Is this the end of the Reagan/Rove right?

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crackerjack

Well-known member
and then there's Palin's palling around with far-right secessionists of teh AIP, a group with plenty of connections to southern confederates.

the Dems have rather more ammo on this than the Reps - the only thing in the locker that can really hurt Obama is Rev Wright
 
D

droid

Guest
Just finished reading 'The Hidden Persuaders", Packard's famous expose of the PR and advertising industry form the 50s - just when psychological techniques were being used to manipulate consumers. Though obviously outdated, theres some very relevant insights in the chapter on politics...

"A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government." —Kenneth Boulding, University of Michigan.

...Not only do the American people, the depth probers concluded, want political leaders with personality, but in the Presidency they want a very definite kind of personality. Eugene Burdick, teacher of political theory at the University of California, made a study of the qualities of the perfect President while serving as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. (This is the same Eugene Burdick who in 1956 brought out a best-selling novel The Ninth Wave on the irrational trends in politics.) Dr. Burdick found that the perfect President doesn't arise out of great issues but becomes "great" in our minds because of his personality. He becomes "great" to the degree that he becomes a "father image" in our minds. Burdick relates: "Recent polls and psychological studies reveal the extent to which the President has now become what psychologists call a 'father image' in the average American home." Burdick summed up (in This Week) a composite picture of the perfect President: "He is a man who has great warmth, inspires confidence rather than admiration, and is not so proper that he is unbelievable. He must have 'done things' in another field than politics, and he must have a genuine sense of humor. His stand on individual political issues is relatively unimportant. . . ." After filling in the portrait, Burdick adds: "Clearly there are some aspects of this portrait that are disturbing.

1. Is it, for example, ominous, that issues are less important than personality?
2. Is it healthy in a democracy that citizens desire a leader who will protect them?
3. Are Americans in their dislike for politicians looking for a heroic leader of the totalitarian type?"

http://www.ditext.com/packard/17.html
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john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
droid said:
Just finished reading 'The Hidden Persuaders", Packard's famous expose of the PR and advertising industry form the 50s - just when psychological techniques were being used to manipulate consumers. Though obviously outdated, theres some very relevant insights in the chapter on politics...
Click to expand...

One of my favourite books!

The Waste Makers is also good, on the roots of planned obsolescence, iirc...
 
D

droid

Guest
Yeah - I got a free copy of the Penguin '61 edition with the classy cover.

651.jpg


Its fascinatingly frank - and of crucial interest to those interested in the engineering of consent in all areas of society.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Common sense, IMO, and probably worse news for McCain and the disfunctional Reps (Palin obviously has the 'ordinary joe' appeal that Bush plays to, but little else) than the self-confident and contained, if perhaps a little too contained, Obama...
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
One British bookie (won't mention the name, because they make a habit of these PR stunts) have said they're paying out on Obama win bets.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Got some good poli sci stuff on the elections...

Larry Bartels at the CSDP Election blog:

Historically (since 1948), about 75-80% of the margin in a typical October poll has lasted until Election Day. If that holds true this year, the current best forecast of the popular vote based on the polls is that Sen. Obama will win by about 6 points.

Historically, best guesses of this sort have been off by an average of about 5 points....

Statistical theory suggests that if Sen. Obama is ahead by 6 plus or minus 4, his current chance of winning (the popular vote) is a little over 90%. This calculation ignores (at least) three important factors. First, there is a fairly strong tendency for late shifts in preferences to favor the incumbent party when the economy is strong and the out-party when the economy is weak; that makes Sen. Obama's position stronger than it looks in current polls. Second, there is more uncertainty than usual this year about who will actually turn out to vote, suggesting that the polls may be more wrong than usual; however, given the pattern of new registrations and the apparent strength of the two campaigns' voter mobilization efforts, Sen. Obama seems more likely to benefit than to lose support from unexpected turnout. Third, the possibility that undecided white voters may, in the end, be unable to bring themselves to vote for Sen. Obama on racial grounds makes his position somewhat more precarious than it would otherwise be. It is very difficult to estimate the importance of the racial factor (that is, the extent to which racial antipathy is not already reflected in current polls), but my guess is that this is less important than the other two factors, both of which seem likely to work in Sen. Obama's favor.​
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Economic crisis favours the incumbent?

Josep Colomer:

Let us just consider the following observations: the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, was judged to be politically sunk just a few weeks ago, when survey polls showed the labour party 20 percentage points behind the opposition; however, as the stock markets have fallen in recent weeks, Brown has risen in the polls up to the point to contemplate a full recovery in electoral expectations. Similarly, while banks and markets fall down, Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and Berlusconi in Italy get increasing support in public opinion in front to divided and ineffective oppositions. Also Zapatero, for one, won the election in Spain a few months ago by reaching not to talk very much about the impending economic recession, but now that it is dramatically visible the opposition is neither obtaining much benefit.

All this suggests that the relation between economic performance and governments’ accountability can be changing in an important way. Traditional political science models of ‘economic voting’ assumed that voters rewarded or punished the incumbent rulers for the country’s economic performance during the most recent period. According to observations across a wide range of countries, voters would evaluate incumbent rulers in ‘retrospect’ to make them accountable for the economy because they believed that government’s actions effectively impinged on issues such as employment, economic growth and inflation. However, greater economic interdependence may be changing voters’ perceptions. Specifically, the international scope of the current crisis may be triggering a turn in favor of incumbent governments as a consequence of both a sense of government’s impotence and a reaction to seek refuge into the hands of the sitting rulers in times of emergency –in a similar way as it tends to happen with natural disasters, terrorist attacks or external aggressions.

This hypothesis has been tested with more than 400 state-wide elections in 75 democratic countries since 1975 in a recent article by Timothy Hellwig (University of Houston) and David Samuels (University of Minnesota). The authors basically regress the change in percentage of votes received by the incumbent head of government’s party regarding the previous election on the annual percentage change in real per capita GDP and the degree of internationalization of the country’s economy in terms of trade and capital flows. The author’s findings strongly support the argument that economic internationalization reduces voters’ propensity to connect domestic economic performance and incumbent merits. In their words, “voters residing in more closed economies are likely to sanction national leaders for past performance outcomes, but voters in open economies are relatively less likely to attribute reward or blame to domestic politicians for economic performance”.​

Henry Farrell says:

This is an interesting argument - and can perhaps be reconciled with McCain’s recent poor performance in the opinion polls. First, even if the US is a relatively open economy, it is still the most important economy in the world, and hence US voters might reasonably or unreasonably hold the US government more accountable than, say, Danish voters would hold the Danish government accountable. I haven’t read the piece that Colomer refers to but it would be interesting to see if the model had a better fit with a US dummy variable. Second, this may just be noise - as Republicans are conceding, the McCain campaign seems to have had particular difficulties with economic issues that, perhaps, a different presidential candidate with more experience would not have had.​
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
Here's two conservatives who hope so:

If you want to know why Obama appears to be ahead in this once-solidly Republican state, this reader will clue you in:

"They are killing me. I am a registered Republican. I live in Virginia. But I am clearly not a "Virginia Republican". This ticket and loathesome campaign is a disaster - I haven't left the Republican Party so much as it has left me, at least here in the Commonwealth. The party gladly allowed Rove/GWB to cultivate a certain brand of politics to win and hold the White House. And now that the bill has come due, so few wish to face the music. And in the process - and his quest for office - John McCain has embraced that which he professed to repudiate.

Ignorant Christian Fascism is not a recipe for success, it's Saudi Arabia under a different prophet. Count me out. Despite differing with the Democratic platform on a great number of policies, I will gladly vote for the Obama ticket because at a minimum it promises adults at the helm, a rational approach to policymaking, the return of science over theocracy, the restoration of the primacy of the rule of law, and the creative destruction of that assemblage once known as the GOP."

That's where I'm coming from too. They deserve obliteration. For the sake of the country and the sake of conservatism.
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http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
yet another bail-out?

General Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, is preparing for a live TV interview tomorrow amid intense speculation that he is ready to endorse Barack Obama’s campaign.

Aides from John McCain’s camp are bracing themselves for another damaging blow, with one being quoted yesterday as suggesting that such an announcement from General Powell would be “personally embarrassing” for the Republican nominee – with whom the General has been friends for 25 years – and would “create momentum against us”.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4965036.ece
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Vimothy, what do you make of all this turmoil? As far as I know you've never stated any allegiance to the American republican party, but as someone who seems to have a strong conservative point-of-view, I wonder what you think of the failed Bush policies (e.g. deregulation, tax cuts, highly aggressive foreign policy) that most Americans now believe are the road to ruin.

Not trying to be provocative, I'm seriously interested in your take on this...

I remember you (I think it was you) linked to an article quite a while ago that I thought was excellent about income inequality and how it was corroding the credibility of/support for conservative ideology in the U.S.

If you agree with the points in the article what do you think the GOP can do to recover from the credit crisis politically (not just economically)?
 
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