Here’s a collection of Barack Obama endorsements from blogs I read. I’ll be adding to the list through tomorrow. I’m still trying to decide whether to write a full endorsement.
Here’s a collection of Barack Obama endorsements from blogs I read. I’ll be adding to the list through tomorrow. I’m still trying to decide whether to write a full endorsement.
When intellectually honest conservatives criticize Barack Obama, they say that he’s the most liberal Democratic nominee since 1972. (The dishonest ones call him a radical or a socialist or other silly things, but they’re not worth arguing with.) At the same time, people on the left argue that he’s not a “real progressive” and warn their fellow liberals that they should lower their expectations about what he wants to accomplish in office.
Critics on both sides can be right simply because there’s a lot of space to occupy between them. But I think that the real explanation is that evaluating a politician only by their ideology (left versus right) is insufficient. I think they must also be rated on a scale that ranges from “pragmatic” to “ideological”. A pragmatist bases their actions on what is achievable and which problems need to be solved. An ideologue sets their agenda to service their ideology.
My guess is that if you plotted Obama’s views, you’d find him on the leftward end of the ideological spectrum. I think he’s a genuine liberal. Obama’s philosophy of how to govern, though, is pegged way toward the pragmatic end of the scale.
I think this is the proper approach for a President. I mention the Overton window a lot. It argues that there’s a range of ideas that are politically acceptable at any one time, and describes how public opinion can be changed to move the window to make previously excluded ideas acceptable.
A President who governs in an ideological fashion will most likely spend their time trying to implement policies outside the window. Those policies will either not pass, or they’ll eventually hurt the President’s party politically. Politicians who ignore the Overton window tend to lie a lot. Since their policies are untenable, they’re forced to misrepresent them as policies that people can accept. The Bush administration has been a classic example of this style of government.
On the other hand, a President who governs with the window in mind can bring about change that stands for decades. I think this is Obama’s plan. If you listen to his speeches, or some of the other things he’s said, he makes it clear that his goal is to build a wide consensus around policies that move toward the end state he’d like to see. He’s aware that relying on the courts to bring about change can lead to resentment and hinder progress, and he knows that policies that win by narrow majorities will not stand the test of time. He seems OK with narrowing his ambitions to increase the durability of his ideas.
If Obama is elected, it’ll be interesting to see whether he follows this path. From what he’s said, I suspect that he will, but nobody knows how a President will govern. In any case, I think that an Obama Presidency would not feel as liberal as many conservatives expect him to be, and I suspect that many liberals who Obama would agree with in the abstract will be disappointed in the specific policies he works to enact. At the same time, if Obama effectively pursues his philosophy, he could lay the foundation for a long lasting shift toward more progressive government.
I’m not a legal expert, so I’m mainly just gathering information, but it sure looks to me like the patent regime as it relates to software is in for fundamental change thanks to a ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday. Links:
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the patent regime as it exists today provides an incentive for individual inventors to create inventions. Most of the patent activity, especially in the world of software patents, is sponsored by large organizations who have the infrastructure and budget to try to patent everything they can. I’ve worked at a number of small companies and we’ve never been able to patent much of anything. We’re too busy coding. On the other hand, my friends at large companies are constantly being encouraged to file patents on everything they work on.
The original idea behind patents is that they’d protect the little guy from having his ideas copied by a company with deeper pockets, but I don’t think it’s worked out that way.
The patent system is complicated, and complicated systems favor people with the resources to game the system. It’s why rich people get more tax breaks than the rest of us — they have more to lose and can spend more to exploit loopholes in the tax system. It’s why people in World of Warcraft who can play 12 hours a day do better those that can play 1 hour a day. They have the resources (time) to invest in exploiting every inefficiency they can find. And it’s why companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple are always accumulating boatloads of patents.
If this ruling is as broad as some are arguing, it clears the field for startups who want to go out and build a product without the fear that they’ve stepped on one of the thousands of nebulous patents that have already been filed. And that’s to say nothing about the advantages for open source software, where the types of patents that seem to have been eliminated by this ruling have been an actual barrier to adoption.
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Watching election returns (for the obsessive)
I’ve been obsessed with the election for over a year, and I’m just as obsessed today. Here’s a disorganized guide to election return watching that I’ll be updating throughout the day.
First of all, ignore exit polls and hope that whatever network you’re watching for returns does the same.
Here’s a short list of what to look for tonight, and here’s an election night viewer’s guide from Nate Silver. John Dickerson lets you know what to look for all day today.
My current plan for tonight is to watch the returns on HDnet, but we’ll have to see whether my wife will go along with that. Dan Rather is nutty enough to be fun, and he has a really interesting list of guests. Because HDnet isn’t one of the major news organizations, they don’t have any of the big name, low information pundits and instead have to make do with people who actually know what they’re talking about.
I’ll be flipping over to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s live election show at 10pm.
I won’t be live blogging the returns simply because it takes too much energy. I will most likely be on Twitter, and I may post updates here if I feel so moved, but I expect to be glued to the TV rather than glued to the computer tonight.
If I am looking at the computer, it’ll be to watch the vote totals creep up, most likely on CNN. To get the results straight from the horse’s mouth, here are the sites where official returns are posted from some states I’m interested in. Usually they’re behind CNN, but it never hurts to look when you’re feeling impatient:
Update: Google is publishing real-time returns as well. (Turns out this is where the map on Talking Points Memo comes from.)
Update: How many Democratic volunteers are out on the streets? So many that I got sideswiped in traffic by another car, and it happened to be driven by an Obama volunteer. Oddly neither car was damaged and we wound up talking about volunteering for a bit and then went on about our business.