It took a bit of tracking down, as the New Republic seems to have disappeared the link, but here is a version of Jonathan Chait's glorious evisceration of the state of Delaware. I love the Joe Biden pick, but he comes from a little pustule of a state.
At Foreign Affairs Robert Kagan looks at the post-Bush world in "The September 12 Paradigm." This article represents the early stages, not the final word, in assessment, of course. My guess is that this will be one of those dialogues that we never quite resolve, as is the case with most ideologically and politically fraught issues with long-range ramifications.
Several New York Times articles have grabbed my attention in recent days, including Allan Barra's revisiting of John Carlos' and Tommie Smith's 1968 Olympic protest, the travel section's return to one of my favorite countries, Namibia, Robert McFarland's fairly brutal takedown of Paul Theroux's latest travel book, and Bill Keller's considerably kinder review of John Carlin's book on Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. I just ordered the Carlin book, as I am in the final stages of an article on rugby, race, and nationalism in South Africa since 1994 and the 1995 Springbok triumph plays a large role, as you might well guess. As for Theroux, I tend to enjoy his travel writing, especially his early stuff, but the man can be insufferable. Plus, one more serious problem I have with his work is that I wonder how reliable he is. No one expects a great deal of depth with someone who covers so much ground, but in Dark Star Safari, his tale of trekking from Cairo to Cape Town, he gets so much rudimentary stuff wrong or mangled about southern Africa that I cannot help but wonder what else he gets wrong about all of those other places about which he has written that I do not know so well.
At his Atlantic blog Mark Ambinder imagines a conversation between an Obama supporter worried about the state of the Democratic campaign and one who by and large is not. It's gimmicky, of course, but worth a perusal. My own view is that we live in times when both parties are pretty much guaranteed about 40% of the vote in a presidential election, but neither party is guaranteed 50%. This has been the case since at least 1992. Why is anyone surprised that it looks as if the 2008 election will be close?
Finally, I can take or leave MoveOn. But free Obama buttons are, after all, free Obama buttons. And if you want, you can buy even more. Then again, of course you can.
