A Letter From the Reality-Based Community

This isn't the most dangerous time in American history. Neither, for that matter, was even 9/11.

No, the era when things could have gone wrong in the most disastrous ways was from October 1989 through December of 1992, the last years of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

In retrospect, it's difficult to explain just how perilous that time was. Aggressive empires like that historically tend to go out with a whimper, rather than a bang. That's especially when they disintegrate as rapidly as the Soviets did.

Any number of things could have gone wrong during that period. If the United States did a victory lap as the Berlin Wall crumbled, the Russians could very well have used military force to retain what they had left. As it was, the deployment of Red Army special forces in Lithuania was followed by a Communist-hardline coup against President Gorbachev himself. A single wrong move on either side could very well have resulted in an armed superpower confrontation.

That was avoided, and we have the good men and women of the administration of President George Herbert Walker Bush to thank for it. I can't think of a better managed international crisis in history, although the first Gulf War was a close second. The only American president that comes even close was Harry Truman.

So when Bush's foreign policy team has something to say about foreign policy, I listen very closely.

When the second Bush started pushing for a war to topple Ba'athist Iraq, people like Brent Scowcroft cautioned against it, and I listened. I supported the war, mostly because it was inevitable, I didn't think that it would be as incompetently handled as it was, and I didn't think Bush 43 was serious about that "democracy" nonsense.

The White House couldn't be more dismissive, describing their cautious allies as "the reality-based community."

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That was an astonishingly Caligula-like statement, and things ended about as well as you would have expected them to.

But the Republicans still managed to be a rather formidable political machine. Despite a stagnant economy and a war that the wheels were falling off of, they let John Kerry be John Kerry, thereby holding on to the White House and both houses of Congress, which is more than they deserved. If nothing else, they managed to remain political realists.

Even during the twin catastrophes on 2006 and '06, most Republicans understood that they were going to lose and why, even though they were shy about telling the truth about it in public.

That ended after the Tea Party surge of 2010, when the supposed Tea Party "wave" reclaimed the House for them. Of course, they still refuse to recognize that the same phenomenon that won them the House probably cost them the Senate and that they over-reached mightily (particularly on the Debt Ceiling crisis,) just as the Class of '94 did.

This time, unlike in '06 and '08, these people actually seem to believe their childish narrative.

"To talk with any working Republican political operative these days is to hear the same tale of woe: a grim accounting of the past few weeks, a dash of gallows humor and a measure of hope that President Obama is still beatable. Never in question is that Mitt Romney is trailing -- the private surveys these strategists see for their down-ballot clients make that clear. The only question is by how much."

"But hanging up the phone or clicking out of e-mail is to find a parallel universe on the right. On TV, talk radio and especially the Internet is a place where the swing-state polls that show Romney losing are not just inaccurate but part of an intentional plot by the heretofore unknown media-pollster axis to depress Republican voters. In this other world, Romney not only isn't losing -- he's on the verge of a convincing victory."

I've personally had this argument with partisans more than once over the last couple of weeks, and it couldn't be more breath-takingly silly.

It's actually worse than that. In denying that there's a problem at all, the Republican rank and file won't pressure the Romney campaign to make the changes that could possibly save them. In fact, changing course without the grassroots might depress the delusional grassroots as much, if not more, than this supposed "media-pollster" conspiracy will.

As of today, the Real Clear Politics average now has Obama up by three and a half points, which is where I've been saying it is for a few weeks now. The polls in the remaining swing-states show the President widening his lead in most of them. I disagree that the spread is quite as wide as some of the state polls suggest, but the trend is undeniably right.

Here's the thing about polling: While the actually numbers may be off by a hair here and there, they're generally right. Crunching data and numbers is what pollsters do for a living, as opposed to bloggers, Fox News personalities and radio talk show hosts, who are just supposed to lie in the most unconvincing way possible.

There has been some controversies here in Canada regarding polling in the recent Alberta and Quebec elections, stirred up mostly by liberals who should know better. In both campaigns, the front-running challengers (Wildrose in Alberta and the Parti Quebecois in Quebec) had unbelievably bad final weeks with candidates saying and doing incredibly stupid things.

But Canadian campaign laws mostly prohibit the publishing of polls over the last weekend of a race and our elections are held on Mondays. That means that if a campaign blows themselves up in the home stretch, polling can't accurately measure the impact. Wildrose destroyed themselves more thoroughly in the last seven days of their campaign than I've seen anyone pull off, driving most of their vote back to the Progressive Conservatives. And the PQ actually did win last month, just not the majority they were expected to.

That was a problem with our law governing polling more than a problem with the polling itself.

Polling companies, along with the "mainstream media," are first and foremost in the business of making money. This is what they do.

Now, let's suppose that a polling company is caught in a conspiracy to "skew the polls" in favor of a given candidate. Do you suppose that anyone is going to hire them again? And remember, political clients aren't where the pollsters make their serious money. That comes from corporate clients who want to know where to gear their advertising.

No matter how much they may or may not "love Obama," it defies common sense that they'll destroy themselves in a foolhardy attempt to sway an election. It's even more fantastical to presume that they'd join together with their own competitors to do so.

There's actually a diagnosis for folks who are convinced beyond reason that everyone is out to get them. That would be paranoid schizophrenia, and that's hardly a ringing endorsement for a political movement.

As much as people might like to delude themselves otherwise, polls generally are right. Mitt Romney actually is losing.

Could that be turned around? Possibly, although I don't think so. Barring an enormous disaster on Obama's part, Romney is now in an Electoral College sinkhole that I'm not sure he can climb out of at this late date. But closing your eyes really tight, plugging your fingers in your ears and screaming "I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the top of your lungs sure as hell isn't going to do anything good.


Story lovingly ripped off from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire.