hilzoy

by hilzoy

During the primary, I compared the legislation Clinton and Obama had managed to get enacted (1, 2, 3); and it occurred to me that it would be useful to do the same thing for Obama and McCain. I compare the legislation each person has sponsored (later I’ll do co-sponsored legislation) that actually became law. For one thing, this gives some idea of how effective they are at working with Congress, and for another, it’s easy to write a bill that promises the moon so long as you don’t think there’s the least possibility that it will ever become law; sticking to legislation that actually got enacted avoids bothering with that stuff.

As during the primaries, I’ve excluded the following: (a) bills that just do something ceremonial, like name a post office; (b) bills that merely call for a report or express the sense of the Senate (too easy to mean anything); (c) bills that appropriate less than $40 million, and that do nothing else; (d) bills of purely local interest. (Interestingly, Obama didn’t have any of these.) I have also only checked the 109th and 110th Congresses, since these are the only ones when both Obama and McCain were in Congress.

The interesting part, for me, is seeing how the comparisons come out. I never really know in advance; one reason I do this is as a check on my own objectivity. In this case, I assumed that McCain would absolutely dominate during the 109th Congress, both because his party was in power and because of his seniority. (These affect not just how likely his bills are to pass, but how likely they are to be listed as his bills: there’s a reason that the bill Dick Lugar and Barack Obama wrote on nonproliferation was introduced as Lugar-Obama.) I wasn’t sure about the 110th: Obama’s party was in control, but McCain still had seniority; probably more importantly, both candidates were off campaigning. Was I right? No. Why not? See for yourselves, below the fold.

Note: descriptions of the bills and amendments are from Thomas. I can’t link to the actual searches or bills; however, the master page from which all searches start is here. I have added comments in parentheses.

Read more

by hilzoy

It occurred to me today that voter registration deadlines are going to start coming up soon, and that that being the case, it might be a good idea for someone to post them. And since I am the change I’ve been waiting for, I thought: why not me? After all, some of my readers might inexplicably have failed to register to vote, and others might feel like going out and doing voter registration but not have gotten around to it yet. So, below the fold, I have posted the deadlines for all the states and DC. I put links to the actual calendars; do check them, since while I did try to be careful, I’d hate for some typo of mine to disenfranchise anyone.

The Obama and McCain campaigns can probably set you up to do voter registration. On the Obama site, if you don’t want to do it in your area, click here, then click the state you’re interested in, and you will be able to find its various campaign offices. (Useful for people like me, who live in safe states and within driving distance of swing states.)

[UPDATE: On closer inspection, it’s only really easy to find your local office in some states. All have lots of info on events, etc., but not all have the useful ‘Find your local office’ button on the right, under ‘Take Action’. The ones with the useful button seem to be swing states, as one would expect. END UPDATE.]

Read more

by hilzoy

I got this email from a friend of mine:

“One thing that struck me last night was the irony of a candidate who relentlessly positions himself as a selfless servant of the nation (“I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.”), and then allocates such a large share of his convention speech to talking about himself. I can understand the need for Sarah Palin to dedicate time in her speech to introduce herself to the nation, given that she was an unknown quantity on the political scene at that point (notwithstanding the frenzy of Google searches over the last seven days). But at 72, after a long career in Washington, after a widely-televised campaign, and at the end of a convention in which an entire day had been dedicated to answering the “Who is John McCain?” question, it seems a little unusual for McCain to use his most precious block of national TV airtime to essentially read aloud from his memoirs, saying comparatively little about the country or about his platform.

Here is an admittedly simplistic way of looking at it based on analysis of the full transcript of the speech found on his campaign website. There were a total of 271 sentences in the speech, not including the “thankyouthankyouthankyouallsomuchthankyou” before he started and the “joinmejoinmefightwithmejoinmefightwithme” bit in the final minute or so. Of those 271 sentences, a remarkable 147 (54%) were devoted to telling us about John McCain himself: his past accomplishments (“I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon”), his qualifications for the job (“I know how the world works”), his family and childhood (“When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house…”), his time as a POW (“On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin…”), his patriotism (“My country saved me”), and so on. Another 8 sentences focused on Sarah Palin. This leaves only 116 sentences (43% of the speech) to discuss the topics that one might otherwise expect to constitute the majority of the speech: the state of the nation, his policy positions, future promises, differences between his positions and Obama’s, and so on.

The contrast with Obama’s speech is pretty dramatic if you go back and review the transcript of both speeches. Obama dwells almost exclusively in the realm of the state of the country, the future, what America is all about, key components of the platform, etc — only occasionally sprinkling in comments about himself and his family that help to provide context and credibility. Using a similar analysis of the 226 sentences in the speech, 35 are devoted to Obama himself and/or his family, or about 15% of the speech. More than a third of these came in a single section containing memories about his mother and grandparents (“These are my heroes.”)”

I went back and did the same exercise. I called a couple of cases differently, but ended up with about 50% of McCain’s sentences focussed on himself, but the same 43% on the state of the country, etc. I counted 14% of Obama’s sentences as being about himself; as those included all sentences about his wife and Joe Biden, there was no need to count those separately. The remaining 86% was about the country, his plans, and so forth.

For the record, both my friend and I excluded any claims about McCain and Obama that were about what they were going to do, however vague (e.g., a sentence like McCain’s “We’re going to change that” counts as a claim about the future, not a statement about McCain.) We counted only sentences that were about their present or past. The contrast was pretty striking, even more so when I read the speeches back to back.

A bit more after the fold.

Read more

A guest post by our regular commenter dr ngo.

***

JUST A HUNCH

by Dr Ngo

I have been unwell recently (nothing serious, just debilitating and distracting), and have not followed recent political events nearly as assiduously as many others have. But between sleeping and waking and dozing and dreaming, an insight struck me, inspired by the comments of that consummate political hack David Brooks.

He suggested – or so I recollect, and that is all that matters here – that McCain’s selection of Palin reflected a mutuality of spirit and temperament, with each of them inhabiting an essentially moral [sic] universe, and to the devil with the details. This, he thought, was Just The Thing when it came to foreign policy, and the evil that is Putin (or Islamofascism, or any other Evil Du Jour). OTOH, it might be a handicap when it came to the plodding competence required to piece together a health plan or economic policy, where the Democrats might have the upper hand. On balance, he was concerned about the balance of the ticket.

Many observers, not least on ObWi, have remarked that McCain is a gambler, a “hunch player,” and that the naming of the unvetted Palin is just the latest and most conspicuous example of this flaw. It bespeaks (we say) a lack of judgment, the very quality McCain is supposed to exhibit supremely over the untested Obama.

But in the context of American politics, I fear, this analysis is wrong.

Read more