Updated: Videos of the debates and the votes

While most British commentators and politicians across the spectrum have ridiculed the shadow home secretary decision to resign over the Labour government’s aims at extending detention without trial to 42 days, most British people in newspapers and BBC forums seem surprised and delighted at David Davis decision to resign over the issue. Who is short term then? Are the British people who support David Davis practicing short-termism over an issue that is unlikely to be changed with his resignation? Are the journalists right in arguing that by resigning, David Davis has completely lost his chance to be the home secretary (or home affairs ministers in s’pore terminology) and thus remove the opportunity to remove the detention? Or did Mr. Davis feel that when the Conservatives win power (it is their election to lose), the issue might not be revisited anyway so why not force the issue early on?

Will the lack of support of David Davis fuel the cynical beliefs of voters that politicians are simply out to win elections? Was his decision a foolhardy one created to force the hand of his Conservative leader, David Cameron, to recognize the importance of civil liberties as well to force Labour to contest in its constituency ?

P.S. There are rare moments of support of David Davis by political pundits, but they are few and far between.

P.S.S. See his speech outside the House of Commons announcing his resignation. He looks extremely frustrated…at something.

“I will be not taking any decision tonight” - Senator Hillary Clinton

The end of the road is clear for Hillary Clinton tonight as Barack Obama clinches the nomination for the Democratic Party with delegates in South Dakota (which Hillary Clinton won) bringing him over the threshold.

Hillary Clinton reflects on her campaign on her speech tonight, focusing on the voters, and her pet issue universal health care. She invited supporters to go to her website and advise her what she should be doing. She did not concede the election, resulting in some MSNBC analysts arguing that she is positioning herself to be a VP candidate in exchange for an endorsement for Obama (and conceding the race).

Hillary still could win if superdelegates decides to switch from Obama to Clinton (as a dozen or more have done from Clinton to Obama) but chances are small.

Her tenacity in this election, admist a less than friendly press, sexism and repeated calls for her to quit the race is admirable. Her enormous grasp on policy issues, and her focus on health care should give the other two candidates food for thought. Her ability to come back time and time again in Ohio, Penn, Texas, Indiana, Puerto Rico and South Dakota helped focus the Democratic message to the voters. She has made in easier for women to run for the President the next time round.

How would Clinton 18 million supporters vote in the General Election. With John McCain and his surrogates praising Hillary Clinton left and right, right and more right (pardon my strong pun), would voters who switch from Hillary to McCain? Can Obama win the general election for the Democratic Party?

Quote of the Day in Chee Versus Lee & Lee as reported in Todayonline:

Another question from Dr Chee [to Mr. Lee Kuan Yew]: Isn’t it presumptuous that “without this entire government, we would not be here” when in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea “people thrive without you and your system”?

I found a website for all of Liang Qichao’s writings in Chinese. Pretty Cool for anybody interested in one of the key intellectuals during the 1890s reform era till the early Republican years in China.

http://www.yifan.net/yihe/novels/classic/lqcwj/lqc.html

Quote of the Day:

民族自由与否，大半原于政治，故此二者其界限常相混。

- 梁启超在论自由（1902年5月8日、22日）

Whether a nationality (or people) are free, largely depends on Politics (or Politicking), thus it is
no wonder that these two elements' boundaries are often blurred. 

- Liang Qichao on "Discussing Freedom" (May 8th, 22 1902)

Will John McCain choose the unexpected candidate in terms of Bobby Jindal? Will an Indian-America shatter the glass ceiling in American politics by becoming John McCain’s running mate?

Bobby Jindal was awarded one of the most influential people of 2007 by Times Magazine

Newsweek was speculating this decision a while ago!

McCain Hopes to Fill Ticket, 3 people steps up

Hillary speaks after her Kentucky Win

“She’s likeable enough” - Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton

“How do we beat the bitch?” - Someone asking John McCain at a campaign event

Excellent article in the NY Times on sexism in  this rancorous Democratic primary- I wonder if Singapore will ever see a women Prime Minister or a non-Chinese PM?

Gender Issue Lives On as Clinton’s Hopes Dim

By JODI KANTOR

With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt — or a cheerful, no-nonsense pantsuit.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in what most agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running “to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in American life, and now the presidency — even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim — seems out of reach.

Along with the usual post-mortems about strategy, message and money, Mrs. Clinton’s all-but-certain defeat brings with it a reckoning about what her run represents for women: a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high office in the first place.

The answers have immediate political implications. If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination, how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?

“Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Columbus, Ohio, and a Clinton supporter. “Sexism has played a really big role in the race.”

Not everyone agrees. “When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is faltering, she added, because of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement — “somebody’s wife,” as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her.

Still, many credit Mrs. Clinton with laying down a new marker for what a woman can accomplish in a campaign — raising over $170 million, frequently winning more favorable reviews on debate performances than her male rivals, rallying older women, and persuading white male voters who were never expected to support her.

“She’s raised this whole woman candidate thing to a whole different level than when I ran,” said Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter and the first woman to be the vice-presidential nominee of a major party, contrasting her own brief stint as a running mate in 1984 with Mrs. Clinton’s 17-month-and-counting slog.

Ms. Goodwin and others say Mrs. Clinton was able to convert the sexism she faced on the trail into votes and donations, extending the life of a candidacy that suffered a serious blow at the Iowa caucuses. Like so many women before, she was heckled (in New Hampshire, a few men told her to iron their shirts) and called nasty names (“How do we beat the bitch?” Senator John McCain was asked at one campaign event).

But the response may have been more powerful than the injury. In the days after Mrs. Clinton was criticized for misting up on the campaign trail, she won the New Hampshire primary and drew a wave of donations, many from women expressing indignation about how she had been treated.

And Mrs. Clinton seemed to channel the lives of regular women, who often saw her as an avenging angel. Take Judith Henry, 67, for whom Mrs. Clinton’s primary losses stirred decades-old memories of working at a phone company where women were not allowed to hold management positions. “They always gave us the clerical jobs and told us we didn’t have families to support,” she said. At a rally last month in Bloomington, Ind., she sat with her daughter Susan Henry, 45, a warehouse worker, who complained that her male colleagues did less work and made more money than the women did.

Decades after the dissolution of movement feminism, Mrs. Clinton’s events and donor lists filled with women who had experienced insult or isolation on the job. Moitri Chowdhury Savard, 36, a doctor in Queens, was once asked by a supervisor why she was not home cooking for her husband; Liz Kuoppala, 37, of Eveleth, Minn., worked as the only woman in her mining crew and is now the only woman on the City Council.

Ms. Kamarck, 57, the Harvard professor and a longtime adviser to Democratic candidates, said she was still incredulous about the time her colleagues on Walter F. Mondale’s presidential campaign, all men, left for lunch without inviting her — because, she later discovered, they were headed to a strip club.

Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, said the world was different now, especially the political world, thanks in part to Mrs. Clinton. “I never heard anybody say she can’t be elected because she’s a woman,” said Ms. Napolitano, who supports Mr. Obama and like many of his supporters saw less sexism in the race than Mrs. Clinton’s backers. “That’s a different deal than we’ve heard before in American politics.”

But as others watched a campaign that starred two possibly transformative figures, they felt a growing conviction that the contest was unfair. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

Some even accuse Mr. Obama of chauvinism, pointing to the time he called Mrs. Clinton “likeable enough” as evidence of dismissiveness. Nancy Wait, 55, a social worker in Columbia City, Ind., said Mr. Obama was far less qualified than Mrs. Clinton and described as condescending his recent assurances that Mrs. Clinton should stay in the race as long as she liked. Ms. Wait said she would “absolutely, positively not” vote for him come fall.

Ms. Ferraro, who clashed with the Obama campaign about whether she made a racially offensive remark, said she might not either. “I think Obama was terribly sexist,” she said.

Cynthia Ruccia, 55, a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Columbus, Ohio, is organizing a group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, of mostly women in swing states who plan to campaign against Mr. Obama in November. “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.

Whatever barriers Mrs. Clinton may have smashed, she left some intact for future contenders to try themselves against. She seemed uncertain how to reconcile her sex with her political persona. Though she projected an aura of authority, said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with any candidate, she variously cast herself as a victim of male domination, a warm girlfriend type and, at the end, an indefatigable warrior. She even made contradictory statements about whether sex should be a factor in the race.

Mrs. Clinton ran into trouble with some of the classic hurdles that women who are politicians face, historians and sociologists said. “It was the same conversations we’ve been having since the ’70s,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Take the need to project toughness and warmth simultaneously. The test is unfair, many say, because men are not subjected to it as harshly and because it is nearly impossible not to err on one side. Still, some say Mrs. Clinton went overboard on toughness.

“The idea that you have to talk about eradicating Iran — that’s all, to me, the voices of people advising her,” said Patricia Schroeder, a former Colorado congresswoman and Clinton supporter who considered seeking the Democratic nomination in 1987.

And yet Mrs. Clinton may not have passed the commander in chief test. In New York Times/CBS News polls conducted this winter, voters rated Mr. Obama’s potential in that area more highly than they did Mrs. Clinton’s, though neither served in the military or has much experience directly handling international crises. Perhaps participants had many reasons for preferring Mr. Obama, but they followed the long-standing pattern of finding women less plausible military commanders than men.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, many women say with regret, did not inspire a deep or nuanced conversation between men and women, only familiar gender-war battles consisting of male gibes and her supporters’ angry responses. Mr. Obama, who sought to minimize the role of race in his candidacy, led something of a national dialogue about it, but Mrs. Clinton, who made womanhood an explicit part of her run, seemed unwilling or unable to talk candidly about gender.

Mrs. Clinton, for example, declined a New York Times request earlier this year for an interview about the gender dynamics of the race; an aide said the topic would be impossible for her to address in a frank way..

The conversation Mrs. Clinton spurred among women, however, seemed newer and more surprising. Her candidacy split Democratic women, not to mention prominent feminists. (Last week, the abortion-rights group Naral Pro-Choice America endorsed Mr. Obama, setting off protest from other women’s groups.) The cleft was largely along generational lines, with older women who had waged their own battles showing more solidarity and younger ones arguing that voting for a male candidate over a female one was itself a sign of progress and confidence.

“The most important contribution she has made is to show that women candidates are just like men candidates,” said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study. “You have to judge them not on the basis of their gender but their character.”

Over the course of the campaign, Jennifer Rogers, a film producer in Los Angeles, came to agree. She voted for Mrs. Clinton, in part because she hoped to see a female president, but she recently lost enthusiasm over what she called a lack of truthfulness on the candidate’s part. “Her problems are about who she is and not her gender,” said Ms. Rogers, 28.

Amy Rees, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother in San Francisco, agrees — most of the time. She said she agonized between the two choices, finally voted for Mr. Obama and did not regret it. Mrs. Clinton lost on the merits, Ms. Rees said.

Still, every so often, she feels a flicker of worry about whether that is entirely so. Referring to Mr. Obama, Ms. Rees said, “He still looks more like every other president we’ve ever had than she does.”

WP organizing secretary Yaw Shin Leong revealed that he voted for MP Teo.

Thinking broadly, it might appear to be a good strategy by Yaw to explain his decision. In fact, it might not be something altogether new. Mr. Low Thia Khiang does vote with the government on issues in parliament, and he has mentioned repeatedly that the role of the opposition is to be a watch dog and not to be a mad dog that “opposes for opposing sake.”

However, could the issue of Yaw’s decision to reveal his voting choice be one of that of a absence of context to the public? Yaw’s vote for Teo is different from Low’s vote for a PAP introduced bill - the former could be seen as an electoral decision that encapsulates broad (if not vague) manifestos, while the latter is a specific bill for specific purposes.

Yet, some would argue in the context of the larger WP’s strategy, his vote makes sense because it contributes to the longstanding notion in recent years that the WP could move to the political center to try to capture the 10% swing vote that will propel WP to electoral victory. This is underpinned by the P-R that WP has done over the year, blending a fiery past which appeals to the liberal (think JBj and Francis Seow) and a semi-collaboration path with the PAP to appeal to the moderates and conservatives.

Yet, this decision by Yaw might prove ultimately to be divisive because the context is made unclear. Yaw chose to delink the notion that the sum of individual interests equals to national public interests. Rather, Yaw chose to argue that in the spirit of the limited public interests (as to that of Bukit Panjang), the PAP candidate was a better choice. By transcending partisanship (even though he calls himself a partisan), Yaw could have been trying to present himself along the general lines of the WP’s image - a party that is semi-collaborative to the ruling regime that focuses squarely and firmly on the policy issues.

The historical irony too might emerge in this debate. Did the PM not argue that people were voting for parties, rather than individual candidates after he was interviewed by reporters after the AMK GRC results were out? I am not sure the WP, or for that matter, SDP or SDA would disagree with the PM. Some political analysts disagreed, saying the people voted for individual candidates, which technically is not wrong either. This ambiguous relationship between voting for a party and for a local candidate has served Singapore political parties well. Yet in this incident, by not leaving room for the alternative, could Yaw be going against the nationalization of issues undertaken by Sylvia Lim (recall she said, this is not a local election, but a national one + the overall WP’s decision to have one stadium rally instead of SDA’s traditional strategies of having multiple venues)? Of course, Singaporeans’ memories are short, but the debate over whether one votes for a party or a candidate based on national or local issues would not go away, as long as we have elections in Singapore

Yet, how many Singaporeans would understand their contextualized strategies, and how explicit can the WP be without sounding too earnest? The reports of the mainstream press and the sammyboy forums could have work better in the realm of nuances, but the emotionality of the collective guilt and hopes of Singaporeans could not be helped by their descriptions. By purging the body politic of the greys, the purity of the alternative vision will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of our collective and instrumental past. Would Yaw become the ash ?

More interestingly,Yaw brings up the PAP’s dictonomy of pro versus anti-Singapore, that is the transcendental public interests (akin to the constitutional dilemmas of Modern China) matters more in politics. Politicking and partisanship should be limited in view of the wider interests of the imagined community. Is it a direct repudiation of the SDP’s strategy of community politicking in the forms of semi- demonstrations (versus the apparent neutrality and connotations of unity in the form of “walkabouts”)?

My sympathies lie more perhaps with Mr. Low and Miss Lim as well as PAP MP Teo. For Low and Lim, how to sound democratic, a little distancing from Yaw and still pursue this middle of road strategy in parliament in a big question in the coming days. For Teo, a WP’s vote may sound flattering, but his position with the PAP will change - either he will be lauded as the new moderate PAP or criticized internally as the new softies.

Two interesting remarks coming out for pro-immigration and immigration reforms in America. Quite refreshing to hear Gov. of California and the NYT as contrast to the Lou Dobbs of CNN.

Interview with LA Times:
Schwarzenegger: I get a lot of requests from the chamber and from businesses to push for immigration reform. And we get a lot of push about, you know, the problem that if we don’t have immigration reform, and we are very tough on the border - which we are in California, we have the National Guard there - and because of that, it reduced the crossings. But because of that, a lot of businesses are suffering now. So what everyone likes is not to have illegals working for them; but what they like is to have the chance to go and hire these people legally. But they don’t get the visas because there’s a cap on that … so it’s a very frustrating system, and it’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the Mexicans, it’s not good for us, it’s not good for our businesses, and especially with the chaos of the students’ visas.

We have students that are studying from all over the world, and then the next day they have to go home. I think it’s crazy for them not to have a visa so they can stay a few years and so we can use their brain power that they actually got in California or in the United States and use them here for a few years and then let them go home. They want to stay here and we need them. That’s one of the most common complaints in Silicon Valley.
So we really need immigration reform, and it’s really - it’s a disaster in Washington. There was such hope when [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi went in; they thought that all those things would be changed, and there would be, finally, they would get things done. Nothing is getting done.