Category Archives: Politics

A Vote For Science is a new blog here on scienceblogs.com, dedicated to science issues in the current election:

With less than two months left before the next U.S. president is elected, ScienceBlogs wanted to dedicate a space to campaign politics. A Vote For Science is a group blog that will focus on the candidates’ science policies. It is managed by many interested ScienceBloggers, as well as guest blogger Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists.

A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama answered the 14 science questions. Now we hear that McCain has answered them as well. If you can believe they still care about Reality (or will let McCain care, if elected), check his answers (side-by-side with Obama’s) here.
Compare and contrast….

Its Not Just Palin — Its The Message.:

The brilliance of the McCain strategy and messaging is that it includes a trap for Obama. To push back on the McCain claim of “country first” and “the original mavericks who will shake up Washington” the Obama campaign’s attack of “four more years of George Bush” becomes a problem. In a country that yearns for post-partisan change the Obama campaign risks sounding too partisan and like more of the same.

Morning podcast with Jay Rosen (please LISTEN to the entire podcast – will make you think!):

That led me to the idea that perhaps it’s not Obama that the Repubs are really running against, perhaps it’s the press. What clued me into that was the way Carly Fiorina conflated three NY Times columnists as “The Democrats” on This Week earlier today. Huh? They may be Democrats, but they are not The Democrats. If the Repubs are running against the press, then why do the press care what the Repubs think (the mistake Obama makes too). And how does Obama get back in the game if the conversation is to between the Repubs and the press (and the press like Obama are always three steps behind, confused as hell and not going to take it anymore). Permalink to this paragraph
Which finally led me to the conclusion for the Obamas and I really hope they get the message, you need to grow your own press, quickly. Use the Internet. It’s all you’ve got. Don’t count on the press caring, they’re busy fighting a war with the Republicans. Permalink to this paragraph

More under the fold:

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Ezra explains in words, but a Picture is Worth a Thousand of those:

BTW, the whole ‘drill, baby, drill’ chant at the RNC Convention, like pretty much everything in the scenography and theatrics there, was deeply sexual, designed to appeal to sexually anxious males. What do you think their reptilian brains were thinking of drilling in Alaska? Google “femiphobia”.

Or, in this case, “I am not a liar”.
Remember, don’t think of an elephant?
Saying that Palin is not a liar elicits the ‘liar’ frame together with her name. Mentioning her name and the word “lying” in the same sentence reminds people she is lying.
When Nixon said he was not a crook, everyone thought of him as a crook. Inserting the word “not” means nothing – that is not how a human mind works.
So, did they lose their framing magic?

Which is the same reason that Obama’s ad “Not maverick” has the unintended opposite effect – reminds people that McCain is supposed to be a maverick:

Come on, guys, get your framing mojo right!

Don’t Think of a Maverick! Could the Obama Campaign Be Improved?:

In 1980, Richard Wirthlin — Ronald Reagan’s chief strategist — made a fateful discovery. In his first poll he discovered that most people didn’t like Reagan’s positions on the issues, but nevertheless wanted to vote for Reagan. The reason, he figured out, is that voters vote for president not primarily on the issues, but on five other factors — “character” factors: Values; Authenticity; Communication and connection; Trust; and Identity. In the Reagan-Carter and Reagan-Mondale debates, Mondale and Carter were ahead on the issues and lost the debates, because the debates were not about the issues, but about those other five character factors. George W. Bush used the same observation in his two races. Gore and Kerry ran on the issues. Bush ran on those five factors.
In the 2008 nomination campaign, Hillary ran on the issues, while Obama ran on those five factors and won. McCain is now running a Reagan-Bush style character-based campaign on the Big Five factors. But Obama has switched to a campaign based “on the issues,” like Hillary, Gore, and Kerry. Obama has reality on his side. And the campaign is assuming that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. That’s false and they should know better.
Chris Cillizza, in his Washington Post column, made the mistake of calling this a matter of “personality.” DLC theorists Bill Galston and Elaine Lamarck have previously made the same mistake. Voters are smarter. Since they don’t know what the situation will be in a couple of years, it is rational to ask if a candidate shares your values, if he’s saying what he believes, if he connects with you, if you trust him, and if you identify with him. That is a rational thing to do. Not just a matter of personality.
Unfortunately, it is also easy to manipulate these things with marketing techniques….

Lose your house, lose your vote:

Voting rights is an area where the psychological and linguistic differences between liberals and conservatives are starkly clear. Virtually all Americans agree that voting is a right and that people should exercise that right. Most of the time when someone says this or that group shouldn’t be allowed to vote, they mean it as a tasteless joke or a bitter commentary on some item in the news and not as a serious proposal to change the Constitution. There are exceptions, but they are mostly stupid people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote.*
The reason that liberals and conservatives come into conflict over voting rights every election is that while they agree that voting is a right, they don’t agree on what the word “right” means. Most liberals think rights are something all people are born with and that they can only be deprived of their rights for the most grevious wrongdoing. Most conservatives think rights are something earned; though we might all be born with a potential to have the same rights, we must first earn the the perrogative to exercise a specific right. Simply put, when a conservative says “right” he means what a liberal means when he says “privilege.”
This difference is most visible in discussions of election malfeasance. When conservatives get upset over election problems, they are almost always upset over the idea that someone voted who didn’t “deserve” to vote. “Deserve” is one of the most powerful words in the conservative lexicon. They worry that the value of their rights are diminished by undeserving people exercising the same rights. When liberals get upset over election problems, they are almost always upset over the idea that someone was unfairly prevented from voting who was entitled to vote. “Fair” is one of the most powerful words in the liberal lexicon. Being excluded is one of the most unfair things a liberal can imagine. Election reform for conservatives means strict controls to keep the wrong people from voting. Election reform for liberals means making sure no one is prevented from exercising their right to vote.

…many more under the fold:

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For those who object I only bash McCain and never say anything nice about Obama:
– I bash conservatism and GOP. It is irrelevant who is their candidate. This time they are serving up a real doozy, but all the others they had in the primaries are just as bad.
– I want to stop them, and since the Democratic Party is the only credible opposition, I will support Mickey Mouse as a Democratic Candidate. It is not that I am Obamamaniac, or that I agree with most of his proposals. But his proposals are at least decent and in the right direction. And he is a smart, decent man who would make me proud. The GOP proposals are dictatorial and dangerous. And the sneering monster who is running on their ticket would make me ashamed.
– I tend to post links and videos – let McCain and Palin dig themselves deeper themselves. I do not need to add much of my own outrage (or analysis, or humor). It is enough to watch one of their clips to see they are the antithesis of what a candidate in a democratic country should be.
So, let Obama speak for himself and you decide:

Sure, she would attack Russia, but at least she is not aware that she can do it pre-emptively.
But that’s OK. She’ll learn at the foot of the master.
Ooops!

Under the fold, as we do here every day….

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Josh Marshall:

Let’s face it. Lipstick on a pig is a classic American phrase. And there’s just no better way to describe the McCain-Palin ticket:

As usual, under the fold….

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First read this:

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Then, see this cartoon….

Under the fold, due to length. Like the previous couple of roundups, take your time – bookmark, read, and use later.

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Where Have I Seen Sarah Palin Before? by Arash Kamangeer:

One of the problems the government faced was opposition from legions of mothers whose sons had been maimed or died in the war. To confront this problem, the government-controlled TV would parade a mother whose son had died in the war in front of the TV on a regular basis. Invariably, this “show mom” would be carrying an infant child and a few other siblings with her. And invariably, she would say something to the effect that “I have given one child to this ‘sacred’ war, and I am ready to give the next one.” Almost always, there would be an adoring crowd who would follow her statements by chants of “Allaho-Akbar” (God is Great). And again invariably, her statements would follow by a not-so-veiled threat from her and the adoring crowd. She would say something like “I and my family would not tolerate traitors and betrayals to the faith and country”. Then the crowd would break into several standard chants such as “Death to traitors” or “War, war, until victory.”
Sarah Palin was much better dressed than the average show mom paraded on Iranian TV more than 20 years ago. The show moms were typically dressed in a black veil. But that’s about the biggest difference. The rhetoric was eerily familiar. When she was finished, I knew I had seen her before. Only that it wasn’t her. It was her ideological predecessors at a different time in a different country.

Control of industry by government? I though these guys were against socialism.
Ed Cone:

I’ve been thinking about a newspaper column on “socialism.” I put the word in quotes, because the subject is bogeyman scare-word “socialism,” applied to any government program or tax policy opposed by the epitheteer, not the actual, government-control-of-industries definition.

Chris Bowers:

The problem I have is with the incredible cognitive dissonance surrounding “big government” in our national political discourse. Even as we have reached national consensus on nationalizing industries, which is the literal definition of socialism and big government, politicians of every party keep talking about “small government” as though it were a virtue. I mean, the day after the Republican convention, which included countless attacks on big government, the Republican administration goes out an nationalizes a major industry. It will probably be done in the corporate welfare style typical of American government–privatize the profits, socialize the risk–but it is still nationalization.

Related: I Want Bigger Government!

The Resentment Strategy :

But don’t be fooled either by Mr. McCain’s long-ago reputation as a maverick or by Ms. Palin’s appealing persona: the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.
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What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.
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Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.
By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many fervent Obama supporters — the candidate’s high-flown eloquence, his coolness factor — have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash. Unlike many observers, I wasn’t surprised at the effectiveness of the McCain “celebrity” ad. It didn’t make much sense intellectually, but it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr. Obama’s star quality.
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But the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent. Resentment, no matter how contrived, is a powerful force, and it’s one that Republicans are very, very good at exploiting.

Steven Wells in Guardian yesterday:

This was a cold-bloodedly deliberate attempt at political branding. Palin referred to herself a hockey mom in her carefully scripted and vetted acceptance speech – and not for the first time. In 2004 she boasted: “It’s said the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick. So with lipstick on, the gloves come off.”
This is a deliberate political coinage. The question being, why? And how exactly does a hockey mom differ from a soccer mom (a phrase that’s been around since at least 1983 but became a political cliche during the 1996 presidential election when it was widely used to describe suburban white women who voted for Bill Clinton).
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“A hockey mom is more American,” says Philadelphia columnist Liz Spikol. “A lot of Americans are suspicious of soccer, and still believe it connotes the foreign. Whereas hockey is as GOP-North American as a fetus on posterboard.”
She has a point. The soccer mom has mutated out of her political pigeonhole. In the lexicon of hipsters looking for an easy bourgeois icon to bash, the soccer mom has become an SUV-driving, road-hogging, sweatpants-wearing, latte-sipping, brat-spewing, strip mall-shopping, suburban folk devil.
To others she’s become lazy shorthand for white, middle class heteronormativity. In the hit TV series Weeds the suburban drug dealer heroine is repeatedly referred to as a soccer mom – despite the fact that, when seen at her son’s game in the first episode, she clearly believes that a match is comprised of four quarters.
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The thug who impregnated her 17-year-old daughter (and who described himself as “a fucking redneck” on his MySpace page) certainly is.
“I live to play hockey,” he writes. ‘Ya fuck with me I’ll kick [your] ass'”
And there, I think – in a sweary nutshell – is the reason Palin is so keen to be seen as a hockey mom. In the minds of the effete conservative elite who run the Republican party, the hockey-playing yob who got Palin’s daughter pregnant represents an idealised form of American masculinity – unthinking, brutish, willfully ignorant, easy to manipulate, unquestioningly patriotic, proudly reactionary, quick to respond to any perceived threat with overwhelming violence – and very unlikely to ever vote Democrat. Or – by extension – play soccer.

….that lying is not the only campaign strategy. So is cheating:

In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.
In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.
In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.
In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

Dan has an astute observation (phrases bolded by me):

America has always romanticized rural life, and no doubt the McCain campaign has prepared all sorts of comebacks that will turn criticism of Palin into insults against anyone with a rural background.
But I want to talk about another “rural problem:” politics. Effective politics in rural America is based on person-to-person knowledge. You might run on an abstract platform, but you build roads and fix potholes and run sewer lines by knowing people who do stuff. It isn’t the way things work in civics texts, but it’s the way things work in Waynesville, NC, and Awendaw, SC.
During my 20-year newspaper career, I saw this pattern play out over and over: A small town hits a development boom, and within five years the old political order falls into chaos, typically because of a scandal. A judge fixes a speeding ticket for a cousin. A mayor gives a contract to a friend without opening it to bids. Invariably, the people implicated in these scandals can’t understand why people are so upset. They typically get defensive and bitter.
Palin arrives on the national scene already equipped with her own ready-made podunk scandal. She just doesn’t seem to grasp that this isn’t the way other people do politics, that the rules that govern small towns just don’t work when you are dealing with more outsiders than insiders.
Best-case scenario for McCain? Palin manages the learning-curve quickly. But she’s going to have to adopt new ways of thinking on the fly. And if she makes a gaffe (which she will — everybody does), she’s going to have to avoid a small-town response.

But if you don’t, here are some snippets from his recent posts:
What’s missing from the Democratic convention?:

The GOP’s attacks on Kerry in 2004 were mocking, scornful, derisive, demonizing and deeply personal — in speech after speech — and they were also highly effective. They weren’t the slightest bit deterred by the fact that Kerry was a war hero who was wounded multiple times in Vietnam while George Bush and Dick Cheney. . . . weren’t. Has there been anything remotely approaching those attacks on McCain by any of the prime-time Democratic speakers?
The GOP assaults on Barack Obama will be — have already been — even more vicious and personalized, which means by the end of their Convention next week, John McCain will be, by all accounts, an honor-bound, principled and courageous patriot (who, at worst, is wrong on some issues), while Barack Obama will be some vaguely foreign, weak, appeasing, super-ambitious, exotic, empty-headed, borderline un-American liberal extremist. Democrats seem to be banking on the fact that the agreement which most Americans have with their policy positions, along with widespread dissatisfaction with the current state of things, will outweigh the effects of this personality war — a war which they, yet again, have allowed to be one-sided.

The GOP’s cheerful viciousness:

Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election, this is what the Republicans do every four years. They render issues irrelevant and convert campaigns into cultural wars and personality referenda. They converted our elections into tawdry reality shows long before networks realized their entertainment value. And every four years, Democrats seems shocked and paralyzed by all of this and desperately delude themselves into believing that mean-spirited “negativity” and nastiness will alienate voters, while the media swoons at the potency of these attacks.
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The Republicans are well aware that they can’t possibly win the election if it is even partially decided based on issues. They need and intend to win despite the fact that Americans hate their positions on the issues, and to do that, they want to ensure that a majority of Americans love and respect the strong, honorable, principled, culturally familiar all-American mavericks John McCain and Sarah Palin (even if they don’t agree with them on everything) while strongly disliking that wishy-washy, snooty, foreign, exotic, self-absorbed Eastern elitist Barack Obama (even if he says the right things on issues).
Democrats have clearly decided (yet again) to cede that lowly playing field to the GOP and are hoping (yet again) that those personality and cultural issues are not enough to outweigh the country’s dislike of Republican policies. This year is indeed different — dissatisfaction with the Government is higher than ever before, the GOP is as discredited as a party can be, and Obama is a more effective candidate than those who preceded him — but the attacks last night were only the beginning, not the end. If John McCain remains — even from the mouths of Democrats — the Honored, Honorable, Principled, Heroic Maverick, the GOP chances will be as high as they can be.

Will the GOP’s negativity produce a backlash?:

None of this is to say that Palin can’t be turned into a liability for the Republicans. She can be. And although I can only guess like everyone else, I’ve thought all year that Democrats would likely win the election and still think that.
But the idea that Americans instinctively recoil from negativity or that there will be some sort of backlash against Republicans generally and Palin specifically because of how “negative” their convention speeches were is pure fantasy. Cultural tribalism and personality attacks of those sort work, especially when they’re not aggressively engaged.
Every four years, the GOP unleashes unrestrained personality attacks on Democrats and exploits cultural resentments. Every four years, Democrats tell themselves that such attacks don’t work and are counter-productive. And every four years, that belief is disproven. These “character” issues end up mattering largely because Democrats, in election after election, allow wars over “character” to be waged in a largely one-sided fashion.

Mockery and satire are sometime the most potent weapons. Nobody likes to be mocked – especially not if there is no possible reasonable response. Nobody wants to be aligned with the side that is consistently mocked in a way that shines light on lies and hypocrisy. The partisans will get mad. But the independents can be turned away from the liars:
daveawayfromhome: Rock, Paper, Scissors:

Republicans play upon our fears to maintain their power, and, as much as Democrats would like it to, careful explanations and reasoned arguments have simply not worked at all with much of the average electorate (it’s only worked those elitist intellectuals, victims, no doubt, of too much knowledge).
Instead, Democrats need to simply make fun of the Republicans and their fears. Mock their fear-mongering. Maybe call them pussies. Done properly, the mockery can become self-sustaining, turning doom-saying Cassandras into hysterical fools. As an added bonus, Republicans tend to have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves, and so their bluster and defensiveness upon being made the butt of a joke adds to their ridiculousness.
One of the beauties of using comedy to fight fear is that the only real way to combat it is to use logic. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, many of their current policies do not hold up very well when put to intellectual tests or (especially) to conservative ideals.

Omen expands on the idea with reasons why it should, in theory, work.

From Shakesville – I thought it deserved to be brought out again, now that a few days have passed and it got burried in the archives:
rrp:

When McCain’s campaign announced that they’d chosen Sarah Palin for VP, most people (different flavors of lefties/progressives) that I talked with were delighted. What could be better? An inexperienced, extremely conservative, first-term governor of a small (population-wise) state.
Then the storm hit.
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Progressives tend to like closely argued issues; well maybe we just like to argue. Still, most progressive sorts I know tend to read up on the ballot measures, look up voting records for candidates, and do some research before we vote. We have emotional reactions, but try to act rationally when it comes to voting. We are a minority.
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Ok, with dueling narratives, who wins?
It depends on who’s doing the listening. There are some people who will never swallow Palin’s story. There are others who will never swallow Obama’s. In both camps there are people who are true believers, who trust in Palin’s stasis or yearn for Obama’s change. But both of them are slugging it out for the center who wants to like the person they elect, who isn’t ideologically driven, who wants to trust the executive to do the right thing, who wants to feel that the things they value are important to the people who run this country.
And at this point, it’s a crap shoot whether this country is going to keep looking back over its shoulder at Palin America or forward to Obama’s.

We know that the GOP has been incapable of and uninterested in governing for about half a century now. We know they have run on personality, not issues since at least 1980, since they have no issues that are palatable to the public.
But they used to be fantastic at campaigning and parades and symbolism and organization, unmatched even by famous shows put up by Mao and Kim Il Sung when they celebrated arrival of important guests or national holidays. What happened?
How did they manage to get upstaged and outshined by Democrats? They could not hide their hall was half-empty. They could not hide how white their delegates are – where were the token minorities? They built a stage for McCain’s speech that looked like a phallic symbol (OK, this may have been on purpose to energize the femiphobic males filling the hall).
They used $1 stock images for their slideshow.
The scene of a military funeral was an acted stock footage.
They are not paying for rights for use of any songs, getting cease&desist notices from the musicians ranging from ABBA to, most recently, Wilson Sisters of the band ‘Heart’ for “Barracuda”.
Not just that they foolishly projected enormous images behind the speakers so only a small piece of the bottom was seen on TV, leading to green screen and blue screen backgrounds (ideal for photoshopping), but they messed up the images themselves: they wanted to show the Walter Reed Veteran’s Hospital. Instead, they showed a picture of Walter Reed Middle School in California (most viewers probably thought it was one of McCain’s seven, or is it eight houses?). And the school has now also sent a cease & desist notice.
The 2000 and 2004 conventions were masteries of pomp and ceremony. This one was an amateurish effort at best. Why?
Are they so disheartened, nobody really cared to make an effort?
Are they penny-pinching?
Are they really so far behind in funding that they cannot afford professionals?
Or is it that they cannot find professionals to do it as they have all left the party over the past four years?
After all, McCain said something about offering positions in his Administration to independents and Democrats – is it because there are no qualified Republicans left? Are they all abandoning ship and saying No to McCain (including for VP, so he had to go with Choice #2,345.600) in order to steer clear of the sinking ship in hope to retain clean-enough names for next time, four years from now?

Wikipedia:

Maverick steadfastly refused to brand his cattle. As a result, the word maverick entered the English lexicon, meaning both an unbranded range animal as well as a slang term for someone who exhibits a streak of stubborn independence.