)
Bravo! It's never boring in CA, where everything is political, and everyone is a player.
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