David Corn, in a piece in this morning's Washington Post, looks at the Obama cabinet appointments and laments what he says is not the change he was expecting or that he says "we" were promised.

Corn is defining the word "change" improperly and, while he uses the word "we," isn't talking for what I'd be willing to bet is a majority of Americans.  His definition -- progressives and liberals rather than centrists and conservatives -- is not what I heard Barack Obama say during the campaign.  To me, "change," meant only one thing: Not George Bush.

Obama repeatedly and continuously talked about how electing John McCain would be another four years of George Bush, but electing him would produce the departure from current policies, fears, and disappointments people wanted.  He provided some specifics, but what he was really promising was just the general idea that he wouldn't continue what Bush had been doing.

I'm not asking about lawn signs, which are easy to remove.  I'm asking about bumper stickers, which once applied are so difficult to remove that they are often seen months or even years later.

Tomorrow will be just four weeks since the election.  I see lots of Obama but no McCain bumper stickers.  It's certainly possible that bumper sticker technology has improved and the glue has changed.  But is something else going on here?  Is the election still going on in some sense?

(Related question: How long before we start seeing "Don't blame me, I voted Republican" bumper stickers?)

The day after election day, the head of the polling division in my firm showed me what at the time I thought was a startling statistic: exit polls indicated that those making in excess of $200,000 a year voted for Barack Obama 52 to 46 percent.  Like this story from Slate, there are now other indications that this was, in fact, the case.

I was surprised because for much of the past year I made close to 500 presentations around the country almost exclusively to people who were earning $200,000 (or much more) and it didn't take long for them to tell me that there was no chance they would vote for Obama.

This almost blood oath not to vote for Obama got much more vocal whenever the election focus turned to the Obama plan to increase taxes on those making over $250,000.  No matter where I was in the more than 70 cities and surrounded areas I visited across the U.S.), I was repeatedly told that this showed that Obama didn't understand the markets, the economy, the importance of wealth creation, etc.  A number of people offered to bet big sums that he wouldn't win.

Dartmouth hosted another post-election panel yesterday, this one convened by President Jim Wright and consisting of a number of Dartmouth alumni who have engaged in public policy whether in office, in academia, or in the media.  Here are some notes I took at the event:

1. Was this really the shattering of a glass ceiling?  If George H.W. Bush had won in 1992 and the field were wide open and the economy were in the toilet in 1996, would Obama and the campaign that he ran in 2008 have also won in 1996?  I think so.  What do you think?


2. Why do Democrats still have to answer Republican questions, even when they win the election?  George W. Bush loses the popular vote and governs like he won a mandate.  Obama wins convincingly and he is somehow supposed to take it slow?  Not if he really does want to solidify a realignment.


3. What happens if these new voters from 2008 are unemployed in 2010 or 2012?  I'm guessing they will want change again.  Obama has such a tough road ahead of him.


4. If the Obama administration is going well in 2012, would Obama drop Biden as a running mate to set up a chosen successor for 2016?


5. Will the Democrats ever nominate a white male for the top spot again?


6. When will the Republicans nominate someone for the top spot who is much younger than his Democratic opponent?

On Friday afternoon, the Rockefeller Center convened a panel of faculty to discuss the outcomes, consequences, and next steps after the 2008 elections.  We tried something new: 10 faculty members speaking for about 5 minutes about their specific areas of expertise. I spoke about fiscal policy (at about one hour and 5 minutes into the video).  You can watch the YouTube video by following this link.

Severely overcharging for his two cents' worth this week is Harold Meyerson in his column in The Washington Post, "A Real Realignment."

The first problem is the one we've seen quite a lot this week: it is not a realignment when one Presidential election departs from the recent past. It is a realignment when that Presidential election is followed by others that are similar enough so that we know the first was a turning point, not an aberration. The way to make that happen is for the Obama administration and the Democratically controlled Congress to provide the political leadership to make people want to return them to office in the next several elections.

The second and more important problem appears in the last paragraph. Just read it for yourself:

Indeed, eight years after Karl Rove stormed into Washington proclaiming that he would create a 21st-century version of the Republican realignment that emerged from William McKinley's victory over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, today's emerging Republican minority looks confined to Bryan's base in America's rural backwaters. The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate. It belongs to Barack Obama's Democrats.

I mentioned yesterday that I voted for Senator McCain, not Senator Obama.  If I could have split my vote, I would have given about 60% to McCain and 40% to Obama.  I suspect that might wife would switch the percentages, and so between her vote for Obama and mine for McCain, the Samwick family's centrist tendencies were reflected pretty well.

My vote was determined more by my self-identication as a conservative than my professional training as an economist.  As a matter of principle, I never signed on to one of those "Economists for McCain" petitions despite a number of requests.  It was McCain's failure to get serious about the budget deficit and other matters relevant for a fiscal conservative that limit the disappointment about the way the election turned out.  That disappointment comes from my concerns about judicial nominations, free trade, and keeping the government's interference in the economy to a minimum in an Obama administration.

I'll leave it to all of the political blogs to analyse Barack Obama's speech tonight. 

But I can't help but wonder what it must be like to stand at a podium before hundreds of thousands of people and accept the power that the voters have just transferred to you.  Is it humbling or enabling?  As you are about to come out on the stage, do you ask yourself whether you are really ready for this moment or did that stop being a question a long time ago?

Economists have done a lot of research on how U.S. presidential elections affect the stock market.  Most of the studies show quite an advantage for equities following the election of Democrats, but a Federal Reserve study concludes there is no consistent relationship if you correct for market volatility and test back to 1852. 

The most cited paper was published in the Journal of Finance in October, 2003 by two University of California economists, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov.  They found 9% higher stock market gains for large stocks in Democratic administrations since 1928. 

However, Santa-Clara and Valkanov did not correct for swings in market volatility or examine periods before the Depression, when market volatility was lower. In a 2004 paper, two Federal Reserve economists, Sean Campbell and Canlin Li, made those corrections and found that the 9% higher return dropped to 4%.  They concluded that market returns don't track with which party wins presidential elections.