More shameless remarks by Larko

Negative, positive or just accurate?

As you can see on this clip, the US electoral campaigns are becoming negative and that goes for both sides:

I barely know the names of Whitney Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. I have no idea why they are being considered as “celebrities”. I am also not interested in getting to know it as I very much suspect that whatever it is they have done or not, it has no relevance in context of my life.

That is less than I can say about Barack Obama and John McCain. Since one of them is more than likely to become the president of the most powerful country in the World, it would be foolish not to pay attention to what they stand for, although I have never even visited that country and have no intention to do so. Which ever wins the US election, he is going to be too important and powerful to be ignored like I can safely ignore Whitney Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and get away with it.

In an ideal World campaigns would focus on the issues. They would rather seek to explain why their own candidate is a good choice than try to smear their opponents. But the World is not ideal, is it? The temptation to score cheap points can quite understandably grow too big to make the campaigns stay within decency and a civilized tone of arguing for their case.

On the other hand, how much can we trust that positive campaigns deliver an accurate image of what a candidate really stands for? As Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, comments for the BBC:

“Political scientists and communications scholars will tell you that negative ads tend to have more information in them than positive ads,” he says.

“We see positive ads that are false or misleading, too.”

Maybe there is something in that statement. If a negative message is accurate and truthful, it should certainly be told. That would be less harmful than delivering a positive message about the own candidate on false prerequisites.

The hard part, of course, is to determin which message you can trust, be it positive or negative. Which is why it always pays out to have a critical attitude towards anything you read or hear about.

Negative campaigning in clips

Negative campaigning has always been a part of elections but the era of YouTube gives the expression a whole new dimension. John McBain MacCain gets his share of it…

…and so does Barack Obama.

Still around

“Hey, there are two of us in this race”, McCain seems to be gesticulating.

Predicting the election just for fun

Johan Ingerö challenged a number of Swedish bloggers to post their early state by state predictions of the US presidential election. All the bloggers mentioned as well as Johan himself have a long record of covering American politics. I am not able to claim the same level of background knowledge but I thought it would be nice to enter my bid just for the fun of it.

This is a very initial prediction entered right after Obama collected the necessary amount of delegates for the nomination. I am more than likely to change my mind many times over, one of which is when we get to know about the running mates of Obama and McCain. Also, the prediction is based on just my guts saying that big surprises may happen due to exceptionally high turnout based on Obama’s stimulating effect on black voting.

I entered my prediction at uselectionatlas.org. For some reason the republican states are displayed in blue and democratic states in red in the map below. As the second image shows, I predict an Obama win by 341 electoral delegates to 197 for McCain. However, the confidence figures display only 259 delegates for Obama that I am pretty sure of. The 101 delegates from either way states may still tip the balance.

Clicking on the images brings you to my prediction page for for a full size view and more detailed numbers.