November 5th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Well, some of my faith in the US is restored this morning. Senator Obama’s election to the White House is an extraordinary gesture of hope that ought to resonate around the globe. His acceptance speech was yet another example of awesome oratory. Let us hope that President Obama governs the way Senator Obama campaigned.
Of course, there were a few disappointments last night. California voted ‘yes’ on proposition 8, effectively banning gay marriage in the state. This exit poll is particularly shocking, indicating that 70% of African-Americans voted ‘yes’ on the issue. I should really learn more about the rationale behind referendums. Why do we (and the US much more than us) have them, and under what circumstances?
Likewise, Alaska probably re-elected an 84-year-old convicted felon (who thinks the Internet is ‘a series of tubes’) to the Senate. He’ll be the first person ever to be re-elected to the Senate after being found guilty on criminal charge. As someone said elsewhere on the web this morning, stay classy, Alaska.
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November 4th, 2008, 2 Comments »
On this historic day in American history, I wanted to reference Sarah’s excellent report from the coincidentally-named town of Obama, Japan:
I spent the past weekend in Obama, and awesome doesn’t even begin to describe how awesome it was.
Obama, a fishing village on the Sea of Japan, has transformed itself into a hotbed of Barack Obama activism. Although, I suspect the people of Obama are rooting for Obama not because they like his politics, but because they like his name.
The charming portrait of Obama featured in the flags and posters that line the town’s main street looks like it was sketched in about five minutes.
She includes plenty of photos, including this crazy clay statue.
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October 3rd, 2008, 9 Comments »
I’m no economist. In fact, I don’t deserve to live in the same town as the guy who hands out the ‘economist’ name tags. With that in mind, I have two ill-informed reactions to today’s signing of the US $700 million billion (whoops, wishing thinking) bailout bill into law:
- For many, many years, Wall Street demanded and received decreased regulation. They repeatedly called for less and less government intervention into the free market. Now, having royally screwed the pooch in this unregulated atmosphere, they get saved by what? Government intervention. Does anybody else find this repellent?
- I have yet to hear a clearly articulated explanation of the alternative outcome–no bailout–for the average American (not to mention the average Canadian). Yes, it’ll be bad news, but I have no sense of how bad. And, you know, I’ve been paying attention.
It must be pretty weird to live in the US these days. On top of impending (and possibly averted) economic disaster, you’re living through one of the weirdest presidential elections in history. I watched some of the US vice-presidential debate last night (and some of the Canadian leadership debate and some of the hockey game), and I continue to be shocked that Governor Palin might one day run this country. If Americans put Senator McCain and Governor Palin in the Whitehouse, they get the governance they deserve.
Here are two tangential links that political junkies have probably already seen: the Sarah Palin debate flow chart, and the hilarious earmarks and pork attached to the bailout bill.
Do we do this–attach all sorts of irrelevant extras to legislation–in Canada? I’m embarrassed that I don’t know.
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September 19th, 2008, 1 Comment »
I guess this is technically a client plug. But if I hadn’t written a guest post on it over at the CI Sense blog, I’d have written it here. We generated some reports for trademark filings associated with the American presidential candidates. I went through them and pulled out 21 of the weirdest products and slogans. Here’s a sampling:
My favourite is probably all of the incredibly lame versions of what ‘O.B.A.M.A.’ stands for.
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April 8th, 2008, 1 Comment »
James (who has his own Web 2.0 community) pointed me to this terrific article by Furqan Nazeeri about building and promoting a new online community. Furqan launched ObamaCycle, a site for recycling campaign materials.
I agree with every point in the list–they all jibe with our experience. None of his ideas are earth-shattering, but they’re definitely useful:
If there is a true community around your site, then members will overlook a lot of faults. On ObamaCycle, campaign materials are “listed” in discussion forum format, but the formatting sucks and it’s hard to find stuff. Despite that a lot of people have and continue to use the site.
Of course, Furqan benefited from having an eager real-world community to connect with, but it sounds like he did lots of stuff right.
I liked it so much, I submitted it to Digg and Reddit.
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February 10th, 2008, 4 Comments »
If you’ve been following the tightly-contested race to choose a Democratic candidate for the American presidency, you’ve probably heard the term ’superdelegate’. What is a superdelegate?
To paraphrase Wikipedia, most delegates are selected through party primaries and caucuses (Vanessa explains these here). However, a minority of delegates are ‘unpledged’ and are known as superdelegeates. Back to Wikipedia:
Superdelegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention include all Democratic members of the United States Congress, Democratic governors, various additional elected officials, members of the Democratic National Committee, as well as “all former Democratic Presidents, all former Democratic Vice Presidents, all former Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic Minority Leaders, as applicable, and all former Chairs of the Democratic National Committee.
The superdelegate system was set up in 1982, to take some influence away from party activists and restore it to party insiders. One article I read described them as the “invisible primary”. Here’s the complete list of superdelegates, if anybody is interested.
By The Numbers
And now for some numbers:
Delegates from state caucuses and primaries: 3253
Current number of superdelegates: 796 (though this may change)
The current total number of delegates is therefore 4049, and Senators Clinton and Obama need at least 2025 to win. As of today, February 10, according to CNN, 2165 of the delegates have been allocated. That leaves about 1100 delegates in play before the Democratic convention.
So, it’s looking unlikely that either candidate will get the 2025 delegates from state parties and caucuses alone. The superdelegates will then come into play at the Democratic convention as tie-breakers. This New York Times article discusses how hard the parties have been working to secure the support of superdelegates. From what I’ve read, Democrats dread that possibilty. From the Times article:
“It is going to be an enormous train wreck unless by June 3 a candidate has a majority,” said Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, who supports Mrs. Clinton. “I don’t think we want to go back to those wheeling-dealing, smoke-filled back-room days.”
So that means that about 20% of the votes are coming from party leaders and officials who haven’t been democratically selected during the primaries (if at all). This seems dubious, but one should remember that candidate selection isn’t exclusively democratic (it certainly isn’t in Canada, either).
So What are the Current Standings?
There were four primaries yesterday for the Democrats, in Washington, Louisiana, Nebraska and the US Virgin Islands (I’ve noticed in several American news sources that they oddly just called them “the Virgin Islands”.). As predicted, Sen. Obama won all three. Where does that put the race? Er, well, it depends on who you ask:
CNN - Clinton: 1100, Obama: 1039
CBS - Clinton: 1118, Obama: 1112
FOX News (from the Associated Press) - Clinton: 1084, Obama: 1054
One reason these numbers differ is because news organizations try to estimate how the superdelegates will vote. There are similar slight differences for the superdelegate count, but roughly speaking Clinton has about 225 and Obama has 125. In terms of democratically-selected delegates, I guess Obama is now ahead.
Why Are Only Some Superdelegates Counted?
Superdelegates are officially uncommitted until the Democratic convention, but may come out in favour of a candidate at any time. At the moment, about 55% of superdelegates have not declared who they’ll be supporting. The 2008 Democratic Convention Watch blog is doing yeoman’s work tracking delegate counts. They have a list of superdelegates who have officially declared their support, and those who have yet to make an endorsement.
Does Canada Have Superdelegates?
As it turns out, yes. They’re called ‘ex officio delegates’. Wikipedia, once again, to the rescue:
In addition to the elected delegates, a large number of ex officio delegates attend and vote at leadership conventions. These ex officio delegates are automatically entitled to attend by virtue of being an elected member of parliament for that party, a member of an affiliated party in a provincial legislature, a member of the party’s national or provincial executive, of the executive of an affiliated women’s or youth organization.
As an example, here’s a list of the ex-officio delegates to the Liberal Party of Canada leadership convention in 2006.
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