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.
As much as I would love to capitalize on all the new readers who found the blog last week*, it’s not going to happen.
I’ve spent most of this week hovering over the hospital bed of my 90-year-old father, trying to figure out whether or not this is his final health crisis.
The whole point of the Sift is that I scour the internet looking for the stories you ought to be reading, I check the facts and the framing of the stories the mainstream media is covering, and I try to provide the kind of perspective and background that intelligent readers are looking for.
There’s no way any of that was going to happen this week. I could probably go through my files of half-written articles and throw some stuff together, but that would be no service to my regular readers and give new readers a poor introduction to what I’m trying to do here.
Maybe next week.
* Last week was the second-most-popular week in weeklysift.com history, with 38,000 views. Most of them were for The Distress of the Privileged.
This week the focus shifted to the Democratic Convention, where Bill Clinton came through big for President Obama, and Obama and Biden did well for themselves. (The pundit class, though, didn’t give Obama much credit, their commentary more-or-less amounting to: “The buildings he leaps at a single bound used to be taller.”)
This week’s Sift will review where the race stands, though I haven’t decided whether that will get its own article or happen in the weekly summary.
I’m trying not to get completely absorbed in the election, so this week’s longest article will step back and look at a larger-scale issue that I’m calling “The Genuine Distress of the Privileged”. What do you do with people who feel persecuted because they are losing their dominance? Whites, men, Christians, English-speakers, heterosexuals … it genuinely stings to be told that there’s something wrong with the attitude you were brought up to have. They don’t think of themselves as hate-filled bigots, so why do people keep calling them that?
The question is: How can we acknowledge their distress without de-railing efforts to deal with the far more serious problems of groups that really are persecuted?
The Weekly Sift 