Perhaps Fela Kuti won't be the only (symbolic) Black President.

Obama wins pretty big in Iowa, and largely on the back of massive caucus turnout and a very strong showing with "the kids." That's hot. Stoller has more. Also, Johnny Sunshine and his anti-corporate populism also edged out Sen. Clinton's high-functioning campaign, which was not expected to finish third, which (along with Huck's populism) might push other candidates to at least think about biting the hand that feeds them. This is also hot.

On the GOP side, soft-touch Huckabee takes it, surging past Mitt Romney and his high-dollar machine. Huck!. I think the theater on the Right is kind of better, actually. They're more wild and free.

And now it's on to New Hampshire, where there will be an interesting contest between McCain and Obama -- the two candidates considered to have the greatest crossover appeal -- over independent voters (who can only vote in one or the other's primary). If the trends from Iowa continue, they'll likely split along generational lines.

...

Adding: I've been pessimistic about all these mofos, but the truth is they'd also all be massive improvements and massive opportunity to push the country forward. They will also all need to be actively whipped to do anything worthwhile. Crisitunity!

Prof. Jeffery Feldman is one of the better individuals I've come into contact through politics. He's a thoughtful, eloquent and good-natured individual, with powerful intellect an ultra-keen ear for language. I just recently came across his campaign roundup post. It's a very good read, especially for someone fatigued and frustrated with the political process as I am.

Feldman basically takes a high-level view of how the major campaigns have been conducting themselves, looking at how they frame their appeals to voters. It's both prescient, and also much more engaging than the usual horserace or battle-of-accusations post.

For those wondering what this primary season has been all about, I suggest giving it a read.

This is a good follow-on to the bit I quoted from _Air Guitar_ earlier. Someone at PBS had the brains to interview my former comrade Zephyr Teachout to talk about the internets and politics this cycle, comparing and contrasting Dean For America with The Ron Paul Revolution. It's an extremely good interview:

NOW: Could you talk about how that sense of connection to the candidate is determined by the way the campaign treats them?

ZT: I could answer to two real possibilities with politics on the Internet. One is that you use the Internet as a massive and really effective marketing tool. You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

And you may be useful as a supporter in such a campaign. But you're not gonna have a pretty deep identification in the campaign. It's clear that you're taking your marching orders from Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. That they have figured out how you can be useful.

The other latent possibility is that it enables groups of people to come together—offline and online, outside of the campaign, do their own scheming, do their own thinking, and take real responsibility for the strategy and the policy of the candidate or group that you're supporting.

Almost all the candidates, this cycle, have tended strongly towards the managerial use of the Internet.

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More Huckabee stuff. It's a shame there aren't interesting movements in the Democratic race to write about. But anyway, check this out:

People in business (or other worlds where Popularity Matters) know what that kind of curve means (the green line). It means you've got true hot-shit exponential growth going on. The Dean campaign had that for a while; Huckabee has it now, at least in Iowa.

However, the institutional forces are arraying against him, and the GOP has a history of putting down outsider upstarts who win an early primary (c.f. McCain, John and Buchannan, Paddy). There's also plenty of time for the Huckster's fortunes to reverse in Iowa, and with it being a caucus, and Romney spending the big cash, I would expect the MormBot to outperform his polling. Professional organizers matter a lot when %0.01 of the population participates and the process is arcane.

This is pretty funny, but the really interesting thing is that this pretty much is Huckabee's message, and so far he is able to sell it:

Here's a great and lengthy quote from Air Guitar, an essay entitled Romancing the Lookey-Loos which starts off with a moment of Waylon Jennings on tour, and goes on to explore the difference between spectators and participants in Art.

It's quite a brilliant essay, and which I think it cuts to the quick of what my shit is all about in both art and in politics:

[Spectators] were non-participants, people who did not live the life -- people with no real passion for what was going on on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion -- afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against.

With spectators, as Waylon put it, it's a one-way deal, and in the whole idea was not to be one of them... Even so, [growing up] it wasn't something we discussed of even though about, since the possibility of any of us spectating or being spectated was fairly remote. It is, however, something worth thinking about today, since, with the professionalization of the art world, and the dissolution of the underground cultures that once fed into it, the distinction between spectators and participants is dissolving as well.

Another politics post, this time to note something techy about how campaigns use email. Previously, I'd said mean things about Team Obama for sending out a message "from a supporter" to a much wider subset of their email list. Today, the Dodd campaign used another SpamKing tactic, faking an apparent "mistake email" as a gimmick to get people to donate.

This stuff may work in bringing in the dough, but I really hate it. Creating the illusion of peer-to-peer contact (in Obamas case) or of an unfiltered "behind the scenes" look into a campaign (as Dodd's email does) undermines the most important virtuous things I like to think teh internets can bring to a Democracy.

You know, people want real connections, they want to know what's really going on, and instead of actually engaging, these tactics prey on that desire. They're false in very important ways, and they undermine the hope that such things as an egalitarian and transparent society are really possible, even in a networked era.

It calls to mind this quote from George Meyer (the most influential of all the Simpsons writers) in a Believer interview:

So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it's not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we're actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we've forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we're somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, "The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.". We have no feel for loss. We've constructed massive metropolises -- the fastest growing in the nation -- in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It's a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, "The American way of life is not negotiable," and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It's a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure -- think exurbs, big lawns, etc -- coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).

This is clever stuff from the Huckster. He's had a lot of trouble raising money, but is starting to gain ground in recent Iowa polling. I do honestly think he would be the most formidable Republican candidate. His ideas are generally bad (National Sales Tax! Outlaw Abortion!) but his presentation is incredibly disarming. Unlike il Rudy -- who is sufficiently obvious in his megalomaniacal insanity -- and Romney -- who's equally clearly a used-car salesman at heart -- I think Huckabee's calm and earnest manner would probably sell very well in a country suffering from Bush Fatigue.

He comes off like your best friends square dad: kind of a downer stick in the mud, but not in a way that you initially/actively dislike, plus he wrote a book on weight loss. He's the aw-shucks Republican, the only really "feel-good" candidate on right. It would be a challenging contrast to the pragmatic effectiveness of Sen. Clinton, and I daresay he'd out-grin Obama or Edwards. Hopefully the antipathy towards his candidacy from the Money People will nip it in the bud.

Via Mr. Kos, more proof that we are not as free as we can be:

bq.. Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

p. Because we are serfs in our cars, beholden to a relatively small business elite when it comes to answering the automotive engineering questions of our times, we are not doing what we could be doing.