A New Domain and an Old Game

So, after a lot of time (and help from the Blogger help board), I finally have registered www.michaelglenwick.com and made it the home for my blog. Going to livefromthemountaintop.blogspot.com will still take you to my (hopefully) weekly posts, so it's your call. The new domain won't change much, just the fact that no one else with the same name--yes, you, the one with the sex podcast--has the rights to michaelglenwick.com

I recently finished reading The Thumpin' by Naftali Bendavid about how Congressman and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chair Rahm Emanuel led the Democrats to victory in the '06 congressional races. Aside from highlighting Emanuel's unique nature as a politician, Bendavid explored in (sometimes too much) detail how elections are won and lost. In 2006, they were often out of even savviest Democrats' hands; according to Bendavid, one of the biggest reasons why Emanuel was able to end the "Republican Revolution" was because of Republican mistakes, not Democratic advances. From New Orleans to Baghdad (and don't forget about corruption scandal after corruption scandal), the Republicans' reputation was its worst in more than a decade, and the Democrats were in a unique position to take advantage of that.

At the same time, however, Bendavid notes--in his most important paragraph--that only a select number of politicians would have been able to utilize and stretch the resources the DCCC had and gain 30 new House seats. For two years, Emanuel's life revolved around the '06 election. He didn't get more than four hours of sleep a night, his health suffered measurably, and he barely got to see his wife and kids. But he was committed to the Democratic cause like no one else, which is largely why Baltimore-native Nancy Pelosi (who knew that a Democratic victory would make her the first female Speaker of the House) entrusted him with heading the DCCC.

Like any sport, a good team wins by playing well but also by having a committed player or two being in a position to take advantage of the other team's mistakes (advice my beloved NY Knicks would do well to heed). Whether or not we want to admit it, politics is a sport in many senses like any other, and in '06 Emanuel was that player. Liberals didn't like him for pushing more conservative Democrats in many of the more moderate races, and conservatives despised him for his recentnesses in pursuing the Democratic cause.

But he didn't care.

Emanuel couldn't have done it on his own, but the Dems couldn't have retaken the House without him either. With Congress up for grabs again in '08 (yes, there is more to the '08 election than the presidential race), reading Bendavid's book is the least that we--Democrats and Republicans--can do to prepare us for what is sure to be an exciting political season.

Argentina and Its Minorities (or Lack Thereof)

On Thursday, my latest piece for COHA--coauthored with Director Larry Birns--was released online. It was a really interesting (and fun) piece to write, and it was definitely a good experience researching and learning about an issue (or two) with which I wasn't too familiar a few months ago. It took a while for us to get the piece out, but I hope/think it was worth the wait.

Hopefully there will be a longer post in the next week, but for now, I've got tests and essays to focus on.

Check out the link above--feedback appreciated as always.

Thanksgiving can't come soon enough!

Values Turned Upside-Down

It's finally November, the time where, in previous years, primary season tended to heat up. This time four years ago, stories about Howard Dean, John Kerry, and John Edwards and the fight for the 2004 Democratic nomination were beginning to get coverage, and eight years ago, there was talk on the Republican side about who would challenge the relatively obvious choice for the Democratic nomination, Al Gore. This time around, however, we've been talking about '08 since November '06, basically a year ahead of time.

Obama and Hillary. Guliani and Romney. On the one hand, it seems like they've been getting all the airplay and all the media's attention. On the other hand, however, if one only listens to the talk around a college campus and browses some of the internet's most popular news sites, it becomes clear that we have a few other (apparently more important) things on our mind.

Like Hollywood.

In a relatively simple--but still revealing--graph made by Google Trends, I compared the volume of online news hits between Hillary Clinton and Britney Spears over the past twelve months. Like her life, Britney's graph has plenty of highs and lows (with her "high" following her MTV VMAs embarassment), but it's been consistently above the number of news hits for Hillary. Meanwhile, in another graph comparing the number of news hits for Republican front-runner Rudy Guliani to Harry Potter--who isn't even a real person--one gets the same results. I don't know about most people, but the fact that more people seem to care about a wizard's quiditch skills than a potential president's foreign policy is a bit disconcerting, to say the least.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert's unofficial primary election Facebook group--1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert--has more than 1.3 million members. The group that inspired the Colbert group was Barack Obama's One Million Strong for Barack, with not even 400,000 members. Even a similar group protesting supposedly polarizing Hillary (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary) just recently celebrated making it halfway to one million. The pro-Obama and the anti-Hillary group don't even come close to combining to surpass the total's for Colbert--a fake candidate running a fake campaign in a single state.

What does the fact that Britney, Potter, and Colbert have generated more excitement and online hits than our country's potential future leaders mean? I'm not quite sure, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Will more people vote in the next American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, or whatever show some TV station comes up with next than the '08 pimaries?

Priorities and values are key insights into what a society is about. And right now, our priorities and values are mixed up, and it's about time we took notice.