He [Thaksin] remains the most influential politician in Thailand, where he is adored by the rural poor who benefited from his populist policies. But the educated urban elite largely revile him, judging him corrupt and power-hungry.

The anti-government protesters have demanded a change to Thailand’s Western-style electoral system, which they say Thaksin exploited to buy votes. They instead favor a system in which some representatives are chosen by certain professions and social groups. ~AP

Of course Thaksin exploited this system to buy votes, and it is because he bought votes that he is enormously popular among the people whose votes he bought.  That sounds vaguely familiar.  The opposition’s alternative electoral system is not something that is proposed very often these days.  I don’t think I have heard of middle-class professionals arguing for a quasi-corporatist voting system in a modern democratic state.  It is usually the case in democratizing states that urban middle-class voters want to dismantle the institutional privileges granted to established estates and corporations, but the goal of weighting votes and providing votes to representatives of professions is plainly to prevent another demagogue such as Thaksin from prevailing in elections.  It remains unclear whether the liberals or the democrats will prevail in Thailand, but for Thailand’s sake we can hope that Thaksin and his party lose.

There are some important new findings by a BBC investigation into the beginning of the war in Georgia in early August of this year.  Seumas Milne has the details:

Not only does the report by Tim Whewell – aired this week on Newsnight and on Radio 4’s File on Four – find strong evidence confirming western-backed Georgia as the aggressor on the night of August 7. It also assembles powerful testimony of wide-ranging war crimes carried out by the Georgian army in its attack on the contested region of South Ossetia.

They include the targeting of apartment block basements – where civilians were taking refuge – with tank shells and Grad rockets, the indiscriminate bombardment of residential districts and the deliberate killing of civilians, including those fleeing the South Ossetian capital of Tskinvali.

The carefully balanced report – which also details evidence of ethnic cleansing by South Ossetian paramilitaries – cuts the ground from beneath later Georgian claims that its attack on South Ossetia followed the start of a Russian invasion the previous night.

Obviously, this does not excuse any crimes committed by Ossetian or Russian forces in the days that followed, but it makes very clear that Western politicians and pundits who have referred repeatedly to Russian “aggression” have been quite simply wrong.  If early Russian reports of Ossetian civilian casualties in the thousands may have been exaggerated, there is apparently good reason to believe that there were at least 300 or 400 such casualties.  These were civilian casualties inflicted in an absolutely unnecessary war escalated by an ally of the United States.

With just three days until the election (can it be true–it’s really almost over?), here are some not terribly surprising predictions.  Obama will win 54-46% with 364 votes in the Electoral College (Missouri will vote for Obama).  Republicans will lose Senate seats in AK, NM, CO, VA, NH, NC, OR and MN, but narrowly retain the GA, MS and KY seats.  In the House, Democrats will lose TX-22 and FL-16, as these are normally heavily Republican districts that were lost due to past scandals, as well as PA-11 (Kanjorski’s seat) and LA-06 (Cazayoux will not prevail in the general), but Nancy Boyda in Kansas and Shea-Porter in New Hampshire will be re-elected.  The Democrats will win 33 other seats: IL-11, AK-AL, FL-08, FL-21, FL-24, FL-25, CO-04, OH-16, NY-29, MI-09, CA-04, ID-01, IL-10, MD-01, LA-04, NJ-07, NJ-03, MI-07, MN-03, NC-08, NV-03, NM-02, OH-01, OH-15, PA-03, WA-08, IN-03, NY-26, OH-02, NY-13, NY-25, VA-11 and VA-05.  Baffling outsiders, Bachmann will survive the fallout from her Hardball interview.  So, in some relatively good news for the GOP, the majority will have a net gain of just 29. 

Darren White will win in NM-01, continuing the inexplicable tradition of metro Albuquerque always electing a Republican representative.  This last prediction is the one most likely to be proved false, because I voted for White and there is another time-honored tradition that says that every candidate I vote for must lose.

In the “pre-criminations” for the likely McCain defeat, there seem to be four targets of criticism: 1) McCain; 2) McCain’s campaign staff; 3) Palin; 4) Impossible external conditions.  Of course, it is possible to argue that #4 makes all of the others irrelevant, but it shouldn’t absolve them of responsibility for their respective failures.  Of the four, Palin has the smallest share of blame, as she was involved in the campaign for the shortest time and the selection of her was an expression of more fundamental problems with McCain and his campaign.  That doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a liability, and it doesn’t mean that she has done a terribly good job, and it definitely doesn’t mean that she is the future of the party, but if the GOP decides to make her the primary individual scapegoat they will be missing far more important lessons from this election. 

The candidate and the staff are hard to extricate from one another: McCain chose the staffers and agreed to heed their advice, and they crafted a message-free campaign that they thought suited a candidate defined by his biography.  To accuse Palin, as some McCain insiders have done anonymously, of having gone “off message” is meaningless–there has been no message from which she could have departed.  For that matter, to credit Schmidt with having enforced some kind of discipline on a rudderless, message-free campaign is not much of a compliment.  All that this means is that he effectively organized an aimless campaign as it zigged and zagged efficiently from one incoherent line of attack to the next.  McCain bears the bulk of the responsibility for a poor campaign, as the nominee always does, and the poor campaign was practically foreordained once McCain decided that characteristically moralistic harping on two or three of his favorite issues, which had been his primary election approach, would be the path to victory in November.  The campaign was message-free because of McCain’s weakness on policy, particularly domestic policy, which ensured that his response to the financial crisis could not have been very effective.  It did not have to be as absurd as it was, but it was never going to inspire much confidence. 

External conditions brought the McCain campaign crumbling to the ground, but that was a result of its unsound foundations and poor construction.

Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win. ~Rick Davis

Via Andrew

When your campaign has hung all of its hopes on the crazy gamble of flipping Pennsylvania, a state that Bush couldn’t win in his re-election campaign in relatively good times, it is strange to have your staffers talk about traditional models.  According to the traditional model, McCain is already finished and has been for weeks.  Then again, what else are you going to say when Arizona and Georgia are now rated as toss-up states?  I’m not sure how much of this is put out for public consumption to prevent stories titled, “McCain staffers lose all hope,” and how much of it is an expression of the real views of McCain insiders.  Presumably the insiders know that they’re going to lose and are keeping up appearances, but how shocked will McCain’s voters be when the comeback that they are being vaguely promised does not happen? 

There does seem to be a real problem emerging here: if McCain supporters, encouraged by the talk radio echo chamber, believe that they are on the verge of an upset win and also believe in claims of widespread voter fraud, what are the odds that they are going to accept the results on Tuesday?  It seems to me that Obama needs to win by a significant margin in the popular vote and Electoral College to quash “stolen election” theories.

But by the late 1990s, during America’s post-cold-war triumphalist moment, Senator McCain gradually but decisively moved away from his realist roots and became an enthusiastic champion of an ideological interventionist agenda. To be fair, many in the political center, including key Republican realists, came to believe that, as the only superpower, the United States was both able and entitled to reshape the world without paying a prohibitive price. ~The National Interest

McCain’s move from hawkish realism, which prompted him to criticize deployments to Lebanon and Somalia, to super-hawkish interventionism can be overstated, but it is clear that during the Balkan Wars McCain abandoned any hint of realism.  Complicating matters, McCain was correct in his arguments against intervening in Lebanon and Somalia, which sounded eerily similar to many conservative arguments against invading Iraq.  At one time, he was wary of intervention because of the intractability of local conflicts, our lack of understanding of the divisions in a very different foreign society, and the lack of clear objectives and direct connection to the national interest, but cast all of that aside to support intervention in the Balkans of all places.  Since then, there has never been a major deployment or use of force that he has opposed.  No one denies that there has been a shift in his views, but as far as I know what no one seems to be able to account for is why, aside from opportunism or perceived political advantage, he came to side with the very kinds of people who would not only have wanted to go into Lebanon and Somalia but who also regularly decry the subsequent withdrawals from those places as invitations to attack.

What is striking about the McCain campaign’s deplorable smear attack in which they label Rashid Khalidi as an anti-Semite, which Philip Giraldi and Glenn Greenwald have already discussed, is how unusually lazy it is.  Of course, flinging such labels at political opponents is already very intellectually lazy and disreputable, but one expects a certain degree of polemical effort when the usual suspects set out to defame someone.  You come to expect these sorts of smears to be directed against people who do not hold approved views of Israel and Palestine, but in this case there haven’t even been the normal lame attempts to equate Khalidi’s views with anti-Semitism.  As an Arab-American with a Palestinian parent and someone who is a scholar of the history of Palestinians, Khalidi is simply assumed by the McCain campaign to hold the worst views, because this ultimately has less to do with the false claims of ties to the PLO and more to do with Khalidi’s own background and political views.  His views on Israel and Palestine would probably not be very popular, but it is Khalidi’s ethnicity that has made him the particular target of scorn.  Indeed, if Khalidi were not of Arab descent it is difficult to imagine Obama’s friendship with him being even remotely controversial. 

Contraryto the title of Mr. Giraldi’s post (which I understand was a bit of rhetorical flourish), we are not all Palestinians, just as we are not all Israelis, and neither are we Georgians nor Russians.  We Americans are Americans, and it has been our tendency to identify ourselves with other nations and take sides in conflicts that have nothing to do with us that have contributed, as I am sure Mr. Giraldi will agree, to the problems in our foreign policy debates and in our foreign policy itself.  As I said regarding the Second Lebanon War two years ago:

It is ludicrous because, no matter the feelings of goodwill and solidarity, we cannot seriously identify ourselves with another nation, nor can they identify themselves with us, because in so many respects every nation, every people is significantly different in meaningful ways that precludes an identification of any two. The fundamental differences between nations also prevent a ready and reflexive identification of the interests of any two nations on the basis of decent moral outrage at evils perpetrated on another people’s civilians.

The impossibility of such an identification does not absolve us of the obligation to condemn and, insofar as it is possible, oppose excesses and outrages in war, but it also points to the truth that our outrage, if it is as genuine as it should be, cannot be selective or one-sided and should not prefer the innocent of one side over the innocent of the other.

Saakashvili has changed prime ministers, appointing the former ambassador to Turkey to replace Lado Gurgenidze:

Saakashvili cited Mgaloblishvili’s reported skill in attracting Turkish investment to Georgia as among the ambassador’s qualifications for the job, but one political analyst believes that the career diplomat’s appointment could mean that the Georgian government intends to put greater policy emphasis on foreign affairs rather than economic development.

“Georgia’s biggest challenge today lies in the realm of foreign relations, not domestic problems such as the economy, which was the case when Gurgenidze was appointed,” said Tornike Sharashenidze, head of Foreign Relations Programs at Tbilisi’s Georgian Institute of Public Affairs.

This is a curious change, since one might have thought that it would be better on the cusp of a global recession to have a talented economic hand at the head of the government.  Saakashvili’s critics in Georgia believe the frequent changes of ministers are designed to prevent any rivals from acquiring the ability to challenge the president politically.  Opposition figures are predictably dissatisfied:

Tina Khidasheli, one of the leaders of the opposition Republican Party, called the premier reshuffle a show that has been going on for years. “What we’ve seen here for several years is one and the same merry-go-round with essentially the same figures being moved around on the chessboard,” said Khidasheli. “People known for their poor judgment … are still there, largely because of their unwavering loyalty to Saakashvili. As a result, key decisions are made almost unilaterally and there is no room left for alternative thinking.”

Having visited Taiwan very briefly in April just after the Kuomintang had won their presidential election, I was interested in this Asia Times column on the opposition to President Ma’s resumption of the KMT’s efforts at forging closer relations with Beijing:

The massive anti-China protests in Taiwan’s capital last weekend were a reminder to President Ma Ying-jeou that his attempts to forge closer links with China will not be all smooth sailing. Although the protest will not change Ma’s China policies, the rally underscores the challenges he faces as a large segment of the population remains deeply wary of the island’s longtime rival. 

Remembering that the DPP was ousted decisively not even eight months ago, I find the decline in Ma’s political fortunes remarkable.  Elected with 58% of the vote, his approval ratings are at 30%, which does not bode well for the long-term success of his proposals if broad popular discontent aids the DPP in future parliamentary elections.  Ma is already suffering from building anti-incumbency sentiment on account of the effects of the financial crisis and his speed in pushing for a closer economic relationship with China.  One of Taiwan’s great economic difficulties is that many international firms now bypass Taipei entirely and do all of their regional business on the mainland, and on the whole Ma seems to recognize this and is addressing it with proposals of establishing a common market and allowing Taiwanese companies to invest more their total assets in the mainland.  Along with the rest of East Asia, Taiwanese exports are suffering from weakened demand overseas, and this economic weakening will make closer economic integration with China even harder to avoid despite strong DPP opposition. 

Update: The Economist story on the protests is here.  They report that Ma’s approval has dropped to 24%.  Ted Galen Carpenter describes the political backlash against Ma here.