Eid (non-Hosni) Mubarak!

Ramadan 1432 - the month we felt the world shift axis. Let's relive the history:

Give us this day our DailyBeast

Recipe: Tomasky post-hoc potpouri
Ingredients: time, a large weasel.
Method:
1. Wait for a foreign-policy crisis to arise.
2. See what Obama says.
3. Wait.
4. Keep waiting.
5. See how things turn out.
6. If it turned out well (e.g. Libya), credit Obama's speeches.
7. If it turned out craply (e.g. Bahrain) write something about Tea Party terrorists.
8. Stew a little.

What makes this recipe a fail-safe success is that Obama's foreign policy is a textbook case of Implausible Deniability (ID(TM)). ID(TM) works according to a simple formula:
1. Wait for a crisis to arise.
2. Wait for it to disappear as quickly as it arose.
3. Keep waiting.
4. If the clock runs out, then say/do something ambiguous.
5. Get senior staff to make unambiguous, mutually inconsistent remarks.
6. Wait and see.
7. If the outcome was favourable, interpret your speech/action in 4. to paint you as a causal factor.
8 If the outcome was unfavourable, interpret your speech/action in 4. to paint you as sufficiently removed so as not to be blameworthy.
9. Pick one of the statements in 5. to support the interpretation in 7/8. Since they were mutually inconsistent by design.

President Kgalema Petrus Motlante

Since a lot of rubbish has been written about this week's municipal election, please allow me to break my silence on the matter (by the way, apologies for not telling the result in advance - I was uncharacteristically clueless.)

The election results can be viewed at the splendidly put-together website of the Independent Electoral Commission. The summary of the all-in Vote:

ANC 63.65%
DA 21.97%
IFP 3.94%
NFP 2.58#
COPE 2.33%
Independents 0.89%

Bottom line: This was a good election for the National Freedom Party, and a crap election for everyone else:

1. The National Freedom Party (NFP).
A party born three months ago to a woman (Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibie) whose name is totally unknown to South Africans, managed to tear in half the baby born to Gatsha Buthelezi in 1975, finishing fourth overall. This at a time when a KZN homeboy is national president. They'll continue to grow in the Eastern province, and will eclipse Inkatha unless Buthelezi is dispensed with.

2. The African National Congress (ANC).
Gone are the heady days of two-thirds majority. They're back to slightly better than 1994 levels. But 64% is a landslide in anyone's vocabulary, and they held onto the Nelson Mandela metropole in spite of everything. Enough for contentment, but nothing to cheer about. Just because you're big doesn't mean you should stop growing. The euphoric celebrations are largely theatre, but partly testament to the fact that at least some factions in the party have given up on ever attracting White and Coloured voters.

3. The Democratic Alliance (DA).
Supposedly the big winners on Wednesday, they've finally managed - after seventeen long years - of surpassing the 20% gained in 1994 by FW de Klerk, the custodian of Bantu Education (and my poor spelling), askaris and the Transvaal faction of the National party. Congratulations, I suppose. What's happened is that the DA has acheived it's dream of locking up the opposition, without denting the bedrock of ANC support. Do the math. The ANC is at slightly better than 1994 levels. The ANC is at its worst level of rudderlessness in democratic history. Its hapless leader is clearly at sea. It faces the greatest, most open resistance to its rule ever. That the DA failed to capitalise on these laboratory conditions is a shocker. The party can crash through the ceiling, but it will do so at the price of it's current identity and cohesion. And not soon.

4. The Congress of the People (Cope).
Mosioua Lekota has finally accomplished his ambition of driving his party into the ground. There was no need for potshots from the opposition - the terror inflicted by the president did it all.

5. The Inkatha Freedom Party (NFP).
For whom this election was like having on-stage tickets to a performance of that well-loved conjuring trick called sawing-the-lady-in-half. Paradoxically, this strengthens Buthelezi's hold on the party, as there's less to fight for, and in the NFP his party rivals have an alternative home with better growth prospects.

6. Helen Zille (Botox Belle).
She'll maintain her hold on the party amid rising tensions. As the belief persists that the party is growing, it will attract greater numbers of the knife-wielding careerist who stab their way to the top of party structures. There'll be pressure to promote black branch leaders to senior positions of real influence within the party, and in the same way that the ANC struggled to control its candidate-list process, the DA's cohesion will give way to resentment from stalwarts, and White voters who feel increasingly alienated from the leadership crop.

7. Mangosutu Buthelezi kaShenge (Gatsha).
Just because you're a party head doesn't mean that you've political influence. Since South Africans have grown to love his droning magniloquence, there'll be plenty of airtime for him yet. RIP.

8. Patricia de Lille (The Mother).
She's reached the height of her political career. Well done. She'll be an inspiring mayoral figure, and a fitting leader for Cape Town. Unfortunately, she lacks a base in her new party, which expects her to be an order-taker. This will create tension, which she'll lose. Don't be surprised when she resigns, although I can't imagine where she'll go to.

9. Gedleyihlekisa Jacob Zuma wamSholozi kaNkandla (JZ).
There is something in the breakdown of the ANC's results to provide ammo to his rivals (see my ANC remarks above.) Also, the conduct of this election, with party leaders forgetting to register candidates, and branch level uprisings against the candidate selection process, and manipulation of the lists, and the open boycott by traditional supporters augur ill for his reelection hopes next year.

10. Fikile Mbalula (Bra Fiks).
He took time off from the Sports Ministry to play senior campaign manager for the ANC, and he came through. His career goes up from here.

11. The Dagga Party (DP).
The audacity of Dope!

South African Press Association in a war against arithmetic

And I quote:

"By 11.30am, the ANC had 11.9 million votes (63.31 percent) followed by the DA with 4.03 million (22.9 percent)...

There was a total voter turnout of 6 967 181 people." - Sapa

Let us pray

I’ve always had a problem with the word Islamist. We don’t speak of Christianists, or Judaists. People who believe in Islam are called Muslims. But it's rude to make sweepingly hostile remarks about Muslims, so we invented the word Islamist (which really just means Muslim) as a veil for anti-Muslim insults. After all, when’s the last time you heard the word Islamist deployed in a favourable context?

Here are sentences you'll never hear:

1. The President paid a visit to leaders of the local Islamist community.
2. Moderate Islamists called for restraint.
3. In a special address, His Holiness the Pope called for improved relations between Christians and Islamists.
4. Controversy followed proposals to open an Islamist preschool near Ground Zero.
5. In a day of fierce clashes, innocent Islamist civilians were set upon by Zionist settlers.

Wikipedia quotes a 2003 article in Middle East Quarterly:

In summation, the term Islamism enjoyed its first run, lasting from Voltaire to the First World War, as a synonym for Islam. Enlightened scholars and writers generally preferred it to Mohammedanism. Eventually both terms yielded to Islam, the Arabic name of the faith, and a word free of either pejorative or comparative associations. There was no need for any other term, until the rise of an ideological and political interpretation of Islam challenged scholars and commentators to come up with an alternative, to distinguish Islam as modern ideology from Islam as a faith

Sweet as it is, that rationale just begs the question as to why ideologues like George Bush and P.W Botha should not be called Christianists. Check Jy!?

Black Hawk Drowns

In the post-Christmas euphoria of that nice lady and the judge getting shot in Arizona, POTUS polled in the low 50's, and the pundits were over-the-moon (or rueful, depending) on his apparent unassailability. On the heels of His lame duck victories a regular (hence well-informed) reader of this blog was prompted to ask

Tax deal (yuck, but a success I guess), repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Zadroga bill for 9/11 workers, and the NewStart treaty all within a few weeks of POTUS being written off as useless ... will it go on?

As usual, the Truecents wet blanket was close at hand. In our SOTU note we remarked that

Last year saw the Republican's winning the battle of ideas, and consolidating their cooption of the Hope/Change strategy. The current political momentum is theirs to lose. I'm calling Barry at 47% on RCP (and a similar level on the rolling Gallup) by the end of March.

Today is March 31. The RCP average has Obama's approval rating at 47.2%. I say this as a prelude:

1. The downward drift confirms the oft-cited anomaly that people like Obama - except in his capacity as administrator. He did well at the New Year precisely because he wasn't doing anything, having handed over his legaslative agenda (DODT, Tax-Cut extentions) to Republicans. The bounce you saw then (as I may have pointed out at the time) was a reward for him faking not being himself. As soon as he'd get to act (which we'd predicted would have happened by the end of the first quarter) the kudos would be withdrawn.
2. I'm gonna stop calling the approval rating until closer to the election (i.e. not before 2012).
3. The Libyan misadventure has not been the fillip one would have expected. Remember, this poll was taken days AFTER Monday's over-hyped and belated casus belli.
4. The political momentum (remarkably!) stays with the GOP. In a weird sort of way (which I'll expound upon later, if I've not already done so) this is good for progressives. I mean real ones.

SOTU

I missed it.

In both SA and the USA I tend to ignore the SOTN/U address, as I've learnt that there usually is a chasm between its rhetoric and the ensuing action. The test is what the shape of WH policy will be. Surprisingly, the following two reviews - form opposite sides of the US political spectrum, are similarly guarded in their enthusiasm:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/politics/26assess.html?_r=1
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/258016/what-crisis-yuval-levin

My own take (on a speech that I haven't, and won't view/read) is that Krauthamer's early definition of the "Obama three-step" is being played out, except with faster-paced music. Krauthamer's version is that Obama:
1. Begins with a fiery denunciation of Bush (read Republicanism)
2. Trumpets minor deviations from the Bush/Republican script.
3. Quietly proceeds with acquiescence to the core rightist script.

So, e.g, last night's soaring defense of progressive spending policy comes only weeks after the expansion of the Bush tax cuts. The continued rhetoric about Health Care reform (included in last night's speech) masks the reality that there hasn't been any (ignoring, of course, the lobbyist-friendly expansion of health insurance). And so forth.

Obama appears to be riding high on Tucson, but this isn't as good as it looks because:
1. This is an Oklahomaesque tragedy, which has propelled his ratings only back to the 50% mark. A 4% jump. Clinton's post-McVie jump was 5% (I quote Gallup, unless) - off the same base as Obama's - which he gave up two months later.
2. Tucson happened during a politically quiet period, when there wasn't negative news (barring the old-hat low joblessness figures) to counterveil.
3. Tucson happened right after Obama gained kudos amongst independents, by extending the Bush tax cuts (no-child-left-behind and NewSTART were relative grace notes).
4. As the normal post-holiday political season gets underway, the goodwill drag will resume.

Last year saw the Republican's winning the battle of ideas, and consolidating their cooption of the Hope/Change strategy. The current political momentum is theirs to lose. I'm calling Barry at 47% on RCP (and a similar level on the rolling Gallup) by the end of March.