Will Straw writes on the topic at the Times.

No, obviously not, would be the response of most. Charlie Beckett of Polis considers the question in more detail, in an extract from a new book.

The online magazine Slate has published, as in previous years, a full list of their staff members, showing each one’s voting intention on November 4th. Step forward for your moment in the sun, Melonyce McAfee, copy editor (Obama).

I’m have no idea what this full disclosure is meant to prove - perhaps to show honesty, although I’m not sure how it does. Whatever Slate’s rationale for its actions, journalists in general and impartial ones in particular are under heavy attack from the partisans at the moment. Perhaps it’s a reflection of difficult economic times, or the impending presidential election, but the tone of the attacks also seems to be nastier and more personal than it was a few months ago.

Take this example from Nick Robinson’s blog yesterday. Of the first hundred comments (I couldn’t bear to read any more) thirty-five were accusations that Robinson was biased in favour of the Government, or responses from others to those accusations. Robinson’s post today on Europe was much the same, but with the personal attacks diluted by the more general hysterics that European stories produce on BBC comment pages.

It’s not news that the wild crowds of the Net hate the mainstream media, but it doesn’t make for entertaining reading when those attacks take up over a third of the comments on the article. It will be interesting to see how the BBC and others react. There must be a strong temptation to remove the comment feature, and perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Politico is trying a different approach. It runs a long article today, defending itself against accusations of an Obama bias. It says:

“There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe. As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.”

That’s true, of course, but the argument assumes, perhaps for politeness’s sake, that people complaining are asking for balance or fairness. They are not. They are asking for bias in the direction they favour, and what riles them more than anything is the notion of impartiality.

If you want to see the different treatment given to those with no concern for impartiality, compare Robinson’s comment pages with the adulatory comments on this article by Melanie Phillips in the Spectator. Phillips claims that presidential candidate Barack Obama thinks that America is the source of all evil in the world, and that his and his advisers’ anti-Semitism will harm Israel and encourage extremist Islam. This is not - to put it kindly - a viewpoint well-supported by evidence, but the commenters don’t care. In the first four comments, we are told that the article is “brilliant”, “makes good points”, reveals previously unknown news about the extremist Samantha Power, and is commendable for reminding people how much better America is than Europe.

Perhaps the BBC should create new editions (like their existing International and National ones) for right-wing loonies and left-wing loonies. In one, Nick “Red” Robbo can inveigh against the fat cat bankers and their ties to the military-industrial complex, while across the aisle Nick “The Westminster Polecat” Robinson slays the evil lackeys of failed New Labour socialism with a stroke of his pen. Each blog would receive thousands of supportive comments, boosting staff morale and productivity sufficiently to create a real BBC News site that the rest of us can read in peace.

A list of useful sites and resources at Salon.com.

In a story about a potential Sarah Palin run in 2012 (at The New Republic Politics blog), a commenter gives some interesting historical background:

Only two failed Vice Presidential Candidates have won their party’s nomination. FDR, after losing on the Cox ticket in 1920, ran and won in 1932, and Dole, losing with Ford in ‘76, got the nomination to lose in ‘96. The two common factors here? Both ran several cycles after their previous effort, and both greatly deepened their resumes in the interim. FDR served four years as Gov. of New York and beat Polio, Dole ended up becoming Senate Leader for the GOP. The road, however, is littered with former Veep nominees who crash and burn four years later, should they run. Edwards in 2008, Lieberman in 2004, Muskie in 1972. Dole himself was wiped out in his 1980 attempt, getting all of 597 votes in the New Hampshire primary. History suggests Palin ‘12 won’t be successful.

David Mitchell (of … and Webb) writes in the Observer on the issue of politicians’ pay.

Why Tuesday? is a campaigning organisation in the US, which campaigns among other things for weekend voting. They were profiled in today’s New York Times.

In The Guardian today.

What are the two main candidates’ positions on the big issues, and how have they voted on and spoken about them in the past? You ask, Congressional Quarterly answers.

Tim Erickson has a vaguely depressing post on something happening Stateside called the American Citizens’ Summit. Personally, I would have thought that November 4th was the ultimate American Citizens’ Summit, but it seems not: this event is being held in February.

The event is all about transpartisanship, which apparently:

acknowledges the validity of truths across a range of political perspectives and seeks to synthesize them into an inclusive, pragmatic whole beyond typical political dualities. In practice, transpartisan solutions emerge out of a new kind of public conversation that moves beyond polarization by applying proven methods of facilitated dialogue, deliberation and conflict resolution.

This long blurb seems to English into “transpartisanship is about getting people to stop fighting and start agreeing”.

Now, I admire attempts to get beyond boring partisan wrangling, but I am strongly suspicious of intellectualising approaches that try, as this summit does, to “synthesize views into an inclusive, pragmatic whole”.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s rather patronising to suggest that if you frightful oafs would only stop SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER for a moment, we clevers could come up with a nice sensible compromise. I don’t think it’s necessarily evil that people who broadly agree with each other should form themselves into parties.

Second, in most big political debates an ultimate synthesis is unimportant, or at least less important than the debate itself. Discussion challenges positions and brings about better thought, as long as it’s between a sufficiently broad group of participants, but that doesn’t meant that everyone has to agree at the end. It is sufficient if opposing views are tested and moderated, in fact that’s probably preferable to the creation of unchallengeable syntheses. I prefer alternation of political parties to the dictatorship of reasonable people with flipcharts.

Third, and most important, there are plenty of big political issues that are not reducible to pragmatic things that everyone can compromise on - in fact, “things not reducible to pragmatic compromises” is a reasonable starting definition of “big political issues”. How, for example, would transpartisanship handle issues like the death penalty, or climate change? Is there some set of facts, or a mind map, that will convince Ian Paisley that maybe the Republicans are onto something?

Overall, I admire the idealism about democracy and rationalism, but democracy has to be a balance between popular passion and rationalism. Too far one way, and you have mob rule. Too far the other, and you have transpartisanship: the arrogant belief that clever people can facilitate a compromise to every tricky issue, without any of the mob’s passion or anger. It feels rather like the sixth-form debating society telling the first XV how to play rugby.

Coalescing people around centrist views is fine, but don’t kid yourself that centrism isn’t in itself a political - partisan - position.