The nerd who called the election

On election night, Nate Silver was right about nearly everything, says Stephanie Clifford in The New York Times. Silver, a 30-year-old statistics geek, is the Chicago-based creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog on which he used a sophisticated blend of every poll available to forecast much of the 2008 election with uncanny accuracy. Silver correctly predicted that Barack Obama would win the popular vote over John McCain, 52 percent to 46 percent; he also called 49 of the 50 states’ results correctly. “From a marketing standpoint, I’d rather hedge a little bit more,” he says, “but we’re the ones who are bold enough to say what the polls translate into.” More than 5 million people visited his site on election night. Silver, a numbers wizard since he was a kid, started off using his talents to predict the performance of baseball teams and players. Silver turned to politics late last year after growing frustrated by prevailing poll analysis. “There is so much hyperventilation when a poll moves in one way or another,” he says. “People tend to look at polls that are outliers.” His methodology weights polls based on past accuracy and whether they tend to favor Republicans or Democrats. “It’s only when you take the polls into context,” he says, “that they tell you a story.”

Can conservatism recover?

"Let's face it: We Republicans are now, by any reasonable measurement, deep in the political wilderness," said U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona in The Washington Post. But conservatives can bounce back if we admit the "folly" of the budget-busting Bush administration and return to the bedrock principles of "limited government" and expanded economic freedom. "America loves a chastened and repentant sinner."

Republicans have clearly lost their way, said USA Today in an editorial, and not just by "spending with abandon and gambling heavily on an ill-conceived war." The GOP was defeated in this election partly because so many of its candidates substituted "fear-mongering" for sound policy proposals on the campaign trail. "If they are to find their way back, Republicans need more ideas and fewer attacks."

Conservative ideas still resonate deeply with the American people, said former House majority leader Tom DeLay in The Washington Times. “We are still a center-right nation" where the majority still favors "conservative approaches to taxes, spending, regulation, foreign policy, and traditional values.” All the GOP needs now is “a new, 21st-century political coalition" to remind people of that fact and restore faith in "actual conservatives."

See, liberals, conservatives are down but far from out, said Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal. Democrats shouldn't fool themselves that the culture wars are over, and "that stupid bankers sank conservatism for good. This movement will be back, and the biggest fights are yet to come."

How they see us: Racism and the presidential campaign

Will American racism cost Barack Obama the election? asked Alexander Downer, former foreign minister of Australia, in Australia’s Advertiser. Polls consistently put the Democrat several points ahead of his Republican rival, John McCain—but the very slimness of his lead is shocking. Both parties share the blame for the global financial crisis, but given that it “happened on the Republicans’ watch,” the Democratic candidate “should win in a landslide.” The fact that McCain still has a chance can be explained by only one factor: race. The truth is, race remains a hugely divisive factor in American politics. We outsiders may not realize it—since we’re used to seeing Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice as the face of America—but polls show that many white Americans view blacks with suspicion, even distrust. “Sen. Obama is doing less well than you would expect not because of his policies, or because of the failure of his character, but because of the color of his skin. That’s very sad.”

But it’s not surprising, said Achille Mbembe in South Africa’s Cape Times. The Republican Party has been practicing “win-at-any-cost” politics for decades. Fighting a close battle with a black candidate, it naturally chose to “descend into the dark territories of race-baiting and xenophobia.” But the tactic may be spinning out of control. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, has been encouraging crowds to see Obama as somehow un-American, possibly even as a terrorist. “Rousing the uglier impulses of America is a symptom of an ideology in an advanced state of decay.”

I have met four Republicans in my life, said Jacob Dlamini in South Africa’s Business Day, and all have been “the very definition of narrow-mindedness and mean-spiritedness.” One of them openly admitted he was a racist, another had a “visceral hatred of gay people,” and the other two believed that the solution to the Middle East’s problems was to “nuke the Arabs.” I know that four people, out of millions, don’t add up to a significant sample. Perhaps there are “many decent Republicans” out there. But I wonder “how many of them feel at home” in the party today.

Let’s hope it’s not many, said Kap Kirwok in Kenya’s East African Standard. True, some of the anti-Obama bumper stickers are downright “scary.” A typical one reads, “Warning: I am a bitter Christian and I am clinging to my gun.” That’s ostensibly a reference to a comment Obama made about people in small towns, but it carries threatening overtones. Still, we should not be disheartened. Obama has a huge and devoted network of supporters, most of them white, and they are working tirelessly to get him elected. He is like “a duck on a lake: On the face of it, it looks all calm and serene, effortlessly gliding along, but below the water surface, its legs are paddling madly.” All we can say is, “Go, Obama, go!”

Is Obama a ‘socialist’?

So this is what desperation looks like, said John Nichols in The Nation. Having failed to convince a majority of Americans that Barack Obama is either a terrorist, a closet Muslim, or a vapid celebrity orator, John McCain has found one final epithet to hurl at Obama in the waning days of the campaign: “Socialist!” As evidence for this charge—currently featured at McCain-Palin rallies nationwide and around-the-clock on right-wing talk radio—McCain cites an exchange Obama had with an Ohio man now nationally known as Joe the Plumber, who had complained that Obama wants to raise taxes on people making $250,000 a year. “When you spread the wealth around,” Obama fatefully replied, “it’s good for everybody.” That notion is certainly debatable, said Rex Huppke in the Chicago Tribune, but it isn’t socialism. Real socialists believe that all important industries should be nationalized, and that everyone should have roughly the same amount of money. These are not Obama’s positions, and if he were a socialist, why would he have the support of such iconic capitalists as Warren Buffet?

Obama may not fit the academic definition of “socialist,” said Byron York in National Review Online, but ordinary people know one when they see one. Like all leftists, Obama wants to punish success and redistribute income from those who earn it to those who live on government handouts. That idea has always been a tough sell in America, where even plumbers believe they can become rich someday. As a result, Joe the Plumber has become more than just “a zinger in McCain’s stump speech.” Supporters are flocking to his rallies with placards identifying themselves as “Phil the Bricklayer” and “Rose the Teacher,” an army of Americans who work too hard for their money to let Obama and his ilk—whatever you want to call them—“spread” it “around.”

McCain’s argument on this point might be stronger, said The Washington Post in an editorial, if he didn’t himself believe in “spreading the wealth.” The radical notion of the wealthy paying tax at a higher rate than the poor happens to be a feature of our current tax system—and has been for a century. It’s called “progressive taxation.” In all his years in Washington, McCain has never opposed progressive tax rates. In fact, back in 2001, McCain even opposed one of President Bush’s tax cuts, saying that “so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans.” And that was before the financial crisis, said Michael Cooper in The New York Times. The truly surreal aspect of McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialism” is that they’re coming from a man who just voted for Bush’s nationalization of the banks and financial system. To put it mildly, McCain’s message “sounds a bit mixed.”

You’re missing the point, said Michael Barone in USNews.com. This isn’t an abstract argument about the tax code. When Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” he revealed an attitude—a liberal elitist’s “contempt for the working man,” whose pockets he feels entitled to pick. That admission might just “turn the election around.” You might be right, said Dan Rodricks in the Baltimore Sun, except that Americans have just lived through a prolonged period of Republican, trickle-down economics in which the wealth “trickled up,” not down. Now, with working people struggling to pay their bills and worrying about losing their jobs in a recession caused by Wall Street fat cats, “socialism” is the least of their fears.

Conservatism: Requiem for a revolution

The modern conservative movement is “sputtering” toward irrelevance, said Paul Waldman in The American Prospect. Barring the outbreak of a new war, the No. 1 issue in this election will be our imploding economy. With the government bailing out the free market from its own stupidity, and the public clamoring for oversight and regulation, the November election could produce “a dramatic repudiation of Republicans at all levels.” The Reagan era is over, said Timothy Noah in Slate.com. When Ronald Reagan revitalized conservatism in 1980, he did so with an appealing blend of muscular militarism, family values, and, especially, the message that “government was the common enemy.” But the catastrophic financial collapse has demolished the “fundamentalist belief in untrammeled capitalism.” Even if John McCain and Sarah Palin somehow manage to win this election, it’ll be as populist reformers, not traditional conservatives. Either way, conservatism “sure looks dead.”

Responsibility for that homicide lies squarely with George W. Bush, said The Economist. His “ruthless partisanship and iron commitment to presidential power” served him well enough at first; most Republicans swooned to his “huge tax cuts” and war on terror. But Bush’s “my way or the highway” approach ultimately fractured his own party. Fiscal conservatives were appalled by his reckless spending. Paleocons resented his invasion of Iraq. Nativists opposed him on immigration reform. The “most damning verdict” on Bush’s mismanagement came last week, when conservative House Republicans initially voted to reject his $700 billion financial bailout package. Their defiance signaled how little respect conservatives now have for their once-beloved leader. Far from “forging a lasting Republican majority,” Bush has left his party “in the worst state they have been in for decades.”

And yet, said John Harwood in The New York Times, Republicans may have reason to be optimistic. When a party is cast out, it often uses its time in the wilderness to “refocus its message and agenda” and stage a comeback. That’s what the Democrats who are now poised to take power have been doing since 2000, and what conservatives did after Barry Goldwater’s humiliating defeat in 1964. In January, Democrats may well assume ownership of the country’s numerous, intractable problems. What better time for conservatives to begin work on their “political renewal”?