Memex 1.1

David Remnick has a terrific essay in the New Yorker reflecting on Obama’s campaign and the role that race played in it. As with everything Remnick writes, it’s beautifully crafted and thoughtful. It ends like this:

Just a few minutes before eleven last Tuesday night, when Barack and Michelle Obama and their daughters walked out on the stage at Grant Park, and everyone around was screaming, chanting, and waving flags, the long campaign came to an end. Joy was in the faces of the people all around me, there was crying and shouting, but Obama seemed to bear a certain gravity, his voice infused not with jubilation but with a sense of the historical moment.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he began.

Obama had done it one last time. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months ago as one who stood on the “shoulders of giants,” as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and pushed it into the background. “Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time.

The same issue also has an interesting article by David Grann pondering how John McCain — a fundamentally decent man by all accounts — will recover from running a campaign which betrayed all his former principles about not taking “the low road” adopted by George Bush and Karl Rove when they destroyed his Primary campaign in 2000. Did his graceful concession speech come too late to rescue his self-respect? How can he live with himself, given the way his campaign developed into the hate-fest of the last few weeks? We will see.

From Dave Winer…

Barack Obama, who’s running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger’s Breakfast. He’s an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he’ll be President in 12 years.

The post was dated 26 July 2004.

This is Mark Newman’s ingenious cartographic way of representing how the US voted, down to county level. For more maps, see his special page on the subject.

This morning’s Observer column…

A few days ago we had the extraordinary spectacle of a Republican presidential candidate complaining that his rival had more money to spend on TV advertising than he had. To those of us who grew up in an era when conservatives always had more money and controlled the dominant communications media, this was truly extraordinary. It summoned up memories of Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock running doomed, underfunded campaigns against opponents who had cash to burn and the best PR expertise money could buy…

MORE: Fascinating video interview with Jascha Franklin-Hodge — cofounder of Blue State Digital, which built Obama’s online social-networking tools — describes how the president-elect’s social-networking strategy made for a well-oiled Election Day effort. And how it can be used in government.

John McCain’s graceful concession speech ought not to obscure some uncomfortable truths, of which the most important (and scariest) is that over 46 per cent of the US electorate voted for him and his fruitcake of a running mate. Or, as Andrew Sullivan put it:

Now all I want to say here, ahem, is that they realized all this about this person within a few days of picking her and yet they went ahead for two months bullshitting us … and risking the live possibility that she could be president of the United States at a moment’s notice after next January.

You know: I took a lot of grief for my pretty instant realization back in August that the Palin candidacy was a total farce. But when you cop to the fact that the McCain peeps knew most of that too very early on after their world-historical screw-up, you’ve got to respect and be terrified by their cynicism. I mean: country first?

And they only lost by a few points?

It’s 2.30am and I’m turning in, convinced that the nightmare of Bush/Cheney is nearly over. But before heading for bed, I came on this nice piece by Sidney Blumenthal in openDemocracy…

In 29 July 2008, President George W Bush appeared at the Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio, where he spoke about energy and then asked the audience for questions. The opportunity for people in a small town in the midwest to pose a question directly to the president of the United States is a rare one, possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “And now I’d like to answer some questions, if you have any”, said Bush. But his request was returned with silence. Bush filled the air with an awkward joke: “After seven-and-a-half years, if I can’t figure out how to dodge them, I shouldn’t…” The audience tittered nervously. Bush continued, “If you don’t have any questions, I can tell you a lot of interesting stories.” The crowd laughed again, but no one raised a hand. “Okay”, said Bush, “I’ll tell you a story.”

Intriguing Peter Beinart piece in the Washington Post, speculating on why Palin’s rhetoric hasn’t worked this time.

The relationship between prosperity and cultural conflict isn’t exact, of course, but it is significant that during this era’s culture war we’ve gone a quarter-century without a serious recession. Economic issues have mattered in presidential elections, of course, but not until today have we faced an economic crisis so grave that it made cultural questions seem downright trivial. In 2000, in the wake of an economic boom and a sex scandal that led to a president’s impeachment, 22 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their biggest concern, compared with only 19 percent who cited the economy.

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and “issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage” down to only 6 percent. It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

The economic challenges of the coming era are complicated, fascinating and terrifying, while the cultural battles of the 1960s feel increasingly stale. If John McCain loses tomorrow, the GOP will probably choose someone like Mitt Romney or Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to lead it back from the wilderness, someone who — although socially conservative — speaks fluently about the nation’s economic plight and doesn’t try to substitute identity for policy. Although she seems like a fresh face, Sarah Palin actually represents the end of an era. She may be the last culture warrior on a national ticket for a very long time.

Hmmm… we’ll see.

From Ed Felten…

Long lines to vote: Polling places will be strained by the number of voters. In some places the wait will be long – especially where voting requires the use of machines. Many voters will be willing and able to wait, but some will have to leave without casting votes. Polls will be kept open late, and results will be reported later than expected, because of long lines.

Registration problems: Quite a few voters will arrive at the polling place to find that they are not on the voter rolls, because of official error, or problems with voter registration databases, or simply because the voter went to the wrong polling place. New voters will be especially likely to have such problems. Voters who think they should be on the rolls in a polling place can file provisional ballots there. Afterward, officials must judge whether each provisional voter was in fact eligible, a time-consuming process which, given the relative flood of provisional ballots, will strain official resources.

Voting machine problems: Electronic voting machines will fail somewhere. This is virtually inevitable, given the sheer number of machines and polling places, the variety of voting machines, and the often poor reliability and security engineering of the machines. If we’re lucky, the problems can be addressed using a paper trail or other records. If not, we’ll have a mess on our hands.

How serious the mess might be depends on how close the election is. If the margin of victory is large, as some polls suggest it may be, then it will be easy to write off problems as “minor” and move on to the next stage in our collective political life. If the election is close, we could see a big fight. The worse case is an ultra-close election like in 2000, with long lines, provisional ballots, or voting machine failures putting the outcome in doubt.

Let’s hope the opinion polls are right. The omens are not good on the voting machine front.

Terrific Glenn Greenwald piece in Salon.com arguing that the modern craze for preferring to the US President as “Commander in Chief” is not only unconstitutional but dangerous.

If I could be granted one small political wish, it would be the permanent elimination of this widespread, execrable Orwellian fetish of reverently referring to the President as “our commander in chief.” And Biden’s formulation here is a particularly creepy rendition, since he’s taunting opponents of Obama that, come Tuesday, they will be forced to refer to him as “our commander in chief Barack Obama” (Sarah Palin, in the very first speech she delivered after being unveiled as the Vice Presidential candidate, said of John McCain: “that’s the kind of man I want as our commander in chief,” and she’s been delivering that same line in her stump speech ever since).

The CiC usage has been assiduously promoted by George W Bush as a way of boosting his view of untramelled presidential power (the so-called ‘unitary executive’ doctrine). After all, in the military, the CiC is someone who must be obeyed. And that’s fine in the armed forces. But the president is a civilian who happens to have been elected to the highest office in the land. His authority is constitutional, not military. If George Bush ordered me to do anything I would tell him to get stuffed — unless I worked for the executive branch of the US government (where he really is the ultimate Boss of Bosses). And so should every American citizen.

The Economist has made up its mind. I’d forgotten how it ‘voted’ in 2004 and went to check in the archive. Turns out that the magazine had anticipated the question and provided a page on previous endorsements.

Here’s how they went:

2004: John Kerry
2000: George W. Bush
1996: Bob Dole
1992: Bill Clinton
1988: No endorsement
1984: No endorsement
1980: Ronald Reagan

The only thing that’s slightly weird is the standfirst on this year’s endorsement. “America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world.” Er, does that mean that electing a 72 year-old unstable ignoramus with a VP who couldn’t locate most countries on a map would be a safe bet?

I love the Economist. Its journalism is terrific. But its editorial line is often potty.