Crazy as it sounds, losing the Armenian vote just might cost McCain the election.

How can the votes of this “small tribe of unimportant people,” as Armenian-American writer William Saroyan described them, matter? By various estimates Americans of Armenian descent number 385,500 to 1 million – roughly one half of one percent of the total number of people who voted in the November 2004 election. But Armenians have more clout – particularly in this election - than their miniscule numbers might suggest.

Once a reliable Republican voting bloc, Armenian-Americans have left the GOP en masse after George W. Bush reneged on his campaign promises of 2000 and 2004 to support the Armenian Genocide Resolution in Congress, which characterizes the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 as a genocidal crime against humanity.

Unlike John McCain, who avoids the topic, Barack Obama has acknowledged the Armenian Genocide as settled history, and anecdotal evidence suggests that he enjoys near-absolute support of the Armenian-American community. Armenians have no idea where McCain stands on passing the Armenian Genocide Resolution, but Obama has made a convincing case to this community that he stands with them in their quest for justice.

Armenians have clustered in states that are solidly Democrat – particularly, CA, MA and NY – so they will neither help Obama much nor hurt McCain much in those states by abandoning the GOP. But swing states could be another story. The Armenian population in several of the states up for grabs is small, but these votes could be decisive in two of them this year: FL is home to 25,000 Armenians, MI to 60,000.

Armenians consider themselves in a permanent state of Diaspora, and reward candidates who support recognition of the Armenian Genocide with their wallets and their votes. Like Cubans and Evangelicals, Armenians tend to be single-issue voters. In the past, candidates from both parties made sure to pay lip service to supporting the Armenian Genocide Resolution and Armenians tended to vote Republican because of shared conservative economic and social values.

But when it mattered most last October, Democrats tried to get the Armenian Genocide Resolution passed in the House whereas Republicans repaid the decades-long loyalty of the Armenian community with betrayal after Turkey threatened to complicate Iraq war logistics by cutting off air and ground supply routes. Obama – who successfully pursued a “no vote left behind” strategy in caucus states – wasted no time capitalizing on the opportunity created by Bush to aggressively court Armenian-Americans.

Neither of the candidates’ campaign Web sites include speeches or position papers by the candidates on the Armenian Genocide. However, an officially-sanctioned coalition group, Armenians for Obama, compares Obama’s positions with McCain’s using statements and speeches from both candidates.

In contrast, McCain has shunned the term “genocide,” even in his half-hearted attempts to reach out to the Armenian community. And not only McCain does not have a counterpart to Armenians for Obama backing him - there are, however, American Indians for McCain, Bikers for McCain and Racing Fans for McCain - even the Web site of the National Organization of Republican Armenians hasn’t been updated for quite a while.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen zeros in on seven must-win swing states, which are very much in play, including FL. Other numbers crunchers include MI on their lists of crucial battleground states. While a comfortable five-point margin separated George W. Bush and John Kerry in both states in 2004 (Bush won FL 52 percent to 47 percent; the results were flipped in MI) the FL race is much tighter this year, with most polls showing just one to two points separating McCain and Obama – and McCain has already ceded MI to his rival, having stopped campaigning in the state several weeks ago. 

In the 2004 election the Bush campaign used “microtargeting” to find significantly more black votes in OH than he got in 2000.

McCain is using the reverse strategy with the Armenian vote. Rather than teasing out additional votes wherever he can, McCain has inexplicably chosen to leave 44 Electoral College votes on the table by writing off Armenian-American voters in FL and MI. And it’s not like he can afford to lose them - especially in FL, where Bush has also managed to alienate another important voting bloc, Cuban-Americans.

As that old rhyme has it, “for the want of a nail … the horse was lost.” By overlooking – indeed, disrespecting – this seemingly insignificant ethnic group, McCain is extending a Bush legacy that will haunt Republicans for years to come.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens notes:

When it comes to defense, there are two Barack Obamas in this race. There is the candidate who insists, as he did last year in an article in Foreign Affairs, that "a strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace"; pledges to increase the size of our ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines while providing them with "first-rate equipment, armor, incentives and training"; and seems to be as gung-ho for a surge in Afghanistan as he was opposed to the one in Iraq.

And then there is the candidate who early this year recorded an ad for Caucus for Priorities, a far-left outfit that wants to cut 15% of the Pentagon's budget in favor of "education, healthcare, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger [and] deficit reduction."

Here’s some of what Obama pledges in the ad:

As president, I will end misguided defense policies. … First, I will stop spending $9 billion a month in Iraq. … Second I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems; I will not weaponize space; I will slow our development of future combat systems … Third, I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. …  I not develop new nuclear weapons … I will negotiate with Russia to … achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.

Stephens points out that “the U.S. hasn't built a new [nuclear] warhead in decades. Its mainstay, the W76, is widely suspected of being unreliable, yet Congress has resisted funding the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead” and asks: “If elected, which Obama do we get? The nuanced centrist or the man from Ben and Jerry's?” 

To read other posts in this series, click here and here.

Scottsdale Home Invaders Wanted To “Redistribute The Wealth”

Three men invaded the Scottsdale, AZ, home Keith Nickels, 68, shared with his 61-year-old girlfriend explained to the victims that it was “their own form of redistribution of wealth” while they ransacked and robbed the home over a 2½-hour period, reports The Arizona Republic. Both victims were beaten until unconscious and when they came to, they were tied up and had pillowcases on their heads. Nickels required 27 stitches in his forehead, eye and ear. Neither victim was able to give police a description of the assailants.

Well-Chosen Words: Part V

† Candidates use logos to “brand” their campaigns, and to subliminally promote certain qualities they want voters to associate with them. John McCain’s campaign uses Optima, the sans serif font in which the names of our fallen heroes are carved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The font that represents Barack Obama’s campaign is Gotham, which is “inspired by signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City,” according to one designer.

† Candidates also use logos and fonts to target specific voting blocs. Peter H. Schweitzer, rabbi of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism – who has amassed an impressive collection of campaign buttons designed to appeal to Jewish voters that is now housed at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia – writes an op-ed for The New York Times about the historical and political significance of the buttons:

In my experience, the most obvious way politicians try to woo Jews today is to demonstrate their support of Israel and to appeal to long-held social values. The less obvious way is through, well, political buttons.

Back in 1940, Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, was beaten by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide. Normally this might make for just a footnote in history. But of great interest to Jews is the button that was handed out in an effort to gain their vote.

This seems to be the first instance of using Hebrew-style calligraphy to communicate - in coded fashion - one’s political allegiance. As rabbinic commentators have said, “The one who knows, knows” - the one who “gets it” doesn’t need an explanation. Non-Jews might perceive this as just some kind of fancy artwork, but Jews would get the secret message that Willkie was “one of us.”

Willkie, a Democrat until the year before his nomination, had been outspoken in fighting racism and opposing the Ku Klux Klan. He was also considered a pro-conscription internationalist when so many Republicans were isolationists. Both these views would undoubtedly have appealed to many Jews, but he ended up as a footnote, garnering only 10 percent of the Jewish vote, the same amount captured by Barry Goldwater - a candidate with Jewish roots - in 1964.

Editorial Note: Today and tomorrow, try to nip into the Museum of the City of New York (Fifth Avenue, between 103^rd and 104^th Streets) to catch the last two days of the “Campaigning for President: New York and the American Election” exhibit, so you can check out these buttons and other political memorabilia on loan from the Museum of Democracy.  

† Washington Post columnist David S. Broder reports on research by Elvin T. Lim of Wesleyan University showing that presidential candidates today speak and think in sound bites, instead of paragraphs:

Complaints about vacuous official rhetoric and the “dumbing-down” of presidential speeches, news conferences and interviews are standard fare. Lim found strong evidence to support those complaints, not just in his interviews with retired speechwriters but in the presidential texts themselves.

In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the second Bush. His tool is something called the Flesch readability score - a measure of the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. The higher the Flesch score, the simpler to get the meaning.

Applied to the annual State of the Union addresses, the average score has doubled from the first few presidents to the last few. Those "messages were pitched at a college level through most of the 18th and 19th centuries," Lim says. “They have now come down to an eighth-grade reading level.” The same trend, but more pronounced, is found in inaugural addresses. Their average sentence length has dropped from 60 words to 20.

Simplification has its advantages, if it serves to increase public comprehension. But it comes with a huge risk: The complexity of real-world choices can be, and often is, lost.

† Broder’s colleague Shankar Vedantam explains how Obama, Joe Biden and John McCain – all seasoned campaingers compared to Sarah Palin – are able to smoothly and subtly evade questions they don’t want to answer – a skill Palin hadn’t had time to master when she was interviewed by Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, or when she debated Biden:

A review of the debate transcripts shows Obama, McCain and Biden all repeatedly dodging questions, adroitly transitioning from questions they were asked to questions they wanted to answer.

In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologists Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between questions and answers. They found the failure was especially acute when answers were semantically linked to questions -- for example, when a question about the war on drugs is parried by an answer about health care. Audiences seemed to notice dodges only when answers were completely unrelated to the question -- such as responding to a question about illegal drugs by discussing terrorism.

The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the same answers to audiences - once fluently and once with “ums” and “ahs” - audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually inferior to the fluent ones.

† Being an inartful dodger allowed Palin to be caricatured, notes Edward Rothstein cultural critic at large for The New York Times, in an article that explores why candidate caricatures are so powerful:

During the recent vice presidential debates, for example, one candidate, boasting of a “mavericky” perspective, when asked about how to deal with the world economic crisis, said: “We’re gonna ask ourselves what would a maverick do in this situation, and then ya know, we’ll do that.” That same candidate, asked about global warming, said: “We don’t know if this climate change whosie-whatsit is man-made or if it’s just a natural part of the End of Days.”

Oh, wait a minute. That wasn’t Gov. Sarah Palin in the debate. That was Tina Fey doing … an impersonation - filled with perky winks and folksy gosh-darn-its and a self-conscious elimination of g’s at the end of whatever word she happened to be sayin’ - that was so resonant, it almost displaced Ms. Palin’s own performance as herself.

So what gives caricature its unusual power? Physically, caricature typically takes a particular feature - a hairdo, a verbal tic, a hand gesture, an accent - and exaggerates it, giving it such prominence that we come to see the person in a new and different light. …

Debates today seem to be a kind of imagistic chess in which stump speeches and stock phrases are moved about to attract attention. The closest we get to argument are accusations. Arguments can be challenged on evidence or logic, but a caricature will have none of it. … It is no wonder that the most talked-about event of the campaign so far is a caricature, and one that encapsulated what many already believed.

† The MSM’s strenuous efforts to make Joe the Plumber into a caricature backfired, and he became a symbol instead. The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse elucidates how this “Joe” -like others - became a stand-in for the “Everyman hero, representing all things and people that are good and solid in this country:

Average Joe, naturally, that hypothetical bloke whose life is the composite of everyone else's existence. …

We hear "Joe," and we know that we are talking about salt of the Earth, and we know that we are talking about America, which is why some countries use it as general slang for “person from the United States.”

It's an easy name to identify with here; in the 121 years of data the Social Security Administration has on the popularity of baby names, “Joseph” has never dipped past No. 16. Everyone knows a Joe.

† Thomas Sowell recently took issue with stigmatizing “[o]ne of the oldest phenomena of American elections- criticism of one's opponent - as “negative advertising,” and notes that only people who are “totally ignorant of history, as so many of the graduates of even our elite universities are” would mistakenly believe that the “criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal” than it ever was. But it is necessary for Libs to decry the tactic because they need to “escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals.” They much prefer to stick with “the real issues”:

What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction - and somehow an unworthy distraction.

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do - and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide - after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.

Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.

† To an enthusiastic reception, John McCain and his wife, Cindy, performed a hilarious six-minute skit to open the final episode of “Saturday Night Live” before Election Day. Here, the highlights:

McCain: This past Wednesday Barack Obama purchased airtime on three major networks. We, however, can only afford QVC. ...

“Palin”: And, as part of our agreement with the QVC folks, we’re gonna try and sell you some stuff.

McCain: This has been an historic campaign. So why not remember it with our line of collectible products? Such as ten commemorative plates that celebrate the ten townhall debates between Senator Obama and myself. They’re blank … they’re still nice plates.

“Palin”: And who wouldn’t want the complete set of limited edition Joe Action Figures. There’s Joe The Plumber, Joe Six Pack and, my personal favorite, Joe Biden. If you pull this cord, he will talk for 45 minutes …

McCain: It’s great if you want to clear out a party. …

McCain: Look, would I rather be on three networks? Of course! But I am a true maverick – a Republican without money. 

Other products the pair hawked included McCain Fine Gold Jewelry (Cindy McCain showcased three necklaces while her husband talked them up); Ayers Freshener to plug into the wall “when somethin’ doesn’t quite smell right”; and pork-cutting knives.

† Republicans living in the NY metropolitan area (unlike “moderate Muslims” and unicorns, they really do exist – there are half a million of ‘em in the five boroughs, in fact) have been manning phone banks at the campaign’s regional headquarters in Woodbridge, NJ, and cold-calling voters in PA to urge them to vote for John McCain, reports The New York Times:

On Monday night, supporters of Senator McCain filled the phone room in Woodbridge, pounding out Pennsylvania and New Jersey area codes on 18 black office phones. … Photographs of the senator, snapshots of volunteers and a large banner - “Small Business Leaders for McCain” - decorated the walls.

“On Tuesday nights, it’s Veterans Calling Veterans, and I come to that, too,” said Jim Bellina, 55, of Skillman, N.J., who served in the Navy. He said he was confident despite polls showing his candidate trailing. “Let me put it this way: This is the fourth quarter in a football game, and we’re having a tough time. But if you know Senator McCain, you know he ain’t got no quit.” …

In Woodbridge, where more than 200,000 calls have been made for Senator McCain, they will be hammering away until Election Day, according to the campaign. …

Jamie Lynn, 27, a waitress and college student who lives in Woodbridge, was making calls on behalf of Senator McCain. She said that for three nights she had been “having trouble sleeping, nightmares” about what would happen if Senator Obama was elected. In her dream, there were riots, she said. She had been making calls every weekday for two weeks and would continue until the election.

† When the MSM discusses the “youth vote” invariably it means “Dem college students and 20-somethings.” But John McCain was not willing to lose this voting bloc to his opponent, and crafted his “serve a cause larger than your own self interest” pitch to rock the Repub vote with the appeal to youthful idealism. Though they are outnumbered by Obamaniacs, Repub students are holding rallies, organizing get-out-the-vote drives, creating Facebook pages and supporting their candidate in various other ways at colleges and universities nationwide – not just at Liberty University and other Christian schools, but also at Penn State, University of Central Florida, Western Michigan University. Aside from McCain’s personal heroism and service to country these students find inspiring, they’re just wild about Sarah Palin at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley College.

“Stand up, stand up and fight. America is worth fighting for. Nothing is inevitable here. We never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

HOOAH!