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More from Pickings four years ago. This time we have Alexis de Tocqueville reporting on a presidential election 180 years ago
Good advice from The Corner.
Gerard Baker with his take.
Two years. A billion dollars. Sixty million votes cast in the primary alone. An election that started out in a country scorched by the fierce heat of the Iraq war ending in the frigid reality of a once-in-a-generation economic slump. A contest that opened with the promise of the first woman president ending in the apparently inevitable elevation of the first black man to the White House.
There’s a paradoxically anticlimactic feeling about election days. All that effort, all that money expended around the clock for years in an effort to influence what happens on this day ends in a period of almost eerie silence.
The heavy guns of campaign speeches and television advertising are muffled. The news turns briefly to other stories as campaign reporters who have checked in and out of hotels in the early hours every morning for weeks finally get to sleep in. The candidates can do no more than anyone else – simply show up and vote quietly in their designated polling station.
It’s a sacred, almost sacramental rite in a democracy. The citizens line up to exercise their terrifying power while the men who might rule them can only sit and wait. This contrast between the heat of the campaign and the light of election day is always most powerful in America, where the stakes are highest, the contests longest and the expenses greatest.
But there haven’t been many days preceded by more energy and freighted with much greater historic significance than this one. …
Las Vegas Libertarian decides, for the first time ever, to vote GOP.
… I have only one marginally effective way to tell those who have spent the past three months libeling and trashing Sarah Palin — and with her, every “regular American” who owns a gun or goes to church and lives outside their oh-so-correct urban enclaves of Washington, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles — where to shove it. And that’s to vote against the communist sympathizer who would make legally owned self-defense weapons as rare as whooping cranes, and for a true American hero — to vote a Republican presidential ticket for the first time in my life.
By the way, and finally, Barack Obama’s campaign Web site promises he’ll do more to “protect women from violence.”
By championing the cause of allowing any woman to carry a concealed handgun without jumping through a bunch of unconstitutional hoops to get a “permit,” that being the only way to “protect women from violence” that doesn’t involve drawing chalk outlines on the sidewalk?
No?
I didn’t think so.
Charles Krauthammer with part 2 of his McCain pick.
… The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.
Whatever happens, we are all going to learn a lot about the state of the polling art. London Times Commentary.
An old newspaper photograph haunts the dreams of every US pollster. A grinning Harry Truman, having won the 1948 presidential election despite every prediction, is holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune. It reads: “Dewey defeats Truman”.
Could it happen again? Every pollster is predicting a victory for Barack Obama. Might a grinning John McCain be pictured on Wednesday triumphantly holding a pile of incorrect polling data?
There are two things that say that he might.
The first is that American pollsters have not yet experienced what happened here in 1992 – when the polls pointed to a Labour victory but John Major won. The conventional wisdom is that 1992 was great for the Tories but terrible for the pollsters. In the long run, the opposite turned out to be true. Victory in 1992 turned to ashes for the Conservatives, whereas the pollsters used the debacle to get themselves sorted out.
Now British polls are properly and carefully weighted, taking account of what is known as the spiral of silence – the tendency of voters for the less fashionable party to keep their intentions to themselves. British pollsters weight their results to allow for these shy voters. US pollsters do not. …
Anne Applebaum says these people, the detestable political class, will never leave us alone.
Tuesday is Election Day, and, as always, Election Day is fraught with peril. Beware the seductiveness of opinion polls, which can badly mislead. Beware the even greater attraction of exit polls, which have so often been wrong in the past. Beware the too-early commentary, the too-swift rush to judgment. And above all, beware that the hopeful, reassuring clichés that will be passed around in the next couple of days will give false succor to winners and losers alike. …
John Tierney writes on the academic researchers who struggle to explain why conservatives are more humorous than uptight liberals
… “Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”
Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture. …