alex chiang: web 6.0

If you’re like me (which I assume you are, since you’re reading my blog), you’re probably fatigued from campaign overdose. It’s not just the TV or radio ads; somehow, this election is special and this year’s presidential campaign is crushingly pervasive. From technology aggregators to your friends’ facebook feeds that announce “Laura joined Fifty Trillion strong for the Messiah” you just can’t get away from it.

So my apologies in advance for adding to the noise. I’m going to write just this one leetle post regarding the presidential stuff and call it good.

Matt Taibbi is over the top in his Mad Dog Palin editorial in Rolling Stone. But, if you can separate out the wheat from the chaff, you eventually get to this good paragraph:

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains.

It’s an important point, and one that I agree with. Unfortunately, if you read that Taibbi piece and found yourself cheering on his vitriol, congratulations! you’ve just unwittingly committed exactly the same sort of intellectual laziness that the Palin-supporters are stereotyped for.

Suzanne Garment’s best point during her Palin-Biden debate analysis:

Palin’s voice was high, perky, earnest, naive, twangy, aw-shucks and altogether unreflective of the weariness, ironies ambiguities that we expect from a leader who has seen and understood the world.

That was what Palin’s voice sounded like to cosmopolitans. Clearly, it did not sound that way to much of the country. Lots of Americans actually talk the way Palin talks.

Indeed they do. And the inability for the “liberal elite” to understand that fact is slightly maddening to me, because the misunderstanding usually comes along with a healthy scoop of superiority as well. Ignorance and close-mindedness are equally distributed on both sides of the aisle.

John Meacham writes a nice editorial titled The Palin Problem and makes a devastating point:

Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. [...] But that honest explanation of the rationale for her candidacy raises an important question. Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks? Therein lies an enormous difference [...]

Obviously, Meacham is saying that Palin is an everday folk. And whether she actually is or is not makes not one whit of difference because perception is reality and there is a significant portion of our country’s population that wants an everyday folk in high office.

As my political ideology matures, I’m increasingly thinking that we need to take a Just Say No! stance towards populism. Colorado has horrible constitutional amendments that are causing real budget problems because it’s so easy to cram just about anything onto a state-level ballot.

A story in Rolling Stone titled Make-Believe Maverick is a semi-hatchet job on McCain, but if you read between the lines and with a liberal dosage of salt, it does cast more than a little doubt onto the true character of the man. Which is a kinda important point, considering a large plank in his platform is his character.

I was a fan of the McCain story during the 2000 election and during the 2008 Republican primaries, when I didn’t know much about him, and he wasn’t doing crazy things like suspending his campaign to “help” solve the bailout or making cynical VP choices. The media often make references to McCain’s famous temper but never really gives any backstory to what’s going on. Dickinson’s article, clearly slanted and not to be taken as gospel, does help you get a little closer to what the true story might be, and even if it’s somewhere in the middle, the idea of McCain as CINC makes me pretty uncomfortable.

Finally, if you can’t get your fill on campaign status updates, you need to read http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. The tagline is “electoral projections done right” and I’m inclined to agree.

Ok, that’s enough — I promise to not blog about the presidential race anymore.

[The Colorado ballot has about 10 or 12 new amendments up for vote, and I plan on spewing a bit on those. ;)]