THE STATE OF THE RACE FOR PRESIDENT

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

The ridiculous level of dishonesty in election campaigns and the media is a major issue in politics today. The desperate attempt to win at any cost has left too many voters in this cycle with the familiar feeling of having to pick between the better of two difficult options. The polls show this and even something as data-driven as polls become the subject of manipulation by die-hards on either side. The data should be objectively observed and reported, but such is not the case.

What we are left with is the bogus poll patrol, and both sides are guilty. Political polls are public opinion surveys that gauge sentiment at the time they are taken. The better polling organizations use sophisticated methods to construct questionnaires, collect data, analyze the data and provide the results with a reasonable margin of error. If we look at many of these polls over a period of time, we can deduce trends to indicate whether a candidate has a lead outside the margin of error, or not. Polls, therefore, are not necessarily predictive but can give us a sense as to where a particular election is heading. Hopelessly biased media “journalists” only look at the data that shows their candidate in the lead or catching up, the other candidate badly failing, and then make impossible-to-support flat predictions in declarative language. Nowhere to be found is any nuanced discussion of margins of error or the methodological difficulties inherent in collecting meaningful data from verbal questionnaires by cell phones.

But back on the campaign trail the Democrats went for the quick fix, the easy route (leveraging Biden out, deciding Kamala is in). But they are not going to solve the Biden problem with a Biden clone. Newly anointed Kamala Harris (so much for “democracy is on the ballot”) is now trying to verbally distance herself from the Biden-Harris border disaster. And Trump is back to his old self, neither chagrined nor informed by the favorable reactions to his mellower convention speech, nor the assassination attempt. Just days ago he called VP Harris “a bum.” How does this help?

Both sides will have an abundance of money, surrogates and talking points. But most of these assets will be bulls-eyed at the other candidate and it will get even uglier if that’s possible. We will be told, umpteen times, that a vote for the opposition is an existential threat, and that our candidate is the savior and the only choice to save the planet. Their candidate? Fuhgeddaboudit. Facts do not matter as each campaign will have legions of realty re-constructors that will design a never-ending air attack designed to destroy the opposition and woo the undecideds. Still, in the end, a more rational electorate will decide which presidential candidate will inherit the most complex job in the world, campaign silliness notwithstanding. This show will go on the for the next few months, with the focus sharpening in the fall, reaching a fever pitch in late October. Let’s hope that somewhere in the circus there may be some actual substantive policy discussion where we can get a glimpse as to what the winning candidate might actually do.

POLITICAL POLEMICS PARTY

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

Only a schizophrenic could make sense of Tuesday’s House of Representatives hearing on Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report. The Judiciary Committee is loaded with Members of Congress who are also attorneys, and the hearing immediately devolved into a contest of can-you-top-this in argumentation and fact parsing.

Republicans and Democrats crafted statements designed to proffer a point view, irrespective pf anything Mr. Hur wrote in his report, or stated verbally. For example, a number of Democrats insisted that the Hurt report exonerated President Biden of any wrongdoing, irrespective of the number of times Mr. Hur categorically stated he did not exonerate the President. Similarly the Republicans only found evidence of guilt in the report. Wasn’t this the same document?

How can intelligent people come away with such dichotomously different interpretations of the same report? They can’t, unless of course its Congress and it’s an election year. Thus the problem. No matter what the issue, each side argues what they must to leverage advantage, facts notwithstanding. The more naïve portions of the public are bewildered, the more savvy listeners hear the same old song and dance. Left in the dust are honesty, honor, and a sense of justice. A poor showing after more than 200 years of democracy and trillions spent on a large, modern government. Yet this nonsense goes on and on.

Third party candidates such as RFK Jr. try to coalesce the middle in an attempt to cobble together a coalition of the reasonable, side stepping the noise in the DC swamp. To what end we will find out in November, but in the meantime it’s a fight to the finish over every scrap of information, every hearing, every special election, every bill and every issue.

We would need a legion of Diogenes-like warriors to wrangle the truth out of the political class in a desperate attempt to make sense of anything that is coming out of Washington.

NIKKI HALEY: THE MUSIC HAS STOPPED

Ken Grossberger, PhD

It’s difficult to understand what Nikki is doing. She has virtually no path to the nomination, and continuing in the race increases her reputation risk. It seems she is intellectually stuck on an idea that does not correlate with reality. She needs to suspend her race while she can still clean up the damage.

Is there a future for the former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador? She’s smart, she’s tough and she can raise money, but her loss of perspective is troublesome as we assess her prospects in the post-election cycle. There is a sense of arguing too much as she repeats that she is going to continue her race because “Republican voters deserve a choice”, one they quite obviously have already made. Will she continue past Michigan primary (tomorrow) and head into Super Tuesday with a string of losses to show for her efforts? Will she continue past Super Tuesday when Trump will have officially locked up the nomination?

She is seduced by her own rhetoric, the force of which is supported by the constant repetition. It is difficult to know, at this point, what it will take to convince her to suspend her campaign. Polls don’t seem to matter, neither do losses. And this for a woman who has won every political race she has run in, and now an increasingly long string of losses. The logic of hanging in waiting for a Trump criminal conviction borders on the foolhardy as Trump has developed a Teflon political shield and will highly likely survive the White House coordinated legal tsunami.

So the music has stopped, the chairs are full of other humans and Nikki is still circling, waiting for some quixotic chance to get back in the game.