Category: Political

The Freakonomics authors, Levitt and Dubner wrote a book on how to think like a freak. The core argument is that a ‘freak’ is always doing experiments to create data to learn about the real world.

I’ve been doing experiments as far back as I can remember.

This blog is about a serious issue.  I had created a group called Research in Politics.  Having run several campaigns, I wondered ‘what was effective in campaigning?’.  I got a chance to test door to door house calls on election day, considered very important by everyone in politics.

Jack Shelley a San Francisco Congressman was elected mayor.  That created an open seat in a special January 1964 election in San Francisco.  

I designed a Latin Square research design, often used in agriculture.  It is a 5×5 matrix that allows two issues to be tested at the same time.  On one corner I had 5 random precincts that had intense Republican efforts to get out the vote.  On the next corner 5 precincts with no get out the vote efforts, the third corner had 5 random precincts with intense Democrat get out the vote efforts.  The fourth corner no efforts.  The rest of the matrix was filled in with levels of effort from 2 to 5 by both the Republicans and Democrats.  I personally worked in the intense Republican precincts to make sure every political volunteer was working hard.

I got the Democrats to cooperate because everyone wanted to know the results.  A special election was the best case scenario because the voter turnout was half of a regular election turnout and a personal door to door visit should have the greatest impact.

Everyone was shocked at the results.  No difference between intense get out the vote effort and no effort.

Everyone was so shocked that they cooperated again in an identical test in Modesto for another special election for Congress.  Same results.

Nobody had changed their view of the importance of election day get out the vote.  The sophisticated campaign managers who knew about my research came to the conclusion: ‘we need to use volunteers for something whether it works or not; get out the vote keeps volunteers busy.’

A fellow named John Gable was disturbed by the social and political dichotomy that we are all immersed in, right now.

He decided that the main problem is that we all  create our own news universes which become echo chambers of homogeneous ideas and ideologies.  We surround ourselves with people we agree with, in jobs, living locations and media sources.

John created a consolidated website that has all major news items put into three categories, Left, Middle and Right.  You can go to his website and see what a wonderful job he has done. (allsides.com)

John is just getting started, so it will take time to see if his focus on the news media and fixing it, will have repercussions in the larger society.

I personally have suggested on my many blogs that the dichotomy we see in our society has multiple sources.  That the news media reflects a change that had already occurred.

• I see that our fraternal institutions withered away after WWII.  The Lions, Rotary, Odd Fellows and Masons.  These were the key bulwarks in keeping America convivial and socially integrated.

• Women left the homes for jobs; they left the neighborhoods and the non-work social world.  They had been part of the social glue.

• The hereditary elite disappeared (around 1960).  Their deep and broad social connections had been a vital source of social harmony. As well as preserving the status quo.

• As unions took over cities along with the Democratic Party and the Left, we got geographic social sorting with Lefties going to the cities and being reflected in impregnable Congressional districts.

• With the end of the Cold War, the failure of communist countries and the decline of domestic unions, the Left faced a hopeless future and became the Party of Despair and Anger.  The penultimate act of anger was the passage of Obamacare (a 19th Century dream) without a single Republican vote.  Political division became rampant and deeply embedded from that point on.

That is where we are today.  Only when young people get out of the clutches of academia where the angry Left dwells and the Lefties die off, will we see more comity in our society.

My regular readers know that I frequently complain about the low quality of government at the local level. I not only complain about the political absurdity of a socialist San Francisco city government that tries to run our individual lives as a parent rather than as a competent government.  I complain that the government is incompetent at doing things that are needed.

I woke up one morning and realized my approach is wrong. I know how to make government work.  I took my two main government tasks and asked myself how to use existing structures to solve the problems. We lack individuals who care and know how to make changes.

The first task that needs being solved is the San Francisco airport. (The second one is in the next blog). We have two landing runways and two take off runways at a 90° angle. On days when the cloud cover is too low, which is common in San Francisco, the two landing runways are too close together for the regular 60 landings per hour. With low clouds landings are reduced to 30 per hour. That consequently reduces the number of flights leaving the airport too.

The two landing runways could be expanded easily by expanding into the adjacent bay.

The environmental organizations that control the bay prohibited this. The current airport political organizations have looked into the issue and always deferred to the power of the environmental political groups.

If the airport were run on a lease to a private company, the private company could easily resolve the expansion of the runway problem. The private companies could offer hundreds of acres of currently used salt flats to replace the dozens of acres needed for the airport runway expansion. How do we get private management of the airport?

The same way BART was created. By local initiative.  It took two elections for the BART initiative to pass.

San Francisco owns the airport and manages it even though it is in San Mateo County. We only need a local initiative in San Francisco directing the San Francisco Airport Commission to lease the airport to a private company.  There are several that run airports around the world.

The initiative must be very carefully written to make sure that it does not get commandeered by  politicians looking for a cushy job. That will cost about $100,000 in legal fees.

An initiative in an off year election will cost another $100,000.

That's how we can do it. For $200,000 we can have a world-class functioning airport that does not shut down every time the fog rolls in.

I am in the middle of reading Joshua Muravchik’s book  Making David into Goliath. You can read the critical chapter, 10, where it was reproduced in the Times of Israel.

Muravchik  has done a masterful piece of history and has come up with a conclusion that has convinced me.

The great Leftist move to fight modernity and commerce originally took the shape of communism in the mid 1800’s with the hard-core belief that workers who hated modernity and the commercial world would rise up as the 'proletariat' to form revolutionary cantons to return the world to the old agrarian ways. Or to at least seize the new industrial technologies.

The proletariat was always a disappointment. Slowly the Left began to look for another revolutionary global population. With the help of the Third World movement promoted by the UN and the American versus Soviet Union conflict, the idea of a global ethnic group formed from the anti-colonialists, created a potential successor to the proletariat that would be the revolutionary future.

It is this global coalition of ethnic populations that the Left now looks to as the revolutionary basis for overturning modernity and industrial commerce.

Muravchik makes the point that ever since Israel defeated its Arab neighbors, most decisively in 1967, the Left has looked at Arabs as part of their new revolutionary coalition and Israel as part of the modern commercial monster.

Since the title of this blog concerns ‘me’, one could ask ‘How do you get in this?’

I am a consultant to the first and most significant fantasy of the Left. I am a consultant to a new group called the Diversity Coalition (no website yet) which has tens of thousands of members made up of black and Latino churches, the major American Filipino organization and an array of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean political action groups.

This coalition has found a number of American political issues on which they can agree. Principally they agree on the need for more access to employment and more access for minority small businesses into banking and the commercial market.

This finds me working for a functioning organization that is part of the wet dreams of the Global Left.  The Diversity Coalition is devoid of the Left’s revolutionary ideology. It is purely American.

Don't tell the Left that such an organization could not exist outside the United State if it included Chinese, Indians and other Southeast Asians as well as Arabs.  The many ethnicities might all hate the United States but such an organization would not be anti-commerce; the members would have such different worldviews they would never be able to agree on anything of substance.

I am most comfortable when I have some data. For this blog I have used some media circulation data which is notoriously unreliable.

So how big is the real Left in America?

I would have to put the number somewhere around 30 to 40 million people. I base this on the perpetual 30% of survey respondents who say they support Barack Obama, regardless of what he says or does. Those surveys are based on people who voted. The actual vote for Obama in 2012 was over 60 million. I have reduced the final number of Lefties because many studies I have done indicate a habitual voting pattern on the part of a large percentage of voters. The remaining voters actually express strong support for their candidate as evidenced in opinion surveys.

Of this 30 million Lefties, where do most of them get their information?

By definition, I consider a sincere Leftist to be someone who reads the New York Times and the New Yorker. That is a tiny population. Even if it includes people who read the New Yorker in the dentist office. That is roughly 1,000,000 people based on the circulation of both the Times and the magazine. We can add to that the people who look at the New York Times digitally and look at stories in the New Yorker periodically.  Despite the unreliability of media data, we get an additional million and a half digital readers. A total of hard core informed Lefties of under 3 million people. They are the core of 30-40 million Lefty sympathizers.

Why do I personally know so many of these people?. By definition: I live in a Lefty city and my friends are disproportionately educated readers.

What is the maximum number of people who can be considered core Lefties? There is another 20 million people who listen to NPR regularly. That includes the under 3 million who read the NY Times and the New Yorker.

The really interesting question is how does this small number of people in the immediate NYTimes and New Yorker Lefty circle have so much influence?

Of course they have a disproportionate influence in academia based on survey data and in journalism, based on survey data. But we have only academia and media at the level of 100,000 people who directly influence the next 3 million people who indirectly influence another 30+ million people.

What are the mechanisms?   I don’t know.  I know that circles of friends, sociologically speaking, demand coherence of values.  That doesn’t explain much.

Before you become upset by these numbers. There are only two comparable numbers we have for the opposition to Leftism. The number of people who look at national print news that is not the New York Times is over 6 million when you include the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The comparable radio audience is Rush Limbaugh and two other conservative talk radio celebrities whose audience exceeds 25 million.  They reach about 70 million people who strongly oppose Obama currently in surveys.  In the 2014 over 40 million of them voted in a new Republican government.  

The conservative non-Lefty world is significantly larger than the Lefty world and certainly the new Congress demonstrates its potency at the grassroots level. But the ability to influence public discussion at the media level is far behind.

I don't know ofreliable data concerning information distributed via the Internet. That must play a significant role as a source of news and information for both the Left and the non-Left.

In the most recent election, the 2014 midterm, a local San Franciscan named Tom Styer put nearly $60 million of his own money into supporting environmental candidates.

I don't know who he actually supported. Nearly all environmentalists in the United States are lefty fundamentalists Democrats. It is a political religion for them, after all.

What I do know is that the Democrats lost miserably. Everywhere, at every level. Enviro-Democrats probably lost more seats at every state and federal level than they had ever lost before in American politics.

This election was not a wave election, it was a tsunami election. I don't think a single penny of Tom Styer's money had any positive effect.

The environmental movement did not benefit from his $60 million. One could argue that without his money they would have done worse.  I'm sure many Democrats told him that.  But he couldn't have had a bigger loss. 100% loss is the upper limit.

It is heartwarming to me to know that so much money funding the environmental movement was completely wasted.  The movement long ago became an armageddon driven religion.

This waste of money is not unusual since nearly all money poured into political campaigns by naïve people is wasted. See the last blog of November.

What is most heartwarming for me is to see that people who believe in simplistic memes ('money is important to elections') are punished by the political system for their naïveté. You do not learn about politics by donating money.

I know for a fact that money plays an insignificant role in electoral politics but I want to make two points in this blog.

The first point is to reiterate that it is very rare when money can play a significant role in influencing the outcome of an election. Anyone in politics has watched hundreds of elections in which one side had a disproportionate funding advantage and the other side won. There is simply no way to ignore that reality. That reality suggests that money is incidental to election outcomes.

It further suggests that the only function of money is when nothing else of importance is at play. That is my general opinion. Money indicates that one side or the other has money and therefore more ads. When that is a positive sign to the voters, then money has some influence. But that is a truism. Money has influence when the public wants money to have influence.

One of the most preposterous models of monetary influence that I hear in these days is the role that giant databases play in getting out the vote. The Democrats claimed effectiveness in the 2008 election and the Republicans claim to have caught up with the Democrats in the 2014 election in their use of giant databases.

I cannot think of anything more preposterous. Well maybe I can. But this is preposterous in itself. When I was running campaigns and doing political research more than 50 years ago we had voter registration lists. We knew exactly who had voted at four o’clock in the afternoon and we knew their political party, if they had one. In a few critical instances we actually took the time to find out if they had voted in previous similar elections; similar meaning presidential or off year.

Exactly how much more information can anyone have because of data on Facebook other than party affiliation and previous voting? Virtually nothing of any significance. The data I had in 1964 comprise about 90% of all the data that is relevant.

On the other hand, during the most recent campaign in which the Republicans have begun using databases, I was swamped with 2 to 4 emails a day for two months before the election. It was all irrelevant to me and I put it in the junk mailbox.

So much for the sophisticated social media campaign. Since I can't take it seriously and I pay more attention than most, I can't believe anyone else takes it seriously either.

The wonderful journalist and Middle East reporter Michael Totten has raised the issue that we are in the era of zombies. He wrote an article for City Journal that summarizes the situation. It is fairly clear that we have gone through an era of popular zombie fascination. Many of my friends and my son are zombie fans. My son argues that a measure of democracy is freedom to make zombie films, which are still not made in China.

There is always a connection between a long term popular subject matter and contemporary life. The great masterpiece of this analysis was West of Everything. Jane Tompkins showed that the Western story and film were expressions of the emotional sentiment of an industrial society;  men were required to persevere in the face of blinding boredom. There was no religion in Westerns, the cowboy was buried on Boot Hill. There were very few women except for warm hearted hookers. The moral of every story was the determination of the good cowboy to right the wrongs.

Michael Totten argues that the zombie issue of our day is really an expression of our sense that the world around us is far too complex; that it could fall apart at any moment. The apocalypse of a completely dysfunctional society is everywhere around us.  It is Detroit, Somalia, Liberia, Argentina and Venezuela.

Totten argues that learning rudimentary survival lessons is the main story in the zombie world.

Many of my friends agree with Totten's analysis.

I find the issue to be much more political. I believe that both the Democrats and the Republicans have the sense that the opposition is blindly following ideas and emotional structures that are impossible to confront. That their opponents are aggressively belligerent but cannot be defeated with logic or argument. On the conservative side it appears that the entire media structure supports the zombie position. On the Left side the hostility is toward Fox News as a mouthpiece for zombie values

That's my explanation of the zombie era that we are in. It is also my sense of what leads me to suggest we are not far from a Civil War encouraged by a president who inflames racism and class envy.

A month ago I wrote a blog bemoaning the horrible fate of a miracle cure, Sovaldi, that cures hep C but costs $100,000 for a course of treatment. The media, insurance companies and Medicare are screaming to try and force the developer, Gilead, to lower the price.

I explained my outrage and my concern that cures for many diseases that my children and grandchildren will experience will not be developed because of this Obama care byproduct: The hysterical Lefty demand to control market prices can destroy research and innovation.

My son has pointed out to me that this may not be the case. Rich people in Canada come to the United States for medical treatment. Medical tourism is growing at geometric rates as some people cross the Mexican border for expensive dental care while others go to Thailand for cosmetic surgery. Americans already travel to the Cleveland Clinic for heart issues, the Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and many other places that are not covered by their insurance.

There is even a town in Japan (Koriyama City) that has invested heavily in a hospital and adjacent hotels for people who want proton cancer therapy, a highly successful and expensive tumor treatment. There are clearly enough people willing to travel. The trivial cost of an airline ticket is added to their cost of medical treatment. Enough people want to survive.

With this prospect, I begin to understand that pharmaceutical companies will continue to invest in new medical cures and treatments. The market may no longer be concentrated in the United States and may be distributed around the world, but at this point in history there is enough money globally to justify the research investments.

I would like to make a contribution to our understanding of a political phenomenon: single women voting for Obama.

The following three paragraphs summarize the data on single women voting. To these paragraphs we need to add that single women voted 67% for Obama in 2012.

The unmarried women of the 2012 make up almost 40% of the African American population, nearly 30% of the Latino population, and about a third of all young voters, or 32.7%, according to the research released on Thursday. They are divorced, separated, widowed, or have never married.

"They had an enormous influence on Tuesday's election," Gardner said.

Single women have traditionally been Democratic voters, largely for economic reasons. They tend to have less money than married women – because they don't have a husband's earnings to fall back on. They also tend to be less educated.

I would like to add to the understanding of this single women voter phenomenon by repeating a popular male adage: ‘when men get married they expect their wife to look like she does for the rest of her life; when women get married they expect to change the man into the person they want him to be’.

I call this the Sex in the City syndrome. After the TV show which is based on the permanent illusion that men will somehow become what women want them to be.

It is my contention that this concept is the backbone of single female thinking.  It constitutes a major reason why single women would vote for a Democrat, particularly the Obama type Democratic who promises that human beings can be changed. Democrats generally believe human beings can be improved by government action and policy.

It is my contention that marriage is an effective antidote to this single woman’s backbone worldview.

Consequently, I see no change on the horizon unless single women lose faith in the Democrats to do what they promise.