Why McCain Lost

Now the Monday morning quarterbacking begins, only this time it's more of a November 5th quarterbacking effort. John McCain failed in his bid for the presidency. The reasons why on the surface are fairly clear - he failed to capture the 2000 and 2004 Bush states, and failed to sway Pennsylvania to shift to a more red hue. But there were underlying causes that began to doom him from the beginning.

The Charisma Gap has played a role in every election in the past fifteen years, since Clinton was elected in 1992. Clinton and W had "everyday guy" charisma, the kind that appeals to average working Joes. This played an important role in capturing the areas of the country which, frankly, may enjoy NASCAR a little too much and consider reading books to be a waste of time.

This election was a little different, but which candidate possessed the more charismatic qualities was obvious. McCain is a fairly good speaker, far better than George W. Bush ever had been or ever will be. Obama, though, is immaculate. Where McCain's technique involves jokes which aren't very funny and somewhat awkward soundbytes, Obama utilizes spotless segues and impressive inflections. Kerry and Gore were well spoken, certainly, but they spoke in a kind of monotonous fashion that made it hard to rally around them. Barack Obama was ready and willing to transcend the soundbyte culture that has grasped the media so tightly in the past eight years, and in many ways he succeeded.

Losing Control was seemingly a factor in McCain's downfall. Steve Schmidt, former Cheney aid and longtime political organizer, was given full control over McCain's campaign in early July. Schmidt comes from a school of thought that when it comes to campaigning, message isn't necessarily the most important issue; that as long as you can come out ahead in the majority of news cycles, the election is yours. This led to the McCain campaign turning quite negative, focusing on his opponent's political weaknesses rather than his own strengths. This probably also led to the strange and erratic movements of the campaign, jerking from one issue to the other as unnaturally as Sarah Palin's catwalk moves.

On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers—Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons—met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had "a pulse."

The above quote, from a Newsweek article just released about the campaign, illustrates the little control McCain had over his own fate. The top advisors of his campaign had a hunch a month ago that things would not go well for their candidate, and they decided to not discourage him. Certainly McCain got wind of this eventually from how the polls and temperament of his colleagues and the media were moving, but it just exemplifies how weak of a grasp he actually had on his own campaign.

Probably foremost among the reasons why McCain's campaign failed so miserably was the selection of Sarah Palin for his Vice President. The pick seemed sound, at least at first. A relatively unknown Washington outsider - could definitely play for the "change" ticket. A woman to boot, to try and scoop up the rest of the Hillary vote. Sounds fairly reasonable, right?

It didn't seem to work out very well. Palin was a definite conservative, but she may have been too conservative for the American public to stomach. She galvanized the abortion- and tax-hating wings of the Republican Party, but did she also push the border cases further to the left? Was her inexperience and her penchant for disastrous interviews a death knell for the McCain campaign? I say yes. She also got off message several times on the campaign trail, "going rogue" as some put it and blathering off on her own tangents instead of sticking to the campaign line:

Palin launched her attack on Obama's association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

She seemed like quite the loose cannon, and some of her behavior toward the end of the campaign seemed to be motivated by her own ego rather than the ticket she was promoting. It seems like things may work out for her as well - in Alaska, where she remains remarkably popular, a Senate seat seems like it'll be up for grabs in short order. With most of the right-wing media calling the McCain campaign a failure because its candidate was not conservative enough, her status of a pariah may stand as a badge of honor.

McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign, and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.

Source.

Sad Songs Are Nature's Onions

Struggling Americans Forced To Work Extra-Dimensional 4th Shift

"I age an extra eight hours every time I work the fourth shift, and it's really starting to wear me down," Vernacini continued. "And having to buy a new shirt every time my body is flattened out to 4,000 times its usual surface area is one more strain on my budget that I don't need."

Some businesses have already installed a rip in the space-time continuum in their break-room areas so that employees can report for work in the other dimension as soon as their Earth shifts end. People who regularly work the fourth shift have reported that the tasks they perform are more or less exactly the same as during their other shifts, though they have to contend with frequent plasma storms and occasionally meet themselves leaving for one shift as they arrive for another, which can be demoralizing.

"The worst part about my job in the other dimension is trying to digest the silica-based food product they serve in the cafeteria," said Thomas Kinney, a line inspector who takes on a fourth shift three days a week at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in alternate Atlanta, GA. "It's probably the most painful part of working a fourth shift. That, and not getting to see my kids grow up."

Election Results

Well, last night certainly was eventful. The results I was watching closely are below.

• Barack Obama and Joe Biden defeat John McCain and Sarah Palin for the presidency and vice-presidency of the United States of America.
• Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey retains his Senate seat over challenger Dick Zimmer.
• Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota is locked in a recount race with challenger Al Franken. The current margin is 42%-42%, with Franken trailing by less than 600 votes.
• It appears Ted Stevens of Alaska has won his seat over Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, despite Stevens' recent felony conviction on charges of corruption. If Stevens does indeed win, it is likely that he will resign and a special election will be held within ninety days for his seat. Look out for Palin trying to take his place and burst onto the national scene.
• Michele Bachmann retains her Congressional seat for Minnesota's 6th District, defeating Elwyn Tinklenberg. The race was closer than it would have been if not for Bachmann's McCarthy-esque statements on Hardball with Chris Matthews a few weeks ago.
• John Adler defeats Chris Myers in my home Congressional district, New Jersey's 3rd. This represents a pickup in the House for the Democrats, as Adler replaces retiring Republican Jim Saxton.
• Tim Walz retains his seat as Congressman from Minnesota's 1st District, defeating Brian Davis handily.



• Arizona, Florida, and apparently California have voted to ban gay marriage within their states.
• Arkansas has voted to ban gay adoption, preventing homosexual couples from adopting children.
• Colorado overwhelmingly shoots down an amendment that would define life as beginning at the moment of fertilization within every constitutional context. This would have essentially given a day old embryo the same rights as a forty-year-old person.
• Maryland votes to allow video slot machines in certain areas within the state, with procedes being directed to the education system.
• Massachusetts denies a ballot initiative that would abolish the state income tax.
• Michigan votes to legalize medical marijuana and permit stem cell research with embryonic stem cells.
• Washington state votes to allow doctor-assisted suicide.

Overall, a mixed bag. The Stevens and Franken races have yet to be called, so I'll update this once everything comes out in the wash. Apparently the Coleman-Franken race could be awhile, though - those from Washington state who remember the governor's race a few years back know what I mean.

Thus far today at work I've been reading meltdowns from various conservative sources around the internet. One of them unironically suggested that people who don't have a job should not be able to vote.

Hoagies

Election Day Hath Begun

Dixville Notch goes for Obama, 16-5. Booyah.

Time to get some rest and then hit the poll in the late morning. Hopefully it won't take too long to get out my vote.

Collegiate Adventures

Obviously, throughout my collegiate academic career, projects and labs were a part of the Electrical Engineering lifestyle. Returning to the University of Minnesota campus and conversing with some team members on said projects jarred some great memories and late nights of working on these sorts of things.

1) Calculator.java - it may seem innocuous and simple. It may seem utterly useless. And it was all these things, but it was really the first programming project I went through that felt complex enough for me to be proud of. The goal of this project was to create a Postfix Calculator. Essentially what this meant was to make a calculator in Java Swing that would take input like 3, 4, and + and spit out 7, for example. It honestly wasn't too hard, and creating the Swing frame was a fairly involved and interesting process. This is also one of the first times where a nasty habit of mine began to rear its ugly head: I am a code hog. I get on rolls where I will simply sit down and code for 5-6 hours at a time unheeded. This means I finish projects rapidly and sometimes when group members are not available to observe or help. This project specifically exemplified that, when I did a good 70% of the project before my group members were even involed. Oops!


2) The Magic Cubes - ah yes, our Senior Project. I have to explain this quite frequently to people who ask me about big projects I had completed during my time at the U of M. Essentially, they were intended to be an interactive piece of furniture, which was initially a large plastic couch. When the couch showed up and lacked transparency, we sent it back and instead ordered a set of three cubes which were intended to be lit from within as dual-purposed lightning and seating elements. These proved much more suitable for the task, and we set to work creating multi-coned inner pieces to which LEDs could be affixed, and the cones could (mostly) direct lights to a single side.

The LEDs we used had a ridiculous three watt power maximum. For power transformation, we used a single ATX power supply which peaked at a couple hundred watts, which was more than sufficient for our purposes; namely, fifteen of the KingBright RGB LEDs. The LEDs were driven by PWM generators made by Texas Instruments, which in turn were driven by Arduino microcontrollers. The Arduinos were ridiculously easy to figure out and program, even with the serial communications required by the PWM driver. Sensors were also integrated that could "hear" sound and "see" changes in lightning, allowing the piece to react to human interaction.

Regardless, the entire thing worked out pretty well, which a vast array of colors available for each side of each cube. It was fun to work on, but there were several long days and late nights trying to finish the stupid things. Matt Oehrlein managed to do some work on them over the summer, which can be viewed here.


3) GeneriQuest 4000 - another programming assignment that I worked on with some close friends. Our task was to author a MUD, a text-based network-enabled and multiplayer game, which was original and interesting. Obviously, the largest criteria was to create something that allowed several people to play using telnet clients. What we created was somewhat like the run-of-the-mill fantasy MUDs, with wizards and swords and MOBs.

The overall coding was certainly bloated and filled with the possibility of buffer overflow exploits, but the game actually worked and could be played to completion. From start to finish with three people, the game took about forty-five minutes. The classes, Wizard, Fighter, and Cleric, had to be meticulously balanced against one another lest one be overpowered and overshadow the rest. It was a lot of fun and a little strange to have a spreadsheet with different attacks available to each class, crunching numbers about scaling options. Also quite amazing was the beta testing phase. One incident which sticks in mind is when I was testing higher level behavior and buffed a character for Jason. Essentially it allowed him to kill a level one or two player in one hit fairly easily. Andy logged in only to be instantly cut down by a single attack from Jason. The game then became how fast could Andy run around and dodge Jason, who was hell bent on smacking the crap out of him.

Obviously, the game had some big flaws - for instance, the only way we could make fighting monsters even remotely fair for the monsters was to have them counter-attack whenever a player made an attack on them. This made the Cleric class fairly essentially, since they were the only one that could replenish hit points quickly. We also made (what I thought was) a cool tick system, where regeneration and attack rate were throttled by a counter, which I believe was on a two or three second timer. Players could only attack once per tick, and would regenerate health once every few ticks. We also hard coded the game map instead of making it more dynamic, which was certainly a mistake, but in retrospect we had spent enough time on it. We won the "most original" award from our professor, conferring to us ten bonus points, which clued us in that we may have spent exactly the right amount of time on the little C program.

Fusion Power

Apparently, I left a couple things back in Minnesota. Unfortunately, my razor was among those things, so I had to stop by Wegman's to grab a new one today. I looked for the same kind I was used to - a Gillette Fusion razor I got in the mail a few years ago. It worked adequately as long as I replaced the blade every few weeks.

I got to Wegman's today and the shelves were full of several different Gillette Fusion products, but none that matched up with my old razor. I had to settle with a new model - it looks like it shares the same type of razor that my old one did, but with one subtle difference.

This one came with batteries.

Yes, apparently it's necessary now to needlessly toss in a triple A battery and make the razor jiggle as you shave. Will it make a difference? Only time will tell...