Technology, politics and the rest

I spent some time last night and this morning putting into writing and trying to reason through my transition from 2000 Bush supporter to 2008 Obama supporter. It’s something that’s been on my mind for a while, so this is my first attempt to record it. I put no research into this and did very little proofreading and editing, so this may be a bit rough around the edges.

Eight years ago, I wasn’t old enough to vote (barely). Had I been old enough to vote, I would have voted for George W. Bush. I had been a fan of John McCain in the primaries, and was quite disheartened when he lost. I didn’t fully comprehend the ugliness of Bush’s campaign (especially in South Carolina).

I was (and still am) interested in Bush’s small-government platform and the modest foreign policy discussed in the campaign (SPOILER ALERT: it didn’t pan out). Bill Clinton struck me as deceitful, and I was against Gore because I was against validating the Clinton administration. I thought Bush wasn’t too smart, but I was confident that he would bring smart advisers to the White House and run the executive branch well. I can’t really expand the argument too well, and I’m not sure it was much more complicated than that. To this day, I’m immensely glad that I didn’t have a chance to cast that vote. It wouldn’t have mattered, since I was voting in CT, but I would have come to regret it later.

September 2001 brought the most significant American event of my lifetime. I was working at the Career Services office at Lehigh for most of the day, and I remember one of the more liberal office workers there admitting, “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad George Bush is president right now.” I thought to myself: so do I! We wanted to go out and get “them”, and we thought George Bush wouldn’t blink.

In retrospect, I don’t really remember putting all that much effort into understanding why Islamic terrorists would want to attack us. Bush’s language was very conducive to this lack of thought: they were “evildoers” who hated our freedom. We were at war with them, a “War on Terror”. Attacking Afghanistan made sense: that’s where the people who had perpetrated this event were supposedly hiding.

Then things got weird.

There had been talk of the threat from Iraq for a while, following 9/11. Bush and his allies (including John McCain, notably), kept pulling it back into the discussion, and it looked like there were some really concerning weapons there. I wasn’t paying as much attention to the news at that time compared to the rest of the last decade, so I don’t really remember having a strong opinion in the lead-up to the war. I believed that Saddam had dangerous weapons (he’d already used some against Iran), but I wasn’t fearful of Iraq. I think the best way to describe my disposition to the war would be resigned: I knew it was going to happen, and I had other stuff to do.

The initial invasion went pretty well, but the events in the years that followed completely changed my opinion on the subject. (Quick note: A lot of this stuff may be completely out of order, I’m just going by memory.) The occupation soon lead to chaos and the lack of preparation and understanding of the dynamics of the Iraqi people soon became very clear. Saddam had been oppressive, but he kept everyone in line, and we didn’t know how to effectively deal with the power vacuum (nor did we comprehend the depth of centuries-old conflicts). Meanwhile, the original case for war was falling apart: there were no WMDs and the evidence shared had been cherry-picked.

For me, Abu Ghraib is emblematic of the reckless way in which the Bush administration has handled detainees as well as the lack of respect for human rights. When the pictures first came out, I thought that the “few bad apples” line made sense. Further thought and research eventually revealed to me that this was far more systemic than they wanted us to believe. What had we become? This was when I began to be thankful that I hadn’t voted in 2000.

Having soured on the Bush administration in 2004, I started looking at the other side. Howard Dean caught my interest, since I liked his straightforward speaking style and his opposition to the war. That didn’t pan out, so I settled for John Kerry (in a switch that reminded me quite a bit of my transition from McCain to Bush).

When John Kerry lost, I was rather surprised: how could we do that after all we had learned? Electing Bush felt like a stamp of approval on his first term. To be fair, Kerry was a bad candidate, but still. I know it’s an elitist thing to say (or something), but I felt rather embarrassed that we had re-elected Bush.

Hurricane Katrina further lowered my opinion of the Bush administration: this was a case study in how Bush had failed to bring responsible, effective people into Washington to run things. This is when I started to emerge from my fog of apathy and get a little mad. Better late than never.

I also started bringing political topics into my blog a bit more, mostly as an outlet (you can see the writing I did on Hurricane Katrina here, it wasn’t much, but it’s a start).

In 2006, I was hopeful that a Democratic majority would bring some accountability and responsibility to the war and the administration in general. This hasn’t really worked out, as the Democrats have generally been complicit with the Bush administration (look at how they cooperate on warantless wiretapping- if only they could work together on helpful issues!).

When I moved to CA to work at Google, a couple of important things happened: I began keeping closer tabs on the election through work and reading a lot more about it. I started working on elections-related projects at Google, which meant I was talking with much more politically-minded (and knowledgeable) people than I had in the past. I had a chance to see quite a few candidates talk at Google during the primaries (McCain, Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Richardson, and probably some others I’m forgetting). I liked a lot of the things that Bill Richardson said, so I made a small donation later that week. That was my first political donation.

No longer living in a swing state (it’s more of a jazz/tap state), my vote in the presidential election is now rather worthless in determining the winner. Believing that this election was too important for me to have no impact, I was left with a few options: try to convince others about my candidate (through this blog and in person), donate to a campaign, or volunteer for a campaign. After Richardson didn’t make it out of Iowa (uh, figuratively), I decided to support Barack Obama. I first gave to his campaign after his speech in New Hampshire (I think), and started reading, writing, and talking about politics more than ever before.

So, I think this is a good summary of how I got to where I am. I didn’t really explain why I support Obama, but if you’ve been reading this blog for the past year, you should have some idea. I wrote this mostly as a record for myself, since my memories will only continue to fade. I’ve certainly become much more liberal in the last 8 years. Some would attribute that to going to college or moving to California, but I don’t think either of those are the case. To some degree, I resent that suggestion, as it makes me seem quite weak-willed and vacuous. My change has more to do with the actions of the Bush administration than my own story, I think. I wonder where I’ll be in 8 years.

So, how did you get here?

This remixed video is rather amusing, though the background music is really annoying:

These have been around for a while, but GenderAnalyzer.com has worked for me for the few samples I fed it. You give it a blog URL and it tries to guess if it was written by a man or woman.

Ben Affleck’s parody of Keith Olbermann is pretty funny if you’ve seen the show before:

The best way to summarize it would be an a-capella John Williams medley with Star Wars lyrics, with all the singing by the same person… it’s quite amazing.

A short video with excerpts from a speech he gave while visiting Google last year:

Lots of details on his plans are here.
(via TechCrunch)

John McCain’s technology plan is here. They have a lot in common, but there are some key differences (e.g. network neutrality).

Politico.com had an interesting, introspective, honest article recently: Why McCain is getting hosed in the press. They make the same point I’ve been trying to make about balance:

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.
As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

From the interesting-but-not-surprising department…

538 ’s discussion of cellphone polling includes this image:

Polls that include cellphones are in yellow. I’m not surprised to see some correlation here. Cellphone-only people (like me) tend to be in demographics that favor Obama, from what I’ve seen.

Chuck Todd used a fancy touchscreen to walk through McCain’s electoral needs on Meet The Press today:

538’s simulations suggest that this is the most likely route to victory for McCain:

Matthew Gray (a fellow googler) wrote a simple Personalized Election Modeler that I’ve played around with a bit. It lets you enter a probability that Obama will win each state and it runs a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the odds of an Obama win given your probabilities (he provides some sensible defaults for you to start with).

The McCain campaign has had some problems with typos lately:

Everbody?

And then from this post on LanguageLog, an email with 4 typos in 2 lines: