Fisherman’s Tale: Mitt and Barack Sprint to the Finish
Two weeks to go, three debates down, and our pair of
racehorses are thundering down the stretch.
Last Tuesday, Mr. Obama found his missing flask of espresso
and managed to come up with an up-tempo performance which at least righted the
listing (or listless) ship of state. One
thing seemed very clear to those of us who watched. The Obamas and the Romneys will not be
double-dating in the foreseeable future.
If you got nothing else out of the 90 minutes (and, as usual, there was
a paucity of actual details) you did get to see a very revealing quality shared
by both men: the capacity for cold anger.
So, can we pick the winners and losers in November? Well,
there’s an avalanche of polling going on.
If you look at the national polls on October 21, they show a very tight
race-essentially a dead heat. Except for
two, the IBD/TIPP tracking poll, which has Obama up by six, and the Gallup tracking
poll, which shows Romney up by seven.
Since Gallup is widely known and respected, Gallup gets all the
attention, and it appears that Mitt is running away with it. Except, maybe he’s not.
Looking deep into the Gallup numbers, you find that what
really counts are “likely voters.” So,
what’s a likely voter? Well, it depends
on whom you ask, but the key seems to be the polling organization’s attempt to
measure intensity and behavior. The more
intense you are (or seem to be, based on your answers to questions they deem
critical indicators) the more likely you are to actually vote. Since elections are only decided by those who
show up, and polling organizations want to forecast outcomes, opinions that
aren’t expressed in a ballot are essentially irrelevant.
What Gallup tries to do is to predict who will vote based on
the 23 different herbs and spices (actually, 7 herbs and spices) that make up a
likely voter. They aren’t any different
than any other pollster. The WSJ/NBC
just released a poll that shows it as 47/47 but with Obama having a 5% lead
among all registered respondents. In the
that poll, they spoke to 1000 registered voters, and then eliminated the
responses of 184 of them. A quick back
of the envelope calculation would lead one to believe that Obama had more than
a 15 point lead among the “discarded” respondents-those deemed unlikely to
vote.
Is that a reasonable way to approach things? Actually, it is, with two qualifiers. First, the predictive model is based on past
behavior as much as it is present intention, and the polling organizations
haven’t fully caught up. The explosion
in the use of cell-phones, houses with no landlines, off-hour workers, single
parent and non-traditional families, change the very nature of whom you can
reach, where, and at what time. So we
have to ask whether the polling organizations are really talking to everyone.
The second is something for which we don’t yet have a good
model. The irrationality index is at an
all time high. Republicans love to say
that Obama is the most polarizing President of all time. He is, because many of them just absolutely
hate him, and would frankly do or say anything to see him out of office. We aren’t talking about the professional
politicians for whom every race is simply about winning and who crave the
spoils. This is the gut, visceral
reaction that causes perfectly normal people to say and post on line words that
they might otherwise be ashamed to utter in any other context. This intensity makes them likely voters. Gallup’s tracking poll shows this, in part, in
the geographic breakdown of the likely voters.
In three regions, East, West and Midwest, places where the communities
are more diverse and have had mixed recoveries, Obama is ahead by a few
points. In the South, he is down by more
than twenty points. This astounding
outperformance in the South swamps the other three, more populous regions, and
gives Romney his national lead.
This Southern tilt is fascinating. Before we go off meandering down the darker
alleyways of motivation, we should start with some basics. On an elemental level, the solid Republican
South makes sense. This is a place that is more rural, more religious, more
tied to the military and a gun culture, more culturally conservative. That makes up an important part of expected
Southern support for the GOP.
Yet, this level of animus is beyond prediction, particularly
because, when Southerners are voting for Romney/Ryan in particular (as opposed,
say to McCain or Dubya) they are voting so much against their personal interests. The South overwhelmingly gets more Federal
dollars than it pays in taxes. It’s home
to more seniors. It collects large farm
subsidies. There are a lot of 47
percenters there. And, if you squeeze
domestic and entitlement spending as much as the Romney/Ryan Plan projects, you would likely seriously hurt a great many
Southern communities. And yet, they
flock to the Romney/Ryan banner.
Before we pin the irrational tail too much on the elephant,
let’s not forget it also belongs on the donkey.
This week a group of conservation organizations are considering a big
advertising media buy--for ads critical of Mr. Obama. He hasn’t been good enough for them, so they
plan to chip away at his environmental
credentials. Turns out that Mr. Obama may be a conservationist, but he is also
a politician, and some compromises are necessary. Now, one might ask if any of these folk took
math in school (Obama-1=Mitt+1). Perhaps
they act this way out of some bizarre desire to turn the entire country into an
Ansell Adams’ landscape?
Are there other losers?
Well, Gene Epstein, the very insightful Von Mises devotee and Barron’s
writer of “Economic Beat” thinks Capitalism will lose. There’s very little
subtlety in the title of his column this last weekend, “Trampled in the Presidential Debate: Adam Smith”.
Epstein ticked off bipartisan apostasies. Both men massively flunked global trade,
particularly on being aggressive with China.
Obama proudly lauded his work in beating back cheap Chinese tires,
Romney tried to one up him by promising tariffs everywhere he perceives an
unfair advantage over American manufacturers and messing with currency rates.
Obama was taken to task for having subsidized wind energy through tax credits,
Romney for quickly pandering “I appreciate the wind jobs in Iowa.” For Mr. Epstein, who is methodical in his
reasoning and apolitical, it’s a uncomfortable reminder of a painful
reality. Just as Mr. Obama is as much a
politician as an environmentalist, Mr. Romney isn’t really pro-capitalism. He’s just pro business and pro wealth. Those are not the same things.
All this actual and potential disillusionment leads me to Pushkin's
poem, “The Fisherman and the Golden Fish.” In it, an old fisherman and his wife
have been living in poverty for many years. One day, he pulls out a golden fish. The fish
pleads for its life, promising any wish in return. The old man, being kindly
and modest in his desires, asks for nothing and releases him to the sea. When he
returns home and tells his wife about the golden fish, she gets angry and tells her
husband to go ask the fish for a new washboard, as theirs is broken. The fish happily grants this small request. Each
day, the wife’s demands grow greater and greater, and each day, the reluctant
fisherman goes to ask the Golden Fish for more. Finally, mansions, and jewels,
and wealth, and titles, and power are not enough. She wants to be Ruler of the Seas, and to
subjugate the Golden Fish to her absolute will.
When the old man makes this request, the fish ends the cycle of greed by
putting the old woman back in her old cottage and giving her back the broken
washboard.
You do wonder what happens if all those likely voters get
their wish.
MM
