Eric The Blue

Orwell

I have been following the advice of George Packer, who in the closing days of the campaign recommended the essays of George Orwell as an antidote for all the lazy empty (but inflated) journalistic chatter that goes by the name Political Discourse.  Packer, however, may have a vested interest in the therapy he prescribes, as he is the editor of what look like two handsome new volumes of Orwell's collected essays.  Wish I had the time for all that.  I've been taking his advice in miniature, meaning I have pulled from the shelf Eight Modern Essayists, edited by William Smart, and read the Orwell section, which is made of "Shooting an Elephant," "Marrakech," "The Art of Donald McGill," "Politics and the English Language" (of course), and "Why I Write."

The best known of these, "Politics and the English Language," includes near its conclusion six rules for writers.  It is impossible therefore to read Orwell's essays without trying to make his sentences conform more perfectly to his own rules.  In "Shooting an Elephant," for example, one reads: "As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him."  In honor of Orwell's third rule--"If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out"--I propose the following: "As soon as I saw the elephant, I knew that I ought not to shoot him."  On the same principle writers should avoid such expressions as "fairly unique" and "completely destroyed."

As long as we're talking about it maybe the third rule should have been, "If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out."

I know you are wondering about the identities of the seven other "modern essayists."  They are Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, Lewis Thomas, James Baldwin, Edward Hoagland, Joan Didion, and Alice Walker.  The book is clearly intended to be used in a college composition course, and one consequence is that Smart has included, where possible, essays in which the author takes up his or her own thoughts on writing.  Thus we have two essays with the same title, the one I like better, by Joan Didion, commencing:

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell.  One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words:  Why I Write.  There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: 

I

I

I

Orwell's most memorable essay, of the ones I know, is here.

The other Frost

In a post last spring I wrote about "the other Frost"--Randall Jarrell's phrase for the author of great and terrifying poems on disintegration and despair, as opposed to the dispenser of homespun country wisdom (good fences make good neighbors!) who has it seems won the title Most Beloved Poet.  Now I see that in The New York Review of December 4 Christopher Benfey begins an article (subscription required) on Frost with an anecdote drawn from the poet's 85th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1959.  Lionel Trilling had been engaged as a speaker, and he took dead aim at the Frost Jarrell could not kill:

Trilling claimed that the Frost he admired expressed "the terrible actualities of life," and was different from "the Frost who reassures us by his affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling."  According to Trilling, the sunbathers looking out to sea in Frost's apparently anodyne "Neither Out Far Nor in Deep"--

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

--were in fact confronting the empty immensity of the universe.

That says what I was trying to say, though "the terrible actualities of life" and "the empty immensity of the universe" are no match for the poems themselves.  Here, then, and here, are a couple more of my favorites.  I know them by heart, which gives me something to mutter to myself while mowing the lawn. 

Trilling, in Benfey's account, left the party early, afraid he might have caused some hard feelings.  But he soon received a reassuring letter in which Frost, implicitly acknowledging the chasm between his public persona and the poet known to Trilling, said that he (Frost) "should like nothing better than to do a thing like that myself--to depart from the Rotarian norm in a Rotarian situation."

 

The Monty Hall problem

My wife, Amanda, came home from her course in "Discrete Mathematics" the other night eager to talk about a problem the professor had discussed in class.  Turns out I had already posted on the very same problem, here.  But in honor of her interest let's elaborate.

The problem concerns a television game show, popular in my youth, called "Let's Make a Deal." In one popular game, the host, Monty Hall, would show a contestant three doors.  You win the prize behind the door you choose.  There's always a goat behind two of the doors, but behind the third there'd be a sports car, something like that.  After the contestant chose a door, Monty would direct that one of the unchosen doors be opened. Invariably a goat was revealed--Monty knew where the car was, and this was a way of building up the suspense.  Here's the interesting part: Monty would also allow the contestant to switch doors.  In other words, once it was known that a certain unchosen door held a goat, you could accept an offer to trade your first choice for the remaining unopened door.

Should you switch?  Does it matter?

Despite what almost everyone thinks, it matters a lot.  You double your chances of winning the sports car by accepting Monty's offer to switch.  Let's see if I can persuade skeptics.  Suppose the car is behind door 1 and you choose a door at random.  If you choose door 1, Monty opens, say, door 2, revealing a goat.  You then accept the offer to switch to door 3 and win--a goat.  If however you choose door 2, Monty opens door 3, revealing a goat.  You accept the offer to switch to door 1 and win--a car.  In the third scenario, you choose door 3, Monty shows the goat behind door 2, you switch to door 1 and win--the car, again.

At the start of the game, your chance of winning is 1/3. By switching doors in the middle of the game, the probability of winning rises to 2/3--you lose if you began with the winning door (1/3 probability), but win if you began with a goat (2/3 probability).

If you don't believe me, you can model the game with playing cards and tally the result.  Take, say, a joker (sports car) and the black twos (goats).  Shuffle, then give "the house" two cards and yourself one (the first choice).  Have "the house" discard a two--there will be at least one--and then trade your card for the house card.  Repeat many times.  See if you can't satisfy yourself that switching cards, or doors, is the best strategy. 

Why do most people have a really hard time accepting the solution to this problem?  I think in most cases it's because they feel intuitively that there is no reason to suppose the car is more likely to be behind one door than another--a supposition that is true at the start of the game only.  Since Monty has determined to reveal only goats before moving to the last stage of the game, there is a nonrandom reason that the two remaining doors are this one (the one the contestant chose) and that one (the one Monty chose).

If this kind of stuff interests you, check out the Wikipedia article on "the Monty Hall problem."  Turns out Amanda's math professor wrote it (at least in part)!  Here's his website.  

Bush honors our traditions

In my last post I alluded to a few of the essays collected in The Bit Between My Teeth.  To get the details right, I had to pull from the shelf my old paperback edition--$2.85 from the Noonday Press--with the yellowing, brittle pages.  Before replacing it, I skimmed through the table of contents and soon found myself reading Wilson's review of George Kennan's Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin.  In his review Wilson quotes in full the following passage from the first chapter, called "Conflict of the Two Worlds":

There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy.  It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda.  It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else.  Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil.  Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.  The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality.  If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged.  If we win, then everything will be possible; all problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.

It's a mistake to think that the Bush follies are of a fresh new variety.  His administration has only honored this stupid tradition identified by Kennan.  It's bedeviled our foreign policy now for a long time.

Massive category

I'm introducing a new category called "loose language" in which I will complain about careless usage and assorted other instances of mind-numbing abuses of our native tongue that I come across while prosecuting the daily routine.  I was inspired by the current cloying ubiquity, in Minnesota journalism, of the adjective "massive," usually in connection with the recount of ballots in our US Senate race.  The effort is massive.

While I was typing that paragraph, I heard someone being interviewed on NPR say that the United States is a "massive borrowing nation."

Now, "massive" is connected to "mass," so I think it is suspect when applied to incorporeal concepts such as the effort required to hand count 2,900,000 ballots.  But, even when applied to things with mass, the word seems to have become nothing more than a hyperventilating synonym for "big" or "lots."  The United States is a big country that borrows lots of money.

Edmund Wilson, in The Bit Between My Teeth, devotes three essays--"Words of Ill Omen," "A Postscript to Fowler: Current Cliches and Solecisms," and "More Notes on Current Cliches"--to my new category.  He discusses "massive" in all three, and speculates on the role that the doctrine of "massive retaliation" enunciated by John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, may have played in the teeming frequency of this word--which, he further notes, occurs four times in David Copperfield and three times (twice in one paragraph) in a contemporaneous short essay by Lionel Trilling.  (The Bit Between My Teeth is a "literary chronicle" of the period 1950-1965.)  Well, the beat goes on, and, whatever the original cause, I attribute the massive overuse of "massive" to the tendency toward puffery--the desire to be noticed and the accompanying need to exaggerate.  It's the same instinct that leads local news anchors and others to resort, for example, to "totally destroyed."  Formerly, "destroyed" meant "destroyed," but now apparently it means "partially destroyed," thereby requiring "totally destroyed" when the thing is, like, really totally wrecked. 

Words through loose use lose their edge.  When the trend turns massive, meaning is altogether lost.

By the way, George Packer has a nice compilation of some words that worked overtime during the past campaign season.  And speaking of Packer, check out this exercise in expert vituperation.  The subject is deserving.

Youth is wasted on the young

When I started college, I thought I would major in a social science subject and enter a "helping profession."  But of course I had to take freshman English--"Literature and Composition" they called it--and this class, widely regarded as required drudgery, turned out to be my favorite.  It was aptly named, for we read literature and composed short essays about our readings, which included Hamlet, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, and A Streetcar Named Desire.  When we turned in our essays, we had to make an appointment to meet with the professor, who at the interview read aloud the paper and graded it in the student's presence.  This had the effect of concentrating my efforts, such was my fear of suffering humiliation in any of the sessions.  I was enrolled simultaneously in "Introduction to Sociology," which, in comparison to the subject matter of freshman English, seemed unrelievedly dull, the textbook and lectures an indigestible morass of jargon. 

My devotion to this new mistress was thoroughgoing.  I signed up for more literature courses, as well as other offerings in the humanities, but, excepting the "distribution requirements" for the liberal arts, eschewed not only the social sciences but also math, physics, chemistry, and biology.  My view was that these were "soulless" and "material" subjects not worthy of the attention of seekers after truth and beauty.  Also, the science classes were filled with "pre-meds" whose fanatical pursuit of high grades was inimical to my ideals.  Yes, I too was an idiot while young.

I have come to feel a bit like Henry Adams, whose autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, is largely organized around the idea that his classical education had not prepared him for citizenship in an increasingly technological world.  The title therefore refers to the self-education he undertook as an adult.  My own efforts along the same line have turned me into a science enthusiast of the kind that working scientists probably regard with a mixture of amusement and derision.  I think it is possible that science might explain everything, including human consciousness.  As human thought has advanced, stories involving such things as the gods and their chariots, and God and his garden, have had to make way for the real--that is, the scientific--explanation of things.  I see no reason to doubt that this trend will continue, and wish I had entered adulthood in a better position to understand what seem to me the most exciting developments of our time.  It's not as if the rate of technological change has slowed down since Henry Adams thought his Latin and his Greek had left him somewhat behind the curve.

The local and the national

I've been spending happy time with these maps of the presidential election outcome, courtesy of The New York Times.  Though it will not be reported on CNN, it pleases me to know that Barack Obama carried Watonwan County, in south central Minnesota, by 2562-2526.  My mother grew up on a farm in that rural county of Scandinavians and Germans.  The local culture is sufficiently conservative for both dancing and investing in the stock market to be regarded as markers of moral turpitude.  For my relatives, the country Lutheran church is the center of social life, and I can tell you that, when there is a funeral, the church ladies are in competition with each other to contribute the best dishes to the post-burial luncheon.  My grandpa used the word "nigger" without a trace of rancor.  I'm reasonably sure he would have been surprised to learn it was a slur.  He didn't know anyone who called them anything else.

Grandpa's dead, and I haven't been in Watonwan County lately, but last time I was I noticed brown faces on the streets of St. James, the county seat, about nine miles south of grandpa's farm.  I'm guessing Obama owes his 36-vote local margin to these Mexican immigrants who may first have come to the county to join a relative or acquaintance who landed there after following the harvest north.  If the only growing part of the local population is Democrat-favoring Hispanics, that would be one of the few "trendy" things about Watonwan County.  Four years ago, in New Mexico, Hispanics were 32 percent of the electorate, and they gave 56 percent of their votes to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, who nevertheless lost the state to George W. Bush by one percentage point.  This year in New Mexico Hispanics were 41 percent of the electorate and they gave 69 percent of their votes to Barack Obama, who carried the state by 15 points.  The story is similar in other growing and formerly red states:  Nevada (Obama won it by 12 after Kerry lost it by 3), Colorado (Obama won it by 8 after Kerry lost it by 5), and Florida (Obama won it by 2 after Kerry lost it by 5). 

It's doubtful that a non-Arizonan could have held that state's ten electoral votes for the Republicans this year.  And if Watonwan County is blue, can Texas be far behind?

In which I imagine myself a Republican

If I were a Republican--a long leap of imagination--how worried would I be about my party's prospects?

The tide comes in, and the tide goes out, and maybe I would think that the Dems, in the immediate afterglow of electoral success, were excessively giddy about the Republicans' demise.  But I think I'd worry that the patient's case was more serious.  It's not just 2008, after all: the Dems are now on a winning streak, and history teaches that the voters do not often deliver body blows to the same party in consecutive contests.  It's almost axiomatic that, after a presidential election, the winner's party loses seats in the next congressional election;  unambiguous disasters, such as the one suffered by the Dems in 1994, are generally followed by--well, that particular one was followed by the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996.

In 2006, the Republicans lost 31 House seats and six Senate seats.  Now they have lost more than twenty additional House seats, at least six more Senate seats, and the Presidency.  In winning 365 electoral votes, Obama carried all the Kerry states by double-digit margins, and he easily prevailed in Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as well.  There is really no way for Republicans to say that, Yes, we lost, but a small shift of only such-and-such number of votes in these three states--no, they were thoroughly rejected by the voters, again.

I try to set my will against sentimentality and mark for myself the occasions when the temptation is strongest.  So it was with one part of my mind that, on election night, I contemplated myself thinking with another part that McCain's crowd looked like America's past and the younger, browner Obama throng celebrating in Chicago's front yard more plausibly like its future.  Judis and Texeira have crunched the numbers and conclude that the part of my mind I regard with suspicion is right.  The Rs have a real problem and should be worried.

No comment needed

You really don't need to make fun of some people.  They do it for you.

Sarah Palin, on Fox News:

Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands—this is what I always do. I’m like, O.K., God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in ‘12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.

John Hinderaker, at Power Line:

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.

Lowell: one more anecdote

Thinking about Robert Lowell made me remember something I once read about him, simultaneously amusing and sad, which I cannot now track down.  I thought it may have been from Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, but I found that book on a shelf in the basement, and it doesn't seem to be in there.  I shall have to go by memory.  Simpson's book, by the way, is enjoyable, and its title, from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence"--"We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness"--applies to the Lowell episode.

He was in the hospital with one of his bouts of mental illness.  Some literary friends came to visit, and Lowell, in a manic state, began regaling them on one subject and another--including an "improved" version of Lycidas that he had undertaken.  These friends listened politely as Lowell, with too much animation, described the project and recited for them long stanzas from his work-in-progress.  When these friends left, they were more convinced than ever that Milton was a genius and that Lowell was indeed very disturbed.

Literary anecdote

In the last week, I have come across two reviews, one in The New Yorker, by Dan Chiasson, and the other in The New York Review, by Helen Vendler, of what sounds like a terrific new book: Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.  Not that I am likely ever to read it.  I have a wife, two kids, a full-time job, and these letters appear to fill a volume the size of Bleak House, which I do mean to read.  Nevertheless I have an interest in Bishop and Lowell.  I even have a funny story concerning Lowell.

Years ago I quit my job and enrolled in an education program at the University of Minnesota.  My goal was to qualify to teach English in the public schools, and the program required me to earn credits in creative writing.  A poetry writing class fit my schedule, so I found myself spending one summer evening a week in a small seminar room with seven or eight aspiring poets.  During class we performed various writing exercises and read aloud poems we had written in fulfillment of assignments.  I formed the idea that the other students regarded poetry as a way of sharing their enthusiasm for life, its beauty and sublimity and spiritual richness, which was not really my idea at all.  I'm not saying my poems were better than theirs.  After the class had ended, I remember running into the instructor at a bar, and she made my friend laugh by referring to me as "non-lyric Eric."  But my poems were different.

Anyway, for the last class we had to read one more poem.  This time, however, we could read any poem we wanted--one we had written or any other poem we liked.  I chose to read this poem by Lowell.  It happened that the student who read just before me, a woman of the sublimity and richness school, had prepared a rather long poem on matrimonial love that had a very strong autobiographical element.  She evidently loved her husband, who evidently was good in bed.  When she was done, I read Lowell, not excluding the epigraph from Schopenhauer.

"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
- Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

Eric the Blue to Power Line: take a deep breath

Coleman's lead over Franken in the US Senate race has dwindled to 221 votes and the wingnuts are getting jumpy.  Over at Power Line, the boys are up to Part 3 of posts titled "What's Happening in Minnesota?"  The last installment consists of a statement put out by the Coleman campaign followed by Scott Johnson's conclusion that "the election seems to be in the process of being stolen." I take the word "seems" to be tacit acknowledgment that there is no evidence to support the (very serious) accusation.  The inevitable small shifts in results that are being checked and rechecked makes for what mathematicians call a random walk.  It happens in every election, between the first reporting of results and the final certification, but now, in a race so close, the phenomenon is suddenly novel and suspicious.   There was around a fifty percent chance that corrections, in the aggregate, would benefit Franken.  That chance has apparently been realized.  To be believed, the claim that Franken is stealing the election requires more than his shrinking deficit and right-wing paranoia.

Here is the statement of the Coleman campaign quoted at Power Line:

"Not content to allow the recount process to move forward as prescribed by law, the Franken Campaign and its supporters are attempting a campaign of undue influence. The increasing questions about unexplained and improbable shifts in vote counts, coupled with Franken Campaign antics over the past 24 hours, compelled us to seek legal action to protect the rights of Minnesota voters. We had an election. Senator Coleman won. And we now must have a legal and transparent process conducted in the light of day - and that is our goal and intent.

"Late last night, after another unexplained shift in votes occurred when the Secretary of State's Office closed, new ballots have suddenly appeared from a heavily Democratic precinct. These ballots have been unsecure since the election, yet the Franken Campaign is demanding they be stuffed into the ballot box, attempting to change a vote count that was already finished. Minnesota election laws provide specific rules for reviewing and counting ballots. Today's legal proceeding is an effort to ensure that a transparent and orderly process be in place. The Franken Campaign should be joining us in this action, not seeking to push the process outside the bounds of the law."

On the morning after the election, Coleman, with a lead of well under a thousand votes out of around 2.9 million cast, declared himself the victor and indicated that Franken should waive the recount required by law.  I don't know what qualifies as an "antic" or the exercise of "undue influence" but it's clear Coleman was endeavoring to close down a process prescribed by law.  Praising the integrity of the election process and the professionalism of its administrators, he asserted that there was virtually no chance that a recount would change the outcome, that the cost to taxpayers was not worth it, and that the time for "healing" had arrived. 

Coleman is reminding me of McCain's erratic behavior in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street financial collapse.  There should be no recount but it is the Franken campaign that is not content to allow the recount process to go forward in orderly fashion.  This recount, which either should or should not proceed, depending upon whether it is the morning after the election or the day after that, had better not reverse the outcome, because "we had an election" and "Senator Coleman won."  The integrity of the election process and the professionalism of the people who administer it are not to be doubted.  Also, the election is being stolen.

I have to admit that not every high-ranking Minnesota Republican is full of it.  Brian Sullivan, who in 2002 ran for the Republican endorsement for governor, positioning himself to the right of eventual winner Tim Pawlenty, is talking sense.  Friday's Star Tribune article on the Senate race includes the following graphs:

Brian Sullivan, a Republican National Committee member, said that "Norm is in the best position because he's still got the most votes, but if he was nervous on Tuesday, he's really got reason to be nervous today."

Sullivan said that in talking to party officials around the state, new voters are becoming a point of concern.

First-time voters may have marked ballots in a way that optical scanners could not read, Sullivan said, but they could be caught by a hand tally.

"We're not talking about improper activity," Sullivan said, "but ballots where votes may not have been recorded if they weren't properly marked."

I agree with all of that.

Dyspeptic jubilation

The thrill of Barack Obama's victory was mitigated somewhat here in Minnesota by the failure of the Dems (so far) to change the ideological composition of our state's congressional delegation.  The third congressional seat, vacant on account of the retirement of Republican moderate Jim Ramstad, was won by Republican Erik Paulsen, whose record as a state legislator indicates he is less sensible than Ramstad.  Meanwhile, in the sixth district, the repugnant Michele Bachmann won re-election despite defaming herself during the campaign.  She'd be dangerous were she smarter--but, then, were she smarter, she wouldn't believe the things she believes.  Praise the lord for his tender mercies!    

Our five Democratic representatives won re-election as well.  The outcomes of their races were all foregone conclusions, of course.  Keith Ellison, whose district encompasses the city of Minneapolis, and Betty McCollum, whose district encompasses the city of St. Paul, both won with more than two-thirds of the total vote.  Wingers complain about these two inveterate liberals but I think they have their own party to blame.  Republicans have succeeded in isolating the state's urban liberals (such as my wife and me) in two densely populated but small polygons of deep blue, one for Minneapolis and the other for St. Paul.  This leaves three completely suburban districts for the Republicans, including nut-jobs like Bachmann.  If the districts were instead shaped like pie slices pointed at the urban core, wingers probably wouldn't have Ellison and McCollum to kick around.  On the other hand, they wouldn't have three seats, either--indeed, they'd be lucky to have one.

As I write, the Secretary of State's website is showing that, in the race for US Senate, Norm Coleman is ahead of Al Franken by 708 votes, or by about one-thirtieth of one percent of the nearly 2.9 million ballots cast.  All 4130 precincts are now reporting their totals.  If this result holds, it will be for me a crushing disappointment:  I hold Franken in high regard and consider Coleman to be nothing but a trimming calculator of his own interest, an empty vessel of ambition animated by biological processes that in humans ideally abet more elevated activities.  I was home from work today so could not avoid watching him claim victory on televison this morning.  He indicated that Franken should not ask for a recount, working into his statement that it would be performed "at taxpayer's expense."  Here is what Minnesota law has to say on the subject.  Note that, in the case where the candidates are separated by less than one-half of one percent of all the ballots cast, the recount is automatic: "the canvassing board shall manually recount the votes."  There is also a provision allowing the trailing candidate to waive the mandated recount, and Coleman, as always seeking advantage, thus sought to discredit the statutory recount by connecting it to a partisan incentive.  He won the first count so, naturally, doesn't want it looked into too closely.  Of course the purpose of the statute is not to overturn a result but to reassure the public, in the event of a very close election, that the winner was indeed selected by the voters.  It is in the interest of the person who takes office to be accepted by friend and foe as the legitimate winner of the election.

The moments surrounding ten o'clock local time, when CNN finally called Virginia for Obama just before turning the Pacific rim blue as the polls closed in the west, the announcement of the projected winner accompanied by shots of a variegated and cheering throng in Chicago, were for this dour Norwegian positively exhilirating.  What a night!

Bardolatry

Here is the opening paragraph of Hendrik Hertzberg's most recent Comment in The New Yorker:

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.

I don't know of a political journalist who consistently writes better English prose than Hertzberg.  Take a look at that first sentence, the way the first long subordinate phrase and then the second much shorter one achieve a straining, deliberative effect that prepares the way for the monosyllabic march to the conclusion.  Well, not entirely monosyllabic: there is the homey alliteration of "bottom barrel," a possible cliche that nevertheless emphasizes the rat-a-tat-tat of the author's derision.

If the charge is bardolatry, I plead guilty.  Follow the link and read the whole little essay.  Hertzberg is the best.

Horse race redux

Well, I've been obsessed with the presidential horse race now for a long time, so let's take a look at where things seem to stand around sixty hours before the polls open in Minnesota.

The electoral map at pollster.com is pretty much what you get at real clear politics, which in turn tracks very closely with fivethirtyeight.com.  For those with no rooting interest, as opposed to fearful and long-suffering Democrats such as myself, it must be obvious that Obama is in a dominant position.  According to pollster.com, he has 311 electoral votes at least leaning his direction, and, of these, 264, or just six fewer than the number needed to win, are "strong."  This means that, to become president, McCain would have to win all the remaining toss-up states--North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and Montana--plus all the ones that are only "leaning" toward Obama.  These light blue states are Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada.  According to the "trend estimate," McCain is at least six points down in all four. 

We should know relatively early on Tuesday evening whether my quaking confidence is warranted.  McCain has two paths to victory.  One, the "inside straight" strategy, is suggested by the above analysis: he could win every state that he is ahead in plus every state in which he trails by fewer than around six points.  That path is blocked if Obama wins Virginia, as he appears poised to do.  McCain's second path is the Pennsylvania strategy.  He has been spending a lot of time there, on the theory, I think, that turning Pennsylvania is a less daunting task than turning all the light-blue states.  A couple recent polls have shown Obama ahead by only four points in Pennsylvania, but the Democrat's average lead in the state is still around eight or nine points.  Note, too, that, as 311 - 21 = 290 > 270, McCain, even with Pennsylvania, needs to win at least two of the four states currently leaning to Obama.

Pennsylvania, like Virginia, is entirely in the eastern time zone.  If news organizations are able to declare Obama the winner in both states before too many actual ballots have been counted, exhale--and turn your attention to the races for the House and Senate.  We have at least three hot ones in Minnesota: the Senate contest between Coleman and Franken, and the races in the third and sixth congressional districts, where Ashwin Madia and Elwyn Tinklenberg, respectively, have shots at picking up Republican seats.  Tinklenbeg's race, in particular, has a high profile, because his opponent is Michele Bachmann, and, thanks to her interview with Chris Mathews a couple weeks ago, people from coast to coast now know what sober people from these parts have known for a long time: she's a crackpot.

Michael Tomasky details the latest news from the Minnesota Senate race here.  It's unclear whether the story can stand out from the noise of the last weekend enough to make a difference.  The Senate scorecard at fivethirtyeight.com gives Franken a 53% chance of winning.  Is that more like Shaq making or missing a foul shot?   Perhaps it's bad to care so much.  If it all gets away we'll still have this:

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too--
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out--
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.