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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
2008-11-25»
in which i demonstrate remarkably personal hindsight»
So I now have some clues as to why I suddenly stopped blogging twenty days ago. Looking over the black box recording, I note it coincides with me engaging in a rash of travel, and also obtaining a prescription for sleep medication for the first time in my life.
That makes sense. When I go on a longhaul plane for a speaking engagement, I go out into deep-space coma until I return. It’s the whole being ferried around by machines, and deposited into womb-like hotels thing. Add to that my discovery of a pharmaceutical that magically medically increases the amount of blood in my caffeinestream, and you’re going to lose me to forty-years worth of sleep catch-up and shoddy hotel connectivity.
Plus I swear to God, everyone I knew spent a few weeks wandering around in a post-election haze. Last week, I spoke at the University of Maryland (which was awesome, but I am an all-comers speaker: if you are at a US college, force your school at gunpoint to book me here: all the money goes to EFF). Honestly out of nowhere people would end any normally pessimistic discussion with this dreamy-eyed “but now, with this spirit of reconciliation in the air”, and stuff like that. Even the NASA guys at the hotel were cheery. Of course, that’s all in the beltway, but there’s languour elsewhere: Republicans are punch drunk and lolling, and the news media is sort of just lying there on the tarmac, having collapse in a heap and lazily eyeballing Obama nominations from one half-closed eye.
Things finally picked up this week, just in time to slam into Thanksgiving, which, to translate for British readers, is really the American Christmas (the real Christmas being more like a Bank Holiday with religious pretensions). You know what I think they should do to boost the economy here? Hold another couple of elections. People would be buying new cars just to have somewhere to put the bumperstickers.
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2008-10-15»
the debate and the spotlight of consensus»
While the position who have particular political biases are relatively constant, it’s fascinating to watch the spotlight of what appears crazy to the general public shift around.
I first started reading Little Green Footballs during the run-up to the Iraqi invasion, because I felt that what they said there gave an insight into how decisions were being made or accepted among a large sector of the public. Steven Den Beste was required reading, because he seemed to be constructing (or interpreting) the abstract framework that best represented Bush’s foreign policy (he ended up writing a WSJ editorial spelling it out).
I didn’t agree with these people, but what they said certainly had predictive value — far more predictive value than those on most left blogs. People would say “surely Americans will see through this bullshit”, and they didn’t. Meanwhile, one of the warbloggers would say that Dean would pay for saying we weren’t safer after Saddam was captured, and lo! That’s what public opinion would reflect. The statements of the conservative bloggers matched much of public discourse (in the US, of course). I remember people like Brad deLong spending much of the first decade of this century standing with their mouths open, agape at the discrepancy between what was obvious to them and what “everyone else” appeared to see.
What’s is fascinating now is watching that spotlight move very dramatically away. The conservative bloggers confidently predict that McCain or Palin ruled the debate and … reality lurches away in the other direction. ESR talks about Obama’s campaign smelling of defeat, right as they begin their meteoric rise up the polls. None of the levers work. The die falls snakes eyes, throw after throw. You move the mouse up, and the cursor goes down. At this point, they’re convinced that the mainstream media, *and* the pollster, *and* random people in the street are just making shit up.
Again, this isn’t about right or wrong. This is about your ability to predict the general population. Just as it didn’t help to talk about dictators stealing the election when over 50% of the American population thought Bush was an allright fella, all the accusations that Obama is a marxist terrorist muslim aren’t going to help you when people are saying sure he’s a marxist terrorist muslim, but they’re going to vote for him anyway because he has a good healthcare policy. How do you compute that if you’re instapundit?
Most of all, I love watching that spotlight of opinion refocus on a point after these debates. And the focus pull in this election seems to be online videos. I thought McCain did okay in this debate, actually, but that’s not where the spotlight has fallen. It’s fallen on the reload button next to the YouTube clip of his “Zero? WTF?” moment. And he can talk about Joe the Plumber all he wants, but the more people who see Obama actually talking to Joe the Plumber (and it’s worth watching all the way through), I think the better Obama looks, not McCain.
I hope to god I’m almost done with this election. My citizen friends are voting early. As Nate Silver says, Obama is in “live boy, dead girl” territory these days. If there’s going to be a change in that, it’ll be one that no-one on either side predicts. The spotlight is steady, and for now it’s trained on the new president.
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2008-10-12»
politics in the city»
Walking down a Bernal Heights street, I heard a guy shouting from behind me to a woman in a garish, oversized white t-shirt with somebody’s name on it. “Hey, you guys are doing well — I see posters for Tom everywhere!”. The woman shouted back, “Thanks! Who are you walking for?” “Eric!” “Cool!”. Later, a bunch of bicyclists fly by in convoy, playing an upbeat latino tune on speakers, and waving flags for another candidate.
It’s election time in San Francisco. As well as the presidential election, there’s the usual Bible-sized selection of other plebiscites to be plebbicized, including the election of the supervisor for my local neighbourhood. You can decide whether you should vote for Eric or Tom or Eva or David or Vern or Mark or the other Eric by thumbing through the 268 page local voter guide here. I believe that’s on top of the 166 page State guide.
I was going to witter here a little about the vibrancy of American elections, and then I remembered where else I’ve lived where elections were this vivid and fun. When I was eight, I remember the cars driving around with loudspeakers balanced on top, and posters, and speechifying and lots of local excitement to a British election. I grew up in Basildon, a marginal constituency (Ohio-on-the-Thames, if you will), and ground zero for those wanting to extrapolate results from their glib little parodies of voting patterns. You had to admit though, both sides fought like prize-fighters for every voter there.
San Francisco is about as far away from a swing state as you can imagine (unless you mean between Cindy Sheehan supporters and Nancy Pelosi fans), but the internal city politics are gloriously internecine and bloody. Supervisors have a surprising amount of power: en mass they are a counterbalance to the major. One of them just pleaded guilty to take $84,000 in bribes. I admire the huge encyclopedia of political explanations that turn up on everybody’s doorsteps every election, as well as the miles of columnage in the local papers analysing the minutiae of the city’s internal politics. Even the alternative free papers here often have front covers with titles like “REVEALED: JUST WHAT THE HELL DOES DEPUTY VICE ALDERMAN DIFRAMBRIZI THINK HE IS DOING WITH THE MANHOLE COVER FINANCIAL ALLOCATION FOR FINANCIAL PERIOD 2007/2008?”. To give a less made-up example, I have just read a (genuinely fascinating, actually) three page piece expose on the fines builders have to pay for having their cones in the wrong place. It is all connected with police graft, of course.
I honestly wonder who reads all of this, and yet I love that it’s there. I was reading Linus Torvalds slightly agape bemusement at how uncivilized American elections are, and wonder: is it better that politics be such a loud carnival? Or would all this corruption go even more unnoticed if no-one was watching?
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2008-10-01»
how palin lost my non-vote»
So, I’m sympathetic to being frozen in the headlights, and I guess I can certainly disregard my current Obama-love-in as being a fairly emotional, culture-wars kind of choice. I was pretty upset with Palin’s convention speech, but I guess it’s the case that such things are aimed at the base. And, heck, sometimes I have days when I don’t remember the names of the papers I read.
But, dude, when you confuse federalism with its exact opposite: there you lose me permanently. If you’re supporting state’s rights, as Palin says she does in this clip, that means you’re opposed to federalism, not a supporter of it, as she then goes on to claim. Handy mnemonic: strong federal government is what the Federalist Papers were all about.
Goddammit: maybe Alaska should secede, and that way Palin would have to pass a real civics test for once in her life. Consider my non-vote clinched for the constitutional lawyer ticket.
Anyway, here’s my prediction for tomorrow’s debate: Palin will do okay for most of it, yet there’ll be two or three spectacular screw-ups which the Democrats will spit their coffee out at, and the Republicans will defensively (and somehow, vaguely convincingly) claim is all down to the evil, evil moderator. Swing-voters won’t care a jot either way, and Obama will continue to hold the lead.
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