Images from the last US Election with Front Pages? Probably not.

Many more here. Thanks to NewsDesigner.

Tuesday November 4

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief...



Update: this just in from Tom P of Croton (and C. Porter of, ah, Paris)

If a holy Hindu man can,
If a gangly Anglican can,
If in Lesbos, a pure Lesbian can,
Baby, you can can-can too.

Warp Speed

“I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”

The NYT on the election that changed things.

Sunday in the Park With(out) George

More pictures here.

да мы можем

No Shocks, Just Numbers: Pew on Media choice and the election

Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 mention the internet as mention newspapers as a main source of election news (49% vs. 17%). Nearly the opposite is true among those over age 50: some 22% rely on the internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Compared with 2004, use of the internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), TV has lost significant ground to the internet.

More here.


그렇습니다 우리는 할 수 있다

It used to be an Englishman that takes his time, now it's a feature writer/blogger

Unlike some of the journalists for not only the daily papers but for networks, who have to constantly blog as well as file stories, I could be a little more leisurely, and beyond that, maintain a big-picture perspective. And frankly, the McCain campaign was much more responsive to that approach. They’ve come to be rather disdainful of the hyper-blogging that takes place on the press bus, and they think it has increased this mind-set of “gotcha” journalism, where every time John McCain would say something, instead of asking a follow-up question, people would go scurry off to their laptops and post to their blogs. And the McCain campaign believes that’s not what journalism ought to be. I’m not positing myself as some kind of superior journalist, it’s just that the format of long-form journalism allows me to be a little more leisurely, allows me to look at the longer view of things, and allows me two-and-a-half months on a single story.

GQ's Robert Draper on the pleasures of taking it slow.


WWD.com interviews Draper.

Watch me single-handedly lose the US Election

Easy.

Another hostage-captor situation...

"You lose contact with the outside world," says Bai. "You call your spouse at home and talk about the trail and the person at home just doesn't get it or care, because it's the same story over and over again. It's murder on relationships." Every four years, Bai says, there's at least one divorce or break-up. "It's just not a normal human experience."

And even if your relationship survives, your personality might not. Last week, Lizza, who was banned from the Obama plane in July, found his way back on and thought he had stumbled on a lost colony. "It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there," he says. "The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone's a little grumpy and territorial, and there's this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation."

From The New Republic: on the campaign trail, the human story.

On the Street where you vote

Archon Fung, in conjunction with ABC news, has launched a "crowd sourcing" initiative to identify problems at polling places, called MyFairElection....

...As thousands of citizens rate their voting experiences, MyFairElection will produce a real-time "weather map" of voting conditions across the country. This map will allow viewers to see where it is easy to vote, and where people have encountered obstacles. Journalists, advocates, officials, and citizens can use this map to address obstacles to voting in real time.

From the Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University .

Top Tropes of the US Election

When Obama went on vacation to Hawaii to visit his grandmother, ABC pundit Cokie Roberts declared (8/10/08): "Going off this week to vacation in Hawaii does not make any sense whatsoever.... I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, you know."

Lots more at Fair.org.

“I don’t think Joe the Plumber wears Manolo Blahniks,” Ms. Behar said.

From the NYT.

Phew!

“We know there are concerns about exit polls,” said Kathy Frankovic, who directs CBS News polling unit. “Our goal is to do two things on election night: explain what’s going on and why, and to accurately project outcomes.”

From Politico.

Those Beastly Words

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.”

James Wood in the New Yorker.

Joy in the Morning

Turning left?


A long night with Wolf and Obama and John and that absurd (but compelling) CNN popularity-o-meter and all those scowls and sneers and several coffees later I take Sunny the dog for a walk. The sun is out and this is the IPod Playlist:



Tell Me Something Good - Rufus
I'll Take You There - The Staple Singers
Whatever It Takes - Ron Sexsmith
Gospel with No Lord - Camille
Tell Me What It Is - Graham Central Station
I Feel It All - Feist
Body and Soul - Anita Baker
Wrestlers - Hot Chip
Offshore banking business - The Members
Duke's Place - Joya Sherill (but the link is Louis and Duke)
Wishing - A Flock of Seagulls
Paris - Friendly Fires
Devil May Care - Raul Midon
John, I'm only dancing - David Bowie
Something's Coming - Oscar Peterson (as close as I could get - sounds right)
Yes We Can - Will.i.am




What can I have been thinking about?





All pictures: Sunny, the dog. Oh happy day!

New Media, New Money

From the American Political Science Association

Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report. In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing. These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a “Colbert bump” or a rise in support for their election campaigns.

Read the research in PDF