Obama Backlash?

Years from now when historians look back at the Obama presidency and seek to determine precisely when the backlash began they will point to two historical artifacts.

This song (opens popup player - lyrics are here for those with stout hearts but weak constitutions) by Garrison Keillor from this weekend's A Prairie Home Companion and this video by a parade of . . . . luminaries(?).  (Oh, I strongly encourage you - do not listen or watch either of these.  No, I'm serious.  They.  Are.  Awful.) 

Marbury has the take down.  

Like many, I have been worried about the state of political satire and comedy under an Obama presidency, but apparently his supporters have all co-conspired to fill in the gap - taking one for the team if nothing else, I suppose.

Church and State

Recently released report from Pew on the religious makeup of Congress and contrary to race and gender it looks a lot like the rest of the country it purports to represent. The full report here and some summary from USA Today.  Of Interest at first glance:  the rise of Catholics (+11.3%) and Jews (+6.1%) and the decline of Protestants (-19.4%) over the past 48 years; and the fact that you apparently still can't get elected without claiming some faith tradition (0% unaffiliated compared to 16.1% of the population).

Inaugural Roster

Looks like Rick Warren will be delivering the invocation at Obama's inauguration.  Interesting choice.  Despite accusations otherwise from both ends of the spectrum Warren occupies a center right position in the American religious landscape, or at least the closest thing there is to a center right position, which means he's not "all that" far from the center left position at which Obama seems to be positioning most of his administration.  I'd be curious as to who else made the short list for the invocation and benediction spots.  

Of equal (greater?) interest is this bit as well:

John Williams, the composer whose music was heard at Mr. Obama’s victory party on election night in Grant Park, will compose a new piece to be played for the incoming president.

His new piece will be played by Mr. Perlman on violin, Mr. Ma on cello, Gabriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet. (Usually at this juncture in previous inaugurations an operatic soloist performs.)

Not too shabby.

PS - A previous bit on Warren.

Mylar Bags in the White House?

The Beat, Publishers Weekly's comic blog (and incidentally one of the few comic blogs I'd say was worth following for the casual fan) pontificates on what I too thought was the most interesting tidbit in last week's "50 Facts You Might Not Know About Obama" in the Telegraph:  

Eight simple words that spell hope for the world:

He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics.

Note the use of the present tense. While it’s a well known fact that young Barack was an avid comic book reader, and certainly no stranger to superhero imagery on the campaign trail, this one verb would have us believe that he still keeps a long box, or perhaps some trendy graphic novels, in his reading pile. Something like, CONAN: BORN ON THE BATTLEFIELD by Kurt Busiek and Greg Ruth, maybe? Or maybe he’s more of a Bendis fan?

We’ll leave the parsing of this particular truth to others. What with administrative transitions, and global recession and nukes in Iran, he’s got a lot on his plate, and to expect him to weigh in on the Clone Saga is just a bit much. Frankly we found this factoid just as interesting.

He has read every Harry Potter book.

Maybe the president-elect is just, you know, kind of a nerd.

Developing?

NPR on Race and the Election

NPR's ongoing series entitled, The York Project: Race & The '08 Vote, continues to be extremely good.  To state the obvious, this is the type of reporting that they do so well and for which, as a medium, radio is particularly well suited.

The Penguin Swiftboats Batman*

* Alternate Title: What the Next 30 Days Will Sound Like

VP Debate Auto-tuned

Bipartisan?  Check.

Auto-tune?  Check.

Genius?  Double check.

(via Waxy)

Sometimes Good Enough . . .

is in fact good enough.  

I'm not watching the VP debate, again, its the ancillary that interests me when it comes to politics.  And so far Intrade thinks Palin is getting the job done as the odds for her to be withdrawn have dropped almost 2 points since the debate began and almost 3 on the day:

Update:  One last glance at Intrade before turning in and Palin is down another point or two. Looks like she's done well enough to stop the Eagleton talk, good for her, but there doesn't appear to be any movement either way on the big board.

Graceful Exits?

Keep an eye on this as people begin to say things like this.  

(No Rick-Rolls I promise.)

"The road to the White House runs right through me."

Never leave Letterman hangin'.

McCain to Suspend Campaign/Debate?

That's one way to stop the poll's from dropping . . . maybe?

Update:  Maybe not - Intrade (having called them into question today it only seems fair to reference them now) has Obama gaining almost three points today alone (most of it post campaign "suspension" I'm willing to bet) and now predicts an electoral win of 278 to 260 . . . 

If I was conspiratorial I would think one of two things re:McCain's strategy:  McCain's health is not good and he's not up for a Friday face the nation (seems unlikely if he's truly wading into the Senate debate over the bail out) or (and this seems more likely) the campaign really is that scared of putting Palin in front of an active audience.

Your Data/Graphic Fix for the Day

Interesting graphic from the NYT displaying the frequency of words and phrases used by the parties, and selected individual speakers, at their respective conventions.

(via)

Palin on Intrade

Intrade has added trading on the likelihood of Palin being withdrawn as the VP nominee.

Via Joshua Green who ponders the Eagleton Scenario just as I did Saturday morning.

First in Firsts

SI.com has learned that for the first time in history, a major presidential candidate may sponsor a race car in NASCAR's premier series. According to sources, Barack Obama's campaign is in talks to become the primary sponsor of BAM Racing's No. 49 Sprint Cup car for the Pocono race on August 3. Details of the agreement are expected to be worked out over the coming days.

This guy is not playing around.

Gambling Habits of the Presidential Candidates

From Time:

The casino craps player is a social animal, a thrill seeker who wants not just to win but to win with a crowd. Unlike cards or a roulette wheel, well-thrown dice reward most everyone on the rail, yielding a collective yawp that drowns out the slots. It is a game for showmen, Hollywood stars and basketball legends with girls on their arms. It is also a favorite pastime of the presumptive Republican nominee for President, John McCain.

The backroom poker player, on the other hand, is more cautious and self-absorbed. Card games may be social, but they are played in solitude. No need for drama. The quiet card counter is king, and only a novice banks on luck. In this game, a good bluff trumps blind faith, and the studied observer beats the showman. So it is fitting that the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, raked in so many pots in his late-night games with political friends.

For centuries, the nation's political leaders have loved their games of chance. Andrew Jackson owned fighting cocks and raced horses. Richard Nixon helped finance his first congressional race with his World War II poker winnings. Teddy Roosevelt noted that the professional gamblers he knew "usually made good soldiers." But even among this crowd, McCain and Obama are distinctive. For both men, games of chance have been not just a hobby but also a fundamental feature in their development as people and politicians. For Obama, weekly poker games with lobbyists and fellow state senators helped cement his position as a rising star in Illinois politics. For McCain, jaunts to the craps table helped burnish his image as a political hot dog who relished the thrill of a good fight, even if the risk of failure was high.

Presidential Wordle's

Here is a wordle of Obama's campaign blog (click for full size*):

And here is a wordle for McCain's blog** (click for full size):

* Annoyingly, Wordle won't let you embed a full size image, or at least I couldn't figure it out.

** McCain's RSS is a bit wonky as there are four or five categories but no single feed for the whole blog that I could find, so I used the "campaign" feed.

Obama and the Black Church

There is a long and interesting piece at the New York Review of Books entitled, Obama and the Black Church.  Here's a bit towards the end:

It is tempting to look at Obama as an inheritor of the integrationist legacy of King, and Wright as a legatee of Malcolm X's black nationalism. The real conflict between Wright and Obama stems from their uses of King's memory. Wright, at least in some of his statements, seems to see his ministry as a continuation of the radicalization King underwent after the profound disappointment of the white reaction to the Poor People's campaign in Chicago and to the striking garbage workers in Memphis. But it was not in King's politics to damn America himself, as much as he was concerned with the effect of racism on Americans. King maintained that the civil rights struggle was one of justice against injustice and he warned that it must not deteriorate into a racial struggle of black against white. Obama returns to the moment of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and wants to recapture the high moral ground of the summer of 1963, when many members of the white clergy turned away from the white nationalism of the conventional American church and marched with blacks in Washington and across the South.

The black church is central to the grassroots and even the secular civil rights movements, and secular leaders who had no interest in religion were nevertheless very much influenced by the black church's emphasis on the redemptive power of suffering and what the American historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses has called the "social gospel of perfectionism that presumes change to be progressive, inevitable, and divinely inspired."[4] This is the legacy Obama claims through his mother, just as through his father he lays claim to another American tradition, the opening to people from different national and ethnic backgrounds. Once again, Obama's biography contains a reversal of expectation: he gets his connection to black American history through his white mother and his links to Americans born of foreign parents through his black father.

The whole thing is worth the read.

What If . . . ?

Quite a while back I voiced my . . . incredulity . . . sure, why not, at John McCain for positing that "the fight against radical Islamic extremism was part of the “transcendent challenge of the 21st Century."  Ezra Klein points out that he is now offering this same response as the answer to the question of what "is the gravest long term threat to the U. S. economy."  I agree with most of what Klein says here - regardless of how much you want to push national security as your chief qualifier for office you've got to throw folks a bone on that question and give an answer that actually touches on the day to day fears and worries about the economy that most of the nation is dealing with at the moment.  (McCain better be careful or he's going to back himself into a Giuliani.)  

But I was especially delighted to see this from Klein:  

There are essentially two sets of premises under which you could answer this question. The first is the real world, which contains likely threats to the American economy. Things like a deep recession that's worsened by a credit contraction. Or oil prices that turn out to be skyrocketing not because of transient speculation, but enduring global instability and a dawning recognition of peak oil. Or a health system that isn't fixed, and is chewing up 30 percent of our GDP in two decades.

The other set of premises is the fantasy world. This is more like Marvel's "What If?" series. What if the Supervolcano explodes? What if we have an "I Am Legend" style pandemic? Or a "28 Days Later" zombie virus? What if "radical Islamic extremism" prevails and terrorists establish a global caliphate?

Anytime that references to Marvel's What If . . . ? series make it into the political debate is one more day that we can say with quiet confidence that truly, the terrorists have not won. 

PS - Of course it does.  Wikipedia has a list of all of the What If . . . ? issues.

Backtracking the Obama Smears

Interesting piece in the Washington Post on attempts to find patient zero in the "Obama is a Muslim" e-mail smear.  This bit was interesting:

"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.

Noonan: The Problem With Being McCain

Pomeroy mentioned Peggy Noonan's rise in prominence the other day so I paid attention to this post at Marbury pointing to Noonan writing in the WSJ.  After explaining that McCain is interesting only when he is being McCain and not a formalized shade of McCain, Noonan goes on to say this:

And there is another problem that is bigger than all of that, and he is going to have to think himself through it. And that is that there is a sense about his campaign that . . . John McCain has already got what he wanted, he got what he needed, which was to be top dog in the Republican Party, the party that had abused him in 2000 and cast him aside. They all bow to him now, and he doesn't need anything else. He doesn't need the presidency. He got what he wanted. So now he can coast. This is, in the deepest way, unserious. JFK had to have the presidency—he wanted that thing. Nixon had to have it too, and Reagan had to have it to institute his new way. Clinton had to have it—it was his destiny, the thing he'd wanted since he was a teenager.

The last person I can think of who gave off the vibe that he didn't have to have it was Bob Dole. Who didn't get it. And who had a similar lack of engagement in terms of policy, and philosophy, and meaning.

I saw a clip of McCain on the news last night and thought the same thing:  he's totally phoning it in, he looks incredibly bored.  Her prediction of how things will play out come November also sounds very plausible:

The campaign will grind along until a series of sharp moments. Maybe they will come in the debates. Things will move along, Mr. Obama in the lead. And then, just a few weeks out from the election, something will happen: America will look up and see the inevitability of Mr. Obama, that Mr. Obama has already been "elected," in a way, and America will say, Hey, wait a second, are we sure we want that? And it will tighten indeed.

The race has a subtext, a historic encounter between the Old America and the New, and suddenly the Old America—those who are literally old, who married a guy who fought at the Chosin Reservoir, and those not so old who yet remember, and cherish, the special glories of the Old—will rise, and join in, and make themselves heard. They will not leave without a fight.

And on that day John McCain will suddenly make it a race, as if moved by them and wanting to come through for them one last time. And then on down to the wire. And then . . .