Archive for the 'USA' Category

Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?

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Guest Poster
2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, Government, Immigration, International, Markets, Policy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 12 Comments

Director of the Centre for Policy Development Miriam Lyons writes:

Barack Obama’s victory represents a watershed in American history, but it will also have ramifications around the world. Before I head out to celebrate I thought I’d just bash out a few quick notes on some of the policy implications for Australia of this momentous turnaround in the state of US politics:

Climate change

Today’s election result heralds the rise of Green Keynesianism. The US economy is in the toilet and smart economists are advocating direct investment over a more consumer-based fiscal stimulus. Democrats in Congress got a head start last year with the Green Jobs Act, and elements of the President-elect’s energy and environment policies look a lot like a ‘Green New Deal’. This from Time Magazine:

He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”

Calls for a Green New Deal are also starting to gain traction in the UK - and the UN. This can only help the chances of Australia’s version of the Apollo alliance, which released the ‘Green Gold Rush’ report last week calling for investment in green-collar jobs growth.

The Obama campaign’s target for emissions cuts was 80% by 2050 - a fair way ahead of Oz Labor’s as-yet-unaltered election promise of 60% by 2050. With the Arctic ice-sheet melting rapidly even an 80% target is too low for a developed country like the US, but it should certainly give Professor Ross Garnaut reason to revise his pessimism about the likely outcome of the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign’s climate and energy platform specifically called for 100% auctioning of permits.

Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?’

US election: End of the Bush era

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Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Climate change, Culture, Economics, Foreign Elections, Poverty, Science, Sociology and USA
. 58 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few weeks about whether today’s vote would signal the end of the Reagan era. That discussion had two interlinked referents - the combination of militarism and small government rhetoric (if not practice) which marked Reaganite governance and the enduring electoral pattern Reagan’s win in 1980 ushered in. It may well be that these predictions are on the money, though we’ll need a few more electoral cycles to be sure (and one very useful thing the Obama administration could do would be reform of the voting process, which might make a fair bit of difference in and of itself). Certainly the red state/blue state frozen electoral map has begun to shift - with the state level strength in the West for the Democrats now translating nationally and the South becoming more competitive (and as Cliff Shecter observes, the demographics in Texas and South Carolina are heading in the same direction):

In other words, Barack Obama and the Democrats are a national party now, while the GOP has become regionalised and fallen behind the times. What a difference a few years can make. It will now be up to Obama and other leading Democrats to solidify these gains through smart politics and smarter policy. So we can all breathe a bit easier, by putting the Bush years behind us forever.

What’s a little surprising is that in the midst of these debates, there’s been little discussion of the exact significance and dimensions of the repudiation of Bushism. As publius says at Obsidian Wings:

Any way you slice it, the 2008 election should be seen as a massive repudiation of the George W. Bush administration.

And not just in psephological terms, as the Republican right may have driven Hispanic voters away for a long time. Let’s make no mistake about it. The collision of neo-con Republicanism and reality has not been kind to the latter. Publius again:

…recent events have repeatedly proven the progressive “sphere” more correct than the conservative “sphere.” Progressives’ policy assumptions seem to jibe better with empirical reality than the fairy tale world inhabited by many in the conservative sphere. In short, in the laboratory of ideas, progressives are winning.

Continue reading ‘US election: End of the Bush era’

Yes They Did.

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Mercurius
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Foreign Elections and USA
. 28 Comments

Scenes from New York City, Tuesday 4 November 2008.

Continue reading ‘Yes They Did.’

US election: Obama wins - The audacity of hope…

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Economics, Foreign Elections, Markets and USA
. 127 Comments

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.

US election: Following the result! Links to liveblogging and results

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections, Notices and USA
. 23 Comments

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.

Pre-Copenhagen positioning - where are we at globally?

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Robert Merkel
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in China, Climate change, Developing world, Environment, Europe, International and USA
. 12 Comments

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.

US election: Counting the vote! Open thread

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections and USA
. 29 Comments

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.

US elections: Prediction thread

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Elections and USA
. 11 Comments

<p><strong>><a href='http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/pick-your-president/'>2008 Election Contest: Pick Your President</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the 2008 presidential election.</p> <p>

This is fun!

You can make your own electoral map to illustrate your predicted result at The Washington Post. I’m not sure if embedding will work in comments, but if it doesn’t, after you’ve gone through the process, you’ll also be given a url to your map to which you can link. You may have to make up a US phone number if you don’t have one, though!

NO on 8 - US election: the propositions

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Activism, Foreign Elections, Lesbian and Gay, Sexuality and USA
. 11 Comments

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.

US election: The Senate - race towards 60 Democratic seats?

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Kim
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Foreign Elections, Polls and USA
. 6 Comments

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?’

US election: links post

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Kim
2 weeks, 2 days ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections, Polls, Religion, Sociology and USA
. 25 Comments

Excitement, or maybe nerves, is building:

I’ll admit it. I just can’t concentrate. How many times can I check 538, pollster, or real clear politics? Hundreds of times a day. I arrived at my office at 8AM with the best of intensions. It’s 10:50. I can’t get anything done. I don’t have any high hopes for tomorrow’s productivity either. Who else is an anxious wreck? Anyone calm?

Martin Kettle looks at why Democrats are stuck in the subjunctive:

What is really happening, I think, is that Obama is going to win, and the Democrats are going to do spectacularly well in the Senate and House races too. But the mood here is like a cup final where your team is ahead with a few minutes to go. Those last few minutes seem to take forever. So near and yet so far. You overreact to every little event on the pitch as the time drags on. You scream manically at the referee to blow the whistle. Right now, Democrats are in that position. They just want it to be over now. But deep down, they don’t really think that they will throw this one away. They just want the whistle to blow so they can cast off the subjunctive and start celebrating.

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.

US election: What to expect and what to watch

Published
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Kim
2 weeks, 2 days ago
in Foreign Elections, Polls and USA
. 41 Comments

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.

More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 3 days ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Foreign Elections, History, Howardia and USA
. 35 Comments

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’

Those shifty Ayrab eyebrows

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Foreign Elections, Levity, Race and USA
. 5 Comments

Not the Sarah Palin campaign… or???

Exit Nixonland, stage left?

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Culture, Economics, Feminism, Foreign Elections, History, Media, Polls, Poverty, Race, Religion, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 43 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘Exit Nixonland, stage left?’