Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Obama in Ankara

Front pages of Turkey's major daily newspapers, Nov. 6, 2008

I picked up copies of a few Turkish newspapers the day after the presidential election, including a couple high circulation tabloids, the papers of record for left- and right-wing Turks, and one of Turkey’s two major English dailies. I’m still not so great at reading beyond the headlines, but one thing is clear: Turkish photo editors dig the Arringatore look. Closeups of each front page with headline translations after the jump.

Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

What Obama means for Turkey

The networks just called Pennsylvania for Obama, garnering another 21 electoral votes and a round of cheers from the 30 hardy souls still holding vigil around the shiny tinny cacophony of CNN. Looks like other networks are calling Ohio. It’s been over for two months, but now it’s really over. Let the Wednesday morning quarterbacking begin.

So, what will happen after the unicorn rainbow hope-o-rama fades? And how will the Obama administration affect Turkey? I can think of a few ways, which I’ll elaborate on further when I get a few moments of decaffeinated peace after the Blitzer blitz:

1. “The Armenian Question.” This is the big one. In a statement released last week, Sen. Obama again emphasized his belief that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” The great majority of Turks disagree. If an Obama administration approaches this problem with diplomatic discretion, there’s a chance that the “question” might finally be answered for good. But this seems rather unlikely: it would require a big change of heart from the Turkish government, and as the Democrats keep picking up Senators this evening, the probability of a bullheaded genocide resolution from Congress and the nasty fallout that might ensue continues to increase.
2. Soft power surge. The world is painted blue, but only twelve percent of Turks currently hold a favorable view of the United States, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey. Despite the Armenian hangup, tonight’s Obama win should soften anti-American attitudes among the Turkish public. Whether it will also affect the Kemalist general staff or the Turkish government is less clear.
3. More attention towards Turkey. The Obama campaign specifically cites “restoring the strategic partnership with Turkey” as an administration goal in one of its foreign policy papers. Thanks to Iraq, the United States has paid plenty of attention to the Turkish military, but this indicates that we may start paying more attention to Turkey’s government, too.
4. Pullout and PKK. Obama understands well the importance that Turks attach to Kurdish terrorism in the southeast. Negotiations between Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish leaders and eventual troop withdrawals of the sort Obama has proposed could mitigate the PKK threat, which would do a great deal to restore the rather tense Turkish-American relationship of late.
5. Strengthening “strategic depth.” Obama’s willingness to talk with the governments of nations like Iran and Syria would reinforce Turkey’s current policy of open dialogue with its turbulent neighbors. Turkey might also become an important mediator for American overtures to these untouchables.

And in the time it took me to pull together this post, the election’s been called for Sen. Obama. Let the euphoria begin.

Tonight’s most interesting observation

Courtesy of Dr. Ted Kohn of Bilkent University, who delivered a concise summary of the 2008 horserace at a panel discussion earlier this evening:

“The Obama campaign has been very adept at using YouTube, which didn’t even exist four years ago. And, as Ersin Bey [the moderator] reminds me, it doesn’t exist for you in Turkey, either.”

YouTube came up again, during a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s 3am phone call ad. It’s hard to tell just how pervasive those sneezing pandas are until they’re banned by the government.

The view from Turkey

Obama on the left, McCain on the right.

It’s currently 2:20 AM in Turkey, and I’m watching election results from a party sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Turkish-American Association. There’s free coffee, reliable internet, and a big screen streaming CNN, so I’ll be spasmodically blogging into the wee hours.

With a full zero percent of precints reporting, I’m calling Turkey and awarding its zero electoral votes to Barack Obama. The crowd here is about 60 strong, split between Turks of all sorts, Anglophile expats, and college kids, huddled like Wright’s philosophers around a projector throwing the fleeting, frantic visage of Wolf Blitzer up on a big screen. Everyone cheered moments ago when the networks called Vermont for Obama, but for a better barometer of the mood here, see the above image. John McCain buttons have gone untouched all night, save for a few foreign service officers wearing one of each in the spirit of professional nonpartisanship. As for the Obama buttons, a staffer just refilled the basket and folks are passing them around for the second time.

Of course, there’s no Barr, Nader, or McKinney schwag, but I did get a chance to stuff a Bob Barr ballot into the party’s mock election box. I am much more likely to cast the marginal vote, but in the end, my fake vote will doubtless have as much significance as my real one.

Great moments in amateur punditry: My prediction

Based on information futures, common sense, and haphazard conjecture:

Obama 364, winning FL, CO, NC, VA, PA, and barely squeaking by in MO. McCain 174, winning GA and IN. Dems win 9 ^[1] more seats in the Senate, which means no cloture, inşallah. I swear I didn’t steal this one from Evan, who eldritch came to the same conclusions, but I’ll cop to stealing his map because boy howdy it’s handsome.

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[Back]I can’t add. This should have been an 8. See my comment below.

I voted early in Pima County

Look, Mom! I voted!

I did it. It took two trips to the consular section and a couple months of apprehensive faith in the Pima County Recorder and the Turkish postal system, but this morning, I irrationaly exercised my “most important right” as an American citizen by voting in my first presidential election.

I try to take seriously the economic and mathematical reality of voting, and moral and philosophical arguments for not voting, not voting badly, and voluntarily voting. Although this year’s Presidential election is a Crest-Colgate matchup as usual, several Arizona initiatives persuaded me to participate. I find this interesting: ballot initiatives are essentially an unbundled set of policies, which, at least in this case, increased my perceived utility from voting because I could more precisely express my preferences. But they are also the sort of direct democracy our constitution was rightly designed to curtail.

I don’t find the argument that voting legitimizes the rules of an unfair game very persuasive, but neither do I see it as a civic duty. I try not to vote strategically, or for lesser evils, but simply to reflect my policy preferences as accurately as possible. Admittedly, this left a quite a few blank spots on the ballot this year. I’ll echo my friend Evan’s praise for absentee ballots, which allow for informed consideration and lower the opportunity cost of casting a vote (at least, if you don’t have to drag it down to the U.S. embassy and wait in line for an hour to mail it). Plus, even though my brain is pickled in the dismal truths of public choice, I still kind of like filling in the bubbles. I even put on the little sticker in the privacy of my own room.

What about Turkey? According to Gallup, 70 percent of Turks are indifferent regarding the Presidential election, but those who have a preference favor Obama by almost three to one. As far as I can tell, this is pretty accurate, though I think the Turkish threshold for rational ignorance is much higher than the American one. Few Turks are aware of Obama’s position on the issue they euphemistically call “the Armenian question,” and I’ve twice been asked to explain Obama’s religious beliefs. My summaries left both interlocutors puzzled and frustrated, but I think it’s very probable that this is just because my Turkish is hopeless, especially when it comes to theology.^[1]

Among American students abroad, the question is not whether one will vote for Obama, but how emphatically one will. When I let slip to one friend that my Presidential vote was a toss-up between Bob Barr, “lumberjacks,” and Paris-Rihanna, I got the kind of concerned-and-horrified look a mother gives when her son tells her he has “something very important” to share. To refuse to pick a side, especially this year, is to sit out a great momentous Miltonian War in Heaven, doomed to suffer all the eternal bummers of the neutral angels.^[2]

Well, suffer I will. But I plan to minimize it by spending the next week with a bottle of rakı and a copy of “Calculus of Consent,” as far from the last few days of delirious campaign coverage as possible. I’ll see you on November 5th.

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[Back] ¹Although one evening at the dinner table, I did manage to explain the Great Schism via the art of mime.

[Back] ²Okay, fine. Milton doesn’t have neutral angels, but “The Inferno” does, and boy howdy did Virgil make their fate sound sucky: “they have no hope of death / and so abject is their blind life / that they are envious of every other lot. / The world suffers no report of them to live. / Pity and justice despise them” (III: 46-50).

Clearing up campaign word clouds

Graphics known as tag clouds, which summarize chunks of text by weighting the font size of words based on frequency of use, have long been used to navigate the Web. Now they’re gaining traction as tools for armchair analysis of political rhetoric, thanks to Wordle, a tool that generates elegant word clouds from websites and blog feeds.

The Washington Post took word-cloud geekery mainstream this weekend, printing a pair of word clouds generated from the campaign blogs of John McCain and Barack Obama. The results:

Washington Post word clouds

As the mystery bloggers at Democracy In America note, it’s evidence that the presidential race is squarely focused on Barack Obama — “from afar both blogs look like they could belong to Obama girl.”

That’s a safe conclusion, considering the two biggest, bluest data points in the graphic. But are there other insights further down the size scale? One might be tempted to conclude that McCain’s big purple “Pentagon” is evidence of his emphasis on national security (or, on closer reading, that it’s more likely a reference to the campaign’s latest attack ads). A look at Obama’s cloud shows a curiously big “president” after the standard trope-trio of “hope,” “change,” “can.” Proof that he really is the “presumptuous nominee?“

Not quite. As with any visualization of a complicated data set, attention to detail is critical. Are the inputs being compared completely equal? Is the visual representation unbiased? Does the graphic quickly convey useful information?

The above clouds aren’t too bad, but they could be better. Each shows the top 150 words, which is Wordle’s default setting. But the number of words represented could be a bit bigger. Half the words are horizontal and half vertical, arranged in no particular order. Any bias created by this arrangement is probably random, but it does mean finding words of interest is a bit of a scavenger hunt. (Quick, where’s “Iraq?”)

Most important, although the author of the article in the Post does link to the two blogs used as data sources, there’s no indication of the range of dates used to generate the clouds. This is a problem, at least if one wants to use the clouds to analyze the rhetorical current of the presidential debate. A quick look at the two blogs shows that McCain’s is infrequently updated by a few staffers, whereas Obama’s is frequently refreshed by a variety of contributors (perhaps not a surprise in a race between a Blackberry addict and an analog candidate). Thus, Obama’s feed ends July 26, and McCain’s concludes a full month earlier. Comparing them directly is an exercise in apples and oranges (although to be fair, it’s not clear whether the Post considered this, and it’s difficult to tell now that the campaign blogs have moved on to the week’s latest inanity).

Below, I’ve regenerated the clouds with a few improvements. Each contains 250 words, displayed horizontally and arranged alphabetically from left to right. The color schemes are identical, and I’ve tried to ensure that the graphics are roughly congruent. Finally, I used Yahoo Pipes to ensure that they both cover the same timespan — posts after July 27. That’s not a lot of time, but short of scraping both blogs with unscrupulous Internet tools, I’m not sure there’s a better way to get an equal data set. The results:

Obama

McCain

(visualizations via Wordle)

Even equalized, it appears that the argument that it’s all about Obama is still sound, although this time McCain does show up as a tiny red squiggle at the top of Obama’s cloud. It’s clear that this week’s debate is all about “drilling” for “oil” versus how to “make” “new” “energy.” And it looks like Obama’s blog covers more topics with more words than McCain. Beyond that, readers will have to draw their own conclusions.

Tag clouds are great tools, but in order to convey useful information, their parameters must be correctly aligned. Consider them critically, lest they mislead.

A message maligned

Dave Weigel at reason also picks up on the narrowing message of the Ron Paul revolution:

The message of the march, according to the official literature, was to be “Ron Paul’s message of peace, prosperity and freedom through adherence to the Constitution.” But the accepted version of that message implied that all three of those things were only possible with rigid national sovereignty, controlled borders, and a narrow vision of trade. The final speech before Paul’s came from Chuck Baldwin, the Pensacola, Florida pastor and Constitution Party candidate, who used the little time he had (graciously having given some of his minutes to Paul) to make a concise national sovereignty pitch. “You’re either a globalist or you’re an American,” Baldwin said. “And I… am an American!” Some of the Baldwin boosters in the crowd (many from Florida) started chanting “USA! USA!”

Some of the people I talked to at the march wondered why Bob Barr had no presence there, ceding all the ground to Chuck Baldwin. I can’t speak for Barr, but I don’t think he lost anything by going to Freedom Fest instead of the Revolution March. Both events were aimed at different segments of the Paul movement choir.

A little piece of me was hoping for a Barr endorsement, which didn’t happen, to say the least. But the idea that there are two factions — one sticking with Baldwin and one that has perhaps already jumped to Barr — is both perceptive and encouraging.