Parents

[prog]

"So whaddaya think of your buddy Obama now?" asks dad.

He's clearly implying that Obama has recently done something horrible, but since I don't hate myself enough to keep up on myrightwingdad.net, I don't have any guesses what the new hotness is in that arena. So I say, "I don't know, what do I think of my buddy Obama now?"

"Heh heh heh", says dad, but mom says, "Hey, let's not talk about politics on vacation." And this is interesting because usually I'm the one to make that suggestion.

They're visiting on Sunday for a time period somewhat longer than the three-hour maximum exposure that classicaljunkie has identified, through repeated observation, as my personal limit. Whee. We'll see how it goes.

Comments

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's the whole lipstick on a pig comment that everyone's freaking out over? Who knows.

[prog.livejournal.com]

That was actually my first guess but I suppose I was being hopeful that it's gone away already.

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

Oh ha ha no. They're calling it 'Lipstickgate' in the latest drive to add -gate to a descriptor for every event (or, more commonly, nonevent) that occurs with either of the candidates, their hangers-on, families, pets, etc etc ad nauseum.

[mangosteen]

Fortunately, the "gotcha/gaffe politics" meme came up much earlier in the campaign, so at least there's a tool at the ready with which to say "People, can we cut out the fart jokes, just this once?"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing he was mostly referring to Obama being a little down in the polls after the Republican convention bounce. You're supposed to be depressed and panicking about that; all the cool kids are doing it.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Good article out there somewhere in your pseudo-news media pointing out that NATIONAL polls are irrelevant to this race, which will be decided in a relatively small number of key states.

Mostly what this election is revealing is how completely broken the American media machine is, letting itself be blatantly manipulated by carefully manufactured "outrage" over innocent remarks, instead of reporting it like this:

John McCain's campaign continued to avoid any substantive discussion of economic policy, immigration policy, foreign policy, trade policy or indeed any kind of policy whatsoever, instead choosing to focus primarily on a remark that Barak Obama made about his policy, bizarrely pretending to believe that Obama intended it to be about his running, Sarah Pallin. Psychiatric specialists we have discussed this with are at a loss to understand McCain's pretence. It isn't clear if the senator really is that clued out, or if he thinks we in the media are so stupid that we will be distracted from the important policy issues that this election revolves around by such manipulative behaviour.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, though to be fair the bounce does seem to be manifesting in state polls to some degree, mostly states that had been marginally for McCain or on the fence turning much more solid for him. Some fraction of that might be irreversible, not so much a new coup for McCain as hidden support now manifesting itself as a result of religious-right enthusiasm over Palin, and the feeling that McCain could actually win.

But it looks like Obama still has the Kerry states plus Iowa (some say he has trouble in Michigan but he can probably hold it; the main threat there is outright vote suppression techniques).

Given that, Obama only needs 6 more electoral votes from somewhere, and several close states to get them from, in some of which he leads in some post-RNC polls. The main question is whether McCain can deny him that. Intrade has it at 50/50 but I suspect Obama is actually undervalued now.

Remember, too, to write a lazy insta-story on polls, national trackers are generally all you have to go on because Gallup and Rasmussen release them every day, whereas to get an electoral picture you might have to rely on some weeks-old data.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and you can probably see why Obama's strategists say the daily trackers are the worst thing that ever happened to polling.

In the primary season they won by keeping the focus strictly on delegate count, rather than who was winning state races and seemed to have "momentum" in the media; there was a long period when the papers kept asking "why can't he close the deal?" when by any reasonable metric he had. I assume the campaign can similarly adapt strategy to conditions now.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Daily trackers are just a symptom of a political discourse that... well, isn't a discourse at all.

There are three types of political story, as I see it:

1) "Horse race" stories in which the journalist is nothing but a race-track caller. In the case of "reporting" on national polls the caller is looking at the track through a fun-house mirror.

2) "Party A Tells the Following Lies... Party B Responds With Lies of Their Own." These are essentially celebrity stories, telling us what the Skank-of-the-Moment is wearing (or not). They aren't totally irrelevant because the lies a person tells will reveal a little bit about them, but at this stage we can all pretty much predict what lies any given person or party is going to tell, so it is depressing that the bulk of the nominal political news coverage is stories of this type.

3) "Party A Announces/Discusses/Clarifies Policy X". These are stories on what a person or party is actually planning to do if elected, either in broad philosophical terms or more specifically. If the serious media were responsible these would be the only stories they would report, leaving the rest to the tabloids where they belong.

Unfortunately, when the topic changes to politics almost every news outlet in America suddenly becomes The National Enquirer. Compare this to business news in the U.S. and you'll see just what a huge free ride the political class and the private organizations known as political parties are getting.