Review before elections

AVI's laconic but timely post had me looking up an old post or two of my own. Pre-election I was trying to guess what kind of presidency his would be.

I judge Obama unsuitable for the office, on grounds of character, experience, and philosophy; but I don't believe him to be the devil incarnate. There ought to be some good arising from his presidency, and it would be a useful exercise to try to figure out what it might be.

Most of my subsequent musings were predicated on the assumption that he would be active instead of passive, and are consequently worthless. I also wasn't expecting such a thorough sweep of House and Senate, with results that make drunken sailors look stingy. All in all, he was worse than I expected.

The worst president we've had in these states was Jefferson Davis: nobody else is even close. My grasp of the doings of earlier presidents has a few gaps, but I think there's no question that Obama was the worst of the past century. Even if you are a devout Keynesian and statist, he was a limp flop with a taste for cronyism.

Our national competitors like him fine, but I don't find that a hopeful endorsement.

I decline to predict tomorrow's outcome (OK, I predict Dane county will elect the Democrat to the House. In other breaking news, water is wet.). Polls with 9% response rate are going to have huge systematic errors. They cite 3% or 5% statistical errors, but I'd go with systematic errors of 28%: the 1/sqrt(12) that you get from the uniform distribution. Which is to say I don't trust them at all and the real vote for a candidate could be anything from 4% to 96%. My gut says there are a lot of yellow-dog Democrats (and Republicans) out there, but you couldn't prove there are more than 4% from the polls.

I promised to weigh the campaign material that arrived, but other family members ditched part of it on arrival, so I can only say there were less than about 16 cards. However, we received something on the order of 50 phone calls for either surveys or "please vote for X" in the past two weeks; all but about 4 being robocalls and about a third of them in the middle of supper.

No matter who gets elected, the worst economic trouble is yet to come. And even more certain than death and taxes--"Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust."