PICAYUNE —
Mitt Romney was far from being the only Republican thinker “shell shocked” by his defeat. So was the author of this elegant communication I received after a column predicting that the 2012 election would mark the end of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”
“You are such a liar. You are not a journalist or a columnist, but rather a whore for the Democratic Party ... November will solve the problem when we kick your Satanic ilk out of our government. May you get a form of incurable cancer and die a long and painful death.”
Needless to say, my pious interlocutor mentioned no particulars. People like him never do. However, my intuitions proved correct: As far as the Electoral College is concerned, the GOP has turned into a strictly Confederate/Cow State party.
In the short term, stunned disbelief and futile posturing are apt to prevail. Why change what’s never worked since 1865?
But the rest of us shouldn’t feel too smug. The nation has experienced a brush with disaster. Who’d have guessed that the $250 million man was as vulnerable to having smoke blown up his wazoo as George W. Bush?
There’s no telling what mad crusades Romney’s neoconservative advisors might have talked him into launching.
One expects a degree of competence in a tycoon; a money guy is supposed to be a numbers guy. That Mitt Romney was as deluded about his chances as Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and the rest of the GOP Marching and Chowder Society comes as a shock.
Even the Washington Post’s persnickety George Will forecast a Romney landslide. The scholarly pundit opined that even Minnesota would back Mitt. Will reasoned that a marriage amendment would bring out hordes of Michele Bachmann supporters.
Final tally: Obama 53 percent, Romney 45 percent — Minnesota’s tenth consecutive Democratic presidential vote. Not even close.
Adepts of the Fox News infotainment cult ought to be asking themselves tough questions. “On the biggest political story of the year,” writes The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, “the conservative media just got its (posterior) handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while The New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.”
His name is Nate Silver, a number-crunching whiz-kid who came to politics after helping to revolutionize baseball stats. His FiveThirtyEight blog aggregates and analyzes data from as many state and national polls as he can find — operating on the principle that the larger the sample, the smaller the margin of error.
In 2008, Silver called 49 of 50 states correctly.
Any poll can be wrong. However, if 18 out of 20 polls show Obama leading in Iowa, then there’s a high probability he’s ahead there. An 84.3 percent chance, Silver thought. (Silver forecast Minnesota as 99.7 percent likely for the president, Florida, 50.3 percent.)
Anyway, as the 2012 election approached, Silver’s numbers showed a steadily increasing likelihood of Obama’s winning at least seven of nine “swing” states, and hence the election. So did Princeton biophysicist Sam Wang’s, whose record is slightly better than Silver’s. Other data crunchers got similar results.
Confronted by unwelcome facts, Foxified pundits did the usual. They invented an alternative reality. One Dean Chambers, proprietor of the website unskewedpolls.com, began his analysis this way: “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the ‘Mr. New Castrati’ voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program.”
Incisive, don’t you think? Unintimidated, Silver responded sarcastically via twitter: “Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide!” A veritable industry sprung up on Fox News and elsewhere arguing that not only Silver but everybody except Romney’s private pollsters were twisting the evidence to favor President Obama.
Why anybody would sacrifice his own professional reputation to give false confidence to a favored candidate’s supporters was never explained.
Meanwhile, like Romney himself, Fox News viewers long conditioned to mistrust any source of information that’s not explicitly conservative took to “Mittmentum” as readily as the sheep in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad!”
Even “mainstream” TV networks attracted to a “cliffhanger” narrative for commercial reasons downplayed what state-by-state numbers kept making clear: Close national tracking polls mainly reflected that Romney had big leads in the South, but trailed almost everywhere else.
By Election Day, Silver’s model gave President Obama a 90.9 percent chance of winning.
In 2012, Silver went 50 for 50. They ought to put the bespectacled analyst out in Times Square like Santa Claus, so Dean Chambers and the Foxified fakers who questioned his integrity can line up to kiss ...
Well, to pay their professional respects.
(Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons can be emailed at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com)
Columns
Fox followers ‘surprised’ again
- Columns
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Columns Headlines
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