Friday, April 23, 2004

Off to NYC I'm headed to New York tomorrow morning. I'll be back on Sunday. 2:38:03 AM    comment [] Poll numbers = "terrible news for the Bush camp" The Lefty Blogosphere has been troubled by the recent poll numbers that show Bush with a slight lead over Kerry. After all the recent bad news for Bush, how could he take a slight lead? However, Dick Morris argues that the latest poll numbers are actually "terrible news for the Bush camp." One of the (very few) immutable laws of politics is that the undecided vote almost always goes against the incumbent. Consider the past seven presidential elections in which an incumbent ran (1964, '72, '76, '80, '84, '92, and '96) - that is, look at the final vote versus the last Gallup or Harris polls. My analysis shows that the challengers (Goldwater, McGovern, Carter, Reagan, Mondale, Perot, Clinton, and Dole) got 85 percent of the undecided vote. Even incumbents who won got only 15 percent of those who reported that they were undecided in the final polls. So . . . when Bush and Kerry are tied, the challenger really has the upper hand. More bad news for Bush: Democrats usually grow 2-3 points right before Election Day as downscale voters who have not paid much attention to the election, suddenly tune in and "come home" to their traditional Democratic Party moorings. Remember, virtually every poll (except Zogby) showed Bush slightly ahead of Al Gore as the 2000 election approached - yet Gore outpolled Bush by 500,000 votes. Morris then explains his own disappointment (*cough*) at the numbers. He thought Bush should have opened up a sizable lead by this point, but Iraq got in the way. He also notes that Bush is not doing as well with women as he did in the 2000 campaign. Paging ... Karen Hughes. [Thanks to EA.] 2:30:39 AM    comment [] More Conservative Hatred of Bush Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, argues in Fortune magazine that conservatives should vote for Kerry. Republicans have long claimed to be fiscal tightwads and railed against deficit spending. But this year big-spending George W. Bush and the GOP Congress turned a budget surplus into a $477 billion deficit. There are few programs at which they have not thrown money: massive farm subsidies, an expensive new Medicare drug benefit, thousands of pork-barrel projects, dubious homeland-security grants, expansion of Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, even new foreign-aid programs. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that in 2003 "government spending exceeded $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II." Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush's latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis? Vote Democratic. Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can "govern" -- which means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That's one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers. [Thanks to EA.] 2:16:56 AM    comment [] Friends and the Decline of Western Civilization I just heard the following commercial on ABC (one of many similar commercials on TV nowadays): Friends ... the emotional journey ... saying good-bye ... the Barbara Walters interview. It's not everyday that a show is spoken about with such earnestness by a rival network. I don't know about you, but I, for one, really don't get the whole Friends phenomenon. By that, I don't mean that I'm simply ignorant or indifferent about the show. I have seen it. I mean that, from my perspective, Friends is perhaps the most vapid show in the history of television. It is positively empty of any redeeming values. And so I wonder what fans see in it. The actors on the show are attractive (but not necessarily as attractive as, e.g., the actors on Aaron Spelling's shows). They're nice to look at. And their interactions are mildly pleasant. But from what I have witnessed, there's no real humor in the dialogue or in the plots. The writing is nowhere near the quality of Frasier or Seinfeld, let alone more dopey comedies like Three's Company. I watch this show, and I see nothing going on, except pretty, not-terribly-smart people enjoying themselves (without any self-consciousness, humanity, or genuine feeling). And it goes beyond that. It's not just that the characters are dumb. They celebrate their dumbness. It's not just that they're shallow. They celebrate their shallowness. Nothing thought-provoking (whether it be something serious or humorous) ever happens to any of the characters, except for the general trend that nothing thought-provoking happens to them (and that doesn't provoke any thought among the characters). Considering the popularity of reality TV, what's amazing about Friends is that it doesn't allow reality to intrude at any point. Thus when I hear others speak fondly of Friends, when I see, e.g., people at my gym transfixed by the bank of televisions showing reruns, I am dismayed. And when they chuckle (there's rarely any strong laughter of the sort associated with top comedies - another strange aspect of the show), I feel like an anthropologist studying a completely alien culture without knowing the language of the natives. And when people identify with the characters, I honestly wonder how empty those people must be. And when I hear how fanatically popular the show is, I tremble at the future of this country. In all seriousness, I think the Friends phenomenon is emblematic of the decline of America (and Western and world civilization, to the extent that the show is popular overseas). Friends cultivates the view (and the habit?) that it's OK not to be troubled by anything, and that one can pass through life in one's immediate circle of peers, sheltered from anything alien, absurd, ugly, or malicious (the source of a great deal of good humor). But it's by encountering and coping with the alien, absurd, ugly and malicious (sometimes through laughter) that problems are grasped, issues resolved, and progress made. A Friends world is a world immune from such encounters. It's immune from genuine laughter. It's a world without progress. Postscript: Is this simply a generational gap? I'm 33 years old. I don't think it's an age issue. A snobby, elitist opinion? Perhaps. But I'm somone who found value in watching even such shows as Gilligan's Island, The Love Boat, Melrose Place, and other exquisite trash. The problem with Friends is that it's not even exquisite trash. "Exquisite trash" like Melrose Place presents itself as such. It's self-conscious trash. And it creates a world that doesn't pretend to be anything other than fake. Friends is trash that doesn't realize it. It presents itself as true to life, when it is as fake as Melrose Place. No, sorry, I see no redeeming value in it whatsoever, and yet people speak about it as if it's the greatest television show of the last decade. There's no denying that it's one of the most popular shows of recent times. But that's what troubles me. 12:01:29 AM    comment []

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