A Second Hand Conjecture

When James Hutton, the father of modern geology, took his friend John Playfair to look at some stratified sedimentary rock, and Playfair realized that he was gazing into a chemical abyss recording the passage of hundreds of millions of years, he said the human mind went “giddy” at the apprehension. Genuine recognition of the titanic scale of geological time required to produce even in a lowly hill on the Earth’s crust, has always been a temptation to flirt with madness.

It happens that democracies can produce a political equivalent of this sort of experience of scale, due to their tendency to compile and preserve vast quantities of generational voting data over time, like strata for a human historical edifice. Thus consider the awful and incredible parity of nineteen presidential elections, producing one and one half billion votes, with a mere one hundred thousand to separate the two parties:

Total Democratic Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,407,082
Total Republican Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,297,123
(Crossing Wall Street via Pundit Review)

As with geology, there is a buried volume and timescale to this enterprise which can be easily missed whilst standing in a November voting line.

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Barack Obama has been president-elect for exactly one day and James Carville is already arguing for an inevitable Democratic majority for the next 40 years. Imagine predicting Jim’s claim to fame, the 1992 election, from the vantage of 1952, and you get a sense of the stupendous absurdity of this assessment in the light of history. But he’s not alone of course, Karl Rove and company were quite fond of these sorts of preposterous predictions just four years ago.

One grows weary of the taste such men have for these imperturbable majorities, lasting for decades which will predictably prove impervious to all future events and leaders. It’s not so much the unreality of it which is tiresome, but the very desire for it. Democracy has its own will, events their own timetable, voters change their minds on a dime, and wanting to grind the gears of history to a halt so that your party can rule forever, is a grotesque and contemptible ambition to begin with.

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According to the Associated Press, a sequence of interviews with Democratic leaders has revealed this to be the political plan being recommended to the Obama campaign:

1. Tie the Republican to an unpopular President Bush.
2. Let no charge go unanswered.
3. Stress plans to fix the economy.

Well, I’m not sure any of these items is good advice, with a possible qualitative exception on #3.
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Dick Durbin renews the Democratic attack on Palin’s experience, and calls for a retreat on family slander. It’s pretty much back and forth between the two attack vectors day-to-day in Democratic circles. They don’t know how to deal with her yet. Meanwhile they’re letting her develop her image as an classical outsider/reformer. It’s a huge political mistake with enduring costs.

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Obama puts up some significant gains in both the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls today. Gallup data suggests undecideds are breaking for Obama, while Rasmussen data seems to suggest a strengthening of Democratic party support. Take your pick I suppose.

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I’m beginning to sense that anti-Palin hysteria is building toward a collective psychological meltdown of truly epic proportions on the Democratic side of our political divide. Today, Democratic consultant Dan Conley angrily pushed us a little further to the brink of that by arguing that the selection of Palin by McCain was “cynical, undemocratic and frankly, unpatriotic.” Wow.

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Ken Davenport has a brutal piece in TWS this morning on the frankly rather embarrassing opposition of the National Organization of Women to Sarah Palin’s candidacy. It still astonishes me to no end that an organization which would be splendidly placed to speak as the pluralistic voice of the majority demographic group in the country (women=51.1% of US population), is so eager to consign itself to speaking only for a fantastically smaller band of Democratic Party partisans.

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Well, here is an embarrassing prospect. It seems the Republican leadership may boycott the Republican convention in Minnesota, for fear of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

The top elected Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was already boycotting. But now we learn that President Bush is said to be unlikely to attend, whilst Senator McCain may deliver his acceptance speech via satellite.

One would hope someone could prevail on both the president and the senator that this would represent egregious folly after a flawless, unifying Democratic convention, with its leadership in attendance. Evidently that’s something of a fortuitous luxury when the wind blows these days.

It should be plain that only an appearance of fear and disarray could possibly be conveyed by the abstention of Arnold, Bush and McCain from their own convention. The Republicans wouldn’t have hesitated to level such charges, had such a similarly ridiculous plan been proposed by the Democrats for Denver.

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Is there an issue equivalent to McCain’s strength in certain foreign policy areas, where Obama can be said to dominate the debate? A worried group of Democratic leaders have concluded that there isn’t, and Obama’s appeal is a kind of a general-studies phenomenon in need of greater authority on specific issues. That’s trouble, as money can buy the commercial breaks during a policy debate, but it can’t buy the authority to command the debate itself.

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Arkansas Blog has the updates on this horrible tragedy.

Arkansas State Democratic Party Chair Bill Gwatney was shot and critically wounded at State Democratic Party Headquarters on Capitol Avenue about 11:50 a.m. today, witnesses at the scene said. Police were not releasing the victim’s identity, but it was supplied by several people on the scene.

A suspected shooter was shot and taken into custody after a chase into adjoining Grant County. His condition wasn’t known. Sources say they are working to confirm tentative information that the suspect, who was critically wounded, was a former employee of a Gwatney car dealership.

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(photo: WBEZ Chicago Public Radio | site)

Obama’s newish McSame style attack ad mocking McCain’s “original maverick” slogan is fairly good. As Ken Wheaton notes, all the time McCain had to spend trying to convince the GOP he was a loyal Republican, unfortunately produced a lot of pro-Bush statements on videotape. Also, I like the Rovian touch of attacking McCain’s strength: experience.

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(photo: Dan Bennett)

Dick Morris writes that it’s beginning to look like McCain can win (if he follows his advice of course). Also, McCain has had an (insignificant) advantage with leaners in the Rasmussen tracking poll for two days now. That’s coupled with some peculiar pro-McCain shifts in their public trust ratings. McCain is now more trusted on a score of issues and dead-even with Obama (45%) on the economy.

One really surprising result was that McCain is now more trusted on Social Security (44% to 38%). That’s pretty uncommon even in Republican years. Ruh-roh, says me. There’s some structural movement under the surface of things.

If the Republicans somehow won this thing, I truly fear that some of my Democratic friends might spontaneously combust. They are as far from mentally prepared for this election to be close as can be. Much less are they even willing to entertain the possibility of a McCain victory. Predictions of such might as well be written Klingon. They will explain to you why it’s “impossible” if asked. Not that it’s unlikely, or improbable, but physically impossible to happen. It’s just not in within the realm of their vision.

When I sent Darryl Holman’s calculation of a 100% probability of Obama winning to a Democratic friend of mine (hoping to cheer him up), he responded that he didn’t need to do the electoral math to know there was no conceivable possibility of “McSame” winning the election. Ruh-roh again. There’s a little too much confidence in that camp for a scenario such as this, where polls aren’t exactly painting a picture of 1964.

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Meet Shirley Golub, a feisty San Franciscan who is challenging Nancy Pelosi for the Democratic nomination in the 8th Congressional District of California, on the grounds that she’s just not anti-Bush enough. Shirley fears above all that if Bush isn’t impeached, he’ll invade Iran. Yes, you might say that Bush will not even be in office if Shirley were to be elected in place of Nancy. But Shirl says it’s just a symptom of “corporate brainwashing” to suggest it’s too late to impeach. You must understand Shirley is very anti-Bush. It wouldn’t be the first time that obsessive and excessive animosity toward this president bent reality a little bit, and sent people spinning off into pointless efforts.

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Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Vowing to vote McCain, an outspoken, paranoid and hopefully drunk Hillary supporter gets tossed out of the Democratic Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting, raving about race and CIA surveillance: video.

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(photo: Serguei Kovalev)

Christopher Hitchens once said that the trouble with biographers of Thomas Jefferson, is that there appears to be the collective assumption on their part that the great man was without a penis. I’m reminded of this truth in reading about the very hot water Mr. Al Franken –the all-but-certain Democratic nominee for US Senate in Minnesota– has gotten himself into, over a satirical and sexually explicit essay he wrote for Playboy magazine in 2000. Hot water originating not only from GOP women, but also from within the Democratic Party.

The piece is without doubt salacious, even enormously kinky (naughty NSFW excerpts available here). But one could be forgiven the crime of commonsense in expecting that a writer tasked with composing anything for such a magazine on contract, would tend to produce something somewhat sexually suggestive if he wished to be paid. One might even go so far as to posit that writing something entitled “Porn-o-Rama,” for an unabashedly pornographic publication, isn’t all that shocking. I mention the title because in defiance of reason we are told by Liza Porteus Viana that the title itself (and neither the publisher nor the substance of the essay), is what is most politically objectionable here.

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source image: heartcores

I’m posting the news rather late because…well, because I’m writing from New Mexico. It should come as no surprise to the election observer, that the Land of Enchantment is once again rather late in declaring a winner in an election. This time it was the Democratic caucuses, and the winner was Hillary Clinton. New Mexico is always late because almost every election seems to break even in this politically divided swing state (and partly because alacrity just isn’t the state’s highest virtue).

In 2004 it took the state canvassing board three weeks to finally declare a winner in the presidential election. That year, California managed to get ten million ballots counted in a couple of hours, while New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, was busy complaining to the press about being overwhelmed with merely 7% as many. Incidentally, if you pronouce her name vee-hill-her-own, you could be a native.

But we should hope the occasion of the recount is just ordinary local narrowness, and not an unwelcome portent that the country hasn’t yet overcome her predilection for narrow national election results. On a raw and bitter level, I’d have trouble enduring another post-election experience full of recounts, recriminations, farcical conspiracy theories and obstinate resistance to obvious concessions. Remember this sort of thing?

Kerry won. Here’s the facts. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted….
(TomPaine)

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election.
(CommonDreams)

Ominously enough, some people are already starting to say similarly strange and obdurate things:

To imply that the New Mexico gives Clinton a win amid a string of losses, is to imply a falsehood.
(Dakota Voice)

This time around I could be pleased with whomever won, if they could give me a Reagan ‘84, Nixon ‘72, or Johnson ‘64 style annihilation of their opponent. A year without another hand recount in New Mexico would be a good thing for this country.

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Obama in Chicago: “If this contest comes down to superdelegates, we are going to be able to say we have more pledged delegates, which means the Democratic voters have spoken. Those superdelegates, those party insiders would have to think long and hard how they would approach the nomination,” he said.

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The Anchoress has a splendid post on my very own Representative, Heather Wilson (R-NM), whom I proudly voted for in 2006. While she upsets many conservatives with her McCain-esque positions (NR likes to slam her quite frequently), it should be remembered that Albuquerque –the urban heart of her district– is a politically divided city. Her cross-appeal to female Democrats has often made the difference in defeating strong Democratic challengers. At heart she’s a conservative and is thus enormously infuriating to Democrats who see the 1st District as being naturally theirs. However, I’d like to keep her where she is in the House. Let Steve Pearce take the fall against popular Tom Udall for Domenici’s Senate seat.

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Social conservatives and particularly crypto-socialist social conservatives (or “populists” if you prefer), are inevitably going to be a minority faction within the GOP. But to their great credit they themselves recognize this. The implications of that self-awareness are dire for Huckabee however.

Because their interests and perspectives are in many ways peculiar to themselves within the party, historically they’ve always been sensitive to their permanent political vulnerability. Thereby there is a tendency among social conservative voters to desert their insurgent leaders at the first sign of weaknesses (ala Pat Robertson, 1988). Weaknesses which could conceivably imperil their leveraged influence with the eventual broader party nominee and his regime.

As Mick Stockinger at Uncorrelated points out, these odd men out have smelled weakness on Huckabee and must soon begin their desertion from him to the establishment, in order to preserve influence. That’s because what the social conservatives are staring at now, is the prospect of being rendered completely irrelevant for the first time since perhaps 1976. Having supported the overthrow of the prevailing order in the Republican party by an extremist champion with a radical and unpopular agenda, only to watch him fail to seize control of the party, the coup plotters will soon be looking for ways to make themselves indispensable again.

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