I'm done talking about Sarah Palin soon, I promise, but I do need to share this.

The one moment in last night's speech that caught me off guard was this one:

To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.

As she said it, I felt something I hadn't expected to feel during her speech --- a sense of being reached out to, a sense of community. That was a surprise, and a welcome one.

As I read over that passage this morning, though, I noticed things I didn't notice last night. "the families of special needs children." A "more welcoming place for your sons and daughters." My family is the family of a person with a serious cognitive disability, but that person is not my daughter, and she is not a child. She is my sister. She is my daughters' aunt. She is my wife's sister-in-law. She is a friend. A colleague. A woman.

The day came nearly two decades ago when my sister was no longer a child. The day will come when she no longer has a father or a mother. But our family didn't stop fighting to help her carve out a place for herself in this country when that first day came, and it won't stop when the second one does. That is the reality facing my family, and Palin's own.

It may be churlish of me to pick apart Palin's phrasing like this --- she has been the mother of a child with a disability for only four and a half months, and it's not so strange, given what she's been dealing with this year, that she would think of the families of people with disabilities primarily as the parents of children with problems.

But I see that Palin slashed outlays for schools for children with disabilities in her most recent budget, and that she used her line-item veto to cut funding for computer and library equipment for the Alaska Brain Injury Network, for a new van and some furniture for a juvenile mental health services facility, for a sports program for disabled veterans, and for ADA compliance at the Alaska state fair. If she has been an advocate for people with disabilities and their families --- their parents or their siblings or their children --- as governor, it's not immediately apparent in her budgetary choices.

Marc Schmitt writes this morning that his "least favorite trait in modern conservatism" is "the carving out of a sympathetic exception for the single family need or health problem that you have personal experience with." These days, he says, every Republican "has his or her little platform issue ... that shows their soft side between bouts of "cutting taxes and slashing Medicaid. The lesson in having a child with special needs" isn't, he says, that "we need more attention for kids with special needs." It's that "life hands out lots of difficult circumstances and lots of families need different kinds of help, so we're all in it together."

What he said.

Tags: disability, politics

1. Everyone on the teevee is saying this takes the "experience" argument away from McCain, but I don't buy it. McCain will still hammer Obama on experience, mostly by insinuation -- the "celebrity" taunt isn't going away, and Palin doesn't take it off the table.

What this does do, though, is alter the Obama camp's line of attack against McCain. Up until now, they've been really tentative in pushing the issue of McCain's age and frailty. By picking Palin, McCain makes that kind of push a lot more appealing. When they raise concerns about McCain's health and vigor going forward, they'll be reminding voters of Palin's greenness without broaching the experience question directly. Look for McCain to be portrayed as a doddering fool a lot more often in the weeks to come.

(Saturday morning update: Huh. I sure wasn't wrong about the age and frailty thing -- one day in, the phrases "Sarah Palin" and "heartbeat away" return 142,000 Google hits in conjunction, while "Joe Biden" and "heartbeat away" turn up just 21,000 after more than a week. The experience question is definitely breaking harder against McCain than I expected it would, though, at least in the short term.)

2. On the gender front, I suspect this choice will, counterintuitively, cement the return of the Hillary faithful to the Democratic fold. Hillary and Bill's speeches at the DNC went a very long way toward making that sale, and the typical Clintonista is going to be revulsed by the idea of sending an aggressively anti-choice conservative woman to the White House in Hillary's place. This pick may win McCain some female votes, but I don't at all see them coming out of Hillary's base.

3. Palin is apparently a strong supporter of Alaskan oil drilling, and her husband is an oilfield worker. I have a hunch that her presence on the ticket will shake up the environmental dynamics of the race a bit, though Obama's shift on offshore drilling may dampen her effectiveness on that front somewhat. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Update: Here's something else. It's only sixty-seven days until election day. That's not a lot of time for the country to get comfortable with someone who is essentially a complete unknown. This isn't the choice of a presidential candidate who thinks he's sitting on a comfortable lead.

One more: Obama represented twenty-five times as many people in the Illinois state senate as Palin did as mayor of Wasilla, AK, and nearly half as many as she does as governor of Alaska. The Bronx Borough President, Adolfo Carrion, presides over a constituency twice the size of Palin's.

Tags: gender, obama, politics

First, he turns 74 in 2016. He won't be running, or serving, with an eye on his own post-Obama career.

Second, according to this, he's the 108th richest of the nation's 100 senators. Sweet.

Third, this doesn't suck.

Update: Here's a fourth. You may have heard that his son is in the Delaware National Guard, and is being deployed to Iraq soon. I just learned from Wikipedia that he's the Delaware Attorney General, he's going over as a member of the JAG corps, and he ships out the day after the vice-presidential debate.

Tags: obama, politics

Anyone have an opinion on the best place to donate money in opposition to the California anti-marriage initiative?

C1 and I are invited to a wedding in Sonoma next summer if same-sex marriage survives the challenge, and I'd hate to see the thing moved to a Boston venue.

Update: Thanks to kmelion for passing this question along to folks with answers, and thanks to those folks for answering! Gotta love the net.

Tags: gender, politics

I have it on good authority that despite what the website says, Camgirls is finally in stock at Amazon. So go buy a copy, if you've been putting it off.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

No work is more fun for me than editing, and I've never had more fun editing than I did last December when I worked on Terri Senft's Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks.

Camgirls is a book about women who live their lives in public on the web, and it concentrates on webcams in their heyday, but that's really just its hook. It's a book about how celebrity and community operate online. It's a book about LiveJournal. (Terri has been participating in and observing LiveJournal culture as tsenft for eight years, and she's got a huge amount of smart stuff to say about how LJ operates as a tool for building connections between people.) It's a book about feminism, about sex work, and about how gender is lived on the internet. It's a book, fundamentally, about the construction and presentation of the self in the online era --- about how we establish and maintain ourselves as people and as personae when we live our lives online.

It's a hell of a book. Really. I bought two copies, so that I can lend one out and not worry about getting it back. Go get yourself one. If you do, and you regret it, mail it to me. I'll pay you for it, reimburse you the shipping, and find it a good home.


Update: Forgot to mention --- If any of you are interested in reviewing Camgirls, or if you or anyone you know is teaching a course in cyberculture or women's studies for which you might be interested in assigning it, let me know. I'll get Terri to hook you up with a PDF reader's copy.

Further Update: So it appears that Camgirls is not yet quite available. Consider this a pre-publication endorsement, and I'll post again when the book is actually on offer. I'm still happy to make arrangements to get PDFs out, though.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

C1 informs me that the NY state legislature approved a bill yesterday giving unmarried couples with no children access to Family Court in domestic violence cases. This law will make it easier for lesbians and gays, as well as unmarried straight people, to secure orders of protection from their abusers, and strengthen the provisions of those orders when granted.

C1's agency has been fighting for this law, the "Fair Access to Family Court Act," for twenty years, and yesterday it passed.

Tags: gender, politics

I've got one comment on each of the three candidates, and one on delegate math. Those comments will be humorless, tendentious, insubstantial, and boring, respectively.

Humorless, on Clinton: I remain flabbergasted by the casual misogyny of the pundit class. Flipping through the political blogosphere this morning, I see that Ezra Klein is portraying Clinton as a girlfriend who refuses to accept that she's been dumped, Andrew Sullivan has put up a "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead" clip from The Wiz, and John Aravosis is saying that she is "just a nasty nasty woman." It really is ubiquitous.

Tendentious, on McCain: In his speech last night, McCain said "I don't seek the presidency on the presumption I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need." I'm not particularly interested in defending my gloss on this line, so I won't articulate it here quite as earthily as I did to C1 on the couch. I expect I'll be coming back to it in a post on sub rosa racism in the campaign before too much longer, tho.

Insubstantial, on Obama: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was a fusty artifact on the day it opened in 1967, but the events of last night lend this scene a certain strange poignance.

Boring, on delegate math: Obama's delegate count stood at 2162 at the end of last night, including 63 pledged delegates from Florida and Michigan. If the DNC were to seat full slates from those two states, those 63 would transform into 126, putting his total at 2228, comfortably above the 2210 needed for the nomination. And even if the party were to seat the Michigan delegation under Clinton's proposed breakdown, he'd still be at 2220. That's just on the basis of what was announced yesterday, and it doesn't reflect the effect of doubling the votes of Obama's MI and FL superdelegates, which I couldn't be bothered to sort out. Put simply, MI and FL are now moot, and all the squabbling over the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting was for nothing. Yesterday would have put him over the top whatever they did.

Tags: gender, obama, politics, race

It's over. The dam's breaking. By the time today's votes are counted, Obama will have clinched it. Clinton's apparently been leaning on supers to hold off until tomorrow, but even the ones who are going along are leaking to the media.

The story tonight is going to be that Obama won the nomination on the last day of voting. That's the story, and it's a great story to go into the general election with.

We won't be counting supers tomorrow, we won't be wringing our hands about Michigan and Florida, we won't be worrying about Clinton sniping and stealing delegates away. We'll have our nominee.

Now comes the fun part.

Tags: obama, politics

Anyone who's worried about this nominating fight dragging on to the convention, stop worrying. By the end of this week, Obama will have picked up so many superdelegates that there will be no way --- under any possible permutation of MI and FL seating arrangements --- for Clinton to prevail.

Not convinced? Check out what former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack said yesterday:

"It does appear to be pretty clear that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee. After Tuesday's contests, she needs to acknowledge that he's going to be the nominee and quickly get behind him."

Vilsack is a national co-chair of the Clinton campaign, and a heavy hitter in Democratic politics. If Clinton presses on beyond Wednesday or Thursday, she's going to start shedding delegates, as her supporters take matters into their own hands. Bigwigs like Vilsack probably won't jump themselves, at least at first, but statements like the one above give lower-ranking officials a green light to do so.

Update::

Clinton is apparently on the air in Montana and South Dakota with ads touting her as the popular-vote leader in this nominating contest. There are three big reasons why this should be a non-starter of an argument.

First, there are too many asterisks. The candidates didn't campaign in Florida, and turnout was depressed as a result. Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan --- do we credit him with zero votes there? At least four caucus states haven't reported vote totals, so their tallies are estimates. Puerto Rico netted Clinton a bunch of votes, but it doesn't participate in the general election. And so on and on.

Second, the popular vote is an aggregation of incompatible data. Clinton tended to do well in primaries, where voting takes ten minutes. Obama tended to do well in caucuses, where voting takes an entire evening. If Clinton got a hundred-thousand-vote margin from a 55-45% primary win and Obama got a fifty-thousand-vote margin from a 70-30% caucus win in a similarly-sized state, which one "did better"? It's a meaningless question, because...

Third, the candidates weren't competing for popular votes. There's an old story about a football game in which the losing coach was quoted in the papers saying that his team had actually outplayed their opponents, because they had advanced more yards over the course of the game. The winning coach sent the loser a telegram that said "The next time you want to play for yards, let me know."

You win the nomination by winning a majority of the delegates. Accordingly, both candidates did their best to win a majority of the delegates. It's not like Obama was pursuing a delegate strategy in January and February and March while Clinton was out there trying to run up a popular vote lead. They were both playing the same game, by the same rules, and Obama won. It's only in retrospect, with the results known, that Clinton has decided that the popular vote is a significant metric. It's not a serious argument.

Second Update:

I see that Clinton is floating the idea of courting superdelegates to switch. On her campaign plane last night, she said "one thing about superdelegates is that they can change their minds."

This is true, and it's the reason that the recurring rumors about Obama stockpiling superdelegates for a mass announcement always turned out to be false --- if you get a superdelegate endorsement, you want it publicly known immediately, so that it's that much more likely to stick. There's always the chance that even a decisive Obama delegate lead could evaporate before the convention.

The problem for Clinton is that everyone knows this, and nobody wants to see it happen.

In about thirty-six hours the polls will close in Montana and South Dakota, and the last votes of the 2008 primary season will have been cast. The nominating process will be over. Over the course of the following day the remaining superdelegates will, in almost every case, make known the decisions that they have long since made. Hands will be raised and counted, and Obama will have a majority.

As soon as Obama gets that majority, we will see a raft of announcements from party elders that he is the party's nominee. Nancy Pelosi will say it. Howard Dean will say it. Al Gore and Jimmy Carter will say it. It won't be true, technically, but they'll all say it, and by saying it they'll make it true.

Is it possible that Obama could screw up so badly as to lose the nomination after that? Just barely. Maybe. But there's nothing Clinton can do to increase the likelihood of it. Lobbying supers won't work. Announcing her intention to fight on won't work. At that point, she's in quicksand, and her only chance of survival is to stay perfectly still and hope that rescue arrives before she goes under. Anything she does to undermine Obama's candidacy will cause her delegates to change their minds, because at this point a lot of her supporters would rather unite behind their second-choice candidate than keep fighting for their favorite.

The time for hand-wringing is over. We're done here.

Tags: obama, politics