Terrorism and the Election

From: KS
Sent: Tuesday, August 3, 2004 1:38 AM
To: taylordw@goodleaf.net
Subject: Misc. things

First off I've been thinking about that crazy idea of postponing the election if there is a terrorist attack immediately preceeding it. I'm starting to think it would be a good idea. If we're attacked the immediate response of the populace will be to rally round the flag and by extension our "commander in chief. If we were to postpone the election for two weeks it would give people time to calm down and start asking questions. Just a thought.

Next, and this may be superfulous if you looked at the raw numbers too, but I thought this in the Washington Post poll was the most encouraging:

12. Regardless of how you might vote, please tell me if you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of (NAME) or perhaps you don't know enough to say.

8/1/04 - Summary Table - Registered voters

                      Favorable   Unfavorable   No opinion
   a. John Kerry         51           32            16
   b. George W. Bush     47           45             8

The fact that Bush's unfavorables are 13 points higher than Kerry's makes me feel a bit more sanguine about all those polls that put them within the margin of error.

Also I thought this was interesting in light of your recent Blog posting:

13. What will be the single most important issue in your vote for president this year: (The U.S. campaign against terrorism), (the war in Iraq), (the economy and jobs), (education), (health care), or something else?

                        Economy/  Educ-   Health          No
       Terrorism  Iraq   jobs     ation    care   Other   op.
8/1/04    20       23     25        7       11      12     2
7/25/04*  20       21     27        7       12      12     1

Now granted economy/jobs is the highest, but if you conflate terrorism and Iraq (and really they're just two sides of the same story) then you have some serious numbers. And at this point I refer you back to the beggining of this note.

K

Smarties's first baby steps

From: <administrator>
To: taylordw@goodleaf.net
Date: Fri, August 15, 2003 3:30 pm
Subject: yo

Donnarino,

Sorry to have missed you when you were in Seattle. Thought you'd be interested to know that I have been browsing my apache logs. Checking out the attacks from the latest MS worm you know. Anyway, I found that someone hit your Stiglitz smarties article, and the referring link was from a google search. Your journey down the road to fame has begun.

J

httpd-access.log:164.119.68.88 -- [15/Aug/2003:05:51:19 -0700] "GET /smarties/economics/stiglitz/stiglitz.html HTTP/1.1" 200 47128 "http://www.google.com/search?q=%22paul +krugman%22 +biography +council+of +economic +advisors +clinton&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=20&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

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