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- American zombieland.
- The GOP's new gay future.
- The view from here.
- Washington, District of New York.
- Who's afraid of Obama the Secret Muslim?
- How to fix the costings fight
- News Corp’s political donations
- What it looks like when the President comes to town.
- A note about the Washington primary.
- Mr Obama goes to Seattle.
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American zombieland.
1 September 2010
I'm interested in, though not entirely convinced by, Alyssa Rosenberg's theory that zombie movies are an expression of American yearning for a new frontier (see also here):
But [new AMC series "The Walking Dead" is] also part of a trend I'm seeing that I think is serious and significant, and that deserves further thought: American pop culture is increasingly giving us stories of depopulating cataclysms that leave only a few survivors alive. I think part of that tendency comes from the need for an American frontier. With the country filled up, the only way to explore ideas of manifest destiny, exploration, and the unsettled wild in an American context is to destroy the country's population and to force characters to survive, and start over. I think there's also a strain of thinking that our present course of life is unsustainable, and that disaster is inevitable.
Certainly the trailer for The Walking Dead supports this; featuring a literal sheriff riding an actual horse, under threat from hoards of inhuman attackers, it feels like a western, even though it's set in the South. But usually, zombie films seem more focused on the immediate aftermath; survival in the short term rather than the long term. The focus here is on a familiar area becoming alien, not a new wilderness. But I'm open to being convinced.
A more convincing proposition for a new American frontier is David Simon's suggestion of the inner city (clicking through will reveal spoilers for "The Wire"):
We did introduce him, and I had it in my mind that I wanted a moment like "The Shootist" or the buried moment in the gunfight at the end of "Wild Bunch." The character that was most in the Western archetype -- and George had a lot of fun with this -- was Omar. The inner city is now the Wild West, the new frontier in terms of American storytelling, it has been for several decades now. We played a lot of our Western film themes and archetypes through Omar's story. I always had that in my mind.
If this is true, perhaps fantasy apocalypses are a way for creative types to explore the frontier mentality without having to deal with the messy political terrain with which The Wire involved itself. Shootouts and survival struggles for the middle class?
The GOP's new gay future.
27 August 2010
Really, the news that Ken Mehlman, the 2004 George W. Bush campaign manager and former Republican National Committee chairman, is gay is more akin to political gossip than anything actual groundbreaking. Sure, it's always worthwhile hearing when people who have worked against gay rights reveal their hypocrisy, but this story is little more than the Beltway whispering among itself, "Hey, guess who likes dudes?"
Some folks disagree. Chris Bodenner highlights a reader's correspondence arguing "Mehlman is in a position to knock some folks back in their chairs and rethink their positions on gay people - and their civil rights," while at Slate, William Saletan pitches it like so:
This is a big deal. Mehlman managed President Bush's reelection campaign in 2004 and chaired the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007. Many influential Republicans have worked with him and respect him. He makes it harder for them to think of homosexuality as a behavior. They now know somebody who is gay.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that for many influential Republicans, Mehlman is far from their first gay acquaintance. Washington D.C. is a progressive city, and it has a liberal stance on gay rights. The town's professional class of political staffers tend to be better educated and reasonably well-off; exactly the kind of people who might feel more comfortable coming out of the closet. Gay folks are not a particularly exotic class in federal politics.
After all, while Mehlman was working on the Bush campaign, he was seeking to get re-elected a Vice President, Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary was well known to be gay. And however cynically the campaign may have sought to exploit anti-gay sentiment amongst American conservatives, I don't believe Bush had any real homophobic beliefs. (Bush's social conservatism in general gets overstated; he knew how to speak the language of the far right, and paid lip-service to their bugbears, but he did little to address their concerns.)
The people driving the Republican Party's anti-gay policies are the voters willing to show up to the polls over issues like same-sex marriage. Few of these voters have any idea who Ken Mehlman is, and their views on gay rights are hardly likely to be swayed by his coming out. Meanwhile, the influential Republicans will keep playing to the base's prejudices; note that Mehlman only went public about his sexuality once he no longer held a position in the party. In fact, the most interesting aspect of this story concerns the Democratic Party not the Republicans. Mehlman, who intends to begin advocating for same-sex marriage, is now to the left of President Obama on the issue.
The view from here.
23 August 2010
How much attention is America paying to the electoral turmoil in Australia? Some, though it's certainly not dominating headlines; a couple of folks round my building have asked me what's going on, and, less anecdotally, the New York Times had a reasonably thorough report on page 12 of its Sunday edition. The headline is a bit odd, however: (my emphasis) "Australians Apparently Fail to Deliver a Clear Winner in National Elections"? It's technically accurate, considering the AEC is yet to complete its count, but the phrasing is still bizarre, even by the idiosyncratic standards of Times headlines.
You can read that story online here, as well as a brief follow up report set to be published in Monday's edition here. Even though America's reputation for insularity is not undeserved, that doesn't mean no news penetrates these borders; it just tends to be dry and informative, as if reporting scientific observations rather than political drama.
UPDATE: The Washington Post ran this report sourced from the Associated Press in its Sunday edition. It covers much the same ground as the Times, but it also includes this interesting paragraph:
Analysts said Australia's major foreign-policy positions, including its deployment of 1,550 troops to Afghanistan, would be unaffected by whichever party wins, because both hold similar views. Domestic issues vary across the large and diverse country and include hot topics such as health care and climate change.
Washington, District of New York.
21 August 2010
The Washington Post's Reliable Source blog has a problem with the new Daniel Craig/Nicole Kidman movie The Invasion, and it's not that someone decided to remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's that a movie set, and even partly shot in D.C. makes a number of fairly simple errors about the city's geography. Leave aside nitpicking complaints about an excess of parking available in Georgetown, or apparently circuitous routes between different neighbourhoods; I figure if the proudly New York "Gossip Girl" can get away with shuttling its characters back and forth between Brooklyn and the Upper East Side every fifteen minutes, we should just assume fictional characters have magic transportation methods available to them. But some blunders identified by the WaPo are less forgivable:
- "Kidman, who plays a D.C. psychiatrist, buys magazines at one of those big sidewalk newsstand kiosks -- the ones all over New York but not on any corner in this town."
- "Her fabulous downtown office window looks out on a bunch of skyscrapers."
- On the Metro, the announcer says, "The subway doors are now closing." Subway?
It reminds me of a complaint Spencer Ackerman had about the Angelina Jolie spy movie Salt:
Among the film’s silver-screen miracles is to transport a block of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, with its majestic and towering gothic (right?) residential apartment buildings, down onto Indiana and 6th Street NW. It’s a cinematic achievement on par with whatever Christopher Nolan will pull off with Inception. By sheer force of imagination, something that building codes could never allow to appear in downtown Washington D.C. actually appears in downtown Washington D.C., and we are to believe it. I wanted to run down to the intersection and marvel at its impossible transformation and then I remembered that it was lazy, condescending filmmaking. Similarly, the Archives Metro station? Reimagined as a stunning replica of the sort of subway stations commonly seen in… New York City.
This kind of thing goes beyond lazy filmmaking. Washington, D.C. is a very distinctive looking city (as you can see above in the trailer for Invasion), and it's difficult to imagine a movie set in L.A., or New York, or London or Paris including egregious errors equivalent to D.C. having downtown skyscrapers or a Metro anything like the Subway. (D.C. is, like London and Paris, a national capital, after all.) America doesn't seem fond of remembering that its capital isn't just a storage site for politicians, that it's a city home to a mostly poor, mostly black population whose citizens still don't have voting representation in Congress. Of course, Hollywood transformations of D.C. into a culture-less expanse of urban anonymity that exists only for the sake of plots revolving around government intrigue isn't responsible for any social problems the city has. But the D.C. area is a culturally vibrant metropolis of 5.5 million, with unique characteristics that should spring easily to any American's mind. And I wonder if the fact that they apparently do not has anything to do with the way the city's more pressing problems are ignored.
NOTE: I wrote this post after following a link trail, and failed to notice I followed it back in time to 2007, when The Invasion was actually released. So, if you're wondering why I'm posting about an old movie that flopped... yeah. Anyway, I think the fact that, Salt, a current, successful movie, repeats the same problems three years later proves my point.
Who's afraid of Obama the Secret Muslim?
20 August 2010
There's been a bit of consternation today about a Pew Research Center poll that found that 18 per cent of Americans say they have a Muslim for President. Strangely, only 11 per cent thought Obama was a Muslim when Pew last asked the question in 2009 and the proportion who say they don't know what their President's religion is has increased from 34 to 43 per cent.
This is the sort of result that might seem gravely troubling for both Barack Obama and the United States; in the case of the former because it could harm his chances of being re-elected, and in the case of the latter because it seems to demonstrate that nearly in one in every five of its citizens believes a moronic conspiracy theory. But though I don't doubt the numbers, I have my doubts that this result is particularly meaningful.
I've included Yes, Prime Minister's Humphrey Appleby explaining the vagaries of opinion polling to Bernard Woolley above not to suggest Pew has been involved in such shenanigans, but to caution about what we do with the information polls give us. I'm quite fond of polling, but for it to be useful we need to remember how to use the data it gives us, and work out whether it's important or not.
I suspect this data is not particularly important.
First, speculation that the President might be a Muslim seems driven more by political ignorance than any deep concern. The 43 per cent figure is high, but I wonder what exactly a "don't know" answer entails. Perhaps these people have heard conflicting reports of the President's faith, and, having thought deeply about it, have been unable to settle their doubts as to whether he is a Christian or a Muslim. But more likely, having been asked a question they had no knowledge about, they responded honestly that they did not know.
Secondly, as Pew shows, people who dislike the job Obama is doing are much more likely to believe the President to be a Muslim. I suppose they might dislike the job he's doing because they believe he is advancing Islamic goals or something like that, but my guess is that in an America where the most important issues are jobs and the economy, Obama isn't losing massive chunks of his constituency because they believe he prays five times a day facing Mecca.
A better explanation would be that people who don't like the President are willing to choose the "worst" option a pollster presents to them, simply because they think nothing nice about him anyway. There's a difference between saying "Obama's a Muslim," meaning "I don't like him," and saying "Obama's a Muslim," and holding a sincere belief that the President considers the Koran to be the literal word of Allah. Others might simply agree that Obama is a Muslim because they've heard that story, and they don't want to appear ignorant by not answering a question.
Let's consider the alternate scenario, however. If a good chunk of America does indeed believe it has a disciple of the Islamic faith in the Oval Office, it is being remarkably sanguine about it. Indeed, as you can see from the table above, a full quarter of the people who think Obama is a Muslim still say that he's doing a good job. And according to the survey, a plurality of the population approves of his performance. Keeping in mind that Obama has a higher approval rating than the assuredly Christian Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter had at this point in their first terms, the level of misinformation about his religion doesn't seem to be doing him any harm.
How to fix the costings fight
19 August 2010
After a litany of excuses, the Coalition has done what it was always going to do, and failed to comply with the Charter of Budget Honesty, thus avoiding independent scrutiny of the cost of their policies by the Departments of Finance and Treasury.
In this election there have been more than the usual number of political promises made about fiscal responsibilities, fully costed and paid for policies, tackling the deficit and returning the budget to surplus. How can any voter know the validity of these promises?
The Howard Government enacted the Charter of Budget Honesty Act in 1998.
On 5 September 1997, in his second reading speech on the legislation, the then Treasurer, Peter Costello, argued in the House of Representatives:
“..the bill provides for more equal access to Treasury and Finance costings of election commitments by the government and the opposition during the caretaker period. This will allow the electorate to be better informed of the financial implications of election commitments. These provisions are fair and balanced and consistent with the principles of Westminster government.”
While Peter Costello now claims that “The charter is an incentive to compete for respectability” - this is an incentive that the Coalition has now chosen to ignore.
The fact is that the rules of costing under the Charter of Budget Honesty are made for incumbency. The legislation was a politically contrived attempt at transparency which the Coalition created for its own benefit. Small wonder, as incumbents, that Labor is now enjoying watching the Coalition duck and weave as their Shadow Treasurers did in past elections.
In an article in the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday (August 17), my former colleague Silvana Anthony makes the case for the establishment of an independent Parliamentary Budget Office, modeled on the Congressional Budget Office in the U.S.
She makes the case that a PBO would model alternative budgets, provide economic advice to the Parliament, prepare 10-year pre-budget forecasts and cost policies for all political parties. She writes, “The CBO approach to fiscal and budget reform would strengthen this capacity [to provide independent budget estimates or macro forecasts] and open the door to robust fiscal and economic analysis within the Federal Parliament that is accessible by all parties and all people. It would render the Charter of Budget Honesty legislation unnecessary – and spare voters the mind-numbing accusations about costing inaccuracies and budget black holes.”
It seems Joe Hockey reads the AFR. Today he is quoted in The Australian as saying that the Coalition would establish a new parliamentary budget office “akin to the highly-regarded US Congressional Budget Office”.
Still, we can’t be sure that is really his intent, as he would allocate only $2 million a year in funding. Let’s see where this interesting idea goes after the election.
News Corp’s political donations
18 August 2010
Both in Australia and in the U.S. there are plenty of issues that give us pause about how unbiased the media is during election campaigns. Why did Channel Nine give Mark Latham all that air time? And what is News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch up to with a US$1million donation to the Republican Governors Association?
In the U.S. media companies have long dabbled in giving money to politicians in an effort to curry favor or protect their bottom lines. But this donation isn’t business as usual – in either size or style. It’s highly unusual for the company not to make a comparable contribution to Democrats, in the way most corporate givers (including News Corp.) usually give – both to hedge their bets and to maintain a sense of even-handedness. And the size of the donation, the largest corporate contribution to the RGA this cycle, was eye-opening for a media company.
This year, 37 governorships are on the ballot, the most in history. The governors association’s status as 527 groups (meaning they can take unlimited amounts of corporate donations), helps account for the fact that both the Democratic Governors Association and the RGA have raised record amounts of money this election cycle.
The News Corp contribution to the RGA highlights the fact that Rupert Murdoch is seen as a player in politics. He’s known to lean right in his own politics – but he hasn’t been shy about crossing the aisle, once throwing a fundraiser for then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton, even though she was long one of the New York Post’s favorite targets. He’s rumoured to favour Julia Gillard to win next Saturday’s Australian election. Certainly edirotrs of his Australian papers seem to be backing her over Abbott.
However Democrats have charged that the million-dollar donation, first reported by Bloomberg Businessweek in an article which sees Republican gaining at least eight new governorships, means that Murdoch’s claim that Fox News is “fair and balanced” is a myth and it is now impossible for Fox to continue to claim objectivity.
News Corp. says the money went to the GOP because the company’s political action committee felt Republicans would create a more favorable corporate landscape.
But there is one political outcome in the offing that the Republican Governors Association is particularly well-positioned to influence – redistricting of congressional districts, the line-drawing that can help make or break a congressional majority. Governors play a unique and powerful role in the process out in the states, and the primary driver for governors’ association contributions is the upcoming redistricting battle based on the 2010 census.
The Bloomberg article theorises that the RGA contribution may have been directly motivated by business interests, since News Corp. opposes proposed federal rule changes that could weaken Fox’s position in negotiations with cable companies. There are examples where governors have stepped in on such matters, such as when New York Governor, David Paterson, called for binding arbitration in a dispute over feeds between Cablevision and ABC.
“Looking at the quotes from News Corp, they seem pretty open and comfortable with what they are doing,” said Amy Mitchell, the deputy director of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “I don’t think News Corp is trying to deny or step away from what these actions suggest. I think the most important thing is, we don’t know why they are doing it.”
What it looks like when the President comes to town.
18 August 2010
The big fundraising event in Barack Obama's visit to Seattle today was held at the downtown Westin hotel, two soaring skyscrapers just north of the Westlake Center. I wasn't able to get inside, of course, but I went for a walk downtown to see how crazy the scene was.
The answer? Not as crazy as I expected. In D.C., I grew used to seeing scores of police officers toting impossibly hefty weaponry, supported by lurking helicopters casting bright spotlights over the street below every time the President ventured outside the White House. The scene in Seattle, featuring city police closing off the single city block on which the hotel stood seemed low key by comparison.
More pictures below the jump, and a word about the protesters.
Although police blocked off the square enclosed by 5th and 6th Ave and Virginia and Stewart Streets, protesters were permitted along the side of the road opposite the hotel. The activists were low-key and disparate.
The expected band of conservatives showed up, carrying "Don't Tread On Me" flags and signs opposing the Federal Reserve. Compared even to the moderate crowd that had filled Westlake Park on April 15 this year, however, they were few in number.
Almost as many protesters came from the left as the right. Some of these were anti-war activists, but the most organised group on either side were immigration rights protesters, who came equipped with large banners and speeches.
A good many people showed up just to have a look at what was going on and take some photos.
The only really controversial bunch was a handful of people waving signs for the loony activist Lyndon LaRouche. I'm loathe to even show them, because they represent no actual constituency or ideology; their biggest interest is in drawing Hitler mustaches on people and handing out leaflets filled with conspiracy theories. They can be reliably expected to show up to any rally held for whatever reason in Seattle. But for the sake of completeness...
Whether any of this protesting did any good is doubtful; the President likely saw none of it. His motorcade, a succession of white vans, black SUVs, police cars, and motorbikes rocketed down Virginia Street, and apparently delivered the man himself into the bowels of the hotel. It was over in a flash and seemed even less eventful than the protests that had preceded it. And even these protests were characterised more by friendly banter and chit-chat between the crowd and the police rather than angry yelling. Maybe Seattle was just feeling particularly tame today, but apart from a brief parade of motorbikes, whose riders had to dismount and hang around in a comically large crowd a block down the street once the whole thing was over, this Presidential visit was just another day in America.
A note about the Washington primary.
18 August 2010
I would loved to have gone along to a polling station here in Seattle to give you guys an on the ground perspective of an American primary contest, but sadly it is not possible. In King County, which encompasses the city of Seattle, all voting is conducted by mail. In the biggest city in the state, this election will play out at kitchen tables and through postboxes, not in school halls and community centres.
It's a shame, because I visited a station in Washington's Whatcom County for the 2004 Presidential election, and found it fascinating. The lines were long, though nowhere near as long as in parts of swing states like Ohio or Florida. The vote was conducted using a rather complex punch card system not dissimilar from the one that caused so much trouble in Palm Beach County in 2000. The polling officials even indulged my request to try a sample ballot on one of their machines. After my experimental attempt, I began to sympathise with the Floridians who found the ballot confusing.
Perhaps this is a reason to recommend mail-in ballots like those used in King County. It seems likely that letting voters cast their votes from home would reduce the chance of error. Allowing people to vote whenever they find time rather than requiring them to show up to a specific place on a specific day also seems an excellent way to bolster turnout. Mail-in voting is popular out west — many parts of Oregon also use it — and while I usually find American voting innovations to be wacky and overly complex (e.g. touch screens), this seems a logical way to improve efficiency and participation.
As for the returns this evening, I meant to mention this in my earlier post today, but it slipped my mind until I saw this Politico article: the thing to watch out for in tonight's results will be the proportion of the vote Senate candidates Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R) get. These are an imperfect predictor of the general election result, as Republicans will likely be more motivated to vote in this primary than Democrats, considering they have a more competitive field to choose from. Likewise, though Rossi is expected to win, he might pick up support in November he didn't have today, from voters who back the Sarah Palin-endorsed Clint Didier but would still vote for Rossi in a two-way contest against Murray. Even so, this will give us an insight into what kind of chance the Republican Party has of swinging Senate seats that in a usual cycle would be safe for the Democrats.
Mr Obama goes to Seattle.
17 August 2010
Campaign signs in Bellevue, WA (pic from BellevueReporter.com)
I won't be holding my breath for a glimpse of the Commander in Chief, however. The President's visit will consist of a private visit to a small business in the historic downtown Seattle neighbourhood of Pioneer Square, before he heads off to a couple of big-money fundraisers for the state's incumbent Democratic Senator Patty Murray. (Tickets for one of these events run at $10 000 a head, the Seattle Times reckons.) Obama is expected to be out of town before the afternoon is over.
Not to worry; the state has plenty to keep itself busy. Today is Primary Day in Washington state, and for all but a select few Democratic Party dinner guests, August 17 will be about local politicians rather than the one visiting from D.C.
A host of races are on the ballot, including state government representative and senatorial seats, as well as a number of judgeships. Yes indeed: as with many other states in America, Washington elects its judges. The local alternate weekly newspaper The Stranger has even been actively campaigning to remove one from the state Supreme Court — your opinion on the bizarreness of this will likely depend on whether you're reading this in the U.S. or not.
But the race to pay attention to will be the Senatorial contest. Murray has no serious Democratic challengers, but a few Republicans are vying to take her out in November. And they might have a shot at doing so: RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight both rate the state as a toss-up, though both have Murray slightly ahead in their polling aggregates.
Though the race is closer than you might expect in blue Washington, I suspect Murray will be likelier to win another term than not this November. But a couple of GOP hopefuls think they can swing the seat. The Tea Party pick is the Sarah Palin-endorsed farmer and ex-footballer Clint Didier, a fiery fellow from the conservative eastern side of the state. However, Washington Republicans have apparently not heard that this is the year of the political outsider, and the GOP favourite is still Dino Rossi. Rossi is a well known politician in the state, and he ran for governor here in 2004 and 2008, losing narrowly both times. Rather than try to remake himself as a Tea Party convert, he has campaigned as a straight-up Republican, and though I've said before that I have my doubts how welcoming the state will be of a two time loser, this is probably his best strategy. He's clearly hoping that this is indeed the year of the Republican Party, and that Democratic unpopularity can tip him over the top. And if the GOP is to have any chance at all of performing the unlikely feat of gaining control of the Senate, Washington is the kind of state it will have to win.
The most likely outcome from today is that Dino Rossi and Patty Murray will be selected to face each other in November. However, it's not assured, particularly considering Washington's unusual primary system. Called a Top Two Primary, it is unlike most other primary contests in that the races are not segregated by party; for each political office up for grabs, the two candidates who receive the most number of votes today will compete in the general election in November, even if they're both from the same party. In fact, the Washington State primary doesn't even acknowledge party affiliation, and considers each candidate to be running as an individual. Candidates signal their party membership by listing on the ballot which party they prefer.
It's a symptom of the West's grizzled independent streak — or its obstreperousness, if you'd prefer. Between 1935 and 2003 voters could cast their primary ballot in any race they chose; voting, for instance, in the Democratic Senate race before making a selection in the Republican mayoral contest. The system was found unconstitutional because it infringed on the party's right to free association. The Top Two Primary was the state's means of retaining a primary that kept control with voters while thumbing its nose at the major parties.
It's worth keeping an eye on the races today, because California has recently adopted the same system, in hopes of clearing some of the partisanship out of its dysfunctional government. The only upset we have a chance of seeing in Washington's Senate race would be a scuttling of Rossi by his party's right wing in favour another Tea Party insurgent. But keep an eye on the race, and try to imagine what chaos the voters of California might cause when they get their hands on this system...
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