Early Exit Poll Presidential Results

First news in from Kentucky, which goes to McCain with 8 electoral votes. Obama take Vermont with 3 electoral votes.

Update:

Then the bottom fell out for John McCain. ;-)

Sources:

MSNBC Exit Polls updated every two minutes.

Early Exit Polls 2008

Early exit polling information released to the public is limited to voter demographics and their general opinions, rather than results of how people voted. This is to avoid influencing the perceptions of voters who vote later in the Western states.


Early Exit Poll Results Favor Obama:

• It's the Economy Stupid: Six in 10 voters picked the economy as the most important issue facing the nation. Many people associate the economic troubles with the deregulatory ideology of the Republican Party.
  
• To Repeat, "It's the Economy": 5 in 6 people are very or somewhat worried the current economic crisis will harm their family's finances over the next year.
  
• Health Care: wo-thirds of voters said they're worried about being able to afford the health care. This issue generally breaks in favor of the Democratic Party.
  
• New Voters: One in 10 voters said they were voting this year for the first time, and that group was disproportionately young and nonwhite.
  
• Survey Under-Estimates? A quarter of new voters said they don't have landline phones at home, only cell phones. Most surveys are conducted by landline phones, suggesting that polls might have under-counted these people who are likely Obama voters, due to age and voter registration efforts by Obama's campaign.
  

Early results the Might Work Against Obama:

• White Evangelical Turn-out: One in four voters were white born-again evangelical Christians. It is important to note, however, that Obama is an evangelical and there is a strong tradition of progressive evangelicals who take seriously their stewardship of the Earth.
  
• Offshore Drilling: Two-thirds favor drilling for oil offshore in U.S. waters where it is not allowed now.
  

Sources:

October 2000 Flashback

On October 3, 2000, while debating Al Gore, George W. Bush said he'd commit troops only with an "exit strategy," and he'd be "very careful about using our troops as nation builders."

Sources:

Mother Jones Magazine,"Chronicle of a War Fortold," September October 2006 Issue.

Iraq "Quagmire": An Intentional Sequence of Steps with No Exit Strategy

Vali Nasr, of Tufts, is not the only one to observe that

The United States is trying to fight on all sides—Sunni and Shia—and be friends with all sides. [1]

The Bush administration recognizes that their earlier steps, including elections, had empowered the Shia majority. At the time, the US military focused on the Sunni insurgency. This shifted the regional balance of power to Shia-oriented Iran. Oops. Can't have that.

The more recent step, the troop surge, generated US alliances with Sunni tribes in Anbar Province. The stated goal was to fight foreign al-Qaeda, which was partly true. This was was mirrored by a sharp increase in establishment media references to al-Qaeda as the primary source and target of violence at the time.

But the shifting US alliance composition also serves to counter balance the earlier imbalance created when the US brought a Shia-dominated government to power; Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malik spent years exiled in Iran. Many analysts and Iraqis believe the Anbar alliances will be ephemeral, and worse, could fuel the Iraqi civil war. Referring to one of the groups with which the US has allied in Anbar, Saad Mutaleibi says:

The Amiriya group, is notorious for beheading people and killing and major atrocities [ethnic cleansing of Shia from Anbar]. And these people are sitting in Amiriya with the American support now. And the Iraqi army or police cannot enter that area. These efforts are tactical moves to resolve today's problem, but in essence you're adding another problem with another layer to the problems of Iraq.

The Bush administration's next likely step has literally become a joke in Iran:

How will the US leave Iraq? Through Iran.

The sad fact is that the US isn't going to leave Iraq, and it's going to hammer Iran via air strikes.

Quagmire? Blunder? No exit strategy? Somehow I think not. The lack-of-security-quagmire justifies continued US occupation of Iraq, which is the Bush administration's intent. This is not a "blunder." No exit strategy is needed if the intent is to stay, which it is and has been. It would be unacceptable to both the Democratic and Republican establishment to leave an Iraqi power vacuum to be filled by Iran. That is why both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now saying the US will be in Iraq until at least 2013.

These people, while intelligent, are blinded by information overload, harried schedules and being inside the establishment bubble. The US has created war conditions on two sides of Iran; imagine how the US would react if another nation, citing the US as "evil," created violent instability in Mexico and Canada in an effort to control those country's resources and regional power balances. The US would not just sit there, as is the present case with Iran. Imagine further if this other nation initiated air strikes on the US. The US would be justified in striking back, as is the hypothetical case with Iran. We shouldn't be surprised if Iran strikes back in ways, and over time horizons, that make the Iraq war look like a tea party.

Sources:

New Yorker, Shifting Targets: The administration's plan for Iran, Seymour Hersh, September, 2007.

Exit Strategy for Iraq: Blame the Iraqis

In case it needs to be said, the strategy for extricating the US from Iraq will be to say that "We tried to give Iraq freedom, but they're too primative to grab the golden ring." In other words, "It's not our fault the Iraqi's are unable to seize this golden opportunity."

Both Robert Fisk and Gary Younge have made this observation. They both work for British newspapers.

Keep in mind that this is the strategy for winning the minds of the US public. The rest of the world won't buy this line. The US will have created more animosity and terrorists (AKA blowback). If we want future security in the US, we need to punish those who started the Iraqi war of aggression. This will buy some good will from people in the world who despise the US. It will help the US gain some of its lost credibility.

Punishing Bush and his war-of-aggression conspirators won't solve all ills, but it would make things better.

Surely the blame lies with Bush for starting the war of aggression. But that might be too sweeping for some to swallow. Here's a more specific example from an article by Peter Maass

A scathing report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, still in draft form [in May 2005] but posted on the center's Web site, blames senior American officials for these failures of Iraqi will. ''The police and the bulk of the security forces were given grossly inadequate training, equipment, facilities, transport and protection,'' states the report, written by Anthony Cordesman, a military expert and former Pentagon official. ''These problems were then compounded by recruiting U.S. police advisers -- some more for U.S. domestic political reasons than out of any competence for the job -- with no area expertise and little or no real knowledge of the mission that the Iraqi security and police forces actually had to perform.'' The report seems to be referring to, among others, Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who was the first police adviser to L Paul Bremer III, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Kerik left after three and a half months. Although the report notes some progress in recent months, it concludes: ''Unprepared Iraqis were sent out to die. . . The fact that some died as a result of U.S. incompetence and neglect was the equivalent of bureaucratic murder.''