Positively presidential: Obama in Berlin

Some amazing photos were posted yesterday and today on DailyKos regarding Obama’s visit to Berlin. Al Rodgers collected some truly wonderful ones:

My favorite post on the subject was by blogger MLDB who has two pre-schoolers. After dinner last night they were playing in the other room and things were quiet enough the parents asked what was going on. “Obama is speaking,” said one. The other said “Help get the stadium filled.” On investigation, this is what was going on:

Pollsters’ Prediction Performance

I am thrilled that Obama did so well in yesterday’s primaries. What was especially interesting to follow was the pollsters’ predictions. They were all over the map, of course. My favorite pollster (and political writer) is Markos Moulitsas, the guy behind DailyKos. He always says he pulls his numbers from a very special place, which I’ll let him describe for you below:

Prediction performance by kos

Wed May 07, 2008 at 08:57:48 AM PDT

According to SurveyUSA’s pollster scorecards, which track 8 different measures of scoring polling results:

North Carolina: PPP was the most accurate by five measures, Zogby by three.

Indiana: PPP was the most accurate by five measures, InsiderAdvantage by three.

Overall, Research 2000, who does polling for Daily Kos, was second best in North Carolina (out of 13) and fourth best in Indiana (out of 10).

Meanwhile, here are the results of my last three predictions:

My prediction —-Actual —-Margin of error
PA C:54.0 O:46.0 —-C:54.6 O:45.6 —-1.0 point
NC C:43.9 O:56.1 —-C:41.5 O:56.2 —-2.5 points
IN C:51.1 O:48.9 —-C:50.7 O:49.3 —-0.8 points

Damn NC burns me up, since I was one tenth of a percent off on Obama, but forgot to account for “no preference” and Mike Gravel on the ballot. Combined, they got 2.4 percent. I would’ve guessed 1 percent, so that would’ve brought my margin of error to under 2 points. But that’s just me being greedy.

Given that I pull these out of you-know-where, it seems my ass is more accurate than the pollsters! I jest, I jest. The polling composites were a big part of my prediction system.

Political Process

This morning I joined 1500 other Clark County Democrats at the County convention as an alternate for Obama. (This not me in the photo…) Although I’m a precinct officer, I missed out on being an official delegate because I was too busy running the caucus in February to volunteer. Today all my precinct delegates must have showed up, so no alternates were needed.

It was an exuberant crowd and there are some fine candidates running for state and local offices. We heard from them, then went into an interminable certification process - I left since I had no further role, but I got reports from friends that it didn’t break up till ours later than it was supposed to.

Democracy is cumbersome and untidy. Our caucus process is under attack by some who think it’s way too unwieldy. But after watching how it works to bring people out and energize them, I don’t want to go to a primary only. The trouble is, primary voters are much less committed to the party’s principles (all they have to do is mark some Xs on a ballot and drop it in the mail).

In the Feb. caucuses the county went 2 to 1 for Obama - with the most enormous turnout ever! Folks who come out for a caucus are hard-core, and tend to be more liberal. They get energized by being with other like-minded folks and become the foundation of the worker-bee army that is required in an election year.

I saw that again today, although I don’t know how folks felt if the convention wasn’t done till 4.

Presidential Qualifications

The Clinton and McCain camps like to say that Obama is young and lacks experience. Musician Tom Rush has some thoughts on that:

There’s a story I like about how Henry Ford wanted his engineers to come up with a certain carburetor design. They worked and worked, and reported that it couldn’t be done. So he took the job to two guys from the mail room, with no engineering training whatsoever, and they worked and worked, and did it.

They talk a lot about Obama’s lack of experience, but I’m thinking that, to the extent that it’s true, it might be a good thing. It seems evident that all of our current problems were carefully (or carelessly) crafted by people with lots and lots of experience. Tons of knowledge about The Way Things Should Be Done have led us into all kinds of very bad situations. Maybe we need someone who doesn’t know how it’s done, or that it can’t be done, to have a try at straightening things out.

Others say that a president must have had prior executive experience. Well, maybe, but if the current occupant is our standard, maybe not. It is important to note that it takes a skillful executive to run a grueling and costly presidential campaign, which involves policy, media, money, and a volunteer army, plus a good measure of damage control skill. For all her brains and experience, Clinton has managed her campaign very poorly and they’ve got serious financial problems. McCain barely has his act together.

Quite apart from his skills as an orator, Obama has run an extremely well-organized and executed campaign. He’s got foot soldiers on the ground all over the country, he’s raised beaucoups de bucks, and when the Rev. Wright issue exploded he faced it with grace and power.

Presidential qualifications? Vote Obama.