Jonah Goldberg [Email him] writes on NRO, in a symposium about “Who’s to blame” for the election this reminiscence:

When asked if he’d run for office again, Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, responded: “No! The people of New York threw me out of office, and now they must be punished.”[How the GOP Got Here by An NRO Symposium on National Review Online]

This is worrisome, and in the sense that anything you say about Obama is a gaffe, arguably a racist remark. (At least by the standards of the NR-backed Trent Lott brouhaha.) You see, Koch was succeeded by the first black Mayor of New York, David Dinkins. How bad was Dinkins? Here’s what an official NYC.gov site has to say:

Dinkins’ inauguration speech was punctuated with references to oppression, human rights, and the need for equality. He vowed to be “mayor of all the people of New York,” and declared: “We are all foot soldiers on the march to freedom.”

Dinkins helped fulfill his prediction that the “bells of freedom will ring in South Africa” by being a national voice in favor of anti-apartheid sanctions. He fought to have the city divest itself of $500 million worth of pension fund stock invested in companies that do business in South Africa and secured passage of a bill that allowed the city to rate banks on their opposition to apartheid. Among his other accomplishments were creating the office of Special Commissioner of Investigations for schools, creating a system of after hour youth centers called Beacon Schools, and working to create an all civilian police complaint review board.

Known for his reserved public demeanor, Dinkins was sharply criticized for his handling of racial strife in Crown Heights, a boycott of Korean Grocers in Brooklyn and civil unrest in Washington Heights. Dinkins faced a $1.8 billion budget deficit when he entered office which grew to $2.2 billion by the time he left office. The economy remained sluggish throughout his term, preventing the enactment of much of his agenda.

And how badly were the people of New York punished? Well, during one year of Dinkins term, their were 2262 murders. That’s not as bad as South Africa where the “bells of freedom” are ringing, but it’s pretty bad.

My guess is that over the next one to two decades, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father will become one of the standards on high school and community college reading lists, like To Kill a Mockingbird,  or that Latina-authored snooze The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

I suspect there will be a big market in Cliff Notes among students who don’t quite make it all the way through Dreams.

By the way, kids, the reason Lord of the Flies is on all school reading lists is because it’s your teachers’ way of letting you know what they think of you.

The doctor turned thriller author (“Andromeda Strain,” “Jurassic Park”) has died at age 66 of cancer.

He was probably the tallest man in history to be famous for something unrelated to being tall.

I read his autobiography many years ago. It includes a section about how he was inspired by Uri Geller to learn how to bend spoons with his mind. He used to attend house parties in the early 1970s of spoon benders — mostly Lockheed engineers and their families, with everybody sitting around bending spoons telekinetically. He said he got pretty good at bending spoons with his brain waves, but then he got bored with it.

I have no idea what to make of that.

My reader suggests that energy importing states swung left, while energy exporters drifted right, but it’s hard to tell.

One thing to note is that in the Greater California Foreclosure Zone, McCain got devastated in Nevada (second worst fall) and got hit hard in California and Colorado. He was down only 1.2% versus Bush in Arizona, but he’s the native son, so that’s a bad performance.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there’s a fair amount of randomness injected into these 2004 to 2008 changes by the impact of levels of advertising delivered. It’s hard to prove statistically that candidate advertising has any affect, but it seems hard to imagine that it’s completely a scam dreamed up by political consultants who get 15% cuts on each ad buy. Lots of states got only minimal amounts of advertising because they are deemed irrelevant to the electoral college results. Other states get a (presumably) offsetting flood from both campaigns. And some states get more ads from one campaign than from the other. This should inject a lot of randomness into the results from election to election, yet affordable family formation continues to dominate three elections in a row now.

in the title of his 1995 book:

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as the Basis of Social Policy

White self-congratulation is a dominant motif since it’s hard to congratulate African-American culture, at least with a straight face. Here we are, 43 years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the first black President turns out to have a completely non-black upbringing sequestered out in the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from any black community.

Obama is exactly the kind of phony African-American beneficiary of affirmative action at Harvard, the kind who are either immigrants, outright foreigners (like Barack Sr.) or have a white parent or grandparent, of whom Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has been complaining about for years:

Guinier, a Harvard law professor, was quoted in The Boston Globe at the time as saying that most minority students at elite colleges were “voluntary immigrants,” not descended from slaves. “If you look around Harvard College today, how many young people will you find who grew up in urban environments and went to public high schools and public junior high schools?” she said. “I don’t think, in the name of affirmative action, we should be admitting people because they look like us, but then they don’t identify with us.”

Obama likely has more black ancestors who sold slaves to the (Arab) white man than black ancestors who were slaves under the (European) white man. (He also has white slaveowning ancestors in his white family tree.)

Guinier is, by her own standards, another phony African-American. Her mother is Jewish (that’s why she looks so much like the late Gilda Radner) and her father was a famous Jamaican immigrant union leader for the Communist Party USA. But she retains enough of her paternal Marxism to feel guilty about this abuse of class in the name of race.

Of course, if you look at the Obamas, the authentic African-American, Michelle Robinson Obama, whose all-American slave ancestry would put her near the top of Guinier’s list of most deserving of reparations due to ancestry, wasted her affirmative action sinecure at Guinier’s Harvard Law School, giving up practicing law way back in 1993. In contrast, Mr. Obama, the ultimate phony in terms of eligibility for affirmative action reserved for African-Americans, seems to have done pretty well for himself.

Here’s Andrew Gelman’s graph showing that there wasn’t much regional change between 2004 and 2008 at the state level, just a national shift to the left (up in this graph). (I’m not sure what % of precincts reporting he’s using, but I doubt if anything will change much).

The states below the 45 degree line swung toward the GOP — most notably Arkansas and Louisiana. Arkansas is probably still undergoing the process of de-Clintonization and is rejoining the rest of the South. Hurricane Katrina ethnically cleansed some of the poor blacks living below sea level in New Orleans, so the state has moved to the right. I’m not sure what’s going on in Oklahoma. The GOP did well in Alaska, presumably due to Sarah Palin. The GOP also did well in Massachusetts due to a favorite son not being the Democratic nominee.

The real outlier for the Democrats is Hawaii, which is, presumably, a favorite son effect for Obama. Vermont is just becoming Vermontier, Delaware is undergoing a long term shift from being a bellwether purple state to a solidly blue one, Nevada was driven left by the Hispanic influx and the highest rate of foreclosures in the country. I don’t know why Indiana jumped so much to the left. Utah’s move from being ultra-Republican in 2004 to just highly Republican might have something to do with growing Hispanic presence, or from Mormons being sore at McCain beating Romney. (Nine months ago, I wondered how Mormons would react to the anti-Mormon animus seen in some of the GOP primaries.)

Anyway, you can see the new best fit line would simply have shifted up (in the Democrats’ direction) a few points, with a pretty good fit.

(more…)

From the NYT:

And the issue of race proved vexing. The campaign was blindsided when DVDs of the incendiary sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s former pastor, emerged and threatened Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

“That was one place where we dropped the ball,” said Mr. Axelrod, his voice growing angry. The campaign’s research operation had not known of the DVDs and was sent scrambling after they were broadcast. “The work just wasn’t done.”

The slip-up violated a key tenet of the campaign: to avoid discussions focused on race. From polling and interviews, the campaign concluded from the outset that it was imperative to define Mr. Obama’s candidacy in terms that would transcend skin color.

“It would be difficult for an African-American to be elected president in this country,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked for Mr. Obama’s campaign and studies racial voting patterns. “However, it is not difficult for an extraordinary individual who happens to be African-American to be elected president.”

“Blindsided”??? I pointed out that Rev. Wright was going to be a problem for Obama 50 weeks beforehand.

The general cluelessness of America’s white political elites regarding anything touching race is astounding. David Axelrod, who has been in Chicago politics for decades, running Daley’s campaigns, didn’t know that Obama’s preacher, who runs a megachurch, sells his sermons online??? How could anyone imagine that Rev. Wright — Rev. Wright — wouldn’t want to pocket some extra cash and edify humanity at the same time by peddling his graceful digital presence? All you had to do was Google “Trinity United Church of Christ” and the DVDs were prominently displayed. (I wonder if any McCain aides ever even bought them?) I saw them on sale in early 2007.

And all this stuff about defining Obama as somebody who “just happens to be African-American” as if he’s the second coming of former LA Mayor Tom Bradley … Wasn’t that dependent upon nobody important reading carefully his 460 page autobiography, My 25 Year Struggle to Define Myself as a Black Man? Granted, practically nobody did, so it worked, but still …

What this shows once again is that Everybody Drinks Their Own Kool-Aid. I’d like to imagine David Axelrod as a mastermind cynically manipulating the media, because at least it would show that somebody who is pulling the strings has a brain. But this revelation that Axelrod was completely clueless about Rev. Wright just reveals that the first person these guys brainwash is themselves. Instead of some evil genius pulling the strings, there are just a bunch of guys yanking their own chains before they can yank ours.

British philosopher Roger Scruton is the author of The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought.

His definition of assimilation in the Third Edition follows:

Assimilation

The process whereby an immigrant community adopts the outward forms and political allegiance of a host community, without necessary absorbing the majority culture or adopting the majority religion. (Cf. acculturation.) Unassimilated minorities, which define their allegiance either in contrast to, or in opposition to, the allegiance of the majority, constitute a potential threat to social and political stability, as recent events have amply demonstrated. The received view in Europe is that assimilation is therefore necessary if immigration is to be acceptable. Note, however, that anybody who said as much 20 or even ten years ago risked the charge of racism. That peculiar fact needs an explanation; so far none has been provided.

Gay marriage types in California put up a Youtube videos in which Mormon missionaries do a home invasion of an extremely straight-looking lesbian couple, steal their wedding rings, rip up their marriage license, and generally make nuisances of themselves. (The point is that the Mormons gave 20 million dollars to the Proposition 8 campaign  to prevent gay marriage.) Aside from the religious question, you don’t usually see white home invaders. Mormons are extremely white.

It turns out that if Proposition 8 succeeds, it will be blacks in California who put it over the top–this is from NRO’s Corner blog:

[Links added]

That’s California demographics for you. Based on this, could gays have crafted a more effective ad, with more realistic home invaders? It worked for Lee Atwater!

The last pages of President-Elect Obama’s autobiography take place at the reception for his wedding to Michelle in 1992. The last two pages begin:

The person who made me proudest of all, though, was [my brother] Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol. He still works at his accounting firm [in Washington D.C.], but talks about moving back to Kenya once he has enough money.

And ends:

My mother’s chin started to tremble again, and Abongo lifted up his glass of fruit punch for a toast. “To those who are not here with us,” he said.

“And to a happy ending,” I said.

We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered-tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

I love that “And for that moment, at least.”

Jeez, Obama, stop feeling so sorry for yourself. You are the luckiest man alive.

The last line of Dreams, by the way, is a pallid knockoff of baseball slugger Lou Gehrig’s famous line from his last appearance at Yankee Stadium in 1939 after he had to leave the lineup after 2130 consecutive games.

“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

When he said that, Lou was dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. (Yeah, yeah, I know, he should have seen it coming.)