I have been following the 2008 US electoral cycle with keen interest, chortling pleasure, and an occasional prickling of concern.

Interest, because the world is clearly at an inflection point - the old order changeth, giving way to the new, etc. How Americans choose to deal with the changing reality is reflected in their political choices. And who is elected to lead America will undoubtedly have a major impact on history.

Pleasure, or more accurately - schadenfreude - because while presidential politics is the highest stakes game there is, its principals are so nakedly trying to learn as they go along, slipping and sliding to political perdition along the way. Not just John "My Friends" McCain, but also Carly "Not Qualified to Run HP" Fiorina, Jeremiah "My Kingdom for a Mic" Wright, the "monstrous" Samantha Powers, the ever-hapless Tucker Bounds, and many more.

And finally, concern, because if these "leaders" don't know what they are doing, who does? I feel a bit like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities:


But the most interesting phenomenon has bloomed following the Sarah Palin selection as McCain's running mate. This breathtakingly stupid decision has split right-leaning opinionators into two stark camps: those trying to deal with it analytically, and those attempting to trans-subtantiate a lipsticked pig into a silk purse.

David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and a few other pundits are currently marvelous exemplars in a slow-mo "five stages of grief" type of enlightenment. (David Frum is the only pundit who instantly recognized the light at the end of the Rupublican Convention at that of a freight train.) These folks started off rah-rah-ing Palin. Since then, they've been talking themselves and their readers back off the ledge.

(Parenthetically, it's hard enough being a journalist and committing your judgments to forever-Googleable bits. Add to that the pressure of having to opine in real-time, on television and blogs, and you have a logorrheic masochist's dream profession.)

Others - sad to say they're the majority - doggedly continue to ascribe the relentlessly unfolding messiness of the Palin selection on the ever-convenient "liberal media". (Parenthetically, it remains surprisingly common for American commentators, even many who have traveled the world and theoretically gained perspective on the domestic US scene, to fail to understand the fundamental conservativeness of mainstream American media.) My Facebook friend and Forbes Online editor Rich Karlgaard is in the latter camp. Rich has even resorted to selectively quoting from the firebrand narcissist Camille Paglia's Salon column on Palin's supposed ur-feminism to bolster his repeated contention that Palin is a "good thing" for McCain and (scarily) for the country.

Until recently, I would have rolled my eyes at attempts to square the circle by an otherwise intelligent man. But I was reminded of something another lifelong Republican friend (the improbably named Pierre Redmond) once told me - "Sanjay, to do anything meaningful you have to pick a team. You can't go through life evaluating everything everytime." (That's a rough paraphrase.) I believe that a misplaced "team affiliation" lies at the root of the wilful-seeming analytical blindness displayed by Palin-boosters.

To begin with, you pick a team - in Rich's case "free-market conservativism" - that has an internally consistent analytical framework. Should the framework be resilient enough, it allows you to build on previous analysis without having to revert to first principles. That is all to the good. But what happens when your team decides to change games? Alert observes figure this out quickly. It's not difficult. But what is difficult is deciding what to do next. Should you switch teams? Should you attempt to influence your team to reset the game? I figure that the more closely you emphasize with your team's "brand", the easier it is to go along with the new game. And it's human nature to rely on brands rather than the reality behind them.

Breaking with one's team is wrenching at best, unthinkable for most. It isn't having to reexamine ideological underpinnings that's the worst. It's the Solomonic cleaving of social assumptions - old friends who now disapprove of your views, your freakish and presumptive new fellow travelers, etc. - that present the greatest disruption risk. Only the boldest, the true free-thinkers, are thus capable.

I've long found there to be a structural inverse correlation between free thought and modern conservatism. The finest counter-example to that notion was William F Buckley Jr. I've also been impressed by Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger at The Atlantic, even though his book The Conservative Soul: How we Lost it, How to Get it Back, is ultimately unpersuasive in its attempt to redirect the current of American conservatism.

Today I read a remarkable article by Wick Allison, the former editor of National Review (another WFB connection!) titled A Conservative for Obama. Its defense of conservatism and its rationale for a break with the Bush-McCain brand is remarkably cogent. (Its dour description of liberalism, not so much. But that's a quibble.) Here's Allison's core argument for ditching his team:

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

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Wick Allison now joins my (very short but growing) list informally titled "a thinking-man's conservatives".

Today's NYT has an in-depth examination of Barack Obama's tax philosophy and proposals. While interesting in and of itself, the article is especially useful in showing how the candidate thinks... in fact, in showing the candidate's startlingly live intellect. A mind in a national-level politician is a strangely exotic notion, given George W Bush's depressing inarticulation and John McCain's distressing tic of seeming like he's reading a teleprompter even when he isn't.

Towards the end of the article, Obama quotes from Robert Kennedy's "Soul of America" speech from the '68 campaign. Delivered less than three month before his assassination, the speech has the trademark Kennedy humor, a characteristic appreciation of history, and most of all, a richly poetic vein doomed to lie fallow in American politics until Senator Obama's emergence at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Obama picks one of his "favorite quotes" from the following wonderful riff on the limitations of Economics:

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[the] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

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That is, indeed, a clever juxtaposition. It's not difficult to see why Obama, RFK's stylistic descendant, highlights the section. However lyrical though, it is far from the rhetorical gut of the speech. That is RFK's truth-telling of the country's two major challenges - Vietnam and its attendant unrest and alienation, and domestic poverty:

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...we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don't want to run for the presidency - I don't want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don't want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we've gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.

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RFK spends the rest of his speech - some 2800 words - describing Appalachian poverty, the mess in Vietnam and laying out the hard work ahead.

Critiquing the recent Rick Warren theofest starring the two major party candidates, my wife observed that Obama "dumbed down" his delivery for the (largely right-leaning) evangelicals, that Obama soft-pedaled to avoid antagonizing the (largely white) audience. Her comments reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' similar complaint about Senator Obama's timidity:

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Obama can't bring the same moralism to bear on the wider he country which he applies to the black community, that he can't point out to Americans that oil prices going up is a good thing. Polluting the world your children will inherit is a moral issue. A system that allows people to buy homes with no money down is a moral issue. Telling people that the best thing they can do after the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, is go out an shop is a moral issue.

I hear all of this talk about Obama as a post-racial candidate--but that only applies when its time for white people to pat themselves on the back. A truly post-racial candidate would be free to preach morals not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans.

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The parallels between RFK's and Obama's respective situations are remarkable: Vietnam vs. Iraq, widespread poverty vs. the current economic meltdown. Perhaps Obama should hew less to advisors-generated tactics and focus more on speaking his mind a la RFK. Maybe "the real Obama" is more like RFK than Hillary Clinton.

The success of prediction markets in the electoral arena hinges on the idea that while talk is cheap, nothing sharpens the mind like real money. Combining the wisdom of the crowd with real money yields better predictions.

So, if how third-party observers choose to use their money tells us what they really think, can the same be said for campaign expenditures? (Key: Expenditures as opposed to campaign rhetoric.) Now, we could dissect the strategy of either presidential campaign (e.g., the famous McCain Strategy Briefing). But we have to contend with incomplete information, possible misdirection, and sample bias. It may be more instructive to analyze the financial actions of the most interested market actors: congressional candidates.

We want to know - where are congressional candidates up for election putting their hard-bought campaign dollars? Are Republican candidates, for instance, tying themselves to the GOP candidate? Or are they assuming a posture of independence from the party establishment? (It goes without saying that all candidates in the 2008 cycle are either attacking or ignoring President Bush.) How much of each candidate's campaign expenditure co-opts the Obama theme of "change", how much focuses on the candidate's individual brand, how much on party affiliation, how much on the economy, etc.

From data on each candidate's media expenditure - along a breakdown similar to that implied above - we can find regression coefficients that essentially mimic the market price for each "meme". These market prices could be aggregated regionally or nationally or through district segmentation ("hard red", "leans blue", etc.). Extrapolating based on such prices at the state level should provide a better forecast of the electoral dominos than opinion survey-based polling.

An illustrative instance comes from the following ad released by Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). He is not only allocating dollars to the "bipartisanship" meme, he is explicitly attempting to leverage the Obama brand.

It's mid-morning, the week after the Ides of March. Homeward bound from Las Vegas, this time on the northern route over Mammoth and Yosemite. Approached from the east, the ridgelines of the Eastern Sierra run uniformly higher than 10,000 feet, the peaks over 13,000. Abeam the Casa Diablo Mountains, I begin negotiating with 3CD about climbing to 12,500 feet – to stay clear of the high terrain and appropriately high over the protected John Muir Wilderness Area – and turn westward from my previous northwest heading.

I have been dropped by Joshua Approach; the high desert is too topographically challenging and too sparsely trafficked for low altitude radar coverage. No need to talk, I turn up the volume as Amanda fades out and Joni sings her signature sepia blues

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
…
The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets thru to you

An unexpected alarm! At first I don’t even recognize that it’s the cell phone and stare at the gauges in confusion. Here? I’m getting a phone call at 11,000 feet over Lake Crowley? Hail technology! It’s my neighbor Bob, likely calling about our joint foray into commercial real estate barony. We have just begun the process of unraveling our partnership less than six months after anteing up for a “sure thing” office property. Dreams and false alarms.

I turn away from Bob’s call and begin looking for evidence of potentially interesting winds funneling through the high pass now straight ahead. Better to go up to 13,500 feet until clear of the pass. 3CD doesn’t protest but wallows hypoxically: till you get there yourself you never really know. Mono Lake, a shimmering mirror on the right, reveals a serration of inverted peaks.

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms

Unexpectedly, I feel the prickling of tears. Could I be hypoxic? But I’m not remotely euphoric. I square 42 in my head without using my flight pad. After a few minutes I struggle out with 1764. No worse than I do at sea level. Not hypoxic, I think. Music-induced nostalgia; the response that can well me up during an Olympics commercials. I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude, and looking down on everything.

I switch the heading bug again, this time to 220⁰. Time to stop scribbling on the pad and re-lean the engine. 3CD smooths out at 8.1 gallons per hour, but cylinder 4 is still giving me the finger on the EMAX display. I turn my attention out and below. The ground is high and close now. Frozen lakes. A ski gondola hut reminds me of James Bond. It’s only March, so snow everywhere. I’m over the pass. Yosemite is ahead to the right. I reprogram the GPS direct to Mariposa airport and twist the heading bug.

I was 10 when I first saw an airplane at close range, Didi was on standby and she let me check out an Indian Airlines HS-748 “Avro” at Palam on a foggy Delhi morning. Today, here over the Sierra Nevada, it is severe clear. Ridgelines to each side and far to the west. Then nothing. The world ends. Alison sings.

Now that I found you
I built my world around you

Soon Joni is back. This time she’s obsessing improbably over boom-boom-pachyderms in a blue motel room. The ground below me is covered only in white bedspreads. A small open field below has four pines marching across it like an advance column supporting a Sherman battalion in the Ardennes.

Half Dome and the deep groove of Yosemite Valley below and Joan is right, there's nothin' I wish to be ownin. I’ve been up high for 25 minutes now; I need to bleed off 9,000 feet in the next 20 minutes. Mt. Boullion moves to the center of the windshield. I reset the autopilot, disconnecting the attitude hold. Emmylou flew here once, I’m sure.

I don't want to hear a love song
I got on this airplane just to fly
And I know there's life below
…
The last time I felt like this
It was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire
And I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn

In summer this is prime forest fire country abuzz with air tankers and muddy with smoke. But not this early in the year. Besides, as of January, the Sierra snow pack is at 160% of its historic levels. This will be a very good year.

Mariposa does not have a control tower. But it does have cheap aviation gasoline and a very nice municipally-run pilot lounge. 15 miles out, I announce my position and intentions on the airport frequency. A student pilot with a lovely Spanish accent is working on getting her landings just right. Funny that getting back on the ground without bending metal is the trickiest part of learning to fly. I will learn later that she began flight training at this airport, moved away, began working with another instructor, and now returns on weekends to finish up with her original instructor.

I’ve been in the air for over an hour and a half, hydrating actively to combat the thin dry air. I feel an imminent urge to inspect the excellent facilities in the lounge. On cue, Hiromi peps into Desert Moon. I ignore the discomfort in my ears and steepen the descent to 1500 feet per minute. Ahead, I see the student pilot touch the runway, and then her engine roars. Slowly, her 172 wins its struggle with gravity.