This is a short posting, just to make a note of some links that I have acquired, to things about Emmanuel Todd.  Microsoft is in the habit of shutting down my computer without warning, and I don’t want to have to go hunting for them again.

Here is a review of a new book about America called America 3.0 (which I already have on order from Amazon), by James Bennet and Michael Lotus.  This book includes some of Todd’s ideas about family structure by way of explaining why the America of the near future will be particularly well suited to the free-wheeling individualism of the next few years of economic history.

In this review, T Greer says:

I was delighted to find that much of this analysis rests of the work of the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd. I came across Mr. Todd’s work a few months ago, and concluded immediately that he is the most under-rated “big idea” thinker in the field of world history.

Spot on.

Greer also makes use of this map, which first appeared in this New York Times article:

Slowly, very slowly, Emmanuel Todd is starting to be noticed in the English speaking world.

I greatly enjoyed the documentary about Richard Feynman shown on BBC2 TV last night, having already greatly enjoyed the docu-drama about the Feynman Challenger investigation.

Last night’s documentary contained the following particularly choice piece of dialogue:

“Why is your van covered in Feynman Diagrams?”

“Because we’re the Feynmans.”

Good answer.

There is a picture of the Feynmans, next to their van, which I found here, where the picture is slightly bigger.

Does this van still exist, with all the Feynman Diagrams on it?  I hope so.

Here.

Via here.

That’s the headline, but really, all that the cats are doing is killing off a few endangered bird species.

I guess people get so used to saying that something is both destroying the planet and meanwhile killing a few endangered species, that if all that it’s really doing is killing a few endangered species, it must also be destroying the planet.

Madsen Pirie has a posting up about the Parisian origins of the Statue of Liberty, featuring one of my all time favourite photographs.  Which gives me an excuse to exhibit some snaps I took in Paris last February, of the Statue of Liberty.

There are two miniature Statues of Liberty in Paris.  Before visiting Paris I didn’t realise there were any, and since being in Paris until now, when I looked it up on the www, I hadn’t realised that Paris contained two.  There is a very small one in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and a less small one next to Grenelle Bridge, which is the one I went to see:

I still have tons more Paris photos to show off, but that’s a start.

This afternoon Antoine Clarke and I, all being well, will be having a recorded chat about the US presidential election.

[LATER: Here is the recording.  Not everything went well.  If my computer’s response is anything to go by, you will hear this through only one speaker, and in somewhat imperfect sound.  But nobody listens to BrianMicklethwaitDotCom sound files to be knocked out by their superb sound quality.  What we both say is audible, and the good news is that the file is far smaller than usual.  I hope that, if you listen, you enjoy it.  It lasts just under 45 minutes.]

Meanwhile, here is another attempt to embed a video here.  This time it’s John McCain, talking about just how badly Obama screwed up this Benghazi business.

That got shown on CBS.  How many people have watched it, or will watch it before the election, I have no idea.  The importance of this and all the other Obama scandals is not that they are scandalous, but whether or not large numbers of Americans are hearing about them.

I have been speculating that the “mainstream” media would maybe desert Obama.  Well, a few people in it are expressing doubts, but on the whole media bias has never been more blatant and brazen.  This is because Obama is, far more than any previous Democrat, their perfect candidate.  Hard left, and determined to inflict (in a thoroughly bad way) fundamental change on America.  I really want these media people to get the kicking of their lives.

Obama’s enemies are still trying to sort out whether they think Obama is merely crass by nature, or evil on purpose.  We may never know.  Successful people (and Obama has been very successful by most measurements) do what they are best at.

I cannot for the the life of me see how re-electing Obama could possibly be anything but a giant act of folly and self-destruction on the part of America.

The BBC, by the way, are still saying that this election is a dead heat.  Or this is what they said on the 9am news bulletin on Radio 3, just before CD Review last Saturday.  Others say Obama is going to get landslided.  I think landslide, but ... we shall see.

If the video isn’t working properly, please let me know.  Not that I will then know what to do, but it will influence my enthusiasm for further such attempts.

Well, well. I just added, to the posting below, this:

Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.

And mere hours later, I read this:

One way of avoiding this error is to look at the same poll over a long period of time.  The numbers themselves might be off, but as long as the same flawed methodology doesn’t change, you should still be able to pick up trends.

Indeed.

But he’s not even sure that Obama will lose, although he definitely inclines that way.  I incline that way more and more definitely with every day that passes.

And now, it seems I’m only one of a stampede.

Already, I am turning my mind to a piece about Romney, entitled something like: Okay, he’s going to win, but then what?

I now think Romney is going to win big.  Part of why I think that is captured in point 2 in that graphic, which I found here.  No one has to know.

In particular, the pollsters do not have to know.  I think the polls have, all along, been wrong about this election, wronger than ever before.  The polls are not being told what people have been, are, and will be thinking.  The polls were wrong when they said Obama was walking it.  They are wrong now that they are saying it’s close.  They will be wrong when they say Romney will just about win, as they soon will.  But on the day, in the real poll, Obama is going to be slaughtered.  Romney will win all the “battleground” states and several which are not now even thought to be in contention.

What polls tell you is not what the result will be.  They tell you what the pollsters think the result will be.  How do they know what they know?  Same way I do.  They guess.  (In this respect, poll results remind me of economic models.) Okay that isn’t entirely true.  I myself factor in what the polls say when I make my guesses.  But the polls are sufficiently wrong to be very wrong indeed, for an event that can be bent into a completely different shape by single figure percentage point errors.

[LATER: Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.  End of LATER.]

We shall see, etc.

Debate Two between Obama and Romney has now become about whether Obama can win by a knockout.  Maybe he can.  But, he won’t.

Romney’s final burst of adverts will have further impact.  Obama’s adverts have accomplished little.  They said Romney isn’t likable, is a right wing nutjob, etc.  Debate One negated this message.  They said something about “Big Bird”.  Ridiculous.  But that doesn’t prove that adverts accomplish nothing, by their nature.  Just as in the debates, and unlike Obama, Romney (and Ryan) have plenty of persuasive things that they want to say.

In a comment on this, I noted that the TV Umpire lady in the Vice President debate did Biden no favours by allowing him to behave so very badly.  Had she told him early on to stop his giggling and interrupting, Biden might well have won that debate.  But give TV Umpire lady her due, she did at least interrupt Ryan, whenever his speeches were starting to sound too eloquent.

But Romney’s adverts can correct that, by saying everything Team Romney now wants to say, and which the mainstream media have until now stopped them saying by less expensive means.  And, they can use the exact words which will work best.

Plus, Team Romney will have, I believe, another two debates worth of Obama waffle to use, like they have already used Biden’s laughing.

Like Jim Bennett said:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

If the same thing happens to Obama, between now and the election (I believe it will), he really will be slaughtered.

But … we shall see.

LATER: Mitt Romney in a landslide.

I stayed up, not so much to watch the Vice Presidential Debate, as to see what would be made of it by others, most especially the BBC.

The BBC’s lady with big blond hair said (a) that it was too close to call, but then (b) called if for Ryan.  Two reasons for making Ryan the winner.  One, Biden had to win, to get some momentum back for Obama.  A draw was enough for Ryan.  So Biden actually lost.  Two, Biden actually did lose, because of all his smirking and interrupting and condescending.  Biden did all that wrong.  Ryan did nothing wrong.  So, Ryan won.

The BBC agreed, in other words, with PJTV drunk blogger Steven Green, who also had Ryan winning.  It’s not a knockout, but it is a win.

My personal take?

At first I was rather impressed by Biden, but then I started to find his air of forced merriment unsuitable for the grim things he was arguing about.  I was glad to see that others thought that too and that it wasn’t just me.

Biden was the more obvious “performer”.  Which is not good.  He was the one trying to create an atmosphere, like an old school stage actor.  Ryan seemed more himself.  Which could just mean that Ryan is a better performer.

Because Ryan was defending while Biden attacked, it looked like Ryan was the actual Vice President, defending four defendable years of him being Vice President and Romney being President, rather than Romney and him being the challengers.  But that may have been because I had the sound switched off for quite a lot of it, while I read other stuff.

If you had seen those two faces in a thirties or fifties political movie, you’d have said Ryan was the young brainy lefty Democrat, while Biden was the old country club Republican President.  But old Republican President is not the persona you want for an attack.

As it was, Young Ryan was under pressure from both Old Biden and the big blond American TV lady.  Ryan kept his cool.  He proved himself a better guy than lots of those watching may have realised.  The general American opinion of Ryan will surely go up, even if only a bit.  He was under big pressure.  He did not buckle.  He was the one who proved he had the Right Stuff.

Here:

Mail Rail Fungus Tunnel Wins London High Line Competiton

But frankly, from then on it’s all downhill:

A winner has been chosen for a competition seeking new green ideas for London. Fletcher Priest Architects won the High Line competition, named after New York’s famous linear park, with a design that melds abandoned rail tunnels, glass fibre sculptures and a fungal garden.

“Pop Down” would reuse the old Mail Rail tunnels, 9 foot-wide tubes for the transport of mail, which run just north of Oxford Street and were mothballed a decade ago. The underground garden would be lit via fibre optic ducts up to the surface, where sculptural glass mushrooms would harvest light, allowing real fungi to grow down below. The concept of an underground park fed by surface light isn’t a new one, and resembles a slim down version of New York’s proposed Low Line.

I followed that New York link, and I must say it looks much better than the London idea, which is just a long dark tube you walk along.  Fibre glass sculpture and fungal gardens don’t disguise what’s really happening.

The point is, most Art galleries are quite nice places, sometimes spectacularly so.  They would be pleasing to visit and to chat in, even if there was no Art present at all.  I mean, you can just as easily stare at the fire extinguishers, if you really, really want some Art but there isn’t any.  Fire extinguishers are often at least as good as Art, if you want something to stare at, to save having to make eye contact with your companion when they say something particularly stupid or threatening.  But a big long narrow tunnel is a crap place to walk along, and stuffing bits of Art in it isn’t going to change that.

I participated in an interesting exchange today at Samizdata, on the subject of this posting, about why I support the Tea Party.  But the exchange came towards the end of a longish, and nearly dead now, comment thread, so few will read it, and I at least want to remember what was said.

“bradley 13”:

I disagree with this article for one main reason: the Tea Party has been nearly entirely co-opted by the social conservatives. The small-government folks seem to accept this as a necessary compromise, without realizing that they have lost control of the movement.

If you took a poll of people identifying themselves with the Tea Party, you would find that religious issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.)) are more important than government spending.  From an article from 2011: “Tea Party supporters … are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues.” (Emphasis mine)

Farther down in the same article: 42% of Tea Party supporters agree with the conservative Christian movement, while 11% disagree. The remainder are somewhere in the middle, but the dominance is clear.

The Tea Party was a great idea, until the religious zealots got ahold of it ...

My response:

bradley 13

Some of what you say is obvious and not bad news at all.  None of what you say is definitely bad news.

Much depends, in surveys, on what questions are asked.

It’s obvious that Tea Party Christians get their social issue opinions from their Christianity.  Who has ever doubted it?  This does not prove that they will use the Tea Party primarily to spread or to enforce these Christian views to or upon others.

Even the claim that they take social issues more seriously than government spending, though suggestive of what you are arguing, does not prove it.

If any question had asked: What do you think the Tea Party is for?  Cutting government spending?  Or: propagating (or even enforcing) Christian values?  Then, the answers would be interesting, and very troubling if the Christians mostly said: For propagating and enforcing Christian values.  The government spending stuff is just something we say, in order to spread Christianity.

But a quick read of the piece you link to tells me that no such question was asked, or if it was, the answers was not reported.  What this survey seems to be about is what else Tea Partiers tend to believe, besides believing in the Tea Party.  Nothing in it surprised me, or lowered, or even altered, my opinion of the Tea Party.

By the way, not only am I a libertarian, I am also a strong atheist.  I think Christianity is not just untrue.  I think that Christian beliefs about such things as the virgin birth and the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ are downright daft.  If I thought that the Tea Party was either founded to create a Christian theocracy or if I ever think in the future that it has degenerated into such an enterprise (as it certainly might), I would not merely stop supporting it, I would, for whatever difference it would make, oppose it.  Meanwhile, what seems to unite Tea Partiers now is, see my posting, the belief that the US government does too much, spends too much and borrows too much, and making that idea stick is what the Tea Party is for.  Nothing in this survey says otherwise.

I agree that Christians loom very large in the Tea Party, but Christianity is not the Tea Party’s publicly agreed purpose.  As of now, I remain optimistic that whereas most Tea Partiers seem to be Christians, and as such profoundly influenced in what they think by their Christianity, these Christians do not think that the purpose of the Tea Party is to spread Christianity, and that the government spending stuff is just a front.

If your response to that is: well, of course they wouldn’t say that.  My response to that would be that nothing is this survey settles that particularly argument about what these Christians are trying to accomplish one way or the other.  Are you aware of any other evidence that Christian Tea Partiers are actually engaged in a huge deception of this sort?  I am not, but that proves very little.  What I do know is that your link does not supply such evidence.

An analogy.  The libertarian movement seems to consist largely of men.  (It’s certainly that way in London.) But this absolutely does not mean that the libertarian movement’s purpose is to spread the idea of male domination of the world generally.  To say that “libertarianism has been taken over by men” is sort of true, in the sense that it is indeed mostly men.  But as an attempt to describe what the men in the libertarian movement are really trying to accomplish, such an observation would be seriously misleading.

As yet there has been no reply, and probably there won’t be.  That’s not itself any sort of argument.  Just because you had the last word, if you did, that doesn’t mean you won.  Merely that communication ceased.

More to the point, if there is any news or evidence that Tea Party Christians are indeed trying the old Popular Front routine rather than supporting the public agenda of the Tea Party in good faith, I would very much like to learn about it.

Well, I near enough hit the nail on the head with my previous prophecy about the Obama v Romney debates, certainly as far as Debate One was concerned.  Deep thanks, again, to Natalie for telling the world.  (We’ve yet to see if I am right that Romney will win the whole thing, which is what my posting is really about - the debates were only part of it, but I am more than ever optimistic about that.)

I said Romney would surprise many with his debating excellence, and that Obama would have no answers.  Debate one went exactly like that.

At first, everyone said: Who saw that coming?  I did!

Then they said: That was actually very predictable!  So, why didn’t they predict it?  I did!

Let me now throw all my winnings back on the table and hazard some more predictions on the same subject.  Romney has a 1-0 debate lead.  I now expect the final result to be 3-0.

In response to the claim that Obama is arrogant, lazy, uninvolved, and behaved in Debate One as if he had only to show up to win - in other words to the accusation that he did not show up - Obama will not so much lose his cool as set it to one side.  He will argue “passionately” that he must be allowed to finish the job he has started, in other words he will turn up the frenzy nob.  He won’t say that what he wants to do is finish off America as most Americans know it and love it, but by the time Romney has explained it back at him, that’s how it will sound.  That will be the story of Debate Two.

Debate Three, one way another will be an even greater catastrophe for Obama.  He will either go completely berserk, i.e. dial the frenzy nob up even higher, perhaps even to the point of melt-down or just give up, or maybe a bit of both.  By the end of Debate Three, he will not just be (pardon the racism) toast.  He will be obvious toast.  And then he will really be in trouble.

The Mainstream Media are already turning against Obama, as I predicted in that Samizdata meltdown piece already linked to above.  This will not improve his mood one little bit.

But it’s not a stampede yet, nothing like.  As of now, their story is mostly that Obama failed to present Obama-ism properly, and most are already saying that next time, he’ll be back, and will present it brilliantly in Debates Two and Three.

Apparently Reagan got a bit of a pasting in his first re-election debate with whoever it was.  And he then stormed back in the later debates.  Obama will do the same, say those still backing him.

But Obama-ism is a crock, see the graphic, which Instapundit found here.  I hasn’t worked, it won’t work and it can’t work.  Obama’s problem is that while he can perform all he likes, he has now, just as in Debate One, nothing persuasive to say.  (As many are now pointing out, the only thing Obama has done for the last two years has been to perform.)

As the above few links illustrate, I am not the only one saying this kind of thing, to put it mildly.  But, for what it may be worth, I am now saying it.

It really doesn’t help Obama that his foreign policy has now blown up in his face.  This was an area of strength for Obama, because he at least wants to reduce American assertiveness in foreign parts.  So he says, anyway.  America wants this too, so far as I can tell.  (So, I rather think, do I.) The Repubs don’t even pretend to believe this.  But now, foreign policy isn’t a story that Obama will find it easy to talk about either.

Oh, and whereas the Rise of Obama was paid for by Arabs, the re-election of Obama is being financed by the Chinese.  As the US Mainstream Media desert the Sinking Ship Obama and start trying to suck up to About-To-Be-President Romney, these sorts of stories may get a bit of serious notice, and sink SS Obama some more.  That will only add to the impression that Obama’s foreign policy is for foreigners, rather than for Americans.

I am a godless supporter of gay marriage, but I do love this, not just because it says Don’t Vote Obama, but because it says it so eloquently.  He is such a great speaker.

Proof that eloquent speaking straight to camera is more than good enough for the YouTube age.

Thanks, yet again, to Instapundit.

I told you (in the Romney’s Going To Win Big posting below) that they’d break ranks:

In my opinion Pat Caddell suggests a golden age of mainstream media non-bias that never really existed.  But nevertheless, interesting.

I found this here, via here.  I am not that clever at embedding video, so apologies if this starts out all over the place.  Please tell me if, at your end, it still is.

I hope this goes viral.

On the other hand, there’s this:

“Obama’s fighting for his life, his party is fighting for their life, and they’re winning. This is, I’ve said all along, this is Romney’s election to lose and by God he’s losing,” Caddell said.

Well, I think Romney is already winning, but I can’t believe he won’t come out of his corner and land a few big blows, come debates time, but maybe he won’t.  Like I say, we’ll see.

If I were a betting man, which I am not (or only in the form of blog postings like this one), I would bet that Obama is not just going to lose his forthcoming election, but lose it big.  I am not that confident about what follows, which is why it goes here rather than here).  It may be wishful thinking, but it is what I have been thinking, and I wanted to get it written down, so that later I can’t strengthen it in my mind if I am right, or blur it if I am wrong.

This guy also thinks this, as do others I have read saying it but have now forgotten the names of.

Of my immediate circle, Michael J has already commented, here, to the effect that he now sees no evidence of a landslide, and that Romney will probably win, but small.  What do others of the sort inclined ever to comment at this tiny little ticking-over personal blog think about this?

My reasons are, in no particular order (this is only a tiny little ticking-over personal blog):

The polls are bent towards Obama, by Democrat intimidation.  The Dems calculate that if they can persuade Repubs that Romney will lose, some Repubs will say what’s the use? - and stay home.  Voters love a winner and are less likely to vote for a loser, or so I keep being told.  No doubt this will diminish the Repub vote a bit, but not enough to make the polls an entirely self-fulfilling prophesy.  They are still several percentage points out.

The polls are also out by personal inclination.  Most of the people who work for these operations are Dems, because Dems are obsessed with politics, Repubs less so.  Repub kids get proper jobs like lawn mowing or pool cleaning, or if grown-up, they get actual proper jobs doing regular round-the year stuff for serious money, and if not that is what they are trying to do.  These Dem pollsters hear, even if they genuinely try not to, what they want to hear, not least because people tell them what people think they want to hear.

Polls have, in general, been getting ever more inaccurate, as people learn that they can say whatever they hell they like to pollsters, most definitely including nothing.  Even the ones sincerely determined to resist pro-Dem bias are still biased thus, somewhat.

In particular, this time around, people still don’t know how to answer the accusation that being anti-Obama is racist.  Which is why the Dems keep on using this accusation.  People know it isn’t so, but are unpractised at making the necessary subtle distinctions.  So, to avoid some presumably pro-Obama person even thinking they are racist, they either lie, or fluff, rather than speak their minds.

All of these polling distortion effects are quite slight, but each is enough to ruin a process where one or two per cent can make all the difference.  But, crucially, almost all these effects now point in the same direction.  That’s a big effect.  I think the polls will be more wrong this time around than ever before.

The economy is not good, and Obama has no story about how to improve it.

In particular, the economy is horrible for young educated people, the ones who voted for Obama in their millions last time around.  These people are pissed off, big time.  Quite a lot will blame Obama, and will stay at home.  Some, under the influence of cool libbo Ron Paul memes, may even switch to Romney.  Many are ashamed of how they voted for Obama with such enthusiasm last time, and are not telling the pollsters about this.  (See above: the polls are very wrong.)

Obama is pissing all over the Jews.  This never works.

The bias of the mainstream media is becoming more obvious now, to a lot of American people.  Last time, media bias went with the grain of American opinion, and the media have thus had eight uninterrupted years to degenerate into blatant propaganda operations, and the internet has had eight years to tell everyone that this is so.  More than ever before, media bias is now believed in .  Again, a matter of degree.  But like I say, these degrees all add up.  In particular, more now distrust those predictions of Obama victory, and will accordingly refuse to be influenced by them into not bothering to vote.

Romney is not nearly as big a jerk as a lot of disappointed Libbos and Conservatives seem to think, or as Dems hope.  He keeps on winning.  I think he will do much better in the debates than most others seem to, because he has a story to tell, to and about an opponent who does not.  Romney is indeed not a genius debater, but he knows it, and knowing also that he is winning, he will prepare hard and go in with exactly the right amount of and kind of confidence, like a winning sportsman.  He will surprise many by how well he does.

Meanwhile Obama, surrounded by yes men, and fatally arrogant, and tired, a fed-up and probably knowing he is going to lose, and having nothing to say, will not prepare well enough for the debates.  He faces a near-impossible task, and will not be up to it.

The Dinesh D’Souza movie is hurting Obama, as will stuff like this (Arab money and support to pay for Obama’s career).  Americans are now ready to be told what sort of man Obama really is, this time around.  First time around, they just voted for the cool black guy, on the grounds that it was damn well time America had itself a cool black guy as President.  This time, policies and opinions will count, along with the (very bad) record of the last four years.  Obama’s policies and opinions are hurting and will continue to hurt him.

Romney is a cunning bastard politician.  His campaign will not only consist of the damaging things about Obama that he himself says.  He probably will stay fairly positive.  But the negative stuff will get out there, like that Arab money thing.

Romney now has a ton more money than Obama has.  Obama has spent most of his trying, and failing, to stay in the race.  Romney is about to spend similar quantities drawing ahead.

At some point between now and the election, some who now want Obama to win and are still propagandising for him will realise that he will not win, and will say why, if only to keep their own credibility in place, a bit.  They will want, as the saying goes, to keep (some of) their powder dry, in order to (e.g.) trash President Romney and all his works.  Obama will respond to these betrayals not with a spirited public rebuttal, but with a resigned shrug, which also will not look good.  (A public meltdown is probably too much to hope for, but I hope for it nevertheless.) How pronounced this effect will be is very debatable.  Maybe very obvious, maybe almost undetectable, but it will, to some degree happen. Already, to a tiny degree, it is happening.

Well, that’s enough to be going on with.  I just wanted to place my little bet, so that if it turns out right I can say: I told you so.  But much of the above is guesswork, so, Americans (especially Americans but also all others), please feel free to tell me I am wrong.

And then, we’ll see.

None of the above says that I think that this is the most important political battle in the world right now.  Its only major importance would be if Obama were to win.  But when (I think) Romney wins, the big questions will remain.  How bad are things going to get?  How unbadly can President Romney be persuaded to handle them?

For me, the big hero of all this is absolutely not Romney, or even Paul Ryan.  It is the collective hero that is the Tea Party.