IS OBAMA A MUSLIM? MICHAEL WALZER'S HEIR AT PRINCETON INVESTIGATES

Toward A Historic Democratic Victory?

Paul Maslin, a consultant for Howard Dean in 2004, points out that "if the economy and the performance of the economy will dictate ultimately the outcome of this race, then again we're looking at, maybe not an FDR-like, but certainly a historic Democratic victory of large proportions." This comes from a roundtable that you can find here, where it was also said that "It's clear that the McCain campaign isn't going to have anything near the kind of ground game in terms of turnout and organization that the Bush campaign had in '04." A possible map of Obama's victory is above here. It shows Obama collecting 317 electoral vote (and possibly 344 if he wins in Florida), approaching the record of Bill Clinton in 1996 with 379 electoral votes. You can find the map, and more data at: http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Housing Crisis: Even Representatives May Be In Trouble

Sub prime mortgages crisis has apparently reached Congressmen, too. CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) reports that Democrat Laura Richardson’s Sacramento home has been sold into foreclosure. The Representative from California claims that this happened without her knowledge and contrary to an agreement with her lender, but Richardson failed to make mortgage payments on the property for nearly a year, and didn't pay approximately $9,000 in property taxes on that home. She has defaulted on other home loans as well. Her house was bought at a foreclosure auction by James York on May 7, 2008 for $388,000.

CREW investigates the story because there is a strong smell of foul play: Richardson has an awful credit history, and it is quite possible that she counts on her connections to take advantage of the situation. However, a U.S. Representative now has a gross salary of about $100,000 per year, that is about € 60,000, peanuts compared to the indemnities of Italian Senators and Deputies, and she may well be in financial troubles...

Will John McCain Do Better Than Barry Goldwater?

Politically, the situation in the field is this: Obama has gained a 7-point margin over John McCain in the last three days (50%-43%) and he seems to be a Democratic candidate not weakened at all by the long battle in the primaries. At least, this seems to be the effect of Hillary Clinton's endorsement of Saturday: now 81% of Democratic voters say they are ready to vote for him.
That means he should easily win in November: he will need only to keep the blue States where John Kerry prevailed in 2004, and win in states like Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico (look at the map on top of the page): that would make 273 votes in the Electoral College, more than the "magic number" of 270. In Iowa and New Mexico a few thousand votes more (or, a few thousand votes LESS in the Republican column) will suffice. Colorado has been leaning Democratic in recent years, electing several smart politicians like governor Bill Ritter and senator Ken Salazar.
This, however, is a conservative forecast: polls give him good chances of winning in Ohio and Nevada, creating a very large majority in the Electoral College for a Democratic President who will have strong Democratic majorities in Congress (the party should pick several seats in the House, and Democrats are on the brink of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate).
During an American Presidential campaign everything can happen, but John McCain will have a hard time in convincing voters that the main issue should be terrorism, or Iraq, and not the economy. The gasoline at 4$ a gallon is simply political poison for him.

Marco Polo Review of Kindles

According to New York Times's columnist Paul Krugman, the day of electronic books has arrived. Krugman, who is a respected economist, correctly points out that "e-books have been coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time." Indeed so: fifteen years ago, Alberto Vitale, the tycoon of Random House, engineered the purchase of Bantam Electronic Publishing to beef up his own electronic division. As proof of his commitment, Vitale formed Random House's New Media Division to 'identify and pursue multimedia opportunities."

The opportunities were very slow in coming, and Random House, together with Microsoft and a bunch of other enthusiasts, lost tons of money in pursuing various e-book projects, while Vitale happily retired after cashing his stock options. Nevertheless, we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink: the small device Amazon Kindle.

The slow penetration of Kindle (now $359) may allow paper books to survive for decades more, but Krugman stresses that its importance lies elsewhere: all business models based on making money by selling contents (either in the form of music CDs, newspapers or books) will find difficult to survive in an era dominated by internet (which is what allows you to read these lines right now for free).

One idea is that the content of books, like music, could be subsidized by merchandising, but it seems easier to sell t-shirts of the Grateful Dead than mugs of Amartya Sen. The Nobel in Economics for 1998, and former Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, is probably happy to let the world know his opinions for free, but the entire building of intellectual creation is shaking. Do not be surprised if the name of this publication will become Marco Polo Review of Kindles, one of these days.

Will Clinton Do What Reagan Did in 1976?

In the end, numbers prevailed and all the talk about a convention fight in Denver proved to be just that... talk. Hillary Rodham Clinton will suspend her campaign and endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, which was her only possible choice after Democratic members of Congress urged her to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around the nominee. Now, the problem is: what will Clinton do in the Fall?

I suspect that the rumors about her becoming Vice president are nonsense: if she is really serious in asking the n. 2 position on the ticket, Obama will be dead serious in refusing it. Not because of her sometimes vicious attacks during the primaries but because an Obama-Clinton ticket would not have credibility vis-à-vis the voters: it would give them the feeling that everything was simply a show and that, in the end, every nasty political fight can finish with tarallucci e vino (if you are not familiar with this Italian motto, send me an email, and I will explain). There are all chances that Obama will pick up someone with experience, and possibly a military background, to stand up to McCain when things will get tough after the conventions. 

The real issue, then, is whether Hillary will indeed campaign for Obama in the Fall, or not. There is one precedent: the 1976 long contest between Gerald Ford, the incumbent President who had entered the White House because of Richard Nixon's resignation after Watergate, and conservative rising star Ronald Reagan. Reagan fought to the bitter end and this solidified his name recognition, and his relationship with the party, opening the path to his easy nomination 1980.

In the campaign of 1976, however, he stayed home in California, and his presence at political events was perfunctory. Ford asked him to play an active role, at least in some swing states were he was popular, like Ohio and Mississippi, but Reagan declined.Of course, nobody can say what would have happened had Reagan campaigned vigorously, but the numbers are there: barely 11.500 ballots more in Ohio and 15.500 in Mississippi would have been enough to tilt these states to Ford, and create a majority for him in the Electoral College. Carter would still have had a plurality of the popular vote but Ford would have won 272 electoral votes and with that the White House (a scenario similar to the one of 2000, when Gore easily won the popular vote but Bush got more electoral votes).

So, the real question is: how hard will Clinton work in the Fall, to convince her supporters that a democratic victory in 2008 is indeed necessary? I suspect that 85% of them will vote for Obama anyway, but the traps on the road to victory in any American presidential election are more than land mines in a Cambodia uncleared field.

Obama and Clinton viewed in an equally positive light by American media

Washington D.C. - A new study was released Friday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the tone of the media coverage of the three candidates still running for the White House; John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The research, conducted by the Pew Research Center in partnership with the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University looked at how various mainstream media outlets have talked about the three Senators since the beginning of the year.
It appears, for example, that the accusations brought forward by the Clinton campaign that media coverage has been more accepting of Barack Obama than of the ex-first lady are not grounded in any data. In fact, the study found that the image of the two democratic candidates that has been portrayed by the media has been equally positive until March and then it has become increasingly negative toward Obama. The report says; "From January 1, just before the Iowa caucuses, through March 9, following the Texas and Ohio contests, the height of the primary season, the dominant personal narratives in the media about Obama and Clinton were almost identical in tone, and were both twice as positive as negative...The trajectory of the coverage, however, began to turn against Obama, and did so well before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright...What’s more, an additional analysis of more general campaign topics suggests the Obama narrative became even more negative later in March, April and May."
In general, both Obama and Clinton have been more successful than John McCain in projecting the image they chose. Obama is viewed as representing change and hope and Clinton is described as being experienced and ready to be president on day one, precisely the message their campaigns have been trying to get across. John McCain, instead, doesn't seem as much in control and the media coverage on him has focused significantly on the fact that he's not a true conservative, something that he's been trying to wipe off, so far unsuccessfully .