What the Survey Says

We tend to believe things that support our opinions and disbelieve the things that do not. With such human nature in mind, it is easy to understand the popularity of polling, also known as public opinion polls. The data that polls generate is enormous and critical to estimating what a well defined target audience is going to favor or reject. Survey data is the life blood of marketing and fund-raising. It is what the survey says.

Since George Gallup in the 40’s and 50’s engaged scientific method to public opinion polling in an analogue environment, polling today resembles a science of itself in our digital environment. Depending on the sampling size, surveys may boast a 2% to a 4% margin of error. The smaller the margin is, the better the chances are that the prediction results are accurate. Prediction is the key.

In politics it can be dangerous because events shape public opinion. The pesky public can change its mind on any issue and it does. Consider off-shore drilling. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico seems to have changed the opinion of Californians by a 16% swing, from a small majority that favored drilling to 59% who oppose drilling off the California coast. We know this because it is what the survey said.

CBS5/AP reports that the Public Policy Institute of California's poll “surveyed 2,502 California residents from July 6 to July 20 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points. The margin of error was 2.7 percentage points for the 1,321 likely voters.” The poll also showed more than 22% of likely voters remain undecided.

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No one surveyed me. “Undecided” is not a choice I would make anyway. “Prefer not to say” maybe, but no one asked me. And well they should not have asked me. I do not poll well. Most likely the reason is because I did not go to a mall, or did not answer my phone, or did not click on an online pop-up box. Somehow, I eluded the surveyors.

It is hard to sell a ticket to a sure thing. Sure things lack chance. There is no book to be made, except on long shots, when there are no odds. Sure things have no competition involved. That is why the emphasis on the polling data as it relates to the midterm elections has got to be reported as too-close-to-call. As a group the so-called undecided vote has obfuscated the data. So it is not necessarily the case that races are too close to call because of the margin of difference. They cannot be statistically determined. The data is unclear.

However, what is abundantly clear is abundance itself. The candidate who has the most money to spend to influence the undecided likely voters typically wins. That Public Policy Institute’s poll I referred to shows 39% of likely California voters support Democratic incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer for reelection, while 34% support Republican challenger Carly Fiorina. More than one-fifth of voters told pollsters that they are undecided.

Silicon Valley’s Mercury News reports that Boxer’s campaign “finished the first half of the year with $11.3 million in her campaign account. Fiorina had $953,000 in the bank.” Enter the RNC. “The National Republican Committee has committed to make a $1.75M television media buy for GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina in the final week of her race to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer,” reports the AP. Most of that money will be spent in Los Angeles. Boxer’s campaign manager, Rose Kapolczynski, said “the Republicans were dumping money into California to try to remake Fiorina, who was fired from HP in 2005.”

In the California governor's race, Democrat Jerry Brown has support from 37% of likely voters. Republican Meg Whitman has support from 34%. That could be considered close except for the 25% of likely voters who are undecided. Incidentally, California voters are heavily registered as Democrats compared to voters registered as Republicans. Whitman has been spending loads of money in advertising statewide. Brown has not, yet.

Regrettably just what the electorate is given to help them decide is ugly. Attack advertising will get uglier, especially in California, where media costs dwarf those of most other states. At this posting, the californiawatch.org Politics Verbatim [weblog] has found a total of 363 ‘candidate attacks.’ Candidate attacks include any statement in which either the Brown or Whitman campaign takes a shot at each other or another political target.” In the next three months, the count will rise.

Money is flowing into media to go after the undecided vote to be sure. But I question just how undecided voters really are. Depending upon which group of pundits one hears or which newspaper opinion page one reads, the rhetoric tends to fall along For-Obama or Against-Obama lines. Yet neither of those arguments convinces anybody of anything. A Floridian associate of mine recently put it this way. “I think Obama is evil . . . not that I know of a Republican I would love to send to White House.” People like that are very hard to convince.

Washington Post columnist David Broder notes, “The history of midterm elections shows regular gains for the opposition party, and so far all the polls look upbeat for the GOP.” However, the flaw in a polling argument is that of voters not aligned to either political party. They are not undecided. They are nondecided. If they vote, it will probably be across a party affiliation, grudgingly or not. As a result the survey numbers are rendered ambiguous, a best guess.

Furthermore, voter turnout is low in midterm elections. FairVote.org says, “Turnout in midterm elections is far lower, peaking at 48.7% in 1966 and falling as low as 39.0% in 1978,1986, and 1998 remaining below 50% in midterm elections.” What that suggests is that so long as the election rules are consistent, “the same electorate can result in 60% turnout in one election and 2% in another depending on what is on the ballot and whether the election has essentially already been decided.”

“It ain’t over until it’s over.” Yogi Berra also said, “Baseball is 90% mental -- the other half is physical." So it goes with polling.

Robert Kennedy is quoted, “One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time." Here is what we know about those folks. They are decided voters. No further convincing is needed. Never mind facts, minds are already made up. They will turn out and vote. Results depend upon turnout. We know this because (I can just hear Richard Dawson's voice on TV’s Family Feud) “ survey says.”

Targeting Ethnic Studies

Arizona’s governor is a Republican, a white, and a woman. Keep that in mind even though it is obvious. If you thought that her attack on civil rights was bad form, get ready. Another measure has come before her for signature and the ink is dry. The measure targets an ethnic studies program in Tucson and has been condemned by a United Nations panel. The Associated Press is a little vague on the condemnation part of the story.

"The governor (Brewer) believes ... public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” according to a spokesperson. That does not sound like anything that United Nations human rights experts would condemn in a report, but they did. The measure suggests that Arizona students were being taught racial resentment and hatred as well as being taught to devalue individuality. But what do UN experts know about Arizona?

State schools Chief Tom Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, “has been trying to restrict the [Tucson Unified School District Ethnic Studies] program ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in 2006 told students that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.’" That is incorrect. Huerta only personified and personalized the objective of Republican hatred. Republicans do not hate Latinos. Republicans hate truth.

Additionally, the Associated Press reports “The measure prohibits classes . . . that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” That suggests that on top of everything else Arizona public school students are taught, they have classes in sedition.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said of signing an unconstitutional piece of legislation into law a couple of weeks ago that she "firmly believed it represents what is best for Arizona." Evidently that includes invalidating the Civil Rights Act and suspending habeas corpus.

That legislatures and governors cannot elect whether or not their state is part of the Federal Union is just an inconvenience. I would have thought that a Republican white woman governor would know that. But as I say, Republicans hate truth.

A Lot of News But Are We Aware?

Think of our news as a dartboard game and opinion as a dart. As long as your dart hits and sticks in the target, your dart scores, you earn points and you can espouse an opinion. Since the dart board is the size of an empty store building, it’s hard to miss. Without a toss we can start with the news that the store building is empty and have an opinion on its emptiness. But, could we have seen it coming? Shouldn’t we have?

I spent some time as a television reporter. A shopping mall had burned to the ground and was still smoking when I arrived with another hundred reporters from regional newspapers, radio and television stations. I shot video above the scene from the skids of a sheriff’s helicopter -- a panoramic view that included all those other reporters standing behind the yellow police tape.

The next day, only reporter on the scene, I shot video from inside the shouldering ruins of the mall. Wet and smoky, the eerie scene got personal when my camera caught a man and a woman hunkered down just inside the door of what, just days before, had been their store and their life savings. Except for the arsonist, no one saw that devastation coming.

No one aside saw California based department store chain Mervyn’s closing. At least the employees and customers did not until the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last July. Cerberus Capital Management, the company that owns Target, saw it coming. Target owned Mervyn’s. The problem is that Mervyn’s was not financially big enough to be saved from failing. GM and Chrysler, by comparison, are too big to let fail, at least for now. Cerberus, the financial company not the mythical guardian of Hades’ gates, also owns GMAC and Chrysler.

Hurricanes are huge. We can personally run from one, but property damage is still going to happen. If we cannot run, the risk of not surviving increases. If we cannot see it coming, we do not know to run. A hurricane is a huge depression, the effects of which are only mitigated by our meteorological forecasting technology. Do we really lack economic forecasting technology? Could we not see this recession coming?

We seem to need something to blame. I blame the news dartboard. It is too big to miss. Unfortunately, it is also personality dependent so we always need someone to blame. We blame the weatherforcaster for the tropical depression instead of blaming an inaccurate forecast.

Since blame is personality dependent, we throw another dart and hope to hit a person. Bulls-eye! Bush! That will work but the target is too big, too easy, too many more column inches to write, and too many writers to fill those inches. How about Madoff, the $50-billion Ponzi scheme guy? The same result as Bush. I am afraid that blame is only interesting.

The news dartboard makes it abundantly clear that a lot of things are not in our best interest, like Ponzi Schemes, predatory lending and poor public policy. What it does not make clear is that we do not have to stand for it like an animal in the beam of oncoming headlights. We seem to have a tremendous amount of information at our disposal. Oddly, what we do not seem to be is aware.

For example, are we aware that banks and credit card companies have no mandate to make our business and personal financial lives suck? As institutions, they are not bright lights. At best they are rear-view mirrors. From a behavior point of view, they are like lemmings. They actually need us not to follow them over a cliff. We are their customers and following their plummet does not work for us. Maybe blaming banks will.

Back at the news dartboard, the scoring point for bank failures is a triple score. In Georgia, for example, there have been five bank failures in the last five months and the hits just keep on coming. Another fifteen banks are expected to go under this year, more than twice the number that collapsed there during the savings and loan crisis twenty years ago.

I do not see a scoring headline that says “Banks and Credit Card Companies Lead Country to Prosperity.” Should we blame them further? On one side I can argue that we cannot blame people for not doing what they do not know how to do – such as lead. On the other side I am troubled when bankers who have received tax dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) refuse to say where that money is being spent.

“We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it,” said a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to." Really!

As a business management consultant with years of experience asking for and getting money for my clients, I can guarantee you that bankers ask two make-it or break-it questions. One is, “What are you going to do with the money?” The second is, “where did you spend the money we gave you?” I can also guarantee you that answering, “We're choosing not to disclose that," would get me and my client shown the door. Bank of New York Mellon got about $3 billion of the TARP and that is what they told the Associated Press.

Fortunately, there is the Treasury Department. It is monitoring how our taxpayer TARP billions is being spent. How is it doing that monitoring?

"What we've been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we're doing this. So we're building this organization as we're going."

That might sound like a Sarah Palin answer, but it is worse than that. Those are the words of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Let’s overlook the “lightening speed” bit and focus on Paulson’s central point. If he had said “We are making it up as we go,” he would use fewer words to tell the truth. We would at least be aware that he was a banker.

While we than deserve more in the way of public policy than “making it up as we go,” that is what we have. It is public policy as a dartboard game. Now that we are aware of that, perhaps we had better learn how that game is played.

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Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine on January 14, 2009.

Where Is Our Money?

According to the Associated Press (AP), the banks will not say what they are doing with the taxpayer bailout money they have received. Basically, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a bank loan on steroids. Banks who received loans in the billions of dollars are saying things like “We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it,” according to a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

Need I ask what is wrong with that picture? A business management consultant by trade, I am used to preparing banking presentations and helping my clients ask for business loans. I can guarantee you that one of the most important questions that banks ask is, “What are you going to do with the money?” I can also guarantee you that answering, “We're choosing not to disclose that," would get me and my client shown the door, but that is what Bank of New York Mellon said and they received about $3 billion.

If you ever wondered why the Federal government is not in the banking business, here is a little insight. Just ask the Treasury department what it is doing to monitor the spending of those TARP billions. It is a fair question, right? Now ask yourself what you would think if you got an answer like this one: "What we've been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we're doing this. So we're building this organization as we're going."

You might think that your question had been answered by Sarah Palin.

However, it is much worse than that. For the record, those are the words of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. After all, he was the banker who put the rush job on Congress, which at last look was part of the same Federal Government and is not in the banking business.

For argument’s sake, let’s overlook the “lightening speed” bit and focus on Paulson’s central point. If he had said “We are making it up as we go,” he would be telling the truth. It would also explain why Geo. Bush picked him. We can only hope that before the next $350 billion is released in the next administration, Tim Geithner will have a plan he can show to congress, which must confirm him to replace Paulson.

Tax payers deserve more in the way of policy than “making it up as we go.” Banking’s top executives deserve to be shown the door. As to being paid bonuses on their way out, to quote one of their spokespersons, “We’re declining to.”