Gingrich now has 31% support from registered Republican voters in the Gallup daily tracking poll, compared with 27% for the former Massachusetts governor.
The former House speaker now has completely erased a 23-point advantage Romney enjoyed earlier this month.
For myself, I'm still undecided. Mitt is just so, so dull. I'd love to see Newt mixing it up with Obama in the debates. But Obama is nothing if not a disciplined campaigner, and Newt is anything but that. I'd hate for Newt to win the nomination and then make some October unforced error that sank his campaign.
This is about where I was in 2008. As the NJ primary approached, Mitt and McCain were both still in the running. Holding my nose, I pulled the lever for McCain, primarily because of Mitt's blandness. I didn't expect McCain to pull his punches in the general election and thought he'd have a better chance of winning. Of course, I was wrong.
This time around, once again it's all about winning. Policy-wise, there's not much to choose between the three front-runners (Paul not included: he's the outlier and frankly unacceptable, not to mention unelectable). I suspect Mitt is more electable than Newt or Rick Santorum; he'll be more likely to appeal to moderates. But Newt, despite what some people say, actually does have a record of reaching across the aisle, and he might prove capable of winning them over. And there's no question Newt will fire up the base more than Mitt. Then again, this year, do we need our candidate to fire up the base? The other candidate should be doing this for us.
Next Tuesday will be a watershed, that much is certain.
You can guess what happened: he flunked them both. On the reading test he did poorly, but managed to eke out a 62%. Of the math test questions he states, "I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly." But here's where it gets interesting. You might think that this person would be embarrassed by his complete failure, in particular at (let's face it) basic math. But no. Here's what he actually said:
It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities...."
Yes, something is seriously wrong. Something is very seriously wrong when a person can obtain three university degrees and still not know a single question on a 10th grade math test, and the problem isn't with the test. I'd like to see some evidence that this gentleman actually can "make sense of complex data", because something does not compute here.
What does it mean when he says he "helps oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion... budget"? Well, it turns out that it means he was elected to the school board of a large district. So he's good at getting elected: fine. But that's not the same as being hired, and on the basis of what I read about his tests, I personally wouldn't hire him to oversee a $3 billion organization in a heartbeat. Would you?
It's possible that the standardized tests are too hard. Or it's possible that our schools are being run by over-educated idiots. To help you decide, consider the following: in the international PISA study, the United States finished 15th out of 30 in reading, 24th out of 29 in mathematics, and 21st out of 30 in science, while spending among the highest amount per student in the world.
So American Airlines is bankrupt. That's bad news, I suppose, for the economy as a whole. And it's unfortunate for any AA employees who lose their jobs as a result. But in some larger sense, this seems like just desert.
Back in the mid-1990s, when computerized airline booking was pretty new, I once made a somewhat complicated reservation via CompuServe (there's a blast from the past, and gives you an idea of how many computer eons ago this took place). But I screwed up somehow. I meant to book a ticket from Newark; instead I booked one to Newark. Furthermore, I didn't even realize my error until I arrived at Newark Airport the day of travel, bags in hand, wondering why there was no line at the ticket counter.
Can you guess what happened? If you've traveled in the past ten years you might not believe this, but I swear it is true: They fixed it for me at no charge. The error was purely mine, and they just fixed it.
I can report another episode that happened a few years later. Again, flying out of Newark. This time, however, I was late for my flight because - and again this is difficult to fathom in today's world - my taxi broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike and the driver had no way to communicate with his dispatcher. So we ended up stuck on the Turnpike waiting for a police car, and then a tow truck, and then for the tow truck to take us to some service center, and then for another cab to arrive. By that point, of course, my flight was somewhere over Kentucky. When I got back home I called American to see what they could do: I needed to make the next possible flight out. They wanted to charge me a full last-minute fare at first - after all, I had missed the flight without warning them - but I managed to talk them into converting my ticket to a stand-by the next morning, at no charge.
Compare that to my recent return flight from a Thanksgiving trip. I booked the flight six weeks in advance. I selected seats: row 17, three together. The day before the flight I went online to check in and print my boarding passes. But my seats were now listed as "unassigned"! Imagining my wife, pre-schooler and I having to sit separately, I quickly tried to select new seat assignments, but naturally the only ones available were for an upcharge. I called AA customer service, and they patiently explained that, while there was nothing they could do, they would be able to seat us together when we checked in the next morning at the airport.
Well, that seemed a little crazy to me. I had had a seat assignment, which had been somehow erased without telling me. The customer service representative couldn't tell me why. Shouldn't I be able to get a new seat assignment, at least over the phone? No way, she said. Has to be in person, because they keep some seats in reserve for families with small children traveling together. (Are airlines beset with scammers pretending to have small children in their party in order to check in over the phone? Did they need visual proof that we had a small child with us? Maybe the truly savvy scammer could bring one to the ticket counter as camouflage.)
With no alternatives at hand, we showed up bright and early a bit before six in the morning to get our seat assignments. Sure enough, they did have three together! In the last row: row 33. Which, on an MD-80, turns out to be the loudest place on the plane, and the only row for which the window is entirely blocked by the engines.
I suppose I should be happy that we got to sit together at all. But consider the inversion in customer experience. In my first anecdote, I made an error and they took me at my word that it wasn't my fault and corrected it for me. In my second, the fault was not mine but also certainly wasn't theirs, and they still did their best to fix it. But in the third, I did everything by the book and properly, they screwed up, and then they wouldn't fix it.
I understand that at some point American Airlines eliminated one olive in each salad offered in the in-flight meal. This supposedly saved them several million dollars a year. The thought of having a salad during a flight - or a meal of any sort - is laughable today, but far more worrisome is that they have taken cost-cutting to its natural limit, and the customer experience is now seriously impacted. The economy has been bad for airlines for years, but surely this attitude to their customers contributed to the failure of American to remain profitable. Here's hoping they learn a valuable lesson.
UPDATE (12/9): An alternate view. Some good points...
Rachel Brown, who runs the Need a Cake bakery in Reading, Berkshire, launched an offer via the money-saving website in the spring in which she offered a 75 per cent discount on 12 cupcakes, which normally cost £26.
However Mrs. Brown vastly under-estimated the popularity of the deal and was besieged by 8,500 people who signed up for the £6.50 bargain.
Naturally, Mrs. Brown is accusing Groupon of nearly ruining her business. But isn't she really to blame here? You can limit the number of deals you will accept via Groupon. Sure, Groupon's salespeople are supposedly pretty cut-throat and want businesses to make pretty steep discounts to maximize Groupon's profits.
But you know what? Sure they are. Groupon's in business for Groupon, not for the Need a Cake bakery. I feel bad for Mrs. Brown, who was evidently taken to the cleaners here while Groupon made a tidy profit. But she should've thought this through. Hmmmm, she might have thought, what's my worst-case scenario? What actually happened probably wasn't far removed from that.
The Groupon business model offers a quick buck, since they pay upfront based on coupon sales. But somehow businesses seem to forget that each coupon sale is a promise to provide some service which they have already been paid for. This could be a problem for Groupon going forward. I wonder how many repeat customers they get? My guess is: not many. Then again, the depths of human gullibility and greed seem endless.
I was briefly super-psyched to see that there will be a major motion picture about Margaret Thatcher in January 2012:
Hmmmm, Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher? That's ominous. Then I looked more deeply. From the first reference:
What was it like to work for Margaret Thatcher? What sort of woman was she at the height of her powers? You might think that if you were setting out to make a so-called "biopic" about such a dominant figure on the political stage of the late 20th century, your researchers would have sought out those who were closest to her in those years and asked them.
I do not know whom the makers of the Meryl Streep film talked to. Perhaps Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, but certainly not me. To judge the film from its trailer, they confined their inquiries to the Daily Mirror and perhaps Tim Bell's public relations firm.
From the second:
"Sir Mark and Carol are appalled at what they have learnt about the film," says a friend of the family. "They think it sounds like some Left-wing fantasy. They feel strongly about it, but will not speak publicly for fear of giving it more publicity."
That's all fine, but that narrative trajectory risks skewing the story. This was not just a time of one woman's assault on a male bastion, but an era of rage about what Thatcher, economy destroyer and warmonger, was doing to Britain.
Here's what Maggie had to say about being an "economy destroyer", by the way:
I guess I'm still psyched. But prepared for a hatchet job.
