For 2007, two-thirds of my predictions hit the mark, which surprised even me. So when I wrote this year’s predictions, I predicted that it would be extremely tough to match that mark and that hitting even half of them would be a good year.
The first prediction, wasn’t really a prediction, but a statement made during the introduction of the predictions. It proved to be the most prescient of all:
It seems pretty clear the nation is undergoing one of those periodic and volatile realignments where a guess may be as good as a prediction, but here are a few trends to watch.
Here are the predictions as made last February and how they turned out: Wins in bold, losses in italics.
1) McCain’s Pilgrimage: I said, “At some point he will need to make amends with the right wing of his party. I then added, “How McCain executes this dance could determine his chances for the White House. If it becomes too obvious and the deal too public he is dead.” This one was dead on as anyone who can say “Sarah Palin” knows. Palin may have inspired a lot of press, but in the end she hurt the ticket. Here is what CNN had to say:
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin didn’t do well in exit polls. Sixty percent of those polled said the Alaska governor is not qualified to be president if necessary; 38 percent said she is. That compares with the two-thirds of those polled who said Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden is qualified to be president and the 31 percent who said he isn’t.
2) VP Huckabee: Quote: “The only reason Mike Huckabee will not be asked to run as Vice-president will be because he declines.” Obviously this one was a complete strikeout. Perhaps Huckabee did take himself out of the running, but it was not because McCain asked him and he declined. Huckabee seemed a strong candidate this past spring, but even the religious right soured on him as the campaign wore on.
3) Housing: Although now this seems like a no-brainer, how soon we forget that back at the beginning of this year the mainstream media and the blogs were still all writing about Iraq. This blog was the only one I know of at the time that wrote, “I expect this to be the top issue in November or close to the top.”
4) Iraq: I thought this would be the year the deployment issue would hit the fan, but it did not. Why Obama did not press this further will be a prime subject for those after-the-election Theodore White-style books of campaign analysis.
5) Tax and Spend: The prediction was the GOP would make this a big issue in the campaign which they did. In fact, when McCain stayed on message with this one, he seemed to be threatening Obama’s lead. If Obama missed an opportunity on Iraq, his finessing of this issue probably won him the election.
6) Blogs: Last spring I predicted blogs would not play a big role in the election. By that I meant the political blogs that played such a big role in 2004 and 2006. This one proved true as the candidates themselves developed their own online communities. Obama’s blogmasters are among the unsung heroes of his victory. They did an outstanding job of attracting readers and rallying the troops. I also said, “Look for an equivalent of syndication to develop.” The biggest political blog on the net has taken this to heart.
7) Bush: Like everyone else up until the polls closed, I expected an October/November surprise. That it never happened is probably as strong an indication as we have that this President will not change course even when he is wrong. Perhaps the only real surprise was his so-called “bailout,” but that was hammered out in a bipartisan Congressional agreement that only made it clear Bush was the lamest of ducks. Even his own party deserted him over this one.
8. The Mess: “George Bush will leave this country is worse shape than any President since Herbert Hoover.” This is one of those predictions you hoped would be wrong, if only for the sake of the American people. Instead, George W. Bush may crawl out of the White House with a reputation even worse than Hoover’s. Right now with the exception of the brief reign of Warren Harding, Bush looks like the worst president of the last 100 years.
9. Big Money vs little money: “The behind-the-scenes battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is over money–can Clinton keep hitting her rich donors or will Obama’s online donors continue to send in their checks? I will go way out on a limb and say Obama will win this one.” I wrote this shortly after the Iowa caucuses when the betting money still favored Clinton. Very few writers thought Obama could sustain the level of contributions he had received from small donors. Instead he exceeded what anyone thought possible and in turn radically changed the political game.
This one probably deserves a post of his own, but suffice it to say that Barack Obama proved Fannie Lou Hamer was right when she said back in 1964 that if someone could energize the American people and particularly people of color they could win the White House. How Obama manages his Netroots will decide the fate of his Presidency. I have been saying for over a year that he has the potential to be another Woodrow Wilson in that he can unite the Democratic Party’s factions. If he uses his Internet base the way Ronald Reagan used the media–going directly to the people–the Obama Presidency will be an exciting one to watch.
10. The Democrats VP: Missed this one completely, as did just about everyone else. My bets were on a female VP candidate, but luckily Obama did not listen to me and made the best choice he could have with Joe Biden.
11. Iraq: For the second year in a row I made the mistake of predicting the end of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The man has more lives than a cat. What many like me perceived as weakness has proven an old adage, “Saplings bend with the wind.” al-Maliki has shown himself to be a master at bending, but not breaking. Of course, the big question is will he be able to stay in power once his patron is out of office? That al-Maliki is already directly challenging Bush shows he already is preparing to deal with the transition.
12. The Myth of the End of the Religious Right: Two words: Sarah Palin. I did throw in a prediction that a religious right organization would get in trouble for violating its tax-exempt status. This could still happen once an Obama Administration takes over.
13. McCain’s Health: I call this a loss because it was never directly raised, but it also leads me to make a novel interpretation of the results of the election. It was clear as the campaign wore on that McCain became grumpier. He appeared burned out. What I wonder about is even as he became grouchier and more bizarre (remember his wandering the stage), McCain kept pushing his own health care plan. My theory is that this may have had the unintended consequence of subliminally getting people to think about McCain’s health. I also think that the thought of Sarah Palin being President did not help.
Final score: Seven for thirteen or 53.7%–a little better than I had hoped for but not as good as last year. As a big picture and systems person I draw an obvious lesson from this: specific predictions involving people rather than trends are difficult to make. The 2008 predictions did not do very well with people, but did hit the trends right.
Yet even I missed the biggest trend of 2008: the American people taking back their country. I was not surprised to see Barack Obama win, but it was how he did it that gives us hope for the future. As I write this my DC-area son and daughter-in-law tell me that there is not a bed to be found in the area for the Obama Inauguration. They figure they could even do well renting out their futon.
There is an electricity in the air that is heartening to see. An older friend of ours said he never thought he would live to see such excitement again. My son asked him if this is what it was like when Kennedy was Inaugurated and my friend said that JFK inspired people, but it was a charisma that at least on Inauguration Day felt like it was based more on personality than substance. He sees Obama as having the substance.
It should be quite a year. A lot of us will have no trouble celebrating this New Year’s which genuinely heralds a new beginning for this nation.
Now the Real Reason for This Post: Thank You
This year this blog has had over four million hits, close to a million pages read, hundreds of thousands of visitors, and used enough band width that my provider threatened to kick the site off the server unless I could pull some fancy tricks to reduce the bandwidth. Never in my wildest dreams did I envision four million people coming to this site, especially since last year it barely cleared a million.
I recite all these numbers not because they are about the site or even about me–they are about you, for each one of those four million represents a real person somewhere in the world who took the time to come to this site. It is a simple fact that writers cannot exist without readers, but behind that simple fact lies something far more complex and meaningful.
This site started as a gamble on my part that people would read long, thoughtful, well-researched essays that tried to cast some light on important issues. Behind that gamble lay my faith in you who are reading this. On nights when the pain would tell me to quit or just forget writing for that day, it was you who sustained me. At times when it would have been easier to use a secondary source rather than search out a primary document, it was you who prodded me. On those occasions when a particularly difficult issue begged to be researched, such as the suicide rate of our Iraq troops or the role of racism in the housing crisis, it was you who pushed me to do it right, to be sure that the case was made as best I could, marshaling evidence like a lawyer with a difficult client. I felt I owed it to you because you had supported me, some of you for the two years this blog has been around.
Many of you are anonymous, but I have to say I especially have appreciated those who have made comments on the site whether positive or negative, because I know something in an essay struck a chord with you. Even more special to me are those who are regular readers and commenters, who have become a sort of family to me although I have not met any of you. It is you who really keep me going and I owe you a great deal for your support. Quite simply this site would have ceased to exist without you.
A few months ago, dogged by both pain and two books that need to be completed, I gave thought to abandoning the site. Yet your support and the election of Barack Obama changed my mind. I do not think there are too many people in America who do not believe next year will be an extraordinary time.
So I end this year thanking all of you who took time from busy schedules to actually read a three-thousand word essay that is anywhere from four to eight times the length of a newspaper story and many times the length of a television story. Since you know my penchant for research, I wanted to know how unusual an audience you are.
There are conflicting statistics about the number of active blogs, but the best estimate I have seen is 15 million and only a third of those are in English. One source reports the average post on these blogs is between 100 and 248 words. Another says it’s 600 words. Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut says:
The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat.
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 reports:
The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off.
In case you are wondering how much dough certain bloggers who use others’ diaries to make money haul in, Technorati reports that sites with over 100,000 unique visitors a month make over $75 grand a year! The writers of those diaries don’t see a dime of that, so if you wonder why the proprietors of what amount to Ponzi-scheme political blogs will be celebrating New Year’s in style, now you know.
A Harris Poll released this year shows how really unusual you are. It reports:
Over half of Americans (56%) say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Just under one-quarter (23%) say that they read them several times a year and just 22 percent of Americans read blogs regularly (several times a month or more).
Even more startling was the report’s finding that only 30% of these regular readers considered blogs more accurate than the mainstream media. Now that is a pretty sobering finding, especially when you throw in Faux News. An even more startling finding came from the global market insight group TNS, which found a mere 9 percent of United States respondents said they believed blogs over anything else.
I purposely ran a series of these statistics one right after the other to show you how truly unusual you are as readers. Which is why I feel blessed and honored to have you.
So I end this year on a note of thanks to all of you who have inspired me and in doing so have helped to prove that people will read longer essays.
May all of you have a great year!
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