Is Demography Political Destiny?

Michael Barone is the savviest political guru of overall trends with the possible exception of Kevin Phillips, who has slipped recently. Barone's political bible The Almanac of American Politics is ubiquitous in DC and if Barone were a Democratic pundit, he would be invited onto every Sunday morning talkfest bar none. In today's WSJ, Barone does some future mapping that is bad news for the Democrats.

The gist of Barone's analysis is that the southward and westward internal migration of the previous decades has been altered to migrations from the East and Left Coasts inland. The link above has the details.

Domestic inflow has been a whopping 19% in Las Vegas, 15% in the Inland Empire (California's Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where much of the outflow from Los Angeles has gone), 13% in Orlando and Charlotte, 12% in Phoenix, 10% in Tampa, 9% in Jacksonville. Domestic inflow was over 200,000 in the Inland Empire, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Orlando. These are economic dynamos that are driving much of America's growth. There's much less economic polarization here than in the Coastal Megalopolises, and a higher percentage of traditional families: Natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) in the Interior Boomtowns is 6%, well above the 4% in the Coastal Megalopolises.

He goes on to say that Florida will probably have the same number of electoral votes in 2012 as New York, Arizona will have 12 to sixteen for Barone's native state of Michigan. All in the last sixty years. And besides domestic inflow, the "natural increase" of children being born is far higher in the internal heartland areas which are predominantly Republican.

Finally, a quibble. Barone puts Miami in the coastal megalopolis category, but Miami has an outflow of 2% and an inflow of 8%, making it perhaps the only coastal city to thrive over 2000-2006. Since they switched parties in the past decade, Florida and Texas are fast becoming natural Republican bases, if Barone's analysis is correct and voting patterns persist. And both will get more CDs---hence electoral votes---when the 2010 census verifies the various data bases Barone employs for his article.

Meantime, I am looking for the latest edition of Barone's Almanac of American Politics which is the single best book for understanding the rich variety of America's political base.

O'Reilly gets Fouled, Strikes Back and gets Called for Second Foul

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post bemoans the condemnation and wrath Bill O'Reilly has displayed against NBC, which has scuttled leftward with the political winds. Kurtz knows his inside-the-Beltway audience shares NBC's leftish tilt, and panders to its delusion that NBC is "centrist" while he tries to deconstruct O'Reilly in his usual soft-pedaling manner.

He brings up Keith Olbermann, whose rants called "special comments" have been put on the blogosphere's most prominently ultra-left "media blogs" as audience-boosting ploys for the farthest reaches of the fever swamps.

As an obiter dictum, isn't it interesting that the favorite POLITICAL columnists of the loony left are failed Broadway critic Frank Rich, former Enron-consultant professor Paul Krugman and TV ex-sportscaster KOlbermann, who flunked out at his sports outpost by reportedly outlandish behavior and insufferable arrogance. Perfect job description for a ultra-left political observer, including the poor soul whom Kurtz chided O'Reilly for calling a lunatic, a New Age poster girl named Sansura Taylor whose mother must have had some bad acid while carrying little Sansura in the womb. Sansura's demented solecisms betray a City-by-the-Bay mindset so deranged that O'Reilly can't help himself and keeps inviting her on his show. Her IQ is such that he could be chided for cruelty to animals.

Kurtz's entire article is slanted pro-NBC and against O'Reilly, going so far as to quote:

Olbermann says O'Reilly's latest offensive "reeks a little bit of an attempt to get some attention," though the former sportscaster admits he started the feud as a way of raising his profile.

Just burying the lede as a final dependent clause, which is Kurtz's manner of writing. Let's say O'Reilly shook off the small dog biting his ankle as a more appropriate trope for the situation.

Kurtz quotes Joe Scarborough extensively, as though this recanted GOP congressman were a "conservative." Joe is tacking with the prevailing winds, though his cultural conservatism is still hostile to what he calls "Hollyweird."

Without defining the previous "layer of farce," Kurtz takes a cheap shot at BOR:

Adding an extra layer of farce, O'Reilly now regularly features a body-language expert, who said that Mitchell displayed "high level of uncomfortability" during her appearance on the show.

The fact is that O'Reilly did not condemn all of NBC as Kurtz deceptively implies, and actually praised the Today Show and Mitchell and some other relatively objective or centrist commentators. Though you wouldn't know this from Kurtz's hit-piece drive-by substance hidden by his soothing style.

But although Chris Matthews gets a free pass at saying Cheney "never passes up a chance to kill," an SF blogger can start a campaign against free speech from the left without any objection from the MSM, who will call right-wing comments that resemble Matthews' senseless rant against the VP "hate speech" and call for its abolishment---hang the First Amendment. Watch this blogger get on MSM and garner praise for trying to limit talk-radio, which is an outlet that entertains tax-paying working people on the job, obviously not a left-wing constituency.

Remember Alec Baldwin calling for Henry Hyde to be assassinated on network TV back during the height of the Clinton Impeachment for lying under oath? I do, but Orwell's memory hole has swallowed that up too.

And to switch from the prophetic 1984 to Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others.

Both Libs & Conservs "Stuck on Stupid?"

Arnold Kling has a libertarian take on the fundamental hypothesis that only about 10% of the population invest any real energy in politics. And of that decimal, each of the paired-off opponents tend to give their own predilections an overwhelming bias in sorting out new information. As Kling succinctly sums up:

The masses' strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites' strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

So we have Matthew Arnold's "ignorant armies" on a "darkling plain." Or do we?

I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.

Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do.[MY EMPHASIS] Many conservatives want to see government used for "conservative ends." However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.

"That government governs best which governs least," said Honest Abe, before the onset of the colossal catastrophe which post-war American government has become. I thank God daily for Medicare, but a single-payer system would be Iraq times ten, a catastrophe which would make Canadian wait-times move from months to years, just to take one example.

I worked for the US government for over a decade, and dealt with it in one way or another for three on a working basis. The bigger government is, the worse it operates. When I was a Beltway Bandito working with Booz Allen Hamilton, I learned of an unpublished study concerning the Pentagon which had been sponsored and paid for by the military itself. It concerned how best to cut back the size of the military bureaucracy. [This was in the early days of the Reagan presidency.] My fellow consultant-informant told me that the study had suggested that ANY WAY that personnel would be cut back would be preferable to the overpopulation of military technocrats and bureaucrats now functioning in the DC area. Indeed, the suggestion was made in the study [never published] that in the interests of efficiency and economy, it would be better if one out of every three names, regardless of rank or position, would be randomly selected out of the Pentagon phonebook and dismissed from their job than it would be to let the bloated payroll/personnel size be maintained at previous levels. This was obviously meant to make a point and not to be carried out, but the study never saw the light of day. I wonder why and who killed it?

Urban legend?

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Welcome to the post post-modern world.