November 2008

Via Cosma, Canadian historian Rob MacDougall on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promises made at the country’s inception:

“We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … King went on: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note … a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And here Sancho [Panza] or Sacvan [Bercovitch] whispers to the guy standing next to him, “Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic–Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest–did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? … Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789.”

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

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I don’t think this is exactly what Kieran had in mind when he suggested that the Amazon recommendation engine might be broadening its scope, but I just received this:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Political Liberalism (Columbia Classics in Philosophy) by John Rawls have also purchased Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America by Mike Huckabee. For this reason, you might like to know that Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America will be released on November 18, 2008.

Via John Gruber.

I’ve not been able to access my work voicemail for the past month. I moved offices, but took my number with me. When I tried to access my voicemail, I kept getting a “number not recognized” message. Today, they finally told me that I had to dial a new and different number for voicemail access, different, that is, from the standard variation on the number people call to speak to me (or to _leave_ the voicemail). So I dial the new code. There’s a a month-old message from the voicemail people: “thanks for your inquiry about not being able to access your voicemail. You can’t access it on the old number, you’ll need to dial XXXX instead.”

Over the fold is my piece from today’s Australian Financial Review on the task facing Obama. The original version started “Following his convincing election victory, Barack Obama can look forward to taking office under the most challenging conditions facing any incoming president since Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933,”, but another columnist came in with an almost identical lead, so I changed mine. But the great thing about a blog is that you can choose which version you like best (or dislike least). The original opening paras are at the end of the post.

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Andrew Gelman with a first pass at analyzing the election data.

This figure illustrates point 5 below — the election was more of a partisan swing than a redrawing of the electoral map. Andrew’s impressions:

1. The election was pretty close. Obama won by about 5% of the vote, consistent with the latest polls and consistent with his forecast vote based on forecasts based on the economy. … 3. The gap between young and old has increased–a lot: But there was no massive turnout among young voters. According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters this time were under 30, as compared to 17% of voters in 2004. (By comparison, 22% of voting-age Americans are under 30.)

4. By ethnicity: Barack Obama won 96% of African Americans, 68% of Latinos, 64% of Asians, and 44% of whites. In 2004, Kerry won 89% of African Americans, 55% of Latinos, 56% of Asians, and 41% of whites. So Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.

5. The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.

Whatever disappointments and unhappiness lie in the future, my two sons are going to grow up in an America where it is a _done deal_ that an African-American with a foreign-sounding name can run for President and win. That’s pretty nice to wake up to.

With the networks calling Ohio for Obama, the only question remaining for today is the size of the win. I’m rushing to write a column (for the Australian Financial Review) but I thought I’d open up a post for anyone who wanted to comment.

According to Arnie, McCain has 100% of the vote. Well, it made me laugh.

Shortly after the Republican convention, I received the following complaint about CT:

How is it possible that the Housemartins have NEVER been mentioned on Crooked Timber?

A mystery indeed. My correspondent was reminded of the Housemartins by the people who were grinning themselves to death. in St Paul. But why complain to me?:

I know, I know, Holbo is random pop culture guy, but you seem to be the best candidate for CTer with (at least prior) affection for “Take Marx… Take Jesus… Take Hope.”

That’s probably right (and I like the gentle suggestion that I am the not-popular culture guy, or, as one of our readers said to me, the “archaic lower-middle-brow British culture” guy). I even saw the Housemartins once, which given my record of attending live popular music events demonstrates remarkable affection (none for 15 years, and only about 10 which didn’t involve Loudon Wainwright III or Richard Thompson before that). I’ve even got all their albums (well, both of them).

But, I thought, is there a song for today? Sitting on a Fence?; Get up off our knees?; Heaven Help Us All (introduced by Peely)?; We’re Not Going Back? (The Christians among you are bound to recognise the sentiments in Sunday isn’t Sunday — I have a “Antidisestablishmentarians for Obama” button, which I got because I figured it announced my membership of a vanishingly small minority group.. My friend told me I was being elitist. “Why, antidisestablishmentarianism is a non-elite view, here”; “Yes, but only elitists know what it means”. What can you do?)

Take your pick. And, sure, the world will be a little bit better tomorrow, but not enough better that you can’t make it better still.

Update: Doug K nominates Caravan of Love. I could go with that.

Recently Aaron S. Edlin, Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan wrote “an article in The Economists’ Voice”:http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol5/iss6/art6/?sending=10393 setting out their argument that rational altruists should vote. A more careful version of the argument is “here”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rational_final6.pdf, and if you like there is also a “mocking response by Andrew Leonard in Salon”:http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/10/31/voting_for_charity/index.html, and a more sensible “counter-mock by Gelman on his blog”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/11/rationality_of.html.

There’s something right about the argument Edlin et al are making; it being rational for you to vote does require a degree of altruism. But I think their model (a) makes some fairly heroic assumptions, and more importantly (b) doesn’t explain why so many people in America should go vote today. Below the fold I give a slightly different reason for voting, one that applies in all 50 American states. The short version is that you should vote today because it increases your chances of getting a good outcome next time.
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Pejman Yousefzadeh: “Vote to remind a certain Presidential candidate that he and his surrogates can’t get away with the claim that they only intend to raise taxes on the rich.”

I guess Pejman Yousefzadeh endorses Barack Obama for President. Because, after all, the only way to hold Obama accountable for claiming that he only intends to raise taxes on the rich is, presumably, to gather evidence that this was not his true intention. I fail to see how it will be possible to gather more evidence about his true intentions than we’ve got already if he loses.

But seriously: I think it’s significant that the complaint against Obama is not that his tax plan is bad (who would say that, if they wanted to win over voters?) No, the complaint has to be that Obama’s tax plan isn’t Obama’s. Republicans have had such a rhetorical advantage on the tax question for decades that it’s remarkable to see them so hobbled this time out. That’s change I can believe in!

Jerome Weeks points out a trend-in-formation: literal video, which is something like Situationism minus Marx plus YouTube:

It’s a form of satire that seems to work best with the more inflated, ’80s or ’90s pop-rock videos, the ones that were developed as little storytelling movies, even though the “movies” had little to do with the song itself or seemed patently pretentious, with or without the song. In short, there’s a profound disjuncture among the posturing twit-lead singer, what he’s supposedly singing about and what’s going on all around him. As they used to say about political photo-ops: It doesn’t matter what the candidate is saying, it’s the background he’s in front of and how he looks….

In a literal video, the lyrics provide a running description of what is happening onscreen — commentary that, as Jerome says, “repeatedly calls attention to (and calls into question) the video’s image choices, making them appear laughably random. Or it subverts any greater, intended import they might have by flatly describing the images and thus “grounding” or re-contextualizing them in a more self-consciously ‘down-to-earth’ matter, while actually presenting a wise-ass commentary on them.” [click to continue…]

No doubt if I had more time I’d find the right answer to this question, but I’m lazy and/or pressed for time, so here goes. For quite a while now the polls which include Nader and Barr show a significantly bigger distance between Obama and McCain than those which exclude Nader and Barr. I thought I understood why, but when my 12 year old asked me to explain my explanation was so bad that not only did it collapse as I tried to articulate it, but it also disappeared (I no longer remember what my supposed understanding was). Why is it? Barr seems to get about 1%, and Nader 2-3% when they are included (both numbers seem remarkably high to me, but what do I know?). Could it be that Nader, as well as Barr, is drawing mainly from McCain (protectionist Republicans who are either too racist to vote for Obama or too sophisticated to believe he’ll be a protectionist?). Or is there some technical explanation that I don’t understand?