Presidential Politics

Some great stuff in the WSJ's Opinion Journal today:

Base10 is a regular reader of James Taranto and is happy to see him write an occassional full piece.  Today he writes from Boston and discusses the ridiculous trend analysis that goes on during the Presidential election.  The current rubric is "No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio."  Mr. Kerry currently holds a lead in Ohio.  Mr. Tarranto points out the seemingly endless list of broken "trends" of this type.  Interesting reading.

This discussion reminds Base10 of the vacuous trend analysis that accompanies the Superbowl.  Ridiculous things like "No wildcard team has ever won a superbowl with a sophmore quarterback."  (Basae10 has no idea whether this is true).  Base10 supposes that this is another example of the football metaphor in politics.

Also, WSJ editheads want the Sandy Berger "in your pants" memo to be declassified and released to the public.  The suggestion is that Berger wrote in the margin on one of the drafts "no" in response to a recommendation to further attack al Qaeda.  While Gov. Kean has stated they have seen everything, the WSJ points out there is no way he can say if something he hasn't seen can change his mind.  And while democratic apologists blame this on Berger's slovenly habits and claim the memo in question just contained minor changes in drafting, the editorial also reminds us that the Iran-Contra scandal was uncovered because of a paragraph that was found in a preliminary draft of an Oliver North memo.

In another good piece, John Fund reports on Democratic hysteria over the new electronic voting machines in several states.  Fund argues that this is a way to channel the leftover hysteria from the "stolen" 2000 election to increase turnout. 

UPDATE: Even Economist/Shameless Political Hack Paul Krugman has gotten in on the computerized voting issue.  Thank God I don't read the London papers!

- posted by Base10 @ 10:29 AM