Palm warned that after seven or eight apps, depending on footprint, we’d have to start closing some items to save memory, but we’ve taken the Pre up to 12 apps and beyond (including four browser windows, email, SMS / AIM conversations, the AccuWeather app, Pandora streaming in the background, dialer, and more) with no issue.

- Engadget

This makes me very happy.

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No doubt you’re already aware that you can watch 4oD Catch-Up on our new improved channel4.com (and if you haven’t tried it yet, what are you waiting for?). All the content is streamed which makes it really easy to use, you shouldn’t need to download anything - simply find what you want to watch and hit “Play”. Oh, and non-Windows users will be pleased to know that 4oD Catch-Up on channel4.com is now Mac and Linux compatible.

From around the end of June you’ll also be able to watch all our archive programmes on channel4.com. Which means all your favourites will be in one place and available for free.

- Channel 4 email to 4oD users

A quiz, dear reader. Does this represent:

(a) the end of months of brand confusion within Channel 4 between the download-based 4oD service and the streaming-based Catch-Up?

(b) a victory for consumers on a par with iTunes’ abandonment of DRM?

(c) a bit of an embarassment for the BBC?

(d) all of the above?

And the answer is (d), sort of. While the sheer range of stuff available on 4OD has always been impressive, the software was horrible, thanks both to the nasty, malware-esque Kontiki peer-to-peer software underpinning it and the bizarre Internet Explorer-based front-end Channel 4 put on top. One can’t blame Channel 4 for quickly switching, for the most popular, recent content, to a streaming system instead. The BBC made the same switch in the first few months of iPlayer. But while the BBC only ever offered recent programmes, Channel 4 still had that archive available. So 4oD struggled on, unloved and uninvested in, as a download service with horrible software. To confuse matters further, the 4oD name was also used in introducing Catch-Up streams and on digital TV.

Now Channel 4 has finally rationalised its offering, in the way that probably offers the simplest solution for consumers: the archive material is being integrated into the streaming service, creating a single portal for both recent and archive Channel 4 shows. Best of all, the pay wall is coming down. And the whole thing steals the thunder of the BBC, who are dragging their heels over their longstanding plan to make archive material available online.

This doesn’t mean that the new 4oD will be as pleasurable to use, or as popular, as the iPlayer. But it does mean 20 years of classic C4 programming instantly, freely available for consumers without any software installation. That’s a good thing.

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Jacqui Smith’s down-to-earth nature and soft approach seemed a breath of fresh air in the early days of Gordon Brown’s government. Now she’s stepping down, her tenure appearing, to many, one of disappointing underachievement. The parallels with the government she served in are inescapable. 

Bet you a tenner I’ve got one of them almost word for word.

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The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

This is a kind of ad hominem argument: that is to say, it doesn’t put forward an argument at all, but simply presents a widely admired author as being on one side of an issue and expects its readers to follow suit out of sheer admiration. It’s the trick every politician pulls when invoking Lincoln, Reagan or Churchill in their speeches: somebody you admire once believed something similar to what I believe in superficially similar circumstances, so you should agree with me. There’s not one sentence - in a 1100-word article - of actual argument against the slew of liberty-infringing laws the article rails against. The effect - the removal of the article’s rhetoric from the reality of the issues at stake - is deepened by the fact that the figure invoked is not even a politician, philosopher, or moralist. He’s a writer - a gifted one, certainly, and one whose writings touched on issues of morality and the role of the state. But not a true political thinker of any stature. There’s not a philosophy being invoked, to which many people nowadays subscribe, which this writer invented or embodied. This simply tells us that a great poet disliked tyranny. Should the fact that Blake diagnosed and condemned sham democracy give us pause today? Well, let’s see what else he advocated. A proto-socialist, he railed against the excesses of capitalism at least as surely as those of government. Do the Times readers enjoying this article subscribe to those aspects of his views, too?

Not that Pullman ought to be concerned with any of this: he is himself, after all, an author. An author, to be precise, of children’s books - highly enjoyable ones, admittedly, with some interesting, if jumbled, religious allusions. But children’s books nonetheless. For him to look to other writers for inspiration in constructing his view of the world, and of politics, is perfectly natural.

But for a serious national newspaper to print it is not. This is a complex issue, deserving of a detailed, nuanced analysis. The list of allegedly freedom-restricting statutes Pullman reels off at the end of the article is just that, a list, and each individual bill contains its own balance between the needs of security and those of liberty. You might well think the government has got that balance consistently wrong. Let’s have a look, citing examples, providing evidence. This is the debate that’s needed; this is the debate it’s a newspaper’s job to provide. Not to give a platform to an author delivering what amounts to a rallying cry for the converted - not intended to win over doubters, but to inspire true believers with the faith that a poet they like would be with them.

Assuming, of course, that Blake would be with them. For an argument could easily be constructed that to compare the democratic situation in Blake’s time with ours now is so callously unfair as to border on the offensive. How can the lines “You are not to be trusted with laws / So we shall put ourselves out of your reach” not mean something utterly different in an age of universal suffrage? No-one can know for sure how Blake would have responded to the threats - both to security and to liberty - that we face today. Even detailed, clear philosophies like those provided by Locke or Marx are hard to apply usefully a century or more on from their writing.

And if this article ignores the immense progress in freedom made in recent centuries, the modern liberty movement also takes a disastrously narrow view of freedom in the context of the present. What about the many positive steps in the last decade? The adoption of the Human Rights Act? The loosening of alcohol licensing is probably a more regular source of joy in the lives of many britons than the presence of CCTV is a worry. What about my freedom to marry my boyfriend? The freedom to travel easily across Europe? The freedom of women and men to work part-time? Blake’s vision of liberty was broad enough to econompass practical, as well as legal, freedom. Why isn’t Pullman’s?

For me to pull out the old caricature of latte-sipping Islington liberals as the only people worried about these things would be engage in an ad hominem argument of my own. But like most stereotypes, it containts a kernel of truth. Only those whose lives are free of discrimination and material want can afford to take  such a narrow view of freedom.

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Imagine if, instead of criticising each other in op-eds, engaging in showpiece letter-page spats or sprawling, hard-to-follow blog arguments, the thinkers of our time actually discussed things directly with each other? Rebutting and responding to each other in real time? And they let us watch? Wouldn’t it be, just, the best thing?

Don’t let the ramshackle presentation and iffy video quality put you off. If it plays its cards right, and maybe smartens up a little, the rapidly-growing Bloggingheads might just be the most important thing ever to happen anywhere (at least, since the last thing I said that about).

A case in point: This exchange - between semi-repentant neocon David Frum and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation (American think tanks always have three-word names, and one word is always “America”) is the best broad-reaching analysis of the current Middle East situation I’ve seen coming out of the recent Gaza debate. It provides a great impression of what the practical road to a palestinian state might look like - and a fantastic insight, for those of us used to the European viewe of the issue - an incredibly useful view of the conservative take on the current state of play and how we got here. There’s an audio download and podcast subscription options also available.

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They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ch.9

Substitute “George and Dick” and you’re pretty much there, no?

Fitzgerald, of course, also said “There are no second acts in American life.” A world nervously hopes that he’s proven right in this case.

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I’ve been meaning for some time to write a short post paying a small tribute to the man I believe is one of the least-sung heroes of the Obama campaign: Governor Howard Dean. Today I sat down to do it and realised this is in fact the very day he hands over to successor Tim Kaine.

Look at this display of front pages covering Obama’s inauguration. What words were selected by more newspapers than any others to summarise the new president’s message to the nation? “Hope over fear.”

Sound familiar? It’s because you heard it throughout the spring of 2004. “Hope not fear” was the  primary slogan of Dean’s campaign. After a year of hearing Obama talk about hope, it’s easy to forget just how radical-sounding this was. In 2004, fear was everywhere in America. Citizens, prodded by regular government threat alerts, feared terrorist attacks. Families feared for their sons and daughters in Iraq, which was just beginning to look insoluble. And the Democractic party feared to attack the war, or President Bush, for fear of sounding weak and unpatriotic. But Dean attacked the war. Dean attacked Bush. And Dean talked unashamedly, unapologetically, about hope.

Dean’s campaign may have failed, and probably rightly. But it provided the first shot of adrenalin that re-started the beating heart of the Democratic party: the grass-roots organisers and volunteers whose energy, four years later, propelled Obama to the nomination and, ultimately, the White House. As the first real internet candidate, Dean laid the groundwork for Obama’s breathaking fundraising organisation. As the first major-party electoral candidate to run against the war in Iraq, he helped set in motion the tectonic shift in public opinion that doomed Clinton and made Obama the Democratic front-runner. And by daring to offer full-throated criticism of President Bush, at a time when the party leadership was too craven to do so, he began the process of breaking down the post-9/11 conspiracy of silence that allowed so many disastrous missteps - Iraq, torture, wiretapping - to happen unchecked.

That same party leadership fought hard to prevent Dean becoming DNC Chair. But, as the grassroots predicted, his leadership was a revelation, galvanising volunteers and transforming fundraising. The 2006 mid-term victories that began the tide that swept Obama to the Presidency? Down in no small part to the smarts and passion of Dean. And that “50-state” strategy that enabled Obama to redraw the electoral map and end, in a stroke, a thousand hand-wringing worries about “divided America”? The brainchild of Howard Dean.

As a presidential candidate, Dean was a failure. But in both that role and his role as DNC Chair, he helped re-inspire a party slouched in despondency - and in his unapologetic passion for progressive politics, he helped Obama re-inspire a nation.

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Someone on CNN just got rounded on by his colleagues for saying that he thought Obama’s speech lacked a truly memorable line on a par with “ask not what your country can do for you” or the oft-misquoted “We have nothing The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And I suspect he’s right: it was lacking a money shot, as it were. But I think that may be deliberate. For while the tasks facing Roosevelt and Kennedy in those speeches were straightforward, Obama’s was highly complex - too much so to be summed up in a single, memorable phrase.

Roosevelt’s task was to reassure a nation in the midst of crisis. That reassurance - a message of, to use the modern slogan, Hope - was all that people needed to take away from his inaugural. For Kennedy, the task was also simple: to stir a complacent nation into a greater level of engagement with the Cold War, the battle against poverty, and assorted other challenges, and in doing so add a sense of history to what was in fact a squeaked-through election victory.

By contrast, Obama’s speech had a double aim: not only to reassure the nation that it could weather the current crisis, but also to impress the seriousness of that crisis on the nation. Remember, when Obama first began selling his message of change to the nation, the financial crisis had barely begun. The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, of failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, were those he promised to deliver America from. As the election continued, the crisis became central to Obama’s speeches and the number one issue for voters. But the true depth of the crisis has become clear only since the election. Just these last few days, the dire news from Bank of America and Citigroup show the bottom has not yet been reached.

Yet the true scale of the crisis, it seems, hasn’t truly hit home. Roosevelt addressed a people who had seen three long years of decline. They knew the extent of their woes, and were desperate to hear good news. While the period since Obama’s election may have seemed interminable, it was merely weeks, much of which has been spent on business-as-usual bickering about the Warren selection, the Burris farrago, Geithner’s tax returns and the like. In recent days Obama’s hopes to quickly secure his stimulus package have been stalled by increasing conservative concern about waste, partly a result of the supposed “failure” of last autumn’s bailout.

All of this is reasonable scrutiny. But none of it is commensurate with a sense of dire emergency. Plans on the scale of Obama’s require a sense of urgency of the kind which was seen after September 11. So the speech had a dual purpose: to provide the sense of hope which we associate with Obama, but also to lay out clearly to Americans, perhaps for the first time, the full scale of the challenge ahead.

Hence the blunt tone of the first few lines. Declaring himself “humbled by the task before us,” he spoke of taking the oath “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. The summing-up of the state of the union that followed was remarkably bleak:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.  Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.  Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered.  Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. 

This from a man who was ridiculed last year as a happy-clappy peddler of loose promises! Even when the tone of the speech turned to the positive future, the tone was of gritty determination rather than high-flown dreams.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and they are many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this, America -  they will be met.

At times, the tone was almost chastening. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “our collective failure to make hard choices.” His main biblical reference was almost damning: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For an America that has been coddled with praise for years by a simplistically patriotic president, this is a remarkable change of tone.

The next siginificant passage reminded this “childish” America of the sacrifices that brought us to this point. 

It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. 

This is the voice of a serious man with a deep sense of history. This is not feelgood stuff.

As the speech went on, Obama talked in more hopeful terms about his goals, and the shopping list is daunting:

We will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But strikingly, the climax of the speech brought the tone back to one of marked uncertainty. More than once, he associated the current crisis with the question of the survival of the United States itself. First he recalled Thomas Paine’s words, read aloud to George Washington’s troops before one of the final battles of the War of Independence:

In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”*

Then in his closing paragraph he openly, albeit briefly, raised the spectre of the end of the American experiment:

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [My emphasis]

This rhetoric is not aspirational. If this is an example of the audacity of hope, it is a hope tempered with a profound sense of foreboding at the scale of the task ahead. If this is inspiration for the future, it’s also deeply aware of the journey that has led us here. And if this is a message of reassurance for the people, it’s also one of responsibility.

It’s a nuanced message. A mature message. Even a conservative one. It reinforces, once again, my suspicion that Obama may truly be what he appears to be: a uniquely serious, thoughtful and determined man, potentially a remarkable leader.

These times require no less.

Read the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech

*Paine’s original words were “to meet and repulse it.”

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“He hasn’t called him a crook!”

We’re now supposed to believe that Obama is at best insufficiently appalled at Blagoyevich’s behaviour - which, let’s not forget, is still legally unproven - and at worst implicated in it, because he uses calm language. And talk-show guests talk openly about Obama’s camp “admitting whatever it’s done”, apparently without feeling the need to admit that so far there’s not a shred of evidence Obama’s camp were involved with Blagojevich in anything other than entirely standard ways.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of how the desperate need to fill 24 hours of news a day has maddened America’s political culture. Not exactly news, I know, but I’m still frequently shocked.

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“This is nothing to do with Obama. But some people are going to try to make people think this has something to do with Obama. So this is bad news for Obama. What is the Obama camp going to do about this bad news?”

US Media FAIL.

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I don’t remember many people singing “God Save the Queen” in May 1997.

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There is an upside - more time for pointless web crazery such as, for example, finding my-name-as-a-face:

Disapointingly dull, you may agree. But I like that it appears to have a moustache.

In other Web News, Metro’s Tom Phillips has pointed out that the forgotten (or in my case, never-on-the-radar) indie lot Johnny Boy produced a 2004 hit (ahem) that, as well as being pleasantly jangly in a sort of Retro Bar way, presciently predicts the current ongoing Collapse Of Everything:

“You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes & You Get What You Deserve”

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The analytical quote:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

- Rod Dreher

The personal quote:

Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.

I feel so much hope.  I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.

I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.

I know hope.

- Anonymous Daily Dish reader

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Dear God, it’s finally here.

It’s worth recalling just how absurdly action-packed this two-year campaign has been. The First Lady Candidate vs the ambitious young black senator. The earliest-ever primaries. The shock in Iowa, Hillary’s tears. The Michigan-Florida farrago, which saw the term “Democratic Rules Committee” enter water-cooler vocabulary. John McCain’s campaign out of money, written off, and then reborn in New Hampshire. Guliani’s Florida gamble. Rev. Wright and “A More Perfect Union”. Bill Clinton’s “fairytale”. “Clean and articulate”. The pit bull, Katie Couric, Tina Fey and Joe the Plumber (say it ain’t so, Joe!). The dramatic Powell endorsement. Then - just as it all seems to be over - Obama’s grandmother dies the day before the election. You couldn’t make it up.

I’m 28, British, and have only been watching elections closely since the Bush era began. But surely this has been the most dramatic campaign since 1968. I wonder if anything - short of, God forbid, an inaugural assassination - can bring it to a suitably compelling climax.

But the next 24 hours should be pretty damn good.

Essential resources (besides the obvious):

• Twitter’s election portal offers stream-of-conscious commentary from its (Obama-centric) young user base
• Twitter accounts @866OURVOTE and @electionjournal have live reports of voting problems and fraud, while Twitter Vote Report offers voting reports from across the country (on a map!)

I’ll be twittering non-stop once the results start coming in. Happy voting, America!

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The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it’ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers.

Which presents a problem - because paid services have an equally mixed history. Monthly-subscription models at news sites like the Wall Street Journal have seen low take-up, prompting Rupert Murdoch to consider dropping the pay wall last year. The New York Times’ pay model, TimesSelect, was dropped around the same time. Similarly, music subscription services like Napster - though I may like them - haven’t caught on in considerable numbers.

So what to do? The answer may lie in low charges and micro-payment systems. Expecting people to pay £2 an article or £20 a month for access is never going to become a mass-market proposition. But if every page-view, video-view, or listen to a piece of music on a website cost the user a couple of pennies, you could see solid revenue generation at a price that didn’t put users off.

The trick, of course, is the technology. The hassle of putting in credit card details is at least as much of a barrier to pay-per-article services as the cost. What’s needed is a single micro-payment system which sites could join. Once logged in, a user could surf a range of member sites - from newspapers to youtube to music providers - automatically being charged pennies for each page or piece of content consumed. A gauge in the corner of the screen would keep them abreast of charges. Once a month, the user would get a email bill for their total that month, and pay online or via automatic payment.

A system such as this is the only way smooth content delivery, without a point-and-click interface, can be funded. And in comparison to the advertising model, it could provide a far better revenue stream for content providers - necessary in areas like music and news where content creation is expensive. It’s also democratising - instead of a ghettoising division between free and paying customers, you get a natural spread of high- and low-demand users paying different amounts each month. In the long run, you could even adopt the same system for actual data charges.

The central obstacle is the lack of a simple system for in-the-background micro-charging with a monthly bill. What’s needed is someone to do it: ideally a globally-used payment service with a reputation for honesty and money for investment, which many websites already support and many users are already registered with. Now who could that be?

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Sometimes, though, change is bad. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. Importing comments and tweets, while a fun idea, didn’t work. It was confusing and made the site seem odd and inconsistent - moreso than it already did. So I’ve turned it off. As before, you can find my comments on other sites, and my tweets, in the left-hand sidebar.

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That renders the old feed for the main site - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygera - pretty much redundant. So I’ve repurposed it as a “firehose” - one feed combining every photo upload, blog post, bookmark and video - a total web 2.0 extravaganza.

I can totally understand that this may be of no interest to you, in which case you should switch to the blog feed, which is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog.

The main site’s comments feed is no more. If you’re still subscribed to that, switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog-comments.

And don’t forget you can subscribe to any type, series, theme or topic - or the comments on any post - by sticking /feed at the end of the URL.

If this all seems really irresponsible and wacky of me, bear in mind that according to feedburner, I have, like, ten subscribers. Sob.

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Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it. The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain.  The race is over.

John McCain’s candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill… Before Wall Street’s collapse Senator McCain was ahead. His approval ratings remained high, his VP pick had generated excitement and interest, and his campaign operatives were capable, on any given day, of winning news cycles and giving their opponents fits. And then the underpinnings of American capitalism begin to sink — and with them sunk McCain.

An election dominated at its inception by the war in Iraq is now overwhelmingly focused on the economy. More than half of voters in polls say that the economy is their top concern and Senator Obama enjoys double digit leads among voters asked who can better fix our economic mess. Put simply, there is no way Senator McCain can win if he continues to trail Senator Obama by double digits on the top concern of more than half of voters.

Howard Wolfson, “It’s Over: Why Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain“

What could turn things round? Wolfson points to a domestic terror attack as the only thing that could seriously shake things up now. I think the “Bradley effect” is likely to mean Obama’s vote will be smaller on the day than the polls suggest now, potentially making things very tight. And the danger is that overconfident Obama supporters will stay at home. The democrats have to warn against complacency and focus all their efforts on getting out the vote.

Still, it’s true: a McCain victory now would be a stunning turnaround.

Track the latest odds on the race

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"Hey, can I call ya Joe?"

Who won Thursday’s vice-presidential debate? It depends on who you ask. The initial poll, from CNN’s panel of undecided Ohio voters, saw the Democrat Sen. Joe Biden rated as the winner 51-36. But conservatives have been crowing all weekend about the performance of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. “She was polished, direct, folksy and on message,” said one Republican strategist. Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin put it more succinctly with a post titled simply, “Sarah Rocks!”

“I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words,” Malkin wrote. “Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.”

Certainly, Palin’s confidence took the audience by surprise. The internet messaging service Twitter offers a live stream of users’ election-related updates. Before the debate, it was, well, a-twitter with messages gleefully anticipating the meltdown of Palin in the face of Joe Biden’s experience and grasp of the issues. As the debate wore on, they grew increasingly quiet, to be replaced by crowing republicans exulting at Palin’s performance.

So who won? Perhaps the real question is: what does it mean to ‘win’ an electoral debate? After all, these events are hardly like a traditional debate on a single topic, where the aim is simply to win a majority of the audience over to your side of the argument. An electoral debate such as this is an opportunity for both candidates to show their grace under pressure, their ability as a debater, and their grasp of the facts and issues. It is, presumably, intended to provide a glimpse of how they would deal with things in office.

By this standard, the imaginary trophy clearly goes to Joe Biden. On most issues - from the war on terror to the economy - his answers, though hardly stunningly detailed, demonstrated far greater hold on the facts than Sarah Palin’s. Indeed, Palin had one fairly serious factual gaffe - referring to the US general in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, as “General McLellan”. Biden responded directly both to moderator Gwen Ifill’s questions and to Palin’s challenges, while Palin avoided certain questions entirely, telling Ifill at one point, “I may not answer the question the way you want to hear, but I’ll talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record.”

So why are so many convinced that Palin, to use a common American metaphor, “hit it out of the park”? Partly, it’s because of the expectations game. After her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, anything better than blithering incoherence from Palin was bound to be seen as a stunning comeback. Or, as Queen Latifah told the audience in her impersonation of Ifill on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live, “due to the historically low expectations of Governor Palin, if she were to do a merely adequate job tonight - at no point cry, faint, run out of the building or vomit - you should consider the debate a tie.”

But it’s also because the aforementioned standard - the debate winner is the candidate who seems most prepared and on top of the issues - isn’t the standard by which debate winners are judged.

Elections, after all, are not fundamentally meritocratic. They’re not supposed to be won necessarily by the most competent, most experienced, most accomplished or most wise candidate. They’re not even always won by the candidate proposing the best answers to a society’s problems. The only guaranteed standard is that the winner will be the one the greatest number of people wants in the job - notwithstanding, of course, quirks of the electoral system that occasionally award victory to the candidate with fewer votes. For debates, too, the “winning” candidate is really the one who makes the most favourable impression on the public.

In my day job, I work as a legal journalist. I speak frequently to businessmen who tell me what they look for in their lawyers - what qualities convince them to spend hundreds of pounds per hour on one over another. Interestingly, they never tell me they chose a particular lawyer for their technical skill or grasp of the law. Not that it isn’t important. It’s just that, at the top level, that kind of knowledge is seen as a given: to be expected and, for a client, hard to assess. To choose between highly competent egg-heads, clients look for more intangible qualities. 24-hour availability. Keen commercial instincts. And, often decisively, a friendly, open demeanour. Given the choice between the world expert in a particular area of law, and a business-savvy, approachable advisor who merely knows it very well indeed, most will go for the latter.

Modern presidential politics is similar. Amidst all the claims and counter-claims, policy spats and questionable facts, the public doesn’t feel it can judge which candidate is most intelligent or most on top of their brief. There is a certain minimum standard for intelligence and aptitude that candidates have to meet - albeit a very low one - but once that standard is met, personalities become as important to many voters as their grasp on the issues or their brainpower. This has been true for a long time. In 1960, Richard Nixon famously bested John F. Kennedy in their debate in the minds of radio listeners, but Kennedy’s looks saw him score higher amongst TV viewers. In recent years, however, the importance of personal characteristics to political success has become more and more overt. Al Gore thought he was pummelling George W. Bush in the first 2000 debate as he offered slick answers and scoffed at Bush’s stumbling. But voters thought him arrogant and rude, and Bush saw the benefits.

Initial reviews of last week’s presidential debate handed it to McCain. But the polls quickly showed that it was Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrat, who benefited most from the occasion, which gave the still quite unknown - if extremely famous - young senator the opportunity to appear presidential under pressure before a mass audience. Republican John McCain was deemed to have turned voters off with his body language and demeanour towards Obama, particularly his lack of eye contact with his opponent, which many considered condescending. On Thursday, Biden held off from strongly attacking Palin to avoid the condescension trap. But he still seemed somewhat distant and offhand, while Palin, like Obama the week before, addressed both her opponent and the camera head-on.

More than any other candidate for national office in memory - with the possible exception of 1968 Nixon running mate Spiro Agnew - Palin has put personality front-and-centre of her campaign. Her much-vaunted convention speech was almost entirely autobiographical, and carefully calculated to appeal reinforce Palin’s credentials, not so much as a potential president, but as the representative in Washington of the American people. For all Obama’s talk of “the audacity of hope,” it’s Palin’s campaign that is truly audacious. She seeks to take the very thing which many feel makes her inappropriate for the vice-presidency - her everyday ordinariness - and make it her biggest strength.

The two candidates in Thursday’s debate, therefore, were aiming to do entirely different things. For Palin, it was essential to pass a certain minimum standard for competence and grasp of the issues; but once that was achieved, she could focus on reinforcing her populist appeal as a person. She met the first task, just about, by breathlessly reciting the talking points she had been cramming all week. She performed extremely well at the second, with a perky confidence that was remarkable, and a succession of folksy gimmicks - the wink, her remark “say it ain’t so, Joe” - that, while incensing traditionalists and some feminists, left her conservative base giddy with excitement. One conservative blogger said that Palin’s performance “sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”

For Biden, the goal was the reverse: to win a traditional debate victory, demonstrating his superior experience, knowledge and thoughtfulness, while passing a minimum standard of likeability by not appearing to bully or mock Palin. It’s a goal he clearly met. Biden wasn’t as loveable as Palin, but he didn’t need to be; Palin wasn’t as competent as Biden, but she didn’t have to be. Biden won the debate on the traditional measures of calm under pressure and grasp of the issues; Palin, supposedly at least, won on the modern measure of “connecting with the voters”.

I say “supposedly” because at this stage, it’s not clear how Palin’s folksy schtick really affected voters. And Biden had his own personality-led moment, towards the end of the debate, when he got choked up discussing the death of his wife and son. The results of CNN’s instant polling suggest this may have resonated with voters more than Palin’s winking.

In the end, there’s only one standard that really measures the winner of a debate - and that’s its effect on the polls. The initial signs are that, in the wake of the debate, Obama’s lead over John McCain continues to widen. That may have little to do with Thursday’s debate. But it’s worth remembering that, for vice-presidential candidates, the most important thing they can actually do for their campaign is to sell their running mate and score points on the other side’s presidential candidate. Biden’s refusal to directly attack Palin, while helping him avoid making her a figure of sympathy, also gave him plenty of time to pummel John McCain - singing his praises as a person, but slamming his positions and delivering a detailed critique of his claims to maverick status. He treated Palin like what, in the end, she is - a distraction from the question of who should be the next President. Though we’ll never know for sure the effect the debate has had on the polls, that strikes me as a victory Biden can be satisfied with.

Newsweek offers an editorial this week that addresses the issue of Palin’s qualifications in more detail and, frankly, with more coherence. Liberal hate-figure Karl Rove also offers a rebuttal.

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Hello Philly,

I am glad to be here today for this voter registration drive and for Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.

I’ve spent 35 years writing about America, its people, and the meaning of the American Promise. The Promise that was handed down to us, right here in this city from our founding fathers, with one instruction: Do your best to make these things real: opportunity, equality, social and economic justice, a fair shake for all of our citizens, the American idea, as a positive influence, around the world for a more just and peaceful existence. These are the things that give our lives hope, shape, and meaning. They are the ties that bind us together and give us faith in our contract with one another.

I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between that American promise and American reality. For many Americans, who are today losing their jobs, their homes, seeing their retirement funds disappear, who have no healthcare, or who have been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that promise and that reality has never been greater or more painful.

I believe Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his work. I believe he understands, in his heart, the cost of that distance, in blood and suffering, in the lives of everyday Americans. I believe as president, he would work to restore that promise to so many of our fellow citizens who have justifiably lost faith in its meaning. After the disastrous administration of the past 8 years, we need someone to lead us in an American reclamation project. In my job, I travel the world, and occasionally play big stadiums, just like Senator Obama. I’ve continued to find, wherever I go, America remains a repository of people’s hopes, possibilities, and desires, and that despite the terrible erosion to our standing around the world, accomplished by our recent administration, we remain, for many, a house of dreams. One thousand George Bushes and one thousand Dick Cheneys will never be able to tear that house down.

They will, however, be leaving office, dropping the national tragedies of Katrina, Iraq, and our financial crisis in our laps. Our sacred house of dreams has been abused, looted, and left in a terrible state of disrepair. It needs care; it needs saving, it needs defending against those who would sell it down the river for power or a quick buck. It needs strong arms, hearts, and minds. It needs someone with Senator Obama’s understanding, temperateness, deliberativeness, maturity, compassion, toughness, and faith, to help us rebuild our house once again. But most importantly, it needs us. You and me. To build that house with the generosity that is at the heart of the American spirit. A house that is truer and big enough to contain the hopes and dreams of all of our fellow citizens. That is where our future lies. We will rise or fall as a people by our ability to accomplish this task. Now I don’t know about you, but I want that dream back, I want my America back, I want my country back.

So now is the time to stand with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, roll up our sleeves, and come on up for the rising.

Bruce Springsteen, Vote For Change rally, Philadelphia, October 4

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Think of any sci-fi film you’ve ever seen with a scene where a character uses the TVs of the future. There’s always about seven mini-screens, isn’t there? Ever since the introduction of computers with multiple applications in moveable window, split-screen has been used as lazy shorthand for an information-overloaded future. It’s a lesson CNN have learned well. Its daily politics show, the absurdly-named Situation Room - hosted by the equally surreally-named Wolf Blitzer - is like a transmission from the starship Enterprise, with a vast screen showing footage from the day’s press conferences and campaign stops, along with a bizarre array of polling data and micro-analysis.

Of course, amidst the noise, all actual thought is in danger of being drowned out. Viewers of Thursday’s vice-presidential debate who watched in high-definition gained the added bonus of a bank of mini-screens at the side showing the running totals of the network’s political analysts as they recorded each candidates’ good and bad “moments” throughout the debate. Seen in aggregate at the end of the debate, the figures were almost breathtakingly meaningless. When one commentator thinks Palin had over 50 good moments, and Biden around 30, and another gives the score at 15-20, nothing is proven except that to break down complicated arguments in such way is entirely subjective.

But one of CNN’s high-tech tools of “real-time analysis” really does add something. Running under the footage were live feedback from its panel of undecided voters. Rather than voting Palin-Biden, they specified (I’m not sure how, but presumably using some sort of electronic slider or dial) they said how positively or negatively they felt about whatever was happening on screen at the time. For the first presidential debate, CNN divided the sample into three lines, for Democrats, Republicans and Independents. The results gave an interesting insight into what Independents do respond to (getting out of Iraq) and don’t (appeals to patriotism). But the real fun came with Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, where CNN divided the sample into men and women. The results are seriously fascinating. When Palin was first picked, it was seen by many as a transparent bid for female votes; but Palin’s winking on Thursday has been likened by some to a “cocktail waitress act”, calculated to turn on male voters (with, it seems, some success). So what’s the real story?

Annoyingly, CNN’s web video doesn’t show the lines, dashing my hopes for post-match analysis. But this post points up some interesting moments:

Anytime either candidate mentioned the word “nuclear” (or, in Palin’s case, “nukular”), the line for men shot upwards — literally at the very moment the word was uttered, like some kind of magic button was pressed in their brains…

Whenever Sarah Palin spoke about her track record and accomplishments in Alaska, both of the plot lines were flat. Apparently nobody gives a shit about her accomplishments in Alaska…

When Palin spoke of representing “regular Joe Six Pack” Americans, the meters did go up…

When the critical question was asked (one of Ifil’s only really good questions, I think) about how the candidates would handle ascending to the Oval Office if the President were to die, Palin’s chart was nearly flatline…

When Biden went on the offensive against Palin, the numbers did not respond. Fortunately for him he rarely attacked Palin in the debate. Pundits on both sides criticized him for being too gentle, but the numbers, both on the graph and in the post-debate polls, speak for themselves.

Palin’s winking and cute you betchas and goshdarnits didn’t work, either. When she said she wasn’t going to answer the moderator’s questions, and when she joked that she was new to this campaign and hadn’t made many promises, both meter lines dropped. People may like her and may even strongly agree with some of her positions, but they don’t like Palin not taking things deadly seriously.

Graphing the Debates - graphpaper.com

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I’ve never really decided quite where the irony-balance lies in this song. After all, David Byrne is as self-consciously urban (in the pre-MTV, racially neutral sense) as anyone. Certainly, as someone who regularly chafes at British culture’s knee-jerk for a nostalgic vision of country life, I can’t help but thrill at such unabashed horror at a back-to-nature future that many people at least claim to long for.

But that line in the last verse - “as it fell apart, nobody payed much attention” - hints at a darker interpretation. After all, one of the central ironies of the modern environmental movement is that the very close-to-nature lifestyle which some of its proponents call for is probably exactly what we’ll wind up with if the kind of “civilisation” Byrne eulogises here continues to run out of control.

Anyway, it’s funky. Enjoy.

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This is the first time I’ve realised just how dangerous going negative could be for Obama. Thanks to - conspiracy alert - McCain-Feingold, this and all other Obama ads have to have his specific approval message on. There’s no way to run a Biden-fronted anti-McCain TV campaign that Obama can distance himself from. So every attack has to be balanced against the risk of losing the sheen of bipartisanship that has made Obama attractive so far - especially risky given that McCain has now set out so hard for that same ground.

Obama has to stick to the same strategy he pursued with his convention speech - stay broadly positive and put some meat on the bones. We need details, and more details. That promise of tax cuts for 95% of Americans needs to be repeated, and trumpeted, and sung from the hills till everyone is sick of it. Those details - those specific promises - are the only thing that can keep this campaign from sliding right into a 2004-style gutter of character assasination. And if it comes down to character, Obama will lose. Sorry, he will. If Americans go into that booth and choose the person who, deep down, they just feel they trust more, like more, or would rather have a beer with - it will be McCain who comes out on top. War hero trumps inspiring black guy. It just does.

It’s ironic, given the characterisation of Obama’s victory over Clinton as being one of style over substance, that policy - and particularly economic policy - is actually Obama’s big advantage. He’s not playing it enough.

UPDATE: Andrea Tantaros agrees with me, sort of

UPDATE 2: Sullivan puts it more succinctly:

Obama must maintain the high road. He must keep insisting that the McCain-Palin camp has no new policies to offer on the most critical issues we face, especially in foreign policy. And he must carefully and relentlessly explain what he intends to do. If he does that and refuses to take the bait, he will win. If he descends into the foul sewer where McCain now resides, he will lose.

Karl McCain knows one thing: how to smear, lie, disorient, distract, and intimidate. You can’t beat these thugs and liars at their own game. Beat them at the task of government. They are unfit for it. Obama is not.

UPDATE 3: Joe Biden kind of gets it (he also follow’s Sullivan’s earlier advice to ignore Palin). But will Obama follow this line?

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Writing that “God has called me to a higher place,” Fulton County State Court Judge Penny Brown Reynolds on Monday notified Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue that she would resign, effective Oct. 22, to embark on her new career as a television judge on “Family Court with Judge Penny.”
- Fulton County Daily Report: Judge to Resign Next Month for TV Gig

Some Virginia judges are asking defense attorneys to refrain from patting police officers on the back in court, on the theory that the gesture suggests the existence of a “good old boy system.”
- Associated Press: Attorneys Told to End Courtroom Back-Pats

Brief shoulder massages and goosing were not specified as prejudicial.

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Hence you can “sanction” someone’s doing something, but also apply “sanctions” against them for doing it.

Is there a word for words with two opposite definitions?

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- Paul Dacre, Editor in Chief, Daily Mail Group, 1999

Are electronic newspapers just a load of bullshit.com? - New Statesman, 1999

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If only I was a big media portal like Yahoo or Google, then I could get everyone to download my very own Rav toolbar!

In web2.0 world, people, dreams come true.

Download Rav toolbar

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While the critical acclaim for PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood may focus on Daniel Day-Lewis’ studiedly epic performance as oiligarch Daniel Plainview, or Johnny Greenwood’s remarkable, discomfiting soundtrack, much of the film’s cultural resonance may lie in its timely reminder for modern audiences, particularly outside the US, of the harsh nature of frontier life in the early American South and West - and its echoes in modern American politics. At the beginning of the film - loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! - Plainview is a desperate, determined loner, literally scratching for silver at the bottom of a hand-dug mine in the Californian desert. With his discovery of oil, Plainview quickly develops a thriving business and a reputation as a giant of his field.

Not a word is spoken in the film until oil is discovered; immediately afterwards, we jump forward several years to hear Plainview, now a successful oil merchant, addressing a meeting of villagers as he makes his case why they should grant him the license to drill their recently-discovered bounty. Contrasting his own background as a genuine “oil man” to speculators seeking to work as middle-men, he extols the values of the small, closely-run business:

I do my own drilling and the men that work for me, work for me and they are men I know. I make it my business to be there and see to their work. I don’t lose my tools in the hole and spend months fishing for them; I don’t botch the cementing off and let water in the hole and ruin the whole lease. I’m a family man- I run a family business. This is my son and my partner, H.W. Plainview.

As I heard this speech I found it naggingly familiar, but couldn’t place it. Then I remembered: this style - this combination of simple language with small-town values - is the language of the modern American conservative movement, and the language of President George W. Bush. The emphasis on hard work over big ideas; the use of “family” as a catch-all codeword for wholesomeness and authenticity; the contrasting of narrow competence against untrustworthy intelligence, are all hallmarks of Bush’s often mangled, but highly effective speaking style. And, like modern conservatism, Plainview’s vision of honest business needs a bogey man to appear really attractive. It’s not enough for Plainview to claim to be honest; he must be more honest, more simple, more genuine, than the ill-defined other.

Out of all men that beg for a chance to drill your lots, maybe one in twenty will be oilmen; the rest will be speculators-men trying to get between you and the oilmen-to get some of the money that ought by rights come to you. Even if you find one that has money, and means to drill, he’ll maybe known nothing about drilling and he’ll have to hire out the job on contract, and then you’re depending on a contractor that’s trying to rush the job through so he can get another contract just as quick as he can. That is the way this works.

This almost-victim mentality is vital to the conservative movement of the last 30 years. Those opposed to it are always out-of-touch moneymen, suspicious characters from immoral cities, brains with no heart. It’s a world-view with a constant undercurrent of mistrust and fear. Most people who will say they want to help you good, ordinary people, Plainview is saying, are dishonest. Corrupt. Only a few good, simple men will listen to you. Only a few share your values. And I am one of them. It’s an echo of Ronald Reagan’s quip that “government is not the answer to the problem, it is the problem”; to Karl Rove’s carefully-constructed coalition of “values voters”. Bush’s down-home simplicity -his astonishing promise on 9/11 to “catch them folks that did this” - stands in marked contrast to the slick ways and fancy words of the untrustworthy Washington elite.

The point, of course, is that Plainview’s vision is a lie. The speech, the first words we hear him utter, is a carefully prepared set-piece speech masquerading as stumbling, homespun wisdom. Far from knowing and valuing his workmen, he works them in 12-hour shifts with minimal supervision, leading to tragic, avoidable accidents. Even his status as a family man, vital to his appeal, is a lie: H.W. is really the son of one of Plainview’s workmen, killed in an accident at work. Plainview keeps him around at least in part to shore up his public face as a committed family man, rather than a driven loner, and by the end of the film their relationship has totally broken down.

As the film progresses, the lies accrue. Tipped off to the presence of oil in the town of Little Boston, Plainview goes to great lengths to hide it from the locals in the hope of buying their arid land at knock-down prices. When word gets out, he promises the earth to the villagers - irrigation, roads, funding for their church - with no intention of paying them their fair share. And his simple frontiersman persona disappears as he builds himself a gothic mansion with his new fortune.

If you’ve been paying any attention for the last eight years, you’ll be getting the similarities. Bush’s family-man values are designed to mask a youth of drug-taking, alcoholism and womanising. For all his trumpeting of simple frontier values, he’s a child of incredible privilege. The child of a president, he campaigned in 2000, astonishingly, as a Washington outsider. A man who grew up in immense wealth, who was helped to power by the nation’s richest people and has executed that power frequently for their benefit, built his electoral appeal by endlessly evoking the image of the dirt-poor, simple frontiersman.

It’s often pointed out that it’s hard for us, in the static, ancient states of Europe, to identify with the American cult of the frontier: its rugged individualism, its disdain for intellectuals, its hostility towards government. But There Will Be Blood serves as a valuable reminder that those standing up and eulogising the simple frontier life have usually been selling something in a bid to escape it. Bush’s simple-family-guy persona has its real roots not in the genuine rhythms and manners of life in the American South and West, but in the carefully constructed performance of the oil salesman. Like Plainview, Bush is an oil man through and through; and, like Plainview, he doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a sale.

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While the high-tech schemes for reducing climate change might grab many of the media headlines, ideas like this show the environmental movement at its most radical. As I’ve noted before, there are various ways in which we can hope to intervene to reduce the climate dangers inherent in our current level of economic activity. One way is to reduce the carbon emissions required for energy production, through renewable energy; another is to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions, through carbon sinks, harvesters, or, yes, giant space mirrors. These areas are where the science-fiction stuff generally comes in.

But there’s a whole other area of intervention - reducing the actual amount of economic activity involved in modern life. This is the school of thought from which ideas like the one above - from TV pundit Penney Poyzer - stem. Modern life, the argument goes, is just too modern. We have too much stuff, travel too much, do too much. We need to return to simpler times - growing our own food, sourcing goods locally, re-using instead of replacing.

Why is this apparently backward-gazing viewpoint so radical? Because it disputes the central idea of economic and political thought in the last 200 years - the beneficence of material progress and economic growth. Having ever-more, the argument goes - more choice, more gadgets, more convenience - is costing the earth.

Ideas such as these reject principles that form the very foundations of modern economic growth. First, there’s specialisation. This is the idea that, if everyone produces the products they are best suited to provide, and exchanges with others, the result will be more efficient and allow a greater quantity and variety of goods than if everyone caters to their own needs. It began the first time farmers whose land was suited to crops first traded with farmers whose land was suited to tending cattle. Now, it’s the logic that sees goods, from electronics to fruit, shipped from across the world and sold more cheaply than those made locally.

The problem, of course, is that specialisation only increases economic efficiency. A company will build its factories in China, even for goods to be sold in the West, because it’s cheaper to do so. The savings gradually get passed onto consumers, and the standard of living increases. But such arrangements aren’t generally energy efficient, or carbon efficient. Indeed, because of the high CO2 emissions associated with shipping and aviation, they’re often environmentally disastrous. Instead, the argument goes, we must rediscover the merits of doing things ourselves, and doing things locally. “Eating apples from New Zealand, wrapped in clingfilm on a polystyrene tray, when it is apples season in England is crazy,” notes an activist in the report.

The same, the argument applies, goes for the other core principle of modern economics - ever-expanding consumption. For the more than 200 years since the industrial revolution began, if not before, economic growth has been driven primarily by the pursuit, by individuals and families, of ever more complex, useful, attractive or effective devices, tools and accoutrements. Our rising living standards have been driven by this process, but the ecological cost has been vast. As a result, it has become a credo amongst many environmentalists that the paradigm of non-stop material progress is inherently flawed. Writer Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff neatly makes the point, arguing the constant pursuit of newer, cooler stuff is leading us up an ecological dead-end. Endless material progress, argues this view, is an impossible fantasy - and its pursuit has become slow-motion suicide. We must relearn to repair broken goods, consume less food, get through fewer clothes, share cars, make do with fewer shiny gadgets.

Together, these views add up to a wholesale rejection of the foundations of modern economic thinking as a response to climate change. This viewpoint is clear - implicitly or, often, explicitly - in much modern writing on the environment and climate change. “The old economics is dead,” declared the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott - a liberal, but hardly radical economist - in 2006, identifying “the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.”

Stores now sell jeans at below $10 a pair… According to the present model of economics, this is progress, just as it is to be welcomed that flights costing as little as $4 make possible stag and hen weekends in Tallinn or Prague.

But are these developments really positive? Orthodox economics says they are, because they raise the real incomes of consumers. But, according to [environmental] analysis, they are potentially very bad indeed.

It’s presented as a given that our current level of consumption is simply incompatible with the long-term health of the environment. It’s taken as read that the predicament we’re in makes a nonsense of the idea of ever-greater consumption, enabled by specialisation and trade, as the driver of progress. It’s a compelling argument. But it may be completely wrong.

Think back to a hundred and fifty years ago. City-dwellers were enjoying an unprecedented level of communication and mobility, thanks to the widespread availability of a hugely effective means of personal urban transport - the horse. There was just one problem - shit. Horse shit was piling up everywhere, making already overcrowded and unsanitary cities even more dangerous. Illness spread. Wise men stroked their chins, dwelling on how to solve the problem. Some sort of restrictions were surely necessary. The convenience of easy travel had a terrible cost to the environment. Surely, this was a convenience we couldn’t afford. No doubt, in a Victorian precursor to modern-day SUV-bashing, drivers of two-horse carts were singled out for blame.

But ultimately, of course, horses weren’t banned - they were superseded. By the tram, the tube, the bus and, ultimately, the car. Far from having to sacrifice convenience because of its nasty side-effects, city-dwellers simply found even more convenient systems that didn’t have the same problems. Technology won out.¹

The same may be possible now. As my previous article notes, in order to avoid dangerous climate change, our task is to lower our global carbon emissions to half their current rate. This may sound quite achievable; but bear in mind that, thanks to rapid improvements in standards of living in developing countries, the average level of economic activity per person is likely to quadruple over the next fifty years. Add to that a likely swelling of the planet’s population, from the current six billion to nine billion, and you’re looking at a six-fold increase in economic activity.

The anti-growth position states that this is simply too much. As the world’s poor countries improve their living standards, it argues, we must meet them halfway, lowering ours to a level more commensurate with the planet’s fragile state.

But remember the horse shit. Few would have imagined, as it piled up in the gutters, a mode of transport that could move people around in comfort without depositing faeces onto the street. Are we really so sure that technology doesn’t have the potential, now, to let us keep our current lifestyle while slashing our carbon emissions?

It may sound cavalier. But think about the maths. A six-fold increase in economic activity, and a halving of overall emissions, means we need to slash the carbon cost of a unit of economic activity by one-twelve. Doesn’t that sound plausible?

There are so many different stages at which technology can intervene. Energy efficiency - insulating buildings, energy-saving bulbs; clean energy; carbon capture. Some estimates suggest renewable energy could ultimately provide 100% of our energy needs, and that’s before you even consider nuclear. The transition to low-carbon energy production, and to greater energy efficiency, will be painful and expensive. But it’s by no means certain that the essentials of our current standard of living can’t be maintained, and improved, and extended to more of the world, without busting the carbon budget. To assume otherwise - to declare, without having properly invested in technological solutions, that we must crawl back down the developmental ladder - smacks of hair-shirt wearing martyrdom.

Take for example aviation. It’s become a standard villain of the environmental movement,as demonstrated by the ongoing protests over the expansion of Heathrow. And, in the short term, reducing the number of flights we take would be a quick way to make some impressive carbon emission reductions. But it’s going too far to conclude, as some have, that flying is simply a luxury we will have to learn to live without. Aeronautic technology advanced, in less than 70 years, from putting the Wright brothers in the air to putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Do we really believe, with a similar level of commitment, that low-carbon flight is beyond our power?

Indeed, in general, the end-of-growth environmental school is based on a fallacy - that because technological innovation got us into this mess, further innovation can only make things worse. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Every year, technology brings us new ways to generate clean energy and reduce our need for energy, all without significantly impairing our lifestyles; from energy saving light bulbs to the IT revolution, from hybrid cars to videoconferencing, which is slashing the need for business travel.

Of course, there are excesses in our modern lifestyle - in packaging, for example, and lazy waste disposal - that we should curb, and help developing countries avoid from the start. But the view that climate change requires the end of material progress, and a return to some imagined “natural” past, is one based less on a detailed understanding of the science and more on a general disdain for all things modern. Indeed, its proponents tend to resort to other arguments as well as the environmental - that modern life is making us miserable, stressed, sick and lonely. Fair enough: its proponents may have a point, although I doubt it. But climate change is too important to be used as an argument for the latest lifestyle fad.

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Ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination commentators have been falling over themselves to evoke the memory of John F. Kennedy. Obama’s youth, short time in the senate, and relentless message of change all stir memories of the handsome young upstart who squeaked the presidency in 1960. With the endorsement of Obama’s candidacy by several senior Kennedys in late January, the comparisons became more frequent. “A president like my father”, Caroline Kennedy called Obama. The New York Times evoked Kennedy’s most successful book when it referred to Obama’s race speech as a “Profile in Courage”.

With JFK still generally revered by most Americans, particularly the white working-class voters Obama desperately needs to win over, it’s a comparison Obama’s people are happy to see made (despite the odd snipe by commentators). The truth is, though, that John F. Kennedy and Obama came from very different places politically - and had very different concepts of “change”.

Obama’s campaign has been built on a solid platform of opposition to the Iraq war. Indeed, if Obama hadn’t been able to contrast his own opposition to Hillary’s mixed record, it’s highly unlikely his campaign would have gathered the momentum - and the money - it needed to seriously compete. With his willingness to negotiate with so-called “rogue states”, and to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, Obama has nailed his colours pretty clearly to the dove mast.

The contrast with the Kennedy campaign of 1960 couldn’t be clearer. Kennedy’s brand of change, and its attendant criticism of the preceding eight years of Republican rule, was unequivocally hawkish.

In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery… We discuss tonight domestic issues, but I would not want that to be any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.

So Kennedy began the opening speech of his famous debate with opponent Richard Nixon. Granted, Kennedy discussed poverty at length in his campaign, and also lent his support to the nascent civil rights movement. But his most progressive ideas were always couched in the rhetoric of the Cold War. “The kind of country we have here, the kind of society we have, the kind of strength we build in the United States will be the defense of freedom,” he went on in his opening speech. If we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we’re moving ahead, then I think freedom will be secure around the world. If we fail, then freedom fails.”¹

Indeed, as George Packer points out, Kennedy’s message of hope was coded to speak to insecurities bubbling under the surface of a nation allegedly at east with itself. In an atmosphere of steady-as-she-goes conservatism - the 1950s, with their fetishising of conformity, had just ended - Kennedy brought to the surface fears about the economy and America’s place in the world that had previously been unspoken. Obama, by contrast, faces a nation in turmoil, where divisions over the best response to myriad challenges have almost made civilised discussion impossible. This means his message of hope, his focus on the positive, can be much more effective.

So is the strange, and ultimately sad, Kennedy story of no real relevance to the Obama campaign? Not so fast. Because there is a Kennedy campaign that Obama has much more in common with - the 1968 campaign of John’s little brother, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Like Obama, “Bobby” built his campaign on a central platform of opposition to an unpopular war. Like Obama, he faced a fight for the nomination with Democratic party royalty whose impeccable liberal credentials had been tarnished by support for that war: vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey (Kennedy had already seen off the previous presumptive nominee, the Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson). Like Obama, he campaigned on a leftist platform - focusing on poverty, public services, and civil rights - but proved effective at transcending traditional party affiliations.

While John’s radicalism was mostly rhetoric - once he entered power, his administration became known for a gradualist approach to issues like civil rights that exasperated activists - Robert’s was genuine: in place of John’s tax cut, Robert called for substantial tax rises to fund social programs; to John’s enthusiastic Cold War saber-rattling, Robert proposed a retreat from the US’ global commitments and from the military-industrial complex that had spiraled since the start of World War II.

While Obama’s program can’t match Robert’s for radicalism, the thrust and theme of his campaign is identical. Where John sought to identify the nagging concerns of a nation grown cosy after years of peace, Robert spoke up to the desire of a nation wracked by war and division for change. Obama’s stance as the “change candidate” has a clear precedent. While the standard approach is to attempt to achieve unity through compromise, Kennedy sought to build a new consensus on ground that had previously been identified with the hard left - essentially the same trick Obama hopes to pull off, a generation later, in 2008. Kennedy’s slogan, a quote from George Bernard Shaw - “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’” - stands out as a more lyrical version of Obama’s “yes we can”.

So what can the campaign of Robert Kennedy - whose closest relatives, ironically, have broken ranks with the rest of the clan to back Hillary - tell us about Obama’s chances? Of course, Robert Kennedy was never put to the general electoral test. His campaign ended, not with a concession speech, but with a victory party - after the Californian primary on June 5. It was ended, not by polls or delegate counts, but by Sirhan Sirhan, the young Palestinian who shot the Senator in the back and head at celebrations in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Psephologists disagree about the chances Kennedy’s radical campaign would have had against the republican nominee, Richard Nixon. When I met Senator Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy brothers in 2004, he confessed he was unsure whether Robert would have even beaten Humphrey, who had the support of most of congress, to the Democratic nomination. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “We had a long way to go.”

What’s clear, though, is that Kennedy had several factors in his favour which Obama can’t rely on. Both men score highly in both party and national polls among young people. But that demographic is far smaller now than it was in Kennedy’s time. The 1960s were the coming of age of the so-called “baby boom” generation, children born in 1945-7 in the postwar boom. As a result, the proportion of people in the US aged 18-25 was higher than ever. It was these “boomers” who protested in the universities, became the first hippies - and fought in the Vietnam war. These young people were the bedrock of Kennedy’s campaign.

The same is true of Obama’s campaign, but almost everything else has changed. Those same baby boomers are entering retirement, leaving America with a chronically aging population. The younger generation, by contrast, is smaller than ever, thanks to several decades of working women with easy access to birth control. And they’re less likely than ever to vote.

It is possible that aging boomers will be inspired enough by Obama’s rhetoric of change - and his resemblance to the Kennedy campaign - to carry him to victory. And blacks, who supported Kennedy in droves, are flocking to Obama. But another core Kennedy constituency, Hispanics, aren’t Obama’s to count on. Kennedy’s support for firebrand activist César Chávez made him a hero to many “Chicanos” (as Hispanics were generally called then). This constituency, unlike the youth vote, has only grown in the intervening years. But Obama’s support among Hispanics now, except the young, is poor.

With the youth vote less powerful, and the minority vote fractured, Obama may face an uphill struggle to clinch the nomination - and then, of course, the presidency. But then, few expected Kennedy’s campaign to obtain such momentum - or for the formerly overshadowed brother to prove such a compelling orator and eloquent advocate for the poor. In these more centrist days, it would be too much to expect that Obama might finish what Robert Kennedy started. But with America once more crying out for a change of direction, for a politics of compassion and co-operation, it seems possible a measure of Kennedy’s vision might be achieved.

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Put simply, most people - including, i suspect, many black people - feel far more nervous walking at night around young black men than young white men. This is based, in part, on the slightly higher black crime rate. But it nevertheless is racism, because it makes assumptions about individuals, and alters our reactions to them, based purely on the colour of their skin.

Until we stop talking about racism as a rare and evil crime, and instead recognise it as something we’re all capable of, we’ll never have a real conversation about it.

But I’ve said this to friends and they’ve looked at me like I’m mad. What do you think?

UPDATE: This article on the American election cites interesting evidence about the widespread nature of this sort of instinctive racial stereotyping.

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Andrew Sullivan (who [a] I’ve never forgiven for not remaining the attractive, slim role model he was when his book, Virtually Normal, was serialised in the Guardian in the 1990s and briefly lit up my gay teenage life; and [b] doesn’t allow comments any more on his blog The Daily Dish, only pingbacks, hence this post) is slightly unfair with his criticism of the inveterate conservative’s gleeful hay-making over Bittergate. Is Kristol, like many conservatives (and Mrs. Clinton*) being entirely disingenuous in pretending that any time a politician, in a private fundraising meeting, makes sweeping generalisations about a section of the electorate and the socioeconomic drivers of their political positions, they’re importuning its collective intelligence? Of course. He goes on to do it himself, a few lines later, by implying that all wealthy San Franciscan democrats are metropolitan snobs (not a generalisation many would disagree with, but then of course that’s the point - many don’t disagree with Obama either). But he doesn’t actually - as Sullivan suggests - cast doubt over Obama’s religious beliefs. Rather, he argues that Obama believes his own religious beliefs to be complex and genuine, but appears not to think that about others.

Not that this is true, or fair, of course. Obama’s choice of verb - he said that people “cling” to religion - was not, as Dan Schnur argued on Left, Right & Center on Friday, the heart of an offensive slur on small-town, working-class whites’ ability to think. Rather, it was entirely the correct word to identify the phenomenon Obama was describing - the phenomenon, unique to America, of religion becoming one of the primary wedges between political parties, despite every significant politician belonging to the same religion. White working-class voters, who believe in God, have been convinced again and again to vote (against their economic interest) for Republican candidates, who believe in God, and to vote against Democratic candidates, who believe in God, because they’ve been persuaded that the Republicans believe in God more strongly than the Democrats do. You don’t have to be a snob, an athiest, or even an arch-liberal to believe this to be at least partly an emotional reaction borne of anxiety and fear - clinging, in other words.

If the presidential candidates were actually from significantly different religions, as in 1960, then you might expect belief to become the primary guide to people’s votes - although the result of 1960 suggests, even then, people might put policy and personality before pulpit. But for this to have happened in a politics entirely dominated by protestantism is bizarre, and somewhat irrational. You could say the same about down-the-line gun-rights voting, when no Democrat has seriously threatened the second amendment for a decade (abortion, where another four years of Republican rule could feasibly lead eventually to the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, is a little different).

A century after Freud, to recognise that people’s voting decisions aren’t entirely rationally based isn’t snobbish, it’s adult. And to deny in public (while, I suspect, acknowledging freely in private) that the phenomenon of the working-class “values voter” owes more than a little to the manipulation of people’s emotions - their anger, their anxiety, and, yes, their bitterness - is duplicitous in the extreme.

So Kristol is innocent of denying the depth of Obama’s faith. But he’s guilty, as usual, of a host of other sins: insincerity, hypocrisy and faux-naivete, for a start.

*I’m having trouble knowing what to call her. To keep using “Hillary”, when I never say “Barack”, seems clearly sexist; but “Senator Clinton” is too pompous and “Clinton” obviously unclear. “Mrs. Clinton” seems the simplest identifier, similar to “George Bush, Jr.”, my preferred name for the current President.

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Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

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“John McCain is a teacher’s pet! John McCain dobs people in!” This is not the way to endear yourself to the conservatives who fucked John Kerry for mentioning soldiers’ confessions of war crimes. I can hear them now: “your hero is your english teacher? what are you, gay?”

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: “MTV Magazine Casting” <mail@dontstayin.com>
To:
Date: 22 Mar 2008 10:52:12 +0000
Subject: MTV ARE LOOKING FOR THE YOUNG, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE COOL FACE OF LONDON. IS IT YOU?

Click here if you can’t see the e-flyer below

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