Are the Politcal Polls Right?

Great Debates
21

Here, too.

Bottom line, voiced repeatedly, with dismay: “He’s making us look bad.”

“He promised us a quick n’ dirty get-in-and-get-out, Uncle Sam Saves The World, and instead it’s turning into another Vietnam. A real mess.”

“Nobody likes us over there. They won’t let us HELP them. Why can’t the Prez explain it to them, that we’re just trying to help them?”

“Why aren’t we winning? We’re the Yew Ess of Aye, we’re supposed to win.”

“And what’s up with that Abu Ghraib thing? He says he didn’t KNOW about that? We’re supposed to believe that Rumsfeld didn’t keep him posted? I’m ashamed to be a vet. That’s not the way they used to run MY Army…”

“Wedding bombings (even if the Pentagon says it wasn’t a wedding)? That’s not MY Army, not a bunch of hotshots with itchy trigger fingers who shoot first and ask questions later…Where’s the discipline?”

“Private contractors getting kidnapped, and gruesomely murdered? Why can’t our Army protect noncombatants? Why can’t Rumsfeld’s Army protect them?”

“I don’t like to believe that our President would lie to us, but–they never have found those weapons of mass destruction, have they?”

Etc.

The bottom line is, he’s the one sitting behind the desk with the little sign that reads, “The Buck Stops Here”. If America looks bad on the world stage, then the Prez takes the heat for it. That’s the way it works.

And a LOT of folks my age now have teenage sons who would be at risk from another military draft.

Nope, the whole Iraq thing is leaving an increasingly bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, people who a year ago were not 100% behind the war, but who loyally said, “Well, he’s the President, and I support whatever decision he makes.” A lot of those folks are starting to wonder if they made a mistake.

22

Well, since you mention your fraternity brothers (what house? Theta Xi here), I’m assuming your localized census is of younger, college-educated or college-attending people. Now, I won’t go running off like a bloodhound and fetch cites for this, but I think it is fair to say that students are poor gauges of the national political mindset, tending towards the rebellious side.

This also seems to be the case with the Internet. As many Republican Dopers go to great lengths to remind everyone else, they are in the minority here. I’m not saying that Democrats are more computer-saavy than Republicans, I’m suggesting that more of them are more forceful with their opinions. Liberals tend to represent a huge spectrum of ideology and have much debate between themselves. Republicans have a spectrum, but it isn’t so broad. Mind you, Republicans have their presence on the Internet (largely represented by GeoCities sites with Java waving American flags, animated .gifs of Osama’s head turning into a skull, cheap MIDIs, and size+6 Bible verses - oh, come on, you can’t deny that those pages exist! ;-), but they still tend to be in the minority.

23

The problem for Bush is that the worst is yet to come. Iraq’s oil production is down as a result of sabotage, and even though Saudi Arabia has promised to produce flat-out, exactly as Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US, was alleged to have promised Bush he would at right about this time if he invaded Iraq, BTW, this promise is not as good as it sounds. From what I’ve been reading, the additional oil that Saudi will pump will be of a lower grade than the preferred, and so won’t do much to affect the elevated price of the higher grades that are used for gasoline.
This is but one relatively trivial aspect of the extraordinary incompetence of the Bush administration’s approach to the world, but it’s the one that people will see, every time they fill up the tank. I can’t conceive of a worse thing for the President, or a better thing for Kerry.

24

Yet more surprises: support for Bush in Scottsdale, one of the most conservative parts of Phoenix, appears lukewarm at best, and then last week, I saw this: an expensive car with a special purple heart license plate! On the back window, it had stickers like “support our troops” and on top of all those signs?

A “Kerry for president” sticker.

25

There’s an interesting story in the paper Saturday on how the campaigns are recognizing that more and more people are getting news from the web. They are buying a lot of web ads.

This attached chart to the article shows the change in how people are getting news from the 2000 election vs. 2004.

26

Sigh, I tried to put those periods in the chart above to line up the columns (since extra blank characters are stripper. This works well on some boards but not on others (like this one). Is there any way to maintian column alignment here when posting something like this? Some trick I need to know?

27

The simplest way to format monospaced type is by using the code key. Format your chart in a text editor using a monospaced font like courier and then precede it and end it with the code markup tags, which are
{code} {/code} (replacing the {} with )

Result:


Source...................................2000......2004
Local.TV.news.............................48%.......42%
Cable.news.networks.......................34........38
Nightly.network.news......................45........35
Daily.newspaper...........................40........31
TV.news.magazines.........................29........25
Morning.TV.shows..........................18........20
Talk.radio................................15........17
Cable.political.talk.shows................14........14
National.Public.Radio.....................12........14
Sunday.political.TV.shows.................15........13
Internet...................................9........13
Public.TV.shows...........................12........11
Web.sites.of.news.organizations...........--........11
News.magazines............................15........10
News.pages.of.ISPs........................--........10
Late.night.TV.shows........................9.........9
C-SPAN.....................................9.........8
Comedy.TV.shows............................6.........8
Religious.radio............................7.........5
Online.news.magazines.....................--.........2
28

Thanks! Are blanks compressed out inside the code section? Do I still need to use periods?