Pragmatos

The Corner’s Mike Potemra.

The View from Harlem

It happened, almost too quickly, what everyone was waiting for. Is it really possible to sneak up on a crowd of many thousands of people? At 11 PM, the big-screen TV at the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem went very briefly silent, and blank; and then a graphic silently popped up, “Barack Obama Elected 44th President.” It seemed to take forever for the crowd’s resulting murmur to coalesce into a shout, and then a roar. This was not a wish or a test pattern, this was it.

The scene was Congressman Charlie Rangel’s block party celebrating the election of Barack Obama. People of all races and ages were there on this mild Manhattan evening, and they were in a festive mood even before the big news was announced. American flags abounded; a platform preacher repeated “God bless America, God bless America.”

Why was I, a John McCain voter, there? A bit of personal history. I was born in 1964, and on the day I was born the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County in Virginia had to reopen its public schools. The county had closed the schools because they decided it was better to have no public schools at all than to have to admit black kids into them. Here we are, just 44 years later, with an African-American president, a president elected with the electoral votes of that very same Commonwealth of Virginia.

I voted for John McCain because I admire him immensely as a person, and agree with him on many more issues than I do with Senator Obama. And I ask a rhetorical question: Can we McCain voters, without embarrassment, shed a tear of patriotic joy about the historic significance of what just happened? And I offer a short, rhetorical answer.

Yes, we can.

Sam Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, weighs in with a final prediction of today’s vote.

Final predictions for 2008

PRESIDENT

Electoral vote: The final polling snapshot is Obama 352 EV, McCain 186 EV. The confidence bands are 68% [337,367] Obama EV, 95% [316,378] Obama EV.

Bias analysis: I expect cell phone users missing from landline surveys to give Obama a 1% boost. Based on the bias adjustment I gave you earlier, this scenario brings the median to a level that is still within the 68% confidence band above. I use it as my personal prediction: Obama 364 EV, McCain 174 EV.

Popular vote: The median Obama-McCain margin is Obama +7.0+/-0.8% (n=9, 10/31-11/2). The error bar incorporates assignment of undecided voters. My final prediction is Obama 53%, McCain 46%, third-party candidates 1%.

Over at 538, I don’t see Nate Silver’s “official” prediction (does he do that?), but here’s today’s summary graphic:

John Wildermuth in the SF Chronicle:

The signs on the front lawn of former 49er quarterback Steve Young’s Peninsula home say “No on Prop. 8,” which normally wouldn’t be much of a story in the Bay Area, a gay-friendly region which is the center of opposition to the effort to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

But Young isn’t only a Hall of Fame quarterback. He’s also the great-great-great grandson of Brigham Young, the second president of the Mormon church. The church has pushed hard and publicly for Prop. 8 and Mormons have pumped millions into the campaign.

…

Young also isn’t just any church member. During his years in the NFL, he was one of the nation’s most visible Mormons. He graduated from BYU, which was named for his ancestor, and received his law degree there. In a 1996 “60 Minute” interview, he said that he still had plans to go on the church mission he missed in college and had no problem tithing 10 percent of his earnings to the church. He retains close ties to Utah, married his wife, Barbara, at a temple in Hawaii and even served as narrator for a short video on the Mormon church and its history, done for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah.

Given all that, it’s surprising to see Young’s family lining up on the opposite side of the church, especially after Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City sent a letter last June that asked all California church members to do all they could to support the Prop. 8 effort by “donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.”

While it’s Barb Young’s name that appears on the checks, she made it clear in a statement issued today through Equality California that the contributions are a family affair.

“We believe ALL families matter and we do not believe in discrimination, therefore, our family will vote against Prop. 8,” she said.

via Bob Morris

via Open Left

Add Apple to the list of companies actively opposing California’s Proposition 8:

No on Prop 8
October 24, 2008
Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Update (speaking of Silicon Valley): Tom Campbell:

Republicans believe deeply that government should be limited. Government has no business making distinctions between people based on their personal lives. That’s why, as a Californian and a Republican who has held elective office at the federal and state levels, I will be voting No on Proposition 8.

A long and pessimistic report by Nir Rosen in Rolling Stone, after and about a harrowing trip into Taliban-held Afghanistan. Iraq was (and is) bad enough, and Afghanistan is not Iraq. I’ll quote a bit of it here, but do read the whole thing.

How We Lost the War We Won

[Dr. Khalil] joined the Taliban early, eventually serving as a commander in a northern district. He says he is fighting to restore a government of Islamic law, but that Mullah Omar does not have to be the leader again. God willing, he adds, it will take no more than 30 years to rid Afghanistan of foreigners.

…

The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. “The Americans are gung-ho about elections,” a longtime nongovernmental official tells me. “But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions.” In Pashtun areas controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence — effectively disenfranchising the country’s dominant ethnic group. “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election,” a senior U.N. official tells me. “It’s a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” Real elections would require the cooperation of the Taliban — and that, in turn, would require negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already lost.

“This can’t be solved other than by talking to the Taliban,” says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban: “They don’t have an international-terrorist agenda — they have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda for the country, but that’s not our war.” Former Taliban leaders agree that only talks will end the war. “If the U.S. deals with Pakistan and negotiates with higher-level Taliban,” says one, “then it could reach a deal.”

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Negotiating with the Taliban would also enable the Americans to take advantage of the sharp divisions within the insurgency. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, has been openly criticized by a rival named Siirajudin Haqqani, who has called for Omar to be replaced. In provinces like Ghazni, the Taliban leadership is now divided between commanders loyal to Omar and men who follow Haqqani. A recent meeting between supporters of the two men in the Pakistani city of Peshawar reportedly descended into fighting when an Omar official threw his tea glass at a Haqqani man. The internal split provides an opening — if U.S. intelligence is smart enough to exploit it.
“The U.S. should try to weaken the Taliban,” a former Taliban commander tells me. “They should make groups, divide and conquer. If someone wants to use the division between Haqqani and Omar, they can.”

The Bush administration believes it can stop the Taliban by throwing money into clinics and schools. But even humanitarian officials scoff at the idea. “If you gave jobs to the Viet Cong, would they stop fighting?” asks one. “Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, ‘Please don’t let the Taliban come in.’ But now you’ve reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn’t work.”

Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000 troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security forces — and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists. “The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians,” says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. “The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding. It’s coming to the same situation as it did for the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the provincial capitals.”

Simply put, it is too late for Bush’s “quiet surge” — or even for Barack Obama’s plan for a more robust reinforcement — to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.

“The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed,” says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. “It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now — or are even nominally allied with the government — are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What’s more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal.”

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan “are all theaters in the same overall struggle,” the president declared, linking his administration’s three greatest foreign-policy disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have “faith in the power of freedom.”

But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently explained why the United States will never prevail in Afghanistan.

“You Westerners have your watches,” the leader observed. “But we Taliban have time.”

via Juan Cole