Are my eyes really blue?

The Washington Post yesterday profiled a woman in Hendersonville, Tennessee, shutting down the Romney campaign office – and still in shock that her guy lost.  The recurring theme is “what’s happened to this country?” – and then, about halfway through the article, you get to the throwaway line that her children aren’t allowed to read Harry Potter or Twilight.  One of those being much more reasonable than the other, but still.

This didn’t use to be how things were down South.  Sure, there were holy rollers out on the fringes, who gave you tracts instead of candy on Halloween, and your parents rolled their eyes and walked you on to the next house. Because you were out trick-or-treating in your Darth Vader costume, not at your church’s “Fall Festival” for kids whose parents had bought into the idea that anything remotely supernatural was the work of the devil.  Ordinary parents didn’t object to sitting up and watching Cosmos on PBS, because it was educational. 

Fred Clark has spent the last month or so on his blog driving home the point that in the early- to mid-1970s, the Southern Baptists weren’t all that het up about abortion.  Indeed, the fixation on abortion was considered a Catholic obsession, and the Baptists explicitly considered a fetus less than a person, based on scripture.  Books on Biblical ethics from the 1970s were re-published over a decade later and were suddenly horribly controversial and yanked from Baptist bookstore shelves – without having changed a word of the original text.

Something happened, all right.  It happened to a Republican party that sold its soul to own the Confederate vote and get over the top nationally.  It let itself adopt positions in 2012 that it would have dismissed as hopelessly backward in 1976.  And now the choice is whether to reach beyond the base, knowing that the mere act of reaching out to Latino voters, of abjuring the culture wars, of admitting the reality of climate change – doing those things will alienate their existing base.  But is that base actually going anywhere?  They might not turn out, but in twenty years they won’t be turning out anywhere except parts of Chicago and at the Legion Field box.

And now the usual suspects come down out of the woods to shoot the wounded. Mitt Romney wasn’t a true believer.  Mitt Romney was screwed by the liberal media (ooooh, that Fox News!).  The GOP spent too long trying to get a nominee and should have picked somebody quicker. (Like in 2008, when John McCain fell ass-backward into the spot.) The primaries went on too long and gave too much exposure to the carnival sideshow of Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump.  And most deliciously – the campaign knew they were dead with a week to go, but had to push the “shellshock” meme because if donors knew that Team GOP knew they were about to take an ass-kicking, they would start wondering why they were giving so much money to a lost cause that its operators knew was lost.  Plus, naturally, nobody could have expected big turnout among black voters, among Latinos, among women, because obviously the Democrats are cheating by running up numbers with minorities.

Right now I don’t take the secession talk seriously, because half the names on the petitions are Californians who would slice off a finger to kick Texas and Alabama out of the country.  The psycho libertarian types are fun to point and laugh at, but I think for the time being it’s going to be more nullification than secession – shocker, the governor of Alabama is already refusing to set up a health care exchange.  Here comes an attempt to create a viable marketplace for health insurance, to expand the range of consumer choice, as Republican an ideal as possible, but since that ni(CLANG!!!!) passed it…well, I guess we’ll see how that works.  Just remember what Earl K. Long warned Leander Perez back in the 1950s…the Feds have got the hydrogen bomb.

 

This was always the Karl Rove offense: you only need 50%+1, so the move is to get your base fired up beyond all reason while simultaneously turning off marginal voters. The point isn’t to grow your base, it’s to shrink the field so that your base becomes 50%+1 of the turnout. Thus the flood of anti-gay-marriage amendments in 2004, to ensure that the holy-roller faithful would show up to the polls. This time out, the plan was taken to its logical conclusion: actually make it difficult for the other side to cast its ballots.  Shorten up early-voting, limit vote-by-mail, reduce the overall level of participation.  Simple.  One loose-lipped GOPer even said that Pennsylvania’s voter-ID laws would deliver the state for Mitt Romney.

Whoops.

If there’s one word to carve on the tombstone of GOP2012, let it be this: “Unskewed.” When polling numbers didn’t synchronize with their expectations, the Republican brain trust decided that the flaw was not in the expectations, but in the polling, and they promptly re-ran the numbers with the turnout/participation figures they expected, rather than the ones reported in the polling. They chose to believe in their own reality. And they got shellshocked.

Now the fears and doubts commence. Some Republicans (noted airhead Sean Hannity springs to mind) are swearing that all they have to do is say something good about immigration to make nice with Latino voters and everything will somehow be all right. Many rightists, quite predictably, are blaming the nominating of Multiple Choice Mitt and saying the answer is (surprise!) selecting a true-believing red-blooded conservative instead of some Massachusetts squish. And everyone is convinced that if they just find another Reagan, somebody who will put a sunny face on what they already believe, they will be just fine.  Maybe within four years Jeb Bush can get his name changed!

And a few – a tiny few – are starting to question how much longer the GOP can survive as the party of the Confederacy, by the Confederacy and for the Confederacy.  Check out some of the maps that count up racial epithets on Twitter Tuesday night and you’ll see why the Supreme Court has no business even calling Article V of the Civil Rights Act into question. Meanwhile, teatards in Texas are already slinging around the age-old re-secede argument (as if anyone in the US needs to sign a free-trade agreement with Texas – wishful thinking, dumbass).  There are Republicans who recognize that America is changing and that the old ways won’t work forever – but so far not enough to drag the party away from the same Nixonland cliches that have carried them for forty years.

Because that’s what it comes back to, in the end. Creating your own reality at Presidential election time has proven to be a losing strategy for the GOP in the absence of a terrified populace, and even then, Bush’s stronger second win wasn’t a match for Obama’s weaker one. Until the Republican party learns to cope with the world as it is, it’s going to be a long road back to the White House – and at the moment, the House gerrymander seems to be the only thing between the party of Lincoln and firsthand experience as a minority.

Guess which candidate didn’t prepare a concession speech for Tuesday night?

1988.  Willie Horton. The Pledge of Allegiance. The “card-carrying member of the ACLU”. George H.W. Bush, with Lee Atwater at the controls, ran a campaign that was almost completely free from issues and instead turned on equal parts “you never had it so good” and visceral appeals against The Other.  Never mind that Michael Dukakis was as radical as warm milk. (Side note: stop trying to make Massachusetts candidates happen, America. They aren’t happening.)

From there, the Perot split, the Congressional realignment as senior Democrats packed it in, and the decision by the GOP to place its destiny in the hands of Southern leadership.  Newt Gingrich, of course, and Trent Lott and Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell and Bob Livingston and Dick Armey and ultimately, George W. Bush, aided and abetted the whole way by the rise of AM talk radio (with Rush Limbaugh as the apotheosis of Republican thought) and then by Fox News and ultimately by the creation of the entire media ecosystem necessary to nurture an entire alternate reality.

In this world, it was Mitt Romney who was the stalwart conservative, rather than a complete political cipher. It was a world where anything involving the seashore was obviously Obama’s Katrina, where the confusion around an attack on an American embassy was a bigger cover-up than Watergate and a bigger scandal than “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US”. It was a world where rolling the dice on saving General Motors, or on taking the shot at killing the aforementioned Bin Laden, were things that weren’t important when Bush couldn’t or didn’t do them, and then became things that were easy and obvious and no-brainers once Obama had done them.

Mostly, though, it was a world free from objective measurement.  The employment figures and economic indicators are suddenly ticking back the President’s way? Obviously being doctored by evil government bureaucrats.  Polling numbers that showed Romney leaping forward after the first debate are now showing him slipping? Obviously those polls are being manipulated by a biased media. Statistical analysis of the state-by-state by a fastidious statistician, whose math is out there to be checked and who ran 49 of 50 states in 2008, shows Obama in the lead? Obviously he is a mendacious little weasel whose very manhood is open to debate, and whose conclusions have less validity than the gut feelings of a has-been speechwriter.  No, Peggy Noonan just knows how things will turn out.

And yet.

Barack Obama won re-election last night, with electoral college votes and popular votes both in excess of anything George W. Bush ever got when he claimed his “mandate” to spend his political capital on disemboweling Social Security. He won all the critical states that Mitt Romney had to swing in order to win: Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and (in all likelihood) Florida.  The Romney-Ryan ticket became the first in forty years to lose the home states of both its ticket nominees (Paul Ryan’s much-vaunted hometown of Jamestown, Wisconsin went decisively for the President).  And the Senate – in a year where the Democrats were defending more seats and were in a vulnerable position – will convene in January with at least two more Democrats added to the majority.

Karl Rove created his own reality, sure enough. And last night it collided with actual reality, and the result was…well, the result was a complete epistemic meltdown on Fox News around 11 PM Eastern.  Half a billion dollars lit on fire in the cause of convincing America that the truth is other than what could be measured by reason and logic and empirical evidence.  It didn’t work.

In fact, this really was the last call for the Old Ones, and it showed – things we thought had been settled decades ago were suddenly dredged up as issues that were supposedly in debate. We had to argue about things like whether insurance was obligated to cover birth control, whether rape pregnancies were some sort of divine blessing, whether – again, inevitably – whether the President of the United States was legally entitled to citizenship and eligibility for his office. And the GOP thought these were winning issues, and the party in the electorate convinced themselves they were winning positions to take.

And then the rest of the world failed to participate in their reality.

Look, I endorse Obama for a reason, because he’s like me: liberal in goals and conservative in sensibility. By rights, in a world that didn’t have its head up its ass, I would probably be a Red Tory. But conservatism in this country is entirely bound up with the South and its sensibilities: the big mules, the wealthy and powerful, securing themselves in their position by constantly whipping up the working classes into a fury of bigotry and ignorance to lash out against The Other.  Black, gay, foreign, smart, it doesn’t matter. Right now, in 2012, this is all the GOP has, and as of this morning, it’s officially not enough. And as the nonwhite population of the country grows, as young voters continue to turn out in reliably advantageous Democratic numbers, as the ability to win an election entirely with an aging white base who remembers segregation dwindles, it may never be enough again.

Hippie-punching won’t get you into heaven anymore, Republicans. It’s time to start the 21st century.

More later. Tomorrow might be hell. But tonight…we got this.

If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress.

– me, September 7, 2008

 There you have it. No less a paper than the Des Moines Register, which had endorsed Democrats every presidential election from 1976 on, has succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome and endorsed Mitt Romney because he’s more likely to be able to get a program through Congress.  Because presumably Democrats won’t go the full Braveheart/300, and Republicans definitely will.

It’s fucking nuts.  You have a candidate who has held every position imaginable – one whose manager, in fact, explicitly said that clinching the nomination was like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake it up and start over.  You have a candidate who has made assertions about an “apology tour” and about car companies shipping jobs to China and about the President relaxing welfare rules – assertions that have been repeatedly proven false – and his response is to push those false assertions even harder.  You have, in short, the first ever openly and unashamedly post-truth campaign for the White House.  And at this point, there are people willing to throw their hands in the air and give in, just to make it stop.

This is what “no future” means.  This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane.  If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it.  If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.

I guess we’ll find out.

For the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s, there was a concept known as “the Electoral Lock.”  Because of California and Texas, it argued, and because of the GOP hold on the South and West generally, the Republican party had an inherent advantage conveyed by the Electoral College; no matter how narrow the margin of the popular vote, the states where they could presume victory were sufficient to get over 270 and win the race.  Indeed, in 1992, Carville and Begala merely claimed that they had picked the electoral lock, not smashed it – and rightly so, given that the winner-take-all and first-past-the-post system used most everywhere allowed a commanding electoral college victory with only 43% of the popular vote.

This was the first huge problem with the Electoral College, although nobody seemed to grasp it at the time.  Bill Clinton won fair and square, under the existing rules and system, and he certainly had a stronger claim than the candidates behind him with fewer votes – but because he was under 50%, the GOP promptly decided he was not legitimately President, and embarked on the scorched-earth approach that takes us down the road to…well, to where we are now.  Eight years later, everything went shit-shaped, but the Democrats’ outrage was limited to the shenanigans in Florida.  Once that was resolved, there was still the inconvenient fact that more people had voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush, and Dubya was President only by a quirk of the math – but the Democrats never gave that much of a push, and the attacks on September 11 pretty much swept the whole thing under the rug for all but the most bong-watered granola-shavers.

Now, the polls are getting down to the nut-cutting, and the GOP is back on the Rove plan: keep proclaiming you’re winning until people believe it.  The state-by-state polling suggests something different, and when matched against national polling showing a tighter margin, it’s paved the way for many a pundit to suggest that Obama could win re-election in the electoral college but not gain a majority of the popular vote.

And if you think the GOP would let that go as easily as the Democrats did in 2001, you’re fucking high. But even if it elects Obama, and they do everything in their power to dislodge or cripple him, they won’t campaign to scrap the Electoral College.

Because the electoral college really does skew the board in favor of one kind of state: narrowly-balanced medium-large ones.  California, Texas, New York: off the board.  Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia: slightly more competitive but not terribly so. Ohio, Florida, and now Virginia? Well, that’s another story.  Those states get to be the pivot point because they can between them shift about 60 electoral college votes, between a fifth and a quarter of everything you need to win the whole shooting match. If Obama has California, Illinois and New York on lock, that’s 94 right there, or 35% of the way to victory without ever spending a minute or a nickel in those three states.  Similarly, if the GOP can count on Texas, Oklahoma and the old SEC states (other than Florida) that’s a whopping 118, or 43% of the way there.  Get those states plus the Ohio-Florida-Virginia axis, and that makes 178, and you’re two-thirds home while only making an effort in three states.  Hell, those GOP lock states gained 5 votes on redistricting in 2010, so that’s a 10-vote swing – as much as winning Wisconsin or Minnesota, without lifting a finger.

This is why the GOP won’t argue to get rid of the electoral college.  They’ll argue to get rid of Obama, but they’re not about to give away a system that lets them gain 2/3 of the votes to win the White House by merely waving a rebel flag and campaigning in three states.  There may not be an electoral lock anymore, but there’s an electoral latch, and the Republican party has everything to gain by making sure it’s intact.

It rather makes you ask why we even need the electoral college – why not just use, you know, the popular vote?  Well, the biggest reason is that right now there’s really no such thing as a national popular vote (barring perhaps Dancing With The Stars or the like).  What we have are a bunch of aggregated state and local elections, which in may ways prevent bigger problems: how do you administer an election from the federal level? Imagine Florida in 2000. Now apply it to every single polling place where it might be possible to swing a hundred votes.  Imagine a bunch of teatards trying to shake down voters here and there, and suddenly the numbers look a lot more fungible.  The Electoral College has the effect of abstracting away the effects of tens of thousands of locally-administered elections, and for all its limitations does simplify things inasmuch as it makes tampering with any one local election pointless.

But it also sets up a very difficult problem: inasmuch as the white vote in the South is probably going to go at least 75% for Mitt Romney, it creates a real non-zero chance that Obama can win the electoral college and the non-Southern popular vote, but lose the national popular vote off the back of wildly disproportionate balloting in the old Confederacy.  And thus does the Civil Cold War grind on.

” [You] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality….That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Eight years ago, that unnamed Bush administration aide – reputed to be Karl Rove himself in some circles – essentially laid out the entire template for what it means to be a Republican in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Twelve.  Being Republican now means you create your own reality.  That’s how it’s possible for a majority of the GOP in the South to believe that Barack Obama was born somewhere outside the United States and is actually a Muslim.  That’s how it’s possible for Paul Ryan to accuse the President of slashing a huge amount from Medicare when those cuts appear in his own budget.  That’s how it’s possible to say that the Obama administration has raised taxes and expanded the government to unprecedented levels, when in fact taxes have gone down every year and the level of government employment has been reduced so far it has a material impact on those pesky unemployment figures. That’s how it’s possible to sweep eight years of Bush mismanagement under the rug, provide nothing but scorched-earth obstruction for four years, and then claim that Barack Obama is on the verge of destroying America.

Look, there’s plenty to criticize with this President.  Did he bring about the progressive liberal New Jerusalem? Not remotely.  Are there serious concerns about the long-term prospects for civil liberties in a world of unregulated drone warfare? Naturally. Should he have done things differently that first year? Almost certainly. And yet, in a world where grandstanding conservative Democrats had to have their feathers preened (looking at you, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu), where moderate Republicans sloughed off their own recorded preferences and fell into lockstep with their party (looking at you, Maine women), where the GOP opened 2009 stating that their highest hope was for the President to fail (that’s you, Rush) and their foremost goal was to make Obama a one-term President (that’s you, McConnell, and fuck the Wildcats while I’m at it) – in short, in a world where everybody dug in their heels and said “Not it,” Barack Obama accomplished at least as much as could be reasonably expected of a President.

Was the stimulus large enough?  No, because it was arbitrarily reduced by Senate Democrats.  Did Gitmo close? No, because GOP Congressmen pissed themselves at the thought of evil magic terrorists crossing the border. Did the United States lose its AAA credit rating? Yes, because the Republican party decided to play chicken with a credit limit that few of them credibly understood. Did we get a public option for health insurance for all?  No, because Ted Kennedy died and the Wise Old Men of Washington decided that a routine sixty-vote threshold for all Senate votes was right and proper and normal and not at all an unprecedented feat of delay and obstruction.

It’s the age old story, sad but true: the first black guy had to be twice as good to get half as far.

I’m not going to reward obstruction. I’m not going to reward bullying. I’m not going to reward rampant douchbaggery. I’m not going to hand the reins over to the people who drove the car off the cliff and then spent four years slashing the tires on the tow truck before blaming the tow-truck driver for the wreck.

I live in the real world.  And in the real world, the guy who’s done his best under preposterous circumstances shouldn’t be punished for it…especially when he’s delivered results.  For this reason, yes, I endorse Barack Hussein Obama for re-election as the 44th President of the United States.

* World Series time again. I don’t have an emotional investment in the Giants that begins to scratch the surface of Vanderbilt, or for that matter Cal football or the Redskins, but I enjoy having the World Series in town and I’d love for the guys to get another one.  San Francisco doesn’t get the kind of run St Louis or Boston or New York do in the “great baseball town” department but I’ll put it up against any of them for sheer fun factor.

* Autumn has fallen like an anvil. Scant days after a mini-heat-wave took the lower Peninsula within an eyelash of 90 degrees, the rain arrived and took the highs down into the 60s.  And since it coincided with being on call for jury duty, I’ve been driving to work in it all week, complete with sunrise times around 7:15 AM (thanks for nothing, Dubya).  And I’m enjoying it. I missed fall, and now I have fall color plus cool and damp plus the pattering of raindrops out the window at night plus an ironclad excuse for jackets.  Now if only I could settle on choosing between the Levis/Filson black tin cloth trucker jacket and the fog-colored ScottEVest Standard jacket…

* Jackets and fitting into them made me reflect a little more on yesterday’s announcement.  Between an iPhone 4S (with a 5 on the way) and a third-gen iPad, I have absolutely no justification (or desire) for an iPad mini.  However, the Nexus 7 is still tickling the fringes of my interest, because a) it’s an Android device that, by its Nexus nature and unlike most Androids, will get updated and b) it should fit in any ordinary jacket inside pocket in a way the iPad doesn’t, and c) it has Wi-Fi and GPS built in and could easily be tethered to the iPhone in a pinch. Given that the pixel space isn’t that much different from the iPhone 5, though (1200×800 as vs 1136×640), I wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze, especially when I already have a Kindle to handle the problem of the iPhone not being optimal for books.

* Speaking of books, I have two endorsements: Straphanger, by Taras Grescoe, a survey of the history of public transit in America and the current state of transit around the world, and Attention All Shipping: A Journey Around The Shipping Forecast, by Charlie Connelly, which I am about halfway through. It appears that my reading material has started to intrude on my jacket/footwear/bag glee as yet another indication that I’m ready to leave the country again.  Or maybe it’s just a certain stuffed turtle poking me with his little flipper-paw-whatever and cocking his head toward the atlas.

* Or maybe it’s lingering election panic.  Look, I moved as far as I could from Alabama, it’s not allowed to follow me. I’m not sure I’m ready for the prospect of governance by the Confederates.  And the irony of it is, as a straight white male of Protestant extraction and reasonable affluence with a well-remunerated job and health insurance, I stand to make out like a bandit if the other crowd gets in.

* Well, I say health insurance.  It’s only Blue Shield. Fuck those guys.

* The neck’s fine, it seems, or certainly less of an issue. Although I did go back on the diclofenac once I slept wrong and then raised my arm wrong and pulled a muscle on the OTHER side.  In fact, right now my shoulders ache like I did weights. Which I didn’t. Getting a review and ruling next week and seeing what happens, and then it’s back to the gym because I need to strengthen up.  Or maybe what I need is a long soak in the hot tub, a long soak in the steam room, and about 90 minutes of somebody who knows their way around deep tissue massage trying to beat the location of the Rebel base out of my back.

* The less said about Big Game, the better – I’ve said my piece elsewhere and stand by my assessment following the Holiday Bowl: Jeff Tedford is not fit for purpose as head football coach at the University of California and has not been for some time.  A move is long overdue…

* Meanwhile, one shitty win over Auburn later, Vandy is a homecoming victory over hapless and winless UMass from turning its 1-3 start into a 4-4 record.  Believe it or not, the possibility of winning out and posting an 8-4 regular season record and 5-3 in the conference – the first outright winning season on either since 1982 – is still out there and not unreasonable.  As a matter of fact, get me that and I won’t need anything else for Christmas…

Every single rumor appears to have paid out today. 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. New Mac mini, new iMac, updated iPad, and – of course – the long-awaited iPad mini, complete with 7.85-inch screen to use the same display resolution as original iPad apps.

Now…do I wish I’d held out and waited? You can’t do that with technology. You have to get what you can and get the full use out of it. And I have. From a pure jacket-ology standpoint, would I like an iPad that fit in all my coats? Sure. But that’s what the iPhone 5 is going to be for…in a month. Probably. Hopefully. 🙂

More to the point, it may be time for me to take the plunge and replace the Mac mini at home, which is three years old and showing its age. It wouldn’t suck if we could get the entirety of everything on a hard drive without dragging an external drive to handle the video storage.

But back to the iPad mini – why? And why now?

I think it goes to the Kindle Fire. Amazon gave the world its first 7-inch tablet that didn’t suck. They did so by following the Apple path: pare it down, include only the stuff you really need, and optimize it for doing the stuff that users want from it. Then, Google handed out the Nexus 7 and proved you could do a full-function tablet in that form factor that didn’t suck. So rather than leave a gap in the market between the iPhone and the full-size iPad, one that its primary rivals could exploit, Apple slid this thing in – the screen less than two inches smaller, but cut down in form factor to get in that 7″ tablet spot.

Himself said you needed to file your fingers to a point to use a 7-inch tablet. But he’s not in charge any more. Things change. And Apple’s starting at $329 for a wi-fi 16 GB model, almost $100 more than the Nexus 7…and counting on the Apple ecosystem and reputation to be worth an eighty dollar premium. Because that’s where they’re playing: affordable premium, instead of lowest cost.

Can they keep it up? Who knows? It hasn’t stopped yet.