NDN Blog

Its been a busy week here at NDN, and i haven't quite been able to waste as much time blogging as i would have liked. Here is one thing i forgot to post yesterday- a superb, superb article in the FT yesterday on that strange new country everyone is talking about - Chinarunindia. It is now almost a political trope that Chinarunindia threatens American jobs. And so it does. But not in the way people often think. Case in point are the statistics people use. You see this often, of the following type.

"Chinarunindia graduate [big number] students every year, while America only graduates [small number]." - Or - "Chinarunindia graduates more engineering students than [America / Europe / Americananeuropetogetha]."

Such statistics are part of statistics-as-metaphor. Whether or not they are true is not the point. You should treat them in the same way people say "Eskimo's have 27 words for snow" or "half the world has never made a phone call." Are these true? They might be. They probably are not. [Read for instance this superb essay by technology thinker Clay Shirky on exactly this point, examining the truth behind the second quote.] But that isn't the point. The point is that they are meant to tell you something bigger: namely that language responds to circumstance, and the technological revolution is confined to rich countries. My favourite is: "1 in 7 people is a chinese farmer." This one is actually true, with 6 billion people and 900m employed in chinese agriculture. But what it really means is nothing to do with farming. It means: holy hell! there are a lot of people in China!

The same habit crops up with the statistics politicians use to describe Chinarunindia. They are trying to make the point - quite correctly - that the world is changing fast. They want you to understand that this brief period of history when the US is the (as Rob Shaprio, our Globalization Initiative directorl likes to say) only global power with no peer since Rome, will be just that. Brief. But in the course of making this point, some real whoppers emerge. As the FT explains:

Although both countries produce millions of graduates annually, the raw numbers are a misleading metric for employable skills. China produces 600,000 university-trained engineers every year, for example, a figure often cited to illustrate the country's inexorable rise as a technology power. But a McKinsey survey of nine occupations including engineers, accountants and doctors found that fewer than one in 10 were employable by multinationals.

The rest of the piece is similarily on the money, and you should read it. It highlights something almost no one seems to understand, namely that (unbelievably) Chinarunindia are running out of workers. They aren't running out of people exactly. But because they invest so little in education, they are running out of employable workers. These labour shortages will ripple out accross the world economy in the coming years. But because politicans use these misleading stats, they miss the bigger point. It is this. Imagine how much Chinarunindia will change our economy when 9 out of 10 of their professionals are employable by multinationals? Makes you think. Have a great weekend............

As inevitably happens, the national landscape of an election year in the spring gives way to a new and changed landscape by summer and fall.  The success of a political party or national campaign often comes from the ability to sense the change and get ahead of the other side.  It feels like we are in such a moment now. 

In the old landscape the Democrats had the wind at their back.  Iraq, Katrina, an economy not working for most, corruption, etc had produced an environment very favorable for Democrats.  My sense is that backdrop, that environment, and all the message plans, the polling, the strategies for media is about to change.  There is mounting evidence of an economic slow down, possibly making the governing party's economic positioning - always critical - even worse.  But how is the security environment going to change?  Not entirely clear.  But what is clear is it is very possible that the events of the world will make this conversation much more than about our failures in Iraq - the question for both parties is are they ready to adapt, to change, to anticipate, to improvise their way into the final fall messaging wave?

To me it is clear that the centrality of Iraq to the whole progressive enterprise is about to give way to a very different - and more complex - conversation about the Middle East, the use of force and the goals of American foreign policy.  Are we ready for this? Intellectually? Politically?

In the summer of 2002 Bush and Rove nationalized the election around Iraq and taxes.  It was around this time that they clarified their approach, went on the political offensive and defined the election.  The response from Daschle and Gephardt, I believe, cost Democrats the election.  They failed to adapt to the redefinition of the race, arguing that all the campaigns would be won on local issues, and did not offer any kind of national engagement on the two issues that defined every race in the country.  They held on to their spring plan.  The game changed. And Democrats got beat. 

4 years ago Bush and Rove ran a national campaign on the two most important issues of every election - peace and prosperity - war and taxes - that came together late in the summer.  Are Democrats ready to leave their spring gameplan behind and build a new one as the game is changed, knowing what happened the last time around?

Whether and how Democrats adapt - and how this changes their public stances and paid media strategies - will determine what happens this fall. 

NDN ran two terrific events in the last two days, one on our Hispanic poll, the other on the New Politics Institute's technology work. Cutting edge tech and grassroots Latino politics. Distinct areas, right? Wrong. Becuase you did read the title of this post right. According to yesterday's Pew Blogging Study, 19% of all bloggers are (english speaking) Hispanics. Given how much i know people reading this love it when I try to show off my child-like statistical abilities, i'm only happy to oblige. We have 147 million Americans are online, of whom 8%, or 12 million, blog. 19% of bloggers are hispanics, which comes out as 2.28 million. This is from a total universe of Hispanic internet users of 16m. To put this another way, the ratio of white bloggers to total internet users is 15:1. The ration for hispanics is 7:1, more than twice as many. Even more strikingly, the number of hispanic bloggers is almost double the number of African Americans, despite there being roughly the same numbers of African Americans and Hispanics in the country.

What explains this? It might be an error. The poll sample on the bloggers is small giving a larger than usual error range of +/-7%. But even this means that we can be pretty sure that the true number is between 1.4m and 3.12m. My hunch is that that online hispanics - being a smaller group of the total population of hispanics compared to whites - are disproportionately younger, and wealthier than the group average, factors likely to be associated with having enough money to own a computer and actually know how to use it. Despite the fact the Hispanics are, on average, less wealthy than white Americans, at present those on line must be more blog-friendly on average than white Americans. And youth must have a lot to do with this. Come what may, if these figures are even remotely correct, it means that Hispanics are the most blog rich demographic group in America. I'm going to write to the poll people are see what their hunch is. More anon.

UPDATE - Amanda Lenhart, the author at PEW, writes back in double quick time. Thanks Adanda. Turns out my hunch was not too far off the mark.  More predictably, i goofed on some of the stats, but we'll gloss over that. Lets leave it to the experts:

"As you may have noticed, the sample for this survey is quite small (n=233) which limits the kind of analysis we can do of the data. However, our hunch is that bloggers are more diverse than internet users because they are overwhelmingly young (54% of bloggers are 18-29, compared to 24% of adult internet users), and work by the Census bureau suggests that younger Americans are a more diverse cohort than old Americans – due to birth rates and immigration. (see this USAToday article for a quick overview and a nice chart: http://www.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/Hot/6-9-05b.htm ) While we can’t analyze our data to show causation, I believe that the age of bloggers at least partly explains the diversity of the group."

Released a new poll memo yesterday looking at Spanish speaking Hispanic voters, and it had dramatic and unexpected results.  The degree of Bush's of fall with this group that voted 48% for him in 2004. and had always held him in high esteem, suprised all of us.  It seems clear now that immigrant Hispanics are holding him personally accountable for the tone and tenor of the immigration debate.  They have been become disapointed with a leader they believed held great promise, while also concluding that Republican government is not producing the results they hope to see.  You can find the poll and the companion PowerPoint presentation at www.ndn.org/hispanic. 

Hard to add to the saturation coverage of what is happening in Lebanon by all the major news outlets, other than to point out a very good piece in the Times today about how the Shiite-led government in Iraq is reacting to the global community's efforts to eradicate Hezbollah. 

With violence escalating, the Post offers a good piece on how Congressional Republicans are backing off their optimistic assessments of the "progress" in Iraq.  This one follows a must read piece yesterday about the growing disenchantment of the right with the failures of Bush's foreign policy.

And the Post offers another good one on how with Ralph Reed's loss in Georgia the rampant Washington scandals may effect the fall elections. 

A coalition of progressive think tanks and the DGA, led by the DLC, released an exciting new proposal yesterday to "Help the U.S. and the Middle Class Get Ahead By Producing One Million More College Graduates by 2015."  NDN is proud to be part of this coalition, and look forward to the a much bigger report to be released this weekend.   

Time has an interesting piece on how soldiers in Iraq are using YouTube to send video messages back home. 

Look forward to seeing many of you at our NPI lunch today at noon.....it has been a busy week, but a very productive one. 

The New Politics Institute has been talking about how the use of digital video off the internet could impact politics this year. In fact, on Thursday we will be holding on event on Capitol Hill on The Powerful New Political Tools of 2006, which features how to use viral video, among other tools.

However, a story in the San Francisco Chronicle this week gives a good sense of how the whole internet video space is exploding as we speak. It overviews the whole space and references 240 websites that are organized around video. This business story focuses on how the proliferation of sites in this sector is reminiscent of the 1990s and how a shakeout can be expected, with larger companies buying the best of the smaller ones, and venture capital money trying to scale a few of the most promising.

The story is useful even for the casual reader because the frenzied business environment usually prefaces a more stable environment for consumers and users. Get ready to start using these sites.

The online story also lists the top 10 video sites with links. YouTube tops the list, with more than 40 percent of the traffic, but others are worth checking out too.

Peter Leyden

In a new national poll of Spanish-language dominant Hispanic voters, NDN’s Hispanic Strategy Center has found that the standing of President Bush and Republicans has dramatically declined with these critical swing voters, potentially wiping out Republican gains made during the Bush years.

While Republicans have suffered a great loss in their standing with this important electorate, Democrats have made only modest gains and though well-liked are not well defined. To take advantage of this new opening, Democrats will need to invest resources to better define themselves to an electorate very open to hearing from them.

Additionally, the poll offers clear evidence that the immigration debate has increased this community’s participation in the civic life of their nation. More than half of those questioned say the issue will make it more likely that they will vote this year. A remarkable 25% of those surveyed state that they have taken part in recent public demonstrations for better immigration policies. It appears that millions of Hispanics are rising to the “today we march, tomorrow we vote” challenge.

You can read the poll release memo here, and view the complete poll presentation here.

• Key Finding 1: Hispanics are disappointed with Bush and unhappy with Republican government. Recent electoral gains made by Bush in this community have been wiped out.
  • In the 2004 cycle, Bush regularly received a 60% favorable rating from Hispanics. In our survey this was reversed, as 38% see him favorably, 58% unfavorably, with 40% very unfavorable. When asked how they would vote if the Presidential election were held today, this group gives Democrats a remarkable 36-point advantage (59% - 23%). For Republicans this is a dramatic drop from the 52% - 48% Kerry-Bush result with the Spanish-speaking sub-group in 2004.
• Key Finding 2: While making modest gains, Democrats have a lot of work to do.
  • On issue after issue Democrats performed far better than Republicans. However, Democrats regularly underperformed their 59% electoral performance and 65% Party favorability. This indicates that while Democrats are well regarded by this electorate, they are not well defined
• Key Finding 3: The immigration debate has had a tremendous impact with these voters, and will increase their turnout this fall.
  • In a remarkable show of civic participation, 25% of respondents say they participated in a recent rally or demonstration for a better immigration policy. 54% of all those surveyed say they are more likely to vote this fall because of the debate
• Key Finding 4: Most Hispanics believe that it is harder to get ahead.
  • Consistent with national data showing median income decline and wages stagnant; rising health care, energy and education costs; and the erosion of the purchasing power of the minimum wage, most Hispanics – an extraordinary 86% - say the cost of living has increased
• Key Finding 5: Despite the perception that discrimination against Hispanics is widespread, Hispanics overwhelmingly believe there are greater opportunities here than in Latin America.
  • Even though 75% of respondents say that there is discrimination against Hispanics in the US, 91% believe there is much greater opportunity here than in Latin America.
    
    
• Key Finding 6: Soccer – futbol - is a powerful way to reach Hispanics.
  • A remarkable 74% said they planned to watch some of the tournament on TV, with 41% saying they were attempting to follow all or almost all of the games. Few events in any culture command this kind of universal and intense appeal.

Not a full roundup today, as we are off to a press conference to release a new poll we've just completed of Hispanics.  Lots of interesting stuff in there, look for it later today.  If you want to read something in advance of our release, check out a new poll from Roberto Suro and the Pew Hispanic Center.  It tracks a lot of what we will be saying, but with a different sample, also has some noticable differences.  They poll all Hispanics, we focus on just Spanish-speaking voters. 

Lots of news coming from the Middle East today.  My one quick thought is no matter what happens now the the Iraq-centric foreign policy debate of this year is ceding to what will be something else.  For the two parties, there is both opportunity and peril in these developments.  But what we now know is that the fall elections will not be fought on the President's failed Iraq policy alone. 

Big week this week.  We release a new Hispanic poll tomorrow, and announce a new stage of our mas que un partido media campaign.  Thursday we have another great NPI event.  Next week I'm off to California for a few days, and we will be releasing a study about globalization.  But as promised, here is a roundup from the last few days....

Harold Ford introduced a very sensible bill this week, one that would make all future “off-budget” items – like the hundreds of billions needed for Iraq – to be in the budget itself. 

Bush, in a moment of candor, tells Vincente Fox that immigration reform is not going to happen this year.  In his other great moment with a head of state recently, we link to the great mouthful of sh---. 

Sebastian Mallaby has a very good piece in the Post called “Fighters and the Freeloaders.”  Thomas Mann has a compelling piece about how Democrats will take Congress this fall.  It begins:

"There's probably no way congressional Republicans can lose this fall, no matter how unpopular President Bush is or how unhappy the voters are with the war in Iraq. That's the prevailing view in Washington today.

But it's wrong.

If history is any guide, we're heading into a major political storm. And that means we could see a national tide in November that will sweep the Democrats back into the majority.

Virtually every public opinion measure points to a Category 4 or 5 hurricane gathering. Bush's job-approval rating is below 40 percent, and congressional job approval is more than 10 percentage points lower. Only a quarter of the electorate thinks the country is moving in the right direction, and voters are unhappy with the economy under Bush. Finally, Democrats hold a double-digit lead as the party the public trusts to do a better job of tackling the nation's problems and the party it would like to see controlling Congress."

Glenn Greenwald has a remarkable post about the extremism of the right-wing blogosphere, aided by research from Media Matters. 

And today, the Attorney General admits it was the President blocked any inquiry into the White House domestic spying program.  This and other fun tidbits in a good Times piece.   

Received my new Mas Que Un Partido t-shirts last night.  My kids were fired up, as was my wife Caitlin.  They look cool! You too can order some of our own at www.ndnfutbol.org.  Thanks to our friends at www.goodstorm.com for making it possible. 

For those in DC don’t forget to drop by our NPI event, lunch, on Thursday. 

Sorry friends.  Will have a real good one tomorrow.  

And did not get picked for jury duty.   While I've enjoyed my past service on a jury, the timing on this one was not so good with our upcoming NPI event this week, and lots of other things going on. 

More tomorrow. 

Earlier posts on this blog listed the impressive reach of the World Cup in traditional media, and they had equally impressive stats in both the Internet and mobile media space. Yahoo! and Fifacup2006.com just released their stats for this year.

Here are some of the key ones:

* 4.2 Billion Page Views

FWC.com attracted more than two billion page views in the tournament's first two weeks, topping the site's total for the entire 2002 tournament less than halfway through the competition. By the end of the final match, FWC.com's 2006 site had more than doubled the page view total from 2002.

* More than 138 Million Video Streams

2006 marks the first year that video highlights of World Cup matches have been free on the Web, and fans have taken full advantage.

* 3.5 Million Flickr Photo Pages Viewed

Via its popular photo-sharing site, Yahoo! enabled fans attending World Cup matches to tag pictures and share their experiences with friends, family members and other soccer fans from around the world.

* 73 million Page Views on FIFAworldcup.com's Mobile Web Destination

FIFAworldcup.com went mobile for the first time in 2006. Millions of fans around the world accessed FIFAworldcup.com on mobile devices to follow all the World Cup action.