The Bread and Peace model predicts that based on the fundamentals, Barack Obama should lose to Mitt Romney. However, when one looks at current opinion polls, it is Obama who has maintained a steady lead. So why is Romney doing so badly and what can he do about it? [Read more…]
Political science professionals tend to discount the importance of the daily news cycle in influencing presidential elections and assert that political and economic fundamentals, based on objective measures, largely determine outcomes. This approach can provide a welcome change from the mindless speculations of the talking head pundit class that assigns deep significance to each ephemeral political event. [Read more…]
Update: It looks like I was premature. There are apparently more dressage rounds to go so Rafalca is still in there though unlikely to medal.]
You have to hand it to Mitt Romney. Thanks to his candidacy, people like me, who had never even heard that there was an Olympic event called dressage, now know more about it than we could have ever imagined, even to the extent of pronouncing it correctly. [Read more…]
On the surface, Romney’s recent foreign trip must have seemed a no-lose proposition. Go to England, pander to the English and bask in the aura of the Olympics which has played a big part in his resume, then go to Israel and pander to the Israelis, and then go to Poland. The Poland leg of the trip puzzles me, frankly. Why Poland? What was to be gained by going there? It has been suggested that the Poland leg was meant to enhance his appeal to white working class voters but Lech Walensa has been out of the limelight for ages. Given the level of political amnesia here, how many people in the US now would know anything about him or of Poland’s history? [Read more…]
The Olympics turns out to be mixed blessing for Mitt Romney’s candidacy. On the one hand, he touts his role in running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as if that were a major accomplishment and, for reasons that escape me, the media seem to take it at face value though it is not clear what running the Olympic games has got to do with one’s ability to be a good president. [Read more…]
Gore Vidal, a class traitor of the best kind, died yesterday.
Born into a well-connected and politically influential family that could have opened doors to a patrician life, he became instead a populist outsider and a scathing critic of the politics of the US. He had wide-ranging interests, writing novels, essays, and screenplays and also acting in films, such as Gattacca where he was pretty good. [Read more…]
Back in the 1960s, satirist Tom Lehrer sang in Pollution about how dirty American cities had become. [Read more…]
News reports say that the Democratic party platform committee has unanimously endorsed same-sex marriage. This reflects the fact that a new Pew poll finds two-thirds of self-identified Democrats support this position. [Read more…]
The Daily Show is fond of pointing out that Americans learn their geography about other countries only when they go to war with them.
But international sporting contests are another source of information about countries and the Olympics is a good way to hear about countries that would otherwise never make the news. [Read more…]
Readers of this blog know that I have a fondness for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (as well as other satires) and frequently link to them if I happen to think them funny and informative. But each of them has his faults. Colbert seems to idolize the military while Stewart is terrible when directly interviewing powerful political figures or news media bigwigs like Brian Williams or Fareed Zakaria, so much so that I don’t even bother to watch those segments anymore. Stewart is best when he has on writers and artists and academics who are experts in some field. In fact, a rule of thumb that I have developed is that the less familiar I am with the name of the guest, the better the interview is likely to be. [Read more…]