The Exceptionalist

50 State v. Triangulation Strategy

So, here are a few thoughts on the state of the Democratic race at present, and more importantly, on what I consider the fundamental (and mostly misunderstood) struggle within the Democratic party today, and over the last dozen or so years.

I don't find much that is bizarre in the Clinton Hillary's "strategy" of mucking around and setting up a bulwark at the Alamo. She's reading the exit polls just like everybody else, albeit (like Guiliani) probably too closely. She's identified her pessimist-shit-out-of-luck demographic, and her consequent "anti-campaign" strategy is just playing to her base, which is what she needs to do. She's also trying to pull in that part of Edwards' supporters that I call the "Johnny Cash demographic." Listen to "Man in Black" if you don't know what I'm alluding to.

Another aspect of her strategy is classic Washington. The Clinton campaign is feeding talking points to the media the Obama's followers are cultists of some sort or another. This is very misleading, negative, and disingenuous, and particularly annoying to anybody with intelligence, but we've long maintained, winning elections is not about appealing to intelligence and negative ads sometimes work (this year, so far, not so much). The Clintons are right at home wallowing in the muck, so again, no surprise here.

What truly is bizarre in my opinion, is Clinton's lack of foresight. Given all her the prosaic self-proclaimed micromanagement she is going to bring to the White House, it seems incredible that Clinton missed the big white elephant walking across the stage before Super Tuesday when her campaign spent all of her money and she failed to develop a post-February 5 strategy. I was reading the newspapers and the one thing every observer agreed upon was that the post-February 5 Democratic race was going to be critical. Was Hillary drunk or is she just bad at math? It's plainly obvious when you compare the exit polls from the early states and compare them to Wisconsin's demographic profile that Clinton should have been trying to win with a good margin in that state. Yet, she had nobody on the ground in Wisconsin, retreated to Texas (a state which is arguably not as good, and which comes two week later), and only realized weeks later that she had committed the political blunder. Now she's in Wisconsin, not in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin, utterly confused. There is total disorganization in Clinton's campaign at the moment. She's clearly losing the chess game.

Yet, she started with a few extra pieces. I'm not nearly as optimistic as many of Obama's supporters are. For one, Clinton has finally gotten her fundraising operation back in gear. For another, just look at the polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She's still neck and neck with Obama nationally, and a good showing in those states could keep this race essentially a tie. Obama still has gains to make if he is going to win. If he coasts, I think she'll win. He now has the time to make his gains, but was it only time which was working against him before February 5? I'm not so sure. Finally, if the finish is close, Clinton has the Michigan / Florida nuclear strategy. It would be tossing the baby out with the bath-water to drag those states into her case for the nomination, but we're talking about a husband and wife that only have one single thing in their lives and they have a history of tantrums and deceit when anybody has ever tried to take their power away from them, so I would not expect them to accept loss gracefully. Maybe they could be forced to accept reality. I'm certain that Dean, Gore, and Pelosi (all "natural" Obama supporters, in my opinion) have been talking about this contingency between each other and I expect that they will step in if the Clintons try to burn the party house down, but we probably won't know for another two months if that is what it comes to. And if it does, what a public and pathetic pity. Generational change is never an easy thing.

More generally, and this is what I really want to write about (not here, I've gone on too long, but later). I've alluded before to what I consider the essential Dean v. McAuliffe struggle that is at the heart of Clintonism v. post-Clintonism dichotomy. This article, from Even Fairbanks at the New Republic, more-or-less misses the point, and Fairbanks takes the pro-Clintonism / McAuliffe / triangulation position that I disagree with, but I think it at least touches on who is on what side and (to a lesser extent) what is at stake in the "50 state" v. "triangulation" strategy. Understanding Dean through the lens of "the scream" is a sure recipe for failing to understand what he was trying to accomplish. In any event, this is the "real" struggle, which Fairbanks has only just stumbled over:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=0a34cc25-08d4-471a-a216-f2b1b60d5a30

Policing the Pollsters

I decided to do an accountability check on the polls to see where they got the Democratic race right, and where they got it wrong. Of the 22 primaries, I found reasonably recent polling data for 14. I decided to only look at polls which were less than a week old where possible. Of the 14, I calculated that 6 got it right and 8 got it wrong.

Right:
NY (1 point to Clinton)
NJ (3 points to Clinton)
CT (2 points to Obama)
TN (correct)
IL (1 point to Clinton)
OK (3 points to Obama)

Wrong:
AL (17 points to Obama)
GA (17 points to Obama)
MA (8 points to Clinton)
MO (7 points to Obama)
AZ (5 points to Clinton)
CA (11 points to Clinton)
MN (42 points to Obama)
CO (33 points to Obama)

First caveat: the Minnesota and Colorado polling data was very thin. Still, the gap is huge. I have four tentative observations:

1. As was true in South Carolina, black voters are showing up on election day in big numbers for Obama. Evidently, these voters are not landing on the pollsters "likely voter" list, and this is drastically skewing the results in south away from Obama. Alabama was supposed to be close. It wasn't.

2. When you consider the shift in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorada in conjunction with the results in Utah, Idaho, Kansas, and North Dakota, its clear that Obama is cleaning up the high-plains, upper-mid west and rockies. Maybe there is a shift moving in his favor after he visited those places. It's hard to define what is sweeping across the wide open spaces in the West, but the polls didn't predict Obama's success there and neither did the pundits. They knew he was competitive, but nobody expected Obama to win with huge margins.

3. Registered democrat Latino voters in CA were 3:1 in favor of Clinton. I think these voters are also undercounted in polls, albeit less so than black voters. Latinos were probably undercounted in Nevada, and it appears in California and Arizona as well.

4. What happened in Massachusetts? I have for the pro-Hillary shift. Could this also have it's genesis in the pro-Hillary shift in neighboring New Hampshire last month? This is the "Massachusetts mystery" to me.

The main conclusion I draw is that if you look at the polls, you have to check the race demographics of the state. If it's a largely white state, the polls are relatively good predictors. If there is a substantial Black or registered-Democrat Latino population (unregistered Latinos were 50 / 50 in CA), you can start discounting the results.

Who Won Super Tuesday?

McCain won Super Tuesday on the Republican side. I mostly ignored the Republican primaries. McCain is winning in all moderate Republican states, Romney is winning the libertarian mountain / wilderness, and Huckabee is carrying the deep Bible belt where single-issue pro-life voters have great influence, but McCain has it in the bag.

Who won on the Democratic side? It depends how you measure things. Obama won more states (14 to 8). Who won more pledged delegates is a more complicated calculation, and won't be sorted out just yet. Clinton got more super-delegates. I decided to crunch some numbers to see who won the popular vote.

The Democratic race was extremely close. You can get the state-by-state results all over the web. I decided to aggregate the 22 state results. Twenty-two out of fifty states scattered across the entire country is a pretty good cross-section, so it probably gives a good indication of the "mood of America."

Two important caveats:

1. 18 states have at least 97% of results in (good enough to call "done" in my opinion) while four (CA, NM, AR, MN) only have 81% - 92% in. Arkansas (89%) is very pro-Clinton and Minnesota (81%) is very pro-Obama and I would expect the remaining votes in these states to more-or-less cancel each other out. Maybe. California (86%) is moderately pro-Clinton, however, Obama has been closing the gap over the past few hours, and I mean in actual vote margin (not just percentage). My theory is that the final results in Cali reflect that fact that many voters voted before the candidates even showed up and the actual election-day votes were more evenly split, but I don't have hard evidence. New Mexico (92%) is basically a tie, so the outstanding votes are probably not likely to substantially affect this analysis. In short, I would expect that the final percentage allocation to be almost the same as the current results.

2. I did not count the Edwards votes. He was on the ballot just about everywhere and even did well in some places, but it's of no moment now that he has dropped out.

Here's what Betsy (my calculator) and I came up with:

Total Votes Cast = 14,181,158
Clinton 7,083,379 (49.95%)
Obama, 7,097,779 (50.05%)

So the "mood of America" is . . . schizophrenia. You don't get much closer than that! We're in for ride.

Lessons from the 50 State Strategy

Suppose you're Rudy Giuliani. It's 2006. You've been biding your time, testing the waters, waiting to enter the race to become President of the United States. The odds look long. You're twice divorced. You're pro-choice. You're considered "gay friendly" for a Republican. And you've presided over a city with some of the strictest gun control laws in the United States. But then, things start to brighten up. The conservative wing of the Republican Party erupts into a series of scandals -- one after another. Bush's approval rating plummets as the Iraq war and the (now obvious) absence of rationale supporting it hangs heavier around his neck. Then the Republicans get trounced in the mid-term elections, losing their 6-year hold on the Senate and 12-year hold on the House. Suddenly, the Republican Party is in disarray, and the party is ready for a change. So, you enter the race, and steadily you rise and rise. It's 2007; you're polling 40% in national polls. You're the clear front-runner. This is your race to lose. It's hard to believe, you think, that somebody with my history, somebody with vulnerabilities can actually win this thing. So, Mr. Front-runner, what do you do?

Why, you drop out of course. You move into the familiar terrain of Florida, a place where people look like you, where people think like you, and you arrive well before all of the television cameras. You spend all of your money like a drunken sailor on television ads that nobody's even watching because they're too busy watching the Presidential race in other places -- in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina. You sit and you wait. And each day, you watch one more percentage point peal off the polls -- 40% in December, 12% by the end January.

Was Giuliani’s the worst campaign strategy ever? I don't know. Somewhere in history, you might dig up a more complete failure, but you would be hard pressed. Gary Hart fell apart pretty extravagantly in 1988 (well actually earlier, in 1987), but that involved a scandal, which was not part of Hart's strategy. Giuliani walked right into fate.

Why did he do it? Well, evidently Giuliani fell into a few common fallacies about Presidential politics.

Fallacy #1 -- Voters choose their candidates on the basis of issues the candidates have stood for and their degree to personally identify with the candidate. In Giuliani’s case, this would not bode well in Iowa or South Carolina. Iowa republicans are far less urban than Giuliani. They're less "ethnic." They often or usually own guns. They're not all that sympathetic to gays. And voters in New Hampshire don't look much better. They're mostly rural, mostly protestant, and not terribly sympathetic to big-city issues.

Why this is a fallacy. Voters do not choose candidates on the basis of issue or identity. If they did, nobody would ever win. Most voters have an important issue or two, which matter to them, and they're certainly going to support the rare person who shares some close personal trait with them, but in most cases, they don't have the luxury of having a viable candidate who shares their view. They associate with a party because that party embraces their view on the issue (or two) they care about and they come to see the other members of the party as their allies and like them and support their candidates out of a sense of group alliance. So, Wall Street tax-cutters support bible thumping when it suits their interest.

The truism: The candidate who wins is the one who is capable (by strength of character and ability to persuade) to carry the party.

Fallacy #2 -- Money wins elections. Wrong. This is backwards. Giuliani had the most money and McCain had much less in late 2007. But McCain will win and Giuliani will support him, but lose. Why? While Giuliani was spending the money of the people who thought he could lead the coalition in Florida, McCain was in Iowa and New Hampshire acting like somebody who wanted to lead the party. And, after being abandoned for months, the media started to pay attention to him. And when the media pays attention, so do a lot of other people. I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans Giuliani was spending money to court by rallies and commercials in Florida weren't seeing more free advertising for John McCain on the television leading up to the primary. And that's not all. Giuliani’s ads were (as political ads are) self-serving while the media (whatever it's bias) is less biased than a commercial. Let's face it, most people hate commercials anyway. And as McCain became the capable candidate, the money started to roll in to him (and no longer to Giuliani).

The truism: The candidate who appears most likely to lead the coalition gets the most money.

Fallacy #3 -- Raw data is a trustworthier indicator of future voter conduct than a vague "gut-instinct" about voter behavior. Wrong. Data, polls, regression analysis, etc. are about as important to success as money. In other words, the equation is backwards. A candidate who inspires something in the gut of his or her supporters will make the data support their chances. Obama is the candidate who understands this best. And he understands that Reagan understood this better than anyone. Reagan probably lost more elections than he won. He took chances. He ran in elections that he didn't have a very good chance of winning, if you based his chances on the polls. But he didn't trust the polls. He must have seen politics as a game with an element of wager, and an element of roulette in it. Sometimes the ball just falls in win and sometimes lose, but to win, you need to make everybody think it's going to fall your way. And most importantly, you've got to play to pay. Politics is not a collection of data. I believe those voters who fell very far outside of the Giuliani demographic in Iowa may have been willing to take a chance and go with him if they thought he might win. And even if Giuliani lost Iowa, he could have gotten 20% in Iowa and said, "wait until later." And he could have gotten 25% in New Hampshire and 25% in South Carolina and said wait until later, and Florida would have delivered the victory he was due. But he didn't trust his chances to convince any once of those voters. He succumbed. He looked the ninny. And he was. What a terrible idea.

The truism: The candidate who defies yesterday's data, makes tomorrow's.

Democracy Now: Kenya

I have questioned the utility and viability of democracy and democratic institutions for a long time. I do this not because I'm a cynic or a supporter of some other form of government. Quite the contrary. I love democracy, so much so, I'm willing to question the received wisdom to determine why it's so good. Well, my initial conclusion is that democracy is good because its simple and simple ideas are usually better than complex ones.

But I have to confess, there is a lot of democracy in this world that is not good, or so flawed, there might be a better alternative, or it is greeted with such skepticism of its promise (free and fair elections) that it is promoted by the governing class and yet smothered by those same promoters.

It's 2008, which means its a leap year, the summer Olympics are ahead of us, and so are the U.S. presidential elections -- those democratic lovelies that visit up every four years like clockwork for over 200 years now. It's a good time to check in on the state of democracy, don't you think. If you're reading this to find new data on the U.S. presidential election, click again, I couldn't possibly keep up with that traveling circus. I'm just one guy and I like fresh air and daylight. I'll save the U.S. for last.

Let's start with Kenya. Young democracies are like babies -- fragile creatures, but their first steps are the captivating. Kenya was a one-party statue until 1991, under the yoke of the ruling Kenya Africa National Union (KANU) and its leader, Daniel Arap Moi. After a decade of jousting for position among opposition partied, these parties put their difference behind in 2002 and fielded a single candidate, Mwai Kibaki. If you believe true democracy comes from the cradle of close elections, Kenya's much-anticipated general election on December 28, 2007 held a lot of promise, albeit mixed with trepidation. Kibaki faced a serious challenge from a (reportedly "flamboyant") populist candidate, Raila Odinga. Reports leading up to the election confirmed that the results would be close. The open question was whether Kenya, perhaps the most developed country in East Africa, was prepared for a gritty election fight.

The answer is no. First, the election appears to be tainted by voting irregularities. On election night, as the votes came in, Odinga appeared to be leading by 1 million votes, a huge total in a country of 22 million people. But the lead dried up overnight as the tallying continued. By the next morning, the lead shrunk to 38,000 and soon it disappeared. The election monitors have been justifiably skeptical. In one area, according to the NY Times, Kibaki received 105,000 votes even though there were only 70,000 registered voters. Kibaki allegedly won the election and now holds power. But violence has broken out across Kenya, and particularly in the rift valley to the west, where Kibaki's supporters are strongest. In the ensuing weeks, a cycle of violence, led largely by gangs, and quickly organized militias has now claimed 800 lives, most, it appears, at the hands of anti-government militias. The problem, according to the New York Times, is one of ethnic association. Kibaki's supporters are almost exclusively part of the Kibuku ethnic group while Odinga's are a coalition of ethnic groups (Odinga is a Luo) who feel discriminated against by the ruling Kibuku class. One report on Reuters today has a an alarmingly similar character to the ethnic violence that swept through Rwanda nearly 14 years ago (and which took 1 million lives): "In the worst incident of the latest flare-up, 19 people were burned to death locked inside a house in Naivasha on Sunday, police officer Grace Kakai told Reuters." But I don't want readers to jump to conclusions. As Josh Ruxin rightly points out, the violence in Kenya is recent and not the culmination of a decades-long genocidal build-up as was the case in Rwanda.

As much as like to see Democracy succeed, if given the choice between peace and democracy, in most cases, I would choose peace. I think most Kenyans would too. Obviously democracy is not the problem in Kenya, but it has become the vehicle for a large and alarming problem which persists throughout the region, namely ethnic / tribal violence.

Michigan Democrats for Mitt Romney

Last week, before the New Hampshire primary, I got into an email debate over the possibility that conservative-leaning Independent voters that ordinarily vote Republican in national elections, but who choose for various reasons to remain independents, might vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic Primary. The thinking goes like this: Obama and Clinton are in what is certain to be a close election, Obama is "less electable" than Clinton, and by voting for Obama, you can hurt the Clinton campaign and scuttle the Democratic race during its primary season causing unknown headaches and hardships to your adversaries.

"Non-sense," I responded. First of all, every opinion poll and common sense have shown that Obama is considered less devisive than Clinton and therefore his "electability," at least on current knowledge is greater rather than less than Clinton. If anything, he has run a far-sighted campaign, and hasn't sold out his integrity in a dirty primary battle against Clinton. More importantly, the cross-over hypothesis failed to pass the logic test. Setting aside the possibility that somebody could "out-smart" the polls, a cross-over vote for Obama was illogical and unlikely for two reasons. First, the Republican race in New Hampshire was very close. If we assume that most conservative sympathizers care who the Republicans elect, then presumably they have an interest in doing what they can, with their one vote, to see that the candidate they support gets their support. Only where the race was essentially one-sided would that conservative sympathizer have the luxury to turn his or her attentions to scuttling the Democratic party race. Second, New Hampshire has an "semi-open primary" which means that registered Republicans may only vote in the Republican primary, registered Democrats may only vote in the Democratic primary, and unregistered independents may vote in either. So the only group of people with a ticket to engage in espionage are independents and not registered Republicans. The only way that conservatives could organize to engage in election espionage on the Democrats would be if they decided in advance to eschew registering with the Republican party well in advance of the election and then to engage in espionage on the day of. It's not inconceivable, but it involves a good deal more planning than most people care to put into their voting patterns. In other words, the likely candidates for this operation were likely to be a few hard-core conservatives willing to ignore their own party's primary. Not likely.

But the Michigan Primary on Tuesday presents a very different situation. And the three factors I referred to above are very different. First. The race in Michigan is close. According to polls, John McCain is leading and Mitt Romney is within striking distance. A win for McCain would likely cement his position as a strong candidate, but a win by Romney, whose campaign so far has been a series of failures, might revitalize his campaign. Second. The Democratic primary is meaningless because the national committee has chosen to punish Michigan by stripping it of all of its votes. Clinton is the only name on the ballot and the Democratic primary in Michigan looks about as meaningful as an Uzbeki election. Third. The Michigan primary is a true "open primary," meaning everybody (Republican, Democrat, or independent) is entitled to vote in whatever election they choose. In other words, all of the preconditions for legally sanctioned voting mischief are present.

None of this is lost on kos, who has called on Democrats to vote for Mitt Romney on Tuesday. As kos points out, there is a venerable tradition of election espionage (my word, not his) in Michigan, previously perpetrated by Republicans when the Republican race has been uninteresting. 1972, Republicans pushed the segregationist George Wallace on to victory and embarrassed the Democratic Party and in 1988 they propelled Jesse Jackson to victory. So why not propel Mitt Romney to victory?

A Romney victory would revitalize his campaign, at least for a time. He'll be able to finally claim a victory after blowing leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, although the victory will be tainted by the fact that his "supporters" were Democrats who wouldn't vote for him to lead a PTA meeting. It would damage McCain's recent surge and therefore it might even breathe a little bit of life into the dying Guiliani campaign. But mostly it would enable Romney to stay in the race and continue his well-funded smear campaigns against his rivals. He's run a dirty race so far, and he's likely to continue.

>Whether a Democrat should, as kos advocates, vote for Romney, raises moral and philosophical questions that are beyond the scope of this posting. We know that it is legal to do so, and therefore from a positivist perspective, there is nothing "wrong" with doing so. Is is wrong to "taint" the election results of your rivals? Perhaps it is unethical, not to mention undemocratic, to alter the course of an election and to diminish the votes of the sincere voters in Michigan. But this probably assumes to much. For example, a democratic election is not a state of purity. Voters are influenced by all sorts of motives which "taint" the process. For example, Romney has spent tons more money filling the air-waves in Michigan with his accomplishments an diminishing those of his opponents. And to use a counter-example, news media have been rather critical of Romney in recent months, consistently pointing out his tendency to place fast and loose with the truth, and they've been less harsh with his opponents. This too can "taint" the process of free will in insidious ways. Whatever Democrats choose to do on Tuesday, these questions will remain.

There is another side to this story, and one that I'm not sure Kos, or anybody else has thought about very carefully. And that is, the negative effect this will have on the Democratic candidates and their supporters. As Kos correctly points out, the Republicans have engaged in this sort of hard-ball espionage before and to my knowledge have never renounced it or apologized for it. In his colorful defense, he argues that you can't "bring a spork to a gun battle." But is this election really a gun battle? The Democratic candidates for their part will take the high ground and not engage this "dirty work," but do Democrats really benefit in engaging in Machiavellian tactics. Arguably not. The liberalism of the late 1960s and some of the hippie excesses that went along with it were ultimately a fuel to Republican politicians in the 1970s and 80s. In the same way, the dirty tactics of Karl Rove have spawned their own backlash in the popular pysche. In both examples, the actors were not politicians themselves, but rather individuals either supporting or hired to support their cause. Whether Machiavellian tactics work in a world with popular opinion and democratic elections is a question that I'll leave open.

Mumblecore

Last year, Harpers ran one of the best magazine articles ever. In "My Crowd," Bill Wasik describes his singular efforts at creating, promoting, observing, and ultimately destroying a briefly-lived hipster phenomenon known as the flash mob. In a detailed factual chronology filled with sociological side-bars, Wasik describes how this brain-child hipster infant terrible grew from an obscure piece of empherama into a full-on social phenomena. The flash mob, in short, was a word-of-mouth happening whereby people were instructed to congregate a certain place at a precise time and engage in some bizarre act of absurdity. In this sense, the flash mob clearly owes something to the spirit of dada or absurdism. And if flash mobs had some message (meta or otherwise), they might have found a proper spiritual home in Weimar Berlin or Paris between the wars. But the flash mob stood for nothing, and not even "nothing" in the sense of nothing meaning something. Flash mobs really meant nothing. It was all a juvenile prank, but , well, a fun one. And behind it all, was Wasik, lapping in the delicious irony, and taking notes on group think. God, is that why we have an ivy league -- so guys like this can engage in this sort of nonsense?

The best parts of the flash mob story are Wasik's keen social observations, borne of careful reflection on the nature of the monster he created and his wry observations on social behaviours within the hipster zeitgeist. Whether flash mobs were ever truly a hipster phenomena is an open question. But for a few months, flash mobs were, in the thinking of newspaper and magazine editors, "hot," they were "a story," and some poor saps were given the unenviable task of finding out "what all the fuss was about." Enter the New York Times, which was evidently late arriving to the flash mob story in 2003, even though this baby was born in Brooklyn. What does a newspaper do when it misses the story by a few weeks? Well, never too late to the party, the New York Times decided to take a backlash angle on flash mobs, to explain the phonomena (after a phone conversation with Wasik) and then declare the backlash underway. From Wasik's account, although it was inevitable, at the time, there was no backlash other than the one that the New York Times created. Of course, a backlash was inevitable. That's how you get the "scoop" when the scoop is gone -- you declare a new one, at least when you can anticipate the future.

The "youth social trend" is a regular piece in the New York Times, and a completely undergrad piece of journalistic rubbish. The only job more loathesome on that venerable journalistic behemoth is to cover the Sunday Styles weddings. Yuck!

Enter Dennis Lim, tasked with making sense of the latest generation of indie film makers -- Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, Jay and Mark Duplass, Frank Ross, and Andrew Bujalski. That is, Dennis' mission was to find the unifying theme, attitude, spirit, style, or philosophy that animates their films. First order of business -- watch the movies. Then, meet the filmmakers. They're small enough that a phone call from the New York Times must feel like "making it." As it turns out, Lim was lucky enough to find that the group (which previously met each other at the Southwest Film Festival in Austin in 2005) have already coined a neologism, "Mumblecore," to describe their work. We've only seen one of these films, "Funny Ha Ha," which is directed by Bujalski, and while their was nothing all that "core" about it, there was certainly a good deal of mumbling on camera. That film at least, seems to owe a little bit to Richard Linklater and a little bit to Noah Baumbach as well, and to judge by Lim's comments, most of the Mumblecore films probably do. And that, in our opinion, is definitely not a bad thing. Better still, a new generation of film makers with something to say is good news. Mumblecore, if a genre even exists, so far sounds like a lot of naval gazing, but then again, Slacker (Linklater's first film) had a bit of that in it along with the seeds of his fine philosophical rumination. It's silly to label this group of filmmakers anything other than what they are -- a group of people white upper-middle class college graduates in their mid-20s with a few hand-held cameras and a maybe a piece of something in their palms.

LAN Restaurant Review

The Exceptionalist has never done a restaurant review.  Pity, too, because we cruise the food blogs in the way some people look at porn and we read Peter Meehan's "Under $25" column in the New York Times, as if we lived in New York.  Writing a meaningful restaurant review is a tough business.  Of course there is always the reviewer's problem of  "dancing about architecture" to borrow a phrase sometimes attributed to Elvis Costello.  But restaurant reviewers have special challenges, chief of which is that they reside in a strange world of neologisms.  Chefs mix and match ingredients and concoct things for which no words exist (that is the process of invention, after all).  So they name their Frankensteins "cucumber jelly" and "salmon foam," both of which not only appeared on a menu we saw recently, but were items (actually parts of items) that we ordered, and worse still, they were actually pretty good.  Okay, they were above "not bad" (the salmon foam was salty).  We're not talking about traditional cuisine here.  We're talking about fusion -- the creative playground from which the creative, innovative, and often just plain weird emerge from the wandering minds of celebrity (and wannabe celebrity) chefs.

Tonight, we went to LAN Restaurant, a recent entry into Beijing's burgeoning dining scene.  We never visited Beijing "back in the day," but by all accounts, it was a truly miserable dining scene.  The image that comes to mind today would be Pyongyang -- cold soggy noodles in a broth of brown salty water with a bit of liquefied (and some congealed) lard for sustenance.  A Hobbesian feast! 

Not today.  Today, Beijing is all things for all people.  It's a city of 12 million people, international, cosmopolitan, a construction site for the most part, with big wide streets, tons of cars, and old Chinese opulence updated and reinterpreted for the lobotomized masses, foreign and domestic.  LAN Restaurant is perfect for this city.  Residing within and across the new twin (LG) towers along Jianguomen Waidajie, the interior was designed by French interior designer Philippe Starck, who evidently had carte blanche to spend a fortune on the design and spared nothing.  The place has concrete floors and a ceiling with exposed air ducts -- which hint at Starck's conventionally minimalist design (albeit in a mildly cliche manner).  Other than those touches, it is a carnival of opulence, filled with plush sofas, paintings which hang on the ceilings and face downward, chandeliers, and kitchy lighting fixtures in black, white, or in the shape of a telephone.  Then, there are the display cases -- one with hands, holding pearls, another with plastic desserts a la Betty Crocker 1964, the kitsch goes on and on.  And by on, and on, we mean it covers the entire floor-space of both towers and the bridge-space connecting them.  This restaurant is designed to be huge, wasteful, opulent, and boastful.  If communism had a bad hangover and decided to put a blasphemous exclamation point on itself, this is it.

Oh, the food?  Without it (the food), LAN would be a museum of the absurd.  And with the food?  Well, it's still a museum of the absurd.  LAN is the latest product from the team that produced South Beauty Restaurant, a fine restaurant (also in a Beijing shopping mall) serving up spicy and well executed Sichuan classics.  And the chef of South Beauty was brought in to LAN, but clearly with a different mandate and the opportunity to indulge a broader creative palate.  The results are strangely congruous with the decor -- Stark's minimalism-meets-its-bete-noir decorative output.  The menu's core is a modern interpretation of Sichuan cuisine.  There are, Dan Dan Noodles and Ma po dou fu on the menu, for example.  And the beloved peppercorn (Sichuan's staple spice) appears in many dishes.  But then there are other pieces from different places around the world.  A buttery cod on a bed of egg white is a distinctly Japanese  classic (the buttery cod) with a very light Cantonese touch (the egg white).  These dishes work well enough on their own.  There is even an entirely separate pan-western-but-mostly-French menu with more or less well executed dishes. 

The result hoewver is decidedly confused.  Not quite sichuan,  pan-Chinese,  western, LAN is less "fusion" than global.  In other words, the dishes do not borrow so much from each other's culinary traditions but remain decidedly rooted in their original mileau.  The food is not really at home in this fun house.   So while the western, Japanese, Cantonese, Bejingese (another neologism, we think) touches are expertly culled from their home cuisine, they are decidedly unfamiliar with one another.  Others will no doubt rave about LAN, because there are things to rave about, but fundamentally we found the dining experience at LAN to be a disjunctive journey to various ports of call around the world -- lots of style, but the substance isn't really there.