Mark Schmitt in the American prospect paints a fairly favorable potrait of Joe Biden. He casts Biden’s famous tendency to bloviate as evidence of his passion for issues. I’m amazed at the transformation of Biden from blowhard to statesman. Just a few months ago, the media was having a laugh over Biden penchant for gaffes. Remember the “clean” comments toward Obama on the first day of Biden’s campaign?

Why the rehabilitation of his image? The “gaffe machine” framing of Biden was never fair. There was always a more compelling story behind his wordiness. Listening to the Sunday talk shows, the reviews have been almost all favorable. There’s no digging into Biden’s past to pull out embarrassing quotes…yet?

Obama’s selection of Biden and the subsequent coverage might signal that we’re coming to the end of the era where “gotcha” politics plays a central role. The era of constant scrutiny makes gaffes part of the everyday stuff of politics rather than something unusual. In this climate, everyone will slip up, so why focus on that aspect of a candidate. In this case, Obama’s campaign has decided to go with someone who can respond to attacks rather than someone who is restrained in speech. What this might mean is that the ability to respond to attack or to reinforce the larger frame you want to construct for your opponent is more important than the occasional mistake. It will be interesting to see his Wednesday night speech.

Black Political Analysis’ outing of himself as a soccer fan has inspired me to post about my own love for the sport. Last night the United States defeated Guatemala in Guatemala City 1-0 in the first game of World Cup Qualifying from the CONCACAF region.

This event signals the only occasion I can think of where Americans travel to Latin America, or any part of the developing world, to engage in a meaningful athletic contest. This exposes them to a good deal of Anti-Americanism when they play Central American teams. This amazing Gatorade video from 2006 captures the surreal experience of CONCACAF qualifying for the United States. I particularly like the look on U.S. player Santino Quaranta as the roof above him is vibrating from the crowd noise.

This animosity the U.S. players deal with often takes the form of batteries and urine bags tossed at the American players. It also makes for particularly intense games on the field. Here are the highlights of yesterday’s game with Guatemala. The do not include the chippiness with which the contest was played.

This qualifying process is an open invitation for jingoism — our boys having urine bags tossed at them by “foreigners.” But we collectively ignore it. Heck, ESPN couldn’t be bothered to start showing the game until the 12th minute, not only to wait for a baseball game to end, but to show Sportscenter highlights.

Why do Americans have little interest in these matches? Does is say something about our continued embrace of Manifest Destiny. After a century and a half of a paternalistic attitude towards Latin America and its cultures, does the idea persist in the American collective that Latin America is of little value?

I don’t think it’s simply an xenophobic hatred of soccer. America has become a soccer nation. The 2006 world cup final drew a 7.0 television rating. While these aren’t quite super bowl ratings, they are competitive with the NBA finals and not too far from World Series ratings. The ratings for the final game of the 2008 European Soccer championship (3.1), an event in which no American team or player was participating, matched that of the average for the Stanley Cup finals (3.2).

However, this has not translated to fervent support of the American team as they engage in a competition with unrivaled passion and intensity, except when countries come to the United States to play. As the United States become more Latinized, it will be interesting to see whether the national imaginary embraces rivalries with Latin American countries and pays attention to them.

Our currrent rivalry with Mexico is perhaps one of the best in the world. After the Americans beat Mexico 2-0 in the 2002 World Cup, it has become a national obsession to best the United States. What irks Mexico most, I think, is that the U.S. consistently beats them and doesn’t seem to care. There is a deep seated sense, in my view, that America has no respect for Mexico. Would a losing streak to Mexico make Americans more interested in the rivalry? Given the current squads, Mexico has far more exciting young players than the U.S. (Giovanni Dos Santos, Carlos Vela, Andres Guardado, Guillermo Franco, etc.) so it could happen.

David Smith in the Guardian gives pause to Google-philes by inviting us to think of what our favorite corporate behemoth with look like in 10 years. As an avowed Google devotee, even I have to pause at the company’s reach:

Google’s tentacles are everywhere. It runs services for blogging, email, instant messaging, shopping and social networking. It offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and other tools to rival Microsoft’s products in the workplace. It is building a software platform for mobile phones that may challenge Apple’s iPhone and others. It has just launched Knol, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia to take on Wikipedia. In America, Google Health enables users to maintain their own medical records. The company is also working on language translation, speech recognition and video search.

The bulk of the article covers familiar ground: is Google a friendly giant helping us manage our lives or is it a gathering dark force poised to hurl us into a police state of our own creation? I remain strangely untroubled by Google’s data sweep, despite the dangers of Google’s uber-data collection and the warnings of Internet critics, like this one by Andrew Keen:

They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together. They make the Stasi and the KGB look like the innocent old granny next door. This is of immense significance. If someone evil took them over, they could easily become Big Brother.

What explains my calm? Our YouTube culture provides numerous examples of people in public live who’s impressions of them have been forever shaped by a snippet of their lives posted on-line. Poor David Hasselhoff will think twice about getting drunk in front of his kids.

Perhaps it is the element of consent involved in the surrender of data. As someone who blogs, e-mails, writes, and reads using google’s products, I’ve willingly entered into an agreement to place parts of my life into the cloud in exchange for convenience. This consent either justifies their collection of data or is an example of my inability to properly assess risk. Google’s narrative, perpetuated by the media, probably reinforces a sense of security. Undoubtedly, the broad swath of cyberdata that Google collects, in the wrong hands, could be uses as a tool of repression.

But despite these looming fears, hundreds of millions willingly submit information. At the end of the day, we have to conclude that for most people, convenience trumps privacy. I don’t agree with this characterization:

It is true that Google doesn’t force anyone to reveal anything. But to quote a book currently popular among politicians, its users are ‘nudged’ towards entering more and more information about themselves in exchange for personalised services. Google can save you time and money, find a restaurant to your taste or a chemist to cure your illness, but only if it knows you well enough. Help it to help you; that is the siren song… The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as “What shall I do tomorrow?” and “What job should I take?” This is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.’

“Nudging” suggests a form of coercion rather than a consensual exchange. The idea that any surrender of information to an entity is heresy and only done is the person is somehow coerced into giving it, strikes me as overly individualistic. Ultimately, we are social beings and we want the opportunities for sociality the web provides. It does, of course, come laden with a political ideology that promotes connection over individualism, but that’s for another post 🙂

Interesting article in the American Prospect by Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein on Obama’s efforts to remake the Democractic party. The gist of the article is that Obama differs from Bill Clinton is his emphasis on grass-roots party building over shifting the party’s ideology to the center. Here is the key quote from the article:

If Bill Clinton’s project for the Democratic Party was mostly ideological, Obama’s is mostly organizational. Clinton sought to change the party’s ideas; Obama is more interested in building its infrastructure. But for what?

The “what,” Goldstein and Klein suggest, is to build a party that can more effectively govern down the line. They cite a number of examples of Obama’s embrace of a “50 state strategy.” Here’s an interesting one from Texas:

The Obama campaign had decided, Axelrod announced to a crowd of 250 at the downtown Wortham Center, to send 15 paid staffers to the state and organize thousands of volunteers to get out the vote, an unprecedented commitment of resources to the Lone Star State from a Democratic presidential campaign. The goal isn’t for Obama to win Texas’ 34 electoral votes. Rather, by registering Democrats, Obama hopes to help the Texas Democratic Party regain control of its state legislature, which would allow Democrats to redistrict the state’s congressional delegation for 2010, potentially winning House seats in the process. That’s not simply down-ballot organizing–it’s way down-ballot organizing, reaching into state legislatures to influence coming congressional reapportionments in order to create large national majorities years down the line.

This grand strategy of course may explode in the Obama campaign’s face, but the upside has the potential to be transformational. In a year where the Republican brand is in disarray, an Obama who just gets past the finish line might not have a personal mandate, but he may have close to veto proof majorities. The suggestion in the article is that Obama’s empahsis on party building is an effort to create an entity that can deliver legislatively.

At the time, observers focused on Obama’s promised outreach to independents and Republicans. His rhetoric has often signaled an appetite for compromise that has left some wondering about what, exactly, Obama’s core policy commitments would be in office. But less attention was given to what Obama seemed to think would attract folks from across the aisle: real policy-making, which Obama’s campaign believes requires a Democratic Party infrastructure strong enough to pass the president’s priorities.

It’s a “grow your tribe” approach that served the Republicans well since the 1980’s. The article highlights for me the potential for a massive realignment in party politics the likes of which we haven’t seen since the early 1970’s. The question is whether it can produce the desired results in 80 days it needs to sustain itself. If Obama loses this election, the 50 state strategy might go with him. On the other hand, if he wins, will be be able to bring along enough congressional seats to have success governing. If he can’t then those Red state electoral seedlings will be choked off.

Fellow political scientist Renee Cramer at Girl with Pen (new blogroll member!) had an interesting post a few months back drawing linkages between Gloria Anzaldua’s work and the Obama candidacy. Cramer quotes Anzaldua’s definition of borderlands:

the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.

This is probably what draws me so strongly to the Obama candidacy. I grew up in a Cuban-American community in South Florida, went to college in Tallahassee, Florida (10 minutes from the Georgia border), graduate school in Boulder, Colorado, lived in central Maine for two years and finally settled in suburban Southern California. The need to negotiate a number different cultures (deep South Tallahassee, hyper-progressive Boulder, parochial central Maine, and now polyglot Southern California), has been a great learning experience but also a challenge.

The great strength of living in the bordelands is the ability to be comfortable in a variety of different settings. The challenge is the feeling of never being comfortable in any one place. This is where I am most empathic towards Obama. As the first truly “borderlands” candidate, he has a great facility with a diverse range of audiences. But the flip side has been this lingering sense among vast swaths of the American public that he is not “one of us.” The McCain campaign tapped into this back in February when they ran an ad calling McCain “The American President America has been Waiting for.” It is this sense of otherness, of the stranger among us, that jeapordizes the Obama candidacy.

The anti-Obama “celebrity” ads, I think, reinforce this idea of Obama as “not one of us.” There is a subtle layering of messages in this recent wave of attacks. At first, I posted that the ad was tapping into “white grievance” over the perception of Blacks receiving undeserved benefits via affirmative-action. Now I think there’s something more subtle going on. The ads, tap into this idea of stranger. The notion that you can’t trust the “borderlands” candidate because his loyalties might lie elsewhere. The idea of celebrity adds one additional layer of otherness. He’s a star. he’s exotic. He can’t relate to your problems because he’s not you.

This casting of Obama as “other” seems to hit me personally. My wife and daughter are in for 80 days of me griping about this. I take it so personally because I am this “other” who is constantly negotiating with difference cultures. The rejection of Obama as a presidential candidate, suggests a fundamental rejection of me and others who live in the “borderlands.” Obama, I think, intuitively understands this risk, and has been running to the center to stave off this notion of “the stranger.” I am pessimistic that it will have the desired effect.

The “bench” of borderlands candidates in either party is thin. If Obama doesn’t do it this time, the change for a president like this might not come for decades. That would be a shame because I fundamentally agree with Andrew Sullivan’s piece, which Cramer references, that we sorely need a “borderlands” worldview in our engagement with the rest of the world.

BTW, I’d be a bad husband if I mentioned Girl with Pen without promoting my wife’s, Adnia Nack’s, own guest post on that blog.

After the 2006 midterm elections my department put on a post-mortem where my colleagues and I discussed the ramifications of the elections for American politics. I was in the minority among my colleagues in thinking that the era of the median voter theory in American politics was over. I thought Roveism, or the idea that the middle doesn’t matter as much in American politics as mobilizing the bases, was in acsendance. I expected a politics of polarization where “tribes” on either side would dictate the outcomes in presidential politics for the forseeable future. What that meant is that as long as the tribe of people who identified as conservative is larger than the tribe of people who identify as liberal, that group will win regardless of objective factors like economic indicators or performance of past administrations.

Initially, the Obama campaign made me rethink my initial view. His call for “bringing people together” seemed to have struck a chord in the American electorate. But 80 days from the election, I’m starting to settle back into my initial view that strong party identification will win out over facts on the ground. I was struck watching the Saddleback Forum yesterday at Pastor Rick Warren’s church that voters are beginning to sort into their tribes. For all the talk of new, young evangelicals giving Obama a chance in November, it was apparent from the difference in responses given to the two candidates that Obama stood no chance of connecting with this group of potential voters. Indeed, among White evangelicals, Obama is faring no better than John Kerry did in 2004. That is stunning given that Bush is widely regarded as the “evangelical candidate” and Kerry was viewed as a largely secular figure.

Now the table seem reversed, Obama is an avowed Christian, albeit at one of those “liberal” churches and McCain is a traditional Western Republican who is reticent to talk openly about his faith. But it hasn’t moved the needle one inch. I think this is because we have two core constituencies on either side of the political divide that have starkly different world views. I’ll be interested to see if his “change” theme works in the face of this continued polarization.

Evan Ratliff at Salon’s Machinist blog asks if the Internet is making us lose our memory. Building off of Nicholas Carr’s provocative Atlantic article entitled Is Google Making us Stupid and the discussions that have resulted therein…here and here, Ratliff wonders what happens to our brains when we never develop the need to remember certain items, like remembering phone numbers, an task that online personal databases has rendered obsolete.

My interest is in whether memorization is a skill we should be teaching our undergraduates. If facts are readily available, should our student assessment consist of testing the retention skills of our students? Should our role be to help students develop the memorization skills they might not have learned beforehand?

Anthropologist Michael Wesch has an interesting take on this question. In this wonderful lecture from the University of Manitoba, Wesch makes the claim that most university classrooms are designed with the assumption that knowledge is limited and the expert at the front of the room is its main disseminator. The result is that the professor is competing directly with the web as a disseminator of knowledge. Speaking for myself, that’s a battle I can’t win. I agree with Wesch that our job is not solely to disseminate information, but to help students use the tools of knowledge aggregation to address problems. In Wesch lecture, he talks about how he poses a “grand narrative” question at the start of his course and the students structure the types of materials they need to address the question they are addressing.

The problem is that many of us in academia treat the web as the enemy. I’ve had countless conversations about the evils of Wikipedia. Much of this is a natural reaction on the part of “experts” whose authority is being challenged by “the crowd.” Unfortunately for us, the information produced by “the crowd” is more accessible, and therefore potentially more influential than that produced within the ivory tower. Since the majority of our students will not live in the ivory tower, I’d rather they learn to marshal “the crowd” rather than ignore it.