Canada is set to vote in less than two weeks on October 14th.  It’s a parliamentary system, so voter choices at the representative level (MP=member of Parliament) in each district (riding) determine who the prime minister is.  The major parties are the Conservatives (far right & center-right), Liberals (center-left), New Democratic Party (left), Bloc Quebécois (regional), & the Greens.  The Bloc is a Quebéc-only party that has fallen out of favor this year.  The big issue this year is whether the Conservatives can get a majority government.  Currently, they have a minority government but with over 50% of the ridings (155 seats), they can get a majority, which means they would have much more power.

We’ve been talking about frames a lot, so let’s see how these play out in Canadian satire using kids to portray the party leaders.  Rick Mercer is in the same vein as Stewart/Colbert and a friend at Ipsos in Vancouver sent the following video around.  The players & some perceptions:

• Stephen Harper:  Conservative & leader of minority government (“W”-like, from the oil-rich west [Alberta], hoping for a majority, emphasizing the economy and “stay the course” mentality, leader of party doing well in the polls now, good at framing & evading)
• Stephane Dion: Liberal (embraced green issues & carbon taxes, nerdy/egghead reputation, has French accent and is linked to past separatist sentiments in Quebéc, leader of a party suffering from weakness now)
• Jack Layton: NDP (strength metaphor, charismatic, resurgence since Liberal party has faltered)
• Elizabeth May: Green (seen as splitting the vote on the left)

The latest polls show that the Conservatives will likely win, but fall short of a majority.  The NDP was hoping to be second, but they’re unlikely to overtake the Liberals.  The election will be decided by 45 “battleground ridings.”  I’ve been following this election since I spend summers in Toronto and figuring out Canadian politics.  I must admit that I find the US election cycle fatiguing… January 2007 – November 2008.  In contrast, this Canadian election season officially started on September 7, 2008 when Parliament was dissolved.

What would the framers have thought of this? Come to think of it, maybe they should make a version with the framers, to satisfy the blood lust of constitutional scholars.

I was going to post on how this game feeds into a pluralist frame of democratic governance, over a deliberative frame, but that would officially make me a pinhead! I wonder if Obama or McCain staffers secretly play this game on a bad day.

In the continuing effort to make the readers of this blog feel as old as I feel somedays, I present you the Class of 2012 Mindest List from Beloit college. Here’s a description of the lilst from their website:

Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. The List is shared with faculty and with thousands who request it each year as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation

Here are, in no particular order, the five most relevant to the increased “thickening” of our culture.

23. Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
31. They have never been able to color a tree using a raw umber Crayola.
37. Authorities have always been building a wall along the Mexican border.
43. Personal privacy has always been threatened.
58. Radio stations have never been required to present both sides of public issues.

Do you think growing up with these things being a given fact of our student’s daily experience means for their engagement in our classrooms?

Bear with me with my French references.  First Bourdieu and now Ségolène Royal. Last spring, I followed the Royal/Sarcozy campaigns in the French Presidential elections, which was full of frames.  Ségolène wasn’t a folksy “hockey mom” type with (say) non-Parisian French and a homespun demeanor of  a country “girl” from Provence.  No, “Ségo” was a “hottie” Socialist, who was the daughter of a general and a disciple of François Mitterand in the 1980s.  She and her romantic male partner, François Hollande (also a Socialist politician) both won seats in 1988 and rose in the ranks of the party throughout the 1990s.  Despite having 4 children out of wedlock, Ségo navigated the French culture wars.  I’m sure it helped she was deemed as sexy and charming.  Her version of femininity resonated with many.  In early 2006, Salon.com, true to type when it comes to missing the point, had an article comparing Ségo Royal to Hillary Clinton.  The Salon.com similarities are superficial and incidental in my book, but the Salon piece did bring up two issues:  (1) the issue of credibility and (2) having an ideologically confused message/platform.  In a post mortem article on her loss, these issues would sink her, along with Sarcozy’s “on code” messages tapping into the concerns and worries of many French citizens.  While her specific “femininity” frame may have helped her, it may have also been a dual-edged sword.  What are the “rules” for a woman be sexy and credible with the masses?  In the end, Ségo’s credibility was hurt by her policies seeming improvised, as she was campaigning.  In addition, the socialist “code” wasn’t on track and failed to resonate with the fragmented left.

How can this relate to McCain/Palin?  I think that McCain was expecting to use Palin as a critical “selling proposition” to the ticket, in addition to having a “wow” factor.  I think Palin was expected to mobilize the conservative base while still having appeal to the moderate “everyperson,” i.e., hockey moms and Joe Six-pack.  If Palin is going to be front-and-center and in the campaign trenches, I’m afraid the “credibility” issue will always be an albatross.  She has been framed in a certain way and now she has to expend so much energy to dispel that perception.  Think Swift Boat veterans in 2004.  Was she framed this way due to her gender or her brand of femininity?  Even if she appears competent and knowledgeable, is the public primed to expect a gaffe from her and will this undermine the credibility of the entire ticket?

Watching the Palin-Biden debate last night, I had one of those “a-ha” moments when a theory’s power is revealed in real time.  For me, this happened as Joe Biden was speaking of aternative energy policy.  I was watching CNN’s coverage of the debate, during which the bottom of the screen flashed the read out of an EKG machine…err…I mean…the collective response from the “Perception Analyzers” of three dozen or so undeclared voters in Ohio.  When Biden was on about clean coal and global warming, the needle didn’t move.

It wasn’t until Biden employed a “frame bridging” strategy of connecting clean coal to “good paying jobs” that the lines on the monitor shot up into very positive territory.   Snow and Benford define frame bridging as a “linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem.” (467). The intent of which in the policy world is to gain greater support for a given policy, in this case “alternative energy”  

The “perception analyzer,” and its progeny, desipte their prima facie corniness title, do greaty aid the watching of debates.

A fascinating piece of research on Sarah Palin just came out in this month’s “Communication Currents” (a website that distills some of the best new research in the field of communication into bite-sized writings), helping us deal with questions like: Why has she been so popular among so many? In what ways has she been framed differently than other women leaders like Hillary Clinton? And what might we infer from this in the lead up to the election? (see www.communicationcurrents.com/print.asp?issuepage=117) 

The authors argue that there are deeply gendered, metaphorical identity frames of the rugged “Pioneer” (an “independent think[er]” and a “symbolic token of women’s achievements”) and authentic “Beauty Queen” (who “knows how to adhere to society’s rules for appearance”) that have been recast for Palin in such as a way as to make her fit into “the Frontier” narrative that has its roots in Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. More importantly, the metaphor of “The Unruly Woman” which many in the media used against Hillary Clinton has been rhetorically refashioned for Palin, who can “revel in unruliness” because of the ways her other conservative credentials protect her from attacks as a “feminazi.”

I should add into this discussion that, the pioneer and frontier metaphors would appear to have a track record in beating out “intellectual” frames (perhaps a subset of the “unruly”?) in American politics. In prior elections, George W. Bush was continually using the frontier myth (e.g. rugged cowboy, Crawford ranch, use of posters such as “Wanted: Dead or Alive” of Osama bin Laden [West and Carey]) to power over his intellectual deficits. It may be the case that history is repeating itself here unfortunately, and if so, Palin may not have as much to worry about over the next month as this last week may suggest.

 Furthermore, despite much of the controversy about Palin’s appearances on television last week and average performance in the vice-presidential debates, she still stands a good chance of rising in credibility in the coming weeks due to these frames. There is decades of research on the concept of “credibility” in the field of communication. While we often talk about credibility as something someone “has,” it is a far more dynamic construct than is given credit, more akin to what someone “does” and constantly in flux given moment-to-moment audience perceptions. For example, even over the course of delivering one speech, a speaker can start with high credibility, lose credibility, and regain it by the end (say, all within 10 minutes!). If anyone, the career of Bill Clinton—whose credibility has gone up and down continually over the years, should teach us much about this. Given the time left until the election, I think we’ll see that Palin’s credibility will continue to wax and wane with these ongoing metaphorical campaigns, and the degree to which they are undermined or advanced by each side.

R or D, you’ve gotta give it up to the Obama campaign for pushing the envelope on new technology in the campaign. Today, TechPresident posts about a new Iphone application that is supposed to work as your personal GOTV organizer. Among the features it has is the ability to organize your contacts by state of importance, quick access to Obama’s policy positions, and a database of local Obama events in the area.

The value of this app is to facilitate the “neighbor to neighbor” elements of GOTV efforts that proved so successful for the Bush campaign in 2004. The Obama IPhone application was actually volunteer created and ultimately adopted by the campaign. It’s a testament to the open source nature of some (not all) aspects of the campaign that its volunteers take such ownership over the campaign process.

Something interesting is popping up in recent swing state surveys. Obama is underperforming among black voters. According to Survey USA, John McCain is garnering a significant chunk of Black voters in critical swing states:
15% of Ohio African-Americans,
17% of Indiana African-Americans,
20% of New Jersey African-Americans,
21% of Florida African-Americans

These numbers seem remarkably high given the fact that George Bush got only 11% of the Black vote in 2004 and that was a marked improvement from 2000 when Bush got only 9% of the Black vote against Al Gore.  How do we make sense of this?

This might be a particular phenomenon among Black voters in swing states.  I went back to 2004 to compare Kerry’s performance to Obama at the same time in the race.  According to Survey USA, these were the percent of Black voters who were supporting George Bush in early October of 2004.

Florida — 10/1 – 16%
Indiana — 10/3 – 16%
Ohio — 10/3 – 20%
New Jersey 10/3 15%

These figures are slightly lower than McCain’s totals at the same time in 2008.  This given the fact that a) Obama is a Black candidate and b) 2008 is a much more favorable climate for Democrats.

More surprisingly, this represents a drop In support for Obama from June, when Survey USA was in the field in these states here were the results:

Ohio 6/22 – 13%

Florida 8/1 – 16%

Indiana 6/21 – 14%

New Jersey – NA

It is an even greater drop if you look at polls during the primary (except for Ohio)

New Jersey 2/26 – 9%

Indiana 2/26 — 4%

Florida 2/26 — 15%

Ohio 2/26 — 20%

This raises a few interesting questions.  Why is McCain’s support growing among Black voters in swing states?  One answer might be fear of what an Obama president might do for race relations? The Boston globe had a headline reading “WHite Supremacists Hope Obama win Creates Backlash”

Another interesting question is whether a chunk of these voters “come home” to the Democratic party.  To understand this, I looked at each state’s final exit poll and found some migration back to the Democrats.

Florida – 13%

Indiana – 8%

Ohio 16%

New Jersey — 14%

What do you think explains all this?

With the deepening economic crisis and the overall gravity of this election, why am I (and others hung up on how Sarah Palin will perform in the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night?

The main reason, I think, is that the Katie Couric interview I saw scared me so much that I’ve been on a fact-finding mission to determine if this woman is for real. I’ve watched some of her 2006 gubernatorial debates and her interview with Janet Napolitano on Charlie Rose. My conclusion is that she’s definitely more politically adroit than she revealed in the Couric interviews, but there’s something unsettling about watching even these, more polished, appearances. She seems to be gliding through these appearances with no one really questioning her core beliefs.

This might be patently unfair, but after watching these videos, Palin’s rise reminds me of Peter Sellers’ character in Being There.

In the movie, Sellers plays a gardener who works tending a rich man’s garden. he lives a relatively sheltered life and thus learns about the outside world through television. When his employer dies, Chance must go out on his own. Through a series of misunderstandings and chance encounters, he becomes an adviser to the U.S. president and a celebrity. The media celebrates his “folksy wisdom” and he is ultimately tapped to be president.

Of course, Palin has more political skill and is actually conscious of her state of affairs, but her appeal strikes me as similar to that of Sellers’ character. Her very anti-intellectualism is seen as a boon to those whose political ideology she shares. For the rest who are not ideological, she’s an every woman. Judith Warner refers to Palin as tapping into the “inner Elle Woods” of lots of women (and probably men).

But this is a scary proposition. take for instance this incredibly insightful article by Andrew Halcro, an independent gubernatorial candidate who debated Palin twice in 2006. He recalls comparing notes post debate with Palin when she offered this observation:

Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?

While we all can relate to instances where we felt “over our heads” and it is appealing to turn to “simplicity” as a response to a complex world, but it strikes me as a great dice roll to elect people to high office based on “folksiness.” I’ll be watching Thursday with great interest.

Update: Oh…my….holy…god!

Comedy gold.

But 1) does it create a backlash among working class white women who identify with Palin and 2) does it set expectations for this week’s debates so low that a string of coherent sentences become a triumph. Keep in mind that this woman beat an incumbent establishment Republican in her gubernatorial primary and beat an established Democrat to become governor. She had to have done something right in her debates to get there.