A House Divided

Interesting article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the latest New York Review. If you're not a subscriber, you should be. It seems pretty clear that Obama saved the US and probably the world from a depression through the stimulus from 2009. This presidential election shouldn't even be close. It should be 1936. And yet if the Republicans had managed to nominate a charismatic moderate, they would almost certainly be going to win on Tuesday. Of course, the Republican Party does not exactly have an oversupply of charismatic moderates. My tip, if I were a political consultant to them, is that they should find some. The problem for Obama is that he and the White House have been unable to control the narrative over the last few years so that that "stimulus "has become a dirty word like "liberal". But here's the thing: the auto industry isn't just the Big Three, it's an entire ecosystem. And a lot of people who are still in a job working for suppliers to the Big Three, thanks to the stimulus and the rescue of the auto industry are in Rust Belt states. Like Ohio. And will vote for Obama on Tuesday, Which might give Obama Ohio and with it the presidency.

Obama and Romney might not get on, but they are fundamentally alike: Harvard-trained technocrats who spent some of their most formative years overseas. A significant difference is that Romney is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist who refuses to provide an adequate account of his tax affairs. I don't know how much the Democrats have managed to make of that. Certainly no-one is going to be going for a beer with Romney, but Obama is hardly a regular guy.. He might have saved the auto industry, but he doesn't look like the guide of guy who would drive an American car, if he had a choice, or drink a domestic beer. The election is a toss-up because a lot of angry white men look at the president and they don't see themselves when they look at the preseident. As I said back in 2008, Obama represents a cosmopolitan, urban, cerebral America: Smartland, not Heartland. Someone like Clinton might have had the charisma and the background to bridge that divide at least to the extent of a larger lead in the polls. I don't know if there is any such figure who might be able to bridge that gap for the Democrats in 2016 or, indeed, for the Republicans.

And the truth is, as someone said on Sam Wang's blog, the Republicans should stop whining about Nate Silver being biased to the Democrats: 80%-20% is a toss-up. I'm just glad I'm on the 80% side, but I remember my old Call of Cthulhu days. Of course, it Sam's right, the odds are more like 98%-99.8% for Obama. I'll take those. It seems there aren't quite enough angry white men who prefer Romney. Perhaps some the angry white men have still got their jobs in the auto sector.

Obama has been a disappointment in many ways. It is ever thus in politics. Without Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, he will be heavily constrained. But the Executive Branch still wields enormous power in the US System and perhaps he might wield more freely without the concern of re-election. And we can hope for more payoffs from initiatives begun in the first term. Take, for instance, electrofuels from ARPA-E. Perhaps there is some hope after all.