GOTV

Daniel Laurison, a Berkeley Sociology doctoral student doing a very interesting doctoral dissertation [judging from the write up on his department page]  calls on me to urge people to volunteer in these last few days, helping to get out the vote for the Democrats.  I could not agree more!  I have written on these pages about the fact that I would rather raise money and do other behind the scenes things than go door to door or call people cold on the phone, but in these last five days, actually persuading some people to pick themselves up and vote is the most useful thing any of us can do.  Obviously the need is greater in some states than others, but right now, the whole East Coast from Virginia north is struggling with the aftermath of the storm, and there will be literally millions of people with very good reasons not to bother to vote.  Anything any of us can do to encourage them to make the effort will pay off tenfold [leaving to one side the reward in heaven, which as an atheist I am barred from mentioning.]

We have Romney on the run.  Let's send him back to his car elevator.

AN OLD OBSERVATION ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY

Johnathan suggested I check out election.princeton.edu, which I did, discovering that this technically sophisticated blogsite, run by a Princeton Biophysicist, Sam Wang, has even rosier projections for Obama than Nate Silver or Votamatic.  Now, I have already had my say about my shameless searching out of experts who confidently predict that what I want to happen will happen [which, as I pointed out, is almost the functional definition of a religion.]  But I took a few moments to read some of the scores of comments and comments on comments that had been posted on Sam Wang's site, and once again I was powerfully struck by the wealth of intelligent, knowledgeable people out there capable of speaking more thoughtfully, with more detail, and in a more balanced and reflective manner than any of the well-known paid opinion-mongers who clog the airwaves and the Op Ed pages of the major newspapers.  This seems to be true no matter what subject you choose to Google, regardless of whether it is an arcane specialty or a matter of common interest. 

When I was young, there were three networks:  NBC, CBS, ABC, and three evening news anchors who were, so far as anyone could tell, the only three knowledgeable, reliable, non-partisan wise men in the universe [there were, needless to say, no wise, knowledgeable, reliable, non-partisan women.]   What Walter Cronkhite said was as close as a Godless nation ever got to the Word of God.

With the advent of Cable, bloviators metastasized, rather like Tribbles, especially with the suspension of the requirements that Talking Heads be either wise or non-partisan.  At the same time, the national community fractured into echo chambers, with each of us [myself included, of course] seeking out the "TV personalities" whose views most narrowly matched our own.  So we have a public world populated by Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Sean Hannity, Bill Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Gail Collins, and the ever egregious Tom Friedman.

But America is better than that, if I may allow myself a patriotic moment.  On the evidence of the blogosphere, this country glories in hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of private citizens whose knowledge, wisdom, insight, and even literary style put to shame those who make their living by having opinions.

As young people like to say these days, who knew?

THE JOYS OF HOME OWNERSHIP IN OLD PARIS

As faithful readers of this blog are aware, Susie and I own a tiny ground floor studio apartment in the heart of old Paris, on rue Maitre Albert, half a block from the Seine, catty-corner from Notre Dame.  We stay there when we can, and rent it out when we are not there.  Our apartment opens onto an interior courtyard, and according to the rules of the coop [reglements du copropriete] of which our apartment is 2.7%, we have exclusive usage of one half of the interior courtyard.  The entire copropriete consists of three buildings, two of which [including ours] date back to the 17th century.

Recently, the company that manages the property [the "syndic"] has been doing some extensive work to shore up our building's foundations [cracks had started to appear not only in the interior wall of the courtyard but also in our apartment -- very alarming.]  The work began without my being aware of it, and I have returned the rent of two couples who have stayed in the apartment because of the inconvenience of having a ten foot deep hole ["three meters," my neighbor tells me] in the courtyard around which they had to tiptoe and climb.

Today, a letter arrived from the syndic informing me [if my inadequate French has deciphered it correctly] that an underground vaulted chamber [une cave voutee] has been discovered in the course of the work, necessitating a reconsideration of the project [this, after I had already paid almost a thousand Euros as my share of the costs.]  It seems that no one had the slightest idea that this chamber was down there.  Presumably, it dates back four or five hundred years!

If there is any treasure buried in it, I think my rights to the courtyard under which it sits gives me dibs on it.  On the other hand, if, as the rather unimaginative construction engineer supposes, it is an old septic tank, then I know nothing about it!

WHAT AM I READING?

Dr. J. P. Smit, a South African philosopher with whom I have had some correspondence, has very kindly sent me a fascinating book about the negotiations leading up the release of Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC:  ENDGAME - Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid, by Willie Esterhuyse.  I will report on it when I have finished it.

CHERRY-PICKING GURUS

I have always had a genial contempt for those who shop for their religion, comparing costs and benefits and opting for a faith that promises bliss without stress.  As an atheist, I take the stern view that one ought to cleave to one's ancestral faith even if it offers nothing more than predestination and eternal damnation.  But as this interminable election winds down toward its conclusion, now only a week away, I am embarrassed to find myself exhibiting a secular version of the behavior I have so long contemned.  A word of explanation. 

Some long while ago, I stumbled on Nate Silver's blog, fivethirtyeight.com, which had an extraordinary record of success in predicting the 2008 election, right down to the state level.  In that cycle, his only miss in fifty state predictions was Indiana, which he calculated would go for McCain but in fact was won by Obama by one percent.  Silver got his start as a sabermetrician [which is to say, someone who analyses baseball using objective data and statistics], and that quite naturally biases me in his favor.  It reveals a seriousness of purpose and a strength of character that most political commentators lack.

Silver has been predicting Obama's victory for quite some time now, with a percentage of confidence that swelled from the low sixties to the high eighties during the long Summer and early Fall of Romney's stumbling performance.  But after the disastrous first debate, the Obama line in his graph plummeted and the Romney line soared, striking into my heart and that of many others a terror that in prior ages was reserved for intimations of hellfire.

Just three days ago, I stumbled on a new guru -- Drew Linzer, an Assistant Professor at Emory University.  Linzer runs a blog called Votamatic, and his predictions for Obama are much rosier than Silver's [even though Silver's Obama line has now clawed its way back to roughly 75%.]  If Linzer is to be believed, Obama's chances are in the 90's, and his probable electoral vote count is north of 330.  Linzer is a quite respectable academic, for all his youth [he earned his doctorate only four years ago], with a fine list of publications on his cv. 

Now, I am a serious person.  I would not forsake the Baptist persuasion for Baha'i or Scientology.  But despite the minatory warnings of an ever-vigilant conscience, I find myself slipping away from Silver and migrating to Linzer.  I hope the election comes before I have consigned myself to what passes for Hell in rational atheist circles.

"THE NAME'S THE SAME"

An old and familiar conundrum to impress the uninitiate at parties is to ask, "In a room with twenty-three people in it, what are the odds that two of them have the same birthday?"  Everyone is always surprised that the answer is "better than fifty-fifty."   In a country of three hundred million people, what are the odds that someone has your name? The answer is obviously pretty near 100%.  My younger son, whose full name is Tobias Barrington Wolff [Barrington Moore, Jr. was his godfather], has an extremely uncommon name.  Unfortunately for him, the only other person in American, so far as we can tell, whose name is Tobias Wolff is of course a famous writer, which produced some contretemps until my Tobias became rather famous as well, although in a different line of work.  Tobias, who is a law professor, visited at Stanford Law School a while back, and who was running the Writing Program there?  Yup.  The other Tobias Wolff.  I mean, what are the odds?

I used to think that my full name, "Robert Paul Wolff," was unique in America until idly Googling myself one day [yes, I do Google myself -- make of it what you will], I came upon this entry:

"Robert Paul Wolff, of the 23000 block of Walton Avenue, Port Charlotte, was charged Wednesday with resisting an officer and driving with a suspended license."

I guess I had better steer clear of Port Charlotte.  [For those of you who, like me, have never heard of Port Charlotte, it is on the western side of lower Florida about twenty-five miles north of Fort Myers.]

Anyone doing a fullscale search of criminal records for the name "Robert Paul Wolff" would come up with an arrest for disorderly conduct in 1986 [anti-apartheid protest at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum] and "resisting an officer and driving with a suspended license" a quarter century later.  One could fabricate an interesting story from these data points about an aging leftie reduced in his golden years to petty crimes.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS

One last comment on the forthcoming election.   Lord, I will be happy when this is behind us.  Unless Obama loses, in which case I must decide whether to kill myself or buy a one way ticket to Paris.

The entire campaign has been really bizarre, and I have been trying very hard to make sense of it.  I have come up with an explanation, which may have some truth in it.  I offer it simply as a sop to those of you who, like me, are way beyond obsession and into hysteria, and hence need something to calm us down.

The focus of my puzzlement has been the sudden dramatic collapse of Obama's very large lead on the occasion of the first debate.  Since all the polling suggested that the country was dramatically polarized, with an unusually small number of respondents to the polls identifying themselves as "undecided," I simply could not make sense of the dramatic reversal of fortunes as a consequence of one listless debate performance.  Had there been a large number of undecided voters, the reversals might have been comprehensible, but how could Obama virtually overnight go, in Nate Silver's excellent statistical analysis, from an 87.1% chance of victory to a 61.1% chance?  [He is back up to a 74.4% chance, thank the Lord.]

There are, it seems to me, only two possible explanations.  The first, which I do not believe at all, is that the polls either before or after the debate were cooked or incompetently conducted.  That way lies paranoia and madness.  The second, which I have decided is the only explanation that makes sense, is this:  From the beginning, the race was going to be very close.  A bad Republican primary season and some unforced Romney errors influenced inattentive voters unduly before the post-Labor Day period, yielding unrealistic poll numbers that made it look as though Obama was going to run away with the election.  The arrival of the real election season coincided with Obama's poor showing in the first debate to jolt natural Romney supporters back to the position they were destined to occupy anyway.  They were never really persuadable by the Democrats.  So, after the second and third debates more or less equalized the situation, the polls began to show pretty much the sort of tight race that it was always going to be, with Obama in a small but solid lead.

This explanation has the great advantage, I think, of comporting with the expectations of the Obama campaign team, who are, in my experience, the smartest bunch of pros modern American politics has ever seen.  From the outset, they were sure they would be facing Romney, they were convinced that he was the strongest candidate the Republicans could put forward, and they thought they would have a turnout election in which their best chance of success was a superb ground game.

There are now no more turning points, no more startling revelations, just a grinding effort to get out the vote, early if possible but otherwise on election day.  My sunny optimism, which reached its peak in my happy blog post that Obama would win and Romney would lose, has given way to a sullen, determined, gut-wrenching slog from news cycle to news cycle as I await Election Day.  My pricey bottle of Chateau neuf du Pape will remain unopened until Obama takes Ohio, or at least New Hampshire. 

In the next ten days, I will strive to find something else to blog about.