09:06 am - Tipping point There comes a time in every expatriate's life when he can't explain what the hell is going on with The Old Country.
That moment the last time out for me was when I failed to understand a Far Side cartoon. A cow orker (also a Merkin expat but basically grew up here) had a Far Side daily calendar. The lo cal cow orkers would peruse it each day and attempt to decipher it. I was often consulted in cases of non-comprehension. I was utterly unable to explain "The Life and Times of Baby Jessica" being unable to recall who Baby Jessica was and why her travails should be particularly funny.
So, who are Kate and Jon? And why does Gmail think I would be interested?
12:34 pm - Lo cal news I guess Lewis Hamilton has a get-out-jail-free card:
British expat and Formula One driving champion Lewis Hamilton reportedly runs a stop sign and crashes his Mercedes into a Peugeot driven by a woman, accompanied by her child, in the Geneva [Switzerland] suburb where he lives. The car struck is a write-off but Geneva police say they have no report of the incident, although a newspaper columnist says officers managed to obtain the McLaren driver’s autograph after investigating the case.
That poor woman is going to have a hell of time getting the insurance company to pay up with no ticket issued to Mr. "traffic laws are optional" Hamilton.
On April 7 [1944], German troops moved against French Resistance fighters in the hills around Gex and Oyonnax, in the Jura Mountains. Code-named Operation Spring, the sweep involved six German regiments and a regiment of Cossacks - Soviet citizens who, having been taken prisoner of war in southern Russia in 1941 and 1942, had volunteered to fight for the Germans.
On the first day of the sweep, five members of the Resistance were killed and thirteen captured.
Gex is about five miles from our house. We hike and ski in the mountains where Operation Spring was carried out. It is strange to think the border a couple of hundred yards from our home was so fraught, a dividing line between safety and mass murder, beyond which the distinction between soldier and civilian, combatant and non-combatant, traitor and patriot was so blurred.
Five dead is a minuscule toll in the tens of millions dead in World War II. But if you look around, you see small reminders of the guerrilla war in France that broke out in 1944: the war monuments in small towns that list the civilian dead of June 1944 in addition to the soldiers sacrificed in 1914 - 1918 and 1939 - 1945. You see it in a small monument commemorating an atrocity by the side of the road to a ski station. Do they still speak to us?
After Alaska Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich called for Senator Mark Begich to step down and a special election be held for his (rightfully won - ed.) seat, Sarah Palin weighed in:
In an email to POLITICO, Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton confirmed the governor’s position. “She absolutely agrees that there should be a special election,” Stapleton wrote. “Stepping down to hold the special election would be the right thing to do.”
State party chairmen are supposed to be partisan attack dogs so I'd expect Ruedrich to throw bombs like this:
“A special election will allow Alaskans to have a real, non-biased, credible process where the most qualified person could win, without the manipulation of the Department of Justice,” he added.
But why would Governor Palin chime in?
Maybe she figures that getting a shot at clawing back another Senate seat will buy her some political cred with the Republican voters in 2012. Maybe she was upset at the Republican machine taking a hit. Maybe she is just a loony.
04:24 pm - Dispatches from a small country Nude hiking in Switzerland is enough of a problem that Appenzell is trying to pass a law against it. Legal complications ensue because there are no laws against public nudity and the mooted laws may not pass constitutional muster.
Note: the print edition of this story in the International Herald Tribune did not include the photo illustration shown in the Web version above.
A Saudi prince staying in Geneva rents 66 luxury cars in Munich for his transportation needs. Lo cal car rental businesses are outraged, lo cal chauffeurs are somewhat mollified that most of the drivers are to be locals.
In other lo cal news, there has been a Buggati Veyron parked in front of the Hôtel des Bergues off and on over the past couple of weeks. I just thought you would like to know.
The Swiss Peoples Party (SVP/UDC) has decided to take action against "the rampant Islamization" of Switzerland by proposing legislation banning minarets. In an inexorable march of logic, the UDC explains that minarets will be followed by muezzins and the imposition of Sharia law in Switzerland.
Check out the debate between Tariq Ramadan and UDC rabble rouser Oskar Freysinger on the lo cal public affairs TV show "Infrarouge."
Re Tariq Ramadan: Ramadan is somewhat of a lo cal gadfly. An Islamic intellectual, Ramadan has labored to define an "European Islam" which seems to please nobody. Europeans are suspect him of being of a crypto-Islamic radical and Islamic fundamentalists scorn him for his flirtation with secularism. The US gummamint suspects him of being a crypto-terrorist and refused him a visa to take up an appointment at the University of Notre Dame because he had contributed money to two Palestinian charities between 1998 and 2002 which the US deemed as Hamas fronts in 2003.
01:46 pm - Crash and burn The Daily Beast had an account from Mark McKinnon who tagged along with Bush on his return home.
Apparently it offered little in the way of irony or drama and was all in all a hearty gathering good old guys and gals.
And it’s nice to see that while some partisans have yet to sheath their swords, Obama too has warmed to President Bush during this period of peaceful, diplomatic, and graceful transition. He now believes, as does anyone who knows President Bush, that he is a “good guy” and that “he made the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances.”
So this is the reductio ad absurdem of the George's claim to power. Decisions don't matter. Consequences don't matter. All that matters is that one be dubbed a "good guy" and it all comes out in the wash.
Since McKinnon uses quotes, I assume that they are not his words but the words of someone else on the plane. How can he miss the left handed compliment of "he made the best decisions that he could?"
So exits a President born to privilege ("born on third base, thought he hit a triple") who treated the country and his office as another plaything.
10:13 am - The view from abroad I stayed up late last night waiting for some whiff of exit polls or results but went to bed disappointed.
My clock radio woke me up this morning with Obama's acceptance speech so I knew it would be A Good Day.
This is my third Presidential election seen from afar and it has been astounding, amazing and moving in ways I would never have expected.
Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Kerry in 2004, all drew mild curiosity from those jaded Yurpeans. This time it was different.
There was live coverage last night on French TV and Swiss TV, kind of odd when since they had absolutely no results to discuss until the wee hours of the morning here. But the images they ran of ecstatic voters reduced me to tears. Mailing an absentee ballot just doesn't have the emotion resonance of going down to the local precinct and pulling the metaphorical lever.
This morning French and Swiss TV was all about Obama.
Some of coverage was cynical (some lefty French socialist speculating that Obama would be a protectionist) but most of the coverage was astonishment that American Democracy was as good as its word that anyone could grow up to be President.
Here's a sampling from a correspondent of the lo cal paper:
Les huit ans du règne immonde de Deubeulyou Bush sont donc achevés. Et pour la première fois, un fils de l’Afrique va présider la puissance numéro un de la planète. Etonnante Amérique. On la savait capable du pire – Abou Ghraib, Guantánamo, la torture officialisée, le Patriot Act. Barack Obama nous rappelle qu’elle l’est aussi du meilleur. Alors, laissons éclater notre joie devant cette victoire historique d’un métis démocrate sur une vieille culotte de peau républicaine flanquée d’une Calamity Palin qui vient du froid et qui ferait bien d’y retourner pour ne plus le quitter.
The President of Switzerland, Michelline Calmy-Rey, proclaimed:
En élisant un président noir et un vice-président catholique, «l'Amérique a montré qu'elle était capable d'ouvrir de nouvelles frontières», a déclaré le président de la Confédération sur les ondes.
Not to be picky, but we got over the whole Catholic thing with JFK but that's Old Europe for you.
There will be disappointment, both in the USA and abroad. The expectations for Obama are impossibly high (put yourself in Obama's shoes, think how daunting that would be).
But I can't escape feeling that the US has turned some kind of corner yesterday. We won't have a President that publically scoffs at outrages on human dignity. Maybe we have a President that will do something about the various gathering dooms of economic calamity, wars and global warming.
You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
11:03 am - Going Negative The Slate Gabfest discussed McCain's strategy in response to Obama's widening lead in the polls. The Gabfest thought McCain would get personal and get negative. They also thought that McCain was holding the Rev. Wright and Williams Ayers issues in reserve as ammunition for their attacks.
Now that Palin has accused Obama of befriending terrorists (an oblique reference to Ayers), I am sure that Wright won't be far behind.
But throwing Wright and Ayers at Obama feels like a desperation move to me.
First, it is too early. The Wright flap lasted all of a week or two in its incarnation in the news cycle. It will get a lot less in its reincarnation. While the Ayers connection has not gotten the exposure that Wright did, there is also a lot less there.
I would have expected Wright and Ayers to have been trotted out ten days before the election if McCain was within the margin of error in the polls not a month before with McCain falling farther behind. To mix metaphors. it looks like McCain is trying to stop the bleeding instead of saving something for the final sprint.
Second, Wright and Ayers would have worked best early in the election when Obama was unknown to some significant fraction of the electorate. With a month to go, that fraction is a lot smaller.
Third, Obama has some ammunition of his own: McCain was one of the Keating Five. It is old news but the parallels between the S&L meltdown and the current economic implosion are compelling. Throw McCain's Keating Five history on top of the beating that McCain's antics in the bailout and his weakness on the economy and Obama could put the election out of McCain's reach.
There are other signs that both McCain and the Republicans are in big trouble. Several high profile Republican senators are in tight races - Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina for example - and they will compete for TV time and money with McCain. McCain pulling out of Michigan shows that McCain is still suffering from tight money and manpower.
McCain has done himself a lot of damage the last couple of weeks. The campaign suspension stunt backfired badly. The revolt of the House Republicans revealed his weak grasp on his party. I wonder if yet another McCain campaign shakeup is coming.
The chattering classes have criticized Obama for not making sufficient electoral hay with the economic turmoil but he has played it exactly right. McCain looked impulsive and ineffective in the bailout faceoff while Obama was steady and reassuring.
And then there is Palin. McCain's campaign is trumpeting the fact that they have exceeded the levels of volunteer campaign worker turnout set by Bush. Palin certainly has fired up the Christian Right and boosted McCain's GOTB (get out the Base) efforts. But by other measures, Democrat vs. Republican voter registration, fundraising and the raw numbers, the Republicans are still not the majority party, show whatever Palin brings to the ticket will be outmatched by Obama grassroots organization.
So I'm reasonably confident of an Obama victory at this point and I am secretly entertaining hopes of a blowout in the House and Senate that could give Obama a workable majority in Congress.
05:12 pm - Geronimo! Pull the ripcord on that golden parachute!
It emerged last night that Alan H Fishman, the Washington Mutual chief executive on the job since September 8, is entitled to more than $13m in severance and bonus pay, according to a company filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
NEW YORK: Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska met her first foreign heads of state as she crisscrossed New York City receiving foreign policy tutorials in advance of her vice presidential debate next week with Senator Joseph Biden Jr., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
...
"Her primary purpose was to develop a relationship and to listen," said [Steve Biegun, a former staff member of President George W. Bush's National Security Council], who quickly added, "I think she's already fully prepared to be vice president."
"Just like you [the True Blue Republicans, not the dastardly Michelle Obama], there has never been a day when I was not proud to be an American,"
There have been a few days when I have not been proud to be an American:
- The days of the post Rodney King verdict LA riots - The day of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos - Every time George W. Bush says "we don't torture." - The day the US invaded Iraq.
I'd love to ask Mitt how he felt about those and a few others.
10:25 am - The Obvious Choice So why did McCain pick Palin? Theories abound:
- To attract disgruntled PUMAs to go McCain - To energize "values" voters (or to be less charitable, fundies) - To attract "soccer moms" - To step on Obama's "change" cred - To step on Obama's acceptance speech media moment - To better define a reform ticket
Palin does shore up McCain's weakness with the Christian Right. In a race that appears to be tight every constituency counts. Fundies provide another important campaign asset: feet on the street. There is a lot of volunteer work done in a campaign and the fundies have been reliable foot soldiers for the Republicans. But McCain could have picked someone like Mike Huckabee and gotten a lot more.
Beyond that, McCain picking Palin is not at all obvious.
The electoral justifications for picking Palin are dubious. Palin's anti-abortion position is not going to siphon off a lot PUMAs and will limit her appeal to soccer moms.
In the standard measures of electoral clout, the number of electoral votes a state commands or its dominance in a region, McCain could not picked a VP with less.
I've hard the conservative punditry (David Brooks and Tony Blankley for example) justify Palin as being a kindred reformer just like McCain. How Palin's twenty months of gubernatorial experience prepares her for pushing through a national reform program they did not explain.
It was funny to hear the conservative talking heads touting the few nuggets of reform agenda that could be gleaned from her very thin resumé.
It was even funnier to hear the pundits talk up McCain and Palin as reforming kindred spirits and when at best they have talked only a couple of times before she being considered for VP.
Yes, McCain did steal the media spotlight from Obama coming out of his convention apothesis. That's not a bad move for a candidate short on money. But now the spotlight is on Palin, not McCain. Like it or not, McCain is going to have to share that spotlight all the way to November, which is a bad move for a candidate short on money. He is going to have to spend a lot of his free media time explaining and defending his choice.
The problem McCain with picking Sarah Palin as his VP is that it is Not Obvious. If you have to go searching for justification for why she is on the ticket, the choice was bad.
Palin is a bad pick. Somewhere, Dan Quayle is pleased that he will no longer be cited as a "what were they thinking?" example of VP choices.
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