Recreational Poli Sci
hedge industries from yesteryear, combined with politics and politicology from deepest suburbia
WaPo cracks Mr. Alvin Greene’s USAF records wide open today. I’ve written here about how military service interacts with electoral efforts, and, well, not sure this is going help Mr. Greene at all.
Migration to Austin
I think it is funny that there are two notables from Wisco. It seems like I met tons of people from Dane co. in Travis co., and now there is a map, so it must be true.
More news for those paying attention to military service and elections.
Joe Sestak, whom we followed as part of the “Fighting Dems” of 2006, convinced PA Dems that he was the right man to be on the ballot yesterday.
From NYT story: “When I went to Congress just a few years ago, after 31 years in the wonderful United States Navy, I found too many career politicians are a bit too concerned about keeping their jobs, rather than serving the public and rather than helping the people.”
How Sestak will fare against Toomey is uncertain, of course, but some hypothetical matchups in polls show he is inside the MOE. Toomey is too young to have been a Vietnam veteran himself (as was Sestak, he was Annapolis ‘74), and did not serve.
Candidates: Don’t Fake Service.
The NYT’s Raymond Hernandez broke a story this morning that Richard Blumenthal (CT’s AG and hopeful for US Senate in 2010) has been saying he served in Vietnam when he did not serve in Vietnam. Further, after a FOI request, Hernandez discovered that Blumenthal not only exaggerated his service but also worked very hard to avoid service in Vietnam.
This stretching of the truth regarding military service is not new. Quayle and W both received heaps of criticism for avoiding Vietnam service through Guard or Reserve service. LBJ quite famously wore a Silver Star for his entire life after WWII, one he almost certainly earned dubiously.
What makes this story more remarkable is Blumenthal’s expectation that no one, apparently, would ever find out, considering how damning this giant-above-the-fold-in-the-gray-lady story will become. Richard, the Pentagon keeps records. Journalists will find them. It’s not 1992 or even 1964 anymore.
We do not have a lot of reason to think that military service attracts scads of votes in a general election, but the impulse to exaggerate one’s record tells us that aspirants still believe it to be very valuable. Worth lying about in public, anyway.
[FOLLOW-UP: Maybe Blumenthal should be punished per Ricks’ advice about another poseur.]
![Poll: Does Jersey Blow According to Jersey?There are a handful of reasonable polling outfits that specialize in polling the Jersey electorate, and I suppose it is my job to keep my eye on inferences that they make. Rutgers recently grabbed David Redlawsk from U Iowa to serve as director, and their Eagleton poll recently asked residents of the Garden State about their attitudes toward their home. Here is the press release. Apparently, despite what Triumph the Wonder Dog thinks about New Jersey, people like it here, or, more precisely, “less than a quarter say they would move out of the state if they had the opportunity to do so” [authorial gasp].Patrick Murray (who does his own polling over at Monmouth) criticizes this inference from the numbers by looking at a time series and finding that on a temporal trend line, NJ’s folks like it less than they have in the past, in other words, feel the context. Redlawsk retorts that we should mentally control for the state of the economy (“worst recession since the depression”), so really it’s not that bad after all.I’m afraid I think both these approaches are flawed, however. The analysis needs a much lower n (how often to you hear that?). A much better comparison would be to compare NJ’s views of NJ to the other 49 states’ navel gazing. If someone did that, I’ll bet NJ’s self-estimation trails most other states, and especially Texas. Why? Because in the few years I’ve been in NJ, I have yet to see a bumper sticker that says “I wasn’t born in NJ, but I got here as fast as I could.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2a9i90AOO1qzxslto1_400.jpg)
Poll: Does Jersey Blow According to Jersey?
There are a handful of reasonable polling outfits that specialize in polling the Jersey electorate, and I suppose it is my job to keep my eye on inferences that they make. Rutgers recently grabbed David Redlawsk from U Iowa to serve as director, and their Eagleton poll recently asked residents of the Garden State about their attitudes toward their home. Here is the press release. Apparently, despite what Triumph the Wonder Dog thinks about New Jersey, people like it here, or, more precisely, “less than a quarter say they would move out of the state if they had the opportunity to do so” [authorial gasp].
Patrick Murray (who does his own polling over at Monmouth) criticizes this inference from the numbers by looking at a time series and finding that on a temporal trend line, NJ’s folks like it less than they have in the past, in other words, feel the context. Redlawsk retorts that we should mentally control for the state of the economy (“worst recession since the depression”), so really it’s not that bad after all.
I’m afraid I think both these approaches are flawed, however. The analysis needs a much lower n (how often to you hear that?). A much better comparison would be to compare NJ’s views of NJ to the other 49 states’ navel gazing. If someone did that, I’ll bet NJ’s self-estimation trails most other states, and especially Texas. Why? Because in the few years I’ve been in NJ, I have yet to see a bumper sticker that says “I wasn’t born in NJ, but I got here as fast as I could.”
