Today's Real Polling Picture

The bottom line is that determining who will win elections requires determining who will vote. The pollsters who do the best job of this publish the most accurate polls. 

Some jounalistic and partisan organizations publish polls as a means of persuading voters how other voters are thinking.  It's the classic tactic of, "Billy's doing it so you should too."  When people don't know politics, they might defer to the majority consensus, determined by looking at polls, which partisan media and partisans hope for.

A pollster looking for a result in polling can find it.  The voter turnout model determines the winner unless one candidate has collapsed.  This page applies the best possibly known voter model to all polls that find a given result are arrives at the most accurate conclusion, if one's objective is to find out what voters are thinking. 

It is surpising how close all the pollsters end up in obtaining their results.  Usually they all find about the same information.  It's what they do with it after that that is important. Here we will give you the truth as best as it can be objecively determine it using polling. 

Despite Devastating Losses, Newt Vows to Stay In

Santorum wins Mississippi and Alabama

Newt's inability to answer this question demonstrates that he is a defeated candidate.  He would have loved to throw out Texas, but he couldn't even win the neighboring state to Georgia.  He was running a southern and Texas strategy.  He essentially admitted that even his Texas strategy is now defunct.

There is a great article in the Mail Online today.  It makes clear that Newt really has no reason to stay in this race.  Link below:

Delusional Newt outlines his strategy to stop Mitt Romney: Sabotage at Tampa

To openly advocate for a convention fight demonstrates that Newt puts himself before his country and party.  It's not hyperbole.  It's true. One cannot make a credible argument where a convention fight helps the Republican party in its quest to defeat Obama. 

Right now, Newt Gingrich is Barack Obama's best weapon. 

Newt: I don't know yet

Ref - 3/8/12

One could look at the video and see an idealistic law student supporting a professor he understandably identifies with because they are both blacks in the legal community.  As a lawyer, I can tell you that there are very few blacks in the legal community now and were significantly fewer in 1991.  It is genuinely harder to live day-to-day in law school if you are black.  There are social and professional dynamics at play that make life harder, dynamics which are probably magnified because the social pool is full of hyper-ambitious sharks.  These ambitious ones may support racial diversity in both word and thought, but when faced with the decision of who to socialize with or partner with in study groups, a white law student is primarily factoring his or her professional future into the equation, and that usually leaves the black kid out.  It's all about rank in law school, race be damned.  Unfortunately, this view ignores the reality that Obama was taking sides within the black legal community, siding with the radical racialist view and abandoning the rational one. 

Derrick Bell harshly attacked a fellow black professor at Harvard, a man named Randall Kennedy, before Obama spoke on his behalf.  Bell attacked Kennedy for questioning the radical racial assumptions academics like Bell adopt, such as the assumption that whites are inherently racist and incapable of genuine good will toward blacks, that whites will only treat blacks equally if their own self-interest is benefitted.  Obama did nothing to defend Kennedy, but apparently took sides with Bell, the crusading racial leftist.  Kennedy is no conservative, or what some racialists might term an "uncle Tom," by the way.  He has written three books on race and the law.  He just didn't adopt the most radical racial assumptions out there, which apparently Barack Obama did.

One might assume that an idealistic young law student understandably sides with an academic who puts diversity of thought as his top priority and fights for it. Again, unfortunately, Bell was fighting to make the already liberal academic establishment more radically left, not more diverse. This fact is underscored by Bell's later firing from the Oregon law school.  His view of diversity required hiring only leftist black professors, and even the liberal law school at Oregon could not go along with this.  Obama apparently thought that academia needed to be more liberal.  If liberal academia was not liberal enough for Obama, he must have been pretty far to the left. 

One inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt might assume that because all of this happened when he was a kid over twenty years ago, it's irrelevant.  This take ignores the fact that Obama was an adult leading the most respected law review in the nation.  A person in this position should be held accountable for his or her positions.  Students in law schools are held to extremely high academic standards and are expected to defend their positions.  Obama knew what he was doing.  The fact that this was twenty years ago is also negated by the fact that Obama continued to have a relationship with Bell until he died last year. 

Whether one views this video as innocuous or like a red flag will be based on the assumptions he or she brings to viewing it.  It seems that Breitbart may have thought that throwing this Rorschach test out there represented the best course for starting this vetting process.  It draws out the journalists who will be willing to at least listen to an honest vetting of Obama and those who are steadfastly against any vetting.  Knowing who these people are will be useful.

Obama-Bell Video

Thomas Sowell on Derrick Bell

Prof. Randall L. Kennedy Giving Some Credit to Whites on Racial Progress, Something Bell Disagreed With

RomneyCare is not ObamaCare.  Regardless of whether Romney ever argued for a national individual mandate, it is a state program in a federal system, which makes all the difference.  States have a great deal more power than the federal government to impose on their citizens.  Scarborough simply does not know what he is talking about or is intentionally trashing Republicans.  Besides that, even if Romney actually wrote and gave the bill to Obama, which of course is absurd, he would still be the guy who is going to repeal it, and that's all that matters.  This country wants the bill gone and Romney is the guy who will do it.  The best Obama can do is call Romney a hypocrite at which point the country will say, no, really, a hypocritical politician?  They will then loudly say, who cares!  Repeal this disaster of a bill!

The state of the GOP is really not as bad as Scarborough says.  Joe's gloom is based on the tough presidential nominating contest the GOP is having and his perception of the field of candidates as weak.  But this ignores the reason for Romney's perceived weakness.  Romney is viewed as weak because he has not locked up the nomination yet.  He has not locked it up because conservatives have not supported him while moderates and independents have supported him strongly, at least until recently.  Independents don't like bitter party fights, so they have pulled back.  That's why they are independents.  There is no reason to think independents won't come back once the nomination is his.  He is not hurt by the social issues debate.  The real reason Romney has suffered  is because he has never decided to "catch his hair on fire" to excite the right, as he put it.  He is still perceived as reasonable and competent because he has not taken the bait from the red meat craving right.   Last, the right is going to vote for whoever the GOP nominates because they will be voting against Obama.  No force is stronger in politics than voting against someone.  This fact guarantees that all those folks voting against Romney in the primaries will be flying his flag higher than anyone else come November.  Doubt that?  Gingrich never fails to make perfectly clear that he will strongly support whoever the GOP nominates.  If Gingrich can say that, then even the most emotional partisan conservative will say the same thing.  So when the independents come back and the right joins with Romney, he will be a very strong nominee, perhaps the strongest since 1984.  I suspect Joe knows this.  He likes to bait the left wings goofs he works with. 

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