Yes We Canvassed

40,000 doors knocked across our region (3 counties) yesterday...

Real Clear Politics has Obama at + 0.3 in NC Read more...

Yes We Canvassed

40,000 doors knocked across our region (3 counties) yesterday...

Real Clear Politics has Obama at + 0.3 in NC Read more...

There have been worse Presidents than George W Bush

The subject of Dubya's place in history came up over dinner among the international speakers at the SP.a conference in Brussels a couple of weekends back.

I put forward the controversial proposition that he might not be the worst US President ever. Indeed, given how seriously Presidential rankings are taken by US scholars, perhaps the focus of his quest for a legacy should involve a kind of reverse Mount Rushmore process: trying to establish which previous Presidents might possibly have a worse record than his own.

I felt Bush's advocates at the court of history might try to target Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, but I wasn't too sure how many others I could identify.

Now The Times has put together a high powered expert panel to rank all of the US Presidents to date.

Its conclusions suggests that I was being unfair on Coolidge and perhaps Hoover too, who are both ranked ahead of the incumbent.

But The Times panel does find four worse Presidents than Dubya - step forward William Harrison, Martin van Buren, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

But they do rate George W Bush, equal with Nixon, as the worst President since the start of the 20th century. Read more...

There have been worse Presidents than George W Bush

The subject of Dubya's place in history came up over dinner among the international speakers at the SP.a conference in Brussels a couple of weekends back.

I put forward the controversial proposition that he might not be the worst US President ever. Indeed, given how seriously Presidential rankings are taken by US scholars, perhaps the focus of his quest for a legacy should involve a kind of reverse Mount Rushmore process: trying to establish which previous Presidents might possibly have a worse record than his own.

I felt Bush's advocates at the court of history might try to target Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, but I wasn't too sure how many others I could identify.

Now The Times has put together a high powered expert panel to rank all of the US Presidents to date.

Its conclusions suggests that I was being unfair on Coolidge and perhaps Hoover too, who are both ranked ahead of the incumbent.

But The Times panel does find four worse Presidents than Dubya - step forward William Harrison, Martin van Buren, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

But they do rate George W Bush, equal with Nixon, as the worst President since the start of the 20th century. Read more...

North Carolina Day 4, Part 2: GOTV time

It's GOTV time in NC.

The volunteer operation is unbelievable, as evidenced by today's canvassing returns.

Out of one campaign office (Downtown Raleigh), across three pieces of 'turf' (the patches and precincts assigned to each Field Organiser), Obama volunteers, who are recrutied on an almost continuous basis, knocked on nearly 4,300 doors - with a contact rate of about 35%.

That's around 1500 voters spoken to today in just our patch of the city.

And I just ran the call lists through VoteBuilder: across the same area, only 70 people - 70 - have not had a call from the Obama team (which includes those who have had up to 2 messages after a 2 day gap).

Early voting says that in the State, Obama leads by 160,000 voters.

But we drove past a Palin rally today, just outside the city, and the crowd ran well into the thousands. As the Senator himself said, this isn't over yet. Read more...

North Carolina Day 4, Part 2: GOTV time

It's GOTV time in NC.

The volunteer operation is unbelievable, as evidenced by today's canvassing returns.

Out of one campaign office (Downtown Raleigh), across three pieces of 'turf' (the patches and precincts assigned to each Field Organiser), Obama volunteers, who are recrutied on an almost continuous basis, knocked on nearly 4,300 doors - with a contact rate of about 35%.

That's around 1500 voters spoken to today in just our patch of the city.

And I just ran the call lists through VoteBuilder: across the same area, only 70 people - 70 - have not had a call from the Obama team (which includes those who have had up to 2 messages after a 2 day gap).

Early voting says that in the State, Obama leads by 160,000 voters.

But we drove past a Palin rally today, just outside the city, and the crowd ran well into the thousands. As the Senator himself said, this isn't over yet. Read more...

The Great Don't Know Factor

That, folks, was the splash headline on the front page of the Daily Mail on May 1st 1997.

(My fellow anoraks can find it on page 179 of the 1997 Nuffield election study).

The suggestion was that the undecideds in the opinion polls could yet spring an election day surprise on Tony Blair. The McCain campaign has put out a memo pinning its hopes on something similar.

The US election is different from that in Britain in 1997. There is a similarity in that one side has had and executed a campaign strategy, while their opponents have often seemed to descend into acrimony and chaos in search of an argument.

But this is a closer election than that one, and a a two horse race with no incumbent. (Undecideds tend to break against the incumbent - as they have had plenty of time to be convinced by them: one can debate whether McCain, as the Republican candidate and a long serving national Senator has more incumbent-like features).

In truth, the stomach churning uncertainty of the final week is part of the wonder of democracy - how power is transferred peacefully through citizens casting their votes. Even so, perhaps some people knew in '97 even if Mr Paul Dacre did not. Read more...