Presidential Race

One Last Illinois Presidential Poll

ArchPundit November 2, 2004 No Comments

Rod McCulloch’s Illinois Poll reports a 10 point lead for Kerry.

The October Illinois Poll of 1200 likely Illinois voters, was conducted October 28-31, 2004. The Illinois Poll is a monthly statewide poll conducted by McCulloch Research & Polling, a Chicago-based firm. ?It appears that there will be no surprises in Presidential politics in Illinois tomorrow,? pollster Rod McCulloch said. ?Senator Kerry should win by about the same margin that Al Gore did in 2000.?

According to the poll, Senator Kerry holds a ten-point lead in Illinois, a state considered to be a ?Blue? or Kerry state from the beginning of the campaign. Former Vice President Al Gore won Illinois by a full 12% in 2000 (54-42%).

The Democratic stronghold of Chicago fronts Senator Kerry to a huge lead (76-21.8%). Suburban Cook County, formerly a reliable Republican region, also would vote for Kerry, by a margin of 58.5-38.4%, according to the poll. President Bush does hold a lead in three of the other four regions of the state, including the still solidly Republican Collar Counties (55-41), Northwest Illinois (50-44), and Central Illinois (51-44). The poll shows Senator Kerry holding a slight lead in Southern Illinois (48.5-47.0%).

McCulloch is a Republican, but is also working to become the goto guy on Illinois polling so he has incentives on both ends. That said, I’m not one who likes to argue over affiliation. McCulloch’s work is good from what I’ve seen, though all polls have limitations.

No Whining

ArchPundit November 1, 2004 1 Comment

This guy defines what democracy is about. Wow.

TAHOKA, Texas – In the 10 days after Welch Flippin decided to stop dialysis and began succumbing to kidney failure, the 85-year-old Texas farmer and World War II veteran had something on his mind. Something, he told his son, he just had to do. He wanted to vote.

So when early voting started last week, his son went down the road to the Lynn County clerk’s office in Tahoka, a one-stoplight town of nearly 2,000 people 30 miles south of Lubbock, and asked if he could take a ballot home to his ailing father.

The clerk offered instead to make a house call.

“In a small town, we’re able to do that,” County Clerk Susan Tipton said Thursday. “But I’ve never had one that was under hospice care, so it was harder emotionally.”

The next morning, she went to the house and saw Welch Flippin, a man she had known for years from his work with veterans. When he smiled and greeted her by name, she knew he was alert enough to vote. She told him he could sign with an X. But he signed his name clearly.

When she left the room to give him and his son privacy, Perry Flippin held the ballot and started asking his father, a staunch Democrat, for whom he wanted to vote.

“You like Kerry and Edwards?” Perry Flippin, retired editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times, recalled in a column in the newspaper.

“Naw,” he replied wearily.

“Bush and Cheney?”

“Naw.”

The elder Flippin answered, “Yeah” when asked whether he liked 13-term Democratic Rep. Charlie Stenholm. His son marked an X for Stenholm.

He dozed off after that and did not talk to his son or wife again. The next day, Oct. 20, he passed away. His last conscious act was casting his vote.

Under state law, the vote will count.

“I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and I was privileged to cast that last ballot,” his son said Thursday. “I’m surprised that he would be thinking about that on his death bed, but he thought his vote was important.”

The Officer Backs Bush

ArchPundit October 31, 2004 2 Comments

Why does Bush want Carl Officer’s support? And why would the Leader treat this as a good thing.

Pat Gauen recounted the more colorful moments of Carl’s career in the PD in 2003:

My personal favorite was the day he gathered the press to announce that he was filing a federal suit to stop Gov. James Thompson from using the National Guard to seize the city. When I broke the news to Thompson’s press secretary, I thought the poor man would laugh himself into a stroke. No troops ever showed up.

Or maybe the best was the time Carl began a speech by greeting me from the podium, by name, but then complained the next day to my editor that the resulting story was unfair because he wouldn’t have spoken so candidly had he known a reporter was present.

No, I think it was the opening of an obstetrical unit to help deal with the community’s soaring population of unwed mothers. Carl, a bachelor, publicly announced that he was personally going to start work on populating the place that very night.

Oops, I almost forgot the major MetroLink ceremony where Carl wiped the smile off every face by vowing to block the project because he wasn’t consulted. (Civic leaders unanimously insisted that Carl was invited to every meeting but never once showed up.)

You’ve surely heard about how Zaire un-invited Carl to help fine-tune its government after he announced that he would take his own blood supply, so if he got sick he wouldn’t depend on its “monkey blood.”

Perhaps the best was when he got stopped by police doing 108 mph in a Jaguar borrowed from a convicted drug dealer. Carl bitterly denied the cop’s version, insisting he really had been doing 140.

Is there no end to it?

I haven’t gotten to the bodyguard with the Uzi. Or the $2,200 Carl claimed for trips never taken. Or the consulting contract the city council approved for $545,000 but Carl signed for $1.3 million. Or Carl’s hearty endorsement of a $450 million riverfront development plan long after everyone else, including a federal grand jury, figured out that it was just a big scam.

The uzis I believe, were present when he went to Big Al’s in Peoria–a gentleman’s club–and his ‘bodyguards’ had to explain why they were carrying uzis.

That’s some family values plan there.
From the Leader:

In breaking with his party on the Presidential race, Officer, an ordained minister, cited serious differences he has with the Democratic leadership on issues like gay marriage and abortion.

So uzis in strip clubs, okay. Populating the city obstetrics unit as a bachelor okay. But a woman having a right to choose and gay marriage bad. It’s all so clear.

If your party is so fricken’ desperate for any black person to back you all, you might try changing the approach.

Kerry Illinois Events this Weekend

ArchPundit October 29, 2004 No Comments

At Illinois for Kerry. I had tried to post this a few days ago and couldn’t get into the site, but if you can help–do.

If You Want to be Upset about an Editorial, Be Upset about this one

ArchPundit October 29, 2004 9 Comments

Oh, isn’t that cute, a story broke about Bush incompetence–it must be nothing.

There’s a reason it’s breaking now–because the administration was hoping it wouldn’t break until after the election. Poo-pooing it is asinine.

But no, that’s not enough

And the Bushies find it curious that so few news shops are covering the Oil-for-Food scandal. That disgraced United Nations program helped Hussein plunder billions to prop up his murderous regime. Wouldn’t covering Oil-for-Food, the Bushies ask, help prove that a corrupt UN didn’t want war with Iraq to disrupt lucrative payoffs in France, Russia and many other countries?

Given Chalabi appears to be the one with the evidence, why doesn’t the press ask Chalabi’s allies in and around the US government for the evidence? Maybe there’s a reason it isn’t public either?

The Change from 2000

ArchPundit October 29, 2004 2 Comments

Jacob Weisberg who I often go to for good moments in writing, in 2000 voted for Gore with this to say:

Jacob Weisberg, Chief Political Correspondent: Gore.

When the race was getting started, I said I expected to be annoyed by everything Gore did in the campaign and then vote for him anyway. He’s held up his end of the bargain, and I intend to hold up mine. As a politician, Gore is nearly talentless. As a president, however, I think he would be likely to build on Bill Clinton’s most important accomplishments, hewing to a path of fiscal responsibility while pursuing a measured federal activism that would help rebuild public trust in government. In some respects, I think Gore could be better than Clinton. He is more engaged by foreign policy and a more principled internationalist. Gore’s sophistication about environmental and technology issues is a significant plus. As for Bush, Christopher Hitchens summed up my view perfectly when he described him as “unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.” A Bush presidency might not be a disaster, but it would surely be an embarrassment.

This year:

Jacob Weisberg, Editor: Kerry

I remain totally unimpressed by John Kerry. Outside of his opposition to the death penalty, I’ve never seen him demonstrate any real political courage. His baby steps in the direction of reform liberalism during the 1990s were all followed by hasty retreats. His Senate vote against the 1991 Gulf War demonstrates an instinctive aversion to the use of American force, even when it’s clearly justified. Kerry’s major policy proposals in this campaign range from implausible to ill-conceived. He has no real idea what to do differently in Iraq. His health-care plan costs too much to be practical and conflicts with his commitment to reducing the deficit. At a personal level, he strikes me as the kind of windbag that can only emerge when a naturally pompous and self-regarding person marinates for two decades inside the U.S. Senate. If elected, Kerry would probably be a mediocre, unloved president on the order of Jimmy Carter. And I won’t have a second’s regret about voting for him. Kerry’s failings are minuscule when weighed against the massive damage to America’s standing in the world, our economic future, and our civic institutions that would likely result from a second Bush term.

I’m not nearly as critical of Kerry, though I’m happy to call him Liveshot, but this year, it just isn’t funny.

When the Jokes Write Themselves

ArchPundit October 29, 2004 2 Comments

Bush meets with African American Leaders in Detroit

Hey Troll

ArchPundit October 28, 2004 8 Comments

The explosive appear to have been there when the Troops arrived. Oops.

Sorry, but a little trash talk was in order here.

Illinois Presidential Poll

ArchPundit October 28, 2004 2 Comments

Post-Dispatch Poll

Kerry 53%
Bush 41%
Undecided 6%

The Research 2000 Illinois Poll was conducted from October 21 through October 23, 2004. A total of 800 likely voters who vote regularly in state elections were interviewed statewide by telephone.

Those interviewed were selected by the random variation of the last four digits of telephone numbers. A cross-section of exchanges was utilized in order to ensure an accurate reflection of the state. Quotas were assigned to reflect the voter registration of distribution by county.

The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 3.5% percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the ?true? figure would fall within that range if the entire population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any subgroup, such as for gender or party affiliation.

Missing Explosives: It’s the Incompetence Stupid

ArchPundit October 26, 2004 31 Comments

Posted about it at the St. Louis City Dems website.