According to CNN's analysis Bush has actually gained Black and minority votes from the 2000 election:

Exit polls from the 2000 election showed that Bush received only 9 percent of the black vote, compared to 90 percent for Democrat Al Gore, and 35 percent of the Latino vote, compared to 62 percent for Gore. So Kerry's lead over Bush among black voters in the new poll was about 12 points smaller than Gore's gap in 2000; among Latinos, it was 8 points smaller.

I see something pretty incredible in that poll, and that's the racial composition of it.

If I read it correctly, only 816 out of the 2,250 adults polled were non-Hispanic whites, or 36.3 percent.

Yet 2000 exit polls showed actual voters on election day as 81 percent non-Hispanic white. So if the eventual electorate resembles numerically what it was in 2000 versus what it is in this sample, Bush wins fairly easily.

However, that assumes Bush doesn't give back the gains he's made among blacks and Hispanics, because he's polling among whites almost exactly where he was in 2000.

Therefore, ironically, the story here is the opposite of the Gallup headline.

Meanwhile, Sully swoons over Edwards.

Surprise!

Yeah, I read Sullivan's post. Would someone please pass him a tissue?

Seriously, everything Sully says boils down to "He's pretty, and he has a nice smile, and he's charming."

Whoever called him a Ken Doll got it right.

Will Blaster and Brian B please say whether they actually disagree with "Sully's" analysis that dull, pompous, klutzy Kerry has picked for himself a front man who's more appealing (in the vulgar sense) and has done so precisely because he has more of that vulgar appeal? Do you actually think that Kerry and Edwards are on a level in this regard or that Kerry has more such appeal?

Jesus, I think the problem with Sullivan's analysis is that it was too obvious to be worth writing up. I hate horserace crap like that, but the simple truth of it is undeniable.

Sullivan posts a long letter from a reader sharply critical of his view that the choice of Edwards was a shrewd one and then he posts a link to the Republican's mindboggling opposition research on Edwards, in which there's something for anyone except Molly Ivins to dislike about the man. If we call that "swooning," what sort of language will we leave ourselves to use in the event that someone swoons over Edwards?

Doug, the link to the GOP Edwards oppo pages is one of his "look how mean the Republicans are" digs.

Sullivan starts out with "Well, this is just what I had hoped for" - looks awfully swoony to me.

Sullivan is on about how brilliant the move was, to pick Edwards, but it was really the "safe" move for Kerry:

Of the potential vice presidential candidates, Vilsack received the least enthusiastic response among adults polled last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Fifty-four percent said they would be enthusiastic or satisfied if Kerry chose him, compared with 72 percent for Edwards and 64 percent for Gephardt.

OT but what the hell...

Ant's gone! YAY!!!

Yeah, this thread is OT, but "topic" is a ricepaper wall begging to become a doorway.

Blaster, "Andy" linked tens of thousands of centrists and center-rightists to a Republican opposition-research document as long as a tickertape, extending its reach to an audience large parts of which would never otherwise have seen it. I surely had no idea what a sh!t Edwards is, but I do now. "Sully" just linked to Grover Norquist's annual defense against taxes and regulation. He emphasized Norquist's under-appreciated point that until the close of business today, we were all working to pay the annual costs of federal, state, and local government. Let's imagine Sullivan steepling his fingers like some cartoon homo villain and whispering, "Eggcellent, my secret plan to win the election for Kerry by stirring up the Right against taxes and regulation is working better than I dared hope. And I'm sure that sexy babe John Edwards will let me have his cherry @ss tonight, now that I've exposed thousands of innocent people to the Republicans' list of a couple hundred reasons to vote against him. Yessss...."

Somebody pass me a tissue, please. Um, can I have a hot, wet handtowel instead? Thanks.

So is Sullivan pulling a double secret switcheroo, then? I mean, he even just posted that there is a reason to vote for Bush (Iran).

I have this weird feeling that November 3 will roll around and Sully will announce he's moving in with the Olsen twins.

That's funny about the Olsen twins. Maybe he's serious enough about the preservation of the human race to hold his nose and make it with the Olsen twins if he were inspired with the right sense of mission. Heh.

As for the election, I think Sullivan will try to do what a lot of guys who love life, liberty, estate, and (ahem) men try to do every two years, which is convince himself to vote Republican for the sake of the Party's economic realism, promotion of property, (imperfect) promotion of liberty, unembarrassed pro-Americanism, muscular foreign policy, and generally greater appreciation of governmental restraint and the federalist principle.

In my view, he would like to draw more "gay" men from the Left to the center-right, although I imagine he's thrown up his hands for the time being. I think such a sense of defeat is a key to understanding the remarks he made in the Advocate interview. In my present interpretation, he said what he did in the interview about the FMA being a deal-breaker, because, well--what else could he say under the circumstances that wouldn't have made him seem ludicrous and monstrous to the interviewer and the readership?

Let me try to make the point clearer with an over-the-top example. Imagine it were Clinton the philanderer who was fighting a fairly effective war against terrorists. Someone could make a case for voting for him along these lines, "Sure, President Clinton seduces interns, exposes himself to women he's never met, and may even be a rapist, but there's a war on and you're just going to have to vote for him anyway. Don't be so selfish!" That's a respectable argument, but it would be hard to make that argument in an interview for Guideposts, Good Housekeeping, or Cosmopolitan. Speaking to a readership of women, it would be hard to say anything other than, "Yes, of course rape is a deal-breaker." On the other hand, if you're serious about national security, you'd walk away from your Guideposts interview and not want to link the article. And then yet again, if someone confronted you with your words from the interview, it would be hard to disown them.

I did say the example was over the top; a point can be made plainer through exaggeration. Sullivan was in a similar predicament at least to the extent that he would have persuaded nobody had he been a cad and just shrugged off the insult of a constitutional amendment. Worse, he would have seemed totally lame through acquiescing in the insult himself. Much of the readership of a magazine like the Advocate would have been lost to his rightward pull thereafter, for years to come.

This is the best account I can give that's compatible with my view that Sullivan's not a poseur, but an actual center-right intellectual. I'm open to good counter-arguments. I mean, in the last analysis, I'm defending someone I don't even know, so I don't really have a dog in this fight.

Much of the readership of a magazine like the Advocate would have been lost to his rightward pull thereafter, for years to come.

And that's why he never came out and said it on his blog, which is much more widely read than The Advocate, because he would have lost his credibility there.

But you can't compartmentalize like that anymore, not with the internet and all us snarky bloggers.

Your Bizarro world example, though, doesn't work. Cosmo was all about President Clinton because he was willing to go to the mattresses (so to speak) on abortion. With this scenario, your evil-anti-Sullivan (you can tell because he doesn't have a goatee) has to tell the Good Housekeeping interview, "Oh, man, no way I could vote for this guy because of the sex stuff," while in his larger audience blog saying, well, it bothers me, but I'm not sure.

OT but what the hell...

Ant's gone! YAY!!!

Whoo-hoo!

Liberation Day!

Does Doug do nothing but post comments about Andrew Sullivan? Geez, it's getting as bad as the Kobe/Peterson/Jacko triumvirate of crappy pseudo-news.

Hi Smack, I've been running a little defense for "Sully" lately because my minister told me I should learn to be nice and do somebody a favor every now and then. But if it's overdone and you need a break, I've got you some evolutionary psychology, some Aristotelian psychology, and a short exposition of the relation between the decline of federalism and the rise of incivility. If you run out of that, I'll hook you up with some more.

:-)

poker me up