Blogger'n'Chief

It Still Felt Good the Morning After

2008-11-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

By FRANK RICH
ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.

And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”

The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.

The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.

But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.

This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.

That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.

If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.

Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

2008-11-08T06:45:00.001-08:00

My initial thoughts on the Obama victory and the last 18 months...

2008-11-06T08:45:00.000-08:00

By me...

The following thought may come-off as a cliché; however, my understanding is that cliché’s are phrases that are “always” said in particular situations… While a similar phrase may have been said or used in some way in the past, I doubt there has been a moment where such words so accurately described such a moment.

On November 4, 2008, the dreamers and idealists showed the cynics and the ideologues, the greedy and the bigoted that in this country – our country – anything truly is possible!... Ok, I got my sound byte out of the way early…

As Obama, himself, said on many occasions, he is an imperfect candidate and despite the media assessment, those of us who so ardently support him always knew this. We’re not expecting a perfect president but a president who wears his imperfections on his sleeve and works WITH us toward a better future that we all seek.

But perhaps the greatest statement made Tuesday night wasn’t about Obama at all… it was about America. As I’ve seen and uptick in anti-gay, anti-immigrant and anti-poor rhetoric and policies over the last eight years, I began to wonder if the American I grew-up hearing about was actually the America I lived in. Tuesday night, there was no longer any doubt. While California did ban gay marriage (we still have a long fight ahead), and inequality and bigotry still exist, as a country we can overcome these instead, as was the case in the 1960s south, be defined by them.
I don’t expect Barack Obama to fully live-up to the expectations that await him; for no human could ever do so of expectations so high. But I do expect the underlying principles of empathy, compassion and collective good will to re-enter public discourse and voices such as Limbaugh’s, Hannity’s, Moore’s, etc… - who have thrived in the current partisan climate – to be slowly marginalized as the country rises above them.

I understand that there are still plenty (perhaps, a majority) who think the above it all hot air. They say the reason Obama won was simply because economic issues trumped other concerns. They forget one thing… Lehman Brothers failed in September. Barack Obama declared his candidacy in February 2007. Barack’s movement pre-dated the economic downfall, enough, so that the Freshman Senator took down Hillary Clinton and the entrenched political establishment in the Democratic Party.
When I “endorsed” Obama in an e-mail the day he declared, I did so having no idea that he would win – or even that he could win (regardless of how much I’d love to claim credit for predicting the future). What I heard and saw in him was much bigger than single policies or a political party… optimism, hope, empathy… all the buzz words that Obama’s critics cast aside as naiveté. In the end, current crises and political discourse will define particular policies but it’s what lies at their foundation that has so caught-on in America and what appealed to me the second Obama stepped-off the stage at the 2004 DNC.

The final question we all have is, what truly changed Tuesday night? Well, we will truly learn that answer over the next 4 – 8 years. But those who woke-up Wednesday morning and perceived themselves living in the same country where they went to bed Tuesday night aren’t paying attention… and that’s ok… WE’VE got 4 years to CATCH their attentions…

2008-11-05T19:49:00.001-08:00

Changed the landscape a bit...

2008-11-05T14:25:00.001-08:00

A speech for the ages...

2008-11-05T10:33:00.001-08:00

Israel reacts...

2008-11-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

2008-11-05T10:25:00.001-08:00

Commentary: My father, George Wallace, and Barack Obama

2008-11-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: Peggy Wallace Kennedy is the daughter of George C. Wallace and Lurleen Wallace, who both were governors of Alabama. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband, Mark Kennedy, a retired state Supreme Court justice. They have two sons, Leigh, a decorated veteran of the Iraq war, and Burns, a college sophomore.
.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) -- I heard a car door slam behind me and turned to see an elderly but spry woman heading my way.

The night before, a gang of vandals had swept through the cemetery desecrating graves, crushing headstones and stealing funereal objects.

My parent's graves, situated on a wind-swept hill overlooking the cemetery, had not been spared. A large marble urn that stood between two granite columns had been pried loose and spirited away, leaving faded silk flowers strewn on the ground.

I was holding a bouquet of them in my arms when the woman walked up and gave me a crushing hug. "Honey," she said, "you don't know me, but when I saw you standing up here on this hill, I knew that you must be one of the girls and I couldn't help myself but to drive up here and let you know how much me and my whole family loved both of your parents. They were real special people."

I thanked her for her kind words as we stood side by side gazing down at the graves of Govs. George Wallace and Lurleen Wallace.

After a few moments, the woman leaned into me and spoke almost in a conspiratorial whisper. "I never thought I would live to see the day when a black would be running for president. I know your Daddy must be rolling over in his grave."

Not having the heart or the energy to respond, I gave her bony arm a slight squeeze, turned and walked away. As I put the remnants of the graveyard spray in the trunk of my car, I assumed that she had not bothered to notice the Barack Obama sticker on my bumper.

When I was a young voter and had little interest in politics, my father would mark my ballot for me. As I thought about the woman in the cemetery, I mused that if he were alive and I had made the same request for this election, there would be a substantial chance, though not a certainty, that he would put an "X" by Obama's name.

Perhaps it would be the last chapter in his search for inner peace that became so important to him after becoming a victim of hatred and violence himself when he was shot and gravely injured in a Laurel, Maryland, shopping center parking lot. Perhaps it would be a way of reconciling in his own mind that what he once stood for did not prevent freedom of opportunity and self-advancement from coming full circle; his final absolution.

George Wallace and other Southern governors of his ilk stood defiantly in the 1950s and '60s in support of racial segregation, a culture of repression, violence and denial of basic human rights.

Their actions and the stark images of their consequences that spread across the world galvanized the nation and gave rise to a cry for an end to the American apartheid. The firestorms that were lit in Birmingham, Oxford, Memphis, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Little Rock and Selma were a call to arms to which the people responded.

And now a new call to arms has sounded as Americans face another assault on freedom. For if the stand in the schoolhouse door was a defining moment for George Wallace, then surely the aftermath of Katrina and the invasion of Iraq will be the same for George W. Bush.

The trampling of individual freedoms and his blatant contempt for the rights of the average American may not have been as obvious as an ax-handle-wielding governor, but Bush's insidiousness and piety have made him much more dangerous.

Healing must come, hope will be our lodestar, humility will reshape the American conscience, and honesty in both word and deed will refresh and invigorate America, and having Barack Obama to lead will give us back our power to heal.

My father lived long enough to come to an understanding of the injustices borne by his deeds and the legacy of suffering that it left behind. History will teach future generations that he was a man who used his political power to promote a philosophy of exclusion.

As his daughter, who witnessed his suffering in the twilight of his years and who witnessed his deeds and heard his words, I am one who believes that the man who, on March 7, 1965, listened to the reports of brutality as they streamed into the Governor's Mansion from Selma, Alabama, was not the same man who, in March of 1995, was welcomed with open arms as he was rolled through a sea of African-American men, women and children who gathered with him to welcome another generation of marchers, retracing in honor and remembrance the historic steps from Selma to Montgomery.

Four years ago, the young Illinois senator who spoke at the National Democratic Convention mesmerized me. I hoped even then that he would one day be my president.

Today, Barack Obama is hope for a better tomorrow for all Americans. He stands on the shoulders of all those people who have incessantly prayed for a day when "justice will run down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24).

Perhaps one day, my two sons and I will have the opportunity to meet Barack Obama in person to express our gratitude to him for bringing our family full circle.

And today, the day after the election, I am going to ride to the cemetery so that if asked, I can vouch for the fact that the world is still spinning but my father lies at peace.

O-H...

2008-11-05T10:12:00.001-08:00

Did you know that 72% of all new ohio votes went Obama? And even Hamilton County (Cincinnati, which is the most conservative part of the state) went Obama?!?!?!

Living History

2008-11-05T08:30:00.001-08:00

Occasionally America turns out to be every bit as good as its hype. It's thrilling to be around to witness one of those moments.

Anna Quindlen
NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Nov 17, 2008
The American Museum of Natural History threw a spectacular party on New Year's Eve 1999, but perhaps the millennium really arrived there just a few weeks ago. A group of New York City schoolchildren were at an event marking the 150th birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist and president, and at the end of the visit one of the kids raised his hand. "I have a question," he said. "Was he black?"

History will record that on Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first black president of the United States. It is impossible to overstate what that means to this nation.

America is as much a concept as it is a country, but it is a concept too often honored in the breach. The Statue of Liberty welcomes with the words "Give me your tired, your poor." Yet generation after generation of immigrants arrived here to face contempt and hatred until the passage of time, the flattening of accents, turned them into tolerated natives. The Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that all men are created equal. Yet for years the politicians and the powerful seemed to take the gender of that noun literally and denied all manner of rights to women.

But no injustice or prejudice brought to bear by this country against its own people can compare with how it has treated black men and women. Humiliation, degradation, lynchings, beatings, murders. The rights the United States pretended to confer upon all were unthinkingly and consistently denied them: the right to the franchise, to representation, to protection by the justice system.

Literal ownership gave way to something not so different: "When we are moved to better our lot," Richard Wright wrote in 1941, "we do not ask ourselves 'can we do it?' but 'will they let us do it?' " Henry Louis Gates Jr., in the memoir "Colored People," says simply, "For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores." Alice Walker left home for college on a bus and was ordered to move after a white woman complained that she was too near the front.

None of this was so very long ago.

Time passed. Things changed. John Lewis, a boy who loved books but was not permitted to enter the public library, a man whose skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers when he led a peaceful march across a bridge, now sits in Congress. Gates is a professor at Harvard, Walker a revered writer. Segregation as a matter of law has given way to segregation as a matter of class and custom. As President-elect Obama said when he gave a speech about race earlier this year, speaking of systemic poverty, bad schools and broken families, "Many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."

But Obama said something else in that speech, something both simpler and more profound that has special resonance now that his improbable candidacy has prevailed. He made the political spiritual. "In the end, then," he said, "what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us." He asked the American people to be fair and just, to be kind and generous, to put prejudice behind them and be one people because that is, not a legal or social imperative, but a moral one.

There will be learned discussion in the years to come about the specific meaning of this moment, about whether it will be more symbolic than substantive, about whether having a black president will lull Americans into believing that racism is a thing of the past. But for just a moment consider this small fact: for a long time a black man in many parts of the United States was denied even the honorific "Mister" by the white community, and was instead called by his first name, like a child, no matter how elderly and esteemed he might be.

Now a black man will be called Mr. President.

They never thought they would see the day, people said, especially the older ones, who could remember the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. They wept, some of them, and so did I. Perhaps it was because this man seems so young and vigorous in a nation that seems old and tired. Perhaps it is because he promises change and hope, and both are so badly needed. He is the president for our children's generation, a more tolerant and diverse society, so insensible of bright dividing lines that one of them would idly wonder whether Theodore Roosevelt was a black man. They belie a time when there was a crayon labeled "flesh" in my Crayola box, a crayon that was a pale pink.

But I suspect that, like many others, I wept for myself, too, because I felt I was part of a country that was living its principles. Despite all our prejudices, seen and hidden, millions of citizens managed, in the words of Dr. King, to judge Barack Obama by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. There were many reasons to elect him president, but this was one collateral gift: to be able to watch America look an old evil in the eye and to say, no more. We must be better than that. We can be better than that. We are better than that.

The Next President

2008-11-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 5, 2008
Editorial

This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:

An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States.

Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.

His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.

Mr. Obama spoke candidly of the failure of Republican economic policies that promised to lift all Americans but left so many millions far behind. He committed himself to ending a bloody and pointless war. He promised to restore Americans’ civil liberties and their tattered reputation around the world.

With a message of hope and competence, he drew in legions of voters who had been disengaged and voiceless. The scenes Tuesday night of young men and women, black and white, weeping and cheering in Chicago and New York and in Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church were powerful and deeply moving.

Mr. Obama inherits a terrible legacy. The nation is embroiled in two wars — one of necessity in Afghanistan and one of folly in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s challenge will be to manage an orderly withdrawal from Iraq without igniting new conflicts so the Pentagon can focus its resources on the real front in the war on terror, Afghanistan.

The campaign began with the war as its central focus. By Election Day, Americans were deeply anguished about their futures and the government’s failure to prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of deregulation. Mr. Obama will have to move quickly to impose control, coherence, transparency and fairness on the Bush administration’s jumbled bailout plan.

His administration will also have to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in. Climate change is a global threat, and after years of denial and inaction, this country must take the lead on addressing it. The nation must develop new, cleaner energy technologies, to reduce greenhouse gases and its dependence on foreign oil.

Mr. Obama also will have to rally sensible people to come up with immigration reform consistent with the values of a nation built by immigrants and refugees.

There are many other urgent problems that must be addressed. Tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance, including some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens — children of the working poor. Other Americans can barely pay for their insurance or are in danger of losing it along with their jobs. They must be protected.

Mr. Obama will now need the support of all Americans. Mr. McCain made an elegant concession speech Tuesday night in which he called on his followers not just to honor the vote, but to stand behind Mr. Obama. After a nasty, dispiriting campaign, he seemed on that stage to be the senator we long respected for his service to this country and his willingness to compromise.

That is a start. The nation’s many challenges are beyond the reach of any one man, or any one political party.

Now that I'm sober...

2008-11-05T07:44:00.001-08:00

There are so many emotions going through me, this city, this country and the world right now... I don't know where to start. I'm very busy at work so I will post articles, photos, etc... over the next few days and eventually I will get to my own thoughts once I have some time. I stopped to pick-up every newspaper I could find on my way to work this morning and the hardest part is choosing which one to frame! An impromptu celebration broke-out outside the White House last night. I've never seen anything like this. Some people are saying it's like News Years Eve but the only thing that comes to mind for me are those photos of the parade after World War II was over and people are literally dancing in the street nation-wide... This is incredible!!!!

What this means...

2008-11-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

We can all tell our future kids, grandkids or just random strangers, that on November 4, 2008 at roughly 11 pm, we stood-up as one people and said that in this country - our country - anything truly is possible! What a great time to be an American!

Holy Sh*t, we actually did it!!!!!!

2008-11-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

Prediction

2008-11-04T11:35:00.001-08:00

There's a ton of predictions out there, most of which are just hot air. I posted Karl Rove's yesterday because seeing Rove predict a Democratic victory over his delusional "Conservative majority for a generation" was worth it.

Nate Silver, from www.fivethirtyeight.com, is one of the best pollsters in my opinion. He uses complex mathematical models that I won't even try to explain. Long story short, his projection: Obama 349 Electoral Votes, McCain 189 Electoral Votes.

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

2008-11-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

Obama campaign instills new pride

2008-11-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

By Eugene Robinson

Whoever wins this election, I understand what Barack Obama meant when he said his faith in the American people had been "vindicated" by his campaign's success. I understand what Michelle Obama meant, months ago, when she said she was "proud of my country" for the first time in her adult life. Why should they be immune to the astonishment and vertigo that so many other African-Americans are experiencing? Why shouldn't they have to pinch themselves to make sure they aren't dreaming, the way that I do?

I know there's a possibility that the polls are wrong. I know there's a possibility that white Americans, when push comes to shove, won't be able to bring themselves to elect a black man as president of the United States. But the spread in the polls is so great that the Bradley effect wouldn't be enough to make Obama lose; it would take a kind of "Dr. Strangelove effect" in which voters' hands developed a will of their own.

I'm being facetious but not unserious. In my gut, I know there's a chance that the first African-American to make a serious run for the presidency will lose. But that is precisely what's new and, in a sense, unsettling: I'm talking about possibility, not inevitability.

For African-Americans, at least those of us old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, this is nothing short of mind-blowing. It's disorienting, and it makes me see this nation in a different light.

Advertisement
You see, I remember a time of separate and unequal schools, restrooms and water fountains -- a time when black people were officially second-class citizens. I remember moments when African-Americans were hopeful and excited about the political process, and I remember other moments when most of us were depressed and disillusioned. But I can't think of a single moment, before this year, when I thought it was within the realm of remote possibility that a black man could be nominated for president by one of the major parties -- let alone that he would go into Election Day with a better-than-even chance of winning.

Let me clarify: It's not that I would have calculated the odds of an African-American being elected president and concluded that this was unlikely, it's that I wouldn't even have thought about such a thing.

African-Americans' love of country is deep, intense and abiding, but necessarily complicated. At its hour of its birth, the nation was already stained by the Original Sin of slavery. Only in that past several decades has legal racism been outlawed and casual racism made unacceptable, at least in polite company. Millions of black Americans have managed to pull themselves up into mainstream, middle-class affluence, but millions of others remain mired in poverty and dysfunction.

A few black Americans broke through into the highest echelons of American society. Oprah Winfrey became the most powerful woman in the entertainment industry by appealing to an audience that is mostly white. Richard Parsons, Stanley O'Neal and others became alpha males in the lily-white world of Wall Street. Through superhuman skill and unbending will, Tiger Woods came to dominate a sport long seen as emblematic of white privilege.

Along came Barack Obama, a young man with an unassailable resume and a message of post-racial transformation. Initially, a big majority of African-Americans lined up behind his major opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton. The reason was simple: In the final analysis, white Americans weren't going to vote for the black guy. Better to go with the safe alternative.

But an amazing thing happened. In the Iowa caucuses, white Americans voted for the black guy. That's the moment Obama was referring to when he said his faith in the American people was vindicated. For me, it was the moment when the utterly impossible became merely unlikely. That's a huge, fundamental change, and it launched a sequence of events over the subsequent months that made me realize that some things I "knew" about America were apparently wrong.

Even if John McCain somehow prevails, that won't change the fact that Obama won all those primaries, or that he won the nomination, or that he raised more money than any candidate in history, or that he rewrote the book on how to run a presidential campaign. Nothing can change the fact that so many white Americans entrusted a black American with their hopes and dreams.

We can all have a new kind of pride in our country.

Eugene Robinson writes for the Washington Post.

Why American Youth Will Vote

2008-11-04T10:56:00.000-08:00

Though we are sometimes too cool for our own good, the youth of America are also naïve enough to hope. That's a good thing.

Courtney E. Martin | November 4, 2008

Let's just clear the air. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about electoral politics. Especially if you, like me, have only voted in two presidential elections that were both highly contested, dragged out affairs involving hanging chads, smug Bushes, and a cowardly Congress.
And even if you didn't have the opportunity to vote in those deflating, hang-over inducing debacles, you watched it happen. You were a greasy-faced adolescent, part of a generation raised on "save the world" rhetoric and compulsory community service. You stole your mom's "I Voted" sticker and stuck it on your messenger bag. You dreamed of going behind those secret curtains and pulling the lever yourself. And then you learned about the electoral college and voter fraud and it all seemed like a whole lot of hype.

But this, all you hipsters and hip-hop heads, Rock Band addicts and radical libertarians, 18- and 28-year-olds, is why we will vote today.

We will vote because we were raised on a lot of rhetoric about the American Dream, but rarely have a chance to participate in it so directly. Hang out in this sprawling, strip-malled land of opportunity long enough, and you learn that "bootstraps" is code for "you're on your own," and the legacy of slavery and sexism is invisible only to those who benefit from it.

It's hard to counter the deeply entrenched notion that all hard work is equally rewarded in the good ol' U.S. of A. But on this day, November 4, Election Day, every single person that walks in that booth -- first-generation American, Thomas Jefferson's great-great-great grandson, black, white, Latino, Asian, Ivy League-educated, junior-high drop out, gay, straight, disabled, skinny, fat, male, female alike -- is granted equal say in our shared destiny.

Your daddy doesn't have to own the booth. You don't have to have a special voting prep course. You don't need to use big words or dress in business casual. You only need show up and pull that lever.

We will vote because we know that while the president cannot save us from ourselves, he or she can be a powerful symbol of the best within us. American citizens make America what it is each and every day. The choices we make about what to consume, how to treat one another, where and with whom we spend our precious time and energy -- this is what adds up to the sum of our country. But the president represents our best intentions. He or she stands before the world as a figurehead. His or her voice is the singular chorus of our collective notion of the country's future.

We will vote because our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents have brought us to this country -- sometimes under fire, flood, the threat of famine, and almost always with great personal sacrifice -- because they had a dream about who we would someday be. We want to be that somebody on Election Day. We want to show them that, while their idea of America may have been a little too romantic, their love was never wasted on us.

We will vote because it is time to show -- with fierce and united force -- just what our generation is made of. We've heard the stories, watched the grainy footage, of the so-called heyday of youth activism. But the '60s are over. And we may not be as convinced of the power of protest, we may have shorter hair and attention spans, but we are deeply, profoundly committed to being responsible citizens. We will vote because it's an opportunity to provide skeptical pundits who have written us off as apathetic with statistics that will shut them up, once and for all.

We will vote because those of us who are female know that women were beaten, ostracized, divorced, and threatened for our privilege. It's hard to even imagine that there was a time when our politics were considered irrelevant simply because of our sex, hard to imagine sitting at dinner with our fathers and brothers, told to keep quiet about matters of national importance. We will vote in honor of our own blissful amnesia of these preposterous times.

We will vote because those of us who are youth of color know that our ancestors not only endured economic oppression, physical and verbal abuse, and humiliation, but died for our privilege. And for the first time in American history, many of us have the opportunity to elect a leader who looks like us, doesn't demonize or condescend to us, who has shared some of our most intimate experiences of growing up in a country with an unfinished racial revolution.

We will vote because we want to be a part of history. We want to sit down with our children and grandchildren as they hit the history books and tell them colorful stories about the election of ‘08 with all its unprecedented twists and turns, invoke the feeling in the air as we strolled to our polling place, and pat them on the head, saying, "Someday, sweetie, you too will get to vote in a groundbreaking election."

We will vote because we have found the real world is sometimes an alienating place, and this is a way to feel less alone.

We will vote because we dreamed that we would someday "make a difference" in the world, and then our rent was hard to afford and our cigar-smoking uncles kept asking us what we were going to do with our lives and we got drunk and forgot. Voting will remind us of ourselves that summer when we were eight and sent all of our lemonade stand profits to Sally Struthers even if we weren't sure it would really help the swollen-bellied children in Africa. It was something to do. It was somebody to be.

We will vote because, though we are sometimes too cool for our own good, we're also young and naïve enough to hope. And as Barack Obama himself has told us, "In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

Hope, kids. Hope hard. And write the true story of an America that stars you as the vote-casting, wide-eyed protagonist. I can almost promise there's a happy ending.

2008 Senate Election Scorecard

2008-11-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

Council for a Livable World

Mark the Contests as They Are Settled

51: Democratic seats as of Nov. 4

7-7:30 PM (EST)

___Virginia: +1 - Mark Warner (D) vs. Jim Gilmore (R) – slam dunk for the Democrats

___Georgia: ? - Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) vs. Jim Martin (D) – Chambliss narrowly favored; if Martin upsets the incumbent or forces a runoff in a month (the winner must receive 50% + 1), it will be a good night for Democrats

___Kentucky: ? - Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) vs. Bruce Lunsford (D) – Minority Leader favored; if Lunsford pulls off an upset, 60 votes are in sight

8-8:30 PM (EST)

___North Carolina: +1 - Kay Hagan (D) vs. Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) – Although there are conflicting polls, Hagan has maintain a narrow lead in most polls

___New Hampshire: +1 –Jeanne Shaheen (D) vs. Sen. John Sununu (R) – Shaheen has been ahead the entire campaign and should win, in a reversal of the same matchup six years ago

___Maine: no change - Sen. Susan Collins (R) vs. Rep. Tom Allen (D) – only a miracle – a huge Obama landslide -- can save Allen against the ever-popular Collins

___Mississippi -? - Sen. Roger Wicker (R) vs. Ronnie Musgrove (D) – this is another contest where the Republican is favored and a Musgrove upset moves D’s towards the magic 60

9-9:30 PM (EST)

___New Mexico: +1 - Rep. Tom Udall (D) vs. Rep. Steve Pearce (R) – an easy win for one of the Udall cousins

___Colorado: +1 Rep. Mark Udall (D) vs. ex-Rep. Bob Schaffer (R) – more of a struggle than for his cousin, but still a win

___Minnesota: ? - Al Franken (D) vs. Sen. Norm Coleman (R) vs Dean Barkley (I) – there are conflicting polls here and an independent with substantial support, making this contest difficult to predict

___Louisiana - no change - Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) vs. John Kennedy (R) – the only hope for a Republican takeover of a Democratic seat, but not much of one

10-10:30 PM (EST)
No key contests

11-11:30 PM (EST)

Oregon: +1 - Jeff Merkley (D) vs. Sen. Gordon Smith (R) – upstart Merkley has staked out a narrow but consistent lead and should win

Mid-night – 1:00 AM
___Alaska: +1 - Nick Begich (R) vs. Sen. Ted Stevens (R) – A Mayor beats a man with conviction(s).

___GRAND TOTAL

Personal Note II:

2008-11-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

Does anybody have my original e-mail from February/March 2007 that I wrote in the minutes after Obama declared his candidacy for Presidency in Springfield (my "endorsement")? If you do, I'd love to have it. I should have kept it but who'd of thunk we'd be here today?...

Personal note:

2008-11-04T10:21:00.001-08:00

I am completely worthless at work today... is it time for the returns yet?

Great day to be an American!

2008-11-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

Guess who this guy is voting for...

2008-11-04T10:17:00.001-08:00

2008-11-04T08:21:00.001-08:00

My wife made me canvass for Obama; here's what I learned

2008-11-04T08:15:00.001-08:00

Charlotte, N.C. - There has been a lot of speculation that Barack Obama might win the election due to his better "ground game" and superior campaign organization.

I had the chance to view that organization up close this month when I canvassed for him. I'm not sure I learned much about his chances, but I learned a lot about myself and about this election.

Let me make it clear: I'm pretty conservative. I grew up in the suburbs. I voted for George H.W. Bush twice, and his son once. I was disappointed when Bill Clinton won, and disappointed he couldn't run again.

I encouraged my son to join the military. I was proud of him in Afghanistan, and happy when he came home, and angry when he was recalled because of the invasion of Iraq. I'm white, 55, I live in the South and I'm definitely going to get a bigger tax bill if Obama wins.

I am the dreaded swing voter.

So you can imagine my surprise when my wife suggested we spend a Saturday morning canvassing for Obama. I have never canvassed for any candidate. But I did, of course, what most middle-aged married men do: what I was told.

At the Obama headquarters, we stood in a group to receive our instructions. I wasn't the oldest, but close, and the youngest was maybe in high school. I watched a campaign organizer match up a young black man who looked to be college age with a white guy about my age to canvas together. It should not have been a big thing, but the beauty of the image did not escape me.

Instead of walking the tree-lined streets near our home, my wife and I were instructed to canvass a housing project. A middle-aged white couple with clipboards could not look more out of place in this predominantly black neighborhood.

We knocked on doors and voices from behind carefully locked doors shouted, "Who is it?"

"We're from the Obama campaign," we'd answer. And just like that doors opened and folks with wide smiles came out on the porch to talk.

Grandmothers kept one hand on their grandchildren and made sure they had all the information they needed for their son or daughter to vote for the first time.

Young people came to the door rubbing sleep from their eyes to find out where they could vote early, to make sure their vote got counted.

We knocked on every door we could find and checked off every name on our list. We did our job, but Obama may not have been the one who got the most out of the day's work.

I learned in just those three hours that this election is not about what we think of as the "big things."

It's not about taxes. I'm pretty sure mine are going to go up no matter who is elected.

It's not about foreign policy. I think we'll figure out a way to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan no matter which party controls the White House, mostly because the people who live there don't want us there anymore.

I don't see either of the candidates as having all the answers.

I've learned that this election is about the heart of America. It's about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It's about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.

My wife and I went out last weekend to knock on more doors. But this time, not because it was her idea. I don't know what it's going to do for the Obama campaign, but it's doing a lot for me.

Jonathan Curley is a banker. He voted for George H.W. Bush twice and George W. Bush once.

VOTE!!!!!!!

2008-11-04T07:05:00.002-08:00

That's it...

2008-11-04T07:05:00.001-08:00

Karl Rove's prediction: Obama 338, McCain 200

2008-11-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Kos gives the following: Obama 390, McCain 148

AL: M+23
AK: M+11
AZ: M+5
AR: M+8
CA: O+22
CO: O+7
CT: O+20
DE: O+24
DC: O+78
FL : O+2
GA: O+3
HI: O+40
ID: M+29
IL: O+25
IN: O+2
IA: O+14
KS: M+17
KY: M+17
LA: M+9
ME: O+18
MD: O+22
MA: O+16
MI: O+16
MN: O+11
MS: M+7
MO: O+2
MT: M+0
NE: M+19
NV: O+7
NH: O+10
NJ: O+15
NM: O+9
NY: O+29
NC: O+4
ND: M+1
OH: O+1
OK: M+26
OR: O+16
PA: O+8
RI: O+28
SC: M+11
SD: M+10
TN: M+13
TX: M+9
UT: M+31
VT: O+22
VA: O+6
WA: O+15
WV: M+8
WI: O+11
WY: M+31

Senate

57 Democrats, 40 Republicans, 2 Independents, 1 runoff

AK: Begich (D) by 15
CO: Udall (D) by 14
GA: Chambliss (R) by 1, but runoff
KY: McConnell (R) by 3 (please, please, please be wrong!)
ME: Collins (R) by 12
MN: Franken (D) by 4
MS-B: Wicker (R) by 4
NH: Shaheen (D) by 10
NM: Udall (D) by 19
NC: Hagan (D) by 6
OR: Merkley (D) by 10
VA: Warner (D) by 30

House

Democrats 268, Republicans 167

This is great... see bold text

2008-11-03T12:51:00.000-08:00

By LAUREN BAKER , Alligator Writer
Less than 48 hours before Election Day, about 4,500 people gathered on the Reitz Union North Lawn to hear Sen. Joe Biden as part of the Obama campaign’s final push through Florida.

Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and his wife, Jill, were introduced by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson to a Gator–chomping crowd. Biden, donning a Gator cap upon entrance, was accompanied by his son, Hunter, and oldest granddaughter, Naomi.

Despite a increasing drizzle, the crowd remained cheery before Biden took the stage at about 4:40 p.m., holding signs with slogans such as “Biden’s my favorite Joe” and grooving to songs such as “Celebration.” ObamaBot waved its arms in rhythm as it rolled around the crowded arena.

Jill Biden, a longtime teacher, spoke of her husband’s commitment to family, public service and education before the vice presidential hopeful addressed the crowd.

An alumnus of the University of Delaware, Biden told the crowd he watched the Gators beat the Dawgs on Saturday.

“I thought, ‘Thank God we don’t play the Gators,’” he said.

Amid cheers, boos and a chant of “Jill, baby, Jill,” Biden spoke for nearly 30 minutes about Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential goals, which he said include strengthening middle–class America, regaining international respect and ending the Iraq war.

“I’m here with a simple message: Change is on the way,” he said.

Biden bundled McCain’s goals with the “failed” economic and foreign policies of President George W. Bush, adding that McCain was guilty of “Karl Rove” politics.

“They have called Obama every name in the book,” he said, adding that “Mr. President” would join the list come Tuesday.

Biden also brushed off Dick Cheney’s recent endorsement of McCain, citing support Obama has received from financial tycoon Warren Buffet and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Some attendees trickled into the arena at about 1 p.m., entertained off and on by members of a jazz band, who played for free but said they would be reimbursed by a photo with Biden.

Throughout Biden’s speech, about 25 students supporting McCain waved Republican campaign signs and a yellow Gadsden flag, used during the Revolutionary War, by the back fence of the arena.

“It stands for preserving liberty,” said Bryan Griffin, UF College Republicans chairman, of the flag, adding that Obama’s policies would strip Americans of some liberties, such as choosing how to spend their money.

Not all Republicans were there to protest.

“I wanted to see the next vice president of the United States,” said Josh Simmons, Gators for McCain chairman.

Simmons said he voted for Obama about two weeks ago.

“I’ve seen a different John McCain than the one I signed up to work for,” he said.

Simmons said he submitted his resignation Sunday night and will no longer be chairman for the group, which has more than 1,000 members.

“I expect them to be incredibly pissed off,” he said.

2008-11-03T11:22:00.001-08:00

2008-11-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

Following the Script: Obama, McCain and ‘The West Wing’

2008-11-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By BRIAN STELTER

When Eli Attie, a writer for “The West Wing,” prepared to plot some episodes about a young Democratic congressman’s unlikely presidential bid, he picked up the phone and called David Axelrod.

Mr. Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, and Mr. Axelrod, a political consultant, had crossed campaign trails before. “I just called him and said, ‘Tell me about Barack Obama,’ ” Mr. Attie said.

Days after Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, delivered an address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the two men held several long conversations about his refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide. Mr. Axelrod was then working on Mr. Obama’s campaign for the United States Senate; he is now Mr. Obama’a chief strategist.

Four years later, the writers of “The West Wing” are watching in amazement as the election plays out. The parallels between the final two seasons of the series (it ended its run on NBC in May 2006) and the current political season are unmistakable. Fiction has, once again, foreshadowed reality.

Watching “The West Wing” in retrospect — all seven seasons are available on DVD, and episodes can be seen in syndication — viewers can see allusions to Mr. Obama in almost every facet of Matthew Santos, the Hispanic Democratic candidate played by Jimmy Smits. Santos is a coalition-building Congressional newcomer who feels frustrated by the polarization of Washington. A telegenic and popular fortysomething with two young children, Santos enters the presidential race and eventually beats established candidates in a long primary campaign.

Wearing a flag pin, Santos announces his candidacy by telling supporters, “I am here to tell you that hope is real.” And he adds, “In a life of trial, in a world of challenges, hope is real.” Viewers can almost hear the crowd cheering, “Yes, we can.”

Comparisons between Senator John McCain and the “West Wing” Republican candidate, Arnold Vinick, a white-haired Senate stalwart with an antitax message and a reputation for delivering “straight talk” to the press, also abound. Vinick, played by Alan Alda, is deemed a threat to Democrats because of his ability to woo moderate voters. And he takes great pride in his refusal to pander to voters, telling an aide: “People know where I stand. They may not like it, but they know I’ll stick with it.”

Even the vice-presidential picks are similar: the Democrat picks a Washington veteran as his vice presidential candidate to add foreign policy expertise to the ticket, while the Republican selects a staunchly conservative governor to shore up the base.

Certainly some of the parallels are coincidental. It is unlikely, for example, that the writers knew Mr. Obama had an affection for Bob Dylan when they made Santos a Dylan fan. But it is the unintentional similarities that make the DVDs of the sixth and seventh seasons, which at the time received mixed reviews, so rewarding to watch now. In both “The West Wing” and in real life, for example, the Phillies played in the World Series during the election campaign.

As the primaries unfolded this year, “I saw the similarities right away,” said Lawrence O’Donnell, a producer and writer for the series who has appeared on MSNBC as a political analyst. Mr. O’Donnell had used Mr. McCain as one of the templates for the Vinick character in the episodes he wrote, though he said that “McCain’s resemblance to the Vinick character was much stronger in 2000 than in 2008.”

Echoing the criticism Mr. McCain faced during the primaries, a White House aide in “The West Wing” contends that Vinick is “not conservative enough” for the Republican base. Sometimes the two candidates’ situations are almost identical: when the press starts asking where Vinick attends church, he tells his staff that “I haven’t gone to church for a while.” Asked in July by The New York Times about the frequency of his church attendance, Mr. McCain said, “Not as often as I should.”

Mr. Alda and Mr. McCain are the same age. When a hard-edged strategist played by Janeane Garofalo joins the Santos campaign, she immediately alludes to Vinick’s age. “He’s been in the Senate for like 90 years. He was practically born in a committee room,” she says.

In the same way that Obama surrogates have subtly knocked Mr. McCain’s lack of computer skills, the Garofalo character remarks to the Santos campaign manager, Josh Lyman: “Why are you always talking about high-tech jobs? Because Vinick uses a manual typewriter.”

Conversely, Santos staffers talk about getting video of the candidate with his “adorable young children hugging their hale and vital dad.” The casting of Mr. Smits introduced story lines about the prospect of a minority president. But when an aide suggests a fund-raising drive in a Latino community, Santos snaps: “I don’t want to just be the brown candidate. I want to be the American candidate.” The Obama campaign has made similar assertions.

Still, “The West Wing” — like Mr. Obama — does not ignore racial issues entirely. In the seventh season Santos delivers a speech on race at a critical moment for his campaign, and staffers privately worry that voters will lie about their willingness to vote for a minority candidate.

If the show sometimes seems like a political fantasy — a real debate where politicians are required to answer questions? a candidate rejecting an attack ad? — it also reflects the tenor of the real-life campaign season.

Santos wins the nomination only after a lengthy fight on the convention floor, an inexact parallel to Obama’s extended primary fight with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Just as the Obama campaign pivoted to the economy this fall, Lyman tells Santos staffers that “this new economic message may be our ticket,” and he winds up being right. An economic crisis does not ensue, but back-to-back emergencies on “The West Wing” — a nuclear power plant malfunction and a dispute in Kazakhstan — bring to mind the election-defining qualities of the actual economic crisis.

“Dramatically, they are exactly the same thing: the unforseeable,” Mr. O’Donnell said.

As President Bush did during the bailout talks, Jed Bartlet, the Democratic “West Wing” president played by Martin Sheen, brings both candidates to the White House for a briefing. Facing the prospect of deploying 150,000 American soldiers to Kazakhstan three weeks before the election, Vinick grumbles, “I can say goodbye to my tax cut.” He tells Santos, “Your education plan’s certainly off the table.”

Santos emerges victorious weeks later, but only after a grueling election night. Online, some “West Wing” fans are wondering whether the show will wind up forecasting the real-life result as well. In Britain, where the series remains popular in syndication, a recent headline on a blog carried by the newspaper The Telegraph declared: “Barack Obama will win: It’s all in ‘The West Wing.’ ”

Counting On Wal-Mart Women

2008-11-02T08:25:00.000-08:00

Eleanor Clift

Despite his pollster's predictions, that group isn't likely to save McCain. So the question becomes, how can the GOP save itself?

Just about every poll shows Barack Obama ahead in key battleground states, yet an internal McCain campaign memo, conveniently leaked to the media, calls the race "functionally even." The memo's author, highly regarded pollster Bill McInturff, argues that McCain's salvation will be "Wal-Mart women" without a college degree making below $60,000 a year. These are the voters the politicians overlook and who have found their voice in Sarah Palin and their gender counterpart in Joe the Plumber—or so the theory goes.

An election night surprise is always possible, but the last time the so-called Wal-Mart women were for McCain was during the Palin mania in early September. Since then, the support for Barack Obama among these voters has grown into a twenty-point gap in Obama's favor. Reading McInturff's memo online, Sam Popkin, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego and author of "The Reasoning Voter," concludes that the beleaguered McCain pollster "must be smoking something."

Popkin polls for The Economist magazine, and McInturff's assertions didn't sound right to him. So he ploughed through the last five months of polling he did for The Economist in search of the Wal-Mart women trend. "I'm looking at the graph," he told me as he scrolled down to find the data. In early September, Wal-Mart women were essentially split, with Obama ahead by three or four points. By the time of the first debate, Obama had a 15-point lead, reflecting the diminishing returns of the Palin pick for McCain along with the increasing saliency of the economy as an issue. McInturff evidently chose his words carefully, introducing a phrase open to interpretation. "Functionally even—I don't know what that means," says Popkin. "Is it the same as functionally illiterate? It doesn't reflect in any way, shape or form the data I'm looking at."

Popkin sympathizes with his fellow pollster and the pressure he's under. "At this point, in the last week of a campaign, you have to excuse whatever anybody says," Popkin told NEWSEEK. "He can't say 'it's over,' or Republicans will never talk to him again." You don't have to be a cynic to wonder if the McInturff memo is more of an effort to rally the troops in the face of depressing poll numbers than it is serious scholarship. In 1980, when pollster Pat Caddell told President Carter, before a single vote had been cast, that he would lose by a big margin to Ronald Reagan, a Grade-B movie actor, Carter was so humiliated he just wanted to get the whole thing over with. On Election Day, he rushed to concede before the polls had closed on the West Coast, costing Democrats seats in the House and Senate as morale plummeted and voters stayed home, assuming the election was over.

Whatever McCain's fate on Election Day, Republicans need to get out their vote to salvage what they can in congressional and state races. After the conventions, it looked for a time as though McCain might overcome the historical odds against him as the standard-bearer for a party and a president that had lost credibility with voters. Democrats worried about the recriminations in their party if Obama lost. If the Democrats couldn't win the White House in this climate, when could they? Imagine the chorus of "I told you so" coming from the Hillary camp. The more likely scenario now is the implosion of the Republican Party, especially if it's an Obama blowout. Many Republicans have started pointing fingers early. "Fire the whole campaign," conservative columnist Bill Kristol asserted weeks ago.

What's shaping up is not comparable to '92, the last time a Democrat won the White House. "It's much more serious and devastating to Republicans," says Stan Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton's pollster. Democrats lost seats in '92; Clinton had no coattails. Obama may enter the White House with close to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a doubling of the Democratic margin in the House. This is a watershed election. Typically, every four years, somebody wins, somebody loses, and life goes on. But Obama represents generational change that has huge political repercussions. He wins 63 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29. For the Republicans, "It's not just a lost election, it's a lost generation," says Greenberg.

Who will they blame for this turn of events? "Overwhelmingly, it's you guys," Greenburg told reporters at a Washington breakfast last week. Republicans are convinced that media bias in favor of Obama tipped the election in his favor, and that coverage of Sarah Palin has been unfairly harsh, conveying sexism as well as anti-conservative bias. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, always a GOP crowd pleaser, calls the mainstream media "Pravda." Blaming the press may feel good. But it won't solve the problem of a party that has lost its way.

© 2008

Daughter of slave votes for Obama

2008-11-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail.

By Joshunda Sanders

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year's presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.

Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones' 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election's significance to the matriarch.

"It's awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us," Baker said. "It's awesome to see what she's done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work" if Obama is elected, she said.

Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 — no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.

Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state — and the country.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation's oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that's hard to validate.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can't confirm whether Jones is the state's oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.

The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 — making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.

Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. "God has been good to me," she said.

joshundasanders@statesman.com;445-3630

2008-11-01T09:34:00.001-07:00

Fun Fact:

2008-11-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Joe the Plummer's name isn't Joe. It's Sam. And he's not a plummer.

Real Headlines from Today:

2008-11-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

An Obama Presidency Won't Bring Global Unity - Lawrence Solomon, NP
Wow, global unity is a pretty high bar to set. If that's all that an Obama presidency doesn't bring, I think we'll be ok. If Obama achieves universal healthcare, gets us out of this economic mess, resolves the war in Iraq, gets the Middle East peace process back up and running, etc... I think I can live with him falling short of "global unity."

Obama's a Better Symbol Than President - Mark Steyn, OC Register
Um, Obama's not president (yet).

Mad About The One - Harold Evans, The Guardian
Lebron James is "The Chosen One." McCain called Obama, "that one." Now, he's just "The One"?

McCain vs. Obama: Divine intervention?

2008-11-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

Political analyst Charlie Cook writes that, unless there’s divine intervention, McCain is probably going down to defeat. “Say what you will about the campaign he has waged and the running mate he picked, but the collapse in credit markets and the stock market may very well have ended his chances of victory, notwithstanding anything he could have said or done differently. The senator from Arizona is a good man, who served his country admirably. And many would say that he deserved a better chance than he got.”

As for Obama, Cook compares him to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, whom voters took a chance on after Hurricane Katrina. As I have watched the rise of Barack Obama and how he appears to be on the verge of being elected president, the Jindal analogy seems to ring true: People seem to want to take a chance. If my assumption of an Obama victory proves incorrect, this space will be filled next week with a huge mea culpa.”

The latest New York Times/CBS poll has Obama leading by 11 points, 51%-40%. “A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.”

Other findings: “Some perceptions of race are changing, with a marked increase in the number of people who say they believe that white and black people have an equal chance of getting ahead in America today. Mr. McCain’s focus on taxes, including his talk about Joe the Plumber, seems to be having some effect, as a growing number of voters now say Mr. McCain would not raise their taxes. Eighty-nine percent of people view the economy negatively, and 85 percent think the country is on the wrong track. Mr. Obama continues to have a significant advantage on key issues like the economy, health care and the war in Iraq.”

"Now as Barack Obama and John McCain vie to become the next president, a promise of U.S. energy independence again has become a rallying cry on the campaign trail," the AP writes. "Is it possible, or even desirable? Many energy experts say it's not. People disagree on what energy independence means -- zero energy imports, or something less? And even if the United States were energy independent, would it be insulated from global oil price shocks, with oil priced in a global marketplace? Again, energy experts say don't count on it."

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/31/1620893.aspx

2008-10-31T12:09:00.001-07:00

2008-10-31T12:01:00.001-07:00

Nature Magazine: America's choice

2008-10-31T09:47:00.001-07:00

Editorial
Nature 455, 1149 (30 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/4551149a; Published online 29 October 2008

America's choice

The values of scientific enquiry, rather than any particular policy positions on science, suggest a preference for one US presidential candidate over the other.

The election of a US president almost always seems like a crossroads, but the choice to be made on 4 November feels unusual, and daunting, in its national and global significance.

Science and the research enterprise offer powerful tools for addressing key challenges that face America and the world, and it is heartening that both John McCain and Barack Obama have had thoughtful things to say about them. Obama has been more forthcoming in his discussion of research goals (see Nature 455, 446–449; 2008), but both have engaged with the issues. McCain deserves particular credit for taking a stance on carbon emissions that is at odds with that of a significant proportion of his party.

There is no open-and-shut case for preferring one man or the other on the basis of their views on these matters. This is as it should be: for science to be a narrow sectional interest bundled up in a single party would be a terrible thing. Both sides recognize science's inspirational value and ability to help achieve national and global goals. That is common ground to be prized, and a scientific journal's discussion of these matters might be expected to stop right there.

But science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values — values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part. Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.

The core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment.
On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain. This is not a panacea. Some of the policies Obama supports — continued subsidies for corn ethanol, for example — seem misguided. The advice of experts is all the more valuable when it is diverse: 'groupthink' is a problem in any job. Obama seems to understands this. He tends to seek a range of opinions and analyses to ensure that his own opinion, when reached, has been well considered and exposed to alternatives. He also exhibits pragmatism — for example in his proposals for health-care reform — that suggests a keen sense for the tests reality can bring to bear on policy.

Some will find strengths in McCain that they value more highly than the commitment to reasoned assessment that appeals in Obama. But all the signs are that the former seeks a narrower range of advice. Equally worrying is that he fails to educate himself on crucial matters; the attitude he has taken to economic policy over many years is at issue here. Either as a result of poor advice, or of advice inadequately considered, he frequently makes decisions that seem capricious or erratic. The most notable of these is his ill-considered choice of Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, as running mate. Palin lacks the experience, and any outward sign of the capacity, to face the rigours of the presidency.

The Oval Office is not a debating chamber, nor is it a faculty club. As anyone in academia will know, a thoughtful and professorial air is not in itself a recommendation for executive power. But a commitment to seeking good advice and taking seriously the findings of disinterested enquiry seems an attractive attribute for a chief executive. It certainly matters more than any specific pledge to fund some particular agency or initiative at a certain level — pledges of a sort now largely rendered moot by the unpredictable flux of the economy.

This journal does not have a vote, and does not claim any particular standing from which to instruct those who do. But if it did, it would cast its vote for Barack Obama.

Web Puts Dog-Whistle Politics on a Leash

2008-10-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

By Ari Melber

Everyone can hear it now. This Internet-driven, hyperactive presidential race is forcing accountability on two of the oldest tricks in politics: dog whistles and secret smears.

With a "dog whistle," politicians use code words to signal unpopular stances to one target audience, while avoiding a backlash because the reference is lost on others. Many people miss President Bush's layered language for evangelicals, from hinting that legal abortion is like slavery to his odd prediction that history will see Iraq as just "a comma." (It only makes sense if you know the proverb, "Never put a period where God has put a comma.") Code words don't fool everyone, but from "states' rights" to "welfare queens," GOP campaigns have tapped racial resentment without facing widespread opprobrium. Secret smears run on a similar axis, enabling politicians to undermine an opponent without taking responsibility for the attack. But the times are changing.

From his race to his name, Barack Obama seemed like the perfect target for such coded attacks. Indeed, some Republicans were eager to run the old playbook on him. "Count me down as somebody who underestimates Barack Hussein Obama, please," said GOP strategist Ed Rogers, speaking on MSNBC's Hardball in the headier days of 2006. Yet Rogers, like the McCain campaign, underestimated not only Obama but a new media model that swiftly blasts would-be Swiftboaters.

Partisan and muckraking bloggers now fight political operatives' efforts to keep unseemly attacks below the radar. Take automated "robo" phone calls, which often deploy the sharp attacks that campaigns don't want exposed in the mass media. Previously, the calls were obscure, rarely drawing major media coverage, let alone sustained criticism. Now they can be recorded, uploaded and dissected in a single news cycle. Sites like TalkingPointsMemo and Daily Kos use crowd-sourcing by readers to track the attacks and pin them squarely on John McCain. Insider political sites, like Ben Smith's Politico blog, also disseminate the audio recordings to media and political elites, converting a "targeted" message into a mass broadcast. And organized campaigns like the National Political Do Not Call Registry use the web, Twitter and e-mail to track and map every call.

As a hub for intelligence, the web can enlist people in "bubbling up reports" of everything from robo-calls to US attorney firings, explains TechPresident co-founder Micah Sifry, a web activism expert who heralds the trend as a new era of "crowd-scouring" the presidency. He argues that information can whip around online with or without a political agenda. "Even without central direction, the crowd is scouring the world for interesting news and sharing tidbits constantly."

Once exposed, McCain's robocalls were unpalatable even to his allies in the party and the media, adding another "Hey, Rube" squabble to his already contentious campaign. Republican senators condemned the calls. Fox News's Chris Wallace pressed McCain on the issue, reminding the senator that he once denounced such tactics. Even Sarah Palin felt compelled to respond to criticism of the campaign's robocalls, telling reporters that while she did not renounce them, she would prefer to do personal and retail campaigning instead.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has run a sophisticated pushback operation of its own, tapping a large volunteer corps through its "action wire" to expose smears and contact local media about unfair attacks. The campaign launched two portals, FightTheSmears and BelowTheRadar, to fight what it calls a stealth Republican operation "to quietly poison voters' information with lies and fear tactics."

All this online activity has been amplified by the rapidly shifting landscape of political television. The increasingly opinionated cable news programs, always in search of conflict and fresh content, now treat debates over these tactics as a major campaign issue. This emphasis is bleeding into the broader campaign discourse, which includes minute dissection of attacks that were once considered unmentionable. A whole range of smears against Obama, for example, have been exposed under the glare of nationally televised debates. Sometimes that process has angered his supporters--as when the ABC News primary debate focused on smears regarding "patriotism" and Islam. In one of the general election debates, CBS moderator Bob Scheiffer was credited for playing a corrective role when he pressed both candidates to answer for attacks from their supporters. That is a stark contrast to the previous two presidential races, when even the most incendiary attacks drew scant calls for accountability at the candidate level.

The infamous Swiftboat attacks against John Kerry, for example, were barely a blip in the 2004 presidential debates. Sure, everyone knew about them, but no voters ever saw President Bush defend them. Run the tape back to 2000, and Bush was never forced to fully answer for one of his most vile political attacks, the racist smear against John McCain's family in the South Carolina primary. Today, it is hard to imagine a candidate in either party sliding through a presidential primary without a huge backlash for deploying that kind of attack.

This cycle, in fact, even faint dog whistles are called out in real time. When McCain launched a late-October attack on Obama, alleging that he would morph the IRS into a "welfare agency," MSNBC host Rachel Maddow bore down on the line. "Welfare? Where'd that come from?" she asked on her MSNBC show, slamming McCain for invoking a "great racially divisive codeword from the '80s and '90s [with] no bearing whatsoever on Barack Obama's tax policies."

As Election Day approaches, Republicans claim their final flurry of attacks on Obama are simply about his foreign policy and judgment. One controversial new McCain ad shows Obama superimposed on maps of the Middle East, questioning whether he would "accept Iran's demands" to destroy Israel, among other things, as music evoking the Muslim call to prayer plays in the background. Another last-minute GOP mailer grafts Obama's face over a map of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. And Sarah Palin is using her closing arguments to link Obama with Rashid Khalidi, a respected Columbia University professor and Palestinian advocate. (Khalidi has minor links to both presidential nominees, as it happens.)

It is not hard to decipher the strategy. McCain has concluded his only road to Washington runs through Tehran--if he can convince voters that's where Obama belongs.

On Wednesday, The Huffington Post, which now draws more traffic than The Drudge Report, was all over the case. Under the banner "McCain's Last Ditch Effort: Tying Obama to Muslim World," Sam Stein reported, "McCain's campaign is making what appears to be a final, full-throated effort to paint Barack Obama as a sympathizer with the Muslim world." There is no equivocating debate or time-lapse delay. An influential driver of political news is exposing McCain for doing exactly what he pledged to avoid--stoking bigoted, racial and religious division to turn people away from his opponent. With sustained attention on these attacks, it appears that voters are increasingly recoiling from McCain's offensive.

"Thanks to YouTube--and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails-- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed," contends Arianna Huffington, whose website pulses with a constant, two-way debate of news and opinion. "The McCain campaign hasn't gotten the message," she added, "hence the blizzard of racist, alarmist, xenophobic, innuendo-laden accusations being splattered at Obama."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who endorsed Obama and recently appeared in his prime-time infomercial, told Huffington that we are witnessing the "end of Rovian politics." That is probably one step too far.

This new media environment undermines political attacks that turn on coded meanings and hidden messages, because now anything can be exposed and cheaply disseminated. Observers used to worry that the web would fragment our media consumption into private little silos--that famous "Daily Me." Yet in presidential politics, an inverse dynamic is emerging. Small groups of people are using the web to expose the targeted appeals of the analog world, and then injecting them into the mass media for the whole nation to assess. And many voters do not like what they see.

Like any other transparency measure, however, this process only enhances the potential for accountability. It does not automatically halt any conduct. It does not ensure, as Schmidt may imagine, that "Rovian" attacks are now futile--or that voters will always recoil from them. Instead, it simply means that candidates will increasingly have to answer for their code words and targeted appeals. Operatives will worry more about how a "secret" smear will play when it is exposed, since it probably will be. Attacks that turn off large swaths of the electorate, like smearing a candidate's family, will keep fading. "Rovian" ploys that hammer more vulnerable targets, however, will not be cut down by exposure alone. (Consider how the GOP has excelled by open gay-bashing, including Rove's own gay marriage strategy in 2004, with no code words needed.) So more transparency is a welcome development, but as Obama can tell you, real "change" only comes from the

2008-10-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

Call Him John the Careless

2008-10-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

By George F. Will
Thursday, October 30, 2008; A23

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday's probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign's closing days.

Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain's saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?

She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes. But does she know that when Lyndon Johnson, transformed by the 1960 election from Senate majority leader into vice president, ventured to the Capitol to attend the Democratic senators' weekly policy luncheon, the new majority leader, Montana's Mike Mansfield, supported by his caucus, barred him because his presence would be a derogation of the Senate's autonomy?

Perhaps Palin's confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration's constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans' Tuesday luncheons. He has said jocularly that he is "a product" of the Senate, which pays his salary, and that he has no "official duties" in the executive branch. His situational constitutionalism has, however, led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch and, when seeking to shield certain of his deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say that he is a member of the executive branch.

Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain's question for his briefer was: "So, who is the villain?"

McCain revived a familiar villain -- "huge amounts" of political money -- when Barack Obama announced that he had received contributions of $150 million in September. "The dam is broken," said McCain, whose constitutional carelessness involves wanting to multiply impediments to people who want to participate in politics by contributing to candidates -- people such as the 632,000 first-time givers to Obama in September.

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.

One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever. The public has always disliked it: Voluntary and cost-free participation, using the check-off on the income tax form, peaked at 28.7 percent in 1980 and has sagged to 9.2 percent. The Post, which is melancholy about the system's parlous condition, says there were three reasons for creating public financing: to free candidates from the demands of fundraising, to level the playing field and "to limit the amount of money pouring into presidential campaigns." The first reason is decreasingly persuasive because fundraising is increasingly easy because of new technologies such as the Internet. The second reason is, the Supreme Court says, constitutionally impermissible. Government may not mandate equality of resources among political competitors who earn different levels of voluntary support. As for the third reason -- "huge amounts" (McCain) of money "pouring into" (The Post) presidential politics -- well:

The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that, by Election Day, $2.4 billion will have been spent on presidential campaigns in the two-year election cycle that began in January 2007, and an additional $2.9 billion will have been spent on 435 House and 35 Senate contests. This $5.3 billion is a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips.

georgewill@washpost.com

American Stories

2008-10-30T08:41:00.001-07:00

By ROGER COHEN

Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:

“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.

Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.

Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.

Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.

Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.

It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.

Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.

But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.

American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.

So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.

It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.

It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.

It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”

It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.

Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.

What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.

I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.

And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.

But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.

Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”

Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”

Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.

Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.

2008-10-30T07:39:00.001-07:00

2008-10-29T17:54:00.001-07:00

2008-10-29T16:43:00.001-07:00

2008-10-29T11:26:00.001-07:00

Look at this!!!!

2008-10-29T11:06:00.001-07:00

WaPo-ABC Track: Early Birds for Obama

2008-10-29T11:03:00.001-07:00

More than twelve million voters have already cast ballots in the presidential contest, according to one estimate, and new data from the Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll shows these voters breaking Democratic by a wide margin.

Among those who said they have already voted at an early voting location or sent in an absentee ballot, Barack Obama picked up 60 percent of the vote in the new poll to John McCain's 39 percent.

These voters make up 9 percent of "likely" voters in the track.

The senator from Illinois has a similar lead, 58 to 39 percent, among those who plan to vote early but have not yet.
(Those who plan to vote on Election Day also go for Obama, but by a narrower, 51 to 45 percent.)

These early voting numbers are a near mirror-image of those from the last two elections: A paper using the National Annenberg Election Study reports that George W. Bush scored 62 percent of early voters in 2000 and 60 percent of them in 2004.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/behind-the-numbers/2008/10/wapo-abc_track_early_birds_for.html

2008-10-29T10:39:00.001-07:00

2008-10-28T19:59:00.001-07:00

2008-10-28T07:11:00.001-07:00

Alex really needs to get a job

2008-10-28T07:08:00.001-07:00

Why McCain Lost Me

2008-10-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

By Anne Applebaum

Yesterday, while reading the latest polling data on John McCain, Sarah Palin and their appeal -- or growing lack of it -- to " independent women voters" it suddenly dawned on me: I am one of these elusive independent female voters, and I have the credentials to prove it. For the past couple of decades, I've sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes Republican. I'm even a registered independent, though I did think of switching to vote for John McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt comfortable with was Thatcher's Conservative Party (I lived in England in the 1980s and 1990s), I didn't actually do it.

The larger point, though, is that if I'm not voting for McCain -- and, after a long struggle, I've realized that I can't -- maybe it's worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it's not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It's his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.

I should say here that I know McCain, slightly: He spoke at a party given for a book I wrote a few years ago, though I think that was as much about the subject (communist prison camps) as the author. But it's not his personality I admire most. Far more important is his knowledge of foreign affairs, an understanding that goes well beyond an ability to name the Pakistani president. McCain knows not only the names, he knows the people; and by this I mean not just foreign presidents but foreign members of parliament, foreign journalists, foreign generals. He goes to Germany every year, visits Vietnam often. He can talk intelligently about Belarus and Uzbekistan; I've heard him do it. Let's just say that's one of the things that distinguish him from our current president, who once confessed that "this foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating."

Another thing I liked about McCain was the deliberate distance he always kept from the nuttier wing of his party and, simultaneously, the loyalty he's shown to a recognizably conservative budgetary philosophy. Fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets, sober spending -- all of these principles have been brushed away as so much nonsense for the past eight years by Republicans more interested in grandstanding about how much they hate Washington. McCain was one of the few who kept talking about them. He was also one of a shockingly few to understand that there is nothing American, let alone conservative, about torture, and that a battle for civilized values could not be won by uncivilized means.

Finally, I admired McCain's willingness to tackle politically risky issues such as immigration, the debate about which has long been drenched in hypocrisy. Those who want to ban it are illogically denying both the role that immigrants, especially the millions of illegal immigrants, already play in the U.S. economy as well as the improbability of forced deportations; those who want to allow it without restriction don't acknowledge the security risks. McCain tried to put together a bipartisan coalition in an effort to find a rational solution. He failed -- blocked by the ideologues in his party.

If these traits appealed to me, they probably would have appealed to other independents, too. Why, then, has McCain spent the past four months running away from them? The appointment of Palin -- inspired by his closest colleagues -- turned out not to be a "maverick" move but, rather, a concession to those Republicans who think foreign policy can be conducted using a series of cliches and those in his party who shout down the federal government while quietly raking in federal subsidies. Although McCain has one of the best records for bipartisanship in the Senate, he's let his campaign appeal to his party's extremes. Though he is a true foreign policy intellectual, his supporters cultivate ignorance and fear: Watch Sean Hannity's " Barack Obama and Friends: A History of Radicalism" on YouTube if you don't believe me. Worse, McCain has -- in a fatal effort to appeal to the least thoughtful, most partisan elements of his base -- moved away from his previous positions on torture and immigration. Maybe that's all tactics, and maybe the "real" McCain will ditch the awful ideologues after Nov. 4, if by some miracle he happens to win. But how can I know that will happen?

Here's what I do know: I would give anything to rewrite history and make McCain president in 2000. But in 2008, I don't think I can vote for him. Barack Obama is indeed the least experienced, least tested candidate in modern presidential history. But at least if he wins, I can be sure that the mobs who cry "terrorist" at the sound of Obama's name will be kept far, far away from the White House.

2008-10-27T16:07:00.001-07:00

Can Democrats Get to 60 in the Senate? A Firm Maybe

2008-10-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

It is possible for Democrats to gain the seats needed to reach a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate in 2008, but it will take running the table in a number of undecided elections.

Running the table means that almost every close election must be won by the Democratic candidate. This is a difficult, but not impossible, task. Indeed, Democrats grabbed control of the Senate in 2006 by doing just that:

►Democrat Jim Webb won the Virginia seat held by Sen. George Allen (R) by fewer than 10,000 votes.

►Jon Tester (D) knocked off Sen. Conrad Burns (R) in Montana by about 3,000 votes.

►In Missouri, Claire McCaskill (D) upset Sen. Jim Talent (R) 50% - 47%.

► Rhode Island’s popular Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R) was ousted by the anti-GOP tide and Sheldon Whitehouse (D).

Presently, Democrats cling to a 51 – 49 majority in the Senate, with one of those 51 the independent-tilting-Republican Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. The Lieberman seat is an important one to factor in any calculation about the balance of power in the Senate.

Unlike in the House of Representatives, it generally takes 60 votes in the Senate – more than a simple majority – to win approval of controversial legislation.

Can Democrats grab 60 votes in 2008? Most certainly, but don’t bet the mortgage on it no matter how much housing prices have sunk in the current market.

As they say in sports broadcasts, let’s go to the scoreboard.

51 The number of seats presently held by Democrats, including two independents, Lieberman and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. There is no Democratic seat seriously in jeopardy, although Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) – currently polling ahead -- always has a tough contest.

+1 Virginia: This race was over when former Governor Mark Warner (D) entered the contest and Rep. Tom Davis (R) decided he could not win the Republican nomination. Virginians will trade one Warner for another when Mark Warner takes the retiring John Warner’s (R) seat.

+1 New Mexico: Democrats picked the perfect candidate for retiring Sen. Pete Domenici's (R) seat in Rep. Tom Udall while Republicans chose conservative Rep. Steve Pearce (R) in a primary over a more moderate candidate who would have put up a better fight.

+1 Colorado: Tom Udall’s cousin Rep. Mark Udall (D) has enjoyed a modest but constant lead over ex-Rep. Bob Schaffer (R) and should capture the seat of the retiring Sen. Wayne Allard (R).

+1 Oregon: One Udall cousin (yes, Smith is related to both Udalls running for Senate) is probably not returning to the Senate as Jeff Merkley (D) has opened up a small but consistent lead over incumbent Sen. Gordon Smith (R). The Democratic tide is probably too strong for Smith, who has tried to grab the coattails of Barack Obama, Ron Wyden, Ted Kennedy and other Democrats.

+1 New Hampshire: In a rematch of the 2002 contest, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D) has held a steady if not huge lead over Sen. John Sununu (R) and should continue the Democratic takeover in a once rock-ribbed GOP state.

+1 North Carolina: Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) has been trailing her Democratic opponent state Sen. Kay Hagan for a while and is likely to go down to defeat.

57 The new total if Democratic candidates pick up all six of these seats.

5 toss-ups or leaning R

?+1 Minnesota: Al Franken (D) has overcome a number of hurdles to claim a narrow front-runner status over Sen. Norm Coleman (R), but the contest is too close to call and is complicated by independent Dean Barkley who is capturing 15% - 20% in the polls.

?+1 Alaska: The jury is still out on this contest – literally – as a Washington, DC jury considers the fate of Sen. Ted Stevens (R). Stevens has been running neck-and-neck with Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D), and the election result is likely to be decided by whether jurors decide that a chair domiciled in Stevens’s house for seven years is a gift or a loan.

?+1 Mississippi: Appointed Sen. Roger Wicker (R) has held a huge fundraising lead over former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove (D), but the Democrat has kept it close.

?+1 Georgia: Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) appeared to be cruising to an easy victory until ex-state Representative Jim Martin (D) suddenly caught up in the polls. Chambliss, who dumped former Sen. Max Cleland (D) in a dirty campaign in 2002 might just end up dumped himself in 2008.

?+1 Kentucky: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) finds himself in a close contest against Bruce Lunsford (D). While McConnell leads, an incumbent under 50% at this point is in serious trouble.

60 votes: Democrats must win 3 of the 5 contests – depending on what happens to Sen. Lieberman

?-1 Connecticut: Does Joe Lieberman jump or get pushed from the Democratic caucus?

Council for a Livable World

October 27, 2008

http://blog.livableworld.org/story/2008/10/27/143225/84

2008-10-27T11:48:00.001-07:00

America is showing Europe the way again

2008-10-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama's rise is an achievement that seems only possible in the US. This veteran foreign correspondent asks when other nations will dare to share the dream

Keith Richburg

My political awakening began in the summer of 1968, when I was 10. Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated after winning the California primary. My father, a union representative and Kennedy backer in Detroit, was upset. I didn't really understand much about presidential politics, but my education began.

'Can a black man ever become the President?' I remember asking, somewhat innocently. My father thought for a while and then replied: 'Not in my lifetime. But it will probably happen in your lifetime. You'll live to see it.'

My dad died last year. And every day this year, since I've watched in wonderment at the unlikely ascent of Barack Obama - as a candidate, as the Democratic party nominee and now within reach of the White House - I keep thinking back to that conversation 40 years ago and wishing my dad had lived just a little bit longer to see progress that he only dreamt was possible.

My father grew up in the segregated south, in Charleston, under Jim Crow laws that didn't allow blacks to vote. He left as a young man, primarily so his children would have more opportunities, all the opportunities that America had to offer. And despite the racism he saw and experienced, he never lost his faith in that American dream. 'You can be anything you want to be,' was his constant refrain to me.

I became a journalist, and a foreign correspondent, and spent nearly 20 years travelling the world, living in Asia, Africa and Europe, seeing things that my dad was never able to see. And over the years, I've only become more and more attached to that American ideal, even when America or, rather, her governments, didn't always seem to be living up to that ideal of herself.

After my stint in Africa in the mid-1990s, covering the genocide in Rwanda, the famine in Somalia and seeing corruption, poverty and lack of basic human rights, I came away feeling blessed that I was born a black man in America, with all the opportunities and hopes that implied. It was a view that elicited quite a backlash from some in the black American community who saw America as an imperfect and racist place.

Living in Asia on two separate tours, and travelling around south east Asia as a correspondent for nearly a decade, I was greeted warmly and made many close Asian friends. But I also saw how too often their attitudes to black Americans were shaped by stereotypes that I put down to ignorance, not overt racism, like when a close girlfriend, Hong Kong Chinese and British educated, asked me: 'Why don't you talk like other black Americans?' What she meant was that I didn't use the street slang she was used to seeing black characters speak in the movies.

Asians had limited exposure to black Americans; the most they saw in person were in the military and their frame of reference was either Hollywood, hip hop videos or the basketball court.

During a trip to Indonesia, at the height of the Democratic primaries, I wondered how different the perception would become if the face of America shown to the world - of the President - was a black man, Barack Obama.

But it was in Europe, where I lived for five years from 2000 to 2005, that I really came to appreciate that the ideal of opportunity for all was indeed something uniquely American.

Based in Paris, I had the brief to roam around the Continent and what struck me is how multiracial and multicultural Europe had become. And what I noticed soon after was how resistant European attitudes still were towards their black and brown residents.

Paris is a multicoloured city - black Africans, North Africans, Asians, Turks and others. But black and brown faces are largely invisible in the top ranks of business, media and politics. France has about six million North African Muslims from its former colonies and another 2.5 million sub-Saharan black Africans, although the numbers are disputed since the government's official policy of égalité dictates that even counting people by race would be discriminatory. But what's not in dispute are the visible facts; out of 577 members of the National Assembly, there are no black or brown faces other than those representing the overseas territories.

Germany is home to some three million Muslims, mostly from Turkey, but only a couple are in parliament. The Netherlands and Sweden are slightly more encouraging - Sweden has members of parliament who trace their origins to Egypt, Eritrea and Congo.

Britain has fared better in terms of raw numbers, starting in 1987 when the first non-white MPs, including Paul Boateng, were elected on the Labour party ticket following urban race riots that underscored the lack of black progress. But leaders of Operation Black Vote, a political mobilisation group, told me Parliament would not be truly representative until there were 50 to 60 minority members, representing Britain's 10 per cent minority population.

So it's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a Barack Obama emerging in Europe soon.

One reason is that Europeans for the most part do not talk about race and race relations as openly as we do. In America, we wallow in it. We self-analyse and form committees, workshops and seminars to talk about it. There are countless organisations and associations dedicated to racial issues. Bookshops stack shelves talking about our racial history and problems. We take measurements of pretty much everything, from black student school test scores to minority living standards.

France, to take one example, is on the other extreme. For a story on the state of minorities in France, I once asked for the statistics on how many blacks were on each political party list and it was like dragging a dead cat into the room and tossing it on the table. Race is simply not openly discussed.

What's more, many Europeans can't even bring themselves to call their minority residents what they are - citizens. They are still often referred to as 'immigrants' or 'outsiders', even if they were born in the country, speak no other language, know no other home.

A European Obama seems unlikely to emerge soon because of the parliamentary systems in place, in which a newcomer to politics has first to find his way on to a party list and work his or her way up through the ranks. In Obama's case, this newcomer leapfrogged far more experienced and better-known candidates - think Hillary Clinton - to take his case directly to voters in primary states.

A year ago, no one here would have predicted that a black candidate would become the nominee of a major party and have a more than realistic chance of winning the White House on 4 November. And it's a testament to Obama's considerable skill that he has largely managed to make his race an afterthought. America is on the verge of something historic and it almost seems anticlimactic.

But black Americans are still pinching themselves, still not quite able to believe what has been achieved. And all Americans should pause from the heated political rhetoric and reflect on the sense of accomplishment, win or lose, that his candidacy represents - an affirmation of that American ideal.

I think back to my father, who suffered terrible racism in the south, still believing for his son: 'You can be anything you want to be.' That means any little boy can even dream of being President. And that really is only in America.

· Keith Richburg is the New York bureau chief of the Washington Post.

The Age of Triumphalism is over

2008-10-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

I really like Bacevich... used him a lot in my honors thesis last year.

Americans are no longer in the mood to chase after distant evildoers.

By Andrew J. Bacevich

All but lost amid the hullabaloo of the presidential campaign, the State Department recently dropped North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Kim Jong Il pocketed a concession that even a year ago would have seemed unimaginable. The American people -- feeling more threatened by Wall Street than by Pyongyang -- managed barely a shrug.

Seldom has a historic turning point received such little notice. By cutting a deal with a charter member of the "axis of evil," President Bush has definitively abandoned the principles that he staked out in the wake of 9/11. The president who once defined America's purpose as "ending tyranny" is now accommodating the world's last authentically Stalinist regime. Although Bush still inhabits the White House, the Bush era has effectively ended.

Of greater significance, so too has the latest in a series of American psychodramas. In the last year or so, the nation's collective mind-set has shifted, and with that shift have come dramatic changes in the way we see ourselves and the world beyond our borders.

The American preference for packaging history as a sequence of great events directed by great men tends to overlook the role played by mass psychology and by the powerful impulses contained within what we commonly call public opinion. The reality is that when it comes to statecraft, policies devised in Washington frequently express not so much the carefully calculated intentions of the nation's leaders as the people's frame of mind.

President James Polk, for instance, came into office in 1845 determined to separate California from Mexico. Yet what enabled Polk to convert ambition into action was the concept of Manifest Destiny -- the popular conviction that it had become incumbent on Americans to spread freedom westward to the Pacific Ocean. Polk didn't invent Manifest Destiny and didn't really control it, but he shrewdly offered this deeply felt urge an outlet, thereby transforming what might otherwise have seemed a naked land-grab into a righteous crusade. The result was the immensely successful Mexican War.

Similarly, in 1898, through war with Spain, the United States acquired an empire, annexing Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. But it was popular fervor for liberating oppressed Cubans, not President William McKinley's hankering for colonies, that convinced millions of Americans that Spain's continued presence in the Caribbean was simply intolerable. Supplanting Spanish power with American power had become a moral imperative. All McKinley had to do was give his assent, neatly tapping into the prevailing zeitgeist to further his agenda.

The problem for policymakers is that the zeitgeist can change suddenly and without warning. President Woodrow Wilson discovered this shortly after World War I, when Americans who had enthusiastically enlisted in his campaign to "make the world safe for democracy" abruptly lost interest and yearned for a return to "normalcy." Accurately gauging the shift in the popular mood, the Senate voted in 1919 not to join the League of Nations in which Wilson had invested such hopes. The president was left high and dry.

George W. Bush has experienced a similar fate. His presidency began with the Age of American Triumphalism at its zenith. When Bush entered office in 2001, America's status as sole superpower was self-evident and seemingly irrefutable. As the indispensable nation, the United States presided over a unipolar order. The emery board of globalization was sanding away the world's rough edges and gradually remaking it in America's own image. Commentators vied to find the appropriate historical analogy. The consensus: America was the new Rome, only more so.

Bush's response to 9/11 reflected this widespread sense of assurance and entitlement. The Bush doctrine of preventive war, the president's impatient, with-us-or-against-us attitude, his disdain for international opinion and international law, his confidence that American military power, once unleashed, would quickly bring evildoers to justice or justice to evildoers -- and above all his conviction that the people of the Islamic world thirsted for freedom American-style -- all of these made explicit precepts that had been germinating during the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. Bush was merely expressing in a crude vernacular -- "Bring 'em on!" -- ideas and attitudes to which the majority of Americans already subscribed.

Today those ideas and attitudes have become the equivalent of an oversized SUV: They no longer sell. Not least among Bush's errors in judgment has been his failure to appreciate just how ephemeral the Age of Triumphalism would prove to be.

Having discovered that being the new Rome entails burdens as well as privileges, Americans have opted out. Although Bush's wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, Joe the Plumber's interest in liberating the greater Middle East or courting a showdown even with a figure as vile as Kim Jong Il is close to zero. Americans are no longer in the mood to chase after distant evildoers. They care about jobs, affordable energy, decent healthcare and restoring their 401(k) accounts. Fix what's broken abroad? No thanks; not until we've fixed what's broken at home. This defines the new normalcy.

The central theme of the presidential election is change, with both John McCain and Barack Obama promising to radically overhaul the way Washington works. In a real sense, however, change has already occurred. Even before the people have voted, they have spoken. The Age of Triumphalism has ended. The Age of Salvaging What's Left is upon us.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

The Thinking Problem

2008-10-27T07:10:00.000-07:00

By Robert Jung

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then -- just to loosen up.

Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confess, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, and her lower lip began to aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors. They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was Porky's, the week before, it was Animal House.

Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I made the final step. I registered to vote as a Republican.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#url=http%2525253A//www.electric-escape.net/node/1234

Go to www.yeswecarve.com

2008-10-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

Gallup Finds Obama at 74% of the Jewish Vote

2008-10-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Aaron Keyak — October 23, 2008

Today, the monthly averages of Gallup Poll Daily shows that Jewish voters “now favor Obama over John McCain by more than 3 to 1, 74% to 22%.”

“Though we will only know the final numbers on election night, the trend is clearly in Senator Barack Obama’s direction,” stated Ira N. Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC).

“More than any year in the past, Republican operatives have crowed about the increasing proportion of the Jewish vote going to Republicans this year. In fact, for every election since at least 1972 we’ve heard ‘sky is falling’ predictions concerning the Democratic proportion of the vote. However, it looks like this is going to be one more year when political pundits, some in the media, Jewish Republicans, and other partisans were wrong in their over the top forecasts,” said Forman. “We have to wait and see what Election Day exit polls bring, but for now Gallup is reporting, ‘[t]he Obama/Biden ticket is poised to perform about on par with other recent Democratic presidential tickets when it comes to support from American Jewish voters.’”

Palin

2008-10-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

Palin resisted the suggestion that if Ayers was a “domestic terrorist” — a standard line in her campaign addresses — then so were conservative religious activists who bombed abortion clinics.

“I don’t know if you’re going to use the word ‘terrorist’ there,” she said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27343688

SARAH PALIN WIG TOP SELLER IN JEWISH AREAS

2008-10-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

NYPost

October 23, 2008 --

Don't be surprised if you see a few Sarah Palin look-alikes in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Borough Park.

A wig wholesaler there says its Palin wig has become one of the company's most popular items.

Georgie Wigs Vice President Shlomo Klein said Thursday that the company has sold about 50 Palin wigs since the Alaska governor joined John McCain on the GOP ticket.

"It's a very conservative yet fashion-forward look," Klein said. "It can be worn down, it can be worn up. There are a lot of styling options. The bun higher, the bun lower."

Klein's company caters to Orthodox Jewish women who must cover their hair after marriage as well as women who need wigs for medical reasons.

He said he doesn't think it's odd that Jewish women would model themselves on Palin, a devout Christian from a frontier state with very few Jews.

"She's pro-Israel," he noted.

Klein said Georgie Wigs has carried Hillary Clinton and Jennifer Anniston wigs in the past. Its catalog currently includes a Posh Spice wig.

The all-human hair Palin wig sells for $695.

"We always try to stay up on the trends," Klein said, "and right now she is the trend."

LIFE OF REILLY: I needed to know: can Obama pick a fantasy team? So I asked him.

2008-10-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

by Rick Reilly

I have the absolute worst fantasy league football partner. Just try to get the guy to return a call. Or a text. You need a damn court order.

He's Barack Obama. And, yeah, I guess he's busy, but why was I the one who had to fly to Dayton, get frisked and have bomb dogs drool on my bags just so I could meet him getting off his tricked-out, chartered 757? He can't meet a guy halfway?

I asked each candidate to be my running mate for one week in a fantasy league, just to see what kind of president he'd make—how he'd handle decisions under pressure and balance a budget. (On ESPN.com's Gridiron Challenge, you get a mystical $50M to spend on a team.) Only Obama bit. We settled on the Week 6 games.

Still, you talk about bossy. I thought he'd let the professional sportswriter do most of the picking while the wonk occasionally looked up from some Pakistan brief and nodded. Yeah, not exactly. When I got on his campaign bus, all three flat screens were tuned to ESPN. Obama was sitting in a black leather swivel chair, reading the paper. "Hey, man, I'll be with you in a second," he said. "I'm poring over the latest economic news." It was the USA Today NFL stats page.

He is taller, grayer and quicker to laugh than I expected. Moves sort of like an athlete—cool and smooth. "Now, you're the expert," he began. "And I'll gladly be the junior partner in this, but I really think we should take Drew Brees. He could have a big week. Oakland's secondary is a wreck."

Ohhhh, so that's how it's going to be. "Well, I like Carson Palmer," I said. "He's due for a big week, plus he plays in Ohio and I figure that's a state you need, so …"

He looked at me like I'd stuck my elbow in his soup. "Man, this is more important than politics!" he insisted. "This is football!"

This is a man who could potentially audit me forever. We paid $7.3M for Brees.

He wanted Clinton Portis. I wanted Adrian Peterson. We took Portis ($6.6M). He wanted Brandon Marshall. I wanted Bernard Berrian. We took Marshall ($5.7M).

Doesn't work well with others. Check.

Have to admit, though, he knows his stuff. Turns out, he played a little. He was a tight end in ninth grade until a coach told him to "trample" an opponent's back. He gave up football for hoops. In 2004, when Mike Ditka considered running against him for Senate, Obama—remembering how Ditka let William Perry score a Super Bowl TD instead of Walter Payton—said that "anybody who would give the ball to Refrigerator Perry instead of Sweetness doesn't have very good judgment." Ditka didn't run. "Too bad," Obama says. "We were hoping he would."

Likes to bait Hall of Famers. Check.

It took us 30 minutes to pick nine slots. The man was into it. I said I'd need to talk to him the following week about how we did.

"Cool," he said. "How's Tuesday?"

"Sorry," I said. "Getting married Tuesday."

He looked stunned. "Who'd marry you?"

Wise guy. Check.

We wound up in a dark tunnel under Fifth Third Field in Dayton for a campaign event. He was telling me a story about throwing out a first pitch when suddenly I heard over the PA system, "… the next president of the United States, Barack Obama!" He looked at me, said "Gotta go!" and sprinted up some steps to a thunderclap of a roar.

Afterward, while signing books, he asked if I thought we'd win. "Win?" I said. "There's like a gazillion teams in this thing!"

He glared a hole in me. "You think we're just messing around?"

Then Sunday came. Man, did he get lucky. The guys he made us choose—Brees and Portis—went nuts. The guys I wanted, not so much. We finished 32,190th for the week. But wait! That put us in the 81.2 percentile, which means we beat four out of five teams!

Of course, he already knew. Because, like so many Americans, he was checking the fantasy stats all day, even while he was supposed to be prepping for his final debate. He e-mailed to say he wished he had followed my advice on Berrian (who smoked Marshall), but he was "pumped up" about our numbers. And he congratulated the newlyweds.

I e-mailed back and said that if he wins this election, the ambassadorship to Tahiti would make a nice wedding present.

Alex is bored... 2.0

2008-10-24T07:22:00.001-07:00

2008-10-24T07:21:00.001-07:00

No Sex Until After the Election

2008-10-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

By Nick Antosca
I am taking a vow of celibacy until the election of the next president, and I encourage you to do likewise. Don't have what reasonable people consider "sex"-- that is, I'm not just going by Bill Clinton's definition here -- before we know whether we've elected Obama or McCain to the White House. Reasons why:

Time-sensitivity. Your free time in the days between now and the election is better spent working on the campaign than on having sex with people or trying to convince them to have sex with you. I cannot completely disavow carnal thoughts, but I can pledge to be mostly doing useful things while such thoughts meander through my head. You can, too. For example, calling voters in battleground states (you can think about sex while doing this, but don't talk about it). Or canvassing. I'm going to Pennsylvania to help get out the vote. I'll be going door to door, I think, unless they give me something different to do. Because I actually care quite a lot about who gets elected this year, I'll be much more interested in doing a good job than in having sex with other campaign workers (or random Pennsylvanians).

Superstition. Before the Super Bowl, Tom Brady holed up with that supermodel, and look what happened. Gandhi was having sex right when his father died, and he always felt pretty rotten about that (and about sex in general). If Obama loses and you were having sex at the time (or in the days before, when you could have been calling swing voters), how will you feel?

Consolation. Indeed, if Obama loses, it will be an incredibly good time to tap into all that pent-up sexual energy. You'll be able to at least briefly obliterate your sense of devastation by throwing yourself into frenzied sexual congress until you collapse in a strange delirium of satiety and despair.

Catharsis. And what if Obama wins (as he well ought, at this point; but then again, Democrats are so good at losing)? Then you get to express your jubilation by having long-awaited celebratory sex with another, or several other, similarly elated individuals (console McCain voters at your discretion). What a pleasing and delightful election night scenario: progressives all across America happily, amorously entwined in triumph.

Regardless of the outcome, it's an additional reason to look forward to the evening of November 4th. If there's any sort of prolonged Supreme Court situation, however, I reserve the right to cancel my vow.

2008-10-23T11:40:00.001-07:00

2008-10-23T10:24:00.001-07:00

2008-10-23T10:23:00.001-07:00

Alex is bored

2008-10-23T10:22:00.001-07:00

Barry Goldwater's grandaughter: Why McCain has lost our vote

2008-10-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

By CC Goldwater

Being Barry Goldwater's granddaughter and living in Arizona, one would assume that I would be voting for our state's senator, John McCain. I am still struck by certain 'dyed in the wool' Republicans who are on the fence this election, as it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year. We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics. I learned a lot about my grandfather while producing the documentary, Mr. Conservative Goldwater on Goldwater. Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket.

My grandfather (Paka) would never suggest denying a woman's right to choose. My grandmother co-founded Planned Parenthood in Arizona in the 1930's, a cause my grandfather supported. I'm not sure about how he would feel about marriage rights based on same-sex orientation. I think he would feel that love and respect for ones privacy is what matters most and not the intolerance and poor judgment displayed by McCain over the years. Paka respected our civil liberties and passed on the message that that we should conduct our lives standing up for the basic freedoms we hold so dear.

For a while, there were several candidates who aligned themselves with the Goldwater version of Conservative thought. My grandfather had undying respect for the U.S. Constitution, and an understanding of its true meanings.

There always have been a glimmer of hope that someday, someone would "race through the gate" full steam in Goldwater style. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened, and the Republican brand has been tarnished in a shameless effort to gain votes and appeal to the lowest emotion, fear. Nothing about McCain, except for maybe a uniform, compares to the same ideology of what Goldwater stood for as a politician. The McCain/Palin plan is to appear diverse and inclusive, using women and minorities to push an agenda that makes us all financially vulnerable, fearful, and less safe.

When you see the candidate's in political ads, you can't help but be reminded of the 1964 presidential campaign of Johnson/Goldwater, the 'origin of spin', that twists the truth and obscures what really matters. Nothing about the Republican ticket offers the hope America needs to regain it's standing in the world, that's why we're going to support Barack Obama. I think that Obama has shown his ability and integrity.

After the last eight years, there's a lot of clean up do. Roll up your sleeves, Senators Obama and Biden, and we Goldwaters will roll ours up with you.

Palin: McCain Supports GOP Abortion, Stem Cell Platform Planks

2008-10-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

By Marc Ambinder

Dr. James Dobson today asked Gov. Sarah Palin about her private conversations with Sen. McCain about the Republican platform's planks on life and marriage.

"In your private conversations with Senator McCain is it your impression that he also strongly supports those views? I know that he did not oppose that platform when it was written. Do you think he will implement it?"

Good question. A lot of social conservatives worry about this.

Governor Palin responded: "I do, from the bottom of my heart. I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details too, about the different planks and what they represent."

The 2008 GOP platform is a bit more conservative than it was in 2004. If McCain is going to implement it - something of which Palin is convinced from the bottom of her heart - then that means that McCain will support a constitutional amendment to ban all abortion (including those cases where the mother was raped or was the victim of incest), a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he will oppose government-sponsored embryonic stem cell research.

Either Palin trying to mislead Dobson, equivocate, or perhaps he doesn't know what her running mate believes. McCain opposes a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.... He supports embryonic stem cell research...he opposes a constitutional amendment banning all abortion. Read the platform for yourself: On abortion... on gay marriage... on stem cells.. .

Maybe McCain changed his mind?

Read the transcript after the jump.

[DOBSON]: He's got some pretty powerful things to say and I do hope that the American people are listening to the concerns being expressed. I have to admit that early on, especially during the primaries I had a hard time deciding what direction I thought we ought to go. And there are concerns, have been concerns within the Republican party that really agitated me. But I am telling you the Republican platform is the strongest pro-life, pro-family document to come out of a political party. Even more so than the platforms during the campaigns of Ronald Reagan. There are principles there that just, I've been fighting for, for 30-40 years and you are trying to articulate those same principles aren't you?

[PALIN] Absolutely. And Dr. Dobson thank you so much for recognizing that. This is a strong platform. [inaudible] around the planks in this platform that respect life and respect the entrepreneurial spirit of this great country. And those things, back to the social issues that are what Republicans at least in the past had articulated and tried to stand on. Now finally we have very solid planks in the platform that will allow us to build an even stronger foundation for our country. It is all good and it is encouraging, you would maybe have assumed people would have, that we would have gotten further away from those strong planks. But no, they are there, they are solid, we stand on them and again I believe that it is the right agenda for the country at this time. Very, very clear and contrasted tickets in this election, November 4th. People are going to see the clear contrast, just go to the planks in our platform and that is where you see them.

[DOBSON] In your private conversations with Senator McCain is it your impression that he also strongly supports those views? I know that he did not oppose that platform when it was written. Do you think he will implement it?

[PALIN] I do, from the bottom of my heart. I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details too, about the different planks and what they represent. And I'm very heartened that John McCain, he doesn't want a vice-president who will check the opinions of me at the door and we talk about some of these. And they are very important. It's most important though, as you are suggesting that Americans know that John McCain is solidly there on those solid planks in our platform that build the right agenda for America.

2008-10-22T11:07:00.001-07:00

2008-10-22T10:53:00.001-07:00

McCain Is Cooked

2008-10-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

By Chris Suellentrop

Election Day is in two weeks. Or is the campaign already over? “At this point it would be difficult to see Republican losses in the Senate and House to be fewer than seven and 20 respectively,” Charlie Cook writes in his National Journal column. “A very challenging situation going into September turned into a meltdown last month, the most dire predictions for the G.O.P. early on became the most likely outcome. The metrics of this election argue strongly that this campaign is over, it’s only the memory of many an election that seemed over but wasn’t that is keeping us from closing the book mentally on this one.” Among Cook’s reasons:

First, no candidate behind this far in the national polls, this late in the campaign has come back to win. Sure, we have seen come-from-behind victories, but they didn’t come back this far this late.

Second, early voting has made comebacks harder and would tend to diminish the impact of the kind of late-breaking development that might save McCain’s candidacy. With as many as one-third of voters likely to cast their ballot before Election Day, every day more are cast and the campaign is effectively over for them. The longer Obama has this kind of lead and the more votes are cast early, the more voters are out of the pool for McCain.

Third, considering that 89 percent of all voters who identified themselves as Democrats voted for John Kerry four years ago and 93 percent of Republicans cast their ballots for George W. Bush, the switch from parity between the parties to a 10-point Democratic advantage would seem to almost seal this outcome irrespective of the candidates fielded on each side. The unprecedented surges seen in Democratic party registrations in those states that require party affiliations confirm that.

At the end of his column, Cook concludes, “As things are going now, this election would appear to be on a track to match Bill Clinton’s 1992 5.6 percent margin over President George H.W. Bush, the question is whether it gets to Bush’s 1988 7.7 percent win over Michael Dukakis or Clinton’s 8.5 percent win over Robert Dole in 1996. Maybe some cataclysmic event occurs in the next two weeks that changes the trajectory of this election, but to override these factors, it would have to be very, very big.”

2008-10-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

2008-10-21T14:41:00.005-07:00

2008-10-21T14:41:00.003-07:00

2008-10-21T14:41:00.001-07:00

Joe Klein was subsequently banned from the McCain plane for his criticism...

2008-10-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

By Joe Klein

John McCain had a fabulously loony weekend, flipping out charges and attacks like a mud tornado. The truly remarkable thing about McCain's attacks, especially on Obama's economic policies, is that McCain, in each case, is "guilty" of supporting some version of the policies he's attacking:

1. He attacks Obama for increasing "welfare" by providing refundable tax credits--that is giving people the cash equivalent if they don't pay enough in income taxes to reap the full benefit of the credit--but McCain's own $5000 health insurance credit is also refundable.

2. He attacks Obama for spreading "socialism," but McCain supported the bailout that enabled the Bush Administration to partially nationalize the banking system last week. If that ain't a (very mild) form of socialism, I don't know what is.

3. He attacks Obama's tax plan as a form of "spreading the wealth"--the words Obama used when talking to Joe the Unlicensed Tax Dodger in Ohio--because Obama would reduce taxes on the middle class and pay for it by restoring Clinton-era marginal tax rates on the wealthy. And yet, McCain proudly voted for a major tax hike and wealth redistribution scheme in his early days in his early days in Congress. In fact he touts it regularly, including on Fox News Sunday, as bipartisan cooperation at its finest:

Ronald Reagan's agenda was very different from that of Tip O'Neill's. Yet Ronald Reagan and Tip O'NEILL sat down together across the table and sat down and worked out a way to save Social Security for quite a period of time.

In fact, that was an enormous--and necessary--tax increase, but it tilted heavily against working Americans. Payroll taxes have been increased no fewer than seven times since Reagan was President and, so far as I know, never been cut--but large capital gains and marginal rate cuts, and all sorts of corporate loopholes, have been built into the tax system during that same period--a massive redistribution of wealth toward the wealthy.

Finally, McCain had this exchange about his campaign's skeevy robo-calls this weekend on Fox:

WALLACE: ... and you said the following [after the South Carolina primary campaign in 2000], "I promise you, I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."

Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo calls against you to — reportedly, to do the robo calls against Obama and the Republican Senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo calls. Will you do that?

MCCAIN: Of course not. These are legitimate and truthful, and they are far different than the phone calls that were made about my family and about certain aspects that — things that this is — this is dramatically different, and either you haven't — didn't see those things

Legitimate and truthful? I supposed that's why Susan Collins, one of McCain's closest friends in the Senate, criticized him for this trashball tactic. Oh, and the "same guy" Wallace was referring to is none other than Warren Tompkins, whose name was a synonym for satan among the McCain inner circle in 2000. I can imagine John breaking the news to Cindy, "Hey, honey, great news! Remember that guy who was involved in spreading the rumors about your addiction to pain killers and Bridget being an illegitimate interracial child? Well, we've got him doing that same sort of high-minded stuff for us!"

Obama Is the Way Forward for Women

2008-10-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

Abortion rights and equal pay are at stake in the election.

By CATHARINE A. MACKINNON

Women are at a crossroads in our struggle for legal equality as a means to social equality. Having women in politics matters, but it is crucial to have the policies women need. At this moment we risk losing ground gained, but we also have the opportunity to advance. At stake in this presidential election are the federal courts.

Despite inroads, women's status remains characterized by sex-based poverty and impunity for sexual abuse from childhood on. The next president will appoint scores of lower court federal judges who will have the last word in most cases. One, perhaps three, justices may be named to a Supreme Court that in recent years has decided many cases of importance to women by just one vote. Equality can be promoted in employment, education, reproductive rights and in ending violence against women -- or not.

The equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution is stalled. The fate of affirmative-action programs that have helped open doors for qualified women of all races may be vulnerable. The scope of Congress's power to legislate -- key to what a majority of Congress can accomplish for all our people -- has become uncertain.

Existing laws essential for women's economic survival have often been regressively interpreted. Women on average remain poorer than men, largely because of unequal pay. Recently, the Supreme Court held in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc. that plaintiffs must sue as of the first unequal paycheck, when they might not even know that their pay is unequal. Barack Obama supports restoring the rule, followed for decades, that allows suit for all the wage discrimination as of the last discriminatory paycheck. John McCain opposed this in the Senate.

In addition, for reasons largely not of their own making, most women work in job categories that are paid less than men, yet are equally productive. Courts have not interpreted existing laws to guarantee equal pay for work of equal value. Comparable worth -- paying women what their work is actually worth -- would wipe out more of the pay gap, and hence women's poverty, than any single economic step.

Cases under Title IX of the education amendments of 1972 have guaranteed equal access to education for women and girls. But full realization of these rights remains before the courts, as does recognizing combined discrimination (such as race and sex together), and the myriad rights lesbian women need. Gender bias in the legal system restricts women's access to justice, making expanding legal aid and victim services as crucial an issue for women as any that exists. Gender justice calls for far more than the conventional equality approach that treats likes alike.

Should a federal Equal Rights Amendment be enacted, and the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDW) be ratified, as the Democratic platform calls for, these egalitarian laws -- potentially addressing women's issues ranging across pay, divorce, rape, sex trafficking, stereotyping and health care -- would be interpreted in court.

If Congress and the states grant women explicit constitutional equality and an end to discrimination -- far more likely under Mr. Obama's leadership than Mr. McCain's -- federal judges will hold in their hands women's hopes for equality for generations to come.

Since 1980, when the Supreme Court permitted exclusion of medically necessary abortions from Medicaid coverage, poor women (disproportionately women of color) have not had effective access to abortion because they cannot afford it. This was when many women lost the right to choose.

Last year, a slim majority upheld a federal abortion ban on a specific procedure that had no exception for protecting a woman's health, ominously eroding the rights of even financially privileged women. Should the abortion ban on the ballot in South Dakota prevail this fall, its challenge in court would place any federal decriminalization of abortion in jeopardy. Of all issues that affect women as women in this election, who sits on the Supreme Court may determine this one, along with the fate of a new possible civil remedy for violence against women.

Positions on women's rights do not divide neatly along conventional political lines, nor is abortion their sole template. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor demonstrated, conservatives can oppose sexism they see in operation, including forms of violence against women that some liberals do not see as such. Reaching across ideology can win legal arguments, but who judges those arguments, at this moment in time, could make or break women's equality in law, hence in life, for generations. An Obama presidency could restore that balance in fairness that ideological appointments by past administrations have upset, and that Mr. McCain has committed to continue.

Neither presidential candidate has taken a position on all of these issues. But the decision, in Mr. Obama's words, on "what kind of America our daughters will grow up in" could not be more urgent. At stake is nothing less than whether women will be, finally, equal.

Ms. MacKinnon is professor of law at the University of Michigan.

2008-10-20T21:19:00.001-07:00

2008-10-20T21:17:00.001-07:00

My theory is true...

2008-10-20T13:01:00.001-07:00

If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in Delta Airlines one year ago, you
will have $49.00 today. If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in AIG one
year ago, you will have $33.00 today. If you had purchased $1,000 of shares
in Lehman Brothers one year ago, you will have $0.00 today. But, if you had
purchased $1,000 worth of beer one yea r ago, drank all the beer, then
turned in the aluminum cans for recycling refund, you will have received
$214.00. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink
heavily & recycle. It is called the 401-Keg. A recent study found that the
average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study found that
Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year. That means that,
on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon! Makes you proud to
be an American!

2008-10-20T10:52:00.001-07:00

The Case for Barack Obama

2008-10-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

Obama is pushing to change the parameters of the country's comfort zone. That's leadership.

Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 27, 2008
It has become fashionable to lament the state of presidential politics and decry the tenor of campaigns. But in fact, this election has been a pleasant surprise. In the last debate, as the candidates discussed their respective health-care plans in some detail, the danger was that the Ameri-can people would be turned off not by negativity but by boredom.

Compare this election to the one in 1988—when the Pledge of Allegiance, Willie Horton, flag factories and Belgian endives dominated the campaign. Or contrast the relatively brief appearance of William Ayers with the barrage of Swift-Boat attacks on John Kerry. Some of this is because the American people have clearly tired of slash-and-burn campaigns. But much of it is because the two candidates are men of decency and honor.

John McCain is brave, and this courage has manifested itself not simply in the prisons of Vietnam. Over the past two decades he has broken with his party and president on global warming, campaign finance, government spending and the use of torture. He has chosen, for the most part, to forgo the racial coding that the Republican Party had used for decades in its campaigns. But despite these tremendous strengths, as a candidate for president in 2008, he is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.

To watch McCain address the current economic crisis is to see a man out of step with his time. His responses have been a recitation of old slogans—cut taxes, limit the government, cut spending—that are largely irrelevant to today's problems. Does anyone really believe that tackling earmarks will get credit markets functioning? In some ways, McCain's intellectual fatigue reflects the exhaustion of the ideological revolution begun by Reagan and Thatcher. The country needs fresh thinking that is ready to accept new facts and new ideas. It's a new world out there.

On foreign policy, John McCain is a fighter. In fact, his bellicosity has increased over the past few years as he has discovered his inner neoconservative. He wants to keep the battle going in Iraq, speaks casually of bombing Iran and is skeptical of the Bush administration's diplomacy with North Korea. He wants to kick Russia out of the G8 and humiliate China by excluding it from that body as well. He sees a "league of democracies" locked in conflict with an alliance of autocracies. This is cold-war nostalgia, not a strategy for the 21st century.

McCain's problem is not only one of substance but perhaps more crucially of temperament. Throughout the campaign, he has been volatile and impulsive. He moves suddenly and unpredictably—one day suspending his campaign, the next urging that the chairman of the SEC be fired, the third blaming Democrats for the economic crisis. He apparently wanted to name as his vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, a pro-choice semi-Democrat with decades of experience, but then instead picked someone close to the opposite—Sarah Palin, a rabble-rousing ultraconservative with limited experience and knowledge of the issues.

By contrast, Barack Obama has been steady and reasoned throughout his campaign. After careful deliberation, he endorsed the administration's decision to intervene in the financial industry but with caveats—not to score campaign points but to make the program work better. These modifications were adopted by the administration and employed last week by Secretary Paulson.

Obama's broader economic agenda—health-care reform, infrastructure investments and a major push for alternative energy—are large solutions to the growing problems of our times. They are not radical, but neither are they overly constrained by the fear of seeming liberal. Bill and Hillary Clinton were always careful not to stray too far from the country's comfort zone. Obama is pushing to change the parameters of that zone. That's leadership.

On foreign policy, Obama is cool to McCain's hot, discriminating about the fights he wants to pick. He argues for greater international cooperation and the aggressive use of diplomacy. He sees a world in which America doesn't have to get adversarial with everyone and tries instead to work with other countries—of whatever hue—to solve the common problems we face.

Let's be honest: neither candidate has past experience that is relevant to being president, except that they have now both run large, multiyear, multimillion-dollar, 50-state campaigns. By common consent, McCain's has been chaotic and ineffective, while Obama has run a superb operation, and done so with little of the drama and discord that usually plague political machines.

This is the case for Obama on substance, which is the most important criterion. But symbolism is also a powerful force in human affairs. Imagine what people around the world would think if they saw America once again inventing the future. And imagine how Americans would feel if they saw their country once again fulfilling its founding creed of equal opportunity, if they saw that there really were no barriers in their country, not even to the highest office in the land, not even for a man with a brown face and a strange name.

I admit to a personal interest. I have a 9-year-old son named Omar. I firmly believe that he will be able to do absolutely anything he wants in this country when he grows up. But I admit that I will feel more confident about his future if a man named Barack Obama became president of the United States.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/164498

It's monday...

2008-10-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

2008-10-19T21:07:00.001-07:00

He Just Can’t Quit W

2008-10-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

By FRANK RICH
OLD Mr. Straight Talk has become so shaky a speaker that when he does talk straight, it’s startling. On Wednesday night, John McCain mustered exactly one such moment of clarity: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Thanks largely to this line, McCain’s remaining base in the political press graded his last debate performance his best. The public, not so much. As with the previous debates, every poll found Barack Obama the winner, this time by as much as two-to-one ratios. Obama even swept the focus group convened by the G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz in the once-impregnable McCain bunker of Fox News.

Perhaps voters were unimpressed by McCain’s big moment because they can figure out the obvious rejoinder: Why didn’t McCain run against President Bush four years ago — as he had four years before that? Instead McCain campaigned for Bush’s re-election, cheered for Bush policies he once opposed and helped lower himself and America into the pit where we find ourselves today.

The day after the debate, McCain put up a new ad trying yet again to shake the president. “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?” he asks, as if he were an innocent bystander the entire time. But no matter what McCain says or does, he still can’t quit the guy. Heading from a Midtown hotel to a fund-raiser the night before facing Obama onstage on Long Island last week, the McCain motorcade lined up right next to the New York red-carpet premiere of Oliver Stone’s “W.” A black cat would have been a better omen.

The election isn’t over, but there remain only three discernible, if highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov. 4. Or newly registered young and black voters could fail to show up. Or McCain could at long last make good on his most persistent promise: follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands on “Hannity & Colmes.”

Even Republicans are rapidly bailing on a McCain resuscitation. It’s a metaphor for the party’s collapse that on the day of the final debate both Nancy Reagan and Dick Cheney checked into hospitals. Conservatives have already moved past denial to anger on the Kubler-Ross scale of grief. They are not waiting for votes to be counted before carrying out their first round of Stalinist purges. William F. Buckley’s son Christopher was banished from National Review for endorsing Obama. Next thing you know, there will be a fatwa on that McCain-bashing lefty, George Will.

As the G.O.P.’s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already setting in among the right’s storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the “headwinds” of the economy. No Republican can win if the party’s incumbent president is less popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is Issue No. 1.

This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.

Bush’s impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to be so devastating. McCain isn’t, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos — if not the incredible shrinking man himself — more tightly than ever. The candidate who believes in “country first” decided to put himself first and sell out his principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain campaign’s failures and its sleaze. It’s a decision McCain made on his own and for which he has yet to assume responsibility.

Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his face.

The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove, is larger than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.

Like McCain now, Bush campaigned in 2000 as a practical problem-solver who could “work across the partisan divide,” as he put it in his first debate with Al Gore. He had no strong views on any domestic or foreign issue, except taxes and education. Only after he entered the White House did we learn his sole passion: getting and keeping power. That imperative, not the country, would always come first.

One journalist who detected this modus operandi early was Ron Suskind, who, writing for Esquire in January 2003, induced John DiIulio, the disillusioned chief of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to tell all. “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” DiIulio said. “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

If politics strongarm everything, you end up with the rampant cronyism, nonexistent long-term planning and abrupt, partisan policy improvisations that fed the calamities of Iraq, Katrina and the economic meltdown. Incredibly, McCain has nakedly endorsed the Bush-Rove brand of governance in his own campaign by assembling his personal set of lobbyist cronies and Rove operatives to run it. They have not only entangled him in a welter of conflicts of interest, but they’ve furthered cynical political stunts like the elevation of Sarah Palin. At least Bush and Rove didn’t try to put an unqualified hack like, say, Alberto Gonzales half a heartbeat away from the presidency.

As if the Palin pick weren’t damning enough, McCain and his team responded to the financial panic by offering their own panicky simulation of the Bush style of crisis management in real time. Fire the S.E.C. chairman and replace him with Andrew Cuomo! Convene a 9/11 commission to save Wall Street! Don’t bail out A.I.G.! Do bail out A.I.G.! Reacting to polls and the short-term dictates of 24-hour news cycles, McCain offered as many economic-policy reboots in a month as Bush offered “Plans for Victory” during the first three years of the Iraq war.

Now McCain is trying to distract us from his humiliating managerial ineptitude by cranking up the politics of fear — another trademark Bush-Rove strategy. But the McCain camp’s quixotic effort to turn an “old washed-up terrorist” into a wedge issue as divisive as same-sex marriage is too little, too late and too tone-deaf at a time when Americans are suffering too much to indulge in 1960s culture wars. Voters want policies that might actually work rather than another pandering, cynical leader who operates mainly on the basis of his “gut” and political self-interest.

The former Bush speechwriter David Frum has facetiously written that McCain could be rescued by “a 5,000-point rise in the Dow and a 20 percent jump in home prices.” But the economy, stupid, can’t be blamed for McCain’s own failures, any more than Bush can be. Even before the housing bubble burst and Wall Street tumbled, voters could see that the seething, impulsive nominee isn’t temperamentally fit to be president.

That’s where the debates have come in. There may have been none of those knockout blows the press craves, but the accretional effect has been to teach the public that McCain isn’t steady enough to run the country even if the economy were sound, and that Obama just might be.

In Debate No. 1, you could put the volume on mute and see what has proved to be the lasting impressions of both candidates start to firm up. In Debate No. 2, McCain set the concrete: he re-enacted the troubling psychological cartography of his campaign “suspension” by wandering around the stage like a half-dotty uncle vainly trying to flee his caregiver. After the sneering and eye-rolling of McCain’s “best” debate on Wednesday, CNN’s poll found the ever-serene Obama swamping him on “likeability,” 70 to 22 percent.

At least McCain had half a point on Wednesday night when he said, “I am not President Bush.” What he has offered his country this year is an older, crankier, more unsteady version of Bush. Tragically, he can no sooner escape our despised president than he can escape himself.

Colin Powell endore Obama

2008-10-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced Sunday that he will be voting for Sen. Barack Obama, citing the Democrat's "ability to inspire" and the "inclusive nature of his campaign."

"I think he is a transformational figure, he is a new generation coming onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Sen. Barack Obama," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Powell said he was concerned about what he characterized as a recent negative turn of Republican candidate Sen. John McCain's campaign, such as the campaign's attempts to tie Obama to former 1960s radical Bill Ayers.

"I think that's inappropriate. I understand what politics is about -- I know how you can go after one another, and that's good. But I think this goes too far, and I think it has made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. It's not what the American people are looking for," he said.

Powell, a retired U.S. general and a Republican, was once seen as a possible presidential candidate himself.

Powell said he has some concerns about the direction of the Republican Party, adding that it has "moved more to the right than I would like to see it."

In regard to the financial crisis, which Powell called the candidates' "final exam," Powell said McCain appeared unsteady in dealing with it, while Obama had excelled in handling the situation.

"Obama displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge," Powell said.

"He has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president," he said.

During the campaign, Powell has met with both candidates and said he has a lot of respect for McCain. He said Sunday that he thinks both candidates are qualified to be president.

"It isn't easy for me to disappoint Sen. McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that," Powell said.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, McCain said he respects and admires Powell, and the announcement "doesn't come as a surprise."

"I'm also very pleased to have the endorsement of four former secretaries of state -- Secretaries [Henry] Kissinger, [James] Baker, [Lawrence] Eagleburger, and [Alexander] Haig -- and I'm proud to have the endorsement of well over 200 retired Army generals and admirals," McCain said.

Powell served as Secretary of State under President Bush from 2001 to 2005.

The possibility of a Powell endorsement has been rumored for several months.

On August 13, Powell's office denied a report on Fox News by commentator Bill Kristol that Powell had decided to publicly back Obama at the Democratic National Convention.

Powell himself brushed off queries on any potential presidential nod but told ABC News in August that he would not be going to Denver, Colorado, for the convention.

Back in February, Powell told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he was weighing an endorsement of a Democratic or independent candidate.

Powell has offered praise for Obama, calling him an "exciting person on the political stage."

"He has energized a lot of people in America," said Powell. "He has energized a lot of people around the world. And so I think he is worth listening to and seeing what he stands for."

The former general, who has largely steered clear of politics since leaving the Bush administration, noted that the next president will need to work to restore America's standing in the world.

Powell gave the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in support of George W. Bush in 2000.

Powell said Sunday that he has no plans to campaign for Obama.

Poll: Obama ahead in critical counties

2008-10-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

By: Alexander Burns

Sen. Barack Obama holds leads in four key counties that will go a long way toward determining the eventual winner in four important swing states — Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — according to a new Politico/Insider Advantage survey.

Obama is poised to expand on recent Democratic gains in three populous suburban counties — Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, Missouri’s St. Louis County and Virginia’s Prince William County. In a fourth, Ohio’s Franklin County, home to Columbus and its suburbs, the survey also found Obama with the lead.

In Bucks County, a politically competitive but historically Republican suburb that shares a border with Philadelphia, Obama is running ahead of McCain, 47-41 percent. In 2004, Democrat John F. Kerry carried the county by a slim 51percent to 48 percent.

Obama bests McCain 50 percent to 42 percent in Prince William County, a Washington, D.C. suburb that voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004. Between 1976 and 2004, Prince William County supported Republican presidential candidates by an average margin of 18 points.

Obama also has opened up a wide 53 percent to 37 percent advantage over McCain in suburban St. Louis County, which does not include Missouri’s second-largest city, St. Louis. In 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, carried St. Louis County, the most populous county in the state, 54 percent to 45 percent.

In Ohio’s Franklin County, the state’s second-most populous county after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, Obama leads by a narrower 45 percent to 40 percent margin. Kerry carried Franklin County 54 percent to 45 percent in 2004.

InsiderAdvantage pollster Matt Towery explained Obama’s success in these areas is a result of his strength among independents and voters between the ages of 30 and 44.

“That is the most angry group of voters that we have this year, with regard to the Republicans,” Towery said. “I see that in almost every poll I look at.”

In Prince William County, Obama leads in this age group, 58 percent to 33 percent, and takes independent voters by an even wider, 55=percent-to-25-percent margin. McCain is scheduled to appear in Prince William Saturday, a nod to his vulnerability there and also to the electoral importance of that traditionally Republican area.

Obama’s advantages in Prince William County hold up in competitive locales across the country, with independents consistently picking him over McCain.

“The big swing, again, is that Obama’s picking up the lion’s share of the independents,” Towery added.

Independents in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County support Obama, 46 percent to 32 percent, and 30-to-44-year-olds pick him by a 10-point margin, 49 percent to 37 percent.

In central Ohio’s Franklin County, he takes 30-to-44-year-olds by a smaller, but still decisive 49 percent to 34 percent gap, and wins independents, 43 percent to 19 percent.

Missouri’s St. Louis County, where Obama is safely ahead of McCain, features Obama’s narrowest lead among 30-to-44-year-olds: he’s ahead there by 49 percent to 40 percent. Independents are breaking for Obama by a more convincing, 47-percent-to-31-percent margin.

During the Democratic primary, Obama won just a handful of counties in Missouri, but by running up big margins in the city and county of St. Louis, he was able to pull out a narrow statewide victory over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Kerry’s 9-point margin in St. Louis County and his landslide 80 percent win in the city of St. Louis were not enough to overcome George W. Bush’s lead elsewhere in the state. But if Obama can maintain his commanding advantage there, it could help tip the state into the Democratic electoral column.

Currently, Towery said, McCain is headed for a major defeat in the area.

“In this county, he’s not even doing well with the 65-and-over crowd,” he said. “This is a wipeout.”

Unlike in St. Louis County, Obama did not perform well in Bucks County in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary. Though the Philadelphia suburb was seen as favorable terrain for the Illinois senator, Clinton handily defeated him there, 63 percent to 37 percent.

Obama’s lead in Bucks County is within the poll’s margin of error and he is not performing as well among women as he is in the other counties surveyed. In Bucks, he has just a 4-point edge with female voters, compared with a 16-point spread in the Columbus, Ohio, area.

According to Towery, this can partly be attributed to McCain’s strong performance among middle-aged women.

“You’ve got an unusually high number for McCain in that 45-to-64 age group, and that’s got a lot of women in it,” Towery explained. Among voters in that age interval, McCain leads Obama 53 percent to 37 percent.

That Obama is ahead of McCain in Bucks County, anyway, suggests that he has been more successful than his opponent in reaching out to the suburban swing voters who dominate areas such as these.

A September poll commissioned by Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies showed McCain leading Obama among suburban voters, nationwide, by a 48 percent to 42 percent margin. The poll was conducted Sept. 15-21.

But whatever the national trend among suburbanites, Obama has edged ahead in key areas that are likely to influence the outcome of the election.

Recent public polling has shown Obama winning all four states in which these county-level polls were conducted. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Obama ahead by 14 points in Pennsylvania, Virginia by 8.1 percent, 3.2 percent in Ohio and 1.8 percent in Missouri.

This is the second round of Politico/Insider Advantage polling in critical counties. The first round results, published Tuesday, showed Obama tied or leading McCain in Jefferson County, Colo.; Washoe County, Nev.; Wake County, N.C.; and Hillsborough County, Fla.

The Politico/InsiderAdvantage telephone surveys in St. Louis County and Franklin County were conducted Oct. 13. The St. Louis County survey included 542 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent. The Franklin survey included 376 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percent.

The Politico/InsiderAdvantage telephone surveys in Bucks County and Prince William County were conducted Oct. 14. The Bucks survey included 320 likely voters and the Prince William survey included 308 likely voters, both with a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percent.

Colin Powell might endorse Obama

2008-10-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

By: Mike Allen

Retired Gen. Colin Powell, once considered a potential running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), now may endorse his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), according to Republican sources. But an air of mystery surrounds Powell's planned live appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," and no one is sure what he will say.

Powell’s unassailable national security credentials could sway voters who are vacillating about whether Obama is ready to be commander in chief, and his endorsement of the Illinois senator would make a national security emphasis by McCain in the election's closing days extremely difficult.

Powell, 71, a professional soldier for 35 years, has advised the last three Republican presidents.

The general’s camp is being coy about what he might or might not say on Sunday. But some McCain advisers suspect, without being sure, that Powell will endorse Obama.

“It’s going to make a lot of news, and certainly be personally embarrassing for McCain," a McCain official said. "It comes at a time when we need momentum, and it would create momentum against us.”

Powell has consulted with both Obama and McCain, and the general’s camp has indicated in the past that he would not endorse.

On “Meet the Press” in June 2007, Powell said: “I’ve met with Sen. Obama twice. I’ve been around this town a long time, and I know everybody who is running for office, and I make myself available to talk about foreign policy matters and military matters with whoever wishes to chat with me."

Asked by moderator Tim Russert if he would come back into government, Powell said: “I would not rule it out. I’m not at all interested in political life, if you mean elected political life. That is unchanged. But I always keep my, my eyes open and my ears open to requests for service.”

Asked about an endorsement, he said: “It’s too early.”

NBC’s ‘Andrea Mitchell broke the news of Powell’s surprise “Meet the Press” appearance on the “Today” show Friday.

“In what promises to be a dramatic moment Sunday, Colin Powell — a lion of the Republican establishment, whom McCain and Obama both have courted for months — will finally speak out on a variety of issues, appearing exclusively on ‘Meet the Press,’” Mitchell said. “Of course, years ago, he was talked about as the possible first … African-American nominee of a major party.”

Heilemann: Obama Nails the Debate Trifecta

2008-10-17T09:45:00.001-07:00

Maybe the most annoying aspect of the coverage of presidential debates is the ceaseless, relentless application of sports metaphors to the proceedings. You’ve got your Hail Mary passes, your slam dunks, your knockout punches, your thrust and parry. But last night, as John McCain and Barack Obama concluded their third and final forensic engagement at around the same moment that the Philadelphia Phillies were putting away the L.A. Dodgers to advance to the World Series, I found it impossible, when asked my opinion of McCain’s performance, to resist a piece of baseball lingo: three strikes and you’re out.

Republican partisans will no doubt howl in protest at this judgment. They insist that last night was McCain’s best performance, that he was aggressive and on offense, that he scored solid hits on Obama (on taxes, in particular), that despite the hokeyness of the Joe-the-plumber trope, it was the kind of rhetorical gambit that would translate into a raft of second-day stories favorable to McCain. They further argue that Obama seemed flat and hypercautious, that he failed to drive a consistent message, that he appeared to be sitting on his lead, attempting to stall out the clock.

And all of that is true, as far it goes — which isn’t very far. For, once again, by every available objective measure, Obama thumped McCain. The post-debate insta-polls could hardly have been any clearer on the matter. The CBS survey of undecided voters found Obama coming out on top by a margin of 53–22; CNN’s effort put the spread at 58–31.

How is it possible that McCain could win more debating points while still losing the debate? One answer, suggested by NBC’s tireless political director, Chuck Todd, is that McCain chose to focus his attacks on issues that energize the Republican base, while Obama quietly played to the middle. Another is that McCain got off the best line of the night when he declared, “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush; if you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago” — but that it came far too late in the campaign to blunt Obama’s efforts to conjoin McCain and Bush at the pelvis.

But the more powerful answer is this: Presidential debates are not only — or even mainly — about substance. They’re about tone and affect and body language, and on all these counts, McCain was once again fairly awful. This time his awfulness was enhanced (or, rather, exacerbated) by the split-screen TV presentation. As Obama looked at him with preternatural calm, all smiles and nods and respectful glances and rueful shakes of the head, McCain twitched, smirked, glowered, smoldered, rolled his eyes. And when he opened his mouth, what came out was too often a tonal match for his facial expressions. He sneered at Obama, interrupted him constantly, mocked his eloquence. A Republican media savant with no small experience in presidential politics e-mailed me, “He’s Bob Dole morphed into Howard Beale from Network. I’ve had fistfights with guys who looked less angry. I don’t see how he gets on a commercial airline and passes security.”

McCain’s grumpy cum irascible cum splenetic countenance was nothing new, of course. It was a defining feature of the first two debates as well, much to his detriment. Indeed, after absorbing four and a half hours altogether of his visage opposite Obama, it occurred to me last night that McCain was this year’s Al Gore — a candidate whose stylistic tics overwhelmed all else in the collective judgment of his debate performances.

But McCain was even worse than Gore in one crucial respect: He gave off a vibe of profound and all-encompassing solipsism. In his complaints last night about Obama’s negative ads — complaints that have some validity, in that the Democrat’s campaign has in fact been more negative than many people believe, though nothing as incendiary as McCain’s — he came across as aggrieved, self-pitying, whiny, entitled. The unspoken sentiment behind his words and bearing was, “This fatuous, line-jumping, all-talk-no-action punk is about to take the job that was supposed to be mine! Can you believe this shit?!” The issues he incessantly chose to harp on — earmarks, ethanol, Colombian free trade — are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic and pet-peevish. In other words, it’s all about him. The contrast with Obama, who throughout all three debates labored mightily to turn every disquisition back to the concerns of you, the voter, was nearly as unflattering as the one between Obama’s million-dollar smile and McCain’s dime-store grimace.

It’s interesting to contemplate whether Obama would have fared as well against a different kind of opponent: a younger, sunnier, highly composed, pretty-boy egghead — Mitt Romney, say. Maybe someone like that would have made it harder for Obama to stay in his zone and set up such a clear contrast of image and temperament. Instead, in McCain, he was blessed with his perfect foil. He walks away from the debates having nailed the trifecta — and quite possibly, the election.

Cute picture...

2008-10-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

Hehe... from americablog.com

2008-10-16T20:12:00.001-07:00