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Emotional Maintenance | Nov 05, 2004 11:08

As part of my new programme of post-election emotional maintenance, I got irie last night, put on Deja Voodoo nice and loud and cleaned up the kitchen. And I got to thinking about how an economic split between the red and blue states might measure up: that is, which bloc generates the most economic activity, or brings in the most foreign exchange?

Do the entertainment, IT, media and science-based industries in the Democrat-voting zones outweigh the rust-belt heavy industries and big agriculture in the rest of the nation? Any economists - amateur or otherwise - care to take on this one? One rule: money from taxpayers, by way of subsidy or military industry, doesn't count.

The deepening divide between red and blue states seems to be on other people's minds too. This new North American map seems to have become a meme in the last 24 hours. Ben Gracewood gets kudos for being first to send the link.

David Friar sent an update from NYC:

The mood throughout New York City over the past two days has been sombre - even the cab drivers aren't honking with their usual impatience. It's incredibly downbeat - no-one can quite believe the result, let alone the decisiveness of it.

Elizabeth Hansen emailed from California:

Thank you for noting in your blog today that while most of this country failed to exercise their brains yesterday, there were a few bright spots. More information: Here in San Diego, we elected a pro-choice woman as Mayor via a write-in ballot and voted down a proposition to allow a large white cross to remain on a prominent section of public land. In addition, my State Senator is now an openly-gay woman. Also, on the state level, we passed a $3billion bond for stem cell research and we re-elected US Senator Barbara Boxer, an outspoken, pro-choice Democrat. In other words, California is a sanctuary for progressive, reality-based thinkers. I myself intend to avoid red states for the next four years.

But Catherine, from an MSN.com address, had a different view:

Not a Destiny Church anything but a sincere attempt to return to the Biblical model and the Ten Commandments. Perhaps after all there is at least a hiccup in Karl Marx"s prediction, "As socialism grows religion will disappear."

Actually, the problem in this case seems to be that as a certain sort of religion grows, people's rights disappear. Erstwhile conservative Andrew Sullivan was anxious as hell yesterday:

I've been trying to think of what to say about what appears to be the enormous success the Republicans had in using gay couples' rights to gain critical votes in key states. In eight more states now, gay couples have no relationship rights at all. Their legal ability to visit a spouse in hospital, to pass on property, to have legal protections for their children has been gutted. If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers. I'm not surprised by this. When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses. But it is deeply, deeply dispiriting nonetheless. A lot of gay people are devastated this morning, and terrified. We have seen, and not for the first time, how using fear of a minority can be so effective a tool in building a political movement. The single most important issue for Republican voters, according to exit polls, was not the war on terror or Iraq or the economy. It was "moral values." Karl Rove understood the American psyche better than I did. By demonizing gay couples, the Republicans were able to bring in whole swathes of new anti-gay believers into their party. With new senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, two of the most anti-gay politicians in America, we can only brace ourselves for what is now coming.

DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, is quite a piece of work: during the campaign he said he supported a ban on homosexuals teaching in public schools - and added "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."

Sullivan, an Englishman, prescribes a new emphasis on federalism to avert culture-war, and he may well be right. Even so, there's still something a little creepy about law-abiding, tax-paying citizens losing basic rights when they cross state lines.

At which point, I should 'fess to a little geographic dissonance in yesterday's post. As a couple of readers have pointed out, the Pentagon isn't in Washington DC, but the state of Virginia, which did go to Bush. And David Cohen also noted that the regional split I quoted from the Washington Post's exit poll doesn't quite match the actual voting pattern (that is, Bush won more regions than it suggests). Stephen Day had another query on the poll:

I know it is only an exit poll, but the Washington Post says that Kerry won 54% of the female vote and 47% of the male vote. If we multiply these figures by the percentage of males and females that voted we get Kerry winning 50.8% of the popular vote and Bush winning 48.2% - roughly the opposite of the popular vote result as it is being called at present. But roughly the result that the major polls were calling before the election.

The same anomaly seems to exist for a number of other voting figure breakdowns.

So, either a significant number of people claimed to vote Kerry but actually voted Bush (A plausible scenario) or I need to go back and read some of those earlier articles on Diebold.

Ah yes. I've been trying to steer clear of all vote-stealing theories until there's actual proof of anything. But the electronic voting machines are still an accident waiting to happen (if Florida had been close enough to call for a recount, what exactly would a recount mean?) and there was a largely unreported rash of problems on election day. Black Box Voting has launched a Freedom of Information action with respect to electronic voting.

Computerworld's Sharon Machlis has a good story pointing out that we just don't know whether the electronic voting systems worked. From an IT point of view, it seems to me that the only sensible practice - in every election - is to have independent auditors dump everything off these boxes for potential forensic analysis, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

Joseph Cannon puts the electronic fraud argument, which revolves around discrepancies between exit polls and published totals. Other people are insisting that the final exit polls actually did wash up pretty close to reported votes. I have no opinion on this.

(But I do feel able to venture a view on Bulgegate. By any reasonable analysis of a multitude of still and moving images, the bulge under Bush's suit in the debates was not "bad tailoring" as the candidate and his people claimed. I don't know whether it was a transceiver, a defibrillator or a curiously-positioned iPod, but there was something there and no one seemed to want to ask about it, which I can't help but find annoying.)

Anton Pichler asked whether, amid all the talk about the mandate implicit in Bush having won more votes than any previous president, Kerry also exceeded the popular vote for any previous president in coming second. Any ideas?

Simon Bird said: "As a further point to your comment on Brash taking the Bush re-election as a vote for the centre(!?)-right, it was interesting, although completely logical, to see that The Economist (surely one of the better publications for centre-right journalism) actually endorsed Kerry."

Meanwhile, whoops-a-daisy, how about that deficit then? Looks like Congress's first job will be to raise the federal government's debt ceiling by $690 billion to $8.074 trillion to get the government through to next September, when the 2005 budget year ends.

And, finally, I'm pleased to say that we now have Bill Pearson's 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist posted in Great New Zealand Argument.

As far as I know it's been out of print since the mid-70s, but now it's online for all. You'll note that we have page turns every 3000 words - it was the easiest way to handle the 16,500-word length. We haven't quite nailed footnotes yet, so all of them appear, a little incongruously, at the bottom of every page. (Also, note the new "Archive" feature at the top right of all the blog pages. Thanks, CactusLab.) Thanks again to Karajoz Coffee Company for making this possible.

Please feel free to tell friends about Fretful Sleepers, link to it, etc. I'm aiming for that top Google ranking inside a week …

PS: Extremely funny post on potential Holmes successors on DogBitingMen. Although I must point out that me saying "you might be seeing a bit of me in the media over the next week or two" does not indicate anything other than that the going-to-the-media part of The Public Address Strategy has begun.

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Get yer evangelicals out | Nov 04, 2004 11:22

Clearly, Karl Rove got his four million evangelical Christians. That is the number reckoned to have stayed away from the polls in 2000, and, by coincidence, almost exactly Bush's margin in the popular vote in 2004. What seems to have surprised everyone - except, perhaps, Rove - is that final exit polling suggests that "moral values" was the key issue in voting decisions for more people than any other, terrorism included.

The ascent of gay marriage to the status of a constitutional issue - and the consequent flurry of ballot initiatives to ban it in key states - has proven to be hugely influential. The initiatives, and the controversy over stem cell research, helped get out a pivotal vote for Bush. The exit polls say that that 78% of people for whom "moral values" were a primary motivator, voted Bush - that's 18 million votes. A lot of those folks queueing for the polls in Ohio, who the Democrats assumed were their people, appear to have been evangelicals.

The Washington Post has a handy graphic of the exit poll profiles (and despite the misleading early numbers, they seem to have wound up fairly accurate) and a roundup of commentary on what they signify.

The numbers are fascinating. They say that on raw votes, Kerry won the Northeast, Midwest and West - losing a majority only in the populous South, where Bush swept the board. Kerry also had more than half the votes of women, all ethnic minorities (including blacks by 9 to 1), independents, self-described moderates, people who didn't vote last time, young people and the middle-aged. He took a majority of voters in all income brackets up to $50,000 per annum. He won Catholics, Jews (by 4 to 1) and non-believers, while Bush took 56% of Protestants and 76% of the evangelical Christians who made up nearly a quarter of those who voted. Kerry won a majority of those who did not vote last time, and picked up slightly more 2000 Bush voters than Bush won over 2000 Gore voters.

Kerry won huge majorities among those whose primary concern was the economy, health care, education or Iraq - while Bush got a bare majority of those who cared most about taxes, and more than three quarters of those most concerned about terrorism and those "moral values".

Ironically, New York City and Washington DC, the two cities which actually experienced the terrorist attacks, went resoundingly for Kerry, along with Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. And the prairie states that no terrorist is ever going to bother with went Bush.

Perhaps none of this should have been a surprise. The Pew Surveys noted this year that 55% of Americans still consider engaging in homosexual behaviour to be a "sin", and 86% of evangelicals say they are regularly told by their churches that homosexuality should not be accepted. Pew also found in 2002 that the US has a degree of religious adherence found elsewhere only in failed states, third-world countries and predominantly Muslim nations. In this sense, they are not like the rest of us in the modern West.

Yes, the modern West still fuels itself so much on American brilliance; its science and technology, its prodigious creative work. But to a great extent, American brilliance didn't vote Bush. The places you want to visit, the dreaming spires - they didn't vote Bush.

So what happens next? Well, there's now an explicit mandate to intensify the war on American science. Reality will go even further out of fashion, and the move to force the teaching of creationism in public schools (detailed in a recent Wired magazine cover story, The Crusade Against Evolution) will undoubtedly accelerate.

Even on the rosiest estimates, it seems highly unlikely that the White House will be able to turn around its fiscal position in the roughly three years' patience that commentators are saying the international investment community will extend - not without raising taxes or making huge cuts to domestic spending. On the other hand, resource issues might provide a practical curb on foreign adventurism (it was interesting that the full translation of Bin Laden's pre-election video statement included a promise to financially bankrupt America). I wouldn't be surprised to see a cut-and-run from Iraq next year.

That looks a positively optimistic scenario compared to Sidney Blumenthal's morning-after forecast:

The new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican Party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. And there are no checks and balances. The terminal illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the Supreme Court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law established since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed.

On the other hand it remains possible that Bush will actually act on his word, steer a moderate course and seek to unify the nation. But he was effectively on notice from the relgious right this time - can he afford to ignore those voters? I guess we'll see. It was perhaps understandable that Don Brash should greet the result as an encouraging centre-right vote on Morning Report today - even though the American people have voted for the kind of lunatic fiscal policy that ought to be anathema to the centre-right. But it wasn't a National Party vote that delivered Bush his second term. It was a Destiny Church vote.

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Coverage | Nov 03, 2004 09:38

I was scrambling to finish yesterday's post when it was suggested that I jump in a taxi and get myself down to the Hilton for Paul Holmes' press conference. Only Holmes could presume to upstage the most important US Presidential election in a decade …

So I've been up since 5.45am writing a last-minute replacement for my Wide Area News column in The Listener, on the news that Holmes, having declined to accept a one-year contract with TVNZ, will be going to Prime TV on a contract worth $3 million over three years. Naturally, I don't have much to add to what I've just written, so you'll have to wait until the weekend for my thoughts on that.

The Holmes news did, of course, make top fodder for a nice little lunch at Vivace, where my elders Hamish Keith and John Daly-Peoples were also in attendance. Hamish began work this week on What's Wrong With This Picture?, a six-part documentary on the history of art in New Zealand which promises to be prodigious and - to hear Hamish talk - provocative. We'll have to wait until 2006 to see it, but I'm fascinated already.

Our hosts were the people from Telecom Directories, who were celebrating the selection of this year's crop of works to grace the country's 18 regional phone books. The 18 successful artists win $3500 each, and all the 1500-odd entries now go into a charity auction for the benefit of Women's Refuge. The gallery and auction details are here.

What with one thing and another, I've been too busy to say what a great afternoon our event on Sunday, The Great Blend, was. Most of our experiments - the venue, the time of day, the mix of talk, music and lawn bowls - came off nicely, and a couple of hundred folks all seemed very happy. We'll be doing one of these every quarter, and I'm already thinking about the next one. We ran over time a little, which meant that quite a few people had slipped away by the time Ladi Six played, but for those of us who were there, with the late, amber sun reaching into the hall, it was really a beautiful thing. (I must say it was nice having both her and the sprawling Lil Chief clan around as people, and not just as performers.)

I was surprised and impressed by how much people liked the Meet the Bloggers panel, and I'm particularly pleased that we could do something nice for the Public Address punters. Thanks for coming, folks: we'll certainly have you back next time. I'll get around to posting my introductory speech soon, but for the moment there's a story in the Herald about it (no, Che and Jolisa weren't able to join us as suggested in the story - a pesky subbing error rather than a reporting one, I understand). Actually, you might be seeing a bit of me in the media over the next week or two …

And you can hear Jolisa reporting the election atmosphere live from New Haven at 1.30pm today on my 95bFM Wire show. After that, I'm heading home to stake a place on the couch and anxiously watch American democracy's big day on TV. Speaking of which, Sky TV got in touch with an updated schedule of coverage on its news channels - all times are local:

SKY News Australia New Zealand
1pm: ABC Network Coverage of the race for the US presidency. Presented by Peter Jennings.
2pm: NZ Parliamentary Question Time: Live from Wellington.
3pm - 7pm: Non-stop Coverage of the final chapter in the race for the US presidency, from the close of voting to the declaration of the winner, led by Peter Jennings and the ABC network, with special comments by Bruce Wolpe.

BBC World
12.45 - 7pm: David Dimbleby in Washington DC, presenting live coverage of the US elections as the polls close across the country, including reports from Massachusetts, Texas and the key swing states of Florida and Ohio.
7pm - 1.30 am (Nov 4th): BBC News Special
Including live coverage of reaction to the outcome of the US Presidential election.
1.30am - 2am (Nov 4th): US Presidential Election Interactive Special Your chance to have your say on the election result, and put a question or comment to studio guests. Presented by Jon Sopel in Washington.

CNN
11am-1pm: US Election 2004 Special: A two-hour election results preview special anchored from Atlanta by CNN International's Richard Quest and Jonathan Mann, featuring reports from Bush and Kerry HQs
1pm- 4.30am (Nov 4th): 'US Election 2004' Live'
As the first polls close, Wolf Blitzer will be joined by Larry King, Aaron Brown and the network's senior analysts Bill Schneider and Jeff Greenfield who will be presenting real-time vote information, exit polls and analysis of key state races across the country in front of the screen video wall in Times Square.

Oh, and we'll finally have changes bedded in to let us publish Bill Pearson's essay 'Fretful Sleepers' on Friday, to illuminate your weekend. Look forward to it.

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