The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.
No, I’m not doing a Scramble today (or at least I’m not planning on it). I’ve got the latest AP/GfK poll, which shows Obama/Biden up by one point over McCain/Palin 44%-43%, to plow through, then 300-some pages of the Oak Creek budget to absorb.
However, I can’t let this slip by without a song.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YIHvK5WN7I[/youtube]
First things first; if you haven’t read Shoebox’s post, go read it now, then come back for some expansion on that.
I briefly noted the disappearance of the PUMAs in a different poll (specifically, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll) near the end of last month. Since we’re talking about the Gallup weekly aggregate of the daily tracking poll, I’ll use Gallup’s numbers to expand on that.
Gallup has been running the weekly aggregate since the week of June 9-15. That week, Barack Obama’s support was 78% of Democrats/43% of Independents/9% of Republicans, while John McCain’s support was 13%D/39%I/84%R. In terms of Democrats, 22% didn’t support Obama, with 13% specifically supporting McCain and the other 9% either supporting a third-party candidate or “undecided” (which includes not voting).
That held rather steady until the Democratic convention. Pre-convention Democratic support of Obama topped out at 82% the week of 7/7-7/13, and returned to 78% the week prior to the convention (8/18-8/24) when he announced Joe Biden as his running mate. Meanwhile, the Democratic support for McCain never dropped below 10% in that time frame (with the low point 7/7-7/13) and topped out at 14% just before the Democratic convention, while the “undecideds” remained between 8% and 9% (the lower just before the Democratic convention). That tracks rather well with Shoebox’s estimates that, had the PUMAs stuck to their guns instead of party, McCain could have had somewhere around 15% of support from Democrats, though I would have been happy with the 12% average that he did get between June and mid-August.
The Democratic convention week (8/25-8/31), which was immediately followed by McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, provided a boost to the Obama/Biden ticket for Democrats, but not a decisive one. The Obama/Biden ticket saw support from 85% of Democrats that week, with a 9% support to McCain and 6% undecided. Democratic support for the Obama/Biden ticket actually dipped in the next couple weeks: the 9/1-9/7 aggregate saw it drop to 83%, with 11% supporting McCain/Palin, and the 9/8-9/14 aggregate saw McCain/Palin pick up another percent from the “undecideds” to bring that back to the average between June and mid-August.
However, there has been a steady march back to the roost for the PUMAs since then. The Obama/Biden-to-McCain/Palin splits among Democrats have been, in succession, 85%/10%, 86%/10%, 87%/8%, 87%/9% and now 89%/7%.
Shoebox’s reminder back in August that there wasn’t much of a difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and specifically his concerns that the PUMAs would remember that before the election, are coming true.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Be wery wery qwiat! I’m hunting PUMAs!
Do you remember back to the end of the primary season? That wonderful, wistful time when we had coalesced behind our candidate and were watching Hillary and Barack clawing at each other?
Do you remember towards the end, before the conventions, after it was clear that Barack was going to be the Dem’s nominee? Do you remember how many of the Hillary supporters, after her shabby and sexist treatment by the DNC and Obama, vowed that they would never vote for Obama? Do you remember how they formed a little group and became known as PUMAs?
With apologies to Pete Seeger:
Where have all the PUMAs gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the PUMAS gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the PUMAS gone?
Became conforming everyone?
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have the PUMAs gone? In late August there were polls showing that 21% of Hillary supporters were committed to vote for McCain, 52% would vote for Obama and 27% were still undecided. Hillary and Barack pretty much split the primary vote. If 21% of Hillary supporters were committed to McCain, that should translate to at least 10.5% of Democrat support for McCain. With 21% still uncommitted, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine that if the PUMAs held together, the Democrat support for McCain could be around 15%. If those numbers make sense, why does the most recent Gallup poll only show 7% of Democrats support McCain?
I wrote at the end of August, during the height of Republican PUMA giddiness, that the PUMA’s disgust with Obama was entirely based on emotion with no substance; the policy differences between Hillary and Obama were “Change you could Xerox!” I was concerned then, that once some time elapsed, the emotion would wane and the PUMAs who had vowed fidelity to John McCain would regain their senses and return to feast at the table of “Hope and Change.”
It appears that while the PUMAs entered the final phase of the election season as lions, they will exit as lambs. Unless of course, they’ve managed to pull off a brilliant deception on all of the pollsters. In that case the adage “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” comes to mind. I can’t imagine anything colder than allowing Obama to believe he has the Democrat vote sown up, only to find that the “Bradley effect” will forever more be known as the “PUMA effect!”
I’ve written a couple of previous times about the corrupt relationship that commercial rating agencies i.e. S&P and Moodys, have with bond issuers and bond purchasers. The rating agencies got paid by bond issuers who would have trouble placing their bonds if the agencies gave them a poor rating. In turn, if the agency provided a poor rating, they wouldn’t get future business from the issuer. It was a situation where both entities benefited from the rating agency providing a high rating regardless of what the real quality of the bonds were.
Today the rating agencies got their turn in the barrel at the Congressional hearings. As a part of the testimony, some text messages between executives of S&P were introduced. The exchange was:
Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous.
Official #2: I know right…model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk.
Official #1: We should not be rating it.
Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.
Rating agencies were one of the few checks that were supposedly available for determine risk in bond issuance. It was thought that the rating agencies were “independent” and would provide an unbiased, integrity based assessment of the quality of the debt instrument being offered. Apparently the these two executives at S&P didn’t believe they had that responsibility.
There were clearly some people and organizations who were not “playing by the rules” and contributed to the current financial challenges. While I don’t really expect it to happen, I hope the Congress and others ferret these folks out and prosecute them with extreme prejudice. I also hope that changes are made to how rating agencies interact with debt issuers and purchasers. The relationship needs to be independent. Without independence, the rating agencies perform no service and the debt issuers may as well rate the bond themselves.
S&P may have given positive ratings to debt even if the deal was “structured by cows.” That’s understandable because both cows and S&P deliver shit, cows at least have the positive attribute of providing milk.
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