Marbury

election fatigue ii

From an otherwise interesting report on the Romney campaign's last minute switch of funds and attention to Pennsylvania, until now thought to be a fairly solid Obama state, comes this odd sentence, surely a product of journalistic election fatigue:

Republicans believe that even if they cannot stop the president from winning the state — and rob him of its crucial 20 electoral votes — they can cut into his margins with certain key demographics.

And what would be the point of that exactly?

"OK so we lost the state. But boy, you should have seen what we did to those demographic margins!"

whatever time it is, it's morning

From a collection of election memorabilia at the Smithsonian magazine:

is the campaign over?

Politics tore them apart. It took a storm to bring them together. (Photo: AP)

Buzzfeed thinks it might be. Hurricane Sandy called a premature end to it on Monday. The nation's attention, already wavering from this untitanic clash, has been fixed on New York and the East coast. The election is old hat.

Obama and Romney are addressing rallies attended by just two or three thousand voters, and the vice-presidential candidates are drawing even smaller crowds (Biden addressed 475 people in Iowa and no doubt gave every one of them a big sloppy kiss).

Here's Buzzfeed:

The rallies aren’t just smaller: They’re less intense. In Greeley, audience members half-heartedly clapped along as country artist Lee Greenwood sang karaoke to his old hits. At a Biden rally last week in Florida, a group of older women tried in vain to keep a “Yes We Can” chant going for more than 20 seconds. In Reno last week with Romney, aides cordoned off a section of a large conference hall for the candidate, initially draping more than a hundred seats because the crowd was so thin. For Obama, away from a college town, the scene is the same — a few thousand supporters, mostly older, politely wait for the candidate. The call-and-response chants and non-stop cheering of 4 years ago, or even three weeks ago, are gone.

Obama won the last news cycle, with a little help from Christie, and the heat going out of the race probably favours him more than Romney, who needs one last surge of momentum to take him over the top on Tuesday.

(Ps the above photo is from 2011, after Hurricane Irene. The Obama-Christie romance has history.)

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(Richard Tisei is a Republican congressional candidate in Massachusetts).

election fatigue

I wonder if this little girl lives in a battleground state... 

when making it difficult for ourselves is a good idea

Jack White, in a scene from the excellent documentary, It Might Get Loud.

Though New Yorkers struggling to light their homes or get to work may not thank me for posting it this week, there are some circumstances in which awkward obstacles to what we want can make us smarter and happier. Here's a piece I did for the current edition of Intelligent Life:

Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: "ease of use". When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.

It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends.

Read on.