Inaguration Week

In contrast to many, I found myself detachedly observing last week's festivities in DC, like an anthropologist from a 1970s sf story studying a mass ritual of a distant society.

Perhaps I would have entered into the spirit of the event if I'd seen unequivocal evidence that President Obama's inaguration embodied the achievement of an ideal expressed forty-five years ago, that the US would be a country where a man is judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character; but instead, all I saw were the thick fingerprints of vote banks, oneupmanship among the self-anointed, and manufactured consent.

President Obama is a Chicago Bragadino, an adept player to people's fantasies. (See Greene, Law 32, and favian saw this a year ago). And just like his Venetian alchemist forebear, President Obama is a symptom of our Fourth Republic's decline, not its cause.

You may doubt my pessimism is warranted. After all, President Obama has tapped smart people with advanced degrees from Ivy and comparable universities for his staff, e.g. Holdren, Sunstein, and Summers. What could go wrong?

Extrapolation & Speculation

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Work, worldbuilding for my next sf novel, "an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is" (unless I phone you), and the quiet pleasures of domestic life have occupied my energies the last two months. Plus, it two weeks after Hurricane Ike for our electricity to be restored.

My previous post and the intervening election remind me of some "how to write sf" book I read in high school or college. (I remember the tan metal shelves and fluorescent lights of the second or third floor of Fondren Library). The author raised a distinction between extrapolation and speculation. My previous post is an extrapolation; so too is the negative correlation between number of uses of the word "recession" by the New York Times and the incumbent party's share of the popular vote. Extrapolation is cautious, sober, linear; speculation is a wild-assed guess, piling all your chips on the black swan.

"President Obama" is pure speculation. Five years ago, no one would have extrapolated the election of the first black US president in 2008: the prominent black political figures of the day either didn't want the job (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice), had tried for it and failed miserably (Jesse Jackson), or had maxed out their positions under the Peter Principle (Charles Rangel, Sheila Jackson-Lee, etc). It would have required a pure leap of faith to predict the first black US president would be (a) half-Kenyan, (b) a then-Illinois state senator, and (c) the beneficiary of a sex scandal involving the actress who played Seven of Nine in order to gain the Governor/Senator/Vice President status held by every non-incumbent major party presidential candidate since about 1952.

Was it John Gardner in The Art of Fiction who pointed out, "Of course truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense"?

What will the next four years bring? Let me extrapolate:

Obama will be a Jimmy Carter with more melanin:-- and I say that knowing Jimmy Carter had a handful of sound policies, such as airline deregulation and allowing the Federal Reserve under Volcker to implement austerity measures that broke the post-Nixon stagflation. However, Obama will enter popular memory, like Carter, as being indecisive, especially in foreign affairs.

Something I'm very interested in seeing during the Obama presidency is how the disillusionment will play out. Obama had to play the hope card to topple Hillary for the Dem nomination this year, but the chickens will come home to roost. Rebellions don't happen when the hopeless have no hope; they happen when the hopeful have those hopes dashed.

So now I'll speculate:

In 2011, a black man will try to assassinate Pres. Obama. ("Try" in the sense of being arrested with weapons in Obama's vicinity).

In 2012, a Republican candidate will gain his party's nomination by building a youth movement out of unemployed white liberal-arts graduates between the ages of 22-26.

Presidential election rules of thumb

Now that both major party tickets have been decided for 2008, it's a fitting time to look at a couple of rules of thumb for predicting a winner.

Americans like presidents with British names
British here means vaguely English, with fairly bland Scots or Irish names, e.g. McKinley, Kennedy, or Reagan, being included. 39 of 43 presidents have had British names. The exceptions? Van Buren, T. Roosevelt, and F. Roosevelt were all descendants of the New Amsterdam Dutch elite and thus were New York's equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Eisenhower was a commanding general in a victorious war, a German-American equivalent of Jackson or Grant. Besides, he had the good British-sounding nickname "Ike."

For 2008, advantage: McCain.

The three-syllable ticket
Since World War II, the major party ticket whose surnames total closer to three syllables is 9-2-4 in winning the presidency. Since the mass adoption of color TV (before 1968), the tendency is even more pronounced: 8-0-2. Why? Non-British names are often more than two syllables (e.g. Eisenhower, Kefauver, Goldwater, Ferraro, Dukakis, Lieberman). Also, a common stress pattern in a three-syllable ticket is AaB (Reagan-Bush, Clinton-Gore), which provides an aural combination of power and restraint more pleasing to the ear than the thudding AB (Ford-Dole, Bush-Quayle, Dole-Kemp), the dog-trot AaBb (Carter-Mondale), or the mouth-mush of any five-syllable ticket (Mondale-Ferraro, Dukakis-Bentsen).

For 2008, advantage: McCain-Palin (4 syllables to 5).

Obama's logo

Yesterday afternoon, I waited at a red light behind a car with an Obama bumper sticker, and I was really impressed with Obama's logo.

The capital O in his surname becomes an encompassing circle, which symbolizes both social communion and the integration of the self.

The rising sun symbolizes birth and rebirth; the beginning of a season of growth; the banishment of darkness. Consider how fitting it is that the synoptic gospels state the women found the empty tomb at dawn in the springtime. The encompassing circle also fits with this, as it symbolizes the birth canal, through which new life enters the world.

The plowed field symbolizes nature's bounty (which obviously belongs equally to us all) and reminds us of our debt to those who work to bring that bounty to our tables. It evokes quiet pride in the hearts of small town and rural Americans and strikes a chord of back-to-the-land longing in the hearts of post-hippie environmentalists.

Obama's logo is especially powerful compared to Hillary's. Hers looks like a tired rehash of previous campaign logos, with the words "Kerry '04" or "Carter '76" photoshopped out.

Given its symbolic power, whether or not he wins the Democratic nomination or the general election, I am confident that Obama's logo will be studied by campaign managers for decades to come.