I was so excited to see the Dennis Miller’s latest HBO special, but it was such let down. He spent the first half sucking wind and the second half sucking up to the Republicans. I mean, he used to have such a sharp policital wit, but now he’s just another partisan hack. It’s pretty sad.

At least Bill Maher is back next week.

I’ve gotten very familiar with the Urban Legend Reference Pages. I often get emails from close friends or family of supposed news stories and quotes that a quick search on the site demonstrate are false. Today, I hit one of the rarer “true” pages on the site. I received a quote in email by H. L. Mencken that has apparently been making the rounds on the political blogs that I am not currently reading due to my personal media blackout. The quote making the rounds is:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

Mencken actually did say this, though the above quote is cut down and taken slightly out of context. Here’s a larger version of the quote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

[Henry Louis Mencken, “Bayard vs. Lionheart”, Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920. Quoted from Snopes.com]

I like the longer version much better. The cutdown quote reads like an indictment of “the plain folks of the land”. The longer quote is more a cynical commentary on the process itself. He still predicts (accurately IMO) the election of a moron to the White House, but Mencken seems to lay the blame more on having to campaign “second and third hand” than on the people who elect said moron. Either way, you still have a moron, but the longer quote gives much more insight on how to deal with the issue going forward.

I wonder what Mencklen would have thought of the modern media?

While I’ve started my self-imposed temporary media blackout, I had to make one last post after discussing the election with my parents. Apparently, someone on the news had said that the Democratic party had lost touch with the American people. Frankly, that bullshit – the exit polls tell a very different story.

First off, Bush didn’t win in a landslide – he won the popular vote by just over 3.5 million votes which translates into a safe-but-still-narrow 3.1% victory margin. In comparison, Clinton won the first time with a 5.5% margin and the second time by 8%. Furthermore, according to the national exit poll, Kerry won both the liberal and moderate vote. The election swung to Bush becuase of the high percentage (34%) of conservative voters. I’d love to compare those percentages to actual population ideology distribution, but I have no idea what those actualy distribution numbers are. Interestingly enough, the 1996 exit polls had an almost identical heavily-conservative ideological distribution and Clinton still won easily.

Kerry lost because he’s had no connection with the conservative voters of the south and mid-west. He stengthed the democratic lead among liberals by five points and among moderates by one point over the 2000 exit polls (mostly due to the Nader non-factor this year) and yet still lost because Bush improved both the republican lead among conservatives and the conservative voter turnout by 5 points each.

You can safely say that the Democrats lost touch with conservatives in America this year, and that it cost them the election. But to say that Democrats have lost touch with America as a whole is simply not true. This electorate doesn’t look that much different than the ones that elected Clinton to two terms.

While I was driving into work this morning, Kerry conceded. While he hasn’t made his speech yet as I write this, I’m assuming he’ll be magnanimous though in reality he’s being a realist. Not enough provo votes to overcome the current Bush lead. Maybe it’s better for Kerry anyway – as I wrote last night, even if he won Ohio and the election, he’d be facing an impossible task of uniting the country, fixing Iraq and digging the country out of the economic tarpit that it’s currently mired in all without the mandate of the popular vote.

Secondly, according to MSNBC, turnout estimation is 59%. That’s still a failing grade. Rod commented that in Australia, voting is mandatory. I like that idea, but he also pointed out that it would “never fly” in the US. Never say never…

With the result no longer in doubt, I’m imposing a personal media blackout for the next month or so. The closest I’m willing to get to politics for a while is is The West Wing.

I’ll be honest – I started Election Day feeling cautiously optimistic. Obviously, that feeling as been proved way, way wrong. Now, its 2:30am, I can’t sleep so I’ve been futzing with Excel and written a following long piece on voting tendencies of different age groups.

Regardless of the eventual outcome in Ohio (which I am most certainly not optimistic about) Bush has won the popular vote hands down – by a significantly larger margin than he lost it in 2000. Any way you slice that, it’s bad for Democrats. Even if Kerry wins Ohio – and the election – he faces a hostile Republican majority in the Congress without a national mandate and an increasingly conservative media ready to crucify him at any turn. On the other hand, if Bush wins Ohio – as I expect will happen eventually – then we get four “more of the same” years – and the last four year were no picnic. And either way, the likely two week delay in processing Ohio’s provisional ballots further divides what is an already polarized electorate.

Right now, going back to blissful ignorance of politics is looking mighty tempting. But I won’t do it. Instead, I want to get more involved in issues I care about in order to affect change. For example, one thing I’d like to see in the coming years is the election reform. I’m not talking about abandoning the Electoral College – which isn’t going to happen w/o a constitutional amendment that has almost zero chance of passing. I’m talking about the changing the low voter turnout that has plagued American elections for decades. Final results won’t be in for a while, what with provisional and absentee ballots, but according to CNN’s current numbers, around 110 million votes have been tabulated, with 95% of the precincts reporting. That means there were around 116 million votes cast (plus the absentee and provisional votes that haven’t been counted yet). However, the US population is estimated by the Census Bureau to be around 295 million. Excluding the estimated 25.7% of the population that is under 18, that leaves nearly 219 million potential voters. Even with this year’s record turnout, we’ve only managed to include 53% of the country in the voting process (maybe low 60’s after with the yet-to-be-counted ballots). While I understand it’s every citizen’s duty to vote, it’s the government’s duty to enable the citizens to do their duty. We should treat the turnout as a grade, and 53% is a failure.

I don’t expect election reform to be a priority of a Republican administration or congress, as conventional wisdom states that larger turnout favors Democrats. Of course, this election’s results fly directly in the face of that idea. However, there are those blogs I read that have suggested that Kerry lost the popular vote because the “much-ballyhooed youth vote simply did not show up”. I thought this too – until I ran the numbers.

The most underrepresented age group in the election (according to the national exit poll) was 18-29 years olds – 22% of the voting age population yet only 17% of the voters in the exit poll. And that group overwhelmingly favored Kerry 54%-44%. By comparison, people 60 and older are also around 22% of the voting population but represented 25% of the voters. Not surprisingly, that group favored Bush 53%-46%. However, it’s interesting to note that if the voter turnout age distribution had matched the actual census distribution, Bush would still have won the popular vote 49.6% to 48.8%. In the census-adjusted model, Kerry is negatively effected by the 30-44 age group, that favored Bush by four points and were under represented in the exit polls – 32% of the voting population but only 28% of voters.

(In fairness, the exit poll isn’t completely accurate – based on the voting turnout age distribution, it estimated a 50% – 48.5% Bush popular vote win and we know Bush won by a wider margin than that. Furthermore, as we are accutely aware, popular vote doesn’t win the presendency and given the closeness of several state races, the youth vote might have shifted the Electoral College in Kerry’s favor.)

I’d like to do more analysis of this exit poll data. There were certain questions that I think are fascinating. For example, 43% of people thought things are going well in Iraq, and 90% of them voted for Bush. 52% of people thought things are going badly, and 82% of them voted for Kerry. Given that people perception of Iraq is directly effected by the media reporting, it becomes fairly obviously the dramatic role that the media plays in our elections. So there’s another issue for me to get involved in – undoing the damage of media consolidation.

But for now, I’m going to try and sleep.