At the end of 2003 I made my predictions for the coming year. With 2004 behind us, it’s time to see how I did:
* Howard Dean wins the primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, narrowly wins in South Carolina, and sweeps up on Super Tuesday, leaving the other Dems in the dust.
Well, I was totally wrong on that one. By January Dean’s loose lips had sunk his ship, and after the “I Have A Scream” speech Dean was toast.
* Ronald Reagan dies. Howard Dean says some exceptionally unkind things about Reagan to the press and turns off the female vote, crippling his campaign.
Ronald Reagan did indeed pass away in June of this year. Reagan’s death may have given Bush a bounce, but its political effect was negligable, and Kerry quite wisely simply paid his respects and did not try to politicize the event.
* Dean picks Al Gore Bob Graham as his running mate. (Yes, I know I’m already changing my mind… however, this one makes more sense in the end.)
How odd that prediction sounds now.
* By Election Day, the NASDAQ will be over 2,500 and the Dow will be over 12,500.
Sadly, this one didn’t come to pass either. The Dow has been flirting around the 10,000 mark all year, and the NASDAQ is over 2,000, but not near 2,500.
* The 2004 Olympics in Greece will see a major terrorist event caused by lax security.
Thankfully, this didn’t happen either.
* Israel will complete the security fence, despite cries against it. Suicide bombings will drop dramatically.
Finally, something that did happen — the barrier is largely completed, and the rate of suicide bombings has slowed, although it hasn’t stopped.
* Yassir Arafat will die suddenly, causing a Palestinian Civil War which ends with Hamas taking control of the Palestinian leadership. Any hopes for the “road map” will be dashed, and Palestine will degenerate into virtual anarchy.
The first part is indeed correct, as Arafat died last month. However, I was fortunately incorrect about a Palestinian Civil War. Rather than descending into chaos, the Palestinians are holding elections which may prove to be a turning point for them. The current head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas is even calling for an end to the intifada against Israel. If the moderates win in the elections, it could usher in the best chance for peace in the region in many years.
* Hackers will break into an e-voting system and try to change votes from Bush to Dean, causing a major scandal that forever tars electronic voting.
Fortunately, this didn’t happen either, and electronic voting machines seemed to have performed well. Chalk me down with the group that says there needs to be a verifiable paper record of each ballot, however.
* Al Sharpton will run as a third-party candidate and take significant chunks of the black urban vote from Dean.
Boy was I wrong. Instead Sharpton became a paid shill for the DNC, to little avail as Bush increased his margins with black voters by a small but significant percentage.
* The 2004 campaign becomes one of the dirtiest in history, thanks to groups like MoveOn.org.
Indeed, 527 organizations like MoveOn made this one of the dirtiest campaigns on record, although all the anti-Bush (and anti-Kerry) vitriol didn’t seem to have a great effect on the outcome of the elections. As is typical in elections, it’s what the candidates do that makes the difference.
* The Iranian theocracy collapses due to a massive popular revolt.
Each year this comes closer, although it hasn’t happened yet. I will continue to predict this every year until it actually comes to pass.
* Bush will win the Presidency by a large margin of the popular vote and a tall margin in the Electoral College (more election predictions later.)
Bush won by 3% nationally and around 30 electoral votes. Interestingly, my early predictions for 2004 weren’t that far off, if I’d only switched Minnesota and Iowa I would have gotten it completely right nearly a year before the election. If only my luck in seeing the future extended to the lottery I’d be posting this from my nice new 20″ iMac — from some tropical island, natch.
* Syria announces it will unilaterally remove its WMD programs in the face of increasing US pressure.
Not yet, but the Assad regime has been very quiet as of late.
* Pakistan and India continue their raproachement over Kashmir despite assassination attempts on both leaders. Musharraf and Vajpayee win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
There have been assassination attempts against Musharraf, and Vajpayee has been replaced by Singh has the head of India, but the issue of Kashmir and the threat of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan has diminished as both parties try to find a peaceful solution to their problems. I maintain that giving Musharraf and Vajpayee the Nobel Peace Prize would have been far better than giving it to the African environmentalist and nut job that recieved the Prize this year.
* Mobile blogging will take off as cell phones begin to support blog updates. (This is already possible, in fact.)
Indeed, more and more people seem to be moblogging, even though I’ve not jumped on the bandwagon yet. I still prefer having a full-size keyboard rather than a dinky little cell phone pad for typing entries.
* Linux will become an increasingly common corporate desktop, causing Microsoft to cut prices dramatically.
Linux is making inroads, but I was getting ahead of myself there. 2004 proved to be the year I ended up joining the The Cut of Mac first by buying an iPod and then buying an iBook. I haven’t looked back since.
* Apple will announce cheaper mini-iPods in January priced around $150. Sales will go through the roof, sending Apple stock through the ceiling.
Instead we got the iPod mini priced at $249 which at first I thought would be a major failure. Which turns out to be the reason I ended up having a a nice crow dinner later when the iPod mini turned out to be a raging success.
* Recordable DVD/PVR devices will become the hot gadget of the year as they begin to fall in price. Ad-skipping and time shifting will cause more advertisers to move to product placements in shows that can’t be skipped.
Indeed, PVR prices have fallen, and there’s starting to be a convergence with recordable DVD devices. Due to time shifting, shows are indeed starting to increase the amounts of product placements on TV.
I’ll finally release version 1.0 of BloGTK.
Indeed, I release BloGTK 1.0 in March, and then promptly ended up getting a full-time job, stalling development. I promise that I’ll get working on a new Atom-enabled BloGTK sometime this year… really…
Well, this year wasn’t too good for my crystal ball. I got a few things right and a number of things completely and utterly wrong. The collapse of Howard Dean wasn’t something I would have predicted, although the signs were all there. The rise of John Kerry was also something I wouldn’t have predicted, right up until the day of the Iowa Caucus where his campaign rose from the dead like something out of a George Romero zombie movie. However, my electoral crystal ball didn’t do too bad. I called the national race fairly closely from the beginning (although I overstated Bush’s margins on several occasions), I got the Diedrich/Herseth race right on the nose, and my predictions for the Daschle/Thune matchup matched the results as well. Nationally, my earliest predictions weren’t too far off, and I my gut feeling on the popular vote spread was right on.
All in all, not a good year for my predictions — perhaps 2005 will turn out better.
It’s humorous how you try to spin 10.7% of the black vote as some resounding victory for Bush. Just think….if the GOP keeps up this breakneck pace, they may some day generate a black vote up to pace with that great Republican achiever Bob Dole, who scored a stunning 12% of the black vote back in 1996. Ultimately, far more blacks voted in 2004 than in 2000, which means even though Bush did a point and a half better than he did four years ago percentage-wise, the numerical vote spread between Kerry and Bush certainly exceeded the gap between Gore and Bush in 2000. Only in the Republican world could larger numbers of black voters coming out to vote against them represent progress.
Your initial projections of the electoral map were pretty shrewd, however. The last place I would have expected a Bush victory in 2004 is Iowa, so that turned out to be my stunner of the evening as well. Clearly, I missed the national trendline for the economically-battered state of Iowa. When people are stripped of their livelihood throughout Middle America, they become MORE likely to embrace the political party who assisted in their demise and have been celebrating it ever since. How could I missed that!?
Your predictions of a “landslide” victory for Bush went out the door when Dean-mania ran its course. Had Dean been the nominee, it would have likely been a sea of red across the map worse than any race since ’84.
Predictions for 2005 should be infinitely easier….
• bloody civil war breaks out in Iraq weeks after the January elections…leaving the 2005 U.S. troop death toll higher than 2003 and 2004 combined, and Iraqi deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
• after the Iraqi elections fail, public support for the war will drop to below 40%, and a re-elected President Bush will say “to hell with the resolve I campaigned on” and present plans for troop withdrawal.
• tax cuts will be made permanent, institutionalizing twelve-figure deficits well into the next decade and failing to squelch cries of “collectivist oppression” from the top 1%.
• huge budget cuts will affect programs that keep America’s working poor afloat, predictably resulting in increased crime and drug use.
• dozens of major U.S. companies, including most of the airlines, will announce their bankruptcy within weeks after Bush inauguration, in coordination with a number of closed-door meetings with Vice President Cheney and new legislation from the Republican Congress to insulate them from many existing financial obligations to their employees.
• artificial, deficit-fueled economic growth will continue at its current modest pace, but failing to produce enough jobs to keep up with population growth.
• oil drilling in ANWR will be approved, with the support of sleazy Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman who campaigned in opposition to the idea.
• The ranks of the uninsured will swell by more than two million in 2005, double the usual rate of growth of one million.
• The most financially-devastated regions of Middle America will continue directing their rage towards gay marriage, school prayer, the teaching of evolution and Hollywood immorality rather than devising any intelligent strategies to make their communities more livable other than engaging in continued corporate welfare bidding wars, most of which prove fruitless and prove most burdensome to those who “win” the bidding war.
• States will continue their trend to the most regressive imaginable tax policy, spiking user fees from everything to park entry to toll roads while continuing to price cigarettes far beyond their market value with massive new tax increases. President Bush will break with his anti-tax worldview to slap on a large new federal tobacco tax, sticking it to the same working class smokers too distracted by the culture war to recognize that they’re being ruined.
A couple predictions I’m not prepared to make relate to a national consumption tax and Social Security privatization. A national consumption tax would be a huge deterrant to the prolific spending our materialistic culture depends on, and I would anticipate vigorous opposition from the very business lobby that dominates the Republican Party. I’d bet against this one.
As for Social Security, the only thing that could stop a trillion dollars of SS money from being given to Wall Street stock brokers is the fact that massive new borrowing would be required to finance it. The question becomes…are there enough principled conservative budget hawks in Congress who will stand up and oppose this fiscal child abuse, and have the sense to resist administration threats and arm-twisting even though there weren’t with prescription drug legislation? My guess is that there aren’t, and the administration and its legbreakers are likely to ramp up the threats and illegal deals on this issue after getting away with on prescription drugs.
Well, I do have one prediction that will most certainly come to pass in 2005:
Mark will be wrong. Again. Repeatedly. Odiously. 🙂
Oh certainly. My track record at predicting failure in Iraq and financial malaise on Main Street has been way off the mark so far. Clearly, 2005 will be the year that everyone who wants a good job will be able to get one and when the Iraqi commonwealth will become the Arabian equivalent of Hawaii.
Pretty much.