2008 USGE RESULTS THREAD PS GOP U LOST DIXVILLE NOTCH LOL

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.

I saw some Earl Anthony in Obama's bowling form. Both have kind of an awkward upright stroke.

what i am saying is: i don't think a remark about arugula is all that offputting to potential voters. it's trivia. but if the press thinks that gaffes and trivia is what's important, and spends all its time on them, that's all that many voters have to go on when they're trying to make a decision on a candidate. it does a disservice to the public.

this time around, it seems the press wrote narratives that mostly worked in our favor. and? next thing, they might be working on one that says obama doesn't have a mandate and this is a center-right country, except, the facts tell us that obama won massively more votes than bush in 2004, who was allowed to declare that he had a mandate. facts matter.

- i don't think a remark about arugula is all that offputting to potential voters.

- facts matter.

See I hate to say it, and I don't disagree with part of what you're saying, but I think these two statements are at odds with one another.

Also, to go back to what we were discussing, the Newsweek piece is a recap of the workings of a campaign -- a campaign is largely about optics! Blame the press or whoever you wish for it, but that's an inescapable fact, and you can't talk about how a race functions without those narratives overlaid around it; I'm not sure exactly what you're calling for here, but part of it seems to be that we talk about fish without talking about water.

hey daria, if a voter thinks talking about arugula is important, maybe they're not actually hurting that much, economically, you know?

Newsflash: different voters have different frameworks for assessing their interests

if the solidarity ship ever docked on american shores, it sailed about 60 years ago

newsweek ch. 6 is up btw

i'm not gonna be waiting by the harbor for it to return

violet and violent

http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/11/2008countycartpurple1024

violet and violent

http://i36.tinypic.com/21jn9me.png

He would appear very somber and emphatic when he accosted Craig/McCain for refusing to speak to the president of Spain. "You wouldn't even talk to the president of Spain!" he would intone with mock gravity. Then he would begin to giggle. He was told that he should attack McCain for saying that it was enough to "muddle through" on Afghanistan. "Muddle through!" Obama would exclaim and dissolve into giggles. It was as if he refused to take the theater of mock indignation too seriously.

During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song "Disco Inferno," last popular in the heyday of "Saturday Night Fever."

perhaps i was not clear. i do not think voters care about arugula. the press apparently thinks they do.

Long Island looks like it's about to eat New Jersey

I was watching the returns with three friends on Tuesday night, and at some point we realized that we were swilling chardonnay, and that we'd won.

um, Manhattan, that is. eep.

i have met voters who "care" about arugula

more Newsweek:

Through much of the speech, Obama looked like just another Democratic presidential candidate reading from a list of promises.

oh, no! just like all those other lame Democrats, Obama gave a speech in which he made promises to the public, so they would know what he'd do if elected. Damn. Gore probably read a list of promises, and Kerry too, that was so lame of them.

"the press apparently thinks they do"

The press cares about selling narratives. If arugala is a good narrative they are going to sell it.

After the first debate, McCain and his handlers reviewed the videotape. Why, one aide asked him, did you never look at Obama? Because you told me not to! McCain retorted. It was true. McCain's debate coach, Brett O'Donnell, had noted Obama's tendency to look directly at an opponent while attacking, and he had instructed McCain not to get sucked in by meeting his gaze. But McCain had taken the advice a little too literally. "We didn't tell you not to look at him at all," one aide chided him. (Advisers also told McCain to soften his blows by saying "what my opponent doesn't understand"— another trope he overused.) The veteran of a thousand morning talk shows, McCain was accustomed to speaking directly to the camera, not to his inquisitor in the studio. But in this case his experience was a liability.

sure, i don't think we have a disagreement here. my point is that the press selling sucky narratives is usually pretty bad for our democracy because it helped elect george w bush.

I pretty much agree with everything you are saying. The Newsweek piece is a guilty pleasure to me.