My name is Michael, and I'm a conspiracy theorist. I don't represent the views of Election Integrity management, which are wholesome and scientific. I've been a conspiracy theorist for nearly a dozen years, but I've been hard-core since about 2003. I try to quit, to stop, to go cold turkey, but I can't. Every time I delve into the details of any of the major domestic USG covert operations JFK, X, MLK, RFK, WTC93, OKC, JFK, Jr., Election 2000, 911, Election 2004, Election 2006 the same pattern emerges. Not only do the deeds look like covert ops, and not only does the "free press" let us down time and time again, but also the free press is actively complicit is selling the public a lie in the service of normalizing the cover-up. The free press is one of the fixers' tools.
Look, this New Hampshire thing. If it were a Big Fix, then the folk who did it must use the media to make it seem normal, and the media must proceed by using the cool quiet voice of authority supplemented by outrageous lying done in the style of ipse dixit. So, of course, with limited resources I turned to the newspaper of record, the New York Times, for a fully informed account of how the pundits could go so wrong. If I were just a conspiracy nut, they'd give us the real skinny; but if my crazy thoughts were true, something else would be on the plate. Today's January 10, 2008 NYT resolved that dilemma. "Analyzing the New Hampshire Surprise" JACQUES STEINBERG and JANET ELDER tells the amazing but must-be-true official story of what really happened. http://tinyurl.com/yp35na The authors set out to answer the pundits' self-questioning: "How could they have not seen it coming?"
The polls, which consistently showed Mr. Obama running much more strongly than Mrs. Clinton, may have been unable to keep pace with events. In the end, it seems, the preferences of a considerable number of New Hampshire voters were very much in flux in the final days of the campaign. What pollsters call “considered opinion” — the kind of opinion born of reflection rather than one elicited in an instant by a poll taker — registers only when people step into the ballot box.
The factors conspiring against pollsters included the convergence of two historic candidacies, those of a woman and an African-American. They also faced the compressed election calendar, with only five days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary; Saturday night’s debate, and Mrs. Clinton’s unusual moment of her eyes welling with tears on Monday. ...
As late as the week before the primary, many New Hampshire voters were not fully committed to a candidate and said they might change their minds. In last-minute polling by CBS, which ended Sunday, the network’s pollsters found an unusually high number of voters who said they could still change their minds, 28 percent, and another 9 percent who said they were still undecided. Those who said they were going to vote for Mrs. Clinton were more strongly committed to her than those who said they would vote for Mr. Obama. (The New York Times conducts polls with CBS News but did not participate in the polling before the New Hampshire primary.)
In the end, women who made up their minds in the last few days voted for Mrs. Clinton, 44 percent to 36 percent.
I think I understand Steinberg & Elder. You see, pre-polling measures only an "instant opinion" and therefore is useless contrary to all appearances and history of its success with other political races, including other candidates in this very race. What really needs to be measured is "considered opinion," that determines the voters choice, but that "considered opinion" comes into existence "only when people step into the ballot box." Wow! That's heavy! There goes the entire imaginary profession of polling down the drain.
But can this line of reasoning be true? Oh, yes, it is true. Tom Brokaw says it is true so it must be true. The problem comes from trying to "read voters' minds," something that would in any case be irrelevant because the relevant content, "considered opinion" only comes into existence in the voting booth. So what to do? asks Brokaw, who then "answered his own question. 'Wait for the voters to make their judgment.' " Just trust the official count.
But wait, can't Steinberg & Elder supplement the nonsense that there is nothing relevant that could be measured before the voter steps into the voters' booth with the empirical claim that the late-deciders had their "considered opinion" opt for Hilary and spice it up with the contradictory claim that Hilary won in part because her fans were true-blue from the start? Why not! Thus, "Those who said they were going to vote for Mrs. Clinton [in Sunday's last-minute CBS polling] were more strongly committed to her than those who said they would vote for Mr. Obama." But, gee, then those strongly committed Clinton voters had something measurable before the "considered judgment" was born in the booth. Okay, but that still leaves that great big chunk of undecided whose "considered judgment" was born only in the booth: "the network’s pollsters found an unusually high number of voters who said they could still change their minds, 28 percent, and another 9 percent who said they were still undecided." So, what really swung it to Hilary?
In the end, women who made up their minds in the last few days voted for Mrs. Clinton, 44 percent to 36 percent.
Now if this were a serious article instead of a piece of propaganda, the authors would at least tell us what percentage of women voters made up their minds in the last few days, or at least how many their were. Instead we are told that reporters had formed irrational attachments to Obama and McCain that made them overly confident that they would win. We are also fed as probable fact the sheer invention that those big Obama rallies were simply -- a fiction created from thin air please note -- fueled by the sexed-up energy of some out-of-state college students on Christmas break!
“Count me among those who thought Obama was a runaway train, that he’d blow Clinton out of the water,” Mr. Achenbach wrote. “You had to see the crowds! Feel the energy!”
“O.K., so in retrospect a lot of those people were probably college kids on break from Massachusetts or Maryland,” he added. “Still many of us sensed that we were witnessing history, a transition to a new era.”
The false sensing was due to the reporters' irrational bias, and failure to note that the exited people were out-of-state college kids on break. Let's help Steinberg & Elder along, remembering (from other sources) that a large proportion of people attending Obama rallies were undecided, and that what rallied so many women around Hilary were her Monday Night's Tears that made them all feel so vividly the horrid injustice of bumping her pretty little head against the glass ceiling! Yes, yes! I see it all now, I see how she pulled those chestnuts out of the fire! Thank you Steinberg & Elder!
If only Jonathan Simon of www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org had not had the bad manners to send the damn (largely unadjusted) National Exit Poll results, a rotten spoiler he!
When Did You Decide Your Vote?
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