Blag the dog

Nice to see that Illinois is continuing to distinguish itself in the area of good government, or lack thereof. Rod Blagojevich--say it three times, fast!! And we thought Obama was a funny name.

Well, this confirms that Patrick Fitzgerald, who showed us what a pack of liars Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were, is nonpartisan and very tough on corrupt politicians. We no doubt will see more "What did Obama know and when did he know it???" breathlessness and guilt-by-association bs, but as the complaint and Fitzpatrick makes clear, Blagojevich was fuming over the Obama camp's lack of corruption.

Still, this is a ugly mess and an embarrassment to Democrats. This guy can't go to jail fast enough.

He’s a Socialist! He’s George Bush! He’s Left! He’s Right!

I don’t tend to put a lot of Fox News clips up on the site; the network has basically become Pravda for Republicans, a propaganda outlet that dabbles in news reporting.

But this clip is interesting because it shows how conservative pundits have been reduced to sputtering, babbling incoherency by Obama’s decision-making.

In this case, they are trying to square their false premise (Obama is a big scary Leftie who wants to make the United States a Socialist paradise) with the very pragmatic, competency-based decisions he has made about his cabinent.

Look, those of us on the left have known all along that Obama is not a Far-Left Radical. Everything about his record and style suggests a relatively mainstream progressive who is cautious, practical, and a consensus-builder.

And so, no, Fox news analysis panel, we are NOT freaking out when he picks Clinton (who used to be a Far Left Radical to Fox News types, until she was the only alternative to Obama—hmmm, that’s curious, isn’t it? Funny how they all talk like she’s some kind of conservative soul mate now) or Robert Gates.

Liaason’s suggestion that progressives have so much to be pleased with that they’re willing to cut Obama some slack is a reasonable statement, but the basic truth is the majority of those on the left did not suffer from this delusion that Obama was The Most Liberal Evah.

When Fox News is struggling to align its talking points with reality instead of parroting the Bush Administration line, that’s change I can believe in.

Political Blogging, so 2008 ...

Now that the election is over, I admit to having a bit less motivation to keep posting here on The World's Most Dangerous Political Blog (TM).

I mean, sure, it's kind of exciting that Obama picked Hillary to be SoS (ooooh! Will they get along?? Will they fight?? And What About Bill??!?) but really, for a layperson like me, posting about transition teams and vote recounts and auto industry bailouts just doesn't have the same thrill as the ol' horserace that we enjoyed for the past two years or so.

So maybe I'll dial back a bit with the blogging. Maybe I'll start reviewing movies (looking forward to The Day the Earth Stood Still!). Or maybe once BO takes office there will be enough big issues (he does have a pretty big mess to clean up) to keep me interested. We'll see. And of course, reader input always keeps things more lively. I'd be interested in knowing what you think of the transition so far...

In the meantime, for old times sake, here's a funny video featuring Sarah Palin!

David Brooks Gets Obama a Pillow

David Brooks is nominally a conservative columnist who went through the motions of being, well, somewhat supportive of John McCain during the election season.

But it’s pretty clear that Brooks is taken with Obama’s emphasis on being smart and competent. I don’t know if you could say he’s in the tank for Obama, but he’s certainly not one of the dwindling number of conservatives who are still talking about socialism or whether Obama’s going to church enough (no joke, there’s a story in Politico about this).

Here are some of his comments on the Obama cabinet:

“Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced “fresh faces” to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

As a result, the team he has announced so far is more impressive than any other in recent memory. One may not agree with them on everything or even most things, but a few things are indisputably true.

First, these are open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence. Orszag, who will probably be budget director, is trusted by Republicans and Democrats for his honest presentation of the facts.

Second, they are admired professionals. Conservative legal experts have a high regard for the probable attorney general, Eric Holder, despite the business over the Marc Rich pardon.

Third, they are not excessively partisan. Obama signaled that he means to live up to his postpartisan rhetoric by letting Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship.

Fourth, they are not ideological. The economic advisers, Furman and Goolsbee, are moderate and thoughtful Democrats. Hillary Clinton at State is problematic, mostly because nobody has a role for her husband. But, as she has demonstrated in the Senate, her foreign-policy views are hardheaded and pragmatic. (It would be great to see her set of interests complemented by Samantha Power’s set of interests at the U.N.)

…

Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.”

They’re … Aliiiiiiive …

Just a random thought: for conservatives, the upcoming Obama Administration may look less like a Team of Rivals and more like Dawn of the Dead.

Look at the names being floated: Tom Daschle at HHS. Hillary Clinton at State; or Bill Richardson. Al Gore as some kind Global Warming Czar. Gen. Wesley Clark has been mentioned as a candidate for Defense Dept.

Not that Clinton or any of the others don’t have meaningful employment now. But Sec. of State, for example, is arguably much more powerful a position than one of a hundred Senators.

It’s too simplistic to say that this is the Clinton Administration, resurrected (… or is it?). But I think it’s clear that a number of Dem heavy hitters are getting second acts in the new Obama Administration. I would be surprised if we didn’t see at least one or two prominent Republicans as well. But a certain feeling of déjà vu is probably unavoidable.

God I wish Kos would grow up already

I’ve been visiting Daily Kos today, and it’s a nonstop whine-fest over there.

Senate Democrats today decided Joe Leiberman would not be harshly punished (by losing his chair of the Homeland Secuity committee) for campaigning for McCain and saying some pretty bad things about Obama during the campaign.

This follows Obama’s lead, observers say, and is part of his no-grudges, bipartisan approach.

It’s not going over well with the lefty blogs. Kos in particular is posting some very bitter and profane comments, kind of playing the cliche of the foul-mouth, extremist blogger to the hilt.

These guys have always had it in for Lieberman, with a ferocity that I never have quite understood. I don’t like Lieberman’s position on the Iraq war, or the fact that he supported McCain, but I would think the Democratic Party is big enough to tolerate one guy who steps out of line. (To be clear, the Dem Party is, demonstrably, big enough… but the lefty bloggers, not so much.)

Much of Lieberman’s positioning about the war is due to a (I believe misguided) sense of needing to protect Israel, and I’m not about to fault his motivation there, even if I disagree with his conclusions and positions.

Listen, in this last election, Obama put the Democratic Party in position to be the majority party in this country for the next generation at least. You’d think if he says go easy on Lieberman, the partisan bloggers could cut him a little slack. You’d be wrong, apparently.

Obama’s entire campaign was built on Americans working together despite their differences. He said from the beginning he wanted to bridge some of the political divides and not keep up this tit-for-tat partisanship. The average American is sick of this kind of infighting. How Kos or anyone else can be surprised at this turn of events is pretty hard to figure.

But hardcore partisans always tend to gripe about compromise. In this case, though, I think they should just accept this outcome and get over it. Hopefully they will.

So that's why we saw Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers a million times on our TV sets...

Lefty blog Crooks and Liars captures this little nugget of election analysis. From Fox News’ Sheppard Smith, no less.

“DiPaolo:...the MSM being so in the tank for Obama...

Smith: Oh, please. That's preposterous. The MSM reflected what was happening in this nation. It did not drive it. The blogs didn't drive this movement, the media didn't drive this movement. Barack Obama did not lose this election. It was his to lose. It was not John McCain's to win. The Republicans had no shot unless the Democrats gave it to them and they didn't and to blame the media is a cop out and ridiculous....

DiPaolo: The MSM has been liberal since its inception. It's years and years of pounding...

Smith: How did George Bush win twice?

DiPaolo: I don't know. Karl Rove is a genius.”


And there you have it. “I don’t know.” If the media has a liberal bias why is the entire AM band of the radio home to raving right-wing attack dogs like Rush Limbaugh? I don’t know. If the media has a liberal bias why do cable news networks put conservative hosts like Dobbs and Beck and O’Reilly on in prime time? I don’t know. If the media has a liberal bias why is MSNBC the only place where you can find any liberals who aren’t doormats to people like Sean Hannity? I don’t know.

Maybe the media doesn’t have a liberal bias. You can argue that newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post tend to be liberal on their editorial pages, but so what? Conservatives have their editorial pages (Wall Street Journal, Washington Times) as well.

Journalists—and I don’t include cable news pundits in that term—have a job to do. They are trained to do it without injecting their personal opinions. There is a lot we can criticize our modern media about, and we should, and we should hold them accountable every single day if they mess up or let some bias slip in. But to continue whining and complaining about liberal media bias when the majority of our TV and radio pundits are white male conservatives seems a little ridiculous to me.

Fox News was in non-stop Attack Obama mode for the past six month and it did nothing but freak out a bunch of people who were going to vote Republican anyhow.

If I were to give a piece of advice to conservatives on how to stop losing elections, I would say: Fire Your Media. Fox, Rush, O’Reilly, Rove, and whole happy gang are a bunch of delusional ideologues who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on their sizable asses. They are telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to know. And you have lost the majority of American voters along the way.

Pelosi!! The Musical

I'm officially agnostic on Nancy Pelosi. I don't know enough about the workings of the US House of Representatives to say with certainty whether she's a good Speaker or bad.

But because she's come up a lot in some conversations I've had recently, I thought I would pass along this article from Politico:

"As Pelosi enters her third year as speaker, by any measure, she has become the most powerful woman in U.S. political history and is now preparing to wield her gavel in a way that few, if any, recent speakers could match. Even former Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the architect of the 1994 Republican Revolution, pales in comparison. Pelosi is being mentioned by observers in the same breath as the legendary Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill, although she has yet to assemble a legislative record to match theirs."

Veterans Day

PE Obama and Tammy Duckworth at a Veterans Day ceremony.

TPM surveys the carnage...

It is very easy to get caught up in the "echo-chamber" aspects of political blogging. This video from Talking Points Media certainly is one-sided, edited to bring up the most negative spin on where the Republican Party stands right now.

But this is still a pretty amazing video.

Readers, conservative or not, are welcome to put their 2 cents in in the comments section.

Mod Lang Endorses Barack Obama for President

Now THAT’S a maverick move.

Obviously, I never had to “endorse” Obama because I was “in the tank” for the guy from early on. Also, thanks to John McCain, I’ve developed a new love for “air quotes.”

OK, seriously, what should we talk about today?

I was thinking this morning of the low point of my day on Tuesday. We were frantically trying to get the house ready for the party. I had just gotten back from running out to buy ice and a few last minute supplies.

On our answering machine was a recorded message from the chair of the Obama campaign in Minnesota. He said that the vote was turning out to be much closer than expected in this state and the campaign was urgently asking people to meet at such-and-such a place to do last minute door knocking.

Then I checked some of the blogs and found that nationally, an email had gone out from the Obama campaign saying that several states were much closer than expected and they were calling for volunteers to do last-minute phone banking.

I almost started hyperventilating. The rational part of my brain knew that I shouldn’t panic, but after one election night where we thought Gore had won it, only to have it taken away, and another where the exit polls initially looked very good for Kerry, I couldn’t help but think, “It’s happening again.”

Of course, both here in Minnesota and nationally, the polls did not end up being closer than expected. I suspect both cases were simply tactics to motivate potentially complacent Obama supporters to get out and vote. Tall guy suggested that perhaps the Minnesota camp’s goal was to squeeze a few more Franken votes out of D districts. I guess they shoulda squeezed harder.

Anyhow, it made me pretty jittery there for a while. I didn’t really start to calm down until they called Pennsylvania.

Want to talk some more about the election?

I thought so.

Congratulations to eft, who almost precisely nailed the final percentage of the popular vote. Eft predicted a 53-47 final margin, the actual result was 52-46. None of us (eft, tall guy, moi) called the states/electoral counts exactly right, but I will take credit for thinking big in one of my two "final" predictions, which called it 375-163 for Obama. The final electoral count will probably be 364-174, if Missouri (Red), Georgia (Red), and North Carolina (Blue) end up the way they're leaning right now.

And who really thought Indiana would turn Blue???? (Blue Indiana, for one.)

I heard a lot of griping about the polls among McCain supporters, about how they are unreliable. McCain lost by 6 points, most polls were in a 4-8 point range (favoring Obama) at the end. No Bradley effect, and as in 2004, the final polls were pretty close to the final result. Rasmussen got it exactly right, and several others were very close.

The Democrats did not pick up the number of Senate and House seats that many predicted. This was not a "wave" election like 2006, although it clearly was a very good year for the D's. So we haven't suddenly become a nation of liberals. But the last two elections suggest we are not exactly a conservative country either.

Good, let's lose the labels and get something done.

Climbing the mountain

Got to bed about 1:30 am last night. I was hoping to hear a result on the Coleman/Franken race, but at that point Coleman was up about 80 votes (!!) and it was clear it wasn’t going to be called any time soon. So I went to bed.

Got up about 7 am thanks to our early-rising 2-year-old (and 7 am is really sleeping in for him.) And strangely, I didn’t feel too bad. Started cleaning up the party stuff while listening to NPR.

One thing that struck me about Obama’s speech last night was how somber and restrained it was. I loved the (subtle) references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sam Cooke. But overall, this speech was not a celebration. He obviously knows that all the work, all the fighting against stereotype and distrust and tribalism has just been prelude. Now he has to lead a nation.

I thought he did a masterful job of reaching out last night to all Americans. But there are some who heard it differently. A conservative woman I know told me today she is distraught because she heard Obama has said his first act will be to sign an executive order legalizing partial birth abortions. And that he has said he wants to redistrubute wealth.

I asked her if she thought his speech last night tried to extend a hand to people like her who didn’t support him. “No,” she said.

It’s an example of what President Obama will face. Rumors, myths, misinformation campaigns, and a segment of the electorate determined to see the worst in him, determined not to give him a break. No wonder he was somber last night. The hard work hasn’t yet begun.

Live Blogging from election night party 3

Things winding down here as the reality of President Obama sinks in.

I think we all need a little time to absorb this.

McCain's speech was dignified and gracious. We all commented on how we would've liked to see *this* John McCain run for President. But the reality was he had a tremendous uphill climb from the start. He stuck to what was tried and true in politics. In other years, against other opponents, it might've been enough.

But I think it's safe to say politics have changed. Along with the country.

And no matter what they tell you, change is good.

Live Blogging from election night party 2

It's just before 9, and we've already had someone throw up. Of course, that someone was 7 months old. ("That's awfully young to be drinking," said one wag.) Things are looking very good for Obama, still too soon to call the Franken and Tinklenberg (of the Fightin' Tinklenbergs!!!) races.

Live Blogging from the election night party

7:40

About 30 peopl in our living room right now, not counting kids, and there are a few of them! A lot of buzz. I was pretty anxious earlier but feeling better now that two nets have called PA for Obama. I wish CNN would get on the ball. Early word is encouraging for Franken. Probably shouldn't jump to conclusions.

We bought a ton of food and beer. And everybody keeps bringing beer. A good problem to have.

I voted

A crisp autumn day in Minnesota. Clouds have moved in since but when I got to the community building next to our public park, the sun was still shining. Leaves were hitting the group with a crackling sound, toddlers were playing in the park. A dad with an "I voted" sticker sat and watched his kids.

I had been listening to Al Green on the way there: "Love and Happiness."

"Love can make you do right," Al sang.

There were no lines. I'd heard about long lines there at 7:30am but although the polling place seemed nearly full I didn't actually wait at all.

"Unh. Unh. Ahhh," Al sang.

The poll workers were helpful, and not as uniformly elderly as they have been in the past. One told me that as of 11:15 am they had seen more than 1,000 people vote. In the 2004 election, a total of 2,200 people voted at that location.

"Hey hey hey," Al sang.

I looked at the ballot. Filled out the ballot. Looked at it a moment more. We've been waiting a long time for this.

"Walk away with victory," Al sang.

Predictions!

Well, the call for predictions didn’t get overwhelming results but two hardy souls ventured their guesses. Sorry I didn’t get these up sooner, full comments can be found at the “Call for Predictions” post.

Eft predicted:

“Obama-53%
 McCain-47%.

AZ will go red bc nearly every state backs their own. (Except for TN and Gore in 2000.) CO will surprise the pollsters and go red bc they're more conservative than they like to admit.
NV will go blue bc it's a state that doesn't mind taking a gamble and MT will join them just to rebel a bit.
For the toss-ups: FL, MO, and IN will go red. (IN can't change, MO will be close, and FL will vote for the candidate closest to their average age.)
ND, OH, and NC will go blue. (ND will align with the rest of the Upper Midwest, OH will glom along with PA, and NC will tip to Obama...barely.)

The two hottest races in NC are for the governor and the US Senate. It seems it's all about change, so the governor will be McCrory (R) and the US Senator will be Hagen (D). McCrory will unseat the anointed one bc the present D administration is rife with scandal. Dole will be out of the Senate bc of her pandering to the conservative base-they want some changes too.”

Eft gives Franken a thumbs down on taking the Senate seat from Coleman.

The tall guy says:

“Obama 49% McCain 47% with 3% going to libertarians and greens.
Electorial Obama gets about 300.

Congress will increase with some more democrats in the house, I don't think they get to 60 in the senate, but close. Lieberman changes parties anyhow.

Franken squeaks in. MN thinks they are not ready for him, but after a couple of years find out he's a better policy guy than they would have thought. He's not all red meat for the base as everyone believes, and all the old satire that is getting flung back at him is hard to bring back up 6 years later.”


I would agree that if Franken gets in he will probably be a pretty good Senator. Not sure he can do it though. I’m a fan and even I thought twice about voting for him.

What are you seeing?

I'd be interested to know how things are looking to readers TWMDPB (TM). Long lines? Partisan displays? Did you get free coffee?

Election Day

Well, it's finally here.

Of the six daily tracking polls I'm looking at, only one has Obama under 50 percent. McCain's highest number is 46.

RCP has Obama leading in Ohio, Penn., Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada. McCain leads in N. Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri. Hard to believe that states like IN and GA are in play.

Polster.com's final poll average puts Obama at an 8 point lead, 52 - 44.

It's a beautiful day in Minnesota, warm and sunny. Big lines at the polls, I'm hearing. Win or lose, I love election days.

Oh no...

I just realized that after tomorrow, there will be no polls to check every day. The thought kind of boggles my mind.

My Prediction

In preparing my Election Predictions, I scientifically assembled a vast array of numbers, statistics, data, and street-level observations, carefully analyzing all of it, in an attempt to come up with the definitive, fail-safe prediction for the outcome of the 2008 elections.

And then I decided to cheat.

The thin reed of hope that McCain supporters cling to is the fact that this really is a ground-breaking election. We’re in uncharted territory here. There could be a Bradley effect that makes the current polls completely inaccurate. Or, there could be a huge turnout of youth and first-time voters that swamps the polls and leads to an Obama landslide. The undecideds could break decisively for McCain (it would probably mean that 120 percent of the undecideds would have to break that way, but whatever…). Heck, let’s throw caution to the wind and say the IBD/TIPP poll numbers are based in reality…

In short, there are enough unknowns to keep this thing interesting right up to the end, even with Obama maintaining a significant lead in these last couple of weeks.

So I’ve prepared two scenarios. One has Obama winning by a strong margin.

The other is that Obama knocks this thing out of the park.

Scenario A:
A very conservative reading of the polls. I give Obama only the states where he is five points or more ahead, according to Pollster.com. In other words, he wins no tossup states. Chances of that are slim, but for the sake of argument…
What do we come up with:

Obama: 311 electoral votes
McCain: 227 electoral votes
In this scenario, I’ll throw out a 51 – 49 percent win for Obama nationally.

Scenario B:
Obama wins every state where he is currently ahead. I also throw in Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina for Obama. All those states are extremely close, and in this scenario, Obama’s ground game carries the day.
And the big map says:

Obama: 375 electoral votes
McCain 163 electoral votes
In this scenario, Obama wins 54—44. A ten point margin, one less than Gallup is showing today.

Now, believe me, I’ve tried to envision a scenario by which McCain wins. Just because I’m a gloom and doom kind of guy. But as far as I can see, the only way that McCain wins is if the polls are massively wrong. All of ‘em.

That just doesn’t seem possible, but we shall see.

As for other races, Cillizza of the WP predicts a Dem pickup of 30 seats in the house, and that sounds about right. Dems won’t get to 60 in the Senate, but they don’t really need to. There are a couple of moderate R’s left in the Senate, and they know their job security depends on them working in bipartisan way—including Minnesota’s Norm “finger in the wind” Coleman, who will probably win on Tuesday.

I’m pulling for El Tinklenberg (of the Fightin’ Tinklenbergs!!!) but I’ll call it for Bachmann. Hey, we need comic relief in our politicians from time to time, so Michele will serve well in that capacity.

I’ll post other predictions from the comments sometime tonight.

Riding the Whirlwind

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m just hanging on as these last few days of The Most Important Election in The History of the Universe reaches its frenetic conclusion.

(It is an important election, of course. But you know, they do say that about every election.)

Today we got our first robocall. In most states, these are recorded phone calls that generally are attack ads aimed at a candidate. In MN, you can’t do robocalls as such, you have to have a live person making the call.

So guess what they do. They hire someone to call you and read a script. The young lady who called me read her script at an almost inhumanly fast pace, in a monotone, never pausing for even a beat, obviously not want to be interrupted or questioned. I actually could not make sense of the blizzard of words that were spilling over the phone line, but I did catch a few, “Obama” and “taxes” and “spread the wealth” and “McCain/Palin.” Maybe they are trying for a subliminal thing. I did get the impression that it was against Obama. The second the reader was done with her script, she hung up. Classy!

All I can say is, I hope the Republican National Committee is spending a lot of money on this stuff, because I can’t imagine a much less productive approach.

I will say that the R’s and the D’s are spending money like drunken plumbers in these last days. Our commerical breaks are about 60 percent political ads, some of them VERY ugly. The stuff they’re throwing up at Franken is as nasty as anything I’ve ever seen, and the stuff against Coleman is not subtle either. I really understand why some are saying “a pox on both your houses.”

I spent some time listening to AM radio yesterday as well, and I’m guessing the National Right to Life has a huge ad account because about every other ad was from them. They’re not Obama fans. They’re also lying through their teeth, in case you had any doubts.

So, where do we stand. There’s talk of tightening polls, but most of them actually look pretty stable. Obama leads by 4-9 points. I don’t know if he’ll pull off N. Carolina or Indiana or Missouri, but it’s notable that McCain and Palin are hitting eleven states, most of them which went to Bush in 2004.

I remember 2004. John Kerry made a similar last-minute, multi-state dash. Minnesota, Wisconsin and other blue states were among his last rallies. We won’t be seeing Obama in those states this time. This election is being fought out in red states.

Call for Predictions!!

OK, I’m guessing that The World’s Most Dangerous Political Blog ™ , despite its dangerousness, is not pulling in thousands, or hundreds, or even dozens, of readers.

But for you proud few, here’s an opportunity to give your two cents.

I’m calling for Election Predictions. You can enter them into any comments at any time in the next few days, and I’ll compile them and put them on the main page. You should be able to comment anonymously, but give yourself some kind of moniker. Karl Rove, Joe the Plumber, Bob the Builder, anything.

What I’d like to see:

1) Your pick of who’s going win the Presidential election. Go into as much detail as you want. Predict the percentages. Call the states. Estimate the length of the concession/victory speech.

2) Your take on how the Senate/House races will turn out. How many seats with the Dems pick up? What are the big races in your state and how do you think they’ll turn out? And is America really ready for Senator Al Franken??

3) What else? Oh, we could discuss What It All Means. If the Dems have a big night, how will they govern? What’s next for the R party? And listen, I really expect my conservative readers to come through for me, allright? I want to hear—in detail!—about how the results prove that the Democratic Party is a fractured, dysfunctional mess that is on the verge of collapse. Don’t let me down, people.

So that’s it. Tell me what choice we’re going to make on Tuesday night. In as much or as little detail as you want.

I’ll post your thoughts, and mine, on Monday.

Obama is questioned – from the Left

This is a long video—11 minutes. However, I think it’s worth watching.

Overall, I think journalists should actually try to be fair and balanced, not advocates for a party or candidate. But if we do have to have political pundits and partisan talk show hosts—and it seems today’s cable industry is determined to give us those—it’s great to see someone with the charm, wit, and smarts of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in a prominent time slot. After years of Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck, Scarborough, on and on and on, it’s really refreshing to see someone who’s not a white male conservative talking politics. (I know MSNBC also has Olbermann, whom I’m much less fond of, but who did break ground as a truly liberal perspective in the Center-Right world of cable news networks.)

And the discussion with Obama, on why he hasn’t been tougher on Republicans, is just terrific. It’s something that hasn’t been discussed much, how Obama’s restraint, discipline, and bipartisan message—his “slow and steady wins the race” strategy—has angered Dem. partisans at times but proven to be an effective and winning approach.

It’s a smart, wonkish, thoughtful discussion. No stereotypes, no gratuitous attacks, no clichés. Who told this guy he could compete in an American presidential election??

McCain’s fickle mind

I know that distorting your opponent’s views is a part of any campaign. Obama, for instance, has muddied the waters on McCain’s proposed tax of health care benefits, but that’s a very complicated subject with lots of room for interpretation.

But as we hit the last days of this long campaign, McCain's attacks against Obama have become inconsistent and incoherent. Look at what McCain said Wednesday on CNN about the “socialist” tag he’s been putting on Obama.



Larry King: You don't believe Barack Obama is a socialist do you?

McCain: "No, but I do believe that he has been in the far left of American politics and stated time after time that he believes in spreading the wealth around. He has talked about courts that redistribute the wealth. He has a record of voting against tax cuts. And for tax increases."



So after suggesting over and over again that Obama's a socialist, McCain, when asked directly, backpedals. And look at that next quote: “He has talked about courts that redistribute wealth.”

Yeah, he’s talked about how they don’t want to, and the context of his remarks is that he agrees it’s not a good idea for the courts to take on that role. So the bottom line is that Obama’s position is the opposite of what McCain is suggesting.

McCain also has a record of voting against tax cuts—he voted against Bush’s original tax cuts, the ones he now supports and wants to expand.

So: Obama’s a socialist, he’s not a socialist. Progressive income tax good, progressive income tax bad. Against big government, for big government bailouts of banks. Bush tax cuts bad, Bush tax cuts good.

This inability to get his story straight is just one of the reasons that McCain simply does not have a strong argument for taking control of our economic future.

Joe jumps ship

Update: as it turns out, Joe showed up a later campaign stops. I guess there was just a mix-up. Kind of sums up this campaign, doesn't it?

Better to redistribute wealth to the wealthy, right?

I was talking recently with a conservative, and although we didn't agree on much, we did agree that cable news is incredibly annoying at times. There are a lot of "pundits" trying to fill time by talking about trivial stuff, or just endlessly blathering on about stuff that's been beaten to death already.

One of the few cable news pundits I really admire is David Gergen, who is always smart and even-handed. The following discussion does spend too much time on Sarah Palin's clothes -- but as they note, the McCain campaign keeps bringing it up-- but the really good stuff is toward the end, when Gergen notes that Reagan started a big wealth redistribution program, the earned income tax credit. I got a little cranky yesterday discussing McCain's "socialist" smears, but Gergen here does a pretty good job of calmly demolishing that completely dishonest line of attack.



(found at crooksandliars.com)

The latest smear: Socialist!!!

How mind-numbingly desperate has the McCain campaign become? They’ve found an interview from 7 years ago, in which Obama wades into some technical points of the Supreme Courts’ civil rights rulings, pulled out the term “redistribution of wealth,” completely out of context, and held up it, screaming “SOCIALIST!”

From what I can tell, and it is a very technical and academic discussion, Obama is saying that the Supreme Court didn’t want to get into the redistribution of wealth, but that other social forces, including community organizing, could bring about “redistributive change.”

Here’s the quote (taken from a conservative newsletter, but I believe it’s fairly accurate):

“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of the wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break us free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution … And the Warren Court interpreted, in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties … I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

In other words, African Americans, traditionally among the poorest and least powerful in our society, could grab a bigger piece of the pie by organizing themselves and gaining more political power.

WHAT A RADICAL STATEMENT! OH MY GOD, IT”S LIKE HE’S JOSEPH STALIN OR GROUCHO MARX OR SOMETHING!!

How stupid do you have to be to fall for this stuff? What is wrong with people that they are so quick to jump to totally unjustified conclusions based on such thin evidence?

Let’s put it another way: Yes, Obama wants to “redistribute wealth.” He wants to change our tax policies that have been favoring the extremely wealthy and make them more favorable to the middle class.

That's socialist?

Lots of presidents have changed tax policy; raising taxes for some, lowering them for others. These include Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. This was also redistribution of wealth. None of these folks were called socialists by anybody with a brain.

McCain supporters have said a lot of less-than-honest things. But this descent into caveman-like stupidity is really hard to watch.

Sorry to rant; I guess the long election season is finally getting to me.

Here’s a WP fact-checker comment on this.

Here’s a very good analysis of the "Obama is a socialist" claim,by Politifact.com.

... Said the man who made the mountain...

"Former White House adviser Karl Rove, credited with winning two elections for President Bush, on Sunday said GOP nominee John McCain has a “very steep hill to climb” in his quest for the presidency.

Rove, who often puts a positive spin on things for the GOP, on “Fox News Sunday” offered a bleaker assessment of the state of the race from a Republican point of view. In his own electoral map, Rove has Democratic nominee Barack Obama ahead with 317 electoral votes after moving Ohio, Indiana, Colorado and Virginia to the Illinois senator’s column."

-- from The Hill


I love the understatement about Karl "I have the real math" Rove. Yes, on occasion he has been known to spin things...

All the News from Lake Tinklenberg

Michele Bachmann (apologies for the misspelling in earlier posts) continues to be big news, garnering a video entry at Talking Points Memo. Quite entertaining. By the way, a new poll puts Elwyn Tinklenberg (of the Fightin' Tinklenbergs!!!) up 47 to 44 over Bachmann. A new poll is due out today. I still have my doubts, but go El!!




In other Minnesota news: Hilllary Clinton appeared with Al Franken recently and a new TV ad features her talking up Franken. A bunch of Minnesota politicians (Coleman, Klobuchar, Bachmann, Ellison) had their homes vandalized by spray-pointed graffiti that featured nasty words and reference to Psalm 2. Huh? Former Repub. Gov. Arne Carlson endorsed Obama, who is way ahead in the latest MN polls (yawn).

Shop 'til you drop

Is it ridiculous that the media is obsessing over where Sarah Palin buys her clothes? Or how much she paid for them?

I find the media is ridiculous in a lot of ways, but although I wish they would spend less time on this, one of the reasons that they spend so much time on it is that people want to talk about it.

Hey, we had to have our 796 hours of talk about John Edward’s haircuts and Al Gore’s earth tones. What’s good for the goose, you know what I’m sayin’?

The media overplays this stuff, but they know people eat it up. Because it does seem hypocritical to claim to be a man or woman of the people and then live a lifestyle completely beyond the reach of most people.

Sure, it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect a candidate seeking to lead the most powerful nation on earth to be an average Joe (six pack, plumber, or otherwise). But who said Americans are ever realistic about their expectations of their leaders?

Speaking of media and ridiculous, this Daily Show clip is pretty hilarious:

It Could Yet Get Worse

I'm noticing from multiple Left blog sites that there is a consensus that McCain will finally start talking about Rev. Wright soon... simply because there's nothing else left to hit Obama with, and he knows he's losing. I guess that will signal that we've finally hit bottom.

This could turn out not to be true. But more than a few insiders are expecting it.

It Could Have Been Worse

Great inside baseball story in Politico today.

Basically says that a “Swiftboat” campaign against Obama, independent of the McCain camp or the RNC and financed by shadowy billionaires, never materialized because of McCain’s erratic performances and the fact that they didn’t trust him. Seems they thought McCain might still have enough decency and honor to publicly rebuke them if they ran those kinds of attack ads.

Plus the sinking stock market made them want to hold on to their money.

That says something about our political system. We have all these wealthy people willing sink to any depths for political gain. But this time, they just didn’t see enough margin in it. Ah well, there’s always 2012.

Kos and effect

I understand why some don’t like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga—Kos, of Daily Kos. He’s very partisan, and a pretty harsh critic of those he doesn’t agree with. And as with any political site that has free and open forum, there are some zealots who post some pretty extreme things on his site.

But he’s also a very astute political analyst, and he doesn’t fall for the partisan spin and wishful thinking that permeates both sides of the blogosphere.

A post from today really illustrates this. Kos notes that despite all the character attacks on Obama, all the questioning of his character and patriotism, he is actually remarkably well-liked by the American people. Which is part of why he is not only ahead in the polls, but seems to be opening a bit more of lead in the last few days.

Kos notes that a new Time/CBS poll finds that Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years.

Kos says:


“Think about what's happened in the last year -- a bruising primary, Jeremiah Wright, bittergate, Tony Rezko, PUMA b.s., hateful emails, months of non-stop Republican smears regarding Ayers, the spreading of rumors that he's a terrorist and Muslim.

… hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of smear emails later, and the best Republicans have been able to do is inch up his negatives?

Republicans tried to sell a patently false story -- that Obama was a secret Muslim Marxist terrorist -- and the public proved too smart for the GOP.

McCain didn't fare as well, but his numbers have still held up quite well. What we have here is an election that won't be decided on the worst smears, but on substance. And in such an environment, the GOP is ill-equipped to compete.

So as we see Jeremiah Wright make his comeback in the next 10 days, realize that Obama has weathered this guy and much more already. The American people are just not willing to believe the crap that Republicans say about Barack.”


I am disappointed that McCain still seems to think he has no choice but to try to drive Obama’s negatives up by using these smear tactics. But I have always felt that Obama is an unusually strong candidate; anyone with an open mind who watches the guy for five minutes is going to like him—even if they don’t agree with him. It’s just that some on the R side can’t stop themselves from grabbing a bucket of mud when confronted with someone they disagree with. This year, it looks like that’s not going to work.

(oh, here's the link!)

At least they're not trying to divide us

Minnesota 6th District Rep. Michelle Bachmann recently questioned whether Barack Obama and other members of Congress are anti-American.

I think she’s come to regret that.

The comments have created a firestorm nationally and raised a ton of money for her overmatched challenger, El Tinklenberg. I say overmatched because ET (heh) is a good candidate who’s been running hard but has not made a lot of headway in this relatively red district.

Until now.

In Minnesota, Bachmann is generally seen by those on the left as a crazyperson. She’s done and said some goofy things, and her personality and politics just drive some people a little nuts. I get a little tired of the namecalling (moonbat, wingnut) that is common on political blogs. Let’s just say Bachmann is a real character. I will say that she’s been very effective as a politician: she’s articulate, projects a warm if somewhat intense personality, and generally plays to her base very well. Not unlike Gov. Palin.

But like Gov. Palin, she’s going to have a little trouble with this “I’m a better American than you” attitude. This thing that we’re seeing during the current election, the idea that if you’re from a conservative area you’re more patriotic, is actually the opposite of patriotic. I hate to bring up the D word again, but it smacks of desperation. As Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show last night, it was liberal New York City and Washington DC that were attacked by terrorists. So it’s a little galling to hear people suggest that somehow those big East Coast cities are not part of “real America.”

We’re all in this together; we’re all Americans.

True of False?

Powell endorsement

If this election were about sober, thoughtful political decision-making, the speech Colin Powell made on Meet the Press Sunday should have effectively closed the case for Barack Obama.

And it was a speech, in my opinion the best we’ve seen since the conventions, laying out a compelling case—from a moderate Republican point of view—on why Obama has proven he’s the best candidate for the job.



He also made some good comments off the cuff later, including some remarks on Michelle Bachmann, "We have got to stop this kind of nonsense and pull ourselves together..." Also some good comments on taxes (Which that big Socialist Ronald Reagan also raised, more than once...)

Voter Fraud: Another Fake Controversy

There are a few voices of sanity out there about the supposed fraud that ACORN is using to "destroy the fabric of democracy" (John McCain at the last debate).

One of them is Dahlia Lithwick:

"Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there.

In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters."

Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections.

RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"

There is no such thing as vote fraud."

Boy, someone should get Fox News the memo. Not to mention John McCain.

I highly recommend reading the entire article.

It ain't so, Joe

Hey, I don't want to pick on Joe the Plumber. He seems like your average guy who just wants to make up a grievance with a presidential candidate in order to give himself a better excuse for voting against that candidate.

I mean, his whole beef was that Obama was going to raise his taxes when Joe buys the plumbing company he's been working for.

Except that he's not really buying it. He's just talked about buying it at some point. And if he did buy it, he would still probably not make the $250K per year that would bump up his taxes slightly. The most likely scenario, whether he buys the firm or not, is that he'll get a tax break under Obama's plan.

Also, if he did buy it, he might want to actually get a plumber's license. He doesn't have one at present.

There are other things to pick on Joe about, including his attitudes toward Social Security and Sammy Davis Jr. But again, I don't want to pile on. He didn't know that his manufactured, unrealistic gripe was going to become prime time debate fodder. I just think it's ironic that McCain is holding this guy up as an average voter who's going to get the shaft under Obama's plan. Because he's not. The entire premise is false.

Of course, that's never stopped a political attack before.

The final debate

A strong debate for McCain, just on the arguments he made. But his visuals are just brutal. Grimacing, weird expressions, looking so uptight and uncomfortable. Obama was relaxed and direct, he seemed intent on bringing it back to the economic issues that voters care about.

Seemed to me the pundits, some of them, wanted to really drag McCain back into contention in this race by saying he won the debate. The polls, one after another, shot that down. People think Obama does a better job at these debates. Maybe because he does.

Side by side, face to face. One candidate is cool, calm, thoughtful, in control. The other seems about to burst out of his skin. I don't mean to be unkind to John McCain. But he is not as strong a candidate as Barack Obama. Political campaigns are all about communication. There really is no doubt who's doing a better job of that in this race.

By all means, do anything Bill Kristol says...

I'm amused to see that Bill Kristol, a legendary conservative pundit (part of his legend is for being extremely right wing. The other part is that he's nearly always wrong in his predictions and advice) is using the "Happy Warrior" phrase in suggesting
what McCain should do next ... (for those of us who are not old, the original Happy Warrior was Hubert Humphrey. He ran for President, too.)

"What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free."

Sing it, Bill! If you LOOOOVE somebody, set them free. Free free, set them free.

Sorry. Bill Kristol channeling Sting is just too wonderful a vision to pass up.

It is a very odd campaign season when I end up agreeing, even if just a little bit, with BK.

"My friends, we've got 'em right where we want 'em"

Well, give Sen. John McCain this much: he's still got a sense of humor.

The ramshackle, erratic, lurching campaign of the Republican nominee took what might be a final twist today when it scrapped the major economic proposals that its surrogates were talking about yesterday and decided to go the Happy Warrior route.

McCain today is casting himself (again) as the underdog, a fighter. He hasn't yet called himself the Comeback Kid, but just wait a couple ... no, on second thought, he's not going to use that one. The Comeback Curmudgeon? That might work.

What seems to be happening is that the McCain camp, after flirting last week with a scorched earth, go-to-any-depths attempt to inflame hatred and distrust of Obama approach, has realized that it's just not going to work. It's pretty bad for your message when the networks are talking about how your supporters are bringing torches and pitchforks to the rallies.

I think here in Minnesota we might have seen the turning point, in more ways than one. In the presidential campaign, McCain seemed to dial back some of the raw emotions that have been seen at his rallies. At a town hall meeting in Lakeville, McCain had to rebuke one supporter who called Obama an "Arab," by saying, "No, he's a decent family man."

The crowd booed.

McCain also told a supporter that he did not have to fear for the future of his child if Obama was elected. This statement was also booed.

But I think this might've been a turning point. McCain finally seemed to realize things were getting out of hand, and it was good to see him speak out against some of the fear-mongering that lately his camp had seemed to encourage.

Another interesting event took place on Friday here in Minnesota. Sen Norm Coleman, after participating in one of the most remarkable political mudfests in memory, with both he and Al Franken just going after each other hammer and tongs, suddenly declared he was going to stop running negative ads.

How interesting. Wonder why? Also, why didn't he attend the McCain event? You'd think he'd be there.

There are a lot of folks out there saying, three weeks is a lifetime in a campaign. Anything can happen. That's true. There could be a major change in this narrative. Or it could be that the questions raised by this election have pretty much been answered.

ACORN: Explain it to me like I was five years old

Josh Marshall obliges

"ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering
:people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud."


I'm not at all putting down JM. As you probably know, that's my favorite site. I just really like the simple way he explains this. The fake outrage about ACORN is another case of lashing out, like Ayers, where Republicans just seem to need something to vent about. If you think about it for five minutes, it doesn't make any sense at all. But there it is.

The Harsh Light of Day

Here’s yet another story
about Republicans at a McCain rally, chomping at the bit, fighting mad, seething with rage, however you want to describe it. And they are not only yelling out nasty (and totally false) things about Obama. They are mad at McCain for not taking his campaign even further into the gutter.

What’s striking to me is how some of these folks seem bewildered with how we could possibly be where we are: with a Democrat poised to win an election.

“Why is Obama where he's at?” one man asks. “Everyone in this room is stunned.”*

Well, when you divorce yourself from reality for eight years, when you only watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh, when you’re so far down in the echo chamber that you don’t even hear alternative voices or views, then yes, I suppose it is shocking to find out the rest of the country has left you behind.

In 2000 and 2004, I had a number of heated discussions with conservatives. And what really got to me about those discussions was not that we disagreed about what was best for the country; it was that we often seemed to be living in different countries—different realities, really.

It’s hard to have an intelligent discussion if you can’t agree on the facts. And there are too many on both sides who are so caught up in their own political subcultures that they simply can’t hear or see things that don’t fit with their worldview.

It’s difficult to see how we’re going to really move this country forward as long as such a large portion of the citizenry want to engage in so much denial and willful ignorance. What’s even worse is the possibility that some of that is spilling over into rage and violence.


* - The exact quote was in an early version of the online Post story. It seems to have been cut in later versions. But similar expressions of disbelief were quoted.

How DARE they ask what newspapers she's been reading!

This is funny: a Washington Post reporter, at a McCain/Palin rally, asking for hugs.



Conservatives have always attacked the messenger. It’s a great American political tradition. Nixon did it. Reagan did it. It plays great with the partisans.

But reality has a way of catching up with you.

Wars don’t go the way they were planned. Cities flood. Icecaps melt. Economies collapse.

Eventually, history passes judgment on political philosophies and movements. And it becomes harder and harder to complain that the facts are somehow conspiring against you.

Unless you’re on Fox News, of course.

It Ain't Beanbag

News stories like this one are regularly noting that McCain campaign speeches are playing to crowds that are, for want of a better term, turning ugly.

"McCain's remarks about Obama were interrupted with shouts of "socialist," "terrorist," and "liar."

At least part of this is on the McCain camp, for abandoning any pretense of running a civil campaign. And this talk of Obama "palling around" with terrorists is really irresponsible--and in my personal opinion, it's just sad to see McCain stoop to such depths, even if he is using his VP candidate to do the actually smearing.

But whatever. McCain doesn't care what I think. He's in a very bad situation. He's behind in the polls. The debates are doing nothing for him. His Hail Mary pass of picking Sarah Palin has not swayed the vast majority of voters, and she is actually a liability, since she can't handle the media and can't speak to anyone but deeply conservative crowds. And he's carrying around this huge anchor called the Bush Presidency. I'd be grumpy too.

I remember seeing Michael Dukakis speak in Milwaukee in 1988, just a couple weeks before he was thoroughly trounced by George H.W. Bush. Everyone knew he was way behind in the polls. But he came into Milwaukee and gave a red-meat, take-no-prisoners speech to a cheering crowd of Democrats.

So I guess it's no surprise that McCain/Palin are going to stoke up their crowds as best they can, and that the crowds are going to be particularly rabid. The last hurrah, I guess.

The difference, of course, is that the partisanship of 1988 seems mild compared to today. And there's the racial factor as well. I can't contemplate the next four weeks without feeling a twinge of fear. All I can think is, if something horribly tragic does happen, what legacy will John McCain have left his party and his country?

I hate to think about it. But when people are screaming "terrorist," you really can't ignore it.

"That one" won

For the record, I don't think it should be that big a deal that John McCain referred to Obama as "that one" in tonight's debate. As Howard Finneman just said, it's not a racial thing, it's an Old Guy thing.

And this comes down to the crux of this contest, as I've been thinking for a long time. When the American people see these two guys together on stage, they see one young, dynamic, obviously smart, talented, guy. And they see one old, veteran politician, who despite his long service to his country, is simply not the future.

Our country needs to turn a corner, to take a new direction. We all know this. Who is going to lead us?

That one.

Remember the good old days, when "soft" bigotry was all we had to worry about?

With McCain and Palin stoking the "not one of us" fires amongst their followers, we are now hearing reports from various media sources of near-lynch-mob mentality at some events.

Crowd members yelling "Terrorist!" when McCain asks "Who is Barack Obama!"

A Palin supporter shouting "Kill him!" at one of her rallies. Presumably not talking about McCain.

Also at a Palin event, media members get subjected to verbal abuse, an African American media tech gets shouted at: "Sit down, boy!"

Nice.

You'd think the McCain camp might want to tone it down a bit. Maybe take the opportunity of the debate tonight to remind supporters that we'll all Americans, all in this together, etc.

Then again, "classy" and "prudent" are not words we've been able to associate with the McCain campaign so far.

A Fist Fight in High Heels Does Not Sound Like a Good Idea

“The heels are on, the gloves are off,” Sarah Palin said recently, in reference to her new attack-dog role for the McCain campaign.

If that’s the metaphor that the McCain team wants to use, I would suggest that they’re going to spend a lot of time picking themselves up off the floor.

William Ayers. Rev. Wright. Tony Rezko.

Yawn.

In addition to the fact that we’ve been over these “scandalous” associations in the past and they’ve been found to be not a big deal, the McCain team opens up a different can of worms. If they’re going to play the guilt-by-association game, Obama supporters can, and will, point to McCain’s association with the Keating Five and Palin’s association with the America-hatin’ Alaskan Independence Party. Obama’s campaign is already out today with a video on the Keating Five.

But the bottom line is that that McCain has been going down in the polls. And now he starts up again with the character attacks, at a time when there are some really serious issues the country needs to deal with. We’ve seen this movie before, right? The American people are smarter than this, right? Fool me once …?

We’ll see. I think it’s a recipe for a landslide, and not the kind McCain wants to see.

SHOCKER: The New Yorker endorses Obama

But they make some pretty good points, including:

"The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness."

Is the McCain campaign conceding that their claims on the Bridge to Nowhere were lies?

I was just thinking about last night's debate, and it struck me that Palin dropped two of her signature claims to fame. The assertion that she said "no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere, and her anecdote about putting the state plane on eBay.

What gives? Were they perhaps concerned that Joe Biden might point out that the Bridge to Nowhere story is a complete lie, or that the eBay story is a huge piece of puffery?

Maybe they hope that no one noticed. I do think that if Palin begins making either two claims again someone should ask her why she was silent on these topics at the debate, or maybe just why she's lying. But of course, that would mean taking questions from a reporter, and that's something that Palin just doesn't do very often.

VEEP debate

I don't think too many people will think Sarah Palin won the debate.

She did OK. I saw a lot of flat lines on the "voter dial," and that fit with my response. A lot of her answers kind of meandered around and didn't go anywhere. My opinion of course.

Biden was good, very good in a couple of places. I think there were a lot of landmines for him and he seemed to avoid them. But there was no Lloyd Bentsen moment where he just put the thing away. That's OK, probably not a good plan to try to hit a home run; just be steady and substantial. He was.

As a bottom line thing, I just can't see Sarah Palin as President. We've already had a folksy, chirpy, incurious idealogue who appeals to the Republican base. As has been said in comments, there's not politician that Palin recalls more than GWB. Maybe others see it differently, but I have had enough of that formula. (There's also been some comparison of her to Michelle Bachmann. Palin/Bachmann in 2012!)

I also like that Biden didn't cede any ground on Joe Sixpack or as a parent. Maybe the best part of the debate.

Palin's had two pretty good nights. The convention speech, and this debate. She prepared several days for one, at least a week for the other. Can she think at all on her feet? Can she handle a press conference? Can she really do what every other candidate has to do, go out and be held accountable by the press? We still don't know. The results that we have seen have been very mixed.

The Palin/Biden Debate

This will be a pretty huge night in the presidential campaign. Since the initial debate between Obama and McCain, Obama has jumped ahead in the polls by a significant margin. We’ve also seen polls showing Obama leading (by as much as 8 points) in states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. If Obama wins Florida on Election Night, he wins this by a landslide.

There’s plenty of time to go yet, but Obama’s position has never been stronger.

So the vice presidential debate, coming on the heels of some pretty bad press for Palin, is going to be huge. Palin’s pick has been unusually high-profile, which is exactly what McCain has hoping for. It was the campaign’s biggest gamble (so far), a high-risk, high-reward proposition. After the convention, it looked like high reward. Things have changed since then.

I expect one of two outcomes: Palin does reasonably well, holds her own, doesn’t seem overwhelmed. There’s also the possibility of a Biden gaffe; he has already said some pretty dumb things on the trail. If that’s the case, if Palin’s performance is seen as a draw or better, the media will explode with “Palin outperformed expectations!” And the doubts about McCain’s VP decision will recede. It could happen. And it could bump McCain’s numbers up a bit and make this a tight race again.

Or she could perform as she has in recent interviews and really look bad. In which case, I would expect the race to break wide open. McCain is vulnerable right now. A poor performance by his pick for VP could solidify opinion that the McCain/Palin ticket is just not the answer this year.

GOP: One Party, Many Voices.

Does anyone know what the GOP stands for these days? We have a presidential candidate being contradicted by his VP candidate on the issue of military action in Pakistan. We have the GOP President pulling out all the stops to pass the bailout bill, only to be defeated by a rebellion of House Republicans. We have McCain calling for the passage of the bailout bill, only to see the Republican National Committee release a campaign ad attacking the bailout bill.

Isn’t it usually the Dems who are seen as the party of chaos? Have the two parties switched identities?

It’s Just A Complicated Game

I’ve been mostly silent on the financial bailout plan because mostly, I don’t understand it. And usually, when you’re ignorant about something, it’s better not to broadcast that fact.

However, as with most political blogs, displaying my ignorance is pretty much what I do here at the World’s Most Dangerous Political Blog ™. So here we go!

I’ve always thought of high finance as a big shell game, a kind of semi-religious con that is basically moving lots of numbers around to the benefit of those who pretend to know what the numbers mean. And when I hear, as I have constantly in the past week, that nobody really understands exactly what’s going on, or that the $700 billion number was pulled out of Henry Paulson’s Fannie Mae, or that no one is exactly sure that the bailout will really work, it makes me think that my—admittedly cynical—take might be right.

But let’s assume that a bailout really is needed. Enough smart people are saying that that I am willing to accept the premise.

The problem that faces us is, apparently, that the majority of Americans are, like me, very dubious about this fix. And in an election year, a lot of congress people are just not willing to go against their constituents and vote for this unpopular bill.

It seems to me that some sort of compromise could be found. Say, a bill that provides some security blanket to Wall Street, that doesn’t lock in another huge debt to the taxpayer, that doesn’t give too much authority to Paulsen, that basically says – “here’s what’s needed to tide us over ‘till after the election” —when the new President and Congress came take this on in a less panicked, politically-charged atmosphere.

Now, that may be kicking the can down the road, and maybe we don’t have that luxury. I simply don’t know.

What I do know is that neither of the two candidates seem to be willing to go very far in suggesting fixes, which, given the calendar, is not surprising. It’s annoying to see McCain flailing around on this, but to be honest, I’m not impressed with Obama’s kind of hands-off approach either.

I know he’s put forward a few suggestions. But mostly, I think he’s content to bash McCain and Republican mismanagement. It’s probably good politics. I personally would like to get beyond that, but I’m not always realistic about these things.

I would now like to formally apologize for wasting three-and-a-half minutes of your time.

Carry on.

What did you think?

We watched most of the debate after getting back from the ER, our son had some weird stomache pains but seems ok now. So anyhow, a little family trauma made the debate just a little less important for me.

But now that things have settled down and I've seen some of the response by the cable talkers, I would say Obama has come out of the first debate better than I expected. My wife and I both thought McCain had a very strong performance, and considering how erratic McCain has been acting recently, he seemed pretty prepared and calm.

But both candidates appeared to hold their own, and the conventional wisdom seemed to be that McCain needed a knockout to change the dynamic of the race. Of course, conventional wisdom can be wrong. We'll see in the next couple of days.

I've noticed in comments on some of the political blogs this curious claim that Obama doesn't do well in unscripted events; that he needs a prepared speech or a teleprompter. It's a ridiculous claim, yet I've seen it quite a few times. I think tonight's debate is a pretty clear refutation of that. Although the folks that make these kinds of claims always seem pretty impervious to things like evidence and logic.

Anyhow, on to the vice presidential debates!

I'm Suspending My Blog! We'll Do it Live!

I've been wanting to post something but every time I fire up the computing machine, John McCain does something even more maverick-y and I just don't know what to say. He sure would be an exciting president.

Oh, and if you get a chance to see Palin being interviewed by Couric, well, I hope you're sitting down. Mega-maverickosity, is what I call it.

Treat her like a real candidate

They called it

Remember, months ago, when Hillary Clinton ran some ads that Obama supporters took issue with? Remember the “3 AM phone call” ad? Remember how the two sides argued about whether Clinton was being too unfair or misleading? And how the Clinton supporters all said, “If you think this is bad, wait until you see the Republican ads in the fall. They’ll make this look like child’s play.”

Those people didn’t prevail as far as getting their candidate nominated. But their prediction looks pretty smart, doesn’t it?

I’ve done my share of bashing the McCain campaign; I think a lot of people recognize now that his ads are over the line even for modern partisan politics. And I think, or at least hope, that people are starting to tune them out. Certainly the popular culture is beginning to get the fact that McCain will say anything to win.

Housekeeping

Just a couple minor changes. I've posted some links to some factchecking sites and Pollster.com. I find these sites useful, you might too. Also, I've opened up comments so that people can leave anonymous comments. I frankly didn't realize that my settings required people to sign up to Blogger to comment. So that's changed for now. If we start getting a lot of spam or Ron Paul supporters showing up in the comments, I may put some mild restrictions up.

Hiding Sarah

Well, here’s some very telling information about Sarah Palin’s first town-hall meeting as VP candidate, where she for the first time took questions from the public:

“The McCain campaign confirms that tonight’s event was advertised on the McCain/Palin Web site and local newspapers. People had to pick up their tickets at local GOP offices after RSVPing for the event. The Kent County GOP headquarters gave out about two thousand tickets. The rest came from GOP offices in Ottowa and Kalamazoo.”

Oh good, a hand-picked audience. You know who else regularly pulls this kind of crap? Our current president, who can talk real tough about terrorists and evildoers, but apparently can’t appear in front of people who might disagree with him. Whose widely-reported unwillingness to hear different viewpoints is credited with disasters in Iraq and here at home. Whose popularity rating hovers between 20 and 30 percent.

Great role model, McCain campaign. You go ahead with that plan and see how it works for you. Keep sending your candidates to friendly crowds in pro-Republican communities. Limit the interviews to a bare minimum, and when you do take questions, insist on interviewers like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly.

There’s a basic truth to campaigning. You can run, but you can’t hide. The very fact that the McCain campaign keeps Palin away from the tough questions speaks volumes about her readiness for the Vice Presidency, and about their confidence in their pick.

The American people are starting to pay attention to this race. And they can see when one side is avoiding scrutiny. If McCain wants to turn this into a classic Rovian presidential race, where each side turns out their base, I think he’s in for a disappointment. Democratic registration is way up, Republican registration is down. It’s true Palin will bring out the hard-right evangelical base, but this year, I don’t think that’s going to be enough.


(update) ... and because it's not worth a new post but is worth reading, here's the best argument yet against Sarah Palin as VP -- from conservative pundit David Brooks.

Resuming our regular programming

Well, I took a couple days off for camping and some family activities. It rained, of course.

But I haven’t gotten back to the World’s Most Dangerous Political Blog™ until just now. What, you don’t like my new slogan?

Seriously, it’s been an interesting few days. We’re seeing the McCain post-convention bump slowly dissipate in the polls. This may or may not continue, but I suspect that Obama will be leading most national polls by this time next week as people realize that John McCain is still at the top of the ticket and Sarah Palin is not the second coming of Reagan.

The financial crisis now gripping Wall Street is a prime opportunity for Obama to seize control of the national debate and show that he is the candidate best suited to deal with domestic issues such as this. The question is, will he? The Obama camp has shown a tendency to play it safe, keep things slow and steady. It’s easy to second-guess that strategy, but it’s been working pretty well for them, the recent setback in the polls notwithstanding. However, I wonder why they’re not grabbing this opportunity.

Maybe there are no quick fixes to the troubled financial sector. Maybe it would be irresponsible to come up with some dramatic plan for change.

All I know is that Obama is hitting McCain hard for saying that the fundamentals of our economy are sound. If they aren’t, what’s Obama’s solution? Can he articulate his vision for change in a way that we, the unwashed masses who don’t understand how Wall Street works, can understand?

He says he’s the real candidate for change. OK, so how do we fix this particular problem?

Is this election about Sarah Palin?

It’s a question that has been on my mind. I know that the conservatives are excited about the pick, and with good reason. And I know Dems are a little freaked out about the bounce in the polls for McCain that seems directly attributable to Palin.

But this election is not primarily about her. It’s fine to examine her record and question her qualifications, that’s the same kind of scrutiny that every candidate has to go through. And the more resistance that the McCain team shows (and they’ve been making quite an effort to keep Palin from facing tough questions) the less good it looks.

My hope is that we can get back to discussing the two main candidates, McCain and Obama, and their strengths and weaknesses. This is pretty important election. I think a major question is whether we want to change the course this country has taken over the last 8 years. We need to focus on that, not Sarah-cudda. (That’s what they called her in Alaska, apparently.)

But if we must have another Palin post, here’s an amusing video that’s made the rounds lately.

Contrasting Candidates, Contrasting Conventions

The conventions are quickly becoming old news. But I wanted to mention how different Denver and St. Paul were, in terms of execution and competence.

The Dem convention came in with a lot of questions. Mostly about whether the party could come together, re: the Hillary and Obama camps. But every day, it seemed the convention kind of raised the bar. Hillary's speech went great. Bill, who the pundits seem to think would blow a gasket or something, also got rave reviews. And Obama's stadium speech, which was increasingly seen as risky by the media, also was a big success. Even the silly "Greek Temple" issue that critics whipped up about the speech's background was defused once you saw the stage itself; there was nothing unusual about it at all. In sum, the convention went pretty much like clockwork.

Compare it to the Republican convention. The hurricane, of course, was something the the R planners couldn't have predicted and couldn't control. But that problem faded quickly. Hurricane aside, the week got off to a chaotic beginning, as a total unknown was announced as VP just prior to the convention. Rudy Giuliani's speech went long, causing the convention to cancel the Palin introductory video (it was played the next night). There was the strange video background for McCain's speech. I have to say, I was absolutely astounded to see a lime green background behind McCain early in the speech, since he had been so widly ridiculed for the green screen background of an earlier speech. And the wider shot was of what appeared to be a mansion -- again, not a good image for McCain, since the "7 Houses" issue came up.

But it wasn't a mansion, turns out. It was Walter Reed Middle School in Los Angeles. Many have speculated that the McCain camp intended to put Walter Reed military hospital in the background, which would have been fitting to some degree, given McCain's past. No one knows exactly what was going on (McCain's camp, in the best Bush tradition, is refusing comment), but the bottom line is that for a huge section of thespeech, what TV viewers mostly saw was a weird green background, which was later replaced by an equally eye-damaging blue background.

That's not to say there weren't good moments to the convention. Palin's speech was a huge success. McCain had some good moments toward the end of his speech. Thompson got his baritone on.

But overall, the R convention was more chaotic, more glitchy, less disciplined. It's a small thing, I suppose. But both conventions can be seen as reflections of the management styles and basic competence of the candidates. Take your pick.

The McCain Speech

You could tell John McCain was trying to appeal to a wider range of voters than his base last night. It was kind of a revival of the old John McCain, after a month of the Sneer N’ Smear campaign that his Rovian advisors have had him running.

So it was kind of nice to see the old McCain. And it was riveting to hear him talk about his POW experience. That was by far the strongest part of what was really a pretty weak speech overall.

But the POW camp was a long time ago. And the Independent Maverick Guy seems a long time ago too. John McCain may still be the patriot with his character forged by the most unimaginable hardship. But he’s also the guy who’s been lying to us for most of this campaign, and questioning Obama’s patriotism, and putting up those despicable “celebrity” ads.

He has to own all of it. The embrace of the far right. His flip-flop on taxes. His 100 Years of Occupation in Iraq. His buy-in to Bush economic policies. His hotheaded neo-con foreign policy. The rash, rushed selection of Sarah Palin, which is a brilliant short-term move but actually is appallingly risky for the country in the long run.

Judge the man as a whole. And hope that he enjoyed the night. His nomination is a fitting end to a long and admirable career. But John McCain is all about the past, not the future.

Life in a box

Geez, I guess the "McCain doesn't exploit his POW years for political purpose" myth is totally dead, right?


update: I wrote the above before McCain took the stage, when the repetitive telling of his POW story seemed a bit excessive.

But in his speech, his story of being a POW was by far the most compelling part. It's a gripping story, and as I've said before, he's a great American. But as a certain conservative pundit suggested recently, this isn't merely a personal narrative contest. This is about the future of the country, and who is best equiped to lead us.

I'll probably have some more comments on the speech later.

Just to follow up ...

From today's Washington Post:

"Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern -- a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years.

"It's hard to look around and not get frustrated," said Michael S. Steele, a black Republican and former lieutenant governor of Maryland. "You almost have to think, 'Wait. How did it come to this?' "

A few names come to mind. Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon. Rush Limbaugh.

Not champions of diversity. And whether or not you agree that diversity is a strength of this country, not something to be feared, the fact is that diversity is our future.

Again, this kind of issue, not mooseburgers, is what this election should be about, in my opinion.

Beyond the Palin Speech

(I just can’t help myself.)

So hey, good speech. After three days locked away with the best speechwriting talent that Republican money can buy, with a crowd primed and ready to cheer her on, Sarah Palin succeeded … maybe not surprisingly, but admirably.

I didn’t watch the whole speech, I’ll admit. My wife and I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD lately, so we switched between butt-kickin’ heroines. And I don’t have a problem with saying Palin kicked a little butt last night. She had a great line about Obama’s foolish “bitter” comment. She had a slightly less great line about community organizers—actually pretty snide and unfair, but the crowd Luuuved it. And she got in a dig at Michelle Obama by saying how small town Americans “always” are proud of their country.

OK, so we know from this speech that she can attack the Obamas and media. And we know that John McCain is a great man. What else ya got?

At some point the R ticket really has to answer with something beside “Obama stinks.” They have to talk about the economy, about health care, about home foreclosures. They have to address education and energy—something beyond “we’ve got plenty of oil and gas on the North Range”—which, environmental concerns aside, simply isn’t true.

As they noted last night, great speeches aren’t enough. Vision is also required. And Sarah Palin’s Christianist, anti-choice, social Darwinist, anti-science vision of America is not a vision of this country’s future. It’s a vision of the past.

Speaking of a vision of the past, it was hard not to notice the Unbearable Whiteness of Being Republican last night when the cameras panned around the convention center. I mean, I expect to see fewer minorities at the RNC, but come on. I could count the number of African Americans I saw on one hand.

Now, how should the Obama camp respond to Palin’s speech? I’m thinking: the less said, the better. Let the R’s have their moment. Don’t come down like a ton of bricks on Palin and make her an even more sympathetic figure. Let McCain’s public nap, I mean, speech tonight pop the balloon all by itself. Or, if by chance he actually can match Palin (pretty unlikely, don’t you think?), give a lot of attention to the media’s fact checking.

For Palin,
it wasn’t pretty:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

(see the AP story for much more.)

Behind the Veil

A conservative friend just emailed me with some fairly boilerplate comments from Peggy Noonan (legendary conservative speechwriter for those of you unfamiliar). In those comments, she says the Left is going to attack Palin for being a strong conservative woman, it will get brutal, they're going to try to "kill her," etc.

The message, much as Fred Thompson (FRED! Good to see you again!) suggested last night, is that the Liberals and the Big Bad Media are in a panic over the virtuousness of Sarah Palin and her cause.

Riiiiiiight.

The truth is, this is just a lot of faux outrage. The McCain campaign is desperate. I know I use that word a lot, but time after time, it's the most appropriate for what McCain is doing. They're trying to whip up the conservative base and whatever women they can peel off, and they think they can do it by telling you the Liberal Media is Out To Get Sarah.

But behind the scenes, there's another story. Here's Peggy Noonan caught on an open mic saying "It's over," in reference to the McCain campaign, and calling the Palin-as-victim narrative "political bullshit."




And here's Joe Klein talking about how the McCain campaign is trying to bully the media into going easy on Palin.

Don't fall for the spin.