(I will say, however, that despite the hype about Obama and behavioral economics, he seems to me to be offering some tax credits, and for the standard reason--to be able to say that rather than spending, he is lowering taxes. The auto tax return sounds like a good idea, though.)
Who is perhaps the most influential blogger among undecided Oregon voters? That's right, Greg Oden. Talk about a well-run campaign. Obama just picked up a few votes for less than the price of a single doughnut.
Kristol's column today is on about the same level as Glenn Beck. I know the Times needed to hire another conservative, and he's a known name, but Kristol seems to be proving to be a little hacky and not up to the challenge of sounding smarter than his Democratic Times counterparts, the way Safire was and Brooks, though fairly moderate, is. Most people take issue with today's column because of its attacks on Obama's patriotism. But the silliness there is too obvious to get into. This is what gets me, because it's maybe the most widely misunderstood thing about Obama's campaign:
"John Kennedy, to whom Obama is sometimes compared, challenged the American people to acts of citizenship and patriotism. Barack Obama allows us to feel better about ourselves."
But the true audacity of Obama's campaign is that it is largely a movement for more citizen involvement in civic life. He has the message and the inspirational capability to get a good percentage of us to put down our fake video game guitars and stop staring at Paris Hilton's vagina for three minutes and actually add to this country. There's no telling whether we'll actually respond, or if our apathy has rendered us comatose, but isn't an attempt at this necessary in dire times? Despite its necessity, the other candidates do not promise anything like this because they cannot.
And compare that idea to this Bush response from last year.
This has been the Republican policy with regard to everything. Avert your eyes, and we will protect you like a great mother walrus. The idea of the public engaging in civic life is actually discouraged. And don't think that McCain or Clinton will be much different. Although they may sound different, at the bottom of things, they will again ask us to defeat the terrorists by going to the mall, because they will not have any success asking us to do anything that we were not planning to do anyway.
"Andy is one of the greatest human beings I've ever met," Rodriguez said. "I have two daughters -- well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want 'em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today's day and age anything is possible."
There is no amount of commentary that can make that more entertaining. It is beautiful and almost perfect as it is.
Lessig may be running for Congress. It looks like he has to file his papers tomorrow, so we should know soon if it's really happening. California's 12th congressional district isn't exclusively Silicon Valley, but it definitely includes enough nerds to make it perhaps the only place in the country that would choose a congressman who is known mostly for crusading for Creative Commons and against increased copyright protection. And that's good--having just one person in the House who understands technology and cares about these issues could have a dramatic impact on the regulation of technology and digital rights.
On the other hand, adding nothing new, Ralph Nader is running for president. This was cute back in 2000 when both candidates ran as moderates, right after having a moderate president, and the good economy and rise of transnational corporations stupidly caused some to believe that politics was no longer very important. But now it sounds like his stated objective is to even the playing field between Obama and McCain. Nader seems to say, Isn't it unfair that, while McCain has Huckabee to force him to the right on issues that are clear losers in a general election, Obama only has Hillary, who is slightly to the center of him? Doesn't Obama deserve a kooky activist on the left to criticize him and hopefully force him to be pro-Palestinian, anti-business, and anything else that will hurt his chances in a general election?
By the way, this is not Nader's third run at the presidency, it's his fourth (at least). (I voted for him in 1996--I was 18, Clinton had a huge margin in my state and I didn't care for him, and I thought it would create some pressure for campaign finance reform, which seemed like a good idea at the time.) Four runs or more is LaRouche territory.
I'm not sure why all news and commentary seems to laugh off most non-New Hampshire small states (and non-states) in the Democratic primary. I know that most of these places aren't going to figure hugely (or in some cases at all) in the general election, but everything now is about horse race politics, and this is where the election is being won.
Hawaii is mentioned as an afterthought to Wisconsin, and not just because its results weren't in until 12:30 a.m. Eastern. However it was nearly as important as Wisconsin. Obama won Hawaii 12 delegates to 4, for 8 points. He won Wisconsin 40 to 28, for 12 points. But had Wisconsin been as close as predicted, it could have easily been something like 36 to 32, making Hawaii a more important victory.
Maine was seen as a very decisive victory for Obama. There he won 15 to 9 for 6 points. However Idaho was mostly laughed at, although he won it 15 to 3, for 12 points--making it twice as important as Maine.
The U.S. Virgin Islands, which Obama won 3-0, was really laughed at. However, by my count, he picked up a lead there that was 2 delegates larger than his lead from Iowa, which he won 16 to 15.
We have received quite a bit of feedback about the lack of fancy coffee in the faculty lounge.
Our solution was to put a lock on the cabinet, so please come by the dean's suite and pick up your key to the cabinet in the faculty lounge where we store the fancy coffee.
This is obviously the most contentious of their yet-revealed plans to steal the nomination, behind seating Michigan and Florida without a re-vote (largely Howard Dean's fault if it happens) and swaying all of the non-elected (and elected) superdelegates.
Now I am glad that maybe the reason Gore, Biden, etc. haven't made endorsements is because they will need to stop all of these shenanigans before they destroy the party. For what it's worth, last night some guy on MSNBC said that in a little-noticed interview over a year ago, Gore said that he didn't know if he'd be endorsing anyone, but that he definitely wouldn't endorse Clinton. Plus I'm sure those party vanguards, or whatever you want to call them, know that they don't get many shots at turning the largest generation ever (Y) and tons of independents into Democrats.
My Obamania generated a gmail ad that caused me to receive this email from Human Events:
Dear Fellow Conservative,
Attached is your requested special report, Barack Obama: Exposed! You'll soon see that, regarding Sen. Obama, the mainstream media has been under-reporting the facts and over-reporting the P.C. nonsense.
I was expecting it to have some real dirt. Grisly stuff. Instead, it was all stuff that Hillary's already injected into the media. And what struck me, while reading their pamphlet, was how little they had to say that was actually bad. They mention his race and his voting record in a way that makes them sound scared to lose hardcore conservative voters (He's black! He's pro-choice!). One article complains that Obama is given a double-standard because CNN dogged W. for being a cokehead until he was about 45, while, in his autobiography, Obama said he did drugs in high school, and mainstream journalists haven't pressed him on it. (He said that to sell more books.) One column in the pamphlet even seems to say that Obama might be another Reagan, and that's not the only positive thing that's said. Overall, the impression that is given is one of a group of people collectively shitting their pants.
By contrast, just look at this sentence from the pamphlet replaying some of the Clinton greatest hits from 1992:
The liberal media don't care what Democratic love objects do when they're in grade school, even in Indonesia, just as they didn't care what Bill Clinton was doing touring Russia and the Soviet bloc in his 20s, just as they didn't care how he dodged the draft or whether he inhaled, just as they didn't even want to know if Clinton raped a woman when he was 32.
I think They're not going to find anything on Obama worth talking about past the age of 15, but if Hillary is nominated, we can expect a shitstorm after she releases her tax records.
This is a good piece on sports and Congress and why Clemens expected to be able to go into Congress completely unprepared, except for having an Enron attorney, and lie his way out of trouble.
How disorienting it must have been for Clemens, then, to face the hilariously red-faced Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who has the bristling haircut of a 10-year-old boy, carrying on about whether the star witness had “carried Band-Aids for his butt if he bled” through his “designer pants” after receiving a shot of something powerful in his hind quarters. The whole Tom Davis litany was delivered as Tom Davis, seven-term congressman, sat beneath a gilded, gold-framed oil painting of … Tom Davis.
On a related note, someone really needs to make a Mr. Toad-style cartoon about the House Oversight Committee, because, well, just look at Waxman.
While I liked this movie, I believe it was made as the result of a dare to create a sort of perfect storm of art house pretension. The dare was to make a movie:
- In French - In black & white - About a girl's sexual awakening - Set in the Mideast - With a political theme
And I'm thoroughly impressed with how they combined everything thick-rimmed glasses-wearing community college professors love, in a cartoon no less, and made it watchable.
A Globe columnist is all worked up because a Houston Obama office had a picture of Che hanging on the wall. (Check out the columnist's picture, by the way.) My guess is that the division between people who see this as controversial and people who say, So what?, mirrors Hillary/Obama demographics exactly: anyone who has been to college in the last 25 years doesn't care.
There is a reason that this is not controversial, and it's the same reason that I own this image on a T-shirt.
Also, these campaign offices are often lent by outside organizations that support the campaign. This one probably just belonged to TexPIRG or some other group that's full of hippies.
It's hard to read this piece in today's Post without being struck by its laziness. I agree, it is hard to know what Obama might do in office if you refuse to read or think about it.
Prior to Feb. 5, there were some news stories and numbers going around showing that Obama might win New York City. (And note that that article was written just before the Kennedy endorsement and surge by Obama in the polls.)
Hillary's Feb. 5 "victory" party was in Manhattan. If Obama had won the area immediately surrounding her party, might the media have seized onto that as a major psychological loss for her? So, might there have been reason for her campaign to want to thwart that possibility by fudging the immediate results and revealing the real results a couple of weeks later?
Investigate, motherfuckers, investigate!!
You know who this is a job for. That's right:
(This marks the first time I'll actually be glad to have him raise a ruckus about something.)
Two things become quickly evident looking at this. First, DNC delegates overall are the majority of the superdelegates. Second, the majority of Clinton's 94 superdelegate lead comes from the unelected delegates (55 vs. 39).
Adding in the pledged delegates, here are delegate totals:
....................Elected Only....Including DNC
Clinton.........1041...............1152
Obama.........1098...............1144
(DNC is used as shorthand for the unelected superdelegates.) This is cause for concern. Because it kind of retards the idea that's going around that the superdelegates should not thwart the will of the voters. Much of that idea seems based on the assumption that, as elected officials, superdelegates have to respond the the wishes of their constituents. But most superdelegates are not elected officials, but instead are former office-holders and shadowy party figures. Of course, most of the former office-holders, guys like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, will probably vote for whoever has a lead in pledged delegates, in the interest of preserving the party. But the shadowy figures might be expected to say 'fuck the voters,' and vote based on some combination of money and loyalty (loyalty related to a tit-for-tat of personal secrets they would not like revealed). Does anyone doubt that the shadowy figures make up Clinton's core group of superdelegates? Obviously these numbers show that her lead in superdelegates comes largely from unelected party officials.
For more up-to-date superdelegate numbers (with less breakdown), today's story in the Times can be assumed to be fairly accurate.
On a related front, this post (from 2/6), Scalia to Determine Democratic Nominee, is pretty funny (either because of or in spite of how plausible it is).
Basically, Obama had better sweep all the remaining states so that I don't end up having a civic duty to join a pitchfork-wielding mob in Denver in late August.
How much of the Bush administration's ability to be bastards in prosecuting the war on terror is directly related to having this picture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? (By the way, is being named Sheikh sort of like being named Judge, Lawyer, Priest, or Mountain?)
If they're ever having an internal argument and someone says, 'Maybe we should torture less,' or 'Maybe we shouldn't have a sham proceeding and then execute these prisoners,' does David Addington just pull a copy of the picture out of his briefcase and point at it?
We had a great night on Super Tuesday, we’re winning the states that we have to win. The big states that are really going to determine whether Democrats win. I have something in common with my husband, he didn’t carry caucuses either. He lost all of the ones that I’ve lost. So my perspective is that as we now move into this two person race with the big states up ahead, Ohio, Michigan obviously, I mean, Ohio and Texas. We’re going to see a real focus on the differences between us.
The College Republicans summer 1973 convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri was quite contentious. Rove's opponent was Robert Edgeworth of Michigan (the other major candidate, Terry Dolan of California, dropped out, supporting Edgeworth). A number of states had sent two competing delegates, because Rove and his supporters had made credentials challenges at state and regional conventions. For example, after the Midwest regional convention, Rove forces had produced a version of the Midwestern College Republicans constitution which differed significantly from the constitution that the Edgeworth forces were using, in order to justify the unseating of the Edgeworth delegates on procedural grounds.[6] including delegations, such as Ohio and Missouri, which had been certified earlier by Rove himself.
OK, Erik was right about PR. The Post debunks talk of the island's Democratic strongman single-handedly awarding 60+ delegates. My guess is that it won't play much of a role (i.e. Hillary won't win by a lot just because it's Hispanic). I don't really know anything about the ethnic dynamics of the Caribbean, but my sense is that whatever racial voting trends one picked up from California (which I think were more based on people just being unfamiliar with Obama anyway), won't carry out into the Atlantic Ocean. It would be just as easy to predict Puerto Rico by looking at the Virgin Islands (90% Obama) and Hawaii (will be 130% Obama) because they are also islands and share a similar sense of their relationship to the mainland.
...sort of like a man with a van, some candy, and large, visible scars.
If her campaign were well-run, this video would be the reason one of her campaign managers was just fired. But it's not well-run, so they probably think this is a good ad, and they are now pursuing the same campaign strategy that worked out so well for Mr. 9/11 (wait around for states they might actually win).
This is good. If he can keep getting 60% victories in MD, VA, and DC, that will probably give him Wisconsin too. And Hawaii will probably go the way of the Virgin Islands regardless (90-100%). That's all too much for Texas and Ohio to ignore.
I think that Barack Obama may be suffering from an information gap. I did not think this was possible until recently. I had assumed that everyone who votes in a primary is well-informed about the election. But that is because I live in a sealed chamber of news and punditry. I read articles about the election all day at work, and then I come home and watch MSNBC for hours. Right now I am even blogging about it in a post that I began writing on a Saturday afternoon. People like me tend to forget that most people could give a shit about politics. We forget that for many, it's not a sport, but a chore. Many avoid most real news and coverage of the candidates because it's boring (and maybe because it's a little debased). However many people like this vote, at least in general elections, and with the 2008 Democratic primary being treated by the country almost as though it is a general election, many of them are voting in the 2008 primaries. Their votes are decided by a combination of the headlines they have been unable to escape, word of mouth (who friends and family are voting for and why), and things like name recognition. I don't think it's too much to assume that these low-information voters are less likely to be college educated than high-information voters.
That is where Obama's information gap comes in. The well-known campaign narratives of experience v. emotion and 'Will this teenage negro whiz-kid be ready to lead the country on Day One?' distort reality and hurt Obama's chances, while Clinton benefits greatly from the fact that everyone is already very familiar with her. That is the above-board, easily-recognized information gap.
But there may be a more insidious information gap taking place by word of mouth on the level that people whisper to each other, addressing topics that they think might not be addressed by the mainstream media out of political correctness. Specifically, I am talking about one thing.
A few days ago, I was talking about the primaries with a friend who had been torn over who to vote for. One of her slights against Obama was that he is a Muslim. Not a secret Muslim who is going to take off a mask and reveal a big, bushy beard at his inauguration as part of an absurd conspiracy, but just a Muslim. This is a fairly smart person with a high income, albeit one who doesn't see the fun in politics that I do (so she is one of the minority of low-information voters who are relatively well-off). I was shocked to learn that, outside of my cocoon of punditry, normal people believe this. When I set her straight, she said that his campaign hadn't done enough to tell voters otherwise (I will get to this in a minute). And I can see how one could mistakenly think that the mainstream media's political correctness is so broad that it somehow wouldn't talk non-stop about this topic if it were true.
So the world of the low information voter can be one where a smear campaign succeeds because the voter simply assumes that the media will not address the topic at all out of political correctness. (I should qualify this with my own political correctness. I easily call the Muslim meme a smear campaign not because I think that being Muslim is awful, but because a huge portion of the American electorate does.) Now, I know that it almost sounds silly that someone would believe Obama to be a Muslim, but think again of Hillary's education gap. Who is more likely to decide who to vote for because of a bit of information like this told by a friend? An educated voter or an uneducated one? And who is less likely to understand that, while we may soon elect a female or black president, we will never ever elect a non-Christian president (except for maybe a secular Jewish philanthropist who is basically an ordained minister of America's true religion, capitalism).
I think that this may also help explain why Obama has been doing so well in caucuses. The conventional wisdom is that he does well in caucuses because he has more young, dedicated volunteers. This certainly helps, but a caucus also gives the better-informed people in the room a chance to give others the legitimate arguments for their candidate and ferret out the lies.
Obama's problem with the information gap, and the Muslim meme, is that there may be nothing he can do to stop it during the primaries. The natural way to combat this would be by showcasing his Christianity. However, doing that would invite questions about Obama's church, which is so fervently black that once people know about it, it will scare white people in a way that--because it is true--could be worse than some stupid, whispered smear campaign. And more importantly, it would alienate the Democratic Party's heathen base. If Obama started making a lot of Jesus talk, the most liberal voters--who he controls a good percentage of--would vote for Hillary instead. All he can do is try to win the primary on honest grounds, and hope to somehow inform the willfully uninformed.
Then, when the general election rolls around, Barack can destroy the Muslim meme and steal Huckavoters at the same time (assuming that Huck's not McCain's VP candidate). Appearing in a lot of churches during the general election (white churches, so as not to scare people) will not alienate Democrats from voting for him, and comparing his Democratic Jesusy compassion with the cold-heartedness of Admiral McCain, his surgically-enhanced USC sorority girl wife, and the inevitable non-Mormon, CEO, Romneyesque-but-less-detestable running mate, will even appeal to the religious. But, in the meantime all he can do during the primaries is send a billion college kids to go knock on doors in Texas.
And just going back to how I don't think conventional theories explain voting patterns very well. Although there is absolutely no science involved in punditry and it is all conjecture, I see a problem with it that closely mirrors the problem with traditional economics. A few years ago, some economists began to realize that everything they believed relied on the idea that people are rational, when we very obviously are not. Similarly, pundits analyze elections with the assumption that voters are somewhat rational and well-informed, when that is obviously not how things work. Pundits just don't want to admit that no one cares about their work and alienate potential readers by calling them stupid.
(Not that anyone notices this shit.) Bennett has a new blog. And I removed the podcast UYD because of this quote last week, by little J. Larroquette, reading a news story his podcast partner had prepared, "Mitt Romney--don't know who that is-- . . . ." Just before saying that, he had revealed huge corn silos of knowledge about every worthless piece of entertainment produced in the western hemisphere in the last thirty years. That, and because their attempt to make the 100th episode a video podcast crashed my iPod 3 times and showed me what they look like.
Here's some analysis in which I accuse a broad group of people of racism in a way that is probably racist. Enjoy.
Latino Vote: 69% Hillary 29% Obama
Can someone please give me a real explanation of this? It is obviously not related to issues.
I don't think it's simple racism. Is it? Anecdotally, at least judging from people in NY, I would say that it's because Latino's openly want to elect Bill Clinton again (perhaps partially because the immigrants among them have a higher tolerance for insanity and corruption in politics than the rest of us). Or is it possible that in America, in 2008, there is actually not enough news and punditry (at least in other languages)? This would explain why, as a group, Latinos seem to have been much more susceptible to some of the more unbelievable memes that have been spread, like that Obama is running on the Al Qaeda ticket. Or, broadly, are Latino family values too good? Whereas I would have no trouble dressing down any family member who planned to vote for Hillary for a bad reason, does a Hispanic kid just keep his mouth shut and let his parents make their own dumb mistakes? Or, is it that, with any recent immigrants, Obama's message just doesn't resonate, because rather than thinking that America has been broken and beaten to a bloody pulp the way I do, they think it's still pretty good?
So it's the "height of cynicism" to be annoyed that California's supposedly open Democratic primary has arcane rules that make it hard for independents to vote? (An actual problem that should be addressed before the next election.) While at the same time you are actively campaigning for delegates from states where everyone agreed months ago not to campaign? (i.e. "cheating.")
This morning, I'm somewhat surprised to discover that undecided voters calling in to WNYC sound as though they've barely read or thought about the election and just spew out some baseless media narratives. Apparently being an exceptional orator means that Obama has negated the fact that he is a natural leader and the smartest candidate either party has had in years, and that he has brilliant people ready to serve in his administration. Do people think he is a thirty year-old actor who decided to get into politics a year ago? Or do they just refuse to believe in the abilities of a politician who is naive enough to have a little honesty?
It occurred to me that it is possible that this page may be visited by someone who either does not know who he or she will vote for on Tuesday (or in June 2009 in the case of Oregonians, who like to have their primaries after the general election, because they think it is funny) or someone who vaguely favors Hillary because of "experience" or some other media-created idea that has no real substance.
That person should read this (and also everything else--there are a million articles laying out good arguments for Obama...and the only ones against him are by people who are seeming to be borderline autistic, like Krugman, who likes to compare today to 1992, as if they are the same at all--Sullivan is right about political fear, and Krug reeks of it). And also consider that, despite being an extremely lazy man and having a general anxiety about non-white neighborhoods, I happily went door-to-door in housing projects yesterday, trying to get people to vote for this man. He will be at the Nets' arena at the Meadowlands tomorrow. Think about going.
doesn't know what the hell it's doing. Sure, they may be doing better than us financially, but that doesn't mean that they're not completely confused about everything. Apparently they think they are so liberal that, to allow the only large, friendly, fairly secular Muslim state in the Mideast to join them, they require it to allow its zealots more leverage to ruin everything for everyone, forever.
