CMC Presidency Course

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The Nomination Process & 2008

The best ad of 2008:

Fred Thompson did not set the race on fire.

Democratic demographics helped explain Obama's advantage.

So did the issue of change v. experience.

Hillary Clinton had certain key assumptions.

Obama built a huge fundraising advantage.

Obama emerges

The speech led to a certain music video. Ten million views so far:

HRC tears up during NH campaign stop

Fox News "helpfully" compiled Jeremiah Wright's greatest hits:

The 3 AM ad:

HRC's Bosnia problem

The bitter clingers:

So long, Tim

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Scots-Irish

Cameron Joseph `08 has a perceptive analysis of the Scots-Irish vote at The Atlantic:

The populist fury aimed at President Obama and his fellow Democrats may have roots much deeper than health care. In fact, it may be that it can be traced back to the emigration of the Scots-Irish, the first white group to settle interior America.They've been called rednecks, hillbillies and crackers. In the modern parlance of political correctness, they've been referred to as the Bubba vote. They live in Sarah Palin's "real America," and they make up the majority of Reagan Democrats. They count as distant relatives at least twelve U.S. presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and even to Barack Obama, yet the Scots-Irish remain largely ignored as an ethnic group in America

Monday, October 5, 2009

Here are some answers to recent questions that have come up in class:

1. Milkis and Nelson are not quite accurate when they speak of "a signficiant reduction in domestic spending" under Reagan (p. 370). In constant FY2000 dollars, there was a drop in nondefense discretionary spending, from $282.1 billion in FY81 to $255.3 billion in FY89. But more than offsetting this change were large increases in other areas of domestic spending:

...............................FY81......FY89
Social Security.......$246b....$300b
Means-Tested
Entitlements (for
the needy)..............$93b.......$111b

2. Here is the formula for the Major Party Index (MPI): ((Most recent 2-Party Republican Presidential Vote)*0.25) + ((Average of the Two Most Recent Republican 2-Party Votes for the U.S. Senate)*0.125) + ((Republican 2- Party Percent of all U.S. House Votes)*0.125) + ((Most Recent 2-Party Republican Vote for Governor)*0.25) + ((2-Party Republican Percentage of Seats in the State Senate)*0.125) + ((2-Party Republican Percentage of Seats in the State House)*0.125). More detail here.

3. In 1976, the first year for which we have FEC data, all presidential candidates in both parties raised a total of $171 million in the primary and general election campaigns. That amount equals $647 million in 2008 dollars (CPI). The latest figures show that Barack Obama raised $656 million in 2008. In other words, he raised more money than all of the 1976 candidates put together.

More Gallup Polls

During today's examination of party identification I remembered Nate Silver's piece about coming of age during different Presidential administrations.

Mr. Silver argues:

What's interesting, though, is what happens when we look at not these abstract generational categories, but rather at the following question: who was President when you turned 18? As annotated in the chart below, the popularity -- or lack thereof -- of the President when the voter turned 18 would seem to have a lot of explanatory power for how their politics turned out later on.