Hi there, Asad Raza here.  Most people assume this election is already a done deal–this is simply not so.  Turnout will be determinative, especially during an election when many voters will be tempted to stay home, thinking the race is decided.  The party that does the better job of getting its supporters to the polls will win.

So, do some kind of civic service on U.S. Election Day this coming Tuesday. Even better, volunteer over the weekend as well.  One reason: if everyone in the U.S.A. voted, our political discourse would be very different.  No matter where you are, it is possible to do something to support the candidate of your choice.  Talk with undecided voters, help the infirm to get their polling location, encourage people who have to work and then stand in a line for four hours at the polls. If you are homebound, go to your preferred candidate’s website and download lists of people you can call and help.

Excitement about this election is running high.  Here’s an email a New York man named Conor Creaney sent to roust his acquaintances into action:

Esteemed Friend,

You know that the day will come when your doe-eyed offspring will gaze up at you and ask “Parent, what did YOU do the weekend before the 2008 election that could have changed the world?” Ponder for a moment how hard it will be to look the little one in the eye and say “I regrouted the tiles in the shower” or “I went to a really fascinating Maya Deren retrospective at Film Forum”. That will be the moment you wave goodbye to your moral authority, and the moment your child realizes that she is aboard a rudderless ship and has carte blanche to defy and mock you at will. Your future as a moral being is at stake here, and there is only one option (I call it an “option” but we both know that choice is an illusion here): COME TO PHILADELPHIA THIS WEEKEND AND VOLUNTEER FOR THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN.

We are going there. We can provide transport, accommodation (nothing fancy, but it will be free), and we will put you in the hands of Sidra Campbell, Obama’s South Philly Out-of State Volunteer Co-ordinator, a woman of formidable organizational skills. She will put you to work out of Obama’s office on S.15th and Christian.  Your energy and charisma will not be wasted.

PA is still in play electorally, McCain is pouring money and time into it.  Sarah Palin is there right now, searing her message into the minds of these goodhearted people.

If you can’t make it for the whole weekend, you come down on the bus for a day. 

So get in touch (conor.creaney at gmail), and let’s fix this.

Yours,

A Concerned Citizen

I think Mr. Creaney has the correct attitude.  Please consider joining him or someone like him.  Thank you, and have a nice day!

The conventional wisdom in presidential politics is that presidential candidates win their home states. In Arizona one would expect every corner to look like a jubilee celebration in honor of John McCain. It’s a hot election season, which means many street corners are festooned with red and blue campaign signs, lined up like colorful sheets drying in the Arizona sun. Surprisingly, though, McCain’s name is absent from most corner festivities.

Even more surprising, volunteers are scant at McCain’s Phoenix headquarters and other GOP offices throughout the state. The McCain campaign has a national website presence, but lacks a cadre of helpful and informed local volunteers — people who answer for their candidate when he’s away. Are these indicators that the McCain campaign is complacent in Arizona, or are Arizonans that blase about McCain’s candidacy? The campaign did not return phone calls, so it’s hard to know. In fact calls to Republican McCain offices around the state often go unanswered.

This is McCain’s backyard, so where are his supporters?

more from Huffington Post here.

From Slate:

Noreen Malone, Executive Assistant: Obama

David Sedaris framed the choice with this metaphor: “Can I interest you in the chicken?” … “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” I definitely want the chicken.

Farhad Manjoo, “Technology” Columnist: Obama

This is the third presidential election in which I’ll cast a ballot, but only the first time that I’ll be voting for someone: The last two times, I was voting against Bush. I’m choosing Obama for one main reason: He’s the smarter candidate. I don’t just mean he’s got smarter policies, though he does. I mean he seems to have the higher IQ. His books and speeches suggest deep intellectual curiosity—a calm, analytical, rational mind of the sort we haven’t seen in the White House in years.

I’ve long admired John McCain; I rooted for him in the 2000 primaries, and I might have picked him over Al Gore in the general that year. I also admired his stance against soft-money political donations and the Bush tax cuts. If that John McCain had been on the ballot this year, I might have thought harder about this vote. But over the last four years, that McCain has transmogrified into exactly the kind of divisive agent of intolerance he once decried, and now I’m terrified at the thought of him in charge.

More here.  [55 out of 57 votes to Obama, 1 vote for McCain.]

///
For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15
Naomi Shihab Nye

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

From You and Yours (CBOA Editions, 2005)

///

From Andrew Sullivan:

More here.  [And you can vote there for your favorite, too.]

From The Guardian:

Karl With, the German art critic who published a life of Marc Chagall in 1923, began his book with two definitions: “Chagall is Russian” and “Chagall is an eastern Jew (Ostjude)”. He went on, “One part of him is reserved . . . melancholic and eaten up inside by burning passion . . . The other side of him is sensual, worldly, sensory, baroque, and blooming. He is lithe as an animal, agile, given to tantrums like a child, soft and charming, amiably sly mixed with a peasantlike coarseness and the delight of a provincial in everything colourful, dazzling and moving.” Making allowances for the period language, it was a shrewd analysis – and although Chagall was to live for another 62 years (he died in 1985), it never ceased to be true. The paradoxes of Chagall’s personality only became clearer with time. He was an introvert who delighted in the world. He was a dreamer and a manipulator. He was instinctively selfish, yet lavishly kind with his eye.

Jackie Wullschlager shows us all this and more, in her beautifully produced book. She has talked to Chagall’s surviving friends, she has a sharp sense of what is gorgeously original in the paintings and also of what is tediously self-cannibalising, and she writes prose that registers intense feeling yet is coolly well organised. Furthermore, she has had the cooperation of Chagall’s estate, so has been able to draw on Chagall’s correspondence with his first wife Bella, who was the mainspring of his greatest work and a profoundly interesting spirit in her own right (her autobiography is wonderful). As had to be the case if Wullschlager was going to do her subject justice, her book tells the painter’s story while also giving a compelling account of modernism in general, and of the 20th century political turmoil that both fed and frustrated it.

More here.

From Science:

Coming from Sarah Palin, it sounded like the ultimate folly: U.S. taxpayer money funding a study of fruit flies in Paris, France. But scientists jumped to the defense of the work that the Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate derided as wasteful on 24 October during a speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The studies, actually carried out at a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratory near Montpellier, 750 kilometers south of Paris, may help protect California olive trees from a serious pest, scientists say. In a speech about her running mate John McCain’s policies on children with disabilities, Palin condemned so-called earmarks, congressional mandates to spend money on specific projects. “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good,” Palin said. “Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” In a video of the speech, somebody can be heard snickering in the audience.

To fight invasive insects, Hoelmer says it’s important to be able to study them over the long term in their native habitats–in the olive fruit fly’s case, the Mediterranean region and Africa. That would be impractical for U.S.-based researchers. EBCL’s predecessor opened in France a century ago to study the European corn borer, which had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The lab also serves as a base for expeditions to scout for insects’ natural enemies.

Hoelmer says that he believes he could convince anybody, including Palin, that his work is worthwhile. But as a government researcher, he can’t comment on political speeches. Zalom can. “This kind of stuff always drives me nuts,” he says. “It’s a total lack of understanding of the importance of research.”

More here.

Amy Serafin in The Smart Set:

If you were to go looking for evidence of France’s huge North African population, you’d find it in the grim public housing projects of the suburban cités, in the gritty peripheral neighborhoods of Paris, and near my home in the relatively privileged 5th arrondissement, where the Great Mosque draws enormous crowds on Fridays and during Ramadan. You would be hard pressed, however, to find many North Africans in the corridors of French business or political power, where they are close to invisible.

And yet, for the last year and a half, a woman of Moroccan-Algerian descent has become famous as one of the most influential and glamorous figures in France. Rachida Dati is the minister of justice, and until recently one of President Sarkozy’s closest confidants. She is a self-made success story who radiates chutzpah, for lack of a better word. She’s also single — and pregnant. As of this writing, the identity of the father is still a secret, and guessing it has become one of the top dinner-party games throughout Europe.

Dati was born in a small town in Burgundy in 1965, the second child of 12. Her father was a mason from Morocco, her mother a French-born Algerian. To please her Muslim parents, Dati wed at age 26, but regretted her decision and had the marriage annulled soon afterward. She studied business and obtained a master’s degree in law.

She has always demonstrated an uncanny talent for meeting the right people. In 2002 she contacted Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then interior minister, offering to advise him on immigration issues.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic:

I’ve only watched the 12-minute version of “Obsession,” the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or “Fire of the Torah,” but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.

Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama’s ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.

But I digress. It’s said of Ronn Torossian that he represents “right-wing” Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. “Right-wing” is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel’s tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens.

More here.  The movie can be seen on YouTube here.

(Via Andrew Sullivan:)

Cohen and Loury on bloggingheads:

Todd Palmer and Rob Pringle in The Huffinton Post:

We are far from the first people to comment on this subject — even within the Huffington Post — so we’ll keep it brief. But Palin’s mockery of “fruit fly research” during her October 24th speech on special-needs children was so misconceived, so offensive, so aggressively stupid, and so dangerous that we felt we had to comment.

Here’s the excerpt from the speech:

“Where does a lot of that earmark money end up, anyway? […] You’ve heard about, um, these — some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!”

It’s hard to know where to begin deconstructing this statement. This was a speech on autism, and Palin’s critics have pounced on the fact that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function — a discovery with clear implications for autism research.

Awkward! But this critique merely scrapes icing off the cake.

Fruit flies are more than just the occasional vehicles for research relevant to human disabilities. They are literally the foundation of modern genetics, the original model organism that has enabled us to discover so much of what we know about heredity, genome structure, congenital disorders, and (yes) evolution. So for Palin to state that “fruit fly research” has “little or nothing to do with the public good” is not just wrong — it’s mind-boggling.

What else does this blunder say about Palin and her candidacy? Many people have used it as just another opportunity to call her a dummy, since anyone who has stayed awake through even a portion of a high-school-level biology class knows what fruit flies are good for. But leave that aside for a second. Watch the clip. Listen to the tone of her voice as she sneers the words “fruit fly research.” Check out the disdain and incredulity on her face. How would science, basic or applied, fare under President Palin?

Andrew Sullivan in his excellent Atlantic blog:

10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won’t touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain’s plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama’s. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain’s knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran’s nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush’s first term and George W.’s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama’s fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

More here.

More here.  [Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.]

Dawn Teo in the Huffington Post:

John McCain and Sarah Palin are attempting to imbue Obama with the characteristics of a traitor by disassociating him from “real America” and associating him with those who are commonly accepted in our society as public enemies. They are using rhetoric that has traditionally been reserved for propaganda against traitors and foreign enemies.

In fact, the McCain-Palin campaign is systematically invoking the image of an accepted enemy for each currently living generation, systematically creating an “us versus them” framework:

Communist and Socialist — for the older generation, those who were reared with fears of Stalinism and Marxism and Maoism

Terrorist and Muslim — for the younger generation, those whose fears center around the religious extremism, guerrilla warfare, or suicide bombers

McCain, Palin, and their surrogates have chosen to use words that are associated with the accepted enemies of each generation and each targeted social group, and they have applied those words to Barack Obama.

The McCain-Palin campaign is using what social psychologists call images of the enemy to create a hostile imagination. With words like “dangerous” and “terrorist” and “socialist,” the McCain-Palin campaign relegates Obama to an “outgroup”; they imbue him with the characteristics of otherness (he is not a “real American”); and they characterize him as an accepted enemy of the state (he is a “socialist” who “pals around with terrorists”). This language makes it seem acceptable to regard Obama as less than ingroup members and as the enemy.

More here.  [Thanks to Caroline Wuschke.]

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better campaign.

When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?

The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning.

More here.

Readers,

We normally do 10-ish posts a day, but I think we’ll make an exception this week. After all, it is an exceptional week. I just spoke with my nephew, Asad, and he completely convinced me that all sophisticated political points of view of the oh-both-parties-are-not-so-different-after-all! type (think very sober people like Noam Chomsky, or even our own Justin Smith) are well and good, but it’s time to start celebrating the possibility of something that might, however little, actually change the face of America, and indeed, the state of the world! Give in to the excitement dammit, Asad says, and I agree.

I hope, Asad, that you will not mind if I reveal what you said to me privately earlier today: that for the first time in your life, you wept out of happiness while conducting a get-the-vote-out effort in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia yesterday.

Here is something Asad sent me as an indicator of the excitement about Obama overseas:

In different ways, Philip Roth’s Indignation and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach force us to confront difficulty. Both are short, and both contain surprises at the end. Both raise initial fears in the reader that he will be subjected to a politically correct tract; both subvert political correctness in the end.

The protagonist of Indignation, set in the beginning of the 1950s, is Marcus Messner, the only child of a kosher butcher in Newark. Marcus is a model son, a brilliant and industrious student who delights in helping his father in the shop. His father, who started working when he was ten years old, hopes that his son will do far better than he did. Unfortunately, Messner Senior undergoes a change. Two developments render him anxious and neurotically overprotective of Marcus: the establishment of a supermarket nearby that threatens to undermine his business and the onset of the Korean War. Having lost two nephews in World War II, he fears he will lose his son in the new conflict. To escape his father, Marcus transfers from a New Jersey college to one in Winesburg, Ohio (an artful reference to Sherwood Anderson that conjures a world of quiet desperation). Winesburg is more provincial than the East Coast, of course, but for Marcus, Middle America is a new world: at the price of some social discomfort, he finds that the move broadens his horizons.

Marcus spends what for him is a small fortune on preppy clothes, but finds when he arrives at Winesburg College (which is a Baptist establishment) that he fits in socially among neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. Impoverished, he works in a bar on weekends, where he hears mildly anti-Semitic jibes. He befriends a beautiful young student, Olivia, the daughter of well-to-do parents, with whom he has his first sexual experiences, but he discovers two things about her that undermine his confidence: first, despite her relatively privileged background, Olivia is mentally unstable and has made a suicide attempt by cutting her wrists (itself a warning that life is not automatically made easier by easy circumstances); second, she has a reputation for loose morals. His sexual experience, then, does not make much of a conquest.

More here.

Palin’s rise captivates us but nation needs a steady hand.

Editorial in Alaska’s own ADN:

Sen. McCain describes himself as a maverick, by which he seems to mean that he spent 25 years trying unsuccessfully to persuade his own party to follow his bipartisan, centrist lead. Sadly, maverick John McCain didn’t show up for the campaign. Instead we have candidate McCain, who embraces the extreme Republican orthodoxy he once resisted and cynically asks Americans to buy for another four years.

It is Sen. Obama who truly promises fundamental change in Washington. You need look no further than the guilt-by-association lies and sound-bite distortions of the degenerating McCain campaign to see how readily he embraces the divisive, fear-mongering tactics of Karl Rove. And while Sen. McCain points to the fragile success of the troop surge in stabilizing conditions in Iraq, it is also plain that he was fundamentally wrong about the more crucial early decisions. Contrary to his assurances, we were not greeted as liberators; it was not a short, easy war; and Americans — not Iraqi oil — have had to pay for it. It was Sen. Obama who more clearly saw the danger ahead.

The unqualified endorsement of Sen. Obama by a seasoned, respected soldier and diplomat like Gen. Colin Powell, a Republican icon, should reassure all Americans that the Democratic candidate will pass muster as commander in chief.

More here.  [Thanks to Tasnim Raza and Shiko.]