McCain’s Peak?

Ross ponders McCain’s poll ceiling:

But by all rights, this ought to be a peak time for McCain’s numbers – not the peak, necessarily, but certainly a high point. His right-wing critics are making nice with him, his favorable ratings are sky-high, and his opponents are too busy driving each other’s negative ratings upward to spend any time (or money, more importantly) putting a dent in his halo. Moreoever, the Democrats’ intra-party tensions are bound to diminish once the party picks a nominee: At least some of the Hillary supporters who tell pollsters that they’d vote for McCain over Obama may actually follow through on that pledge, but a lot of today’s McCainocrats will come home to the Democratic fold when all is said and done.

Yet even with all this going for him, McCain’s poll numbers are bumping up against the same 45 percent ceiling that they’ve been hitting since December. If the election were held today – a pretty good day for McCain, all things considered – he’d probably lose to Obama, and might lose to Clinton as well. That doesn’t mean he will lose, by any stretch, but it certainly doesn’t bode well for November.

The Millennial Generation

Something is indeed afoot with the under-40s and the massive generation gap in this election only brings it home. I’m not sure what to make of all their conclusions, but the analysis of Hais/Winograd certainly stimulates:

Millennials’ reliance on the Internet (technology that the Democrats have learned to exploit more quickly than their Republican opponents) and their passion for texting and instant messaging have political implications as well. In placing a heavy value on the opinion of friends and peers, the authors of this book suggest, Millennials are inclined to favor conclusions reached by decentralized decision making, and multilateral rather than unilateral policy making.

Their proclivity for sharing their lives with thousands of others through MySpace and Facebook also makes them “the generation least perturbed by any potential restrictions on civil rights or invasions of privacy that might have occurred in fighting the war on terrorism.” As a more socially tolerant and less divisive Millennial generation becomes a larger part of the electorate, Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais predict, “the power of social issues to drive our political debate will wane”: wedge issues will lose their effectiveness, and ideological divisions will give way to an emphasis on “successful governmental activism.” “Majorities,” they argue, “will coalesce around ideas that involve the entire group in the solution and downplay the right of individuals to opt out of the process.”

Some find it confusing that the young have shown their highest levels of enthusiasm in this campaign for Ron Paul and Barack Obama. But when you look at politics away from a right-left perspective and more from a decentralized/authoritarian angle, their similarities trump their obvious differences. What we’re seeing is a socially inclusive pragmatism in the next generation. It isn’t McCain’s bag; and it isn’t Clinton’s. But one day it will be the dominant mode of discourse. The question in this election is whether the older generation has one last spasm of influence. We’ll see.

If Obama Had Done This …

One can almost start a list of issues like this, but Senator Clinton’s bizarre back and forth on whether she would be prepared to obliterate Iran with nukes – she’s backtracking last time I checked – would have been regarded as a fatal error of inexperience if Obama had gone there.  But this campaign has a media narrative – Clinton is experienced, Obama is not – that is immune to actual facts. or actual issues. Which makes it easier for the MSM, of course. We just follow our own stories. And so the beat goes on …

The Saudi Arabia Of Food

Martin Walker writes:

The United States may have been a significant part of the problem—with its annual $6 billion in subsidies to produce ethanol from corn. But the United States is also almost certain to be part of the solution because it is to food what Saudi Arabia is to oil: the swing producer that can most easily and swiftly increase the world’s food supply.