Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 31

Getting Sued

By 1963, my father could well see the trajectory of his business. He’d keep building one pre-bought home at a time for people with steady, but unspectacular payechecks. Those customers would keep giving him headaches, showing up in the middle of the job and telling him to move walls without paying an extra cent. At the end of the year despite the long hours, he’d be making no more than had he stayed in the carpenter’s union.

My father was getting frustrated by his lack of progress. It all came to a head when a client sued him for shoddy workmanship. He had to go to court. He had to hire a lawyer. My father had a very short fuse in all matters. But when it came to the law and rules, he had hardly any fuse at all. He was worried he’d end up owing his ex-client a ton of money that he didn’t have.

Adding to the trouble was the lawyer my father hired. Of course, my father didn’t have the money to hire anyone decent. He ended up with a laconic, unintelligent, inexpensive Jewish guy with limited court experience. Aside from being cheap, the lawyer possessed one necessary skill. He spoke Yiddish. He also looked remarkably like Groucho Marx.

The trial proceeded with the plaintiff bringing in one hired gun after another testifying to my father’s incompetence. In legal parlance, these are called expert witnesses. In the real world, they are called verbal whores, people who will say anything for money. My father watched all of this unfold with dread. There was little cross-examination on the part of his incompetent lawyer. My father, I’m sure, had to hold back every impulse he possessed to slug the guy.

When it was the defense’s turn, my father had no expert witnesses. Somehow, his lawyer didn’t clue him in on the need for verbal whores to represent his side of the case. Besides, I doubt my father – both on principle and cheapness – would have paid for them. He had some friends and past clients attest to the quality of his workmanship. These witnesses weren’t standing up to the plaintiff’s cross-examination very well.

My father wanted to be called as a witness. His lawyer said no on the grounds that my father did not know English that well and came across as a rather aggressive, unsympathetic figure. The lawyer’s opinion on this matter was driving my father apoplectic. The trial was going poorly. In my father’s estimation, he was going to lose. He needed a game changer. My father insisted that he go up to the witness stand.

What no one knew was that my father was taking a calculated risk. On the first day, he noted the name of the judge, Kowalski, a large potato-faced man with a grey crew cut. He’d spent the first twenty years of his life around Poles like this. He knew the type.

My father walked up to the witness stand. “Do you speak Polish?” He asked the judge. The judge beamed, “Of course!” My father smiled and started to talk to the judge. The entire proceedings stopped during their banter. My mother knew what was going on. He was buttering the judge up. Another person in the room understood the banter, too: the plaintiff, a Polish-Jewish immigrant and widow.

My father had a joke about building that he used a lot when he made a mistake. It was a silly self-deprecating thing. He would show both his hands outward and then flip his right hand palm-sized down so that it had the same orientation as his other one. Then he would smile and say, “What do you expect? I have two left hands.”

On the witness stand, bantering in Polish with the judge, he showed both his hands outward and then flipped his right one. Then he told his little joke in Polish. The judge broke out in laughter.

Finally in Polish, he said to the judge that he was sorry about all of the fuss about this building. He believed that he built a good house. He would be happy to buy it back at the same price that his client paid for it.

The plaintiff stood up when she heard this offer in Polish. “No! I don’t want to sell the house back,” she said. “I like the house!”

“Lady, if you like the house,” the judge said, “why are you suing?”

“It’s not like this,” she blurted out. “It’s not the house. It’s what I paid for it. A friend told me she bought the same house for $1500 less from another builder.”

“You’re suing because of an agreed price?”

“Yes. It was too much.”

For all intents and purposes the case was over.

Still, my father hated the entire experience. He hated the wasted time in the court. He hated the bill from his lawyer who to his mind did nothing to help the case. He never wanted to be put through such a thing again.

My father had a new plan. His days as a builder of single family homes in Wisconsin were over. We would move out to California. Surely the opportunities would be better there. He’d join the union again at first to build up some cash. Then he’d start building fancier houses, the stuff that rich people bought. He was tired of dealing with lower-middle-class shnorers who sued you over your scant profit. There was a lot of money in California. He was going to get his share.

My father was inherently analytical, however. His plan sounded good on paper. But he needed some proof. We’d go out West for a vacation. He’d take a look around LA and San Diego to see if his plan had a chance of working.

Forty Questions on the Injured Reserve

I took a silly fall and sprained my elbow. I'll be back in a few days.

Emily Dickinson and The Music Business

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all

There are some tens of thousands of CDs released every year with a bar code on the cover, which indicates that they are intended for sale. Almost all will not sell more than 10 copies or if they are digitally available not sell 10 or more downloads. The principal reasons they don't sell are that no one knows this music exists and even if they do, the public does not have the feeling that the CD is "purchase worthy." By that I mean that the public, even if it has heard and liked the music, does not feel the product has enough cache to merit a purchase.

Awareness and cache. Those are the two things needed to sell a five inch round disc (or download).

You can get awareness two ways: 1) bludgeon the market; 2) hope that in this internet age your music catches on and goes viral. Number one, bludgeoning, is what record companies do every time they release a CD. There are maybe a dozen labels out there with thirty or so major releases every year. For most of those releases, they spend a ton of money - about a million dollars - in advertising and bribes (aka payola) to get the attention of the public. The songs get played on thousands of radio stations, adds are taken out and videos are made. The artist appears in magazines and on TV shows.

The hope - that thing with feathers - is that all this effort will cause a massive swell of interest. The CD will become a cultural phenomenon and sell a million or two copies (or equivalent downloads). Until the emergence of downloading on peer to peer sites, the hope was that the CD would sell several million copies. Regardless of the goal, only about one in eight CDs from the major labels actually sells enough to come close to recouping the cost of the advertising and awareness campaign. The public says meh to the other seven. This is why CDs and downloads cost so much; most CDs are failures.

When a major record label spends this kind of money, one benefit is that the product being sold is instantly identified as being purchase worthy. The logic in a person's mind is, I guess, wow I saw these guys on Letterman, heard this stuff on the radio a bunch of times, heard it on Grey's Anatomy, and read about it in Time/online. It's new and hot. I like it and I want it! If they don't download it for free (a relatively new stumbling block in the music business), they'll buy it. Ka Ching!

We can go down a notch and find smaller labels - with names like Matador and Drag City - doing the same thing as the major labels except at a smaller scale. They have about a dozen releases a year each. They can't bludgeon the market. They don't have the money. Their budgets are less than a tenth of that of the major labels and their goals are much smaller. If they sell a few tens of thousands of CDs on a release they are very happy. But they too have high failure rates. And they also have a remote idea that maybe, just maybe they'll get lucky. One release will somehow go viral on the internet and sell millions or at least 100,000 copies. Very, very rarely it happens. Without the big budgets and the bludgeoning approach of the major labels, what starts out small almost always stays small.

Then we go down a notch further and find labels that house maybe one or two artists. Usually the artist is also the owner of the label. Their budgets are less than a tenth of the mid-sized labels. They hardly have any money at all to promote their one record a year or record every other year. They are the true Emily Dickinsons of this business. Somehow without any money and little more than a myspace site, they hope that the world will recognize their music for the wonder it is.

Very rarely it does happen. I don't know how it does, but it does. Someone hears a song on myspace, they like it, recommend it to others, and the chain starts. Sadly, that's almost always where it ends. A million hits on myspace never seems to translate into sales. It's just a million listens to a song. Myspace doesn't have the cache to make the listener think that the product is purchase worthy. It's just a song on a computer. The listener moves on. Hope takes a holiday.

About the only avenue that the artist not on a real label has to get awareness and cache is for a song of theirs to somehow get picked up on a major TV show or major movie. The odds are long that this will happen. And even if it does, the odds that the one song that is heard will suddenly capture the imagination of the American public are even more remote. But one can hope.

Why am I writing all this? I have a new CD coming out this January. I have a tiny budget to promote it. It will, if I'm lucky, be heard in the background on a few minor TV shows and small movies. It's had some nice things said about it in some small magazines and websites that get a modest number of hits. I'm sure a few more nice things will be said. It's already being played on a few radio stations. I'm sure a few tens more will play it. What is its likely future? Obscurity. But one can hope.

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 30

Making Something Of Yourself

Both my parents possessed great drive and ambition. While their overriding goal was to make money, it wasn't so that they could buy stuff. Neither was particularly materialistic. Showing my parents anything retail was like showing Dracula the cross. My father's principal possessions consisted of a few suits he bought on deep discount, some fishing rods of decent quality, and a six horsepower boat motor that he would lug around in his station wagon when he wanted to go fishing. He'd rent the boat at whatever lake he was at. My mother had a thing for shoes, as I'll undoubtedly talk about another time, but she too would only make purchases at a deep discount.

We never had particularly fancy cars, with one funny exception, or lived in an elaborate house. The furniture stayed the same for decades. On our vacations we would almost always drive, even when we went to Florida, and the hotel of choice was a Holiday Inn or lower.

No, the reason my parents were ambitious wasn't so they could buy fancy stuff or travel the world first class. It was simply to show everyone - especially their fellow immigrants - that they had the ability and drive to make something of themselves. My father also had more than a bit of a chip on his shoulder when it came to American born Jews. He didn't have their education. He didn't have their ease with American culture. But damn if he wasn't going to show those American born Jews he knew that a foreigner with lousy English could outwork them, out-hustle them, and out-think them.

My mother was strictly trying to show her peers that she could take advantage of all that America offered.

In comparison to other Holocaust survivors I met in my hometown, I'd say that their ambition was unusual. Most seemed stunted in comparison, as if the War had taken something out of them that they could never get back. It seemed a struggle for them just to get through the day or to make a sanguine assessment of their behavior, they seemed to just be happy with the little things, just happy to be alive. Not my parents. They came to this country to make a new life. They were determined to make it as accomplished a new life as possible.

My father abandoned furniture making and took up carpentry to make a living. He had saved seven hundred dollars by the time he married. He could have lived a decent life as a union carpenter for the rest of his days. But he chafed under the union's rules. And he wanted more. He wanted his own business. He simply was the kind of person who needed to be in charge.

Before my mother got married, she worked at a sausage factory. She had quick hands and her supervisors loved her work assembling the packages of sausages. For my father it was a point of pride that he be the sole breadwinner and my mother promptly quit her job when she got married. She had her first child eight and a half months later.

I don't think that my father originally thought of my mother as a business partner. The plan was to have a large family and for my mother to be a stay at home mom. The large family never happened however. In a way, this inability of my mother to have lots of children turned out to be a stroke of luck. My father had a dream to go off on his own and build homes. But his English was poor and his people skills were at best gruff. He could not suffer fools at all.

My mother on the other hand not only had a better grasp of English, but she was inherently a social creature. Building homes requires expertise and technical skill. But someone has to deal with the banks for loans. Someone has to interact with the customers. Early on, my parents decided that my father would handle the building. My mother would handle the people. They formed a company that expressed the nature of this partnership, Lee-Rae Builders. My father was Lee. My mother was Rae. They were friends, lovers and business partners for all their years together. I have never met a couple as intertwined 24/7 and in love as my parents.

My father's first house was built when my mother was pregnant with me. It was built without a loan. At the time, my father was loan adverse. He scoured the West Side of Milwaukee for a cheap lot in a decent neighborhood. He finally found a corner lot near 82nd and Lisbon. For some reason, corner lots were generally cheaper in Milwaukee. This was how my father always bought lots, something that was a little less desirable, a little cheaper than average. He liked a bargain.

He wanted this first house to be solid. This house would, after all, be the cornerstone of his reputation as a builder. He looked at the blueprint he had ordered from the architect. It was a single family home on a single level, a modest three bedroom house built with a brick facade. He looked at all the plans for ventilation in the roof and, never having built a house on his own, they didn't make sense to him. Ventilation meant leaking air to his mind. Leaks meant draftiness. My father didn't want his first house to be drafty. He decided to eliminate the vents entirely.

The house was built in three months and sold quickly, right before I was born. It cost him $2500 to build. He sold it for $5600 to a fireman, a good profit. He was on his way as an independent builder. Except for one thing. The house sweated. Condensation formed on the plaster. The owner complained.

My father scratched his head. He didn't understand how such a thing could happen. The house was so solid, far better built than anything he had been involved in working on as a carpenter. He asked around and found out that all that ventilation he thought would make the house too drafty served a purpose. The house was simply too air tight.*

My father apologized to the owner and for a small cost out of his own pocket retrofitted the ventilation. My father now had a satisfied customer, someone he could use as a reference for future homes.

For the next ten years, my father would build many single family homes on Milwaukee's West Side. We lived in one of them. They were simple boxes with three bedrooms, two baths, on 1/7 acre lots with a detached garage in back. He had one basic floor plan and one blueprint that he would slightly modify from home to home.

There were a large number of builders making houses like this in Milwaukee, basic, serviceable homes that would last a lifetime (and not made of ticky tacky as the old song goes, but of brick). To those not in the know they all look alike. But I can for the most part identify my father's homes on any block in an instant without even knowing that he built them. There are subtle things that my father did with flower boxes and window trimmings that I can see. Plus he always used the same brick manufacturer. There is only one other person who had his "style," his arch-enemy, fellow builder, and fellow Ludmir native Marvin Tuchman. I always thought that their similarity of approach was funny. But hey, they were both Ludmirers so it made a certain sense.

My father would travel around the West Side looking for fill-in lots. He was very conservative in his choices and avoided neighborhoods that were mostly unbuilt. "Those are for pioneers," he would say. "Pioneers go bankrupt." Once when I was about a year and a half, he brought me along on one of his lot hunting trips and found a great lot for only three hundred dollars. That was it. After that I was his lucky charm. If he went looking for a lot, I'd be riding shotgun. I remember feeling very important about my role as the lucky charm and sometimes confidant on these trips, even as a five year old.

Usually, my father would build not on speculation, but with a buyer already in hand. This had the advantage of not having to use his own cash to build. But it had the disadvantage that he had to deal with the whims of the buyer, usually someone who had never owned their own home before and had very unrealistic ideas about what could be done.

These buyers caused my father heartburn and more. Without my mother to smooth things over, I doubt he could have kept going. They made a modest living despite all of this effort, about the same as my father would have made as a carpenter. My father was not happy about this state of affairs. Something had to change. I'll take about that eventually, maybe next week.

*My office in Redwood City has the same problem because the owner, like my father, wanted super-tight, energy efficient, construction. In the winter when I use the furnace, I have to keep the attic access door halfway open so that the ceiling drywall doesn't get soggy.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40

I picked about 40 radio stations across the country that I think play pretty good music. Below is what they were playing yesterday ranked in terms of number of spins. Quite a bit of it is still rather shlocky. But there are some real gems in the mix.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40
November 20, 2008

1 Javon Jackson, Once Upon A Melody Palmetto
2 Beck, Odelay
3 James Moody & Hank Jones, Our Delight
3 Bill Heid Asian Persuasion, Doodlin'
3 Jeremy Pelt , November
6 Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 1
6 Roger Kellaway, Live At The Jazz Standard
6 The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?
6 David Cook , Out Of My Head
10 McCoy Tyner, Guitars McCoy Tyner
10 Dave Holland, Pass It On
10 Natalie Cole, Still Unforgettable
10 Lucinda Williams, Little Honey
10 Will Bernard, Blue Plate Special
15 Joe Locke, Force Of Four
16 Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Cardinology
16 Sherrie Maricle & The Diva Jazz Orchestra, Orchestra
18 Ray LaMontagne, Gossip In The Grain
18 Calexico, Carried To Dust
18 Alejandro Escovedo, Real Animal
21 Joey DeFrancesco, Joey D!
21 The Decemberists, Always The Bridesmaid: A Singles Series [Sampler]
23 Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
23 The Pretenders, Break Up The Concrete
23 Jonatha Brooke, The Works
26 Kings Of Leon, Only By The Night
26 Houston Person, The Art & Soul Of Houston Person
28 Bill Cunliffe, The Blues And The Abstract Truth
28 Amina Figarova, Above The Clouds
28 Gene Bertoncini & Roni Ben-Hur, Smile
28 The Stryker/Slagle Band, The Scene
28 Charlie Haden, Family & Friends - Rambling Boy
33 Roy Hargrove, Earfood
33 Boz Scaggs, Speak Low
33 The Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet, Infinity
33 Phil Norman, 'Totally' Live At Catalina Jazz Club
33 Jackson Browne, Time The Conqueror
33 John Hicks Legacy Band, Mind Wine: The Music Of John Hicks
33 Delta Spirit, Ode To Sunshine
33 Dr. Dog Fate, Park The Van
33 The Republic Tigers, Keep Color
33 Monkey, Journey To The West
33 Sheila Jordan, Winter Sunshine

Some Things Never Change Even When They Should

Forty years ago, I wrote my first researched political paper for school. It was on abolishing the Electoral College. That year, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon had a nail biter of an election and it looked like Nixon might not get the needed majority of the Electoral College because a third party candidate, Wallace, was taking the southern states. It was clear then that the EC was not a good way to elect a president. It's clear now, too.

Today the NY Times did what I did forty years ago and countless others have done. They wrote a piece calling for the abolition of the EC. Like my piece of forty years ago and those countless other logical and correct statements of the obvious, it will have no impact. Some things never change even when they should. The EC is here to stay. It's too much to ask to change the constitution over what is essentially a numbers game.

Actually, I think the more important issue vis a vis presidential elections is to completely overhaul the primary system.

The list of problems with our primary system is long. The primaries go on for what seems like forever. They require a candidate to possess tens of millions of dollars from the start. The caucuses used by many states have been aptly described by NY Times columnist Gail Collins as a political version of the game red rover come over. Perhaps worst of all, a candidate is absolutely required to appeal to two tiny states, Iowa and New Hampshire, that in no way represent the demographics of the US as a whole.

Unlike abolishing the Electoral College, changing the primaries to a month long contest involving real elections in every state would not require any change to our constitution. It would be easy to do. The end result would be a far more sane way to pick a candidate than the strange and expensive contraption we have right now. Any chance we could do that?

ABC Watches ETWWC

One of the more psychologically twisted aspects of the recent election was the Anybody But Clinton, ABC for short, movement that came from both the left side of the Democratic Party and those Hollywood types like David Geffen who apparently didn't have their egos stroked enough by the Clinton family. The ABC'ers were delusional in their portraits of the Clintons. Bill and Hillary were evil through and through according to the ABC'ers. Just about every word the Clintons uttered was dissected by the ABC'ers and found to be laced with malice and/or racism.

Hillary was Lady Macbeth and then some. The ABC'ers had their press amplifiers Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, MSNBC, and The Huffington Post create narratives that were incredibly melodramatic. Had you read and listened to these people you would have thought that Hillary Clinton drank the blood of infants for breakfast.

Not only were the ABC'ers delusional about the Clintons, they were also delusional about Obama. Somehow, a politician in favor of wiretapping, against DC's handgun law, in favor of Bush's energy bill, and in favor of the use of the death penalty even in some non-murder related cases, was made out to be a progressive Moses, someone who would lead the left to the promised land.

The ABC'ers were successful in championing their candidate. They were also successful early in demonizing the Clintons, successful enough to give Obama a lead in the primaries that he hung onto just barely at the end.

I worked with a lot of ABC'ers on the Obama campaign. I saw the supreme love for their candidate shine in their eyes. Without those ABC'ers, Obama would not have had the ground game and money that made him victorious. He needed them. If they wanted to believe he was a left winger, he wasn't going to dissuade them.

Now the election is over. It was a tremendous victory for the Democrats. It was a victory predicated on Obama having a great ground game and lots of money while running on centrist issues. The last point was not simply political theater for Obama. He is a centrist by nature, a compromiser not an ideologue.

Given Obama's centrist politics it's not surprising that the names that are emerging for positions of leadership in the Obama White House are names we all heard the last time a centrist Democrat held the presidency. There's Rahm Emmanuel. There's Eric Holder. There's Bill Richardson. And then of course, there is none other than Hillary Clinton. I even have a dog in this kennel; my supposed mishpucha (his grandfather is apparently my great grandfather) and former Clinton counsel, Abner Mikva, is one of Obama's closest advisors. Obama is looking more and more like Bill Clinton every day save for the sexual trysts (and I don't think that sexual trysts are going to make a comeback in the White House).

Obama relied on the ABC'ers to get him elected. Now he's relying on the ETWWC'ers (Everybody That Was With Clinton) to run the White House. I happen to think that this is a good idea. These people are experienced. They are tough. They are well aligned with the political philosophy of Obama. I think they'll help Obama get off to a fast and successful start, something that didn't happen with Bill Clinton.

What do the ABC'ers think about all of these appointments? They aren't happy. But really now, they only have themselves to blame. They deluded themselves into thinking that Hillary Clinton was the devil and Obama was a left wing saint. Now they are crying and complaining because the man they helped put into the White House isn't following their delusional narrative. I'm glad he isn't. The narrative that the ABC'ers want would be disastrous for the future of the Democratic Party. It would be George McGovern revisited. We all know how that one would end.

Taylor Swift and the Olive Garden

Usually on my way home from SF, I'll drive by an Olive Garden restaurant that's close to my house. By the cars overflowing in the parking lot, I know it's always packed. Call me dense, but I'm always amazed that it's always packed. I've never been inside. But I did eat in an Olive Garden on the road once. It was dreadful. Awful food. Cheesy ambience. I've never felt a need to go back to one.

Not to beat my head against the wall, but almost every time I pass my local Olive Garden I think, "There are a half dozen restaurants two blocks away, locally owned, all of them with better food than this. Why on Earth are people eating here?"

The answer is that of course I don't get it. People like the fact that they can get something predictable in a middle America kind of setting. They don't want to go to restaurants that are unknown where the owner and waiting staff speak with heavy foreign accents. They don't want adventure. They want comfort. And here's where my inner snob really comes out: they don't even know what good food is.

The Olive Garden does great because it delivers what people want. They've done their mass market surveys I'm sure. They know how much sugar the public wants in everything. They know price points. They probably even know what textures people prefer against their tongues.

I say this because I just listened to a CD by a girl named Taylor Swift called Fearless. I sandwiched listening to it between two wonderful pieces of music by two young and great jazz musicians, Anat Cohen and Christian Scott. That's not fair I know. But it was the only way I was going to get through Fearless. I could insert some joke here about the inappropriateness of the name of the CD, but I won't.

Taylor Swift is to music what the Olive Garden is to food. I'm sure her record will sell millions. It may even be the biggest seller of the music year. In a way it's brilliant as I'll get to later. But like visiting the Olive Garden, once is enough. I don't have a need to listen to it again.

I've heard Taylor Swift sing live. She can't. She has poor pitch control. She has limited range. She can barely play guitar. But she is a tall glass of water with long blonde hair. And I will tell you this much. She may be only 18, but she has a command of the stage that tells me she's been singing in front of crowds for a long, long time.

The mass market for music is a funny thing. The music is always dreadful to my ears. The melodies are predictable. The lyrics are trite. Most of the people performing have little musical talent. The last point doesn't seem to matter. But my guess is that the predictability and triteness of the music are actually virtues in terms of mass market appeal. Music that is as boring and irritating to me as hearing my toaster oven rattle every time I toast my bagel in the morning is comfort music to the mass market.

The formula for success in pop music is to be very predictable, and to package that predictability in some young thing that's attractive with a winning personality. This is what Madonna understood many many years ago (and amazingly it still works for her decades later). It's what Britney Spears' handlers understood (and still works for her a decade later). It's what Avril Lavigne understands, too (and I imagine she'll last awhile).

When I saw Taylor Swift perform, I thought of those three performers: Madonna, Spears and Lavigne. None of them can sing. All three of them are blonde most of the time. They all seem to have personalities that their fans adore. Music isn't what they are about. Image is.

Taylor Swift is different than those three in one way: she's a country music performer. But the boundaries between country and pop have blurred. And the brilliance of Taylor Swift is in marketing. She's the first kiddie pop performer ever in country music.

I'm surprised no one thought of this before. High school girls still buy music, lots of it. They and soccer moms are the last CD and mp3 buying demographic groups left. Heretofore, country music focused on the soccer mom. Everyone who sang was designed to appeal to them, thirty to forty something year old women. The funny thing about this approach is that even 18 year old kids like Blaine Larsen were forced by country music conventions to sound like they were in their thirties. They waxed nostalgically about the good times they had when they were young. It was silly.

Taylor Swift ignores the "sing older than you are" convention completely. She sings about high school relationships, boy trouble and the like. Because she can't really sing - her range is only a little better than an octave - she defies another convention of both country and pop music. Her choruses don't lift. They stay right down in the same musical range as her verses. Sometimes there is a rhythmic change to make the chorus separate from the verse, sometimes not. It's just talky, sing song, monotonous stuff. She's the country equivalent of Avril Lavigne that way. I'm sure she'll sell millions.

One thing that's strange about the pop music world is that reviews from the press rarely concern themselves with critical assessment of music. Instead they focus on their judgment of a record's mass appeal. For instance, if I were a press reviewer listening to this stuff, I'd say something along the lines that Fearless by Taylor Swift is a surefire hit album bound to appeal to teenage girls across the country. Not surprisingly, the reviews from Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, Blender, and Rolling Stone have been very positive. Even the New Yorker has called Taylor Swift a "prodigy." Oy vey.

I can't listen to this stuff. I can't eat at the Olive Garden either. They're all about mass market appeal. For me, if Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Avril Lavigne et al. would contract permanent laryngitis, this world would be a better place. Want some good music? Listen here to some Anat Cohen. Why on Earth would anyone want to listen to pop when you can hear this? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Anat Cohen is indeed Fearless. Taylor Swift. Um no.

Sorry, I couldn't resist jabbing at the title of Taylor Swift's new CD. I just couldn't.

The End of Anti-Semitism

About a week ago I was listening to KZSU, the Stanford University radio station, and the following version of the song Makin' Whoopee came on:

Another war, another profit,
another Jewish business trick!
Another season,
Another reason
for making Whoopee!

A lot of dough, alot of gold
the British Empire is Free and sold,
We're in the Money,
thanks to Frankie (FDR)
We're makin' Whoopee!

Washington is our ghetto
Rossevelt is our king
Democracy is our motto-
think what a war can bring!

We throw our German names away
We are the kikes* of USA
You are the goys, folks, We are the boys, folks,
We're making Whoopee!.

I was appalled. This version was created by the Goebbels Nazi propaganda machine during WWII. To hear it being played while I was driving my car down El Camino in Menlo Park was at best surreal. I called up the DJ, a college kid. I asked him if he had ever heard the song before he played it. He said he had listened to it a few times. I asked him if he thought that the lyrical content might be considered offensive. He said, no it hadn't really crossed his mind.

I believe I was polite and calm during our conversation. I lectured him a bit and said that he was probably too young to realize this, but for anyone Jewish with a knowledge of WWII, this was awful stuff. For those who had family who died in WWII, this song was more than awful.

The DJ said he was sorry. He said he would make a public apology on the air, which he did. He said he just didn't know. I believed him.

On the one hand, I was angry to have memories of the Nazi war machine brought up so nonchalantly. But there is a silver lining to all of this. The kid absolutely didn't know that material like this was anti-Semitic. He just thought it was funny in a pathetic lame sort of way. He was beyond anti-Semitism. He was looking at it in the rear view mirror and laughing at its stupidity.

I grew up in the tail end of acceptable anti-Semitism in this country. I've been insulted. I've even had rocks thrown at me. But that was long ago. Every once in a while I'll hear some anti-Semitic remark from the far right fringe. But for a Stanford kid, I don't think anti-Semitism is even on the map anymore. In mainstream American culture it doesn't exist. I hope it never returns in my lifetime.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 29

Baby Crazy

My mother was a naturally positive and optimistic woman. She certainly did have her edgy side, but central to her being was a joy for living. It was almost always present. Some things, though, elevated her happiness to atmospheric levels. Two items in particular come to mind, one quite simple and one potentially quite complex: good food - especially good fresh fruit - and babies. My mother was always baby crazy.

Whenever my mother held a baby in her arms, she would have an indescribable glow and exuberant smile on her face. It was as if every ounce of her being was excited into a rapturous state by the presence of that child. It didn't have to be a relative. It could be anyone's baby. My mother would have been a great politician in one area and probably only one area: she would be able to kiss babies on the campaign trail with complete abandon.

She wanted a lot of children. So did my father. It wasn't meant to be. They had their first child quickly, but the second didn't come nearly so easily. First there was a delay because of finances. My father was chafing under the rules of the carpenter's union. Here's my dad's union payment book from 1953. If you click on it, you can see a big fat 50 dollar fine, about one week's worth of wages, for working a non-union job on the weekend.

My dad never liked to follow rules. Working for the union wasn't going to last. He had dreams of running his own construction crew and building his own homes, but to do that he needed cash. Future babies were put on hold for a few years until he could start his own business.

They saved little by little. They lived very modestly. In a few years, my father had saved up a remarkable amount of money, several thousand dollars, enough to begin looking for a lot to build his first home. They started to try to have more children. It took a awhile. I was finally born, premature and five years after the birth of my brother. My mother almost died giving birth. I never got the gist of just why, but there were vague statements of incompatibility between my mother and father's blood type. After I was born, the doctor informed my mother that for her own health, she should never get pregnant again.

Everyone has regrets and major disappointments. My mother actually had very few and to the best of my knowledge only two that stayed with her always. One was about losing her childhood and way of life in Poland, a life she remembered with great fondness. Another was that her family was far smaller than she desired. She wanted at least one more child, a daughter certainly. If god was willing, she wanted five or six children total. There were at least twenty times that I heard her state this lament. Her inability to have more children was a very hard blow.

I have a funny theory about parenthood. It's that everyone who is a responsible parent has a peak period when their temperament and parenting style perfectly matches the age and degree of development of their children. They may be good parents during other ages, but they are especially good over this peak time. I won't say what I think my peak period is, but for my mother it was definitely between the ages of zero and three. She was nurturing, patient and loving to every infant I ever saw her with.

Once when I was five years old, I asked my mother the big question. How are babies born? We were in our kitchen when I asked. She gave me a dismissive look at first. It wasn't a question she wanted to answer. But then she got up the courage and literally blurted out, "They come from me."

I looked at my mom, surprised. "From you?"

"Yeah, from inside me."

I wanted to know more. "Every child comes from inside you?" Now that was definitely not a question she wanted to answer. She paused. Then she nodded her head. "Every one," she said.

I went outside shortly after that to play with my neighborhood friends. Wow, I thought. Every one of them comes from my mom. My mom was one special woman. But then I started to think about it further. OK, I have five friends on this block and none of them look a thing like my mom. Plus, why would she give them up in the first place? And then there were other blocks with other kids, lots of kids. It just didn't make sense. All of those kids couldn't possibly come from inside my mom.

I never told her that I dismissed her claim of being the mother of all children within an hour of our conversation. But I do know that whenever I see a statue of a fertility goddess from another culture, all of those breasts, the fecund belly, I think of that day when I asked that question. For a brief time, my mother was, in my eyes, a fertility goddess, the mother of all babies. It's not so far from the truth, though, in terms of spirit and mood. There was nothing that brought her more joy than children.

The Elephant Seal Way

There's a funny movement out there that says humans should aspire to behave bonobos, an endangered chimp species that lives in the Congo. Bonobos copulate like crazy picking partners on whim. According to this movement, The Bonobo Way, all of this indiscriminate sex several times a day in a multitude of positions creates a chimp society free of conflict and full of love and empathy.

I of course happen to like sex. But the idea of screwing around several times a day with multiple partners sounds exhausting and confusing. Besides bonobo societies aren't conflict free as advertised. They can be damn mean and violent despite all of the orgasms.

I say screw the bonobo way (sorry for the pun). I have another species that I think would be far better to emulate: the elephant seal.

Male and female elephant seals don't spend much time together. Usually, the female is either on the continental shelf or north of Hawaii feeding on squid. In contrast, males spend most of their time off the Aleutian Islands where they also eat mostly squid. I like calamari quite a bit. I'm beginning to like the life of the elephant seal already

The males and females spend about three months together. They meet up at the same beach every winter, somewhere between San Simeon and Sonoma County on the California coast (there are meeting beaches in Mexico too, but let's not complicate things). The females nurse their babes. The male fights to try to become the head of a harem. If his harem is established he gets to have sex many, many times a day. I don't need a harem, but the idea of being separate for all but three months a year sounds good to me. Males and females are very, very different in terms of attitudes and how they approach living. A 12 month a year partner is a stretch.

Then there is the fact that I like the north woods a great deal. Alaska would be just fine for me (the reader can insert their favorite Palin joke here!). My sweetie loves the beach. Hawaii would be fantastic for her. Those elephant seals may be on to something.

Here's an idea that I think that would be perfect. My sweetie buys a condo on the beach in Hawaii. I buy a cabin in Alaska. She hangs out on the sand in her bikini most of year. I hang out on a raging river chock full of salmon and fish every day.

Then comes wintertime when the weather in Alaska is dreadful. I meet up with my sweetie in San Francisco where we copulate day and night for three months. We are so busy having sex that we eat little and lose a ton of weight. Then it's back to Hawaii for my sweetie and to Alaska for me where we fatten up and dine on squid (Not raw, please. Lightly sauteed with a glass of prosecco). The elephant seal way. It has a certain ring to it. Now if only I could get my sweetie to sign on!

All That Knowledge

The other day I was packing up old textbooks to send to universities in Africa. I haven't opened up many of those books in at least seven or eight years and someone else I'm sure could find value in them. Most of the books deal with aspects of solid earth geophysics and the solution of partial differential equations. Open up the pages and you'll find one equation after another. As I started to put those books in boxes, I realized that I still knew most of this stuff. I looked at a random page here and there. Yep. It still made sense to me.

I just don't need it anymore.

I loved learning it, too. There's beauty in describing the Earth mathematically. I can't quite articulate just why, but there's an inherent elegance present when you manage to distill all of the complexity that makes up our planet into differential equations. At least it's elegant to me.

As a professor, I started out trying to teach this material to graduates and undergraduates. I gave up after about the fourth year. These were smart students, but somehow hardly a single one could manage to actually use any of the calculus they took in high school or as a freshman. Despite their As and Bs in math, they just didn't see beyond the symbols. And you couldn't make them see either. Believe me I tried. But from the first moment I put a dm/dt or worse yet a partial derivative, people looked by turns stunned or tortured. They had some strange mental block about using math for anything. I didn't understand it.

As the years went on, I used equations less and less when I taught. By the time of my last year all of the equations were gone from my classes. We talked about how to solve problems rather than actually solving them. The students were happier. As for me, I couldn't believe I could talk so much in a class and impart so little information. I'd developed a new skill, I guess.

I still used those textbooks early on in my research. But money dried up in theoretical problem solving in geophysics by the late 1990s and I had to go with the flow. I started working on issues related to the human use of the global water cycle instead. That had its own interesting aesthetic, but most of the work involved statistical analysis and computer simulations.

But what about all of that knowledge on this obscure stuff that I still have related to subsurface water flow, crack propagation in rocks and the like? The books are going to be shipped far, far away, but I still have retained most of that stuff in my head. I'm glad I learned it even though I only used it for about a decade or so. It truly was fun to learn and use. It disciplined my mind and gave me an approach that I still use to learn new material, even music and writing techniques.

I wish I could have actually taught this material to someone. But as time went on, I realized more and more that, even ignoring the fact that almost everyone I taught was math phobic, my favored approach to scientific problem solving was stylistically anachronistic. I like to sit down with a paper and pencil and try to distill and simplify. I pound my head against the wall. Then I simplify some more. If I can't get to the essence of a problem using this approach, I start to think I'm a complete hack. I would try to teach people how to simplify. All I gave them was a headache or worse.

No one I know uses this kind of approach except for people who grew up in places like Russia where computational resources were once hard to come by. For decades now the preferred method of operation is to just sit in front of the computer from the get-go and crunch away at numbers.

It may be that the ways I learn and the ways I do research are simply too idiosyncratic to be transferrable. And I'm certainly happy not to see those pained looks on the faces of students anymore trying to teach them what I know. I really didn't want to torture students, honest.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 28

Politics

In November of 1968, I was at my elementary school staying late when my parents came to vote. I watched as my parents left the voting booths and entered the hallway near the entrance of the school. "Who'd you vote for?" I asked. "Humphrey," my mother answered. "None of your business," my dad said.

I looked right at my dad. I knew what was going on. "You voted for Nixon, didn't you?" He turned red in the face. My father rarely looked embarrassed.

"Sure, he voted for Nixon. I knew he was going to do it," my mom said.

"Like I said, none of your business."

I was mad at my dad. But like he said, it really was none of my business. Looking back on that day, I can understand why he voted for Nixon. Hubert Humphrey was a little guy with a whiny voice. He had more than a bit of the boy scout in him.

Nixon on the other hand was a real man in my dad's eyes. He cheated when he had to. He was smart and cunning. He wasn't afraid to show his temper. Nixon even looked a bit like my father. My father could understand Nixon. Humphrey? There was little common ground on a personal level.

I know my mom agonized over this election. Humphrey was not exactly her idea of a politician or a man. She liked men with swagger and confidence. Humphrey seemed like someone anyone could walk over. That said, there was no way she could vote Republican. The Republicans were, as far as she was concerned, a party of anti-Semites. And to the best of my knowledge, that election was the only time my dad voted Republican.

My parent's politics were not simple at all. They were filled with irony. When you grow up next door to Josef Stalin how could it not be so? They weren't liberal. They weren't conservative. They feared the prospect of fascism even in the well built democracy of the United States. I would call them pragmatic centrists with a strong dose of fatalism about the ultimate futility of civil governance.

I think my parent's political views - which were very similar - were heavily influenced by one man, Józef Piłsudski. In my household, when historical politics were discussed my parents didn't mention US politicians. There was Stalin. There was Hitler. Those two were Satans in human form. But for my parents, their opposite was Józef Piłsudski, the father of modern independent Poland. Pilsudski was left leaning for most of his life. He clamped down on anti-Semitism when he was in power. He cleverly managed to keep the Soviet Union at bay.

Utlimately, Piłsudski lost faith in democracy for Poland. My parents seemed to agree that democracy was not always possible. And then there was Józef Piłsudski's strength. He was a shtarker. For my parents, above all a leader could not be a wimp.

When my parents looked at politicians in the US, Piłsudski was the standard by which they made their comparisons. A politician had to be pragmatic. He had to be intelligent. He had to be cunning. He had to show strength. He had to be fair to all people except those sons of a bitches of course who got in his way.

How did American politicians measure up to Pilsudski? Not very well in my parent's eyes. American politicians were too sloppy for them, lacking polish, discipline, and seriousness of purpose. They did like Kennedy. Johnson they liked until he got caught up in the mess of Vietnam. Nixon they didn't like - my father's one vote for him notwithstanding - because they always thought he was an anti-Semite. Carter was way too wimpy and naive for them and the born again stuff scared them.

Then there was Ronald Reagan and the conservative revolution. My parents didn't understand this change at all. Conservatism seemed crazy to both of them. When they looked at Reagan, they thought of the Russian revolution. A man like Reagan was dangerous because he didn't understand that if you didn't throw the little guy a bone, he just might rise up against you in organized violence. The conservatives weren't throwing enough bones to the little guy at all. Reagan and his disciples made my parents very worried about the future of democracy in this country.

If there was a political philosophy in the United States that my parents could align themselves with, it was the pro-business throw the little guy a bone approach of Bill Clinton. My mother didn't like Clinton personally much because of his womanizing, but she did like what he was doing politically.

Would my parents be happy with Barack Obama? They would not be happy with the idea of a black man as president. They would have worried about the lack of a father in his childhood. My mother had those same worries about Clinton, too. In Yiddish parlance, both Clinton and Obama lacked yechus, and a man without a strong family to raise him undoubtedly had serious character flaws. But given Sarah Palin on the other side and the age of John McCain, I have no doubt they would have voted for Obama. They would have admired his intelligence. They would have approved of the way he and his wife seemed like best friends. They would have approved of how important his children seemed to be in his life.

But ultimately, I know they would be measuring him against Pilsudski. Would Obama measure up to this standard? No American politician in the past did. I have no idea what my parent's verdict would ultimately be about Obama.

Something Funny About Obama

The novelist Colson Whitehead has a very funny piece about the importance of the election of Obama here. He had me laughing out loud.

A few years ago I was trying to find the location of a Colson Whitehead reading on a college campus. I walked up to a skinny black guy, the only person outside the building, who was leaning against a large cylindrical concrete planter smoking a cigarette, and asked, "Do you know where the Colson Whitehead reading is?"

"Sure," he said. Then he pointed to the entrance of the building and gave me directions.

Ten minutes later that skinny black guy walked into the reading room and sat down in front of all of us. It was Colson Whitehead.

Breaking Barriers

Eighteen years ago, I was a new resident of the state of North Carolina. That year, a black man with a distinguished record of public service was running against the incumbent, Jesse Helms, for the Senate. The polls were tight, but then Jesse Helms unleashed a racially inflammatory advertisement about affirmative action. The polls moved in favor of Helms.

A month before the election, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Burgaw, North Carolina. In the booth next to me, a white man unleashed a tirade of racial slurs about the black candidate to his friends who nodded in approval. I lost my appetite. I felt awful.

The day of the election I stood in a long line to vote. People I had no idea even lived in my neighborhood, elderly blue haired ladies and men literally with corn cob pipes and straw hats, stood in line on a warm, sunny November day. One of the old men looked me in the eye and said, "We're gonna win this war." I was the enemy to him. I came home stunned. How could I live in such a racist place? That election never left my mind. As a result of it, I never even applied for a North Carolina drivers license. I just kept renewing my California license (with a North Carolina address) and wrote down on my renewal forms that I was living in North Carolina only temporarily. My temporary stay lasted 11 years.

When Obama won the Democratic nomination, I thought about North Carolina and those old people in that voting line 18 years ago. Surely those people were long gone. As Darwin once famously said, you don't convince your enemies, you just outlive them. Still, I wasn't so sure about how the state would take to Obama. A couple of years ago, I was in Durham at the beginning of the Duke Lacrosse scandal and the city was so tense that I thought it was possible there would be a race riot if someone wasn't arrested.

This past August I was vacationing on the beach in North Carolina with my sweetie's family and my mother-in-law said, "I think Obama can win here." She's a naturally optimistic person. I'm not. But as she said it, I thought, "From your lips to God's ears."

As I write this, 100 percent of the vote is in for the state of North Carolina. Obama leads by a little over 12,000 votes. Part of me can't believe it.

But most of me, even pessimistic and cynical me, thinks that this country has changed profoundly for the better over the last twenty years in terms of race. A black man can become president. A black man can win a presidential election in a state where just a short while ago you could see "Whites Only" signs still showing through the whitewash on the cinder block walls of bathrooms.

This country made a magnificent step tonight. I have never felt so proud to be an American.

Uncle Stuey's Election Post Audit

My alter ego Uncle Stuey did very well as a pollster this year. In terms of the Electoral College, I predicted Obama would score between 356 and 378 votes. It looks like Obama will end up with 364. My only misfire was with North Dakota, which I thought would go to Obama on the basis of his outstanding ground game and Minnesota bleed over. My alter ego Uncle Stuey rated Indiana and Missouri as the only toss-up states left. As I write this, Obama leads McCain by about two thousand votes in IN and McCain leads Obama by a mere few hundred votes in MO.

In terms of the popular vote, Uncle Stuey did less well. My alter ego predicted that the traditional national polls would underpredict the youth vote. They didn't. The youth of this country did not come out to vote in big numbers. Obama was cool, but apparently not cool enough for a long wait in line. When all is said and done, it looks like Obama will win the national vote by six points. I predicted a margin of victory somewhere between nine and ten points. Given the estimated error of about 3 points for both Obama and McCain, though, Uncle Stuey did just fine.

Uncle Stuey did just as well as those fancy shmancy Monte Carlo simulators at fivethirtyeight.com. In terms of Electoral College votes, Uncle Stuey did better. Fivethirtyeight.com uses methods that are all about brute force. They have all the elegance of a meat grinder. Monte Carlo simulations have their place in this world. I've used them quite a bit. But they aren't at all necessary or even desirable for predicting elections. That all said, Uncle Stuey has no wish to become a full time pollster or prognosticator of anything. I won't be putting my index finger up in the air to see which way the wind blows again until 2012. I promise.

Uncle Stuey's Presidential Poll, Part 5 And Final

The election is today! Hooray! I can go back to being a real human being again and obsess about writing rather than obsess about numbers (OK, that's not normal either, but it's normal for me). Today is my last day as a pollster. Uncle Stuey says that the news for McCain is grim. No matter how you cut it, he has less than a 2.5 percent chance of winning the popular vote. His odds of winning the electoral vote are miniscule.
First let's look at the long term trends over the past six weeks. Obama's support has gone up by about a point and a half. McCain's support has gone down by about a point. Sometime around October 18th, the odds of McCain winning the popular vote dipped to less than 2.5 percent (the intersection of the red and blue lines, the best McCain forecast versus the worst Obama forecast).

Another way of looking at the popular vote is to simply look at the percent victory expected for Obama or McCain under the best of circumstances. Since mid-September the most optimistic scenario for Obama has shown a double digit win. In contrast, since the beginning of October, the best McCain scenario (with about 2.5 percent probability) is a tie or worse. The remote chance of even a squeaker victory hasn't shown up in the polls since October 18th.

Given the noise in the data, however, you can also make the argument that the race has been unchanged since October 1st. If you look at all of the national polls over the month of October, McCain has not had a lead in a single one. The average lead has been seven points. Assuming the undecided voters split their vote, the October polls suggest the following result with 95% probability:

Obama 52.3% +/- 2.8%
McCain 44.7% +/-3.4%

Finally, the odds of McCain winning the Electoral College are ridiculously low. Obama holds solid and likely insurmountable leads in states with 277 electoral votes. McCain holds a solid 132 votes. For McCain to win, he has to come on top in every state that is in play - AZ, CO, FL, GA, IN, MO, MT, NC, ND, NV, and OH - plus steal a solid Obama state. The odds of him doing this are about the same as the odds of flipping a coin tails 12 times in a row, about 0.02 percent. If you say that isn't a fair assessment, that AZ and GA are shoo-ins for McCain, the odds go up to about 0.08 percent.

I note that journalists and places like fivethirtyeight.com, which uses Monte Carlo simulations, believe the odds of an Electoral College victory for McCain are higher than this (not much higher, but definitely higher). To get higher odds, you have to assume that many Obama leaning states are possible for McCain to win. But McCain isn't really campaigning beyond the states I list above aside from Pennsylvania and perhaps New Hampshire. You can't win where you don't campaign.

Uncle Stuey is going to go completely out on a limb and say that the polls have on average under-predicted Obama's support both in terms of the youth vote and in terms of likely voters. Uncle Stuey predicts a 9 to 10 point victory for Obama with Obama winning 356 to 378 electoral votes. Remember where you heard it first. Uncle Stuey, a trusted name in political polling since October 2008!

Aspirational Politics On Hold

There were many aspects of the politics of Ronald Reagan that were innovative (not necessarily good, but definitely innovative). For me, one of the most interesting was his approach to garnering public support. Prior to Reagan, campaigning was about promising modest improvements to people's lives. The idea was to appeal to middle class goals. The public wanted to be assured that decent food would be on their tables, reliable cars would be in their garages, and solid roofs would be over their heads. The public wanted a little bit more next year than they already had. The economic expectations from our presidents were small.

Reagan changed all that. People talk about how Reagan promoted the idea of less government. But I don't think that tells anywhere close to the whole story at least when it came to his public appeal. Reagan's approach I think was more subtle, almost subliminal, and romantic. Reagan was a wealthy man not afraid of showing off his wealth. Inherent in his campaigning was the idea that not only was he rich, but you could be too. His politics were aspirational.

His message wasn't just about less government. It was also that America is the land of opportunity. You can be rich. And when you get rich like me, I promise that you'll be able to keep your money because I'll keep your taxes low. He didn't mention how you might get to be rich. That was left unsaid. To be harsh, it was a lottery vision of wealth. If you win the lottery or by some miracle are discovered and become a movie star, I as president will expect little of you come tax time.

The one liner that resonated during Reagan's 1980 campaign was, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The idea was somehow that you would not only be better off in 1984, but much better off.

This aspirational approach of Reagan not only changed political campaigning. It changed culture. Greed became good. Conspicuous consumption became a badge of honor. Hollywood values of glamor came to Main Street. Prior to Reagan, showing off your wealth was considered tacky. After Reagan, not showing off your wealth meant you were a loser.

To a large extent, post-Reagan Republicans continued campaigning with an aspirational style. Their candidates were wealthy. They flaunted their wealth. They were living models as to what you could become if only government got out of the way. Democrats continued to work the old we'll give you a little more than you had before approach. Republicans on the other hand worked the romantic, conspicuous consumption, win-the-lottery model. They wanted the American public to dream big. That model worked more often than not to win elections.

It hasn't, however, worked this election. I think it could have to some degree and McCain did embed and continues to embed the aspirational model into his campaign. However, with the crash of the economy in September, public attitudes shifted. They became much more pragmatic. They weren't dreaming of becoming millionaires anymore. They had more immediate worries. Could they keep their houses? Could they hold their jobs? Could they ever retire? The public stopped aspiring and started worrying.

In such a climate, aspirational politics go nowhere. I think that they are on hold for the foreseeable future. So are the symbols of aspirational politics. For example, at the opening of the Republican's convention Cindy McCain's 300,000 dollar outfit barely raised a murmur in the political world. After the world's economic crash however, Sarah Palin's 150,000 dollar wardrobe caused a week's worth of derision and howls.

It's not surprising that McCain's campaign crashed with the economy. The Republican message invented by Reagan that had worked successfully for so long - I'm a millionaire and because this country is great you can be too - is no longer believable. Greed isn't good anymore. I imagine that greed will make a comeback, just not anytime soon.