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October 13, 2004

Erosion Continues: Bush Slips Behind Nationally, and in Ohio

Bad news at the top of KerrySpot. The WaPo poll has Bush behind by Kerry 49-48, and Kerry's got a small lead in Ohio to boot.

Let's not go all to pieces like the liberals did last month. It's going to be a tight one; Bush may need some help, as they say about teams on the wildcard bubble.

But you have to vote.

posted by Ace at 05:56 PM

Comments

It's a close race now and will probably remain that way unless one of them does something outrageous or there's a signifigant change in the news.
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msl

Posted by: msl on October 13, 2004 06:02 PM

Ace, get a grip. There have been a dozen positive-leaning polls the last week, but you moan about every negative blip. Besides, the polls are fubar - they have no clue who's likely, or even who's really registered. If you can't psych yourself up when they go up and ignore them when they go down, you'll go mad.

Posted by: The Black Republican on October 13, 2004 06:14 PM

Black Republican:

I agree. I was reading on real clear politics that the only poll in the last election that was consistently accurate was Mason-Dixon. The rest were off significantly in both directions in all races.

People just need to make sure they vote. If the base is motivated and I believe they are then it will be very close. If the base especially the evangelicals 4 million plus voters, stay home, it is not a good scenario. I happen to think they will vote and we will have a close race to the last state I worry only about Ohio these days, but I am hoping the hoards of Catholics there will vote with the forces of good.

I think the fact there are 3 justices ready to retire is a serious issue for the religious right in this country and one that is often not addressed. I think we will hear about it tonight though and hopefully he will have a better response tonight.

Also, I hope he doesn't step in it tonight and I hope he controls his face.

Keep the faith, Ace. It isn't over yet.

Posted by: Jennifer on October 13, 2004 06:24 PM

The Wash Post tracking went from 50 to 47 Bush to 49 to 48 Kerry in one day. That means yesterday's sample was 44 to 53 Kerry to get these results from a 3-day tracking. I find that hard to believe. What happened Monday to get these results? I can't think of anything. I don't trust these polls and neither should you.

Posted by: Laddy on October 13, 2004 06:24 PM

Explain to me why the President never used the bully pulpit in places like Ohio and Pennslyvania to rip corporations for not hiring during a recovery? It would cost him nothing politically. Instead Bush will lose, because he wouldn't call out corporate America. Don't these companies understand? Make a big production of hiring new employees. It's got to be cheaper adding some payroll now than paying all those taxes when Kerry gets elected.

Posted by: finlay on October 13, 2004 06:44 PM

finlay - you're right about the taxes, but one thing you have to remember, just as we dislike Kerry for his snobbish, consdescending manner, we dislike politicians who tell us how to run their businesses.

As a small business owner, he can 'encourage' us to hire, but if he used the bully pulpit to 'rip corporations', well that's dumb. Politicians have enough of their hands in my pocket as it is.... and I'd resent it.

Posted by: on October 13, 2004 07:54 PM

As for Ohio, the Chi Trib poll is probably not correct. Rasmussen has Bush up by 4 in Ohio and Strategic Vision has Bush up by 6. Chi Trib has Bush by 2 in IA. It's unlikely Bush is winning IA while losing OH. Chi Trib has no polling history in OH plus its a lib paper. The RCP poll summaries are sometimes not up to date and that's the case with OH. Ras also has Bush down only 1 in PA and by only 3 in MI. Don't get discouraged. The Wash Post/ABC poll showed a big plus Kerry spike yesterday. Neither Zogby nor Rasmussen saw the same spike. It could be that both Zog and Ras missed it, but what are the odds?

Posted by: Laddy on October 13, 2004 07:56 PM

Finlay -

It's waaaay too late in the game to have Bush biting the corporate exec/investor class hands that feed him and start hectoring them about spending their tax cuts on mansions and investing in new Chinese factories being a "bad thing".

And that would presume that the wealthy give a crap about the lesser 98% of Americans having jobs or not.

To add insult to injury, most of the money Bush borrowed from China and the Euroweenies to give to the wealthiest as "tax cuts" after his initial claim that they were only "rebates from the surplus rationale" disappeared - went to states where the big bucks people live - states that are "Kerry blue" - except for Texas and perhaps, Florida.

Do credit Bush's Big Government deficit with creating lots of new government jobs with nice benefits that partially compensate for the rest being low-pay, no benefit service sector jobs. Reagan's deficits at least went to creating decent domestic high tech jobs needed to work Reagan's defense build-up, and Reagans high-tech infrastructure goals.

Bush's 1st 4 years legacy will be some nice Palaces for Plutocrats scattered across America and happy Chinese and Indians working the nice manufacturing and high tech jobs bought politicians and greedy boardroom pigs gave away. Some of those McMansions are even swankier than Saddam's, where Iraq's money was diverted away from 98% of Iraqis, who suffered poor economic prospects.

The silver lining in the cloud? Kerry is a weak weasel-scumbag. Lucky the Dems didn't field a Centrist strong candidate like Bill Clinton, Gephardt, Lieberman, Biden, or "shudder" - Hillary. Let's hope that fears of Terrorism and a Ruth Bader Ginzburg Supreme Court will allow voters to overlook Bush's domestic economy incompetence and vote Bush back in - assuming Congress will finally have to fix his major fuck-ups. Top of the list being borrowing money from foreigners to give to the wealthist Americans, and having someone else pay for those gifts 20 years from now.

Posted by: Cedarford on October 13, 2004 08:01 PM

Surely you realize that the MSM is doing poll manipulation in order to depress GOP vote turnout...

Don't fall for it.

Posted by: someone on October 13, 2004 08:27 PM

I visited my daughter's school this last weekend, and we listened to the college radio station while we were there. The DJ played an audio clip, listing a dozen or more reasons to vote for Kerry. The clip is at this site. It's a must listen.

Posted by: Phil on October 13, 2004 08:59 PM

here's an explanation of how the Post survey moved so much in just a couple of days follow link

Posted by: steve on October 13, 2004 09:56 PM

Unless I missed something, Kerry answered that last question without once saying he loved his wife.
He made the joke about "marrying up" and then went on to speak about his mom.
That really struck me as odd and disturbing.
He didn't say he loved his wife or daughters once in that answer that I heard anyway, even though it was clearly an an invitation to do so.
Bush did well on the same question I thought.
Not the most pressing issue I guess, but it's what I walked away with...
msl

Posted by: msl on October 13, 2004 10:45 PM

It's not going to be close. Relax. Vote, but relax

Posted by: jeff on October 13, 2004 11:22 PM

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He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

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Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
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Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

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[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]