In his Monday evening post on the subject, Whiskey Bar blogger, aka Billmon, an alumnus of Daily Kos, stated the following to his faithful readers:
One thing that really annoys me about the reaction to blackface Blitzer is the number of right-wing attack artists -- like this one -- who insist on referring to me as a "liberal" and Whiskey Bar as a "liberal" blog.
This is slander. I'm not exactly sure how to describe myself politically these days, but liberal is definitely the wrong word.
He comically concluded:
But what it does not make me is a liberal, except in the sense that I've grudgingly resigned myself to the fact that the pathetic old shell of the Democratic Party is the only effective barrier to one-party rule by a bunch of really dangerous authoritarian creeps.
So call me a racist, call me a hypocrite -- hell, call me a communist and a lunatic. I've been called worse before breakfast. Just don't call me a liberal. Because as some in the blogosphere have already discovered, I tend to regard that as a fighting word.
Fascinating. Of course, none of this should surprise us. Instead, maybe this should explain just why the polls have been so wrong in the past three election cycles, and why they likely are mistaken about what will happen next week.
For instance, in the 2004 presidential election, according to exit polls, although 37 percent of voters claimed to be Democrats, only 21 percent acknowledged being liberal. By contrast, and more logically, 37 percent claimed to be Republicans, while 34 percent acknowledged being conservative. Makes sense, right?
Assuming that no Republicans viewed themselves as being liberal, this means that only 32 percent of the combined Democrat and Independent voters acknowledged being liberal. If this indeed was the case – and if only it were so! – one would have expected a liberal like John Kerry to receive far fewer than 48 percent of the total number of votes.
Instead, it appears that many folks such as Billmon that are offended by the word “liberal” typically vote for liberal candidates and causes while they eschew the term which best describes them. As such, it is highly probable that opinion polls are regularly over-sampling liberals given the number of left-leaning members of the society who refuse to acknowledge their political proclivities.
With that in mind, as you continue to hear and read polls suggesting how doomed the Republicans are in the next seven days, try to remember just how many Billmons were included in the sample who told the questioner they were moderate and Independent.
Post facto pontification: For what it’s worth, Wikipedia describes Billmon as follows:
Billmon is a prominent American blogger who writes pseudonymously on various political and economic issues of the day from a left-wing perspective. His blog is called Whiskey Bar. […]
Billmon was one of the earliest participants in what is now the largest political blog on the internet, the Daily Kos. Indeed, his name appears at the top of the list of Kos Alumni on the Daily Kos frontpage. […]
In the following 12 months, Billmon established himself as one of the leading bloggers on the left. [...]
The 2003 Koufax Awards gave Billmon due recognition. These awards are the quasi-Oscars of the left/liberal blog community, and each year they are given out, virtually, in various categories. They are named after Sandy Koufax, a famous baseball player and a lefty. In 2003, Billmon won three Sandys, for Best Writing, Best Post and Best New Blog.
For those interested, here are the final results from the 2003 Koufax Awards. Try to find some moderates. It will prove far more challenging than locating Woody Gremlin! :-)
