HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INTERNATIONAL EDITION: Erasmus Endangered?

LESS THAN 200 PEOPLE ATTEND STEVIE WONDER’S PRO-OBAMA APPEARANCE IN CLEVELAND THIS MORNING: Organizational competence at its zenith, as spotted by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer:

Legendary performer Stevie Wonder this morning expressed his love for Cleveland during a get-out-the-vote rally at Cleveland State University.

His love went largely unrequited.

Fewer than 200 people showed up to watch Wonder perform a handful of his hits at the early voting event in support of President Barack Obama.

Most of the people had learned of the event just hours before the 9:30 a.m. start time. Some just happened to be in the area and followed the live music.

Lee Stranahan tweets, “More people are saying they are going to vote for Obama than will actually vote for him. Just watch. This will be consistent on Tuesday.” It’s stories like the one above — and similar reports such as this — that add support to that prediction.

UPDATE: An Insta-Reader writes that the Stevie Wonder snafu is all Artie Fufkin’s fault.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Holiday Toy List.

CREDIBLE NON-PARTISANSHIP IS THE ONLY KIND OF NON-PARTISANSHIP: “If making a wager makes someone seem as though they have a rooting interest in a particular outcome, then donating to a cause most certainly proves it, doesn’t it? It’s like James Taranto says in his Best of the Web column: Two papers in one!”

HECK OF A JOB, BLOOMIE: Marathon Cancelled, but Damage to Bloomberg’s Rep is Done.

And this current debacle is on top of his feckless response to the blizzard of 2010.  But if your top priorities are more bike lanes in Manhattan and banning the Big Gulp, then Mike’s your man.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails, “If New Yorkers had wanted Bloomberg to get rid of all that snow, they should’ve told him they were enjoying it.”

Yeah, Mike’s the very definition of a Puritan — in more ways than one.

STEPHEN F. HAYES EXPLAINS THE MYSTERIES OF BENGHAZI. “November 6 is not only Election Day, it’s also the eight-week anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Regardless of which candidate wins, the American people deserve answers to the many unanswered questions about the attack—and the events that preceded and followed it. The Benghazi debacle is a drama in three parts: the lack of security before the attacks, the flaccid response during the attacks, and the misleading narrative after the attacks. There are unanswered questions about each part. Here are some of the most important.”

CHARLES MOORE: It is Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffes’ that should win him the election: The Republican best represents his country’s ability to renew itself for each generation.

This sense of a people defeating appalling obstacles, through their own efforts and the hand of providence, is as old as Moses. As Conan Doyle implies, it is central to the story of the English-speaking peoples. Even today, it is what makes America new in each generation. Barack Obama does not believe in it – he does not even like it. Mitt Romney does.

What the media see as a “gaffe” is often, in reality, a challenge to the dominant orthodoxy. In the late Seventies, Margaret Thatcher made the gaffe of questioning the motives of the Soviet Union when everyone else was mad about détente. She made the gaffe of questioning incomes policies when most people said they were the only way of stopping inflation. After a while, she piled up enough gaffes to make sure that she won the general election of 1979. In the United States in 1980, Ronald Reagan made those sorts of gaffes, too.

I love this about Obama: “It turns out that his character is not that of a man who has emerged from nowhere to challenge the powerful few on behalf of the wretched of the earth. It is that of a media-savvy professor of an Ivy League university – comfortable with irony, more than comfortable with the sound of his own voice, confident that he knows a great deal more than most of us. One of the striking features of the lives of such professors is their terms of employment. They have what is called ‘tenure’: no one can get them out. . . . Mr Obama went into the contest that ends on Tuesday believing that he, too, had tenure. The White House was his. The election, like those bogus selection processes for top public sector jobs when the winner has been pre-decided, was little more than a tiresome formality.”

FLASHBACK (From Ed): Speaking of Thatcher’s seventies-era “gaffes,” And now, a Few Words from Margaret Thatcher on the Failure of Obamanomics.

OWN GOAL: Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark.

Yeah, that’s what you want to be doing on the weekend before an election. Can a campaign drop an October November surprise on itself?

CHANGE: Obama Attracting Smaller Crowds than McCain in 2008.

UPDATE: Obama’s Cleveland Rally Attendance 20x Lower than 2008.

GOOD GRIEF: Ron Radosh on Oliver Stone’s new Showtime documentary Untold History of the United States: “Carl Marzani told this very story in We Can Be Friends. A secret member of the American Communist party who had worked during the war in the OSS, Marzani later was proved by evidence from Soviet archives and Venona decryptions to have been a KGB (then the NKVD) operative…Over and over, Stone uses the same quotations, the same arrangements of material, and the same arguments as Marzani. This is not to accuse Stone of plagiarism, only to point out that the case he now offers as new was argued in exactly the same terms by an American Communist and Soviet agent in 1952.”

MENTAL IMAGERY GIVES LANGUAGE MEANING.

REVENGE — FOR WHAT?

BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A PIECE OF PAPER: Marriage works, and it’s the answer to the misery of loneliness.

SIMPLE RECIPES for those without electricity. This isn’t exactly rocket science.

I’VE READ WORSE EXCUSES: I get my constituency news in the pub, says Tory Charlotte Leslie.

PUBLIC SERVANT: ‘Motherly’ Margaret Thatcher cleaned bodyguard’s shoes and tidied their rooms.

FIGHTING OBESITY IN OFFICES with “Active Design.”

RUDY GIULIANI: Obama Should Resign Over Libya, Economy.

Welcome aboard, Rudy.

DIRTY TRICKS: 4 men arrested in Perrysburg for stealing Romney signs while driving sheet metal union truck. “Perrysburg police arrested four Toledo area men early Friday morning on charges of stealing Mitt Romney campaign signs in Wood and Lucas counties in Northwest Ohio. The signs were found in a pickup truck owned by Sheet Metal Workers International, Union Local 33 in Parma, according to the police report. Many of the signs — some measuring as large as 4 feet by 8 feet — were believed to have been put up by members of Northwest Ohio Conservative Coalition, said John McAvoy, the group’s president.” My advice to the Conservative Coalition: Don’t let this pass after the election: Sue them, and do discovery. Get them under oath and ask about money, connections to the state and national Party, and the Obama Campaign. Make the rubble bounce.

REASON TV: Gas Lines, Gouging, and Hurricane Sandy: Keeping Prices Low Means Nobody Gets Fuel. Can somebody explain basic economics to Chris Christie and Mayor Bloomberg?

DO IT FOR LOVE:  Of country.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: New Romney Ad: Voting For Revenge Or Love Of Country.

WAPO FINALLY NOTICES BENGHAZI, but can’t resist a slap at Fox even while crediting them with, you know, actually covering the story. “While the agencies separately defend themselves — or not — the White House appears determined to put off any serious discussion of Benghazi until after the election. Sooner or later, however, the administration must answer questions about what increasingly looks like a major security failure — and about the policies that led to it.”

By its own behavior, the Post has made clear that, like the White House, it would prefer “later” — that is, after the election.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Bad Omens For Greece In Argentina.