Isegoria

Boy shocked after man powers up campaign sign:

Shawn Turschak of Chapel Hill was tired of someone stealing McCain-Palin campaign signs from his yard. Turschak, with a degree in electrical engineering, hooked up a third sign to a power source for an electric pet fence Monday and also put up a surveillance camera.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that a 9-year-old boy with an Obama-Biden sign grabbed the McCain-Palin sign and got a jolt on Tuesday.

The boy’s father, Andrew Noble, upset that his son had been shocked, showed up at Turschak’s door. Soon an Orange County sheriff’s deputy also showed up at the Turschak’s home.

Noble said his son just wanted to see how the sign was put together. Turschak said the boy intended to swap out the signs.

Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass said he doesn’t plan to file charges.

I suppose both sides see the other as totally in the wrong.

Fouad Ajani discusses Obama and the Politics of Crowds:

There is something odd — and dare I say novel — in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, Crowds and Power (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking — Canetti’s feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.
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My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd — the street, we call it — in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and ’60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession — its imagination.

From Elias Canetti again: “But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens.”

The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat — by now unthinkable to the devotees — will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won’t be solved by a leader’s magic.

Richard Fernandez doesn’t call it an election. He calls it Operation Grand Slam:

In the movie Goldfinger, James Bond, about to be split in half by a laser beam, asks the villain, “do you expect me to talk?” He answers, “no Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” Roger Kimball exclaims, “is Obama a ‘transformational figure’? You don’t know the half of it!” Michael Medved believes that “for Conservatives, Obama’s changes would be permanent and devastating”. That, my dear Mr. Bond, is the point.

Intensity of commitment has long been a decisive component of historical military strategy. It is possible to defeat a superior enemy if you can ‘outcommit’ him: take things to a level where he is afraid to follow. Napoleon did not anticipate that the Russians would burn Moscow rather than let him have it. Napoleon was defeated. Late in the Second World War the Japanese adopted the method of suicide attack, which became famous as the kamikaze. The Japanese still lost, but only because the US was many times more powerful and had the Atomic Bomb to boot. If the match were nearly equal things would have been much harder. Clausewitz observed that war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do its opponent’s will. In that equation, it is not just the quality of the force, but the quality of the will that matters. In politics, to a lesser extent, things are much the same.

If conservatives now realize that their political enemies are not simply out to win an election cycle but to effectively destroy them, the only surprising thing is that they were surprised.

Although it’s tempting to ascribe ruthlessness only to certain ideologies, it is potentially an attrbute of all “winner-take-all” world views. The continued survival of a liberal democracy implies the absence of groups which see politics as a zero-sum game. Once a significant political force decides that it — or its point of view — must dominate over all others, a social crisis becomes inevitable. Lincoln put it this way: “In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. ”

Civility in political life can only be sustained when everyone owes their basic allegiance to the larger nation and subordinates their partisan identity to it.
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While there may be some doubt about what Barack Obama’s intentions may be, should he win the Presidency, there’s little doubt that for people like Ayers, Dohrn, Wright and Farrakhan, a victory in 2008 won’t be seen as “their turn”, but as their Destiny.