This is going to be something. I’m actually looking forward to this. I don’t think this debate can possibly matter in this election. And the two guys who are debating are actually pretty representative of their parties. Democrat Tim Kaine is hardly my kind of a politician, but he’s a standard Democrat at this point. And while Republican Mike Pence is a vile piece of garbage, he’s very much in keeping with his party. If the economy collapsed and 50 million people lost their jobs, Mike Pence would be against doing anything to help if a Democrat was in the White House, because, like virtually all Republicans, he places party above nation.

What I wonder about the vice-presidential debate is if the two candidates are going to go after the presidential nominees. That will be sad — at least for me. Jerry Bowles wrote a good primer, Think Trump Is Scary? Check Out Mike Pence on the Issues. But it doesn’t much go into economics. On that, he’s a typical supply-sider. He voted against the 2009 stimulus, although to be fair, he likely would have voted for it if a Republican had been in the White House. He was against foreclosure relief. Basically, you can determine the correct economic policy by choosing whatever Mike Pence is against.

Tim Kaine is a mixed bag. On a personal level, I like it. I like people who surprise me. And Kaine seems all over the map, well, all over the map. But he isn’t vile. He’s just wrong. Like on the Trans-Pacific Partnership — he’s just wrong. It would be great if the debate allowed me to get a better handle on him as a politician. But I fear that won’t be the case.

What I Expect

I’m afraid the whole thing is going to be dueling charges of how the other’s running mate is awful. “You’re part of a racist campaign!” And, “You’re complicit in Hillary’s lies!” I expect the worst from Pence because he’s been very public in defending Trump’s lies. He seems to have no shame whatsoever. Of course, if he doesn’t become vice-president, he will have no political career either. At least Tim Kaine has a political future regardless.

But none of this really matters. I have two friends that will help me through this vice-presidential debate. The first is Modern Romance by Midnight Sun Brewing Company. The second is Denogginizer by Drake’s Brewing Company. They are both very tasty. But more important in a situation like the vice-presidential debate, they are both almost 10% alcohol. I may not be able to type by the end.

Two Beers: Modern Romance by Midnight Sun Brewing Company and Denogginizer by Drake’s Brewing Company by Frankly Curious is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

There’s no doubt that I’d be a communist if I had even the smallest amount of faith in humanity. But I believe that regardless of the economic system that we create, the worst people will rise to the top. It’s because these are the people who care about rising to the top. That’s not to say that all people in the ruling class are equally horrible. But I do think they are mostly equally uncreative. What young man worth his salt thinks, “I know what I went to spend my life doing: I want to spend it making a lot of money!” His is a soul worthy of Dante’s Inferno

Yes, the 25 year old who wants to save the world is naive — silly even. But he’s got a soul. You know the old line often (falsely) attributed to Churchill, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”? There is something to that. Of course, in fact, people don’t get more conservative as they age. Sometimes society passes people by, but people are pretty consistent.

If you think that you are going to make a bunch of money at 20 and then at 35 you will do what you really want, you truly have no brain. You are what you do not what you plan to do. And if you plan is to make money today, it will be same tomorrow and when you are 35 and when you are lying on your death bed and finally when you are deep in the Inferno.

The Communist (False) Hope

In theory, a communist system would allow one to be more serious about the choices one makes. Think about it. How much would everyone have to work in order to make sure that everyone was housed and clothed and well-fed? An hour a day? I can’t imagine it’s more than that. And that would allow for a lot of time for people do what they want to do. It just so happens that a lot of what they want to do is stuff that makes the world better. I’ve known a lot of inventors in my lifetime. None of them did it for the money.

I look out on our capitalist system and I see unbelievable waste. Look at the internet! Have you noticed that every month someone comes up with some new and annoying way to shove advertisements at you. The button to close an annoying video commercial changes so you have to hunt around for it. A pop-up may not have a button; you may just have to click outside it to make it go away. It wastes your time. It angers you. And it even increases your blood pressure. I have no doubt that people die as a result of this nonsense.

The Capitalist Inferno

So why do they do it? Because 0.1% more people will watch the stupid video ad or click on it. And the website owner will be 29¢ richer! But don’t get me wrong! I understand! I’ve read my Adam Smith! I’ve read my Friedrich Hayek! I understand that there is a cycle. That website owner makes money and continues to provide me with the great content that I’m looking for. It’s like the natural world itself! Isn’t that great: capitalism has allowed humans to create a system that bacteria discovered three billion years ago!

I just have a few questions. Where is our Iliad? What about our Aeneid? Where is our Divine Comedy? Do you know what shows up if you Google “Inferno”? Dan Brown’s 2013 novel and the movie based on it that is coming out later this month.

I’m not saying that communism is the solution. We humans are hopeless. But it does bother me that in the modern world virtually no one even thinks that maybe something better than capitalism is possible. I’m cynical. I know that. But I also know that humans are clever. If we tried, we might be able to come up with a system that would work better than the one we have. But instead, we just get better and better at selling things. And the result is that we get no Iliad, no Aeneid, no Divine Comedy. We just get better and better at extracting 29¢ here and 29¢ there.

Our Civilization Is in Hell

It’s not just we’ve lost the souls of young people who think making money is a fine way to spend a life. It’s that we’ve lost the soul of our culture. When western civilization crumbles in upon itself and we are reduced to countless warring tribes, there will be scattered people wondering why it had to be this way. But I can already answer the question: we haven’t evolved. We still act as though we are one bad harvest away from starvation. Our ideas of justice are warped. We don’t understand mercy at all.

We are just stupid animals who can do clever tricks like earn 29¢ by getting someone to watch the entire trailer of Ron Howard’s newest blockbuster, Inferno. In theaters 28 October!

The Los Angeles Times is hardly a conservative newspaper. Yet if you look at their polling for this presidential election, it’s bizarre. Let’s look at Real Clear Politics right now:

PPP: Clinton +4
LA Times: Trump +5
Reuters: Clinton +6
Quinnipiac: Clinton +1
Bloomberg: Tie
Monmouth: Clinton +3
Economist: Clinton +4
NBC News: Clinton +7
ABC News: Clinton +2
McClatchy: Clinton +7

Don’t think that there’s a trend there. It’s not that the PPP poll is an outlier and that Trump is really taking off after his amazing Twitter storm yesterday. This is the way that it’s been for months. So today I decided that I would look into it.

Why Polls Differ

The truth is that there are many reasons that polls differ. The biggest is just that samples vary. If you pick 500 people in a truly random way, they are likely to be a good representation of the population as a whole. But that isn’t always the case. that’s what margins of error are about. I get so sick of hearing people say that this or that poll is outside the margin of error and so means that this or that candidate is ahead. All the margin of error gives you is a measure of how likely a poll is to be right.

When it comes to political polling, there is a whole other can of worms. It doesn’t matter who a voter would vote for if they don’t vote. So each polling company has to come up with their own system for determining who is likely to vote. In the 2012 election, Obama did better than many expected because of a surprising number of people who said they weren’t likely to vote who did indeed vote.

None of this much matters in the present case. These two uncertainties probably explain why PPP and Reuters disagree by two percentage points. But it doesn’t explain why PPP — one of the most respected and careful polling company around — has a 9 percentage point difference with the LA Times.

LA Times Poll Is Different

The LA Times poll is curious, as they admit themselves, Why the USC/LA Times Tracking Poll Differs From Other Surveys. It does things that other polls don’t do. One is that it is tracking poll. It uses roughly 3,000 people for its poll and it uses these same people week after week. Now in one way, that’s a good because it allows us to see what the actual trend is in the thinking of the voters.

There’s a bad thing about it, though: if the sample itself is not a good one, then all of the numbers are going to be skewed. On the plus side, the bias is going to be consistent. So again: it’s good for looking at trends. But it isn’t much use for looking at how people are going to vote. And that’s especially true because the people picked for the poll were based on how they said they voted in 2012. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is well documented that people lie about (or just forget) who they voted for in the last election.

The other major thing in this poll is that it doesn’t just ask people who they are planning to vote for. It asks them to provide an estimate — from 0 to 100 — as to how likely they are to vote for the candidates. Nate Silver rather likes this idea. I don’t. I think it adds complication without adding clarity. If someone says they are 75% certain to vote for Trump, you know they are going to vote for Trump barring his death or video showing that it was actually him who killed Vince Foster.

Polling Averages

FiveThirtyEight provides a list of what they think each polling company’s implicit bias is. But remember, they aren’t trying to biased. PPP has a Trump 1.2 percentage point bias, and they are generally considered a liberal outfit. But LA Times has a 6.1 percentage point bias — the highest of any that FireThirdEight follows.

What this all comes down to is that one should never look at a single poll. Real Clear Politics currently gives Hillary Clinton a 2.9 percentage point advantage. And that seems about right. Any given given poll can be off by a long way. But it’s much harder for hundreds of polls from dozens of polling companies to be off by much.

I do think that there is something special about Donald Trump. Actually: lots of things. He’s clearly a psychopath — in a strict sense of the word. He’s also fairly dimwitted. It’s clear he’s unable to concentrate and thus incredibly ignorant. He’s the perfect presidential candidate for the Twitter age. But in terms of the politics, there’s nothing unusual about Donald Trump. He’s just like any other Republican in any presidential race.

We see this most clearly in the polling. What we are seeing is exactly what we saw with Mitt Romney in 2012. You may remember that he was losing badly to Barack Obama up to the first presidential debate. In that debate, he did well. True, he lied throughout and contradicted everything that he had been saying throughout the campaign. But in terms of political theater, he did great. And his polling numbers went way up. And all the pundits talked about how the debate had helped him and given him momentum.

Presidential Race Won’t Be Affected

Now, after Trump’s disastrous first debate, we are hearing that Trump’s momentum has stalled. It’s the same error they made with Mitt Romney. In 2012, the debate didn’t give Romney momentum. It just gave people who were always going to vote for him a reason to stop saying they were undecided and start saying they were going to vote for him.

What we’ve seen with Trump is that his numbers have have steadily improved over the last two months. This has not been because more and more people have been won over to him. It is just an indication that Republicans would vote for a groundhog if it had an “R” after its name. So these people have gradually gotten comfortable saying that they will vote for Trump. But they always were going to vote for Trump.

Clinton’s Numbers Haven’t Changed

Look at the Real Clear Politics average. Since the end of June, Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers have been quite solid. Yes, they’ve fluctuated. That’s because there are people who will definitely vote for her who get embarrassed when the meida start talking about her email server. But there’s no trend.

On the other side, Trump’s numbers have steadily increased for the same period of time. (The exception of that is his temporary peak from the RNC.) So people are wrong to think that things would be different if John Kasich or Ted Cruz had been the nominee. They wouldn’t have seen the long, slow increase in polling numbers; they would had numbers like Hillary’s: pretty steady.

John Kasich Wouldn’t Change a Thing

But in both cases, it would be the same: Hillary Clinton would be about 2 percentage points above Kashich, Cruz, or (as is the case) Trump. And I can’t blame the Republican voters. I think they are wrong, but in terms of what they care about, any Republican would be better than any Democrat. I believe the opposite.

What I have a problem with is this idea that there is a kind of grand narrative of the presidential race. There isn’t. There is just a Democrat running against a Republican. And that’s all there is.

There Are Differences

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t things that will affect this presidential race. Trump’s explicit racism has the down side of scaring away conservatives who don’t want to be seen as racist. And this has been what Trump’s whole “minority outreach” campaign has been about: making them feel comfortable with him. And this is certainly going to cause Gary Johnson to do better than he normally would.

But the really big issue is that if John Kashich or Ted Cruz had won the nomination, they would have normal ground operations. They might not be as good as Hillary Clinton’s. But they would have had them. Trump seems to have next to nothing. And I suspect this will have a big effect that we are not seeing in the polls.

But when you hear pundits claim that this presidential race would be very different if the Republicans had nominated someone other than Donald Trump, don’t believe it. This presidential race will end up the same regardless of which nutjob the Republicans had nominated.

Last Friday, Donald Trump released a list of 10 more judges that he would put on the Supreme Court. As Ian Millhiser noted, Trump’s New SCOTUS Picks Signals Willingness to Abolish Child Labor Laws, Medicare, Social Security. But that’s not quite accurate because Millhiser is only talking about one of those picks: current Senator Mike Lee. We can assume looking at the other nine, things would be even worse.

The article focuses on a lecture that Mike Lee gave in 2010. In it, he claimed that the federal government is prohibited by the Constitution from passing child labor laws. According to Lee, that was left up to the states. Millhiser pointed out that we actually tried this and that all it did was cause businesses to move from one state to another — eventually causing all the laws to be repealed or simply ignored.

Mike Lee Is a Tenther

Similarly, Mike Lee doesn’t believe that Social Security and Medicare are Constitutional. He claims “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.” This must mean that Mike Lee is a “Tenther” — a person who thinks that the Tenth Amendment says, “The powers not expressly delegated to the Unite States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The problem is that the Constitution does not say this.

This idea came from The Articles of Confederation. You know: the form of government that the Constitution was created to replace because it was impossible to govern the nation under it. And that one little word makes all the difference in the world. People like Mike Lee are constantly putting it in our founding document because they want all the power in the nation to be at the state level. But the founders of this country wanted something different.

Trump’s America Would Be Unrecognizable

Imagine our nation if Mike Lee and the rest of the Tenthers had their way. Would we still have slavery in some states? Probably. We would certainly still have six-year-olds working in factories. And we would have no minimum wage. We wouldn’t even have a country. Various blocks of states would have broken off into their own countries. So not surprisingly, Mike Lee shows he is a true conservative by being against the very idea of this country. And Mike Lee is number one on Donald Trump’s newest list of Supreme Court nominees.

If you look at the data for voters in Florida, what you see is the biggest Trump supporters are people between the ages of 65 and 80. I wonder how they would feel about Trump wanting to put a man on the Supreme Court who wants to take their Social Security and Medicare away from them. They’d probably just dismiss it because conservatives always think that the bad stuff will be applied to those other people — the “bad” people — not themselves.

The Reality Trump Represents

But this is the reality. If Donald Trump becomes president, he will put people like Mike Lee on the Supreme Court. And while Trump may be out of office in four or eight years, his imprint on the country would last for decades. This is why all this nonsense about us just managing to get through a couple of years of Trump is such madness.

The next time you see Trump, imagine Mike Lee on the Supreme Court. Imagine a revolution — but not a normal one. Imagine our entire way of life being turned upside down without a shot fired — with just a Supreme Court decision or two. Imagine Supreme Court Justice Mike Lee.

So I guess that I will be live blogging the first presidential debate. It starts at 6:00 pm Pacific Time. But I will likely be blogging throughout the day.

I have to admit to being worried about this. This election is so important and this debate really could go any way. I figure that it makes sense to give you some idea of what I think will happen. And we’ll see if I turn out to be right.

In one way, it seems like the outcome of these debates doesn’t so much matter. I remember Mitt Romney’s excellent performance in the first 2012 presidential debate. He got a permanent bounce from it. But as I noted at the time, all that had actually happened was that people who were doubtless going to vote for him in the end finally felt good enough about him to tell pollsters.

Looking at the polls thus far, I think that Trump has already gotten that bounce: all the Republicans have come home to support him (because they really don’t care about the principles they claim to). This time, it is Clinton who has a lot of people who haven’t felt comfortable supporting her.

The word is that roughly 100 million people will be watching this. This is a good opportunity for Clinton. I wonder how much it can help Trump.

Trump at the Presidential Debate

I don’t think that Donald Trump is as much a loose cannon as many people think. I suspect that he will go into the debate doing his best impression of “presidential” that he can. Just the same, this thing will go on for a while. I suspect his greatest problem will be avoiding obvious bordom.

I’ve talked about this quite a lot in the past. Donald Trump really has only about 5 minutes worth of material. If you’ve listened to any of his speeches, you know this. He’s incredibly repetitive. The real question is whether he will be allowed to get away with this. Will people actually notice that he isn’t saying anything? That there is no substance to what he’s saying? It’s not like the viewing audience seems to care that much about substance. And sadly, neither do the professional pundits.

Clinton at the Presidential Debate

I think we do need to stop thinking about this election being all about Trump. At the same time, it’s hard not to think of Hillary Clinton as just a given. In a quantitative sense, it’s like Alabama playing against Sonoma State University. Alabama is one of the very best college football teams. Sonoma State isn’t in the same league. If the presidential debate were a football game, Clinton would simply crush Trump.

But I keep thinking back to Frank Bruni during the first 2000 presidential debate. Sure, Bush was pathetic. But Bruni wasn’t interested in that. Being stupid and ignorant was no sin compared to Gore’s being “barely able to suppress his self-satisfied grin.” Has the press learned for all this? I kind of doubt it.

What I Expect

I figure that Clinton will be prepared for whichever Trump shows up. What I except to show up is a fairly subdued Trump. But I do expect him to bring up the things that Clinton didn’t answer well in the primary debates. In particular, I expect some mention of her high speaking fees talking to bankers. But mostly, he will just pretend that things like his ridiculous tax plan are equivalent to Clinton’s carefully constructed policies.

Above all, I expect that the moderator will allow Trump to largely get away with this. So it really comes down to how Clinton is able to focus attention on the fact that Trump really is devoid of substance. Anyone who isn’t convinced that Trump is a bigot will not be convinced by anything in this presidential debate. But maybe, just maybe, if things go well, they will see he really is nothing but bluster.

Post-Debate Thoughts

I think you can see how worried I was before the debate based upon my posts. But right out of the gate, Hillary Clinton was in control. I really didn’t think that Trump could be as bad as he was.

There was reporting that he wasn’t taking the debate preparation very seriously. I didn’t believe that. But seeing the debate, it is clear he didn’t. He really approached it the same way that he approached the primary debates. I’ll be very interested to see what the pundits say. But I can’t imagine that anyone but the strongest Trump supporters thought he did well.

It’s interesting that at MSNBC there is much analysis. And even the Republicans think Clinton did great and Trump did poorly. On Fox News, there is no analysis. It is just Sean Hannity interviewing Donald Trump. That’s not exactly how you reach out to anyone but the truth believers.