[updated to fix a screwed up link and a deleted sentence]
Republicans up, Democrats down.
The number of Americans who consider themselves to be Republicans jumped nearly two percentage points in December to 34.2%. That’s the largest market share for the Republican brand in nearly two years, since January 2006 (see history from January 2004 to present).
At the same time, the number of Democrats fell to 36.3%. That’s down a point compared to a month ago.
Liberal-blog readership down, conservative-blog readership up.
It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.
Publishers’ bestseller sales flat, except when they’re way down. See the Top 50 Bestsellers of 2007 list here, at Publishers Weekly:
Simon & Schuster had eight titles among the top 50, led by The Secret; the company’s bestsellers sold 6.6 million copies. Seven Penguin titles—selling a total 6.5 million copies—made the top 50. The country’s largest trade publisher, Random House, also had seven titles (selling 3.2 million copies) among the top 50; its biggest bestseller, The Road, came in ninth place. The four HarperCollins books on the list totaled sales of 2.5 million copies.
Michael Cader, of PublishersLunch (no link available) writes [e.a.]:
2007 Bestsellers
Nielsen Bookscan provided a number of additional bestsellers lists covering most (or part) of 2007 in various markets. Immediately below are the top 50 books in the US through December 16. In the macro sense, the list is similar to that of two years ago (the last time there was a new Harry Potter on the market), comprising sales of just under 37 million units. Twenty-eight of the top titles are hardcovers (compared to 30 two years ago). The most dramatic change among publishers on the list is at Random House–two years ago they led the pack with 14 of the top 50 titles, comprising 10 million units. This year, they had 7 titles in the top 50 (two were Oprah picks), comprising approximately 3.25 million units.
No word on how HarperCollins’s dreadful 2007 bestseller numbers stack up against their numbers two years ago, and I’m not industrious enough to research it. None of this is good news for any of the trade book publishers.
Fantay is in, reality is out. Reza Aslan writes:
Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to “re-brand” America’s image in the Middle East, I can’t help but think about Jimmy Carter’s [1977] toast. … In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.
It’s just this sort of blunder — naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions — that worries me again these days. That’s because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a “fresh face” with an “intuitive sense of the world,” and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.
Justly, Aslan mocks Andrew Sullivan’s notion that
it is Obama’s face — just his face — that “proves [jihadis] wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”
Perhaps Aslan missed Gordon Brown’s rousing realism vis-a-vis Pakistan?
In an article for Pakistan’s Daily Jang newspaper, Brown said it was important Bhutto’s killing did not deflect the country’s political leaders from the pursuit of democracy and that scheduled elections could be free, fair and secure.
“A strong representative democracy in Pakistan will defeat terrorism and extremism, show the path to a more stable, prosperous future, and stand as a lasting memorial to the life’s work of Benazir Bhutto,” Brown wrote.
“We owe it to her memory to strive together to achieve that goal,” he said.
Aslan certainly missed Rudy’s commitment to reality
Mr. Giuliani will call for a new military surge in Afghanistan, a change in the way America’s spies are promoted so that officers are rewarded for finding actionable intelligence and not just the number of agents they recruit, and a new war on Al Qaeda’s intricate network of Web sites, sites used both to communicate with its agents in the field and to recruit new jihadis.
Matthew Yglesias didn’t miss Giuliani calling “for more war,” but then the whippersnapper is notably afraid of “bad actors,” and thus the prime example of a 21st-century American fantasist: someone who believes that the United States can simply opt out of potential foreign policy messes by just letting other countries take care of their own problems—as if somehow those problems don’t concern us:
In policy terms, it seems to me that the conversation tends to veer from the idea of supporting “our bastards” in countries like Saudi Arabia to the idea of trying to transform them into democracies. The latter would be nice, but doesn’t really seem possible. That still leaves us, however, with the possibility of not being so deeply in bed with these kind of regimes.
I can’t wait to hear the details of young Yglesias’s foreign policy prescription for getting back on the course Clinton was on before he was so rudely shoved aside by eight years of aggressive unilateralism in response to 9/11. (Hint: it has to do with international law and stable institutions. Sweet dreams, son!)
Bottom line, though? Frank Furedi says that the strongest fantasy gripping us all is the fear of the Apocalypse running rampant through public debate:
Public figures appear to have lost the capacity to reassure or lead people. Instead, they frequently opt for evoking frightening futuristic scenarios where the line between fiction and reality become unclear. In every respect, the sensibility that underpins public debate today can be described as a ‘crisis of nerve’. This crisis over the future coexists with a powerful sense of disorientation about the status and worth of the human species itself. Increasingly, humanity is represented as the biggest problem on the planet, rather than as the harbinger of a better future.
This tendency to avoid reality has consequences, he says:
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. …
[T]oday’s future-frightened public debate about economics seems more interested in finding ways to transform capitalism into a carbon-free, green-leaning system than in discussing the steps we need to take to minimise the destructive impact of a global recession on people’s lives and aspirations.
I’m no trend-spotter, and I’m sticking with my predictions: in November, it’ll be competent vs. competent—probably Rudy vs. Hillary. In that match-up, Rudy will probably win. (And if not him, then another Republican.)
