As Barack Obama’s campaign attempts to convince Democratic voters and Superdelegates that he’s fit to be the party’s nominee, news broke today that his top internal pollster, Jason Buckingham, doesn’t even know how to count. The revelation couldn’t come at a worse time for a campaign that is more reliant than ever on accurate data, analysis, and voter profiling to maintain their slim lead.
“It’s shameful, I know,” murmured a contrite Buckingham at an afternoon news conference. “Considering I was doing high-level trend analysis and intent segmentation, it’s probably one of the more ridiculous things that’s been allowed to happen. Wow.”
It was revealed that Buckingham didn’t even know how to count to 10 when he was doing a live interview on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Referring to Sen. Clinton’s recent wins in Ohio and Texas, Buckingham said in that condescending, know-it-all tone we’ve come to expect from data-driven geeks who appear on TV, “She’s seen a nice pop in some of these more rural states.Two days from now, in the April 7th debate in Pennsylvania, we’ll see how her message resonates on a bigger stage.” After an awkward moment, Cooper commented that April 7th was “12 days from now” causing a panicked Adams to count out the days (unsuccessfully) on his fingers. He then collapsed into a writhing mass on the floor while attempting to count from 1 to 10 over and over. His random numerical shouting of “2,” “8,” “7,” 1089,” and “1.8 squared” brought the segment producers onto the sound stage.
As he ended his press conference, Buckingham said, “Hopefully some good can come out of this, there are thousands of people like me out there. They’re just not employed by sophisticated data accrual and forecasting firms hired to give candidates top-notch number crunching. I’ve been living a lie for so long, it’s nice to finally say ‘not only do I not like numbers, I don’t even really know what they are.’”
Before leaving the podium Buckingham offered what is probably his last piece of political prognostication ever:“I will say that if Hillary Clinton can capture “drag racing dads” between the ages of 35 and 40 while maintaining an upward support spike from non-registered agnostics of Pacific Islander descent, she has a chance to close the gap with non-partisan moderates.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 3, 2008. Read the original PDF.