2008 USGE RESULTS THREAD PS GOP U LOST DIXVILLE NOTCH LOL

NO SMASHING PUMPKINS

OK give Daria a break, what she's giving here is INFORMATION, not her personal opinion. Respect that.

No Common or Luda because they go to UCC. Kanye is a great fit actually and I'll eat my shoe if they don't at least invite Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who is basically now shielded from past associations by virtue of - if not his success - his marriage. Destiny's Child one-off for his girls instead? Female performer mentions thin on the ground here, disappointed!

MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT

BET ON IT

Also the dirt-off-shoulder as some kind of explicit Jay-Z riff seems really off to me -- surely the gesture's been in general circulation long enough that it's not some direct reference

I guess, but Jay-Z was the first thing I thought of when he did it

http://bp2.blogger.com/_mIPUrjIVnas/SAeh8Dr5k6I/AAAAAAAAACk/mGKl6tP3sp0/s400/2340317881_662005e885

Dirt off shoulder? This is a thing?

Female performer mentions thin on the ground here, disappointed!
hard pressed to name a big female performer from Chicago, apart from Mavis Staples.

who would be a great choice, actually.

You can have them all...

Dwight D Eisenhower's first inauguration in 1953 was the longest ever. It included 73 bands, 59 floats and horses and elephants and lasted four-and-a-half hours.

I guess, but Jay-Z was the first thing I thought of when he did it

This is not particularly surprising considering how often Jay-Z is mentioned around this particular demographic combined with how much time we all waste here!

omg I really hope Obama gets an elephant instead of a puppy, gangsta

Ha, Shakey, I wouldn't have thought anything strange about considering it a gesture stemming from or with particular currency in some broader "hip-hop culture" or whatever weasely words you want to put there -- there was just something odd about quoting the single like the dude invented it

daria read the postmortem for the awesome stories basically

yeah, i'm trying. i just can't help but be stunned by the degree to which.. this is a group of writers i suppose.. they have internalized so many right wing talking points from the past few decades. there is specific language to this that continually jumps out at me. liberal media, my ass.

hey no worries i don't feel like anyone is getting on my shit here.

hard pressed to name a big female performer from Chicago, apart from Mavis Staples.

Liz Phair, duh

is she actually "big" anymore? I used to work with her dad.

Daria I have a hard time thinking of that group of writers as having internalized anything right-wing (and besides, the group of writers listed there are basically just the Newsweek reporting sources listed throughout, not authors) -- maybe helps to remember that they are talking about campaign optics more than reality here, so of course the language is going to play against party narratives on both sides.

mod request: move thread to ILM pls

nah shakey, she's slimmed down quite a bit

Killdozer, for god's sake

(ok, now following I DIED's lead from here on out)

No results found for "petition for sam prekop as inaugural ball performer".

boner jamz

― metametadata (n/a), Thursday, November 6, 2008 5:09 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

^^not American

Didn't Steel Pulse play at Clinton's '93 inaugeration?

YOUR INAUGURAL BALL MUSIC PERFORMER PREDICTION THREAD

oops shoulda said 2009

nabisco, i'm afraid i don't understand what you're saying with that..

mavis staples is a great choice - i post it here now bcuz i dont feel like posting in an entire thread devoted to this discussion

didn't staples put out an album on election day?

The Obama campaign did not want to get caught up in trying to satisfy all the interest groups that make up the modern Democratic Party—the one that had lost seven of the last 10 presidential elections. The John Kerry campaign set up elaborate liaison offices dedicated to ethnic groups, organized labor, groups for the disabled, for women, for gays and lesbians.

^^ OK, stuff like this, writers like -> "interest groups" make the democrats losers, winning campaigns shouldn't do much of anything to work with them.

i don't think the kerry campaign lost because it had liason offices to gay and lesbian groups, disabled groups, organized labor, etc. the correlation just doesn't make any sense to me.

the sentence itself makes no sense. bad writing.

The Obama campaign seems to have thought it was a waste of resources, though.

i dont think it reads like 'not paying attention to interest groups helped them win!', more like 'sticking to a winning strategy meant focusing on a ground game and not paying a bunch of PR hacks'

omg I really hope Obama gets an elephant instead of a puppy, gangsta

lol

didn't staples put out an album on election day?

yep

http://www.barackobama.com/images/people/aa.jpg

http://www.barackobama.com/images/people/da.jpg

http://www.barackobama.com/images/people/rural.jpg

http://origin.barackobama.com/people

I read that more as "splitting everybody up into micro-managed groups was a stupid inefficient strategy". which is the truth.

I read that sentence as "the Obama campaign chose to focus on giving a consistent message rather than attempting to be all things to all people or please all of the constituents of the Democratic Party". The use of the term "interest groups" seems like lazy shorthand to me.

Yeah sorry, Daria, I didn't unpack that nearly well enough. What I mean is that when you're recapping a campaign, you're talking about how the personas of the candidates are formed and managed, and that is stuff that inevitably happens against a context of certain myths and expectations and narratives from both sides of the political spectrum -- those things are the very water you're swimming in, and how much they are, umm, epistemologically true is kinda secondary to the fact that they're how elections work and how voters often think about things. So I don't think it betrays any internalization of right-wing talking points for Newsweek reporters to talk in some of those terms and refer to those narratives; that's the very substance of what they're reporting on. So, e.g., saying that Obama has a disdain for identity politics could be read not as assertion that other black politicians absolutely have, but a suggestion of how he's broken from perceptions of black politicians -- "perceptions," in the context of a campaign story, being weirdly interconnected with "truth." (I also don't think that statement is particularly untrue, particularly if you broaden it to talk more generationally about black politicians in Obama's age group.)

xpost - Daria that statement about interest groups is flatly declarative! You're taking issue with a very low-level suggestion that catering to interest groups is something that sunk Kerry and Obama got beyond, but keep in mind that you are reading an article about how Obama won an election, and pretty much anything he did differently from previous Democratic losers is going to be of note as a point of interest!

P.S. I used the word "optics" since this seems to be the word used by analysts and commentators that completely carries the freight of the difference between what they think is epistemologically true and how something works in terms of a campaign -- e.g., "I don't think it's weird for Sarah Palin to buy a crapload of new clothes for a national campaign, but yes, the optics of it are terrible"

turns out it was also flat-out terrible, though

hahaha

i'm not content to let the myths and expectations and narratives in the news media go unchallenged. especially when they help republicans, because IMHO most of them do. for instance, organized labor being characterized as an "interest group" that is part of a loser party. we just let it go by? why? if it's a myth that screws over progressives, fight back.

Wow, really? That's what you took away from that?

Daria I take your point, but I think you're reading way, way too much into the language of the piece. I also think:

(a) They are not myths and expectations and narratives in the news media, they are the very substance of politics and campaigns, and to talk about politics and campaigns without acknowledging them would be an absolute disservice to truthfulness

(b) It is Newsweek's purpose here to recap how a campaign operated in the real world, not to recap how it operated from some fixed alternative political perspective that challenges the mentalities of the campaigns and the voters they're talking about (i.e., they are reporting, not deconstructing)

(c) One potential example of your over-reading might be reducing that sentence to "loser party," which spins a vague implication left to the mind of the reader into some kind of explicit statement; also organized labor is an organized interest group, and they'd be the first to tell you so

(d) A piece like this is bound to assemble some kind of narrative around the campaign -- this is the piece's entire purpose -- and part of me feels like you're objecting to the assembly of narrative as much as to what the narrative here is; I'm not sure what you're seeing in the narrative they're assembling that goes beyond the level of opinion and becomes so flatly objectionable!

this seems to be the word used by analysts and commentators that completely carries the freight of the difference between what they think is epistemologically true and how something works in terms of a campaign

and this is a TERRIBLE thing for this country! for instance, obama says something about the price of arugula, and turns out to be a shitty bowler, or john kerry orders a green tea, and the mainstream press corps is so lazy that they freak the fuck out over it because of "optics." meanwhile what is epistemologically true is that people are losing their jobs, health care, and money in their 401Ks if they even have them, and newsweek is running cover stories about the optics of beer versus arugula. we can't just let that shit go. that's how we lose. the republicans need those kinds of distractions to win elections because their actual policies are terrible for the country, and when the media covers campaigns based on optics and trivia, IMHO that hugely favors the GOP.

except we won

also, if we're gonna fact-check, let's not repeat the 'obama is a shitty bowler' meme, when dude let some kids bowl for him

I mean, seriously, what that sentence says is "Kerry catered to organized interests (and BTW lost); Obama declined to follow this model (and BTW won)" -- I can understand any argument that this difference was now what bore on their electoral results, but it's the basic nature of a piece like this to ask what was done differently, what new approaches a candidate took, and present that as a possible narrative of how things worked out differently!

xpost - Daria are you even talking to us any more?

It's not laziness that makes the press discuss "optics," it's the fact that they're reporting on what happens in a campaign, and if what happened was that someone's comment about arugula was offputting to potential voters, then that is news, that is just flatly what happened! I agree with you that we see altogether too much reporting on campaign "news" (tactics, events, gaffes, maneuvers, etc.) as opposed to long-term non-news reporting about positions and policy, but what you're saying above seems only tenuously related to what we're talking about

daria your whole "we can't play along because then the republicans will destroy us" is interestingly timed i must say

nabisco, of course i'm talking to you. huh? it takes me some time to type out what i'm saying and so there are crossposts.

I didn't get quite the take-away on that passage that Daria did but obv unions should not be marginalized in public spheres 'cos all that helps is big-box employers who want you to be 'flexible' and 'individual' but won't give you the benefits to be secure in that flexibility and don't want you to collectively organize. Also, to do so is to create false equivalency with much smaller interest groups. There needs to be a concentrated effort on false equivalency now that the meme has been busted open over this cycle.

One very impressive thing about the Obama campaign is that - judo move - it has made it possible for the kinds of people unions might not necessarily reach at this point in time to see themselves as capable of collective action.

Last quick note: I also think it's very dangerous for any of us to start thinking that our analysis of the world is true in that epistemological sense, and therefore the press should present information from that framework, because it's just very rigid and seems equally true to people in a lot very subjective positions. (I'd also suggest that by and large those of us who fit the educated-leftist category are already winning this one, press-wise, in that our framework for rationally assessing truth really sort of is the one the press operates on. As it should.)

Suzy, I don't think it marginalizes unions to refer to them as an organized interest in this country; that seems just neutral and accurate. I suppose you can complain about the existence of an "unmarked category," as they say, of Republican voters who aren't thought of as an organized interest, but this just might be because they're honestly not organized.