Alaskan Paper backs Obama - game, set and match?

The news today that the top newspaper in the home state of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for president is quite possible the final nail in the coffin for the Republican campaign.

It follows weeks of McCain trailing by double figures in the polls and comes just over a week before polling day itself. And despite McCain and Palin's numerous gaffes en route, this could be the knock-out blow.

In it's lead editorial, Alaska's Anchorage Daily News said governor Mrs Palin was "too risky" to be one step away from the presidency although "her nomination 'captivated' Alaskans.

The paper is known in the industry to stay more towards the liberals and backed the Democratic candidate in the last three presidential elections. Yet coming out and flying the flag for Obama in such a comprehensive dismissive fashion now is highly important, especially so as it described Mr McCain as the "wrong choice".

The editorial states that Republican presidential candidate John McCain has "stumbled and fumbled badly" in dealing with the economic crisis: "[John McCain] embraces the extreme Republican orthodoxy he once resisted and cynically asks Americans to buy for another four years", it says. (Read the full editorial here).

The Republicans now have the choice of either accepting defeat or going gung-ho on the campaign trail in the swing states, perhaps for no overall outcome.

It surely is only a matter of time before Obama is elected and America finally has, in the words of the Anchorage Daily News, a "cool, steady hand" at the helm.

Visual Hybridity

Apparently not everyone gets or agrees with the social construction of race. There are still people who are shocked when they find out that there's no biological basis for our racial categories whatsoever. These interesting photographs illustrate how we construct the race of people of blended heritage. All via Sociological Images.

First, the image on the right is of little Barack Obama with his grandfather (Stanley Dunham) who looks remarkably like the picture on the left of the adult Obama (although the picture looks slightly stretched to me).

Obama, to my eye, is the spitting image of his grandfather. Yet, we see Obama and Dunham as separate races, members of two categories we see as diametrically opposed, even biologically distinct. <rest>

Then this photo project makes us question how we assign racial or ethnic categories by providing faces that are difficult to categorize.

This project consists of a series of 16 color portraits of people of mixed ethnic origin in front of primary color backgrounds. The images challenge the concept of race by highlighting the disparity between the stark natural boundaries between the primary colors, and the ambiguous and artificial, yet commonly accepted boundaries between the different races. This project asks the viewer to question the existence of race in nature.

The aim of the portraits is to strip our idea of race down to its elements. It is in this nakedness that the viewer watches the races literally dissolve in front of their face like so many moth-eaten clothes. The tone is neither confrontational nor ironic, but rather unassuming in its directness

Finally, this story of fraternal twins - one "white" and one "black". Well, actually both are of mixed race, as are their parents. Over at SI, she uses this example "to illustrate how skin color (which is real) is translated into categorical racial categories (which are not)."

October 24, 2008 - Communitarians, Arise

I’m on study leave for a few days, at our Adirondacks place. I’ve got quite a pile of accumulated books and journals to plow through.

The first thing I pick up to read is the September 9th issue of The Christian Century, whose news briefs section cites some political commentary from a column by E.J. Dionne. U.S. history, Dionne observes, is a back-and-forth tug of war between individualistic and communitarian impulses. The Century summarizes Dionne’s argument: “Dionne thinks there is a communitarian correction after a period of time when the individualistic metaphor of free markets reigned supreme. McCain’s notion of honor associated with the military is more communitarian than individualistic, and Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can’ reflects deep communitarian commitments.”

My generation, the Baby Boomers, advanced communitarian ideals through the social upheavals of the 1960s, then settled in for a long period of individual striving. Many of us traded George McGovern for Ronald Reagan, backpacks and sandals for briefcases and wing-tips. We trekked from Woodstock to Wall Street.

Our parents’ generation, the “Greatest Generation,” traversed similar territory in their time. They cheerfully pitched in with Victory Gardens and rationing coupons during the World War II years, then traded in their communitarian values to raise nuclear families in the up-and-coming suburbs.

Ronald Reagan’s political revolution was an emphatic, angry resurgence of individualism. The recent near-collapse of the financial markets – brought on by the absence of government regulation – is the natural conclusion of the Great Communicator’s program. These developments have exposed the central economic dogma of Reaganism – that unfettered individual striving will result in “trickle-down” communal benefits – as a fraud. Greed has done what greed always does, left to itself. It has nearly wrecked our society. Now, as Dionne astutely observes, both presidential candidates are speaking communitarian language again. The one who is most adept at it – Obama – seems poised to win the election.

The other night, I attended the monthly blood cancer support group sponsored by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. What could be more communitarian than a bunch of people sitting around in a circle, sharing their stories and seeking to uphold one another? It would seem the way to health – for us as well as for our nation – lies in facing the beast together, rather than alone.