From The New Yorker, here.
And winter is upon Oberlin. I followed my morning routine today: I grabbed breakfast at the Science Center Cart, I picked up a copy of the Times, and sat outside, drinking my coffee and doing the Monday crossword. About halfway through the puzzle, I realized my hands were blue. What happened? It wasn't but a week ago that, if you sat in the sun, you'd have to take off your sweater. Oh, Oberlin, your weather is schizophrenic, your winters cold, your summers unbearable. And for months in between, you swing between snow and heat like a yo-yo.
Now, though, I think it's cold for good. If only we could get the sun to shine so things wouldn't be so dreary...
As usual, I'm with Ezra Klein; today's XKCD is really quite touching. Also, it's a strange day when Ezra Klein, XKCD, and Warren Ellis are all talking about the same thing.
An article in yesterday's New York Times seems evidence as much as anything else that yesteryear's conservative identity politics is dead--or at least dying. It's called "The Transformation of Levittown," and, though the writing tutor in me says something's a little off with this prose, the blogger in me says, wow, this is pretty interesting. Michael Sokolove writes:
These were the voters whom Mr. McCain was targeting when he made a big bet on Pennsylvania, investing money and a substantial amount of his time and the time of his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. But Mr. McCain’s message, to the extent it was received at all, irritated them. The Democrats of Levittown did not defect — they stayed in the fold, and then some. Over all, in the four municipalities that Levittown spans, Obama got a slightly higher percentage than John Kerry did in 2004, and because of higher turnout, emerged with a 3,200-vote greater margin of victory. (Levittown is defined by ZIP codes and Levitt-built homes, but is not its own incorporated town. Large parts of it extend into towns with large white working-class populations — Bristol, Middletown and Falls Townships, as well as Tullytown Borough — but it does not make up the entirety of any of those places. In those four jurisdictions, Obama defeated McCain, 41,110 to 25,034 — contributing to his resounding 11-percentage-point victory in Pennsylvania.)
“McCain pointed a lot of fingers instead of giving answers,” Steve O’Connor, a plumber, told me.
Mr. Obama’s message, on the other hand, seemed like it had entered some voters by IV injection. “I don’t want a clone of George Bush,” Mark Maxwell, 47, a corporate chef, said. “With McCain, that’s exactly what we’d get.”
Said Lisa Winslow, a 20-year-old college student: “I’m not rich. I can’t afford to vote for McCain.”
What had changed for Mr. Obama? The financial meltdown obviously made a huge difference. Five more months of exposure to him, and his millions of dollars worth of advertisements, engendered a comfort level. And Iraq, to a much greater extent than the pre-election polls implied, mattered. Nearly every Obama voter I talked to mentioned it, and many linked it to the economy.
In short, with the economy collapsing, people have started to respond to--gasp--substance over personality attacks. This election feels like vindication (or at least the beginings of vindication) for Michael J. Fox's character in Aaron Sorkin's The American President:
LEWIS (FOX):People want leadership. And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership, Mr. President. They're so thirsty for it, they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.
PRESIDENT SHEPARD: Lewis, we've had Presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand, 'cause they're thirsty, Lewis. They drink it 'cause they don't know the difference.
In 2004, I felt like Shepard. We had just reelected a president who was pulling apart the already-fraying fabric of our progressive institutions and social compact. Republican character attacks and slights-of-hand--the Rovian strategy of identity politics and 50% + 1 governance--had felled two Democratic nominees, and since Reagan, we had yet to see liberal governance.
But, now, the narrative slowly emerging from the Obama victory is that voters--even those "Reagan Democrats" in Levittown--have rejected Rovian politics: the politics of minimalist coalitions and political Pentecostalism.
Intrigued? Go, read.
Last today, I'd like to plug George Packer's new article in The New Yorker. Packer is fast becoming one of my favorite magazine journalists. The last article I went gaga over, "The Hardest Vote," was about Glouster, Ohio. I think I talked about it for about a week nonstop. If you missed it, then go, read.
But in his latest article, Packer seems to be with me--and Krugman, and most of the lefty blogosphere--that what we need from Obama is a New New Deal. He writes:
Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?
Of course, he doesn't stop there:
For the first time since the Johnson Administration, the idea that government should take bold action to create equal opportunity for all citizens doesn’t have to explain itself in a defensive mumble. That idea is ascendant in 2008 because it answers the times. These political circumstances, even more than the election of the first black American to the highest office, make Obama’s victory historic. Whether his Presidency will be transformative, in the manner of Roosevelt and the handful of predecessors named by F.D.R. in 1932, will depend, in part, on history—it’s unclear whether today’s financial troubles will offer a political challenge, and an opportunity, of the magnitude of the Great Depression. But the power of Obama’s Presidency will ultimately hinge on how he chooses to interpret the “modern application” of liberalism in the twenty-first century.
During the two years that he spent campaigning for the Presidency, amid relentless media scrutiny, Obama made a greater commitment to specific plans than Roosevelt did. Yet he, too, represented different versions of moral leadership to different groups of voters, at various stages of the campaign. Roosevelt’s answer to his interviewer reflected a belief that the Presidency has both a political role and a philosophical role. Obama, using the language of the modern age, has reflected Roosevelt’s belief: there is the “post-partisan” Obama and the “progressive” Obama. Some tension exists between these two approaches, but he will have to reconcile them if he is to fulfill his ambition of bringing profound change to the country.
Look, I can't blockquote the entire thing. Just go, read.
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