"1,583 COMMENTS."

Hey! Thanks for all the comments on last night's election live-blog, from which I absented myself after a post at 8:04, noting the obviousness of Romney's impending loss of Wisconsin. I'd started the live-blog (at 5:12) saying "I'm thinking it will all be about Wisconsin" and "I'm Wisconsincentric." I really was.

I came back at 10:04 to say I was "distancing myself from the political fray, reconnecting to my old aversion to politics." And that's quite true. That's my instinct. When it's over, it's over, and it's been such a long campaign season. Time to stop obsessively looking at all the little numbers, take note of the one big number — 303 (or is it 332?) — and widen one's horizons.

What was I doing during those 2 hours? I had the TV on, and I was sitting back playing solitaire on my iPad (which is something I do when I want to listen without getting distracted into my own thoughts). I was calmly waiting for the inevitable to crystalize. I was adjusting to the new political reality in America.

I knew readers were having it out in the comments. Some were taunting and gloating. Some were telling us what they were drinking. There was an occasional "Where's Ann?"

I'm going to be very curious to hear what Althouse has to say tomorrow about her two-hour AWOL right in the heart of election night. Very odd, to say the least.

She always does this when she "live blogs", starts strong and craps out somewhere in the middle.

That last one was Palladian, who himself was away from the comments for a good long while (and who was drinking Ardbeg Uigeadail).

Vote — for revenge... or love?

This clip neatly embodies a reason why I believe Romney will win. He feels like optimism, and Obama — who once owned the word "hope" — seems petulant, divisive, and ungrateful.

ADDED: On love and revenge, read Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize:

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

AND: Here, for comparison, is Barack Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, over which we will puzzle forever. What was it for? He didn't mention revenge, but he did mention King and he did mention love:

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their fundamental faith in human progress – that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

As it becomes apparent — is it apparent? — that Obama is likely to lose — going to lose? — the election...

... what should we expect to see?

1. Desperate attacks, material that otherwise would not have been dumped into the public discourse.

2. Liberals distancing themselves, saying things like "He hasn't presented us with a comprehensive plan for his second term," to preserve their ability to say, after the election, that the American people did not choose conservatism and they don't want conservatism; they merely selected what seemed to be a plan over the absence of a plan; they wanted change and we have a new plan for change.

3. ???

"Stick with me, Ann," Barack Obama emails.

"Ann -- I don't want to lose this election."

Not because of what losing would mean for me -- Michelle and I will be fine no matter what happens.

Okay. Be careful. You know the reason many of us women feel inclined to stick with you is because we don't want you to have to feel bad. We don't want to hurt your feelings. We don't want you to think that we didn't think you were good enough.

But if it's all the same to you... well, then...

It's like your boyfriend is saying to you he could stay or go, it's all the same to him, but he doesn't want to hurt you. What girl doesn't say then get out so I can have someone with passion for this job?

The audience completely failed to cheer or applaud when Jon Stewart announced that Obama was the guest on "The Daily Show."

Here's the whole show. You'll have to put up with a commercial, and then what I'm talking about happens is the first thing after the intro music, 20 seconds in.

"Hey, everybody," Jon Stewart yells in his usual way, trying to get people stoked for the show. "Welcome to 'The Daily Show,' my name is Jon Stewart. We got a good one for you tonight. On our program, uh..." He looks comically at his notes as if maybe he forgot he has the President of the United States on his show. He continues, using a rising inflection obviously intended to evoke a strong response from the audience: "this evening, tonight, the President of the United States Barack Obama..." Nothing. Cheers were intended there. Stewart elongates the sentence with material that I think was either improvised or intended to be muttered overwhelmed by rapturous noise from the audience: "... will be joining us on the program tonight." And then a joke: "He's the star of the new film 'Here Comes the Boom.'" And that gets a laugh, a small laugh, which is interesting because of the way it points up the contrast to the utter absence of reaction to the news that the President was on the show.

This audience — presumably, the key demographic of young adults who went mad for the man last time — is not excited at all.

ADDED: It's "Here Comes the Boom," not "Here Comes the Boo," as I thought I heard, transcribing. I pictured something for Halloween, but it turns out: "A high school biology teacher looks to become a successful mixed-martial arts fighter in an effort to raise money to prevent extra-curricular activities from being axed at his cash-strapped school."

"Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason."

"We all need to take a cold, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is."

Said the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Michael P. Lynch, who says:

According to Haidt, not only are value judgments less often a product of rational deliberation than we’d like to think, that is how we are supposed to function. That it is how we are hardwired by evolution. In the neuroscientist Drew Westen’s words, the political brain is the emotional brain.

Often “reasoning” really seems to be post-hoc rationalization...

That reminds me: new Supreme Court term starts today.

... we tend to accept that which confirms what we already believe (psychologists call this confirmation bias). And the tendency goes beyond just politics....

Lynch thinks Haidt goes too far:

Critics of reason, from Haidt to conservative intellectuals like Burke and Oakeshott, see reason as an inherently flawed instrument. As a consequence, they see the picture of politics I’ve just suggested — according to which democracies should be spaces of reasons — as unfounded and naïve. Yet to see one another as reason-givers doesn’t mean we must perceive one another as emotionless, unintuitive robots. It is consistent with the idea, rightly emphasized by Haidt, that much rapid-fire decision making comes from the gut. But it is also consistent with the idea that we can get better at spotting when the gut is leading us astray, even if the process is slower and more ponderous than we’d like.

Haidt's new book is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."

I've been thinking a lot today about about the verb "to like."

First, I was struck by the Democratic pollster who said, about Romney, "Ultimately, people don’t like this guy. If they don’t like someone, it’s hard to get people to vote for him — particularly to fire someone they do like."

And then later today, I overheard a professor — I won't say who — telling students they will be meeting representatives of 2 groups, one conservative and one liberal, and that they "would like" the liberals. These particular conservatives, he said, were more effective pursuing their aims — some field of policy that I won't identify — but the liberals, you will like.

And it got me thinking about this word "like." What is this liking that we do — or are told to do or assert that we do — these days? You can "like" somebody on Facebook. It's a social thing. Politically, it's about liberals. Liberals are likeable. Barack Obama is — it's drummed into our heads — likeable. He's so likeable. He got ahead of Hillary Clinton for being so darned likeable, and he famously said "You're likeable enough" to her on his way to beating her to the nomination.

It occurred to me that that liberals have quite effectively insinuated the message into our brains that they are likeable, and, in particular, Barack Obama is likeable. And that doesn't just mean that any given individual likes him, subjectively. He is likeable, objectively. If you don't like him, what's wrong with you? You don't seem likeable. You'd better like him or no one will like you. All the likeable people are liberal, so you'd better be liberal or no one will like you.

That sounds very schoolyard, or like a shallow adult. Maybe if you're old like me, you remember the Arthur Miller play "Death of a Salesman," in which a pathetic man was way too concerned about whether he was well liked. Years ago, when we Baby Boomers were young, it seemed pathetic to dwell on being liked. It was a distraction for small minds, for conventional people.

Consider the etymology of the verb "to like":

O.E. lician "to please, be sufficient," from P.Gmc. *likjan (cf. O.N. lika, O.Fris. likia, O.H.G. lihhen, Goth. leikan "to please"), from *lik- "body, form; like, same." The basic meaning seems to be "to be like" (see like (adj.)), thus, "to be suitable." Like (and dislike) originally flowed the other way: It likes me, where we would say I like it. The modern flow began to appear late 14c.

The modern flow! I like Obama would pre-14c be expressed: Obama likes me. He pleases me. And why? Because he's like me? I see myself in him? Is that what we are doing? Looking in a mirror? If it feels as though we are looking in a mirror, we like him?

I'm reading the long Oxford English Dictionary entry for "like" — sorry, it's not linkable — and I run across the line in "Uncle Tom's Cabin": "I may like him well enough; but you don't love your servants." I can link to the full context:

"Would you think you were well off, if there were not one creature in the world near you to love you?"

"I?—Well, of course not."

"And you have taken Dodo away from all the friends he ever had, and now he has not a creature to love him;—nobody can be good that way."

"Well, I can't help it, as I know of. I can't get his mother and I can't love him myself, nor anybody else, as I know of "

"Why can't you?" said Eva.

"Love Dodo! Why, Eva, you wouldn't have me! I may like him well enough; but you don't love your servants."

"I do, indeed."

"How odd!"

"Don't the Bible say we must love everybody?"

"O, the Bible! To be sure, it says a great many such things; but, then, nobody ever thinks of doing them,—you know, Eva, nobody does."

Eva did not speak; her eyes were fixed and thoughtful for a few moments.

Now, I certainly don't think we ought to love our political leaders. "He loved Big Brother" is the last line of George Orwell's "1984":

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Horrifying. But this liking of Obama — not loving, liking — what is it? Is it racist? You like him. You really, really like him. Or something's wrong with you. Do you twinge with anxiety that you might be racist if you don't like him? Better like him. Why suffer the cruel, needless misunderstanding, the stubborn, self-willed exile from the likeable breast! Everything can be all right. The struggle can be finished. Surrender to the victory over yourself. You like Barack Obama.

But only like. You don't love....

Love... it's so old fashioned and retrograde. It's what the Baby Boomers talked about, back when they were hippies.

It's so fine, It's sunshine
It's the word, love
Everywhere I go I hear it said
In the good and the bad books that I have read

Not anymore. Now, the word is: LIKE. 

A WaPo writer "searching for the 'authentic America'" is delighted to travel to Madison, Wisconsin.

"We’d always heard about that mythically quirky place called Madison, a free-spirited land with far fewer chain stores and BlackBerry addicts than Washington," enthuses Emily Wax. Man, living in Washington, D.C. really lowers your standards of authenticity.

Influenced by the 2011 documentary “Wisconsin Supper Clubs: An Old-Fashioned Experience,” Wax goes to the restaurant called Old Fashioned, which is fairly new, and not one of the funky old places I think of as "supper clubs." She eats some fried cheese curds and says she has no idea how to tell whether cheese curds are especially good. (Answer: They squeak. Except they don't squeak if they're fried.)

She drinks the cocktail called an Old Fashioned, and then on another day she has another Old Fashioned and proclaims "How Madison!" On another day, "my husband and I headed for a romantic dinner at the sexy, dimly lit Tornado Steakhouse," which supposedly "has a wonderful menu."

And so did she achieve it, that sense of authenticity infusing the city, of delight with mythical quirkiness all around her, of free-spirited energy rushing through everything alive? Myself, I'm over-indulging in deep-fried prose tonight and wondering if I need to see a surgeon to get my neural pathways reconnected. I'm losing it somehow, as I gaze out on the treetops of Madison.

Disappointed Barrett voter: "The end of the U.S.A. as we know it just happened."

"Every single one of you out there in the nation, if you're watching, democracy died tonight."

Also at the link: The Barrett supporter who slapped Barrett in the face (for conceding).

And check out Adam Schabow — here he is in happier times — emoting late last night:



Time for Republicans and conservatives to act mature... even if you don't think Democrats and liberals would be acting very dignified right now if the election had gone the other way.

"Newt Gingrich... cloaked himself in churlishness and accessorized with self-pity."

My favorite phrase from Robin Givhan's fashion report on the Iowa Caucuses.

I like the literary device that characterizes emotion and facial expression as clothing. I wish I could think of a lot of examples, but what springs to mind is "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile."

There's also "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella." Somehow, I'm only thinking of old "smile" songs. Both of those examples put the singer in a position of advising somebody else to smile. Thanks a lot. It's not really too empathetic. You want a big, old phony smile on a man who's hurting? Hurting. Where is the song that acknowledges — maybe even celebrates — the display of churlishness and self-pity by presenting it as a fabulous cloak?

And can you picture such a cloak?

IN THE COMMENTS: MikeR quotes Psalms 109:18: "He wore cursing as his garment; it entered into his body like water, into his bones like oil."

AND: Here's the King James version:

As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment,
so let it come into his bowels like water,
and like oil into his bones.
Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him,
and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

"This is not a joke" = the subject line of email from Barack Obama's campaign manager...

... received just after the email from Rick Santorum, blogged in the previous post. Where Santorum addressed me "Patriot," Obama's guy (Jim Messina) addresses me "Friend." (How much does that say about the difference between conservatives and liberals?) Excerpts:

The extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory [in Iowa]. No matter who the Republicans nominate, we'll be running against someone who has embraced that agenda in order to win -- vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman's right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations....

Vowing all these things? The Democrats' campaign — or perhaps only its scheme to extract money from those who might yield money — is to scare us about how terribly right-wing the Republican candidate is.

[T]he path ahead for Romney -- or whichever of the Republican candidates is going to emerge from this process -- is sadly and starkly very clear: to run even further to the extreme right, and make even more dangerous promises that threaten not only the progress we've made but the fundamental fabric of American society.

Extreme! Extreme! Dangerous!!!

Watching the circus on TV, it's tempting to think it's almost funny -- but this is not a joke.

Funny? Who writes this stuff? I'm picturing clowns — they're familiar with the circus — who really have a lot of ironic distance and have the instinct to laugh at Republicans. Think of Alan Colmes, who thought he could be funny mocking Rick Santorum for "playing" with his dead baby. I imagine that Colmes mostly talks with smart, cheeky guys whose natural habitat is distanced observation and edgy humor, and he just didn't realize that ordinary people are more closely interwoven with what some ironist trying to get serious might call the fundamental fabric of American society.

These distanced observers, who see the world in terms of humor and tell ordinary people to get serious... how do they push us to seriousness? Not with rational arguments and accurate information, but by making extreme overstatements about extremism and urging us to feel afraid. And yet they call me "Friend."

Friend... before you came, Barack Obama, I was all alone...



The full text of the email...

These Republican candidates spent in some cases more than a year -- in Mitt Romney's case seven years -- campaigning in Iowa to be the next president.

But tonight, GOP voters there couldn't decisively get behind anyone.

Who exactly leads the Republican race going forward isn't clear, but we do know two things:

1) The extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory. No matter who the Republicans nominate, we'll be running against someone who has embraced that agenda in order to win -- vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman's right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.

2) We'll be facing an onslaught of unprecedented spending from outside groups funded by corporations and anonymous donors. In Iowa alone, so-called "super PACs" spent $12.9 million on almost exclusively negative ads. These groups will turn their fire even more directly on us in the weeks ahead to prove that their candidate is the most anti-Obama.

This race is officially on -- and if we want to win, the only way is to out-organize them on the ground.

Sign up to volunteer your time now, and one of our organizers in your community will give you a call by the end of next week to talk about how you can help.

Many observers still think Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. If he is, we will be prepared. But it's curious that no one can really explain how, when or why the 70-plus percent of Republicans saying in polls and in Iowa that Mitt Romney's not their candidate will suddenly come around.

So the path ahead for Romney -- or whichever of the Republican candidates is going to emerge from this process -- is sadly and starkly very clear: to run even further to the extreme right, and make even more dangerous promises that threaten not only the progress we've made but the fundamental fabric of American society.

We also know that candidates who take these extreme positions can, in the right circumstances, win not only a primary but also a general election in just about any state.

Just ask the Tea Party senators from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and the Tea Party governors in Florida and Wisconsin.

Watching the circus on TV, it's tempting to think it's almost funny -- but this is not a joke.

We've got to be ready.

What you decide to do next will determine which kind of politics wins this election:

http://my.barackobama.com/After-Iowa

More soon.

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

"President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement..."

"... and it may cost them the 2012 election, "says pollster Douglas Schoen (in the Wall Street Journal).

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda....

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

It's obviously risky for Obama to identify too closely with these people, but there are also risks in distancing himself. If you look at the various statements by Obama and his advisers, I think you'll see that they have positioned themselves in the middle ground with the message: We understand the protests as an emotional expression about current economic conditions. There's no identification with the protesters' abstract ideology or policy proposals — which Schoen's polling may reveal, but which are not that apparent in the protests. So Obama may have the right strategy: Characterize the protests as inarticulate cries of pain about problems that are real and that affect all Americans.

Schoen cites the 1970 elections — the midterm of the Nixon administration — when Democrats should have gained ground but lost by "aligning too closely with the antiwar movement hurt Democrats [as] many middle-class and working-class Americans ended up supporting hawkish candidates who condemned student disruptions." The Democrats who won, Schoen says, were the ones who acted enthusiastic about law and order. So Schoen — who was a pollster for Bill Clinton — recommends that Democrats eschew the "huge new spending programs and tax increases" that the protesters would like and please moderates by "opposing bailouts and broad-based tax increases."

But let's examine the 1970 analogy. The antiwar protesters pushed a very specific policy: ending the Vietnam War. A politician couldn't characterize their noise as an inarticulate cry of pain. If you sided with them, you were opposed to the war.

So I'm not convinced that moderate voters will punish Obama for taking his "I feel your pain" approach to the protesters. The rest of America also feels that pain, and Obama is good at performing empathy. Make it all very general and emotional, and let that emotional fuzz further obscure the already vague policy notions in the mushy heads of the protesters.

True, moderate Americans dislike disorder, but how hard is that to deal with? Up to a point, merge it with the "expression of pain" interpretation. And if it goes too far and there is actual violence, you do what all the moderate folk do when there is violence: Deplore it.

No criminal misconduct by the Waukesha County Clerk in the WI Supreme Court election.

Law broken, but not willfully.

Sorry if this seems like inane trivia to most of you out there in the land of not-Madison. It's a big deal around here.

"What did David Plouffe really say about unemployment?"

WaPo's Greg Sargent tries to rehabilitate Plouffe, who clearly did say that the unemployment rate is not going to determine how people vote in 2012.

When you see the transcript and think about it, it's obvious that Plouffe did not say that unemployment wouldn't matter to voters. He said that the percentage itself isn't what affects voters' minds. What matters is their personal subjective experience:

So, you know, people won’t vote based on the unemployment rate. They’re gonna vote based on, “How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?”

Sargent says:

You can argue that it was a misstep in that the quote does sound tone-deaf when reproduced without the surrounding context, and it’s understandable why people would see it as insensitive when viewed without that context.

A lot of clever remarks are like that. A witty, engaging speaker will say something surprising and counterintuitive, but then flesh it out or add one more point, and then it clicks. Of course, if you have opponents, you've got to anticipate what they'll do with the little slice of what you said that seems head-slappingly idiotic. So it may not be so smart to be smart like that.

Now let's look more closely at that possibly clever notion of Plouffe's: Any given voter is going to ask not what the facts are about Americans in general, but how do I feel about what's happening to me personally and do I believe that the President cares about me. 

This is how people* got hooked into voting for Obama in the first place! Plouffe and company massaged people into the place where they had a feeling about Obama. Hope. Change. Yes We Can.

And Plouffe is gearing up to do it again. The difference this time is that Obama is not an outsider to the current conditions. He represents not change, but: the same. And the current situation is dreadful. Plouffe knows that, and his comments show how he's planning, this time, to do the same thing but different. Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family? Yes, you do. Or you will. Plouffe hopes.

You can savage Plouffe all you want for his seemingly stupid remark, but don't miss the opportunity to see what he revealed about the theory of the reelect Obama campaign.
_______________________

*Not me. I voted for Obama, but I coolly observed all this emotionalism, soberly examined the 2 major party candidates, and made a rational choice.

Our congresswoman Tammy Baldwin asks U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Wisconsin.

Because it's probably, like, a federal crime that some Waukesha county clerk made a clerical error.

In the letter, Baldwin says the mishap raises serious doubts as to the integrity of the state's electoral process.

Did she say why? Did she say why the state procedures were insufficient to investigate possible problems in this instance? What's the threshold for calling in the feds for something like this? Anything more than your unhappiness with the outcome?

At the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates's debate, incumbent David Prosser goes after JoAnne Kloppenburg for what commenters have written on her Facebook page.

What can we attribute to the person with the power to delete comments?

While there was no explicit mention of a Dane County judge's decision to issue an emergency order to block the state's contentious new collective bargaining law, Prosser acknowledged the attacks against him on Klopperburg's Facebook page were from people hoping to elect someone to decide "cases that come out of the governor's budget bill."...

Prosser said Kloppenburg is responsible for the comments on her Facebook page and should take them down. He said the nature of the comments raises questions about whether she can impartially decide any cases that come before her with the budget bill. He mentioned one that read, "Stop the turd, vote Kloppenburg."

"Now am I the turd or is the governor the turd?" he said to laughs from the audience. "Either I am being sort of dissed or she is committing herself to vote in a particular way on a particular case. That's totally inappropriate."

Kloppenburg said the people who post the comments are responsible for the content and that the postings aren't untrue.

"They understand that it is so important to have an independent and impartial court," she said of the people posting on her Facebook site.

I have a very free comments policy myself, and this blog's comments thread is full of things I don't agree with, so I'm strongly disinclined to attribute comments to someone who maintains a comments section. Now, a political candidate might want to clean up the comments, but if she doesn't, what does it mean? It might mean nothing more than a failure to monitor the page — mere inattention or sloppiness. It might mean a commitment to free speech. But one might infer that a candidate would scrub comments that were damaging to her in the election and, perhaps, keep what was helpful.

The key question is whether Kloppenburg has "committ[ed] herself to vote in a particular way on a particular case." Clearly, many of her supporters are saying that she is much more likely than Prosser to give them the outcomes they want, and some of them have said that where she has the power to delete. But Prosser's campaign manager wrote in an official campaign news release that Prosser would "act as a common sense compliment to both the new administration and legislature." Now, that's not exactly a "commit[ment]... to vote in a particular way on a particular case," but it's a signal to people on the conservative side that Prosser to is more likely to give them the outcomes they want. Prosser has "disavowed the release and said he didn't see it before it went out," but what's worse? The Prosser campaign statement or the Kloppenburg Facebook comments?

The answer to that question isn't going to determine who votes for which candidate. Obviously. It's a shame if the judicial campaign has turned into a referendum on the Governor and the GOP legislature, but both candidates bear some responsibility for that. Normally, judicial candidates in this state try quite hard to look as though the race is all about judicial skill and temperament. I think Wisconsinites want that message, and, also, that they are more likely to conflate conservative politics with properly judicial skill and temperament. (That's how Gableman defeated Butler, in my view.)

But at this point in the Wisconsin craziness, some unknown large number of Wisconsinites — especially those who will take the trouble to vote on April 5th — see the election as a way to express an opinion about what the Republicans have been doing in Wisconsin. Presumably, there are some more who have opinions about the extent to which a court should check the legislative process — a more conventional view about judging. I think there are also plenty of Wisconsinites who have a general preference for conservative judges. (They worry that liberal judges will be too sympathetic to criminals and that sort of thing.) Lots of people just vote for the incumbent because they figure he's a solid guy who knows what he's doing.

Who will turn out on April 5th? My sense is that the people who have been protesting for the last month have a lot of pent-up energy to expend on getting their people to the polls, and they are saying vote Kloppenburg.

Warren Christopher has died.

He was 85. I most remember him from his role in Florida recount in the 2000 election:

Mr. Christopher came under criticism at the time, and later in “Recount,” the 2008 HBO dramatization of the Florida vote dispute, over a lack of legal and political aggressiveness against Mr. Bush’s legal team, led by a former secretary of state, James A. Baker. The movie, in particular, portrayed Mr. Christopher as overly concerned with the niceties of the law while Mr. Baker was waging a bare-knuckled campaign on all fronts.

Mr. Klain said that was an unfair characterization. “Like all dramatic portrayals, they sought dramatic tension by exaggerating people’s personalities,” he said on Saturday. “People often confused Chris’s reserved style and personal sense of propriety with a lack of fierceness on behalf of his client. That would be a mistake.”

He said it was Mr. Christopher’s decision to challenge the Florida result, even as most Republicans and some prominent Democrats were urging Mr. Gore to concede. “People don’t remember how controversial that effort was. Without Chris’s stature and credibility, I’m not sure we would have gotten as far as we did,” Mr. Klain said.

I remember Christopher solemnly intoning: "We need to count all the votes." It was a mantra. And the other side had its mantra. James Baker would say: "The votes have been counted. They've been counted and recounted." Chez Althouse, we were for Gore, so Baker's "votes  have been counted" line drew hoots of derision. Analyzing the litigation calmly, afterward, I accepted the soundness of Baker's point. These were ballots designed to be read by machines, the ballots had gone through the machines twice, and there was no showing that the machines had malfunctioned. Switching to human readers introduced much more ambiguity and risk of deviousness than accepting the verdict of the machines. The machines, as they processed each card, didn't have political preference and awareness of which side was being helped.

The criticism of Christopher— that he was too nice and too proper — fails to take into account that he was arguing on the side that would strike many people as scarily chaotic and power-grasping. Baker was arguing for the security of the result delivered by machine.  Baker's attitude of belligerence was used to argue for ending the struggle. Transpose the Baker attitude onto the Christopher side of the argument — struggle, chaos, litigation, and the unknown. Would it have worked better than Christopher's mild demeanor?

"This is the old 'bitter clingers' (or 'What's the Matter With Kansas?') argument reduced to utter incoherence."

James Taranto quotes Gov. Ed Rendell...

[P]eople don't always vote on logical reasons. Emotion drives voters particularly when they have reason to be angry and frustrated. If you lost your job or lost your house or lost your 401k, you had every reason to be angry and frustrated and when you are, you have a tendency to blame the people who are in office...

... and — via me — UW polisci professor Charles Franklin:

I'm not endorsing the American voter... They're pretty damn stupid.

Taranto — being much nicer to Franklin than Rush Limbaugh was — includes the self-defense Franklin wrote in the comments to my blog:

... [V]oters embraced Ron Johnson before they knew much about him. . . . The race wasn't about specific details of Johnson vs Feingold, it was a rejection of Democrats more or less regardless of what voters knew about the GOP candidate... [D]espite not knowing the details of Johnson's policy positions, the voters did NOT make a mistake in choosing Johnson as the more conservative candidate and certain to be more favorable to cutting government....

Taranto finds this incoherent: "In other words, the electorate was smart. So why did Franklin call them stupid?"

***

By the way, I love Taranto's Best of the Web. This, from the same link, had me in hysterics:

Such as: What the Heck Is Tomosynthesis?
"Breast Tomosynthesis on Verge of U.S. Approval, but Questions Linger"--headline, DotMed.com, Nov. 24

"People have been seeing too many Blaxploitation movies and kind of enjoyed Shaft..."

"... and they like the idea of this true black man... getting angry on television."

Why do people want Barack Obama to get angry? Do they? I guess the lefties do. If only he'd fight harder to make people see things his way and just force his will on us. I think the conservatives get off the hook for that particular version of racism.

Maureen Dowd says Christine O'Donnell, like Barack Obama, is "smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth."

That is, Barack Obama, the presidential campaigner. As an actual President, the "passion and myth... are sorely missing." 

Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality.

Now, there's an assertion! I agree that the blood is on the right, but I'm not seeing much rationality from anyone.

[Obama] has never shaken off that slight patronizing attitude toward the working-class voters he is losing now, the ones he dubbed “bitter” during his campaign....

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.

Oh, my. This is all so Dowdesque. She gets multiple themes going, many mixed images, and she demands that you believe that she's tied them all together when she says she has. It's ironic here, because she's the one full of passionate intensity and low on rationality. What I just can't buy is that Obama is rational. He's phlegmatic. He always was. You can read that as rational, but it's irrational to do so.

***

I was just reading an old post of mine from April 2007 — "Is Obama a gasbag?":

[I]f I didn't know who he was and that there was a crowd there, I would picture an old man slumped in an armchair, expatiating for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot. It's formless stream of consciousness. Oh, there is that theme of hope. The stream swirls back there at predictable intervals....

[R]eally, such drivel. Just listing a lot of issues and saying hope, hope, hope should not inspire real hope. I can't believe people are hearing this and thinking: brilliant rhetoric. "Intellectual slovenliness" is a much more apt phrase.

Yes, I know, I ultimately voted for him. Here's a post of mine from February 2008 explaining how I got from "gasbag" to the decision to vote for him in the Wisconsin primary. I can't really say that I was terribly rational.