As widely expected given the recent downturn in New Zealand’s economy, voters there ousted Helen Clark and her left-of centre Labour government after three terms in office by electing John Key and the conservative National Party. The National Party won 45.5% of the vote to Labour’s 33.8%. National will have 59 seats in the 122-seat parliament and Key has secured support from ACT New Zealand and United Future to govern.

ACT won 3.7% of the vote and will have five members in parliament, including Roger Douglas, 70, who was finance minister in the 1984-1990 Labour government. Together with United, the National Party will have a governing bloc of 65 seats. Labour will have 43 seats, and with the Green Party and the Progressives will form a 52-seat opposition bloc. The non-aligned Maori Party won five seats. Mr. Key said he will hold talks with Maori Party leaders and may include them in his government.

Helen Clark resigned as leader of the Labour Party but will remain in the back benches. She had a formidable run as a left-leaning PM and will be missed on the world stage.

More from the UK Guardian.

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Okay, so he’s not the President of my dreams but as I’ve noted before he’s an improvement on the current occupant and I remain cautiously optimistic. Sure, he’s bound to disappoint then and again but he’s also bound to please and delight. I think Paul Krugman may be onto something, if I read his column on Friday correctly, let’s prod the President-elect in a progressive direction. We may win more often than naught. It’s worth a try and at least we stand a chance. At any rate, here’s a delight via the Washington Post:

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

“The kind of regulations they are looking at” are those imposed by Bush for “overtly political” reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration’s Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama’s team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush’s appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.

This is a good start and frankly wonderful to have a President who isn’t a science-skeptic. Let’s be thankful and give praise when praise is due. Seeing the word liberal attached to Obama in any way, shape or form is cause for celebration.

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Anne Marie Cox of The Daily Beast has an interview with Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manager, that is well worth a read.

Some clips:

“The party in the Northeast is all but extinct; the party on the West Coast is all but extinct…there has to be a message and a vision that is compelling to people in order for them to come back and to give consideration to the Republican Party again.”

Vermont never voted for a Democrat until 1964. It wouldn’t do so again until 1992. After DC and Hawaii, Vermont gave Obama his widest margin. With the defeat of Chris Shays in Connecticut, there are no Republicans in the House from New England. Of 12 New England Senators, only three are Republicans. In the past, New England sent Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge (father and son), Margaret Chase Smith, Edward Brooke, Jim Jeffords, John Chafee, Lincoln Chafee, Warren Rudman, Robert Stafford, Leverett Saltonstall, William Cohen and Lowell Weicker. This wing of the GOP is all but extinct.

“The Republican Party wants to, needs to, be able to represent, you know, not only conservatives, but centrists as well. And the party that controls the center is the party that controls the American electorate.”

I would hope that Governor Charlie Crist is the future of the GOP but I fear it is Governor Bobby Jindal. At least Jindal has a reputation for competence. But what if it is Newt Gingrinch or Mike Huckabee?

If you look at the returns from the southwestern and mountain west states, with rising Latino populations, it’s clear that Latinos are repudiating the party, their anger about the tone of the immigration debate, and the party has to figure out a way to communicate that wanting to have a secure and sovereign southern border and respect for Latinos are not mutually exclusive. But if the party does not figure out a way to appeal to Latino voters, it will become increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to ever again win a national election.

Yup. Thank Tom Tancredo for me.

When you look at the campaign, one of the results of this campaign is the reality that public financing is dead. And the Obama campaign changed the scale of American politics by their fundraising operation, and their use of technology. Each party develops techniques, usually when they’re out of power, for the purpose of gaining power on the next election—need being the mother of all inventions. You saw Republicans pioneer direct mail in an earlier age. You saw, you know, the use of television advertising pioneered in an earlier age. You saw microtargeting—you know, the overlaying of consumer and consumer data against the voter file, earlier in the decade, to much effect. There’s been a profound leap forward in technology and from a community organizing perspective by the Obama campaign in this election. The Democratic Party is a generation ahead technologically. And the Republican Party is going to have to be competitive to catch up in a world where viral information is just as important as what might be in the network news.

Pretty evident that first question any future candidate for President will be can I raise $750 million. I shudder to think the ungodly sums that will be expended.

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Here are a few articles to ponder President-elect Obama’s “leftist” credentials, if any.

Why America Will Not Turn to the Left
By Paul Harris in the UK Guardian.

Sometimes the most telling moments of a campaign come in the forgotten details. Back in January Obama met editors from a Nevada newspaper, the Reno Gazette-Journal. Obama surprised them by praising former President Ronald Reagan, not for his policies but for his ability to change America. ‘He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,’ Obama said. The comments caused a brief kerfuffle. Hillary Clinton attacked Obama as praising Reagan’s right-wing legacy. Then it faded from view.

Until now. In the wake of his election win last week, those remarks can be seen in a new light. Many Democrats are hoping that Obama can be a left-wing version of Reagan. He can change America for a generation. Reaganism, after all, dominated American political life from 1980 to last week. Every politician after him, including Bill Clinton, had to run on the pro-business, tax-cutting, hawkish, anti-government playing field that Reagan created. Now many liberals say Obama has the mandate to do the same thing. But in reverse. ‘There is a lot of talk in Washington about the end of the Reagan era,’ said John Fortier, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Obama has built a huge and viable coalition of support. It is made up of college-educated whites, blacks and Hispanics and of young voters. It has propelled the party to pick up swing states such as Ohio, Iowa and Florida. It has turned once red states such as Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina into blue states. It has seen big gains in both houses of Congress, giving Obama control over government. ‘Clearly he has a mandate. The power is there. The question now is when he talks about bringing change, what does he mean?’ said David Frum, a leading Republican and former aide to President George W Bush.

Obama: Radical Moderate
By Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times.

The first order of business for Mr Obama is to figure out why he did so much better among this centre-right electorate than his predecessors did. He won among Catholics, who had begun giving Republican candidates majorities in the early 1990s. His 11-point victory in Pennsylvania was built around wooing moderate Republicans in metropolitan Philadelphia. He won several states in the south because white people liked him better than John Kerry or Al Gore.

But we should not exaggerate. Mr Obama’s appeal is not universal. Only 10 per cent of Democrats voted for Mr McCain and only 9 per cent of Republicans voted for Mr Obama. Mr Obama won this election in the centre and without centrist voters his great mandate will collapse like a house of cards. His position is structurally similar to the one Ronald Reagan faced in 1980. Reagan’s political challenge was to separate sympathisers outside his party (such as trade unionists, who were to be protected and wooed) from irreconcilables (such as public-service unionists, who were to be confronted and, if necessary, destroyed). Reagan built his presidency on Reagan Democrats, not on rural anti-abortion activists. His invocations of Franklin Roosevelt as a model were almost constant.

Mr Obama’s tribute to Abraham Lincoln at his victory speech in Chicago should be understood as a similar invitation: “Let’s remember,” Mr Obama said, “that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.”

75 Years Later, a Nation Hopes for Another F.D.R.
By Joe Nocera in the New York Times.

“We are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime, and we’re going to have to act swiftly to resolve it.”

So said Barack Obama on Friday in his first postelection news conference, a pretty good sign that the president-elect had been brushing up on his presidential history. Seventy-five years ago, the last time the country was this close to economic abyss, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous inaugural, the one where he uttered those immortal words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But as a Newsweek columnist, Jonathan Alter, who wrote “The Defining Moment,” a book about Roosevelt’s first election and early presidency, pointed out to me the other day, that great line was buried in most news stories about the speech. Stories focused instead on another phrase F.D.R. used: “action, and action now.” In 1933, after three years of incompetence from the administration of Herbert Hoover, that is what Americans most yearned to hear. And on Friday, when Mr. Obama vowed, within the first five minutes of his remarks, to “act swiftly,” he too was offering the same message to a country every bit as receptive.

I’m thinking we got Grover Cleveland really. Granted that does beat Benjamin Harrison. Still, I’d take Chester Arthur in a heartbeat. Not quite sure if there is a modern-day Chester Arthur though. I’d compare Bush to Buchanan, Grant, Hayes or Harding but I don’t like to disparage the deceased. Still, it’s fair to say we are living through another not-so golden Gilded Age if measures of income inequality are any indication. If President Obama reverses this even if slightly, I will sing his praises. If he utters the phrase “poverty is a moral imperative,” I will listen and cheer. He did perk my ears with his “spread the wealth” comments. More of that and I’ll be clapping regularly.

Obama, Be Progressive!
By David Sirota writing for Salon.

These are heady times for the party of Jefferson, Roosevelt and Obama. Only a few years ago, Democrats were almost relegated to permanent minority status by a Mission Accomplished sign and a flight suit. But since President Bush’s 2004 reelection, they gained at least 50 House seats, 12 Senate seats, seven state legislatures and seven governorships. As Republicans used “socialism” attacks to make the election a referendum on conservatism, Democrats also registered their biggest presidential triumph since 1964.

So, while the president-elect talks of forming a bipartisan Cabinet, his victory wasn’t the public’s cry for milquetoast government by blue-ribbon commission. As Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change says, Obama’s win was an ideological mandate presenting “an opening for transformational, progressive change.”

A six point win, while broader than the previous two cycles, is not a landslide. Is it a mandate? Perhaps but to suggest that it is a mandate for a progressive agenda is foolhardy. Not from a candidate who moved away from universal health care or who sided with the GOP on FISA. Let us not deceive ourselves. Obama is an improvement on the current occupant but is he the sum of all our progressive dreams? I don’t think so. Nor do I think that we as progressives have made the case for a progressive America clear to the American people. We need to do better in marketing our ideas.

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Apparently, the President-elect’s great-great-great-great grandfather was Irish. From the BBC.

Barack Obama’s Irish roots have been strengthened, with the discovery that a distant ancestor was a Dublin wigmaker.

Genealogists now believe the US presidential hopeful is descended from an 18th-Century Dublin businessman.

Previous records found Mr Obama’s fourth great-grandfather was a shoemaker in the midlands village of Moneygall, whose son Fulmuth Kearney left for the US in 1850.

Well he has certainly has had the luck of the Irish, hasn’t he?

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Some 43,000 people are still living in slavery across the West African country of Niger. They are born into an established slave class and labour for their masters without pay. Not surprising, the majority of these slaves are women. Slaves are inherited, given as gifts, and sometimes have their children taken away from them. In April 2008, Hadijatou Mani, a former slave, took the state of Niger to court for failing to implement its own laws against slavery. From the Times of London:

For ten years, Ms Mani was forced to carry out unpaid domestic and agricultural work, and was later abused as a sexual slave by her owner, who had four wives and seven other such slaves, or “sadaka”. When Niger outlawed slavery, Ms Mani was released officially and given a “liberation certificate”. Her “master” refused to let her go, claiming that she was his wife, but a local tribunal allowed her to leave.

However, when she married another man, she was found guilty of bigamy and was forced to spend three months in jail.

Ms Mani, who is thought to be 24, is the first former slave to bring an action against a state. In the past, members of slave castes in countries such as India have mounted legal challenges against individuals or former employers.

Ten days ago, the court found in her favour and ordered the government of Niger to pay Ms Mani 10m CFA francs (£12,430; $19,750). It’s a landmark ruling though slavery persists throughout West Africa. In Niger, it is estimated that about 8% of the population endures slavery. In Mauritania, the figure rises to 18%.

More from the BBC and Anti-Slavery International.

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Senator Obama, now the US president-elect, promised to end the war in Iraq if he was elected. Indeed, Senator Obama highlighted his opposition to the war throughout the campaign. In 2007 when Iraq was still front and center in the minds of most Americans with a visible war raging, it can be argued that his opposition to the war propelled him to the top-tier of Democratic candidates allowing Obama to clearly differentiate himself from Senators Clinton, Edwards and Biden. While Iraq as an issue faded as the surge has seemingly worked, the issue of how to proceed on Iraq remains a critical one.

This episode of Al Jazeera’s Inside Iraq asks if he will live up to his campaign promise once in power.

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‘A healthy automobile manufacturing sector is essential to the restoration of financial market stability, the overall health of our economy, and the livelihood of the automobile sector’s work force. The economic downturn and the crisis in our financial markets further imperiled our domestic automobile industry and its work force.” — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson

Call me a socialist if you want and I’ll take no umbrage in that but with calls by leading Democrats in the Congress to provide an unspecified amount of financial assistance to the US auto industry which is in the midst of a long-term downturn that has in the past few months plunged off a cliff, it is time that the United States consider what most advanced societies from Sweden to Japan, from Portugal to Brazil, from South Korea to Singapore and from Austria to Denmark among many others already have — a national industrial policy.

The plight of the US auto industry is stunning. In 2008, the US auto industry has shed some 97,000 jobs and GM is burning through cash at a clip of a billion a month. October was 28th consecutive month of job losses in the nation’s factory sector with the auto manufacturing and parts sub-sector leading the way. That the industry is in this position is no doubt of its own making but to allow the industry to fail might set a far-reaching economic spiral that could plunge the country deeper into a recession if not depression. Consider what a study from the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan has to say:

If all three Detroit manufacturers were to cease operations, the U.S. economy would lose 2.95 million direct and indirect jobs in the first year. Governments would lose at least US$156.4-billion in taxes over the first three years.

If Detroit cut output and employment by 50% to meet ever-shrinking market share, which would mean contraction by two of the automakers, 2.46 million jobs would be lost initially. Governments would lose US$108-billion in revenue over three years, according to the analysis.

A National Industrial Policy isn’t socialism, it’s prudent economic planning. It involves identifying critical sectors of the economic and fostering their development. At its core should be the energy sector and the investment in the sector should be a mix of private and public funds. Brazil in the 1970s chose to develop a core competency in bio-fuels (sugar ethanol). Last month, the Brazilian bio-fuel sector became the largest in the world surpassing that of the United States. The Brazilian ethanol industry generates one million direct jobs and up to six million indirect jobs. Denmark began investing in wind energy technology just 25 years. The Danish wind turbine industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in Denmark, according to figures from the Danish Wind Industry Association. Today 21,000 people are employed in development, production and exports in wind turbine technology in Denmark, compared to 8,500 ten years ago. Danish wind turbine manufacturers collectively have a 40% share of the global market. These are but two examples of direct government investment and protection of nascent industrial sectors.

In the US, we have allowed market forces to solely dictate investment. That process may have served us well in the past but it clearly no longer does. Hence in an era of cheap oil, we have failed to do what Brazil and Denmark have done and what Portugal is doing with wave energy. It’s time for a national industrial policy that ensures high-paying factory jobs here at home. I am generally a free trader but the time has come to choose between cheap Asian electronic goods and high-paying jobs at home. We can’t have both. I’ll take the high-paying jobs at home.

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