Sarah Palin's approval numbers have dropped pretty steadily over the past week or so, which prompts Yglesias to opine:
In the wake of Sarah Palin's nomination, a surprising number of people
-- some of whom weren't even operating in bad faith -- suggested that the
smart thing to do when faced with a popular political opponent would be
to avoid attacking her, lest the attacks cause a backlash. Looking at the Research 2000 tracking poll data, however, confirms common sense -- when you attack someone, she becomes less popular.
I was one of the people who urged the Obama campaign not to attack Palin (if I was arguing in bad faith, I wasn't aware of it) in the wake of the convention, and I still think it was good advice; in fact, I also think it's advice that the Democratic ticket has largely taken over the past week-to-ten days. Palin's fall, I suspect, has been driven primarily by negative press reports on her Alaska career (with the anti-Palin notebook dumps in the Times and the Post leading the way), ongoing coverage of the still-simmering Troopergate scandal - and especially by her widely-watched, none-too-impressive interview with Charlie Gibson, which aired the day her slide in the polls began. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has busied itself going after McCain - for lying in his ads, for being out of touch on the economy, etc. etc. - and avoiding the "she's just a small-town mayor" attacks that they trotted out immediately after the Palin pick was announced. Or at least that's been my impression - it's possible that there's been a barrage of anti-Palin fire from the Obama camp that I've missed, but by and large it seems like they've been doing a decent job of just getting out of the way, and leaving it to the media (and Palin herself) to undo her initial spike in popularity.
In addition to ensuring that I'll be labeled forever as "rap scold Douthat", I think thesethreeposts from last week about Bill Cosby, rap and jazz ended up conflating several intertwined but arguably distinct issues - the moral content of rap versus jazz, the artistic content of rap versus jazz, gangsta rap versus the broader universe of rap and hip-hop, non-ironic versus ironic approaches to exploitative entertainment, and probably a few others as well. Rather than trying to untangle them, though, I'll just cop out and suggest you go read Peter Suderman and Michael Brendan Dougherty on these and related subjects.
April 17, 2008
Jazz And Gangsta Rap
I should note, in response to a commenter's point on my last post, that yes, obviously gangsta rap obviously has already been domesticated by the upper-bourgeoisie, becoming a tame sort of protest music for young well-off white kids who aren't really protesting anything. But there's distinction between this sort of domestication and what's happened to jazz, which hasn't just become safe - it's become highbrow. And the following (irony-drenched and NSFW) video notwithstanding, I have a tough time imagining the same thing happening with Dr. Dre. (Moreover, if it does happen - if the fortysomething intellectuals of 2030 end up dragging their griping kids to hear the N.W.A. in the Park concert series - it will be a vastly more plausible indicator of cultural decline than the highbrowfication of Miles Davis.)
August 29, 2007
Songs of a Native Son
Since there's apparently a "cloud over Idaho" at the moment, this seems like a good time to mention that I recently had the privilege of meeting Josh Ritter, an Idaho native and possibly the best American singer-songwriter of his (that is, my) generation. I say this as a certified musical philistine, so by all means take it with a grain of salt, but there are plenty of non-philistines out there who agree with me; Amazon calls his just-released disc "the best album of 2007, hands down, by the most under-accorded American musical genius," though personally I would suggest starting with 2003's Hello Starling and going onfrom there. If you like Dylan or Leonard Cohen or anyone else in that vein, you owe it to yourself to give him a listen.
Also, he seems like a really nice guy. So hold your head high, Idaho!
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
