Sarah Palin is to 2008 what Gay marriage was to 2004

Wind back the clock to 2004

The Republicans in congress are proposing a bill that in effect illegalizes gay marriage. Republican presidential incumbent George Bush is an ardent supporter and the Democratic challenger John Kerry (from Massachusetts) is a reluctant detractor. It's a farce and everybody knows it.

For starters, the bill has zero chance of passing. Politicians are genuinely divided on homosexuality, but everyone AGREES that it should be decided at the state level – just as it's been done since the beginning of time. The issue is absolutely and totally irrelevant at the Federal level.

Regardless, the topic grips the Presidential election. This, despite a healthcare system in shambles, an economy propped up by a self-deluding housing bubble, an ongoing global warming crisis, and a bloody and costly Iraq war. All of sudden John Kerry is a homo-lovin' left wing pinko and George Bush is a gay-bashing right wing nut job.

The farce of course is a calculated political move so established and well documented it has its own name: THE WEDGE

Here's the thing about the general election. Despite all the fancy graphs, polls and ever shifting numbers 90% of voters know who they're voting for a year before election day. When you're two months away from the big show, you're not trying to win over new voters you're trying to make sure that you're guys come out. It's one thing to say "I like so-and-so", and another to actually take a half-day, drive to the poll, wait in line, and fill out the ballot.

The problem with the truly important issues of today are they are too big and too complex for voters (including myself) to understand hence they're hard to get excited about. Wedge issues like gay marriage are black and white. They not only make you want to vote for your guy but all of a sudden it's crystal clear - you have to stop the other guy from getting elected.

Flash forward to 2008

Hurricane Ike and Gustav are wreaking havoc on the coast. The economy is in shambles after the collapse of Fannie and Freddie, and the Iraq war rages on. Despite this, Sarah Palin's views on abortion and dinosaurs are making headlines. People seem to care a great deal that her teenage daughter is pregnant.

A lot of people ask me what I think about Ms. Palin. I think she's a political calculation and a genius one. For this I have two reasons.

1. Sara Palin is a gun-toting conservative
The fact that she is a small town, Bible thumpin', pro-lifer is basically the Republican party throwing a hand grenade at the Democrats. I open my Facebook and I see about half a dozen Matt Damon or Tina Fey postings making fun of Sarah Palin. Her appointment has effectively changed the discussion away from the economy and the Iraq war and put it squarely on trivial social issues.

Liberals who smugly mock Palin don't understand how in the world McCain is actually gaining Obama in the polls. Simply put, the more attention liberal outlets like Colbert Report, Facebook, and the New York times editorial department bring to Sarah Palin the more they piss off conservatives.

If you asked me a few months ago I would have told you Obama in a landslide, but liberals are really shooting themselves in the foot. They are driving otherwise indifferent conservatives who would not have voted McCain to vote anti-Obama. CLASSIC WEDGE.

2. Palin is "politically inexperienced"

The biggest knock on Barack Obama is his lack of "political experience" so many were puzzled why McCain chose a first-term Alaskan governor as his running mate. A lot of pundits have called this a stupid move. I don't. It's counter intuitive, but brilliant.

For voters there's a huge difference between the amount of experience we perceive them to have, and the amount of experience they actually have. Case in point the Democratic primary:

1. Hilary Clinton is more experienced than Barack Obama
2. Joe Biden is more experience than Barack Obama
3. Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden are experienced

That's how most primary voters (including myself) felt but in actuality the facts are this: Hilary only has 4 more years Senate experience than Barack's 4. Joe Biden 35 years.

The point I'm trying to make is that the "political experience" we perceive is all relative. Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton seem equally experienced because Barack Obama is the reference point. If you don't buy this argument, ask someone who works in consumer product pricing.

Sarah Palin's inexperience is an asset to John McCain because all of a sudden SHE is the "political experience" reference point.

BEFORE, we knew that John McCain had more experience that Barack Obama but we didn't know how much. NOW, we know John McCain is more experienced than Sarah Palin who is more experienced than Barack Obama e.g.

John McCain > Sarah Palin > Barack Obama

At least this is how you'd think if you're moderately McCain leaning. If you're moderately Obama leaning you might think the other way around e.g.

John McCain > Barack Obama > Sarah Palin

In actuality, it's absurd to compare the political experience of a first term governor from Alaska to a first term Senator from Illinois. Regardless, people form a much clearer idea of experience as an issue and are more likely to take a side. COUNTER WEDGE.

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What should you take from all this? Well, if you're like me and you support McCain on real issues but hate Sarah Palin and the political freak show, I don't know what to tell you.

I do take solace in the fact that the VP is merely a figurehead and the Republicans have a history of appointing some comically bad, politically expedient running mates. Think Quale, Cheney, Kemp. Al Gore didn't become Al Gore until years after the Clinton years were over. I'm afraid, but issues matter to me.

If you're an Obama supporter I urge you not to get caught up in Palin-mania. Of the many things I admire about Barack Obama his message of bringing people together and his refusal not to lower the level of discourse is probably the two that stand out. Yes, the Republicans shot the first bullet, but bear in mind, you have the choice not to fire back. Use it.

INSEAD Memory: House of Moret Sur Loing

Another memory from the year that went by too quick. 

My time at INSEAD lasted 12 months.  The first 8 were spent in Singapore, and the remaining 4 were in France. Singapore was all about the big party, exotic trips, chilling out on the beach.  It was a convenient place, inexpensive to live, and lots of local activities.  France was nothing like that.  The weather stank.  No one spoke English.  Everything cost at least twice as much.  Parties were good but the whole designated driver thing put a real damper on things.  Hey, when 20% of the women are sober you're playing the odds.

Here's the thing.  If you want to compare France on Singapore on fun-ness Singapore wins hands down.  But INSEAD Singapore was a fling.  She knew it, I knew it.  But it was France stole my heart.

We lived a small village 20 minutes from campus called Moret Sur Loing.  It was a 3 story house that once served as quarters for a monastery.  Down the road was a historic medieval town out of a fairy tale.  At the time I thought all towns in Europe had guard towers, cobblestone streets, and gingerbread houses in them.  I would later learn we lived in a Unesco world heritage site. Our landlady was a lovely French woman named Carole.  When I woke up I would play with her 3 pugs, Chin-chin, Falcon, and I forget but I do remember he was super old and liked to be carried around everywhere.  Behind our house was a well manicured lawn and a river where ducks and swans would quack late into the night.

I lived with 7 guys, an Israeli, a Brit, a Russian, a Spaniard, a Portuguese, and a Brazilian.  Although we were from different backgrounds we were like brothers in that house.  Maybe living in the middle of the forest with nothing to do freed us from the realities of career, intellectual elitism, and shallow groupism that you develop when you do an MBA.  It's a comforting feeling to know that somewhere in the house there's a PS3 opponent or an unintelligent conversation waiting to happen.  These things don't happen by making an appointment in your date book and it doesn't happen over dinner at a fancy restaurant.  They occur when you're unshaven, unshowered walking around in your underwear eating Cheetos for breakfast.  The humor was low brow.  We talked in the filthiest of terms.  Everyone, save Vaneet had a "dude you were so wasted last night" story.  France is a very classy place which our house somehow managed to get unclassy - but in a good way. 

I miss my life in Moret.

Westside till I Die - New York, Philly, Frankfurt, Brussels, Vienna

So, I've been doing a lot of moving around lately.  My project in the Philippines ended and for some reason I don't fully understand I was sent to Philadelphia.  This is basically the other side of the planet.  It's amazing how email makes very long distances seem close.  I wish the same could be said about 24+ hours of transcontinental flights but hey, at least I'm racking up the milage. 



Philadelphia

I traveled from New York to Philadelphia via the super fast Acela train which covers the distance in exactly 1 hour.  I felt like a big shot until someone pointed out the much cheaper, more frequent regional train which takes exactly one hour and twenty minutes. Somewhere the ghost of John D. Rockafeller just guffawed.  Although I've lived in Baltimore and New York I've never really spent a lot of time in their northeastern sibling.  I learned that there is a good part of Philly and a bad bad part of Philly, the political boundaries of which - like Georgia's - arbitrarily change depending on who you ask.  After a year abroad it was really nice to be somewhere that's - and I'm not being trying to be sarcastic - kind of ghetto.  There's something comforting about going to a fancy bar where they serve "the mojito", and have 10 different kinds of miniaturized mexican fast food items as finger food. 

New York

It's nice to be back in the hometown.  I nearly cried walking around in the East Village.  Someone on the street asked me what was wrong.  I said, no nothing's wrong, it's just nice to be back home.  Then she asked me if I could spare some change.  It really is good to be back home.  Weather was great and lounging around central park made me feel like a new man.  My timing was perfect.  The investment bankers make migrate annually to the big city around August and I was in the thick of it.  I was really looking forward to seeing my INSEAD friends.  As an American who spent the year abroad doing his MBA in Europe and seeing my attemps at picking up women upstaged by my smoother, classier European counterparts I thought I'd be nice to finally see the tables turned.  Wrong.  I quickly learned that my European counterparts who were better at picking up women in Europe were also better in America also.  I also I learned this:  American girls will fall for any man with an accent thus making them the easiest women in the world.  Oh well, at least I saw the Dark Knight 3 times (twice on IMAX bitches)!

Brussels

After New York I spent 2 weeks in Brussels.  Like pretty much every city in Europe the people of Brussels claims their city was once the center of human civilization.  I'm not sure how valid this claim is but considering that this is where they convene the EU and InBev, the Belgium beer maker who bought out Budweiser is based here, they at least make a strong argument.  One nice plus about Belgium is that have populations that speak Dutch/Flemish and French and hence you can reliably get by on everybody's default language English.  On the weekend I took the train to a real life fairy tale town called Bruges.  This is an almost pristine 14th century European city filled with romantic churches, cobble stone streets, gingerbread houses, and the quaintest Pizza Hut you've ever seen.  Isn't it just adorable?

Vienna

Walking around the city of Mozart the one thing that strikes you is how freaking beautiful the people are.  No wonder Amadeaus wanted to get the hell out of Saltzburg!  Honestly, the city is filled with tall, gorgeous, blond men and women that bring out all your insecurities.  It's like you're back in middle school with braces, glasses and discount Kmart tshirts.  People are exceedingly friendly in Vienna.  At least three guys came up to me asking (in an Austrian accent), would I like to go to the hottest disco in Vienna?  In any other circumstance, I'd think wow this gay guy got the wrong idea.  But here you don't get any sense of iill will.  Helps that some of the nicest people I knew at my year of INSEAD were Austrian too.  Goes to show What an impression a few people can make on an entire country.

Frankfurt

Back in Frankfurt.  Where will the job take me next?  Hopefully will be back in Asia but will depend on staffing.  More to come this week.    

GEORGE BUSH DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO CALL ANYONE "BULLY"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/world/europe/16bushtext.html?ex=1376539200&en=908bb07a9cacab1c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

"Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free world. Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."

If I were Russian, the President's recent remarks would have emanated a stench of hypocrisy.  George Bush might be justified and he might be right but you pretty much give up the moral high ground the when you preemptively invade a nation against the will of the UN, wiretap your citizens, and set up offshore torture facilities.

Please step aside and let Sarkozy do the talking. 

The dark knight plays devil's advocate

SPOILER ALERT - read after you've seen the film



Batman, silhouetted against the gloomy backdrop of a 9/11-esque bomb site, the Joker taking shoddy video footage of a hooded hostage right before his maiming, the sight of a Federal building being blown up in the hard afternoon sunlight.  The images purposefully evoke memories of our terror filled recent history.  The new Batman film is powerful not only for its action sequences but because it's unafraid to reopen wounds we forgot still existed.  There's a grim edginess there that's unexpected. 

At one point Alfred referring to the Joker says to Bruce,

"Some men can't be reasoned with.  Some men just want to see the world burn"

There's something profound about the way Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger reinvents the Joker.  The genius is the ambiguity of his motivations.  There is something comforting about a villain we understand.  All cartoon bandits wanted were sacks with dollar signs on them.  In that sense what motivates them, by and large, motivates us as well.  The difference between good and evil, is in the implementation.  Stealing those sacks vs. earning them.  The Joker's morbid nihilism flips the traditional villain on it's head.  He robs the bank only to watch the mountain of cash burn.  He is a smiling clown one moment, and a psychopath with a knife to our face the next.  Ambiguity.  Unpredictability.  Craziness.  This more than anything chills us to the bone.

In many ways the Joker is the perfect character to tap the demons that Americans live with and Mr. Nolan has played him beautifully.  In the post-Nazi, post-communist era of ubiquitous globalized terror, the struggle often is not with the terrorist but with ourselves.  The Dark Knight puts all our insecurities on screen.  It tells us that we can triumph but the road to do so is more complicated than we think.

Assigned Seating at Movies

Saw Batman on IMAX yesterday.  I now know why they call it IMAX - 4 floors of movie screen literally maximizes every nerve ending in your eye.  Somebody give me a cigarette.



In order to get decent seats I bought my tickets two days in advanced and got to the theater nearly an hour before the movie was scheduled to begin.  As I munched on my nachos meant for 2, bag of peanut M&Ms and my, 30 oz Coke I waited for the movie to begin and I got to thinking how all this would be much easier if only there were preassigned seating at movies.  Why doesn't it exist already?  They do it for concerts and sporting events.  In this age of 500+ capacity stadium seating multiplexes, why not movies?

I've seen it work in less internet savvy nations such as Singapore and the Philippines and in this country of ubiquitous smart phones and always on 3G connections I don't see why it couldn't work in America.  Yes, it does take the spontinaeity out of the moviegoing experience but it more than makes up for it with the time saved waiting for the film to start. 

Criminality, homosexuality, prostitution and the one child policy?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3377

Wow, is this interesting.  Long story short - the preference of parents to abort females rather than males has left China with about 40 million eligible bachelors without a female counterpart.  The article argues that as a direct result demographers forsee a future where "Mumbai and Shanghai may soon rival San Francisco as gay capitals" and "organized crime networks that traffic in women will shift their deliveries toward Asia and build a brothel culture large enough to satisfy millions of sexually frustrated young men".  (if you think that's provocative, you should read the whole thing)  I don't know when Foriegn Policy started lettting second graders write their articles but the notion this article promotes is ridiculous.  I don't think for a moment that India and China will go this route. 

I say this because in my experience there is a rapid rise in female empowerment in India and China.  I've said it once and I'll say it again - all evil on the earth derives from men.  The fact that Indian and Chinese women have gender equality that they've never had before can only make these countries safer and more stable.  Also, the notion that sexually frustrated men resort to homosexuality and commit more crime is ludicrous.  By this logic I've been a gay criminal for years.

Love and Marriage

I was looking at pictures of a good friend's engagement party on Facebook today.  It was cool to see.  It made me realize that a good number of my friends are married or getting married this year.  This made me think about my love life, which is never a good thing. 

The thing is you grow up side by side with your friends and like trained circus tigers you pass through life's hoops one after another.  Middle school, high school, college, work.  I'm not sure what to make of this seismic shift of friends who are getting themselves hitched.  In some parts of my mind I feel like the retarded kid who has to do 4th grade all over again. 

When I think of my married friends though, I can't imagine being like them and I got to think they can't imagine being like me either.  I don't even have a girlfriend.  Shit, I'm not even trying.  Even when I talk to a girl I'm on a plane the next week to another country. 

I realized something as I wrote this.  A part of me doesn't want to grow up.  This is not to say that I have some weird Peter Pan psychosis.  I don't plan on commuting to work on a skateboard nor do I plan on dating 16 year old girls (ladies, call me when you're legal).  When I was young often what motivated me was the belief that I had "potential".  I'm not sure what that meant exactly. It's not like I thought I could be Superman or Spiderman but I did think I could be Batman because after all, Bruce Wayne was just a regular dude with blue spandex and a cape. 

That kind of hope gave me something to live for.  It made me feel like anything was possible.  Even today, I like to think that, at age 29, I haven't reached my full potential.  In the World of Warcraft game of life, I still have more experience points, swords, and magic potions to gain before I log off and do my homework.

I've always believed that it is the job of women to crush the hopes and dreams of men.  This isn't a bad thing because often men need to be held back.  Would Hitler have killed so many Jews if he was a family man?  Who knows?  Maybe I'm wrong and in this Venn diagram, living an exciting fulfilling life and being a stable and responsible family man are not two mutually exclusive circles floating aimlessly in space.  There might be a proper intersection and it might just come when the right girl comes along.  That or you just keep lowering your expectations until someone makes the cut.

I don't know much but I do know this.  At some point in my life I want to go to the basketball court with my 5 sons.  They would shoot 3's, pass with precision and slam the rock with authority.  Winded and disoriented the other ballers on the court would say,

"Yo. Your boyz gots too much skillz.  Let's mix it up"

to which I would jauntily reply:

"Knickerbocker please.  I grew this team.  Come back when you got YO' seed" 

I figure it's a lot to ask a woman to bare me 5 sons with superior ball handling skills.  The least I could do is make her an honest woman.  Yes, someday Toshi will get married.  This begs the question, does anybody have any cute friends who will bear my seed?

R.I.P. Tim Russert

Presidential Election - BOLD Predictions

Bold predictions from a bold man. 

Bold prediction #1:
Obama picks John Edwards to be his running mate - John Edwards has everything Obama lacks to win the presidency.  He's southern, populist, and white.  What about Hillary Clinton?  She's southern, populist, white, AND a woman.  True, but she made the cardinal mistake of politics:  asking to be on the ticket.  Hillary should have played hard to get. Real prom queens don't ask to go to the ball.   John Edwards is the real prom queen.

Bold prediction #2:
McCain picks Mike Huckabee to be his running mate - The only thing older than a John McCain is old joke is John McCain.  John McCain is no Bob Dole, but he needs to do two things: 

1. Energize the evangelical right 
   
2. Not look like a raving lunatic

... which is a hard thing to do, but Mike Huckabee seems to pull it off. 

Bold prediction #3:
Latin voters are the most important demographic in the election - Millions of spanish speaking voters will have to decide "who do I hate more.  The young black guy, or the old white guy"?  Neither candidate really speaks to the Latin voter, which is significant because they may swing electorate heavy states such as Florida, New Jersey, and Colorado.  Expect Obama and McCain to be making regular appearances on Telemundo's "Sabado Gigante".  Latin voters will split more or less evenly between the two candidates.

Bold prediction #4:
Obama wins in a landslide - Democratic turnout will be the highest in history fueled by a surge in new and black voters.  Republican turnout will be at a 20 year low.  "Values"-based Republican voters will support McCain but come election day, they will not show up to vote.  Obama takes the coastal states, while McCain struggles to hold leads in the midwest.  McCain takes Florida and Ohio by a nose but Obama takes Pennsylvania, Michigan, and to everyone's surprise Texas!  Smaller midwestern states are split 70-30 to McCain, but Obama's dominance in the electorate heavy states give him a resounding victory.

BOLD!!!!!  Goddamnit!!  I should sell steak sauce!