Detailed Abstractions

As depicted in the movie Blood Diamond, many diamond deposits around the world only function through government/militia oppression, slavery, violence, children soldiers, and really some of the worst actions on behalf of humans anywhere.

Enter the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme; which is an international process which is designed to certify the origins of raw diamonds as conflict free diamonds.   & they’ve been doing so well with this process, that UN member states have voted, less than a month ago, to extend their power in order to give them a better ability to halt non-certified diamonds.

Which all in all seems like a good thing.  It’s certainly a noble effort to try to prevent oppressors from making money off of violence and slavery.

Today’s announcement by the Kimberly Process however, should give reasonable people reason to question whether they are truly acting towards their stated goal (article here):

…The Kimberley Process has granted Zimbabwe permission to continue conducting supervised sales of diamonds….

With of course two sides to the story (article con’t):

…The issue of Zimbabwe selling the Marange diamonds has divided the KP along political lines with Western countries led by the United States, Germany and Australia as well as civil society groups that are members of the organisation calling for banning of the gems…

But African and other countries, including Russia, have opposed the calls to ban the diamonds, appearing to buy Harare’s claims that calls for banning of the Marange stones are driven more by the West’s dislike of President Robert Mugabe than by concern for human rights….

Theoretically two sides… assuming you ignore Zimbabwe’s constant chaos and conflict at the hands of their leader for more than 30 years Robert Mugabe.   He has taken a country and almost completely destroyed it all while singing songs of revolution and owed dues from those responsible for Apartheid.

(more…)

An excellent publication overall, the Economist, is using their online debates to ask a question which doesn’t seem to have any useful answer (here):

This house believes that America’s political system is broken.

The current debaters are Matthew Yglesias, defending the motion and Peter Wehner arguing against.   In their second round of the debate, the house is winning with a full 75% agreeing to a broken US political system.

I say it doesn’t seem to have any useful answer as the most likely result from such a poll will be based mainly upon emotions.  Since most lay people don’t typically sit around and try to analyze political systems, the answers from the majority of respondents will have to fall back on other knowledge and human behavior demoonstrates this is likely to be emotions.  IE – if I like what’s going on, no fixing.  If I don’t like what’s going on, it needs fixing.

Reminds me a little of an argument I’ve seen a number of times in the health care debate.  Invariably, someone will put up a poll telling me how many people think their health care costs are too high.  & my retort stays the same, with some variation of Socratic questioning like… ”So?  Did you expect to see a poll that said most Americans want to pay more for anything?”

But I digress, the question has been asked and for Mr. Yglesias, things aren’t going well.  His baisc argument starts something like this:

American political institutions are in a period of crisis. The source of the crisis is relatively simple. Our institutions work only when leaders can reasonably expect broad bipartisan co-operation, but the emergence of more ideologically rigorous parties makes such co-operation extremely unlikely…

Which might make for a good thesis, assuming you can prove that broad bipartisan co-operation is indeed a requirement (hell, prove it’s useful…) as well as proving that more ideologically rigorous parties have come into existence.

His proof?  In the short, yet varied history of the US, he points to the last few election cycles – excluding all information about 9/11 and two wars and the nominal fact that the higher the consequence of any legislation the more ferocious the public debate – he starts his historical research by going all the way back to President Bush the younger; who entered the presidency with:

…an unprecedentedly weak electoral mandate. More voters marked their ballots for Al Gore than marked their ballots for Mr Bush. The median voter in the election supported Mr Gore. But thanks to a combination of litigation, stubbornness and the perversity of the electoral college, Mr Bush succeeded in prevailing and becoming president….

Just a quick note here – is it a little odd to start an arguement to theoretically prove that idealogically rigirous institutions are harming us, by being idealogically rigid… but whatever.

He contends that the result of the weak mandate  and an inability to overcome a Senate fillubuster worked well:

…This led to a fair amount of legislative co-operation in the first Bush term. A series of important changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act were approved; an extremely costly new prescription drug benefit was added to Medicare; income taxes were steeply cut—all on an at least somewhat bipartisan basis….

Somewhat bipartisan?  Like idealogically rigirous, “somewhat bipartisan” is undefinable in any concrete terms, but a quick look on just the tax cuts seems to indicate consistent partisan fighting.

What we know?

The cuts themselves were passed in two bills.

1. Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 &
   1. Senate vote here, House vote here
2. Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.
   1. Vote totals here

In 2001: only 1 Republican voted against it in the Senate out of 33 nay votes (the other nays were Democrats), and in the House, all but one of the 154 nay votes were cast by Democrats.  & of course out of the yea votes, while less one sided, still doesn’t appear to be bipartisan.  In the Senate, 12 of the 58 yea votes were cast by Democrats and in the House 28 votes our of 240 yea votes were cast by Republicans.

& 2003?  I guess Mr. Yglesias would also be surprised to learn that in the 2003, the tax debate was even more lopsided (more…)

It’s a truism of real leaders since the dawn of time; they find themselves, not from true success and stable times, but rather from adversity and chaos. When faced with those seemingly insurmountable odds, it’s the strongest who remain calm, read the landscape, and discover new answers from which they can seek out continued success.

Though under great stress, we humans tend towards the flight or flight response. True leaders however, can use these difficulties against themselves to provide both motivation and a sense of urgency to gain the ingenuity required for such challenges.

This is understood well in society. Like business leaders who understand innovation can be helped significantly by design constraints (here):

Great designers understand this. Charles Eames says design is all about innovating around constraints. And it’s the constraints – the scarcity – that fires the designer’s creativity. Smart business people “get it” too. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos embraces self-imposed scarcity saying, “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”

They understand that principle of economic scarcity. As do military leaders. Sun Tzu notes in the Art of War:

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

For President Obama, the Tea Party & the Republicans taking back control of the House of Representatives could give him the opportunity to display true deft.

Assuming it does happen as predicted (here via the Philly Inquirer) however, the President is accorded a tough task ahead.

He would now have the body responsible for appropriations bills (all spending bills much start in the House & they are very important. For instance, they can kill health care by simply not funding it….) mainly in place due to running against him. Secondarily, while they don’t wish to be seen as obstructers, their willingness to work with Obama will be small even without their election strategy. Because any bill passed, regardless of how/why, if it turns out to be a good or well liked idea, Obama will naturally take credit to further his chances for re-election in 2012.

& the Democrats know that neither the President nor health care is a selling point for this election, even if they are communicating differently. The facts are that se hasn’t really made many direct candidate speeches, just backyard BBQs in key districts in key states. They are essentially, and correctly, playing against their weakness – his popularity.

Not a bad strategy in the short term, but I think people have heard him speak enough and any celebrity (yes, while the President is certainly more important and more powerful than any normal celebrity, s/he is still a celebrity) runs the risk of over saturation.

Irregardless, with Obama, the question is can he live inside those constraints?

What we know is given a new landscape, the answer for tomorrow’s question will not be the same answer as today’s. I think if he can push himself with a sense of urgency, surveys the landscape to see what he has and what he can accomplish with what he has. Then uses both the sense of urgency and strategic thinking by changing his game plan when the field of battle changes…. well, then we’ll see a real leader who may live up to his Nobel Peace Prize (here).

Or said more succinctly, it’s a crappy state of affairs you might find yourself in Mr. President, but challenges is how leaders prove themselves.

Honestly, I don’t think he’ll be able to do it. I think he’s too insecure (here) about himself and his handlers seem to know little more than an approval ratings drop equals time for Obama to give more speeches. & I don’t honestly think that’s likely to change…. but predictions are better left to Ms. Cleo.

What is likely however is the people around him understand exactly this point.  They do know it. The question is whether their emotions towards their beliefs (see: Confirmation Bias here & here) combined with the difficulty of telling a President who gives great speeches to shut up. Not to mention game theory predicts leaders to surround themselves with “yes men”.

All of that makes significant and required change seem unlikely, but I’d never count out someone who made it to the Presidency, nor, the team that helped him get there.

So Mr. President, here’s your chance.

Just 9 short years ago & I can still vividly remember every detail.  Where I was, the helplessness I felt, the drive to NYC to help on 9/12…. 17 hours straight.  The cloud of smoke hovering over the city from the smoldering rubble, clearly visible @ even 3 AM.  The posters of missing loved ones everywhere, the spontaneous candle light vigils, the make shift memorials on street corners, at buss stops, at fire & police stations, pictures hung up from school children outside of one while a cop lit the candles as nightfall descended…

But as that month drew closer to an end, my mind still asked the question “I wonder how long all this fellowship will really last?”

The reality? It lasted about two months, then back to politics as almost usual.

Which was bad enough, but then there came this week, the 9th anniversary of those attacks and all I heard was election year squabbling.

It’s strategic, one of the required steps in any war is to define your enemies clearly.  This not only helps your side focus, but also helps draw people into a common cause.

So here we are…. Mosque building here, Koran burning there….all politics.  All attempts to rally a base of voters, on both sides, my trying to paint the other side as “those people”, trying to connect them to unpopular ideas, trying to change your vote.

What a shame – so many heroes lost, so much more blood to be spilled in response, many more being asked to do very difficult things, many more heroes yet to die, many others returning, some with disabilities from which they will never recover, some with injuries, unseen by looking at them, the mental stress…. all who returned, changed forever.

& yet still…. election politics.  Strategic positioning, rhetorical maneuvering…. just politics.

For those who, like me, think it should mean much more than this, a solemn reminder (here):

Friday last week, I posted random links including a short story about the current Senate race between Carly Fiorina & Barbara Boxer (here):

…In what has to be either a sign of the end times or a sign of our bright future, Senator Barbara Boxer is in a tight race against former HP CEO Carly Fiorina…

While the true impact of the 2010 midterm elections is still ultimately up to a vote which hasn’t happened, the signs seem to all be pointing to good news based upon selectorate theory (DA post here):

..the theory is also powerful due to its simplicity.  It states that leaders will pay back those people that helped them become leaders in order to stay leaders.  This seems fairly intuitive and agrees with most understanding of incentives, but from here they can make predictions based upon the ration between what they call W, the Winning Coalition, and S,the selectorate or those who can affect who the leader is….

…The corollary with W/S is that when W is small as compared to S, the revenues spent will be mainly private and conversely if W is large compared to S, expenditures will be mostly public….

The basic idea is that the leader will use their power to pay back those who helped them get elected and the larger that coalition is, the less likely that money can come in the form of direct payoffs.

Now theoretically, in a free election system, W is 1/2 of S + 1.  IE – in order to get elected I need 50% of the votes plus one.

What happens however, if the voters through their actions artificially limit W?

How can they you ask?  Easily actually.

Every 10 years post census, each state will redraw district boundary lines based upon population numbers.  The problem is this “redrawing” isn’t done based on some objective science or even just basic math, but based on politics.  The way it currently works is the party in power redraws the districts.

Typically, the only ones who argue against these plans are the parties out of power.  Historically, the minority party would go to court, but courts have answered these challenges by stating that unless specific acts of discrimination or such can be proven, political redistricting is not something the court will actively change.

The reasoning is that voters have recourse already, so legally speaking the point is moot.  Their recourse is to elect those who redraw the district boundaries.

Now in states that change majority party from time to time, there are incentives for politicians to not gerymander individual districts too badly, least they be on the receiving end next time.

However, in states like CA or TX, where one party dominates, there are no incentives for the party in power to do anything but draw district boundaries in such a way as to ensure they can maintain power.

This is how we end up with politicians like Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi, who win their individual districts in landslide elections, but whose national approval rating is slightly higher than the IQ of a prune.

This is also the reason (here) “polls showing voter disgust, such as the dismally low congressional approval ratings, only show feelings.  The reality is even with rates of congressional approval as low as 16%, the rate for the election of incumbents is well over 90%.”

But his only works through voter ignorance.  The reality is voters are free to vote for whom they want.  Just because a district is redrawn to include mostly Democrat supporters, doesn’t mean those voters must vote for the Democrat.

We know the truth however for many voters is party loyalty and party identification are much stronger forces in their life than political analysis.

There are reasons for this as well, including the sheer complexity of the government itself.  This level of complexity means for a voter to be truly informed, a good deal of time is needed to sort through the information.  Time most people would rather spend with their families after work.  But I digress…. (read more about The Myth of the Rational Voter here via Cato)

The point is that while voters don’t have to vote party loyalty, the evidence is very strong to suggest they do.

Therefore - back to W/S as a ratio – if voters allow a district to always put a Democrat (or Republican) in that seat, they are effectively making the general election a formality whereas the real election is during the primaries.

This combined with the facts that primary voters represent a very small percentage of total voters & primary voters tend to be true believers, results is an artificial reduction of W in our ratio of W/S, ultimately reducing voter power.

While I tend to stay away from any predictions, the current trending of certain national Senate and Congressional races is showing a promising sign of reversing this trend for at least one election cycle.

Of course for now, these are only polls.  They only tell us what people think during a given time period and nothing more.  The true test for voters will be on election day:

Will voters stand up against incumbents?  Or will they do what they’ve done for the past couple of decades; complain about the worthless government while simultaneously voting to keep the same government?

Boxer might lose?!?!  In what has to be either a sign of the end times or a sign of our bright future, Senator Barbara Boxer is in a tight race against former HP CEO Carly Fiorina (via the Atlantic here):

The latest Field poll looks a bit troubling for Sen. Barbara Boxer: she leads her Republican opponent, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, by just three percentage points (47% to 44%)…

San Fransisco’s City Council, in an attempt to prove themselves the absolutely dumbest people on Earth, might ban the sale of pets (via Huffington Post here):

…If the ordinance passes San Francisco could be the first city in the nation to ban the sale all pets except fish….

The IMF tells the US to slow down on spending (via the Hill here):

The United States must rein in its deficits sooner than President Barack Obama wants, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Thursday.

In an annual report on the U.S. economy, the IMF said the U.S. faces a “central challenge” in implementing a “credible fiscal strategy” to ensure that public debt is put on a sustainable path without putting the economic recovery in jeopardy….

The NSA responds to the WSJ article (posted here yesterday) concerning the “Perfect Citizen” program (via the Atlantic here):

Today’s Wall Street Journal article by Siobhan Gorman, titled “US Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies,” is an inaccurate portrayal of the work performed at the National Security Agency. Because of the high sensitivity surrounding what we do to defend our nation, it is inappropriate to confirm or deny all of the specific allegations made in the article. We will, however, provide the following facts: PERFECT CITIZEN is purely a vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development contract. This is a research and engineering effort. There is no monitoring activity involved, and no sensors are employed in this endeavor. Specifically, it does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems. This contract provides a set of technical solutions that help the National Security Agency better understand the threats to national security networks, which is a critical part of NSA’s mission of defending the nation. Any suggestions that there are illegal or invasive domestic activities associated with this contracted effort are simply not true. We strictly adhere to both the spirit and the letter of U.S. laws and regulations….

I’m not saying I automatically disagree that their statement is completely accurate, but we should not forget the NSA is the same agency who for years denied even having something like Echelon.

Sometimes a more interesting way to find out how people truly view the world, is not to have them tell you where they stand on certain issues.  Another informative way to analyze someone’s critical thinking skills is how reflexive they are to disbelieve facts that counter their world view or agree with facts which confirms their world view.

Seeing their reactions to overly simplified answers which not only confirms their world view, but also their ego, you can use it to analyze that person’s tendency towards confirmation bias.

Before going further, a general disclaimer:  we all, every human falls for confirmation bias.  We want an ordered world and want to understand things and want to be right.  So patterns of random events become, after the fact of course, a series of events who destiny is their present state.

However, for those claiming to know more, claiming to impart important information to the masses, the truth as they see it – for those people, confirmation bias shouldn’t be as obvious.

For our example of people who lack critical thinking skills this time, we have Marcella Mroczkowski, a self described lawyer, activist, and Huffington Post Citizen Journalist.

Now I know – looking for critical thinking on a site like the Huffington Post is much more difficult than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, but I still thinks it’s useful to remind us all of the tendency.

In her February 9th piece titled Why Americans Must Defeat the Right’s Culture of Hate: Understanding the Science And History of Demonizing Hate gives you a pretty good idea of her logical consistency, but for some reason, I read further.   To save you the trouble, I’ll summarize:

Using one poll, which she claims proves a large, but minority, percentage of Republicans are prone to believe things like Obama isn’t a natural citizen.  From there, she lumps the birther movement in with those who believe Barack is a socialist.  Tie that to the freedom-increasing destruction of the Fairness Doctrine, or in her parlance, the end of untainted free press and equality and an increase in corporate slavery.

Tie that to talk radio, through it, use nominal facts like people tend to get more fanatic during recessions and hate is a primal emotion.

Jump from there to leaders who can exploit man’s primal tendency to hate others through dehumanzing, such as Hitler!

& viola – people who don’t believe like Marcella are not just Republicans, but hate filled Republicans who are being exploited by Hitler’s reincarnation.

So with that said, I think objectively we can say that if this sample is her normal standards, then Ms. Mroczkowski’s skills in critical thinking are demonstrably lacking. We can also say, again, assuming this piece of hers is representative of her other writing & analysis, but with that assumption, she’s also a little full of herself.  Narcissistic even.

I mean even I try to assume the role of her – try to think, a liberal would agree – what do they see worth agreeing to?  Her non-familiarity with logic becomes apparent, as even if I agree with all her logical leaps, to believe the underlying assumption that her beliefs are perfectly right and her opponents are evil and full of hate is just too perfect to be believed by any nominally objective person.

I mean seriously – when the snake oil is packaged and marketed that it will grow your hair while shrinking your waistline and increasing your cognitive abilities – critical adults are naturally and rightfully and forcefully skeptical.

Or as others have said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence… or at least should for those pretending to provide “truthful” claims.

The interesting thing however is the polling data itself.  The data she uses to springboard her attempts to conflate Republicans and their mouth pieces with evil hate speech, is completely flawed.   First, it comes from Daily Kos, which should be an obvious sign to anyone approaching or attempting to approach objectivity.  They have an obvious bias and a quick check on their facts demonstrates it.

With simple math, we can take DailyKos’s own figures, 2008 voting records, and see if the percentages of respondents coincide with the actual percentages in the last election.

So in those states they label the NE, in the 2008 Presidential election, a total of 28,836,059 were cast for President, roughly 40% for McCain, or 11,458,616.

Those 11 million votes for McCain in that region, were out of the 59,948,240 votes cast for him nationally.  So the 11 million represents 19% of the total republican vote.  Not exactly a perfect measure of the percentage of Republicans living in the NorthEast, but likely more accurate than DailyKos’s attempts to minimize that part of country’s respondents to only 11%.  & my numbers were also two years ago – I think one can objectively say the Democrats aren’t doing as well as they could be and are in less favor now that prior to the election.

Regardless, they not only undervalue the opinions of those Republicans in the NE, but they also exaggerate the weight of the south, giving them 42% of the weight of the poll questions, whereas using the same basic analysis, those same states only made up 36% of the total Republican vote cast for McCain.

There are other signs in there as well, but ones I didn’t feel like researching… but to the eye, I’m not sure if 89% should be white or that 56% should be men, though I’ll admit both might be possible.  Using a full 70% of respondents aged 45 and up however, defies logic.  A cursory glance shows voter registration for that age group making up a little less than 50% of all registered voters and while I’ll be more than happy to concede the idea that the makeup of the Republican party isn’t a complete demographic mirror of the national population, I’m pretty sure we can safely say the 70% is exaggerated as well.

With all the inconsistencies, it’s hard to even subscribe to a benign notion such as incompetence.  It appears much more likely that they moved the numbers around until they could get results which showed what they wanted.

Of course to normal people, hearing or reading “A poll from the Daily Kos showed….” could be followed by “the Earth is round” and be right to be skeptical.

Using that poll as evidence of something however is another story entirely.  Here again, I’d like to think this is an innocent mistake, but I think hiding the poll through another link (she linked to Huffington Post site which discuss the poll, which linked to the poll), picking only two questions out of the litany asked and acted as if the rest of it was overwhelmingly convincing of her basic point, then logically stumbling about to equate Republicans with hateful, primitive thinkers who are just following Hitler’s rise to power…. well, that might say more about her motives than even her reflexive belief.

The problem is that only slightly off people like me will dig around for all those numbers to prove or disprove our assumptions.  & that percentage of people currently testing their assumptions versus those voting… well, let’s just say it’s probably pretty small.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that mind you – our marketplace of ideas is full of different people with different opinions and tripe like this will always be seen by objective people for the hollow and shallow self-confirmation it truly is.

The only real sad part is some people, probably more than I want to admit to, will read and blindingly believe.  Not because they don’t have an extra hour to research voting numbers and compare then to polling – they will believe it for the same reason it was written – it will confirm something for which they already believe.  Republicans are primitive & evil.

Yep, using a big dose of self-delusion for courage, they will believe completely in such a hateful point, without even noticing the hateful point is being stated in an article decrying hate.

It’s almost embarrassingly easy to pinpoint the talking points or narratives that will prevail with any story, but if fish in a barrel don’t want to be shot… they should get out of the barrel.

Starting sometime last week, you could see the narratives shaping up in anticipation of a Brown victory based upon the trends of the poll data.  On January 9th, people still believe in Coakley (here):

…Buoyed by a huge advantage with independents and relative disinterest from Democratic voters in the state, Republican Scott Brown leads Martha Coakley 48-47….

…All that said Coakley can certainly still win this race, perhaps even by a comfortable margin….

Indeed, Real Clear Politics shows polling from various sources starting in September (here), showing a 30+ lead for Coakely being worn down to a tie in early January, then to a 9+ lead leading into the election.

However, the expected Brown win, was still an upset.  Both the fact that MA is a Democratic state that Barak won by 28 points and the fact the vacant seat was a Democratic torch bearer who is recently deceased… any way you wish to view this, it is a failure on the part of the Democratic party to have lost.

The narratives of course focus on “who” to blame – for the Republicans, this is sure sign that Barak’s agenda is being pushed to the side by the American people (here):

…Seeing President Barack Obama reverse course and make a last minute/last ditch effort to save the Coakley campaign brings back memories of November, when Obama put his prestige and political capital on the line in an unsuccessful attempt to save the gubernatorial campaigns of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and Virginia’s Creigh Deeds.

Combined, those two elections were a stinging rebuke of the Obama Agenda–higher taxes, government control of health care and out of control spending….

While for the Democrats, Barak isn’t hurt in the least by the pathetic showing from Coakley (here):

…The usual blame Obama faction in this community were quick to criticize the President for being the reason Martha Coakley lost her bid to replace Ted Kennedy in his long held Senate seat….

…If anything, the media spin had a lot more to do with the ascendency of Scott Brown than anything Barack Obama or Democrats had done….

Even going so far as to blame the media:

…The first year of the Obama Presidency has been a year of spin.  He has been scrutinized more than any other President in history. In some respect, this extreme coverage has created an anxiety about this President that, at times, has verged upon negative fanaticism, where daily hurdles are created and expectations have become increasingly unrealistic. For some on the fringe, Obama seems to have become the cause of all that ills America….

As usual, the truth is somewhere in the muddled middle… though I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the faulty logic associated with the Daily Kos (I know, I know… fish in a barrel…).  The idea that the media pushed a fringe blame Obama group to result in 52% of the population voting for Brown is almost too stupid to analyze.

On the other hand of course, the idea that this was a direct and total Obama failure is less certain than it appears as well.  Even the President has his thoughts about a “mood” (here):

…The president suggested the same forces that elected Brown “swept me into office” in 2008. People are frustrated “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”…

With more to come:

…White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters at his daily briefing, “That anger is now pointed at us because we’re in charge. And rightly so.”

Gibbs said Obama would address the Massachusetts results “and what they mean” in his State of the Union address next Wednesday….

Odd that the President plans to use the State of the Union speech to discuss one senate race in MA, but I digress.

The truth is, given the numbers, the percentage of independent voters who voted for Brown, the state, the Senate seat itself, basic voter demographic information… this is surely a failure which can be place @ the President’s door.

However… this doesn’t mean that Brown’s election is necessarily a referendum to oppose health care reform or a mandate to filibuster everything.   All politics is local is still true for the most part in that anybody other than a Democrat was not guaranteed a victory based solely on Obama’s agenda.

In fact, I think the President is correct when he “suggested” the country is just angry… not only at the current administration, but also the last 8 years.  Unwittingly he might have pinpointed the main issue people are having trouble dealing with, and that’s the continuous growth of government regardless of the idiot in charge.

So just like the ’08 election which swept Obama to office on the anger of Bush – it wasn’t a mandate for Obama’s policies so much as a punishment for Republicans, though a lesser politician would have still lost to McCain… just as a crappy GOP candidate would’ve likely lost to Coakley, even with a high level of anger towards the current administration.

& last but not least, let’s not forget that since 1862, there have been 36 midterm elections held during the first or second terms of an administration. In 33 of those 36 elections, the opposition party gained seats in the House.

All in all, it’s really no consequence to most of us as to “why” this or that person was elected in a state/district in which you don’t vote.   Your vote should be based upon your preferences and your candidates & hopefully the person you want to win does (assuming that person is pro-individual freedom of course, I’ll join in on your wish).

All the rest of this crap is just a narrative… IE – the standard tit-for-tat spin-game politicians play with the media as willing participants.