Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

in ,

Ah, The Onion.



African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."



***


Barack Obama, or at least his campaign photographer, maintains a Flickr account. Yet another reason Obama is the young people's choice. I'm not sure McCain has even heard of Flickr.


The latest set of pics is from Election Night. Here he is, watching TV on Election Night. Here he is, doing his famous point. If you were the recipient of said point, it must feel like receiving one from Michael Jordan after a nice play.


Ah, to be so telegenic. Also, how does one get to be Obama's campaign photographer? That's a guaranteed path to a coffee table book in 8 or 9 years.


***


A mostly unrelated sidenote: this morning, our kitchen sink clogged up and then spewed up what seemed to be sludge. It smells terrible. I blame Joe the Plumber for neglecting his duties, and I pray my apartment will fix this problem soon so I can use my kitchen again.


Someday we'll look back and laugh that a candidate for the highest office in our land brought Joe the Plumber out on the campaign trail in crucial days of the Election as, well, a prop.


***


Yes, I'm still not Election'd out quite yet, and neither are my sisters and all the volunteers I worked with this campaign season, all of whom have been trading e-mails with me non stop since Tuesday morning. Perhaps we won't stop thinking or discussing politics as long as Obama is in office. Is that such a bad thing? The West Wing is no longer on TV, but maybe we'll bear witness to the real-life version. A citizenship invested in politics for more than one out of every four years? That would be a blessing.


A way to relive the campaign is through this much discussed 7 part series from Newsweek. They were given extensive access in exchange for an embargo until after the Election was decided. Read it now, before it's turned into an HBO miniseries.


***


Obama iPhone wallpapers. My wallpaper for most of the time I've had my iPhone was a photo from an Obama event at Gibson Ampitheatre here in LA last December. Then, for roughly the past month, my iPhone wallpaper was a photo I took with actress Kelly Hu while canvassing for Obama in Las Vegas (if you have to ask, you probably don't know what she looks like, and besides, she was out with us canvassing and rallying, so she's ace in my book).


I thought I'd be ready for a non-Obama-themed wallpaper now that he'd won the Election, but no, I'm going to choose one of these from Flickr for my phone for just a while longer.


***


DailyKos breaks down exit poll data to assess the Election vote by age and race. The younger the voter, the more the skew towards Obama, but he won the 18-29, 30-44, and 45-64 age groups. Only the 65+ demo went McCain.


As for race, McCan won the white vote, the largest bloc by far at 74% of the voting pool, by 55% to 43%. But Obama won the African-American, Latino, Asian, and Other categories, all by more than 60%, and that carried it for him.


As for turnout, the estimate is that 64% of the voting-age population voted on Tuesday. That would be the highest turnout since women got the right to vote in 1920.


***


Jumping back to Tuesday's Indecision 2008 special, I noted yesterday that I found out that Obama had become President Elect, officially, at the end of that special. I sent it to Joannie, and she was moved that Colbert started to cry. When I wrote, as the title of my post, "When Colbert Wept", I meant it facetiously, as I thought he was pretending to be choked up in character (it's also a reference to a book titled When Nietzsche Wept which I read a long time ago).


But on yesterday's Daily Show, Chris Wallace makes reference to Colbert and Stewart crying when they found out Obama had won...






And so I went back and watched that moment when they announced Obama as the President, and it does seem like Colbert is fighting back some emotion (they say women are better readers of emotion, and Joannie has a higher Emotional IQ than I do). Even if Colbert isn't overwhelmed by the moment, I'd just like to think he is, because who didn't tear up a bit when Obama walked out onto that stage with his family? Maybe Obama is the only person cool enough to take it in stride, but I was bobbing at sea in tidal waves of emotion.


What do you think? Did Colbert drop out of character for just a beat?


, , , , , , , ,

Getting that coveted copy of the NYTimes

in ,

Sadly, I was shut out of getting a copy of the NYTimes yesterday, like many people. A note on their website today:



[Note to readers: Copies of Wednesday's paper were again available for the $1.50 cover price Thursday at Times headquarters, at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 40th and 41st Streets, until they run out. Commemorative editions may be ordered online or at 1-800-671-4332 for $14.95, which includes shipping and handling.]



Alas, the phone line is overwhelmed and not fielding calls right now, and that online link times out. If you're in the pipeline and get a timeout, the store also annoyingly redirects to the NYTimes.com front page for no good reason. Oh, if only Amazon could fulfill everyone's orders; clearly the NYTimes Store has the capacity to handle very little order volume.


Among Obama's many powers we can add the ability to temporarily revive a moribund business.


, , ,

And Colbert wept

in ,

At 7:59pm PST last night, I was watching TV with my roommate, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central, already feeling certain about victory. But none of the networks had called it yet. And then, at that moment, just as Indecision 2008's hour of programming was up, there was this:






One of the greatest moments I've ever seen live on TV.


, , , , ,

The Big Picture

in ,

You just knew The Big Picture would have some great shots of our next President.


Obama is the coolest cat wherever he goes. He never looks anything less than like some cinematic dream of a President. It's almost surreal that he is actually our next President.


That photo of McCain with his tongue out at the end of that last debate, all those pics of his eye-rolls and tongue juts, I don't recall a single photo of Obama like that. I half expect Obama came out of the womb not crying but giving fist bumps to his doctor and mother and pointing to nurses in the delivery room to thank them for their work.


That photographic contrast is just one of the many factors that fed into this landslide. One of the candidates looked like the guy you wanted to lead you out of the crisis, while the other looked like the hothead who would've gotten you into it.


, , , ,

The Onion, The Chicago Tribune

in

Headline: Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress


Half satire, half brutal truth.



"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."


"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."



My sister wrote me an e-mail this morning to let me know that the Chicago Tribune sold out in 20 minutes. She was at a sundry shop in her office when someone walked in with 10 papers, and she slide tackled and roundhouse-kicked a few people to grab a few copies. I'm going to frame that baby.


, , , , ,

Some notes on a historic day

in

How is it that so many politician's best speeches are their concession speeches? Gore, Kerry, and now McCain gave their most heartfelt and moving speeches after their dreams for the White House had come to an end.


That was the McCain that held such appeal to so many independents back in 2000. It took the duration of this election battle, but McCain finally found grace in defeat at the end.


***


The youth vote? A record turnout. One of the few sad moments for me this night was realizing I'm not considered part of the youth vote anymore. But I am grateful towards the 18-29ers tonight. That was the only age segment in which Obama won a majority of the white vote.


***


Sarah, you get back up there and, uh, keep an eye on Putin.


***


Obama gave his speech in Chicago behind giant panes of bulletproof glass. I confess, it was reassuring to see those in place.


***


Hey Joe. Here's a plunger. Get back to work.


Oh, and some of those toilets? You clogged them with all your crap.


***


If you consider America as a brand, then in one day it has improved its standing in a way that any corporation would kill for.



From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.


Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,

Barack Obama, the next President of the United States

in

We did it.


In 2004, my sister Joannie and her husband Mike worked for the Barack Obama campaign for Senate in Illinois. Karen canvassed for Obama in Pennsylvania. I worked with a local Obama office here, smiling and dialing to voters in swing states, and then canvassed in Nevada.


Supporting our hometown boy Obama has been a family affair. So when I say "we did it," I am writing about how we feel, and how every Obama volunteer feels, as part of a much improved ground game, one I think can be even stronger the next time around.


Sure, McCain was behind the eight ball given how poorly Bush ran the Republican Party into the ground, but I feel no sympathy for those who elected Dubya a second time.


And so the United States of America has its first black President. Has a black man or woman ever been president of a country in which blacks are a minority?


President Obama, you can start measuring the drapes now.


,

Socialism

in

The New Yorker examines McCain and Palin's criticism of Barack Obama as a socialist and finds in it a bit of hypocritical name-calling between pot and kettle. McCain himself came out in support of the same tax structure as Obama in 2000.



Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,

The Onion = Nostradamus

in ,

Article from Jan 17, 2001 The Onion: "Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over."



Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.


During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.


"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"


...


"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."


...


"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."



To think I laughed at the time. Please let this long tragicomedy end.


, , ,

Electoral College

in

In the NY Times op-ed piece Blue State Blues, Gail files the latest installment in what seems like a U.S. Presidential Election year tradition, the rant against the Electoral College. I agree. The marginal value of a vote in Ohio or Florida is worth too much more than a vote in states that nearly always go blue or red when deciding our future President. It's a wonder so many voters in those states, like California, New York, or Texas, even bother.


,

Robocall compilation

in

McCain's campaign is running robocalls and TV ads in a variety of key battleground states. They are, if not sleazy, then at least dishonest. TPM has a good compilation of which ones are running in which states, along with audio or video files for some of them.


When asked to defend the robocalls, McCain said that they were absolutely accurate.







After having been savaged by robocalls by the Bush campaign in 2000, McCain has chosen to fulfill a screenwriter's dream by turning to the same tactic in his own bid for power. There is a Greek tragedy here just ripe for a made-for-tv movie in, say, mid-2009.


Sure, these robocalls appeal to some of his base, but most independent voters are seeing right through these for what they are, just as Colin Powell and others have in endorsing Obama.


If there has been a positive result in this election it's that the crucible of the campaign trail has revealed the characters of both candidates and drawn a sharp contrast between them. This election has shrunk McCain before our very eyes. The wisdom of the Palin pick has followed a Flowers for Algernon trajectory.


My other curiosity about robocalls: people sit through these? I detest being bothered by human telemarketers but ironically feel insulted when they can't even pay for a human to do the job, leaving it to a recording. As soon as I detect the unnatural pause that indicates a recording kicking in, I hang up.


, ,

Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

in ,

If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.






LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.


Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"


, , , ,

My weekend in Nevada

in ,

I am as exhausted as I've been in a long time having just returned from a long weekend of canvassing and rallying for Obama in Las Vegas. Nevada has traditionally leaned red, and it went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Polls shows a near coin toss right now in Nevada. Its five electoral votes may not mean much, but just as a symbol, we (I use the royal we, my support for Obama being no secret) would desperately love to win it this time around.


It was an eventful and exciting weekend for team Obama:



  • The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama. Growing up in Chicago, I was used to seeing their blue masthead bleed red election after election, so this endorsement is a pleasant surprise.

    Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.


    We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.


    We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.


    The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.


    -----------------------


    This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.


    ...


    McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.


    Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.




  • Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning. It was once thought that he might be the first African-American to be President, but it was not to be. But his part in this saga was still to be played, and today was that day. Ken texted me from the East Coast at around 9am PST: "Powell endosed Obama on MtP." It was the perfect start to the morning and fired up the volunteer team for the morning rally in Chinatown.

    Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week": "What that just did in one sound bite -- and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad -- is it eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?"


  • Obama raised $150 million in September!

  • Someone was indeed trying to manipulate the prediction market Intrade to boost McCain's numbers.

It's often written that the Republican ground game won them the White House in 2000 and 2004. The terminology similarity to football is not the only apt comparison. As in football, where the ground game tends to grind out yards, three, four at a time, the ground game in politics is hard work.

This was more vivid for me this weekend in the Vegas desert heat as I strolled from house to house in various Clark County neighborhoods. But while economists wonder why people vote because it's irrational (one vote is so unlikely to make a difference), volunteering feels more sensible. If each of us can reach ten, twenty, fifty people, and if we can encourage a few extra people to get out and vote, or convince a few undecideds to vote for Obama, then the multiplier effect lends our efforts feel numerically significance.

Andrew Sullivan, writing about the ground game, says Obama's "major enemy is complacency among the young."

That's fair given weak youth turnout historically, but my generation (X) and generation Y are not happy about the label, and I believe the pundits are severely underestimating the youth vote and impact. I can't remember an election in which more people my age and below have been so active, not only contributing money but flying all over the country to do phone banks, voter registration, canvassing, rallying, and everything in between. If the Republicans are counting on youth complacency this time around, they are going to be disappointed. We don't just want to win the election (what Obama dismisses as the 50-plus-1 governing model, referring to the idea that it's enough to win 50% of the country's support plus one additional vote), we want to make states that have always gone red go blue.

Did our efforts this weekend make a difference? Saturday was the first day of early voting in Nevada. After a rally this morning, a local Obama organizer shared some figures with us. ~15,000 early votes were cast on Saturday, and 64% of them went Obama.

16 days to go.
, , , ,

The latest on the Election

in ,

Barack Obama is going to air a long-form 30 minute(!) ad on Fox on Oct. 29, and MLB has agreed to shift the start of Game 6, if it's needed, by 15 minutes from 8:20pm to 8:35pm EST to accommodate it. The ad will also air on NBC and CBS. Lest anyone think it was all altruism...



The blessing from MLB clears the way for Fox to air the promo and collect upward of $1 million in ad revenue for the half hour, more than what either CBS or NBC was charging.



Lest any Republicans out there think this is favoritism, note that the NFL moved this season's opening game so it wouldn't interfere with McCain's acceptance of the Republican nomination at the RNC.


I can't recall ever seeing a 30 minute political ad. Very curious. What will the format be? One long speech? A mix of edited footage and talking heads?


***


Sarah Palin is appearing on SNL this weekend. Yep. You betcha.


***


I don't recall watching the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner before, but it surprised me to see McCain and Obama making jokes about issues that seemed to have them exasperated with each other just a day earlier at the final debate.


Both candidates are quite funny, more so than the Thursday SNL in which, on one day turnaround, the SNL crew seem content to re-enact the debate and read most of the same lines that were actually spoken in the debate.


Check it out.






It's all in good fun, but there is some political scoring going on. When Obama jokes around about things like his middle name, or where he was born, or who he pals around with, and when McCain laughs at said jokes, those lines of attack lose a bit of heat.


McCain can be charming when he's willing to use a bit of humor which is why it's been so surprising that he's been so churlish in the debates.


***


McCain finally kept his appointment with David Letterman.






***


Joe the Plumber's story doesn't really check out. He's not a licensed plumber, he's not earning $250K+ (he'd actually save more money under Obama's tax plan under his current income), and he has no specific plans to buy that business he spoke of. He was vetted about as well as Palin.


Not that it's a big deal. Whether Joe the Plumber's story was true or not, he was entitled to ask the question, and Obama answered it. If he was making the $280K he claimed, he would be paying higher taxes on the marginal $30K under Obama's tax plan. I don't think it's a great loss for Obama as most middle class voters aren't worrying about their surplus income above $250K.






, , , , , , , , , ,

Nate Silver profile

in ,

NY Magazine profiles Nate Silver, whose hobby has now made him more famous than his day job, at least to the public at large. To me, he's been the guy that's built PECOTA, a baseball forecasting tool, for Baseball Prospectus, a site I've been reading and subscribing to pretty much since it started. But to most people now, he's the guy who built the models powering FiveThirtyEight.com, the thinking man's go-to site for electoral projections.



Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.



The key insight that led to his unique spin on interpreting the polls:



As the primaries went on, however, Silver, who had been writing an anonymous diary for the liberal Website Daily Kos, made an observation about this year’s voters: While the polls were wobbling wildly state-to-state, the demographic groups supporting each candidate, and especially Clinton and Obama, were remarkably static. He wasn’t the only one who noticed this, of course—it was a major narrative theme of the campaign. One pundit summed it up by saying that Clinton had “the beer track

Jay-Z

in , ,

I went to the re-opening celebration concert for the Hollywood Palladium tonight. Jay-Z performed with an assist from DJ AM and a special guest cameo by T.I.


Between songs, mid-concert, Jay-Z stopped to talk politics. He's clearly an Obama supporter, and he offered his "homeboy" some advice (paraphrased from memory):


"I shouldn't talk about this...but f*** it, I'm an American citizen. Free speech and all that. If I were to give my boy some advice on how to deal with homegirl -- you know, 'you betcha' -- I'd tell him..."


And he jumped straight into "99 Problems":



"If you're havin' girl problems i feel bad for you son


I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one"



, , , , ,