This Atlantic piece about the tech guys who ran the Obama campaign is well worth your time.
Excellent Links
Open Thread: “Takers, Makers, Givers”
__
__
From a commentor at Seattle’s Slog:
A theme you may have noticed in the conservative world is the idea that on Tuesday night “Takers” won. People who have no interest in contributing to society and just want to mooch off the hard-working bankers, or “Makers,” this country depends on.
What makes me the most upset about this interpretation from the right is the idea that they refuse to acknowledge the people who want to be “Givers.” People who are happy and proud to pay taxes as a representation of contributing to a society we share and want to function….
The right ignores the fact that people need help sometimes and there other people that are willing and able to provide that help. Willing and able. Including people who used to be “Takers.” I came from a low-class background and worked almost every day since I was 13. It started so I could have a little extra spending money and not take from the family budget for a movie night with friends. Then it was survival so I didn’t have to go on Food Stamps (even though I qualified). And now that I make enough to give back to the society that helped me, I am happy to fill out my tax form knowing it is paying for Food Stamps for a hungry kid trying to get through school. Or maybe going to Social Security Disability Income to help out a person who worked their whole life but had a tragic accident that made them unable to function in a job. Or to a great transit system that makes owning an expensive car unnecessary….
We need to hear from some more “Givers.” We need to make paying taxes as righteous as saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
Read the whole thing, here.
Lede of the Day
So it’s finally here – the big day. After eighteen months of relentless, ear-splitting propaganda, with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of reporters humping the horse-race (jumping on every single poll like heavily-panting boy-dogs with their little red wieners showing) and day after day swinging the heavy horseshit-hammer of Thor, braining us with one meaningless, made-up non-controversy after another – after all that angst and stress and directionless aggression, it’s finally going to end.
I just voted. The nice old ladies at the poll said that they were over 50% turnout an hour ago.
Early Morning Open Thread: Shadow Walkers
__
__
For the Day of the Dead, and the festival of Santa Muerte, a meditation by Amy Wilentz on zombies:
… Most people think of them as the walking dead, a being without a soul or someone with no free will. This is true. But the zombie is not an alien enemy who’s been CGI-ed by Hollywood. He is a New World phenomenon that arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery…
The only escape from the sugar plantations was death, which was seen as a return to Africa, or lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa). This is the phrase in Haitian Creole that even now means heaven. The plantation meant a life in servitude; lan guinée meant freedom. Death was feared but also wished for. Not surprisingly, suicide was a frequent recourse of the slaves, who were handy with poisons and powders. The plantation masters thought of suicide as the worst kind of thievery, since it deprived the master not only of a slave’s service, but also of his or her person, which was, after all, the master’s property. Suicide was the slave’s only way to take control over his or her own body.
And yet, the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so. The zombie is a dead person who cannot get across to lan guinée. This final rest — in green, leafy, heavenly Africa, with no sugarcane to cut and no master to appease or serve — is unavailable to the zombie. To become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand. It is thought that slave drivers on the plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes Voodoo priests, used this fear of zombification to keep recalcitrant slaves in order and to warn those who were despondent not to go too far…
There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself…
Apart from remembering those who have gone before, what’s on the agenda today?
Early Morning Open Thread: Shadow WalkersPost + Comments (74)
Open Thread: Word to the Greatest Generation (NSFW)
__
__
Stolen from Watertiger, h/t commentor Jim, Foolish Literalist.
************
Longish piece, for those who need a confidence-booster: Sasha Isenberg at Slate discusses “Obama’s Secret Weapon“:
… All targeting carries the risk of missing the mark, and there are regularly voters whose actual attitudes defy the predictions of statistical models. But regular misfires by Republicans—which at best only waste resources and at worst mobilize Democrats who might not have voted otherwise, or provoke a backlash among those still persuadable—illustrate a gap between how the right and left practice politics in the 21st century. Contrary to the wishful intimations of the Post and Times stories, while the groups on the right could conceivably catch up with Obama and his allies in the scope and funding of their ground-level activities, in terms of sophistication they lag too far behind to catch up in 2012.
In fact, when it comes to the use of voter data and analytics, the two sides appear to be as unmatched as they have ever been on a specific electioneering tactic in the modern campaign era. No party ever has ever had such a durable structural advantage over the other on polling, making television ads, or fundraising, for example. And the reason may be that the most important developments in how to analyze voter behavior has not emerged from within the political profession…
Schaeffer attributes the imbalance to the mutual discomfort between academia and conservative political professionals, which has limited Republicans’ ability to modernize campaign methods. The biggest technical and conceptual developments these days are coming from the social sciences, whose more practically-minded scholars regularly collaborate with candidates and interest groups on the left. As a result, the electioneering right is suffering from what amounts to a lost generation; they have simply failed to keep up with advances in voter targeting and communications since Bush’s re-election. The left, meanwhile, has arrived at crucial insights that have upended the conventional wisdom about how you convert citizens to your cause. Right now, only one team is on the field with the tools to most effectively find potential supporters and win their votes….
How goes the storm / storm cleanup in your area? And what else is on the agenda today?
Open Thread: Word to the Greatest Generation (NSFW)Post + Comments (59)
Open Thread: “Obama’s Edge”
Hope everyone in Sandy’s path is hunkered down & staying safe. Here in the Boston area it’s just rain so far, but just about every school system will be closed tomorrow & Mayor Menino is telling people to ‘stay home if they can’…
Nice little piece by Molly Ball in the Atlantic on “The Ground Game That Could Put Him Over the Top“:
… While Obama’s office in Sterling is one of more than 800 across the country — concentrated, of course, in the swing states — Romney commands less than half that number, about 300 locations. In the swing states, the gap is stark… But the difference isn’t just quantitative, it’s qualitative. I visited Obama and Romney field offices in three swing states — Ohio, Colorado and Virginia — dropping in unannounced at random times to see what I could see. There were some consistent, and telling, differences.
Obama’s office suite in Sterling was in an office park next to a dentist’s office. The front window was plastered with Obama-Biden signs, the door was propped open, and the stink bugs that plague Virginia in the fall crawled over stacks of literature — fliers for Senate candidate Tim Kaine, Obama bumper stickers — piled on a table near the front reception desk. In rooms in front and back, volunteers made calls on cell phones, while in the interior, field staffers hunched over computers. One wall was covered with a sheet of paper where people had scrawled responses to the prompt, “I Support the President Because…”, while another wall held a precinct-by-precinct list of neighborhood team leaders’ email addresses.
Only about a mile down the road was the Republican office, a cavernous, unfinished space on the back side of a strip mall next to a Sleepy’s mattress outlet. On one side of the room, under a Gadsden flag (“Don’t tread on me”) and a poster of Sarah Palin on a horse, two long tables of land-line telephones were arrayed. Most of the signs, literature, and buttons on display were for the local Republican congressman, Frank Wolf. A volunteer in a Wolf for Congress T-shirt was directing traffic, sort of — no one really seemed to be in charge and there were no paid staff present, though there were several elderly volunteers wandering in and out. The man in the T-shirt allowed me to survey the room but not walk around, and was unable to refer me to anyone from the Romney campaign or coordinated party effort…
In a technical sense, the Romney campaign actually does not have a ground game at all. It has handed over that responsibility to the Republican National Committee, which leads a coordinated effort intended to boost candidates from the top of the ticket on down. The RNC says this is an advantage: The presidential campaign and the local campaigns aren’t duplicating efforts, and the RNC was able to start building its ground operation to take on Obama in March, before Romney had secured the GOP nomination.
“The Romney campaign doesn’t do the ground game,” Rick Wiley, the RNC’s political director, told me. “They have essentially ceded that responsibility to the RNC. They understand this is our role.” The disadvantage of this is that the RNC is composed of its state Republican Parties, which vary dramatically in quality. States like Florida and Virginia have strong Republican operations, while those in Iowa and Nevada haven’t recovered from attempted takeovers by Ron Paul partisans, and the Ohio GOP still bears the scars of a protracted leadership fight earlier in the year…
On the “tongue firmly in cheek” front, also at the Atlantic, Connor Simpson explains why Harry Reid just might be the Highlander.
What other news are we overlooking? Anybody want to report in from south of New York City?
Late Night Open Thread: Oh, the Vulgarity!
__
First Lena Dunham, the Joyce Maynard of a new generation, does a YouTube ad for the Obama campaign, and Foreign Policy asks “Is the Obama campaign taking commercial ideas from Vladimir Putin?” Not just commercial ideas, the commentors assure each other! Garance Frank-Ruta (perhaps ironically) also brings out the Cavuto Mark — “Lena Dunham’s New Obama Ad—As Controversial As Everything She Does?” — linking to the well-known moralists at Breitbart.com and RightScoop, who are appalled by the filthy sluttiness of it all. (I suppose I should look for Ross Doubthat’s opinion, but there’s only so much I’m willing to withstand for you guys.) Of course, as GQ‘s Reid Cherlin helpfully points out, “People who see this video and are outraged were going to vote for Romney anyway. “
Then Douglas Brinkley, sercon historian guy, does a Rolling Stone cover interview with President Obama (which you should definitely read if you haven’t already), and includes a throwaway line:
… As we left the Oval Office, executive editor Eric Bates told Obama that he had asked his six-year-old if there was anything she wanted him to say to the president. After a thoughtful pause, she said, “Tell him: You can do it.”
Obama grinned. “That’s the only advice I need,” he said. “I do very well, by the way, in that demographic. Ages six to 12? I’m a killer.”
“Thought about lowering the voting age?” Bates joked.
“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama offered. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.'”…
Worse things have been said about Willard Mitt Romney, of course, but the President used a naughty word, on the record! eleventy-one! The Latino Rebels blog has a pretty good collection of links to the various MSM reactions. The Daily Mail points out that noted Christianist and prominent moral scold Rick Santorum has also used the bs-word in public, as recently as last March. Dave Weigel at Slate has the best capper:
… The late-game presidential cuss word is a factor with some precedent. In the last week of the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon slipped and said that the campaign was “getting down to the nut-cutting.” In 2000, most famously, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were unaware that a mic was picking up their conversation about New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. “Major league asshole,” said Bush. “Big time,” said Cheney. And Politifact wasn’t even around to discuss whether this was true.
And, hey, look! Both Nixon and Bush won close elections.
Incidentally, one of the earliest political anecdotes I can remember hearing as a small child involved another Democratic president, the then recently-retired Harry Truman, who was said to have offended some ladies at his wife’s tea party with a reference to “manuring the lawn”.
“My dear,” said one of them to Bess, after Harry left, “Couldn’t you get him to say… fertilizer?”
To which Bess replied, “It’s taken me forty years to train him to use ‘manure’.”
Late Night Open Thread: Oh, the <em>Vulgarity!</em>Post + Comments (52)