Having just participated in the Iowa caucuses and coming away less than impressed with this year’s experience, I find a little vindication with the finding that even Uranus is more accurate at predicting the president of the United States than the caucus goers of Iowa. (I’ll shun the many potential plays on words that brings with it.)

Today’s LA Times includes a fascinating column from University of Nevada-Reno economics professor Brad Schiller, author of “The Economy Today,” which takes a look at the various means of predicting the outcome of our nations presidential elections.

Conventional wisdom holds that people vote their pocketbooks, which is why I have believed that Obama would be re-elected as the economy improves – its trending in his favor currently — unless a strong jobs candidate is nominated by the GOP.

But, as Professor Schiller writes, we make it more complicated than that:

In the last five contested Republican battles, voters in Iowa wrongly predicted the eventual Republican nominee three times. A coin flip would have done better. And in 2008, New Hampshire Democrats went for Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama.

So if you can’t count on Iowa and New Hampshire, where should you look to get an accurate reading on the country’s political future? One option might be the United Astrology Conference, to be held in New Orleans in late May. There, the group plans to divine the likely winner of the November elections from the position of the planets. In May 2008, the astrologers noted that Saturn’s predicted opposition to Uranus on election day implied upheaval and transformation — the kind of “change” that would sweep Obama into the White House.

There are a number of polls and predictors out there, but Schiller writes about one very impressive predictor, Yale economist Ray Fair, and his economic predictor model.

The only thing that matters in Fair’s model is the economy. Echoing Bill Clinton’s mantra — “It’s the economy, stupid” — Fair offers a model of total economic determination. As he sees it, people will vote their pocketbooks. Period.

Fair’s equation uses only two variables: economic growth and inflation. On the theory that voters will reward the incumbent who delivers on improving the economy, the calculation adds points for growth (as measured by changes in real gross domestic product) and subtracts them for increases in the rate of inflation

And he predicts Obama will win re-election based upon the improving trend, rewarding the incumbent and supposing voters will have short memories.

I don’t disagree and suggest that Republicans, bent on unseating Obama, reconsider the current narrative that has defined their selection process. This campaign should be about one issue only: the economy.

Read Schiller’s complete column by following this link to the LA Times.

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I love this story and virtually everything about it.

A small-man dictator pumps his chest and threatens the United States.

Iranian fishermen attacked my Somali pirates are held for six weeks. The U.S. Navy sails in and saves the day, as the New York Times captures and reports in complete detail.

I doubt blustery Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever studied U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his “big stick” foreign policy. Addressing the Congress in December 1902, President Roosevelt said, “A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.”

Why’d we do it? Because we’re America, that’s why.

Forty-seven years later, my mother is back in the same Corpus Christi hospital, different name and a new wing, and this time surrounded by family.

The day I was born a winter blast swept into South Texas. Oldest daughter Barbara was taking care of my brothers and sisters while Nellie Faye Bailey was checking into the hospital.  Her primary physician, Dr. Hand, was off for the holiday and a stand-in tended the delivery room.

As the sleet turned into a freezing ice storm, extremely unusual for Corpus Christi, Dr. Hand kept her in the hospital until he could check on us and the winter freeze would thaw and it was safe to head home.

“I stayed in the hospital, bored out of my mind,” she told me recently.  I was four days old when she finally wheeled out of the hospital and headed to our small house on Starlight Lane on the far edge of town.

Over the next 47 years, she’d see very little rest, usually working two or three jobs at a time to help raise us kids, pay the bills and always provide the perfect birthday gifts (thanks, mom, especially for that $400 car!)

So my heart sank and tears filled my eyes when I got a call earlier this year that she had been diagnosed with cancer.  I scrambled, calling close friends and clients who fight cancer and diseases on a daily basis. (Thank you Drs. Giroir and Fossum at Texas A&M, Mary Crowley Cancer Centers and M.D. Anderson)  They all had great information, directions and advice.

Feeling empowered, I hustled down to Corpus to visit with her oncologist and demand to know his plan of action. Dr. Ghraowi told me emphatically that he would “kick this cancer’s ass.” His thick Turkish accent had a particular emphasis in it that I found reassuring

Over the last year she’s been in and out of hospitals and medical clinics in South Texas but kick it, he has, apparently, as she recently received a clean bill of health.

So imagine my surprise and the sharp pain my heart felt when, on New Year’s eve at 10:53 p.m., I received a text from Martha saying, “Mother has decided to celebrate the New Year’s eve in her own way. She’s at Spohn Hospital and will be here a few days.”

The doctors are just being cautious; after six months of treatments and chemotherapy to kill a cancer in her stomach, they’re giving her antibiotics and don’t want her to get ill from the common cold, flu or pneumonia attacking an immune system already weakened by chemotherapy. This time she’s surrounded by my sisters Barbara, Martha and Sara, girls who’ve loved and lived a life full of ups and downs, joys and smiles.

I spoke with her a moment ago, a bit groggy but she’s happy to be surrounded by her daughters, to hear from her favorite son (sorry guys, Alden, Walter, Russell and Jimmy… yeah, I’m her favorite!) and to be cancer-free!

That’s about the best birthday present ever.

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Update: Sitting at breakfast yesterday morning with two terrific women, when the subject of cancer came up. Perry Deputy Chief of Staff Kathy Walt’s husband Bob passed away from cancer and Dallas Morning News Bureau Chief Christi Hoppe kicked breast cancer.  It’s stunning how many lives are touched by this disease and Kathy mentioned how after Bob’s diagnosis she met so many people who were affected and how proud she is that Governor Perry has funded so much research to fight cancer.

“Yeah, it’s a big club,” quipped Hoppe, “but not one you want to be a member of!”

Amen.

As the ubiquitous social media queen @AmyJoMartin asks, “it’s your news, why wouldn’t you break it?”

“The University of Arizona, and more specifically @Greg_Byrne, did this the right way by delivering value to fans when, where and how they wanted to receive it,” explained Digital Royalty founder Amy Jo Martin, who has worked with athletes and leagues to develop digital integration and social media strategies. “The value was in the form of exclusive news shared instantly and directly with loyalists such as the students, faculty, boosters, parents and alum who were most invested in the situation. Greg proved there’s a reason to follow him on Twitter.”

Providing a reason for fans to follow and engage with a team or university is a key to social media success.

Too often, organizations allow the media, or even more frequently, the chatter class of pundits and prognosticators to define and and shape the conversation, to the detriment of the brand and the fan experience.  In this case, the organization got it right!

Thank you to PEOPLE magazine for joining in the efforts of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to help put a face with every name on The Wall.

The photographic spread in this week’s PEOPLE is an example of the kinds of stories behind and the faces associated with the names etched in the black granite on The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is working to build an Education Center adjacent to The Wall. To learn more and to help support the effort, please follow this link: Build the Center.

About 45 minutes later, according to one D.C. Bureau Chief I visited with this week, the White House told the Press Corps, “The lid’s been lifted.”

This was an indication that additional news would be coming from The White House. It could be anything ranging from minor economic news that might have financial market implications or a senior staffer providing a briefing on an international issue, such as the continuing situation in Libya. Both of these are routine; lifting the lid is not, so this action alone raised eyebrows among the Capitol Bureau news hounds.

However, at 9:45 The Press Office indicated that President Obama would be speaking to the nation at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Speculation spread like wildfire amongst the media elites and across social media. News about the presidential address reached Twitter as early as 9:46 p.m. EST, prompting curious Twitter users to make guesses about the nature of the unplanned address.

Social Flow Research & Development, www.socialflow.com, a social media monitoring, measurement and engagement tool has produced a very interesting visual depiction of just how this speculation spread and turned into the news that President Obama would announce to the world that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Additionally, Social Flow provides terrific insights into the factors which contribute to just such a social wildfire, namely the influence and trust that ensure a Tweet is ReTweeted and distributed around the world.

With more than 14.6 million Tweets on the subject, one particular Twitter user, posted at 10:24 p.m. EST informed the world and broke the story:

@keithurbahn: So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.

As in most communications, it comes down to influence and trust. Keith Urbahn is followed by major media sources and Washington, D.C. elites (Influence) and is considered “in the know” given his position as Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff (Trust).

Here’s what Social Flow has to say on the subject, and I encourage you to read their complete report at blog.socialflow.com/

Authority, trust and persuasiveness play an important role in influencing others, but are only part of a complex set of dynamics that affect people’s perception. Connections are another important factor, along with timing and a dash of pure luck. But as humans, we are still incredibly irrational, and constantly make decisions based on our intuition, or whatever we feel like at that moment.

As we build out digital social spaces, we must not get derailed by metrics of status affordances that have taken center stage. Just because we have easily accessible data at our fingertips doesn’t mean that we have the capacity to model and place a value tag on human behavior. Followers, friends or likes represent an aspect of our digital status, but are only a partial representation of our general propensity to be influential. Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. And with that, the perfect situation unfolded, where timing, the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.

In a future post, we’ll talk about the interdependence between Social Media and Television in breaking the Osama Bin Laden news story.

Barry Pepper plays the role of Galloway in the film "We Were Soldiers Once...And Young"

I am honored to count among my friends Joe Galloway, the author of “We Were Soldiers Once…And Young” and one of the world’s best known war correspondents.  We’ve talked long hours over the ease with which our nation’s leaders tend to send men to the battlefield and the courage and duty it takes to step forward and serve.

With the recent deaths of war correspondents Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya, Galloway sent me this note late last night. With his okay, I’m sharing it with you.

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Joe Galloway

There was a discussion on a net group to which I belong, with a few complaining that the deaths of these two photographers drew mega media coverage while the deaths of the poor Libyans drew little or none. This overlooks the fact that these two shooters and a whole host of war correspondents are there precisely to report on those Libyans and their struggle.

Well, it got my juices flowing and below is the response I posted last night:

I get your point. Mine would be that we need men and women who have the courage to risk their lives, and sometimes give up their lives, trying to get the stories and pictures and film that tells the truth about that half a war in Libya, and all our wars, and try to inform a public that seemingly does not care much about the wars today, or about those we send to fight them.

From your post:  “However, these men were there on purpose and totally on their own volition.”

That is pretty much what the people who don’t really care about the wars and who does the fighting say about our military….our volunteer military. They like to underline that word “volunteer” and say that whatever they get, including multiple and unending deployments to combat, they asked for by signing up of their own volition. In other words, it’s okay with them so long as it’s not their children or grandchildren who are called to do so dangerous a job with so little thanks and so little in the way of material reward. After all….”they asked for it.”

This may be true in both cases–different professions which share some of the same dangers. Both go in harm’s way because they have, in effect, signed up for it. They have stepped forward with a purpose, and after that it is a matter of doing your duty whether you are a soldier or a war correspondent. However, to me that is a callous way of looking at those charged with defending our country and safeguarding our national security, as defined by elected political leaders. It is also callous, in my view, to similarly view that shrinking number of correspondents who accompany the troops, or sometimes go ahead of them, in search of stories and images that we hope will better inform an increasingly aloof majority of citizens who have no skin in the game of modern war, and little apparent interest in what happens so far away.

It was another time and the biggest war of all time, but Ernie Pyle was a volunteer who chose the danger of covering the Infantry from as far forward as he could get. When he was killed in the final months of WWII, having shifted to the Pacific from Europe after VE Day of his own volition, even though he was sick and tired and worn down by war and its horrors, the entire nation mourned his loss and the loss of  his unique and straight-forward stories of the soldiers and Marines who were still dying by the thousands.

It was a different country and a different people then. Nearly everyone had a real stake in the war; nearly everyone had someone among the 15 million wearing a uniform and fighting that war. They cared deeply about the troops and they cared deeply about a skinny, tired old reporter who could with his words make them love and mourn an Infantry captain from a small town in Texas who died on a rocky mountainside in Italy in the winter of 1944.  Read: The Death of Captain Waskow, January 1944, if you have never read that.

No one dared suggest that the troops who volunteered by the millions in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor were there of their own volition and therefore we need not care as much about them. They were there defending much of the world against some men and nations who sought to dominate and “purify” that world by conquest and murder. No one suggested that the outpouring of grief at the loss of Ernie Pyle somehow took something away from all the other soldiers and civilians who were among the 60 million who died in that war. Ernie was better known than any other war correspondent of the time, and he was certainly better loved and appreciated because he loved the Infantry and took the risks, shared the risks, to tell the stories of ordinary soldiers doing extraordinary things every day.

I’m glad I am of a generation where, when they said you were doing something dangerous of your own volition, whether it be soldiering in a war or reporting on a war, it was meant as high praise — not somehow perjorative or a sign that your sacrifices were self-inflicted and, thus, of lesser consequence than if you were accidentally done in on I-95 by a speeding 18-wheeler. Or, God forbid, if somehow you had been forced against your will to go fight or cover a war. There was a time in this country when doing something so dangerous by your own choice, your own volition, and “of a purpose” was seen as both honorable and courageous, and something worth doing for the good of the country.

In WWII, 54 war correspondents were killed out of 500 accredited by the Pentagon to cover American forces at war. Hundreds more died covering other armies during the war. They died by all the ways possible in war: Bullets, bombs, artillery shells, flying on bomber raids, in naval battles at sea. The only reporter chosen to cover the Dieppe Raid was in the first wave to land and was among the first to die.

During the war in Indochina, some 70 correspondents were killed, or are missing in action and presumed dead, during ten years of the war.

Some, like reporter/photographer Dickey Chappelle, were old hands at covering war. She died in November 1965 when a Marine in front of her triggered a booby-trapped shell and a small fragment nicked Ms. Chappelle’s jugular vein. My friend bled to death with her head in the lap of a colleague and a Catholic chaplain leaning over giving her the last rites. A stringer new to the business claimed a place on a dangerous Special Forces insertion of a small team into a besieged Special Forces camp in October 1965. As the team began a dash through enemy lines toward the camp the cameraman raised up to film it with his 16mm camera. An enemy machine gun round tore through the lens of the camera and through the eye of the journalist who was killed instantly before he shot a foot of film. If he had lived and gotten the story, and it was deemed useable, he might have been paid $75 or $100 by the company which gave him a few rolls of film and told him to go see what he could get on that film.

By contrast, during the first month of the war in Afghanistan, November of 2001, a dozen correspondents were killed, most of them stopped on the roads and executed on the spot, before the American military suffered its first KIA. The war in Iraq was clearly the deadliest of all conflicts surveyed. The death toll among correspondents and local staff in Iraq since 2003 stands at 230 killed and 14 missing in action. At least 43 of those killed were kidnapped and then executed.

I’ve gone on far too long but this thread provoked a detailed response. I covered wars aplenty, from four tours in Vietnam beginning in April 1965, to my last short tour in Iraq in 2005-2006. Many of the correspondents killed along the way were good friends who shared foxholes and watering holes, and I mourn our loss of their talent and their courageous pursuit of the stories of soldiers, even as I mourn their deaths and the deaths of brave men and women in uniform all around us–then, now and in the future.

I always felt we who marched with them had more in common with the troops than we did with your average American civilian. In this discussion I am reminded of a conversation with a retired four-star in which I expressed some wariness about going out to do a bunch of embeds in Iraq. He responded thusly: “Go on out there, Joe. We need your reporting. Besides, if you get killed I guarantee the Army will give you the best funeral we ever put on for anybody. Full honors. Horse and caisson. Band playing. Bugle blowing Taps. Everybody will come.”  I am happy it never came to that, even though I appreciated the offer.

– Galloway