Scenes from New York City, Tuesday 4 November 2008.
Archive for the 'International' Category
It’s all over, red rover, and Barack Obama, with 200 electoral votes in the bag and enough in the bag to come from the West Coast and Midwest to come, has won the presidential election. Lots of interesting stuff still to come, including the all important Senate races and the ballot iniatives, and the size of the victory both in the electoral college and in the popular vote. And the turnout, which is looking huge.
What’s intriguing about this win is that Obama will exercise influence immediately. George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, and arrangements have already been made for the next president to participate in shaping economic policy, and former Times Economics Editor Anatole Kaletsky thinks that influence will make a difference quickly:
If tomorrow’s election delivers a clear economic mandate to a competent new Administration, the financial markets will soon stabilise — and the US economy could recover surprisingly quickly from the blundering incompetence of Henry Paulson and George W. Bush.
Obama will be naming cabinet members and other key administration figures very quickly, and we won’t have the traditional waiting game for policy and names to trickle out before mid January.
How will he govern? One of the most interesting comments he’s made is when he told Jon Stewart that difficult times enable a President to achieve big things. There’s a bit of an FDR game in play, perhaps, with the modest promises of the campaign potentially being eclipsed by the pressure of events. We’ll see - expectations will certainly be high.
Related posts: The archive of all US election 2008 posts at LP can be accessed here.
Update [by Mark]: The text of Obama’s speech is here.
Gobama!
We seem to be getting a lot of 503 errors, which must mean either increased traffic on our server or the intertubes staggering under the weight of US election traffic generally.
But here’s a widget from MSNBC which should enable anyone checking in here to get a sense of the latest results. You can mouse over each state to get the latest count:
Other places to follow the count - Crikey has both Possum and The Poll Bludger liveblogging. At The Guardian, Anna Pickard is liveblogging the election coverage on tv (and Fox might get interesting!) while Oliver Burkman liveblogs the count. William Edelstein comments on the appalling voting process. There’s also liveblogging at Feministing, Crooks & Liars and much closer to home at Hoyden About Town.
The invaluable FiveThirtyEight.com has a post by post liveblog, and updated results graphically illustrated on the sidebar.
Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise has a twitter map of the US for your edification.
Update: I think scatterplot is right. Obama has won this thing.
Update: New post on the policy implications of Obama’s victory.
Amongst the myriad other things that Barack Obama (touch wood) will have to deal with, it’s negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that’s of the greatest long-term importance.
While it’s always risky to equate campaign positions with how a politician will actually govern, the noises from the Obama campaign have been reasonable. This is particularly so given the peculiar American fixation with “energy independence”. Their policy position is straightforward: domestically, an 80% cut by 2050 through cap-and-trade, with 100% auctioning of permits. Internationally, they want to re-engage with the “UNFCC – the main international forum dedicated to addressing the climate problem”. They will also create a Global Energy Forum of the world’s largest emitters “to focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues”. It’s still inadequate, certainly, but it’s a heck of a lot closer to the ballpark than the current administration.
Meanwhile, the other big polluters have been starting to firm up their positions pre-Copenhagen (or, technically, pre the next round of talks in Poland in December), but the road to a deal is as clear as mud at this point. While a number of eastern European countries - and Italy - have tried to renege on Europe’s commitments to a 20% cut in emissions by 2020, the broader EU seems to be holding firm on its position. But the biggest unknown is China. China recently released its own white paper on climate change. It details in some detail, and without sugarcoating, the potential domestic effects on climate change. It also details a large number of domestic policies to reduce emissions growth. But as far as international targets go, it’s extremely vague, with lots of praise for the Clean Development Mechanism but very little about what it might take for the Chinese to sign up to anything stronger.
It seems like there’s lots of horsetrading to go before - if - we get a deal in Copenhagen.
I’d contemplated liveblogging the results, but then I thought I’d like to sit back and enjoy watching them! In any case, I suspect this will be the most liveblogged event in history, so there will no doubt be lots of places around the tubes where you can hit the refresh key all day, if that’s your thing! Links to good liveblogs solicited.
So please treat this thread as an open US election results thread.
Related posts: What to watch and what to expect, prospects for the Senate and the House and predictions.
The archive of all US election 2008 posts at LP can be accessed here.
Update: I’ve put up another post with a live results widget, and links to good places where you can follow the results via liveblogging.
Some US states which were influenced by the Progressive direct democracy movement in the early years of last century (which also saw direct elections to the US Senate and the beginnings of the presidential primary) have “propositions” as part of their electoral system - basically legislation or constitutional amendments which can be put on the ballot by direct voter iniative. Californians know how many bizarre votes you can cast in one go (and California also has the recall procedure for state officials - which is how Arnie became Gubernator). It’s largely in the South and the West, though a lot of municipalities also allow direct votes (for instance on bond issues and other local fiscal matters). Since the 1970s, when both anti-gay referenda and the famous Californian “tax revolt” (which incidentally, Murdoch’s Australian tried to transplant to Australia with negligible results), highly ideological measures have often featured on state ballots. Ann at Feministing has a partial list of some of the more egregious ones around the states tomorrow.
The most prominent has been Proposition 8 in California, which would remove the rights to marriage same sex couples currently enjoy. There’s been a vigorous No on 8 campaign in the blogosphere, and here’s a vlog from Riese and Haviland, who some may know and love from Riese’s L Word recap blogging (or maybe that’s just me!):
If Proposition 8 is defeated, there really would be some sign of a shifting cultural climate in the States. A complete list of ballot initiatives and propositions is at CNN, where voting figures will be posted as they become available.
A sign of a campaign in trouble is normally the plea to make sure the winner doesn’t win too big. In the Australian context, we’ve often had the “send a message” ploy from Oppositions in state elections - Premier X and Party Y is bound to win big, so vote your grumbles and make them more responsive. When the incumbent’s support is soft, it can win you the election - two examples that come to mind are Wayne Goss in Queensland in 1995 (though strictly speaking it took a contested election and a subsequent by-election, etc, etc) and Jeff Kennett in Victoria in 1999. There was a twist on this tactic last year from the Liberals federally - with the “Labor coast to coast” scare, though that was despair from the incumbent rather than an insurgent Opposition. In America, where the legislative and executive branches are elected separately, it’s easy to run this sort of thing - hence the ploy from the McCain/Palin campaign to start a furore over “leftest government ever” if Obama is added to big Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Mind you, I can’t see personally how anyone would be scared of Harry Reid, or why he’s some ultra-liberal commie pinko. And Nancy Pelosi and “San Francisco values”? Well, look what happened in ‘06. In the House, the Democrats are hunting deep in red state territory and in the Republican suburbs and exurbs, actively campaigning in over 60 GOP held districts, while the Republicans play defence. Gains of 20-30 seats are expected.
But there’s probably more interest in the Senate contest. The Senators up for election this time around were elected in 2002 - a good year for Republicans. There’s some hope that the Democrats will increase their current majority from 51, perhaps reaching 60 - a point at which the minority can no longer hold legislation hostage through filibuster threats. (Note, though, that party discipline is nowhere near as tight as it is in parliamentary systems, though it’s much tighter among the Republicans than it used to be since they became more ideologically unified.) The Dems now include among their wafer thin majority two independents - Socialist (more like European style social democrat) Bernie Sanders of Vermont and “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Lieberman may well lose his committee chair after the election, but in terms of his re-election prospects, he’s still got some incentive to caucus with the majority.
Nate Silver has all the good oil on which races to watch. Stirling Newberry also has a worthwhile analysis of the contests in the South - Virginia, where former Governor Mark Warner (D) (and former 08 presidential hopeful) should easily take Richard Lugar’s seat after retirement, Georgia, where Jim Martin (D) looks good against Saxy Chambliss (R) (and where there might be a runoff under state law if the Libertarian candidate can prevent either the Dem or Repub from getting 50%), and North Carolina where Elizabeth Dole (R) looks to be in trouble. Longer shots are one of the two races in Mississippi (to fill the unexpired part of Trent Lott’s term), and Kentucky where GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is vulnerable. John Cormyn’s seat in Texas is a really long shot, but turnout - if it’s big and big for Obama - may well be a factor in making a lot of the races tighter than they appear to be.
Continue reading ‘US election: The Senate - race towards 60 Democratic seats?’
I’ll be updating this post as we get closer to Wednesday, but it’s worth making a few points at the outset:
Exit Polls: Take these with a grain of salt. In the states which allow early voting, almost 30 million have already turned out - with big advantages in many states in terms of the proportion of registered Democrats and independents voting over registered Republicans. Obama has “banked”, if you like, a lot of the support he had at the top of the range of his poll results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t get a lot of support on election day - the number of genuine undecideds would be very low at this point. The race is basically frozen - there hasn’t been much “tightening” and McCain has run out of time. The early voting advantage also means a smoother turnout the vote operation on the day itself, and all the evidence is that the Republicans’ much touted turnout advantage has been completely reversed. In fact, if you put together a lot of what we know about the lack of volunteers and enthusiasm in the GOP camp, this could be quite important.
In addition, the chance of dirty dealing on the results is lessened because a lot of the African-American vote has deliberately turned out early to minimise shenanigans and maximise the chance of votes being counted. So… that takes us to…
Why people are still saying the race could go either way… It’s partly the meejah trying to maintain interest, and partly both campaigns have an interest in making sure their voters think it’s important to turn out. And then there’s Republican denialism and their well known habit of assuming that you can create your own reality. And Democratic nerves.
States in play: Here’s the Kerry/Bush map from 2004 (courtesy of Wikipedia):
The latest polls have Obama ahead in all the Kerry states, and leading in the following Bush states - New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa. Outside chances are Georgia, North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and McCain’s home state of Arizona. McCain appears to have a lot of eggs in the Pennsylvania basket, but it doesn’t look likely. The invaluable Nate Silver discusses possible McCain electoral math scenarios here, and the key states to watch here.
Update: Nate Silver sums up where the latest polling leaves the race:
Far more important, of course, is the race for 270 electors. It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.
Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.
Robert Corr has tweaked a map of poll closing times in the various states, adding Australian times to it as a guide for tomorrow, and Nate Silver has prepared an hour by hour guide of what to look for as the results come in.
Update: Related post: Election eve links.
Update: Howard Dean’s pollster at Salon on how to read the numbers.
Update: Related post: What to watch for in the Senate races.
Update: Nate Silver on ten reasons why you should ignore exit polls.
In a previous post on expectations of whether an Obama win will reshape politics and end the culture wars, I briefly discussed Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I read recently. The title, incidentally, comes from a passage in a speech by Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential election, when the Democrats played on Eisenhower’s recent heart attack to stir up fears of Nixon becoming President - convinced as they were that attacking the genial Ike himself would be in vain:
Our nation stands at the fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.
Perlstein emphasises the dissonance between Stevenson’s claims to high minded political virtue and his own tactics:
The courtly type, he couldn’t campaign directly against a dying war hero; instead he ran against the man who might replace him. And he did it in a singularly uncourtly fashion. He wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” Galbraith acknowledged that as a “noble compliment.”
There isn’t much evidence that Stevenson’s “jeremiads” helped his cause much. His loss to Ike in 56 was comprehensive, and its dimensions were greater than those of his first defeat in 52.
In another excellent book on Nixon, in this case on his various images in the American cultural imagination, David Greenberg emphasises that liberal attacks on the Republican’s devilish character tended to backfire. Nixon’s Shadow highlights the genuineness of the identification between Nixon and many voters, and debunks the claims that such identification was nefariously produced by artifice. Artifice is one of the perennial political arts. Continue reading ‘More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars’
Not the Sarah Palin campaign… or???
The Guardian’s Comment is Free website and Soundings magazine are organising a series of debates on the theme of After New Labour: Who owns the progressive future?. Some of the contributions are making it online. After excoriating the “Third Way” for its lack of focus on what used to be the left’s core goal - working to put into practice the belief “that it is the sacrosanct duty of community to care for and to assist all its members, collectively, against the powerful forces they are unable to fight alone”, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman poses a problem which haunts anyone concerned with political action in the name of social justice:
Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances of most of our contemporaries, have evaporated from the nation state into the global space, where they float free from political control: politics has remained as local as before and therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One of the effects of globalisation is the divorce between power (the capacity to have things done) and politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space, and politics deprived of power in the local space.
Continue reading ‘All politics is local, but power is global’
One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko.
I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.
I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.
Err… whatevs. Continue reading ‘Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…’
US election: links post
Excitement, or maybe nerves, is building:
Martin Kettle looks at why Democrats are stuck in the subjunctive:
The last great white hope (sorry!) for McCain may be the Bradley effect, but Thomas Noyes thinks it’s non-existent, while Stephen Guess discusses the terminological inexactitude surrounding the “socialist” charge, and its ideological implications.
Looking beyond election day, Gary Sauer-Thompson thinks the Republicans will be reduced to a Southern and Western rump. In this context, it’ll be interesting to see if Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays loses his seat. Shays is the last GOP House member left in New England, and the only survivor from the wipeout of what remained of the once influential liberal and moderate Republicans of the North-East after the 2006 election. But the South is changing too, and Sasha Abramsky examines how the GOP’s lock on the region could be broken tomorrow. Firedoglake assesses the prospects for a Senate super-majority in the South, which is the battleground for some of the last close seats to take the Democrats close to a filibuster proof majority of 60. That majority would include Joe Lieberman, though he’s not flavour of the month among the Senate Dems (or anyone else bar John McCain, probably).
And if Sarah Palin wants to be the GOP’s standard bearer after a McCain defeat, it might be worth having a squizzy at her bizarre religious affiliations and why she’s just outed herself as a Klingon. One thing is for sure - the Republicans and the noise machine won’t take defeat lying down.
Related post: What to watch and what to expect.
Update: Some interesting links from Xeni at Boing Boing, including an election FAQ.
James Ridgeway at Comment is Free looks at the structural barriers to change Obama will face (including those within the Democratic party).
Update: An interesting post from Jon Perr on the “character war” waged against Democrats.