Month: August 2008

Bouncy, Bouncy, Bouncy

Larry Sabato warns:

Recent history suggests that there is a better than even chance we’ll be misled by the post-convention bounces in 2008. Yet forests will be lost to produce the newsprint for the stories about the overarching significance of 2008’s post-convention bounces. And the "tubes" that comprise the internet (in the immortal description of now-indicted Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens) will be clogged with breathless analysis of the same numbers.

(Hat tip: Clive Crook)

Pushkin And Georgia

A reader writes:

Sadly, you quote Pushkin to express Georgian suffering.  This is like having an abuser speak for the pain of the abused.

Both he and Lermontov wrote romantically of the people of the Caucasus at the time of the Russian conquests of this area.

And true, the czarist empire did save them from Persian and Turkish slaughter. But the Russians imposed their own empire and even simple things like ancient Georgian religious chants were pushed aside in favor of Russian music until the 1990’s. Pushkin wrote of the conquest of the Chechens, a particularly horrid war, where the dense forests that used to cover much of the land were hacked down tree by tree to deny the Chechens cover, an ecological disaster they have not recovered from. He celebrates these conquests, and Russians often quote him to express their love for that area. But the conquered see it totally differently.

And did not these Chechens try to separate from Russia, just as the Ossetians and Abhaz now claim from Georgia, just a few years ago and were met by bombings worse than WW2 ? And this was met by silence from the world. Interestingly Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet, persecuted by the Czars, wrote from the viewpoint of the Chechens. So would it not have been better to quote a Georgian poet  to express Georgian misery at the hands of Russia?

Probably, yes. But the Pushkin was beautiful.

Obama, Underdog?

Obamaemmanueldunandafpgetty

Andrew Romano talks to Tom Holbrook, convention bounce sage:

If Obama does get a nice big bump and ends up ahead by six points or so, obviously that’s good for his campaign. While it doesn’t necessarily predict that he’s going to win, it does says that he was undervalued going into the convention and that the ship’s finally been righted. The real danger, though, is the "no bump" scenario. Given that the race is relatively tight now, if Obama doesn’t get a big bump out of this convention, I think that will say something about how hard it’s going to be for him to increase his lead in the polls. If he can’t do it substantially over a four-day period when it’s all his show, then I think his campaign should be worried about the months ahead.

I’m not sure any of this is worth guessing or anticipating. I do have one observation about the campaign so far, though. Obama’s candidacy makes the most sense as an insurgency. The point of his campaign is change – change from the last eight years and from the way Washington plays politics in the Morris-Rove era. When he became the front-runner, got anointed as the establishment candidate, this point got blurred. The worst thing to have happened to him is this premature ascendancy. He actually needs a period when he’s behind to get out of this dynamic.

Otherwise, McCain becomes the insurgent change-agent against the prematurely anointed one. (Al Giordano’s related thoughts are here.)

That’s why the Bayh pick, if that’s what it turns out to be, could be a very shrewd idea. It creates a Clinton-Gore 1992 dynamic in which a young duo – visually different – somehow amplify the themes of newness and generational change. Against McCain, the theme of generational change is essential to the Obama message. The themes write themselves: change, not more of the same. And: It’s the economy, stupid.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)