Marbury

US vs UK

Two contrasting takes on the differences between the British and American political cultures. Here is The Guardian's George Monbiot:

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage... On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures.

And here is a blog post from Sky's Adam Boulton:

I've been in the US less than a day - but already I'm struck by how unjustifiably arrogant and patronising we Brits are towards the American political process. Just look at the contrast. All of the US is locked into serious debate about a potentially transformational election. And what are we discussing in Britain from the Prime Minister down? Some offensive and smutty phonecalls made a couple of vulgar celebrities... On TV, their talk show hosts such as Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart are funny but serious - cutting through the spin to put the candidates to the test... And what do we get? Jonathan Ross asking David Cameron if he used to masturbate about Mrs Thatcher.

We love to attack the US media such as Fox and MSNBC for bias - but what they are doing is arguing fiercely about the issues and attitudes which will define their nation for the next eight years, teasing out such fundamental issues as race, gender, equality, liberty and power.

Boulton's post is worth reading in full. Monbiot's, not so much.

not waving but drowning

It's easy to forget that the election is already happening. Here's the news from two battleground states:

PPP estimates that nearly two-thirds of Coloradans have already cast their ballots, as have 55-60 percent of New Mexicans, with large majorities of those votes going to Barack Obama.

state of the race: four days to go

Inevitably, now that we're a matter of days away, the chatter about every new poll is approaching hysterical levels. For a calmer overview, readers should return to 538 every day. The essential story is, not much is happening. Yes, there does seem to be some tightening: McCain has crept up in the national polls and perhaps in one or two key states. But at this stage, creeping isn't enough. McCain needs to be making up much more ground than he is if he's going to be within striking distance of Obama come Tuesday.

I think the only way that's going to happen is if we have a Black Swan moment: some unpredictable, external event that changes everything. Could happen. But then again, two in two months does seem unlikely.

538's Nate Silver addresses the panic that a couple of yesterday's polls (including one in Pennsylvania) set off amongst his Dem-leaning readers yesterday. Interesting to note, in passing, how Obama supporters (of which Silver is one) may be starting to adopt Obama's patterns of speech. The soothing tone, the appeal to better judgement, the frequent use of "Now, look...":

Now, look. I don't think we need to be in the habit of ripping a poll apart every time that we don't like the result. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with this poll. It's simply that we need to look at in concert with the rest of the evidence. In this case, we have an abundance of evidence, and it suggests on balance that Pennsylvania is neither particularly close, nor is it particularly "tightening"...

book of the show

As explained here I'm writing a book that will tell the story of this extraordinary election year. My thanks to all of you who have asked to be notified of its arrival in the shops.

If you'd me to drop you a note when the book's out (in January) then email me with the subject line TO BE PRESIDENT (that's the title of the book).

where's joe?

sexy robo-call

there's no such thing as not voting

On the same theme: the late David Foster Wallace's piece on the McCain 2000 campaign, recently republished as a short book, contains the best argument for voting I've heard:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you bored and disgusted and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay at home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

how i lost the election for obama

obamercial

Last night the Obama campaign screened a thirty minute ad on seven networks and cable stations, in effect creating their very own, post-convention and post-debates "event". Alongside all the furious on-the-ground organising that's going on in battleground states they clearly figured that they wanted to do something more at a national level to raise people's comfort levels with Obama-as-possible-president a few days before the election.The concerns that people do have about this newcomer (some of which are legitimate, some of which are nonsense, but gripping) tend to dissipate the more people actually see of him.

Now this could have gone wrong. It's an unprecedented move in presidential elections. It bumped back the World Series by half an hour. It could have come across as a massive piece of very annoying self-glorification. And maybe it did to some people. But I don't think they could have executed it much better. The Obama campaign is, if nothing else, brilliant, almost scarily so, at marketing. And this video, with its weaving of emotional vignettes about ordinary Americans with stories about Obama's policies and personal life, is as good as you'd expect.

At the end there's a cut to a live feed of Obama at a rally in Florida. But you wouldn't know it because the production values are so smooth. Which makes it kind of pointless, but anyway. Note how the candidate is assiduously branded throughout as OPTIMISM, in contrast to the vignettes, which are usually pretty sad portraits of people in distress. They're a bit like Casualty, those vignettes; they start off happy (we raised a family and built this wonderful home right here...) and you're thinking, oh shit, something's going to go really badly wrong for you isn't it...and then it does (our employer took our pension away and I fell sick and the government screwed us). And then comes Obama in a flashing ambulance.

Eve Fairbanks at TNR is very good on how the ad presented Obama as, first and foremost, a Listener.

Ben Smith calls the ad "a dramatic gesture executed in a very safe fashion" which strikes me as a pretty good description of Obama's whole candidacy.

golden girls

Margaret and Helen are two women who have been best friends for sixty years. They share a blog. And it's a work of flaming genius. Here's Helen on why she's unapologetic about calling Sarah Palin a bitch. (Thanks CJ).

you can vote however you like

I heart America.

radical ideas

The NYT's piece on the conservatives who see Sarah Palin as the future includes this snippet:

She has received extensive policy tutorials and been briefed on foreign policy almost daily. Aides say she has taken particular interest in Pakistan and Israel and in causes of Islamic extremism, which she has related to the economic despair that plagues parts of Alaska.

The way this is written implies that the Governor believes the roots of Islamic terrorism lie in her home state but I think we can blame that on the NYT's copy editing rather than her.

However, on the general point - that Islamic extremism is borne of economic deprivation - Palin's position suggests an interesting divergence from the McCain/Bush line, which is that Islamism is an self-contained ideology rather than a simple response to poverty. In fact Palin's economic take on it is kind of...Marxist, no?

his choice

It's a measure of the decline in Sarah Palin's ratings that the Obama campaign now feels it can use her as a punchline:

state of the race

As far as I can tell, it's eerily static. Although John McCain's camp is claiming to detect a tightening, the evidence for it is slight.

Meanwhile, it may be that the polls are actually underestimating Obama's strength. The evidence for this is the extraordinarily high turnout in early voting in states with high African-American populations. Pollsters base their estimates of turnout on previous elections - what else do they have to go on?  But if these early figures are anything to go by the turnout amongst blacks for Obama will be much higher than ever seen before. Which kind of makes sense.

Also, the latest Pew poll (an authoritative source) gives Obama a whacking lead. This has been written off by the McCain camp, quite reasonably, as an outlier. But Pew does something most pollsters don't do. It talks to voters who don't have land lines, only cellphones, who tend to be young voters. If that's giving them a more realistic sample, then it may be that they're just more right than most of the other pollsters. A reality-based outlier. The big unknown there, though, is whether young people will actually get out and vote in big numbers, the scamps.

Finally as Nate Silver points out in the post linked to above, the news at battleground level is even worse for McCain. He's making a little progress in Pennsylvania, but he's moving backwards in Nevada, and Obama still has significant leads in Ohio and Florida (if Obama ends up winning Florida, by the way, it's game over).

I'd actually welcome better news for McCain at the moment. It would make for more excitement. And perhaps an even higher turnout. But it's really hard to find any.

in defence of palin

Whilst I'm no fan of Sarah Palin, I do think there's much more to her than the sneering consensus here and in the US media admits. She's not dumb. Neither do I get the sense that she's particularly extreme or zealous.

Here's an interesting counterpoint to the conventional wisdom about her intelligence from an ex-Clinton aide who, oddly, has ended up doing some work for Palin:

Now by “smart,” I don't refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don't really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I'd heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly
who she is.

I find all this quite easy to believe. Does that mean I think she's a towering intellect, the next Reagan/Thatcher etc? No. A combination of the moribund state of her party, and her premature ascent to the national stage, means that she's not being forced to use that brain to do any real thinking. She's interesting as a figure, but she really has nothing interesting to say. Anyway, I suspect she relies too heavily and lazily on her 'instincts' to do the hard thinking required to develop a distinctive political vision. But I do think she'll emerge as very strong contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 and that she'll come back as an improved, more substantial version of her 2008 self.

UPDATE: here's Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live head honcho, on his brief experience of working with her:

Michaels doesn’t agree with anything Palin believes but does think she’ll be continually underestimated just as “our end of the world” continually underestimated Ronald Reagan. “There’s a real intelligence there,” he said. “She connects with people. She's got a confidence. Whatever it means to be a star she is. Plus I think she will do the work. She has incredible discipline.”