By Martin J Young
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) got underway this week in Las Vegas when it opened its doors on Monday. The big names in technology were all in attendance to showcase their latest products, ranging from robots to cars to the largest TV in the world (measuring 3.8 meters on the diagonal and weighing a quarter of a tonne). Over 140,000 people were expected to pass through the doors of the exhibition, now in its 41st year.
Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates outlined his vision of the future to a full house of more than 4,000 technology aficionados with his "next digital age" being one in which gadgets that respond to touch, speech and vision replace keyboards and mice. Strumming an Xbox 360 guitar, Gates also predicted simpler navigation from more intuitive devices with the coming of a second digital decade more focused on connecting people.
He also announced several new Microsoft partnerships, including one with news channel NBC, which will be streaming live video from this year's Summer Olympics in Beijing using the software giant's Silverlight program, and with MGM, ABC and Disney, which will be making movies available on the Xbox platform.
There were few other significant announcements, which disappointed Xbox fans expecting at least a couple of technology bombshells or swipes at the competition. Gates also spoke of stepping down from daily operations at Microsoft this summer to work for his charity organizations. "It will be the first time since I was 17 that I won't have a full-time Microsoft job," he said. "I'm not sure what the last day at work will feel like." Let's face it; it's not as if he needs the salary to pay his bills.
Hardware
Intel unveiled 16 new 45-nanometer core technology processors at CES. The CPUs are aimed at a wide range of applications, including mobile devices, desktops and servers, with another 16 planned for later in 2008. This year will also see the introduction of Intel mobile Internet (WiMAX), which will mean "smaller, lighter and powerful Internet-enabled devices that ultimately will fit right into your pocket".
The chipmaker also boasted "divine performance" from its new Skulltrail platform with quad core architecture. Technology gurus demonstrated a prototype on an Alienware rig using two 45 nanometer quad core processors water-cooled and overclocked to 4GHz. Needless to say it churned through several benchmarks.
AMD also made some announcements at the CES, namely their new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 graphics processor with full DirectX 10.1 support. ASUSTek are among the first notebook manufacturers to boast the new 3000 series chips in its latest models. AMD also released hushed info on their next generation R680 dual core graphics card however specifications were not provided.
Plenty of new concepts, gadgets and gizmos were on display at the CES including a 2000 pixel plus curved display from Alienware which was put to the test with Crysis running at 2880 by 900 pixels. 3D web browsing was touted by SpaceTime's revolutionary browser which previews and zooms in on websites without actually having to enter them. And the tiny new EeePC from ASUS which was selling like hot cakes. More information on this year’s CES can be found on the CES website.
Internet
A new open source search engine called Wikia made its appearance this week as an alpha version. The concept is to allow users to complain about flaws and developers to fix them, unlike other well-known search giants that run under the notion of their way or the highway. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stated last year that the intention was to offer a search engine with something that Google doesn't have - transparency - with the mystery taken out of how the web is scanned, searched and ranked.
His philosophy is that Internet searching should be open, transparent and democratic. "If you're relying on people not knowing how the system works, you've got a big problem," he stated. A trusted network of users similar to those that contribute to Wikipedia will be responsible for discussion and planning of future developments of the project. Wales has cautioned users against expecting too much too soon by stating that they won't find a Google-killer at wikia.com; people should understand that they are at the early stages of a project building a "Google-quality search engine".
Gaming
French developer Ubisoft has announced that its next iteration of the popular shooter Far Cry will be available on PS3 and Xbox 360 and not kept exclusively for PC as originally planned. Far Cry 2 will bring gamers to Africa where they do battle with international arms dealers away from the lush tropical settings and open-world landscapes that made the original game a hit. Official release of the game, which features reactive game play elements that respond to the player's actions, has not been announced but it is expected after April this year.
Security
A new bug in the Firefox web browser could lead to identity theft and a compromised computer if users are tricked into filling in fake authentication boxes. The browser fails to sanitize single quotation marks and spaces, causing it to display a variable called a "Realm" in the dialogue box. An Israeli security researcher discovered the flaw, which makes it possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted "Realm" value that makes the authentication box look like it came from a trusted site. Mozilla programmers are investigating the vulnerability, which affects the latest version of Firefox 2.0.0.11.
OLPC
Following requests for exclusivity to the One Laptop Per Child program, Intel has finally pulled the plug on it. Intel has started working on its own initiatives to bring computers to children in developing countries with their Classmate PC program. Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy stated: "We've always said there will be many solutions. The most important priority is to serve the need". OLPC, also aiming to bring laptops to underprivileged children initially for US$100 per machine, has been suffering from rising costs putting the computers close to $200.
AMD delivered a boost to the OLPC program as its employees recently pooled their own money to buy hundreds of inexpensive XO laptops for developing countries under the OLPC "donate one laptop get one free" initiative. The XO, a hard-wearing water- and dust-proof machine designed for rural environments, is powered by a hand-crank generator. AMD matched its employees’ contributions by donating an additional $30,000 to the project; it is also responsible for the low powered Geode CPU in the XO laptop.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Clinton's upset not black and white
By Julian Delasantellis
Outrage stalks the glistening halls of the American punditocracy, victim of a sneak attack far more brazen than Pearl Harbor or September 11, 2001. The American public, or at least the miniscule section of the American public composed of the people who cast Democratic Party ballots in Tuesday's New Hampshire presidential primary, has risen in open revolt, in that it did not do what the punditocracy said it was going to do.
This cannot be allowed; what's the point of having an elite pundit class if the public is going to get uppity and ignore what it says it's supposed to do? What's next then for the pundits - customer service trainee jobs at Target or something?
In the immortal words of Governor William J Le Petomane ( Mel Brooks) in his 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles, "We've gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!"
And so, like cavalry soldiers of old, the punditocracy saddles up and rides out to the sounds of the guns. If the pre-election polls that predicted a Senator Barack Obama of Illinois landslide over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York proved to be different to how the actual voting went, then the only explanation must be that electorate was wrong. The polls cannot be wrong; in the same way the British Empire used its navy to control the seas, the pundit class uses public opinion polls to control public debate in America.
America's premiere cable television political pundit, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a man who nightly drinks more hyperbole than British statesman Winston Churchill did scotch, led the charge. The public betrayed the pundits, and their ongoing televised coronation of African American Obama, because the public was racist and evil. When asked about race prejudice outside the US South, where the violent experience of the civil rights movement left the region with an international reputation for bigotry, like any good pundit, Matthews was ready with a withering verbiage barrage.
"Boston? Boston?" ( an obvious reference to the fierce white resistance to school racial integration in Boston in the mid-1970s) "... There's different kinds of prejudice in the North and in the South, but it exists ... it might be, 'I don't want to live next door to you.' There's different kinds of prejudice in this world ... He's [Obama] gotta just look at the polls, and take about 10 points off each time."
Even from the high parapet of the editorial pages of The New York Times, the pundits were still firing their broadsides. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, attributed the pundit's failure to the same reason, albeit in a bit less overcaffeinated manner than Matthews.
"Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here's the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews ... Why didn't this problem come up in Iowa? My guess is that Mr Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn't yet the front-runner."
Not only are they bigots, but they're less educated and poorer as well. Let's call them names - that'll teach them not to rebel from pundit rule!
In that I have no real idea why the polls were wrong in New Hampshire, I thus qualify as a pundit in good standing . But rather than run over the peasants, in the style of the Marquis St Evermonde from A Tale of Two Cities, with my pundit coach, I am willing to entertain another possible reason for the polling perfidy of New Hampshire.
In the words of James Carville, 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton's chief electoral strategist, "It's the economy, stupid".
One thing that the pundit class has not yet realized, unless they are having something other than just perfunctory conversations with their plumbers and gardeners, is just how weak the US economy has opened 2008. In contrast to many observers (including yours truly, see Shopping 'zombies' offer US hope, Asia Times Online, January 3, 2008) who hoped that the economy's late-2007 strength might continue into the New Year, 2008 has dawned with the US economy looking far weaker than it was just a few happy weeks ago.
In just the five trading days from the 2008 start of trading to the New Hampshire primary on January 8, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 760 points, 5.7% of its value, certainly an ominous augury for those who believe that a year's stock trading trend is determined in its first few days. The tech stock heavy Nasdaq stock index fared even worse, losing just under 8% of its value in that period, probably dashing the hopes of those who were hoping that continuing strength in the US tech sector might offset the subprime mortgage crisis weakness in US financials and real estate (Widgets and wrecks, Asia Times Online, November 13, 2007).
As bad as the general market indices have performed in 2008, a look deeper within the markets presents an even gloomier picture. Is the US consumer finally breaking from the strain of high energy prices, the subprime mortgage crisis, and, perhaps most important, the poor employment data released on January 4?
In the first five trading days of the year, the RTH retail stock index lost almost 7% of its value. Like all indices and averages, the overall figures mask some truly breathtakingly bad individual stock prices and reports.
The retail selloff just nicked retail behemoth Wal-Mart (which reported a 2.4% gain in December same store sales), whose stock was down 3.5% in the period - Americans are, thankfully for those guys working in state tourist bureaus trying to attract European tourists with the lure of the weak US$, still apparently buying lots of deodorant and toilet tissue. But once you get past the, ahem, necessities to more discretionary purchases, the picture darkens considerably.
Macy's, the biggest of the old line national department store chains, lost 14% in stock value the period; it reported a 7.9% decline in December sales, and also lowered its sales forecasts for January.
JC Penny's stock was down a whopping 21% in the period; its December same store sales fell 7.5%. Kohl's stock was down 13.5% on an 11.4% decline in December sales. Nordstrom's lost 14%, on a sales decline of 4%.
Worse and worser
Moving up to the more rarified (and thus more easily postponed in hard economic times) the situation looks even worse.
Women's upscale clothing retailer Talbot's stock lost a quarter of its value in five days. Saks Fifth Avenue lost 16.4%; apparently, many of the Ladies Who Do Lunch who are its primary customer base are doing a lot more of it at McDonald's these days.
Teen retailers Zumiez and Hott Topic's stocks lost 32% and 22% of their respective values. Even recreational boating supplier West Marine's stock took a 20% dunking; apparently, most people will let the yacht get repossessed before the house.
Expanding the focus of the analysis makes it look even worse. Most of these stocks' 2008 losses build upon similar losses of 30-60% in the second half of 2007. Retail analyst Howard Davidowitz calls the situation a developing retail Armageddon, with the worst, including the closing of up to 1,000 retail outlets nationwide, still yet to come.
So how did this help Clinton in New Hampshire? We in the pundit class didn't really learn about the deteriorating employment situation until the January 4 December employment report, but, way down there at the peasant level, it must have been known, been felt, as it was happening.
Prior to her assassination, most Americans probably thought that former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto was a menthol cigarette, but if a local plant closes, or if folk see more and more homes foreclosed and boarded up in their local neighborhood, eventually the message gets through, and the spending cutbacks commence.
And maybe you become unwilling to take as many chances with your presidential primary ballot. With all the blather about this election being about nebulous and ever-morphing conceptions of "change'', voters (at least those over 30, whom Clinton did far better with than younger voters in New Hampshire) can look back, recall the prosperity and success of the Clinton 1990s, decide that they want the tried and tested sure thing over the untested longshot Obama.
Exit polls of New Hampshire primary voters go a long way towards proving this point. Clinton won the overall balloting by three percentage points, 39-36%, but among voters who reported their 2007 family income as being between $15,000 and $30,000, Clinton won by 21 points, 50-29. Among voters with family income between $30,000 and $50,000 she won by 12; in contrast, Obama won the $100,000 to $150,000 crowd by 10 points, 43-33.
This voting pattern illustrates one of recent American politics most bizarre contradictions. The Democratic Party, and its ideological standard-bearer left wing, since at least the Great Depression of the 1930s and president Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, seen as the protector of the interests of the poor and downtrodden, has lately been getting a lot of support from some very upscale zip codes.
In wealthy places like Marin County, just north of San Francisco, or Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk County outside New York City, or Middlesex County north of Boston, or the Northern Virginia counties of Arlington and Fairfax, all up until recently reliably rock-ribbed right wing, the Republican Party is being progressively and inexorably decimated.
Newer residents of these areas, the Starbucks-drinking "information workers" of the new globalized economy, with their fatter paychecks earned from successfully riding the globalized economy's monied crest, react with abhorrence to the Republican Party's recent alliances with stifling and repressive Protestant fundamentalism. They want to go out to a dinner that is something other than franks 'n' beans in the church basement, and if they want to go to a concert, they want to hear something other than the church organist providing the accompaniment to yet another Messiah sing-a-long.
These are your Obama voters.
In contrast, what has happened to the Democratic Party's traditional base, the white blue collar lower middle-class factory worker?
In much of America outside the Northeast, these voters have become Republicans. The Zogby polling agency reported that 85% of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers voted for George W Bush in 2004 (88% of people who never entered the place went for John Kerry.)
Thomas Frank, whose 2005 book What's the Matter with Kansas? expanded on this phenomenon of lower socio-economic classes in the US Midwest voting against their economic self-interest, elaborated on the ramifications of this new seemingly upside down political order.
"The country we have inhabited for the last three decades seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy patriots reciting the Pledge while they resolutely strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of hardened blue-collar workers in midwestern burgs cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a 'rust belt', will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover."
But in US northeastern states like New Hampshire, a lot of these people still vote for the Democratic party. Some of them, or their parents, might have flirted with a dalliance with the Republican right as "Reagan Democrats", in the 1980s, but when their factory jobs were outsourced to the US sunbelt (the same jobs which more recently were outsourced to China, India and Mexico) they realized they had to return to the fold.
Still, it's an uneasy social fit with the young academic and information-based Democrats who are coalescing around Barack Obama. Here it's chardonnay versus Budweiser, the Ford F-150 pickup versus the Toyota Prius hybrid, hunting versus blogging.
Whether or not she intended it or not, Clinton's slightly more centrist positions, on Iraq, on Iran, on healthcare, appeal to the blue collar lower-income Democrats, if only, perhaps, because these positions so irritate the younger sophisticates. It is endlessly repeated that the jobs of those whose education goes no further than high (secondary) school are most at risk from competition with the new globalized workforce, especially in the tougher economic times America now seem to be entering.
Clinton won the high school-only vote 46-31, as for those with some postgraduate college education Obama won 43-31. In Hanover, New Hampshire, home to prestigious Ivy League Dartmouth College, Obama bested Clinton by an almost 2.5 to 1 margin; by comparison, in much larger Manchester, home of one of the few remaining industrial manufacturing redoubts in the state, indeed, one of last of the rapidly disappearing industrial manufacturing communities in the country, Clinton bested Obama by a 60% to 40% margin.
So it wasn't racial prejudice (Manchester has a significant minority population). It wasn't Clinton's tearing up and crying the day before the election. In contrast to the most recent US presidential elections, where the pundits mandated that the most contentious debates would center around such crucial issues as flag burning, gay marriage and what the candidates did or didn't do as young men in the Vietnam war 35 years previously, this one may be decided on real, live genuine bread and butter economic issues that actual Americans actually care about. To paraphrase Thomas Frank, that's "What's the Matter with New Hampshire."
Issues that the pundit class can report on or describe, but don't really feel. If soon you see your favorite TV political pundit with a Dunkin Donuts black coffee and a jelly donut instead of the usual Starbucks half-caf latte and scone, well, at least you'll know they're trying.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
Outrage stalks the glistening halls of the American punditocracy, victim of a sneak attack far more brazen than Pearl Harbor or September 11, 2001. The American public, or at least the miniscule section of the American public composed of the people who cast Democratic Party ballots in Tuesday's New Hampshire presidential primary, has risen in open revolt, in that it did not do what the punditocracy said it was going to do.
This cannot be allowed; what's the point of having an elite pundit class if the public is going to get uppity and ignore what it says it's supposed to do? What's next then for the pundits - customer service trainee jobs at Target or something?
In the immortal words of Governor William J Le Petomane ( Mel Brooks) in his 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles, "We've gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!"
And so, like cavalry soldiers of old, the punditocracy saddles up and rides out to the sounds of the guns. If the pre-election polls that predicted a Senator Barack Obama of Illinois landslide over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York proved to be different to how the actual voting went, then the only explanation must be that electorate was wrong. The polls cannot be wrong; in the same way the British Empire used its navy to control the seas, the pundit class uses public opinion polls to control public debate in America.
America's premiere cable television political pundit, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a man who nightly drinks more hyperbole than British statesman Winston Churchill did scotch, led the charge. The public betrayed the pundits, and their ongoing televised coronation of African American Obama, because the public was racist and evil. When asked about race prejudice outside the US South, where the violent experience of the civil rights movement left the region with an international reputation for bigotry, like any good pundit, Matthews was ready with a withering verbiage barrage.
"Boston? Boston?" ( an obvious reference to the fierce white resistance to school racial integration in Boston in the mid-1970s) "... There's different kinds of prejudice in the North and in the South, but it exists ... it might be, 'I don't want to live next door to you.' There's different kinds of prejudice in this world ... He's [Obama] gotta just look at the polls, and take about 10 points off each time."
Even from the high parapet of the editorial pages of The New York Times, the pundits were still firing their broadsides. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, attributed the pundit's failure to the same reason, albeit in a bit less overcaffeinated manner than Matthews.
"Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here's the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews ... Why didn't this problem come up in Iowa? My guess is that Mr Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn't yet the front-runner."
Not only are they bigots, but they're less educated and poorer as well. Let's call them names - that'll teach them not to rebel from pundit rule!
In that I have no real idea why the polls were wrong in New Hampshire, I thus qualify as a pundit in good standing . But rather than run over the peasants, in the style of the Marquis St Evermonde from A Tale of Two Cities, with my pundit coach, I am willing to entertain another possible reason for the polling perfidy of New Hampshire.
In the words of James Carville, 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton's chief electoral strategist, "It's the economy, stupid".
One thing that the pundit class has not yet realized, unless they are having something other than just perfunctory conversations with their plumbers and gardeners, is just how weak the US economy has opened 2008. In contrast to many observers (including yours truly, see Shopping 'zombies' offer US hope, Asia Times Online, January 3, 2008) who hoped that the economy's late-2007 strength might continue into the New Year, 2008 has dawned with the US economy looking far weaker than it was just a few happy weeks ago.
In just the five trading days from the 2008 start of trading to the New Hampshire primary on January 8, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 760 points, 5.7% of its value, certainly an ominous augury for those who believe that a year's stock trading trend is determined in its first few days. The tech stock heavy Nasdaq stock index fared even worse, losing just under 8% of its value in that period, probably dashing the hopes of those who were hoping that continuing strength in the US tech sector might offset the subprime mortgage crisis weakness in US financials and real estate (Widgets and wrecks, Asia Times Online, November 13, 2007).
As bad as the general market indices have performed in 2008, a look deeper within the markets presents an even gloomier picture. Is the US consumer finally breaking from the strain of high energy prices, the subprime mortgage crisis, and, perhaps most important, the poor employment data released on January 4?
In the first five trading days of the year, the RTH retail stock index lost almost 7% of its value. Like all indices and averages, the overall figures mask some truly breathtakingly bad individual stock prices and reports.
The retail selloff just nicked retail behemoth Wal-Mart (which reported a 2.4% gain in December same store sales), whose stock was down 3.5% in the period - Americans are, thankfully for those guys working in state tourist bureaus trying to attract European tourists with the lure of the weak US$, still apparently buying lots of deodorant and toilet tissue. But once you get past the, ahem, necessities to more discretionary purchases, the picture darkens considerably.
Macy's, the biggest of the old line national department store chains, lost 14% in stock value the period; it reported a 7.9% decline in December sales, and also lowered its sales forecasts for January.
JC Penny's stock was down a whopping 21% in the period; its December same store sales fell 7.5%. Kohl's stock was down 13.5% on an 11.4% decline in December sales. Nordstrom's lost 14%, on a sales decline of 4%.
Worse and worser
Moving up to the more rarified (and thus more easily postponed in hard economic times) the situation looks even worse.
Women's upscale clothing retailer Talbot's stock lost a quarter of its value in five days. Saks Fifth Avenue lost 16.4%; apparently, many of the Ladies Who Do Lunch who are its primary customer base are doing a lot more of it at McDonald's these days.
Teen retailers Zumiez and Hott Topic's stocks lost 32% and 22% of their respective values. Even recreational boating supplier West Marine's stock took a 20% dunking; apparently, most people will let the yacht get repossessed before the house.
Expanding the focus of the analysis makes it look even worse. Most of these stocks' 2008 losses build upon similar losses of 30-60% in the second half of 2007. Retail analyst Howard Davidowitz calls the situation a developing retail Armageddon, with the worst, including the closing of up to 1,000 retail outlets nationwide, still yet to come.
So how did this help Clinton in New Hampshire? We in the pundit class didn't really learn about the deteriorating employment situation until the January 4 December employment report, but, way down there at the peasant level, it must have been known, been felt, as it was happening.
Prior to her assassination, most Americans probably thought that former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto was a menthol cigarette, but if a local plant closes, or if folk see more and more homes foreclosed and boarded up in their local neighborhood, eventually the message gets through, and the spending cutbacks commence.
And maybe you become unwilling to take as many chances with your presidential primary ballot. With all the blather about this election being about nebulous and ever-morphing conceptions of "change'', voters (at least those over 30, whom Clinton did far better with than younger voters in New Hampshire) can look back, recall the prosperity and success of the Clinton 1990s, decide that they want the tried and tested sure thing over the untested longshot Obama.
Exit polls of New Hampshire primary voters go a long way towards proving this point. Clinton won the overall balloting by three percentage points, 39-36%, but among voters who reported their 2007 family income as being between $15,000 and $30,000, Clinton won by 21 points, 50-29. Among voters with family income between $30,000 and $50,000 she won by 12; in contrast, Obama won the $100,000 to $150,000 crowd by 10 points, 43-33.
This voting pattern illustrates one of recent American politics most bizarre contradictions. The Democratic Party, and its ideological standard-bearer left wing, since at least the Great Depression of the 1930s and president Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, seen as the protector of the interests of the poor and downtrodden, has lately been getting a lot of support from some very upscale zip codes.
In wealthy places like Marin County, just north of San Francisco, or Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk County outside New York City, or Middlesex County north of Boston, or the Northern Virginia counties of Arlington and Fairfax, all up until recently reliably rock-ribbed right wing, the Republican Party is being progressively and inexorably decimated.
Newer residents of these areas, the Starbucks-drinking "information workers" of the new globalized economy, with their fatter paychecks earned from successfully riding the globalized economy's monied crest, react with abhorrence to the Republican Party's recent alliances with stifling and repressive Protestant fundamentalism. They want to go out to a dinner that is something other than franks 'n' beans in the church basement, and if they want to go to a concert, they want to hear something other than the church organist providing the accompaniment to yet another Messiah sing-a-long.
These are your Obama voters.
In contrast, what has happened to the Democratic Party's traditional base, the white blue collar lower middle-class factory worker?
In much of America outside the Northeast, these voters have become Republicans. The Zogby polling agency reported that 85% of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers voted for George W Bush in 2004 (88% of people who never entered the place went for John Kerry.)
Thomas Frank, whose 2005 book What's the Matter with Kansas? expanded on this phenomenon of lower socio-economic classes in the US Midwest voting against their economic self-interest, elaborated on the ramifications of this new seemingly upside down political order.
"The country we have inhabited for the last three decades seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy patriots reciting the Pledge while they resolutely strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of hardened blue-collar workers in midwestern burgs cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a 'rust belt', will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover."
But in US northeastern states like New Hampshire, a lot of these people still vote for the Democratic party. Some of them, or their parents, might have flirted with a dalliance with the Republican right as "Reagan Democrats", in the 1980s, but when their factory jobs were outsourced to the US sunbelt (the same jobs which more recently were outsourced to China, India and Mexico) they realized they had to return to the fold.
Still, it's an uneasy social fit with the young academic and information-based Democrats who are coalescing around Barack Obama. Here it's chardonnay versus Budweiser, the Ford F-150 pickup versus the Toyota Prius hybrid, hunting versus blogging.
Whether or not she intended it or not, Clinton's slightly more centrist positions, on Iraq, on Iran, on healthcare, appeal to the blue collar lower-income Democrats, if only, perhaps, because these positions so irritate the younger sophisticates. It is endlessly repeated that the jobs of those whose education goes no further than high (secondary) school are most at risk from competition with the new globalized workforce, especially in the tougher economic times America now seem to be entering.
Clinton won the high school-only vote 46-31, as for those with some postgraduate college education Obama won 43-31. In Hanover, New Hampshire, home to prestigious Ivy League Dartmouth College, Obama bested Clinton by an almost 2.5 to 1 margin; by comparison, in much larger Manchester, home of one of the few remaining industrial manufacturing redoubts in the state, indeed, one of last of the rapidly disappearing industrial manufacturing communities in the country, Clinton bested Obama by a 60% to 40% margin.
So it wasn't racial prejudice (Manchester has a significant minority population). It wasn't Clinton's tearing up and crying the day before the election. In contrast to the most recent US presidential elections, where the pundits mandated that the most contentious debates would center around such crucial issues as flag burning, gay marriage and what the candidates did or didn't do as young men in the Vietnam war 35 years previously, this one may be decided on real, live genuine bread and butter economic issues that actual Americans actually care about. To paraphrase Thomas Frank, that's "What's the Matter with New Hampshire."
Issues that the pundit class can report on or describe, but don't really feel. If soon you see your favorite TV political pundit with a Dunkin Donuts black coffee and a jelly donut instead of the usual Starbucks half-caf latte and scone, well, at least you'll know they're trying.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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