Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Photo of the Obama event in Chicago courtesy of bcbeatty - licenced under Creative Commons.
So, since there was so much discussion before election day of where folks were going to meet up to watch the count in convivial style, how did everyone enjoy their election celebrations? Where did you go? What was the mood? Any good drinking games?
And how’s everyone feeling today?
I didn’t get a chance to link to this post during the American campaign, but I thought that Scott’s piece at Grodscorp on why a lot of Australians get into American elections with so much fervour was a top class piece of work. Other cogent explanations were offered, but the comparative level of excitement - and entertainment - is certainly one of them:
Conversely, can you imagine Kevin Rudd standing in front of 50,000 people in a sports stadium, making a stirring speech about his dreams and aspirations for Australia, causing every person in the audience and the millions watching on the telly to feel a tingling sense of national pride and hope for their country? Can you imagine John Howard visiting an army base, attracting tens of thousands of supporters, and bringing tears to the eyes of those assembled as he spoke of patriotism and sacrifice for an ideal? Can you imagine Steve Fielding being interviewed by a news program and looking dumbstruck when asked what newspapers he reads? “Well, just the Bible, Katie,” he’d say. “It’s got all the information in it that I’ll ever need.”
Of course, just as it’s true that many Americans rightly vote not on the basis of the putative celebrity status of candidates but for compelling public reasons, we Australians do get passionate about what matters to our collective future and our lives in the political sphere. But, I think, the point retains its force.
So yesterday, Wayne Swan was accused of releasing the midyear budget review on Presidential election day to draw attention away from the projections on growth and unemployment, the media tut-tutted because he couldn’t instantly recall the inflation number and had to consult notes, and Malcolm Turnbull accused him of lacking credentials on “economic management”. Just another day in Canberra…
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson on the mid-year economic outlook.
With which of your rights would you willingly part, if the majority willed it?
Which of your rights would you not fight for, if the state legislated them away?
Democracy, for all its precious redeeming virtues, has a major flaw in its potential to become a tyranny of the majority.
It happened in Germany in the 1930s.
It happened in Australia with the Pacific Solution.
And on Tuesday 4 November 2008, it happened in California.
With 52% of the vote (the same proportion with which Obama won the Presidency), California passed Proposition 8 to amend the state constitution and to ban same-sex marriages. Gay Californians had briefly enjoyed the right to marry following a California Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.
So last night, a legally constituted right was removed from a segment of the population, by popular will.
Continue reading ‘Your rights extinguished, by popular demand’
Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr - reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.
No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:
The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.
In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.
In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:
The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process - as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.
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.
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?’
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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.