Cruise to Port Aransas pt4

This massive catamaran shrimper sells its catch right off the boat in Port A.

After some breakfast and bloody maries we left back for Corpus Christi

Here you have to play "dodge the ferries" like frogger. They come from both sides and leave as soon as they fill up with 9 cars.

Cruise to Port Aransas pt3

We arrived in Port Aransas after sailing 3/4 the way and motoring the rest. We saw about two dozen dolphins and a few followed us for a while along the way.

Once there, the YC has a pot luck and there were a bunch of colorful baby boomers with all sorts of stories, there weren't any people less than twice my age, but I still had some interesting conversations.

When I got in a conversation about where I live and I said, "Philadelphia".
Someone said, "I'm sorry."
I realized they were just ribbing me but I repeated, "Philadelphia."
They then explained that they heard me, but they say, "I'm sorry" every time someone says anything other than Texas.
"No, I like living in Philadelphia."

As this was before the election, someone brought up Sarah Palin. Not because of any particular political belief or persuasion but rather out of the need to share an interesting fact which I had recently read, I felt like bringing up the interesting point that her husband might not be able to get security clearance because of his previous association with the Alaskan Independence Party. Nearly everyone I've met down here, which is a fairly small subset of society consisting of mostly friends of my parents and baby-boomer sailors, loves Sarah Palin.

Eventually, after establishing that I was not attacking Sarah Palin, an older Texan told me about Texan independence and that he was very proud that Texas was the only state that was an independent nation before it was admitted to the Union. I forgot to put on my diplomat hat and felt like correcting him that technically California was briefly a country as the Bear Flag Republic, albeit for less than a month. In retrospect, I feel like a jackass because the Republic of Texas was a nation for over a decade and recognized by multiple countries.

I ended up in a conversation with a retired government agent from a non-US English-speaking country who had some interesting stories of rerouting flights, terrifying third-world hotels, and deporting people around the globe.

Meanwhile, we were serenaded by a Jimmy Buffet look-alike (& live-alike) who lived aboard a sailboat at the marina singing Jimmy Buffet and folk songs and playing guitar.

This whiskey & rum dispenser was on a larger and interesting looking limited-production Taiwanese sailboat.

Cruise to Port Aransas pt2

While there is a huge Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, there is a smaller Naval base across the bay in Ingleside. The base is one of the newest in the Navy but is also scheduled to close.

Offshore drilling rigs and equipment is made here. These cranes are absolutely massive.

Oil Tanker

Liquid Natural Gas tanker

Cruise to Port Aransas pt1

A few weeks ago I was invited on a 2 day cruise from Corpus Christi to Port Aransas and back with some friends of my folks and their YC.

Corpus Christi from the marina:

Tankers pass us in the ship channel

A tugboat was carrying around a crew boat to service well heads

The Deep South in the 2008 election

One of my favorite blogs for the few of years has been "Strange Maps", the other day they featured this map of cotton production in 1860 juxtaposed with a by-county map of the deep south in the 2008 election, originally from Professor Allan Gathman.


85 Million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, the Deep South was underwater. If you've read "Guns Germs and Steel" (I haven't... yet), you'll know that agriculture determines history. Geology and soil determines agriculture. In the 2008 election, history and geology determined election results in the deep south. (The Vigorous North)

In my previous history and politics-related post, I wrote about the Upland South and the 2008 election results. Since the Civil Rights movement, which has bipartisan support, excepting Southern Democrats, the national Democratic party has had a serious problem connecting with southern white voters and where they have lost the Republicans have gained substantially and due in part to what Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips called the "Southern Strategy".

Before FDR, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans, identified with the Republicans. While Eisenhower sent the army to enforce Brown vs. Board of Education and a higher percentage of Republicans in congress voted for the Civil Rights Act, in 1964 Barry Goldwater, who voted against the act, defeated liberal Republicans Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to win the presidential nomination of the party. Likewise, President Johnson's signing of the act along with the earlier Democratic policies of the New Deal gained the support of the community. When large numbers of African-Americans in the South started registering and reclaiming the political rights that their antecedents briefly had for the decade proceeding the Civil War, it created deep divisions within the Democratic Party. The party in Mississippi, for example, refused to desegregate and activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. The party worked hard to claim legitimacy and sought to be seated at the Democratic Convention that year in lieu of the official party, which would not support Johnson for reelection. The national party brokered a compromise giving the MFDP two delegate votes, which left both parties very angry and the official Mississippi Democratic Party walked out.

Goldwater carried Mississippi that year with 87% of the vote, the first Republican to win Mississippi and Alabama, excepting Reconstruction. 1964 was the first time Georgia EVER voted Republican and that Vermont EVER voted Republican(yes. It is the only time in the Electoral College that the Deep South voted differently than the entire Outer & Upper South. Johnson won the popular vote by over 22%, the 5th largest margin ever. 61.1% of Americans voted for Johnson, more than any other President since James Monroe ran virtually unopposed. Goldwater won the 5 states in the Deep South and his home state of Arizona. Downticket the Republican party also lost big. 1964 was also the last time a Democrat won a majority of the white voters.

By the time Nixon ran again in 1968, it was a completely different playing field than in 1960. Reaction to the Civil Rights movement had eroded the ensconced support of the "Solid South" for the Democratic Party. Kevin Phillips opportunistically identified the potential for winning Southern Voters, "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans." And quit they did and for the past two decades Republicans have dominated the south with southern blacks largely supporting the Democratic party.

When Democrat Howard Dean, while running for President in 2004, stated, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," he was soundly criticized by national Democratic leaders. When he became the leader of the Democratic Party itself and decided to fund staffers and campaigns in the south as party of his 50-State Strategy, he was soundly criticized by other party leaders again.

This year the Obama campaign had a massive Get Out The Vote (GOTV) and his candidacy obviously excited and increased turnout of African Americans through the country. It's no secret that most African Americans were brought to the American colonies and the early United States for slavery and with the invention of the cotton gin in 1794, large and very profitable plantations took off and previously wilderness areas Deep South were cleared, American Indians were forcibly removed, and they settled in the 1820s and 30s the mad rush of "Alabama Fever". Note the concentration of plantations along the Mississippi river and a "black belt" of fertile black "prairie topsoil" which extends across Alabama into Mississippi in the crescent visible in all of these maps.

This map illustrates the successful Get-Out-the-Vote efforts and enthusiasm for the Obama campaign among southern African-American voters:

Purple America: election results by hue:

You'll notice the patch in central Tennessee that does not correspond to Obama votes, this area farmed cotton largely without the use of slaves and divided its support in the Civil War and remained a violent place afterward with the founding of the KKK there with reprisals against Union supporters and blacks.

Recently, the New York Times declared an end ("For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics" Nov. 10, 2008) to the "Southernization" of American politics. The declining demographic and electoral dominance of the southern white voter is shrinking has broken as voting block-- with the "suburban south" states of Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina all went for Obama.

Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republicans went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.

“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”

...

David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for [a God-damned Yankee!], Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.

“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.

In the Deep South, the Democratic white vote His three lowest performing states were Alabama (10%), Mississippi (11%), and Louisiana (14%) followed by GA (23%), SC (26%), TX (26%), OK (29% --southeast OK is called Little Dixie), AR (30%). Whites voting Democratic nearly cut in half in Alabama and Louisiana while increasing in Indiana by 32% and nationally by 5% versus 2004.

2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more below national white vote
2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more above national white vote
(Science Blogs: The great white sort)

So there you have it, as they say, the Civil War is still being fought in the Deep South.

The Upland South and the election

Here is more evidence that 2008 might be a realigning election:

Below is a map of the Upland South. Consisting of the greater area surrounding Appalachia and the Ozarks, it is bordered to the north by the Rust Belt, to the south by the Deep South and Sun Belt, the Great Plains to the West, and the Tidewater Region and the Southern Eastern Seaboard coastal plains.

Unlike the Deep South, the Upland South consisted of mostly independent smaller farms as opposed to plantations. The "Yeoman" upland farmer owned few or no slaves compared to the Deep South and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina did not sucede until after the Attack on Fort Sumter while West Viginia, Missouri, Kentucky, & Maryland remainded in the Union during the Civil War. The below map shows the percentage of African-Americans to the general population, the falloff corresponding to the borders of the "Upland South" correlates to the significantly lower percentage of slave ownership in the antebellum south.
One of the most dominate ethnic groups in this region are the Scotch-Irish (Scots-Irish), known to the rest of the English-speaking world as Ulster Scots. They emigrated to this region largely in the 18th century, predating the 20th century antagonism as a result of the partition of Ireland, but nevertheless associated with the ethnic stereotypes of fierce independence, mistrustful of authority, fierce loyalty to family (Hatfields and the McCoys), and the H-word or the R-word. The areas with the highest concentration of the Scotch-Irish are in Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, most of Tennessee, Western Maryland, most of West Virginia, Western PA, Texas Hill Country, and Panhandle Florida (shown below).
While conflict between the citizens of the tidewater region and the piedmont charecterized much of the history of Colonial Virginia; the political realization in American politics of the Upland South and the Scotch-Irish came with the revolutionary Andrew Jackson. All previous presidents were college graduates and former statesmen and diplomats, with the exception of George Washington. Jackson was born in 1767 the rural uplands of western North Carolina known as the Waxhaws, his parents emigrated from Ireland only two years prior and his father died weeks before he was born. He ran populist campaign as a "man of the people" appealing to disaffected rural voters and their values against "corrupt aristocrats of the East"; similar rhetoric to that of William Jennings Bryan, Barry Goldwater (to an extent), Perot, and Palin.

The above map shows areas which have voted more Republican since 2004. Lest we assume this is a hotbed of virulent right wing politics, I recommend you watch "Harlan County, U.S.A.". The film is about a coal miner strike in the the southeastern most county of Kentucky, one of the darkest red in voting less for Obama than they did Kerry as shown in the above map and also darkest in the below map of poverty. Starting with RFK, politicians on "poverty tours" always include Eastern Kentucky on their map, it was mimicked by John Edwards in 2007 with substantially less public interest. In 1976 it went 60% for Jimmy Carter, in 2004 it went 60% for Bush, and in 2008 72% voted for McCain over Obama.

There is, of course, the first conclusion most people make by looking at that map, racism. An October 27th Washington Post article by Ruth Marcus, "In W.Va., Lingering Doubts on Obama" dealt with sentiments in the southwest corner of West Virginia, reddest in the above maps for politics and poverty. In Mingo County less than a century ago Mother Jones (the person, not the magazine) organized miners there in the "largest organized armed uprising in American labor history". In 1976, Carter carried three-quarters of the vote; Gore won 60% there in 2000, but Obama lost by a margin of 12%, the reverse of the 2004 results for that county. In 1984 when Ronald Reagan carried West Virginia by 11% in his 49-state win the county voted Democrats outnumber Republicans 11:1. The slip from 2000 to 2004 to 2008 is also a biproduct of the citizens being able to relate less and less to the Democratic nominees versus the Republican ticket and the frustration over the loss of the region's prefered candidate, Hillary Clinton. The article's 'man on the street' expressed concern over the possibility Obama is a 'secret Muslim', that "if Obama goes in there the [blacks] are going to go crazy," and that his values differed irreconsilably.

However, for some of the few places Democrats are losing ground, many are also losing population. The below map shows population loss in many of the areas corresponding to longer-term Republican gains. This map covers population changes from 1980-2000, most notably absent is the massive population loss caused by Hurricane Katrina in Southern Louisiana.

Identity, populism, and racism are not the only reasons for the dramatic shift in votes. As alluded to earlier, the traditionally democratic areas that turned more red in Appalachia are "Coal Country". While the Miner's union endorsed Obama, his comments that building coal power plants would bankrupt companies under his administration were exploited to their full extent by Palin at a rally in southern Ohio (McCain co-sponsored legislation which would implement the policy Obama was describing in his errant comments, Cap-and-Trade).

The above map overlays perfectly with all above mentioned sociological, economic, demographic, & political trends. Upland Southern culture, higher Scotch-Irish and lower African-American ratios than the South as a whole, highly Democratic, high poverty rate, high population loss, and coal, all correspond to significant gains by the Republican ticket in 2008 relative to previous presidential elections.

Centrism, pragmatism, and message

Obama ran a more centrist disciplined message than either Gore or Kerry and doesn't attack corporations any more than McCain did. I think that some of Kerry's anti-corporate rhetoric pushed a number of independents away from him... after all, the majority of people work for corporations of some sort. His election shows Americans that though good education, discipline, civic engagement, and by playing by the rules you can get ahead and make a difference, all traditional small 'c' conservative values.

While controlling the house from 1955 to 1995, the democrats moved progressively to the left and a number of people in the party left while the opposite happened with the republicans, that's obviously simplifying it. By the 1990s there were no pro-life Democrats in leadership positions in Congress while there were multiple pro-choice Republicans chairing committees. The 2004 election which resulted further defeats for the Democrats after a slaughter in the 2002 midterm elections. In 2005 Howard Dean, who had run an anti-war left wing campaign that generated a tremendous amount of grassroots support before it finally received mainstream attention and subsequently imploded, took over as the head of the Democratic Party and announced a '50-state strategy' involving staffing and spending millions of dollars on each and every state. The DCCC's and future Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel and Chuck Schumer as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee both criticized the plan but with Indiana, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, and Nebraska's Omaha district all going for Obama, Dean's strategy was largely vindicated. Recently, the Democrats also have made the smart move of encouraging more social conservatives in the party again, take for example pro-life Bob Casey who was recruited by Schumer. Look at the relative success of the so-called "Blue-Dog" Democrats, although many are very frustrated with Pelosi's leadership, if more join their coalition I wouldn't be surprised if her leadership were challenged.

Contrast the support of the Blue Dog Coalition with the Republican Main Street Partnership. While the latter has more politically powerful members, it doesn't have the prominence, attention, or grassroots support of the former. Take for example the vigorously fought primary challenges of RMSP members Arlen Spector & Lincoln Chaffee, both extremely well funded by the Club for Growth. While changing the message and allowing more moderates and social liberals into the party is a clear path to building a winning coalition, it's a bit naïve to expect a change anytime soon, particularly as registration shrinks to an 'ideologically pure' base making it nearly impossible for these candidates to win primaries.

I think a good analogy for Sarah Palin would be George McGovern. Her message really connects with millions of Americans, however very few of them would consider voting for Barack Obama in the first place. Many of Palin's most fervent supporters were unsatisfied with John McCain's moderate stances and deeply disappointed by the failures of the Bush administration. Her message resonated with a number of people in the right wing who would be otherwise alienated and disappointed with mainstream politics. Likewise, George McGovern's message resonated with a number of people in the left wing who would be otherwise alienated and disappointed with mainstream politics. The 1972 election however was won by Richard Nixon with the 4th largest margin in history. McGovern said of the election, "I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out." To that end, scores of retired Republican politicians, bureaucrats, and officials have endorsed Obama along with a number of conservative columnists.

Obama's legislative record clearly mimics that of a liberal in the McGovern mold but the RNC was much more unsuccessful at painting him as far-left as they did McGovern. During the primary of that year an anonymous democratic senator stated to columnist Bob Novak, "The people don’t know McGovern is for [draft-dodger] amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot, once middle America — Catholic middle America, in particular — finds this out, he’s dead." The slogan "amnesty, abortion and acid" doomed McGovern as fundamentally out of touch with middle America. The effort to link Obama to the radical views of his pastor, his neighbor, Karl Marx, and the man who sold him a parcel of land all fell flat with most independent voters. Those concerned about his legislative record could look at the support of a number of prominent republicans and hope that Obama will not be hasty in abandoning the coalition that he built. While his Republican party support cannot be as easily dismissed as Zell Miller was by Democrats in 2004, many of the people on the list identify more with the dwindling and possibly doomed "Main Street Partnership Branch" and are horrified by the new, supercharged, and envigorated "Sarah Palin Branch". Republicans who have publicly endorsed Obama include: Paul Volker, William Weld, Susan Eisenhower, Colin Powell, Lincoln Chafee, Lowell Weicker, C.C. Goldwater, Michael Smerconish, William Milliken, Charles "Mac" Mathias, Scott McClellan, George Cabot Lodge, Francis Fukuyama, Ken Duberstein, Arne Carlson, Jim Leach, Wayne Gilchrest, Christopher Buckley, and Larry Pressler.

It feels like 1896 all over again.

This is basically what all those TV fancy president maps will look like tomorrow, except with the colors reversed. One of the apparent changes is that those brown areas are somehow states now, plus two more! Goddamn kids!

This leads us to a bigger much more important question, will Obama be like William McKinley and have a prominent Alaskan mountain renamed after him? Will Joe Biden be replaced by a Teddy Roosevelt in four years? My advice: avoid Pan-American Expositions in Buffalo.

Palin 2012 - why and how?

I think Palin by now has had more than enough criticism, some unfair, but every time the press or she herself raises the idea of a 2012 bid they willfully ignore something that is jarringly obvious to me....

Who would vote for Palin that would vote for Obama over McCain?

Texas Sky

Santa Fe, Texas:

taken from my phone.