Politics
oracknows | November 5, 2008One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…
razib | November 5, 2008In 1996 Bill Clinton won with 49% of the vote vs. 41% for Bob Dole. The New York Times now allows you to compare county-by-county outcomes across two elections between all presidential years between 1992 and 2008. I think 1996 is the most analogous to Barack Obama's victory yesterday, so I want to focus on that map. My comments:
1) Obama got more of the black vote. No surprise.
2) Geographic proximity matters. Much of the Upper Midwest where the black turn out can't explain Obama's advantage over Clinton is not too far from Chicago. One could term it Greater Chicago, but I don't want to…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
sa smith | November 5, 2008I survived yesterday :) Back to normal science programming soon.
But for all of you working to ween yourself off of politics news, Ive got a nicotine patch for ya: Freepers and RR.
Bask in the schadenfreude. Come down off the laughing gas. Get back to work :P
OH! And Im sure you all know what my recommendation is for Malia and Sashas new puppy!! Im SO glad NYT chose to quote the Human Society of the United States, Animal Liberation Front pieces of shit in their coverage of this fun event. *rolleyes*
gregladen | November 5, 2008But this time I was not too far off. This graphic shows my electoral map (on the right, which to you is down until you tilt your computer monitor 90 degrees to the left) and the actual map (on the left, or top).
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Or rather, Jimmy Smits' character, Matt Santos? I am rather taken by how much like the presidential race involving Smits and Alda the recent election was. Obama is an intelligent Santos. I wonder how much credit for the sea change in American politics must go to Sorkin's portrayal of a decent administration just at the time when the least decent administration was in power. How many people looked at the Bartlett administration, with all its faults, and thought "Why isn't that what our executive wing is doing?"
Enough politics for now.
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2008From The Onion, of course:
Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.
“Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate,” said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed,…
razib | November 5, 2008Andrew Gelman reports the finding from the national exit polls that the highest income brackets seem to be leaning toward the Democrats this cycle. The difference between 2008 & 2004 is striking and of note. But, remember that $100,000/year in Palo Alto is a working stiff. $100,000/year in Little Rock is a very good living.
I suspect that throwing all the data together into one pot and not correcting for regional differences in cost of living removes important information. The correlation between income and region, and voting and region, might mask the true relationship between income…
razib | November 5, 2008I suggested below that though on average whites did not move toward the Democrats, regionally there might be differences. I inferred this from the fact that areas where blacks are thin on the ground in the South it looks as if John McCain did better than George W. Bush in 2004. So I compared the voting patterns of whites in the 2008 and 2004 elections; and there are regional differences.
2008 Democratic presidential white vote declined 15% or more vs. 2004
2008 Democratic presidential white vote increased 15% or more vs. 2004
2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more below…
revere | November 5, 2008The US election is over. Now comes the battle over what it means. The right wing of the Democratic Party aside, it seems pretty clear this was one of the periodic "realignment" elections that are of historic significance. Obama's base, overwhelmingly the progressive heart of the Democratic Party, is a powerful coalition of the younger generation, racial and ethnic "minorities" (each probably constituting larger voting blocks than the right wing linchpin of white evangelicals), GLBT groups, women, young professionals, those deeply concerned about the environment, traditional Democratic…
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2008President Obama it is. Cool. I wanted Hillary Clinton, but I'll take what I can get. And even though I'm one of those people who says things like, “If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention,” I confess to being moved by Obama's victory speech.
Can he lead? Who knows? The braying nincompoops from the National Review notwithstanding, I see little evidence that Obama is some sort of left-wing ideologue (not that I hold that against a candidate). In fact, my great fear is that he values compromise and pragmatism so greatly that he will bend over backward to placate the right-…
pharyngula | November 5, 2008Some people are getting a bit cranky about the fact that I pissed in their cornflakes this morning, so here's a little more exposition.
A charismatic new face appeared on the political scene, somebody who was honest and sympathetic and intelligent. So he was a little more religious than I liked; he's still a good man who promises to repair the damage of the former presidency. He's running against a relic of that previous corrupt administration, his campaign slogan is all about change, and I am so relieved to have a promising choice. I campaigned for him, I stayed up all night with my friends…
drorzel | November 5, 2008Slate (who, by the way, drive me up the freaking wall with their habit of giving each story about six different headlines, depending on where the link is) has hit the ground running with a panel of distinguished right-wing types discussing what the Republicans should do now. Jim Manzi gets the ball rolling with an idea that's sure to be a winner: market-based education reform.
No amount of money or number of "programs" will create anything more than marginal improvements, because public schools are organized to serve teachers and administrators rather than students and families. We need, at…
razib | November 5, 2008The MSM rocks, specifically the New York Times.
If you filtered out blacks I'm pretty sure that the swath of red would be far more discernible in the South.* The blue patches match up very well with the Black Belt. It looks like the East South Central Census division, the core of Old Dixie is for now the Other America, along with parts of Appalachia.
I spot checked 2004 exits and compared them to this year. Whites in the deep South seem to have shifted Republican against the national trend. We're back to old school sectionalism, but now blacks can vote. People have said that the white…
goodmath | November 5, 2008 Sorry about the abrupt end to the liveblogging last night; Firefox crashed, and CoverItLive wouldn't let me log back in as the moderator.
Anyway, it's a good day to be a liberal. As you all know by now, it was Obama in an absolute landslide. He won by a huge margin in the electoral vote, and by a good margin in the popular vote.
The Democrats also kicked Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu out of the senate, which is wonderful. But they didn't take enough seats to get
past a filibuster in the Senate. This means that we can expect to see a really dramatic level of obstructionism from the…
drorzel | November 5, 2008As I said in an earlier post, the only election-night coverage I watched was the Comedy Central special and Obama's speech on C-SPAN. This morning, though, I flipped back and forth between MSNBC and CNN while feeding and walking the floor with SteelyKid (when she's fussy, she won't tolerate me standing still to read blogs).
It's really amazing stuff. I think they managed to have negative information content. I actually feel dumber for the bits and pieces of commentary I saw before SteelyKid wound down and could be coaxed to go to sleep.
gregladen | November 5, 2008One last dig at Sarah Palin. I love the piano playing moose. No more digs after this, I promise.
HT: JoAnn
pontiff | November 5, 2008"Local" politics.
Siskiyou County, CA (on the CA/OR border), where I grew up (population 44301, population density 8 per square mile, median household income $29530), voted 53.6 percent for McCain and 43.7 percent for Obama. That's extremely close for a very red county (2004 it was 60 percent Bush, 37.7 Kerry.) In other local Siskiyou County news a giant Salmon was found just to the south of Siskiyou County in the Sacramento River.
One can tell that Seattle is once again lagging the nationwide economy (yep), since the voters were in a mood to spend money. (Okay well Western Washington…
hrynyshyn | November 5, 2008"Now the hard part" writes Peter Baker in today's New York Times. Sure enough. It's never too soon to be reminded that Barack Obama is just this guy, you know? But it doesn't take Baker two paragraphs to completely misconstrue the enormity of the challenge facing the next president:
WASHINGTON -- No president since before Barack Obama was born has ascended to the Oval Office confronted by the accumulation of seismic challenges awaiting him. Historians grasping for parallels point to Abraham Lincoln taking office as the nation was collapsing into Civil War, or Franklin D. Roosevelt arriving in…