Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - Posts
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In the last minute of his keynote address tonight, Mark Warner drew on a favorite ploy of Virginia politicians since time immemorial: He invoked a hackneyed Thomas Jefferson quote. Tonight, Warner chose this one: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
It’s an odd choice for a man whose keynote address was a glorified résumé of his victories as governor of Virginia, a term that has been on the books now for almost three years. If you chanced upon this keynote address in a vacuum, you could be forgiven for missing the fact that Warner is now running for the U.S. Senate. Maybe it’s because he’s expected to wallop his opponent, Jim Gilmore. But one can’t help get the feeling that Warner is lukewarm on his personal future in politics.
During his four years in Richmond, Warner fancied himself the CEO governor, forged by a career in business that made him fabulously rich and adept at running a government efficiently. This image worked well for him as governor. But it will make the transition to senator—a famously punishing one for people who like to be the boss—even more difficult than usual.
Warner has joked—painfully—about how Barack Obama stepped seamlessly into the role that Warner carved out for himself in the party. Now he faces, in the next six years, the infinite tedium of being a freshman senator among a crowded field of rising stars in the Democratic party. For someone with such high ambitions, we can only imagine that he indulges occasionally in a little history of the past.
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During Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic Convention, she tried to reintroduce herself to America. How well did she do? It depends on whether you watched MSNBC or Fox News Channel.
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DENVER—Native Denverites here are all too eager to offer tips to us flatlanders on how to survive on 17 percent less oxygen to the brain. "[M]any conventioneers are likely to notice a shortness of breath," cautions the Denver Post. "A few may suffer, for reasons researchers still don't quite understand, throbbing headaches. A fraction might get hit with what can feel like a no-booze hangover—headaches along with nausea and lethargy." (Others warn that the some-booze hangover is even worse; supposedly, rarefied air does a real number on one’s alcohol tolerance.)
The medical term for this is called cerebral hypoxia, and NIH advises us that "symptoms can include inattentiveness, poor judgment, and uncoordinated movement." So one can’t help but wonder: Will the mile-high altitudes of Denver make Obama supporters even crazier than usual?
Literature and psychology are of some guide here. In Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, protagonist Hans Castorp experiences some of this emotional bewilderment while holed up in a sanitorium high in the Alps. As quoted in this 1994 study on emotional contagion, Castorp thinks: "But when the heart palpitates by itself, without any reason, senselessly, of its own accord, so to speak, I feel that’s uncanny. … You keep trying to find an explanation for them, an emotion to account for them, a feeling of joy or pain, which would, so to speak, justify them."
Four decades later, psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer studied the conflux of physical arousal and emotions experimentally by injecting subjects with adrenaline. They found that those subjects who received the adrenaline were highly emotionally suggestible and would often interpret the physical arousal of the drug as a symptom of a heightened emotional state.
Subsequent studies have qualified and questioned Schachter and Singer’s results. More direct attempts to measure the effect of altitude on emotions have not found strong correlations; a 2005 study found that small groups of men exposed to simulated altitudes of up to 4,500 meters did not exhibit significantly different mental capacities compared with the control group. The FAA’s brochure on hypoxia (PDF), on the other hand, tells us that "some people in an oxygen deficient environment actually experience a sense of euphoria—a feeling of increased well-being." And a series of letters in the Financial Times recently pondered the possibility that flying at high altitudes makes one more likely to cry at cheesy movies. (This guy cried during The Game Plan, featuring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.)
Obamamania resists quantification, so it’s a bit hard to experimentally determine the effects of the thin air here. (Though my colleague Jim Ledbetter suggests a massive data-mining project to measure voting patterns as a function of altitude.) But in an election that could be decided by a hair, I don’t think John McCain should cede this advantage. It’s not too late for the RNC to relocate their convention to Albuquerque, N.M., elevation 5,300 feet. Plus, New Mexico’s a swing state.
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If Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people, the DNC is where it gets to meet its better looking half. A few of us (of the former type of Hollywood) were walking down Denver's 16th Street Mall when I spotted a familiar face. "That's Obama girl," I said. She looked the part, with black leather pants and a yellow top. But she wasn't dancing or lip syncing or flying or doing anything Obama girl is supposed to do. She was getting on the bus.
As a murmur spread, she looked embarrassed and hid her face. Something tells me this is the one city right now where Obama girl can't go outside without someone asking for an autograph.
How funny that people who spend all day coolly passing Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Franken in the halls can suddenly melt at the sight of Obama Girl.
Others seen mingling: Wendell Pierce, Zooey Deschanel, Harry Shearer, Spike Lee, and Toby Ziegler. They're easy to miss. Late Monday night, a Slatester rode in a cab with Rosario Dawson -- without even noticing it.
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