I agree with Gary Kamiya that the vast majority of HRC supporters will line up behind Obama once he is the nominee (although I think as penance for her divisiveness and grasping, Hillary should be made to campaign as tirelessly for Obama, from the convention to the election, as she has for herself), and that the key to the whole thing is working-class white males (and to a lesser extent WCW females). I don't agree that McCain is running as son of Bush--as someone else pointed out, he did that to gain the nomination but has now started running for the center. In order to flank, Obama must, must, must pick a Southern white male. (And he's got to have military experience, to counter the plausible charge that Obama is insufficiently versed in matters military). There is more to this than racism--I think that anyone who is so thoroughly racist that they wouldn't vote for a black man, wouldn't change his mind because a white guy is at the bottom of the ticket. However, WCWMs and Fs have a legitimate right to want someone who represents their interests and values on the ticket (various other identity groups--Hispanics, women, etc. etc. can also make this legitimate claim, but they are less important to a Democratic victory this November). An Obama-Webb ticket would reconstitute the New Deal coalition of urban intellectuals, blacks, and working-class whites (north and south) that put Democrats in the White House for 20 years.

The last Democratic ticket that didn't have a Southern male on it was Mondale/Ferraro in 1984. Think about it.

This matchup is like Reagan-Carter, in that one candidate doesn't have to do a whole lot more than ask, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" in order to make a compelling case. This candidate is not John McCain.

This matchup is like Reagan-Carter, in that one candidate doesn't have to do a whole lot more than ask, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" in order to make a compelling case. This candidate is not John McCain.

Taibbi asserts, of going undercover to mingle amongst evangelicals, "On some level, it's kind of a villainous endeavor. But I tried to be aware of that the entire time and not be condescending in the way I treated these particular people."

If the book exceprt that appeared as an article in a recent RS is any guide, he must not have tried very hard, or maybe he did and is so condescending by nature that it didn't work out. The article was one of the most mean-spirited, ordinary-folks-bashing I've read in a mainstream magazine.

Jared Diamond, not a China scholar (nor does he profess to be), is not particularly well regarded in the field. His thesis of "lack of competition between states as an engine of development" (which he attributes, in turn, to China's less fractal geography and less coastline) lacks explanatory power in that there were numerous times in Chinese history, often lasting a century or more, in which there was no centralized Chinese state and the region was host to conflicts between states. What's more, his thoughts on China are dashed off as an afterthought to the substance of his book, which is really about *Eurasia as a whole* developing more "advanced" cultures than the rest of the world.

Anyway, one of the leading scholars in the field is Kenneth Pommeranz, who in "The Great Divergence" subscirbes European ascendancy over Asia to the acquisition of material resources in the New World which enabled the Industrial Revolution. The IR then drove European merchants to seek new markets for their surplus, and said merchants were backed by the willingness of Euorpean states to open markets by force. The (not all that overwhelming, but substantive) advantages in military technology--especially naval technology--that the Industrial Revolution afforded Europe allowed them to do so. Once the markets were open opium acted as a literal narcotic upon the Chinese working classes, murdering productivity. China was thus forced to attempt to modernize while facing a major drug problem *and* draining its treasury to pay the indemnities it owed from the Opium Wars and other imperialist ventures.

Ironically, Europeans found the New World (which remember gave them the jump, development-wise on Asia in the first place) because they were looking for direct trade routes to Asia. Asians did not seek direct trade routes to Europe because there was nothing in Europe that any Asian governments deemed were worth mounting voyages of exploration for.

In any case, Western Asia (Europe)'s ascendancy over East Asia seems to have lasted all of 250 years, if that, and in my opinion now that China's resources are wedded to capitalist forms of production it is just a matter of time until East Asia is the world's dominant region.