Politics

Bashing Kerry

by

One of the things that has always frustrated me is the way that some individuals will place the blame for a traumatic event on someone who really has no responsibility for said event.

Case in point is this post from today’s Strategypage.com. (Post from October 18, 2004.) It would seem that Haiti’s current civil war is heating up, with more violence breaking out between the government and supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But the real news is who the UN thinks is to blame.

The commander of the UN peacekeepers blames U.S. senator John Kerry for much of violence, because earlier this year Kerry said that if he were president he would have sent American troops to protect Aristide. This, the UN commander believes, encouraged Aristide’s followers to start fighting.

I really don’t agree with this at all. I doubt many people involved with the street fighting in Haiti have a great deal of interest in what a candidate for the US Presidency has to say in a speech in Iowa. The UN commander is probably just trying to lay the groundwork when someone inevitably blames him for not doing something. (Not that any UN commander in recent history has been able to do any real peacekeeping without the Anglosphere doing the heavy lifting.)

In related news, CNN reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has urged US voters to mark their ballots for President Bush this election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat “could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world.”

While I don’t agree with the comments from the UN, I have to admit that the Russian President makes a great deal of sense.

(Now I’m agreeing with the Russians! How the world has changed in a few short years.)

Meteorologists for Kerry?

by

Hmm. If I ran an advertising agency I might think twice before displaying, in front of my office on a major thoroughfare, such a subtle and nuanced example of my creative and persuasive talents. But maybe I don’t understand the business.

Manipulated Markets?

by

I’m becoming less confident about the accuracy of the online futures markets in predicting the outcome of the presidential race. Intrade’s Bush re-election market sold off into the debate, rallied during and sold off after. This behavior seems odd, and is similar to what the same market did during the previous presidential debate and the vice-presidential debate. (I didn’t follow the first presidential debate.)

It’s occurred to me that partisans might be trying to manipulate the markets (Glenn Reynolds and Tom Smith have similar ideas, as I suspect do other observers). While I have no evidence for this possibility, consider it on a cost/benefit basis. Political futures markets aren’t so deep that a trader, or consortium of traders, willing to spend a few hundred grand couldn’t bias them against Bush for days or weeks at a time. Given the increasing credibility of these markets, and given the high cost of conventional advertising, selling a big lot of Bush re-election futures might be a relatively inexpensive way to help Kerry. (Of course the bill would come due eventually, if Bush won, but in that case the inevitable market pop might not occur until shortly before the election, in which case money invested in holding down Bush’s numbers would have been well spent.)

I think that these markets are a great tool, and that they will eventually equal or surpass conventional opinion-polling in the degree to which they become accepted by the media and public for political prediction. But markets aren’t perfect. Someone told me that James Cramer on CNBC suggested that Democratic hedge-fund managers are buying oil futures in an attempt to boost oil prices and hurt Bush politically. I am skeptical about Cramer’s idea: oil has been rallying for a variety of reasons, it’s a huge market and manipulation of huge markets tends to be prohibitively costly for prospective manipulators. But if Cramer is saying it, it means other traders are thinking it. And if they think it about oil, what about the relatively illiquid elections markets? It seems likely that politically engaged traders have considered, if not actually attempted, trying to push those markets their way. I don’t know whether they have succeeded. Perhaps this would be a fruitful area for systematic research.

OTOH, it could be that the election really will be as close as the online markets suggest it will be. We’ll know soon enough.

(Previous related posts: here and here)

UPDATE: Lex reminds me that the election odds shown by online bookmakers have roughly paralleled the odds shown by Intrade and the Iowa Markets. His observation supports the close-election hypothesis.

UPDATE2: Don Luskin suspects manipulation.

Wake Up and Smell the Futures

by

Conservative-blogger triumphalism about Bush’s most recent debate performance ignores warnings from the Intrade and Iowa online political futures markets, which show the presidential race tightening. I hate to write this, because I want Bush to win and until recently I thought he would probably win in a landslide. Now I’m less confident.

Tom Smith has some interesting speculations here and here about why Bush’s re-election odds seem to have slipped. He thinks that forthrightly moralistic anti-abortion talk alienates liberal swing-voters. Could be. Unfortunately, we are not likely to know for sure until well after the election.

Bush’s fortunes may rebound, he may win big, and anyway I do not think that he should compromise his strongly-held positions to appeal to marginal voters. But I would feel more comfortable if his numbers were higher.

Australia

by

Australian results. Jericho rejoices as does Chrenkoff. See O’Sullivan’s warm regard for Australia. Evidently an insufficient number of voters were convinced that the Bali bombing was Howard’s fault. Of course, Bin Laden had always had other motives, including his complaints about Timor. (And then there was the awkward fact that Bali was bombed before the “unilateral” – with Australia – invasion of Iraq.) (Updated.)