martinbau.com

But lots of interesting stuff to point to, and perhaps even comment on if there’s time.

First, I just love these maps from a psych paper called “A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics.” Dig the distinctions between the maps for “openness” and for “agreeableness,” then note NC’s profile. Mirrors.

Dare I get into the election stuff? Well, given that I’ve spent so much of my free time fixing and fixating on it, I might as well. I’m naively optimistic that Obama knows what he’s doing and is playing it cool and letting the incessant lies wash over him. The mainstream press is perhaps starting to point things out, though their predilection for “balanced” rather than “accurate” reportage means they roughly equate Obama’s selectivity with the facts about McCain to the other camp’s utter distortions of the records. Luckily, the ladies of the View didn’t hold themselves to that kind of absurd standard, resulting in McCain’s google-eyed guffaw when his air of self-importance got punctured by… Joy Behar? Yep.

This is a really, really important piece in Time about Obama not hitting back in part because he can’t afford to be seen as an angry black man.

Race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign. In West Virginia’s primary, one out of every four Hillary Clinton voters actually admitted to pollsters that race was a factor in their vote; that may be an Appalachian outlier, but even in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio the figure was a troubling 1 in 10. It’s a tribute to America’s racial progress that a biracial man born before Jim Crow died could come this close to the presidency, but if you believe that contemporary America is color-blind, you probably also believe the Georgia Congressman who recently called Obama “uppity,” then claimed he had no idea it was a traditional Southern slur for blacks who didn’t know their place. (”Uppity” often modified the slur everyone knows is a slur.) Blacks are still known as “minorities” because this is still a majority white country, and Obama is just as anxious to avoid running as “the black candidate” as McCain is anxious to avoid running as “the Republican candidate.” (See photos of Barack Obama’s family tree here.)

This is something to keep in mind now that the Thomas Friedmans and Arianna Huffingtons of the world are imploring Obama to get angry, to shed his above-the-fray cool and fight back against the McCain campaign’s silly-season accusations that he’s a charismatic chauvinist who wants to teach kindergartners how to have sex. Over the past 18 months, Obama has been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing élitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the only attacks that clearly stung him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — attacks that portrayed him as an angry black man under the influence of an even angrier black man.

The Wright stuff is coming back. You know it is. Over under on number of days before the election: 12. Take a side.

Joe Klein has a good piece up here on McCain and the Republicans and the current financial crisis. We had six years of a Repub-controlled congress AND White House and regulations were correspondingly eroded or gutted. Now we find ourselves in this mess. There are lots of other factors, sure, but absent regulations the system runs amok.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide over the weekend. It’s worth taking a step back and reading this fabulous new journalism-inspired piece he did for Rolling Stone on McCain’s 2000 campaign. There are better passages than the one pulled below, but this is most timely:

There’s another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and THM with it, so the buses’ press hear it about too times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: “I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.” This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder: why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him.

Here’s what would feel good now: the realization of a belief that such brazen disavowal of a mantle so proudly worn will quite simply come back to bite in the ass, with nasty, festering consequences.