The Bush Bounce, Part Deux

I wrote my earlier post first thing this morning. In the meantime, today’s Rasmussen tracking poll shows an absolute dead-heat: 47.3% apiece for George W. Bush and John Kerry. (It is only in the last four days that Rasmussen started reporting his results in tenths of a percent. I personally think this imparts greater precision to the numbers than they deserve.)

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Scott Rasmussen said that the results he published yesterday (a 1.1% lead for Bush) included an extremely pro-favorable Kerry sample on Saturday, partly offsetting pro-Bush results on Friday and Sunday. As Rasmussen is now showing a tied race, it means that two of the last three days have been pro-Kerry. Perhaps the Bush bounce is now retreating — as “bounces” invariably do.

This is the first presidential race in my adult lifetime in which a candidate has support that I simply cannot comprehend. That candidate is George W. Bush. Oh, I’m not talking about Bush’s core support among the Republican stalwarts, who clearly would vote for any member of their party — just as the Democratic base does for their candidate. But the party faithful get a candidate to no more than a 30–35% standing. The rest of a candidate’s support are the so-called “persuadable voters.” And how any significant percentage of persuadable voters could be supporting Bush just baffles me.

I mean, what has George W. Bush done that worked? He invaded Afghanistan, but failed to find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar. He invaded Iraq, but failed to find the WMD that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Not one of his domestic programs has produced the result that was advertised. Not one. His second-term domestic agenda, which the conservative columnist George Will described as “pedestrian,” included nothing but a bunch of old Republican chestnuts that have been on the table for years, but have never come close to becoming law.

In short, the Bush platform comes down to, “Give me four more years, and perhaps I’ll get it right this time.” Or perhaps it comes down to, “Whatever you may think of me, at least I’m not John Kerry.” It’s a sign of how feeble a candidate Kerry is, that he has managed so far to squander such an obvious opportunity.

The Bush Bounce

If you’re hoping for a Bush victory in November, you couldn’t have been happier when first Time magazine, and then Newsweek, uncorked polls this week showing the President with an 11-point lead over challenger John Kerry. In the history of polling, no Presidential candidate with a double-digit lead on Labor Day has gone on to lose in November. Elections typically get tighter near the end, but they don’t tighten that much.

The plot thickens, however. Rasmussen Reports publishes a tracking poll every day. Since Kerry clinched the nomination in the spring, neither candidate been more than four points away from the other. Yesterday, Rasmussen showed Bush with just a 1.1% lead, 47.6% to 46.5% over Kerry. Rounding out the post-convention polls to date, Gallup shows Bush ahead by 7 points, 52% to 45%, among likely voters.

What is going on here? Rasmussen was assailed with complaints after he failed to find the Bush bounce that Time/Newsweek did. All year long, his poll has been within the margin-of-error of all the other major national polls, and a 10-point difference surely indicates that something is wrong — the polls shouldn’t be that far apart.

In a revealing article that should be required reading for anybody who interprets polls, Scott Rasmussen cleared it up. The short answer is that Gallup has it about right: a Bush lead of 5-7 points. You can follow the link, but here is a brief explanation:

In both the Time and Newsweek polls, a plurality of voters surveyed identified themselves as Republicans. In the polling era, there has never been a presidential election in which Republican voters outnumbered Democrats. Republicans win only by getting a sufficient number of Democrats to cross over, which (luckily for Republicans) is a pretty easy thing to convince them to do. Nevertheless, party affiliation has remained pro-Democrat from one election cycle to the next.

Now, however enthused you were about the Republican convention, do you believe these four days were enough to turn a plurality of the country into self-identifying Republicans, when it has been the opposite for generations? Or is it just possible that Newsweek and Time conducted their polls during the convention itself, when a high proportion of Republicans were likely to be home with their TV sets tuned in? Rasmussen concludes the latter.

On the other hand, Rasmussen concedes that his three-day tracking sample included an extraordinarily good day for Kerry on Saturday, which explains why he shows just a 1.1% lead for the President. Excluding Saturday, Rasmussen shows a 4-point spread, which is in the zip code of Gallup’s 7-point margin. The strong likelihood is that Bush’s actual lead is somewhere in the 4 to 8-point range — not fatal to Kerry, but clearly not where he’d hoped to be. Gallup, incidentally, gives Bush a 2-point “bounce” out of his convention, which is right where the pundits predicted it would be, and comparable to the bounce that most pollsters gave Kerry after his convention.

Reading all of the polling analysis on the web reminded me that modern poll numbers are “cooked” a lot more than people realize. Most pollsters, for instance, report the views of “likely voters.” This means that the poll is not reporting the “raw” results, but the results after eliminating those judged unlikely to vote. This is a reasonable methodology, for polls show that many more people state an intention to vote than actually do. The no-shows tend to be predominantly Democratic, and a poll that failed to exclude them would consistently predict Democrat victories that fail to materialize on election day. But predicting “likely voters” is not an exact science. If turnout is higher than historical norms, it will favor Kerry.

Although Bush does not have an 11-point lead, by any measure he does have a very real lead that is right at, or perhaps slightly outside of, the margin of polling error. That lead will most likely subside a bit — that’s why they call the post-convention surge a “bounce” — but Kerry still has some ground to make-up. In addition, although the Time and Newsweek polls were clearly erroneous, Bush gets the benefit of the perception, however inaccurate, that he enjoys a potentially insurmountable lead. Kerry, on the other hand, has suffered through a 2 or 3-week period in which he has largely been responding to news (most of it unfavorable to him), rather than shaping it himself. Comparisons to the lead Michael Dukakis squandered in August 1988 are apposite.

If this election is going to be a real race, Kerry is going to need to make it so. And soon.

New York Times Proposes to Abolish Electoral College

In an editorial last Sunday, the New York Times proposed abolishing the electoral college. It marked a reversal for the gray lady’s opinion page, which a few years ago had argued in favor of the current system.

If ever there were an idea guaranteed to go nowhere, this is it. A Constitutional amendment would require approval from two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three-fourths of the states, which could never happen. It takes only thirteen states to derail an amendment (assuming it somehow gets by Congress), and there are far more than thirteen states that would lose influence if the current mechanism were abolished.

The electoral college doesn’t just benefit less-populous states. It also benefits many minority groups. As a national constituency, Cuban-Americans hardly matter. But in Florida, where the election is razor-close, Cuban-Americans have outsized influence. It’s no surprise to find the candidates tailoring their message to South Florida’s huge Cuban population.

I come from a Jewish family, and my father always used to point out that the electoral college benefited the Jews. That’s because, although Jews are a small proportion of the national electorate, they are a huge proportion in several key states, such as New York and Illinois. However, in recent years those states have been so dependably Democratic that the Presidential candidates ignore them anyway, so the Jewish influence isn’t what it once was.

Of course, not wanting to put it that way, the Times emphasized other inequities in the current system:

Barring a tsunami of a sweep, heavily Democratic New York will send its electoral votes to John Kerry and both parties have already written New York off as a surefire blue state. The Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial. It’s hard to tell New York City children that every vote is equally important — it’s winner take all here, and whether Senator Kerry beats the president by one New York vote or one million, he will still walk away with all 31 of the state’s electoral votes.

The apparent closeness of the current race — which could easily change by election day — has raised the spectre of an electoral college tie (269-269). In one of the more bizarre and anti-democratic provisions of the Constitution, the House of Representatives would choose the President in that case, with each state’s delegation getting one combined vote. As the Times puts it, there would be “one [vote] for Wyoming’s 500,000 residents and one for California’s 35.5 million.”

These are valid points, one and all, but I can’t see the system changing in my lifetime.

The Governor and His Boy-Toy

New Jersey Governor James McGreevey resigned in disgrace last week, after revealing that he’d had an extra-marital affair with another man. It wasn’t that he’s gay, or that he’d cheated on his wife, that forced the Governor to resign. Rather, it was a threatened sexual harrassment lawsuit by McGreevey’s former lover, Golan Cipel.

McGreevey and Cipel tell very different stories, and it will be some time before the truth comes out — assuming it ever does. But even construing the facts in McGreevey’s favor, the story is an ugly one. Cipel briefly held a six-figure job in the McGreevey administration as New Jersey’s Head of Homeland Security, a position for which Cipel was monumentally unqualified. As a non-U.S. citizen, Cipel wasn’t even eligible for the security clearances required to gain access to the classified information a Homeland Security director must inevitably deal with.

Cipel says McGreevey raped him, then offered him a cushy government job as the price of his silence. McGreevey says the relationship was consensual, and Cipel’s lawsuit is just thinly disguised blackmail. But the unavoidable conclusion, even accepting McGreevey’s version of it, is that Cipel was on the government payroll so that the Governor would have easy access to him for sex.

Never has such a high-profile politician come out and admitted he was gay. But despite McGreevey’s sudden candor, it’s clear this wasn’t a voluntary confession. Rather, after weeks of agonizing reflection, the Governor was forced to accept that the truth could no longer be concealed. The picture of a conflicted man living a private life of lies, while publicly trying to persuade the world that he was “normal,” is hardly the image the gay community wants to portray. McGreevey isn’t a poster-child for gay America. He’s just another corrupt politician who couldn’t keep his pants on.

What if the Election's a Tie?

An article today on electoral-vote.com raises a fascinating prospect: what if the election is a tie?

I don’t mean a popular vote tie (virtually impossible), but an electoral vote tie. If George W. Bush wins exactly the same states as he did in 2000, the election would be decided 278-260 in the Electoral College. Now, suppose John Kerry peels off New Hampshire (4 E.V.) and West Virginia (5) — both of them battleground states in which Kerry currently holds a polling lead. That would make the election a 269-269 tie. Not likely, perhaps, but certainly plausible.

Under the Constitution, if no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the President, with each state’s delegation getting one vote. Republicans control 31 of the state delegations today, with 14 in Democratic hands, and 5 tied. Nobody thinks the Democrats can do well enough in this year’s election to take control of a majority of the state delegations. Therefore, a 269-all tie in the Electoral College is as good as a Bush win.

But in one of the more peculiar Constitutional provisions, the Senate would get to choose the Vice-President in case of a tie. The Democrats have a decent shot at taking over the Senate in this election. Not a superb shot, but at least an average shot. It could therefore happen that the House chooses President Bush, but the Senate chooses Vice-President Edwards, sending Dick Cheney into early retirement.

Needless to say, a Vice-President Edwards wouldn’t be welcome in the Bush White House. Indeed, you could expect Edwards to have a good deal of time on his hands, showing up in the Senate only occasionally to do the one thing the Constitution allows all VPs to do: cast a tie-breaking vote. At least, he’d have plenty of time to plan his 2008 Presidential race, while drawing a handsome government salary (and a beautiful home at taxpayers’ expense) for doing essentially nothing.

Oddly, this would mark an unintended return to the original system. Before 1804, electors didn’t vote separately for President and Vice-President. Instead, each elector just wrote down two names. The candidate receiving the most E.V.’s — provided he was named on a majority of the ballots — became President, and the candidate receiving the second-most votes became Vice-President. It was thus quite possible that the President and V.P. would not only come from different parties, but indeed would be complete ideological opposites.

The system of separate choice for a President and V.P. was adopted after the 1800 election, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College. After 1800, the House of Representatives chose the President just one more time. That happened in 1924, when Andrew Jackson won the popular vote handily (43.1%), but the electoral votes split among four candidates, and the House voted John Quincy Adams President. Jackson supporters were outraged, and he easily defeated Adams four years later.

Outfoxed

Outfoxed, an exposé on the right-wing bias at FoxNews, is now playing at the Quad Cinema (34 W. 13th St, between 5th & 6th Aves). Subtitled “Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” the film:

…examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.

The film explores Murdoch’s burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.

Media experts, including Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide contexamines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.

Outfoxed is like a junior Fahrenheit 9/11. It is only playing at small arthouses in cities that have huge anti-Bush audiences to draw upon (NY, D.C., L.A., San Fran, Berkely). The Quad seats about 150, and it was nearly full last night. If you enjoyed Michael Moore’s film and would like a second dose, Outfoxed might be for you. The Quad is offering seven screenings a day, but I don’t expect this film to have “legs” the way Fahrenheit did.

The film’s not-so-shocking revelation is that FoxNews is unabashedly an organ for the Republican Party. I doubt that anybody in the audience will be surprised by this, so most of the film’s 1:15 running time is just reinforcing what we already know. As in Fahrenheit, the director has cleverly chosen the most damning evidence, and edited it with an intent to ridicule.

Perhaps the funnist moment is when FoxNews anchor Brit Hume claims that the chances of dying in the line of duty in Iraq are about the same as the chances of being murdered in California. More damning is that about 83% of Hume’s guests on his 1-to-1 interview show are Republicans. Hume can interview anyone he wants, of course, but not when the network claims to be “fair and balanced.”

But Outfoxed doesn’t know where to stop. Pompous “experts” lament “the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.” To the contrary, Rupert Murdoch hasn’t taken control of my right to know anything. It’s up to us, as citizens, to seek out what we need. The information’s out there — indeed, more of it than most anyone can possibly absorb. It’s people’s own damned fault if they choose to let Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity spoonfeed them.

In this sense, Outfoxed lacks Fahrenheit’s sure touch. No one would accuse Michael Moore of objectivity, but even he stops short of such sweeping over-generalizations. Outfoxed is worth a look for the laughs it gives us at Fox’s expense — if you’re into that sort of thing. I had a good time, but I could have done without the over-blown fears about the collapse of our democracy. Luckily, most of Outfoxed is more solid than that. And more fun.

Laura Bush’s Flawed Science

I don’t know what First Lady Laura Bush majored in, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t biology. In an interview with the Associated Press, she praised her husband’s policy virtually banning stem cell research in any lab that receives Federal funding.

To be exact, the Bush policy limits stem cell research to the 78 stem cell lines that were in existence on Aug. 9, 2001 — the date the ban was announced. It has turned out, for a variety of reasons, that only 21 of those lines have been useful. Some of those lines have other problems that limit their practical utility. About 99.9% of the lines that could potentially be studied are unavailable. The ban doesn’t apply to privately-funded research, but there are few laboratories and/or scientists that don’t receive Federal funding at some point, making the ban extremely effective at very nearly shutting down this avenue of research.

Laura Bush said, “We don’t even know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything — much less that it’s very close.” But of course, one seldom knows for sure that a scientific breakthrough is “very close” until it happens. The Bush policy ensures that progress, whether close or not, will come a lot more slowly than it should.

Electoral College Math

If you passed ninth grade civics, you know that electoral votes — not popular votes — decide U. S. Presidential elections. There are 538 electoral votes available. That corresponds to the number of senators (100) and representatives (435) in Congress, plus three for the District of Columbia. The actual electoral voters are local party officials who are totally unknown to people like you and me. Being named an elector is their reward for years of toiling anonymously but loyally in partisan politics.

Taken together, the group of electors is called the “Electoral College.” I don’t know why they’re called a “college” — they’re nothing of the kind — but we might as well get used to it. By the way, the correct pronunciation is e-LECT-or-al, not e-lect-OR-al. You can show your political savvy by pronouncing it correctly.

It would take too much space to explain why the Founders chose this peculiar system, which most Americans don’t seem to understand. Some people would like to see the Electoral College abolished or modified, but this has no chance of happening. The system overwhelmingly benefits the less-populous states, because each state, no matter how few citizens it has, gets at least 3 electoral votes. This means even Alaska, which is almost all wilderness, carries 0.55762% of the votes necessary to elect a President. Many of the thinly-populated states have considerably less than 0.55762% of the nation’s voters, so the electoral college gives them a lot more influence than they would otherwise have.

A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College would require a 2/3rds vote by both Houses of Congress, followed by the approval of at least 3/4ths of the state legislatures. A lot more than 1/4th of the states benefit from the present system, because they have more votes than a purely proportional allocation would give them. Any amendment to make the system more democratic would therefore be opposed by enough states to prevent its passage. This simply goes to show that we’re going to have the Electoral College with us for a long time. Probably forever.

In 2000, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the Electoral College 271-267 (with 270 needed to win), making it one of the closest elections ever. Actually, one of Al Gore’s electors abstained in protest, so his official total was just 266. I’m giving Gore credit for 267, because I don’t think the elector would have done this had her vote mattered. Gore would have been President had he won just one more state — and he barely lost in several, most notably Florida, but also in New Hampshire, among others.

The available electoral votes get reapportioned among the states every ten years, after the census. Over many decades, this process has gradually worked against the Democrats, as Republican-leaning states in the deep south and far west continue to gain in population compared to the rest of the country. Had Michael Dukakis in 1988 managed to win the states Al Gore won in 2000, Dukakis would have been President. (Dukakis, of course, ran one of the most inept campaigns in modern times, and came nowhere close to winning enough states to be President.)

Since the 2000 election, another census has rejuggled the electoral votes, giving the Republicans a further advantage. If George W. Bush wins the same states as in 2000, he’ll win in the Electoral College by a margin of 278-260. Of the states Al Gore won, just California has gained an electoral vote, while six of Gore’s other states have lost them. Four Bush states have lost an electoral vote apiece, but seven others have gained a vote or two.

Of course, neither party is guaranteed to win the same states as last time, but the electorate is more polarized than it has ever been before. By most accounts, there are about thirty states that are essentially non-competitive. Indeed, there are eleven states (worth 62 electoral votes) that have voted Republican in every election since 1964. Another eight states (worth 60 electoral votes) have voted Republican eight out of the last nine. In total, that gives George Bush 122 electoral votes in states he can win without ever paying a visit.

No states are as dependably Democratic as the nineteen the Republicans have in their hip pockets. As recently as 1984, Ronald Reagan carried 49 out of 50, losing just Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Richard Nixon had done the same in 1972, losing only Massachusetts. (People think of Kerry’s home state as a liberal bastion, but it voted for Reagan twice, and it has a Republican governor.) In 1988, the first Bush won 40 out of 50 over Michael Dukakis. Oh, the Democrats did carry the District of Columbia in those landslides, so that gives them just 3 electoral votes that are rock-solid.

Turning to more recent history, there’s a core group of states that have been solidly Democratic for the last several elections, and in which John Kerry currently enjoys very large leads that even Republicans would concede are insurmountable. Although there are only eleven states (plus D.C.) in this category, it includes three of the five largest prizes: California (55 E.V.), New York (31) and Illinois (21). Altogether, Kerry has at least 168 electoral votes locked in, which is just 102 shy of the number needed for election.

The remaining twenty states are commonly called the “battleground states.” If you live in one of these states, you’re going to be seeing an awful lot of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Kerry, and John Edwards. These are the states that both sides recognize as competitive. They could go either way. Most polls in the battleground states show either no meaningful lead, or a lead for one candidate that’s well within the margin of polling error. That’s why they call them battlegrounds.

Nevertheless, the news in the contested states is better for Kerry than it is for Bush. In every such state that Al Gore won in 2000, Kerry has consistently led in the polls (even if only slightly). In other words, there is no state that Bush lost four years ago that he can feel particularly good about winning in 2004. Kerry’s lead is weakest in Minnesota (10 E.V.), Wisconsin (10), Iowa (7), and New Mexico (5), but he is ahead in all of them. On the other hand, should Bush make inroads in the larger Kerry states, such as Pennsylvania (21) or Michigan (17), it would be a sign that Kerry’s in big trouble.

Bush, on the other hand, is already in some trouble in several states that he won in 2000, particularly New Hampshire (4), West Virginia (5), Missouri (11), and Florida (27). Whether he holds the lead in these states can change almost daily, but at this writing it looks like he would lose at least three out of the four. Bush is also vulnerable (that is, within the margin of polling error) in several Republican strongholds he once expected to win easily, such as Nevada (5), Ohio (20), Arkansas (6), Arizona (11), Tennessee (11), and Virginia (13). John Kerry is unlikely to win all of these, but he doesn’t need them. If Kerry holds Al Gore’s states, he only needs to peel away 10 electoral votes that George Bush won four years ago. As of today, Kerry stands a very good chance of doing that. We’ll have to see if that’s still true after the Republican National Convention, when Bush can expect at least a modest “bounce” in the polls.

A Presidential election is actually fifty-one separate elections that happen to be held on the same day. Nationwide public opinion polls, which are the most common kind we see, tend to obscure the state-by-state races where the election is really decided. Both campaigns have Electoral College strategists who are experts in all the different ways of counting to 270. Just look at where George Bush and John Kerry spend their time over the next three months, and you’ll have a very good idea where the battle is being fought.

The Incredible Shrinking Election

The post-convention polls are in, and there isn’t much for John Kerry to crow about. His “bounce” is, at best, a modest 1-2 points, which is statistically irrelevant when you consider that the margin of error in most polls is 3-4 points. Indeed, the Gallup/USA Today poll actually had him losing ground to Bush after the convention. I am inclined to discount the Gallup result because it is so far askew from all of the other polls. Nevertheless, Kerry’s bounce shapes up to be the smallest of any challenger since the Democrats nominated George McGovern in the middle of the night in 1972.

Naturally, the two parties have contrasting views as to why this happened. Republicans say that the voters finally got a good look at John Kerry, and they don’t like what they see. Democrats say that most voters had already made up their minds, and they never expected a large bounce. Neither explanation is particularly convincing, although surely the Democrats hoped for a bounce greater than zero, which is about what they got.

An article in today’s USA Today gives eight possible reasons for the non-bounce, but concludes: “Check back in five weeks” — that is, after the Republican convention. Kerry’s convention performance can be compared to the top half of the first inning in baseball. The visiting team failed to score. Bush’s convention will be the bottom half of the inning. If most voters have already decided who they’re voting for, then Bush won’t get a bounce either. If Bush does get a bounce, he could head into the fall election season with a significant advantage, since the candidate ahead as of Labor Day has almost always won in November.

The New York Times noted this morning that Kerry had two clear shots to change the dynamics of the race during July. The selection of John Edwards as his running mate was the first, and his convention speech was the second. Neither has significantly helped him, and Bush figures to dominate the headlines during the month of August. Kerry will need to play defense until after Labor Day, when the debate season will offer his last chance at swaying that ever-shrinking segment of the electorate that has not already made up its mind.

Do Running Mates Matter?

Every four years, the news media follows the VP selection frenzy with rapt attention. The choice is described as the nominee’s first truly “Presidential” decision. The pundits debate where and how the VP choice will help the ticket — or if will help at all.

After all that debate, the conventional wisdom is that running mates typically don’t matter very much. However, nobody knows for sure, because there isn’t an alternative universe where the same election is run with different VP candidates, to see if it turns out differently.

In my lifetime, most of the Presidential elections have been electoral college landslides. When that happens, it’s hard to argue that any conceivable VP candidate could have affected the outcome. In 1988, Michael Dukakis made a sound choice in southerner Lloyd Bentsen, but he still lost 40 out of 50 states. Just about everyone agrees that Dan Quayle was a slight drag on George H. W. Bush that year, but Dukakis ran one of the most inept campaigns in living memory. When that happens, you could have Thomas Jefferson as your running mate, and you are still going to lose.

I suppose common sense dictates that comparatively few voters make up their minds because of who’s running for Vice President. But in a very close election, “comparatively few” votes might be the difference between victory and defeat. In 2000, Al Gore barely lost in a handful states. Since all he needed was just one more state, it is emminently possible that the right running mate would have pushed him over the top — not because running mates make a huge difference, but because a slight difference was all Al Gore needed.

I’d say Joseph Lieberman turned out to be a poor, and perhaps fatal choice, for Al Gore. Lieberman’s two clear constituencies, Connecticut voters and Jewish voters, figured to vote for Gore in large numbers anyway. Gore chose Lieberman, in part, because Lieberman had been so publicly critical of Bill Clinton’s moral shortcomings. If that trait mattered, surely there are others who could have supplied it. Choosing a running mate from a swing state would have been better advice, and had Gore heeded it, he’d most likely be President today.

Most polls show the current Presidential race a statistical tie. If the race remains that close, every little factor, however slight, could figure in the eventual outcome. My bet is that John Edwards is a net positive for Kerry, and no other available choice would have been a better one. It will be a while before we know whether the race is close enough for it to matter.