“Now that my focus has been enlarged, I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events, national issues.”
Who made this statement in an interview on national television yesterday?
a) Ben Bernanke
b) Scott Brown
c) Barack Obama
d) Sarah Palin
Click on the continuation link to find out the answer.
The AP has just called the special Massachusetts senate election for Republcan Scott Brown.
Teddy Kennedy’s seat will be occupied by a Republican who will make it his personal mission to scuttle the healthcare initiative.
Today I’ve found myself thinking about my years in the Boston-Cambridge area. Back in the day, we used to go every now and then to the bleachers at Fenway Park, to take in the game, be boisterous, and enjoy the old-time baseball atmosphere. I didn’t mind too much about basically being the only person of color. There were times when it seemed to me that the nearest African American was future Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice down in left field.
I remember one bleacher moment particularly vividly. My friend C. B., a lifelong, diehard Democrat, turned to me and said: “Take a look around. This has got to be one of the most liberal states in the union, but you sure wouldn’t know it looking at all the meatheads sitting around us.”
For me, the turning point in Barack Obama’s campaign, the moment that I knew for sure that he was the candidate for me, was the moment when the late Teddy Kennedy endorsed Obama.
Right now, I am amazed at the cosmic irony of the Democrats’ losing Kennedy’s seat and thereby squandering the opportunity to pass the healthcare reform that was Kennedy’s fondest hope.
It makes me wonder whether we aren’t in fact just the playthings of the gods.
[Thanks to greaterbostonphotography.com for the photo of the bleacher creatures above. Click here to go to the original location and see the wry caption that accompanies the photo.]
So here’s a place where two of my interests — technology and politics — come together: David Bergman’s Gigapan image of President Obama’s inaugural address. It’s a 1.47 gigapixel shot — yes, that’s gigapixel not megapixel — created using Gigapan’s Epic photo mount, which enables you to shoot a series of multiple overlapping pictures that can later be fused into one helluva panoramic print. Bergman set it to shoot a grid that was 20 photos wide by 11 photos down. The whole process took about 15 minutes to complete.You can read Bergman’s account of how he came to make the picture on his blog.
If you click on the image below, you’ll be taken to a fullscreen viewer that you can explore, zooming in, out, and all around, using your mouse.
What else can you find in the picture?
One of the questions that arises in the course of Melville’s Moby-Dick is whether Ahab’s name is significant. It’s not just a matter of literary symbolism, in which the author is sending a signal to the knowing reader that the the reader might glean something about the character from the name. That’s standard practice in allegory.
For example, in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678), a Christian allegory that takes the form of a dream vision, the main character is named “Christian,” and we’re meant to understand that what we’re reading is a representation of the Christian life. But none of the characters in the book talk about why Christian is named Christian.
Likewise, Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) has a name that is fraught with symbolic overtones: her first name brings to mind Oedipus, Sophocles’ tragic hero or Freud’s Oedipus complex or the Oxford English Dictionary (commonly referred to as the “OED,” which happens to be Oedipa’s nickname, “Oed”); while her surname sounds like the Spanish , the intensifier “more” (from the Spanish más, meaning “more” or “most” or “else). Reader, make of all that what you will!
It’s different in Moby-Dick though. Naming the captain of the Pequod “Ahab” is not just a signal to the reader about ways of reading both the character and the narrative: it’s also a subject for discussion among the characters themselves. In one of my favorite chapters, “The Ship,” Ishmael signs up to serve on the Pequod (after a wonderfully comic good-cop-bad-cop routine in which two of the ship’s owners, Captains Peleg and Bildad, use Biblical logic to drive down poor Ishmael’s share of the profits) and then thinks to ask about the ship’s captain.
Here’s Peleg’s answer:
He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab — so some think — but a good one.
Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. he’s a grand,
ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he
does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s
above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the
cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery
lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the
keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain
Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg;he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!
Ishamel, though, is a former schoolteacher and knows his Bible, so he calls Peleg’s bluff: “And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?” The reference is to the story of Ahab in 1 Kings.
So Peleg changes his tack:
“Come hither to me — hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance
in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on
board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name
himself. ‘Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother,
who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw
Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic.
And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to
warn thee. It’s a lie.”
Is naming Ahab’s prophetic? Near the end of the novel, Ahab seems to embrace the idea: a sense of destiny that seems to be foretold by his naming. Justifying his seemingly mad actions to his first mate, Starbuck, Ahab asks (in Chapter 132, “The Symphony“), “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? … how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I.” Seemingly answering his own question, he says, “By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in
this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”
Now two economists at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, David Kalist and Daniel Lee, offer a modern perspective in the Social Science Quarterly. You can read about their work in a Time magazine article entitled “Can Your Name Make You a Criminal?” According to Time, “The short answer is that our names play an important role in shaping
the way we see ourselves — and, more important, how others see us.”
I guess squaw Tistig was on to something.
Then again there are people who, unlike Ahab, manage to overcome the limitations implicit in their naming. Here’s one for you: Barack Hussein Obama.
Barack Obama has patterned himself after some of our most revered Presidents. During the campaign he invited comparison to another Illinois politician who began his career in the state legislature, Abraham Lincoln, and it’s been widely reported that he’s been influenced by Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s cabinet. Because of his age, he’s been compared to John F. Kennedy. And in his inaugural address on Tuesday, he invoked George Washington and echoed Thomas Jefferson.
On day two, however, he was keeping company with two of the less august members of our presidential pantheon: Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge.
Arthur, Coolidge, and Obama are the only three presidents who have had to retake the oath of office.
In both Arthur’s and Coolidge’s cases, the irregularities occurred because a sitting president had just passed away.
Arthur was sworn in on September 20, 1881 in New York City after President Garfield died the previous day from the wounds he received after being shot in the back on July2. The oath was readministered when he returned to Washington, DC, two days later. (Click here to see an engraving of the first oath.)
Coolidge was sworn in on on August 2, 1923 after President Harding passed away. The oath was administered to Coolidge by his father, a notary public, which struck some as unseemly, so it was redone. (You can read Coolidge’s rather moving account of his intial swearing in here and a painting of the event from the Library of Congress here.)
Which makes Obama’s case unique and a tad embarrassing in comparison. Of course, Obama’s mistake wasn’t exactly his fault: it was Chief Justice Roberts who misplaced the word “faithfully,” with Obama (who clearly had studied his lines), then prompting the Chief Justice to correct his error. But in the confusion what Obama ended up doing was repeating the mistake. Greg Craig, the White House chief counsel, said that the original oath was legal, but that it was better to do it again “out of an abundance of caution.” There’s a nice little account of the do-over at msnbc.com.
Let’s hope that we remember this little episode as the biggest mistake of Obama’s presidency (wouldn’t that be nice?) and not a portent of bigger mistakes to come.
In a sign that it’s a former rather than the latter, one of the other things that Obama did yesterday was a literal case of putting his money where his mouth has been: he froze the pay of senior White House aides making more than $100,000.
Go, O!
{Photo Credit: Office White House photo: Pete Souza / White House handout via AFP – Getty Images.]
INAUGURATION DAY 2009
At the words “And so help me God,” we popped the bottle of Mumms. I’m saving the cork.
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”
Bye, bye, Bush.
This morning at ahistoryofnewyork.com, I wrote a post about the first Presidential inaugural address, which was given by George Washington in New York City in 1789, The post ended with two word-frequency maps, created with Wordle, one for Barack Obama’s Nominatinon Acceptance Speech (August 28, 2008) and one for his Victory Speech on November 4 in Chicago.
Nation. New. People.
Major League baseball’s free agent-signing season began today, with
the Yankees making a monster offer to the Milwaukee Brewers’ pitcher C.
C. Sabathia. They’re apparently also planning big offers to free-agent
pitchers Derek Lowe and A.J. Burnett. The Mets are going to be more
conservative with their money this off-season, but they’re still hoping
to be able to find some free-agent help for the bullpen and the
outfield.
This year, however, I’ll also be watching as another
team takes shape: the Presidential Team. How nice — and how strange –
to be following the rumors about Cabinet posts with the same intensity
that I follow the rumors about baseball signings and trades. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State? Bill Richardson? They both seem like good choices to me, but I think that if Clinton would agree to do it, we’d have the strongest sign yet that it isn’t going to be politics as usual in Washington starting January 20. (And I always thought that the triumph of liberal politics in The West Wing was such wishful thinking, particularly the last season with a young minority candidate winning the presidency and then choosing his rival to be Secretary of State.)
And what
a change to be looking forward to Inauguration Day! It feels like the
beginning of a new millennium. Too bad about the eight-year delay.
It’s election day, arguably the most important election of my voting life. I’m going to be updating this post in the course of the day.
7:05 a.m.
We’re in line to vote. Lucky for us, the polling place is just in our the back of the first floor of our residence hall. Things are a little bit more chaotic this year than in the past, and when we get there, we hear raised voices complaining about the way the line is being run. Three different districts are voting in our building, and the poll coordinator isn’t sure whether to have there lines or one, and if there is one, at which point to divide it into three . . . The workers at the table haven’t gotten their system down either: there are two different sign-in books, and they’re passing it around rather assigning one to each of the two people there to check in names.
Behind us, a middle-aged African American woman is there with a boy whom I presume to be her grandson. He’s about 15, and he’s still half-asleep. But he’s being good-natured. At one point, the grandma cups his face in her hands and says, voice breaking a little, “Honey, we’re making history today.”
Some of the undergrads in line are hoping to get “I’ve Voted” stickers, but they’re going to be disappointed.
7:40 a.m.
Our neighbor, who teaches Early Childhood Ed at NYU’s Steinhardt School, comes out shaking her head. She tells us that we’re seeing the fruits of our educational system in the way that the polling place is working, a case study in problems of literacy and organization.
7:52 a.m.
My younger son is in the 1960s-era voting booth with me, and he helps me pull the lever for Barack Obama. We pull the red lever back to record the vote. We have just made history, voting for an African American man for the presidency of the United States.
There’s definitely a buzz in the air that I haven’t seen in past elections.
8:15 a.m.
So apparently Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, which is traditionally the first place to vote in the country, opening its polls at 12:01 a.m. on election day, has voted to elect Barack Obama, 15-6. (The town has 75 residents and 21 registered voters). Nate writes that Dixville Notch is never regarded as a predictor of anything, but it has gone Republican in several recent presidential elections: 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. But, as Nate points out, “you’d rather be up 15-6 than down, wouldn’t you?”
4:30 p.m.
Off to pick up my younger son and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. My wife, via text message, is willing to admit that we might need a bottle of champagne later tonight.
7:03 p.m.
Polls have closed in several states, and Kentucky has been called for McCain, Vermont for Obama. No surprises here. No calls yet for Indiana, Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina. McCain currently slightly ahead in Indiana … whoops, Mark Warner has been predicted to win in Virginia, a Democratic pickup. A very good sign!
7:13 p.m.
Obama up 50-49% in Indiana with 7% reporting. My mother-in-law must be psyched. She lives in Lafayette, has been a diehard Obama supporter from the moment he became a national politician, and has been been canvassing for Obama all fall. She’s currently somewhere outside Grant Park in Chicago.
8:20 p.m.
I’ve been explaining how the elections work — voting, electoral college, polling, predictions, calling states — to my older son all evening, and he’s become very invested in the whole thing. He.s watching the returns as if it were a sporting event and is protesting mightily that he has to go to bed before the polls close in New York.
After the 8:00 p.m. closings, the projected electoral count on CNN is Obama 77, McCain 34, with no upsets yet. But as they break down the numbers in Indiana and Florida, it seems that McCain is doing worse than Bush did four years ago almost across the board. More good signs for Obama.
8:27 p.m.
CNN is being conservative, but MSNBC has called both Pennsylvania and New Hampshire for Obama, giving him 103. Over at fivethirtyeight, Nate says that the speed with which the AP called New Hampshire is “the best evidence yet that Obama is about to become the next president.”
8:40 p.m.
CNN is now calling Pennsylvania for Obama. Holding onto the state is huge for Obama, because McCain spent a lot of time and money trying to turn it red. I can feel the momentum building … There’s a huge cheering crowd over in Times Square watching CNN’s coverage on a big screen …
On the other hand, Obama hasn’t flipped a red state yet …
9:00 p.m.
More poll closings: New Yrok, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Michigan — and Minnesota to Obama! Go Al Franken! Meanwhile, my wife tells me that my mother-in-law has been an Obanma supporter since he was a state senator. CNN’s count: Obama 174, McCain 49. But still no red state flipped.
9:11 p.m.
Sitting downstairs now in the Commons of our residence hall, where the mood is boisterous. The pizza that arrived at 8:00 p.m. was devoured in five minutes, I’m told.
9:34 p.m.
A huge cheer here as CNN ()which is what we have up on the big screen here) calls Ohio for Obama. MSNBC had called it earlier, and now they’re calling New Mexico.Looking at the electoral map before Ohio was called, my neighbor, the philosopher from Hofstra, said, “It’s like Monopoly: houses are fine, but I want a hotel!” A big red hotel that we can paint blue!
9:50 p.m.
Back upstairs. My fellow Faculty Fellows and I have done the math: if CNN’s projections so far are right, which have Obama at 199, then it’s done: California, Oregon, and Washington
account for 73, getting Obama to 272, two more than he needs. But that won’t be all, it seems . . .
10:00
Iowa! For Obama! I wonder if they know more about some of the states they’re not calling as a courtesy to the Western states. John King of CNN is asking what they (at CNN) do when Obama gets to 270 (presumably soon), and now he’s arguing that how many electoral votes he gets will be important in terms of governing. They’re doing their best to make this seem like a drama. But the handwriting, as they say, is on the wall.
We figure we’ll save the champagne for one more hour , , ,
10:24 p.m.
CNN keeps calling states for McCain — Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi — but they’re also reporting that two “senior McCain aides” so “no path to victory given the results so far.”
They’re right about the final electoral tally and the percentage of the popular vote making a difference. I keep clicking on various online electoral maps to see how the races in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida are going. I want Obama to run up the score.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to finish preparing for my second lecture on Hamlet , but it’s a late hard to concentrate on the Dane right now. Though it strikes me that there is something Shakespearean about John McCain’s fall from grace this year.
10:59 p.m.
Virginia called for Obama! Virginia!
11:00 p.m.
All the polls in the continental USA have closed. CNN is projecting that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. I can hear screaming outside my windows, screams of joy! The wife is weeping.
I have a new title for my book: Joy in Mudville! Baseball and Politics from Bush to Barack.
11:20 p.m.
McCain is giving a very gracious concession speech. Maybe David Brooks is right about the “real” John McCain; too bad we didn’t see him very often during the campaign. If only the Republicans had nominated him in 2000.
11:35 p.m.
We’ve switched to CSPAN. We’ve tired of the talking heads and just want to see the happy people.
11:35 p.m.
Barack to the world: “A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
As I turn in for the night, it’s after midnight and already, technically, election day. Nate Silver writes that “the national polling picture has cleared up considerably. Barack Obama
is on the verge of a victory, perhaps a decisive victory, in the race
for the White House.” And he notes that, according to his models, “McCain’s chances of victory are estimated at 1.9 percent, their lowest total of the year.”
I’m hoping that, twenty-four hours from now, I turn out to be wrong, that it’s an actual landslide for Obama. That seems unlikely at the moment, but Nate points out that there are “many reasons to think that the polls are understating Obama’s support, because of such factors as the cellphone problem, his superior groundgame operation, and the substantial lead that he has built up among early voters.“
Hope. I go to bed with hope. And later on today, as is our custom, one
of our sons will accompany me to the voting both and help me pull the
levers.
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