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"OK, now you say, 'Welcome to the Oval office, Mr Obama'."
Obama and Romney had lunch yesterday. What fun that must have been for both men.
Politico has an interesting story about the relationship between presidents and their former rivals or predecessors. I didn't know that Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford became close after Carter's victory - "almost best friends". I doubt this will happen to these two.
Susan Rice, America's ambassador to the UN, and the woman that Obama wants to succeed Hillary Clinton at State, is meeting with John McCain, at her request, to discuss what the fuck his problem is McCain's concerns over her response to the Benghazi attack.
If you need the background on McCain's opposition to Rice's appointment to Secretary of State, read this. It seems to me that while there may be people at fault over Benghazi, Rice isn't one of them (actually, the person with more to answer for is David Petraeus). She gave what proved to be a misleading characterisation of the attacks in the days after they happened, because she was reading from what proved to be a misleading CIA briefing note.McCain knows this but is intent on shooting the messenger. Why? Well, the key to everything with John McCain is to understand that he views all of US politics through a singular prism: does this represent a slight to me or not? For McCain, the political is very personal.
By opposing Rice, he can get back at Obama, who slighted him by winning the presidential race in 2008. He can also get back at Rice herself, who, as one of Obama's team during that campaign, made a catty comment about his tendency to grandstand:
So that's what this is all about.
I think Rice would make a good SoS. First, because she's obviously very close to Obama, which makes her instantly powerful in negotiations with other countries. Second, I like the fact that she's quite an undiplomatic diplomat, who believes strongly that foreign policy involves moral rights and wrongs, and that some people are simply assholes and ought to be addressed as such.
But let her get confirmed first. In this meeting, she needs to grit her teeth and sooth McCain's sensitive ego - to stroke his hair and tickle his belly (I am speaking figuratively).
UPDATE: So, uh, that went well.
Bobby Jindal (AP).
So anyway, with 2012 out of the way we can start obsessing over the 2016 primaries, which promise to be absolutely fascinating, particularly on the Republican side. More on this in weeks to come but right now let's just note the first potential GOP contender to begin staking out a position: Louisiana's governor, Bobby Jindal.
Jindal has long been talked of as a future nominee. He's bright (a degree in political science from Oxford) and accomplished, being midway through a second term as governor at the age of 41. He's been an effective and popular governor of Louisiana, overseeing a radical post-Katrina education programme (much of the New Orleans school system literally got swept away in the floods) which has won admiration around the world, raising standards for poor, African-American kids. He's got conservative cred because of his refusal to take (at least some of) the Obama stimulus, and his hardline beliefs on abortion (he's a Catholic). And of course he has the unusual distinction of being a Republican politician who isn't white.
His national prospects received a setback in 2009 when he was chosen to give the party's response to Obama's first State of the Union and did a dreadful job, communicating with all the vibrancy of a cardboard box and employing an anecdote of rather dubious truth value.
Jindal's SOTU response was bad partly because he seemed to be parroting party talking points, and poorly. But he's now talking with the urgency of a man who has discovered his political mission. In an interview on Monday he said:
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything...We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys...It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated...We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”
No senior Republican politician - not even Chris Christie - has dared be as blunt about the party's malaise. But that wasn't the end of it. Yesterday, Jindal commented on Mitt Romney's unseemly explanation of his defeat. Romney, talking to his donors on a conference call, said Obama won because he handed out "gifts" to minorities and young voters. Other senior Republicans, like Marco Rubio, cautiously distanced themselves from Romney's remarks. But Jindal really hammered him:
“I think that’s absolutely wrong,” Jindal said later Wednesday at a news conference in Las Vegas at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association. “We have got to stop dividing the American voters. We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent..."
Then, in a CNN interview he reiterated his point:
"This is completely unhelpful," Jindal told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." "This is not where the Republican Party needs to go. If you want voters to like you, the first thing you've got to do is like them first."
That last sentence - if you want voters to like you, the first thing you've got to do is like them first - is, I think, simple but brilliant. It nails the problem with Romney's remarks, which was one of tone and tenor as much as substance. It expresses, in a few words, a profound political truth - a lesson that the modern Tory Party had to learn the hard way after 13 years out of power, and one that successful politicians like Reagan, Blair and Clinton, understand instinctively. Jindal is doing his party a service by spelling it out, but it can't be faked - the last two Republican candidates tried and failed. For all the ardent talk about loving America, right now many Republicans seem to be baffled and repelled by many Americans. That's got to change if they want to win again.
John Coyne's thank you party. (Yana Paskova/NYT)
One of the best traditions of New York life is the esteem and affection in which the managers and doormen of its apartment buildings are held. Another is the way its inhabitants come together in a crisis. This lovely story, as reported by the NYT, combines both.
Its about John Coyne, resident manager of a venerable building called the Osborne, across the street from Carnegie Hall. When the storm hit, part of a nearby construction crane came loose and was twisting ominously in the wind. Everyone in the immediate area, including the Osborne's residents, was evacuated. Coyne sneaked back into the building using a ladder, to feed the cats and water the plants, keeping the residents up to date on what was going on in the following days and generally reassuring them that their homes were OK. Once the residents were safely back they threw him a surprise party to say thank you.
I enjoyed reading the whole report but particularly this bit, which tells you so much about the kind of people who live in the Osborne. The reporter asks one of the residents to describe the disturbing sound of the crane coming loose:
“If you know the opera ‘Salome,’” said Naomi Graffman, who has lived in the Osborne since 1962, “the way the double basses play as they’re starting to cut off John the Baptist’s head — it sounded like that.”
Ah, yes, of course. Just like that.
(Full story here.)
Paula and Scott Broadwell. (Photo: Daniel Coston/Charlotte Observer)
The Petraeus scandal, which just keeps on giving, is bonkers and boggling and utterly compelling. But the more that emerges, the more I'm thinking, really? Two adults who had an affair? This was the subject of an FBI investigation? This has led to the resignation of one of America's most accomplished officials from one of its most important posts? As far as we know, no security interest was compromised, and no vital information leaked. Yet the state has been rocked because two people did what ordinary people sometimes, in fact rather often, do. It wasn't just that, of course: America's generals have also been sending flirtatious emails and attending parties. I mean, really, how dare they.
Having quietly announced his retirement from novel-writing, I'd be surprised if Philip Roth isn't itching to get back into the game. The whole episode reminds me of this passage from The Human Stain, which is set during the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal:
It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?", when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing a legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. It was the summer when - for the billionth time- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.
(I found the transcription here).
I'm not a particular fan of Petraeus but I have some sympathy for him, and for Broadwell. We are witnessing the public humiliation of two families, and the deep embarrassment of two more (the Kelleys and the Allens). And for what? For our own cheap satisfaction.
Oh, I've heard this high-minded stuff about how Petraeus and Allen shouldn't have allowed themselves to get distracted when they're commanding wars. Do we really think human beings function better when they are monomaniacally obsessed by one thing to the exclusion of all else? I'd have thought that distractions, and solace of one kind or another, are vital to the performance of any high-stress job. I'm not saying the U.S army should encourage affairs (oh by the way this really has opened up the whole question of straights in the military), but everyone needs time out, and not everyone plays Scrabble.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all for cheap satisfaction, and I'm enjoying the juicy details too. But let's call it for what it is.
(P.s In case you need reminding that Paula Broadwell is not a two-dimensional femme fatale then read this.)
As you may have noted before, this familiar map always gives the impression that the Republicans won, whatever the result of the election. The U.S. looks like it has a vast heartland dominated by honest-to-God Republicans, while a minority of Democrats gather in plush lounges around the edges of the country, sipping cocktails and talking down America. This is because (as discussed previously) Republicans tend to do better in more rural states that cover larger geographic areas, while Democrats do better in more urbanised states, with plenty of voters but less space. In other words, the conventional political map fails to take account of population distribution; hence the dominance of red.
Of course, a map that gives an impression at odds with reality is by definition a bad map. While it may be impossible to draw a map that perfectly corresponds with America's politics, it turns out to be instructive to look at different ways to do it, as Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan, demonstrates in a fascinating post. He has created a map in which the states are sized roughly according to the size of their populations. In this map, Rhode Island is twice the size of Wyoming, because despite being 1/60 as big it has twice as many inhabitants.
(Read the whole post, complete with several further refinements of this map.)
Philip Roth (Photograph by Chris Maluszynski/Moment/Redux)
Posting may be light for a couple of weeks because I'm travelling (I'm currently in Hong Kong). I see there have been some news explosions since I left home base. First, and most bizarrely, David Petraeus resigns over an affair. Then the boss of the BBC resigns after 54 days in the job (being skilled at strategic ignorance will get you so far but it doesn't serve you so well at the top). Finally, and perhaps most momentously, Philip Roth resigns from novel-writing.
A few years ago Roth, now 78, engaged on a kind of audit of his life's work. First, he reread his favourite authors (Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Hemingway). Then he reread all of his own novels:
I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.
That is as much as anyone can ask for, or expect of themselves. So now he's done:
If I write a new book it will probably be a failure. Who needs to read one more mediocre book?
Ah, how I wish more artists - novelists, playwrights, musicians - took that attitude. It's the very definition of resigning with honour.
Columbus, Ohio.
A common theme of the post-match commentary on this election is that it revealed long-term trends in the US electorate which spell bad news for the Republican Party in its current form. I agree with this, but it's important to note that these trends are not just about ethnicity (oh and by the way, media organisations, white people are "ethnic" too).
The originator of the "long-term demographic trouble for the GOP" analysis is a political scientist called Ruy Texeira. In 2002 Texeira co-authored a much discussed book called The Emerging Democratic Majority, arguing that the growing diversity and urbanisation of America's population was benefiting one party more than the other. Two years later, George Bush won a second term and Texeira's theories became less fashionable. Now they are being looked at again. After all, Republicans have polled a minority of the popular vote in five out of the last six elections.
A caricature of this view, usually made by its critics, is that the Republicans will never win again. But of course they will. The Democrats have their own problems, and political parties adapt, albeit slowly. But that's the point: unless the GOP adapts to the new America, it will be at a growing disadvantage in every presidential election (in midterm elections they will tend to do better because the people that come out to vote tend to be older and whiter, for now).
It won't be a quick fix, because it requires a whole shift in attitude and outlook. As Texeira points out in this interview, winning the Hispanic vote isn't just about immigration:
I wrote a piece arguing that [GOP stances on immigration], in terms of projecting hostility toward that population, it clearly hurt them. But I also thought if you looked at Hispanics’ other opinions — opinions on the economy and opinions on the role of government, on education — just look at a wide variety of views on who can handle the economy, they’re very much aligned with the Democratic Party, and an activist view of government, and not with the hardcore, quasi-libertarian approach of the Republicans, which putting Paul Ryan on the ticket seemed to underscore.
As you can see, it's not just about ethnicity or demographics - or, at least, it's at the point where demographics dissolve into culture, attitudes and political instincts. In short, the outlook of American voters is changing. If you want a simple explanation why, this from Gail Collins and David Brooks (NYT columnists "in conversation"), is pretty good. Brooks first:
David: Ronald Reagan won with an electorate that was nearly 90 percent white. Now the electorate is around 72 percent white. And the white population is different — more educated, more centered in college towns, more socially diverse, more likely to live in single-person households.
That means they are less likely to subscribe to the cowboy ethos of the rugged individual. It doesn’t mean they want to return to the New Deal, but it does mean that the old Republican narrative can no longer win a majority.
Gail: I’ve always thought the big political division was empty places versus crowded places. People who live in crowded places just naturally appreciate how useful government is. Empty-place people don’t see the point. Maybe this is the death of the empty-place vision.
For all the talk about ethnicity, the more fundamental change is that more people are living in cities and relying on complex infrastructure and government services every day. If you're Hispanic you're even more likely to rely on these services at some point because you're more likely to be working your way into the middle class. Urban dwellers are also more likely to be surrounded by neighbours and colleagues who are racially different, openly gay or smoke pot, and over time, what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect means that these things become normalised for more people.
In Ohio, Obama won because he ran up huge margins in the cities, including Columbus. To win the presidency in 2016, the GOP must do more than nominate Marco Rubio and soften its immigration stance. It needs to catch up with the rest of the country and leave the small town behind.
This was a narrow victory in terms of the popular vote. But in every other way, it's massive.
There's a Democrat in the White House.
A Democrat majority in the Senate.
Obama won nearly all of the swing states.
He won America's fastest-growing demographics, including an overwhelming majority of the Latino vote, and a decisive majority of the youth vote.
America has its first openly gay senator, its first Asian female senator.
Gay marriage has been approved by voters in three states.
Two states have voted to approve marijuana.
Michelle Bachmann has lost her seat (UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Seems she held on, just) and other prominent Tea Partiers lost their races.
Universal healthcare insurance is now entrenched and will soon seem normal.
In other words, the liberals won. Big. And conservatives lost.
This commentator suggests that yesterday may come to be regarded as an equivalent turning point to Reagan's victory in 1984.
Four years ago, there was much talk of the long-term shrinking of the GOP base. Then the 2010 "shellacking" happened and that talk went away. Well, it's back, and with a vengeance. 2010 now looks like a blip. At this rate, the Democrats will hold the White House for another twelve years.
America is changing. Will the Republican Party?
Ever eager to put the 47% moment behind him, Mitt Romney finished his campaign talking about "one nation" (did he do a Biden and borrow from Britain's leader of the opposition?). Obama also finished with talk of bringing people together.
It's a truth of modern American politics that the amount of rhetoric about unification is in direct proportion to the polarisation of its electorate. Everyone wants the republic to be united again, but only if it's subject to the rules of their own side.
Having said that, one of the most striking aspects of this year's election is how similar the two candidates are. Most presidential elections, including and especially the one before this, are studies in personality contrast. Not this one.
Both Obama and Romney are cool and cautious by nature. They share a deep distrust of hot-blooded ideologues and regard themselves as, first and foremost, problem solvers. Both are introverts, happiest by themselves or with close friends and family. Both are highly competent politicians who are uncomfortable with much of the business of politics.
At a time when the tenor of the American debate, always brassy and full-throated, has become feverish and sometimes demented by antipathy, the men chosen by each party to represent them in this contest embody the opposite qualities. It's almost as if the electorate knows, at some level, that it needs restraining, not rousing.
Partly as a result, this campaign was pretty dull. It was reasonably well-mannered, more so than 2008 or 2004. There were blessedly few refrains of the perennial "dirtiest campaign ever" chorus. But it was also lacking in content. Without a contrast in temperaments to assess, it was even harder not to notice that, in their debates, Obama and Romney didn't dare discuss their (substantial) differences in anything but the most sterilised and ersatz terms. This at a time when one of the biggest and most momentous economic decisions in America's history is right around the corner.
There's a reason for this tacit agreement to evade real debate about the country's future, other than the innate caution of the candidates: neither man has a political mission, other than to make himself president. That's the downside of their pragmatism. Both are running for president because, essentially, they think they are, or would be, good at the job.
That's not a terrible reason to run. The last four years have shown that while Obama may have over-estimated his own gifts he wasn't wrong to imagine he had many of the qualities needed to be a good president. I suspect Romney would fill the role out pretty well too. But unlike Clinton, or Reagan - or in this country, Blair, to whom a similar contrast can be drawn with Cameron - they haven't spent many years doing the hard work of fighting political battles, winning and losing elections, marinating themselves in retail party politics, all the time thinking and rethinking why they want power. In different ways, they've taken short cuts to the top, confident they would work out what to do after they arrived. That makes it hard for them to convey a vision of where they want to take the country, because the truth is, they don't really know. They just know they're the guy to take it there.
I want Obama to win because I think a Republican takeover of the executive, and a more conservative judiciary, would be bad news for America. But between the two men, it is a close call. As David Brooks argued here, gloomily but persuasively, Romney is more likely to get big things done in office. If only because Republicans will be more willing to work with him, he'll find it slightly less difficult to get a deal done on the deficit that includes tax rises, and to pass immigration reform.
I do think Obama deserves re-election because, for all his shortcomings, he has done a good job in near impossible circumstances over the past four years. I just wish I believed that he has a plan for the next four.
New York. Photo: AP via Jessica Testa.
I was due to be in New York today to see friends and watch the election, complete with Wolf Blitzer and 4D holograms, but my trip was one of the less important casualties of Sandy.
It's going to take a while for the city, and for the whole region affected, to recover. Marbury wishes everyone well and is somewhat encouraged by this photo.
(Photo: Michael Finnegan)
This photograph, from today (Sunday), shows voters lining up to vote in Columbus, capital of Ohio, the most vital battleground state in this election.
There's always something moving about seeing the quiet determination of people to exercise this right (though they could take a few tips from the Brits about queuing strategy).
Meanwhile, less happily: Florida, oh Florida.
Via Nate Silver: Average of national polls Thursday: Obama +0.9. Friday: Obama +1.2. Saturday: Obama +1.3. Today (so far): Obama +1.4 (UPDATE: 1.9). Not seeing much evidence of MIttmentum here.