What a difference four years makes

Four years ago around this time of year, I had flown down to Florida with MoveOn to get out the vote. Of course, I voted early before I left, but of course, my vote didn't count. This was after a few months of canvassing for John Kerry, knocking on perhaps 50 doors a day or standing on a street corner of Northhampton with a bucket. I still remember the mood on the plane down to Florida. And the mood when we all sat in the bar and the votes started coming in...

After it was fairly clear Bush was going to get his second term, I called Gene back in Massachusetts. I tried putting a brave face on it for a while, then I realized the other end of the line had gone silent. But I could tell he was still there so I held onto the phone without saying anything. But between us, a silent communication flowed -- "How, how did this happen again?" Matt Yglesias was right when he said that Dems believed that Kerry was going to win despite being narrrowly behind in the polls. I was one of those Democrats. In fact, before seeing that graph I could have sworn that Kerry was slightly ahead in the polls going into the election, not behind.

The next day, our group flew back to Massachusetts, where as luck would have it, the airport TVs were showing John Kerry giving his exceptionally gracious concession speech. I remember thinking to myself, why oh why couldn't we have a candidate that is this eloquent and real and comfortable in his own skin during the campaign? When he was done, I looked back at my group. There was not a dry eye in the house.

Fast forward four years...I am in Taiwan, busy missing the biggest campaign in my lifetime. I've contented myself with the fact that this time round my vote is in North Carolina, my most recent US residence, and that is indeed a swing state. The polls are looking great and I fully intend to attend a Democrats Abroad event on Wednesday night in a celebratory mood. I haven't kept in touch with most of my buddies from my canvasser days, but what's this? One of them is running for State Representative in Connecticut! Well, Matt Lesser, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm sure you'll agree when I say this...

What a difference four years makes!

NPR puckers up for John McCain

I don't usually get angry while listening to NPR, unless it's Monday morning and they have the vapid Cokie Roberts giving her "analysis" of the campaigns.

But today's story on John McCain by Scott Horsely was as sycophantic as anything I've seen on Fox. It even featured the mother of a dead soldier, who gave McCain a bracelet to wear in her son's honor.

Expect to see more of this from the media in the coming months, as they try to put their favorite warmonger in the White House.

Oh, that's just what America needs

Ralph Nader announces he is running for President again.

Didn't you do enough damage in 2000, Ralph?

Your implicit association testing have no effects on me

I don't have to explain implicit association testing to y'all, right? It's when those clever-clog psychologists use a web-based test to see how quickly you associate various pictures with either pleasant or unpleasant words to see how you really feel about the subject of the pictures.

As it's election season, said clever-clog psychologists from Harvard rigged up a election'08 edition of the implicit association test. Go take it, won't take more than 10 minutes.

Both Amanda and Jeff took the test and found their revealed preferences to square with their actual stated preferences. Good for them. Mine was rather hilariously off. Hillary came first, ahead of Barack Obama, my actual preferred candidate. But what's really funny is Mike Huckabee, the guy I would least likely to see in the White House, did just as well as Obama. McCain came in dead last.

Possible interpretations:

(1) I am secretly an manchurian-candidate type plant sent by the Evangelicals to infiltrate the liberal blogisphere.

(2) Huckabee, more than any of the other candidates, concentrates on propagating a homey, folksy image. Sure, he is a utter religious nutter and I would consider a Huckabee administration a disaster of epic magnitude, but that doesn't mean I don't think he's a nice person.

Sure would be interesting to see some aggregate results of different demographics from this test. A pollster tool for the future?

Or perhaps, with some modifications, the most awesome push-polling tool evar.

Yes we can...bomb Iran

We've all heard a lot about the transformative and inspirational nature of the Obama campaign. Well, if it inspired the man who was responsible for the awful "My hump" song to come up with the heart-swelling "Yes we can", that's surely a sign that there's something to it.

This is not as musical, but funnier.

My Election Choices

My Election Choices have been making the rounds. It's a looooong quiz that asks you to pick out unattributed quotes from presidential candidates and tallying who you agreed with the most. Honestly, while I can appreciate the impressive amount of work that went into making such a quiz and I think the makers have built a very useful quick database of quotes on various issues, I really don't think it's all that good as a predictor of which candidate to support for me.

According to the quiz, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama are all co-champions (!) while my preferred candidate, Edwards, only just edge out Joe Biden at the bottom of the Democratic barrow.

So does this mean that I should examine my choice of a preferred candidate? Absolutely not. It means that Hillary got points for bromides such as this:

"You have to balance Second Amendment rights against keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and people who are unstable."

Um, yeah, who can be actually 'for' guns in the hands of the unstable? Meanwhile, Edwards probably lost some points because he talks a moderate talk whereas I am very liberal. So in a lineup of many quotes where I'm pulling out ones that had me nodding my head, Edwards' quotes probably won't pop out at me. But that's a feature not a bug in reality. I don't want a firebreathing liberal in the White House. I want someone whose views are reasonably aligned to mine but who can also reach out to people who are a lot less liberal with success.