I got to hang out with Joe Trippi yesterday. Here are three miscellaneous snippets:

Waiting for Hawaii. Hawaii, which went for Gore by 20 points, is now in play. Trippi’s latest count of electoral votes puts the two candidates even…which means that the deciding votes may come from an archipelago where the polls don’t close until 2pm on Wednesday, East Coast time.*

Both sides think they’re going to lose. Apparently (= borderline rumor ahead), the mood on both campaign planes is dismal. Both sides think they’re going to lose.

Tracking polls soften the blow. Tracking polls average results over three days. I.e., On Friday you see the average of W-T-F, and on Saturday you see the average of T-F-S. That means that if a small gap opens on Friday, you’re likely to see a substantially larger one one on Saturday. This is bad news for Kerry if you watch Zogby but good news if you watch the Washington Post. (Zogby is good news for Nader, who has gained about 40% in the past 12 days, up to 1.1. On the other hand, if you’re Libertarian, Constitution Party, Green, Other or Undecided, Zogby says you’re screwed.)

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*Joho guarantees that all its math is wrong.

Update: Zogby now has Kerry cutting Bush’s lead to 1 point. By the logic of tracking polls, we should expect a further gain by Kerry tomorrow. (Fingers crossed, knocking wood, sacrificing small woodland mammals in particularly gruesome ways.)

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“I wonder how Jackie Chan would get down…”

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Every time a ball fails to clear the fence, assume that the players are already giving 110% and calculate exactly how many more percentage points were needed to make it a home run.

Supply the answer in the form, “If baseball player had only given ___%, that would have been a homer.” Repeat until your wife and son go upstairs to watch in your bedroom.

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I think this ad is some fine propaganda. Does it work for you? Do you think it’d work on undecided voters?

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Joe Trippi invited me in as a guest speaker at the seminar he leads at the JFK School of Government at Harvard. Man, that was fun, although I apparently depressed several students judging by the number of them who were googling for some variation of noose “how to tie”. You know you’re being depressing when, in response to a question about the world in twenty years, you use the phrase “surface dwellers.”

I began with 15 minute informal talk about the miserable shape our democracy is in. But, I said, during the Dean months, I felt something different. I think we call it “hope.” It came not from Dean or his policies. It came from the connection to other Deaniacs and the sense that it was in our power to make a difference together. The sense that democracy is ours and that it sounds like people talking with one another – that’s what I loved about the Dean campaign.

I get some of that from the blogosphere. It’s one place where the spark still lives.

Then I shut up and we had an interesting discussion about how realistic the Internet hope for democracy is. Trippi is less pessimistic than I am.

At the end, I asked for a show of hands: Who thinks Kerry will win, and who thinks Bush will? It was 50-50.

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You’ve been dubious that Bush plans on bringing back the draft? Take a look at the front page of the Bush web site today. It features this photo:

Bush site prepares us for the sub-teen draft

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David Zucker, the producer of Airplane, Naked Gun, and Ruthless People, has made a movie — supported by the Republican Club for Growth (remember the “sushi-eating, Volvo-driving” anti-Dean ad?) — that lampoons Kerry for being a flipflopper.

Without the slightest sense of irony, Zucker promotes himself as a former Democrat who now is a Republican.

(Link from LGF.)

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Cameron Marlow of Overstated.com and Blogdex is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. It’s on Political Hacks, i.e., hacking politics. (His slide is here.)

He gives lots of examples of people using the Net to take advantage of information that’s already been there. e.g., www.FundRace.org. Don’t miss his analysis of the debates here and here. (That second link goes to an auto-summary of the debates. I once did the same thing for the book of Genesis.)

We played around a bit with a tool Cameron wrote that maps the frequency of phrases in the two candidates’ stump speeches, mapped across time. Some surprises. Try searching for saddam, osama, health care, vietnam, lawyers, and teresa.

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RCN provides our house with telephone service, cable modem, and cable television. I just switched another telephone line over to them because MCI charges too much for sucking.

But here’s what I learned: RCN charges $7.00/month for Caller ID. Seven bucks for a service that is essentially free to them. Jeez. It makes me love my Vonage phone all the more.

(On the positive side, RCN silently upgraded its cable modem customers to 7 megabit service. Right now, DSLReports says I’m getting 5mbit down and an increasingly asymmetric 572kb up.)

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I received yet another personal message from Marc Racicot today. He certainly seems to like me! This one says:

There’s an old saying that goes, “All politics is local.” As a former Governor, I couldn’t agree more.

To reach the undecided voters, we need to make our message local as well. That’s why we have created special web pages for every state – to tell every voter why President Bush is the best choice based on the local issues important to them.

We encourage you to share our Massachusetts page with friends, family and neighbors who live near you and may still be undecided.

www.GeorgeWBush.com/Massachusetts

It’s with a certain satisfaction I report that the links leads you to this:

Petty of me, I know. But I’m afraid the only pleasures left are petty.

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