Warmies Seek To "Pombo-ize" Congress

What are the chances of New Mexico getting impacted by global warming spawned rising oceans? Zero -- no, less than zero. But that doesn't stop the propagandists at the Defenders of Wildlife from using it to try to knock off Republicans, just as the knocked off Richard Pombo in 2006.

They're running this ad against New Mexico Republican Steve Pearce:


Here's a partial transcript:

Little girl: This is my congressman, Steve Pearce. (points to man with head stuck into the ground) He cares so much about my future he’s going to get his head out of the sand and help stop global warming.

Pearce: (pulls his head out with a "thwok" sound) No, I’m not. Little girl, we don’t need to do anything about global warming.

Little girl: Then why are you melting?

Pearce: I’m not melting. I feel fantastic. It’s not hot.

Little girl: (as the sea begins to engulf them) That’s because the sea level is rising around us.

Pearce: No, it’s not. Prove it. Stop being hysterical. The rising sea stuff, that’s a theory. Like the theory of gravity.

Little girl: You don’t believe in gravity?

Pearce: Is all the evidence in? I don’t think so.

It's all ludicrous, of course. New Mexico is already hot enough to melt steel, it has no oceans and Pearce, by all accounts, is a firm believer in gravity. Besides, he's a chrome-dome, no neatly coiffed silver lobbyist-cut on him.

So what crime did Pearce commit that is so onerous the Greenies are after him in the primaries? (He's running against Heather Wilson, also a Greenie target, for a chance to run against the more green-tinted Tom Udall for Pete Domenichi's Senate seat.) Oh, really radical offenses, like saying stuff like this:

It is a crucial period for New Mexico and energy production. We must reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy from countries headed by oppressive dictators. Our country is in need of greater domestic supply. On the House Natural Resources Committee I have been a leader in making renewable and alternative forms of energy a high priority.

We must also look to make our traditional sources of energy, such as oil and coal, environmentally friendly. Through our domestic supplies of oil shale and coal alone, we could significantly reduce our need for foreign sources energy. But we must do so in a way that considers the environmental impact of retrieving those resources.

Yup. Nasty. As High Country News puts it,

This 60-second animation was the first salvo fired by the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund in its battle against New Mexico Congressman Steve Pearce and five other Republican lawmakers, over their support for carbon-intensive fossil fuel industries.

Pearce is being targeted strategically by the Greenies:

"We’ve found over the past seven years that science, law and policy analysis are not enough -- we have to change the decision-makers. So we’re focusing on members of committees that matter," says Fund director Rodger Schlickeisen, who hopes to tip the balance in Congress toward "a significant piece of legislation that redirects our energy policy away from fossil fuels."

Pearce is on the Natural Resources Committee, and the Greenies don't want any views on that Committee opposing their view that natural resources aren't really resources, they're just natural stuff to keep your hands off. The Defenders of Wildlife spent about $2.5 million in the 2006 election cycle, $1.5 million on its successful effort to knock off Richard Pombo. This year, it's expected they'll have $3 million to target key GOP committee members.

Unfortunately, this kind of challenge is very difficult to fight. With few exceptions, there are no national groups that can take up the cause of a Pearce or a Wilson, and they're so underfunded they can't compete against a big Greenie group like Defenders of Wildlife. Besides, even if a counter-attack were mounted, the Greenies would just point to energy company funding of the effort and demand that voters dismiss the ad as not credible -- as if their ad were credible, as if they're not just as biased by the truckfuls of money they collect from anti-energy interests.

This calls for what I call train wreck communications. We keep trying to apply the brakes of course, but public opinion is driving us at full speed into a major crash. Since that's the case, we fight defensive battles to protect those we love (those nice coal miners and oil drillers, for example), and prepare ourselves for when the crash happens. Then, we'll be ready to redirect a suddenly disillusioned public onto a safer track.

Some Pretty Good Iraq News

Coming up with a valid opinion poll in Iraq must be quite a trick, so I always look at the results with plenty of questions in mind. That said, it's hard to deny that there's a positive trend in poll results over the last year or so.

The latest poll, reported today by BBC and co-sponsored by BBC, ABC, Japan's NHK and others, includes some good news.

The viability of the Iraqi government keeps on improving, as now just under 50% of Iraqis have confidence in the Baghdad government -- Is that more than in the US? Hmmmm -- up from just 39% at this time last year.

Both Shi'a and Sunni want the government to hold together, says the poll, but only about 10 percent of Kurds want a united Iraq.

The Iraqis' sense of security has improved dramatically:

Still, it is incorrect to call the American presence "popular," but there is a positive trend. The amount of people wanting the US to leave immediately is at 38 percent, compared to 35 percent who want them to stay until order is restored. By comparison, in 2006 70 percent of Iraqis wanted the Americans out within a year, according to a World Public Opinion poll.

An increased sense of security is evident in the poll, along with increased faith in the Iraqi army and police and greater frustration with the militia. All in all, that adds up to less fear of what will happen when the American's leave, so one shouldn't necessarily consider the fact that about 40% of Iraqis want us out now as bad news.

Poll Check

Super Tuesday II has turned out some pretty definitive polling on the Dem side (why bother with the GOP side?), so it'll be interesting to see how accurate the polls are after the fog of war starts blowing off the Texas and Ohio battlefields tomorrow evening.

First, to Texas, where the RCP average says it's a squeaker:

Clinton: 46.8%
Obama: 46.5%

With a margin of error of .3%, it's a statistical dead heat -- at least for now. Tomorrow we'll find out for sure.

Ohio offers up a nice contrast to Texas, with the polls showing Clinton pulling away in the final days to enjoy a strong lead, according to RCP:

Clinton: 49.3%
Obama: 42.9%

Seeing these results, my Inside-the-Beltway mom turned to her hubby and said, "There go our dreams." Obama folks, you know, all dreamy this time around.

Let's hope so. Go Hillary! Keep those Dems dazed and confused!

Mr. Whipple And Global Warming

Mr. Whipple, the strange man with the fixation to squeeze toilet paper rolls, proved the old advertising adage that you can't just tell somebody to buy something. Instead, you have to bludgeon them into it. Or, as they say in ad school, repetition builds recognition, and recognition builds sales.

So year after year, Mr. Whipple got caught in the aisle white-handed, squeezing his beloved Charmin. And people bought it, and life was good at P&G or whatever corporate demon foisted this heinous campaign on us.

Mr. Whipple, metaphorically speaking, is whispering in my ear, telling me this is quite simply the most amazingly unbelievable chart ever produced:

We have BBC to thank for it, because they stuck it on the bottom of a story about low recognition of global warming in Russia. Scan over to the right, to the green "don't know" numbers and you'll see that absolutely everyone in Brazil, Australia and France has heard of global warming.

Yup, there's not one up-Amazon indigenous tribe member walking about with a bone through his nose who has not heard of global warming. Way out in the Outback where people know a thing or two about heat, there's not even one Fosters-swilling town drunk who couldn't tell you why the appropriate term is "climate change." And all the epicures and snobs in Paris, not to mention every single French sheep herder down in the Pyrenees, can sit down over a croissant and discuss the finer points of urban heat islands and polar ice cycles with you.

Why, even in dumb ol' America, where we're all too fat and sassy in our SUVs to ever actually learn anything, a full-blown 99% of us know about global warming. That 14-year-old gal Warren Jeffs wed up maybe didn't get a chance to find out about it yet, I guess.

To cover up the sheer audacity of making such claims as these, BBC tells us:

The survey was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan together with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland. GlobeScan co-ordinated fieldwork between 29 May and 26 July 2007.

The question itself is straightforward enough on the survey instrument:

M1. How much have you heard or read about global warming or climate change?

The methodology section of the survey is suspiciously unrevealing, just giving the number of people surveyed per country, when they were asked and a few sketchy details. There are no clear reasons in the information available that would give us a hint at why such improbable results were posted. I see two possible reasons:

1. The data are true. We may indeed have reached a point where the media have such compelling reach that if they all get singing from the same page, people will hear about it. I find this impossible to believe. There are just too many people how are too remote, too unplugged or too stupid for the data to be true.
2. The countries were selected carefully. I don't see Senegal there, or Peru, or Myanmar, or Yemen. Instead, countries with better than average education and communications systems were selected. Still, the data for the 20 countries selected is simply not believable.
   

Neither idea really pans out. But a second look at the methodology tells the tale: In virtually every country, a phone survey was conducted. Phone ownership biases surveys heavily. Phone owners have dwelling places, money, connections, technology. And (surprise!) when face-to-face interviews were used, they were conducted in urban markets. Guess what? Urban residency biases surveys heavily. Urban dwellers -- especially the ones who will stop and talk to someone on a busy downtown street -- have money, connections and technology.

So what we've learned is that a lot of people know about global warming and there are a lot of ways to bias a survey.

Oh, we also learned that in Russia, they really don't care all that much about the negative effects of global warming. As one meteorologist in the frozen town of Arkhangelsk told the BBC, "I know global warming is a problem, but I would welcome a bit of warmth up here. Then I could grow my own tomatoes."

He was standing in the middle of a frozen river, with the temperature hovering at -25C.

hat-tip: Jim

Dem Talking Points

Last night, I nominated Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley's column This is Your Brain on Politics as one of the most ridiculous stories of the year. This morning, I want to share some of the tactical recommendations to the Dems presented in Begley's column.

The recommendations were made by Drew Westen of Emory University, whose book, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” was the starting point for Begley's ridiculous column.

I don't disagree with Westen's theory that emotions drive opinion formation more than rational thought, but I do disagree with his position that the GOP is skilled at emotional string-pulling while the Dems are inept. Dem presidential candidates don't appear to disagree, however, since Begley tells us two of them have approached Westen for help on their campaigns.

If he signs on, and I'm sure he wrote the book so he would get such an offer, here's the kind of talking points we an expect, excerpted from the book via Begley's column. First, abortion:

Westen has penned powerful sound bites and mini-speeches that Dems could use to justify their core positions on perennial issues. Abortion, and bills outlawing it (as GOP platforms have long called for) or requiring parental consent? “My opponent puts the rights of rapists above the rights of their victims, guaranteeing every rapist the right to choose the mother of his child. . . My opponent believes that if a 16-year-old girl is molested by her father and becomes pregnant, she should be forced by the government to have his child, and if she doesn’t want to she should be forced by the government to go to the man who raped her and ask for his consent.”

Doesn't it sound like the infamous "Republicans are going to kill Social Security" stuff? It's not like the Dems don't do this kind of thing all the time -- remember famous Dem Cameron Dias saying if Bush is elected, rape would become legal?

Begley, no doubt fabulously in favor of murdering the unborn, really likes this message, so it's pulled her emotional strings. But she already would have voted for this candidate, so we have to ask if the aggressive language will work.

To work the listener will have to forget the fact that most abortion laws have a rape exclusion; forget the fact that the rapist has no "right to choose the mother of his child," but rather has only the right to go to jail for a long, long time because of his crime; and forget the fact that parental notification laws have exclusions for parental rape.

Most voters who care about the abortion issue will see this as pandering and excessive, and the quote will not broaden the base for this candidate, although it may solidify it.

How about Westen's advice on gun control?

How about an ad showing a parade of Arab-looking men walking into a gun store, setting their money on the counter and walking out with three or four semi-automatics each, with this voice-over: “My opponent thinks you shouldn’t have to show a photo ID or get a background check to buy a handgun. He thinks anyone who wants an AK-47 should be able to buy one, no questions asked. What’s the point of fighting terrorists abroad if we’re going to arm them over here?”

It's a powerful image, indeed, but again, it's shallow and not factual.

For it to work, Westen will have to find a Dem who's up against a candidate who actually holds that belief, and he's going to have a hard time doing that. You have to know the issue before you can write effective talking points -- emotional or not -- and Westen fails because he hasn't bothered to find out what the pro-gun positions are. Ironically, he's accepted as true his emotional perceptions of what the positions are.

Finally, we go to Westen's proposal that Begley thinks would have given us President Gore if only Westen had been on the Gore campaign. He cues off this comment from Bush regarding Gore's Buddhist temple fundraising: “You know, going to a Buddhist temple and then claiming it wasn’t a fund-raiser isn’t my view of responsibility.”

Gore waffled it -- I think he said something about inventing either campaign finance reform or Buddhism, but I really can't remember -- and at that moment, the VEEP probably inspired Westen to right the book. Here's what Westen would have had him say:

“You have attacked my honor and integrity. I think it’s time to teach you a few old-fashioned lessons about character. When I enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War, you were talkin’ real tough about Vietnam. But when you got the call, you called your daddy and begged him to pull some strings so you wouldn’t have to go to war. So instead of defending your country with honor, you put some poor Texas millworker’s kid on the front line in your place to get shot at. Where I come from, we call that a coward.

“When I was working hard, raising my family, you were busy drinking yourself and your family into the ground. Why don’t you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt? Where I come from, we call that a drunk.

“When I was serving in the U.S. Senate, your own father’s government had to investigate you on the charge that you’d swindled a bunch of old people out of their life savings by using insider knowledge to sell off stocks you knew were about to drop. Where I come from, we call that crooked. So governor, don’t you ever lecture me about character. And don’t you ever talk to me that way again in front of my family or my fellow citizens.”

This is the sort of "gee, if I'd only" thinking we all do after the fact, but in politics, you have to anticipate these questions long in advance and be prepared for them.

Reagan did that when prepping for his Mondale debate, knowing the age question would come up. Instead of going into a three paragraph ad hominem attack, Reagan just chuckled that he wouldn't hold his opponent's age and inexperience against him.

Now that's an emotional message -- short, clear, funny, witty, sharp, self-depreciating, honorable. It pulled every string right and was the end of the Mondale campaign.

Westen's approach is to haul up the garbage truck, pour a few gallons of foul-smelling false scent over it, and dump it on the stage. His message for Gore was long, personal, angry and inaccurate. It will not work because people don't want a long-winded, vindictive, angry and inaccurate president.

I hope Westen's been hired on to Hillary's campaign, because whoever hires this guy is going to lose ground, and she's got the most ground to lose.

hat-tip: Soccer Dad