Month: November 2008

People of faith should be proudly part of public life. I am. But equally, they need to recognize a distinction between religion and politics as well as church and state. Some are recognizing this. Mark DeMoss:

I’d like to see evangelicals look for competent, qualified candidates who share our values, whether or not they share our faith or theology. I believe it’s wrong to oppose a candidate because of his faith (Mitt Romney), and equally wrong to support a candidate primarily based on common faith (Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin).

Along the campaign trail I met so many people, including pastors and religious leaders, who could tell me only that their choice for president was a "good Christian," or "one of us." This, in my view, is a dangerously inadequate approach to choosing our highest leaders. We don’t choose people for any other positions using this test; why would we apply it to one of the most important positions on the planet?

Virginia Postrel on the lessons that should be learned from 8’s passage:

Conventional wisdom maintains that the hide-the-gays strategy was good politics, but a) it insulted voters’ intelligence on an issue that was not hard to understand b) it seemed desperate c) it suggested that gay marriage is, in fact, something to be ashamed of instead of an extension of normal family life and, of course, d) it didn’t work.

The political and cultural reality is that either people think it’s OK for gays to get married, or they don’t. And if they don’t, they think this kind of discrimination is good–and completely different from the bad kind of discrimination. Besides, when you say the issue is "discrimination" and equate traditional limits on marriage to (now-illegal) racist practices, traditionalists can claim, without seeming crazy, the next step will be to outlaw even private, religiously based limits on marriage. Isn’t that what we do with discrimination?

Ideally, we would persuade skeptics that gay marriage is good. But, at the very least, we need to persuade them that it’s not bad. A lot of people are still in the muddled middle on this issue. They just need more evidence and more experience. As hard as it may seem right now, gay families need to be more, not less, public about their lives.

Agreed. Patrick Guerrerio helped rescue the campaign at the last minute. But it was guided throughout, alas, by the same mentality that plagues the Human Rights Campaign. They are poll-obsessed, focus-group manic, and devoid of real, gut-level conviction. They ran a Clinton-style campaign in an Obama-style environment. But I’m not depressed by this. Every time we lose, and tell our stories, we win. And we will win this, however timid so many of the well-moneyed, boomer-dominated HRC establishment types are, howevermany bumps in the road.

Because we’re right. And history will prove it.

Nate Silver is on the case. Something has happened there in this election that requires an explanation.

This good. The only state their model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge’s recent coverage and compare it with Silver’s, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive – and they are only as good as their last few posts.

If you want to know why newspapers are dying: that’s why. They’re just not as good as the web at its best. This election proved that beyond any doubt. For the record, I think the WSJ and the WaPo and the NYT and the Anchorage Daily News rocked in this election. Most of the rest of the old media: not so much.

The man most responsible for the Palin fiasco is now fighting for his career:

Hilarious tale of neocon-on-neocon violence from the McCain campaign.

Larison sighs:

The claim that she didn’t know Africa was a continent is the sort of thing that almost sounds as if it belongs to a caricature of a person who knows nothing, but it seems remotely possible that it is true.  Americans’ knowledge of world geography is notoriously poor, which does not excuse it in this case if true, but neither is it all that far-fetched. The troubling thing is that I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this.

I can almost hear some dedicated pundits rehearsing the next defense, "Well, how many people understand that Africa is a continent?  Do we expect our elected officials to understand the conventions originally invented by ancient geographers?  Besides, technically, Africa is attached to the landmass of Asia and so you can see why she might have been hesitant to identify it that way."  A more aggressive defense might say, "Who cares about Africa?  Palin is interested in helping this country." The claim about NAFTA seems hard to believe: how could a governor of Alaska not know which countries were involved in this agreement?  Then again, this tends to confirm everything we have come to know about her lack of interest in policy details.  These claims about her are so bizarre and yet specific that it is hard to dismiss them outright.

O’Reilly said that the news that she needed education on civics past a sixth grade level was "nit-picking." Her selection was a bigger scandal than the press reported. They deserve a shellacking for their cowardice and incompetence.

Lindsey Graham sends the new chief-of-staff a Valentine.

For the record, Rahm was channeling "Animal House."

This is very odd:

Four years ago, 313,592 out of 474,740 registered voters in Alaska participated in the election-a 66% turnout. Taking into account 49,000 outstanding ballots, on Tuesday 272,633 out of 495,731 registered Alaskans showed up at the polls; a turnout of 54.9%. That’s a decrease of more than 11% in voter turnout even though passions ran high for and against Obama, as well as for and against Sarah Palin!

This year, early voters set a new record. As of last Thursday, with 4 days left for early voting, 15,000 Alaskans showed up-shattering the old record set in 2004 by 28%! Consider the most popular governor in history-and now the most polarizing-was on the Republican ticket. Consider the historic nature of this race; the first African American presidential candidate EVER! The second woman to ever make a presidential ticket; and she’s one of our own. Despite that, we’re supposed to believe that overall participation DECREASED by 11%. Not only that, but this historic election both nationally and for Alaska HAD THE LOWEST ALASKA TURNOUT FOR A PRESIDENTIAL RACE EVER!!!

I’m not drawing the conclusions this blogger is, but it does seem remarkable.