This is your new OTP thread, boys.

OK, great, but where's the hook? I need a story on the order of "Logan Morrison and Todd Akin form new think-tank for political gynecology" or something.

We've got a convention coming up. My thoughts before the fact.

1) This thing is gonna be neg-a-tive. The "tripod of lies" line they're trying out this week seems likely to come up, along with the obvious (Medicare! Medicare! Medicare! And Bain!).

2) None of the Democratic speakers look particularly exciting to me. There's definitely no Obama 2004 on the schedule. I expect Bill Clinton will kill it - he's Bill Clinton, after all - but everyone expects that anyway. I'm going to love Elizabeth Warren's speech, but so will the ~20% of the electorate who share most of my views. I'll be surprised if it's a huge hit, though we can all wishcast a little. I would have given Al Franken a good speaking slot, but he doesn't appear to be anywhere on the docket.

3) The 2004 election is looking like a better and better analogue. In 2004 at the DNC, after a couple days of red meat attacks for the base, Kerry tried super super hard to paint a portrait of himself as a willing soldier for the nation, it fell mostly flat. After smacking Obama around for a couple days, the Republicans tried to pivot to Romney as the Noblesse Oblige Business Lord who will return us to a better time in the past, and it was, I thought, about as unsuccessful as the scripted attacks had been successful. In 2004, the Republicans followed the mostly blah Dem convention with a cavalcade of negativisty, just destroying both Kerry's character and his policies. In the end, Americans were mostly just turned off, but the (relatively small) polling bump went the Republicans' way. Dems will be going for something similar.

4) As noted, Bush got only a small bounce, and Bush 2004 is a model for how to win a very close election. It involves Obama never being particularly clear of his opponent or confident in victory. I don't see much chance that Obama comes out of this week with a good lead.

5) So, after the conventions, it'll still mostly about the chance of exogenous shocks to the economy. So far, somehow, there haven't been any for 12 months. If there aren't any before the election, Obama's probably a favorite by a couple points. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Spain, though, this could quickly turn into a Republican sweep.

6) This is now no longer about the convention. Because Obama's playing small ball and looking for a small victory, you never know if a good debate for Romney or a misstep by Obama's campaign might turn this into a toss-up. In 2004, with the economy in better shape by a half-step or so, Kerry won the debates by a good margin and turned the race into a near-nailbiter. If something along those lines goes against Obama, it will create a true toss-up situation.

If something along those lines goes against Obama, it will create a true toss-up situation.

It's already a toss-up. A candidate like Obama (inspiring figure with shitty track record) will always over-poll.

Look at the two Dinkins/Giuliani elections. Lot's of moderates/independents don't want to admit publicly they're going to bail on the first black "X", b/c he did a shitty job, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they'll bail away.

A candidate like Obama will always over-poll.

He's ran in two closely contested national elections, and he has yet to over-poll in either of them.

A candidate like Obama will always over-poll.

What exactly do you mean by "like Obama"? His final vote total in 2008 was almost spot-on to what the polls were predicting.

Look at the two Dinkins/Giuliani elections. Lot's of moderates/independents don't want to admit publicly they're going to bail on the first black "X", b/c he did a shitty job, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they'll bail away.

The Wilder Effect did not appear in 2008. It appears that the Wilder Effect disappeared in the mid-1990s. See Daniel Hopkins, "No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect":

The Wilder effect occupies an unusual position in our thinking about American elections, as it is often invoked (e.g., Elder 2007; Lanning 2005) but rarely scrutinized. By analyzing Senate and Gubernatorial elections between 1989 and 2006, this paper has provided the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. In the early 1990s, there was a pronounced gap between polling and performance for black candidates of 3.2 percentage points under the model. But in the mid-1990s, that upward bias in telephone surveys became insignificant, falling by 2.3 percentage points. And it was nonexistent in the 2008 primaries and general election.

On Obama:

The 2008 Democratic presidential primaries renewed speculation about the Wilder effect, so as an additional test, we applied the same decision rules as above to collect up to three polls for each of the 33 U.S. states that held contested Democratic primaries. Doing so yields 87 observations of polled and actual support for Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with other candidates excluded. The mean polling-performance gap was 1.4 percentage points for Senator Clinton and the reverse for Senator Obama. This estimated mean is not at all sensitive to particular polls or states: if we remove the observations for five randomly chosen states at a time, we still observe that Senator Obama’s election day performance was better than his polling on average in every one of the 10,000 simulations.

I don't think he considers 2008 Obama to be a "candidate like Obama" in 2012, since he's now an incumbent with a supposedly uninspiring track record. The problem, as always, is that democrats are afraid to actually tout their track record. Passing the ACA should be a huge positive for Obama, but he's let the other side define it as socialized medicine. Passing the new CAFE standards should be a huge positive for Obama, but he won't even talk about it. Etc, etc, etc.

I don't think he considers 2008 Obama to be a "candidate like Obama" in 2012, since he's now an incumbent with a supposedly uninspiring track record.

Fair enough. I'm just curious of what other examples he has besides Dinkins/Giuliani (and I'm also curious about a source for how much Dinkins under-performed his polls; not being a NYer, I don't have any recollection of how that result differed from expectations). I'm having a lot of trouble getting a feel for what a good analogy is for this race. I see the parallels to 2004 that MCoA raises, but I can also see some similarities to 1980 - which obviously broke decisively the other way. But neither one really feels exactly right. Given a lack of a good gut feel, my instinct is to trust the numbers, and Nate Silver says Obama's about a 2-to-1 favorite, so I guess I'll go with that as a default.

In 2004, the Republicans followed the mostly blah Dem convention with a cavalcade of negativisty, just destroying both Kerry's character and his policies. In the end, Americans were mostly just turned off, but the (relatively small) polling bump went the Republicans' way. Dems will be going for something similar.

I'm not so sure you're right about this. The re-elect campaign has shown itself to focus heavily on door to door organization strategies and negative ads that they can keep Obama's fingerprints off of. In addition, the re-elect has focused to an incredible extent on female voters. Obama seems to see his coalition as minorities and white women with at least some college. Bush's coalition, by contrast, was made up much more of working class men. I don't think Obama will go massively negative in the convention, although I don't really think the conventions matter.

In 2004, with the economy in better shape by a half-step or so, Kerry won the debates by a good margin and turned the race into a near-nailbiter. If something along those lines goes against Obama, it will create a true toss-up situation.

Again, I think my view of the race is much more set in stone than your view. I don't see massive upside for Romney in this race. The only things that I think can really tip things are a huge supply shock, another terrorist attack or some kind of massive sex scandal in the Obama admin that tanks his personal likability numbers.

Again, I think my view of the race is much more set in stone than your view. I don't see massive upside for Romney in this race. The only things that I think can really tip things are a huge supply shock, another terrorist attack or some kind of massive sex scandal in the Obama admin that tanks his personal likability numbers.

This is, to me, too economically deterministic. With a sample of so few elections, we don't have evidence that campaigns don't move votes of 1-3% of the population. The best-fit models still have a lot of wiggle room. It's a gap that could easily, and logically, be filled by campaign differences. I think that in elections as close as 2008, campaigns matter.

I see the parallels to 2004 that MCoA raises, but I can also see some similarities to 1980

Look at GDP growth and unemployment in 1980. If we're in a full-blown recession come election day, Romney will win in a landslide (or the modern version of a landslide, maybe 5-8 points).

It's a gap that could easily, and logically, be filled by campaign differences. I think that in elections as close as 2008, campaigns matter.

It's not that I disagree with this, but in a dynamic where both campaigns are trying hard, you have to really give a lot of credence to the ability of three debates to move a lot of ground. Both campaigns (Eastwood notwithstanding), are generally run in a competent way (although Romney seems to go off message at times). If anything, Obama has had the more effective advertisements (except maybe the Welfare ones, but those run real risks for Romney).

The only remaining non-scripted events are the debates, and I don't know that the debates can really shift public polling by 3 to four points. That's just a huge effect for three-six hours of TV that most people regard as medicine.

What is important about the convention is the media spin. With the RNC it was Ryan's lies, Clint's senility and Mitt saying nothing. The DNC has to be about ideas and the future while portraying Mitt as having the same ideas as W. There is a possibility of getting a little daylight between them and Mitt.

One of the many, many weird things about the conventions for me is having the candidates' spouses speaking in prominent roles.
Michelle Obama has spent the last four years basically saying "THIS woman's place is in the kitchen, in the garden, and in the gym."
In 2012, why is this still happening?

# 2 - I was hoping for some headline like "Amazon.com declares 'war on women' instead of another political thread.

A pox on all of them - please don't enocurage them via blog posts or contributions!

Perhaps someday we will get people that appeal to the better angels of our nature without having to focus group test the language. And as Baka said in "The Ten Commandments "this is not that day".

Look at the two Dinkins/Giuliani elections

NY and the USA are two different animals, as are Obama and Dinkins, as well as Giuliani and Romney. I see it playing out like 2004, but being a little closer. I think a really good GOP candidate could beat Obama, but I have not seen much indication that Romney is that guy. I think Romney will need an outside event, as noted, to win.

Commentary
"The Dinkins Effect in the Presidential Race"
John Steele Gordon | @steelegordon
07.31.2012 - 12:45 PM ...

I think what I call the Dinkins effect is in operation. David Dinkins was the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York in 1989, having defeated three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the primary. His Republican opponent was Rudy Giuliani. The polls all showed Dinkins well ahead, but he won the race only narrowly. In 1993, there was the same match-up. The polls all showed Dinkins (who had a lousy record as mayor) as narrowly ahead. Giuliani won in a walk. The reason the polls were so wrong, I think, was because Dinkins is black and some people were simply unwilling to say, even to a pollster, they were voting against the black guy. Racism is nearly extinct in this country, but the fear of being thought racist is pervasive, and the willingness of some people on the left to play the race card apparent.

Could that be why President Obama has high ratings in polls asking about his “likeability”? My dislike of his politics probably clouds my judgment somewhat, but I don’t find him likeable at all. He’s arrogant, often mean-spirited, sometimes downright nasty. He avoids taking responsibility for failure but takes all the credit for success. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor that I can see. He’s, well, chilly. I don’t like Bill Clinton’s politics much either, but I’m sure I’d have a great time having dinner with him some night. He may be left-of-center and more than a bit of a scoundrel in his personal life, but likeable he most certainly is. Obama, simply, is not.

Also, of course, a lot of people might be unwilling to admit they think they were sold a bills of goods in 2008 by a political flim-flam man. No one likes to admit they were cheated. So they say they’re voting for Obama but then won’t.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/31/the-dinkins-effect-in-the-presidential-race/

From the previous thread:

WTF are we still doing in Afghanistan?

Pick the least abhorrent warlords, bribe them with enough guns and money, so we can stage SF in their areas when necessary, and get the eff out.

The problem from the political POV is that very shortly after the US leaves the Taliban will be back in control (to the extent that anybody controls the country that is, but they were in effective control before and I see it unlikely that things would play out any different). It's the kind of outcome that no decision maker is likely to find acceptable.

Just to be clear, I didn't think making war on the Taliban was a good idea from the get-go. And I think "declare victory and leave" is as good as it's likely to get. It'll be easier for a second term president to do this.

Based solely on the excerpt quoted in #18, my issue with the "Dinkins effect" is that it apparently appeared in BOTH Dinkins/Giuliani races, the former of which would seem to line up just fine with the 2008 Presidential race (how could Dinkins qualify as an "inspiring figure with a shitty track record" before he even HAD a track record) and, as noted upthread, Obama's performance in the 2008 general election was perfectly in line with what polls were saying.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/31/the-dinkins-effect-in-the-presidential-race/

Like I said, the USA isn't New York, and Obama isn't Dinkins. But I guess that evens it up for Hutcheson's link about the GOP convention in the last thread, which was about the same kind of piece: an emotional response to something couched in faux-logical language.

The other point I would make is that a lot of people, according to the numbers, have already bailed on Obama. No numbers that I have seen showing him either holding the same Electoral map or getting the same percentage of the popular vote. 538 has Obama with 50.9 of the popular and shows him with a 91.6% chance of losing a least one state he carried in 2008, and with only a 21% chance of winning a state he lost last time.

From OTP - August:

[5968]. It was about on the same level as what Elizabeth Warren did in claiming that "Indian" ancestry when she was applying for her faculty position. On the one hand it's the sort of Little White Lie that is sadly all too commonplace among people who should know better, but on another level it could very well be a symptom of something worse. My opinion of Elizabeth Warren took a small nosedive when I heard about that bogus claim of hers, and when I read about a wildly bogus claim like Ryan's it's kind of hard not to wonder what other type of BS he spreads about himself whenever he thinks he can't be outed.

How is it on the same level? In their present campaigns, maybe on the surface. However, it's not at all clear that it did not help Warren get hired by UPenn and by Harvard. Did Ryan win his House seat by touting his marathon times?

The New York Post
"A recipe for trouble"
By HOWIE CARR
Last Updated: 5:04 AM, May 21, 2012 ...

The 62-year-old “Okie” (as the Native American emeritus now describes herself) began checking the box, as they say, back in 1984 — and her academic career immediately took off. The newly minted minority catapulted from the University of Texas to the Ivy League, first Penn (where her name was boldfaced in faculty directories to indicate her minority status) and then Harvard.

If Warren hadn’t decided to run for the Senate, she’d still be an Indian. But three weeks ago, it got out that Harvard had been bragging about her as a “minority” hire as far back as 1996. This led the newspapers to ask the New England Historic Genealogical Society to trace her roots. A day or so later, their top researcher reported finding a 2006 family online newsletter, that mentioned an 1894 application for a marriage license in Oklahoma that supposedly listed her great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee. Thus, the one-thirty-second claim.

The next day, Warren’s greatest cheerleader, The Boston Globe, breathlessly announced that “an 1894 document” had been “unearthed.” Maybe she could have brazened it out — but then Warren stumbled into her own personal Little Big Horn.

In a press release, she touted both the supposed 1894 document and an obscure 1984 Indian cookbook, “Pow Wow Chow” (edited by her late cousin), as proof of her tribal origins.

Then a Breitbart researcher, Michael Patrick Leahy, called Logan County in Oklahoma, where the document would have been filed. The county clerk told him that in 1894 there was no such thing as a marriage-license application — only a license, with no box to check off for race.

Cherokee spokesmen called for her to release her law-school job applications, but Warren stonewalled. Asked why she had claimed Indian heritage, she cited an old photograph of her “papaw,” her grandfather, who “had high cheekbones, like all the Indians do.”
As for claiming Native American status in minority law-school directories, she said she’d done it simply in hope of being “invited to a luncheon . . . with people like me.” Right.

Then the Breitbart blogger got a copy of “Pow Wow Chow,” supposedly a compilation of “special recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”

Five recipes came from “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.” At least two were plagiarized — lifted verbatim from The New York Times. They’d been developed by “60-minute gourmet” Pierre Franey as chef at Le Pavillon, the mid-century center of haute cuisine in Manhattan.

One of them — for cold crab omelet — Franey wrote in 1979, was a particular favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and composer Cole Porter. [Emphasis added]

http://m.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/recipe_for_trouble_FjE51f7qZJ9SUIZmF6pX1H

In all fairness to Elizabeth Warren, we don't have anything that even remotely resembles a comprehensive list of Native Americans. In our history pre-1900, we treated them with apathy at the best of times and antipathy at the worst. A lot of people descended from both Caucasians and Native Americans had a number of reasons to not identify themselves as Native American, with the only trace being a tradition passed on through the generations.

She might be claiming descent as part of a family tradition (and having a cousin that also claims it would be evidence of this) but that doesn't excuse her for the terrible evidence presented when pressed on it. She would have been better off just saying it was a part of her family tradition, and so she has always thought of that as part of herself.

I tell people I'm half-Welsh/half-German...it's actually more of a unknown division of Welsh, Scottish, and English on that side...but Wales is a cooler place so I go with that. Though I'm not sure anyone's ever hired me because of it, or indeed cared when I've told them.

Ah, ancestry. I was born and raised in Oklahoma, and there's was a very vague family mention of some microscopically small fraction of American Indian ancestry. Which would have had nothing to do with Oklahoma, since both my parents came from places well to the north or northeast of there. The only real evidence, if you want to call it that, is that multiple lines of my ancestry probably go back 8 to 10 generations within the U.S. (or what would become the U.S.) That far back, in the absence of documentation or tracing, who knows? And if you want to tell me that saying, "That far back, who knows?" opens up all sorts of other possibilities, then, yes, I'm aware of that. (And my DNA has not been tested.)

I grew up considering myself to be mostly English on my father's side and mostly German on my mother's side. It seems likely that my mother's side, although it certainly includes Germans, was more English than I realized. And some of what I'm calling German could be Dutch or Alsatian, and some of what I'm calling English could be Scottish. And of course, none of that really matters anyway.

Well, lots of people claim or acknowledge various ancestry for various reason. I talk in certain contexts about being Slovak-American, but that's due to one grandparent (who was born in Chicago), and nobody's spoken Slovak in my family since her, and there's no legal status called "Slovak" in the US. For white Americans, this is all usually a big "So what," for sure. But for American Indians who are eligible or not for certain political status because of legal definitions of "blood quanta," this is a hugely important issue. You do not get to blithely call yourself Cherokee because your great-uncle used to live in Tahlequah.

My maternal grandmother's family -- at least 4 of 5 brothers & 1 (the grandmother in question) of 3 sisters -- picked up & moved from SW Arkansas to eastern Oklahoma around 1900 or a little later. (Presumably, one of them went first, found the pickings good or whatever, & told the rest there were livings to be made &/or land to be had. Everybody's been dead for decades, & the vast majority of those guys never procreated, so there's no one for me to get any sort of details from.)

The main thing they appear to have gotten out of it was several cases of tuberculosis, supposedly contracted from the Indians whose money the brothers (who tended to work at banks, apparently) handled, or so the stories went. And my grandmother got a husband, my grandfather -- a Jewish guy from the Philadelphia area. Though that lasted only till my mother was a couple of years old.

Growing up a few decades later back in SW Arkansas, I was one of the few kids who didn't claim any sort of Native American blood.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/31/the-dinkins-effect-in-the-presidential-race/

Like I said, the USA isn't New York, and Obama isn't Dinkins. But I guess that evens it up for Hutcheson's link about the GOP convention in the last thread, which was about the same kind of piece: an emotional response to something couched in faux-logical language.

Again, this has been studied. We have data. The "Wilder Effect" has been shown to be statistically significant in the early 1990s, when Giuliani beat Dinkins. It has faded such that in the last decade, there has been no notable tendency of African-American candidates to underperform their polling numbers. It has nothing to do with New York - in the early 1990s, the effect appeared all over the place, and in the late 2000s, it appears nowhere. I don't know why this is the case, but whether it has to do with improved polling techniques, changes in feelings about race, generational shifts, or something else, the data is in. There has not been a Wilder Effect (or "Dinkins Effect") for many years.

Again, this has been studied.

I know. But my point was I am not sure that I would buy the comp anyway, even if there were no data, for obvious reasons. Presidential elections are different than other elections.

The only thing to say about that Commentary rant is to wonder how or why anyone would pay any attention to anything published in that Neocon rag to begin with. Everything in Commentary for about the past 45 years sounds as if it had been written by Portnoy's father while grunting and straining on the throne, and the above article is no exception.

are any actual native americans upset by this, or is it just more kindling for the anti-affirmative action "derka derr" crowd?


because it seems to me that the people who are angriest about elizabeth warren (allegedly) taking advantage of affirmative action are the same people who are angry about the existence of affirmative action in the first place.

Afganistan is one ugly pickle, I can see the worst case being far worse than the Taliban retaking power... the actual worse case is that it triggers a Pakistani / Indian nuclear war and also destablize Pakistan in general.

It's hard to think of how to actually fix Afganistan, it's a country that's in all reality, still in the medieval era. how do you get a country up to speed by about 500 years in a decade?

because it seems to me that the people who are angriest about elizabeth warren (allegedly) taking advantage of affirmative action are the same people who are angry about the existence of affirmative action in the first place.

There's no disconnect between the former and the latter. But for affirmative action and Warren's apparent fraudulent use thereof, she's liable to be some unknown professor somewhere.

It's sort of like the Lance Armstrong apologists who are saying it doesn't really matter if Armstrong cheated, because he's done a lot of good. But without the (alleged) ill-gotten fame, Armstrong likely never would have had the platform from which to do the good deeds.

3) The 2004 election is looking like a better and better analogue. In 2004 at the DNC, after a couple days of red meat attacks for the base, Kerry tried super super hard to paint a portrait of himself as a willing soldier for the nation, it fell mostly flat. After smacking Obama around for a couple days, the Republicans tried to pivot to Romney as the Noblesse Oblige Business Lord who will return us to a better time in the past, and it was, I thought, about as unsuccessful as the scripted attacks had been successful. In 2004, the Republicans followed the mostly blah Dem convention with a cavalcade of negativisty, just destroying both Kerry's character and his policies. In the end, Americans were mostly just turned off, but the (relatively small) polling bump went the Republicans' way. Dems will be going for something similar.

I'd agree with this, adding, Romney and the super-PACs have a huge money advantage over the incumbent, first time that's ever happened. I pity voters in swing states (like VA, PA, FL) for the amount of advertising they're gonna have to deal with. All signs point to really, really close votes, with the Republicans already doing all they can to keep Gary Johnson off the ballot. Romney has not yet tapped his warchest. He's about to.

Another thing Obama will not have going for his campaign this time is the youth turnout. They're not gonna vote for Romney, I suspect, but 26-year-old college grads living at home thanking god they can work 30 hrs a week in retail plus pick up a shift bartending are not, actually, as likely to show up for Obama in the numbers they did previously.

You know it's taken me a shocking amount of time in this thread to realize that Dinkins is black. I blame Seinfeld (my only previous knowledge of him) for not showing him on screen.

It's sort of like the Lance Armstrong apologists who are saying it doesn't really matter if Armstrong cheated, because he's done a lot of good. But without the (alleged) ill-gotten fame, Armstrong likely never would have had the platform from which to do the good deeds.

I don't really know much about Armstrong, except that I've never particularly liked him. But the second sentence doesn't seem to negate the first. Again, I'm not an Armstrong apologist, nor have I heard what the apologists are saying. But it sounds like they are saying exactly what you're pointing out in the second sentence..."sure he cheated, but look at all the good that came from that cheating. I'll take a few tainted bike races as the price for millions in cancer research any day."

I tell people I'm half-Welsh/half-German...it's actually more of a unknown division of Welsh, Scottish, and English on that side...but Wales is a cooler place so I go with that.

######## sheep is cool now?

######## sheep is cool now?

It's like ruling over peasants, or chopping people's heads off with a sword...I personally wouldn't want to do it, but there's cachet in having ancestors that did it.

######## sheep is cool now?

IIRC the justfication is usually something like "anything with wool and a hole".

I wouldn't be surprised if most people whose families have been in America for more than a few generations have Indian ancestry floating around somewhere. Black ancestry too.

Again, I'm not an Armstrong apologist, nor have I heard what the apologists are saying. But it sounds like they are saying exactly what you're pointing out in the second sentence..."sure he cheated, but look at all the good that came from that cheating. I'll take a few tainted bike races as the price for millions in cancer research any day."

That's not how the commentary I've seen has been written or stated. The apologists I've seen have essentially been saying, "Sure, he cheated, but he's Lance Armstrong, Cancer Warrior," without acknowledging that he'd be just another anonymous cyclist but for the seven apparently ill-gotten Tour de France wins.

As I say, I'll defer to someone who's actually read an article about Lance Armstrong in his life.

In a more general, philosophical sense it seems like a murky grey area. Without his cheating, maybe cancer research gets a little less funding over the past ten years or so. The fact that he'd just be another anonymous cyclist sort of makes it a good thing he cheated. At least for someone like me, who's interest in cancer research (mild) heavily outweighs my interest in who wins a bicycle race (zero).

Oh, this is a politics thread. I thought we were going to ship Kim Ng and Brian Sabean.

Oh, this is a politics thread. I thought we were going to ship Kim Ng and Brian Sabean.

You reveal a lot with this.

The apologists I've seen have essentially been saying, "Sure, he cheated, but he's Lance Armstrong, Cancer Warrior," without acknowledging that he'd be just another anonymous cyclist but for the seven apparently ill-gotten Tour de France wins.

Anybody keeping track of the relative numbers of this type of apologist vs the "sure he cheated, but everybody he was competing against cheated too" type of apologist? My impression is that the latter significantly outnumbers the former here, but it may be the reverse in the broader population.

Lance Armstrong cheated, and then was a self-righteous ass about it. I'm far more oft-put by the latter, as every cyclist in the sport is doping their asses off.

I'm having a lot of trouble getting a feel for what a good analogy is for this race.

1948, Truman-Dewey. But with better and continuous polling, and I have no idea how Sasha or Malia's singing voices are.

Re: Guiliani and Dinkins--
The results of their two races were similar; Dinkins beat Guiliani 51% to 49%, and then Guiliani beat Dinkins 51% to 48%. In the 1993 rematch there was a ballot initiative in Staten Island to secede from New York City (which passed, and was then ignored). The increased voting activity within Staten Island, which was heavily conservative, was the most notable shift in the two elections.

What would be the point of Staten Island seceding from NYC?

It's important to realize that Livstrong does not actually fund cancer research anymore and have not since about 2005. Live strong is about cancer awareness and helping people with cancer to get information and funds for the best treatment. These are noble goals, but do little for research. The only real negative is the odd conflict of interest between Livestrong.org and Livestrong.com. The .com is a for profit enterprise that many see as leaching from the non profit. Also the non profit has a pretty low rate of funds going to the cause vs other similar non-profits. Especially when you look at many of the very elaborate and expensive events that they claim are part of "the cause".

So the reason that Armstrong doped his blood was because he wanted to raise public consciousness about cancer, and it had nothing at all to do with gaining an advantage over his competitors?

Color me unconvinced.

OTOH since it's just a bike race, I don't know or care whether the entire field was doing the same thing. Those who care about bicycle racing have much more standing to comment on that.