Google Trends: Zombie Edition

I'm giving a couple of talks next week at Wofford College. One of them will be about my 2017 article "Laughing off a Zombie Apocalypse: The Value of Comedic and Satirical Narratives." Preparing for the talk, I became curious as to the continued popularity of zombies. Scholars who study popular culture have to be on the alert for changes that might leave them studying an unpopular phenomenon.

I know "The Walking Dead" (which started in 2010) is still on television, though I have not watched it in several years. Likewise, AMC has a spinoff series called "Fear the Walking Dead" and other zombie-themed shows are still on TV: "iZombie" (I have viewed season 1 and part of 2) and "Santa Clarita Diet." Today, I discovered that the long-promised sequel to "Zombieland" is set for release this October.

This would seem to indicate that the undead are not yet dead in popular culture.

For less anecdotal evidence, I turned to Google Trends. In case you are not familar with that phrase, it is a Google application that measures "Interest over time" in particular search terms. Consider this chart of searches for "zombie" since April 4, 2007 (12 years ago today):

Google says that "Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term."

This means that the peak time for popular interest in zombies was June 2012. There's been a steady decline, which seems worrisome.

For relative interest, I added the search term "Barack Obama"and the results were somewhat startling.

So, basically, people have for many years searched more frequently for information about zombies than they have for the President of the US through eight of those twelve years. Obama's rise to fame early in this period is the only real exception. Did people in the US take him for granted?

I added the search terms "Tom Brady" and "Beyoncé" to get a feel for relative differences with a prominent athlete and pop singer. The results are perhaps not surprising, at least to me:

Beyoncé is generally the most popular through this time, but Tom Brady and zombie occasionally emerge. Again, Obama was very popular when he burst on the presidential politics scene.

Then, I wondered how would this chart look if I added "Donald Trump"?

Trump's peak when he emerged as a presidential candidate set incredible new heights of popular attention. And since that date, Trump has maintained his lead over the other terms by a decent margin.

I played around with assorted celebrities, products, and ideas and discovered that Trump's peak isn't necessarily so impressive when considered against various non-political terms. For example, consider amazon, sex, and iPhone:

Through much of the period, zombie and Trump are neck-and-neck. Neither of those search terms are ever as popular as amazon, sex, or iPhone through this twelve year period.  It's not close.

Not all of that is good news.


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Riot hyperbole in history

If you are disturbed by the discussion of what is happening in Baltimore tonight, then I offer some context.

My junior year in college, 1981-1982, my debate colleague and I advocated for fairly strict limits on police use of deadly force. Among the advantages we claimed was reduction in the risk of urban riots, which historically are often triggered by police violence.

Because we were 20 years old and every argument needed to involve significant threats, we used to reference portions of this quote in virtually every affirmative debate. It is from Louis H. Masotti, et al A Time to Burn?, 1969, p. x-xi:

To a very great extent, riots are a cry of utter despair, pleading for someone to hear and respond. Yet our response has been more talk, more unfulfilled promises, more tokenism, and recently, more suppression. And while we are talking, the disillusionment and frustration of the ghetto is accelerating at a frightening pace. The civil rights efforts of the past decade and the continual bombardment of the mass media have heightened the consciousness and raised the expectations of the Negro far beyond the level of our response. Those who say that riots have nothing to do with the civil rights movement are either engaging in enormous self-delusion or are attempting to protect the good name of a phase of the movement which is more palatable to themselves and the American public. They are blind to a long history of social revolutions which have often begun as broad-based nonviolent efforts to change institutionalized injustices, only to merge as violent social revolutions when more moderate efforts failed. As a minority of slightly more than ten per cent of the population, Negroes stand little chance of winning in a violent confrontation. But before the militant leaders push the Negro community beyond the point of no return, we must do some sober thinking about the consequences of such a confrontation. American society itself would be the ultimate loser. We would become the captives of fear and hate of a magnitude that would make Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa seem like meccas for civil libertarians. Such a confrontation would make a mockery of the American Revolution and the entire history of our experiment in democracy. But even this might be a relatively minor consequence. In a mood of rage and hate, the balance of power in this nation might very well shift into the reckless hands of those who would disrupt the precarious balance of peace between the nuclear powers and plunge the whole world into nuclear holocaust.

Update: here's a review of Masotti et al from Edward B. McLean in The Review of Politics, 1970. It is not kind:

"A Time to Burn?...is not a very good book and is already quite dated. The summers of 1968 and 1969 have not supported the assumption that the 1967 summer riots were a prelude to continuing and expanding violence in the Negro areas....Although the authors insist that theirs is a scholarly work, it is far more in the vein of commentary literature....as an effective and relevant examination of the problems of race in the country in 1960 and 1970, it has little value....Serious questions can be raised about the balance and seriousness of the evidence which is the basis of the book and the support for the authors' contention that" the U.S. is a country "on the verge of a race war, and very possibly on the brink of self-destruction." 

The book was coauthored by four colleagues from the Civil Violence Research Center at Case Western Reserve University. The coauthors are Kenneth Seminatore, Jeffrey K. Hadden, and Jerome R. Corsi. That last name is probably the most familiar as he is a well-known backer of Obama conspiracy theories.



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New Look

Readers probably noticed the new banner and other minor blog updates -- the former made fairly easily thanks to Picmonkey. Once again, the photos are courtesy of government websites, so should not involve any copyright issues:

• Obama with beer
• Kansas Jayhawk
• KC Royals Blue October 2014
• Comedy-Tragedy Masks
• Earth

The last update occurred in 2010. 


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A Democratic Majority?

Photo Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

Yesterday, Democrat Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. President. His party, in fact, has won at least a plurality of the votes in five of the past six presidential elections. On average, Democrats have received about 4.5 million more votes than Republicans in every presidential election since George H.W. Bush won decisively in 1988. Was that the end of the Reagan era?

The Democratic party has also controlled the U.S. Senate since the 2006 midterm elections. Indeed, in the fifteen years between January 2001 and January 2015, Democrats will have controlled the Senate for all but four and one-half years. That's roughly two-thirds of the years to-date of the twenty-first century.

Republicans currently control the U.S. House of Representatives, but this is thanks largely to gerrymandering and quirks of political geography. Democratic candidates in the 2012 elections received one million more votes than did Republicans. Indeed, FairVote.org has estimated that Democrats were actually preferred roughly 52-48% by the electorate in the most recent elections. The Democrats controlled a majority of the House from January 2007 until January 2011, which means they have won a meaningful majority of votes cast in three of the past four congressional elections.

Why mention these facts? Well, it is interesting how quickly political reality can change. Remember when some pundits and insiders were predicting a "durable" majority position held by the Republican Party?

That alleged majority was built largely on the Republican control of the south and the exurbs. To get a taste of the era, consider the following analysis that I found while going through old drafts of posts that were never posted on this blog. The piece was written by Ronald Brownstein in the February 2006 issue of The American Prospect. The columnist was reviewing four contemporary books about the South and American politics:

The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the South has grown so pronounced that it swamps the Democratic strengths elsewhere and provides the GOP with its margin of majority for both Congress and the White House.

Consider the Senate. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky -- the generally accepted political definition of the South -- Republicans hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats. In the rest of the country, Democrats control seven more Senate seats than the GOP....

The same is true in the House. Outside the South, Democrats hold a 152-140 edge in House seats....The imbalance is even more pronounced in the race for the White House. In 2000, Al Gore won just over 70 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. But George W. Bush narrowly won the White House because he swept all 165 Electoral College votes in the 13 southern states. Four years later, John Kerry won 68 percent of the Electoral College votes outside the South. But Bush won because he again swept the 13 Southern states -- this time worth 168 Electoral College votes after population growth measured in the 2000 Census.

In my review of the 2004 presidential election results, I noted some "ongoing demographic changes" that were already influencing voting patterns in Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia. I described these as a "good sign for Democrats for 2008 and beyond," even though they had just experienced their most disappointing election of the past quarter century.

I suspect, somewhere, Republican analysts are looking at the most recent voting and demographic data in an effort to find some pathways to victory in 2016.


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2020 Presidential Election: A Blue Blowout?

Photo credit: Troy McCullough (Idle Type)

Last Friday, Congress certified the 2012 Electoral College results and Barack Obama was officially reelected by a tally of 332 to 206. Unofficially, the Associated Press counted the number of individual votes the candidates received in nationwide balloting. In the AP's final election result, Obama got 51.1% of the vote, while Mitt Romney received 47.2%.

Many analysts have already highlighted the startling vote percentages Barack Obama achieved in 2012 among Latino and Asian voters. Here's how the Boston Globe framed it on November 9, 2012:

Exit polling by The New York Times showed Asian-Americans voted for Obama over Romney 73 percent to 26 percent, after backing him against John McCain 62 to 35...

Obama’s 47-point advantage among Asian-Americans on Election Day was bigger than his edge among Latinos, 44 points, or women, 11 points.

In 2008, Obama beat John McCain among Latinos by about two-to-one: 67% to 31%.  Romney managed to win only 27% of the Latino vote in 2012, while Obama won 71%. That's a bit better than 2.5 to one.

Given demographic changes, Latinos are expected to be an even greater electoral force in the coming decades. In 2010, there were about 50 million Hispanics living in the US, or about 13% of the population. By 2030, the numbers will be 78 million and they will comprise almost 22% of the population.

Asian-Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the US. There were just over 17 million Asian-Americans counted in the 2010 census, constituting 5.6% of the population. If the last decade's population growth holds up, there will be more than 25 million Asian American in the US in 2020. The US government forecasts 20 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders living in the US by 2020. By 2050, they are expected to make up nearly 10% of the US population.

Unless Republicans can increase their appeal to these demographic groups, they are in for more electoral disasters. Republican election strategist Ed Gillespie pointed out in January 2012 that his party would be in big trouble by 2020 if even 2008 voting patterns held:

“If the Republican Party nominee in 2020—just two elections after this one--gets the same percentage of the white, African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American vote, according to current projections the Democrat will win the White House by 14 percentage points.”

In the policy realm, Vice President Joe Biden already predicts that the Republican party will recognize the reality and cooperate with Democrats to pass immigration reform in the new Congress.


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Turnout Unskewed?

I haven't blogged much about the presidential "horse race" this year. However, I've read a large number of articles about the state of the race and am generally convinced by the data and analysis presented by Nate Silver, Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, etc. Using primarily state-based polling data, these analysts see a solid lead for Barack Obama. In this work, the President's well-established lead in Ohio is a key firebreak that Mitt Romney cannot easily overcome.

Many conservative websites point to the Gallup likely voter national polling (temporarily suspended because of Hurricane Sandy) and challenge Silver et al. Romney has been winning handily in Gallup LV polling. One writer on Red State called the President "toast" because of his apparent failure to appeal to independent voters in 2012. Some conservatives ridicule the "Moneyball" election analysts. If national poll averages suggest a 50-50 election, then this is best seen as a coin flip like 2000 (or 2004), not a likely Obama victory.

Silver, famously, put the odds at an Obama victory at roughly 2-to-1 for many weeks and that ratio is now creeping past 3-to-1 towards 4-to-1. Wang thinks the President's chances are over 90%. Linzer is also confident that Obama will win.

If you read Silver consistently (or Linzer or Wang), they have at one time or another explained why all the conservative arguments are wrong. They don't employ ideology or wizardry, they use math.

For example, some critics and skeptics argue that Obama cannot win because young people and other enthusiastic 2008 voters are disillusioned with his presidency and will not vote next week. This will significantly depress 2012 turnout and pave the way for enthusiastic Republican anti-Obama voters to tilt the election to Romney. Silver responds analytically:

Suppose, for example, that you take the consensus forecast in each state. (By “consensus” I just mean: the average of the different forecasts.) Then you weigh it based on what each state’s share of the overall turnout was in 2008, in order to produce an estimate of the national popular vote.

Do the math, and you’ll find that this implies that Mr. Obama leads nationally by 1.9 percentage points — by no means a safe advantage, but still a better result for him than what the national polls suggest.
What if turnout doesn’t look like it did in 2008? Instead, what if the share of the votes that each state contributed was the same as in 2004, a better Republican year?

That doesn’t help to break the discord between state and national polls, unfortunately. Mr. Obama would lead by two percentage points in the consensus forecast weighing the states by their 2004 turnout.

Or we can weigh the states by their turnout in 2010, a very good Republican year. But that doesn’t help, either: instead, Mr. Obama leads by 2.1 percentage points based on this method.

Ohio polls close at 7:30 pm ET, though anyone in line at that time can still vote. Conceivably, the election could be effectively over if Obama clearly wins this key state at an early hour. On the other hand, there are going to be a large number of provisional ballots in Ohio-- perhaps more of them than the margin between Obama and Romney.  Since those ballots are not counted for 10 days, we might wake up next Wednesday without a clear winner. I find that unlikely, but these are the range of alternatives.

I would note that Obama will likely retain the presidency without Ohio, Florida,  and North Carolina (all states in won in 2008) if he holds on to the appropriate combination of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin. Silver finds that Obama has a 1 to 4 point lead in each of those states.


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The Underlying Social Contract

By now, these lines from Barack Obama have been burned into the 24/7 news cycle by the American right: "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen." Mitt Romney on the campaign trail and Fox News in its programming (presuming you see a difference) have apparently been using it relentlessly.

Here's the video for those who have missed the uproar:



Here is the wider context from the White House website:

     I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them.  So I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way.  We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts.  We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more.  (Applause.)  And, by the way, we’ve tried that before -- a guy named Bill Clinton did it.  We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine.  We created a lot of millionaires.

     There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.  (Applause.)

     If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

     The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.  I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service.  That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.  That’s how we funded the GI Bill.  That’s how we created the middle class.  That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam.  That’s how we invented the Internet.  That’s how we sent a man to the moon.  We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people

Typical socialist, eh? He's talking about how government can promote free enterprise to grow the economy for everyone. Not exactly how Marx and Lenin mapped the future.

As others have noted, these words from Obama echo those of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (starting about 0:50):



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Obama and Wall Street

Is Occupy Wall Street fueling a populist political movement on the left that can pave the way to new economic stimulus, dramatic economic reforms in the tax code, or whatever else they might seek? I'm not trying for cheap snark -- but they have been somewhat unclear about their goals.

Could the protest movement even help energize voters on the political left, in the same way the tea party did on the right in 2010, and thus help Barack Obama and other Democrats find victory in November 2012?

Or, as my Duck of Minerva colleague Megan MacKenzie argued today, should the White House be ashamed for ignoring (and thereby "insulting") the anti-Wall Street populism for the past 10 days?

I have to disagree with Megan on this one.

Sunday, Obama blasted Bank of America for its $5 fee on debit card users. "You don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit, if your customers are being mistreated,” he said. Later, he added, “this is exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.” Was that a nod to the protesters? It sure sounds like they are on the same side.

The National Journal today criticized the President for his overt "tax the rich" populism -- an approach some of his advisors apparently think will fail in key swing states. Steve Benen dismissed that take, however.

A month ago, independents sided with the GOP by a five-point margin on creating jobs, but now we independents siding with Obama by 13 points. That’s a pretty dramatic swing in a fairly short period of time, suggesting that those arguing that the president is driving independent voters away with his new economic message have this precisely backwards.

Google the White House website for "Wall Street" and you learn that the President or his chief spokespersons have been demonizing Wall Street in some way almost every day -- and pointing out that their reform law was aimed at tightening regulation. Here's a sample from September 30:

frankly, we had seen the rules tilted against ordinary folks in favor of those who were well connected in Washington or powerful on Wall Street.

And we argued in 2008 -- and we captured I think the imaginations of a lot of people -- that we could bring about some fundamental change if we got past some of the partisan rancor and the constant politicking that had come to characterize Washington.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner today emphasized "shock" that Wall Street itself has turned against President Obama -- and he expressed (somewhat incoherent) sympathy for the concerns of those who Occupy Wall Street. For the new populist Obama, it is desirable for Wall Street to hate you. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," right?

And finally, Politico reported this additional evidence today:

“He [Obama] gets genuinely pissed off at the banks; it’s not an act,” said Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, who participated in Obama’s daily economic briefing in the Oval Office for the first year of the administration.... “The angriest I ever saw the president was when we found out about those bonuses,” he said. [The banking industry] is like a Doberman he found by the side of the road, nursed back to health, only to have them jump up and bite him.

Our newly populist president has seen his poll numbers drop month-after-month. I do not know if his new economic message will reverse those trends, but it does appear as if he's rolled up his sleeves for a fight with Wall Street. And in doing that, he's with the Occupy Wall Street crowd.


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Election 2012: Early Analysis

Photo source = whitehouse.gov

Today, I've been participating in a discussion at Outside the Beltway about Barack Obama's reelection prospects in 2012. It is still very early in the election cycle and much can change before next November.

One basic fact stands out, however, regardless of polling showing the incumbent President's vulnerability in specific states he won in 2008. Obama can win reelection in 2012 merely with the Kerry states plus Florida. That means (a) the incumbent can lose Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Omaha; and (b) Republicans could be in big trouble regardless of the economy if they select a candidate who tells Florida’s retirees that their Social Security benefit is built on an unconstitutional ponzi scheme.

If the Republican’s spend most of the next year talking about the deficit (and more tax cuts), then it’s pretty easy to imagine that Social Security would seem vulnerable under their leadership -- regardless of candidate. Everyone recalls the first major policy initiative Bush pursued after his 2004 victory, right?

Despite the concessions I make above, there are long-term demographic issues working against Republicans in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

Finally, it must be noted that campaign Obama proved a lot more effective at his job than governing Obama has. Think of the jobs bill (and related tax cuts/increases) as part of the campaign instead of as a meaningful policy initiative that is likely to gain traction in the current Congress. That perspective reveals it to be an essentially populist proposal aimed at attracting swing voters — especially when pitched directly against specific Republican counter-proposals in a two-way race, namely, additional corporate tax cuts and deregulation.


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Reynolds on Journolist

Instapundit conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (also a law professor at the University of Tennessee) published a provocative op-ed about Journolist in Sunday's Knoxville News.

Reynolds begins by pointing out that J-List was merely a list service, and "like most email lists, much of the content was profane or sophomoric." However, Reynolds quickly references a few selective (and incendiary) quotes and implies that they are all attributable to journalists. Then, he makes a few hasty generalizations about the list (and media) from these few selective quotations. Remember, the list members exchanged well north of 10,000 postings since 2007.

Yes, some of the quotes are embarassing. In turn, some of the people who wrote what was quoted have apologized for their remarks. All of the participants thought they were contributing to an off-the-record forum that they did not expect to become public.

Furthermore, some of the most incendiary quoted postings were not written by journolists, though Reynolds emphasizes at the very beginning that the list included "reporters at top publications like the Post, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, PBS, Time, etc." Reynolds never mentions that the list additionally included academics (like me), policy wonks, social movement and labor activists, etc. I don't know how many of the 400 members were working journalists, but then again neither does Glenn Reynolds. Listowner Ezra Klein long ago disabled the function that allowed members to see the email identities of the other members. Only people who posted were known to everyone else -- and many members were silent parties on the list. There's no way of knowing if they even read the content.

Moreover, many of the journalists on the list were bloggers or people who work for opinion outlets like Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, etc. This is an important distinction since many listmembers are being criticized for lack of objectivity when their job is to provide opinions. Given academic freedom, scholars like Reynolds and I are likewise free to express our opinions in private email lists or in public newspaper columns. Are the J-list critics like Reynolds saying that journalists of all types should not be free to talk privately to each other and to academics, activists or wonks?

In any case, let's consider Reynolds's discussion of what he sees as the list's worst offenses to journalism:

Some JournoList members talked about getting the FCC to shut down Fox News, or about denying web traffic to rivals deemed too conservative. And, most troubling, there were concerted efforts to choose a storyline and spread it across the outlets for which they all worked, so as to manipulate the public's perceptions. When John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, JournoList participants coordinated their attacks.

Should I begin by pointing out that Instapundit primarily links to and blogrolls fellow conservatives? His blogroll doesn't include Daily Kos or Ezra Klein, for instance, and just last week Reynolds declared that he won't send traffic to particular websites.

As has been reported, the single member who asked a question about whether the FCC could shut down Fox News (“but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”) was in fact a law professor -- and working journalists replied that it was a bad idea. Nobody actually advocated the idea. It was an hypothetical question about what might be possible, working from a assumption that Fox is an arm of the Republican Party rather than a genuine news network.

Professors -- even Reynolds -- sometimes conjecture about ideas that are quickly viewed as incredibly dumb by others with more expertise in the subject area. That doesn't mean the forum hosting the idea is to blame.

As for the remaining attacks, Reynolds provides no evidence for them. Yes, individuals on Journolist may have urged colleagues not to write about specific stories, or to emphasize other important stories in their blog posts or opinion outlets in order to shape a particular news cycle -- but there's no evidence that these posters were non-opinion journalists and no evidence that the ideas were overlooked in the media (even by J-listers). Where are the smoking guns?

Daily Caller originally quoted Chris Hayes of The Nation and some other opinion journalists arguing that the Jeremiah Wright story was a distraction from the real issues in the Clinton-Obama primary campaign and that many right-wing media outlets (like Fox) were trumpeting the Wright videos for partisan purposes. Not even Hayes's colleagues at The Nation listened to his advice as the magazine posted dozens of stories about Wright in 2008. Indeed, many J-listers undoubtedly wrote about the Jeremiah Wright story regardless of what colleagues were urging: Ezra Klein pointed out his own post the very next day after being encouraged to go silent.

By contrast, when any overtly political activism appeared on J-List, Klein shut it down.

The idea that J-list was the source for Sarah Palin attacks is mind-boggling. Andrew Sullivan was not on the list. So far as I know, no one associated with television programs featuring Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson was on J-list. Tina Fey (or SNL writers) never posted, so I presume no one from SNL was a listmember. And Sarah Palin herself provided plenty of new ammunition on a daily basis from the campaign trail. She's the one that emphasized Alaska's proximity to Russia, supported the bridge to nowhere, talked divisively to the "real America" about Barack Obama's "socialism," and claimed "Obama sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists."

The attacks on Palin practically wrote themselves. The Daily Caller posted first reactions by members of J-list who (like the American people) had very little idea of Sarah Palin's identity. Most of the participants in the thread responded to her words and ideas in any case -- and several slimey lines of attack that did appear in other political outlets were dismissed in the thread by various J-list members.

Daily Caller reproduced this email and many J-list critics have referenced it as proof that an "unofficial campaign" of journalists was secretly backing the Obama campaign:

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia[n] wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

First, Levy is not a journalist, obviously.

Second, Levy was talking about the very large group of people (including bloggers) who openly advocated for Obama in specific domains even though they were not in any way coordinating with the campaign -- or even with each other. That's why he talks about "viral" outlets. And third, Levy thought national novice Palin provided an opening for the exact kinds of attacks that unknown Obama experienced. And he was right. Andrew Sullivan's infatuation with Trig (shared by others) proves the point.

As Kathleen Parker opined last week, the J-list controversy is "weak tea— a tempest in Barbie's teacup."

Ironically, and perhaps hypocritically, Reynolds previously coauthored a book on "the appearance of impropriety," which argued that many contemporary Washington ethics battles are "tempests in ethical teapots." The book criticized the press and bureaucracy for focusing on "regulatory minutiae."

Maybe Reynolds should give it another read.


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Obama Doctrine?

I'm teaching American Foreign Policy in spring 2009 and have been thinking about how to discuss the transformation in policy from the Bush years. It's still early in the Obama term and not much academic writing has evaluated Obama's foreign policy. Katrina Vanden Heuvel recently provided a useful course:

The president's quartet of major speeches abroad--in Cairo, Prague, Moscow and Accra--began to lay out an Obama Doctrine in international affairs: support for diplomacy and the UN; commitment to a nuclear-free world; a belief that democracy is strengthened not through US intervention but when people win for themselves their rights and liberties; and engagement and cooperation with, rather than antagonism toward, the Muslim world.

Students will read these four speeches, plus the Af-Pak speech the President delivered last night.

I may well add the Nobel speech, but I want to read it first.


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Nobel

Yesterday, at Duck of Minerva, I blogged "Peace Prize" about Barack Obama winning the Nobel award. I noted my surprise since nearly all of his many peace and disarmament initiatives remain in the discussion or implementation stages. At this point, I argued, he has generated far more hope than change and the gap between them is wide.

As I thought more about it through the day, and talked to friends and colleagues, I became convinced that the Nobel committee decided to reward certain norms of behavior and process that they must think promote peace. Obama the Non-Bush has obviously changed the way the US behaves in world politics and altered the image of the US.

As a Habermasian, I can certainly appreciate the decision to reward procedural norms. However, it still feels like a form of recognition that could have waited another year or two. Most Bush critics hoped for new results as well as new processes.


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Rush Limbaugh: Idiot Savant of Bloviating

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh compared Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler. The money quotes being widely repeated are from a fairly lengthy rant:

"Obama's got a health care logo that's right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook...they [Nazi's] were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare....a Hitler-like policy that's being heralded like a Hitler-like logo...Obama is asking citizens to rat each other out like Hitler did."

Limbaugh has perhaps proven Godwin's Law for public discussion (in the context of the health care debate). Eventually, some doofus always compares an opponent to Hitler and the Nazis.

Remember just a few years ago when conservatives went crazy with outrage because two obscure videos produced by people entering an on-line ad contest compared then-President George W. Bush to Hitler? The video ads were originally hosted on the MoveOn website (along with 1500 from other competitors) and they quickly created a political firestorm.

MoveOn just as quickly denounced the ads, removed them from the web, and announced procedures to make sure the error could not repeated. The ads in question were not among the 15 contest finalists that received the lion's share of attention (and web traffic). In fact, most attention drawn to the ads came thanks to the Republican National Committee, which featured the ads on their website to highlight the evil of MoveOn.

Does anyone believe Limbaugh's reductio ad Hitlerum is going to create the same reaction -- from those on both the left and right outraged by the Bush comparison? To jar your memory, here's Fox News, January 2004:

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie called the ad, "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech."

Of course, Limbaugh has used the term "Feminazi" for years without sparking this kind of reaction from RNC chairs and others, which likely means that the outrage about the Bush comparison may have been completely partisan and cynical.


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Photos: Obama at church

The woman in the foreground is blocking my wife from the picture, but my oldest daughter is in green, stargazing:



This is the best one of the group I received:



Pictures courtesy of our friend's cousin Jimmy. Click photos for a larger image.


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Hot Rod Blagojevich

I think the best blog post about the Blagojevich case was written by Benjamin Sarlin. Check it out: "Who (Allegedly) Said It?" The post includes a list of 10 quotes and readers have to figure out whether each was from the Rod Blagojevich tapes or the mouth of Tony Soprano.

Some on the right are bound to try to link President-Elect Barack Obama to this scandal. After all, Hot Rod was apparently trying to auction Obama's vacant Senate seat and the indictment claims that Obama had a favorite for that post. However, there's good news for Obama in the indictment. Jeffrey Toobin:

It is Obama’s good fortune that the Governor seems to be pretty irritated with Obama’s lack of attention to Blagojevich’s needs. In a soon-to-be famous observation on the tapes, the Governor on Obama’s team: “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F*** them.”

Yes, I cleaned up the Governor's speech and Toobin's quote.

John Dickerson at Slate found a similar quote in the indictment:

The person who looks great in this sordid affair, in fact, is Barack Obama, whom Blagojevich refers to by another name. According to the charges:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants ... are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherf***er [the President-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him."

Yes, I cleaned up that one too.

Are high profile cases of political corruption as interesting as elections? If the evidence is of this quality, then I think they can be.


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Obama's foreign policy team

Next week, apparently, President-elect Barack Obama will be announcing his foreign policy team. Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to be named Secretary of State and other so-called "liberal hawks" (and Clinton loyalists) are expected to win positions throughout the State Department, National Security Council, and Department of Defense.

Spencer Ackerman explains the implications:

Some Obama loyalists pointed to a 2007 memo written by Harvard’s Samantha Power — a former leading Obama adviser who resigned from the campaign after making an untoward remark about Clinton — that summarized the Obama campaign’s ideological meta-critique of many of the people who might staff a Clinton-run State Dept. Titled “Conventional Wisdom vs. the Change We Need,” the campaign released Power’s memo to the press after the Clinton campaign labeled Obama naive for proposing negotiations with dictators without preconditions; for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and for proposing highly-conditioned military strikes in Pakistan against senior Al Qaeda operatives.

“It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Power, who declined to speak for this story. “The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced and even naïve.”

Some in the Obama camp are left wondering whether picking Clinton as secretary of state represents an acquiescence to such conventional wisdom. “That memo was emblematic in many ways of the difference between the two groups,” said a Democratic foreign-policy expert and Obama loyalist.

Count me as someone who thinks that "some in the Obama camp" have this upside down.

Obama's foreign policy plans are going to be America's foreign policy. Sure, every President rejects some campaign rhetoric. Bill Clinton, for example, famously reversed his pre-election position on China. However, Obama promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months, end the mindset that got the U.S. into that war in the first place, and behave as a foreign policy pragmatist. He was by no stretch a liberal hawk and nearly all of his foreign policy advisors in the campaign opposed the Iraq war. He has not backed down from any of these positions since the election and there's no reason to think that he will.

Thus, liberal hawks like Hillary Clinton embedded in prominent foreign policy positions in an Obama administration will be expected to administer the President-elect's planned transformation of US foreign policy.

While Obama supporters (dare I call them doves?) worry that their man has abandoned them, I think this is potentially a brilliant strategy. The Democratic party was split nearly 50-50 in the primary season and some of the divide reflected foreign policy differences (though probably not all that much). To the extent that Obama was less hawkish -- and I think that he was -- then what better way to reorient the party than to include the most prominent political opponent as a key policy figure?

Hillary Clinton's career success as Secretary of State will be tied to the career success of Barack Obama as President. Clinton and her loyalists will not likely dissent publicly (at least not too loudly) if they are part of the team. All of them will have a personal stake in making sure that US (i.e. Obama) foreign policy succeeds on their watch. None will want to seem like a backstabber or troublemaker. Plus, they must realize that Obama's approach was popular with the American electorate. And those who are insufficiently enthused should rightly fear that they will be tossed aside.

In sum, I don't fear a new team of rivals, at least not on foreign policy. Rather, I see these likely Clinton-team appointments as a reflection of a unified Democratic party, about to take office, ready to implement a brand new set of policies.

In two months, I predict that the chattering classes will be talking about how new U.S. foreign policymakers are effectively tossing aside many of the policies of George W. Bush. With that unified project in mind, this Clinton-Obama "divide" can be set aside.


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President-Elect Obama

America has elected a biracial man named Barack Hussein Obama to be its 44th President. Much of the TV coverage has focused on the enormity of this fact.

The racial healing symbolized by Obama's victory is significant and certainly deserves emphasis.

However, from the point of view of partisan politics, the results are arguably even more impressive. Obama openly embraces the idea of universal health care, increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and an end to the American war in Iraq. He wants to "put a price on carbon" in order to combat global warming, to substantially increase investment in domestic infrastructure, and to initiate an alternative energy program modeled after the Apollo program. In fact, Obama embraces a plethora of policies that have made previous Democratic candidates for high office gun-shy.

Moreover, Obama was labeled the most liberal member of the US Senate by a reputable third-party evaluator, and his opponents often pointed out this fact. Indeed, they tried to call him a socialist.

Some implied that Obama was anti-American. He "palled around with domestic terrorists." You get the picture.

In sum, Obama embraced a clear Democratic agenda, withstood horrible attacks about his identity, and still won an overwhelming victory. As I write, he has 4 million more votes than John McCain and 51% of the vote. I suspect his margin of victory will increase a bit as big city tallies and the west coast totals become known.

This is remarkable. Truly unique and inspiring.

Earlier tonight, I was reminded by a prominent journalist that Bobby Kennedy's last words were "Now it's on to Chicago and let's win there."

It took 40 years, but admirers who watched Obama's speech in Grant Park must think that Kennedy's words now ring true.


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On socialism

The John McCain campaign charge about Barack Obama's alleged socialism is ridiculous:

1. Obama is basically promoting progressive tax policy -- placing higher tax rates on the wealthy and lower rates on the poor. McCain himself dismissed charges that this was socialism in 2000 when a student pressed him about it. Watch this video, which I originally saw on "The Daily Show."

2. McCain seems to be complaining about tax refunds to people who don't pay taxes. This hints of Reagan's welfare queens, though McCain refuses to acknowledge that Republicans like him (and Reagan) sought the Earned Income Tax Credit so as to provide government tax rebates rather than higher minimum wages to the working poor.

Incidentally, the working poor pay payroll taxes (and regressive sales taxes), so this idea that a huge portion of the population pays no taxes is just bunk.

3. McCain's health care proposal, which includes a $5000 tax rebate to individuals, is precisely the kind of alleged "socialism" that he attacks in Obama's plan.


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On-line video and the 2008 election

Check out the Political Video Barometer on Shifting the Debate. That page includes a graph that indicates the political leanings and number of bloggers linking to particular videos related to the 2008 election. Left to right, the horizontal axis reveals videos linked by blogs rated liberal to conservative. The vertical axis reveals the quantity of links.

I clicked on a link for one of the most popular videos on conservative blogs: "Obama Citizenship" (episode 6), which claims to be the October Surprise.

The entire video is an interview with attorney Philip J. Berg, who claims to be a lifelong Democrat and former Deputy Attorney General in Pennsylvania. Berg says Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen and is thus ineligible for the presidency.

It's interesting that so many conservatives are linking to this video. I wonder if they realize that he filed lawsuits to arrest George W. Bush and Dick Cheney because of their involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy?

In any case, the arguments he makes in the video are typical of conspiracy theorists. Some of the "evidence" is based on hearsay, second-hand accounts of what some people supposedly say. Other "evidence" is based on tortured logic. Obama went to school as a child in Indonesia. The country was at war at the time and only citizens could go to school. You get the picture, right?

He claims that images of Obama's birth certificate posted on the internet are fake, basically because one image includes an Hawai'ian state seal and another does not. Snopes sides with Obama.

Berg recently lost his suit to block Obama's candidacy because the court ruled he did not have standing. That's the soft part of the ruling:

In a 34-page memorandum and opinion, the judge said Berg's allegations of harm were "too vague and too attenuated" to confer standing on him or any other voters.

Surrick ruled that Berg's attempts to use certain laws to gain standing to pursue his claim that Obama was not a natural-born citizen were "frivolous and not worthy of discussion."

The judge also said the harm Berg alleged did "not constitute an injury in fact" and Berg's arguments to the contrary "ventured into the unreasonable."

It's good to see that the right-blogosphere is focusing on important matters for the nation's future.

If John McCain was the Democratic candidate, I'm sure many of these same bloggers would be linking to similar theories about his eligibility for the presidency. Interestingly, in the case of McCain, the facts are clear about where he was born. Any uncertainty is based on the legal question as to whether a person is a "natural born citizen" if delivery occurs in a U.S. military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone.

According to a State Department manual, U.S. military installations abroad cannot be considered "part of the United States" and "A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth."

Prominent legal scholars, including Harvard's Larry Tribe, say that McCain has nothing to fear.

It's easy to imagine the right blogosphere sneering at Tribe's defense of a Democratic McCain.


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Instant Debate Analysis

1. John McCain kept saying "Senator Obama doesn't understand," but Barack Obama pretty clearly proved time and time again that he did.

2. Did McCain get the last word on every question? Whether he got the question first or last, he refused to let Obama have the last word. With the first point, this made him seem like a bully to me.

3. Obama blew the closing. I don't know why he talked about his Kenyan father when McCain had just said he wasn't qualified to be President. I suspect that people make their own judgments about qualifications, but I would have responded to something that outrageous.

4. McCain was able to dominate the agenda on economics. Obama let McCain make the discussion about taxes and spending, rather than unemployment and foreclosures.

5. Pundits are emphasizing how much Obama agreed with McCain, but that might have been intentional. Both guys have said they will bring a new kind of politics to Washington. Well, after 8 years of "my way or the highway," which guy seemed like the one who could work on a bipartisan basis to solve problems? First, you have to find room for agreement with opponents.


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