All you really need to know:

Older voters came out… younger ones didn’t.  The underlying fundamentals were pretty much the same as they were in 2008 Whites turned out at slightly greater number (78% this time compared to 74% in 2008) and they did vote Republican in greater numbers (55% in 2008 compared to 60% last night), but all racial and ethnic groups voted for Republicans in slightly greater numbers.  White women in particular shifted to the GOP in greater numbers.  They went 58%-40% for Republicans this year, compared to 53%-46% in 2008.

Be comforted Dems, the President and the Congress used their political capital and achieved significant legislation in the first two years.  They knew they would never be as popular as they were in January of 2008 and they moved a progressive agenda forward in the face of a horrible political context.   Regardless of what the Dems did, they were going to lost their majority.  They have a significant body of work to show for it.  If they could have gotten one more Senator in 2008, you could have seen an even bigger progressive legislative Renaissance.

Via: Matt Yglesias

From an otherwise depressing election.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, Latinos turned out in big numbers to keep Sharon Angle out of the Senate.

Despite earlier polling data that indicated Hispanics would skip this election, exit polls showed they accounted for a record 16 percent of total voters. That turnout was likely backlash to an ad aired by a Republican operative explicitly telling Hispanics not to vote, as well as inflammatory ads from Angle’s campaign that used images of Hispanic youth dressed as gang members.

I hope this signals to Republicans that they will pay a political price for making implicit racial appeals like this one.

Man is this cynical, but funny!  All I can say is…  ouch!

For those of you who are grad students out there, don’t believe the hype! Being an academic is a great job.  There is a whole lot of kool-aid drinking in my discipline, but there are lots of different ways to be a college professor.  I admit that if I had taken a different career path, I might be as cynical as the freakishly long armed professor in this video.

Via The Monkey Cage.

Ezra Klein is just fine with the term illegal immigrant. He’s not partial to just calling someone an “illegal.” Here’s part of his logic:

it’s not as if the word games fool anyone. The people who need to be convinced of comprehensive immigration reform — which must include a path to legal status for illegal immigrants — are angry about illegal immigration. Trying to paper over that won’t help, and might actually hurt.

But it’s not about convincing opponents of immigration reform. It has to do with how we talk about human beings who happen to be caught in a broader tension between global capital flows and claims to national sovereignty. To refer to a group of people as “illegal” in any kind of discussion is to assert their illegitimacy in the public dialogue. This is why when we have conversations on this issue, few people in the media think to talk with/get the perspectives of those who are “illegal” themselves.

If Klein wants to keep using the term “illegal immigrant,” let’s just go ahead and call anyone who violates the law “illegal ______.” Anyone with a speeding ticket is an “illegal driver.” After all, let’s not avoid the issue using PC language. Parking ticket? No…”illegal parker”! We don’t do it because we see those who commit those infractions as full human beings who made a mistake.

I often ask my class whether undocumented immigration is more like a misdemeanor or a capital crime? If it is a capital crime, then maybe the term applies. Sure, call someone a “murderer” or a “rapist” as their defining characteristic. I’d argue that maybe that person has ceded their expectation that society will view them as a multidimensional, human being. But what have undocumented immigrants done to be placed in that category?

Here’s more what I have to say about it. FYI, not sure why my image is so huge on that site! It’s a little scary 🙂

Maclom Gladwell searches for an activist Facebook in his recent New Yorker piece. Guess what? He doesn’t find it. Gladwell isnot the first person to make the observation that Facebook and other social networking platforms are of limited effectiveness in promoting activism. Evegny Morozov makes the important observation that the ease with which Facebook users can express support for a cause and feel they have taken action on that cause inhibits, rather than promotes, social activism.

I think these social critics are setting up a digital straw man. Facebook, for instance, serves other important political purposes that might not have direct, identifiable effect upon social policy. In my own recent work on Facebook political groups, I find that many of them are created with no specific activist purpose. Often, these groups seem simply to be a site to “park” political views in a place with access to thousands of sympathetic eyeballs. I argue that many individuals use Facebook to perform political identity in a venue that allows them to try on different political selves in a nomynous (not anonymous) venue. This means that individuals are performing a “public” political identity. For many of them this might be the only place they feel comfortable expressing this voice. Those who aren’t good communicators, disabled, low income or otherwise inhibited from participating in political activism can use Facebook as a semi-autonomous space to proclaim their political self.

Rather than see it as the savior of global politics, we should see Facebook as one more site where individuals can development their political voice. It’s often not a voice that we necessarily want developed. There is a great deal of nativist, racist, sexist and homophobic voice development on-line. But as a space, Facebook and other SNS sites allow the development of humanist/transformational voices. It is not an activist training ground, but rather a “third space” for cultivating political identity.

For us, the trick should be transforming these performative identity spaces into deliberative, cross cutting spaces. This requires theorizing digital citizenship to include cross-cutting dialogue as an essential component. In a paper I presented at the Western Political Science Association annual conference last year, I made the case that we should be training young people in a digital citizenship that includes stressing the importance of what Susan Bickford called “the politics of attention” or including the voiceless as be part of public conversations. Listening to the other through what Diana Mutz calls cross-cutting dialogue is critical in helping individuals developed textured, vetted and more nuanced voices in public dialogue.

The convergence of media and politics has it’s benefits 🙂

This is great and all, but can “viral irony” equate to youth turnout during midterm elections? At least it’s good for a laugh.

Here’s the original ad being parodied above:

Co-Thickculturite, Don Waisanen had a great post a while back about the political effect of public signage.  here’s another jarringly effective example of what I’ll call “engaged public space.”

This tally of military suicides is outside the studio of Brooklyn artist Sebastian Errasuriz. Its power comes from its simplicity.

BTW, if you have some free time, check Don out on the latest Sociology Improv podcast.

Also, take some time to read through fellow-Thickculturan Russell Stockard’s compelling reflections on his current trip to Haiti.

Finally, if you need some bedtime reading material, here’s one of my articles just published in the Journal of Public Deliberation.

My biggest disappointment with the Obama administration by far is that he has turned out to be a conventional (and somewhat effective) campaigner. What I expected from his presidency was the same rhetorical innovation he showed during his campaign. As a candidate, he was adroit as “breaking the third wall” of politics. He used his mix of revivalism and cerebralism to deconstruct the more absurd elements of politics. When an opponent would attack him, he’d say “this is what they’re trying to do….this is how politics is done in Washington.” It was wildly effective, it allowed him to be “in politics” but not “of politics.”

Now that is party is less than a month away from a pretty serious bloodletting in Congress, the president is back on the trail. But instead of returning to his deconstruction of politics theme, he’s decided to campaign as an insider. What’s worse is that he’s pretty much campaigning on the maddeningly erroneous Democratic belief that you can somehow reason with voters. The reason the Republicans were so effective in maintaining power for eight years was because they made no distinction between different types of Democrats…in their rhetoric, the Democrats were all godless liberals who hate America and want it destroyed.

I thought Obama was a candidate that understood the past rhetorical mistakes of the Democrats. I expected that after labor day, President Obama and the Democrats would take a page out of the Republican playbook and tie the Republicans to the Tea Party movement. He’d come out and connect the Republican party to their extremist elements. Perhaps a more sophisticated, less blatant version of Congressman Alan Grayson’s “Taliban Dan” ad against Republican Daniel Webster in a Florida House race.

The ad is incredibly unfair, taken out of context and really just unseemly politics. Perfect! Grayson might not survive, but at least he’s trying to weave a narrative about the other side. They are dangerously illiberal in their beliefs. I expected the Democratic party, under Obama’s leadership, to try to get the county to envision what it would be like to have people like Rand Paul, Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell in the Senate. Instead, the president keeps trotting out this stupid analogy of a car in a ditch and the Republicans doing nothing to help the Democrats get the car out of the ditch. Towards the end of this speech to the DNC here:

This is a poor rhetoric on so many levels. First, it seems like whining. Second, the public already has a low opinion of Republicans. The problem is not that they think Republicans can’t do a good job, the problem (speaking as a Democrat) is that they don’t fear Republicans. The public thinks (and of course I’m generalizing) that Republicans will come in a at least keep their taxes low and won’t be too much of a burden on business. Since politics is screwed up anyway, why not put in place the party that at least won’t harm my bottom line?

As someone who worked in the Democratic party and is still sympathetic to it, it maddens me how god awful the Democrats are at hand-to-hand political combat. It’s not that difficult, Democrats. Stop painting the Republicans as ineffectual do-nothings and paint them as dangerous. Something to be feared. Give Karl Rove credit. In 2002, the Republicans squeezed the Democrats like an anaconda. If you were a Democrat, you couldn’t get out from under the label of “soft on terrorism.” If you’re a Republicans, you can define yourself however you want and you’ll get no real pushback from the Democrats. The president refers to Republicans as “sipping on a slurpee” while the Democrats take action. That doesn’t scare me. Instead, the Republicans have won the rhetorical war by paining the Democrats as scary… (e.g they are running up the national debt). Did you ever stop to think that maybe most of the public is OK with slurpee sippers in Washington? They certainly aren’t going to be afraid of slurpee sippers. They might be scared of gun-toting, fundamentalist, witchcraft practicing, evolution denying, gay bashers.

This recession is a different animal than past incarnations. Here’s a data point:

The supposed recovery is being slowed down by artificially constructed housing market. We won’t see much progress until the damage of the last decade cycles through the system. Meanwhile, I wonder how much government can really do to alleviate the pain. Which I think it has some moral obligation to try to do… big soft lefty that I am.

From Good Magazine

1) The recession is hitting Black college grads harder than it is hitting White college grads. I guess post-racial America will have to wait.

Via Andrew Sullivan

2) A recent study found that those who pray\ regularly are less likely to drink than those who simply focus on “good thoughts.” Three cheers for ritual! Via Big Questions Online.

3) A study summarized in Miller-McCune People with symptoms of Type-II diabetes are less inclined to “forgive others” than those without.