Friday, January 02, 2009

Heading into the seventh

No, this isn’t a baseball post.  Nothing in this post about stretches, no excerpts from Take Me Out To The Ballgame.  The “seventh” I’m referring to is blog-years.

The first appearance of Peace Tree Farm as a blog was on January 2, 2003, so this place has been in existence for six full years.  Tomorrow begins the seventh year of this blog.

At the time I opened this blog, the American death toll from the War in Iraq was 0.  The shuttle Columbia hadn’t even taken off, much less broken up during reentry.  Saxby Chambliss, Lindsey Graham, John E. Sununu, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, Norm Coleman, and Mark Pryor were not yet Senators.  No one had died of, been diagnosed with, or even heard of SARS.

When I started writing Peace Tree Farm, Robert Novak didn’t know that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent.  Gray Davis had been recently reelected as Governor of California.  No National Hockey League game had ever been played outdoors.  Air France and British Airways operated daily Concorde flights to JFK.  New Hampshirites could still look up proudly at their state symbol, the Old Man of the Mountain.

As Peace Tree Farm opened, the Anaheim Angels were the World Series champions and the Philadelphia Phillies had won the Series only once, over 20 years in the past.  It had been 84 years since the last title for the Boston Red Sox and 85 years since the Chicago White Sox had won the Series.  The Chicago Cubs hadn’t won the World Series since 1908, and hadn’t even appeared in the Series since 1945 (some things don’t change).  Rickey Henderson, Joe Girardi, Mark Grace, David Cone, Mo Vaughn, Matt Williams, Ron Gant, Jesse Orosco, and Greg Vaughn were still active players.

The defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots had failed to make the postseason.  Cris Carter, Darrell Green, Terrell Davis, Jumbo Elliott, Desmond Howard, Richmond Webb, Danny Wuerffel, Ray Crockett, Lomas Brown, Eric Metcalf, and Hardy Nickerson all had just played, or were about to play in the postseason, for the last time in the NFL.

The reigning NBA champs, the Los Angeles Lakers, were struggling at 13-19, though they would soon right the ship and get into the first round of the 2003 playoffs.  Michael Jordan, David Robinson, John Stockton, Tim Hardaway, Steve Kerr, Shawn Kemp, Danny Manning, Arvydas Sabonis, Chris Dudley, and Danny Ferry were still playing in the NBA.

Defending their Stanley Cup championship, the Detroit Red Wings led their Division on the way to another first-place finish.  In the spring, they would lose their opening playoff series against the eventual championship runnerup Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.  Patrick Roy, Pavel Bure, Mike Richter, Doug Gilmour, Phil Housley, Claude Lemieux, Tom Barrasso, Adam Graves, Ulf Dahlen, Theoren Fleury, Craig Berube, and Sylvain Cote were still lacing on their skates in the NHL.

Much has happened in those six years, and I’ve occasionally commented on some of those events.  In these exciting, albeit troubling, days, we prepare for the inauguration of Barack Obama 18 days hence (and will simultaneously celebrate what will likely be the happiest of my nephew’s 15 birthdays).  There’s much more to come here at Peace Tree Farm.

Oh, in the spirit of last year’s blogiversary post, the standard acknowledgment for a sixth anniversary is candy or iron (traditional), wood (modern).  If you’re going for candy, may I suggest something from here?

Friday, December 26, 2008

Obama sweeps Seattle (election analysis part 1)

In my post-election post, I mentioned that I wanted to add to my early observations about the results on November 4.  Now that I’ve downloaded the King County precinct data from the King County Elections website, and begun processing the voluminous information therein, I’m ready to start the more detailed look at the election.

The “e-canvass” data file created by King County is, in a word, huge.  1,570,184 records huge.  That’s due to the level of detail in the data records.  Even an uncontested race, such as House Position 1 in my own Legislative District, generates 16 records for each precinct in the LD:

• 1 for the count of Registered Voters in the precinct
• 3 (Absentee, Polling, and Total) for Times Counted, the number of ballots cast in the precinct
• 3 (Absentee, Polling, and Total) for Jamie Pedersen, the one and only candidate on the ballot
• 3 (Absentee, Polling, and Total) for Times Blank Voted, the number of ballots left blank for this race
• 3 (Absentee, Polling, and Total) for Times Over Voted, the number of ballots with more than one marked choice (in this case, both Jamie and a write-in)
• 3 (Absentee, Polling, and Total) for Write-in, the number of write-in votes cast in the race

Every additional candidate adds another three records to the total for the race.  The presidential race, with eight tickets on the ballot, generates 37 records ... in every single one of the 2526 precincts in King County.  That multiplies out to over 93,000 records just from the presidential election.  And each ballot in the county covered 30-some additional offices, measures, initiatives, amendments, and levies.

Large as it is, the e-canvass dataset is only about three-quarters the size of the equivalent 2004 file.  That’s largely due to the ridiculous “top two” primary system we’re now saddled with, which limits all races except the presidential race to two candidates on the general election ballot.  Also, King County now has about three percent fewer precincts than it did four years ago.  That’s an issue I’ll be returning to in a future post.

In light of the national outcome of the 2008 general election, the results here in King County—particularly in the city of Seattle and the six Legislative Districts that fall at least partially within it—aren’t all that interesting.  This is an overwhelmingly Democratic city, in a definitively Democratic county.  Still, we do have some interesting issues to discuss.  Let me start by correcting a statement I made in the post before this one—contrary to my (and Mayor Nickels’s) belief, Dubya actually won two precincts in Seattle in 2004.  We were both aware of Broadmoor, the gated golf course community where Kerry was soundly defeated 57%-42%, but we’d missed the close defeat (51%-48%) in nearby Madison Park.

No such blots on the city in 2008.  Obama got 53% of the vote in Broadmoor to 46% for McCain, and he breezed to a 60%-39% margin in Madison Park.  I’ll offer a more detailed look at the Seattle presidential vote in a future post, but at this point let’s just whet your appetite with the citywide totals:

Pres/VP Candidates	Votes	Percent
Obama/Biden	279,441	84.3%
McCain/Palin	45,761	13.8%
Nader/Gonzalez	2,394	0.7%
Barr/Root	1,214	0.4%
McKinney/Clemente	682	0.2%
Baldwin/Castle	336	0.1%
Harris/Kennedy	129	0.04%
La Riva/Puryear	85	0.03%
(Write-in)	1,367	0.4%
Total	331,409	100.0%

As I continue to examine the King County election results, I’ll hit a number of themes.  At the moment, I plan to present the above presidential results broken out by Legislative District.  The city of Seattle contains the entirety of the 36th, 43rd, and 46th LDs, most of the 34th and 37th LDs, and a small portion of the 11th LD.  Another topic of interest is registration and turnout, the principal targets of the Obama and Combined campaigns this year.  For this topic, we’ll also want to look at the last presidential cycle in 2004.  After all, you can’t say much about how good, bad, or indifferent your turnout is unless you have something else to compare it with.

Of course, we weren’t voting only for a president this year.  After the 2004 cliffhanger, the gubernatorial rematch between Chris Gregoire and Dino Rossi also drew great interest.  It turned out vastly better (and much, much quicker!) than last time, and it’s quite apparent that the Governor’s share of the vote increased all over the state.  In addition to the improvement in her vote percentage, I’ll explore the possibility that fewer voters opted to sit out the governor’s race this time around.  It’s little more than a surmise on my part, but I recollect that there was widespread dissatisfaction with the choices we had been presented four years ago, which could have translated into a relatively high proportion of voters skipping that part of the ballot.  It may not be possible to separate that effect from the possible opposite influence of the influx of new voters whose only real concern was voting for Barack Obama, but I do want to explore it.

I’d also like to look at LD and precinct-level patterns in the 7th Congressional District, which means adding portions of the 32nd LD, just north of Seattle, to the analysis.  Did Congressman McDermott lose any precincts to his hapless Republican “opponent”?  I also want to look at House races nationwide, to determine whether Jim really did draw more votes than every other winner save one.  Even if he didn’t, he’s certainly right there at the very top of the heap.  I also intend to look at what was surely the most interesting state legislative race in King County, the selection of a successor to Representative Helen Sommers in Position 1 in the 36th District.

Additional avenues for analyses may present themselves as I continue to look at these King County precinct numbers.  More to come!

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Election 2008 tidbits

[UPDATE:  Final results entered, slight changes noted.]

Today’s the day that Washington’s 39 counties are supposed to submit their final certified results from the election that took place three weeks ago.  Those final reports are streaming in to the Secretary of State’s office even as we speak.

Though the county-by-county results aren’t quite all tallied, it’s close enough that we can begin to point out a number of (possibly) interesting items in the results.  As I write, the SoS appears to believe that there are only 100 ballots that haven’t yet been completely dealt with, and that number may be different by the time you, the reader, look at the voter turnout page on their website.  Whitman County was the last to report, at 9:41am on Wednesday.

What follows are some tidbits on the 2008 general election in Washington state.  Nearly all of them were observed on the Secretary of State’s website, though I may also pull some local King County information from the King County Elections site.  Also, I may add to the list as I run across additional interesting points. 

• Amazingly, King County appears to be the second county in the state to issue its final results.  Only San Juan County, which finished yesterday afternoon, was ahead of King.  It looks like the good people at King County Elections pulled an all-nighter, as their final report was timestamped at 4:11am today.
• Rounding is our friend, at least at the presidential level.  Most of the national sources show vote percentages as whole-number percentages, so Washington’s result will be displayed as 58% for Obama to 40% for McCain.  That looks a whole lot more impressive than it would if taken to two more decimal places, as the SoS does—57.65% to 40.48%.
• Edging up to 84.60% 84.61% turnout, the state has recorded its highest level of participation by eligible voters since at least 1952 (that’s as far back as the SoS displays it).  The previous record of 82.35% was set in 1960, ever so slightly above the 82.23% turnout in the last presidential cycle.  Washington’s turnout is regularly among the highest of all states.  The two counties still using polls, Pierce and King, were slightly lower than the state as a whole.  King County’s mail voters returned almost 86% of their ballots, and constituted a bit under 70% of the ballots cast in the county.
• John Kerry won 12 of the 39 counties in 2004.  This time, Barack Obama added Clallam, Clark, Island, Klickitat, Skagit, Skamania, Wahkiakum, and Whitman Counties to Kerry’s “usual suspect” Democratic counties.  That comes to 20 counties, a majority!
• Chris Gregoire cruised to a convincing win in her second battle with the soon-to-be-forgotten Dino Rossi.  She won’t quite make it to a 200,000 vote advantage, but her margin is something like 1500 times the size of her razor-thin 2004 edge.  Last time, she won only eight counties, the real Dem core of Cowlitz, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, King, Pacific, San Juan, Thurston, and Whatcom.  Though Cowlitz swtiched to Rossi, five other counties (Island, Kitsap, Pierce, Skagit, and Snohomish) moved into her column.  She won her counties by larger percentages this time, and cut her deficits in many other counties.
• It wasn’t us King County lefties who beat Tim Eyman this time.  In fact, the rest of the state voted NO on I-985 at a higher rate than did King—59.61% in King, 60.15% elsewhere.  And if you also remove Pierce, which inexplicably gave Eyman his only county win, 62.05% of voters in the other 37 counties rejected I-985.
• It’s no surprise, of course, that Jim McDermott cruised to an easy win in his “rematch” against hapless Steve Beren in the 7th Congressional District.  Just your standard-issue 84%-16% thrashing.  However, the actual number of votes for Jim—291,963—is quite impressive.  Though I haven’t made an exhaustive study, I’m fairly sure that only one other House member in the entire country received more votes than Jim did, and that’s mainly because MT-AL has by far the highest voting population of any Congressional District.  Last I checked, the winner exceeded 250,000 votes in only eight CDs.
• On first glance, it looks like two state legislative races will go to recounts.  In suburban Spokane’s LD6, House Position 2, Democrat John Driscoll leads Republican John Ahern by 74 votes (50.05% to 49.95%), and in Snohomish County’s LD44, House Position 2, it’s Republican Mike Hope ahead of Democrat Liz Loomis by 118 votes (50.09% to 49.91%).

As noted earlier, I may augment this little report as other points of interest come my way.  I’m looking forward to the release of King County’s complete precinct-by-precinct canvass ... I really want to know whether Obama won every single precinct in the city of Seattle.  Bush beat Kerry in one Seattle precinct in 2004.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

The "Where were you when...?" moment

Why do I write posts on most November 22nds?  Before today, I wrote Forty years in 2003, The end of the innocence in 2004, and 43 ... and 46 in 2006.  And here it is, November 22 again, and I’m posting another time on the JFK assassination and its impact.

For my parents’ generation, the Where were you when...? moment was surely December 7, 1941.  With, perhaps, April 12, 1945 as a secondary moment. 

In the generation following mine, I’ve heard, January 28, 1986 was an important Where were you when...? moment.  I must admit that the Challenger disaster was nothing of the kind for me.  In Pittsburgh working on my dissertation at the time, I recall hearing about the explosion that morning, shrugging, and going back to my writing and research.  I didn’t see the video until the evening news, at which time I wondered why they were showing it over and over and over.

Without a doubt, September 11, 2001 is and will remain such an event for many people, myself included.

What defines a Where were you when...? moment?  What makes its importance and effect more searingly visceral, for a huge number of people, than other events?  I would suggest that there are at least three reasons that these particular moments live on so meaningfully, and with such immediacy even after many decades, in the lives of those who experience them.

Surprise and shock

Undoubtedly, some Americans knew in 1941 that our nation was on the brink of entering World War II.  There’s no question that some Morton Thiokol engineers tried to stop NASA from launching the space shuttle that frosty morning.  Two and a half years too late, we learned that Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.

But at the time each of these events transpired, the general populace had no idea whatsoever that such troubles were afoot.  More than that, even as they happened, such things were, for all intents and purposes, inconceivable in the public mind.  As the shuttle lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral that morning, NASA was all about beating the Russians to the moon and the heroic engineers of Apollo 13.  As the presidential limousine turned onto Elm Street, assassination was something you read about in dusty old books; we knew about Lincoln, of course, but few could have told you much about Garfield and McKinley.  If New Yorkers were thinking about anything other than the gloriously clear, bright weather that Tuesday morning, it was the primary to determine who might replace Mayor Giuliani.

Where were you when...? moments come at us totally out of the blue, without warnings or premonitory events.  They assault our conceptual spaces from hitherto unknown directions, instantaneously producing novel and unwelcome thoughts, questions, fears, ideas that consume us to our very being.

The death of Franklin Roosevelt doesn’t really meet the criteria for this sort of moment.  It was a surprise, but anyone who watched newsreels at the local movie theater could observe FDR’s frailty and deterioration (seeing those photos, it’s shocking to realize that he was only 63 when he died).  A surprise, then, but not really a shock.  Similarly, in post-JFK America the two 1968 assassinations could no longer shock us in anything like the way we were shaken exactly forty-five years ago today.

Transformative

Many events surprise and shock us.  But very, very few also transform our world and our view of it.  In a very real sense, the world we occupy in the instant following a Where were you when...? moment is a very different place from the one we were experiencing immediately beforehand.

I don’t think I really need to belabor this point.  Although “everything changed after 9/11” soon became a political weapon for George W. Bush and the Republicans, its effectiveness arose in no small measure from the truth of the phrase.  In my 2004 November 22 post, I argued that what we now think of as “The Sixties” actually began on that afternoon in Dallas:

As I see it, what we now know as the Sixties started exactly and precisely during that sunny lunchtime in Dealey Plaza.  The ferment, the torment, the uproar, the outcry of the next decade and more—from Vietnam to Prague Summer to Dylan going electric to Bader-Meinhof to the Mexico City and Munich Olympics to Salvador Allende to Yoko Ono to Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars to Woodstock to Kent State to Watergate, and a thousand more events—all of that exploded into being when the core of our national being was ripped away in Dallas.  What may have been bubbling under the surface, what might eventually have produced major, earthshaking changes in American and world society, was suddenly and violently facilitated by a single rifle bullet ripping through the brain of one man.

For me, the Challenger explosion falls short on this criterion.  It certainly altered my impressions of NASA, the way it was administered, and its safety/quality culture, but my worldview wasn’t fundamentally changed by it.  I felt no deep discontinuity, no wrenching loss of focus.

Widespread and immediate

A Where were you when...? moment is shared by a huge number of people.  It becomes a point of shared experience instantaneously.

Thus, it is difficult to envision such a moment before the existence of broadcast media.  No matter how great their influence on the rest of the 20th century, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28, 1914) and the October Revolution (October 25, 1917 on the Julian calendar, November 7 on the Gregorian) fall short because the news of their occurrence crept, rather than leapt, around the world.

[Parenthetical note—family tradition has it that my paternal grandparents were married, in Russia, on the exact same day as the October Revolution.  But, as peasants in a small Ukrainian village, they knew absolutely nothing about what was happening at the same time in St. Petersburg, and wouldn’t learn of it until days or weeks later.  As supporters of Kerensky, I’m sure they were (eventually) disappointed to hear about it.]

Only after radio became ubiquitous in the 1920s was it really possible for an event to be widely and simultaneously experienced in something close to realtime.  News of Abraham Lincoln’s murder—which surely meets the sudden/shock and transformative criteria—spread like wildfire by the standards of 1865, but that still wasn’t anything like the speed of reports on the radio or television, much less the internet.  With the availability of realtime dissemination, both the sudden, transformative event and its sequelae and ramifications can be shared widely.  The Kennedy assassination discontinuity, after all, wasn’t just the death of JFK; we also co-experienced LBJ’s swearing-in, Jackie’s bloodstained dress, Oswald’s murder, the world leaders descending on Washington DC for the state funeral.  And we saw others, all around the world, sharing in our grief and disbelief and transformation.

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These are my thoughts today, on the 45th anniversary of what was undoubtedly the most important and monumental Where were you when...? moment of my life, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A different sort of Veterans Day

Every previous Veterans Day post here on Peace Tree Farm (2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003) was written in the continuing context of George W. Bush’s unconscionable and disastrous destruction of Iraq.  While that horror continues—dozens dead yesterday, more today—the nation’s orientation is now different.

The election of Barack Obama won’t immediately end the insanity that was the Iraq invasion.  More Iraqis, and more Americans, will die in that nation that has been destroyed in our name.  But the orientation of the American activities will undoubtedly shift from Bushian plunder and destruction to efforts at disentanglement and reconciliation.  It will be a difficult and dangerous task, but it’s a long overdue change.  We can never undo the awfulness that Bush caused this nation to inflict on the people of Iraq, but we can, at the very least, put an end to it.

I write on this Veterans Day as a Draft Board member.  The results of last week’s election probably make it less likely that I’ll ever have to perform such duties.  If unforeseen circumstances do somehow take us in that direction, however, I will always be fully aware that those responsibilities lead directly to this day.  What the Draft Board does, what the Selective Service System does, would convert young American men and women in to veterans of the armed services. 

That is, those who aren’t honored and remembered on Memorial Day.