Gail Collins in the New York Times on the media’s obsession with the idea that Tuesday’s election results were some kind of huge national rebuke to President Obama:

No wonder the White House said [Obama] was not watching the results come in. How could the man have gotten any sleep after he realized that his lukewarm support of an inept candidate whose most notable claim to fame was experience in hog castration was not enough to ensure a Democratic victory in Virginia?

New Jersey was even worse. The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine made it clear that the young and minority voters who turned out for Obama will not necessarily show up at the polls in order to re-elect an uncharismatic former Wall Street big shot who failed to deliver on his most important campaign promises while serving as the public face of a state party that specializes in getting indicted.

The very weirdest part of this is that I’ve been hearing and reading over and over that the fact that the voter turnout in this off-year election was lower than in last year’s presidential election shows that America is turning against Obama. Hel-lo? That this happens in every off-year election has been conventional wisdom (oh, I think I made a little joke there) for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to be aware of our politic process, and I’m not a young guy any more.

Well, whaddaya know. Who knew that so many of our pundits are recent immigrants to our country?

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration’s efforts in recent days as “amateur night at the Apollo Theater.”

From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:

It has long been my strong suspicion that the romanticized ideal of America that so many conservatives want us to “return” to, comes not from an America that used to exist and has vanished, but from an America that never existed at all but seemed vividly real to these people when they were impressionable children, presented in popular entertainment like Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, and Disney movies of the Hayley Mills era.

From Jon Carroll’s column today, quoting a reader, Ray Welch:

“We live in a country where many people think it’s great, even imperative, for the federal government to snoop on our phone calls, e-mail and library records, to deploy a private militia accountable to no one (Blackwater, or whatever it calls itself now), to give the president “unitary” powers during a state of perpetual war, to hold people under arrest indefinitely without charge and torture them in undisclosed locations, to search without a warrant (using so-called national security letters) and to disseminate internal propaganda, but bad, even evil, for the federal government to manage health care, because that might give it too much power, which it would abuse.

“My government can detain me indefinitely without a warrant and turn me over to Blackwater to be tortured, and lie to my family about where I am, but a federal health care program – now that is verging on totalitarianism.”

Headline of a front-page article in the Contra Costa Times this morning:

Charming — but effective?
Allure, star power can sway votes, but results mixed on ability to govern

Fifth paragraph:

When voters elect a successor to Schwarzenegger next year, will they mark their ballots for a charismatic figure such as Gavin Newsom or fellow Democrat Jerry Brown? Or, will they opt for one of the accomplished but bland Silicon Valley-ites vying for the GOP nomination: Tom Campbell, Steve Poizner or Meg Whitman?

What is a piece of obvious pro-Republican spin like this doing on the front for crying out loud page? Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown are not familiar faces because they are charismatic, they are well known because they are governing, and right now. Have been for some time, too.

But a long and successful career of public service like Brown’s is just “charm” and “star power”, and it’s the GOP candidates who haven’t achieved anything like that who are “accomplished”. Sheesh.

Column by Dan Kennedy in the Guardian about the Birthers. He begins:

Just because there are people who believe some mighty peculiar things doesn’t mean I’m obliged to pay them any attention.

And then goes on to pay them quite a lot of attention for the rest of the column. Near the end, he justifies doing so:

And it’s tempting to say that the media should simply ignore the Birthers — not to mention the global-warming deniers, the WTC conspiracists and all the rest. But given the cultural environment in which we find ourselves, such tactics would only lead to conspiracy theories about the liberal media — as if there weren’t enough of those already.

I disagree. Ignoring them entirely and attacking them are not the only two choices, but if they were, I would still vote for ignoring them. These folks have their own reasons for giving expression to their fear and anger in this way, reasons that are completely separate from the facts of the matter, and there ain’t nothing we can do or say to force them to change their minds or shut up about their screwy theories. Nor should there be, if we’re not ready yet to give up on the idea that we have freedom of thought and speech in this country.

Mr. Kennedy is correct, I believe, in saying that if we don’t attack them, there will be conspiracy theories about the liberal media. But he is also correct, I believe, in saying that there will also be conspiracy theories about liberal media anyway even if we do attack them. It seems to me that this is not much of an argument for why we need to go on the attack.

“Horrors! Contrary people might decide do contrary things unless we do something! Wait a minute, everybody, I’ve got a plan: Let’s do something that won’t stop them!”

Adopting a position of outrage just isn’t going to cause these folks to back down. Anything but. To justify their fear and hatred and anger, people like this need to prove to themselves that the enemies they’re so afraid of are not just creations of their own imaginations, because that would make them seem pretty ridiculous, even to themselves, to be so afraid of their own shadows. So for anyone to take on the role of their enemy is just agreeing to perform in this corny melodrama by the script they themselves have written, wearing their costumes and reading their lines.

Pointing out the facts is important to do, certainly, but for the sake of the less irrational people like you and me (if that isn’t too optimistic) who try now and then to reason from facts to conclusions and not vice versa. Not because we think it’s going to change the minds of the Birthers. They already know what the facts are. They have made up their minds anyway.

Giving them lots and lots of media attention, even if it’s negative, just gives them what they need to maintain their attitudes. Tells them that this issue is really important, tells them that they have important enemies, tells them that clinging to their position is what makes them important.

As Carolyn Hax has said, it’s not a tug-of-war any more as soon as you drop your end of the rope. If you have a cantankerous relative who loves to hold forth about some crackpot conspiracy theory, do you persuade him to change his behavior by arguing with him at every opportunity? I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have picked a crackpot conspiracy theory as his idée fixe if he didn’t enjoy it when people argue with him. You’re just giving him exactly the payoff he wants.

What we really need to do is stay calm, stop turning these folks into our own Others to project our fears onto, smile indulgently toward them as we do toward our own eccentric relatives (which is after all who these folks are), listen to them respectfully and patiently as they have their say once, and then gently change the subject to things that we honestly believe are important.

From an AP news analysis by Philip Elliott:

Despite the misstep, Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught.

It ought to be one of those SAT questions that tests whether a high school senior can make simple deductions without being distracted by irrelevant information.

1. Which weighs more?

     (A)  a pound of feathers
     (B)  half a pound of lead

2. Which is worth more?

     (A)  a dollar’s worth of tin
     (B)  a nickel’s worth of gold

3. Which is wiser?

     (A)  a wise Hispanic woman
     (B)  an unwise white man

And then several months later a red-faced parent stands up at the school board meeting, waves his son’s lousy SAT scores in the air, and insists that the right answer to question 3 is B and anyone here who thinks the answer is A is clearly a racist.

(Here’s Sotomayor’s remark in its context.)