This week I took some of the time off that I’ve been promising myself since the election campaign. So while there will be a Weekly Summary, all the articles it links to will be written by other people. Topics: a surprising number of the people I read reacted to the recent Gaza hostilities with disgust or sadness, rather than taking a side; for all the articles being written about the fiscal cliff and all the speculation about how a deal might look, we’re getting almost no useful information; and while we’re all focused on the mostly imaginary dangers of the U.S. debt, the march towards a global-warming catastrophe continues.
Since I don’t have any articles to finish writing, the Weekly Summary should come out by 10 or so.
BTW, I have to crow a little: In Foreign Policy magazine’s list of “100 Top Global Thinkers“, Thinker #91 (dana boyd) mentions me and says that “The Distress of the Privileged” gave her an “aha moment”.
Because I want the Weekly Sift to be a counterweight to the mainstream media, I try not to pile on to stories that are already getting way too much attention. So last week, I just acknowledged the Petraeus scandal without saying anything about it. This week, it’s still making headlines and I still don’t care who slept with who.
Then I saw the Onion’s Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal and realized that while Petraeus’ sex life still isn’t news (by my lights), it does provide a good hook to start talking about some important or interesting things. So the main article this week, “Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal”, will look at how easy it is for the FBI to invade an American’s privacy, the non-sexual moral issues Petraeus’ career raises, how Petraeus got such a larger-than-life image to begin with, and the “spiritual fitness” program that channels so much of the Pentagon’s money into Christian evangelism.
Last week I gave a one-word explanation of how the Republicans could hold the House of Representatives while getting fewer votes than the Democrats: gerrymandering. This week I look at how that works in theory, and then how it worked in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both of which returned Republican majorities to Congress while voting Democratic.
Finally, I review ESPN’s brilliant documentary “Ghosts of Ole Miss”, which follows the 1962 University of Mississippi football team through an undefeated season that is remembered mainly for James Meredith, the lethal riot against integration, and the 82nd Airborne’s invasion of campus. The narrator, a white Mississippi native, artfully traces the boundary between nostalgia and shame.
The articles should start coming out soon, and I’ll have everything up well before noon.
No surprise, this week’s Sift focuses on the election aftermath, and in particular where the Republicans go now.
They’ve lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential election now, and seem to have alienated Hispanics as a voting bloc. (Asians too — which gets much less attention and points to a larger problem than just immigration policy.) White identity politics motivates the base, but the price may be too high. Evangelicals demand purity on gay rights and abortion, but those positions push away young voters.
So this week’s main article “W(h)ither the Republicans?” examines their reactions to a sweeping loss and gives my own suggestion: Keep a small-government, private-sector approach to problems, but come back to reality. Start proposing solutions to real problems like climate change, rather than imaginary ones like voter fraud or Sharia law. And recognize that conservatives are only 1/3 of the electorate, so you need to compromise.
The second article “Why Didn’t Money Talk?” discusses why the doomsday predictions many of us made after Citizens United didn’t pan out. The money showed up, but the results didn’t. Why not?
I’m trying to get both out before noon.
What else is there to talk about? There’s an election tomorrow and people disagree about how it’s going to come out.
Until now, I’ve been trying not to cover the election as a horserace and instead focus on the real-world consequences of giving power to one party or the other. I figured you were already getting way too much horserace coverage on TV and in newspapers. But Election Day is like Christmas. You can denounce materialism 364 days a year, but on Christmas Eve you can’t help staring at the packages and wondering what Santa brought you.
Unfortunately, Election Santa likes to bring lumps of coal. (Or maybe we’ve just been naughtier as citizens than we’ve been in our personal lives.) We unwrapped a lot of coal in 2010. In my state of New Hampshire, we’re hoping to dispose of a lot of that coal tomorrow. (Gotta be careful with this metaphor. If I were a Republican talking about the coal the country got in 2008, that would be a racial dog whistle.)
Anyway, I’m going to go out on a limb once again and predict hour-by-hour how the election will unfold. My predictions did really well in 2008, but that was a very different election.
The theme of this week’s Sift is “Don’t Panic”. Yes, I know that the outcome of the election is still uncertain and could herald The End of Democracy as We Know It. And the FrankenStorm is just off the coast, sweeping inexorably towards New York like the villain of a Marvel Comics crossover or Godzilla on his way to Tokyo. But things often don’t turn out quite as badly as we fear. Your odds of survival are excellent.
Anxiety is a symptom of pent-up energy, and the best use of that energy is to channel it towards averting the disaster that called it up. People who are doing something — donating to a blood bank, volunteering for the Red Cross, making phone calls or canvassing for their chosen candidates — tend to be less anxious than people who nervously watch minute-by-minute news coverage while doing nothing.
If you can’t come up with something constructive to do, at least don’t make things worse by whipping yourself into a frenzy. Don’t panic, and try to stay mostly harmless.
So this week I’m going to minimize the amount of who’s-going-to-win coverage in the Sift (that’s next week’s election-eve topic) and instead focus on two things: What closing arguments you should know if you’re going to have any last-minute conversations with persuadable voters, (Parallel advice to “Don’t Panic” is “try to avoid conversations with unpersuadable voters”), and what’s really annoying about those Richard Mourdock comments on abortion.
Plus, you really have to see two endorsement videos: Lena Dunham for Obama and Joss Whedon for Romney.
This week’s main article will be a little long, but I think it’s important. “Take a Left at the Market: Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow” says we don’t have to talk about capitalism in either Marxist terms (like exploitation) or Libertarian ones (like freedom).
A liberal view of capitalism should revolve around access: How can we create a market economy that everyone can get into? When access is your focus, liberal economic policies make sense, and aren’t just a hodge-podge of taxes and regulations.
In the weekly summary, everybody has been talking about binders full of women. (You knew that already, right?) But we shouldn’t let Romney’s unintentional humor distract us from just how awful his answer really was. Also: the polls are contradicting each other and may be overlooking two important factors.
And George McGovern died. He lost one of the most lopsided elections ever, but history has been kind to him.
This week I found so much interesting stuff written by other people that I put my own article off to next week. I am going to separate off a post on food safety, but even that is based on a much longer Bloomberg News article. It’s basically a short note that mushroomed.
As we move towards the election, that’s increasingly dominating the news. This week we had the VP debate, which pundits immediately declared a draw, but which in hindsight looks more and more like a Biden win. We also saw the polls tighten, producing some white knuckles among Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Democrats seem likely to hold the Senate and Republicans to retain the House.
But fortunately, there was some fascinating stuff that had nothing to do with the election. Let me tell you about the fastest-growing major religion in America, about the toilet of the future, and about marshmallows …
I’m still in the Midwest, putting the Sift together at a Panera rather than at home in my office. That adds an element of unpredictability to the day (plus an hour of time change), so if the Sift isn’t showing up as quickly as you expect, have patience.
The big news this week, of course, was the presidential debate. Why was Obama so listless? Were any of the charges and counter-charges true? How has Romney’s good showing affected the race? And so on. I’m trying not to get completely absorbed by the hype, but there is also some actual newsworthiness in there.
The weekly summary will be called “The West Wing and other fantasies”, after something Joy Reid said Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes. The short notes include some fascinating stuff about how the public discussion of global warming has changed, new data on how effective free contraception can be at reducing the abortion rate, the battle within newsrooms about whether immigrants are “illegal” or “undocumented”, and more.
The only separate article will address the question: What do we really know about Mitt Romney’s tax and budget proposals?
Previous teasers have told you the reason I’ve been in the Midwest: my father’s health. He died last Monday night and the funeral was Saturday. I’ll be going back home tomorrow, so I expect the Sift to return to normal next week. Life, I suppose, will find a new normal.
I’m still in the Midwest and working out of coffee shops, so the Sift may come out a little slowly this week.
I’m following up last week’s Obama’s Positive Case with Sorry Jill, I’m Not Voting Green. When I do the “I Side With” quiz, it matches me with Green candidate Jill Stein. But as much as I appreciate the positions Stein takes on the issues — single-payer health care, no drone strikes unless we’re at war — I still tremble at the spectre of Bush vs. Gore.
That’s the article that’s closest to finished right now, so it should go up first.
The other article this week will be The Romney Pre-mortems. I have to laugh at the general impatience of our age; we can’t even wait for a guy to lose before we start analyzing why he lost. But once that game gets started, it is strangely irresistible, and I end up playing it too.
I haven’t figured out whether it needs its own article or will fit in the weekly summary, but there are a bunch of fairly simple why-questions about the campaign that aren’t getting the simple answers they deserve: Why (other than the fact that Romney’s losing) do Republicans say the polls are skewed? Why does Obama say Romney will raise middle-class taxes and Romney deny it? And so on.
This week’s quote, about the shrinking efficacy of American politics, is from Rachel Maddow, who has been on a tear lately about all the issues that aren’t getting debated in the campaign.
Welcome to the new readers the Weekly Sift picked up from the popularity of The Distress of the Privileged. I hope you’ll appreciate this week’s Sift enough to bookmark the Sift and come back every Monday.
This week will have two main articles, which I’ll try to get out before noon. (I’m running a little late today because I’m still in the Central Time Zone*. Like the main character in Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE, I’m getting my Internet from a HyVee packed with retirees.) In the first, I’ll anticipate the Obama campaign finishing on a high note with Obama’s Positive Case. In the second, I give my answer to Waiting for Superman in Education Reform: I’m Still Not Convinced.
The weekly summary will be called Bedrock, after an insightful thing Chris Hayes said Saturday on Up. What everybody has been talking about this week, naturally, is the sad state of the Romney campaign.
* Dad is hanging on, but things don’t look good. Thanks for asking.
The Weekly Sift 