Election Roundups
Ralph Luker is off conferencing, so someone has to do the"Noted Here and There" post.... I'm not quite as broad in my reading as the Supreme Cliopatriarch, but here's a run through our blogroll, anyway.
I will not post speculations about 2008. No. No. No. Not even about 2006.
World Reaction: My brother, currently in London, sent me the Daily Mirror's front page and roundup of (negative) world reaction. A more balanced survey can be found, as usual, at the World Press Review (which has reactions from China and Korea separately, as well as Kenyan reaction to Barack Obama's victory).
Abu Aardvark says that Jihadists are thrilled by Bush's victory and that the Bush administration has some serious rebuilding to do diplomatically. Caleb McDaniel starts the process with an open letter of apology, which my brother might find useful with his London colleagues. Anyone who wants to leave behind US citizenship will find this useful (via wood's lot). Anne Zook comes out of blog-retirement briefly and suggests we turn over"leader of the Free World" status to a country that has its priorities straight: New Zealand.
Radical Redistricting: Or perhaps we should revise our borders? Two proposals for linking blue states with Canada are floating around the web. Cliopatria's Tim Burke considers the possibility of dividing the union, because of the failure of federalism to protect us from each other, but rejects it because"I recognize the advance of universal human rights as a matter of slow, persuasive and voluntaristic transformation rather than civil or statist enforcement." As it happens, though, the state-level divide creates an illusion which is not sustainable on closer examination: county-level maps and cartograms [weighted maps] show a much less clearly divided nation, as well as, for me, calling the Electoral College thing into stark question.... again.
Voting Patterns: Hugo Schwyzer has a few of the voting gaps noted. Over at Crooked Timber it is pointed out that the original 13 states, the anti-slavery Union, and the Black voters who supported and benefited from the civil rights movement are the ones who voted for Kerry, a powerful coalition of historical freedom fighters. Andrew Sullivan notes that Gays and Jews voted more or less the same way, and that self-identified" conservatives" were a powerfully consistent bloc as well. Daily Kos takes on the question of a mandate, and Brandon at Sirius shortens our reading list considerably:"I think we have good reason to ignore any post-election analysis that assumes that Kerry somehow failed, rather than what seems to be the case, namely, that he did extremely well but Bush did better." Gayrights was important, and will continue to be.
Meaning? Historian Garry Wills, in the New York Times, calls the election the End of the Enlightenment, but that presumes that the Enlightenment was deeply embedded in US culture to begin with. Tim Burke echoes many of us when he suggests that the Bush Administration and its supporters will have to bear the responsibility for their policies.
In other news: Arafat is likely to be dead soon, and aside from wondering why it matters so much, I note Brian Ulrich's thoughts on the possibility that we may not have a single successor to deal with, but a committee.
Finally, for some relief, David Nishimura notes the discovery of Roman Cosmetics and an international gathering for the exchange and promotion of Testicle Cuisine. And if you think the Anglophone Blogosphere is big, you're right, but the Iranian Blogosphere is catching up, and seems likely to be more important in Iran than our own exercise in really, really cheap speech.
P.S. Chapati Mystery has a new guest-blogger who speaks to the Supreme Court issue: don't rely on Senate liberals, too easily mollified by litmus test invocations of precedent, to prevent the appointment of"Bork-Scalia-Thomas-Federalist Society" types who could, as a court majority, rival the Dred Scott and Korematsu courts for sheer moral vacuity.