Barack Obama campaigned on some pretty progressive issues: health care as a right of citizenship, a measured withdrawal from Iraq, a tax increase for Americans making over $250,000/yr., fighting global warming, increased spending on education, and more. But he also campaigned on changing the tone and ushering in a new era of post-partisan cooperation.

It seems unlikely that he will be able to keep both promises. Republicans will resist the Obama agenda fiercely, but Obama will have the clout and the Congressional support to fight back if he chooses to. This week’s question asks whether or not he should, and I’m curious to know what you think.

Do you think Obama should strive for bipartisan compromise and national unity, or should he use all of the powers and support at his disposal to advance a progressive agenda regardless of the opposition?

Is Obama president yet?

The First Folio (1623) delineates Shakespeare’s plays into three genres: Comedy, Tragedy, and History. More recent scholars added the category of Romance to describe some of his later plays, and there is also a fifth, more nebulous, category that goes by several different names, which describes plays like Troilus and Cressida that seem to defy genre.

How meaningful are these genres? Certainly, a play like King Lear has a very different tenor than, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not just a question of mood, but even the rules are different. These are plays in different genres. But does this distinction hold up across the canon? Or does each play speak for itself? This is the Question of the Week.

How much stock should we put in Shakespearean genres?

And if you say that these genres are correct, I have a few follow-up questions. Perhaps you’d like to tackle one of these as well:

• Why is Macbeth a Tragedy while Richard III is a History?
• Why is As You Like It a Comedy, while The Winter’s Tale is a Romance?
• Why is Much Ado About Nothing a Comedy, while Romeo and Juliet is a Tragedy? (Is it just the ending? Is that enough to consider it a different genre?)

With just a month left until the election, polls indicate that Barack Obama has a healthy lead in both the popular vote and electoral college projections, and the Democrats in Congress are looking strong as well.

After 2004’s disappointment, I don’t want to put too much faith in the polls, but I am feeling cautiously optimistic.

But this week’s question isn’t about predicting the election. Let’s suppose hypothetically that Barack Obama does win next month. Let’s say that the election maintains a Democratic majority in the House, and Democrats wind up with 60 seats in the Senate (enough to block a filibuster).

This would basically put the Democrats in control of the agenda for at least two years, longer if the voters are pleased with the results.

So, the two questions I pose to my mostly liberal readership (but also my few conservative and moderate readers as well) is this:

If the Democrats were to take control, what would you like to see happen? What would you expect would actually happen?

Via the Shakespeare Geek we learn that Kenneth Branagh is to direct Thor:

In a departure from his normal cerebral choices for directing, it seems British actor and film-maker Kenneth Branagh has decided to take on something a little less complex, the Marvel Studios version of “Thor”. “Thor” is based on the well known German/Norse God of Thunder, but in the Marvel Universe and prospective film, he has an alter-ego, a disabled medical student called Donald Blake, which makes the god have a more human/vulnerable side than some superheroes. The film has a scheduled released date of 2010.

We all have to eat. On to the Question of the Week!

Which Shakespearean role would you cast with which superhero (or super villain) and why?

I’ll get the ball rolling by casting The Flash as Puck. Who else could “put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes”?

Enjoy!

Inspired by a video clip posted by Ro, I’m moved to examine the following question:

Right now, at this moment, what would you say is the percentage chance that Sarah Palin will become President of the United States in the next four years?

I’m going with 5%. That figure puts the election at about 50/50, and gives McCain a 90% chance of surviving his first term.

What do you think?

Do Barack Obama and John McCain have the same web designer?

We did a reading of As You Like It yesterday, and the question of the best marriage in Shakespeare came up again.

Here’s what I had to say last year in response to Cesario, a fellow blogger who suggested that it was the Macbeths:

I’ve heard Harold Bloom express this opinion, and I get the equal partnership aspect, but I find their relationship too dysfunctional and codependent to pay them this compliment. The title “Best Marriage in Shakespeare” is a dubious honor, but I think I’d have to go with Brutus and Portia. They seem like they have a really strong relationship. The fact that it can be torn apart by the assassination is a testament to the earth-shattering significance of that event. We won’t count the marriages at the end of the comedies, because who knows how they’ll fare?

But now, I turn the question over to you.

What’s the best marriage in Shakespeare?

P.S. Cesario is currently annotating the text of Hamlet, scene by scene, on her blog. Check it out.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Question of the Week. Fans of the site may recall that the Question of the Week was originally inspired by the Edge Foundation’s annual question, asked to leading thinkers. This year, their question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”

For me, I’d have to go with Wikipedia. When I first heard about the open source encyclopedia, I scoffed. It was one thing for the Internet to allow anyone to post their opinions, but quite another to trust the general public to get encyclopedia-style facts right. Without authors putting their names on their work, the information would be worthless.

But as I started using Wikipedia, I found it to be an invaluable resource. I assured myself that I wasn’t really using it, only using it as a casual reference. But over time, I was surprised to find it a source I could rely on. Of course, it’s not always accurate, and I still couldn’t see myself actually citing it as a source in a publication, but it’s way more reliable than any of us would have had a right to expect.

The tipping point for me was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. I was expecting this to be a madcap trivia book of fun facts about American history that never made the textbook. Not so much, no. Instead, it was a detailed historiography of twelve American history textbooks and how they knowingly distort and obfuscate their subject matter. After that, I could no longer consider Wikipedia to be inferior to the textbooks we’ve been giving students all this time. I would actually trust a fact in Wikipedia over one in a textbook if they were in conflict.

But it’s not just facts; Wikipedia is also superior when it comes to point-of-view. I laughed at their value-neutral philosophy, because such a thing isn’t possible. At least, it’s not possible where there’s a single author. But in the negotiated definitions of Wikipedia, there is a natural balance of viewpoints that really gives the readers a sense of the range of opinions on a particular issue, often just as valuable (if not more so) than the dry facts. Even fake controversies seem to be quickly expunged from its pages.

I’ve changed my mind about Wikipedia. How about you?

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Do you think that the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire have an inordinate amount of power in deciding who the credible candidates are going to be in the presidential primaries?

Take the issue of ethanol, an alternate energy fuel that can be made from corn, which is one of Iowa’s chief agricultural products.

Ethanol fuel is not particularly efficient, and some even believe that it may use more energy to produce ethanol than the fuel provides. But both Republican and Democratic candidates must support ethanol to get any traction in Iowa. And you may disagree about the promise of ethanol, but we can never have a serious discussion about it as long as Iowa retains such a powerful voice in the presidential elections.

This is just one extreme example of the larger issue, which is that two states get to set the tone for the other forty-eight. From the financial districts in New York, to the wheat fields in Kansas, to the senior citizen centers in Florida, to the Mormon churches in Utah, to the cattle ranches in Texas, to the Hollywood community in California, to the indigenous peoples of Alaska and Hawaii, America is a panoply of voices and points of view. To bestow the coveted frontrunner status to candidates after hearing from only two out of fifty states seems like a subversion of democracy.

The general election is held in every state on the same day.

Should the primaries all be held on the same day?