An open letter to:

...those who are looking to choose

I watched the debate live last night, along with recaps and reports this morning.  I've been thinking long and hard about the performances of both distinguished gentlemen.  My intention is not to point out the strengths or weaknesses of either candidate, because whichever I documents would lead do an outpouring of arguments from my friends on the opposite side of the aisle.

Instead, I'll focus on one piece of advice my father gave me when i was a teen   My father always felt that you could get a good gut impression of a man by whether he looked you in the eyes when you spoke with him. It's been my experience that this is a pretty good indicator (and often tied to a 'shake like a fish' but i digress).   Not only couldn't Senator McCain look at Senator Obama during the debate, not only did he choose not to adress him directly, but he squirmed  every time Senator Obama spoke as if he was facing his most vile enemy.  

Much ado has been give to Senator Obam's statements with resepct to meeting with world leaders.  While I agree that his stance may be too liberal, I have a greater fear of having Senator McCain being put in that same situation.  If he couldn't show courtesy and respect to another member of Congress what will he do when it's someone who really is a threat, and may see his posture as such?

Sincerely
Looking you in the eyes when i express my potentially unpopular opinion.

...press corps members assigned to cover the election

I'm amazed that you can't take a hint.  Although I'm not authorized to speak directly on her behalf, can't you see that Governor Palin does not want to be bothered with your pesky questions?   Yesterday during her 'Baby and Me,' er 'International Briefing' with Hamid Karzai you were givin 29 seconds of time to flash photos.   Shouldn't that make it clear?

So please, do us all a favor and grant her wish - STOP COVERING HER.  She is not the story here.  Neither is how she's wearing her hair nor how accurate the portrayal of her by Tina Fay was. (Although the latter is A story, it's not this story.  I believe the entertainment stuff is either in the D section, or at 10 minutes before the hour, depending on your traditional media of choice).

Please focus your attention on what Senator Obama and Senator McCain are doing today.  Show me something a little longer than a sound bite.  If you've got an intern sitting around somewhere, have him prep follow-up of validation (or invalidation) of things the candidate said.   Once you've got that covered, you can give Governor Pail her 29 seconds of coverage per day.   That is, of course, when you afford the same amount of time to Senator Biden - both with post spin validation.

Sincerely,
Looking for the fourth estate.

...those who give, take or read polls

I think it's finally time to revamp polling during election cycles.  The current system is bad for two reasons.  First and foremost,  they influence the outcome of what they're measuring.   Media outlets use constant opportunity to call it as if it was a horse race.   This gives the perception of momentum and, in turn, plays a role in the choice of some portion of those voting (and being polled).  Second: they don't actually measure what needs to be measured.   As i recall, it's the delegate count that determines the winner - not the popular vote, and the latter is what the polls are measuring.

On a side note, I was appalled at people who continued to point out that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000.  Considering this was the 57th presidential election, i would hope that we'd all remember that has no bearing on who's elected.   We might as well have considered who had more myspace friends for winner in 2004 and then who has more people following their twitter streams this year - all would be just as relevant.

Back to the point - you'll notice I said we should revamp polling.  My first point should be enough to eliminate it.  Since I doubt that will happen, i think the media should all chip in and do it right. Instead of one poll to judge the popular vote, they should run fifty state-based polls.  Each of those could then be placed into some cool delegate map to show the outcome.  A few outlets, the LA times for example, had great maps during the primaries. They could even throw in a slider to let us play with the margin of error (come on, can't they just borrow the code from Karl Rove's I/T guy?)

I realize that there are two potential areas of contention in my theory: work and accuracy

Work: to run a single poll with +/- 3 percentage points you need to survey 1111 people.   To run 50 such polls would be quite a few phone calls - especially if there doing two a week.  reducing the margin of error to +/- 4 percentage points would only require 625 people per poll.  This is still 31,250 phone calls, but that's quite a bit less work.

Accuracy: It's been some time since my statistics classes, so I'm not exactly sure how to roll up the margin-of-error in a case like this.  Simple combination of the data is pretty well documented, even weighting the margin-of-error for different size samples.  This part needs a better mathematical mind than mine.

So, I'm appealing to the pollsters to update their methods, the media to refuse to publish polls that are based on total popular vote.  If both of those fail, I'm calling on anyone who gets a phone call from a pollster to tell then they're voting for Rush Limbaugh.  That should show the validity of the poll.

Sincerely,
Checking my caller ID before I pick up.