Obama Electoral Lead Widens as National Lead Shrinks
Radley Balko notes a "strange dichotomy" in the election polls: Obama's lead in the national head-to-head polls is narrowing at the same time his Electoral College numbers based on state-by-state polls is widening. Sure enough, that's the case. Here's the RealClearPolitics snapshot: Here's the current Electoral College map from electoralvote.com, which has the race at Obama 320 - McCain 204 - ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 15, 2008 08:56
No Beer, No Civilization (Updated)
George Will has been at the top of the pundit game for so long that you'd think he'd have joined a sizable number of his peers in seemingly dusting off one of their stock columns every week. Not so. Will's latest installment is on the virtues of beer. "The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 10, 2008 12:11
Educating the Masses
Clive Crook contends that, "Broadly speaking, educational quality has topped out - and on at least one measure, it is actually deteriorating. In 2006, Americans aged 55-59 collectively possessed more masters degrees, professional degrees and doctorates than Americans aged 30-34." Arnold Kling fears that this is just a caste system at work, observing, "I don't think we have a recipe ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 14:53
By Any Other Name…
Jonah Goldberg has sparked a minor blogospheric furor for a recent column in which he castigated Barack Obama, John McCain, and others for promoting a compulsory national service program, which he compared to slavery. There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 13:26
Appalachian Election?
Steve Tuttle takes to the pages of Newsweek to proclaim the ascendency of Appalachia as the decider of the next president. "Hick." "Hillbilly." "Redneck." "Inbred." "Cracker." "Ridge Runner." I heard and self-effacingly used them all when I left the mountains of Appalachia to attend college in the great metropolis of Williamsburg, Va., in the '80s. I was mercilessly ribbed as a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 30, 2008 09:20
Dumbing the Presidency
David Broder uses Elvin Lm's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency to argue not only that presidential speeches have steadily dumbed down over the years, which we might have guessed, but that this dumbs down public policy, too. In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 30, 2008 07:13
Why ‘Child Care Professionals’ Make Low Wages
Ezra Klein awards Snark of the Day honors to Megan Carpentier's stunning discovery that babysitters don't earn a lot of money. Child care professionals are responsible for the health, well-being and development of the fruit of other women's loins (not mine!) But in exchange for that, the median average salary in 2006 was $17,160. The government survey shows that other comparatively ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 27, 2008 13:16
No Reset Button in Foreign Policy
Nick Gvosdev, the outgoing Editor of The National Interest and soon-to-be professor at the Naval War College makes a point that can't be emphasized enough: "[T]here is no 'reset' button in U.S. foreign policy. . . . [N]o matter who the next president is, there are challenges to be faced that will require adaption to the changes occurring underway ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 26, 2008 13:17
Obama Has Huge Lead in Another Poll
Barack Obama has a 12-point lead in the latest Bloomberg/LAT poll, giving those of us who thought the 15-point lead in last week's Newsweek poll was an outlier some pause. In a two-man race between the major-party candidates, registered voters chose Obama over McCain by 49% to 37% in the national poll, conducted Thursday through Monday. On a four-man ballot that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 25, 2008 07:27
Obama and Hidden Racism
Mike Tomasky believes that, despite the fact that three-quarters of black Americans are middle class and that "[m]ore black and white people go to college together and work together than in probably any other racially mixed society in the world," he thinks we're essentially a segregated society. I haven't been able to find any numbers on this, but here's my educated ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 14:53
