Writing in Salon, Gary Kamiya describes the near hysteria to which “movement conservatives” are reduced in confronting a likely Obama victory:
…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”
The ludicrous hyperbole of such Jeremiads is self-refuting. Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life. As they face these challenging real-world goals, the abstract buzzwords trotted out by the right ring hollow.
Of course, Obama hasn’t won the election yet, and it’s vaguely possible that he may not, though highly unlikely if the polls are taken into account.
Kamiya’s analysis of the internal contradictions of the American right is sharp, and it’s certainly true that the movement conservatives’ dogmatic bag of tricks isn’t holding up too well in confrontation with reality. (And there’s some amusement to be gained from observing the cognitive dissonance in the right wing blogosphere.) But I wonder whether the implication – drawn by some – that an Obama victory would represent an epochal end to the culture wars craziness is overstated.
Obama’s election would, more than almost any other Democratic candidate, represent the long-overdue crushing of the barely-disguised racist “Southern Strategy” pursued by the GOP since the time of Richard Nixon. In doing so it would also represent the effective end of the Christian Right as a driving force in US governmental politics.
On more than one level, it almost certainly won’t. The noise machine – which is crucial to sustaining any culture wars electoral strategy – started up during the Clinton presidency, and took off along with talkback radio (after changes in FCC regulations), cable tv and the internet. It would be a brave soul who’d suggest that the culture wars were less virulent in the Clinton administration, and certainly his second landslide victory didn’t put a stop to it all – quite the opposite.
Similarly, the wilder reaches of the religious right are going truly troppo in anticipation of “Obamageddon”. (Here, it’s necessary to point out that by no means all evangelicals, let alone mainline Protestants and Catholics, subscribe to the crazy fundie principles, and in fact Obama has had some success with his religious outreach program.)
Thirdly, the institutional apparatus of the culture wars will remain in place – Fox, the talkback stations, the right wing press (now with added Murdoch) and the wingnut blogosphere.
All this, of course, could be relatively ineffectual if there’s an Obama administration, and obviously his election would demonstrate there’s a limit to the effectiveness of so-called “values” politics.
But it’s important to remember that the politics of division is not new.
In Nixonland, which I found an enticing read in its own terms, Rick Perlstein traces back the Republicans’ turn to cultural wedges to the immediate postwar period. He’s been criticised – in a review by Andrew Cockburn which I think is somewhat unfair and certainly unkind – for painting a picture of a golden age of social and political consensus shattered by the evil Richard Nixon. Perlstein also stands accused of hankering after a transformational President who would heal and knit together all the wounds of decades of division.
Although his cyclical theory of American political history is a bit questionable, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was right to argue that culture wars predated Nixon – immigration, Communism, sexual mores, race, feminism and Prohibition all caused massive ructions in the 1920s, for instance. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of Schlesinger’s three Presidential biographical subjects, came under vicious attack throughout his long tenure in the White House.
While it’s absolutely the case that FDR’s electoral appeal, though waning over time, was long lasting, his domestic dominance was rapidly eroding shortly after his election to a second term. Nevertheless, FDR did lay the groundwork for Democratic electoral hegemony for a long period, and certainly shifted the terrain of American political debate and policy practice. Both the circumstances and the size of his first and second victories were important in creating an enduring legacy.
A big Obama win next week – and a big Congressional win for the Democrats – would need to be entrenched over more than one electoral cycle to constitute a realigning election. And most importantly (and obviously key to future electoral prospects) he would need to govern effectively to meet the expectations created in order to reinforce a choice of a social and economic agenda over cultural identification. That’s a tall order, and it wouldn’t stop the culture wars, just render them less relevant. In politics, conflict is endless.
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson on Kamiya at Public Opinion.
Tall order indeed, Mark. However, I got faith that Obama is the person to do it. He transcends race and cultural identificaton like nobody that’s gone before him.
He’ll annoy progressives most during his tenure. And that’s the way it should be.
2012 will be the actual landslide. Next Wednesday will be a mere 385 Electoral College vote earth tremor.
I have two questions for all: how long would have been JFK’s term and how long is apiece of string. Mark tends to answer both of those as well as anyone I’ve met but I still don’t get it…
Not sure I get the first question, Benji… since the 22nd Amendment was agreed to in 1951, every president has been limited to 2 terms. JFK would have been outa there in January 69.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Maybe worth noting that the dude wasn’t all that popular through a lot of his term in office – a lot of the myth making only paid off after his assassination.
He also had one of the narrowest victories ever in 60, and got in through electoral fraud in Chicago and Texas. (Electoral shenanigans didn’t start in Florida in 00 – they’re a grand old American tradition.)
If you read Schlesinger, he suggests Johnson rode the wave of increasingly progressive sentiment Kennedy began to see on the horizon in about 62/63, but did himself in through Vietnam. But it’s a really big counterfactual as to whether JFK would have got out of ‘Nam, and I think the balance of opinion is – no.
More interesting is what might have happened if RFK hadn’t been assassinated. He was arguably much more concerned with social justice than JFK. But it’s also quite possible, even likely, that Humphrey would still have been nominated in 68.
Nixon probably is important in that his administration sealed the deal on widespread public disgust with the political system and the federal government. So a different Preznit after LBJ may have made a big difference. To some degree the erosion of the legitimacy and responsiveness of the state does fuel the culture wars’ intensity.
Mark’s right – Obama has a lot to turn around.
To those fearful of Obamageddon, I say Gobama! However I think we have to question how left Obama really is, as opposed to simply left of centre to a centre that has shifted consistently right for the past 28 years. His foreign policy is actually quite conservative, even if his domestic policies mark a return to concern for social justice. Of course the charge of distributionist in chief is an utterly absurd and hopelessly outdated attempt to once again ridicule the left through a simplistic rendering of Marxist principles of spreading the wealth, I think the charge of revolutionary in chief for Obama coming from the left may be equally simplistic given America’s current political atmosphere, whose hangover from neoconservative at home will only be rivalled by the sting of neoliberalism in terms of its adventures abroad which I am unsure will be radically altered in course by Obama’s administration if perhaps not the same in terms of tactic. Pace Colin Powell.
Arguing about the future is usually a mug’s game.
But my guess is that an Obama victory, not matter how large, will have the same effect as shacking a hornets’ nest with a stick. Few wingnuts will die, but they’ll be angry and vengeful.
The huge questions are if and how the more moderate Republicans will attempt to channel the Right’s fury into political efforts designed to win national elections rather than to bring on a civil war.
Is that cognitive dissonance link supposed to be to pr0n? Even if it had some kind of laughable wingnuttery in it, perhaps someone can describe it rather than me watch it at work
The inevitable disappointment with Obama will set in about 6 months after he’s elected and everyone realises he’s not going to fix everything at once. Rudd is a real lesson for the US blogosphere (especially wrt. the woeful Conroy and his pr0nno proof fence).
Katz, I think you’ve hit the nail there – the hornets will be well and truly stirred up. If history repeats itself they’ll channel all that anger into digging shite up to discredit Obama and the Democrats. It will probably get very low, very dirty and end up in legal battles of various kinds (not to mention a whole new conspiracy industry).
Mark, Gary Kamiya is correct that the majority are questioning what-the-hell is going on. One thing I think he misses out on however is that a section of the Right will go even further off into the lands of lunacy. That in itself is a bit scary.
This comment by “Lyn” over at Public Opinion:
It’s not something that crossed my mind before, does anyone else think this might be true? Or is it just an artifice of the nature of online discourse?
There are those on the American right who really think that Obama’s agenda is to turn the US into a European social democracy.
If only.
But what if it were true? The south would secede, again, as would the mountain and plains states. There’d be another civil war.
Hot damn! The next few years could get very interesting.
Um, Obama’s success spreads well beyond the traditional blue states. He is leading in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, tied in North Dakota and Wyoming and drawing close in South Dakota and Arizona (!). Senatorial candidates are also performing well in a lot of the inland west.
As far as the South, it’s worth reminding yourself that Obama is tied in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, while he is solidly leading in Virginia. He is also drawing closer in Mississippi.
The Democrats are on track for 57 Senate seats, if they can hold their leads in Alaska and Minnesota. On the night, it’s worth watching Kentucky, Georgia and Mississippi, where Democrats are close. If they win these three, the result will be 60-38-2.
“tied in North Dakota and Wyoming”
I think you mean ND and Montana, Wyoming is like Utah its red red red – how do you think Senator Dick Cheney is comfortably re-elected.
It is interesting that there are now few blood-red states: – Utah, Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma, Nebraska (which goes by congressional district) – the rotten boroughs of Alaskan politics is making it less red and flippable in a mass landslide. Texas is really the only large state (and while its GOP heartland, immigration is slowly changing that). That we are even talking about the Dems winning Montana, North Dakota, Mississippi (Clinton with his southern governor appeal picked up Nebraska, Louisiana, Teneesee and one or two more)
In contrast the deep-blue states have a much higher concentration of population – California (Nixons old state), New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Pennslyvania (are moving deep blue), with Virginia, Nevada and Colorado a few other states due to population movement moving more into the blue, where will this culture war stuff resonate other than about 80-100 EV of rural states that GOP already safely holds. The GOP needs its moderates, as the “Southern Strategy” is going South at a rate of knots.
RWDBs have been around since Alexander Hamilton (who, btw is a fascinating case study), and probably before except they just weren’t called that. Sometimes even supposed lefties eg Billy Hughes, Joe Lyons, turn into RWDBs. RWDBs will persist after Obama and during his presidency, just as they have here. The Left foegets at its peril the dangers of the extreme right, whether its the American Neocons, and its minions here, the Howardistas and Minchinistas, the paranoid anti-Communists, Fascists, Nazis or any other variety of the ultra right. Their evil is just a matter of degree, but the end result is always the same: the world ends up fucked.
(I do hope by mentioning the Nazis in this vcontext I haven’t invoked Godwin’s Law.)
Important point. This site has a map (about half-way down) of the 2004 presidential election results on a county-by-county basis.
It really is a stunning map.
If elections were won be real estate, then the Republicans would win in a landslide every time.
“how do you think Senator Dick Cheney is comfortably re-elected.”
Chaney is the Vice President. He was never a Senator from Wyoming. He was a congressman, representing Wyoming’s only seat in the House of Representatives.
“Obama is .. drawing closer in Mississippi.”
McCain leads by over 10% in Mississippi. Obama is going to win big, really big, but he’s not going to win the deep south.
Interestingly, McCain leads by more in Louisiana than Bush won the state by in 2004. You’d think after Katrina the people of that state would not be crazy about Republicans, but there you go.
A lot of the people who weren’t crazy about Republicans in New Orleans never made it back, Spiros!
Evidently so, Mark.
Maybe they all went to Virginia, explaining why it for the first time since 1964 is going to vote Democrat.
On electoral geography:
My emphasis.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174995/robert_eshelman_republican_nosedive_in_pennsylvania
“Jews are now likely to vote for Obama by a more than 3 to 1 majority (74% to 22%).”
Even though he’s a secret Muslim who toasted Yassir Arafat … if only the LA times would release the videotape … yada yada yada
Virginia is the result of lots of former Democrat voting DC voters moving to “Northern Virgina” which as John Stewart notes isn’t part of “Real America.”
http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/21/the-daily-show-nancy-pfotenhauer-says-there-are-two-virginias/
A similar thing is happening in South Carolina as people in the IT industry (IBM) move from NY and then there is similar migrations happening in other states, such as people from California moving to Colorado – making it a more liberal state. In this the GOP have similar demographic problems to the Nats – America is getting more urbanised – as David Brooks put it they are now running as the “small town party”
In regards to big swing states, the GOP are stuck with Florida (which due to retirees moving south they will always be competitive)and Ohio. Since they’ve defined California as Gomorrah they’ve thrown away the start of Nixon, Illinois one of the big states that was a more leaning GOP state is now a safe Democrat safe (Obama actually won his senate seat of a retiring GOP senator), with the waining of the Rockofellor wing New YOrk is now a law-down misere, and Pennslyvania is looking rock solid. I can see the GOP coming close to winning an election, but like McCain they’d have to win every swing state and that’s an awful position to have to start from.
“I can see the GOP coming close to winning an election”
Wait till Obama lets all those illegal immigrants become citizens. The south west will become a Democrat lock, including Texas’ 34 electoral votes. Once that happens, it’s over for the Repubs till mid century.
Unless the Boudicca of the Backwoods can energise the base in 2012 (ROFLMAO).
Mark, I agree. It’s a bit like Australia really – although on a larger scale…. the more things change the more they stay the same. Howard becomes Rudd – not a lot changes. Bush becomes Obama – probably same thing.
So taxes go up a bit to fund welfare, social issues get more airplay, we pull out of ill-conceived wars in foreign lands…. hooray! Meanwhile, back on the ranch – life goes on.
It will take more than one election to dramtically shift the ‘culture’ of a country like Australia or the US. Thankfully so.
That’s right, I meant Montana, not Wyoming, although the Democrat running for Wyoming’s House of Representatives seat is in with a shot of winning.
Um, Mississippi isn’t being won by 10 points. Obama is on 42% according to Pollster.com, with McCain leading by 7 points. The last two months has seen McCain drop five points in the state’s Pollster.com rolling average. It is one of three states classified as “lean McCain”, along with South Dakota and Arizona. Also, the Senate race is classed as a toss-up, and Democrats hold three of the four House seats in the state. It is also the nation’s blackest state, with a higher African American proportion than any other state.
PS. Breaking news, Pollster has moved North Carolina Senate from Democrat to Toss-up, although the Democrat still leads.
“Mississippi isn’t being won by 10 points”
10.4 to be precise.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/ms/mississippi_mccain_vs_obama-612.html
And one of the major “dogmatic bag of tricks” is held within the fundamentalist christian right, as represented by VP candidate Palin, and the attack on science, under the guise of anti-elitism, which panders to an almost 50% who believe the world is 10,000 years old. Time and time again, but starting for simplicity in recent times with Jerry Falwell and his so called ‘Moral Majority’ [If you gave Falwell an enema his remains could be buried in a matchbox-Hitchens] and modern day epigones who have hijacked elections on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and overegged, alleged ‘moral turpitude’.
Hitchens has a scathing article in Slate on Palin’s idiotic comments on fruit fly research:
http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
IMHO, Obama has his work cut out for him–forgetting health care for all, pulling out of Iraq ect etc for the moment: education is the long term key to tamping down wingnuttery permanently to acceptable levels such as we have here in Oz.
It’s all on a knife edge, the US Supreme Court is one judge away from overturning Roe v Wade and likewise overturning cases like the Dover “Intelligent Design” judgement. Only with education, I posit, can the tide be turned and that’s a big ask given that US education standards have appreciably dropped in the last decades and will drop further with national economic fundamentals in the toilet. Unless of course Obama as President focusses on policy which assists the states and puts some substantial fed funds into education (and eliminates the influence of the religious right in the process concurrently: suggestion withdraw the tax exemptions)
That’s going to be extraordinarily difficult given other crumbling infrastructure and near bankrupt states—even Arnie in California is looking for a bailout so I’ve read.
It is an absolute disgrace that McCain would choose an equivalent, potential Shia_Ayatollah_in_waiting for his running mate but it is so redolent of the US political malaise–the pustule on the body politic–which must be lanced and “disinfected” for all time.
(Just one example of the “pustule”–Palin refusing to label abortion clinic bombers as terrorists. Not even John Howard would have gone to water on that one.)
The “confrontation with reality” has some time to run, methinks. Thankfully reality “has a well known liberal bias”, which Obama can tap into: some small comfort.
Spiros, we disagree on which source we rely on. I rely on Pollster, which has it at 7, while RCP has it on 10.4. But I’d note that the McCain vote is the same, but RCP is estimating Obama’s vote as being 3% lower.
“Jews are now likely to vote for Obama by a more than 3 to 1 majority (74% to 22%).”
GIven that Jews have always been more pro-Democrat than even blacks – with typically 90% of Jews voting Democrat – and Obama’s insistence an undivided Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel, what is going on that Jewish support has nosedived to 74%!?
I heard somewhere that Obama is pulling even with Kerry’s level of support amongst the Jewish population. The impression I get is that the conspiracy theories about Obama being a muslim and antisemitic have been particularly prevalent amongst older Jews.
Stephen Hill @ 19 – it’s not just demographic change.
What gets me about this election is everyone appears to assume that “red states” and “blue states” are somehow frozen in place, and everything has to be read off demographic change and differences in turnout off the Bush/Gore and Bush/Kerry maps. That’s a very partial picture.
The flaw is the assumption that there is a dissensus of values with an array of Democratic voters confronting Republican voters across the electoral map. This is basically the Rove narrative. It’s the turnout, stupid.
If you go back and look at the 92 and 96 (in particular) electoral maps, different states were in play.
There is a much bigger group of independent voters who have been up for grabs this year – and who are largely swinging to Obama – than this sort of thinking captures. There’s nothing set in stone about the current configuration.
she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
It occured to me it was somewhat inhumane of her to have all those children, particularly one like Trig who needs more looking after, if that is the case. Then I remembered that her whacky subgroup of Sky-fairy worshippers think that they and their families will be raptured up to heaven.
If this sort of thinking was coming out of Haiti or Rwanda, RWDBs would be pointing to it as an example of why these people can’t belong in the modern enlightenment-driven Western world and must have overlords to look after them.
“what is going on that Jewish support has nosedived to 74%!?”
Obama’s middle name (Hussein) perchance?
Fools! Do you really think we would permit you a choice in this election?
I don’t know whether to welcome our new cacky-fisted overlords or not now. Does McCain even remember which handed he is?
Mark says:
A figure-free pontification on the election is not much use. Lets stop with the qualitative hypotheticals and get with the quantitative categoricals.
Six months ago I predicted a “landslide” victory for Obama. (A landslide win is, by my reckoning, something in excess of 53-47 in a two-party split. Which is why Lambert et al were absurd to classify Rudd’s 2007 victory as a landslide. Just under a dozen seats – less than 10% of the total – have to change hands and he is out on his ear.)
My reasons for predicting an Obama-slide are the boring ones as usual: the periodicity of the economic and political cycles. Both are in their anti-Republican recessional phase (no pun intended). That is, we are at a moment of economic stagnation (not stimulation) and political “outcumbency” (not incumbency).
# jack strocchi Says: May 15th, 2008 at 12:34 p
I am going to stand by my 53%+ DEM victory prediction. Any other pseph bloggers want to put a number on their name? (Be prepared for enduring the Mother of all Psephological Bragging Rights Exercise if I hit the nail.)
But I would not draw any “Realignment” conclusions just yet from a large DEM win.
Cyclical reasons only explain half of Obama’s expected margin. The Bush factor explains the other half.
But Bushism is no longer a defining feature of the REP party. The REPs are in fact in full retreat from his legacy already, hence the choice of maverick McCain.
So a big DEM victory does not spell political realignment for the US. It just spells resuscitation for the US polity, suffocating under the refuse left by its worst ever President.
My guess is that Obama’s Presidential duties will be more janitor than a Messiah.
At this point, anyone willing to take on the role of janitor would be the messiah.
The right have always had a narrative to go on with in opposition until now. The homosexuality/abortion thing just is not playing as it did, you’ll note that the Falwell/Robertson generation has not been replaced. The Republican image of economic responsibility vs Democrat profligacy is now gone.
The conservative conceit in US politics is that they are the guarantors of US greatness. Yeah I know this is crap, but the more evidence there is for American decline, the more they ramp this up. The Leninist tactics of brooking no opposition, particularly from moderates, is a legacy of all those leftits in the far-right and is worthy of more examination than has been the case. Why do we just accept that firebrand Trotskyites inevitably become jowly reactionaries?
The sneaky refrain of the 1970s that Democrats undermined the Vietnam War effort will be replaced by a similar narrative for Iraq and Afghanistan. I find Obama’s foreign policy thinking on Asia quite refreshing, potentially, though Americans with a distaste for dealing with other countries on any basis but hegemony would disagree. Once the US change tactics from aerial attacks on highly decentralised and fast-moving targets to a broader engagement model, Afghanistan/Pakistan could get very interesting (positively so, in terms of marginalising the Taliban).
In the next 4-8 years the big US car manufacturers will hit the wall. During this time the successes of the BRIC economies will come to the fore and present too great a contrast for the Americans. Same with cultural exports – we’ve already seen Chinese memes come through in Hollywood action films, and trilly Middle Eastern singing rhythms in US music, and that cultural hegemony will only decline. There isn’t much a President can do about this cultural stuff, but Obama will have to wear it as it will define him.
Obama’s task is to manage American decline across a number of fronts and make Americans feel good about that. Palin isn’t the person to galvanise American dissatisfaction with their own decline, but you’re right Mark in that someone will pop up.
I think they already have AndrewE, and any merger of GM with Chrysler will only momentarily delay the inevitable. (Likewise Fed handouts will not solve the underlying problems of the Big 3′s health care component of costs which cripples competitiveness. And, they’re dinosaurs in any event that keep on building crap.)
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1855185,00.html?iid=tsmodule
Money will run out next year for GM so it appears. They lived a few years too many in hog heaven with SUVs and could not see the simple reality of the unsustainability of cheap gas forever. (Watch Toyota and others clean up from now on.)
I don’t think that’s necessarily determinative of the fundamentalist Christian right’s ability to cream their political pants with Palinesque “Bible spice” in the near future, (like in 4 years time)
THis article syndicated from the Boston Globe is pretty much what I was trying to say.
“There’s definitely a shift going on,” said Harry Wilson, director of the Centre for Community Research at Roanoke College in Virginia.
“If the Democrats are going to win these states back, this is the year to do it. I’m not saying a Republican couldn’t win back (battlegrounds in the South) in 2012 or 2016, but they won’t be able to take it for granted the way they have in the past.”
http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-election-2008/democrats-on-rise-again-in-shifting-south-20081031-5fj8.html?page=-1
With this pretty strong caveat: -
But part of the Democratic shift in the region may be a one-time event fuelled by Senator Obama’s historic candidacy, with blacks and youth registering and voting in unusually high numbers that may not be repeated, some believe.
“Racism is still alive and well in the South,” said Ray Strother, a Democratic consultant and specialist on politics in the South. “We have a cadre of new voters coming out for Obama, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm. But I think it’s Obama-centric.”
I’m not merely referring to blue and red dichotomies, I was suggesting that increased education and interstate migration was making the old regional appeals a little less potent. For the GOP to win they’ll have to alter their narrative a little, but when enthusiasm dims some years in the future the Democrats could have a re-run of the Gore election (although if the stinking legacy of the Bushies might mitigate the third-party defectors assuming the two parties were identical). Still it would be delusional to assume a permanent Democratic majority, its what did in Bush and Howard and also lots of parallels with the NSW state g’ment – also with mid-term elections the pendulum can rapidly swing somewhat the other way.
I don’t think Palin ’12 or ’16 is the inevitability it’s currently being presented (and even so, look how the McCain fallback option has come through for the Republicans). I’ve posted on this in another thread, she doesn’t have the infrastructure.
Seems to me that Palin appeals to the people that would never have voted democrat anyway. Which is why extreme lefties and righties don’t win elections. And why Obama, McCain, Howard and Rudd all desperately claim the middle ground while desperately trying to portray the other middle-hogger as a radical.
Peter Kemp wrote:
They’ve been just as guilty Peter – who really needs monster V8 powered Landcruisers? Toyota even build a Ford F100 clone now. Ludicrous, but they were astonishingly profitable for a while. Toyota’s only saving grace is that their other markets ensured a ready supply of economical models. The US auto market is really just another highly protected trophy industry with wave after wave of special technological requirements, which hobbles even GM and Ford as they struggle with the costs of federalising their own European vehicles or even the vehicles of their erstwhile japanese partners. On top of that, US consumers never really liked smaller cars and only buy them under sufferance. It’s been true since the 1930s. (and stupidly, I sympathise somewhat, I love those trad massive American vehicles but wouldn’t use one as regular transport).
Jenny neatly summarises why Palin was a failure as an electoral magnet: she never managed to get past that “get out the vote” base. What worries me is that the Republican religio-gun-nut extremists might have thought she’d have wider electoral appeal.
The Big Empty.
Sarah Palin took a call from a French-Canadian comedian posing as le President Sarkozy. When ‘e ask ‘er ‘would you be ze President?’, she respondes “Maybe in 8 years!”, so we can sink she sinks peut-etre l’Obama is for ze ‘ow you say? “two times”, et zut alors it is SHE to be not ze bewdiful wife of Pres, but la Pres la meme belle dans La Maison Blanc?
Sacre bleu.
http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-election-2008/palin-takes-prank-call-from-fake-french-president-20081102-5g7h.html
those pesky Canadians…..
If Obama reasserts American scientific culture and makes significant alterations to the ‘energy economy’ he’ll have done a job of work. The rest is periferal.