I’ve just read an extraordinary blog post. This is how it begins:
I have a confession to make.
I did not vote for Barack Obama today.
I’ve openly supported Obama since March. But I didn’t vote for him today.
Read it in full. It’s not what you think.
Thanks to Nicci and Sean for finding it.
Yep. See here.
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.
Intriguing joint venture by ASUS and Intel — a site which enables visitors to vote for the features they’d like to see in a notebook computer. A marketing stunt? Or something more profound?
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.
I’m astonished by the vox pops that journalists are doing in the US as they interview ‘undecided’ voters. Time and time again one hears people whining about Obama that they “don’t really know anything about him”. On what planet have these people been living for the past year? I know that most voters aren’t terribly interested in politics, but this is ludicrous. Does it mean that they can’t think of a respectable way of explaining why they’re not going to vote for a black candidate?
Robert Winder has a lovely essay in the Guardian about Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. How does it read now, in the light of Bush, Iraq and thWall Street maelstrom? He concludes that
The Right Stuff is now best read as an elegy – a remembrance of vanished times. It describes a place and a mood that have crashed and burned. The seeds of this melancholy may already have been in place when the book was published – Wolfe was describing the early 60s from the vantage point of the late 70s, after all. But he was still able to work in an optimistic, fizzing spirit that has now quite dissolved: no one writes pop songs about astronauts the way that Bowie/Elton John/Pink Floyd and company once did. A book that once juddered with thoughts of the future now comes suffused with the past. Nostalgia for the 60s usually involves thoughts of free love, raw music and ditzy drugs, not the panic attacks inspired by Sputnik and the missile testing in Arizona and Florida. Wolfe was thrilled to find such subjects, and had superb, pyrotechnic fun with them. Who would have thought, only a generation later, that his eager, loop-the-loop prose would seem so sad?
He’s right. Sigh.
Michael Dales has a wonderful picture on Flickr that he took at the Canadian War Memorial.
Microsoft had a busy week at its Professional Developers Conference, and announced lots of new developments — in addition to Azure. ArsTechnica has a useful roundup.
