…they may not have what you need but you can always get an apology.
At the Obama drugstore…
Obama
Paul Rahe’s Landslide vs. “Don’t get cocky”
Glenn Reynolds links to Paul Rahe’s prediction that we’re about to see a 1980-type electoral landslide for Romney.
I want Rahe to be right but the bookmakers’ odds give me pause.
Intrade.com has Obama at 60% odds to be reelected. Other bookmakers are in the same ballpark.
It’s possible that these market odds are overly influenced by inaccurate polls. The odds certainly respond to polling data. However, the bookies have a very good record of predicting election results.
On Intrade, before November 2004, Bush’s odds only went as low as 50% a couple of times and always bounced from there. Obama’s odds are behaving like that now. If Obama’s numbers sink below 50% and stay there I’ll feel a lot better. As of now there is much reason to worry.
If the USA today were the USA of 1980 I would agree with Rahe. I remember the run up to the 1980 election and the conventional wisdom that Carter would win. At the time I was afraid that he would. I asked a wise older friend of mine, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, what he thought would happen. “Reagan will win in a landslide”, he said. My friend was reasoning as Rahe is. And of course Reagan did win. But much has changed since then. A larger proportion of the US voting population is poorly educated and a larger proportion is dependent on government. Rush Limbaugh has been arguing that increasing dependence on government insulates an ever larger fraction of the electorate from the consequences of Obama’s poor economic policies. Consequently, the argument goes, Romney cannot afford to run on Obama’s economic failures alone and may have difficulty winning in any case. This seems plausible.
“Don’t get cocky” is good advice. So is, “Be very afraid”. Let’s hope the market odds shift to support Rahe’s prediction.
“Caroline Glick – Israel on the Eve of US Elections”
Worth watching. Glick bluntly describes the delusional nature of current US foreign policy and predicts terrible consequences unless we change course. As she puts it in her closing remarks, Israel embarked on a similar delusional course of action in the early 1990s at the eventual cost of thousands of lives. Current US policy repeats Israel’s naive mistakes on a grand scale and will be much more costly unless we change it. And we have the power to change it merely by voting in a new government.
The Smallest Hive
My friend plays bridge; she tells me the Soviets banned it. Ah, I thought, bridge is mysterious; why, I asked. But it wasn’t bridge it was the four or eight or twelve it was community, sharing an interest, and then companionship. It wasn’t as big as the God the party banned or as intimate as the family nor as public as deadened ideas in factory and academy. But it was one of those pillars Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart whose fall disorganizes and diminishes our lives – and our society. Our desire for them is strong; alienation requires strong dominance, perhaps murder random and targeted, mass and individual. At first we don’t miss them; now and here, we can choose. We often don’t weight our choices as if they are consequential. But they are.
Government has intruded more in the last four years will in the next four if Iowatrades has it right. But a half century ago we boomers loftily decided connections were oppressive. Above our water beds, posters quoted Emerson Whim, yes, that was it. Well that’s part of growing up. Eschewing those conventions, consideration of “others” was hazy. We thought, in Haidt’s terms, with our chimp minds. And that’s pretty much adolescence chimpdom. Spurning connections – religious love, familial love, communal love, and selfless passion for vocation/avocation – we devalued the hive. And the smallest, the first, hive is family.
Why the large “marriage gap” between Obama and Romney? They share one quality neither is always credited with consistency of vision. If we see a part we can understand the whole. What they don’t share, of course, are definitions of success or family, government or power, integrity or responsibility. Those multi-generation pictures of the Romneys contrast with Obama’s disinterest even in his half-siblings. He may have a broader definition of community, but it isn’t because he has built on a smaller one. Remember how he described his grandmother – family less a marker than race.
Did the government really build that?
Recently, President Obama opined that businesses depend on infrastructure built by the government. Roads, bridges, “you didn’t build that”. So the businessman writing the big check for taxes? His money sent to government doesn’t mean that he built it. Fair enough, but why is President Obama’s check privileged over the businessman’s check? The guy with the backhoe, the flagger, the asphalt plant, chances are that all of them are private industry. In all justice what makes it the government’s road?