Whoops

The media narrative throughout primary season has been that Giuliani skipped the early states to focus on the later, delegate-rich states like Florida.

Only, um, it turns out he didn't:

But Giuliani's effort here has been Herculean. Romney held 176 events in New Hampshire through Tuesday, primary day, while Giuliani held 126. That's considerably more than McCain, who held 104, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who held 93.

Moreover, Giuliani held more events in New Hampshire than either Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who are favored to come in first and second (not necessarily in that order) on the Democrats' side.

He also spent $2.5 million on TV ads.

It's an interesting strategy -- downplay your efforts and try to fly under the radar, so that when you do really well you can claim a groundswell. "See? I barely even made an effort, and look how many votes I got!" And it's true that when it comes to seeing other people on the sly, none of the other candidates are a match for the Rudester.

Trouble is, it didn't work.

Editor For Hire

Right now you're probably thinking "Make fun of Alan Keyes? Why bother?" And yet I simply can't resist...

A friend of mine is on every political e-mail list you can possibly imagine, and stays on some of them for the sheer entertainment value; as such, he recently forwarded me a fundraising e-mail he received from Alan Keyes. As a believer in the accuracy of language, I thought it could use a little editing. Keep in mind that, as with all editorial work, these are merely suggestions:


Dear Friend and Fellow American:

First, let me wish you a very Blessed Christmastide, and a Happy New Year.

Intruding on this Holy Season is urgent and vital national business -- citizenship business -- about which I must speak to you. For the sake of our beloved America my ridiculously outsized ego, I am still running for President of the United States just like I have been for twelve wasted, futile years, and I need your prayerful counsel and committed help help in being committed.

This week, the USA Today/Gallup Poll showed me EVEN with Ron Paul and AHEAD of long-running conservatives Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, even though I have only been actively in the race a few weeks being ahead of Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter is about as difficult as being more physically attractive than the Elephant Man.

If you know me and share my rock solid defense of true moral and fiscal conservatism Messiah complex, please SELECT HERE NOW to support my campaign delusions of grandeur.

To learn more about me and my campaign for America’s revival, and read about my uncompromising stands on key issues like halting the illegal border invasion ramping up xenophobia, protecting innocent life from conception to natural death birth, defending traditional marriage and the family by throwing my lesbian daughter out of the house, asserting the priority of U.S. national security, sovereignty and prosperity as being a couple spots lower on the list than tax cuts for gazillionaires, and above all putting shoving our Creator God back in secular America’s public square face, SELECT HERE to contribute tithe.

You see, I have decided to enter the presidential fray as THE conservative candidate who can awaken America to the crises we face and the hope we have to victoriously meet those crises indisputable fact that eloquent nutjobs like me are primarily responsible for them. I publicly pledge to lead our people in an American revival regression, supporting subverting and defending despoiling the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States -- the repositories of our God-given rights and liberty.

In these troubled times, America must elect a person of faith and unvarnished truth, who above all will honor God, and by so doing “Honor the Oath” of public office and lead America onto a better path! But until that person enters the race, you’ll just have to settle for me.

SELECT HERE NOW to support my campaign feed my growing mania.

To learn more about me and my campaign for America’s my speaking fee’s revival, and read about gape in open-mouthed disbelief at my uncompromising utterly lunatic stands on key issues SELECT HERE.

I cannot prevail without YOUR active pledge of support, in a “people single-loner-power” effort to bypass the mediocrity and leftism sanity and equanimity being foisted on us by the party bosses and the mainstream media majority of American voters. We MUST revive our nation and do all possible to prevent another American-debasing economy-reviving Clinton administration, or Carter-era malaise respect for human dignity, or worse -- and so I’m asking for YOUR prayers, YOUR best possible financial contribution, YOUR committed pledge to VOTE, AND YOUR best effort to sign up forcibly detain at least FIVE MORE voters lonely nutcases, as well.

Like many Republican voters, I have tried failed to patiently wait and watch coherently think, hoping and praying that a true champion of the Party of Lincoln Buchanan and Reagan Nixon would emerge. You, like I, have seen what has happened instead. These counterfeit “front-running” candidates, who will say anything to dupe the public into voting for them, and are not fit to lead this nation in these trying times, have been pushed relentlessly forward by the country’s “elites” as our only possible choices, while qualified, decent and capable men are discouraged from running and driven from the field, ignored and ridiculed. (I actually kind of agree with this last bit).

I need your financial support TODAY -- even with our late start, our campaign for America’s revival could still qualify for federal matching funds, but I can suckle at the Federal teat I so despise ONLY if you will join our citizen effort and give as generously toward the fully matchable $250 individual donation NOW as you possibly can!

I cannot, I will not sit idly by and listen to the lies take my tranquilizers, while America all interest in my unhinged rantings dies. Nor should you. If you love your nation a good laugh at my expense, please heed this call! American patriot conservatives CAN save America the Republic of Gilead, if only we will act together. Please SELECT HERE and learn what you can do TODAY.

Keeping Faith Losing It,

Alan Keyes

New Hampshire: Not all that surprising, really

Okay, I'll admit that I was pretty sure Obama was going to win the NH primary. But in retrospect, how much of a shock is this? The fact that anyone -- myself included -- was surprised by Clinton's win is due to a preference for percentages over raw numbers and for tea-leaf reading over letting people actually vote. It's also due to a misguided belief that the mini-narratives the media loves -- from Huckabee's negative ad "gaffe" in Iowa to Clinton's "moment of humanity" in New Hampshire -- mean a damn thing to anyone but the media.

Heading into NH, Obama had an average 8% lead in the polls. Let's take the RCP poll average through 1/7:

Obama - 38.3%
Clinton - 30.0%
Edwards - 18.3%
Richardson - 5.7%

That leaves about 7-8% undecided once you figure in the two or three people who are voting for Kucinich or Gravel.

So here's your equation: Decent # of undecideds + margin of polling error + inexact polling methodology + high turnout predictions + the fickle human mind = an 8-point lead that's not really a lead, especially when the organizational aspects of a campaign come into play.

Polls are meaningless if nobody shows up to vote. Listening to the talking heads, you'd think that all that happens in a campaign is that you put up some ads, give some speeches, and then just cross your fingers and hope people vote for you. In practice, it doesn't quite work that way.

If you're running a campaign, getting your own voters to the polls counts for everything, and it takes a lot of organization, a lot of professionalism, a lot of experience, and a lot of money. You succeed or fail based on how your organization runs its "ground game" -- and on how everyone else runs theirs.

What the numbers tell me is that Obama has an excellent organization in NH, but it wasn't able to capitalize on the "phenomenon" bit -- he got tons of new supporters in the past week but wasn't ready for them and couldn't convert them into actual votes. His campaign had to leave that last bit up to fate. Clinton's organization, in the meantime, turned out every last voter they possibly could -- her organization in NH is, by all accounts, incredible. The final results tell the story.

In other words, if you look at the polling numbers free of hype (hindsight always being 20/20), it was always a toss-up between Clinton and Obama. It's that "free of hype" bit, though, that's the problem. The Obama Wave made for a good story, and people -- the news media especially -- are suckers for a good story. You'll hear a lot about how Hillary's getting misty won it for her, or how she swung this group or that group, or how it was the Bradley Effect, or how those cranky-but-lovable New Hampshire voters wanted to send a message, but what it comes down to is that she did in NH what Obama did in Iowa -- she figured out exactly who her voters were and she made damn sure they got to the polls.

What we're seeing here is a struggle between two well-known candidates running well-funded, well-organized, highly professional campaigns. Now it gets interesting.

GfG!

I'm convinced that if Hell exists, it somehow involves spending all eternity being shackled to Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews as they analyze election results. The only upside to this is that I would actually be interested in hearing how they spin being cast into the Lake of Fire as being good for Rudy Giuliani's campaign. Because, according to these two, everything is good for Giuliani's campaign. In fact, I've decided to save time by just using the acronym GfG - Good for Giuliani.

Coming in fourth in New Hampshire? GfG!
Keeping a low profile until Florida? GfG!
Hillary winning New Hampshire? GfG!
McCain winning New Hampshire? GfG!
Natural disasters spreading chaos throughout the land? GfG!
Godzilla rampaging through downtown Tokyo? GfG!
The voice of God booming "Rudy Giuliani is the AntiChrist"? GfG!

In sum, every single thing that happens on the face of the earth is, according to Scarborough and Matthews, beneficial to Giuliani's electoral fortunes. Everything. There is literally nothing they can't somehow spin into a benefit for the Rudester.

It's the kind of phenomenon that you initially think might make a fun drinking game - take a shot every time you hear the phrase "Good for Giuliani" - until you realize that everyone playing will wind up in the emergency room from alcohol poisoning after the first ten minutes.

I have some free time this afternoon and evening. Whether I do laundry or go to dinner with a friend or simply lie flat on the floor, sucking up oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, I will bask in the warm glow that comes with knowing that whatever I do will be GfG.

Miracles of Modern Science

You learn something new every day. Via an admittedly circuitous route (World-O-Crap as linked to by Atrios) comes this LA Times article which is, um, well... Oh, hell, just read it:

Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

Yes, you read that right: like a scenario from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, there is a burgeoning movement to serve the needs of "post-abortive men", asserting that the emotions involved are on a par with those experienced by women and therefore deserve equal attention. Put simply, it's an attempt to find a new angle to the anti-choice argument by focusing on men's emotional trauma.

How widespread is this trauma? Apparently, it doesn't matter:

But the activists leading the men's movement make clear they're not relying on statistics to make their case. They're counting on the power of men's tears.

Like Chuck Norris' tears? The ones that could cure cancer if he ever cried?

Before we start quibbling about whether this concept is infinitely offensive or merely deeply offensive, let me just say that I'm not trying to belittle anyone's emotional pain (well, okay, maybe just a bit); I'm trying to belittle what's being done with that pain while pointing out how potentially dangerous this is.

The "post-abortive men" movement as described by the Times instantly reminds me of Promise Keepers. For those not familiar, the surface premise of PK is to get men to live up to their "responsibilities" as men. Basically, that means taking abusive drunken assholes who ignore their families and turning them into abusive sober assholes who control and dominate their families. PK takes the self-absorption of sad-sack failures and, instead of replacing it with empathy, concern for their loved ones and a healthy outlook on the world, simply rechannels that self-absorption into a direction more politically acceptable to the forces behind PK (see "Dobson, James").

Similarly, the post-abortive men's movement takes what may well be legitimate emotional pain and channels it in a direction that'll support its own worldview. Thus the central question for members of the "movement" isn't "How do I get over myself?" so much as it is "How could I have let her do this to me?" Or, as liebniz puts it in Atrios' comments thread:

"I don't own a woman's uterus! Waaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

It's another attempt to shore up a rapidly crumbling patriarchy. It'd be laughable if it weren't so creepy.

Scott at the aforelinked W-o-C article tries to find some middle ground:

I will happily accept that we have abortions if, whenever a woman dies in childbirth, the father is immediately executed. It’d be easy. Just make sure that, along with the epidural, you have a lethal injection on hand, and you could do it right there in the delivery room.

And just to drive the point home further, let's leave this particular issue with a tale recounted in the Times article, in which they interview one Chris Aubert. This guy's a real prize; apparently, he once refused to take one of his pregnant girlfriends to the clinic because it conflicted with his weekly softball game (sorry, ladies, he's taken now). He reflects on his sordid, abortion-strewn past:

In the end, Aubert says his moral objection to abortion always wins. If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

Aubert looks startled. "I never really thought about it for the woman," he says slowly.

'Nuf said.

Definitions

It's been pointed out via e-mail that in my Huckabee post, the definition of "schadenfreude" was perhaps not as clear as it could have been. Hopefully a righteous combination of Avenue Q and Evangelion can clear that right up:

Happy Monday, Everyone!

Just a few quick links tonight:

First, thanks to Friends y Amigos for pointing me towards this illuminating Frank Rich column on the larger trends behind the rise of Obama and Huckabee.

Second, as long as we're talking about the Huckster, this may be two months old but Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone is usually a pretty good read.

NH Primary tomorrow. Stay tuned...