Some Thoughts On The 2016 US Election

Oh well, so much for my prediction 4 years ago that the Republicans would never again win a Presidential election in the foreseeable future.

I was completely blindsided by Trump's victory. I had all but assumed a Clinton presidency post-Nov 8. I guess I was living in a bubble created by the media and left-leaning intellectuals. Of course, there were a few people in my social media circle who were predicting a Trump victory, but since many of them were right-leaning, there's nothing to say they were not engaging in some wish-fulfillment themselves.

There's a lot that has been said by other worthy people, and I will merely link to their words here. There's nothing to be gained by me repeating their points.

Seshadri Kumar has a comprehensive analysis of what happened and why.
Kanishka Sinha offers a fascinating set of parallels between Trump and Narendra Modi.
Raja Visweswaran provides a comforting explanation to his disappointed and apprehensive children.

I will try to make some original points here.

1. Trump's victory was the result of sexism.

This is going to infuriate a lot of people, because I don't mean what many may understand from this.

I'm in fact blaming many older feminists for Trump's victory. Many women who earned their feminist stripes over the last few decades were so taken with the idea of electing the first woman president that they willingly threw a much more deserving candidate under the bus during the Democratic primaries -- Bernie Sanders. Sanders is a progressive who has stood with women on all women's issues, and his track record in the Senate shows that he is a trustworthy ally to the feminist cause. Yet his gender worked against him in the primaries. Many older women voted against him purely on grounds of gender. Madeleine Albright infamously said in support of Clinton, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." To their credit, younger women showed that they had internalised the lessons of a post-feminist world, and they ignored gender by supporting the more worthy candidate, but older women sadly proved that they had failed to overcome their learnt biases.

I have heard women from that cohort defend their preference ("He's impractical, she's pragmatic"), but I see that as post-facto rationalisation. They voted for the woman for sexist reasons, pure and simple.

Well, how did that karma sandwich taste the morning after?

I believe Bernie Sanders could have beaten Trump, for at least three reasons:

1. Sanders criticised the unfairness of the global capitalist system with more credibility than Trump did, and of course with far greater credibility than Clinton could ever hope to muster. He stood up for the people who lost out on account of the New Economy, and has a track record of having done so consistently. He had the moral high ground from which to expose Trump's hypocrisy on imported steel, migrant labour and unpaid contractors. As the "establishment candidate", Clinton never had a chance to call out Trump on his hollow platform.

2. Sanders has a long public record, and it's clean. Clinton's team tried its best to dig up dirt on him during the primaries, and they couldn't manage anything. It's unlikely that Trump could have flung any mud on him that would stick, unlike what he did to Clinton. She was a highly flawed candidate whose flaws stood exposed throughout the campaign. Whether it was policy flip-flops, highly paid speaking engagements paid for by Wall Street, a track record of warmongering, or the infamous email scandal, she was far from being squeaky clean. The Clinton-Trump clash was a choice between two evils. A Sanders-Trump match would have been a clear choice between good and evil.

3. While it's not a matter to be proud of, it's a fact that Clinton lost many votes to Trump because of misogyny amongst the voting populace. Trump wouldn't have had that advantage against Sanders. And conversely, while Trump lost votes to Clinton because of the antipathy of many women, that effect wouldn't have been neutralised if Sanders had stood instead of Clinton. Sanders would have had a net advantage in terms of the gender bias, on top of everything else.

In short, the reason the world is looking at a President Trump today is because many women who call themselves feminist couldn't recognise and fight the sexism in their own minds.

2. There are (thankfully) limits to money power

One silver lining I take away from Trump's victory is that money can't ...ahem... trump the people's will.

Clinton had the inexhaustible war chest, while Trump was reportedly strapped for cash and couldn't afford as many TV ad slots. Fat lot of good that did her. I'm glad to see that democracy isn't for sale. It was a free and fair election, and the outcome was determined according to the rules. One could quibble about the popular vote not being reflected in the electoral college, but those are the rules. All the king's horses and all the king's money couldn't put a Clinton in the White House again.

3. It's now capitalism versus democracy

I have often said this in the past, but it's coming true in recent months, first with Brexit and now with Trump. The runaway march of capitalism can only by stopped by democracy, because the number of votes a person has bears no correlation to their purchasing power. Try as they might, the plutocracy cannot take over. What we've seen recently is the genteel equivalent to the French Revolution. The elites managed to crush the Occupy movement, but it's now clear that the revolution cannot be rolled back. If the elites do not take heed from these recent reverses, we might one day see heads carried on pikes down Wall Street. I will not shed any tears on that day.

As a member of the elite myself, I have attended economics lectures and swallowed without question the idea that free trade is an unmitigated good, and that Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage proves it to be so. Well, that's only true in a macro sense. At the micro level, there are winners and losers from free trade in every country, and it is the responsibility of each country's ruling elites to ensure an equitable distribution of the benefits of free trade to all parties. That has never happened to date in any country. The winners keep all their winnings to themselves, and don't share any of it with their less fortunate compatriots. There are people who have personally lost out on account of it, and yet the elites expect them to keep supporting globalisation, outsourcing, free trade and other aspects of the New Economy because they expect the virtues of these to be self-evident to anyone who isn't a troglodyte. Well, the dispossessed can protest, and they are doing so now.

4. The Republicans have themselves a poisoned chalice

It was widely predicted that the Republicans were going to lose both the White House and the Senate, with only the House of Representatives in their hands, and they were therefore girding themselves for another long round of trench warfare and government shutdowns. Now they have unexpectedly found themselves in control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Soon they will be able to ensure Conservative control of the Supreme Court too. At that point, they will have no more excuses. If they don't deliver in terms of making people's lives better, it will be downhill for them from 2016 onwards. The younger generation (18-25) is the most hostile the GOP has yet encountered, and as the older populace dies out in the years ahead, there will be strong headwinds for the Republicans to face. 2016 could well be their high watermark.

I personally believe that the creeping advance of the "Technology Singularity" is responsible for what is recognised to be a jobless recovery in most advanced countries, and this trend will only exacerbate the pain that ordinary people are going to face. These are structural problems, and they cannot be solved by protectionist band-aid. I believe the only workable long-term solution is a socialistic one - a guaranteed minimum income paid to every household, from taxes levied on businesses that operate without the costs of employing human labour. There will be a painful transition to an ultimately pleasurable "leisure society", but conservatives are fundamentally incapable of conceptualising it or ushering it in. Their repertoire of traditional conservative solutions (small government, low taxes and private enterprise) will fail them dramatically in the New Economy as capitalism clashes ever more dramatically with democracy. Ultimately, the Republicans will lose power altogether unless they jettison economic conservatism.

5. Trump could either start World War III, or usher in a new era of peace

Trump is famously unpredictable, volatile and narcissistic. He has all the makings of a maniacal despot. On the other hand, he has more than once expressed his desire to bring US troops home, and has said he would ask allies to pay for their own defence, which is a more conservative, isolationist stance than that of any US president in recent memory. He is also far more likely than Obama or Hillary Clinton to arrive at an amicable arrangement with Russia's Putin and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East.

There's a lot to fear, but there's also hope. Obama started his term by winning the Nobel Peace Prize. By the end of his term, the US was bombing seven countries, with none of those bombings authorised by Congress (see video below). Trump enters the White House amidst widespread trepidation. It is possible he could belie those fears just as Obama belied hopes.

And those are some of my thoughts after the US poll verdict.

Why I'm Gratified By The Result Of The US Elections

So Obama has won re-election with 332 electoral college votes, beating even my prediction of 320.

As the meme goes, not bad.

I'm very happy about the result, but it may surprise many to know that it has nothing to do with Obama himself. In fact, Obama as President has been deeply disappointing to me.

He was supposed to have rolled back the Bush-era assaults on civil rights. He did nothing of the kind, and even gleefully extended them. He didn't close down Guantanamo Bay. The US government continues to be Big Brother under an Obama administration. It's the Obama administration that is going after Julian Assange so stealthily and vengefully. As Gerry Caplan says, "[...] the list of areas where the president already betrayed so many hopes is long and disheartening -- justice, drones, torture, police brutality, inequality, prisons, African Americans, poverty, education, Africa, gun control, war on drugs, whistleblowing, climate change, the Middle East." So what was all the idealism of 2008 about? ("You can't intrude into our private lives like this!" "Yes, we can!")

What I'm really happy about is the defeat of the party I like to call the Retaliban Party. A more mediaeval bunch of crazies I've never seen. Just like their counterparts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the American Taliban are anti-liberal, anti-women, homophobic, anti-science, creationist gun-loving bigots who take their holy book literally and hate anyone unlike themselves. And since the US isn't made up exclusively of rich, old, white, straight men, they got the sharp rebuke they deserved.

I'm alarmed about the increasing reports of misogyny from around the world, and I do hope the increase is only in the reporting. It's even worse when one of the supposedly most advanced countries in the world exhibits such behaviour. We've seen a fair amount of it during the just-concluded campaign season in the US.

In all the excitement over the presidential election, it's easy to overlook the results of the congressional elections. Here too, my cup runneth over. My two favourite crazies, former senators Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana, both Republicans (what else?), got the boot as well.

Todd Akin believes women's bodies have the ability to "shut down" unwanted pregnancies in cases of what he called "legitimate rape"

Richard Mourdock believes that pregnancies, even as a result of rape, were "intended by God"

Well, the American political system clearly has the ability to shut out legitimate idiots, and they would have to agree that this result too must have been intended by God.

[Update 08/11/2012: I also realised that an Obama victory is likely to have more durable effects on American society. And this is through the appointment of Supreme Court justices. In Obama's first term, he replaced liberal-leaning David Souter with another liberal, Sonia Sotomayor, in effect merely retaining the status quo and preventing a lurch to the right. In his second term, he has the opportunity to actively move the court to the left by replacing one or more retiring conservative judges with liberal ones. The effect could last decades.]

A couple of months ago I predicted the Republicans would lose this Presidential election and never win one again until they changed themselves drastically. I guess that view is now partially vindicated. 2016 will tell if the rest of it plays out as I think it will.

It isn't a day of just gloating for me, though. I must say I deeply appreciate one aspect of both Presidential candidates. It's that both Obama and Romney are good family men, deeply devoted to their wives and children. Throughout the campaign, however ugly it got, there was nary a suggestion of improper sexual behaviour about either of the men. After the unsavoury exposés of Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Newt Gingrich and many other presidents and presidential candidates, it was a relief to be considering two wholesome men for a change.

I really like this photo of the Obamas, taken after the result was known.

"No ma'am, he's not an Ay-rab. He's a decent family man" - John McCain, 2008

Well, he's that all right. At the very least, Americans (and the world) have a good role model in the First Family.

The End Of The Republican Party As We Know It

(Synopsis: Social conservatives are out of touch with the mainstream electorate. Fiscal conservatives are unpopular with the mainstream electorate. That spells Game Over for the Republicans.)

I'm going to go out on a limb by predicting that not only is Mitt Romney going to lose November's election but that the Republican Party itself will never win another presidential election until they reinvent themselves to be more in tune with modern society.

It's a bit of a bold prediction, especially coming from someone who is not American, but distance lends perspective ("And what should they know of England who only England know?" - Rudyard Kipling), and I say this as an serious amateur student of world history and current affairs who has studied the world  (and the US) with more than a little interest for over forty years.

There are demographic and social changes afoot in US society (as in the rest of the world), and none of these changes favours the Republicans.

• Women are becoming more aware of their rights as individuals, and men too are more accommodating of an equal role for women. A religious view of abortion imposed on women will be resisted strongly, yet this is exactly the position that the Republican party has adopted. The term "the Republicans' war on women" is increasingly heard, as is the slogan, "If you're a woman and vote Republican, you're a moron".
• Non-white births now outnumber whites, and many US cities have non-white majorities. The demographics are shifting towards an ethnically pluralistic society. In a country where elections are decided by marginal states and marginal constituencies within states, minor demographic shifts can have major electoral consequences. The Republicans' social conservatism (evidenced by their hard-liners' opposition to the DREAM Act) is, arguably, inherently less friendly to diversity. The party's public posture is a more sanitised pro-nationalism and integration, but the views of the rank and file are more xenophobic and exclusionary, and this is the true face of the party. It's a formula for electoral loss.
• Society is becoming more understanding and tolerant of what used to be considered "sexual deviance". Gay rights are far less controversial to the average person, and contraception even less so. The traditional family is no longer seen as the only acceptable social unit. Social conservatives (the core of the Republican party) are increasingly isolated from the views of mainstream society.
• Education and scientific thinking are becoming more widespread. Blind belief in doctrine, whether of the religious or nationalistic kind, is less prevalent among the educated. These positions are mainstays of the Republicans, and they are increasingly being abandoned, even if not always publicly questioned, by the educated voting public. It explains why the "blue states" (Democrat-leaning) are the coastal states where education levels are high, and "red states" (Republican-leaning) are in the less educated heartland.
• Religion (especially dogma and superstition) are losing their grip. The social conservatives' base is steadily eroding, and we must not mistake noise for number. Bible-thumping seems a joke to all but the most hardcore supporters.
• There is an increasing awareness of economic unfairness. John Steinbeck's quote (“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”) is not as true as it once was. The worldwide Occupy movement has focused the attention of the 99% against the 1% everywhere, including the US. This is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle by cutting taxes for the rich and managing the deficit by slashing programs for the poor, which is the Republicans' plan for ending the deficit.
• All of the above are aspects of generational change. The young are more likely to be educated and have socially progressive views. The more conservative tend to be older and (how do I say this delicately?) are dying out, both literally and figuratively. With each election, the demographic shifts to a more liberal group of voters.

Each of these changes is marginal, but the trend is strengthening from election to election. The state of the economy at the time of an election has an impact on the chances of the incumbent, but it is a superficial blip over a longer-term trend. The media also tends to report the loudest, the most strident and the most outrageous voices, and these are disproportionately from the Right, but the trends are quietly pointing in the opposite direction.

America is becoming more liberal. There's no denying it, and there's no stopping it.

The one potent arrow in the Republican quiver is "small government". Correctly stated as the quest for a balanced budget, this is a laudable goal, but it will be politically very hard to reel back the wasteful spending that various interests now see as entitlements. It will have to be a long and hard process, with only incremental progress, and the US may never quite get there. In any case, the fiscal conservatives' platform alienates at least as many voters as it attracts, so while it is a noble goal, this is not an argument that can win an election.

Perhaps after the Republicans lose 2012, and definitely after they lose 2016, the party will rip itself apart. The conservative base and the moderate fringe (which by then will have more adherents) will part ways. The conservatives will isolate themselves to irrelevance and be gone in another couple of elections. The moderates will struggle to differentiate themselves from the Democrats.

In the medium-term future, the US will have two Democratic parties who will have to fight on local issues and around personalities. As an ideology, the Right is finished. It is simply out of touch with modernity.

Obama's "Gaffes" - The Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Conventional wisdom holds that Obama made two major gaffes during his long presidential campaign. The first was during the Democratic primaries when he remarked at a private dinner that many poor whites in Pennsylvania were bitter and clung to guns and religion. Hillary Clinton pounced on him for that bit of political incorrectness and attempted to squeeze every bit of mileage she could from it (not very much, as it turned out). Then, towards the end of the campaign, there was his comment to Joe the Plumber that "spreading the wealth around" was a desirable thing in the current circumstances, a comment that was promptly seized upon by the Republicans to proclaim Obama a socialist.

Now that the election is safely over, and far from the heat and dust of US politics, I have to wonder what Obama said that was so wrong.

Do uneducated poor whites in the Appalachian region bitterly cling to guns and religion? Sweet Jesus, that's God's own truth, so shoot me.

Perhaps as Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep suggested in A Few Good Men, Americans can't handle the truth...?

And wouldn't spreading the wealth around just be the opposite of George Bush's policy of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few? That hasn't exactly been the best policy as current events have shown, so why the fuss?

I think it would be far better to suffix the word "socialist" every time it's used with the Seinfeldian phrase, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

(My idea of Utopia isn't socialism (not that there's anything wrong with that) and neither is it laissez-faire capitalism, but if we cannot have competitive markets to spread the wealth around in a capitalistically acceptable way, then perhaps a little fiscal spreading through progressive taxation is the way to go.)

After the election, Obama made another "gaffe". He said he wouldn't hold séances to contact dead presidents like Nancy Reagan did. That was untrue only in a literal sense. In spirit (pun intended), it was a fair comment since Nancy Reagan was known to consult astrologers.

All in all, I think I like Obama's gaffes better than his trite statements. They have the clear ring of truth. Keep them coming, Mr. President!

Ich bin ein Amerikaner

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Change has indeed come to America. And what momentous change!

Take your eyes off Barack Obama for a minute to see the greater wonder. Michelle Obama enters the White House as First Lady of the country that enslaved her ancestors. Now that is poetic. None of Barack's ancestors was ever a slave. It is in Michelle Obama that I see the wheel of history come full circle.

Still, the world has reached but one milestone. We rejoice that a black (or as my pedantic mind would interject, "half-black, half-white") person has won the recognition he deserves for his talent and potential without regard to his race. That is a triumph of American meritocracy. The next milestone for our collective civilisation will be when such an achievement does not evoke comment.

Personally, my opinion of the US has now soared. Having always looked at the US from outside, I would say it was US foreign policy that has had the greatest influence on my opinion. Specifically, as an Indian growing up in India during the seventies and eighties, resentment was my uppermost feeling whenever I thought of the US. US foreign policy never practised what it preached. It preached democracy and human rights. Yet when asked to choose between democratic India and authoritarian Pakistan, the US always came down on the side of Pakistan. Repeated evidence of Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in India was ignored by successive American administrations. In particular, Nixon's shameful partisanship during the 1971 Bangladesh war will remain forever in my mind, and I could not help but feel glee at his subsequent ignominous departure from public life. If I was religious, I would call it karma.

It has only been in recent times (i.e., during the Clinton adminstration) that India has received more favourable treatment compared to its troublesome neighbour. And that's not so much because the US finally saw the error of its ways but because India became economically so much more important. Barack Obama too understands where the threat to peace comes from today. He is the highest-profile American to have talked about possible military action against Pakistan to root out terrorism. One more example of his clear thinking if one was needed. At last, an American President who sees what only Indians could see so far.

Regional politics aside, Obama's election now robs every dictatorship around the world of its last remaining excuses. I remember eighties-era Soviet propaganda and its boast - that it was easier for the descendent of a Russian serf to achieve high office in the USSR than it was for the descendent of an African slave to become a governor or the President of the US. Now, a truly liberal American populace has shown the lie to that sort of thinking. As recently as a couple of months ago, people around the world were muttering that American racism was alive and well, that American voters would never "allow" a black person to become President.

America retorted: Yes, we can. Just watch us.

And the world watched, mouth agape.

I have always resented it when Americans referred to their country as "the greatest nation on Earth." Today, I'll swallow that resentment and grant them the right to say that. As Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago, "the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

Meritocracy matters. At least two generations of talented Indians have left India's shores for the US. "Opportunity" is the word most often used to explain their decision to migrate, but what provides opportunity is the undiscriminating meritocracy of American society. You perform, you are rewarded. No wonder Indians are known as the most successful ethnic minority in the US. The entrepreneurial Indian provides the seed, and the meritocratic American environment provides the fertile soil for that seed to become the biggest tree it possibly can. Reportedly, 40% of Silicon Valley's startups have Indian owners. So many Indian names feature in the senior executive level of the American corporate world and in the faculty lists of the Ivy League. In contrast, India's own soil has been sadly barren for several decades, and native seeds could never grow into such tall trees in that soil.

The challenge that Barack Obama's election poses to India is different from the challenge that it poses to many other countries. India is already a democracy with an equally impressive record of righting historical wrongs and empowering its historically disadvantaged minorities. Next year's Indian elections may see the elevation of a Dalit ("untouchable") woman to the highest office in the land. That will be doubly impressive for a society that has historically been both patriarchal and caste-ridden. No, the challenge for India from Obama's election is to develop as an equally visible meritocracy. Can India provide opportunity to all, regardless of personal background? Affirmative action is hugely effective in India in churning and inverting the social pyramid, but it is also hugely controversial and creates its own pockets of unfairness. There is also entrenched unfairness and bigotry in the Indian populace at large of the kind that Americans were so recently accused of. As an example, the leader of the party that formed the current Indian government was effectively denied the Prime Ministership in spite of her Indian citizenship because she was born Italian. Even educated Indians wrote emphatic comments on blogs swearing that they would never accept her as PM. Welcome to racism, Indian-style. India needs to answer the American challenge - Can a white person become prime minister of India? Because meritocracy counts, and change starts at the top (or at the bottom, if you're talking about the mind of an individual).

We will definitely see this election reverberate throughout the world. Obama's greatest handicap now is the weight of expectations that he carries. No one expects that he will sell out US interests in a naive internationalist spirit. He will first and foremost safeguard US interests. If he can see (in a way that past US administrations could not) that US interests are best served by supporting a network of true democracies around the world rather than by propping up acquiescent dictators, he would have achieved a win-win situation for all of us.

I also cynically hope he will renege on his protectionist election promises. Protectionism always harms those it is meant to protect, so I'm hoping he will prove to be as pragmatic (on trade) as he was when he rejected campaign financing after initially pledging support for it.

Great Ad, and Great Advice

Apparently, this ad saying "Let the issues be the issue" is running in Manhattan on the eve of the US election. It dramatically shows a white Barack Obama and an African-American John McCain. It's a great idea, just imagining how race could be factored out of the election so that voters could concentrate on the really important issues.



Why didn't they do this earlier, and why only in Manhattan?

The McCain Less Known

I read everywhere about John McCain being "a man of honor", with no one challenging his bravery or his principles, only his policies and choice of VP (if at all). I wonder why this detailed piece on McCain titled "Make-Believe Maverick" by Tim Dickinson hasn't been more widely known. The article was originally published on Rolling Stone.

It's either a brilliant exposé or a smear, and I'm not in a position to say which it is, but it's worth a read anyway. It's also profoundly disturbing.

I've always favoured Obama as US President, and this article has only reinforced my feeling.

US Election - My Prediction

Less than two weeks to the US election! It's no big deal predicting that Obama is going to win. Everyone's saying that. The real deal is in predicting the margin. I think it'll be an absolute landslide. Obama will pick up more than 400 votes out of 538.

(Here's my reasoning. As of 24-25 October, ABC's electoral map gives Obama 311 votes to McCain's 163, with 64 being too close to call. I believe the states that are labelled 'moderate Republican', 'marginal Republican' or 'too close to call' will gradually be won over by Obama before election day, so I've counted only the electoral votes of strongly Republican or very strongly Republican states in favour of McCain. That only yields a total of 134 votes for McCain, leaving 404 for Obama. See map and table below.)



And why do I think the moderate Republican states will ultimately swing to Obama? Many reasons - Colin Powell's endorsement, Sarah Palin's un-hockey mom wardrobe that should speak louder than her pro-American rhetoric to undecided voters, the lingering fears of an economic collapse and a recession that alienate voters further from the Republicans whose cronies and appointees are perceived as having caused the whole mess, attacks on President Bush by McCain and Palin (!) that may put some Republican voters off voting altogether, my expectations of a high voter turnout that's usually a good sign for the Democrats, and my belief that there is a 'reverse Bradley effect' at work that prevents many people in conservative neighbourhoods from openly backing Obama in opinion polls, understating his actual support.

We've seen a generation of "Reagan Democrats". Welcome to the Obama Republicans. I believe they're called Obamicans.

The Effect of Race in the US Presidential Election

I like to think I'm post-racial, and I also like to think the US election has progressed beyond considerations of race. But this comment by Realista over at Boston.com has startled me into understanding just how potent a factor race still is.

Essentially, it's a set of hypothetical questions - what if certain characteristics of Sen. Obama and his Republican opposite numbers (McCain and Palin) had been switched around? Would people still look at the two candidates the same way?

I'm going to repeat those questions verbatim here, because they're so hard-hitting:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn’t read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes? (My note: I understand it was 3 planes, not 7)

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money first bootlegging, then from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

Amazing, isn't it? Any or a small set of the negative aspects of McCain/Palin might have ended Obama's candidacy prematurely if they had been his flaws. Conversely, any of the positive things about Obama might have been trumpeted far more loudly had it applied to McCain/Palin.

What's often said about women (i.e., that they have to work twice as hard as a man to get the same recognition) may also apply to minorities.

I'm afraid we're still in Kansas, Toto.

Sarah Palin - Now why would McCain choose her?

I'll be blunt. Sarah Palin has a good reputation as a new broom who swept Alaska clean, but that's not why McCain chose her as his Veep.

Cynical as always, the political machine (and yes, this is a bipartisan trait) has picked the candidate with the best potential to bring in the votes, never mind how.

McCain's campaign calculates that there are millions of seething women out there who are frustrated at their favourite candidate Hillary Clinton's defeat in the Democratic primaries. Not to put too fine a point on it, they're counting on sexism to bring those disaffected voters to the Republican side. They're gambling that millions of women will put aside issues of party affiliation, policies and plans, and vote purely on the issue of gender.

I hope they're proved wrong. It would be terrible if sexism turns out to be a winning strategy.