Political Polls

I am a Voter.  I like to Vote.  I vote every chance I get.  I guess this gives me a reputation among pollsters as a Likely Voter. This speculation is based on the number of politically-oriented phone calls I get in the weeks before an election.  They call people like me because they think we’re going to vote.  I am an unapologetic Liberal too.  Which makes the quality of many of these calls, um, Interesting.  

This election season, the bias in the questions in these polls is often funny, occasionally appalling, and sometimes inaccurate, and most of the calls I get lean way, way to the right.  Why are there no Democrats calling me yet?

Full disclosure: I am a Democrat.  Do I Always vote for Democrats? No.  Do I usually vote for Democrats? Yes.  Do I consider each candidate on the basis of individual merit, regardless of their party affiliation? To the best of my ability, yes.  Have I made my choices in the upcoming election? Not yet.  Do I lean one way or the other?  Are you even paying attention?  

Back to the phone polls.  The questions often begin by assessing my voting likelihood (Definitely Voting).  After that they might ask about my affiliations and inclinations in general or on specific subjects before moving on to my opinions about specific candidates.  My favorite style is the one that asks me who I think I’ll vote for in a particular race, then asks if claims about one of the candidates have any influence on my vote, then asks me at the end if I’ve changed my mind about how I plan to vote.  Political argument disguised as a poll. 

Last night’s phone call was one of these.  First, it referred to a Senate race in my area in which the candidates are Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D), Blake Farenthold (R), and Ed Mishou (L).  First problem: this is NOT a Senate race.  These are the candidates for U.S. House of Representatives, Texas District 27.  Um, ok.  Second problem: the poller cannot pronounce Farenthold or Mishou with any consistency and keeps referring to the incumbent as “Solomon.”   Now, don’t take this as criticism of the poller.  She was sharp and enthusiastic and friendly.  She did a decent job with the script she was provided.  The script she was provided, though, that was inaccurate and absurd.  If they are wrong about which seat these candidates are vying for, why should I trust their claims about the candidates? 

If you knew that one of the candidates (specifically named) ate puppies for breakfast, would that influence your vote? Would it make you strongly more likely, somewhat more likely, somewhat less likely, strongly less likely, or have no effect on your vote?  

If I “knew” that?  Well, if I knew that to be true, I think it would give me pause.  I would wonder why the police weren’t involved.  But since I doubt the veracity of that statement, I’d have to say it has no effect on my vote.  Please don’t attack me for supporting a puppy-eater.  

Of course, this was not one of the questions, but several of them seemed just as absurd.  So with each question, I had to assess whether I thought the statement was true, and then, if I thought it was, if that would change my vote.  I feel like I have a decent handle on the issues in this race, since I sort of pay attention to that sort of thing sometimes.  But what about a voter who isn’t paying attention?  Would that potential voter be influenced by the statements in this “poll”?  

All but two of the litany of questions included statements that might be damaging to the incumbent, with only two statements about the Republican challenger’s intentions to fight recent legislation (did you notice the bias yet?).  To be sure, some of the statements about Ortiz had some validity.  According to the Wall Street Journal in August, he was among a group of representatives questioned about the use of travel stipends.  Mixing in these bits of truth with the exaggeration, in a long phone call, with the kids needing things and the poller offering to repeat the choices, made it even harder to discern what might be my right answer.  Thank goodness the voting booth is quiet and without time limits (other than the general social pressure of a long line, perhaps, if we’re lucky enough to have a long line at the real polls, the polls that count).

All of this is a long-winded guffaw at polling.  Don’t listen to the poll numbers.  Certainly don’t let pseudo-polls like this one influence who you vote for.  Make sure you’re registered.  Read about the issues in each race.  At least a little bit.  Then go vote.  Vote with your brain and your conscience.  Just vote.  

What’s the most ridiculous question you’ve been asked or heard about in a political poll?  Put it in the comments so we can all laugh with you.  

I don't even know where to start

(11,062 words completed yesterday.  Oh, and one correction: yesterday I said that ScriptFrenzy is in June, and though it was a June event its first year, it is now an April event.)

In today’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times, this letter to the editor:

***

[snip]

Prayer, paddles

…I do know the cause of the decay in quality of education.  It is not the three Rs that are missing.  It is the three Ps that are absent from the education system (prayer, pledge, and paddle).  Those were the things made each generation a little smarter and a little wiser than the ones before.  When the three Ps left the school system, the three Rs followed them out the door.  

[snip]

Larry Reid, Rockport

***

I’m not sure why this letter to the editor irritated me so much.  Usually I can pass up the really annoying ones with an eyeroll or a sigh.  And there’s usually at least one of those every day.  

The inaccuracies are a bit grating.  

I’m not sure when Mr. Reid was last in a classroom, but my kids recite the U.S., Texas, AND School pledges every day during the morning announcements, and the U.S. pledge is recited at the beginning of all parent meetings.  Sporting events always include a performance of the national anthem.  So I would politely suggest that “pledge,” or other manifestations of American pride and patriotism are far from missing in American education. 

Prayer is also far from absent in public education, at least in some local institutions.  As recently as last year, all meetings, concerts and sporting events in our school district were opened with a prayer, in spite of the clearly established unconstitutionality of official-led prayer in public educational settings.  As defenders and teachers of the U.S. Constitution, public schools must observe the separation of church and state that ensures our religious freedoms.  This year such invocations are practiced in a more clearly constitutional way.  “Spontaneous,” student led prayer is a-ok according to the Supreme Court, and it happens all the time.  Every school in our district practices a minute of silence each morning, in which students can choose to pray or reflect or doodle simply sit quietly.  Every Friday night at the football game the athletes convene at center field after the national anthem to recite the Lord’s Prayer.  The difference this year is that school representatives do not invoke the prayer over the loudspeaker, or actively call for prayer in other meetings.  

The one point Mr. Reid is sort of right about is the paddle.  Corporal punishment is rare in American education today, though if you check the books, it is still within the power of teachers and administrators in Texas to administer bodily punishment.  As someone with intimate knowledge of a school administrator, I can vouch that parents sometimes ASK administrators to paddle their children, though no school official, to my knowledge, uses corporal punishment in this district.  Part of the reason such punishment is thankfully almost unheard of today, even here in Texas, is that educational philosophies today advocate positive discipline to help students choose to learn rather than learning out of fear.  There is also the obvious litigiousness of our society.  Consider the liability a school faces if a corporal punishment is deemed abusive, or if injury or other extreme harm comes to a student as a result of that corporal punishment.  

I wonder if Mr. Reid could pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (the infamous TAKS, a standardized test, administered beginning in third grade, and ultimately necessary for graduation in Texas)?  Did his praying, pledging, and paddling experiences help him to remember and understand essential information or ultimately make him a better citizen?

What, I wonder, is Mr. Reid’s evidence of the “decay” of the educational system?  Perhaps it is the broken buildings, the high teacher turnover, or maybe he relies on test score data?  I think this decay argument is often trotted out as a precursor to some sense of insecurity about the U.S.’s place competitively in the world.  But the mandate of public education has grown so far beyond the three Rs that simplistic proclamations about how praying and beating will make our schools better are really rather ignorant.  

I understand that his implicit argument is about the balance between local educational control and federal educational control.  The Constitution leaves education to the states.  Changes in policy under the second Bush administration (No Child Left Behind and its offspring) enacted sweeping accountability measures which grabbed some control of education from the individual states (though often without funding for its proclamations).  I don’t necessarily agree with Mr. Bush’s educational policies, but I do think that in today’s global culture and economy, that we need to think as a nation, and not as a collection of loosely confederated states, about what our educational standards are and how we will train our young people to be citizens of the world.  And I hope those standards include respect for each student’s bodily integrity, cultural integrity and desire to learn and succeed.  

The NaNoWriMo Post-Election Update

Proud to be an American

Wow.  Just wow.  I’m still so excited and proud and relieved about the results of the presidential election.  Disappointed in the outcome of some local races, but I have a good feeling that things will work out for the best.  

I want to hold on to this hope and enthusiasm and do Something.  I’m about as far from the White House as most of us, but I think we can all find some little way to Be Nice, Live the Hope and try to make our communities and our country and our world a better place.  

For me, this starts small, helping out a little more at the kids’ school, on the philosophy that every little thing we can do to make the whole school better helps all of the kids.  I’m also investigating volunteer opportunities at the local library.  

What thing, small or large, can you do to help us all live in a better world?

A Month of Literary Abandon

In other news, we are in day six of NaNoWriMo.  For those of you who don’t know, this is a crazy, month-long, writing extravaganza, in which people from all over the world try to write a novel in one month.  The goal is to write 50,000 new words during the month of November.  And this year is the tenth anniversary.  More than 120,000 writers from all over the world, many of them just regular schmoes like us who might never have written a thing in their lives before right now are whipping out blank sheets of paper or opening up text files and starting to pound out stories.  

There are writing forums, a procrastination station, a very cool word-counting widget that lets you mark your progress, weekly encouragement newsletters from writers un-famous, famous and infamous.  Last year Neil Gaiman put in his good cheer, among others.  Brian Jacques, Meg Cabot, and Philip Pullman are among the list of notable Pep Talkers this year.  And at the end of the month, if you’ve written more than 50,000 words, you can verify your word count with the word counter robots and you get a lovely certificate and badges for your blog or web page, as well as the satisfaction of know that you did a hard thing.  

Participation in NaNo is free, but The Office of Letters and Light, the non-profit organization that runs both NaNo in November and ScriptFrenzy in June, takes donations to cover their overhead costs as well as in support of the Young Writers Program.  YWP seeks to provide materials and support to get young people involved in writing as a valuable form of self-expression.  Their motto: “We believe in ambitious acts of the imagination.”  The goal this year, in honor of the tenth anniversary of NaNo, is to get donations, big or small, from at least ten percent of participants.  They’re up to 3.6 percent at last count.  

In my personal novelling quest, I have achieved 8500 words so far.  My goal is to write 2000 words per day.  I missed goal on the first, which was a planning and mapping day for me.  I also missed goal on Tuesday (the election was just too distracting and exciting), but managed to make up a little ground yesterday.  The tickle of sinus congestion promises to be a challenge today, but I’m hoping to hit 11,000 before I go to bed tonight.  

If you’ve ever thought that there might be a novel knocking around in the back of your mind, this is a fun and butt-kicking opportunity to start to capture that idea and get it down on paper.  It’s totally not too late to start.  I try to write in 15 minute bursts here and there throughout the day (though mostly during afternoon naptime and after the kids go to bed), and on a good day I can spit out 300-400 words in each 15-minute stretch.  If you can manage to get a friend writing at the same time, it can be very motivational to have 10- or 15-minute Word Wars, races to see who can write the most in a short burst of time.  (Go ahead, suggest another metaphor for me to throw in that messy mix)

I’m eglentyne on the NaNo site.  Send me an email to eglentyne at gmail and I’ll add you as a buddy.  

Writing with a friend—or 120,000 friends—or writing with a deadline can make the writing fun and really get the words flowing.  

Give it a shot.  At least drop by the site.  And leave a fiver in the jar as you pass through.  

"Live Your Values. Love Your Country. Vote."

Reasons 4 and  5 on MoveOn.org’s Top 5 Reasons to Vote in Texas (but these apply elsewhere as well):

4.  Help make history.  You could cast one of the votes that elect the first African-American president.  If we win, we’ll tell our grandchildren about this election, and they’ll tell their grandchildren.  Do you really want to have to explain to your great-great-grandchildren that you were just too busy to vote in the most important election of your lifetime?

5.  People died so you’d have the right to vote.  Self-government—voting to choose our own leaders—is the original American dream.  We are heir to a centuries-long struggle for freedom:  the American revolution, and the battles to extend the franchise to those without property, to women, to people of color, and to young people.  This year, many will still be denied their right to vote.  For those of us who have that right, it’s precious.  If we waste it, we dishonor those who fought for it and those who fight still.

We voted.  You vote too.  

Are you out of your ever-loving mind?

This is another post where I tell you about something that I’m not talking about.  This telling-you-what-I’m-not-telling-you was actually a classic rhetorical move used by Chaucer to great effect.  Though at the moment, the exact story in which he used it to such great effect is escaping me.  

The other day I wrote an angry, ranty, post about an ugly bit of racism occurring on our quiet street, and more generally about racism and its stupidity and hypocrisy.  I’ve learned (ha) as I’ve grown older that it’s usually best, with an emotionally charged communication, to let things percolate for a day or two before zapping things off.  Now that the anger has come down to a simmer, I’ve decided not to post that little love note.  It was a little too personal.  That kind of anger isn’t generally a part of who I am or what I do.  

I leave in place, however, two quotes that I think work well together, as part of a somewhat measured response to racism, sexism, ablism, classism, and outright ignorant bigotry.  Implicit in my sharing of these particular quotes at this particular time is, I don’t doubt you’ll notice, an endorsement.  

***

Referring to his mother’s “creed,”  Joe Biden said in his acceptance speech for the Democratic Vice Presidential nomination: “No one is better than you.  You are everyone’s equal, and everyone is equal to you.”  

***

Stumping for Barack Obama with union workers, Don Gonyea said,  “And here’s a man, Barack Obama, who’s going to fight for people like us, and you won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin.  Are you out of your ever-loving mind?”