Month: February 2010

Adam Ferrier questions the truism:

I came across an interesting study today by Gardner and Oswald (2007), Money and mental wellbeing: A longitudinal study of medium-sized lottery wins. In short they tested if people who had a medium sized lottery win (approx. $3,000 – $300,000) were happier. They did the study under quasi-experimental conditions, including creating a sample size large enough to make the findings reliable. In short they found people who won money in lotteries were psychologically happier as a result of their win – even up to two years later. A financial windfall made people happier.

A reader writes:

You spent your Saturday night live blogging Sarah Palin???!!!! Are you insane?!!

She is a media personality – driven by a corporate media who knows she sells – just like any other Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears. Don't you get it?! You guys have become her papparazzi! You just can't get enough of her and I'm beginning to worry about you. Quit feeding the frenzy and watch how quickly her star fades. Really. Trust me on this. As soon as the media – whom she demeans at every opportunity by the way – stops reporting on her, well – it's out of sight and out of mind. It will drive her and her handlers crazy. Now go enjoy yourself.

And get away from the damn TV.

Well I spent much of the day in the snow with the dogs. And what the hell are you doing reading a blog on Saturday night anyway? (Just kidding).

Weigel:

Palin adroitly re-wrote the history of the past three months of elections, giving the Tea Party movement credit for Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts and calling the White House “0 for 3″ in recent elections–leaving out the New York special election where her candidate, the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman, lost in a last-minute upset.

“You know,” said Palin of Brown, “he was just a guy with a truck, and a passion to serve his country,” said Palin. Brown, however, was a state senator and state representative whose campaign staffers cut their teeth with Mitt Romney.

If you are one of those people who think this person cannot become president of the United States, think again.

Two lines stood out for me. The first is a sign that she believes and her followers believe that she has a divine destiny. She is Esther, with a touch of martyrdom:

"I will live, I will die for the people of America."

The second was the Dolchstoss attack on the duly elected president of the United States:

"We need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law."

These two potent messages – delegitimizing Obama as "the other" and as a weak-kneed traitor to the troops, and casting herself as the avatar of the real America, ready to die for its survival – are political gold. Most politicians in liberal democracies she somewhat from stating them so obviously, because they clearly invoke certain, shall we say, non-democratic forms. Not she.

The media, too scared be tarred as elitists, will never demand policy specifics from her; there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony "fiscal conservatism"; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America's enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

10.02 pm. "I will live; I will die for the people of America."

10.01 pm. She again reiterates her claim that she will return her speaking fee to "the cause." Will someone – anyone – in the media ask her what that means?

10 pm. Her first priority is energy projects and cutting spending. Now she's saying that Obama is faking bipartisanship, and she doesn't believe in it if there's no core agreement.

9.59 pm. She's now backing contested primaries and says she is going to assist in some of those. This was a total embrace of the leadership of the populist tea-party movement.

9.56 pm. Her plan: support those who understand the foundation of our country. Free market principles, hard work, and then in national security: "We win. They lose." By they, she means, I think, Islamists. But how do we win? Does she think we "won" under Bush and Cheney? Again, there's nothing here but slogans and cliches – no specifics, no actual strategic arguments in foreign policy. Just fight our enemies and win.

9.54 pm. I notice how the "interviewer" keeps talking about "conservative" government rather than Republican government. She also says her own husband is more conservative than she is.

9.53 pm. Now, a screed against the "lame-stream media." "Plow on through it."

9.51 pm. She says that the key to the future is to seek "divine intervention." Reliance on the Creator. Maybe God can balance the budget.

9.50 pm. Her specifics: "We have to rein in the spending." "Jump-start energy projects, i.e. drilling." "Allowing America's spirit to rise again." One simple question: what spending will she rein in?

9.49 pm. Again, it's all about being over-taxed. And that's how we tackle the debt.

9.46 pm. There is no question in my mind that Palin is the leader of the opposition in this country. And there is no question in my mind that she is the leader of the Tea Party movement. Listening to her completely content-free rehash of every Fox News truism, underlined with the classic claim that Obama is on the side of the terrorists and is incapable of being commander-in-chief. Cheneyism is behind her.

9.45 pm. She's for the people against the government! Shes against Washington! They love her!

9.42 pm. Now the resentment. "Considering a candidate's children fair game." She's railing against the "elitists". Her invocation of Ronald Reagan is, to me, sickening.And in the peroration, the key proof of her being a genuine person: her son, Trig, and people with special needs. That has gotten the biggest applause of the night. It will be code for banning abortion. And she will be its talisman.

9.40 pm. Now she's saying things in the abstract that I completely believe in. But it is so lacking in any specifics, so devoid of any actual proposals to deal with any of our problems, so packed with cliches and tested bromides. And now she's claiming that we should stop "apologizing" for the troops. Who has been apologizing for the troops?

9.37 pm. She calls for more cuts in spending than just the spending freeze – but absolutely no specifics. And she endorses tax cuts! The Tea Party keynote speaker wants more tax cuts and no specified spending cuts. This is what created the deficits!

9.36 pm. In foreign policy, this is a campaign for return of Cheneyism. On energy, she wants non-carbon energy, but no government action to foster it except "projects" for non-carbon energy.

9.33 pm. Again, she's reprising fantasies of her alleged record in Alaska as fiscally conservative and reformist. "Get government out of the way." On healthcare, she favors meaningful "market reforms." The same old "across state lines purchases" and tort reform. That's it. Nothing else.

9.31 pm. "Big new programs with giant price tabs." She is now giving the fiscal conservative critique of the Bush years – but not of Bush. And so far, no actual policies proposed. I'm still waiting.

9.30 pm. The first mention of the debt after half an hour. This is a brutal, take-no-prisoner attack on Obama. She's running for president.

9.28 pm. Again, coopting all the populist themes of transparency, of anti-lobbyists.

9.26 pm. The governor who set up private email accounts for state business is now campaigning for transparency. And then a litany of every tiny little petite scandale in the stimulus. But notice how there isn't an actual attack on the stimulus itself.

9.23 pm. Now she's attacking Wall Street. "Where are the consequences for their getting us into the worst situation since the Great Depression?" This is a kind of left-wing populism, built in implicit rejection of TARP and the notion that the "stimulus" was a way for the federal government to take control of the people in the states.

9.22 pm. Obama is the enemy of the constitution.

9.19 pm. I'm struck by how much of this speech is now about national security, and how president Obama is anti-democracy around the world. She's also channeling Scheuneman on Iran. This is a speech to restore the Cheney vision of foreign policy: friends versus enemies. She claims Obama is "courting our adversaries." She's tired of hearing "talk, talk, talk."

9.17 pm. She's now claiming that he was asked no questions after the first fifty minutes – denied by the FBI. "We need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law." This is Cheneyism from a fembot. She's impugning the idea that Obama is commander-in-chief.

9.13 pm. So far not a single policy endorsement – but she's pivoting toward the Dolchstoss card. "We can't spin our way out of this threat." She's using the undie-bomber … and here we come with the Miranda rights argument. If you think the tea-party movement is just about fiscal issues, you're wrong. It's also about restoring the Cheney protectorate.

9.10 pm. Again she says she wants to challenge both parties. It's the "people" versus both parties.

9.09 pm. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi coalition is responsible for the entire mess we're in. George Bush is the past; the left "own this now." She's tired of looking backward, and wants to look forward. And the reason to be excited about the future is that the GOP is winning off-year elections.

She's really good at this – joking, playing brilliantly to the crowd, and endorsing "contested primaries" in the future.

9.08 pm. She's co-opting Scott Brown for the Tea Party revolution.

9.07 pm. "America is ready for another revolution."

9.05 pm. Gosh she's so proud to be an American.

Weigel finds the Palin cult alive and well – even among the dissenting dudes at this afternoon's presser. More Palin mania here. More here and here.

Damon Linker reconsiders the great liberal realignment:

“Anything But The Other Guys” isn’t a particularly inspiring slogan, especially in comparison to the (let’s face it) exaggerated expectations for change many progressives entertained during the 2008 campaign. But the phrase captures the most pressing fact about the present political moment: Today’s Republican Party is unfit to govern and so must not be permitted to win the presidency.

Everything else—including health care reform and climate change legislation—can and should be treated as negotiable. If the Democrats conclude that compromise or caution will make a Republican resurgence less likely, then they should take that path, for the good of the country. Until the Republicans come to their collective senses, depriving them of power must be the most urgent aim of progressive politics.

(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A Robin eats berry from a snow covered tree in Silver Spring, Maryland, on February 6, 2010. By Jewel Samad/Getty.

George Packer mourns the loss of books:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off.