Anderson@Large

Mr. President, It’s Cold on Main Street

President Barack Obama will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight. Obama will propose a three-year freeze on “non-security” discretionary spending to rein in the federal deficit.

Never mind that candidate Obama said “the problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”

Bottom line: Obama was against a spending freeze before he was for it.

A proposed spending freeze leaves former Labor Secretary Robert Reich cold:

The bigger news is Obama is planning a three-year budget freeze on a big chunk of discretionary spending. Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever.

A pending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won't do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule.

[…]

His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that’s important. Chalk up another win for Wall Street, another loss for Main.

During a recent economic recovery workshop Ryan Sweet, a senior economist with Moody’s Economy.com made a similar warning about the risk of cutting back on government spending:

A self-sustaining expansion will only happen if stimulus spending is not withdrawn too quickly.

Atwitter about Twitter

John McCain telling Sean Hannity that he’s “Twittering the top 10” is a clear indication that Twitter has jumped the shark.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows users to share information and updates – some obsessively – with their “followers.” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ followers apparently include the White House economic staff with whom he’s meeting today.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 11 percent of wired Americans are Twittering:

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging' service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”

Of the standalone applications that enable short messaging to a network of friends, Twitter is the most well known. First made available to those online in August 2006, Twitter allows users to send messages, known as “tweets” from a computer or a mobile device like a mobile phone, Blackberry or iPhone. Users of the service are asked to post messages of no more than 140 characters and those messages are delivered to others who have signed up to receive them such as family, friends or colleagues.

And now the estimable Pew Research Center has joined the Twittering class.

To view Jon Stewart’s hilarious take on Twitter, go here.

You can follow my tweets on Twitter here.

Election Day 2008: All Soles to the Polls

The polls are open. Do you know where your polling place is? Great. After you vote, text  “blackyouthvote” to 69302.

I’m in DC, where I'm live-blogging Election Day from the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation’s Command Center.

We are operating out of the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women on Pennsylvania Avenue, the “Avenue of Presidents.”

National leaders will monitor what's happening with black voters nationwide. They will receive reports from Unity '08 coordinators on the ground in battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

We will also monitor calls to the voter assistance hotline, 1-866-MYVOTE1. So, check back here throughout the day for frequent updates.

You can also follow me on Twitter. I will be sending tweets to the Twitter Vote Report.

Jews for Obama

Sarah Silverman should STFU.

Sarah has organized “The Great Schlep” to encourage Jewish grandchildren to visit their grandparents in Florida and urge them to vote for Barack Obama.

Sarah's video has more than one million views, but she knows bupkis about politics. According to a Gallup poll, 75 percent of Jewish Americans plan to vote for Obama.

During a public forum on American Jews and the 2008 presidential election, Prof. Steven Cohen, director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner, said:

Older Jews are more likely to vote for Obama than younger ones…Jews are voting for Obama in the same percentage as they voted for past Democratic presidential candidates.

Cohen said younger Jews are more likely to intermarry and tend to be less ethnically Jewish in their political identity. Also, a higher percentage of Jews aged 18-29 are Orthodox. While non-Orthodox Jews favor Obama, 80 percent of Orthodox Jews support John McCain.

Cohen noted his survey found that Jewish support for Obama is not about his policy positions; rather, it's about their political identity:

With the possible exception of their concerns for Israel’s security and Iran, Jews’ political values incline them to support Obama. However, multivariate analysis demonstrates that the Jewish/white gap in vote intentions cannot be well-explained by their differences in political values, by such demographic factors as education and income, or by religiosity-secularity, a factor that has been shown to influence the vote even more than economic standing.

Only one factor substantially explains the Jewish/non-Jewish white gap in vote intentions: “Political identity,” the tendency for Jews to identify as liberals and as Democrats rather than conservatives and Republicans.

The bottom line: Jewish grandmothers—Sarah's bubbes—should schlep to swing states and tell their grandchildren to vote for Obama.

Josephine the Plumber

Long before Joe Wurzelbacher became a media sensation, there was Josephine the Plumber, who was portrayed by actress Jane Withers.

What’s my point? I don’t have one. I need a break from the political ads. While I can live without TV, I live online and you-know-who keeps popping up on my monitor.

The "days are dwindling down," but Barack Obama has money to burn. So, I will just have to wait until Election Day Night.

In the meantime (sigh), "Hey Joe."

The Joe Effect?

With 12 days to go, a new Associated Press-GtK poll has John McCain and Barack Obama running even. McCain is getting a boost from Average Joes who earn less than $50,000 a year.

AP reports:

During their final debate, a feisty McCain repeatedly forced Obama to defend his record, comments and associations. He also used the story of a voter whom the Democrat had met in Ohio, "Joe the plumber," to argue that Obama's tax plan would be bad for working class voters.

"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told the man with the last name of Wurzelbacher, who had asked Obama whether his plan to increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year would impede his ability to buy the plumbing company where he works.

On Wednesday, McCain's campaign unveiled a new TV ad that features that Obama quote, and shows different people saying: "I'm Joe the plumber." A man asks: "Obama wants my sweat to pay for his trillion dollars in new spending?"

Since McCain has seized on that line of argument, he has picked up support among white married people and non-college educated whites, the poll shows, while widening his advantage among white men.

Obama says McCain is "out of touch." So, an appropriate campaign song for the homestretch may be "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe" from the 1943 musical, "Cabin in the Sky."

Not Your Average Joe

In a presidential campaign replete with rock stars and rising stars, an ordinary citizen stepped out his front door, asked Barack Obama a question about his tax plan, and became “an instant star.”

A study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, drove campaign coverage last week:

It was during that debate that the legend of Joe the Plumber was born. And almost immediately, the press descended on the home of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who seemed to enjoy the exposure until reporters began probing his political views, employment status, and a tax lien filed against him. An October 16 ABC report declared that “the networks battled over him as if he were Britney,” adding that by the end of the week, “Joe was already feeling the flip side of fame.”

John McCain is exploiting Wurzelbacher’s celebrity, such as it is. His campaign is plumbing the depths with an “I’m ‘Joe the Plumber’” video contest. The best video could end up in a TV ad.

In one respect, though, Wurzelbacher is average. His name is misspelled in the voter database. He's been registered to vote since 1992 so he's not at risk of being challenged on Election Day.

But 200,000 newly registered Ohioans were nearly kicked off the voter rolls. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice found:

Some states will not register voters or will purge them from the voter rolls if election officials cannot match their voter registration information against information in other government databases. The problem is the computer match processes states use are inherently unreliable. Between 15% and 30% of all match attempts fail because of typos, other administrative errors, and minor discrepancies between database records, such as a maiden name in one record and a married name in another or a hyphen in one record and not another. No match, no vote policies can block hundreds of thousands of voters through no fault of their own.

If the U.S. Supreme Court had not quashed Republicans' efforts to challenge voters whose name did not match with government databases, a lot of average Joes and Josephines would have been left standing in long lines – again.