Eric The Blue

The trouble with Scott Johnson

I haven't placed a post in my "Power Out" category for awhile.  What are the philosophers up to?  Well, Scott Johnson doesn't like the Minnesota Poll, which, he says, seems "regularly to overstate Democratic strength."  The poll's latest offense is to find that Mark Dayton is 9 points ahead of Tom Emmer in our gubernatorial race.  Johnson relates the tale of how, in 2002, when Norm Coleman was running for US Senate against first Paul Wellstone and then, after Wellstone's death, Walter Mondale, he (Johnson) wanted to bet the poll's director that on election day Coleman would do at least five points better than "the final pre-election Minnesota Poll would show."  The director "wisely" declined, and Coleman, according to Johnson, outperformed the final poll by 9 points.

It is not really so surprising that a candidate should, on election day, surpass the support measured in a poll, where after all "undecided" is a choice.  Johnson doesn't appear to be saying anything more than that some undecided voters end up casting a ballot for the Republican.  So what?  He needs to be fact-checked, anyway.  The Minnesota Poll's last measurement of the 2002 US Senate race in Minnesota is here.  It shows Coleman at 44% and Mondale at 42%.  On election day, Coleman won, 49.5% to 47.3%.  What is Johnson talking about?

For the record, here is the final Minnesota Poll result of the most recent high-profile, statewide races in Minnesota, together with the actual result. 

In the 2008 US Senate race, the final Minnesota Poll showed Franken leading Coleman by 42-38; the result, of course, was a virtual dead heat, with Franken winning by the narrowest of margins.  The final poll of the 2006 governor's race had Democrat Mike Hatch ahead of Republican Tim Pawlenty by 42-39; on election day, Pawlenty won by 1%.  In the US Senate race that year, the last Minnesota Poll had Democrat Amy Klobuchar at 54% and Republican Mark Kennedy at 33%; Klobuchar won the election, 58-38.  In the presidential election of 2004, the last Minnesota Poll had Kerry leading Bush by 46-42; Kerry won the state by 51.1 to 47.6.  The last measurement of the 2002 gubernatorial race had Pawlenty ahead of Democrat Roger Moe by 41-28; Pawlenty won the election, 44.4 to 36.5.  In the 2000 presidential race, the last Minnesota Poll showed Gore at 41% and Bush at 36%; Gore carried the state, 47.9 to 45.5.

Today--one day after Johnson denounced the Minnesota Poll--a different poll, showing Dayton even farther ahead of Emmer, was published.  Johnson has a post up about that one, too.  Money quote:  "It should be noted that the MPR/Humphrey Institute poll results tend to support the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll's, though it seems to me they raise similar questions."

It seems to me that he's a joke.

Freedom: a short review

Finished Franzen's Freedom.  Didn't want it to end, but it did, and I feel now like I thought I would--not like there's been a death in the family but tending in that direction.  Some people consider themselves too smart to fall for it but not me.

More than one reviewer has taken note of the part played in the novel by Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Patty reads it, partly to impress Walter but also because she enjoys it, especially the way in which the narrative seems to reflect aspects of her own life:  she's Natasha to Richard Katz's Anatol while Walter is Prince Andrei.  By these allusions Franzen I think calls attention to his high ambition, the effort to compose a sweeping chronicle of the United States in the years, roughly, 1978 to 2008, by telling the stories of two families, the Emersons and the Berglunds.  One aspect of this ambition is the geographic sprawl, from Minnesota's Twin Cities and the Iron Range towns to points distant and eastward: New York City, Westchester County, Georgetown, West Virginia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia.  Franzen, master of the American scene, provides rich renderings of all these locales, their flora and fauna, from which locales (except for West Virginia and Hibbing, Minnesota) you might surmise that none of the principal characters is in foreclosure--and you'd be right.  In that way it might be argued that Freedom is not true to the American scene, but something similar could be said against War and Peace, and, anyway, toward the end of the novel, when Walter is living by a lake in a mostly hardscrabble region of northern Minnesota, his solitude is encroached upon by a new upscale subdivision whose residents, it is revealed, are not all paying their bills.

About those neighbors: they are studying Walter and Patty just as, at the very beginning, Walter-and-Patty were the objects of their neighbors' attention in their gentrified St. Paul neighborhood.  So we see the two of them first through other eyes, darkly, and then in the long and mostly satisfying middle sections, directly, before at the end they blur out in the eye of a different set of neighbors.  The desired effect, I believe, is to give the impression that one has come finally to the apt and necessary conclusion of a bulging epic.  Perhaps by the end, however, the memory of the parallel beginning is not distant enough for this effect to be fully realized.  I will finish where I began by saying that--excepting the sequences concerning Walter's work with the Cerulean Mountain Trust, which he finally renounces in a somewhat corny scene involving a speech he ad-libs before the right-wingers with whom he had made implausible (considering his intelligence) common cause--I wished the novel longer.

Eric the Blue looks at the arguments against gay marriage

According to a headline on page 1 of today's Minneapolis newspaper, "Governor's race steers clear of social issues."  I guess that means we get to listen to Tom Emmer's odd notions about economics instead of being subjected to his odd notions about gay marriage.  Not exactly a blessing, but, on the blessing side of the spectrum, it is probably another sign that the tide is turning on issues pertaining to gay rights.  Not very long ago candidates like Emmer would have loved to make a political campaign a referendum on gay marriage.  Now their judgment is that they are better off putting their failed, recycled economic program front and center.

The arguments against gay marriage smell of bad faith.  Let us begin with the idea that the Bible is against it.  Jesus, fully human but never a husband, has nothing to say on the subject.  The Old Testament condemnations of homosexuality are interwoven with an assortment of rules and proscriptions, such as what to do with menstruating women and whether or not a glass of milk may be enjoyed with a ham sandwich, that Christian conservatives have no evident passion for enforcing.  Then there is St. Paul.  He is disgusted by homosexual relations, also heterosexual ones, and this, by some leap of illogic, makes him a champion of the movement that places "traditional marriage," an unassailable Christian ideal, opposite the dark perversion of homosexuality.

It's obvious that all the dear people whose Bible condemns homosexuals are a lot more interested in homosexuals than they are in the Bible.

And if we are all children of God, and if traditional marriage is the ideal arrangement, then it follows that it must be a rank injustice to deny traditional marriage to one substantial segment of humanity.  Here the arguments against gay marriage become laughably strained.  Marriage is for raising children, and therefore it must be an option for heterosexual singles in the eighth decade of life who meet at a Sun City West mixer--but not for gay couples who actually are raising children. 

Of course this whole outlook is sufficiently absurd to attract the Catholic Church!  Here in Minnesota, the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul, under the direction of Archbishop John Nienstedt, is sending an anti-gay-marriage DVD to 400,000 Catholic households in the state.  The Church's perfect record of craziness on any issue remotely associated with sexuality is intact. 

She told you so

Zadie Smith, writing in February of 2003, reminds us who was right about the wisdom of invading Iraq.  She's a good novelist, too.

More Freedom

In Freedom, I've advanced to the section, about half-way through the novel, concerning Joey Berglund's freshman year at the University of Virginia.  I hope it doesn't seem perverse if I persist in my quirky attention to the novel's chronology and the fact-checking of small details, such as whether it is indeed possible that Joey's mother's college basketball games were played before the alternate possession rule eliminated almost all jump balls.

On page 251, Joey and his roommate are watching a World Series game on television.  We know that it is a few weeks past the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which occurred just as Joey was starting college.  The game, we are told, is between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees--check, those two teams were indeed the 2001 contestants.  The Diamondbacks, behind Randy Johnson's pitching, win the game 4-0--check, that was indeed the final score of Game 2, played on Sunday, October 28, in Phoenix, with Johnson the winning pitcher.  At the bottom of the  page, our omniscient narrator reports that "On Jonathan's TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over"--check, that is how  the game ended, according to the batter-by-batter summary supplied at the above "Game 2" link. 

Even Homer nodded but it's hard to catch Franzen.  Maybe the characterization of Patty Berglund,  nee Emerson, is not all of a piece.  Here she is speaking with Joey on the telephone, Thanksgiving 2001:

"But you don't have any religion."

"Exactly my point.  That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts.  That religion is stoopid.  Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished."

"Which sister?"

"Your aunt Abigail.  She's apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are.  How do I know this, you ask?  Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah.  I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey."

"I don't even know what the Kabbalah is," Joey said.

"Oh, I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her.  It's very Important and Mystical--I think Madonna's into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there."

"Madonna's Jewish?"

"Yah, Joey, hence her name."  His mother laughed at him.

All very enjoyable, like so much else in this long book, but, by this point in the narrative, the reader has gotten to know Patty pretty well, her flattened affect, for example, and how she is supposedly the stupidest person in her eccentric, flawed family of origin, and it therefore seems that some of the intelligence and wit displayed in the above conversation is on loan from Jonathan Franzen himself. 

Carping complaint, not even really a complaint, just something that occurred to me while I was reading along with great pleasure.  There are two Pattys.  One can't figure out that her drug-addled college friend does not really have leukemia and the other is the sophisticated author of the "autobiography," written at the suggestion of her therapist, which is included in the novel and displays throughout Franzen's own effortlessly elegant, but still conversational, prose style.

Freedom, Mary Tyler Moore, and jump balls

I have been reading with gusto Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom.  For me there is a kind of built- in "thrill of recognition," since the first 100 pages or so--that's how far into the 560-page work I am--are set in St. Paul and on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota.  The latter, especially, is my old stomping grounds.  The main character, Patty, plays for the Golden Gophers women's basketball team, and her husband-to-be, Walter, a first-year law student from The Range, goes to the games.  So did I!  During my years, from 1981 to 1984, you could display your student ID at the gate and watch a Big Ten women's basketball game for $1.  It appears I missed Patty by just a couple of seasons, for her career-ending injury occurs in the winter preceding Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister of Great Britain, which was in May of 1979.  I have tried, and so far failed, to catch Franzen nodding with respect to his chronology.  When Patty is 17, she is interruped while watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," which at the time "comprised the entirety of [her] knowledge of Minnesota."  The show ended its seven-year run in 1977, so that fits.  I thought I had him for sure when he has Patty resent the way in which back-up center Abbie Smith loses possessions by getting tied up, again and again, and then losing the ensuing jump ball.  The alternate possession rule had to have been adopted by then, right?  Nope, that didn't happen till 1981, so all the games Patty played in could well have been pockmarked by jump balls. 

I suppose no spoiler alert is needed before I let drop that Jonathan Franzen's Minnesota scene diverges somewhat from Garrison Keillor's. 

Incident

The Hennepin County Government Center, the building in which I work in downtown Minneapolis, has an "administration tower" and a "courts tower," both built around an open atrium.  The floor of the atrium is taken up mainly by a large wishing pool.  Yesterday, when I was passing through at lunch time, I noticed an African-American woman, on the border between middle- and old age, sitting by herself on the ledge beside the pool.  She was weeping soundlessly.  There were others all around, sitting nearby or, like me, walking past on their way to get some lunch.  I looked for her a few minutes later when I was passing through in the other direction, but she was gone.

Here is a poem by W.H. Auden that I like a lot:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.   

On the other hand

There is a tradition among scientific disputants, rarely imitated by political ones, of addressing themselves to the strongest arguments against their own view.  In that spirit, I want to point out something about instant runoff voting (IRV) that I do not particularly like.

Suppose that, in our Minnesota governor's race, the Independent in the contest, Tom Horner, who appears to be lagging, were to gain ground and pull just about even by election day, so that the final result was, say: Emmer, 35%; Dayton, 33%; and Horner, 32%.  In an IRV contest, this would not make Emmer governor--a good thing, I've argued.  Instead, Horner would be eliminated from contention, and the ballots cast for him would be redistributed among Emmer and Dayton, according to the candidate named on these ballots as second favorite.  Presumably this would put someone--I've speculated that it would be Dayton--over the 50% threshold needed to win election.

That would in my opinion be a fine outcome but, by the logic of IRV, is it really best?  It seems very likely that nearly a hundred percent of all voters named Horner as either their first or second choice, yet he is the one who is eliminated. Meanwhile Dayton, regarded as anathema by 35%--that is, by all the Emmer voters--takes office.  Notice what happens if Horner and Dayton switch places in my speculative results.  Now the outcome of the first round of counting is: Emmer, 35%; Horner, 33%; and Dayton, 32%.  Dayton therefore is eliminated, his ballots are redistributed according to the indicated second choice, and Horner wins. 

The final outcome hinges on the nearly dead heat contest for second place in the first round of counting.  Only the second choices of voters who prefer the third place finisher matter.  In the scenario in which Dayton becomes governor, Horner gets no credit for being the second choice of nearly all the Emmer voters. 

Well, when you are in the laboratory you can cook up any scenario you desire.  The question is not which system is perfect but which is best.  I still think that IRV, for the reasons given here, is superior to what we now have. 

Instant runoff voting and Minnesota's gubernatorial election

Speaking of the governor's race in Minnesota, the latest poll shows Dayton and Emmer tied, with Horner trailing by a considerable margin, though still almost within range given that a full fifth of the respondents are undecided.  If that is really the state of the race, Emmer is not being penalized for his failure to state clearly how he will address the state's budget problems.  He will "redesign government"--what does that mean?  And how is it worth a few billion dollars?  Does he think our current governor, Republican Tim Pawlenty, has been insufficiently vigilant at cutting taxes and waste?  He won't say.

Since Emmer may have a solid 30% base, but a ceiling not much above that, he could win a close three-way race. The problem is that the sane part of the population has two choices, while Emmer is the only option for those suffering from a reality deficiency.  Which brings me to the real subject of this post, instant runoff voting.  It's needed.  Suppose that on election day the undecideds in the poll split their votes evenly among the three main candidates.  Then Emmer and Dayton would finish in a dead heat and we might have a crackpot inflicted upon us by 38% of the voters--a coalition of the crazed and confused.  In an instant runoff election, however, this dismal outcome would be avoided.  The first round of counting would eliminate Horner, but the next governor would be the candidate named by a majority of his supporters as their second choice.  If there is anything to my view that two of the candidates are reasonable men and one isn't, then presumably the second choice of one sane man's supporters will be the other sane man--Dayton. 

Under instant runoff procedures, it is hard to see a path to the governorship for Crazy Tom Emmer.  That is a good advertisement for instant runoff voting.  Here are a few more.

(1) Campaigns would be cleaner.  Candidates could not risk alienating an opponent's supporters, whose second-choice votes might decide the outcome.

(2) Candidates with extreme views would be at a disadvantage.  See (1) above.  Of course, truth may reside toward one end of the spectrum. In that case, we shall trust it to be the first choice of at least half the voters--or the first choice of 48% and the second choice of 3%. 

(3) No one has to cast an insincere, "strategic" vote.  In the Minnesota governor's race, for example, Horner's poll numbers would likely be higher (and the undecideds lower) if no one had to consider the possibility that a vote for him might help to elect Emmer.  A vote for Horner would be a vote for Horner, and it would help keep everyone else below 50%. 

(4) In general, permitting voters more of a voice--allowing them to convey more information on their ballots--is a result devoutly to be wished.

At the Fair

Went to the Minnesota State Fair on Saturday.  I do not care for it, but Amanda is a devotee, and I think there may be a state law requiring citizens to attend.  Anyway it sure feels like it while you are  maneuvering a stroller through the masses in the Midway, where throngs of people spend their money freely on "rides," several of which are not recommended for pregnant women (possibly a form of advertising), and around the lines at the booths housing the tricked-up carnival games and their elusive, kitschy prizes, the most popular still being the oversized stuffed animal.  The freak shows, however, are gone.

Several of the local radio stations broadcast live from the Fair, and I spent an agonizing ten minutes or so standing in line for corn dogs within earshot of "The Patriot," one of the right-wing talk outlets.  The host, Mitch Berg, had as a guest Phil Krinkie, a former state legislator and anti-tax, Tea-Party type.  Their candidate for governor, Crazy Tom Emmer, promises to close the state's gaping budget hole by "redesigning" government.  No one, including apparently Emmer himself, has a very clear idea of what that might mean.  Consequently, Emmer has been assailed, by Mark Dayton, the DFL candidate, and by Tom Horner, the Independent, for "having no plan," and journalistic critics have taken up the complaint.  The purpose of the Berg-Krinkie dog-and-pony show was to defend Emmer by depicting him as another victim of "The Liberal Media" and by distorting Dayton's plan, the centerpiece of which is a new tax bracket for the highest earners, then criticizing their own distorted version of his plan.  The middle-aged, overfed white men who were milling around listening could be counted upon not to interrupt their reveries.