1.  Voters seem to be feeling quite virulently anti-rich right now.  When people are losing their jobs and struggling to make ends meet,  Whitman would have hardly endeared herself to people by showing that she had enough stashed away so as to be able to spend more than a hundred million dollars ;

2.  She was a CEO.  She could have gotten away with being rich if her wealth had been inherited, but she made her money as a CEO.  The only category of people whom voters dislike as much as Wall Street professionals are the CEOs  – the people who layoff hundreds, get golden parachutes and make millions in stock options.  It’s no surprise that Carly Fiorina too lost.

Meg Whitman (AP Photo/ Ron Edmonds)

3.  Most importantly – she spent her own money, which means she had less incentive to ask people for donations.  The best way to gauge the response to your campaign is by assessing the success of your fund-raising, and also by looking at the sources of your donations.  Long before people vote in the polling booth, they are showing their support when they donate.   These are the people who will certainly vote for you.  By spending her own money, she was giving one less reason for voters to engage with her.  When you are spending millions of your own money to run, you are giving a clear indication that this is all about your ambition to become Governor, you cannot even make the usual hollow claim about how you are running because others have asked you to serve the country.

There are other reasons for her loss, of course – her stance on immigration would not have helped,  neither would the controversy over her illegal immigrant former housekeeper.  Did it matter that she was a woman CEO? is a woman spending millions seen as more threatening than a man spending millions?  Would she have done better if there hadn’t been a recession ?

Those are all questions that her campaign should be asking.  But in the end, I believe that if only Meg Whitman hadn’t spent $140 million of her own money, if she had decided to fund it entirely through campaign contributions, she might probably have had a much better shot at becoming Governor of California.

1. Sarah Palin writes beautifully.  She writes much better than how she speaks or twitters.  Sample this (and all this in just page 2):

A robin’s egg sky arced overhead, the brisk kick in the air hinting at winter’s approach. Like a family conga line, we wound our way among the vendors and exhibits: from pork chops on a stick to kettle corn, veggie weigh-ins, and livestock competitions. A local dance troupe took to the stage and music blared, competing with the constant hum of generators and squealing kids on rides.

All right, the language may be a little over the top,but compare this with a few recent tweets:

Who hijacked term:”feminist”?A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a singular issue; it’s ironic (& passé3)

Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice,America.

Dr.Laura:don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence”isn’t American,not fair”)

Clearly, her speeches and tweets are written by incompetent ghostwriters.  She should fire them immediately.

2.  It’s not surprising that Sarah Palin writes well, considering what a prolific reader she has been since childhood :  (page 27)

From The Pearl to Jonathan Livingston Seagull to Animal Farm and anything by C.S. Lewis, I would put down one book just long enough to pick up another. The library on Main Street was one of my summer hideaways. I wandered through the stacks, thumbing through the smalish collection as though it were a secret treasure.

3.   See that, Katie Couric?  Actually, do you know that Sarah Palin only agreed to be interviewed by Ms. Couric out of pity? (page 256)

“Katie wants people to like her,” Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

4.  And as for the part about Putin rearing his head over Alaska?  Again, we misunderstand.  All she wanted to do was give us a geography lesson.  (page 274):

Lower 48ers grow up seeing our state tucked with Hawaii in a little square off the coast of Mexico on the nightly news weather map. So I began by trying to squeeze a geographical primer into a ten-second sound bite, explaining that only a narrow maritime border separates Alaska from Russia, that  we’re near the Pacific rim countries, and that we’re bordered by Canada.

But Katie interrupted and I did not complete my answer. I wish now I had stopped her and said, “Here’s the geographical context. Now may I answer your question?”

5.   OK, but what would she have said instead?

There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about. For instance, that Alaska’s geographic position makes our relations with Pacific Rim countries of great strategic import, and that we’re the air crossroads of the world.  That Russian bombers often play cat-and-mouse with our Air Force near Alaska’s airspace.

Indeed.

There is a lot more, and this is surely a fascinating work of fiction biography autobiography (there, I finally got that right!)

When you consider that you are getting an insight into the thinking of someone who might well become a future US  President/ Vice-President/ some kind of kingmaker, it makes for a kind of riveting reading.

Do read this book if you can get hold of it. If you can’t find it under “Non-Fiction”, try “Fiction” or “Horror”.   (Blame the book-reading, dorky, liberal librarian for misfiling it).

As I listened to Maher speak, I wondered if Greg Mortenson was also watching.  I could picture him sitting in his home in Bozeman, Montana, and agreeing with every word that Bill Maher said.

I have just finished reading “Stones into Schools”, Mortenson’s account of how he built 145 schools (most of them exclusively girls’ schools) in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  This book continues the story he started telling in the wildly popular “Three Cups of Tea”.  I have to confess that I found “Three Cups of Tea” rather hard to read.  It seemed to me that the target audience was exclusively five-year olds.  Anyway, the very awkward writing is probably the fault of the co-author, David Oliver Relin.  The second book lacks both that co-author and the awkward writing.  It is, in fact, very well-written and gripping.

“Stones into Schools” is also heartwarming at about six different levels.  It is an incredible tale, written in a matter-of-fact manner.  You read about people who are so determined to get their children educated they have schools in tents, in the open air, and in buildings that were once public toilets (with the floor boarded up).  Or how a neglected, isolated cluster of villages deep in the High Pamir in Afghanistan wanted schools so badly that they sent as emissaries fourteen Kirghiz horsemen. The horsemen rode for 6 days through high-altitude passes without stopping, carrying no food and little water, into Pakistan to meet Mortenson.  After they had delivered their entreaties for a school, the Kirghiz horsemen were back on the road the next day, trying to reach home before the snow started falling.

Apparently, word had spread into even the remotest parts of Afghanistan that there was this American in Pakistan who was building schools.  It’s amazing how much goodwill this seems to have generated.

Greg Mortenson (by his own admission) did not want to have anything to do with the US Army, or even the appearance of having anything to do with the US Army, for a very long time.   But if the US Army had started its own initiative for building schools and hospitals in Afghanistan, perhaps that would be what Bill Maher would have considered a good way to fight terrorism.

Porters carrying supplies for building a school (Pic courtesy: GregMortenson.com)

Of course, this strategy (of  winning over hearts by building schools) only works because the people there have such a zest for education – even when the mere act of going to school carries deadly risks.  You read in the newspapers about Afghan girls having acid thrown in their faces, or being exposed to poisonous gas, all for attending school.

So in one corner of the world, we have children who value education very highly but do not have access to it.  In another corner, we have students who apparently couldn’t care too much about attending school.  Economist Robert J. Samuelson writes in Newsweek:

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If the students aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a “good” college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure……Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well.

Perhaps they should make “Stones into Schools” mandatory reading in US schools.  Perhaps after reading the book, at least some students in the US might find enough motivation to do well in school.

First, there were those votes for the lizard people.

Pic courtesy NPR

Then there were those who wanted to make it clear they were holding their nose and voting for Franken.

Courtesy NPR

Then there were those who preferred Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to anyone else.

Courtesy NPR

And finally, the ones who couldn’t make up their mind even on election day.

Courtesy NPR

The recount, and the legal challenges dragged on for more than seven months. All of which brings me to my question – do you think something like this can happen in India?

Do people in India ever vote purposely for fictional candidates and invalidate their vote? I know even the poor in India know the value of their vote – they are more likely to barter their vote for a color TV or a sari, but throw it away? The only argument that one can make for throwing your vote is – if you fear rigging and worry that someone else may cast your vote if you don’t. That was not even the issue here.

And then how does one vote for one candidate and then change their mind immediately? You’d think someone who makes the effort to come to the polling booth and stand in line would have decided whom to vote for.

It is funny how literacy has no correlation to voting – even the most illiterate people in India have decided opinions on whom to vote for, and know the value of their vote. While on the other hand, educated, middle-class people have low voting turnouts in the cities.

I also cannot imagine a recount process lasting seven months. That alone seems so wasteful and inefficient. Has such a long drawn out recount (or similar electoral challenge) happened in India, does anyone know?

Here is how the “analysis” went.

- Did he really offer the position to her or did he not?

- Will she accept the offer, or will she not?

- If she accepts the offer, and if Bill Clinton is appointed an envoy, will he end up working for her?

- If she does not accept the offer, why would that be? Is it because she doesn’t want to be vetted?

- Who leaked the offer to the media? Was it Obama’s camp or Clinton’s camp?

- Why did they leak – was it a deliberate/ “strategic” leak or was it not?

- If it was a deliberate leak by Obama’s camp, what was the strategy behind it – did they want her to accept, or did they really want her to reject the offer, but be seen as offering it to her? Or were they trying to damp Kerry’s hopes or send a message to Bill Richardson?

- If Obama wants to really offer Secretary of State to Clinton, was it because he wants to put together a “band of rivals” like Lincoln? Was he taking the Godfather’s advice – “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”.

- Or was he floating the idea to see how his followers would react to Clinton’s appointment?

- If it was not a deliberate leak by the Obama camp, does it mean we can expect a lot more leaks from the so-far leakless Obama camp?

- If it was a leak by the Clinton camp, why did they leak it?

- When Clinton joked about the speculation in Albany, did she do that because she was serious about the offer, or because she wasn’t?

- Will Kerry feel bad? He gave Obama his first chance on the national spotlight. Will Richardson feel hurt? He endorsed Obama at a crucial juncture.

There was much more, and this went on for two whole hours – first thrashed out by Chris Matthews, and again rehashed by Keith Olbermann.

I wondered if this was what I should expect on television for the next four, or maybe even eight years.

Maybe it doesn’t matter – I have already torn out most of my hair.

I tried switching channels – but what are my choices? Another “analysis” on why the market crashed again, on CNBC? House flipping on HGTV? Yet another rerun of a program on the Grand Canyon (Travel channel)?

I think I shall take up knitting. Or Hatha Yoga. Unless you guys have better ideas?

1. Why don’t they declare a holiday on Election Day? Why do they force people to line up for hours before or after work? How many people can take so much time off from work to vote?

If you live in Connecticut and work in NYC, you cannot vote in an hour, or even during the day. If you start for work at 6 am and leave work by 6 pm, do you have to line up in the dark to vote either at dawn or dusk?

2. Why is it okay for candidates to campaign even on election day and for television ads from political action committees to run even on election day, but why, in some states, are voters not allowed to vote wearing a T-shirt or even a button with a candidate’s name? I am trying to understand the logic here – voters will not be influenced by the television ad they see just before they head out to vote, they will not be influenced by the affiliation of the campaign worker who drives them to the polling booth, but they will be influenced by the lettering on someone’s T-shirt or the tiny button they see?

3. Why do they not make voter lists easier? Everyone has a driver’s license or a state ID. They do check your immigration status when you apply for a license/ ID. Why cannot they add a line about citizenship in the driver’s license? Wouldn’t that be an easy proof and save the hand-wringing every four years?

4. Why do so many people have misconceptions about voting? Who spreads these rumors? Who spread the rumor that Democrats should vote on Nov. 5th while everyone else votes on Nov. 4th?

Who spread the rumor that you cannot vote if you have tax arrears or a foreclosed house or have a police record?

Why do political parties, who spend millions digging up and publicizing real and imagined dirt on their opponents, not spend a dime to put out television ads to set the record straight?

5. On a related note – shouldn’t the homeless be allowed to vote too? Given how many homeless there are, shouldn’t there be some system – like a letter from a shelter, or a social service worker? How can you have a situation where people are turned away because they do not have proof of address?

6. Why do they allow individual counties to design their own ballots? We all know how confusing Palm Beach County, FL ballots were in 2000. Yet, this election, Palm Beach county was again allowed to design its ballot and it came up with another masterpiece. Palm Beach believes in being unique, apparently. so they didn’t want the simple checkboxes or filled circles that other FL counties had. Their new ballot design had two parts of a broken arrow wth a gap in between – voters were supposed to shade the gap to make the broken arrow whole. If this sounds to you like a child’s playschool assignment, well, I take it you are never moving to Palm Beach county

This is a country where people believe in having one national standard for everything ranging from window panel sizes to store layouts. Why, then, don’t they have a standard ballot design? Why take the risk of disenfranchising thousands of voters – especially the poor, the elderly and the not-so-literate?

Do you think they will resolve these issues over the next four years? Do you also, like me, have things you find puzzling about the elections?

On election night, I watched McCain give the best speech of his campaign – the only speech where he appeared gracious and honorable and statesmanlike. Too bad he waited until his concession speech to show this side of himself.

Then I watched Obama’s victory speech, which was very inspiring too except for the Oscar acceptance part when he started thanking everyone from David Axelrod to his wife and kids. Does he have a dog? I wondered. Will he thank it next? Isn’t the average American supposed to have 2.3 kids and a dog?? Barack has done well on the 2.3 kids, so I was not surprised when his next line was about getting a puppy.

Watching all the campaigns over the last 2 years taught me an unwritten, but important rule of American politics – when you speak, you must always have an adoring spouse standing behind you, smiling broadly, clapping at appropriate points and generally acting like an NFL cheerleader (highkicking is optional).

If, on the other hand, you are a candidate who doesn’t have a spouse standing behind you at every campaign rally, there must be something wrong with you.? If you are 30 and single and we don’t even hear about your girlfriends, then you must be gay. That is exactly what the opposition insinuated about Ashwin Madia.? Not surprisingly, Madia lost the election.

If this election was a vote for change, it was obviously not a vote for too much change. It was sad to see Proposition 8 (which seeks to ban gay marriage) pass in California. ? Some minorities will still need to go a long way to become equal.

But electing a black President was a huge change for this country. It was historic because it would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. As Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post said with tear-filled eyes, even a few years ago, he would never have believed such a thing would happen. Not that he would have calculated the odds of a black president and concluded they were low – the very idea that a black man could become President was unthinkable.

I watched black men and women of all ages, columnists and college students, get teary eyed after the election. Middle-aged and elderly blacks, especially were more emotional than young people, no doubt because they had experienced much stronger racism. You could not watch the scenes without getting a little emotional yourself, and realize how historic this election was, not only for blacks, but for America in general, because the country had taken a significant step towards becoming a post-racial place.

So yes, it was a historic change. But when Obama said in his speech “America is a place where all things are possible”, I wondered if he wasn’t going too far. Obviously it depends on how you define “all things”. It’s true if you mean that more than a hundred years after black men got the right to vote, a black man had become President. Yes, that was now proven possible.

Gay marriage still obviously does not come under “all things”. But minorities aside, what about the majority – women? Was it possible in America for a woman to become President? More to the point, was it now finally possible for a woman to become President, now that an African-American had become one?

After all, African-American men got the vote before women did.? Women in the US were granted the right to vote only in 1920. Black men, on the other hand, had the right to vote with the passing of the 15th Amendment in 1870. (It’s a different matter that this legal right to vote wasn’t much help in the face of continuing racism). But my point is – whoever made those laws were convinced that women were on the lowest rung of the ladder of legal and political rights.

Attitudes towards women have still not changed, even if we are now in the 21st century. Just look at the reaction to both the women on the ticket – if Hillary Clinton was vilified as a shrew, if we saw people holding placards saying “Iron my shirt” or selling nutcracker dolls, we saw Sarah Palin being cast as an airhead.? I am not defending Palin’s competence or suitability for the ticket.? But VPILF?? Is that the way one thinks about a Vice Presidential candidate?

Ironically, being seen as ignorant and incompetent may have helped Sarah Palin to some extent, as she was less threatening to many men than Hillary Clinton was. After all, when there are men who think women are not capable of taking decisions about their own body and reproductive choices, how do you expect those same men to believe that women are capable of running a country?

We will certainly not see a woman President in the US in the next eight years. Will we see one in the next eighteen?

Perhaps we will. But when it happens, don’t expect me to get teary-eyed. All I would feel is satisfaction on a much-needed change. My own country, India, has had a woman Prime Minister and now a woman President. Women have been leaders of major political parties. They have been, and are, powerful women, not stooges.

I guess Barack Obama should add a disclaimer to that speech – “America is a place where all things are possible, but eventually, in the fullness of time, and maybe when humans live on Mars.”

I would like to believe too, that America is a nation where anything is possible. but for now, I will face the reality – that statement doesn’t apply to everyone. Maybe that’s why it’s called the American Dream – that’s exactly what it is.

For those of us in the US who have been reminded of the elections every day during the last year and a half, every time we switched on the television, read a newspaper or answered the landline, today will be a climactic end, or it will be an anti-climax, depending on whom we support. Half of the US is going to be disappointed with the results, irrespective of which candidate wins.

I can offer my own anecdotal evidence of why I think voter turnout is going to be high and people are very invested in this election. At the beginning of the campaign, I had a lot of visitors who had landed on this post after searching for “how to sell my vote” or something similar. I would feel sorry for them, given that the post is not about selling one’s vote, or even about US elections. But for the last few months, I have noticed that no one searches online for methods of selling their vote anymore. I’m assuming this means no one wants to sell their vote anymore, but who knows, perhaps it means that everyone who wants to has already figured out how to sell their vote to the highest bidder

I am confident I will be completely unproductive today, as will millions of others.?I still do not understand why they do not make election day a holiday in the US, as they do in India.? More so when voting times stretch into hours. I will also stay up until late night to watch the results come in. Election results always remind me of the time when I would walk down to the big board outside the Hindustan Times building in Connaught Place and watch the latest Lok Sabha election results. You are right, that was in the days when no mainstream Indian newspaper had an internet presence.

Much more recent is the memory of waking up in the middle of the night to check NYTimes and find that Ohio’s results had all come in and Kerry had lost. There are other memories, and I am not even going into the hanging chads and butterfly ballots.

At the beginning of the day, Pollster was predicting a landslide for Obama – winning 311 electoral college votes (against the 270 required), Mccain winning 142 and the remaining 85 being a toss-up. This map will change during the day:

If, like me, you find yourself checking back repeatedly to see how the map changes, here are a few hilarious ads to take your mind off the results

An Obama ad that’s a hilarious take-off on Bud’s famous “Wassup” ad series:

A beautiful song to the tune of “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” sung by a self-professed Hockey mama who doesn’t seem to like Sarah Palin very much:

And finally, John McCain’s appearance last weekend on Saturday Night Live, if you haven’t seen it already. I wish we had seen more of this version of McCain during the campaign. Things might have been very different for McCain then – the McCain I saw on SNL is so much more likeable than the one we saw on the campaign trail.

Whichever candidate wins, this election is going to make history for many reasons. This election has evoked strong emotions in many people, including in many of us who cannot even vote.

In the end, I do not know if I am going to be happy or disappointed. I do know, though, that I will be very relieved it’s finally over!

No, I am not running for President.
Not even Vice President, though
that is not saying much.

But R, I suspect, is the secret
political strategist
for some leading party.

For the last fourteen months
for four hours every evening
all we’ve watched is election coverage.

Then there are the blogs.
Politico, Huffington Post and RealClearPolitics.
Fivethirtyeight, Caucus and Raising Kane.

Drudge Report and? Weekly Standard
MyDD, Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos
Swampland, New Republic and the Fix.

Marc Ambinder, Ramesh Ponnuru
and Charlie Cook.
Peggy Noonan, Joan Walsh
and Anna Marie Cox.

But most of his research
is focused on Pollster
where he’s surely the
country’s leading expert.

Our conversations are all about
the differences in polling methods
between Rasmussen and Zogby.

Why IBD/TPP poll undersamples youth
and how the AP poll model
has 50% evangelicals.

Why “Likely Voter 1″ model is flawed
and how voter registration
is 98% in Michigan.

Early voting demographics in Georgia,
the Reverse Bradley effect
and GOTV efforts by state.

Friends are questioned too
Will Prop 8 pass in CA
Will Obama win in PA
and will 270 come from VA?

I am tired of being on the campaign trail.
I wonder how I still
have all my hair.

And then I wonder
if this is how he is now
when he is not even a citizen

how much worse
it would be when he
actually gets to vote?