October 22, 2008
Gabriel Schoenfeld teams up with Aaron Friedberg producing a WSJ OpEd on what the world
might be like with a diminished U. S. presence.
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely to diminish? If
so, what would that mean?
One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across the world is that the
primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face an entirely new and
adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237
billion from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and
expensive domestic relief programs.
In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to
lay out what portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has
suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid. This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary
terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where we may be headed: toward a
major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-induced isolationism.
Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already intense before this
crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular.
Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might
well become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions.
Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before
our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many
Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow. ...
David Warren writes on Obama as "savior."
... The hysteria over global warming, the hysteria over the banking crisis, the hysteria over Barack Obama's
presidential candidacy -- to name just three hysterias in a rich international field, and not even mention
Islamist terrorism or the word "Eurabia" -- combine in strange ways to make a reading tour of any major
newspaper (or Internet news aggregator for that matter) into a simulated space flight.
We live in a country that just re-elected a Conservative Party that has tried very hard to remain boring,
generally; and more specifically, inoffensive to our media, bureaucratic, academic, and legal elites. They
barely limped home, owing largely to the fact that the principal opposition party was led by a man (I wouldn't
be so cruel as to name him) who could not formulate sound bites in English (or any other language).
But had we recently joined those United States of America, in some alternative universe, Mr. Obama would
be in no need of the estimated $700 million he will have raised, in total, to pump into swing states in the final
fortnight of the U.S. election. For according to casual polls up here, Obama would sweep all ten hypothetical
ex-Canadian states by breathtaking margins, without a nickel of advertising. ...
Different view of Obama from Richard Epstein, ChiLaw prof.
... Put otherwise, Obama's vague calls for change that "you can believe in" are, to my thinking, wholly
retrograde in their implications. At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate,
both sides on every question--but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a
vengeance.
That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into
a global depression. The first of these is his anti-free trade attitude that loomed so large in the primaries. But
even Obama cannot repeal the principle of comparative advantage. Any efforts to scuttle NAFTA, deny fast-
track approval to other agreements, or limit outsourcing will not be as dramatic as the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
But combined, they would act as a depressant on general economic growth. Everyone would suffer.
Second, Obama is committed to strengthening unions by his endorsement of the Employer Free Choice Act,
a misnamed statute that forces union recognition without elections and employment contracts through
mandatory arbitration thereafter. That one-two punch could tie up the very small businesses that Obama
seems determined to help. Tax relief won't work for firms that won't get formed because a labor fight is not in
their initial budget.
And third, he is in favor of progressive individual taxes and high corporate taxes. It is as though the U.S.
does not have to compete for labor and capital in global markets. My fear is that with his strong egalitarian
bent, he has not internalized the lesson that high rates do not offset declining revenues.
Thus, even before we get to the added bells and whistles of the modern welfare state--windfall profits taxes,
ethanol subsidies, health care--an Obama administration could lock us into a downward spiral by ignoring
the simple fundamentals of sound governance. Boy, does this stalwart libertarian ever hope that his friends
are right and his gloomy prediction is wrong!
Michael Barone with a learned discussion of polls.
Can we trust the polls this year? That's a question many people have been asking as we approach the end
of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is
yes -- with qualifications.
To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random
sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get
a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can
reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the
whole population they're sampling.
Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such
households, and found their candidate preferences aren't much different from those with landlines; and
some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing
number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can't know for sure if they're different in some pertinent
respects from those who are willing to answer questions.
Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if
we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the
presidential candidates is black?
It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated
the margin for the black Democrats who were running -- Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to
account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the
white Republican. ...
John Stossel reminds us of Hayek's "spontaneous order."
... The only times we have shortages in America are after governments intrude, like when President Nixon
appointed an energy czar to regulate gas prices, and this year, when some states' anti-"gouging" laws
prevented gas stations from raising prices after storms.
Despite the repeated failure of central planning, the political class acts as if politicians can direct our lives.
When there are problems, politicians will solve them. They're going to give us prosperity and cheap health
care, fix education, lower gas prices, stop global warming and make us energy "independent."
And that's just the beginning. A speaker at the Republic convention said, "If you want to fight childhood
obesity, then John is your man."
Who do people think these guys are?
"We actually think that some people can do magic," says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. "Voters would
have to believe that every politician is some combination of Superman, Santa Claus and Mother Teresa.
Superman because he can do anything. Santa Claus because he's going to give us things.
"It's kind of an instinctive reaction," says Boaz. "But a president can't fix all the problems in your life."
That's OK. Most of life works best when you are in charge.
So how effective is TSA airport screening you ask? Jeffery Goldberg has answers in The
Atlantic Monthly.
IF I WERE a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a
C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I
would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place
myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of
counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named
Bruce Schneier. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which
consists of a Sony VAIO laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation
Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an
egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at
the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late. ...
... As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom
users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass
through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I
splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and
approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document
checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He
said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting
to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my
driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added.
He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card,
and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”
Dilbert and Borowitz are here today.
WSJ
The Dangers of a Diminished America
In the 1930s, isolationism and protectionism spurred the rise of fascism.
by Aaron Friedberg and Gabriel Schoenfeld.
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely to diminish? If
so, what would that mean?
One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across the world is that the
primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face an entirely new and
adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237
billion from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and
expensive domestic relief programs.
David Gothard
In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to
lay out what portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has
suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid. This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary
terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where we may be headed: toward a
major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-induced isolationism.
Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already intense before this
crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular.
Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might
well become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions.
Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before
our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many
Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow.
Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial architecture. For
decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide
use of the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge
budget deficits, as we counted on foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a
safe haven. Will this be possible in the future?
Meanwhile, traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic
terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their bellicose paths,
while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to chaos. Russia's new militancy and
China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern.
If America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum. The
stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our position as
defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines could all be placed at risk.
In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground nearly to a halt, the
peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics who rose
up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk that rogue states may
choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our moment of maximum vulnerability.
The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly rock our principal strategic competitors even
harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the Russian stock market has demonstrated the
fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices, now driven down by the global
slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on foreign
investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and
perhaps even sparking unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to
prosperity.
None of this is good news if the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal
travails with external adventures.
As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when many European nations are struggling to deal
with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past
dynamism, Japan faces similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world
economic and geopolitical power.
What does this all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before
us is between the potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued
American leadership.
Are we up for the task? The American economy has historically demonstrated remarkable resilience. Our
market-oriented ideology, entrepreneurial culture, flexible institutions and favorable demographic profile
should serve us well in whatever trials lie ahead.
The American people, too, have shown reserves of resolve when properly led. But experience after the Cold
War era -- poorly articulated and executed policies, divisive domestic debates and rising anti-Americanism in
at least some parts of the world -- appear to have left these reserves diminished.
A recent survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs found that 36% of respondents agreed that the
U.S. should "stay out of world affairs," the highest number recorded since this question was first asked in
1947. The economic crisis could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
In the past, the American political process has managed to yield up remarkable leaders when they were
most needed. As voters go to the polls in the shadow of an impending world crisis, they need to ask
themselves which candidate -- based upon intellect, courage, past experience and personal testing -- is
most likely to rise to an occasion as grave as the one we now face.
Mr. Friedberg is a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson
School. Mr. Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, is a visiting scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in
Princeton, N.J.
Ottawa Citizen
Obama, the world's saviour
by David Warren
That we cannot solve, or even assuage, any problem, on the basis of wrong information, is one of those
articles of faith to which I continue to subscribe, along with the Nicene Creed, and the proposition that two
plus two will always equal four -- not only in this world, but in all possible worlds.
This admits of the "exception that proves the rule," however, under my also oft-repeated "iron law of
paradox." For information is just information, there is always more to be had, and it sometimes happens that
a problem goes away, notwithstanding our best efforts to take the wrong end of the stick, and beat it until it
gets much worse. In my Catholic Church, we have a variety of little prayers that turn on the logic, "Lord,
don't send us the fate we deserve," and I utter it quite earnestly at times like this -- when, to cite the daily
rubric in James Taranto's excellent Wall Street Journal web column, "Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out
of Control."
The hysteria over global warming, the hysteria over the banking crisis, the hysteria over Barack Obama's
presidential candidacy -- to name just three hysterias in a rich international field, and not even mention
Islamist terrorism or the word "Eurabia" -- combine in strange ways to make a reading tour of any major
newspaper (or Internet news aggregator for that matter) into a simulated space flight.
We live in a country that just re-elected a Conservative Party that has tried very hard to remain boring,
generally; and more specifically, inoffensive to our media, bureaucratic, academic, and legal elites. They
barely limped home, owing largely to the fact that the principal opposition party was led by a man (I wouldn't
be so cruel as to name him) who could not formulate sound bites in English (or any other language).
But had we recently joined those United States of America, in some alternative universe, Mr. Obama would
be in no need of the estimated $700 million he will have raised, in total, to pump into swing states in the final
fortnight of the U.S. election. For according to casual polls up here, Obama would sweep all ten hypothetical
ex-Canadian states by breathtaking margins, without a nickel of advertising.
Hypotheticals are not actuals, however. Were we in fact part of the United States, we might prove no more
Democrat than Alaska -- for our whole attitude towards the election would be changed by the prospect of
living with the results.
The same comment goes for almost every other country, for with the exception of several ex-Communist
corners of central Europe, the whole world overwhelmingly wants Obama to win. That the whole world is
hardly interested in the alternative policies of U.S. Democrats and Republicans, and knows little if anything
about the real stakes, should go without saying. Everyone has an opinion about what someone else should
do.
The idea of "Obama as Saviour" -- cultivated by the man himself in the earlier laps of his marathon
campaign, and expressed forthrightly in his remarkable memoir, The Audacity of Hope -- has seized hold of
the planet, though not entirely of the United States.
For in the U.S., contrary to bullying media impressions, the polls still show the two presidential tickets
surprisingly close -- five or six points between them in the RealClearPolitics national average, and more like
two points when the numbers are re-sorted to represent those most likely to vote. Those points could easily
disappear after discounting the systemic bias towards Obama in polls that over-sample urban Democrats, to
say nothing of the next few days. Meanwhile, the proportion of "undecideds" seems to be growing.
This is the classic set-up for a Truman-beats-Dewey "November surprise." Alternatively, it is the classic setup for a Reagan-beats-Carter-in-landslide -- for over the last weekend before the election, the "undecideds"
may indeed swing decisively for the apparently revolutionary candidate, on the principle that you only live
once.
The Democrats, and their running dogs in the mass media, have tried repeatedly to present the competition
for votes as a referendum on race -- that is to say, the only thing that could possibly explain an Obama
defeat, would be, "America is racist." (Behind that lies the culture wars, writ very large.) I think anyone in his
right mind should be able to see through that imposture, but then, I'm not sure how many Democrats are
currently in their right minds.
The world, however, is anti-American enough to accept that analysis at face value. In a moment of
international hysterias (note plural), the notion of Obama as Saviour (simply in being Obama, regardless
what he might subsequently do), carries no rational restrictions. And while I am confident that the fallout
from a McCain victory could be contained by the National Guard in the U.S., I'm beginning to worry about
the international ramifications.
Forbes
The Obama I (Don't) Know
by Richard A. Epstein
CHICAGO My Obama number is one. I know him through our association at the University of
Chicago Law School and through mutual friends in the neighborhood. We have
had one or two serious substantive discussions, and when I sent him e-mails from
time to time in the early days of his Senate term, he always answered in a sensible
and thoughtful fashion. And yet, for assessing the course of his likely presidency, I
don't know him at all.
It should come as no surprise that the traditionally liberal Hyde Park community is
a veritable hotbed of support for Obama. So my manifest reluctance on his
candidacy raises more than a single eyebrow: Loyalty for the home team counts.
The odd point is how his many learned and thoughtful supporters couch their endorsement. Almost without
exception, they praise the man, not the program. Their claim is that Obama has proved himself to be a
consummate politician who understands that the first principle of holding high office is to get reelected. His
natural moderation in tone and demeanor, therefore, translate into getting advisers who know their
substantive areas, and listening to them before making any rash moves. The dominant trope is that he will
be a pragmatic president who will move in small increments toward the center, not in bold steps toward the
left.
But is it all true? The short answer is that nobody knows. Virtually everyone who knows him recognizes that
he plays his cards close to the vest, so that you can make your case to him without knowing whether it has
registered. At this point, my fear is that the change in office will not lead to a change in his liberal voting
record, as reinforced by a hyperactive Democratic platform. My great fear is that a landslide victory will give
him solid majorities in both Houses of Congress, so that no stalling tactics by Republicans can slow down
his legislative victory procession. At that point his innate pragmatism will line up with his strong left-of-center
beliefs on issues that have thus far been muted during the campaign.
Put otherwise, Obama's vague calls for change that "you can believe in" are, to my thinking, wholly
retrograde in their implications. At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate,
both sides on every question--but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a
vengeance.
That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into
a global depression. The first of these is his anti-free trade attitude that loomed so large in the primaries. But
even Obama cannot repeal the principle of comparative advantage. Any efforts to scuttle NAFTA, deny fasttrack approval to other agreements, or limit outsourcing will not be as dramatic as the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
But combined, they would act as a depressant on general economic growth. Everyone would suffer.
Second, Obama is committed to strengthening unions by his endorsement of the Employer Free Choice Act,
a misnamed statute that forces union recognition without elections and employment contracts through
mandatory arbitration thereafter. That one-two punch could tie up the very small businesses that Obama
seems determined to help. Tax relief won't work for firms that won't get formed because a labor fight is not in
their initial budget.
And third, he is in favor of progressive individual taxes and high corporate taxes. It is as though the U.S.
does not have to compete for labor and capital in global markets. My fear is that with his strong egalitarian
bent, he has not internalized the lesson that high rates do not offset declining revenues.
Thus, even before we get to the added bells and whistles of the modern welfare state--windfall profits taxes,
ethanol subsidies, health care--an Obama administration could lock us into a downward spiral by ignoring
the simple fundamentals of sound governance. Boy, does this stalwart libertarian ever hope that his friends
are right and his gloomy prediction is wrong!
Richard Epstein writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. He is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover
Institution and a professor of law at the University of Chicago, visiting this fall at the New York University
School of Law.
WSJ
Are the Polls Accurate?
Reading them right is more art than science.
by Michael Barone
Can we trust the polls this year? That's a question many people have been asking as we approach the end
of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is
yes -- with qualifications.
Martin Kozlowski
To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random
sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get
a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can
reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the
whole population they're sampling.
Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such
households, and found their candidate preferences aren't much different from those with landlines; and
some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing
number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can't know for sure if they're different in some pertinent
respects from those who are willing to answer questions.
Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if
we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the
presidential candidates is black?
It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated
the margin for the black Democrats who were running -- Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to
account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the
white Republican.
It's not clear that race was the issue. Recently pollster Lance Tarrance and political consultant Sal Russo,
who worked for Bradley's opponent George Deukmejian, have written (Mr. Tarrance in
RealClearPolitics.com, and Mr. Russo on this page) that their polls got the election right and that public
pollsters failed to take into account a successful Republican absentee voter drive. Blair Levin, a Democrat
who worked for Bradley, has argued in the same vein in the New York Times. In Virginia, Douglas Wilder
was running around 50% in the polls and his Republican opponent Marshall Coleman was well behind; yet
Mr. Wilder won with 50.1% of the vote.
These may have been cases of the common phenomenon of the better-known candidate getting about the
same percentage from voters as he did in polls, and the lesser-known candidate doing better with voters
than he had in the polls. Some significant percentage of voters will pull the lever for the Republican (or the
Democratic) candidate even if they didn't know his name or much about him when they entered the voting
booth. In any case, Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins, after examining dozens of races involving black
candidates, reported this year, at a meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, that he'd found no
examples of the "Bradley Effect" since 1996.
And what about Barack Obama? In most of the presidential primaries, Sen. Obama received about the same
percentage of the votes as he had in the most recent polls. The one notable exception was in New
Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton's tearful moment seems to have changed many votes in the last days.
Yet there was a curious anomaly: In most primaries Mr. Obama tended to receive higher percentages in exit
polls than he did from the voters. What accounts for this discrepancy?
While there is no definitive answer, it's worth noting that only about half of Americans approached to take the
exit poll agree to do so (compared to 90% in Mexico and Russia). Thus it seems likely that Obama voters -more enthusiastic about their candidate than Clinton voters by most measures (like strength of support in
poll questions) -- were more willing to fill out the exit poll forms and drop them in the box.
What this suggests is that Mr. Obama will win about the same percentage of votes as he gets in the last
rounds of polling before the election. That's not bad news for his campaign, as the polls stand now. The
realclearpolitics.com average of recent national polls, as I write, shows Mr. Obama leading John McCain by
50% to 45%.
If Mr. Obama gets the votes of any perceptible number of undecideds (or if any perceptible number of them
don't vote) he'll win a popular vote majority, something only one Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, has
done in the last 40 years.
In state polls, Mr. Obama is currently getting 50% or more in the realclearpolitics.com averages in states
with 286 electoral votes, including four carried by George W. Bush -- Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and
Virginia. He leads, with less than 50%, in five more Bush '04 states with 78 electoral votes -- Florida,
Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. It's certainly plausible, given the current state of opinion, that he
would carry several if not all of them.
Of course, the balance of opinion could change, as it has several times in this campaign, and as it has in the
past. Harry Truman was trailing Thomas E. Dewey by 5% in the last Gallup poll in 1948, conducted between
Oct. 15 and 25 -- the same margin by which Mr. Obama seems to be leading now. But on Nov. 2, 18 days
after Gallup's first interviews and eight days after its last, Truman ended up winning 50% to 45%. Gallup
may well have gotten it right when in the field; opinion could just have changed.
We have no way of knowing, since George Gallup was just about the only public pollster back then, and he
decided on the basis of his experience in the three preceding presidential elections that there was no point
in testing opinion in the last week. Now we have a rich body of polling data, of varying reliability, available.
And we will have the exit poll, the partial results of which will be released to the media clients of the
Edison/Mitofsky consortium at 5 p.m. on Election Day. These clients should, I believe, use the numbers
cautiously for the following reasons.
First, the exit polls in the recent presidential elections have tended to show the Democrats doing better than
they actually did, partly because of interviewer error. The late Warren Mitofsky, in his study of the 2004 exit
poll, found that the largest errors came in precincts where the interviewers were female graduate students.
Second, the exit polls in almost all the primaries this year showed Mr. Obama doing better than he actually
did. The same respondent bias -- the greater willingness of Obama voters to be polled -- which apparently
occurred on primary days could also occur in the exit poll on Election Day, and in the phone polls of early
and absentee voters that Edison/Mitofsky will conduct to supplement it.
The exit poll gives us, and future political scientists, a treasure trove of information about the voting behavior
of subgroups of the electorate, and also some useful insight into the reasons why people voted as they did.
And the current plethora of polls gives us a rich lode of information on what voters are thinking at each stage
of the campaign. But political polls are imperfect instruments. Reading them right is less a science than an
art. We can trust the polls, with qualifications. We will have a chance to verify as the election returns come
in.
Mr. Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, is co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics 2008" (National Journal Group). From 1974 to
1981 he was a vice president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, a polling firm.
Townhall
Unappreciated Spontaneous Order
by John Stossel
Avid supporters of John McCain and Barack Obama cannot wait until their man gets into office. They say
things like: McCain "will bring peace and stability to the United States." Or that under Obama "our kids and
our grandkids will have a better life."
But how can one man be expected to do such grand things? It's easy to think that complex problems require
centrally planned solutions. But the opposite is true: The more complex a problem, the more centralized
political decision-making is not the answer.
Try this thought experiment suggested by economist Daniel Klein of George Mason University. Imagine you
had never seen a skating rink and were told that people were going to strap blades to their feet and propel
themselves on the ice wherever they chose at whatever speed they could -- without a license and with no
one directing traffic.
You'd say, "That's insane! We must have rules, signs and traffic cops, or skaters will smash into each other."
But of course skating rinks demonstrate that there is another way to organize life: spontaneous order. Most
of our economy works that way, and when government tries to micromanage that, it messes it up
I tested this theory for my ABC special "John Stossel's Political Incorrect Guide to Politics," by trying to
centrally plan a skating rink. I stood on the ice and gave commands: "Turn right. Turn left! No backwards
skating!"
It didn't work. People were falling down.
OK, maybe I don't know enough about skating. What if an Olympic gold medalist -- Brian Boitano -- took
charge?
That didn't work either. Even the Olympian, with his vastly greater knowledge, couldn't make the skating
better by directing it. People hated being bossed. They wouldn't listen.
"They want to do their own thing," Boitano said.
"It kinda ruins the fun of it," a woman skater said.
Much of life would be a drag if a leader directed everything. And fortunately, most of our lives are selfdirected. Spontaneous order, not government, prevails. It's so commonplace we take it for granted.
Some people would say the skating rink works because it's small. When it's a big place like America, you
need planning.
"The more complex the problem, the more planning you need," says Russell Roberts, author of "The Price of
Everything." "But it's not planning at the top. It's planning from the bottom up."
At the rink it means the planning is done by individual skaters, who spontaneously coordinate with others.
Each knows more than a central planner would know.
Spontaneous order is found in things far more complex than skating rinks. Language is useful, flexible -- and
hair-raisingly complicated. No one constructed it. But when someone tried to build the perfect language,
Esperanto, it flopped.
Communism was adopted by more countries than Esperanto, but it also failed because planners never could
anticipate the myriad wants of different people. Russians spent hours a day in lines. Millions starved.
The only times we have shortages in America are after governments intrude, like when President Nixon
appointed an energy czar to regulate gas prices, and this year, when some states' anti-"gouging" laws
prevented gas stations from raising prices after storms.
Despite the repeated failure of central planning, the political class acts as if politicians can direct our lives.
When there are problems, politicians will solve them. They're going to give us prosperity and cheap health
care, fix education, lower gas prices, stop global warming and make us energy "independent."
And that's just the beginning. A speaker at the Republic convention said, "If you want to fight childhood
obesity, then John is your man."
Who do people think these guys are?
"We actually think that some people can do magic," says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. "Voters would
have to believe that every politician is some combination of Superman, Santa Claus and Mother Teresa.
Superman because he can do anything. Santa Claus because he's going to give us things.
"It's kind of an instinctive reaction," says Boaz. "But a president can't fix all the problems in your life."
That's OK. Most of life works best when you are in charge.
Atlantic Monthly
The Things He Carried
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and
catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all
manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
IF I WERE a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a
C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I
would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place
myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of
counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named
Bruce Schneier. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which
consists of a Sony VAIO laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation
Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an
egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at
the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late.
I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to,
partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the
commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials
trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would
report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my
plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a
large American airport. Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to
prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art—I have for
some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA’s security regimen
seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on
bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and
so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my
home airport, Washington’s Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but
also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport
(which is where I came closest to arousing at least a modest level of suspicion, receiving a symbolic patdown—all frisks that avoid the sensitive regions are by definition symbolic—and one question about the
presence of a Leatherman Multi-Tool in my pocket; said Leatherman was confiscated and is now, I hope,
living with the loving family of a TSA employee). And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting
on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed
an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir
Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also
carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of
rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji
Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out
of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I
was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a
spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder
and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football
games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The
company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to
25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My
Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the
inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by
the federal government.
On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my
secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, threefoot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as
its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic
writing that reads THEN SURELY THE PARTY OF GOD ARE THEY WHO WILL BE TRIUMPHANT. The
officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my
flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Not “Uh-huh, I’ve been
trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical
person, your behavior, and your last name, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley–
trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system,” but “Uh-huh, I’m going on break, why are
you talking to me?”
The author's forged boarding pass—complete with Platinum/Elite Plus status and magical TSA-approval squiggle—
got him through security.
In Minneapolis, I littered my carry-on with many of my prohibited items, and also an OSAMA BIN LADEN,
HERO OF ISLAM T-shirt, which often gets a rise out of people who see it. This day, however, would feature
a different sort of experiment, designed to prove not only that the TSA often cannot find anything on you or
in your carry-on, but that it has no actual idea who you are, despite the government’s effort to build a
comprehensive “no-fly” list. A no-fly list would be a good idea if it worked; Bruce Schneier’s homemade
boarding passes were about to prove that it doesn’t. Schneier is the TSA’s most relentless, and effective,
critic; the TSA director, Kip Hawley, told me he respects Schneier’s opinions, though Schneier quite clearly
makes his life miserable.
“The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists,” Schneier told me. A smart terrorist, he says, won’t
try to bring a knife aboard a plane, as I had been doing; he’ll make his own, in the airplane bathroom.
Schneier told me the recipe: “Get some steel epoxy glue at a hardware store. It comes in two tubes, one
with steel dust and then a hardener. You make the mold by folding a piece of cardboard in two, and then you
mix the two tubes together. You can use a metal spoon for the handle. It hardens in 15 minutes.”
As we stood at an airport Starbucks, Schneier spread before me a batch of fabricated boarding passes for
Northwest Airlines flight 1714, scheduled to depart at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Reagan National at 5:47 p.m.
He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status,
which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the
expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous
places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security
checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured. (I once asked Michael Chertoff, the secretary of
Homeland Security, about this. “We actually ultimately do have a vision of trying to move the security
checkpoint away from the gate, deeper into the airport itself, but there’s always going to be some place that
people congregate. So if you’re asking me, is there any way to protect against a person taking a bomb into a
crowded location and blowing it up, the answer is no.”)
Schneier and I walked to the security checkpoint. “Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to
make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit
doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda
will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last
week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were
rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency
response.”
Schneier and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,”
he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security
officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers
use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding
passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The
SPOT program—“Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques”—was based in part on the work of
a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “microexpressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week
long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chickenscratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We
took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled
“saline solution.”
“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the
TSA’s three-ounce rule.
“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”
“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”
They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schneier held up the bottle and said to the nearest
security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”
“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security.
(Later, Schneier would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An
officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)
We were in the clear. But what did we prove?
“We proved that the ID triangle is hopeless,” Schneier said.
The ID triangle: before a passenger boards a commercial flight, he interacts with his airline or the
government three times—when he purchases his ticket; when he passes through airport security; and finally
at the gate, when he presents his boarding pass to an airline agent. It is at the first point of contact, when the
ticket is purchased, that a passenger’s name is checked against the government’s no-fly list. It is not
checked again, and for this reason, Schneier argued, the process is merely another form of security theater.
“The goal is to make sure that this ID triangle represents one person,” he explained. “Here’s how you get
around it. Let’s assume you’re a terrorist and you believe your name is on the watch list.” It’s easy for a
terrorist to check whether the government has cottoned on to his existence, Schneier said; he simply has to
submit his name online to the new, privately run CLEAR program, which is meant to fast-pass approved
travelers through security. If the terrorist is rejected, then he knows he’s on the watch list.
To slip through the only check against the no-fly list, the terrorist uses a stolen credit card to buy a ticket
under a fake name. “Then you print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You
give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the
documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the
airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real
boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not
checking your name against your ID at boarding.”
What if you don’t know how to steal a credit card?
“Then you’re a stupid terrorist and the government will catch you,” he said.
What if you don’t know how to download a PDF of an actual boarding pass and alter it on a home computer?
“Then you’re a stupid terrorist and the government will catch you.”
I couldn’t believe that what Schneier was saying was true—in the national debate over the no-fly list, it is
seldom, if ever, mentioned that the no-fly list doesn’t work. “It’s true,” he said. “The gap blows the whole
system out of the water.”
This called for a visit to TSA headquarters. The headquarters is located in Pentagon City, just outside
Washington. Kip Hawley, the man who runs the agency, is a bluff, amiable fellow who is capable of making
a TSA joke. “Do you want three ounces of water?” he asked me.
I raised the subject of the ID triangle, hoping to get a cogent explanation. This is what Hawley said: “The
TDC”—that’s “ticket document checker”—“will make a notation on your ticket and that’s something that will
follow you all the way through” to the gate.
“But all they do is write a little squiggly mark on the boarding pass,” I said.
“You think you might be able to forge that?” he asked me.
“My handwriting is terrible, but don’t you think someone can forge it?” I asked.
“Well, uh, maybe. Maybe not,” he said.
Aha! I thought. He’s hiding something from me.
“Are you telling me that I don’t know about something that’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re well aware of the scenario you describe. Bruce has been talking about it for two years,” he said,
referring to Schneier’s efforts to publicize the gaps in the ID triangle.
“Isn’t it a basic flaw, that you’re checking the no-fly list at the point of purchase, not at the airport?”
He leaned back in his chair.
“What do you do about vulnerabilities?” he asked, rhetorically. “All the time you hear reports and people
saying, ‘There’s a vulnerability.’ Well, duh. There are vulnerabilities everywhere, in everything. The question
is not ‘Is there a vulnerability?’ It’s ‘What are you doing about it?’”
Well, what are you doing about it?
“There are vulnerabilities where you have limited ways to address it directly. So you have to put other layers
around it, other things that will catch them when that vulnerability is breached. This is a universal problem.
Somebody will identify a very small thing and drill down and say, ‘I found a vulnerability.’”
In other words, the TSA has no immediate plans to check passengers against the no-fly list at the moment
before they board their flight. (Hawley said that boarding passes will eventually be encrypted so the TSA can
follow their progress from printer to gate.) Nor does it plan to screen airport employees when they show up
for work each day. Pilots—or people dressed as pilots—are screened, as the public knows, but that’s
because they enter the airport through the front door. The employees who drive fuel trucks, and make french
fries at McDonald’s, and clean airplane bathrooms (to the extent that they’re cleaned anymore) do not pass
through magnetometers when they enter the airport, and their possessions are not searched. To me this
always seemed to be, well, another “vulnerability.”
“Do you know what you have on the inside of an airport?” Hawley asked me. “You have all the military
traveling, you have guns, chemicals, jet fuel. So the idea that we would spend a whole lot of resources
putting a perimeter around that, running every worker, 50,000 people, every day, through security—why in
the heck would you do that? Because all they have to do is walk through clean and then have someone
throw something over a fence.”
I asked about the depth of background screening for airport employees. He said, noncommittally, “It goes
reasonably deep.”
So there are, in other words, two classes of people in airports: those whose shoes are inspected for
explosives, and those whose aren’t. How, I asked, do you explain that to the public in a way that makes
sense?
“Social networks,” he answered. “It’s a very tuned-in workforce. You’re never alone when you’re on or
around a plane. ‘What is that guy spending all that time in the cockpit for?’ All airport employees know what
normal is.” Hawley did say that TSA employees conduct random ID checks and magnetometer screenings,
but he did not say how frequently.
I suppose I’ve seen too many movies, but, really? Social networks? Behavior detection? The TSA budget is
almost $7 billion. That money would be better spent on the penetration of al-Qaeda social networks.
As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom
users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass
through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I
splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and
approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document
checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He
said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting
to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my
driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added.
He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card,
and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”
Dilbert's Blog
Unlearned Skills
I read somewhere that the number one thing men want from their wives is to be appreciated for what they do
right, as opposed to criticized for what they do wrong. I assume that showing appreciation is a learnable
skill, just like saying please and thank you. So while the school girls in this country are learning that mylonite
is a breccieated metamorphic rock frequently found in a fault zone (to recycle a phrase), they are learning
nothing about how to keep their future marriages intact.
Likewise, the little boys in this country are learning nothing about how to be better future husbands and
fathers.
Kids also learn nothing about the importance of a positive outlook, especially how it affects other people.
They don't learn about setting goals, or managing risk, or discerning the difference between truth and lies in
the media and in person.
You could make your own long list of skills that kids aren't taught during the time they are learning things
they will never use. Yes, yes, yes, I understand that some of the subjects taught in school are meant to
increase critical thinking and generally expand minds as opposed to teaching useful facts, but isn't there a
way to accomplish the same thing with topics that ARE useful?
I'm in the process of building a house. (This is year 3.5 of the process, and ground was broken just
yesterday.) While the project is frustrating, it is also intellectually fascinating. I had no idea how many
technical disciplines would be involved. There's even an engineer who specializes in knowing how to move
the dirt from one part of the property and fill in a hole in another, packing it down in just the right way to
make it stable for the foundation.
You could take any tiny portion of the house project and make it an exercise in critical thinking. I can imagine
a school curriculum organized around building an imaginary house, advancing from first grade through high
school. Kids could learn all sorts of useful skills, from budgeting (math), to calculating loads (science), to
learning how couples can decide on the fixtures and furniture. Your geography course could be based on
deciding what country to build your house in. Geology would be oriented toward deciding what type of land
to build on. Art class would involve interior design and architecture, with a semester on how to identify good
art for the walls. Biology would involve understanding your own future garden and plants. Evolution would
involve learning why your family dog walks on four legs and you walk on two.
You would learn all the critical thinking you ever needed just trying to design a kitchen that requires the
fewest footsteps and fits into a defined space, with a limited budget.
Kids who are gifted would learn more about the math and science behind the engineering of the house. Kids
on a more hands-on career path might be learning how to pave the driveway or design the electrical system.
Designing and building a house employs almost every useful field of knowledge, excepting maybe history
and language.
Maybe we wouldn't be in this economic mess if all kids had to learn about budgeting, mortgage loans, and
risk analysis.
Borowitz Report
McCain Sends Biden to Key Swing States
Just Keep Talking,’ Says Mac
In a move unprecedented in the annals of presidential politics, Republican presidential nominee John
McCain announced today that he was sending Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph Biden on a
campaign trip to several key swing states.
"I told Joe, I will pay your plane fare, hotels, all your expenses," Sen. McCain said. "Just get out there and
say whatever's on your mind, my friend."
Sen. McCain added one small caveat: "Whatever you do, don't edit yourself."
The Arizona's senator's unusual proposal is part of what one aide called the campaign's "Two Joes"
strategy.
"For the next two weeks, this campaign is going to be all about two Joes," said McCain spokesman Tucker
Bounds. "Joe the Plumber and Joe the Blabber."
But the McCain campaign's plans were short-lived as Sen. Barack Obama today announced plans of his
own for talkative running mate: "Between now and the election, Joe Biden will be reaching out to voters in
Antarctica and possibly the Moon."
Sen. Biden said he was grateful for the assignment, adding, "I will be proud to serve under Barack Obama,
especially when one of our enemies tries to test him with a full-on nuclear attack. Kerblooey!!!!"