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OXBLOG MEGA-SUPER-UPDATE SPECTACULAR: It's hard to live up to a headline like that, but I think I've got a pretty decent story to tell. I've mentioned in passing that I've been travelling abroad for the past few months. Well, that was a euphemism. I was in Iraq, working as an analyst for the Coalition's counter-IED task force.

That wasn't a secret per se, but I was instructed not to blog about my job until I got home from Iraq. When people ask what exactly I was doing in Iraq, I like to say that if I told them I'd have to kill them. Sadly, that just isn't true. I won't go into it right now, but the broad contours of my work had to do with some pretty general questions about the insurgency that lots of people are asking.

I got home from Iraq three weeks ago. Forty-eight hours later, I started working as a full-time volunteer on the foreign policy and national security staff for McCain 2008. I've taken a leave of absence from day job so that I can work a lot more hours for a lot less pay. (Just more proof that I'm an irrational, impractical, delusional ideologue.)

Now let me toss out my third hand grenade: I'm getting married. I proposed to Susanna six days after coming home from Iraq. We hope to get married some time in the spring of 2009. I don't recall off-hand if I ever mentioned Susanna by name on OxBlog. I've generally tried to separate my personal life from my blogging. But this is just too big and too exciting (at least for me).

So, lots of big changes in my life, none of them conducive to frequent blogging. (Some of you may be quite thankful for that.) In Iraq, I could blog, but I was almost always too tired after work. Now I'm too tired and I can't go around expressing political opinions because being part of a campaign means having some discipline. I hope I can work something out where I can blog as part of the campaign, but that's up in the air for the moment.

Now to close on another random note. I'm writing this post sitting next to a window with a panoramic view of downtown Seoul. I made a commitment almost six months ago to do several days of research in South Korea. From the little I've seen, Seoul is an amazing city and I hope to come back when I have time to enjoy it.

To say the least, my life isn't boring these days.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS, BLOOD TIES: In Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent US visit, we can see the peculiar dynamics of the Anglo-American relationship at work.

This piece in the Times in particular tells us a lot about the anxieties that accompany the British/American alliance.

On the one hand, we see the competitive desire to prove that Britain is most special in America's constellation, even more than Atlanticist Sarkozy (who only got to speak to the President rather than all three candidates!) and Oz Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who only, gasp, got a phone conversation).

The alliance with the US means that Britain can play Greece to America's Rome, and is first in a strong field of contenders for that role.

And we also get a glimpse of what the British alliance delivers the US: a sense of mystical pedigree and ancestral prestige. Thus the New England Historic Genealogical Society has found that Obama is a distant relative of Winston Churchill, himself part American, and the embodiment of Anglo-American kinship, shared burdens and world mission.

Obama's claim to a blood tie is actually more than an eager identification with Churchill. It is an American presidential tradition, but with a twist. On the accession of a new American President, there is the publication of their genealogy as it relates to the English monarchy.

Thus George Bush senior was announced as a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth II by the director of 'Burke's Peerage', and Burke's Presidential Families of the United States links Lincoln to Edward I, Washington to Henry III, and Teddy Roosevelt to Robert III, King of Scots.

Obama, wittingly or not, has updated this tradition, tracing his blood ties to an aristocrat, but one of democratic politics.

For her part, Hillary has more prosaically found a Welsh ancestor. She also discovered Jewish ancestry some years ago during a public dispute over her views on Palestine, and in a moment of real excitement, remembered in New Zealand that she was named after Edmund Hillary, who conquered Everest some six years after she was born.

But the factual truth of these claims is less interesting than what motivates them, which is a kind of compact. The US offers access to power, Britain offers the mystique of old-world prestige. And history is pressed into action to serve both.

NB: For more on this blood-tracing and much else besides, see the Hitch's Blood, Class and Empire.

CLINGING TO GUNS AND RELIGION: There doesn't seem anything intrinsically offensive in Obama's remarks about the political ecology of small towns. But it might be empirically wrong.

Getting fired up about wedge issues at election time might not be what struggling folk from small towns do more than others.

According to Larry Bartels, it is college-educated urbanites who are far more attached to social issues when it comes to their voting behaviour:

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

Moreover, it is Ivy-League educated Presidential candidates, both Hillary and Obama, who see small-town America in this distorting way. Hillary by pandering to it, and Obama by despairing of it.

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