Original sin and the Big Dig

The importance of Sean Murphy’s story in yesterday’s Globe is that it reinforces a gnawing fear many of us experience every time we drive through the O’Neill Tunnel — that today may be the day all hell breaks loose, and that we’ll be buried alive under tons of water-logged dirt.

Am I being overly dramatic? Perhaps. Officials whom Murphy interviewed seek to assure us that the ongoing mini-flood inside the tunnel is no threat to safety. But when we learn that “state officials acknowledged there is already surface rusting on 10 percent of the massive steel girders in the ceiling,” it’s hard to believe those reassurances.

The picture I take away from this is that of government officials knowing they have a potential catastrophe on their hands and having absolutely no idea of what to do about it. Even if you could close it and start over — and think about the incredible disruption to the region’s economy — where would you ever find the money?

The original sin was revealed in this 2004 story, by then-Globe reporter Raphael Lewis with an assist from Murphy. A watertight tunnel required a proven, two-layer approach — a tube within a tube, essentially. But once the tunnel designers realized they didn’t have room to do it right, they decided to do it wrong, and to brag about how smart and innovative they were. Thus we have a single tube, leaking from the sides and the top.

Moving forward, the incentives are all wrong. Especially during these early years of the Big Dig, the odds of catastrophic failure are no doubt pretty long. Officialdom has every reason to kick the can down the road, reasonably secure in the knowledge that we can get by for now. If Gov. Deval Patrick were to take drastic, disruptive action without a compelling reason, he’d be excoriated for creating a one-man recession.

Yet who knows what the truth is? It’s likely that even those studying the tunnel most closely don’t know whether it will last 25 years, the timeline in Murphy’s story, or 25 months. (And how do you like that 25-year figure? If it had opened in 1982, which doesn’t seem that long ago to me, we’d be looking at replacing it now.)

Even though the problem was unrelated to the leaks, we’ve all known since Melina Del Valle was crushed to death that something had gone horribly wrong with the Big Dig. In the absence of any good ideas for fixing it, we’ll all be playing Massachusetts Roulette every time we drive through it.

There may come a time, if it hasn’t already arrived, that the Big Dig will be viewed as the most blatant example of government incompetence in our history. And before you start sharpening your ideological swords, it’s unclear whether the problem was too much government or not enough. Certainly there should have been far more oversight of Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the private partnership given carte blanche to design and build the project.

What a disaster.

Photo (cc) by Scutter. Some rights reserved.

Hoyt’s mixed bag on Kristol

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s column on the hiring of William Kristol is disappointing, but entertaining nevertheless.

It’s disappointing because he quotes the most unhinged, illiterate e-mails the Times has received so that he can claim that at least some Kristol-bashers are nothing but ignorant haters, and because he blows right past the criticism that Kristol “is an activist with the potential to embarrass The Times with his outside involvements.” Well, yeah. That’s disqualifying, or at least it ought to be.

But Hoyt is right on the money in flogging Kristol for publicly urging that the Times be prosecuted for committing the sin of journalism against the Bush administration. And he’s touchingly naive in saying that Kristol’s refusal to talk to him was “an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.”

Does Hoyt really think Kristol is going to do any reporting?

Last word on the Bradley effect?

If you haven’t read John Judis’ analysis at The New Republic yet, you should. Judis has looked at the numbers from New Hampshire and found that 57 percent of those voting in the Democratic primary were women — substantially more than the 53 percent that had been predicted. Change that assumption, and you’d have had poll numbers within the margin of error. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Where are those college students?

I just got an e-mail from a long-time correspondent who reminded me of something that the cable pundits should have known Tuesday night. Remember when they were saying that Obama still had a chance because the college towns hadn’t reported? Well, guys, the semester hasn’t started yet.

I overlooked that because classes started at Northeastern last week. But we’re on an unusual schedule. Very few other schools start until next week, or in some cases even later. Shouldn’t the folks who make the big bucks have figured that out?

Fake outrage over a non-issue

The talk shows are already going nuts over Gov. Deval Patrick’s statement that he may issue an executive order allowing illegal immigrants who live in Massachusetts to pay the in-state tuition rate at public colleges or universities (Globe story here; Herald story here).

But Lt. Gov. Tim Murray, appearing this morning on Tom Finneran’s show on WRKO (AM 680), said at least twice that such immigrants would be eligible only if they can document that they are in the process of seeking legal status. He also said there would only be about 400 or 500 eligible kids.

Not a big deal. Then again, we already know that anger over illegal immigration is one of those phony issues that doesn’t extend much beyond Talk Show Nation. Just ask Mitt Romney how his tough-guy talk played in Iowa and New Hampshire.

More on the (Tom) Bradley effect

Over at Hub Blog, Jay Fitzgerald has a good post linking to two commentaries by pollsters. In the New York Times, Andrew Kohut argues that a subtle version of the Bradley effect may have made Barack Obama’s support in New Hampshire look stronger than it was — lower-income white voters who might tend to reject a black candidate are also less likely to answer polling questions in the first place.

But John Zogby, in the Huffington Post, says (at least I think this is what he’s saying) that the pollsters didn’t get it wrong so much as they ran out of time. Uh, OK.

More on the Bradley effect

Only this time I’m talking about Bill, not Tom. Robert David Sullivan, one of my editors at CommonWealth Magazine, has analyzed the results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama contest in New Hampshire and finds an eerie resemblance to the 2000 Democratic primary between Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

Apparently the archetype is more important than the person. I can’t see much resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, but each appealed to New Hampshire’s more traditional Democrats. And the smug, self-regarding Bradley couldn’t be more different from the electrifying Obama (OK, Obama is a bit self-regarding, too), but both had their base among the affluent, the well-educated and the young.

Robert does things with maps and stats that I can barely comprehend, but he makes a plausible case that the way to win a Democratic primary in New Hampshire is to go after the party regulars. Among other things, unlike young people and independents, they can always be counted on to vote.

Random thoughts on N.H.

So what do you care what I think? Like everyone else, I believed the polls and figured Barack Obama was going to win New Hampshire by 10 points — and then run away with the Democratic nomination. In retrospect, Hillary Clinton’s victory makes sense. (It always does in retrospect, doesn’t it?) Why? A few thoughts.

1. The gender card. No, I’m not going to say what you think I’m going to say. The gender card was not played so much by Clinton as by her enemies, especially among the media commentariat. I was struck by something Robin Young said on WBUR (90.9 FM) this morning. During the last few days of the campaign, she said, it seemed as though the media were really piling on, gleefully predicting Clinton’s demise and all but calling her a “bitch.” (Young didn’t actually use the word.)

The result may have been that women in New Hampshire were offended enough to cast their votes for Clinton, whereas in Iowa they largely supported Obama. It wasn’t a huge leap for them to do so, given that the polls showed they had supported Clinton for months, and had only briefly considered switching to Obama at the end. It didn’t help that some of the more idiotic commentators all but accused her of faking tears on Monday.

2. A real primary. Following Clinton’s defeat in Iowa, her supporters tried to claim that the boutique nature of the Iowa caucuses had worked against their candidate. The caucuses are custom-made for the sort of affluent, well-educated liberal activists who’ve comprised Obama’s base from day one. The idea was that middle- and lower-income working people are less likely to blow an evening at their local caucus. For one thing, they might be working.

Everyone snickered, of course. But it may be that the Clintonistas were right.

3. Depth of support. One aspect to the race that the media completely missed was the longstanding affection New Hampshire Democrats have for the Clintons. When you see polls showing Clinton losing by a double-digit margin, it’s hard to remember that. In the end, though, the idea that voters would abandon her solely on the basis of Obama’s Iowa victory was ludicrous, even if it didn’t seem that way until the results started coming in.

4. The Bradley effect. Maybe. Probably not, though I raised it as an issue last night. But I do hope some enterprising soul spends some time examining the entrails of all the exit polling from New Hampshire.

Howard Kurtz expertly assesses the media lowlights:

This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. Polls giving Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact. The news surrounding the former first lady had been uniformly negative for days. She’s done everything wrong, Obama has done everything right. She got too emotional in the diner. People just didn’t like her. She campaigned in boring prose and Obama in soaring poetry (to use her analogy). Bill was hurting her. A campaign shakeup was on the way. An era was ending. Some pundits were predicting a 20-point Obama margin.

And then the voters actually went to the polls.

The result: Dewey Defeats Truman.

Will the media ever learn? Will they ever just cover this stuff instead of framing everything within the context of what they think (and hope) is going to happen next? I’m not talking about columnists, commentators or — perish the thought! — bloggers. I’m talking about straight-news reporters who spent five days swooning over Obama as the New New Thing, only to learn that they had missed the story once again.

So, do you want another prediction? I think Clinton has regained most, if not all, of her momentum as the inevitable nominee. If Obama wins the South Carolina primary on Jan. 19 — which he certainly could, given that half the state’s Democratic electorate is African-American — then he could be right back in it. But who really knows?

As Jay Fitzgerald says, channeling Bill Parcells, “That’s why we play the games.”

Photo — obviously not from last night — (cc) by Llima. Some rights reserved.