Almost everyone except for the people who work at The New Yorker seems to have grasped that, whether intended as satire or not, the effect of the cover image is disastrous for the Obama campaign.  The timing might have been worse, but not by much, since Obama is getting ready to go on his trip out of the country.  The image is the most complete expression of the inexplicable desire of Obama supporters to “help” the candidate by portraying him in what are actually the most unflattering and politically damaging ways possible while simultaneously believing that they are pre-emptively defending and praising the things they are describing.  This cover image is slightly different, in that it is trying to undermine the worst attacks by revealing them to be nonsensical caricatures, but nonetheless the artist seems incapable of imagining that there are many voters, particularly those who don’t know that much about Obama, who will see this image flashed on their television screens or attached to chain e-mails and think, “I knew there was something about that Obama I didn’t like, and now I see what it is!”  No doubt many Obama supporters thinks this gives a lot of voters too little credit, but they have been giving them too much for a long time.  Besides, this isn’t just a question of voter savviness–the power of suggestion can be great, and in a tightly contested race, in which the challenger has not yet won the confidence of a majority of voters, any lingering doubts that prevent people from supporting the challenger could be decisive.  The less informed undecided voters are, the more susceptible they will be to such an image, which will plant seeds of doubt where there might have been none before. 

In an era of instant, mass communication, the image will be, indeed already has been, circulated widely and will gradually lose whatever “ironic” edge it once had.  That the image derived from a New Yorker cover and was intended for an audience of high-information, predominantly left-leaning voters who already support Obama will be irrelevant or will add to the “credibility” of what the image conveys. Then the word will go forth in forwarded emails everywhere: “Even The New Yorker thinks Obama is a secret Muslim, etc…”      

The artist, Barry Blitt, takes for granted that the portrayal of the Obamas he is ridiculing is self-evidently absurd, which is the essential failure of imagination that accompanies every one of these episodes of some starry-eyed friend of Obama “helping” the candidate.  While casually mentioning how many foreign relatives he has, his purported greater understanding of the Islamic world and how very excited many Arabs are that he may be elected, the “helpers” seem to be unable to imagine how these same claims–to say nothing of the more bizarre fantasies built on top of them–would inspire dislike and hostility in many voting constituencies.  They seem to conclude that because they find such a reaction to be wrong and misguided that it will not be significant, which makes no sense.  They also seem to have made the strange judgement that just because a candidate is being attacked in wildly contradictory and irrational ways that the attacks can easily be offset by showing how irrational and contradictory they are, which misses the point that they are irrational.

P.S.  This entire episode reminds me of the art school subplot in Ghost World with The New Yorker in the role of the art teacher promoting an art project that “ironically” uses blatant racial stereotypes.  Had the editors at the magazine been more attentive Steve Buscemi fans, they would have seen the problem with using the image.

Update: Sullivan says that “the notion that most Americans are incapable of seeing that [it is satire] strikes me as excessively paranoid and a little condescending,” but it is not so much a question of capability as it is one of willingness.  Some people will see it as a confirmation of what they already believe or suspect, others will “get” it but still find it outrageous, and still others may understand that the intent was satire but will still come away with the impression that there could be some element of truth to the stereotyping.  The fairly small number who just laugh at it and think that it skewers smear artists will not begin to offset the number of people who will either take offense or take the image all together too seriously.

As I started reading Ryan Lizza’s interesting, long article on the rise of Obama, who should I come across on the first page but Alderman Toni Preckwinckle?  That makes sense, since she was one of Obama’s earliest supporters and an important patron in city politics, but the name rang a bell for a different reason.  Her name had come up earlier in that Globe story about failed private development of public housing in Obama’s state senate district:

After Rezko’s assistance in Obama’s home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar’s buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

“I started getting complaints from police officers about particular properties that turned out to be Rezko properties,” said Toni Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman.

She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city’s best affordable housing developers.

But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was “getting out of the business,” she said – walking away from its responsibility for managing the developments.

“I didn’t see him nor have anything to do with him after that,” she said.

While she wouldn’t talk to the Globe about Obama and Rezko specifically, the article used Preckwinckle’s break with Rezko to imply that Obama’s claim of ignorance about the deterioration of Rezmar buildings was questionable, which made his continued association with Rezko prior to the latter’s indictment seem even worse than it already did. 

Now Lizza uses her as a representative of disenchanted Obama supporters, and in his article she does have some things to say about Obama and Rezko:

Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.

The general impression one gets from the two old Obama supporters quoted in the beginning of the article is that Obama has a bad habit of relying on constituents to propel him upwards and then ignoring them (or at the very least making them feel as if they have been ignored, which is usually just as bad for the pol).  This is true of many politicians, but it isn’t necessarily true of all of them, and it certainly isn’t a very attractive feature. 

Update: Regarding Obama’s much-celebrated 2002 antiwar speech, Lizza quotes the woman who organised the rally to make the obvious point:

The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”

Second Update: Whatever else people take away from the article, it seems to me that its merits and revelations are going to be completely overshadowed by controversy over the cover of the issue in which it appears:

On the Roger Cohen scale of counterproductive, tone-deaf pro-Obama gestures, this is a 12.

You might guess that an op-ed that refers to “raving grease-monkey CPAs” is not persuasive, and you’d be right.  Yglesias marvels at the uselessness of the Post op-ed pages that DeBord’s piece exemplifies, though he should remember that this is an outfit run by Fred Hiatt, and reaction to the idiotic lament for the Hummer has been appropriately severe and caustic.  As an icon of the fantasy of “endless abundance,” the Hummer fulfills far more than the fantasies of insecure men–it perpetuates the myth that technology and progress will triumph over all things, there are no limits, resources are practically infinite, and a standard of living that has now become prohibitively expensive is within the reach of all.  In other words, it is an invitation to insanity. 

Worst of all, DeBord slipped up and acknowledged just how absurd the entire Hummer phenomenon he is praising really is:

If this all sounds like caricature, that’s because it is.

If Mr. Bush has himself long ago reached self-caricaturing status, epitomised by his reported remarks at the G-8 summit, DeBord reminds us that there is still a constituency for ridiculous bluster and defining American identity according to how much we can consume and destroy.

The thing that prompted Rod to write about Africa yesterday was the Security Council vote that rejected the proposed sanctions against Zimbabwe, which the reporters for the Times declared rather hyperbolically to be “an historic defeat for the West.”  Of course, it’s true that Russia and China have essentially taken Zimbabwe’s side in their resistance to any international attempt to regulate the internal affairs of Zimbabwe, which they understand quite well could be applied to them or their satellites in the future, but the points that their ambassadors made are worth considering.  The Russian ambassador said:

This draft is nothing but the council’s attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state.

Of course, that is exactly true.  Indeed, that’s the whole point of the exercise.  The Chinese ambassador added, “Internationally, to use or threaten to use sanctions lightly is not conducive to solving a problem.”  This is often also true.  Suppose for a moment that the arms embargo and travel ban had been enacted, and the financial assets of the ruling clique frozen in various banks around the world.  Does anyone seriously think that this would mean that the ZANU-PF goons and the military would not be able to acquire arms illicitly?  Of course not.  It probably would make it much more likely that the opponents of Mugabe would be unable to arm themselves for self-defense.  The travel ban and asset freeze would be more burdensome, but would the latter not encourage the kleptocrats to steal whatever they have not already stolen inside Zimbabwe?  Has anyone thought for a moment how such an action would worsen conditions, as hard as that may be to imagine, rather than impose pressure on Mugabe?     

Furthermore, the Security Council does not properly have the authority to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe for its government’s misrule and brutality.  This is not the purpose of the United Nations Security Council.  Under the U.N. Charter, the Security Council can impose sanctions, blockades and even authorise military action to restore “international peace and security,” according to the provisions of Chapter VII, but one of the key provisions of the Charter that no one in the West seems to care for very much (and which non-revisionist powers such as Russia and China end up defending out of self-interest) is the statement in Article 2:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter…

Those who want the Security Council to act against Zimbabwe’s government want it to do something that it does not actually have the authority to do under the U.N.’s own fundamental law.  The powers it possesses to pursue collective security very plainly concern international disputes that threaten the peace.  The disaster in Zimbabwe does not fall under this jurisdiction. 

Update: It’s also worth noting that there are many significant sanctions already imposed on Zimbabwe by the U.S., EU and the Commonwealth, and these have had no effect in changing the behaviour of Mugabe’s regime.

I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need. ~John McCain

Well, there’s never been any danger of McCain becoming a great communicator.  Also, it’s not a good sign that he had to be reminded that he reads his own daughter’s blog.

Via Rod, I came across this rather extraordinary article by one Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent, in which he proclaimed Africa worthless:

They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Far be it from me to tell anyone to be more optimistic, but if this statement is true of some parts of Africa (and I think you can fairly say that it is) it is manifestly untrue or at least grossly exaggerated concerning other parts.  There is also a matter of when we are talking about: fifteen years ago, you would have listed Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast as success stories of post-colonial independence, and at that time they were doing reasonably well, but today you would list them as tragic cases of disaster to varying degrees.  My inclinations towards pessimism should make me conclude that this shows that even the seemingly successful states in Africa are going to collapse into chaos and disorder eventually, but I’m not sure that this shows that at all.  I think those two cases in particular do show that the politicisation of ethnicity through elements of mass democracy and the division of a country along ethnic lines tend towards the creation of ruinous, exploitative and oppressive policies that destroy previously flourishing states.  The case of Zimbabwe does point to the inherent difficulties in transitioning from an old, entrenched anti-colonialist political class to a new political leadership, but it does not necessarily mean that Zimbabwe will be doomed to this cycle forever.     

One of the perennial justifications offered for intervention in various African countries is the assumption, often unstated, that Africa as a whole is a hopeless disaster that will collapse in on itself if no one else does anything.  We, and by “we” I mean mainly Westerners, do not take this view of any other part of the world, except perhaps when it comes to Arab states (more on that in a moment), and this is very curious.  Crucial to developmentalist ideology is the idea that Africa is thrashing about impotently and needs still more aid, when surely the thing that Myers’ article tells us is that it has been the habit of development “aid” and the desire to “do something” to save immiserated Africans that have compounded the problems many African nation-states face.  One essential thing that I think should be taken from Myers’ article is the recognition that it would help African states to provide them with fewer crutches of aid and loans and integrate them more fully into the world’s economy.  If, as James has wisely observed, growing corruption worldwide is the great story of the decade and one of the great threats to political life in many “developing” countries, the role of development aid in fostering corruption cannot be ignored. 

As William Easterly has said in one of his many salvoes against the destructive ideology of developmentalism:

But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.

As Prof. Easterly laid out last year, fatalities caused by war account for an extremely small percentage of deaths in Africa, and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa has been considerable:

But this doesn’t quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today’s rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa’s history.

The real Africa also has seen cellphone and Internet use double every year for the last seven years. Foreign private capital inflows into Africa hit $38 billion in 2006 — more than foreign aid. Africans are saving a higher percentage of their incomes than Americans are (so much for the “poverty trap” of being “too poor to save” endlessly repeated in aid reports). I agree that it’s too soon to conclude that Africa is on a stable growth track, but why not celebrate what Africans have already achieved?
 

Easterly makes the vital point that the standards by which African progress is often being measured demand incredible improvements in very short spans of time, and so naturally African states keep falling short despite making reasonably good progress.  Easterly quoted an Ugandan journalist who asked the obvious question: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?”  This is the basic conservative understanding that dependence created by aid can be positively harmful.  Whatever their intentions, humanitarians and developmentalists are working to distort and stunt the development of African nations.

Myers’ attitude towards Africa is no doubt influenced by experiences in some of the worse, more conflict-ridden states (or, in Somalia’s case, pseudo-states) and his appropriate horror at the irresponsible attitudes of many southern African governments, not merely that of Mbeki, about the region’s public health crises.  Myers makes many legitimate points, and I’m sure the sweeping generalisations he ends up making are the product of frustration with the stigma against saying such things publicly.  Still, it occurs to me that this overly broad view of Africa is very much like the American view of “the Middle East,” which people in this country will commonly refer to as exceedingly violent or unstable, when it has been–outside of a very narrow strip of the Levant–relatively quiet, peaceful and stable until recent years.  Americans believe this because they are frequently shown only those parts of the region that make international news, and those tend to be the parts where there are intractable conflicts, and they are now often told that America’s role in the region is to provide stability in a region that supposedly would otherwise lack it.  That almost exactly the opposite might be true is not really considered a serious view.  The idea that Africans can make their own way in the world without ongoing assistance and support also seems to be quite unusual and controversial.  Developmentalists and interventionists have many incentives to propagate the idea that outside aid and meddling are essential for the well-being of the regions in question, but this not credible.  The most important thing to take away from Myers’ complaint is that these are the people who have exacerbated many of the problems that they then use to justify continued interference.

There are new reports based on Jane Mayer’s new book The Dark Side detailing a Red Cross investigation that concluded that detainees have been tortured by the CIA and also revealing that the administration ignored warnings that many of those being held at Guantanamo had been detained by mistake.  The authorised use of torture is a disgrace and a blot on the reputation of the government, but it has hardly been a secret.  Indeed, the efforts of members of the administration and its supporters to define away various forms of torture as something other than torture took for granted that the government was using torture on detainees.  The way that most Republican presidential candidates were rushing to out-do one another at one debate in their enthusiasm for brutality towards terror suspects, the dreadful invocations of necessity from Republican bloggers and the ease with which administration supporters began deploying euphemisms to describe torture (e.g., “enhanced interrogation techniques”) all pointed with certainty that the government was using torture and its defenders were either indifferent to this or openly supportive of it.  The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable.  “We have to be pragmatic!” they tell us.  This is where the logic of wanting to “get things done” takes you.

It is this other information, which is again not entirely surprising, that is more damning in its way, since it reveals the fraud behind the entire defense of detention facilities for “enemy combatants” who were, as Mr. Bush never tired of saying, “picked up off the battlefield.”  According to the new book’s account, this was always as false as it seemed to sound:

After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters [bold mine-DL]. Previous published reports have described the CIA analyst’s visit but have not provided details of its findings.

According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error.

As the story relates, the administration refused to review the status of any of the detainees, no doubt concluding that to acknowledge that such a huge percentage of detainees had been arrested in error would be to make sure that the entire para-constitutional system they were trying to create would be fatally undermined.  The premise of the dissenting minority in Boumediene was essentially that if the government has defined someone as an enemy combatant, he should not enjoy any measure of due process and to grant such an “enemy combatant” the ability to contest his detention and the charges against him would be to risk the acquittal and release of terrorists.  Of course, when the government is allowed to define who an “enemy combatant” is, up to and including U.S. citizens such as Padilla, it takes away the possibility of reviewing the very designation that strips the detainee of legal rights, and then without those rights he cannot contest his detention.  Better still from the government’s perspective, because the detainees are charged with terrorism and would not have been uniformed members of any military, they cannot claim the status of prisoners of war and so the government tries to find a way to evade international legal obligations as well.  The argument that these detainees should not have access to the courts relied on the belief that terrorist suspects should not be processed through civilian courts, which presupposed that their status as terrorist suspects had some basis in reality.  The entire system was justified according to the assumption that the government never makes mistakes and always acts in good faith, when we know that the opposite is typically the case.   

This news also reminds us of the secret prison network that the CIA was running in certain European countries, which was revealed back in 2006 to cries that Mary McCarthy was breaking the law and betraying national security.  If there had been half as much outrage about the government’s violations of the law as there was about Ms. McCarthy’s alleged wrongdoing, the entire detention system would have been dismantled years ago.  As I suspectedatthe time, the secret prisons were exactly the kind of black sites that were designed in such a way that they were an invitation to abuses, and that is assuming that they were not specifically intended as places where detainees were to be abused and tortured all along, and this new report of torture by CIA interrogators makes that seem even more likely.

P.S.  Schwenkler hasmore.

Update: Via Steve Clemons, I see that Prof. Andrew Bacevich, a TAC Contributing Editor, has a review of The Dark Side in the Post.  Prof. Bacevich writes:

Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

As the rest of the review makes clear, the same executive usurpation that created the detention system and drove the abuse of detainees is also behind the use of warrantless surveillance, and all of it is premised on the idea that the President and his agents are not under the law. 

Second Update: Glenn Greenwald has more, and makes the point that I have been trying to make in the past:

Things like “torture” and “illegal eavesdropping” can’t be compared as though they’re separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.  

Jay Cost looks at Obama’s television advertising buys, and notes that the campaign has so far opted not to advertise in several states that Clinton won in ’96 (and in ’92 for that matter):

Compare the ad buys to the 1996 results, and you’ll notice that there are six states Clinton won that Obama, who is flush with cash and could spend anywhere, has chosen to leave off his list. Obviously, Arizona is easily explained, as it is McCain’s home state. However, there are five other states not included in the buys: Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas. We can make three points about them.

First, they have been more supportive of successful Democratic presidential candidates than North Dakota et al. Bill Clinton won all five in 1996 and 1992. Jimmy Carter won them all in 1976. Until recently, West Virginia was solidly Democratic – voting for Carter in 1980 and Dukakis in 1988.

Second, with the exception of Kentucky, all of them were more supportive of Kerry in 2004 than North Dakota et al.

Third, they generally remain Democratic in their partisanship.

As Cost notes, the campaign has not been running ads in these states because these were states where Obama was particularly weak in the primaries.  Three of them are in Appalachia, and four of them belong to what I once dubbed “the Casey belt,” because of the prevalence of so-called “Casey Democrats” in these states.  The phrase refers to states that still tilt towards the Democrats in many local and state elections and continue to have greater Democratic than Republican registration, while their Democratic voters tend to be socially conservative.  So it was no accident that Obama fared quite badly with white Democrats in all of these states and lost the primaries in four of them.  There is tremendous resistance to his candidacy among many of these Democrats similar to the resistance Kerry faced, but as Cost observes the states where Obama is making unconventional ad buys demonstrated even greater resistance to Kerry.  

Except for Indiana, which is a natural target for an Illinois candidate, most of the “map-expanding” moves that Obama is making right now make little sense.  I know that the Montana, North Dakota and Alaska polls show a very close race, and at least one has shown Obama leading in Montana, but there are structural reasons that these states almost never vote Democratic in the presidential race, just as there are structural reasons why “the Casey belt” states are more likely to vote that way.  Many of the latter would be reverting to previous voting patterns, while the newly targeted states will have to break with long-established patterns.  Put another way, if these states even voted for Bob Dole, odds are they will still end up voting for Dole Mk II McCain. 

What makes this strategy even more odd is that Georgia, North Dakota, Alaska, Montana, and Indiana add up to 33 electoral votes, while Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas add up to 39 electoral votes, and the first five are much less likely to flip to the Democratic side.  Winning the latter five may not be easy for Obama, but it should by all rights be easier than winning the others, and even if he is entirely successful in winning the traditionally “red” states the payoff is not as great.  What is still more puzzling about the strategy is that it is unnecessary.  Colorado and New Mexico are much more likely to vote Democratic this year than these others, and so long as Obama holds all the Kerry states and wins these along with Iowa he will narrowly win the election.

Consider that the GOP’s best performance in recent years among voters with postgraduate degrees, the heart of the mass upper class, came in the 2002 midterms, when they backed Republican congressional candidates by 51 percent to 45 percent. Had the GOP gone wobbly on abortion or suddenly embraced gay marriage? Of course not: It was the difference between the two parties on national security, suddenly reasserting itself after a decade of abeyance, that made all the difference.  ~Ross and Reihan

It’s an interesting detail and one I wasn’t familiar with, but for one thing I’m not sure that there was as much significant difference here as Ross and Reihan claim.  The differences between the parties on national security were emphasised even more sharply in 2004 (e.g., Howard Dean’s candidacy) and still more in 2006 (e.g., Jim Webb et al.), but most voters (and certainly a much largermajority of post-graduates) found the national security vision of the GOP to be unattractive.  Emphasising differences makes sense, but if it requires one party to go fairly crazy in order for it to make the necessary distinctions it may not be desirable for both party and country.  For that matter, to the extent that there was significant difference between the parties on national security it revolved around the all-together disastrous plan to invade Iraq, but even here the leadership of the opposition very deliberately caved in to sided with the administration.  In any case, I’m not sure that the 2002 campaign offers a desirable or practicable model for the future, since it requires the extremely unusual circumstances of an immediate post-9/11 climate, heavy doses of jingoism and preparation for an unnecessary war.  What this detail from the 2002 midterms tells me is that in an unusually nationalistic mood all segments of the population are more likely to vote for the more robustly nationalist party, and the political pressure in such an extraordinary moment is such that the opposition party feels compelled to imitate the majority by having its leadership throw in its lot with the President’s policies.

Arguably, what has alienated the managers and professionals and caused suburbanite flight to the Democrats is the demonstration of unbelievable incompetence in the prosecution of the war as much as the war itself, but it’s not clear that the two can be usefully separated.  Viewed another way, the devil-may-care approach to postwar occupation and reconstruction is the flip side of the GOP’s more sanguine attitude towards exposure to risk, which is also related to the “economic optimism” that Ross has recently discussed in relation to the Gramm gaffe.  Republican leaders are themselves fairly insulated from economic insecurity, which is what causes the Gramms of the world to whine about national whining.  What these leaders are even more oblivious to is that globalisation has started to create economic anxiety among professionals and managers, just as it has been doing for working-class voters for years and years.  Economic anxiety is related to the desire to shield oneself and one’s family from significant risks, and the inability of Republicans to speak the language of voters who are experiencing this anxiety is directly related to their preference for policies that increase exposure to risk.  That suggests that there may be another way to look at those 2002 results: in the fairly alarmist post-9/11 months of 2002, the party that seemed most capable or willing to reduce exposure to the risk of catastrophic attack prevailed, but in subsequent years this same party has failed to understand and respond to other forms of insecurity and has monomaniacally fixated on antiterrorism as the only kind of security it can talk about with even minimal coherence. 

There is another aspect to this issue that came to mind when I first read the passage quoted above.  In Grand New Party, Ross and Reihan describe the rise of the mass upper-middle class and the resulting cultural polarisation in the country, and they have a particularly astute observation here:

The more that elites kept patriotism at arm’s length and treated national pride with a sophisticate’s tolerance, the more the breach was filled by Sean Hannity-style jingoists.

However, if my interpretation of the ’02 elections is right, it seems as if Ross and Reihan are arguing that one way to win over the heart of the upper-middle class is to engage in jingoism and demagoguery on national security as the GOP did in 2002.  That does not seem to add up.  Fortunately, their actual policy proposals for winning over the upper-middle class are entirely domestic and are far removed from the spirit of ’02.

Newsweek has a new presidential poll out, and not surprisingly the results have changed radically now that they have corrected their methodology with respect to party ID.  Instead of Republicans making up 22-23% of all respondents, they are now 25% (and 28% of the RV respondents), and suddenly Obama’s lead is three points instead of fifteen.  It’s hard to know how much movement in the poll is simply the result of making this correction, and how much the race has tightened in recent weeks.  At first glance, it would appear as if all of the change has come from previous Obama supporters switching sides or reverting to undecided, but again this may be nothing more than fixing the glaring problems of the last poll.  The large undecided figure and the reasonably small Obama lead are much more in line with several other surveys. 

In one potentially telling crosstab, Obama receives just 36% white support, and he is still pulling in just 70% of Clinton supporters.  All in all, though, this new result is much more in line with Newsweek polls from before June, but it also shows an increase in undecided voters compared to both April and May, while I would have thought the opposite would be true now that both nominees are known.