My husband and I went to Nyack for Indian food this evening. Before dinner came, Steve pulled out his blackberry to check results in South Carolina. Then I called my mom for more information. Life of the political junkie.
Our waiter overheard our conversation and asked for information. He was overjoyed. He said he couldn’t wait to see what the talking heads had to say tomorrow. And the bloggers.
After dinner, we strolled down the street and spotted a TV in a pizzeria. Obama was giving his speech. All the pizza guys in their white shirts had come out from behind the counter and from the kitchen and were watching the speech. We went in and watched the speech with those guys. It was one of those rare bonding moments that you have with strangers. We talked about the upcoming primary and warmly wished each other a good evening.
Matt Yglesias wondered how many ordinary people watched Obama’s speech tonight. More than anyone expected.
Apt. 11d 
“..rare bonding moments that you have with strangers..”
One of my wife’s golden memories is going to a bar on Capitol Hill – she was a very junior civil servant in a group house with no TV – and watching Nixon resign. It glows in memory for her even still.
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We were out to dinner last night and I heard two other tables talking excitedly about the Obama win. This is a red state. It gives me hope that he could actually win the presidency.
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And, how about Carolyn Kennedy, who says she’s finally found the man to inherit her father’s legacy: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27kennedy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
“Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.”
It’s amazing actually, prevented from being extremely political from the fact that Ms. Kennedy has lived a carefully private life for so long.
Super Tuesday is going to be hard — California and New York are thousand pound gorillas where the demographics don’t break his way. For reasons I don’t understand, the Asian community is strongly supporting Clinton. It’s going to be tough for him to win.
I’m a cynic. I don’t necessarily believe in being inspired to greatness by any other person (a bit too messianic for me), but Obama is running on an idea, not on numbers and policy papers.
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“For reasons I don’t understand, the Asian community is strongly supporting Clinton.”
Racism? Or, more neutrally, Black/Asian racial tension? The LA riots were only 15 years ago.
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Racism is always a possibility — but, I’m not going to allege that motivation for people like Daniel Inouye, who I truly admire. I once heard him speak; he talked about the parallels between his own internment during World War II and about the treatment of Arab Americans in the aftermath of 9/11. He could have spent time talking about the differences. But he didn’t.
My suspicion, is that many establishment democrats have been helped by the Clintons’ in the past and that as one of their supporters said recently “They helped me all along. I’d feel like slime if I didn’t support them when I could help them.” Maria Cantwell is supporting Clinton — she can’t be forgetting that Hillary came out to do a fundraiser for her, when Hillary’s starpower made a difference for Maria.
bj
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I thought I had read somewhere that the Asian community does not vote as a bloc. It is a very diverse political group, internally.
I would read Inouye’s response to post-9/11 hysteria as stemming more from internment as an experience, vs. “being Asian”. An 80s-era Hmong family is Asian, but would not necessarily react in the same way, I would think.
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One prominent Asian blogger suggests that the “East Asian work ethic” promotes a dislike of Obama and his tendency to skip all controversial legislative votes.
(My time as a manager suggests that the fabled work ethic is a myth, but since when has veracity been allowed to get in the way of cultural pride?)
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An informal poll in a class at my husband’s university yielded a win for Huckabee, second place for Obama, and then the remaining vote-getters were all Republicans. (This is in Texas.)
Now that I’ve finished reading “Liberal Fascism” I’m expecting Jonah Goldberg to come out with a piece on Obama, Clinton, and Huckabee. The book is just crying out for an election-year addendum. (The last chapter is “The Tempting of Conservatism,” and Goldberg naturally has a thing or two to say about “compassionate conservatism.”)
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Amy — that sounds like the “Pariah endorsement” they detailed in the NYT (or Wash Post?) this morning. Are the students aware of Obama’s liberal ratings? one would guess not.
(The NYT also talked about the Clinton “endorsement” of McCain falling in the same category).
bj
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There are forces out there working to develop the Asian vote as a block (hampered, yes, by the diversity of the group). But, at least one plays hard on the race card: the perception that AsianAms are discriminated against in Universities and other hiring, because they are qualified in much higher numbers than their ratio in the population.
But, I spoke of Inuoye specifically because he has endorsed Clinton — even though he hails from Obama’s native state of Hawaii, and even though his own coalition has also been multi-ethnic (though multi-ethnic in Hawaii’s unique terms).
bj
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“But, at least one plays hard on the race card: the perception that AsianAms are discriminated against in Universities and other hiring, because they are qualified in much higher numbers than their ratio in the population.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if that perception of discrimination contained some truth. I note, for example, how often I hear that graduates from Asian or South Asian schools working here aren’t “creative.” (“Sure they’ve got good test scores, but they aren’t creative.” This comes up a lot when talking about American education. It’s the only bit of self-back-patting available, so it gets used a lot.) I also think that many areas of the American workplace are biased unfairly in favor of extroverts.
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I know when I was living in California in 1997 one of the most controversial elements of affirmative action was its impact on Asian American admissions to the university system. By requiring that admissions match state demographics, affirmative action drove required test scores for Asians way up — an Asian American needed to get significantly higher test scores than any other group to get in. I believe affirmative action was repealed in California subsequently.
BTW is it viewed as a good thing to have an ethnic group band together into a voting bloc? Isn’t the whole goal of diversity to move people beyond being judged and behaving based on these groupings alone? If Asian Americans are a diverse group, then why try to artificially band them together?
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It gets even more bizarre if you use the “Asia/Pacific” grouping, which covers way too much territory. (Plus, nobody seems to have figured out that most of Russia is in Asia). “Hispanic” or “Latino” is another famously broad category. When I taught night ESL classes in suburban MD, I’d have whole classes of Spanish-speakers from a dozen different countries, covering a whole rainbow of skin-tones, reflecting very different heritage and (very likely) very different life experiences and socioeconomic status in the old country.
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“(Plus, nobody seems to have figured out that most of Russia is in Asia)”
Tellingly, this includes the Russians themselves.
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Actually, that’s one of the enduring debates in Russian life–how European/Western should Russia be? It would be very interesting to hear how Russia’s current political leadership answers that question. I wouldn’t be surprised if they lean further towards Asia than Yeltsin and Gorbachev. I am not up on the latest, but it seems that Russia may be trying to be the head of the third world, rather than a third-rate first-world country.
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Maybe I should have said: “it seems that Russia may be trying to be the head of the third world, rather than a step-child of the European Union.”
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>Russia may be trying to be the head of the third world, rather than a step-child of the European Union
“Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”?
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Doug,
Good heavens, that’s exactly what I was thinking after I posted. Russia isn’t hell, and they seem to be doing really well thanks to all that oil revenue, but running the whole economy on oil is not a permanent solution. Of course, just going by current trends, by the time Russia runs out of oil, there will barely be any Russians (the CIA factbook says that Russian women have 1.39 kids). Russia has huge amounts of social capital thanks to the Soviet Union’s focus on math and science education, but I don’t think that advantage is being made proper use of.
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Although it’s not so much the low fertility as the excess vodka that’s driving Russia’s demographic decline; pretty much all of it (though ask M. Feshbach of course for details) is in the different life expectancies of Russian men and women, which is all about the vodka.
“Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol
The Russians escaped while we weren’t watching them, like Russians will
Now we’ve got all this room, we’ve even got the moon…”
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